Requiem (85 page)

‘We’d find the right lawyers and experts to help you fight your case. If that’s what you decided to do.’

He gave a non-committal grunt and eyed her leerily over his glass. Finally, after a last thoughtful glance, he chucked his cigarette onto the fake coals. ‘I did my best, you know. Never knowingly hurt a fly. Never.’ He looked up at her mournfully.

‘But there were cock-ups?’

He tensed and looked into his drink. For a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he drew in a slow breath, hissing it through his teeth. ‘The bloody guidance system … sometimes didn’t work. Or the flow line – that jammed once. Not my fault. It was the no-good ground staff. Bloody incompetent. Keen’s fault. Wouldn’t pay a decent rate.’ He reached slowly for a cigarette, spinning out the movement so that he could avoid looking into Daisy’s eyes. ‘One day …’ He hesitated and said with sudden anger: ‘Shit, I don’t know – ’

‘This is off the record,’ she murmured.

He risked a look at her and nodded unhappily. Perhaps he knew that what he was about to say wasn’t going to sound too good. Perhaps the memories had been bothering him for some time. He lit his cigarette and started to play with his lighter, swivelling it on the arm on his chair.

‘The time with the flow line. Bloody thing seized up. Then suddenly got going at the wrong moment.’ He held the cigarette in his fingers like a peashooter, drawing short puffs from it. ‘Doing a patch near a big house. Loch Fyne, it was. Thought I saw someone. Couldn’t be sure though. There was a horse. Saw that all right. And a hut, a stable. Thought I saw something else. Behind the horse. But then I had to turn away fast. Impossible to go back and see. Fairly sure they must have got a pretty good whiff though.’ He gave a joyless chuckle. ‘Surprised not to hear anything about it, if you really want to know. Thought all hell would break loose.’

‘And the other time?’

Baring his teeth, he sucked in his breath. ‘Think it was a boy.’ His fingers tightened on the lighter so that it stopped turning. ‘Not absolutely certain … Only saw him for a flash. Standing in this field at the end of the run, he was. So close couldn’t have missed him if I’d tried. Flew right over him.’ He grasped the lighter and squeezed it hard. ‘Turned back and took a look, but hard to see. Hidden behind the animals or something …’ He blinked rapidly. ‘Flew straight back to the strip, sent a telex to Keen telling him to stuff it. Told him that if I wasn’t given proper recce time I’d be off. Same bloody answer. He’d see to it. He was always seeing to things that never bloody happened.’ He glanced at her, gauging her reaction. ‘Felt bad about it,’ he said in a rough voice. ‘Just a kid. Often wondered if he was okay. But it was too late by then, wasn’t it? No good telling everyone. What good would that have done?’

Daisy spent a moment examining her hands. She said: ‘Can you remember what you had in the tanks that day?’

‘Yup. It was that stuff of yours,’ he offered gladly. ‘Silver-whatsit.’

He peered at her through the wreaths of smoke, his lids drooping knowingly. ‘Did I say the right thing?’

Jenny was waiting in the Catch office with good and bad news. The good news was that Simon was due back from Prague at any moment and that she’d managed to arrange a meeting in the editorial office of the
Sunday Times
for seven that evening. The bad news was that she’d got a price from a security firm for guarding Alan Breck and it wasn’t going to be cheap.

As bad news went, it could have been a lot worse. There was still something left in the Octek kitty.

Then Jenny showed her the day’s newspapers, and Daisy saw it was going to be worse after all. The story took up a quarter page in the tabloids, a more restrained side paragraph in the qualities. Charged. Bailed. In possession of drugs at his Highland castle. All the tabloids called it a castle, which suggested they had got the story from a wire service. In the absence of other facts, they had rehashed the usual history: Alusha, the financing of the laboratory, the fire.

She wondered: Can it be true? Then in the next instant: What the hell difference did it make anyway? They should leave him alone. He doesn’t deserve this.

It was nine before the Alan Breck deal was struck. Simon delayed the final agreement, worried by the apparent lack of documentation, throwing up what seemed to Daisy to be unnecessary obstacles. The offer wasn’t as good as she’d hoped – travel expenses and a ten-thousand-pound fee – but with foreign rights the money could double. Would it be enough? Would Alan Breck be hoping for more? And what about all his other expenses? She had the feeling he would be expecting her to find them, along with the cost of the security people.

