by Ian Rankin
‘Sit down.’
Parfit sat, crossing his legs. The chair was as uncomfortable as it needed to be. It was not designed for long-stay visitors.
‘Another demo outside.’ It was a statement of fact.
Gilchrist removed his glasses and rubbed at the red indentations either side of his nose.
‘It seems quiet enough today,’ Parfit commented.
‘Thank Christ for that at least then.’ Gilchrist slipped the glasses on again, pushing them down firmly onto the bridge of his nose. ‘Now, what about Dreyfuss?’
‘What about him?’
‘Come on, Parfit. What’s your game?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Gilchrist waved the comment aside. ‘You should be there in Sacramento. Somebody should be there at least. Has he regained consciousness yet?’
‘We think so.’
‘Think?’
‘It’s not easy getting straight answers just at the moment. You should know that, or haven’t you noticed that our dealings with the cousins have become rather frosty? We keep in contact with the hospital authorities, who pass us on to somebody else, and that somebody else tries to sell us a call-back-tomorrow or an I’ll-check-and-call-you-back.’
‘All the more reason why somebody from the embassy should be there.’
‘I’m going.’
‘Yes, but when?’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
Gilchrist stared hard at Parfit, who didn’t flinch. ‘Is that a maybe-maybe or a maybe-definitely?’
‘It’s a maybe-probably.’
Gilchrist smiled in defeat, then took off his glasses again to rub at his nose. He had been doing this ever since Parfit had known him, and it irritated him more than he could say.
‘So,’ Parfit began, ‘is there anything I should know about the state of play on the pull-out?’
‘No. NATO’s making its usual balls-up of the whole thing. Nobody seems able to agree with anybody else. Fallings-out left and right. If only we had the right bloody government in power …’
‘But we don’t.’
‘Quite. So instead it’s complete chaos, and what are the Soviets doing? Have you noticed?’
‘I wasn’t aware they were doing anything.’
‘Exactly. They’re just sitting back enjoying the bloody show. Oh, and speaking of bears, Ben Esterhazy’s back from Bonn. Not the happiest of soldiers, by all accounts. There’s talk that he’ll be heading for Sacramento.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, most of that shuttle crew were his men after all.’ Gilchrist sighed. ‘We really could have done without this on top of everything else.’ He pulled a newspaper from the drawer of his desk and began to read aloud. ‘“The Jonah Factor. Major Michael Dreyfuss, the Briton they did not want on the tragic shuttle mission, was still seriously ill in Sacramento General Hospital today. Ground observers report that the shuttle’s undercarriage appeared not to operate during its descent towards Edwards Air Force Base.”’ He looked up at Parfit. ‘Et cetera,’ he said, ‘until this at the end: “Whatever happened, one thing is clear. The people of the United States will long remember the dealings of the past few weeks with the British government, the British people, and one British subject in particular.”’ He threw the paper back into the drawer. ‘They’re talking about Dreyfuss, and yet you’re letting him lie there—’
‘I have a good reason.’ Parfit snapped his mouth shut, but too late. He had already said it. Gilchrist smiled again, nodding.
‘I thought there must be a reason. So come on, what is it?’
Parfit sighed. ‘Not here.’
‘Very well then, let’s stretch our legs as far as the secure room. I’m all ears, I’m sure.’
7
At last, Hepton had two clear days free from the base, and could take a drive into the country. Ripening fields, the sun beating down as it had no right to do in the course of an English summer. An occasional splash of garish yellow where rape – vegetable cash to the farmers – had been sown. But mostly the fields were green, or were delivering up golden buds of wheat and barley. A beautiful country. He so seldom noticed it, but it was the truth. He had become blind through living his life underground, but like a mole, he had burrowed his way to the surface and was now scenting the air anew. He checked in the Renault’s rear-view mirror. The Ford Sierra was still with him, a hundred yards back but quite noticeable, there being so little traffic on these winding roads.
Twenty minutes ago, he had slowed behind a tractor, though overtaking would have been easy, and had watched the car behind him edge forward until the face of the driver – female – was clear in his mirror. The face of a businesswoman, but she didn’t appear to be in any rush. So that when he had waved her past, she had flashed her lights once in acknowledgement, but shaken her head too. And stayed behind him.
