Death of a Raven (2 page)

“He went back to work on the Monday,” I told him. “That would be the 17th.”

“Oh, I know about that,” Daws said before I could continue. “He spent two weeks doing what everyone assumes he gets paid for — organising the PM’s security on all visits outside London.” Uncharacteristically, Daws chuckled. The
mille
-
feuille
seemed to have worked wonders. “Prevented a student from throwing an egg in Coventry and then managed to catch the PM when she tripped at Heathrow three days later.”

I had already guessed what Patrick had been up to for at least part of the time. By now I was used to him being forbidden to contact me whilst thus engaged on his official duties and had to content myself with an occasional glimpse of him on the television news. Always not far from the lady’s elbow he often could not avoid being in camera shot, to everyone but his family yet another ceaselessly watchful security man.

I said, “He phoned me the day Andy was killed, last Wednesday, and asked me to contact Andy’s wife. I tried to but she was staying with her mother. I only managed to get hold of her on Friday morning and spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday with her. I assumed Patrick was doing something for you.”

A beautiful long case clock in one corner of the room ticked off a few more seconds into eternity.

Daws turned his attention to the computer terminal at his elbow. “I gave him and Meadows their orders late on the Wednesday you say he phoned you.” He spent the next minute or so punching buttons on the keyboard and reading the information that appeared on the screen.

It didn’t need an ability to read sideways for me to come to the conclusion that the computer didn’t know where he was either.

“So you’ve heard nothing from him since last week?”

“No.”

“Did you make any comment about his assessment?”

“Too tired,” I replied. Then in response to the knife edge stare, added, “They made him do the mute march with full pack. It was a new medic, I understand.”

“Majors don’t necessarily have to obey medics,” Daws grated.

“He wouldn’t make a fuss — not in front of the others. Anyway, I got the impression he did it to find out if he could.”

At this Daws relaxed slightly. Damn you, I thought, so long as any blame can’t be laid at the Army’s door you’re not too concerned.

“If anything,” Daws mused, using the keyboard to recall some information, “he was found to be more fit than on the previous assessment a year ago. Would you say he was worried about it?”

People who perform fifty press-ups before breakfast every day
are
generally worried about their fitness. “Not really,” I lied. “But we do seem to be skating around defining whether we’re talking about physical or mental fitness here.”

Eyes narrowed, Daws said, “I’d be very interested to hear any comments you have to make about either category.”

“Fitness isn’t just to do with recovering mobility after being blown up,” I said. “It’s learning to live with the thought that you’re never going to be quite the same again, and accepting it. Before he was injured Patrick had a very high opinion of himself. Recovering his self-confidence to a reasonable degree has been the real achievement.”

No, I wasn’t selling my husband down the river. This was my very own spy probe into the normally impenetrable Whitehall. I wasn’t about to mention Patrick’s recurring nightmare of being fired, huge crowds shouting “Cripple!” at him.

“I can’t give you the results of the psychological tests,” Daws said, realising what I wanted.

“I’m not asking you to,” I replied. “But if he’s never given so much as a hint of how he’s regarded —”

“Can you contact him?” Daws interrupted.

This was a leading question. To admit that there was a phone number or address the existence of which MI5 was kept in ignorance was tantamount to treason.

We stared at each other stonily and I won.

“‘Flippant’,” the Colonel said with a grimace. “‘Flippant, sarcastic, has sometimes quite the wrong attitude for a man of his rank, and as far as an enemy is concerned is utterly lethal with both brain and hands.’ Will that do?”

For some reason tears pricked at my eyelids. “I’ll ask around,” I promised.

*

I spent the rest of the day at the secret London address, a building that from the outside purported to be no more than the rather shabby offices of an export company, and then caught a late afternoon train back to Devon. During a snatched lunch I had rung Terry Meadows’ number but there had been no answer.

I was sure that behind the urbane exterior Daws had been seething. He can tolerate his staff being flippant, sarcastic and even faintly murderous during a full moon, but for them to wriggle out of the system altogether was inconceivable, unmentionable and, to use his own words, wouldn’t do at all.

Chapter 2

It was snowing hard at Halifax, Nova Scotia. As the de Havilland DASH 7 thrashed up though the murky sky, chunks of ice were hurled from the propellers and clanged into the sides of the fuselage. Only those inured to such seemingly pioneering flying ignored the noise, ostentatiously dozing or stagily thumbing through the handout magazines. Together with the nervous old ladies, I jumped at every bang.

I had found it convenient to fly from Prestwick. A visit to an old friend who lives at Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, had been planned for some time and as Daws has always impressed on me that one of my chief assets to him is my independent way of life, my invisibility as he calls it, which means that he doesn’t have to find excuses for me to be in various places, it seemed a good idea to keep my appointment then fly on from there.

The flight from Halifax to Port Charles was short, only taking forty-five minutes, and when we landed snow had reluctantly given way to driving rain. But my spirits were well and truly raised by now, partly due to a last minute phone call from the Colonel. The missing link had reported in, he had said cryptically. Don’t forget to bring me back a lobster. The eastern shores of Canada are rich in all kinds of sea food.

