by Des Ekin
His eyes widened. ‘There were only a thousand of those. That will be most acceptable.’
Emma frowned. ‘I haven’t got it with me, of course.’
‘It’s OK. Mail it to me at the shop. I trust you.’ He fished in his pocket and produced his card. ‘The woman you are looking for is a Christianite.’
‘That’s her religion?’
‘No, no. She lives in the Free City of Christiania.’
Oh, no, thought Emma. Just over nine hours to go, and I’m in the wrong damn city.
‘How far away is it?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Can I drive there? Or do I have to take a ferry or plane?’
To her intense irritation, he burst into laughter. ‘It’s in the Prinsessegade. Only a short stroll from where we sit.’
‘But you said it was a city …’
‘Christiania is a city within a city. Come. I’ll take you there if you like.’
‘You sure?’
Jens nodded. ‘I’ll take the morning off. We shall have plenty of time. You will find it …’ He paused. ‘… Interesting.’
They rose from the bench.
‘Just a moment,’ said Emma, as she stuffed the photos back into her folder. ‘You still haven’t given me this woman’s name.’
So he told her. And then she had to sit down again.
IN the southern state of Georgia, it was not yet dawn. Torrential rain drummed deafeningly on the roof of Atlanta Airport. The noise made conversation difficult. Mark Tobey, standing at the flight booking desk, raised his voice.
‘Let me get this straight,’ he told the attendant. ‘You’re telling me you can change my original flight schedule, but you’ll have to route me through Washington?’
The attendant looked distastefully at Mark’s crumpled suit.
‘Yes, sir, I am,’ he said. ‘We will not have a direct flight to Dublin, Ireland, until this evening.’
‘And how long will this journey take?’
‘It depends how quickly you can change planes at Washington, sir. There’s a charter flight leaving Dulles Airport for Dublin with limited seating available; if you can catch it, you should arrive in Dublin at around twenty after eight, local time, tonight. If you miss it, my advice would be to transfer to JFK in New York and take the next available scheduled flight to London Heathrow.’
‘Which would get me to Dublin by …?’
‘Possibly eleven, eleven-thirty.’
‘That’s too late.’ Mark fidgeted with his tie. ‘I have to be back before nine tonight. I have a deadline to meet.’
‘Then it’s vital that you make that Washington connection, sir. But I must advise you that it’s extremely tight and there are no guarantees. Should I go ahead and book?’
‘Yes.’ Mark glanced across the lounge towards the closed door of the women’s restrooms. ‘And book seats for two. I’m bringing someone back with me.’
HUNTER closed the plastic cover of Claire’s mobile with an angry snap. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘This is the fourth time I’ve tried to phone Emma. She’s not answering.’
‘Perhaps she’s out of range,’ suggested Claire, changing down a gear as she negotiated her Fiat Brava through the heavy Tuesday-morning traffic.
Hunter shook his head. ‘She shouldn’t be.’
‘Have you left a message?’
‘That system doesn’t appear to be working, either. I just keep getting a recorded announcement from the operator telling me to please try later.’
‘What about Naomi Scott?’
‘No luck there, either. Naomi still hasn’t turned up for work. And she’s still not answering her home phone.’
Claire shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve done all we can do.’ She drew to a halt at a traffic light. ‘Now, tell me, Hunter – where exactly are we going?’
‘I told you last night. We’re going to see Joseph Valentia.’
‘Be serious.’
‘I am being serious.’ Hunter was surprised at how snappy his voice sounded. He realised that he was starting to feel the ill effects of a week of sleepless nights. Last night had been no exception – the best he’d been able to manage had been a few restless hours, tossing and turning on the same lumpy cinema seats. Even a luxurious shower and a change of clothes had failed to restore his sense of self-esteem.
‘You look fine,’ said Claire, spotting him rubbing his chin in the mirror of his sun visor.
‘I cut myself shaving with a women’s razor at the club. It’s still bleeding.’
‘It doesn’t show. I’m telling you, you look fine.’ Claire accelerated through an amber light. ‘Which way now?’
