A Spy's Life (21 page)

‘Mr Harland?’

‘Yes. Tomas,’ he said, ‘would you just accept that I accept that everything you’ve told me about your birth is true – okay? So call me something else. Right, where are you now? I’ll come and meet you.’

‘Be careful not to be followed. It was foolish of me to come to your sister’s house. I was worried they were watching it.’

‘Well, don’t worry. The party was exceptionally good cover – a lot of people coming and going.’ Then Harland thought about what the boy had just said. He couldn’t possibly know about Vigo’s people following him. ‘Tomas, who do you think could be watching you?’

‘The same people who tortured and killed Flick. The people who will kill me, if they find me.’

‘Who are they? Why in heaven’s name would anyone want to kill you?’

‘It’s a long story. I will tell you everything later. I will be at Cleopatra’s Needle in half an hour. You haven’t forgotten where it is?’ he asked, and hung up after Harland said he knew precisely where it was.

He put the phone in his pocket and thought back twenty-five years and wondered whether he was on the point of understanding everything.

He went and found Harriet who was looking after a few stragglers at the party. He took her aside and whispered. Harriet smiled and briskly announced to the group that she was going to take her brother to midnight mass and would therefore be happy to drop off anyone who needed a ride home. Even the most determined couldn’t fail to shift after her unambiguous hint.

It was Harland’s particular request that Harriet should not bring her RV round to the front of the house, so they all had to file through the kitchen to the garage. He took the middle of one of the rear seats, having insisted that the love-struck Deakin sit in the front. As the garage door opened and the car moved out into the drive, he slid right down into his seat so there was no chance of him being spotted leaving the house.

After four stops they were left alone in the car. Harriet said she was sure she hadn’t been followed, but to be on the safe side he told her to turn into the entrance of a large mansion block which was obscured from the road by a hedge. Harland opened the door and hopped out while the car was still moving. He waited a little time after Harriet had disappeared and then headed in the direction of Baker Street tube station.

He arrived at Victoria Embankment just before eleven o’clock and left the tube station by the north exit. Some way off he could hear the rumble of music from one of the clubs in the bowels of Charing Cross station. He walked quickly to a run of short railings on the right of the street and, placing his hand on the top, vaulted over into Embankment Gardens. Nothing much had changed in the twenty-five years since he’d last been there – the layout of the gardens was more or less the same and the gates which led onto the embankment had not been changed. He knew they were easily scaled. He moved quickly to the south side where he waited for a while. He could just make out Cleopatra’s Needle from where he stood behind the gates, but he would have to get closer to see if Tomas had arrived.

He questioned why he was being so careful – after all, no one could possibly know where they intended to meet. Maybe, he thought, this tension was prompted by memories of when he’d come as a young man with a mixture of hope and dread to meet Eva. He’d taken ridiculous precautions not to be followed that day, applying the skills recently acquired during training at the Fort and, no doubt, looking rather foolish. All the business of doubling back on himself and popping in and out of pubs had caused him to be late. And when he got there Eva was nowhere to be seen. He’d waited and waited, then circled the area until nightfall. She never came. He obsessed about being late, although it had only been a matter of fifteen minutes – twenty at the most – and he imagined that she thought she’d been stood up. He expected her to call him later. But not a word came.

Grasping the spikes at the top of the gate, he climbed up the railing until he could place both feet on the top bar, and let himself down the other side. The gates stood back from the main boundary of Embankment Gardens so he could drop down without being seen. He glanced towards the obelisk and then back down the embankment to Hungerford Bridge, where two policemen stood drinking coffee by their car. The traffic was very light and there was almost no one about. He waited while his eyes ran over the scene. Then he made his move across the road and walked sharply along the river wall, noticing that the tide was low. The wind carried a faint smell of mud to his nostrils and his mind flipped back to the East River.

