Reedy’s eyes narrowed, his mouth slackened, he contemplated Dublensky with something like distaste. Crumpling his serviette and placing it deliberately on the table, he said: ‘I feel sorry for you, John. I really do.’
Dublensky nodded blankly. ‘You may be right.’
Reedy gave it one last shot. ‘You won’t see sense? You won’t change your mind?’
Dublensky thought of Anne, he thought of Tad, and though he felt a sudden sharp fear for them, he knew that he wouldn’t change his mind.
Daisy pushed the door shut behind her and stood, gathering her breath. From above, a muffled thump, the reverberation of a slamming door announced the presence of the Greeks, then the house fell quiet again, stifled by the Sunday morning hush.
She stood, matching the room against her memory of the previous evening. The furniture was still herded together in the same haphazard way, the books lay undisturbed on their shelves, the red chair sat by the fire.
There were no obvious signs of an intruder. But then Maynard would be too professional for that.
Out in the road, a horn tooted lightly and, going to the window, Daisy pushed up the lower sash and, supporting the weight of the frame on her shoulders, waved to the Beetle which was double-parked below. Jenny looked up at her, her face pressed close to the windscreen, and signalled a question: Are you sure you’ll be all right? Daisy nodded: I’ll be fine.
Jenny shook her head as if to say, I give up, then with a last glance to make sure Daisy hadn’t changed her mind, drove away.
Daisy eased the broken sash down and, dropping her jacket over the red chair, went to check the answering machine, only to remember that she had left it off. She continued into the kitchen, still looking for signs of Maynard’s presence. There were several mugs sitting unwashed on the draining board, an open jar of instant coffee, a coffee-soaked spoon sitting in the sugar bowl – the plasterer, most likely, making himself at home. Otherwise the jars, shelves and racks were possessed of their usual disorganised clutter.
She put a kettle on, prepared some coffee. A familiar routine: a way of re-establishing her territory. Maynard may not have left any visible trace, but like an alley cat he seemed to have left a nasty aura behind him.
As the kettle heated, she drifted towards the bathroom in search of a bottle of witch hazel which she remembered having put in the back of the medicine cabinet somewhere.
Even after regular glances at Jenny’s bedroom mirror during the night, the sight of her face still held a lurid fascination, and seeing it now in the surroundings of her own place, it seemed even more macabre, as if a makeup artist had run riot with the rouge and plasticine. The swelling on her cheek had reduced her right eye to a little more than a slit through which an iris swam darkly and uncertainly in a brilliant sea of blood-red that had once been the white. The skin of her cheek, distended by the hugeness of the swelling, was red and taut and burning hot. The bruising continued into her hair to a point somewhere above her ear, which still rang loudly, like an alarm bell going off after the event. But the ringing, though distracting, was mild compared to the headache, a throbbing girdle of pain which a double dose of Panadol had failed to shift.
She found the witch hazel and dabbed at the bruise. What was really needed was ice, and she pottered back into the kitchen to chip some chunks off the solidified lump that was the ice tray.
The couple who’d picked her up off the ground and propped her against the wheel of the Beetle the previous night had pressed a handkerchief to her head, as if she were bleeding. More welcomely, they had also fed her cheap brandy, produced like magic from the inside pocket of the husband’s coat. Being long-standing residents of the estate, they were not surprised when she turned down the offer of an ambulance, and, in their relief at not having the bother of explaining their side of the business to the Bill, took her to their flat and put a call through to Jenny.
Wrapping an ice chunk in a tea towel, Daisy pressed it to her face and, making coffee, went into the main room and rooted around in her bag for the Panadol that Jenny had put there. Breaking two out of the bubble pack, she washed them down. Then, going to the desk, she opened the centre drawer and pulled out a pile of notebooks going back two years or so. These spiral-bound A5 pads were her daily records: pages of names, phone numbers, information and ideas jotted down as meetings occurred, as people called or thoughts came to her. Most of her ideas she later transferred to the relevant files or lists, and the phone numbers to her pocket-sized loose-leaf folder which, despite its striking similarity to a Filofax, she refused to call anything but an address book.
It didn’t take her long to find the phone number Maynard had quoted in his original letter all those months ago, the number of the friend in Battersea, the place where he was staying for a while and could be contacted between eleven and twelve.
Before she found reasons to put off the call she took the pad to the phone and dialled the number. There was a click, the usual pause, then a deathly whine. She tried again but there was no mistake: the line was disconnected.
The Hertfordshire address would probably be just as useless, though Jenny was going to dig the letter out of the Catch files first thing in the morning and check it, just in case.
Sitting down in the red chair she began to go through her shoulder bag, compartment by compartment, an exercise she had carried out twice already at Jenny’s. Her purse had gone, along with its contents: cash, driving licence, library ticket, Green party membership card. But her address book was still there, also her cheque book, note books, miscellaneous papers and documents. Also, her keys. Didn’t muggers usually take keys? If not for themselves, then for friends who might want to knock over your flat while you were in hospital?
But then it was possible that the mugger hadn’t been interested in the keys because his friend, Maynard, had already had a good look around the flat. The scenario of the mugger and Maynard as a team had a disturbing ring of plausibility to it.
