Superintendent Donnelly regarded the information chattered out by his telex and had no idea what to make of it. A vital clue? A meaningless coincidence? If a clue, then to what? He sought further information, was told no further information was available. If enquiries into a B&E at the East End offices of a small publishing house progressed beyond the stage of showing an intelligent interest for the sake of taxes paid, Superintendent Donnelly would be the first to know.
Alone in his office, ignoring the press of more urgent matters, Donnelly watched the print-out as if he was expecting it to do something. Like Michael Wylie, he did not really believe in coincidence. All the same, he could not begin to guess how this latest fragment might relate to either of the previous episodes, let alone both of them. Finally he picked up the phone.
Todd answered on the second ring.
“Is he there?”
Todd knew very well who the call was for, and thought he knew who it was from. Sometimes, however, he took a stand in the name of common politeness. He said evenly, “Yes, I’m here.”
“Flynn,” growled Donnelly. “Is Flynn there?” At Todd’s interrogative silence he gave his name.
“Oh, it’s you, Superintendent,” Todd said smoothly. “No, I’m afraid he’s not here.”
“Are you expecting him back?”
“Not with any confidence.”
“Oh God. Is he off on his white horse again?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Todd with dignity. Of course, it was not true.
Donnelly breathed heavily. “All right. Stay where you are, I’m on my way round. Maybe you can make some sense of this.” Without further explanation he rang off.
It was an unremarkable little burglary in itself: breaking and entering at an office like a thousand other little London offices that just might have kept enough petty cash in a drawer to be worth the effort of forcing the door. In fact the Pretext operation was slightly more sophisticated than that and had a wall safe, so the petty cash was untouched. The intruder had then turned his attention to the furniture. He had emptied every drawer of every desk and filing cabinet. The contents had been scattered throughout the premises.
Clearing up had taken all day, and only then was the proprietor able to say what was missing. The list included cameras from the darkroom, a lap-top word processor from the office, the tea money from the secretary’s desk—and a folder with Mickey Flynn’s name on it from the editor’s filing cabinet.
Todd stared. “What was in the folder?”
“Nothing. That’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. There was nothing in that folder that could have been of use or interest to anyone. Prints of a few photographs that had already appeared in a magazine—low-circulation but widely available. If anybody had wanted a copy they could have bought one for two pounds per issue.”
There had to be more to it than that and both men knew it. Nobody breaks into buildings to steal photographs that have already been made public; and nobody stealing cameras and computers would pause long enough to select one file of used photographs out of a cabinetful and make his get-away with it tucked under his arm. It made no sense, and therefore it had not happened that way. There was another element, something they were unaware of or something whose significance they were missing.
Todd said, “Did Pretext have a list of what the photographs were?”
Donnelly nodded. “They went through their back copies for the last couple of years and made up a list of what pictures Flynn had sent them, on what subjects, and when they were published. And no,” he added, getting where Todd was going first, “none of them were of Tomas Obregon, Peter Loriston, Michael Wylie or Jamil Fahad.”
“Well, they wouldn’t be,” said Todd. “Hard news isn’t really Pretext’s area. They print a couple of popular science magazines—by which I mean the science is popular rather than technical; the magazines are only just popular enough to stay in business. They do a nature one called Preserve and one with a physics bent called Context. They’re heavy on photographs with a bit of fairly lightweight prose to help with the layout. Narwhals and novae: that’s Pretext.”
Donnelly frowned. “I wouldn’t have thought Flynn had much interest in either—or in the rates that a three-room marginally solvent publisher could pay.”
Todd smiled. “They’re not what he made his name with, no. But actually there’s almost nothing a good photograph can be made from that Mickey Flynn isn’t interested in. After the business in Israel three years ago he went travelling—all right, on the run—and he got to some fairly improbable places. Being Mickey, he photographed anything that moved and a fair number of things that stood still. Some of the suitable ones—the crater lakes at Keli Mutu, electrical storms over the Skeleton Coast, the Great Aletsch Glacier, one of zebra stallions fighting in the Ngorongoro—he sent to Greg Miller at Pretext. Not mainly for what Greg could pay but because he’s a friend and the occasional big-name contribution helps him stay solvent. Before he had his own darkroom, Mickey used Greg’s. I remember the first film he ever developed there. I kept it for a bookmark: you couldn’t have used it for anything else.”
