Jigsaw

by Campbell Armstrong

  Barron said, ‘You’re back in that weird mood again.’

  ‘How would you know anything about my moods?’

  ‘From experience,’ he said. ‘From watching you. From caring.’ He considered how defensive she could be when the whim seized her. ‘You’re capricious. You veer from one extreme to another.’

  She walked round the bed, heading toward the bathroom. ‘You can get inside me, Barron. But you can never get inside me.’

  She stepped into the bathroom. Her image came back to her from the mirrored walls, strange angles, diminishing reflections. She didn’t recognize herself in any of them. The hardened wax shapes on her flesh suggested fresh scars.

  She locked the bathroom door, entered the shower, ran scalding water over her flesh, soaped herself vigorously, cleansed herself of wax, of Barron’s touch. But was it Barron she was trying to clean away: or was it that dark aspect of herself he managed always to explore? She closed her eyes and listened to the drumming of water.

  FIVE

  DUBLIN

  JUST AFTER DAWN, FRANK PAGAN BOUGHT A COPY OF THE TIMES AT Dublin Airport. He found the story on the front page, together with a smoky photograph of what looked like the crushed and blackened remains of an Underground carriage. Without the accompanying caption it would have been difficult to tell. Rails, bent and uprooted by the blast, created pincers round the carriage, which had lost all shape and form. Firemen labored in the wreckage, their faces bleached of features by harsh lamps. The picture had the grainy feel of an old wartime photograph of atrocities.

  Pagan stared at it for a long time; it defied understanding. It was painful and chaotic, brutal and tragic. It vibrated with loss. His eye drifted across the story. He registered key words and phrases. Rush hour. Underground. Piccadilly. The number of casualties has not been estimated. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the outrage, believed to have been caused by a sophisticated explosive device.

  Responsibility, he thought. He tried to imagine a bomb blast in the London Underground system during rush hour. Why would anyone want to claim that as their own work? He’d encountered many acts of terrorism before, too many, but he’d never been able to comprehend to his complete satisfaction the heart of them, not even when they came wrapped in tedious political dogma. Nor was he immune to the anger they induced in him. Did those lunatics believe extreme violence brought sympathy for their cause, whatever it was? Did they think the massacre of innocents won them some kind of bloodstained respectability? He knew he might have had more composure, more professional detachment, but he’d never achieved that state of disinterest.

  He wandered around the terminal impatiently. He had half an hour before his plane boarded. He bought a cup of coffee, spread the newspaper out on his table and looked at the photograph again. So. He was going back to London to deal with this. This was why Nimmo – Mr Nimmo, as Foxworth pointedly called the upstart – had commanded him to return. My line of work, he thought. My speciality. Blood and death. Carnage. Did he have the heart for it? Did he have the protective armour it took to cope with destruction? He was eager to get back into the stream of things, but he wondered if his spell of recent inactivity, and the shabby way he’d been treated during Nimmo’s ‘reconstruction’, might have diminished his appetite.

  He sighed, closed the newspaper, set it aside, and then picked it up once more, drawn irresistibly back to the photograph. He was sucked down into it, as though he were trapped inside the frame and stood alongside the wreckage, a prisoner of violence. He imagined he felt the heat of the lamps against his face and that if he were to reach out a hand his fingers would be scalded by molten metal. Troubled, he folded the newspaper so that the photograph was no longer visible. He pushed it aside and thought: I am going back to a world where everything that moves does so in shadow.

  LONDON

  Foxworth was waiting at Heathrow when Pagan’s plane arrived before noon. He’d been Frank’s assistant for years, give or take those times when he’d been shuffled off into other areas of criminal investigation. He’d been in Art Fraud, that cut-price basement of police activities, for a while. Once, briefly, he’d worked in Internal Affairs, an unhappy interlude in his life: he didn’t make a good spook. He belonged with Pagan in counter-terrorism, that nebulous zone populated by spurious little groups who bestowed acronyms upon themselves as if these might impart dignity to motives that were often grubby. He also enjoyed working with Pagan who, like God, sometimes moved in mysterious ways.

  ‘It’s great to see you, Frank.’ He shook Pagan’s hand and thought Frank looked fatigued, rather pale and sunken, although you could never quite douse the little light of determination in his grey eyes.

