Threats and Menaces Read online

  Threats and Menaces

  Alan Scholefield

  © Alan Scholefield 1999

  Alan Scholefield has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Macmillan London Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  My thanks for his help go to Detective Inspector Hugh Toomer formerly of the Metropolitan Police.

  Any mistakes are my own.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter One

  … Like a diamond in the sky.

  The line came back to her. She must have learned it in her English class at school.

  Twinkle… twinkle…

  There it was against the blue of the sky. Bright. Intense. Like a mirror reflecting the sun.

  She would watch it sometimes, this light from above, and think how free it was.

  … Up above the world so high…

  Here too there were diamonds. Right in front of her. White-painted steel bars crossing each other at angles. She was looking through the diamond pattern to this other diamond twinkling in the sky.

  These diamonds, her diamonds, were familiar. There were seedy buildings in Manila where the old-fashioned elevators had gates like these.

  But you eventually got out of elevators.

  Not here. Not through these diamonds.

  She heard him moving above her. Soon he would come down to the kitchen. If she was lucky he would only talk.

  She looked up, but the diamond in the sky had gone.

  She felt lost. Abandoned.

  Chapter Two

  Dory was carrying her parcel in one hand and hanging on to her father with the other. As they went up the marble steps of Sel-boume Place, Trevor, the porter, pressed the button that opened the big reinforced glass doors.

  When these doors were installed the residents had congratulated themselves on the fact that they were built to withstand earthquakes and nuclear wars. They would surely keep out the Great Unwashed. Now they weren’t sure.

  Dory watched herself and her father enter the doors on the TV monitor in the hallway. She saw a small dark-haired girl and a large man whose equally dark hair was a mass of curls and who wore a drooping sixties moustache which made him look like the sort of person you would not want to sit next to in an aircraft if you were faint-hearted about terrorists.

  Trevor, in his grey porter’s uniform, was sitting behind his desk in the cool marble foyer which was made to seem even cooler by the glass sculpture of a waterfall cascading into a pool of artificial reeds and ferns.

  ‘Afternoon, Mr Mavroulian. Hello, Dory. More presents?’

  Dory did not reply.

  ‘You know what kids are,’ Max Mavroulian said.

  In the elevator Dory said, ‘He doesn’t know what kids are. He doesn’t have any and I’m the only one in the flats. Anyway he’s a hermaphrodite.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Mr Pargeter said so.’

  ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘I looked it up.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘He’s always sort of sneering. Specially about me.’

  ‘That’s just his way. He’s an old woman.’

  ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Is gay the same as being a hermaphrodite?’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  They got off at the fourteenth floor.

  ‘You’d better not let your mother hear you talking about hermaphrodites.’

  They went into the apartment. It was big, even by the plushest of London standards. All the apartments in Selbourne Place were. It was split-level with a huge sunken living-room done in gold and blue that led out through a wall of glass on to the big balcony with its array of garden furniture.

  The first impression of the apartment was one of greenery: there were palms and ficuses and Swiss cheese plants and spider plants and through the glass wall you could see window-boxes filled with regal pelargoniums and zonal geraniums and pansies and lobelia. And all the leaves of the trees were clean and shiny and the window-boxes looked as though someone had just planted them — which someone just had.

  The whole place seemed to be poised for the arrival of a photographer from Homes & Gardens.

  The balcony looked out over a small, narrow square to a twin apartment block on the far side.

  Adrienne Marvell was on the balcony under a striped umbrella, correcting proofs of her latest book.

  ‘God, it’s hot,’ Max said.

  Adrienne was cool. She was in her late thirties, slender with dark hair pulled back giving her a look of Nefertiti. She wore no make-up.

  ‘There’s fresh lemonade in the fridge,’ she said.

  Max came back from the kitchen with a glass. ‘There’s a tea leaf in the sink,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘No wonder you can never hold on to a housekeeper.’

  ‘It’s not a question of holding on to them. The last one drank. I let her go.’

  ‘I’d drink too if I had to work in a kitchen as spotless as that.’ He took off his jacket, ‘It’s getting more like Fort Knox every day.’ ‘The kitchen?’

  ‘This building.’

  ‘That’s what we pay for.’

  He stretched out on a lounger. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘It’s really appalling. I mean the kind of mistakes that creep in these — ’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t mean the proofs.’

  ‘Don’t say that in front of Dory.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Dory, don’t hang over the balcony, please.’

  ‘I mean the new book,’ Max said.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t seem to get settled in. It won’t gel.’

  ‘It had better gel.’

  ‘I’m not a machine, Max.’

