‘I’m waiting for you to tell me,’ Harry yelled back, swerving around the flashy blue motor with Lally’s gleaming dark head in the front seat. ‘Any ideas? Let’s get away from the field so blasted Hastings doesn’t just tag along behind us all night.’
‘It sounds quite simple,’ Theo said. ‘Where’s the River Irwell?’
‘Well, that’s rather the question,’ snapped Harry.
‘Oh, I do hope it’s not going to be one of those nights,’ Flick moaned. ‘I remember now why I’d got so tired of treasure hunts. Selina, remember that time we were with Clarence and Lally and we ran out of petrol somewhere near Maidenhead? It was gruesome. I’d always thought that Maidenhead sounded marvellously romantic, but it absolutely wasn’t. The man at that hotel we stopped at was utterly beastly.’
‘We did wake him up at four o’clock in the morning,’ Selina remarked absently, her mind spinning back to the schoolroom, and a particular geography-obsessed governess. ‘I have a feeling the River Irwell is up north somewhere, you know: Nottingham or Leeds or somewhere like that.’
Flick wailed. Theo looked aghast. Harry, speeding along the Strand, suddenly hauled on the steering wheel and swung round in a U-turn, so for a moment it felt like being on a fairground carousel. A couple coming out of Savoy Passage stepped back in alarm, the man raising his fist in fury as the motorcar mounted the kerb and bounced off again. Flick’s wail turned into a scream.
‘Manchester!’ Harry yelled triumphantly as they hurtled back down the Strand.
‘But that’ll take hours …’
‘And be deathly … Isn’t it all factories and dirt?’
It wouldn’t be the first time that they had made an impromptu night-time trip out of London, but after the last one, when Selina had decided it would be fun to get the sleeper train to Scotland and have breakfast in Fort William, their reluctance was understandable. The idea had been romantic, but the reality of the long journey, made in evening dress, had been chilly, uncomfortable and expensive. Harry laughed.
‘Manchester Square, you dullards. The kilted rebel is William Wallace – the Wallace Collection is in Hertford House. Five minutes away and not a cotton mill in sight.’
With relieved laughter they passed around the wine bottle again. It was exhilarating, hurtling through the early summer dark. On nights like this the venerable old city belonged to them – the Bright Young People, as the newspapers called them – its streets and squares were their playground, its stately public monuments their toys. Tomorrow the more populist newspapers would carry excited reports of the evening’s events, fed to them by treacherous insiders (Theo came up with a new list of prime suspects after every event) while snide summaries would appear in the broadsheets, and consequently a thick fog of chilly disappointment would hang over the Lennox luncheon table in Chester Square, muffling conversation.
But tomorrow was a whole lifetime away. Tonight stretched ahead, glittering with fun and possibility, ringing with the whoops and shrieks of their fellow hunters as they converged on Manchester Square. Harry had worked out where the clue would be hidden (‘Well-earned –pound to a penny there’s a decorative stone urn somewhere’) but as it turned out so many other teams were there that it was simply a matter of joining the jostle around the gatepost to read the words chalked on the stone pilaster on which the urn in question stood. It was always like this at the start of the hunt, especially when the clue was so straightforward; later the cars would spread out as the trail got harder and intelligence and tactics began to tell. Theo leapt out to join the crush, gaining a crucial few seconds’ advantage by hearing someone else shout it out. He raced back to repeat it.
‘The principal of judgement.’
‘What?’
‘That’s it. The principal of judgement – nothing else. Everyone seems to be a bit stumped.’ He took a swig from the bottle and wiped his chin on his sleeve. ‘It must be something to do with the law, so what do you say – shall we head to the Old Bailey? Lincolns Inn?’
‘Anywhere!’ Selina cried, flinging her arms out. ‘We need to lose the others. For God’s sake Harry, just drive!’
* * *
The night’s edges blurred. Points of light – streetlamps and the bright squares of windows – became a continuous golden stream as the car hurtled through the streets. High above a half moon floated indolently on her back and the stars circled and spun. They lost Flick at the Criterion (‘principle of judgement, not principal,’ Harry had grumbled, bafflingly) where they’d stopped for special Treasure Hunter cocktails that had appeared on the menu (gin, framboise and grenadine – marbled pink like the sunrise that was only a couple of hours away – with the next clue wrapped around a cocktail stick) and she’d been bundled into Aubrey Hastings’s car amid much squealing and laughter. Selina had glimpsed her again as they raced away from collecting the next clue, but Harry’s blood was well and truly up by then and he refused to slow down, so all they could do was stand up in their seats and blow extravagant kisses as they flew past each other.
After that the field thinned, so it was impossible to know where they were in the race. Every now and again distant whoops and horn blasts reached them on the warm night air as other teams encountered each other. Screeching out of Baker Street (straight after finding a clue in the windowbox of number 221: We don’t want to lose our marbles) Theo let out a blood-curdling view halloo as he spotted a police car and Harry, with the best part of a bottle of champagne and the Criterion’s extremely potent cocktail sloshing through his system, roared down Euston Road as if it were the track at Brooklands.
On the surface the rivalry between their set and the city’s police force was good natured enough, though spiked with mutual distrust. Police officers tolerated a certain amount of high spirited fun from young people, many of whose fathers were responsible for making the laws they were charged with enforcing, but they had an unpleasant habit of mentioning to newspapermen whenever one of the Bright Young People ended up spending the night in the cells. It was best to elude them wherever possible.
Selina turned round and kneeled on the seat to watch them give chase. Having put some distance between them, Harry swung right and plunged into the shuttered, sleeping streets of Bloomsbury.
‘Are we shaking off our constable friends, or heading to the next clue?’ Theo asked, gripping the sides of his seat.
‘Both,’ Harry grinned. ‘It’s the Elgin marbles, isn’t it? The great big ugly things Sandy Bruce’s ancestor swiped from the Greeks and sold to the British Museum. Too bally easy if you ask me.’
It was darker here; too dark to see whatever it was they hit. Afterwards, when the moment replayed itself in Selina’s mind, she would fancy that she glimpsed a streak of dark fur, a flash of white, the fleeting gleam of eyes, but at the time the thud and jolt came from nowhere and were all the more shocking for it. The car swerved crazily, the wheels losing traction on the cobbled road, bumping and skidding sideways until it hit the kerb. The engine cut out suddenly.
For a second the world seemed absolutely silent, and then, slowly, the sound returned: a gentle hiss from somewhere beneath the bonnet, the frenzied yapping of a little dog in a nearby house, the distant hum of a speeding engine, getting closer. Perhaps it was this that galvanized Harry. He swore and looked around.