Those Who Feel Nothing (30 page)

‘Mr Tingley, is it?' he says. Oh dear.

The man moves closer. ‘I'm Detective Sergeant Bellamy Heap. We have friends in common. Detective Inspector Gilchrist and Police Commissioner Watts?'

‘That we do.'

Heap flushes. ‘I'm sorry, sir, but I need to detain you.'

‘You are detaining me and I need to get on.'

‘I need you to come with me,' Heap says.

You're wondering how much of a fighter Heap is. You don't want to hurt him more than necessary to get away and that will inhibit you. You know how to kill more than you know how to damage.

‘For what reason do you need me to come with you?'

He's now only three yards away from you. ‘Mine is not to reason why,' Heap says.

‘Well, young man, I want you neither to do nor die. And I'm sorry. I can't let you detain me.'

Heap shrugged. ‘That's my job.'

You stand very still.

‘I know who you are, Bellamy. May I call you Bellamy?' Heap gave the slightest of nods. ‘Thank you. Well, Bellamy. Don't be a dick. Neither of us wants what is about to go down.'

Heap shrugs again. ‘It is what it is.'

You look down at your hands. ‘No. It's not. It's something else. Please walk away.'

Heap shakes his head. ‘Can't do that.'

You look at your hands again. Close your eyes. You are aware of your phone ringing in your trouser pocket. Heap hears it too.

‘You want to answer that?'

You shake your head. ‘It will wait.'

Heap takes a torch from his belt. Except it's not a torch. You recognize it as an incapacitating flashlight. You look at him warily.

‘We've been asked to trial this by Police Commissioner Watts.'

You nod. ‘I'm not sure he intended you to trial it on me.'

Nevertheless, you don't want to be vomiting up your guts any time soon.

‘Why are you at this address?' Heap says.

‘Why are you?' you say.

‘I have to take a DNA sample and inform the woman who lives here that we may have found her son,' Heap says. ‘Dead. What about you? Why are you here?'

You look at Heap. He's so fresh-faced.

‘Because the woman who lives here handles the Cambodian slave trade in the UK for a certain Sal Paradise and a certain Charles Windsor.'

B
righton Marina always reminded Watts of John Hathaway, the Last King of Brighton, with whom he'd had a curious relationship. Hathaway had had a bar here that had been burned to the ground by a barbaric Balkan gangster. There was no sign now it had ever existed.

Watts saw the beautiful wooden boat at the near dock of the marina. The steam was up. It was bigger than he had realized, taking up three berths. Hathaway used to berth a boat here that he used for smuggling runs. Watts wondered whether Windsor's participation in the Great Escape had been entirely altruistic. What cargo might he have smuggled in or out of England?

Gilchrist was clearly having the same thought. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if the ballast wasn't made of bronze and sandstone – or those three things Jimmy mentioned but didn't specify.'

‘Given that he went on the lam when your phone rang, you mean,' Watts said.

‘Given that,' she said.

‘How long before that warrant arrives?' he said.

She chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘Could be hours.'

‘Of course, if there is believed to be a terrorist danger no warrant is needed.'

Gilchrist gave him a slow look. ‘That still needs permission.'

‘Who from?'

She smiled. ‘The police commissioner. Sir.'

‘Consider it given,' he called back as he strode towards the boat.

‘But hang on,' she said in a loud whisper as she headed after him. ‘You can't be involved in anything operational.'

‘I'm not – I'm just there to ensure that the letter of the law is observed with regard to the Protection Against Terrorism Act.' He turned and grinned. ‘You're on your own, kiddo.'

Heap follows as you walk round the back of the house.

‘What are you doing?' he says quietly.

You try the back door then break a pane of glass in it with your elbow. There is a curtain draped on the other side of the glass so the noise is not as bad as you feared. You put your hand through carefully and feel for a key in the lock. You're in luck.

DS Heap shuffles his feet as the door swings inward.

‘You coming in?' you say back over your shoulder to him.

You catch him shaking his head. ‘Can't. I'm an officer of the law.'

‘I heard there was a burglary in progress. Shouldn't you be investigating that?'

