Death of a Raven (19 page)

For the present Terry was to remain in Port Charles, and until everything was resolved would continue to escort Drew McAlister and Paul Rogers to work. Nasonworth had lent DARE a secretary to replace Margaret Howard until someone could be flown out from England. The last piece of news that Terry had given Patrick which was unlikely to be of interest to Daws was that Chris Fraser’s father, an old man of nearly eighty who had been the founder of the firm, had temporarily taken control.

It was twenty minutes before Patrick appeared. Dazed, unseeing, he came into the corridor and went to the next window to the one where I was standing. Strangely, he copied what I had done, rested his brow on the glass while supporting himself with arms high and wide in the window embrasure. Below, a troop of the Blues clattered past.

“I need a drink,” he announced from his crucified position. Then he made one of his rare frightening movements, an explosion of energy that took him several yards further away from me down the corridor.

“You’re in uniform,” I reminded his rigid shoulder blades.

He turned unexpectedly, for I was sure he had neither heard nor seen me. When he’s driven to it, said an inner warning voice, he’s capable of the unspeakable.

“There’s a Mess,” he observed after a few heart-stopping moments, somehow restored to rationality by my trite remark.

“Where you can have a drink but not get drunk,” I pointed out, deliberately utilising my carrying, diva, voice. “Did Six sell us down the river after all?”

It worked. I might as well have thrown my skirts over my head and started to sing
Roll
out
the
Barrel
. Appalled, he glanced left and right to see if anyone had heard, seized my hand and towed me to the nearest lift.

“What has Daws
done
?” I asked when he had rammed a rigid index finger on to several buttons.

He took a deep breath through flared nostrils and let it out again slowly. “I might be court martialled. And that’s not all. He’s going to split us up. You’re to work with Terry.”

“Not a chance.”

“Say that within these walls and we’re finished.”

“So we’re finished. We fall back on Plan B.”

“It’s not as easy as that.”

Neither of us spoke again until we were outside in chilly British sunshine.

“I sometimes think …” Patrick said when we were in a café not a bar, a tiny back street haven I had found when once in London to see my publisher.

“What?”

“That you agonize over your stories, living really deeply with your characters, but when something ghastly happens to us simply trot out a statement like you did just now — ‘We fall back on Plan B.’”

“Patrick, that’s simply not true,” I protested. “I was trying to say that I didn’t mind. That if you’re … well … disgraced, it won’t make any difference to how I feel about you.”

The plastic spoon he had been bending in one hand suddenly snapped. “You think Fraser pulled the wool over my eyes too, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You
do
bloody know,” he said in a savage whisper.

“Someone at Ravenscliff, or someone who knew Fraser well and how he dropped the ringpulls back into empty beer cans …” I glanced up at him. “That someone is the person who killed Lanny or arranged to have him killed. If it wasn’t that man who came after us in the forest — the one who was hired, I mean — then who? Either Fraser did it or he was framed. Nothing’s clear in my mind. The man we killed looked like a thug. Not the sort of person Margaret Howard would associate with. But be fair — you yourself were quite sure at one point that Fraser had cut Lanny’s throat.”

“I said that the night I was on a high from Hurley’s bloody truth drug.”

“That was the same night you nailed down Fraser for the truth,” I said, finding myself thumping the table at every word. “You were stoned on the stuff — that and me having just told you I was pregnant. I said that we ought to have included being taken away for questioning in the report.”

“It was an irrelevance.”

I bit back what I was about to say, that it would have been an excuse. No, not an excuse, the Army wouldn’t countenance excuses. But it might have been a mitigating circumstance, bearing in mind the notes on Patrick’s file forbidding the administration of drugs to him during training.

“It isn’t a disgrace,” I said laying a hand over one of his. “It isn’t even carelessness or misjudgement — you’d been nobbled.”

But I realized then, looking into his eyes, that he didn’t want people to be kind or find reasons. He wanted to be believed.

