Llewelyn went on smiling. “And there are so many charges that could be laid, against you, against him—especially against him; murder and conspiracy are just the start. If you think you’re protecting him you’re not,” he said, pressing a fist into his breastbone, “you’re making it worse, worse for yourself and worse for him. So stop protecting him. There’s no need. We know everything about the two of you.” His crafty grin altered to a sudden moment’s puzzlement, his brows arching, and he gave a thin laugh of disbelief, saying, “Oh, Mrs Valentine.”
Then, deadweight, the Brigadier hit the floor, his forehead knocking the edge of the coffee table, bright red dappling the pinkish Turkish rug when his cheek kissed the floor.
Startled, the dog popped up from beneath the pillows and barked, while Mae stared at a man who orchestrated lies for a living. Half on his side, a thin trickle of blood seeped from his dark head, his eyes open and unfocused. Had he fainted, was he stunned, or was he dead? The man coordinated swindles, traded and risked the lives of others, played games, played dead. She didn’t trust him. She watched him, watched his chest rise and fall, watched him gasp and gurgle. If wasn’t playing, he was dying, and if he died… Llewelyn’s eyelids fluttered and closed.
Mae went on staring and Llewelyn became a woman crushed between the Bentley and the front of a tipper and there came the sound of her laboured final breaths, the rattling sound like teeth in a Hoover. Helpless. She and the woman smashed between two vehicles had both been helpless. The woman could not be helped, Mae could not help her, things followed a natural consequence. She’d been powerless to stop the outcome, but now… The thought drifted in seductively. Her mind turned over the unfathomable, pondering the value of letting nature take its course again, of removing what stood in the way for her and Kitt and threatened their life together.
“Jaysus,” she whispered. “Oh Jaysus.” Mae dropped to her knees beside Llewelyn. “Brigadier, can you hear me?” she said loudly, placing the teacup on the coffee table to shake his shoulder hard. “Brigadier—Roger, can you hear me?” She felt his skull, fingertips passing through blood from the slice where his forehead had smacked the coffee table. She rolled him onto his back, tilted his head, put an ear to his mouth, and listened, looking down along his chest for any rise or fall.
He’d stopped breathing.
She swept a finger into his mouth and found it clear of obstructions. She placed her fingers on his neck, into a trickle of blood that had come from his head.
He had no pulse.
The suite’s phone sat beside the crystal clock on the side table at the other end of the sofa. She lunged for the cordless receiver, poked a finger on the speaker, and dialled the front desk, dropping the handset beside Llewelyn. She jerked open his heavy dressing gown, his cotton pyjama top, and started chest compressions before the clerk at reception answered with, “Good evening, Professor Boothroyd, this is Kerim, how may I be of assistance?”
“Kerim, the Professor has collapsed, he isn’t breathing, his heart has stopped, and he and needs medical attention, urgently.” Mae said loudly, and rather soullessly, she thought.
Kerim’s voice cracked as he said something about sending up a doctor, ringing an ambulance, a staff member trained with a portable defibrillator would be on the way.
Thirty compressions, two breaths, thirty compressions, two breaths. When was the last time she updated her first-aid certificate? Was it still thirty compressions, two breaths, repeat until…until… until…? Mae kept going, counting, performing CPR, counting, breathing, sweating, swearing at the man who smelled of vomit and holiday spice. “Roger, come on! Ya conniving bastard, come on!”
She looked at the clock. Three minutes passed, four minutes, Llewelyn didn’t stir, hadn’t begun to breathe on his own, and she kept going, counting to thirty, trying to keep a steady rhythm, forcing back the devil’s voice inside her head that wanted to convince her not to keep going.
Where the hell was the hotel staff member with the defibrillator the clerk? Where was the bloody paramedic and EMT? “Wake up, ya big warped plonker!”
The doorbell chimed. Felix let out an arf! Mae shouted “Come in!” Sweat ran between her breasts.
The door swung open. The dining trolley loaded with the items she’d ordered for baking Chelsea buns bumped against the door. The same pale brown-eyed man who had delivered the rijsttafel earlier moved into the suite and stopped dead, trolley blocking the door open, his mouth agape.
