The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  One evening in the Jacuzzi, Toothy Annie (as Lisa had previously named her when things weren’t quite right between them), the long-limbed, dizzy twenty-something year old stockbroker’s youngest, who wore a look of permanent inebriation, had been staring down, aghast and transfixed by the buoyancy of Lisa’s bobbing endowments protruding outwards towards her, and commented, “Well, Lisa, it’s easy to see why he can’t keep his hands off you, and another part out of you,” before turning hot scarlet with embarrassment, whilst still unable to wrest her haplessly widened eyes from their twin targets. Finally, some days later, on exiting the shower in the changing rooms, Lisa – towel wrapped up as far as the waist – had almost collided with the awestruck Annie who was, once again, overwhelmed. “Oh my god! Lisa, they’re so… so firm! Do you mind if I just…”

  Subsequently, they had tried a threesome on a number of occasions, but it had not worked. It had exhausted Lisa because the other two had shared an immediate and sustained mutual disinterest in each other. First, Andy would make love to her, him on top. Then Annie did her, twice. First, with Lisa underneath and wiry Annie sprawled all over her, arms and legs pushing and pulling as if she were climbing, then with a more diminutive, gasping Annie underneath who, far too often for Lisa’s comfort, came seriously close to being starved of oxygen – such was the vigour with which she’d ravish and immerse herself in the older woman’s bosom. (In fact, when bruises began to appear, Lisa had had to ask Annie to curb the boisterous manner with which her wiry, bony fingers and hands fondled her breasts –usually one at a time, because of their dimensions.)

  By that time, Andy, having been dreamily aroused by Annie’s clamorous, unfettered lust for the mature woman, was himself more than ready for another hard stab at her whilst Annie, seemingly undergoing one wildly pleasurable orgasm throughout, cried and rasped with gleeful anguish as Lisa’s stud mounted her, frequently and sometimes desperately seizing a part of one of Lisa’s heaving, upright breasts with both of her gaping, spidery hands. And on more than one occasion, during the three or four times they had met as a threesome, Andy and Annie would apportion one huge breast to each other and lie on either side of their sexual quarry. Altogether, this had been just too much for Lisa.

  Things had been worked out now; Andy had his spot on Monday afternoons, having put some work in on Matt’s Jeep in the morning. Annie arrived eagerly each Thursday evening, when Matt was with his mates in the clubhouse celebrating or commiserating their relative fortunes in life, at work and with women. Annie would arrive in a state of dampened readiness for what Lisa called their ‘grope and grind’ sessions. She liked Annie, her vanity even more than liked her at times; to be nearly, virtually, worshipped by another woman, some thirty years her junior. Surely neither that strange girl Millar nor that tart Prestons could lick that!

  For his part, Andy’s seduction by Lisa had been a double-edged sword. He felt awful about Karen, the girl he’d met at Sainsbury’s late on a wet autumnal Saturday afternoon in the ice-cream aisle; her wanton look of helplessness had immediately appealed to him and she, frantic to escape the gradually intensifying advances of her stepfather, had moved in with him and his deaf stepmother on the Sunday of that same weekend.

  But Lisa had spoiled things between them now, at least on the physical side. She was more fun in bed than Karen would ever be and she was even better than lovely sweet Katherine, Andy’s half-sister, had been, too. Besides, he hadn’t heard from Katherine for over a year now, when she had been visited and counselled by the Cambridgeshire Social Services.

  25

  A phone call from Matt Fothergill

  Matt Fothergill was in an extraordinarily bad temper. McKay’s mobile had rung at around ten o’clock on the Tuesday morning. Having had breakfast and completed a number of emails, one quite important one to DI Burrows, he had just been preparing to leave for the hotel in Cambridge for a few nights. His room at the White Hart was being retained for him by the generous proprietors.

  “Now, just what the hell is going on, McKay? I understand that you still have not spoken to Sarah Millar face to face but that you have been snooping around her friends and where she lives in Cambridge! What’s it all about? Are you still investigating the same case, or have you got yourself caught up in one of Mountfitchet’s pointless jaunts? Well? What have you got to say about this?” McKay was surprised by the sheer abrasiveness of the Museum Director’s tone and by the volume at which he was speaking. Maybe he is trying to impress somebody else, perhaps someone standing close by, he thought silently; perhaps his secretary or Jill Prestons, or possibly even Sarah Millar herself.

