‘By then, they figured where there’s smoke there’s usually somebody with a blowtorch. Bad enough nasty foreigners are shipping drugs to innocent American teenagers, let alone someone from the Fourth Estate being involved. It was enough to cost him his job.’
Riley frowned. Why was Weller telling her all this? He was unlikely to be trying to give her a career boost by tipping her the wink on dubious former journalists coming into the country. ‘What’s he doing over here — lecturing to London’s finest?’
‘How droll,’ muttered Weller. ‘But not such a bad idea, now you mention it. I’m sure there’s plenty we could learn from him. Actually, he claimed he’s here on holiday. He made the mistake of coming in under false papers, but he was recognised at immigration by one of their embassy spotters. They thought we should know, so we picked him up.’
‘Kind of them. And this affects me how?’
‘Ah. Yes.’ Another crunch echoed down the line. ‘Among his various personal bits and pieces was a piece of paper with your name on it. Now why would that be?’
Riley was astonished. ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never heard of the man. Did you ask him?’
‘Of course. He wouldn’t say. Said it was just a name he’d picked up out of professional interest. Must be nice having fans out there.’
Riley ignored the dig. ‘Where is he now?’
‘No idea. The Yanks finally admitted they didn’t have any objection to him being here, and he was found to be carrying his legitimate passport, anyway. In the interests of the so-called special relationship, we slapped his wrist and let him go. Personally, I’d have slung him on the next flight home. The man’s clearly unhinged. Still, what can you do, eh?’
‘Well, thanks for telling me. I’ll look out for him.’
‘Do that. You might also warn your friend Palmer when you see him next.’
‘Why?’
‘Henzigger had another piece of paper in his wallet. It had Palmer’s name and the name of someone we’ve all heard of.’
‘Who?’
‘Sir Kenneth Myburghe.’
The phone clicked off, leaving Riley with a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Myburghe again?
The more she heard from Weller, the more uneasy she began to feel about his tactics. Why had he chosen to call her, a member of the press? Why not one of his other contacts — of which he must have many? Was it really just to check Henzigger’s story? Or had he decided to set some cats loose and see what came scurrying out of the wood pile?
*******
CHAPTER TWENTY
Next morning, Riley forced herself out of bed and into a brisk walk through Holland Park. She needed the exercise to blow the kinks out of her system after the previous day’s drive, and the fresh air to get her brain into some sense of order. She collected a croissant and coffee on the way and chewed as she strolled, sharing space with mothers and strollers, joggers and children.
So far, she told herself, she had a man hinting at some sort of scandal surrounding a senior British diplomat with a service record in Colombia; Frank Palmer guarding the very same diplomat; a senior cop from the Met taking an interest in Palmer, and now a disgraced American journalist with a background in South America taking an interest in all of them.
Whatever was going on involved too many people she couldn’t get to. Palmer because he was…well, Palmer, although that might be less of a problem if she could collar him long enough to wear him down; Myburghe because he was out of bounds; Weller because he was playing puppet-master; and Tristram AKA Jacob Worth, who claimed to know something, if only he would part with the information.
She threw the remainder of her croissant to a couple of pigeons, then strolled on, sipping her coffee, until she found herself at the southern edge of the park on Kensington High Street. She was about to turn back when a man fell in alongside her, matching her pace.
‘You’re Gavin, right?’ said the man genially. He was tall and solid, with tired eyes set in a swarthy face beneath short-cut grey-flecked hair. He could have been a businessman looking for directions, but not too many businessmen sidle up to women on the street and use their name.
Riley readied herself for a seedy proposition and checked her coffee mug, but there wasn’t enough to do more than stain his shirt.
‘You’re Riley Gavin,’ he repeated quickly, sensing her wariness. He had an American accent, although with some of the edges smoothed off, as if he’d been out of his home country a lot. ‘I know it’s you because I got your picture from a piece you did a while back. And I’ve already seen you with your pal, Palmer. I need to talk with you.’
