Stones of Treason

by Peter Watson

  Giles Wittington had never seen so many famous faces close up. Tom Lessor’s was the first he recognized. He had been on television only last week and now he came out of the Cabinet Room into the hall at Number Ten along with James Hammond, Environment Secretary. Frank Massie, Chancellor, was next, talking to Ian Dunlop, Secretary of State for Scotland, and John Waymouth, Education Secretary.

  Wittington was waiting with Mordaunt, Leith and Eric Slocombe. They were to see the Prime Minister as soon as Cabinet was over.

  As the ministers began to leave, the front door opened, letting a weak sunshine flicker into the corridor. Jocelyn Hatfield, Chief Whip, came out of the Cabinet Room next, with Mary Fraser, Social Services Secretary. Then came George Keld, Defence, by himself and looking rather stern. Robert Standish followed – he was Trade and Industry.

  Wittington felt a tap on his shoulder and turned, to see Leith holding a piece of paper in his direction. ‘This is Eugenie Shelby’s address. She’s separated, apparently. We’re trying to trace the ex-husband at the moment.’ Wittington looked at his watch – a quarter to one. He was beginning to feel a little jaded after being up for most of the night. He had remained in the archive until just before dawn, when he had transferred, as Ogilvy had instructed him, to the staff lavatory nearby, and locked himself in. He had been told the security guards would not use it and they hadn’t. He had left the lavatory a minute or two after ten. Some unknown early member of staff had tried to get in but no doubt assumed that a fellow keeper had beaten them to it. Then, posing as an early visitor to the gallery, Wittington had strolled around for half an hour, and then left. He’d gone straight to Leith, who had debriefed him, sent him off for breakfast and then brought him on here. It had been quite a night.

  ‘I think we can go in now,’ said Slocombe. ‘All the ministers have left.’ He led the way into the Cabinet Room where Evelyn Allen was talking in subdued tones to the Prime Minister. Slocombe and the others all stood on the opposite side of the table and waited for the Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary to finish. Eventually, Allen looked across at Slocombe, nodded, and left the room. Slocombe took the lead and sat at the table. The others did likewise.

  ‘How did Cabinet go?’ Slocombe asked.

  Lockwood shrugged. ‘Our secret is safe … for the time being.’ He looked at Leith. ‘This cathedral burning is a bit of a setback.’

  Leith nodded. ‘But there is progress to report on other fronts, sir. This is Wittington, by the way.’

  Lockwood and the handwriting expert exchanged nods.

  Leith continued, ‘The woman we want at the BM is called Eugenie Shelby. Wittington is fairly certain the handwriting matches, but equally relevant is the fact that Shelby is her married name. By birth she is Greek. The Shelbys are separated now and we’re trying to trace the husband, in case he can be a help. As for Eugenie, she works in the conservation department of the museum – I’ve spoken to Ogilvy this morning and he knows her … She specializes in sculpture conservation.’

  Lockwood nodded but spoke to Wittington. ‘You’re certain this Shelby woman is the person we want?’

  ‘Sir, I found her file at about two o’clock this morning. But I had to spend the rest of the night in the museum, so I didn’t just go to sleep. I looked at all the other files on the list which Inspector Leith gave me. With only signatures to compare, it’s never easy or foolproof with handwriting. But hers is definitely the closest match of all those I looked at. I’m sure you’ve been told that there are seven hundred people employed by the museum. Obviously I only looked at a couple of dozen files.’

  Lockwood nodded again. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not much, I’m afraid.’ Leith leaned forward, his hands spread out on the Cabinet table. ‘At the moment, Riley is tailing Zakros in Basle, while O’Day is legging it around the city, making a survey of all the public phones. We might get lucky.’

  ‘And in Greece?’

  Leith made a face. ‘Zilch. Tatton and Andover were at the second site earlier today. No sign of our friends. In fact, they were told Kolettis definitely wasn’t there. They are now on their way to the third site, at Knidos –’

  ‘Remind me,’ said Lockwood. ‘They are still sticking to the sculpture trail – yes? Where is the next stop, exactly?’

