by Len Deighton
‘Okay, I looked in his pockets.’
‘And found the sapphire brooch?’
‘Yes. Yes, I did. In his pocket. That was a silly mistake.’ Prettyman suddenly stiffened. Sometimes throwing a scare into a suspect makes them freeze like that. ‘I’ve got the brooch here,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You didn’t say anything to Tabby, did you?’
‘Say anything? How would I start? You are such a complicated double-dealing crook I wouldn’t know how to tackle it.’
‘I didn’t know the brooch belonged to your sister-in-law. I swear I didn’t.’
‘That would have made a difference, would it? You are the bastard who had her killed. And then killed her hit man.’
‘I tell you no.’
‘No, not you. You just waited for Thurkettle to arrive at the rendezvous and have heart failure.’
‘I was just a contact man. Let me explain. The first I heard was that Silas Gaunt wanted to talk to some sort of hit man. It was not such a surprising request. The Department often use me to make contact with hard-to-find people or esoteric institutions. So I set up the meeting. I didn’t know what it was all about.’
‘Silas Gaunt actually talked to Thurkettle? When? Where?’
‘How was I to know that Silas was going nuts? No one told me he was a crazy man. His name was whispered like he was about to be canonized. They told me he was an infallible old hero. They told me that nothing important was decided until word had come from this oracle in the Cotswolds.’
‘How do you know he’s going crazy?’
‘Right! It came as a surprise to me too. Everyone said it was the D-G who was going nuts, didn’t they? Now it becomes clear that it was Silas Gaunt who was running out of control: the D-G was just on a damage-limitation exercise.’
‘What is out of control?’
‘All the signs were there ages ago but no one would face up to it. First I heard that Silas Gaunt was sick and bedridden. Then he gets some sort of brain-storm because the local district council tells him to chop all his elm trees down. Maybe there were other signs of physical deterioration. Who knows what was hatching in his brain? All we know for sure is that now they have locked him away.’
‘Silas is alive and well and living at Whitelands,’ I said.
‘They are keeping it very need-to-know.’
‘You say Silas briefed Thurkettle? Are you sure?’
‘Sure? Sure? I arranged it. I took Thurkettle to the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane. I wasn’t allowed to sit in at the meeting of course.’
‘Silas Gaunt would never have revealed his identity to a hit man.’
‘What did he have to lose? He was arranging for Thurkettle to be killed too. And anyway, as I say: Silas was crazy.’
‘I don’t believe you. I’ve known Silas Gaunt all my life. I saw him recently …’
‘I don’t care what you believe. If you go chasing after him, like you chased after me, you won’t get to him. Because they finally slammed him into some special funny farm the Department uses for people who have State secrets in their heads.’
‘It shouldn’t be difficult to check out,’ I said.
‘Not difficult at all,’ he agreed. ‘Check it out. And you’ll find I’m telling you the truth.’ He craned towards me and stared: ‘I swear to God.’
‘Look, Jim. Thurkettle killed Tessa Kosinski; I was there, I saw it. But you killed Thurkettle. You took the gun that Werner Volkmann delivered to you; a special plastic gun. You waited at the rendezvous for Thurkettle to arrive on his BMW motor-bike. No one pays a hit man in advance, so he would have had to meet you somewhere to collect his payment. You wasted Thurkettle, grabbed the money, abandoned the motor-bike, dumped the gun and drove away. My guess is that you drove away in some kind of camper vehicle.’
‘This is your theory, is it? It’s not something you saw on late-night TV?’ Prettyman narrowed his eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t staring; perhaps he was in pain.
‘And that’s not all of it,’ I said. ‘Your Cindy was there. I sometimes suspect that this knock-down, drag-out brawl the two of you like displaying to everyone is a cover-up. I think you two have been in cosy agreement until now. She took you to your rendezvous with Thurkettle in a car. You had to have someone drive you there, because after killing Thurkettle you have to drive his car away somewhere. Cindy maybe helps you with your murder and then drives on to meet the Swede and his plane. She collected the box file from the Swede and took it away with her. Now you have some kind of fight about who owns it. Or maybe you don’t have a fight; maybe that’s a scam too.’
