On the way back to her car, Liz looked in at the Trafalgar. The place was almost empty, and there was no sign of Cherisse behind the bar, only a middle-aged man in a cardigan whom she guessed to be Clive Badger. A strange object of desire for a girl like Cherisse, she mused, especially if he was the sort of employer who made her balance the till out of her own pocket.
A glance into the public bar told her that Cherisse wasn’t there either. The busy times would be lunch and evening. She probably went home for the afternoon.
Dersthorpe was a couple of miles to the east of Marsh Creake. Liz slowed down as she drove past Headland Hall, but there was no sign of Peregrine or Anne Lakeby, just the dark trees bending before the sea wind.
It didn’t take Liz long to find the council block where Cherisse Hogan lived. Outside it, in the rubbish-strewn car park, two youths were desultorily booting a punctured football around. Dersthorpe might have been just down the road from Marsh Creake, Liz reflected, but culturally it was another world. No one, surely, had ever bought a weekend cottage in Dersthorpe.
Cherisse lived on the third floor. She had changed from her work clothes into a crumpled black sweater and jeans. A tattoo of a baby devil was visible in the sweater’s deep V-front.
“Yeah?” she asked, frowning, flicking her cigarette ash out of her front door.
“I was in the pub this morning,” said Liz.
Cherisse nodded warily. “I remember.”
“I want to talk about Ray Gunter. I’m working with the police.”
“What’s that mean, working with the police?”
Liz reached inside her coat and found her Civil Service identity card. “I report back to the Home Office.”
Cherisse stared blankly at the card. Then she nodded, and took the door off the chain.
“Is this your place?” Liz asked, squeezing through the proffered gap.
“No. My mum’s. She’s out at work. My nan lives here too but she’s gone into Hunstanton on the bus.”
Liz looked around her. The air in the flat was close, but the place was comfortable. A three-bar electric fire blazed beneath a mantel-shelf decorated with glass ornaments and photographs of Cherisse. The wall held a framed print of waves breaking by moonlight. The TV was wide-screen.
Cherisse knew Gunter, she told Liz—she knew pretty much everyone in Marsh Creake—but denied that there had ever been anything between them. Having said that, she admitted, it was perfectly possible that Gunter had gone round telling people that there had been. In the public bar at the Trafalgar he liked to give the impression that she was his for the asking.
“Why?” asked Liz.
“He was that sort,” said Cherisse blithely, stubbing her cigarette out in a tin ashtray. “When you’re … busty, people think they can say what they like. That you’re just there to make jokes about.”
“Did you ever put the record straight about you and him?”
“I could have done. End of the day, though, he’s a paying customer, and I’m not put behind that bar to make the customers feel like tossers, even if they are. Basically, Ray Gunter thought that if he wanted to impress someone all he had to do was start on me.”
“So who was Ray Gunter wanting to impress?”
“Oh, various odds and sods. You know that house of his? There was always people trying to get him to sell to them. Like he was some sort of moron and didn’t know the value of the place to the nearest penny. He’d take them down the Trafalgar and have them buying drinks for him all night.”
“Anyone else?”
“There was one guy … Staffy, I used to call him, because he looked like a bull terrier.”
“Do you know his real name?”
She nodded. “I’ll remember in a minute. Cup of tea?”
“That’d be nice.”
The kettle whistled. The electric heater seemed to shimmer in the radiated heat. Cherisse came back with two mugs.
“Thanks for this morning,” she said hesitantly. “Helping me out.”
“It was a pleasure,” said Liz truthfully.
Cherisse grinned. “He didn’t like the look of your friend, that’s for sure.”
“I thought it was me he was scared of,” protested Liz.
“Well,” said Cherisse, “perhaps it was.”
There was a short silence, broken by the manic revving of an engine in the car park below. “Do you have any idea what Ray would have been doing at the Fairmile Café last night?” Liz asked.
“No idea.”
“Do you know if he was into anything illegal? Anything to do with his boats?”
She shook her head again, her expression vague, and then brightened. “Mitch! That’s what his name was. I knew I’d remember.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, he wasn’t from round here. The reason I remember him is that when he came in Ray never sat at the bar like he usually did.”
“Where did they sit?”
“Off in a corner. I asked Ray once who he was, because he’d been having, like, a good stare at me, and Ray said he was someone who bought from him. Lobsters and that.”
“Did you believe that?”
Cherisse shrugged. “It wasn’t a nice stare.”
Liz nodded, and laid her empty mug on the table.
After the heat of the Hogans’ flat, the sea front was bracingly cold. The phone box smelt of urine, and Liz was grateful when Wetherby picked up on the first ring.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Things look bad,” said Liz. “I’m coming back now.”
“I’ll be here,” said Wetherby.
W ith each click of her scissors, another rat’s-tail of black hair fell to the floor. Outside, the sky was dark with unshed rain. Faraj Mansoor was seated on a wooden chair in front of her, a white bath-towel around his shoulders. He didn’t look like a murderer, but by his own account that was exactly what he had become—and within an hour of entering the United Kingdom for the first time.
