Click.
‘Yes,’ Marta said.
The conversation was over but Marta didn’t realise this at first because Louisa went on clicking the lighter and smiling at the flame. And there were quite a few clicks and smiles before it occurred to Marta that Louisa was drunk in the way Marta’s brother used to get drunk when life became too much for him. Not singing drunk or wobbly drunk, but crystal-headed, perfect-vision drunk. Drunk with all the knowledge she had been drinking to get rid of. And stark naked inside her housecoat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was one-twenty on the same morning when Osnard’s front doorbell rang. For the last hour he had been in a state of advanced sobriety. At first, still raging from his defeat, he had revelled in violent methods of ridding himself of his hated guest: hurl him off the balcony to crash through the roof of the Club Unión a dozen floors below, ruining everybody’s evening, drown him in the shower, put Jeyes Fluid in his whisky – ‘Eh, well, Andrew, if you insist, but only the merest finger, if you please’ – suck of the teeth as he expires. His fury was not confined to Luxmore:
Maltby! My Ambassador and golfing partner, Christ’s sakes! Queen’s own bloody representative, faded flower o’ the British bloody Diplomatic Service and gyps me like a pro!
Stormont! Soul o’ probity, one o’ life’s born losers, last o’ the white men, Maltby’s faithful poodle with the stomach ache, egging his master on with nods and grunts while my Lord Bishop Luxmore gives them both his blessing!
Was it conspiracy or cock-up? Osnard asked himself, over and over again. Was Maltby tipping a wink when he spoke of ‘share and share alike’ and ‘can’t hang on to the whole game’? Maltby, that smirking pedant, putting his fingers in the till? Bastard wouldn’t know how. Forget it. And Osnard to a degree did indeed forget it. His natural pragmatism reasserted itself, he abandoned vengeful thoughts and applied himself instead to saving what remained of his great enterprise. The ship is holed but not sunk, he told himself. I’m still BUCHAN’s pay-master. Maltby’s right.
‘Care for something different, sir, or prefer to stay with the malt?’
‘Andrew, please. I beseech you. Scottie, if you don’t mind.’
‘I’ll try,’ Osnard promised and, stepping through the open French doors, poured him another industrial-sized shot of malt whisky from the sideboard in the dining room and returned with it to the balcony. Jetlag, whisky and insomnia were finally taking their toll of Luxmore, he decided, clinically examining his master’s semi-recumbent figure in the deckchair before him. So was the humidity – the flannel shirt soaked through, tracks of sweat streaming down the beard. So was his terror at being stuck out here in enemy territory with no wife to look after him – the haunted eyes flinching with every sudden clatter of footsteps or police siren or ribald shout that zigzagged up at them through the gimcrack canyons of Punta Paitilla. The sky was clear as water and strewn with brittle stars. A poacher’s moon etched a lightpath between the anchored shipping in the mouth of the Canal, but no breeze came off the sea. It seldom did.
‘You asked me whether there was anything Head Office might do to make life a bit easier for the Station, sir,’ Osnard reminded Luxmore diffidently.
‘Did I, Andrew? Well, I’m damned.’ Luxmore sat up with a jolt. ‘Fire ahead, Andrew, fire ahead. Though I’m pleased to see you’ve already done yourself pretty well out here,’ he added, not entirely pleasantly, with an erratic swing of the arm that took in both the view and the grand apartment. ‘Don’t think I’m criticising you, mind. I drink to you. To your grit. Your acumen. Your youth. Qualities we all admire. Good health!’ Slurp. ‘You’ve a great career ahead of you, Andrew. Easier times than we had in my day, I may add. A softer bed. You know how much this costs at home now? Lucky if you see change out of a twenty pound note.’
‘It’s about this safe house I mentioned, sir,’ Osnard reminded him, in the manner of an anxious heir at his dying father’s bedside. ‘Time we weaned ourselves away from pushbuttons and three-hour hotels. Thought maybe one o’ those conversions in the Old City would give us greater operational scope.’