The Madness of July (31 page)

Flemyng said quickly, ‘They want to use him?’

The Americans were turning the screw, said Sam, because they had the secret. ‘The price is high, Will, very high. They need us – the loyal ally – to use our asset to feed stuff to their dodgy guy and trace the leak, watching how it travels, where it ends up.’

‘A barium meal,’ said Flemyng, who had veered away.

‘Exactly,’ Sam said. ‘We’ve served up a few in our time, you and I. Down it goes, and we watch it all the way.’

‘And he has no choice but to take it,’ Flemyng said, and then it seemed to Sam that he drew an invisible curtain around himself and disappeared from view. For a few moments he was removed from the scene.

‘That’s right,’ Sam said. Silence.

Flemyng was looking at a picture, stock still. After a long pause, he asked, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Certain. Does it help?’ Sam steered him firmly into another room to kick start the conversation after the awkward pause, and walked quickly. ‘But that’s where my story comes to an end. I’m sorry.’ He made an actor’s pause, and turned. ‘Except for this.’

There was a shake of anxiety in the hand that he put out to Flemyng. ‘It’s gone wrong. The thing has turned upside down or back to front or something. There’s panic. It’s Finzi and the Turks all over again, only worse.’ He gazed at Flemyng’s face, watching for the reaction. ‘And no sooner had I picked that up, just a whisper, than I’m rumbled and sent packing. I tell you, Will, in certain quarters you are now “the bastard Flemyng”, minister or no minister, and as for me, I’m being kicked out of town, pronto. Long-running thing in Athens and they need a spare bagman. To shovel crap through the night, in other words, and maybe never come back.’

Flemyng held him for a moment in a friend’s grip. ‘Stay steady, Sam. You’ll survive. Promise.’

‘And you?’ Sam said. ‘I don’t like the look of you.’

Then he stepped back and spoke slowly. ‘Somebody wants to get you,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me why, but watch it, old friend.’ With that, Sam left the room and joined the crowd heading for the Pre-Raphaelites, a catalogue for the exhibition appearing in his hand.

Flemyng saw him disappear, walked out of the gallery and crossed the road. The afternoon was still hot, and he swung his jacket over a shoulder. Turning left along the embankment he watched the river glitter with sunlight, and saw that he was following the ebbing tide as he walked.

His step was quick and he ignored the heat. He could reach his office in ten minutes if he kept up the pace, and Sam would give him time to be well away before he left the gallery. No one recognized Flemyng as he walked, his head being down now. He exchanged a word or two with the doorkeepers in the office courtyard and took the stairs to his office. There was no sign of life in the corridor, nothing to disturb the dusty beams from the high skylight that laid squares of light in a row on the wall. The outer rooms of his office were empty. On Lucy’s desk there were two high piles of papers: they looked undisturbed, and he concluded that she had not made one of her quiet Sunday visits. He went to the inner room and, unusually, turned the key once more before he went to his desk, locking himself in.

He sat for a full five minutes without moving, arms crossed and his eyes on the picture straight ahead of him. Then he stood up, unlocked the lowest drawer of a filing cabinet in the corner of the room and removed a long grey metal box which was also locked. Selecting a tiny key on the ring in his pocket he opened it, and removed two thin notebooks. They lay side by side on the desk, scuffed and dog-eared relics from a past life. He turned each of the covers and the books fell open. There was no identification on either front page, and the contents were a mixture of numbers, some strings of letters and a few short sentences. Most of the pages were blank. To anyone else, the pages would have been mystifying. There was no pattern, no evident logic in the entries. Flemyng fingered the sheets in the books like a man without sight feeling his way, and looked at the few initials scattered here and there. He found what he was looking for, a set of letters that would mean nothing to anyone else.

Writing carefully on a sheet of office newspaper, he created a phone number from the notes on the next page. Using a pen to touch the figures one by one in a pattern that he remembered, he soon extracted what he wanted. He ran the pen underneath the string of numbers and felt the jerk of recognition in his mind. It was time.

But first he let stillness take hold again. A few minutes passed before he pulled the phone towards him and dialled on his private line. The first attempt failed, and he waited before he tried again. The connection was slow, the clicks echoing in a background of static.

There was silence, then the soft voice of a woman far away.

