‘I’ll do a press conference tonight at nine,’ Nimmo was saying to the minion on the other end of the line. ‘Get that information out on the double.’
Pagan shut the door. Nimmo would appear on TV, his expression one of grave concern. But somewhere along the way he’d rally, change his manner, summon up the bulldog of self-righteousness and let it bark so loud and clear it could be heard all the way across the land. Even as I stand before you, he’d say, even as my heart goes out to those who were murdered, I give you my solemn vow. Justice will prevail.
What heart? Pagan wondered as he headed in the direction of the elevators.
4
BRIGHTON
Tommy Rafferty was not in demand for portrait work, which was why the woman’s request surprised him. She’d turned up without an appointment, wanting a headshot of herself; it had to be black and white, six by four. She was very specific. Inside his studio, which was a bare leaky flat in one of the narrow streets below Brighton station, he had her sit in front of a crumpled cloth backdrop and tried to involve her in conversation while he fidgeted with his old battered Roliflex.
His hands had a constant tremble these days. The woman, who said very little, unsettled him even more than usual and consequently he dropped a lens-cap and had some trouble loading the camera with film. The amphetamine heebie-jeebies. Heart like a drumbeat.
He was a long-time speed-freak, a nervy emaciated man of about fifty. In the late 1960s he’d made a lot of money with his informal grainy shots of rising rock stars. These days he forged a marginal living from the occasional porn gig, and, infrequently, a bargain-basement wedding.
He tried to engage the woman in a story about the time he’d photographed Keith Moon in Soho one legendary drugged night. But she was all business, didn’t have time for small talk. She told him the angle she was after, the look, the half-smile, soft light. He thought she seemed vaguely familiar, but in his concussed state a lot of people looked familiar.
‘You want to tilt your head forward a little, love?’ he asked. He peered through the lens at her, seeing her face in reverse image.
He couldn’t decide if she was beautiful or not. The face was structured, he thought. It had a pleasing symmetry to it, and if she were in a more relaxed frame of mind it might have been … well, perhaps not beautiful as such, but certainly captivating. The mouth was a work of art, there was no denying that.
Rafferty looked at her through the lens. ‘Hold that one.’ Click. He stepped back from the camera, readjusted the lighting. That sense of familiarity came at him again, but it was lost in the general detritus of his brain. He stared at her green silk shirt, tailored black slacks, the way her hair, an intriguing blend of dark and light brown, fell just to her shoulders.
‘I think if you bring the chin just a little more forward,’ he said.
She did so, again without any indication of approval. She gazed into the lens, smiled – there was the tiniest of pouts to the expression, adorable – and Rafferty moved behind the camera and took the picture.
The woman stood up. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait.’
Rafferty was surprised. ‘You want me to print them right away?’
The woman nodded. ‘You’ll be well paid,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Why don’t you sit down and I’ll do it as fast as I can.’
‘What are you on, Rafferty?’ she asked.
‘What am I what?’
‘I’d guess speed,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Old habits, you know what they say.’
‘Speed kills,’ she said.
‘Everything kills, love. Booze, ciggies, sex,’ Rafferty said, and moved toward the tiny chamber he used as a darkroom. ‘I’ll be as fast as I can.’
He went inside the darkroom, shut the door. Working in darkness, he listened to the rap of the woman’s heels as she moved back and forth in the other room. He worked quickly. Stainless-steel spiral, developer, fixer. The air smelled vinegary, stuffy. He agitated the film in the developing tank, then thirty seconds in the stop-bath, four minutes in the fixer, followed by the wash in methylated spirits. This part of the process took about ten minutes and still the woman walked the other room impatiently.
She knocked on the door. ‘How much longer?’
‘I’m working as fast as I can, dear.’ Why the great rush? Why only two shots when the roll carried twelve? What the hell, it was her money. He wondered how she’d found his name. He didn’t even bother these days to advertise in the Yellow Pages. He had a sign outside, but it was weathered and almost illegible. Just passing by, sees the sign, wants her picture taken quickly? No, he didn’t think so. There was more to it than that, but he wasn’t inclined to ask. She was American, to judge from her accent. Not obviously American, just enough to notice.
