The Avenue of the Dead (25 page)

‘If she does,' Grant said, ‘it's still too late. He obviously panicked and killed his wife. There won't be any hiding that away. It hasn't gone according to plan, has it, John?'

‘No,' Kidson said. ‘It hasn't. Not that I quite knew what the chief's plan was. Elizabeth Fleming was always in danger from the KGB.'

‘Naturally; if they acted against her that reinforced our case against the husband. We were waiting to see if that happened. Had it done, she'd have either vanished or been the victim of a very convincing accident. Not murdered and hidden in her own car in her own garage. That, my dear John, is not the way the opposition protect their agents! Which makes Fleming the killer. And a clumsy one, unfortunately for us. It's going to be difficult convincing the chief that there hasn't been all-round incompetence.'

‘I expect it is,' Kidson said sharply. ‘Here's Hickling now. Peter? Where the hell have you been? Mr Grant's been waiting nearly half an hour.'

‘I'm sorry,' Peter Hickling said. He offered his hand to Humphrey, who shook it reluctantly and briefly. ‘Did you have a good flight?'

‘I don't know. I slept.'

‘Sorry I was out,' Hickling went on. He gave Kidson a quick glance; it wasn't at all friendly. ‘I went out to meet a contact from the CIA. We've done deals before, exchanging information. I asked him to check the registration number on the cab that picked up Mrs Fleming. And I struck lucky.'

He paused; both his seniors were watching him intently. ‘The cab that abducted her was one of their own decoys,' he said. ‘She was picked up that night by the CIA and taken in. I think that alters the picture quite considerably.'

There was a silence that seemed to Hickling to go on too long. Then Humphrey spoke to Kidson. ‘It does indeed,' he said. He let out a long slow sigh.

‘What a tiresome, brutal lot of bunglers they are,' he said. ‘I think we are in a position now to ask for an urgent meeting with our erstwhile colleague Mr Spencer-Barr. I want to hear his explanation of covering up a CIA murder by framing their own Assistant Under-Secretary of State. Get him on the phone, will you, Hickling? Thank you.'

Lomax's ID card got him and Davina and Charlie past the CIA man sitting inside Fleming's front door. He stared after the younger woman as she walked past him, and puckered his mouth in a whistle. He knew the British were an odd lot, but if that woman was a cop …

Davina said, ‘Charlie, you and Colin better wait downstairs. I'll go and see if Fleming is able to talk.'

He was in a spare bedroom; the guard on the upper landing opened the door to her. He was sitting up against the pillows and his eyes were dull, the pupils enlarged. Davina sat down on the edge of the bed. Fleming looked at her. ‘Get to hell out of here!' he said.

‘I came to see how you were. And to say I'm sorry about Elizabeth.'

‘You're not sorry about anything,' he muttered. He lolled sideways on the pillow and for a moment his eyelids closed. ‘She's dead, and I did it. That's all there is. I give up; now go away, will you?'

‘No, I won't,' Davina said. ‘Because I don't accept what you've just said. I don't believe for a minute that you killed your wife.'

He turned back and opened his eyes. ‘You must be the only one,' he said. ‘The CIA, John Kidson – they were all here yesterday, and they know I'm guilty. They just haven't made up their minds how to hush up the scandal.'

‘They can't,' she said. ‘We've got less than two days to prove you're innocent. It was a plant, Edward.'

He sneered at her, his mouth twisted into a grimace. ‘You know I'm a Russian agent, don't you? You know I stood back and let one woman burn to death. How come you're so sure I didn't choke the next one …'

‘Because I'm not a bloody fool,' Davina snapped. ‘You had that diary hanging over your head – you couldn't have hurt her if you'd wanted to. You don't take risks like that; you're not the reckless type. You listen to me. I don't give a tinker's damn about you, Edward Fleming. You turned Elizabeth into a drunk and a slut. She wasn't much to start with, but by the time she'd been married to you …'

‘That's not true!' he summoned enough breath to shout, and heaved himself upright. ‘She drank, but my guess is she'd been doing it all the time, and hid it from me before we got married – but she didn't sleep around.'

‘She never had a lover?' Davina insisted.

