Heaven's Light

by Hurley, Graham

  Chapter Seven

  Liz Barnaby was half-way to Winchester in the Mercedes when the phone rang. She reached for the radio console and turned down the morning edition of Woman’s Hour. The voice on the phone was all too familiar.

  ‘Dad? It’s me, Jess.’

  Liz swerved to avoid a big puddle by the side of the road, wondering what a young child was doing in Merrist House. She could hear it quite clearly in the background, howling.

  ‘Jessie?’

  Jessie was talking to someone else now. A door slammed. Then she was back again. The howling had stopped.

  ‘Mum? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s gone to Singapore.’

  ‘Oh …’

  Liz touched the brakes as she approached a queue of traffic dawdling along behind a tractor. Jessie usually called from Merrist in the evening. Evidently it was difficult getting to the phone during the day.

  ‘Got the morning off, Jess? How’s it going?’

  There was another silence and Liz thought the connection had gone funny. Then Jess was on the line again, telling her that things had been difficult. Her best friend, Lolly, was in trouble. She was worried sick about her little girl. In the end there’d been no other solution.

  Liz was in third gear now, tucked in behind a big milk lorry. It began to dawn on her that something had happened. Something serious.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘What’s been going on?’

  She heard Jessie laughing. She said there was nothing to worry about. She was up in Guildford, looking after Lolly and Candelle. She had a little money saved and Lolly had borrowed forty quid from a friend round the corner. Everything was working out fine.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Liz saw a lay-by approaching and signalled left, pulling the Mercedes out of the traffic stream.

  Jessie was telling her about Candelle, Lolly’s little girl. She was supposed to be in care but the social workers had brought her round for the morning. She was a real dreamboat. She had blonde ringlets and little dimples that matched Lolly’s almost exactly. No wonder Lolly had been in such a state.

  Liz cut in, her voice icier than she’d intended. ‘Are you on leave? Have they given you a pass or something?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people at Merrist. The drug people.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Jessie was laughing again. ‘Once you’ve split, that’s it. There’s no way back. Ever.’

  Liz stared at the long ribbon of road. The queue of traffic behind the tractor was a blur in the distance.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘Shit, shit.’

  ‘Mum?’

  Liz looked at her watch, making a series of rapid calculations. ‘I can’t believe this,’ she said aloud. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. After six weeks? When it’s gone so well? And you just give it all up?’

  ‘It’s no problem, Mum. I’m better, I promise.’

  ‘You said that before.’

  ‘I know. It’s different this time.’

  ‘You said that, too.’ Liz checked the rear-view mirror and restarted the engine. ‘So are you coming home or what?’

  Jessie said that was impossible. It wouldn’t work and it wouldn’t be fair. Then she started talking about Lolly again. She needed support, she needed looking after. The pair of them would be up in Guildford for as long as it took. Liz shut her eyes, squeezing hard until red blobs swam out of the darkness. It was something she did involuntarily, in moments of great crisis.

  ‘Do you have an address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I have it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Liz reached for a petrol receipt and scribbled the address on the back. Nine months of living with a junkie told her it was probably false.

  ‘And what about Haagen?’ she said thickly. ‘Where does he come into all this?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Haagen. Your German friend.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Jessie sounded vague, as if she’d misplaced a half-forgotten card from her filing index. ‘He’s tried to get in touch but I haven’t had time to do anything about it.’

  ‘Am I supposed to believe that?’

  ‘Mum…’ Jessie sounded reproachful, and Liz found herself on the edge of an apology. Maybe she was being too harsh. Maybe the people at Merrist really had worked a miracle.

  Jessie was talking about Charlie Epple. She wanted his home telephone number.

  ‘Why?’ Liz said at once.

  ‘He’s been very sweet. He sent me some money.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I think he’d even have come down to see me except it wasn’t allowed.’

  Liz slipped the Mercedes into gear and began to inch forward, struck by a sudden idea. She’d seen the place in Old Portsmouth that Charlie was buying. It was far too big for a single man and there was plenty of room for Jess. Better still, it was just round the corner, no more than a couple of minutes’ walk, and if Jess wouldn’t live at home then it was definitely the next best thing.

  ‘Do you want me to get in touch with Charlie?’ she suggested, rather too quickly. ‘Tell him you’re better?’

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  ‘You’ll ring again?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you’ll…’ Liz was unable to finish the sentence. She knew nothing about this new friend of Jessie’s except the obvious. She, too, had been in Merrist House so she, too, had presumably been a junkie. In the background, Liz heard a door opening and a child’s voice. She checked the road behind her, and pulled the Mercedes into a savage U-turn. Whatever it took, she had to get Jessie back to Portsmouth before this new-found independence landed her in yet more trouble.

  ‘Mum?’ Jessie was back on the phone. She was talking about Haagen again. She said he’d written her a couple of sweet letters. To be honest, she felt guilty not writing back. Had Liz seen him around? Had he phoned at all?

  Liz eyed the speedometer. The bends were on the tight side for eighty miles an hour. ‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘Someone told me he’s gone back to Germany.’

