Jigsaw (18 page)

George Nimmo suddenly appeared in the doorway. He wore a black cashmere coat and maroon scarf. ‘Settling in, Frank?'

Pagan gestured at the office. ‘We're making the best of it.'

‘Everything will be out of here in a matter of hours,' Nimmo said. ‘Cartons. Boxes. All of it. A clean sweep.'

‘Glad to hear it.'

Behind Nimmo stood two men Pagan vaguely recognized. One, fat and bald, had an enormous brow that gave him the fierce look of a mentally disturbed philosopher. The other was red faced, dressed in a crumpled raincoat that hung open. The label was visible: ‘Aquascutum'.

‘I believe you might have met Ted Wright,' said Nimmo, indicating the bald man. Wright nodded once, rather severely. ‘And Joe Gladstone.' The man in the raincoat stared at Pagan blankly.

‘I'm giving them to you, Frank,' said Nimmo.

‘In what sense do you mean?' Pagan asked, although he knew.

‘Beef up the team here. That sort of thing.'

Beware of Nimmo bearing gifts, Pagan thought. So George was putting in a couple of his own boys, loyal servants to the regime. I cough, and it gets back to Nimmo immediately. I shuffle some papers and Nimmo knows at once. That was the way these things worked. Men with empires to protect needed their own praetorian guards, their spies.

‘We'll find them some office space upstairs,' Pagan said. Banish them to the attic, he thought.

‘That will be quite suitable,' Nimmo remarked. He looked round the room. ‘Must be strange coming back here again.'

‘It brings back memories,' Pagan said. He rose, made his way over the cartons. He handed Billy Ewing's slip of paper to Joe Gladstone. ‘Here, Joe. Take Ted and get over to this address. See what you can learn about a man called Dracowitz.' That was how to deal with Nimmo's people: send them scurrying across London, a little tedious legwork.

Joe Gladstone looked at the paper, then glanced at Nimmo, as if he sought approval. Nimmo nodded in a fashion that was almost imperceptible. Pagan felt a small conspiratorial buzz in the air. You could read all the signs, you could feel the vibrations of the invisible threads that bound Gladstone and Wright to the Master.

‘And who is Dracowitz, Frank?' Nimmo asked.

‘Somebody I want checked out.'

‘Ah. A lead?' Nimmo looked optimistic.

Right, Pagan thought. Only a man like George Nimmo would live in a world of sudden leads, big breaks, culprits nailed to the masthead within a few hours of a crime. Dream on. ‘You never can tell,' he said. Then he looked at Gladstone. ‘You know how to find Cricklewood? You have an A to Z?'

Joe Gladstone had a Yorkshire accent. ‘I'm familiar with Cricklewood,' he said in a dry way.

Pagan turned to Nimmo. ‘By the way, we need a good plumber.'

‘A plumber?' Nimmo asked.

‘A plumber. Somebody with experience in boiler rooms. It's damned cold in this place. We need heat.'

‘We'll work something out,' Nimmo said, and smiled in a stressed manner. You could see behind the expression a reprimand taking shape, a repressed urge to trim some of the brazen wind from Pagan's sails.

Pagan stepped out into the hallway. Nimmo, lightly laying a hand on Pagan's arm, said, ‘I'll be in touch.' He wandered off along the corridor, followed by Wright and Gladstone. Gladstone clutched the slip of paper as if it were suspect.

Pagan leaned against the wall and sighed, watching the three men leave. He was strangely out of balance all at once, assailed by pressures both small and large, the ridiculous cardboard boxes, the intolerable cold, the whine of the electric drill, the sudden addition of Nimmo's lackeys. How the fuck could he work like this? How could he work impeded on all sides? And then he was plunged back inside the tunnel, he was gazing into the wreckage of the carriage, smelling death. You'll work in any conditions, he thought. Because you have to. Because you believe in what you have to do. Because that's the way you are.

Billy Ewing shook his head. ‘I know Gladstone. In my book he's a right arsehole. I never met Wright before, but …' Ewing changed the subject. ‘Incidentally, I've got all the messages from the emergency number upstairs in my office. If you want to sift them—'

‘Not yet,' Pagan answered.

‘They're a disappointing collection,' Ewing said.

