Grasshopper Page 38

  ‘I know what you’re going to say. That I shouldn’t have said I was Michael Silverman when we’ve told Andrew and Alison we’re both called Brown. It was a slip of the tongue. But the chances of their ever meeting and comparing notes are pretty remote.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ I said. Once he had always been able to make a good guess at what I was going to say.

  ‘What, then?’

  There were so many things. The one I most wanted to ask I shied away from. ‘Who’s going to pay for your proposed trip to Australia with Jason?’

  ‘Andrew and Alison have money. They’ll pay for themselves.’

  ‘I expect they will, but I’ll be very surprised if they finance a separate flight for you and Jason. You’re planning to pay for it yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘It’ll cost thousands. And there’ll be a hotel to pay for and cars to and from airports. And these passports, who’s going to pay for them? False passports – have you any idea what you’ll have to pay for them?’

  He looked away from me. ‘You think having money is bad for someone my age. This would be a way of getting rid of it. You can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘D’you care how I have it? D’you really think the way you go on, the way you shut me out, I’m going to be there to have it one way or the other?’ I’d started shouting, forgetful of the people not far below us. ‘We were happy and you’ve made us miserable. You never told me a word of this plan of yours, you never consulted me. It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to them.’

  He could be so cold and quiet. ‘I’ve made us miserable? I think you’re forgetting your hand in it.’

  I should have asked then but I didn’t. I jumped up and ran away from him across the tarpaulin, not going carefully, not troubling where I set my feet, but running as if I were on solid ground. The damaged timbers creaked. I jumped on to the slates on the other side, making a lot of noise about it. He was watching me, blank-faced, not as if he cared what happened to me but out of mere interest in folly. I had looked back once but not again. I ran on, crying while I ran, the tears still coming while I climbed through our window. Judy was back, sitting with Niall, sharing a bottle of wine and a joint. Hours passed before Silver came to bed. He lay quite still for a minute or two, then turned his back on me.

  It was Jonny Silver intended to ask about the passports. He told me this in the neutral cool voice he had begun using when he spoke to me. It was a far from ideal plan but it was the only one he could think of. Jonny was the only criminal he knew.

  ‘And don’t ask me what it’s going to cost,’ he said.

  ‘I was going to ask you if it’s wise to let Jonny in on this.’

  ‘Probably not but who else is there to ask? You have to remember that whatever happens and whatever he does, he’d never, never, go to the police.’

  I took Liv down the stairs, out of the front door and down the path. How about going out of the gate and taking a few steps down the street? She looked fearfully at me, then nodded as if agreeing to do something that took great courage. Perhaps it did. There was very little difference between the texture and surface of the path and that of the pavement, both being of Portland stone, but Liv behaved like someone attempting to step from firm ground on to a quicksand. I had a moment’s anxiety when the front door of 19 opened and Selina came out, not because I was afraid to see her but on Liv’s account, in case she mistook her for Claudia or some other avenging fury. But Liv seemed untroubled, concentrating now on taking a second step. Selina was carrying a big suitcase in each hand. She put them down on the path, went back and returned with two even larger cases. A taxi drew up. Apart from a little frisson passing through her neck and shoulders, Liv seemed unfazed. She was proceeding along the pavement like an amputee learning to use artificial legs.

  Selina beckoned rather imperiously to the taxi driver. Taking his time about it, he got out of his cab and strolled up the path. Liv took him in her stride too, her eyes just flicking over him. Making sure the driver knew what was expected of him, Selina watched him pick up, with much panting, two of the cases. She came over to us. The complete solipsist, she showed no surprise at seeing me there, nor at seeing me the escort of someone apparently disabled, but cried out, ‘I’m going, darling. I’m off to fresh woods and pastures new.’

