Orkney Twilight (38 page)

‘You have to be sensible if you don’t want to find yourself in serious trouble.’

She looked into the Commander’s face, his thin-lipped mouth and his dead-fish eyes. And she could tell then that he had seen too much to bother with second thoughts, the benefit of the doubt. Regrets. She could sense his mind reckoning, totting up the debits and the credits, coming to unavoidable conclusions. Calculating the collateral damage. She didn’t move.

The roar of the returning bike broke the deadlock. She watched the reflection of the black Yamaha advancing in the Commander’s steel-rimmed glasses. The rider drew level. Feet on ground. Controlling the weight of the bike with one hand. Slipping the other into his leather jacket. Metallic flash. Pistol. Her turn to get it in the neck. Pay the price for her smart-arsery. She gasped. Closed her eyes. Squeezed tight.

Nothing.

Opened her eyes. The rider’s arm was raised. Shoot position. His pistol aimed at the Commander. He jerked his head towards the station slip-road.

‘Run,’ he said.

She remained rooted to the spot, numbed by uncertainty. Exhaustion.

‘Run.’ He spoke more urgently this time. ‘Go. Now. Quickly. Leave me to sort this fucker out.’

She came to her senses, allowed her limbs to obey his command, bolted up the slope. The South African accent of the rider rang in her ears, ricocheted around her mind.

‘You shit. You fucker. You think you can make me do anything just because I’m on the run. Well, you’re fucking wrong. There are limits to what you can tell me to do. I obeyed your fucking order to shoot her father, but I’m not going to kill a teenage girl. I’ve had enough of your fucking games.’

The pistol shot came as she reached the entrance to the mainline terminal. One crack. She halted in her stride. She couldn’t help looking back. Staring at the corpse of the Commander, face down in the gutter, blood oozing out around his lopsided trilby. She stood hypnotized as Avis chased along the street, heading in her direction. Drawing nearer. Reaching the taxi ramp. But, just at that moment, the rider revved his bike and intercepted Avis’s path. He turned and waved his pistol at Sam, gesturing, telling her to scram. She couldn’t shift. She was riveted. It was like watching a film – a thriller, not real life. She wanted to know what happened next. How the story ended. A police siren wailed through the air, jolted her back to her senses. And finally, she managed to move her legs and sprint for the cover of Waterloo station.

She cut across the mainline terminal, tacking through knots of people huddled around train timetables, and headed to Waterloo East. On the far side of the station bridge she spotted a telephone box, sprinted to the door. Slumped inside. Sirens still wailing all around. She scrabbled around in her trouser leg pocket and grasped the scrap of paper with the phone number written on it, the one that Tom had found under Jim’s bed. Message in a bottle. She squinted at the 01 London number. She had nothing to lose anyway; she might as well try it. She balanced a ten-pence piece in the coin slot and dialled. The phone rang. Nobody answered. Perhaps nobody was there. Perhaps it was a non-number. She was about to replace the receiver when somebody did pick up. She fumbled with the coin, jammed it into the slot.

‘Hello,’ said the voice at the other end. Gruff. Male. ‘Hello. Russian Embassy.’

She almost dropped the phone. That wasn’t what she had been expecting. Jim had assured her this wasn’t anything to do with the KGB. He said he’d lost those Soviet contacts ages ago, and now it turned out he had been wandering around with the number of a direct line to the Russian Embassy all along. He was the Kim Philby of the Force, a double agent. He was directing her towards a poison-tipped umbrella. How stupid of her to think that a scrap of paper found in a whiskey bottle under Jim’s bed might have been useful; that Jim might actually have somehow done what he had told Ruth he was going to do and left her a number to call in case she needed help. She should have known better.

‘Hello, Russian Embassy,’ said the voice again. In a distinctly non-Soviet accent. ‘Garage extension,’ the voice added. Garage extension? She frowned, trying to recall something Jim had said. Something about a sitting-down position. She pushed the coins into the machine.

‘Chauffeur speaking,’ the voice said.

She hesitated. ‘Are you on diplomatic duties?’ she asked uncertainly.

There was a pause at the other end now. ‘Yes… Is that the third man?’

The third man. Tilbury. Everything went back to the day at the docks. It all began at Tilbury. She was the third man, Jim had said. He had made up his mind. It was her. The third man. That was Jim’s nickname for Sam.

