Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  THE PARK WAS ALMOST deserted. She could see a few determined joggers in the distance. She passed a few people, heads bent against the wind, walking their dogs. She followed the main path in the direction of the residence gardens, then struck off onto the grass; mud squelched underfoot.

  Lise Hawthorne had not been very exact in her directions. The residence gardens were large; they cut into the park itself in a deep horseshoe-shaped curve. For a time Gini patrolled this curve, back and forth. Then, although no one seemed to be paying the least attention to her, she moved a little farther off. She chose a well-positioned bench, fifty yards away, in the midst of open lawns. The minutes ticked by: ten, ten-fifteen, ten-thirty. She was becoming very cold, and she felt very conspicuous. It had not occurred to her at the time Lise made the arrangement, because she had been too shocked by the pallor and anguish in Lise’s face, but now that she was actually here she saw the oddness of Lise’s instructions. This was hardly a covert or discreet place to meet.

  Could it really be true that she had, in the past, met McMullen here? Gini considered: Perhaps she had been referring to a much earlier period, five or even six months earlier, sometime before Hawthorne’s suspicions were aroused. She wondered again about the exact nature of the relationship between McMullen and Lise, and whether they had been lovers or not. Then, shivering, she rose to her feet.

  She would give it one more try, she decided, one slow pass along the perimeter of that high horseshoe-shaped fence. Half an hour more: It was useful to remind herself, she thought, of what a citadel it was, this place where Lise Hawthorne lived. Turning back to the north of the house, to the rear of the entrance lodge with its bristling aerials and cameras, she began to follow the fence around the deep curve of the gardens, to where it met the ring road to the south of the house.

  This fence, completely encircling the rear gardens, was a formidable one. It was constructed of metal bars ten feet high, each with three curved spikes on the top. The bars themselves were shaped so as to make any purchase on them almost impossible; they were coated in anticlimb paint, and were narrowly spaced. There was no crossbar low enough to be used to wedge the feet. Through the bars she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the house, and the wide lawns behind it, but for the most part the view was obscured by tall evergreen shrubs ten or twelve feet deep. This cover, Gini knew, would contain other less visible security devices: The care with which this boundary was protected was obvious—wherever the shrubbery gave insufficient cover, camouflage netting had been erected, yard upon yard of it, slung inside the bars of the perimeter fence.

  The rain was easing off now. A jogger passed her, and a woman with a red umbrella walking a tiny, delicate dog. Gini was approaching one of the park lakes; here two conduits ran off and formed an additional barrier, a moat that forced her some fifty yards away from the residence fence.

  Ahead of her there were two small ornamental bridges, and a children’s playground. A man and a woman stood on the farther bridge, ignoring the rain and feeding bread to the ducks. Gini looked at them as she passed, and they smiled, made a comment about the weather; both were sixty at least.

  She walked on past the deserted playground. She was now on the southern side of the residence gardens; they lay to her right, the circle road was straight ahead. In front of her, and just to her left on the far side of the road, was the large copper dome and the tall minaret of the London Central Mosque. She was struck, as she always was when passing it, by the unlikeliness of its placing. In this most English of parks, flanked by the Nash terraces at Hanover Gate, this Islamic exoticism was arresting. The minaret was just over a hundred feet high, an Arabian Nights landmark visible for miles. The beautiful copper dome was crested with a sickle moon. Within an English park Arab territory and American territory were cheek by jowl. Less than one hundred yards separated Moslem devotions from the American ambassador’s private home.

  Gini stood between the two buildings, beneath a grove of young chestnut trees. Their bare branches dripped; she saw that she was on a slight rise, a knoll, with the ground falling away to her right. From here she could walk down to her right and stand alongside that barred perimeter fence. She did so, and touched the bars with her hand. Beyond the camouflage netting, thick here, and the shrubbery, she could see nothing, but she could hear voices.

  Men were working in the gardens beyond. She could hear the sound of spades, then the whine of a chain saw. Some of the older trees on the edge of the gardens were being pruned. The noise of the saw stopped, and suddenly, to her astonishment, she heard Lise Hawthorne’s voice. She was giving instructions to the workmen.

