The ambulance arrived moments later, squealing into the square in front of the Dreamstone building, closely followed by a police car and a police van. Two paramedics hurried into the building, carrying a stretcher. A couple of policemen followed, with more police fanning out around the pickets with their banners. Harry watched anxiously as the paramedics eased Levon onto a stretcher, lifting it gently. Somebody has covered th the redhaired girl’s shoulders with a man’s jacket, possibly Levon’s, and Harry could see that she was holding Levon’s hand. He saw her big black beret lying on the floor and bent to pick it up. Then he looked around. Sophie was staring down at her smart pinstriped business suit. It was stiff with blood, but she seemed more shocked than hurt, and she shook her head as Harry moved towards her.
‘I’m alright. Most of it’s Levon’s.’ She looked as though she was ready to burst into tears.
Teresa and Christine stoodd grouped behind her protectively. Teresa had brought her a cup of tea. Two young men from Dreamstone’s account department stood guard over Julia, stiff and silent in a chair. She might have been carved from ice.
The two policemen watched the paramedics stretcher Levon away, and looked around aggressively. One wore small shiny metal sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder, next to his number.
Harry moved quickly to take command. He looked at the police sergeant, and gestured at Julia. ‘She went mad and attacked my partner with a carvingknife.’
‘Partner, sir?’
‘I’m a director of Dreamstone.’ He made his voice authoritative, hoping the television camera team had gone off somewhere distant.
The police sergeant half turned towards the open door. The pickets had already begun packing up their banners. ‘Was she with them?’
‘No.’ He shook his head, but the police sergeant seems to be waiting. ‘We’re making a takeover bid. They came this morning from one of the factories. They’ve been no trouble at all. She works for the chairman.’
The police sergeant looked a litle baffled. ‘Chairman, sir? Why was she here?’
‘She came to deliver some papers.’
‘I see.’ But it was plain the the police sergeant did not see at all. ‘I think you’d better make a statement, sir.’
Harry could see the ambulance men loading Levon into the back of their ambulance. He shook his head. ‘I need to go to the hospital first. I’ve got a car outside.’
‘The silver Mercedes, sir?’
He nodded, and the police sergeant hesitated. ‘You can come with me. I’ll tell you about it in the car.’ He glanced at Julia. ‘Will your people look after her?’
‘We will, sir.’ The police sergeant relaxed a little. He looked as though he would quite like to be chauffeured in a silver Mercedes. ‘My men will take her back to the station. We’ll get a doctor to look at her.’
‘Right. I’ll just brief everyone her.’ Harry was masterful. Sophie, Teresa and Christine were still standing where he had left them. He held out his keys. ‘Christine, take Teresa and Sophie round to my place, and get someone to bring Sophie some clothes. Try somewhere smart, they’re more likely to come. Charge everything to Dreamstone. Get some things for Teresa and yourself if you’ve caught any bloodstains. Then call the cleaners and get them to come round as fast as they can, and our PR people, and our bankers, and say that Levon has had an accident, but that he’ll be ok. Fob everyone else off for a couple of hours, until I get back. This place can close down for the day.’
Christine nodded. Good secretaries prove themselves under stress. Harry made a mental note to give Sophie twelve months’ pay as a bonus, and pack her off somewhere exotic at the firm’s expense to recover.
His mobile began to ring, and he walked out onto the Dreamstone steps. He felt a little irritated, telephone calls were the last thing he needed.
A woman’s voice spoke, sounding strained. ‘Hello, I’m Eleanor, from last night. They’ve taken Daddy to hospital.’ She sounded on the verge of tears. ‘Can we meet somewhere? I need somebody to talk to.’
Harry took a deep breath. Troubles always come close, one after another.
‘Will it be too much bother?’ He could hear the hope in her voice ebbing away.
He shook his head. ‘No. Let’s meet.’ He spoke in staccato bursts, thinking on his feet. ‘But it’ll have to be later. A mad woman has stabbed my partner. We’re taking him up to Saint Clements. Where are you?’
‘Greenwich District. It’s by the Blackwall approach road.’
‘I know it.’ Harry realised that the police sergeant has joined him. ‘Wait there, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I promise it.’
The police sergeant eyed him, and Harry sighed. ‘A friend. Her father has been taken to Greenwich District.’
The police sergeant nodded sympathetically. Two of his men were already leading Julia across the small square towards the waiting police van. The pickets had all vanished.
Harry found Levon in a small hospital cubicle, lying flat on a couch. A drip hung over him, and a nurse had carefully cut away his shirt. The girl with red hair was seated in a corner, still clutching his jacket around her.
