“And whether Tutti’s death has anything to do with it,” added Peggy.
They both sat silent, thinking. Then Liz said, “Peggy, do you think I’m being paranoid? Marco Tutti’s wrists were slashed with a Stanley knife and when I was mugged, my attacker threatened me with a Stanley knife. If we hadn’t been interrupted by some people down the street, I think she was going to cut my throat.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I wasn’t sure. It could have been just a street robbery. The police thought so. Brian agreed with the police,” she added with a shrug. “He thinks I’m another hysterical female, gone wobbly at the first hint of violence.”
Peggy’s alarm was now too great to disguise. “Liz, if you think that the attack on you is connected with Tutti’s death, I don’t think you should stay a moment longer in the Brunovsky house.”
Liz stared at Peggy, wondering how best to hide the fact that she agreed with her one hundred percent. “Whatever’s going on, I can’t believe they would try anything in the house,” she said finally, using a smile to disarm her younger colleague. “And I’m sure I won’t be there much longer.”
After Peggy had gone back to her office Liz sat on at her desk, gazing out at the unprepossessing view. Her intuition was telling her loudly now that something about the Brunovsky household did not add up—or it added up in some way she could not yet fathom. She’d be wise to get out, though she had to confess that sheer curiosity had her in its grip. And there was no way she would let Brian or Geoffrey Fane think that she couldn’t cope. She would not reinforce whatever their female stereotype was—“Okay for desk work but can’t really deal with the sharp end.”
What are you trying to demonstrate? a small voice in her head was saying. That she was just as tough as a man in dealing with personal risk? Probably. But it could be a liability, that kind of macho posturing. Women had different skills, intuition and empathy—the “feminine skills” so many men lacked. She knew what hers were telling her. But this time she wasn’t going to listen.
Down the corridor, Peggy was worried. Her mind raced. She knew she’d never change Liz’s mind, but that didn’t mean she was prepared to sit and do nothing. Who could she turn to? She knew better than to tackle Brian Ackers. He was the problem. Could Liz’s old friends in Counter-Terrorism help? They’d tell her to go through the correct channels, which brought her back to…Brian again. Geoffrey Fane? No. Liz would never forgive her and anyway he’d be no help.
Unless…and the more Peggy thought about it, the more her heart thumped like an out-of-control drum. There was a way to help Liz, provided that Peggy was eloquent and forceful enough not to get sent off with a flea in her ear, or worse, an official reprimand. She wasn’t that worried about being blamed for doing the wrong thing—she had enough pride to ignore any qualms about that—but she was worried she might make a hash of it, and end up with Liz in the same dangerous situation.
She waited until she got home that evening and then, pushing her spectacles firmly up her nose, she sat down, picked up her phone and rang the duty officer at Thames House. “It’s Peggy Kinsolving here from Counter-Espionage. I need to speak to Charles Wetherby urgently. Could you give me his home number please?”
“You know he’s on extended leave, don’t you?” came the reply.
“Yes. But I still need to contact him.”
“Are you at home? I’ll ask him to ring you.”
A few minutes later her phone rang. “Charles Wetherby,” said a quiet voice. “I gather you want a word.”
“Charles. Thank you so much for ringing. It’s about Liz Carlyle.”
47
It was an eventful morning. Arriving at the house in Eaton Square, Liz had not expected to find a residence in mourning, but still thought there would be a subdued atmosphere in the Brunovsky household. Yet there had been no sign at all that Marco Tutti’s death was affecting business as usual: as Liz arrived, Brunovsky was shouting for Tamara, Mrs. Grimby had brought up a pain au chocolat, still warm from the oven, and Mrs. Warburton was supervising Emilia the maid’s dusting with an eagle eye.
Only Monica had made reference to the recent mortality, stopping in the doorway to the dining room. “Poor Marco,” she said, before asking Liz if she had ever been in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It was not so much callous, thought Liz, as Monica’s usual way of dealing with the past—sticking her head in the sand.
