The Man With No Face

by Peter May

  ‘Well, Mr Bannerman, isn’t this a surprise. Come on, Henry. You don’t mind if we join you, Mr Bannerman?’ Mrs Schumacher sat herself down without waiting for his reply.

  Bannerman turned in astonishment. Mrs Schumacher grinned at him, her face flushed in that way he had seen at the party. She had been drinking. Again. Behind her Henry Schumacher hovered apologetically. He nodded politely at Bannerman and the girl. ‘Perhaps they want to be alone, dear,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Henry, sit down.’ Then to Bannerman, ‘Well, Mr Bannerman, this is unexpected. Aren’t you going to introduce us to your young lady?’ And confidentially, ‘You certainly are a fast worker. Does she speak English?’

  Bannerman smiled indulgently. ‘She is English. Miss Sally Robertson – Mr and Mrs Schumacher.’

  Sally was taken aback by the sudden arrival of this garrulous American woman with her big bosoms and timid husband. She took a moment to collect herself. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, my dear.’

  A waiter arrived promptly at the table and Mrs Schumacher flashed him a winning smile. ‘How are you tonight, Jean?’

  ‘I am very well, Madame. Have you had a good evening?’ He looked almost as though he might be genuinely interested in her reply.

  ‘Why, yes, Jean, as always. We took your advice about that little restaurant in the Grande Place. Exquisite.’

  ‘I’m very pleased, Madame. You will have a sherry?’

  ‘Well, yes. But just a very small one.’

  ‘And Monsieur?’

  ‘A whisky-soda, please.’

  Jean bowed and dematerialized into the gloom.

  Sally and Bannerman exchanged looks. ‘Actually we were just leaving,’ Bannerman said.

  Schumacher leaped self-consciously to his feet to allow Sally out from behind the table. ‘Perhaps you would join us for a drink tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘We are going home on Sunday.’ He seemed so eager for their company that Bannerman was almost sorry to turn him down.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Mrs Schumacher said. ‘Tomorrow’s our last day, and I would so have liked to hear all about the exciting world of newspapers. We’re flying back to Edinburgh on Sunday morning to spend a few more days there before going back to the States. It is The Times you work for, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Post. The Edinburgh Post.’

  She frowned as the myth she had been constructing in her mind crumbled. She would no doubt rebuild it over the next few days. ‘Wasn’t it just terrible about that poor Mr Griffin?’

  ‘Gryffe,’ Bannerman corrected her.

  ‘And to think we were speaking to him just the night before he was killed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bannerman said. ‘Goodbye. I hope you have a good journey.’

  ‘Why thank you, Mr Bannerman. Goodbye, young lady.’ Schumacher shook their hands solemnly. ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said. ‘If you should change your mind, about the drink I mean, give us a call. We’re at the Hotel Regent in the Avenue Louise.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  And when they had gone Mrs Schumacher said, ‘They haven’t even finished their drinks. He seems a very strange young man, doesn’t he? You don’t think he’s trying to avoid us, do you, Henry?’

  ‘They struck me,’ Schumacher said thoughtfully, ‘as two young people with rather a lot on their minds.’

  II

  Bannerman watched her undress in the moonlight that flooded in through open shutters. The room was cold and he shivered. He knew this was a mistake. Afterwards, it would only be all the more difficult. But he wanted her, with every fibre of himself.

  ‘Let me,’ he said.

  She had slipped out of her jeans and panties and stood only in her T-shirt. Bannerman ran his hands over its intimate softness, over the swellings of her small breasts. Then behind her, pulling her to him, feeling the smoothness of her buttocks and lifting the shirt up over her head. He dropped it on the floor and kissed her, his tongue in her mouth, seeking out every part of it. Then he lifted her and carried her to the bed.

  Afterwards they lay still for a long time, curled up in one another’s arms, each reluctant to be the one to break the spell. Finally it was Bannerman who rolled over and turned on the bedside lamp. They blinked in its sudden brightness. She pulled the sheet up to wrap around herself and lay on her side watching him. ‘I wish . . .’ she said. But her voice trailed away and she never said what it was she wished.

