THE PARK WAS ALMOST deserted. She could see a few determined joggers in the distance. She passed a few people, heads bent against the wind, walking their dogs. She followed the main path in the direction of the residence gardens, then struck off onto the grass; mud squelched underfoot.
Lise Hawthorne had not been very exact in her directions. The residence gardens were large; they cut into the park itself in a deep horseshoe-shaped curve. For a time Gini patrolled this curve, back and forth. Then, although no one seemed to be paying the least attention to her, she moved a little farther off. She chose a well-positioned bench, fifty yards away, in the midst of open lawns. The minutes ticked by: ten, ten-fifteen, ten-thirty. She was becoming very cold, and she felt very conspicuous. It had not occurred to her at the time Lise made the arrangement, because she had been too shocked by the pallor and anguish in Lise’s face, but now that she was actually here she saw the oddness of Lise’s instructions. This was hardly a covert or discreet place to meet.
Could it really be true that she had, in the past, met McMullen here? Gini considered: Perhaps she had been referring to a much earlier period, five or even six months earlier, sometime before Hawthorne’s suspicions were aroused. She wondered again about the exact nature of the relationship between McMullen and Lise, and whether they had been lovers or not. Then, shivering, she rose to her feet.
She would give it one more try, she decided, one slow pass along the perimeter of that high horseshoe-shaped fence. Half an hour more: It was useful to remind herself, she thought, of what a citadel it was, this place where Lise Hawthorne lived. Turning back to the north of the house, to the rear of the entrance lodge with its bristling aerials and cameras, she began to follow the fence around the deep curve of the gardens, to where it met the ring road to the south of the house.
This fence, completely encircling the rear gardens, was a formidable one. It was constructed of metal bars ten feet high, each with three curved spikes on the top. The bars themselves were shaped so as to make any purchase on them almost impossible; they were coated in anticlimb paint, and were narrowly spaced. There was no crossbar low enough to be used to wedge the feet. Through the bars she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the house, and the wide lawns behind it, but for the most part the view was obscured by tall evergreen shrubs ten or twelve feet deep. This cover, Gini knew, would contain other less visible security devices: The care with which this boundary was protected was obvious—wherever the shrubbery gave insufficient cover, camouflage netting had been erected, yard upon yard of it, slung inside the bars of the perimeter fence.
The rain was easing off now. A jogger passed her, and a woman with a red umbrella walking a tiny, delicate dog. Gini was approaching one of the park lakes; here two conduits ran off and formed an additional barrier, a moat that forced her some fifty yards away from the residence fence.
Ahead of her there were two small ornamental bridges, and a children’s playground. A man and a woman stood on the farther bridge, ignoring the rain and feeding bread to the ducks. Gini looked at them as she passed, and they smiled, made a comment about the weather; both were sixty at least.
She walked on past the deserted playground. She was now on the southern side of the residence gardens; they lay to her right, the circle road was straight ahead. In front of her, and just to her left on the far side of the road, was the large copper dome and the tall minaret of the London Central Mosque. She was struck, as she always was when passing it, by the unlikeliness of its placing. In this most English of parks, flanked by the Nash terraces at Hanover Gate, this Islamic exoticism was arresting. The minaret was just over a hundred feet high, an Arabian Nights landmark visible for miles. The beautiful copper dome was crested with a sickle moon. Within an English park Arab territory and American territory were cheek by jowl. Less than one hundred yards separated Moslem devotions from the American ambassador’s private home.
Gini stood between the two buildings, beneath a grove of young chestnut trees. Their bare branches dripped; she saw that she was on a slight rise, a knoll, with the ground falling away to her right. From here she could walk down to her right and stand alongside that barred perimeter fence. She did so, and touched the bars with her hand. Beyond the camouflage netting, thick here, and the shrubbery, she could see nothing, but she could hear voices.
Men were working in the gardens beyond. She could hear the sound of spades, then the whine of a chain saw. Some of the older trees on the edge of the gardens were being pruned. The noise of the saw stopped, and suddenly, to her astonishment, she heard Lise Hawthorne’s voice. She was giving instructions to the workmen.
“No,” Gini heard. “That branch there must go, and the large ones just above. It’s casting too much shade, nothing will grow there as it is. Then that large sycamore must come out. It seeds itself everywhere, and my husband would like the small Himalayan birches in its place. Now, shall we take a look at the lavender walk? Or what’s left of it after all this rain, which isn’t a great deal. …”
Her voice faded into the distance. The whine of the chain saw recommenced.
