Free Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard

the message to Cardale and gauge his reaction to it. As it was, however, he saw Cardale much sooner than that.
    He had locked up and was en route to Piccadilly, with the half-formed intention of kicking off his evening with a cocktail at the Ritz, when he saw Cardale bearing down on him along St James’s Street, clutching a newspaper in his hand.
    ‘There you are, Swan.’ He was breathless and clearly agitated about something. He looked, indeed, like a man who had just received a great shock. ‘I … I was on my way to see you.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I thought you said you weren’t coming back this afternoon.’
    ‘I wasn’t intending to. But—’ He broke off and grasped Swan’s elbow. ‘You obviously haven’t heard.’ He flapped the newspaper. It was that day’s
Evening Standard
, folded open at an inside page. ‘Awful. Perfectly bloody awful.’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘This, man. Here.’ Cardale stabbed at a side-column headline. ‘See?’ And Swan saw.
    Belgian liner
Uitlander
torpedoed in mid-Atlantic
– no survivors

1976

NINE
    Eldritch’s idea of telling me everything I needed to know hadn’t amounted to a lot by the time we reached London the following Monday. His spell as Isaac Meridor’s secretary had ended with Meridor’s flight from Antwerp in the face of the Nazi menace in May 1940. Eldritch had been diverted to London with the most precious part of Meridor’s art collection, his Picassos, to be lodged with the dealer Geoffrey Cardale for safekeeping. As a precaution against the U-boat threat to transatlantic shipping this had proved all too prescient. The liner carrying Meridor had gone down, with the loss of everyone aboard. That had left Eldritch thanking his lucky stars and working as Cardale’s assistant while he decided what to do next.
    I had little doubt there was much more he could have told me about the circumstances surrounding these events, but he was a hard man to extract information from. He gave only what he wanted to give. Already, on the train ride up from Paignton, I’d begun to question the wisdom of accepting his offer. My mother, originally inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, had reacted with dismay to my announcement that I was accompanying him to London. ‘If he insists on stirring up the past, you should let him get on with it, Stephen. I don’t want you getting into any trouble on his account. There’s your career to consider. And London’s a dangerous place these days. Only last week the IRA tried to bomb another Tube train. They killed the poor driver, you know.’
    I did know. The IRA had been targeting London more and more of late. But nursemaiding Eldritch in return for a cut of the reward he stood to gain if he could prove the Brownlow Picassos had been stolen from the Meridor estate had sounded to me worth the remote risk of being blown up: at worst a waste of time, at best an exciting and lucrative proposition. More attractively still, it delayed my return to that career of mine Mum was so worried about but from which I badly needed an extended break. What can I say? I was young then, too young to let wisdom in on the act. Eldritch was leading me on. I knew that. But sooner or later he’d have to tell me the truth.
    The first surprise he had for me was undeniably pleasant: the destination he named when we climbed into a taxi at Paddington station. He announced it with the relish of someone who’d waited a long time to be able to roll the sound around his tongue. ‘The Ritz.’
    ‘Are you out of your mind?’ I demanded of him as the cab started away. ‘Twisk’s never going to pay us to stay somewhere as swanky as that.’
    ‘Oh, but he is. In fact, I’m assuming he already has. I made it a condition of agreeing to do what his client was asking. Insist on the best when someone else is paying. It’s always been a motto of mine.’ He smiled. ‘Besides, it’s handy for the Royal Academy.’
    Eldritch entered the Ritz with the air of one