0900 Friday
It was my third morning at the Health Farm. It felt like the hundred and third. My head buzzed from the question and answer session which had lasted till midnight, while my mind got busy and counted the number of people searching for Suzy Katoul. But the hunt had only just started.
We were in Ross's office. All of us. Elizabeth, LeClerc, Archie Dorfman and the neat little man from political intelligence. At the head of the table Ross drank orange juice and glared at the transcript of last night's interrogation session. He turned to LeClerc. "What's the computer make of all this?"
LeClerc braced himself for his normal morning bawling out. "Still cross-referencing. People she met at the camps - other refugees who made it to Paris - links with Baader Meinhof. It all takes time."
"We haven't got time."
"Another hour," LeClerc pleaded. "That's all."
"An hour too long," Ross growled, forever mindful of Suzy's twenty-four hour deadline. The gold Tissot flashed on his wrist and he grew increasingly restless. "What you got this morning, Archie?"
Dorfman frowned. "Pieces of another guy's jigsaw I think. Not much to fit our situation."
"So tell me."
Dorfman would clearly rather not, but he opened his file and fumbled into his report. "Taking the shipping angle - two hundred and eight vessels were within a hundred miles of the Marisa when she was hit. We've cleared a hundred and ninety so far. The rest are still being followed up, but we think a large ship was close to the Marisa. when it happened - possibly within twenty miles. Identification's difficult but we've narrowed it down to three possibles: a Dutch freighter, a British cruise ship and a Libyan tanker."
"Go on."
"Well, we've had some radio contact with the British and Dutch ships. Enough to be reasonably satisfied they're in the clear. We're still checking of course - our people meet the liner at Oslo this afternoon and the freighter at Rotterdam tomorrow."
"And the tanker?"
"Not much really. We think she's the Fedayeen and if she if there's a bit of mystery about her," he frowned. "Well, not exactly mystery, but—"
"I'll evaluate."
Dorfman blushed. "A week ago she was in Copenhagen. She stayed overnight, carried out some repair to her electrics, then moved on." He consulted his notes. "Supposedly headed for Aberdeen, but she never made it. We checked with the Port Authorities there. But she was seen in Scottish waters."
Ross scowled. "So where is she now?"
"Tripoli. She docked last night."
"And?"
"Apparently her electrics blew up again while at sea. She stood by for about twenty-four hours to fix them, then put back to Tripoli for an overhaul." Dorfman shook his head. "And according to her log she never went near Scotland."
"But you believe otherwise," Ross watched him closely.
"We're double-checking the reports now, but we think she was sighted off the Orkneys." Dorfman returned to his notes, "By a Scottish trawler and a Norwegian tanker."
Ross pulled a face. "It's not much." He looked at LeClerc, "Any comment?"
The Frenchman shrugged and shook his head, but next to him the neat little man cleared his throat. When he spoke he sounded almost apologetic. "We did pick up another story from Copenhagen. I've told Archie about it and there's probably no connection, but Passport Control at Copenhagen reported two known IRA men there last week." He searched half a dozen pages of his notes before he found the correct reference. "Purpose of visit, holiday, according to the immigration cards. The Danes noted which boarding house they were staying at and put them under loose surveillance," he giggled. "Well, it appears that it was a bit too loose - because they vanished."
"Vanished?" Ross echoed in disbelief.
The little man nodded. "The Danes are hopping mad about it. The boarding house was supposed to notify the police if the Irishmen checked out early, but they went out Saturday night and the boarding house forgot about it until Monday morning. Meanwhile, the Irishmen dropped out of sight. Passport Control say they haven't left Denmark, but the police can't find them in Copenhagen."
Ross swore softly. "Who were they?"
"Not big wheels. I can show them to you if you like?"
Ross nodded. The little man extracted two cards like library tickets from an index box, while Elizabeth closed the shutters against the morning sun. The temperature dropped, Elizabeth clicked back across the marble floor and the little man punched buttons on a pocket calculator. One of the television screens lit up with a larger than life colour shot of a man in blue duffel coat. CIA computer banks hold millions of cards on suspected terrorists, supplied by half the security organisations in the world, yet it takes less than a second to retrieve one photograph and flash it on to a TV screen. I grappled with the Orwellian significance of it while the man in the duffel coat changed position until we had seen half a dozen shots of him.
