Illegal Action

by Stella Rimington

  Looking through the small window, Liz watched the Severn grow larger, then after a short time begin to shrink in the distance behind them. She thought about Brunovsky, trying yet again to get a fix on the man—difficult, since he was so volatile: one minute charm itself, the next volcanically bad-tempered. The deference he’d shown her at first had slowly diminished as she had become a familiar in his household. He obviously had some kind of confidence in her and had listened to her warning like a little boy being told what was good for him, but increasingly he was treating her as his property, in the same peremptory, demanding fashion he treated Monica or, God help us, the hapless Tamara. Another three weeks in Belgravia, thought Liz, and he’d have me taking dictation.

  She undid her seat belt and walked back to the galley in search of some water, passing Jerry Simmons in his blue chauffeur’s suit. There would have been something imposing about his gorilla shoulders and big, bland face, had he not been sound asleep, snoring softly with his mouth open.

  As they reached the eastern tip of Ireland the cloud thickened and the view disappeared. The plane descended slowly and bumpily until suddenly, only a few hundred feet above land, a gentle, rolling landscape of silky green appeared like a watercolour below. Liz could make out small farms, a hamlet of six or seven cottages, a stream no bigger than a large ditch, and then the wheels gently touched the runway with a delicate kiss.

  A jubilant roar came from the cockpit, and as the plane rolled slowly towards the tiny terminal in the distance, Brunovsky emerged with a grin on his face. “I have not lost my touch,” he declared happily as he rejoined Liz, who was taking her mobile out of her bag. As she turned it on, Brunovsky reached out a large hand. “Could I borrow that for a moment?” he asked. “I left mine behind, and Monica likes to know when I have landed.”

  Liz was extremely reluctant to surrender her phone, since it held a battery of Thames House numbers, but with Brunovsky’s hand held out, it was difficult to refuse to lend it to him. He took the phone and went back to the cockpit as the plane continued to traverse the long cross-axis of runway.

  At last the plane came to a stop outside the terminal, and the pilot pushed open the cabin door, then unfolded the steel stairway. As Liz and Brunovsky came down the steps, with Simmons behind them, a chill westerly wind that had not yet reached London swept across the tarmac, catching them as they walked quickly to the tiny new terminal building of tinted glass and charcoal steel. There was a Boeing 737 parked outside the far end of the building, and a line of Cessna propeller planes on the grass fringe by the airport fence, but otherwise no sign of traffic.

  Inside the terminal, landing formalities were cursory. A cheerful young man in a uniform gave a quick look at their passports and waved them through. Baggageless, they moved past an unattended customs desk into a small outer hall, where a solitary girl sat doing nothing behind a desk. Liz thought she had better let Peggy know where she was. “Can I have my phone please?” she asked Brunovsky.

  “Of course,” he said, and felt in his jacket pocket. He tried another pocket, then patted all of them with an anxious look on his face. “Oh no,” he said, “I’ve left it in the cockpit.”

  “I’m sure I can go back and get it,” said Liz. She couldn’t believe the man at passport control would object.

  Brunovsky shook his head. “I am so sorry, Jane, but the plane won’t be there. The pilot’s taken it for refuelling.” He looked at her apologetically.

  “There must be a pay phone here.”

  Brunovsky looked irritated. “Jane, we are late already. Please wait. We will be at the house in half an hour—you can ring from there.”

  51

  Your call is being forwarded to the voicemail service…

  Peggy had already sent a text message—RETURN TO LONDON URGENTLY. RING ASAP—and had phoned half a dozen times to no avail. What had Liz said in her message? I’m going to Ireland with Brunovsky in his private jet to see this new picture that’s turned up. We’ll be back this evening but I’ll ring again when we get there to let you know where we are. But no call had come, so where were they?

