by M C Jacques
Some fifteen or so minutes later, up on the street in the chill of the early morning air, having securely clasped both of her hands around his neck, Emily had made certain that she snogged McKay munificently before allowing herself to be prised off him, giggling and hiccupping, with the compliance of the moustached cab driver – probably from the Sudetenland, McKay thought – and levered into the back seat of a burgundy, beige-leather seated Jaguar X-type private hire car, which quickly and quietly sped off along Jesus Lane, bound for the A10, towards the city of Ely and then for the hamlet of Stuntney, where her parents live, just off the Newmarket Road.
Alex stood in the doorway observing thoroughly and, at the same time, restraining himself from flooding into full laughter. “Fancy one for the road, Mark?”
28
Updates…
The woman fairly tore into McKay.
“It’s absolutely disgusting. A man of your age should know better! Honestly! A disgrace! I don’t know what your profession can possibly be, but this is a family run hotel and a respectable one at that.” She maintained her forthright posture, her pinked, fleshy arms forming outward-pointing arrowheads from her waist, her neck angled towards him, standing aside and over McKay at the same time.
This must be who the Wing Commander refers to as Frau Majorette Harrison! A local girl, christened Marjorie Jane Stenning, she had apparently done well to finally marry Flight Lieutenant Richard Harvey Harrison, from Hyland, Illinois, who had been stationed at Lakenheath after the war and took a shine to Cambridge, in general, and to East Anglian women in particular, at least, to the more robust female of that variety!
“It won’t happen again. My apologies.”
“It won’t happen again,” stated the Majorette with intensified severity. “Or you’ll be out. Note my words. You’re as bad as that old RAF bloke! Dickie H likes him; that’s the only reason why I put up with him, that is, the old crook! ‘Drinks on the house, Marjie, old girl?’ Don’t think you can start getting away with the things he does! No, my word!” With that the Majorette marched away, her head shaking resignedly, emanating disapproval and revulsion of McKay’s tardy timekeeping to all the other hotel guests who were already enjoying their hearty breakfasts as well as the unexpected, impromptu and spirited humiliation of another guest. “Appalling, absolutely disgusting, that is!” A mini thesaurus of further approbations echoed out from amidst the kitchen clamour and along the emulsioned, pimpled, papered walls of the small hotel.
Despite his late arrival at his breakfast table, by a quarter past eleven, the now notorious McKay was turning the corner onto Parkside, where he had arranged to catch up with DI Burrows. The chauffeur of an elegant, deep blue Jaguar saloon patiently awaited the remote opening of a side barrier to a discrete car park. Having signed in and received the requisite visitors’ clip-on lapel badge, McKay waited by the reception desk.
“Hello McKay; sorry to keep you. We had a nasty assault on a paramedic in the early hours, out at Milton, and I’ve had to help the lads and lasses pore over hours of CCTV footage. Early start. Now, why on earth would anyone want to bash someone who’s giving up his Friday night to help that person recover from a drink-induced tumble? Never mind. Right, so how are you getting on? Let’s go through here.” The burly, freshly turned-out DI pushed open a wood-panelled, dull-grey handled door. The room inside was tiled with a darker, newish, mahogany desk at the far end, resting under a large, frosted and metal-framed window. “Take a seat. Good to see you. Sorry to hear about the nose, mind.”
McKay, encouraged by his welcome, updated the DI as efficiently as he was able to – the afternoon around Mill Road, the evening in the Pan Asiatic, the thuggery which ensued, Matt Fothergill’s irascibility and protective ardour towards Sarah Millar – but he was careful not to mention anything connected with the article by Katy Devere and the Ijmuiden link or, indeed, anything connected with a Middle Eastern assassin once known as Yosuf-Al-Salam.
Burrows sat upright and listened alertly, pausing only to call to a WPC Amy Sutton for two coffees: one for himself, naturally, and ‘knocked up’ to his favoured composition, and another ‘as strong as hell with loads of milk’ for his friend.
