Jigsaw (7 page)

‘I can imagine.' He thought of a tunnel, people trapped in fiery steel, the terrible claustrophobia of death.

‘The truly puzzling thing is we haven't had any of the usual phone calls. If it was the IRA, they'd have made one of their coded phone calls beforehand, which gives us a few minutes to evacuate people. But this is different. This isn't quite their style. It doesn't seem to be anybody's style, actually.'

‘I want to see the scene, Foxie.'

‘I'm under strict orders to deliver you to Nimmo before you do anything else. He wants to brief you himself.'

Pagan looked from the window. The Rover was on the motorway to central London. ‘Tell me, Foxie. Why am I being resurrected?'

‘Nimmo needs your experience.'

‘Suddenly.' Pagan shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat. He was still cold, despite the heater.

Foxie said, ‘I suspect he's out of his depth and he wants somebody with experience to run the show. Look at it this way, Frank. He can't lose. If you make a success of it, he gets much glory. If you fudge it, he's got himself a whipping-boy.'

‘I'm not whipping-boy material. I bleed easily.'

‘It's politics,' Foxie said.

‘Fuck politics. I've never played politics. I don't have the skills. I'm short on turpitude. I don't do doublespeak. I prefer not to lie. I don't have the qualifications for politics.'

Pagan stared out of the window, brooding, silent, thinking of the explosion in the Underground. After a while he imagined he could hear the sound of people screaming in a dark tunnel. He shut the noise out of his head. Stand back. Keep your cool. If you allow it, you'll become submerged, drawn down into that place where you suffocate. Sometimes you imagine too much.

He turned to Foxie just as the car approached Hammersmith. ‘Have you heard anything about Martin Burr?'

‘I understand he spends half his time down in Hampshire cultivating roses, and the other half at his Knightsbridge place,' Foxie said. ‘Enjoying his retirement by all accounts.'

‘The end of an era.'

‘On with the new,' Foxie said.

‘New doesn't necessarily mean better.'

‘How does one quantify better?'

‘
How does one quantify better?
Who have you been reading recently, Foxie?'

‘Thomas Aquinas. Does it show?'

Pagan sighed and folded his arms. ‘Thomas Aquinas. Stick with spy novels.'

‘They're not the same since the Berlin Wall came down.'

Pagan was swept by a moment of fatigue. ‘Nothing's the same since the Wall came down.'

Foxie stopped the Rover at a traffic light. There was something a little strange in Pagan's mood, he wasn't sure what. As an inveterate Pagan-watcher, he'd seen Frank in many phases. Arrogant. Brutal. Sympathetic. At times even soft-hearted. But now there was a difference about him, an alteration hard to define. He had a wearily defensive air. It was as if he'd come back from his enforced vacation disillusioned by the way he'd been cast aside in the first place, and now he felt vulnerable, bruised by the political shenanigans that had sent him into limbo. Maybe he was wary of his future. He had every right to be, Foxie thought.

He was at Nimmo's whim. And Nimmo's whim was no place to be.

The office was spartan, authoritarian. No family pictures; presumably George Nimmo didn't have a family, or if he did he kept it tucked away in Berkshire or wherever he lived. No paintings on the walls. No pictures of Nimmo gabbing with the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary. No diplomas. No framed thank-you letters from grateful charities. Alone, waiting for Nimmo to appear, Pagan reflected on the strange blankness of the room. You could deduce nothing about the inhabitant from this place. It was a long cold box, a deep-freeze. It contained a plain desk, bookshelves of law volumes, a black leather swivel-chair. An ascetic's room, a dedicated civil servant's room – where was the untidy array of papers, the stuffed in-tray, the general dishevelment that had characterized Martin Burr's reign? He had a quiet surge of affection for Martin just then. Burr had been approachable, a friend. Burr had often put his neck on the guillotine for Pagan.

This place unnerved Pagan even as he tried to remain aloof from the prospect of seeing George Nimmo. Their last encounter had been marked by Nimmo's offhand hostility. We will try to find a place for you in the new scheme of things, Frank. I can't promise it will be easy or quick. Blah blah blah. The boot was the boot, Pagan thought, no matter what you called it. The swift kick in the anus.

