Mambo (5 page)

Yesterday, though, to her great surprise, something was different. During her morning ride she'd seen a dark-blue Range Rover outside the house. Intrigued by the possibility of some new happening in a part of the world where fresh occurrences were rare, she'd come back to see if the vehicle was still there, or perhaps even catch sight of the new occupant. In this rustic environment information was a prize, something to be seized then passed along to the next person, like a great favour.
Oh, by the way, there's some new people at the old Yardley place. You didn't know
?

The vehicle was parked where it had been the day before. But the house still looked disappointingly empty, the windows dark and bare. A crow was scratching around in the soil. Leaves, fallen from the willows, had become piled against the east wall of the property. It was all rather desolate. Steffie enjoyed little mysteries, and, in her mind, the dead appearance of the old house was exactly that – something to be solved. Why was there a Range Rover and no sign of life? Why was there no smoke from the chimney, no dog in the yard? Everybody had dogs around here.

She wanted a closer look. She left the mare chewing on a clump of grass, then moved down the incline a little way. She stopped after a few yards, uneasy at the idea of trespassing on other people's property. Divided between her natural curiosity and her sense of intrusion, she wasn't sure if she should go any further. But really, what harm could it possibly do to pop down there and just sniff around? If anybody discovered her she'd just tell them she lived on her father's horse-breeding farm three miles away, and then introduce herself as the next-door neighbour – practically.

She was halfway down when she heard the noise – a penetrating
crack
. Her first startled reaction was that a jet from an airbase nearby had shattered the sound barrier, a common occurrence round here. But then she realised the noise was closer than that and more focused: it had come from the house. The raven, cawing harshly, rose in the clear air.

If it hadn't been a supersonic plane –

She suddenly realised what had caused the sound. She turned back up the rise, moving quickly, her heartbeat rapid. The noise had faded but she could still hear it perfectly inside her head.
Crack
. Just like that. When she reached the top of the slope she glanced one last time down at the house.

The building was as lifeless as it had been before, the windows opaque in the chill dawn.

But somebody had to be inside. Somebody had to have fired the gun. Guns did not go off by themselves. Unless there were spirits, and Steffie was too sophisticated to believe in anything like that.

She rode the mare hard between the birches, intrigued more than ever, and afraid in a way that was quite new to her and strangely interesting.

Crack
.

She'd come back tomorrow. She couldn't leave the mystery alone.

3

London

When his wife Roxanne had been killed seven years ago by an IRA bomb detonated in a London street, Frank Pagan had lived for some time in a world of incomprehensible pain, a bleak place where his will to live was smothered. It was the sort of pain that lingered in bewildering ways long after the event. A resemblance on a street, a phrase from a certain song, the creak of a floor in his flat – these things stirred the ghost, and the pain returned, always swift, never less than savage. He'd come to accept that this emptiness was a lifelong thing. He'd combated it to some extent, but there was always the residue. Sometimes he'd caught himself waiting for the approach of Roxanne Pagan's memory. The anticipation of pain, a gentle masochism.

That was one kind of hurt.

In this white hospital room, whose translucence suggested an hallucination, he was beginning to understand another form of pain altogether. When he raised his face, hot threads tightened malignantly in his chest. When he had to get out of bed and go to the toilet – he defiantly refused to take the wheelchair, which was transportation for the damned only – he walked like a man negotiating a field of broken glass. Any sudden motion sent a violent response up through his bandaged chest. At times his heart seemed charged with electricity, as if copper wires were conducting a brisk current through it.

He really hadn't needed to be reminded so forcibly of his own mortality. What also shook him was the sense of violation, his body breached by a force that might have destroyed him. This notion was shocking: he'd been shot at before, but never hit, and perhaps he'd come to think it was one of those things that happened to other people, never to oneself.

