Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  He sat down on a bench in the square, hunched, hands on his knees. Foxworth sat alongside him. There wasn’t any great need to talk. Pagan’s affection for Burr had always been a given.

  ‘I keep thinking I could have done something,’ Pagan said. ‘I could have intervened. I could have made some kind of effort to wrestle the gun away from her. Something. Anything.’

  ‘She was armed. You weren’t. What were you supposed to do?’

  Pagan seemed not to hear this. ‘All right, I could say I was shocked, everything happened so damn fast, I could say Martin’s murder short-circuited me – but I’m trained to react, for Christ’s sake. I’m trained to respond to situations like that.’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself.’

  Pagan turned his face toward the front door of the office on the other side of the square. The building was dark, save for a light in the entranceway. He didn’t want to go inside. Not yet. He was thinking of the woman. The effortless way she’d fired the gun. Not once, but twice. The first shot had been ruthless. The second had finished the old man. Pagan had lost an old friend, and he’d reached a stage of life where old friendships are precious and new ones difficult to cultivate.

  He looked at Foxworth. ‘She said Burr had done something wrong. She said it was time to make good again. I don’t see how killing Martin could make anything good again.’ Pagan gazed in the direction of his office again, thinking how the move to Golden Square had been initiated by Burr years ago, creating a place where Pagan’s anti-terrorist office could be located. Burr’s careful fingerprints were all over his career. ‘And then she comes out with this name. Pasco. Richard Pasco. Which means nothing to me. Presumably it meant something to Martin … God knows what.’

  Pagan slammed his hands together in a gesture of frustration. ‘But she wants me to find out because she wants me to go after her. Come on, let’s see what you’re made of. And just to make bloody sure she has my full attention – as if she doesn’t already know that – she comes up with some reason to kill Martin Burr.’

  Foxie, who detected a note of mild hysteria in Pagan’s voice, knew that the woman had eluded Frank last February in Venice, but he also understood there had been another escape many years before, when Pagan had been holding her in a London hotel room. Somehow she’d managed to get away. Dressed as a maid, a bribe to a porter – nobody had discovered how she’d done it.

  Pagan got up from the bench. He moved slowly across the square. Foxworth followed. Inside the building Sergeant Whittingham was behind the desk, pretending to be busy. His big ruddy Devonshire face was sombre. He looked like a farmer at a funeral.

  ‘Shocking business, Mr Pagan,’ he said. ‘Shocking. I always liked Mr Burr. There was nothing high and mighty about him.’

  Pagan moved toward the elevator. It was a fair assessment. Martin had never lost the common touch. He’d always taken an enormous interest in the welfare of his people. Unlike Nimmo, he hadn’t courted favours from the powerful. He’d avoided politics and all the donkeylike braying involved. He believed, as Pagan did, in an uncomplicated notion of justice. He might have approached it in a different manner – quietly, with less of a headstrong impulse – but the goal was the same.

  Pagan listened to the elevator creak in the shaft, the straining of pulleys. When he yanked the iron door open and stepped out, he headed along the darkened corridor to his office, where he turned on the light. The room was bright and unappealing. The photographs on the walls seemed to reproach him for his failure to protect Burr.

  ‘Do me a favour, Foxie,’ Pagan said. ‘Take them down.’

  Foxie unpinned the pictures and stacked them on the corner of Pagan’s desk. Bare walls. A kind of exorcism.

  Pagan didn’t hear Marcia Burr enter the office.

  ‘Frank.’

  He stood up. ‘Mrs Burr,’ he said. He moved around his desk and reached out to take her hands, which were cold and glassy.

  Marcia Burr was in her early fifties, fourteen or fifteen years Martin’s junior. Normally she carried herself in a sprightly straight-backed manner. But tonight she wore no make-up, her cardigan was wrongly buttoned – the carelessness of grief, Pagan thought – and she slouched. Pagan held her hands and said nothing. Words didn’t present themselves. He resented the inadequacies of language.

  ‘You were there,’ she said. ‘You were with him.’

  Pagan nodded. Marcia Burr stepped away from him. Foxworth helped her into a chair, holding her elbows gently and easing her down.

