“The Gunter sister? Kayleigh?”
“Yes, Kayleigh. Apparently the girl who does the Fortescues’ garden was at school with her, and told Sophie that she—Kayleigh, that is—works a couple of nights a week in a club in King’s Lynn as a stripper.”
“Really?” Perry raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know King’s Lynn offered such lurid temptations. Did she mention the name of the club?”
“Perry, stop it. The point I’m making is that the present generation of Gunters are not quite the simple fisherfolk their parents were.”
Perry shrugged. “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
He walked back to the window. Looked out over the shining expanse of Norfolk coastline to the east and west of them. “Times change,” he murmured, “and we change with them. Ray Gunter’s doing us no harm at all.”
Anne removed her glasses and placed them on the side table with an exasperated snap. Perry could be wilfully obtuse when he wanted to be. She was worried, too. After thirty-five years of marriage she could tell when he was up to something—and he was up to something now.
N u-Celeb Publications of Chelmsford, Essex, occupied a low modular building on the Writtle Industrial Estate to the southwest of the town. The premises were spare and utilitarian, but they were warm, even at nine in the morning. Melvin Eastman hated to be cold, and in his glass-walled office overlooking the shop floor the thermostat was set to 20° Centigrade. At his desk, still wearing the camel-hair overcoat in which he had arrived ten minutes earlier, Eastman was examining the front page of the Sun newspaper. A smallish man with neatly dressed hair of a slightly unnatural blackness, his features remained expressionless as he read. Finally, leaning forward, he reached for one of the telephones on the desk. His voice was quiet, but his enunciation precise.
“Ken, how many of those Mink Parfait calendars have we had printed up?”
On the floor below, his foreman looked up at him. “ ‘Bout forty thou, boss. Should be the big Christmas seller. Why?”
“Because, Ken, Mink Parfait are splitting up.” Taking the newspaper, he held it up so that it was visible to the foreman.
“You sure it’s kosher, boss? Not some publicity …”
Eastman laid the paper down on his desk. “ ‘Citing personal and musical differences,’ ” he read, “ ‘Foxy Deacon confirmed that the four-strong girl group would be going their separate ways. “We know that this’ll come as a shock to the fans,” says FHM cover girl Foxy, 22, “but we wanted to end things on a high.” Insiders claim that tensions within the group date from …’ etcetera. We’re not going to be able to give those calendars away.”
“I’m sorry, boss. I dunno what to say.”
Eastman replaced the phone and admitted a frown to the pallid moonscape of his face. It was an unpromising start to the day. Nu-Celeb was not the only iron that he had in the fire—the celebrity calendar business had been created as cover for a raft of other, less legal activities that had made him a millionaire many times over. But it still irked him that he could take a bath to the tune of twenty large on the whim of a bunch of scrubbers like Mink Parfait. Half-caste scrubbers at that. Melvin Eastman did not subscribe to the dream of a multicultural Britain.
A key player in one of Eastman’s other business activities, a narrow-featured man in a black bomber jacket and baseball cap named Frankie Ferris, was sitting against the wall. He had a mug of tea in one hand and was smoking, tapping the ash into the bin with nervous and unnecessary frequency.
Folding the newspaper and placing it carefully in the same bin, Eastman turned to Ferris. Noted the pallor of his lips and the faint shake of the cigarette between his fingers.
“So, Frankie,” he said quietly. “How’s it going?”
“I’m awright, Mr. Eastman.”
“Returns coming in? Everyone paying their way?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“Any special requests?”
“Harlow and Basildon both want ketamines. Asked if we can do ’em a trial batch.”
“No way. That stuff’s like crack—strictly for coons and mentals. Go on.”
“Acid.”
“The same. Anything else?”
“Yeah, the Ecstasy. Everyone suddenly wants the butterflies.”
“Not the doves?”
“Doves’ll do but butterflies are best. The word is they’re stronger.”
“That’s bollocks, Frankie. They’re identical. As you know.”
