David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (27 page)

       
“He hadn’t only been
shot at,”
Chaston
said. “In fact, he was bleeding to
death. And what about his language skills? Was he a native English speaker?”

       
“I don’t know,” Melissa
said. “I don’t know his full background. But it sounded like English might not
have been his first language. I couldn’t be sure.”

       
“Where are you going
with this?” Hardwicke said.

       
“Well, sir, if you take
two days and add it to ‘close down’ the government, do you know what you get?”
Chaston
said.

       
Hardwicke stopped the
paperclip’s motion dead.

       
“The State Opening of
Parliament,”
Chaston
said. “The beginning of the new
Parliamentary year.
All the MPs.
The Lords. The
bishops.
The most senior judges.
Not to mention Her
Majesty.
All together, in the same place, an iconic location,
up to their necks in pomp and ceremony.
Can’t you just hear the
terrorists drooling?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Deputy DG had said he wanted Melissa and me to get to the bottom
of how the
caesium
had been stolen as a matter of
urgency. He’d made that very clear, so I expected us to head straight over to the
hospital when the meeting finally wrapped up and start digging. But Melissa had
other ideas. She thought she could turn more up from the office, via the
computer and the phone. And this time, she didn’t invite me to sit with her.

       
There was nothing inherently
suspicious about that. Plowing two furrows in parallel can be an effective
strategy. But when someone’s
behaviour
unexpectedly
changes, it makes me wary. And when I added that to her unexplained absence
after our last meeting at Thames House, my sixth sense went into overdrive. So
I may have agreed to go to St Joseph’s right away on my own and start the
groundwork, but I didn’t actually leave the building. I set myself up in an
empty meeting room diagonally opposite the office Melissa shared with Jones. I
jammed the door open a tiny crack, just wide enough that I could see out but no
one could see in. And I settled down to watch.

       
Jones came into the
corridor three times in the next hour. Twice he returned.
Once
with coffee.
Once with an armful of red folders.
And while he was gone the final time, Melissa appeared. She was wearing a coat,
but didn’t turn right, towards the exit. She went further into the building and
then through an unmarked door, which I knew led to a set of stairs. If she went
down, she’d end up in the basement. And in the basement, she’d have access to
any of the vehicles in the car pool.

       
I hailed a cab directly
outside, on
Millbank
, and had the driver loop round
into
Thorney
Street and stop where I could see the
exit from Thames House’s garage. A pair of Fords pulled out almost immediately,
followed by a Jaguar, but
all three were driven by men
.
An unmarked van was the next to leave. I couldn’t see who was inside it, but my
gut told me to ignore it. I was beginning to wonder if I’d made the right
choice – and the cab driver was becoming increasingly anxious, but for a
different reason – when a bottle green Land Rover Discovery cautiously
nosed out into the street ahead of us. It sped up once it reached the top of
the ramp, but I had enough time to confirm it was Melissa behind the wheel.

       
We followed as she
turned right onto
Horseferry
Road, then left onto
Millbank
and along towards the Houses of Parliament. The
traffic was light so we had no trouble keeping up as she crossed into Whitehall,
and only fell four cars back as she skirted Nelson’s column and started up the
east side of Trafalgar Square. My driver was taken by surprise, though, when
she lurched without warning into the mouth of William IV Street and came to a
sudden stop. I told him to keep going for another hundred yards, and then made
my back down the other side of
Charing
Cross Road on
foot.

       
A gaggle of people had
formed outside the box office for the Garrick Theatre, so I joined in the
middle of them and kept an eye on the Land Rover. Melissa was still in the
driver’s seat. She was sitting completely
still,
looking to her right, back the way she’d come. I had no idea what she was
watching for, though. She could have been checking for a tail. Observing a
suspect. Waiting for a contact.
Or just getting away from the
office for a nervous breakdown.
Nothing in the pattern of people or
vehicles in the vicinity gave me any clue. I was still none the wiser fifteen
minutes later when she climbed down from the vehicle. She made a show of
locking the door, but I knew she was really scanning for anyone paying her too
much attention. Then she walked across to a broad glass cylinder that sprouted
from the pavement – the modern entrance to the ancient crypt of St
Martin-in-the-Fields church – and disappeared through the door.

       
I waited two minutes,
then
followed. There was no sign of Melissa near the bottom
of the spiral staircase, or in the church’s gift shop. That left two options:
the bathroom; or the cafe, which filled the crypt itself. There could be a
perfectly innocent explanation for visiting either place. And both would be
ideal locations for a covert rendezvous.

       
It would have been
impossible for me to go into either area without being seen, so I made my way
over to a woman who was taking photographs of a set of brass plaques that were
leaning against the base of the left hand wall.

       
“Excuse me,” I said.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve got a real problem. I was wondering if you
could help me?”

       
“I can’t spare any
money,” she said. “Sorry.”

       
“Money? No. It’s more
awkward that. I’m here with my girlfriend. She loves this place – the
vaulted ceiling, the golden light, all those kind of things, and
..
.”

       
“I don’t see any
girlfriend.”

