The Final Programme Read online

  Now the overhead referee was moved out to his position above the ring. Four other referees took their places outside the ring, one on each side.

  The match began.

  It gave Jerry no kicks, but he watched with some amusement at the whitewash-covered tangle below, at the ecstatic crowd. When Jenny gripped his hand he felt pleased until he saw that Miss Brunner was gripping her other hand.

  The young blonde in the white one-piece was having her arm twisted by her old enemy. Probably Lolita del Starr and Cheetah Gerber, Jerry decided. Doc Gorilla, the hairy one, looking like the Old Man of the Sea with his beard covered in whitewash, was in a tie-up with the other girl, Ella Speed, and handsome Tony Valentine. Somewhere out of sight beneath them was the Masked Crusher, who didn’t seem to be doing much crushing.

  Though he couldn’t summon up the same enthusiasm as the rest of the audience, Jerry sat back and relaxed. Soon all the wrestlers were so covered in whitewash that it was impossible from where he sat to recognise who was who.

  He shouted in Jenny’s ear, “You can’t tell the men from the women, can you?”

  She seemed to hear and shouted something back, which he missed the first time. She shouted it again. “Not these days, no!”

  The match went on, with people dancing about, being bounced on ropes, flying out of the ring, climbing back in again, performing acrobatics and contortions of odd complexity.

  As a finale with a twist, Tony Valentine and Ella Speed jumped up and grabbed the overhead referee’s legs, hauling him into the ring. Then the ref sped round the ring hurling all the wrestlers out over the ropes. The crowd cheered.

  Winners were announced and the ring cleared of its whitewash tray.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, that famous folk group, whose songs have heartened the oppressed all round the world, will entertain you during the intermission. Ladies and gentlemen—The Reformers!”

  The Reformers were clapped into the ring. Two men and a good-looking girl with a pointed, self-indulgent face and fair curls. The two men held Spanish guitars. They began to sing a slow song about out-of-work miners. The audience seemed to be enjoying it as it tidied itself up and bought refreshments from the girls who were now trotting round.

  “God, aren’t they awful?” said Jenny. “They’re ruining the song. It’s one of Woody Guthrie’s, you know—very moving. They’ve sugared it horribly!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “Wasn’t the group originally The Thundersounds—one of those rhythm-and-blues groups that had a record at the top a couple of years ago? Social conscience, Jenny, it’s a good gimmick.”

  “It’s all wrong.”

  “You’re right, love. When pop stars started getting a social conscience, that was the beginning of the end for the social-conscience business.”

  She gave him a baffled look.

  “Are you being contentious, Jerry?” Miss Brunner leaned across the girl.

  “Oh, you know…” he said.

  “Would you mind if we left now, Jenny?” said Miss Brunner.

  “There’s only two more matches, Miss Brunner,” said Jenny. “Can’t we stay and see them?”

  “I’d rather we went home now.”

  “I was looking forward to the match between Doc Gorilla and Tony Valentine.”

  “I think we ought to go, Jenny.”

  Jenny sighed.

  “Come along,” said Miss Brunner, firmly but kindly.

  Jenny rose resignedly. They filed from the arena and walked out of the stadium. Jerry had left his car in the nearby lot. Miss Brunner and Jenny got in the back. Jerry started the car and reversed into the street. “Where now?”

  “Holland Park. Quite near you, I think.” Miss Brunner sat back. “If you go to Holland Park Avenue, I’ll direct you from there.”

  “Okay.”

  “If we’re leaving first thing in the morning, it would be a good idea if you spent the night at my place,” Miss Brunner said after a bit.

  “Or you at mine.”

  “Out of the question; I’m sorry.”

  “Why? Afraid of the gossip?”

  “I’ve got things to do. All you’ve got to do is pack a bag and come round. We’ve got a spare bedroom. You’d be quite safe. It bolts on the inside.”

  “That sounds comforting.”

  “You’re not joking, are you?” Jenny sounded a little surprised.

  “No, love.”

