I returned to the lock-up, changed my shirt, put money in my wallet and called Mathilde Brommer, Lars’s ex-girlfriend and the lady who’d collared me outside the Pallenbergs’ apartment in Berlin. She sounded tired or as if she were in the middle of something and I’d interrupted. I couldn’t claim that she was pleased to hear from me. Once we’d got basic civilities out of the way, never my strong suit, I launched in.
‘Mathilde, you mentioned Lars had got in with a new crowd of people in London.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who were they?’
‘People in the art establishment.’
‘Any particular names?’
She rattled off a list of people I’d never heard of bar one: a BBC journalist specialising in the arts.
‘Did Lars ever talk to you about a man called China Hayes?’
She waited a beat. I could almost hear her trawling through her memory bank for an elusive connection. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Who is he?’
‘A bad guy.’ I wondered fleetingly if Hayes was responsible for Lars’s death. How the hell did that fit together? Mathilde followed my line of thinking and asked the same question.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to find out.’
‘Really? I thought you were an art dealer. Does this man, China Hayes, paint?’ Mathilde’s tone was caustic.
There followed an awkward silence in which I thought she’d hung up. Eventually, she spoke. ‘You are most persistent.’
She had no idea. ‘Mathilde, what did Lars do for fun?’
‘Lorna Spencer,’ she said, no trace of humour.
A name assumed by McCallen. I closed my eyes and wished I wasn’t talking to a woman. They could be so vengeful. As soon as the thought entered my brain, I wondered why I’d discounted the most obvious possibility. ‘Aside from Lorna, who did he mix with socially? Did he attend parties with the great and the good?
Mathilde let out a short, dry laugh. ‘Why are you asking these questions?’
‘Because I’m trying to find out who killed Lars.’
‘That’s a heavy allegation,’ she said fast as electricity lightning.
‘It is,’ I said simply. ‘Did he mix in playboy circles?’
‘Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, how the hell should I know?’
‘Is it likely?’
‘For the old Lars, no. For the new Lars, perhaps.’
Perhaps was good enough. ‘Did he ever mention a French woman by the name of Simone Fabron?’
‘Never.’
‘You are absolutely certain?’
‘What makes you think he’d confide in me?’
‘Because he told you that he was being followed. He told you he felt under threat. Mathilde, the man still cared about you despite what you think.’
It wasn’t like me to get empathic but I believed Lars had cared. Whether or not Mathilde had once cared for Lars until, emotions trampled, she’d reached the point of no return was up for debate.
‘I hope so,’ she said in a small voice before hanging up.
* * *
Removing a finely tailored suit and a smart pair of shoes from my collection, I took a Tube to the Barbican and booked into a hotel – part of an upmarket chain in Charterhouse Square – for a couple of nights. I needed somewhere to clean up, eat a decent meal, sleep and think. I was frustrated. McCallen’s mobile had sprung back to life but McCallen was still missing. Every lead revealed loose associations and, at the dark heart of a murderous campaign of revenge, the ghost of Billy Squeeze hovered. I wasn’t exactly running on empty. I still had the party the next evening. Darren was sniffing around on my behalf. In twenty-four hours, China would have got the message, cleared out of his riverside apartment and gone to ground. I hoped Leonid was right about his boss’s chosen lair.
The German connection bothered me. Something that struck me in conversation with Mathilde made me view events in a different way. What if there was no link between McCallen’s disappearance and Lars Pallenberg’s death? What if things had happened simultaneously? In other words, was Mathilde innocent? Had heartbreak morphed into humiliation and then led to violence?
Mathilde came across as level-headed, a good soul, but the more I thought about it, the happenstance of her being in the right place at the right time, outside the Pallenberg’s apartment at the moment of my arrival, forced me to wonder whether I’d missed the obvious. Mathilde Brommer had more reason than anyone to want Lars Pallenberg dead. McCallen had smashed the certainty that Mathilde was ever going to marry the man she’d loved and lived with for over a decade. I frowned. I’d never been hired to settle domestic scores. Wasn’t my bag. In spite of my lack of experience in such things, it doesn’t take a degree in relationship counselling to know that a scorned woman is immensely dangerous. Truth was I had to face the possibility that Mathilde had ordered the death of her former lover. I cursed my failure to consider this before. How it tied in with McCallen’s fate, I was less certain.
I took out my phone and ran through the crime scene shots, attempting to profile the psyche of the killer from the evidence on the ground. The method spoke of cool, calm surgical precision followed by total wipeout. It didn’t bode well for McCallen’s chances.
Unless I’d got it all wrong about the solitary killer.
Recalibrating my thinking with regard to McCallen’s disappearance, I reckoned it needed one person to abduct, another to do the business. An operational phone was no proof of life and yet, inexplicably, I still believed, and in spite of so many days without news, that McCallen was in the land of the living. She might be in poor shape, be close to death or at risk of dying. Mine was not blind optimism. I simply had a strong, almost visceral, sense of her existence. Right now, gut instinct was all I had and, until proved otherwise, I determined to hang on to it.
I bathed, fixed my nose with a strip of plaster and stared at my reflection in the mirror. The skin around my eyes had turned a deep shade of blue, Leonid’s calling card stamped all over my face. Not a terrific look for my forthcoming party. Frankly, I was more troubled by what I read in my expression. I saw hunger and thirst there. Hunger for justice, thirst for action. The sight of the dead man lying at the bottom of the quarry had woken old demons. An unarmed householder is no match for a thug with a Magnum. In the ordinary scheme of things, I’d be hailed as a hero for using reasonable force, but my life was not ordinary. It never had been. Aside from the past twelve months, I’d lived it full-throttle and out loud. This raised wider questions.
How long could I hold out without resorting to my wild and wicked ways? How long before I contacted an old supplier, issued the precise specifications of the model of the gun and ammunition I needed? Would it be hours, a day, a week before I caved in? And then what? Would I ditch my newfound career in property development, say goodbye to Dan and the lads, leave the only place I’d ever been able to call home, the place where I’d once, long ago, had a life with a mother I loved? Was I destined to kill and sleep in the arms of strangers until I got too ancient or too slow and someone younger and fitter took me out of the game?
In despair, I turned away from the unbearable prospect, dressed in dark and sober clothes and ordered room service. I had to do everything in my power to avoid a return to the terrible life I’d known and once lived. I’d be a dead man inside if I didn’t.