“God damn,” said Hurley softly through his teeth.
“You can forget any other methods too.”
“I’m not stupid!” Hurley snarled. “For Chrissake get her out of here!”
“Which one?” Le Blek enquired, straight-faced.
The moaning paramedic was carried out by two men, with no more ado than if they had entered to empty the wastepaper basket. I made a pad of my handkerchief to stem the bleeding from my arm.
“Did you ask him about her?” Hurley persisted, jerking a thumb in my direction.
“Listen to the damn tapes!” Le Blek said, voice rising. “The answer’s right under your nose. She writes. She goes with him sometimes as company when the job isn’t expected to get too close to the coalface. I imagine she’s been given a little basic tuition in self-defence in case there’s trouble. Why should she be lying about being pregnant?”
“According to —” Hurley started to say but I cut in, addressing Le Blek.
“We’ve been trying for ages,” I said, and such was the pain in my arm that my voice sounded strange in my own ears. After my burst of anger I felt weak and tired. I hadn’t had any sleep the previous night either.
“There’s no security clearance for them,” Hurley shouted. “For all we know they might be a plant by the bloody Communists to disrupt the frigate programme.”
Le Blek’s lip curled. “Oh sure. As soon as the first boat drops into the Saint John river Moscow waves the white flag. Do you really think,” he went on and it seemed to me that as his temper rose the less Canadian and the more Irish his accent became, “that the KGB employs a couple who are trying to start a family? Thought about seriously, would they be permitted to go all out for babies if they were working as a team?” He noticed the blood-stained handkerchief. “This is all the support you can get from me. Call a car and I’ll take them home.”
“The Mounties always get their man,” said Hurley in a dead quiet voice. “I can just picture you standing on a bloody mountain top dressed in your red jacket and fancy pants hollerin’ for Rose Marie.”
What happened next startled me greatly and woke Patrick. Quite cold-bloodedly Le Blek drew his gun from a shoulder holster and put three shots in the floor at Hurley’s feet. The result of this was Hurley going through the door at some speed, somehow preventing an armed inrush, and five minutes later Patrick, Le Blek and I were in a car and speeding down the drive, Le Blek driving as though all the fiends of hell were after him.
“I don’t give a damn if you’re the fairy on the KGB’s Christmas tree,” he said, choking with anger. “When you said you were pregnant back there, the fear of death was in your eyes.”
“Please slow down just a little,” I urged.
“Janice and I have been trying for fifteen years for kids,” he continued, but heeding the plea, “And that stupid bastard behaves as though everyone but Canadians are reds. It’s the brainwashing they give them. Trouble is, they forgot to give him his back after it went in the tub.”
“Will you get into trouble?”
After he had straightened the car when it had slewed round a sharp corner Le Blek glanced sideways at me. “I guess not. My boss calls the security boys hickory heads. Besides, the Major is my responsibility.”
“Then either slow down some more or give me a brown paper bag,” Patrick said weakly from the back seat.
Le Blek lifted his foot off the accelerator and switched off the ignition so that the vehicle rolled to a standstill. Then he got out, opened both rear doors and laid the pliant passenger on his side, ordering him to take deep breaths of fresh air. When Patrick felt better he closed the doors and opened the windows.
“Gets to you, doesn’t it?” Le Blek muttered. “They tried it out on me once during training.” He got back behind the wheel and twisted round with his arms on the back of the seat. “Is Daws someone important?”
Patrick swore fluently.
“It’s important that he stays unmentioned,” I said, wondering with a sinking feeling how much damage had been done by blowing Colonel Richard’s cover in Canada. Enough, probably.
Le Blek faced front again and re-started the engine. “That’s what I thought. I’m not convinced that a lot of stuff doesn’t get to the ears of the Yanks via the likes of Hurley just to show the CIA that they aren’t all horns and balls. That’s why I scrubbed the tapes.”
“But there were others present,” I said, refraining from hugging him.
“Only the medic and right then she was listening to someone give her orders over the radio.”
A few miles further on towards Port Charles we pulled into a lane that led to a group of houses, a new development set in a copse of white birch and beech trees. At the house nearest the road we stopped and two women came out into the garden. The youngest was Le Blek’s wife, Janice, surprised to see him home so early from work; the second his mother who looked as though nothing concerning her son would surprise her.
Patrick was beyond caring if the distaff side of Le Blek’s family assumed him to be inebriated. Once out of the car he leaned on a handy tree, still taking deep breaths. I went to him but was beaten by a short head by the elder Mrs. Le Blek. With bright blue eyes she gave Patrick a long, penetrating appraisal.
“Steve is a very bad driver,” she announced at last. “But to be sure you aren’t the type of person to make a fuss so it must be something else.”
“It is herself of the Irish,” murmured Patrick, kissing her hand. “So help me I’ve been felled not by his driving but the poteen he brews up in the garage. If you have another drop of the same …” He gave her a wan smile.
“I’ll get it,” Janice said, eyes on my makeshift bandage. “You all look as though you could do with some.”