Heap breaks the smallest smile. ‘I suppose I should.'

He follows you in. ‘What you said—'

You put your finger to your lips, cock an ear. The house is dark and silent. You are in the kitchen. There is a door ahead of you. A cellar door. It has four bolts on it.

‘Does that torch work just as a torch?'

‘Unfortunately not,' Heap says. He reaches into one of his capacious pockets. ‘This should do, though.'

It's a pencil torch but it will, indeed, do.

You draw the bolts quietly. They are well oiled because, you can see, well used. You turn the key in the lock painfully slowly.

‘You wait here,' you whisper as you pull the door open. ‘Watch my back.'

Heap nods and you start slowly down the stairs.

Gilchrist led the way up the gangplank. There was no sign of life on the deck although the fore-hold doors were open and the empty hook of a crane swayed over it in the wind.

‘Ahoy on deck,' Watts muttered. ‘Coming on board.'

‘Ready or not,' Gilchrist said more loudly.

There was a tall, glossily varnished double door leading below, its brass handles gleaming. Watts stepped forward but Gilchrist held him back and reached for the handles.

‘You're just observing, remember?' she said.

A short flight of polished steps led down into a cabin the size of a hotel suite. It was high ceilinged and should have been plush but Windsor had decorated austerely, as with his house. The room had dim wall-lights but a spotlight's beam was directed from the ceiling down on a life-size, gleaming golden statue of a full-breasted woman. She was naked to the waist but a long lower garment covered her to her ankles. Her right hand was held out as if she was giving something; her left hand looked like it should be holding something. She shimmered in the light. She was beautiful.

Another spotlight was directed to a glass case in which there was some kind of helmet. A third light illuminated a smaller case, the contents of which were obscured.

Charles Windsor was standing in front of the statue, gazing at it. He turned when their steps clattered on the stairs and frowned. ‘I'm sure this is trespass,' he said icily.

‘We have reason to believe terrorism is being aided by what is happening on this boat,' Gilchrist said.

Watts looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She almost shrugged – it was the best she could come up with.

‘Are you insane?' Windsor said. He raised his voice. ‘Rogers, get in here.'

Nothing happened.

‘What is that?' Watts said, indicating the statue.

‘The goddess Tara in gilded bronze,' Windsor said. He was clearly unable to keep his knowledge to himself as he continued: ‘It is solid cast, unlike the majority of bronze images that were cast on a clay core. It was gilded after it was cast.'

Gilchrist stepped closer. The statue had a headdress with a surround like a flame encrusted with precious stones. She looked down into one of the glass cases. A gem-studded helmet was propped up inside. Windsor followed her look.

‘See those images on each side? That's Tara again, in precious stone. In the centre is Amitayus, the Buddha of infinite life.' He gestured to the statue. ‘This is her helmet.'

He waved at the other glass case. ‘Fabergé eggs from Cambodia and Thailand. Frivolities, merely.'

‘And these are stolen goods, Mr Windsor?' Gilchrist said.

‘Haven't we gone through all that once?' he almost snarled. He raised his voice again. ‘Rogers, where the hell are you?' Then he gestured at the helmet. ‘That beautiful object? It was in the local history section of the National Museum for decades. Those morons didn't know what they had. I'm not talking about the Cambodians, I'm talking about the French. You know, a Frenchman designed the museum during the Great War. The French ran it until Cambodian independence in 1953 but they hadn't a clue.

‘It was left to fall down during the Khmer Rouge period. Most of the people running it were killed. Bats colonised it. I've been trying to help since, as I told you, in collaboration with UNESCO, but ninety per cent of the collection is in store in the basement. And every rainy season it floods. They have two thousand works on display and twelve thousand suffering water damage in the basement. They only got rid of the bats five years ago. So, please, spare me your “this stuff is better there than here” crap.'

‘I wasn't making that point,' Gilchrist said.

‘Do you know Sal Paradise?' Watts intruded, also moving closer to Windsor.

‘I'm not good with names as I get older,' Windsor said.

‘Cambodian fixer, smuggler, antiques dealer. Your Mr Rogers worked for him back in the day.'

‘Is that so? Rogers, where the hell are you?'

