Gregory's Game (18 page)

They'd kept in touch for a while, but, like his teachers and his school friends, such as they were, it was as though they'd just been his caretakers until he could take care of himself.

It was sad, he thought. She'd have made a good mother, had she had the right child.

‘I met Mae in Singapore,' he said. ‘Michelle, she was then. Turned up on the arm of some Soviet big wig. It was just after the wall came down. Gorbachev was making eyes at Maggie Thatcher and the Cold War was in its last throes. So that was before you got your mucky paws on her.'

‘My paws were never mucky.'

‘Unlike you, I never got close. I think we exchanged three words. But she was like the rest of us. A player. Everywhere you looked, there was Mae, blonde, brunette, redhead. Always on the move, always with an eye for the next big thing. Age is a cruel thing, Nathan. Age and time.'

Nathan laughed. ‘Are you getting sentimental?'

‘Only occasionally. Nostalgic, maybe. Ever think the world is too complicated now? I find myself craving simpler times, when I had a fair idea of what I was against and who I'd have to kill to keep the status quo.'

‘It was never simple,' Nathan said. ‘Never black and white, not really. It was always Technicolor messy.'

Maybe he was right, Gregory thought. Outside the day was still a misty grey, damp and cheerless, but the fields were gone now and the road was widening out. Grey buildings replaced faded, wintry trees. They'd spend the night in one of the chain hotels where no one remembered anyone and then move on again. Tomorrow, they'd be seeing Bernie Franks and, hopefully, another piece of the puzzle would be joined.

He thought about Katherine Marsh and her child, wondering again what was really going on and where they were tonight.

I
t was the silence that was so oppressive, Kat thought. Church Lane had been quiet, with thick walls keeping what little country noise there was at bay, and for a while she had found that oppressive too. But then she had grown used to the creaks and groans of old timbers, the cry of the fox across the fields, and sometimes an owl, off hunting in the twilight. She had learned to map the noises and understand them and the sense of isolation had diminished as a result.

She had been glad, though, when they'd moved back to her old home. She liked to hear the sounds of the occasional car in the street and her neighbours in the garden. It wasn't intrusive – no loud music or screaming kids; it wasn't that kind of street. But it was familiar and ordinary and kind of cosy.

Sitting now on the old mattress, her child sleeping at her side, Kat found she was straining to hear … anything. She'd identified the sound of water – occasional and unclear, lapping rather than running or flowing – and the sound of a far-off train. Once, she thought she had heard a car door slam, but there had been no sound of an engine, so she was no longer sure. She listened for the sound of someone coming back. Willed it and feared it and couldn't decide which was worse; that her abductors would return or that they wouldn't. That she'd be left alone with Desi and they would both die here, slowly starve. She was rationing the food and water, ensuring Daisy drank and ate, but keeping her own intake to a minimum. She had thought about just not eating or drinking, but reason had prevailed. If she collapsed, what would her daughter do?

She tried not to think what would happen if no one came and brought them more supplies. The thought of her child, hungry and thirsty, tore at her; the thought of Desiree dying of hunger or thirst was one she kept pushing determinedly away – but it kept returning, haunting her.

Desi's breathing was soft and even and Kat rose carefully, took the lantern and walked the perimeter of their cell once more. The batteries were going, she noted. She had two more sets, but that was all. As she had done already several times, she glanced back to make sure her child was still sleeping and then turned off the light. The darkness closed around her, like some solid thing.

Kat began to count. She knew it would take her eyes time to adjust to the dark. Would take time to tell if the darkness was as entire and thick as it first seemed. If she could see anything … didn't that mean that light might be seeping in from somewhere?

Three times she had tried this same thing. Turned out the light. Counted to fifty and then one hundred, waiting for a glimmer – of light, of hope, of anything.

Three times there had been nothing. Only the heavy, pervasive black.

