Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover)(1980)

by Jack Higgins

  Stewart appeared with tea in two paper cups. 'Cheer up, sir. We'll get the bastard.'

  'Not if it's who I think it is,' Harry Baker told him.

  At that moment, John Mikali walked back on stage to take another standing ovation. He exited down the gangway known to the artists as the Bullrun. The stage manager was waiting there and handed him a towel. Mikali wiped sweat from his face.

  'That's it,' he said. 'If they want any more, they'll have to buy tickets for Tuesday.'

  His voice was attractive, full of its own character, what some people would call good Boston American, and matched the lazy charm he could switch on instantly when required.

  'Most of them already have, Mr Mikali.' The manager smiled. 'The champagne's waiting in your dressing room. Any visitors?'

  'Nothing under twenty-one, George.' Mikali smiled. 'I've had a very young week.'

  In the Green Room he stripped off his tailcoat and shirt and pulled on a towelling robe. Then he switched on the portable radio on the dressing table and reached for the champagne bottle, Krug, non-vintage. He put a little crushed ice in the bottom of the glass and filled it.

  As he savoured the first, delicious, ice-cold mouthful, the music on the radio was interrupted for a newsflash. Mr Maxwell Cohen, victim of an unknown assassin earlier that evening, had been operated on successfully. He was now in intensive care under heavy police guard. There was every prospect that he would make a full recovery.

  Foreign news sources reported that responsibility for the attack had been claimed by Black September, Al Fatah's vengeance group, formed during 1971 to eliminate all enemies of the Palestine revolution. They gave, as their excuse, Maxwell Cohen's considerable support for Zionism.

  Mikali closed his eyes momentarily, was aware of the burning truck, the four fellagha walking round, drifting towards him, the smile on the face of the leader, the one with the knife in his hand. And then the image changed to the tunnel darkness, the white, terrified face of the girl, briefly glimpsed.

  He opened his eyes, switched off the radio and toasted himself in the glass. 'Less than perfection, old buddy, Less than perfection and that won't do at all.'

  There was a knock at the door. When he opened it the corridor seemed crowded with young women, mainly students to judge by their university scarves.

  'Can we come in, Mr Mikali?'

  'Why not?' John Mikali smiled, the insolent charm firmly back in place. 'All life is here with the great Mikali. Enter and beware.'

  Baker stood in the foyer of the mortuary with Francis Wood. There was nothing particularly clerical-looking about him. Baker judged him to be about sixty, a tall, kindly man with a greying beard that badly needed trimming. He wore a dark car coat and a blue polo-neck sweater.

  'Your wife, sir?' Baker nodded to where Helen Wood stood at the door talking to Mrs Carter. 'She's taking all this remarkably well.'

  'A lady of considerable character, Superintendent. She paints, you know. Water colours mostly. She had quite a reputation, under her previous name.'

  'Morgan, sir? Yes, I was wondering about that. Mrs Wood was widowed, I presume?'

  'No, Superintendent - divorced.' Francis Wood smiled faintly. 'That would surprise you, the Church of England holding the views it does. The explanation is simple enough. To use an old-fashioned term, I happen to have private means. I can afford to steer my own boat. There was a gap of a year or two when we first got married when I was out of a job and then my present bishop wrote to me about Steeple Durham. Hardly the hub of the universe, but the people there had been without a rector for six years and were willing to have me. And my bishop, I might add, is a man of notoriously liberal views.'

  'And the child's father? Where could we contact him? He'll need to be notified.'

  Before Wood could answer, Mrs Carter left and his wife turned and came towards them. She was thirty-seven, Baker knew that from the information supplied by Stewart, and looked ten years younger. She had ash blonde hair tied at the nape of her neck, pulled back from a face of extraordinary beauty and the calmest eyes he had ever seen in his life. She wore an old military trenchcoat which had once carried a captain's three pips in the epaulets, his policeman's sharp eyes noticed the holes.

  'I'm sorry to have to ask you this, but it's time for formal identification, Mrs Wood.'

  'If you'd be good enough to lead the way, Superintendent,' she said in a low, sweet voice.

