Made. Was. Past tense. That was that. The worst.
And there was a kid. Oliver. He read on.
Mr Weaning has confirmed that Dr Lestoq called him just before the attack with accurate details about what was about to happen. Had Ms Reegan been close to the auto attempting to catch Mr Windsor’s first words on South English soil, as was her expressed intention, she would have been killed outright. “She has paid a terrible price for her dedication and professionalism,” Mr Weaning has said.
Horatio clicked off.
He walked past the Polish Hearth Club and the Goethe Institute and finally reached the top of Exhibition Road, beyond the last street camera. Could Jean have committed suicide? She was certainly distraught enough when he left her. Should he have stayed?
He felt a sudden constriction of the throat. Breath came hard. He felt like he had been punched in the solar plexus. He took a pull at the Salbutamol. Only after something approaching a minute of acute discomfort was he able to think again.
Despair pushed its way into his mind insistently, hungrily, like the first maggot was wriggling through an eye socket into a corpse’s brain. He yearned for his Pluszac, however small a dose. Or should he just finish it there and then with Jean’s gun? The world could think what it liked. He’d know why.
He must find out more about poor Jean whom, he remembered, the Admiral had admonished him to protect. Another terrible failure. He returned to the pager. He had his own EuroNet index mention now. For the first time since his Carlyle coup. Lestoq, Dr Horatio. Pages 9661–9665 Y:
Dr Horatio Lestoq, the twenty-nine-year-old Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, is alleged to be responsible for the murder of Admiral Michael Ratcliffe – oh for the old system of sub judice, he thought – and is now also wanted in connection with the Entente Bridge outrage. Europol recently named him as also being wanted for questioning over the death of Ms Jean Dodson, sixty-two, who was killed in Ibworth, Hampshire, this morning. She died when her auto exploded in the High Street. Dr Lestoq’s fingerprints were found on a full clip of ammunition in the house.
A man answering his description was seen walking towards Mrs Dodson’s house at 11.30 yesterday morning. Ms Dodson is suspected of having been a witness to the murder of Admiral Ratcliffe.
They might as well have ended the news report with the words ‘Open and shut case’ thought Horatio bitterly. He felt drained, nihilistic, wretched. He wanted to do something vicious. If not to his enemies, then to himself. A ruddy-bluish film was descending over his eyes. Sitting on the steps of the Albert Memorial he wondered how a supposedly clever person could be so bloody stupid so bloody often? There were another twenty minutes before his mother was due. But first he needed to know that she really was his mother. He needed to hear that the Admiral had got something wrong. Too many people had suffered because of his belated, deadly honesty. Horatio made his way slowly south-west across the Park towards the meeting place.
Jean was dead. Gemma was lying in some Dover morgue – what they’d been able to find of her. The photos of what military lasers had wrought in the Second Gulf War suggested there wouldn’t be much. That massive concentration of light and energy simply evaporated everything in its beam.
The statue of William of Orange – his godfather, Rory MacAdam, had been a proud Ulsterman – stood outside Kensington Palace Modern History Museum. Rory had died during the Loyalists’ brave but doomed march on Dublin. It was while he was standing in the drizzle under the trees in Kensington Park, keeping the statue in view from a distance, that Horatio realised he was being watched.
A man in a dark beret was loitering under the bandstand about a hundred metres away, pretending to take cover from the rain. But he glanced over in Horatio’s direction just often enough.
Horatio’s heart began to pound all over again. How many more were there? Would they start to move in on him. When? What could he do? He had Jean’s gun in his pocket. Would he need to use it? He gripped it tight.
The first thing was to put as much distance between himself and the statue as possible. He mustn’t get his mother – or aunt, or whoever she really was – involved in any of this. He started walking south towards High Street Ken, scanning the drizzling scene for any sign of confederates. The workmen on the rooftop of the Presidential Garden Hotel? The man selling bratwurst at the park gates? The jogger, perhaps? He walked quickly towards the road. Then, swinging around, he picked out the man following in his direction, hands thrust deep into a raincoat and seemingly oblivious of him.
