‘Very well,’ she said as Jackson came up. ‘I’ll do as you say.’
She moved away gracefully and I grabbed Jackson by the elbow as he turned to follow her. ‘Superintendent Hanna wants to talk to you, Mr Jackson.’
Hanna looked surprised but caught on and picked up his cue. ‘Yes, about the riots today.’
‘Oh,’ said Jackson. ‘Who was that?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A friend of Conyers, name of … er … Samson, I think.’
‘Simpson,’ said Hanna with a straight face.
‘She’s quite a looker,’ commented Jackson. ‘What about the riots, Superintendent?’
Hanna took his arm. ‘I don’t think you are giving the police a fair shake in your coverage.’
I left them to it because I had seen Stern on the other side of the room. Halfway across I was button-holed by Roker. ‘Hold on a minute, Kemp.’
‘What do you want?’ I said brusquely.
‘Just a friendly chat.’
‘I pick my friends carefully,’ I said.
‘What’s the point of insulting me?’ he asked. ‘I understand Mrs Salton offered you a job. You won’t get it. You’ll find she’ll withdraw the offer.’
‘You seem to know a lot about what Mrs Salton will or won’t do.’
‘I know exactly,’ he said flatly. ‘And you’re through as far as she is concerned. You already know what Lord Hosmer thinks of you. You might as well quit. If you do, then Hosmer promises he’ll reconsider.’
‘Big of him,’ I said. ‘What’s your leverage on Mrs Salton?’
‘You were just talking to it. Conyers says that if you’re still here at midday tomorrow, he’ll break the story of Salton’s mistress. There’s someone putting Mrs Salton in the picture right now. I’d say that she’s going to hate your guts if you’re still here tomorrow afternoon.’
I glanced around the room. ‘I don’t imagine there’s been a bigger crowd of bastards collected in one place since the Nuremberg trials.’
‘Quit wailing,’ said Roker. ‘Look, you can come out of this on top. You can make things right with Hosmer and still be in good with Mrs Salton. Doing her a favour like that could get you quite a piece of change.’
‘You asked me a question just now,’ I said. ‘You wanted to know what was the point of my insulting you. I insult you with words because I’m prohibited at the moment from insulting you with my fist.’ I tapped him on the chest. ‘But only at the moment. If you approach me with any of your smart-alec suggestions again, I’ll drive your teeth through the back of your neck.’
‘Big talk!’ He sneered at me.
‘You’d better hope so,’ I said, and left him.
Stern had disappeared while I was talking to Roker but I didn’t bother looking for him because I wanted to find out who was talking to Jill Salton. As I might have expected, it was Hosmer: he had her corralled in a corner of the marble hall and was yapping at her.
I walked up and said, ‘Having trouble?’
She looked at me and her eyes flickered away. A bad sign. Hosmer said, ‘I don’t think Mrs Salton wants you to stay on Campanilla.’
‘Is that right, Jill?’ I asked deliberately.
‘It’s that woman,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been told that if you don’t leave by noon tomorrow Conyers will tell the press about her and David.’
‘The age of chivalry is dead, Jill.’
‘But David’s reputation …’
I cut in. ‘And what about Ogilvie? Am I supposed to forget that?’
‘Why so stubborn?’ asked Hosmer.
‘That’s a quality you’ve paid for highly in the past,’ I said. ‘Don’t knock it now. Jill, let me get one thing straight. Is Conyers willing to guarantee that if I leave by noon tomorrow, the story won’t get into the press?’
‘Of course,’ said Hosmer quickly.
‘Then he’s a liar, because he’s promising something he can’t deliver. Hawke knows about it and you can be sure he’ll break the story in his own good time, and there’s nothing Conyers can do about that. This is going to come out anyway, Jill, and right now you’re being conned by Conyers, the con man. I just wanted you to understand that before telling you that I wouldn’t have left anyway.’
