Requiem (36 page)

‘No, I am most definitely not. Listen, you have the wrong number!’

Susan thought: Bad-tempered, too. ‘Oh, sorry. I looked you up in the book. I thought …’

But there was a click then the buzz of an empty line.

Susan put down the phone, glowing with self-congratulation. In her heyday as a model she’d posed for Bailey, Parks, O’Neill – all the best – she’d even done bit-parts in a couple of commercials, but until now she’d never quite appreciated the extent of her talent to impersonate.

She saw the time. Hastily she phoned Central Office to confirm Tony’s car, and, breaking the habits of a lifetime, managed to shower, throw on some makeup and get dressed in twenty minutes flat, so that she was standing at the door to welcome Tony when he finally returned at nine twenty, delayed, he said, by heavy traffic. He looked preoccupied and grim. Two minutes later she was back at the door, the diary and memo book in hand, ready to pass them to him as he flew out of the house again. At the sight of them he looked startled, patted his pockets, and frowned at her.

‘You left them by the phone,’ she said.

‘Good God. Thanks.’ He peered into the street to make sure the official car was there, kissed her briefly, started down the steps and turned back. ‘I’ll call you the moment I get some news.’ He grinned suddenly, a pathetic almost apologetic smile. ‘Don’t get too excited.’

‘Ha! No less than the cabinet!’

He managed a laugh, but she could see that he was deep in some torturous gloom. ‘Oh, and Susan – the car. I couldn’t find a space for it. Would you?’

He indicated the Rover, which was parked on a yellow line.

‘Of course.’

She waved him goodbye. The perfect wife.

Drab utilitarian stuff. Hillyard wrinkled his nose slightly at the Chairman Mao shirt and Castro fatigues, though that didn’t prevent him from flicking diligently through the remainder of the hangers. There was only one frock that could be described as stylish, and that was a drapy floral number which would look rather fetching in a country garden, taking tea under an apple tree.

Replacing the dress, he went quickly through the chest of drawers. Cheap Marks and Spencer underwear. Nothing remotely lacy or silly. Except for one nightdress, a present from a rich boyfriend perhaps, although it was hard to imagine Miss Field having friends who even began to verge on the stylish. He ran his fingers over the fabric. Silk: wonderful next to the skin.

There was a clutter of papers by the bed. Kneeling, he went through them methodically, but there was nothing to catch his attention, just periodicals and reports.

He glanced along the shelf of tapes above the tape player. She’d tidied them, he noticed, even rearranged them since his last visit. Put the classics at the far end and the pop music, which accounted for most of the collection, at the near end. While the case-history tapes, the ones he had come to look at, had disappeared. He exhaled crossly and it wasn’t until he turned to look around the rest of the room that he spotted the stack of tapes on the desk under the window, perched on a pile of papers. He could almost hear Beryl’s gravelly voice saying: Who’s a lucky boy, then?

The window, a bay, was tall and uncurtained, the sun hitting the glass and spreading over the film of London grime like gold dust, so that even the most vigilant neighbour would have trouble seeing in. He sat at the desk and, slipping the tapes out of their boxes one by one, made a careful note of which tapes belonged in which boxes before exchanging them for the blanks in his pocket. Just as he was restacking the boxes on the pile of papers the phone rang with a loud shrill. Out of long habit he froze until, with the clicking of the answering machine, he could once more hear beyond the flat to the sounds on the communal stairs and the street below.

The answering machine spewed out its message, broadcasting it through the room. ‘
I’m not here just at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message …
’ The caller took up her invitation, announcing himself as Campbell from Loch Fyne.

Hillyard suddenly straightened and strode through to the bathroom. Springing onto the side of the bath, he opened a door set high in the wall and thrust his ear as close as possible to the cupboard inside. The hot water gurgled in the tank below, a pipe expanded with a tick-ticking sound, but even when these extraneous sounds ceased it was impossible to hear the whir of the tape in its hidey hole behind the thick bundles of old blankets and abandoned clothing that filled the available space. The caller rang off. There was a clunk from the answering machine in the main room, but from behind the high-set cupboard there was not the faintest sound.

He didn’t disturb the machine – he’d already had it out once to change the tape and renew the batteries – but closed the door and stepped down, carefully wiping any trace of footmarks from the edge of the bath.

As he passed the bathroom wall-cabinet he took a quick look inside on the principle that you never knew what you might find, then, after a quick perusal of the street from the bay window, let himself out. He had obtained a full set of her keys, copied from the spare set she kept in the top right-hand drawer of her desk.

The car was parked in an adjacent street, guarded by Beji. He drove to the heath, to a popular parking place where old dears sat in their cars enjoying the sun and determined dog-walkers set off briskly, chins jutting, into the wind.

Hillyard collected a holdall from the boot, slid the driver’s seat back as far as it would go and, settling himself comfortably with legs outstretched, began the time-consuming task of dubbing the tapes. He plugged the tape machine into the 12-volt lighter socket and, inserting the first pair of tapes, set the high-speed dubber in motion. He listened to the senseless jabbering for a moment before turning the volume down and making some cryptic notes in his personalized shorthand. These related to the message he’d heard in the flat.
Campbell, Loch Fyne. May have found (an)? airfield to west of Stirling.
There had been something else noteworthy in the message, but with the distractions of the bathroom expedition, it took him a while to recollect exactly what it was. He wrote:
No luck on the spray
. When the last tape had been copied he put the originals back in his pocket, repacked the holdall and returned it to the boot. As he headed back through Highgate, he hummed contentedly, thinking of the thick body of facts that would go into the next report. Some weeks it had been necessary to pad things out a bit. Then Beryl, exercising all her wicked ingenuity, had massaged the story forward, hinting at the promise of future disclosures without ever quite diverting from the facts, or, indeed, the lack of them. But this week no padding would be necessary, not so long as Beryl got moving on the transcriptions and had them finished in time.

