The Unseen (23 page)

“I thought we were meant to be married,” Sean said, putting beer cans into the fridge. He looked over to her, eyes wide and hopeful.

“If I thought the opposition might peep through the bedroom window, then I’d sleep with you. But as that is highly unlikely, you can sleep in the spare room. However, as you are a lottery winner, you can first take me to dinner.”

He lifted two bottles of white Rioja from the bag. “Who wants crabby restaurant food? I’ll do better. I’ll cook you dinner. Halibut in white wine with olives, capers and a tossed green salad, or maybe you’d prefer peppered steak?” He extracted a bottle of Monsterio, Calatayud, red. “Or …”

“It won’t happen, Sean. Our lives are too far apart and too busy. I can’t let it happen.” She remained by the door, staring at him, her arms folded as if she were trying to hide.

He placed the bottle onto the kitchen worktop. “I remember four magnificent days in Cornwall. Four days where you and I played undercover for real. I remember one night when something so wonderful happened, it has stayed in my mind and heart ever since.” He moved towards her.

“No.” She raised her hand. “It’s a memory. A beautiful memory I agree. But let’s keep it that way. Let’s not complicate our lives. Marriage never worked for you. Even partnerships don’t work for me. This is business, Inspector Fagan, not a casual fling.”

“That might be, Agent Lawless. But you’re still beautiful.”

She stared for long seconds. “So are you,” she said and walked out the room.

He finished unpacking the groceries and laid two prime halibut fillets on the cutting board. His granny had always told him to persevere. Maybe he could tempt her with his culinary skills. Maybe. Upstairs he heard the shower. The night was early and Mrs Fagan had set him a challenge. Were their lives really so distant and far apart? His mobile rang and Diane spoke.

“Just reporting in, boss. Travelpath is big. We estimate there are at least twenty staff on the premises. Others come in on a shift basis. The boys are building up photo IDs, mainly males, but it’s possible a female worker might be passing on information.”

“Unless we hit a match with our burglar, there’s no easy way out of this. We need to start following people home, see who their friends are.”

“You’re looking at manpower.”

Sean heard the click of her lighter, heard her draw in smoke. “Cobbart would want firm results first,” he said. “I have a disk nicked from PKL and a camcorder film which needs to be taken to Steve Rawlings. If you have a team member anywhere near they could collect them. Otherwise I’ll deliver tomorrow. But if we can prove mass fraud, Cobbart will sanction more men.”

“I’ll phone round, boss. Be in touch.” Diane switched off.

His isolation interrupted, he took the opportunity to check his text messages. Becky said hi, and yes, she had done her homework. Sophie informed him she had reached level 3 of Princess Kay-ling. Sean texted back.
Don’t forget your mum’s birthday this Saturday.
He put down the mobile. Don’t do what I did, forget. He went back to preparing dinner.

Maybe Victoria was right, each of them was so wrapped up in their work they had no time for personal things. But every now and then they could at least recreate that same magic they had once shared in Cornwall. No commitment, just blind, passionate lust. He washed the fish, peeled the potatoes and set them on the stove. For a moment he paused, realising that was the crux of their problem. They hadn’t simply shared sex, they had made love. Something must still lie deep, something to re-awaken.

When everything was ready to cook Sean went up the stairs. The door to the main bedroom was shut and his clothes left in a neat pile in the spare room. It removed any excuse for him to knock.

He used the main bathroom, showered changed and went back to the kitchen. Sean heard the deep-throated roar of the motorbike cut out on the driveway moments before the bell rang. The guy on the step wore full leathers and looked like some mechanical robot but with tiny waist and hips. When the visor was lifted, Jan looked out.

“Diane said you had an urgent collection. I’d just followed a suspect home to Radlett so I shot over here.”

Sean gave her the disk and the camcorder film taken via his lapel badge. “Take ’em to Steve at High Tec. What’s new at Travelpath?”

Jan shook her head, her deep brown eyes looking back at him through the elongated slit of the helmet. “Just leg work.”