"Liam Reilly," said the little man. "Age thirty-eight, married, two children, occupation fisherman. Suspected IRA courier for twelve years, believed to have smuggled arms into Ireland from France. No convictions. Generally considered a quiet sort, not ambitious. Possibly because of his occupation, however, it's thought he might have been involved in the Claudia incident in seventy-four."
"Is it now," Ross said with sharpened interest. The Claudia incident was one of the few provable instances of Gaddafi sending arms to the IRA.
The little man tapped a new code into his calculator and a different photograph appeared. "Pat Brady. Same age as Reilly, went to school together and been friends ever since - always ready to follow where Reilly leads. They both work for a set-up called Inishmore Fishing. Nothing known about that, so it's probably all right." He lapsed into silence while we stared at the dark-haired Irishman. Eventually Ross asked, "Is that all?"
"All we've got at the moment," the little man said.
Elizabeth walked to the windows and we blinked at the sunlight while Ross turned to Dorfman. "You're suggesting those two hitched a ride on your tanker?"
Dorfman shrugged. "It seemed a possibility to begin with—"
"Are they in Tripoli?"
Dorfman shook his head. "No, we think they're in Ireland."
"Ireland?"
"It seems likely—"
Ross scowled. "You're saying this tanker went to Ireland? As well as Scotland?"
Dorfman tried to explain. "We've been monitoring coastguard reports from all round Europe. Everything filed last week. It takes time of course but—"
"If anyone says that again," Ross threatened.
"But we think we've found something," Dorfman protested. "A report filed Wednesday by the Shannon coastguard. Routine interception of a fishing boat, skippered by a man called Liam Reilly."
"The same Reilly?"
"We’re awaiting more detail, but we think so."
"Why?"
"Because the mate's name was Brady."
Ross winced. "Never look for Jones and Evans in Cardiff. There's hundreds of them. Like Reilly's and Brady's in Ireland."
"Liam Reilly, and Pat Brady?"
"Tom, Dick and Harry." Ross was determined not to be impressed. "And Liam means Bill."
"But the fishing boat they were in, the Aileen Maloney, belongs to the Inishmore Fishing Company."
"Oh," Ross sounded disappointed. "You never told me that."
Dorfman opened his mouth for a quick answer, but thought better of it.
Ross stared into space, turning the idea over in his mind while we sat and watched him. Finally he said, "I can't see the IRA in this. It's too big, too well organised." He gazed around the table, as if inviting contradiction, and when none came he made up his mind. "Don't waste time on it. Pass it to Dublin and forget about it. Concentrate on the Middle East."
I watched Dorfman's reaction. His mouth drooped at the corners and he looked a shade crestfallen, but for the determined glint in his eye. He was about to make an issue of it when Ross cut him off and turned to me. "You're going to the pictures, wit
h Elizabeth."
"Anything good?"
"Mug shots. People who were in the Lebanon camp with Negib Katoul, others who had contact with your girl in Paris. Let me know if you recognise any of them - okay?"
"Okay."
I followed Elizabeth downstairs to the studio, thinking Ross was making slow progress and wondering if Nikki Orlov was coping any better.
It took rather longer than an hour to view fifty mug shots. Elizabeth flicked her way through an entire library of cards while I stared dutifully at the screen. Only once did I think I recognised a face.
"Who's she?" I asked, looking at a slim blonde in her middle twenties.
Elizabeth sat a yard away, separated by dust motes and cigarette smoke trapped in a beam of light. She shook her head. "Sorry, you tell me." She must have sensed my irritation because she added, "It's the procedure. It mustn't be said that I led you on."
I gave her a few choice words about salacious gossip and turned back to the blonde on the screen. Something about her seemed familiar. Elizabeth tapped buttons and the blonde changed her position. And her clothes. Where she had been kitted out in an ankle-length leather coat, now she was dressed for tennis. Whoever she was she had a good figure and money enough to show it off. A third shot showed her at the races, complete with an Ascot-type hat and a man in a grey topper.
