Denied to all but Ghosts (37 page)

“If you say so, Emily.”

Beckett sounded meaner than he had intended,
but he could not pretend that he had not been distressed by the
drugging, despite the persistent unsettling feelings he still
carried for her.

“Perhaps Josh will arrest you for the
drugging but I fancy Marchel would like to get his hands on you
first.”

“Who is he?”

“He is an Untersucher.”

“What’s that?” she asked suspiciously.
Beckett relented from inspecting his camera, removed his glasses
and twisted to face Emily. He silently cursed at the involuntary
reaction his body made whenever he looked at her.

“Search me, he’s an investigator for some
organisation. You seem to have fallen into a world of skulduggery
without realising it.”

“What does he want?”

“I told you, he wants you. Wants you to tell
him how you came to know about the sword. I’d tell him if I was
you, he does have a bit of a reputation.” It was the mediocrity and
the low-key delivery of his words that chilled Emily the most.

“And there was I thinking that you had come
to rescue me, Mr Beckett, but I don’t suppose you are any different
from all the rest.” If her words were meant to sting Beckett then
they certainly hit the mark.

“Hey, I don’t know what sort of men you’re
used to hanging out with, but you seem to have made some dodgy
choices of late. Don’t go comparing me with Slingsby; I remember
what he was like when I worked in London.”

“I’m sorry, Tom. I’m tired. I’m talking
rubbish. Please believe me when I say I hate myself for what I did
to you. You might not believe me but it’s true.”

“Do you realise what you’re doing when you do
that?” he said gravely. She screwed up her face, fashioning a
quizzical expression.

“Do what?”

“Do that ‘girly’ thing; it really is a
powerful tool.”

“You think I’m playing with you.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know you well
enough to know. I guess Sunday was all play-acting on your part. I
was certainly taken in.”

Emily was about to reply but was cut short by
Beckett, angry at betraying his suppressed emotions concerning
Sunday evening.

“I mean, all that stuff in the fairground,
the dancing. You had me bloody convinced!” Beckett felt the pain
and disappointment of that evening spill out as he made his caustic
comments.

“I told you,” she insisted, “Paul made me do
it!”

“What, the dancing?”

“No, you idiot,” she cried, “the
drugging!”

“I can’t believe he could force you to do
anything!” He emphasised the ‘you’. “What’s he got, bloody
Polaroids!”

“No!” she screamed.

“What then, it must be something pretty
fuckin’ damning!”

Beckett suddenly fell silent as he
contemplated the implication of his accusations. Neither of them
had realised how charged the atmosphere in the room had become as
he released his pent up frustration and she faced her guilty
conscience. Emily stared at the picture on the wall in front of her
featuring the colourful beach huts on the golden sands that lined
the Wells beachfront.

“It was a recording,” she said quietly. “I
was drinking one night and got carried away. I said some things
about my colleagues that I shouldn’t have. I was stupid, I had no
idea the sick bastard was recording it all.”

Even after all she had been through, she
could not bring herself to reveal the full contents of the
recording, especially to Tom Beckett. Silence ensued as Beckett
grappled with her confession.

“I guess I can understand why you did it, but
it doesn’t change the fact that you did do it. You knew you were
going to hurt me, so what am I supposed to take from that, that
deep down you don’t give a shit about me!”

“Who stayed with you?” she spat, returning
her attention to the patently wounded man. “Who cleared up your
vomit? Who undressed you and cleaned you up? Who put you to bed and
comforted you until they knew you’d be okay? It certainly wasn’t
your bloody friend Cavendish!”

It was Beckett’s turn to be dumbstruck.

“But I thought it was... I’m sorry I had no
idea.”

“No you haven’t. You’ve no idea what I have
been through, no one does. Okay, it was all of my own making but
that doesn’t make it any easier. Do you think I’m proud of what I
did? Do you not think that every day I wonder how I got myself into
this ridiculous situation, sitting fuck-knows where, wearing a pair
of oversize jeans and some bloody remnant that belongs in the
Canadian wilderness!”

“I’m sorry, Emily.”

