The Convenience of Lies (21 page)

Thirty-Three

Benwick’s words were edged with genuine anger, controlled but evident in his eyes. It seemed to McCall that the intensity of his feelings was rooted in something deeper than professional animus alone.

He
was coming across as a man starting to make sense of himself to his priest for the night. If his past actions seemed incomprehensible, he might now offer context if only to keep McCall inside the tent while it suited.

Nothing
of what he’d hinted at so far explained why he carried a gun or from what - or whom - he was running, still less his interest in a munitions factory. But this might come with patience.

‘You’ll
have gathered I’m out in the cold,’ Benwick said. ‘But if I’m to tell you things I shouldn’t, then you must be just as open with me.’

‘What
do you want to know?’

‘How
you found me… and this isn’t just about my injured pride because you did, it’s more about my neck.’

Benwick
wasn’t alone in having concerns about personal well being. McCall didn’t feel bad about holding back on the whole story.

‘I
saw the postcard you sent to Malky Hoare,’ McCall said. ‘This helped me to trace the hotel where you’d stayed in Blackrod then I asked around and dropped on someone who’d heard you went bird-watching near the weapons factory.’

‘You’re
saying your first clue was Hoare showing you my postcard?’

‘No,
he didn’t show it to me. I found it when I found his body.’

He
stared at McCall even more intently as the implication of his words registered.

‘Hoare’s
dead?’

McCall
nodded.

‘Christ,
I thought the Lord above was supposed to look out for drunks and fools.’

‘Well,
Fleet Street’s got plenty of both so even He would be hard pushed to keep up.’

‘Was
it natural causes?’

‘It
looked like it to me,’ McCall said. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

Benwick
fell quiet again but hardly with grief. It began to rain, steadily enough to seep through the barn’s dislodged slates and drip on the floor by the window. He took another mouthful of brandy then came at McCall from left field.

‘You’ve
got a source, a man called Roly Vickers.’

‘Have
I?’

‘Yes,
a publisher, does books written by communist bloc defectors once they’ve been pressed dry of all useful information by the British and need a bit of extra money paid by the back door.’

McCall
stayed as expressionless as he could but was alarmed that his contact with Vickers wasn’t the secret he’d always taken it to be.

‘How
do you know him?’

‘I
swam in a small pond, McCall. Vickers might have always appeared to be your friend but he’s a dangerous man to know.’

‘Meaning
what, exactly?’

‘That
he’s an agent of influence for the spooks, does deniable favours for them when they’d rather not show their hand. Because of that, I don’t think it was my postcard which steered you to me, I think it was Roly Vickers.’

This
was Benwick displaying strength while probing for weakness.

‘You
must think what you want,’ McCall said. ‘But why would it concern you if he had given me a leg up?’

‘I’ll
answer that once you prove your loyalty.’

‘Why
do I need to prove loyalty to you?’

‘Because
like it or not, we’re in this mess together. We stand united or fall separately.’

‘Does
this mess involve you being mixed up in an assassination in Belgium back in March?’

‘If
that’s what Roly Vickers told you then he was slipping you a FUD.’

‘A
what?’

‘A
FUD… the creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt among your enemies by the use of disinformation. It’s this relationship you have with Vickers which bothers me.’

McCall
waited. There were times when a denial as to a matter of fact or falsehood could be equally incriminating. This was one of them.

‘I’m
not sure how much I can trust you, McCall. You’re quite amoral. You’d cut a deal with the devil himself if it got you the story you wanted.’

‘Once
upon a time, maybe.’

‘Oh,
really? That doesn’t sound like the guy who once had nerve enough to run around some of the nasty countries where Vickers sent you on errands. Not exactly friendly to Her Majesty’s Government, were they?’

‘Good
stories often happen in bad places.’

‘Sure,
but information is the currency traded by spy and journalist alike, isn’t it?’

‘What
are you getting at?’

‘You
don’t really need me to answer that. Still, I guess all the exclusive stories old Roly put your way in return made the risks worthwhile.’

McCall
winced at the professionally damaging truth of this. Benwick could hold a gun to his head in more ways than one.

*

Lexie, weak and dosed with analgesics, couldn’t be sure if the words going round her head were remembered from a script, a song or a book.

You’ve got to be lost before you can be found
. Only now, capsized by disease and surgery and obliged to audit the ungrounded life she had lived, did she see their relevance to her.

