Requiem (94 page)

‘Why not?’

‘Half the reason people put their companies in the Cayman Islands is so that people like us can’t trace them.’

‘But haven’t I got a company in the Caymans?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But there must be a way surely.’

‘You asked me, and I’m telling you there’s no way. Zilch.’ He made a chopping movement with his hand. This was David at his steeliest, the David encountered by record companies trying to negotiate contracts.

Nick persevered: ‘Have we no contacts?’

David turned slowly to face him, his emotions hidden behind layers of hard-won impassivity. ‘Contacts are only as good as the favours they owe you.’

‘But you could ask, David?’

‘Asking’ll get me nowhere,’ he drawled. ‘Secrecy’s sewn into the system tighter than the coins in my grandmother’s hem when she escaped the Russian revolution.’

‘But
asking
…?’

A slight pause which Nick took as a hopeful sign.

‘When can I tell the others you’ll be coming to rehearsal?’ David replied, apparently changing the subject but not, as they both knew, changing it at all.

‘David, as soon as I can. This afternoon. Maybe sooner. Look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

David filled the cups and, taking them across the kitchen, plonked them saucerless on a rustic wooden table that matched the dark oak units. ‘Everything’s important with you, Nick, everything except what you’re meant to be doing at the time.’

Smarting under the unprecedented rebuke, Nick sank onto a stool.

‘Someone’s gone missing,’ he tried to explain. ‘Daisy Field, the campaigner from Catch. You remember …?’ He began to tell him about the weekend’s events but a veil of indifference had dropped over David’s eyes and Nick recognized the look he usually reserved for the stream of hard-luck stories that regularly came his way each working day.

‘Not your problem, surely,’ David murmured at last.

‘But it
is
. She was— She’s— I have to find her, David!’

‘I see,’ he said, and his eyes carried a wealth of meaning.

‘It’s not like that,’ Nick replied sternly. ‘It’s not like that at all. It’s just – I feel sort of responsible. I feel …’

He trailed off, aware that David was watching him with open puzzlement. He repeated: ‘I can’t leave it, David.’

David reassumed his world-weary mantle.

‘Okay,’ he conceded with a slow sigh, ‘okay. I’ll do what I can, but I promise nothing, you understand,
nothing
. I’ll have to ask a lot of favours, serious favours I have no right to ask. It could take time.’

‘How long?’

‘Well there’s the time difference for a start, five hours, and favours never come quick. Several days, at the least. But even then I can’t promise a
thing
, Nick, not a
thing
.’

‘I thought …’ What had he thought? That it would be a question of lifting a phone and getting a quick answer.

‘Having got that out of the way,’ said David heavily, ‘can we now discuss a few small items like this tour we’re meant to be starting next week? I won’t begin to tell you what I’m going through with the insurance people – ’

‘I was fixed up, by the way.’

David’s eyelids drooped lower. He didn’t speak.

‘The drugs. Someone set me up.’

David kept all expression out of his face. ‘Who’d want to do that, Nick?’

Nick downed his coffee and got ready to leave. ‘People who wanted to warn me off.’

This was too much, even for David, and a sort of regretful wariness came across his eyes. ‘But, Nick – do you mean they
planted
the drugs?’

Nick stood up. ‘I mean someone tipped them off.’

‘Who?’

A vision of Susan slipped into Nick’s mind, and, as always when he thought of her now, it was against the backdrop of that South Kensington flat all those years ago. Whether from an improvement in his memory or some trick by which his brain had patched in conversations from other times, he seemed to hear the very words she had used in the argument that had finally broken their relationship, words that were uniformly violent, bitter, and ugly. It occurred to him, as it had occurred to him soon after the drugs raid, that she had hated him then, and probably still did.

But this wasn’t the moment to deal with that. There would never be a right moment. Thoughts of vengeance and recrimination had never formed an important part of his repertoire. It was quite enough that he was rid of her.

Yet as he went out to the car and half turned to wave to David it suddenly struck him that Susan, far from being someone to avoid, was probably the very person he should go and see. Much as he loathed to admit it, much as it infuriated him to think of facing her again, Susan might just be able to wave a magic wand: Susan with her knowledge of Schenker, her many dealings with him, Susan who liked to show off her contacts, Susan the perfect messenger. Even – it wasn’t totally impossible – Susan with a sense of shame at what she had done.