She laughed at Beckett’s sincerity.

“Why are you laughing at me?” he asked
pitifully.

“I’ve ruined my career, I’ve made a laughing
stock of myself with a bully and you apologise. I’m sorry I accused
you of being like the rest. If I could say that anything good has
come of this whole sorry episode then it has to be meeting you.
Thinking is all I've done lately. Believe me. When I was locked in
that room I thought what I would do to Paul the next time I saw
him, believe me it wasn’t nice. The bastard used me. When I was at
my lowest, I thought of you. You got me through the ordeal.”

Beckett felt initially embarrassed by her
admission but slowly found himself basking in a wonderful glow that
he vaguely remembered from many years ago. For a few blissful
seconds he was lost for words.

“Tell you what, Emily; I’ll make us a fresh
coffee. I don’t know about you but I’m famished. Fancy a fry
up?”

Emily stared doubtfully at the incorrigible
Beckett and her icy glare melted like the morning frost in the
spring sunshine.

Leaving the Goldstein brothers, Cavendish
paused with uncertainty on the steps of their house. Pleased that
he had controlled his temper, he could almost imagine that Simeon
had some sympathy for his plight, but perhaps that was expecting
too much. The interview with Miles took place at Cavendish’s
accustomed expeditious rate, Miles was not out to hide anything and
seemed relieved to be able to disclose his part in the theft,
perhaps as an act of contrition.

Cavendish galloped back to the parked car but
began to experience a disquieting uncertainty, he felt that he was
chasing shadows and would need a good deal of luck if he was to
recover the Romanov items before they were out of reach and his
career was over. Luck was something that Cavendish did not like to
rely on.

As he seated himself in the Galaxy, he became
aware that he was sweating profusely despite the chill of the early
morning; he struggled to remove his coat but in doing so found the
frostiness of the car interior numbing his cognitive reasoning.
With a tacit sense of self-loathing, he realised he was afraid and
desperate as events transpired beyond his control.

As an Untersucher, it should be his
prerogative to move the chess pieces, as he done with Slingsby and
Emily. However, some unseen hand had attempted to usurp his
manipulation with a cunning ploy of their own. Yet as a master of
the art of sedition, he grasped that his opponent had moved too
rashly for they had given him a chance that he would never have
granted.

He needed to regain control of the board and
allay his anxieties. He needed to start moving the pieces, to
distance himself from his mutable anxieties. Reaching for his coat,
Cavendish fumbled for his mobile and after consulting the contact
list; he dialled a number and waited impatiently for the call to be
answered.

“Miss Williams? Marchel Cavendish here. I’ve
a few errands for you if you would be so kind.” Bethan Williams,
the firm’s UK Fixer, had never spoken to the visiting Untersucher;
all their previous dealings had been via email. She felt perturbed
and yet also intrigued and excited to be called in person by this
firm luminary.

“For Christ sake, Herr Cavendish, it’s seven
in the morning, you shit the bed or something?” answered Bethan in
her typically forthright manner. The coarseness of her words was
lost on the German as he was engulfed by the mellifluous ripples of
her south Wales accent. By now he was accustomed the jocular and
abusive vocabulary employed by so many members of the British firm.
They were indeed a breed apart.

“I need a trace on a number, and all you have
on the owner. I’m sending you the number now,” stated
Cavendish.

“Well you’ll have to bloody well wait for me
to get up won’t you? I’ll call you when I’m fit to face the world,”
replied the obdurate Bethan.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take too
long, Miss Williams.”

“Oh, you bloody men are always in a
hurry.”

“Thank you.” The line went dead. Cavendish
disconsolately placed the silent phone on the passenger seat; he
had no next move to make and was solely dependent on Bethan
tracking the number that Miles had provided. His heart was
pounding, as he glanced down at his white shirt he watched with
casual detachment the way the fabric billowed with every
contraction of his left ventricle. His career stood on a knife-edge
in a foreign city, dependant on the efficiency of a woman he could
barely understand.

The world was becoming busier around him;
people were leaving their homes to go about their daily lives,
oblivious to his presence, their purposeful activity infusing him
with an overwhelming compunction to move, anywhere was preferable
than this oppressive Bath side street.

