by Henry Porter
Remembering what the woman in the roadside café had said about the two Russians on a fishing trip, he waited and watched through his binoculars. He focused on the area to the north, where Harland had been targeted, and worked out the route that the killer must have taken if Ulrike had spotted him from the cabin. He decided to follow the same way up the peninsula and see for himself the place where Harland was killed – as he painted the landscape, for God’s sake!
The beauty of the place that Harland loved so much was striking, but also its desolation and abandonment: a hulk rusting in the sea, the lighthouse that no longer shone and the mangled evidence of coastal defences from a period of war or paranoia that he could not determine. He found the place without much difficulty. Police tape flapped in the wind and emergency vehicles had left tyre marks and thrown up patches of moss. Oil paint, still wet, was smeared on the ground; scorch marks and traces of blood in the grass told the whole story. He thought of Harland, and of Ulrike coming on the scene and finding her husband dead, her worst fears realised. He hadn’t gone without a fight, however, and as a result the killer had been caught. Had he tried to communicate a last message as the killings were set in train in London and Washington DC?
He went a full circle, realising how isolated the spot was, even for this forsaken strip of land, then walked to the cabin. It was several minutes before it came into view. He stopped in his tracks and raised his binoculars – a woman was standing by the door, a big bag over her shoulder and a black scarf wrapped around her neck and over her head. A man came out – tall, young, very thin – wearing a beanie and carrying a small rucksack. Smoke trickled from the metal chimney pipe. They had burned something before leaving– there had been no smoke twenty minutes earlier. The couple set off, but instead of heading for the place where Samson had parked, they followed a path due west and soon disappeared from sight. He lowered his binoculars and continued. He was too far away to see the couple’s faces, but he’d recognise the woman’s big, confident stride anywhere. Zoe Freemantle.
He went closer and scanned the windows to see if there was any movement inside and, satisfied there was no one else about, approached and tried the door. It was locked. Zoe and her man friend had a key. But so did he, from Ulrike. He opened the door and locked it again once inside. Paper ash glowed in the wood burner. There was a smell of cannabis in the air. On the ashtray a sticky brown mark indicated that a cigarette or joint had recently been left to smoulder there. In the tiny kitchen, he put his hand on the kettle. It was warm. Empty cans of beans and chopped tomatoes and a spent bottle of wine were in the waste bin, and pieces of pasta lodged in the drain of the sink. An inspection of the shower room produced a piece of wet soap in the soap tray and a damp toothbrush. Zoe and her friend had been sleeping and eating there, though not for any length of time, he thought. They hadn’t turned over the place. The main room, which served as eating area, sitting room and studio, looked to him undisturbed. Some papers had been destroyed in the wood burner – that was all. He opened the doors of the burner and gently lifted the ashes with a poker to see if there was any residue of writing or print. Nothing.
He felt he was trespassing in the Harlands’ snug little retreat but reminded himself that he was there at Ulrike’s invitation. He wondered if Ulrike knew Zoe would be there and meant him to find her, but somehow he doubted that. She would have put a note in with the map reference if she had. But Zoe had gone there for a reason and that, surely, was to find something. He began a thorough search of the main room, where Harland and Ulrike had lived those last months. He opened the drawers, felt along the tops of shelves and under the table, chairs and sofa. He pulled back the old kelim rug, tested the floorboards and felt the wooden panels of the walls to see if there was any give or movement. In the bedroom he conducted a similar search, noticing black marks made by oil lamps and candles on the ceiling and above the bed. There were clothes in the wardrobe, a few books on the bedside table, but very little else.
He returned to the main room and sat down at the table where Harland had worked and scraped his chair round and stared out to sea with a drink – the table’s surface was patterned by ring marks. The Harlands’ presence was very strong, their happiness and love, too. He began to look at the art materials. There were books full of sketches in charcoal and watercolour, quick and vivid. Samson thought he’d love to own one.