Then Brunovsky had shouted again, this time calling for Liz. Has he started to think I’m working for him? she’d wondered as she rose from her chair.
“Yes,” she had said coolly when she got to the door of his study.
He was standing by his desk, holding a passport. “Do you have one of these?” he’d asked. It sounded urgent.
“Of course,” she’d said, for she had long before taken the precaution of having one in the name of Jane Falconer.
“With you?”
She nodded. The mugger had got some of her cover documents when she stole her handbag, so for the time being, until they were replaced, she was carrying her passport with her as proof of identity. He breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank goodness,” he’d said. “You can come along then.”
“Where to?”
Brunovsky looked at her with surprise. “Why, Ireland, of course. With Marco dead, I got in touch with this Miss Cottingham right away. She is not keen to visit London, so I thought why not let the mountain visit Muhammad, no? My plane is at Northolt and it will take only an hour to fly there. Harry will meet us and we can drive to this lady’s mansion in thirty minutes. We’ll be back in time for supper. Well, late supper anyway.”
Liz stared at him incredulously. He was obviously determined to go, indeed he seemed to have instigated the plan. Liz was certain he’d be walking straight into a fraud, if not something worse. She was convinced that Blue Mountain was no more authentic than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But now that Tutti was dead, who was running the scam? It must be Forbes, the American—he’d been tied up with Tutti in the past. Both of them had been after Brunovsky’s wallet since the beginning.
She hesitated. Brunovsky returned to the charge. “Jane, you must come. I need you,” he said in his little-boy voice. “Not perhaps for your Pashko expertise,” he winked at her, a rare acknowledgement that she was working undercover. “It’s just that I respect your judgement. These are complicated matters—you will look after me.” He smiled at her winningly.
“Are you taking Jerry Simmons?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Of course. I will need him to drive me when we land.”
Thank God. If Brian wasn’t going to move Special Branch in to protect the Russian, at least his bodyguard should be around.
Liz glanced around. There was no one in the room or in Tamara’s office outside but she walked with deliberate slowness to the door and closed it. As if surprised, Brunovsky sat down at the table, and Liz came to a stop in front of him.
“Nikita,” she said—it was the first time she had ventured his Christian name but suddenly it seemed appropriate—“it’s not my job to protect you. But you did ask for me to be here to keep an eye out and give you advice about your security and I’m doing that now. You know that you are under a threat. Blue Mountain could be a fake or a fraud as you are well aware, but it could possibly be some kind of a set-up to catch you and your protection on the wrong foot in the wrong place. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s wise for you to go to Ireland.”
She stopped, wondering what on earth his reaction would be.
For a moment he gazed at her with simple unfeigned astonishment, his mouth opening and then closing. “Thank you for the warning,” he said, “but it is very important to me to go. There will be no danger.”
Then suddenly he grinned expansively. “You’ll come then? That’s my girl! Is that the right thing to say to a member of the British Security Service?”
And ninety minutes later she was walking with Brunovsky out on to th
e tarmac towards an Embraer Legacy jet, its steps down and the pilot, casual in a windcheater, standing on the top step. She’d tried to ring Peggy but she was not at her desk. The message she left must have sounded inane to the young woman—flitting off across the Irish Sea spontaneously, in search of a painting that didn’t exist. It was all getting out of hand. When I’m back, Liz decided, I’ll tell Brian to get me out of here or I’ll go and talk to DG.
48
He had never, ever, had an interview like that in all his time in the Service. DG had spoken, not emotionally, not even overtly angrily—either would have been preferable to the icy coldness of the dressing-down he had just received. When Brian had been eight years old, he had been caught cheating on an exam at his boarding school and sent to the headmaster. That was how he felt now.
Barely noticing the river view, he stood resting his forehead on the window of his office, until it clouded up from the exhalation of his breath. Absent-mindedly he drew a grid for noughts and crosses, etched a large O and a smaller adjacent x, then forgot about the next move as he played back in his head DG’s accusatory tones.
