by Ian Rankin
'You live there?' Witch nodded slowly. 'Well, that's one to cross off the list then, eh?'
'Yes,' said Witch. 'I've just locked the place up. I'm going away for a few days.'
'Lucky you. Anywhere nice?'
'Scotland.'
'Locked all your windows?'
'Of course.'
'Burglar alarm?'
'We don't have one.'
He puckered his lips. 'Think about getting one, that's my advice. Well, thanks anyway.'
'You're welcome,' Witch answered politely, crossing the road again and walking on steady legs in the direction of Stoke Newington railway station.
The policeman turned to his companion. 'Travels light, doesn't she?'
he said.
Saturday 13 June
'What are we looking for?'
Joyce Parry was not best pleased at being summoned to her own office on a Saturday morning, and all because Elder didn't like using computers.
She sat at her desk in front of the terminal while Dominic rested his hands on the back of her chair and leaned his head close to her right shoulder.
'Someone this end helped her enter the country,' he answered. 'She's travelling, she's hiding, she's already had help on the Khan hit. There has to be someone else, however loose a tie they might be.' He checked that he wasn't about to give away more than he should know. 'Your man Barclay has found a link between Witch and two men in Paris.'
'DST found it, he's just tagging along.'
Elder looked at the back of her head. 'Whatever,' he said. 'I'm wondering if there's another terrorist loose over here, someone she knows she can call on for help.'
'You want to access MI6's files?'
'Yes.'
'How wide a search?'
'I'm still thinking about the American woman, Khan's lover.'
Parry nodded. 'It's a starting point.' She half-turned to him. 'Could be a long day.' She didn't sound angry with him any more. He squeezed her shoulder and she began tapping in her security code. Then she had a thought,
and swung her chair towards the telephone. 'I'd better just clear this with my oppo.'
After a short conversation, she was back at the screen. Moments later, the first file appeared - a brief description and history with a head and shoulders picture. Elder wanted to study every one of them as they came up. After a dozen or so, Joyce smiled at the screen. He saw the reflection of her face there.
'What's so funny?'
She shook her head. 'Nothing. It's just a bit like old times.'
A few dozen files later, Elder made her go back a couple of files. It wasn't a woman's face on the screen, it was a man's, going bald.
'Someone we should know?' Joyce asked.
'Someone we do know.'
The phone rang, and she swivelled towards it, leaving him staring at the picture on the screen.
'It's for you,' she said.
He tore his gaze away and took the receiver from her. 'Hello?'
'It's Doyle here.'
'Good, I think I've got something for you.'
'Me too.' There was a pause. He was waiting for Elder to ask, so Elder obliged.
'And what would that be?'
'Khan's tart, Shari Capri. I know who she is.'
It was oppressively hot in Trilling's office. Outside there was a generous summer's day. The building was quiet, it being the weekend.
Yet here they were - Dominic Elder, Doyle and Greenleaf, and Trilling himself - stuck in darkness behind a firmly shut door and closed Venetian blinds.
'It's the bleedin' black hole of Calcutta,' Doyle said, shifting on his chair. Doyle, Greenleaf and Elder sat on a row of three stiff-backed chairs facing the wall behind Trilling's desk where a white screen had been erected, the sort used for slide-shows and home movies.
Not that anyone bothered with Super 8 any more; it was all videos these days.
'When does the usherette come round?' Doyle asked, changing his metaphor but not the irritation in his voice. He had something to say and he wanted to say it, but first there was all this to be gone through.
Trilling was behind them, fiddling with a slide projector which had been set up on a tripod. Its piercing beam shot between Greenleaf's left and Doyle's right shoulder and wavered against the screen as Trilling made adjustments to height and attempted to level the slightly askew - 'pissed' was Doyle's word - beam.
'Can I help you with that, sir?' asked Greenleaf, not for the first time.
'Perfectly capable myself,' muttered Trilling, also not for the first time. He was grinding a peppermint to powder between his teeth.
