Billy Ewing shook his head. ‘I know Gladstone. In my book he’s a right arsehole. I never met Wright before, but …’ Ewing changed the subject. ‘Incidentally, I’ve got all the messages from the emergency number upstairs in my office. If you want to sift them—’
‘Not yet,’ Pagan answered.
‘They’re a disappointing collection,’ Ewing said.
‘I’ve seen a few of them.’ Pagan remembered the young policewoman in the Tube station, the telephone and notebook. He had an urge to get out of the building for a while, to walk, think. All this clutter was suffocating. He told Foxie he’d be back in a few minutes. Foxie appeared slightly concerned, as if disturbed by Pagan’s sudden decision to leave.
‘Is there anything you need, Frank?’
‘Look through the messages,’ Pagan said. ‘See if there’s anything even remotely interesting.’ He took the elevator to the ground floor, conscious of how Foxie had been frowning. Foxie, guard dog, sentry over Pagan’s moods. Now he’d be fretting in Pagan’s absence.
Outside, the darkness had begun to yield to streaks of grey that hung in the form of drab canopies over Soho. He crossed Golden Square where the first of the morning’s office workers were coming up from the Piccadilly Circus Tube. On Beak Street he turned left, walking quickly past Carnaby Street, a carnival during that period of history when London had been a mercurial mecca of fashion – the Beatles, Union Jack boxers, hairstyles by Mary Quant. The narrow street felt tawdry to him as he glanced at it. The bright pageant had left long ago and now only tourists or disoriented nostalgia freaks came this way, like people checking for a pulse they would never find.
When he reached Regent Street he paused. Buses came raging down from Oxford Circus, pouring exhaust fumes into the air, where it hung, trapped. He waited for a traffic light to change, then he crossed Regent Street and made his way by an indirect route through back streets toward Piccadilly. He realized he was heading for the tunnel, although that hadn’t been his purpose in leaving Golden Square, at least on no conscious level. Drawn back to the scene, he thought. Looking for something. Any old hook on which to hang a thought.
On Piccadilly he paused. He had the curious instinct he was being followed. It was nothing very definite, a formless sensation. He didn’t look round. The streets were busier now, clerks hurrying to offices, shops opening, lights going on, buses disgorging their passengers.
He continued to walk, stopped at a news-stand, looked at headlines. POLICE CLUELESS IN TUBE BOMBING, one of them read. Clueless, he thought. What did these scribblers want from the police? A quick salve for the public? He scanned the page, read George Nimmo’s name, and some way beneath it his own. He was identified as the officer delegated by Nimmo to administer the investigation. Administer: he liked that one.
He gazed at a headline in The Sun. I SURVIVED TUBE HORROR. This was allegedly the first-person narrative of a woman who’d been riding in the carriage behind the one that had exploded. Pagan ran an eye over it rapidly; overcharged with sweaty clichés.
He walked on. The odd feeling of being watched persisted. He paused outside a pharmacy. He wondered if the bomber had come this very way. If he’d strolled the route to the station Pagan was now taking. He had a ghostly little sensation, a quick shiver, almost as if he expected to turn his face and see the bomber a few steps behind.
He looked inside the pharmacy window, absently gazing at cylinders of lipstick, eyeliner displays, rainbows of eyeshadow. He glanced to the side, saw crowds of people swaddled against the cold, hurrying to their places of employment. Then he turned and continued in the direction of the Tube station.
Across from The Ritz, he pretended to study the menu in the window of a Lebanese restaurant. Somebody is following me. The damned feeling was stronger now, ringing in his skull.
He didn’t notice the woman until she was alongside him.
‘Pretend I’m not here,’ she said.
Pagan didn’t look at her. ‘OK. I’m pretending.’
‘You’re Frank Pagan?’
He nodded, still examining the menu.
‘I need to talk to you. But not here. Not like this.’ Her accent was Home Counties, her vowels expansive. ‘It isn’t safe. Go to the Athenaeum Hotel. Ask for me at the desk. I’m registered under the name of Canningsby. Give me fifteen minutes or so.’
