Necrocrip (36 page)

‘They haven’t let much of it get out,’ he said, ‘but all hell has been let loose. I’ve been up to my neck for the last month. Coming here’s been rather restful, really.’

She nodded. ‘Jim told me a bit about it. He’s been to see me once or twice.’

‘Jim? Atherton?’

‘Of course Atherton.’ She smiled at his absurdity. ‘How many Jims do we know?’

‘You’ve been seeing Atherton?’

‘Oy,’ she said, protesting at his choice of words. ‘He comes to see me now and then.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he likes me and I like him. And because he’s the only person in the world I can talk about you to.’

‘Oh.’ The last words seemed to him faintly comforting. She put a hand up to field her hair out of her eyes. It was longer – she evidently hadn’t had it cut for a while. He said, ‘Look, shall we get out of this wind? Could you – do you fancy a spot of lunch? There’s a pub just along here—’

He expected her to refuse, but after a moment she nodded. ‘I’ll have to keep an eye on the time, though.’

‘Yes, me too,’ he said defensively. She turned and they walked back up the hill together, awkwardly, far apart in case they might brush accidentally. It was a horrible pub he never went in – modern, built for tourist through-put, full of young people from the offices, loud music, keg beer, overpriced plastic sandwiches. On the other hand, no-one he knew would come in here, and he had walked up this way in the first place to get away from them.

He bought drinks and sandwiches, and then they shoved their way through to a corner and managed to get the reversion to a couple of warm, just-vacated seats at a table awash with spilt beer and piled with dirty plates. It seemed, somehow, right that they should meet at last in such unpropitious surroundings. Surely the gods’ envy would be appeased and they would look away for a few moments?

‘It’s a horrible pub,’ Joanna said, as if she had read his thoughts. ‘No-one would ever think of looking for us here.’

‘It’s good to feel safe. Everyone at the court is trying to winkle information out of me,’ he said.

‘Does that mean you aren’t going to tell me?’

‘Oh no, you’re different. If you really want to know—?’

‘Of course I do!’ A young couple came to play the fruit
machine which was right next to them, so she shifted her chair closer to his and leaned towards him. The piped music and the electronic warbling of the machine would have foiled any listening device known to man, let alone human ears. ‘You know I won’t tell. So tell.’

He told.

Barrington got up abruptly from his desk, and walked back and forth across the room in front of his window. It made him hard to see, big and black against the bright May sunshine, stroboscopic as he cut in and out of the shadow of the glazing bars. Finally he turned and dropped his fists threateningly on the desk top. ‘You’ve no evidence for any of this. No evidence at all.’

‘No sir,’ Slider said.

‘It’s all suggestion. Innuendo.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Don’t agree with me, damn you!’ Barrington bellowed. Slider could see he was worried. The granite face revealed nothing, but the eyes were thoughtful. There must have been occasions –
must
have been – when he had asked himself questions. But perhaps not these questions.

‘All I ask, sir, is that some enquiries be made. Some we can carry out, but others – concerning a possible missing microchip, for instance – will have to go through other channels.’

‘You don’t want much, do you?’ Barrington enquired fiercely.

Atherton put in his word. ‘Sir, if Chang is innocent, and he’s really gone on holiday, it ought to be easy enough for the FBI to find him. But if he is missing—’

‘When I want your input, I’ll ask for it,’ Barrington snapped. But now Atherton could see he was shaken, and that shook Atherton.

‘At the very least, there are some things that need explaining,’ Slider said gently. ‘Mr Cate lied about how he met Ronnie Slaughter. He lied about that note he said Ronnie had written in his presence. And his ownership of the properties involved in the case is at the least an odd
coincidence—’

‘Alleged ownership,’ Barrington interrupted. ‘You have no evidence that he has anything to do with Shax.’

‘I think Peter Davey would tell the truth if he was leaned on,’ Slider said. ‘The mark on Leman’s palm could be matched to his earring. And there’s the question of the ring. Why would Leman’s fingers have been cut off if not to retrieve—’

Barrington straightened up abruptly, and a look of great bitterness crossed his face. ‘You just couldn’t do as you were told, could you? You had to disobey orders. Indiscipline is at the bottom of every evil in society today.’

‘Sir,’ Atherton protested, unable to help himself.

