‘Good morning, Dr Hammond.’
‘Ingrid?’
‘I got your message.’
‘What, er … took you so long?’ He rubbed his eyes and squinted at his alarm clock, which he had not bothered to set, thinking he would wake early enough without it. To his surprise, it was nearly nine o’clock.
‘I thought we ought to meet to discuss the situation, doctor. So, I had to … make travel arrangements.’
‘Meet? What do you mean?’
‘I am here. In Lugano.’
‘But I never—’
‘Be on the nine forty-five funicular to Monte Brè. We’ll talk there.’ And with that she rang off.
*
He had not told Ingrid where he was. And by her own admission she had never known where Piravani had banked her father’s money. So, how had she discovered he was in Lugano? The question swirled confusingly in his mind as he grabbed the hotel phone and dialled Vidor’s room number. A second later, he heard it ringing through the wall between them. But Vidor did not pick up.
Hammond threw on some clothes and rushed into the corridor. He hammered on Vidor’s door and shouted his name. There was no response. Then he tried Furgler’s, with the same result.
By now, he had attracted the frowning attention of a strait-laced businessman making his way to the lift, whose frowns must have deepened when Hammond overtook him and hurried down the stairs. It was only two flights to reception, but he carried on down to the basement restaurant, where breakfast was served. There was no sign there of them, so he doubled back to reception.
‘My friends, er … Mr Vidor and Mr Furgler,’ he panted to the man on duty. ‘Have you, er … seen them?’
‘They went out, I think.’ He squinted at the key-rack. ‘Si. Yes. A little while ago.’
‘Together?’
‘Yes. Together.’
‘Did they say when they would be back?’
‘Ah … no.’
‘Did they leave a message for me?’
Another squint at the key-rack. ‘No. No message.’
There was nothing else for it, then. He would have to go. And he would have to go alone. ‘How do I get to the Monte Brè funicular?’
‘It runs from Via Pico, at the eastern end of town. About a ten-minute ride by taxi. You want me to call one?’
‘Yes.’ Hammond nodded decisively. ‘Right away.’
He made it in the end with time to spare. The morning was cold but clear and the two or three other passengers waiting aboard the funicular were dressed for hiking. Ingrid Hurtado-Gazi was not among them. Somehow this did not surprise Hammond. He expected her to arrive at the last moment.
But she did not. At 9.45 precisely, the train clanked into motion. Hammond watched the lakeside buildings slowly recede, frustration and bafflement competing for mastery of his thoughts. What was Ingrid playing at?
An answer began to emerge at the first stop, when the passengers all disembarked and crossed the road to join another more steeply pitched funicular for the continuation of their journey to Monte Brè, whose wooded summit loomed above them.
The schedule allowed an excessive amount of time for the transit to be completed. Hammond sat alone in one of the compartments of the second train as the minutes ticked slowly by. They were due to proceed at 10.05. At 10.02 a dark blue BMW convertible pulled up outside the station. And Ingrid Hurtado-Gazi got out.
She was dressed in shades of black that varied from inky to night, an extravagantly flared, wide-collared fur coat and film-star dark glasses ensuring that no one could mistake her for a hiker. She bought a ticket and walked quickly up the stepped platform just as the beeped warning of the train’s imminent departure began to sound. The door closed behind her as she slipped into Hammond’s compartment and the train jerked into motion. She sat down opposite him.
Immediately, he caught a gust of her perfume. Only then did he remember its overripe, gardenia scent. Her leather trousers creaked as she crossed her legs and smiled at him with no more than a hint of triumph. ‘Good morning, Dr Hammond,’ she said, in the sweetest of tones.
‘How did you find me?’ he demanded at once.
‘The Banca Borzaghini, Lugano, was the source of the transferred funds.’
‘But you couldn’t know I’d still be here today.’
‘You were not likely to leave until you heard from me.’
That was true, but as an explanation it seemed to Hammond not quite good enough. And it begged an obvious question. ‘Why did you want to meet me, anyway?’
