A Sentimental Traitor

by Dobbs, Michael

  They sang traditional hymns, Onward Christian Soldiers and I Vow to Thee My Country, stirring stuff when sung with strong male voices, the morning sun shone through stained glass and filled the church with rich dappled colours, and the oration, delivered by an old regimental padre, told the girls of sacrifices their father had made for others that he would never have told them himself. Even old men were shedding silent tears. And the time had come for the coffin to be taken. The bearers appeared once more, but as they approached Harry stepped forward, laid a hand on the sleeve of the funeral director, and took a place. And in an instant there were others, beside the coffin, to lift their old friend and bear him on their shoulders to his final resting place in the graveyard, through the ranks of the men who had known him best.

  And it was done. Sloppy was gone. They filed away solemnly, still bound by their sense of loss.

  Harry was at the lychgate when he tugged a sleeve. ‘Corporal Battersby.’

  The man turned. ‘Hello, Boss. How are you, sir?’

  ‘I think you know. Daft bloody question.’

  ‘Sorry about all the fuss, sir.’

  ‘You used to be a canny sod at transport.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Still am. In the motor trade.’

  ‘Wheels outside?’

  ‘The Beamer parked outside the pub.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

  ‘There’s another funeral in Salisbury. Two hours’ time. Think we can make it?’

  The corporal scratched his chin dubiously. ‘Not if you stand there prattling, we won’t.’

  Summer seemed endless that year. As they pulled up, a workman in shirtsleeves was mowing the deep grass verges beside the driveway and the heavy air held the scent of roses and lilac. An excellent day for an Englishman, and for a cremation.

  They could see that the ceremony had already started. The hearse and another funeral car were parked in their bays outside the main entrance to the crematorium, but there was little sign of anyone else, five cars in the public parking area. The undertaker’s staff waited patiently in the shade, stifling in their suits of black. As Harry walked towards the entrance he could hear desultory singing coming from within, the voices masked by the efforts of the organist. He checked the name on the card outside. Felix Bartholomew Wilton.

  ‘You’re late. It’s almost over, sir,’ one of the pallbearers said.

  As Harry gazed into the brick-built funeral hall, he found a gathering of seventeen, which included the vicar, and Felix had already been dispatched, sent on his way to the burning place below, while the vicar was delivering his final blessing. Then he was done, the mourners raised their bent heads, the organist began upon his endeavours once again, pumping out a suitably anodyne tune, and the vicar walked out from behind his podium to the front row of the congregation where he grasped the hand of a woman clad in expensive mourning black and whispered condolences in her ear.

  ‘Who is that?’ Harry asked the pallbearer.

  ‘The lady? That’s the deceased’s wife.’

  It was as though he had been hit by a bullet. Something exploded inside him so unexpectedly that the body didn’t know how to react, left him numb, his heart racing while it tried to find something it could recognize out of this sudden chaos. He heard his own voice as though it came from far away.

  ‘He . . . was married?’

  ‘Why, yes, sir. Mrs Patricia Wilton. Although she doesn’t go by her married name, of course.’

  ‘She . . . doesn’t?’

  ‘Calls herself Vaine. Patricia Vaine.’

  The pallbearer scurried off to his duties, leaving Harry scrambling for his senses. He’d had no idea. Stupid of him, to have jumped to conclusions, that a man who prowled gay haunts wouldn’t be married. After all, he could name at least two Cabinet ministers who . . .

  As Harry struggled with his surprise, he watched as the woman thanked the vicar, nodded to those around her, put on dark glasses and began to walk out. Then she stopped. Took off her glasses once more. She had seen him standing in the entrance. And he could tell from her expression that she recognized him, knew him, and not just from newspapers. The eyes were filled with more than recognition, there was also alarm and a little fear in them, too. She pulled her phone from an elegant bag and pressed a single button, began talking, without ever once taking her eyes off him. That she knew him, and wanted him out of her life, was confirmed some minutes later when two patrol cars, lights and sirens clearing their way, came hurtling down the approach road. And they, in turn, confirmed that Harry had found what he had come searching for. The next link.

