Killed in the Fog Read online

  “But doesn’t it hurt?”

  “A little,” he conceded. “But I’m doing quite well here. I can afford the odd scarf, you know.”

  “Not a scarf, the thing in the nose.”

  “Oh. Well, Sandy doesn’t have one of those. Things, I mean, not noses.”

  “You’re doing it to me again, Bernard.”

  “I’ve quite missed you, Matt,” he said.

  The lift stopped; we got off. Bernard introduced me to a couple of people who waved to me without looking up from computer screens, then led me to a nice mid-size office, tastefully furnished.

  I took a seat while he got settled in behind a big, marble-topped desk. He liked marble for his desk top, he explained, because it was cooler when he went to sleep on it.

  Right now, he leaned back in his swivel chair, cleaned his plain, black-framed National Health Service eyeglasses on the end of his tie and said, “Now, what do you want to talk about besides noses?”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “I just get curious. I mean, it’s not a cultural thing. Jill’s face is as English as a box of Weetabix.”

  “Have you tried them?”

  “I love ’em,” I said. “I never saw anything get soggier faster and still taste good. But there are practical considerations. What if you wear one of those things and you get a cold? You must bruise the inside of your nose like fury trying to blow it.”

  “You seem to have given the matter some thought,” Bernard said.

  “You gave me plenty of time to consider it, and I had her nose in front of me the whole time. You ought to get some magazines down there. And what,” I went back to the subject, “happens if you do get off a good blow? I can just see the thing going ptweeng! and there you are on your hands and knees combing the rug for an expensive piece of jewelry that just flew out of your nose.”

  I was warming to the subject. “And there’s a clasp inside, right? So don’t you think that snot must accumulate on it and—”

  Just then, the door to Bernard’s office burst in and a woman entered. In her own way, she was magnificent, at least as tall as my own six two, iron-gray hair, bright red dress clinging to a figure that was roughly cylindrical, except for a frontage that looked like a shelf waiting for a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  I was raised right, so I would have gotten to my feet even if I hadn’t jumped to them in surprise. Bernard did likewise.

  “Hello, Lady Arking,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  She ignored him and turned a hawklike gaze on me. “Matt Cobb?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “I consider your presence here an outrage, and I demand an explanation immediately!”

  4

  “... It’s a simple matter. He needs to express his defiance.”

  William Russell

  Callan, London Weekend Television

  I LOOKED AT HER. My face was calm, but inside I was singing with joy. Oh, the freedom of not having to give a damn.

  I was bland. I said, “You do, huh? Nice to meet you by the way. You must be Pam Arking.”

  I knew I should have said “Lady” Arking. You don’t (I don’t, at least) spend three months in a place without picking up at least that much of the quaint local customs. I left it off on purpose, to see what sort of reaction it would bring.

  What I got was a hiss, in stereo. Behind me, Bernard sucked in breath, shocked at my temerity. In front of me, her ladyship was gathering air for an explosion.

  I didn’t let it go off.

  “And you call me Matt, okay, Pam? I was a big admirer of your husband’s, you know. Keep up the good work.” Over my shoulder, I said, “Hey, Bernard, it’s been great. We’ve got to have you and Sandy over to the house some time, as soon as we get rid of the livestock.”

  Puzzled looks. I hadn’t gotten around to telling him that I was living in a quarantine house, or, for that matter, that I was sharing it with a woman who was her ladyship’s only rival (along with Oprah Winfrey) among women in the communications industry for dough, if not for clout.

  “Let’s keep in touch,” I told Bernard. “Nice to meet you, Pam.”

  I started for the door of Bernard’s office.

  “Mr. Cobb,” Lady Arking said. It was a voice that could have stopped a charging rhino.

  It stopped me. I turned and said, “What is it, honey? I’m in a hurry.”

  “I should like to see you in my office.”

  “You should?” I was sympathetic. “That’s a shame. Because you see, I have a very important appointment with a person with manners.”

  I felt sorry for Bernard. He was gazing out his window with a look of desperation, as if he wanted either to turn into a pigeon and fly away from all this or jump to his death and escape it that way.

  Lady Arking put on a show of her own. First, she went as gray as her hair, then as red as her dress. If she could do that on demand, she would be a natural as a halftime show for Ohio State.

  She stared at me as if I were a bug under a microscope, but I’m used to the kind of look from Tom Falzet, so I just stared good-naturedly back.

  She raised her eyebrows, and it was as if she’d hit some sort of switch—when they came back down, her face was a perfect blank.

  Her voice, which had started rough and had been approaching downright raspiness smoothed out, too.

  She said, “Of course. Mr. Cobb, if you could be so kind, won’t you please join me in my office for a few moments?”

  “I would be delighted to, Lady Arking. Since you put it that way.”

  “I,” she said emphatically, “do.” She turned to Bernard. “Please forgive me, Mr. Levering, for poaching your guest.”

  Bernard was sort of sickening. Yes, Lady Arking, he was leaving anyway, as you can see. No problem, at all, your ladyship. Take him, he’s yours. He did everything but say he was sick of my face anyway.