Riley stopped and turned to face the man. ‘Where did you see us?’ There were plenty of pedestrians about, so she wasn’t alarmed. But one thing she didn’t want was to have this stranger following her back to her flat.
‘You were at that hunt near Colebrooke. I saw you watching. Palmer was off killing stuff.’ He grinned without humour. ‘I had to leave in a hurry, remember?’
Then she realised: the man in the woods. He looked bigger here, somehow, as if being surrounded by trees and undergrowth had diminished him.
Seeing that she had placed him, he said, ‘Yeah, that was me. What do we get for trespassing on private land in this country — slammed in the stocks or hung from a tree?’
‘You’re out of date,’ she told him. ‘We stopped hanging people when you lot started lynching cattle rustlers. It got so tacky. Who are you and what do you want?’
‘My name’s Toby Henzigger,’ he said neutrally. ‘I’m in the same line of business as you.’ He held out his hand.
Riley ignored it, her thoughts flashing back to Weller’s phone call of the previous day. This was getting spooky.
Henzigger shrugged and stuck his hand back in his pocket. ‘Can we go somewhere and talk? This is a bit public for my tastes.’
Riley was concerned about how he’d found her. She wasn’t in the phone book and she didn’t give out her home address, having learned from colleagues long ago that unhappy subjects of the criminal kind had a knack of finding out where journalists lived, and might choose to make late calls to protest their innocence or anger.
‘Here’s fine,’ she said. ‘Talk about what?’
‘I’ve been looking for you. I know you’re an investigative reporter — I’ve read some of your stuff. You heard what they said about me?’ His right eye flickered slightly as he spoke. It was an almost imperceptible movement, which Riley guessed wouldn’t have been visible if he hadn’t been standing so close.
Riley didn’t want to spoil his day by telling him that he hadn’t been nationwide news, but said anyway, ‘Well, I heard you were almost a guest of Her Majesty. False passport, wasn’t it? Bit unwise, in view of the current state of things.’
Henzigger looked sour. ‘It was a mistake,’ he muttered. ‘It was all a mistake. Did you know I’ve never been charged? They let me sweat it out for over a year, then dropped the case.’ She had to think hard about that, before guessing that he wasn’t talking about being pulled in by Immigration, but his problems before that.
‘Isn’t that a relief?’
‘Oh, sure.’ It came out with a hint of sarcasm, and he wiped a hand across his face. It was a big hand and looked as if it could do a lot of damage. The nails were clean, but the skin was rough and deeply tanned, suggesting Henzigger spent a lot of time outdoors. ‘Look, I know you don’t have any reason to trust me or nothing. But I need to talk. Can we get a coffee somewhere? Somewhere public — you choose.’
Riley nodded. In spite of herself, how could she not be intrigued? Part of it was professional, wanting to know Henzigger’s story. The other part was a growing sense that this man might know something important about Sir Kenneth Myburghe. Otherwise, why had he been there?
‘This way,’ she said, and led him along the street to a café where they could talk safely without being isolated. She let him place the order and sat down at a corner table. When he joine
d her, she didn’t waste time in small talk. ‘What do you want from me?’
He tasted his coffee, then reached for more sugars, tearing off the paper ends with a jerk and pouring the contents into his cup. He flicked the paper fragments away. ‘I was set up, you know? That stuff about unauthorised contacts and me being too close to the cartel was pure crap.’ He looked sour, as if he was bubbling with suppressed rage. ‘You know how it is. Over the years I could’ve taken back-handers to kill stories, and cut into some deals big enough to pay off the Bolivian national debt. And nobody would’ve known. Not Washington, not Congress, not the Department of Justice — nobody. But I didn’t. You wanna know why? Because it didn’t interest me. I didn’t become a newsman because I liked the retirement plan or I figured the industry had a good ethics programme. I did it because I knew a college buddy killed himself on coke — and that was before it got fashionable. He fell in with a bad crowd on campus who liked to ‘experiment’. Only they didn’t know what they were getting into and they got sold some shit cut with face powder. His first shot and he dies in agony. And he wasn’t the only one. I figured right then that it was going to get worse and maybe I could help make a difference by working my way up and exposing some of the underbelly of the drugs market.’ A little bubble had formed on his lip with this impassioned claim, and it popped when he clamped his mouth shut.