As Horatio crossed the road, the rain falling more heavily now, he put his hand on Jean’s gun for comfort. He had no idea whether the safety catch was on or not. He knew nothing about guns, and his cursory examination of this one on the M3 had not helped much. He decided to take De Vere Gardens and then double back down Canning Place, towards Victoria Road. Then, heading south past Douro Place and St Alban’s Grove, he turned right into Cottesmore Gardens.
The man was still behind him. That settled it.
As he turned the corner into the quiet Kensington street, Horatio experienced another panic attack. He had always been slightly neurotic but this threat was all too real. What if it was not a policeman following him with a view to an arrest, but an officially-sanctioned assassin waiting for a suitable opportunity to rub him out? If these people could smash up houses, gag newsagencies, organise auto crashes, kill judges, asphyxiate people and then frame innocents for it, what would stop them just shooting him? Ever since the Met were armed, more and more people were being killed on the streets. Shoot-outs with the various ethnic organised crime syndicates were almost daily news fare. It would not be hard to explain away. His mother would know the truth, as would Cleo and Marty, but no one else would suspect anything. With the gun on him they’d just say he died ‘resisting arrest’. Some cleaner would probably find the tape stuck under the Oratory pew months from now and doubtless throw it away. He took a deep pull on his inhaler.
Turning sharply left at the end of Cottesmore Gardens, past the last house with the blue plaque announcing that Sir Philip Ziegler, historian and biographer, had lived there half a century ago, Horatio stepped smartly into the doorway of the first house in Stanford Road. He held the gun tight and resolved to be brave. If he didn’t faint first.
After what seemed like a millennium, but was actually only about twenty seconds, the man in the hat and raincoat walked past. As he caught sight of Horatio he stopped and turned, looking surprised. Horatio froze.
‘You gave me a shock!’ the stranger said, with a smile.
In that same moment the man’s hat, and then the left side of his head, flew off. The hat landed on its rim, rolled along the wet pavement and then flopped over. Skull, brain, blood and grey matter splattered far across the street. The body itself was knocked over by the power of the bullet. It toppled, what remained of its head first, and started bucketing blood onto the pavement. The gutter, which was already running with rainwater, ran dark pink to the nearby drain. To make the sight yet more macabre, the man’s hands stayed stuck securely in the raincoat pockets.
Horatio stood stock still, taking it all in.
The next thing he saw was someone running down the street towards him. Horatio pulled out his revolver and took aim. The man wore gloves and a balaclava. He put his hands up but continued running. As he approached he shouted, ‘Quick! Horror! Come with me! Police’ll be here any minute. Explain later!’
His nickname, yelled in a voice he recognised. Whose?
The man then walked over to the corpse and put his hand in the raincoat pockets. Taking out a gun from one and a two-way from the other, he thrust them into his own pockets and ran off down Stanford Road, shouting ‘Come on!’ over his shoulder.
People were looking out of their windows. A middle-aged woman who had been unloading shopping from her grade 2 auto further down the street had seen everything. A large fragment of hairy, blood-soaked skull had landed a couple of metres away from her. She was holding her hea
d in her hands and screaming hysterically in short, ear-splitting bursts. And she was looking straight at Horatio.
Not knowing what else to do, he started off after the man in the balaclava. The police would come soon. The dead man had had a gun. Perhaps his life had been saved? Impossible to know. He couldn’t stay there though.
He had gone too far, was in too deep, not to take risks now. At the end of Stanford Road the man darted left down Eldon Road and stopped by a small yellow electric. Horatio followed.
‘Get in!’ Horatio did. As he sat down in the driver’s seat, the man pulled off his balaclava.
Horatio then saw the face of his saviour.
Or his assassin.
CHAPTER 21
09.10 WEDNESDAY 5 MAY
‘Peter! For God’s sake!’ Horatio cried in between pulls on his inhaler. ‘Why are you following me? What’s going on?’ Riley started the auto and drove away.