“What we need is the manager. Set up a lift for tomorrow, Jan. Tell the others.”

“Will do, boss.”

Sean closed the door and called Steve. “I’m sending you a disk from PKL. Also a camcorder film. Could you let me know if they contain usable evidence?”

“Will do,” Steve said. “At the moment we’re intercepting heavy e-mail activity, most of it’s coded. It’ll take time to crack, but my guess is, they’re scrubbing hard disks and overwriting with new programmes.”

“Who are the recipients?” Sean asked, turning back to the kitchen.

“Morrison Hotel, Brighton is the main one, but there’s other stuff going out on multi-transmission. Probably to sales agents. If you open files from a trusted supplier containing a dedicated instruction, it would bypass any checks and covertly download a cleaning system.”

“So we raid the hotels now, get what evidence we can?” Sean spoke with visions of Victoria in Cobbart’s office, her lips compressed, her eyes unyielding. What did MI5 know that he didn’t?

“Too late,” Steve said. “By the time we’re on target everything will be clean. It will only blow our cover. Somewhere, someone won’t open their file instruction. We need only one lead, one staff member to start talking. One agent or investor with a suspect file.”

“I know just the person. Keep at it, Steve.” Sean redialled and waited on Danielle. “If you receive e-mails from PKL, the girls’ prize, possible business information, don’t open them.”

“But my research. What must I do?”

“As I tell you.”

“Les hommes!”

Sean listened to the silence as she switched off. If PKL were cleaning files then they suspected unwanted interest. He couldn’t see how his lifting of the DVD had compromised their operation, but it was possible they were edgy after the Irish murder. Which also meant whoever cleaned was a participant.

He returned to the kitchen and stared to cook. If their cover had been blown then any contact Victoria now made on her own would be dangerous. She would need backup and if MI5 wouldn’t provide it, then he would, whether she liked it or not, whether she knew or not.

When Victoria appeared, she had clearly made an effort. A top and long skirt flattered her figure but in a totally discreet manner. Her makeup was light, her hair loose.

“You look stunning,” he said.

“Thank you.” She smiled and folded her arms staying near the door. Her expression had a mixture of sadness and determination which he thought was perhaps the reason for her extended absence. She bit on her lower lip.

“Sean,” she looked up at him. “I don’t want sex for the sake of sex. I always thought you and I had more than that. And in truth, I’m scared of facing it. I’m thirty-six-years old with three failed partnerships. I don’t want children, and yet, I do want children. Same time I don’t want commitment outside of my job. That places me in a vacuum cocooned by a veneer of resolve. To make love with you would dent that resolve. And that frightens me.”

“Like it or not, what you just said means we have a whole future. So maybe I could start by tempting you with something more interesting than sex.” He scooped a halibut fillet from the pan. “Good food and wine. Perhaps a little Classic FM on the radio?”

She smiled. “Try to understand, Sean, for us.”

“I’m trying, for us.”

End of mission, Zoby cleaned and stowed reusable equipment. Cards, driving licences and soiled clothes he destroyed. His trophies were the memorabilia, items considered keepsakes of war. Not even the Colonel knew of his trophies. He had to trust the Colonel, the Colonel had always been there, always in command; but the Colonel never knew about trophies. Zoby never told him.

The nun’s uterus and vagina had kept well in the cool-bag. With the aid of a scalpel he cleaned associated body tissue and congealed matter from the black, grey tube lying on the kitchen table then washed it under the tap. He whistled quietly to himself as he set about the task. He knew a better job was possible, but it wasn’t his fault. They should have allowed him to stay in medical school and become a top surgeon. Zoby stopped his tuneless whistling and started to hum the Princess Kay-ling battle hymn. Both ovaries and fallopian tubes were severed, but he figured they weren’t necessary. They no longer had a use. More important was a means of display. He had in mind a flat glass tank with the whole piece pinned out. Then maybe he would give it to Tate Modern. Dead flesh in preserving fluid seemed popular with the people who ran it and he would like others to see his skills. When satisfied with its cleanliness he let the soft tissue slip through fingers into a laboratory jar of formaldehyde, his nose wrinkled at the smell. Sealed away he placed the new jar next to Helen Carter’s. Her jar was small and the contents something of a disappointment. He had really wanted to take the severed head but her expression had become stretched and ugly, so he cut off her ears instead. It seemed a good idea at the time. Now they looked nothing.

