Chapters (31)
He was playing with me in exactly the same way that he had with Marc Bellamy. Of course I sold fewer copies than Dan Brown. And why should he have bothered to read anything I had written? At that moment I saw him as a schoolboy at Westland College with Marc Bellamy and knew without any doubt that he would have been absolutely horrible.
‘I’m sure you can still get a ticket to my event,’ I said.
‘Oh yes. I’ve asked and there are still plenty available.’
We had been walking down the high street while we talked and stopped as we reached his car. It was, of course, the Mercedes with the personalised number plate that I had seen earlier. But as le Mesurier pressed the key fob to open the doors, I noticed something had been lodged under the windscreen wipers. It was a playing card. He saw it too and pulled it free. He showed it to me.
‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘Must be my lucky day.’
The card was the ace of spades.
He got into the car, taking the playing card with him. The door closed with a soft clunk and about a dozen lights came on in unexpected places, filling the interior with a soft glow. I watched as he started the engine and drove away, and all the time I was thinking that the ace of spades wasn’t necessarily something I would have associated with good luck. Quite the contrary: the card had been printed with a skull and crossbones inside the spade. I had seen it clearly.
I like decks of playing cards. I have a lot of them. And I remembered that the double-sized black pip at the centre of the ace is often thought to resemble, even to have been inspired by, the spade used by an undertaker. The Americans deployed it as a weapon in the Vietnam War, dropping it on the bodies of the soldiers they killed in order to frighten the survivors. In Iraq, the ace of spades was the card that identified and targeted Saddam Hussein.
Charles le Mesurier thought it was lucky. I knew better.
It was the death card.