by Oliver Tidy
When he had finished they sat in silence for a while. After everything had sunk in she adopted a troubled expression.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘I don’t doubt any of what you’ve told me, right?’
‘Right, but?’
‘But how can any of it be linked to Bishop, or anyone in particular? Smith and Bishop are the only names you have. By your own admission you only ever had any contact with either before you left the country. You have nothing to tie anyone to anything that’s gone on since your return.’
‘There are two dead men lying in the New Forest who have traceable identities.’
She made a face. ‘Neither of which is in a position to support any of your claims.’
‘You asked me at breakfast what I had in mind for taking this forward in a positive way. Positive for us, that is.’
‘If you have an idea, now would be a great time to share it.’
‘There is one thing that they will respond to, I’m sure.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Me.’
‘You’ve lost me. Sorry.’
‘They want me, so I’ll make good bait to draw them out.’
‘What exactly are you suggesting?’
‘A honey trap or a forced meeting. If I can get them in a room with me, I’m sure I can get them to talk.’
‘What good will that do, having a nice cosy chat before they kill you and bury you so deep no one will ever find you?’
‘If you’re listening, a lot.’
***
17
The office called her back. There had been no reply to several phone calls made to Mrs Tallis’s home phone number. Answer-phone messages had been left. Should they keep trying? Yes, they should. The reporter decided to keep this to herself, after Sansom had made it clear that no news wasn’t any longer to be considered good news.
The journalist in her didn’t object to the idea of what he was proposing – putting himself in danger to get the truth. Sometimes it was the way it had to be; someone had to take some responsibility and some risks. And she had no personal feelings towards him. He was work and that was it. Sure, she felt sorry for his losses, his trials and his predicament, but she wasn’t responsible for any of that – discounting her vitriolic piece in the paper – or for him as a person. Rule number one: never get involved on anything other than a professional level.
She needed to know what he had in mind. She said, ‘Who? How? When? Where?’
‘Initially, I thought about getting to Bishop. He would be the easier of the two to locate and perhaps the easier of the two to pressure into something.’ She didn’t ask him to clarify his expression but she understood that if he got his hands on the politician ‘pressure’ would be a harmless euphemism for what he would be prepared to do to him in order to get some answers. He continued, ‘But I can imagine I’d have significant logistical issues getting close, especially now. He must be very much on his guard. He knows that if I choose not to turn tail and run for the continent and a life in hiding then I’ll be looking to him to prove my innocence. It stands to reason.’ She was nodding, letting him get it all out in the open before giving her own two penn’orth. ‘The only other one is Smith, if that’s even his real name. I don’t doubt that he will be reading the situation the same as I am, but he’s an anonymous figure. If he’s in military intelligence then his profile will be necessarily low at all times. Probably he expects that his cloak of invisibility will keep him safe. If I can’t find him, I can’t get to him.’
Unable to restrain herself, she said, ‘This isn’t exactly taking us forward, is it?’
‘I haven’t finished, yet. Bishop and Smith must have contact, particularly with all that’s going on now. I need to sight them together once.’
Filling the void he left, she said, ‘And then?’
‘And then I follow Smith. Find out where he works and lives, then pay him a visit.’
‘And how do you intend get them together to that end? Don’t you think that with “all that’s going on” they will be avoiding each other like the plague? They won’t want to be seen together.’
He smiled a small, self-conscious smile. ‘I’m working on that.’
‘It could take days, weeks even. What happens in the meantime? Where would you stay?’ Another elephant plodded across the laminate flooring. ‘How are you going to keep a watch on Bishop without being seen yourself?’ She was finding the flaws in his thinking impossible to ignore.
‘Have you got a better idea?’
‘Actually, yes, I have.’ He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘At the paper we have an extensive photo library and then we have access to other huge online archives. Punch in a search term – the name of an individual, for example – and everything associated with that person will be flagged. I can access it from here. My suggestion is that we try a few terms to include Bishop’s name and you can sit at my desk and see who comes up. It’s a lot safer. There are no guarantees, of course, but I think it would be a good place to start. It’s possible that this Smith, or whatever his name is, might make an appearance and if you can give me a face I can get everything else.’
He thought about it for a moment. ‘OK. It’s worth a try. When can I start?’
It had been surprisingly easy, she thought. Perhaps it was a reflection of his lack of confidence in his own plan. Maybe he simply saw it for the good idea that it was.
‘I can get you access whenever you’re ready.’
‘I’m ready.’
She logged in first to the computer and then to the newspaper archives. She showed him how to use the program and left him to it.
‘I need to go out for a few things,’ she said.
‘Right.’
‘Do you need anything?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘I’ll be back in about half an hour.’
‘Fine.’