  I said goodbye to her and Liv did, though as far as I knew they had never before set eyes on each other. The taxi departed for Dolphin Square. At the gate of 17 Liv and I turned round and came back again. I was pleased with her and said so. She nodded complacently as if this was only her due. I could see she had taken a huge turn for the better, something largely brought about by Wim’s attentions, it seemed. We no longer had qualms about leaving her alone. Wim would come to her and Jonny wouldn’t. That was how we saw it – but how can I say ‘we’ like that when it was becoming impossible to use that pronoun, implying as it does a couple, a union, a closeness? I saw it like that and I believe Silver did too, that’s all I can say. Yet we were still together and still united in our plan to rescue that imprisoned trio. But Silver went on his own to find Jonny, back to Holloway and the little grey house with a disproportionately large and high flight of steps reaching up to its front door.

  I tried to make myself like Judy and be nice to her. My efforts must have worked, for she seemed happy to come with me to take her passport photographs at 4E. We all walked together to the end of Russia Road where Silver left us to get the bus to Swiss Cottage. Judy watched him go, rather wistfully, I thought, and said with some nervousness that I didn’t expect her to climb on roofs, did I? We’d let ourselves in at the front door, I said. Andrew had given me a key. It was then that we had an unlooked-for piece of luck.

  At first it seemed like disaster or near-disaster. We were on the doorstep of 4 Torrington Gardens, Judy with camera, tripod and a bagful of photographic stuff. I was fishing the key out of my pocket when the door was opened by Sean Francis. We took a step back. He looked at me, half-recognizing me as the Nylands’ houseplant minder, then at Judy. An uncertain smile hovered, he put his head on one side, said, ‘Hello. I know you, don’t I? Can’t remember where from.’

  ‘Norroy,’ Judy said. ‘Norroy House. The Ghost Child.’

  ‘That’s right. How extraordinary. How are your mum and dad? And the terribly nice lady who used to make endless cups of tea?’

  ‘They’re fine, they’re all fine.’

  ‘Look, are you living round here? I’m in a mad rush, I’m late before I’ve started, but give me a ring, will you? We might have a coffee or a drink or something.’

  Judy said she would, she’d like to. He ran off down Torrington Gardens. Not a word had been said about me or watering the houseplants or the Nylands. We stepped inside the hall and closed the door behind us. ‘What was all that about?’ I said. ‘How d’you know him?’

  Her parents had lent their house to the television production company that was making a film Sean Francis was in. The company paid them a lot of money, refurnished the house and partly decorated it but the family remained in what had been a housekeeper’s flat. Judy and her brother got to know some of the cast quite well, a state of affairs helped by their grandmother, who lived with them, luring some of the actors away from their mobile canteen and plying them with tea and cakes.

  ‘It was just before I started going about with Silver. I told him about it but I expect he’s forgotten.’

  I decided not to comment on that. We started up the marble staircase, eight flights of it. ‘Would you have a drink with him? You wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘It would be a funny sort of girl who’d mind,’ she said.

  ‘Because we have to get him in on this. We have to take him into our confidence. The ideal thing would be if you could sort of pave the way and then maybe we could all meet and – well, tell him.’

  ‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’ She grinned. ‘Who knows what may come of it?’ Outside the Nylands’ front door she stop
ped, turned and said to me, ‘I just want to say, Clodagh, you know I’m not interested in Silver any more, don’t you? I love him, I really do, but not like that. Not any more. And he doesn’t like me like that. I just want you to know, though I expect you do already.’

  Honesty is mostly best. ‘No, I didn’t already. Thanks. Thanks a lot.’ I felt like laughing and singing, though I knew this didn’t solve everything or even anything much. I smiled at her.

  ‘Only I thought you’d been a bit cold with me and you’re not really a cold person, are you?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not.’

  I don’t know which of us made the first move. But she put her arms round me and I put mine around her and we hugged each other there on the marble step halfway up the empty echoing house. It’s a good feeling, your enemy turning into your friend in the twinkling of an eye. Just a few words said, a misunderstanding cleared up, the world changed.