The flat was cold when she got in. As she bent down to light the fire something made her pause. She listened for a second or two. A sound, a gentle scraping, like a leaf on the window, except it hadn’t come from the window. The kitchen then? She went in. The kitchen window returned her reflection dustily, like a sheet of black metal. Outside it was very dark and, though she put an eye to the glass, she couldn’t make out anything in the small patch of paved garden below. Above, the yellow oblongs of lighted windows hung in the blackness.

Whatever the sound was, it had gone, or else it was lost in the ringing that was still buzzing like a run-down alarm clock in her ear. She switched on the kettle then heard the sound again.

It was more distinct this time, coming in clearly over the chiming in her ear, not so much a scraping as a scratching, emanating, so it seemed, from the main room. She crept soundlessly towards the door, but as she stepped into the room it stopped. She waited, cocking her good ear from side to side. For perhaps half a minute there was nothing but the murmurs of the street, the faint beat of reggae music from the flat below and the humming of the heating kettle. Then it sounded again, but so soft, so vague, so lost in the insistent caterwauling of her singing ear that she was no longer sure that it was inside the room. She crept into the centre of the room and stood still, preparing to wait it out.

When the scraping came again it was so sharp that it seemed to be very close by, and she started slightly. A grinding noise, as if someone were running his nails over a rough surface. She’d got the direction now – close by the kitchen door and lowish – but by the time she had inched forward the kettle was rumbling to the boil and if there was any other sound she missed it.

When the kettle had clicked off and grumbled into silence there was still nothing, and after another couple of minutes she gave up and went and made herself a coffee.

She unpacked her bag, hung up some clothes.

In the flat below the reggae music stopped and a door slammed.

She went to the chest to throw a jersey into the bottom drawer. As she leaned forward she caught a whiff of an acrid almost fetid smell.

She pulled open the top drawer to drop in some clean clothes and the smell rose up in a wave. At the same time her eyes were drawn to a series of yellow stains and black dots scattered over her underwear.

‘What the hell – ?’

She reached into the drawer. As her hand closed over her one and only pair of silk panties, the clothes at the back of the drawer gave a distinct twitch. She stared, immobilized. She looked into the shadows at the back of the drawer and was met by a single shining dot. Yellow, glistening. An eye.

She jerked back, and in the same instant her clothes burst into movement; there was a violent scuttling and scrabbling, and a missile thundered wildly round the drawer. She gave a shriek that sounded unnaturally loud in her ears. The missile, brown and trailing a low tail, leaped at the side of the drawer, propelled itself over the edge, landed on the ground and, its claws skittering furiously on the floorboards, shot past the red chair, across the hearth and disappeared under the bed.

She stared mutely at the bed then back at the ruins of her underwear. Suddenly and without warning, something folded inside her, the tears leapt hotly against the back of her eyes.

‘Shit,’ she murmured. ‘
Shit
.’

It was a moment before she realized the door bell was buzzing.

The route to the window – her normal vantage point for the inspection of callers – would take her too near the bed and other dark places. She backed towards the door and pressed the entry. Opening the flat door she heard the street door open and close, she heard footfalls in the hall.

Then, inexplicably, the footsteps ceased. A second later the stair lights clicked off. Darkness and silence.

Something rose up in her, something close to panic. She roared: ‘Who is it?’

There was the heavy sound of someone stumbling, and a muffled oath.

‘Who is it?’ she yelled, her throat raw.

‘Daisy? Where are the lights, for God’s sake?’

That voice. That
voice
.

She reached out onto the landing for the push button and the lights came on. She went to the stairs and peered over the banister.

‘God!’ she cried.

Nick, climbing the stairs, began to speak but, looking up, the words died on his lips. ‘Jesus …’ He came to an abrupt halt. ‘What the – ?’ His expression was so astonished that she slapped a hand over her black eye to cover it.

Coming up the last few stairs, he said: ‘Daisy … What
have
you been up to?’

He laid a hand against her bruised cheek and murmured a sympathetic: ‘Ouch, ouch!’

The lights clicked off and for a moment Daisy thought she’d landed in heaven.

