The Last Testament (18 page)

‘And you watched her?’

‘I never planned to. But couples would appear in our front 146

SAM BOURNE

room, asking my mother to arbitrate between them. “Let’s see what Mrs Costello has to say.” It became a catchphrase round our way. I watched what she did and I suppose I picked it up.’

‘She must be very proud of you.’

‘They both are.’

Uri said nothing, allowing the hum of the car to fill the void.

Maggie scolded herself: it was crass to have referred to her two parents in the present tense so breezily, rubbing their aliveness in his face. But she had got carried away. It was rare for her to be asked about herself like that and she had enjoyed the chance to answer.

It had probably seemed obvious to Uri, who earned his living getting people to talk about themselves, but she couldn’t remember the last time anyone else had asked, ‘How come you’re a mediator?’

It struck her that Edward had never once asked that question.

While they sped towards Jerusalem, past roads she knew were choked with Palestinians moving at a fraction of their speed, if they were moving at all, she tried to focus on the meeting with Shapira.

He seemed pretty clear: Guttman had told Shapira what he had found –
You don’t want to know what I know
– and, Shapira believed, the Israeli government had killed him for it. But Shapira was a big, puffed-up blowhard. Why hadn’t he told Uri what his father had discovered? Maybe because she was in the room. Though that made no sense: if there was some devastating new ammunition against the peace process, he’d have seized his chance to hurl it at the Americans. Was it possible Shapira knew nothing, but simply wanted to make the Guttmans look like martyrs to the cause?

She was too lost in thought, and Uri the same, to look closely in the rear-view mirror and notice what was behind them: a white Subaru that kept three cars back. And never let them out of its sight.

They were back in the home of Shimon and Rachel Guttman.

The instant Uri let them in, she shuddered. The house was not THE LAST TESTAMENT

147

cold, but a chill hung in the air all the same. This was a place of death, twice over. She admired Uri for being able to set foot inside it.

The doormat was piled high with notes and cards: well-wishers from abroad, no doubt. Everyone else would be at Uri’s sister’s house now, where the
shiva
for his father would continue and where the
shiva
for his mother would begin once she had been buried. Maggie worried that Uri was absenting himself from a process he needed. She knew from wakes back at home that all this fuss wasn’t for the dead, but for the living, to give them something to do, to distract them from their grief. When you have to talk to two dozen relatives in an hour, you haven’t got time to be depressed. Yet here Uri was with her, denying himself that sedative for the pain.

‘In here.’ He switched on the light in a room that was, thankfully, at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen where she had discovered Rachel Guttman’s dead body the previous night. It was small, cramped and lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There were also piles and piles of paper on every available surface. In the middle of a simple desk, just a plain table really, was a computer, a telephone and a fax machine with a jumble of electronic gadgetry, including a video camera, pushed to one side. Maggie checked the camera straight away: no tape inside.

‘Where on earth do we start?’

Uri looked at her. ‘Well, why don’t you quickly learn Hebrew?

Then it will only take us a few months.’

Maggie smiled. It was the closest thing to laughter they had shared since they had met.

‘Maybe if you look at the computer. A lot of that was in English. I’ll start on these piles.’

Maggie settled herself into the seat and pressed the power button. ‘Hey, Uri. Can you give me the cellphone again?’

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He pulled out the transparent plastic bag he had collected from the hospital on their way back from Psagot. Inside it were ‘the personal effects of the deceased’, the things his father had with him when he was killed. He passed her the phone. She switched it on, then selected the message inbox.
Empty
. Then the ‘sent’

box.
Empty
.

‘And you’re definitely sure your father used to send text messages?’

‘I told you already. He sent some to me. When I was on border duty in Lebanon, we used to text all the time.’

‘So this phone has definitely been wiped.’

‘I think so.’

‘Which means his email account is likely to have gone too.

Whoever did that to your mother probably came in here too.

But let’s look.’

The familiar desktop appeared on the screen. Maggie went straight for the email account. A box appeared, demanding a password.
Damn
.

‘Uri?’