  But Bannerman could guess. ‘It probably wouldn’t have worked out,’ he said. ‘It’s probably as well that you’re going.’

  And for the first time she knew for certain that he didn’t want her to go. But somehow it was all too late. They would go their separate ways though neither of them wanted it. Neither of them had been able to summon the courage to face the alternative.

  She reached up and pulled his head down so that she could kiss him, taste him again, reassure herself about what had gone before. ‘It was perfect,’ she whispered. ‘You and me. It’s never been like that before.’

  Bannerman pulled away, rolling over on to his back and staring up at the ceiling. ‘Perfection,’ he said, ‘comes only once. It’s never the same a second time. Or a third. You spend the rest of your life trying to recapture a lost illusion.’

  She was silent then for a very long time. Before finally she said in a tiny strained voice, ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you?’

  He thought about it. ‘Yes. It probably means more to me than you’ll ever know. But that’s now. What it will mean next week, or next month, or next year – I don’t know.’ She lay quite still. ‘A week ago,’ he said, ‘there was no one in my life. Now there are two people.’ He heard her head turn but he didn’t look. ‘You and . . . Tania. And you are leaving. Sometimes life is like that.’

  ‘Yes.’ And somehow that one word was the final acceptance of their parting, that whatever they might feel now there was no real future in it. Then she asked, ‘Why does she mean so much to you?’

  And he wanted to tell her. He knew that tomorrow she would be gone and it wouldn’t matter any more.

  ‘Somewhere’ – he gestured vaguely in the moonlight – ‘there is a child.’ His laughter was hollow and laced with bitterness. ‘Not even a child any more. Very nearly a young woman. A part of me. My daughter.’ He turned to look at her, but there was nothing in her face. ‘I’ve never seen her. Not even a photograph.’

  ‘You were married?’

  ‘No. Her mother was a girl I knew a long time ago. She was just seventeen. Worked in telesales on my first newspaper. I was eighteen. She was a shy girl. Didn’t know much about anything. Least of all sex. She thought she loved me, and maybe she did. I used to pretend that I loved her too, even to myself. It was a kind of growing-up game I played. Testing her, testing myself, playing with both our emotions to see what would happen. I was just a stupid boy who thought the world had given him a raw deal. Anyway, I took her virginity. Led her into it when she really didn’t want to. I had to promise that I loved her, you know, the way kids do. And it was easy to say it; it’s always easy to say when you don’t mean it.’ He paused. ‘Much harder when you do.’

  For several long minutes he was lost in recollection. All the finely etched memories that would be with him always. ‘She got pregnant, of course, and I thought the whole world had fallen in on me. Didn’t give her feelings a second thought. It was all about me. How I felt. How it would affect my future. I tried to persuade her to get rid of it, but she wouldn’t. She just cried and cried and said she would have to tell her parents. So I said I would marry her.’ He shook his head sadly, and the flicker of an ironic smile crossed his face. ‘She turned me down. No great fuss or anything. Just said, no. Didn’t want to marry me. She would have the child and stay with her parents if they would have her.’


  Sally heard the catch in his voice.

  ‘And still, all I could think about was me. My feelings, my confusion, my hurt. She would rather go through the pain of being a single mother than marry me. The mist was gone from her eyes and she saw me for what I was. A liar and a coward.’ He shook his head. ‘And then once I’d got over my injured pride I realized I was free. I didn’t have to marry her. There’d be no paternity suit. She didn’t even want my money, because that would have given me rights.’ He snorted his self-contempt. ‘It lost me my job, though. Word got around. My editor called me in and told me he didn’t want someone like me on his staff, and that I’d better start looking for another job. I was pretty sore at the time, but I did get another job. In England. I heard later she’d had a baby girl, and then I lost contact. It didn’t seem to matter then. I was just glad to have escaped.’