  Andrew’s eye looked out at us through the tiny glass hole in the door. Bolts were drawn, a chain removed, and he let us in. He had managed to grow a small moustache about as thick as his eyebrows. It did quite a lot to alter his appearance but his suspicious nature was unchanged. He had been prepared for Judy’s coming but he was still apprehensive and later, while she was going about the flat with Alison looking for a suitable place to take her shots, he questioned me – in fact, he interrogated me – as to her trustworthiness. How well did I know her? How could he know she wouldn’t just take her pictures to the police?

  ‘I can only tell you she won’t do that,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want her to take your photographs, you’d better say now and we’ll go. But there’s no one else and you have to have photos for your passports.’

  He nodded, not entirely convinced. Where was Silver? Why hadn’t he come? Did I realize this was the first time Silver hadn’t come?

  I said he had gone to see someone about the passports. Someone he knew on the other side of London who he hoped would be able to get them. Judy came back and the photography session began. Jason, who might have made a fuss at being expected to sit still, enjoyed posing and faced the camera with an engaging smile. Andrew consented to comb down his hair into a fringe across his brow and when this was done looked even less like his former self. Alison had been cutting his hair and not very successfully but this way the chopped-off pudding-basin effect worked. We got Alison to make herself up heavily and use a dark lipstick Judy had brought with her. It aged her, making her seem more tired and worn than ever, but at least she looked quite unlike all the newspaper photographs. They were both dubious about their appearance in these shots. Did such small subterfuges really create a disguise? I reminded them that, without Jason, no passport official was likely to give them a second glance, but all this did was to start Alison off again on the horrors of being parted from him.

  We took their shopping list, promised to report back on how Silver had got on and then we left, Andrew muttering as he accompanied us to the door that we did understand, didn’t we, that he wasn’t made of money, he couldn’t pay some ridiculous price for false documents, it wasn’t as if he had a regular income.

  ‘They’re not very nice, are they?’ Judy said as we clattered down, not bothering to muffle our footsteps with no one to hear us. ‘He’s no charmer and she whinges all the time.’

  I thought how odd it was that the oppressed, the disadvantaged, the victims, are always supposed to be nice people. To be virtuous and lovable, almost saintly. If they’re not, and they’re just as often not, there’s resentment, a feeling that they don’t deserve rescuing. But people can’t change and become perfect overnight as soon as they find themselves in a trap or in peril. I said some of this to Judy and she laughed and said it was all very well in the case of hostages but Andrew and Alison’s situation was of their own making. If they expected help, they ought to be pleasanter to their rescuers.

  ‘You haven’t rescued them yet, anyway,’ she said.

  Silver hadn’t returned. I didn’t expect him for a long while. Judy said let’s go round to the Robert Browning or the Warrington Hotel and take Wim with us. But he was evidently behind that closed door in bed with Liv, so we went alone. Max and Caroline Bodmer were at a table outside the Warrington but once they had seen me they left quickly. We stayed until the pub shut and went home slowly through the warm streets, making a diversion to the canal to watch the dine-and-dance boat go by, its coloured lights glittering, its music drifting across the water.

  ‘I really fancy that Sean,’ Judy said. ‘It’s not going to be a punishment getting to know him better.’

  Five years later she married him, and when I last heard they had two babies and were very happy, but that was all unthought of then. Silver came home in the small hours, I think it was about three. He sat on the bed and told me in a tired voice – or was he just tired of me? – that he had seen Jonny and got a promise from him to produce three passports.

  27

  When he got there Jonny was out. The house was a warren of single rented rooms. No one living there knew where he was or when he’d be back, but several confirmed that he was a tenant. Silver sat down on the wall outside to wait for him. The neighbourhood, not far from Holloway prison, was very different from ours. Not so many people owned cars but everyone seemed to want to be out in the streets, either walking about or sitting on their front doorsteps. The night was warm for early September but the sky overcast and the atmosphere sultry as if a storm threatened. Men’s shouts and women’s shrieks, which always seem to start when darkness comes, had begun and bursts of rock music thudded out of passing cars, their windows open or their roofs down. Silver told me all this as if I didn’t know it already or as if there was no one there and he was talking to himself.

