Jigsaw Read online

  Pagan sat in Nimmo’s pristine office. He’d summarized the events of the investigation, but what he’d given Nimmo was an edited version on the grounds that too many details might flood George’s brain. He folded his hands in his lap and remembered the way Quarterman had been shot. A gunman, a silenced pistol in a sedate hotel bar, the ridiculous chase through the streets of Mayfair. What had Quarterman known that had caused a gunman to undertake such a risky assassination? What had he been privy to? You didn’t shoot a man down in daylight in the heart of a city unless you were scared beyond reason of what he might reveal. You waited for a dark place. You waited for the right situation. Whoever wanted Quarterman dead didn’t want to take the chance that Al, in a moment of weakness, in a flash perhaps of self-preservation, might become a little too chummy with a couple of London cops.

  Pagan felt exhausted, perplexed, harried by devils more important than George Nimmo’s exasperation and the Home Secretary’s unhappiness. He had the feeling of being locked in a box of tricks, or studying one of those join-the-dots puzzles whose ultimate solution would have all the coherence of an ink-blot.

  ‘Harcourt had been involved in some form of, yo, illegality,’ Nimmo said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Let’s just say the message on the answering-machine suggested such a possibility. I can’t be more explicit. Not yet.’

  Nimmo had a sour expression, as if he’d found a dead cockroach in his sherry trifle. ‘And so you contacted Quarterman in the hope of assistance. And now Quarterman is also dead. Before he could tell you anything.’ He rubbed his jowls. ‘We will soon have the streets of London littered with our dead American friends, I don’t doubt. Charming. See London and die.’

  ‘Look, this is a bloody investigation into a calamity, I’m not working for the tourist board,’ Pagan said, his voice rising. Blood coursed to his head. ‘I go where the investigation takes me. I didn’t arrange for Quarterman to be shot, for Christ’s sake. It was the last damn thing I expected. I wanted some answers, I thought he might supply them, the next thing he’s a corpse.’

  Nimmo stood up. ‘Don’t rage at me, Pagan. I will not have that.’

  Pagan gazed at the windows. He was frazzled, his edges were unravelling, but he wasn’t going to apologize to Nimmo for the outburst. Such outbreaks served a useful psychological purpose. Balm to the troubled soul. In any case, Nimmo sounded like an overbearing schoolteacher chastising a guilty pupil. And Pagan didn’t feel guilty about anything.

  ‘Understand one thing,’ Nimmo said. ‘Your position is fragile here. You hang by the proverbial thread. At a snap of my fingers I can have it cut. Bear that in mind, Pagan.’

  Nimmo sat down again, his face flushed. He had a gift, essential to all politicians, Pagan assumed, of easing from one mood to another, of readjusting his emotions without blinking. Quite a knack. It suggested shallowness, a lack of true substance in the heart.

  ‘The Home Secretary is going to meet the US Ambassador, Mr William J. Caan. I will be present, of course. There may be further questions you will have to answer to the satisfaction of both these eminent men.’

  ‘I’ll be only too happy,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Now. This woman. This Carlotta.’

  ‘We’re checking her,’ Pagan said ‘She’s presumably left the country. If she departed by any of the usual ways, there’s got to be some kind of record.’

  ‘She’s a nasty piece of goods,’ said Nimmo. ‘I’ve been reading her file. And you think she might be behind the attack?’

  ‘I can’t say that for certain. There’s always a chance.’ And that’s all you’re going to get out of me, George.

  Nimmo was quiet a second. ‘One other thing. I don’t like the way you handled Gladstone and Wright. They’re experienced men, they could be very useful to you, but what do you do with them? Send them off to Cricklewood on some fool’s errand.’ He looked in his in-tray, fished out a slip of paper, stared at it. ‘This chap Dracowitz. He turns out to have been a harmless idiot who lived in some dreary basement filled with a mildewed paperback collection of Lenin and a score of mousetraps, which he seemed unwilling to empty.’

  ‘I thought he was worth looking into,’ Pagan said. So. Gladstone and Wright send their reports to Nimmo directly. I ought not to be utterly astonished.