He grimaced a greeting. ‘It was my best suit, a friend made it for me in Savile Row. The pants are ruined.’ He looked pale and strained. The girl with red hair eyed the policeman a little apprehensively.
The nurse looked up, and stared coolly at Harry and the police sergeant. She was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty, and very pretty, with blue eyes and flaxen hair pinned up in a chignon. ‘He’s been badly cut up, and he’s still quite weak. He’s in no fit state to make a statement at present.’
The police sergeant nodded. ‘We’ll wait outside.’
Levon tried to lift his head, but it was too much of an effort, and he let it fall back. ‘Harry.’
Harry moved closer as the policeman retreated.
‘I never knew heaven could be so painful.’
The flaxen-haired nurse paused.
Harry bit his lip.
Levon’s tone was almost sepulchral. ‘They had to give me two angels instead of just one. Do you think I’ll be allowed to keep them?’
The cubicle was silent for a moment, and then the nurse smiled slightly. ‘You’re going to be all right, Mr. Haris. You’ll be out of here in the morning.’
Harry could have sworn that the girl with red hair brushed at her eyes.
The police sergeant wrote Harry’s statement a little laboriously as they sat on two chairs outside the cubicle, balancing a pad of lined paper on his knee. He noted Underwood’s name, and Wide Horizon’s address, and Harry sketched quickly through Dreamstone’s bid, but made no connection with Julia’s carvingknife. There was no need, the police sergeant built the link for himself, and tried several times to secure Harry’s concurrence. Harry played a wholly diplomatic hand, refusing to speculate on things about which he knew nothing. But he judged that Julia’s attack had harmed Dreamstone very little, in a world where anything that moved Underwood out of the way must accelerate the group’s progress.
The police sergeant finished writing, and Harry signed at the bottom of each of two pages. Then they sat waiting in silence. But the police sergeant grew bored after a while, and got to his feet. ‘I’ll try Mr. Haris tomorrow.’
Harry smiled. ‘You’ll find him at the Savoy.’ He wondered whether Levon would be on his own.
A dark-haired doctor in a white coat passesd, barely acknowledging Harry’s presence, and disappeared into the cubicle, now closed off by a curtain. He came out again a few minutes later. ‘Mr. Haris is lucky. His mobile took the full force of the initial attack. He’s sleeping now. He may wake later tonight, but I doubt it. Sleep’s the best cure for trauma. We’ll transfer him to a ward for observation.’ He spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, with the assurance of knowing a patient had been safely drugged. ‘Do you want to take Diana home, so she can change?’
‘Diana?’
‘The girl in there with him.’
Harry got to his feet. He could take Diana back to his flat for refitting along with the three Dreamstone women. The thought made him smile wryly. Four goodlooking women in his bedroom, all in their underwear. How Levon would envy him.
Everything runs smoothly after that. Harry ferried Diana back to Canary Wharf, but did not talk to her much during the short drive from the hospital, for he had seen her holding Levon’s hand as the paramedics stretchered him to the waiting ambulance, and that was sufficient. He found a Harrods van already parked outside the flat, and guessed that Sophie, Teresa and Christine must have ordered up clothes using his computer.
Christine comes out of his bedroom briefly. ‘I’ve briefed everybody.’ She was wearing a blouse with a couple of buttons undone, and he swallowed. ‘How was he? Do you want me to call Shosanah?’
He shook his head, trying to keep his eyes averted. Christine was a podgy girl, but she had all her bits in the right places. ‘He’s fine, he’ll be out in the morning.’ He deftly ignored her question about Shosanah. ‘Did you organise the cleaners?’
‘They’re sent two teams.’
Harry grinned. ‘I’ll leave you all to it.’ He paused. ‘You’ll find some champagne in the fridge, don’t drink it all.’ Another pause. ‘And kit Diana out as well. Levon believes she’s an angel.’ He cast around in his mind for loose ends, and tugged his wallet from his hip pocket, to take out a handful of twenty pound notes. ‘Organise taxis for the lot of you, and ask her if she’d like to come to a boardroom lunch tomorrow. We’ll be celebrating Levon’s lucky escape.’
Christine beamed, and suddenly threw her arms around Harry’s neck, hugging him close The embrace only lasted a moment.. But he felt like a hero.
He met Eleanor half an hour later. Levon’s chauffeur drove him to Greenwich District, and he found her waiting at the entrance to the Accident and Emergency Unit. She looked drained, wan and desolated, and Harry could see that she had been weeping.
‘He went about an hour ago.’ She spoke in a flat, lifeless voice. ‘He had another stroke, and he was gone.’
Harry felt an urge to put his arms around her. But he did not know her well enough. ‘Do you want to sit down?’