  “Let’s talk when you’re a little calmer, shall we, Mr Fothergill? I’ll try and get in to see you later in the week, I promise. I will be speaking with Ms Millar, it’s just a matter of time. And I’m sorry for any inconvenience the investigation is causing to any of your staff.” He considered it preferable to maintain a little distance during the present disquiet, yet he could not afford to ignore Fothergill’s raucous protests completely.

  The Director’s reply indicated that McKay had not quite pitched his reply correctly. “Later in the week! Do you have any idea of how busy I am, McKay? Well, do you?” Fothergill’s initial protest was deftly augmented by a rapid succession of expletives which caused McKay to suppose a reassessment of the Museum Director to be in order. What exactly was going on in Fothergill’s private life to render him thus? When a successful man is as irascible as that, he thought, trouble with a woman, or women, or kids, usually isn’t very far away.

  26

  A chat in the Fitzwilliam

  Fortunately, the rather small, rather scruffy old diesel train which formed the ten forty-seven into Cambridge was not heaving full on this occasion. Having avoided a tacky, chewing-gum clad aisle seat, McKay hurled his squat case onto the rack above him and nestled down against the window to his right, deliberating certain contents of John Foote’s most recent email which had arrived only around fifteen minutes prior to Fothergill’s heated tirade – even though, curiously, John had dispatched it hours earlier from his converted sugar warehouse apartment in Manhattan.

  Anyway, what had really tapped McKay on the shoulder was something that one of John Foote’s Facebook’s contacts had been able to uncover about a certain Islamic cell, originating from the Maghreb and operating from the very centre of Cambridge. More specifically – and certain words of DI Burrows’ were clanging away in McKay’s ears when he’d read this – it seems that he had been closer to them already than he could have dared to imagine.

  John’s ‘Facebook friend’ was a Kuwaiti in his thirties; a journalist, who had acquired a formidable knowledge of Arabic, Koranic, commercial and the various colloquial strains, as well. John and his friend had been trying to unravel, to make sense of one particular recurring phrase used on the group’s website and on a variety of blogs and posts used by key members from the group. Friend K, as John liked to refer to him, was uncertain whether or not the group was directly linked to Al-Qaeda or not. In this instance, Friend K tended to doubt that such a link existed, although, as he’d pointed out to John at great length, any link and connection which there may be between these groups tend, by their very nature, to be slight and informal, through their innate fear of detection or impregnation by the world’s security networks. Conversely, this makes any association between such groups and cells very difficult to spot in the first place, and then even more difficult to confirm.

  Anyway, based on intensive scanning of a number of known, and not so well-known websites, and blogs frequently visited by extremists, one recurring phrase, which appeared to be a rendezvous point for members of the Cambridge cell and others based between Romford and Stansted, had baffled Friend K for some time.

  Two other Cambridge rendezvous points had already been determined by John and K: one was The Pearl of India, a spacious restaurant just off the Market Place – which was actually a Bangladeshi est
ablishment, whilst the actual owner of the building itself was a Somali property developer based in Hackney; and the other was the Café-bar-Riyadh on Mill Road, which had surprised McKay when he had read it, even though he was aware that he had not witnessed it in full swing on a Friday or Saturday night.

  The third place took a while to crack and even then needed to be checked again when it was found that a variant spelling had been used in a message posted on a Gazan Liberationist site, condemning the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to the interminable wrath of Allah because of their support for the marauding crusaders whilst, as the blogger drew his or her emblazoned breath, extolling the Faithful of the Cause to meet at this third venue in Cambridge, as yet unascertained by John and his friend. But the variant spelling of the word was not entirely accidental, for the word had not been misspelled simply. One of the Arabic word’s modern characters had been replaced by an ancient, pre-Koranic (sometimes mistakenly referred to as ‘Syriac’) letter.