"What's a nice girl like that doing in a place like this?"
"Do you know her?"
"I could try. She's a lot prettier than Arafat."
Elizabeth sighed, then the girl changed into a bikini and sat on the edge of a swimming pool while I sighed and watched her.
"That's all we've got," Elizabeth said.
"Don't apologise. I'll take her."
We went through the sequence again. Leather coat, tennis gear, a day at the races and the bikini. "Go back to the race track," I said.
"My," Elizabeth purred, "the iron self control of the man." Obediently she changed the picture and the blonde and I stared at each other.
She might have been a model. Pleated silk skirt, full with a swirl to it, tight-waisted below a modest but well-shaped bust, with a haze of chiffon at her throat. The photographer had focused on her, catching her with compelling clarity although the man on her arm was blurred and indistinct. My eyes stayed on the girl. A snub nose with a hint of freckles, wide generous lips and deep blue eyes. I did know her.
"She's French," I said.
"Did you meet her in Paris?"
"No, not Paris." I was certain of that. It was the dress which reminded me. Put a dress on some women and it might be a shroud, it fulfilled a function, preserved their modesty, kept out the draft. Put a dress on this girl and she made you look at it - and what was inside it. It had something to do with the way she carried herself, the walk, the confident tilt of her chin - everything about her was captured in that one photograph.
"A friend of Suzy's?" Elizabeth prompted.
I hesitated. Friend was wrong. At least I had thought so at the time. I had distrusted her. Suzy had introduced us in her usual smooth way. "Harry, I’d like you to meet—?" like you to meet? What the devil was the girl's name?
It had been warm. An English summer's day. The girls had worn silk or cotton. Cool, formal, smelling of money and privilege. The accents were mainly English too, loud voices with all that haw-hawing which passes for upper-class conversation. Suddenly I remembered.
"It was Henley, two summers ago. We met quite by chance." I laughed at the memory. "I avoid that sort of thing like the plague as a rule. But I was staying the weekend with a friend who was more or less obligated to put in an appearance and I got dragged along."
"Which friend Harry?" Elizabeth coaxed in her golden brown voice.
"Does it matter?"
"Harry," she scolded. "Everything matters. You know that."
Did I? I sat hunched up in my chair, staring at the larger than life blonde and thinking back to the summer of'76. Next to me Elizabeth moved. I took no real notice but registered that I could no longer see her from the comer of my eye.
Henley, '76. I had been staying with Tubby Hayes. Strange bloke Tubby. Used to be a war correspondent years ago, way back in Korea and the aftermath. Then he'd gone to Taiwan, discovered their infant electronics industry and turned capitalist. Imported all sorts of stuff into the UK: cheap tape recorders, intercoms, even walkie-talkies until the GPO stopped him. Later it was hi-fi and all that nonsense, and now it's video recorders and calculators and God knows what else. lives in opulence in a Georgian pile on the Thames at Henley and goes in for country house parties with as many as a dozen people staying for the weekends. You meet all sorts at Tubby's.
Cabinet ministers, journalists, businessmen; all mixed up and talking their heads off. As jaw shops go it beats the House of Commons. I stay perhaps three times a year and entertain him in London sometimes, as a token return of his hospitality.
There was nothing unusual about that particular visit, apart from it being Regatta week, until late on Friday afternoon when Tubby mentioned the promise he had made to call on a neighbour.
"Just for an hour, Old Boy," he said. "Scoff some strawberries and chat up the pretty girls. Want to come?"
We walked across Tubby's manicured acre to the copse screening the gardens from the river, along the tow path to the next boathouse and then through a wicker gate leading to another garden. Lawns bereft of a single daisy swept down to meet us and we picked our way through a dozen trees heavy with apples. The house was a hundred yards away, high up and skirted by a wide terrace from which gracious stone steps descended to the garden.