  ‘Sweetness, no publisher pays a million bucks because he likes the colour of your eyes. Leggatt wants it by October. Next year’s whole spring/summer list is built around the new Adrienne Marvell. We deliver or we are in mucho trouble.’

  ‘I don’t like Leggatt.’

  ‘You can like him or loathe him but he’s the honcho with the money box. OK? You want me to look at it?’

  ‘What makes you think — ?’

  ‘Because I looked at the others. Not only looked but made you change things, gave you ideas. You’re not writing Pride and Prejudice, sweetie pie, you’re writing for dough. OK?’

  ‘Dory, what are you doing?’

  ‘Looking at you.’

  ‘Well stop it. It’s rude. And where did you get those binoculars?’ ‘Max bought them for me.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘Why can’t I call him Max?’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic.’ She turned to her ex-husband. ‘You’ve got to stop this.’

  ‘Why? She’s my daughter. My only
daughter. My only child for that matter. Why can’t I give her things?’

  ‘She’s got a whole room full of things: typewriters and word processors and cameras and a stereo and a CD… and God knows what. Anyway, what does she want binoculars for? There’s nothing to look at.’

  ‘I want to watch birds.’

  Max said, ‘She’s been bird watching with Mr P. up on the roof garden. She borrows his binoculars. Might as well have a pair of her own.’

  ‘Little girls don’t watch birds,’ Adrienne said.

  ‘Maybe not in your books they don’t. But maybe in real life they do.’

  ‘I like watching birds,’ Dory said.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Adrienne said to Max. ‘She’ll get bored in a few days and they’ll end up on the top of her wardrobe with the printing set and the glass-engraving set and —’

  ‘I won’t,’ Dory said. ‘Did you know there was a kestrel nesting over there?’

  ‘Where?’ Max said.

  She pointed to the apartment block called Rosemount Towers on the other side of the small park.

  ‘And there’s a collared dove nesting in the square.’ She held out the binoculars to her mother. ‘Do you want to see?’

  ‘I hate birds,’ her mother said.

  ‘Can I go up on to the roof and look?’

  ‘OK, and if Ralph’s there tell him I don’t like the window-boxes. I want more variety. Tell him around lunchtime tomorrow would be best, when I’ve done my morning’s work.’ She got up. ‘I’ll get the manuscript, Max. You can look at it.’

  ‘Hey, give me a kiss,’ Max said, picking Dory up. ‘Just in case I’m gone when you come down.’

  She hugged him. ‘Thank you for the binoculars.’

  ‘You’re welcome, darling. When are the holidays?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Terrific. We’ll go out lots and lots.’

  He watched her leave the apartment, a fatherly smile on his face.

  Adrienne came back with a folder. ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You’re spoiling her. You think she’s so sophisticated and clever and all that but you don’t see her most of the time. Underneath she’s still a seven-year-old who plays with dolls. She’s not some kind of prodigy.’

  ‘She’s lonely. There isn’t another kid in the building and you won’t let her have friends here.’

  ‘This is my office. I work here. I can’t have kids’ parties all the time.’

  ‘You could take her out once in a while.’

  ‘You know how I feel about that.’

  ‘Listen, everyone gets burgled in London. If we all stayed in all the time nothing would get done. And I don’t mean take her to Brixton. I mean down to the square or the park, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t go on about it, Max. Anyway, this business about bird watching… She’s a terrible… well, let me just say she exaggerates things, that she’s got quite an imagination for a little girl.’ ‘Like her mother.’ He caught her arm and drew her towards him. ‘You want a quick one?’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting.’

  ‘What’s disgusting about it? Anyway you’re an ex-wife and that makes it OK.’

  ‘Not with me.’

  ‘Christ knows how we ever conceived Dory.’

  ‘Read the manuscript.’

  Dory was alone on the roof garden. It was the only place she was ever allowed by herself. She leaned against the high parapet and began to focus the binoculars. She saw the collared dove in the square. It was pecking a bit of bread near one of the benches. Then she looked across at the kestrel’s nest on Rosemount Towers. It was up under the eaves and she thought she could see fledgelings.

  The glasses were small and powerful, with a zoom. Better than Mr R’s. Their lenses brought the opposite block of flats so near she felt she could almost touch it.

