At Risk

by Stella Rimington

  “I still think we should look.”

  “When they pay us the extra money, we’ll go the extra mile. Until then, bollocks to ’em.”

  She hesitated. Rain beat at the windows. Dead air rasped from the intercom.

  “Besides,” he said, his hand squeezing the warm flesh above the waistband of her uniform trousers, “we’re due back in Fakenham at half past. That gives us, what, fifteen minutes?”

  She shifted doubtfully but pleasurably in her seat. “You’re a bad man, Sergeant Mudie, and you’re setting me a bad example.”

  “What are you going to do about it, PC Clissold?” he murmured, his face in her hair. “Arrest me?”

  H ow’s your fish?” asked Bruno Mackay.

  “Long on bones and short on taste,” said Liz. “A bit like picking cotton wool out of a hairbrush. This wine, on the other hand, is seriously fabulous.”

  “These out-of-the-way places sometimes do have good things in their cellars,” said Mackay. “No one ever orders them so they lie there for years.”

  “Just waiting for a discriminating chap like yourself?” said Liz archly.

  “Basically, yes,” said Mackay. “Ah, here’s Bethany with the tartare sauce.”

  “Who, like the wine, has been quietly maturing downstairs …”

  “You know something,” said Mackay. “You’re a very judgemental woman.”

  Liz was searching for a reply when her phone sounded. It was Goss.

  “Just calling to say that we might have a name for our shooter. Mitchell’s been looking at photographs all day, and he’s made a provisional identification. Would you like me to e-mail you the data?”

  “Definitely.”

  “What’s your address?”

  “Hang on a sec.”

  She handed the phone to Mackay. “Tell Steve Goss your e-mail address. We’ve got an ident on the shooter.”

  He nodded, and she placed her knife and fork in the six o’clock position to indicate that she was giving up on the fish.

  It was ten minutes before the pictures came through. They were sitting in Victory, Mackay’s room. He had saved the wine and their glasses, but the pervasive smell of cheap air freshener put Liz off drinking any more.

  “Makes the gorge rise,” Mackay agreed, as the attachment downloaded. “It’s a pity Ray Gunter couldn’t have been offed on the beach in Aldeburgh—there are some wonderful hotels and restaurants there.”

  She nodded at the computer on the dressing table. “You know who this is going to be, don’t you?”

  He frowned. “No, do you?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” she said, as a dust-coloured portrait of a man in a mujahidin cap materialised on the screen.

  “Faraj Mansoor,” he read. “So who the hell’s Faraj Mansoor?”

  “Former garage worker from Peshawar. Known contact of Dawood al Safa and holder of a forged UK driving licence made in Bremerhaven.”

  He stared at the image on the screen. “How do you know? What haven’t you been telling me?”

  “What hasn’t Geoffrey Fane been telling you? He’s the one who picked up on this guy after German liaison flashed us about the driving licence. Are you really telling me you don’t know anything about this man? You’re Mr. Pakistan, after all.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Who is he?”

  She told him the little she knew.

  “So ultimately all we’ve got is a name and a face,” said Mackay. “Nothing else. No known contacts, no—”

  “Nothing else that I know about, no.”

  “Damn!” He sank down to the bed, which was covered with a faded green candlewick bedspread. “Damn!”

  “At least we know what he looks like,” said Liz, looking at the slight, sharp-featured figure. “Quite handsome, I’d say. I wonder what’s going on between him and the girl?”

  “I wonder,” said Mackay drily. “The police are getting posters out, I assume.”

  “I guess so. It’s a start.”

  He nodded. “There can’t be too many people looking like that in East Anglia.”

  “I’m not so sure. He’s very pale-skinned. Shave him, give him a fashionable haircut, dress him in jeans and a down-filled jacket, and he could walk unnoticed down any high street in Britain. My instinct is still to cherchez la femme. If we can identify her, and put her life under the microscope, I reckon we can find the pair of them. Did you get any inspiration—anything at all—from that Eurostar passenger list?”

  “Only a confirmation of life’s unfairness.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Can you imagine the start in life it would give you to have a name like Adrienne Fantoni-Brizeart or Jean D’Alvéydre?” asked Mackay. “Every introduction would be a declaration of love.”