  They reached Notting Hill and drove along Holland Park Avenue. Miss Brunner told him to turn off to the left, and he did so. Another turning, and they were outside a smart, countrified house.

  “Here we are,” said Miss Brunner. “What do you think of my suggestion? If you popped round to your place and packed a bag, you could be back in a quarter of an hour and I’d have some coffee for you.”

  “You can produce better inducements than that. Okay.” Jerry was still riding with the tide.

  As he drove back to Holland Park Avenue and his own large house, he realised that Miss Brunner had been doing a lot of checking. He knew he hadn’t told her where he lived.

  He left the car standing in the street and went up to the steel gate in the high wall. He said very quietly, “This is a raid.” Responding to the sonic code, the door swung open and closed again as Jerry walked up the overgrown path to the house. Another murmured code opened the front door.

  Less than a quarter of an hour later, bearing a large suitcase, he left the house and got into his car, put the case on the seat beside him, and returned to Miss Brunner’s house.

  He rang the bell, and Jenny let him in. She looked as if she’d been taking some rough mental battering while he’d been away, but it might have been just the different light. She gave him a small nervous smile, and he patted her arm reassuringly. Obviously Miss Brunner wasn’t planning to take Jenny with her to Lapland, and when they got back he’d make a strong attempt to take Jenny away from Miss Brunner. Jenny didn’t realise it but her knight was already plotting her rescue. He hoped she wanted to be rescued. She’d better.

  * * *

  Miss Brunner sat pouring coffee from a Dunhill Filter finished in electric red. It went with the rest of the room, which was mainly red and grey but pretty featureless—just a long couch and a coffee table.

  “How do you like it, Mr Cornelius?”

  “I always like it how it comes.”

  “So you say.”

  “My helicopter is near Harwich. If we started really early we should be able to drive down without too much trouble.”

  “That suits me. What time—seven?”

  “Seven.” He took the cup of coffee, drank it down and handed back the cup. She poured him another expressionlessly and gave it to him. He leaned on the wall—slim, serene and elegant.

  * * *

  Miss Brunner looked him over. He had natural style, she thought. Maybe it had once been studied but it was natural now. Her mouth watered.

  “Where’s this safe bed?” he asked.

  “Upstairs, first one you come to at the top.”

  “Fine. Want me to give you a knock around six?”

  “I don’t think that’ll be needed. I’m not sure I’ll be sleeping.”

  “It must be chess and it can’t be bridge. I can see I’m not necessary.”

  She looked up at him. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

  * * *

  When Jerry entered the room, he closed the door behind him, locked it, and pulled the bolt. He still didn’t feel quite right. There was a shower in the room, and he used it, got into bed and went to sleep.

  He was awake at six, showered again, and dressed. He decided to go down and make himself some coffee if Miss Brunner and Jenny weren’t up yet.

  Downstairs he heard a noise in the living room and went in. Miss Brunner, dressed as she’d been the previous night, was lying on the couch with her arms flung back and her legs asprawl. Jerry grinned. The noise he had heard was her breathing, deep and ecstatic. At first he guessed that she was
drugged, but there wasn’t any evidence around. Then he saw a neatly folded deep pink dress, a red-edged leather jacket and a pair of black tights and pumps. Jenny’s clothes. Where was Jenny?

  He looked down at Miss Brunner’s face and felt funny.

  He felt even funnier when the eyes popped open and she stared up at him with a quick but dreamy smile.

  “What’s the time?”

  “Time for you to change while I make the coffee. What happened to Jenny?”

  “She won’t be coming with us—or maybe…” She swung herself into a sitting position, straightening her skirt. “It doesn’t matter. Okay, you make some coffee, then we’ll be off.”

  Jerry looked at Jenny’s clothes and frowned. Then he looked at Miss Brunner and frowned again.

  “Don’t worry, Mr Cornelius.”

  “I’ve got a feeling I ought to.”

  “Just a feeling? Ignore it.”

