by Ian Rankin
'No.'
'So what now?'
'Special Branch are checking—'
'Yes, fine, but what now?' The voice not so calm any more. 'The police can check till Doomsday. They'll find only as much as she wants them to.'
'You don't think Witch's job is finished?'
'Joyce, I don't think it's even begun ...'
The door of the buffet opened, interrupting her reverie. He was carrying a suitcase which he placed on the floor beside her booth before sliding on to the seat opposite her.
'Hello, Joyce. I was expecting more of a welcome.'
'Your train's early. I was going to wait for you on the platform.'
He smiled. 'I was being ironic'
'Oh.' She looked down at her hands. They lay palms down on the table-top, either side of her cup. Then she slid one of them across the table towards him and lightly touched his fingers. 'It's nice to see you again, Dominic'
'Nice to be here. How's the tea?'
She laughed. 'Terrible.'
'Thought as much. What about a drink?'
'A drink?'
'It's what people do in pubs.'
'A drink.' She thought for a moment. 'Yes, all right.'
'You can even treat me to dinner if you like.'
She almost winced. 'Sorry, Dominic, previous engagement.'
'Oh.'
'Official business. I can't worm out of it this late on.'
'No problem. I shall dine alone in the teeming city. Is Delpuy's still open?'
'Delpuy's? God, I don't know. I mean, I haven't been there in - well, since well, not for ages.'
'I'll give it a try. Did you find me a room?'
'Yes. Quite central, quite reasonable. I can drop you off if you like.'
'Is there time for that drink?'
'Just about.'
'Then what are we waiting for?' He slid back out of the booth. She pushed the tea aside and stood up too. For a moment they were inches apart, facing one another. He leaned towards her and pecked her on the cheek before picking up his case. 'After you,' he said.
Making to unlock her car-boot, she dropped her keys and had to bend to pick them up. Elder was asking her a question, but she didn't catch it.
'Sorry?' she said.
'I said, who's my contact at Special Branch?'
'Contacts. There are two of them, Doyle and . . . Greenleaf, I think the other one's called.' She thought again of the tea, fresh-leaf. A bit like green-leaf . .. She unlocked the boot and opened it. Elder heaved in his case.
'I've heard of Doyle. He's pretty good, isn't he?'
'I wouldn't know. They both work for Trilling.' She slammed shut the boot.
'Bill Trilling? Jesus, is he still around?'
'Very much so. I should warn you, he's not best pleased with us just at the minute. I'll tell you about it en route.' She unlocked the car and eased herself into the
driver's seat, fumbling in her bag for her glasses. As they fastened their seatbelts, their hands touched. She started as though from a static shock. She couldn't help it. She'd thought she could handle this with her usual . .. well, whatever it was. But it was turning stupid. Meantime, Elder had asked another question.
'Sorry?' she said.
'Trouble with your ears, Joyce? That's twice I've had to repeat myself.
I said, how's young Barclay getting on?'
'I don't know. Okay, I suppose.' She started the car. The sooner she'd delivered him to his hotel room, the better.
Better for all concerned.
'You sent him, didn't you?' He framed it as a question, but really it was a statement.
'Yes,' she said, reversing the car out of its parking space. 'I sent him.'
'Good.'
'Let's get one thing straight from the start, Dominic. You're here in a consultative capacity. I don't want you going rogue, and I don't want you. . .'
'Manipulating others to serve my needs? Dumping them afterwards?' He was quoting from memory; she'd given him this speech before. 'You're pre-judging me, Joyce.'
'On past experience.' She felt more confident now, more like herself.
She knew that given free rein Dominic would have the whole department looking for ghosts. He'd tried it before. 'Why the interest in Barclay?'
'Am I interested?'
'You wanted him sent to France. That smacks of the old Dominic Elder.'
'Maybe he reminds me of someone.'
'Who?'
'I'm not sure. Tell me about our friend Khan.'
Elder listened as she spoke, his eyes on the world outside the car.
