The Lucifer Network (15 page)

‘I reckon I've got twenty-four hours. They're bound to get the lawyers in before publishing anything this sensitive, which'll make it too late for tomorrow's papers.'

‘But the sooner you get Duncan Waddell involved, the better your chance of surviving the mess,' she insisted.

‘You're right, of course. I'm just putting off the evil moment.' He looked down at his empty glass.

‘S'pose you want me to buy you a whisky to chase that pint down.' She got to her feet.

‘Well it
is
your round . . . And if you can see a sandwich in that cabinet that hasn't curled into a ball, I wouldn't mind it.'

‘I'll tell 'em to fill it with chicken vindaloo,' she muttered, making for the bar.

When she brought it back, it turned out to be tuna mayonnaise. She watched in silence for a minute or two as he ate it.

‘I suppose you could try a transplant,' she said after a while.

‘What are you talking about?'

‘The part of your brain that you use for assessing women. I mean I assume the brain
is
involved at some stage in the process.'

‘Steph . . .' he warned.

‘I mean, this creature – a quick flash of thigh and a “please help me I'm so unhappy” and you're putty in her hands. And that Chrissie . . . How many years was she pulling the wool over your eyes?'

‘Steph, I can do without this.' He glared across the bar which was crowded with a young clientele. All looking so carefree. So
together,
damn them.

‘I think you'd better go and ring the Belfast bully-boy,' Steph told him, forcing a cheer-up smile.

He reached for her hand and squeezed it. ‘Thanks for listening, Steph. You're the best. You know that?'

‘Go on with you. What are friends for?'

They finished their drinks, got up and walked out into the street.

‘Criminals keeping you busy?' Sam asked as they stood on the pavement, delaying the moment of parting.

‘Up to my neck in fascists,' she told him.

‘The Southall bomber . . .'

‘The local station's handling the scene of crime, but Special Branch is trying to establish if there's something wider going on here. There were other incidents on the continent at the same time. Neo-Nazis torched an immigrant hostel in Leipzig – three dead – and in Toulon
some Le Pen supporters smashed up shops belonging to Algerians.'

‘I know. I heard it on the news.'

‘Any connection between the incidents is only speculation so far. We've no intelligence on it.' She kissed him affectionately on the mouth. ‘Now be a good boy and go tell Daddy about the mess you've made.'

He gave her a bear hug.

‘You know the worst thing about it?'

‘What?'

‘The bloody woman thinks I arranged for her dad to be killed.'

She looked at him aghast. ‘You mean you
didn't
?'

He raised an eyebrow, turned and walked back towards Hammersmith, keeping an eye out for a taxi.

Thirty minutes later, he'd broken the bad news to an apoplectic Waddell, collected his car from the side street in Chiswick and returned to his flat. Once inside, he closed the front door and leaned hard against it as if it was his last defence against a vengeful world.

One part of him hated Julie Jackman for tricking him, wanting to string her up. But another part was more offended than hurt, distressed that she'd believed her father's paranoid ramblings rather than his own word.

Half of him sought revenge for what she'd done, the other simply wanted to set her straight. To make her recognise that he wasn't an assassin.

But he needed more from her than that, because the wound she'd inflicted on him affected his pride.

He wanted her to desire him. With the same blundering blindness that had driven him onto the rocks this evening.

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSIONER
for Social Affairs was a woman of boundless energy, an elegant and sophisticated Parisian in her mid-fifties whose paramours had included some of the most senior politicians in France. Her left-of-centre credentials dated back to the barricades in the Paris Latin Quarter in the hot, neo-revolutionary summer of 1968.

Dressed in a crisp, beige suit with a skirt ending just above the knee, she walked the short distance from the metro station to the Brussels headquarters of the Commission. She was entitled to an official car to bring her from her home, but on most occasions she spurned it, preferring to feel the press of ordinary people about her for a few short minutes before plunging into the rarefied world of Euro politics.