Campbell raised his eyebrows expectantly as Nick got into his car.

Nick fought an increasingly miserable battle with himself before starting the car and driving round the square.

‘Well? Anythin’?’ Campbell demanded eventually.

‘What? No, nothing.’

‘So?’

‘We’re going to see Mrs Driscoll. Well, I think so.’ And saying it he realized he still hadn’t made up his mind.

‘And who is she?’

‘The wife of the agriculture minister.’

Coming into Eaton Square, Campbell gave a sudden peremptory exclamation, half-way between a grunt and a shout, and seemed to clutch his stomach. Imagining sickness or worse, Nick swerved in to the kerb. ‘What is it?’

Campbell made an odd sound, and it was an instant before Nick realized it wasn’t a bark of impending nausea but of gruff excitement. He was brandishing a half-rolled bundle of papers which he had extricated from the inner reaches of his jacket.

‘Daisy, she had no room for them, she gave them to me. That name, that name – it’s in here!’

Nick shuffled through, reading quickly. ‘I don’t see …’

‘Look –
Driscoll
!’

Nick stared at the papers for a long time, reading and rereading them until their meaning was both clear and confused in turns. Workham Overseas Holdings. The Cayman Islands. Expenses. Operatives. Vehicles. And then hospital bills. The name Angela Kershaw. And:
Cramm –
But will Driscoll stay away from
her
?
Who was the her? The Kershaw woman? And Driscoll, could it really be the same … Yet if all these papers came from a Workham Overseas Holdings file, if Workham was in fact Morton-Kreiger, then why on earth not? Reading the cryptic message again, he tried to imagine a situation where a man in a prominent position couldn’t be relied on to keep away from a woman, and ended up with a sexual scenario. The hospital bills sent him further along the same path. He tried to push his mind in other directions – hate, guilt, debt – but nothing else rang with anything approaching conviction.

He threaded the car back into the traffic, aware of two simultaneous and equally disturbing thoughts: that this might be something extremely valuable, and that he hadn’t the first idea what to do with it.

He remembered that Susan had moved to a place somewhere off Vincent Square but had to call his housekeeper on the car phone for the exact address. He found the house at one end of a narrow and uninspiring street of variable architecture. The place was a dark-bricked Georgian town house with newly painted window frames, a royal-blue front door that shone like glass and baggy-knicker curtains in the upstairs rooms. Waiting outside was a black car with a uniformed driver.

Nick hesitated a moment, struck by nervousness and an odd beating excitement that, in an ancient reflex, had him momentarily longing for a drink. Leaving the car keys with Campbell, he went up to the house and rang the bell. The door opened instantly as if someone had been waiting behind it, and a soberly suited man in horn-rimmed glasses stepped forward. The man had clearly been expecting someone else because an expression of surprise darted across his face. Deciding that Nick was harmless, exercising a politician’s versatility, he recovered quickly with a brisk enquiring look.

‘Good morning,’ he said, angling his head as if to catch some airborne clue as to Nick’s identity.

‘I’ve come to see Susan.’

‘Of course, of course.’ The professional smile, broad but bleak, flashed across his face. He looked like his photographs but smaller and plumper, and, despite his vigorous manner, less intimidating.

‘One of her interior people, are you?’ Driscoll said. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy his turn of phrase before deciding that his time was too valuable to be spent hanging around on the doorstep. Retreating into the hall he shouted Susan’s name up the stairs while shrugging on his coat. Picking up a battered ministerial dispatch box, he advanced on the door again.

‘With you in a moment.’ He ground to a halt on the threshold, faced by the impropriety of leaving Nick in front of an open door, and yelled over his shoulder: ‘Susan, your guest’s waiting. Mr – ?’ He turned questioningly.

‘Mackenzie.’

Driscoll repeated it up the stairs without visible recognition, then, assuming the benevolent but preoccupied look of someone with good works to do but not enough time to do them in, he scuttled across the pavement to his waiting car.