‘Maybe there’s not even a box file,’ he said.
‘The thought had occurred to me,’ I agreed.
‘Very good, Bernard. Very logical, but too baroque for a Hollywood movie. Cindy help in a murder? Are you serious?’
‘You took the payoff money to Thurkettle. A lot of money, because professional hits like that cost a lot of money. You would have had to bring back some kind of receipt, however disguised that paperwork might have been. There would have to be a piece of paper, for some cashier somewhere in Whitehall to do his sums. And somewhere too there would be a debriefing report.’
‘And is that what you think you’ll find in the box file?’ He forced a little laugh. ‘You’re a card, Bernard, you really are. You’ll be sorry you ever started this nonsense.’
‘Let’s not play truth or consequences, Jim. Threats leave friendships in tatters.’
‘So you’ve noticed that, have you, Bernard? It took you a long time, didn’t it? And cost you a lot of tattered friends.’
‘Too late now to worry about that, Jim old pal. Right now I’m more interested in the box file Cindy wants to sell you.’
‘Are you? You are very clever, Bernard. And very nearly right. But no cover-up. Cindy and I don’t get along and that’s for real. Your biggest error is thinking that I killed Thurkettle. You’re right too about him leaving a camper in place. I was told not to let him drive off in it, so Cindy was with me to drive the camper away. But when I found Thurkettle dead I sent her to the plane instead. Wrong about the money too. I didn’t have any money for Thurkettle, I had an arrest warrant. Thurkettle had been told we would fly him to a spot he’d chosen in Germany. But my orders said I was to fly with him to England, to a military strip in Dorset. They were going to put him on ice. I had no money for him: that was how I was going to get him on the plane instead of letting him drive away. And I wasn’t told to debrief him. In fact I was told not to talk to him about any work he’d done, or let him tell me anything about his operation or his orders.’
‘Why try to wriggle out of the Thurkettle killing?’ I asked him. ‘It’s got your prints all over it.’
‘Of course you don’t believe me. The truth doesn’t fit into your theory, does it? Well, you can go on disbelieving for as long as you like. The truth is that I was fooled. We were all fooled. Thurkettle was more fooled than any of us: fooled to death. But Cindy knew nothing of it: she was waiting back on the Autobahn. I didn’t tell her I’d found Thurkettle dead. Yes, I searched Thurkettle’s body to get his car keys. I took his VW camper and went through the checkpoint and drove all night to a safe house I knew in Düsseldorf. I went to earth and waited for instructions. I think that’s what the manual says is the right drill.’ He smiled. How these bloody office people always liked to play field agent. ‘Two days after that, the alarm bells started to ring in London. With me sitting in Düsseldorf, and the Swede arriving in England with empty seats in his plane, Silas Gaunt knew his pet scheme had fallen apart. Nothing had gone the way he planned. From the Department’s point of view it was a total disaster.’
I nodded as I ran it through my mind. Prettyman’s story would have a strand of truth woven into it. Good cover stories always do. But I noticed that Cindy could not be called in to corroborate his version of the Thurkettle death.
Was it a cock-up or a triumph of concealment? Never mind the way he now wanted to bend the truth. Prettyman was concocting a stor
y that got him off the hook. I suppose he didn’t want to go along to Mass and explain that gunning down a colleague in cold blood was a part of his misspent past. But look at it another way and Jim had done more or less what he was told, and the Department had got more or less what they wanted out of it. Silas had fixed it so that no one knew the whole story. Only a maniac or a genius could have programmed such a complex operation, and Silas was a mix of both. Congratulations Uncle Silas. Disaster? A couple more disasters like that and they’d be giving Jim the medal he so desperately craved.
Perhaps he saw what sort of doubts I had. He said: ‘Maybe it was all planned that way.’
‘Was his payoff waiting in the camper?’