During the early morning, when her splitting head had woken her and she had lain on Jenny’s sofabed, dazed with pain, she had attempted to construct another plot, to persuade herself that the mugging had been pure chance, that she had been the victim of nothing more than bad luck, but when she looked at it the other way round and considered how lucky that made Maynard, then her suspicions took on more life.
Besides, the man had been wearing a raincoat. What sort of mugger wore a raincoat?
But if any one thing was needed to convince her, it was the absence of the scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled Maynard’s registration number. Looking again now, the scrap – roughly the size of a supermarket receipt – was definitely not there.
Late last night, while under the influence of brandy and Panadol, Daisy had tried to remember the registration. Now, sitting in her old red chair, her head buzzing with coffee, she had another go, jotting down possibilities and comparing them with her previous efforts. The first part of the sequence looked promising in so far as it came out the same each time – G412 – but the final three letters showed a depressingly variable pattern, and the more she worried at her memory the more uncertain it became. After a time, even the first part of the sequence began to lose conviction and, admitting defeat, she dropped the pad to her knee.
No phone number, an unlikely address, a lost car registration. Got me beaten, Maynard. Had me beaten all along. Ran rings round me, in fact. It must have made you laugh, to find someone this simple.
She thought back over the last few months, to the way everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong. Peasedale being warned off, the destruction of Octek, the publicising of Nick’s identity. Looking at these events from her new vantage point – a half-closed eye, one might say – she now saw that bad luck had very little to do with it, that, on the contrary, there seemed to be an absolute inevitability to what had happened. Maynard – or his friends – seemed to have a flawless seam of information which allowed them to judge their tactics very finely indeed.
And what had brought Maynard here? What had he been hoping to find?
She went to the shelves. The tapes were undisturbed. The books were in their usual order, pressed back against the wall so that the spines of the differently sized volumes formed an irregular line. Yet when she looked more closely she saw that the dust on the shelves had been pulled into tramlines as the books had been slid out one by one. She ran a finger over the compressed page tops, and it seemed to her that some of them were missing their veneer of dust.
She went over to the desk and stared at the familiar stacks of papers, files and magazines that covered the top. Moving slowly round the side, she peered at the desk’s ancient cracked leather surface. Finally she found what she was looking for: a shape made dark by being dust-free, a shape that was clear-edged and right-angled, marking the place where a pile of files had been standing before it was moved.
So he had been looking for papers. Yet what would he find that was on paper? She groped for the significance of this thought, fretted at the edges of it, but this too refused to come.
The phone rang. She reached quickly down and flipped on the answering machine.
It was Inspector Brent, sounding tetchy, wanting her to come in and see him the next morning, if it would convenient – a note of sarcasm here – and would she please confirm as soon as possible.
She decided to leave the machine on for the rest of the day. Even when Campbell called ten minutes later, she let his voice feed onto the tape. He sounded subdued, depressed, but though she felt a vague shame at not answering him, she couldn’t get to grips with Adrian’s case now. Time enough tomorrow when the lawyers were back at work, when she could think about returning to Scotland. When she had thought the Maynard business through.
Why had Maynard come looking for papers? She never put anything on paper.
Her brain finally made the connection. That was it. Peasedale, Nick … Nothing had been in writing. Their connection with Octek had only ever been mentioned person to person. Or –
She was still for a long moment. Then, lowering the cold compress from her face, she went into the kitchen and found the collection of basic tools she had acquired during one of her self-sufficiency drives. Kneeling on the floor in front of the red chair, she unplugged the telephone cord from the wall, and took the cover off the socket. This revealed a simple array of wires and no space for concealment.
The phone itself then. But what was she looking for? How large were these things?
She removed all the visible screws and lifted the casing clear of its base. The inside of the casing was free of extraneous fixtures. She went over the guts of the apparatus wire by wire, connection by connection, but everything looked as though it had been soldered or welded; the two sealed cubes that had seemed vaguely promising had obviously been fixed on some production line.
She reassembled the body of the phone, dropped the handset back in place and rested her head against the side of the chair for a while.
The phone rang. She watched the answerphone whir into life and, watching it, thought: It’s you!
Jenny’s voice sang out, demanding to know if she was okay and insisting that she call back immediately otherwise she’d worry and have to come over again.
The moment she rang off, Daisy had the answerphone cable out of the wall and, a short while later, the front off the socket.
Nothing.
The answerphone itself, with its tape decks, windows, knobs and composite plastic casing, was more resistant to dissection, but finally yielded with the unfastening of four deceptively small screws in places designed to conceal them. The back, a single sheet of alloy, came away to reveal the interior, a dark conglomeration of electronic clutter. She examined it minutely under the table lamp. There were tape receptacles, circuit boards, sealed units, bunches of bound wires. And absolutely nothing that was loose or extraneous.
When at last the machine was together again, she took a rest, had a herb tea, and felt the effects of the Panadol lifting.
The handset was relatively easy: just two screws and a firm tug and it fell into two halves.
