By the Light of a Lie (Thane & Calder Book 1)

by Marjorie Orr

  They settled at a corner table outside a restaurant, Herk sitting with his back against the wall.

  ‘Old habits die hard?’ she asked.

  He ignored her and said: ‘Moules frites are good.’

  Tire laughed. ‘Almost fish and chips but not quite.’

  Over lunch, as they happily fingered their way through a mountainous bowl of mussels, he quizzed her about her meeting with St Clair.

  ‘Not much to tell,’ she said, munching on a chip. ‘Said he was a court appointee, only met my father once, was a third cousin of my mother and had never met her. The money came from my maternal grandmother’s estate and my mother’s life insurance.’ She sighed. ‘And my father’s savings. Though I did think he lied about my father. Said he wasn’t a mechanic, but didn’t know what he did.’

  ‘Why did you think he was a mechanic?’ Herk asked absently, looking around the busy street.

  ‘One of the newspaper reports of the trial described him as an aeronautical engineer.’

  He turned to her, exasperated, and said: ‘Engineer covers everything from the guy who designed the aeroplane to the guy who checks the screws. He could have been an overseer, or an inventor, for all you know.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ she replied. ‘That can get investigated later.’ Or not, she thought to herself. ‘I’ve got my father back in his box for the time being. The more important matter is Paul Stone. St Clair warned me against going in too heavy, unless I had enough to topple him. And the young guy who turned up before I left…’

  ‘That was the Audi?’ he interrupted.

  ‘You were watching?’ she asked, intrigued.

  ‘Not really, but I saw it go down the road.’

  She looked at him suspiciously.

  ‘Well, what did he say? Who was he?’

  ‘Said he was an ex-colleague, Jake Harrister, mid-thirties, possibly gay. He said, when he was showing me out, that a Scottish journalist investigating Stone had been killed in a car crash.’

  ‘Help my god, they tumble like nine pins around that guy. Reckon St Clair is right. Best tread very softly or,’ he gave her a straight look, ‘give up all together.’

  ‘No chance,’ she said firmly, ‘I’ve been up against some hard nuts before. I’m not letting this one go, given what he might have done to Erica. Or paid a goon to do.’

  She scowled at a passing woman, who flinched and looked away discomfited. Two mopeds roared past, dodging in and out of the lingering tourist cars. Coffee came and after the waiter had cleared away the empty mussel shells and plates, he said thoughtfully: ‘The mate I went to see in Sandhurst, a sergeant I served with at one point, he said they kept a special look out for St Clair’s house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He didn’t know. But he’s clearly not just a retired paper-pusher. There must be security implications. Smells like MI5. And Harrister is a name that rings a bell with me somewhere.’ He scratched his head and rubbed his lips, then raised a hand for the bill. ‘I can’t place him. I did work for an intelligence officer at one point, maybe he had contacts with him. It’ll come to me.’

  Back in the car they circled back round the bay, back onto the main route and through a short tunnel hewn out of the mountain.

  ‘That’s Cap Bear,’ Herk pointed to their left where a white lighthouse glinted in the sunlight on a promontory. ‘Hellish weather out there sometimes when it’s blowing. Worse than the north of Scotland.’

  ‘You served up there as well?’ she asked.

  He didn’t answer, but kept his eyes on the curving road, dipping and weaving its way round the mountain edge above the sea. At the next village, turning right on the stony seafront, the road straightened out. They passed wineries that wafted their pungent scent into the open car windows.

  Once under a railway bridge, it narrowed to a winding country road through vineyards and olive groves, with a rising mountain directly ahead. The BMW, sitting low on the tarmac, negotiated the hairpin bends smoothly. The road zigzagged, clinging to the edge of steep drops and passing almond trees planted in neat lines on a perilous slope, hedged by wild figs and scraggy cork oaks.

  At the top, Herk waved a hand at the valley below. ‘There you are. Spain. And not a gendarme in sight.’

  ‘There’s no border controls at all?’ Tire asked, amazed.