Patrick said, “That kind of high doesn’t impair judgement — it enhances it. That night I felt I could count the stars, see the atoms in the wallpaper. It was as if I had Fraser under a microscope. If I’m wrong it means I’m somehow failing — not that I’d been nobbled. It means that if I get chucked out or severely reprimanded and sent out to the Rhine to organise military band concerts, I shall never feel that I know where I stand again with any mortal being on this planet. Ingrid, does that make sense?”

I nodded slowly. “And Plan B?”

“It can’t be a last resort, can it? I’ve got to have something to offer, not go cap in hand …”

“Your father might say that was spiritual pride.”

“Then I’m proud,” he replied unhesitatingly, and changed the subject. “When is this child of ours due to hatch?”

“Just before Christmas. Patrick, you must accept that there’s a risk — I am rather old.”

“Old!”

“Positively ancient to have a first baby.”

“But you’re as fit as me — come to that, fitter.”

“The risk might be to the baby. There’s more chance of its being abnormal when you’re older.”

“Down’s, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Better than no child at all.”

“D’you really mean that?”

“I always mean what I say, don’t I?”

We returned to Patrick’s pied a terre just off Gower Street. I made us more coffee, just for something to do really, found that he had fallen asleep on the sofa, drank it myself and curled up on the bed. When I woke it was nearly dark and a large orange street light just outside the window was shining into my face.

The sofa was still occupied. By a man and a bottle of whisky. No glass. In the lurid orange light I took it away from him, closed the curtains, switched on a couple of table lamps and then went into the bathroom where I had a wash and brushed my hair. When I returned to the living cum bedroom he had re-acquired the bottle and was tilting it to his lips.

“Patrick!”

He grinned and then I noticed that the bottle was full, the seal unbroken.

“Virgo intacta,” he said sadly. “I was promised a hideous demise if I touched a drop whilst on these damn pills.”

“So you were contemplating suicide?” I enquired lightly, not at all sure of his frame of mind.

“No, I was going to stop taking the pills first.”

I threw a cushion at him, on my way to raid the kitchen for food. Expecting to find baked beans, frozen sausages and beer I hummed casually to cover the surprise of discovering game soup and smoked oysters in tins, scampi, strawberries, cream and wholemeal rolls in the freezer, butter and a bottle of champagne in the fridge.

“Found the emergency rations?” he called through the door.

“Pity about the champagne,” I said, replacing it in the fridge.

“Pity be blowed. I’m only forbidden spirits.”

I took the bottle through to him with two glasses. I love watching Patrick open champagne. “What are we celebrating?”

The cork rocketed into the ceiling. “What would you like to celebrate?” His expression was unreadable.

“How about my believing that Rachel exists?”

“You don’t have to,” he said, pouring carefully. “I think our relationship can stand a few hiccups now.”

“No, I mean really believing it.”

“What changed your mind?” He
had
smiled just a little, I told myself. He was not, after all, a man prone to cowboy whoops and bouncing on the furniture.

“Back to basics really,” I said. “Thinking about Fraser. If he wasn’t doing it because of dreadful threats then it would be for money. And although I should imagine he can be a bit cunning in everyday matters, the thing that really comes over about him is his deep down integrity — he’d rather die than accept money from the Russians. And I remembered just now how he looked when you mentioned to him that I was expecting — his face just froze.”

“Cheers,” said Patrick, holding up his glass. “To the Oink then.”

“Oink?”

“That’s what Terry calls small children — Oinks.”

We drank to the Oink and after another glass I deemed us sufficiently mellow to talk about the immediate, less pleasant future.

“I made a phone call,” Patrick said when I broached the subject. “While you were asleep. If everything goes to plan, our being well and truly alive will be all over the front pages of tomorrow’s evening papers.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re going to do?”

“No — then you’ll behave naturally. Don’t worry, it’s not drastic like last time.”

“Does Daws know?”

“I hope not,” muttered my spouse grimly.

“I don’t think he would court martial you,” I said after some thought.

“Perhaps that would be too public. But a ruling of insubordination and emotional instability would probably mean I’d end up in an army mental hospital for a while.”