  Louise Carlton didn’t bother to queue for the shuttle minibus over to the Home Office but took a taxi instead. The interdepartmental meeting was scheduled to start promptly at eleven and there were limits, she told herself, to the current obsession with cutting costs.

  The traffic was surprisingly light and the cab dropped her outside Queen Anne’s Gate with ten minutes to spare. En route to the conference room on the fourth floor, she shared a lift with two of the New Scotland Yard people and they spent half a minute or so exchanging small-talk about the morning’s headlines. There were City rumours about a big financial scandal in Singapore. Someone from a UK bank had been taking crazy positions on the Tokyo stock market and the fall-out was substantial.

  The lift door opened and Louise led the way along the corridor to the room at the end. The deputy permanent secretary was already sitting at the head of the long table, his papers carefully arranged in front of him. Although the Home Secretary, technically, had ordered the F4 division of his police department to convene the meeting, Louise knew that the real concern had come from the civil servants. The interdepartmental turf wars were getting out of hand. MI5 designs on areas of traditional policing were increasingly blatant. Something had to be resolved before the squabbling in the nursery woke the grown-ups.

  Five minutes later the meeting started. Louise was part of a three-strong delegation from MI5 and she sat in silence for nearly an hour, listening to the heavyweights slugging it out. The Assistant Commissioner from the Yard was obdurate about the precise limits of police responsibility. Clean-up rates, he grimly reminded the meeting, depended essentially on secure convictions. And convictions, in turn, were the consequence of evidence. Without evidence, properly gathered and fully admissible in court, there would be no prospect of bringing a single investigation to a successful conclusion. So where did that leave the shadowy c
iphers from MI5? Men and women who couldn’t appear in court without the shield of a curtain and an alias?

  He looked around, tabling the question, registering his own antipathy with an indifferent shrug. The law was the law. The police were the proper agency to enforce it. The gentlemen from Thames House, while a useful source of background intelligence, surely had wars of their own to fight.

  The Assistant Commissioner’s sidekick stirred. Mickey Allder was a tiny florid man with a reputation for a short fuse. One of his hands-on responsibilities was the Met’s substantial Special Branch, six hundred strong. He would, he said acidly, value a little practical guidance. His men were operating in the dark. They’d always acted as the front office for MI5, assuming cooperation at every level, but on more and more operations they were bumping into bodies from Thames House who had neither right nor reason to be there. Lately, it had got beyond a joke. People had given up talking to each other. Was this really the way to run the forces of law and order in a so-called modern democracy?

  The deputy permanent secretary looked pained. ‘Examples?’ he murmured.

  Allder had been expecting that and he turned, at once, on Louise. He knew very well that she headed F7, the task force responsible for monitoring fringe political groups. Indeed, she and his Special Branch co-ordinator often pooled intelligence but this partnership depended on a degree of trust on both sides. So what role was she playing in the current National Front operation? He leaned forward, shadowing his blotter, spelling out the detail. Five had got a blanket intercept order on a number of NF phone lines. On the face of it they’d been scrupulous about sharing the intelligence yield. They’d read the ministerial edicts about collaboration in the interests of efficiency and justice and they were insisting that they had no other agenda. Yet day by day he was seeing reports from around the country that indicated something very different on the ground.

  Louise abandoned her doodles and looked up. She liked declarations of war. They gave life a certain edge.

  ‘Meaning?’ She smiled at him.

  ‘Meaning you’re putting bodies into play. Quite needlessly.’

  ‘Duplicating effort?’

  ‘Getting in our way.’

  ‘How? Where?’

  The little policeman leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. On the south coast he’d come across a prime example. Young German lad. A name that cropped up time and again in the telephone transcripts.

  ‘Haagen Schreck?’ Louise had seen it coming.

  ‘Yes. You’re denying an interest?’

  ‘On the contrary.’

  ‘You know we’re already watching him?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Then why are you bothering?’

  Louise offered Allder a motherly smile. She was about to describe the security considerations that made Haagen Schreck a legitimate MI5 target when the deputy permanent secretary intervened. ‘This is operational,’ he said pointedly, glancing at his watch. ‘Let’s keep to the big picture.’ He looked down the table at Louise. ‘I suggest you two get together this afternoon. Might that be fruitful?’

  Louise was still watching Allder. Denied a full-blown row, he was scribbling furiously on the pad at his elbow. At length, he looked up.

  ‘Delighted,’ he snapped.

  Liz Barnaby was back in Portsmouth before midday. She drove through the centre of the city, following the swirl of traffic around the new one-way system. In Southsea she parked on the double yellow line outside Haagen’s basement flat. She picked up her bag and locked the car. She could hear music coming from Haagen’s flat and knew he had to be in.

  He answered her second knock. The scar on his face that she’d glimpsed a couple of days earlier looked infinitely worse close up, a livid welt of tissue that sliced down across his cheek.

  ‘It’s you.’ He stepped back. ‘Come in.’