       
“Well, no. She’s hiding
in the bathroom. Because what happened is, when we arrived just now, she
thought she saw her ex husband go into the cafe.
He’s –
well, bad news.
There’ve been some stalking issues. The police have been
involved. There’ve been court orders. I won’t bore you with the details. But the
thing is, I need to know if he’s in there. If he is, we’ll just leave. Avoid
any trouble. But I can’t go and look myself. He’d see me. And obviously Marie
can’t.”

       
“So what do you want me
to do?”

       
“Well, I was thinking,
if I show you his picture, would you mind just popping your head round the
door, and seeing if you
recognise
him?”

       
“That’s a little weird.
But I suppose I could.”

       
“Thank you,” I said,
pulling my phone out my pocket and opening the photograph folder. “I really
appreciate it. Now, let’s try and find a recent one.”

       
I fiddled with the phone
for another thirty seconds,
then
threw up my hands.

       
“Oh, this is
ridiculous,” I said. “Of course. After the last incident, Marie made me delete
them all. There are none left. Not even old ones. This isn’t going to work.”

       
“Oh well,” the woman
said. “Sorry I can’t help.”

       
“No, wait. Here’s an
idea. How about this? How about I give you my phone, and you take a couple of
pictures inside the crypt?
Just a few random shots.
Tourists are always taking photos in there.”

       
“No way. I can’t do
that. It’s too weird.”

       
“Why not? Please. You’ve
already been taking pictures. You’re obviously good at it. It’ll only take a
minute. And if I can’t convince Marie that John’s not here, she might never
come out of the bathroom. We could be here for days.”

       
“Well, OK. I’ll take two
pictures for you. I’ll give it thirty seconds, max.”

       
“That’s great. Thank
you. I really appreciate it. I’ll wait here in case Marie panics and tries to
make a run for it.”

       
In the end, the woman was
in the cafe for three minutes. She took seven pictures. She told me she thought
the single men in two of them looked dangerous. But it was the shot of a couple
sitting at a high table against a pillar at the far side of the room that
interested me. One of the people was Melissa. The other was a woman I’d never
seen before. She was dressed more smartly and was older, maybe in her fifties.
And even though it was a still photo, you could see they were arguing.

Melissa was the first of the pair to leave. She paused in the doorway
of the entrance cylinder and scanned the area, then walked a little stiffly
back to the Land Rover. She started the engine, but didn’t pull away. She just
sat until the other woman appeared, five minutes later, and watched as she lit
a cigarette then turned left and headed towards The Strand.

       
It was interesting that
Melissa waited, I thought.
And also inconvenient.
Because it meant I couldn’t follow her lunch companion.

       
I had to be content with
emailing the picture of the two women to my control in the hope that the
stranger could be identified, and was weighing up whether to walk to St
Joseph’s or take a cab when my phone rang. It was Melissa.

       
“How’s the rest of your
morning been?” she said. “Find anything out?”

       
“Nothing concrete,” I
said. “I thought I might be onto something, but I hit a block in the road. How
about you?”

       
“Up and down. I’ve come
up with something that might help us, though. The name of a woman at the
hospital I think we should talk to. I’m on my way over, now. Where should I
meet you?”

       
“I’m not actually at the
hospital yet.”

       
“You’re not? Where are
you, then?”

       
“Well, what you said
about working on the background got me thinking. About the detail of some of
those old fraud cases I claimed to know all about. I
realised
I was little rusty. I thought it might be an idea to brush up a little before
diving in the deep end.”

       
“That’s smart. You’re
not still at Thames House, are you?”

       
“No. I needed some old
notes I’d made.”

       
“So you’re at
Tottenham
Court Road?”

       
I had to think before I
replied. There are entry and exit logs at all Navy buildings. They’d show I
hadn’t set foot in the place, and if she
was
getting
access to information about me in the same way I was about her, she’d know if I
lied about being there.

       
“No,” I said. “I’m at
home. The notes I’m taking about aren’t exactly official copies, if you know
what I mean.”

       
“I do know,” she said.
“And that’s no problem. I’ll swing by and pick you up. What’s your address?”

       
“What do you mean,
‘swing by?’”

       
“Didn’t I tell you? I’ve
got my hands on a vehicle.”

       
“You didn’t. What do you
need one for?”

       
“Well, I figured if
we’re going to question this woman,
we’ll
need some
privacy. I’d hoped we could steal a room at the local nick for half an hour or
so, but they knocked me back. I don’t want to drag her all the way to
Millbank
, so I had an inspiration. Borrow a surveillance
vehicle. We have ones with built-in cameras and recorders.”

       
Melissa said she could
be outside my building in ten minutes, which made me
realise
two things. I’d have to hurry, to get there before her. And either I was
barking up the wrong tree, or she was better at covering her tracks than I’d
given her credit for.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Melissa guided the Land Rover into a service bay on Silk Street - the
closest point to my apartment in the Barbican you can easily reach by car - and
slid across into the passenger seat.

       
“I think you better
drive, David,” she said, as I climbed on board. “No offense, but if you walk up
to a strange woman in the middle of the street and ask her to get in a car with
you, she’s more likely to call the police or run away screaming.”