He was clutching a bundle of papers to his chest, adding to it each time he examined a sheet from the pile on the desk in front of him. She could see progress was going to be painfully slow.

‘Try Vladimir.’

‘Vladimir?’

‘As in Jabotinsky. The founder of Revisionist Zionism. The first serious hardliner. My dad’s hero.’

She keyed in the letters slowly. Without fanfare, the screen began to fill up with email. Uri smiled. ‘He always used that.

Used to write love letters to my mother under that name.’

Maggie scrolled down, looking at the unopened messages.

They had kept coming, even now, since his death. Bulletins from the
Jerusalem Post
; a soldiers’ relief fund; circulars from Arutz Sheva, the settlers’ radio station.

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She went back earlier, to those that had arrived before his death. Still the same round robins and circulars. Hold on: some personal ones. A request to speak at a demo next Wednesday.

That was today. An inquiry from German TV; a request to be on a BBC radio panel. She looked further, hoping for a message from Ahmed Nour or anything which might explain the fevered words of Rachel Guttman in this very house just two days earlier. She checked the sent box, but there was not much there that stood out, and certainly no communication with Nour.
How
stupid could she be?
With confidence, she searched for the codename she had unscrambled, Ehud Ramon, certain it would be here. Not in the inbox, not in sent messages. Nothing.

Maybe Maggie’s assumption was right. Whoever had killed Rachel Guttman had stopped in here first, methodically deleting any emails of significance. She looked in the recycle bin, just on the off-chance. Nothing in there since Saturday, the day of Guttman’s death. Which meant that either someone had hacked into this computer and was skilled enough to cover their traces

– or the dead man simply avoided using email for any communication that mattered.

‘Are you certain your father used email? I mean properly.’

‘Are you kidding? All the time. Like I said, for a man his age, he is very modern. He even plays computer games, my father.

Besides, he is a campaigner. They live on the internet, these people.’

That gave her an idea. She clicked the email away and looked instead for the browser. She opened it up and went straight to the favourites. A couple of Hebrew newspapers; the BBC; the
New York Times
; eBay; the British Museum; Fox News.
Damn
. Her hunch had been wrong. She shut down the browser and stared at the desktop which, at this moment, looked to her like an electronic brick wall.

She stared hard at the icons on it. A few Word documents, which she opened. She saw Yariv1.doc and her heart leapt. But 150

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it was only an open letter, in English, addressed to the Prime Minister and headed ‘For the Attention of the
Philadelphia
Inquirer
’. Whatever it was Guttman had wanted to say to Yariv, he had not left it lying around here.

Then, at the bottom of the screen, an icon she had on her own machine but had never used. She clicked on it and saw it was another internet browser, just not a very famous one. She looked for the favourites, here called
Bookmarks
, and there was only one.

gmail.com

It was what she had been hoping for. An email account, separate to his main one, effectively hidden away. Here, she had no doubt, was where Guttman’s serious correspondence would be kept.

A box appeared, this time asking for both a name and a password. She typed in Shimon Guttman, with Vladimir as the password and waited. No luck. She tried Shimon on its own. Nothing.

She tried lower case, upper case and then no spaces. None if it worked.

‘Uri, what would he use besides Vladimir?’

So she tried Jabotinsky, Jabo, VladimirJ and what seemed like three dozen other permutations. No luck. And then it hit her.

Without pausing, she pulled out her cellphone and punched at the numbers. ‘The office of Khalil al-Shafi please.’

Uri reared back, dropping a clump of papers onto the floor as he did so. ‘What the hell do you think—’

‘Let me speak to Khalil al-Shafi please. This is Maggie Costello from the State Department.’ It was her Sunday best accent.

‘Mr al-Shafi. Do you remember you told me that Ahmed Nour had received some mysterious emails prior to his death, requesting a meeting? That’s right. From an Arab name his family did not recognize. I need you to tell me that name. It will go no further than me, I assure you.’

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She checked the spelling back twice, making sure every letter was right, knowing there was no room for error. She thanked the Palestinian negotiator and hung up.

