Jigsaw (19 page)

The woman was in her middle forties, immaculately made-up, good looking if you went in for a slightly arrogant beauty.

‘I want to be certain we are not being followed.'

‘Miss Canningsby, if that's your name, I'm in the middle of a bloody troublesome investigation. I don't have time for fun and games.'

‘We need to talk,' she said. ‘It might be useful.'

‘If it's useful, I'll listen.'

‘There's a Turkish coffee shop round the corner. Meet me there in five minutes.'

Pagan sighed. ‘Give me one good reason why I should bother.'

‘Does the name Bryce Harcourt mean anything to you?' The woman smiled in a manner both condescending and polite. You could imagine this one holding court in a fine drawing-room, surrounded by her cronies and dishing the dirt over tea in china cups and dainty plates of petit fours.

‘I've heard it,' Pagan said.

The woman walked out of the hotel. The door was opened for her by a top-hatted flunkey. Pagan saw his own reflection flash in the movement of glass. He thought he looked ectoplasmic, as if he'd entered the world by the dubious means of a medium's power, by some psychic back door.

He waited in the lobby of the hotel for ten minutes, then went outside, walked to the corner, turned. He reached the coffee shop, which was a dark little place you might not have noticed if you hadn't been looking for it.

Inside, the light was dim, the room quiet and shadowy. The woman sat in a corner, studying her face in a compact mirror. Pagan moved to the table, sat opposite her, ordered a cup of Turkish coffee.

‘I am sorry for the subterfuge,' the woman said. She held one hand out rather limply to be shaken. Her perfume was rich, overpowering. If you were too long in this woman's company you'd need an oxygen mask. ‘My name is Victoria Canningsby.'

‘You said something about Bryce Harcourt,' Pagan remarked. He sipped the thick coffee; his heart did a slight jump.

‘You don't stand on ceremony, do you?' she asked.

‘I was never big on pomp. It takes too much time, Miss Canningsby.'

‘Mrs, actually.'

Pagan set his cup down. ‘Bryce Harcourt,' he reminded her.

‘I wanted to come to your office,' she said, and here she drifted a little, changing a mental gear and floating off into the distance. Her blue eyes seemed to scan some inner region, perhaps a memory. ‘But I wouldn't have felt safe, you see.'

‘I don't really see, Mrs Canningsby.'

‘Bear with me, if you will.' She came back into focus and smiled at him, and all at once the apparent brittle quality about her appeared to defrost in the smile. There was a seductive little edge to the expression, directed not at Pagan specifically but executed as if by habit. He had a feeling that men much younger than herself had shared her bed.

‘I have known Bryce for two years,' she said. ‘Let us say we were well acquainted, and leave it at that. I find disclosures of a very personal nature tiresome. But we were close.'

Pagan looked into his coffee. The woman opened her purse, took out a cigarette, and slid her lighter across the table to him. He struck the flame for her, wondering at his own response. Mrs Victoria Canningsby was accustomed to having her cigarettes lit for her, a world of willing doormen and obliging cabbies. In the presence of imperious women, Pagan found an odd reservoir of good manners in himself.

‘He was on that Tube,' she said.

‘How do you know?'

‘I know a good deal about Bryce. I correct myself. I
did
know a good deal.'

‘OK. But how do you know he was on that Tube?'

She tilted her chin, blew a fine line of smoke upward. Only when she raised her face in this way could you see a certain puckering of her neck. She would have a few bad moments in front of mirrors, Pagan thought.

‘I have sources inside the Embassy where he worked, Mr Pagan. It only took a telephone call to one of his associates to have my fears confirmed.'

‘So he was on the Tube and that's a tragedy. But why all this secrecy? What are you afraid of?'

‘Some fears cannot be specified,' she remarked.

‘Christ, I hate mystification.'

‘Really? I would have thought it was part and parcel of your profession, Mr Pagan.'

‘It doesn't mean I have to like it.'

She put out her cigarette. ‘Bryce Harcourt was a charming man. He had a certain weakness for the fairer sex, as we're sometimes called. I won't say he was a sexual predator. Far from it. He knew how to treat a woman. He had a certain grace about him.'

‘Where is this leading, Mrs Canningsby?'