It was raining too hard to see if I recognised any of the people peering through the windows of the arrival lounge. I declined one of the umbrellas being handed out by a stewardess and ran across the tarmac, collecting a few odd looks from the other passengers.

Inside, a few minutes later, disappointed to see no welcoming party, I was hefting my case from the carousel when I noticed a woman, well dressed and pretty in a fragile way, come through the main entrance and gaze searchingly at the new arrivals. Our eyes met.

“Miss Langley?”

I told her I was.

“I’m Emma Hartland.” Rather awkwardly she held out a hand.

I said, “I’m never sure whether women shake hands either,” and we did, laughing, the ice broken.

“David’s in Montreal,” Emma said on the way to the car, having apologised that they no longer had a chauffeur to carry my case.

“Will he come home on Friday?”

“Thursday probably. If he can. He’s quite worried about these DARE people.”

“It’s very kind of you to make your house available like this.”

She unlocked the car, a gleaming monster in silvery grey of a breed as yet unknown to me. “David believes in flying the flag,” she replied.

Flying the flag seemed to be a general custom in Canada, I discovered as we travelled west. Each and every building, including petrol stations, seemed to have a flag pole with the familiar scarlet maple leaf on a white background whipping in the stiff sea breeze. There were quite a few Union Jacks as well but of course New Brunswick is part of Loyalist Canada where refugees patriotic to the Crown fled after the American War of Independence. They were rewarded with vast tracts of land by George III.

The unique environment hit you right between the eyes. The good, the bad, the beautiful. Countless trees, a thousand lakes — so many that I knew most did not have names — a hideous scar in the landscape with an oil refinery steaming and festering in its centre, a pulp mill pouring filth into a river, and cormorants diving for fish in the stinking yellow water. Over all of this a serene sunset, the sky a delicate pink fading to turquoise.

I dragged my gaze away from notices proclaiming Beverage Rooms, Fried Clams and Super Mufflers, realising that Emma was speaking to me.

She smiled at my apology. “Your friend Robin has taken the day off to be at home when you arrive.”

“How good of him,” I murmured. Robin! Ye gods, was that what he was calling himself?

“Although, strictly speaking,” Emma went on, “he wouldn’t have gone in today. They told him at the hospital to take things easy this week.”

I actually felt the blood drain from my face.

“You didn’t know?”

I shook my head speechlessly.

“Nothing serious,” she continued, concentrating on a road junction. “He had a touch of fever last week — something to do with an old injury. David thought it best that he receive proper attention so he was packed off to hospital for a few days.”

A week! Patrick had been in Canada a week! I pulled myself together and thanked her, realising how much this would have cost with no NHS, and she smiled again.

“He really was quite poorly. David’s such a big softie — he can’t bear people feeling ill.” Then on the next breath she added, “I really wasn’t sure whether I ought to call you Mrs. Gillard — David said you were married to an army officer by the name of Patrick Gillard, and he was very highly thought of.”

I took my time over answering. “It’s a question of security. Langley was my maiden name and the book world refers to me as that so perhaps it’s easier to stick to that when you introduce me to others. My mother was convinced when she called me Ingrid that it was a name that couldn’t be shortened. Time has proved her right.”

“I loathe pet names,” said Emma. “No one ever calls my husband anything but David in my presence. Dave and Davy sound so trivial and commonplace.”

I turned to look out of the window in case she saw and misunderstood my smile. No one, to my knowledge, has ever attempted to call Patrick Paddy in my presence.

The largest built-up area in Canada, Port Charles lay like pieces of a torn up patchwork quilt over the low hills that overlooked the Bay of Fundy. The colour came from the houses, nearly all clad in wood and painted in bright but tasteful shades of blue, pink, yellow and green. There was none of the stone and brick monotony found in Britain, and every house seemed to be different from its neighbour and be situated in an acre or two of land with native trees, cedar and spruce, left to grow undisturbed to provide privacy. Thus the effect, despite the oil refinery and pulp mill, was quite pleasant.

We crossed the city centre, in the fading light a confusion of shopping malls, hotels and office blocks, and four miles further on drove into a suburb Emma informed me was called Moss Vale. Even inside the car I could sense the opulent hush pervading the tree-lined streets.

The Hartland’s Maritime home, Ravenscliff, was set high on a hillside facing the sea. Set into the hillside would be a more accurate description. As we approached and entered the driveway, I could see that sheer cliffs of reddish coloured stone formed a backdrop to the garden, magnificent pines growing at their foot.

As we covered the half mile or so of driveway Emma explained that the house was usually only occupied by herself and her husband during the weekends in the spring and summer. They used their flat in Montreal, only a short distance from his office, during the week and spent most holidays either on their cruiser moored on the Saint John river or flew home where they had a cottage in Norfolk. Their son, Mark, studied architecture in Toronto and lived at his flat during term time. During the vacations he usually stayed with friends and they didn’t see much of him.

“I never know when he’s coming home,” Emma finished by saying. “I’m not sure whether he likes to surprise us or simply can’t be bothered to pick up the phone.”