There must have been at least fifty people there, more women than men, their summer dresses catching the sunlight like butterfly wings and the sound of their laughter tinkling down to us on the soft summer breeze. White-coated waiters served golden drinks from silver trays to old men who looked faintly ridiculous in striped blazers and yellowed straw hats, and the air was heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and Chanel number five.
We had been on the terrace half an hour before I saw Suzy. I was astonished. We had met in Paris the week before and she'd said nothing then about visiting England. But there she was, at the far end of the terrace, flanked by two other girls and absorbed in conversation with a very tall man who stood partly in shadow. I excused myself from the people I was with and started across to her. She saw me when I was still six or seven yards away, our eyes meeting across the heads and hats of others. Her face froze with surprise, surprise and something else? I thought it was alarm for a moment, fear even, then I laughed at the absurdity of it as she turned to greet me with a radiant smile and elbowed her way through the crush.
"Harry! How marvellous. Oh, I wish I'd known you'd be here." She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. "But - well, it's not really your scene is it?"
"Is it yours?" I was laughing, delighted to meet her. "What are you doing here anyway?"
"I'm here to meet—" she began, but she was interrupted by one of the girls she had been talking to.
"Suzy, darling, who's your good-looking friend?" The blonde with the blue eyes hurried to join us. People stepped aside to make a path for her so I got the full impact of the model's walk and the flashing confident smile. Even the tilt of the chin was exactly as in the image on the screen.
"Harry, I'd like you to meet Monique Debray," Suzy said, hugging my arm. "Monique, meet Harry Brand," she hesitated for the briefest second, then added, "my godfather."
The blonde engulfed me like a long lost cousin and gushed a lot of nonsense about how much she had heard about me. Then Suzy was tugging my sleeve again. "Harry, come and meet A—" she stopped abruptly, her gaze directed toward the end of the terrace where she had been a moment earlier. The man had vanished. He had been there seconds earlier, along with the third girl, now nothing, only empty space quickly filled by other people drifting across the terrace like leaves on the wind.
"He's making our goodbyes," Monique Debray explained. "Suzy, we're lat
e already."
"Late?" Suzy's head snapped round, surprise all over her face.
Monique said, "I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Brand." She had a hand on my arm, blood red fingernails complementing a huge ruby ring. "But we should have left half an hour ago. As it is we'll have to drive like maniacs to catch our plane."
"Plane?" I said stupidly.
"We're due back in Paris this evening," she nodded. "The time's just flown - hasn't it Suzy?"
Something in her manner worried me, as if she was warning Suzy about something, and Suzy was just about to speak when Tubby Hayes joined us. He looked strained and anxious which was unusual for him. Generally he's the most relaxed man I know. But he too was looking at his watch. I introduced him all round and Tubby flashed a perfunctory smile which barely concealed his agitation. "Rawlins has arrived, Old Boy," he said urgently. "Sorry to break the party up, but we really ought to get back."
Rawlins was a Parliamentary Under-Secretary who was driving over from Maidenhead or thereabouts for dinner. Tubby had mentioned something earlier about his coming especially to ask me about recent developments in Iran.
Monique Debray was talking into my other ear. "I'm so glad we met - and I'm sure we'll meet again." She transferred her hand to Suzy's elbow and was steering her away, edging her toward the french windows and the shade of the drawing room. Suzy looked slightly dazed, but she leaned forward hurriedly and pecked my cheek. "It seems I have to go," she said. Behind me Tubby Hayes was saying goodbye in a loud voice and tugging my jacket at the same time. "I say Old Boy, I'm awfully sorry but we've got to dash. Old Rawlins will think it's no end bad form if I'm not there to greet him."
I turned to claim another minute to say goodbye to Suzy, but he was already shouldering his way through a group of people. "Tubby, hang on a sec." I swung back to ask when I would see her again, but she had gone. I caught the merest glimpse of her green dress next to the blue worn by the blonde as they hurried across the drawing room, and I was half prepared to chase after her when Tubby called, "I say Harry Old Boy, do get a move on! Rawlins will be absolutely furious!" So I went.
Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1 Page 15