It didn't matter that his Pakistani doctor, Ghose, a sweet chain-smoking man with fidgety hands, kept telling him he was
wery wery
lucky. After all, six policemen had died during the carnage four days ago in Shepherd's Bush. Another inch to the left, Ghose had reminded him, another short inch, and the total would have been seven.
Imagine it, Mister Pagan – the tiny distance of infinity
. The idea of six dead policemen, four inside the leading van, one in the third car, and poor Ron Hardcastle from a devastating head wound, took something away from any contemplation of his own luck. Even the knowledge that two of the assailants had also been killed didn't quite cut the gloom.

On the morning after Pagan's admission to the hospital, Ghose had held up X-rays in his smoky-orange fingers, pointing enthusiastically to the pathway of the bullet, which had gone straight through the right lung.
Absolutely no functional disturbance
, Ghose had said.
No fractured ribs. No debris. Very little crushed tissue. A wonderfully clean exit. I'm utterly delighted. I rarely see such symmetry. You must thank God for the insignificant yaw of the bullet
.

Yaw: now there was a nice little word. Pagan had wondered why, if it was such a terrific wound, aesthetically so pleasing to Ghose and with a low yaw factor into the bargain, he was in such terrible
pain
those first three days.

Initially he'd been injected with morphine. A thoracostomy tube had been inserted in his chest to reinflate the lung, and then attached to a chest-draining unit. The wound had been closed on the third day. He'd been given anti-tetanus therapy and antibiotics and Ghose prescribed Pethidine, so that this fourth day was the most comfortable Pagan had spent. But comfort in the circumstances was merely relative: he was more glazed by drugs than truly soothed. Just when he thought the pain had subsided it would come back and lance him, causing him to gasp and his eyes to water.

And then, Christ, there were the dreams. In most of them he was back on that terrible street again, surrounded by searing flames, hearing the same explosions. Sometimes he rushed toward the burning van and tried to get the door open to release the trapped men, but he never quite made it. Infuriating dreams, frustrating and tragic. He always scorched his hands in these nightmares. At other times he dreamed of Gunther Ruhr, hearing over and over the drily uttered German phrase Ruhr had used in the car.
Die Reise ist nicht am Ende bis zur Ankunft
– endlessly repeated, echoing. He reached out in anger to silence Ruhr, but invariably the German had vaporised, courtesy of that special chemistry of dreams and Pagan would wake sweating, filled with a sense of desperation.

What he really needed was to be discharged from this place. He couldn't do anything from a hospital bed. He couldn't bring the outside world into this boring room of tubes and charts and starched bedsheets. He couldn't begin to get at Ruhr, who had disappeared without the courtesy of a clue. He'd asked Ghose only that morning to release him. With that inscrutable look all doctors must learn in medical school, the doctor said he'd consider it.

Restless, Pagan turned his face to the window, where a rare October sun shone on the dusty glass. A tree, gloriously lit by autumn, pressed against the windowpane and tantalised him. There was a high breeze outside, the kind of spirited wind that dries laundry. All this contributed to his impatience. All this made him doubly determined to find a way out of here before it was night again and nurses came to dispense sleeping-pills with the persistence of drug-dealers.
Now, Frank, you really must swallow this, do you the world of good
. Or,
Come on, Frank, be a good boy
. He didn't
want
to be a good anything. He wanted to be a cantankerous pain in the arse to doctors and nurses alike. He wanted out: he wanted Gunther Ruhr.

When the door of his private room opened he saw Martin Burr step inside. Burr, the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, carried a bottle of that British panacea called Lucozade and a small bag of fruit, both of which he set down on the bedside table. Haggard from insomnia, he'd been coming twice a day ever since Pagan had been rushed here by ambulance. The Commissioner propped his walnut cane against the bed and sat down, smiling at Pagan, who noticed how a streak of sunlight struck the dark-green plastic patch over Burr's blinded right eye.

“How are we today, Frank?”

“We're a long way from wonderful,” Pagan replied. “We would like to get the hell out of here.”

Burr reached for his cane and tapped it on the floor, sighing as he did so. “You're always in such a damned hurry, Frank. Accept the fact you've been wounded, and even if you're released from this place you need time to convalesce. You still look awful.” Burr looked round. “Rather nice place. Room to yourself. TV. Magazines to read. Enjoy the privacy, Frank. Think of it as an enforced holiday.”

