Thunder in the Blood (23 page)

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly half past three in the morning. I looked at the telephone a moment. McGrath had told me he usually read most of the night. The least I could do was say goodbye. I lifted the phone and dialled his number. He answered almost at once, God knows how.

‘It’s me,’ I said, ‘your little English friend.’ I paused. ‘Homeward bound.’

‘Sarah?’ I caught the rising tone in his voice. Just as well I’d phoned.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

There was a moment’s silence. Then he was back. ‘The FBI have been on,’ he said, ‘an Agent Pedernales.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing specific…’ he gave a little cough, ‘… but I gather they’re watching international flights.’

American Airlines run two non-stops from Washington to Dallas every day. I was on the first, a window seat at the back of the aircraft, the one and only time I’ve ever volunteered for a smoking seat. Smokers, I told myself, have no sense of smell.

By mid-afternoon, I was back at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. I took a cab to Grant Wallace’s house. En route, I asked the driver to find a shopping mall where I could buy clothes. When he raised an eyebrow at my estimate that I’d be half an hour at the mall, I gave him a hundred-dollar bill and told him to wait. There’d be another one for him when we got to Grant’s place. Under the circumstances, money was the least of my problems.

At the mall, I replaced the bits and pieces I’d left at the reservoir. I bought a simple two-piece, skirt and jacket, formal enough to get me through most social occasions. I found a couple of nice shirts, two pairs of jeans and three sets of underwear. I also bought a case to put it all in and a new pair of Reeboks.

Back in the cab, we drove to Grant’s. One of the favours I wanted from him was a little privacy – an hour or so to soak in the tub and wash my hair, and make myself look half-respectable. Another, given my reluctance to risk a flight home, was a fresh look at the material he’d compiled on Harold Beckermann. By now, in my head, I’d turned an important corner. Whatever I’d got myself into, I told myself, wasn’t going to go away. Quite what it had to do with the Gulf War was anybody’s guess, but it was better – whatever happened – to confront it. Both for Wesley’s sake and, in some curious sense, my own.

The cab dropped me outside Grant’s house. There was another car in the drive, parked behind the big Lincoln. I looked at it for a moment, wondering if this was such a good idea. Then I dismissed the thought and followed the path to the front door, rang
the bell. Nothing happened. I rang again. Finally, there were footsteps and the sound of a dog yapping. The door opened and a small, thin woman peered out. I recognized the face at once from the photograph behind her on the wall: the grey perm, the beaky nose, the hard, baleful expression. Grant had put a name to the face the last time I’d been here. ‘Mom’ wasn’t a word that had come easily to him.

‘Mrs Wallace?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Sarah Moreton.’ I paused. ‘Friend of Grant’s.’ She looked at me, saying nothing. The poodle at her feet began to bark again. Then she frowned, her eyes on something by the gate. ‘Squirrels,’ she said briskly, ‘darn things.’ She looked back at me. ‘Suppose you’d better come in.’

I followed her into the house. There was something different about it I couldn’t quite place. Then I had it. The smell of flowers. I looked around. There were bunches of them everywhere, stacked carelessly in vases, no attempt at an arrangement, or an effect. Typical, I thought. Men.

I paused at the foot of the stairs. Grant’s mother was looking pointedly at my suitcase. For the first time, it occurred to me that she might be alone.

‘Is Grant out?’ I said.

Mrs Wallace frowned at me again, shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s dead.’

She made me coffee in the kitchen, matter-of-fact, impatient, a woman untouched by grief or mourning. First she’d heard was a call from the state police, three days ago, Saturday morning. She lived across the city in a suburb called Sunnyvale. The trooper had said there’d been some kind of accident. A friend of Grant’s had phoned in. It all looked pretty straightforward, but there was the question of formal identification. He was sending a car. He’d said he was sorry.

I nodded, listening. ‘You saw Grant a lot?’

‘Very rarely. Not since Christmas, matter of fact.’ She paused. ‘You want the rest of it?’

She’d gone to the city morgue. Grant was tucked up there in a fridge. He’d been shot in the head. The attendant at the morgue had told her it would have been painless. He’d known exactly
what he was doing. It was as simple as turning off the light at night. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.

I frowned, still nursing the coffee. ‘He?’ I said.

Mrs Wallace reached for another cigarette. The pack at her elbow was three quarters empty. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘he did it himself. Suicide.’ She paused. ‘Just as well it worked, too. His father would have been mad as hell.’

‘But whose gun was it?’