As he approached the first of the pair of huge bronze sphinxes that guard Cleopatra’s Needle, he realised he’d forgotten nothing about the place. He found himself recalling its history – the hazardous journey across the Bay of Biscay when six men lost their lives; how the scars and pockmarks around one of the sphinxes had been left to commemorate the very first air raid by German aeroplanes on London in 1917; and the fact that the granite obelisk had been carved nearly one and a half thousand years before Cleopatra was born. Myth attributed the obelisk to Cleopatra although it was doubtful whether she had even laid eyes on it, unless she had happened to see it raised at Alexandria, a few years before Christ’s birth and her own death. But Harland dwelled on that myth and as his search for Eva went on he had gradually merged Eva and Cleopatra into a single, mythic nemesis.

‘Age cannot wither her,’ he murmured to himself as he touched the flank of the sphinx, ‘nor custom stale her infinite variety … She makes hungry where most she satisfies: for vilest things become themselves in her.’

He knew too much about the damned needle and it reminded him of the obsessed, cocksure young intelligence officer who thought he had all the answers.

He walked round the end of the sphinx to look over a short flight of steps, to the wide stone platform that projects from the line of the embankment into the Thames. There was no sign of Tomas so he moved past the obelisk to the second sphinx, whereupon he stopped and peered again. Nothing. He looked up and down the road as a shoal of seven or eight cars was released by the traffic lights a little further to the east, and then mounted the steps that led to the platform. He found him hidden, sitting on a ledge directly beneath the monument. He called out to him but Tomas didn’t turn. He had his hands over a pair of earphones and he was staring down the river towards Waterloo Bridge and the illuminated cupola of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Harland moved in front of him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He noticed that the stone was covered with a thin film of mud so he sat down beside Tomas and lifted his feet to the ledge. He was about to say something but was silenced by the view. He had never imagined London could be so still. Even the city’s permanent background hum of traffic had faded with the approach of Christmas Day.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what are we going to do about all this?’

Tomas looked at him. He was shaking a little and his face was pinched with cold, like the first time Harland saw him.

‘What if my mother had come here that day? Would I have been born, I wonder? Would I have grown up with you as my father? Would I have lived in London? Would Flick be alive today? I was thinking about those things.’

Harland opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

‘I don’t know the answers to all that,’ he said. ‘But I’m certain that you should now tell me everything you’ve held back from me. Then we can decide what we’re going to do about them. Maybe we should call your mother and get things straightened out.’

‘I have not talked to my mother in two years.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she deceived me about my father, because I could not talk to her about the things I had seen and done – things that I cannot talk to you about, Mr Harland.’

‘Call me Bobby, for heaven’s sake. I’d find it a lot easier.’

‘Bobby,’ he said bleakly.

‘Spit it out,’ said Harland gently. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to the police and tell them what you know about Flick’s killers. Otherwise, they’re going to think you had something to do with it.’

‘Well, I did. I did cause her death, just like I caused the death of the man in Bosnia.’

‘Bosnia? Why the hell are you talking about Bosnia?’ His mind was flooded with all kinds of connections, but he wasn’t going to push things. He told himself to allow Tomas to speak in his own time.

It had begun to spot with rain. Tomas got up, walked to the parapet and turned to Harland. He was about twenty feet away and reduced almost to a silhouette by the three floodlights that were ranged along the top of the parapet to light the obelisk. Harland watched the raindrops fizz on the floodlights and waited for his son to speak.

‘It all begins here,’ said Tomas, throwing out his hands. ‘Everything in my life begins here. Tell me, is there somewhere like that in your life, Bobby, some very significant place?’

‘Yes,’ said Harland after a while. ‘Here.’

‘How strange that is.’ There was a hint of a smile in his voice.

Suddenly his hand jerked upwards and he staggered forward. Then his body folded like a hinge at the abdomen and he was pushed back with a terrible force. Harland’s mind took in two further shots. One hit the middle floodlight and caused it to explode; the second cracked into the parapet about a foot from where Tomas’s head had come to rest. He flung himself forward to Tomas’s body. Another shot came and ricocheted with a long whine between the parapet and the obelisk. He looked at Tomas and in an instant knew he was dead.