  The patrol cars set off in pursuit of the BMW that had been seen speeding away from the crematorium. It took them several miles before they caught up with Battersby and managed to persuade him to pull over, but by that time Harry was tucked away on the back seat of a bus travelling in entirely the opposite direction.

  It was market day in Salisbury, the centre was milling with people. Excellent cover. Harry had a head start, but he knew it wouldn’t last long. They would be searching for him, watching the train and bus stations, and he had less than fifty pounds in his pocket. He couldn’t keep running for ever. There was also something else, other forces more powerful than Arkwright, which were hunting him. He still didn’t know what, but now he had a name. Patricia Vaine. And this was her territory, her home patch. Still more danger but also, perhaps, opportunity.

  He avoided the main streets, keeping an alert eye for those who wished him ill, and when he saw an approaching patrol car he slipped into the nearest shop. It was a computer repair place, one of those that ekes out a living on a side street, not trying to compete with the bully boys of the trading estate or the High Street. A bleary-eyed youth with tussled hair and John Lennon glasses stood behind the counter, idly flicking through a tattooing magazine. He looked up, rather like a shipwrecked sailor spotting a ship on the horizon, not expecting it to make land.

  ‘Hi,’ Harry said. The patrol car still hadn’t passed by, was loitering, and Harry needed an excuse. It also gave him an idea; circumstance had perhaps played him a fair hand for a change. ‘Do you have any laptops for sale?’

  ‘New or second-hand?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘We only do recons.’

  ‘Something I can connect to the Internet with while I’m travelling.’

  ‘They all do that.’

  ‘Nothing too fancy. But I’d like to have a look at one with the operating system already set up. Don’t have a lot of experience with this sort of stuff.’

  The assistant at last peeled his eyes away from the magazine. ‘Cash or credit card?’

  ‘Which do you prefer?’

  The young man gave Harry a look that suggested he might have landed from a planet located in the farthest reaches of the solar system, then led him through a clutter of computer bits to the end of the shop where several machines were lined up on a bench. He spent several minutes outlining the prowess of the most expensive before Harry cut across him.

  ‘What’s the deal on these?’

  ‘Six months warranty, labour and parts. So long as you don’t drop it in the bath. Take one with you now and I can do you a deal.’

  ‘Try before I buy?’

  ‘Take your pick.’ For the first time the assistant looked curious. ‘You from round here?’

  ‘Moved in recently,’ Harry muttered, bending over one of the laptops, trying to obscure his face.

  The young man shrugged and retreated behind his counter as Harry began manoeuvring with the mouse and tapping at the keyboard.

  Jemma had been waiting to hear from Harry, anxious about the progress of his day, reluctant to call him – funerals were rarely the right moment for phones to ring – but growing ever more anxious as the hours passed without any contact or message. To cover her unease she picked up the cat phone and set once more to her task. She was two-thirds of the way through her list
, well into the economy class, had eliminated almost all of what she had seen as the more obvious possibilities and, although she hated herself for it, was beginning to lose heart. She was reduced to going through what remained of her list alphabetically, putting any form of judgement to one side, trusting to blind luck. As she made her next call, she wondered why she had overlooked Farrokh Maneckjee, not put him on her initial list of likely suspects. He was a little on the young side, had no identified occupation. She hoped it hadn’t simply been because of his Indian background; she was better about that than her father, wasn’t she? But why had Maneckjee been on the flight? There was only one way to find out.

  When a woman answered the phone, Jemma slipped into her well-practised script, explaining carefully and slowly how saddened she was to make this call, apologizing for the intrusion, enquiring about Farrokh, yet the accent of the woman – his mother – was so lilting and deep that Jemma had considerable difficulty in understanding much of what was being said, a struggle made all the more difficult by the other’s evident emotion. As she spoke about her son, the words came pouring out at incomprehensible speed. Jemma began to lose the flow of what was being said, until one word hit her that she couldn’t possibly misunderstand.