Frankie shrugged. “Just telling you.”
Melvin Eastman nodded and turned away. From his desk drawer he took a plastic bank envelope, and handed it to Frankie.
Frankie frowned. Turned the envelope over incomprehendingly.
“I’m only giving you three fifty this week,” said Eastman quietly, “because it’s clear that I’ve been overpaying you. You did six fifty at the blackjack table in the Brentwood Sporting Club last Friday.”
“I’m s-sorry, Mr. Eastman. I …”
“That kind of behaviour attracts attention, Frankie, and attention is very bad news indeed. I don’t put a grand a week in your pocket for you to piss it away in public, understand?”
Eastman’s tone and expression were unchanged, but the edge of threat was very close to the surface. The last man to seriously displease his employer, Frankie knew, had washed up on the mudflats off Foulness Island. The dogfish had had a go at his face and he’d had to be identified by his teeth.
“I understand, Mr. Eastman.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, Mr. Eastman. I’m sure.”
“Good. Then let’s get to work.”
Handing Frankie a Stanley knife from his desk, Eastman indicated four sealed cardboard boxes which were stacked against one wall. The boxes’ stencilled sides indicated that they contained Korean-built document scanners.
Cutting across the seal, Frankie opened the first box, revealing the advertised hardware. With care he removed the scanner and its Styrofoam mould. Beneath were three tightly filled, sealed polythene bags.
“Do we need to check them?”
Eastman nodded.
Frankie cut a small incision in the first bag, drew out a wrap of paper, and passed it to Eastman. Unwrapping the paper, Eastman touched the tip of his tongue to the off-white crystal, nodded, and returned it to Frankie.
“I think we can take the jellies and the Es on trust. Just see if Amsterdam’s sent us doves or butterflies.”
“Looks like doves in this one,” said Frankie nervously, peering at a bag of Ecstasy tablets. “Must be using up old stock.”
The same operation was applied to the other three boxes. Carefully, Frankie packed a rucksack with the bags of Ecstasy, temazepam, and methamphetamine crystal, topping the load off with a T-shirt and a pair of dingy Y-fronts.
“The butterflies go to Basildon, Chelmsford, Brentwood, Romford and Southend,” said Eastman. “The doves to Harlow, Braintree, Colchester—”
His phone rang, and he held up a hand, indicating that Frankie should wait. As the conversation progressed he glanced at him once or twice, but Frankie was staring out over the shop floor, apparently engrossed in the progress of a fork-lift truck.
Was he using? Eastman wondered. Or was it just the gambling? Should he offset the morning’s stick with a bit of carrot—push a couple of fifties into his back pocket on the way out?
In the end he decided not to. The lesson had to be learned.
F araj Mansoor,” said Charles Wetherby, returning his tortoiseshell reading glasses to his top pocket. “Name mean anything to you?”
Liz nodded. “Yes—person of that name bought a fake UK driving licence last weekend in one of the northern ports … Bremerhaven, I think? German liaison flashed him to us yesterday.”
“Any terrorist form?”
“I ran him through the database. There’s a Faraj Mansoor who’s on a long list logged by Pakistan liaison of all those spoken to or contac
ted by Dawood al Safa in the course of his visit to Peshawar earlier this year.”
“Al Safa the ITS bagman? The one Mackay was telling us about yesterday?”
“Yes, that one. This Mansoor—and it’s got to be quite a common name—is identified as one of half a dozen employees of an auto repair shop on the Kabul road. Apparently al Safa stopped there and looked at some second-hand vehicles. Pakistan liaison had a couple of guys on his tail and when al Safa moved on they dropped a man off to list the employees.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Wetherby nodded pensively. “The reason I’m asking is that for some reason I can’t presently fathom, Geoffrey Fane’s just called me with a request to be kept in the loop.”
“About Mansoor?” asked Liz, surprised.
“About Mansoor. I had to tell him that, as things stood, there was no loop.”
“And?”
“And that was it. He thanked me and hung up.”