‘His own gun. They showed it to me. New one. I don’t know…’ She shrugged. ‘He’d just bought it. They had the sales slip. And the box it came in. They found the box in that hidey-hole of his.’

We went to the den. Someone had been through it since I was last there. Grant’s desk was a mess, papers everywhere, totally out of character.

‘So where did he do it?’ I said.

Mrs Wallace was standing in the doorway. There were steps down into the den, and the extra height made her look even more formidable. She had one arm folded across her body. The other hand tapped ash on to the carpet.

‘There. On the sofa. I saw the photos.’

‘And the gun?’

‘In his hand.’

I nodded, saying nothing. Then I crossed to the big filing cabinet, aware of Mrs Wallace looking down, following my every movement. I knelt quickly, half expecting the cabinet to be locked, it wasn’t. I pulled open the bottom drawer, the one where he kept the files on Beckermann. It was quite empty. I looked up. Mrs Wallace was stifling a yawn.

‘Happy now?’ she said.

Book Three

21

The next few days were critical. They marked the moment when circumstances eased the baton from other hands and passed it to me. So far, like the good trooper I’d always been, I’d taken my orders, respectively, from Stollmann and from Wesley Keogh. For reasons that will become clearer, these chains of command were about to disintegrate. In Stollmann’s case, the story is complicated and had yet to unfold. Wesley’s situation was infinitely simpler. By late October, he was dying.

I spent three solid days effectively in hiding, trying to raise him on the phone. Grant’s death, on top of the Washington incident, had certainly affected me. The polite term would have been ‘unnerved’, though I’m sure Wesley would have found something a little more colourful. Either way, it was at this point that I thought it wise to adopt a new identity, Frances Bevan, an alias that was easy to remember because it was my mother’s maiden name.

In the US, performing this little conjuring trick isn’t as simple as it sounds. Most people use credit cards to settle their bills and credit cards are an instant giveaway if you’re trying to pretend you’re someone else. I, though, had still got a hefty reserve of cash, and as soon as I knew I’d be staying a little longer, I drew more. Cash is increasingly suspect in most American transactions, but the kind of places I was now checking into didn’t ask too many questions. As the laconic black student behind the desk at the Patriot Motel put it, ‘A dollar’s a dollar, ma’am. That’s where the rubber meets the road.’

I stayed at the Patriot for four nights, wrapping myself in the anonymity of my new name. I kept the door firmly locked, and didn’t go out at all, except for brief, after-dark excursions to the
K-Mart across the street. I didn’t believe for a moment that Grant Wallace had taken his own life, and if they’d got rid of him with such brisk efficiency, then I saw no reason why I shouldn’t be next on the list. The fact that they’d even gone to the trouble of retrieving the gun they were going to pass off as the so-called ‘suicide weapon’, the Beretta that had disappeared from my car, simply added to my paranoia. Not only were these people dangerous, they were also bloody clever. And not only were they clever, but they were also well connected. The police ballistics report must have ruled out Grant’s Beretta. Yet the cause of death remained ‘suicide’.

But I couldn’t find him. The Guildford number, hard as I tried, wouldn’t answer. And when I began to dial the answerphone as well, expecting – at the least – to find some kind of message waiting for me, there was nothing. Just the ring-ring of the number at the other end and the hollow transatlantic spaces in between. Calls to Stollmann got me no further, either. For reasons I didn’t begin to understand, he, too, wasn’t answering.

In the end, day two, I rang Derek Aldridge. By this time, I’d mastered the little recording machine I’d bought at the Radio Shack and I was taping everything. Listening to the tapes now, I can hear how guarded he was, though at the time just the sound of an English voice was enough to bring a smile to my lips. I explained I needed to talk to Wesley. I said it was urgent. I said I couldn’t find him. Might there be a number I hadn’t tried? Aldridge gave the question a second’s thought and then asked for my number, saying he’d call back. I said no. I’d ring again in ten minutes. There was a moment’s silence at this and then he laughed.

‘Moscow rules?’ he murmured, before ringing off.

Ten minutes later, I was back on the line. He said he had a number. He read it over to me. I stared at it. It was the same number I’d been ringing for the taped messages, the electronic dead-letter box Wesley had been so proud of.

‘Where’s this?’ I said.

‘Southend.’

‘Whose is it? Who lives there?’

‘His mother.’

‘Ah.’ I nodded, wiser now. ‘Connie?’

‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘And she’s there now. I just talked to her.’

