The Madness of July (17 page)

As they walked along the rough bike trail on the line of the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal below Georgetown, the Potomac sliding past them very slowly going the other way, Maria spoke of Joe. He’d seemed indestructible, a survivor who proved as much by spending most of his time living on the edge. Maria had pulled him back from the chasm a few times, and although she had always harboured the knowledge that it was bound to happen again, she had held on to the illusion that his old habits – in truth, the one habit – had been discarded.

He’d spent long months in clinics in Arizona and Montana, the empty places where you can disappear. ‘The word from Miami was that he was clean. I believed it,’ she said.

She thought of him as a tree-dwelling creature springing from branch to branch, scampering from the forest floor to the highest tops in easy bounds, lying quiet for a while in the shade and then making a spectacular jump into the sunlight. He was never still for long, always watching and ready for the next move. He’d lived high in Miami, getting his energy from Maria’s messages which assured him that his networks matched her highest hopes and that he would always be one of her best boys.

Leila understood some of Maria’s connections to the apparatus of which her own office at State was a distant part, although there were almost no names that she would recognize. Abel’s was one; Joe’s was not. Fat Zak Annan and Barney Eustace, the short and the tall, appeared at the house from time to time as sentries come in the night to protect the citadel, and were familiar shadows. Annan always chose a corner chair from which he seemed to fill the room; Eustace was ever on the move, a thin figure who could slip through a doorway almost unseen. They were protectors of Maria’s secrets, and now she was talking about Joe. She said he represented the wildness that they all had within them, and never wanted to lose.

‘I cared for him so much. He tried it on with me more than once. An experiment. Wanted to see if I might melt, knowing all along that I wouldn’t. We laughed about it a lot in the end.’ Her voice was quiet, though she was enjoying the memory.

Leila asked, ‘How did he die?’ Straight out.

‘Drugs, for sure. Cops have no doubt.’ Maria held her hands like scales of justice and weighed them back and forth. ‘The embassy’s waiting for the autopsy report from the Brits. We’ll do our own in good time, when Joe’s handed over. Cold, so cold.’

She paused. ‘But I need to know if he talked to anyone about things that should never have been spoken of, and I’ll never be able to ask him.’

Maria stopped by a bench hewn out of a wide tree trunk and sat down. ‘The thing is, they found a syringe beside him.’

Leila sensed her lover’s mystification. ‘You said he had an old habit.’

Maria was watching the water. ‘No. There was someone with him, must have been.’

Leila was used to waiting in such conversations. When they happened, which was not often, they brought a new intimacy with them, and demanded special trust. She placed a hand on Maria’s shoulder.

‘I knew something about Joe that, through all the bad times, never changed. And I know it can’t have been any different yesterday, on his last day on this earth. ’Course, I told Abel, too.’

Leila waited.

‘Last thing I told him before he flew last night, before you came home. Joe couldn’t take needles. So he was with someone, near the end. In his hotel, where they found him. Why?’

Leila said, ‘Unless it was planted afterwards.’

Maria nodded. ‘Sure. Don’t I know it.’

Once more she felt the distance to London yawning in front of her, and her inability to feel the atmosphere from far away: Abel’s eyes, the tilt of Wherry’s quizzical expression, the gossip among friends in their own shadows. With Joe dead, and the heavy mechanism of formal investigation engaged, the careful bits of cover being put into place, she knew the story was slipping from her grasp. It was going to be a long morning before Abel got back to her.

But he would be calling, that was sure. She stood up to put her hand in Leila’s. ‘Let’s take a quick walk. I need to be home.’

They turned their faces to the sun and decided without a word to enjoy a few minutes of silence.

*

‘My brother called New York,’ Abel said, first of all, when he spoke to Maria from London. It was lunchtime for him; Washington was getting to the office. ‘Will, I mean. Hannah hasn’t spoken to him for nearly a year. She told him I was in DC; didn’t know about London when he rang.’ He could offer no more, and told her that he would choose the best moment to make contact. It would be later in the day; didn’t want to call Flemyng in his office.

‘How are things between you?’ Maria asked.