  ‘Knidos. The excavation site is about twenty miles from Datça – that’s on a narrow spit of land leading out from Marmaris.’

  ‘Turkey? Would a Greek be able to dig in Turkey? They are hardly the best of friends.’

  ‘Scholars are a funny bunch, Bill. If Kolettis is the authority on Praxiteles which Andover says he is, he’ll be very welcome. Also, in a way it’s good cover for them – no one would think of looking for a Greek operation run from Turkey, for the very reason you have just voiced.’

  Lockwood shrugged. ‘At least Tatton speaks Turkish – yes?’

  Leith nodded.

  ‘And how do they get to … Datça?’

  ‘They could go to Izmir but that would probably take too long. I expect they’ll take a plane to Rhodes. Then the ferry to Marmaris. And by road from there. They won’t be in Datça until after dark tonight, if that’s what you want to know.’

  Lockwood looked at Slocombe. ‘Don’t bother with Shelby’s husband. If we question him, he might alert her. They were married – he might still feel his main loyalty is to her.’ The Prime Minister bit his lip. ‘What would be the psychological impact if we simply moved in now, and arrested two of them – Shelby and Zakros?’

  Slocombe steepled his fingers. ‘They’d be shocked, but the others would go to ground. The fact remains that, so long as they have the remaining Nazi pictures, they have the upper hand. We can’t put Zakros on trial, even if we could get him extradited, and that would be difficult enough – we’ve been through all that before. And I doubt whether we could make anything stick against this Shelby woman. All we have, when it comes down to it, is an envelope that is probably in her handwriting, which was found in the Greek’s house and, remember, was obtained illegally and therefore not allowed as evidence in a court of law, even if we wanted to bring it into a court of law. So we don’t really have a great deal. The chief value of the Shelby woman is that we now know who she is, but she doesn’t know that we know. She may be worth following. It might also be worth tapping her phone, although, since the Greek in Basle is so careful with his, she probably is too.’ Slocombe pushed his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m afraid it all comes down to Tatton and Andover in Greece. If they can locate Kolettis, then we stand a chance of winning. The odds are that Aristotle and Stamatis Leondaris are with him but, even if they aren’t, Zakros and Kolettis seem to be running the show … Unless there is someone else in this Brigade, whom we know nothing about, we could apprehend the three of them simultaneously and barter their freedom in exchange for the paintings.’

  ‘What do we know about the second Leondaris, the MP?’

  ‘I asked the political attaché at the embassy. Stamatis is rather right-wing, or makes a lot of noise in that direction anyway. Interestingly, he’s the member for a Thessaloniki constituency – where Kolettis is professor. His wife is a jeweller, highly thought of. And he’s Ari’s brother, by the way. There’s still no reply to Ari’s phone in Athens and, according to the political attaché, Stamatis didn’t show the other day for a rally in Thessaloniki. No excuse was given, but it does seem that he’s out of the way somewhere.’

  ‘And so we carry on as before?’ Lockwood sucked the tip of his pen.

  ‘For the time being, Bill. But I feel a bit calmer now, don’t you? We’re making progress.’

  Lockwood nodded. ‘I suppose. But I don’t know how much longer we can hold off in Greece. This burning of the cathedral … it’s a bad business. Where is it going to stop?’

  O’Day was growing to loathe Basle. He had quite liked it to begin with. The wide river, bisecting the city, gave it space and provided some pleasing, and surprising, vistas. But if this had been an American city, laid ou
t in a grid pattern, his job would have been easier. Easy. He could have covered the entire town systematically. As it was, he’d been forced to buy a large-scale map and mark off the streets he’d walked along, otherwise he would never have remembered and could have wasted precious time doubling back on himself. He’d started near the Mittlere Bridge and the old fishmarket fountain, and worked south towards the large synagogue, then across to the museum area, completing an arc and coming back to the river at the Wettstein Bridge. That had taken no fewer than five hours to cover properly and so far he had discovered only one phone on his list, at the edge of a small park across from the History Museum. That was gratifying but hardly sensational and, since the number was higher up the list than the one on which Zakros had received his call the previous evening, it had almost certainly been ‘used’. He decided now to cross the river, to try somewhere completely different. He walked across the Wettstein Bridge and turned left, back towards the centre. He had no luck. Now he went away from the river, towards the freight-marshalling yards and the more industrial parts of Basle. Nothing. He started to get angry. How many telephones were there in this goddam city, for Christ’s sake?

