‘So. What now?’
‘For me and thee, I don’t know. Gil left all sorts of plans in train. She’s got people in to fix up the de Freitas’s house, seems to think that if Hale figures they’re coming back he might approach them. Me, I don’t know.’
Mac smiled. ‘I’ve got a feeling that might be easier than you think,’ he said. ‘If Hale’s people were watching the Duggan house yesterday, there’s a good chance they think the de Freitas came down with Fitch. Bridie thought it might be good to throw a little confusion into the mix. Maybe she was right.’
He explained to Abe about the two employees of Bridie’s who had driven down to Frantham and were currently in the De Barr hotel.
‘She took a risk doing that. A risk with them, I mean.’
‘A small one. True. What then? Lyndsey still has the phone number. Isn’t that the simplest way to make contact?’
‘She’s already agreed to call them again. I did think she was going to fall apart on me that day we met Rina. She was in deep shock, like she’d been putting it off since Ian died and suddenly it all caught up with her. But she’s rallied. Wants to bring Hale in. I think the thought he had Ian killed is a big motivator.’
‘Like it is for you?’
‘Like it is for me.’
The rest of the day was heavy with activity. There were phone calls made both in the clear, hoping Hale would intercept and other communications using the avoidance tactics they had devised. Mac spent a good deal of it with DI Kendal and Superintendent Aims. Aims, still suspicious after being taken for a ride, was not pleased by the latest revelations. He’d sent men out to arrest Abe Jackson and the man hadn’t even had the courtesy to turn up. Now he was being told that Abe was not the one they wanted after all.
Mac was left with the distinct impression that Aims would have been happier if Hale had been the legitimate agent. With his tailored suits and public-school accent, he had been far closer to Aims’ expectation of a spy than Abe Jackson could ever be.
It was also a day of activity up at the de Freitas’s house. Glaziers were called in to fix the window and a team of cleaners to tidy up the mess. Local police investigated the break-in and forensic teams dusted for prints. Phone messages gave every impression that the burglary had been discovered by the housekeeper and the police were treating it as a common or garden crime.
Phone calls too, to the effect that the de Freitas had in fact already returned, and were staying at the hotel until their house was habitable.
Gil, returning at noon and learning about Bridie’s bit of subterfuge, made full use of it and posted her people inside the hotel and on watch outside in case Hale should try to approach ‘Lydia and Edward’, but by late afternoon there had been no sign of anything untoward.
Tim had spent an hour with Gil just after she returned and in the afternoon the glaziers returned.
Lyndsey and Ray turned up with their escort at Hill House in the middle of the afternoon. Mac had been summoned.
Ray looked scared. His face almost as pale as his hair and Mac realised for the first time just how young Ray and Lyndsey were. It was something he had not really thought about before, but neither was much older than Joy Duggan. He felt a sudden surge of resentment against Paul de Freitas that he should have put such a weight of expectation and danger on such immature shoulders.
Then, he just got angry, not just with Paul, but with the whole regime that kept such secrets, developed such secrets. Stole them and traded them and had no regard for life. He fought down the irrationality of his feelings, pushed them away knowing that this was the way of the world and there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes, it was very hard to believe in Paul’s concept of The Power of One.
Ray had a holdall with him. He set it down on the dining room table and unzipped the bag, then stood back, dragging his fingers nervously through his white-blond hair.
‘I thought it was a game,’ he said. ‘Until Paul got killed. I knew he’d written me into Lydia’s game. I’d got the weapon, the Kraken Hunter. When he was killed, I realised that it wasn’t just a game, it was like, real.’
‘So you took this out of the lab?’
Ray nodded. ‘Paul made me promise I’d keep the kraken killer safe. He was drunk, so was I. We were playing the level and having a laugh about it, then he got all serious and … I thought it was the drink talking, but it wasn’t, was it?’
He opened the bag and showed a jumble of parts, none of which made sense to Mac. ‘I hid it, then I ran to Toby’s place. I thought if I just kept moving maybe it would be all right.’
