“Put it this way: if he was, it wasn’t on a big enough scale to come to our attention.”
“But a bit of a local bad boy?”
Goss shrugged. “According to the CID, not even that. Just a bit mouthy and free with his fists when he’d been drinking.”
“I take it he was single,” said Liz drily.
“Yes,” said Goss, “but not gay, which was one of the first things that occurred to me when he was discovered in the toilets at the Fairmile.”
“Is it a gay pick-up place, then, the café?”
“It’s every kind of pick-up place. They get very frisky, these long-distance HGV boyos.”
“Could Gunter have been there to pick up a woman?” Liz asked.
“He could have been, and there were certainly a few toms who worked the place, but that still leaves the question: how did he get there without a car? Who brought him? If we can answer that one I suspect we might get somewhere.”
Liz nodded. “So what do we know about the shooting?”
“Not a lot, frankly. No one heard anything, no one saw anything. Unless we get a forensic break I’d say our best hope is the CCTV.”
“Were the cameras definitely running last night?”
“The owner of the café says they were. It’s a new system, apparently. There was a spate of thefts from rigs last year and the drivers threatened to boycott the place if he didn’t install some decent security.”
“Fingers crossed, then.”
“Fingers crossed,” agreed Goss.
They talked on, but soon found themselves retreading old ground. Liz remained studiedly neutral in these exchanges. The Special Branch were police, and information had been known to leak from police stations to journalists—usually in return for cash. Goss seemed like the better sort of Special Branch officer, just as Bob Morrison was without doubt the worse sort, but Liz was relieved when the local detective superintendent rang to say that the CCTV footage was back from Norwich.
“It’s pretty rough, apparently,” said Goss, returning his phone to his belt. “It’s going to have to be enhanced if we’re to get any useful information off it.”
Liz looked down at the remains of her lunch. Half of the sandwiches were uneaten, languishing alongside an untouched mound of Branston’s pickle. And she’d been right about the coffee. “I’ll go up and pay,” she said. “This one’s on Thames House.”
“That’s very generous of them,” said Goss drily.
“You know us. Sweetness and light.”
As Liz got to her feet, a phone began to ring behind the bar. The barmaid picked up the receiver, and a few seconds later her mouth opened in a speechless gasp. She’s just heard about the murder, Liz guessed. No, she already knew about the murder but has just found out that the victim was Gunter. She must have known him. But then everyone in a place this size would know each other.
Liz was beaten to the bar by a young man in a leather jacket and a lilac tie. Journalist, thought Liz. Almost certainly tabloid. That particular blend of the metropolitan and the downmarket was unmistakable.
“Another pint, love,” he demanded, placing a glass and a ten-pound note on the bar. The barmaid nodded vaguely and turned away. A minute later, still visibly dazed, she delivered the drink and rang up the price on the till. As she handed over the change, Liz saw the man’s eyes briefly widen.
“Excuse me,” said Liz, addressing the barmaid. “I think you’ve made a mistake. He gave you a ten-pound note. You’ve given him change for a twenty.”
The barmaid froze, the till still open in front of her. She was a heavy girl of about eighteen, with flustered gypsyish eyes.
“The fuck’s it got to do with you?” asked the man in the leather jacket, turning to Liz.
“Give her a break,” said Liz. “Her till’s going to be out.”
The man addressed his pint. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.”
“Is there a problem?” asked Steve Goss, materialising at Liz’s side.
“No problem,” said Liz. “This guy accidentally pocketed some extra change, but he’s about to give it back.”
“Ah,” said Goss sagely. “I see.”
The man in the leather jacket took in the sober bulk of the Special Branch officer. Shaking his head and smiling as if in the presence of the mentally unhinged, he slapped a ten-pound note down on the bar and carried his drink away.
“Thanks,” said the barmaid, as soon as the man was out of earshot. “I have to make it up out of my wages if I’m short.”
“Local guy?” asked Liz.
