Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Mallory listened in silence. The enthusiasm of these young men engaged him. They had the critical energy of stars, especially Skidelsky. Sometimes, though, Mallory felt a barrier between himself and the others. He often wondered if it was an age thing. And sometimes, when they came out with parodies, a few admittedly amusing, of the Pledge of Allegiance, he had to still a small resentment in himself. But it was too late for resentments, too late for regrets. He was in; he belonged. He was part of it all. Like a marriage – for better or worse.

  Skidelsky looked up at the night sky. ‘I wonder where she is at this precise moment,’ he said.

  ‘She’s on her way,’ Mallory said quietly.

  Skidelsky, who only ever allowed himself one beer, raised an arm and tossed his empty bottle off into the darkness. ‘And where, I wonder, will she begin?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Mallory, and raised his face to the sky too, thinking of airplanes, the multitudes of passengers crossing the heavens, most of them ordinary travellers, businessmen and women, tourists. But one of them was different; one of them was carrying death.

  22

  LONDON

  They returned to Golden Square through the dark empty streets of the city. It took Foxie a couple of hours to explore those electronic networks whose dispassionate function it is to record human movement and business transactions, and to learn that a woman by the name of Kristen Hawkins possessed an EEC passport issued in London, an American Express Gold card, and an Access Card obtained from the National Westminster Bank in Kilburn, where she kept an account into which deposits were made twice a year by wire-transfer from a bank in Venice. And there was more: she’d leased the house in Kilburn for almost twelve years, and rent had been paid annually, via draft from a financial institution in Liechtenstein, to the company, Greater Southern Properties Ltd, that owned the house.

  Twelve years, Pagan thought. For twelve years she’d had that house in Kilburn. He wondered how often she’d gone there, slipping in and out of the city unseen. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was; frontiers meant nothing to her. There were no borders in Carlotta’s world, neither geographical nor moral.

  Foxie kept tapping keys, tracking the person known as Kristen Hawkins. He stopped abruptly and looked at Pagan with a curious smile. ‘God. You’re going to love this one, Frank. Our dark lady of the sonnets actually worked as a temporary secretary, from 3 July until 5 July this year, at Scotland Yard.’

  ‘She did what?’

  Foxie read from the screen. ‘She was sent to the Yard by an employment agency called The Quik-Help Bureau, and she spent three days in the accounts department. If she used her initiative, she found out how to break into the computer system.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it for a moment.’ Pagan tried to imagine her strolling the corridors of Scotland Yard. Unassuming Kristen Hawkins, temporary secretary. Nobody would notice her, nobody would remember her. Moving quietly, she would pass unobserved in and out of offices, perhaps clutching files under her arm – a drab little nobody who’d wander around unquestioned. So much for internal security, he thought. So much for screening procedures. For three short days, he and Carlotta had been colleagues in a sense, both employed by the same organization. We’re bonded, Pagan. Whether you like it or not. The most wanted person in the country – and she’d been secure under the umbrella of the Yard.

  ‘What else can we get on her?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I’ve dug out just about everything I can dig,’ Foxie answered, and he leaned back from the screen, clasping his hands together, cracking his knuckles. ‘I don’t know where else to search.’

  Pagan looked from the window, saw the city coming to life, cars in the square, pedestrians moving to their places of employment. He thought: Pasco goes to her for help. What kind of help? He remembered the burnt bank-book. Had Pasco offered her money for this unspecified assistance? Money didn’t interest her. Besides, she obviously had enough of it stashed away in Venice and Liechtenstein, and God knows where else – no, she wouldn’t want Richard Pasco’s cash. And if Pasco had offered her any, he’d clearly misjudged her. She wasn’t for sale. She couldn’t be bought. Question: who the hell was Pasco? This was what it kept coming back to.

  He wandered away from the window and stood behind Foxie. ‘Bring up Martin’s files,’ he said.

  Foxie tapped the keys. The screen changed. The outline of Burr’s career appeared together with a list of sub-directories. Foxie, beset by a sense that he might go blind if he kept staring at the console, said, ‘Now what?’

