by Clare Carson
He stared over his shoulder in an exaggerated sweep of his head, searching for figures in the dark.
‘There’s nobody there. I’ve looked.’
‘I forgot, you’re an old hand at this game.’
A drift of mushy leaves from the overhanging planes had caught around the iron legs of the bench; she spread the mulch around with her foot.
‘She said he was an arms dealer called Henry Davenport.’
Jesus. Henry Davenport. Tom had unearthed the cover name Pierce was using in ’76.
‘I assume Davenport isn’t his real name,’ Tom said. ‘The father of your friend Anna. The guy who was involved in the Intelligence sting.’
She nudged one of the plane’s fallen fruit, spiky like an underwater mine, rolled it under the sole of her monkey boot.
‘How did Karina know about Anna?’
‘Davenport told her he was divorced, but he had a daughter called Anna who he saw occasionally, but not as much as he would like.’
Bloody spies. They wove their legends from truths and half-truths and, it turned out, their daughters’ names.
‘She said she’d seen a photo of her in his house, a really pretty girl.’
The photo; it had to be the one she found in the envelope along with the chequebook.
‘She even thought she’d seen her once in the street after he’d disappeared in ’76 – Anna and a friend.’
Sam flushed; so much for their surveillance skills.
‘She hasn’t seen him since. She said he had to go into hiding because the Czech arms dealer was after him. She said Davenport’s life was in danger, he mentioned something about torture, apparently.’
She twitched. Fucking tortured. Change the subject.
‘So what’s Karina’s story?’
‘She was born in Prague in 1957.’
‘Fifty-seven?’
‘Yep.’
‘That means she was nineteen...’
She had realized Karina was young when she saw her in ’76, but she hadn’t guessed she was only nineteen. Still a teenager. The revelation gave her an uneasy feeling. Best not to dwell on the details.
Tom nodded. ‘Her father had some bureaucratic job with the StB, working for Omnipol, back office support for arms sales, something like that.’
Like Reznik, she noted.
‘Then in 1970 he was sent to be a functionary in the Czech Embassy in London.’
‘Was he still working for the spooks?’
‘Possibly. Karina wasn’t sure. Or she didn’t want to say. Either way, her mother had an affair with some English diplomat she met at one of these vol-au-vent parties embassies always seem to have, and in the space of two years she managed to ditch her first husband, shack up with this other bloke, marry him and finesse the paperwork so that Karina and she could become British citizens. But they kept in contact with all these Czech émigrés and, although she tried to avoid them, she also moved in the same circles as some dodgier characters her birth father knew. Which was how she ended up at a party held by this Czech man called Pavel, who she was told was an arms dealer.’
‘Pavel?’
‘Yeah. She said he had a fearsome reputation and she guessed that wasn’t his real name.’
‘It isn’t. His real name is Reznik. Which is Czech for butcher.’
‘Oh great. You didn’t tell me that earlier.’
‘I forgot.’ She didn’t want to bring Harry into the conversation.
‘I asked her whether this Pavel could have been an ex-StB agent. She said it was possible because almost any Czech arms dealer would have links with Omnipol and would almost certainly have been working with the StB. But she didn’t know for sure.’
‘Well, it sounds like a bit of a dead-end story to me.’
She said it with some relief.
‘That wasn’t the interesting part.’
‘Oh?’
‘The interesting part was Davenport.’
‘What about him?’
‘Karina met him at the same party. Pavel’s party.’ He took a drag, squeezing the filter again in that same old geezer way which was starting to annoy her. He stuck his hand in his overcoat pocket, pulled out an envelope, removed a photo. ‘She gave me this.’ A snap of two people smiling at a restaurant with a bottle of bubbly in an ice bucket in the foreground, chandelier overhead. ‘It was taken in Paris in 1975.’
She gawped, the faces as she remembered them from her snatched glimpses in the summer of ’76: Karina and Pierce.