He followed the same route back to Upper Holloway and parked within sight of the Field woman’s flat. More from habit than the expectation of seeing anything, he watched the dust-coated windows of the first-floor flat for a couple of minutes before getting out and strolling gently towards the front steps. He was pulling the keys out of his pocket, preparing himself for a rapid entry, when he spotted a man at the far end of the street walking briskly down the hill towards him. At that distance Hillyard couldn’t make out his face but he had a sudden and unpleasant suspicion that this was someone associated with the Field woman. A firm disciple of his own intuition, he accelerated into a more purposeful stride and, ignoring the house, kept walking.

Within a few yards Hillyard realized several things simultaneously: that he had been mistaken and didn’t recognize the man at all, and that the approaching figure’s resemblance, such as it was, had been to the Field woman’s boyfriend, the
Sunday Times
journalist, Simon Calthrop, and it was this that had sounded the faint alarm in his mind.

If he’d had more time to think about it, he’d have known a visit from Calthrop wasn’t likely. The boyfriend always liked the Field girl to go to him. But better safe than locked up, as Beryl liked to point out.

Passing the man, Hillyard carefully averted his eyes, and reaching the end of the street took a quick look back to make doubly sure that the man was not after all entering number fifty, before turning left and left again, to beat a circuitous path back to the car.

There he waited until there was a nice long lull in the business of the street. Letting himself back into the flat, he replaced the blank tapes with the originals, and stacked them carefully on the pile of papers, exactly where he’d found them.

He was in and out within two minutes. To a casual observer, a resident who’d just popped in for something.

There was a mammoth jam in Park Lane and it took him a good hour to get back to Battersea. He spent the time entertaining himself with Beji, dangling choccy drops above her nose.

N
ORMALLY SCHENKER NEVER
ate alone in hotel suites – he resented the waste of executive time – but today he made an exception and ate breakfast in front of the TV so as to catch the first news of the British government appointments.

Cable news finally delivered at seven, but gave only the top four cabinet appointments. Schenker called Cramm’s room immediately to find that his assistant, ever the great anticipator, had at that very moment plucked the information from the Reuters wire service.

Driscoll had got Agriculture.

Schenker beamed. He beamed at himself in the mirror as he adjusted his tie, and he smiled at Cramm as they descended to the Plaza’s main lobby and went out to the waiting limo. There were still faint signs of pleasure on his face as they headed downtown to their appointment on Madison Avenue.

‘The right man,’ he remarked in a self-indulgent murmur.

‘Absolutely,’ echoed Cramm dutifully.

And the right man twice over, Schenker comforted himself. Not only was Driscoll a friend in the most beneficial sense of the word, but almost any change would have been a vast improvement on the last incumbent, Cranbourne, whose obstructive little ways had been a thorn in Schenker’s flesh for a long time. Fortunately Cranbourne had overreached himself and made a slip just before the election. In better times the mistake – allowing the export of some unsafe meat – would hardly have rated more than a brief rebuke in the press, but Cranbourne had failed to realize that for a politician without friends, errors, however minor, were inclined to be fatal. Provided with the appropriate facts – and journalists existed to be fed facts – the media had developed the affair into a minor scandal. The timing hadn’t helped the government’s election chances of course, but that was a risk that had had to be taken.

‘You always knew it would be Driscoll,’ Cramm said with suitable admiration.

Schenker shrugged modestly. ‘Not
knew
. Just weighed up the chances, and he always came out on top. Not too much of a high-flier, you see. Not too ambitious. Not foreign secretary or home secretary material. And he knows it. That’s his strength. Steady, good grounding, solid ability, someone who can be relied on to spare the prime minister unpleasant surprises.’

‘He’s got a lot to deliver though, hasn’t he?’ said Cramm delicately. ‘The manifesto, those environmental commitments … they were pretty heavy.’

‘This government will never push Green issues at the expense of its economic programme,’ said Schenker with confidence. ‘The economy comes first and, whatever the British people may say, however Green they may think they are, the economy will always come first with them too.’ Summing it up as he thought rather neatly, he added: ‘Food before ideas. Always has been, always will be.’

The Food Bill, which everyone had got in such a panic about, had quickly got bogged down at committee stage, and the more extreme clauses gradually thinned down until, thanks to the snap election, the entire Bill had got killed off. The government had of course promised to reintroduce the legislation, which was only to be expected, but the details had been left acceptably indeterminate. With Driscoll safely in the chair, the insane warning-label idea for food was not likely to emerge again, and with a bit of luck – which, since Schenker left nothing to chance, meant a lot of hard work – the sampling and penalty proposals would lose most of their teeth.

As the limousine undulated down Fifth Avenue, Schenker allowed himself a rare moment of optimism.

Cramm cleared his throat and said: ‘That problem at the Aurora works, the health scare – ’

‘I thought that was under control.’

‘In so far as it was possible, yes. But there are ripples. EarthForce, the environmental group, are pressing the EPA to investigate the health reports, and a local congressman’s got hold of the story and is hammering the press.’

‘We don’t need this now.’ Schenker was thinking of the US launch of Silveron which, after interminable delays, was finally within sight. He was also thinking of the Stock Market, where Morton-Kreiger shares were still under pressure. ‘Who’s been talking?’ he asked grimly. ‘That scientist again?’

‘MKI thinks it was this local doctor who’s been treating the Silveron workers. Someone called Burt. They’re looking into it.’