He moved the chair and saw that a canvas had been propped against the wall beside a pile of stuff covered with a cloth. He lifted the cloth – an open box of oil paints, tubes without their tops, a couple of sketchpads, a collapsible easel and chair, rags, bottles of drying medium. The whole lot just dumped, and Samson knew why. These had been retrieved from the murder scene and probably handed to Ulrike by the police. Or perhaps she had gathered them together herself and covered them up so she wouldn’t have to look. He turned the oil canvas – still wet to the touch – and put it on the table leaning against the wall, stepped back, and knew its significance immediately. The rapid summary in greys and dull greens of a fleeting burst of light out to sea was what Harland had been working on when he was killed. It was dazzling. He must have been pleased with it.
One of two sketchpads in the pile became dislodged and slid to the floor near his feet. Samson’s eyes came to rest on the words ‘Berlin blue’ written on the back. He snatched it up. Close by, in the same desperate scrawl, but in capitals, was ‘LOVE YOU’. He leafed through the pages but found nothing else. Harland’s last moments had been spent identifying his killer, or the person who ordered his murder, and conveying his love to Ulrike, but she hadn’t noticed and had left the sketchbook with the other things. And the police, if they had been struck by the words ‘Berlin blue’, must have assumed that it simply had something to do with his art. And clearly Zoe, who knew what ‘Berlin blue’ stood for, hadn’t seen it either. He took a photograph and sent it to Ulrike’s phone with the caption, ‘Did you see this on the back of his sketchbook?’
Her response came quickly: ‘No, bring it to me, please.’
‘And the painting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will do. Can you talk?’
Pause.
‘I’m with someone. Later.’
‘Who is Berlin Blue?’
No answer came.
Then, quite a while after he’d assumed the exchange was over, came the message: ‘Will you cook with Mother’s recipe?’
He sent three question marks, and wondered if it had been meant for someone else. He went through to the kitchen, where he noticed that Zoe had left the best part of a litre of milk, together with an unopened pot of yogurt. It might indicate that they were coming back – he hoped they would, because he had a lot of questions for Zoe – but it also meant that he could make tea. He put the kettle on the gas ring and found an old enamel cup with a dried thumbprint on the handle – Harland’s cup – located some tea bags and sat down on a wicker chair to wait. The sun had swung round to the west, filling the cabin with afternoon light. His gaze wandered to an enclosed space below the kitchen counter, to four volumes of recipe books, one German, two Estonian and a large old burgundy-coloured book entitled Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. He was familiar with this book, because his mother always cited the Victorian household goddess as the reason the English didn’t know how to eat well. He pulled it from the shelf and felt its weight. On the title page was a name and a date – Mary Harland, Christmas 1948. Harland’s mother, presumably.
‘Will you cook Mother’s recipe?’ Ulrike had texted. He turned the pages, wondering at the illustrations of flans and jelly moulds, which his own mother would certainly have mocked, but what about Harland’s? This post-war edition of the book had 1,700 pages and he was sure Ulrike didn’t mean him to go through all of it. He removed the remaining cookery books and leafed through them, but found nothing. He felt inside the space where the books were stored, tapping the sides and bottom with his fingertips. It
all seemed solid enough, until he reached the part where Mrs Beeton had stood alone in her dust. He drew back and saw that the plywood base would slide forward. Working a kitchen knife into the crack at the far end, he pulled with the flat of his hand and the section of plywood came out smoothly, revealing a shallow cavity where another book was lying flat. He lifted out the turquoise-bound modern edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, the online version of which he’d already studied.
The kettle boiled. He made tea and sat down with Harland’s book and his mug. The book was organised simply, from whites, greys, blacks and blues through to browns. Under the entry ‘Berlin Blue’ was written a name, Mila Daus, and an IBAN number – not scrambled, he suspected. He went back to the blacks. Under ‘pitch black’ was the name Erik Kukorin. Pearl Grey was marked as Jonathan Mobius; Saffron Yellow was Elliot Jeffreys; and Aurora Red was Chester Abelman. All had IBAN numbers. Mobius was the only name he recognised.