  ‘I don’t want details,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t live with details. Don’t tell me what it was like.’

  Pagan said nothing.

  ‘It hasn’t hit me yet, you know. It hasn’t quite sunk in. They say it takes time before you actually realize …’ She looked at Pagan. She had the pinched appearance of the newly-bereaved. ‘Martin was very fond of you, Frank. Sometimes he called you his best student. Sometimes he cursed you, too, but always with affection. Pagan is the bane of my life, he’d say. Never listens. In one ear and out the other. He’d thunder at you, but he didn’t ever mean it in a harsh way. I think you understand.’

  Pagan said he did.

  ‘He was very proud of some of the things you achieved,’ she said. ‘He would never have told you to your face. But I know. We talked about his work frequently. I was rather like a sounding board for him.’ She smiled softly, then inclined her head and covered her face with her hands. She didn’t cry. She was the kind of woman who would yield to grief only in private. Public sorrow was without dignity. Pagan had the stranded sensation of being a witness to someone else’s heartache. He watched her take a Kleenex from the sleeve of her cardigan and press it against her lips.

  ‘He was so busy trying to organize his memoirs. He hated retirement, you know. He once said it made him feel utterly useless. I suppose the memoirs filled a space. Between ourselves, I doubt if he’d ever have finished writing them …’ She stared at the Kleenex in her hand, as if it puzzled her. She was, Pagan realized, miles away, lost perhaps in a recollection. She crumpled the tissue into a wad and let it fall from her fingers. ‘You’ll find her, Frank.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pagan said.

  ‘I know you’ll find her.’

  Pagan had a longing to destroy something, to perform an act of mindless vandalism, like kicking a hole in the wall, or throwing a telephone through the window. Something energetic yet ultimately useless. A sign of life, a vicious little pulse.

  Pagan moved toward her. He lowered his body so that his face was level with hers. He laid his fingertips on her wrist. Her skin was suntanned. ‘I have one question for you, if you’re up to it,’ he said. ‘Did he ever mention anyone by the name of Pasco to you? Richard Pasco.’

  ‘Pasco? Why? Is it important?’

  Pagan said it was. Marcia Burr looked around the office. She said, ‘I don’t believe he ever did. No. I can’t remember the name. Perhaps …’ There was a very faint trace of her origins in her accent. Pagan remembered she’d been born and raised in the United States – Ohio, Iowa, he wasn’t sure. But she’d been in England so long the accent had almost entirely vanished inside the consonants and vowels of the Home Counties.

  The unshaded light in the room created little pockets of darkness under her eyes. ‘Perhaps it’s in his files. He’s got boxes of them. Tons of papers. I always complained about the clutter he made. You’re welcome to look, Frank. If it helps.’ She opened her purse and removed a key, which she handed to him. ‘That’s the key to the flat in Knightsbridge. If you need to go through his files, please, feel free. I’ll spend the night in London, but I’ll go down to Sussex first thing in the morning. Do you have the phone number in case you need to get in touch with me?’

  ‘I can find it,’ Pagan said.

  Marcia Burr stood up. She was a little unsteady. She leaned toward Pagan, who caught her, holding her against his body. Small comfort. He walked with her to the door and along the corridor to the elevator. She kissed him on the side o
f his face. Her mouth was chilly.

  ‘Don’t bother to come down,’ she said. ‘I’ll manage. I’ll ask your desk sergeant to find me a taxi.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I have to get accustomed to being on my own, Frank. I have to get accustomed to a great many changes.’ Pagan opened the elevator door for her. She stepped inside. He drew the door shut and looked at her through the iron grating.

  ‘Do it, Frank,’ she said. ‘Find her.’

  ‘I promise you.’

  The elevator shuddered, and began its whining descent. Pagan lingered a moment, listening to the mechanism of the lift, then went back to his office.

  ‘Sad,’ Foxie said.