A tedious evening might lie ahead, and he had grown to loathe London, yet he felt quite calm, quite satisfied for the moment. He rubbed against the back of the seat. When Joyce had finished talking he was thoughtful for a moment.
'The model interests me,' he said.
'How so?'
'Witch must have had inside information. She knew where Khan was going to be, and she seems to have known he'd have company. It can't have been the bodyguard, she damned near killed him. We should be asking questions about the model'
'Okay. Anything else?'
'Just the obvious question really.'
'And what's that?'
He turned to her. 'Where exactly did they find Khan's tongue?'
Calais was grim. Bloody French. They waited, seemingly with infinite patience, while he tried in his stumbling French to ask his questions, then it turned out half of them spoke English anyway. They would stare at him and explain slowly and carefully that an English policeman had already asked them these questions before. One of them had even had the gall to ask, at the end of a particularly fraught session, if Barclay wasn't going to ask him about the financial affairs of the sunken boat's skipper.
'The other policeman,' explained the Frenchman, 'he thought this was a very important question to ask.'
'Yes,' said Barclay through gritted teeth, 'I was just getting round to it.'
'Ah,' said the Frenchman, sitting back, hands resting easily on thighs.
There could be no doubt in anyone's
mind: this young man was a tyro, sent here for some mysterious reason but certainly not to gain any new information. There was no new information. Monsieur Doyle, the boisterous drinks-buying Englishman, had covered the ground before. Barclay didn't feel like a tyro. He felt like a remould tyre - all the miles had been covered before he'd appeared on the scene. He was driving an old circuit, a loop. No one could understand why. Not even Barclay.
Well, maybe that wasn't exactly true. At first, despite his puzzlement, he'd felt pleased. He was being trusted on a foreign mission, trusted with expenses and with backup. He was going 'into the field'. He couldn't help feeling that Dominic Elder was somewhere at the back of it. Then he saw what it was, saw what was behind the whole thing.
He was being punished.
Joyce Parry was punishing him for having gone behind her back to Special Branch in the first place. He had blotted his copybook. And his punishment? He would follow in the footsteps of a Special Branch officer, unable to find fresh or missed information, expendable.
Yes, there was no doubt about it. This was the penance expected of him.
So he kept his teeth gritted as he went about his business.
'But the other policeman, Monsieur Doyle, he already ask this!'
'Yes, but if you could just tell me again what it was that made you .. .'
All day. A long and exhausting day. And not a single grain of evidence or even supposition to show for it. There wasn't much to the centre of Calais. It had taken him an hour to explore what there was. There wasn't much to the centre, but the place stretched along the coast, a maze of docks and landing bays, quaysides, jetties and chaotic buildings, either smelling of fish or of engine oil.
That's why it had taken him so long to track down the people he wanted to question: the boatmen, the port authorities, people who'd been around and about that evening when the boat carrying Witch had chugged out to sea
. It was no wonder the men he spoke to weren't enthusiastic, when he himself showed about as much enthusiasm as a netted cod. In short, he'd completed a poor day's work, and still with a number of people on his list, not yet found. He'd try to wrap it up tomorrow morning.
Before lunchtime. The sooner the better.
It was six now. He'd been warned that the French did not eat dinner before eight o'clock. Time for a shower and a change of clothes back at his hotel. Really, he should head back out to the docks after dinner: there were a couple of names on his list who worked only after dark and whose home addresses no one seemed willing to divulge.
'Sur le bleu,' one man had told him, tapping finger against nose. On the blue: the French equivalent of the black economy. These men would work for cash, no questions asked or taxes paid. Maybe they had daytime jobs. But they were on the sidelines. Doyle had spoken with them and learnt nothing. How could men working 'sur le bleu' afford to see anything or hear anything? They didn't exist officially. They were non-persons at the docks. All of this Doyle had put in his report, a report Barclay had read. It was a thorough report, certainly as good as the one Barclay himself would write. But it was also a bit pleased with itself, a bit smug: I've covered everything, it seemed to suggest, what did you expect me to find?
