‘You’re going to need a mechanic,’ he said. ‘I don’t think your car’s going anywhere.’
She turned to the Escort, which was still hissing madly. She shrugged. ‘I’ll phone the car hire company. They’ll fix me up with a replacement, I guess.’
‘That might take some time. And this isn’t exactly the safest place in town to linger. Where were you headed before you decided to ram my Camaro?’
‘I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that,’ she remarked. ‘I’m staying at the Hilton. Park Lane.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
‘You don’t have to …’
Pagan opened the door, turned the key in the ignition. The Camaro started at once. The girl locked her Escort and stepped in on the passenger side of Pagan’s car and said, ‘This only makes me feel more guilty, you know. Are you usually this tolerant and kind?’
‘I’m usually a bastard,’ Pagan said.
‘Yeah. Right.’ She held her hands in her lap as the car started forward. ‘Are you what they call a bobby?’
‘Not exactly. I was spared the indignity of a uniform. I specialize in counter-terrorism. I track down deranged persons with bombs and sundry explosive devices. Your basic political madmen.’
‘Dangerous stuff.’
‘It has its moments.’
He turned the car into Trafalgar Square where a few drunks had clustered round Nelson’s Column. They had the look of conspirators who have forgotten the basic reason for their assembly and were shuffling around aimlessly, as if in search of a lucid spokesman.
‘What’s your name, by the way?’ the girl asked. ‘I didn’t get to read it on your somewhat imposing ID.’
‘Frank Pagan.’ The interior of the car was filled with her perfume, which was fragile, a hint of cinnamon.
‘Pagan. I’m Brennan.’
‘That’s your first name?’
‘It wasn’t my choice. I got it at birth.’
Pagan listened to the car as he drove. He thought he detected an unusual vibration from the area of the rear axle. Terrific. Next thing the bloody wheels will fall off. In Park Lane he parked as close to the Hilton as he could. The girl opened her door.
‘The very least I can do is offer you a drink,’ she said.
Pagan hesitated. Maybe he needed company. Maybe he needed to slough off solitude, breathe air that wasn’t tainted by the stench of the tunnel.
She got out of the car and said, ‘Come on,’ and Pagan followed, thinking of the unexpected twist the night had taken. He walked beside her into the lobby and they moved towards the bar. Inside, she took off her coat, scarf and gloves, and placed them on a chair. She was wearing a short black silk dress.
He sat down, looked up into the girl’s face, seeing in the muted light of the bar just how perfect the architecture of her bone structure was. The delicacy he’d noticed on the Embankment was gone; she had a surprisingly strong face. He saw layers there of determination, perhaps even a sedimentary stubbornness, but these were alleviated by a quiet mocking light in the eyes.
‘What are you drinking?’ she asked.
‘Are you playing waitress?’
‘I’m good at it.’
‘Scotch and soda. No ice.’
He watched her walk to the bar. She moved with a lack of self-consciousness. With grace, he thought. He wondered how old she might be. Twenty? Twenty-one? That would make her slightly less than half his age. It was a sobering consideration, the kind that made you puzzle over where the years had gone and what you’d done with your time on the planet. Other people’s youthfulness could be terrifying. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him. A crumpled linen suit, a crushed blue shirt, steely hair, a face in need of a shave. He thought he probably resembled a composite picture of a bad credit risk.
She returned with two drinks. She set the scotch and soda in front of him and sat down facing him, raising her glass of vodka. ‘Cheers,’ she said.
‘What brings you to London?’ he asked. He was useless when it came to small-talk. He always felt clumsy with chatter. He hated parties, forced conversations.
‘It was the last stop on my itinerary. All my life I’ve wanted to see Europe – the Doge’s Palace in Venice, Notre Dame, Monte Carlo because I like to gamble. I’m usually lucky. Then I always wanted to see London.’
‘You travel alone.’
‘Is that so strange?’
