by James Becker
“Now we can go,” he said.
III
Bronson unlocked the front door of his house and stepped inside. He’d caught one of the fast trains out of Charing Cross, and had got back home quite a bit sooner than he’d expected. He walked through into the kitchen and switched on the kettle, then sat down at the table to study the translation of the inscription again. It still wasn’t making any sense.
He looked at his watch and decided to give Mark a call. He wanted to show him the translation, and suggest that they meet up for a meal. He knew his friend was in a fragile emotional state. He’d feel happier if Mark wasn’t left alone on his first evening back in Britain immediately after his wife’s funeral.
Bronson picked up the landline phone and dialed Mark’s cell phone, which was switched off, so he called the apartment. The phone was picked up after half a dozen rings.
“Yes?”
“Mark?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
Immediately, Bronson guessed something was wrong.
“Who is this?” the voice asked again.
“I’m a friend of Mark Hampton, and I’d like to speak to him.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir. There’s been an accident.”
The “sir” immediately suggested he was talking to a police officer.
“My name’s Chris Bronson, and I’m a D.S. in the Kent force. Just tell me what the hell’s happened, will you?”
“Did you say ‘Bronson,’ sir?”
“Yes.”
“Just a moment.”
There was a pause, then another man picked up the phone.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr. Hampton is dead, Detective Sergeant.”
“Dead? He can’t be. I only saw him a few hours ago.”
“I can’t discuss the circumstances over the telephone, but we are treating the death as suspicious. You said you were a friend of the deceased. Would you be prepared to come over to Ilford to assist us? There are several matters that we think you could help us to understand.”
Bronson was in shock, but he was still thinking clearly. It was far from normal procedure to ask an officer from another force to just pop over to the scene of a suspicious death.
“Why?” he asked.
“We’re trying to establish the last movements of the deceased, and we hope you can assist us. We know you’re acquainted with Mr. Hampton, because we found your Filofax here in his apartment, and the last few entries suggest you’ve just returned from Italy with him. I know it’s not the usual routine, but you really could be of great assistance to us.”
“Yes, of course I’ll come over. I’ve got a couple of things that I’ve got to do here, but I should be there within about ninety minutes, say two hours maximum.”
“Thank you, D.S. Bronson. That’s very much appreciated.”
The moment Bronson put down the phone, he dialed another number. It rang for a very long time before it was answered.
“What do you want, Chris? I thought I told you not to ring me.”
“Angela, don’t hang up. Please just listen. Please don’t ask questions, just listen.
Mark’s dead, and he’s probably been murdered.”
“Mark? Oh my God. How did—”
“Angela. Please listen and just do as I say. I know you’re angry and you don’t want to have anything to do with me. But your life is in danger and you have to get out of your apartment right now. I’ll explain why when I see you. Pack the minimum possible—enough for three or four days—but bring your passport and driver’s license with you. Wait for me in that cafe’ where we used to meet in Shepherd’s Bush. Don’t say the name—it’s possible this line has been bugged.”
“Yes, but—”
“Please, I’ll explain when I see you. Please just trust me and do what I ask. OK? Oh, and keep your cell phone switched on.”
“I . . . I still can’t believe it. Poor Mark. But who do you think killed him?”
“I’ve got a good idea, but the police have a completely different suspect in mind.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
14
I
Though he was used to the traffic in Rome, Mandino was still surprised at the sheer number of cars on London’s streets. And at the treacle-slow pace at which the traffic moved, from red light to road works to another red light.
The distance between the apartment in Ilford and Angela Lewis’s apartment in Ealing was only about fifteen miles, about a quarter-hour drive on an open road. But it had taken them more than an hour so far. Rogan was inching his way down the Clerkenwell Road, silently cursing the traffic, and the navigation system for bringing them this way.
“We’re coming up to Gray’s Inn Road,” Mandino said, consulting a large-format London A-Z he’d bought at a newsagent’s fifteen minutes earlier, when they had been stationary for even longer than usual. “When we reach the junction, ignore what that piece of electronic junk tells you and turn right, if you’re allowed to.”
“Right?”
“Yes. That’ll take us up to King’s Cross, and if we turn left there we’ll be able to get on the Euston Road, and that will take us straight to the motorway. That’s a longer way around, but it has just got to be faster than staying in this.” Mandino gestured at the nearly motionless traffic all around them.
A mere ten minutes later, Rogan was pushing the Ford sedan up to fifty on the A40.
“If there are no more holdups,” Mandino said, calculating distances on the map, “we should reach the Lewis woman’s building in under twenty minutes.”
In her north Ealing apartment, Angela replaced the telephone and stood in the living room for a few seconds, irresolute. Chris’s phone call had scared her, and for a moment she wondered if she should ignore what he’d asked her to do, bolt the doors and simply stay inside the apartment.
Chris was right—she was still angry with him, because in her opinion the breakup of their marriage had been his fault, due entirely to the fact that he’d always been in love with his best friend’s wife. He’d never talked about his feelings for Jackie—but then again, Chris had never been very good at talking about any of his feelings. But you only had to watch his reaction when Jackie appeared—his whole face would light up. The sad reality was that in her and Chris’s marriage there had always been three people.
