Dead Line

by Stella Rimington

  ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to sound unkind. He seems very nice. I do mean that.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Susan said simply.

  ‘And mother, one other thing.’ Liz hesitated for a moment, feeling slightly embarrassed. ‘I don’t want you to feel that Edward has to be exiled to the spare room when I’m around.’

  Her mother gave a small smile. ‘Thank you. I told him it was perfectly ridiculous, but he insisted. He said it was your house, too, and that he didn’t want you to think he was invading.’

  ‘That’s very tactful of him,’ said Liz with surprise, though she was becoming increasingly aware that there was rather more to Edward Treglown than she had supposed.

  ‘He is very tactful. That’s one of the things I particularly like about him.’

  ‘He said he does some work for a charity.’

  ‘He runs the charity. I didn’t discover that until I’d known him for months. He’s very modest; you’d never know he won the DSO.’

  Her obvious pride in her new beau started to nettle Liz, but she stopped herself. Why shouldn’t Susan be proud of him? It wasn’t as if Edward were the boastful type - far from it. And he obviously made her mother happy. That was the important thing.

  And when she left for London, Liz found herself saying to Edward not only that she had enjoyed meeting him, but that she looked forward to seeing him again soon.

  ‘Perhaps you and Mother could come for supper sometime,’ she said, thinking of all the clearing up she’d have to do in her flat if they were to visit.

  ‘You let us take you out first,’ he said gently. ‘From what I gather you work awfully hard. The last thing you need to worry about is entertaining. I’ll let your mother make a date.’

  She drove back to London in a more cheerful mood than she’d been in driving down. Edward had turned out to be rather a good thing, actually, and her mother seemed happier and surer of herself than she’d been in ages. It was funny to think that she didn’t have to worry so much about Susan now, not with Edward in loyal attendance. Funny, but why wasn’t it more of a relief? In a flash of self-knowledge that made her shift uneasily in the driving seat, Liz admitted that now she would have no excuse not to sort out her own personal life. She’d already resolved that it was time to move on from her fruitless hankering after Charles Wetherby, but could she do it? And move on where, she asked herself, move on to whom? She wondered if Simon Lawrence would actually use the phone number she’d given him. She wasn’t going to worry about it, but it would be nice if he did.

  She opened her front door to the usual muddle of last week’s newspapers and letters spread all over the table and the faint air of dusty unlovedness that the flat always had after she’d been away for a weekend. The light on the answer machine was blinking.

  ‘Hi Liz,’ the voice said. It was American but polished, and sounded slightly familiar. ‘It’s Miles here, Miles Brookhaven. It’s Sunday morning, and you must be away for the weekend. I was wondering if you’d like to get together for lunch sometime this week. Give me a call at the embassy if you get a chance. Hope to hear from you.’

  Liz stood by the machine, quite taken aback. How did he get my number? she thought. Was this work-related? The call had been oddly ambiguous. No, she decided, he wouldn’t have called her at home if this was just professional, much less rung on a Sunday, not unless it was something extremely urgent. She suddenly remembered that she’d given him her home number after it had been decided that he would be her contact on the Syrian case, and immediately, in a quick change of mood, she began to feel flattered, rather than suspicious.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Chacun à son goût,’ said Constable Debby Morgan. DI Cullen scowled at her, wondering whether to admit he hadn’t a clue what this meant. She liked using foreign phrases, but then she had a degree, like so many of today’s recruits, and he supposed they couldn’t help showing off a bit.

  Not that he really minded with young Morgan, for he had a soft spot for her. He got a bit of stick from some of his colleagues on the subject, and it was true that Debby Morgan was an attractive girl, with big blue eyes, cute features, and an athletic figure. But DI Cullen had been married twenty years and had three daughters of his own, one almost as old as Debby. He was fond of his junior colleague, but in a completely avuncular way.

  Now he said, ‘Goo is the word for this one.’ He pointed to the open file on his desk, with the photos of the corpse that had been found in a box in one of the City’s churches. ‘This bloke met a sticky end all right.’