  ‘When it comes to that kind of boring legwork, use a uniform, for God’s sake. Gladstone and Wright don’t need to be scurrying halfway across London for nothing.’

  Pagan nodded in a gesture that might have passed for agreement. He rose from his chair. Nimmo smiled; it was intended to be conciliatory. ‘This investigation is above personality, Frank. You’re a professional. You should know that. Conflicts of style and attitude have no place in any of this. We’re a team. I don’t have to remind you, do I?’

  Pagan muttered something inaudible. There were times in his life when he truly couldn’t muster politeness, when he couldn’t force what he didn’t feel. Sometimes it cost too much to be falsely agreeable. Sometimes the price was too high in terms of what you valued, such as your integrity, your sense of self-worth.

  ‘Have we an understanding?’ Nimmo asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Pagan said in a dry way. ‘We have an understanding.’

  ‘Then I expect you to behave accordingly. When you have any news of this Carlotta, let me know at once. In the meantime, I think we should refrain from publicizing her name in any way. Keep it out of the Press. I don’t want any putative connection bruited about the place. Do you agree? I don’t want her forewarned, as it were.’

  ‘Fine,’ Pagan said.

  ‘By the way. Here’s McCluskey’s analysis for you.’ And Nimmo took from the surface of his desk a thin folder he handed to Pagan. Even McCluskey had been ordered to submit his reports here before they reached Pagan; Pagan couldn’t blame McCluskey, couldn’t accuse him of betrayal, he was only following Nimmo’s directions.

  He left Nimmo’s office and went downstairs. Foxie was waiting outside in the car. The rain had ceased, but the day had the allure of a threadbare coat.

  Pagan got in the car on the passenger side.

  ‘Well?’ Foxie asked. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘You shouldn’t ask, Foxie.’

  ‘He was on his high horse.’

  ‘Saddled and bridled. The complete squire.’

  Foxie started the car. ‘Golden Square?’

  Pagan nodded. He gazed at the rainy streets as Foxie drove. Give me bright sunshine and explanations, he thought. Tell me why Quarterman was shot. Tell me what Bryce Harcourt was up to that Carlotta had killed him – if indeed it was Carlotta who’d done the business. Speak to me about Jake Streik.

  His inspiration was as numb as the season.

  He looked at Dick McCluskey’s folder, but didn’t have the urge to open it just then, almost as if the fact that Nimmo had perused it beforehand had contaminated whatever it might contain. Be forgiving, Frank, he thought. Try to like George Nimmo. Try to fit in. After all: We’re a team. My arse we’re a team. What we are is antagonists, George Nimmo. We don’t breath the same air.

  He turned to look at Foxie. ‘You have a friend in MI6, don’t you?’

  ‘McLaren? I wouldn’t say he’s a friend exactly. We went to school together.’

  ‘Make a connection with him. Run this Jake Streik past him. See if he has anything on file. It’s worth a shot.’

  ‘That means I’ll have to take him out for drinks. He’s a fish. Hollow legs. He only opens up when he’s pissed as a newt.’

  In Soho Foxie parked and both men went inside the building on Golden Square and rode in silence in the cranky elevator. They stepped from the lift and walked inside Pagan’s office.

  ‘Somebody didn’t like the kind of company Al Quarterman was keeping. So Al was a potential threat and had to be removed.’

  ‘And the grave, they say, is an awfully silent place,’ Foxworth observed.

  ‘So what did Al Quarterman know about Harcourt’s activi
ties,’ Pagan said, thinking aloud. ‘One thing’s pretty clear. Harcourt was no innocent researcher. Whatever he was up to, Quarterman knew about it.’

  ‘Something is rotten in Grosvenor Square,’ Foxworth said.

  ‘Sure. But how do we find the source of the stench? There are boundaries here, Foxie. There are serious limitations to what we can do without causing a diplomatic incident.’ Pagan got up, wandered the room. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Quarterman’s death, the brute suddenness of it.