She took a deep breath. ‘Yes. This is the third man. I have something for you. I need to hand it over. Urgently.’

‘Are you in town?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know Charlie the lift-man?’

Charlie. Greenwich foot tunnel. Let’s face the music.

‘I know Charlie.’

‘How soon can you be there?’

She glanced up at the clacking departure board above the ticket office – the Greenwich train posted and due to leave in fifteen minutes.

‘About an hour.’

‘I’ll find you at the bottom.’

Distant voices drifted on the river’s current. The glass dome glittered against the violet sky. The shadow of a man was leaning against the railing, staring out across the oily water. It was Jim. She was eight years old again and Jim was there by her side, holding her hand. We’ll have to hurry. Or Liz will have our heads chopped off, he said. The concertina lift-gate was open and Charlie was sitting on the wooden bench reading a paper. He glanced up as she approached.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said.

He searched his dimming memory for her face. She smiled.

He nodded his head in recognition, returned an old man’s toothless grin. ‘Hello, princess. You’ve not changed that much.’

‘Neither have you,’ she lied.

‘I heard your dad had passed. I’m sorry. He was a good bloke. So long as you were on the right side of him.’

She smiled again, unable to form words reliably in her lumpy throat.

‘Going down?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘Business?’

He pulled the gate shut across the cavernous lift and, as they descended, he whistled the lament for Tom Paine’s bones. Jim’s favourite song. The tune dawdled mournfully in the air as she stepped out into the eerie green light of the white tiled tunnel.

She paced under the Thames, stared straight ahead as the last notes of Charlie’s whistle dwindled and the rushing of water echoed above her head. It was cold down here, beneath the river. Colder than she remembered. Cold and damp and clammy, the air dank with the fetid traces of the tunnel’s inhabitants: late-night piss-heads, dead rats, slimy vegetation. River water seeping through. She shuddered. And when she heard the footsteps pacing up behind her, she began to fear she might have made a mistake. Jumped to the wrong conclusion. She turned sharply at the sudden weight of a meaty hand on her shoulder. Faced the hefty figure looming up behind her – cropped black hair, boxer’s nose, leather bomber, trainers.

‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Thank Christ it’s you and not some nutty Russian. Do they know they’ve hired a cop for a chauffeur?’

‘Course they do.’ He smiled benignly. Moved swiftly on. ‘I was half expecting you to call.’

‘Were you?’ She was too exhausted now to care or even to be surprised.

He dug around in the pocket of his bomber, pulled out a postcard.

‘It arrived yesterday. The old bugger hadn’t put the right stamp on it so I had to pay the difference.’

She examined the card. Postmarked Inverness. The Ring of Brodgar on the front and on the back Jim’s scrawl danced like the scribble on a planchette, a message from the other side.

The third man may need your help. Jim.

‘The third man,’ he said. ‘That’s what Jim always called you. Family joke I assumed.’

She grimaced, too many memories stirring, thought she heard a whisper, a footfall, glanced over her shoulder. Nothing. Nobody.

‘So what do you have for me anyway?’ Harry asked.

She stuck her hand into the side pocket of her combat trousers, removed the manila envelope.

‘Information from Jim. Everybody seems to be after it. That’s why he was killed. Here. Take it. Please.’

Harry held the envelope, turned it over thoughtfully. ‘Slaughter told me about the hit,’ he said.

‘Slaughter?’

‘Kevin Slaughter. Mortuary assistant. Another of Jim’s jokes. East End Borstal Boy. Jim helped him get the job. Thought it would give everyone a laugh to have a mortuary assistant called Slaughter who looked like a skeleton.’

She muttered, ‘Sometimes Jim’s jokes were a bit painful.’

‘Everyone has to find their own way of dealing with the difficult stuff.’ He rolled his bottom lip down, raised his eyebrows. ‘And some people have more difficult stuff to deal with than others.’

He shrugged. ‘You’d better tell me what’s been going on anyway. I know the gist of it. Jim told me he was heading up to Orkney to pick up the gen on Intelligence and their funny business. I assume that’s what this lot is.’ He wafted the envelope in the air. ‘And I’ve just heard over the airwaves that there’s a bit of a mess down in the swampland that needs to be cleaned up before forensics start dusting the place for fingerprints. The Commander. That’s certainly put everybody in headless chicken mode. Word is that the other stiff is that creep who had it in for Jim and me when we were at Tilbury; Intelligence shit worker.’