‘I've seen a few of them.' Pagan remembered the young policewoman in the Tube station, the telephone and notebook. He had an urge to get out of the building for a while, to walk, think. All this clutter was suffocating. He told Foxie he'd be back in a few minutes. Foxie appeared slightly concerned, as if disturbed by Pagan's sudden decision to leave.

‘Is there anything you need, Frank?'

‘Look through the messages,' Pagan said. ‘See if there's anything even remotely interesting.' He took the elevator to the ground floor, conscious of how Foxie had been frowning. Foxie, guard dog, sentry over Pagan's moods. Now he'd be fretting in Pagan's absence.

Outside, the darkness had begun to yield to streaks of grey that hung in the form of drab canopies over Soho. He crossed Golden Square where the first of the morning's office workers were coming up from the Piccadilly Circus Tube. On Beak Street he turned left, walking quickly past Carnaby Street, a carnival during that period of history when London had been a mercurial mecca of fashion – the Beatles, Union Jack boxers, hairstyles by Mary Quant. The narrow street felt tawdry to him as he glanced at it. The bright pageant had left long ago and now only tourists or disoriented nostalgia freaks came this way, like people checking for a pulse they would never find.

When he reached Regent Street he paused. Buses came raging down from Oxford Circus, pouring exhaust fumes into the air, where it hung, trapped. He waited for a traffic light to change, then he crossed Regent Street and made his way by an indirect route through back streets toward Piccadilly. He realized he was heading for the tunnel, although that hadn't been his purpose in leaving Golden Square, at least on no conscious level. Drawn back to the scene, he thought. Looking for something. Any old hook on which to hang a thought.

On Piccadilly he paused. He had the curious instinct he was being followed. It was nothing very definite, a formless sensation. He didn't look round. The streets were busier now, clerks hurrying to offices, shops opening, lights going on, buses disgorging their passengers.

He continued to walk, stopped at a news-stand, looked at headlines. POLICE CLUELESS IN TUBE BOMBING, one of them read. Clueless, he thought. What did these scribblers want from the police? A quick salve for the public? He scanned the page, read George Nimmo's name, and some way beneath it his own. He was identified as the officer delegated by Nimmo to administer the investigation. Administer: he liked that one.

He gazed at a headline in
The Sun
. I SURVIVED TUBE HORROR. This was allegedly the first-person narrative of a woman who'd been riding in the carriage behind the one that had exploded. Pagan ran an eye over it rapidly; overcharged with sweaty clichés.

He walked on. The odd feeling of being watched persisted. He paused outside a pharmacy. He wondered if the bomber had come this very way. If he'd strolled the route to the station Pagan was now taking. He had a ghostly little sensation, a quick shiver, almost as if he expected to turn his face and see the bomber a few steps behind.

He looked inside the pharmacy window, absently gazing at cylinders of lipstick, eyeliner displays, rainbows of eyeshadow. He glanced to the side, saw crowds of people swaddled against the cold, hurrying to their places of employment. Then he turned and continued in the direction of the Tube station.

Across from The Ritz, he pretended to study the menu in the window of a Lebanese restaurant. Somebody is following me. The damned feeling was stronger now, ringing in his skull.

He didn't notice the woman until she was alongside him.

‘Pretend I'm not here,' she said.

Pagan didn't look at her. ‘OK. I'm pretending.'

‘You're Frank Pagan?'

He nodded, still examining the menu.

‘I need to talk to you. But not here. Not like this.' Her accent was Home Counties, her vowels expansive. ‘It isn't safe. Go to the Athenaeum Hotel. Ask for me at the desk. I'm registered under the name of Canningsby. Give me fifteen minutes or so.'

She walked away from him, and only then did he look at her. Tall, dressed in wintry elegance, fur coat, leather boots, a bright silk headscarf. She walked with brisk purpose, hurried and yet seemingly unpressured, as if her time were entirely her own, like a woman on her way to an appointment with somebody she didn't consider very important.

Canningsby, he thought. The name didn't mean a thing to him. She vanished out of sight after she'd passed the Tube station where various uniformed policemen lingered behind the tape; guardians of the dead. It isn't safe, she'd said. Why isn't it safe? he wondered. If she wanted to talk, why hadn't she come to the office? Puzzled, he continued to stroll, pausing when he reached the station.

