by Peter May
Two men had died, a child had lost her father and her future, and all any bastard could think about was the story it would make on tomorrow’s front page.
Including himself.
He remembered the years of knocking on doors, cadging pics. How do you feel about your son being killed, Mrs Smith?
Sometimes you got there before the police, and after you’d broken the news you searched out and removed every picture of the dead boy so that the competition wouldn’t get one. It was not how you wanted to work, but that’s how it was. Accept it or get out. Right now he was hurting in a lot of places, inside and out, and he took the easy option by joining the pack. He pushed his way to the front and took his own copy of the drawing from Lousière. Like the rest of the carrion creatures he would do a story himself.
Only, he had a head start. He was on the inside, and knew things the others didn’t.
‘I am sorry. No more questions,’ he heard du Maurier saying. The policeman collected his papers and headed for the door, only to be surrounded by radio and television hacks all wanting their pound of flesh; individual interviews, pics, the outside chance of an exclusive.
‘Why is there no face in the drawing?’ Bannerman heard a voice asking. Stiffly he pulled on his coat and pushed his way towards the door.
‘Neil, Neil!’ There was a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Platt at his back. ‘Good God!’ Platt said, beady eyes examining the damage to Bannerman’s face. ‘You look as though you’ve been in the wars. What the hell happened?’
Bannerman glared back at him. ‘None of your fucking business.’ And he turned away.
But Platt was not to be deterred, chasing after him to grab his arm. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We could work on this together. You knew Slater. I know Brussels.’
‘Piss off.’ Bannerman shook himself free and turned away again.
‘I’ve got good contacts,’ Platt shouted after him. But Bannerman was gone.
Platt glared after him angrily. Cocky bastard, he thought. He’ll come to me yet. He wondered again why Bannerman had come to Brussels in the first place. Surely he couldn’t possibly have known . . . And yet, hadn’t he seen Bannerman with Slater and Gryffe just last night? He must know something. It would pay to keep an eye on him.
*
Outside, the temperature was still falling. The wind blew sleet up the Rue des Quatre Bras into the darkness of the Place Poelaert, to swirl around the foot of a tall black monument. Bannerman stepped out across the cobbles, pulling up his collar, and headed down towards the lights of the Boulevard de Waterloo, crossing the tramlines, past a group of people huddled below a shelter at the tram stop. The cold reached him even through the thickness of his coat. He thought about Tania and felt deeply depressed. He remembered the moment, just two nights ago, when she had come into his room, standing there in her nightdress watching him and then leaning over to touch his face.
What horrors were locked up in that little head?
Inside a large fashionable restaurant, prosperous people were seated at tables around a huge open fire, drinking wine, laughing, untouched by it all. Bannerman looked in at them through a large picture window and saw his drawn face, white and marred by bruising, reflected in the glass. He turned away and crossed the boulevard and walked up to the Métro at the Porte de Namur. He rode the underground to Arts Loi and then changed for Schuman, where he came out under the shadow of the Berlaymont. For several minutes he stood looking up at the endless rows of darkened windows, wondering if the answers to everything that had happened today might lie behind them. Then he set out with heavy steps down the Rue de la Loi towards the Rue de Commerce.
Slater’s apartment was dark and still when he let himself in, and he almost expected to find Slater in his chair in the half-light of the living room where he had sat two nights before. That seemed a long time ago now. The living room was cold and empty. He went into Tania’s room and stood in the darkness. An old rag doll lay in the armchair by the dead fire. He bent over and picked it up to hold against his face. Life was so unfair for those who deserved so much more. He dropped the doll back on to the chair and returned to the living room. He switched on the light and lifted the phone and began dialling wearily. The number rang three times.
‘Edinburgh Post.’ The voice was polished thin by all the miles in between.
‘Neil Bannerman. Give me the editor.’
‘One moment, Mr Bannerman.’ A phone lifted a few seconds later.
‘Tait.’
‘Neil Bannerman.’
‘Jesus Christ, Bannerman! Why the hell have I not heard from you before now?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kale opened the shutters on the first light of morning and looked out on the grey mist that hung over the city. He had his coat on already, his bag packed and sitting on the end of the bed.
It had been a bad night with little sleep. He had dreamt of the long, cold dormitory, the voices of little boys crying beneath their covers. The harsh discipline, the loneliness of the place; both had left their mark on him. But he had never cried as others had. He had never succumbed to the authority of the housemasters. Rather, it had strengthened in him that which set him apart. The boys had known it, and so had the masters. He sensed their fear of him. They did not know how to deal with his sullen, silent rebellion against their establishment. The beatings, the solitary confinement, the withdrawal of privileges. All had been met with the same mute acceptance that so baffled them. The dark eyes that blazed their hatred; a boy who was only nine. It had all left its mark, and none of it had been without pain. But they would never know it.
Kale turned away from the window and lifted his bag from the bed. He was unsettled, anxious now to be away. But there were still four hours to pass before he could collect the remainder of his money from the locker at the Gare du Midi. He left the room and got into a lift that hummed and clattered its way slowly down to reception. The desk clerk looked up as he swung the lift gate open.