‘You have met him then?’
She stalled, working out how much to give away. ‘Yes, I saw him once very briefly at our house. When he dropped Anna off.’
Sam kicked the spiky ball of the plane fruit, sent it flying into the embankment wall.
‘Davenport was Karina’s boyfriend,’ Tom said. ‘Lover, as she put it.’
Lover. She had a fleeting image of the pretty blonde girl, sad and desperate, hanging around outside Pierce’s deserted house in Lewisham.
‘The photo was taken in Paris. He was always whisking her off on glamorous holidays, apparently. She said he was the first and greatest love of her life.’
Sam placed her face in her hands, elbows on knees, stared at the muddy puddle beneath her feet. Spies had a knack of making themselves the love of the lives of the women they were using. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to know.
‘According to Karina, Davenport was an ex-big game hunter from Zimbabwe.’
‘A what?’
‘A big game hunter. He told her he organized tours for rich tourists so they could shoot wild animals. You know, lions, tigers.’
‘There aren’t any tigers in Zimbabwe.’
‘I know. I was just...’ Tom waved the photo. ‘Anyway, Davenport told her he’d given up the game hunting because there wasn’t enough money in it, and had become an arms dealer. A legitimate arms dealer – rifles to hunters, that kind of thing. But he had contacts in the illegal arms dealing trade – I get the impression there’s no real dividing line between the two – which was why he was hanging around at Pavel’s party.’
The puddle rippled; concentric circles spreading. Raining again. She’d sent Tom on the trail of Reznik, but he’d ended up finding out more about Pierce.
‘Do you think that’s why he targeted Karina for a relationship? Because she was Czech, a known name in the crowd, a useful addition to his cover?’
‘Quite likely. Well, she said he sometimes asked her to translate Czech documents for him, but she is very attractive so maybe Davenport just liked demonstrating his pulling power. Obviously, that’s not the way she saw it. She reckoned they had this amazing relationship and they were going to get married and walk off into the sunset together.’
‘Did you tell Karina anything about Davenport?’
‘Of course I didn’t tell her anything about Davenport. I don’t know anything apart from the vague hints you’ve given me. As I said, she already knew he had a daughter called Anna because he told her himself. What is Davenport’s real name anyway?’
So that was what he was after – a name. Well, he could fuck off; he wasn’t going to get it from her. ‘I don’t remember the details.’
He flicked his fag butt; it sizzled as it hit the ground.
‘Anyway, whatever Karina believed about her relationship with Davenport, or whatever his name is, they didn’t run off into the sunset together. One day in ’76 he disappeared without warning. And shortly after that, she was visited by these two Czech guys who wanted to find out what she knew about him.’
‘Oh my god. Did they hurt her?’
He lit another fag, dragged and coughed. ‘They roughed her up. Threatened her with rape.’
‘Shit.’
‘She kept her cool. She was well enough connected in the Czech community to drop a few names that put the wind up them and obviously made them think twice about pushing it too far.’
‘Sounds like they did push it too far to me.’
‘She’s sm
art, knows how to deal with this sort of stuff.’
Tom fancied Karina, she reckoned; attractive older woman, good backstory.
‘And anyway, she didn’t have anything to tell them – she didn’t know where he had gone. She didn’t have any information so she didn’t have to pretend. She seems to have got more information out of it than they did. These heavies told her Pavel was looking for him because he was involved with this arms deal with the Red Army Faction which turned out to be a trap.’
‘She had no idea Davenport was an agent?’
‘No.’ He jabbed his fag in the air. ‘In fact she was convinced it was a total mistake. She said Davenport would never knowingly have anything to do with stupid terrorists, he was far too ethical for that. She said all his clients were legit. She’s not naïve but she seems to have been completely conned by him. I think somehow coming from the Eastern Bloc made her suspicious of anybody from behind the Iron Curtain, and wide-eyed about the freedoms of the West. She was desperate when he disappeared, totally out of her mind with worry. That was why she kept going back to the place where she reckoned she spotted Anna – his house in Lewisham. She wanted to warn him he was in trouble. She wondered whether she should go to the police, but she didn’t in the end, because she didn’t trust them. And then one day about a month after he had vanished, she got a letter from him. Posted from Harare.’
