Requiem (86 page)

She gave him a quick sideways glance. He smiled briefly by way of encouragement. She looked back to the fire.

She told him about the succession of things that had started to go wrong, small things, not-so-small things, and her feeling that she was constantly being outmanoeuvred, that however hard she tried, someone was always there ahead of her. The problems with the licence, Peasedale being warned off by his boss, Adrian getting made a ward of court, the disintegration of Alice Knowles’ case … Always something. Looking back she couldn’t be sure what was inevitable, what might have been prevented. All of those things perhaps, or none of them; it was impossible to know.

The fire, though, that was something else. She arched her head back and gave a laugh of disbelief. He noticed the long smoothness of her neck, and remembered having noticed it once before. Animal rights! she scoffed. You had to hand it to them. The slogans, the freeing of the rats and mice – well planned. And they did a brilliant job at destruction, nothing left intact. And the burglar alarm: disconnecting the thing, then setting it to go off when they left and it was too late to save anything.

She was silent for a moment, then shifted on her cushion. For an instant her leg came against his, but she moved it quickly away.

Then there was you, she said, her voice calm now. Only three people knew about your involvement, she said. You yourself – she ticked him off with a solemn gesture in his direction – and me – she pressed a splayed hand against her chest – and your accountant. Until the night of the fire, that was. Then – yes, she had to admit there had been someone else – Simon Calthrop of the
Sunday Times
. But he wouldn’t have told, she added; she was certain of that. And even if by some wild chance he’d gone against everything he believed in and told someone, it certainly wouldn’t have been another newspaper, not in a thousand years. No, no, the point wasn’t that she’d
told
Simon; the point was that she’d made the call from
here
, from this phone. She looked back to him to make sure he’d grasped the significance of what she was saying.

Then she gave an exclamation of disgust, directed at herself. She should have guessed then. Why she hadn’t, she couldn’t imagine. So stupid, so stupid. She said it over and over again, screwing her eyes down and shaking her head.

‘But why should you have guessed?’ he said.

She began again: Friday night, the night after the fire, the night she had come to see him in Kensington … She faltered uneasily, as if this was a part of the story she’d rather not relive.

‘Sorry I got mad,’ he volunteered.

She spun round. ‘No, no. I don’t blame you!’ she said. ‘Really. Really.’

Then, looking back to the fire, she continued, speaking in a pedantic un-Daisyish fashion, all bare bones and no emotion, running briskly through facts like so many on a file: how after she’d left him in Kensington she’d gone home and drunk too much and left the wild overblown message on Simon’s machine, how next evening she’d spotted Maynard leaving her flat and followed him into the dead-end trap of the north London estate. She skimmed over the attack itself with a cartoon-strip ‘Then, pow! That was it!’ and was on to the discovery of the bug in the phone before he could pull her back to the mugging.

‘It must have been one hell of a clout!’

‘Don’t remember much. Just that he wore this unlikely raincoat. More like a flasher.’

He leaned forward and turned her face towards him, tracing the bruise across her cheek and into her hair, feeling the lump above her ear.

‘God,’ he said.

‘Don’t be too sympathetic.’ She laughed feebly. ‘Might feel sorry for myself.’ She spoke lightly, but not so lightly that there wasn’t a trace of emotion in her voice.

‘Can you hear all right?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Ha, ha. He could have killed you, you know.’ He dropped his hand. ‘And the rat?’

‘A charming little thought of Maynard’s, I’d guess. Probably one of the ones from our own lab!’

He thought suddenly: And I killed it. And with no compunction at all. Daisy had obviously appreciated the irony of the situation already, because she turned and gave him an oddly flustered look.

‘Is that it?’ he asked.

‘Not quite.’ She twisted around until she was facing him and, laying an elbow over the chair-arm, told him all about the man known as Alan Breck and how she needed to get him over to Britain.

‘Can I help?’ he said.

She looked questioningly at him.

‘I mean, money?’

‘Amazing.’ She was laughing with disbelief.

‘Well, it’s about the only thing I’m good for, isn’t it? Money.’

‘Not true!’ Impulsively, she knelt forward and, reaching an arm round his neck, pulled his cheek against hers. He felt the softness of her, felt her warmth. But after a reciprocal squeeze he disengaged himself. He was in too uncertain a state of mind to be embracing someone like Daisy; he might cling to her, a piece of buoyancy in the wreckage.

Sitting back on her heels, she regarded him gravely. ‘Why did you come? Was it …?’

‘Something happened.’

She said quickly: ‘I read about it.’

He murmured: ‘And that was only the half of it.’ He thought of Susan and felt a lurch of bitterness, but he didn’t want to talk about that, and certainly not to Daisy. ‘My manager’s having hysterics,’ he said instead. ‘Our European tour starts in two weeks and with this drugs thing the insurance people are threatening to withdraw cover, which means if anything goes wrong I could get wiped out financially.’ He snorted with an amusement he didn’t feel, then added: ‘I won’t put up a defence, you see. They’d want to know where I got the stuff. They’d want to rake over old ground.’

She didn’t say anything.

He said: ‘No, why I came was … I talked to Campbell.’

‘You did what!’

‘He dropped in on me. Unexpectedly. He told me about Adrian.’ And all about you, he almost added.

‘Adrian,’ she echoed.

‘I realized … Well, anyway – I’ve come to offer my help.
Again
. If you want it.’

‘Even after everything?’

‘
Especially
after everything.’ He thought: Oh, you have no idea!

‘You won’t regret it.’

‘I don’t expect you’ll let me.’

She grinned, her bruise like a carbuncle on the side of her face.

‘Your Mr Breck, you said he’s calling? Shall I wait?’

‘Would you?
Would
you?’

He went down to his driver and sent him for a pizza, which they ate sitting on the floor in front of the fire.