‘Left.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I checked Valentia’s schedule. He was due to address the Dublin branch of his party at 11.00am.’
‘And you’re going to confront him? Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘Hunter …’ Claire stopped at another light and eased the gears into neutral. ‘Are you sure you’ve thought this through? He’ll just call the police and have you arrested. Which, may I remind you, is something you’ve gone to considerable lengths to avoid.’
Hunter frowned. ‘It’s a risk I have to take. I need to know whether he’s aware that his daughter has set him up. I want to see the expression on his face when we show him the photos.’
‘We?’
‘Okay, when I show him the photos. After that, we can decide what approach to take.’
The traffic eased off as the Fiat headed southwards in the opposite direction to the main flow of commuters. Claire turned right off the dual carriageway, and within five minutes she was parking her car outside the community hall where the party meeting was due to take place.
It was a bleak building, its sandstone front blackened by the smoke from generations of smoking chimneys and years of car exhausts. In front stood a similarly grimy statue of some minor Victorian bureaucrat, his eyes staring forward heroically under a ridiculous toupee of white pigeon-droppings.
No one asked Hunter and Claire for identification as they walked into the packed hall. The party meeting had ended, and middle-aged ladies in tweed suits were dispensing cups of tea and plates of biscuits.
‘I can’t see him,’ whispered Claire. ‘Perhaps he’s gone.’
‘No. His Merc’s still parked outside.’ Hunter nudged her and pointed. ‘Look. There he is.’
Valentia was circulating smoothly among his crowds of supporters, pressing the flesh and answering questions. He knew everyone’s first name. He inquired after sick spouses and asked about children’s progress at school. His rich, resonant laugh rang out above the hubbub of conversation as he moved from one circle to another, never staying too long in one place. He ate the dry, curling sandwiches and soggy biscuits as though he genuinely enjoyed them, and held out his cup enthusiastically when one of the tweedy ladies offered him more stewed tea.
‘He’s an android,’ whispered Claire in genuine wonder. ‘Nobody could be that smooth.’
‘He’s a real pro,’ Hunter agreed. ‘Now let’s see how he reacts when we chuck this little bombshell into his lap.’
The roar of conversation had died down to a quiet hum, and Valentia was making really-must-go noises.
‘Now!’ whispered Hunter.
Together, they moved forward and ambushed the politician just outside the door.
‘Mr Valentia,’ Hunter said quietly. ‘May we have a word with you?’
‘Mr Hunter!’ Valentia’s expression didn’t even flicker. He chuckled fruitily, as though greeting an old friend. ‘I’m surprised to see you here. The pubs are just about to open, you know.’
The face appeared to glow with genial good humour, but the eyes were staring at him coldly, weighing him up, wondering what was going on.
‘May we have a word?’ Hunter repeated. ‘In private?’
A man wearing a sharp suit and Ray-Ban sunglasses noticed the conversation and started as he recognised Hunter. Urgently, he began to elbow his
way through the crowd.
‘Out of the question, I’m afraid,’ said Valentia, still beaming. He nodded at the minder, who grabbed Hunter’s arm.
‘It’s about your daughter,’ shouted Hunter, as Valentia turned his back and moved off towards his waiting car.
Valentia froze in mid-stride.
‘It’s about your daughter, Charlotte,’ Hunter repeated in a lower voice. ‘And her friend, Mags Jackson.’
Slowly, the politician turned around. Hunter reached into his folder and, watching Valentia’s reaction carefully, produced the clearest of the photos.
Valentia’s face betrayed nothing, but all around him, conversations trailed off into silence and his crowd of supporters waited edgily, expectantly. Something wasn’t right here, and they knew it.
Valentia threw his arm out in a gesture of generous welcome. ‘Would you like to join me in my car?’ he asked.
Hunter and Claire climbed into the back seat beside him. The deeply polished Merc pulled out from the kerb to join the heavy flow of traffic.
Two hundred metres away, a powerful Honda motorcycle emerged from behind a rusted rubbish-skip and followed them. Chato Cook’s gloved hand twisted the throttle and then, deliberately, eased off again to drop a few car-lengths back in the following traffic.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘WELCOME to Christiania. Welcome to our modern Utopia of peace, love and happiness.’
