Requiem (93 page)

Arguments that didn’t bear much examination; but they kept her going while she waited breathlessly in the darkness. The silence was worse this time because she knew he moved soundlessly, and, while he might well have left the room, he could just as easily be inches away, his hand reaching slowly for the door, or, worse, just standing there, waiting.

The silence stretched out. The sounds in Peregrine Road, now stifled by the closed window, were barely audible: a dog barking, the occasional car, a jet rumbling over on its descent to Heathrow. After a time she persuaded herself that the room was empty again. When ten minutes’ silence had passed she murmured inwardly,
This is ridiculous
, and reached for the door again, one hand to the hook, the other to the door edge. She pushed gently but the door didn’t shift. She tried harder. It was very stiff. She ran over her memories of the door: the soft click when she had pulled it shut, the operation of the simple spring-ball arrangement, the knob on the outside which had been of the fixed non-turning variety, the impossibility of a latch or anything heart-stopping like that.

She pushed again, really hard this time. And again.

And then for an instant her heart really did stop, because as she put her whole weight against the door, she realized it would never open. It had been locked from the outside.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. Over the bicycle shop. An’ look, the hire car’s still there. Three down, behind the white one.’

Nick looked at the Escort, then surveyed the building. It was on the opposite corner, on a junction with a small street called Peregrine Road, whose name, set on a plate on the side wall, was just visible in the streetlights. A single white light glowed dimly in the window of the shop. The windows above were in darkness.

‘The door, it’s at the side there.’

Campbell’s voice tightened oddly, and Nick took a quick look at him. He sat stiffly in the passenger seat, his head pressed back against the rest, his lower lip pushed out fiercely, like a bulldog’s. In the thin light it was hard to tell if he was in pain or just exhausted.

‘You all right?’

‘Huh? I’m a’right,’ he replied testily. It was the answer he’d given at the hospital when Nick had picked him up from the casualty department an hour before. His only visible signs of injury, then as now, were a puffy left eye and a long cut over the lid which had been fixed with Elastoplast, giving him the look of a boxer after a choppy fight. The nurse had mentioned something about concussion, but Campbell had brushed the idea aside.

Nick turned off the engine and peered forward to take another look at the building. Was Daisy still there? He tried to imagine her somewhere behind the dark windows. Was she lying unconscious? But no, why would they have attacked her? There wouldn’t have been any need to subdue her, not like with Campbell. Trapped then? But why would they have kept her there, why would they bother?

He sighed fretfully: ‘We should have gone straight to the police. There’s nothing we can do here!’

‘Ha!’ Campbell brayed his contempt. ‘An’ what would
they
be doin’ that we canna’?’

‘Having the law on their side,’ Nick replied.

‘Aye, an’ they’d just listen like lambs, would they? They’d just come along an’ do as we asked, would they?’

Nick, remembering that he was up on drugs charges and Campbell on bail for assault, reluctantly felt himself giving way, though it went against his better judgement.

‘But why would she still be here?’ he argued.

‘Huh? Well, she didna’ come out, did she?’

‘How do you
know
? You were in the gutter unconscious.’

‘But she’d have made a call if she’d have got out, would she not? She’d have taken the car. She’d have called Ashard.’

There was no denying that and, momentarily silenced, another idea came to Nick: that she’d had an accident, tried to climb out and fallen from a window. The idea, dramatic and unlikely though it was, began to fix itself in his mind.

‘Perhaps we should ask at the hospitals.’

‘Eh?’ Campbell dismissed it with a blow of his lips. ‘But they’d have brought her to the emergency there’ – he gestured over his shoulder in the general direction of the hospital they had just left – ‘I would’ve seen her.’ He moved his bulk towards the door, impatient for action.

But Nick had a good idea of the action Campbell had in mind, and he didn’t want any of that, not if it could possibly be avoided. ‘Wait,’ he insisted firmly. ‘Let’s decide what we’re going to do – to say.’

‘Say?’ Campbell sucked in his breath disapprovingly. ‘Best to go straight in’ – he thrust an arrowlike hand in the direction of the building – ‘take a look around, see if she’s there, an’ talk later.’

‘That’s a sure way to get into trouble!’ Nick snapped. ‘They might call the police.’

