Long Time Coming Read Online Free PDF Page A

later, telling Mum he wouldn’t be back for dinner. He didn’t say where he was going, but it seemed obvious. He wasn’t exactly the centre of a wide social circle. I didn’t see the going of him myself. But I planned to be on hand when he returned. And to find out, if I could, whether he had taken on the ‘lucrative assignment’ Twisk was offering him. As it turned out, I got my chance to do that long before he returned.
    Mum was engrossed in some TV cop show when the phone rang late that evening. She signalled for me to answer it. To my surprise, the caller was Eldritch.
    ‘I’m at the Redcliffe Hotel, Stephen,’ he announced.
    ‘I thought you might be.’
    ‘Do you think you could join me here? There’s something I’d like to put to you. Man to man.’
    ‘What about Twisk?’
    ‘He’s toddled off to bed. But I’ve … reached an agreement with him. That’s what I want to discuss with you. Meet me in the bar, there’s a good fellow.’ His unusually avuncular tone suggested he’d already spent some time in the bar. ‘I’ll buy you a drink. Well, Twisk will. Or, rather, his client. We really should talk, Stephen. Do say you’ll come.’
    *
    I’d spent one university vacation working at the Redcliffe. It maintained the palm-court tradition in the teeth of changing fashion, though it looked more like a maharajah’s seaside retreat thanks to its Indian-style architecture. That was a legacy of its original owner, Colonel Robert Smith, who’d retired there after making pots of money building roads, bridges, houses and palaces all over the subcontinent. Torbay’s mild climate had always attracted well-heeled Britons returning home after long years abroad. In that sense, Eldritch fitted in perfectly, bar the well-heeled part, of course.
    Dancing was in progress in the ballroom, the band doing its brassy best to fill the floor. Eldritch was at a central table in the adjoining bar, in the lee of a pillar, sipping whisky and apparently lost in thought. He was wearing his brown pinstripe suit and smoking one of his Sobranies with an air of half-remembered decadence. All in all, the hotel could have done worse than hire him to enhance the mood of a bygone age.
    He looked up as I approached and nodded to the barman, which sufficed to get me whatever I wanted to drink. I settled for a beer and joined him at his table.
    ‘Cheers,’ I said, with less than wholehearted enthusiasm.
    ‘Your good health, Stephen.’ He took another sip of whisky. ‘I haven’t tasted Scotch in thirty-six years, you know. Thanks to Twisk’s client, I’ve been able to break my drought with a particularly fine malt.’
    ‘Who is his client?’ I asked in a casual tone.
    ‘He won’t say. But evidently no skinflint. Twisk didn’t stint himself when it came to ordering wine with our dinner. I haven’t tasted Chambertin in thirty-six years either.’
    ‘I take it from all this generosity on his part you’ve agreed to do what his client wants.’
    ‘Yes.’ Eldritch winced. ‘Which I’ll no doubt come to regret.’
    ‘Why do it, then?’
    ‘No choice. I can’t stay on at Zanzibar. And, as I’m sure you’ve already come to suspect, I haven’t the means to move anywhere … tolerable. So, I need money. Enough to take me somewhere …where I can die in comfort. The Riviera, perhaps. Cannes. Nice. Somewhere like that.’
    ‘Sounds good.’
    ‘Indeed.’
    ‘Are you planning to tell me what you have to do to fund your Mediterranean dotage?’
    ‘Yes. I am. That’s why I asked you here. But let’s go somewhere quieter.’ He glanced towards the ballroom. ‘I can’t compete with a saxophone.’
    The first-floor lounge, Colonel Smith’s old ornately ceilinged drawing-room, was where guests often retired for coffee after dinner. They’d all been and gone by the time we walked in, though coffeepots, drained cups and chocolate-crumbed plates remained on several tables. We sat by one of the windows that looked out into the