  Normally, this was just the sort of problem Peggy enjoyed solving but she wasn’t enjoying herself now. The possibility that Liz was in danger was making her heart thump uncomfortably as she worked. She began by checking back through all Liz’s reports to see if there was any mention of the location of this supposed new picture, but all Liz had said was that it was owned by a Miss Cottingham who lived near Cork. Peggy had great faith in the Internet as a starting point for puzzles and she was pretty sure that she would be able to find Liz within a few minutes. Googling “Cottingham + Ireland” produced only the useless information that Lewis Cottingham was the architect of Armagh Cathedral. Liz had said the old lady owned a large country house, but a trawl through landowners and tourist sites turned up nothing useful. The Irish telephone directory listed only four Cottinghams in the entire country—three in Dublin and one in Belfast, none of them obvious owners of large country houses, none of them likely candidates for the perpetration of an art fraud.

  Airports next, thought Peggy, trying to keep calm. Where would a small plane land? They were heading for somewhere near Cork, so probably Cork airport. But it could be Kerry. Or even Shannon—if they had a helicopter standing by they could reach almost any point in southwest Ireland within half an hour. There were thirty-six airports in Ireland and even when she had discounted the twenty-one with unpaved runways, that still left fifteen possibilities.

  At this point Peggy telephoned the office of the Garda Siochana in Cork and found herself speaking to a soft-spoken man named O’Farrell, head of Special Branch. She told him that she needed urgently to contact a colleague who was on her way to visit a country house somewhere in the county, owned by an old lady. “I don’t know the name of the place, and was hoping you could help.”

  O’Farrell gave a gentle laugh. “Ireland’s full of old country houses inhabited by almost equally old ladies.”

  “I’ve got the owner’s name,” she said eagerly. “It’s Cottingham—a Miss Cottingham. But I can’t find her in any directory.”

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but then, I’m not a student of the Irish gentry. Let me ask around. I’ll get back to you.”

  What next? thought Peggy, drawing what felt like her first breath for half an hour. “When in doubt,” her Anglo-Saxon tutor at Oxford had once told her, finding her half in tears when stuck with a particularly tricky passage in Beowulf, “the answer is to move on.” So now Peggy did.

  The news in the message from the Danes that she had shown to Brian, that Greta Darnshof was not who she claimed to be, would in other circumstances have thrilled Peggy. Now it frightened her. The Danes had run Greta Darnshof’s name against a programme intended to help expose identity theft and they’d hit the jackpot. At first the search had come up negative—the Danes had focused on 1964 when Greta claimed to have been born, and 1965. But when they widened the search they found Greta Darnshof, a five-year-old girl, died with her mother and father in a car crash in 1969, thirty kilometres from the town of Horsens. About six years ago someone else had assumed her identity and three years later, the new Darnshof had moved to Norway. Herr Beckendorf was convinced this was his Illegal and now she was living in London, dead thirty-eight years yet miraculously reborn as the editor of Private Collection. Neither the Danes, the Germans nor Peggy knew what her mission was, but it was looking increasingly likely that it had something to do with Brunovsky.

  Peggy rang the office of Private Collection in Hanover Square. “Miss Darnshof is unavailable,” said a tired, Sloaney voice over the phone.

  “Will she be available later on?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” said the voice, this time audibly suppressing a yawn.

  “Well, is she in town? I’m an old friend from Denmark,” added Peggy, wishing she’d thought of this in time to add a slight accent. “I’ll ring her flat—unless you think she’s gone to Ireland.”
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br />   “I don’t know if it’s Ireland, but she was flying somewhere.” The Sloane seemed to wake up at last, and regret her indiscretion. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Thanks very much,” said Peggy, and after this non sequitur put down the phone, suddenly feeling sick at the thought of Greta Darnshof in Ireland. If anything happens to Liz, she thought with sudden helpless anger, I hope they hang Brian Ackers up from a lamp post on Millbank.

  Why didn’t Liz ring? She must have landed by now. Perhaps she couldn’t find a private place to make a call, but Liz would always find some way to keep in touch. She tried to still the racing thoughts in her head, stretched both arms out and took a few deep breaths to keep her circulation flowing. Pushing her glasses firmly up her nose, she reminded herself that sometimes the answer was so obvious you ignored it. What obvious thing had she missed?

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, she remembered that even a private plane had to file a flight plan. A few phone calls got her to Northolt, then a brief argument, another call to the airport police, and eighteen minutes later Peggy was staring at the faxed copy of Brunovsky’s itinerary. Then she rang O’Farrell of the Garda again.

