by Jessica Mann
Chapter Sixteen
Another victim of the disaster at Sholto House had died. But the leading item on the news was the death of Steven Courtney. Police are treating it as a murder enquiry. An IRA connection has not been ruled out. Police are anxious to interview anyone who saw a tall woman, with grey hair and a dark coloured coat anywhere in the vicinity between the hours of …
The earphones in the isolation wing were unchangeably plugged into Radio Two. Rosamund listened to the music for a while, and let the honeyed brogue of the disc jockey drip into her ears, while she tried to work it out. She had been to Steven’s house yesterday afternoon. Mail had been visible on the door mat, through a glass panel. She could not remember seeing anything bigger than a letter, certainly no parcel or package. When she had telephoned later, a strange voice had answered the call. That was apparently well after the time that the bomb had exploded. But if the police thought that she had delivered it, why did they think she would try to ring Steven? Did they suppose her to be checking the success of her murderous venture? Or were they tracing all the calls to that number?
It looked as though Rosamund herself, and one other, were the only people in the country who knew that she had not posted a lethal parcel through Steven Courtney’s front door. Police and security officers were searching for her now. But whom should they really be hunting for?
Someone who wanted to get Rosamund into deeper trouble? Who knew that she had gone to Courtney’s house? Rosamund found herself unable to believe in so trivial a motive for such massive violence.
It must have been someone who needed to prevent her from seeing Steven, and to prevent Steven from telling what he knew: someone to whom Steven only now presented the threat which had been dormant for so many years. Phoebe’s death had made Rosamund the instrument which was potentially destructive to Aidan Britton, and, through Rosamund, Steven was equally dangerous. I killed Steven, she thought: and it’s no excuse to say that it was the last thing I intended.
One feels much more remorseful for accidents than for intentional misdeeds: Rosamund was now overcome with futile self-reproach. She had not envisaged Steven’s danger: but she should have done. She should have realised that Aidan had known nothing of the information sent by Steven to Rosamund, and by her to Phoebe, until Phoebe warned him that she would use it against him. She had telephoned Rosamund in New York, telling her that she intended to tackle Aidan that day. And that day she had died. Aidan had killed Phoebe. He had tried to kill Rosamund. He had killed Steven Courtney. An item on the radio news had announced that the Prime Minister’s health was not improving as quickly as had been hoped. Now that Aidan was so near his goal, he would not endure frustration.
Remorse again: if Rosamund had made public her doubts about her brother-in-law before, he would never have achieved his present position. He would not have been able to kill.
Rosamund realised that she was not free to duck out from under, even if Aidan would now let her. It was no longer her enemies who directed her movements, but her conscience.
In the sluice room she found a packet of disposable face masks and some protective clothing. She put on a fresh overall with a plastic apron over it and transferred her belongings to its pocket. She glanced at her father’s picture; more remorse. It’s all my fault, she thought. She tied a cotton cap over her hair, and hooked the elastic ear pieces of the mask firmly in place. She went out into the corridor and scurried towards the central landing. None of the people she passed did more than glance at her, except for a staff nurse, who said, ‘Are you on your way to thirteen? Can you hurry?’
It would probably not be wise to be seen in protective clothes on the lower floors, outside the wards. Behind a door, Rosamund took off all but the overall.
There was a continuous background noise of car engines and sirens through all the open windows. Rosamund had assumed it was the usual morning chorus of a hospital with a large accident and out-patient unit. It was only when she looked down the stair-well, standing to one side as dieticians and physiotherapists and ward orderlies went by, that Rosamund saw policemen in the entrance hall below. Their uniforms were reflected in the plate glass windows.
It could not be anything to do with her. Road accident victims must regularly be escorted to hospitals by policemen. There must have been a pile-up somewhere, and that was why she had heard so many ambulance sirens. But all the same, Rosamund looked round for escape. If they searched the hospital even the isolation ward would be no protection, for the administrator would know that it should not be occupied. What’s more, he would see at once that it had been occupied.