I phoned the number. A woman answered. She sounded old and a little vague, a flat, ugly East London accent, Wesley without the voltage. I asked for her son.

‘He’s ill, dear. You a friend of his?’

‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘How ill?’

‘He’s in that hospital again. The same one. The one in Paddington. St Mary’s.’

‘Which ward?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Do you go and see him?’

‘Yesterday, I did.’

‘Is it upstairs? Downstairs?’

‘What, dear?’

‘The ward. The ward where they’re keeping him …’ I paused again. ‘The place where the bed is.’

‘Upstairs. Top of the stairs. It’s the one with all those poor young men in. You go into the old building. He’s in the bed at the end on the left. Next to the window. Are you going tonight? Only—’

‘No,’ I said hastily, ‘no, I’m not.’

I got the number of the hospital from the international directory. Wesley had already told me about St Mary’s. He’d been there before, the time he’d contracted TB. I knew he had no great affection for the place, but I knew too that they went out of their way to make life bearable for AIDS patients. That included access to telephone callers. When I got through, I gave Wesley’s name to the admissions clerk, plus a brief reprise of his mother’s directions. Thirty seconds later, after a word with the ward sister, there was another voice on the phone. He introduced himself as Mark.

‘Mark?’ I said blankly.

‘Friend of Wesley’s.’

I hesitated a moment, then remembered. Mark had been an old flame, the young actor who’d nursed him the last time round.

‘It’s Sarah,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s Sarah.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s… asleep.’

‘You mean that?’

There’s a silence at this point, another of my little tapes. In the background, you can hear hospital noises. Half-buried amongst them, but still audible, is Wesley. He’s wanting to know who it is. He definitely isn’t asleep.

‘Mark—’ I begin.

‘Sarah, listen. This isn’t as simple as it—’

‘No. You listen. Put him on. Just put him on. OK?’

‘Sarah, I—’

‘Just do it. Please.’

‘OK.’

There’s a pause here and a scuffling sound, the phone passing from hand to hand, or perhaps Mark joining Wesley on the bed, holding the phone to his ear. God knows.

‘Wesley?’

‘Yeah? Who’s that?’

I remember gazing at the phone. He sounded about ten million years old.

‘It’s me, Sarah. Listen, how are you?’

‘Fine… fine … just fine. Sarah?’

‘Me. Yes. Look—’

‘You coming up to see me? Only…’

The voice falters and gives way to a strange whooping noise. Then Mark’s back. He sounds upset and a little angry.

‘Please,’ he says. ‘You see what I mean?’

‘How is he?’

‘He’s ill, Sarah.’

‘How ill?’

‘I can’t say. Not here.’

‘Give me a number.’

‘OK.’

Mark gave me a number, the flat where he lived. I wrote it down and he told me to phone in a couple of hours. When I did so, I told him how sorry I was. Not about Wesley, but for being so difficult earlier. The last thing either of them needed was some idiot woman pretending to be Florence Nightingale. Mark accepted the apology with a quiet laugh. He sounded tired. Wesley had been taken into hospital the day I’d returned to Dallas from Washington. The hospital still had his number on Wesley’s file and had phoned him. He’d been pretty much living there ever
since. Now, on the third day, Wesley’s temperature was still nudging 104°. When he was lucid, he complained of a terrible headache and pains behind his eyes, but most of the time he was barely conscious. The last twenty-four hours had been especially bad although, oddly, he’d been able to put together the odd word for my benefit. I’d asked him what he’d said afterwards, once I’d hung up. Had he mentioned anything specific? Was there a message of some kind?

‘Sarah,’ Mark had said gently, ‘he hasn’t a clue who you are.’

‘You mean that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his mother? Connie?’

‘Another stranger.’

‘And you?’

‘God knows.’

I’d ended the conversation at this point, both of us too upset to take it any further. The only additional information I gathered was about his treatment. They were giving him massive doses of sulphadiazine and pyramethamine, the surest sign that they’d diagnosed cerebral toxoplasmosis.

‘Toxo’ was the infection that Wesley had been fearing for months. It’s an organism that invades the central nervous system, and causes abcesses in the brain. It’s sometimes found in cats, and most of us are never infected, but if your immune system’s down then you can end up paralysed and half mad, and even if you respond to treatment and get better, there’s no telling when you’ll relapse again. Once infected, you’re infected for life, and thinking about it, I couldn’t help wondering whether Jake McGrath hadn’t been right about Wesley’s death wish. Living with a cat like Scourge was asking for trouble. The odds again. And Wesley’s determination to ignore them.