Enlarge the prints, crop them to the size she wants, get paid and auf Wiedersehen. He took the prints from the dryer. As he was cutting them he studied her face, and just for the moment he thought he had it.
She was famous for something. He wasn’t sure what.
He opened the door and went back inside the room.
‘Let me see the prints,’ she said.
He gave them to her. They’d turned out quite well. She examined them quickly in the direct light of his lamps. One she dismissed immediately. The other appeared to satisfy her.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘A rush job like this. Let’s say two hundred and fifty. All right with you, love?’ He was suddenly more nervous than usual, not knowing quite why, probably the speed, the last dying rush.
She opened her purse, a big chubby leather job, stuck the prints inside. She removed a handgun with an ungainly silencer attached and shot the photographer once directly in the heart. He fell, bringing down tripod and camera as he dropped. Air escaped his lips, a hiss, like a note of irritation. She stepped over him, entered the darkroom, found the negatives, which she also placed in her purse. She struck a match, set fire to some old newspapers piled in the corner. When she was certain they’d caught and the place was filling with flame, she left the darkroom, closing the door behind her.
She glanced at Rafferty as she moved past him.
5
LONDON
Cherchez la femme. What else?
In the building in Golden Square, where his counter-terrorist section was housed, Frank Pagan looked at the photographs of the woman thumbtacked to the walls of his office. He’d collected a score of shots of her from various criminal archives around the world, mainly from the USA, where she was a fixture on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
The trouble with the photographs lay in their variety: she was never the same person twice. She had ways of rearranging herself – with make-up, hairstyles, wigs, expressions. She had a knack of shedding skins. This gallery of portraits underlined the difficulty in tracking her down; reported sightings of her were notoriously hard to check. And names – she used so many aliases that computer checks for such things as driver’s licences and phone bills were pointless. Carmen Profumo, her latest, was new to him. Profumo, perfume, a phantom scent.
He surveyed the collection, as if he were seeking a constant. Her beauty was undeniable. Even in those shots where she contrived to look sullen or contemptuous, an element of that beauty always came through. Sometimes it had its source in the intelligence of her eyes, at times in the curve of mouth. In one or two shots, where her hair was cut boyishly short into her skull, there was a stark quality to her face, as if she were deliberately trying to negate her attractiveness. But she only succeeded in looking, Pagan thought, invitingly androgynous.
He glanced through the window down into Golden Square where people basked with what passed in England as abandon, men stripping to their waists and women wearing sleeveless blouses, their shoulders the colour of poached salmon.
He turned when he heard his office door open.
Foxie came into the room. ‘The press wants you, Frank.’
�
��To lynch me?’
Foxie shrugged. ‘You know how they are. They’ve been clogging the phone lines. You’re in demand.’
‘It’s open season on Frank Pagan, is that it?’
‘You’re not at fault,’ Foxie said.
‘Nimmo thinks differently.’
‘The idea of Nimmo thinking – isn’t that an oxymoron?’
Pagan looked at his young associate with a certain fondness. In an often hostile world, Foxie could always be relied on.
‘Tell them to fuck off. I have nothing to say, Foxie.’
‘No comment is the phrase, I believe.’
Foxie leaned against the desk, arms crossed. He looked drained. He’d been up all night with Pagan, questioning the hotel staff, helping the medics when he could, supervising the movements of the security team. ‘I keep thinking about the fact I almost chose the beef dish. At the last minute, I changed my mind. Don’t ask me why. It was a toss-up, though. Beef or Dover sole, and the coin came down on the side of the fish. Is there a patron saint of cops, do you think?’
‘If there is, he’s not always around when you need him,’ Pagan remarked. He strolled the office, glancing at the photographs even as he tried not to. But the pictures drew him back time and again. A face – what could you really read from a face?
