Now MI5 had found out something, but that woman hadn’t said what they knew. If she was telling him that the Syrians knew what he’d done, then his life expectancy had diminished dramatically. She’d left him worried sick, but in the dark.
Since she’d left, he’d taken precautions. He’d double-locked the front and back doors, made sure the windows were shut tight and locked. He’d stayed in, hadn’t answered the phone, and had kept the curtains drawn. But he couldn’t live like this for ever and this morning he’d been forced to venture down the hill to Hampstead village. The cupboard was bare, and that was not a metaphor - there wasn’t even a packet of dried pasta left.
Not that he’d bought much in the way of groceries, for he had decided he would have to leave his house until the immediate danger had passed. Though how would he know when it was safe to return? he wondered anxiously, as he walked slowly back along the edge of the heath, dotted at this time of the morning with dog walkers, and East European nannies pushing babies in buggies.
Where should he go? It would probably be possible to secure another assignment, provided MI5 didn’t scupper him. What he needed was something that would take him abroad. The Sunday Times people had liked his Assad profile and had suggested further assignments - Merkel in Germany was high on their list. But it would be impossible to keep a low profile working on that, not when he’d need to be in Berlin making appointments to see the Chancellor, interviewing her friends and colleagues, digging into her background in East Germany. Anyone who wanted to find him could do so within days.
But was there a threat? The rational, experienced side of Marcham struggled to convince himself there wasn’t. After all, he had only just come from Syria, and there’d been no sign anyone knew anything about his covert activities. If they’d known, they could have killed him there. He could have been easily dealt with in Damascus -discovered dead in a hotel room, a fatality declared an accident by a compliant doctor, under orders from the country’s authorities.
He thought some more about where he should go, as he walked circuitously back to his house, ensuring that the people behind him on one street were not the same ones he noticed when he turned around casually on the next. There was always Ireland, where young Symonds, a church-going friend he’d made through Alex Ledingham ironically enough, had a cottage outside Cork he’d always said Marcham was welcome to use. If he went there for a month, things might calm down. Should he tell anyone where he was going? No, he’d just say he was away. He could always check emails at an internet cafe in Cork; he couldn’t be traced doing that - he hoped.
But there was one person he wasn’t going to tell about his departure, and he shuddered at the reaction of the man if he did. He called himself Aleppo, which Marcham knew as one of the most peaceful and beautiful cities in Syria. It seemed such an inept name for the man; there was something ruthlessly clinical about him, an air of controlled menace that didn’t seem entirely human.
On his own street he saw no one, but was careful nonetheless as he approached the house, stopping on the paved path once he’d gone through the gate in the hedge, looking and listening for signs that anyone was waiting outside. Nothing.
He carefully unlocked his front door, then with equal care double-locked the door behind him. He walked straight through to the kitchen and made sure the back door had not been disturbed. He unpacked his two bags of groceries, boiled the kettle and made himself a strong cup of tea, which he took into the sitting room. It was only as he sat down with a sigh that he saw the man in the wing chair by the unused fireplace. It was Aleppo.
‘God, you scared me!’ he exclaimed, leaping to his feet and spilling his tea on the coffee table.
‘You’ll recover,’ the man said. He wore a black leather jacket and a black pullover and black jeans. The effect was European rather than English; he might have been a lecturer at the Sorbonne, though equally, the dark hair and swarthy countenance could be Middle Eastern as easily as French.
‘How did you get in?’ asked Marcham, his heart beating frantically. He wanted to be angry at the intrusion, but he was too frightened to protest.
‘I’m paid to get in,’ said Aleppo. ‘Relax. Sit down.’
Marcham did as he was told, starting to feel a prisoner in his own house.
‘So have you had any other visitors lately?’
Marcham hesitated. He didn’t want to say anything about Jane Falconer’s visit, but he sensed it would be a great mistake to be caught lying and Aleppo always seemed to know more than he let on. ‘Actually, I have. A woman came from MI5. She wanted to talk to me about a friend of mine who died.’
‘Anything else?’
He hesitated for a split second. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘That was the strange thing. She wanted to know if I’d had any contact with Syrian intelligence.’
‘Syrian?’ Aleppo looked up sharply. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘Nothing,’ he said hastily. ‘Nothing that matters. I told her about the profile I wrote on Assad.’
‘And did you tell her what else you’d done in Syria?’ They both knew what he meant.
There was a chill in the room now, and Marcham realised his answer was going to be crucial. Crucial to what? He didn’t like to think. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said forcefully.
Aleppo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t want to know anything about your history there?’
‘I’m sure she did. But I diverted her. My friend Ledingham died in rather bizarre circumstances. You may have read about it in the paper. They called him “The Man in the Box”.’
He was glad to see that Aleppo’s eyes widened. Marcham continued, ‘What the papers didn’t say is that I was the one who found his body. I put him in the box.
‘So, when this woman started pressing me about Syria, I got upset. I think she thought I was breaking down. I told her it was over Ledingham. I said that we’d been close - lovers, in fact. I told her I’d been hiding that. As well as the fact I hid his body.’