‘So how come you’re still walking around?’
‘Because they couldn’t prove anything. They listened to the rumours, they tracked down everyone I ever met and they talked to every junkie who had a deal to cut. It’s no surprise they got the story they wanted to hear.’
‘But?’
‘In the end they decided to drop it. And you know why? Because it never would have stood up in court. Trouble is, shit sticks. After that I couldn’t get hired to write page numbers.’ His look of disgust deepened at the memory of how he’d been treated and Riley felt a flicker of sympathy. But it didn’t explain why he’d been in the woods at the shoot in Gloucestershire, or why he was now sitting in front of her. Nor how he’d tracked her down.
‘How did you find me?’
He took his time answering, as if he was marshalling his words to make sure they came out right. ‘I need your help. I need someone I can trust. To be honest, I’d never heard of you until I picked up the name of your military cop pal, Palmer.’
‘In relation to what?’
He gave a thin smile. ‘Sir Kenneth Myburghe. Who else?’ When Riley remained blank-faced, he continued, ‘I took a drive in the country and followed the shooting party Myburghe was supposed to be in. I knew straight away he wasn’t there, though, and figured it was a decoy set-up. That’s where I saw you and Palmer.’
‘How did you get our names?’ Weller had told her that Henzigger had Palmer’s name in his wallet at Immigration, suggesting he knew the name before entering the country. But that didn’t explain how he’d got hold of it.
He seemed to read her mind. ‘I still got friends, don’t worry. They found out Palmer was running protection on Myburghe and got his name through the licence plate number. Then they hooked onto you. The rest was easy.’
‘What’s your interest in Myburghe?’
‘It’s because of him that I was set up.’ He sat back suddenly, looking tired, as if he’d been harbouring the words for a long time and it had cost him a great deal to get them out. He shook his head. ‘That sounds lame, right?’
Riley agreed. It did. It also sounded like every crook who’d ever been caught with his nose in the trough, making excuses. Criminals were always innocent and crooked cops were victims of a frame-up. It was an old song.
‘How could he have been involved? He’s a British diplomat.’
He looked away. ‘Oh, he’s involved, believe me. It’s why I came over here. I fouled up coming in on false papers, but it gets to be a habit in my line of work. By the time I realised, I was in line at Immigration and couldn’t get to my real ID. I figured, what the hell, it was nothing that couldn’t be sorted out.’ He shrugged fatalistically. ‘I was wrong. In the end someone at the embassy made a call and they let me go. I guess they knew it wasn’t worth the hassle.’
He made it sound so simple, Riley almost found herself believing him. She had never used a false ID, so had to take it on trust that if you did so all the time, you might reach for the wrong one under stress. But would Immigration really allow someone who’d used false papers to go free on the say-so of the US Embassy?
‘How does this affect me?’
‘You were out near Myburghe’s place in — where is it, Gloucestershire.’ He pronounced it the American way, with staccato syllables. ‘At the shoot. Are you doing a piece on him? You should — it’d make your hair curl.’
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He guessed he was referring to Colombia. As a journalist, Henzigger would have made it his business to know all the key players in the area he was covering, putting names to faces, sorting out the friendly from the hostile. It was a subtle balancing-act, having to mix and meet on one hand with people from embassies and trade missions, and then going off to rub shoulders with men and women who wouldn’t know a canapé from a can of beans.
‘What were you doing in the woods?’ she asked.
He smiled crookedly, a thin sliver of charm breaking through the angry veneer. ‘That wasn’t my finest hour, was it? I’m getting too old for all that backwoods stuff. They nearly had me.’ The expression dropped away just as quickly as it had come. ‘I was just doing some groundwork. I got past the guards but I didn’t expect you and your partner to roll up. Is he for real? That was some fancy gunplay. I thought there was strict etiquette to hunting over here.’