“With respect, what I need is to get back on the job.”

Burr's smile was small and strained, barely concealing the stress of a man who had just spent the worst four days of his life. There had been endless news conferences, and questions raised in the House of Commons about events in Shepherd's Bush. A commission of inquiry was being set up, which meant that a bunch of professors and civil servants would be asking all kinds of bloody questions. And the press, good God, the press had squeezed the tragedy for everything it was worth and more. The breakdown of law and order. The incompetence of British security forces. The supremacy of the “super-terrorist”. On and on without end. A mob was howling for blood, preferably Martin Burr's. And the Home Secretary had commanded Burr to attend a private interview, which could only mean that the Commissioner's job security was somewhat in doubt. These were not good times. The temper of the country was bad; the citizens were horrified when policemen were killed.

Burr said, “What would it accomplish if you returned to work? You'd wear yourself out within a day, Frank. You'd be back in this bed in no time flat.”

“I don't think so. Basically I think I'm in good shape.”

“Notwithstanding a hole clean through your chest. Think of the shock to your system.”

“I can't just lie here.”

“Afraid you have to,” Burr said. “Anyway, everything that can be done is being done.”

“And Ruhr's back in custody?”

“Below the belt, Frank.”

Burr leaned towards the bed. He laid both hands over his face and massaged his flesh in a tired way. When he spoke there were hollows of fatigue in his voice. “Let me bring you up to date. Our explosions people say the parked cars that exploded along Acacia Avenue were detonated by a timing-device and the explosives used were of Czech origin.”

“Brilliant work,” Pagan remarked drily.

Martin Burr gave Pagan a dark look. “I realise you have very little patience for the kind of systematic work technicians have to do, Frank. Nevertheless, it has to be done.”

Pagan shut his eyes. There was a tickle in his nostrils. A sneeze was building up. If it succeeded, it would send uncontrollable bolts of pain through his chest. He struggled to overcome it, reaching for a tissue just in case.

Burr continued. “Twenty-six cars were detonated simultaneously. Nobody we interviewed in the vicinity saw anybody plant the explosives in the first place. The whole thing was done with an extraordinary degree of stealth.”

Pagan opened his eyes. The sneeze had faded. He lowered the tissue and looked at Martin Burr. “I think we can take stealth for granted,” he said.
That tone
– it was close to petulant sarcasm. He'd have to be careful not to push it. Alienation of Martin Burr wasn't a good thing.

Burr fingered his plastic eye-patch, which he did when he was annoyed. “I understand your impatience, Frank. I also understand that a gunshot wound affects a man's perceptions. However, I didn't come here to listen to your cutting little asides. I've got enough on my plate as it is.”

Whenever he was irritated, Burr resorted to a patronising tone that Pagan disliked. Chided, Pagan stared at the window, the gorgeous sunlight, and resolved he'd leave this place today no matter how the considerations of Doctor Ghose turned out. He'd swallow some Pethidine and walk out of this bloody hospital under his own steam. By mid-afternoon he'd be back in his office overlooking Golden Square in Soho, where his anti-terrorist section was located. Lord of his own domain again.

“Now where was I?” Martin Burr said. “Ah, yes. I was coming to the two terrorists killed in the assault.”

Pagan felt his interest quicken. “Is there anything new?”

“We haven't been able to identify one of the men. The other, however, was an Australian citizen by the name of Ralph Masters.”

“It doesn't ring any bells,” Pagan said.

Burr sat back in his chair. “Born Adelaide 1940. Served in the Australian Army in 1960. Nothing for a long time. Then he turns up again in Biafra, nowadays Nigeria, in 1967. He was in the Congo in 1968. After that, he makes an appearance in Nicaragua in the mid-1970s.”

“The mercenary circuit.”

“Indeed.”

“Is there anything more recent on him?”

Burr shook his head. “So far as we know, he'd been sitting quietly in Sydney. He installed telephones for a living.”