  As the one who had originally uncovered this embedded method of codification and informed the authorities, McKay knew all too well what this signalled: this cell was deadly serious and would take any measures necessary to retain its integrity and safety. Little did he know then, as the rocking train wheezed and rasped its diagonal way across to Platform 4 at Cambridge, just how later events would more than justify his own concerns about the foe at hand.

  So, once all the enquiries and the cross-referencing had been done and certain sources attested to, there was only one place this oft-recurring phrase could possibly have been referring to: Secret Rooms, Jesus Lane, Cambridge. McKay swallowed hard as he rose to alight from the train.

  Why had it taken so long? Part of the problem had been the diverse translations possible in English of the Arabic word used for ‘dark’. A deliberately vague term had been used in the Arabic, which could also just as easily be rendered as ‘hidden, covered, concealed, intangible, hazy’ and the like. Just to complicate matters further, various local, culture-sensitive North African derivatives had taken on a life of their own and evolved other meanings from the Koranic original, such as ‘top layer’ or ‘surface covering’, positively misleading images when referring to a club, hidden deep beneath the streets, in Cambridge’s belly!

  Before he knew it, McKay was confronted by the recently installed, inanimate ticket barrier and began searching madly for his credit card-sized, orangey ticket, irritating the swarm of passengers, locals and tourists who had made a corporate surge from the King’s Lynn-bound service in the direction of the station exit. He eventually fingered it crumpled between DI Burrows’ trim and official-looking card with the Cambridgeshire Constabulary crest and logo positioned just to the left of the text, and that of ‘Duggie’ Mountfitchet D.S.O., bright and flamboyant, this time with the deep blue text framed within a Burberry-like check on a straw-speckled, pale yellow backdrop.

  McKay circumnavigated his way into town, sweeping left off Hills Road onto Lensfield Street, just past the imposing late Victorian edifice of the Catholic church and then right at the ‘T’ junction onto Trumpington Street which does, of course, after combing the colleges of Peterhouse and Pembroke respectively and appositively, eventually flourish into Kings College Parade, straddled on the left by the noble façade of what was founded as Eton’s ‘upper school’ and by a Mecca of gift shops and punt touts on the other.

  But McKay turned left, opposite Brown’s and the impressive Old Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and was soon standing in the reception hall of the elegant, neo-classical Fitzwilliam Museum.

  “Could you page Professor Lawson, Middle Eastern Studies, please? I’ve arranged to meet him here.”

  The rather wiry, rather doubtful man peered at McKay from behind his desk, then looked over and beyond his split field spectacles before responding. “You must be Dr McKay. Professor Lawson is expecting you and is seated in the café.” The man paused, pursed his lips and raised his hands, with the fingers on his left hand outstretched. “Through there, across, and then turn sharp left past the shop.” The verbal instructions were administered in tight synchronisation with a generous helping of limp-wristed manual and digital illustrations, humorously reminding McKay of one of the more colourful teachers he’d encountered at Ashby in the early 1970s.

  The café in the Fitzwilliam Museum is light, bright and airy, effectively exuding repose and scholarship in roughly equal measure. Each septuagenarian studying one of their newspaper’s shiny supplements is offset by the zealous, perhaps overzealous, undergraduate armed with a laptop or, even worse, with a pile of books conscripted to help him or her complete some assignment, often due in later that day or late on the previous one.

  “Professor Lawson; it’s nice to see you again, sir.” The don arose from his small, secluded table against a whitened brick wall which had once been, probably, an outside one.

  “Doctor McKay; how are you? Still pottering away at those wretched Qumran scrolls at Yarnton? I thought it’d be good to meet here. No listening walls or ears.”

  “Not exactly, Professor.” McKay wondered the best way to continue. “I’ve been asked to give some assistance to the local police with a murder enquiry.” Lawson nodded knowingly. “It looks as though it just may be connected with a fundamentalist cell operating in and around Cambridge. Based on our previous chats about such things, I know that you keep, well, that you keep an eye on things from the university student body aspect. I just wondered if there was anything you could tell me which might help. It’s all still pretty nebulous, to be frank.”