  “No,” Gini heard. “That branch there must go, and the large ones just above. It’s casting too much shade, nothing will grow there as it is. Then that large sycamore must come out. It seeds itself everywhere, and my husband would like the small Himalayan birches in its place. Now, shall we take a look at the lavender walk? Or what’s left of it after all this rain, which isn’t a great deal. …”

  Her voice faded into the distance. The whine of the chain saw recommenced.

  Gini began to turn away, puzzled. She glanced back at the fencing, turned, then gave a gasp. The jogger who had passed her earlier was now standing two feet behind her. She had not heard him approach. He was wearing a black track suit; its hood was up, and she could scarcely see his face.

  She took a quick step backward, then stopped. The man looked threatening, but was making no move toward her. She looked at him more closely. He was breathing lightly. He lifted a hand to adjust his track-suit hood slightly; she saw he was wearing a signet ring on his left hand. He had fair hair.

  “Are you looking for Jacob?” he asked. He had an even, pleasant English voice.

  Gini hesitated. “I came here to meet his friend,” she said. “But I have been looking for Jacob, yes.”

  As she stared at him, he lifted his head; the hood fell back just a little. He was older, obviously, but his features were imprinted on her memory. She had studied his photograph long enough. She gave a low exclamation: It was James McMullen.

  She was about to speak, when he glanced over his shoulder and lifted his finger to his lips. A man had just come into the park, through the ring-road gate.

  “The British Museum in an hour,” he said in a low voice. “Wait there. I’ll meet you there. If it’s safe.” The man was now walking toward them. McMullen raised his voice slightly. “Can you give me directions?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Gini replied. “Across the park. Aim south. Then take a left….It’s a pretty long way from here.”

  “Thanks, I’ll find it.”

  Without a backward glance he jogged off. He covered the ground very fast. Gini turned back to the ring road, passing the man, who was wearing a dark overcoat, but who was no one she recognized. He did not even look at her. When she reached the road, she looked back. He was continuing along the path at a measured pace. He paused by the elderly couple on the bridge in the distance, the couple who were still feeding the ducks. Then he continued on. Some way beyond them, he lifted his hand to his face.

  It was too far away for Gini to be sure: It might have been an innocent gesture. He could have been consulting his watch; he could have been adjusting his tie; he could have been speaking into a wrist mike. She began to walk rapidly away. The street was deserted. When she next looked back, she was passing the mosque, and the man in the park and James McMullen were both out of sight.

  “I want Gini taken off this story,” Pascal said. He was in Nicholas Jenkins’s fifteenth-floor sanctum, with its view of the new emerging docklands London. He could see towers and scaffolding through the plate glass behind Jenkins’s head.

  Jenkins was smiling, nodding, all amiability. It was eleven A.M. Pascal had come straight here from the airport. He had been expecting a fight with Jenkins over this, yet Jenkins gave no indication of opposition. He continued to smile and nod, and give Pascal small devious looks.

  Pascal tried to force out of his
mind all memory of black Mercedes cars; he tried not to think of Lorna Munro’s beautiful dead face. He had had all night to decide how to approach this, and exactly what lies to tell Jenkins, yet now he had the impression that Jenkins was several jumps ahead of him, and knew it. Pascal leaned across his desk.

  “I’m getting through to you, am I, Nicholas? I won’t work with Gini on this story. I want you to take her off it. You understand, yes?”

  There was a small flicker of amusement behind the nuclear-physicist-style spectacles. Jenkins sighed.

  “Oh, dear,” he said in a sweet-toned, innocuous voice. “What went wrong, Pascal? Bad chemistry? Or was it more dramatic than that?”

  “Give it a rest, Nicholas. She’s fine. She works hard, she’s very thorough. But I work better on my own. I always have.”

  “I did warn you.” Jenkins gave him a reproachful look. “I told you she was good. I also told you she was a pain in the neck.”

  “I didn’t find that.” Pascal looked at him coldly. “I don’t need her anymore, it’s as simple as that. She was”—he hesitated—“slowing me down. Just let me carry on at my own pace, I can get this sewn up by the end of the week.”

  “By Sunday, you mean?” Jenkins looked at him intently.