Pagan drummed his fingers on the side of his chair and looked up at the ceiling. It was typical of Nimmo to keep you waiting. He wanted to give the impression that he'd squeezed you in between more urgent business.

When the door opened Pagan didn't turn to look. He didn't get up from his chair. Nimmo walked past him to the desk and sat down. ‘How was your holiday, Frank?'

A holiday, Pagan thought. So that was what Nimmo was calling it. He looked at Nimmo, who was a big man with an air of blustery congeniality that might deceive an innocent into thinking he was not only human but quite affable besides. The soft round pink face, the pendulous lower lip, the high forehead. Nimmo's hair was unruly, curly, touching the collar of his jacket. Probably the hairstyle hadn't changed much since prep school. You could see on his face the ruins of childhood, a ghost of the boy he'd been, the kind of kid who tries to befriend everyone and yet somehow always fails, despite favours and gifts. He might have been cherubic in those days, with soft-cheeked choirboy features. This lapsed boyishness was altogether misleading, a useful disguise.

‘My holiday was fine, Mr Nimmo,' Pagan said. He'd maintain an equilibrium here, a forced politeness. If he yielded to any other kind of behaviour, if he loosed his cannons of complaint and anger, he'd drop points to Nimmo, and that was unthinkable.

‘Come, Frank. Don't be so formal. George.' Nimmo, who mistook light sarcasm for propriety, laughed. He had a professional laugh, one that was rooted not in mirth but in expediency. Some people fell for it. Some people thought the laugh contagious and were confused into thinking Nimmo a merry soul. ‘Europe, wasn't it? France? Switzerland?'

‘Italy. Switzerland. Germany. Austria. Finally Ireland.' Pagan wondered what would happen if he were to whip out a hundred holiday snapshots and flash them at George.
This is the centre of Dijon, and that's me holding a pot of the local mustard. And this is the Floriani Wine Bar in the Hotel Weitzer in Graz. And here I am standing in front of the Bayerischer Hof in Lindau, freezing my arse
.

‘Switzerland,' said Nimmo, as if that was all he'd heard of Pagan's itinerary. ‘I have always admired the Swiss. Much to be said for neutrality, of course.'

This was a very Nimmolike statement. He peppered his speech with unassailable
of courses
, and had the odd verbal mannerism of dropping the sound
yo
into his sentences the way some people might say
um
or
er
. Pagan supposed this was an affectation from public school or university. Perhaps Nimmo considered it an endearing little eccentricity.

‘You wonder why I have had you returned to the fold,' Nimmo said. He looked suddenly like a quiz-master awaiting a response.

‘I saw the newspapers,' Pagan said.

‘We have a situation.'

A situation? Pagan thought. Nimmo could have made Hiroshima sound like a fireworks display.

‘A very bad situation. And I want you to handle it, Frank.'

‘Why me?'

‘No need for false modesty. You have experience in this field.'

‘What field?'

Nimmo put the smile on again. ‘Are you trying to make this difficult for me?'

‘On the contrary, George,' Pagan said. He heard an edge of irritation in his own voice. ‘I'm asking a straightforward question. What field? My expertise is in counter-terrorism. But I understand no group has come forward to take credit, if that's the word, for the explosion. And since that's the case, how can you be sure we're dealing with organized terrorism here?'

‘Who else would bomb a bloody train, for God's sake? My money is squarely on this being the IRA. It has IRA written all over it.'

‘Maybe. But you could come up with a number of candidates for this one. A lone madman. A psychopath with some kind of bomb and a massive grudge against London Transport. There are some weirdly disaffected people in this world. They get very pissed off because fares are going up or trains don't run on time, or because they've been fired from their job as a ticket clerk. They begin to be obsessed and before long you've got a deranged person with a hugely destructive rage. There are some off-the-wall loonies in the quietest of suburbs. Strange men in string vests and combat jackets are patiently building tiny bombs in their garden sheds even as we sit here. You know that. I know that. So why do you assume this to be an act of the IRA or any other terrorist group?'

‘Some assumptions
need
to be made. We cannot go around whistling in the dark, Frank.'

‘In my experience, organized terrorists always claim responsibility. There's hardly ever an exception. They're in the business of making statements, violent statements, and it does them no damn good to carry out the violence without claiming it. It doesn't fulfil them. It doesn't satisfy them.'