She’d
always presented an image of confident fulfilment. Yet lying in hospital on that sleepless night, Lexie was confronted not just by the fiction of such apparent self-belief but the vacuity of her life, of time wasted and mortality itself. She sensed a curtain coming down on all she had known and had been.

The
slow, electronic tick of the ward clock came through the sighs and groans of other patients. In the bed by Lexie, the breath of an elderly woman guttered in and out from the rafters of bones which were her chest. The tired skin of her face sank into the many hollows of the skull within. And yet a lover might once have craved those lips, blue and bloodless now in this, the dimming of her day.

Who
was she? What was her story? Something about her suggested a likeness to Lexie’s mother - and to how she herself might yet become. Maybe they could exchange a word or a smile after breakfast for who will remember any of us in the end - and for what? We all walk the cobbles of the same coffin path, each weighed down along the way by different burdens.

Lexie
was never sentimental but her emotions no longer seemed under control. Try as she might, she couldn’t fend off the mood of remorse and regret welling within her.

Thirty-Four

‘All right, so you’ve got some black on me,’ McCall said. ‘But don’t tell me you always played by the rules when you were an undercover cop.’

‘Who
says I was a UC… Roly Vickers?’

‘Believe
it or not, I do have other sources.’

Benwick
stretched out his damaged leg towards the fire and took his time finishing the last of the brandy.

‘OK,
McCall… I’ll tell you what’s relevant to Ruby but don’t push for any more.’

Benwick
read linguistics at university then worked at the Foreign Office. Diplomacy was dull so he joined the police. He spoke Russian and some Arabic so was fast-tracked through the ranks.

‘I’m
walking to the tube one morning and - bang, I’m grabbed from behind, my eyes and mouth get taped over, hands bound and I’m shoved in the boot of a car, scared shitless that some terrorists had got me.’

‘That
can’t have been pleasant.’

‘No,
but the car finally stops then I’m put into something like a metal coffin and left there. When it’s finally opened and my eyes get uncovered, some guy’s standing over me having a smoke and he says “…you’ll do. Welcome to S.O.10.”’

‘To
what?’

‘Special
Operations ten, the Met’s undercover unit.’

‘Quite
some job interview.’

‘Yes,
but they needed to see how much stress I could take before I started gibbering.’

‘Why
did they choose you in the first place?’

‘I
guess I’d not been a cop long enough to look or sound like one.’

‘Or
were a plausible liar?’

‘A
useful attribute in both our trades, McCall.’

‘Touché.’

‘Anyway,
I was given the identity of a boy who’d died young and I used his name to build a phoney legend with bank cards, rented flat, driver’s licence, the lot.’

‘So
if any background checks were made, you’d look kosher?’

‘Right,
but I was really in a repertory company run by the cops.’

‘Did
you enjoy the work?’

‘Loved
it, living on nerves and adrenaline, being privy to secrets. All so addictive.’

‘So
how did this lead to you investigating Ruby’s case as a regular detective?’

Benwick
threw more logs on the fire and said it started by him being assigned a role as a lobbyist, cultivating new sources in Westminster.

‘I
hooked into this really strange guy fronting a freelance dirty tricks campaign for the benefit of the Labour Party,’ he said. ‘Always in the market for any dirty gossip about Tory MPs, boozing, extra marital affairs, stuff like that. Every Tuesday, he’d hold court in a curry house in Soho and buy lunch for anyone who delivered the goods.’

‘What
did he do with this gossip?’

‘If
it came up to snuff, he’d plant embarrassing stories in the papers. He was a bit like Vickers in that way, a cut-out for those who wanted to keep in the shadows.’

Benwick
registered this new snout as Auric because his information was ‘…as good as gold’. Auric told him about a young trade union official who arrived one lunchtime, very agitated. He claimed his boss had turned him into a rent boy for the pleasure of some well connected guests at private parties at a house in Clapham, south London.

‘And
he wasn’t a rent boy before?’ McCall said.

‘Possibly,
anyway he named two Conservative politicians who’d sexually assaulted him, one openly gay the other, a real high flyer marked out for high office, unmarried but supposedly straight.’

‘What
was his motive for talking?’

‘He’d
been fired after a big row over pay with his boss.’

‘And
the union’s motive for allegedly pimping him to the MPs?’

