Secret Asset (16 page)

Thanks to O'Phelan he saw his father's killers in the raw—the members of the English Establishment that people claimed no longer existed. What nonsense, thought Sherwood, as the plane climbed to its cruising level. The Establishment not only survived, it prospered. He was part of it himself.

He remembered how O'Phelan had seen this as an advantage from the start, and gradually persuaded him that he should not feel any embarrassment about his manifest Englishness. He should instead use it as a secret weapon in what they both now agreed was a necessary war.

“No one will ever suspect,” the don had told him. “They'll think you're English through and through. Trust me, they never turn on their own. Look at Philby; they believed him when he said he wasn't a mole. Or Blunt. Even when they knew Blunt was a spy, they let him go on working for the Queen.”

Now as the aeroplane moved over North Wales, Sherwood looked down at Snowdonia. The Welsh managed to be despised by the English, he thought, and yet remained so passive. A few holiday cottages torched, an insistence on bilingual road signs; as far as he could tell, this was the sum of their nationalist efforts.

But were the Irish really any better? His father had hoped so, and for those crucial years at the beginning of his career, so had his son. Yet more than eighty years after Partition, the country was no closer to unification than in 1922. More fools them, he thought bitterly. He'd tried to help (just as his father had, God knows), but they hadn't wanted any of it. They'd given up the fight just as he was preparing to join them.

The seduction of power—O'Phelan had been right about that. He'd always said the greatest danger Ireland would ever face was the day the English wanted to negotiate.

Over the Irish Sea he remembered his student visits to Ireland, how he had braved the crossing from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire in wooden boats the size of oversized tugs. Most of the passengers were male, boisterous and happy to be going home, drinking in the bar until they went out on deck and threw up over the railings.

His plane landed in Belfast in light drizzle with a hard bump that threw spray up under the wing. Disembarking, he moved through the terminal quickly, not making eye contact with anyone, gripping his thin briefcase tightly and pulling up the collar of his coat while he joined the taxi queue. Like many of his fellow passengers, he was on his way to a day meeting in Northern Ireland.

The taxi dropped him in the city centre, busy with office workers hunched up in their coats against the rain. At this early hour of the day Belfast looked like any other city—no bag checks, no soldiers carrying rifles, no sign of armoured cars. As he set out walking quickly towards Queen's, he inspected the people he passed—well dressed, prosperous—so obviously living for the moment and the moment alone. Don't they understand? he thought bitterly, as he looked at them: an old man in a new cloth cap; a couple under one huge umbrella, trendily dressed and holding hands; a black teenager in a hooded top, moving jerkily to the rhythms of his Walkman.

But then, he had never really felt he was doing it for them. They had moved on.

         

“How punctual,” said O'Phelan, with a thin-lipped smile. As he turned back into the room, his visitor entered and closed the door behind him.

“Have a seat, and I'll make some tea. Or would you prefer coffee? There's whiskey, if you'd like a drink. No? It is a bit early.”

O'Phelan was excited, finding it hard to stand still, gripping the back of his chair with both hands, then letting go and taking a step back to inspect his visitor. “You haven't aged much, I have to say.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Would that time had been so kind to me.” He sounded self-mocking.

“I thought we might go out somewhere for lunch. There's a bistro down the road that's rather good. Would that be safe? But first, I want to hear what you've been up to all these years. Tell me all. Oh, but first the coffee, or will you have tea?”

And in his excitement he darted back to the small alcove in the far corner of the room, where he turned on the kettle and busied himself extracting milk from the small fridge, then sugar from the cupboard and two spoons, and of course the china cups and saucers.

“How do you like it, black or white?” he called back over his shoulder. There was no reply, which puzzled O'Phelan only momentarily. For suddenly he was choking, and something was blocking his windpipe. By the time the kettle boiled O'Phelan was dead.

34

W
hen Liz arrived for work she went straight to her desk in the agent-runners room to check her mail. She found a message from Jimmy Fergus, asking her to ring him urgently. This reminded her that she needed to book her flight to Belfast the following week, but she rang Jimmy first. He sounded uncharacteristically subdued. “I've got some bad news,” he said.

“What's the matter?”

“This man O'Phelan…”

“Yes?” There must be nothing on him in the database, she thought. A pity.

“He's been murdered in his room at Queen's.”

“You're joking,” said Liz. “I was planning to see him again next week. What happened?”

