‘Perhaps we should ask at the hospitals.’
‘Eh?’ Campbell dismissed it with a blow of his lips. ‘But they’d have brought her to the emergency there’ – he gestured over his shoulder in the general direction of the hospital they had just left – ‘I would’ve seen her.’ He moved his bulk towards the door, impatient for action.
But Nick had a good idea of the action Campbell had in mind, and he didn’t want any of that, not if it could possibly be avoided. ‘Wait,’ he insisted firmly. ‘Let’s decide what we’re going to do – to say.’
‘Say?’ Campbell sucked in his breath disapprovingly. ‘Best to go straight in’ – he thrust an arrowlike hand in the direction of the building – ‘take a look around, see if she’s there, an’ talk later.’
‘That’s a sure way to get into trouble!’ Nick snapped. ‘They might call the police.’
Campbell threw him an incredulous look. ‘What? They’d no more call the police than I would!’
‘We don’t know that,’ Nick argued, zipping up his jacket with finality. ‘But whatever happens violence isn’t going to help.’ He was aware of sounding sanctimonious, but he didn’t know how else to dampen Campbell’s insatiable appetite for action.
‘Stay here,’ Nick instructed, and before Campbell could argue he got out and strode across Peregrine Road to the entrance in the wall. It was barely six and still pitch black; there weren’t many people around yet, just the occasional car in the main road. The door was in a bad way, splintered and bent around the remains of the lock. It had been patched up with pieces of plywood, nailed roughly into place. A square of white card had been pinned to the door. Peering at it closely, he read: Reynard Associates are temporarily closed for staff holidays.
Nick pressed the bell, waited, then pressed the second bell. After four tries he left his finger on both bells.
No one came.
He returned to the car with a sense of anticlimax.
‘Should a’ gone straight in,’ mumbled Campbell, a note of censure in his voice. ‘Now they’ll know we’re here.’
Nick clenched the wheel. ‘I want to find her, Campbell, just as much as you do.’
His remark seemed to trigger something in Campbell for, without a word, he got out of the car. Nick shouted, but there was no stopping him.
Nick watched half in agitation, half in fascination as Campbell strode up to the door and beat on it with both hands. Ignoring the stares of a passer-by, he then kicked viciously at a point half way up the door where the lock should have been. When that failed he ran the full weight of his shoulder against it, and looked surprised when the door withstood his advances. He was rallying himself for another go when a man on the corner of the main road started shouting and gesticulating at him. Then Nick saw that the gestures weren’t aimed at Campbell, but towards Campbell, as if directing someone towards the scene. Suddenly appreciating his danger, Campbell abandoned the door and, looking over his shoulder, half walked, half ran back to the car. Nick, falling into the required role of getaway driver, had the engine running and the car moving even as Campbell climbed in. Braking to turn out into the main road, he saw a uniformed policeman pounding up to the passer-by, who was pointing towards the car.
Nick shot out into the road and accelerated away, his ears singing, his heart pumping, feeling the policeman’s eyes burning into the illuminated car registration. The car lights – he should never have turned them on! What a stupid mistake! Then, when the worst of his panic had subsided and he’d got things into some sort of proportion, he realized that it wasn’t the lights that had been the mistake, but allowing Campbell to talk him into such a crazy idea in the first place.
He wasn’t capable of speech for some time and it was Campbell who broke the silence as they crossed the river.
‘A regret,’ he said with feeling. ‘A real regret. I was almost there!’
Nick pressed his lips together and parked in silence just the other side of the King’s Road. Using the car phone he called Jenny at Glen Ashard, but there was no news. They walked back to a café-brasserie that was just opening up, ready to catch the yuppie breakfast trade.
Nerves partially restored by strong coffee, Nick made Campbell go through the whole evening again in more detail, from the time he and Daisy had got inside the place until the moment he woke in the street with the ambulancemen leaning over him. Campbell, speaking haltingly, got as far as the tape recordings and the invoices and the Work-ham Overseas Holdings files when his ruddy cheeks turned ashen and he clutched a hand to his injured head.