  ‘Here. Make yourself useful. Take my bag.’

  ‘Always one to oblige,’ Foxie said. He grabbed Pagan’s suitcase. ‘You travel light.’

  ‘What’s the point of excess baggage? God knows, I carry enough of that as it is.’ He walked ahead of Foxie in the direction of the exit. The wintry sun over London was cold, drained of colour, assailed by clouds.

  ‘I have a car waiting,’ Foxie said.

  They went toward the car park. Pagan said, ‘You look different, Foxie. I can’t quite put my finger on it.’

  Foxie remarked that he’d had his hair cut, but Pagan saw only the usual gingery brush effect.

  ‘Perhaps the new threads,’ Foxie said. He was wearing a pinstriped suit similar to all the other suits he owned. He favoured the Savile Row thing, three-piecers, old-school tie, a clubby appearance. Pagan liked more casual gear, jeans, bright shirts, linen suits he had made up for him by a tailor with basement premises in Greek Street. The Youthful Look. Keeping time at bay on a strict budget. Foxie at least had the benefit of income from a generous trust fund.

  The car was a black Rover. Foxie stashed the suitcase on the back seat and got behind the wheel.

  ‘Bloody cold,’ Pagan said.

  Foxie turned the heater on. ‘It’s been the worst winter in twenty-five years, they say.’

  The weather, Pagan thought. Those poor bastards in the Tube were beyond any weather. ‘Tell me what you know about the explosion, Foxie.’

  Straight to business, Foxie thought. Characteristic of the man. Small talk made him irritable. ‘What we know is that somebody put a bomb in the Tube. We don’t know yet what kind of device. The lab will come up with that information. The usual time-consuming reconstruction. I’ll say this – I haven’t seen anything quite like it in my life. The bodies are burned beyond recognition. It’s an unholy mess down there.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ He thought of a tunnel, people trapped in fiery steel, the terrible claustrophobia of death.

  ‘The truly puzzling thing is we haven’t had any of the usual phone calls. If it was the IRA, they’d have made one of their coded phone calls beforehand, which gives us a few minutes to evacuate people. But this is different. This isn’t quite their style. It doesn’t seem to be anybody’s style, actually.’

  ‘I want to see the scene, Foxie.’

  ‘I’m under strict orders to deliver you to Nimmo before you do anything else. He wants to brief you himself.’

  Pagan looked from the window. The Rover was on the motorway to central London. ‘Tell me, Foxie. Why am I being resurrected?’

  ‘Nimmo needs your experience.’

  ‘Suddenly.’ Pagan shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat. He was still cold, despite the heater.

  Foxie said, ‘I suspect he’s out of his depth and he wants somebody with experience to run the show. Look at it this way, Frank. He can’t lose. If you make a success of it, he gets much glory. If you fudge it, he’s got himself a whipping-boy.’

  ‘I’m not whipping-boy material. I bleed easily.’

  ‘It’s politics,’ Foxie said.

  ‘Fuck politics. I’ve never played politics. I don’t have the skills. I’m short on turpitude. I don’t do doublespeak. I prefer not to lie. I don’t have the qualifications for politics.’

 
Pagan stared out of the window, brooding, silent, thinking of the explosion in the Underground. After a while he imagined he could hear the sound of people screaming in a dark tunnel. He shut the noise out of his head. Stand back. Keep your cool. If you allow it, you’ll become submerged, drawn down into that place where you suffocate. Sometimes you imagine too much.

  He turned to Foxie just as the car approached Hammersmith. ‘Have you heard anything about Martin Burr?’

  ‘I understand he spends half his time down in Hampshire cultivating roses, and the other half at his Knightsbridge place,’ Foxie said. ‘Enjoying his retirement by all accounts.’

  ‘The end of an era.’

  ‘On with the new,’ Foxie said.

  ‘New doesn’t necessarily mean better.’

  ‘How does one quantify better?’

  ‘How does one quantify better? Who have you been reading recently, Foxie?’

  ‘Thomas Aquinas. Does it show?’

  Pagan sighed and folded his arms. ‘Thomas Aquinas. Stick with spy novels.’