Jens gave an ironic grin as he invited Emma to walk ahead of him through the gate that led into the free city. The entrance was nothing special, just an ordinary gate in an ordinary street in the densely populated Copenhagen suburb of Christianshavn. It could have been the gateway to any city park anywhere in the world, except for the wording on the noticeboard beside it: instead of stating the usual ban on camping and walking on the grass, it forbade hard drugs, guns and cameras.
Jens led Emma into the main street, a busy thoroughfare lined with market stalls. But instead of fruit and vegetables, each table displayed dozens of different types of marijuana. The stallholders looked edgy and slightly intimidating as they rearranged their merchandise. Some of them glared suspiciously at Jens and Emma as they walked through.
‘They’re always worried about undercover police,’ Jens explained. ‘Selling dope is against the law, even in the free city, but the authorities tolerate it so long as it’s confined to this single area. However, the cops often raid the place just to show who’s boss.’
Emma peered at the market stands as they passed. They reminded her of the herb and spice stalls she’d seen in the souks of Casablanca. There were also pipes, cigarette papers, water-coolers and tacky souvenirs for the tourist trade. At one end of the table lay a transparent case containing several giant joints.
‘Biggest spliffs in town, lady,’ said the man, in a high-pitched Euro-American accent. ‘Afghan black – dynamite effect, but gives a really mellow high. Only twenty kroner. Like to try?’
Emma shook her head. ‘Come on,’ she whispered to Jens.
‘You can smoke it in the café over there,’ said the dealer. ‘No problem. You’ll be high all day, I promise.’
‘No, thank you.’
Near a settlement of makeshift houses, a woman with spiked purple hair was selling hot vegetarian dishes from a roadside stand. Men and women walked by with the dazed, spaced-out expressions Emma normally associated with patients in a psychiatric hospital, leaving behind them a smell of burnt cannabis and slept-in clothing. Half-wild mongrel dogs chased each other through the litter-strewn grass. Looking around her, Emma found it hard to believe that she was in the heart of Copenhagen, Scandinavia’s biggest and most prosperous city. It seemed more like a shantytown in Jamaica or Johannesburg, without the benefit of sunshine and smiling faces.
‘How much further, Jens?’
‘Not much. Come on.’
By now the sun had vanished and it was almost dark. Far away, on the other side of the canal, Emma saw the bright lights of office buildings, service stations, apartments, all the signs of civilisation, but they might as well have been a thousand miles away. Here, she was trapped in the Dark Ages.
‘Right,’ said Jens, nodding in front of him. ‘We have arrived.’
The street that lay ahead of them was nothing more than a straggly line of clapboard shanty-houses. The best-constructed homes had felt roofs, but most bore ramshackle covers of corrugated steel, and a few temporary structures were protected only by lashed-down tarpaulins. They were all brightly painted in oranges, yellows and blues – colours from a child’s paintbox – and decorated with peace signs, yin-yang circles and sunflowers. One house had a garden with neatly tilled rows of vegetables; the others had unruly plots full of weeds, rubbish-bags and the straggly remains of cannabis plants. From behind dirty windows, eyes followed Emma and Jens suspiciously.
Jens led the way to a saffron-painted house on the left. There was someone at home: they could see a dim light flicker behind the crudely stitched jute curtains. Jens grinned encouragingly at Emma and stood back as she delivered several loud knocks to the wooden door.
For a long time, nobody answered. In one of the other houses, a dog began barking loudly and a voice yelled at it in Danish to shut up.
A woman opened the door.
‘Hello, Mags,’ said Emma. ‘Or should I call you Charley? Either way, I think I’d better come in. We have a lot to talk about, you and I.’
JOSEPH Valentia leaned forward towards his driver. ‘Drive towards Leopardstown,’ he ordered. ‘Around Foxrock. Then back again.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The driver signalled right and drove slowly up the hill.
Hunter and Claire exchanged glances. Hunter fished in his portfolio and brought out the photos.