McKay rounded off by summarising his chat with Professor Lawson at the Fitzwilliam. Burrows and Lawson clearly worked closely together or, at the least, had done so recently. “Yes, he’s a good sort, David Lawson. Panics a bit, mind, easily overwhelmed, you know, swamped with work, but a good sort taken as a whole. He’s certainly generous with his time. Helps us out a lot and doesn’t always claim his expenses – now there’s a thing!” His cubic head span round to his left, towards the door which had been opened without even a tap, let alone a knock. Neither had McKay heard any footsteps approaching from the tiled corridor.
“Heavens, Sutton!” He glanced across to McKay and winked. “You’d be better off in espionage than fast-tracking in CID! Talk about stealthy! A degree in Museum Studies as a mature student, Mark – local gal’ done good! Hoping to do things with our friends in forensics, aren’t we, Amy? Come on, buck up, only pulling your leg!” Amy Sutton nodded, smiled through her newly acquired, cherry-red facial glow and scuttled across the floor, bumping the sturdy white pot mugs onto the desk beneath the Venetian window. She looked across at McKay with wide eyes! “A great book, Dr McKay. Couldn’t believe some of it at first. All the things we’ve missed about Jesus, sorry, Yeshua, until now! I still have a faith, though, like you. Bye. I hope the coffee is how you like it, Chief.” The latter aspiration was uttered Burrows-ward as the young lady’s eyes then veered towards the floor. Simultaneously, Burrows and his guest reasoned why Sutton’s approach and re-entry had gone undetected: timidity and the young officer’s wracking of her mind of how to form her compliment to McKay had effected an unwitting stealth of step – slow, silent, soft.
“No doubt, Sutton, no doubt! Thanks. All okay up there in traffic, as far as you know?”
“As far as I know, sir,” she nodded. Having issued a smile to both males she then headed for the door with commendable acceleration, inhaling deeply, as if not quite daring to believe that some awful purge was about to end. Then she paused and turned back to face her Detective Inspector again. “Sorry, Chief, but PC Mahmet would like a word sometime later; ‘sooner rather than later’ were his words. He asked me to let you know.” She stood frozen momentarily, awaiting her boss’s reaction.
“Sure, I think I know what it’s about. I’ll catch him at lunch, if not before.” The stout coffee mug was eagerly enveloped by his large hirsute hand. “Coffee okay, McKay?” Burrows was devouring his. “Have to call her back in before long for refills – first of the day for me. Gosh, I needed that!”
With what McKay deemed to be an untypical amount of caution, Burrows, taking two massive strides to do so, went and locked the office door, having checked – with a surprising sprightliness – that the corridor was completely empty. “Now, McKay, to move on. We’ve had some pretty grim intelligence recently about a thoroughly unsavoury character who has – and all the intelligence we can muster up ourselves or hammer out of the dimwits in security indicates this to be the case – arrived on our doorstep here in sunny Cambridge. To cut to the quick, he’s a known killer; and a damned chameleon to boot! Different names every week, tens of ridiculously authentic passports – God knows how he sources them; I mean, his are good! My friend, Pim Hendriksen, in the Amsterdam AIVD, says the only passport which they can be sure belonged to him is the best fake full-blown EU passport he’s ever seen in his life – and he’s seen some life, I can tell you, Mark. It has all the latest technological tricks which Joe Public aren’t even supposed to know about – bang up to the minute! It took them, the Dutch (and they’re good at this type of thing with all the drug traffic and the like they have to deal with, mind), well, it took them nearly seventeen hours to determine that it was actually counterfeit and, even then, one of their specialists demanded it be put on record tha
t he considered it to be a real specimen, even if the data recorded on it was bogus. It was that realistic.”
The terrible implication therein was not wasted on either man; the passport may well have been genuine in kind, in matter – the only element of forgery, therefore, being the imprint of false personal details upon it. Both were visibly stilled and chilled by the numbing thought of what all detectors and expositors of falsified documents fear the most: viz. an in-house copy; yes, the nightmarish nemesis of a genuine forgery.
Burrows, by this time almost sweating with anxiety, broke off and reached, nervously, for another sip – which actually turned out to be more of a swig, this time – of the rich coffee, now, too, a little cooler than it had been minutes before.
“My boss, you know, Roger Bolstridge, upstairs, sideburns…”
“The guy with the blue Jag?”