He shook his head and was quiet a moment, fidgeting with his drink. ‘You’re American,’ he said.
‘New York. You know it?’
‘A little.’
‘I run a catering company in Manhattan. Private parties for the most part. Bar mitzvahs. Weddings. I’ve got a few clients on Wall Street who still like to serve lavish lunches for their best customers. If there’s a recession, they don’t know about it.’
‘Chicken vol-au-vent and devilled eggs for the wealthy,’ Pagan said.
‘And cocktail sausages on tiny sticks?’ She laughed. It was a tuneful sound, a fragment of melody. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. Our customers are into American cuisine.’
‘What’s that? Rattlesnake pâté? Cactus jam?’
‘Quit teasing me. The stuff we do is for health-conscious Americans. Jogger’s food. If there’s meat it has to be white and lean. Salads made from designer lettuces. Radicchio. Arugula. Mache. Dandelion weeds are a big favourite. The good old iceberg has had its day. Why are you smiling? Does my occupation amuse you, Frank Pagan?’
Pagan shrugged. ‘I don’t see you in a kitchen slicing greens. I can’t imagine you in an apron, up to your elbows in stalks and leaves.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure. The lovely young lady in the black silk dress at the tables in Monte Carlo, the woman in the apron. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the contrast.’
She looked at him for a time, as if she were trying to classify him. ‘Let me see if I understand. You’re an old-fashioned guy who likes easy categories, is that it? The kind of woman who’s at home in a kitchen shouldn’t be hanging out in European cities on her own, right?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then I’m not sure what you are saying, Frank.’
‘Maybe I’m just surprised.’
‘Surprised by what? I work, I play.’
Pagan looked at her face and realized he was being quietly teased for his failure to fathom her. Dear God, he thought. Has my imagination atrophied after six weeks of my own company? What the hell is wrong with me anyway? An old-fashioned kind of a guy: he wasn’t like that. That implied premature senility, an arthritis of attitude. You need to get out more, Pagan. You need to live.
She looked down into her drink. ‘Anyway. I’m probably keeping you from something. You were probably rushing home when I smacked into you. Do you want to phone anyone?’
Pagan shook his head. ‘There’s nobody,’ he remarked. He paused a second, then – without knowing why he felt the need to say more – added, ‘My wife’s dead.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago. I don’t dwell on it.’ He wondered if he’d carried off the lie. Lately, for reasons he didn’t understand, he’d been thinking more and more of Roxanne. Maybe grief was something you never overcame; it was a lifelong series of absences that kept stalking you.
‘I’m sorry I asked, Frank.’
He sipped his drink. ‘She was killed near Harrods. A terrorist bomb. An IRA gift on Christmas Eve.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. The depth of sadness in her voice touched him.
He said, ‘It comes with the business of living. You take what comes along. Bad, good, whatever. Things happen. You can’t do much about them. Life goes on … after a fashion.’
She turned her face to one side. He couldn’t see her expression. When she looked back at him her eyes were damp.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he said.
‘It’s just,’ and she broke off her sentence, raised her glass to her mouth, sipped. �
�I have a sentimental streak this wide. I hate tragedies. I hate to hear about people dying for no reason. I go to weepie movies armed with wads of Kleenex and I cry when I hear the lines of certain songs. Call it a character flaw.’
‘I don’t see it as a flaw,’ he said.
‘Don’t you?’
He shook his head and said, ‘There are enough hard characters in the world. What’s so terrible about being sentimental?’
‘Some people might consider it a weakness, that’s all.’ She reached across the table and touched the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry about your wife.’ The contact of skin lasted only a second but long enough for him to experience the vibrancy of unexpected intimacy. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had touched him. His passage through the world in recent years had been a solitary one. There had been a couple of liaisons, none entirely satisfactory in the end; it was as if each of these affairs, if that was the word, had contained the source of its own destruction from the very beginning.
She finished her drink. ‘Do you want a refill?’