“He was found last night, but the pathologist says he was killed in the morning. Somebody strangled him. Well, not quite—they garrotted him.”

“
Garrotted
?”

“I know. It's straight out of
The Godfather.”

“Any idea who or why?”

“Not yet. There are about a million different sets of prints to sort out, but I imagine they all belong to his students.”

Liz thought of the arrogant, slightly epicene figure she'd interviewed. “I can see him being unpopular with them, but killing him is going it a bit. Any other leads?”

“We're looking into his personal life. He was unmarried, but so far nothing's come up on the sexual front.”

“Why did it take so long to find him? Where were his students?”

“He'd cancelled all his supervisions, and his afternoon class. He told one of his students an old friend was coming to see him. We're trying to locate this old friend.”

“Keep me posted please. We have an interest in this one.”

There was a long pause, and Liz could picture the big man at his desk, sitting with a mug of coffee, wondering what exactly MI5's interest was. “Of course,” he said at last. “CID are in charge, but I know the lead officer.”

Liz put the phone down, her mind racing. Another death on her watch. Get a hold of yourself, she said half aloud, then saw Dave Armstrong at his nearby desk staring at her. “You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, but she knew she wasn't. She stood up and walked down the corridor to the conference room she and Peggy were using. Peggy was out of the room, and Liz closed the door and sat down to think things through.

Was she somehow responsible for this one? She wondered if inadvertently she had made a slip, and put O'Phelan at risk. She had better tell Wetherby right away, she thought, just as the door opened and, as if on cue, Wetherby himself came in. “I thought you might be here,” he said with a thin smile, but then he saw her face. “What's wrong, Liz?” He pulled back a chair and sat down at the conference table next to her.

“I've just spoken with Belfast Special Branch. Liam O'Phelan, that lecturer, has been murdered.”

Wetherby looked stunned. “Had you arranged to see him again?”

“No. I was going to ring him this morning.” Liz shook her head. It seemed unreal. She had to keep telling herself that she no longer needed to book a flight to Belfast.

“Did anyone know you'd been to see him?”

“Only Peggy and Jimmy Fergus—I had dinner with him the same night. I wanted to know if O'Phelan was in the Special Branch database over there. People here knew I was away, but I didn't say where.” She paused and saw that Wetherby was looking reflective, as if he were a million miles away. She said, a little bitterly, “I feel as if I'm back to square one.”

“Not at all,” said Wetherby. He looked at her sternly but his tone was encouraging. “You know there was a link between O'Phelan and Keaney. And you were sure there was another connection between O'Phelan and someone on your list. So you're just going to have to find that link some other way. There was never any guarantee O'Phelan was going to help you.”

“That's true,” Liz acknowledged. But she would have much rather had the chance of questioning O'Phelan again. He had been slippery, but she felt confident she would have got more out of him second time round, especially now she knew about his ties to Sean Keaney.

“Can you see any connection between your visit and his death?”

Liz shook her head. “No. But there was something decidedly creepy about the man. I'm certain he knew I was from the Service. I didn't like him at all—not that it matters any more. At first I thought he was a misogynist, though maybe he just hated the English.”

“Not unknown in the six counties,” said Wetherby wryly. “If he was a specialist in Irish affairs he may have been strongly nationalist. More to the point, his death could have absolutely nothing to do with your visit.”

She realised Charles was looking at her appraisingly. He said, “You had a bit of a knock last year. Then Marzipan, and now this.” He stood up, tugging at his tie thoughtfully. “You're a strong person, Liz, and I'm not worried about you. Provided you don't start worrying about yourself.”

“Okay,” she said quietly, taking his point. There was sometimes self-indulgence in feeling guilty, something which she had tried to avoid when thinking about Marzipan. With Liam O'Phelan it was certainly possible that if she had never gone to see him he would not have been murdered, but with that kind of reasoning, she might as well give up her job. Her real regret was that she hadn't gone back to see him sooner. Too late to worry about that, she told herself.

“I need to talk to Michael Binding urgently. O'Phelan was his referee—that's why I went to see him in the first place.”

“Michael's got a few days' holiday, Liz. Won't be back until next week. Part of me is tempted to call him back—we could think of a pretext—but if there is something to worry about, that would set off all sorts of alarm bells prematurely.”

Liz was shaking her head. “No, it can wait, I think. For all my reservations about O'Phelan, I don't think he was holding anything back about Michael Binding. He was contemptuous about him, to tell you the truth, and it didn't seem in the least contrived. It was something else he wasn't coming clean about.”