After that he wasn’t much good for anything. Nick offered to deposit him at a doctor but with some predictability Campbell wasn’t having any of that and lay back in his seat, pale and uncommunicative, as they drove through the first knots of rush-hour traffic to Scotland Yard.
‘What was she doing there exactly?’
The inspector’s manner was deceptively benign, making it only too easy to overlook the directness of the question.
Nick replied carefully: ‘She went there for information.’
‘What kind of information?’
How much to tell? ‘Information about the illegal bugging of her telephone – and other things.’
The inspector smiled blandly and raised an eyebrow to show that he was prepared to be moderately impressed. Having become something of a judge of policemen over the last months, Nick put him down as shrewd rather than bright, a man who had carved out a niche that exactly suited his talents. Greying and pouchy, he seemed poured into his seat. The benevolence, the unhurried speech, the apparent sloth were, Nick suspected, part of a well-practised approach, designed to lull, lure and, quite probably, to drive people to confession through sheer frustration. It was almost an hour since Nick had announced himself at the desk downstairs, and forty minutes since he had been ushered in to see this man Morgan. Yet far from responding to the urgency, it seemed to Nick in his present mood that Morgan was taking pleasure in slowing things down.
Morgan asked: ‘And what makes you so sure she’s still in there?’
‘I told you – the car. And she would have called if she’d managed to get out. It’s the first thing she would have done.’
‘So why would she be having trouble in getting out? Why would anyone want to prevent her?’
At Campbell’s insistence, Nick hadn’t mentioned the fact that Campbell had been there, hadn’t suggested that Daisy was anything but alone. ‘These people had been spying on her,’ Nick offered. ‘They knew she was on to them, they knew she was going to expose them. They would have had good reason to shut her up.’
‘But she hadn’t called us in?’ Morgan murmured. ‘She hadn’t thought it serious enough for that?’
Watching the inspector, Nick was suddenly reminded of the roomful of doctors he’d faced during Alusha’s illness and how they had worn the same look of condescension and quiet disbelief. Goaded by tiredness and old anger, Nick added testily: ‘You don’t seem to believe me.’
‘If I didn’t believe you, Mr Mackenzie, I wouldn’t have sent a car to go and look, would I?’
‘But can they get in? Can they search the place?’
‘Not without a warrant.’
‘And will you get a warrant?’
‘Not without some evidence.’ He gave a humouring smile. ‘Which is the purpose of these questions, Mr Mackenzie.’ He took a long languid breath. ‘Now this company, Reynard Associates – you say they’re private investigators?’
‘I told you … Look, can’t we do this later?’
‘But why not now, Mr Mackenzie? Is there some difficulty?’ The ingenuous smile.
‘Because – ’ Nick could almost hear Campbell’s voice, telling him that this was just what he had warned him about, all talk and no action. ‘Because there’s no time!’
The inspector dropped his eyes slowly to the desk and examined his pen. When he looked up there was an obdurate look beneath the benevolent gaze. ‘We’ll hurry as best we can, Mr Ma
ckenzie. In the meantime, Reynard Associates – would you mind?’ Nick saw that there was to be no escape, not for the time being at least, though that didn’t stop him from burying his head in his hands. Then, drawing a deep breath, he started to go through it again.
It was nine fifteen by the time Nick called an exasperated halt. The patrol men sent to ring on the side door in Peregrine Road had drawn a blank, and the inspector was showing no signs of trying for a warrant. Leaving Morgan to dig up what he could on Reynard Associates, Nick got down to the car to find Campbell half asleep in the passenger seat. He was grey-faced and groggy, but that didn’t stop him remarking: ‘What did I tell you, hey?’ with a glint of satisfaction.
Nick called Jenny at Ashard again, but there was still no news.
Intending to drop Campbell off into the care of his housekeeper in Kensington, Nick headed west. His route took him close by David’s place in Knightsbridge and, realizing David might still be at home, he diverted into Montpelier Square.