  ‘Nuh. And there are roads like this all the way across. They wouldn’t take an articulated lorry, but it saves all that fuss at the main crossing after Le Boulou. You can get held up for hours there in summer. The customs guys and the policía

  poking their noses into car boots. Right pain. Mind you, after the Madrid bombing it wasn’t surprising and the Basque terrorists used to be a worry as well.’

  A huge brown bird hung lazily in the sky in the distance, circling so slowly it was almost at a standstill. Tire peered and said: ‘Perhaps an eagle. Might even be a lammergeyer. They’ve got broader tails, but I can’t see at this angle.’

  ‘Which would mean what exactly?’ he asked.

  She chuckled. ‘Off on your omens again? Eagles are majestic and a good sign. Lammergeyers? They’re vultures, scavenging after dead carcasses, cleaning up decay. The Egyptians and Romans thought they were lucky. Sacred to the mother goddess. Protective. All about renewal, death and rebirth.’

  ‘You’re a walking encyclopaedia,’ he replied, admiringly.

  The bird disappeared slowly over the hill into the next valley. She wound down the window and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the passing breeze. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, she said: ‘I grew up with birds, on holiday anyway in the Western Isles. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. I felt connected to them and later I read them up.’

  ‘But you don’t believe in omens; apart from astrology, I mean?’

  She nudged his arm and laughed. ‘Not that I’d admit to publicly. Though if I was honest, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this...’ He grinned. ‘...I have seen birds and dead animals at times that fitted with what the astrology was saying. Tiresias, the old Greek seer, had the gift of prophecy by the birds. There’s a whole mysterious world out there that isn’t talked about. Astrology is just a touch more respectable.’

  The well-surfaced single track descended quickly, crossing a ford, passed a farm with Charolais cows grazing on the river pasture, then through several rustic Spanish villages sitting amid acres of vines. Tire could feel her tension rising again. Once onto the main drag for Figueres, the signs for the Dali Museum flashed past. She checked her phone for emails.

  ‘No joy on Louis Neroni yet from Matt,’ she said. ‘Paul Stone’s stepson. He’s traced his birth certificate to Orvieto in Italy, which was a lucky guess from a cutting about his father’s death. They evidently don’t do central registers out there, so you have to search village by village. He’ll try immigration into France and UK after his mother’s death, on both the Stone and Neroni names, and see if he can turn up anything.’

  ‘Bit of a long shot, that,’ Herk remarked sourly.

  She gave him an amused glance. ‘Hey, I’ve been researching for two decades. You just keep pursuing every angle till you get lucky.’

  Another email caught her attention and she flicked up and down it, reading it several times. ‘That is strange,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘What?’

  Her hesitation caused him to look at her irritably. ‘OK, OK, I’m just trying to work it out. Paul Stone funds research into Alzheimer’s drugs, presumably to improve memory or at least stop it deteriorating. Perhaps because of his dear old ma. But he also funds research in Mexico into drugs to suppress memory. Why would he do that?’

  Herk shrugged. ‘Sounds quite sensible. Some of the lads who were suffering from PTSD after Kosovo and Afghanistan used to get medication to make the memories less overwhelming.’

  ‘According to this, from a Mexican doctor, these drugs they are testing aren’t just about dampening down the emotional affect, they are aimed at obliterating memories altoge
ther. A bit like a chemical cosh, he says. He doesn’t approve.’

  The car swerved sharply to the left and Herk swore at an articulated container lorry that had pulled out in front of them with no indication.

  ‘Fucking idiot. No discipline on Spanish roads. They’re a bleeding nightmare.’ He accelerated past a tailgating series of lorries and pulled into the inside lane. ‘I’ve two questions for you. Do all these research people not cost you a fortune?’

  ‘They’re tax-deductible,’ she said shortly. ‘And this one came free, anyway. Next?’

  ‘What’s wrong with deleting bad memories? Some things I’ve seen, I never want to remember.’

  After a long pause, she said: ‘Your memory is your biography, your life story. If you destroy that, you aren’t you any longer. Your sense of identity would be damaged.’

  Herk absorbed what she said and replied: ‘I don’t see that. I’d be who I was before and I knew who I was back then.’