Kat looked up, hardly daring to believe. It was so slight she thought she might be mistaken. But no, it was there. High up there was a tiny hint of light – a window, maybe?

Kat's heart beat very fast. She moved back a step or two, moved to the side, shifted forward slowly, trying to get a sense of where the light was coming from and how high up it might be. She realized, abruptly, that this meant there was no roof to their cell. That the light was coming from a window in a wall, outside of this box they had been forced into. If she could climb up …

Desiree woke and began to whine, scared by the sudden dark. Kat switched the lantern back on.

Could she get out? How high were the wooden walls? Higher than she could reach, she knew that. Even standing on the chemical toilet, she'd been unable to touch the top.

But there was light, Kat thought. There was a window. She had no idea how she might make her way out, even less how she'd get Desiree out, but even so, it was a tiny hope.

Kat picked up her little girl and hugged her tight, soothing her. There had to be a way. She was not going to just stay here and die.

T
hursday lunchtime and Jaz and her colleague returned to their little cubby hole of an office and shared sandwiches and chocolate and discussed what they had. The two other officers that had worked with them for part of the morning had been dragged off, one to help with the house-to-house enquiries and one to help hold the line against the sudden rush of reporters who had invaded the professor's quiet street. There had been little in the way of an official statement yet, but Jaz knew that something as big as this would never be kept quiet for long and the link with the earlier murder would be irresistible. The papers and television news would be full of it for a few days. A quick Internet search told her that it had already gone international.

‘If he's got any sense he'll move out,' Fields said.

‘And what if the kidnappers call?'

‘Then it'll go straight to call divert. We'll pick up.'

‘True, but … I don't know. I think if I was him I might want to be there. I wouldn't want to be on my own, but leaving would feel like running away, somehow, or like deserting them, you know?'

Fields nodded. ‘I see what you mean. Hope neither of us ever have to find out what we'd actually do,' she said. ‘Right, what have you got? You show me yours and I'll trade mine.'

We both sound far too cheery, Jaz thought guiltily, but the truth was this was the part of the work she loved doing. ‘You first.'

‘Well, I've got this,' Susan Fields said. ‘But I don't know if it's relevant. I did a search for the use of monofilament, either as a murder weapon or associated with and there are a few instances where fishing twine or similar has been used to tie someone up, usually just because it was available. Mostly, the killings were impulsive. I think it's fair to assume there was some planning in this one – even if they went after the wrong man, and I think that's something we've got to think about seeing as how the professor and his family have been targeted again.'

Jaz nodded. ‘OK, so anything that might link more directly?'

Her colleague hesitated. ‘I don't know, she said. ‘It's a bit far-fetched, maybe, but … Look, I'll just show you the crime-scene photos and you can tell me what you think.'

She brought up two images on to the twin screens in front of her. One was familiar; the kitchen at Church Lane and the body of the estate agent hanging from the tie beam. Jaz winced, unable completely to control the revulsion she felt. She looked at the second picture. It seemed to be an old factory or warehouse of some kind. The body had been hoisted up higher this time, on to some kind of gantry, the arms bound, the body stripped to the waist, the same deep marks on the torso.

No rope, Jaz noted, but apart from that the similarities were striking.

‘This looks old,' she said. ‘It's not a digital image.'

‘No, but there's been a drive to put old case files on the system, going back through the nineties, and this is one of those. We're lucky. It might have taken an age to trawl through the paper files, though we may still have to do that.'

‘So, who died and who did it?'

‘Well that's the thing. I didn't find this on the system. It's not a police file. I did the same kind of lateral search you're doing because, I figured, it would be the kind of thing the media would love if they picked up on it, but this is a bit of an oddity. It was taken in East Berlin in 1994, so just a few years after the wall came down and reconstruction was just getting under way. There were a lot of empty warehouses; a lot of deserted industrial buildings. Contractors moved in to dismantle an old steel works and they found this.'

‘And the dead man?'