‘Oh yes, one. One guy I found out about – she admitted it. She was drunk when it happened. Ellen hated her – she'd say anything, she hated her so much.' He sighed, the effort had exhausted him. ‘She made Ellen get rid of her dog,' he muttered. ‘That started it.'

‘You hated her too, didn't you?'

‘Yes, I hated her. I hated the sight of her. As much as I loved her, and that is one hell of a lot.'

‘Why?' She shook his arm. ‘Tell me. Why did you hate her so much? Because of the man, the drink – why?'

‘I forgave the man,' he said slowly. ‘I had to; I had to find an excuse. I tried to live with the drink.' He stared at Davina without focusing on her. ‘It wasn't easy, but I tried. I did love her very much. I kept reminding myself of how she was when I first met her. She was beautiful but it was more than that. Beautiful women grow on trees here; every sidewalk is crammed with beautiful girls. But she had a beautiful nature. There wasn't a lousy thought in her head or a mean word about anybody. And she was no tramp, whatever you say – she never slept with me in Mexico, and Jesus, I tried hard enough at first … then I realized she wasn't that kind of woman. I respected her, doesn't that sound funny to a liberated little hard-nose like you? Sure it does, but it's true. I wanted to marry her, take care of her. I closed my eyes to it all at first. She was such a liar, that was the first shock. She sneaked about the place, drinking on the side, sidling up to me one minute wanting to go to bed, yelling at me the next; she picked on Ellen, she started touting for clients to do up their houses for them, and she wouldn't accept that it jeopardized my position in Washington. There was a row that I'll never forget. She used language … I couldn't believe it.'

‘I want to ask you one thing,' said Davina. ‘It's very important you tell me the truth. Was there anything that happened to make Elizabeth go to pieces like that? Anything between you after you got married? Your sex life? Did you put pressures on her?'

He said dully, ‘Nothing happened. No traumas, nothing. So far as sex is concerned, all I wanted was a lot of it. She did too. I don't have any kinks, if that's what you're getting at.'

‘You said,' she continued after a pause, ‘that she wasn't very keen on sex – before you married, anyway. Now you say she liked it. Did that happen quickly?'

‘I'm good in bed,' he answered. ‘I made sure she liked it. You must be quite a kinky lady, asking all these questions. She hated you, did you know that?'

‘No,' Davina said quietly. ‘I didn't. We weren't friends at school, but she was always telling me she was fond of me. She was on the phone every minute if I didn't see her. Why do you say she hated me?'

‘Because she did,' he answered. ‘Miss Smart-Ass, she used to call you. I heard her say it, when she hung up after talking to you. She thought she was alone. I didn't ask about it; she was just being nice to your face, making use of you. That was Elizabeth.'

‘Yes,' Davina said. ‘You identified her, didn't you?'

He nodded. ‘Ellen found her. I identified her. I cracked, but it was just shock. Shock and the strain and your bloodhound Kidson on my back. It wasn't grief.'

‘I'm not surprised,' Davina said. ‘I'm going now.' He glanced at her from the pillow; his face was grey and the cheeks had sunk.

‘And you still think I didn't kill her?'

‘I'm perfectly certain you didn't.'

‘I'm not a Soviet agent either. Not that anyone believes me.'

‘I believe you,' Davina Graham said. She opened the door and went out.

‘How do you account for this, Jerry?' The director asked the question very quietly. Spencer-Barr was standing in front of his desk; he hadn't been invited to sit down.

The pick-up team were being assembled, and the two responsible for Elizabeth Fleming's surveillance were on their way back from the East Coast where Jeremy had exiled them. Messages hummed from the director's office. One message was still to be delivered. He hadn't decided when to inform the President of what had happened. It had to be timed exactly, so that the President heard from the director before there was any leak to the media, or any echo from the giant sounding-board of Washington rumour. The police were pledged to secrecy, the Fleming household was being guarded without any outward sign of a police presence, the telephone was monitored and calls were referred to Fleming's secretary. Fleming himself had recorded a message saying he was going out of town for two days, and this had been played over to the unsuspecting staff in his office when his secretary checked the recording machine for late messages. It was sewn up and sealed tight like a plastic bag full of poison gas.

