The Yellow Room Conspiracy Read online

  The answers in my case are (1) Barely (2) No. I was however involved in other ways. Soon after Lord Vereker’s funeral, and before my lunch with Lucy, Gerry telephoned. We chatted briefly and then he said, “Look, I don’t like doing this, but I’m in a minor fix. If you can’t help, or don’t want to, which is much the same thing in this case, forget it. That job you did in Cairo, nursemaiding people like me, finding us things to do in the evenings …”

  “Yes?”

  “I take it there were some who demanded rather more exotic entertainment than I did … I’m sorry, old man. You may find this deeply unpleasant …”

  Old man? I suppressed my amusement with a snort, which he misinterpreted. It was somehow typical of him to be so out of his depth in this kind of thing that his embarrassment should result in such false notes. Not that he didn’t have cause for embarrassment. As he’d suggested, I might well have told him bluntly that I couldn’t help him, but as it happened there was a wartime acquaintance with whom I’d had to get in touch a few months earlier, for the benefit of an unpleasant Dutchman whose help I needed.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I know how you feel. One gets stuck with these things. What does the fellow want? Male or female? Not straightforward, I take it?”

  “Yes, that’s about it. Female.”

  “Money no object?”

  “Not much. I don’t know what the limit might be.”

  “The equivalent of shopping at Harrods, say?”

  “That should do.”

  “Try a woman called Isobel Mudge. You’ll think you’ve got a wrong number—she has one of those Dresden Shepherdess voices and a remarkable command of euphemisms, but she keeps her side of a bargain. Incidentally, you’d better keep yours—she’s got some pretty tough friends. Tell her Mr Charles put you on to her. If she can’t help I don’t know anyone else.”

  I gave him the number and he started to thank me.

  “Forget it,” I said. “These things happen. Incidentally, why did you need to come to me? I’d have thought in the course of your work with Michael …

  “I don’t want to involve Michael,” he said quickly. “But thanks. I’ll pay you back some day, somehow.”

  “You can get me a ticket for the Saturday of the Lord’s Test. They’ve made a cock-up over mine.”

  “Do my best.”

  I barely thought about it again, being almost at once taken up with renewing my affair with Lucy. A clandestine relationship, such as ours now needed to be, is much more energy-consuming than a publicly acknowledged one. The expansion of my company, leading to the flotation to which I’ve already referred, had involved my acquisition of two related businesses when I could only comfortably assimilate one, but I had been forced to take on both or miss the opportunity. I had intended to leave the second one to carry on as it had been doing while I absorbed the first, but I now found that its management had been so cowed by its previous owner, a forceful but erratic autocrat, that they were unable to reach decisions on their own. To make things worse it was clear that Lucy and I were going to get very few evenings together, as hers were mostly taken up with her public duties as wife of the Lord Seneschal, and her week-ends were tied to Seddon Hall. Her solution was to enrol herself for a series of Cordon Bleu cookery classes. Seddon’s chauffeur would drop her at the door every Thursday. She would go in, copy down the day’s menu, leave and catch a taxi to my flat, where we might look the dishes up and perhaps attempt to cook one if I had the ingredients—I have always been a fair cook—but usually we spent most of the time we had in bed.

  This was another, and I think to both of us regrettable, difference from our previous affair, which had had time in it for much pleasurable companionship, talk and silences, activities and loiterings, plans and purposes and accidents—all part of the process of being in love. Now all that there seemed to be room for was our time together in bed. That was overwhelmingly necessary, for Lucy, I came to think, even more than for me. She never referred to it, but I soon realised that there must be something seriously amiss between her and Seddon, though she always spoke of him with an odd mixture of warmth and regret. Afterwards she would take a cab to Knightsbridge, do some perfunctory shopping to account for the rest of her afternoon, and go back to Eaton Square. I would return to my desk and work late to make up for lost time, though well aware that my absences were inconvenient for my staff.

  No sooner had our renewed affair begun than Lucy telephoned me at work and asked me to come to a formal dinner next day at Eaton Square. Astonished, I demurred, but she begged me.

