Confessor (3 page)

Showered, shaved, for the first time in four days, and smelling slightly of a cologne he had not used in weeks, Herbie Kruger came downstairs to the aroma of bacon and eggs. He had changed into a pair of slacks that, while still a shade loose around the waist, looked as though they almost fitted him. The shirt and jacket he had also put on did seem a trifle large. He had a lot of weight to reclaim, or a new wardrobe to buy.

Worboys had driven into Lyndhurst and bought bacon, eggs, sausages and a decent coffee. He stood at the stove, spatula in one hand, frying pan in the other. “Welcome to the best breakfast you’ve had in weeks,” he cheerily greeted Herbie, as though the kitchen belonged to him alone.

Kruger swallowed hard, bile in his mouth, for he had eaten little of late. The alcohol, in its strange way, had sustained him while it drained away energy.

The first few mouthfuls were difficult, but at last his stomach settled, and by the time he had done away with three eggs, two sausages and four rashers of bacon, he even began to feel a little like his old self. So much so that he started to grieve for Gus Keene.

“So, give me my marching orders.” A touch of the old confidence.

Now Worboys spelled it out for him, just in case he had missed it the first time. Gus’s car had gone off the road and exploded. Herb had to see the Plod, take a look at the site, hear the story, then come to London and sit with the captains and the kings. Tell them the tale in his own words. Speak to them in tongues and let them hear how he saw it.

“Okay, I got to talk with the local Plod. Which local Plod?”

“Salisbury. A Detective Inspector, name of Roach …”

“Bet they call him ‘Cock.’ Provincial Plod is usually predictable, ja?”

“Probably, Herb, but listen. You’ll have to drive to Salisbury. See the Plod, see where Gus died and then come back to the office, okay?”

“I should go and see Carole?” Herb asked. Gus’s widow haunted his mind. He thought he knew what a widow must feel when this thing called death struck so unexpectedly.

“The Chief went down an hour ago, Herb. Went down with one of the girls. Stay away for a while. Let’s see what we’ve got here: accident or malice aforethought.”

“Murder most foul.” Kruger had already made up his mind.

“
NOT MUCH CALL FOR
you fellows these days, I suppose?” Detective Inspector Roach, a tall, thin man, all angles and sharp features, was trying to make polite conversation as they drove to the accident site between Salisbury and the old garrison town of Warminster.

“So they say.” Herbie felt sick, troubled and noncommittal. His head still ached; what he had already seen made him want to throw up. What was left of Gus Keene’s car had been towed into the big garage behind the Salisbury police station, and the picture of that would remain in his mind for a long time. A pile of blackened, twisted scrap metal from which no human could have got out alive. Death at the snap of fingers. There one minute, gone the next in a tangle of flame and steel. Forensics were going over it with their plastic bags, scraping here and there, examining and measuring, combing through the wreckage like buzzards.

Herb had also read the two statements that DI Roach placed before him, like an acolyte opening the gospel for a priest.

The first was signed by William Dunne, a Military Police sergeant on attachment to one of the many units stationed in the town of Warminster, which, being adjacent to Salisbury Plain, has known the presence of soldiers for centuries.

Sergeant Dunne had been driving back to his barracks following an evening spent with a young lady in Salisbury. About a mile from the small village of Wylye, on the Warminster Road, he had seen a car half pulled off on the grass verge. Being a man of instinctive powers of observation, he had identified the vehicle as a Rover with the registration number ED439B. In plain language, Gus Keene’s car. Two men stood talking near the front of the Rover, and both had turned their backs to his headlights as he passed. The time was four minutes to three in the morning.

The second statement told how a Mrs. Doreen Hood, who lived in one of the cottages on the outskirts of Wylye, had been awakened by what she called “a terrible bang”—a phrase that had caused much ribald comment among the police who knew Mrs. Doreen Hood’s mode of life, which involved many hours in bed with numerous local worthies. On looking from her window, Mrs. Hood saw the car, later identified as Gus Keene’s Rover, engulfed in flame, lying on its side a good five meters off the road. “It was one of them explosions like you see at the pictures: in those Arnold Schwartzanagle’s films. Like
Legal Weapon
.” It was Mrs. Hood who telephoned for police and ambulance. They had logged the time as three-oh-four in the morning. It was summer. July. The date/time was on the tape, spoken by an electronic voice. Such is progress.