“No. Never seen him before. When he came in he was asking me about the …”
“The murder?”
“Yeah. At the Fairmile. If I knew the dead man and that.”
“Did you?” prompted Liz gently.
She shrugged. “Knew him to look at. He came in a few times. In the public bar.” She flicked over the pages of her pad and handed Liz the bill. “That’s seven pounds exactly.”
“Thanks. Can you do me a receipt?”
The nervousness returned to the barmaid’s eyes.
“On second thought,” said Liz, “don’t worry about it.”
When they got outside, the wind was throwing down irregular spatters of rain.
“That was neatly handled,” grinned Goss, forcing his hands into his overcoat pockets. “What would you have done if the guy had refused to give back the money?”
“Left him to your tender mercies,” said Liz. “We’re just an intelligence-gathering organisation, after all. We don’t do violence.”
“Thanks a lot!”
They turned back in to the village hall, where Don Whitten, the detective superintendent in charge of the case, had just arrived back from the Fairmile Café. A bulky, moustached figure, he shook Liz’s hand briskly and apologised for the spartan conditions in which they found themselves.
“Can we sort out some heating for this place?” he demanded, looking exasperatedly around the bare walls. “It’s brass bloody monkeys in here.”
The constable, who was crouched in front of the VCR, got uncertainly to her feet. The DS turned to her. “Ring the station and ask someone to bring over one of those hot-air blowers. And a kettle, and some tea bags and biscuits and ashtrays and the rest of it. Jolly the place up a bit.”
The constable nodded and thumbed a number on her mobile. A plainclothes officer held up a video cassette. “Norwich have identified the footage and run us off a copy of the Fairmile CCTV tape,” he announced. “But the quality’s terrible. The camera wasn’t set right, and the tape’s all ghosting and flare. They’re working on an enhanced version, but we won’t see it before tomorrow.”
“I was afraid that might be the case,” Goss murmured to Liz. He pointed her to one of the canvas-backed chairs, and took one for himself.
“Can we have a look at what we’ve got?” said Whitten, lowering himself into a third chair. He took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and then remembering that there were no ashtrays, irritably returned them to his pocket.
The plainclothes officer nodded. As he had said, the CCTV footage was pretty much unwatchable. The time code, however, flickered strong and clear. “We’ve basically got two bursts of movement between four and five a.m.,” he said. “The first is this.”
Two shuddering white lines scribbled across the blackness as a vehicle arrived in the park, slowly reversed out of shot, and extinguished its lights, returning the screen to blackness.
“From the distance between the head-and taillights we reckon that’s an HGV of some sort, probably quite a long one, and probably nothing to do with our case. As you can see, that sequence is time-coded 04:05. At 04:23 things get a bit more interesting. Watch this.”
A second vehicle appeared to enter. This time, however, there was no reverse-parking manoeuvre. Instead, the vehicle, which was clearly shorter than the earlier one—a truck, almost certainly—performed a three-point turn, came to a halt, and exting
uished its lights in the centre of the parking area. As before, the screen returned to blackness.
“Now we wait,” said the officer.
They did so. After approximately three minutes a lower, smaller vehicle—a saloon car, Liz guessed—suddenly switched on its lights, reversed at speed from its position at the left-hand edge of the parking area, swung round the parked truck or van, and disappeared out of the front gates. More time passed—at least another five minutes, and then, rather more slowly, the truck followed it out.
“And that’s it until five a.m. So given that the pathologist has given us four thirty as the time of death, give or take fifteen either way …”
“Can you show us again?” asked Whitten. “Speeding up the bits where nothing’s happening.”
They watched it again.
“Well, it’s certainly not going to win any Oscars for best camerawork,” said Whitten. He rubbed his eyes. “What’s your reading of it, Steve?”