“The guy with the blue Jag,” confirmed Burrows. “He is completely convinced that this chap, Al-Salam, last known ID – by the way, I’ll give you the documentation on him before you go, all that I can give you, at any rate – so, Bolstridge is convinced that he’s our killer, the guy who gunned down Smith. But, so far, we have no knowledge of any solid, substantial connection between Al-Salam and the Royal War Museum, whatsoever. And Smith’s murderer had the detailed knowledge and the wherewithal required to execute a very complex assassination. It’s got Al-Salam stamped all over it!” Burrows’ pained expression bore the irony of knowing that even the name he uttered was futile and probably redundant, being already supplanted manifold times. “And not many others have that level of technical knowledge about firearms. That assassination he pulled off a year or so ago, of that UN delegate, attempting to scupper the Cairo Middle East talks was, apparently, nothing short of a masterstroke.”
McKay sighed, allowing his mug to come to rest on the desk surface gradually. “I haven’t got anything yet; well, not concrete, anyway,” started McKay. “There might just be some sort of link between a radical cell and the RWM through a woman called Sarah Millar.” On hearing her name, Burrows perked up and switched into his full UK cop mode.
“Millar, Sarah, Head of Marketing and School Visits. Twenty-eight years old in September. No children. No record… that we know of. Big, muscular type of girl. Nice smile.”
“And a fierce frown!” interjected McKay, to the Inspector’s mild chagrin.
“Got on the wrong side of her already, did you, then, Mark?”
McKay shook his head. “I’ve been nowhere near to either side of her. Not yet, at least. That’s what Matt Fothergill blasted me about when he called. He wanted to know why I was skirting around her.”
“And why are you skirting around her?”
McKay’s answer didn’t emerge promptly. “I suppose that it’s something one of my sources cautioned me about…”
“Oh yes? Which source would this be then?” Burrows looked attentively at McKay, trying to decide just how trustworthy he considered his new-found acquaintance to be, now that the chips were being laid on the table by both men.
“Millar appears to be connected with a number of radical, fundamentalist websites; sites which tend to nurture anti-American interest.” McKay halted, his brow corrugating a fraction. “Correction: her email address appears on these sites, or pages, sometimes. Some of these sites are remote; she can’t automatically assume that I will ever have stumbled across any of them, let alone know or would recognise her email address! As soon as I make one false move, she can warn whoever might be making use of her PC, laptop, whatever. And we’ve lost them!” Burrows looked up the moment McKay paused. Having taken a somewhat dawdling sip of his dark, heavy coffee, he continued.
“Her reaction has been interesting; she’s moaned to Matt Fothergill about me checking out a few of her haunts on Mill Road…” Burrows’ eyebrows shot up here as McKay went on. “… the Café-bar-Riyadh, the Pan Asiatic…”
Burrows could bite his tongue no longer. “Yes, I know! The Pearl of India, along with your haunt, and Mountfitchet’s, I understand, Secret Rooms, tucked away below Pizza Express on Jesus Lane!” Burrows grinned wryly towards McKay, the grin indicating that the confidence between the two had been restored. “Not my sort of place at all, from what I hear; full of Hooray Henries and the type, isn’t it?” McKay nearly rose to the bait and perhaps would have done had it not been for the broad beam emitted by the man opposite.
“Pop down there at around eight tonight, before it starts heaving, and I’ll stand you a round or two!”
“I may very well do just that, if Pat’s happy about it. Pat’s my much better half, by the way! She does tend to visit her mother on a Saturday, actually, so it should be fine. About eight.” The last two words were uttered in monotone and the Detective Inspector made a note deliberately on the back of some brightly-coloured business card he had fished out of a recess in his wallet. “So, may see you later; if not, do let me know how you get on with Ms Millar, please, Mark. And, er, do keep me posted in general. You know, in Ms Millar, we may just have that connection – I know it’s tenuous at the moment – between Al-Salam, or whatever the devil he’s calling himself now, and the shooting of Sergeant Smith.” Burrows’ eyes sought concord from those opposite. McKay only nodded gently but admitted the thought inwardly: Perhaps… perhaps.