  “Tommy suggested you himself,” she said. “He’s a terrible fusser about numbers, and someone’s fallen out, and we’ve got this French minister’s wife coming who doesn’t speak any English and lets everyone know if she isn’t enjoying herself, but she’ll eat out of your hand. Please.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

  “It’s all right. I promise. Or I wouldn’t ask. I have to do what I can for him, don’t you see? Please.”

  Very uncomfortably I gave in, and found the evening much less dreadful than I had expected. The sheer formality, which was considerable—white ties and stiff shirts, medals, footmen, a partner to take in to dinner on one’s arm, seating by protocol, of course—created a complete barrier, or seal, between the occasion and normal life. The minister’s wife turned out to be an opera fanatic, which kept us going all evening.

  “Tommy was delighted,” Lucy told me later. “If it hadn’t been you it would have had to be Colonel Brent, who doesn’t speak French and can only talk about breeding pointers.”

  “Why did it have to be anyone?”

  “It’s got to be eighteen. 4x + 2 is the magic formula, so that he can sit at the head and I can sit at the foot with everyone paired off down the sides, and there isn’t room for twenty-two and Tommy says fourteen looks mingy. He’s a bit obsessive about numbers and things. I oughtn’t to tell you this, but it makes me laugh. He has all his socks marked with a red tag sewn into one of each pair, so that he knows which foot it goes on. Some of his socks are made with separate big toes, so it makes sense with them, sort of, but he likes it done with all of them. Of course sometimes someone drops out at the absolute last minute. There was one poor chap from the ministry who slipped on the ice outside our front door and broke his ankle and Tommy was still grumbling about it at breakfast next day, saying he could have come to the dinner first and gone off to hospital afterwards. It was a joke, of course—he’s a very kind man under that shell—but a tiny bit of him meant it too.”

  “How did that evening go?”

  “Perfectly well. Even Tommy admitted that. But he still wasn’t happy.”

  “You must get some pretty odd pairings with all this barrel-scraping.”

  “Do we not! But he doesn’t mind that, in fact he rather likes it. There’s a bit of him, you see, which is in revolt against all this. I’m not sure that isn’t why he wanted to marry me. He thought I could give him a kind of wildness … I don’t know. Anyway, I’m sure it’s why he puts up with Michael Allwegg … The trouble is Tommy says I’m to put you on my list, so you’re going to have to think up some first-rate excuses if you don’t want to come.”

  “Have you tried Gerry? He’s alone in London fairly often.”

  “He came once and said never again. I’m keeping him till I’m absolutely desperate.”

  “How much does your husband know? About us, I mean?”

  “He knows about before, of course. We didn’t try and hide it, did we? Not about now.”

  “Well, I don’t like it, but I’ll do it if you genuinely need me. I find I have oddly primitive objections to taking the bread of a man whom I am at the same time in some sense betraying.”

  “Do you really? How very strange. I wonder if I’d feel like that. All right, I won’t ask you, though I’m afraid he’s bound to suggest you
again.”

  This turned out to be the case. Indeed my success with the minister’s wife meant that Seddon had now marked me down not simply as a possible stop-gap but as a useful primary guest, single, cultured, sociable and fluent in both French and German. I excused myself a couple of times on the grounds of pressure of work, but then Lucy began to worry that it might begin to seem that I had other reasons for staying away, so reluctantly I agreed to accept the next invitation.

  The occasion turned out to be even stiffer than the previous one, with minor Balkan ex-royalty present, resulting in a definite air of tension which I didn’t fully understand. The mix of guests contained some obvious oddities. As we settled into our places I noticed a young man on the other side of the table and two along, slight and decidedly handsome, with an air of swagger, or panache, even when seated and making the first self-introductions to the woman on his left. Neat features, pale face, blue eyes, strong black brows and well-groomed coarse black hair worn rather long for that period. I paid no attention at first, conversing during the hors d’oeuvres with the Austrian on my left and turning formally when the soup was brought to attend to my neighbour on my right. This was a Frenchwoman, the wife of a Greek diplomat, middle-aged, plain-featured but svelte, formidable, but sufficiently pleased by my speaking French to have unbent a little as I escorted her in to dinner. Now she had hardly acknowledged my approaches before she made a tiny gesture with her head and muttered, “Le jeune homme là-bas, c’est une femme, n’est-ce-pas?”