“Perhaps you should focus on O'Phelan's time at Oxford.”

She nodded. “I'll ask Peggy to have another look. I want to widen the net a bit with the families of the people on our list, and check for even the remotest Irish connection. We've got Dobson and his cousin in the Maze; I want to see if any of the others has something comparable.”

35

T
he bookshop owner, when called in for questioning, turned out to be Jamaican, an ex-Rasta with a string of narcotics convictions and a history of dabbling in the murkier fringes of what was left of Britain's Black Power movement.

Now a Muslim, he brought to his new creed the fervour of the converted. And a new name—the Kingston-born Otis Quarrie now went under the exotic soubriquet Jamil Abdul-Hakim. Gone were the dread-locks, and the floppy Rasta hat; now he wore a white caftan and sandals in all weathers. Intellectually he had travelled far—it was clear to Dave Armstrong, as he sat listening to the man talk, that Abdul-Hakim had read many if not all of the Islamist volumes he sold, and was happy to talk about them to anyone at length. Including Dave and a confused-looking Special Branch officer.

Dave had managed to get in a few questions. He had learned that Sohail Din had been a steady employee about whom Abdul-Hakim professed to know very little. He had been punctual, quiet, diligent. Since this account accorded with Dave's own impressions, there had been nothing more to say. Abdul-Hakim had seemed sincerely sorry about Sohail's death; equally, he seemed authentically to believe it had been a racist murder.

“Excuse me,” said Dave now, breaking in on the latest tangent, a defence of the rights of Muslim schoolgirls to wear the jilbab. “But if we could just get back to this Imam, Abu Sayed. My understanding is that he was supposed to meet certain followers here but the meeting never came off.”

“There were lots of meetings, mon,” said Abdul-Hakim, who for all his new identity had not shed his Rasta accent.

“With these men?” Dave handed over the photographs of Rashid Khan and the other two men.

The Jamaican glanced casually at them, then shrugged.

“Do you know who they are?” asked Dave.

“No.”

“But you recognise them, don't you?”

“They were here, mon, sure. So?”

“So,” said Dave, finding his patience tried, “they met once with the Imam and were supposed to meet with him again. What happened? Why didn't they show?”

“You'd have to ask them di question,” Abdul-Hakim said with a trace of defiance.

“It's your bookshop.”

“But it was the Imam's meetings, mon,” said Abdul-Hakim with a smirk, and would not be drawn further.

In the freshly hoovered living room of her house in Wokingham, Thelma Dawnton was distinctly miffed. Trevor had insisted on being present when Simon came back for another chat. He was good-looking, the young Simon, even if he looked a bit scruffy in his parka. He was friendly too, and he liked badminton—though he didn't get to play very often. Thelma would never have dreamed of being anything but a loyal wife (well, she might have dreamed, but reality was different), but glancing over at Trevor she resented his unnecessary chaperoning.

Still, she had to admit that Trevor knew about some things she didn't. Like cars—which Simon seemed very keen on.

At first, they had talked about the men next door, and Thelma knew she had been helpful there—more than Trevor, for sure, since, as he would be the first to admit, he couldn't tell a Pakistani from a Zulu. She'd searched her memory (ignoring Trevor's “Don't invent”) and surprised even herself at what she'd come up with.

One of the men had been short, almost a dwarf Thelma remembered, and she was pretty sure he had a trace of a limp. Maybe he'd twisted an ankle, she offered, and Simon had written this down in his notebook. As for the other two, she really only had an impression of one of them, for he was always scowling, as if—she had thought about this since her last conversation with Simon—he was depressed about something. After all (though she decided not to say this to Simon) hadn't the
Femail
pages in the newspaper said anger and depression were usually linked? And hadn't it said that one out of four Britons were depressed? Or was it one out of twelve?

It was then that Trevor rolled his eyes, which infuriated Thelma and, as the same newspaper said, lowered her self-esteem, though she was determined not to show it. She was going to have a word with her husband about this habit of his, and she would do it sooner rather than later.

This time Simon didn't write anything down, but changed the subject instead. To cars. She'd said the men next door had had a smart motor, and that was when Trevor snorted and Simon smiled—she knew that meant a man thought you were being daft—and focused his attention solely on her husband. “You said it was a Golf these men drove. Black—or was it dark blue?”

“Black.” Trevor was adamant.

