Mambo (25 page)

Officially, it was an accident. After all, Dulzaides was blind drunk; was that disputable? Statements were taken, a report filed, a dossier opened and closed.

Enrico Caporelli and the others repaired for drinks to the Ritz, conveyed there in a chalk-white Cadillac driven by two armed men. Freddie Kinnaird joined them there. Each member was sceptical about the matter of the accident; but what was there to say? The police were convinced, the witnesses many, and Dulzaides' blood alcohol level was undeniably dangerous. Perhaps an accident; perhaps not. If an accident, then it was an ironic one given the recent circumstances surrounding the Society.

In the morning Caporelli, who wanted the chance to speak with a sober Dulzaides and perhaps check the man's background, the veracity of his story, telephoned the jail where the driver had been taken. He was informed by a cold voice that Monsieur Dulzaides had,
hélas
, died of heart failure at four-twenty a.m. and the body had already been claimed by relatives. Like garbage under a violent sun, it had been removed quickly from the premises.

11

Norfolk

Middlebury Comprehensive School, located between Norwich and the ancient Saxon town of Thetford, was a new building that resembled a car-assembly plant, as if each pupil were a machine to be bolted, buffed, waxed and wheeled out into the world – which, Pagan supposed, was true in a limited kind of way. According to the headmaster, a man named Frew who had the deep fatalism of the jaded schoolteacher, a pupil called Stephanie Brough had been missing overnight. Steffie's pet horse had returned home, saddled and riderless. Country policemen, defeated by darkness, had begun a systematic search at first light. By three o'clock in the afternoon, seven hours after the theft of the missile, not only had the missing girl continued to elude detection, but a constable on the case had vanished as well.

By five o'clock inquiries made of estate agents in a twenty-mile radius of Steffie's home had revealed the recent rental of a dilapidated farmhouse. The nice old dear who told Pagan about the tenancy had the quietly confidential air one sometimes finds in people whose occupations involve discretion. She would give nothing away unless the authority that needed answers had unimpeachable reasons. Pagan's needs, backed by his imposing credentials from Scotland Yard, fell into that category.

It was the woman's opinion that the man who'd rented the house was a “foreigner”, although remarkably “civilised” for all that.

Had there been only one renter? Pagan asked.

The agent remembered no other. Of course, a tenant could do pretty much what he liked as soon as he had a key, especially in a rural area without nosy neighbours. She would be happy to find a copy of the tenant's signature, but it would take an hour or so. Her office was not, she remarked proudly, computerised. Pagan thanked her and said he'd return.

The farmhouse was dismal, buried in a black hollow. Moss grew against walls and the chimney had partially collapsed. Tyre tracks were found outside the house; on the slope behind the building were varied muddy footprints, some large, a few rather small, small enough to be Steffie Brough's. Pagan stood for a while on the rainy incline, a photo of the girl, provided by her school, in one hand. She was pretty, a lovely devilment in the face, a puckish little smile, tiny pointed ears suggesting other-worldliness. A pixie. He tried to imagine Steffie Brough on this slope, watching the farmhouse.

Was this the place where she'd come? And then what? Had Ruhr surprised her? Pagan ran a fingertip across the image of the girl's face. If he squinted, there was a very strong resemblance between Steffie Brough and the girl with whom Gunther Ruhr had been captured in Cambridge. It was an unpleasant realisation: if this child were in Ruhr's possession, then he not only had a hostage but one who was practically a duplicate of somebody he'd desired into the bargain. Pagan pushed this thought aside and squelched back down to the house where Foxie – whose red hair was the only bright thing in the place – was wandering around.

“I don't doubt Ruhr and his chums found accommodation here, Frank,” Foxie said. “Look at this. Presumably they kept the child here.”

Foxie led Pagan inside a narrow room where an old iron bed had been placed under the wall. Lengths of rope were attached to the frame; somebody had clearly been bound here. On a threadbare bedside rug lay a small white bra, streaked with hardened mud. Foxie picked it up and passed it to Pagan, who handled the garment as if he were afraid of finding blood inside it. He looked for stencilled initials, laundry marks, but found none. He gave it back to Foxworth, who folded it in the pocket of his raincoat.