  Near the freight-marshalling yards, there was a smoky brasserie and he dipped in there to get himself a late lunch and a beer. The place was crowded, thick with people and cigarette fug. He ate his lunch quickly – sausage, onions and red cabbage – and then opened out the map on his table. Was Basle laid out in any systematic way or with any features that would determine where the Greek might have chosen the phones? The more he looked, the more irregular and unplanned Basle seemed. That sort of thinking was no help at all. As he drained his beer, he thought back to the two sites where he knew the telephones were located. One was in a small square with a cinema; the other was on the edge of a small park, across from the History Museum. No … that sort of reasoning was silly. After all, the Greek may well have chosen the sites at random – that would be the most secure system.

  It had started to drizzle outside and he ordered a coffee. He looked at the map yet again and tried to put himself in the blackmailers’ place. One thing had struck him about the list of phone numbers when Riley first showed it to him. The list was very long and yet there were no addresses. Surely that could only mean one thing: there was a rhyme or reason to their arrangement around Basle, something that the Greek could remember in his head. There had to be a pattern – it was there, if only he could discover it. He stared out at the drizzle. A yellow tram went clanking by. His coffee arrived. He looked at the map again. The main roads were in red, the smaller ones in black. The parks were marked with stippling which made them appear grey, as was true of the river. The major public buildings – the museums, the fishmarket fountain and the large churches – were blocked out in black. Tram routes were marked as straight black lines along the streets they ran on, with round blobs every so often.

  Trams. The square with the cinema complex was on a tram route. Deliberately, O’Day located the site of the other telephone, the one in the park near the History Museum. So far as he could tell, it was on the same tram route as last night’s phone. O’Day drew the map closer to him. His fingers closed around his coffee-cup as he examined the symbols more carefully. No, he couldn’t see what he was looking for. He looked up, caught the waitress’s eye and signalled that he wanted the bill. He folded the map and finished his coffee. The waitress put a tiny slip of paper on the table. He examined the amount and left enough cash to cover it.

  Outside in the drizzle he looked up and down the street. There was a tram stop some hundred yards to his right. Even better, there was a tram coming, headed back into the centre of town. O’Day sprinted for the stop, arriving more or less abreast of the tram. He climbed the steps, paid his fare as if he was going the whole way on the tram but did not immediately search out a seat. He was looking for the feature which he knew existed on most public transport systems – a map. He could see one at the back of the tram where, fortunately, there were very few passengers. He stood in front of the map and found the route he wanted. As he had hoped, it was highly stylized and simplified, but each tram stop was marked. As he examined the map he made two discoveries. First, there were two numbers between the two sets of digits for which he knew the locations – and there were two tram stops between those locations. Second, the first number he had located was seventh in the list – and it was near the seventh tram stop from the beginning of the line at Spalentor. Therefore, it did not require a first-class degree in mathematics to reach the conclusion that the Greek’s telephone numbers were laid out along one particular tram route and that each successive call came to a phone that was the next stop out, along that line. This was presumably how Zakros could remember where the phones were without having to write down their addresses.

  O’Day was excited now but he’d have to check. From the map in front of him, it appeared as if the route he was now travelling on came closest to the one he was interested in at the Steinenberg Strasse. That was in about five stops’ time. He found a seat and waited. The tram clanked back across the Wettstein Bridge, turned right past the Kunstmuseum. O’Day got down where the route passed Steinenberg Strasse. It was now approaching three-thirty. Riley would be wondering what had happened to him but that couldn’t be helped. Another half-hour and he might just have an answer … According to the map on the tram, most of the routes started either from Spalentor or the square where the Falkenstrasse met the Kohlenberg. He walked west, crossed Steinenvorstadt and reached Leonhardsgraben, which took him to Spalentor. There he found a stationary tram waiting to begin its journey. He got on.