Gini began to turn away, puzzled. She glanced back at the fencing, turned, then gave a gasp. The jogger who had passed her earlier was now standing two feet behind her. She had not heard him approach. He was wearing a black track suit; its hood was up, and she could scarcely see his face.
She took a quick step backward, then stopped. The man looked threatening, but was making no move toward her. She looked at him more closely. He was breathing lightly. He lifted a hand to adjust his track-suit hood slightly; she saw he was wearing a signet ring on his left hand. He had fair hair.
“Are you looking for Jacob?” he asked. He had an even, pleasant English voice.
Gini hesitated. “I came here to meet his friend,” she said. “But I have been looking for Jacob, yes.”
As she stared at him, he lifted his head; the hood fell back just a little. He was older, obviously, but his features were imprinted on her memory. She had studied his photograph long enough. She gave a low exclamation: It was James McMullen.
She was about to speak, when he glanced over his shoulder and lifted his finger to his lips. A man had just come into the park, through the ring-road gate.
“The British Museum in an hour,” he said in a low voice. “Wait there. I’ll meet you there. If it’s safe.” The man was now walking toward them. McMullen raised his voice slightly. “Can you give me directions?” he asked.
“Sure,” Gini replied. “Across the park. Aim south. Then take a left….It’s a pretty long way from here.”
“Thanks, I’ll find it.”
Without a backward glance he jogged off. He covered the ground very fast. Gini turned back to the ring road, passing the man, who was wearing a dark overcoat, but who was no one she recognized. He did not even look at her. When she reached the road, she looked back. He was continuing along the path at a measured pace. He paused by the elderly couple on the bridge in the distance, the couple who were still feeding the ducks. Then he continued on. Some way beyond them, he lifted his hand to his face.
It was too far away for Gini to be sure: It might have been an innocent gesture. He could have been consulting his watch; he could have been adjusting his tie; he could have been speaking into a wrist mike. She began to walk rapidly away. The street was deserted. When she next looked back, she was passing the mosque, and the man in the park and James McMullen were both out of sight.
“I want Gini taken off this story,” Pascal said. He was in Nicholas Jenkins’s fifteenth-floor sanctum, with its view of the new emerging docklands London. He could see towers and scaffolding through the plate glass behind Jenkins’s head.
Jenkins was smiling, nodding, all amiability. It was eleven A.M. Pascal had come straight here from the airport. He had been expecting a fight with Jenkins over this, yet Jenkins gave no indication of opposition. He continued to smile and nod, and give Pascal small devious looks.
Pascal tried to force out of his mind all memory of black Mercedes cars; he tried not to think of Lorna Munro’s beautiful dead face. He had had all night to decide how to approach this, and exactly what lies to tell Jenkins, yet now he had the impression that Jenkins was several jumps ahead of him, and knew it. Pascal leaned across his desk.
“I’m getting through to you, am I, Nicholas? I won’t work with Gini on this story. I want you to take her off it. You understand, yes?”
There was a small flicker of amusement behind the nuclear-physicist-style spectacles. Jenkins sighed.
“Oh, dear,” he said in a sweet-toned, innocuous voice. “What went wrong, Pascal? Bad chemistry? Or was it more dramatic than that?”
“Give it a rest, Nicholas. She’s fine. She works hard, she’s very thorough. But I work better on my own. I always have.”
“I did warn you.” Jenkins gave him a reproachful look. “I told you she was good. I also told you she was a pain in the neck.”
“I didn’t find that.” Pascal looked at him coldly. “I don’t need her anymore, it’s as simple as that. She was”—he hesitated—“slowing me down. Just let me carry on at my own pace, I can get this sewn up by the end of the week.”
“By Sunday, you mean?” Jenkins looked at him intently.
“If you’re asking can I get the pictures then, the answer is yes. I think I can. And I’ll do it a whole lot better and more efficiently on my own. This isn’t a suitable story for a woman.”
Jenkins gave a little smile. “I did wonder about that,” he said, “when I heard Appleyard was dead.”
Pascal gave him a sharp glance. He was not about to be drawn, however: He had decided last night. He trusted no one on this story, including Jenkins, and he had no intention of giving Jenkins any further details until it was over.
