Lovers and Liars (89 page)

‘She won’t come in/ Hawthorne said. ‘She won’t let them touch her or go near her. She won’t put on a jacket or a coat. She’s done this before. If they try to move her, she’ll get very violent … Dear God! All I want, all I want is to avoid that. The shame and the humiliation - for Lise.’ He sighed. ‘For myself, too, of course, I admit that.’

He turned to look at Gini. ‘It began, Gini, at that house last night. I finally closed the shutters. I could see what was happening. I didn’t want anyone to witness that, least of all Lamartine.’ He turned away tiredly.

‘It’s gone on all night. It will continue for the rest of the day if I don’t do something. Will you talk to her? She’s been saying she wants to talk to you since two o’clock this morning. I think, if you did, she might leave, quietly. I think she might do that.’

‘If I talked to her?’ Gini stared at him in astonishment. ‘Why on earth would she want to talk to me - especially now?’ Hawthorne’s face became shadowed. He shrugged hopelessly.

‘Can’t you guess? She thinks we slept together. Just for God’s sake tell her we didn’t. She won’t believe me but she might believe you. Please, Gini. I may not have the right to ask any favours from you, but I am asking you to do this … ‘

‘All right. If you think it will help. I’ll talk to her. But I’m not going to lie.’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to. We’ve both had enough of lies.’ He turned, and began to descend the stairs. Gini followed him. On the first landing, they passed a tall and very beautiful long-case clock. Gini hesitated, and looked at Hawthorne.

‘Is that the clock - the one your father gave youT

Hawthorne nodded, and hurried on down the stairs. Running footsteps passed outside. Gini looked at the clock, then turned and followed him.

On the clock-face were Roman numerals, a sun and a moon. The hands of the clock, exquisitely shaped, had just reached the ten and the twelve. As she and Hawthorne reached the hall, the clock’s mechanism whirred, and it began to strike.

AT EIGHT, Pascal was in Hampstead. He watched the slow dawn. At eight-fifteen, he was back in Gini’s empty Islington flat. At eight-twenty, he was back outside in his car.

He drove south fast, then turned west towards St John’s Wood. He felt as if he had been driving and telephoning for centuries. He had not slept or eaten. His mind felt as white as the lightening sky.

He had had all night to look at his fears. He had had all night to listen to unhelpful people with no knowledge of Gini’s whereabouts, and all night to alternate between dialling Islington and this rented house he was now approaching. His mind rang with the sound of unanswered questions and unanswered telephones.

As soon as he reached the St John’s Wood house, and pulled fast into its drive, he could see that the lights, like the telephone, were back on. There was a band of light just visible at the edge of the closed downstairs curtains. Pascal felt a fugitive hope. Calling Gini’s name, he ran inside.

The emptiness of the house hit him at once. He could smell, feel, see, hear she was not there. Very well, he told himself, he would leave for Oxford, right now - that was what he had planned. Then, turning, feeling disbelief, he saw the flashing light on the phone.

His heart leapt. He felt a second’s sweeping optirrdsm, then a

fear. It would not be Gini, he told himself - warned himself - as he pressed the playback controls. It would be another trick or warning or deception. Then he heard her voice, and the air felt bright.

He listened intently. He played back her message five times. Her voice sounded almost as usual, strong and warm: she did not sound as if she were in trouble. She told him she was well, that she was safe and returning to London. Then - distinctly Pascal heard a man’s interjection. He said, ‘Ma’am.’ There was a brief pause, during which something was said which Pascal could not hear. What followed was strange. Gini mentioned Beirut, the places where she used to meet him. This part of her message was abruptly cut off.

She must have been calling from outside London then, presumably from Oxfordshire. The man with her could only have been one of Hawthorne’s bodyguards - who else with an American accent would address her as ‘ma’am’? Pascal stared at the phone. He had no way of knowing when the message had been recorded but he was sure that Gini had been trying to communicate something to him, something she was certain only he could understand.