‘How did you let it happen?' the director said.

‘I don't understand your question, sir,' Jeremy fenced with outward coolness. ‘Nothing happened to Mrs Fleming as a result of her interview with me. She was questioned, warned, and then driven back to her home. You've had the tapes and the transcript. My people set her down and she went into the house. That was the last time anyone saw her.'

‘You mean your team lost sight of her until her body was discovered? And you didn't report to me? You took no action? Explain this – explain why you bawled out your operators and sent them to a low-grade posting. Wasn't that a punishment, a punishment for fouling up the job?'

‘Yes, it was.' He squared his shoulders and looked as if he were going to admit something unpleasant. ‘I believed the British had got her out of the country,' Jeremy said. ‘Two of their people, the woman Graham and a man, came to Fleming's house some time later. They stayed a while and then left. My operatives said they were certain Mrs Fleming wasn't with them. I thought they'd relaxed their surveillance at some point and she'd slipped out to Graham's car. That's why I re-assigned them. They'll confirm this. I was disturbed, sir, very much so. But I decided to wait it out and see if my contacts in England picked her up. In a way I thought I'd achieved my object. She'd left the country and there'd be no more chance of a scandal. I was wrong.'

‘You were,' the director repeated. ‘I told you not to step on any twigs, Jerry, remember? You asked to handle this; I said OK, but I told you to be careful. So what do you do? You take in this woman for an unauthorized interrogation, you frighten the shit out of her – oh yes, that came across in the tapes I heard – how much did you edit out, by the way? Then you send her home to her husband. You send an alcoholic back in a state of panic. Hysteria. That was a fool thing to do – suppose he'd just gone to the President and raised hell? That would have been bad for all of us. Especially you. But he killed her instead. And he's going to stand trial for it, and he's going to testify that she'd been held by the CIA. If he gets the right kind of lawyer – and he will, Jerry, he will – he'll say he found her dead and he panicked. He panicked and hid the body. He knew she took a cab. The two Limeys knew she took one. That cab can be traced if anyone saw the registration. That lands the Agency right in the shit. That's where you've put us, Jerry. In the shit.'

Spencer-Barr opened his mouth but the big square hand came up to silence him.

‘And that's just where I'm going to put you,' the director said. ‘Right in it, Jerry, up to here.'

The hand rose to the level of the director's eyes. ‘You're going to carry the can for the Agency and I'm going to see to it in person that you do. You can walk out of here right now. And you're suspended.'

There was nothing Spencer-Barr could answer. His face had flushed a deep red. He turned and left the office. He had been working at Langley long enough to know that the director would do exactly what he threatened.

Unless he could get the Agency off the hook first. Suspended or not, he went back to his own office and there he found Humphrey Grant's message. He left the building and within an hour he was at the British Embassy, taking the same side entrance as Kidson and Grant had done earlier that morning.

‘There's a funny feel to this house,' Charlie said.

‘That's hardly surprising,' Lomax answered.

‘I mean it doesn't feel like a proper home,' Charlie retorted. ‘Look at this room, for instance, this is the study or whatever Americans call it, the den, that's right. We have a room like this at home, John and I, and my parents always use a small room for relaxing and watching TV. It's supposed to be casual and untidy, somewhere you can put your feet up, pile magazines and papers, generally make a cosy mess. Have you ever seen anything more formal, in a funny way?'

Lomax looked round. ‘I suppose not. We only had the one sitting-room. I'm not too sure what a study ought to look like.'

‘Not like this,' she said firmly. ‘There's only one photograph in the room – that picture of their wedding. It's so impersonal, all perfectly colour-matched and terribly
Homes and Gardens
, but you can't imagine anyone actually spending an evening here. I wonder what the rest of the house is like. Her flat in London wasn't like this. She was very keen on blue … I'd like to wander round, do you think it'd be all right?'

‘If I come with you,' Lomax said. ‘Those gentlemen outside won't let you go anywhere without an ID. Where do you want to go?'

‘To the bathroom for a start,' Charlie said. ‘Upstairs – I'd love to see her bedroom. Why are you looking at me like that, Mr Lomax?'