  She searched for an explanation without wishing to probe too deeply. ‘The point is you aren’t who you were before. Your experiences have moulded you and being able to digest the memories of what happened allows you to move on as a whole person. Deleting memories would be a bit like amputating a limb, and maybe worse, since messing with the brain has all sorts of unforeseen consequences.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about digest, speaking personally. More like vomit them out and get rid of them,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But, as you say, it begs the question of why Stone is so interested. And I could see how it could be misused. There’s a lot of the top brass would be happy if some of us forgot quite a few things they threw us into.’

  The three-lane motorway hurtled south, flashing past pine forests and rivers, with occasional old-style, stone Spanish houses on either side, their rural idyll rudely interrupted by modern progress. The traffic started to thicken as the approaches to Barcelona drew near.

  Tire was searching for an elusive piece of information that was staying irritatingly hidden. Finally she said, banging her boot on the floor: ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What?’

  She waved a hand above the dashboard and said: ‘I’ll need to take this slowly since I don’t remember it too well. Wiping the past clean means you can start with a pristine new world of your own creation. It’s the classic sign of a megalomaniac. It’s all about control. No guilt, no responsibility for what has been. And no situations in which you were powerless. You can step across a threshold shining white and start again. Think about Tony Blair.’

  ‘I’d rather no, thank you,’ Herk replied smartly.

  She could feel her heart racing as another piece of the jigsaw fell into place. This made sense. What was in Paul Stone’s past that he was trying to hide?

  CHAPTER 31

  Underpass after underpass, the maze of subterranean tunnels that was Barcelona’s answer to surface clutter kept the rush-hour traffic moving quickly. Fume-filled darkness gave way to regular patches of blue sky over roads lined with palm trees. Then back into the concrete subways burrowing across the Catalonian capital.

  Out the other side into open country, they drove along the Ronda ring road following the signs for the El Prat de Lobregat airport. The arterial entrance led directly onto massive multi-tiered car parks, perched on banks of grass. They swung into the one marked C and spiralled upwards through almost-empty floors to the top level.

  At the far end, a car park attendant in a visibility waistcoat was smoking a cigarette, leaning against a mud-splattered black Range Rover. Herk pulled into the bay beside and jumped out. He nodded curtly to the attendant, handed the BMW keys and gate ticket to him and gestured towards the boot. The travel bags were brought across to the Range Rover as Tire frantically scrabbled in the front for her scattered belongings. Within five minutes Herk had checked over their new transport, handed the impassive Spaniard three hundred euros in notes from the stash Tire had given him and they were on their way back down.

  ‘That was quick,’ she remarked. ‘Is there anything you can’t brew up?’

  He grinned and said: ‘It’s not difficult. You just need to know the right people to contact, grease their palms and it all happens. With luck we’ll swap back in four days. You needn’t worry. It’s got insurance for the maximum. Now for the port.’

  ‘Why are we going there?’ she asked, getting edgy about not being kept in the loop.

  ‘I’ve a meeting with a guy there,’ Herk answered nonchalantly. He stopped the car just before the airport exit, set the GPS and within fifteen minutes they were heading into the Port of Barcelona and passing the dock entrance. The ticket and embarkation office was crowded with milling tourists, security guards and two policía outside. Herk drove past and found a parking space, then flipped open his mobile. He found a number in his contacts and when that answered said simply: ‘Black Range Rover, Spanish plates, ten cars down.’ Then he lit a cigarette and waited.

  Tire stared resignedly at passers-by heading for the Majorca ferry, dragging wheeled cases behind them, then jumped when Herk rolled his window down further, leant out and roared at a couple approaching them. ‘Watch out, pickpockets.’ The wife turned to find two skinny teenagers in dirty jeans and hooded jackets jostling them from behind and she let out an ear-splitting yell. The youths turned tail and ran, and the flustered couple gave Herk a grateful smile.

  ‘Your good deed for the day?’ Tire asked, then she jumped again when the passenger door clunked shut behind her.

  ‘Buenas tardes, senora,’ a deep voice said, his garlicky breath reaching over her shoulder. ‘Como estas hoy, Senor Smith?’