“Can you remember anything else about it? Any kind of quirk, anything unusual?”

And Trevor had sat there and thought. “It was a T-reg.”

She wanted to say what did that matter, but then she looked at Simon's excited face and decided not to say anything at all. Men, she thought with disgust. Men and cars.

         

Doris Feldman wanted to help but didn't see how she could. Insomnia might put her in the chair by the window, early in the morning, but there had never been anything to see across the street—not that is, until the night the policemen had shown up. As she said to the young man in the parka who sat sipping a cuppa with her—he could have been her grandson almost, she thought—there was nothing to say about the visitors to the bookshop that she hadn't said before.

The young man nodded. And he didn't seem surprised. Almost perfunctorily, he passed over a sheet on which there were photocopied photographs of three young men. All three were Asian in appearance, and at first Doris shook her head when the man in the parka asked if she recognised them. Then like a light bulb, memory lit up. “I know him,” she exclaimed, pointing to the photograph of Rashid. “And him,” she said, pointing to one of the other photos.

“How is that?” asked the man patiently.

“This one,” she said pointing to the picture of Rashid, “bought some cord rope. He started to ask how strong it was and the other chap got cross. ‘Just pay the lady,' he said, as if I wasn't there. Rude if you ask me. That's why I remember him. The other fellow seemed upset. Poor little thing.”

Why had this man come back? He'd told him what he knew already about the lease on 48 Somerset Drive. Which was next to nothing. And Richard Penbury had so much to do—there were three viewings he was conducting that afternoon alone, and about a million chasing phone calls to make.

But here was the policeman again, Simon something, asking him once more to try and remember the man who had let the house on Somerset Drive. A white man, which as he had tried to explain, was precisely the difficulty—an Asian would have been memorable in this part of town. It made for a kind of racism in reverse.

Penbury said, “I probably saw ten people that day about properties. Multiply by five for the week, that's fifty, and it's been fifteen weeks or so. Surely you can see the problem.”

“Of course I can, but anything at all you can remember about our Mr. Larrabee would help. I mean, was he tall or short? Did he have bad teeth? It's things like that you might remember. Had he rung first, for example?”

“He would have done. He wasn't going to come all the way from London on an off chance we had something to let.”

“London?” said Simon quickly. “How do you know he came from there?”

“Because of his application form. He gave a London address,” said Penbury, weary in the face of the policeman's interest. “Not because of anything I remembered.”

But curiously something was coming back to him. What was it? Something visual, but it wasn't a face. Something to do with a hand. “I know,” he said aloud.

The policeman looked startled. “What is it?” he asked hopefully.

“He had one arm in a sling.”

“A sling.” Simon sounded doubtful. “Which arm?”

“Well, I can't remember, but I suppose it was his left. He signed stuff anyway, so unless he was left-handed…”

“Keep thinking,” said Simon, “you're doing well.”

Penbury
was
thinking hard. “Take your time,” said Simon. And he did, concentrating intently, while images of faces, and gestures, and once even a handbag flashed through his mind. But the phone on the next desk rang twice in the space of a minute, loudly, and then Millie, the new girl, shrieked as she spilled tea on her blouse, and it was no good. No good at all. He'd try again, he reassured Simon, who looked disappointed, but now if he didn't mind, he really had better get on with his work.

         

Sarah Manpini sat on her own in the control room outside Reading, finding the viewing room a relief after yet another session with the late-night shift patrolmen, who even after two years still seemed to find her surname hilarious.

She was on her third hour of CCTV analysis—only it wasn't exactly analytical, now was it? More like mindless viewing, just like any couch potato, only nothing much was happening on this filmed record of the M4 traffic either side of Reading. To be accurate, nothing much
had
happened, since the footage she was viewing was almost a week old. Twenty-seven VW Golfs had triggered the cameras for one reason or another in the forty-eight-hour period she was reviewing, but only three had been black or dark enough to pass as black.

Two of those had been heading east and she duly recorded their number plates. The third had been going west like the clappers—the speed had triggered the camera—but its numbers had not come out on the screen. She replayed the segment of the tape and peered at it closely. Luminescent paint had been applied to the plastic strip of numerals. Clever, she thought—that must be the car. She called in further tapes, now that she knew the time the Golf had triggered the camera west of Reading. And bingo—at the Newbury exit thirty minutes later the Golf had left the M4. From the secondary camera she knew only that it had then headed north.