‘I really ought to be going,’ he said. He didn’t have any great conviction in his voice and he wondered if she noticed. He was suddenly reluctant to be on his own; melancholy was rolling like a fog toward him. He looked at the girl, who was gazing at him. The connection of eyes seemed to diminish the physical space between them. He stared down into his drink, and the connection was broken.
‘Anyhow,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very understanding about the accident. I appreciate that. You’ve been nice.’
Nice, he thought. It wasn’t a word he would have applied to himself. He had a generous streak, and he tried to bear no malice, but nice was something else, it was for little old women in the Home Counties who sent money to needy children in Third World republics.
She rose from the table. ‘I better get some sleep.’
‘I just realized I don’t know your last name,’ he said.
‘It’s Carberry.’
‘Brennan Carberry. It has a ring.’
‘You think so? I always thought it too masculine. I don’t know. Too many ‘r’ sounds. Harsh.’ She flicked a length of hair from the side of her face. Pagan set his glass down; he’d reached that point where he couldn’t stall his departure. He got up from his chair. He felt a mild depression coming on, the sense of something crashing in his system.
‘How much longer are you going to be in London?’ he asked. Impetuous, he thought. But sometimes solitude, of which he’d had too many unbearable weeks, brought out a bold streak.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want a menace like you driving the streets of London on your own. If you’re going to spend a few days in town, I’ll give you a number where you can reach me – if you feel like it. Maybe we could find some time to do something together. On one condition. I drive.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
He wrote his home number on a matchbook. She walked with him towards the door of the bar, where they both hesitated; for a moment he had the pleasing feeling that she was about to raise her face and kiss his cheek, but instead she took his hand and shook it briefly. A kiss, he thought. A heady notion, a possibility blown out of all proportion because his loneliness had been punctured briefly by the girl’s company. In the foyer he plunged his hands into his pockets.
‘Good night, Frank.’
He walked in the direction of the doorway, paused, turned around. But she was already gone. Dematerialized. The lobby was empty. He went outside, glanced at the impenetrable expanses of Hyde Park, then strolled slowly to his damaged Camaro.
ELEVEN
LONDON
DETECTIVE-SERGEANT SCOBIE LOOKED AT THE BODY ON THE BED. The wrists and ankles had been bound by a sheet torn into strips. The face had been lacerated, obviously by the bloodstained scissors that lay on the bedside rug. The sheet beneath the body was saturated, dark red turning to brown. Scobie thought of the killer’s sick frenzy, the brutality of repetition. It was hard to tell how many times the body had been stabbed.
He raised his face, gazed at the bedside lamp, stared at the blood-red hieroglyphics inscribed on the shade. The words were easy to decipher because they’d been written with obvious care, as if the killer knew he had all the time in the world to leave his mark. Scobie tried to imagine an index-finger dipped in blood moving across the paper surface of the shade. But some things you couldn’t envisage. Some things were just beyond your grasp.
He turned to the girl with the white make-up and eyelashes so black and thick they might have congealed. She was smoking a cigarette frantically.
‘I came in and I found her like this,’ the girl said. ‘She was just lying there. Looking like that. Oh God.’
‘What’s her name?’ Scobie asked.
‘Andrea Brown, I think.’ The girl spilled ash down the front of her coat.
‘You think?’
‘She used different names. I didn’t know her that well.’
‘But you lived with her?’ Scobie asked.
‘Sort of, yeh.’
Scobie stepped back from the bed. ‘Either you lived with her or you didn’t. Which is it?’
‘We shared, see. We weren’t close, nothing like that.’
‘Does she have family?’
‘I don’t know.’
Scobie, a cop for twenty-three years, looked at the girl’s ashen make-up, which rendered her features masklike. She took a pack of Benson and Hedges from the pocket of her jeans and used the old cigarette to light the new. Her hand shook. She inhaled smoke with a tiny wheezing sound.
‘Where’s she from?’ Scobie asked.
