At Risk (19 page)

Peregrine said nothing. His expression remained unaltered, but the colour began to ebb from his face.

“For several years now, the Marquise has been the proprietor of a discreet establishment in Shepherd Market, W1, where she and her employees specialise in . . .” she consulted the printed sheets, “discipline, domination, and corporal punishment.”

Again, Peregrine said nothing.

“Three years ago, the existence of this establishment was drawn to the attention of the Inland Revenue. Madame la Marquise, it seemed, had neglected to pay any income tax for a decade or so. It must have slipped her mind. So the Revenue asked the Vice Squad if they’d mind giving her a nudge, and the Vice Squad didn’t mind in the least. They raided the place. And guess who—along with an eminent QC and a popular New Labour peer—they found strapped to a flogging-horse with a rubber gag in his mouth and his trousers round his ankles?”

Peregrine’s gaze turned to ice. His mouth was a thin, taut-clamped line. “My private life, young lady, is my own business, and I will not, repeat
not,
be blackmailed in my own house.” He rose from the sofa. “You will kindly leave, and leave now.”

Liz didn’t move. “I’m not blackmailing you, Mr. Lakeby, I’m just asking you for the precise details of your commercial relationship with Ray Gunter. We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way. The easy way involves you giving me all of the facts in confidence; the hard way involves a police arrest on suspicion of involvement in organised crime. And given that, as we all know, there’s a regular flow of information between the police and the tabloid newspapers . . .”

She shrugged, and Peregrine stared down at her, expressionless. She returned his gaze, steel for steel, and gradually the fight and the arrogance seemed to drain out of him. He sat down again in slow motion, his shoulders slumped. “But if you’re working with the police . . .”

“I’m not quite working with the police, Mr. Lakeby. I’m working alongside them.”

His eyes narrowed warily. “So . . .”

“I’m not suggesting you did anything worse than take Gunter’s money,” said Liz quietly. “But I have to tell you that there’s an issue of national security at stake here, and I’m sure you wouldn’t wish to endanger the security of the state.” She paused. “What was the deal with Gunter?”

He stared bleakly out of the window. “As you surmised, the idea was that I turned a blind eye to his comings and goings at night.”

“How much did they pay you?”

“Five hundred a month.”

“Cash?”

“Yes.”

“And what did those comings and goings consist of?”

Peregrine gave a strained smile. “The same as they’ve consisted of for hundreds of years. This is a smuggler’s coastline. Always has been. Tea, brandy from France, tobacco from the Low Countries . . . When the Channel ports and the Kent marshes got too dangerous, the cargoes moved up here.”

“And that’s what they were landing, was it? Booze and tobacco?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“By who? By Gunter?”

“No. I didn’t actually deal with Gunter. There was another man, whose name I never found out.”

“Mitch? Something like Mitch?”

“I’ve no idea. Like I said . . .”

“How were you paid?”

“The money was left inside the locker on the beach. The place where Gunter kept his fishing gear. I had a key to the padlock.”

“So apart from this second man, did you ever meet or see anyone else?”

“Never.”

“Can you describe the second man?”

Peregrine considered. “He looked . . . violent. Pale face and a skinhead haircut. Like one of those dogs they’re always having to shoot for biting children.”

“How did you meet him?”

“It was about eighteen months ago. Anne was up in town for the day, and he and Ray Gunter came up to the house. He asked me outright if I wanted to be paid five hundred pounds on the first of every month for doing absolutely nothing.”

“And you said?”

“I said I’d think about it. He hadn’t asked me to do anything illegal. He rang me the next day, and I said yes, and on the first of the next month the money was in the locker, as he had said that it would be.”

“And he specifically said that it was tobacco and alcohol they were bringing in?”

“No. His actual words to me were that they were continuing the local tradition of outwitting the Excise men.”

“And you had no problem with that?”

He leaned back against the sofa. “No. To be absolutely frank with you, I didn’t. VAT’s the bane of your life when you’ve got a place of this size to run, and if Gunter and his chum were giving Customs and Excise a run for their money, bloody good luck to them.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me? About their vehicles? About the vessels they picked up from?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. I honoured my side of the bargain, and kept my eyes and my ears closed.”

Honoured, thought Liz. There’s a word.

“And your wife’s never suspected anything?”

“Anne?” he asked, almost bullish again. “No, why on earth should she? She heard the odd bump in the night, but . . .”

Liz nodded. The second man had to be Mitch, whoever Mitch was. And the reason he had been so furious with Gunter for talking about tobacco-smuggling to Cherisse was that the two of them had something much more serious to hide. Gunter had clearly been an indiscreet and generally far from ideal co-conspirator. As the man who owned the boats and knew the local tides and sandbanks, however, he had equally clearly been a vital cog in the operation.

Would Frankie Ferris come up with anything on Mitch? His manner on the phone had suggested that he knew who Mitch was, which in turn suggested that Mitch was one of Eastman’s people. But then that was Ferris all over—desperate to prove his usefulness, even if it meant stretching the truth.

She looked at Peregrine. The urbane façade was almost back in place. She had given him a brief scare, but no more. On the way out she passed Elsie Hogan, who was standing, arms folded, in the kitchen doorway. Peregrine didn’t waste a glance on her but Liz did, and saw the calculated blankness of the older woman’s expression. Had Elsie, she wondered, spent the last ten minutes engaged in the household servant’s traditional pastime of listening at the door? Would there soon be lurid tales of bared bottoms and upper-class spanking orgies circulating in the local bus queues, post offices and supermarkets?