Goss frowned. “I’d say the first vehicle we saw is just a regular commercial rig. It’s the second one I’d like to see more of. It doesn’t park up, so is obviously expecting to be on the move pretty sharpish …”
Unobtrusively, Liz removed her laptop from its carrying case. There were a couple of queries that she had e-mailed to Investigations at Thames House, and with a bit of luck the answers might have come through. Logging on, she saw that there were two messages, with numbers in the place of sender names.
Liz recognised these as Investigations sender codes. The messages took a couple of minutes to decrypt, but they were short and to the point. They could only trace one UK citizen named Faraj Mansoor, and he was a sixty-five-year-old retired tobacconist living in Southampton. And Pakistan liaison had confirmed that Faraj Mansoor was no longer working at the Sher Babar auto repair shop on the Kabul road outside Peshawar. He had left six weeks earlier, leaving no forwarding address. His present whereabouts was unknown.
Switching off her laptop and replacing it in its case, Liz stared at a curling hand-lettered poster on the wall, advertising a production of HMS Pinafore by the Brancaster Players. As Whitten had said, the hall was bitterly cold, and it had the dour, institutional smell of all such buildings. Pulling her coat tightly around her, Liz allowed her mind to wander through the incoherent mass of loose ends that the case had so far thrown up. Before long, she began to meditate on the subject of 7.62mm armour-piercing ammunition.
F araj Mansoor woke thinking that he was still at sea. He could hear the crash of waves, feel the sucking undertow as the Susanne Hanke reared up the side of the next peak to come crashing down into the trough. And then the noise and the sea seemed to recede, to recede beyond a window—a small wooden window framing a steel-grey sky—and he realised that the waves were some distance away, dragging at a beach of stones, and that he himself was lying fully clothed in a bed, unmoving.
With this realisation came the knowledge of where he was, and the surreal memory of the landing on the beach and the attack in the café toilet. He revisited the attack, ran it through his mind like a film, frame by frame, and concluded that the fault for the way things had turned was ultimately his own. He had played the role of the downtrodden migrant just a shade too effectively, and had failed to allow for the Briton’s sheer venal stupidity. From the moment he had allowed him to approach, the outcome had been inevitable.
Faraj was not greatly troubled by the fact of having taken another man’s life, and had examined Gunter’s smashed skull with cold dispassion before deciding that a second shot was unnecessary and that it was time he was on his way. But the killing would attract attention to the area, and that was bad. The British police were not fools, they would calculate that the shooting was something out of the ordinary. And they would take the necessary steps.
Patting his trouser pocket, Faraj reassured himself that he had collected the spent cartridge case from the floor. For a moment he put it to his nose, and smelt the gunpowder residue. He had chosen his weapon with care. A target hit was a target down, flak jacket or no. When it came to the moment, he mused grimly, he might well need the few seconds this would buy him.
He swung his legs to the sea-grass flooring. He had said nothing to the girl about the killing of the boatman—he needed her to be calm, and the knowledge that a police murder hunt would soon be under way would have agitated her. For himself, he felt detached, a spectator of his own behaviour. How infinitely strange it was to find himself on this cold and lonely shore, in a land that he had never thought to visit, but in which—and he held out no illusions about this—he would almost certainly die. If it was to be, however, it was to be. The black rucksack hung where he had left it the night before—over the bedhead. The cheap windcheater they’d given him in Bremerhaven lay folded on a bedside chair. The gun was on the bed.
He could remember very little about the drive back to the coast from the service station. He had tried his best to stay awake, but fatigue and the after-effects of the adrenalin that had flooded his body during the fight had blurred his senses. The car, additionally, had been warm and smoothly sprung.
He had barely registered the girl. She had been described to him by one of the men who had trained her. She had been pushed hard at Takht-i-Suleiman, the man said, and she had not broken, as most soft city-dwelling women broke. She was intelligent, a prerequisite in the field of civilian warfare, and she had courage. Faraj, however, preferred to reserve his judgement. Anyone could be brave in the bullish, sloganeering atmosphere of a mujahidin training camp, where the worst you had to fear were bruises, blisters and the instructors’ scorn. And frankly, anyone with half a brain could master the basic weapons and communications skills on offer. The important questions were answered only at the moment of action. The moment at which the fighter gazes into his or her soul and asks: What do I truly believe? Now that I have summoned death to my side—now that I can feel his cold breath on my cheek—can I do what has to be done?