Hands resolutely shaken by the other, McKay left the room followed by the Detective Inspector who promptly peeled off up some back stairs towards the upper floors. It was not until McKay had turned the corner at the end of the corridor and faced reception that he saw a face he recognised. Their pairs of eyes clashed before either had time to look away. The male face which McKay looked at was the one which had been studying him from a distance in Secret Rooms, only hours before; one of the young, faintly-bearded Arab men in that same coterie at the bar with Sarah Millar and her friend. The only differences were that, on this occasion, instead of being in front of a bar, he was this time behind a counter and that, perhaps most notably, he was wearing a badge which unmistakably identified him as a member of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
29
Messages
The drowsy Sunday afternoon had turned quite moribund enough for McKay already; dashes of mizzle, gun-metal skies, so that even the usually up-striking skyline of the mediaeval colleges of Cambridge’s centre had been cowered into a tedious bashfulness, and then Matt Fothergill had phoned him.
Fothergill, thought McKay, especially for a Sunday, had been more than reasonable in tone and manner. “Look, McKay, we can come into Cambridge tomorrow. Let’s take a stroll through the gardens and have a chat. I imagine it’s just a mild overreaction on Sarah’s part, although, you must admit, you have been rather on her case and keeping her on her toes! She doesn’t know where you’re going to turn up next!” McKay initially felt like responding with a simple ‘And so?’ But he held back.
“Right, Matt, let’s meet at the entrance near Station Road at eleven, tomorrow. Fine. Yes, I look forward to meeting her, too. I hope the weather will have improved a little by then! You, too. Cheerio!”
The email to John Foote ran on to well over seven hundred words, and was mainly about the Al-Salam affair but carefully encrypted using a simple system known only to the pair of them. It was, in fact, a refined version of a system they had nurtured and developed, and had employed for leaving post-it notes on each other’s doors at university in the 1980s; it had proven to be remarkably effective.
In the refined version which was currently employed, where there was patently no need, no encryption was used at all, although the template was applied meticulously and a couple of grammar and spelling errors deliberately introduced.
Where sensitive material or intelligence was being transmitted, a digit, indicated by the length of a certain word, which itself was only identifiable (to either Mark or John) through an embedded verbal indicator in the email’s, facsimile’s, or letter’s title, determined how many
places in the alphabet certain letters would be displaced. But rather than simply replacing letters, which could provide an able decipherer with the first and fatal step towards decryption, the word itself would be replaced entirely with a synonym or, and sometimes even preferably, with a neologism or word contrived ex nihilo by either writer.
At first, it had taken an interminable age to read each other’s correspondence, and mistakes were made, occasionally. One autumn in the mid-1980s, for example, soon after he and John had once more upgraded the system, McKay had been certain that – based on the contents of his friend’s airmail letter, received a week or so after he had departed – John, on his return flight to JFK Airport, had met an attractive, eighty-seven year old bearded lady with whom he had made an assignation on the following Saturday evening, in a downtown launderette. Moreover, John appeared to be uncertain as to whether the said lady was a postmistress in Utah or a croupier at a lower-end Brooklyn casino. The more obvious flaws were quickly ironed out.
Having received confirmation of the successful delivery of the aforementioned missive to Mr Dwight C Ventner of Maine, Massachusetts, McKay began to revisit and revise his case notes if, indeed, they merited such a description. Paperwork had never been his strong point; when conducting research at Oxford, once in the early 1990s and again, more recently, he had needed to exercise a ridiculous level of self-control in order to harness all his notes, papers, translations, references et al into anything like an orderly system; the eventual target being, of course, the compilation of a coherent corpus of literature: a thesis! And, even then… well, his administration had been barely adequate, to say the least.
30
The Botanic Garden, Cambridge
Monday, thank goodness, could not have been much more of a different day to the preceding afternoon and evening. So much so that McKay found himself even anticipating his midday appointment with the Fothergills. He’d seen enough of Matt Fothergill to form an embryonic impression of his character, his predilections and his contradictions. Unlike DI Burrows, McKay was unable to log Matt Fothergill as being an outright suspect, much as, upon occasions, he would have liked to. Lisa Fothergill was of an as yet unidentified quality and quantity and McKay hoped that a placid stroll through the University Botanic Garden might at least yield some indication of the manner in which the Fothergills rubbed along, or else shuddered along, as a married couple.