  ‘They’re not the same since the Berlin Wall came down.’

  Pagan was swept by a moment of fatigue. ‘Nothing’s the same since the Wall came down.’

  Foxie stopped the Rover at a traffic light. There was something a little strange in Pagan’s mood, he wasn’t sure what. As an inveterate Pagan-watcher, he’d seen Frank in many phases. Arrogant. Brutal. Sympathetic. At times even soft-hearted. But now there was a difference about him, an alteration hard to define. He had a wearily defensive air. It was as if he’d come back from his enforced vacation disillusioned by the way he’d been cast aside in the first place, and now he felt vulnerable, bruised by the political shenanigans that had sent him into limbo. Maybe he was wary of his future. He had every right to be, Foxie thought.

  He was at Nimmo’s whim. And Nimmo’s whim was no place to be.

  The office was spartan, authoritarian. No family pictures; presumably George Nimmo didn’t have a family, or if he did he kept it tucked away in Berkshire or wherever he lived. No paintings on the walls. No pictures of Nimmo gabbing with the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary. No diplomas. No framed thank-you letters from grateful charities. Alone, waiting for Nimmo to appear, Pagan reflected on the strange blankness of the room. You could deduce nothing about the inhabitant from this place. It was a long cold box, a deep-freeze. It contained a plain desk, bookshelves of law volumes, a black leather swivel-chair. An ascetic’s room, a dedicated civil servant’s room – where was the untidy array of papers, the stuffed in-tray, the general dishevelment that had characterized Martin Burr’s reign? He had a quiet surge of affection for Martin just then. Burr had been approachable, a friend. Burr had often put his neck on the guillotine for Pagan.

  This place unnerved Pagan even as he tried to remain aloof from the prospect of seeing George Nimmo. Their last encounter had been marked by Nimmo’s offhand hostility. We will try to find a place for you in the new scheme of things, Frank. I can’t promise it will be easy or quick. Blah blah blah. The boot was the boot, Pagan thought, no matter what you called it. The swift kick in the anus.

  Pagan drummed his fingers on the side of his chair and looked up at the ceiling. It was typical of Nimmo to keep you waiting. He wanted to give the impression that he’d squeezed you in between more urgent business.

  When the door opened Pagan didn’t turn to look. He didn’t get up from his chair. Nimmo walked past him to the desk and sat down. ‘How was your holiday, Frank?’

  A holiday, Pagan thought. So that was what Nimmo was calling it. He looked at Nimmo, who was a big man with an air of blustery congeniality that might deceive an innocent into thinking he was not only human but quite affable besides. The soft round pink face, the pendulous lower lip, the high forehead. Nimmo’s hair was unruly, curly, touching the collar of his jacket. Probably the hairstyle hadn’t changed much since prep school. You could see on his face the ruins of childhood, a ghost of the boy he’d been, the kind of kid who tries to befriend everyone and yet somehow always fails, despite favours and gifts. He might have been cherubic in those days, with soft-cheeked choirboy features. This lapsed boyishness was altogether misleading, a useful disguise.

  ‘My holiday was fine, Mr Nimmo,’ Pagan said. He’d maintain an equilibrium here, a forced politeness. If he yielded to any other kind of behaviour, if he loosed his cannons of complaint and anger, he’d drop points to Nimmo, and that was unthinkable.

  ‘Come, Frank. Don’t be so formal. George.’ Nimmo, who mistook light sarcasm for propriety, laughed. He had a professional laugh, one that was rooted not in mirth but in expediency. Some people fell for it. Some people thought the laugh contagious and were confused into thinking Nimmo a merry soul. ‘Europe, wasn’t it? France? Switzerland?’

  ‘Italy. Switzerland. Germany. Austria. Finally Ireland.’ Pagan wondered what would happen if he were to whip out a hundred holiday snapshots and flash them at George. This is the centre of Dijon, and that’s me holding a pot of the local mustard. And this is the Floriani Wine Bar in the Hotel Weitzer in Graz. And here I am standing in front of the Bayerischer Hof in Lindau, freezing my arse.

  ‘Switzerland,’ said Nimmo, as if that was all he’d heard of Pagan’s itinerary. ‘I have always admired the Swiss. Much to be said for neutrality, of course.’