“So who steals photographs of zebras?” The ramifications of this case were putting Donnelly under a strain. Three weeks after the crash of Flight 98 the people who had thought him the best man to investigate were tired of being asked if arrests were imminent and wondering if replacing him with a higher-ranking officer would be accepted as a working substitute for progress.
It would not be the first time he had lost top billing, and it was not altogether enviable being the man a nation expected to solve two hundred and twenty murders. But Donnelly liked whenever possible to finish what he started, and it irked him that every time he felt to be getting a perspective on the thing something like a sea-fog came swirling in to cloud the issues again.
“Have you got Greg’s list?” Todd’s eyes went distant as he studied it, trying to recall the photographs recorded. Some he remembered clearly, others vaguely, some not at all. He might not have seen them all, of course. One name caught his eye. “What, him again?”
Donnelly peered over his shoulder, a task complicated by the fact that Todd was taller and his shoulders broad. “Who?”
Todd tapped the list. “Him. Dr. Dieter Hehn of Deering Pharmaceuticals. Oh, nothing to do with this.” He chuckled. “Deerings’personnel department wanted so many copies of the print Mickey was convinced they were papering the boardroom with them. They only stopped nagging him when he told them the negatives were lost in the crash.” Then his eyes met Donnelly’s speculative grey gaze and his smile turned slowly to a thoughtful frown. “At least, I don’t think it’s anything to do with this.”
“Tell me,” said Donnelly.
Their problem in trying to assess the significance of the Deering connection was that, even if Todd’s recollection was full and accurate—full and accurate recollections being his trade—they could not know how complete and balanced a picture of his dealings with the firm Flynn’s few casual remarks drew. Certainly Flynn had never seen Deerings in a sinister light: they had been useful to him, then a bit of a nuisance, and after the loss of the Hehn negative they had slipped from sight as completely as a major corporation can.
“It must be a coincidence,” decided Todd, if doubtfully. “What could they have against Mickey? The only reason he was in their building was to get a photograph from their roof. The only photograph he took inside the building was at their specific request. Why would anyone at Deerings want Mickey dead?”
It was not so much an answer as the sound of a brain working round a jumble of facts much as a sheepdog marshalls sheep. “We may not be altogether safe assuming that murder was the purpose of the exercise,” said Donnelly.
Todd stared at him. “You know some way of blowing up an aircraft in flight without killing people?”
Donnelly’s expression flickered irritably. “Oh, murder was the inevitable consequence of planting a bomb on Flight 98. But it may not have been the reason for it.”
“Explain.”
If it struck Donnelly as incongruous to be explaining his train of thought to a reporter, he gave no sign of it. Partly it was because Todd had not achieved all he had, and held onto it for so long, without being both an intelligent man and a responsible one. He did not look a particularly intelligent man, except in the depths of his dark grey eyes, and the very idea of a responsible journalist is so old-fashioned that no policeman younger than Donnelly could have encountered it.
Of the many things Todd had lived long enough to see pass away, he most regretted the respect that was once afforded a serious British journalist in his native land. Now British journalists were respected in Europe, in America and further afield, but at home frequently pretended to play piano in houses of ill repute rather than risk embarrassing their children.
But if Donnelly needed a sounding-board for his thoughts, with the chance of some creative thinking in return, he could have chosen a great deal worse. Todd had neither the face nor the figure usually associated with minds like steel traps, and had not had even when younger. But he was an astute and perceptive man, and if he had a personal interest in this it only honed the edge on his thinking.
So Donnelly explained. “We’ve been assuming that the bomb was put on the plane to kill Flynn. Suppose it wasn’t. Suppose it was put on board to destroy the negatives he was carrying. That might explain why, three weeks after two attacks in one day destroyed virtually everything he owned, there seem to have been no further attempts on his life—but someone has broken into an office and stolen examples of his work.”
It had been a terrible thing to contemplate when they had believed that two hundred and twenty people had been sacrificed to a convenient means of murdering one. The idea that someone had murdered them as a convenient means of disposing of some negatives was unbearable. Todd looked at the policeman as if he had made an obscene joke, and could not keep his lip from curling. But he knew it was not a joke, that Donnelly was trying everything he could think of to make sense of what had happened, the bizarre as well as the appalling, because understanding it was a necessary first step towards apprehending the guilty. So Donnelly’s speculations were anything but flippant. He was a man with a difficult job to do, and he deserved all the help he could get.