‘Did you find what was hidden in the music box?’ Mac asked.
Gil signalled to someone and the box was brought over. It had been stripped down to its constituent parts, even the little dancer, naked without the tulle of her skirt.
Gil picked up the little doll. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s very nicely done.’ She unscrewed the head, set it aside, slid the body apart, showing a little compartment inside where the torso had been hollowed out. ‘The chip was in here,’ she said. ‘Paul made a lovely job of hiding it. Clever man.’
‘And I had the code,’ Lyndsey said. ‘To get into the secret level of the game. Richard found that bit, but he didn’t get the whole picture. There was a second level inside the first. I thought I was making a patch for the game, but Paul put my patch inside his new level. I’d never have made the connection.’
‘So, you have the whole thing?’
‘It’s going to be passed on to experts capable of testing it,’ Gil said. ‘But if Hale was right and Paul succeeded in creating something that will pick up the signature of the submarine, then we need to know and we need to find ways of deflecting it. But first things first. We have to take Hale out of the equation and we have to identify his contacts.’
‘How serious is this?’ Mac asked. ‘How far do you think Hale’s influence goes?’
Gil ignored his question. She screwed the head back on to the little dancer and handed it back to the technician. Mac figured she wasn’t going to answer that one.
FORTY-THREE
It was all in place. Hill House may never have been occupied for all the trace they left behind. Fitch had driven the couple pretending to be Lydia and Edward up to their house. They had made a great show of going inside, being upset, ‘Lydia’ in tears. Fitch had driven them away again.
A little later, Lyndsey had run from the cliff path, across the lawn, taken the key from under the herb pot and gone inside. She was carrying a holdall and from the way she moved it was obviously heavy.
Once inside, she walked through the house into the hallway, took out her mobile phone and dialled the number Paul had left her. She took a deep breath, knew she had to put on the performance of her life.
The same sense of opening up on the other end of the line, the clicks, the sense of space. ‘I know you’re there,’ she almost screamed into the phone. ‘I know you can hear me. Please, say something. Say something to me.’ Stressed as she was, it cost her little effort to break down in tears.
‘He’s a madman. A crazy man. But I got away from him. He went to sleep and I ran. God, I thought that man never slept. He just kept on talking, kept on saying these insane things and Paul gave me this number. He said you’d know what to do. You’ve got to help me, got to come for me. Got to take this thing away and keep it safe. Paul said you would. He told me …’
‘You have it all?’
Lyndsey whimpered, genuinely frightened. The voice seemed to come out of nowhere. She had given up on getting a direct reply. ‘I’ve got it all. The chip. The code. The device. Got it all. Paul trusted me.’
‘Stay there. We’ll come to you. It will all be over soon.’
‘You don’t know …’ But the connection had broken and the voice was gone. ‘Where I am,’ she finished softly. Obviously, they did.
Had they believed her?
She’d been told, speak to no one, look at no one, you’ve got to behave as if you�
�re completely alone. It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be. She really, truly felt alone.
She went into the Big Room. Outside it was near dark, the sky deep blue and the line between cloud and sea now indistinguishable. She sat down in Edward’s chair, the holdall at her feet. Unable to bear the enormity of the situation, she switched on the light beside the chair and leaned forward, head in her hands. She didn’t need to fake the tears. They flowed freely. Scared beyond words, she wondered how long they would make her wait.
Silence.
Waiting.
Boredom. She had not expected waiting to be so tedious or for the utter terror to pass into something so banal. She seemed to slide past being scared and into some strange state close to lethargy. Lyndsey leaned back in Edward’s chair and closed her eyes. That same desperate need for sleep that had overpowered her when Abe had taken her to Hill House, now set in again. She found that all she wanted was to give in, to seek the oblivion that had been so soothing, so relieving, so utterly peaceful.
And then the shattering of nerves, of silence, of everything. Lyndsey’s world was filled with the noise of breaking glass. Of gunshots, of men shouting. Abe yelling at her to stay down. She was aware that he had dragged her from her seat and was now covering her body with his own, though she had no memory at all of him grabbing her and pulling her to the ground.