That made her … what? A conspirator to murder? An accessory after the fact? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the operation and its security. All that was necessary was that they remain invisible.
There was much, of course, that she didn’t know. It had to be this way—she wouldn’t have had it any other. If she was taken, and subjected to whatever truth drugs and interrogation techniques the security services employed these days, it was essential that she had nothing to tell them.
She shivered, and almost cut him. If they were seen together or connected in any way, then this was her endgame. There would be, quite literally, nowhere to hide. She had been told enough about Faraj Mansoor, however, to know that he was a consummately professional operative. If he had shot and killed the boatman last night, then that would have been the best course of action at that particular moment. If it didn’t worry him that he had ended the man’s life, then it shouldn’t worry her.
He was, she supposed, quite a good-looking man. She had preferred him as he had been when he’d woken up—still the wild-haired fighter. Now, beardless and neatly cropped, he looked like a successful website designer or advertising copywriter. Handing him the blued-steel scissors, she took the binoculars, stepped out on to the shingle, and scanned the horizon.
Nothing. No one.
The book that she had picked up shortly after her fifteenth birthday was a life of Saladin, the twelfth-century leader of the Saracens who had fought the Crusaders for possession of Jerusalem.
She had flicked through the first few pages, her mind on other things. She had never had much of a taste for history, and the events she was reading about had taken place in a past so distant, and in a culture so obscure, that they might as well have been science fiction.
Unexpectedly, however, she had found herself engaged by the book’s subject. She pictured Saladin as a spare, hawk-faced figure, black-bearded and spike-helmeted. She learned how to write the name of his wife, Asimat, in Arabic script, and imagined her rather l
ike herself. And when she read of the final surrender of Jerusalem to the Saracen prince in 1187, she was in no doubt that this was the outcome she would have wished.
The book represented the first step of what she would later describe as her orientalist phase. She read haphazardly and indiscriminately about the Mohammedan world, from swooning love stories set in Cairo, Lucknow and Samarkand to The Arabian Nights. In the hope of acquiring a Scheherezade-like mystique, she dyed her mouse-brown hair jet black, perfumed herself with rosewater, and took to painting the insides of her eyelids with kohl from the Pakistani corner shop. Her parents were bemused by this behaviour, but were pleased that she had found an interest and that she spent so much of her time reading.
Her early impressions of the Islamic world, refracted as they were through the prism of teenage escapism, would not have been recognised by many Muslims. Within a couple of years, however, the romantic novels had given way to dense volumes of Islamic doctrine and history, and she had begun to teach herself Arabic.
Essentially, she longed for transformation. For years now she had dreamed of leaving her unhappy and unremarkable background behind her, and of entering a new world where she would, for the first time, find total and joyous acceptance. Islam, it seemed, offered precisely the transformation she sought. It would fill the void inside her, the terrible vacuum in her heart.
She took to visiting the local Islamic centre, and, without telling her parents or teachers, receiving instruction in the Koran. Soon she was regularly visiting the mosque. She was accepted there, it seemed to her, as she had never been accepted before. Her eyes would meet those of other worshippers and she would see in them the same quiet certainty that she felt herself. That this was the right path, the only path. That the truths offered by Islam were absolute.
She told her teacher that she wanted to convert and he suggested that she speak to the imam at the mosque. She did so, and the imam considered her case. He was a cautious man, and something about this ardent, unsmiling girl worried him. She had done the necessary study, however, and he had no wish to turn her away. He visited her parents, who expressed themselves “totally cool” with the idea, and shortly after her eighteenth birthday he received her into the Islamic faith. Later that year she visited Pakistan with a local family who had relatives in Karachi. Soon, as well as speaking fluent Arabic, she was proficient in Urdu. When she was twenty, after returning twice more to Pakistan, she was accepted as an undergraduate at the Department of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne in Paris.
It was at the beginning of her second year at the university that the frustration began to bite. She was trapped, it seemed to her, within an utterly alien culture. Islam prohibited the belief in any god but Allah, and this prohibition included the false gods of money, status or commercial power. But everywhere she looked, amongst Muslims as well as unbelievers, she saw a crass materialism, and the worshipping of these very gods.
In response, she stripped her life to the bone, and sought out the mosques which preached the strictest and most austere forms of Islam. Here, the religious teachings were placed in a context of hard-line political theory. The imams preached the need to reject all that was not of Islam, and especially all that pertained to the great Satan—America. Her faith became her armour, and her abhorrence of the culture that she saw around her—a bloated and spiritless corporatism indifferent to anything except its own profit margins—grew to a silent, all-consuming, twenty-four-hours-a-day fury.
One day she was sitting on a Métro station bench, returning from the mosque, when she was joined by a young, leather-jacketed North African with a straggly beard. His face seemed vaguely familiar.
“Salaam aleikum,” he murmured, glancing at her.
“Aleikum salaam.”
“I have seen you at prayers.” His Arabic was Algerian in inflexion.