DI Roach drove with the immense care of a police officer out to teach by example. In truth, Kruger interested him, for he was the first member of the SIS Charlie Roach had ever come across. “You weren’t born in England, were you?” he asked.

Kruger gave not a flicker of a smile. “Thought I’d fooled you.”

“I detected an accent. I suppose during the Cold War you spent time abroad?” Abroad for DI Roach really meant package deals to Malta or Marbella, but he was aware of the dark freezing days when secret men and women plied their trade across the Berlin Wall. Like millions of others, he had read
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, so he knew it all. Now he glanced at the big man with a drawn and haunted face. In the wink of an eye, he saw Herbie in the shadows of ruined Berlin, or stepping from a doorway like Orson Welles in
The Third Man
. “It must be an adventurous life,” he added.

“Sure. Dead adventurous. I still go abroad. More call than you’d think for people like me. Even now.”

“Really? I’ve always wondered what it was like. Spying and that.”

“Not what it’s cracked up to be.” Herb stared straight ahead. They were approaching the place where Gus Keene’s Rover had gone off the road. He knew this particular route as well as the lines on his own hand.

The gray stone of Wylye village lay ahead. They were deep in the Wylye Valley, which is not as beautiful as it sounds. The river is more of a brook for most of the way, pollarded willows dotting its banks, which stretch out indefinitely into little pools of marshland. On some days the view could be downright depressing. Herb hardly ever passed this way without hearing words about a willow aslant a brook, and thinking of dead, drowned Ophelia.

In a couple of minutes he was standing in the open, looking at the deep dark scars in the grass where the Rover had plowed in and blown up. DI Roach heard the choke in the back of the tall man’s throat, and the look of grief spread like blood across his face.

“You knew the gentleman well?” Roach asked, as though he had to make conversation.

“Alas poor Gus. I knew him, Inspector. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?”

“Your what?”

“He’ll be mourned by many.” Herb simplified it.

The drive to London was slow and infuriating. Herbie had the radio on and there was some panic. Two mainline railway stations had been bomb targets. The FFIRA had telephoned code words two minutes before the devices blew, killing seven and injuring two dozen more.

In the center of London’s West End two other bombs had exploded in cars—one carrying an American official to the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the other taking a senior diplomat to Heathrow Airport. Both men and their drivers had been killed. The names would not be released until the families had been informed. The FFIRA had made a second statement, declaring that they had had nothing to do with the car bombs.

“So that’s it,” Herbie said later to those assembled on the fifth floor. “No skid marks. No sign old Gus had to throw out the anchors. Just a couple of long deep ruts in the grass, then a wet burned patch. More like the car was detonated. Looked like a mortar bomb hit, not a car accident.”

“It’s what the local law are saying.” Worboys looked down at the typewritten pages already stacking up in their red card folder. “Jesus, poor old Gus.”

“Also, they’re saying identification’s going to be difficult.” Herbie steepled his fingers.

Tony Worboys nodded and looked, as if for help, around the room. The Chief was still down at Warminster, comforting the bereaved, but he had called two other people in to listen to Herbie. They were in a kind of shock, for Herbie had been right about Gus being mourned by many. They all knew they had lost a part of themselves—something that often happens with an unexpected death.

Four of them, including Herb and Worboys; Martin Brook, portly, bespectacled, owlish, once Gus Keene’s pupil, now his successor, and a young man from Registry called Angus Crook, who held a thick buffcolored folder containing a printout of Keene’s record. Worboys’s eyes settled on Crook. “Identifying marks?” he asked, as though this were a real question.

“If he’s been burned to a frazzle, there’s going to be no way.” Crook was an earnest young man; a computer wizard, which is the main required skill for people who work in Registry these days. Nowadays you fed subjects into a computer that asked for code words and clearances before it spat out documents, and the SIS Registry was safe as proverbial houses because it was cut off from the world of modems and easy access by computer hackers. It had also led to many redundancies, for Angus ran the place with the aid of one other officer and three female Registry Clerks, who were also computer experts. Those in the know called them the Secret Five.

