“Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars,” murmured Pascoe.
“Sorry?”
“I was just wondering what a man does when his occupation’s gone,” he said. “Thanks, Wieldy. As always, you are a wonder.”
“No problem. Oh shit.”
A movement by the open bedroom window had caught Wield’s eye. He looked up to see Monty emerge and perch on the sill. In his paws he held what looked like a very old, very pricey vellum-bound volume.
“What?”
“Got to go. Take care, Pete.”
He switched off the phone. Pursuit he knew was counterproductive. In the marmoset’s eyes, it just became a game. But a clever detective knows that sometimes the name of the game is Softly, Softly…
He went into the kitchen to make some more toast.
7
SAFE HOUSE
Pascoe sat in the hotel dining room and thought about what Wield had told him as he toyed with the Continental Breakfast at £12.50, patriotic parsimony having made him decline the Full English at £32.
Ffion had mentioned that on one of their northern book tours Young had gone walkabout when they were doing Sheffield. Visiting an old military friend had been his excuse. Kewley Castle near Hathersage fit the bill very nicely. Another word with the Welsh witch would be useful, especially now that he’d read the interrogation transcript. And this Kewley-Hodge character was definitely worth having a chat with.
His instinct was to strike out alone, but simply not turning up at the Lube was just as likely to alert the suspected CAT mole as putting all this on an official basis. On the other hand, keeping his plans to himself at least meant no one could officially veto them.
In the end he took out his phone and rang Rod’s mobile.
“Morning, Peter.”
Sharp boy already had him entered in his phone book.
“Morning, Rod. Sorry to disturb you, but when you get to the Lube, could you book out one of those nice stealth cars you lot use and pick me up at the hotel?”
“Right on it. I’m just walking into the building now.”
Pascoe looked at his watch. Ten to eight.
“You are keen,” he said. “Bad night?”
“Good one, but all good shifts come to an end.”
The weary and unwitting cuckolded husband returning home…
“I see. Well, I hope you’re not too weary to drive.”
“No, I’m fine. Where are we going?”
“Into the country to chat with an old army buddy of Young’s. Leave Tim a note to that effect, will you?”
That should cover his back, he hoped.
“Sure. See you in half an hour, OK?”
“OK.”
At half past eight on the dot, he was climbing into a Ford Focus in a suitably ambiguous shade of bluey-green. Rod certainly looked bright enough.
He smiled and said, “Morning, Chief. Which direction are we heading?”
Pascoe thought for a moment then said, “For a start, let’s visit Safe House Four.”
If Rod now said, “And where is that?” then he was stymied. But the young man merely checked his mirrors, signaled, and moved slowly away from the curb. Ten minutes later, even with the central rush hour traffic behind them, they were still moving through the quiet outer suburbs with a legal stateliness that Pascoe was about to remark upon when the car turned into a narrow cul-de-sac and came to a halt.
“Here we are,” said Rod.
Pascoe’s picture of what a Security Service safe house looked like derived mainly from television. While he certainly hadn’t been expecting something like a mini Colditz with barred windows and a portcullis, this small suburban bungalow with whitewashed walls and wisteria growing around the door came as a surprise.
As he walked up the short drive, he found himself wondering how on earth they kept someone in a place like this who didn’t want to be kept?
He got at least part of the answer when the door was opened by a middle-aged woman built like a London bus. She greeted Rod with evident pleasure, but glowered at Pascoe and refused to remove the security chain till she’d checked his ID.
“She’s not up yet,” she said after she’d let them in. “You’d best wait in here.”
She’d opened a door into a kitchen designed by a myopic optimist. Its walls were canary yellow with cupboards and work surfaces to match. On the hot plate of the yellow oven, a yellow coffeepot bubbled.
“She’ll likely need waking up,” said the woman.
“Well, coming in here should certainly do the trick,” said Pascoe, blinking.
The woman looked at him blankly and said, “I’ll get her.”
The idea of Ffion not wanting to be got clearly did not enter her calculations.
Pascoe said, “I think I’d better talk to her alone, Rod.”
“You sure?”
“Oh yes. It’ll make her feel more at ease. I’ve known her some time,” said Pascoe with more confidence than he felt.
“OK,” said Rod. “I’ll be in the sitting room with Dolly.”
Dolly!
A couple of minutes later the door opened and Ffion Lyke-Evans came in.
Her hair was uncombed and she wore no makeup. She was wearing a toweling robe loosely tied around her narrow waist. What she wore underneath it Pascoe did not care to let himself speculate.
She didn’t look at him but went to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee.
“Hi, Ffion,” he said. “Everything OK?”
She sat down at the yellow kitchen table and made a face.
“I’ve been banged up here since Sunday with Grendel’s mother,” she said. “What do you fucking think?”
“Look,” he said, sitting down. “I know it’s a pain, but these Security people think everyone’s as devious as they are. They need to check and double-check, then check again. I’m sure you’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Oh yes? Last time we talked you said I’d be sleeping in my own bed that night.”
“Yes. I thought you would be. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right then. So long as you’re sorry.”