‘She swallowed this?’
‘Absolutely. She didn’t ask me anything more about Syria.’ He looked intently at Aleppo. ‘I give you my word.’
To his immense relief, Aleppo nodded. He believes me, thought Marcham, feeling almost grateful. He sensed that if he’d given a different answer, something awful might have happened.
Aleppo said, ‘This woman’s been in the house before. Is there anything she might have seen she shouldn’t have?’
‘No. There’s nothing secret here at all.’
Aleppo stood up. ‘Let’s just make sure, shall we? Let’s do a quick tour.’
‘Of course.’ Marcham led the way down the short hall to the kitchen, feeling calmer now, his worries largely dispelled. He’d told Aleppo the truth, and the truth seemed to have been accepted.
Marcham walked into the bedroom and switched the central light on. Aleppo paused in the doorway, surveying the room. Then he pointed past Marcham, to the small painting of Jesus on the cross that hung on the far wall. ‘I like that. Where did you find it?’ he asked, with a voice full of curiosity.
‘Funnily enough, I found it in Damascus,’ Marcham began, moving closer to the painting. ‘There’s an interesting story associated with the shop where I first saw it,’ he added, preparing to tell Aleppo the tale - it should amuse even this dour, dark man. As he started on his story, he didn’t notice Aleppo quietly close the bedroom door.
THIRTY-NINE
The call came just as Liz arrived in her office. She was juggling a mug of coffee with the same hand that held a newspaper; her other gripped her handbag and she had her office pass in her mouth. She managed to pick up the phone on the fourth ring.
‘Ms Carlyle? It’s DI Cullen. It’s about Christopher Marcham, that friend of Alexander Ledingham, the man who was found in St Barnabas.’
‘St Barnabas? Oh, the Man in the Box,’ she said instinctively. Then she tensed a little: something must have happened if Cullen was calling her.
‘I’ve got so
me bad news. Christopher Marcham’s been found dead.’
What? She was shocked by his simple declaration. It hadn’t been forty-eight hours since she’d seen the man. ‘Where was this?’
‘In his house in Hampstead.’
‘How did he die? Was it a heart attack?’
‘No, no,’ said Cullen, hastening to put her right. ‘That’s the peculiar thing. He asphyxiated himself. Just like Ledingham did. Looks like he was involved in auto-eroticism too. He was tied up to the bed posts, and, um, he didn’t have any clothes on.’ The policeman coughed to cover his embarrassment. Liz sensed that DI Cullen thought dimly of such practices. She asked, ‘Are you sure it was an accident? It seems quite a coincidence.’
‘Well, I don’t think he was trying to kill himself, if that’s what you mean. There’re a lot of simpler ways to do that. But it’s not that unusual for people who go in for that sort of thing to get it wrong. It’s a dodgy business.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Liz, forcing herself to restrain her impatience. ‘I meant, are you sure that no one else was involved?’
‘As sure as we can be at present, though the scene of crime boys will be going in later this morning. They’ll find anything there is to find. But there were no signs of forced entry; the house was all locked up when the cleaner arrived - she’s the one who found him.’
‘I saw him the day before yesterday, as we agreed. He was perfectly OK when I left.’
Cullen coughed again. ‘Yes, I’ll need to take a statement. You may have been the last to see him alive. But we should be able to keep it quiet if it’s as open and shut as I think it is.’
‘When was he discovered?’
She heard him turning the pages in his notebook. ‘About four pm yesterday. We haven’t got the pathologist’s report yet, but the attending physician said he’d probably been dead less than twenty-four hours. It’s a good thing it was the day the cleaner came, or he might have been lying there quite a while. Apparently she’s new. Gave her quite a shock. She’s wondering what she’s got herself into.’
When Cullen had rung off, Liz sat at her desk, wondering why Chris Marcham was dead. Another freak accident? She didn’t believe it for a minute. The coincidence was too great and he’d told her he didn’t go in for the same practices as Ledingham.
Trust your bones. That’s what her father had always said about intuition. And Liz felt in her bones that this was no accident. She couldn’t prove it, she knew that, but that just meant that Marcham’s killer was not only ruthless, he was also clever. Which made him even more dangerous.
Perhaps it was her fault. She shouldn’t have insisted on doing that interview. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She’d been too oblique. She should have warned him instead of just asking him vaguely about Syria. Well, there was no point in worrying about that now. The only thing worth thinking about was whether his death had any connection with the Syrian plot. After all, that had been what initially stirred her interest in the man. If this was all part of it, what was going to happen next?
She remembered her first visit to the small Hampstead house, and an image came to her, of that mysterious gardener. Tall, lean, dark, with those giveaway shoes -slip-ons, last seen disappearing over the back wall of Marcham’s garden.
There was something troubling about the picture, almost a form of déjà vu - a sixth sense linking it to some other image stored in her head. She sat thinking fruitlessly, trying to place the face in another context. Had she seen him somewhere else? Could it have been in Essex, where she’d gone in pursuit of Sami Veshara’s illicit business? Or even Bowerbridge, when she’d first tentatively emerged from her sickbed, visiting the nearby village shops with her mother?