‘There is. But Palmer doesn’t play by the rules. It’s why they don’t invite him very often.’
‘I guess not. He any good?’
‘Yes. So what was this groundwork for?’ She was getting irritated by the way he was constantly wandering away from the subject, as if reluctant to approach it head-on.
‘You ever heard of a guy called Walter Asner?’ When she shook her head, he continued, ‘He was a trade secretary at the US embassy in Bogotá. Career diplomat, like Myburghe, only lower down on the totem. He’d moved around a bit, the way those guys do — Europe, Middle East, Far East, places like that. Then he learned Spanish and moved to South America. He was out there a long time.’ He tapped his fingers on the tabletop, a nervous reaction. ‘Just over a year ago he returned Stateside. He’d done his time, put in the hours, and he wanted out.’
‘Early retirement?’
‘Uh-huh. Supposed to be, anyway. He was in his fifties. Good time to go. Still a lot of years left to kick back and watch the flowers grow.’ He tracd a line through a puddle of moisture on the table top, and Riley suddenly knew he was going to tell her something unpleasant.
‘Go on.’
‘He never made it. One evening he pulled into his garage, closed the door behind him and blew out his brains.’
*********
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Riley waited, not quite sure where this was leading.
‘Walter Asner,’ Henzigger continued after a few heartbeats, ‘wasn’t what everyone thought.’ The way he said ‘Walter’ produced a faint softening of his features — at least, for a moment. ‘By that I mean he wasn’t the embassy suit he pretended to be.’
‘Not a diplomat?’
He shook his head. ‘Walt was special… part of a unique programme. He came from a family of career administrators. He was smart, well educated and knew pretty much what made the world tick. But he wanted to join a team that made a difference. He wasn’t prepared to simply push paper around the way his father had done. The administration recognised that. But they knew he had other skills, too. Skills they could use. They put him through training with the DEA — Drug Enforcement — and once he’d finished he was dropped out and fed into the embassy circuit under deep cover. Not even the staff he worked with knew what he was
really doing.’
‘Why the secrecy?’
‘It was a programme set up about twenty years ago. A focus group in the Department of Justice decided it would be a neat idea if they had some special agents who knew how to hold a knife and fork, to blend into the embassy circuit. Their job would be to work the corridors, mix with the foreign mucky-mucks and look for sources, contacts, that sort of stuff. But they weren’t to get involved with the day-to-day anti-drugs war. They’d concentrate on the people at the top, their aides and secretaries, while the rest of the DEA troops would work the streets. It was a good plan, too. It brought in great intelligence from both ends, some of it top grade. You’d be amazed what those stiff collars hear at some of those fancy trade gatherings. And Walt knew how to work ‘em. He was good.’
Riley saw where he was going. ‘But somebody found out what his true function was?’
‘Must have. He was way too experienced after all those years to have let it slip. Hell, I’m not even sure his wife knew.’
Riley shrugged. Maybe, after all the years working under such circumstances, Walter Asner had simply become careless. ‘Could it have been suicide?’
Henzigger shook his head with measured emphasis. ‘Not a chance. Walt and I went back a long way. He wasn’t the type.’ He held up a quick hand to forestall argument. ‘I know, the shrinks say everyone’s got it in them; that everyone’s got their breaking point. I hadn’t seen Walt for months, but I spoke to him before he quit. He wanted to enjoy life, not end it. He had lots of plans, all of them involving his wife, Margie and their boat.’
‘This still doesn’t explain why you’ve come to me after all this time. Are you saying Myburghe was involved?’
‘Myburghe,’ Henzigger said, appearing to have only heard part of what she’d said. His eyes glinted sharply. ‘I hear he’s been getting some letters and stuff.’
Riley was surprised. She wasn’t sure how much Henzigger knew or how much was guesswork, but by ‘stuff’, did he mean the fake bomb, or his son’s finger and ring?
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