‘To express my gratitude, doctor. You have done what I asked. Late, it is true. But late is better than never.’
‘No thanks are necessary, Ingrid. I simply … did what I had to do.’
‘But only a few days ago you made it very clear you weren’t willing to do it.’
‘I changed my mind. I … faced up to the reality of the situation.’
‘How very sensible of you. I must—’ She broke off as her phone began ringing, muffled by her coat. ‘Excuse me. I’m expecting an important call.’ She took the phone out and answered it. ‘Diga? … Si, soy yo … Si, entiendo … Gracias … Adiós.’ Important or not, the call was certainly brief. Her smile broadened as she tucked the phone back into her coat pocket. ‘It is a good day, Dr Hammond.’
What was she talking about, he wondered – the weather? ‘You got what you wanted, Ingrid. OK? If you think I need reassurance that your father won’t mention me at his trial, forget it. I’m sure he’ll stick to our deal. It wouldn’t be in his interests – your interests – not to.’
‘His trial? You are not worried about that, doctor. I feel sure. Neither am I.’
‘Shouldn’t you be? He’s facing a life term.’
Bizarrely, Ingrid laughed. She craned her neck to admire the view, slowly expanding as the train climbed to take in the whole of Lugano, spread out greyly around the misty blue curve of the lake below them. Sunlight flashed on her jewelled necklace. Her eyes danced, as if she was suffused with joy. ‘Switzerland is a wonderful country, don’t you think? So clean. So efficient. So … purposeful.’
The air was cooling rapidly as they ascended. But something else was sending a chill through Hammond’s blood. He knew the game he was playing. But Ingrid, it seemed, was playing one all of her own. ‘I think I’ll get off at the next stop and wait there for a train down,’ he said. ‘We have nothing more to—’
‘You’re going to the top, doctor,’ she interrupted, turning her gaze on to him. ‘We both are.’
‘Now I’ve paid you the money, Ingrid, you don’t get to tell me what to do any more.’
At that moment, the train pulled up at a small platform. The down train coasted in on a passing loop beside them. If he hurried, he could probably catch it before it left. But as he made to rise, Ingrid grasped his forearm and said, ‘My father is free, doctor. That call was confirmation. The plan worked perfectly. He has escaped.’
‘What?’ He could not believe what she had said. And yet he did not doubt the accuracy of her words. Suddenly, the world shifted around him.
‘He is free.’
‘That’s … absurd. He can’t …’ The train started moving again. Doubts and questions suddenly locked together in his mind. The money. The escape plan. The trap he had helped to bait. But who had it been baited for?
‘A prison transport van travelling from Scheveningen to ICTY was hijacked one hour ago, doctor. The guards were disabled with CS gas and their six prisoners were released. Five of them will be recaptured later, since they have no means of leaving the area. The search for them will occupy a great deal of police time and manpower, however. That will be to my father’s advantage. I have hired the best people – the very best – to get him out of The Hague. A new life – a new identity – is waiting for him a long way from there. This time he will not be found. This time he will have the peace and security he deserves.’
‘But …’
‘The authorities knew nothing of th
e plot, doctor. You’re not part of an operation designed to lure the people organizing the escape into the open. You were part of the escape plan itself. Thanks to Piravani authorizing you to draw on the Borzaghini account, I have been able to pay those people what they demanded. It was a lot – many millions of francs. But it was worth it. I love my father. I cannot let him die in prison. And now … he will not.’
Words failed Hammond. He stared at Ingrid and saw his gullibility revealed to him in her mocking smile. Vidor had been working for Gazi all along. And so, in effect, had he.