“Look,” he continued. “I’m in a hurry, Nicholas. You give me a decision here and now. If you want those pictures, you take Gini off this story. It’s as simple as that.” He gave a shrug. “I did try to persuade her myself, and I got precisely nowhere. There’s a chance she’ll listen to you. Pull rank, Nicholas. Do whatever it takes.”
“Oh, but I already have.” Jenkins’s smile was now broad and complacent. “I did it last night. You just don’t know how to handle her, Pascal. I had no problems at all. A piece of cake.”
There was a silence. Pascal stared at him.
“You took her off this story last night?”
“I most certainly did. And in the end, she agreed. She argued first, of course—in fact, she was fucking rude to me, but never mind that.” Jenkins gave him a small gleaming look. “Gini’s never liked me, I’m afraid. She accused me of bowing to pressure from outside, from our dear proprietor Melrose, and Melrose’s friend, the ambassador.” He paused, eyeing Pascal. “I told her I was killing this story, so I suppose she had some justification.”
“And are you killing this story?”
“No, Pascal. I’m not.”
He rose, moved across to the large plate-glass windows, looked out thoughtfully for a while, then turned back. The light winked against his spectacles. He gave Pascal a sharp look. “Gini seems to think I’m a pushover. Some kind of poodle. Well, she’ll learn in due course. You don’t get where I’ve gotten by being weak. And you don’t advance your career long-term by bowing and scraping when some boring old fart like Melrose snaps his fingers. What you do is, you smile, and you say yes, Lord Melrose, of course, Lord Melrose—and then you carry right on. Only you take a more devious approach. Save the direct confrontation for when it really counts….” He smiled. “Like, about fifteen seconds before the presses start rolling. Or even later, when the papers actually hit the streets. That way, if the story’s good enough, he doesn’t dare to fire you. And if he does, you’re still a hero, the fearless editor.” He grinned suddenly, “Eat shit, Melrose, because I’ve got five other job offers. That’s my general approach.”
There was a silence. Pascal extinguished one cigarette, then lit another. He said slowly, “I think you’d better bring me up-to-date. Obviously, a lot has been happening that I’ve missed.”
“Oh, a very great deal.” Jenkins gave a knowing smile and returned to his desk. He sat down. He picked up one of the phones on his desk. “Hold all calls for fifteen minutes, Charlotte. All calls, you’ve got that?” He replaced the receiver and gave Pascal a long, assessing look. “When did you last get some sleep?” he said. “You look like hell, do you know that?”
“Very probably.” Pascal shrugged. “There are reasons for that.”
“I rather thought there might be. All right. Listen, Pascal, and listen carefully. I’m going to say this only once.” He paused. “First of all, there’s the question of who else knew you’d be working on this story. That question has been exercising Gini quite a lot. I’m afraid I wasn’t straight with you before. I will be now. James McMullen knew. It was agreed between us last December, when he handed over that tape. Two weeks before he disappeared. He asked specifically that you work on it—which surprised me, but apparently he’d seen your war photographs as well as your recent work. Gini was my suggestion, agreed reluctantly by him. Who else he told, I don’t know, but there’s one obvious candidate, though he claimed it was better she didn’t know.”
“Lise Hawthorne?”
“Precisely. It’s also possible”—Jenkins paused, frowning—“it’s possible our conversation was overheard. We were careful, obviously. I never went to his flat. He never set foot in this building. We met well away from other fucking journalists, and on that occasion, when your names were discussed, we met at the Army and Navy Club,” he said, then added, “There’s a few other things you should know, and they concern Johnny Appleyard. I thought his importance was tangential, and I was eager to keep it like that. That’s why I didn’t mention it at first. I realized I was wrong when I heard that he was dead….
“Then we come to the really interesting part,” he said. “We come to this last weekend, and to the dinner I attended with Gini last night.” He smiled. “A concatenation of circumstances, Pascal. It’s when I realized there had to be more to this than just a sex scandal”—his face took an expression of triumphant delight—“that’s when I realized that this story was really big.”
“Why?”
“Because I was leaned on, Pascal. Leaned on in a surprising way. Leaned on very heavily indeed. Always a good indicator, that,” he said. Then: “How much do you know about Lord Melrose?”
“He’s the proprietor of the News, obviously. He inherited his papers from his father. He has three others in this country, two in Australia, one in Canada, and one in the States. I gather he’s a friend of Hawthorne’s, or so Gini said.”
