‘Exactly.’
‘That’s utterly wicked.’
‘Maybe but great men aren’t necessarily good men. Just you wait, soon after Inglis makes his triumphant entry into Downing Street, some urbane gent will take him aside and get out a few pictures from Clapham, just so he remembers what the real party line is.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Doing what the Yanks tell us and cutting any crap about disarmament or scaling back selling weapons to regimes we’re not supposed to do business with.’
‘And Gillespie?’
‘The spooks blackmail him on the same kiddie-fiddling rap as Inglis but at arm’s length, through Roly Vickers,’ Benwick said. ‘They’re happy for Gillespie to think he’s serving up little girls and boys for Inglis’s photographic sessions to screw favours for his union.’
‘And if anything goes wrong, it’s a union conspiracy, not MI5’s?’
‘Neat, isn’t it?’
‘So why did you move against Gillespie and rescue Ruby when you did?’
‘Because we’d got a bead on the Arta’s cargo and I was assigned to deal with it. But I wasn’t leaving Ruby in danger after I knew I’d have to disappear.’
Before Benwick could be asked any of the obvious questions his last statement provoked, the Russian shouted for him. Something was coming in over the radio. Benwick scanned the Arta with binoculars and saw a thin curl of smoke rising from where the bridge met the deck.
Within minutes, it became a billowing black cloud. Then a quick series of explosions ripped from the bridge to the bow in a rolling firestorm, vivid orange and crimson, till the ship looked like it was being hit by volley after volley of missiles.
McCall grabbed Benwick’s arm and demanded to know what he’d hidden on the Arta.
‘Thermate, the stuff they put in incendiary grenades. Does a decent job, doesn’t it?’
‘What about the poor bloody crew? Those guys are gonna die.’
‘They’ll get off but even if they don’t, do the maths, McCall. Six or seven dead against the thousands their cargo would’ve killed.’
‘Who the hell are you to play God with anyone’s life?’
‘Even Jesus Christ would agree the world’s a bit safer now that lot’s going to the bottom.’
‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better about you duping me, is it?’
‘I told you, they always get warnings to change their ways.’
‘Like that Canadian scientist did?’
‘Especially him. He was given two choices and he made the wrong one.’
‘And what choices did the Arta’s crew have?’
‘Listen, get it into your head, Saddam’s end game is mass murder and another fucking holocaust with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons. Do you understand?’
A final thundering explosion tore through the Arta. The ship tipped backwards then slid beneath the boiling sea in a haze of steam and smoke.
McCall turned to confront Benwick again. But the man he’d helped to escape and flee from justice had been joined by the Russian. And he had his own Makarov.
‘OK, show’s over, McCall,’ Benwick said. ‘Time to get you below.’
They forced him into a storage locker beneath one of the bunks then barricaded him in. It was barely the size of a coffin. McCall began to scream in the darkness. He’d suffered a blind terror of confined spaces since childhood. The air was hot and reeked of diesel fumes and he could feel the vibrations of the revving engine through the hull as they sped away.
McCall couldn’t breathe, couldn’t escape. It was like being buried alive.
Forty-Two
How long had those bastards locked him in that floating oubliette - ten hours, fifteen, more? He didn’t know. Maybe he’d passed out. Feelings of savage anger, hatred, and revenge took hold of him. The cruiser was no longer moving. They must have moored up. But where - and why? He heard voices. Benwick and the Russian. And something else, faint at first.
Waf, waf, waf, waf, waf, waf. A helicopter. Getting closer.
Waf, waf, waf, waf, waf, waf. Almost above the boat.
It drowned out all other sounds. Then the pitch of the chopper’s engine changed. It was lifting off. The down draught rocked the boat from side to side.
McCall felt even sicker. That total shit, Benwick, was leaving him to die. He started shouting and thumped and kicked against the walls of his tomb.
Amazingly, the locker door gave way. He couldn’t believe it. He’d finally dislodged whatever had wedged it shut - or someone had. McCall crawled out, shaking and screwing his eyes against the sudden light. All his joints hurt, his knees, neck, elbows, the small of his back. He’d survived car crashes with less discomfort.