You have placed an officer’s life in danger. And for what purpose? I want you to act at once to retrieve the situation. And the final terse warning: I must warn you that I shall be taking disciplinary action.
Was that how his career was going to end? Thirty years’ service abruptly terminated because someone got nervy. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Adler’s original story had been correct. The Russians were up to something—they were always up to something, that’s what people didn’t understand. But it was Brunovsky they wanted, not Liz Carlyle. Silly, panicky woman. It was his misfortune to have got stuck with her on this operation.
He sat down at his desk and stared at the green marble slab and its unused pen. He wondered where DG had got his information. Who had spoken to him? Who had gone around his—Brian’s—back? He’d find out in the end who’d undermined him. But that would have to wait—he had to act immediately, if only out of self-preservation, and do what DG had ordered.
He sighed, then dialled the mobile number, only to get a voicemail’s recorded announcement. Damn. It was bad enough having to eat humble pie, but worse having to postpone the meal. He put down the phone, then picked it up again, and dialled an internal number. “Could I see you please, right away?”
Peggy Kinsolving came in within sixty seconds. She seemed an efficient sort of lass, if a bit too close to that Carlyle woman for his liking. Very young, but a competent investigator. He did not ask her to sit down; this wouldn’t take long.
“I’m trying to reach Liz Carlyle but her mobile’s on voicemail.”
“I’ve been trying to reach her too. You know that we’ve been in touch with the Danes and the Germans to try to identify the Illegal that they thought might have come here. I’ve just had a message.”
Peggy took a piece of paper from the folder she was carrying and put it on the desk under Brian Ackers’ nose. He gazed abstractedly at its few terse sentences and at the name.
“Has this woman surfaced here in any way? Do we know anything about her whereabouts?”
“She is close to Brunovsky.”
“My God!” said Brian excitedly. “This could be our first sight of Victor Adler’s plot.”
Then suddenly the implications of Peggy’s statement struck him like a thunderbolt. Liz Carlyle could be in real danger after all. Trying not to look as shaken as he felt, he began issuing rapid-fire orders. “I want you to go to the Brunovsky house and find Liz. Pretend you’re an old friend, or her sister—I don’t care, just make sure you find her. Tell her I want her to get out of there at once—she can think up any excuse she likes but she must leave immediately. Is that understood?”
“I can’t, Brian,” Peggy said, looking at her feet.
Jesus, he thought angrily. What’s wrong with these women? “Nonsense,” he said harshly. “Do as you’re told.” If DG could talk to him like that, then he could act the same way with his subordinates. “This is your immediate priority. Is that clear?”
“I’m sorry, Brian,” said Peggy, but she was not apologising. “Liz isn’t there. She’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky. She left a message for me about an hour ago from Northolt. They’re taking his private jet.”
“Oh God,” Brian groaned. “What is she doing there?”
“She said they’ve gone to try and buy this picture from some old lady west of Cork.”
“Will this…woman…be with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right,” said Brian. He knew now how wrong he had been, but he found himself almost eerily calm. There was no point in self-recrimination. “Get me Michael Fane,” he said to Peggy. “I’m going to send him over there as quick as we can manage. I want you to get on to the Garda right away. Tell them we’re urgently trying to find a colleague. Get them to meet Michael when he lands at Cork.”
“All right,” said Peggy. “Shall I tell them the whole story?”
“No, for goodness’ sake,” said Brian. “Just tell them what they need to know.” He waved a bony hand to indicate she’d better get a move on. So why wasn’t this girl going? She was looking at him in a way he found unsettling. It was a look he’d never seen before in one of his staff—contemptuous but pitying at the same time.
“Don’t you think, Brian, you’d better speak to Geoffrey Fane and the Foreign Office? We don’t know how this is going to turn out. And I think I’d better try and find out who’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky and Liz.”
