THE PERFECT KILL (9 page)

She was an intelligent, experienced woman. She was also sensitive. Apart from cooking, shopping and teaching the boy how to cook, she made no contribution whatsoever. She was never asked a question or an opinion. As the days moved through July, she dreaded waking up in the mornings and then it got worse, because she found herself unable to sleep. She spent hour after hour lying on the huge bed near the man, hearing his breathing, occasionally a muttered sound, as he talked in a dream. Her only thoughts centred on her mortgage and her clapped-out Fiesta.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Laura Schembri stood on the patio of her farmhouse and watched in the distance as her son and Creasy worked on a wall of the old farmhouse. That morning she had been shopping in Victoria. Her cousin was a gossip. She had told Laura that the woman living with Creasy, she had not called her his wife, shopped in the supermarket almost every day; told her with relish how she and everybody else had frozen her out.

“I never talk to her,” she had smiled. “Not a single word. Not since the day she first walked in.”

At the greengrocer’s, the woman behind the counter had said similar things with the same relish. Laura looked at the two men working in the distance. Her son was on the wall itself. Creasy was passing up old limestone blocks to him. Her eyes swept across the fields, to where her husband was ploughing with a small tractor.

She looked at her watch and made a decision.

She went into the house and picked up her handbag and the keys to the Land-Rover, and wrote a note to Paul.

Leonie was lying on a lounger by the pool when the old-fashioned doorbell rang. She glanced at her watch. It was too early for Creasy to be returning. Michael and his Arab teacher were under the trellis, deep in conversation. As she walked to the door, the thought crossed her mind that, as well as everything else, Creasy might teach the boy some manners.

She opened the door and found herself looking at a woman, tall, well-built, almost statuesque. She had a handsome face, with ebony-coloured hair.

The woman said, “Hello, you must be Leonie. I’m Laura Schembri.”

For a moment, Leonie’s mind was blank and then the woman said, “Nadia’s mother.”

The blankness in Leonie’s mind turned to confusion. She could not find any words. The woman smiled. A warm, pleasant smile. She held out her hand.

“I’m pleased to meet you finally.”

Leonie took the hand and said, “Please come in.”

The woman shook her head.

“Another time. It’s Thursday afternoon and on Thursdays they play Bingo at the Astra Band Club. I wondered if you’d like to come along? It’s quite a social occasion,” she said. “A lot of the local women will be there…hundreds of them. We have a few drinks during and after, and we all get acquainted with the week’s gossip.”

She looked at Leonie steadily and the younger woman gazed back at her, then nodded her head firmly and said, “Thank you. I’d love to join you.”

Laura Schembri had not played Bingo for twenty years but as they walked into the cavernous room, and as her eyes swept across the scores of tables and the hundreds of women, she recognised almost all of them and almost all of them recognised her. She was known for her forceful personality and short temper, her direct talking and her integrity. She was known as a woman who had lost both her daughters, one in a car crash in Naples and one in a plane crash in Scotland. She was known to go to Mass every Sunday. Her youngest daughter had died only eight months before but she was walking into the Astra Band Club, not wearing black, but wearing a brightly-coloured, red and blue dress and she was walking in with the woman who had recently married her dead daughter’s husband.

At the far end of the room, a man sat on a high podium. In front of him was a huge transparent plastic bowl, containing ping-pong balls with numbers on them. He held a ping-pong ball in his hand and called out into the microphone, “Eleven, legs eleven!”

But nobody was listening. Heads were turning, looking towards the entrance. A hush fell over the room and then a rolling murmur of whispers.

Laura took Leonie’s arm, smiled and said, “Let’s get a drink at the bar first, and then I’ll introduce you to some people.”

Leonie smiled back and said, “I think I know some of them already.”

Laura shook her head. “You don’t, but you will.”

On Saturday evening, Joey Schembri passed by the house to pick up Michael and take him to the disco. Michael was still in the bedroom getting dressed, in his faded new frayed jeans with holes at the knees, and his new Chris Rea T-shirt. Leonie was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Creasy brought a couple of lagers out to the table under the trellis and chatted to Joey about the house they were working on. All week they had been building a new wing, which was to be the dining-room and kitchen. They couldn’t decide whether to use arches or wooden beams for the roof. In fact they had had a couple of arguments over it.

