The Power of One (8 page)

‘Are you all right, Rina dear?' Bethany asked. She and her sister perched on a two-seat music stool. Rina had never known either of them to play as an individual at Bridge or at the piano come to that. Like the Montmorencys, they seemed to have spent such a long lifetime as a double act that they found it almost impossible to think or act one without the other. There were times when Rina truly worried what would become of the one left behind once the inevitable happened.

‘I'm all right, dear,' Rina told her. ‘I suppose I just have a lot on my mind.'

‘Rina had a spat with our pet policeman,' Matthew said.

‘Oh, Matthew, I did not.'

‘You did, Rina darling. We all know that.' Bethany was indignant. ‘Why else would Tim get all protective and big brotherish and hustle you away like that?'

Rina was both amused and exasperated. ‘And how do you know it was Mac I'd argued with?'

‘Oh, Rina.' Eliza laughed coquettishly. ‘Outside of the people in this room, oh and apart from Tim, of course, there's only one person you'd get upset over and that's our policeman. We aren't entirely blind, you know.'

‘Or lacking in empathy,' Matthew finished. He laid down his hand of cards. ‘So why don't we give up on this pretence of a game and I'll pour us all some nice G&Ts and you can tell us what's stopping you from enjoying our family evening.'

Relieved but also reluctant, Rina laid down her cards and allowed Steven to administer alcoholic balm. Bethany's notion of Tim being big brotherish amused her; though, she admitted, sometimes he seemed like one of the elders.

‘It was nothing really,' she said. ‘Mac was trying to do his job and I suppose I was overstepping the mark a little.'

‘Oh, but you always do that,' Bethany exclaimed. ‘He doesn't usually mind.'

‘And you know he'll come and say sorry just as soon as he's able to,' Eliza added. ‘And eat cake and get back to plotting with you and Tim and everything will be fine again.'

‘Of course he will,' Matthew reassured. ‘And if he doesn't realise he's upset you, Tim will tell him your feelings were hurt and he'll come round at once. Sebastian would never let a little police formality come between you.'

Sebastian, Rina thought. Matthew was the only person who ever called Mac by his given name and it was a mark of regard, she knew, that Mac merely winced.

‘Right, so now we have that settled,' Steven said, ‘I believe there's a Hitchcock film on one of the cable channels. Shall we?'

Lydia stood in the Big Room staring at the dark as it crept landward across the stretch of steel-grey ocean. Pale streaks of sky broke up the inky blue and the last echoes of the day's sun touched pink at the very tips of the cloud. It would rain, she thought. Later tonight or in the early morning, drenching the garden. The thought relieved her; she knew that Edward's beloved roses needed watering and the bedding plants were crisping in the summer heat but the thought of leaving the house, even for the relative shelter of her own green space, terrified her just now. Inside, she didn't exactly feel safe, but at least less threatened and in this room, with its vertiginous view of sea and sky she could imagine, almost, that she floated above the world and its troubles.

More practically, she couldn't see the wilting flowers.

The door opened and Edward came slowly down the steps into the sunken room. He crossed to where she stood and laid his hands hesitantly on her shoulders.

‘It's like being on the prow of a ship, this room,' Lydia said. ‘I used to imagine that's what Paul liked so much. That feeling of floating above and beyond it all. Nothing to see but open water and that big sky.' She sighed, suddenly sick of the sight that had fascinated her only seconds before. ‘Can't we move, Edward. I can't stand this place now. It didn't save him, did it. Getting away from everything. I thought, being aboard
The Greek Girl
he should have been safe. He should have been …'

‘I know. I know.' He hugged her, awkwardly, as though he'd almost forgotten how. ‘Lydia, we knew he was in trouble. We should have forced him to tell us what was going on.'

‘It isn't just him, though, is it? Those phone calls, those threats. Edward, if I knew what they wanted, they could have it but I don't. I'm scared enough to give them just about anything they want, but how can we when Paul never told us …'

Edward couldn't think what to say. She leaned against him, hands tight on his arms as though unable to stand unless he held her.