Barrington spared him only a glance. His attention was all on Slider. ‘It will be out of our hands,’ he said. ‘Once you start asking questions of US military intelligence—’

If there is such a thing, Atherton added silently to himself. In the face of deep peril, it is the custom of Englishmen to make jokes.

Barrington released Slider from the burning glance, and turned his cratered face away towards the window. Was it imagination, or did his silhouette already look diminished? ‘Go away and write me a full report. Have it on my desk by the end of the afternoon. I’ll read it and think about it. That’s all I can promise.’

‘What about Mr Cate, sir?’ Slider asked, with the air of a man reluctant to kick another when he’s down, but forced by circumstance at least to prod him with a toecap.

Barrington did not look round. His eyes were fixed on the shining spaces of the Uxbridge Road beyond his clean windows. ‘He’s not going anywhere,’ he said shortly. ‘Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t get far. He’s too well known.’ They waited for more, but all he said was, ‘Just get out, will you?’

It was while they were still writing that the call came through for Atherton from Slim Kim, and he took it in Slider’s room, where they were working one on either side of his desk. The smell of paint was almost gone now, but Slider still found the pale blue of the walls unnerving. It made him feel as though he was in the non-critical ward of
a mental hospital, and he felt enough like that in any case not to want any help from his decor.

‘Interesting,’ Atherton said when he put the phone down. Officially Chou was attached to the Science and Technology branch at Maida Vale, which is what Cate said. He was over here to buy computers and software for his department. But Sun-Hi, Kim’s little friend, says that he was only recently transferred there from the Ministry of Defence. He was with them for a long time. He speaks very good American, and he did a summer course in Political Economy at UCLA last year.’

‘Very interesting,’ Slider said.

‘It still doesn’t prove anything,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘No. It’s all just suggestion. But how much do you have to suggest before it becomes suspicious?’

‘Depends, I suppose, on who you’re suggesting about.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Slider. ‘But three people are dead—’

‘Only one of them known to be connected with Cate,’ Atherton said. ‘I don’t think we’re going to bring this one home. I don’t even think Barrington is going to take it up.’

‘He knows Cate is guilty. You can see it in his face.’

‘Knowing isn’t proving.’ He chewed the end of his pen. ‘Do you think they
were –
you know?’

Slider shook his head. ‘Not my business.’

Atherton tried to be cheerful. ‘Never mind, if we don’t get him, someone else will, sooner or later. You said Tufty warned you about him. And he wasn’t exactly a careful conspirator. He’ll trip himself up one day. In the meantime, there are other villains. And once this report is in, the rest of the day’s our own.’

‘I’d better report to Barrington straight away about Chou,’ Slider said, getting up. ‘I don’t want to annoy him any more at this stage.’

But he found Barrington had gone out not long after he and Atherton had left him, saying he’d be back later. And by the time Barrington did return, the first reports had already come in about a fatal shooting at Chorleywood.

*

‘Apparently,’ Slider said to Joanna, ‘Mrs Cate arrived back home from holiday to find she couldn’t get in. The security gates were double locked and she couldn’t raise anyone inside. She had to go to the local cop shop to get them to override the circuit, and when they managed to get in they found Cate lying dead beside his car and the security guard ditto at the top of the steps. Each had been killed by a single shot from a long-range rifle. It looked as if the guard must have seen Cate fall, and locked the system from the control box before running out to see what was happening. Then of course they shot him as soon as he was in clear view.’

‘Unsporting,’ Joanna said expressionlessly.

‘Ungentlemanly. Well, they found my name in the guard’s occurrence book as the last outside visitor, and then the local DCS remembered that Cate and Barrington were chums and members of the same golf club, so he telephoned through to us to let him know. Of course when Barrington finally got back and heard the news the Shah finally bit the spam. There was no hope for him after that of keeping the whole thing quiet, even if he had wanted to.’

‘So who killed Cate?’ Joanna asked.

‘We don’t know. He and his security man were both shot with the same XL-type long-range rifle. It’s a type that’s commonly used and freely available. Criminals have them. Our own SAS and Anti-Terrorist Squad both use them at times. The IRA have stolen plenty of them. And for the same reasons foreign intelligence services like them – even the CIA on occasion, when they don’t want to leave their calling-card. So it could really have been anyone. It could have been a business associate or an enraged lover, or for all I know Mrs Cate might have found out about his proclivities and hired a hit-man.’

