Arms and the Women (34 page)

The young woman sighed and took a deep breath.

'Before we go inside, there's something I need to tell you,' she said.

iv

spelt from Sibyl's leaves

Has anyone here seen Kelly? Kelly from . . .

And there's a curious thing.

Not where Kelly has gone. People are always going. Another name, another country, another life. But no one moves without a trace and late or soon, getting and spending, we work out their whither.

Not to know their whence, though, now that really is curious.

Four years you've been on my magic island, child, marooned here by that most princely of pirates, old Silvernob himself, Gaw Sempernel.

Low-level entry, basic details to start with. But not even the most basic checked out.

Kelly Cornelius.

Passport details:

Born London, April 4, 1972. (No confirmatory entry found in any registry of births and deaths.)

Passport issued January 23,1994. (A Sunday. Not normally a day for issuing passports, which is perhaps why the Passport Agency failed to find any record of it.)

Emergency contact names, to be informed in case of an accident. Only one given (and this made me laugh so much I almost fell out of my chair, which would have been unfortunate as I find it increasingly difficult to get back into it without assistance). Gawain Sempernel, of this address.

She knows about you, Gawain.

With her command of cyberspace where we all track our spoors, how should she not know? And she knows that you know she knows. And she doesn't care.

I admire you, my Kelly. And I envy you. For you are young and I am old. You are lithe of limb and can make your escape on two wheels, while I can never escape, though permanently on four. And even out of our bodies and into our other dimension, I am only a cyber-sibyl, ordering my caskets in the confines of my magic island, while you are a cyber-queen of infinite space.

I know this because of what I do not know.

You appeared in England, and on my island, four years ago, a whizz in the world of financial technology, trailing clouds of praise from your previous employers, who have been for the most part financial institutions in the Americas. You'd been a busy bee for one so young, perhaps busier than anyone knew, for when we checked (uninvited, naturally) their personnel files, we found you there all right, but curiously incomplete, one job leading only back to another till suddenly we were back at the one we started with, impossible in real time of course, but someone had created a temporal Mobius strip which not all my best efforts could straighten out without destroying it.

And of course your real employers have been people whose records are not the common currency of the air, as ultimately everything reduced to electronic impulses must be, but word of mouth and cryptic scribbles on scraps of paper and nods and winks and all the old channels of communication inaccessible to such as me.

But we don't need them for we know what you have been doing. Your talent is turning dirty money into clean. You do this not by having your own set up which would be assailable and surveillable by the forces of law. You enter the world of international banking as a skilled and trusted employee and you use their systems with all their protections and connections and subtle interactions to move your masters' money around so quickly and quietly and untraceably that what might have been seizable as a drug baron's ill gotten billions ends up as clean and untouchable as a nun's pension fund. Nothing is illegal, nothing is stolen from the banks, in fact you do them sterling service and leave them better, or at least better off, than you find them. And you never stay long enough to become a fixture or an embarrassment.

And so it seemed would things carry on when you came back to Europe.

First you spent your time commuting between London and Switzerland, which is to dirty money what a privet hedge is to crisp packets. You straddled Europe like a whore up a back alley, with one foot planted firmly in Credit Apollyon de Zurich and the other in Arblasters, the kind of City merchant bank which has been making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, since Richard Arblaster of that Ilk sold his shares in the South Sea Company shortly before the bubble burst.

But next came a very strange move, away from the golden glow of the City to darkest Yorkshire, to take a dip in salary and status, social opportunity and cultural accessibility, by becoming an employee of Nortrust Bank pic, created five years ago out of a small and local demutualized building society.

What were you playing at, my Kelly from nowhere?

What impulse has turned you from a high-class laundry girl into a common embezzler putting you at last within reach of the long and predatory fingers of Uncle Gawain? Was this why you were suddenly upgraded from non-surveillance level to
Sibyl's Leaves
? Or was it just coincidental?

I don't yet know. All I know about you, officially, is all that Gawain wants to be known about you officially. That is Gawain's way.
Sibyl's Leaves
is full of such bits and pieces, shreds and patches, always just enough to cover his back in case our First Mover ever checks through the folder.

But once together in the dim light of my cave, all these individual spores and seeds of information take light and heat from each other and begin to germinate till finally, finally, the same god who binds his prophetess in darkness suddenly ravishes her with light!

I don't know where you've come from, my Kelly, not yet. But the way to find out where an animal comes from is to watch where it runs to.

Gawain, circling high in the sky, likes his prey to freeze on the ground so that he can descend on it like a thunderbolt when he feels the moment is ripe.

I, on the other hand, as fixed in my place as a convict in the electric chair, prefer to see the objects of my concern in movement.

Twice now I have flushed you out and set you running free, my Kelly. Once by a cryptic note on your computer screen, and this time by a little electronic billet-doux about you to that arch-mischief-maker, my twenty-stone Puck, ol' man Dalziel.

The game's afoot!

Has anyone here seen Kelly? Kelly from . . .

v

realms of gold

Edwin Digweed in an idly reflective post-coital moment had once asked Edgar Wield how much his choice of career had been influenced by the license it gave him to strike up conversations with strange men in parks.

The sergeant recalled the
facetia
(a word his partner had once used punningly, then had to explain in both its meanings, by which time the joke had fallen somewhat flat) as he traced Kelly Cornelius's probable route through Charter Park. In fact, on a day like this, being a cop was quite inessential as no one he approached showed the slightest concern even before he flashed his credentials (the kind of double entendre to which Edwin reacted as Wield had done to
facetia),
perhaps confirming Pascoe's theory that the English have been conditioned over centuries to regard bright warm sunshine as a rare gift from God under which no evil may flourish.