‘Well according to the online translator – and my very poor German – the article says he was ex Stasi.'

Jaz stared at the two pictures. ‘If we can access this, then others can too,' she said. ‘It could be just coincidence. I mean, this is, what, twenty years time difference?'

Susan Fields nodded. ‘Like I said, it's a stretch, but …'

Jaz nodded, understanding what she was saying. The two scenes bore so many similarities but differences too and she thought that wasn't just because of the difference between the industrial and domestic settings. ‘What's the context for the article?' she asked and from Susan Fields' grin knew she had asked the right question.

‘Well this picture is from a book written in the late nineties about the reconstruction of East Berlin. There was a chapter about what happened to the Stasi records and this was included. But the picture and some of the material for the chapter came from a PhD dissertation written a few years before – the student gets a credit in the chapter heading. So I chased up the student paper and you know how it is sometimes – I chased the rabbit down the rabbit hole and found that the original source was a now defunct local news sheet. It wasn't even an official newspaper. Apparently, just before the wall came down, there was this mass movement in East Berlin, loads of these little pamphlets springing up all over the place. The Stasi would close one down, make some arrests and another one would spring up. Most were just photocopies, passed out to friends and then left wherever. This PhD student went round collecting as many as he could. He found that a few actually survived the fall of communism, like the one this picture appears in. No one came forward to claim authorship and the paper vanished completely after ninety-six. I guess there wasn't so much to protest about. Whoever he was, he called himself The Gadfly – only in German:–
die Bremse
. Gadflies bite and irritate people, apparently.'

‘And the author of the PhD dissertation?'

‘Well, I did manage to track her down, but she died in a railway accident a couple of years after she got her doctorate.'

‘Convenient,' Jaz commented. ‘And the author of the book?'

‘Is still around, working as a journalist in Bremen.'

‘Might be worth getting in touch,' Jaz said.

‘So, what do you have?'

‘Well, mine is more recent at least. I did a search for abductions that seemed out of kilter. You remember the Gilligan and Hayes thing, the two human rights lawyers who were killed a couple of months back?'

‘I do, but I don't see—'

‘Truthfully, neither do I. It was just on my weird list. But I did a bit of checking anyway and a familiar name came up. Gustav Clay. Wasn't he the guardian of our mysterious Mr Crow?'

‘And Annie Raven,' Susan Fields agreed. ‘But what's his link to Gilligan and Hayes?'

‘Well, that's the thing. He's mentioned in some of the cases they dealt with. He was a diplomat of some kind, we know that, but he seems to have become a consultant after he retired. To be honest, it's all a bit vague. All I've got is the odd news report when what they did made it into the news. But like you said, once you start chasing the rabbit …'

‘And your rabbit hole led where?'

‘Well, you know how Gustav Clay's house was supposed to have been blown up because of a gas leak and the said Mr Clay was believed to have died in said explosion?'

Susan nodded.

‘Well. There's a problem. On day one, because Clay was high profile, it was being looked at as a possible terrorist act. There are reports that Clay's two dogs were found in the garden, shot to death. And there's no mention of finding a body in the wreckage.'

‘It might have taken a while to find him.'

‘True, but by the following morning. First thing the following morning, all reports are talking about a gas leak. The dogs are suddenly killed in the explosion and their owner is found inside. There's only one reference to the dogs being shot and that's put down as being a mistake made by an inexperienced fire officer.'

‘Odd mistake to have made,' Susan commented. ‘Do we have a name for said fire officer?'

‘We do,' Jaz said.

‘Then you'd better go and talk to him. I'll hold the fort here, chase some more rabbits.'

T
oby Parks was off duty and a bit disturbed to find a police officer on his doorstep. He was even more disturbed to find out what she had come for.

‘Look, I was probably a bit green; didn't know what I was seeing, all right? I'd only been on the job a few weeks. The explosion at that house was the biggest thing I'd attended and I got a bit carried away by my own imagination, yeah?'