  Doctor Evans, the pathologist, waited in the postmortem room, flanked by two male technicians, already wearing white overalls and boots and long pale-green rubber gloves.

  The room was lit by fluorescent lighting so bright that it hurt the eyes and there was a row of half a dozen stainless-steel operating tables.

  The child lay on her back on the one nearest the door, covered by a white sheet, her head raised on a wooden block. Helen Wood and her husband approached, followed by Baker and Stewart.

  Baker said, 'This isn't going to be nice, Mrs Wood, but it has to be done.'

  'Please,' she said.

  He nodded to Evans who raised the sheet, exposing the head only. The girl's eyes were closed, the face unmarked, but the rest of the head was bound in a white rubber hood.

  'Yes,' Helen Wood whispered. 'That's Megan.'

  Evans covered the face again and Baker said, 'Right, we can go.'

  'What happens now?' she said. 'To her?'

  It was Francis Wood who said, 'There has to be an autopsy, my dear. That's the law. To establish legal cause of death for the coroner's inquest.'

  'I want to stay,' she said.

  It was Baker who by some instinct got it exactly right. 'Hang around here if you want to, but within five minutes, you'll think you're in a butcher's shop. I don't think you'd want to remember her like that.'

  It was brutal, it was direct and it worked so that she broke at once, falling against Wood, half-fainting; Stewart ran to help him. Together, they got her from the room.

  Baker turned to Evans and saw only pity on his face. 'Yes, I know, Doc. A hell of a way to make a living.'

  He walked out. Evans turned and nodded. One of the technicians switched on a tape recorder, the other removed the sheet from the dead girl's body.

  Evans started to speak in a dry unemotional voice. 'Time, eleven-fifteen p.m. July twenty-first, nineteen seventy-two. Pathologist in charge, Mervyn Evans, senior lecturer in forensic pathology, University of London Medical School. Subject, female, age fourteen years one month. Megan Helen Morgan. Died approximately seven-fifteen p.m. this date, as a result of a hit and run driving accident.'

  He nodded and one of the technicians pulled back the rubber skull cap, revealing immediate evidence of massive cranial fracture.

  Continuing to speak in that same precise voice, detailing every move he made, Evans reached for a scalpel and drew it around the skull.

  Francis Wood came in through the swing doors and found Baker and Stewart waiting in the foyer.

  'She'll be all right now. She's in the car.'

  'What will you do, sir? Go to an hotel?'

  'No, she wants to go home.'

  'A tricky drive at this time of night on those Essex country roads.'

  'I was a padre with the Royal Artillery in Korea in the winter of nineteen-fifty, when a million Chinese came out of Manchuria and chased us south again. I drove a Bedford truck through heavy snow for four hundred miles and they were never very far behind. We were short on drivers, you see.'

  'A hell of a way to take your advanced driver's course,' Baker commented.

  'One interesting aspect of life, Superintendent, is that some experiences are so terrible, anything that comes after seems like a bonus.'

  They were talking for the sake of it now and they both knew it. Baker said, 'Just one thing, sir, I've had a phone call from my superiors. It would seem that for security reasons, no direct link will be made publicly between your daughter's death and the Cohen affair. I hope you and your wife can accept that.'

  'Frankly, Superintendent
, I think you'll find that my wife would infinitely prefer this terrible business to be handled as quietly as possible.'

  He turned towards the door, then paused. 'But we were forgetting. You asked me about Megan's father.'

  'That's right, sir. Where can we contact him?' Baker nodded and Stewart got out his notebook.

  'Rather difficult, I'm afraid. He's out of the country.'

  'Abroad, sir?'

  'It depends entirely on your point of view. Belfast, Superintendent, that's where he is at the moment. Colonel Asa Morgan, the Parachute Regiment. The right department of the Ministry of Defence would be able to help you contact him, I suppose, but you'd know far more about that than me.'

  'Yes, sir, leave it to us.'

  'I'll say good night then.'

  The door swung behind him. Stewart said, 'Colonel Asa Morgan, Parachute Regiment. You know something, sir, I shouldn't think he'll be too pleased when he hears about this, a man like that.'