  It was a side of him I’d never seen in New York. I told myself not to be too hard on him. He was a young man with a wife and kids who probably wanted to go to Eton to hobnob with the nobs, and his nightmares probably all started with his losing this job.

  I, on the other hand, was not only single, I had (a) a rich girlfriend and (b) money put aside, all on my own. In fact, at my insistence, I was paying half of all the expenses of our visit except for those concerning the extra beasts.

  Heads did not exactly poke out of office doors and say “oooh” as Lady Arking strode regally down the corridors with me in tow, but there was a definite cessation of talk as we walked by.

  There are lots of ways of being the boss, and you really can’t argue with results. British International Communications made a lot of money for shareholders around the world, and Lady Arking had undoubtedly inherited the style as well as the business from the late Sir Richard.

  In the unlikely event I ever took Roxanne up on her teasing offers to install me at the head of the Network, I suppose I’d insist on respect (admittedly a tough thing when everybody knows you hold your job solely because of whom you’re sleeping with), but I would try to downplay the Awe and Silence bit. That sort of thing isn’t even granted to the Queen anymore.

  Lady Arking had a corner office overlooking the river. The same people who’d done the entrance had done this place, giving her a set of windows equal to the view. I could see barges on the Thames, and rowing eights, and Hammersmith Bridge. Across the river, I could see some of the rugby fields of St. Paul’s School.

  If I could see that, I might be able to see Menagerie Manor and blow Roxanne an unsuspected kiss. I looked, but there were too many trees in the way. Autumn is weird in London. There’s hardly anything in the way of autumn leaves. The chestnut leaves turn yellow, and there’s some good color from some kind of vine whose leaves are shaped like a maple’s, but that’s about it. For the rest of it, you say goodnight to a green tree, and wake up in the morning to a front yard (garden, they say here, even if the thing is buried u
nder six inches of concrete and the only thing it ever grows is wet in a rainstorm) full of dead brown leaves.

  It hadn’t happened on the streets between the river and our address, so Roxanne’s house remained invisible.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Cobb,” Lady Arking said.

  “I will,” I told her, “but only because you remembered to say ‘please.’”

  “It will probably help us move this conversation along, Mr. Cobb, if I inform you that I have no sense of humor.”

  Here, alone with me, she looked very tired. Still indomitable, but very tired. I felt sorry enough for her not to go on testing her sense of humor or lack thereof.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “That you already know. I demanded it before; now I shall ask it civilly. Will you please explain to me how the Network’s top investigator turns up at our joint venture and closets himself with one of my top executives without my very knowledge, let alone my consent?”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Ah, indeed. If there is any dissatisfaction with the way I have been running our joint venture, let it be expressed openly and aboveboard. This project was a dream of my late husband’s, and to be frank, I have denied other BIC ventures my personal attentions until TVStrato was up and running profitably.

  “Now, on the verge of achieving that—”

  I could see that she was wound up for a long sermon, and since I wasn’t the kind of sinner she was aiming at, I cut her off.

  “Lady Arking,” I said. “Lady Arking?”

  She was so into it, it took a few more repetitions before she realized she’d been interrupted. The knowledge irritated her.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “There has been no misunderstanding of the joint venture agreement. Article Four explicitly states that I am to have day-today executive responsibility in all—”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then will you kindly get to the point? Please?”

  “The point is,” I explained, “that I’m not the Network’s top investigator anymore. In fact, I’m not anything anymore. I’m not working for the Network.”

  “You used a Network credential at the downstairs desk,” she said. If this were an episode of Perry Mason, I would crumble about now.

  “I’m on a leave of absence,” I said. I told her the whole story, except for the fact that it was Roxanne I was keeping company with. If she got this paranoid at my being in the building, the fact that the Network’s biggest stockholder was with me would send her clean around the bend.

  When I finished, she eyed me suspiciously.

  “So you’re here strictly on holiday?” she demanded.

  “Came to the U.K. at Heathrow Airport early in August. Want to see my passport?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said.

  I guessed it wouldn’t, at that. Woman with that much juice could have the flunky of a flunky call the Home Office and find out when I’d entered the country.

  “So your visit to TVStrato was strictly coincidental.”

  “Right. I’ve been here for a few months, just settling in, acquiring a taste for pork pies, reading the Times and the tabloids when I finally realized I had an old friend living here I hadn’t given so much as a phone call.”

  “Levering.”

  “Exactly. I knew him in New York; his wife once worked for the Network. I went to their wedding. I decided it was time to make contact, and since I’m living not too far away, a short ride on the number 69 bus, and it’s a nice day, I further decided to call in person instead of phoning ahead.”

  She mulled it over for a few seconds. “I intend to check this information, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Dear lady, you may check my information until you are blue in the face. I don’t give a damn, for I am telling the truth. So little do I care, in fact, that I am not even going to make one little phone call and tell New York that there really is something fishy going on around here.”