  ‘Weird to think he did it to himself.’

  ‘I’ve seen weirder.’ Which was true - he’d worked vice for six months once in Soho, and had never got over what some people got up to. He looked at young Morgan, thinking she had a lot to learn about life. ‘So what are you thinking?’

  She shrugged. ‘The obvious, I guess. Who put him in the box?’

  DI Cullen nodded. ‘There’s that, of course, but does anything else strike you?’ She looked blank, so he supplied the answer. ‘Someone else put him in the box, but the death was self-inflicted. So why didn’t this other person help the victim? The pathologist said death wasn’t instantaneous at all - the poor bugger took several minutes to go. Where was our good Samaritan then?’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t know the victim,’ she offered hopefully.

  ‘If you found a dead stranger in a church, what would you do? Call the police? Run for help? Try the kiss of life? Or would you cram him in a box and walk away?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  There was a knock and the door to Cullen’s office opened a foot. A young sergeant stuck his head in.

  ‘Excuse me guv, but I thought you’d want to know.’ The sergeant looked at Constable Morgan with frank admiration.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Cullen shortly.

  ‘We had an anonymous call giving a name for the man in the box.’

  ‘And?’

  The sergeant looked at his pad. ‘Alexander Ledingham.’

  ‘Who is?’

  The sergeant shrugged and looked at Cullen helplessly, as if to say ‘beats me’. ‘Lives in Clerkenwell, according to the caller.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That’s it. They hung up.’

  ‘Write down everything you can remember about the caller,’ said Cullen, standing up abruptly, and the young sergeant nodded and withdrew. Cullen looked out the window, where the sky was turning a threatening shade of grey. ‘Grab your coat,’ he said to Morgan. ‘It looks like rain.’

  They ended up going to Clerkenwell twice, the second time with a search warrant and a locksmith. The previous afternoon, with the help of the local police station, they had located the residence of one A. Ledingham, in a brick warehouse that had been converted into new flats. No one answered the buzzer, which made sense if Ledingham was indeed the man in the box. Two neighbours said they hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. He was a new tenant, who kept himself to himself. Neither recalled ever seeing any visitors to Ledingham’s flat.

  This time DI Cullen and Constable Morgan went straight to the flat on the third floor. They waited impatiently while the locksmith went to work; five minutes later the flat’s front door sprang wide open.

  A powerful odour greeted them as they stepped into the small hall. ‘Phew,’ said Debby Morgan, holding her nose and stepping into the blue haze that filled the flat. Straight ahead of them was a large, wooden-floored open area that seemed to be dining room and sitting room combined. It was sparsely furnished, a sofa and two wooden armchairs at one end, a cheap-looking dining table and four chairs at the other. On the walls, just visible through the haze, were framed posters, bright Op Art geometric constructions.

  DI Cullen screwed up his eyes and stepped forward into the small kitchen, which seemed to be the source of the smell. He saw with alarm that the electric cooker was on, and opening the oven door he was greeted by a cloud of black smoke. Once he’d stopped coughing he looked again. There seemed to
be something in a roasting tin.

  ‘Let me,’ said Debby, turning off the cooker at the wall. Holding her handkerchief in front of her face and grabbing a pair of oven gloves, she reached carefully into the oven and pulled out the tin, which contained the remains of some unidentifiable roast, now shrunken to a smouldering black heap. She dumped the entire pan without ceremony into the sink and turned on the cold tap. A loud hissing noise resulted and clouds of steam rose up and gradually began to disperse as Cullen switched on an extractor fan.

  ‘What do you think that tells us?’ asked Cullen.

  ‘That he’s not much of a cook?’

  DI Cullen shook his head. ‘It means he was planning on coming back here. Whatever he was getting up to wasn’t meant to take very long.’

  ‘This is one of those ovens with a time delay,’ said Morgan, who was examining the controls. ‘So he could have set it to come on at a certain time.’

  ‘Whatever. He was expecting to come home and eat it.’ He was looking round. A book case on one wall held a row of paperback novels, and several larger books on computer graphics. That must be his work, thought Cullen, and he noticed a laptop open on a small desk in one corner.

