The Crocus List - Lyall Gavin - Страница 46

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If somebody had suggested to Agnes that she was not security-minded, she would just have stared at them. Security was her trade, always had been. But, as Maxim had realised the evening before, her training was in hunting, not being hunted. Even in the long-ago undercover work on the weekly magazine, she had always worked with the comforting feeling of being in her own country, with the big battalions immediately behind her. She had never-quite-known what Dorothy Tuckey, and Magill and Tatham had known of the real loneliness of the hunted. Otherwise, she would never have put anything on record in that isolated motel cabin, all ready for Them to snatch when they kicked the door in.

By Hand

Private amp; Confidential

Dear Mr Harbinger,

Anglam Gateway amp; its Properties

With the kind assistance of the local estate agencies I have gone some way to tracing the subsequent history of the two properties owned by the above company.

The Tunbridge Wells house was sold, as I believe I told you, when the company acquired the lease on Oxendown House, near Eastbourne. It was purchased by the late Colonel J. R. M. Clarke, and passed to his children on his death seven years ago. Three years ago it was sold toa Dr William Baxter, who lives and operates his surgery there.

Anglam Gateway had only a nineteen-year lease on Oxendown House, which is part of the Gardener Estates. We sold the residual sixteen years, approx, to a client represented by Harvey Gough amp; Partners, who soon afterwards resold it by private treaty to a small company whose name I have not yet discovered, with the rumoured intention that it would be turned into a private nursing home.

However, I understand it has since been resold to yet another private company, who appear to have resold the lease to the Estates who in turn sold the farmland to local landowners but rented the house to the company, presumably for a much reduced sum.

I am afraid this is all very complicated and difficult to untangle at short notice, but I hope, nonetheless, that it is of some help.

Please give my best regards to your Uncle Charles;

Yours sincerely,

Donald Nightingale.

George locked the letter away, smiling with grim satisfaction. Practise in peace, Dr Baxter of Tunbridge Wells, he thought; you sound an honest pill-peddler to me. But if that wasn't a second smokescreen settling on Oxendown House as fast as possible after Charlie's Indians had withdrawn their own, then I don't know smoke signals when I smell them.

He would have liked to know who that 'client of Harvey Gough amp; Partners' had been-Arnold Tatham himself, perhaps, using the pension contributions he had withdrawn on his resignation. Certainly that was as close to a gap in the smokescreen as there had been, when Charlie's Indians were screaming (silently) for a quick sale to sever their connection but before a barricade of shell companies could be erected to take it over…

But why had Tatham wanted to keep that house? To keep a base, yes, and what could be an isolated one, surrounded by farmland, yes-but he could have bought some other, without any history. Unless Oxendown had certain special facilities, something not easily transferred… He would like to take a look at Oxendown House. He also wished Maxim was back.

The East Coast of America is dominated by the big cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington all exert such a gravitational pull that the smaller towns are sucked into an orbit of dependency on the nearest city sun. In the Midwest, not even Chicago exerts such influence, and St Louis very little at all. Across the plains on either side of the Mississippi and Missouri, it is as if a giant city planet had exploded, leaving a random scatter of asteroid towns frozen in their wanderings but uncommitted to an urban star.

Never quite random, of course. Some grew up on river crossings, at water-holes on the westward trails, and a remarkable number-Matson included-on the railroads or, thanks to founding fathers with a keen eye for land values, where they deduced the railroads must come. Robert Julius Matson had guessed right: the first train had come through just nine years after the town was founded in 1858, pulling behind it the fertiliser works, the corn mill, the seed-corn warehouse, and with them the quiet prosperity that spawned the first Masonic lodge in 1871, a voluntary fire brigade in '75, the telephone in '84 and the first sewer in 1920. All this-and a lot more-Maxim learnt from a centennial booklet in the town library, just one floor up from the town offices.

Already he had spent an hour wandering around the town-it needed no more time than that-trying to get the feel of the place. This wasn't easy, because it was clearly a private town: self-contained within its white wooden houses that seemed as well-rooted on their green lawns as the tall trees of Elm Street, Pine, Walnut, Chestnut… the usual street names of such towns, not unimaginative, just because you built houses like that and named streets likethat. If you wanted to be different, you could find a big city at the end of the railroad and be different there. He guessed a lot of young people had: the few faces on the street seemed of retirement age. He realised why when he walked down to where Main Street crossed the railroad tracks and saw the grass-grown rails, the deserted depot and the dusty windows of the empty fertiliser works.

Robert Julius had been right, but only for just over a hundred years. The railroad giveth and the railroad taketh away, and when it stops giving and taking, a lot more stops as well. Maxim stood on the rails and tried to imagine the bustle as a train panted in, of the steam glowing the lamplight at night, of the sense of distance and connection… but it was trying to imagine the broken chimes of a clock you never heard.

Nobody had even thought to throw stones through the windows of the fertiliser works.

The Maison Sentinelhad died, too, just a few years before, and the bound copies of its back numbers were also in the library. Maxim leafed through them because-as he was forced to admit to himself- he had no idea of how to approach Clare Hall. Surrounding himself with local knowledge was a form of entrenchment; if you dig in and stare at a hill you can often persuade yourself you know what's going on behind it. Confidence wins battles; even false confidence has won a few.

(This is not a battle, he reprimanded himself. Alan James Winterbotham does not fight battles.)

The woman librarian finished a murmured telephone call and drifted across. "Are you finding what you wanted?"

"Just pottering," Maxim (Winterbotham) said. "Seeing America by bus on my way home. As far as Minneapolis, anyway. My car busted there."

Her indifference told him he had explained too much (but maybe Canadians, or Winterbothams, did explain too much). "Looking up the town history? It's kind of quiet these days, since the railroad pulled out. Mostly folk retired off the farms around here."

She had the Midwestern accent that is usually called 'flat' because the Midwest doesn't believe that emotionalemphasis makes the corn grow taller. Her tall thin elegance was camouflaged by a loose, dark woollen dress and heavy glasses, but restored by her prematurely grey hair-she was about Maxim's age-that was cut in simple elegant sweeps over her ears. Perhaps she was playing the part of a small-town librarian but hoping not to be taken too seriously.

"Anything more you'd like to know, just ask." She drifted away to the shelves, shuffling a book here and there.

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