‘You must lend me this book one of these days,’ said Sempernel. ‘Very well. I am nothing if not a pragmatist.’
He sat down, looked towards the woman and said, ‘Cynthia, my dear, would you care to resume your guard-dog duties in case of further interruption?’
The woman nodded and went out. Wield looked towards Dalziel, who gave him a single nod, upon which he followed.
‘What well-trained beasts we keep,’ said Sempernel. ‘Now, Mr Pascoe, first let me assure you there was never any plan to abduct your wife. Far from it. Our intelligence was that your house would be empty that day with your good lady accompanying your daughter on her school trip. What occurred was merely a botched-up attempt to extemporize when, to their great surprise, my operatives discovered Mrs Pascoe still at home. I hope that puts your mind at rest on that point.’
‘At rest?’ exclaimed Pascoe. ‘She had a key. To my front door. She was going to masquerade as Ellie. And I’m supposed to feel reassured?’
‘Well, no. Perhaps not. I take your point. But my point is that neither you nor she would have known anything about this if things had gone to plan.’
‘Mebbe,’ said Dalziel, who’d been looking round the room with a pointer’s unblinking and questing gaze, ‘if you told us about this plan… ah yes.’
He rose, went to a fine oak bureau, opened the cupboard to reveal an array of bottles and glasses, and said, ‘Malt or blended?’
‘I bow to your taste,’ said Sempernel. ‘The plan. Yes. Mr Pascoe, for some time now, your wife in her capacity as a member of the Liberata Trust has been in correspondence with various political prisoners, including a Colombian woman called Bruna Cubillas. Have you heard of her?’
‘Vaguely. I knew Ellie wrote to these people, and sometimes, not often, got replies. But we didn’t talk about it much.’
‘Really? Could this perhaps be because she felt there might be some conflict with your job as an officer of the law?’
‘Of course not. How the hell can you break the law, writing to someone?’
‘I can think of half a dozen ways off the top of my head,’ said Sempernel. ‘But never mind. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. ‘Bruna Cubillas…’
xi
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves
Bruna Cubillas…
born in a shack in a slum on the banks of a drain…
living was pain…
One brother, five sisters. The other girls all died in infancy.
Did Bruna ever look up soulfully at a questioning stranger and insist, we are seven?
I doubt it. She might feel her life in every limb, but kids of that condition in that place almost certainly knew a hell of a lot about death.
look at her growing…
out on the streets where each day a new terror could strike…
What was it like?
Even if I knew the details, could I begin to understand? She probably had freedoms which I in my narrow little Welsh village in my narrow little Welsh valley could never have dreamt of, the freedom to roam at will from her earliest years, the freedom on boiling-hot days to leap naked from the concrete lip of the dock into the sordid but cooling waters beneath, the freedom to make her way from the shanty town where she lived into the heart of Cartagena, the real town next door, the freedom to beg in the street, the freedom to snatch bread or fruit from market stalls and slip her pursuers by squeezing under fences and through cracks that their adult bodies couldn’t negotiate.
But my freedoms – the freedom to wear clean new clothes, to eat fresh wholesome food, to sleep between cool linen sheets, to be feted and fussed over on my birthday and at Christmas, to go on holiday with my family in the summer, to sit at a school desk among my friends and complain about being educated – these were freedoms she never knew, and probably never dreamt of. Not until her brother started talking about them.
Fidel Cubillas…
Known to the world – to his world anyway, that world of myth, legend, heroism, horror, ranging from Andean heights to the depths of the rainforests, which is South American subversive politics – as Chiquillo. Because of his youthful appearance. Or maybe on the same basis as they called that early A-bomb Little Boy.
killed his first cop with a knife driven straight
through the spleen…
he was thirteen…
Or so the legend tells us. A raid on the shanties in search of subversives, the boy wakened rudely by having the rags that covered him snatched away, the knife that was never far from his hand sleeping or waking thrust up in unthinking reflex, the cop on the ground, screaming and dying, the boy dragged to police HQ where he is beaten and sodomized, the prison where the treatment continues till he comes under the protection of a group of Farc freedom fighters. While outside, Bruna, under the protection of no one now that her fiery brother is taken away, somehow survives and grows and doesn’t forget and aged seventeen is waiting when one of the irrational amnesties used to clear space in the prisons for the next intake sends her eighteen-year-old brother stumbling out into the light of day.
