Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  “Why?”

  “Because some fucking devious bastard told Melrose what I’d done.”

  “Who told him?”

  “I don’t know. But when I find out, he’s dead.” Jenkins paused. “Finally Hawthorne had another go at Melrose, last night. We were all at this bloody dinner. Hawthorne made this fucking sanctimonious speech about press freedom, then he took his old friend Melrose into a corner and really laid into him. Mentioned libel, criminal libel, a few things like that. Whereupon Melrose lost his nerve totally, and we were back to square one. Kill the story or else.”

  “And you agreed? This was last night?”

  “Of course I agreed. We bide our time, right? Gini’s off the story, that looks good. That ought to help convince them I’m playing ball, and then—”

  “You’re not playing ball?”

  Jenkins gave him a very sharp glance; his glasses flashed. “You don’t know me very well, Pascal. Genevieve-bloody-Hunter doesn’t know me at all. Let’s put it this way. I was a working-class boy once. A scholarship boy at a major public school. It left me a bit chippy, a bit sensitive about certain things. Like, I’m not too fucking keen on the old-boy network. I’m not too fucking keen on old Etonians who take other old Etonians out to lunch and lean on them. I’m not too fucking keen on Wasps like Hawthorne who preach one thing and do another—and when they all start to pressure me, I smell a rat. And I start thinking—if they’re that worried, that keen, it has to be major. Maybe even more than we realized.”

  He leaned across and unlocked a drawer of his desk. He extracted a large manila envelope and passed it across the desk. “Go on working on this,” he said. “But cover your fucking tracks. I can’t be involved. I don’t even know what you’re up to, all right? When you’ve got what we need, we can always rope Gini back in, if necessary. Get the pictures Sunday and we’re halfway there. Once we have pictures, Hawthorne’s screwed. Even Melrose won’t be able to protect his old friend. Then we can really get to the bottom of this story. It’s more than beating up on blond call girls once a month. It’s more than a kink for expensive blow jobs when the girl’s wearing black gloves. There’s something more, Pascal, I can smell it, and it’s not recent either, not a taste Hawthorne developed in the last four years, the way McMullen told me. It links back to earlier events. I may not know what they are—yet. But there’s been a cover-up, and it goes back a long way. Take a look through this.”

  He tapped the envelope. Pascal looked at it. It was sealed, and it was thick.

  “What is that?”

  “Details of John Hawthorne’s exemplary military service. I got it faxed from a friend in Washington yesterday. Plus some details on my friend McMullen. Details I never bloody well knew.”

  “Is he a security risk?”

  “Difficult to say.” Jenkins made a balancing gesture of the hand. “He was vetted for the army, obviously. Some of this stuff came via Melrose’s spooky friend, so it may or may not be reliable. It certainly doesn’t look as if McMullen spent his entire army career in the Parachute Regiment. He’s possibly more dangerous than I realized,” Jenkins continued. “Most interesting of all, his links with John Hawthorne go back further than he claimed to me.”

  “Where to?” Pascal asked sharply.

  “Oddly enough, to something Hawthorne touched on last night in his speech—”

  “Where to, Nicholas?”

  “To Vietnam,” Jenkins replied. “Now, how about that?”

  Gini walked slowly along the huge marble-floored entrance hall of the British Museum. From here, she told herself, there were many places from which she could be watched. There were staircases, lobbies, pillars; innumerable places where, if he wished, James McMullen could conceal himself. Presumably, she thought as she turned and slowly retraced her steps, McMullen would wait, and approach her when it suited him. The roles of hunter and hunted were reversed.

  Perhaps the best thing was simply to linger here, and wait. There were few other visitors to the museum on a wet midweek January morning. There was a party of schoolchildren being shepherded toward the museum shop; a group of dispirited Japanese with camcorders, one or two solitary figures examining the classical heads and torsos on exhibition.

  One more time, she walked slowly down the gallery, then returned. Nothing. A tomblike somnolence hushed the air. Her footsteps echoed; no one approached.

