Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide (13 page)

Maria nodded and they concentrated on their lunch for a while. Then she asked, ‘When I was talking to Mr Limonides he had a phone call complaining about an unpaid invoice. I think the company was called Xenides.’

‘Ah, that would have been Mo Miandad – he’s the shipping agent for the company that leases the ships and hires the crew. Mo’s a bit of a rogue, not quite upright enough for the likes of our Mr Limonides. His family emigrated here in 1947 at the time of Partition in India. Mo was born here. The family are now very well off but it’s said that they disowned him because of his behaviour – apparently he became involved with a married woman and got her pregnant. He’s certainly a bit of an acquired taste, particularly if you’re female. Asia’s answer to Casanova.’

As they walked the short distance back to the office, the shops were reopening after the midday break. Maria was about to thank Berger and head off home when a taxi drew up beside them. A blonde woman got out and thrust some money at the driver.

‘You made it,’ Berger said, as the woman stepped on to the pavement, pulling a small suitcase.

‘What a nightmare,’ she replied. ‘The French air controllers had a wildcat strike, bless them. For a while, I thought we were going to fly to Athens via the North Pole.’

‘Let me introduce Maria Galanos,’ said Berger. ‘She’s joining us tomorrow. Working with Mr Limonides.’

The woman stepped forward to shake hands. ‘I’m Katherine Ball. I heard you were starting. Welcome to UCSO.’ She gave Maria a warm smile.

‘You’ll see each other tomorrow,’ Berger said.

‘Yes, see you then,’ said Maria. She turned to Berger. ‘Thanks for lunch. I’ll be in the office first thing.’ And as she walked away, she wondered if there really could be anything sinister about the Athens office of UCSO. Everyone seemed so charming and straightforward.

Bruno Mackay at the embassy had seemed confident there was something wrong there, but then Bruno Mackay had struck her as confident about everything.

Chapter 18

Richard Luckhurst had always liked the idea of ‘gardening leave’. But confronted with it, he realised that there was only so much gardening he wanted to do. When in quiet moments at sea he’d thought about retirement, he’d seen himself tending his roses, edging the lawn and erecting the big greenhouse he had always wanted. But faced with the opportunity to do all that, he couldn’t even find the enthusiasm to cut the grass.

His employers had been firm: he couldn’t sail for another four weeks, and even that was contingent on a doctor’s certificate. Not from his own GP, a nice old buffer who Richard knew would say he was fit as a fiddle, but from the company’s medic – a pompous ass who’d ask him how he was feeling ‘in himself’.

Luckhurst felt fine. Not for him this post-traumatic stress nonsense. He’d been well treated by the kidnappers in Somalia, and his only worry had been about the welfare of his crew. But they had been all right too. None of them had been hurt or seriously threatened, just a bit scared and very bored. The food had been disgusting, it was true, but that was all he could really complain about, and even that had had a side benefit – he had lost half a stone, something which he’d struggled unsuccessfully to do for years.

But he’d be putting it all on again if he couldn’t get back to work soon. The company had him down provisionally to take command of an oil tanker sailing from the Gulf of Aden to the east coast of America. But that was a month away, and just now a month seemed an eternity to him.

He was sitting outside on the patio, trying not to notice how long the grass had grown, while his wife Sue was inside, vacuuming. They’d settled in this pleasant Birmingham suburb twenty years before. Their children had grown up here – largely without their father, he thought ruefully. Sue was such an old hand at running the place that he felt he’d only get in her way if he offered to help. She must find it strange having him around so much. In any normal year, he was away at sea ten months out of twelve.

He was listening with half an ear to the radio as he dozed in his deckchair. On Radio 4 a presenter was leading a discussion about the threat posed by home-grown terrorists. What a world we live in, thought Luckhurst. He’d grown up during the Cold War, and like many children of that era had felt scared by the idea of nuclear missiles pointing at his town. When the Soviet Union had collapsed at the end of the eighties, he’d felt a profound sense of relief. But now the Cold War seemed to have been replaced by something just as frightening and more difficult to understand. You couldn’t blame it all on Osama Bin Laden, thought Luckhurst. Even if that sinister character died tomorrow, there seemed to be countless followers around to carry on where he’d left off.

They were saying on the radio that the danger zone was shifting – not everything was coming out of Afghanistan or Pakistan now. Some security expert from an institute somewhere was saying that many of the hardliners were moving away from their traditional hideouts and setting themselves up in lawless places in other parts of the world, where there were no effective governments and they could live and operate without interference. A Middle East correspondent from Reuters added that he’d learned that training camps were being set up in some of these places and new recruits from Britain were being sent there instead of Pakistan. Al Qaeda were planning to use these places as bases from which to hit new targets, he said.

They’re everywhere, thought Luckhurst, only partly reassured when a man identified as ‘a security consultant’ paid tribute to the excellent job the intelligence services were doing in tracking down these new threats. Then the Reuters man piped up again, pointing out how hard it was to track anyone in Yemen where, he said, Al Qaeda had a growing foothold. And if Yemen got too hot for the terrorists, there was always near-neighbour Somalia.

At this mention of the country where he’d been so recently a prisoner, Luckhurst opened his eyes and sat up. Memories came flooding back. He was in the cage again, in the camp somewhere near the Somalian coast. He could visualise dinner coming, carried by Taban – yes, that had been his name, the young boy he’d befriended. Luckhurst wondered what had become of him, remembering that last evening, just before the hostages were freed, when Taban had seemed so alarmed. The boy had said there had been Westerners visiting the camp – not hostages, but associates of the pirates. He’d said one had spoken English – a brown Englishman. Could this be one of the British Pakistanis the man on the radio was talking about?