  “You say Shillington airport?” he said when she’d explained. “That would make sense. It’s new, about thirty miles west of Cork. Small but with a long enough runway to take private jets. It gets a lot of use from the money that’s been coming into Cork by the coast. Do you want me to send someone there to pick her up?”

  And then Peggy looked at her watch and with a sinking feeling realised it was too late. Liz would have landed by now. Brian Ackers had told her to play it low-key with the Garda. “We don’t want to cause an unnecessary international incident,” he’d said. She decided to disobey him.

  By the time she had given an astonished O’Farrell a version of what she thought was going on, he had agreed to send two officers to meet Michael Fane, now en route to Heathrow, when he landed at Cork airport. Then they would take him to…where? Peggy hoped that by then she would have been able to make contact and would know where Liz had gone.

  She thanked O’Farrell, agreed to keep in close touch, hung up, then picked the phone up again.

  Your call has been forwarded to the voicemail service.

  52

  We will be landing at Cork in twenty minutes.” Michael Fane did up his tie and ran a comb through his hair. It wasn’t that he was expecting the Garda officers meeting him to be particularly spruce, but they’d be looking to him to lead and he was determined to be authoritative.

  He wondered if they would be armed. I hope so, he thought a little nervously, recalling Brian Ackers’ warning. Brian had kept stressing the possible danger Liz might be in, yet seemed perfectly happy to be chucking Michael into the middle of it.

  Not that Michael could complain. When Brian had summoned him, he had assumed, despite Liz’s assurances, that he was going to be reprimanded for his surveillance of Ivanov. Brian had looked furious—red in the face, his eyes darting about unnervingly. But Michael quickly discovered that Brian’s agitation had nothing to do with him, and he was so relieved that at first he didn’t take in what he was being told to do.

  “You’re to go to Ireland right away,” Brian said at once. “Liz went there early this morning—we don’t know exactly where she’s gone yet. Take the first flight you can get to Cork. Peggy Kinsolving has talked to the Garda. Keep in touch with her and she’ll arrange for them to meet you. If there’s any trouble, you’re to defer to them, but otherwise they’ll look to you for direction.”

  “What do I do when I get there?”

  Brian looked at him as if he should have known. “Find Liz,” he said shortly. “Wherever she is, locate her and bring her back. I don’t care who she’s with or what she’s doing, you’re to remove her at once and return with her to England. Is that clear?”

  It couldn’t be much clearer, thought Michael, though he could see an obvious problem. “What if she won’t come? I mean, she usually gives the orders, not me.”

  “For the time being, you report directly to me. When you find her, tell her you are just a messenger, conveying my orders.”

  Thanks a lot, thought Michael, but he was excited by the challenge. As he left he almost missed the tall, slim figure standing in Brian’s secretary’s office, looking through the window down into the inner atrium. As the man turned, Michael saw that it was his father.

  “Hello, Michael,” said Geoffrey Fane.

  His father was his usual elegant figure in pinstripe suit and silk tie and Michael, seeing him there in his boss’s office, felt the familiar feeling of inferiority and anger swell up. I don’t know what you’re doing here, thought Michael, but trust you to show up just when I’ve got something real to do at last. Here you are to muscle in on it and spoil it.

  But just as the fog of all the usual emotions started to settle, he stopped long enough to cast a sideways look at Geoffrey, who was just standing there looking at him. He suddenly seemed to Michael—there was no other way to describe it—forlorn. And then, for reasons Michael could not have described or explained or even halfway understood, he saw in this bogeyman figure of a father something he had not seen before, something that had nothing to do with the figure he had created in his mind, something that instead seemed entirely, unexpectedly human.

  “Dad,” he found himself saying, “I’m in a bit of a rush. I’ve got to go to Ireland.” And he paused, wondering where these words were leading, until out of nowhere new words came to him and he said suddenly, “When I get back, maybe we could have lunch.”