For a moment she seemed not to hear him, and then she shook her head. ‘No. Let’s go somewhere, I just want to get away from here. Let’s go and walk across the park.’
They watched the silver Mercedes purr out of the hospital carpark, and set off along Trafalgar Road, turning up Maze Hill and into Greenwich Park just short of the Vanbrugh Castle. Harry was silent, until Eleanor slowed to look up at him.
‘Did you say something about an attack?’
He sketcheed Julia quickly, and they walked on again in silence. Then she began to speak haltingly. ‘Your friend was lucky. It’s dreadful to watch someone die. Daddy died slowly, and he knew he was dying. He was frightened, and he couldn’t cope with it.’
She paused, not looking at him. ‘You don’t mind me telling you?’
Harry shook his head silently. He wanted to take this woman’s hand, as a gesture of solidarity, to evidence sympathy. But he barely knew her. He had helped her manoeuvre a wheelchair, nothing more.
They walked on a little, and she spoke again. ‘He had his first stroke just over two years ago, Mummy had died of cancer two years earlier. I was a partner in a firm of local solicitors, we were doing quite well. I shared a nice house behind the Town Hall with a boyfriend, I thought he was quite serious.’ She corrected herself. ‘We had talked seriously.’
She was silent again as they climb towards Blackheath, stopping again at the gate. ‘Daddy couldn’t be on his own. He was so afraid. I took more and more time off work, and the other partners asked me to take a sabbatical. They didn’t want to throw me out, but I wasn’t pulling my weight. Keith got very ratty.’
‘Was he your boyfriend?’
She nodded. ‘He told me I must put Daddy in a home, but I just couldn’t do it. I’ve seen stroke victims go into homes. They fill them full of drugs, and turn them into cabbages. I told him I’d look after Daddy, come what may. He told me I had an Oedipus complex, and cared more for Daddy than I cared for him. I slapped his face.’
‘So he ditched you.’
‘Men can sometimes be real bastards.’
Harry winced, and she looked at him quickly. ‘You’re not a bastard.’
‘You really don’t know.’ He realised that he had taken Eleanor’s hand. But she did not withdraw it. ‘What happened then?’
‘He forced me to sell. The house was in joint names.’
‘You were thinking of getting married?’
‘Something like that.’
Harry realises that Eleanor has begun to cry. But she was crying silently, not making any sound. Only the tears glistening on her cheeks and the way her shoulders shook from time to time betrayed what she was feeling. He stopped, taking her in his arms, and pressed her face against his shoulder, patting her head softly.
After a moment she pulled free. ‘Everything fell apart. Daddy blamed Keith, Keith blamed Daddy, and I was pig in the middle. I went to live with Daddy – he had a big house, facing out over Blackheath, he had always lived there, and his father before him. I had the money from my house, and somewhere to live, but Daddy grew worse and worse. He used to wake up in the middle of the night, and cry like a baby, or have fits of rage, and try and break things. He became incontinent, and I had to clean up after him. I had to feed him at mealtimes, because sometimes he was just a big baby. I was all on my own, and I was so lonely. But then he would come back to life, to what I knew he had been, and it broke my heart.’
‘And now he’s dead?’
‘And now he’s dead.’ She echoed his words bleakly.
‘What will you do?’
She shrugged. She had stopped crying. ‘I don’t know. I can go back to the firm, they’ve kept my partnership for me. I suppose I’ll find another Keith, marry, and have a family. I’m prosperous, I’ve kept myself in shape. I suppose I could make something of myself.’
‘You need a nice man.’
She laughed shortly. ‘They don’t grow on trees.’
Harry was silent. Unhappiness and misery are not easy to deal with. People need helping hands, sometimes just one helping hand. But most people are demanding. They want, and sometimes they are insistent. They give rather less often.
They were now walking back towards the National Maritime Museum, and he remembered the Spread Eagle. ‘I’ll take you out to dinner.’
Eleanor stopped. ‘Do you want me to go back home and change?’
Harry shook his head. ‘I’m taking you out to dinner, just the way you are. I don’t want you to do anything, but come and have dinner with me, and perhaps let me make you smile.’
Tears glistened again on her eyelashes, but she pushed them away. ‘I’ll try.’ She smiled weakly. It was not much of a smile, but it was a small ray of sunshine.
They ate well, fish starters and a rich beef stew, but this time a bottle between them for each course, and the East African waitress was charming. The wine cheered Eleanor up, and Harry told her something of himself, of how he had made a fool of himself, and how retribution had caught up with him.
Eleanor looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘You had a good run for your money.’
