The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,19
to find something to say that didn’t sound like an awful cliché. ‘Put your hands . . . um, let me see what you’ve got there.’
His opponent’s face was contorted in a peculiar smile. A rictus of hate or fear, maybe both. The man remained still but for the hand he slowly drew from his jacket pocket. It was holding a little bottle.
‘Drop it on the floor,’ Fleming ordered.
As the man did so, Miller went to pick it up. It was ridged on one side and on the other was a white label. OIL OF VITRIOL, it read. She gasped and nearly dropped the thing.
‘What is it?’ asked Fleming.
‘Acid,’ she replied.
‘You bastard,’ Fleming spat.
‘I was only going to scare her, mister. That was the plan. Just scare her.’
‘Dirty little Nazi. I ought to shoot you.’
‘I ain’t a Nazi,’ the man protested.
Fleming told him to sit down and watched him as Joan went to the bedroom to phone Special Branch. Luckily the duty officer was someone she knew and he agreed to send a couple of officers straight away. As she put the phone down she noticed a tremor in her right hand. Fleming was attempting to interrogate the intruder as she came back into the living room.
‘Our little friend here actually denies he’s a fascist,’ Fleming told her. ‘But then he would, wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Joan. ‘They’re usually terribly proud of it, you know, triumphant. Calling out that the invasion’s coming and we’ll all be on the list the Gestapo’s drawn up.’
‘So,’ Fleming turned to the seated man. ‘If you’re not a quisling, what were you doing at the meeting yesterday?’
‘Meeting?’ The man scowled. ‘What meeting?’
‘Oh well,’ Fleming sighed. ‘Better let Special Branch give him the third degree.’
Miller frowned, trying to remember if she had actually seen the man in the basement the day before.
It was dawn by the time two plainclothes policemen came to take him away. With just the two of them in Joan’s flat, all at once the mood became strangely formal. While they had kept vigil over the intruder or dealt with the official rituals of Special Branch, the atmosphere of external tension had somehow allowed for a covert intimacy. A shared smile or a reassuring glance, a fleeting moment of intense eye contact that needed no explanation. But now they were alone together, they were possessed by a peculiar awkwardness, a kind of static charge.
‘I really should stay for a bit, you know,’ Fleming offered hesitantly. ‘You’ve had quite a shock.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all right.’
‘I’d like to,’ he said softly.
‘What?’
‘Stay.’
An attempt at a nonchalant grin smarted on his face. As she held his gaze he noted that her eyes were deep blue. Cool, direct, quizzical.
‘Stay then,’ she said with a shrug.
He frowned. Women are such difficult characters, he reasoned. His inner text demanded that they should be an illusion, nothing more than a thorough but simple physical description. Miller’s appearance certainly fitted his ideal. She was undeniably attractive. Wide-set eyes and high cheekbones; an elegant curve to the jaw framed by a mane of raven hair cut square to the nape of her neck; a bow-lipped mouth, full and sensual. Fleming found it easy to draw up an account with the banal symmetries of detail. But now there was too much depth to his impression of her, and he felt that he already knew her far too well. And it annoyed him that she seemed more at ease than he was.
Miller laughed.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘You look like a lost little boy.’
He suddenly felt horribly inert. He tried to empty his mind, to assume a seductive charm, but it eluded him. He was full of desire but knew that if he was unable to focus on the possibility of simple animal pleasure this urge would quickly vanish.
‘Come here,’ she said.
He went to her but the moment was already lost. Now she had the initiative, and this would never do. She kissed him lightly on the mouth. His lips were cold and he couldn’t help but flinch slightly as she gently stroked his face with her fingers. They pulled away from each other.
‘Look,’ he began, not knowing what to say.
‘I suppose we’re both a bit on edge,’ she offered. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘Yes. I suppose.’
He offered her a cigarette and for a while they stood smoking in her living room. All at once they reverted to the casual tone of procedure, going over their report of the night’s events and their implications.