‘Good morning, Mr Pagan,' one of the constables said. ‘Cold enough for you, sir?'

Pagan, still pondering the woman, merely nodded. He went inside the empty station, rode the escalator down to the platform. He thought: the bomber must have come this way, must have travelled on this same escalator – unless, of course, the device had been placed inside the carriage at another station along the line. Why did he get the feeling that this wasn't the case, that the killer had come here to this station, the device concealed on his body? Instincts were frequently groundless affairs, formed in a place beyond reason, but he usually went with them. So. The killer had travelled on this escalator, walked on to the platform – and then what? Then what?

Pagan looked the length of the platform. There were two uniformed constables manning the telephones. The young policewoman had been replaced. London Transport officials spoke quietly together, smoking, drinking tea from mugs. A score or so of body-bags remained in the place where they'd been before.

A plainclothes cop Pagan recognized as Detective-Sergeant Benny Banforth was standing on the edge of the platform, gazing down the tunnel. He turned when Pagan approached. ‘Fucking depressing this, Frank,' he said. He gestured to the body-bags. ‘Those poor sods haven't been identified yet.'

Pagan watched Banforth light a cigarette.

‘Some guy came from the US Embassy a couple of hours ago,' Banforth said. ‘It seems one of their people was on the Tube.'

‘Positive ID?'

‘Positive. Dead man's name was Harcourt.'

Pagan looked at the mouth of the tunnel. Black and uninviting, it nevertheless drew him toward it. He touched Banforth on the arm, then walked the length of the platform. He lowered himself on to the track and gazed at the ruined carriage where lamps still illuminated the wreckage. Something flashed in the distance, a buzz of light and sparks flying out of a welding tool. The carriage would have to be removed sooner or later, which involved cutting it into manageable pieces that could be hauled off the broken track by machines.

He stared at the shower of sparks and thought:
The killer stands on the platform. The train comes in, stops, doors open, crowds get on and off, the regular hurlyburly of rush hour. And then what? Is the device placed inside the carriage unnoticed? Is it stashed inside a briefcase, as McCluskey had suggested?
Pagan tried to imagine this, as if from some mystical source inside himself he might conjure the face and body of the bomber. A sixth sense was what he needed, something beyond mere instinct alone. Get well soon, Frank. Crystal balls, tarot cards, casting the runes – none of this abracadabra had a role to play in the routine drudgery of police work. You couldn't make the sky rain butterflies.

He walked towards the carriage, stopped, studied the ruin. The wreck had an immediacy to it, a clarity it hadn't had some hours before. He contemplated the inside of the killer's head, trying to catch on to a mood, but it was slippery and eddied away from him. Tension? Surely. Even if this had been done by a professional, there would be nervousness and strain. Only a deranged amateur might feel absolutely nothing. Only somebody far gone down the avenues of madness might have transcended normal anxiety.

Amateur or pro, it was a hell of a way to make a statement. But if this
was
meant to be a statement, why hadn't there been a follow-up? This came back to puzzle Pagan yet again as he gazed at the crushed outline of the carriage. Frustrated, he turned and walked in the direction of the platform. The burst of heat in the tunnel had been so intense it had seared the advertizing posters on the wall across the track. The faces of lipsticked models peeled from brick.

He wandered towards the exit, rode the escalator up to the street, then walked in the direction of the Athenaeum Hotel. The wind blowing off Green Park had a cruel intensity. He was glad to step inside the warmth of the hotel.

At the reception desk he asked for Miss Canningsby. He wasn't sure if it was Mrs or Ms. The receptionist punched a button on her computer and shook her head. ‘We don't have anyone registered by that name.'

‘You sure?'

‘I'll check again.' She did so. ‘Sorry. Nothing. Do you have the right name, sir?'

Pagan tapped his fingers impatiently on the reception desk. ‘I believe so.'

‘Are you sure you have the right hotel?'

Pagan looked into the girl's pleasant face. ‘I thought I had.' He turned away from the desk and made his way past a group of elderly American tourists doing Europe in the dead season. An old pink-cheeked geezer from the Midwest was grumbling about the weather. Pagan moved toward the doorway.

The woman appeared suddenly at his right. ‘You have to forgive me,' she said. ‘I need to be sure, you see.'

‘Sure of what?' Pagan asked.