Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  ‘I won’t be a second,’ Beaumont said. ‘I’ll make some calls.’ She would know the drill. MI5 and MI6 had their own undertaking service. There would also be an autopsy, routine when a senior officer died, no matter how old they were. He went out into the hall to use the house’s landline but swerved into the kitchen and poured two large brandies. Then, from his wallet, he extracted the piece of paper with the contacts he had written down in the aftermath of Inverstone Lodge. He sipped his brandy, went out to the hallway and dialled the number he had for the Clifford-Browns’ grandson.

  There was no answer.

  * * *

  ‘Just because the bomber is dead doesn’t mean there are no bombs,’ said Kate Muraski. ‘Riley told me the bomb-makers are usually separate from the bomb-planters. The skill of a good bomb-maker is too hard won to sacrifice needlessly.’

  They were in Oakham’s office, waiting to update the top floor on the events of the previous night. The explosion and its aftermath had run on all the news channels. So far it had been blamed on a gas leak, but there was a good chance someone had managed to film something on their mobile phone that would puncture that particular balloon.

  ‘You think the Russians might still have a trick up their sleeve?’ Oakham asked. She wondered how he managed to still look fresh and fragrant, whereas she felt like she’d had an argument with a hedge and lost.

  She rubbed at her left eye as it started twitching. ‘At least one. Who knows how many bombs that bastard made before the one that got Dom?’

  ‘You know, when we go upstairs, I’d rather you didn’t adopt an alarmist tone. Or too much of an emotional one. What happened to Riley was… regrettable.’

  ‘Regrettable?’

  ‘Perhaps not the best choice of words. Is there an update?’

  ‘I spoke to them half an hour ago. The doctor said he should have a shattered spine, given the force that the metal hit him. All he’s got is a chipped vertebra. The Kevlar took the brunt of the force. They’re still worried about concussion.’

  Her phone rang. ‘Speak of the devil. Riley? How are you?’

  ‘On my way out of hospital.’

  ‘What? I thought they were keeping you in.’

  ‘They tried. I’ve promised not to drive. Had to sign something in my own blood.’

  ‘Drive where?’

  ‘Dunston. I got a message from Ben Beaumont.’ There was a small, unexpected break in his voice. ‘My grandfather is dead.’

  Another punch to the stomach. Henry Clifford-Brown, after all he had been through. She thought to ask how it happened but realised it would just waste time. ‘I’m on my way. I’ll give you a lift.’

  * * *

  ‘There used to be nightingales in those woods,’ said Riley, pointing to the trees across the lake. ‘They think the muntjacs did for them.’

  ‘Muntjacs?’ asked Muraski. They were sitting on stone steps outside the drawing room where the body of his grandfather had been found. It was gone now, whisked off by the tame undertakers. A man from Six, one Hector DeMontfort Clarke, was drinking tea in the kitchen with Ben Beaumont, who was half-cut on brandy. Barbara Clifford-Brown was upstairs, trying, and probably failing, to get some rest.

  ‘Small deer,’ said Riley. ‘The RSPB think they eat the same vegetation as nightingales and are more efficient. They leave just some tough old shoots for the birds, which starve. Muntjac escaped from captivity at Woburn and have spread up here, driving out the nightingales. My grandfather used to go down at dusk to listen to them. It’s the male that sings, you know. Not the females as everyone thinks.’

  Muraski put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You okay?’

  ‘There’s a whistling in my left ear. And a bruise that looks like a map of the world on my back.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know. Numb,’ he said.

  ‘I think that’s normal.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he sighed. He thought about Ruby, how she would take the news. The first death in the family. He decided he would break the news personally, rather than over the phone. She wasn’t close to Henry, but she knew her father was.

  ‘Or it could be the concussion,’ said Muraski, breaking into his thoughts.

  ‘I haven’t—’ he began, before he realised she wasn’t serious.

  ‘It must have been quick and…’ She tailed off, clearly unsure of where to go with the sentence.

  ‘He’d had a good innings?’