When Nick looked into the house again it was to see Susan standing on the stairs. She was wearing a Japanese wrap, long and flowing, in a blue which intensified the colour of her eyes. Her skin was pale and luminous and apparently bare of makeup, her hair a shining gold. Her loveliness shocked him, it seemed so inappropriate; and for a moment he was bowled back in time and remembering all kinds of things he would rather forget, like the warmth and suppleness of her body, and the long afternoons in Kensington, memories now inextricably mixed with anger and remorse.

She gave an abrupt laugh. ‘Well, talk of the devil!’

‘Were you?’ he asked.

‘What?’ She took his hand and drew him inside the house and closed the door.

‘Talking of me.’

‘Not exactly,’ she said, kissing him chastely on the cheek. ‘But I was
thinking
of you, which was a hundred times better.’ Still holding his hand, she stood back and examined him carefully, like a fond and long-lost friend. He looked for signs of embarrassment or shame in her face, but apart from the peculiar concentration of her gaze there was nothing to give her away, and she wore her confidence brilliantly, like a piece of jewellery. She thought she was safe, he realized. She thought she had got away with it.

‘Now why would you be thinking of me?’

She caught the edge of sarcasm in his voice and for the first time a glint of doubt darkened her eyes. But it didn’t trouble her for long; with a small chuckle, she started across the hall, gesturing for him to follow. When he didn’t move, she looked back and asked in mock reproach: ‘What, no coffee?’

‘I won’t stay,’ he said tautly, knowing he mustn’t antagonize her, yet unable to prevent the disapproval from showing in his voice.

She caught the message all right because her eyes lost some of their sparkle and she said a small ‘Oh.’ Then some sort of realization came to her and, clapping a hand theatrically to her forehead, she came back and gripped his arm. ‘Of course, forgive me … The papers, that beastly story. I was so glad to see you that I almost – ’ She made a face of suitable mortification, her eyes already inviting forgiveness. ‘Listen, I tried to call you several times. I left messages, but they told me you were in Scotland.’ She gave a soft groan and pressed a hand against his cheek. ‘Poor, poor Nick – the
last
thing you needed. But they can’t charge you with anything, surely – can they? I mean,
drugs
. It just isn’t
you
, anyone could have told them that.’

The anger rose suddenly, without warning, and then he couldn’t stop himself. ‘They knew what they were looking for.’

She looked surprised then puzzled. He had to admire her: it was really a very good act. ‘Knew?’ she asked.

‘Someone tipped them off.’

‘Oh?’ Her forehead crinkled gently into a frown.

‘Told them about’ – he couldn’t say Alusha’s name – ‘the morphine in the house.’

She searched his face, and read there the meaning he had intended her to see. Her mouth twitched, her eyes narrowed and then came understanding, disbelief and hurt.

‘You think …’ She gave a soft gasp. ‘You think
I
…’

She looked so appalled, so genuinely hurt, that his certainties uprooted themselves and swam around, dissolving the moment his mind touched on them. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Well!’ She was sawing away at her mouth, biting back tears. ‘Well!’ Her eyes brimmed suddenly, and she drew away.

‘I think you’d better go,’ she choked, hiding the contortions of her face with a splayed hand.

There was nothing he would have liked better than to go, to be free of the swooping and churning of his emotions, but there was still the business of Daisy. He said: ‘That wasn’t why I came.’

‘It wasn’t? I see!’ she retorted in a sudden fury. ‘That was just a little aside then, was it? My God, you’re making me wonder what’s coming next!’

He plunged in, desperate to get the whole thing over and done with. ‘Daisy Field’s gone missing,’ he said quickly. ‘We think your friend Schenker might be able to find her.’

She stared at him for a moment. ‘
What?
’ She made an exaggerated gesture of disbelief, stabbing the fingertips of both hands against her chest. ‘You want me to – ?’ She rolled her eyes expressively. ‘You came to ask me
that
?’

‘We think she might be in danger.’

‘But’ – through the tears came an incredulous laugh – ‘God, you’ve got a nerve! Schenker’s nothing to do with
me
. Why should you think he’s anything to do with me! If you need to ask him, why don’t you go and do it yourself!’

‘I thought the request would come better from you.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘I can’t help you. And now I think you really must go.’ Her voice rose suddenly.