  ‘Look for Pasco.’

  Foxworth punched the keyboard. The word SEARCHING flickered on and off hypnotically. Then it stopped. The name Pasco, Richard, appeared, followed by a command to open a file called MB/ DRGS/86/35H.

  Foxie typed in the appropriate letters. The file appeared. Pagan leaned over Foxworth’s shoulder to read it. It simply said: Deleted and transferred to private papers, August 1986. Authorized Martin Burr.

  Pagan studied the message a second, then he felt inside the pocket of his jacket and produced the key he’d been given by Marcia Burr.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  A lifetime of work, big cardboard boxes of old files, manila folders stuffed with official papers, some of them yellow and faded with the passage of time, notebooks filled with Burr’s precise handwriting: in Martin’s Knightsbridge apartment Pagan felt like an archivist dismayed by an abundance of uncollated material. He and Foxworth sorted through the cardboard boxes, which had been marked by years in thick black felt pen. 1976, 1977, 1978 and so on. Pagan found the one they were looking for – 1986 – after a few minutes. He dragged it into the middle of the floor and opened it.

  In 1986 Burr had been in charge of the Drug Squad. The box contained details of busts, cargoes seized from ships, cocaine, hashish. There were also monthly notebooks, which Burr had kept conscientiously; these consisted of private reflections, comments. The only way to beat the smugglers, Burr had written in March 1986, is to legalize the bloody stuff and have it available by prescription. Martin the heretic. Who would have suspected that Martin, so correct, would have been an advocate for the decriminalization of drugs?

  Pagan kept turning the pages. It was disconcerting to be sifting through the private observations of a dead man. Martin had written: If a man wants to use dope, it’s his own business, provided he doesn’t hurt anyone in the process. Legalization would also provide a means of taxation.

  Pagan raised his face, looked round the room, found himself gazing out into the hallway through the open door. It was half in shadow, the way it had been when Martin was murdered. He got up from his chair and looked along the corridor almost as if he expected to see the woman standing by the door. In the place where Martin had been slain, there were bloodstains on the rug and a few dried petals from a flower vase.

  He returned to the notebook. Pressed between the pages was a photograph of Martin taken in the hold of a cargo vessel surrounded by tarpaulined bales of reefer. Burr looked vaguely forlorn.

  Pagan found the notebook for August 1986. He had the makings of a dull headache behind his eyes. His mind drifted to the woman. He pictured her out there somewhere, perhaps even in London still, and he imagined he could hear her laughter. Pasco, Pagan. Look for Richard Pasco. A voice from nowhere, a maddening whisper from space. It instilled him with a sense of urgency.

  He kept flicking, flicking. Sometimes a personal note was added in a margin. Seventeenth wedding anniversary. Must buy flowers, book a table at The Connaught. Important – underlined three times.

  Seventeen years of marriage, Pagan thought. Which meant that Martin and his wife had only last month celebrated their twenty-seventh year of marriage. And now it was all blown away, it was sand. He pondered Marcia Burr, wondered if she’d gone down to the cottage in Sussex to see if it were possible to pick up the slack of her life—

  It came off the page at him suddenly. One short ungrammatical string of words that didn’t immediately
yield meaning, almost as if Burr had jotted them down without really thinking, as if he were disturbed to the point where he wasn’t able to formulate the sentence properly.

  Pagan said, ‘Look at this.’

  Foxie peered at the notebook. ‘Pasco,’ he said. ‘But what does it tell us? It’s garbled.’

  With the notebook open in his hand, Pagan stood up, wandered the room, then sat on the edge of Martin Burr’s desk. What Martin had written wasn’t clear at all. The other entries in the notebooks had reflected calm detachment, but this one had been written without any apparent attention to structure, simply something Burr wanted to skip over because—

  Because what?

  Poor Pasco, Marcia says forget, hands grubby.