This was to be a busy week for Blanche Duvalier. On Wednesday she was to chair a two-day conference on race relations, a subject close to her heart but one of the hardest to deal with. Improving attitudes to the minorities in their midst required more than brave words. Race hate was a sickness endemic to the human species which she'd campaigned against for most of her adult life. Most of
today and tomorrow would be spent in preparation for the conference. Much effort would be needed to prevent it degenerating into pointless polemic.

The entrance to the Commission building was set back from the road under a huge porch which gave shelter from the elements for the official cars as they dropped their passengers at the rotating glass doors. A few more seconds and she would be there.

Walking towards her along the pavement was a woman in her forties with wild brown hair in desperate need of a combing. For a moment Blanche Duvalier thought it was one of the journalists from the diplomatic press corps and began to think of a quote. Then she realised that she didn't know the woman at all. The creature looked an oddity. Face flushed, eyes wide and staring as if driven by some inner demon, her clothes clashed horribly. She was encumbered by shopping bags, the control of which she seemed about to lose as she detached a hand from them to wave it in Blanche's direction. Did she know this woman after all, Duvalier wondered? The Commissioner glanced behind her and quickly realised her mistake. The wave had been directed at the driver of a car which had illegally halted at the kerb a little way behind her. The passenger door swung open.

The woman was only a couple of metres in front of her now, eyes locked on the car, when she began to stumble, tripping over heels far too narrow for speed. Too late to take avoiding action, Blanche Duvalier braced herself for the impact. The woman tumbled against her, making no attempt to prevent a collision, her armful of possessions cascading forward. Duvalier felt a sharp prick as the corner of one of the bags jabbed into her just below her left breast.

‘Merde!'

As the woman grappled for control of her shopping, Duvalier felt a second scratch at her flesh.

‘Eh alors!'

‘Sorry. So sorry.' The woman spoke in English. She regained her balance and hurried on towards the open door of the waiting car.

Instinctively Blanche Duvalier rubbed at the place where she'd been hurt. Her fingers touched moisture and she gasped. She looked down and saw blood on her cream silk blouse and a tiny rip in the fabric.

‘Merde!' she said again, spinning round, ready to confront the ludicrous woman who'd caused the accident, but the car was already easing its way into the traffic.

She looked down at herself again. It was the tiniest of cuts, but the blouse was ruined. Fortunately she kept a spare in the office in case of lunchtime accidents. The blood was continuing to ooze. She took a handkerchief from her handbag, slipped it between the buttons to press against the nick in her skin, then carried on into the Commission building, trying to regain her composure.

She stepped into the elevator and found it occupied by Piers Hyams, her English first secretary.

‘Madame, good day to you,' he began before noticing that all was not well. ‘Something wrong? What happened to you?'

‘Some stupid woman crashed into me on the pavement outside. Had something sharp in one of her bags.' She withdrew the bloodstained handkerchief.

‘Oh good heavens! Do you need a doctor?'

Blanche Duvalier gave him a withering look. ‘Really, Piers! Do I look as if I'm about to faint?'

The young Englishman smiled weakly.

‘But really,' she continued scathingly. ‘There are some people who simply shouldn't be allowed out on the streets.'

Piers Hyams fixed his eyes on the illuminated floor counter above the doors.

‘Madame,' he murmured drily, ‘as Commissioner with responsibility for the elimination of intolerance, let's hope the media haven't bugged this lift.'

London

Sam Packer caught a mid-morning shuttle from Heathrow, glad to be escaping from the recriminations his controller had hurled at him first thing. Depending on what the
Chronicle
published, his employment with the Intelligence Service was now in jeopardy. For much of the flight north he despairingly tried to work out what an ex-spy could put down on his CV.

The flight landed at Glasgow airport at 2.15 and he carried his rucksack straight to the car hire desks to pick up the vehicle he'd reserved. It was a blustery day in Scotland, dark grey boulders of cloud charging across a pallid blue sky. As he stepped out of the terminal the wind hit him, blowing through his brain like a purgative.