I
n the thirty-six hours since his arrival, Faraj Mansoor had spoken very little. He had described the circumstances surrounding the death of the fisherman and he had satisfied himself that there was no particular reason for the police to come knocking at the bungalow door, but otherwise he had kept his own counsel. From 8:30 to 10 p.m. on the evening of his arrival he had paced the beach in the dark. He had eaten the food that the woman had put in front of him, and smoked a couple of cigarettes after each meal. At the prescribed time he had prayed.

Now, however, he seemed disposed for conversation. He called the woman Lucy, since this was the name on her driving licence and other documents, and for the first time he seemed to look at her closely, to fully acknowledge her presence. The two of them were bent over the bungalow’s dining table examining an Ordnance Survey map. As a security precaution they were using stalks of dried grass as pointers; both were aware that a bare finger leaves a fine but easily traceable grease trail on map paper.

Road by road, intersection by intersection, they planned their route. Where possible they selected minor roads. Not country lanes where every passing car was a memorable event, but roads too insignificant for speed cameras. Roads where the police were unlikely to be lying up waiting for boy-racers or drunk-drivers.

“I suggest we park here,” she said, “and walk up the rest of the way.”

He nodded. “Four miles?”

“Five, perhaps. If we push ourselves we should be able to do it in a couple of hours. There is a track for the first three miles, so we shouldn’t look out of place.”

“And this? What is this?”

“A flood relief channel. There are bridges, but that’s one of the things we need to recce.”

He nodded, and stared intently at the gently undulating countryside. “How good are the security people?”

“We would be foolish to assume that they are not very good.”

“They’ll be armed?”

“Yes. Heckler and Koch MP5s. Full body armour.”

“What will they be looking out for?”

“Anything out of the ordinary. Anything or anyone that doesn’t fit.”

“Will we fit?”

She glanced sideways at him, tried to see him as others would. His light-skinned Afghan features marked him out as non-European in origin, but millions of British citizens were now non-European in origin. The conservative cut and idiosyncratic detailing of his clothing indicated someone who, at the very least, had been educated in Britain, and probably privately educated there. His English was flawless, and his accent was classic BBC World Service. Either he had attended a very smart school in Pakistan, or he had had some decidedly patrician friends over there.

“Yes.” She nodded. “We’ll fit.”

“Good.” He pulled on the dark blue New York Yankees baseball cap that she’d bought him in King’s Lynn. “You know the location? They said that you knew it well.”

“Yes. I haven’t been there for several years, but it can’t have changed much. This map is new, and it’s exactly as I remember it.”

“And you will have no hesitation in doing what has to be done? You have no doubts?”

“I will have no hesitation. I have no doubts.”

He nodded again, and carefully folded up the map. “They spoke highly of you at Takht-i-Suleiman. They said that you never complained. Most importantly, they said that you knew when to be silent.”

She shrugged. “There were plenty of others prepared to do the talking.”

“There always are.” He reached into his pocket. “I have something for you.”

It was a gun. A miniature automatic, the size of her hand. Curious, she picked it up, ejected the five-round magazine, ratcheted back the slide, and tried the action. “Nine millimetre?”

He nodded. “It’s Russian. A Malyah.”

She hefted it in her hand, slapped back the magazine, and thumbed the safety catch on and off. Both of them knew that if she was forced to use it, the end would not be far away.

“They decided that I should be armed, then?”

“Yes.”

Fetching her waterproof mountain jacket, she unzipped the collar section, pulled out the hood, and zipped it up again with the Malyah inside. The hood effectively hid the slight bulge.

Mansoor nodded approvingly.

“Can I ask you something?” she said tentatively.

“Ask.”

“We seem to be taking our time. A recce today, a rest day tomorrow . . . What are we waiting for? Why don’t we just . . . do it? Now that the boatman is dead, every day makes it more likely that . . .”

“That they’ll find us?” He smiled.

“People don’t get shot here every day,” she persisted. “There will be detectives, there will be pathologists, forensics people, ballistics . . . What’s that round of yours going to tell them, for example?”

“Nothing. It’s a standard calibre.”

“In Pakistan, perhaps, but not here. The security people here aren’t stupid, Faraj. If they smell a rat they’ll come looking. They’ll send their best people. And you can forget any idea you might have about British fair play; if they have the faintest suspicion of what we are planning to do—and a search of this house would give them a pretty good idea—they will kill us outright, proof or no proof.”

“You’re angry,” he said, amused. Both of them were conscious that it was the first time she had used his name.

She lowered her fists to the table. Closed her eyes. “I’m saying that we can accomplish nothing if we are dead. And that with every day that passes it becomes more likely that . . . that they will find and kill us.”

He looked at her dispassionately. “There are things that you don’t know,” he said. “There are reasons for waiting.”

She met his gaze for a moment—the gaze that at times made him look fifty, rather than a score of months short of thirty—and bowed her head in acceptance. “I ask only that you don’t underestimate the people we are up against.”

Faraj shook his head. “I don’t underestimate them, believe me. I know the British, and I know just how lethal they can be.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then, taking the binoculars, opened the door, stepped outside on to the shingle, and scanned the horizon to east and west.

“Anything?” he asked, when she returned.

“Nothing,” she said.

He watched her. Watched as her eyes flickered to the jacket containing the concealed Malyah.

“What is it?” he asked.

She shook her head. Took an uncertain step back towards the front door, and then stopped.

“What is it?” he said again, more gently this time.

“They’re looking for us,” she replied. “I can feel it.”

He nodded slowly. “So be it.”