  Lawson sighed and sat back in the pine-framed chair. Rolling his tongue around his oral apex, he unhurriedly folded his broadsheet, McKay couldn’t quite see which edition, and slid it into a green and yellow-lettered, sackcloth supermarket bag nestling on the floor to the right of his chair.

  His first words emerged from a second, slighter, sigh: “Well, you know, there is quite a lot going on at the moment. Everyone’s flat out. We’ve only three who are, could have, connections with Al-Q itself or, rather, themselves – a disparate lot really, in their own way, as you well know, of course! Anyway, one of these has already been pulled in.” He squinted and arched his mouth as he continued, as if he wished the corners of his mouth would reach up to the troughs beneath each of his eyes; a smile without the smile. Curling in his upper lip and tucking it against his top teeth, so that it became virtually invisible, he pointed down to the bag, his index finger darting up and down determinedly. Once again, McKay observed an admirable degree of wrist movement in the Professor’s indications. “And it looks like they’re going flat out to haul in another guy.” His elbows, shrouded in brown leather, edged across the table’s hardwood surface towards McKay, nominating what he was going to reveal next to be of import, and the volume of his utterances decreased commensurately. “Some assassin from near Tripoli has been lying low in St John’s Wood, waiting for instructions. Anyway, it seems as though he’s been in Cambridge for the last few months, possibly holed up with cell members.” McKay continued to listen intently.

  “DI Burrows got the nod that this chap is now in town and asked me to snoop around a bit, but we can’t find any close ties with students. No leads at all. Not even with some of the shady clubs these chaps get involved in. Burrows couldn’t give us much to go on, not even a name, not a quark. Apparently, he’s changed it about six times since he’s been in the UK. You know, the normal variations: Omar this, Mohammed that, Ali, Yusif, Osama and so on.” The last sentence tumbled into a tone which was dull with resignation. McKay resisted the invitation to intervene.

  “I mean, I’ve got a host of other things to do into the bargain. There’s a summit coming up on the horizon in Jordan. I’ve got self-righteous Foreign Office officials crawling all over me and Kirsty – my secretary – for data on Iranian interests in Swedish arms manufacturing and Dutch yachts, their government’s recent orders for Audis, Mercs or other German junk! I
’m doing an exchange visit to Minsk straight after that, for heaven’s sake, to enlighten the Belarussians about ‘British Governmental Attitudes to the Middle East following the Suez Crisis’. God knows why! I certainly don’t! Anyway…”

  “I get the idea, Professor. Thanks very much for your time. If any name comes to light, here’s the number of my hotel.” Lawson took a quick glance down at the number with no name, scrawled in biro on a beige serviette.

  “Good. Thanks.” Lawson seemed surprised by McKay’s willingness to wrap up their chat so promptly. “Always a pleasure, McKay.” Lawson’s wavering nomenclature for McKay aptly summarised his inability to categorise him precisely. After a quick roll of the eyes, the trace of a tiny grimace, he went on. “You’d better take a look at this.” He reached down to his right, causing his light, lemony Crombie Tweed jacket to gape, and flung the paper onto the table as he arose. “Page four. Might be of some help to you, all things considered. Must dash. Paperwork piled high and all that! See you soon. Best to Nadine.”

  He’s forgotten our last meeting at the Dead Sea seminar at Wolfson, thought McKay as he sat down again and began to thumb through the already well-fingered crackly pages of the broadsheet. The article in question was by Katy Devere, a columnist specialising in Palestine and Western Arabia.

  Having obtained his statutory small Americano with milk, McKay set about the article. He knew of Devere, the journalist, and of several items and papers she’d produced whilst working towards a doctorate at Tel Aviv in the late ‘80s. Soon after, she’d married an Egyptian importer of construction machinery who had sought to become a main dealer for either JCB or Caterpillar. The marriage hadn’t endured after the gentleman in question (a Mr Sulemain, perhaps?) had been exposed as a dealer of far less substantial, yet far more combustible, stuff than metal. Not only that, but once they had fallen under scrutiny, the financial dealings of the hitherto honourable Mr Sulemain were then found to have been less than honourable towards the Egyptian State Treasury.