  “Were those two names on the list?” asked Liz. Something, some urgent thread of an idea …

  “As far as I can remember, yes?”

  “Just say it again,” said Liz flatly. “Say those names again.”

  “Well, there was a woman called Adrienne Fantoni-Brizeart, I think, and a man called Jean D’Alvéydre, or something very like it. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Something …” She squeezed her eyes shut. Damn. “No. Lost it.”

  “I know that feeling,” Bruno said sympathetically. “Best to file and forget. The memory’ll throw it up when it’s ready.”

  She nodded. “I know you went to Lakenheath today; did you go to either of the others, Mildenhall or Marwell?”

  “No. I’d hoped to take in Mildenhall but the station commander was away. I’m due there tomorrow morning. Want to come?”

  “No, I think I’ll stay here. Sooner or later someone’s going to spot that hire car. Whitten’s had people looking for it all over the—”

  There was a muted bleep, and she snatched the phone from her belt without checking the caller. “Jude?”

  “No, it’s not Jude, whoever she is, or he is, it’s me. Mark. Listen, you know I said I was going to talk to Shauna? Well, I have. I’ve …”

  She no longer heard him. She couldn’t afford to listen, couldn’t afford to let go the thought that had just that second, completely unbidden …

  “Mark, I’m in a meeting, OK? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Liz, please, I …”

  Ignoring his protests, she rang off.

  Mackay grinned. “Who was that?”

  But Liz was already standing. “Wait here,” she said. “I want to look at that list on the laptop. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  Leaving Mackay’s room, she crossed the corridor to Temeraire. Switching on her laptop, and tapping in her password, she called up her incoming e-mail list. It took her less than a minute to find what she wanted.

  “You were right,” she told Mackay, back in Victory. “There is a Jean D’Alvéydre.”

  “Er, OK.”

  She consulted a handwritten list. “And a Jean Boissevin, and a Jean Béhar, and a Jean Fauvet and a Jean D’Aubigny and a Jean Soustelle.”

  “Right.”

  “And I bet you anything you like that one of them isn’t a Jean, rhyming with con, but a Jean, rhyming with teen.”

  Mackay frowned. “Who’s been put with the French men because she’s got a French-sounding surname, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “My God,” he murmured. “You could be right. You could be damn well right.” He took the list of names from her. “That one would be my guess.”

  “I agree,” said Liz. “That was my choice too.”

  She reached briskly for her bag. “Wait here. Give me five minutes.”

  If the phone box on the sea front had been unprepossessing in the day, it was worse at night. It was ice cold, the cement floor was covered with cigarette ends and the receiver stank of the last user’s beery breath.

  “Jude …” Liz began.

  “I’m afraid the answer’s no so far,” said Judith Spratt. “About sixty per cent of the French names
are in, and they’re all negative.”

  “Jean D’Aubigny,” said Liz quietly. “Second page, with the French men.”

  There was a pause. “Oh my Lord. Yes. I see what you mean. That could easily be an old English name. I’ll—”

  “Call me back,” said Liz.

  She and Mackay had time to finish the wine and drink a cup of coffee each. When Judith Spratt finally called back, Liz knew from her tone that she’d been right. In the phone box her back ended up pressed hard against Mackay’s chest but she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Jean D’Aubigny, twenty-four,” said Spratt. “Nationality, British, current address, deuxième étage à gauche, 17 Passage de l’Ouled NaÏl, Corentin-Cariou, Paris. Registered as a fee-paying student at the Dauphine department of the Sorbonne, reading Urdu literature. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” said Liz, twisting round to nod at Mackay, who gave her a wide grin and a clenched fist salute. Got you, she thought. Got you!

  “Parents are separated and live in Newcastle under Lyme; neither was expecting Jean for Christmas as she had told them she was staying in Paris with friends from the university. We’ve just finished speaking to her tutor at Dauphine, a Dr. Hussein. He told us that he has not seen Jean since the end of the term before last and assumed that she had withdrawn from the course.”

  “Can the parents get us pictures?”

  “We’re on to all that, and we’ll e-mail them to you as soon as we get anything. Apparently Jean hasn’t lived with either of her parents for several years now, but we’ve got a couple of people on their way up there anyway. We’re also going to suggest that the French take a quiet look at the flat in Corentin-Cariou.”