Harry sighed. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Did she cure you of teenagers?’
He sniffed. ‘Well, Sylvia cured me of solicitors.’
Eleanor burst out laughing. ‘You’re a brute, a real brute.’ For a moment she forgot her sadness, almost as though a cloud had lifted from her. ‘Solicitors can be good people.’
‘Except on the phone.’
‘You should have chosen somebody nicer.’
‘I couldn’t find anyone nicer.’
She smiled, and it was a long warm smile of friendship, but she did not reply, reaching for the menu instead. ‘What’s for afters?’
They ate French fruit tarts for dessert, and drank coffee, and Harry paid, and then they were outside the Spread Eagle, and the sun was setting. He looked down at Eleanor, because she was standing close to him, as though taking shelter under his wing.
‘I better walk walk you back home.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Take me back to Canary Wharf with you. I don’t want to go back to Daddy’s house, it has too many memories. I’ll go back to clear it, and buy myself a house somewhere else.’
‘You aren’t afraid of meeting my memories?’
‘Ghosts are ghosts.’ She blew out her breath, like a man making a smoke ring. ‘I’ll be a breath of fresh air.’
They travelled back to Canary Wharf on the Dockland Light Railway, holding hands. Harry had just one brief moment of fear as he approaches his front door. He hoped that Sophie, Teresa and Christine had not taken him too seriously and decided to stay and party away all his champagne. But the flat had two spare bedrooms, and he imagined there would be room for all. He could always sleep on his sofa.
The flat was silent, and impeccably neat. He went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Eleanor to explore. He did not hear her return, and started as he realised that she had joined him, to stand at his side as he filled two small mugs.
‘You’ve got a real City tycoon pad.’ Her voice was admiring.
‘You like it?’
‘Mmmm.’ She was very close to him.
‘I’ve got a spare bedroom.’
‘I yield nothing to teenagers and solicitors.’ She lifted her arms to link them around his neck, and then they were embracing. But somehow Harry found that kissing Eleanor was not like kissing Doreen, or Sylvia, or even Anne. He had a feeling that she was kissing him because he had been kind to her, and wanted to give her own kindness. He had no sense of payment, nor obligation, either given, nor received, but only of someone wanting to provide affection because affection had been provided, and it was the same as they lay together in his bed. They had undressed each other, in measures of kindness, each caressing the other, and they come together because each of them needed the other, and each of them gave pleasure, because they were creating a pleasure with a power to weave magic bonds, and they were gentle with each other, because gentleness binds. Their pleasure lasted a long time, and sometimes they were waking, and sometimes sleeping, and each time they woke they enlaced again, and in the morning Eleanor sat up in his bed, and looked down at him, and spoke very simply.
‘Harry, I love you.’
He echoed her words, and they kissed, folding themselves again, each in the arms of the other, and they knew that they were in love, because they were making love.
Later, as they sit drinking coffee at his kitchen table, Eleanor looked at him. Somehow she seemed to have shed the careworn quality that burdened her the previous evening. There was a freshness about her, as though she has begun a new life. ‘Will you let me help you in your work?’
Harry grinned. ‘You’re after a partnership.’
She snorted. ‘I told you. You’re a brute.’
‘Diana called me a corporate executioner.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Harry. We’ll create, not destroy, because we’ll have to think of our children.’
Harry made it to work a little late that morning. He found Sophie, Teresa and Christine already at their desks, though Sophie looked a little as though she had been hung out to dry. All the mess had been cleared away.
Levon arrived at lunchtime, limping a little, with Diana following him closely. She looked a different woman altogether, in an expensive black silk blouse and black silk combat trousers, and somebody had cut her red hair very smartly.
Levon kept smiling at her. as though she was guiding him through paradise. Perhaps she was.
They all ate at the Four Seasons. Somebody had told Enrico of Julia’s attack, and the hotel donated the event, possibly as a thankoffering to the Gods for not losing such a good customer. All Dreamstone was invited, and all Dreamstone came. Clerks from the accounts department rubbed shoulders with the directors, and Diana found herself with Levon seated to one side of her, and Levon’s chauffeur on the other. Harry mentioned Eleanor in passing, and a delegation went to his flat to sweep her in as well. They ate as a family, and Levon outlined to Harry his plans for a relocation agency to help find new jobs for Wide Horizons employees found surplus to requirements.
‘Diana will organise everything, we’ll do nicely out of central and local government grants.’ He beamed, and Shosanah was quite forgotten. His chest and left shoulder were swathed in bandages, but he was in high spirits. ‘She will be my phoenix. She will create from what we destroy.’
Harry and Eleanor held hands and smiled at each other.
The end