Campbell threw him an incredulous look. ‘What? They’d no more call the police than I would!’

‘We don’t know that,’ Nick argued, zipping up his jacket with finality. ‘But whatever happens violence isn’t going to help.’ He was aware of sounding sanctimonious, but he didn’t know how else to dampen Campbell’s insatiable appetite for action.

‘Stay here,’ Nick instructed, and before Campbell could argue he got out and strode across Peregrine Road to the entrance in the wall. It was barely six and still pitch black; there weren’t many people around yet, just the occasional car in the main road. The door was in a bad way, splintered and bent around the remains of the lock. It had been patched up with pieces of plywood, nailed roughly into place. A square of white card had been pinned to the door. Peering at it closely, he read:
Reynard Associates are temporarily closed for staff holidays.

Nick pressed the bell, waited, then pressed the second bell. After four tries he left his finger on both bells.

No one came.

He returned to the car with a sense of anticlimax.

‘Should a’ gone straight in,’ mumbled Campbell, a note of censure in his voice. ‘Now they’ll know we’re here.’

Nick clenched the wheel. ‘I want to find her, Campbell, just as much as you do.’

His remark seemed to trigger something in Campbell for, without a word, he got out of the car. Nick shouted, but there was no stopping him.

Nick watched half in agitation, half in fascination as Campbell strode up to the door and beat on it with both hands. Ignoring the stares of a passer-by, he then kicked viciously at a point half way up the door where the lock should have been. When that failed he ran the full weight of his shoulder against it, and looked surprised when the door withstood his advances. He was rallying himself for another go when a man on the corner of the main road started shouting and gesticulating at him. Then Nick saw that the gestures weren’t aimed
at
Campbell, but
towards
Campbell, as if directing someone towards the scene. Suddenly appreciating his danger, Campbell abandoned the door and, looking over his shoulder, half walked, half ran back to the car. Nick, falling into the required role of getaway driver, had the engine running and the car moving even as Campbell climbed in. Braking to turn out into the main road, he saw a uniformed policeman pounding up to the passer-by, who was pointing towards the car.

Nick shot out into the road and accelerated away, his ears singing, his heart pumping, feeling the policeman’s eyes burning into the illuminated car registration. The car lights – he should never have turned them on! What a stupid mistake! Then, when the worst of his panic had subsided and he’d got things into some sort of proportion, he realized that it wasn’t the lights that had been the mistake, but allowing Campbell to talk him into such a crazy idea in the first place.

He wasn’t capable of speech for some time and it was Campbell who broke the silence as they crossed the river.

‘A regret,’ he said with feeling. ‘A real regret. I was almost there!’

Nick pressed his lips together and parked in silence just the other side of the King’s Road. Using the car phone he called Jenny at Glen Ashard, but there was no news. They walked back to a café-brasserie that was just opening up, ready to catch the yuppie breakfast trade.

Nerves partially restored by strong coffee, Nick made Campbell go through the whole evening again in more detail, from the time he and Daisy had got inside the place until the moment he woke in the street with the ambulancemen leaning over him. Campbell, speaking haltingly, got as far as the tape recordings and the invoices and the Work-ham Overseas Holdings files when his ruddy cheeks turned ashen and he clutched a hand to his injured head.

After that he wasn’t much good for anything. Nick offered to deposit him at a doctor but with some predictability Campbell wasn’t having any of that and lay back in his seat, pale and uncommunicative, as they drove through the first knots of rush-hour traffic to Scotland Yard.

‘What was she doing there exactly?’

The inspector’s manner was deceptively benign, making it only too easy to overlook the directness of the question.

Nick replied carefully: ‘She went there for information.’

‘What kind of information?’

How much to tell? ‘Information about the illegal bugging of her telephone – and other things.’

The inspector smiled blandly and raised an eyebrow to show that he was prepared to be moderately impressed. Having become something of a judge of policemen over the last months, Nick put him down as shrewd rather than bright, a man who had carved out a niche that exactly suited his talents. Greying and pouchy, he seemed poured into his seat. The benevolence, the unhurried speech, the apparent sloth were, Nick suspected, part of a well-practised approach, designed to lull, lure and, quite probably, to drive people to confession through sheer frustration. It was almost an hour since Nick had announced himself at the desk downstairs, and forty minutes since he had been ushered in to see this man Morgan. Yet far from responding to the urgency, it seemed to Nick in his present mood that Morgan was taking pleasure in slowing things down.