  “I’ve got a feeling I ought to do that too.” He went out of the room and found the kitchen. He filled the kettle, let it boil, put coffee into the filter, added the water and put the pot on the stove. He heard Miss Brunner go upstairs. He sat down on a stool, not so much puzzling over Jenny’s disappearance as trying not to. He sighed, feeling cold and rough.

  7

  “You know what Jung thought, don’t you?” Jerry tilted the copter up into the clear winter sky. “He reckoned history went in two-thousand-year cycles and that the current cycle started with Christ.”

  “Didn’t he work flying-saucer sightings into that theory too?”

  “I believe he did.”

  “It was all so fuzzy—all that stuff written ten or more years ago.”

  “There were a lot of hints.”

  “There are more now.”

  “And something to do with the zodiacal signs—that thing of Jung’s.”

  “Yes. According to him, we were entering a cycle of great physical and psychological upheavals.”

  “That isn’t hard to spot.”

  “Not with the Bomb already developed.”

  The helicopter was nearing the coast, with Holland as the first stop.

  “You think it could be as simple as that—the Bomb as the cause?” Miss Brunner looked down at the land and ahead at the sea.

  “It could be, after all,” he said. “Why does the Bomb have to be a symptom?”

  “I thought we had agreed it was.”

  “So we had. I’m afraid my memory isn’t as good as yours, Miss Brunner.”

  “I’m not so sure. For the last few weeks I’ve been having hundreds of déjà-vu experiences. What with your ideas on cyclic time—Major Nye…”

  “You’ve been reading my books?” He was annoyed.

  “No. Only about them. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of anything. Privately printed, were they?”

  “More or less.”

  “Why aren’t there any around?”

  “They disintegrated.”

  “Shoddy jobs, then.”

  “No. Built-in obsolescence.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “I’m not with you; that’s more to the point.” He was still brooding about Jenny. He felt a pretty useless knight now.

  “You’re talking like that because you don’t understand.”

  “You should have gone to bed last night; you’re getting pretty corny.”

  “Okay.” She shut up.

  He felt like crashing the copter into the sea, but he couldn’t do it. He was afraid of the sea. It was the idea of the Mother Sea that had put him off Celtic mythology as a boy. If only Brother Louis hadn’t brought up the same image, he might still be in the Order.

  So Miss Brunner was having déjà-vu hallucinations too. Well, it was that kind of old world, wasn’t it?

  He realised he was getting morbid, reached over, switched on his radio and put the bead in his ear. The music cheered him up.

  Thirty miles north of Amsterdam they landed in a field close to farm buildings. The farmer was not surprised. He came hurrying out with cans of fuel. Jerry and Miss Brunner got out to stretch their legs, and Jerry helped the farmer, whom he paid well, to fill the tanks.

  Five miles east of Uppsala they had to land and carry the fuel themselves from a barn to the copter. The snow, deep and crisp and even, got in their shoes, and Miss Brunner shivered.

  “You might have warned me, Mr Cornelius.”

  “I’d forgotten. I’ve never been this way in winter, you see.”

  “Elementary geography…”

  “Which, apparently, neither of us possesses.”

  They entered a blizzard after a hundred miles, and Jerry had difficulty controlling the copter. When it was over he said to Miss Brunner, “We can get ourselves killed at this rate. I’m going to put her down. We’ll have to find a car or something and continue the journey by land.”

  “That’s foolish. It will take three days at least.”

  “All right,” he said. “But another storm like that one and we walk if necessary.”

  There was not another bad storm, and the copter performed better than Jerry had expected it to. Miss Brunner read the map, and he followed her precise directions.

  Below, black scars winding through the snow showed the main roads. Great frozen rivers and snow-laden forest stretched in all directions. Ahead they could just see a range of old, old mountains. It was perpetual evening at this time of year, and the further north they went, the darker it became. The white lands seemed uninhabited, and Jerry could easily see how the legends of trolls, Jotunheim, and the tragic gods—the dark, cold, bleak legends of the North—had come out of Scandinavia. It made him feel strange, even anachronistic, as if he had gone back in time from his own age to the Ice Age.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to make out what lay beneath them, but Miss Brunner persevered, scanning the ground with night-glasses and continuing her directions. Although the copter was well heated, they were both shivering.