  Muraski shook her head, annoyed that she had been about to spout platitudes. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I guess it’s more tragic with someone like Jamal, a young man.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘It’s true though. But like I said, he was like a father to me for much of my childhood. Maybe this is what Safi meant? About me feeling his pain.’

  ‘Safi didn’t do this. Old age did.’ She paused. ‘But what’s left of Safi’s house is being pulled apart as we speak, although it could take weeks to sift everything. That might yield some clue as to what was on his mind when he said that.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ After the butane explosion a good portion of the downstairs had been gutted. It had taken the fire brigade close to two hours to get it under control. Meanwhile, a considerable chunk of the upstairs had been blown out into the street, along with the remains of Safi and Moe.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You won’t find any of the devices he made for the Russians in there, will you? They’ll be long gone. Your lot don’t have anything on them yet? The Russians?’

  Muraski shook her head. ‘We are trawling back to see if any likely GRU agents, a man and a woman, entered the country. Like we did with the Salisbury agents. Nothing. Those Novichok clowns made themselves bloody obvious though, as if it was deliberate. This lot? They might have been here years, of course.’

  ‘Sleepers?’ he asked.

  ‘Deep cover, certainly,’ she said. ‘Of course, they might just be hired hands.’

  ‘Who swear in Russian when a dog bites them?’ He pointed across the missing central section to the empty east wing. ‘You looked at the oligarch next door?’

  ‘Kutsik? We did, of course.’

  There was a ripple of irritation in her words. Maybe he was teaching his grandmother to suck eggs.

  The phrase reminded him once again that he had lost such an important man. The man who had spent hours out in the fresh air, teaching him to fish and shoot, had turned a shy, bullied boy into someone with the confidence to join the army and become an ATO. He wiped a tear away with his sleeve and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. No word from Nick, who normally butted in to call him a pussy or some such when he showed any emotion. But Nick’s not real, he reminded himself. He’ll be down there in that black cavern where his grandad would dwell. And, real or not, Nick could just shut the fuck up. He’d mourn if he wanted to. No, more than that. He needed to mourn.

  ‘Kutsik hasn’t even been in the country during most of this,’ Muraski continued. ‘Putin put Kutsik’s son in prison for fraud. Seized a good chunk of his assets. Kutsik is no fan of the regime. So I doubt he’s a player in this. We’re also trawling all the CCTV near George O’Donnell’s house, although given the timescale since his new chums came calling, a lot of it has been lost. Counter-terrorism has pulled him in. He’s given them, and they’ve passed to us, the approximate dates of the visits by his possible Russian buyers, so we can narrow down the search. Who knows? That might throw something up. Of course, he claimed he sold them nothing. And we don’t have any proof at the moment.’

  ‘Just my word.’

  ‘I’m not sure any testimony extracted via exploding dog is valid in court.’

  ‘Fair one. Meanwhile we just wait?’ Riley asked.

  ‘No, there are stones being turned everywhere. But, in the end, it’s their move, Dom.’

  ‘That’s what I am afraid of.’ He loathed waiting for the other side to make their play.

 
‘Dominic?’ It was his grandmother, looking frail and shaky as she stepped down from the kitchen. ‘Walk with me, please?’

  ‘Off you go,’ said Muraski, getting to her feet. ‘I might join Mr Beaumont in a brandy. Mrs Clifford-Brown, I’m sorry… about Henry. I misjudged him when we first met.’

  ‘You were just doing your job.’ She gave a glacial smile. ‘I was like you once.’

  Riley could see the tension beneath Muraski’s thinly returned smile. He suspected that his grandmother would have eaten ten Kate Muraskis for breakfast without a second thought – and that Muraski knew it.

  * * *

  Riley and his grandmother strolled towards the nightingale wood, taking the path that skirted the lake. He couldn’t believe his grandfather would never walk over this lawn again or across those fields and through the trees that made up the wood. He slid his arm through his grandmother’s and pulled her close. ‘How are you, Gran?’