Flemyng was ready. He spoke slowly, although his German flowed as easily as ever.

He gave a name, not his own, and asked if he might leave a message.

18

On Sunday evening, the fourth day of the crisis, they gathered a few minutes before eight. Paul was back in his casual suit, tieless and apparently relaxed, almost suggesting that they were off-duty, but Gwilym showed signs of wear and tear. He sagged as if he had been knocked askew by a hidden blow and might topple over at any minute. His face was livid and Flemyng thought the tremor in one hand was getting worse. His stage cheerfulness was summoned up for their first greeting, with evident effort, but his voice had lost much of its rich timbre and he sat down quickly to avoid crumpling into his chair in a heap. ‘Will. Ah, Will…’ he said, inconsequentially.

Paul had three files in front of him, differently coloured, and Gwilym had brought some official papers in a bundle as a stage prop, or perhaps a comfort toy. Flemyng prepared himself, aware that his researches had led him into territory whose promises and inducements had drawn him on, stirred his senses, but left him with few of the answers Paul had asked him to seek out. To the others, he appeared untroubled, and ready to lead.

They began, knowing that they were approaching a decisive moment when the whole business might tip one way or the other, wrap itself up in a puzzling configuration or start to unravel. Paul’s serenity made a contrast with Gwilym’s constant restlessness, his posture straight and his hands placed neatly side by side as he welcomed Flemyng quietly. Their intimacy, buttressed by a shared fear, had the effect of introducing a strange formality to proceedings. Flemyng felt as if he were in a doctor’s consulting room, with an old friend across the table who knew everything about him.

He took his cue, and said that he had learned a little about Joe Manson’s last movements – pushing it a good deal – and added that he had begun to put together a pattern that might help them make sense of the disparate pieces of the pattern that was confusing them. About Sam and Berlin, nothing.

‘I hope I can take you forward,’ said Paul. ‘I have another teaser for us. It will require some thinking through.’

Gwilym had resumed his sighing role from Friday, now with both hands clutching at his head, which was streaked with sweat, leaving his straw hair matted and spiky. He rubbed his hands across his blotched red forehead. Flemyng suspected that he hadn’t slept for more than a few hours since he had last seen him.

‘Will,’ said Paul. ‘Something very funny has come up. A few things, in these papers.’ He flapped the beige file in front of him, sliding it away from the others. ‘But first, you. What do you know?’

Flemyng looked him in the eye, trying to identify suspicion, bewilderment, trust. It was clear, however, that the path now led away from the room where they sat and straight to Abel, who could no longer remain an offstage presence and must be introduced, Gwilym notwithstanding. Looking across the table, Flemyng realized it was not going to be difficult. Gwilym was all over the place, tuning in and out. He made his decision.

‘I’ve been to the place where Manson was found – I spent a little time there on Friday, and I have some thoughts. But first, I can tell you how my phone number got into Manson’s pocket. That’s the proper place to start.’ He glanced to the side of Paul, and spoke slowly.

‘Gwilym, I have a brother.’

He grinned back. ‘Don’t we all? Many of us, anyway.’

‘Mine’s called Abel,’ said Flemyng with a smile.

‘I hope he’s still with us,’ said Gwilym, and hooted. ‘Do you bear the mark of Cain?’

Flemyng laughed dutifully. ‘He’s living and working in America. He has – had, I should say – some connection with Manson through government service – maybe distant, I can’t be sure – and I’ve established that he gave him my number in case he needed a contact here. Some time ago, when Manson was coming to London on official business. Kind of thing my brother would do for a colleague. I spoke to him about it this weekend.’

He stopped. Then added, ‘In Scotland.’

Paul took his hands from the files in front of him, where they had been resting, put them behind his head and leaned back, his whole body relaxing. He was able to smile. ‘And where is he now?’

Flemyng glanced at his watch. ‘Probably on his way back to London.’

‘I take it…’ Gwilym began, looking at Flemyng, and at a glance from Paul he desisted.

‘I can arrange to talk to him later tonight, or tomorrow. Or for you, Paul…’ Having opened the path, Will could let it lie clear. ‘Obviously not here.’