  As it moved off a few minutes later, he began counting the stops. The first phone he had located should come into view after seven stops, the second after ten stops and, if all that went according to plan, he would get off at the next, the eleventh, stop.

  The tram swung into Gerbergasse, rolled passed the fishmarket fountain and, close to the river now, turned left into Blumenrain. The seventh stop was reached just before the Johanniterbrücke – O’Day knew it well, for it was indeed near the phone he had found earlier in the day. The tenth stop was just on the St Johannes Ring, near the square with the cinema where they had watched the Greek receiving his call the evening before. Now very excited and pleased with himself, O’Day prepared to descend from the tram. The St Johannes Vorstadt had now changed its name to the Elsassestrasse and the tram’s next stop was where this street crossed Mulhauserstrasse.

  O’Day was slightly apprehensive when he saw this intersection; it was one of the busiest, and one of the biggest, in the city. He could see phones in several directions. Still, it was a lot more manageable than surveying the whole of Basle and he set about systematically examining all the booths he could see. There was a bank of three outside a department store. No. There were two across the street, near a kiosk selling newspapers and magazines. No. Beginning to sweat a little he looked around for more. There was a cinema on the far corner and, on the other side of the entrance, he could make out three more phones. He waited for the lights to change so that he could cross the road. As he did so, however, he noticed a little alleyway between a shop selling fishing tackle and a post office. There was a line of six phones there. He decided to try them first. He knew the number he was looking for by heart now: 47 78 11. The first booth was empty – and the number was wrong. The second booth was occupied … he would come back to that. The third booth was occupied … he would have to come back to that also. But the fourth booth was free. He lifted the receiver so that he could read the number. He groaned in pleasure. The number was 47 78 11.

  Edward reached across, took the bottle from the bucket and held its neck over Victoria’s glass. ‘More wine?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t feel thirsty, I don’t feel hungry and I certainly don’t feel happy.’

  Edward nodded but helped himself to wine all the same. Their journey to Datça had been uneventful and they had arrived at around seven in the evening. They had fo
und a hotel but then had immediately gone to enquire about the excavation at Knidos. All the taxi drivers knew where the dig was, but Knidos was about twenty miles away, and at that hour, of course, the site was closed. They had returned to the hotel looking forward to their dinner – after travelling all day they were both famished. But then Victoria had called London, to be told that O’Day and Riley were making real progress and hoping to tap the blackmailers’ phone very soon, and that Wittington had unearthed the name of an Apollo Brigade member in the British Museum. ‘In other words,’ as she had pointed out to Edward once her conversation with Leith in London was at an end, ‘we are the only people with no progress to report. I’ll bet Lockwood is getting itchy.’ She also told Edward about the Aghia Sophia in Moscow Road. That had deepened their gloom still further. And ruined their appetite.

  ‘We ought to discuss our plan for tomorrow.’ Edward put the bottle back in the bucket. ‘The same as last time? Watch out for one of the diggers, follow him or her, ask about Kolettis?’

  She seemed not to hear him. ‘What worries me … is that we took that man’s word too easily. The man in the café at Olympia, I mean. If I were Kolettis and were involved in what they are involved in, I would have some sort of security system. At the least, if someone came looking for me, I would leave standing instructions, to the effect that I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Even allowing for Haydon’s murder, he can have no idea we’re on to him. He’s here as an archaeologist. He’s not in hiding as such and is not acting as a terrorist – or indeed as a blackmailer – normally does, keeping himself to himself in a closed cell. There is nothing suspicious about him.’

  ‘Hmm. Maybe. One of the main points of security is that it secures you against the unexpected. He may not expect us to have tracked him down so quickly, but if he is professional he will still have taken precautions against what might happen rather than what he expects to happen.’