  ‘Russia’.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was there, so eventually he found it. Hidden, elusive, yet nonetheless undeniable. It was almost impossible to hide in a world where the merest detail, real, imagined or simply manufactured, was captured and computerized. Run a search on Rupert Bunnyrabbit or Patsy Dipstick and something will turn up. The European External Action Service got more than fifty million hits, but searching out the European Anti-Terrorist Agency was like trying to find butterflies in a desert. Of the entries the search engines did find, many were some years out of date, others opaque and confusing, many more were from websites that saw conspiracy lurking in every corner and demanded open government. As for Patricia Vaine, there were practically none at all. There were any number of Vaughans and Vauns and Vanes, but Patricia Vaine found only three direct hits. The first two came from people search directories based in the US which, although they promised to be interrogating billions of public records, kept timing out and came up with nothing.

  Yet the third was all he needed. A brief, formal employment notice, twenty months old, about a woman who was being employed as a senior liaison officer within the European External Action Service, the mothership of EATA.

  He had found her.

  Russia. The word kept ringing in her ears. Jemma began dancing around the room of many colours with the cat in her arms, knowing she had found what they had been searching for. The missing link. The cause of it all. Not the details of it, but enough to know that they were very close to discovering why Speedbird 235 had been ripped from the sky. Yet even as she danced and rejoiced, her happiness was about to be stripped from her, so savagely that it caused her to cry out in pain. For now her new, vibrant, joyful world had grown altogether too colourful. Lights of acid ice blue were burning through her window, overpowering even Caitlin’s garish ideas of taste. Outside, on the road below, Jemma saw two patrol cars and many men. Mrs Gracie had done for her, after all. She knew there was no way out; the premises didn’t have a fire escape and Jemma didn’t do drainpipes. She was lost. She sat on the sofa, cradling Sammi in her lap, in tears, waiting for what was to come.

  Harry’s ear was bothering him. It had once been attacked – cut off, in fact – but the repair work had been superb and it no longer gave him pain. Ever since the surgery that had sewn it back, his new appendage had revealed an uncanny knack of warning him of approaching danger, growing hot, itching, responding perhaps to some innate inner sense that saw just that little bit further ahead. It hadn’t bothered him in ages, yet now it was talking to him once more, tingling, warning him. He glanced over his shoulder at the shop assistant; he was standing at the counter, shuffling, pretending to be engrossed in his magazine, but his eyes kept darting to the door, and then to Harry. When he saw Harry returning his gaze, he blushed and tried to bury the guilt amongst the pages of tattoos.

  Harry knew he had been betrayed. A phone call made while he’d been pursuing his prey across the Internet. He wondered how much time he had left, yet already the answer was screeching to a halt outside the door. Two police officers jumped out, a male and female, and made straight for the door. There was no time for Harry to run.

  By the time they accosted him from behind, Harry was back, bent over his computer.

  ‘Mr Jones? Mr Harry Jones?’ they demanded, addressing the back of his head.

  He hit the delete button and switched off the computer, his back still towards them. ‘You mean Harry Jones, the one they want to question about a murder and violent assault on a woman in London? Yes, that’s me.’ He stood up. Only then did he turn to face them. His right hand was in his suit pocket. He was clutching a highlighter pen, stretching the cloth. Just as the barrel of a gun might.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ the young male constable said.

  ‘You’re really willing to take that chance? After what I’ve done?’

  Harry knew that if the constable laughed he was done for, but instead he was glancing sideways at his colleague.

  ‘Ron?’ the WPC asked, her voice wavering in uncertainty.

  ‘There’ll be another squad car here any second,’ Ron insisted, but it seemed from the tic in his lips as though her doubts were becoming infectious.

  ‘Any second, you say. But until then, there’s just you and me.’

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ Ron’s colleague cried. Ron was trying to stand tall, firm, but his hand hadn’t moved any nearer the weaponry on his belt.

  ‘Do you get paid enough for this?’ Harry asked.

  And Ron backed off.