He looked around him. Beside his bed was a chair, on which was folded a red towelling dressing gown. On the end of the bed was a towel. Accepting the invitation that these items seemed to offer, he stripped off his dirty clothes. The dressing gown seemed inordinately luxurious, given the situation. Feeling slightly foolish, he put it on.
Tentatively, weapon in hand, he pushed open the door to the main area of the bungalow and stepped through, barefoot. The girl was facing away from him, filling an electric kettle from the tap. She was wearing a dark blue sweater with its sleeves hitched halfway up her forearms, a heavy diver’s watch, jeans and lace-up boots. Her hair hung straight and brown to her shoulders. When she turned round and saw him she jumped, sluicing water from the kettle’s spout on to the floor. Her other hand went to her heart.
“I’m sorry, you gave me such a …” She shook her head apologetically and collected herself. “Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam,” he returned gravely.
They stared at each other for a moment. Her eyes, he saw, were a hazel colour. Her features, while pleasant enough, were utterly unmemorable. She was someone you would pass in the street without noticing.
“Bathroom?” she hazarded.
He nodded. The stench of the Susanne Hanke’s hold—vomit, bilge and sweat—hung about him. The woman would certainly have noticed it in the car the night before. She preceded him through the door, handed him a zip-up sponge bag, and backed out. Laying the gun on the floor, he turned on the bath’s hot tap. A roaring sound emanated from the wall-mounted heater, and an uneven thread of tea-coloured water wound into the enamel bath.
He unzipped the sponge bag. In addition to the usual washing equipment there was an extensive first aid kit, complete with sterile wound dressings and suture needles, a small oil-filled compass, and a diver’s watch like her own. Nodding approvingly, Faraj set to work with the razor. The bath was clearly going to take some time to fill.
When he finally emerged, she had cooked. There were places set, covered dishes on the table and a smell
of spiced chicken. In the tiny bedroom he dressed in the clothes she had bought for him in King’s Lynn the afternoon before. These were of good quality: a pale blue twill shirt, a navy blue sweater, chinos, buckskin walking boots. A little hesitantly, he returned to the central room, where the woman was scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. Hearing him, she turned round, lowered the binoculars, and looked him up and down.
“You speak English, don’t you?” she asked.
Faraj nodded, and pulled out one of the chairs at the table. “I went to an English-language school in Pakistan.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“We have both travelled a long way,” he said. “The important thing is not where we came from, but that we are here now.”
She nodded and, suddenly galvanised, reached for a serving spoon. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope this is OK, it’s—”
“It looks excellent,” he said. “Please. Let’s eat.”
She served him. “Are the clothes comfortable? I used the measurements they sent me.”
“The fit is good, but the clothes seem … too fine? People will look at me.”
“Let them look. They will see a respectable professional man taking his Christmas break. A lawyer, perhaps, or a doctor. Someone whose clothes say that he is one of them.”
He nodded slowly. “The famous English caste system.”
She shrugged. “It’ll explain why you’re here. This is a place where the middle classes come to play golf and sail and drink gin. England’s full of well-off young Asians.”
“And I look like such a person?”
“You will do when I’ve given you the right haircut.”
His eyebrows rose for a moment, and then, seeing the seriousness of her expression, he nodded his acceptance. This was what she was here to do. To make these decisions. To render him invisible.
He took a knife and fork and began to eat. The rice had a flaccid, overboiled texture but the chicken was good. Taking a sip of water he slipped his hand into the pocket of his chinos, took out the tall cartridge case, and stood it upright on the table.
At Risk Page 10