“Do you have the defibrillator?” she asked.
The waiter went on staring with his gob hanging open.
“Help! Ambulance, doctor!” she shouted, assuming the words were similar in Dutch. The man stood there and blinked. “Hey!” she bellowed and Felix popped up from his pillow burrow, leapt off the sofa and sped about barking, barking, barking.
Then Kitt appeared, his jaw set, blue-grey gaze blistering with menace, Weed a step behind. They pushed the waiter out of the way and Kitt swore.
“Ja. Er is niks aan de hand, Kitt—there is nothing unusual going on,” Weed said as Kitt shoved past him, gently nudging the dog away.
Mae glared at the dreadlocked man and kept going, her neck slick with perspiration, loose hair plastered to her cheek, counting to thirty, trying to keep a steady rhythm that matched, as a first-aid instructor had suggested, a Bee Gees disco hit with a ludicrously apropos title. “Don’t stand there gawking like the waiter, Mr Weed, find out where the ambulance is, thank you!”
“Tot Uw dienst—At your service,” Weed made a slight bow and tuned about, the waiter following.
She bent over, realigned Llewelyn’s head, and blew two breaths into his mouth as, coolly, the dog pawing at him, Kitt knelt beside her, felt his superior’s carotid for a pulse. His eyes locked with Mae’s, her expression one of grim determination. He shook his head, she gritted her teeth, breathing hard, air hissing in and out, and went on trying to revive the man. “Move, my love,” he said softly.
“No. I can’t stop. If I stop, he’ll die, and he can’t die. I have to help him. I couldn’t help Eaton or Charteris. I have to help him. I have to.”
“Mae, you’re tired. Let me help him.” Kitt pulled her hands away and took over chest compressions. “How long?”
Mae sat back on the floor, panting, one leg splayed out, pushing wet tendrils of blonde hair from her forehead. “I don’t know,” she said breathlessly, and looked at the crystal clock on the side table. Six minutes had elapsed since she’d rung the front desk. “Six minutes. It’s been six minutes. Jaysus.”
“You did well to keep it up for that long. What happened?”
Felix trotted to her, sniffing, nosing her ear. “We were talking…and he…” she swallowed, took a deep breath, and exhaled hard, “…he collapsed, hit his head on the way down, but it’s just a cut, and not very deep. I rang for assistance, which you see hasn’t arrived. Why hasn’t it arrived?”
“Take my phone, it’s in my pocket. Ring Bryce,” he said, performing an action he’d carried out more times than he cared to recall, pressing down and up with mechanical, ruthless force. “Tell him to get over here. Say, ‘Flag is down’. Have you got that? Flag is down. He’ll hang up straightaway. Then take Felix into your room. Weed will be back with paramedics and the dog will get in their way.”
“Oh, God, Kitt.”
“I’ve got this.”
Mae put her arms around the dog, still catching her breath. “Don’t stop,” she said, rising, holding the dog. “Keep going. Don’t stop.”
“Why would I stop?”
She looked at him, rattled, almost shamefaced, and her gaze swept to Llewelyn’s dark, ashen face, she bit her lips together and looked away, shuddering. “I…I… didn’t th…” Head shaking, her eyes cut back to his. “Don’t stop. Just, don’t stop.” Mae hurried off to her room, carrying Felix.
Kitt watched her shut the dog away and shifted his position, lifting Llewelyn’s head. “Goddamn it, Roger,” he said, and covered the man’s mouth with
his, filling lungs that refused to do their job, pumping an equally unobliging heart. The thought struck him when he moved to give another kiss of life, and he almost hesitated. He glanced at his watch. Eight minutes. He’d once kept a man’s heart going for forty minutes. He’d despised the man, a racist, misogynist, known double agent, yet, as their position was shelled and strafed, in those long, terrifying, gruelling moments before a medic and evac team arrived, he never hesitated, he never almost hesitated or even thought of his own welfare. He didn’t consider his own welfare now, but his mind was not set on Llewelyn’s either. He was not, as Mae may have believed, cold-blooded, but Christ, it would have been easy, it would have made life simpler, and she knew. ‘Don’t stop,’ she’d said. She knew, Mae knew he’d consider, however fleetingly, the option, the out that would free them both.