David emerged from the door of his immaculate town house and stared at Nick disbelievingly before his face lit up like a child’s for whom a long-heralded promise has unexpectedly come true. ‘Nick! You made it! You made it!’ He must have been shaving because he was still in his dressing gown and there were smudges of foam on his ears.
Nick remembered his promise of the previous afternoon. ‘David, I’ll try to get into the studio later, I promise.’
David’s expression underwent a painful transformation from open joy to the sort of dull hurt shown on the faces of ill-treated dogs in advertisements for animal charities.
‘David, a favour. Could you trace a company for me? It’s called Workham Overseas Holdings.’
With a sigh David turned away and padded off across the hall and down the stairs. Nick followed him into the basement kitchen, a mock-German-farmhouse affair with a dazzling ceiling of recessed spotlights, walls of dark oak fittings and a central island that sported hanging copper pans which gleamed from lack of use.
‘It’s based in the Cayman Islands,’ Nick prompted.
David flicked on a coffee percolator, filled it with water and, opening a cupboard, pulled out two cups and deposited them noisily on the work surface. His movements were slow and heavy, as if he was suddenly very tired. ‘Can’t be done,’ he said laconically.
‘Why not?’
‘Half the reason people put their companies in the Cayman Islands is so that people like us can’t trace them.’
‘But haven’t I got a company in the Caymans?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But there must be a way surely.’
‘You asked me, and I’m telling you there’s no way. Zilch.’ He made a chopping movement with his hand. This was David at his steeliest, the David encountered by record companies trying to negotiate contracts.
Nick persevered: ‘Have we no contacts?’
David turned slowly to face him, his emotions hidden behind layers of hard-won impassivity. ‘Contacts are only as good as the favours they owe you.’
‘But you could ask, David?’
‘Asking’ll get me nowhere,’ he drawled. ‘Secrecy’s sewn into the system tighter than the coins in my grandmother’s hem when she escaped the Russian revolution.’
‘But asking …?’
A slight pause which Nick took as a hopeful sign.
‘When can I tell the others you’ll be coming to rehearsal?’ David replied, apparently changing the subject but not, as they both knew, changing it at all.
‘David, as soon as I can. This afternoon. Maybe sooner. Look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’
David filled the cups and, taking them across the kitchen, plonked them saucerless on a rustic wooden table that matched the dark oak units. ‘Everything’s important with you, Nick, everything except what you’re meant to be doing at the time.’
Smarting under the unprecedented rebuke, Nick sank onto a stool.
‘Someone’s gone missing,’ he tried to explain. ‘Daisy Field, the campaigner from Catch. You remember …?’ He began to tell him about the weekend’s events but a veil of indifference had dropped over David’s eyes and Nick recognized the look he usually reserved for the stream of hard-luck stories that regularly came his way each working day.
‘Not your problem, surely,’ David murmured at last.
‘But it is. She was— She’s— I have to find her, David!’
‘I see,’ he said, and his eyes carried a wealth of meaning.
‘It’s not like that,’ Nick replied sternly. ‘It’s not like that at all. It’s just – I feel sort of responsible. I feel …’
He trailed off, aware that David was watching him with open puzzlement. He repeated: ‘I can’t leave it, David.’
David reassumed his world-weary mantle.
‘Okay,’ he conceded with a slow sigh, ‘okay. I’ll do what I can, but I promise nothing, you understand, nothing. I’ll have to ask a lot of favours, serious favours I have no right to ask. It could take time.’
‘How long?’
‘Well there’s the time difference for a start, five hours, and favours never come quick. Several days, at the least. But even then I can’t promise a thing, Nick, not a thing.’
‘I thought …’ What had he thought? That it would be a question of lifting a phone and getting a quick answer.
‘Having got that out of the way,’ said David heavily, ‘can we now discuss a few small items like this tour we’re meant to be starting next week? I won’t begin to tell you what I’m going through with the insurance people – ’
‘I was fixed up, by the way.’