  “If you’re asking can I get the pictures then, the answer is yes. I think I can. And I’ll do it a whole lot better and more efficiently on my own. This isn’t a suitable story for a woman.”

  Jenkins gave a little smile. “I did wonder about that,” he said, “when I heard Appleyard was dead.”

  Pascal gave him a sharp glance. He was not about to be drawn, however: He had decided last night. He trusted no one on this story, including Jenkins, and he had no intention of giving Jenkins any further details until it was over.

  “Look,” he continued. “I’m in a hurry, Nicholas. You give me a decision here and now. If you want those pictures, you take Gini off this story. It’s as simple as that.” He gave a shrug. “I did try to persuade her myself, and I got precisely nowhere. There’s a chance she’ll listen to you. Pull rank, Nicholas. Do whatever it takes.”

  “Oh, but I already have.” Jenkins’s smile was now broad and complacent. “I did it last night. You just don’t know how to handle her, Pascal. I had no problems at all. A piece of cake.”

  There was a silence. Pascal stared at him.

  “You took her off this story last night?”

  “I most certainly did. And in the end, she agreed. She argued first, of course—in fact, she was fucking rude to me, but never mind that.” Jenkins gave him a small gleaming look. “Gini’s never liked me, I’m afraid. She accused me of bowing to pressure from outside, from our dear proprietor Melrose, and Melrose’s friend, the ambassador.” He paused, eyeing Pascal. “I told her I was killing this story, so I suppose she had some justification.”

  “And are you killing this story?”

  “No, Pascal. I’m not.”

  He rose, moved across to the large plate-glass windows, looked out thoughtfully for a while, then turned back. The light winked against his spectacles. He gave Pascal a sharp look. “Gini seems to think I’m a pushover. Some kind of poodle. Well, she’ll learn in due course. You don’t get where I’ve gotten by being weak. And you don’t advance your career long-term by bowing and scraping when some boring old fart like Melrose snaps his fingers. What you do is, you smile, and you say yes, Lord Melrose, of course, Lord Melrose—and then you carry right on. Only you take a more devious approach. Save the direct confrontation for when it really counts….” He smiled. “Like, about fifteen seconds before the presses start rolling. Or even later, when the papers actually hit the streets. That way, if the story’s good enough, he doesn’t dare to fire you. And if he does, you’re still a hero, the fearless editor.” He grinned suddenly, “Eat shit, Melrose, because I’ve got five other job offers. That’s my general approach.”

  There was a silence. Pascal extinguished one cigarette, then lit another. He said slowly, “I think you’d better bring me up-to-date. Obviously, a lot has been happening that I’ve missed.”

  “Oh, a very great deal.” Jenkins gave a knowing smile and returned to his desk. He sat down. He picked up one of the phones on his desk. “Hold all calls for fifteen minutes, Charlotte. All calls, you’ve got that?” He replaced the receiver and gave Pascal a long, assessing look. “When did you last get some sleep?” he said. “You look like hell, do you know that?”

  “Very probably.” Pascal shrugged. “There are reasons for that.”

  “I rather thought there might be. All right. Listen, Pascal, and listen carefully. I’m going to say this only once.” He paused. “First of all, there’s the question of who else knew you’d be working on this story. That question has been exercising Gini quite a lot. I’m afraid I wasn’t straight with you before. I will be now. James McMullen knew. It was agreed between us last December, when he handed over that tape. Two weeks before he disappeared. He asked specifically that you work on it—which surprised me, but apparently he’d seen your war photographs as well as your recent work. Gini was my suggestion, agreed reluctantly by him. Who else he told, I don’t know, but there’s one obvious candidate, though he claimed it was better she didn’t know.”

  “Lise Hawthorne?”

  “Precisely. It’s also possible”—Jenkins paused, frowning—“it’s possible our conversation was overheard. We were careful, obviously. I never went to his flat. He never set foot in this building. We met well away from other fucking journalists, and on that occasion, when your names were discussed, we met at the Army and Navy Club,” he said, then added, “There’s a few other things you should know, and they concern Johnny Appleyard. I thought his importance was tangential, and I was eager to keep it like that. That’s why I didn’t mention it at first. I realized I was wrong when I heard that he was dead….