She leaned back in her chair, her robe opening far enough to show him she had nothing on above the waist at least. Dalziel would have got himself an eyeful and passed an opinion. Pascoe stood up, went to the stove, and poured himself a cup of coffee, giving her the chance to adjust her robe. She didn’t bother.
“This a social call, is it?” she said as he resumed his seat. “Or have you just come to practice your lying technique?”
“Just wanted to get a couple of things clear,” he said. “Let’s go back to last Friday. You say that Youngman rang you on the train to say he was ducking out of the show just as you were arriving in Middlesbrough, right?”
She didn’t answer and he said, “Look, Ffion, I know you’re pissed off with me, but I really did think they’d be turning you loose on Sunday. And I’m doing everything in my power to get you out of here, all right?”
Coming from a man who had next to no power, it wasn’t absolutely a lie.
She shrugged and said, “If you say so.”
“Well, I am, I promise you. So Youngman rang you on the train…?”
“That’s right.”
“Was that the first time you’d spoken to him that day?”
“No. I’d rung him earlier in the journey just to confirm the arrangements. It’s best when you’re dealing with writers and the media to double-check everything all the time.”
“So before you rang Youngman, you’d already checked with the Fidler’s Three producer just to make sure everything was going ahead as planned?”
“Yes.”
“Fidler’s Three doesn’t advertise ahead who’s going to be on, does it?”
“No. That’s part of the gimmick,” she said. “Clever really. They don’t use big names with a lot of pulling power, see, so Joe makes not knowing the hook.”
“How about the people he invites on the show?
And the people he passes the invite through, like you? Do they know in advance who the other guests are?”
“No. That’s part of the deal too.”
“So you didn’t know that Kalim Sarhadi was going to be on?”
She hesitated and leaned forward. This time when she caught the involuntary flicker of his gaze to her breasts, she drew the robe more tightly around her.
“Not before Friday,” she said.
“Meaning the producer told you when you spoke to him from the train?”
“That’s right. I asked him straight out who the other two were.”
“Any reason.”
“Not really. It’s not like Jerry Springer or something. They don’t dig up ex-wives or bastard kids just to embarrass people.”
“But they do like to get some kind of connection going, right? Like in this case, the Middle East and terrorism. Which was how you were able to sell them Ellie when Youngman pulled out, right?”
He hadn’t meant to get personal. Perhaps he was just trying to work up a bit of uxorial indignation to compensate for the stirrings of lust caused by his glimpses of that lithe brown body.
She grinned and let the robe relax once more.
“Look, Ellie and I talked about it after. OK, she was pissed, but I told her, wait till you see next month’s sales figures. Her book got more hype from Friday night than we could have bought with a publicity budget twenty times as large as hers.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Pascoe dryly. “Twenty times a fiver doesn’t get you much these days. So when you rang Youngman, naturally you’d mention to him who else was going to be on the panel.”
“Yes, I think I did.”
He cocked his head and raised his left eyebrow quizzically, a trick it had taken many hours in front of his shaving mirror to master.
“All right, of course I did. I’m there for my writers, that’s what I get paid for.”
You were certainly there for Youngman, thought Pascoe.
She glared at him defiantly, as if she’d caught the thought, and he said quickly, “Before he told you he was going off to visit this alleged sick relative on Sunday, had there been any indication that he might be planning to leave?”
“Like what?”
“Like say a phone call which he might have claimed was from the hospital?”
She thought, then said, “No.”
“Or did he ring anyone?”
“Not that morning,” she said. “His phone did ring the previous evening while we were…busy. One of those rings like it does when you get a text. He checked it after…we’d finished. Then he went off with it into the bathroom and I think I heard him talking in there, so likely he’d rung someone.”
“Did he seem agitated at all when he came out. As if he’d had bad news.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just the same as when he’d left the room. Or not quite the same. Unlike most men I know, he had a very quick recovery time.”
“Sounds as if he needed it,” said Pascoe dryly.
He immediately regretted the gibe. A flush spread across her face, then she stood up abruptly with her cup in her hand and turned toward the stove. As she moved forward her bare foot caught against the table leg and she stubbed her toe. She cried out, letting the cup fall to the floor where it shattered against the hard yellow tiles. Her other foot came down on one of the shards, which dug into her instep. Now she shrieked in pain and fell back across the table. Pascoe jumped up, started to pull her upright. Her robe had opened wide and the full length of her naked brown body was pressing against him when the door opened and Rod and Dolly came rushing in.
In such circumstances explanation is usually vain and often counter-productive. Better to let the situation speak for itself to the disinterested ear. But Pascoe heard himself babbling defensively, “She was going to get more coffee and she dropped her cup, I think she may have cut herself.” Ffion wasn’t helping matters. Sensing his embarrassment, she was treating this as payback time, pressing ever closer and looking up into his face with moist, parted lips.
Dolly regarded him with a neutral stare worse than accusation and said, “Best if you sat her down till I get this lot swept up.”
Pascoe was only too pleased to oblige. He resettled her onto the kitchen chair, pulling the robe shut over her body.
