The Yellow Glass by Claire Ingrams Read Free Book Online

a complete lunatic to have involved
her in the first place.   It wasn’t as if
she didn’t have form.   She’d reverted to
type and done a bunk.
    “Rosa Stone, a spy!”   Her journalist friend commented.   “You must have been off your head, man.”
    And now I’d also involved some new species of bohemian
from the North of England.
    Initially, we thought she was visiting the
Ladies.   Well, I did; we didn’t discuss
it, obviously.   We ordered our pints and
carried them back to a table.   I’d bought
Rosa a small shandy.   Time passed while
we debated the Marshall Plan [9] and, if I thought about my niece at all, it was to assume that she was doing
something with her queer mop of brown hair, or powdering her nose.
    “They got us right where they wanted us,” Magnus was
becoming increasingly het up.   “They gave
us money, right enough, but it was all used to buy goods from the U.S. of
A.   And we’re supposed to be grateful to
them, man!   We paid for the war in Korea [10] ,
that’s what people don’t get!   And it’ll
go on and on, so that the world becomes more polarised; it’ll all be Us and
Them for evermore and us’ll stand for U.S. more than owt else.”
    He was not without brains, that much was obvious, but
what was the alternative?   I’d bought a
pack of Player’s and offered him one.
    “What about the death of Stalin [11] ,
Magnus?   Bring a tear to the eye, did
it?”
    “Hey!”   He
raised his palms in an interesting gesture of fake supplication, “You’re at it,
too; if I’m not bowing at the feet of Uncle Sam, then I must be in the pay of
Uncle Joe, that’s how you lot think, isn’t it?”
    Yes, I was rather enjoying the conversation, and the
ale, after what had been an unnecessarily wearing day.   Until I realised that my niece had gone and
done a bunk.
    Of course it crossed my mind that they might have
abducted her.   But that was
unlikely.   It was possible - all things are possible in my trade - but, as I say, not
likely.   The man Magnus (who, like most
of his tribe, was a crass romantic at heart), came up with a crackpot theory,
whereby a Dickensian network of street urchins had been bribed to keep a lookout
and report our whereabouts to a criminal mastermind; Rosa having fallen into
their net upon the threshold of the Quiet Dog public house.   It was an amusing idea (for the Artful Dodger
substitute a spotty teen-ager who bought his clothes from Woolworths), but that
was all it was.   Besides . . I knew my
niece.
    We made a desultory effort to look for her in the
local streets, but she’d have been miles away by then.   Magnus seemed prepared to spend the entire
night searching for her, if need be, and was distinctly unhappy when we turned
back to the Quiet Dog.   He wanted to
carry on charging about in the most ineffectual manner (as amateurs usually do),
but it made far more sense to wait
for my wife to arrive with the car and then conduct a comprehensive sweep of
the area.   Of course, the journalist was
pretty far gone on her - that much was plain to see (and, in retrospect, I
suppose that must have been the reason I’d let him in on the game).   
    Anyway, eventually I managed to drag him back to the
pub and we waited a bit.
    “Why don’t you go home and put your paper to bed,
Magnus?”   I tried to get rid of him.   “If you give me your telephone number, I’ll
let you know how she is in the next few days.”
    “How could you do this?”   The ants were still in his
pants.   “Put her in danger like this,
man?   You’re supposed to be her bloody
uncle!”
    He had a point, although he didn’t need to know it.   I was a lot more rattled than I was letting
on.   We were in a hole, one way or
another.   In fact, we were in an entire
rabbit warren’s worth of holes, several of which had been dug by my missing
niece: dropping Arko’s glass, taking us straight to the haunt of Arko’s young
mole.   But being rattled doesn’t do in