He scuttled back crab fashion to the steps which on his side were ten deep, as against the six on the other. He edged into the shadow of the obelisk and peeped over the top step. A flash in the shrubbery across the road told him the gunman’s position. But he didn’t register the sound of the shot, just the burst of mud and stone some fifteen feet behind him. He looked again. There was a slight disturbance in the bushes. The gunman was leaving. Maybe he was coming after him.

He crawled back to Tomas and looked down into his lifeless face. There was a mass of blood pooled by a wound in his throat and he appeared to have been hit in the stomach also. Harland felt the uninjured side of his neck where there wasn’t a trace of a pulse. So he picked up a hand and fumbled beneath the cuff of Tomas’s jacket. There was something, a very faint flicker of life, although he wasn’t sure whether he was feeling his own racing pulse.

He looked up again and saw a movement. Someone was running across the road. Maybe there were two of them. He crouched down again and made for the gap in an iron railing which allowed access to a steep flight of steps running down to the river. He could see in the light from the street that their surface had been greased to a treacherous finish by the tide. He lunged to his left, found the handrail and plummeted down the steps, slipping and falling, but never quite losing his grip on the handrail.

He had some notion that he would be able to escape along the sandbank which was showing at the edge of the water into the shadow of the embankment wall. But that idea ended with the snapping fire of a different type of gun behind him and a sudden, livid pain in his shoulder. His hand instinctively released the handrail and he fell forward, somehow managing to propel his weight around the corner of the massive Victorian stone buttress and into utter dark.

He was convulsed with pain, but he was certain his wound wasn’t serious. For one thing he could still clench and unclench the fist of his right hand. He hugged the wet stone, clinging to the crevices with his fingernails, and waited for his breath to subside. He strained to work out what was going on thirty feet above him, but the groans of an old pleasure boat buffeting against the wooden piles nearby made it impossible to hear. He waited. There was a brief sound of a siren and the squeal of tyres. More gunfire. Then right behind him there came a sloshing noise and a voice croaked in the dark, ‘Hey, you! What’s happening up there?’

He swung round to find a dim torch a couple of feet from his head and beneath it a very old face, much of it covered by a grey beard. The torch appeared to be part of some kind of headgear because every time the face moved the torch did. Harland was aware of a fretful pair of eyes looking at him.

‘Get that light off,’ he said under his breath, ‘unless you want to get killed.’

A hand reached up and switched off the torch. ‘What’s going on up top?’

‘Someone’s been seriously injured – my son. Who the hell are you?’

‘Saint George,’ said the figure, apparently unconcerned by the news. ‘Cyril St George – mudlark. This is my patch. Been here twenty-two years. Before that in Southampton – under the old pier there. Maybe you know it.’

Harland didn’t reply. He realised that the old man must work the riverbank at low tide for coins.

‘Can you get me out of here?’ he said. ‘I’ve been hit.’

‘Not for a few minutes, I can’t. Wait for the tide, because sure as eggs is eggs it won’t wait for you.’ He switched the lamp on and looked at a watch pinned to one of his many outer garments. ‘Five minutes or so and we should be all right. Good conditions this evening. Couldn’t miss a tide like tonight’s.’

They waited without speaking, the old man’s breath rasping in Harland’s ear.

‘Right, let’s be having you,’ he whispered, and took hold of Harland’s left hand and placed it on the hem of some very coarse material. ‘Don’t lose your grip and follow me. If I take off into the current, don’t be afeared. I know what I’m doing down here – I should do after all these years.’ He coughed a laugh.

They set off and edged along the wall immediately below the obelisk in about a foot of water, then turned right so they were wading across the current.

Harland wondered why the old man didn’t carry some sort of stick but he seemed to know his way. They moved out of the shadow of the wall into a part of the riverbank where there was more light. In the shallower areas he could see a number of weighted traffic cones which he guessed the old man had appropriated to serve as markers when the tide was not fully out.

‘Nobody can see you down here,’ he said. ‘You think they can, but they can’t. Don’t you go straying now.’