  “Then we come to the really interesting part,” he said. “We come to this last weekend, and to the dinner I attended with Gini last night.” He smiled. “A concatenation of circumstances, Pascal. It’s when I realized there had to be more to this than just a sex scandal”—his face took an expression of triumphant delight—“that’s when I realized that this story was really big.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was leaned on, Pascal. Leaned on in a surprising way. Leaned on very heavily indeed. Always a good indicator, that,” he said. Then: “How much do you know about Lord Melrose?”

  “He’s the proprietor of the News, obviously. He inherited his papers from his father. He has three others in this country, two in Australia, one in Canada, and one in the States. I gather he’s a friend of Hawthorne’s, or so Gini said.”

  “Correct. But the most important thing about Melrose, from our point of view now, is that he’s an establishment man through and through. Friends in high places everywhere, including the security services, though Melrose tends to keep very quiet about that. We’ve had run-ins before, as a result. It happens like this: From time to time some nice discreet civil servant takes Melrose out to lunch at the Athenaeum, or Brooks Club, it’s usually somewhere like that. This man waits until they’ve served the coffee and the port, then he has a quiet word in Melrose’s ear. If one of his papers is on to something a bit sensitive, the man steers Melrose off. Come on, old boy, national security and all that, time to call off the bloodhounds. Now, sometimes Melrose listens, and sometimes he remembers his nice liberal conscience and tells his friend to get lost. Last Friday, Melrose went to one of those lunches.”

  “Last Friday?”

  “That’s right.” Jenkins gave a sly grin. “Unfortunately, I’d kind of neglected to mention the Hawthorne investigation to Melrose—shockingly remiss of me, yes? So when Melrose found out, he wasn’t pleased. In fact, he was mad as hell. What made it all rather worse was that this nice, discreet, faceless old Etonian was alarmingly well informed. Not only did he know we were working on the Hawthorne story, he knew the name of my source.”

  “He mentioned McMu
llen by name?”

  “To Melrose? Yes, he did. And he explained to Melrose that McMullen was very bad news. Not only had he been peddling a pack of lies to me about an eminent man, but—apparently—the old Etonian and his friends had had their eye on McMullen for some time. As had their cousins across the pond. The British files on McMullen went back a long way—a very long way, Pascal. They hadn’t looked at them in some time, but when they got them out and dusted them off—this was last summer—they found they were several inches thick.”

  “Let me get this straight. According to Melrose, McMullen had been investigated before? By British security?”

  “Yes, he had. Last summer the Americans joined in the act. For which there’s a simple explanation. They did so from last July onward, at John Hawthorne’s behest.” Jenkins tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now, Melrose’s reaction to all this was to panic,” Jenkins went on. “He went into one of his flaps. He asked for the weekend to think it over, and his Etonian friend bought that. Then, on Sunday morning, at seven-thirty Sunday morning, his friend John Hawthorne called him up personally. Then the shit really hit the fan.” Jenkins grinned. “I was telephoned at home, summoned to chateau Melrose, and given a straight choice. Kill the Hawthorne story or go in Monday morning and clear my desk.”

  Pascal said nothing. He was thinking about the timing. Hawthorne called the morning after Mary’s party. These maneuvers were taking place as he and Gini had left for Venice. He looked back at Jenkins.

  “So, what did you do?” he said.

  “I bought myself a little time—and I’m fucking good at that. I did a lot of injured outrage, banged on about censorship. I made Melrose feel like a Fascist, and since he really fancies himself a liberal, that did the trick. He gave me forty-eight hours to decide, on the condition I published nothing in that time, obviously. And he agreed to go back to his Etonian friend and get some more information. I said I wasn’t being fobbed off with a whole lot of vague crap about McMullen being suspect. I wanted a few facts. The way Melrose was going on was ludicrous. McMullen could have been in the pay of Moscow, or he could have been late paying his taxes—it was as loose as that. So Melrose toddled back to the Athenaeum, or wherever. I came in Monday morning, heard about Appleyard’s death, and put our Italian stringer on to it that morning. I also ordered up every damn file on Hawthorne in existence. Mistake.”