“Correct. But the most important thing about Melrose, from our point of view now, is that he’s an establishment man through and through. Friends in high places everywhere, including the security services, though Melrose tends to keep very quiet about that. We’ve had run-ins before, as a result. It happens like this: From time to time some nice discreet civil servant takes Melrose out to lunch at the Athenaeum, or Brooks Club, it’s usually somewhere like that. This man waits until they’ve served the coffee and the port, then he has a quiet word in Melrose’s ear. If one of his papers is on to something a bit sensitive, the man steers Melrose off. Come on, old boy, national security and all that, time to call off the bloodhounds. Now, sometimes Melrose listens, and sometimes he remembers his nice liberal conscience and tells his friend to get lost. Last Friday, Melrose went to one of those lunches.”
“Last Friday?”
“That’s right.” Jenkins gave a sly grin. “Unfortunately, I’d kind of neglected to mention the Hawthorne investigation to Melrose—shockingly remiss of me, yes? So when Melrose found out, he wasn’t pleased. In fact, he was mad as hell. What made it all rather worse was that this nice, discreet, faceless old Etonian was alarmingly well informed. Not only did he know we were working on the Hawthorne story, he knew the name of my source.”
“He mentioned McMullen by name?”
“To Melrose? Yes, he did. And he explained to Melrose that McMullen was very bad news. Not only had he been peddling a pack of lies to me about an eminent man, but—apparently—the old Etonian and his friends had had their eye on McMullen for some time. As had their cousins across the pond. The British files on McMullen went back a long way—a very long way, Pascal. They hadn’t looked at them in some time, but when they got them out and dusted them off—this was last summer—they found they were several inches thick.”
“Let me get this straight. According to Melrose, McMullen had been investigated before? By British security?”
“Yes, he had. Last summer the Americans joined in the act. For which there’s a simple explanation. They did so from last July onward, at John Hawthorne’s behest.” Jenkins tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now, Melrose’s reaction to all this was to panic,” Jenkins went on. “He went into one of his flaps. He asked for the weekend to think it over, and his Etonian friend bought that. Then, on Sunday morning, at seven-thirty Sunday morning, his friend John Hawthorne called him up personally. Then the shit really hit the fan.” Jenkins grinned. “I was telephoned at home, summoned to chateau Melrose, and given a straight choice. Kill the Hawthorne story or go in Monday morning and clear my desk.”
Pascal said nothing. He was thinking about the timing. Hawthorne called the morning after Mary’s party. These maneuvers were taking place as he and Gini had left for Venice. He looked back at Jenkins.
“So, what did you do?” he said.
“I bought myself a little time—and I’m fucking good at that. I did a lot of injured outrage, banged on about censorship. I made Melrose feel like a Fascist, and since he really fancies himself a liberal, that did the trick. He gave me forty-eight hours to decide, on the condition I published nothing in that time, obviously. And he agreed to go back to his Etonian friend and get some more information. I said I wasn’t being fobbed off with a whole lot of vague crap about McMullen being suspect. I wanted a few facts. The way Melrose was going on was ludicrous. McMullen could have been in the pay of Moscow, or he could have been late paying his taxes—it was as loose as that. So Melrose toddled back to the Athenaeum, or wherever. I came in Monday morning, heard about Appleyard’s death, and put our Italian stringer on to it that morning. I also ordered up every damn file on Hawthorne in existence. Mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because some fucking devious bastard told Melrose what I’d done.”
“Who told him?”
“I don’t know. But when I find out, he’s dead.” Jenkins paused. “Finally Hawthorne had another go at Melrose, last night. We were all at this bloody dinner. Hawthorne made this fucking sanctimonious speech about press freedom, then he took his old friend Melrose into a corner and really laid into him. Mentioned libel, criminal libel, a few things like that. Whereupon Melrose lost his nerve totally, and we were back to square one. Kill the story or else.”
“And you agreed? This was last night?”
“Of course I agreed. We bide our time, right? Gini’s off the story, that looks good. That ought to help convince them I’m playing ball, and then—”
“You’re not playing ball?”
Jenkins gave him a very sharp glance; his glasses flashed. “You don’t know me very well, Pascal. Genevieve-bloody-Hunter doesn’t know me at all. Let’s put it this way. I was a working-class boy once. A scholarship boy at a major public school. It left me a bit chippy, a bit sensitive about certain things. Like, I’m not too fucking keen on the old-boy network. I’m not too fucking keen on old Etonians who take other old Etonians out to lunch and lean on them. I’m not too fucking keen on Wasps like Hawthorne who preach one thing and do another—and when they all start to pressure me, I smell a rat. And I start thinking—if they’re that worried, that keen, it has to be major. Maybe even more than we realized.”