Pagan gazed at the bed again, the ropes, the strict knots. The idea of the child being imprisoned here upset him. He wandered uneasily through the rest of the house. Except for the remarkably tidy kitchen, the place was a mess. The smell of dampness was overpowering. Pagan went from room to room, most of them small low-ceilinged enclosures with narrow windows. Upstairs several old mattresses lay on the floorboards. Rodents scratched in the attic.

“This must be the terrorist dormitory,” Foxie said. “Not very well appointed, is it?”

Pagan moved to the window. The view was uninspiring. Flat and dead fields, stricken by the breath of coming winter, stark trees from which a couple of crows arose. Only the big black birds created any kind of movement. Pagan pressed his moist forehead against the windowpane. The motion of the birds – floating, searching – intrigued him, though for the moment he wasn't sure exactly why.

He went back downstairs to the main part of the house. In the living-room dirty glasses stood on a ping-pong table, newspapers were strewn everywhere, spent matches, cigarette butts, beer bottles on the cracked lino. He re-examined Steffie's picture, turning it over and over before passing it to Foxie.

“Ruhr likes them pale and thin, doesn't he?” Foxworth said in a quiet voice.

“That's the way it looks.” Pagan bunched his hands in the pockets of his sodden raincoat. “When they're finished with the Range Rover, the fingerprint boys better get over here next. The way I see it, nobody's been very careful about hiding their prints.”

“Arrogant lot,” Foxie said.

“With an arrogant leader. I'll tell you what else pisses me right off, Foxie. How could this damned place be overlooked in the general search for Ruhr? How could it be missed, for Christ's sake? It has all the necessary credentials for a hiding-place. Isolated. Recently rented. You'd think it would be obvious to any cop.”

Foxie was silent. He might have said that the countryside was large, the police force relatively small, and this house well concealed but he could see that Frank was in no mood for platitudes, even truthful ones.

Pagan walked round the room, thinking how some places defeated the imagination – they were empty stages, and you could never imagine anybody playing on them. Other houses, by contrast, were vibrant long after their vacancy, and seemed to echo with laughter that although old was cheerful just the same. But this house was a slum, like an abandoned inner-city house where drunks came to defecate, and light could never alter it. The presence of happy people couldn't change the structural gloom. Misery claimed this house, and misery was a clammy tenant, tenaciously silent.

Ghosts, Pagan thought. He stood at the foot of the stairs. For some reason he thought of Magdalena Torrente; at least her intrusion into his mind was a bright occurrence. He tried to imagine how her laughter, floating deliriously from room to room, might make a difference to this hideous dump. He thought of how he'd kissed her before walking away from her, and he could still feel her tongue against his own – another ghost.

How had it come about that Magdalena, who despised Castro's regime, whose father had been shot down and killed at the Bay of Pigs, had become the lover of Castro's Minister of Finance? Rosabal had reputedly been hand-picked by Fidel to mend Cuba's broken finances and restore economic order to a nation allegedly going under. Castro sent him on fund-raising trips to Russia and Czechoslovakia and anywhere else a purse might be forced open for Cuban coffers. Why did Magdalena associate with such a man? Was Rosabal part of some anti-Castro movement? was that the connection with Magdalena? Had she perhaps changed and become a secret supporter of Castro? God, how unlikely that seemed! Perhaps they were simply lovers. He pinched the bridge of his nose and frowned.

Dear Christ, what did Rosabal and Magdalena matter
? He had a missing girl and a crazy terrorist to deal with. Steffie Brough had stumbled on to this place, and Ruhr had seized her. A simple story really, a variation on Beauty and the Beast, with the contemporary addition of a stolen nuclear missile. He wondered if Ruhr had hurt the girl yet in any way, or whether Gunther preferred to savour such possibilities and prolong them, getting the timing and the flavour just right before he made his move.

Or did Ruhr understand how the idea of the frail girl's life and security would go round and round maddeningly in Frank Pagan's mind? And did he enjoy the feeling? Of course he did. Ruhr had one of those instinctive minds that quickly pick up on the personalities of others, almost a mimic's skill; in their few encounters he had come to know Frank Pagan somewhat. He would also know where to open Pagan's skin and lay bare the appropriate nerve.