She nurses him to health. Miraculously his boyish looks remain, but inside he has aged and hardened to match the ancient rocks his cell was carved out of.
And now he is connected.
Over the next few years Little Boy becomes a big player in the long-running saga of insurgency, but eventually, in a land where the boundaries between terrorist/freedom fighters, cocaine kings, compliant local officials and colluding national security officers are blurred and indistinct, his uncompromising take-no-prisoners-make-no-deals attitude turns him into a liability in the eyes of the main insurgent groups. His own small but fanatically loyal following make it difficult to deal with him directly, but a hint to the government’s counter-insurgent force seems set to do the trick. But in this world, even treachery is usually betrayed and Chiquillo and his men escape, not unscathed but scathed only enough to provoke the ferocity of the wounded animal.
Thus is formed PAL, short for paliza, meaning a beating or thrashing, a name which captures pretty well the motives and methods of a group which, though small, is soon recognized as one of the most dangerous ever to emerge from this long shadowy war. Chiquillo manages to do what the peace brokers have been failing to do for decades, unite government and anti-government elements in their desire to suppress him.
But he is as elusive as the Snark. Reports of his capture here, his fatal wounding there, are rapidly discounted by his appearance in another outrage a hundred miles away. Finally the counter-insurgents hit lucky and get a fix on the group. There is an ambush, a ferocious fire-fight, the insurgents take huge casualties, the survivors retreat, killing their wounded as they go, leaving no one alive to become a prisoner. Except one. Shot through the leg and unable to walk.
Bruna Cubillas.
Bruna has not been one of those women who like the Amazons of old have assumed an active role in the armed struggle, but since Fidel’s release from jail, she has never been far from her brother’s side, devoting herself to his wellbeing even to the extent, rumour has it (a rumour which gave even the liberation priests an excuse for condemning him), of sharing his bed.
So now the government forces have a bargaining counter, or so they think.
Bruna Cubillas…
tortured and raped but won’t talk and at least
she’s alive…
can she survive…?
Messages are sent into the forest, inviting dialogue. Nothing comes back but silence.
Just when it seems that perhaps Chiquillo has decided that with his group in tatters and his sister in enemy hands, his best course is to lie low for a while, PAL explodes into new life. No longer a potent guerilla force, they launch a vicious urban terrorist campaign. Bombs, assassinations, uncaring for the death of twenty innocents so long as they get the target they judge guilty. It is like the Troubles, and indeed word is that in the freemasonry of terror, they have been breaking bread with Irish extremists.
&n
bsp; Curiously, this eases rather than exacerbates Bruna’s lot. A worthless bargaining counter isn’t even worth throwing away.
Then after a year a sharp-witted prison censor notes that she is developing a relationship with a bleeding heart from Liberata, one of those irritating human rights groups.
Eleanor Pascoe.
Could this be usable, long term, in getting a line on the incredibly elusive Fidel?
But it would need cooperation from the UK. Hardly seems worth the effort.
Nevertheless, eventually someone mentions it casually to Our Man in Bogota who happens to have gone to school with Gawain Sempernel.
Sharp old Gaw. Once he told me, in those dear departed days when he was still disguising self-congratulatory pillow talk as grooming me for a Top Job, that if you wanted to catch big fish, you must never miss the chance to drop another hook into no matter how unpromising a water.
And while at this time Chiquillo was of no more than academic interest to him, Liberata and its prime mover, Serafina Macallum, were certainly in his sights, and Eleanor Pascoe proved to be already tucked away in my little casket, all neat and tidy and declined to that relative silence Gaw always finds so suspicious.