He drove in the only direction he knew and
that was towards Bristol. Slowly, he edged through the busy city
centre towards the outskirts, desperately hoping that Bethan would
ring and end his meaningless drive into ignominy. He drove blindly
on, fixated upon the road ahead in his efforts to assuage his
mocking indecision, when suddenly he spotted a road sign for a Park
and Ride and made an intuitive decision to pull into the car
park.

What he found suited him, the car park,
already busy, was surrounded by an apron of dense trees and bushes.
Here he could park up and feel cocooned from the disobliging world
and await Bethan’s call. As he parked the Galaxy in the remotest
corner of the car park, he was aware that his shoulder holster was
clearly visible to the world and was in the process of removing it
when his mobile rang.

“I’ve got the number, Herr Cavendish.” Bethan
was sitting in front of the computer screen in her home office as
she keyed the number into the database. “You’re in luck; it’s a
contract phone, registered to a Zachary Asimov, home address in
London. I’ll stick his details in the database, hang on a mo. He’s
twenty-six and down as a student. Pretty looking boy. Okay, he’s
had a few run-ins with the law, a male ‘prozzi’. Does he sound like
your guy?”

“Could be, I’m going to need you to run a
trace on the phone, I need to know where this Asimov is. I want you
to relay the tracking information to my phone as soon as you can.
How long will it take?”

“You’re very demanding, Herr Cavendish, I do
have other work to do for the firm you know.”

“I really need this one, Miss Williams.”
Something in Cavendish’s voice conveyed itself across the ether,
Bethan picked up certain nuances in Cavendish’s precise, yet
quirkily foreign accent that conveyed something was clearly
worrying him. “I’ll have to ask you to do a little leg work for me,
Miss Williams. I want a list of his recent calls; you can pass it
on to me later. For the moment, all I need is to find this man. Can
you access his credit and debit card statements as well?”

“You certainly ask a lot of a girl, don’t
you? I assume he is a heretic of some kind?”

“He is a suspect, yes. There’s a lot riding
on finding him quickly.”

“Alright, Herr Cavendish, I’m doing it for
you now. How is your house in Wells, hope it’s okay for you?”

“I’m not in Wells, I’m in Bath.”

“In Bath, what are you doing there? Oh, never
mind. Triangulation on that number is coming through now. Well,
I’ll be buggered; it’s showing as being in Bristol. Huh, I suppose
you knew that, didn’t you?” Cavendish silently ingested her
information. After a moment, he received a signal on his phone to
follow.

“Where are you, Mr Asimov,” he mouthed
through clenched teeth. Cavendish aggressively fired up the
Galaxy’s engine and followed the satnav directions to Bristol. He
was entering the built up area of Brislington when Bethan’s strong
Welsh inflection erupted over the hands free phone speaker.

“He’s on the move!” Bethan sounded
excited.

“Can you track any card transactions he may
make?”

“You know bloody well I can, and if he buy’s
anything we’ll be the first to know about it.”

“Where’s he heading?” demanded Cavendish
anxiously.

“He must be on foot; he’s moving very slowly,
could be heading towards Temple Meads railway station.” Cavendish
clumsily punched the destination into the satnav and drove
erratically towards the railway station, accelerating too quickly
and breaking abruptly as he encountered traffic lights and other
driving impediments during Bristol’s rush hour.

“Temple Meads it is!” Bethan’s feverish tones
were now beginning to rile Cavendish’s highly stressed state of
mind. Minutes elapsed as Cavendish fought against the
exasperatingly slow commuter route into the heart of the city. He
questioned as to how anyone could tolerate such a daily grind into
this vehicular hellhole.

“He is using his credit card, give me a mo,”
Bethan fell silent for what seemed like an eternity. “He’s bought a
single standard railway ticket for Plymouth!”

Cavendish could now see the station but the
one-way road system prevented his right turn into Brunel’s station,
his way bared by a fenced central reservation.

“Scheiβe!” he shouted, “I’m going on
foot!”