Morgan asked: ‘And what makes you so sure she’s still in there?’

‘I told you – the car. And she would have called if she’d managed to get out. It’s the first thing she would have done.’

‘So why would she be having trouble in getting out? Why would anyone want to prevent her?’

At Campbell’s insistence, Nick hadn’t mentioned the fact that Campbell had been there, hadn’t suggested that Daisy was anything but alone. ‘These people had been spying on her,’ Nick offered. ‘They knew she was on to them, they knew she was going to expose them. They would have had good reason to shut her up.’

‘But she hadn’t called us in?’ Morgan murmured. ‘She hadn’t thought it serious enough for that?’

Watching the inspector, Nick was suddenly reminded of the roomful of doctors he’d faced during Alusha’s illness and how they had worn the same look of condescension and quiet disbelief. Goaded by tiredness and old anger, Nick added testily: ‘You don’t seem to believe me.’

‘If I didn’t believe you, Mr Mackenzie, I wouldn’t have sent a car to go and look, would I?’

‘But can they get in? Can they search the place?’

‘Not without a warrant.’

‘And will you get a warrant?’

‘Not without some evidence.’ He gave a humouring smile. ‘Which is the purpose of these questions, Mr Mackenzie.’ He took a long languid breath. ‘Now this company, Reynard Associates – you say they’re private investigators?’

‘I told you … Look, can’t we do this later?’

‘But why not now, Mr Mackenzie? Is there some difficulty?’ The ingenuous smile.

‘Because – ’ Nick could almost hear Campbell’s voice, telling him that this was just what he had warned him about, all talk and no action. ‘Because there’s no time!’

The inspector dropped his eyes slowly to the desk and examined his pen. When he looked up there was an obdurate look beneath the benevolent gaze. ‘We’ll hurry as best we can, Mr Mackenzie. In the meantime, Reynard Associates – would you mind?’ Nick saw that there was to be no escape, not for the time being at least, though that didn’t stop him from burying his head in his hands. Then, drawing a deep breath, he started to go through it again.

It was nine fifteen by the time Nick called an exasperated halt. The patrol men sent to ring on the side door in Peregrine Road had drawn a blank, and the inspector was showing no signs of trying for a warrant. Leaving Morgan to dig up what he could on Reynard Associates, Nick got down to the car to find Campbell half asleep in the passenger seat. He was grey-faced and groggy, but that didn’t stop him remarking: ‘What did I tell you, hey?’ with a glint of satisfaction.

Nick called Jenny at Ashard again, but there was still no news.

Intending to drop Campbell off into the care of his housekeeper in Kensington, Nick headed west. His route took him close by David’s place in Knightsbridge and, realizing David might still be at home, he diverted into Montpelier Square.

David emerged from the door of his immaculate town house and stared at Nick disbelievingly before his face lit up like a child’s for whom a long-heralded promise has unexpectedly come true. ‘Nick! You made it! You made it!’ He must have been shaving because he was still in his dressing gown and there were smudges of foam on his ears.

Nick remembered his promise of the previous afternoon. ‘David, I’ll try to get into the studio later, I promise.’

David’s expression underwent a painful transformation from open joy to the sort of dull hurt shown on the faces of ill-treated dogs in advertisements for animal charities.

‘David, a favour. Could you trace a company for me? It’s called Workham Overseas Holdings.’

With a sigh David turned away and padded off across the hall and down the stairs. Nick followed him into the basement kitchen, a mock-German-farmhouse affair with a dazzling ceiling of recessed spotlights, walls of dark oak fittings and a central island that sported hanging copper pans which gleamed from lack of use.

‘It’s based in the Cayman Islands,’ Nick prompted.

David flicked on a coffee percolator, filled it with water and, opening a cupboard, pulled out two cups and deposited them noisily on the work surface. His movements were slow and heavy, as if he was suddenly very tired. ‘Can’t be done,’ he said laconically.