The places we used to meet in Beirut … Pascal stood there tense and alert; he listed the places one by one in his mind. Sometimes that caf6 by the harbour, sometimes her hotel, sometimes his own room, to which he had given Gini a key that first day. Where else? Several times outside his local mosque, which was a few blocks from his room, on the edge of a shady tranquil square. He could remember seeing Gini, sitting on a bench in that square, waiting for him to arrive. Then, twice, at least twice, he had met her outside an Arab school, midway between her hotel and his room, and he could remember the voices of the children at play behind the school walls as he ran, and she ran, and he took her in his arms. Was there anywhere else - anywhere he had forgotten? He could replay the geography of those three weeks day by day. Where, where did she mean? And then it came to him: the mosqtie. There was a mosque here too, almost opposite the ambassador’s residence - and driving fast it was two and a half minutes away.

He ran out to his car, reversed out into the street. He’reached the park at a quarter to nine, slowed and stared. The park entrance, and its ring road, were closed.

Closed to traffic perhaps, but not to pedestrians. He drew up at the junction opposite the park gates. The gates had barriers across them, and two uniformed policemen on guard. No cars

were being admitted, but as Pascal watched, a jogger and a woman with a small dog were allowed through. He turned left, then left again, and parked. He ran back towards the entrance gates. As the police came in sight, he slowed to a more inconspicuous pace; he made sure that the camera slung around his neck was inside his leather jacket, and concealed.

He walked past the two policemen who gave him a cursory glance, and turned right along the ring road. As soon as he was out of sight of the policemen he began to run fast. Ahead of him now, around a bend in the road was the mosque and the residence. Next to the residence lodge was the pedestrians’ gate into the main acres of the park. Pascal slowed as he passed.

The lodge gates were firmly closed. He could see little of the residence itself as he passed it, for it was shrouded from the road by trees and thick evergreens. Through gaps in the foliage he could glimpse white vehicles. He checked himself. It was difficult to be certain, but what looked like two ambulances were drawn up outside.

Pascal quickened his pace. He jogged the sixty yards or so to the mosque the other side of the ring road. On this side, facing the park and residence, there was no entrance. A low fence divided the mosque from the road. No-one was standing there; no-one passed. He looked over the fence and saw that the area surrounding the mosque, its outbuildings and its interior courtyard, was large. To his immediate left now was the mosque itself, with its glittering dome; directly in front of him was the courtyard and the high, very high, minaret, and to his right were further buildings, all deserted, their doors closed.

The entrance to the courtyard, mosque and minaret was eighty yards ahead, fronting a main road. Pascal looked to right and left, then vaulted the dividing fence easily, and dropped down to the ground. It was a few minutes past nine when he reached the courtyard. He stood below the minaret and looked around him. There were a few pedestrians on the main road beyond. Cars passed there, and people, but the courtyard was deserted. He looked around him; he glanced up at the height of the minaret, squinting his eyes against the strengthening sun. No-one. Nothing. Did Gini really mean him to wait for her here?

He did wait, for ten or fifteen minutes. At nine-twenty, unable to stand it any longer, he crossed the courtyard again, vaulted over the fence and back into the ring road. He hesitated, then crossed the road, and went into the park.

He was now, he realized, in the place where Gini had been the day McMullen first approached her. He was standing, as he knew she had, on a small knoll, a rise of ground, under a clump of young chestnut trees. He could see both the mosque and the residence gardens clearly from here. He could see that high perimeter fence around the residence gardens, with the camouflage netting Gini described strung between its bars. He could see the gaps in the tree cover which were the results of the tree-pruning Gini had mentioned. He frowned at the fence, glanced over at the mosque behind him, moved across to a nearby bench, and sat down.

His eyes scanned the park. It would be another beautiful clear winter’s day, but it was still early for a Sunday, and it was cold: the park was as yet almost empty. He could see some joggers making the circuit, several people with dogs, a couple by the boating lake, a father with two children in the small playground and beyond that, where a bridge passed over a conduit from the lake, two people, an elderly man and a woman, feeding bread to the ducks.

He could feel something edging its way forwards from the back of his mind. There was a sense here, a meaning in the apparently random views, and he was very close to it, could almost grasp it. He lit a cigarette, and began to think very hard.