49
The view of the lake had not changed for a hundred years (when the last of the woodland had been felled), and Letitia Cottingham had been alive for eighty-six of them. This morning as she took her small constitutional around the box hedge of the terrace, she wondered vaguely who all these people were flitting in and out of her house.
Perhaps they would have a party. That would be nice, like her childhood again, those days before the war when Thomas, her brother, would bring friends all the way from Cambridge to stay. The house was filled with laughing voices then, and they played lawn tennis and swam just down there, next to the boathouse. In the evenings there was dancing, and she was allowed to stay up and watch from the stairs.
But it had all ended with the war. The locals had been unhappy when Thomas had enlisted in the British Army—some of their mutterings had been positively pro-German. But even they had shown sympathy after that bleak morning when the postman had cycled up the drive, carrying the telegram announcing Thomas’s death at El Alamein.
Her parents had never recovered; both were dead within five years. And so the place had come down to her—plain Letitia Cottingham, whom nobody had wanted to marry until she had inherited the estate. She’d had her revenge, saying no to half a dozen suitors after that, and though she had never made a success of the place—selling off parcels of land every few years—she was still here. The roof leaked so badly there were buckets in the attic; the sash windows were rotten to the core; woodworm and rot in the floorboards meant that half the bedrooms were uninhabitable; but the fact was, the house was still Letitia’s. They would have to carry her out with her boots on.
The new carer was nice. Better than the last one who’d come from Dublin and seemed to hate the countryside. What was this girl’s name? Svetlana? Something like that. From one of those countries in Eastern Europe everyone used to complain about. She was such a gentle girl, even if her English wasn’t very good. Her friends were nice as well, though those foreign men who’d been the week before were rather brusque. And that unpleasant woman. Still, it was good to have life in the old place again.
50
Brunovsky was in love with his aeroplane. He sat in one of the vanilla leather-padded chairs, wearing a fawn cashmere blazer and Gucci loafers that looked as soft as slippers, talking to Liz in loving and monotonous detail about the attributes of the Embraer Legacy 600: its range of 3,400 nautical miles, wingspan of 68 feet, approach c
apability of 5.5 degrees (whatever that meant), and last but not least, its $23.6 million price tag.
The engines revved and the jet accelerated down the short Northolt runway until they were pushed back against their seats. It cleared the outer perimeter fence with what looked to Liz no more than twenty feet to spare; for a moment she wondered if the pilot was planning to join the cars heading west on the M40.
A friend of her father’s had once flown in the Concorde back from New York, and said that its interior was like a padded cigar tube, but Brunovsky’s jet was remarkably spacious. It could seat fourteen passengers, but on board now were only Liz, the oligarch and Jerry Simmons, sitting by himself on a two-seater sofa near the galley in the rear. As soon as they were airborne a slim young blonde stewardess in a smart navy blue suit with the shortest skirt Liz had ever seen on a uniform offered them smoked salmon and cold Sancerre. This is the life, thought Liz, settling back in her chair, realising without any feeling of guilt that she was the only one to accept the wine.
Sitting up front, alone with Brunovsky, she was wondering how much if anything she should tell him about Peggy’s recent discoveries. But she hesitated. She didn’t see it as any part of her job to tell Brunovsky that all his pals were crooks. He might well be aware of it already and he wouldn’t thank her for pointing it out. Tutti, for example. It was remarkable that Brunovsky had not even mentioned his supposed suicide. He might well know more about Harry Forbes than she did, and if that club was where he had met Monica, he must have a pretty good idea already of what sort of a girl she was.
As for Greta Darnshof, Liz determined to find out how much Brunovsky knew about her mysteriously funded magazine. She was about to raise the topic when Brunovsky finished his lunch, unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. He pointed towards the cockpit. “Excuse me, Jane, I must leave you for a little while. Monica hates flying, and when we travel together I have to sit and hold her hand. Now I have the rare opportunity to keep my pilot skills sharp. Hopefully, you won’t know if it’s me or the regular pilot who lands the plane.” He laughed and moved towards the nose of the plane.
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