Before I went to sleep that night, I phoned Wesley’s mother. I didn’t know what to say, except that I was sorry, but it was obvious that she hadn’t a clue what the problem was. She talked vaguely about chickenpox, and said how funny it was that she couldn’t see any spots, but when I probed a little further, she began to complain about the trains. Maybe, on reflection, Wesley was right not to have let her into his little secret. There can’t have been much room in her life for that kind of complication.

Next morning returned me to my own nightmare. Still depressed about Wesley, I rummaged through Yellow Pages, looking for the section on private investigation agencies. I’d decided by now that I’d have to buy the help I needed. There were various clues I knew I should pursue, but doing the work myself would mean breaking cover in the most obvious places. Although I’d returned the sales invoice for the Beretta to Grant, I could remember the name of the supplier, the Sun Valley Arms Corp. Their address was in the phone book, and it would be interesting to know who might have been enquiring about similar guns in the last few days, but these kinds of questions I couldn’t afford to put myself. If they could find the Chrysler in a Silver Spring car park, a thousand miles away, they’d have no difficulty staking out the Sun Valley Arms Corp, waiting for little me to turn up.

The first three agencies I phoned responded to my initial enquiries in exactly the same way. They asked me for a domicile address and a credit reference. When they established that I was nonresident, a visitor, they quoted me an hourly rate and warned me that any work would be contingent on a sizeable deposit. The deposit, as it happens, was within my means, but that, somehow, wasn’t the point. The point was that I had to know these people. I had to trust them. I had to be sure that they were honest and wouldn’t simply sell or pass the information on. Whether or not that kind of thing ever happened, I’d no idea. But I needed more reassurance than a brisk conversation about hourly rates.

In the end, after some thought, I came up with a solution. It was far from perfect, but it offered a logical way forward. It was also, I told myself, a move of which Wesley would approve.

According once again to Yellow Pages, there were four newspapers in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area. Since the
Courier-Star
was the only one I’d ever heard of, it seemed a logical place to start. I phoned the switchboard and asked for the crime correspondent. His name, the woman told me, was Raoul Delahunty. When he picked up the phone, he sounded younger than I’d expected. I gave him my false name and told him I had a story I wanted to discuss. He asked me for details, but I said we had to meet. He told me he was busy, but there was maybe a chance we could get together later. Around five o’clock, after the deadline for the paper’s final edition, I could find him in a
bar called the Mission Bell. If I gave my name to the barman, he’d locate me. I was still scribbling the address of the bar when he hung up.

I spent the rest of the day in the motel room, watching television between abortive calls to Stollmann. For whatever reason, he still wasn’t answering. At five, I ordered a cab. I was wearing the semi-formal two-piece I’d bought on my return from Washington, plus a tacky pair of sunglasses I’d found across the street at the K-Mart. Studying myself in the mirror, waiting for the cab, I was amazed how quickly I’d acquired the local disguise. Take away the scar, I thought, and I looked just like any other female Dallas executive: hollow-cheeked, hard-faced, brisk, watchful.

The cab dropped me outside the bar at half past five. The Mission Bell was tucked between an insurance building and a branch of Texas Realty Inc. There were lights on behind the smoked glass and discreet posters advertising a forthcoming evening with a jazz saxophonist. Inside, it was much warmer than I’d been used to. There were circular tables around a long crescent of bar, and a light-fingered pianist in the corner was doodling with a version of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’. The place was busy, mainly men in suits, and there was a comfortable hum of conversation. I went to the bar.

‘Frances Bevan,’ I said, ‘for Raoul Delahunty.’

The barman nodded, but said nothing. Seconds later, I felt an arm on mine. Raoul Delahunty was tall and thin, straggly blond hair, sharp features, no more than thirty years old. His eyes were the palest blue, the colour of a certain kind of china. My mother has a whole teaset in it, seldom used.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking my hand.

I followed him back to his table. The bar, it turned out, was L-shaped and the alcove around the corner gave us a little privacy. I sat down and he signalled the waiter.

‘You wanna beer?’

‘Please.’

He gave the waiter the order. He had a strange manner, at once terse and playful, as if he was trying to keep me permanently off-balance.

‘You’re English?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’ He nodded. ‘So why the call?’

I looked at him for a second or two. I’d rehearsed this moment a number of times in my head, back at the motel, but now I wasn’t at all sure it was such a good idea. Maybe I should ask him about hourly rates. Maybe money had its uses after all.