She walked away from him, and only then did he look at her. Tall, dressed in wintry elegance, fur coat, leather boots, a bright silk headscarf. She walked with brisk purpose, hurried and yet seemingly unpressured, as if her time were entirely her own, like a woman on her way to an appointment with somebody she didn’t consider very important.
Canningsby, he thought. The name didn’t mean a thing to him. She vanished out of sight after she’d passed the Tube station where various uniformed policemen lingered behind the tape; guardians of the dead. It isn’t safe, she’d said. Why isn’t it safe? he wondered. If she wanted to talk, why hadn’t she come to the office? Puzzled, he continued to stroll, pausing when he reached the station.
‘Good morning, Mr Pagan,’ one of the constables said. ‘Cold enough for you, sir?’
Pagan, still pondering the woman, merely nodded. He went inside the empty station, rode the escalator down to the platform. He thought: the bomber must have come this way, must have travelled on this same escalator – unless, of course, the device had been placed inside the carriage at another station along the line. Why did he get the feeling that this wasn’t the case, that the killer had come here to this station, the device concealed on his body? Instincts were frequently groundless affairs, formed in a place beyond reason, but he usually went with them. So. The killer had travelled on this escalator, walked on to the platform – and then what? Then what?
Pagan looked the length of the platform. There were two uniformed constables manning the telephones. The young policewoman had been replaced. London Transport officials spoke quietly together, smoking, drinking tea from mugs. A score or so of body-bags remained in the place where they’d been before.
A plainclothes cop Pagan recognized as Detective-Sergeant Benny Banforth was standing on the edge of the platform, gazing down the tunnel. He turned when Pagan approached. ‘Fucking depressing this, Frank,’ he said. He gestured to the body-bags. ‘Those poor sods haven’t been identified yet.’
Pagan watched Banforth light a cigarette.
‘Some guy came from the US Embassy a couple of hours ago,’ Banforth said. ‘It seems one of their people was on the Tube.’
‘Positive ID?’
‘Positive. Dead man’s name was Harcourt.’
Pagan looked at the mouth of the tunnel. Black and uninviting, it nevertheless drew him toward it. He touched Banforth on the arm, then walked the length of the platform. He lowered himself on to the track and gazed at the ruined carriage where lamps still illuminated the wreckage. Something flashed in the distance, a buzz of light and sparks flying out of a welding tool. The carriage would have to be removed sooner or later, which involved cutting it into manageable pieces that could be hauled off the broken track by machines.
He stared at the shower of sparks and thought: The killer stands on the platform. The train comes in, stops, doors open, crowds get on and off, the regular hurlyburly of rush hour. And then what? Is the device placed inside the carriage unnoticed? Is it stashed inside a briefcase, as McCluskey had suggested? Pagan tried to imagine this, as if from some mystical source inside himself he might conjure the face and body of the bomber. A sixth sense was what he needed, something beyond mere instinct alone. Get well soon, Frank. Crystal balls, tarot cards, casting the runes – none of this abracadabra had a role to play in the routine drudgery of police work. You couldn’t make the sky rain butterflies.
He walked towards the carriage, stopped, studied the ruin. The wreck had an immediacy to it, a clarity it hadn’t had some hours before. He contemplated the inside of the killer’s head, trying to catch on to a mood, but it was slippery and eddied away from him. Tension?
Surely. Even if this had been done by a professional, there would be nervousness and strain. Only a deranged amateur might feel absolutely nothing. Only somebody far gone down the avenues of madness might have transcended normal anxiety.
Amateur or pro, it was a hell of a way to make a statement. But if this was meant to be a statement, why hadn’t there been a follow-up? This came back to puzzle Pagan yet again as he gazed at the crushed outline of the carriage. Frustrated, he turned and walked in the direction of the platform. The burst of heat in the tunnel had been so intense it had seared the advertizing posters on the wall across the track. The faces of lipsticked models peeled from brick.