I stared at him dumbly.

“I’m not sure if it’s an official accusation,” he continued. “That’s the worst part. Was Daws just shouting or did he write it all down after I left and staple it on my file?” He drained his glass. “Come to think of it, you accused me of something very similar in Canada.”

“Only because of emotional instability of my own,” I protested.

“Who’s to know? I think I’d rather be court martialled in a way — my blunderbuss and flyswatter lying crossed on the table — better than an ambulance coming for one, don’t you think?”

It was an unbearable moment, seeing him smile at me bleakly and the unbounded misery that lay beyond.

Chapter 20

Daws rang at eight-thirty the next morning to confirm, using code words with which we were all familiar, that Six’s neglect in clearing us with the Canadian Security people had been traced to a certain individual. There was no evidence of deliberate foul play. We were to stay out of sight until ordered otherwise and he would prefer it if we returned to Devon.

“We go tonight,” Patrick said to me when he had related what had been said.

“It sounds as though he’s washed his hands of the entire business.”

“According to him it is now a police matter. Nothing to do with Five. He sprayed that all over me like weedkiller yesterday.”

“Then why leave Terry in Port Charles?”

“He’s ordered him home on the first available flight.”

“But I thought …?”

“Terry asked for a week’s leave and Daws had no choice but to grant it.”

“I hadn’t realized that Terry was so keen,” I remarked, baffled.

“He’s keen on Drew’s new assistant.”

“Don’t tell me you rang him at three a.m. their time!”

But all I got was an enigmatic smile while he spooned muesli into two bowls.

“I don’t really want any breakfast,” I told him.

“Feed the Oink,” he instructed, plonking a bowl in front of me. “Look, I’ve even been out to get you single cream to have with it.”

Still bemused I sat down. “I do wish you wouldn’t make such a mystery of things. Why did you ring Terry again?”

“I didn’t. He rang me — at one twenty-six our time, if you must know.” He chuckled. “I thought you hadn’t noticed I slept on the sofa. Terry is exploring a theory of his own. Do you remember a few months ago when all those American diplomats were chucked out of Moscow in retaliation for some Russians being expelled from Washington for spying?”

“Last November,” I said.

“Right. Well, apparently Canada turned out its cupboards too and got rid of a few odd-balls of its own under cover of supporting Uncle Sam. Terry is getting as many photos of these characters as he can from records and is sending them to Old Bill the gardener, in Vancouver, to see if he recognises any of them.”

“The lad is a genius,” I breathed. “How come records are co-operating?”

Patrick spoke through a mouthful of muesli. “Leander Hurley’s boss trying to make amends. Terry read between the lines that certain folk have been trying to zap our muscle bound hero for some time.”

“So the male visitors weren’t Emma’s boyfriends — they were there to see her husband.”

“Not so fast. Nothing’s proved yet, it’s only a theory.”

“And likely to remain so, knowing the Canadian postal service.”

“That’s where Le Blek comes in. He’s going to Fax them over to the nearest RCMP post to where the gaffer lives with his daughter. Another thing that might interest you is that both the Hartlands left home separately for destinations unknown. Not for Montreal, though, Terry does know that.”

“When?”

“David on the evening of the day we turned up, Emma the following morning. And if you’re going to say that he should have mentioned it before, he said that he hadn’t had the idea then and it hadn’t seemed all that important.”

“It’s a long shot,” I said quietly.

“Yes,” he agreed. “A bit like shooting an arrow out of a window and asking to be buried where it falls.”

*

I asked no questions when we went out for a walk. All things considered, we weren’t in such bad shape as I had thought. A good night’s sleep and two square meals had seen to that, and when I stepped out into the fresh air I felt quite invigorated. But I reminded myself that my companion’s pallor was concealed by his tan and accordingly walked a little more slowly than I would have done normally.