‘The latest count is fifty-five,’ Foxie said quietly. ‘Five people chose the fish. Three who didn’t managed somehow to survive and are presently in intensive care. The prognosis isn’t good, because nobody’s identified the poison. Without that knowledge, there’s no chance of an antidote.’
Pagan thought about the woman, imagined her hands working dough, those long delicate fingers stretched across the uncooked pastry. The poison.
Foxie drew a hand wearily across his eyes. ‘I keep seeing …’
‘I know what you keep seeing,’ Pagan remarked. He moved to his desk, scanned the computer printouts that lay scattered across the surface, then he raised his eyes to Foxworth. ‘Did you run a check on this Carmen Profumo?’
Foxie nodded. ‘With the usual results, I’m afraid. She’s registered with the Inland Revenue. The address they have for her is the hotel, nothing else. She’s never applied for a driver’s licence, never been in trouble with the law. Her passport’s the genuine article. And we double-checked her references. They’re real. She worked at a hotel in Lucerne, and another in Seville.’
Pagan said, ‘The question is – does she intend a follow-up? Is she here to do some further damage? What’s her bloody agenda? Was last night just some kind of kick-off? I have this ongoing difficulty, Foxie. She can’t be found and she can’t be predicted. And when you can’t predict, how are you supposed to act? If she’s going to do more terrorism, what the hell is her target?’
He wondered about the corridors of her mind, and he had an impression of dark, oddly-angled passageways leading to rooms, some with sloping floors, others with shuttered windows where no light penetrated. There were no straight grids, no intersections. He wanted to enter that head and walk those passageways; he wanted the intimacy of knowing her thoughts and dreams. Her plans.
Foxie said, ‘We don’t even know if she’s still in the country. She might have gone. We’ve got the airports covered. The ferries. Bus and railway stations. God knows what else.’
Foxie walked in front of the photographs. Unlike Pagan, he didn’t find the woman overwhelmingly attractive, unless you enjoyed a certain kind of facial architecture, angular and a little chilly. And when you took into account the monstrosities of which she was capable, her looks were irrelevant anyhow. Foxie was drawn a moment into an old New York PD mugshot of her, in which her appearance was particularly threatening.
He glanced at Pagan, and wondered, not for the first time, if Frank had developed a quirky attraction for this woman. In a manner of speaking, she was the only female in his life. She occupied his thoughts for long periods. He fretted over her whereabouts. These were symptoms of a kind, surely. And Foxworth wasn’t convinced they were entirely healthy ones. Obsession – perhaps it wasn’t that strong. But there were certainly the seeds of one. And they were firmly planted.
Pagan gazed at the sheets of paper, which were collations of reported sightings from around the world. He studied names and places and dates with a look of irritation on his face. He didn’t doubt that some of these observers meant well. They believed they’d spotted the woman, but all too often the reports came from people who lived uneventful lives and needed the boost of thinking they’d seen a legendary terrorist.
He picked up the top sheet of the print-out and held it toward Foxie. ‘Every time I look at these alleged reports, I feel like I’m hammering my head into a fucking brick wall. Example. Here’s a guy by the name of Buddy Watts in a place called Sleepy Hollow, Oswego, New York. Sees a woman at a filling-station, thinks she’s our wanted friend, so – good citizen that old Buddy is – he calls the Feds. The FBI send out two of their finest to interview Buddy. And what does it turn out to be? Nothing. In fact, Buddy, bless his heart, can’t even describe the woman’s car, can’t remember the colour, the make, the place of registration. Buddy, in short, just wants some attention.’
Pagan flicked the sheet, as if it were something disgusting that had adhered to his fingertips. ‘Example. On exactly the same day as Buddy is seeing our terrorist at a filling-station in upstate New York, a certain Mrs Wallace Drake of Torquay claims that the person who has come to live next door to her is the one we’re looking for. I send a man all the way down there only to discover that Mrs Drake suffers from a mild paranoia induced by diet pills, and that her new neighbour is nothing more sinister than a dental hygienist.’
