The Raven's Eye

by Barry Maitland

‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘The arm’s a bit sore, but mainly I’m feeling angry, because I still can’t remember anything of what happened. It’s like a bit of my brain has been stolen. What did I do in those three days? What was done to me?’

  ‘I’ve made a start. We got the numberplate on camera of the car that dropped you home yesterday. It was registered to the Pewsey Clinic, so I went there and spoke to the director, Vernon Montague. You’ve met him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘He thinks he’s a better actor than he is. His first reaction was that you might drag them into some kind of compensation claim, then when I told him you’d completely lost your memory he denied that you’d been there. Then I told him about identifying their car and he discovered that you had been there after all. Your doctor was called in, Partridge, and he said you turned up on their doorstep in a taxi at eight on Friday night, soaking wet. We’re trying to trace the taxi now. Ring any bells?’

  ‘Friday night?’ Kathy frowned, shaking her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘About two hours after Ned Tisdell’s boat was reported on fire.’

  ‘I caught a taxi to the Pewsey Clinic and was there for almost three days and I can’t remember a thing?’ Kathy rubbed her head in frustration.

  Brock had gone to Mile End that afternoon and taken photographs of the burnt-out boat and its surroundings, and he now downloaded the images onto Kathy’s laptop and showed them to her.

  ‘That’s the Venerable Bede?’ she said, astonished. ‘It’s completely gutted. Nobody could have survived that.’

  ‘According to Partridge you were soaking wet when you arrived at the clinic, although it was a dry night. Could you have gone into the canal?’

  Kathy closed her eyes with a groan. ‘I don’t know . . . I just don’t know.’

  ‘It’s all right, Kathy. Don’t worry, we’ll work it out. There were no human remains on the boat, and we’ve got an alert out for Tisdell. We’ll get there in the end.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of this, Brock—Tisdell and Bragg and the clinic. And Gudrun . . . I had a dream about her today. After Suzanne gave me lunch I lay down and had a sleep, and I saw her. I was in her boat, and it was very dark. I was desperately searching for her, and I came across four steel drawers. I opened one and there she was inside, laid out, bright pink, dead.’

  ‘Four steel drawers?’ Brock murmured.

  ‘Like in Sundeep’s mortuary. I suppose it was all mixed up in my mind.’

  ‘There’s a secure area at Pewsey. Did you ever go in there?’

  Kathy pondered. ‘I remember noticing it on the fire-escape plan in my room, and wondering what it was all about. But there’s a security door that only staff can pass through.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was something else. That old green jacket I was wearing when I came home. I remember that Anne Downey had a similar one.’

  Now Brock remembered the doctor standing at the back of her boat in a shabby old coat, arms folded. ‘Yes. We should get hold of her too.’

  Kathy sighed. ‘But what’s the point, if I can’t remember anything?’

  Later that evening, Brock got a text message from headquarters. Team leaders were to clear their diaries for the next day and attend a briefing with Commander Lynch at eight a.m.

  22

  The atmosphere was military, Brock thought, with a large map of the south-eastern counties projected on a screen facing them, the enemy positions marked with circles and code numbers. Staff officers scurried around supplying the demands of the senior planning team, who sat beneath the map with their heads together, while the junior officers waited, studying the individual briefing pouches they had each been handed on arrival.

  ‘Right!’ Lynch barked, and everyone sat up to attention, the room abruptly silent. ‘Thanks in large part to intelligence which has been gained from the interrogation of Jack Bragg in the last few days—and nights—we are now in a position to execute over two hundred arrest warrants in eight locations in and around London.’

  There was a murmur of surprise across the room—at the scale of the operation and that they had been able to get such information from Bragg.

  ‘This will be one of the biggest operations mounted by the Met in recent years. The range of offences we shall be pursuing is extensive, including drugs, firearms, extortion, corruption of public officials and fraud. Each of your teams has been assigned a series of targets and you will be working in close cooperation with borough commands whose briefings you will be attending later this morning. The raids will commence at oh-two-hundred hours tonight. This is, hopefully, the final stage of Operation Intruder.’

