Mr Salton.’
I watched him until he was out of sight and thought what a right bastard I was, then I went into the changing room, showered, dressed and headed for the kitchen.
It was exactly what you’d expect to find in a house like that: a lot of stainless steel, eye-level ovens, islanded preparation counters, all gleaming and clean as a whistle. Jill Salton had changed, too. She was wearing a short frock, a simple little number you can buy anywhere for $1,000. As I arrived she said, ‘How do you like your martinis?’
I’m not a martini mystic. I shrugged and said, ‘As they come.’
‘You must get a lot of different martinis that way,’ she observed, and poured a healthy slug from a gin bottle into a shaker.
‘I like variety.’
She mixed the drinks and poured them, strained through cracked ice into chilled glasses taken from the refrigerator. ‘How often do you see my uncle?’
I smiled. ‘As little as possible. We don’t exactly rub shoulders.’
She handed me a glass. ‘He thinks a lot of you. He said so this afternoon.’
I sipped the martini. It was very good. ‘Face to face?’
‘Via satellite. He sang your praises a lot. He says you’re the best man in the business.’
‘I’ll have to remember that when I negotiate my next contract.’
She lifted her glass and her cool, green eyes appraised me over the rim. ‘What business would that be?’
‘What else but insurance? I’m a money man at heart.’
She smiled. ‘I doubt that. Are you married?’
‘Not at present.’
‘You sound as though you’ve been burned. You were married?’
I hooked over a chair with my foot and sat down. ‘Twice. My first wife died and my second divorced me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about the first, and surprised at the second.’
‘Surprised?’
‘I can’t see how a woman in her right mind would let you get away.’
I thought she was joking but she seemed serious enough. Abruptly she put down her glass and walked across the kitchen to open the lid of a big deep freezer. I played it lightly and said to her back, ‘There was nothing to it. I didn’t wriggle off the hook – she threw me back.’
‘Why? Were you tomcatting?’
You ask some damn personal questions, Jill Salton, I thought, then reconsidered. Come to that, so did I. Perhaps this was her way of giving me a taste of my own medicine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She didn’t like bigamy. I was married to the insurance industry.’
She took some packets to a counter and switched on an oven, then began to prepare the food. From what I could see, millionaires didn’t eat any better than the rest of us – just the same old frozen garbage. ‘Some women are fools,’ she said. ‘When I married David I knew what I was getting into. I knew he had his work and it would take up a lot of his time. But there’s a certain type of woman who doesn’t understand how important a man’s work can be to him.’ She paused with a knife upheld. ‘I suppose it means as much as having a baby does to a woman.’
‘You’re not the liberated feminist type, then. When were you married?’
‘Four years ago.’ She got busy with the knife. ‘Believe it or not, I was still a virgin at twenty-four.’
She was right – I did find it hard to believe. I wondered why the hell she was telling me all this. My acquaintanceship with beautiful young heiresses was admittedly limited, but I’d come across a handful in the way of business and none had felt impelled to tell me the more intimate details of her life. Still, statistically, anything can happen given a long enough period of time, and maybe she’d get around to telling me about the quarrel with her husband.
She said, ‘David was exactly twice as old as I was, give or take a couple of weeks. My family said it would never work.’
‘Did it?’
She turned her head and looked at me. ‘Oh yes, it worked. It worked marvellously. We were very happy.’ She looked down at the counter again and wielded the knife. ‘How was your first marriage?’
I looked back along the years. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Very good.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘Nothing much to tell. We married young. I was a second lieutenant and she was an army wife.’
‘So you were a soldier.’
‘Until ten years ago, when I started working with Western and Continental. I’m still in the reserves.’
‘What rank?’
‘Colonel.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You must have been good.’
I laughed. ‘Good, but not good enough, tactically speaking.’ I found myself telling her about it.
I had worked my way upwards from my green commission with a rapidity that pleased me until I found myself a half-colonel commanding a battalion in Germany. I did not get on very well with my superior officer, Brigadier Marston, and the bone of contention was that we disagreed on the role of the army. He was one of the old school, forever refighting World War II, and thought in terms of massed tank operations, parachute drops of entire divisions and all the rest of the junk that had been made obsolete by the pax atomica. For my part, I could see nothing in the future but an unending series of counter-insurgency operations such as in Malaya, Cyprus and Aden, and I argued – maybe a bit too forcibly – that the army lacked training for this particular tricky job.
When Marston wrote my annual report it turned out to be a beauty. There was nothing in it that was actionable; in fact, to the untrained eye the damned thing was laudatory. But to a hard-eyed general in the War House, skilled in the jargon of the old boys’ network, the report said that Lt-Col William Kemp was not the soldier to put your money on. So I was promoted to colonel and I cursed Marston with all my heart. A colonel in the army is a fifth wheel, a dogsbody shunted off into an administrative post. My own sideline was intelligence, something at which I was particularly skilled, but my heart wasn’t in it. After a couple of years I negotiated very good freelance terms with Western and Continental, who paid willingly for my expertise. I would still be pushing pieces of paper around various desks but I’d be getting £15,000 a year for doing it. Marston, meanwhile, was in Northern Ireland, up to his armpits in IRA terrorists and wondering what the hell to do with his useless tanks.
I finished my story and looked up at Jill, who was staring hard at me. My army experience had exposed me to some brutal interrogation techniques, but Jill Salton could give my instructors points. ‘So that was it,’ I said. ‘I quit.’
‘But your wife had died earlier.’
‘I