I glanced at Hosmer, who was moistening his lips, and added, ‘If you don’t believe me, look at your precious uncle and you’ll see it written all over his face. Lord Hosmer, common blackmailer.’
His face purpled. ‘Now, see here …’
‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘And keep that bastard Roker away from me or I’ll break his neck.’
I walked away feeling a dreary satisfaction at having been able to speak my mind for once. This whole damned business was beginning to get me down and for the first time I seriously questioned my own motives for staying. I knew the answer, of course. I was exactly what Hosmer had said: stubborn. Obstinate, pigheaded, obdurate – all to the point of wilfulness. That was the real reason I’d come a cropper in my army career.
But I didn’t like being pushed and I didn’t like being manipulated, and there were too many people trying to do both. My reaction to being pushed was to push back, but this case was so bloody amorphous that I didn’t know who or where to do the pushing. Slamming at Hosmer only gave me small satisfaction – it was hard to imagine he had anything to do with Ogilvie’s death, either directly or indirectly. The Hosmers of this world aren’t murderers. They don’t kill a man; just his spirit. But somebody had killed Ogilvie, and somebody had taken a shot at me, and there was still a hell of a stench surrounding Salton’s death. My biggest frustration right now – apart from the feeling of being unwillingly backed into a corner – was that the whole mystery was shrouded in a fog against which it was futile to push.
I headed back to the party to find that the noise level had reached the optimum decibel rating, marginally less than that of Concorde taking off. Negrini was near the door. He took one look at my face and said, ‘You look as though you’ve just swallowed a lemon. Cheer up and have a drink.’
‘Not now.’ I looked about the room. ‘Seen Hanna?’
Negrini grinned. ‘I saw him talking to Barstow a few minutes ago. It looked like the opening shots in a civil war. I’d say there’s a schism developing in the police force.’
I said, ‘How safe is Hanna if it comes to a power struggle with Barstow?’
‘I wouldn’t know. He’s a clever guy, and don’t you be deceived by that sleepy look of his.’ He shook his head. ‘But Barstow has Conyers behind him.’
I saw Hanna on the other side of the room, standing with his head cocked on one side as if listening to something. I said, ‘I think we’re about to find out how safe he is. The earthquake is coming, Gerry.’
I went across to Hanna and said, ‘They’re trying to blackmail her. Me too.’
He blinked at me. ‘Who and who?’
‘Conyers, Hosmer and Roker want me absent. They threatened to blow the story of Salton and Leotta Tomsson if I don’t leave. I think I spiked it – for now.’
‘As I said before, things happen when you’re around. There’s a word for it. You’re a catalyst.’ He frowned and cocked his head on one side again. ‘Something’s going on.’
‘What?’
‘Listen.’
A woman near me was yelling at her escort in a high-pitched soprano. ‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to hear in the middle of this?’ But obediently I listened and found that there was a different quality to the noise, an underlying rhythm of varying intensity, which seemed to beat in waves.
Hanna jerked his head at me and I followed him to the window. He pulled aside the curtain and we looked out over Fleming Square. Dusk was falling and it was packed with people, a shimmering mosaic of shouting heads and waving arms in the fading light. There must have been a couple of thousand out there and they were all shouting the same thing.
Sal-ton. Sal-ton. SAL-TON. SAL-TON.
As Hanna dropped the curtain I saw
the first of the riot squads arrive on the other side of the square. He said, ‘That’s no rentacrowd – that’s the real thing. They mean business.’ He looked around and beckoned to Barstow.
I parted the curtain again and looked out over the square. The contrast between the colonial rococo inside and the raw street outside, between the urbane civilities of the cocktail hour and those clenched fists, made me realise what the Czar and his family must have felt just before the mob stormed the Winter Palace.
Someone out there must have seen the chink of light at the upper-storey window. I caught a brief glimpse of something thrown and there was a smash of glass just to my left. I dropped the curtain quickly and stepped back. The drapery had prevented shattered glass from spraying into the room, but the missile lay on the carpet: a jagged half-brick.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hanna and Barstow making a quick exit and then Conyers was coming towards the window. ‘What’s going on out there?’