One policeman, accompanied by a man with a name tag on his lapel, was coming towards the staircase. Rosamund retreated through swing doors marked ‘Haematology’.
Haematology? What on earth … Blood tests, that was it.
‘Can I help you?’ a boy who looked too young to be at work asked.
‘No thanks. I’m just going to see about a plasma count …’ She went on, and through another pair of double doors into a laboratory where three people were working at their high benches, surrounded by test tubes, chemicals, bottles and sinks. Nobody looked up, and she carried on through a store room lined with shelves of packets and boxes.
The hospital had been designed on a circuit system to save the staff’s feet. It should not be necessary to retrace her steps. Out again, and here were the back stairs, not much more than a fire escape, leading down, past the second floor (ophthalmology and ENT), the first floor (general surgery and Intensive Care) and down to the ground floor. One or two nurses running up and down, but no questions.
Outpatients, X-Ray, Plaster Clinic. Someone had left a clip board on a window sill, and Rosamund picked it up.
A waiting room with rows of patients who looked up hopefully every time a uniform entered the room. Rosamund pencilled a scribble on the sheet of paper clipped to her board; its columns were marked with mysterious combinations of letters, surely meaningless to most people. She shook her head and backed out of the waiting room. Market research? Length of time spent waiting to see the consultant? The incidence of twins in the population? Nobody ever questioned the need for such studies.
A nurse in dark blue; authority. ‘Can I help you?’
Not sure whether it’s a doctor or an intruder. ‘I am undertaking a survey for the Regional Health Authority. The administrator has been informed.’
‘Oh yes? I suppose I can’t stop you then. Mrs Henley please, room five. Surveys indeed. The money they throw around. We are very busy, please don’t obstruct my nurses.’
A policeman came into the department, and the nurse turned to him. ‘What next, for goodness sake? What with Doctor Choudhray away and nurse Pettit off with a migraine again … what do you want this time, officer?’
‘Just checking. Anything for us today, dear?’
It was a routine visit. Rosamund bent her head over her page, and moved the pencil purposefully over it.
‘Just the usual chaos,’ the staff nurse said bitterly. ‘Too many patients booked, I tell them and tell them but nobody takes a blind bit of notice. And staff shortages as always. And now a snooper from the Region. And then they talk of cutting administration costs. I don’t know …’ The nurse and the policeman went further into the waiting room together.
‘Nurse, I’ve been waiting here since eight o’clock this morning …’
‘I’m sorry dear, doctor’s very busy today.’
Rosamund moved towards the door. When it swung open she could see that more policemen were in the lobby, and at the end of the passage, waiting beside the Hospital Hostesses’ desk, were two men in dark suits and carrying bowler hats and rolled umbrellas.
More people were making their way to the outpatients’ waiting room; a whole family escorting a boy with crutches and his leg in plaster; a man with dark goggles over his eyes; an elderly woman leaning on a walking-frame; a very pretty girl, pushing an empty wheel-chair. She was looking curiously around her, search
ing faces. When she saw Rosamund she stared and caught her lip in her teeth. She was standing beside a door with a symbol of a woman in a skirt. She hissed, ‘Quick, come in here.’
The cloakroom had been designed for the use of invalids and there was plenty of room to push the wheel-chair in. Rosamund remembered with a quick flash through her mind the studies she had read when this very cloakroom was at the design stage, of the optimum shape and size to fulfil Department of Health requirements.
The men in dark suits were looking in this direction, and the policeman was coming back down the passage. Rosamund followed the girl into feminine sanctuary.
A lavatory flushed, and a fat woman came out, adjusting her clothes. She glanced at a notice which read Now wash your hands.
‘I tell you what,’ she confided. ‘I shan’t because they told me to.’ She went out, banging the door.