He stank of vomit and piss and the clammy sweat of fear. There was something else in the air, too - something smelling like hard-boiled eggs. It was probable the marshy creek outside.
He began to walk unsteadily along the gangway between the sleeping quarters and the galley. His mouth and tongue were gummed up with thirst. At the top of the steps to the rear deck was a puddle of rainwater. He licked at it like a dog till there was nothing left.
It was still early, maybe not long after dawn. His watch was broken so he didn’t know the right time. He couldn’t see anybody about. The masts of a few sailing dinghies bobbed at anchor like fishermen’s floats. But Benwick’s yacht scraped against the quay as he’d not bothered to put any fenders out.
McCall stood on the guardrail then clambered up the stones of the harbour wall, slippy and green with algae. It took a moment to recover his breath. A fair distance behind the boathouse and chandler’s store he made out a church, a huddle of houses and cottages and further on, sand dunes and the start of a pine forest.
He looked again, unsure if he was seeing correctly. Such was his fragile physical and mental state, he might be hallucinating to escape the nightmare of confinement. Either that or he’d died and gone to whatever vale of delusion lay beyond the grave. What he saw around him was familiar. He knew this place, however dreamlike his euphoric presence in it.
But his hurts weren’t imagined or the gathering certainty that by accident or design, the fates had delivered him back to this spot.
Here was Jung’s principle of synchronicity at work, suggesting again that coincidental events had meaning. Yet even as this student memory forced its bizarre way into his consciousness, reality exploded behind him - literally.
Something like a bomb erupted within the cruiser in a violent purple flash, breaking its back in an instant and hurling a plume of debris into the air. A jagged lump hit McCall’s head and felled him.
Fire quickly engulfed the boat’s crippled superstructure. Melting plastic floated on the water like hot wax and a great cloud of noxious smoke burst above him. Blood poured from the right side of McCall’s face, into his eye, down his collar. He tried to get up but stumbled into the dirt once more, concussed.
He had to get away from danger - that and the police who would soon arrive in a swirl of flashing blue lights.
McCall’s instinctive fears had been right. He’d never been more than a convenient substitute for Benwick’s female accomplice who’d out-lived his usefulness. Why else would he make so free with such sensitive information? McCall was never going to be around to use it.
He ran between the beach and the marsh in panic - stooping, panting, falling again and again. In his mind, he could see the place where he needed to be. If only he could find his way back, he might yet be safe… and all would be well.
*
Late that Sunday afternoon, the Eastern Daily Press’s district reporter filed her piece for Monday morning’s paper from a phone box beyond the police cordon around the harbour. If it remained a thinnish day for news, she might make the splash.
Police were last night hunting a man seen escaping from a luxury cabin cruiser destroyed in an explosion which rocked Brancaster Staithe harbour early yesterday.
Norfolk Police wouldn’t c
omment on rumours it had been abandoned by drug smugglers or that a helicopter was heard landing nearby minutes before.
But they confirmed a man injured in the blast is being sought. He was seen by Anna Verity, 42, who said: “I thought a bomb had gone off. I woke up and looked out of my bedroom window and saw a man in dark clothes lying on the ground. He just about managed to get up and stumble towards the beach.”
In a statement, Police said: “We would ask this man to come forward urgently to be eliminated from our inquires. Officers are checking with local hospitals and any GP should contact us immediately if a man seeks treatment for what could be serious head, facial or back injuries.”
The cabin cruiser - the Ellie Rosee - was rented by a foreign-sounding man last Thursday, according to a boat hire firm in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. He said he was planning a four-day fishing excursion in the North Sea.
The firm’s spokesman told the EDP: “He had all his tickets, including a coastal skipper’s certificate and a VHF communications licence so he knew what he was doing.”
He left a substantial cash deposit and gave an address in Leeds which West Yorkshire Police have since discovered is false.