‘I was sent to protect you. We believe you’re in serious danger.’ They were driving north fast.
‘Who’s “we”? And who was that man you killed?’ They turned left when they reached Kensington High Street. As they drove alongside the park they saw three police autos, sirens screaming, driving straight towards them on the wrong side of the road.
‘Shit!’ muttered Riley. ‘They’ve got us.’ He pulled over and took out a gun. ‘We may have to shoot our way out of this, Horror. Just stick close to me.’ Horatio reluctantly pulled out Jean’s gun.
But the police did not slow down. They sped straight past and swung off right into Victoria Road.
Horatio breathed out as Riley drove on.
‘Listen to this two-way. That’ll tell you who he was.’ Horatio put the receiver in his ear as Riley switched on the dead man’s transmitter.
Come in Spartacus! Come in Spartacus! This is Sigint. Do you read us? Where are you, Spartacus? Are you still trailing suspect? Let us have your present position. Urgent! We heard a shot. What’s going on? Police are on their way now! Respond! Respond!
Horatio switched it off and handed it back, not much the wiser. As he turned up Kensington Church Street, Riley threw the radio out of the window down onto the road.
‘He was a Berlin-Brussels operative whom I saw on your track. When he had you cornered I had to take the decision about whether or not to fire. I’d been authorised to, so I did.’
‘By whom? Who the hell do you work for then?’
‘I’ll tell you when we’re in the safe house.’
‘No! I’m not going anywhere unless you tell me now.’ Riley stopped the car halfway down Vicarage Gate. Without turning around to face Horatio, he said simply: ‘I work for the Tenth May Group’
‘You – a terrorist! Jesus how absurd. You’re a historian for Christ’s sake!’
‘And you’re a logician. It hasn’t stopped you getting mixed up in all this.’
‘How did you know where to find me? What do you want?’
‘I was told you’d be in the Park. I was to watch you and get you out of any scrapes. If anyone tried to arrest or harm you I was to get you safely away. We’re very rarely told we can shoot to kill – it was my first time. I thought a stunning would be enough but I had specific orders.’
‘Who gave you them?’
‘My cell commander. Who’d have got them from Army Council London District. I can’t tell you anything else about that.’
Could he trust Riley? What choice had he? As they drove up Kensington Church Street and turned off right into Vicarage Gate he asked what other operations he’d carried out for the Group. Riley seemed embarrassed.
‘I’m only very junior, Horatio. This is the first time I’ve actually taken life.’
‘I see.’
‘So far it’s jobs like I imagined this would be. Following, watching, protecting, that kind of thing. I was involved in blowing up the Santer statue in Commission Square.’
Horatio remembered the incident. The statue of the archnationalist, Winston Churchill, had been taken down from its pedestal in Commission Square, ostensibly for cleaning. For a long while nothing happened, until one morning about five years ago a statue of former Commission President Jacques Santer was erected in its place. A week or so later, in the middle of the night, it was blown up, in what some papers called a terrorist outrage, but what had struck Horatio as little more than a jolly student jape. No one had been hurt and the statue was soon replaced.
‘Pretty undergraduate stuff.’
‘And I was involved in springing Redwood.’ That was more like it. At seventy-two, John Redwood was the grand old man of anti-federalism, having been one of the chief political opponents to Aachen. Yet even at that age he had been arrested on trumped up charges of spying for the Americans. He’d been sprung from Pentonville by the Tenth of May Group in a famously well-executed operation. Somehow they had managed to spirit him out of the Union altogether. He wound up overseeing the Free British Office in Oslo.
‘You must have been all of about twelve.’
‘Eleven. My family went on a Swedish holiday with the old boy hidden in a false bottom in the camper van. We nipped over the border into Norway at an unguarded part of the northern frontier.’ The conversation had gone on long enough. He had to trust Riley.
‘I’d like to meet one of your senior people. I’ve got information that they badly want. Can I give you the gist of it?’