Except there was no out, there was no free. Everything, everything, had changed. “God damn you, Roger,” he muttered and continued pumping an unobliging heart.
Mae came out of her room, hurrying back to Kitt. He carried out CPR with mechanical efficiency, expressionless, detached from the process. She realised she was detached too, from what was occurring before her. It was as if watching a performance on stage, from the front row where one was part of the audience, yet nearly part of the production.
Noise travelled up the hallway and into the suite. She watched Weed enter the stage, giving orders in Dutch, the thumping of footfalls behind him dulled by carpeting, and the clatter of a gurney smacking into the cloth-covered trolley that held the door open. The hotel manager rushed into the scene ahead of a lean, short man in spandex bike shorts and cleated shoes, a doctor’s bag in hand. Two paramedics, both women, one blonde, one redhead, rolled in the gurney and dropped their gear beside Llewelyn, opposite Kitt. For a moment, all the players stopped moving and the action became a tableau by a modern Dutch master. Then, in slow motion, medical professionals took over, and Kitt rolled back and sat on his haunches, still maddeningly detached.
How had he not broken a sweat?
He looked at her, distant, elsewhere, frozen somewhere inside himself.
Weed parked his arse on the edge of the food trolley, arms crossed, and Mae knew his eyes were on her too as she untied the apron over her dressing gown. There was smear of blood on the white strings. She moved to the sitting room, sank onto the sofa, apron bunched in a fist, watching the two women and the athletic doctor work trying save the life of a man she’d wanted to die.
And when he did, she felt nothing.
Chapter Seventeen
Grim-faced, Bryce stood near the door with the three police officers attending the scene. For now, local precedent overrode diplomatic precedent. When the doctor in lycra bike shorts explained the legal protocol to Bryce, saying something about natural causes, inquiries if foul play is suspected, death certificates, burial permits, and the worst food poisoning he’d ever experienced, Kitt made his way to the sitting room. He pulled a beige woollen throw from a chair and draped it over Mae’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” she said, playing with the strings of the apron on her lap. “Are you all right?”
“I admit I’m bit shocked.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You tried. We both tried.” He sat beside her, elbows on his knees, the fingers of his right hand feeling what remained of the two shortened fingers on his left hand. He let his eyes follow the swirl pattern on the Turkish rug, numbness swirling through him in a similar manner.
Mae scooted to the edge of the couch and sat the same way. She lay her hand on his arm. “I didn’t try hard enough. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m so sorry.”
“People die. Mae.”
“Yes, but I wanted him to die,” she whispered, and pulled her hand away.
“So did I,” he murmured, lifted his head and met her eyes. She made a sound, a low tremor of air, and held his gaze until he looked away. Tea, now half-dried, marred the papers and blue file folder that lay in the open on the coffee table. Despite being stained, rumpled and scented by a merry spice cocktail, the colour passport photocopies remained legible, the images on them clear, if not a tad sepia-toned. Kitt gathered the papers together.
“Oh,” she said and the word, so small, was extraordinarily heavy.
He slid the pictures into the blue file.
“This is all so unreal,” she said, laying aside the soiled apron that had been in her lap, draping it over the arm of the sofa.
Kitt didn’t say anything. He placed the folder back on the coffee table, out of the way of a wet patch of tea.
Mae watched a muscle pulse in his jaw. “Hamish,” she said softly, “Were yo—”
“Kitty, “Bryce said, coming toward them, “the doctor, Weed, and I are going down with the crew. You two okay?”
“Yes,” Kitt eyes slid to the paramedics wheeling out Llewelyn’s sheet-covered body on the ambulance gurney, “we’re okay for now.”
“Mm-hm. Right.” Bryce looked from one to the other. “You’re both shell-shocked. I know I sure as shit am. I’ll see if I can find a good bottle of bourbon in the bar downstairs. The one in here is crap.”
“Are you coming, Mr Bryce?” Weed called out.
“What an arse,” Bryce muttered. “Back soon.”