‘Call this background if it makes you a little less impatient. I'm coming to the point.' She raised her coffee and sipped, leaving along the rim of the cup the dark rosy stain of her lipstick. ‘I saw Bryce three or four times in the last couple of weeks. Something was troubling him deeply. Very deeply.'

A jukebox kicked into life all at once, a female singing a Turkish version of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'. Pagan worked at tuning it out of his head.

‘What exactly?' he asked.

‘He said he was being followed. He believed his phone was tapped. He had heard that people were asking questions about him. I believe I'm correct in saying he feared for his life. He also feared for anyone associated with him. He was not the kind of man who might usually yield to such anxieties. He was carefree by nature.'

‘Why would people be following him?'

She shrugged, a delicate little motion of shoulders. ‘I don't have an answer for that. My impression is that it had something to do with his work. Beyond that …' She shrugged again.

‘My understanding is he was a researcher of some sort,' Pagan said.

Victoria Canningsby laughed. A small clock might have chimed in her throat. ‘Bryce? A researcher?'

‘Why is that so funny?'

‘The idea of Bryce researching anything is amusing, if you had known the man. The only thing Bryce might have researched was the female anatomy.'

‘Then what did he do at the Embassy?'

‘He was never entirely clear about that, Mr Pagan. If somebody has given you to believe that he was some kind of researcher, I think you've been … misled? Sometimes an innocuous job description can cover a multitude of sins.'

Pagan thought of Quarterman. If Victoria Canningsby was correct, then Quarterman had lied about Harcourt's line of work. It was a concrete wall, though, a curtain of hard steel. What went on inside the American fortress in Grosvenor Square was beyond Pagan's reach, far beyond his authority. Diplomatic personnel enjoyed all the immunity of cows wandering the banks of the Ganges. Quarterman would have had reasons of his own for misleading Pagan – if indeed that was what he'd done. Maybe Harcourt operated in a sensitive area, something Quarterman was neither authorized nor inclined to reveal.

‘Why were you afraid to come to my office, Mrs Canningsby?'

‘For the simple reason that lately I believe I have been followed myself. Strange cars passing my house. One or two unexplained phone calls.'

People following people, Pagan thought. Shadows after shadows. The world was out of joint. Things were unhinged wherever you looked. ‘Because of your connection with Bryce.'

‘I imagine so.'

‘You felt it would be unhealthy to be seen in my company.'

‘Even as we sit here, I feel unhealthy, Mr Pagan. The feeling isn't going to go away.'

Pagan was quiet for a time. The jukebox mercifully fell silent. ‘Let me ask you this. Do you think the explosion on the Tube had a direct connection to Harcourt's presence?'

‘How could I possibly make a connection like that?'

‘Then all you're really telling me is that Harcourt was a worried man,' he said. ‘The world is full of worried men, Mrs Canningsby.'

She pushed her chair back. ‘I'm telling you that he lived in fear of his life, Mr Pagan. You can do what you like with the information. I happen to find it strange that somebody with Bryce's apprehensions should be killed in an explosion. That's all. You're the detective, not me.'

‘Coincidence,' Pagan said. He remembered Foxie's question:
Was the bomber after just one person, Frank?

‘As you say.' She rose, drawing her fur coat round her shoulders. ‘Coincidences happen, after all.'

‘The alternative to coincidence in this case is very hard to accept, Mrs Canningsby.' He looked up into her face. She was staring down at him rather coldly, brittle again, regal.

‘How would I get in touch with you if I had to?' he asked.

‘Look in the telephone book, Mr Pagan. Wivelsfield, Sussex. I caution you, though. I don't want a certain party to be involved in any of this.'

A husband, Pagan thought. Some hardworking cuckold in the City who doesn't know about Madame's infidelities. ‘I can be discreet,' he said.

‘I'm sure you can. When you need to be.' She walked to the door and, without a backward look, went out into the street. Pagan waited for several minutes and left only when the jukebox began to play again; a man sang in Turkish a constipated version of ‘My Way'.

He took a taxi back to Golden Square where a cleaning crew was busy hauling the cardboard boxes away. His own office had already been emptied; a woman with her hair in a makeshift turban was running a vacuum over the floor. She switched it off as soon as he entered the room.