In the end I had real English tea and drank it sitting on a seat in the garden. Patrick had by this time slid to the grass and was leaning on his tree, sipping from the Waterford crystal tumbler that had contained at least a triple of Irish whisky.
They left us alone in the sunlit garden.
“Come and sit over here,” I suggested after a while.
“You’ll have to provide a crane.”
Between the two of us, the tree and I got him to his feet and I steered him to where I had been sitting. There was a reason for moving him. I didn’t want him to fall asleep again outside. There are notes in Patrick’s file in red letters an inch high emphasising that under no circumstances is he to be given drugs during training or for any other reason. Since the Falklands and the resulting two years in and out of hospital, his constitution overreacts to alien substances.
Patrick broke the silence first. “Don’t blame Hurley too much.”
“Ladies don’t spit,” I said.
He took my hand.
“Ever get the notion we’ve been set up?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“What else can I say? If it is like that then I’m sure Daws doesn’t know.”
“Despite the fact that there’s supposed to be co-operation, Six didn’t clear the way for us. Hurley said so and the way he worded that to me suggested that people have been checking. You’re always so sure of Daws but we didn’t ask. Aren’t we supposed to be grown up now and think for ourselves?”
“No, no and yes,” Patrick replied absently, lifting the stained handkerchief from my arm. “How did this happen?”
I told him, not giving the real reason for my resistance.
“Ingrid one, paramedic nil,” he said. “They waited until I nodded off before giving me the works. I must be losing my grip.”
Some time later Janice took us both indoors where we showered and rested and then were invited to sit down to dinner. Through the window the sun was setting in a magnificent sky of orange, pale pink, translucent aquamarine and blue, tiny clouds looking as though they were floating on a lake of colour. In the garden crickets zithered frenziedly.
“Wishing you’d never come to Canada?” enquired
Le Blek, but his wife silenced him with a look and asked Patrick to say grace. Clearly, there had been some feed-back.
*
“Red herrings everywhere,” Patrick said suddenly, getting into bed that night.
Le Blek had driven us back to Ravenscliff where we had met several local newspaper reporters, and found a large pile of cash in coins and notes that Terry had tipped into an antique chamber pot. Patrick’s winnings.
“I think I’m going out of my mind,” I said. “Everything’s either black tragedy or pure farce. One minute the third degree the next a pot full of money.”
“Blood money at that.”
“You mustn’t —” I said, and then stopped for he was smiling at me, untroubled. No, the killing of two armed thugs holding your wife hostage was not murder.
“Your father could find a use for it,” I said lightly. “Organ fund, dry rot, rising damp.”
“I’ll have to see what else I can get up to,” Patrick interrupted. And he lay down on the bed and laughed, slightly hysterically, winding down like a clock. “Oh God,” he muttered. “Am I going mad too?”
I sat on the bed with him. “Patrick, do Five check up on Six?”
We had said nothing of what had transpired, not even to Terry. As far as he was concerned it was unnecessary. Anyone with service insight looking at Patrick could see that he had been drugged. I was fairly certain that he had been given a shot of LSD as well to hurry the process.
“What did you say? Hell, Ingrid, am I really as high as a kite?”
“I was just thinking the same,” I told him. “Yes, and I asked you if Five check up on Six, to try to bring you down to earth.”
He frowned ferociously, thinking. “No, not really. You know our Richard. If he got even a sniff of a rumour he’d be on to it. But you can say what you like — if he had had suspicions he would have warned us. My bet is that it’s nothing more than incompetence — someone in Six overlooked getting us cleared.”
“Here’s another red herring for you then,” I said, and told him what Carol had related to me the previous evening.
“Sherlock Holmes where are you?” Patrick said with feeling when I’d finished. “According to the boffin it was shellfish poisoning but the report was very vague in places. I’m not keen on questioning Margaret Howard until we get more from Daws on her East German boyfriend. Now I’ve a red herring for you — when I went down to the airport to check on Fraser’s plane, I discovered that he’d had a three-hour wait in Halifax to get the Port Charles connection. But he could just as easily have got off a plane from Montreal that arrived an hour after the one he was supposed to have come on from Heathrow.”
“Was his name on the passenger list?”
“Not on either — but he could have been travelling under another name for security reasons. I intend to ask him.”
“You keep coming back to Fraser. Does your funny feeling tell you he’s in the pay of the Russians and that he’s going to ruin his own firm and kill people to achieve it? If so he’s hating every minute of the job.”
“Not so fast,” Patrick admonished. “Here we have a man who wouldn’t bat an eyelid at seeking out the likes of Bryce Gaspereau, who would be more than familiar with the expression bloody pongo, and could have slit Lanny’s throat with no more qualms than swatting a bluebottle. The really important bit of evidence is that Fraser drinks Oland’s Schooner beer and drops the ringpulls into the empties — like the ones in the bus. I’d put money on him killing Lanny.”
“But that means that the threatening letter was a fake.”
“Not at all. But he could have received another one as well with instructions to hand over only the first to the police. It’s possible that he’s under appalling personal pressure. Do we know if he has a family? Have they been kidnapped? Anything might have happened.”