And Mark was dead! This shocking news, coming so soon after Jackie’s fatal accident in Italy, was almost unbelievable. In just a few days, two people she’d known for years were dead.
Angela felt the tears coming, then shook her head angrily. She wasn’t going to turn into a weeping wreck, and she knew what she had to do. Chris had many faults that she could—and indeed had—expound in great detail during their brief marriage, but he’d never been given to flights of fancy. If he said her life was in danger, she was perfectly prepared to believe him.
She walked briskly into the bedroom, pulled put her favorite bag from under the bed—it was a Gucci knockoff she’d picked up in a Paris street market years earlier—and quickly stuffed clothes and makeup inside. She took a smaller bag and grabbed a selection of her favorite shoes, checked her cell phone was in her handbag, unplugged the charger from its usual socket by the bed and tucked that in the overnight bag as well, then chose a coat from her wardrobe.
Angela made a final check that she’d got everything, then picked up her bags, locked her door and took the two flights of stairs down to street level.
She’d only walked about a hundred yards down Castlebar Road when she spotted a vacant black cab in the northbound traffic. She waved her hand and whistled. The cabbie made a sharp U-turn and stopped the vehicle neatly beside her.
“Where to, love?” he asked.
“Shepherd’s Bush. Just around the corner from the Bush Theatre, please.”
As the cab gathered speed down Castlebar Road toward the Uxbridge Road, a Ford sedan made the turn into Argyle Road from Western Avenue, and stop
ped outside Angela Lewis’s apartment building.
II
Bronson put down the phone, ran upstairs, pulled an overnight bag from his wardrobe, grabbed clean clothes from his wardrobe and chest of drawers and stuffed them into it. He made sure he left one particular item on the bedside table, then went back downstairs.
His computer bag was in the living room, and he picked that up, checked that the memory stick was still in his jacket pocket, seized Jeremy Goldman’s translation of the inscription from the kitchen table and shoved that into his pocket as well.
Finally, he opened a locked drawer in his desk in the living room and removed all the cash, plus the Browning pistol he’d acquired in Italy. He slipped the weapon into his computer bag, just in case.
And all the time he was doing this he was checking outside the windows of his house, watching for either Mark’s killers or the police to turn up. The Met now knew he was a serving officer with the Kent force, and it would take only a few phone calls to find his address. Whether or not his agreement to drive over to the apartment in Ilford had actually served to allay their suspicions he had no idea, but he wasn’t prepared to take any chances.
Less than four minutes after he’d called Angela, he pulled his front door closed behind him and ran across the pavement to his Mini. He put his bags in the trunk and drove away, heading north toward London.
About two hundred yards from his house, he heard sirens approaching from ahead of him, and took the next available left turn. He drove down the road, made another left at the end, and then left again, so that his car was pointing back toward the main road. As he watched, two police cars sped through the junction in front of him. He guessed that he’d got out of the house by the skin of his teeth.
An hour later, Bronson parked the car in a street just off Shepherd’s Bush Road and walked the short distance to the café. Angela was sitting alone at a table in the back, well away from the windows.
As Bronson threaded his way through the tables toward his ex-wife, he felt a rush of relief that she was safe, mingled with apprehension as to how she might be feeling.
And, as always when he looked at her, he was struck anew by her appearance.
Angela wasn’t a beauty in the classical sense, but her blond hair, hazel eyes and lips with more than a hint of Michelle Pfeiffer about them gave her a look that was undeniably striking.
As she pushed her hair back from her face and stood up to greet him, she drew appreciative glances from the handful of men in the cafe’.
“What the hell is going on?” Angela demanded. “Is Mark really dead?”
“Yes.” Bronson felt a stab of grief, and swallowed it down quickly. He had to stay in control—for both their sakes.
He ordered coffee, and another pot of tea for Angela. He knew he should eat something, but the thought of food made him nauseous.
“I rang Mark’s apartment,” he said, “and a man answered the phone. He didn’t identify himself, but he sounded like a police officer.”
“What does a policeman sound like?” Angela asked. “Still, I suppose you would know.”
Bronson shrugged. “It’s the way we’re told to use ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ when we’re talking to members of the public. Almost nobody else does that these days, not even waiters. Anyway, when I gave him my name, he told me that Mark was dead, and they were treating the death as suspicious. Then another man—definitely a copper, and probably a D.I.—asked if I could drive over to Ilford and help explain some things.”
He put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe he’s dead—I was with him earlier today. I should never have left him alone.”
Angela cautiously reached for his hand across the table. “So why didn’t you just drive over to Ilford, as the policeman asked?”
“Because everything changed when they found out my name. The second man—the D.I.—told me they knew I was a friend of Mark, because they’d found my Filofax in the apartment, and that there were notes about the trip to Italy in it.”
“But why did you leave your organizer with Mark?”