  And that was it, that was all. ‘Poor Pasco,’ Pagan said. ‘Why poor Pasco? And hands grubby? What is that supposed to mean? And this – Marcia says forget?’

  ‘Ask her,’ Foxie said.

  ‘I asked her last night. You were there. I asked her if Pasco meant anything to her, and she said it didn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s lying.’

  ‘She might have forgotten. This notebook is ten years old.’

  ‘Then we jog her memory, Frank.’

  Pagan stared at the entry. Even the handwriting seemed different, hurried. ‘It’s not the best of times to ask questions of Marcia,’ he said. He remembered her drawn features, the sorrow in her eyes, the tentative gestures. He recalled the misbuttoned cardigan: bereavement created imbalances. Everything was awry because there were no longer any foundations. Ask her gently, he thought. And if she didn’t remember? Or if she chose not to remember? If she’d been deliberately lying? What then? How could he pressure her into telling the truth?

  ‘So?’ Foxie asked. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ Pagan said. ‘It means going all the way down to Sussex.’

  Pagan wondered about the times of trains to Lewes. He turned from the window, walked to Martin’s desk, gazed at the word-processor. Scraps of paper, on which Martin had scribbled words and phrases, lay alongside the keyboard. Rule number one – Begin at the beginning, Martin had written on the back of an envelope. Everywhere you looked there was a reminder of Burr, traces of a life violently interrupted.

  But life goes on, Pagan thought. Killers have to be caught. Especially this one. Especially. He had a flash of the hotel, the dining-room, the chaos.

  ‘Phone the station, Foxie. Check the times of the trains.’

  Foxworth found a phone directory and leafed through the pages. Pagan looked again at the notebook. Hands grubby: it suggested that whatever Martin had been involved in with regard to Pasco had left him feeling unhappy, even ashamed. Poor Pasco.

  Foxie had dialled a number. ‘Bloody recorded timetable,’ he said after a moment. ‘They’re always scratchy and inaudible. Why can’t they pay somebody to answer inquiries?’

  Pagan heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. He went into the hallway, saw the front door opening.

  Marcia Burr, dressed in the black of mourning, stepped inside the apartment. She moved a couple of feet forward and seemed to sway gently, as if her balance had been undermined by the shock of realizing that the place where she stood was the precise spot her husband had been killed. Pagan hurried toward her, caught her by the elbow.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, fine.’ Her voice was thin. A black veil hung across her face. ‘I hate this, this thing,’ she said, and shoved the veil away, as if in doing so she might diminish her grief, deny the condition of widowhood. ‘I hate black. Why can’t we wear red or something bright? Where is it written that one has to wear black? It’s so cheerless. So final.’

  Pagan escorted her along the hallway. He tried to divert her attention from the bloodstains, but it was too late. She’d already seen them. He wondered what was going through her head. She’d perceive this apartment differently now. It would be alien to her, and horrifying.

  She looked round the drawing-room. She might have been seeing it for the first time; she seemed to recognize nothing. How can I ask her questions when she’s in this state of mind? he wondered. Last night in Golden Square she’d given the impression of marginal self-control – but a form of collapse had taken place in the hours of darkness.

  ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. She stared away from him, her attention drawn to a glass case inside which sat a stuffed partridge. There were several taxidermized game birds in the room, each entombed in a case. ‘Those damned birds. I always loathed them,’ she said. Her voice was flat and hollow.

  What was he supposed to say? Pagan wondered. Could he come right out with it? What role did Pasco play in Martin’s life? Foxie appeared in the doorway, then stepped quietly into the room.

  Marcia Burr removed her black gloves and laid them in her lap. ‘I only dropped in to see how you are doing, Frank.’

  No, he thought. It was more than that. He caught a wary edge in her voice, something she was trying to guard. She turned her face to him. Her lipstick was badly done, raggedly drawn with a hand that must have been shaking. Pagan felt useless. What comfort could he possibly bring her? He sat down on the sofa facing her. Foxie, hushed, lingered near the window.

  ‘Our son arrives today,’ she said. ‘From Hong Kong.’