He hadn’t taken his eyes from the screen as he carefully began to click his way through the database, searching the faces in crowds of suited politicians and aides. She collected her handbag, keys and mobile phone and left him to it.
*
When she returned home forty minutes later there was more than a hint of autumn evening in the air. She took a good long look up and down the street for any suspicious vehicles or loitering men; the conspiracy theory was beginning to grip her. Seeing nothing alarming, she stepped inside the building and was soon back in the safety of the flat.
He hadn’t moved from in front of the screen. She felt a spasm of bitter disappointment, not simply at the waste of time, but at what he might feel was a pointless exercise. She sensed that he was a man of action and not one for pushing a plastic mouse around a Formica tabletop. The thought of him loose on the streets of London trying to execute his half-baked plan filled her with a deep sense of dread. He wouldn’t last long out there, not with his face in the minds of the public, his gung ho attitude towards his objectives and the plethora of CCTV cameras with face-recognition software littering the city.
‘Nothing?’ she said.
He treated her to a broad smile, the first she’d seen from him since his arrival the day before. ‘Got him,’ he said. ‘I’ve managed to get a couple of good, clear images up.’
She dumped the shopping and came across to see. ‘I have to ask that you are sure? You said you only met him once.’
‘Absolutely. No doubt. If the tagging on the photographs has been done properly, his name is Francis Smith.’
She looked through the few he had found. Francis Smith was nondescript. The wrong end of middle age. Not a tall man but thickly set, probably running to fat in his easy government-funded lifestyle. Smartly tailored and always in dark glasses, like he had something to hide.
‘Who is he?’ she said.
‘It just says government advisor.’
‘That’s tagging language for “haven’t a clue’’.’
‘Well he crops up with Bishop in some interesting places. This
one,’ he reached across her and clicked the mouse, ‘was taken in Africa three years ago. And this one,’ more clicking, ‘on a Ministry of Defence trip to Iraq eighteen months ago.’
There were no formally posed shots, she noticed. Each image captured of Smith had an accidental or incidental quality about it. He didn’t look like one who sought out the camera. In each image he was part of a bigger entourage surrounding Bishop.
‘Bishop would have been involved with Defence then, wouldn’t he?’ she said.
‘Yes, he was. I remember something Tallis said about a conversation he had with Botha. You remember he was the South African arms dealer that Bishop set me on the trail of? Stan said that Botha and Bishop had dealt arms, or made promises to do so. From what I recall it didn’t come across as anything official. Bishop was supposed to have disappointed Botha and that was something to do with the massacre on The Rendezvous. Stan also understood that there was something else about it all, but he didn’t have the chance to get to the bottom of it.’
‘This is good,’ she said. ‘This is something – progress. Let me have a look around the web, see if I can find out anything about him.’
‘I’ve done that. There’s nothing.’
‘With respect, Mr Sansom, perhaps you just don’t know where to look. Cyber space is as vast as outer space and, if you don’t know your way around, just as murky.’
He made the chair available for her, acknowledging with the gesture that she was probably right. She gave him credit for his easy compliance. After all, he was a macho-man being told what to do by a woman. They didn’t all accept it with such good grace. In her experience, men seemed to view technology like they did cars – they didn’t often take kindly to the suggestion that a woman might be better at the controls.
‘How about calling me Acer?’ he said.
‘Susan.’ They resisted the urge to shake hands.
He said, ‘Would you like me to make some dinner?’
The offer sounded genuine, not a sarcastic attempt at wit after his displacement. On the back of his recent acquiescence the suggestion gave her further cause to regard him slightly differently. Perhaps there was more to him than unfortunate die-hard.
‘I’ve shopped for something to be thrown together in a wok.’
‘No problem. I used to be a wok enthusiast. Wok can go wrong?’
She gave him her deadpan we-are-not-amused look. ‘Fine. You know where the kitchen is.’
He left her to her research, collected up the shopping and disappeared into the small space to prepare the meal without further comment. As she settled herself to get on with her task she realised that she was almost smiling.
He was a noisy cook. The banging and clattering, the opening and closing of drawers and cupboards, the chopping sounds and the noise of other utensils carried through to make his presence something she could not ignore. But it wasn’t, she reflected, unpleasant to have a man cooking in her kitchen again – bizarre, perhaps, surreal even, given his identity and the circumstances of their association. She found that her eyes had wandered over to where his box sat and she thought about the pistol inside it – a weapon he had probably used to take the lives of the men who killed Tallis. It was incomprehensible for her. They can’t have been all bad. Possibly they had wives and children. They had just been men doing a job that had been ordered by someone else. The casual taking of life was all so appalling and anathema to her. She stared at the image of the man Sansom knew as Bishop’s organiser. Was she researching the man responsible for it all? Was Francis Smith the one calling those shots, provoking them in return?