‘We have to tell someone,' he said. ‘Lydia, this is all too much for us.'

‘I know. But who? Paul said there was no one he could trust and he was right, wasn't he? He tried to protect himself and they still found him.'

‘Whoever
they
are. Lydia, I don't know what to do, but we have to do something. I can't stand this nothingness. This limbo land. If there's something we have to face, I'd rather do it head on, take my chances with it.'

She nodded but he could tell she was unconvinced. He couldn't tell whether that was because she was not convinced that this was the right course of action or that he truly meant what he said.

It was late. Miriam slept and for a while Mac had watched her sleeping, cherishing the sight of her long hair tumbled across his pillow and the soft rise and fall of her breasts as she slept more peacefully than Mac ever could.

In his hand he held a photocopy of the scrap of newspaper he had found at Paul's flat. He knew now that this was not some random act, some meaningless selection. Beyond that, he was still mystified.

Miriam had brought the copy of the hard drive her colleague had taken from Paul's computer. Most of it was irrelevant stuff, so far as Mac could tell. Letters and stored emails, music downloads and the odd video from an internet site that specialised in short films. Mac had been curious enough to look at the Screening Room and found that it was mainly dedicated to showcasing new film makers, and random information gleaned from the computer disk confirmed that cinema in all its forms was another passion of Paul de Freitas.

There were also many files containing pictures by artists that Mac recognised and many more that he did not, and folders of ideas and visuals that looked to Mac as though they were rough workings for new games.

Almost everything on the drive was in the clear. He didn't even have a password on the start-up screen. But there were two folders that were protected, and it had taken Johnny the Geek, as Miriam fondly called him, quite some time to find a way in to them – even to find; hidden as they were in a partition that looked at first sight to be something the manufacturer had set up simply for BIOS files.

Mac, frankly, couldn't make head or tail of them and Miriam told him that they were in two separate programmers' languages. Unhelpfully, she couldn't read them either. Old-fashioned, she said. No one does this any more. A phone call to Johnny had confirmed that one was binary and one machine code.

‘The man knew his stuff,' Johnny said. ‘He talked directly to the machine.'

It would take time and probably more skill than even Johnny the Geek had to unravel that mystery but it was the title that Paul had given to one of his files that told Mac he held in his hand a photocopy of a genuine clue.

On one side of the sheet was an advert for a riding stables but on the other was a funeral announcement for a man called Payne. His first name was missing, the tear passing between the first and second name and Mac only had fragments of information about his funeral; single words and half a date, the number twenty-three. But the name of one of the hidden files Johnny had found, the programme he was told was written in binary code, was entitled
The Power of One
. The other was
Payne 23
.

Unable to sleep, even with Miriam, Mac dressed and walked slowly through the darkened streets of Frantham Old Town, the original harbour village in which his boathouse home was situated. Narrow streets, a fierce determination of the local people to keep it local and a definite lack of vehicular access meant that this little settlement possessed a distinctly different atmosphere from the Victorian town of Frantham-on-Sea, for all that it was only a ten-minute walk. At one time there had been a solid path round the headland and linking these two halves, but winter storms some twenty years before had finally washed it out and the link now was a wooden boardwalk, raised high on the cliff face, beneath which the sea surged and struggled. Mac had yet to walk it in full winter; he had a feeling that by then he might have to resort to the longer road, but often unable to sleep, he had frequently passed this way in the dark. Troubled dreams disturbed him, the death of a child he had been unable to prevent. A killer still loose because of his own, very human reaction which meant he had run to the dying child and not pursued the man who had just cut her throat.

It had taken a long time for Mac to learn to function once more in the waking world. Time, new friends, a fresh start. And now Miriam. But the nights were still bad.

Mac paused as the walkway rounded the headland and gazed out to sea. Chill air rose up from beneath his feet and he shivered, despite the fact that he'd had the foresight to don a fleece and long-sleeved shirt. Nights could be cold here even at the height of summer. Out on the horizon the sky lightened as though anticipating a dawn that was still hours away. Mac had noticed this phenomenon before but still didn't understand how it worked. He had lived by the sea for most of his life and usually the horizon darkened as it touched water.

