Dead in the Water (33 page)

“
I’d like a room please.”

“
Very good sir,” he says without glancing at Jeremy or Rachel. “Passports.”

“
My passport has been stolen,” says Rachel, as Jeremy puts his on the desk.

“
No room for the lady with no passport. I am sorry.”

“
I am going to the Embassy in the morning – as soon as it opens.”

“
I know this. But no guest is allowed with no passport.” He puffs with laughter as one of the contestants spews out a mouthful of whatever.

“
I can pay cash.” Jeremy puts 300 Reals on the counter, a hundred more than the advertised room price.

“
OK, I sell you the room, Mister. Room for one. Yes? Understand? If you want to have a lady guest in your room, OK. This is not my business. I don’t see this. Understand?”

The room is the same as any other international hotel. Do they make all these rooms to a mould? It’s a double.

“
I’m sorry,” says Jeremy. “What do you want to do?”

She looks at him smiling, gives him a look like a flirtatious teenager, and asks, “About what?”

“
I mean where do you want me to sleep?”

The flirting stops. “In the bed. Sorry, Jem. Sorry. Is that embarrassing?”

“
Are you sure?”

“
Course I’m sure,.”

“
OK.”

“
But it’s not an invitation.”

“
I didn’t think ––”

“
Unless you’d rather sleep in the bath.”

He shakes his head and sits down beside her on the bed. She apologises for being such bad company on the plane; and now for wanting to go straight to sleep again.

“
I don’t feel too good. I’ll be fine in the morning.”

She lies back on the bed, shuts her eyes. He goes round to sit beside her. Puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezes gently.

“
Rachel.”

She murmurs acknowledgement.

“
We ought to ring your dad. About the passport. He’ll know someone can get it sorted.”

“
Yes.” She struggles back up to a sitting position, takes her satphone from the Yanomami leather bag on the bedside table. “But we shouldn’t use this phone, should we. If … what was his name?”

“
Sanders.”

“
They tapped into it, didn’t they. That’s what you thought.”

“
Probably.”

“
Use the hotel phone, shall I? What time is it over there?”

“
In London. Eight in the morning. I’ll leave you to it. I need to use the loo.”

While Jeremy’s in the bathroom, he can’t help reflecting wryly on her lack of concern about sharing a bed with him. It’s heartening that she has such trust in him; but he can’t suppress his disappointment that to Rachel he doesn’t seem to register as a sexual animal. Probably for the best though. Things are complicated enough as they are.

When he returns, she’s fast asleep, lying down exactly as before, the covers unrumpled on the side by the bedside phone.

58
London

The sky is lightening as Mark gets back to his London flat, but he has an hour in bed before the alarm radio wakes him and he struggles back to life. After blundering through the early morning routine, he rings the SIS woman, gives the agreed code word and is politely informed that his contact will ring him back shortly. To his relief, Robyn Westacott gets back to him almost immediately. “I have something for you,” he says. “I need to talk to you in person.” She agrees to meet him at Cowley Street at half past eight.

He collects his laptop and document bag and is about to leave the flat when there’s a message alert on his mobile. The number’s not one he recognises, but it’s Rachel, sounding hoarse and exhausted, as if she’s recovering from a nasty dose of flu.

“
Hi Dad. Rache here. I’m safe. I’m OK. I’m on my way home. I’ll ring later. Love you.” She must have rung while he was on the phone to the spook.

He calls Joanna to pass on the news.

He’s shocked to find a uniformed police officer standing outside the door to old Mrs Williams’ flat on the floor below his. “Is she alright?” he asks, assuming that she has been burgled in the night.

“
I’m sorry, sir. I’m not allowed to speak about it.”

“
I’m not asking about what happened. I want to know if she’s alright. Can I come in and see her? She’s a friend of mine.” And then the ghastly thought occurs to him that she may have died in the night.

“
I’m sorry, sir. Nobody is allowed in.”

“
Oh for goodness sake.” As he tries to push past, the officer takes hold of him and prevents him going any further. “I am a friend of Mrs. Williams,” insists Mark.

Then a slim man with close cut hair and pale, almost blanched skin, opens the door, assesses the situation and produces an identity card, shows it to Mark and announces himself as a detective inspector in SO 13, the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Met. “Mrs Williams is helping us with enquiries.”

“
You have got to be kidding. Mrs Williams.”

“
Are you a relative?”

“
I’m a friend. I live on the next floor up. What the hell is she supposed to have done? The world’s going bloody bonkers. She’s eighty something.” Ignoring his rantings, the D.I. goes back in to her flat, shutting the door behind him. The uniformed copper has nothing more to say.

Profoundly shaken, he walks down the stairs and heads for Hyde Park. Why Mrs. Williams? Everyone knows her as a harmless old radical. She’s always been harshly critical of the government, of every government, but her solutions to the country’s woes are rooted in ‘good old-fashioned socialism’, not green politics of any shade. Arresting her is ridiculous. She’ll no doubt be thrilled to bits that someone still considers her a threat. They might as well arrest everyone who has ever sent a donation to
The World Wildlife Fund
.

Hyde Park doesn’t lift his spirits, although the sky is clear. The grass and the roads around the Serpentine are covered in dried mud. And if the smell of sewage is at least not as bad as yesterday, it’s still enervating. The long trudge to Cowley Street leaves him with a sore throat, sticky skin and stinging eyes. He feels filthy – and dreadfully ill-prepared for the encounter with the SIS woman; ill prepared for the whole fucking day: Mrs W., the Select Committee, the spook; every bloody thing.