Coincidence is the name fools give to the voice of God who is the Accuser of this World. Thus sayeth Gaw.
So we took over. Mrs Pascoe’s letters were gradually phased out and our own, indistinguishable in style but much more insinuating in politics, were substituted. Bruna’s replies, of course, were intercepted long before they reached Yorkshire, though an occasional formal note was sent to Mrs Pascoe so that she would not grow over-anxious and start agitating. Her gift of books to help Bruna improve her English was reduced by an irrational censor to the single-volume Shakespeare, and as this provided Bruna with her only example of the English language in use, gradually her letters abandoned Spanish for a kind of fustian Elizabethan.
But still they said nothing that was useful to the men hunting for Chiquillo, not even those which she imagined were being smuggled out of prison to evade the censor’s eye.
In an effort to lull her into indiscretion, her lawyer was told that the authorities were minded to admit his application for release on the grounds that she was never an active participant in PAL’s terrorist activities, and a date was set.
And then Gaw learned that his old enemy, Popeye Ducannon, was negotiating to sell the arms Gaw had missed in the Liverpool fiasco. It emerged that PAL, eager to become a player on the guerilla front again but barred from using the usual American arms dealers by the strict interdiction of all the major native customers, was interested and had contracted Kelly Cornelius to broker a deal.
Or perhaps it was Kelly who had contacted Chiquillo. For they seem to be long acquainted and she knows all his ways. Not too surprising in view of her line of work. But neither would it be surprising if their connection was more than professional. Kelly is… Kelly! And Fidel, with his boyish looks and his devil’s heart, has to be a turn-on for the kind of woman who’s turned on by that kind of thing.
Says I, with all the superiority of one who went for the father figure. But at least we had the devil’s heart in common.
But if Kelly told Chiquillo about the arms cache, that also means she must have some link with Popeye. If so, I can’t believe this one is also sexual. Does that make me sexist? I guess it does. Just because I find bulging eyes a turn-off, is that any reason to condemn a man to celibacy? He can’t help his appearance.
But he needn’t go out in daylight, as my old gran used to say.
Whatever, Kelly did the direct negotiation with the Irishman, but there was no way she could do more than reach a notional agreement with him. To set up security for the handover, to arrange for the arms to be shipped out of the UK, and, most difficult of all in face of the combined opposition of everyone in Colombia from the government down to the cocaine lords with the insurgent groups in between, to get the consignment safe into the hands of PAL, needed cooperation in the highest, which is to say the lowest, places. In other words, the Cojos, the Lame Ones.
Chiquillo knew how to set about this. You applied to El Cojo with a barrowload of the country’s most negotiable currency, cocaine.
So far so good. Except that in the eyes of the Cojos, intermediaries, especially female intermediaries, have no standing. Chiquillo must come himself to close the deal.
He must have been desperate to agree. Or certain enough of his own superior cunning. But agree he did.
How he got here, God alone knows. Despite all the best efforts of the Colombian police and ourselves, we have not been able to find any trace of either his exit or his entrance. Which is why the release of Bruna fell so opportunely. Somehow she knew everything that was going on and when she made it clear she was heading for the UK, we knew that this was our best line onto Fidel, Popeye and the arms.
It seemed impossible that we would lose her too. But we did. Then a letter intercepted before it reached Mrs Pascoe told us that Bruna was as keen as ever to meet her friend and benefactor. And when a phone call was intercepted to the Pascoe house, our substitute readily agreed to a meeting.
Trouble was that Bruna insisted on coming to the house.
Perhaps it was simply the effect of a lifetime of caution. Nothing is certain in this life, but meeting Ellie Pascoe at the address she had been writing to for all this time reduced the chances of betrayal to a minimum.
Or perhaps it was simply that Bruna had built up a picture in her mind of where and how her friend lived, and had an irresistible longing to see all this for herself.