The garden was quite superb. As we swept up to the front of the house I beheld seemingly acres of velvety lawns, neatly raked gravel paths and banks of different shrubs, some still encased in their winter protective covering of sacking and plastic. Scarlet tulips blazed from flowerbeds. And, built on to a wall, a heated greenhouse, surely the ultimate luxury in this part of the world.

The house itself was a surprise. I had expected Ravenscliff to be built of brick and stone but it was the usual wooden construction, painted white. On the western side of the building was a verandah, or deck as I already knew Canadians called them, complete with a red cedar swinging garden seat and barbecue. To the east of the house, but not connected to it was a row of garages and a stable block.

Robin, I reminded myself as we went indoors. Robin, Robin, Robin.

Nevertheless, when we came upon Robin warming himself in front of an ornate woodburning stove in the open plan living room, I was struck dumb, only vaguely aware of Emma excusing herself saying she would ask the cook to make tea.

There was no doubt about it, Robin looked decidedly wan.

“You’ve lost weight,” I said when, just good friends, he kissed my cheek.

He grinned. “The eagle-eyed writer.” Then he motioned me to silence with a finger to his lips, took his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket, found a scrap of paper and wrote with the pen he found on an antique writing desk in one corner of the room. 

Mystified, I took the message from him. Every room, every nook and cranny, every tree in the garden, he had written, even the greenhouse and stables, were bugged. We would have to remain just good friends publicly and also in private.

It was shattering. I threw the note into the woodburner while the news sunk in. It would mean that unless the pair of us went right off the property nothing could be discussed, no councils of war held, no hint could be given that I knew Robin very well indeed. I couldn’t even ask him if he knew the reason for the microphones as we weren’t supposed to know of their existence, or for that matter about any theories he might have concerning Hartland’s apparent paranoia.

For a moment disappointment and anger almost took hold of me. Instead of a few weeks cover job spent in socialising and unhurried preparation of
Two
for
Joy
, I was now landed with twenty-four-hour days of concentration when one slip of the tongue might ruin everything.

Robin was smiling at me, obviously aware of everything that was going on inside my head.

“Are you obeying orders and taking the rest of the week off?” I enquired.

“No. There’s no need. I’m fine now.”

My resentment and anger began to turn into panic. Robin and I were part of a team and the teamwork depended heavily on close communication. How, if any real communication was barred, were we going to do the job? And first and foremost I am a writer by profession. My training for Department 12, mostly of the self-defence variety, had not turned me into a super-spy.

Robin, damn him, was smiling at me again. “Headache?” he asked.

I sank into a chair. “It was a very early start,” I replied, taking the cue. “The Gas Board started digging up the road outside at four am.”

Robin sat down too. “Great here, isn’t it?” he said. 

“Bright as ninepence houses surrounded by a muddle of pickups and Skiddoos … all mixed up with garden gnomes, plastic Snow Whites and hand-painted statues of the Virgin Mary.”

“Fibre glass garden wells,” I added. “And wooden butterflies on the outside walls like those flights of plaster ducks you used to see at home. What on earth are super mufflers?”

“Silencers,” he told me. “Cars, exhaust pipes for the use of.”

We were both laughing when Emma returned. She asked Robin to put some more wood on the stove and the conversation turned to general matters until the tea arrived. Then, when a tray had been set before her on a low table by a middle-aged woman who was introduced to us as Dot, short for Doris, Emma commenced gently to question me.

“This Colonel … Daws, is it? He’s not really MI6 at all, is he?”

“Search me,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned he’s just a rather charming army officer who asked me if I fancied working on my novel in Canada to keep a few British engineers company.”

“Surely he didn’t just phone you up out of the blue.”

“No, I met him at a Mess dinner.”

“Daws only surfaces at occasions like Mess dinners,” Robin said. “The rest of the time he can be run to earth pruning his roses and writing irate letters to
The
Times
.”

But Emma seemed to think there had been a breach of security. “Didn’t you find it a rather strange request?”

I sipped my tea, taking my time. “No, why should I? Patrick probably mentioned to him that I was looking for a bolt hole.”

She gave me a cool look, then an enigmatic smile. “I’d forgotten about the Major for a moment. David told me that he packed a lot of hardware and could be found close to the Prime Minister when she was being shown around sewage farms.” 

I filed away this small insight into David Hartland, raising my eyebrows at Robin and making sure that she saw me. “And other such establishments,” I murmured. “He does love places where he can take his green wellies.” I buried my nose in my cup, hearing Robin’s soft chuckle. The green wellies were an in-joke between us.

“I’ll carry on riding shotgun tomorrow,” Robin said to Emma.

“Only if you’re sure you’re fit,” she replied. Then, turning to me she said, “The DARE team have all been travelling to work together under police escort while Robin was ill. As you can imagine this tends to draw attention to them even more.”

As she was speaking cars were scrunching to a standstill on the gravelled drive outside the window, one a taxi, the other a vehicle I knew to be a Plymouth Caravelle, a large American saloon car seating six. Down the drive, a police car tooted a horn in farewell and reversed out of sight.

“It’s David!” exclaimed Emma. “Oh, God — and his assistants.” With that she fled from the room, presumably to warn Dot about extra mouths to feed.