  After a while, she decided that this main hall was too open and too public. She mounted one of the marble staircases that led to the first floor and rapidly became lost. She lingered by large cases containing Roman coins and pottery. She turned into another room and found herself in a glass-walled cul-de-sac lined with blind Grecian heads.

  Down some stairs, along a corridor, up some stairs, and she was in the Egyptian galleries. She watched her own reflection, a glacial ghost, as she passed along the cases filled with images of gods. Once, she thought she heard movement behind her, a light footfall, but when she turned, there was no one there. She bent to the cases, examined the oil and grain jars, the papyrus scrolls, the tiny pottery grave relics, and the more gorgeous ornaments with which princes were lovingly sent on their journey into the afterlife. She looked at gods in the shape of hawks, and the shape of cats. Their painted stares met hers; on the glass she traced the ochre and black of their eyes. She listened intently. Nothing. She was still alone. She confronted line upon line of mummies, some standing, some lying, some still in their gilded and painted outer casings, some protected only by the swaddling of their bandages.

  So many, so lovely, so various, and so fearsome, these ways of death. She looked at a pharaoh’s son laid to rest in garments of scarlet, lapis, and indigo, painted calm on the painted likeness of his face. The air smelled dusty; in this, the older part of the galleries, the display cases made a second labyrinth within the outer one of the museum itself. She had to pass around, between, behind the dead. They cornered her, and she decided to wait elsewhere, in a more conspicuous place.

  She returned to the main entrance, went outside, bought a newspaper, and returned to the museum again. In the café where the schoolchildren were making a hubbub, she sat down. No one approached.

  The early edition of the Evening Standard led on John Hawthorne’s speech the previous night. The headline was: U.S. Ambassador Slams “Nazi” Arab States. An incendiary description of Hawthorne’s comments, she thought—and the comments seemed to have had an inflammatory effect. According to the Stop Press, demonstrations had begun outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, and outside the London headquarters of several American banks. There had been clashes with the police.

  Gini drank some coffee, waited fifteen minutes, then left. There were telephone booths near the entrance, and from there she telephoned first the number of Pascal’s studio in Paris, then his wife’s number, on both lines, an answering machine was the only response.

  Perhaps he was returning, even now, as she called. This thought made her heart lift. She was still unwilling to give up on this museum. She had now been here an hour. One more try, she decided.

  This time she took the stairs that led down to the basement galleries. Here, the overall illumination was dim, and the individual sculptures, which included some of the museum’s glories, were bathed in angled light. She passed along the Elgin marbles, and a battle frieze that had once decorated the Parthenon. She looked at the great rearing marble haunches of the horses on the frieze, at the minutely observed weaponry, and at the frozen attitudes of dying men. Nothing. No one. Silence. She passed into a farther gallery, and still another, and found herself in a part of the museum she had never penetrated before, in the Assyrian rooms.

  Here, bathed in an angled light, were walls of massive stone reliefs. They were somber, detailed, and magnificent: She stood, listening, before a great procession of ten-foot kings and warriors and priests. They were carrying offerings, and Gini tried to concentrate on the bundles of corn, the bowls of wine, the sacrificial animals. The phalanx of men reminded h
er of that security phalanx that protected John Hawthorne wherever he went, though in the modern world, of course, their offerings were automatic weapons, and modern princes like Hawthorne were rarely accompanied by priests.

  She bent to read the label that explained the symbols of these past events, and heard movement behind her—a single footfall, the brush of stone against cloth.

  At last. She swung around sharply and scanned the room. From the corner of her eye, in the shadows of the far entrance, she thought she saw darkness move. She turned, and it was gone. She ran across to the entrance, but the gallery beyond was empty. Massive reliefs rose up on either side of her. She stepped back, peering beyond them and dazzled by the lighting that now shone directly in her face. There was no one there. There was no one in the rooms behind her—but there were three other exits from this place. She checked each of them in turn, but each led to corridors and stairs, and if someone had been there, he was gone.