They talked. He stretched out in the big red chair with the creaky arm. After a while he felt drowsy; he hadn’t slept the previous night. Without meaning to, he dozed.

‘Sorry,’ he said, waking suddenly.

She couldn’t resist it. ‘Like old times.’

‘Ha, ha.’ He smiled.

When he woke next it was midnight and the phone was ringing.

A
BRILLIANT SUNDAY
morning. Daisy stood waiting by the window. It had stormed and blown for three solid days, the media had talked about a repeat of the ’eighty-seven hurricane, but by now the air was still, the last few leaves hung exhausted in the plane trees and a strong yellow light was touching the chimneys of Augustus Road.

Seven twenty. She made her calculations again, working backwards from the time Simon would need to leave for Heathrow to the latest he could reasonably get up. It was possible he’d got up early to work on the novel of course, but as she knew from many a gruff encounter it was safer to interrupt his work than his sleep.

Finally, worried that she might have miscalculated and missed him altogether, she dialled his number fifteen minutes early. The telephone was answered at the first ring: she could almost see him snatching it up.

‘Yup?’ His brisk tone.

‘I checked with the airport,’ she said. ‘The flight may be early.’

She could imagine him pursing his lips, putting on a look of forbearance. ‘I’ll be there in good time,’ he grunted.

‘Terminal 3. Jenny’ll be waiting from nine thirty – ’

‘Yes, yes.’ He was openly impatient now. Stress was not kind to Simon.

She asked: ‘The US agreement, it got signed?’

‘There were problems, they wanted one of their own people to take over the story. In the end we agreed to split it.’

Of course you did, she thought, because this story will make your name and the US deal will make your newspaper some money. ‘Well done,’ she said.

But he wasn’t to be deflected from his bad temper. ‘This secrecy’s ludicrous, Daisy. I
cannot
go away without leaving a number. The office have
got
to be able to get in touch with me.’

‘I told you – it’s not possible, not at the moment anyway.’

A sigh of exasperation. ‘
Really.
You’ve been seeing too many films, Daisy. Life isn’t like this.’

‘Maybe not, but I promised.’

‘
Jesus
… Anyone would think I was going to broadcast it from the rooftops!’

But Simon had lost the power to intimidate her. ‘Jenny’ll tell you at the airport,’ she said mildly. ‘Like we discussed.’

Another sigh, some more huffing and puffing, but he rang off without further argument.

She drove down to Hammersmith by a circuitous route, stopping several times just past tight bends, taking detours through drowsy streets. By the time she was onto the Great West Road she was sure she was quite alone.

At eight thirty only a few dedicated Sunday travellers had ventured onto the roads and the M4 seemed unnaturally wide and empty, like a runway. Soon she was turning off and running along the road skirting Heathrow’s northern perimeter, with fifteen minutes to spare. She decided to use the time on a last check, a final look for fellow travellers. She circled a roundabout, turned into a cul-de-sac, parked for a few minutes outside a garage. She watched, but the scene, like the morning, was fresh, clear and innocent.

After that it would have been tempting to take a few shortcuts, but she stuck to her plan and, avoiding the Airport Inn and its car park, left the car at the next hotel along and walked back, taking a couple of rearward glances as she went. These precautions, which would have seemed ludicrous a couple of weeks ago, were now a bare and reasonable minimum, and never mind the scorn that Simon would pour on them if he knew.

The hire car, a grey-green Escort, sat on the far side of the Airport Inn car park, in the tight space she had found for it at eight the previous night.

It was a moment before she got it started, a moment that brought the time up to nine exactly. She drove round to the front of the hotel and peered under the canopy.

Campbell must have been watching for her, because he came straight out and, throwing his bag into the back, sank wordlessly into the seat beside her. He was wearing his usual tweeds, she noticed, though as a gesture to town life he had forgone the headgear he had been sporting when she met him off the flight – a countryman’s narrow-brimmed hat of great age and uncertain shape. What Campbell thought of her costume he wasn’t saying. She had deliberated long and hard over the choice of clothes that would achieve both transformation and anonymity, finally borrowing from Jenny some loose charcoal-grey trousers, a black cossack jacket and a deep-brimmed grey hat, turned back at the front in Paddington Bear style. She had tied her hair up inside the hat and added tinted glasses: a student traveller, an artist, a would-be actress on her way to New York.

At Terminal 3 she stopped in one of the drop-off lanes and instructed Campbell on the various manoeuvres that would be needed to elude traffic wardens: moving the car a few yards along the lane, hovering at the far end, in the last resort making a circuit of the traffic system.

Leaving Campbell, she went to the arrivals hall and, having established the flight was on time, took up station in an ill-lit corner furnished with two lines of bucket seats and a wide pillar. There was a dense crowd at the barriers around the customs exit. Shortly after nine thirty she saw Jenny arrive with the two security men, who looked like everyone’s idea of bodyguards, large, with jackets that sat uneasily on their shoulders and heads that swivelled continuously. Led by Jenny, the three of them took up a position at the corner of the barriers, where Jenny’s hand-held sign was visible to the emerging passengers. At ten, when the ‘landed’ sign lit up next to the American Airlines New York flight, Simon was nowhere in sight, and when he still hadn’t arrived by ten fifteen it occurred to Daisy that he was putting them through this uncertainty on purpose.

It was ten twenty when Jenny and the two security men finally pushed their way free of the crowd and closed around a family negotiating their trolley out of customs: Alan Breck, instantly recognizable behind his owlish spectacles, and next to him his wife, a dark-haired, intense-looking woman, and their son, ungainly and sullen in a football jacket and cap.

As Jenny shook their hands Simon appeared as if by magic with a photographer at his elbow, and, in his effortlessly dominating way, took charge of the party and guided them towards the exit.