Heaven's Light

by Hurley, Graham

  Ellis smiled. He liked the thought of money having no smell. It was dry, desiccated, neutral, a little like Zhu himself. Lim was talking about Shanghai again. Ellis’s last session with the CAD team had concentrated on Zhu’s interests in Pudong, an area across the Yangtse from the high-rise sprawl of Shanghai’s financial district. Pudong was generating explosive rates of growth, outstripping any other development in South-east Asia, and Zhu had secured a substantial slice of the action. Most of his investment was in construction, the raw material of the New China, but he’d also staked out a dominant position in transportation, specifically shipping. The number-crunchers at the Commercial Affairs Department had been reluctant to put a figure on the size of Zhu’s investment but it was clear that they were talking billions of dollars.

  Ellis nodded. The last few days had confirmed what he’d always suspected: that mainland China was the ultimate destination for the order Zhu had placed for riot gear back in 1995. Packed into containers, and despatched by sea, the stuff had trans-shipped through Singapore and ended up with the quartermasters of the Chinese People’s Militia. According to the CAD, final landfall had been Shanghai. In one sense, this was the best possible news. Given their reservations about democracy, the Chinese People’s Militia would have a limitless appetite for comms gear, riot shields and hi-tech insurgency sprays. In another sense, though, Zhu’s reticence on the subject was troubling. Why, confidentially, hadn’t he been straight? Why all the camouflage?

  Ellis voiced the thought, watching a big 747 wallowing down the glide path into Changi International. Lim eased the car into the slow lane.

  ‘Don’t you think it was a modest order?’ he asked at last. ‘For mainland China.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ellis replied. ‘But we’re rather assuming he’ll be back for more.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Something in Lim’s voice drew Ellis’s attention away from the 747. New information, he thought. Something they haven’t told me. Something they want to plant now, away from the secretaries around the conference table, away from prying ears.

  ‘The order was for fifty thousand sets,’ Ellis recollected, ‘and that included a reserve for spares.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Lim was smiling now. ‘And you know the size of the force Beijing’s putting into Hong Kong next year? Once the British have gone?’

  He was silent, letting the implications sink in. Finally Ellis wound up the window. The noise of the slipstream was too loud for comfort. He wanted to be absolutely sure. ‘You’re saying that Zhu bought that equipment in case of riots in Hong Kong?’

  ‘Of course. And he chose British suppliers …’ he looked across, smiling, ‘… because he has a sense of humour.’

  The last guests had left the big front lounge at the Imperial Hotel when the petrol bomb came crashing through the window. It was a crude design, a milk bottle stuffed with burning rags, but the petrol inside spilled across the carpet, igniting at once. The noise brought the night porter running through from his cubby-hole beside the reception desk and he tackled the blaze quickly, smothering the sheet of flame with foam from a nearby extinguisher, kicking aside an armchair that was already beginning to smoulder.

  Within moments the fire was out, and the porter bent to the carpet, picking up shards of broken glass from the window, wondering whether to leave the remains of the bottle for police examination. He was back on his feet, gazing out at the darkness beyond the forecourt, when he became aware of movement behind him.

  Zhu was standing in the lounge, looking down at the blackened crater in the carpet. Most of the foam had settled and there was a strong smell of petrol. The porter told him briefly what had happened and Zhu nodded. The dressing gown was too big for him, hanging limply on his thin frame. He poked at the carpet with his slippered foot, his face devoid of expression. The porter began to move towards the door. He’d yet to phone for the police. He should get them here as soon as possible.

  Zhu put out a restraining hand. ‘It was an accident,’ he said quietly. ‘Just clear it up.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hayden Barnaby was at Charlie Epple’s front door before half past seven next morning. Charlie answered his knock. The two men conferred in the hall.

  ‘What’s Wilcox saying?’

  Barnaby took a deep breath. He’d been on and off the phone since six, trying to prise Wilcox away from the obvious headlines. Negotiations hadn’t gone well, not least because Wilcox was fighting a savage hangover.

  ‘He’s saying he has no choice. The kid’ll survive but her face is a mess. The consultant says it’s early days but the outlook’s pretty grim. Privately, he’s saying there isn’t a plastic surgeon in the country who can make much difference. Apart from filling in the holes.’