  Pagan thought of the woman wandering out into the night. He considered the sudden emptiness in her life. Sad. More than sad. But her appearance had the effect of stirring him out of the vapours of sorrow; she’d animated him, and now he had to shake off the unhappiness he felt, because Burr wouldn’t have wanted him to dwell on anything so self-indulgent. The work at hand, Martin would have said. Nothing else matters. Only the work.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs, Foxie,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if we have anything on Pasco.’

  They left the office and went toward the staircase that led to the top floor where the computers were located. Pagan had little affinity for these machines, but Foxworth knew his way around them.

  Foxie switched on a light and sat down in front of a machine and pressed the power button. He rubbed his hands together briskly and lowered them over the keyboard and punched in the code-word that gave him access to the mainframe, which not only contained internal data, but was linked to other sources of law-enforcement information in Europe, the United States, the Far East. There was a whirring sound and the word READY blinked, with manic electronic urgency, on the screen.

  Foxworth located the program he needed, and typed in a second password, followed by the name: Pasco, Richard. The machine whirred, then responded after a prolonged searching period. No record.

  ‘Zero, Frank,’ Foxie said. ‘No criminal record here or anywhere else.’

  Zero. Pagan walked toward the shadows in the corner of the room. Windows overlooked the square, which was empty. Two thirty a.m., and nothing moved down there. Zero. He tried to think his way inside her mind. She killed, and she enjoyed killing. She destroyed, and was in love with destruction. He forced himself to imagine how it would feel if you were enchanted by murder, if you loved the sensation of snuffing out somebody’s life – but it was too far away for him to grasp. Another zero.

  What motivated her? The pleasure of cruelty, yes. The gamble of risky killings, sure. The idea of eluding her pursuers, certainly. Did she consider herself immune to capture? Flip the coin: did she want to be captured? Did it all come down to something as simple as the elemental thrill of the chase in the end, the adrenalin of the hunt?

  He brought back to mind the way she’d looked when she’d fired the pistol at Martin Burr. It was the expression of somebody on a target range, concentrated, focused; and yet there was more – an indifference, as if the target were not human but an inanimate thing, a clay pigeon. There had been a certain … serenity, in her look. He couldn’t think of another word. Another thing struck him: even in the act of killing, she’d shed none of her beauty, no ugly frown, no determined distortion of the lips, as if she were utterly detached from what she was doing. She was in another realm, a world she’d created for herself.

  He turned to Foxworth and asked, ‘Could Pasco be listed under some other heading? Another file, say?’

  ‘It’s possible, Frank.’

  ‘Try Martin’s name. See if you can find any mention of Pasco under Burr.’

  Foxworth did so. The machine was silent for a time. Then it responded with Burr, Martin, followed by a list of dates – the year he joined the Yard, the years he spent in charge of the Drug Squad, his various promotions up to the rank of Commissioner. Retired 1993. There was a series of messages directing the computer operator to sub-files where more detailed information on the old man’s career could be found. Pagan was about to instruct Foxworth to start searching these secondary files when he noticed, at the bottom of the screen, a brief message. THIS FILE LAST ACCESSED 3 SEPTEMBER 1995, 0930.

  ‘This morning,’ he said, and pointed his finger at the message. ‘Somebody looked at this bloody file only today. A few hours before Martin was murdered. Who?’

  Foxie was gazing at the screen. ‘It had to be somebody who knew the codes, Frank.’

  ‘How many people are we talking about, Foxie?’

  ‘God, dozens, I suppose.’

  ‘Is there any way of narrowing it down?’

  Foxie was quiet for a moment. ‘I’m not sure—’

  ‘Think, Foxie. There’s got to be some way of finding out who broke into Martin’s file. It’s too much of a coincidence that somebody accessed the material on the morning of his death. I’m not happy with coincidences at the best of times – and this, God only knows, isn’t the best of times.’

  Foxie pushed his chair back from the computer. He was aware of Pagan’s sudden energy as if it were a force field. ‘There’s a code for backtracking through logs,’ he said. ‘I’ve never used it before, but I can try.’

  ‘Try then.’

  Foxie hunched over the keyboard. ‘I might screw it up, of course. Lose some data.’

  ‘I’ll take the chance,’ Pagan said. He stared at the screen, drawn into its light.