  He kept his eyes turned away. I suddenly understood that he was deeply unhappy but when I put out my hand to touch his hand he withdrew it. He had sat in the corner café opposite and drank coffee. Tiredness had come over him and he needed something to keep him awake. Jonny came when he was on the point of giving up. The café had closed and he was back on the wall, almost stunned by the volume of someone’s music belting out of an open window behind him. It was ten to one.

  Jonny was carrying a black leather backpack, not on his back but with one of its straps hooked over his shoulder. He said hello to Silver and called him mate. Silver asked if they could talk and, after a momentary hesitation, Jonny nodded. They went upstairs through that dilapidated house which smelt of grass and tobacco and curry but most overpoweringly of decay from the wheelie-bin in the hall. If they left it outside, someone would nick it, Jonny said, as if stealing garbage containers was the most ordinary thing in the world. His room was at the top of the house. Silver noticed that access to the flat roof would be easy through the single sash window.

  The coffee had done its work and he felt wide awake and very aware of his surroundings. He suspected the black leather backpack was Håkan Almquist’s, yet he couldn’t have positively identified it, not if, for instance, the police had asked him. Nothing in the room gave any clue to Jonny’s affluence, if affluent he was. He was dressed much as usual, the room was furnished as such places are, drearily and sparsely. It was dirty and untidy. For Silver to make that comment meant it must have been in a bad state. Since it looked as if he wasn’t going to be offered anything, he asked if there was any tea or instant coffee. Jonny looked as if about to say a blunt no, but eventually produced an electric kettle, two mugs and, in the palm of his hand, two teabags.

  ‘Liv been out in the street yet?’ Silver shrugged, taking the mug of milkless tea. ‘Because when she does I’m fetching her back here. I’ll be over to fetch her in the van. You can tell her that, so as she’s ready.’

  Silver made no reply to that. He went straight into the middle of things and asked Jonny about the passports. Could he get passports for a man, a woman and a child?

  ‘I might be able to.’

  Silver wanted yes or no but he knew better than to ask directly.
r />   ‘It’ll cost you,’ added Jonny.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Couple of K each.’

  Silver had no means of knowing if this was, so to speak, the standard rate for false passports, if it was too high or even too low. The trouble with dealing with criminals if you’re not one yourself is that the language is unfamiliar to you, the country they inhabit, all the terms of reference. Would Andrew Lane be willing to pay this sort of money? Would his wife agree? And if they weren’t willing but still wanted to leave the country, would he pay it out of his own pocket?

  ‘Would you?’ I said.

  ‘If I have to.’

  I wanted to say, in one of my mother’s pet phrases, that there was no ‘have to’ about it, but I could see that would have no effect on him.

  ‘The fuss people make about a couple of thousand,’ he said, thinking, I suppose, of Liv’s lost money as well. ‘It’s not megabucks, for God’s sake.’

  Not to you. And there lies the difference. ‘So you told him to go ahead?’

  ‘I told him I’d bring him the photographs as soon as Judy has them ready.’ This was tantamount to a yes. ‘I didn’t tell him who they were for. I was putting off doing that, I know, even though he’d never go near the police.’

  Silver was leaving, he was at the door, when he turned round and asked Jonny straight out if it was he who had assaulted Håkan Almquist and taken his backpack. He said he wouldn’t have been surprised to get the old answer, ‘It might have been.’ But Jonny just looked at him. You read in thrillers about a man giving someone an ‘ugly’ look – well, that describes a frequent expression of Jonny’s quite well. He gave Silver an ugly look. Silver was about six inches taller than he and six years younger but Jonny would still be a formidable opponent. He looked as if he was going to make for the door and head-butt him.