“I didn’t, that’s the point. The last time I saw my Filofax was in the guest bedroom of Mark’s house in Italy. The only way it could have been found in his apartment was if the killers had dropped it there in a deliberate attempt to frame me for his murder.”
He went on to explain about the “burglaries” at Mark’s house following the uncovering of the first inscription, and the possibility that Jackie had been killed during the initial break-in.
“Oh, God. Poor Jackie. And now Mark—this is a nightmare. But why are you and I in danger?”
“Because we’ve seen the inscriptions on the stones, even if neither of us has a clue why they’re important. The fact that Mark was killed in his apartment—or at least, that’s where the body was found—means the killers found out where he lived. And if they found his address, they could just as easily find mine and, more important, yours. That’s why I wanted you to get out of your apartment. They’re going to come after us, Angela. They’ve killed our friends and we’re next.”
“But you still haven’t explained why.” Angela banged the table in frustration, spilling some of her tea. “Why are these inscriptions so important? Why are these people killing anyone who’s seen them?”
Bronson sighed. “I don’t know.”
Angela frowned, and Bronson could tell that she was thinking it through. She had a fierce intellect—it was one of the things that had attracted him to her in the first place. “Let’s just look at the facts here, Chris. I talked to Jeremy about these stones and he told me that one inscription dates from the first century and contains exactly three words written in Latin. The second is fifteen hundred years later, written in Occitan, and appears to be a kind of poem. What possible link can there be between them, apart from the fact that they were discovered in the same house?”
“I don’t know,” Bronson repeated. “But the two people who owned the house where the stones were hidden are now dead, and the Italian gang that I believe is responsible has made a pretty professional attempt to frame me for Mark’s death.
We have to stop them. They can’t get away with this.”
Angela shivered slightly, and took a mouthful of her tea. “So, what’s your plan now?
You have got a plan, haven’t you?”
“Well, we’ve got to do two things. We have to get ourselves out of London without leaving a paper trail, and then we have to sit down and decode those two inscriptions.”
“Got anywhere in mind?”
“Yes. We need somewhere not too far from London, but with easy access to a reference library and where a couple of researchers like us won’t stand out.
Somewhere like Cambridge, maybe?”
“Bicycle city? Yes, OK. That sounds as good as anywhere. When do we leave?”
“As soon as you’ve finished your tea.”
A couple of minutes later they stood up to leave. Bronson glanced at Angela’s luggage.
“Two bags?” he asked.
“Shoes,” Angela replied shortly.
Bronson paid the bill and they walked out of the cafe’. He turned right, not left toward where he’d parked the Mini Cooper, but to an ATM machine outside a bank off the Uxbridge Road.
“I thought guys on the run didn’t use plastic?” Angela said, as Bronson took out his wallet.
“You’ve been watching too many American films. But you’re right. That’s why I’m using this machine, not one up in Cambridge.”
Bronson withdrew two hundred pounds. He wasn’t bothered that the transaction would pinpoint his location, because they wouldn’t be staying in the area for more than a few minutes.
He stuffed the cash in his pocket and led the way to his Mini. He repeated the process, each time drawing a few hundred pounds, at four further ATMs about a mile apart, but always staying in the Shepherd’s Bush-White City area. He reached his credit limit at the last one.
“Right,” he said, as he got ba
ck into the driving seat of the Cooper after the final withdrawal. “Hopefully that will convince the Met that I’ve gone to ground somewhere in this area. From now on, we’re only going to use cash.”
15
I
Angela stepped out of the cramped shower cubicle, wrapped a towel around her and walked across to the sink. As she dried her hair, she stared at herself critically in the small mirror and again wondered just what the hell she was doing.
In the last twenty-four hours her world had been turned completely upside-down.
Before, her life had been ordered and predictable. Now, one of her best friends had been killed and her ex-husband was apparently the prime suspect, and she was on the run with him, trying to avoid both the police and a gang of Italian killers.
But, strangely, she was beginning to enjoy herself. Despite the failure of their marriage, she still liked Chris, and enjoyed being in his company. And, though she would never admit it to anyone else, she found his dark good looks just as attractive now as when she’d first met him. It still gave her a thrill inside when he walked into a room, instantly commanding attention.
Perhaps, she reflected as she dressed, that was part of the problem. Chris was attractive, and perhaps that had clouded her judgment when he’d proposed. Maybe if she’d looked at him more carefully she’d have realized that his real affection was directed elsewhere, at the unattainable Jackie. It would have saved her a lot of heartache if she’d deduced that at the time.
She jumped slightly at the knock on the door.
“Good morning,” Chris said. “Have you had breakfast yet? Because we need to get to work.”
“I’ll grab something later,” Angela replied. “I’ll go and make the calls, and take a look around. You stay here until I get back.”
Outside the hotel, she walked briskly down the street until she found a working public telephone, fed a phone card into the slot and dialed the number of her immediate superior at the British Museum.
“It’s Angela,” she croaked. “I’m afraid I’m going down with something, Roger. Flu or something. I’m going to have to take a couple of days off.”