Joey drained half his glass, gave Creasy a very severe look and said, “I’ve decided, Uomo, and I don’t want any more fucking arguments.”

“Decided what?”

“It’s going to be arches instead of beams.”

“Why?”

“Because I like arches, it’s more traditional.”

Creasy shrugged, noncommittally.

“Yes, but you have to think of the market. After all, most of these farmhouses are bought by English people, or lately, Germans. They like the old wooden beams, think they’re more rustic. Let’s face it, Joey, you’re not going to be living in the place…are you?”

Joey gave him a narrow-eyed look. He drained his glass and stood up, walked across the patio and shouted through the wide-arched door in Maltese.

“Michael, if you’re not ready in two minutes, I’m leaving without you, and that Swedish girl will be heartbroken.”

A voice shouted back, “Coming, Joey, coming!”

Joey walked back to the table and grinned down at Creasy.

“I’ve got a feeling that later on tonight he just might be. That girl is crazy about him.”

“Don’t let the young bastard drink too much!”

Joey shrugged.

“The deal is I take him there and bring him home. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. Last week was just his first real night out and he went over the top. I did the same thing.”

“You went over the top more times than I like to remember.”

Joey grinned again and then as he heard the clattering of the pans in the kitchen, the grin faded. He looked down at Creasy and said, “By the way, I have a message from my mother.”

“Tell me.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. She said don’t bother coming to lunch unless you bring your wife with you.”

Creasy grimaced. “Your mother can be a pain in the ass. When was the last time she played Bingo?”

Joey spread his hands.

“I didn’t even know she’d ever played and you’re right, she can be a pain in the ass.”

Michael walked out under the trellis and Joey whistled and said, “Holy shit, man. What a knockout! Where did you get that T-shirt?”

The boy grinned and said, “I had it flown in yesterday from London. You haven’t got a chance tonight!”

Creasy made his announcement on Monday night over dinner.

In the morning he had picked up a number of letters from Gleneagles. One of them was post-marked Washington.

In the afternoon, he had not gone to work with Joey on the farmhouse. He had stayed in his study and made a series of overseas phone calls and some local ones.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be away a couple of weeks.”

“Where are you going?” Michael asked.

“Here and there. I’ve got things to do.”

He looked at the boy steadily and said, “You know a man called George Zammit…He’s Paul Schembri’s nephew, Joey’s cousin?”

Michael nodded.

“You know what he does?”

Again Michael nodded.

“OK. Well I talked to him early this afternoon on the phone and made some arrangements. Starting tomorrow, and thereafter every Tuesday and Thursday, you’ll catch the seven o’clock ferry in the morning and then the bus to Valetta. From the terminal, you’ll walk down to Fort St. Elmo. George will be there.”

“What will I do?”

Creasy thought for a while and then glanced at Leonie.

“Further your education,” he said in a flat voice. To Leonie he said, “It’s very early, but I’d prefer your driving him to the ferry, while I’m away.”

“Of course.”

First he went to Luxembourg and spent an hour in an office of a small private bank. Then he went to London and checked into the Gore Hotel in Queensgate, a small, comfortable family-run hotel. They knew him there as Mr. Stuart. The concierge arranged a single ticket for him for Phantom of the Opera that night.

When he returned to the hotel it was after midnight. The night porter let him in and told him that there was a man waiting for him in the bar. The bartender had been long gone but the night porter made them drinks and then left them alone. The man was short and slightly plump with sandy hair. He was in his late fifties.

“They’ve been asking about you,” he told Creasy.

“Who has?”

The walls of the bar were covered with paintings, all done by one man, a friend of the owners of the hotel. They were all for sale but in the years that Creasy had been coming to the hotel he had never known one of them to be sold. The sandy-haired man was looking at one.

He said, “I don’t like these paintings, Creasy, they’re too bizarre, what do you think?”