  This was a very Nimmolike statement. He peppered his speech with unassailable of courses, and had the odd verbal mannerism of dropping the sound yo into his sentences the way some people might say um or er. Pagan supposed this was an affectation from public school or university. Perhaps Nimmo considered it an endearing little eccentricity.

  ‘You wonder why I have had you returned to the fold,’ Nimmo said. He looked suddenly like a quiz-master awaiting a response.

  ‘I saw the newspapers,’ Pagan said.

  ‘We have a situation.’

  A situation? Pagan thought. Nimmo could have made Hiroshima sound like a fireworks display.

  ‘A very bad situation. And I want you to handle it, Frank.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘No need for false modesty. You have experience in this field.’

  ‘What field?’

  Nimmo put the smile on again. ‘Are you trying to make this difficult for me?’

  ‘On the contrary, George,’ Pagan said. He heard an edge of irritation in his own voice. ‘I’m asking a straightforward question. What field? My expertise is in counter-terrorism. But I understand no group has come forward to take credit, if that’s the word, for the explosion. And since that’s the case, how can you be sure we’re dealing with organized terrorism here?’

  ‘Who else would bomb a bloody train, for God’s sake? My money is squarely on this being the IRA. It has IRA written all over it.’

  ‘Maybe. But you could come up with a number of candidates for this one. A lone madman. A psychopath with some kind of bomb and a massive grudge against London Transport. There are some weirdly disaffected people in this world. They get very pissed off because fares are going up or trains don’t run on time, or because they’ve been fired from their job as a ticket clerk. They begin to be obsessed and before long you’ve got a deranged person with a hugely destructive rage. There are some off-the-wall loonies in the quietest of suburbs. Strange men in string vests and combat jackets are patiently building tiny bombs in their garden sheds even as we sit here. You know that. I know that. So why do you assume this to be an act of the IRA or any other terrorist group?’

  ‘Some assumptions need to be made. We cannot go around whistling in the dark, Frank.’

  ‘In my experience, organized terrorists always claim responsibility. There’s hardly ever an exception. They’re in the business of making statements, violent statements, and it does them no damn good to carry out the violence without claiming it. It doesn’t fulfil them. It doesn’t satisfy them.’

  Nimmo was quiet a moment. He clasped his fleshy hands on the desk and looked aggravated by Pagan’s tone of voice. ‘Frank, Frank. Let
’s clear the air. I understand you think you’ve been wronged. I don’t condemn you for your sense of injustice. I sympathize with it. You feel you were unjustly discarded. It was not an easy decision for us to make. Reorganization often entails difficult adjustment.’

  Difficult adjustment, Pagan thought. He stared at Nimmo. You’ll never know, George.

  ‘But what you perceive as exile was nothing more than, yo, a temporary business. We put you on hold, of course. I am not denying that. I admit it might have been done with more, shall we say, finesse. But it was not my decision alone, Frank. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t make decisions in a vacuum. I consult. I inquire. I survey. That is the way business is done around here now.’

  ‘By consensus.’

  ‘As you say. Some of your colleagues, even those who express admiration for you, admit to a certain suspicion that you are not entirely a team player. I think you would agree with that assessment. And in a world of team players, the man who likes to carry the ball alone is sometimes suspect. You have an inclination to do things your own way. This tempered the decision to put you on hold. Keep that in mind, Frank. It was never the intention to discard you permanently. Far from it.’

  A world of team players, Pagan thought. He wondered if he wanted to live in it. It suggested drab conformity, a deadening of initiative. Men of little flair compensated for their failure of imagination by banding together in castrated herds that called themselves committees.

  Nimmo said, ‘And now we have a situation that we believe will suit your talents.’ He opened a drawer absently, glanced inside, closed it again. ‘I think you are the best man to deal with this affair.’

  A little chilly flattery. Pagan wasn’t buying it. It was too late in the day to be convinced that Nimmo felt even the smallest regret that an injury had been done. Besides, with all his talk of team players, it was clear that Nimmo didn’t accept total responsibility for the banishing order. He was too shifty for that, too cunning. He spread the blame around in a tidy fashion. But it was hard to shovel shit without some sticking to you.