I also kept my own counsel when Patrick announced that he was going to have his hair cut, successfully guiding him past a grim short back and sides establishment with a betting shop in the basement and a window crammed with faded advertisements for certain articles in rubber. Beaming mutely I bustled him into a unisex salon a short distance away and sat near the door to prevent any change of heart. Soon the unkempt black curls were all around him on the floor and he was undergoing what was probably the first blow-dry of his life.

We took a taxi, the driver being instructed to take a roundabout route, and finished up not far from where we had been the previous day. I still kept quiet although desperate to try to alleviate a condition that had worsened steadily as the morning progressed. Outwardly nothing was amiss. A quick glance from a passer-by, and Patrick collected several for he was again in uniform, would not have elicited that here was a man literally speechless from nerves. As we approached Horse Guards Parade again from Whitehall I reluctantly put a different word to it — fear.

Fear is contagious.

There was the usual crowd of tourists around the gateways, Nikons and Leicas clicking frantically as they photographed the two hapless soldiers of the Household Cavalry. We walked through, attracting a few clicks of our own. Once on to the smooth setts of the parade ground Patrick halted, gazed around as if measuring distances and then went on a little further. I followed, my stomach tying itself in knots.

“If you should see a loose horse,” he said over his shoulder, “do keep right out of the way.”

I thought about Hyde Park and the riders in Rotten Row, wondering if he had some kind of sixth sense. Then I noticed two men with cameras who were not tourists. Most certainly they were from the Press. They lounged, gimlet-eyed, against an archway.

Several clocks struck but I was too distracted to notice which hour. Behind me there were shouted orders and the sound of hooves ringing on stone. Then from across the parade came a troop of Blues.

“You’re kidding,” I whispered to myself. “You can’t be serious.”

The impossible happened. There was a mêlée and a scattering of the approaching horses. I saw no one fall but suddenly a riderless horse broke away. Several of the troopers rode at it to head it off but this seemed to madden the animal and it plunged away from them and headed towards us and the gateway.

The man was crazy if he thought he could stop that half a ton of horseflesh heading towards us at a gallop, and all for a publicity stunt. Its ears laid back, eyes rolling, it clattered pell-mell at him, its harness metalwork glittering in the sunlight.

He stopped it. Any living creature will stop when someone makes the kind of noise that Patrick now uttered. I whipped round to see where the ghastly screaming bark had come from and when I looked back he had hold of the bridle. The horse reared, taking him up with it, and for a moment I thought he would fall beneath the flying hooves. Then it was over and the Press photographers took a few more pictures before disappearing into the crowd.

I decided that it was time a woman was silent no longer but he forestalled me — not speaking, he couldn’t yet — just gestured to an open door in the archway. It opened wider as we approached and closed behind us, the Corporal responsible for this saluting Patrick crisply. He returned the salute and then fainted into the man’s arms.

More doorways, a flight of stairs, a large hallway, a long passage. Then into a light, sunny room, the shadows of the glazing bars in the windows making black ladder patterns on a sky blue carpet. Blue and white striped Regency wallpaper, heavy antique furniture, a huge bowl of white lilac and pink tulips on an oval table. It is strange how many powers of observation are heightened at moments like this.

And Daws.

Neither of us spoke, just gazed at the quiet face in the crook of the corporal’s elbow. Then the Colonel issued concise instructions and crossed the room to sit in a high-backed chair. I perched on the end of the Chesterfield upon which Patrick had been laid down and placed his hat on a nearby chair, not remembering having picked it up.

“The animal’s knee caught him in the chest when it reared,” Daws said. “I was watching from the window.”

A medical orderly arrived at the double. Patrick eyes opened when the orderly knelt beside him so he was spared a whiff of sal volatile. There was really not a lot the man could do. The patient was already taking pills for the suppression of pain so an injection was out of the question. After a quick examination to ensure that no further damage had been done the orderly departed, warning against further violent effort.

Daws held out a tumbler into which he had poured a generous measure of whisky. “You appreciate this stuff or I wouldn’t waste it on you. Tamnavulin-Glenlivet. Eight years old — eighty per cent proof. Take it slowly and thank me when you feel able.”

