Dead Line (15 page)

As he got out of the car at the police station, he scanned the pavement nervously, before realising that this was probably the one place in London where he was unlikely to be attacked. Above him, cars thundered along Westway.

Inside, he gave his name to the receptionist, and immediately a uniformed policewoman led him down two flights of stairs, along a corridor bleakly lit by overhead bulbs, to a small, windowless room containing a table, two chairs, and nothing else. She closed the door behind her as she left.

Claustrophobic at the best of times, Sami had a moment of panic, wondering if he would ever breathe fresh air and see grass again. This modern-day dungeon seemed designed to play on his fears. Pull yourself together, he told himself sternly; this is England, not Saudi Arabia. I can always ask to see my lawyer.

He waited twenty minutes, sitting on one of the hard chairs, growing more anxious every minute. The door opened and a man came in. Middle-aged, conservative suit, his face businesslike but not unfriendly. He was carrying a folder. Sami relaxed just a touch.

‘Mr Veshara, my name is Walshaw. Thank you for coming in.’ The man sat down on the other side of the table and looked at Sami, his eyes fixed and expressionless. Sami shifted uncomfortably. Perhaps he was not so friendly after all.

‘I am happy to help in any way I can,’ said Sami. He tried to make a joke - ‘You know, to assist the police in your inquiries.’

The man gave a fleeting smile but said, ‘I’m not a policeman, Mr Veshara. They’ll be along in a little while to speak to you. I think you may know what it’s about.’

‘’No,’ Sami said theatrically, turning both hands, palms up, in a gesture of innocence. ‘I have no idea.’

‘I see,’ said Walshaw. He fixed Sami with a stare of such intensity that the Lebanese felt unnerved. The man’s eyes seemed to look right through him like an X-ray.

Then Walshaw shrugged. ‘It’s up to you, of course. From what I understand, the police think you have a good deal to answer for.
The Dido
has been seized, in case you didn’t know. There were seven women on board, entering the country illegally.’

He opened the file in front of him and looked briefly at the top page. ‘They were heading for Manchester, I understand, though the work they would have found there might not have been what they were expecting.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I understand several people are in custody. The crew of
The Dido
and a man in Manchester. Who knows what they will say?’

Sami’s heart began to beat faster and he could feel perspiration on his palms. He rubbed them on his immaculate trousers. Walshaw looked at him, this time thoughtfully. Suddenly, putting both his hands together, he leaned across the table, speaking softly but directly. ‘We haven’t got much time, Mr Veshara, so let me come to the point. In a few minutes you are going to be interviewed, and very probably charged. Like it or not, we take a dim view in this country of the kind of trade you’re involved in. Frankly, I’m not sure they’d think much of it in your country either. You need to make a decision.’

Sami gulped. The situation was running out of his control. Who was this man and what did he want? ‘What sort of decision?’

‘You can take your chances with the British justice system, or you can talk with me. I’m not in a position to offer you anything, but I am not… without influence. If you help me, it will be taken into account and it could prove useful to you.’

There was something lulling about this voice. Sami felt as if he were trapped in a pressure cooker and had suddenly been shown the safety valve, but without knowing how to turn it on. What did this man want?

‘What would my talk with you consist of?’

Walshaw took his time replying, picking up a pencil and tapping it lightly on the table. At last he said, ‘We already knew a bit about your business interests, and after the seizure of
The Dido
we know a lot more. But that’s not what interests me.’ He added lightly, ‘Neither does your personal life, for that matter.

‘What does matter to me is where you’ve travelled in the Middle East in the last few years. What you’ve seen there, and who you have been talking to about it. In Lebanon, of course. But in other countries as well. In fact, why don’t we start with Syria?’

Sami stared at this man Walshaw, whose eyes were unyielding now. It was tempting to start talking straight away, to calm his nerves, but if he told this man everything, the next time he set foot in the Middle East his life wouldn’t be worth a Lebanese piastre. He hesitated.

Walshaw said, ‘If we’re going to be able to help you, Mr Veshara, then you need to start talking. Otherwise, I’ll tell the inspector that you’re ready for him.’