Moving on, his feet in canvas deck shoes feeling the cold now, he rounded the headland and trotted down the steps onto the Victorian promenade. He realised that, subconsciously, he must have expected to see the woman on the beach.

She looked up as his feet crunched on shingle and then fell more softly on the sand closer to the waterline. ‘Can't sleep?'

‘No, too much to think about. You?'

Rina nodded, she slipped her arm through his. ‘I never grow tired of looking at this,' she said. ‘Fred loved the sea, you know. We always planned to settle down at the seaside, raise a family.'

Mac smiled. It was rare for Rina to talk about her beloved husband. They had been married only five years when he died and she had never, to his knowledge, settled on anyone else. ‘Well, you have a family,' he said. ‘Perhaps not the kind you planned.'

‘But I think he would have approved.'

They stood for several minutes in companionable silence and then Rina said, ‘So, what particular puzzle brought you out here? I know it wasn't bad dreams tonight, so it must have been something else.'

‘And how do you know it wasn't the dreams?'

‘Because you've left Miriam in bed and you don't get the dreams when she's with you. Or at least, not so terribly that you have to walk them away.'

‘How?'

‘Oh, Mac. I can smell her perfume on your skin.' She hugged his arm. ‘Women notice these things, you know. So what's the puzzle? Two heads and all that.'

‘I should be telling you it's police business.'

‘And then we'd have to fall out again and neither of us want that.'

Mac told her, about the computer files and the scrap of paper folded as a bookmark and then he fished into his pocket and gave the photocopy to her, knowing for certain now that he'd hoped to see Rina tonight. Why else would he be carrying it around?

‘Go home to bed,' Rina told him. ‘I'll take a look in the morning, get Tim involved. I'll tell him you came waving the white flag, no flowers and chocolates required.'

A few miles away a little hatchback, dark green, pulled up outside of the house where Paul de Freitas had lived. A dark-haired woman got out and crossed the road. She had a key to the house door, let herself inside, and softly climbed the three flights of stairs to Paul's flat. The police seal caused her a moment's pause, then she broke the tape and slipped her key into the door.

She spent only a minute or so inside, going straight to the bookshelf and using the light slanting through the window to find the volume she sought.

Then she left, tiptoeing back down the stairs, silent as she had come.

E
arly the next morning, Mac drove over to see DI Kendal. Abe Jackson, the MOD liaison, was not quite what Mac had expected. Recalling Kendal's joke about his sounding American, he was amused to find that Abe's father had, in fact, been born in the US. He was a cheerful soul, on the surface at least, round faced and smiling, with a shock of sandy hair growing at odd angles and a complexion that belonged to an outdoorsman, tanned and slightly reddened. He asked a lot of questions, rummaged through the evidence bags that Mac had brought from Paul's flat and then asked, frankly, what Mac and Kendal thought was going on.

Mac sensed something odd behind the question. He glanced at Kendal looking for a clue as to what.

‘Abe here has never heard of anyone called Hale,' he said.

Mac absorbed that. ‘So who the hell is he?' he asked.

Abe shrugged. ‘Beats me,' he said. ‘Complex business you seem to have gotten into. All I do know is, your Superintendent Aims believed his credentials and gave him full access.'

That sounded like Aims, Mac thought. Not that the man was stupid; just a little too ready to be overwhelmed by title for Mac's taste. ‘Did anyone think to check him out?'

‘Not as easy as it might sound,' Kendal pointed out. ‘Apparently Aims called the Home Office but the wheels of enquiry turn slowly. It's not like you can phone someone and say, look, we have one of your spooks here, can you tell me if he's the real deal or some Walter Mitty wannabe.'

‘And I'm afraid when I got involved, it seemed to just confirm this Hale's story. Aims just assumed we were part of the same team.'

Mac sat down and pulled his coffee mug towards him, then, finding it empty, pushed it hopefully in Kendal's direction. ‘And I suppose you're for real,' he said.