  'And that's the understatement of the bloody age,' Baker said violently.

  'You know him, sir?'

  'Yes, Inspector. You could say that.'

  Baker made straight for the porter's office, phoned Scotland Yard and asked to be put through to Assistant Commissioner Joe Harvey, Head of the Special Branch, whom, he knew, had already installed himself there for the night with a camp bed in his office.

  'Harry Baker here, sir,' he said when Harvey answered. 'I'm at the mortuary. The girl whom our friend ran down in the Paddington tunnel while making his escape - her mother's just left after making a formal identification. A Mrs Helen Wood.'

  'I thought the kid's name was Morgan?'

  'Her mother's divorced, sir. Remarried to a vicar, of all things.' Baker hesitated. 'Look, sir, you're not going to like this one little bit. Her father...'

  He hesitated again. Harvey said, 'Spit it out, Harry, for Christ's sake.'

  'Is Asa Morgan.'

  'There was a moment of silence then Harvey said, Dear God in heaven, that's all we needed.'

  'Last I heard he was in Trucial Oman with the Special Air Service. Know what they are, George?'

  Baker was standing at the window of his office. It was a little after midnight and rain drummed against the glass.

  Stewart passed him a cup of tea. 'Can't say I do, sir.'

  'What the military refer to as an elite unit. The army likes to keep as quiet about this one as they possibly can. Any serving soldier can volunteer. A three-year tour is the rule, I believe.'

  'And what exactly do they do?'

  'Anything too rough for anyone else to handle. The nearest thing to the SS we've got in the British Army. At the moment, they're in Oman on loan to the Sultan, knocking merry hell out of his Marxist rebels in the mountains. They also served in Malaya during the Emergency. That's where I first came across them.'

  'I didn't know you were out there, sir.'

  'On secondment. They weren't doing too well with the Chinese Communist underground so they decided to see if some real coppers could help. That's where I met Morgan.'

  'What about him, sir?' Stewart asked. 'What's so special?'

  'The right word you've chosen, that's for sure.' Baker filled his pipe slowly. 'He must be damn near fifty now, Asa. A Welsh miner's son from the Rhondda. I don't know what happened to him earlier in the war, but I know he was one of those poor sods they dropped in at Arnhem. He was a sergeant then. Got a field commission as a second lieutenant afterwards.'

  'Then what?'

  'Palestine. His first taste of urban guerrillas, he used to say. Then he was seconded to the Ulster Rifles when they went to Korea. Captured by the Chinese. They had him for a year, those bastards. I know some people thought all that brainwashing stuff they used on our lads out there had really gone to his head.'

  'What do you mean, sir?'

  'When he came back, he wrote this treatise about what he called a new concept of revolutionary warfare. Kept quoting Mao Tse-tung as if he was the Bible. I suppose the General Staff decided he'd either turned Communist or knew what he was talking about, so they sent him to Malaya which is where I met him. We worked together for quite a time.'

  'Did you do any good?'

  'We won, didn't we? The only Communist insurrection since the Second World War to be successfully crushed, was Malaya.'

  'I saw him again for a while in Nicosia during the Cyprus thing when I was seconded out there on the same sort of deal. Come to think of it, he'd just got married before leaving the UK, I remember that now, so the kid's age would fit. I remember hearing he was in Aden in nineteen sixty-seven because he got a DSO for saving the necks of a bunch of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who got ambushed in the Crater district.'

  'He sounds quite a man.'

  'Oh, yes, you could say that. The original soldier monk. The Army's everything to him. Family and home rolled into one. I'm not surprised his wife left him.'

  'I wonder what he'll do, sir, when he hears about his daughter.'

  'God knows, George, but I can imagine.'

  The wind rattled the window and, outside, rain drifted across the rooftops from the Thames.

  3

  But in Belfast that day, extraordinary things had been happening also. A day that was to go down in the history of the war in Ulster as Bloody Friday.