“It’s mayhem,” I said. “MI5 are being made a laughing stock because people are being done away with under our noses. DARE’s being put out of business and that means the Trident programme will suffer.”
“Not to mention the Canadian frigate programme and a new patrol boat for the Dutch Navy that DARE have just won a design contract for.”
It seemed far too complicated for three people to sort out. I said, “We ought to include Terry in this discussion.”
“But almost more important in my view,” Patrick went on as though I hadn’t spoken, “is that it might destroy D12 as well. We’ve built up too good a reputation over the past months for Moscow to be happy.”
“So what do we do?” I asked, repeating the question because he had closed his eyes and there was no response. “I’m not asleep — I’m thinking.”
“Perhaps Fraser hadn’t cut a man’s throat before,” I said, half to myself. And shuddered.
A full minute went by before Patrick said anything. “Despite what Mark thinks I never have either. It’s messy, melodramatic and only indulged in by those ignorant of tidier methods.”
He didn’t know it but he wasn’t telling me anything new.
“How’s your arm?”
“It throbs a bit.”
“Did you really floor that clone of Stalin’s mother?”
“Two of them carried her out,” I told him.
“I had a dream that you said you were pregnant.”
I experienced a kind of weird glow all over. “You’re using your methods on me, Major Patrick. First the soft approach and then slam in with the big question. You weren’t asleep in the car.”
“I haven’t been able to think of anything else,” he whispered.
“According to a testing kit,” I said, trying to control the wobble in my voice.
“And fainting all over the place and behaving as though you were moon-struck,” he added, and enveloped me with his long arms and kissed me until my bones turned to water. Nineteen forty-seven was a very good vintage for kisses.
“I’ll get Fraser in a corner and ask him,” said Patrick after a while when we were in bed, not making love, just smoochily hugging. “Take him out crow shooting in the boondocks — get him on his own.”
“Make sure he doesn’t kill another raven,” I said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I murmured, nibbling his ear.
Chapter 16
Despite all the tension and unpleasantness, DARE continued to work doggedly at their Machinery Control Functional Design Document, or McFUDD, putting in long hours of overtime, every Saturday and most of Sunday, with Terry roped in to file, sort, fetch and carry. The McFUDD was the second paper to be produced by the team. The first, the Machinery System Operational Design Document, quaintly referred to as M.SODD, had been presented to Nasonworth very soon after their arrival in Canada, some of the work having been done in England.
These facts were provided by McAlister at a meeting called the following morning, Sunday 18th May, with a view to tightening security even further. He then disquieteningly spoke of deadlines.
“Oh, yes — the first of June,” Drew said in response to Patrick’s query. “I’m sorry, should I have mentioned it before?”
“Someone should,” Patrick said, glancing up as Fraser entered. “Will you meet it?”
McAlister politely gave us his chair at the head of the table for Fraser to sit down but found himself still spokesman. “Er — we should do. There’s nothing to make me think otherwise. Paul’s doing the really difficult stuff and Chris is helping him where necessary.” He looked at Fraser as if hoping that he would verily what he had said but Fraser was filling his pipe, in a brown study.
“Are you going in today?” Patrick asked him.
The pipe was lit and drawing satisfactorily before Fraser replied. “After lunch. There’s no need for anyone else to come. Paul’s staying in bed — he’s tired out.”
“Only your minder,” said Terry.
“If you insist,” Fraser replied without emotion.
Patrick then outlined his new proposals: that in future he would travel with th
em to work and spend the day in the near vicinity, invisibly, adding to the security cover, then make his own way home, probably in a taxi, to the rear of their vehicle. On occasions where the team were split up, as they would be that afternoon, those remaining at home were to stay indoors.
“It’s like prison,” said Margaret Howard, making her first contribution to the discussion.
“Let me know where you did time,” Patrick said shortly, turning to speak to Terry. “On second thoughts, I’ll go in with Chris — you have the afternoon off.”
“If you say so, sir,” replied Terry bleakly, going down with guns still blazing.
There had been a short, fierce encounter between him and his commander over the latter’s plans to take Fraser into the forest, hunting. In the end Patrick had been forced to pull rank on him, something he loathes doing.
“I don’t intend to turn my back on him,” Patrick had said into an unhelpful silence. “Ingrid will be two minutes behind us with the homing device sounding loud and clear.”
Terry had glowered.
“You haven’t fully recovered from that slug you took in the shoulder last year,” Patrick had continued winningly. “Just because you managed to take a chunk out of Hartland’s door frame it doesn’t mean that you’re fast enough against a bloke armed with a hunting rifle.”
Now it seemed that the plan had changed. Fraser was about to be abducted instead.
It was with a sense of mild foreboding that I changed after lunch into jeans and sweater, packed several small indispensable items about my person, found my light waterproof anorak and went downstairs. Foreboding was accompanied by a feeling of unreality. The sun shone, birds sang, leaves were bursting from buds on the trees — and I was about to be a party to taking away a man against his will and interrogating him about murder.
Death of a Raven Page 14