“They’re going to be hard put to.” Crook had a gruff Scottish accent, which some said was an affectation. “If Gus is now just burned bone, they’re not going to make a positive on him. Bits of wristwatch. Maybe some coins.”

“Surely dental records …?” Worboys began, but Crook smiled grimly and shook his head. “That’s for thrillers. Gus had perfect teeth. All his own. Never saw a dentist in his life as far as I can see.”

Martin Brook got up and walked to the window, looking down the river Thames from this perch above London. “So, what’s the drill, Tony?”

“The drill?” Worboys shrugged. “The drill is that we really don’t want the law scratching deeply into Gus’s life. The Chief’s insistent on that. He says I have to do a deal.”

“Call off the Plod and use one of our own sleuths?” Brook queried.

“Call off the Plod and use Herb.”

Kruger growled, “Now I play Sherlock?”

“That’s the way it goes. Our Lord and Master is talking to the Chief Constable of Wiltshire e’en as we speak, but that won’t keep everyone off our necks.” Worboys looked hard at Kruger. “So, give it to us, Herb. Words of one syllable, eh? Your immediate thoughts.”

“Alka-Seltzer and a long lie-down.”

“Immediate thoughts about Gus.”

“Impressions?”

“Impressions, Herb.”

“I believe he’s dead. I seen the car. I seen where he went off the road.”

“But you have reservations?”

“Many. Gus, or I presume Gus, was seen pulled off the road talking with someone a few minutes before it happened. No skid marks. Road as dry as dust. Deep ruts into the grass—not skids, but ruts. Heavy, like he drove straight off, then boom.”

“Boom?”

“Boom, as in, shit, I’m on fire and the car’s in little pieces. Shouldn’t be surprised if Gus was also in little pieces. When we get the medical stuff? Autopsy?”

“Maybe later today. If we’re lucky.”

“You think he was definitely pushed, then?”

“’Course he was pushed. Old Gus wouldn’t just drive off a road only ten minutes from home and detonate himself into oblivion. If Gus wanted out, he’d make it stick like a real accident, if only for the insurance. For Carole.”

“Then who’d want to do away with old Gus?” Worboys said it quietly, as though he were not really asking.

“You want a head count?” Herbie prized himself out of his chair. “How many people did Gus put in the pokey during his long and varied career? How many secrets he take to the grave, eh?”

Martin Brook turned back into the room. “He was writing his memoirs, Tony. People still alive, gentlemen in England, now abed, would possibly get their names all over the Sunday funny papers. There’s motive for you.”

“Sure.” Herb sounded as though he did not believe a word of it.

One of the six telephones on Worboys’s desk began to chirp.

It was the Chief, calling from Warminster. Worboys covered the mouthpiece with his right hand and whispered, “Wants to talk with you, Herb.”

“Yes, Chief.” There were no jokes and no tripping over his English. It was all business, a serious, sober Kruger. They all felt the change, and heard the grave note in his voice.

At last Herbie put down the telephone and turned to look each of them in the eye. He blinked once before speaking. “He called me Herbie, and he’s new to the beat.”

“He’s a quick study.” Brook grinned.

“It seems that I am to be dear Gus Keene’s vengeance.” Even Worboys shuddered at the way Herbie spoke. Only a couple of times in his long dealings with Kruger had he heard the big man talk like this. On both occasions there was hell to pay.

“The Chief says I can have anyone and anything I want as long as I find out the why and the who. I tell you exactly what I want, Tony. Okay?”

“Okay, but you’ll get an anti-terrorist copper in tow, sooner or later. Possibly sooner.”

“I’ll have to live with that, then, won’t I?”

Kruger spent the night at a safe house he had known for years. A tall, narrow four-story place in a pretty little square behind Kensington High Street. It was there that, in his own way, he mourned the death of Gus Keene and reflected on his own mortality.

Before going across the river to Kensington, he had spoken to the Chief, who called from Warminster. “I’m not going to ask you to sign on again, Herbie,” the Chief said. “Though we’ll give you anything you want. I’m just concerned about finding the truth of this business. You think it was an accident?”

“No.” Herbie’s replies were now mostly monosyllabic.

“Suicide?”