Mambo (58 page)

Pagan found the Executive Motor Car Company located over a philately shop. He climbed the stairs. Halfway up, winded, he paused. A telephone rang somewhere above him, a kettle whistled. This was the way Foxworth had come, these were the stairs he must have climbed. Pagan reached the landing where a lovely young woman stood in a doorway, holding in one hand a mug of hot tea.

“You don't look terrific,” she said. “Are you feeling sick? Can I get you anything?”

Pagan smiled, shook his head, showed his ID, asked about Foxie. The woman said her name was Miss Wilkie and, yes, she remembered Foxworth, he had been very charming, very much a gentleman of the kind one rarely saw these days – and she blushed, Pagan noticed.

Miss Wilkie frowned, as if she had become suddenly concerned about Foxworth's fate. “Has something happened to him?”

“I'm not sure,” Pagan replied. “Where was he going when he left here?”

“I gave him very specific directions, Mr Pagan, to a house in Ayrshire. In fact, I kept a copy of the map our driver made for him. It's a bit rough, but easy to follow.” She paused. She had small, trim hands that gleamed because they had recently been rubbed with skin lotion. “He hasn't come back yet, is that it?”

Pagan nodded. “That's it exactly.”

“He asked about some men – let me think a minute. They had names that began with the letter C. One was called Chap, Chap something or other.”

“Chapotin?”

“I believe you're right,” said Miss Wilkie. “The other man was named Caporelli. Both these men used our limousines to visit the country house in which Mr Foxworth showed such interest.”

Pagan felt a very small pulse in his dry throat. He tried to imagine Foxie's excitement when he uncovered the information that both Chapotin and Enrico Caporelli had visited the same house. That link, that complex knot tying together Caporelli and Chapotin, the same knot that brought both Rosabal and Gunther Ruhr into its ornate folds and twists.

“He might have been in an accident,” Miss Wilkie said in a kindly, hesitant way. “Some of the roads are bad. Then there are cliffs …” She left this line of thought alone, and smiled, and there was bravery in the expression. “You'll find him, you'll see. People always turn up.”

But in what condition? Pagan wondered. He took the copy of the map, studied it, felt dizzy. He asked about renting a car and Miss Wilkie said she could oblige very easily. A few forms to complete, that was all. Pagan filled in the requisite paperwork, thanked Miss Wilkie, shook her hand, went down into West Nile Street. The city seemed unduly loud to him suddenly, the clatter of buses, clogged streets. He found a small coffee shop near Royal Exchange Square and went inside, drank two cups of strong Kenyan quickly, then returned to Executive Motor Cars Limited to pick up his hired car, a Fiat Uno.

Out of the city and on his way south; easy enough on paper, but his sense of direction was skewed and he went in circles for an hour before finding the route that would take him into Ayrshire, presumably the same route Foxworth had taken before. Pagan drove carefully; sleep kept coming in now, dark wave after dark wave. He studied Miss Wilkie's map now and then, and, noticing the sparkling greenery of the countryside through which he drove, wished he were a tourist and this some casual jaunt directly into the heart of beauty.

He stopped in Ayr, stretched his legs near the harbour, breathed the sea air into his lungs, watched gulls squabble like spectators in search of a sport. Perhaps Foxie had come this way too; pursuing a ghost, Pagan thought. He half-expected to see Foxie by the side of the road, his automobile broken down and young Foxie resting indolently upon a grassy bank while awaiting the arrival of a mechanic. But Pagan saw no Foxworths and no broken-down cars. He drove south out of Ayr and almost at once the countryside became forlorn – lovely, yes, but in a different way, more starkly melancholic, with ancient, whitewashed stone cottages and old farmhouses erected in quiet isolation, and here and there a TV antenna to bring another world, an incongruous one, into old parlours. Pagan continued to drive south.

He parked in a place overlooking the sea, examined the map again. He saw Ballantrae on his rough map, and out of that village led a narrow track, and there – an inked rectangle, underlined – was presumably the house. It was unnamed, a simple inky square on copy paper. Had Foxworth gone there? Had he found it? If so, why hadn't he called Golden Square to say so?

Pagan's head throbbed as much from anxiety as pain; dread created a stress all its own. He drove again, thinking that Foxie could take care of himself, he was a grown man, a good cop, he knew how to handle situations:
so why all this damned worry
?