Barclay's hotel lay in a dark, narrow street near the bus terminus.
There was a small piece of waste ground
nearby which served as a car park (at each car owner's risk). Barclay had taken out European insurance before crossing the Channel, and he half-hoped someone would steal his creaky Fiesta with its malfunctioning gearbox. To this end, he gathered together his opera tapes and carried them in a plastic bag. He didn't mind losing the car, but he didn't want his tapes stolen too .. .
His hotel was in fact the two floors over a bar, but with a separate smoked-glass door taking residents up the steep staircase to the rooms.
He'd been given a key to this door and told that meals were served in the bar. Between the smoked-glass door and the stairs there was another door of solid wood, leading into the bar. He paused, having pressed the time-controlled light-switch, illuminating the staircase with its grey vinyl wallpaper. He could nip into the bar for a drink: a cognac or a pastis. He could, but he wouldn't. He could hear locals in there, shouting the odds about something, their voices echoing. Two or three of them, the bar empty apart from them. He started to climb the stairs, and was halfway up when the lights went off.
He wasn't in complete darkness. A little light came from the downstairs door. But not much. There was another light-switch on the landing, just beside the huge potted plant and the framed painting of some anthropomorphic dogs playing pool. He climbed slowly, hand brushing against the horrible wallpaper with bristly vertical stripes, more like carpeting than anything else. The sort of carpeting that gave you an electric shock if you wore the wrong kind of shoes. Just along the wall a little .. . light-switch somewhere around here ... ah, yes, just . . .
His fingers pressed against something. But it wasn't the switch. It was warm, soft, yielding. It was a hand. He started and almost fell back down the stairs, but another
hand grabbed his arm and pulled him upright. At the same time, the lights came back on. The hand his own hand had touched had already been resting on the light-switch. He found himself facing a young woman, small, with short black hair and very red lips. Her face was round and mischievous.
She smiled wryly.
'Pardon,' she said: the French word, not the English. He attempted a light laugh which came out as a strangled snuffle. Then she brushed past him and descended the staircase. He watched her go. She was wearing baggy trousers and a sort of cotton blouson, the trousers dark blue and the blouson sky blue. And lace-up shoes, quite rugged things. Her fingers touched the stair-rail as she went. At the bottom, unexpectedly, she turned back and caught him looking at her, then opened not the door to the street but the one leading into the bar. The voices from inside were amplified for a moment, then the door closed again, muffling them.
'Christ,' he said to himself. He walked unsteadily along the corridor and was just trying to fit his room-key into the lock when the lights went out yet again.
Inside the room, he threw his bag of cassettes on to the carpet and sat down on the springy bed. Then he lay back across it, left hand gripping right wrist and both resting on his forehead. He should make a start on his report, at least get his notes in order. But he kept seeing the girl in his mind. Why had she given him such a start? He managed to smile about it after a bit, rearranging his memory of the incident so that he came out of it in a better fight. Well, at least he hadn't tried to say anything in his inimitable French.
He had a shower, humming to himself all the time, then dried himself briskly and lay back down on the bed again. After a moment's thought, he reached down beneath the bed and pulled out a bulging cardboard document wallet marked in thick felt pen with the single word witch.
It had arrived by motorbike courier at his flat in London, less than half an hour before he'd been due to leave to catch the ferry. A large padded envelope, and the helmeted rider saying: 'Sign here.' He'd torn the envelope open, not knowing what to expect - certainly not expecting Dominic Elder's crammed but meticulously organised obsession. There was a note pinned to the dogeared flap: 'I have the feeling your need will be greater than mine. Besides, I know it by heart. I'll be in touch.
Good luck. Elder.'
Biked all the way from deepest south Wales to London. The bike charges must have been phenomenal, but then Barclay surmised that the department would be paying.