  Geoffrey Fane looked so surprised that Michael started to regret his impetuous proposal. “Yes,” his father finally said, “I would really like that.” And he smiled, but uncertainly, awkwardly—something Michael had never seen in him before.

  “I’ll ring you when I’m back,” said Michael confidently.

  He basked in that feeling now, as the 737 dipped one wing and the Irish coast disappeared from view. The prospect of this trip no longer seemed so daunting. It would be an anticlimax to get sent out with such urgency, only to find there wasn’t a problem at all; part of him secretly hoped to see some action. It would be nice to have something to tell his father.

  53

  Jerry Simmons was driving them in an enormous black car which had been waiting at the tiny little airport where they had landed. A Mercedes-Benz S600, the safest car in the world, Brunovsky had boyishly declared. He wasn’t talking about road accidents. The way the back doors clunked as Jerry closed them suggested that the side panels were armour-plated. Why on earth hire an armoured car in rural Ireland? wondered Liz.

  Now Brunovsky was studying some spreadsheets he had produced from his briefcase and was clearly not in conversational mode, so they travelled in silence. Liz was concentrating on the route, trying to memorise the names on the fingerposts at each crossroads. Simmons was driving fast but carefully through the thin Atlantic rain that spattered the windscreen, relying on his satellite navigation system to direct him.

  At first Liz found it quite easy to keep track of where they were as they drove west through a succession of building sites and roadworks, but then, as they turned north, away from the coast and its influx of new money, she began to get confused. Gradually the villages became smaller, the roads narrower and more twisted and the cottages older. The few people they passed stared at the bulletproof limousine negotiating their narrow streets, and two pigs nonchalantly forced them to a halt on a mud-covered track on the outskirts of a town.

  At last Simmons turned off a valley road and, carefully steering through a gap in an ancient iron boundary fence, drove on to a gravel drive. On either side was parkland, studded by huge oaks, with a dozen scraggy sheep grazing on the lush grass. Ahead, through gaps in the sentry lines of towering lime trees, Liz could see a vast grey stone Georgian house. Two enormous pilasters flanked the entrance, with wide stone steps leading up to the front door. Above the attic windows a balustrade r
an the width of the house, and as they drew nearer, a side wing of Victorian brick came into view.

  Simmons pulled the car to a halt on the gravel in front of the house, and got out to open the doors. As Liz stepped out she looked up into the chauffeur’s eyes, and they held hers meaningfully for a moment before he looked away.

  What was that about? she wondered as she followed Brunovsky up the steps. The door was answered by a tall, thin old man in a frayed black jacket covering a dingy jumper, his face mottled purple by weather or drink. “Will you come in?” he said in a voice full of Ireland, and they walked into the hall. Four impressive Corinthian pillars soared up to the roof and a staircase swept up to a landing in an arabesque of stone. But the paint on the pillars was peeling like loose onion skins, and most of the floor’s tiles were cracked. It was cold, even colder than outside, and the strong smell of damp was as pungent as the salt air in a seaside town.

  Liz walked behind Brunovsky into the drawing room, a long salon running across half the width of the house. She paused inside the door to take in the room—the ceiling decorated with plaster friezes of cherubim, family portraits on three of the walls and in the fourth long, vertical windows looking out over the terrace and overgrown formal gardens. Her attention distracted, she did not notice the young woman in a nurse’s uniform standing in front of the fireplace until she spoke. “Welcome,” she said. “I am Svetlana.”

  “Zdravstvujte,” said Brunovsky, shaking her hand and they exchanged a few words in Russian.

  Noticing Liz’s surprise the woman spoke in English. “Miss Cottingham is slightly indisposed today, though I hope she will join us later.”

  “Is Harry Forbes here?” asked Liz. With Marco gone, he was the intermediary in this deal, if that’s what it was going to be.

  A woman’s voice behind her said, “He is not well.”

  Liz turned to see Greta Darnshof standing in the doorway. Her leonine blonde hair was tied back in a tight bun, and she wore a severe grey suit. In the cold light her fine-featured face seem hard, almost fierce. Greta advanced towards Brunovsky, ignoring Liz. She said, “I left Harry in the hotel. Everything has been prepared.”