  He picked up Dick McCluskey’s report, read it. It was highly technical. The material used was a plastique called C-4, Czech-made, triggered by a non-electric detonator. McCluskey described fragments of a spring discovered at the scene; he’d attached a drawing of the explosive to his report. It looked like a tampon inside which compartments had been constructed. One contained the spring, another a primer; acid had been used to erode a retaining device which freed the spring which in turn activated a plunger that provided the spark. Pagan studied McCluskey’s drawing, admired its meticulous quality, and wondered how anything so innocuous in appearance as this tampon-shaped object could cause such devastation.

  He imagined hands shaping this device, fingers constructing it; he tried to picture Carlotta in a room somewhere, building this compact monster. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d purchased it ready-made. But she knew her way around explosives. She had long experience of them. Why would she bother to buy one off the peg from a supplier?

  Billy Ewing came inside the room, closing the door behind him. He made a grunt of exasperation. ‘Frank. For Christ’s sake, I can’t blow my nose without Gladstone and Wright watching me. Can’t you do something about them?’

  ‘They’re with us for the duration, Billy. Nimmo’s directive. What we know, they know. What they know, Nimmo knows. They’re in-house spies.’

  ‘Can’t you send them on a bloody mission?’ Ewing asked. ‘Don’t we have leads they can follow in North Wales or somewhere bracing like that?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’ He’d plunge them into the tunnel, he thought. They could liaise between the tunnel and Golden Square, although Pagan wasn’t sure what that might involve. But it would sound good to Wright and Gladstone: liaison officers. It had a ring of importance to it. Consign them underground, cast them into the depths.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Ewing said, ‘you might be interested to know that a certain Karen Lamb, carrying a US passport, left Heathrow on the night the prostitute was murdered in Mayfair. She caught a late Air France flight to Paris. Does she sound like your woman?’

  Karen Lamb. Carlotta Starling. Charlotte Pike. Pagan considered the permutations of aliases. Karen Lamb was a strong contender.

  ‘According to Air France, she had an ongoing ticket to Nice. For some reason she never made that plane. It could be the usual diversionary tactic. She might have stayed in Paris. Or hired a car and gone on elsewhere. None of the other airlines operating out of Paris have a record of a passenger under that name. But she could have changed it anyway, assuming she carries a set of passports, which I’d say is a given. I’ve got a call into the French police. But I’m not optimistic, Frank. They’re helpful, but only up to a point. And if they get an inkling they have Carlotta on their territory, they’d like nothing better than to nab her. Consider the kudos.’

  Pagan had a connection in the Sûreté, Claude Quistrebert, who’d been mildly helpful a few years ago in the search for a German terrorist known as Gunther Ruhr, but he wasn’t about to ask the rather unapproachable Quistrebert for help – at least not unless it became absolutely essential.

  ‘Effectively she’s disappeared,’ Ewing remarked. ‘Unless our French friends can come up with something.’

  Quarterman dead. Carlotta vanished. Blind alleys. ‘Did you turn up anything on Jake Streik?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘Zero,’ Ewing answered.

  Pagan envisaged the embassy on Grosvenor Square, the US flag, the great stone eagle that hovered over the building, the lines of would-be emigrants seeking visas that would enable them to exchange one kind of recession for another. The doorway to Democracy and two hundred million handguns. Here’s your green card, sir. Do remember to buy yourself a pistol first chance you get. We generally recommend a Colt for newcomers.

  How to get inside the mysterious fortress? he wondered. In the unlikely event of gaining access to the place, where would you look? Where would you even begin? What he needed was somebody with knowledge. On an impulse, he picked up his telephone and dialled Martin Burr’s number in Knightsbridge. Burr answered on the second ring.

  ‘Frank Pagan,’ he said. ‘Heard you were back in harness. Working you hard, are they?’

  ‘Hard enough,’ Pagan replied.

  ‘It’s good for you, Frank. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I need a few minutes of your time.’

  ‘Come over in an hour.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Pagan hung up the phone. An hour. That gave him time to grab a sandwich somewhere; he was hungry, couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. He put on his coat and as he moved toward the hallway, Foxie asked, ‘If I need to reach you, where will you be?’

  ‘I’m going to the oracle,’ Pagan answered. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  Foxworth frowned. Pagan could be infuriatingly mystifying at times. How were you supposed to keep up with him? He was too fond of wandering labyrinths alone.