She was still behind him, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing. He thought of pulling in to a café, to see whether she would follow him. After all, this might be innocence itself, a chance encounter that might lead … well, anywhere. Except that he had to press on. Paul Vincent was in the Alfred de Lyon Hospital, and the Alfred de Lyon Hospital was an inconvenient forty or so miles away yet. So he drove on.
He thought of Zephyr, of the miracles satellites could perform. He stuck an arm out of his window and waved towards the sky, wondering if he could be seen. There was no doubt that Zephyr could see him if it wanted to. It could give close-ups of his car, of his number plate. But Zephyr wasn’t trained on him. It was trained on a series of air force bases, where the US personnel were preparing for their flights back home. Or at least that was what it had been watching yesterday evening, on Hepton’s last shift.
Something niggled, though, something he had noticed and mentioned in passing to Nick Christopher. It was to do with Buchan Air Force Base in the north of Scotland, just outside the town of Peterhead. Buchan had been an RAF radar station, but then the American forces had moved in for a time. Hepton had watched it before. He liked the quality of light in northern Scotland. That was what niggled: the sun was setting early in Buchan.
‘Cloud cover,’ Christopher had explained. ‘I’ve seen the weather reports. Overcast skies.’
‘Yes,’ Hepton had said, ‘but they’re not overcast.’
And Christopher had shrugged his shoulders, then placed a hand on Hepton’s own.
‘Maybe when you go to visit Paul, you and he should swap places. What do you say?’
Then they had both laughed and gone to watch the night’s television.
Was something wrong with the weather, then? Or had the Zephyr malfunction caused some tinting of the lens, some aberration to appear on the glass? What the hell. He’d think about it some other time. For today, he had forty-eight hours’ worth of off-base permission, and he intended to use the time well. He switched on the radio and found a station broadcasting a phone-in about the Geneva arms talks. The Soviets were offering yet more deals. Jesus, what were they going to do with all those redundant guns and tanks and missiles? Better yet, what would they do with all that redundant manpower?
On another station, two critics discussed the latest high-grossing American film, Gun Law. They’d had a bootleg tape of that on the base last week. Usual vigilante stuff, all about how the USA should pull up the drawbridge and let everyone outside the moat rot. Laughable really, yet some of the men on the base had started acting tough the very next morning, and come in wearing black T-shirts and white jeans, the way the hero did.
‘Strange times,’ Hepton said out loud, flicking to another channel. Mahler. Radio 3, he supposed; some lunchtime concert. He didn’t know which Mahler it was, but he knew it was Mahler. Jilly had listened to Mahler before, during and after each session of lovemaking. Which had seemed weird to him at first. In fact, it had seemed weird all the time. She would push his prone body away from her so that she could go and change the cassette tape and then would come to him again and give him a hug, just to sh
ow that she liked him a little bit too.
But not enough to stop her taking the newspaper job in London, not enough to stop her zipping a bag and throwing it into the back of her MG, giving him a brief embrace while her eyes glazed over with thoughts of leader columns and front-page scoops. A peck on the cheek, and then into the driving seat where she belonged, no seat belt necessary, though he had warned her before.
‘Phone me!’ he had called, but she never had. And now it was over. He had toyed with the idea of using Zephyr to track her down, to peek through some bedroom window as she pushed away another prone body and went to change the tape.
It was a nice dream.
After the Mahler, there was the one o’clock news, including a small item on Major Mike Dreyfuss and the American reaction to the shuttle disaster. Predictable stuff. He had watched the TV pictures. Orange flame, the nose of the craft crumpling, turning in on itself, more explosions. It was a funny thing about Dreyfuss, though. He was in his late thirties, a few years older than Hepton, not exactly his physical prime. Hepton had read about the other candidates who’d been in the running for the UK’s only place on the mission. They’d been young, strong. So why Dreyfuss? Not that it was any big deal. Not the big deal it was when the first Briton in space had gone up on that Soviet mission, or when the second one had gone up soon afterwards, courtesy of the Americans. No, to be Britain’s third man in space: well, there was something pathetic about that, wasn’t there? He allowed himself a guilty smile.