He wandered towards the exit, rode the escalator up to the street, then walked in the direction of the Athenaeum Hotel. The wind blowing off Green Park had a cruel intensity. He was glad to step inside the warmth of the hotel.
At the reception desk he asked for Miss Canningsby. He wasn’t sure if it was Mrs or Ms. The receptionist punched a button on her computer and shook her head. ‘We don’t have anyone registered by that name.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’ll check again.’ She did so. ‘Sorry. Nothing. Do you have the right name, sir?’
Pagan tapped his fingers impatiently on the reception desk. ‘I believe so.’
‘Are you sure you have the right hotel?’
Pagan looked into the girl’s pleasant face. ‘I thought I had.’ He turned away from the desk and made his way past a group of elderly American tourists doing Europe in the dead season. An old pink-cheeked geezer from the Midwest was grumbling about the weather. Pagan moved toward the doorway.
The woman appeared suddenly at his right. ‘You have to forgive me,’ she said. ‘I need to be sure, you see.’
‘Sure of what?’ Pagan asked.
The woman was in her middle forties, immaculately made-up, good looking if you went in for a slightly arrogant beauty.
‘I want to be certain we are not being followed.’
‘Miss Canningsby, if that’s your name, I’m in the middle of a bloody troublesome investigation. I don’t have time for fun and games.’
‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘It might be useful.’
‘If it’s useful, I’ll listen.’
‘There’s a Turkish coffee shop round the corner. Meet me there in five minutes.’
Pagan sighed. ‘Give me one good reason why I should bother.’
‘Does the name Bryce Harcourt mean anything to you?’ The woman smiled in a manner both condescending and polite. You could imagine this one holding court in a fine drawing-room, surrounded by her cronies and dishing the dirt over tea in china cups and dainty plates of petit fours.
‘I’ve heard it,’ Pagan said.
The woman walked out of the hotel. The door was opened for her by a top-hatted flunkey. Pagan saw his own reflection flash in the movement of glass. He thought he looked ectoplasmic, as if he’d entered the world by the dubious means of a medium’s power, by some psychic back door.
He waited in the lobby of the hotel for ten minutes, then went outside, walked to the corner, turned. He reached the coffee shop, which was a dark little place you might not have noticed if you hadn’t been looking for it.
Inside, the light was dim, the room quiet and shadowy. The woman sat in a corner, studying her face in a compact mirror. Pagan moved to the table, sat opposite her, ordered a cup of Turkish coffee.
‘I am sorry for the subterfuge,’ the woman said. She held one hand out rather limply to be shaken. Her perfume was rich, overpowering. If you were too long in this woman’s company you’d need an oxygen mask. ‘My name is Victoria Canningsby.’
‘You said something about Bryce Harcourt,’ Pagan remarked. He sipped the thick coffee; his heart did a slight jump.
‘You don’t stand on ceremony, do you?’ she asked.
‘I was never big on pomp. It takes too much time, Miss Canningsby.’
‘Mrs, actually.’
Pagan set his cup down. ‘Bryce Harcourt,’ he reminded her.
‘I wanted to come to your office,’ she said, and here she drifted a little, changing a mental gear and floating off into the distance. Her blue eyes seemed to scan some inner region, perhaps a memory. ‘But I wouldn’t have felt safe, you see.’
‘I don’t really see, Mrs Canningsby.’
‘Bear with me, if you will.’ She came back into focus and smiled at him, and all at once the apparent brittle quality about her appeared to defrost in the smile. There was a seductive little edge to the expression, directed not at Pagan specifically but executed as if by habit. He had a feeling that men much younger than herself had shared her bed.
‘I have known Bryce for two years,’ she said. ‘Let us say we were well acquainted, and leave it at that. I find disclosures of a very personal nature tiresome. But we were close.’
Pagan looked into his coffee. The woman opened her purse, took out a cigarette, and slid her lighter across the table to him. He struck the flame for her, wondering at his own response. Mrs Victoria Canningsby was accustomed to having her cigarettes lit for her, a world of willing doormen and obliging cabbies. In the presence of imperious women, Pagan found an odd reservoir of good manners in himself.
