Death of a Unicorn

Before I came I had made careful mental inventories of what I was and was not prepared to tell Ronnie. I found it remarkably difficult to keep to them. I had rummaged out my old manuscript a few days ago and had read it through with less distress than I had expected. It had even struck me that I could use it to help Fiona to see what sort of decision I was asking her to make, and that I understood the difficulty of the choice. But that had been about all I did understand. I had read with growing bewilderment, not simply at the events but at my own relationship to them. The words ‘my own’ beg the question. The gulf between myself now and the girl who had experienced the events and then written about them seemed almost unbridgeable. My urge to tell Ronnie more than was sensible may be accounted for as an unconscious attempt to close the gulf, to assert the identity and value of my single life. Perhaps the squalid and imprisoning little room added to the impulse, with its sense of last chances almost lost. Certainly as I was speaking I discovered in myself a longing for the day when I would give Fiona the manuscript to read and then tell her as much as I knew of the rest of the story, uncensored.

Even with Ronnie I was more expansive than I’d meant to be, so that time was beginning to run short before my luncheon appointment. He listened with little sign of interest to the details of our stay in Barbados, which I’d thought might stimulate him with its potential for television. I said B had been very nervy. I explained in general terms about my mother’s attempt to blackmail him, and how he’d taken it seriously although she didn’t appear to have any special knowledge to threaten him with. I said he’d managed to get hold of a very valuable piece of jewellery, which I’d been under the impression he’d sold in order to pay her off, but just after he’d left on his trip to Rio I found that he’d never sold it after all. I’d assumed he hadn’t paid her off either, but had recently discovered he had. Finally I told Ronnie about the men who had questioned me the Sunday morning when I’d first learnt that B was dead.

‘Interesting,’ said Ronnie when I’d finished, in something ghostily like his old voice. ‘A currency swindle of some kind, evidently.’

‘That’s what I’ve always thought.’

‘There was a lot of that going on. Remember the Dockers?’

‘Oh, he wasn’t like that at all. We once had a very stingy weekend in Paris. He hated not having money to spend, but he wouldn’t risk breaking the rules.’

‘Very sensible if you’ve got something big on. The Dockers got caught because Lady D was always in the gossip-columns, splashing it out in Monte Carlo. I gather there was a lot of money to be made if you could get round the rules. What he’d have been doing on Barbados would be selling a supposedly run-down estate so that he could show a low figure in his accounts of the transaction. But if he had it in good order it might have fetched a fair sum, with the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement due to operate soon. The sale of the estate would also have provided cover for whatever he was getting out of the transaction over the hotel. All that could have gone through on the side, in dollars. He’d have had a very good chance of getting away with it, provided nobody tipped them the wink at the Treasury.’

‘If somebody happened to tell a Director of the Bank of England there was something fishy going on in Barbados, you mean?’

‘That would have done. They couldn’t stop the system leaking, they could only make things as risky as possible for the leakers. They operated largely on hunch and hearsay. Those chaps who came and asked you questions at the end sound like Treasury investigators to me. They went in for retired bobbies. Did you tell them about this piece of jewellery?’

‘As a matter of fact, no.’

‘Very handy, that might be. Small, easy to smuggle, not gone through the trade, and so on. Professional jewellers had to report all transactions over a certain value, so something like that . . . until anyone noticed it was missing, of course.’

‘There was a very good replica.’

‘Perfect.’

‘But he left it behind.’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t ready to use it yet. But it raises an interesting point. We’ve been assuming that the deal on Barbados was set up for the general purpose of making a quick buck, but, it sounds to me as though it was for something much more specific than that. He had a deadline to meet, and something extremely nasty was going to happen if he failed.’

‘It certainly felt like that.’

‘And the Barbados deal couldn’t go ahead if there was a threat of investigation. Then this gewgaw turns up and he can use that instead, so he can make the Barbados deal legitimate, though I don’t see why, if he does that, he’s got any need to settle with his blackmailer.’

(Because it would have been cheating me, of course. Curious how you can suddenly be perfectly certain of something as apparently unknowable as that.)