  They broke up to be briefed on their individual roles, Brock and Bren sitting down in a corner of the room with one of Lynch’s planners. As they got to the end Brock became aware of Lynch standing silently at his shoulder, observing. When he looked up, Lynch nodded his head and Brock got to his feet. They went to a table where cups were set out for coffee and helped themselves.

  ‘What’s this about Kolla?’ Lynch said.

  Brock gave him a summary of Kathy’s disappearance, and Lynch shook his head.

  ‘She didn’t strike me as that stupid.’

  ‘She was trying to prove a point,’ Brock said. ‘No one believed her when she said that she’d seen Tisdell at the Pewsey Clinic the night Bragg was captured. Now it seems she must have been right, yet the clinic denies any knowledge of him, and how could he have got in without a pass?’

  ‘The fact that his boat was in the neighbourhood doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘There’s no possibility that he was working for us, is there?’

  ‘Us? Of course not. You tell Kolla that she’s on sick leave and to stop this nonsense. And you concentrate on Operation Intruder.’

  ‘How did you get Bragg to talk?’ Brock asked. But Lynch was moving on to one of the other tables.

  Operation Intruder was military in its execution too, in the coordination of many different units, the precise timing of their actions and the overwhelming effectiveness of their results. By dawn the following day Brock’s team, exhausted but elated, had carried out seven separate house raids within their area and made eighteen arrests without injury to anyone involved. As similar results came in from the other teams and the first sensational reports appeared in the media, stories began to circulate about the extraordinary performance of Commander Lynch over the past week, his tireless attention to detail, his ability to go without sleep for long periods, and his almost superhuman drive. By the time the scene-of-crime and interview teams moved in to mop up and the scale of the victory became apparent, military nicknames began to attach themselves to him in both the ranks and the press reports—Monty, Napoleon or Stormin’ Fred, according to taste. After the arrests and interviews came the court appearances and a blizzard of paper, all managed with similar efficiency, although exhaustion was now setting in. By Saturday afternoon the ranks were thinning out, skeleton crews taking over, and Brock began packing up. He folded the camp bed in his office on which he’d caught short spells of sleep during the previous days and, feeling soiled and weary, made his way out into the cool evening air and walked around the corner to St James’s Park station and caught the tube to Blackfriars, and then a train on the suburban line out to Dulwich. When he got home he phoned Suzanne, had a long scalding shower, changed into fresh clothes, packed a few items into a bag and got into his car and set off for Battle.

  Suzanne opened the door to him with a hug. ‘How are you?’ she asked, examining his face critically.

  ‘Exhausted. You?’

  ‘Happy to see you.’

  He lowered his voice. ‘How are things?’

  She rocked her open hand, nodding back over her shoulder towards the sitting room, where he found Kathy on the window seat overlooking the back garden. She looked up with a smile of what seemed like relief and got to her feet, eager to hear what had been going on in London. He gave
her a quick account, making light of it and getting her to smile with descriptions of the reactions of their team to the operations—Phil the action manager imperturbable as always, Bren taking care to ensure the supply of emergency hamburgers and tea, and Pip eager to make use of her recent firearms training.

  ‘And Mickey?’ she asked.

  ‘He was seconded to the planning team, Kathy. He seems very interested in the new Digital Security Task Force.’

  ‘He’s ambitious,’ she said.

  Brock tried to read her expression. ‘I’m hoping he’ll tell us what DiSTaF’s all about. Anyway, more important, how have you been?’

  ‘Oh, I feel okay, except that I still don’t know much about what happened in those three days. It’s like trying to remember a dream; I get random snatches, but when I try to pin them down they fade away into darkness.’ She shook her head in frustration and he noticed the nails of her right hand were bitten short.