‘It’s the voice of a dead man,’ I said. ‘You can’t fight that, Mr Prime Minister.’
EIGHT
I
Although Joe Hawke had not been invited to the Prime Minister’s cocktail party, he was undoubtedly present, in spirit if not in body. The crowd out in the square might have been yelling the name of Salton, but they were puppets manipulated by Hawke. He was milking the situation for all it was worth.
The reaction in the ballroom could best be described as modified panic. As another window smashed, the noisy conversation gave way to the roar of the crowd outside and, for a tantalising moment, everyone stood still. The mob, a manifold wild beast, sounded like something out of a zoo baying with a rage that held everyone in a strange paralysis.
Then a woman screamed and the spell was broken. Conyers swung on his heel and elbowed his way through the crowd, which had begun to scurry about in a chaotic manner. Women were gathering up their handbags and already the quicker-witted were slipping away. I saw Conyers approach a red-tabbed army officer and speak to him urgently. The officer nodded, picked up his braided cap and a swagger stick, and shouldered his way to the door.
I didn’t like the look of that. If sending in the army was Conyers’s instinctive response to a civil disturbance, it suggested he was losing his grip. The use of armed force against civilians is not a good indication of a clear-headed statesman.
A third window smashed and I decided it was time to make a move. The crowd had thinned appreciably – there would be no last-minute drunks at this party – and I made my way across the room. Negrini grabbed my arm. ‘Seen Jill Salton?’
‘The last time I saw her she was out there.’ I nodded towards the door.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘She’ll have got a head start.’ He grimaced. ‘What do you think’s blown the lid off?’
‘Someone told me it was me,’ I said, and ignored his look of surprise. ‘What’s the best way out of here?’
‘You saw out front: how does it look?’
‘The square’s jammed with people.’
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘My car’s out there. Maybe the back door’s our best bet.’
The rear of Government House was a rabbit warren of service rooms. The architectural splendour diminished as we went on. We passed through a kitchen and then came into a long corridor with dull marmalade-coloured walls. Negrini pointed. ‘Looks like an exit.’
We came out on to a cul-de-sac that was used for deliveries. In the dying light I saw a row of dustbins and a scrawny cat, which fled as we appeared. At the end of the cul-de-sac, people were running and shouting, and the chanting of the crowd from the square on the other side of the building was intense.
A rush of people burst out of the door behind us, spooked by the noise from the square. It had taken them longer than us to realise that the best way out of Government House was the rear, but there were a lot of them – not only guests from the party, but also servants in white jackets and other staff – and we were pushed back against the opposite wall. From what I could see of their faces in the light from the corridor, panic was really setting in. The wide eyes, open mouths and meaningless noises brought sharply to mind a batch of raw recruits I’d commanded in Korea as a young officer. Terror in human beings is never a pretty sight.
I grabbed a passing figure by the arm. ‘What’s happening back there?’
It was the balding man I had seen talking to Jill at the party. ‘They’re breaking down the front door,’ he said breathlessly.
He tore himself loose and ran away. When I turned to speak to Negrini I found he had gone, jostled aside in the crowd, and the narrow alley was full of running people. In the distance I heard the wailing of sirens.
I flattened myself against the wall again and let them go by. When the first spate had gone, I followed towards the end of the cul-de-sac. In front of me was the limping figure of a woman and when I reached her I saw it was Leotta Tomsson. ‘I thought you left earlier,’ I said.
‘I saw the crowd coming into the square,’ she said. ‘So I turned back.’
‘What’s the matter with your leg?’
‘Nothing. Just my shoe – the damned heel’s come off.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘The hell with it!’ She stooped and took off her shoes. ‘Tonight’s a time to run,’ she said.
We approached the corner. ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Let’s go carefully here.’