  Slowly, anticipating, hoping, she let them travel down the building to the ground floor. She could see Douglas, the porter at Rosemount, standing at the top of the steps like he always did. She swung the glasses to the right, to the house which stood by itself in its own garden. She could almost see the dirt on the curtains. They were closed, as they mostly were, but even as she looked, one was drawn aside and she saw the oval face and olive skin of the Princess of the Pavement People. The Princess looked up, seemingly at Dory herself. After a few moments she raised her hand and the curtain dropped.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Orgasms are apparently all the rage this year,’ Zoe Bertram said, looking up from her newspaper.

  She and Leo Silver were sitting in deck chairs on the flat roof of their maisonette in Pimlico reading by the last of the light. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  Leo marked the place in his book with his finger. ‘I thought they’d always been fashionable.’

  ‘I mean for girls.’

  ‘Girls are never satisfied. You got the vote, didn’t you?’

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘It says here that career women tell their companions when they want to go to bed; then they tell them what to do.’

  ‘No wonder there’re so many gays around.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Frighten the life out of most men, that would.’

  ‘It also says in the paper that religious fundamentalists are bringing back the old values. One of which is that women should be subservient to men. I wonder why there aren’t any fundamentalist religions in which men are supposed to be subservient to women.’ She paused. ‘Leo!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m talking to you.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say? I hear you. I’m reading. I don’t want to start an argument. It’s too nice an evening.’

  Zoe put down her paper.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘You never told me you read books. What sort of book?’

  ‘Detective story. By someone called David Leitman.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He’s having it off with Macrae’s ex-wife.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The first one. Linda.’

  ‘Does Macrae know?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s started going round there. Never used to.’

  ‘How is he? Still being a curmudgeon?’

  ‘Sort of. Wilson said he should see a quack. He didn’t take kindly to that.’

  ‘A psychiatrist?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘My God, I can’t imagine Macrae on the couch, can you?’ ‘He’ll get over it. I did.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ But she smiled as she said it.

  She lay back in the deck chair. Leo went on with his reading. Around them London hummed softly in the warm summer air. ‘Leo?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think your mother’s ever had an orgasm?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a prig. You must have thought about it. All children wonder about their parents.’

  ‘You wonder about yours, I’ll wonder about mine.’

  The thought of his father and mother in bed, other than peacefully asleep, made him uneasy.

  ‘Leo!’

  "WHAT?"

  ‘What sort of women do you like?’

  ‘What sort of question is that?’

  ‘A sociological one. Pretend I’m doing a survey.’

  ‘I’m reading.’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Only for your advertising campaigns. The new trend is to make women powerful and men into wimps. If it was the other way round there’d be an outcry.’

  ‘Come on.’

  He leaned back. ‘OK. You asked for it. Let’s see… Well, for a start I like big women. Big breasted. Deep-thewed thighs. Buttocks like a mare. Something you can get your hands on, as Macrae would say. Oh, and blonde. Rhine maidenish. That’s the type for me. Woof… woof…’

  ‘Is that so!’

  Zoe was small and wiry and dark with big wide-spac
ed black eyes and black shiny hair.

  ‘Nordic. Blue eyes and —’

  She scrambled out of the deck chair and began to belabour him with the rolled-up paper. ‘You bastard.’

  ‘OK… OK…

  ’ He shielded his head. ‘You asked for it. You wouldn’t let me read.’

  ‘Properly then. “My Favourite Feminine Type”, by Detective Sergeant Leopold Silver of the Yard.’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘But, Leo, you’ve got to be serious.’

  He put on a serious face. ‘OK, first of all I like older women.’ ‘You never told me.’

  ‘Well, I do. They’re more… sexually experienced. No hangups. No false modesty. Give you a much better time in bed. And I like women who’re divorced or separated because they’re grateful for your attention so they look after you better. And vegetarian because it shows they care about dumb creatures. And green because it shows they care about the planet and —’

  ‘You leave my mother out of this!’

  ‘Stop asking silly bloody questions then.’

  ‘One more.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  She went down the ladder to the flat below. It was only a wooden stepladder. One day he would really make something out of the roof. A proper roof garden. Barbecues… Sun-bathing…

  He heard the phone. Surely Macrae wouldn’t want him now. Then he heard Zoe say, ‘Oh God!’

  He rose and climbed down into the flat. She was standing at the table with the phone in her hand. Her face had gone white. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s my father,’ she said. ‘He’s had a stroke or a heart attack.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘That was a neighbour. He saw him through the window. Daddy had fallen down in the living-room. He couldn’t get in so he’s called an ambulance and the police. Leo, we’ve got to get down there.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Zoe’s father lived in Surrey and it took them three-quarters of an hour to reach the small village.

  As they shot down the A3 Leo was very aware of Zoe sitting like a statue in the passenger seat.

  ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’