  I glanced, took a mouthful, glanced again. Yes. The girl was turned towards her far-side neighbour, so I was seeing her in profile. No doubt she was less conscious of how she might look from that angle, but even so I don’t know that I would have seen through her disguise without my neighbour’s prompting.

  “Effectivement,” I answered. “Je pense que vous avez raison. Un pari, peut-etre?”

  “De la part de qui? Notre hôte un joueur? Ii ne me semble pas le genre. Lady Seddon non plus.”

  I might have expected her to be affronted, but she was clearly amused. Perhaps the intricacies of Greek diplomacy had accustomed her to off-beat events, and it was their emergence at the stuffier end of the British social scene that she found piquant. She dropped the subject and began to question me about how I had learnt my French, then moved on to further probings till the fish arrived and I reverted to the Austrian. By then I had become aware that the Frenchwoman and I were not the only ones to have noticed, and by the time the course was cleared the vague tension of the dinner party had been tightened up a notch along my side of the table, with variations of anxiety, excitement, and amusement. In the lull before the meat a footman delivered a folded note to the girl. She opened it, blushed scarlet, and was for a second or two very obviously not what she was pretending to be, in fact neither man nor woman, but a child caught out. She recovered herself, spoke briefly to her neighbours, rose, made a stiff little bow to Lucy, and walked towards the door, which was behind Seddon’s place.

  I had assumed that it was he who had written the note, but he seemed to realise that something was amiss only as she was coming towards him. He too rose, solicitous, perhaps thinking one of his guests was ill, perhaps worried by being about to be one short of his totemic guest-number. I’m afraid that we were all watching avidly. One stout bald man with a lot of foreign decorations had half risen from his chair for a better view. Seddon still seemed, as he accompanied her to the door, to be assuming that his guest was a man, but as he opened it for her she turned to him, put her hand on his arm and deliberately dropped her disguise. I don’t know how she did it, but even from where I sat there was no mistaking that this was an attractive, indeed seductive, young woman.

  Seddon started. His jaw literally dropped. For a moment the whole carapace of his diplomatic manner fell away. Laughing with teasing glee at his discomposure she slipped a card into his breast-pocket, kissed her fingers to the company and vanished. Seddon resumed his mask of calm as he closed the door and returned to the table. The rest of the evening was considerably less interesting. Naturally I asked Lucy, at our next meeting, about the incident, but she told me she wasn’t supposed to talk about it so I left it alone.

  A few days later Gerry rang.

  “I’ll be sending round your ticket for Lord’s,” he said.

  “Good for you. What did you make of Mrs Mudge?”

  “She wasn’t able to help.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Not your fault. Are you going to the new Turandot?”

  “I went last night.”

  “Pity. I’ve got two spare tickets for the twelfth. Some friends of Nan fell through. Seddon will be at this Chequers Conference so we could see if Lucy’s free. Nan would be there to give the occasion respectability.”

  Lucy, I already knew, would be free. With Seddon away she and I had planned to spend the night together. The offer was extremely tempting.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing Turandot again,” I said. “Excellent. I’ll get Nan to try Lucy.”

  The seats, it turned out, were not together, but in two pairs separated by several rows. Gerry apologised and made mumblings about how we should arrange ourselves.

  “I’ll sit with Paul,” said Lucy firmly, and as we settled into our places she whispered, “I’m sick of creeping around.”

  At the interval I was rising to join the others when Lucy pulled me back into my seat and pointed surreptitiously.

  “The end box on the right,” she said. “Black gloves, bare shoulders. Seen her before?”

  The girl was leaning forward, intending to be noticed. A mass of dark hair made the face small and perky. The dress was cut so low that from our angle she mightn’t have been wearing a stitch, apart from the long lace gloves. The effect was decidedly erotic.

