You Will Never Find Me (52 page)

‘Let me put it this way,' said Kidd. ‘Once we were given the news about Professor Statnik and Igor Tipalov being killed in Russia, we had to accept that our intelligence cell's cover had been blown and that Andrei Bobkov would now become a target himself. We therefore decided on a course of preventative action.'

Silence. Mercy and Makepeace exchanged looks.

‘So Bobkov was working for British intelligence,' said Makepeace, ‘rather than under his own steam?'

Nothing from Kidd. Silence, punctuated only by the tapping of his fingers on the leather arms of his chair.

‘The fact that you wanted us to continue to perform normally, as the Met kidnap unit,' said Mercy slowly, thinking out loud, ‘does that mean you
intended
it to look like a botched negotiation?'

Still nothing from Kidd.

‘Was it important for their future safety that the outside world believed that Bobkov senior was shot and Sasha was fatally wounded and DOA at Charing Cross?'

‘I am unable to reveal any MI5 operational detail,' said Kidd, looking her directly in the eye, expressionless.

She smiled at him. He winked, but she wasn't quite sure whether it was that tic of his or if he was confirming her suspicions.

I
t was early afternoon and it still hadn't rained. Boxer and Mercy had been banished to the sitting room by Isabel, who had never mastered the ability to cook and talk at the same time. The television was on, as it was in most UK households during the Olympics. Sweden was playing Argentina at handball, an unlikely attraction, but there was always someone riveted at some point. Three bottles of wine stood on the table, two red and one white, all of which had been opened. Boxer was drinking a beer and Mercy was on her first glass of Rioja.

‘So, you and Isabel,' said Mercy. ‘Four months. That's a record, isn't it?'

‘In the post-Mercy era, yes, it is,' said Boxer. ‘How are you getting on with young Marcus?'

‘No need to make him sound like a schoolboy, just because he's younger than me.'

‘So when do you think you'll be able to take him to SCD 7's Christmas party?' asked Boxer. ‘I can just see him offering the DCS a toke . . . '

‘Don't go there, Charlie,' said Mercy, smiling.

‘You know what I'm saying,' said Boxer. ‘He's a nice guy and he's been good for you, but I know what you're like, and this isn't a career move.'

‘I thought we were having a nice little family gathering where we didn't talk about things like . . . guns under the floorboards, baseball bats and—'

Mercy shut up as Isabel came in with a tray of canapés, told them not to eat them all. The doorbell rang and she asked Boxer to deal with it.

It was Esme. Despite the sun breaking through the clouds, she was wearing a red mac with a matching umbrella.

‘Lost your confidence?' said Boxer.

‘I've tried and been soaked too often this summer,' said Esme, kissing him, handing over two bottles of white Montrachet with a look that told Boxer they were not for sharing.

He opened one and poured her a glass. She went into the kitchen, kissed Isabel and walked straight back out again without offering to help. They went into the sitting room.

The doorbell rang again. Mercy let in Marcus Alleyne. They kissed and hugged each other for a while because Mercy had been away on a course all week and hadn't seen him. He gave her two bottles of red, both 1999
grand cru
burgundies.

‘Where did these come from?' asked Mercy.

‘Well, they didn't fall off the back of a lorry,' said Alleyne. ‘I just put the word out that I wanted to take something special to a party and this is what came back. Don't know anything about it.'

‘What if I told you a hundred and fifty quid a bottle?'

‘I'd say, let's put them by the front door and take them home with us.'

She took him to the kitchen and introduced Isabel, who despite never having met him, kissed him on both cheeks.

‘I'm half-Portuguese,' she said. ‘If you're a friend of my friends you get kissed.'

‘You hear me complaining?' said Alleyne.

They went in to the sitting room, where Mercy gave Boxer the two bottles of wine with a raised eyebrow.

‘Bloody hell,' he said, looking at the labels.

Mercy introduced Esme. Alleyne shook her hand with a quick bow and a grin.

‘You're the fence from Brixton, aren't you?' asked Esme.

‘Me?' said Alleyne, innocent as the day.

‘I was just wondering if you could get me a decent pair of trainers. Size six. Nikes?'

‘Would that be for running, gym or tennis?'

‘I didn't realise it would be
that
complicated,' said Esme. ‘Can we smoke in here?'

‘No,' said Boxer. ‘There's a patio out the back, through the dining room.'

Isabel brought in more canapés and a bottle of champagne.

Her daughter, Alyshia, and her boyfriend, Deepak, arrived as if they'd come straight off a Bollywood movie set. There were more introductions.

‘Is she part Portuguese 'n' all?' asked Alleyne, mesmerised by Alyshia's beauty.