It would be a great gamble. He would effectively be putting his life in this Englishman’s hands. But if he didn’t, he knew he faced arrest, trial, a prison sentence. Prison. The prospect was too ghastly to bear. He could live with the disgrace; he knew his wife would stand by him; conceivably his businesses might even survive his absence. What he couldn’t contemplate was the physical fact of incarceration. It was his worst nightmare.

He exhaled noisily, then sat back in his chair. ‘I hope you are not in a hurry, Mr Walshaw. It is a long story I have to tell.’

As Charles Wetherby listened, making the occasional note, Sami Veshara told him how, five years or so ago, two Israelis had come to his office in London. They had threatened that if he didn’t help them, they would report his people-trafficking business to the British authorities. It was at a time when he was cultivating some government ministers through a charity he had founded, and he was hoping to be recommended for a peerage.

The men were from Mossad. They knew about his regular visits to Lebanon and his contacts there. They knew he travelled around the country buying figs and other produce. They wanted him to go to Lebanon whenever they asked him to, to travel to the south and, using some equipment they would give him, to send signals which they told him would help them locate the positions of Hezbollah rocket launchers.

He had done what they wanted. He had not seen them again in London, but had met them in Tel Aviv from time to time. He described two men, one built like a squashed bowling ball, the other lean.

But to Charles’s enquiries about his contacts with Syrians, Sami gave a flat denial. He had no contact with Syrian intelligence people or with Government officials and had to the best of his knowledge never met any. He had no particular hostility or friendship towards them, he said, and Charles could not shake his story.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Remarkable,’ the consultant had said. You are very lucky, Miss Carlyle. You’re making a truly remarkable recovery.’

Liz wished she felt quite so remarkable now, as she sat drowsily in a deckchair in her mother’s garden at Bowerbridge on her fourth day out of hospital. She had wanted to go back to her flat, but Susan Carlyle wouldn’t hear of it. What Liz didn’t know was that Charles Wetherby had met Edward in London. The two men had liked each other immediately and Charles had been frank with Edward about his concern that Liz might still be at risk from whoever had attacked her. Edward had undertaken to keep a very close eye out for anything unusual around Bowerbridge and to contact Charles immediately if he had any anxieties. Now Susan sat knitting on a garden bench, watching Liz carefully, like a mother hen.

It was September now and the apples were swelling on the trees at the bottom of the lawn. The huge white flowers of a hydrangea paniculata were attracting heavy, slow-moving bees and the musky scent of an old-fashioned climbing rose was wafting down from a wall. Liz had been in the Whittington two weeks, though the first few days were not even a memory. Amazingly, she had not broken a single bone in her ‘accident’ - but she hadn’t escaped unscathed. Far from it: she’d had severe internal bleeding and, most ominously, a ruptured spleen. A quick-thinking paramedic had spotted that as she lay half-conscious in the ambulance. On arrival she had been whisked straight into emergency surgery. The consultant told her later that another ten minutes and she would not have made it.

So I shouldn’t complain, thought Liz, though even walking from the house to the garden still tired her. She’d realised for the first time that just because she was out of hospital, it didn’t mean she was well again.

In the first few days, between the lingering effects of the anaesthetic and the codeine-based painkillers, Liz had been entirely out of it. She’d sensed her mother’s presence, and in the background saw a man she dimly recognised as Edward Treglown. Once she could have sworn Charles had been sitting in the chair at the foot of her bed.

As she’d slowly come to, more visitors had arrived -Peggy Kinsolving, trying to act her usual positive, cheerful self, but more subdued than Liz had ever seen her. Flowers had arrived from Geoffrey Fane and, typically, a bottle of champagne from Bruno Mackay. Miles Brookhaven had sent flowers too, and Peggy said he’d rung twice to ask after Liz.

She had had ample time to think about what had happened to her. Her mind kept flashing back to the sight of the oncoming car as she’d turned around, but she could remember nothing after that. There was no doubt in her mind that she had been deliberately run down, but no one had come up with any clue as to who had done it, or why.

It would not have been easy to plan. Someone would have had to follow her to find out where she lived. How long had they been watching and waiting? She might easily have stayed that night in Harwich. Or taken her car to work instead of the Underground. Presumably they would have just come back another day. Liz fought back a shudder at the thought they might try again.