‘Much the same. Distant. No special reason, as you know. Just a drifting apart that neither of us wanted, but it happened all the same. Maybe we could never play the same game too close together. There was never a crisis, but neither of us has made the move. It’s sad. For him, too.’

‘Sure,’ Maria said, aware of Abel’s hesitation, and didn’t push him. She had no wish to compound his awkwardness and weigh him down.

To business. Maria said he was expected at the Wherry home for dinner at eight – ‘Jackson’s a trouper, always was’ – and rang off to settle down for the wait. In that moment of calm, when everything seemed to stop, she felt as if an engine were about to kick into life and set events on the move, remembering that it was always like this when the first surprise came along. Will Flemyng, drawn in already.

For her part, she called Annan and Eustace to tell them to be on hand for the evening, at home with her, and to clear the weekend. One of them, at least, might have to travel. ‘It will break in the next three days. I know it.’

She hailed a cruising cab on the corner of South Capitol Street, rolled down the window to let the breeze blow through, and reached 16
^th
Street in a few minutes. She walked two blocks to her office, in a building that gave no hint of its government status, and there extracted a buff folder from her personal safe. She took out four thick files and laid them on her desk. Opening the first, she looked at the title page: William Benedict Flemyng, born 5 November, 1930.

*

Flemyng had four hours before his rendezvous with Sam, and told Lucy that the office wouldn’t see him in that time. She could make any excuse she chose: he didn’t mind the paper piling up. He’d be going to Scotland as planned, so Lawrence could pick him up at seven to go home for a quick goodbye, then on to the airport. He assumed Lucy was surprised, but gave no sign. When he left, she set about preparing the red box that she intended to send after him to Scotland. It would be looked at by Sunday night, or else.

Two other projects were going to occupy her afternoon. She had a plan to crack the story of the Washington embassy, which Flemyng had reported from his conversation at the opera house, and she knew where to start. If Dennis had blown a gasket at the news that he was being dumped again, she had a friend on the bridge of that ship in Paris who would have the story. Second, she had a date of her own with the personnel department, which could be brought forward to coincide with Flemyng’s absence if they had a gap that afternoon. Neat.

Flemyng walked to Parliament Square, lingered with a police officer at the gates of New Palace Yard for a minute or two, knowing that if there was a hint of spice in the daily round of gossip, he’d pick up the scent. Nothing. ‘Quiet as the grave,’ said the copper. A Friday heavy with tasteless phrases.

He strolled through the arches and turned into the service passageway running under the building towards the terrace and the river, the natural route for a habitué looking for air, or a drink. Within two minutes he was on the stairs that led to the room where Joe had been found one floor up. Flemyng kept climbing, to the main floor.

Lunchtime on a summer Friday, and silent. A party of workmen was attacking the ceiling in the library corridor, long starved of attention, and plaster mouldings were leaning against the walls. The men’s newspapers looked incongruous on the green leather benches to each side, the Page 3 girls in
The Sun
still a novelty, and turned upwards. Further along, a pair of picture restorers was starting work on a wide battlefield canvas, brushing away the first layer of dust. He heard a gaggle of tourists being led from central lobby up the stone staircase to the committee corridor, and exchanged words with another policeman who was on his way down to the terrace, for a smoke or an early pint in strangers’. All quiet, and nothing to break the surface calm.

Doubling down a short stairway he was at the store-room door. There was no key. From inside he jammed a heavy oak chair under the doorknob. It held tight.

The room in which he stood was square and high. It was part attic, part church vestry, with a jumbled collection of furniture and ceremonial implements, cast-offs and broken remnants. There were two formal pictures hanging above head height, one of a prime minister, the other of a sea battle with the smoke of cannon wreathing the ships and tongues of fire on their sails. He examined what lay around him.

There was a set of damaged wall-hangings to one side, and a collection of broken pediments, window sashes and oak panels on the other. Beside them on the floor, a pitted stone gargoyle lay tilted back so that his eyes met Flemyng’s. He had a sharp mental picture of the sight that had shaken Denbigh, the clerk who had found Joe. Gwilym had said that his open eyes, whose lids he could not bear to close, were the most poignant touch.