Nimmo was quiet a moment. He clasped his fleshy hands on the desk and looked aggravated by Pagan's tone of voice. ‘Frank, Frank. Let's clear the air. I understand you think you've been wronged. I don't condemn you for your sense of injustice. I sympathize with it. You feel you were unjustly discarded. It was not an easy decision for us to make. Reorganization often entails difficult adjustment.'

Difficult adjustment, Pagan thought. He stared at Nimmo. You'll never know, George.

‘But what you perceive as exile was nothing more than, yo, a temporary business. We put you on hold, of course. I am not denying that. I admit it might have been done with more, shall we say, finesse. But it was not my decision alone, Frank. Contrary to popular belief, I don't make decisions in a vacuum. I consult. I inquire. I survey. That is the way business is done around here now.'

‘By consensus.'

‘As you say. Some of your colleagues, even those who express admiration for you, admit to a certain suspicion that you are not
entirely
a team player. I think you would agree with that assessment. And in a world of team players, the man who likes to carry the ball alone is sometimes suspect. You have an inclination to do things your own way. This tempered the decision to put you on hold. Keep that in mind, Frank. It was never the intention to discard you permanently. Far from it.'

A world of team players, Pagan thought. He wondered if he wanted to live in it. It suggested drab conformity, a deadening of initiative. Men of little flair compensated for their failure of imagination by banding together in castrated herds that called themselves committees.

Nimmo said, ‘And now we have a situation that we believe will suit your talents.' He opened a drawer absently, glanced inside, closed it again. ‘I think you are the best man to deal with this affair.'

A little chilly flattery. Pagan wasn't buying it. It was too late in the day to be convinced that Nimmo felt even the smallest regret that an injury had been done. Besides, with all his talk of team players, it was clear that Nimmo didn't accept total responsibility for the banishing order. He was too shifty for that, too cunning. He spread the blame around in a tidy fashion. But it was hard to shovel shit without some sticking to you.

‘Isn't MI5 in on this?' Pagan asked. ‘I thought counter-terrorism fell into their domain.'

‘They're sniffing around, of course. But as you just pointed out, there has been no terrorist claim. Consequently, no terrorist organization is as yet
officially
responsible. So our friends see it for the moment as, yo,
more or less
a police matter. We may have interference. They are not uninterested, naturally. They have an eye on the situation.' Nimmo got up and walked to the bookshelves and gazed at the volumes. He plucked at his fleshy lower lip. Pagan thought there was an element of the fallen angel about Nimmo. He'd made commitments to a variety of devils.

‘I have never subscribed to the idea that counter-terrorist activity should be the exclusive domain of intelligence, Frank. And it isn't just MI5. You have a plethora of groups with their finger in the terrorist pie. The Defence Intelligence Staff. Army Intelligence Corps. Joint Intelligence Committee. The list goes on. I have always advocated that a single unit should be responsible for that area. Namely, Special Branch. We are just as well equipped as anyone else to handle everything. I have always said so. Mine has been, alas, a solitary voice in the clamour of Whitehall.'

Ah. A light dawned on Pagan, a penny dropped. He understood now. Nimmo perceived this disaster as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, a chance to show those who made major decisions along Whitehall that the police could cope as well as anyone, thank you. Nimmo saw this tragedy as a canvas on which he might, yo, inscribe his own florid signature.
George Nimmo. Look at me! I exist!
Why am I not surprised? Pagan wondered. The callous heart of the base human need for self-aggrandizement. The sorry desire for approbation, no matter what. He suspected Nimmo had been beaten up at school, bullied in the yard. Kids had a way of sniffing out a misfit in their midst. Now he was determined to show the boneheads of Whitehall that he'd been a visionary all along. It was political buccaneering.

‘You will be answerable to me, of course. Any and all information you get comes to me. You make no significant decisions without consultation. Is that clear, Frank?'

It was ruthlessly clear. Nimmo wanted to get in before one of the intelligence agencies decided it was their business after all. He wanted his own foothold, his own encampment. And if the intelligence boys desired a piece of the action, Nimmo's investigation – conducted by Pagan, the old maestro – would be so deeply entrenched that they couldn't interfere without raising grave questions of jurisdiction. Sweet, if you liked that kind of brute, sneaky ambition.