‘No. I went right through it next day. The camper was obviously arranged by Thurkettle himself. He planned to take the money and run, but I had no money for him. Inside the camper I found a wallet with an Amex card and Visa and some other plastic, small change and odds and ends. It was all in some Scandinavian name – not Thurkettle – so I guess he was going to change identity. No passport; he must have hidden that somewhere else. He’d made all the arrangements to escape, but he had reckoned without the arrangements that someone else had made for him.’
‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard,’ I said. ‘You go through his pockets, and you steal a brooch and give it to some girl you take a fancy to. It stinks; you stink.’ I wondered what else he’d stolen from the body and I would never know about. I couldn’t help wondering if Prettyman disobeyed orders and killed Thurkettle in order to steal the payment for the hit. I wouldn’t put it past him if he became desperately short of money. And the fee for a tricky and dangerous job like that might have gone into six figures.
‘The stink comes from the Department,’ said Prettyman. ‘And it didn’t even work.’
‘Didn’t it?’
‘They thought they could foist off the burned body of Tessa Kosinski as being that of your wife, while you two escaped. That was a stupid idea. I could have told them that if they had consulted me. You can’t burn a body properly in a car fire with a few gallons of petrol.’
‘Why?’
‘You need a temperature of about one thousand degrees centigrade to reduce the big bones to ash.’
‘It doesn’t have to become ash to be beyond identification,’ I said.
‘No it doesn’t, but that wasn’t the problem. They wanted a corpse that was identified, a corpse that would resemble another specific person. What Thurkettle did was useless. It didn’t burn properly. You’ve got to take into account all the water in the guts of a human body. I saw the East German report on the Kosinski body.’
‘Where did you get hold of that?’
‘The Department. Did they never show it to you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘The skin and flesh was blackened, the legs were burned, but the abdomen and the internal organs – lungs and liver and so on – were virtually intact, and that had prevented the upper body burning properly … Is this affecting you, Bernard?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s your sister-in-law, I know.’
‘Go on, I said.’
‘The failure of the upper body to burn meant that the skull was too preserved to fool them. The top of the skull had gone, but the frontal sinus was intact. Fiona had been treated for a sinus problem. They had X-rays of her skull.’
‘A substitute skull was burned with the body. The prepared skull had had its dentistry specially done to be like Fiona’s.’
‘It wouldn’t fool them for a moment. The sinus cavities are just as identifiable as teeth. And anyway, much of that clever dentistry was a waste of time and effort. The lower jaw detached from the skull and was burned away; the upper was less easy to match.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘No, it was all for nothing.’
‘What happened to you, Jim? Back in the old days you would never have considered becoming a part of a dirty business like this.’
‘That was the old days,’ he said, looking at his hands. They were bent and pale and spotted; the hands of a sick man. ‘We live in a different world now, Bernard. In the old days it was all an amusing game, and we were good at playing it. But the world has gone professional, Bernard. You tell me I stink, and maybe I do. It’s because the Department called me in to do their dirty work. I do it so that people like you, and Bret and Sir Henry and Silas Gaunt and all the rest of the sanctimonious time-servers, could keep your hands clean, and keep your conscience in good shape, by telling me I stink.’
‘You can’t rationalize murder,’ I said.
‘I’ve never killed anyone,’ said Prettyman. ‘I draw the line at that. And at the drug dimension too. I never knew that Thurkettle was supplying Tessa with dope to keep her under his spell. But I’m through with all that. I have made my peace with God. I will meet my maker and I will be free.’ He reached into the top pocket of his dressing-gown and found the sapphire brooch. ‘Take it; give it to Fiona or to George. I don’t want it.’ He passed it to me. It was carefully wrapped into a white silk handkerchief. He must have already decided to give it to me, and put it in his pocket before I arrived. I suppose he’d been sitting here all morning rehearsing his story. I wondered how much he had changed in the face of my questions.
I unwrapped the brooch and looked at it. The sapphire was scratched but its faint blue cast was luminous and liquid, like a glass of mountain water. The sparkle from the diamonds was quite different; a very hard light, like the beam from a carbon arc-lamp. It was easy to see why people became obsessed by such stones. The brooch suddenly reminded me of Tessa and I could hear her voice. I wrapped it up and put it in my pocket. ‘I’ll send it to George; he’s next-of-kin I suppose.’