  Nonplussed by his matter-of-factness, Liz did as she was told, bracing herself for the stench. The last time she’d been here, rescuing Jessie’s pathetic bundle of belongings, the place had been a tip. Now, to her astonishment, there was a pleasant smell of fresh flowers. She followed Haagen into the big room at the front. A proper table stood in the bay window, covered with a heavy chenille drape. Beside a chessboard and a pile of books was a glass bowl full of fruit. She looked round. In front of the hissing gas fire were two leather-bound armchairs, a little scuffed but otherwise well preserved, and between them stood a low wooden table, piled high with yet more books. The flowers were on the mantelpiece, a bunch of fresh-looking freesias in a fluted china vase. The only reminder of the old Haagen was Oz, his beloved bull terrier, sprawled in front of the fire, asleep.

  Haagen was waving her into one of the armchairs. Did she want tea? Coffee? Liz loosened the silk scarf at her neck. For a hideous moment she wondered whether Jessie might already be back here, out in the kitchen maybe, but then she remembered the call on the car phone, and the child yelling in the background, and dismissed the thought. Not even Jessie could be that devious.

  Haagen was looking at her, amused. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘To drink?’

  Liz shook her head, desperate now to regain the initiative. She’d come with one intention only and she wasn’t leaving without the answer she needed. ‘I want to make you an offer,’ she said brusquely. ‘Give you a present, if you like. Only there are strings.’

  Haagen sank into one of the armchairs, gesturing at the other, but Liz ignored the invitation. To sit down would be to accept his hospitality. The last thing she needed was any form of indebtedness.

  ‘I have a cheque for a thousand pounds.’ She touched her bag. ‘It’s yours on one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You leave the country.’

  At first, Liz thought Haagen was going to laugh. Instead, he leaned back, the armchair swallowing his slight frame.

  ‘Why should I do that?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Because I want you out of my daughter’s life.’

  Haagen took off his glasses and began to polish them. For the first time, Liz saw the fan of typescript at his feet, pages and pages of it.

  ‘What makes you think there’s anything between us?’

  ‘You’re telling me there isn’t?’

  ‘No, I’m asking you why you think that way. She’s not around any more. She’s getting herself straightened out. Good decision. Very wise move.’

  Liz was taken aback. This was a new Haagen, not at all the cocky young thug she’d met last year.

  ‘You’ve been writing her letters,’ Liz said carefully.

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Liz nodded. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  Haagen didn’t reply but got up and left the room. Next door, from the kitchen, Liz heard the clatter of cups. When he returned, he was carrying a small wooden tray. Against her better judgement, Liz at last sat down and accepted a cup of tea.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  Haagen was tidying the typescript into a pile. The dog had woken up and was nosing wetly around Liz’s ankles.

  ‘A thousand’s not enough,’ he said. ‘And I need to know about the rest of it.’

  ‘Rest of it?’

  ‘These strings of yours.’ He pointed at her bag beside the armchair. ‘What exactly am I supposed to do?’

  Liz took a deep breath. She’d worked out most of it on the drive back. The rest she’d make up as she went along.

  ‘I’d lodge the money at a travel agency. They’d give you a ticket home and the balance in currency. I’d want you to promise me you’d stay away for at least a year.’

  ‘You want me to sign something?’

  ‘There’s no point. I’ll accept your word.’ She stared at him. ‘And I’ll expect you to keep it.’

  Haagen patted the dog and adjusted the flame on the gas fire. He was wearing a green collarless shirt and a pair of nicely cut jeans. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, and hi
s look of intense concentration, he might have passed for the kind of student Liz had always wanted Jessie to meet.

  ‘Where’s home supposed to be?’ Haagen was asking. ‘As a matter of interest.’

  ‘Germany, I imagine. That’s what Jessie always told me.’

  ‘You think I’ve got relatives there? Somewhere to stay? Somewhere to call my own?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘You think it’s that easy? Just up and go?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Liz reached down for her bag, suddenly wanting to get this scene over. ‘Two thousand. I’m afraid that’s my limit.’

  Haagen sat back in the chair again, his legs crossed beneath him. His smile was emptied of everything except curiosity. He gestured round: the wall-mounted spotlights, the framed poster advertising pre-war Baden-Baden, the neat rows of paperbacks on home-made shelves.

  ‘This is as good as it’s ever got,’ he said. ‘Why should I leave it? Why should I just bail out?’

  ‘I can think of reasons.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like it’s not your country, not your home. And it must be difficult getting by sometimes …’ She moved uneasily in the chair. ‘I take it you don’t have a job?’

  ‘I’m busy. I work.’ He waved at the typescript on the floor. ‘But you’re right. It doesn’t pay.’

  ‘Then take it with you. Whatever it is.’

  Haagen said nothing, and for a moment Liz had the feeling she was making progress. ‘You need to be gone within a week,’ she said. ‘That’s the other condition. I’ll lodge the cheque with Thomas Cook. They’ll have instructions to return it to me if you don’t cash it in for a ticket and currency. You know how to find Thomas Cook?’

  Haagen looked up at her. His eyes were the lightest blue.

  ‘Five thousand,’ he said quietly. ‘And we’ll shake on it.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘Yes.’ He got to his feet, a hint of the old contempt back in his face. ‘This country is falling apart. It has nothing left for me, nothing. Five thousand’s cheap. You should call it an investment.’