All that this did was add an extra dimension to our masquerade. A dimension too far, by all accounts. Gaw has tried to keep report of the fiasco down to a minimum, but not even his famed capacity for intelligence management in the world at large could stop the tattle in the world in small. Our world.
So everything seemed to be slipping away from Gaw. Fidel had the arms, we know that. All we had were four bodies by a lake in Kielder. We didn’t know where the arms were (except for this mysterious CP), where Chiquillo was, where Bruna was, where Kelly Cornelius was.
Gawain must have felt he was wandering alone in a remote wasteland with no sound in his ears but the grinding of the axe that is going to chop off his head.
Then suddenly all is well. How do I know? By nods and winks from my magical mystery machine. From words dropped by my colleagues who confuse their Sibyl with the machine she tends. But most of all because, near or far, I still can feel that surge of arrogant self-congratulation which sends your ego tumescing when the gods reveal yet again that they have marked the great Gaw Sempernel down as one of their own.
You’ve made yet another breakthrough, haven’t you, Gaw? You’re soaring high above once again, watching all the little rodents scuttle vainly away from the beat of your mighty wings.
All those looney people, you know where they come from…
All those looney people, you know where they belong…
xii
come to dust
One thing you had to give old Pimpernel, thought Andy Dalziel, sipping the Scotch he’d liberated from the Aldermann drinks cabinet, he might be economical with the truth, but he could tell a tale with precision and clarity when the occasion demanded.
‘Oh God,’ said Pascoe when the story was done.
‘What?’ demanded Sempernel, leaning forward.
‘These letters in Elizabethan English. We got one through the door two nights ago. Archaic language. Ellie recognized it. Cymbeline. From the dirge for Fidele… Fidel…’
‘Yes, probably because of her brother’s real name, our letters show a particular fondness for Cymbeline too. But this came through your door, you say? She got as close as that?’
‘Someone did.’ He was looking at Sempernel with loathing. ‘Where the hell were your people then?’
‘Where, I might ask, were yours, Mr Pascoe?’ said Sempernel. ‘I, surprisingly, have rather limited resources. I assumed that the Mid-Yorkshire
constabulary would be pulling out all the stops to make sure their nearest and their dearest were fully protected.’
A keen blow. Pascoe recalled his insistence to Novello that while he was in residence, he was quite capable of looking after his family. At least this Bruna could be assumed to have a pretty friendly agenda.
‘The man who attacked Daphne,’ he said. ‘Where does he fit into this?’
‘That, we guess, would be a man called Jorge Casaravilla. The Colombians like to keep a close eye on their disaffected exiles and their main anti-insurgency agency, the Consejo Juridico, commonly known as the Cojos, has a presence in most of their embassies. Officially, of course, they are under political control, but over the years they have garnered so much power that for all practical purposes they are answerable to no one.’
‘Oh aye? Must make you lot feel right at home,’ said Dalziel.
‘We have our checks and balances,’ said Sempernel, unprovoked. ‘Diplomatically, Casaravilla is a trade attaché in London, but he is in fact the Cojos’ Chief of Staff in Europe. He is venal and vicious, and the nastier his job is, the more he seems to enjoy it. Officially we have been cooperating with him, our target being Ducannon and the arms, his Chiquillo. Unofficially it seems his agenda has been slightly different. The plan, I think, was for his men to return from the Kielder handover with a sad tale of an attempted double rip-off. They would claim that Popeye Ducannon was lying about the arms cache, and all that Fidel Chiquillo had brought was a bagful of talcum powder, not coke. In the ensuing argument, all the Irishmen got killed, as did Chiquillo, in proof of which they would produce his undisputed body, causing enough rejoicing on both sides of the Colombian fence to have the operation starred as an unqualified success. Jorge accepts the plaudits, sells off the cocaine, and when things have gone quiet, looks for a new market for his valuable arms cache.’
Arms and the Women Page 32