Flemyng lifted aside an old curtain and revealed two dark oak cupboards, with a collection of glass inkwells stacked on top and some metal boxes filled with doorplates, hooks and window latches. Covering them over, he turned to the bust of Gladstone lying on the floor. The Grand Old Man had taken a grievous blow to the head. He was cracked from top to bottom through the left eye and, Flemyng fancied, would soon split in two. Apart from a glass-fronted bookcase, on the top of which the syringe had been found, and which was dust-free, there was a collection of institutional bric-a-brac, and a rolled-up carpet which would never grace the Palace of Westminster again, its threads rubbed bare.

On the floor where Joe’s body had lain there was no mark. Flemyng poked around for a few minutes. Nothing. Then, as he took away the chair that had secured the door, his eye caught a flicker of white on the carpet. He was able to pick up a thin sliver of stone when he swung the door inwards. He turned it and held it up to the light. Then he placed it in his dark blue handkerchief and folded it carefully into an inside pocket.

Passing through central lobby and down the steps towards the public exit, he imagined Joe’s progress. Had he met someone there, where visitors congregated for arranged appointments, and been spirited out of public view? A gamble. He need only have hung around for more than a minute or two if he’d got his timing right. On the other hand, getting into one of the inner corridors alone without being challenged would have been difficult, and for a man wearing jeans almost impossible. A police officer would have asked an awkward question. A meeting must have been fixed; it was the only way.

Flemyng considered the risk Manson had taken, then burst into laughter that startled the tourists waiting in line. So simple. Joe hadn’t known he was on anyone’s radar. The prospect of danger hadn’t occurred to him.

Didn’t know there might be watchers; didn’t know he was going to die.

Flemyng left the building and strolled through the gardens along the river.

He’d ring from the call box in Smith Square to see if there was a message from Abel in Washington to Francesca or – even more unlikely – to the office, get some energy back, and then there was Sam. He’d take a cab to Mansfield Mews, confident that his friend would have understood the summons from ‘Mr Massie’.

The temperature was refusing to dip, and everywhere he saw the comatose signs of a lazy weekend ahead. Building sites abandoned, grass patches turned into communal sun lounges, the pace on the pavements slackening in the sun. When he reached Mansfield Mews, deliberately early, he walked slowly past number six and was able to read the names on the brass plates. He got confirmation of what he’d expected, and understood why Sam had been bound for that black door. He rounded the corner, and a minute afterwards his friend had arrived behind him. He was smiling.

‘I’ve pounded the corridors on your behalf this morning. Ministerial instruction after all.’ He leaned in. ‘I left no tracks.’ Flemyng acknowledged the compliment, and the reassurance.

‘I may be able to help, even if it’s not as much as you’d like. To start with anyway. We’re talking about the Americans, right?’

Flemyng dipped his head. ‘Naturally.’ They were off.

They had cut into a square where there was one empty bench. Sam threw his jacket across it, a signal that no one else was welcome, and they sat down. ‘There’s a game on,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t got a handle on it. We live in compartments, now more than ever. Battery hens. For you and me, it’s The Service and always will be, but believe me, they’re starting to call it The Office
.
Not I, mind you. Three-year plans and crap of that kind flying around. But people still talk, thank God. And I know there’s something up, have no fear.’

Sam leaned in. ‘Janus Forbes’ – the proper name for once – ‘is in on it. He was in the conference room this morning. Four of them altogether. Saw me passing the door and shot me a nasty look.’

Flemyng digested this simple fact. A ministerial visit to Sam’s office was rare, business between their political masters and the spies more often done on home ground. But Forbes would love it, his grip on the delicious knot of status and secrecy. Flemyng dealt with a shiver of jealousy, and bowled a googly at Sam.

‘I assume Guy Sassi was with them.’ He got a wide grin in return. Sam said that was one of his little surprises, although he had others tucked up his sleeve.

‘Bingo. Got it in one.’

‘He’s been in and out these last two weeks. Not in my little patch. I’ve been shoved up a bit of a siding, as you may be aware.’ Flemyng shook his head, and said nothing, out of respect. ‘I hear he’s connected with an old Paris friend of ours.’ Looking up, waiting for a response, which after a moment they gave in unison, Flemyng’s eyes sparkling with enjoyment.