Pagan saw now that the German was doing more than what Foxworth had called “thumbing his nose”: he was torturing Pagan. The scarf, the bra, these weren't mere gestures. It was as if the girl were being forced to perform a slow striptease. And Frank Pagan, like some devoted father desperately searching for his missing daughter through a maze of sleazy nightclubs, was doomed to find only the girl's discarded clothes.

Impatiently, Pagan stepped to the door and looked out across the yard. The birds were on the ground now, pecking with dedicated industry at something concealed under leaves. For one dreadful moment Pagan's heart lurched in his chest as he walked across the mud. He thought that perhaps the birds were feasting on Stephanie Brough, that she hadn't been kidnapped at all, that Ruhr's clues had been cruel jokes. The girl lay here, demolished by black-feathered morticians who picked their corpses down to bone.

Disturbed, the ravens fluttered a couple of feet away, landed, observed Pagan with bleak resentment. They were patient creatures who often had to take their meals cold. Pagan kicked some dry leaves aside. The face that appeared was missing one eye, half the lower lip had been ripped away, a cheek gouged. There was a deep wound in the neck. The man wore a police constable's dark-blue uniform made all the more dark by blood that had dried around his chest. Pagan turned away from the sight, picked up a couple of rocks, tossed them at the big birds, who flew quietly to a nearby tree, there to wait.

Foxie came out of the house and glanced at the corpse. All colour went out of his face. “Christ,” he said quietly.

Pagan rubbed his hands together. His entire body was suddenly cold.

Foxworth said, “I've had enough of this place, Frank. Do we need to linger here?”

Pagan got into the car without saying anything. He heard Foxie on the car telephone, reporting the discovery of the dead constable. The afternoon was darkening, the English autumn yielding to the coming winter with customary melancholy. Pagan sat in a hunched position, bent slightly forward to find relief from his renewed pain. Along country lanes a fresh wind blew moist fallen leaves at the car. All the little scraps of a perforated season were falling finally apart.

The office of the lady who had rented the farmhouse was located in a village seventeen miles from Norwich. It was an eccentric operation, manila folders stuffed in drawers, a big old-fashioned black telephone left over from more poetic times when exchanges had proper names. Joanna Lassiter wore her greying hair up, held in place by a marvellous array of coloured pins that Foxworth and Pagan admired. It was as if her skull were a map and the pins pointers to various locations.

She was a pleasantly confused woman who mislaid files and papers. On her desk scores of yellowing receipts had been impaled on a metal spike. The presence of the two policemen unsettled her. She suggested herbal tea, which both men declined. Pagan was impatient to go back out into the darkness of the early evening.

While she searched her desk for the necessary information, Joanna Lassiter said she personally supervised the rental and management of more than a hundred houses and apartments throughout the area, that business was good, and that once – funny, weren't they, these tiny coincidences? – she'd owned a pet dog called Pagan. As she rummaged she flitted breathlessly from topic to topic as if the pins that held her hair in place had punctured the brain itself, destroying the routes along which mental signals were meant to travel. When she wasn't speaking she kept up a sequence of little noises –
mmms
and
arrumms
and
drrmms
. There was battiness here, relief from a grim world.

“He was, I recall, a pleasant sort of fellow. Wore black glasses, which I don't usually like. I only met him once, and then briefly. Our business was done mostly by phone and mail. Can't possibly imagine him connected to any wrongdoing.” Joanna Lassiter poked through a thick folder from which slips of paper fell to the floor and were not retrieved. “Most of the tenants give me absolutely no trouble. Well, I always say I have an instinct about people, Mr Pagan. I sense vibrations from them, you see. It's a gift.”

And on and on.

Finally she pulled a sheet of paper out of the folder and held it aloft. “I rather think this is the naughty little chappie we've been seeking, Mr Pagan.” She held the paper directly under her desk-lamp and squinted at it. Pagan leaned across the desk with interest but the handwriting on the sheet was like Pitman's shorthand.

“The man rented the old Yardley place for six months. Paid the whole thing in advance with a money order. I think he said he was some kind of naturalist, actually. Needed a place to assemble his notes on a book. Mmmm. He was only two weeks into his tenancy. Well. It's not an easy property to rent, I'm afraid. Has bad feelings. Don't much like going over there myself. Dreary. Spot of paint might help a bit.”