‘She never said. Once she mentioned something about Hove, I don’t remember what. She might’ve lived there, might not. Can’t say really.’
‘You’re a right little encyclopedia,’ Scobie said.
‘Well. I can’t help it if I know nothing, can I? She never talked about family or boyfriends.’ The girl stared at the lampshade and shuddered.
Scobie walked to the window and looked down into the street. This corner of Mayfair, defined by alleys located at the rear of business premises, was shabby. He gazed down into a lane where plastic bags of rubbish lay in a pile. He considered the fact that a mere half-mile from this grubby room a bomb had exploded in an Underground station. There was too much violence in the world. When he was a boy the worst that ever happened was that somebody got their lights punched out on a Saturday night outside a pub after a piss-up.
He returned to the bed. The dead girl was naked. Nakedness always shocked Scobie. Somehow he could handle the dead better when they were clothed. The naked dead had no dignity, especially when they were in the appalling condition of this poor girl. The whole room seemed to vibrate with the drumming reverberations of murder. Scobie imagined scissors rising and falling, tearing flesh, the savagery of it all.
He stared once again at the lampshade, at the crazy writing. Odd – but you couldn’t expect to find reason in this room. ‘That writing mean anything to you?’ he asked.
The white-faced girl shook her head.
‘Maybe one of her customers had a bad turn,’ Scobie suggested.
‘Customers? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Don’t play games with me, love.’
‘You insinuating something?’
Sometimes Scobie had an avuncular manner to which people responded. He put out a hand and touched the girl on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m not wet behind the ears, darling.’
The girl blew smoke at him. ‘I’ve got a lawyer,’ she said.
‘You and half the population.’
‘I’ll call him.’
‘You do that.’
The girl didn’t move. Scobie took out his notebook. ‘Let’s get it down on paper, shall we? What’s your name?’
‘Do you really need to know that?’
Scobie sighed. ‘This is a murder case. I need to know all there is to know.’
‘Sandra,’
the girl said reluctantly.
TWELVE
NEW YORK CITY
IN MANHATTAN A THICK SWIRLING SNOW MADE HAZY WHITE FUNNELS around streetlights. The storm blew from upstate, from Syracuse, Albany, Saratoga Springs. The General, stepping quickly from his Buick, turned up the collar of his coat and hurried inside a building in the Tribeca area. It had once housed a garment-manufacturing company, but that sweatshop had gone under long ago and the place had lain derelict for years. The new owner had refurbished it entirely. Where once archaic machines had clacked and clattered, and ill-paid seamstresses laboured myopically over stitches, now there were walls of teal-shaded ceramic tiles, genuine palm trees in great earthenware pots, a Southwestern conceit.
The General dusted snowflakes from his overcoat as he strode to the elevator. His mood was uncertain. For one thing, he wasn’t altogether at ease in the United States, so long an enemy of his own country that old suspicions still lay close to the surface of his emotions. For another, the business on hand was not altogether pleasant, and the General, by nature a man of reasonable good humour, had no real heart for distasteful matters. In his long career he’d been obliged to make painful decisions that had condemned men and women to death because the system had demanded it of him. He had signed papers and issued decrees, though it sometimes seemed to him that the hand holding the pen wasn’t his own but an instrument of the State. He’d been detached from the process of condemnation.
He rode up in the elevator to the top floor. A man greeted him when the doors opened, a cheerful fellow in a check suit and red necktie. He smelled so much of aftershave it was almost audible.
‘General Schwarzenbach,’ the man said.
The General nodded.
‘This way, General.’
The General followed the man along a corridor, a long peach-coloured passageway that led by means of a glass-enclosed walkway to an adjoining building. The General stopped to admire the view of the city. The scene was lovely, although it struck him as prodigal that any great city should be so brightly illuminated after dark. But much of this society was wasteful. It had a lot to learn in the ways of abstinence.
‘Nice view, huh,’ the man said.
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