10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [74]
So was his, to me.
Education and Social Security were looking puzzled.
“Do you two know each other?” one of them asked.
“We’ve met,” Wyvern said shortly.
His own appearance, too, had changed. At Hoopwestern he had made a point of looking inconspicuous, of being easily forgettable. Four years later he wasn’t finding it so simple to fade into the wallpaper.
I had thought him then to be less than forty, but I now saw that to have been probably an underestimate.
His skin had begun to show a few wrinkles and his hair to recede, and he was now wearing glasses with narrow dark frames. There was still about him, though, the strong secretive aura of introverted clout.
At the Downing Street Christmas party there was no overt sign of the sleeping anger that had blazed across Orinda’s face and nearly killed her. He was not this time saying to me aloud in fury, “One day I’ll get you,” but I could see the intent rise again in his narrowed eyes as if no interval for second thoughts had existed.
The extraordinary response I felt was not fear but excitement. The adrenaline rush in my blood was to fight, not flight. And whether or not he saw my reaction to him as vividly as I felt it, he pulled down the shutters on the malice visible behind the dark framed lenses and excused himself with the briefest of courtesies to Education and Social Security: when he moved slowly away it was as if every step were consciously controlled.
“Well!” exclaimed Jill Vinicheck. “I know he’s never talkative, but I’m afraid he was ... impolite.”
Not impolite, I thought.
Murderous.
After the reception Polly, my father and I all ate in one of the few good restaurants in London that had taken the din out of dinner. One could mostly hear oneself speak.
My father had enjoyed a buddy-buddy session with the prime minister and Polly said she thought the circular eyes of the home secretary were not after all an indication of mania.
Didn’t the home secretary, I asked, keep prisoners in and chuck illegal immigrants out?
More or less, my father agreed.
I said, “Did you know there was a list on a sort of easel there detailing all the jobs in government?”
My father, ministerially busy with broccoli that he didn’t actually like, nodded, but Polly said she hadn’t seen it.
“There are weird jobs,” I said, “like minister for former countries and undersecretary for buses.” Polly looked mystified but my father nodded. “Every prime minister invents titles to describe what he wants done.”
“So,” I said, “theoretically you could have a minister in charge of banning yellow plastic ducks.”
“You do talk nonsense, Benedict dear,” Polly said.
“What he means,” my father said, “is that the quickest way to make people want something is to ban it. People always fight to get what they are told they cannot have.”
“All the same,” I said mildly, “I think the prime minister should introduce a law banning Alderney Wyvem from drinking champagne at No. 10 Downing Street.”
Polly and my father sat with their mouths open.
“He was there,” I said. “Didn’t you see him?”
They shook their heads.
“He kept over to the far side of the room, out of your way. He looks a bit different. He’s older, balder. He wears spectacles. But he is revered by the minister of education, the secretary of state for social security and the secretary of state for defense, to name those I am sure of. Orinda and Dennis Nagle were kindergarten stuff. Alderney Wyvern now has his hands on levers he can pull to affect whole sections of the nation.”
“I don’t believe it,” my father said.
“The dear ladies of education and social security told me they had a friend who would do wonders for my ... er ... mother’s wardrobe. He had already, they said, turned Hudson Hurst from a quasi-mobster into a polished gent. What do you think they give Alderney in return?