  ‘I’ve been given strict instructions to get you to counselling as soon as possible,’ he said cheerily, and watched her gloomy nod. ‘Anyway,’ he patted her arm, ‘there’s more colour in your cheeks.’ He felt vaguely guilty, as if he’d abandoned her here, as if they’d all been swept off course by Lynch’s obsessive campaign against Bragg and by the wider winds of change of which it seemed somehow a symptom. And looking at Kathy, preoccupied and unconsoled, he felt as if he’d let her down, had betrayed the instincts that had always underpinned their relationship. ‘We’ll talk about things tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But for now, let’s see what Suzanne’s got to drink.’

  Kathy smiled. ‘We made a special trip to the off-licence for you.’

  ‘But not for me alone, I hope.’

  The next morning they took a walk up to the ruins of the abbey and then on down to the meadow beyond, across which the Norman army had struggled in 1066, on an autumn day much like this perhaps, with the threat of rain and squelch of mud underfoot.

  ‘Every morning I wake up hoping that I’ll be cured, and my memory will have come back, but all I can get are fragments, and some of them don’t make any sense at all—that image of Gudrun lying in a steel drawer, for instance; it keeps coming back, but it feels unreal, just like a dream.’

  ‘You said she was in one of four stainless-steel drawers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I saw four drawers like that at the clinic, in a room they use as a temporary mortuary. But it was inside the secure area of the clinic—someone would have to have taken you through the security check. Do you remember that?’

  Kathy frowned. ‘Something . . . Just when you said that I had a sudden picture of Butcher Bragg standing in a corridor, supported by two men in leather jackets. But that doesn’t make sense either. That must have been a dream too.’

  ‘Tell me about the other things you remember.’

  ‘Going to Limehouse Basin and talking to the man there, then standing on a bridge somewhere, looking down through railings at the canal, Tisdell’s boat . . .’

  ‘You can remember his boat?’

  ‘Yes, but not going onto it. The next thing is sitting in a taxi, shivering with cold and my arm feels terrible, and I’m ashamed because I’ve made the seat wet and I think the cabbie will be mad.’

  ‘You were on your way to the clinic. Can you remember anything about the cab?’

  He watched Kathy’s brow crease with concentration. ‘A minicab? I don’t remember a glass panel to the driver like in a black cab.’

  ‘And inside the clinic?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ She gave a violent shake of her head. ‘It’s so bloody frustrating.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’ll come back to you.’

  He took a different tack. ‘Let’s go back to the beginning,’ he said. ‘You’re a detective faced with a confusing story about two sisters who, within nine months of each other, die apparently accidental, unrelated deaths. What other explanation are you considering?’

  Kathy took a moment to focus, reluctantly he thought, on what he was asking. In the silence he heard a crow screech in the trees up ahead.

  ‘Freyja was a brilliant mathematician, working on some cutting-edge project to do with the security of communications. Then she was murdered.’

  ‘Why murdered?’ he objected softly.

  ‘Because why else would Gudrun take on a false identity to infiltrate a company that specialises in security of communications?’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘You should see their setup, all hidden scanners and restricted access.’

  ‘But we don’t know of any connection between Paddington Security Services and Penney Solutions in Cambridge.’

  ‘Freyja must have told Gudrun about it. In any case, Ned Tisdell makes the connection—he met Freyja in Cambridge and then Gudrun bought a boat to park right next to him in Paddington, a stone’s throw from their offices. And now they’ve killed him too.’

  ‘You think so?’ But Brock was thinking that there had been no sightings of Tisdell since the fire on his boat.

  Kathy said, ‘The thing I don’t understand is what this has to do with the Pewsey Clinic.’

  ‘Three murders, Kathy? Who on earth could be responsible?’