Liz allowed her eyes to wander round the bare walls. Wondered why Wetherby had called her to his office for a conversation which could easily have taken place over the phone.
“Before you go, Liz, is everything all right? I mean, are you … OK?”
She met his gaze. He was someone whose face, try as she might, she could never quite summon from memory. Sometimes she could recall the dead-leaf brown of the hair and eyes, sometimes the wry asymmetry of the nose and mouth, but the precise collision of his features evaded her. Even now, facing him, he seemed elusive. As always, a subtle irony seemed to pervade their professional relationship, as if they met at other times and on some different basis.
But they never had, and outside the context of their work Liz knew very little about him. There was a wife who was supposed to have some sort of chronic health problem, and there were a couple of boys at school. They lived somewhere on the river—Shepperton, perhaps, or was it Sunbury? One of those Ratty, Toad and Mole places out to the west.
But that was about the limit of her knowledge. As to his tastes, interests, or what car he drove, she had no idea.
“Do I look as if I’m not OK?”
“You look fine. But I know this Marzipan business hasn’t been easy. He’s very young, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He is.”
Wetherby nodded obliquely. “He’s also one of our key assets—or promises to be—which is why I gave him to you. You debrief him, say nothing, and let me see the product—I don’t want him declared for the time being.”
Liz nodded. “I don’t think he’s registered on Fane’s radar yet.”
“Let’s keep it that way. We have to play a long game with this young man, and that means no pressure from this end whatsoever. Just concentrate on getting him solidly dug in. If he’s as good as you say he is, the product will follow.”
“As long as you’re prepared to wait.”
“For as long as it takes. Does he still think he’s going to university next year?”
“No. Whether he’s told his parents or not I don’t know.”
Wetherby nodded sympathetically, stood up, and walked to the window. Stared out over the river for a moment before turning back to face her. “Tell me. What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t working here?”
Liz looked at him. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said eventually. Because I was asking myself more or less the same question only this morning.”
“Why this morning in particular?”
“I got a letter.”
He waited. There was a reflective, unforced quality to his silence, as if the two of them had all the time in the world.
Hesitantly at first, uncertain of how much he already knew, Liz began to sketch the outlines of her life. Her fluency surprised her; it was as if she was rehearsing a well-learned cover story. Plausible—verifiable even—but at the same time not quite real.
For more than thirty years her father had been manager of the Bowerbridge estate, in the valley of the river Nadder near Salisbury. He and Liz’s mother had lived in the estate’s gatehouse, and Liz had grown up there. Five years earlier, however, Jack Carlyle had died, and shortly afterwards Bowerbridge’s owner had sold up. The woods and coppices which comprised the sporting estate had been sold to a local farmer, and the main house, with its topiary, greenhouses and walled garden, had been bought by the owner of a chain of garden centres.
The outgoing owner, a generous man, had made it a condition of the sale that his former manager’s widow should occupy the gatehouse rent-free for the remainder of her days, and retain the right to buy it if she wished. With Liz working in London, her mother had lived in the octagonal lodge alone, and when the estate’s new owner converted Bowerbridge House and its gardens into a specialist plantsman’s nursery, she had taken on part-time work there.
Knowing and loving the estate as she did, the job could not have suited Susan Carlyle better. Within the year she was working full-time for the nursery and eighteen months later she was running it. When Liz came up to stay with her at weekends they would go for long walks along the stone-paved avenues and the grassy allées and her mother would explain her hopes and plans for the nursery. Passing the lilacs, rank after cream and purple rank of them, the air heavy with their scent, she would murmur their names like a litany—Masséna, Decaisne, Belle de Nancy, Persica, Congo … There were entire acres of white and red camellias, too, and rhododendrons—yellow, mauve, scarlet, pink—and orchards of waxily fragrant magnolia. In high summer, every corner turned was a new and dizzying revelation.