  She came to a halt and looked around her with a sense of angry frustration. Why was McMullen playing these cat-and-mouse games? She was now standing at the foot of a back staircase, in a small, ill-lit lobby. From there she had a clear view back into the room where she had been when she first heard the noise. She could see the huge relief she had been studying, with its procession of warriors and priests. Just as she was about to turn away, a shadow moved across the face of the sculpture, and then a man came into sight.

  He was wearing the same dark overcoat he had worn before, and he moved silently, on those soft-soled shoes described by Lise Hawthorne. Frank Romero. He stood in front of the relief, staring up at it for a moment. He touched it. He peered behind it, then bent to examine the floor in front of it. He began to move silently and stealthily around the room, examining each carving in turn, as if he were searching for something, some message left, perhaps.

  Gini edged back into the shadows and toward the stairs. A hand came out of the darkness and clamped itself across her mouth. She felt a moment’s pure fear. Before she could struggle, or even think, she felt a man pulling her closer against him, so his mouth was against her ear. She could feel his breath on her face.

  “Don’t scream, and don’t speak,” he said in a low, calm English voice. McMullen’s voice. “I’m going to give you a number. Call it tomorrow at noon. You understand? If you do, nod your head.” Gini nodded. “Don’t look round. Can you remember numbers?” Gini nodded again.

  McMullen repeated the numbers, slowly and quietly. “You’ve got that? Call it at noon tomorrow. Use a safe phone. Noon. Not five minutes before, not five afterward. Now go up these stairs, turn right, then second left. You’ll be in the main hall. Buy some postcards, as if this were a normal visit, then leave. No, don’t look round. You’ve got that?”

  He released her, and Gini did as he said. She fled silently up the stairs, reciting the number to herself. Once she was safely back in her car, she took out a notebook and pencil and wrote it down, her hand shaking. The number had an 0865 prefix. An Oxford number.

  A familiar Oxford number too—at least she thought it was, but she couldn’t be certain, and she had left her address book at home in her flat.

  She drove north as fast as she could, but the rain was still heavy, and street after street was gridlocked with traffic. She used every back-street rat run she knew, but even so it took her almost an hour to drive the five miles.

  She parked in the square and ran down the area steps, inserted her key in the lock. The address book was on her desk, just next to the telephone. She swung the living room door open. As she closed it, something soft brushed her face.

  She continued a few paces on, toward the desk. Then the terrible wrongness of the room registered. She stopped. Sickness welled in the pit of her stomach. Something soft had brushed her face as she closed the door. There was nothing there, there should be nothing there to brush against her in that way. On the back of that door was an empty hook.

  She turned, looked, and cried out. She ran across to the door, but it was too late—at least an hour too late.

  Whoever had killed Napoleon had made a neat job. The black stocking sent her the previous week had been used to strangle him. They had wound the nylon around his throat, throttled him, and then left him to hang from the hook by this noose. His body was already stiffening. There was blood on his mouth and nostrils. There were scratch marks on the door panels where he had scrabbled with his feet.

  Gini thought: How long did it take him to die? She cradled his body, lifted him down, and held him close. She began to cry, and pressed him tight against her chest. His eyes were closed and her fingers fumbled to undo the stocking. She rocked him, and wept. Her fingers would not move too well, but in the end she unwound the noose. She sat down on the floor and crooned to Napoleon. She stroked his marmalade fur and tried to believe that love could resurrect. Napoleon lay inert in her arms. It cut her to the heart, the littleness of his body, in death.

  She stroked his fur and touched the beauties of his whiskers and his feet. After a long time, the wildness calmed and the tears stopped. She sat there and made herself a final promise: No one would stop her now, not after this.