  ‘Yuk.’ Charlie disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a drying-up cloth. He mopped commas of shaving foam from his chin. ‘So how’s he going to play it?’

  ‘Big spread. Front page.’ Barnaby paused. ‘The father wants the dog put down and Wilcox is running an editorial, saying the same thing.’

  ‘Good fucking riddance. I’ve been trying for months,’ Charlie said. ‘What else?’

  Barbaby looked up the stairs. The door to Lolly’s bedroom was closed. ‘It’s a question of ownership,’ he said slowly. ‘Lolly’s name’s still in the frame. They think it’s hers. As long as she sticks with her story, we’re probably in the clear.’ He frowned. ‘Fall-back, I’ll tell Harry it was Haagen’s. In fact, I might do that anyway.’

  ‘And Jess?’

  ‘Jess won’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Charlie reached out, steadying Barnaby as he began to turn for the door. ‘I meant about the dog. Having it put down. Shouldn’t you talk to her? Break the news? Fuck knows why, but she’ll be bloody upset.’

  Barnaby was buttoning his Burberry. ‘You tell her,’ he said briefly. ‘I’m late already.’

  When Charlie went up to her room Jessie was still asleep. She’d spent most of the evening with Lolly, trying to calm her down after the incident on the beach. The dog had gone off in a police van to a cage in the RSPCA compound.

  ‘Tea,’ Charlie murmured, shaking her gently.

  Jessie rubbed her eyes, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘I’ve got to phone them,’ she said at once. ‘I’ll do it this morning.’

  ‘Phone who?’

  ‘That poor little girl’s parents. What can they think? Oz can be such a handful.’

  Charlie looked at her. Plainly she had no idea of the real extent of the child’s injuries. Lolly, hysterical, hadn’t got much further than telling her how traumatic the whole thing had been. He picked up the tea, nudging the mug into her hand.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘We ought to talk.’

  Jessie blinked up at him. The pillow had left a crease line down her cheek, and it gave her face a childlike, slightly lopsided look.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘What have I done?’

  Charlie explained about the news from the hospital. He spared her most of the details but left her in no doubt that the child would probably be scarred for life.

  ‘Christ.’ Jessie’s eyes were wide. ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘It is. You’re right.’

  ‘I’ll phone them now. Here—’ She gave Charlie the mug, trying to swing her legs out of bed.

  Charlie restrained her. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s early. It’s not eight yet.’

  ‘But they’ll be out of their heads with worry. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Sure, of course.’

  ‘Then I’ll phone. Have you got a number?’

  ‘No, and I haven’t got a name, either.’

  ‘Shit.’ Jessie collapsed back against the pillow, staring at the ceiling. Then she was up again. ‘I’ll phone the police. They’ll know. They’re bound to know. I was going to phone them anyway. It’s my dog. Sort of. Not Lolly’s.’

&n
bsp; Charlie held her down. On occasions like these he’d learned that there was nothing kinder than the truth. ‘They want to put Oz down,’ he told her, ‘and you can understand why.’

  ‘Put him down? You mean destroy him?’

  ‘Yeah. I know it’s primitive. I know it’s unfair. But their little girl… you know…’ He watched Jessie struggle with the implications of what he’d just said. Oz gone. Another bit of her life wrenched away. Another hole for grief or drugs or God knows what to fill. ‘We’ll get something else,’ Charlie muttered. ‘A cat, a hamster, a tame crocodile, anything. Just as long as it doesn’t bite anyone.’

  Jessie was staring up at him, her eyes glistening. She hadn’t heard a word. At length, she sniffed, dabbing at her nose with a corner of the sheet. ‘It’s Haagen,’ she said softly. ‘What do I tell him? How can I explain?’

  Mike Tully had the dates neatly listed on a notepad when he approached the woman at the information desk. He used the Central Library a great deal. The international reference section alone occupied nearly half a floor.

  He gave the woman the list. He was interested in Dutch national newspapers for the dates shown. The woman apologized at once. The library didn’t subscribe to any. The best she could do was Die Welt from neighbouring Germany.