  He turned to see Sally’s dark unreadable eyes gazing into his. He couldn’t meet them, and turned away.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘well, then I had time to think about it. The years pass. You get a little older, a little wiser, and you become more aware of consequences. I find it difficult now to reconcile myself with who I was then. I ruined two lives. Stole a girl’s innocence, and robbed a child of her father’s love. I didn’t discover my own wounds until later. Perhaps not until now.’

  In the silence that followed, he felt no better for having told her. What had he expected? And suddenly he was embarrassed at having opened his soul to her. This was only making the moment of parting worse.

  He rolled away and climbed out of bed, crossing to the window, standing naked in the darkness with his back to her.

  ‘Neil . . .?’ Her voice trailed after him.

  ‘You’d better go,’ he said, his voice muffled against the glass, breath misting it.

  She rose and dressed slowly. He heard her moving about behind him. Then he heard the bedroom door opening and closing. From out on the landing came the sound of a door shutting, and footsteps echoed distantly on the stairs.

  When he could no longer hear them, he let his face rest against the cold glass and whispered, ‘Goodbye.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  He woke with a bad taste in his mouth. It had been a restless night and the sheets were wrapped around him like a shroud. He was cold, but didn’t get up immediately. He lay staring at the rectangle of blue sky he could see through the window.

  She was gone. All that remained was the lingering traces of her perfume.

  He got up and dressed himself slowly, with an empty feeling inside. He made coffee in the kitchen and sat drinking it in an armchair in the living room where the sun slanted in and warmed the air.

  Closing his eyes he pictured her at the airport. Or perhaps she hadn’t yet left her apartment and was still packing. He allowed the thought to flicker through his mind only briefly. It was over, a thing of the past, already a memory that he would lock away with all the others.

  The phone rang, a long single ring, then an interminable wait before it rang again. He rose reluctantly and crossed the room. ‘Bannerman.’ His voice caught on the phlegm that had gathered in his throat overnight and he coughed.

  ‘A heavy night, Neil?’ A pause. ‘Hector Lewis here.’

  ‘What have you got?’ Bannerman sat down on the edge of the settee and wiped the sleep from his eyes.

  ‘I thought I’d call you early in case I missed you. I tried yesterday evening, both at your office and at this number, but you were out gallivanting no doubt.’

  Bannerman repeated irritably, ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Now hold on just a minute, my old friend, not so fast.’ His smarminess oozed across the telephone lines all the way from Switzerland, and it occurred to Bannerman that Lewis would not have been trying this hard to reach him if he hadn’t hit on something worthwhile. ‘It’s going to cost you.’

  ‘You said that already.’

  ‘Yes, but that was two days ago, and I was talking about the search fees. Now it’s going to cost you to keep the information exclusive.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, Lewis?’ Bannerman fought to stay calm.

  ‘I mean I’ve just unwrapped a time bomb that’s going to blow up in a lot of faces in London and Brussels. It’s meaty stuff, Neil, and in column inches alone I could make thousands.’

  ‘I could be on a plane for Switzerland within the hour and break your fucking neck by lunchtime.’

  ‘Haha, yes, that’s good, Neil, but by lunchtime I could have sold the story halfway around the world, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?’

  Bannerman felt his grip tighten around the phone. He should never have trusted this to Lewis. But he’d had no choice. Now he was being screwed. ‘So?’

  ‘So I have a certain reputation for confidentiality to maintain, and since you came to me in good faith, I’m offering you first option – in good faith.’

  ‘You bastard!’

  ‘It’s how I make my money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Ten thousand.’

  Bannerman was stunned. ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind, Lewis! You think the Post’s going to pay ten grand for a company search?’

  ‘They will for this one.’

  Bannerman’s thoughts were racing. ‘I would need to know what I’m buying.’

  ‘But of course. I have no objection to giving you the broad outline over the phone. But you’ll require documentary evidence to back it up before you run the story. And before you get that, I’ll require the money.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘You agree to my terms?’