‘Did they break in, or what?’

‘They didn’t need to. The range of the rifle is such that they could have done it from the road if they could have got a clear sight. But it looks as though the shots were fired from the top of a tree on the next property, which was easily accessible. Cate’s neighbours didn’t go in for the same degree of security.’

‘And who do you think it was?’

He glanced automatically around before answering. ‘My own personal preference was the Chinese government. They had the most to lose, and if I were them I’d have wanted to get rid of a conspirator as unsafe as him. He was leaking all over the place, and the questions were being asked too close to home. Our enquiries in Hong Kong and at the embassy must have made them nervous.’

‘You were right about it all, weren’t you?’ she said, almost anxiously, as though it mattered that he should have been.

‘Yes, I was right,’ he said, and sighed unconsciously. ‘It hasn’t made me flavour of the month. Some little questions I’d been asking in the States about the missing Lee Chang met up with some great big questions they were already asking about a missing microchip, and there was an almighty explosion. The Home Office and the Ministry of Defence were both involved – they were badly embarrassed because they’d put so much trust in him – and Special Branch, M13, C13 – you name it! Then we had the Americans accusing the Chinese and the Chinese being righteously offended, and the Foreign Office in the middle trying to keep everything quiet – there was almost a diplomatic incident. It was absolute hell. The reverberations are still going on – fortunately at a level well above my head.’

‘Oh Bill! No wonder you look so worn.’

‘In a way, though, that wasn’t as bad as the storms closer to home.’

‘Barrington?’ He nodded. ‘Washe involved?’

‘It seems not. But I still have my doubts about him. He must at some point have at least suspected that Cate wasn’t completely straight. I think what upset him most, though, was what was revealed about Cate’s personal life – his little love-nests, where he kept his lads. Caged rabbits, Peter Ling called them. They were very much of a type – young men alone in the world, strays who’d cut themselves off from their families, or didn’t have any to begin with. He picked them up, gave them a home and a job and a complete new identity, even a new name sometimes. He recreated them. That way he had complete power over them.’

‘He must have been mad,’ Joanna said dispassionately.

‘Yes, probably,’ Slider said absently. Three of them were
called Peter, that was the odd thing. He wondered whether Cate had really named them all after Peter Ling, or whether there had been another Peter before him, a more fundamental Peter – in childhood perhaps – who was at the bottom of all his strangeness. Well, they’d never know now. Cate had died and taken his mystery with him.

‘You don’t think that he and Barrington—?’ Joanna asked, breaking into his musings.

‘No, I don’t think so. Though I wonder whether Barrington didn’t have suppressed feelings about him.’

‘If he did, and realised it, that might account for why he took it all so badly.’

‘Perhaps,’ Slider said. He had wondered that too. He had also wondered whether perhaps it had been Barrington who had fired those two long-range shots – Barrington who was a fellow member of the Shooting Club, had been a noted marksman in his army days. He had worshipped Cate and been let down by him. Had he wondered all those years whether it was just coincidence that Cate ordered him to leave his post at the Carlisle at the very moment the two villains were making their escape? Had Slider’s new questions and revelations made him think again, brought him to a conclusion? No-one had ever asked where Barrington had gone that afternoon and early evening. Perhaps no-one but Slider had wondered.

‘So I gather from Jim they’re not exactly throwing bouquets your way?’ Joanna was saying. ‘It does’ seem unfair, when you’ve solved the case – three murders.’

‘That’s the way it goes. The whole thing had to be hushed up. Officially Slaughter murdered Lam and then committed suicide out of remorse. And Peter Leman’s murder was a completely unconnected incident.’

‘Peter Davey really did do that, didn’t he?’

Slider grimaced. ‘You and Atherton have been having some talks. Yes, he did. It was on Cate’s orders, but he was jealous enough to have wanted to do it anyway, especially when he was told to retrieve the ring, which of course was a match to the one Cate wore. The trouble’s going to be making up a court case without bringing all this other stuff into it. There’s plenty of evidence against Davey, but juries
always want a motive, and once Cate is mentioned as the lover of both, it’s bound to start other questions being asked. He was such a pillar of society.’