  ‘Stow it, Fred. Ye can cut the pleasantries. Have you got what I asked for? Both of them?’ Herk said brusquely, turning to look at him.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Herk,’ the voice replied. ‘Yup, they’re tucked under the seat. See you.’ The door clunked again and he disappeared without Tire having seen his face.

  ‘What the hell was that about?’ she asked, bending round to try to see what had been left and failing.

  ‘Just a bit of backup, in case we run into trouble,’ he replied cheerfully, negotiating across a busy roundabout.

  ‘You don’t mean guns, do you?’ she screeched. ‘What the hell do you think we’re going into. It’s a holiday resort, for chrissakes. Do you not think you’re getting a bit paranoid?’

  He swung onto the Ronda Littoral, then settled at a steady 110, before replying: ‘I’d rather be hyper-cautious than caught out, that’s all. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. If I don’t need them, then they’ll go back and no worries. I just didn’t want to bring them across the border, that’s all.’

  Her claustrophobia was making her brain fog over and she cursed herself for deciding to come on this idiotic jaunt. The road signs for the A7, direction Girona and France, came up. For a moment she almost suggested going home. How had Herk managed to morph from helper to control freak in charge? She had always operated alone in the past. Now she was being ordered about like a squaddie and ferried around as if she was a submissive wife. Her sense of humour got the better of her and she giggled at the irony. She was a sucker for new experiences so she might as well enjoy this one.

  Eventually she said weakly: ‘Where are we going now? We’re not expected till tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Begur,’ he replied. ‘Fred knows a decent hostelry and he booked us in. Then we can do a recce first thing before we get to Castell Pajol. It’s only fifteen kilometres away. I need to know where the roads are in and out. In case we need a fast exit.’

  What was Herk’s gut telling him? Her head grated. She was not going to allow herself to get infected by his pumped-up anxiety. If she worried about threats round every corner she couldn’t function. The worst that could happen was a wasted trip.

  CHAPTER 32

  The sheen on the bronze statue of a reclining man, exaggerated by an overhead spotlight, gave the impression of a heavily oiled body. Although nude, one muscled thigh was drawn up to co
ver his genitals and his face, buried between his arms, was also hidden. The gallery was empty of people so the ten statuettes, each on their own display stand, were all visible.

  Jimmy, having examined the sleeping figure minutely, moved on to view a kneeling woman, her breasts bare, the warm brown of the bronze thrown into sharp relief by the gold-coloured blindfold and gilt cloth draped discreetly just above her pubic bone. He wrinkled his nose and frowned. Loud laughter from the office at the far end made him jump.

  ‘My dear chap,’ Ricky’s voice echoed round the gallery. ‘I didn’t realise you were here. Examining my treasures, are you? Aren’t they wonderful? My cousin sent them over. They’re by an Italian sculptor.’

  He strode across, his camel jacket open over a black polo neck and black trousers, tossing his hair out of his eyes. He put a friendly hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, smiling widely, then looked concerned.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ he said.

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘It’s that yellow brass on it, that look’s too modern, I suppose. For my taste anyway.’

  ‘Wally, what do you think?’ Ricky called over his shoulder.

  A stocky, ginger-haired man emerged through the door with a cigar in his hand. He had a rough, reddened face that sat uncomfortably with the loud check of his tan suit and waistcoat. Unaware or uncaring about his appearance, he carried himself with confidence and a hint of aggression.

  His voice was brusque and gravelly. ‘No sense in asking me, Ricky. I don’t like your sculptures. At least this one’s a woman. No like that obscenity.’ He waved his cigar at another male nude standing erect on a marble plinth, his arm outstretched.

  Jimmy moved across and leant closer to the offending statuette. ‘That’s Apollo,’ he said quietly. ‘See – he’s holding a lyre.’

  Wally snorted as Ricky winked at Jimmy, then moved forward with his hand outstretched. ‘I’m Wally Strang. I like your paintings. Ricky here said you’d do me one specially.’ It wasn’t a question, so Jimmy nodded politely, moving back a step.