Elder was thinking of Joyce Parry. They were dining out together tonight, a celebration of their morning's work and, as Elder put it, a chance to relax before the storm came. He'd chosen a small, intimate restaurant near Kew Gardens, and he'd been in luck: a booking had just fallen through, there was a spare table.
He wondered now why he'd chosen that particular restaurant. The answer, of course, was its intimacy. It was a restaurant for seduction. The fact that it was run by an apparently brilliant young chef had little to do with it. He wanted Joyce to get his message, loud and clear, which meant soft lighting and low music . . .
'That looks about right,' said Trilling.
'Maybe move the tripod an inch to the left, sir,' commented Greenleaf.
Lab analysis of Witch's letter to Elder had thrown up nothing, not even saliva on the flap: Barman Joe told them she'd dabbed her finger into her drink and wet the seal with that. The lab confirmed that the drink had been neat tonic water with a slice of lemon. Joe's session with the two Special Branch men had been long, but totally unproductive.
She'd only come into the bar the once, and he hadn't seen her around before or since. An artist drew up a sketch from Joe's description, and this had been run off for the officers whose job it now was to check hotels, boarding-houses, taxi-ranks, and so on. The sketch had been turned into a small wanted-style poster. Information wanted on the whereabouts of this woman. Details were given beneath the drawing itself: approximate age, height, what she'd been last seen wearing.
The van driver, Bill Moncur, who'd given her the lift from Folkestone to Cliftonville said all she'd had with her was the one rucksack of stuff, and it hadn't looked full, yet already she'd worn two outfits
- the one described by Moncur and the one described by Barman Joe. Maybe she'd done some shopping in Cliftonville. Shops, too, would be shown the artist's impression. The poster would go up in clubs and pubs, on the off-chance that some pissed late-night punter had seen her.
The drawing had been shown to Moncur, who had shrugged. 'Hard to tell,'
he'd said. 'Maybe it's the same woman, maybe not.'
More copies had been made, too, of the drawing of the man Mike McKillip had seen his employer talking to in the bar. To be shown around Cliftonville at the same time as the Witch drawings. Yes, they were going through the procedures, the correct and proper routine.
But Elder thought he had something better than an artist's impression.
Greenleaf had suggested yet another line of inquiry: travel. She'd travelled from Cliftonville to Scotland. How? She wouldn't still be hitching, not now that the hunt was on for her. Too open, too public.
Which left several options: public transport, a bought or hired car, or an accomplice. Train siations were being checked, booking clerks questioned. Bus company offices would be next, then car-hire firms, then car dealers. She would need fake documents for these last two, and Elder reckoned there was a better chance that she was actually using train or bus or plane or, most likely, a combination of these. He didn't think she'd be using an accomplice to chauffeur her around. She liked working alone too much.
Auchterarder did not have a railway station. However, buses passed through it, and nearby Gleneagles did have its own small railway station, an echo of the days when visitors would arrive by train for their holiday there. Maybe some still did.
It was true that they hadn't given A
uchterarder much thought. They'd been too busy further south. But the town wasn't populous, and Elder knew the Scots to be a curious race, in the sense that they liked to know all about strangers. So now a team was being despatched north -
a proper team, not just local CID and the like. They knew what questions to ask, and where to ask them. In a town that small, Elder reckoned Witch wouldn't have opted for staying at a hotel or B&B. She just about had the cheek to check into Gleneagles itself, and this option would be checked. But he thought the likeliest bet was that she'd slept rough, out in the countryside around the town. Which meant checking camp-sites, showing her sketch to farmers .. . She'd
travelled further afield than anticipated. The Fablon she'd used was only available in that part of the world, according to the makers, from a store in Perth. The store had been visited. Yes, they did sell that particular design, but no, no one remembered serving anyone with it, let alone someone of Witch's description.