“Thank you, Ffion,” he said stiffly. “Hope you get out of here soon.”
She said, “Give my regards to Ellie.”
Outside he looked at Rod and said, “Don’t say a word.”
“What word would that be, Peter?” said the young man, grinning. “And is that the entertainment over for the day or are we going on somewhere?”
“Oh yes,” said Pascoe, recovering a little. “The fun is just beginning.”
8
TO THE CASTLE
An hour and a half later they were approaching the village of Hathersage.
With anyone else driving it might have been just an hour later but Rod seemed to think there was an eleventh commandment which read, thou shalt not overtake without a clear mile of empty road ahead, and all speed limits were meticulously observed with a good 2 percent safety margin.
“Do a lot of driving, do you, Rod?” Pascoe had inquired after a while.
“Not since the big pileup,” said the young man tremulously.
Jesus Christ! thought Pascoe in alarm. Then he saw Rod was grinning and realized he was being sent up.
“I know everyone says I’m a bit slow,” said Rod. “But when I got recruited into the firm, I got told that sometimes getting a job done might mean having to break the law, but if I started breaking laws for personal convenience, then I was no good to anybody. Sticking to the Highway Code seems a good way to keep that in mind.”
Pascoe digested this, then said, “Lukasz Komorowski?”
“That’s right. How did you guess?”
“I heard he recruited you. And it sounds like the kind of thing he might say.”
“Yeah, I was really lucky, not just with catching his eye but because that’s more or less the way he was recruited too. I think it pleased him to be offering someone else the chance that he got.”
I was right, thought Pascoe. Despite Freeman’s objection to the word, it really was romantic.
“Wasn’t there a Komorowski something to do with the Warsaw uprising?” he said.
“General Tadeusz, C in C of the Polish Home Army,” replied Rod promptly. “Lukasz’s dad was a half cousin. There were a lot of reprisals against the family. Lukasz is surprisingly unbitter. He says war does things to people, so the trick is to avoid war.”
“Seems a nice guy,” said Pascoe.
“Yes,” said Rod, nodding vigorously. “He is.”
So are they all, all nice guys, thought Pascoe. Lukasz and Bernie and Dave and Sandy and Tim and Rod and probably all of the others who worked in the Lubyanka.
But one of them, if his guess was right, believed that “getting the job done” gave the Templars license to ignore lesser laws such as the one against murder. In the world of Security, reaching that position probably took only a very small step. Deception, betrayal, assassination, torture were after all the tools of their trade, only usable perhaps as last resorts in circumstances of dire necessity, but even admitting that possibility put you on a downward slope.
The police world was very different. You were there to uphold the Law. OK, on occasion you could stretch it, twist it, bend it, even tie it in knots, but once you broke it you weren’t on a downward slope, you were off the edge and falling.
These musings, and others more precise, occupied his mind till Rod brought him back to the world with a triumphant, “This looks like it.”
He looked up to see that they were turning through a gateway which bore a sign reading Kewley Castle 2 miles—unfenced road—please observe 10 mph speed limit, which Rod certainly did, from a considerable distance.
At least, thought Pascoe, it gives me time to enjoy my passenger’s perk and take
in the view, which was of attractive moorland, aglow with gorse and rising into shapely hills, good walking country.
The castle itself, however, was as disappointing as Wield had forecast.
Little more than a line of rubble lying behind a modest declivity which had presumably once been a moat, only the broken arch of its ruined gatehouse took the eye, but even that did not hold it long, as Pascoe spotted a movement through the trees of a small copse just beyond the ruin. A man on a white horse emerged. When he saw the car he came to a halt framed against the broken arch. It made a lovely picture, fit for a tapestry woven with bone needles in an older age, a more innocent time.
Then he resumed his advance at a stately canter. Only the fact that the horse had farther to go allowed them to beat it to the house, which stood a few hundred yards behind the ruined castle whose name it bore.
Pascoe got out of the car with some relief. Not the kind he felt when he got out of a car driven by, say, DC Shirley Novello who believed that time spent driving from here to there was wasted time which would have to be accounted for on Judgment Day, but a sense of pleasure at being back in the dangerous world of standing on his own two feet.
He stood for a moment and took in the house, a severe-looking three-storied building in dark gray stone entirely without adornment, apart from a battlemented portico presumably added on to justify the appellation castle. They were in a tarmacked yard formed by a two-story stable block and a barn converted into a triple garage.
“An Englishman’s home,” said Pascoe.
“Probably a lot more convenient than the real thing,” said Rod.
The door of the main house opened and a woman appeared. She was in her late forties, with short dark hair and a classically oval face. She had a full rounded figure and she held herself like a gymnast. She wore a plain gray dress which though not positively a uniform, had something of a uniform about it. Too young to be the mother, judged Pascoe. Housekeeper maybe. Or serving wench? He flashed her his boyish smile and got no response either of expression or word. But when Rod called out, “Hi there,” as if addressing some girl he’d bumped into in a club, he noticed an immediate thawing of her chilly expression under the warmth of the young man’s grin.
Death Comes for the Fat Man Page 29