  “We’re going to need everything,” said Liz. “Friends, contacts, people she was at school with … Her whole life.”

  “I know that,” said Judith. “And we’ll get it. Just keep checking your e-mail. Are you going to go on staying up there in Norfolk?”

  “I am. She’s in this area somewhere, I’m sure of it.”

  “Talk later, then.”

  Liz cut the connection, and hesitated, finger poised over the dial. Steve Goss first, she decided, and then Whitten. Yes!

  W hat people saw in the Strand bungalows, mused Elsie Hogan, was more than she could fathom. They were poky, they were cold, you had to drive all the way to Dersthorpe if you wanted so much as a box of tea bags, and there wasn’t a telly or a phone in any of them! Still, Diane Munday had to know what she was doing. She wouldn’t hang on to them if they weren’t turning her a profit.

  Elsie “did” for the Mundays on the days that she wasn’t “doing” for the Lakebys. She wasn’t particularly fond of Diane Munday, who was rather liable to run an accusing finger along a dusty skirting board, and to argue the point when it came to totting up the hours. But cash was cash, and she couldn’t survive on what the Lakebys paid her alone. If Cherisse fell pregnant … Well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  Sunday was Elsie’s morning for the bungalows. She didn’t sweep them all out every weekend, especially if they were unoccupied, but she kept an eye on them, and as she lurched slowly up the uneven track in her ten-year-old Ford Fiesta, windscreen-wipers thonking back and forth against the steady rain, she could just see the front of the black car belonging to the woman staying in Number One. Student, Mrs. M had said. Well, she was welcome to her studies, especially on a morning like this.

  From the front seat of the Astra, Jean D’Aubigny watched the Fiesta’s slow approach through her binoculars. She had driven up to within a couple of feet of the track to give herself a clear field of vision in either direction, and for the last hour’s watch had been listening to the local BBC station on the car radio, hoping for news of the Gunter murder. Nothing had come through, though, and she had been left peering through the sweeping curtains of rain and attempting to subdue her mounting agitation. The last time-check, a couple of minutes ago, had been 10:20 a.m.

  When were they going to go against the target? she wondered for the hundredth time. What was the delay? The C4 was volatile, as Faraj knew, and couldn’t be stored for long. But he was imperturbable. “We go when it is time,” he had said, and she knew better than to ask again.

  She blinked, and returned her eyes to the binoculars propped on the Astra’s half-open window. Slowly, like a mirage, the other car crept towards her. It was old, Jean could now see, and almost certainly too clapped-out to be carrying plain clothes policemen or any other servants of the state. On the other hand, they might deliberately be using a cheap old car to get close to her. To be on the safe side she drew the Malyah, and laid it in her lap.

  The Fiesta was almost on her now, and Jean could see the driver—a solid-looking middle-aged woman. Switching on the engine and putting the car into gear, she accelerated and let out the Astra’s clutch, intending to reverse towards the house, well out of the other car’s way. But the car was not in reverse. Somehow she had put it into first or second, and as the gears engaged the car leapt hard forwards and hammered into the wing of the oncoming Fiesta. There was a crunch, a lurching cough as the Astra stalled, and a cascade of headlight glass. Swinging counter-clockwise across the wet surface, the Fiesta came to an unsteady halt.

  Shit, thought Jean. Shit! Shoving the Malyah into the waistband of her jeans, she jumped from the car, heart thumping. The Astra’s bumper was dented and it had lost a headlight. The Fiesta’s entire passenger-side wing, however, was a write-off and the car’s driver was sitting motionless, staring in front of her.

  “Are you all right?” shouted Jean through the Fiesta’s closed window. Rain sluiced down, drumming at the car roof and drenching her hair.

  The window opened a couple of inches, but the middle-aged driver continued to face ahead of her. She had switched the engine off and held the keys in her hand, which was shaking badly. “I’ve hurt my neck,” she whimpered plaintively. “Whiplash.”

  Like hell you have, thought Jean savagely, crouching beside the window with the rain running icily down her back. “Look, we really didn’t hit each other very hard,” she pleaded. “Why don’t …”

  “I didn’t hit anyone,” said the woman, her voice a little stronger now. “You hit me.”