  Tully found himself a place at a nearby table. The newspapers arrived in a thick bundle, secured with string. He undid the knot and sorted out the editions he wanted. Beside each date he’d made a separate note of the weather Haagen Schreck had described. By matching these descriptions against the next day’s weather reports, Tully could put the obvious explanation to the test. In his heart he knew the answer already but decades of investigative casework had taught him the value of double-checking. There was no room in his world for guesswork.

  The first cluster of dates was in early spring, two days in the same week. On both occasions, Haagen had moaned about winds and constant rain. Tully checked the dates of the calls against the forecast, and then against the subsequent weather reports. The results brought a smile to his face. During the second week in March, Western Europe had enjoyed an early taste of summer under a huge anticyclone. Temperatures in Cologne had nudged 20 degrees Celsius. In Amsterdam, it had been even higher.

  Tully glanced down at his list, knowing there was no point in going any further. Haagen wasn’t in Holland at all. The calls to Jessie had indeed been in code, a simple series of agreed messages to signal when it was safe for her to visit. Tully sat back and reached for the string, wondering where the boy had gone to ground.

  Louise Carlton drove herself down from Cheam. South of Petersfield, as the dual carriageway cut through the chalky flank of Butser Hill, she realized that she’d never been to Portsmouth. In every conversation she’d had, the place itself had been of little importance. It was simply a source of departmental opportunity, or a target for overseas investment, or – as now – a political predicament. Not once, oddly, had she devoted any thought to what it might look like.

  She glanced down at the directions she’d scribbled across the top of The Times. Jephson had phoned first thing, giving her the name of a contact at the Defence Research Agency. It was evidently an establishment of some size, situated on the hill that looked down over the city. Once an arm of the MoD, it had now been given agency status, and a modest foothold in the private sector. The links with Whitehall, naturally, were still strong, and Jephson had talked vaguely of the support they’d be able to give her. There’d be an office she could use. Communications in and out were secure and there were people on hand who’d know their way around the city. It would, he’d said, be an ideal perch from which she’d be able to get a feel for what he called ‘the reality of the situation’.

  At the coast, Louise joined the east-west motorway. To the left, beyond the salt marsh and a gleaming stretch of water, she could see the blue-grey shadows of a major city. To the right, a fold of downland was slashed to the bone by earlier quarrying for chalk. On top of the hill, visible to the naked eye, was a sprawl of buildings.

  She consulted the directions again, taking a slip-road off the motorway and grinding up the hill. A route along the top gave her a fine view to the south and she drove slowly, taking in the distant sprawl of Portsmouth. Rarely had she seen a city so well defined. Even in the north, looking down on Yorkshire mill towns from the flanks of the Pennines, there wasn’t this sense of containment, of semi-isolation. She thought of Jephson again, and of the Portsmouth MP who’d sounded the alarm bells at Central Office, and she was forced to acknowledge that he might have a point. If you really wanted to turn your back on the UK, there was probably no better place to do it.

  The DRA lay on the western crest of the hill. A mile of chain-link fencing, topped with barbed wire, protected acres of pre-fabs and low, red-brick offices. She began to slow, then turned in through the agency’s main gate. Yellow-jacketed security men waved her to a halt, and while they inspected her pass she gazed up at the Union Jack, snapping in the wind.

  The main block was Building 91. The car park lay beside it. One of the agency’s administrative officers shook her hand and led the way inside. The place looked worn and slightly shabby. There were fire doors everywhere and the scuffed walls and endless flights of stairs reminded Louise of the old MI5 building in Gower Street. The man stopped at a door and produced a key. Inside, Louise found herself inspecting a small office. Sunshine flooded in through the steel-framed window. There was a desk, two telephones, two filing cabinets and an electric kettle. The man indicated a small safe behind the door. His name was Milne. ‘We only got the message this morning,’ he said. ‘I hope this one’s big enough.’

  Louise peered at the safe. Jephson, she thought. Lately, he’d become obsessed with locking things away.

  Milne was checking the telephones, lifting each in turn to his ear. ‘These are both direct lines. Everything routed out is XPX standard seven. If you want extra screening I’m afraid you’ll have to give us a couple of days.’