Another dead end, but it opened other routes. How had she travelled to Perth? Had she bought any other materials there? Had she stayed there for any time? The local CID were now busy finding answers to these questions. Patience and manpower were the necessities. But they were already stretching things to the limit and beyond. This close to the summit, they should be focusing in, instead of which the hunt seemed to be spreading wider and wider. He thought for a moment of Barclay.
He hoped he would be all right. No, that wasn't exactly true: he hoped he would get results.
The summit started on Tuesday, meaning Witch was probably already in town calculating her plan of attack and her escape routes. She'd have more than one escape route. Unless this really was to be her swansong, her kamikaze trip. Elder was beginning to wonder. He'd stared long and hard at the drawing of her conjured up by the police artist's hand and Barman Joe's memory, trying to place the face .. . failing ...
'Here we are,' said Trilling. There was no longer white on the screen in front of them, but colour. Greenleaf adjusted the focusing before sitting down. 'Thank you, John.'
In focus, the slide showed a man leaving a building. It had been shot with a powerful zoom, looking down from an angle. Probably taken, thought Elder, from the second or third storey of the building across the road from where the man was emerging. There was a car standing at the kerbside and he was heading purposefully for it, his lips pursed. In the second slide he was looking to his right, and in the third to his left, checking both ways along the street as he stooped to get into the passenger seat. A careful man, quite a nervous man.
He had blond hair, but was mostly bald. What was left of his hair he wore quite long, in strands which fell down around his ears and over the back of his neck. His face was pale, cheekbones prominent. He didn't have much in the way of eyebrows.
'We don't know his name,' said Trilling. 'Or rather, we know too many of them - at least a dozen aliases in the past three or four years, and those are only the ones we know about.'
'So who is he?' asked Doyle, wanting Trilling to get on with it. Trilling did not reply. Instead, the projector clicked its way to slide number four. Same man, at a cafe table, enjoying a joke with an olive-skinned man.
'The Arab gentleman is known as Mahmoud. He works for an arms dealer.
Or should I say, he works for the owner of an import-export business located in Cairo.'
'I went there once on holiday,' commented Doyle. 'You think the traffic's bad here . . .'
Cli-chack, cli-chack. Slide five. A street scene. The camera had just about managed to focus on a conversation between two men who looked to be arguing about something. The bald blond, and this time a small fat Asian-looking man.
'Spokesman for a now-defunct terrorist group. This is a rare photo of him, made more rare by the fact that he died last year. Not natural causes.'
Cli-chack. Slide six. Cli-chack. Slide seven. And so it went. In a few of the photos, the bald blond had disguised his appearance. There was a particularly risible hairpiece. There were sunglasses, of course, and what
looked like an authentic moustache. Eventually, the slides came to an end.
'So he doesn't mix with royalty,' said Doyle. 'But, with respect, sir, who the hell is he?'
Trilling switched off the projector. Greenleaf went to the window and tugged up the Venetian blinds. Elder walked to the projection screen and stood in front of it.
'He's a go-between,' he said. 'Just that. He has made a profession and a reputation out of liaising between people - terrorist groups and arms suppliers, crooked politicians and drug dealers, all sorts of organisations. He's worked in India, Czechoslovakia, Beirut, Austria, Egypt, Colombia
'A one-man United Nations.'
'I think divided nations would be nearer the mark, Doyle. He's Dutch, that much we're sure of. These slides came courtesy of MI6, who were given them by the Dutch authorities. There was, and still is, a long-term operation to arrest this man.' He paused.
'But not,' suggested Trilling, 'until his usefulness is past.'
'I can't comment on that,' said Elder.
'What do you mean, sir?' Greenleaf asked Trilling.
'I mean,' Trilling was happy to explain, 'just now they keep a watch on him, and they learn what he's up to. They amass information about all these groups he seems to work for. He's more useful as an unwitting source of information than he is behind bars.'
'The old story,' Doyle said simply.
'The old story,' Elder agreed.
'Like with Khan,' Doyle added.
'I can't comment on that either,' said Elder with a smile.
'So anyway,' said Greenleaf, 'what about him?'