  “OK, fine. I hit you. I’m sorry. Why don’t I just give you a hundred and fifty pounds right now—cash, right—and we can …”

  But to her horror, Jean saw that a phone had appeared in the woman’s hand, and that the two-inch gap in the window was closing. She grabbed at the Fiesta’s door but the rust-streaked handle locked solid as she reached it, and through the rain-blurred glass she saw the woman pulling away from her, her fingers stabbing with tremulous suspicion at her phone.

  No time to think. Wrenching the Malyah from her waistband and thumbing down the safety catch, Jean screamed, “No! Drop the phone!”

  The two plinks at the windscreen were barely louder than the beating of the rain, and the woman seemed to sink in her seat belt and fold forwards. For a moment Jean thought that she had somehow fired the Malyah without knowing, and then Faraj ran forwards with the PSS, shouldered her out of the way, and put two more aimed rounds through the driver’s-side window. The woman’s body jerked a little with each new impact, and sagged further forwards.

  Reaching down to the ground for a large stone, Faraj heaved it through the bullet-crazed side window, reached inside, unlocked and opened the door, and rummaged beneath the woman’s body. His arm came out bloodied to the elbow, and wiping the phone on the woman’s blouse he glanced at the display and cut the connection.

  “Load the car,” he said quietly, rainwater streaming from the pale planes of his face. “Go.”

  Hurrying to the water’s edge, he hurled Elsie Hogan’s phone and the four brass-bright 7.62 shell cases out to sea. Inside the bungalow, desperately trying to ignore the shrieking panic that was expanding within her, Jean made up two bin-liners of clothes and bundled them into her rucksack with the Malyah ammunition, the map book, the compass, the clasp knif
e, the Nokia phone, the two washbags, and the velcro-sealing wallet containing the money. Keep doing things, she told herself unsteadily. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Faraj, meanwhile, carefully took the C4 device from the fridge, placed it in an open-topped biscuit tin that he had packed with a hand towel, and took it out to the car.

  Everything else that might assist a forensic investigation—their used clothes, the sheets and blankets, the spare food—was bundled into the centre of the sitting room and sprinkled with petrol from the five-litre container Jean had filled at the Hawfield garage. Further fuel-soaked combustibles were packed around Elsie Hogan’s body in the Ford Fiesta.

  “Ready?” asked Faraj, surveying the bungalow’s disordered front room. The air stank of petrol. The time was 10:26. It was just five minutes since the killing. They were wearing jeans, hiking boots and dark green waterproof mountain jackets.

  “Ready,” said Jean, flicking a plastic briquet lighter at the fuel-soaked sleeve of one of the shirts she had bought Faraj in King’s Lynn. They left the house at a run, heads down into the rain. As she leaned through the Fiesta window with the lighter, he swung the rucksacks into the back seat of the Astra.

  Then she drove. They had planned for a fast exit, thanks be to God. She knew exactly where she was going.

  I t took Diane Munday several minutes to come to a decision. She hadn’t picked up Elsie Hogan’s call, she’d let the answering machine do the work, as she always did. That way she didn’t have to relay tedious messages backwards and forwards between Ralph and his golfing chums—crashing bores to a man, in Diane’s opinion.

  When the call had come in—“Mrs. M? Mrs. M …”—something had stayed her hand. “It’s Elsie, Mrs. M,” the voice had shakily continued. “I’m at the bungalows, and I’ve—”

  Then a shout of some kind. Not Elsie’s voice, but stifled and indistinct. Two plinks, like a teaspoon on bone china, and a long gasping groan. The plinking sound repeated, a thump, and silence.

  Elsie was on Diane’s speed-dial list, and Diane tried calling her back, but got the engaged tone. Then, mystified, she rewound and played back the message. It made no more sense than it had before, but Diane knew that she ought to react in some way. Drive over there, perhaps. But she decided against this. Her fear was that some sort of tiresome medical episode had occurred. If this was the case, driving up to the bungalows could well entail driving Elsie to hospital, hanging around in King’s Lynn, signing things and otherwise having her Sunday morning well and truly ruined, rather than merely spoilt.