The Alfred de Lyon Hospital was, for the most part, a rest home, and had been chosen not because it was so far away from the base but, in Fagin’s words, ‘because Paul is suffering from some kind of nervous exhaustion, and they specialise in that’. Now that Hepton re-ran that statement in his head, he saw an ominous ambiguity to it. He checked in his mirror but couldn’t see the Sierra. He signalled and came to a halt by the side of the road, where he waited for three minutes. But there was still no sign of the car. Somehow, he felt disappointed. Maybe he should double back. The woman might be in trouble, her car might have gone off the road …
Or, more likely, she had taken a turning and was heading towards her destination.
Maybe Nick was right, Hepton said to himself. Maybe I do need to book myself into this place. He started the car again, and within quarter of an hour was turning the Renault through an imposing main gateway and up a country house driveway of gravel so clean it might have been polished that very morning. Therapy for the patients, perhaps?
As he rounded a bend, a rabbit leapt into his path and he nearly hit it. He braked hard and watched it flee across an expanse of manicured lawn and into some shrubbery. Skin tingling, he opened the car door and stepped out. He could hear a car approaching the gateway. When he turned, he saw the same Ford Sierra driving past. He listened as its engine faded into the distance. Smiling, he got back into the Renault and drove up to the imposing entrance of the Alfred de Lyon Hospital itself.
‘I must have made a mistake then, it’s as simple as that.’
They were sitting in the morning room, a modern extension to the main building fitted with patio doors and filled with pot plants. It was like a hothouse, and Hepton, who had already taken off his jacket, now dragged his tie loose from his neck. Paul Vincent, dressed in slippers, thick dressing gown and sunglasses, didn’t exactly look ill. He looked rested and a little tanned. In fact, he looked a good deal healthier than Hepton felt.
‘Still,’ Vincent continued, ‘it’s good to see you, Martin. Thanks for coming. So tell me, what’s happening back at the base?’
Hepton shook his head. He hadn’t driven all this way for gossip. ‘What makes you so sure you made a mistake?’
‘Well,’ Vincent opened his arms in supplication, ‘like you say, nothing’s been done about it. And Fagin doesn’t seem to think anything’s amiss.’
‘Fagin can make mistakes.’
‘Not while I’ve been working for him he hasn’t.’
‘So how come we lost Zephyr for over three minutes?’
‘You can’t blame that on him.’
‘Why not? He’s in charge, isn’t he?’
‘Martin, what’s wrong?’ Vincent seemed genuinely concerned.
Hepton rubbed sweat from his forehead. It was a good question. What was wrong? Why was he so keen to see mysteries where there might be none? Paul Vincent didn’t seem anxious. Nick Christopher didn’t seem anxious. Fagin didn’t seem anxious. So why was he bothering?
‘I don’t know, Paul. It’s just …’ He sighed. ‘I really don’t know.’
Vincent smiled. ‘It really was nice of you to come. I haven’t seen anybody since I came in here.’
‘What happened to you? I mean, back at the base?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not exactly sure. One minute I was fine, the next I was in hospital.’
‘And what did the hospital say?’
‘You know what they’re like. The patient always gets to know the least.’
‘Who was your doctor?’ Hepton had asked the question in a rush. It seemed almost to catch Vincent out; he stared at Hepton before replying.
‘McGill, I think. Yes, a Dr McGill.’
Hepton sat back in the chair and looked around. A few elderly men were seated in wicker chairs. Two were playing a game of chess so delicately they looked to be moving in slow motion. The heat was prickling Hepton’s neck and back. He rubbed a finger beneath his shirt collar and glanced towards the doorway, where two muscular male orderlies stood, their jaws fixed. Like soldiers on parade, he thought, rather than nurses caring for the sick.
‘So what’s it like here?’ he asked.
‘The food’s good,’ said Vincent. ‘Mind you, the sex isn’t up to much.’
They laughed, but Hepton was beginning to catch something behind his friend’s eyes, something trapped behind that dead, unfocused look.