The cul-de-sac opened out on to a street that led to Fleming Square along the side of Government House. I peered around the corner to the left, towards the square, and saw a writhing mob of people. The noise was a solid wall of sound. A quick glance the other way showed more trouble. Several lines of police were strung across the road, the street lights gleaming off their plastic face shields. Behind them loomed an armoured car, from which projected the ugly snout of a water cannon. At least, I hoped it was a water cannon.
‘This is not a good place to be,’ I said.
‘Is that the police up there?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re on the move,’ she said. ‘Let’s get back.’ I saw the line of policemen move forward, their batons raised.
‘Good idea.’ I was thinking of the pitched battle I had witnessed from my hotel window. If that was a sample of Campanillan police work, I didn’t want to encounter it at the sharp end. And that was a mere skirmish compared to what was brewing now.
We moved a little way back down the cul-de-sac and stood against the wall, waiting for the police to go by. When they appeared they were already moving at a trot. The first line went by and then a second, and then they must have hit the crowd in the square because a shout went up, interspersed with screams. Another line of police went past the entrance to the cul-de-sac and then a squad of six veered off and came running directly towards us.
I grabbed Leotta and pulled her into the alcove of the exit, now dark with its door closed once more. We flattened against it and they didn’t see us in the gathering gloom, their boots clattering past in the alley. They got to the blind end and paused. Two of them went into Government House through another door further down, and the other four came back more slowly. I had the sudden impression they were looking for something. Or someone.
All hell seemed to be breaking loose in the square. The armoured car rumbled past and I heard the detonations as gas canisters were discharged. But I was less interested in that than in the fact that two of the coppers had produced powerful flashlights and were giving the alley a thorough inspection.
They came closer and the nearer light settled on me. ‘Sergeant.’
I was blinded and put up a hand to my eyes as I heard the thud of boots running up. They clattered to a halt. ‘That’s him. Right!’
I twisted sideways as a baton flailed out and hit the wall by my head. Leotta screamed in a piercing wail as I ducked out of the revealing light. Something, probably another baton, hit me in the side with enough force to have cracked ribs if I hadn’t been moving away from it fast. I kicked out high with my foot and the flashlight went flying.
It had been a long time since I’d practised unarmed combat – too long. And even so, odds of four to one were too much, especially as these men were prepared for action. They wore helmets and their faces were covered, they had riot shields and those damned batons, and their boots were heavy. It was the boots I was afraid of. I knew that if I went down, it would be all over. They could stomp me right into the ground.
Leotta screamed again and a hoarse voice shouted, ‘Leave the girl!’ One of the coppers came at me: I whirled and his stroke missed. I chopped sideways at his neck and connected, but another of them got in a good blow to my shoulder as I did so and my whole right arm went numb. Then another came in lower and thrust his baton between my legs so that I stumbled and fell.
As I pitched forward I had a sudden vision of Ogilvie as I had last seen him, his face and body purple with bruises, and I knew it was going to happen to me. When I hit the ground I rolled away desperately, but not quickly enough. I was booted hard in the thigh at the same time as a baton cracked down heavily on my back.
I knew I had to protect my head and stomach so I squirmed into a ball with my knees up and my head bent over covered with my hands, trying to imitate a hedgehog – or a foetus. A boot cracked against my shin and blows rained down. The men were silent except for their heavy breathing and occasional grunts.
Then a voice yelled ‘Sergeant!’, there was a final blow and the beating mercifully stopped.
That last stroke of the baton had been over my kidneys and a wave of dizziness washed over me. I heard the voice again, cold with authority and crackling with tension. ‘Sergeant, just what do you think you’re doing?’ A light played over me. ‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’
‘Taylor.’
‘Taylor – what?’
‘Taylor, sir.’
‘Post?’
‘Hogtown, sir.’
‘Well, Taylor, you will take these men and report to my office immediately. You will turn in those weapons and you will report to Inspector Rose and tell him that you are under arrest pending an inquiry. If he is not there, you will wait for him or for me. Is that understood?’
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