  Foxie pondered the keyboard. He pressed a couple of keys in unison. The computer didn’t respond.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘So far, nothing. Let me think.’ Foxie placed his fingertips against his lips and contemplated the screen. There were certain key combinations, he knew that much, but it depended on getting them correct. An operational manual was kept at the Yard, but you had to sign in triplicate to get it, and at this time of night that involved awakening a senior officer who wouldn’t be overjoyed by a disturbance.

  ‘Are you thinking?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘Damn, yes, I’m thinking—’

  ‘Think deeper,’ Pagan said, impatiently. ‘I want to know who looked at Martin’s files.’

  Foxie raised his hands over the keyboard again. Pagan’s hovering made him nervous. Another combination of strokes – OK. He punched two keys simultaneously. The screen blackened a moment, then was filled with a slightly startling amber light.

  ‘Abracadabra,’ he said.

  Pagan leaned even closer to the screen. A series of black letters fluttered across the amber background. Inquiry Log. Enter request. Foxie tapped out a series of letters and the screen flashed a couple of times and Pagan, more tense than he realized, was transfixed by the video console.

  ‘Here we are,’ Foxworth said. ‘The source of the inquiry isn’t named. The only thing recorded here is the telephone number used to gain access to the computer line. Zero one seven one six two five eight eight five six.’

  ‘London,’ Pagan said. ‘So all we need is an address.’

  Foxie located a reverse directory and began to search through its pages. Pagan, restless, moved away from the glare of the screen. Somebody hacks into the computer, opens Martin’s file. For what?

  Foxie found what he was looking for. ‘Kilburn again. Number 36 Brondesbury Terrace. Somebody called Kristen Hawkins.’

  Kilburn, Pagan thought.

  And he heard the woman’s voice zone in from nowhere, uttering the words he’d last heard her say in wintry Venice when she’d escaped from him. He remembered the canal, the black waters parting with the force of her body, the damp scent of the night.

  Catch me.

  18

  LONDON

  In her room at The Dorchester, Marcia Burr thought grief the most devastating emotion of all: numbing, numbingly final. Recovery was never complete. A part of you simply failed to come back from the trenches of loss.

  She’d taken two sleeping-pills but they’d managed on
ly to make her groggy. Such defences as she had against the fact of Martin’s murder were fragile. What was strange was her inability to shed tears; she supposed they’d come later, perhaps at the funeral, perhaps when she met her son Kenneth who was flying in from Hong Kong, or when she was obliged to go through Martin’s belongings, the shirts and shoes and suits, all the relics of his life. What did you do with a dead husband’s possessions? What did you do with your own life?

  She picked up the telephone and called room service. She asked for hot chocolate to be sent up. Then she took the bottle of sleeping-pills out of her purse; she’d swallow another one as soon as the hot chocolate arrived.

  She rose, walked the room, glanced at her face in the mirror and thought how small and lonely, how bedraggled, she looked. Self-pity: she wouldn’t give in to that. She’d always been sensible, practical, far more down-to-earth than Martin. God knows, for a man in his position he’d been uncommonly vague, absent-minded. Half the time he seemed elsewhere. Had he been the one to survive her, he would never have managed the rudiments of basic living, the little intricacies that constituted a life.

  The room service waiter came. She tipped him generously. When he’d gone she popped the sleeping-pill in her mouth and sipped some hot chocolate. She sat on the edge of the bed and wondered at the silence in the room; it was vast, immeasurable, as if all sound had been drained out of the world.

  It was a chilling revelation to understand that for as long as you lived you would never see your husband again. She shut her eyes and said his name aloud.

  ‘Martin. Dear Martin.’

  She wondered about the notion of the recent dead lingering invisibly nearby, their souls still bound in a mysterious way to the trappings of life. Was Martin close? Was he listening? She liked to think so.

  She turned her wedding ring round, twisting it, seeing how the flesh around it swelled because it was too tight ever to remove. She wouldn’t dream of taking it off anyway. She tilted her head slightly to one side in the fashion of someone who has detected an unexpected presence nearby.