He'd read through the file on the trip across the Channel. It contained plenty of detail; the only thing missing was factual evidence that any of the operations and incidents outlined in two dozen separate reports had anything to do with an individual codenamed 'Witch'. It seemed to Barclay that Dominic Elder had latched onto any unsolved assassination, any unclaimed terrorist outrage, and had placed the name Witch beside it. A woman seen fleeing the scene ... a telephone call made by a female ...
a prostitute visited ... a girl student who disappeared afterwards . ..
these shadowy, ephemeral figures all turned into the same person in Elder's mind. It smacked of psychosis.
Barclay wondered why. He wondered what had spurred Elder on, why had the mere idea of Witch gripped him in the first place? He got the feeling Elder knew more than he was saying. Flicking through the file for a second time, he caught a single mention of Operation Silverfish. It was noted in passing, no more. Operation Silverfish. No clue as to what it was, just that it had occurred two years before. The year, in fact, that Elder had 'retired'
from the department. The year, too, that Barclay had joined: they'd missed one another by a little over five weeks. A slender gap between the old and the new. He would ask someone about Silverfish when he got back. Joyce Parry perhaps, or Elder. It might be that he could access the operation file without prior consent anyway. He'd be back tomorrow, back to the reality of technology, back to his role as Intelligence Technician.
His phone buzzed. This in itself was surprising: the apparatus looked too old to be functional. He picked up the receiver.
'Hello?'
'Barclay? It's Dominic Elder. I said I'd be in touch.'
'How did you get my . .. ?'
'Joyce passed it along. I'm in London now. Anything to report?'
'Nothing Special Branch haven't already found.'
'Flagging already, eh?'
Barclay bristled. 'Not at all.'
'Good. Listen, Special Branch are policemen, they've got policemen's minds. Don't get stuck in their rut.'
Barclay smiled at the image, remembering his retread tyre. 'You'd advise lateral thinking then?'
'No, just deep thinking. Follow every idea through. All right?'
'All right.'
'I'll call again tomorrow. And listen, don't tell Mrs Parry. It would only get us both into trouble.'
'I thought you s
aid she'd given you this number?'
'Well, she told me which hotel you were in. I found the number for myself.'
Barclay smiled again. Then he remembered something. 'I've been reading the file, I wanted to ask you about Operation Silver—'
'Talk to you soon then. 'Bye.'
The connection was dead. It was as though Elder simply hadn't heard him. Barclay put the receiver back. He was quite getting to like Dominic Elder.
He had brought a couple of paperbacks with him, expecting to have time to kill. He'd been struggling with one of them for weeks, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. A computer buff friend had recommended it. He'd unpacked the book and left it on the bedside cabinet, beside his French Grammar and travel alarm. He picked up the book now. He still had an hour before wandering off in search of dinner. Maybe he could pick up the thread of Pynchon.
He opened it where his leather bookmark rested. Jesus, was he really only up to page forty-nine? He read halfway down the page, sure that he'd read this before. He was much further on ... page sixty-five or seventy at least. What was the bookmark doing left at a page he'd read before? He thought for a couple of minutes. Then he examined the corners of the book. There was a slight dent to the bottom right-hand corner of the cover, and to a few of the pages after it. The book had been bought new, pristine. The dent was the kind made by dropping a book.
Picking it up to flip through it ... dropping it ... the bookmark falling out . . . replaced at random . ..
'Jesus,' he said, for the second time in an hour.
Dressed for dinner, in lightweight cream suit and brown brogues, white shirt and red paisley tie, Barclay opened the door to the bar. It was busier, five men leaning against the bar itself and deep in discussion with the hotelier who filled glasses as he spoke. Barclay smiled and nodded towards him, then made for a table. There was only one other person seated, the young woman from the landing. He pulled out a chair from opposite her and sat down.
'Do you mind if I join you?' he asked.
'Comment? Vous etes anglais, monsieur?'
'Anglais, out' He stared at her without blinking. 'Are you staying here, mademoiselle? Restez-vous id?'
She appeared not to understand. The hotelier had come to the table to take Barclay's order. 'Une pression, s'il vous plait.' Barclay's eyes were still on her. 'Would you like another?' She had an empty glass in front of her. She shook her head. The hotelier moved back to the bar.