  ‘Let’s look in the bedroom,’ he said, pointing to a door in the corner of the room. ‘We can do a detailed search here later.’

  He opened the door gingerly, and the cautious look on his face turned to astonishment as he peered in.

  ‘What on earth?’ exclaimed Constable Morgan as she came in behind him.

  The room was dominated by an enormous bed, neatly made, with brass posters at its feet and a canopy supported by intricately carved wooden posts above the head. Dangling from one of the brass uprights was a pair of silver handcuffs.

  DI Cullen said, ‘He must have been a right weirdo.’

  ‘But a religious weirdo,’ Debby said, pointing to the wall facing the bed, where a painted triptych of wooden panels hung. Christ was on the cross, depicted in gory detail; blood dripped from his side and crucified hands and feet. The panels were cracked and faded - antique, thought DI Cullen; he’d seen things like it in a church in Italy, where his wife had insisted on going one summer, overruling his preference for Marbella.

  That wasn’t the only strange thing: on the other walls were dozens of architectural drawings, held up by masking tape. They were all of churches, many of them detailed floor plans, heavily annotated in black ink in a small, precise hand, notes mostly, but also a series of lines that converged near the altar, marked by arrows and large Xs.

  If the bed hadn’t been there, you would think this was the office of an ecclesiastical architect. But there was nothing sacred about the overall effect; sinister, rather.

  Shaken, DI Cullen opened a cupboard door in the corner of the room, half-expecting to find a skeleton hanging from a rail. He was relieved to discover only clothes, neatly folded on shelves, with a few jackets and shirts on hangers.

  Constable Morgan had put on a pair of latex gloves and was searching through the drawers of a pine dresser. She turned with a triumphant look on her face, holding up a little black book. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Cullen, ‘you’ve found a guide to black magic rituals.’

  ‘Not so exotic. I think it’s his diary.’ She flipped through the pages, then suddenly stopped, holding it out for Cullen to see.

  Each page covered one week and Morgan had stopped at the current week. There were only two entries. Sunday said 1 pm, Marc. Which sounded like a lunch date. But Tuesday made Cullen’s eyes open wide. St B. 8 p.m.

  ‘What was the name of the church where they found this bloke?’

  ‘St Barnabas.’

  He pointed at the diary with an angry finger. ‘There it is.’ Morgan continued going through the diary. There was no other mention of ‘St B.’ But on several pages she found initials that could be churches - ‘St M’, ‘St A’ and ‘Ch Ch’ appeared.

  Cullen gave an appreciative whisthe.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Constable Morgan anxiously.

  He looked into her big blue eyes and smiled. ‘You’ve done well, Debs. Drop that in an evidence bag and let’s take a look at Mr Ledingham’s computer to try and find out where he worked. Maybe someone there can explain all this…’ - he raised a baffled hand to take in the room.

  EIGHTEEN

  Liz had dressed up for her lunch with Miles Brookhaven. She was wearing the flared silk skirt and the strappy sandals that she’d bought for her mother’s party. She’d been determined to put Edward in his place with her sophisticated elegance. But as it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. Now she was giving the clothes an airing for a different reason.

  But looking at the Closed sign on the front door of Ma Folie, a bistro on the South Bank, she wondered if they’d be wasted again. What had happened to American know-how and where was Miles Brookhaven? When he’d rung to arrange lunch, he’d said he’d booked the restaurant. ‘You’ll love the place. The food’s so good you could be in France.’ You certainly could, thought Liz now, since like many of its French counterparts, Ma Folie turned out to be closed for the entire month of August.

  She was wondering what to do next when she heard footsteps hurrying along the pavement, and saw Miles approaching.

  ‘There you are!’ he cried, with such a friendly smile that Liz couldn’t be annoyed. He cut an eye-catching figure in a light grey summer suit with a bright blue shirt and yellow polka dot tie. Gesturing towards the bistro, ‘I take it you’ve seen the bad news’, he said. ‘But never mind: I’ve got an alternative I think you might enjoy. I hope you have a head for heights.’

