Death of a Unicorn

My mother had told Aunt Minnie something because she wanted it passed on to Sir Drummond. Aunt Minnie, shrewd as anyone behind her sugary manner, would have had her own reasons. She would have been aware of Sir Drummond’s blondes and prepared to tolerate them, provided he changed them frequently. But the one I had actually met in his company had struck me as something of a sticker. Though Aunt Minnie would not have cared for that, a direct counterattack would have been far from her style. She would have been more likely to embark on a series of gentle sappings, one of which could well have been to tell Sir Drummond something she had learnt about B, something which, as a representative of the City’s financial probity, he would have to act on. It would not just be a case of Aunt Minnie using his public duty to remind him of his private duty; she would also have manoeuvred him into letting down a fellow-member of that vague club of men who kept women, breaking the sense of mutual support and thus undermining Sir Drummond’s own confidence. It would all have been no more than a minor tunnelling in Aunt Minnie’s whole campaign—a campaign in which, to judge by the circumstances of Sir Drummond’s death, she had succeeded all too well. I wondered what had become of the blonde, poor thing.

For a moment my attention was caught by the screen, at which I had so far been gazing unseeing. Two of those mysteriously implausible beauties drawled hate-words at each other. My mother was rapt by the conflict, all on the surface, visible, explainable.

Mrs Clarke had told her something about B’s doings on Barbados. (But when had they met again? Surely they couldn’t have got that far at the Uncle Tosh party?) I had been aware from the first that B had been engaged in some kind of financial jugglery to do with the Halper’s Corner estate and the hotel in the bay, and had guessed from his obsession with the subject that he was trying to use it to evade the currency control regulations. Mrs Clarke, keeping her ears open as she used to say, might well have picked up a rumour on one of her West Indian expeditions. Or she might have written directly to some contact and asked—her file-card on B had been crammed with her coded writing when I last saw it. It was peculiar how vividly that scene in her office suddenly came back to me, though I had barely thought of it for thirty years. It was all written down in a manuscript somewhere, and locked away. I decided I’d better have a look through it and see whether there was anything in it I’d forgotten which might help me now . . .

And what did that mysterious sentence about B getting money from the Jews mean? It sounded more like something out of my period, or earlier—the lavish life-style, the increasing debts, the sudden dash abroad. But not that death. No. That was something else.

Besides, he had told me that he had plenty of money, only it was in the wrong place. And he seemed to have paid for the Banqueting Hall roof. Why on earth should he do that?

You could get into real trouble for fiddling exchange controls, I seemed to remember. There’d been that fuss about the Dockers, hadn’t there? But B had done all his spending inside the sterling area. He’d kept complaining about having to. There’d been those knick-knacks he’d brought back from Germany, but apart from that . . . and it still wouldn’t get you killed, would it? Ruined, perhaps, but not shot. Gunned down in broad daylight in Rio?

And why hadn’t he sold the sapphires?

One moment. Ronnie had said something—he’d had a lead . . .

I had heard nothing from Ronnie for about eight months. After his visit to Cheadle he had sent me a formal note of thanks, adding that he would have to consult his publishers about my terms for co-operation. Suppose I were to offer to mitigate those terms . . .

‘That girl is too clever by half,’ snapped my mother, smacking mental lips at the prospect of the character in question coming to grief.

‘They all strike me as complete numskulls,’ I said.

‘Her eyes are too blue. I expect she dyes them.’

‘They probably use a special filter. I’ll be seeing some film people next week. I’ll ask.’

The dark one was in tears, in close-up. The camera tracked away and showed that she was by the swimming pool in the usual minimal swimsuit while beyond her one of the blonde ones was strutting away with a display of buttocks which would have done credit to an ape asserting its right to its territory.

That would all fit in rather neatly, I thought. I could go and see Ronnie the same day.

V

It was a tall, narrow, peeling house in a terrace well north of Hyde Park. Ronnie had been resistant, even grudging, about meeting me. He had hurt his foot in some way, he said, which prevented him from getting out to keep appointments. When I had said I would see him at home he had tried to marshal secondary excuses, but I had over-ruled them. I assumed he was ashamed of his domestic circumstances, perhaps comparing them notionally with mine.