And there it was. An oblong, about two inches in length, half an inch square. Dull metallic black in colour, attached to the inside of the casing with some sort of sticky tape. Two wires coming from the ends, fastened to connections near the mouthpiece by tiny alligator clips.
She looked at it for a long time, but did not touch it. Eventually she put the two halves of the handset back together and screwed them up.
She climbed into the red chair, her legs over one arm, her cheek against the back. The headache had returned, pumping more fiercely than ever, and new shafts of pain darted down the side of her skull and into her neck.
She realized that she’d been far, far too modest. She hadn’t thought she was important enough for anyone to bother.
Well, Maynard had bothered all right, and Maynard had been well rewarded. Slowly, working through the drumming in her head, she catalogued the information. Conversations with Peasedale, the call to Simon, the explanation of Octek, the mention of Nick. He’d had it on a plate.
The next realization came to the surface with a great leap, like a submerged bubble.
I’ve got hard evidence. I’ve got it right here!
That was what Maynard had heard, that was what had brought him snooping around the flat. The evidence she’d embroidered for Simon, the proof about the Silveron data, the proof that did not exist.
She felt a flutter of satisfaction; she almost laughed. Serve him bloody right, serve his masters bloody right. Let them panic. With that thought, she wondered if the black bug in the phone might yet serve a purpose, though at the moment she couldn’t quite see what.
When she woke the light had shifted round until it was shining in a golden rectangle on the wall above the bed. The answering machine had just clicked on. It was Jenny again. Daisy reached down and picked up the phone.
‘Now listen, you; are you okay?’
‘I’m okay.’ She lay back, feeling drugged and heavy.
‘You should have an X-ray, I’m sure you should have an X-ray.’
‘No point. Can’t put it in plaster, can they?’
Jenny made more clucking noises, threatened to come over, and was only placated with promises of doctors if things weren’t better in the morning. On the point of ringing off, she said: ‘Oh, there’s a message from Alan. A call he took late on Friday. A Mrs Ackroyd. Came through on the unlisted line, asking for some company that Alan had never heard of. But also asking for you.’
‘Ah.’
‘She left a number. Dorking.’
Dorking? Duggan, the Boy’s Own pilot Duggan. But Ackroyd …
But no, wait a minute – Duggan’s sister.
‘Keen to speak to you, so she said. Shall I deal with it?’
Daisy remembered the invisible black box under her hand and said: ‘No … Don’t worry. It’s nothing important. Just give me the number.’
She had a wash and walked down the hill. She tried the Dorking number from the phonebox a few yards from Mr Patel’s, but there was no reply. She went into the shop and bought some supper. Mr Patel, his expression twisted into a comic picture of concern at the sight of her face, popped a packet of marshmallows into her bag when she wasn’t looking. On her way back she tried the number again, but there was still no one home. As she started up the hill again, she found herself looking over her shoulder. Was it possible? Would they bother with that as well? Surely not. And yet why not?
The thought powered her up the last of the hill and kept her occupied while she boiled up a steak-and-kidney pudding with frozen peas. Then she tackled the area around her bed, shifting furniture, clearing the dustsheets, making up the bed.
It was much later, in what felt like the depths of the night, that she heard the phone ringing from a long way off, as if from another room. The answering machine picked up, she heard a voice, a voice fro
m another age, another world, a voice that had her stumbling awake and groping for the receiver.
‘It’s me,’ she interrupted groggily.
‘Daisy Field?’ asked a soft male voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Umm. We met in Virginia. Back in July. Umm, Alan Breck. You remember? With Paul Erlinger?’
She pulled herself up on one elbow, struggling to clear her brain. ‘Yes. Of course I remember.’
‘I wanted to talk. Is this a convenient moment?’
‘Yes, yes.’ She sat up and fumbled for the light. There was a short silence and for an instant she thought she had lost him. ‘Hullo?’ she prompted.
‘Look, I’m not sure you can help …’
‘Please, I can help. I can help!’
He gave a short laugh, nervous, cautious. ‘That day we met, you seemed … I got the feeling that you understood the, er … difficulties …’ His voice hung in the air, awaiting reassurance.
‘Oh yes,’ she said hastily. ‘I understood. I still do.’ She saw the dark figure in the diner, the restless hands, the furtive eyes.
‘It’s … well … There have been particular problems with EarthForce. You know what I mean?’
She gathered her wits and plunged in, hoping she was on the right track. ‘Security problems, you mean? Yes. Yes, I could see that.’
‘You could? You could? But …’ Another long pause. ‘It’s all right your end? It’s – I mean, I’d be safe, would I?’
Even as she began to make firm reassurances, her mind took off in a great leap of fear and she stalled in mid sentence. The black box! Christ! What was she thinking of! Her heart raced, her mouth was suddenly dry.
‘What is it?’ he asked sharply.
She was silent, in a momentary panic, but even as she fought her way free, it came to her that if she told him to stop talking and the reason why, then she’d lose any trust he might have, and that would be the end of that. She heard herself stalling: ‘Sorry – it’s the middle of the night here. I dropped the phone.’
Requiem Page 61