‘I thought I’d never find you,’ the girl said. ‘I’ve even peered at patients on stretchers. Do you know that the place is full of men looking for you? I thought, if you get in here –’ She gestured at the chair.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am called Tamara Hoyland. I’m on your side. I’m a friend of Thea Crawford’s. Listen, there isn’t time to explain, but they heard your conversation with her. That must be how they got here. After all, I did myself. But Miss Sholto, there isn’t time now …’
Rosamund sat down, and Tamara began to wrap a rug around her, but gasped and exclaimed, ‘My God, you’d better take off the white coat first. That’s more like it. Look, I’ll put your stuff in my bag, OK? Here, tie my scarf over your head and have my sunglasses. They go darker in daylight. And keep your head down. Pretend you’ve hurt your neck.’
Rosamund put her feet together, aimed slightly to one side on the metal rest, and let them poke out under the fringe of the rug. She hunched her shoulders and clasped her hands under the cover, looking firmly downwards. The grey floor of the cloakroom changed to the hideously patterned carpet of the passage. Feet: black laced-up shoes, small on the nurses, huge under the policemen’s blue trousers. Brown suedes? A hospital administrator.
‘Do you need some help?’
Tamara Hoyland’s high voice. ‘Oh no, thank you so much. I always manage beautifully. I’m quite used to it.’
A ramp down to the concrete of the drive. Much colder than it had looked through the windows of the overheated hospital. Windy too; Rosamund shifted her knees to grasp the rug firmly between them.
‘Hang on a sec.’ The chair stopped. Rosamund saw Tamara open the door of a new Ford and grab something from the back shelf. They moved on again, and stopped beside a tiny yellow car with a sunshine roof. Tamara put what she had taken against her own windscreen. It was a neatly lettered card, saying ‘Hospital Car’.
‘Nobody’s looking. Quick, get in.’ Rosamund got into the passenger seat, and Tamara said, ‘Here, cover yourself up again. Just in case they are checking.’ She folded the wheelchair and propped it behind her seat, whence it would be easily visible from the outside.
Groups of observant men were standing around the exit from the car park. Rosamund kept her face well down, but Tamara waved and smiled, and one of the men lifted his bowler hat to her. She was, after all, a very pretty girl.
Chapter Seventeen
The conference in Ankara was about alternative energy sources for underdeveloped countries. Sylvester Crawford went to it because the editor for whom he usually worked had offered such a large fee, but he was unenthusiastic. Nothing new would be said, no new results would flow from it. Sylvester had reached the stage in his life when he preferred to spend his working life in his workroom, but Bernard Trent believed in chivvying him out. ‘You can quarry your own personality only so far,’ he told Sylvester, doodling a moustache onto a rival’s cover picture of the Lord Chancellor. ‘Sometimes you need the fertilisation of new places and subjects.’
They had this conversation about once every eighteen months. ‘It’s only four days,’ Bernard Trent said.
‘Turkey.’
‘You can have a month’s press visit to the new underground city in Antarctica if you prefer.’
‘Oh God. All right. Ankara.’
It was not so bad when he got there. It never was. Sylvester got VIP treatment, and managed to disappear sightseeing with a blonde Danish girl for at least one day. He was due to leave tomorrow, flying back with a stopover at Athens to interview a man about an island. He was writing a book about island economies, the oil-rich Shetland, the tourist-rich Greek Islands, the poor western isles of Scotland. After his return to Buriton he and Thea were going to the Scillies together.
He wondered whether to skip that evening’s banquet, and was delighted when Pieter Aarvold of the International Magazine rang to ask him to join a party at a restaurant a few miles out of town. Sylvester had hired a car for the day, and gladly agreed to forego lukewarm food and speeches which would be equally boring in comprehensible or unknown languages.
Several other journalists were at dinner, most of them old acquaintances, and after working their way through the American Primaries, the Orthodox domination of the Israeli government, the politics of the Queen of the Netherlands, and Basque separatism in Spain, they started to discuss Aidan Britton as a successor to the British Prime Minister. Clementina von Ranke maintained that he was Hitler reincarnated. Andreas Piatowski claimed to have slept with him; a cold fish, he said. Francis Dunstan of The Guardian said that Britton’s name had been mentioned by one of the Cambridge traitors in a list of those he intended to drag down in his own ruin. Sylvester, like most political commentators, had heard this rumour before, and discounted it as yet another of the schemes to sow distrust hatched by those cute spymasters. Yet now that Britton was so near ultimate power, the story was, paradoxically, more worth considering.