No, she couldn’t place it. And then suddenly she understood why. She hadn’t seen the man in another place; she’d seen him in a photograph. And the photograph was sitting in an envelope in the cupboard in the corner of her office. She twirled the combination lock to open the cupboard and took out the envelope, tipping the prints onto her desk impatiently.
There he was, sitting next to Andy Bokus, high in the stands of the Oval. Suddenly two different worlds collided, and the name Danny Kollek, which had come to represent Mossad for her, joined the image of the sinister man snooping around Marcham’s house.
So Kollek had known Marcham. Why? Had he been running him for Mossad? There seemed no other conceivable explanation. In which case, why wasn’t Marcham’s name on the list Bokus had supplied, of all the agents run by Kollek here in London? And what about Hannah?
There were too many questions she couldn’t answer. But what bothered her most was that she didn’t think the Americans - Andy Bokus, or Miles Brookhaven - could answer them either. She was sure Bokus hadn’t been holding out on MI5; he simply didn’t know. He thought he was running Danny Kollek, but it was starting to look the other way round.
FORTY
’And that’s the lot.’ Miles Brookhaven threw the file down onto Liz’s desk, and sighed wearily.
She was tired too. They’d spent all morning reviewing the reports of what Danny Kollek had passed on to Andy Bokus, and the experience had been unedifying. It was very low-grade stuff; little more than gossip. Even Markov, the Russian-Jewish oligarch now based in Lancashire near his newly acquired football team, had nothing to say about his fellow émigrés that MI5 didn’t know already.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Miles knowingly.
‘Probably.’ Liz pointed to the files. ‘There’s not a lot there.’
‘Actually, I was thinking how hungry I am.’ He laughed, adding, ‘How about you?’
‘Yes, I could use some lunch. There’s a good sandwich shop round the corner. We could sit on a bench and watch the river go by.’
‘Aren’t we near the Tate Gallery?’
‘It’s just down the road. Why?’ She’d noticed how Miles always seemed to be ready with irrelevant questions and tangential remarks.
‘I haven’t been there in a long time. Couldn’t we get a sandwich there?’
Twenty minutes later, Liz and Miles were staring at a large oil by Francis Bacon, of a grotesque satyr-like male figure whose face was set in a rictus of agony.
‘I don’t know about Bacon,’ said Miles at last. ‘I know he’s very gifted and so on, and his pictures go for millions. But I can’t help wondering what he’s done that Hieronymus Bosch didn’t do centuries before.’
Downstairs they gave the formal restaurant a miss and bought sandwiches from the cafe, finding a place to perch on the line of stools against the corridor wall.
Liz, casually dressed in a skirt and blouse, was amused by Miles’s smart blazer and cream linen trousers. Did his taste for formal clothes hark back to his time at Westminster school? All he needs is a boater, she thought, and he’d fit in well at Henley regatta.
‘Not long now till the conference,’ said Miles as he cast a cautious eye at his smoked salmon sandwich.
‘Two weeks.’
‘I’m not going to be here for it, I’m afraid.’
‘Really?’ she asked, startled.
‘I’ll be in the Middle East. It’s part of my job to stay up to date with things, and follow up any business I’ve come across here in London. I’ll be in Damascus. Anything I can do for you there?’
‘I’d be interested in what you could find out about Marcham’s time there.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I meant anything personal. Damask silk from the Old City, say.’
Liz gave an inward sigh. She liked Miles, but having tried to hustle information out of her on the Eye, was he now going to make romantic overtures? It was flattering, and she was not averse to his interest in her, but she wished he’d picked a better time.
‘Besides, I could use a break from Andy Bokus.’ He grimaced.
Liz looked at him, and he returned her gaze. ‘That bad?’ she said lightly, intrigued but not wanting to press. Miles had never struck her as the complaining type.
He shru
gged, then folded his paper napkin and put it on his plate. ‘One of the myths about America is that it’s a classless society. Bokus carries a hell of a chip on those big shoulders of his.’
‘Really? What’s he chippy about?’ She wasn’t going to pretend to understand the social intricacies of American society.
‘Half the time it seems to be me. It’s not that I’m grand. I don’t mean that. It’s more to do with education. Bokus likes to call me Ivy.’
‘Ivy?’ thought Liz. She was surprised. Miles had none of the macho swagger of his boss, but there wasn’t anything effeminate about him. Had she missed a trick?
She must have looked puzzled because Miles explained. ‘As in Ivy League. He likes to think I must be some rarefied snob because I went to Yale - he went to a state university.’
‘Isn’t that all a bit passé?’
‘Of course it is. Though I suppose Bokus can remember the days when half the staff went to Yale. A bit like your services and Oxbridge, I suppose.’
‘It changed here a long time ago,’ said Liz. And a good thing too, she thought to herself.
‘And Andy’s feeling especially touchy ever since Tyrus Oakes briefed me about Kollek.’
‘He must be rather embarrassed that we caught him out. Though it was pure chance we were watching Kollek that day.’
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