The town of Girvan, sunlight on deep grey water, seabirds, a miniature fairground, tarpaulined for the dead season, near the sea. Pagan was blinded by bright sun rippling on the tide. And then Girvan was behind him and he was headed for the village of Ballantrae, remembering that Robert Louis Stevenson had once written a novel entitled
The Master of Ballantrae
, but Pagan had never read it, never read a word of Stevenson; how remiss of him, he thought now. Foxie, who had gone to an expensive school, had probably read the lot.

The track outside Ballantrae was narrow. Birds flew from hedgerows – bright starlings, thrushes, plain little sparrows, and once a plump plover that flew toward Pagan's windshield as if intent on bringing to a swift conclusion some avian depression. The hedges that rose on either side prevented any kind of view of what lay beyond, and Pagan wondered if Foxie had come this way and felt the same sensation of isolation, almost an eeriness that the forceful sun could not dispel.

Foxie: where the hell are you?

What did you find in this place?

The track grew worse; the hedgerows eclipsed the low morning sun. Pagan felt the Fiat bump and shudder, but it was nothing compared to the ride in Bengochea's chopper. He slowed where the hedges thinned, seeing flat meadowlands vanish toward stands of trees, an empty landscape with neither animals nor people. Only a solitary hawk, casting a squat shadow, suggested motion. He ought to have reached the house some time ago, but then he understood that this roughly drawn map bore no resemblance to actual scale.

When he finally saw the house it surprised him. It rose in sunlight and shadow as though it were a deformed sandstone dream, grand circular towers and narrow windows, a pretension here in a landscape without airs of grandeur. He stopped the Fiat, got out, peered through the hedgerow at the edifice, then pushed his way through – branches springing at him with unexpected harshness – and stepped into a swampy meadow littered with yellow wild flowers.

The house glowed red in morning sunlight. In crannies, in abysses of brickwork, between turrets, shadows were wine-coloured and warm. Pagan walked across the sponge-like grass toward the mansion, then paused when he reached a copse of trees. Somebody had been working there – a wheelbarrow was propped alongside a tree, a spade stuck in the soil, there was the soft scent of good earth newly turned over. A sizeable trench had been dug in the ground. Pagan stepped between the trees, paused, looked off in the direction of the house, which was a half mile away.

A car was parked in the drive, a Jaguar, he thought, but sunlight obscured the lines of the vehicle; there was also a jeep just behind it. Nobody moved, though; the house showed no sign of life. Had it not been for the presence of spade and wheelbarrow and the clammy black perfume of newly shovelled earth, he might have thought the estate abandoned. He took a few steps forward between the overhanging branches of the trees, and loose leaves, disturbed by his passage, drifted to the ground around him. Earth made soft by recent rains sucked at his shoes.

Bloody hell, he was tired. He leaned against a trunk, listened to the lazy buzz of a bee nearby, a lark impossibly high in the sky. There was a narcotic conspiracy here, something to lull a man towards sleep.

The sound of a footfall made him open his eyes and turn around. The twin-barrelled shotgun, large and vicious, was held by a short man with centre-parted hair and the relic of a hare-lip that had been removed surgically years before. A feeble moustache had been grown over the scar.

Pagan reached inside his pocket for his identification, but the man gestured with the shotgun. Frank Pagan stood very still. The man, whose voice had a nasal edge, poked the barrel closer to Pagan and said, “Another bloody snoop.”

Pagan finally fished out his wallet, but the man was unimpressed and didn't even look.
Another bloody snoop:
had Foxie been the first one?

“I'm looking for somebody,” Pagan said.

“Are you indeed?” the man said.

“A colleague of mine.”

“A colleague, is it?” The man raised one thin eyebrow. For some reason he didn't immediately understand, Pagan's attention was drawn to the spade propped against the tree, the mound of earth inside the wheelbarrow. These simple perceptions, rustic and yet sinister, shook him and he didn't know why; but now the sunlit day seemed bleached, as if colour had drained out of it.

“The man's name was Foxworth. Detective Foxworth.”

“Is that a fact?” asked the short man.

“From Scotland Yard.”

The man was still unimpressed.