He slotted home the piece of plywood and returned the four cookery books to the space beneath the counter. He went to fetch the sketchpad with Harland’s final message and picked up the painting using the wet canvas clips attached to the top, brought both into the kitchen area and put the sketchpad and Werner’s Nomenclature into his backpack. He made himself another cup of tea. He stirred some sugar into it, unusually for him, and sat down to think things through in a pool of sunlight that came from the skylight at the back of the kitchen. He had the names and the five IBAN numbers, which he guessed were the account numbers used to finance five separate investigations, a good haul for a day’s work.
His attention went to a peacock butterfly fluttering at the window of the back door. He remembered Anastasia moving a table in his flat and standing on it with a jar to capture a butterfly and nearly breaking her neck in the process. He smiled to himself and reached to release the catch on the door. At that moment, the panelling to the right of the door exploded. He heard shattered glass falling into the sitting room. Someone had fired from the front of the cabin at his silhouette and missed because he had moved to get the door. He fell to the floor, grabbed the backpack and waited. The door catch was already released – the door would open with a shove. He looked up and saw no one and concluded that the gunman was some distance away – a sniper. He lunged at the door handle and threw his weight at the door. Another shot. There was no report, just the sound of splintering wood to his right as he tumbled across the threshold on to the gravel. He crab-crawled up to the rock behind the house to gain cover and a better view. When he got there, he took the binoculars from the side pocket of the backpack and moved to a gap in the rock where he could search the land in front of the house. Nothing moved. There was no glint of metal or glass in the sunlight, and no sound. He waited. It was vital to know the shooter’s position before deciding which way to escape. His leg was giving him less trouble, but running was still out of the question, so he bloody well needed to make the right choice. A killer would expect his quarry to try to escape, whatever the chances. Samson wasn’t going to oblige by making a panicky move – another lesson he’d learned in Syria when a sniper pinned him and two guides in a building just over the Turkish border. The guides had sat down with their backs against the wall, propped the guns beside them and closed their eyes. Samson had smoked a lot in those days, and he’d offered them cigarettes. They’d shaken their heads. Smoke could be seen through a telescopic sight and they needed to make the gunman think they had gone. It was very hot. They had no water. They had waited twelve hours and, when they’d eventually moved, they took the hardest, least obvious route, climbing up the side of the building and working their way across roofs pitted by mortar shells. So, now, he waited and watched. But he also texted Ulrike: ‘Under fire and pinned down at cabin. Can you call local police?’ A reply came a few minutes later. ‘Have done. Neighbour coming armed.’
The neighbour was probably a long way off, as were the police, in this empty part of Estonia, but it was better than nothing. Samson waited, certain that between the moment the shooter had fired three shots in quick succession and his own scramble to the rocks there had been very little time for the man to change position. Two other things were in his favour. Unlike a sniper on a battlefield, sooner or later this character would have to check whether he’d killed, wounded or missed his target. The reason he hadn’t already done so was because he didn’t know whether Samson was armed and lying in wait for him in the cabin. Again, there was a feeling of amateurishness about it all. A professional hit man would have made sure of the shot and kept on coming until he saw the target’s body lying at his feet.
Also in Samson’s favour was that night would come, though not for another few hours. He passed the time by conducting a minute survey of the terrain to the east of the cabin, where he paused at every tussock and ambivalent shape or shadow. He found the sniper after half an hour in a slight dip in the land, the gun poking through a tussock of marsh grass. The shooter had come prepared for the particular hue of the landscape and was wearing a very effective pale camouflage. Now that Samson knew where he was, he could work out his best route of escape. The trouble was that the land to the south of him – the direction of his car – was very exposed. He waited some more and it dawned on him that he might not necessarily be the target. If the gunman had been after Zoe and her friend, then he would expect a second person in the cabin, who might, of course, be armed.