‘He
claimed they wanted the high flyer in their pocket, in other words to have enough on him to be able to persuade him into always seeing things the union’s way if he and the Tories came to power.’

‘To
blackmail him? That’s quite a story if it’s true. But how do we know this young bloke wasn’t some fantasist with a persecution complex?’

‘Fair
point but his allegations didn’t stop there. He provided information about some young girls and boys being procured for these parties, too.’

‘Being
sexually abused by these politicians, you mean?’

‘Yes,
and used in vile photographs and videos.’

‘Who
were these kids?’

‘Most
of them had troubled backgrounds, lived in care homes or lived rough so they’d been deliberately targeted for that reason and given drugs and alcohol and a few quid for their pains. If they’d complained, no one would’ve taken any notice because kids like them are seen as worthless anyway.’

‘But
Auric believed his informant?’

‘He
did because he signed a statement with names, dates, times and because he also agreed to talk to me - me being a lobbyist, of course.’

‘Did
you find him a credible witness?’

‘That’s
it - I never got to meet him face to face. He died of a heroin overdose before we could set up a meet.’

‘So
the source was an aggrieved ex-employee, a drug user and a rent boy. Dead or alive, you must have seriously worried about his reliability as a witness.’

‘I
would’ve agreed with you most times but he was about to bring down some mighty powerful people.’

‘You
think his death could have been suspicious?’

‘His
body wasn’t found for two months so whether it was an accidental overdose or murder couldn’t be established.’

‘So
you were snookered?’

‘Yes
but the same devious politicians who’d escaped Operation Kid Glove were still at it and I was damned if they were going to get away with it a second time.’

‘Not
when one of them was a possible future prime minister?’

‘I
take it that’s an educated guess?’

‘Nothing
more,’ McCall said. ‘So you knew perfectly well who Guy Inglis was when he turned up at the reservoir with those other MPs?’

‘Of
course… and don’t think for a minute that was a random inspection. Inglis was there to sniff out anything on our Ruby enquiry.’

Before
McCall could question him further or show him Ruby’s drawings, they both heard a noise outside. Something heavy was knocked over. Benwick motioned McCall to stay still and quiet. He went to the window with his night sights.

‘There’s
a guy running away… and a car, no, two cars. We’ve got to move, McCall.’

They
grabbed their bags and hurried to the shed. Benwick unlocked a cabin-like structure in the corner and heaved out an off-road motorbike. McCall looked on, ever more intrigued by the extraordinary degree of Benwick’s forward planning.

‘Can
you ride one of these things?’

‘Years
ago I could.’

‘Then
start remembering - and quick. My ankle isn’t up to it.’

‘Got
everything you want out of your car?’

‘There’s
that suitcase from the hotel in it, why?’

Benwick
didn’t reply but unscrewed the fuel cap, stuffed a rag inside and set it alight.

‘What
the hell are you doing? That’s not my car and all my evidence is in it.’

‘Tough
shit, McCall. Just get the bloody bike started.’

Then
he went to the door of the barn, took something like a grenade from his backpack and threw it towards the fireplace.

‘We’ve
got thirty seconds at most.’

McCall’s
survival instincts took over. He rode the bike out into the open. Benwick clambered on the pillion. They careered onto a muddy track leading across the field to the birch woods on the far side.

Less
than half way there, an explosive flash turned night into day for two or three seconds. Chunks of car, metal and masonry were hurled into the air. A shock wave hit the motorbike and they almost keeled over. They skidded and swerved but made the cover of the trees as burning debris cascaded down around them.

When
they stopped to look back, the ruins of the barn and implement shed were engulfed in fire which was boiling into a plume of dirty black smoke. Benwick’s face had the satisfied look of a wartime saboteur. Yet again, McCall queried the wisdom of joining forces with a psychopath.

‘Christ,
you could’ve killed those guys.’

‘They’d
be no bloody loss.’

‘But
they’re MI5 men. They’ll never let you get away with this now.’

‘You’re
wrong, McCall. I am going to get away with it - and they’re not spooks.’

‘So
who the hell are they?’

‘Think
of them as undertakers.’

‘Undertakers?’

‘Yeah, guys who’ve been sent to bury the evidence.’

‘Evidence
of what?’

‘Of
what’s behind Ruby’s kidnapping. And if we don’t get going, they’ll bury us, too.’