Valentia said, ‘I estimate that you have roughly six hundred seconds.’ His voice was neutral.
Hunter could almost hear the sound of a clock ticking away. He handed over the pictures and waited.
Valentia took his time, studying first the originals and then the computer enhancements.
‘Interesting,’ he said at last, in a bored voice. ‘But I’m not sure what you think they prove.’
‘Come on, Valentia. It’s all over. These photos prove that your daughter Charley was in this up to her neck.’
‘They prove nothing of the sort, Mr Hunter. A strong likeness, I admit. But no court would ever accept them as proof. Particularly as your clearest images have obviously been enhanced by computer.’
‘But the originals haven’t,’ Claire interjected.
‘But they’re not clear, my dear, which is why they were enhanced in the first place,’ Valentia pointed out with infinite patience. ‘Catch-22, don’t you think? The legally acceptable ones aren’t clear, and the clear ones aren’t legally acceptable.’ He peered out the window. ‘I’d estimate you have about four hundred and twenty seconds left, wouldn’t you?’
Despair turned Hunter’s stomach to ice. Valentia was right. His precious photos wouldn’t last five minutes in a court of law.
‘Why did she set you up, Valentia?’ he asked. ‘You must want to know as much as I do.’
Valentia sat back wearily. ‘Charlotte has had many problems over the years,’ he said with resignation. ‘I have no control over her.’
‘She’s a heroin addict, isn’t she?’
‘She has had many problems,’ Valentia repeated.
Hunter leaned forward, trying to make eye contact with him. ‘Don’t you think we should postpone tonight’s deadline until you talk to her – find out why she did this?’
Valentia shook his head impatiently. ‘You’re a typical journalist, Mr Hunter,’ he said. ‘Tunnel vision. You focus your telescopic lens on one small area of life. You ignore the big picture.’
‘Okay, so enlighten me. Show me the big picture.’
Valentia glanced at his watch. ‘You couldn’t even begin to comprehend, Mr Hunter.’
‘Try me.’
He sighed. ‘We are both victims, Mr Hunt
er. Both of us. Victims of the most elaborate dirty-tricks operation ever mounted in this country.’
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’
‘You know what I’m talking about. My popular support has made me dangerous. After this election, I would have been in a position to control the direction of the social policy of an entire nation for the next five years. My ideas were radical, revolutionary. Certain people did not want that to happen. So they used the entire apparatus of the State – secret and otherwise – to engineer my downfall. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Mr Hunter. Read your history. It’s happened so often in the past, it’s almost boringly predictable.’
The car sailed slowly past Leopardstown Racecourse and entered the tree-lined avenues of old Foxrock. In one embassy garden, a labourer was using a garden vacuum to suck up fallen leaves.
Hunter stared at him. ‘You’re saying this whole thing was a set-up by Orla Byrne?’
Valentia ignored the question. ‘I’m saying that you, Mr Hunter, were a mere pawn in this game. You were used to disseminate the black propaganda.’ He smiled thinly. ‘And please don’t think you’re in any way special. This was just the latest in a long series of smear campaigns. Like the myth of the video nasty in the glove compartment of my car. I assume you’ve heard that one?’
‘But what about your daughter’s role in all this?’ Claire was anxious to keep to the point.
‘I don’t accept that the woman in your photograph is my daughter,’ Valentia said. ‘If she were, I would be very sad, but it would not make me any less the victim. More so, if anything.’
‘Let me be clear about this,’ Hunter said. ‘You’re telling us that everything that was supposed to have happened that night – everything to do with your alleged role in the abduction of Kate Spain – was fabricated by black-propaganda experts?’
‘Of course it was, you poor credulous dupe.’ For the first time, Valentia appeared to lose his cool. ‘I never even met Kate Spain – aside from one tedious occasion on which I patiently sat in my clinic listening to Miss Spain’s whinges about how hard it was for her to bring up her bastard child in the perfectly good apartment that the State had generously provided for her. All these lies were deliberately fed to you. The police were, no doubt, instructed to feed your colleague Mr Tobey the off-the-record confirmation. And you bit like a hungry fish.’