‘There is more I have to tell you, doctor. Listen carefully. It is important you understand. I am grateful to you. So is my father. We will trouble you no more. Leave us alone and we will leave you alone. But, naturally, we require some guarantee that you will not supply the authorities with information about how the escape was funded or which UN employees were involved in the plot. That would be … inconvenient. So, you should be aware that the recordings Vidor gave you do not contain any reference to your late wife. Nor do the originals. They have been suitably edited. Without that it will be hard for you to disprove any allegations your brother-in-law makes against you. Worse, if your role in the transfer of my father’s money out of Switzerland becomes known, it will seem to substantiate those allegations. As will the part you played in engineering the arrest of Branko Todorović, who betrayed my father’s trust and deserves to rot in prison. It will look as if you helped my father because the murder of your wife left you in his debt. No one will believe you were tricked into doing it, because no one will believe you could have been so stupid.’
Still Hammond was unable to speak. What was there for him to say, after all, when stupid was exactly what he had been?
‘You see, doctor? Your best chance of leading a peaceful and comfortable life is to say nothing to anyone about your dealings with us. Then there will be no case for you to answer. Please give the authorities as much to use against Todorović as you like, though. Tell them you met Zineta when you went to The Hague to watch my father’s trial and she persuaded you to help her obtain the tapes in order to punish Todorović for taking her son away from her. She cannot contradict you, can she? And Piravani—’
It was Ingrid’s use of Zineta’s name – her casual contempt for the woman who had died in Hammond’s arms – that finally broke him. He lunged across the compartment, intent in that moment on closing his hands round her throat and tightening them until she was choking for breath and begging for mercy. What he would do then he could not have said. Silencing her was as far as his thoughts would carry him.
And even that was too far. Ingrid was ready for him. He never actually saw her take the spray out of her pocket. Perhaps it had been nestling in her palm all along. A spurt of Mace hit his eyes like a flame. He cried out and bowed his head, then fell back against the bench behind him.
‘We’re nearly at the top,’ said Ingrid, her voice close to his ear, as if she was determined he should hear her through the pain that blinded him. ‘I’ll be leaving you there. You should find some water if you can, to rinse your eyes. The effects last about half an hour. So, we won’t be seeing each other again.’
The train slowed as it approached the summit station. Hammond tried to open his eyes, but they filled with tears and the pain was too much to bear. He closed them again and covered them with his hands. He could neither speak nor think, let alone see.
‘Goodbye, doctor,’ said Ingrid. ‘And thank you again. For everything.’
THIRTY-TWO
Hammond only reached the toilet at the summit station thanks to the reluctant assistance of some other passengers he blundered into as he staggered off the train. He filled a basin with water and bathed his eyes until he could at least bear to open them again. Even then, the visible world was a teary blur, the sunlight outside the station painfully dazzling.
As he soon realized, however, the pain was a merciful distraction from the horror he felt at how he had been manipulated and to what end. Gazi was free. And he had helped to free him. Ingrid had got from him exactly what she had wanted.
She was long gone, of course, whisked away by car, he assumed. He could see a road winding down the hillside just below the station. Vidor and Furgler had probably been waiting for her. Certainly he did not doubt that they had booked out of the Principessa by now, leaving no trail for him to follow. They had finished with him. As Ingrid had said: ‘We will trouble you no more.’
The next train down to Lugano was due to leave in ten minutes. Quite why Hammond did not wait at the station to catch it he could not have explained, even to himself. He walked away along the path through the sparse woodland covering Monte Brè, with no direction or destination in mind. Snow-capped mountains climbed away ahead of him, the wilderness they enveloped offering a kind of refuge, chill and glaring as it was, from the madness and rottenness of humanity.
But such a refuge was illusory, as the ringing of his phone reminded him. His first thought was not to answer, but when he saw who was calling he knew he had to.
‘Hello, Svetozar.’
‘Do you know if it’s true, Edward?’ Miljanović’s words came in a frantic jumble. ‘We hear Gazi has escaped. Armed men stopped the van taking him to the court in The Hague this morning. There was a shoot-out. Two guards were killed.’ Ingrid had said nothing about guards being killed, of course. They were details she had not concerned herself with. ‘Several prisoners got away, including Gazi. A few have been recaptured. But not Gazi. Are these reports accurate, Edward?’