James McMullen was alive - that was the first thing. He might not know it for certain, but he felt very very sure. If the dead man on the railwayline were wearing McMullen’s signet ring, had been carrying McMullen’s ID, then that suggested McMullen had staged his own death. But why?

If Gini had been certain he had done so by the time she placed that call, why direct Pascal here to the mosque? Was it simply that she herself was near by, in the residence, and she wanted him to know that? Or was there another reason, a hidden message?

Time was passing, passing. Pascal stared around him with infuriated despair. Joggers, a father with two children, an elderly couple, a perimeter fence, a mosque. Pascal rose, he began to pace. He looked back at the mosque, but it was still deserted. Should he go back, and try to gain admittance to the residence? He would almost certainly not be admitted - and why were those two ambulances there?

He walked deeper into the park, closer to the lake, then turned, frowning, looking back the way he had come. It was nine forty-five now, and more people were entering the park. Pascal stared back at the gate by which he had entered: he saw a group of teenagers with skateboards, a pair of lovers hand in hand, two men, one in a track

suit, one in a Barbour jacket, a woman pushing a baby buggy. He thought: At ten. I’ll go to that lodge at ten, and I’ll make them let me in. But even as he thought that, he could still feel the comprehension, inching its way forwards from the back of his mind.

He began to walk back towards the gate, and the mosque, and as he did so, approaching that grove of young chestnut trees, it came to him. He stopped dead: he thought, A knoll; rising ground.

Little hints, little clues, which he had overlooked began to fall into place one by one. Why had McMullen taken him and Gini to that hide-out in Oxfordshire? Because it was misleading, that was why. It directed their attention away from London, away from here. This was the place where Lise had met McMullen in the past: Pascal had suspected some collusion between Lise and McMullen before - but supposing that collusion went further than he had realized? Could Lise have been planning an attempt on her husband’s life with McMullen from the first, even in the days when they walked in this part of the park together? Had McMullen, when he met Gini here, had a dual purpose? Had he intended to contact Gini, and at the same time finalize his plans?

I’ve been an idiot, I’ve been a fool, Pascal thought, and he ran down from the knoll to the perimeter fence of the residence gardens. He could see nothing beyond the camouflage netting and the shrubbery, but he could hear voices in the garden beyond. He swung around, white-faced, frowning, looking at the lie of the ground. No. he thought; no, it isn’t possible; the ground doesn’t rise sufficiently, the cover around the gardens is too thick and too high. In the distance, a church clock tolled ten times. Pascal stood there, frozen, trying to see how McMullen might have planned this, how it might be done.

Not from inside the gardens, surely - any attempt at entry would set off a million alarms. From outside then? But from where? And how could McMullen know of a time when the ambassador would be in the gardens? Unless that was something he could arrange, for certain, using Lise. Pascal stared around him: the grass, the rising ground, the mosque, the ring road, the high white arch of the brilliant winter sky.

He understood -about one n-dnute before he saw James McMullen in the distance. He understood when he looked at that newly made gap in the garden’s protective tree line, the gap Lise Hawthorne had instructed be made. He understood when, turning his eyes a few degrees further to his left, he looked at the mosque and its minaret, a minaret that was over one hundred feet high.

For one tiny instant, he travelled back to his own past. Beirut. Belfast. The snipers who could position themselves with such lethal efficiency high up, on a tall building firing down - a perfect line of fire.

At exactly that moment he saw McMullen one hundred yards away from him. He was removing his Barbour jacket; he wrapped it around something else which he had just picked up from the ground. He moved out of the gate, beyond the park hedge, and into the ring road. Pascal began to run. He thought: It’s Sunday. It’s the third Sunday in the inonth. That’s how they planned it. It’s now.

As Hawthorne led Gini out onto the terrace at the back of the house, there was a crackle of radio static. The group of people watching Lise had now swelled: there were at least ten of them, Gini realized, as they parted to let Hawthorne through. Two nurses, a woman in a maid’s uniform, who was crying, a manservant, the paramedics, and no less than three security men. Malone was standing at the edge of the terrace, looking towards Lise. Gini saw him frown, lift his arm, and speak into the microphone in his cuff.