She curled up tight, making herself as small as she could, but Abe was telling her that it was over. That it would be OK now, that she was safe.
He let her up then, holding her arms and staring into her face, calling her name, then holding her tight while she sobbed.
‘It worked love, it worked. God I was scared.’ He was laughing, relief and sheer pleasure at a job well done.
‘You were scared. I was …’ She gave up trying to tell him what she’d been. Knew only that Tim’s illusion had been good enough. He’d had so many doubts. She lifted her head to look at the devastation in the room. The massive expanse of glass that had once been the window was completely shattered and the second pane, angled inward in the middle of the room, also gone, just the anchor points that had held it from the ceiling remaining.
‘Took a lot of nerve, that did,’ Abe told her. ‘Ian would have been proud.’
She tried to tell herself that she’d not really been in danger. She’d been placed behind a steel and Kevlar screen, the chair and the light putting her below the level of the barrier, like the orchestra pit at the Palisades which hid the actor playing ghost from the audience. The bright light placed behind her chair projected the image of her sitting in Edward’s chair on to the glass that Tim had angled in the centre of the room.
Pepper’s Ghost.
‘Bloody hell, it worked.’ Tim sounded so amazed that she had to laugh.
‘You mean you had your doubts?’
‘Well, yes, kind of. I mean all kinds of things could have gone wrong. Like if they’d used a scope, you’d have been kind of transparent.’ He laughed slightly hysterically. ‘Seems like he fired first and thought about it after.’
‘You don’t expect the thing you can see not to be there,’ Abe said dryly. ‘You’re dealing with expectation, not reality. Even experts sometimes see the frills and not the heart of the trick.’ He got up, pulled Lyndsey to her feet. The rest of the team was moving in now and Abe felt ready to leave them to it.
‘Any chance of a bed at Rina’s place tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’ve had enough of this lot. No offence to you,’ he added, looking with something close to affection at Lyndsey. ‘This just isn’t my way, you know. Not a clean fight.’
EPILOGUE
Rina leaned against the railings and looked out to sea, Tim on one side of her and Mac on the other. They were standing on that part of the walkway that rounded the headland between Frantham Old Town and Frantham new.
‘They arrested Hale last night, trying to leave the country,’ Mac said. ‘His is the tenth arrest, apparently. If you ask me there’s going to be something of a witch-hunt going on. Gil told me that much out of courtesy, but she’s implied that this is the last we’ll hear of her and that we should just forget the whole thing.’
‘As if,’ Tim said. ‘We did all right, didn’t we?’ He was still overwhelmed by the fact that his idea had worked. Disappointed but resigned that he’d never actually be credited for it.
‘We did well,’ Rina said quietly. ‘And Lyndsey and Ray?’
‘Ray will stay on at Iconograph. Lyndsey still says she wants to go but I think she may change her mind. Edward is offering a very attractive package, apparently. He wants to keep them both.’
‘Do you think she’ll give in?’
Mac nodded. ‘I think she needs to feel wanted; persuaded. I think if Edward plays that right then she’ll stay willingly, but I think there’s a bit of her feels entitled to the extra attention. Ray, too.’
‘I can’t say I blame them for that,’ Rina said. ‘I’ve told Abe he should stay in touch. I’m interested to know what he decides to do with his life now. It can’t be easy for him. No family, nothing outside of the army.’
‘Rina,’ Tim told her sternly. ‘You can’t adopt him. We really don’t have the room.’
Mac laughed. ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘Miriam is coming over and I think I’m cooking.’
‘Takeaway then,’ Rina said.
‘As it happens, Matthew has provided me with a recipe and a shopping list. I’m no longer a microwave man, Rina.’ He leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek, then bid them both goodbye and walked away.
Rina lifted a hand to touch her cheek. She could feel tears, unexpectedly pricking at her eyes.
Tim said nothing, he just took her arm and slipped it through his own.
The Power of One Page 21