‘Do you speak any Arabic, Uri?’

‘A little.’

‘OK. What does
nas tayib
mean?’

‘That’s very simple. It means a good man.’

‘Or, if we were to translate it into German, a
Gutt man, nein
?

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E

LONDON, SIX MONTHS EARLIER

Henry Blyth-Pullen tapped the steering wheel along to the
Archers
theme tune.
Tum-tee-tum-tee-tum-tum-tum, tum-tee-tum-tum-tum-tum
. He was, he decided, a man of simple tastes. He might have spent his working life surrounded by sumptuous antiques and precious artefacts, but his needs were modest. Just this – an afternoon drive through the spring sunshine, with no more onerous obligation than listening to a radio soap – was enough to cheer his spirits.

He always liked driving. Even this, a forty-five-minute run from the showroom in Bond Street to Heathrow Airport, was a pleasure.

No phone calls, no one bothering him. Just time to daydream.

He did the drive often. Not to the main terminals, teeming with passengers and all kinds of
hoi polloi
on their way to their tacky vacations in heaven knows where. His destination was the turning almost everyone else ignored. The cargo area.

He pulled into the car park, finding a space easily. He didn’t get out straightaway, but stayed to listen to the end of the episode: Jenny breaking down in tears for a change. He got out, straightened his jacket – a contemporary tweed, he liked to call it – shot THE LAST TESTAMENT

153

an admiring glance at his vintage Jaguar, polished to a shine, and headed for the reception.

‘Hello again, sir,’ said the guard the instant Henry walked into the Ascentis building. ‘We can’t keep you away, can we?’

‘Oh come on, Tony. Third time this month, that’s all.’

‘Business must be good.’

‘In truth,’ he said, mimicking a courtly bow, ‘I cannot complain.’

At the window, he filled in the air waybill. On the line marked

‘goods’ he wrote simply ‘handicrafts’. For ‘country of origin’, he wrote ‘Jordan’ which was not only true but suitably unremarkable. Imports from Jordan were entirely legal. Asked for his 125

number he wrote down the string of digits Jaafar had given him over the phone. He signed his name as an approved handling agent and slipped the form back under the glass.

‘All right, Mr Blyth-Pullen, I’ll be back in a tick,’ said Tony.

Henry took his usual seat in the waiting area and began leafing through a copy of yesterday’s
Evening Standard
. If he looked relaxed, it was because he felt relaxed. For one thing, he was dealing with the staff of BA, not Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs department.

Sure, Customs would look at the forms but he couldn’t think of the last time they had asked to open anything up, let alone a crate that had been vouched for by a recognized, and highly respectable, agent like him. The truth was, they were not really bothered with the art trade. Trafficking, whether in drugs or people, that was their game. The lead had come from the top. The politicians, pushed by the tabloids, wanted to keep out crack, smack and Albanians –

not the odd mosaic fragment. As Henry had explained to his over-anxious wife more than once, the uniformed men at Heathrow were playing at
The Sweeney
, not
Antiques
bloody
Roadshow
.

Sure enough, Tony soon emerged with a set of papers and his usual smile: Customs must have nodded the forms through. Henry Blyth-Pullen wrote out a cheque for the thirty pounds release fee and went back to his car, waiting, with Radio 4 now deep into an 154

SAM BOURNE

afternoon play, to be called into the secure area. Eventually he was beckoned forward, driving through the huge, high gates until he reached Door 8, as instructed by Tony. Another short wait and soon he was putting a single brown box into the boot of the Jag. One more signature, to confirm receipt, and the shipment was officially signed, sealed, delivered – and one hundred per cent legitimate.

When it came time to open the crate in the back room of his Bond Street showroom, he felt the same pulse of pleasure he experienced whenever a truly special consignment arrived. It was almost sexual, a stirring in the loins, that he had first known as a teenager, smoking an illicit joint at his boarding school. He levered open the top, taking care to avoid the splinters these tea-chests could skewer into your fingers. But his mind itched with that most delicious of questions, known to any child tearing away at ribbons and paper on Christmas morning:
what’s inside?