  She was still sitting there, holding Napoleon, when Pascal’s taxicab drew up in the street. She did not hear the cab’s engine, or his footsteps on the sidewalk. She heard and saw nothing until he was in the room with her. Then she heard his closeness, and looked up. She saw his face change as he took in the stocking discarded on the floor and the bundle in her arms. He was angrier then than she had ever seen him, and she had a brief groping sensation of how formidable, in anger, he might be. Whoever made an enemy of Pascal made a mistake. Then his face became gentle, an extraordinary tenderness lit in his eyes. With a few low words, he bent, and gathered her close.

  He said, “My darling, don’t cry. We’ll find them, I promise you, whoever did this.”

  Chapter 25

  THEY BURIED NAPOLEON IN the small garden behind the house. The earth was soft from the rain, and the task easy enough. They worked in silence, side by side, and when it was over, Pascal said close to her ear, “Not here. Not here. Pack some clothes and come with me. We have three days left. It’s time to disappear.”

  The journey was long and circuitous, though the distance traveled was short. They went first to a small hotel in St. James’s, where Pascal was known and a double room had been booked. Pascal said the manager, an old contact of his, would ensure the room appeared to be occupied. Telephone calls would be made, and food sent up.

  “Our ghosts will occupy this room,” he said. “But we’ll be somewhere else. For a day, maybe two, this will help. Then, if necessary, we try something else.”

  They moved on, traveling by tube, bus, and taxi, setting off in one direction, then doubling back. When Pascal was satisfied they were not followed, he led them to their destination. It proved to be a small cottage in Hampstead, near the summit of the heath. It was situated in a maze of narrow, cobbled alleyways inaccessible by car. It had three entrances. Pascal’s motorbike was already parked in a shed to its rear.

  “I came here earlier and checked it,” he said. “It’s anonymous. It isn’t overlooked at front or back, and it has a number of other advantages, Gini. Look.”

  He led her inside, and Gini went from room to room with mounting astonishment. The house was well furnished and equipped. The bed was made up. There was several days’ food in the refrigerator. The day’s newspapers were neatly stacked in its small sitting room. All the windows had thick wooden interior shutters. The exterior doors were reinforced with steel plates.

  “Pascal,” she said. “Who lives here? What is this place?”

  “It’s a safe house—and no one lives here as such. It belongs to a contact of mine. Once upon a time, she owned the most celebrated brothel in France. Then there was a little misunderstanding about tax. She retired to London, and invested the remains of her fortune in property. She’s over seventy now. An extraordinary woman. She lets this place to former client
s of hers, people who need somewhere secure and private—and clean in the electronic sense.”

  “Are there many such people?”

  “Oh, yes. We can talk here, Gini. It has antielectronic surveillance equipment, and it’s regularly swept. It may not be one hundred percent secure, nowhere is, but it’s ninety-nine percent.”

  He drew her toward him and took her hand. Her face was white, and still tear-stained. There were little bits of twig and leaves in her hair; her hands were still muddy. He kissed her brow gently.

  “Now, listen, Gini,” he said. “Go upstairs. Unpack. Have a bath. No—do as I say. It will make you feel better. While you do that, I’ll make us something to eat. Then, later, when you feel stronger—we’ll go over all this, piece by piece. We’re close now, darling. I can feel it, I can sense it, it’s starting to make sense.”

  Gini drew back from him; she looked up at his face. “You know you said you asked Jenkins to take me off the story. Why?”

  Pascal smiled. “I didn’t know he’d already done so, obviously not.” His eyes met hers. “I don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to, Gini; not even him. I don’t trust him completely, I don’t trust anyone. Apart from you, of course.”

  “But you didn’t mean what you said to him—Pascal, you promise me that?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid for you, yes. I’ll protect us any way I can. I won’t let what happened to Lorna Munro happen to you—” He broke off. Gini’s expression had become fixed. He told her, then, exactly what had happened, and how swiftly it had happened.

  Gini gave a low cry. “We killed her, Pascal. We did that. We as good as wrote her death certificate.”