She found him a rolling pin, part of a set of kitchen implements she’d bought off a stall in Camden Lock. Clearing the furniture away from the bed he advanced slowly.

‘Careful. It’s enormous,’ she warned.

‘Not nearly as big as I am,’ he said.

‘I’m not so sure.’

He looked back over his shoulder. ‘Whose side are you on?’

‘The winner’s.’

‘I’d better not let him get away then.’

He slid the bed slowly away from the wall, one end at a time, then crept round behind it. He poked the rolling pin into the assortment of luggage, scrolled paper and plastic-wrapped bundles that made up the subterranean clutter under the bed, then moved with sudden speed as the creature scuttled between a suitcase and a roll of paper. He took a swipe at it, missed by a tail, and chased it to the other side of the room, tripping and almost sprawling over the rug as he scrabbled round the end of the bed in hot pursuit.

The creature was fast, but he finally cornered it by the bathroom and dealt it a blow. Finishing it off quickly, he wrapped the carcass in newspaper and took the parcel down to the dustbins. While he was away Daisy hastily sponged her face and daubed some makeup over her bruise.

She came out of the bathroom to meet him. He was still catching his breath. They stared at each other for a moment.

‘I’m not too practised at rat-catching,’ he said.

‘Oh, you’ll do,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled but distractedly.

‘Please – sit down.’ She straightening the red chair and brushed a hand over it. ‘Coffee?’ she said brightly.

He stopped just in front of her and said: ‘How
did
you get that face?’

‘Ah! That’s another story.’

He raised his eyebrows slightly and she could almost see him thinking: If this was a boyfriend, he must be something else.

‘I’ll make the coffee,’ she said and turned quickly towards the kitchen.

His voice drifted in from the living room. ‘What happened to the ceiling?’

Tapping the coffee gently into a mug, she went and stood in the doorway. ‘I was wondering about that too.’

He was looking mystified, trying unsuccessfully to fit this into the boyfriend scenario.

‘I think they did it on purpose, when they came to install the bug – ’ Her hand flew over her mouth. ‘Hell,’ she breathed and, going back into the kitchen, found a screwdriver. Putting a finger to her lips, throwing him a significant look, she stabbed a finger towards the instrument. Kneeling, she unscrewed the handset and pulled it apart. Her heart skidding, she peered inside, held it up to the light, ran two fingers along the casing and sank slowly back on her haunches. ‘It’s gone,’ she gasped.

He slid forward onto his knees beside her and peered at the handset. ‘What’s gone?’

‘The bug. The microphone. The thing they were listening with.’ Her voice was flying high, sawing all over the place.

‘What are you saying?’

‘They were bugging this place. Listening to everything.’

He hesitated as if he needed to understand it correctly. ‘Listening?’

‘Yes! It was a bug all right, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of removing it, would they?’

He nodded uncertainly.

‘They must have realized I’d found it, you see,’ she argued. ‘They must have been frightened that I’d use it as evidence.’

‘You’re shivering,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m okay.’ But she wasn’t, not quite yet, and he seemed to realize it, because he got up and went into the kitchen and came back with the coffee.

He sat hunched forward in the chair above her, watching over her as she drank. ‘All right?’

‘I’m glad you’re here.’

He smiled, and the tiredness seemed to go out of his eyes for a moment.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said, sitting back in the chair. ‘The rat, the ceiling, the bug.’

‘Not overlooking the eye,’ she said.

‘Not overlooking the eye,’ he said gravely.

She sat on a cushion at his feet, her profile outlined against the fire, her bruised cheek turned away from him. Her hair was untied and swelled out in a cloud from her neck. It was the sort of curly pre-Raphaelite style much favoured by models, but which in Daisy’s case was almost certainly achieved without a hairdresser. She had a fine profile, with a straight nose and arched brows, and he noticed the outline of her lips.

When she began to speak her voice was hesitant and low-pitched.

The Greeks’ water tank was the first real clue, she said, the first thing that should have made her stop and think. But she had too much on her plate, too many things to organize; it simply never occurred to her that it might have been intentional. Why should it? But looking back she could see that they must have been desperate to locate the laboratory, and that the tank was the only sure way of getting her back to the flat. If anyone had tried to tell her people would go to those sort of lengths, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now …