  “Ought I to have?” I said.

  “Came to our dinner party dressed as a man.”

  “That must be a wig, then.”

  “Can’t you see it is? I noticed her because she seemed to be pointing us out to someone as the lights went down.”

  I had once or twice been forced to take one of those end boxes rather than miss a production, but I’d sooner be right up in the amphitheatre. Your side of the stage is partly invisible from them, and you see right out into the wings on the other side. Moreover, the music reaches you unbalanced. Their only advantage, which I’d never needed to make use of myself, might be that unless you leaned forward you were invisible to everyone except those in the boxes opposite. I was naturally inquisitive about the girl and her companion, but Gerry had ordered champagne for the interval so we had to go and do it justice.

  The girl was still there when the performance resumed, but I re-absorbed myself in it and, forgot her until the applause for Liu’s Tanto amore segreto, when Lucy whispered in my ear, “I think it’s Tommy with her!”

  “I thought you told me he didn’t enjoy opera.”

  “He hates it. And he’s supposed to be at Chequers talking to the French about how to dish Colonel Nasser. Otherwise …”

  “Do you want to make sure?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose … Yes …”

  The applause was dying. The best I could think of was to tear a page from my diary and scribble a note to Gerry saying we’d meet him at the restaurant. Luckily he and Nan were near the end of a row, so as the curtain calls began I was able to barge my way out, reach in to Gerry and pass him the note. I had seen that the party in the box were also preparing to leave early, but I know my way round the Royal Opera and Lucy and I were out by the natural exit from those boxes in time to see the other couple hurry out. The man certainly could have been Seddon but he was wearing a dark hat and a cloak-like greatcoat with big lapels which he had turned up round his face. I felt Lucy quiver on my arm.

  “Are you all right?” I whispered.

  “Let’s see where they’re going.”


  There were taxis about, waiting to cream off the opera-goers, but the couple ignored them and strode off towards Soho, the girl, despite her high heels, matching her pace to the man’s. In those days the streets were nothing like as well lit as they are now, but the two distinctive silhouettes were easy to pick out as they moved from one patch of lamplight to the next. I was never a trained agent and had no expertise in tailing a quarry, but as soon as we crossed Shaftesbury Avenue the crowds emerging from other theatres gave us cover.

  Soho was then a very mixed district, or rather the mixture spilled out on to the streets more than it is allowed to now, with tarts in every other doorway, pimps and bully-boys keeping an eye on them, clients wandering through, boisterous groups emerging from reeking pubs (it was now around closing time) while theatre-goers like us were making their way towards restaurants and those who had dined earlier were starting home—all, as I say, very ill lit, with passages of deep shadow between the pallid circles cast by the lamps. We were in Greek Street, and the couple seemed to be reaching their destination, with the girl beginning to fumble in her handbag, presumably for a door-key, when the commotion began.

  Most of it happened in shadow. I heard a yelp of alarm—a woman’s—cut short. Two or three people were struggling towards a car. I could see the man we’d been following confronting another man who had gripped his coat by the front and was menacing him with his fist while our man made protesting motions with one hand, still holding his lapels over his face with the other. Then a man –and I knew at once from his lightness and speed that it was Gerry—raced past us and flung himself at the group by the car. The impetus of his charge hurled one of the figures against the bodywork. In the same movement he had grabbed the collar of another of the figures, who I could now see had the girl by the arm and was forcing her into the car, and using the man’s weight as a brake swung him round, sending his legs skidding from beneath him and crashing him into the rear wheel. The girl fell clear. The third man left Seddon and was moving towards Gerry. He had a knife out, but Gerry feinted, dodged the thrust, seized him by the wrist and whisked him over his shoulder and down. The first man was now rising. Gerry kicked him in the throat, picked him up by the collar and crotch and tossed him through the open door of the car as it drove off. The other two men scuttled away. I tried to make a note of the car’s number as it drove past, but the plates were illegible with dirt.