Pagan tossed the sheet down with a gesture of contempt. ‘Nimmo’s giving one of his press conferences tonight, which is going to mean, surprise surprise, a flood of fresh sightings. For Christ’s sake, Foxie. We’ve already got thousands. Do we want thousands more to plough through? Do we want more and more of these pointless sheets to come spitting out of the computers? I don’t need it, Foxie. I didn’t become a cop because I have this hidden infatuation with paper-shuffling. The more paper, the less time I have to find the bloody woman. What am I? A fucking clerk?’ Pagan crumpled a few sheets of paper quickly and dropped them on the floor, then kicked them furiously around the room. There was more than a touch of petulance in his manner.
Foxie, who’d been listening to the anger build in Pagan’s voice, thought that Frank’s moods were a planetary system with a gravitational pull all its own. He could be generous and kind, sympathetic and understanding; turn that around and you found stubbornness, impulsiveness. Foxie would never dream of questioning Pagan’s humanity, his sense of justice, his perception of rights and wrongs – but sometimes the man yielded a little too quickly to anger, when calm was needed. Sometimes he went too close to the edge, when caution was required. Frank’s history, the fact that his wife had been killed by a terrorist bomb one miserable Christmas Eve years ago in Knightsbridge, that he’d never remarried and his life was essentially a solitary one, could be invoked to explain the extremes of his character, to some extent; but Foxie, who was expert in making allowances for him, wished at times there was less of a headlong quality to his nature, and more cool contemplation. But when you worked for Pagan, you took him as he was or else you applied for a transfer.
Pagan said, ‘I’m frayed. I’m bone-weary. And I’m frustrated.’
Foxie wondered if this was some mild form of apology for the sudden display of rage.
‘And I’m going home. I suggest you do the same. Get some rest. We’ve got some bloody hard work ahead of us.’
Foxie nodded, vanished with unusual haste out into the corridor. The room was hot and stuffy. Pagan rose, rolled up the sleeves of his linen shirt, and wandered in front of the photographs again. She’d just killed more than fifty people – so why couldn’t you see the mark of the assassin in her features? Why wasn’t there a sign of sorts – a craziness about the eyes, say, a murderous hin
t?
When you scrutinized a face long enough, it underwent changes in much the same way as the meaning of a word deteriorated the more you stared at it. Maybe something like that was happening to him now. He had a brief mental lapse, couldn’t connect himself to the photographs, couldn’t connect the pictures to reality – as if what he were looking at was some form of composite likeness you’d never find in the physical world.
He took his jacket from the back of his chair and draped it over his arm. Enough was enough. He’d go home, and if the mood took him, he’d listen to some music, turn the stereo up loud, banish the silences of his apartment with vintage rock and roll. He had a vast collection of old albums, many of them obscure. Thurston Harris and the Sharps. Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. Gary US Bonds. Frantic ghosts. Maybe he was in the mood for frantic ghosts because they filled the hollow places of his life. Because they erased on a momentary basis the fact of death, the memory of that dining-room, that killing banquet.
He left his office the back way. Phones were ringing throughout the building. He knew there would be reporters waiting for him out front by now.
Pagan’s flat was located in Holland Park and overlooked a square, which at this time of year was a black-green riot of shrubbery and leaf and flower. He unlocked the front door, walked past the downstairs flat where the frail Miss Gabler lived with her colonial relics and dreams of a dead empire, and climbed the stairs. Inside his apartment he opened the curtains in the living-room and stared across the square, seeing an infestation of dogs and screaming children. An icecream vendor’s van appeared, bells chiming. All the fun of the fair, Pagan thought, and wondered if his present mood of misanthropy warranted closing the curtains again.
He went inside the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared at the unappetizing contents. Two pork chops, and a clouded plastic bag of carrots. Who could eat anyway? Food was a turn-off. He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle of Auchentoshan and poured himself a generous amount, then carried the glass back inside the living-room where he sat down, kicking off his shoes. He listened to the sounds that infiltrated from the park: the malt whisky would mute these intrusions.
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