During the day he had phoned the office and told Stratton his mother had died and he was arranging her funeral. Stratton sounded sincere in his condolences though Zoby doubted he was. He agreed to do some work from home and downloaded files over the Internet. That evening he went out hunting but found no suitable quarry. He was restless now, he was always restless after a mission. Staring into the mirror he saw himself tight, compact, neat. The perfect combat soldier, always ready for action. Somewhere beyond his image in the mirror he knew the boy hiding inside was also watching, somewhere way back, somewhere no-one could see. To distract himself, he worked out for three hours, then practised two hours with his Samurai sword. He considered the possibilities of taking up conceptual art for real and making himself famous. The idea of shocking people appealed to him. He would steal a baby and cut it in half. Why mess with dead animals when you could do the thing properly? Zoby spent the night thinking of that and looking up maternity hospitals. The baby would have to be new, unsullied by human contamination. Unable to sleep, he checked his e-mail. The Colonel had a new mission, immediate action, code red. He sat waiting.

At 1 a .m. Richard came out of his flat which occupied half the top floor along with the executive offices of PKL. The conference room was the first along the corridor, then accounts, then Snibbard’s office with terminal three. Downstairs was the main open-plan floor of the admin section. During the day this was full of busy, well-paid young women who accepted Snibbard’s grubby attentions with weary tolerance. Richard despised them for letting the geek get away with it, but then Snibbard agreed their joint bonuses and made sure they got paid. For Richard, that made them all whores.

As project manager and Richard’s number two, Snibbard’s office had windows giving fine views towards the city, a little fridge provided cold drinks. Snibbard had never retained a secretary for more than two weeks. During his lunchtime, he went to watch pole dancing in a local wine bar, in the evenings it was a laptop bar. While students in Glasgow it was Richard who picked up the girls while Snibbard stood around open mouthed. After some weeks of Internet contact to place both the girls and Snibbard under SPI, Richard then sent them to the woods. There he could watch in secret frustration while Snibbard indulged his lustful perversities. It built a grudging one-sided friendship. Snibbard like a bucket of testosterone with a computer for a brain but never realising he was part of the experiment. No girl had ever openly given herself to Snibbard. It proved Richards first success with SPI, but like Zoby, it was now time for Snibbard to be sacrificed.

Walking over the office floor that was partially illuminated by moonlight, he passed the mainframe server that had been activated by Faulkner in Milton Keynes. Stacked in a corner it chugged and clicked, chattering away with its sanitisation programme to erase and overwrite all SPI on the Shoreditch system.

Richard clicked rapidly with the mouse. The expected e-mail from the Morrison Hotel, Brighton, contained web addresses, the digital photo of two girls taken at prize handout, hotel register address and discount voucher number. From the voucher number he re-checked files for the address of the original PKL sales agent. As before the address did not correspond with the address given by Fagan when signing the register, nor the bank. For a moment Richard was puzzled. The present Mrs Fagan would have needed teenage pregnancy to be mother of the elder girl. So the current Fagans were most likely in a second partnership. Two houses in such a relationship were not uncommon, three improbable, particularly for a welder even if he had won money. It could possibly be a police undercover operation where one true address had been inadvertently revealed. He looked at the photograph of the girls, both beaming smiles of innocence. If Fagan was police, maybe he had visited the hotel with his kids and realised what was going on. One of the addresses, possibly the agent, could be the original parental home, Mr Fagan’s family enclave. But he had to be sure.