Death of a Unicorn

They let me make a pot of tea and then I sat down in the chair where I used to wait for B to come home. I could understand what they were saying now. I told them the answers but not anything else. They didn’t ask about the sapphires. While we were talking there was a ring at the door and one of them answered it. He came back as if nothing had happened and they went on with their questions. There was something about them not like ordinary policemen. They were quite old, solemn and fatherly. What they wanted to know about was B’s foreign trips. I told them he usually went to Germany and sometimes to Barbados. Once to New York. They were interested in the ivory statue and the other things like that but I could only tell them he’d brought them back from Germany. When they’d finished the senior one said, ‘Our caller was a journalist, Lady Margaret. For your own sake you’d better not talk to journalists. We’d prefer you not to in any case. My colleague will see that the coast is clear and then I think you’d better go up to your own flat and not come down here again.’

‘It’s bound to come out. We’ve been about together a lot.’

‘We’ll do our best to see that you don’t have any problems. Since you have been so frank with us I will tell you that this is not a normal criminal investigation.’

‘What do you mean?’

He shook his head.

I never finished the jigsaw. I rang Jane at Cheadle to tell her I was coming home. She was different now. She sounded cold and angry. She said she mightn’t be there, although it was the art-school vac. I had to beg her. My cell was closing in again.

I packed a few clothes, took the jigsaw to bits and put it back in its box. I left my case at the porter’s lodge while I walked down to the river with the box under my arm. A bright spring afternoon, the tide just past full, the dirty water sweeping seaward below the Embankment wall. I put the box on the wall, opened the lid and took out a handful of pieces, but before I could throw them someone gripped my wrist and forced it back over the open box.

It was a man, not one of the pair I’d talked to in B’s flat but another of the same sort, only younger. He let me spill the pieces back in the box and took it from me.

‘It was a goodbye present,’ I said. ‘It isn’t anything else.’

He poked among the pieces, took some out one by one, held them up to the light and looked at them closely, back and front.

‘It’s the only thing I can do, you see,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got anything else. Nothing that means anything.’

He closed the box, turned it over, looked carefully at the underneath.

‘Please,’ I said.

He handed it back to me and watched while I opened it again. I took the pieces and threw them in handfuls on to the river. They seemed to vanish as they touched the surface. The water was their colour, dark green or cardboard. The few white bits of unicorn might have been flecks of foam.

[1] This tawdry phrase is still my only means of thinking of the event. If I had been there at his side perhaps I could think of it (if I could think of it at all) in terms of the sudden clatter, the bewilderment, my own throat numb with screaming, the smashed body bleeding on to my dress. As it is, my contact is through a newspaper headline. I would rather have that than nothing at all.

PART TWO

1982–1983

I

Maxine was out of the office so I answered the telephone, using my old secretary-voice.

‘Cheadle Enterprises.’

‘Mabs?’ said the man after a slight pause. Nobody apart from my mother and sisters had called me that for twenty years.

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Ronald Smith.’

‘Would you mind telling me . . . Ronnie?’

‘Ah, it is you. Yes, Ronnie.’

‘How nice to hear from you after all these years. What can I do for you?’

Maxine came in and I signalled to her to get ready to interrupt with the urgent-call-on-other-line routine. This was more excusable than it may sound. Ronnie had been something of a public figure in the Sixties as a television journalist specialising in Eastern Bloc politics but with a lucrative sideline in British traitors, most of whom he had known well. Then he had dropped rather suddenly out of sight, after a series of drunk-on-screen episodes.

‘May I come and talk to you, Mabs?’

‘Is it about money?’

‘Am I hoping to touch you, you mean?’

‘I’m afraid so. Most people seem to be.’

‘In my case, no. But I’m told you make a charge for interviews.’

‘Sometimes. If people are trying to use me and my name for their own profit I don’t see why I shouldn’t get a percentage.’

‘Ah. This may be one of those times, then. The thing is, Night and Day is coming up to its fiftieth anniversary and I’ve been commissioned to write the official history to celebrate the event. I leave it to you, with your extensive knowledge of the publishing industry, to decide how much profit there is likely to be in that.’