At other times, as the rain beat against the glass and the damp green plant odours rose about them, they would pace the iron walkways of the Edwardian greenhouses, and Susan would explain the various propagation techniques as the lines of cuttings and seedlings extended before them to perspective infinity.
Her hope, clearly, was that at some not-too-far-distant point Liz would decide to leave London and involve herself in the management of the nursery. Mother and daughter would then live in happy companionship in the gatehouse, and in the course of time “the right man”—a dimly imagined Sir Lancelot–like figure—would happen along.
Liz was by no means wholly resistant to this idea. The dream of returning home, of waking up in the bedroom in which she had slept as a child and of spending her days surrounded by the mellowed brick and greenery of Bowerbridge, was a seductive one. And she had no objection to handsome knights on white chargers. But in reality she knew that earning a living in the countryside was grindingly hard work, and involved a deliberate narrowing of horizons. As things stood her tastes and friends and opinions were all metropolitan, and she didn’t think she had the metabolism to deal with the countryside on a full-time basis. All that rain, all those bossy women with their petty snobberies and their four-wheel drives, all those local newspapers full of non-news and advertisements for agricultural machinery. Much as she loved her mother, Liz knew, she just wouldn’t have the patience for it all.
And then that morning the letter had arrived. To say that Susan Carlyle had decided to buy. That she was investing her savings, along with the money that she had earned from the nursery and the life insurance payout after her husband’s death, in the Bowerbridge gatehouse.
“Do you think she’s trying to draw you back there?” asked Wetherby quietly.
“At some level, yes,” said Liz. “At the same time it’s a very generous decision. I mean, she can live there for nothing for the rest of her life, so it’s me she’s thinking of. The trouble is, I think she’s hoping for a …” she put her glass down and shrugged despairingly, “a corresponding gesture. And right now I just can’t think in those terms.”
“There’s something about the place one grew up in,” said Wetherby. “You can never quite return there. Not until you’ve changed, and can see the place through different eyes. And sometimes not even then.”
A spasm of knocking seized the radiator behind his desk, and there was a faint smell of heated dust.
Outside the windows the skyline was vague against the winter sky.
“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my not very important troubles.”
“It’s anything but a burden.” His gaze, touched with melancholy, played about her. “You’re very much valued here.”
She sat unmoving for a moment, conscious of things unsaid, and then rose briskly to her feet.
“A—you’ve been promoted,” hazarded Dave Armstrong a couple of minutes later, as she arrived back at her desk. “B—you’ve been sacked. C—despite heavy-handed official disapproval you’re publishing your memoirs. D—none of the above.”
“Actually,” said Liz, “I’m defecting to North Korea. Pyongyang’s heaven at this time of year.” She swivelled thoughtfully in her chair. “Have you ever talked to Wetherby about anything except work?”
“I don’t think so,” said Dave, stabbing pensively at his keyboard. “He once asked me if I knew the test match score, but I think that’s as personal as it’s ever got. Why?”
“No reason. But Wetherby’s sort of a shadowy figure, even for this place, wouldn’t you say?”
“You think perhaps he should appear on Celebrity Big Brother? As part of the new accountability?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess.” He frowned at his screen. “Do the words Miladun Nabi mean anything to you?”
“Yes, Miladun Nabi is the Prophet’s birthday. Sometime at the end of May, I think.”
“Cheers.”
She turned her attention to the flashing message light on her landline. To her surprise, there was an invitation to lunch from Bruno Mackay.
“I know it’s hideously short notice,” came the languid voice, “and I’m sure you’re already booked, but there’s something I’d like to … mull over with you, if I may.”
She shook her head in disbelief. That was so Six, the suggestion that the day—and the business of counter-terrorism—was really one long cocktail party. Mull? She never mulled. She anguished, and she did it alone.
But why not? At the very least it would be an opportunity to examine Mackay at close quarters. For all the supposed new spirit of cooperation, Five and Six would never be serene bedfellows. The better she knew her opposite number, the less likely he was to outmanoeuvre her.
At Risk Page 4