Todd said, “Why should anyone steal photographs that have already been published? What possible secrets can they still contain?”
Donnelly’s lip curled too, with frustration and anger. “If Flynn was here we could ask him.”
Todd said quietly, “I know he’s making life difficult for you but try to understand how he feels. One way or another, even if we don’t know quite how or why, this thing seems to have happened because of him. Two hundred and twenty people died, and he wasn’t even one of them.
“You’re a policeman. It’s not inconceivable that at some time you’ve been responsible for a man’s death. Maybe not, maybe you’ve been lucky. Let me tell you, it’s not a great feeling. It doesn’t matter that you had no choice, that the man who ended up dead gave you no choice, that he created a situation in which someone was going to die and if it hadn’t been him it would have been you or perhaps some innocent third party. So you do what’s necessary, or what you believe is necessary, or anyway what he’s driven you to, and when he’s dead at your feet your first reaction is relief because if you had any doubts that it needed doing you wouldn’t have done it.
“But afterwards, when you’re no longer in danger and the adrenaline has dried up, and both the relief and the anti-climax that follows have washed over you and drained away, that’s when the reaction hits you. You feel so guilty you can’t sleep for it. You wish you’d let him kill you. You feel worthless, as if it was something in yourself you destroyed. It taints everything you do, everything you touch. You know, logically, that you did the only possible thing, and if you can make yourself talk about it with anyone else they’ll tell you the same. But it doesn’t alter how you feel. You feel unclean. You feel like a dead man walking round looking for somewhere to lie down.
“That’s how it feels when you’re responsible for the death of one evil man. Can you imagine how it feels if two hundred and twenty ordinary men, women and children are dead because of you? It’s chewing him up. If he’d sat here waiting for your investigation he’d have gone mad. I mean literally, climbing-the-walls insane. Maybe you think he did go crazy, that only a madman would go chasing round the world hunting out people with a reason to kill him. What he was looking for was catharsis: the cleansing of the flame.
“Now he’s pursuing something different: the frail hope that, if none of these men who had a reason to kill him actually tried to, then maybe the destruction of Flight 98 had nothing to do with him after all. Those lost lives belong on somebody else’s conscience. If he finds Wylie, and Wylie doesn’t kill him, he’s going to arrive back here a lot happier than he left.
“And then one of us is going to have to tell him about the break-in at Pretext, and he’s going to be right back where he was three weeks ago—staring at smouldering wreckage, smelling burnt flesh and knowing that, somehow, all that was because of him.”
Flynn took a taxi from Heathrow. He gave the address of the warehouse. Halfway there he remembered his apartment had been gutted and gave the driver Todd’s address instead. He passed Donnelly in the corridor without recognising him.
Todd supposed the bell was Donnelly again, and again he opened the door to find Flynn on his threshold, his long body leaned up against the wall like an abandoned ladder, his face averted. In the split-second of seeing him, even before he had time to be glad, Todd knew that something was terribly wrong. Flynn’s face was dark and savage, and at a deeper level despairing, and his long loose-limbed body was rigid with tension.
Todd said nothing. He stood back from the door and Flynn, also silent, wheeled inside. Donnelly was behind him and Todd, eyebrows raised interrogatively, waited for him to pass too before closing it.
In the centre of the livingroom floor Flynn stopped and after a moment turned round. The leaden cast of his face shocked Todd deeply. He looked like a sick man, a man sick enough to be dying. His eyes were stretched, glazed with weariness and something more; the line of his mouth, healed now, had taken a bitter twist.
Todd found a voice of a kind. “In God’s name, Mickey, what’s happened? Did you find Wylie?”
Flynn’s voice was deeper than always, hollow, bitter-edged. “I found him.”
Todd thought he understood. “It was him?”
Flynn shook his head, just once. “Michael knew nothing about it. And, knowing nothing, went straight to the obvious heart of the matter.” He saw Donnelly then and acknowledged him with a faint nod. “So now, Superintendent, I can tell you who put the bomb on Flight 98, and when, and how, and why.”
Donnelly’s eyes never left Flynn’s face, watching him as if everything he needed to know was written there if he could read it. His voice still quiet he said, “Who put the bomb on board?”
Very slightly, perhaps unconsciously, Flynn drew himself up to his full six-foot-two. Heavy lids dropped half-hooding his eyes. His eyes were desolate, his voice bleak. He said, “I did.”