  ‘Back of the shop, no one gets hurt,’ Harry instructed, waving them on with his hidden highlighter, wondering where he’d come up with such a dreadful line. Whatever life he had to live after this, it would never be as a Hollywood scriptwriter.

  Yet they did as they were told, joining the assistant, whose eyes bulged behind his glasses in paralysing confusion. They squeezed themselves tightly into a corner behind the counter.

  A traffic warden suddenly appeared outside the window, walking slowly past, inspecting the patrol car. It distracted Ron. And that was when Harry ran.

  They weren’t far behind him, once they had scrambled from behind the counter, but Harry needed little time. The hapless Ron had left the keys in the ignition, and Harry was away even as the wretched man was reaching for the door handle. As he glanced in the mirror Harry saw the policeman almost obliterated by a plume of burnt rubber, twisting in frustration, barking frantically into his radio. Harry dropped the highlighter onto the seat beside him. He might have laughed out loud like some vaudeville villain, if he hadn’t been thinking of Jemma, and Sloppy, and of what was to come.

  There had been a time, some years before, when Jemma had lost her temper with her mother. Mrs Laing had found a lump on her breast, and done nothing about it for months apart from sitting at home and praying for it to go away. Now Jemma was doing the same. She could hear the policemen banging at the front door, so ferociously it was sure to bring the elderly lady from the rear flat to open it. Her own door would be broken down if she didn’t let them in. Her time was almost out.

  But it was not gone, not yet. She still had perhaps seconds, and a secret to share. Desperately she grabbed the phone once again.

  Harry’s mobile began burbling as he was speeding recklessly along a country road, watching for signs of the inevitable pursuit. ‘I can’t talk now!’ he barked at her.

  ‘We won’t be able to talk later. I’m just about to be arrested. They’re about to break down the door.’

  He almost missed the corner. ‘Jemma!’

  ‘Shut up and listen! I think I’ve found it. Farrokh Maneckjee is the name, lived in Andover. Worked in Russia. Can you take down his mother’s details?’

  ‘I’m driving at
eighty trying to kill myself.’

  ‘Then you’d better have a bloody good memory, Jones!’

  She gave him the information he would need, while he offered a short prayer of thanks for the ability he’d developed for remembering numbers, like map references, when an error would have cost him his life. And as he listened, in the background he could hear muffled shouts and banging, like a door being smashed off its hinges.

  ‘One more thing,’ she shouted above the confusion and noise. ‘Do you think there’s any chance of us getting cells next to each other?’ She was trying to laugh, be brave, but he couldn’t mistake the tremble of fear in her voice.

  ‘Jem, I don’t think they’re planning to let me get as far as a prison cell.’

  Yet even as he spoke it was too late. From the other end of the phone came the sounds of scuffling, a cry of pain, and protest, and the wail of an angry cat.

  They would catch up with him, too, and very soon, he knew that. Even now there would be helicopters in the sky, every policeman in the county would be on alert. They would search for him and eventually get him. The police car was probably tagged and transmitting his location to within a mean yard. How long did he have?

  He couldn’t outrun them, but he might just outwit them for long enough to do what he had to. And in the middle of the silage that life had poured over him in unbelievable quantities, there was one fragment of good news. Andover, where Mrs Maneckjee lived, was close at hand, but first he would have to dump the car. This he did in the car park of the nearest train station, Grateley, deliberately blocking the access, causing an obstruction, making sure it wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. Then with most of the money he had left he bought a single ticket to London. The watching eye of a CCTV camera caught it all. Another crumb of good fortune; the train arrived immediately, he even had to scamper across the bridge to catch it. Every minute would count.

  As soon as he was on board he made a further point of seeking out the conductor, questioning him about the arrival time in London, looking at his watch, expressing muttered doubts about whether he would get there in time. Yet, at the next stop, which was Andover, he slipped quietly from the train, trying to avoid being seen by either conductor or station staff, walking out through the car park rather than going through the ticket barrier. It was a small ruse, an attempt to trick them into believing he was headed for London, but it might keep them off his back for a little while longer. Then he started walking.