  ‘Hurting, to be frank.’

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘I knew it would come one day. This moment. Still hit me like a train. Isn’t that silly?’

  Riley put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, as if he could absorb some of the pain she was feeling. ‘No, Gran. He was a fine man. One of a kind. Like you. I’ll miss him.’

  ‘I can’t stay here now. In the house. He’s in every brick of it. I can’t bear it. I’ll have to sell it. Would you mind terribly? I always thought it might be yours one day.’

  ‘What would I do with a country pile? You do what you have to do. Where will you go?’

  ‘Well, for the moment, Ben has a place in town.’ London. ‘A little pied à terre. Just while I sort myself out. There’ll be a funeral of course, but a memorial at St Paul’s would be nice.’

  They reached the edge of the wood. The bluebells were out, a splash of vivid colour in the sun-dappled shade of the canopy. A dove was cooing and a woodpecker was knocking himself silly. Riley took a breath and it choked him on the way out. His grandmother ruffled his hair, as she had when he was a teenager. ‘It’s cruel, but it’s nature’s way.’

  He sniffed back more tears. ‘I’m supposed to be comforting you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t need any of that,’ she snapped, a flash of her usual self. ‘But I do need a favour.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Go and see your mother. Tell her about Henry. I can’t face her just now. I know that’s ghastly, but there we are. You can take the BMW if you don’t want Miss Muraski to come along. Can you do that for me?’

  He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Of course, Gran. It’s the least I can do.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  ‘Have you come to take me home?’

  It was the usual greeting from his mother. It always came with a beaming smile of relief, a face raised in hope.

  Rachel Clifford-Brown – she had reverted to her maiden name – was sitting in The Snug. It was one of several day rooms at Silver Lake, the secure care home that Barbara and Henry had settled on. Or rather, had settled on them. UK care homes in general did not like ‘customers’ who had Rachel’s profile of problems, so the choices were surprisingly limited. Riley didn’t know how much it cost per year, but his grandfather’s bushy eyebrows had always conveyed that it was a lot.

  Riley had always been able to see why. It was decorated more like a hotel than the usual care home cliché of floral patterns and swirly carpets. Rooms were spacious enough, there were plenty of staff and the public areas looked over an expanse of water on the edge of the university. The Snug had leather chesterfield-style sofas, deep armchairs that might have been lifted from a St James’s club and triple-glazed French windows that gave the impression that any of the inhabitants could throw them back and wander freely in the grounds. But it was an illusion. The doors did not open and to reach the grounds you had to go through three locked doors in the presence of a ‘companion’, as members of the care staff were known.

  On the face of it the place seemed like paradise at the end of life, at least compared to some establishments. But under the perfumed air there was always an undertone of piss, and the room known as The Retreat was full of those who had withdrawn from life and were waiting for death to show up. Skeletal, befuddled, soiled and in pain, collectively they spoke eloquently of everyone’s final destination, even if you had the money for Silver Lake.

  ‘Shall I get my things?’

  ‘Not now, Mum,’ Riley said softly, reminding himself that she was stuck in a loop. It was all too easy to get irritated, as if she had any choice in the matter. He walked over to the fireplace where a rather convincing fake, and therefore safe, fire burned in the grate and turned down the radio on the mantelpiece a notch. The Snug did not have a television, the focal point of daily life in many homes. There was one in The Lounge, but his mother preferred to sit and listen to the Radio 3 or Classic FM broadcasts that were the norm for The Snug.

  They had the room to themselves. The only other occupant, a woman in a towelling dressing gown, looking as if she was waiting for a spa treatment, had tutted when Riley entered and left, taking her copy of Country Life with her. Rachel was dressed in a two-piece black trouser suit, smart enough for an evening cocktail party. A five-diamond Elsa Peretti Tiffany necklace was at her throat. She still looked glamorous, her hair cut short and spiky, her cheekbones sharp; just the backs of her hands, veined like a river delta, and a slight sagging of the neck hinted that she was a good decade older than she might appear at first glance. The elegance was offset somewhat by a pair of ‘bunny’ slippers and a bandage on her right wrist peeking out from under the jacket.

  ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she said airily. She poured a few inches of water from a plastic jug into a glass, took a sip and replaced it on her side table. ‘Right. Shall we go?’

  Her body had held up well, but her mind had begun to slip when she was in her early fifties. Drink and drugs, said the doctors. After a concerted and exhausting campaign of interventions, her parents had got both out of the picture. But once they had been stripped away, it revealed that the damage was both irreversible and ongoing.

  ‘Are we off?’

  ‘Hold your horses, Mum.’ He caught himself once more. Time had told him that impatience with Rachel was unfair and counter-productive. ‘In a bit, maybe.’

  ‘How long’s a bit?’ She looked at her watch, a Cartier that had been pawned more than once. Henry had always retrieved it amid empty promises that the heirloom – it had been his mother’s, a present on her ‘coming out’ at a debutante’s ball – would never leave her wrist again. ‘We’ll miss the next bus,’ she said with a tremor of anxiety.

  ‘There’ll be another,’ he said calmly. There was a bus stop on the premises of the care home for buses that never came. Some of the inhabitants insisted they wanted to leave, and they would be taken to the bus shelter by their companion. After a while they would lose interest or forget why they were sitting in the shelter and ask to go back to watch a favourite TV show or have tea. It had seemed a cruel deception to Riley when he first heard about it. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘What happened to your wrist?’ he asked.

  She looked at the bandage as if it were newly applied ‘Oh. I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you fall again?’ Whatever had eaten away at her mental faculties had also sideswiped her balance mechanisms.

  ‘No, no. Nothing like that. Just a…’ She couldn’t seem to make her mind up what it was.

  Riley made a mental note to ask at the desk about the dressing and what lay beneath.

  ‘How is Ruby?’ Rachel asked, apparently keen to change the subject.

  ‘Ruby?’ He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice. On his last visit she couldn’t remember him being married, let alone having a daughter. ‘Tall, bright, creative.’ And probably a little bit scared right now. ‘Both lovely and a bit of a handful.’

  ‘How old is she now?’

  ‘Thirteen.’
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br />   ‘A difficult age.’

  ‘Apparently.’ Riley didn’t want to go into the fact that he was sitting out of most of the storms of adolescence. ‘Look, Mum, I have some bad news.’

  ‘Rachel! You want to do the sweepstake?’

  The man who had entered The Snug was so bent over he appeared to be looking at the floor. All Riley could see of him was the mop of silver-white hair on top of his head. He was dressed in a high-tech blue anorak and Rohan-style outdoor trousers. On his feet were sturdy hiking boots. He looked as if he had popped in from a stroll along Scafell Pike.

  ‘What sweepstake?’ Rachel asked. ‘Bill, this is my son…’ Just a moment’s pause punctuated the introduction. ‘Dominic.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Dominic. Match tonight,’ Bill held up a hard-backed notebook. ‘Guess the score. You in, Rachel?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Riley, reaching for his wallet. ‘How much?’

  The man laughed. ‘We’re not allowed to gamble for money. Winners get to choose a film on film night.’

  ‘Oh, okay. Who’s playing?’

  ‘Arsenal versus Liverpool.’

  ‘Two–one to Arsenal,’ said Riley, against the current form of the sides. In a different world, many years ago, it would have been him and Moe the terp betting on the result and first to score.

  ‘Yes, two–one,’ said Rachel. ‘And I’ll have A Star Is Born. The Streisand one.’

  Jesus, she had gone mad.

  Bill wrote it down in his book. ‘Only if you win.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘And you did choose it last time.’

  ‘Did we watch it?’

  ‘Yes. But never mind. Most of us don’t remember what was on the news five minutes ago.’ Bill left, laughing softly to himself, having still not made eye contact with either of them. Riley had rarely seen such a bad curvature of the spine. He wondered when the poor guy had last seen the sky.