Mambo (14 page)

Ruhr put the gun in his waistband.

“I'll leave,” the girl said. “I won't bother you again, I swear it.”

“Tell me your name first.”

“Steffie.”

“What a very ugly name,” Ruhr said.

“Stephanie then.”

“That's better.” It occurred to Ruhr that he could let this girl walk away. By tomorrow morning he'd be gone from this place anyhow. What did it matter? He looked down at the house; he thought he saw the shadows of the two South Americans in the windows.

“Well,” the girl said, and there was a flutter of fear in her voice. “I suppose I'd better leave.”

Ruhr watched her face. There was renewed anxiety in her eyes and her mouth had become very tense. And of course he knew why.

“I can't let you go.”

She backed away. “I didn't see anything. I swear I didn't.”

He stepped toward her. She slipped as she moved backward. She lay in the mud, the skirt above her waist, white underwear showing, her legs raised and bent at the knees. He stood over her.

“You know who I am, don't you?”

She shook her head, tried to rise, slipped again. “Please,” she said. “I won't say anything. Not to a living soul. I promise.”

“You saw my picture in the newspapers. You saw this,” and he raised his right hand.

Tears rolled over her cheeks. “I only want to go home.”

“We all want that, Steffie.”

He reached for her arm, hauled her to her feet, led her down the slope to the house. She wouldn't stop crying; he hit her once, rather softly, across the side of her face. After that she sobbed in silence, as if something inside her had begun to break. He pushed her into the house, slammed the door shut.

“What the hell is this?” Trevaskis asked.

“A little gem,” Ruhr said. “Isn't it surprising what a man can find in an otherwise dreary English landscape?”

At the summit of the slope, under bare, sodden trees, the girl's horse whinnied, a sound obliterated by wind and rain.

Nobody in the farmhouse heard.

London

Martin Burr dreaded visits to the Home Secretary's office. It was a vast oak-panelled room hung with faded oil paintings of politicians past. Under the scrutiny of the portraits the Commissioner felt like a defendant in the dock of history, judged by the stern faces of an awesome jury – the first Earl of Chatham, Gladstone, Lord Acton, Sir Robert Peel. Their faces glowered disapprovingly into the room as if abruptly summoned from a long, well-deserved sleep. Martin Burr looked round the room for a sign of something less imposing, less official, and found it parked in a dim corner – a small, bedraggled canary in a brass cage. The little bird shivered in misery.

Burr turned when the door opened and the Home Secretary came in. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, Martin.” He tossed some folders down on his enormous desk, then rummaged in a drawer and brought out an eye-dropper filled with clear liquid. He went to the bird cage and pushed the dropper through the bars, letting fluid drip into the canary's food dish. “Bird's got some kind of flu. This stuff's supposed to help it. It's touch and go, I fear. We live in hope.” The Home Secretary gently rattled the cage, bringing his face very close to it and whispering to the canary. “Don't we, Charlie? Don't we live in hope?”

He walked back to his desk, sat down. “Now then. This bloody Ruhr business. Where are we exactly?”

Burr, who half-expected to be axed, gazed at the window. The afternoon sky over the Thames was low and leaden. “Not as far along as I would have liked, Secretary,” he said. “The search continues. Sea ports are being watched. Air terminals. Railways. All public transport. Ruhr's picture is plastered everywhere. Frank Pagan's office is examining all known terrorist connections.”

“Pagan? Shouldn't he be in hospital or something?”

“He's a stubborn bastard,” Burr said. That damned Pagan. “He discharged himself yesterday.”

The Home Secretary turned his face toward the window and appeared to consider this information. Then he turned back to the Commissioner. “What news of the leak, Martin?”

Martin Burr imagined he saw Sir Robert Peel frown. He glanced up at the portrait of the man who had founded the London police force in 1829. Then he looked elsewhere. “I've imposed unusually strict limits on the number of people who have access to the paperwork generated by the Ruhr investigation. Memoranda and confidential reports on the affair no longer circulate in the usual way. Pagan has tightened his own departmental security – restricted access to computer data, telephone scrambling devices, that sort of thing. When we communicate with each other in the future, we do so directly, either face to face, or on a safe line. No third parties.”

“But you haven't sniffed out the culprit?”