‘You could just as easily give it to them yourself. They’ll send someone senior over straightaway, I imagine.’
Riley restarted the auto and drove up Brunswick Gardens. The safe house was, he explained, known solely to his cell. Horatio was to let himself in and wait until he was met by whichever member of Army Council had been detailed to discuss the next stage.
‘If you want a wash,’ he said, with a look which suggested that Horatio looked and smelt as if he did, ‘use the bathroom on the first floor. On no account open any curtains or windows. Here’s the card. It’s number nine.’ They stopped outside a large, double-fronted Kensington townhouse. ‘Be as inconspicuous as possible. Go.’
Horatio stepped out of the car and, without saying goodbye or looking round, let himself in through the garden gate. As he walked up the short path he heard Riley drive off behind him. The card key worked smoothly, and once he had closed the large door behind him he let out a long, satisfied sigh.
Another followed five minutes later when he lowered himself into a hot bath. He’d explored the house and found it completely gutted. The only furniture, apart from a couple of futons in the upstairs bedrooms, was a mangy sofa on the ground floor. Horatio hated sleeping in anything but a proper bed. He dreaded the idea of a futon. There was a kettle, some U.S.E.-processed coffee and a good deal of unappetising-looking dehydrated food. Otherwise the place looked as though the builders were about to arrive. At least the cable managed to pick up most channels.
Was he right, he wondered, as he soaped around the vast white bloated belly of which he was so secretly and inordinately proud, to throw in his lot with a terrorist organisation? Especially one with such a monastic outlook on creature comforts? Would it not compromise his revelations, if and when at last he got a chance to make them? He had read the Commission propaganda about the Tenth of May Group, of course. Their viciousness, implacability and so on. They took their name from the date in 1940 – Old Britain’s annus mirabilis – when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. For them it was the defining moment in British nationhood.
Like so many other English people, Horatio was in two minds about the English Resistance Movement. Not recognising the legitimacy of the Strasbourg parliament, the E.R.M. refused to contest seats for it. They also did not accept the Aachen decision and had finally resorted to violence to achieve their ultimate aim – an independent United Kingdom. Although the E.R.M. was outside the democratic process, many people in North and South England admired them and sympathised with their aspirations, especially when their military wing, the Tenth May Group, began specialising in daring
hits on unpopular, ‘hard’ targets. The kidnap of the Union Agriculture Commissioner from his own office in Brussels, for example, had been condemned by the media but applauded by the people, especially after the Commission obtained a Directive which would have destroyed the English oak and lettuce industries.
They were supposed to be rigidly disciplined and ruthlessly efficient. Although they had started off amateurishly in the Twenties, the group had been welded into an efficient unit, largely by the professionalism of the many ex-servicemen in their ranks. They had been fighting now for over twenty years, concentrating on taking out people they termed ‘Euroquislings’. They were now able to hit targets in North and South England in a highly discriminating way. That was why people like David Fraser always looked under their autos every morning before driving to work. Gregory Percival had long been top of their hit list. Three times they had tried to assassinate him, each plot having gone awry at the last moment.
The English people might privately have applauded the E.R.M.’s ends, but most did not (at least publicly) condone their means. The blowing up of Commission buildings and personnel never commanded general public support. But this, Horatio reasoned, was largely because the Aachen referendum was thought to have legitimised the federal Union, however unpopular it might subsequently have become.
What would happen, he wondered, as he soaped around his athlete’s foot, once it became public knowledge that Aachen had been fixed? Overnight these terrorists would become freedom fighters, their campaign proved morally justified all along. Instead of the psychopathic gang of fascist thugs continually portrayed in the media, Tenth May terrorists would become patriotic heroes overnight.
It was all down to him and the Aachen Memorandum.
What would they do to get hold of it? Was he ready to give it to them? What would he demand in return? Free Norway had no extradition treaty with the Union. A.F.T.A., perhaps? New Zealand might be an option worth exploring. He couldn’t stay in the Union, but the thought of trying to live anywhere else depressed him.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 19