‘Your bill, Monsieur?’
Kale nodded and laid his bag on the floor beside the desk. The clerk lifted the bill off a shelf behind him and pushed it across the counter.
‘Are you not having breakfast?’
Kale shook his head and the clerk shuffled uncomfortably as Kale counted out the notes from his wallet. The clerk had seen them come and go in an establishment like this, but this one was different. There was something dark and vaguely sinister about him. Nothing you could put your finger on. His wallet was amply filled, but his clothes did not suggest money. The clerk noticed these things. When there is so much time to pass in a day, you begin to look for them. The button missing from the coat, the slightly frayed cuff.
Kale lifted his bag and turned away, but stopped as he noticed a rack filled with the French-language Belgian daily, La Dernière Heure. ‘How much?’ he asked.
‘Fifteen francs, Monsieur.’
Kale lifted the top paper off the pile and felt a touch like icy fingers on the back of his neck. He stared numbly at the drawing that filled the top quarter of the front page across four columns. The doorway, the painting, the chair, the figure in the foreground. There was no face, but he recognized himself with a chilling sense of déjà vu. The bold headline across a further four columns read, L’HOMME SANS VISAGE – EST-IL L’ASSASSIN? He looked up to see the clerk watching him curiously. He dropped the paper on the desk. ‘Fifteen francs?’ The clerk nodded. Kale fished in his pocket for the money. He was loath to make conversation, but he had to know. ‘What’s the big story?’
The clerk seemed surprised. He glanced at the paper and shrugged. ‘Two men were shot dead here in Brussels yesterday. The police think the man in the drawing may have been involved. It was drawn by a child in the house where it happened. But she is – how can I say – not right in the head. The police won’t say whether they think it was murder or not. But the papers don’t have
any doubts.’ He paused and asked casually, ‘What’s your interest?’
Kale glared at him and dropped the fifteen francs on the counter. ‘None,’ he said. He lifted the paper and crossed the lobby, pushing open the glass doors and vanishing out into the street.
The clerk watched him go and frowned as a tiny nagging thought entered his mind. He rounded the desk and lifted a copy of the paper, peering closely at the drawing. The figure was suddenly familiar. There was a button missing from the coat. The same button missing from the Englishman’s coat. But how could a child have noticed such a tiny detail? The clerk scratched his head and returned to his seat behind the counter, taking the paper with him. He looked at it some more, then looked at the card he had filled out with details of the Englishman’s passport. James Ross was the name he had written. A salesman. Again the clerk frowned and scratched his head. But then, he thought, it was none of his business.
*
The Gare du Midi was busy. Passengers stood around in knots in the big arrival hall watching the boards for arrivals and departures. A thin metallic voice made announcements alternately in French and Flemish. Neither meant anything to Kale. He was seated on a wooden bench at the foot of a wide pillar from where he could see through glass doors and along a short corridor to the left-luggage lockers. It was not yet eleven-thirty, but he had been here for nearly an hour in the hope of seeing whoever might leave his money, if the deed had not already been done. The time had dragged painfully, so that all the uncertainty about what exactly was in the newspaper had grown in his mind. Over and over again he had thought about the drawing, stared at it. How was it possible there had been a child in the house without him knowing? He remembered the cloakroom. She could have been in there. But why? Still, he felt certain that no one could recognize him from the drawing. Only the child could know what he looked like, and according to the hotel clerk she was somehow mentally impaired.
He had struggled through the story again and again, trying to make sense of it from what little French he knew. But all that he had gleaned from it was the girl’s name; the daughter of one of the men he had killed. He swore softly to himself. Things had not gone well. The sooner he got out of this damned country the better.
A stream of passengers emerged from platform six, partially obscuring his view of the glass doors. In that moment he saw a figure at the lockers. A figure he recognized. The white hair of a working man in city clothes. He jumped up and pushed his way through the passengers. Someone shouted at him and he stumbled and felt a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged himself free and ran towards the glass doors.
The figure had vanished.
Kale hurried down the corridor to the lockers. There was no sign of the man with the white hair. How the hell could he have got out of here without Kale seeing him? Kale looked back along the corridor towards the commuters milling beyond the other side of the glass.
Gone.
Breathlessly he took out his key and turned back to the lockers. Number thirty-nine. He fumbled at the lock and pulled open the door. The black case he had left there yesterday was gone. In its place a white envelope that was neither big enough nor fat enough to contain the money he was owed. He ripped it open with trembling fingers and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. There were three words printed across it in a tight, neat hand.
KILL THE CHILD.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The telephone woke Bannerman just after eleven. Long single rings that brought to an end the strange dreams that come just before waking. He slipped from the rumpled bedsheets, still woozy from the restless hours of shallow sleep. He had lain awake almost until dawn, unable to stop his brain from replaying the events of the last forty-eight hours. He was still stiff and his head and face still ached. The air in the flat was cold as ice and he shivered as he went through the hall to lift the phone in the living room and sit heavily on the settee.
‘Bannerman.’ He ran a hand over the stubble on his jaw.