‘Zimbabwe?’
‘Maybe he really did have connections in Zimbabwe and retreated there.’
Or persuaded somebody to post the letter for him from Harare so it had a Zimbabwean postmark.
‘What did the letter say?’
He stroked his chin; he hadn’t shaved. Men often let their chins bristle, she had noticed, when their hair started receding.
‘The letter said that he’d had to leave the country because he believed his life might be in danger. He said he was incredibly sorry to leave her like this, he would come back when he thought it was safe, but he had been badly scared.’
Tradecraft. The letter didn’t give anything away, but at least part of it was true, she reckoned; Reznik’s men were after him. The only false details were his name and his hideaway. He had ended up in Rackwick Bay. Not Harare. She wasn’t going to tell Tom that. She picked at her thumbnail with her teeth. He wasn’t telling her everything he knew either. What details was he hiding? Karina’s address and what else? He was on guard, as much as she was. Big Ben’s chimes startled her. Ten thirty. Too late for more talking now.
‘I’d better get moving,’ she said.
‘Do you want me to walk back with you?’
He was staring at the river, arms folded. Was that a straightforward offer, or was he asking her if she wanted to sleep with him? Which she didn’t, and never had done. Not much anyway. They were just friends, of sorts. She fretted the back of her front teeth with the tip of her tongue. She didn’t fancy him, but on the other hand she did want more information: the details about Karina he was holding back. She glanced sideways at Tom again, let her eyes linger on his face. She couldn’t believe she was doing this.
‘Yeah. It would be nice if you could walk me home.’
She said it in a kittenish voice that she didn’t even realize she possessed. It produced an easy smile from Tom. Not his cynical, sly journalist smile. Men were so predictable, so easily led.
*
THANKFULLY BECKY WAS out for the night. The house was silent, except for his breathing next to her. Duvet on the floor. She leaned down, grabbed it, yanked it over their bodies. Lay there, feeling pleased with herself. Interestingly, her ulterior motive had added a frisson that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Her determination to sleep with him because she wanted to get to the pillow talk had made what would have been a mediocre shag into something more exciting. She was in control, and it gave her a shiver of satisfaction. What’s more, it was making the post-fuck chat less excruciating. They both knew this was going nowhere. She didn’t have to test his reactions and intentions. She didn’t care. What she did care about was how much information she could extract from him now he had let his guard down and they were lying there together in her bed. She didn’t want to push it – he might begin to suspect. She stared into the amber darkness. A greenish light glowed in the corner of the room.
‘I forgot to switch my computer off.’
‘Amstrad?’
‘Sounds like a jumbo jet warming up when I switch it on.’
‘I’ve got one too.’
‘Do you do everything on your computer now, or do you still use a typewriter?’
‘I have a notebook and pen.’ He’d always carried those. ‘And I write my notes up every evening on the computer.’
‘Disciplined.’
He put his arm around her; he smelled of sweat. Sticky. She almost pulled away, but caught herself in time, rolled into him.
‘You’ve not been to my new place, have you?’
‘No. Where is it?’
‘The Barrier Block.’
She spluttered. ‘The Barrier Block? In Brixton?’
‘Yep.’
‘Why did you move there?’
‘It was cheap.’
‘How much?’
‘Thirty quid a week.’
‘That’s probably thirty quid more than anybody else pays – I thought most of the flats were squatted.’
‘I’m subletting from a council tenant.’
‘Well, they saw you coming.’
‘The flat’s quite nice. The view’s not bad. There’s a courtyard out the back with some trees in it.’
‘Isn’t that where all the junkies shoot up?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t really care.’