In another intriguing link to northern England, a pair of black, size 8 brogue-type shoes found near the quay, contained a price label inside one of them marked “Oxfam, Hull”. Police think they might have belonged to the injured man and inquiries are being made by detectives on Humberside .
Three fire appliances attended the blaze following the explosion which smashed windows in a nearby chandlery and slightly damaged other two boats in the harbour. Initial reports suggest a faulty butane gas cylinder was the most probable cause. A forensics team will examine the wreckage once a salvage company has lifted it out of the water.
*
This story will dominate the EDP’s front page next day under the headline Mystery Man Sought After ‘Drugs’ Cruiser Explosion with a photograph across four columns showing police examining the shattered remains of the Ellie Rosee. Smaller pictures of the eyewitness and the ‘Oxfam shoes’ will appear alongside a graphic of the east coast with Bridlington marked in relation to Brancaster Staithe.
On page five will be a brief account of an abortive air and sea search for a missing cargo ship captain. The MV Arta was carrying building materials and iron goods from Hull to Jordan but sank just before entering the English Channel after a fire on Saturday night.
Six east European crewmen were rescued from their lifeboat by a trawler and treated in hospital in Dover for smoke inhalation but not detained.
*
The helicopter had materialised out of a sea mist just as Hester was making a small fire near where she’d slept on the beach. It dropped down somewhere by the harbour but less than a minute later, flew back the way it’d come, fast and low. Hester had more personal matters to concern her so took little notice.
She’d not brought any food so the fire was for comfort, not breakfast. Gathering an armful of dry sticks from under the pine trees allowed her waking mind to continue processing its overnight thoughts. These were inevitably all about Lexie.
Hester didn’t link the helicopter to the explosion which happened a few minutes later. The sound rumbled across the fields then died away, just another unwanted interruption to the isolation her spirit craved for a few moments more.
She sat by the bright fire, cross-legged, eyes closed, till all but the sea was quiet. There was a need for her to enter into a meditative compact with nature before getting back to Staithe End. Talking to Lexie about what might happen if she died was not a conversation she relished.
It wasn’t quite moral blackmail but a tiny, selfish part of her felt Lexie hadn’t given her much choice. Hester was to re-configure her own remaining days, move from the Welsh borders to Norfolk and raise Ruby.
But ever charitable, Hester began to wonder if this wasn’t her destiny after all. She stood up to go but some two hundred yards away, noticed a man tottering along the tide line. He was not a jogger. His arms flapped like broken wings, his legs looked ready to buckle. Then they did and he fell headlong at the water’s edge.
But still he managed to crawl across the wet sand on his hands and knees. He kept looking back over his shoulder as if scared and wanting to make sure he wasn’t being followed. With great effort, he tried to stand but hadn’t the strength and collapsed, groaning and exhausted.
Hester hurried to him with a strange sense of foreboding. She saw blood seeping through matted hair to redden the sea around his gashed head. He’d neither shoes nor socks and the soles of his feet were lacerated and bleeding. There was a long scorch mark on the back of his jacket and his torn trousers could have been those of a tramp. But even before she rolled him over on his back, Hester knew whose distraught face was about to stare up into hers.
Forty-Three
The hunt for McCall quickly gathered pace. Whatever he’d done, wherever he’d been, the police wanted to question him. Uniformed officers carrying clipboards were going house to house in Brancaster. They’d soon be knocking at Staithe End.
Lexie was given a script to learn by Hester. She herself was back on the beach, heaping a big green wheelbarrow with driftwood and sticks to explain away the telltale tracks she’d made when pushing McCall back in it earlier.
Hester couldn’t have borne his dead weight to the cottage on her own and Lexie was too weak to help. Ruby, tuning in to the grown-ups as always, provided an answer.
‘Give him a ride in the wheelbarrow.’
McCall flopped in it like a corpse. He didn’t make much sense and kept repeating the same words - they wanted me dead. Hester stripped off his wet clothes and Lexie bathed and bandaged his head. Once he was in bed, she dosed him with two of her own sleeping tablets.
A policewoman now came across the sands as Hester pushed another load of fallen pine branches to the barrow.