‘The Watcher.’

‘The Watcher? Yes. Him.’ He harrumphed dismissively. ‘What was he doing in Waterloo? Was he after the information?’

‘The Watcher was the middleman for the Intelligence operation to fix the miners’ strike. When Intelligence found out that Jim’s contact had some information on the operation, they set the Watcher after him to try and retrieve it. But he didn’t manage to get hold of the envelope in Orkney.’

Harry nodded. ‘Jim told me that the Commander had instructed him to ask that old mate of theirs to provide a courier to pick the papers up in Orkney. American. Ex CIA.’

‘Don Chance,’ Sam confirmed. ‘He sent his daughter, Avis. She works for Ventura, his security company.’

‘So why didn’t Jim pass the envelope on to her?’

‘When Jim looked through the papers, he must have worked out that South African Steve, the agent provocateur hired by the Watcher, had also been employed by Don Chance through another of his companies – Shaba Security. And that made him suspect Chance was working with Intelligence in some way and would probably destroy the information rather than pass it on. But I reckon Chance also wanted the envelope because he was worried there might be something in it that linked Shaba Security to a load of shootings that took place at this mine they were supposed to be guarding. Shinkolobwe. He would obviously want to try and erase any connection to that. So when Jim failed to drop the envelope at Brodgar, South African Steve was ordered to hijack Jim’s car on the way back from Kensington Olympia Station. Made him drive to Vauxhall.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to recount the event. ‘Faked the car crash.’

Harry took a sharp intake of breath. ‘That’s a bit wild west,’ he said. ‘Those kind of tactics are usually saved for overseas operations.’

‘Well, I suppose Chance is more used to working overseas. And he’s obviously a bit of a crackpot.’

‘But they didn’t find the information in the car?’

‘Jim didn’t have the envelope with him.’

Harry checked her out of the corner of his eye.

‘I had it,’ she said. She tried to grin in a dippy sort of way.

Harry stroked his chin. ‘So it was Chance that ordered the hit on Jim.’

She hesitated; relieved that Harry hadn’t asked about her own involvement, how she had ended up with the package. And in the gap in the conversation she heard the strange sounds of the tunnel – the rushing river overhead, ghosts of the past whispering, and somewhere far away a drip, drip, drip of water, like the ticking of a clock.

Eventually she spoke. ‘The Commander ordered the hit on Jim.’

Harry shook his head. ‘No. Now I think you’ve lost the trail. Jim had his suspicions about the Commander. He was worried that he was setting him up. But he was wrong about that.’

‘Why did Jim suspect him?’

‘Jim started getting jumpy when the Commander directed him to Chance’s company for a courier. Thought there was something funny going on. Although he couldn’t quite see what. He suspected the Commander was conniving with his old dining-club mates in Intelligence, carving up the home turf, trying to ease Jim out of the frame because he was being difficult. But I’m sure he was wrong on that score. I always thought the Commander was too close to Jim to do him in. Used to piss me off, the Commander. Wanted to use the roughs and toughs, the street-wise cops, but he couldn’t stomach our uneducated ways. But he loved Jim. Jim was a bit more cultured than the rest of us. Liked reading books. Understood Latin. The Commander and Jim were a team. The Commander wouldn’t have turned on his right-hand man.’

Harry licked his thumb, rubbed a scratch on his leather jacket. ‘Anyway, I know Jim was wrong about the Commander. He wasn’t siding with Intelligence.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Jim asked me to find out whether the Commander was communicating with his old mates in Intelligence behind his back. Operation Asgard.’

Of course. Now Jim’s edginess about Operation Asgard made sense.

‘So Operation Asgard was Jim’s attempt to find out what the Commander was doing,’ Sam said. ‘Not the Commander’s operation to retrieve the information about Intelligence.’

He nodded. ‘Operation Asgard. Jim and me, just like old times. Jim asked me to listen to the wires.’

‘What wires?’

‘The wires between the Embassy and Moscow. If the Commander was communicating with Intelligence, then the Russians would have found out about it and the Embassy would be passing the information back to their bosses in Moscow. And then I would have found out about it. But there wasn’t anything. No noise. Nothing.’