It took a few minutes for the connection to take root in Richard Luckhurst’s mind, and another hour before he picked up the telephone. But after that things moved fast: just as Sue put the kettle on for tea, Detective Inspector Fontana drove his car into the Luckhursts’ drive and rang the doorbell.

Chapter 19

For three weeks, Maria went conscientiously into the UCSO office every morning and spent the day helping Mr Limonides with the accounts, keeping her eyes open for anything out of the ordinary. She wasn’t at all sure what she was looking for. Neither her handsome contact at the British Embassy nor her new boss Berger had been at all precise about what they thought might be going on in the office. ‘Someone taking a nosey interest in the manifests of aid shipments sailing from Athens’ seemed to sum it up, but at the moment there were no shipments being assembled. In fact, not much was going on in the office at all as far as she could see. The only member of staff who seemed to be doing anything interesting or out of the ordinary was Claude, the Frenchwoman, who had just returned from a short visit to Kinshasa. Maria was interested to hear about her trip but Claude was such a dour soul that she made even the most exotic parts of the Third World sound dull.

Mr Limonides was proving difficult to get to know. He was a model of courtesy, but volunteered no information about himself or his private life. He was a widower, according to Falana, but she didn’t know if he had any family or children; there were no photographs on his desk, and any questions Maria asked that got close to the personal were politely rebuffed. One evening as she was walking to the bus stop near the office after doing some shopping, she caught sight of him in a little taverna, eating a solitary supper, his eyes focused on his plate. Maria thought there was something ineffably sad about the scene and she hurried past before he could look up and see her.

She saw little of Berger, who seemed busy enough in his office. He didn’t ask to see her and she didn’t want to bother him as she had nothing to report. She had no contact with the British Embassy; she’d been told to report in the first instance to Berger.

Of the rest of the staff, Katherine Ball was her favourite and the closest to her in age and style. Katherine worked mainly in London as deputy to the charity’s overall director, but she kept a desk in UCSO Athens and visited several times a year for a few days or weeks, depending on what was going on. She was often closeted with Berger, presumably discussing policy matters, but occasionally she walked round the general office, chatting to the staff. When she put her head round the door of the room where Mr Limonides and Maria worked, it was as if a breath of fresh air had blown in.

For Anastasia and Falana, Katherine’s elegant clothes and easy cosmopolitan chic provided hours of conversation and debate. When from time to time Maria drank her morning cup of coffee with them, she was required to join them in speculating on such important matters as whether Katherine’s shoes could be real Jimmy Choos. Both girls loved to ask Maria questions about London, which she was happy to answer, and about herself, which she was not. But she had no difficulty at all in diverting their interest in her life by questioning them about theirs, which led to lengthy accounts of their favourite clubs, their favourite music, and their favourite boyfriends. Anastasia was the more outgoing of the two and she was insistent that Maria should join them and some friends for a night out, an invitation that Maria had managed so far to find an excuse not to accept. But she had a sinking feeling that in the interests of politeness and good relations, she wouldn’t be able to duck the invitation for ever.

The only thing at all out of the ordinary happened one evening in her third week when Maria got back to her apartment block after her day at UCSO. Madame Coco was standing in the foyer, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette not much thicker than a toothpick. A small woman of indeterminate age – probably in her seventies – Coco looked after the building with the gossipy vigilance of a Parisian
concierge
; she also cleaned some of the residents’ flats, including Maria’s.

‘You had visitors,’ she said. ‘A couple.’

‘When was that, Coco?’ asked Maria, wondering if her parents had come round. They’d only been here once, when she’d first moved in, and Coco had never met them.

‘After lunch.’

‘Really?’ That seemed odd; her parents knew she was usually out at that time of day. The faintest suspicion flickered through her mind.

‘What did they look like?’

Cocoa shrugged. ‘I didn’t see them. Mr Pharmakes told me they’d been here.’ He was a retired gentleman who lived on the top floor of the building. ‘He came across them in the hall outside your flat.’

This was odder still. The door to the foyer was kept locked, so non-residents couldn’t simply wander in and out of the building.

‘Did he describe them?’

Cocoa laughed, and stubbed out her cigarette end with a carpet-slippered toe. ‘All he said was that one was pale and the other dark.’

‘Which was which?’ Maria asked instinctively.

Coco shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me. And I wouldn’t bother asking Pharmakes. He has cataracts in both eyes.’

Maria thanked Coco and went up to her flat. The visitors probably had been her parents after all. Her mother was an English rose, with pink skin that easily burned in the sun, while her father was a typical Greek with nutmeg-coloured skin and dark hair.

But as she let herself into her flat, she still wasn’t satisfied. Why would her parents come here in the middle of the day? It would have to be about something urgent . . . her mother’s sister had been very ill. Maybe it was something to do with that. But surely they would have left a message. Maybe she should ring Bruno Mackay and report this. But he’d probably think she was very green, getting jumpy for no good reason. Don’t be silly, she told herself, even though, when she rang her parents, her mother told her they hadn’t been out all day.

By the end of the third week, Maria was beginning to wonder how long she would be able to put up with the boredom of this new assignment. The extra money she was being paid by the British Embassy was nice to have, but she didn’t feel that she was doing anything to earn it. Then on the third Tuesday morning, as she was leaning on Falana’s desk drinking her morning coffee and chatting, Berger came out of his office and asked to see her.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked as she sat down.

‘The job’s fine. But I’m afraid I haven’t uncovered anything.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I’d much prefer to be wrong about all this.’

‘I can’t say if anything’s going on or not. I certainly haven’t noticed anything. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I ever will.’

‘Well, that brings me to what I was going to tell you . . . we’ve got a good chance now to find out, one way or another. Our next shipment is due out in three weeks. I want you to start to build up the manifest.’