“Can’t wait,” Kitt said watching him leave, watching him usher out Brigadier Sir Roger Niven Llewelyn. When the door closed, he was left looking at a cloth-covered dining trolley a nervous-looking waiter had left behind.
This was wrong. It didn’t gel. Nothing about it was logical. Llewelyn was an older man, but he was healthy. He had to be healthy to maintain his position, and unlike some of his junior officers, the man did not indulge in any vice; he wasn’t a smoker, he didn’t drink or use recreational drugs, frequent brothels, or drive fast. But neither had Morland, and he was dead too.
“We were talking, before he dropped dead,” Mae said beside him. “He was insisting that… The file, the pictures you just put away, they are the reason I’m here, isn’t it?”
Kitt stopped denying one reality and desperately wanted to deny another. Llewelyn had died, and the pictures, Christ, she’d seen the damned pictures. He went on staring at the trolley. “Yes.”
“Were you going to tell me about them?”
“This is impossible,” he murmured. Never in his life had he felt so small, so powerless, so inept.
Mae exhaled and shrugged off the woollen throw, tossing it on the back of the sofa. “So you knew. Were ya goin’ to tell me or not?” she said, Irish intoned, and lifted the folder, taking out the images, fanning them out on the table.
He looked at her then. And said nothing.
She was tired, she was angry and spoke in a flat, hushed tone that told him just how deep her fury went. “Is it habit because secrecy has been such a necessary part of your job you just fell into automatically? Are we back to that place where keepin’ secrets is all about my safety or…” she paused and chewed her top lip for a moment, “…do ya think…” she swallowed, looked at the papers and spilled tea on the coffee table and swallowed again, “…do ya believe the same thing Llewelyn does…did, that I’ve been protec—”
“God damn Llewelyn! God damn Weed!” Kitt snatched up the photocopies, crumpled them into a ball, and pitched it on the table into a puddle of chai, the perfume of which would forever be associated with the dearth of a man he admired, hated…and loved. “No. No. I didn’t think that. Yes, it’s habit, long-practised bloody habit and I’ve been weighing up the options, considering reasons, considering the necessity, considering the meaning, wondering if there was any merit, any bloody point in telling you, wondering if it’s true, and if it is true, knowing what it means for us.”
“What are ya suggesting by what it means for us? This is more Llewelyn bullshit.”
“Mae,” he said, tongue thick in his throat.
A groove formed between her brows. “Oh Lord, ya think they’re real!”
Yes, they were real, and she
believed they were fake like so much of his life with her had been for far too long. “Two years ago, your brother,” he said bloodlessly, “hired an investigator who found things.”
She looked at the balled-up photocopies on the table. “Why would Sean not tell me that?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he was prepared to. Perhaps something made him change his mind. Perhaps it was for the same reason I didn’t tell you the things I knew about Caspar and his other wives until my hand was forced. I didn’t want to break your heart more than it had already been broken. But that was then.”
“And this is now. When did my brother tell you he’d hired an investigator?”
“He didn’t. Llewelyn did.”
“Of course he did.” She reached out and grabbed out the crumpled, tea-stained papers opened them, opening the ball, stretching out the photos. “Who made them then, where did these come from?” She waved the creased papers.
He pointed. “That one was found in a drawer in Sean’s flat, your former home. The other is from Llewelyn’s counterpart in the AVID, who, like Llewelyn got them from the Materials Tech officer.”
“How did a Materials Tech officer get copies?”
“Most likely when a sweep was made of your brother’s flat.”
Mae rose with an irritated snort. “A sweep of… You’re telling me someone went into Sean’s home?
“Yes. All new residents in the area, all your neighbours and tenants, from Masterton to Stephens to your brother, are or have been vetted. It’s standard, ongoing practice for the safety of any intelligence officer. You know that.”
“I didn’t realise being vetted meant a Materials Tech team broke in, poked about homes, and planted crap when it suits The Consortium.”
“No one breaks in. They are very careful and very thorough, and finding that information in your brother’s flat, a flat that belongs to you, a flat you lived in, added to the suspicions Llewelyn maintained about you. He believed you were hiding something, protecting someone.”
True to Your Service Page 22