Creasy shrugged and said, “You get used to them. Who’s been asking?”

“First of all Peter Fleming. He’s in charge of the Loccurbie investigation. He asked Special Branch, who asked us. It landed on my desk.”

“And so?”

“And so I gave him the one-sheet hand-out, the one that ends up with you dead in Naples. A week later I had a query on it.”

“And so?”

The small man smiled. “And so I told the man at Special Branch that’s all we had…and what with all that’s happening around Eastern Europe these days, I had enough on my plate not to waste time on a one-time mercenary who died five years ago.”

“Thanks.”

The small man took a sip of his whisky.

“That’s OK, Creasy, but then we had a G1 request from the FBI from high up.”

“How high?”

“A man called Bennett. He’s a Deputy Director.”

Creasy leaned over the bar, took the top off the ice bucket and dropped some cubes into his glass.

“Was he specific?” he asked.

“Yes, very. He came through the DG personally.”

The small man’s voice became apologetic.

“I had to push all the buttons on my little console and give them everything we have.”

Creasy was swirling the ice in his glass and looking down at it reflectively.

“And what was the bottom line?”

The small man’s voice was still apologetic.

“The bottom line, Creasy, was that we had three reported sightings of you over the past five years, during the years that you’re supposed to have been dead. The last only two months ago at Heathrow Airport…A man from the SB antiterrorist squad…a watcher…you should have had plastic surgery, Creasy.”

“It was expected, especially from the FBI. I set it up myself.

The small man looked surprised. “Why?”

“I needed someone to know. Now he knows. How’s the investigation going?”

The small man smiled grimly.

“Like all such investigations, very slowly. The last memo I saw was a week ago. That man Fleming is tenacious, but he’s having problems with the German police. He thinks there’s a coverup or a foul-up. The Germans are determined to prove that the bomb didn’t originate in Frankfurt. They’re trying to pin it on Heathrow. Naturally, Security at Heathrow are trying to pin it on Frankfurt. It’s got bitter enough to go to Foreign Office level.”

Creasy turned on his stool.

“George, give us another one.”

The night porter came into the bar. He had a very pronounced limp. Silently he refilled their glasses, then limped out.

“What’s your view?” Creasy asked.

“It’s got to be Abu Nidal or Ahmed Jibril, paid for by the Iranians, probably using other groups to front for them. Fleming will find out, I’m sure of that.”

“A simple policeman?”

The small man shook his head.

“Not simple, Creasy. Very bright and very tenacious and apart from the Germans he’s getting very good cooperation. From the FBI, the CIA and us. We’ve got a whole team on it, eight people. Four of them in the field.”

“How long?”

“I’d guess within a year. Less, if the Germans start cooperating.”

“But you think it’s Nidal or Jibril?”

The small man drained his glass and stood up. Creasy also stood up.

“That will be the bottom line, Creasy…and both very hard to get to. Mossad have been trying for years.”

Creasy shook his head.

“You’re wrong. Mossad only say they’ve been trying…lip service to the Americans. Mossad just love those two bastards. Every time they kill an innocent, they hurt the Palestinian cause.”

He took a sip of his drink. He was looking at one of the bizarre paintings. It depicted a bunch of West Indians, working in a field. Their features were distorted.

Wryly he said, “It wouldn’t even surprise me if Mossad were funding those two bastards.”

He held out a hand and the smaller man shook it.

“Thanks, I owe you one.”

The small man shook his head and very quietly said, “You’ll never owe me one, Creasy. Not in a million years. Not since the night you came through that door and pulled me out. We were a bit younger then.”

Creasy grinned.

“We sure were and perhaps a little wiser.”

The small man nodded.

“If anything breaks, I’ll be in touch. Walk on water, Creasy.”

Michael finished the last of the chicken casserole, glanced at his watch and stood up, saying, “I’d better get changed. Joey will be picking me up in five minutes.”

He had almost reached the door when Leonie’s voice stopped him. It was a low voice but very determined.

“Michael, come back here and sit down.”

Slowly the boy walked back and sat down, glancing at his watch again.