Paul took his cue and fished a folded piece of paper from the pink file in front of him. ‘We mustn’t overlook one quite obvious fact. This is what Joe Manson had in his pocket, the number written down in his own hand. There’s no name attached. Assume for now that he didn’t know whose number it was when your brother gave it to him’ – he looked at Flemyng, received a nod in return – ‘some time ago. For emergencies only. But this was surely a crisis for Manson. Why not use it?’

They couldn’t escape the question, Paul said. ‘What was it that he came to London to find out, and why didn’t he use this number to try to get to it?’ He was watching Flemyng’s every movement. ‘Any of us would use a helpful contact, wouldn’t we?’

Flemyng said, ‘I’d go at it the other way round. I’m interested in what he knew already. Because I think that’s what is scaring our American friends, even more than what Manson wanted to find out.’

Paul thought about this for a few moments. ‘Let’s run through it. Joe Manson dropped in here in a hurry, for purposes unknown. He met a friend from the American embassy, Halloran from Wherry’s outfit. There are dozens of them these days, as you’ll know. Within twenty-four hours of that lunch he was dead, having gone to parliament in the meantime for some reason we can’t fathom and then succumbed to an overdose.

‘Before we leave this room we’re going to find the thread that connects these events. Maybe I should start with what I have here.’ This time the beige file, flapped apart, stayed open.

He produced several sheets of paper, which he said had come from Osterley, a copy of the magazine article that Flemyng had been sent in his overnight box, and a notebook. They were laid on the desk, with a hint of ceremony.

They had been found at the Lorimer. ‘Where exactly?’ said Flemyng.

Paul’s embarrassment welled up at revisiting the story. ‘The team on Thursday missed these things. They didn’t want to hang around. As I indicated to you on the phone in Scotland, Will, the police who were called after the discovery of the body found them in the course of subsequent enquiries.’ He paused. ‘They were in the hotel safe-deposit box.’

Flemyng laughed out loud. ‘Glory be,’ he said. ‘I haven’t lost the old touch after all.’

Paul cast him a puzzled look. ‘The most interesting item is probably this.’ He picked up a sheaf of papers, roughly stapled together. Flemyng could see they had been annotated in red ink.

‘They’re the transatlantic travel histories of four ministers in the government, and one official who sits not far from this room,’ said Paul. ‘Going all the way back to a time when they weren’t in politics. Two decades, a little more.

‘And, Will, you are one of them.’

He sank back in his chair. ‘Why? Why in God’s name would anyone want that? All my government trips are public and I’ve been coming and going from the States all my life. My mother and so on. She was American, as you know. What’s this about?’

Paul shrugged. They agreed that they were coming at the conundrum from the wrong angle, and couldn’t know where the right one lay. Somewhere in these sheets lay the answer. ‘The trouble is that we don’t have the faintest damned idea what it means without knowing the question we’re trying to answer,’ said Gwilym, demonstrating that his instinct still lived. ‘We’re stuffed and skewered. Yet again.’

Paul slipped the pages quickly back into his file, and said that there was nothing obviously peculiar about the patterns revealed in the itemized journeys – no quick in-and-outs, no odd one-way passages, nothing noted as peculiar against any name. Although, he said, there was a good deal of underlining. They reminded him of a balance sheet that had been through the hands of a pernickety accountant. But as Gwilym had said – Paul nodded in his direction – they were meaningless without access to the question to which they were meant to provide an answer. So he wouldn’t say who else was on the list.

‘It must have taken Manson some effort to get all this,’ he said, ‘from the bowels of various offices. Why?’

The theory was that he had got some of the details, at least, from Halloran, his embassy friend. Paul said they would sweat him, via Wherry, at the right moment.

But not all had come from that source. ‘We can infer from these,’ he said, ‘that Manson set about getting the details before he left Washington. Records on these people wouldn’t have been pulled together in one morning, even with the American embassy’s resources – visa records, and so on. This is personal and sensitive. Manson has been determined, and careful. There is evidence here of hard work.’ He waved the sheets.

Flemyng had felt a strong tide of excitement in the air at the start of their meeting, perhaps expectation, something even Gwilym’s flagging spirits couldn’t disguise. Yet they seemed to be stuck again, perhaps doomed to sink. The atmosphere in the room had become heavy with the waning of the day and he felt a pressing need for air. Paul did the sensible thing, and called a break.