He struck gold instantly. The first person he spoke to, a woman wheeling a pram which contained a chubby child who bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Dalziel, had been in the park the previous afternoon. She needed only one glance at the photograph Wield showed her.

'Oh yes,' she said, her face lighting up. 'I remember seeing her. Lovely-looking girl. I remember thinking I used to have a figure like that before
he
came along.'

He
looked up from the pram with a most Dalzielesque curl of the lip. It struck Wield, who was a connoisseur of intonation, that there was at least as much of admiration as of envy in the tone, a judgement confirmed when the woman went on, 'It did me good just to watch her, she were such a lovely mover.'

'You watched her?' said Wield. 'So which way was she heading?'

The woman indicated that Cornelius had been walking from the side of the park where her flat was located towards the town centre.

'Then she turned off the main path there and went down to the canal.'

Wield followed her pointing finger and asked, 'You see anyone else around?'

'Yes, well, there would be, it was a lovely day. Like today. People need to get out, enjoy it while you can.'

The Greenhouse Effect could turn England into a second Sahara and the natives would still be convinced each hour of sunshine was the last.

'So, anyone in particular?'

The woman thought then shook her head.

'No. Kids. People. But I remember her. Full of life, she were.'

This was strongly suggestive that the powerful impression Cornelius had clearly made on Pascoe and Dalziel was not merely sexual.

He said, 'Thanks a lot, luv. By the way, you don't know our Mr Dalziel, do you? Superintendent Dalziel?'

'No. Why do you ask?'

Wield looked once more at the baby, who bared his toothless gums in a mocking smile.

'No reason,' he said.

He made towards the canal, pausing to chat to a gang of pre-pubescent cricket players.

Several of them had been in the same spot the previous afternoon and had no difficulty in recalling Cornelius.

'She caught our ball and threw it back, proper, tha knows, not like a lass. Then she went down to the canal and watched the ducks.'

'Was there anyone else around by the canal?'

'No.'

'Yeah, there was that old tramp,' interjected one of the other boys.

'Oh yeah, but she don't count,' said the first speaker, unhappy at having his status as group spokesman challenged.

'Which old tramp?'

'Some old biddy, looks like she sleeps rough.'

'How old?'

'About a hundred,' said the boy without hyperbole.

'Did the young woman who can throw speak to the tramp at all?'

A moment's consultation, then a tentative affirmative.

'So, anything else you noticed.'

More consultation, then the spokesboy said, 'No. What's she done, mister?'

'Nothing. Just got lost,' said Wield. 'Thanks.'

As he turned away a voice said, 'She were on a bike.'

He turned back. The speaker, already looking like he was regretting it, was the smallest child there, slightly built, fair, almost white, hair, with a slack mouth and somewhat vacant expression.

'A bike?' said Wield. 'You saw her on a bike?'

The boy seemed to have exhausted his supply of words but he did give an almost imperceptible nod.

'Don't pay him no heed, mister,' said the spokesboy. 'He's a bit . . .'

He tapped the side of his head.

'Anyone else see a bike?' asked Wield.

A general shaking of heads. The fair-haired child looked close to tears.

'You sure it were her?' said Wield gently. 'The lady who threw the ball?'

The boy just hung his head and the others laughed, though more possessively than derisively.

'Well, thanks, anyway,' said Wield.

As he walked away the fair-haired child suddenly yelled, 'It were both of 'em on the bike!'

The laughter swelled behind him, and even Wield smiled at this extension into tandem.

But an hour later he had stopped smiling and was hurrying back towards the cricketers.

Peter Pascoe had developed many of the carapaces necessary to long-term survival in the police force. In fact, according to his wife he now had a shell thick enough to cause envious comment on the Galapagos Islands. But he had never been able to rid himself of the distaste he felt for searching other people's property.

He experienced it now as he went through Kelly Cornelius's apartment.

He'd been here before with a Fraud DI when the case had first broken. The Fraud man had removed the PC with the odd message and some disks but found nothing else of interest to him. Pascoe had done a general search, completing what PC Hector had begun with such devastating consequences.

'Looking for sackfuls of dosh, are you?' said the Fraud man derisively. 'If it's anywhere, it'll be in here, mate.' Waving a disk.

'Just getting a feel what she's like,' said Pascoe.

'From what I hear about her, I wouldn't mind a feel myself,' said the other.

Pascoe had said pleasantly, 'Do you think you might have been too long with Fraud, Inspector? Perhaps you might consider a transfer to Vice?'

Conversation had died thereafter till the DI, ready to leave, found himself waiting while Pascoe carefully replaced on hangers and in drawers the clothing he'd been searching through.

'What's that in aid of?' he finally demanded.

'To stop it getting creased,' said Pascoe.

'Creased?' said the man incredulously. 'Je-sus!'

Now second time around Pascoe found the apartment much as he recalled leaving it. His excellent memory for detail plus the precise written notes he'd made at the time of the first search told him that Cornelius certainly hadn't come home and packed a case with clothes in anticipation of making a run for it. As far as he could make out, she must have come from the court after her release, opened a bottle of bubbly (empty on the bathroom floor), had a bath (damp towel and discarded clothing in the linen basket), got dressed and gone out. So nothing to indicate to Sempernel's watchers that she was on the point of doing a bunk.