  Twenty minutes later Liz was a third of the way up the London Eye, sipping a glass of fizz. Miles had booked a private ‘pod’ with a champagne lunch.

  The ascent of their capsule was so gradual that they didn’t seem to be moving at all, though Liz noticed that the top of Big Ben, which a few minutes before had been at eye level, was now below them. It was a perfect day for the Eye, sunny and clear, and all that was preventing Liz enjoying herself was the thought of how much this must have cost. Had Miles paid for it himself or was this on the expenses of the CIA station in Grosvenor Square? She suspected the latter and if she was right, why was she worthy of such extravagant cultivation? What were they hoping to get out of her?

  ‘I have a small confession to make,’ she said, as Miles offered her a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ve never been on the Eye before.’

  He laughed. ‘Most New Yorkers have never been up the Statue of Liberty. Now have some lunch.’

  She sat down on the banquette next to him. ‘Is that where you’re from - New York?’

  ‘Nothing so flash. I am a native of Hartford, Connecticut.’ He paused, then added with a smile, ‘The insurance capital of America. As interesting as it sounds.’

  ‘How long have you been with the Agency?’

  ‘Five years. I joined two years after 9/11. I graduated from Yale and was doing an MA in international relations at Georgetown. Being virtually next door, it’s a natural recruiting stop for Langley. Plus, I speak Arabic… I’m sure that’s why the Agency was interested in me in the first place.’

  ‘It’s quite unusual for an American to know Arabic, isn’t it? No offence.’

  ‘None taken. You’re quite right - when I joined you could count the number of Arabic speakers in the CIA on the fingers of one hand. Seven years on, you now need two hands to count them.’

  ‘How did you get interested in it?’

  ‘My father was an insurance broker; he specialised in oil tankers. One summer he took all of us with him on one of the super tankers. We went all around the Gulf, then through the Suez Canal. I just fell in love with the region, and the language.’ He gave a shy grin.

  ‘Is this your first posting abroad?’

  ‘I was in Syria for three years. In Damascus.’ He looked out of the pod’s window dreamily. ‘It’s the most beautiful country, Liz.
Much maligned by my countrymen.’

  Even sitting down, Liz could see the distant suburbs to the north and south come into view. From the Eye, the city was curiously flattened, stretching out like a pancake in every direction.

  She said, ‘London must seem very humdrum. A different world altogether.’

  ‘Not really. Sometimes it seems half the Middle East has moved here.’ Miles stood up and pointed west towards the horizon. They were at the apex of the Eye’s trajectory and seemed dizzyingly high. ‘What is that? It looks like a castle.’

  Liz said drily, ‘Well done. It’s Windsor Castle.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ He laughed. ‘And down there are two other fortresses.’ He pointed down at the long block of Thames House on the north bank, its copper roof shining gold in the sun, and a little further along, on the South Bank, the trendy green and white lines of MI6’s postmodernist towers.

  After a pause he said, ‘Andy Bokus, my head of station - you saw him at the meeting the other day - Andy says the French have complained for years that even though London is a hub of Middle East terrorist activity, you guys have been far too slow to get onto it. He says he thinks they’re right.’

  ‘Do you agree with him?’ asked Liz. She’d heard that view too often to react.

  ‘No. I don’t. I think you do a good job between you. It must be a nightmare trying to keep track of all the foreigners you have here, each with a different agenda. And it’s your side that has come up with this threat to the peace conference. I suppose that came from a source here?’ With his back to her, Miles looked out through the window of the capsule.

  Liz said nothing. If Geoffrey Fane hadn’t told the Americans where the information came from, she certainly wasn’t going to. She was surprised at Miles’s crude approach. They must think I was born yesterday, she thought. Maybe this style of intelligence gathering worked well in Damascus lush up your potential source and then pop the question but he’ll have to get a lot more subtle if he’s going to be successful here. She wondered with a smile whether Andy Bokus would refuse to pay the bill for lunch if Miles came back empty-handed.