Hammond could not speak, could not frame a reply. It all felt so distant from him. And yet he knew it was an event he was only too close to, unalterable and undeniable, a black sun squatting in the sky above his head.
‘Edward?’
‘I’m sure the reports are accurate, Svetozar.’
‘But … this is terrible.’
‘Yes. Terrible is what it is.’
‘You don’t sound very surprised. Did you … know this was going to happen?’
‘I should have done.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean it’s my fault, Svetozar.’
‘Your fault?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll explain it to you one day. One day soon. As soon as I can. As soon as …’
‘As soon as what?’
‘I’m sorry, Svetozar. I can’t speak any more.’ Hammond cut the call, switched the phone off and put it back in his pocket. He took a deep breath of the chill air and felt his slowly healing rib twinge. He looked up into the cloudless dome of blue above him. And tears filled his eyes.
For the next few hours Hammond followed the wooded track that led up into the hills above Brè village. The climb was slow and seemingly endless, but he was barely aware of his surroundings, locked as he was in a sterile debate with himself. What was he to do, when so clearly he could do nothing? Gazi was free and he had aided and abetted his escape. Gazi had needed his help no less desperately than when his liver was failing. And he had helped him, unwittingly and unwillingly this time it was true, but no less crucially.
He came to a shelf of land, high above Lake Lugano, where the trees thinned and revealed the cold, shimmering world about him. He sat on a bank and stared down at the white line of a boat’s wake, at the dark specks of lorries moving on the lakeside highway, at a gleam of gold that was a weathervane on a village church. A few yards to his left, the ground fell away sheerly in a cascade of cliff and scree. Self-destruction was close at hand, if he wanted it. He gazed into the blue void and was tempted, for the first time in his life, by the ease and immediacy of such an act: a solution of sorts, a resolution at all events.
Gaze was all, in the end, that he did. At some point, he started back down the track, reaching Brè, exhausted by hunger and despair, as the late afternoon began to suck the warmth out of the sun. He sat in the central square, waiting for a bus into Lugano, tasting the chill clarity of the air and wishing
he could somehow dissolve into it. Shame was what he felt most keenly: shame that he had done so much harm and so little good. All his arrogance was gone now, gone where his reputation, he was sure, would soon follow. This was the end for him. Or else it was the beginning of a new Edward Hammond. There were no other choices.
*
The bus came. Villagers returning from Lugano clambered down and ambled off to their homes. There were few takers for the journey back. But Hammond was one of them. So was a young woman who, disconcertingly, looked quite like Alice, uncannily so from behind. Hammond watched her texting happily through the journey down into the city and thought of how he would set about explaining to his daughter everything that had happened, not just in the past two weeks, but at the time of her mother’s death thirteen years before. The dread of her reaction was a knot in his stomach. And the worst part of his dread was the fear that he would fail to tell her the whole truth. It was the choice Ingrid had left him with. It was how, finally, she had rewarded him for his efforts on her father’s behalf.
The receptionist at the Principessa considerately refrained from commenting on Hammond’s dishevelled appearance. She informed him that his friends – Signores Furgler and Vidor – had booked out earlier in the day. ‘They said you planned to leave tomorrow, sir. Is that correct?’ He answered with the vaguest of affirmatives, having, of course, no real plans at all. He went up to his room and tuned the television to CNN. He did not have to wait long for a report on the sensational events that morning in The Hague.
A reporter was in place near the scene of Gazi’s daring escape. Behind her, on the other side of a road, was a wooded park, of the kind Hammond recalled travelling through on the tram with Zineta after his visit to ICTY – clumps of trees between curving footpaths and cycleways. But there were no walkers or cyclists in sight this afternoon. A line of police tape had been strung round the visible portion of the park and armed officers were in place to see it was not breached. The line enclosed half the road as well. Various police vehicles were parked inside it, with blue-clad figures scurrying to and fro between them.
Blood Count Page 27