  Pagan stepped out into Golden Square, where he turned up the collar of his coat against the wind. He walked in the direction of a nearby sandwich bar. He was unaware of the girl approaching until she came within inches.

  ‘Miles away, were you?’ Brennan Carberry asked.

  Surprised, he looked into her face.

  ‘Well, I called the number you gave me, didn’t get an answer. So I used some of that famed Yankee initiative and called Scotland Yard, and after some persistence on my part they told me where you could be found.’ She smiled at him, touched his sleeve.

  She linked her arm through his, a gesture that pleased and surprised him. He walked with her to the end of the square, where it flowed into a narrow street leading down to Piccadilly Circus. He had the feeling that some of the chill had just been sucked out of the afternoon; behind the barren density of cloud cover a sun was surely shining somewhere.

  He bit into an egg mayonnaise sandwich. The girl sipped coffee and watched him, seemingly amused by the speed at which he ate.

  ‘You don’t waste much time on food, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t have time to waste,’ Pagan said. ‘Anyway, my attitude to food’s pathetically basic. It’s fuel. Keeps the body going. That would be sacrilege to somebody in your occupation, I suppose.’

  ‘Worse,’ she said. ‘Do you know you’re supposed to chew each morsel of food at least fifteen times?’

  ‘Christ, I’d be here forever,’ he said. ‘I’d never get anything done.’

  She propped an elbow on the table, placed her chin in the palm of her hand. She had, Pagan thought, a way of looking at him that was just a little unsettling. The brown eyes probed, certainly, but it was the small light of mischief behind them he found the unnervingly attractive factor. He was pleased to be in her unexpected company; he kept receiving tiny waves of enjoyment – the old-time word ‘vibes’ came into his head – but under her gaze he was conscious of a strange awkwardness in himself, a clumsiness. A glob of egg salad slid from his sandwich and dropped in the middle of his plate, and he was embarrassed. He made flurries with his paper napkin, which tore between his fingers. He wasn’t doing very well and he wasn’t sure why.

  He looked at his watch. He still had thirty minutes before he was due to meet Martin Burr.

  ‘I’m keeping you from something,’ she said.

  ‘I have an appointment.’

  ‘You sound apologetic. Don’t. You don’t have to drop everything just because I’m here. And that includes your egg salad.’

  She
pushed a lock of hair from her forehead. Pagan thought this gesture endearing. Endearing: now there was a fresh discovery for him. All of a sudden. He looked at her face. She had a fine mouth which, when she smiled, created an impression of honesty and directness. He could detect nothing false or hidden in her and wondered why he even took the trouble to think about quarrying faults out of her. Old habits. He had a turn of mind, stoked by years of seeking concealed motives and foraging in the darker territories of the human heart, that led him into foggy areas. He sometimes found it impossible to accept things at their face value. It was cop mentality. After years, it was a tough habit to break.

  He pushed aside his plate, covering the stray dab of egg salad with the ruin of his napkin.

  She said, ‘I saw your name in the morning paper. I read you’re working on this explosion business in the Underground. I couldn’t cope with anything like that, Frank. I guess you need a shield around you when that kind of shit happens.’

  ‘I’m not sure how good my shield is,’ Pagan replied. ‘You get older, death gets harder to take. Funny. I always thought the opposite would happen.’ He looked down at the napkin, seeing how moisture from the salad had seeped through the paper. He raised his face and thought: You could look into her eyes and believe no such thing as the tunnel existed, nobody had died, there were no mysteries, like Quarterman, Bryce Harcourt, Streik, Carlotta. These were unconnected shadows from another dimension.

  Brennan Carberry represented a simpler world, a sunny place where birds sang and every night brought a magical full-blown moon, awesome in a starry sky. Jesus Christ. Get real, Frank. Next thing you’ll be thinking nightingales in Berkeley Square. He withdrew into silence. You couldn’t make the world go away just because you found a good-looking young woman attractive and sympathetic.

  ‘Have you any idea who planted the bomb?’ she asked. Then she shook her head, held up one hand. ‘No. Forget I asked that. It’s none of my business. And you’ve had it up to here anyhow. I can tell. You don’t look so good. Stressed-out.’