  Louise was standing behind him, gazing out at the view. A submarine lay moored in the harbour below, the black silhouette unmistakable. Beyond it, she could see a big white ship easing into a ferry berth. Milne was still worrying about secure communications. Louise put her handbag on the desk. ‘My mobile’s digital,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably use that.’

  Milne beamed at her, visibly relieved. ‘Do you need a PC at all? Secretarial back-up?’

  ‘I’ve got a laptop.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He hesitated, looking at the kettle. ‘There’s tea and coffee downstairs. I’ll get some sent up. Any preferences?’

  Louise opened her handbag. She’d brought sachets of camomile tea from her supplies at home and she piled them beside one of the telephones.

  ‘Biscuits would be nice,’ she said. ‘Plain chocolate wholemeal if you have them.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Milne couldn’t take his eyes off the Harrods bag in which Louise was carrying a collection of files. At length, she began to unpack them, storing them in an unlocked drawer. ‘Do you have a key for this? As a matter of interest?’

  ‘I’ll find one.’ He hesitated, looking at her. ‘I understand it’s coded CROMWELL,’ he said shyly, ‘whatever it is you’re up to.’

  Louise wondered where this information had come from. Normally Jephson wouldn’t dream of sharing more than was necessary. Operational codewords were strictly for family use.

  ‘That’s right,’ Louise said slowly. ‘CROMWELL pretty well covers it.’

  Milne was beaming again. He moved away from the desk, giving her room to sit down. He was a local-history buff. He was in and out of the city archives every week. The use of CROMWELL as a code-word rang a bell.

  ‘Churchill’s plan to repel boarders, wasn’t it? Battle of Britain and all that?’ He was standing by the door. ‘What a nice idea.’

  Hayden Barnaby chaired the Pompey First morning press conference. Zhu had closed off one of the Imperial’s private banqueting suites f
or the duration of the campaign, permitting Charlie to convert it into a fully staffed press centre. Barnaby loved this conscious echo of the way the national parties tried to shape the media agenda, and he found himself spending more and more time at the hotel. The operation was staffed by volunteers – a couple of young journalists on unpaid leave from the Sentinel and a freelance PR consultant who shared her life with one of the Pompey First ward candidates. The team had dubbed themselves Charlie’s Angels, and between them made sure that the phones were manned fourteen hours a day.

  The press conference started at ten. They’d been running for nearly a week now and the attendance had confounded the cynics who’d accused Pompey First, yet again, of losing touch with the real world. Local politics, they said, was meaningless. The percentage of people bothering to vote was the lowest in Europe. No one understood the issues, and even if they did they’d lost all faith in politicians’ ability to deliver. Local veterans, with half a dozen campaigns under their belts, scoffed at Charlie’s plans for daily briefings, hot-response desks and a brand of grass-roots involvement he’d dubbed ‘retail politics’, yet the rows of curious faces in the banqueting suite had grown and grown, attracted by word of mouth and by the ever-fattening file of news stories, many torn from the pages of the national press. Far from collapsing under the weight of its own self-importance, Pompey First was fast becoming the story no one could afford to ignore. Things were happening down on the south coast. No matter how absurd, how parochial, Pompey First was definitely worth a look.

  Barnaby began by announcing the day’s campaigning theme. Shopping areas in the city centre were becoming derelict. Streets that featured proudly in the sepia prints of Edwardian Southsea – handsome, fashionable, busy – had been ravaged by urban blight. Charlie had commissioned students from the university’s Department of Architecture to prepare a series of slides, and on a signal from Barnaby, the lights dimmed and a projector at the back of the room threw image after image onto the screen behind the top table. The images were scored to a jazz track, a long saxophone solo, and the journalists in the audience sat back, swamped by boarded-up shops, abandoned supermarket trolleys and whorls of vicious graffiti on the rain-streaked concrete. Regulars at the morning press conferences had got used to Charlie’s passion for slick, hard-hitting presentational novelties like this, and if he occasionally went over the top, compressing a dozen urban miseries into a couple of nightmare minutes, they were more than willing to forgive him. Most of the political messages were simple enough to play well in print or on-screen, and the coffee and Danish served afterwards were invariably excellent. In the seven brief days since the press conferences had started, Pompey First had stolen a huge march on the opposition. Almost overnight, local politics had been transformed.