  “There are a couple of bottles of Scotch in the back,” said Jerry. “Better get one.”

  She found a bottle of Bell’s, unscrewed the cap and handed the bottle to him. He gulped some down and handed it to her. She did the same.

  “That’s cheered me up,” he said.

  “We’re getting close. Go down. There’s a Lapp village marked on this map and I think we just passed it. The station isn’t much farther.”

  The station seemed to be built of rust-red sheets of steel. Jerry wondered how they had got the materials there in the first place. Snow had been cleared round it, and a metal chimney blew black smoke into the air.

  In that odd twilight, Jerry landed the copter on the snow and switched off the engine. A door opened, and a man stood there holding a portable electric lamp. It wasn’t Frank.

  “Good afternoon,” Jerry called in Swedish. “Are you alone?”

  “Absolutely. You are English by your accent. Were you forced down?”

  “No. I understand that my brother was here.”

  “A man was here yesterday before I arrived. He went towards the mountains on a snowmobile, by the signs. Come in.”

  He led them into the cabin, closing the triple doors behind him. A stove blazed in the room they entered. Another room led off it.

  The little man had a slightly Asiatic cast of face, reminding Jerry, too, of an Apache Indian. He was probably a Lapp. He was dressed in a large, heavy coat that covered him from neck to ankles. It looked like tawny wolfskin. He put the lamp on a deal table and waved towards some straight-backed chairs.

  “Sit. I have some soup on the stove.” He went to the range and took a medium-sized iron saucepan off it. He put it on the table. “I am Marek—the local pastor to the Lapps, you know. I had a reindeer team, but the wolverines got one of them yesterday, and I couldn’t control the other and had to let it go. I expect a villager will discover it and come and look for me. Meanwhile I am warm here. There are provisions. Luckily, I am allowed a key to the place. I replace the
supplies from time to time, and they allow me to use it on such an occasion as this.”

  “My name is Cornelius,” said Jerry. “This is Miss Brunner.”

  “Not English names.”

  “No. But Marek isn’t a Swedish name,” Jerry smiled. Miss Brunner looked vexed, unable to understand the conversation.

  “You are right, it is not. You know Sweden?”

  “Only as far as Umea. I’ve never been this far north—not in winter at all.”

  “We must seem strange to someone who sees us only in the summer.” Marek reached into a locker over the stove and took out three bowls and a loaf of rye bread. “We are not a summer people—winter is our natural time, though we hate it!”

  “I’d never thought of that.” Jerry turned to Miss Brunner and told her the basic details of their conversation as Marek poured the soup.

  “Ask him where Frank might be going,” said Miss Brunner.

  “Is he a meteorologist?” Marek asked when Jerry put the question.

  “No, though I think he’s got some knowledge of it.”

  “He could be going to Kortafjallet—it’s one of the highest mountains near here. There’s another station on the summit.”

  “I can’t see him going there. Anywhere else?”

  “Well, unless he was going to try to get through the Kungsladen to Norway—it’s the pass that runs through these mountains—I can’t think. There are no villages in the direction he took.”

  Jerry told Miss Brunner what Marek had said.

  “Why should he want to go to Norway?” she said.

  “Why should he want to come here?”

  “It’s remote. He probably knew I was after him, though he thought you were dead. Maybe someone told him otherwise.”

  “Frank wouldn’t come to somewhere as cold as this unless he had a real reason.”

  “Was he working on anything that would involve his being here?”

  “I don’t think so.” Jerry turned to the pastor again. “How long would you say this man had been here?”

  “A week or longer, judging by the low state of the supplies.”

  “I suppose he left nothing behind him?”

  “There was some paper. I used some of it to light the stove, but the rest should be in this bin.” The priest reached under the table. “Aren’t you going to eat your soup?”