I became aware of a familiar sound, the homely tick of the Colonel’s clock. It stood in a corner to one side of the door behind me, not far from his case of military memorabilia and items from his jade collection.

“I live here when I’m in London,” Daws told me upon seeing my interest. “But you’re the only two in the department who know so button your lips. It’s only two floors from where you saw me yesterday and three from the office of the ragamuffin friend of your husband’s who was bullied into this morning’s stupidity. With horses at two thousand pounds a head not even chums of Patrick Gillard can allow them to career all over London and risk breaking their legs tripping over tourists without
some
kind of official permission.” Like all good raconteurs he paused for effect. “The permission had to come from a rather good friend of
mine
”

But he was smiling.

Patrick gave the glass to me so that I could take a sip, a rare treat. But whisky is not my drink. My experience of single malts is that they are for the educated palate, pleasure coming with time.

“Not to be mucked around with tap water,” Daws said severely. “Nor by throwing in sickly stuff out of plastic bottles.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Patrick.

Daws grunted. “If you want to know why I didn’t cheer when that nag belted you in the ribs, I’ll tell you. I’ve had two communications this morning, both intended for you. The first was a telex that had come via Interpol, New Scotland Yard — you name it it had been there — from your Mountie, Le Blek. Tracker dogs have found the grave of that character you knifed. His name was Cody Mullen and he’d been a local hoodlum. There was a cheerfulness in the wording that I found somewhat tasteless. The other was a report over the coded Fax machine from Meadows.”

Looking as fragile as spun glass Patrick sat and gazed at him.

“The gist,” said Daws, “is that a member of the Russian trade delegation, now expelled from the United States for activities incompatible with his status, was seen at the home of David Hartland some two weeks before he flew out. From the States, you note, not from Canada. He was utterly forbidden to cross borders like that — as you know.”

“The gardener identified him?” I asked.

“Initially. Meadows was given photographs of all the expelled Russians, both from Canada and the States — apparently they were all part of the same espionage cell at home — and these were shown to …” Daws consulted a folded sheet of paper he took from his jacket pocket, presumably Terry’s report. “… William Harper, retired gardener formerly of Ravenscliff. Harper said he thought he recognised three of the men. Upon receipt of this information Meadows then took the photos to the cook who still works for the Hartlands and she positively identified Mikhail Kirov — he walks with a stick apparently, following a car smash last year. She’d returned to the house on her day off to fetch something and saw the man arrive by car and go indoors. She hadn’t seen the other two so I’m going to forget them — the old man wasn’t that reliable a witness.”

“The Frigate Programme was a gift to Hartland,” I said. “Right on his doorstep. How long has he been working for them, do you think?”

Daws said, “I rather think he was recruited with that target in mind. It’s been no secret for some time that the Canadians were thinking of bringing their Navy up to date, and also that they haven’t built warships for over twenty years. Plenty of ferries and coast guard vessels, of course, but that isn’t the same technology. It’s really elementary that they would eventually ask for British help — they’ve bought new submarines from us since the war.”

“But DARE was the real target?”

“Of course. I can’t imagine that Canadian frigates are high on Moscow’s espionage list.” He went over to an old-fashioned bell-pull and gave it a yank. “I hope you aren’t going to faint again, Major.” 

“Margaret Howard was the next victim,” said Patrick, who had had his eyes closed. “That was why Mullen had a photo of her in his pocket.”

“That had occurred to me,” Daws said. “She’s probably quite safe now — she rang McAlister yesterday and said she was in California, married that East German of hers. Sorry, I forgot to mention it to you — someone in DARE at Devonport rang my office after you left.”

When a steward answered the summons the Colonel asked that a light lunch for three be brought, together with a bottle of Muscadet. Not a lot was said while we waited and I guessed that Daws was hoping, as was I, that food and rest would result in Patrick’s feeling stronger. I also had a suspicion that the Colonel was feeling a little guilty, wondering if his savage carpeting was the reason for Patrick’s silence. His next remark confirmed this.