'Two things,' Elder said. 'One, he's in Britain. That, at any rate, is what the Dutch think. His trail's gone cold, and they'd quite like to pick it up again.'
'As if we don't have enough on our plates,' said Doyle.
'I don't think you quite see,' Elder told him.
'Oh? What don't I see? We're up to our arses in the summit and Witch and everything ..."
'And so,' said Elder quietly, 'is the Dutchman. My second point. Think back to the description of the man Crane was seen having a drink with.
Do you remember?'
Ever-ready Greenleaf supplied the answer. 'Fair and balding, according to Mr McKillip.'
Elder nodded, while Doyle took it all in.
'It does seem a mighty coincidence,' said Trilling. He handed a copy of the McKillip drawing to Doyle so that Doyle could take in the resemblance for himself.
'It could well be that this Dutchman is the link between the assassin and her paymasters,' said Elder.
'You mean her paymasters on the Khan hit?'
Elder shook his head. 'Nobody brings an expensive assassin like Witch into the country for a hit like that. There's another job, and those paymasters will have supplied the Dutchman.'
'I thought,' said Greenleaf, 'she did one paid hit to finance her own private vendettas, isn't that what you told us?'
'Yes, but aspects of this operation make it unique. It doesn't quite fit her previous profile.'
Doyle was pinching the skin at the bridge of his nose. 'So now you're saying we change tack completely? Leave Witch and start looking for this Dutchman? New posters made up, more questions at hotels and boarding-houses ..."
'Starting here in London,' Greenleaf added. 'It's the obvious place.'
'Which is probably precisely why he'll be based elsewhere,' said Elder. 'Somewhere out in the suburbs, pretending to be the rep for a Dutch company or something.'
Doyle counted on his fingers. 'Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Three days before the summit opens. It's too much ground even to start to cover.'
'So what should we do? Ignore the information?'
'You know that's not what I'm saying.'
'I know what you're saying, Doyle. You're saying you object to the workload, you object to grafting all weekend - again. You're tired and you need a break. Am I right?'
Doyle shifted his weight on the chair.
Only Greenleaf laughed at the pun, and then not for long.
'Find the Dutchman,' said Elder levelly, 'and we find who Witch's target is. He's almost bound to know. We may even catch Witch herself.'
Trilling nodded. After a moment, Doyle nodded too. He looked around at the three faces.
'Well?' he said, rising to his feet. 'What are we waiting for? I'll just phone my bird and tell her I'm not available for lechery this weekend.'
Greenleaf sighed. 'And I suppose I'd better phone Shirley. I've hardly seen her recently. She'll go spare.'
'And I,' said Trilling, 'have to cancel a race meeting I was supposed to be attending. You see, we all make sacrifices.'
Elder was pleased, but didn't let it show. He was wondering how he would break it to his colleagues that he had to make a progress report to Joyce Parry this
evening, a briefing he just couldn't cancel. Then Doyle remembered something.
'Oh,' he said, 'I know who the American bird is. An old mate of mine, Pete Allison -1 used to work with him in CID, he runs his own security firm these days. He phoned me to say he'd been working for Khan, trying to find out about Shari Capri.'
'Why did he want you to know?'
Doyle shrugged. 'He was a bit sweaty about Khan being bumped off like that. He thought it through and decided he'd better come clean.'
'So what did he find?'
'She's a hooker, not a cheap one. That was all crap about her being a model. The story Pete heard is that another security firm had hired her to sniff around Khan.'
'Commercial espionage?'
Doyle nodded. 'Women and money, that's what it boils down to in the end. Another bank wanted to know what Khan's bank was up to, so they hired themselves a spy.' He turned to Elder. 'You still think she was working with Witch?'
Elder shrugged. 'Maybe not. But Witch did know a lot about Khan's movements. Maybe she had the Dutchman put a bit of money about, ask a few questions.'
'The security firm?'
'That'd be my guess. Someone there would have known what Ms Capri knew.