He lit a fag.
‘I hope you’ve got a good deadlock on your door.’
‘Actually I haven’t. The bloke I rented it off said somebody kicked the door in and smashed the frame. He’d replaced the Yale, but he hadn’t managed to refit the mortice. I suppose I should do it. But I haven’t had any trouble.’
‘Lucky. What’s the number of your flat anyway?’
‘Fifty-eight. Second floor. Look, I’d better try and get some kip. I’ve got to work in the morning.’
She’d riled him with her onslaught on his new home, his lack of south London nous.
‘It’s Saturday tomorrow.’
‘I work for the Sunday Correspondent, remember?’
He touched her arm. She rolled away. She couldn’t sleep with him so close. Was there a polite way of telling somebody you didn’t want them in your bed? No. She would feel mean making him walk home in the middle of the night. She lay there, listening to his breath. Slower. Slower. He twisted around.
‘There was one more thing Karina said, by the way.’
‘Oh?’
‘I asked her whether she had any ideas about what made this Czech arms dealer think Davenport had set him up.’
Tension cranking; he was about to drop something heavy on her, she just knew. She was ready for it, features set in impassive mode.
‘What did she say?’
‘There wasn’t anything definite, but Davenport mentioned this name a couple of times that she could tell made him edgy.’
‘Right.’
She didn’t want to ask. He was going to tell her anyway. He put his hand on her shoulder.
‘Jim,’ he said.
She didn’t move. Sweat running down her chest, between her legs.
‘That’s a pretty common name.’ Her voice was calm. That was why he wanted to sleep with her, he just wanted to catch her in an unguarded moment, drop Jim’s name and test her reactions. See if she burst into tears and blabbed. Well, she was one step ahead.
‘You don’t think it was your dad? Involved in some way when he was working undercover?’
‘No.’ She had spoken too emphatically; she should have left room for doubt to show she wasn’t bothered by the possibility. ‘Apart from anything else, he wouldn’t have used his first name as a cover.’
‘Wouldn’t he?’
‘Nope.’ Was it obvious she was lying through her teeth?
‘As you say, it’s a common name. Jim.’
He caressed her neck. She tried not to flinch.
‘The reason Karina wanted to talk to me was because she thought I might be able to help her find out what happened to Davenport.’
‘Well, that’s too bad. Because you can’t.’
She rolled over, turned her back on him.
‘Sam, she still worries about him.’
As if he really cared about Karina’s feelings and wasn’t trying to nail his story.
‘Tough.’
‘You don’t think there’s any way of finding out where he is or whether he’s safe?’
‘No.’
‘God, you’ve got a really hard streak.’
That was why she was still alive. She said nothing.
CHAPTER 20
London, October 1989
WIND SHOOK THE sash windows. She was awake already, but the rattling woke Tom.
‘What’s that noise?’
‘Winter approaching.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘About five.’
She had felt confident about asking him home the previous night, revelling in her emotional detachment, but in the coldness of the morning she felt awkward.
‘I have to go to the office. I know the security guard. He’ll let me in.’
‘Why do you have to go to work so early?’
‘I want to follow up on something.’
She clenched her fist, dug her nails in her palm.
‘Karina?’
‘Yeah. I just want to see if she’ll talk to me again, see whether the story has legs or not.’ He placed one hand behind his head, scratched his armpit.
‘I’m not going to mention Jim.’
As if she would take his word on that. ‘Are you going straight to the office?’
‘Yes. But look, we should talk.’
‘Sure.’ She had done enough talking with Tom.
She waited for the front door to shut, rolled out of bed. She had a dull burning in her stomach, a fear she hadn’t experienced for a while. Exposure. Tom was on to Jim, had a lead on whatever part Jim had played in Pierce’s damage. She had to stop him, and anyway, she wouldn’t mind talking to Karina herself. Tom didn’t need to know what Jim had done – but she did.