‘Sorry to trouble you but did you hear that big explosion early this morning?’
‘Yes, it interrupted my meditation. What was it?’
‘A cabin cruiser going up in smoke in the harbour.’
‘No one hurt, I hope?’
‘Yes, a man who might have been aboard. Did you notice anyone who looked injured pass this way… slim build, dark hair going grey, dark clothes?’
‘I was here on the beach all last night, star-gazing,’ Hester said. ‘But I didn’t see any stranger pass this way after the explosion.’
Her statement was entirely factual if disingenuous. She prayed it bought time to work out their next move. Fortunately for Hester, that chalice passed from her when Lexie’s ex-husband turned up at Staithe End half an hour later, unannounced and unexpected.
*
Hester thought Evan Dunne the sort of languid Englishman who only populated post-war films - wearily cynical and superior as if by right of birth.
She wasn’t to know he was acting, too. He looked in his mid fifties, wispy fair hair and a tailored tweed jacket, well worn but expensive when new.
Evan made sure he answered the door to the policeman asking questions about the wanted man.
‘I’m sorry, but the lady living here is only just out of hospital,’ he said. ‘She’s still in bed and isn’t very well. She’s not been outside for several days.’
‘Anyone else in the house?’
‘Only a friend of hers. She was on the beach early on but she’s already been interviewed by one of your colleagues, a police woman, I think.’
‘And you, Sir, might you have seen the man we’re after?’
‘No, I haven’t long since arrived from Cambridge.’
‘Another family friend, are you?’
‘Divorced husband actually, but we try to keep everything civilised.’
Chilly smiles were exchanged then the door was shut. Ruby watched Evan from a chair in the corner, swinging her thin legs back and forth.
‘You tell lies,’ she said. ‘Mac’s in the house, and me.’
‘Yes, but don�
��t worry Ruby, I will tell them but not today.’
‘People shouldn’t tell lies.’
‘No, they shouldn’t but this time we can because Mac’s not very well and we don’t want him to get any more upset, do we?’
*
The suspicious coincidence of Evan’s arrival in mid-crisis intrigued Hester and confirmed he knew far more than he let on. He seemed aware of what’d happened in Lexie’s recent life - her operation, the tragic death of Ruby’s mother, McCall going missing. She and Evan must keep in touch. Not many ex-husbands would want that, not once they’d a decree from a man-eater like Lexie. Yet there was still that easy warmth between them, the comfortable understanding old lovers share. Hester also noted Evan’s concern about McCall. It was almost brotherly.
Lunch was a hurried affair of cold meat and salad. Ruby went to draw pictures of Ludo in her bedroom afterwards, but only on condition she didn’t wake McCall. Evan appeared to have a plan for which Hester was quietly grateful. The drift of events piling up around Staithe End that day threatened all within.
‘It’s probably safer for Mac to stay out of sight here for a while,’ he said. ‘He looks a bit grey around the gills and that head wound’s a worry but if you keep it clean and dressed, it’ll most likely heal naturally.’
‘What sort of trouble is he in?’ Lexie said. ‘Say it’s not drugs or anything criminal.’
‘No, it’s all about politics.’
‘But you haven’t seen him for ages. How do you know?’
‘By asking around, old thing.’
‘He was supposed to be investigating Ruby’s kidnap,’ Hester said. ‘He told us there was a lot more behind it and she still wasn’t out of danger.’
‘If that’s what he said, that must be the case.’
‘Then he ends up delirious and covered in blood on a beach in Norfolk.’
‘Indeed. I’m sure we all look forward to his explanation. But I have to go now. There are things to do if we’re to help Mac out of this spot of bother.’
*
McCall owed his claustrophobia to an ineradicable fragment of memory from early childhood - an image of two long boxes of pale wood being carried on the shoulders of grown-ups dressed in black. A bell tolling, people singing, a man in a white smock talking. Women’s faces bent towards his, eyes soft with pity, powdered cheeks veined from tears.
The Convenience of Lies Page 23