‘Are they giving you any drugs, Paul?’
‘No more than I usually take.’ Vincent laughed again, but Hepton managed only a smile, listening to that laughter, to its nervy hollow centre.
‘Know what I think, Paul?’ he said. Then he leaned towards his friend and lowered his voice. ‘I think you’re in trouble. I think you’re frightened. I think this is all bullshit.’ He nodded in the general direction of everything around them. ‘And I think you need a friend like me. Maybe I’m wrong.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Give me a call if you feel like talking.’
‘Martin!’
But Hepton knew that the only way to end the scene effectively was for him to walk and keep on walking. So he did. He wasn’t going to learn anything here, not unless he could scare Paul enough to make him say something.
He was practically at the car when he heard footsteps hurrying across the gravel behind him.
‘Martin, wait!’ Paul Vincent caught up with him, looking paler now after the exertion. ‘Martin.’ He paused for breath. ‘At least stay for afternoon tea.’
It wasn’t the answer Hepton wanted. He opened the driver’s-side door. Vincent’s hand came down onto his own level.
‘Look,’ he said. He glanced around him. ‘I’m going to say this just the once, but that should be enough. You always were a good listener, weren’t you?’
‘I still am, Paul.’
‘Well, listen now. Stay out of it. Take a holiday. Suggest it to Fagin. He’ll approve it. Go off somewhere warm.’ He laughed at this, the sweat gleaming on his face. ‘I mean somewhere exotic, somewhere quiet.’
‘That’s friendly advice, is it?’
Vincent shrugged. Hepton could see the two orderlies in their white uniforms watching them from the main building. Could he bundle Paul into the car and make a getaway? Not against the fitter and younger man’s will. He climbed into the Renault and closed the door.
‘Tell me,’ he said through the open window. ‘Really, just between us, what did you think you’d discovered?’
Vincent sighed. His voice when he spoke was no more than a whisper. ‘There was
something up there, Martin. Something big.’ He glanced over his shoulder towards the orderlies. ‘But that doesn’t seem to be the point.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The point seems to be that no one cares. One name, Martin.’
‘Yes?’
‘A man called Villiers. He came to see me, to ask a few questions. He didn’t give his name, but I asked at the desk afterwards and they told me. I didn’t like him much. Steer around him if you meet him.’
‘What questions did he ask?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, routine stuff. What happened at the base? What happened with my computer? That sort of thing.’ Vincent paused. ‘The disk got wiped, didn’t it? The hard disk?’ Hepton nodded, and Vincent sighed. ‘They’re being pretty thorough.’
‘You’re saying the disk wasn’t wiped accidentally?’
‘I’m not sure, but I never was a great believer in coincidence.’
‘No, me neither. But then someone in the control room must have wiped it.’
‘I suppose so, yes. I got the impression Villiers wanted everything kept as quiet as possible.’
Which, Hepton thought, seems to mean keeping you out of the way.
‘Thanks, Paul,’ he said.
‘Remember what I said about taking a holiday.’
‘Goodbye, Paul. Look after yourself.’
‘You too, Martin. And I mean that. You too.’
Driving off, Hepton checked in his rear-view mirror and saw the two orderlies approach Vincent. Vincent had the look of a lonely man, of a man unfairly imprisoned. Hepton felt his hands harden around the steering wheel. He pressed down a little on the accelerator and enjoyed the momentary feeling of complete control.
8
The Palladio Bookshop was sited not far from Holborn Underground station, and every weekday morning the shop’s proprietor, Mr Vitalis, would take the Piccadilly Line Tube from his home in Arnos Grove. He always walked up the escalators rather than standing, but this was due not so much to impatience or any need to be getting on as it was a keen desire to keep himself fit. After all, Mr Vitalis was nearing fifty, though he looked older. Some said his background, to judge from his voice, was east European, and that he had come to England at the outbreak of World War Two. Others, examining his olive skin, proclaimed him Greek, while a few guessed at Italian and fewer still north African. In a sense, they were all correct, since Mr Vitalis liked to think of himself, in the truest sense of the phrase, as a man of the world.