‘Can't hear meself think,' she said. ‘Just about done, dear.' She turned the machine back on. Pagan listened to it roar across the ancient rug, raising clouds and spirals of dust from worn fibre. He sat behind his desk and forced a look of patience. He needed quiet in which to think about Victoria Canningsby's information. Did it clarify anything? Or was it just another isolated item in an investigation that hadn't yet become airborne? Among the roll-call of the dead there had to be a hundred secrets, and presumably Bryce Harcourt had a few of his own.

‘Right, dear. Done now.' The woman unplugged the vacuum and wheeled it out of the room.

‘I'm grateful,' said Pagan. On his desk was a pile of telephone messages gathered by Ewing or one of the uniforms on the upper floor. He scanned them quickly. Nothing riveting.

Foxie came into the room, accompanied by a man Pagan had never seen before.

‘Frank,' Foxworth said eagerly. ‘Do you know Detective-Sergeant Andrew Scobie? He has something rather interesting to tell you.'

‘I could use something interesting,' Pagan said, shaking the hand of the man called Scobie, who was built like a safe and had the grip of a longshoreman. Scobie had a rather kindly face. He was a cop of an older generation, close to retirement, a man who'd probably begun his career on a neighbourhood beat when the world was a simpler place and the local police knew by name all the villains in their parish. A time before handguns, before mindless violence, before the current climate of brutishness had descended on the land.

‘A prostitute was murdered in Mayfair, Mr Pagan. A particularly brutal killing by any standards. Scissors. A royal mess.'

Pagan listened, wondering what this had to do with his own investigation. ‘And?'

Scobie looked slightly embarrassed. In an awkward way, he shifted his weight. ‘I don't know quite how to say this, Mr Pagan.'

‘Say it any way you like, Scobie.'

‘Well, your name's attached to it.'

‘Attached? How? I'm not following you.'

‘I think you better see for yourself.'

FOURTEEN

ZAVIDOVO, RUSSIA

T
HREE HORSEMEN IN HEAVY OVERCOATS CAME OVER A RISE BETWEEN
pine trees. Snowdrifts lay thick under a cold sunny sky. The horses sank to their flanks in the brilliant drifts and laboured, breath crystallizing on the frozen air; the landscape was stark and secretive. A wind came and went in forceful flurries, shaking snow from pine branches, creating tiny pockets of greenery in an otherwise unbroken expanse of white.

The front rider carried an automatic rifle strapped to his shoulder. He rode some yards in advance of the other two. He surveyed the landscape; the Presidential security force, six white-uniformed men spread here and there between the trees, was invisible to his eye. He reined his horse, a big black brute of an animal, and brought it to a stop.

He turned, looked back, seeing Gurenko on the bay mare; Gurenko's companion, Budenny, was in the saddle of a chestnut gelding. Both men were lighting cigarettes.

Gurenko, in his late fifties, often had the slightly bewildered look of a poet decayed by drink. As a young man in Kazan critical of the inadequacies of Soviet Marxism, he'd tried his hand at a few allegorical verses that, with hindsight, were embarrassing in their naïvety. He was also something of an authority on the work of Tintoretto; when he was a student he'd published a slim monograph on the artist's work, which apparently nobody had read. This artistic sensibility had been eclipsed during the rugged years of his political life, which had been dedicated at first to the complex matter of survival after the collapse of the Union, and then later to the arduous struggle for the presidency, an unseemly armed conflict – a squalid bloody business in the centre of Moscow – that had resulted in his opponents being tried and jailed for acts of treason against the State.

Despite the occasional appearance of bemusement and self-absorbed gloom, there was iron in Gurenko, and ambition. He'd fought hard and long for his supremacy, and guarded it avidly, even though he had sentimental moments when he thought of his earlier lost self, a dimly remembered state of innocence. Innocence, alas, was a perishable commodity. It had no place in the brutality of politics.

Budenny, Chief of State Security, was older than the President, a smooth-shaved individual whose cologne could be smelled at a distance, and whose lust for young girls was reputed to be insatiable. Budenny, who favoured Armani suits and hand-painted silk ties, had a dacha at Zavidovo. So did Gurenko. Even in post-Union Russia, political power retained its old advantages.