‘He was on that Tube,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I know a good deal about Bryce. I correct myself. I did know a good deal.’
‘OK. But how do you know he was on that Tube?’
She tilted her chin, blew a fine line of smoke upward. Only when she raised her face in this way could you see a certain puckering of her neck. She would have a few bad moments in front of mirrors, Pagan thought.
‘I have sources inside the Embassy where he worked, Mr Pagan. It only took a telephone call to one of his associates to have my fears confirmed.’
‘So he was on the Tube and that’s a tragedy. But why all this secrecy? What are you afraid of?’
‘Some fears cannot be specified,’ she remarked.
‘Christ, I hate mystification.’
‘Really? I would have thought it was part and parcel of your profession, Mr Pagan.’
‘It doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
She put out her cigarette. ‘Bryce Harcourt was a charming man. He had a certain weakness for the fairer sex, as we’re sometimes called. I won’t say he was a sexual predator. Far from it. He knew how to treat a woman. He had a certain grace about him.’
‘Where is this leading, Mrs Canningsby?’
‘Call this background if it makes you a little less impatient. I’m coming to the point.’ She raised her coffee and sipped, leaving along the rim of the cup the dark rosy stain of her lipstick. ‘I saw Bryce three or four times in the last couple of weeks. Something was troubling him deeply. Very deeply.’
A jukebox kicked into life all at once, a female singing a Turkish version of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. Pagan worked at tuning it out of his head.
‘What exactly?’ he asked.
‘He said he was being followed. He believed his phone was tapped. He had heard that people were asking questions about him. I believe I’m correct in saying he feared for his life. He also feared for anyone associated with him. He was not the kind of man who might usually yield to such anxieties. He was carefree by nature.’
‘Why would people be following him?’
She shrugged, a delicate little motion of shoulders. ‘I don’t have an answer for that. My impression is that it had something to do with his work. Beyond that …’ She shrugged again.
‘My understanding is he was a researcher of some sort,’ Pagan said.
Victoria Canningsby laughed. A small clock might have chimed in her throat. ‘Bryce? A researcher?’
‘Why is that so funny?’
‘The idea of Bryce researching anything is amusing, if you had known the man. The only thing Bryce might have researched was the female anatomy.’
‘Then what did he do at the Embassy?’
‘He was
never entirely clear about that, Mr Pagan. If somebody has given you to believe that he was some kind of researcher, I think you’ve been … misled? Sometimes an innocuous job description can cover a multitude of sins.’
Pagan thought of Quarterman. If Victoria Canningsby was correct, then Quarterman had lied about Harcourt’s line of work. It was a concrete wall, though, a curtain of hard steel. What went on inside the American fortress in Grosvenor Square was beyond Pagan’s reach, far beyond his authority. Diplomatic personnel enjoyed all the immunity of cows wandering the banks of the Ganges. Quarterman would have had reasons of his own for misleading Pagan – if indeed that was what he’d done. Maybe Harcourt operated in a sensitive area, something Quarterman was neither authorized nor inclined to reveal.
‘Why were you afraid to come to my office, Mrs Canningsby?’
‘For the simple reason that lately I believe I have been followed myself. Strange cars passing my house. One or two unexplained phone calls.’
People following people, Pagan thought. Shadows after shadows. The world was out of joint. Things were unhinged wherever you looked. ‘Because of your connection with Bryce.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘You felt it would be unhealthy to be seen in my company.’
‘Even as we sit here, I feel unhealthy, Mr Pagan. The feeling isn’t going to go away.’
Pagan was quiet for a time. The jukebox mercifully fell silent. ‘Let me ask you this. Do you think the explosion on the Tube had a direct connection to Harcourt’s presence?’
‘How could I possibly make a connection like that?’
‘Then all you’re really telling me is that Harcourt was a worried man,’ he said. ‘The world is full of worried men, Mrs Canningsby.’
Jigsaw Page 14