  The first bomb exploded at two-ten p.m. at Smithfield Bus Station, the last at three-fifteen at the Cavehill Road Shopping Centre.

  Twenty-two bombs in all, in locations scattered all over the city, usually where people might be expected to be present in large numbers. Protestant or Catholic, it made no difference. By the end of the day nine people were dead and a hundred and thirty injured.

  At midnight, the army was still out in force. No less than twelve of the bombs which had exploded that day were in the New Lodge Road area which was the responsibility of 40 Commando, Royal Marines.

  In a side street littered with glass and rubble, off the New Lodge Road itself, a dozen marines crouched against a wall opposite what had once been Cohan's Select Bar, which was burning fiercely. Two officers stood casually in the middle of the street surveying the scene. One was a Marine lieutenant. The other wore a paratrooper's red beret and a camouflage uniform, open at the neck, no badges of rank in evidence and no flak jacket.

  He had the dark, ravaged face of a man who had got to know the world he inhabited too well and now only had contempt for it. A small, dark man with good shoulders, full of a restless vitality which was somehow accentuated by the bamboo swagger stick he tapped against his right knee.

  'Who's the para?' one marine whispered to another.

  'Runs Special Section at Staff - Colonel Morgan. A right bastard, so I've heard,' the man next to him replied.

  On the flat roof of a block of flats seventy-five yards away, two men crouched by the parapet. One of them was Liam O'Hagan, at that time chief intelligence officer for the Provisional IRA in Ulster. He was examining the scene outside Cohan's Bar with the aid of a pair of Zeiss night glasses.

  The young man at his side carried a conventional .303 Lee Enfield rifle of the type much favoured by both British Army and IRA snipers. It had an infrared image intensifier fitted to it so that he could search out a target in the dark.

  He squinted through it now as he leaned the barrel on the parapet. 'I'll take the bloody paratrooper, first.'

  'No you won't,' O'Hagan told him softly.

  'And why not?'

  'Because I say so.'

  A Land-Rover swept round the corner below, followed by another very close behind. They had been stripped to the bare essentials so that the driver, and three soldiers who crouched in the rear of each vehicle behind him, were completely exposed. They were paratroopers, efficient, tough-looking young men in red berets and flak jackets, their Sterling submachine-guns ready for instant action.

  'Would you look at that now. Just asking to be chopped down, the dumb bastards. You'll not be telling me I can't have a crack at one of them?'

  'It wo
uld be your last,' O'Hagan told him. 'They know exactly what they're doing. They perfected that open display technique in Aden. The crew of each vehicle looks after the other. Without armour plating to get in the way they can return fire instantly.'

  'Bloody SS,' the boy said.

  O'Hagan chuckled. 'A hell of a thing to say to a man who once held the King's commission.'

  Down below, Asa Morgan climbed in beside the driver of the first Land-Rover and the two vehicles moved away.

  The Marine lieutenant gave an order and the section stood up and moved out. The street was silent now, only the flames still burning fiercely in Cohan's Bar, the occasional explosion of a bottle inside as the heat got to it.

  'Mother of God, what a waste of good whiskey,' Liam O'Hagan said. 'Ah, well, the day will come, or so my Socialist Democratic comrades tell me, when not only will Ireland be free and united again, but with whiskey on tap like water in every decent man's house.'

  He grinned and slapped the boy on the shoulder. 'And now, Seumas, my boy, I think we should get the hell out of here.'

  Morgan stood by the desk in the OC's office at the Grand Central Hotel in Royal Avenue, the base for the city centre regiment and billet for five hundred soldiers.

  He stared down at the signal in his hand blankly and the young staff officer who had brought it from HQ, shuffled uncomfortably.

  'The GOC has asked me to offer his sincere condolences. A terrible business. He's authorized your onward transportation to London by first available flight.'

  Morgan frowned. 'That's very kind of him. But what about Operation Motorman?'

  'Your duties will be assigned to someone else, Colonel. Orders from the Minister of Defence.'

  'Then I'd better start packing.'

  Somewhere in the distance there was the dull crump of an explosion and the rattle of machine-gun fire. The young officer started in alarm.