He turns on the computer and screams silently at the number of e-mails that have arrived since last night. Most of these he moves into a file marked pending; but there’s something from the
One World
people in Caracas, asking him to contact them urgently by phone.

The news is not good. The bodies of two
FPA
guys from an office in Amazonas have been found floating in the Orinoco. It sounds like a war of attrition against environmentalism, and he thinks to himself that the Summit cannot come too soon. And thank God Rachel’s on her way out of there.

There’s a note from a desk editor at
The Guardian
, reminding him of the midday deadline. He could send his piece in as it is; but he’d rather make a few minor revisions, and they’ll have something by midday. Minor revisions, indeed. The thing’s a mess. He opens the report he has to comment on at the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs Committee – and realises just how ill prepared he is.
Changing Land Use in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset
: a
Statistical Analysis
.
The problem is that the frames of reference make it impossible to draw the kind of conclusions that committee members will expect from it. In his eyes, it’s a half-arsed bloody pig’s ear of a report and proves nothing. But he needs to have read the bloody thing properly, and to have a pile of additional statistics at his disposal to support his own argument that tourism, wind farms and organic farming can all benefit the local economy, but only when managed as an integrated system. That’s what he should have been doing these past few days: chasing additional statistics. More statistics. And he always used to think of work as a refuge.

“
I’m sorry about yesterday,” says Barbara, just behind him, patiently waiting for him to make space for her to put down his cup of coffee. “I’ve never missed a day before.”

“
Don’t be silly. Is Chris’s school open again?”

“
I’ve got someone to look after him.”

“
Ba. I told you.”

“
Mark, he’s OK. I’m OK.” Her presence is reassuring. He manages to make some improvements to
The
Guardian
article and has made a start on trawling through tray loads of statistics in preparation for his appearance at the Select Committee when the phone rings. It’s reception. His visitor has arrived. She’s ten minutes early. She must be taking him seriously.

He’s relieved that it’s the same woman. Whilst hardly a friendly face, they had a certain rapport. Rigorously attentive, she listens to his story, only occasionally prompting him, and in response to her gentle, almost seductive, questioning, he tells her everything he can remember about last night.

“
Clifton Hamden?” she asks. He must have stumbled over that word ‘home’. He nods; and she continues: “The family home?”

“
Yes,” he says, though she has picked up on his momentary hesitation.

“
You parked in Croftdown Road, met your son on the Heath, drove to Clifton Hamden, then back to London. You don’t by and large do a lot of driving.”

“
The circumstances ––”

“
If you were late for work, would you drive your car?”

“
No.”

“
Even though you have a reserved space in the car park underneath the Houses of Parliament?” He nods. “Does Stephen know you don’t like using the car?”

“
Of course.”

“
So he knows you don’t like using the car – as a matter of principle?” He nods in agreement. “And yet he asks you to go and see his mum at three o’clock in the morning, to drive to Clifton Hamden, and he doesn’t try to contact her himself.” He finds something surprisingly threatening in the mildness of her tone. “Were you followed?”

“
The Motorway seemed empty. There were a few cars behind me. Nobody overtook.”

“
But did it occur to you that you might be followed?”

“
Yes”

“
So who did you think might have been following you?”

“
You lot – or the police. My phone is being tapped.”

Not rising to the indignation in his voice, she encourages him to talk about the clicks and buzzes and other odd noises he’s heard on the phone.

“
Tell me about Hampstead Heath.”

“
There was nobody else around. So I assumed nobody was following us. Is that what you mean?”

“
You think they’ve got at Stephen as a way of targeting you?”

“
And the bombs are aimed at discrediting the Green Movement. That’s what Stephen was getting at. That and the warning about Heathrow and the summit.”

Then she takes him back over everything again; from the moment he left work yesterday evening
to getting back to his own apartment at five in the morning.

“
OK. Last night, when you got home from work. The car was back from the garage when you got home?”

“
Yes. They’d delivered it. It was what we arranged.”

“
Not a garage you’ve used before?”

“
No.”

“
And this Daniella Gilman. You’d never met her before?”

“
I explained.”

“
Yes. You did.”

“
You’re surely not suggesting she’s got something to do with it?”

“
We consider everything.”

“
I checked out the garage. I wasn’t totally stupid. It’s a bloody main dealer. Not some seedy back street outfit.”

“
Very wise.” Then she pauses. Nods, as if weighing up how much to tell him; then: “I think you’re right about being targeted. Though it’s not the word I’d use. They are watching you. We know that. The question is why they were so keen for you to drive fifty miles or so out of London. Why did they want you to use your car? Did they, for example, want you out of the way so they could get access to your flat?” Is this rhetorical? Evidently. “It’s alright. We have it under surveillance. Nobody tried to break in.” Is that supposed to be reassuring?

“
You’re telling me that Stephen’s working for them?”

“
I think he got himself into deeper, murkier water than he imagined, and like he said, he wants out. But he’s frightened of the police. Which isn’t surprising. So either he’s broken free of these people and he’s on the run from them
and
the police, or they sanctioned the meeting with you. Set you up for it even. In which case you’ve got to ask yourself, what’s in it for them? What’s in it for Stephen?” A shard of fear pierces Mark’s composed façade. “We think your car is probably bugged. And your drive was some sort of an equipment test. Is there anything you haven’t told me? Anything? However trivial.”