  ‘Not until I know what you’ve got.’

  Lewis sighed. ‘The company, Machines Internationale, is owned jointly by René Jansen, Michel Lapointe, and . . . ah, the late Mr Robert Gryffe.’

  Bannerman felt the skin tighten across his scalp.

  ‘Not directly, of course. That would have been too easy. No, Machines Internationale is ostensibly owned by another company which in turn is an offshoot of another company, and so on. All shell companies of course. A cobweb of deceit, if I may lapse into cliché, to disguise the identity of the man to whom the number one company is ultimately responsible.’

  At last it was the link between Gryffe, Jansen and Lapointe that Bannerman had been looking for. But not worth ten thousand. ‘What is its business?’

  Lewis waited and then replied with calculated melodrama, ‘Armaments, my friend. Guns and bombs and landmines, and God knows what else. Machines Internationale buys arms, mostly from the US, and sells to the Third World, some of the Arab states, and one or two of the South American republics. Not in itself a crime, of course. But when a minister at the British Foreign Office is involved, then it starts to get interesting, doesn’t it?’ Lewis chuckled to himself, and when there was no response from Bannerman, he added, ‘So I got my boys to dig a little deeper in the company records, and it would appear that Machines Internationale have also been selling their wares to a number of pirate companies which operate out of several small states in Africa and the Middle East – companies which, it seems, are supplying arms direct to South Africa, in open defiance of the UN embargo on the apartheid régime there. And perhaps even more interesting, to Rhodesia – during almost all of the time that sanctions were being imposed against the illegal Smith regime.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘My sentiments exactly, Neil. So much so, in fact, that I even did a quick trace on the origins of a couple of the pirate companies. Each of those I checked out is owned by a Liechtenstein-registered company, Corniche S.A. Corniche, unfortunately, is one of those naughty little nominee companies that can act for unnamed clients whose anonymity is protected by law. Of course, you’ll know about nominee companies. This one is owned by a very respectable Swiss lawyer and businessman, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever know who’s
actually behind it, or the companies it controls. Worth it though, eh? Ten grand? Cheap at the price. British government minister murdered in Brussels was selling arms to Rhodesia and South Africa. Neat headline wouldn’t you say, Neil?’

  Bannerman felt the muscles in his throat contracting, and the fingers of his free hand trembled slightly as he reached for the notepad by the phone. One glance showed the name of the company he had underlined in the notes he had taken after Platt’s phone call. Corniche S.A.

  ‘Hello, hello? You still there?’

  Bannerman was fighting to piece it all together. Corniche S.A., formerly a Belgian-registered company belonging to Lapointe, had uprooted and reregistered in Liechtenstein, and was now a new company listed to a Swiss lawyer. But wasn’t it just possible that Lapointe, who had used the original company to buy and sell other companies for Jansen, was still pulling the strings, still providing the cash? That this Swiss lawyer was just his front man? It occurred to Bannerman that he didn’t even need to prove that. A plain statement of the facts would make the connection by implication. Gryffe, Jansen and Lapointe had not only been selling arms to pirate companies who were in turn selling to the white-ruled African states, they also owned the pirate companies themselves. It wasn’t indirect selling, for Christ’s sake! They were doing it direct. The implications for the British government were incalculable. And for Jansen and Lapointe. International pressure would be bound to force the Belgian government to take action against the Jansen empire.

  ‘Bannerman, you haven’t died on me, have you?’

  No wonder Lewis was seeking his pound of flesh. ‘I’ll call you back,’ Bannerman said.

  ‘No, no, no. You just wait one minute. None of this is for free. I want a certified cheque within twenty-four hours. When that cheque is in the hands of my bank you will get your documentary evidence. And if the cheque hasn’t shown by nine o’clock Monday morning, at the latest, I’ll sell the story elsewhere. You understand?’ The tone had changed. This was a hard statement of terms.