She half closed her book, looked meaningfully at her watch, and said nothing.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
Expressionless, she angled the book so that he could see the title. It was the autobiography of Malcolm X.
“Our brother Malik Shabazz,” he said, giving the civil rights activist his Islamic name. “Peace upon him.”
“Just so.”
The young man leaned forward over his knees. “Sheik Ruhallah is preaching at the mosque this afternoon.”
“Indeed,” she said.
“You must come.”
She looked at him, surprised. Despite his unkempt appearance, there was a quiet authority about him.
“So what is it that this Sheik Ruhallah preaches?” she asked.
The young man frowned. “He preaches jihad,” he said. “He preaches war.”
O n the drive back to London Liz thought about Mark. Her anger at his untimely call had faded, and she needed a break from the rigorous business of analysing the day’s events. This would not, she knew, be time wasted. If she refocused her attention, her subconscious would continue to shuffle the pieces of the jigsaw. Continue to meditate on exposed headlands, terror networks, and armour-piercing ammunition. And perhaps come up with some answers.
How would it be if he left Shauna? At one reckless and wholly irresponsible level—the level to which Mark instinctively gravitated—it would be great. They would conspire, they would say unsayable things to each other, they would roll over in the night in the certain knowledge of the other’s answering desire.
But at every realistic level it was impossible. Her career in the Service would not prosper, for a start. Nothing would be said to her face, but she would be regarded as unsound, and in the next reshuffle moved somewhere risk-free and unexciting—recruiting, perhaps, or protective security—until the powers that be saw how her private life worked out.
And how would it really be, living with Mark? Even if Shauna kept quiet and didn’t make a fuss, life would change drastically. There would be new and only vaguely imaginable limitations on the freedoms that she currently took for granted. It would be impossible to behave as she had behaved today, for example—to simply get into her car and drive, not knowing when she would be back. Absences would have to be explained and negotiated with a partner who, not unreasonably, would want to know when she was going to be around. Like most men who hated to be tied down themselves, Mark was capable of being intensely possessive. Her life would be subject to a whole new dimension of stress.
And there were more fundamental questions to answer. If Mark left Shauna, would it be because the relationship between the two of them had been doomed from the start? If she—Liz—hadn’t come along, would the marriage have imploded anyway? Or would things have been fine, give or take the odd hiccup? Was she an agent of destruction, a home-wrecker, a femme fatale? She had never seen herself in that role, but then perhaps one never did.
It couldn’t happen. She would call him as soon as she got back to London. Where was she? Somewhere near Saffron Walden, it seemed, and she had just passed through the village of Audley End when she became aware of a familiar sensation. A prickling, as if soda bubbles were racing through her bloodstream. An expanding sense of urgency.
Russia. The memory struggling towards the light was something to do with Russia. And with Fort Monkton, the MI6 training school, where she had done a firearms course. As she drove she could hear the unemphatic Bristolian burr of Barry Holland, the Fort Monkton armourer, and smell the torn air of the underground firing range as she and her colleagues emptied the magazines of their 9mm Brownings into the Hun’s-head targets.
She was almost at the M25 when the memory finally surfaced, and she realised why Ray Gunter had been shot with an armour-piercing round. The knowledge brought no sense of release.
She sat down opposite Wetherby shortly after eight. She had arrived at her desk to find a two-word telephone message: Marzipan Fivestar. This, Liz knew, meant that Sohail Din wanted to be rung at home as a matter of urgency. She had never received this message from him before, and it immediately concerned her, because a Fivestar request usua
lly meant that an agent was fearful of discovery and, on either a temporary or permanent basis, wanted to cease contact. She prayed that this was not the case with Marzipan.
She dialled his number, and to her relief it was Sohail himself who picked up the phone. In the background she could hear canned laughter from a television.
“Is Dave there?” Liz asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Sohail. “Wrong number.”
“That’s strange,” said Liz. “Do you know Dave?”
“I know six or seven Daves,” said Sohail, “and none of them lives here. Goodbye.”
In six or seven minutes, then, he would call her back from a public phone. She had instructed him never to use the nearest one to his house. In the interim, she called up Barry Holland at Fort Monkton, and by the time Sohail called back, her laser printer was disgorging the relevant information.
Wetherby, she thought, looked tired. The shadows seemed to have deepened around his eyes, and his features had assumed a fatalistic cast which made her wish that she was the bearer of better news. Perhaps, though, it was just a matter of the time of day. His manner, as always, was fastidiously courteous, and as she spoke she was conscious of his absolute attention. She had never seen him take notes.
“I agree with you about Eastman,” he said, and she noticed that the dark green pencil was once again between his fingers. “He’s being used in some way, and it very much looks as if the situation’s spiralled out of his control. It sounds certain that there’s a German connection of some kind, and that the connection points east. More specifically there’s the truck in the car park to consider, and the probability that some sort of handover was made at that point.”
Liz nodded. “The police seem to be proceeding on the basis of the weapon in question being some sort of military assault rifle.”
At Risk Page 12