The welcome and alluring smells of whatever he was preparing gradually wafted through to her. She responded by bringing her period of intense but fruitless searching to a temporary halt. She ended up in the kitchen doorway and was impressed. She’d expected a mess, like her ex would have left – ‘I’ve cooked for you. You surely don’t expect me to have to clear up as well do you?’ – but he’d not only washed up the two meals-worth of crockery that had sat on the work surfaces, he’d cleaned up after himself as he’d gone. The detritus of her life that had steadily piled up on the little kitchen table had been replaced with something that she hadn’t seen for a long time: its surface, two clean plates with cutlery and glasses. Thankfully, he’d stopped short of lighting a candle even if it would have completed the picture.
‘Smells good,’ she said.
‘I like to cook. I enjoy food. Even more these days after a year of eating roots and leaves.’
‘I’d like to talk to you about that sometime,’ she said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Not now. I mean when this is all over.’ In response to his glance up at her, she said, ‘Yes, I’m still confident that there will be an “after this”. Would you agree to me doing a piece on you? You never know, there might even be a book in it.’
He laughed then – a little explosion of genuine mirth. ‘Sorry. I don’t know if you’re serious.’
‘I am. Maybe.’
He was shaking his head but still smiling. ‘It’s not really me. Besides, when this is all over, I just want to have a quiet life.’
‘Where?’ She moved into the kitchen and was hunting for the corkscrew, bottle in hand. He passed it to her from where he had put it back in the drawer.
‘Not England.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s nothing here for me any more. No one. Just memories – and too many of them are bad. Besides, even if this all goes well – and by that I mean that I come out of it alive – I’ll still have to face some music. Not everything I’ve done has been within the law.’ He wasn’t smiling now. The familiar shutter of his troubled existence had been lowered back into place.
‘The two in the forest were self-defence, you said’
‘They were, but it will always just be my word for it.’
‘And the man on the coast?’
‘Harper? I told you; he shot first.’
‘And missed?’
‘No. He raised his shirt to expose the still white welts of scar tissue against his tanned hide.’
‘Christ!’ she said, unable to help herself. ‘How the hell did you survive that?’
‘Barely. It’s the Army that will want to make an example of me. They have their rules when it comes to being AWOL even if you think you have good reason. They have to make examples without exceptions. The service would fall apart otherwise.’
He seemed resigned to it and she found herself admiring him a little. Not only was he heroically trying to avenge a murdered friend, but he was also preparing himself to face the fall-out and the consequences of his actions. When his judgement day arrived, she had little doubt that he would take whatever punishment they handed down to him stoically.
‘Have there been others as part of this?’
He understood that she meant had he killed other men? ‘Yes, but not in the UK.’
‘Were they all in self-defence?’
He thought for a long moment. ‘No. If it helps, they all deserved it.’
She found herself fascinated to ask and hear more about the taking of life and how he could justify it, under any circumstances other than self-defence, but she didn’t want to risk getting on her moral high horse and ruin the promise of a good meal before it had been introduced to the plate.
He changed the subject anyway. ‘Anything on Smith?’
‘Not yet.’
‘This is ready. Shall we eat now?’
‘Yes. I’ll look again afterwards, while you’re washing up.’ She was watching him closely for his reaction to her little joke, but he just nodded agreement absently, preoccupied with his serving.
She drank the wine. He preferred water. They ate in a mixture of companionable silence and easy discussion. He asked her where she’d been, about the biggest stories she’d covered and about her ambitions in journalism. She noticed that he didn’t want to talk about himself, his life before all that he was embroiled in,
or his future, in any great detail. Each time she tried to overcome his defences, he gently steered the conversation around to her. She accepted his obvious sensitivity.
‘If we get nowhere on the Internet with Smith, what then?’ he said, finally bringing the conversation around to the present.
‘There are people who I could ask at work, other journalists I know who have greater knowledge of this area of current affairs. They might be able to identify him, give me some pointers.’
He thought for a short while. ‘What would be the risks?’
‘I can be discrete. Sometimes even the press have to be.’
‘All right – but it must be a last resort.’
He rose to clear the table.
‘That was very good. Thank you,’ she said and meant it.
‘My pleasure.’ He smiled down at her and she felt something unexpected happen in the pit of her stomach: an unstoppering of something that washed briefly throughout her, leaving her with a familiar and wholly inappropriate ache. She pushed it back and tried to poison or dilute it with the last of the wine, which, on reflection, she thought was possibly not the smartest thing to do.
‘I’ll make tea,’ she said, ‘and get back on the laptop.’
‘No need. I’ll do it after I’ve tidied up here. I’ll bring it through to you,’ he said, leaving her in no doubt where his priorities lay.