‘The pretty little Canadian nurse told me what you said to her.’
‘She thought you’d got it out of a bran-tub.’
‘I didn’t know it was that valuable. Or where it had come from. I just wanted to empty Thurkettle’s pockets. I don’t know why I didn’t just throw it away at the time. I wanted to give the Canadian kid something. She was a nice little girl.’
‘They all are, Jim. But don’t tell Tabby, is that it?’ I said.
He gave me a man-to-man smile. I was sorry for him, in the way I would be sorry for anyone living out his final days near London’s airport. But he was a creep and he was using me as an anvil upon which to beat his newly heated memories into a shape that suited him. I’d had enough. I got up and said goodbye. From the downstairs hi-fi a soprano was singing exuberantly. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure that Tabby’s Merry Widow was a felicitous choice of background music.
‘Was that all?’ he said with evident relief. Despite my denials, he still thought the Department had sent me to check him out.
‘You’ve told me all I need to know, Jim,’ I said. ‘You did okay. You are well on the way to a medal.’
He smiled suspiciously.
How much of it could I believe? Was Thurkettle really dead? I wasn’t even totally convinced that Jimjay was sick. If next week I happened upon Jim and Thurkettle playing a strenuous game of squash, Jim would just give me a shy smile and another long explanation.
10
An Autobahn exit. The German Democratic Republic
The best way to test Prettyman’s story was to go to the exit ramp he’d specified and see what could be found there. It was forbidden to leave the Autobahn, so I didn’t tell Frank what I intended.
I took Werner with me. I hadn’t told him about my meeting with Prettyman, but he knew I’d been pursuing every lead I could find. By the time we reached the Ziesar exit ramp I had formed a clear idea of what Thurkettle would need for an inconspicuous rendezvous.
‘This would be good, Werner,’ I said as I lowered the window and looked around. This was Germany at its most rural. There was the smell of freshly dug lignite on the air. Since the oil crisis of 1973 the Soviet Union had become more possessive about its oil. The German Democratic Republic was producing its own energy
and paying the price in dozens of open-cast Braunkohl workings. They scarred the landscape, and this low-grade solid fuel polluted the air, both before and after being burned.
Werner didn’t reply. He seemed to think we were engaged on a wild-goose chase, although he was too polite to say so in those exact words. But this was a perfect spot for a secret rendezvous of any kind. The junction was wide and hidden from view, protected from the weather and yet very close to the Autobahn. I ran the car – it was Werner’s ancient Mercedes – up on to the grassy verge and used my binoculars to scout the surroundings. Two or three fields away I saw two farm-workers forking over a manure heap. ‘Let’s go, Werner,’ I said, getting out of the car. I buttoned up tight against the steady downfall of wet snow that had continued ever since we left Berlin. It was better to walk over to the men. Until I had sniffed out the situation in this sleepy little backwater, I preferred that they didn’t see the West Berlin licence plates on the car.
The temperature seemed to be below zero, but that was hard to reconcile with the sleet. It fell steadily and was whisked into little tempests that whipped my face painfully, like shaving with a rusty razor-blade. The wind was from the north, the most unkind wind, for north of here the world was flat; as level as a vast sea-bed, which it had once been. From here to the Baltic Sea there stretched the north German plain. This was Europe’s battlefield, an arena where invading armies had manoeuvred and fought since Germans stood firm against the Slavs, and their recorded history began. Little wonder that the wall dividing the Soviet Empire from the forces of NATO was so near to this place.
As we walked towards them, the two men stopped work. They rested upon their long-handled forks and watched us approach, viewing us with that cool suspicion that country-dwellers save for visitors of urban appearance. Werner’s long black overcoat was not the sort of garment to be encountered frequently in the German countryside unless he had been the proprietor of a travelling circus – a few mangy lions, a zebra and a trapeze act – the sort of family enterprise still to be found touring round Eastern Europe from one small town to the next.