  ‘I’m glad you won’t be alone,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Of course.’ She fidgeted with the gloves, stared at Pagan, then at Foxworth. ‘I’ll sell this place. I’ll put it on the market as soon as the funeral is over. It’s no use to me now.’

  She was talking round the edges of things. Pagan realized that. The unspoken name of Pasco lay between them like a third party in the room. She must have known he’d come across the name somewhere in Martin’s papers. She tossed her gloves aside and pressed her fingertips to her eyelids.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t get you a drink?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I miss him, Frank. I miss him terribly.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do. You’ve been going through the boxes, I assume.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So much paper,’ she said. ‘Martin was like a jackdaw.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was quiet a second. ‘Have you found anything interesting?’

  You know we have, he thought. ‘There’s so much material to get through,’ he answered quietly.

  ‘Frank. Why don’t you just say it? I’m a bad liar.’

  Pagan mumbled some mild protest, made a gesture with his hand.

  ‘Oh, Frank, I don’t like it when somebody demurs,’ she said. ‘I’m just not very good when it comes to fibbing. You saw the name, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re too tactful to ask about it.’

  ‘Respectful more than tactful,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Respect won’t help you find this wretched woman.’

  Pagan stood up. He wandered to one of the glass cases and peered inside. Lustrous feathers, glazed glass eyes.

  ‘Richard Pasco,’ Marcia said. ‘Martin worried himself sick about the man. You know how bloody high-minded he could be at times, Frank. Anything that offended his sense of ethics caused him sleepless nights.’

  ‘Tell me about Pasco, Marcia.’

  She slumped back in the chair, tilting her face, gazing up at the ceiling. ‘Pasco, yes. I’ll tell you about him. But I believe I’ll have that drink first, Frank. If you’d be so kind as to do the honours. Gin if there’s any. A dash of tonic.’

  Pagan went to the cocktail cabinet and poured a glass of Beefeaters. He added a touch of flat tonic water and took the drink to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Martin always felt guilty about Pasco. I tried to tell him he was judging himself far too harshly. But you know what he was like. He was his own most severe critic.’

  Pagan leaned back on the sofa. What had Martin wri
tten on the back of the envelope? Rule number one – begin at the beginning. He said, ‘Why don’t we go through it slowly, Marcia. From the very start.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She tasted her drink and stared at Pagan over the rim of her glass. ‘Why don’t we?’

  23

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Professor Edward Jay Binns sat in his bed and browsed the pages of a skin magazine called Studs, which depicted perfect specimens of suntanned young manhood. He was in his early sixties and rarely lectured these days, perhaps once a year if he was feeling up to it, or if he had some fresh insight to add to his life’s work: a study of the relationship between the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the Romantic poets. He was one year short of statutory retirement, although the Dean had promised him office space after that – nothing commodious, you understand, Ed, a small token of our esteem.

  Binns passed much of his time reading and making notes and conducting the occasional seminar or tutorial. What he really enjoyed was a one-to-one situation with a student, preferably a good-looking boy, and preferably in the comfort of his own house on the leafy outskirts of Baltimore. Between reading and scribbling notes, he haunted sex shops and purchased magazines.

  He was presently examining a study of two naked young men, one black, the other white. They were a wondrously muscled pair, and each had an erection. The black boy’s hand was curled around the white penis, which was large and swollen. The black penis was slightly shadowed by the white boy’s body, but it was discernible, and bold, a flamboyantly proud mauve-headed thing. The professor, who didn’t believe in the current fad of ‘outing’, as it was called, stared at the photograph.

  His absorption in it was such that when he heard his front doorbell ring he was frankly irritated. He had half a mind to let it go unanswered, but it kept ringing. He got out of bed and wrapped a robe around his spindly white nakedness and made his way downstairs, passing portraits of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats – all his heroes. He opened the front door. His first impression was of a good-looking young man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans, short black hair slicked back, an earring attached to one lobe and sparkling in the morning sunlight.