David’s eyelids drooped lower. He didn’t speak.
‘The drugs. Someone set me up.’
David kept all expression out of his face. ‘Who’d want to do that, Nick?’
Nick downed his coffee and got ready to leave. ‘People who wanted to warn me off.’
This was too much, even for David, and a sort of regretful wariness came across his eyes. ‘But, Nick – do you mean they planted the drugs?’
Nick stood up. ‘I mean someone tipped them off.’
‘Who?’
A vision of Susan slipped into Nick’s mind, and, as always when he thought of her now, it was against the backdrop of that South Kensington flat all those years ago. Whether from an improvement in his memory or some trick by which his brain had patched in conversations from other times, he seemed to hear the very words she had used in the argument that had finally broken their relationship, words that were uniformly violent, bitter, and ugly. It occurred to him, as it had occurred to him soon after the drugs raid, that she had hated him then, and probably still did.
But this wasn’t the moment to deal with that. There would never be a right moment. Thoughts of vengeance and recrimination had never formed an important part of his repertoire. It was quite enough that he was rid of her.
Yet as he went out to the car and half turned to wave to David it suddenly struck him that Susan, far from being someone to avoid, was probably the very person he should go and see. Much as he loathed to admit it, much as it infuriated him to think of facing her again, Susan might just be able to wave a magic wand: Susan with her knowledge of Schenker, her many dealings with him, Susan who liked to show off her contacts, Susan the perfect messenger. Even – it wasn’t totally impossible – Susan with a sense of shame at what she had done.
Campbell raised his eyebrows expectantly as Nick got into his car.
Nick fought an increasingly miserable battle with himself before starting the car and driving round the square.
‘Well? Anythin’?’ Campbell demanded eventually.
‘What? No, nothing.’
‘So?’
‘We’re going to see Mrs Driscoll. Well, I think so.’ And saying it he realized he still hadn’t made up his mind.
‘And who is she?’
‘The wife of the agriculture minister.’
Coming into Eaton Square, Campbell
gave a sudden peremptory exclamation, half-way between a grunt and a shout, and seemed to clutch his stomach. Imagining sickness or worse, Nick swerved in to the kerb. ‘What is it?’
Campbell made an odd sound, and it was an instant before Nick realized it wasn’t a bark of impending nausea but of gruff excitement. He was brandishing a half-rolled bundle of papers which he had extricated from the inner reaches of his jacket.
‘Daisy, she had no room for them, she gave them to me. That name, that name – it’s in here!’
Nick shuffled through, reading quickly. ‘I don’t see …’
‘Look – Driscoll!’
Nick stared at the papers for a long time, reading and rereading them until their meaning was both clear and confused in turns. Workham Overseas Holdings. The Cayman Islands. Expenses. Operatives. Vehicles. And then hospital bills. The name Angela Kershaw. And: Cramm – But will Driscoll stay away from her? Who was the her? The Kershaw woman? And Driscoll, could it really be the same … Yet if all these papers came from a Workham Overseas Holdings file, if Workham was in fact Morton-Kreiger, then why on earth not? Reading the cryptic message again, he tried to imagine a situation where a man in a prominent position couldn’t be relied on to keep away from a woman, and ended up with a sexual scenario. The hospital bills sent him further along the same path. He tried to push his mind in other directions – hate, guilt, debt – but nothing else rang with anything approaching conviction.
He threaded the car back into the traffic, aware of two simultaneous and equally disturbing thoughts: that this might be something extremely valuable, and that he hadn’t the first idea what to do with it.
He remembered that Susan had moved to a place somewhere off Vincent Square but had to call his housekeeper on the car phone for the exact address. He found the house at one end of a narrow and uninspiring street of variable architecture. The place was a dark-bricked Georgian town house with newly painted window frames, a royal-blue front door that shone like glass and baggy-knicker curtains in the upstairs rooms. Waiting outside was a black car with a uniformed driver.
Requiem Page 72