“No, but that isn't our top priority, Secretary. After all, the damage caused by the leak is already done. We're concentrating exclusively on Ruhr. When we catch him, then I can turn my attention to our internal shortcomings.”

The Home Secretary was silent for a time. “Sound approach, Martin,” he said finally.

This unexpected vote of confidence startled Burr. He poked his walnut cane into the weave of the Secretary's Persian rug. He had come here expecting his own execution or, at best, a severe reprimand. The Home Secretary wasn't famed for a kind heart. A compliment from him had been known to make otherwise sombre men light-headed for weeks. Perhaps the Secretary's mild approval was merely a way to soften the inevitable blow. Burr braced himself.

“Do we have
any
idea why this German is here?” the Secretary asked.

Martin Burr shook his head. “There's a list of possibilities that grows longer by the moment.”

“Possibilities or guesses, Martin?”

“Guesses,” Burr said.

The Secretary was quiet for a time. “When six policemen die, when we have an atrocity of that magnitude, it's common to look immediately for an individual to take the total blame. The obvious choice, Martin, would be you. Commissioner of Scotland Yard, the man in charge of Ruhr's transport, the responsible commanding officer, etcetera etcetera. The great masses, who have quite a taste for the blood of fallible officials, would not be unhappy with a public hanging.”

Burr sighed and nodded his head. A public hanging: he saw himself turned out of office, a long retirement at his house in the Sussex countryside. He saw himself stooped and ancient, pottering around in a garden whose fruits and flowers didn't remotely interest him but were merely things one grew on the way to the grave.

“What damn good is a scapegoat?” the Home Secretary asked. “Your record is distinguished, Martin. And I stand squarely behind you. I will say so in public at any time.”

Surprised, Burr brightened at once. “I appreciate that.”

“I am one of your staunchest supporters, Martin. And I am certain the Commission of Inquiry will exonerate you in due course.”

Burr felt a surge of gratitude that rose to his head like blood. He wasn't sure what to say. He saw the Home Secretary reach across the desk and extend his hand, which Burr shook. It was a vigorous grip between two men who have sworn to uphold the laws of a nation.

“Go back to work with a clear mind, Martin,” the Home Secretary said. “I don't want you to be hindered by criticism. I don't want the Commission of Inquiry to distress you in any way. Remember this. You have an ally in me.”

“I'm very grateful, Secretary.”

“No need. If you were an incompetent buffoon I would have you out of office in two shakes of a lamb's tail. But you're not. Your record speaks for itself.”

Burr rose from his chair. A weight had been removed from him and he felt quite spry all at once. Even the portraits appeared less uncompromising, as if Burr had passed some kind of test and his examiners were, for the moment at least, pleased with him.

The canary cheeped bravely. The Home Secretary walked to the cage and looked inside. “Bird's first sound in days. Perhaps it's a good omen.” He drew a fingernail over the bars, making a dull harp-like noise. “Keep me posted daily, Martin. That's all I ask. When anything comes up, I will expect to hear from you.”

“Of course, Sir Frederick.”

The Home Secretary smiled. It was the easy expression of a man who, though born into wealth, prides himself on having the common touch. For this reason he was never called Sir Frederick in the newspapers. It was always the more colloquial Sir Freddie.

He walked Martin Burr to the door.

“Good luck, Commissioner.”

“We'll need it,” Burr said.

Still smiling, clapping Martin Burr on the back, Sir Freddie Kinnaird closed the door.

7

London

By mid-afternoon on his first full day of freedom, Frank Pagan had coaxed extra help from a variety of departments. Men had been called in to do extra shifts or work their day off. A few had been summoned from the twilight world of semi-retirement and sent out into the streets, grumbling yet grudgingly pleased to be useful. Officers travelled to a score of different places, Ealing and Wembley, Poole and Ramsgate, anywhere the names of those on the computer list had been located. It was a thankless undertaking, but what alternatives were there? Ignore the twenty-nine names? No. Pagan wanted to cover as many bases as he could. Later, there might be the consolation that he'd done everything possible and hadn't skimped. He had three officers checking private airfields in the Home Counties for any evidence of the helicopter used in Shepherd's Bush; another bloody long shot.