A familiar voice crackled in his ear. ‘That was a good piece you sent us last night, Neil.’
‘That’s what you pay me for, Mr Tait.’ Bannerman could barely disguise his sarcasm. He heard Tait sigh.
‘I’m flying out to Brussels tomorrow,’ Tait said. ‘For the funeral. I’ve been in touch with the Belgian authorities. Slater had no living relatives, so I didn’t see the point in having him flown back for burial. They’ll release the body after the post-mortem.’
‘Save the paper money, will it?’ Bannerman asked.
But Tait wasn’t going to be baited. ‘The arrangements are made,’ he said. ‘The funeral will be at the Cimetière de Bruxelles tomorrow afternoon. Two o’clock. I want you to remain in Brussels until this whole thing is cleared up. You can stay at the Rue de Commerce. We’ll be making arrangements for the collection of Slater’s belongings. Oh, and you’d better pick up his car. I understand it’s been taken to the police car pound.’ He paused, but got no response from Bannerman. ‘I’ll meet you at the office tomorrow around midday. We can have lunch and then you can drive me out to the cemetery.’
‘What about his daughter?’
Tait cleared his throat. ‘Ye-es,’ he said, ‘that’s a bit of an unknown quantity. I suppose the paper has some kind of responsibility . . . Anyway, I’ll see about that after the funeral. Meantime you stick with the story. Give me a call before the five o’clock conference and let me know what’s happening.’
Bannerman hung up. It was all over already. He could read between the lines. By tomorrow night the story would be dead and buried along with Slater. The Post was embarrassed. There would be echoes of it in the other dailies and in the Sundays, but the Post would want it over and done with as expeditiously as possible. Bannerman heaved himself out of the settee and went into the bathroom to shave.
Hard blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror as he soaped his battered face. The politicians, too, would be happy to see the whole affair interred. The Belgians, like the Post, would be embarrassed, but for different reasons. A British government minister shot dead in the Belgian capital. They would not be relishing the publicity. And the British government would be worried about electoral repercussions. They could not afford a scandal with a general election less than three weeks away. Du Maurier’s warning of political interference the previous day had been only too prescient.
Bannerman sluiced his face and neck with cold water and went back through to the bedroom to dress. He eased himself into a dark, crumpled suit and again sifted everything through his mind. He stared from the window across rooftops that shone black in the fine drizzle that drifted across the city.
He began with du Maurier’s certainty that Slater and Gryffe had been murdered. If he was to work from that basic assumption then it was clear that it would be necessary to find either the murderer or the motive. Find one and you would find the other, he told himself, but without much conviction. The difficulty was knowing where to start.
He turned away from the window and sat on the bed. The murderer, apparently, had left no clues. But there was a witness. Tania had seen him, though Bannerman doubted if the child would ever be capable of identifying him. A motive might be easier to unearth.
There was the hostile relationship between Slater and Gryffe, the file of cuttings on the Minister that Slater had kept in his office, the money in the suitcase in Gryffe’s study.
Bannerman got up and went through to the living room, lifting the phone to call the Post. He waited uneasily as the number rang distantly. He felt a lack of commitment to this story. Tait, he knew, would not want him to unearth anything that might bring the paper into disrepute, and he felt a disconcerting lack of personal motivation. It worried him.
‘Edinburgh Post.’
‘Put me through to the library, please.’ He waited until a receiver lifted.
‘Library.’ It was a woman’s voice.
‘Jean, it’s Neil Bannerma
n.’
‘Hello, Neil. You still in Brussels?’ And without waiting for an answer, ‘Poor Tim. What a terrible thing.’
‘Yes,’ Bannerman said. ‘Look, do me a favour, Jean. Search out any cuttings we’ve got on Robert Gryffe, as well as anything we might have on him in his obit file. I want to lay hands on everything we know about the guy.’
‘Are you in a hurry for it?’
‘Yes. Just photocopy the stuff, stick it in an envelope and give it to the editor. He’s flying over tomorrow. He can bring it with him.’
‘Okay, Neil.’
He hung up, and drew the curtains open and stared thoughtfully down into the street. Then he turned his gaze around the living room. He might as well make a start with the apartment.
It took him less than half an hour to go through it room by room, drawer by drawer. There were extraordinarily few personal items. The safe was locked, and most of the drawers empty. It was not until he had begun his search that he noticed just how tidy the flat was. Slater had not struck him as being a particularly fastidious man. Of course the place would already have been searched by the police, and when a good cop does his job properly he almost always leaves the place he searched tidier than he found it. But still, it was more than just tidy. It was as if the flat had never been lived in. Even the child’s room seemed naked, except for the rag doll lying on the armchair where Bannerman had dropped it the night before.
Here, too, the drawers were empty. Bannerman opened the wardrobe. A dozen coat hangers rattled and swung freely. Bannerman frowned as a suspicion grew in his mind. He went through to the kitchen and found the larder. There were a few cans of soup, a tin of spaghetti and a nearly empty coffee jar. The refrigerator had been switched off, and its shelves were bare. Then into Slater’s bedroom, again to find an empty wardrobe, empty drawers in the bedside cabinet.