“Could you lower your gun?” Pagan asked. “You make me nervous.”

The shotgun stayed where it was, level with Pagan's heart. The man glanced through the trees toward the house. Pagan turned, saw three figures coming across the landscape, perhaps a half-mile distant and small. There was an instant familiarity about two of them; after a moment Pagan recognised the man who walked in front as Foxworth. The red hair, made almost blood-coloured by sun, was unmistakable.

Pagan's relief at the sight of Foxworth alive and breathing was immense but brief; immediately behind Foxie was a man who carried a shotgun trained on his spine.

At the rear, moving with brisk steps, hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a laird walking his terrain, was the third man. Pagan had one of those odd moments in which inversions take place – the sky tilts, the sun darkens, the heart is suddenly stilled, and perceptions are tunnelled as if through reversed binoculars.

A mistake, Pagan thought.

It had to be.

A resemblance, nothing more.

But as the three figures came closer Pagan saw Freddie Kinnaird sweep a lock of hair from his forehead in that characteristic gesture he had. There was a smile on the famous face, but cold, very cold.

No mistake.

Pagan couldn't swallow. Astonishment and a brutal, burning anger denied him that simple reflex. He thought of all the information to which Kinnaird had been privy. Everything that passed across Martin Burr's desk eventually reached Freddie. He thought of how Freddie Kinnaird had known of Gunther Ruhr's route through Shepherd's Bush, of how Freddie must have passed that juicy item along the line to Rosabal, who had arranged the drastic rescue of Gunther and rented the country hideout. At every turn, every angle, nothing of substance had been withheld from Sir Frederick Kinnaird. And he must have shared everything with his associates who had come to this house in the secret depths of the Scottish countryside – Chapotin and Caporelli, perhaps the late Herr Kluger and the two Americans as well, a tight little gang of old pals.

Pagan raised his face to the sun. He was hot in his raincoat. Freddie Kinnaird approached, stopped some yards away. Pagan glanced at Foxie, who had the slightly red-eyed look of a man who has been held captive for days in a dark room and now sunlight astounds him.

“Well, well, well,” Kinnaird said with a certain cheerfulness. “Frank Pagan himself.”

Pagan said nothing. He had the unbearable urge to reach for Kinnaird and grab him and crush that smug face until nothing recognisable was left of it. But how could he move with a shotgun shoved into his back?

“We had that whole damned island sewn up,” Kinnaird said and grabbed air in his hand and made a fist, as if what he held there were locks of invisible hair. “We had it all. Why did you have to stick your nose in?”

Pagan gazed upward again. The lark he'd seen before was imposed against the sun, like an inscrutable punctuation mark in the sky. “It's my job to stick my nose in, Freddie. You know that.” There was an ugly note in Pagan's voice, which came close to breaking. Control yourself, Frank. It wasn't easy. The depths of his own loathing astonished him.

Kinnaird appeared to be elsewhere, concentrating on some inner lyric of his own. He had in his eye a very small, sharp light that suggested some quiet, well-bred form of craziness. “You helped bollix the whole damned thing.”

“I think you overestimate me, Fred. I'd dearly love to take the credit for fucking your scheme up, but it wouldn't be fair. All I did was get a young girl out of Cuba. That was my job. I wanted to bring Ruhr back to stand trial, also part of my job. I lost that one. I did the best I could with what I had. But I'm not personally responsible for screwing up your plans for Cuba, Fred. I didn't kill Rosabal. Blame Magdalena Torrente. Blame Rosabal himself for choosing the wrong woman to fuck up over. Blame any damn thing you like. All I did was my job.”

“I rather think you're hiding your light under a bushel, Pagan. After all, you managed to save Magdalena Torrente's life in Miami.”

Pagan shouldn't have been surprised by Kinnaird's knowledge of the murder attempt, because it was plain that very little had escaped Freddie. He'd obviously learned from the Commissioner that Pagan was going to be in Miami with Magdalena Torrente. That simple. But somehow Pagan was surprised anyway, although he wasn't going to give Freddie the satisfaction of showing it.

Kinnaird, who looked all at once like a large, sulking boy, said, “If you hadn't saved her, she'd never have gone to Cuba. And if she hadn't gone there –”

“If she hadn't gone there, Rosabal might have fired his missile.”