‘May still do so,' Watts said. ‘As may you.'

‘Me work for somebody else?' Windsor scowled and walked over to a wing-backed chair in the far corner of the cabin. He lowered himself into it. ‘Not for sixty years.'

‘Then maybe Paradise works for you,' Watts said, joining Gilchrist in front of the statue.

Windsor looked at his clasped hands, liver-spotted and gnarled. ‘You know, Cambodia has never come to terms with those Pol Pot years. How could it?' He reached for a drink on the table beside the chair. ‘The Khmer Rouge left behind a devastated country. A quarter of the population killed. But there has been no closure. Successive governments have tried to ignore what happened. The Khmer Rouge period was only made part of the school curriculum in 2009.'

‘What about charging people with war crimes?' Watts said, even as he knew this was a diversion.

‘The government was pressured by the west into setting up a war crimes tribunal back in 1996, to operate in partnership with the UN.' Windsor scowled. ‘One hundred and fifty million dollars and nearly twenty years later it has prosecuted one case, with two more pending. A number of the European judges, representing the UN, have resigned in disgust at the way a couple of cases were handled that never came to trial. The cases involved a couple of men who switched sides in 1978 and now have positions of great power in the country.'

Gilchrist was getting impatient. She also wondered where this man Rogers was.

‘Only last year the war crimes tribunal freed a former leader of the Khmer Rouge,' Windsor continued. ‘Ieng Thirith. She was Pol Pot's sister. They were a middle-class pair, both educated at the Sorbonne. She was a Shakespeare scholar. She was also the Khmer Rouge's highest-ranking woman, the social affairs minister – there is an ironic title if ever there was. She faced charges of crimes against humanity, genocide, homicide and torture. But she was eighty and suffering from Alzheimer's so she was declared mentally unfit for trial.' Windsor waved his hand. ‘And I was supposed to leave the world's treasures in the hands of people like that?'

Watts was trying to remember.

‘What happened to Pol Pot?' he said.

‘He ran his own, mad illegal state on the Thai border until 1998. On the evening before the twenty-third anniversary of his takeover of Phnom Penh he either killed himself or was murdered. He was under house arrest in the hands of a faction of the Khmer Rouge. One version has it that he heard on the Voice of America that the Khmer Rouge faction holding him had agreed to hand him over to be tried for war crimes, so he killed himself. The other story goes that the faction poisoned him so he couldn't be handed over.'

‘Time's a ticking, Mr Windsor,' Gilchrist said. ‘We're going to have to impound this boat.'

‘Oh for God's sake. Rogers – get in here!'

Finally they heard footsteps from the back of the room. A man ducked into it. When he stood and looked round the room he saw Gilchrist and grinned.

‘Hi, Sarah,' Agent Merivale said.

Watts looked from him to Gilchrist.

‘I'm not sure what to call you,' she said. ‘Merivale or Klingman or Rogers.'

‘Not Rogers, but try “Killer”,' a voice behind her said. Merivale looked beyond her. They all turned. Jimmy Tingley was standing there, with Bellamy Heap on the steps behind him.

‘Do I know you?' Merivale said.

Tingley stepped down into the room and walked up to Merivale. The American dwarfed him.

‘I know you,' Tingley said. He nodded at Windsor. ‘The mechanic for this gentleman.' He looked at Gilchrist. ‘Klingman here killed an art expert who had been working with Mr Windsor – while she was in prison. Very ingenious and very nasty.'

Merivale shrugged. ‘Anybody can be bought,' he said. ‘Especially prison guards.'

‘Hilary Black?' Gilchrist said, remembering Merivale's description of the poor woman's death. ‘Did you have to make it so horrible for her?'

Merivale glanced at Windsor. ‘Following instructions.'

Windsor was saying nothing. He sat in the corner, looking from person to person. His tongue darted out to lick his lips and he took another sip of his drink.

‘You killed Rafferty too, didn't you?' Heap said. ‘Tried to pass it off as suicide.'

‘He couldn't be trusted,' Merivale said shortly. He smiled down at Tingley. ‘So – what is to be done?'

‘Give up your cargo,' Tingley said.