Kisses were exchanged, glasses filled. Isabel came in to drink some champagne. They were waiting for Amy now. Esme headed for the garden. Alleyne joined her. Isabel went back to the kitchen. The smell of weed drifted into the sitting room from outside. Mercy rapped on the French windows.

‘Come on, Marcus,' she said.

‘Don't be such a spoilsport,' said Esme.

Mercy gave her one of her dead-eyed looks and backed away.

The canapés were almost finished when Amy arrived alone. Esme and Alleyne came back into the sitting room, Esme giggling, Alleyne with his beatific Rastafarian grin. Amy was kissed and hugged by everyone and they immediately went in to the dining room to eat. Amy sat next to Mercy, who looked at her, questioning.

‘I got delayed at LOST,' said Amy. ‘You know what it's like.'

‘I thought we were going to meet . . . Josh?'

‘He didn't want to come,' she said, shrugging as if it wasn't her fault.

‘You told him it was informal,' said Mercy, ‘that we weren't going to measure him up for a morning suit.'

‘I told him,' said Amy. ‘He's just being Josh. Which means . . . complicated.'

They started with clams and mussels in white-wine sauce. Boxer took personal charge of Esme's bottle of Montrachet to ensure her exclusivity. The main course was one of Isabel's Portuguese specialities—
borrego assado—
slow-cooked lamb over roast potatoes. They drank the burgundy, which made everything else taste like rubbish afterwards, and Isabel proposed a toast: ‘To families, and to quote Dickens, one of our greatest Londoners, “Accidents can occur in the best-regulated families.”'

They finished with home-made almond tart and ice cream, and Isabel produced a decanter of vintage port.

The television was on constantly, sometimes unwatched and then occasionally drawing half the room.

By evening most people had left. Isabel was taking a siesta upstairs while Boxer, Mercy and Alleyne, having cleared away the tea, had cracked open the beers.

‘You've got to see this,' said Amy from in front of the television. ‘Jessica's running her eight hundred metres now.'

Amy, who had never admitted to admiring anybody, had developed a passion for the British heptathlete Jessica Ennis, not just because of some mixed-race sisterhood, but also because she could see that the success of the London games had fallen squarely on her shoulders. Amy wanted to see Ennis triumph, and when she saw her coming off the final bend and refusing to accept third place, she went delirious.

‘You show 'em, sistah!' she yelled, her fists punching the air, jumping up and down, engulfed by the noise of the crowd roaring in the stadium.

She'd barely recovered when it was Mo Farah's turn to run the ten thousand metres against the Kenyans and Ethiopians, to show that the boy from Hounslow, via Mogadishu, had the right stuff. There wasn't a moment in the race when any one of ten men couldn't win it, until the bell for the final lap, when eighty thousand people stood up in the stadium, along with twenty million in their homes, and decided that this was Mo's moment. They turned the sound up for the last lap, and Boxer, Amy, Mercy and Alleyne were screaming and leaping, hollering and roaring at the top of their lungs. GO, MO! GO, MO! GO, MO! They lost themselves in the euphoria of the moment, in a noise so loud they couldn't hear each other shout, the four of them jumping up and down together, in unison with the tumult.

‘Did we win something?' asked Isabel, bewildered, stumbling into the room.

Acknowledgements

 

This is not so much an acknowledgement but more an admission of a huge debt and a massive gap in my life. Those of you who notice these things will have seen on the dedication page that my wife of twenty-seven years passed away after a hard-fought and courageous battle against leukemia. This was the last book she worked on. Her first symptoms started the day after we sent
You Will Never Find Me
to Orion.

It's no exaggeration to say that Jane made me into the writer I am today. She helped with research, she was a brilliant sounding board for ideas, and she was my first reader. She taught me how to write female characters, what to cut and what worked, and she told me the brutal truth, but . . . with love. In the long process of writing she always encouraged me and gave me total support. She was an instinctive editor because she was a voracious reader (she'd ‘done' the Russians by the age of twelve when I'd barely started on the English) and she had phenomenal judgement. She was also tireless. She read and re-read my work over and over and it didn't leave the house until we were both satisfied.

When asked what on earth she did out in the depths of rural Portugal while I was writing she always replied very modestly: ‘I do the stroking.'

I'll miss all that stroking.

She will always be in my heart.

Robert Wilson was educated at Oxford University. He has written twelve novels, of which
A Small Death in Lisbon
won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel of the Year and the International Deutsche Krimipreis. He was also shortlisted in 2003 for
The Blind Man of Seville
, the first in the Javier Falcón series.
The Vanished Hands
won the Gumshoe Award for Best European Crime Novel.