She couldn’t stop going over it all. It must be someone she’d encountered in the course of work. She reviewed what she’d been doing in the past few months, but nothing pointed to any explanation. Was it some kind of revenge attack? No doubt Neil Armitage, the scientist convicted of passing secrets to the Russians, in whose case she’d given evidence, nursed a massive grudge, but he was safely behind bars and in any case he didn’t know who she was.

Which left the Syrian Plot, as she was beginning to think of it, even though it had a dearth of suspects who might want Liz out of the way - only two, in fact: Chris Marcham and Sami Veshara; and possibly the Syrians.

Marcham had certainly been peculiar, and she had sensed there were secrets he didn’t want her to know. But not about Syria, which was her only real concern with the man. He seemed so chaotic (she thought of the mess in his house) that for him to engineer a carefully plotted murder seemed wildly improbable. He hadn’t got a motive and the means of doing it would be well beyond him.

That wasn’t true with Sami Veshara, whose respectable front as a food importer belied his involvement with an especially vicious trade. He’d be no stranger to violence, but unlike Marcham he wouldn’t have had the faintest idea Liz was investigating him. If he’d had someone watching out for the trawler, who had somehow witnessed its capture, and even spotted Liz, would Sami’s reaction really be to order a hit on her? Not within a few hours. It didn’t make sense. Especially since the minicab was already sitting on her street in Kentish Town when she got back from Essex.

What about the Syrians? How could they possibly know who she was and even if they did, why attack her?

Lying in hospital during her second week there, Liz had kept mulling all this over, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. When Charles came to see her in the second week, as she was just starting to feel human again, she’d tried raising it with him. But he had proved frustratingly elusive. ‘Let’s talk about that when you’re better,’ he’d said, over Liz’s protests that there was nothing wrong with her brain. Even Peggy couldn’t be drawn, and she’d avoided any serious talk about what was going on at Thames House in Liz’s absence.

She heard the front door bell and her mother sprang up, returning a moment later with Edward, who was carrying two bags of groceries. ‘I’ve brought you the papers.’ He waved copies of the
Guardian
and the
Daily Mail
.

‘Let me help you put things away,’ said Liz, standing up a little unsteadily.

‘You sit still,’ her mother commanded. ‘I’ll get you a nice cup of tea.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m perfectly all right,’ Liz snapped, knowing she wasn’t, but annoyed that people kept mollycoddling her. It was becoming intolerable.

‘That’s a very good sign,’ Edward interjected, coming out of the kitchen. ‘A cranky patient is usually a recovering patient.’

For a moment Liz felt furious - who was he to intervene? But there was such a twinkle in Edward’s eye that she couldn’t stay cross, and she found herself laughing, for the first time since the accident.

‘That’s better still,’ said Edward, and this time all three of them laughed. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said to Susan, and while he busied himself in the kitchen Liz looked at the newspapers.

Edward emerged holding a tray, with two mugs and a tumbler. ‘Susan,’ he said, handing her one of the mugs.

He handed the tumbler to Liz. ‘Very medicinal,’ he said. ‘Your mother says you prefer vodka, but I hope a hot toddy will do.’

She took a careful sip. Just what she needed. ‘Anything in the papers?’ Edward enquired, sitting down on the sofa next to Liz.

‘Just the usual. I see the Man in the Box has been identified.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Susan.

Liz laughed. ‘Someone they found dead in a church, Mother. In a box, as I say.’ She glanced at the paper, interested that the police had finally decided to release the victim’s name. ‘He’s called Ledingham. I don’t suppose you knew him,’ she said with a smile.

Her mother smiled back. ‘I’m sure I didn’t.’

Liz looked at Edward, but he wasn’t smiling. ‘Did you say Ledingham? Is it by any chance
Alexander
Ledingham?’

Liz was slightly nonplussed. She looked at the article again. ‘That’s right.’

‘Could I?’ asked Edward, and reached out for the paper. He read the article quickly, then gave a small sigh. Liz said, ‘I’m awfully sorry for joking. Did you know him?’