  Kathy sighed, plunging her free hand deeper into the pocket of the green jacket she’d somehow acquired. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’

  Of course there were other, much more likely and less melodramatic explanations, Brock told himself. Tisdell might have met Freyja at the Plough in Fen Ditton by accident. Perhaps he had then been introduced to Gudrun and the two of them had hit it off—both rather solitary misfits by the sound of it. Perhaps Gudrun had gone to Paddington to be with him, hiding her identity to escape from her father, or because there was some other threat to her that they hadn’t discovered, a jealous boyfriend maybe. And the deaths of the two sisters were far more likely to be the tragic accidents that everyone assumed them to be, with Ned Tisdell now probably having moved on to some other corner of the country.

  But there was a kind of fierce determination in Kathy’s account that Brock didn’t want to dismiss or argue with at this stage, so he said, ‘How could we move forward then?’

  ‘Establish a connection between Penney Solutions and Paddington Security Services and learn more about Freyja’s work. Dr Penney was very evasive, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and that is a problem. The work they do there is commercially sensitive and he doesn’t want any information leaking out to competitors. The Paddington people are probably the same, and we have no grounds for forcing them to open up their books. In any case, Freyja’s work would probably be unintelligible to us.’ He came to a stop, rubbing his beard as he pondered. ‘But there is somewhere we might go for help.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘DiSTaF. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be concerned with, digital security? Suppose I take this to their boss, Suzy Russell, and see what she can make of it?’

  Kathy thought about it. ‘She might be interested. She was certainly concerned about the possibility of Ned Tisdell having got into the clinic. And she invited me to go and see what DiSTaF was all about when I felt better.’

  ‘Did she?’ Brock looked shocked. ‘Sounds as if they’re trying to poach my whole bloody team.’

  Kathy smiled. ‘Would you go through the commander?’

  ‘Lynch has got too much on his plate at the moment, and he’s also made it very clear that he doesn’t want to hear any more about the Kite girls. No, I think a direct approach to Russell would be best.’

  And so, back at his office the following morning and having dealt with the immediate priorities on his desk, Brock made a call to Superintendent Russell’s office and found himself offered an appointment for a snack lunch within the hour. Her office was a short cab ride away, in a sleek glass and steel office building so new that there were still pieces of protective tape on the stainless-steel handrail by the front door. A young man standing by the reception desk, designer-stubbled and looking more like a
fashion model than anything more functional, showed him to the lift and took him up to the top floor and into some kind of lounge room furnished with contemporary sofas the same scarlet colour as Suzy Russell’s glasses. She arrived a moment later, and shook his hand warmly.

  ‘We’ll get a bit of peace and quiet up here. Fancy some lunch?’ She gestured to a sideboard on which was laid out a platter of food. On the wall above was hung a huge enlargement of an etching of a cross-section through a building, which Brock recognised.

  ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, you recognise it.’

  The building was circular, Brock recalled, six storeys high with prison cells ranged around the perimeter all facing in towards a tower in the centre from which they could be observed. ‘1791,’ he said. ‘The perfect machine for control by surveillance.’

  ‘Or just the possibility of surveillance,’ Suzy Russell said, smiling. ‘That was the real stroke of genius. There might not even be anyone in the tower. Just the possibility would be enough to maintain control.’

  Brock filled a plate of delicate morsels which he had trouble identifying. Russell poured them glasses of mineral water and led the way out to a balcony on which stood a small table and two chairs.

  ‘Like you,’ she said, ‘I prefer to be located in an annexe away from headquarters. Although I can’t boast a private pub in my basement.’ She shot him an arch smile that seemed almost flirtatious. Had she been investigating him? He knew that the eccentric little Victorian bar installed in the basement at Queen Anne’s Gate by the previous owners was known to a few people in Homicide and to property services, but surely not beyond.

  ‘Well,’ he said, admiring the view across the rooftops towards the Millbank Tower, ‘we certainly don’t have anything like this.’

  ‘It’s a little suntrap up here,’ she said, ‘even on an autumn day. I come up here to think. So what did you want to talk about?’

  ‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, ma’am . . .’

  ‘Suzy, please. And everyone calls you Brock, am I right?’