He had been there well over an hour when he decided to make a move. He tightened the straps on his pack and stumbled as fast as he could towards the shore. There was one area where he would be vulnerable, a rise in the land, which he had to take before descending to the shore. He took it as fast as he could, but that wasn’t very fast. The shooter spotted him. Two bullets kicked up earth and grit in front of him. But he was over the summit and moving down. Now that he saw how well hidden it was from the gunman’s position, he opted to take the shoreline south. Even if the man pursued him, he had a head start and would make it to his car.
His phone vibrated with a text from Ulrike: ‘They are with you now.’ He looked around and saw no one, then spied a white bow wave rounding the lighthouse to the north. A rigid inflatable hoved into view with several men on board. The boat was moving very fast then swerved left towards an old concrete jetty, where it rapidly deposited four men. They were armed with wildfowling guns and quickly went to take up positions across the peninsula, two hundred metres apart, as though they were preparing to drive game down the peninsula. Samson moved to see what was happening and was astonished as the line of men started towards the south, letting off volleys from their shotguns as they walked. He ran to the top of the rise to see what the effect would be on the shooter. It was immediate. He snaked backwards then crouched with binoculars to look at the line of men advancing in his direction. He didn’t linger further. He shouldered the gun, jogged to the cover of some wind-blasted bushes and vanished.
Samson texted thanks to Ulrike. She replied: ‘Police are waiting for him. They’ve located his vehicle. Can you bring Bobby’s painting to the house?’
He entered the cabin and retrieved the painting from the floor. It was lying face up. A bullet had passed clean through the bottom of the canvas where there were a few strokes of translucent colour.
Chapter 21
KaPo
He was in Tallinn by 9 p.m. – too late to return the car. He parked outside the old town walls, quite near to the hotel, and passed through the gates at the Fat Margaret Tower. As he turned into the narrow street leading to the Cloister Hotel, a voice called his name. He turned to see Tomas Sikula, one of his contacts in the KaPo – a senior officer who he’d met in the debriefing after Narva and who, it turned out, was a good friend and protégé of Harland’s.
He approached with his usual dazzling grin, grasped Samson by the hand and elbow. ‘Paul, you must be losing it – using the same crappy ID at the same hotel!’
‘Ah!’ said Samson. ‘Thought I’d make thing
s easy for you.’ The Hungarian ID he’d used on the registration form had no doubt triggered an alert at KaPo’s offices, not that it mattered.
‘It’s good to see you, Paul. I gather you had some trouble this afternoon, but that conforms to recent patterns, no?’ His eyes danced with mischief. ‘What are your plans for this evening? I know a bar where we can have dinner.’ He looked down. ‘What is this here – a painting by Bobby?’ He peered at it. ‘What have you done to it – used it for target practice?’
‘You mentioned dinner,’ said Samson. ‘I need a wash and, anyway, I want to put the painting in a safe place at the hotel.’
‘Okay, there’s a bar at the end of the street. KandaBaar.’
‘I know it.’ It was the bar where he’d met Harland the first time. ‘I’ll see you there in fifteen minutes.’
He arrived at the bar, having photographed the pages from the Werner Nomenclature. The book was tucked into the inside pocket of his old, scarred leather jacket.
‘Beer or wine?’ asked Tomas. ‘You may need something stronger after being shot at.’ Another grin. ‘We know all about it – the police informed us immediately. It could only have been you. What were you doing out there, Paul?’
‘Picking up a painting and a sketchbook Bobby’s widow wanted.’
‘A likely story.’
‘You saw the painting in my hand.’
‘With a bullet hole through it! A good summary of Bobby’s life, no?’ The waitress came, and Tomas went through his usual routine of flirtation. A strikingly good-looking man, he seemed to need to seduce everyone, even though he was openly gay for what he described as most of the time. At length, he let her go with an order for steak, fries and beer. ‘So what were you looking for out there? What else were you retrieving for Mrs Harland?’