The motorway led westwards along the white-flecked Clyde. The tide was low, the green and red channel markers rising out of the river bed like giant salt cellars. On the far bank a shaft of sunlight caught the russet stone of Dumbarton castle atop its rock. At Greenock the road cut inland before emerging on the blustery west coast. A couple of yachts beating the choppy, grey waters between Ayrshire and the Cowal Peninsula had their mainsails reefed hard.

Sam tried to envisage his father coming here twenty-seven years ago but couldn't. Couldn't because his memory of the man had no bones to it. All he had was a naïve eleven-year-old's fantasy of a father's life – heroics beneath the waves, interspersed by short periods at home as head of the family and Sam's temporary ally in a house dominated by women. A figure who bore no relation to the sex pest and spy that others now talked of. Grudgingly he'd accepted that his sister's impressions of the man would have been more sharply formed than his own. She'd been fifteen already when their father died. Foreboding gnawed at him. This investigation looked set to destroy an icon, the only one he'd ever had.

The road wound through trees and suddenly he was at Wemyss Bay where the ferries left for Bute. To the right stood the terminus, a low building with half-timbered gables, a red tiled roof and a clock tower with a sandstone base. As Sam swung the car into the assembly area, a youth in a yellow waterproof came over, leaning into the wind.

‘You for Rothesay?' He hurled the words against the gusts.

‘Yes.'

The marshal pointed to the line of cars at the top of the ramp. Beyond it, the ferry waited, a craft like a large trawler, with funnels each side of the car deck and an ‘A' frame bridging it.

‘Sails in twenty minutes. Tickets in the station.'

‘Thanks.'

Sam parked behind the last car in the row then struggled into the dark blue waterproof he'd brought with him. Inside the terminus, pale green Edwardian ironwork supported a glass roof above a circular concourse. Beyond it the platforms curved towards Glasgow, from where scores of thousands had flocked during the annual holidays
in the inter-war years. A wide, covered ramp swept down from the concourse to the quay, its glazed grandeur more suited to a transatlantic liner journey than a boat trip to the isles.

Would
they
have come here by train twenty-seven years ago, his father and whoever he'd been with? Sam stood by the buffers, looking along the rusty track, picturing a bearded, smiling figure loping towards him, a guilty grin on his face and his arm round some woman who wasn't his wife. It
had
to have been a woman, he'd decided. Why else would he have hung on to the tickets?

He turned and made for the booking office.

The car deck was less than half full when they closed the ramp and slipped the warps. Sam climbed to the upper deck to watch the mainland shore slip away, standing in the shelter of the bridge as other passengers scurried to the saloon to escape the wind. Despite the chop of the sea there was no swell and the ferry cut a smooth track across the water to Bute. A lone yacht braved the gusts with its storm jib up and a small triangle of main.

Five minutes later, when a squall hit the bridge wings, he took the stairs down to the saloon where the small rectangular windows were obscured by salt spray. Teenage boys prodded desultorily at electronic games machines in a corner. From an open serving hatch he bought a cup of tea and a cheese roll and took it to an empty seat. A couple with young children came inside, shivering, all bravely dressed in shorts. It took character to holiday in Scotland in a summer like the one they'd had this year.

As Sam sipped his tea, his mind relived the nightmare of yesterday evening. Half of him still wanted Julie Jackman's blood, the other being consumed with shame at his own stupidity. He wondered if Waddell was getting anywhere stifling the
Chronicle.

He checked his watch. They would be approaching Rothesay shortly. The sun was out again, so he drained his cup and returned to the deck, reaching the railings as the ferry rounded a headland. A line of buoys led into the bay and to the island's only town. Neat brownstone houses stood back from the water, separated from the rocky shore by bright green lawns. A couple of minutes later a loudspeaker announcement summoned drivers to their cars.

From behind the wheel, Sam watched the side ramp drop and the family in shorts amble down it onto the quayside. For now the sun shone strongly, warming the children's legs. He drove ashore, passing a small basin filled with yachts and fishing boats. At the promenade he turned right and found a place to park, trying to decide what to do, trying to guess what his father would have done twenty-seven years ago. If it had been
him
here with a girlfriend, he'd have checked straight into a boarding house and spent the afternoon in bed.