  Her voice was ominous. “I have told you I have no sense of humor, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Right. And therefore I wouldn’t presume to joke. Item: You have security grassing to you instantly the second anybody walks through the door. There was no way you could have burst into Bernard’s office so quickly with my name on your lips. Item: You’re as tense as a piano wire, next thing to hysterical. Item: You are totally paranoid about your authority here and threat to it, to the point where you’re sure you’re being investigated by your partners, and to the point where you make dire threats about checking my story. Do you want more?”

  Her voice was ice cold. “That will be all, Mr. Cobb. Good day.”

  5

  “... I just want to see some action in my life.”

  Theme song

  Dream Stuffing, Channel Four

  THREE DAYS LATER, SUNDAY afternoon, found Rox and me on Wardour Street, just where Chinatown meets Piccadilly Circus, stuffing ourselves at our favorite dim sum place. If you want to go out on Sunday, you have to leave Barnes, because aside from the Safeway supermarket on the Upper Richmond Road in nearby East Sheen, everything is closed, including a lot of the restaurants.

  If you would like to know how a restaurant stays in business when it doesn’t offer Sunday dinner, one of the major eat-out times (at least in the States), so would I.

  It’s frustrating, but this place we stumbled into one afternoon when we were just touristing around serves little plates of oriental ambrosia every day August Heaven sends, between twelve and three in the afternoon.

  Rox and I had just finished demolishing various servings of paper shrimp, ginger beef, barbecue steam buns, sticky rice, spring rolls, fried wontons, and other delicacies, and I was reaching for my wallet.

  I’d had such a great time at the meal, I forgot what else was in my pocket. As soon as I touched it, I frowned.

  Roxanne picked up on it in a flash.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “Yes, I do. I promised.”

  “I don’t care. Besides, you didn’t have to promise.”

  “You didn’t say that at the time.”

  “I said it was up to you. It was up to you. I didn’t say I’d be glad with your decision.”

  “Up to me,” I scoffed. “What the hell kind of girlfriend are you, refusing to boss me around? They’ll throw you out of the Guild.”

  She smiled. “I’ve never been much of a joiner,” she said.

  I smiled back. “Come on,” I said. “You were as impressed as I was.”

  Roxanne bounced her head from side to side, loathe to admit it. At last she said, “Well, yeah. I mean, her ladyship dropping in on us. Incognito yet.”

  She was only wearing dark glasses and a scarf over her hair,” I said. “I recognized her instantly.”

  Roxanne was exasperated. “Matt,” she said, “the woman came in a bus. Not in a limousine, not in a taxi, not even in a minicab. In a bus.” She shook her head. “Believe me,” she said, “I grew up among people like this. If she had a heart attack, she’d spurn the ambulance and insist on being taken to the hospital in a limousine.”

  “She wasn’t born to it, you know.” I’d stopped in the Castelnau library in our neighborhood and done a little checking up. “Her parents were teachers, and she was a reporter on one of Sir Richard’s regional papers, down in Brighton.”

  “Hove, actually,” Roxanne said. “But that just strengthens my case. People born to big money just don’t give a damn. People who marry it always feel as if they have to live up to something.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes and looked at me for a long time. I figured my big mouth had gotten me in trouble again, and was already drafting several apologies based on what my offenses were likely to have been, when Roxanne said at last, “Is that a proposal?”

  “I thought I more or less proposed last summer, and you mo
re or less accepted.”

  “You’re more or less right,” she conceded. “I thought what you said right now might be a proposal to do something about it.”

  “Any time,” I said. “You know that.”

  She pushed aside a few empty plates and took my hand. “I know, Cobb,” she said tenderly. “And as soon as I can persuade you out of this macho nonsense about a prenuptial agreement, or as soon as I can stop taking it as a personal insult, we’ll do the deed.”

  “I don’t want it because of you,” I said.

  “Why then? Because of you? I think the idea of providing for the failure of a marriage before you even start it is sick.”

  “Look,” I said. “There are three things people will believe about any man, and one of them is that he married his wife for her money. If we get married, they’re going to think it about me—hell, they think it now.”

  “So what do you intend to do about it?” she demanded. “Hand out Xeroxes of your prenup every time you meet somebody new?”

  “I don’t intend to do anything about it.”

  “Then what’s the point, Cobb?”

  “The point is, when we walk into a room and people start to smirk, I want to know in my heart that they’re wrong. I want to know for myself that I could, if I wanted to, prove that I’m with you because God sent you to earth to alternately make me ecstatic and drive me nuts.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “Which is it this time?”

  “Little of both.”

  “Well,” she said. “I must admit you’ve come up with a new argument. Let me think about it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “But I tell you that coming in a bus for this woman was traveling incognito.”

  It took a few seconds to whip my brain back to the previous conversation, but I got there, and conceded the point.

  Incognito or not, Lady Arking’s visit was pretty bizarre. Rox and I had just finished dinner—lamb chops, peas, roast potatoes, choice of mint or red currant jelly. This had been prepared by the extremely soft hands of Miss Roxanne Schick her own personal self—we had a cleaning lady who came in, but no cook. God knows where Rox learned how to cook, but she’s a natural at it. God knows she didn’t learn by helping her mother, the way I did. Anyway, we take turns, cook together, or order out.