Controlling Interest by Bernard Bannerman

Author:Bernard Bannerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authors On Line Ltd

Chapter Seven

As we planned to eat near my house, we had parked on the Square where I live. Walking back from the restaurant, Ali wanted to stay, rather than drive us both up to Highgate. I could think of no good reason why not. Though still tired from the previous night, we had energy enough to practise doctor-and-nurse for an hour or two before, this time, she drifted off to sleep ahead of me.

I was still lying awake, enjoying the notion and occasional touch of the bright and beautiful brand new body beside me in my bed, when the good reason we shouldn’t have stayed rang. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. I grabbed the ‘phone quick enough to stop it waking her. I greeted the caller with the warmth he or she deserved:

‘What?’

‘I think you’d better come in to Mather’s, sunshine,’ said the voice of the only policeman I’ve ever even been tempted to refer to as friend, and that while I was still suffering the post-operative effects of the removal from my shoulder of a bullet.

I repeated:

‘What?’ But I was already beginning to guess.

‘More a question of who,’ he said, his sarcasm designed to soften the news. I waited. He told me. I repeated in an altogether different tone:

‘What?’ And hung up. I thought: this is no fun any more; no fun at all.

I debated waking Ali, but she seemed so comfortable there was no point depriving her of a little while longer in innocent slumber. She had made me sleep on the side of the bed nearest the edge of the platform, in case she fell off: a new dimension to fear of flying. Carefully, I crawled around the bed and stepped cautiously and backwards down the stairs. The bed-platform, which I had built myself, was as solid as a rock: creak-free it was not.

I dressed, set the answering machine so that if the ‘phone rang again it wouldn’t disturb her, and scribbled a note, telling her I had to go out; if I didn’t come back she should make herself coffee and simply slam the door behind her: I’d been robbed so many times there was nothing left to steal. I was about to tape it to the top of the bed-platform steps where she was bound to see it when I realized it was a bit curt. I added: ‘love’. But I didn’t sign my name nor even an initial, so it couldn’t be used in evidence.

After I left the Clairmount, I’d had time to kill before she caught up with me, so I had decided to pay a visit on speculation to a house I was never otherwise going to be invited to. I was professionally pleased with my discovery, but personally uncomfortable: Andrew was the weakest of the brothers, the apple on the lowest branch, and Wainwright hardly counted at all. It was going to cause a lot of grief, to no obvious advance or achievement.

Martin’s address proved to be a huge town-house in Maida Vale.

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