Jacques Yves de Riviére wanted to discuss the attempted expansion of territorial waters to include a newly discovered gas field just outside those at present dominated by Holland. At this approach to the subject of the conference which had brought them all to Ankara, each person at the dinner table was eager to express a view.
Sylvester Crawford left before the others. He drove out into the countryside of the plain, so much darker than any at home, and lowered the side window to listen to the crickets and to smell the aromatic vegetation.
He thought about treachery. There had been numerous scandals about a generation before his own, about his father’s contemporaries. The ‘Five Men’ as later sagas knew them, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and the still unidentified ‘Basil’, and others, no doubt, had been corrupted as undergraduates in Cambridge before the last war. A don had recruited them to the service of a foreign power. But these men, now almost mythological since so much had been written about them, were old, or dead; certainly useless. Their time was up. Where were their successors? It was not the first time that Sylvester had wondered. No scandals had yet emerged about the undergraduates of the 1940s or ’50s. What ‘moles’, now in their industrious prime, were burrowing under the society they purported to maintain? Whoever they were, they were successful. Not a breath, not a whisper of suggestion that such another generation of spies ever existed, had ever been publicly heard. Such men – or women – could be at the heights of government and influence.
Was it possible? Sylvester thought back over his years of association with Aidan Britton, from their undergraduate days as friendly rivals, through the years of carrying on their independent but interdependent professions, to the present time, when Aidan was poised to become Prime Minister. Sylvester had always been a theoretical socialist, and voted Liberal, but quite apart from what need have been no more than superficial differences of alliegance, there was by now a gulf between his attitude and Aidan’s, which made Sylvester especially careful to analyse his reactions. He wanted nothing less than to see Aidan Britton governing his country.
Caught there on the Anatolian plain, between West and East, at a moment between idleness and respon
sibility, Sylvester found that he could imagine Aidan as the heir to the Cambridge traitors.
A hypothesis then: would his homosexuality have been the spur? Hardly, then. Conviction? Ambition? Or simply money? There had certainly been an injection of capital into Britton’s Foods and Groceries which could, possibly, represent an advance payment.
But Sylvester halted his groundless speculation; it was always profitless to theorise without evidence. He made a rapid mental list of the course his muck-raking would take as soon as he was in London, while realising that the midden was non-existent. It was a nice idea: but an unfounded one.
Meanwhile he started the engine of the hired car, and after several false starts found his way back to the highroad, and turned towards the town.
Three miles short of Ankara he saw a police car, lights off, waiting on the verge. As he passed, it turned out behind him. A mile further on, sirens blaring and lights flashing, it overtook Sylvester’s car and forced him to stop.
‘Routine check,’ one of the officers said in English. Sylvester lit a cigarette while the men searched the car. He had put nothing into it since hiring it earlier in the day. He offered a cigarette to one of the men, who refused it. Another man, having lifted the spare wheel out from its socket, held up a small white bundle. Sylvester had never seen it before. The man unwrapped the paper and polythene, to sniff, and then taste, the white powder it revealed.
‘A correct tip off,’ he said. ‘For a change.’
‘Here in Turkey we are not lenient with drug smugglers,’ the other man announced, his gold teeth flashing in the beam of the headlights.
Sylvester made the routine protests which were, as he might have expected, no more acceptable for being true. He was arrested and handcuffed, and driven to a gaol.
It was morning before a British Consular official appeared, a young man with a flushing skin and drawling accent. He viewed Sylvester with distaste, and was hardly convincing either in his expressions of sympathy, or of belief that Sylvester was innocent and ignorant. He would do the best he could, he said; Sylvester Crawford was, after all, a public figure. But the Turkish legal system worked very slowly, and they were cracking down on drugs. He could not hold out much hope for release in less than a week.