By four o'clock, Pagan had also sent two men to Cambridge to analyse potential targets in the area with the Chief Constable. Another five had been ordered to meet the security officers of military bases throughout East Anglia, from Colchester in the south to Hunstanton in the north, an area some eighty miles wide and sixty miles long. Bounded by The Wash and the North Sea, it was a region of waterways, leafy lanes, ancient churches. Villages, some of them surprisingly remote, still had timbered houses. Across this flat green landscape, Air Force jets screamed out of bases and left fading trails in the sky.

In Golden Square two officers were employed full time taking phone calls from people who claimed to have seen Ruhr. These came from every corner of England; The Claw had been observed by a lonely old man in Hull, a young drunk in Plymouth, a very proper lady in Sevenoaks, an octogenarian in Radlett. He had also been spotted on Westminster Bridge, and in a restaurant on the Grand Parade in Eastbourne by a short-sighted French waiter who'd never forgotten the humiliation imposed on France by the Germans at the Maginot Line. Ruhr, it seemed, was as common as hedgerow, and his movements just as tangled.

Even though officers were scurrying all over the place, and business was being conducted briskly, Pagan was still beset by a sense of having overlooked something very simple, except he wasn't sure what. It was a flavour in his mouth he couldn't name, a word he couldn't get off the tip of his tongue. Too many Pethidine, too little sleep on the hideous office sofa. He had the feeling that his brain, knocked off-centre, was dealing with the German only in a peripheral way. And the deficiency of his muse had really nothing to do with insomnia or pain. Face it, Frank, he told himself in that stern inner voice he kept for self-honesty: you've been bollixed by the last name on the bloody list.

The twenty-ninth name. As he looked down into the darkening afternoon in Golden Square, he was uneasy.

He wished he could set the past aside, lock it inside a box labelled oblivion. But it was a sneaky intruder, and it came upon you with the quietness of a shadow. He thought that perhaps Foxworth hadn't been able to track the person down, and maybe that would be a relief, but all the particles of his curiosity were wildly activated. Sometimes the urge to visit your own history was overwhelming and so you walked old neighbourhoods regardless. The reckless heart, Pagan thought. It went where it wanted to go, striding to its own timetable, and there was nothing you could do but follow, even if the journey took you into the red-light district of your memories.

Foxworth entered the office, whistling slyly. “Has anybody mentioned your resemblance to Quasimodo?” he asked.

Pagan shook his head. “I must be missing something.”

“It's how you carry yourself, Frank,” Foxie said. “Like Charlie Laughton. All you need is a fair-sized hump.”

“I can't think of any other way to be comfortable.” Pagan had placed all his weight on the left side of his body. His right arm hung rather uselessly, and the right shoulder was raised a little. It wasn't a pretty sight, but it was an improvement on total discomfort.

“I'll get you a bell for Christmas.”

“I'd settle for Gunther Ruhr.”

Foxworth stopped whistling. He took out his notebook, flipped the pages. He tore out a sheet, slid it across the desk to Pagan. “I found the individual you wanted. Wasn't easy, actually. She checked into a hotel in Victoria two days ago, then promptly settled the bill and moved without explanation in the middle of the night. Arrived in a second hotel in Knightsbridge the day before yesterday. Did the same damn thing all over again. Paid the bill,
arrivederci
, upped and moved to the address you now have. Strange behaviour. One might say suspicious.”

“One might.” Pagan looked at the piece of paper, then tucked it in his pocket.

“You'll need a driver,” Foxie said, thinking that what Frank really needed was a nurse and three weeks in a quiet room with an ocean view.

“And that might as well be you, Foxie.”

“I was hoping you'd ask.”

Pagan was silent and nervous in the car as Foxworth drove along Piccadilly and up through the clogged streets of Mayfair. Late afternoon yielded to evening. Feeble sunlight pierced the slate-coloured sky, laying a dirty amber streak across Berkeley Square. Park Lane loomed ahead, and Hyde Park beyond, where evening had already settled among the trees. Pagan folded his hands in his lap. His mouth was very dry. This visit wasn't the most practical thing he'd ever done. He could have assigned somebody else, even Foxie, to make this call. But how could he have resisted and let the chance slip past and then have to kick himself in regret?