He leaned across and unlocked a drawer of his desk. He extracted a large manila envelope and passed it across the desk. “Go on working on this,” he said. “But cover your fucking tracks. I can’t be involved. I don’t even know what you’re up to, all right? When you’ve got what we need, we can always rope Gini back in, if necessary. Get the pictures Sunday and we’re halfway there. Once we have pictures, Hawthorne’s screwed. Even Melrose won’t be able to protect his old friend. Then we can really get to the bottom of this story. It’s more than beating up on blond call girls once a month. It’s more than a kink for expensive blow jobs when the girl’s wearing black gloves. There’s something more, Pascal, I can smell it, and it’s not recent either, not a taste Hawthorne developed in the last four years, the way McMullen told me. It links back to earlier events. I may not know what they are—yet. But there’s been a cover-up, and it goes back a long way. Take a look through this.”
He tapped the envelope. Pascal looked at it. It was sealed, and it was thick.
“What is that?”
“Details of John Hawthorne’s exemplary military service. I got it faxed from a friend in Washington yesterday. Plus some details on my friend McMullen. Details I never bloody well knew.”
“Is he a security risk?”
“Difficult to say.” Jenkins made a balancing gesture of the hand. “He was vetted for the army, obviously. Some of this stuff came via Melrose’s spooky friend, so it may or may not be reliable. It certainly doesn’t look as if McMullen spent his entire army career in the Parachute Regiment. He’s possibly more dangerous than I realized,” Jenkins continued. “Most interesting of all, his links with John Hawthorne go back further than he claimed to me.”
“Where to?” Pascal asked sharply.
“Oddly enough, to something Hawthorne touched on last night in his speech—”
“Where to, Nicholas?”
“To Vietnam,” Jenkins replied. “Now, how about that?”
Gini walked slowly along the huge marble-floored entrance hall of the British Museum. From here, she told herself, there were many places from which she could be watched. There were staircases, lobbies, pillars; innumerable places where, if he wished, James McMullen could conceal himself. Presumably, she thought as she turned and slowly retraced her steps, McMullen would wait, and approach her when it suited him. The roles of hunter and hunted were reversed.
Perhaps the best thing was simply to linger here, and wait. There were few other visitors to the museum on a wet midweek January morning. There was a party of schoolchildren being shepherded toward the museum shop; a group of dispirited Japanese with camcorders, one or two solitary figures examining the classical heads and torsos on exhibition.
One more time, she walked slowly down the gallery, then returned. Nothing. A tomblike somnolence hushed the air. Her footsteps echoed; no one approached.
After a while, she decided that this main hall was too open and too public. She mounted one of the marble staircases that led to the first floor and rapidly became lost. She lingered by large cases containing Roman coins and pottery. She turned into another room and found herself in a glass-walled cul-de-sac lined with blind Grecian heads.
Down some stairs, along a corridor, up some stairs, and she was in the Egyptian galleries. She watched her own reflection, a glacial ghost, as she passed along the cases filled with images of gods. Once, she thought she heard movement behind her, a light footfall, but when she turned, there was no one there. She bent to the cases, examined the oil and grain jars, the papyrus scrolls, the tiny pottery grave relics, and the more gorgeous ornaments with which princes were lovingly sent on their journey into the afterlife. She looked at gods in the shape of hawks, and the shape of cats. Their painted stares met hers; on the glass she traced the ochre and black of their eyes. She listened intently. Nothing. She was still alone. She confronted line upon line of mummies, some standing, some lying, some still in their gilded and painted outer casings, some protected only by the swaddling of their bandages.
So many, so lovely, so various, and so fearsome, these ways of death. She looked at a pharaoh’s son laid to rest in garments of scarlet, lapis, and indigo, painted calm on the painted likeness of his face. The air smelled dusty; in this, the older part of the galleries, the display cases made a second labyrinth within the outer one of the museum itself. She had to pass around, between, behind the dead. They cornered her, and she decided to wait elsewhere, in a more conspicuous place.
She returned to the main entrance, went outside, bought a newspaper, and returned to the museum again. In the café where the schoolchildren were making a hubbub, she sat down. No one approached.
The early edition of the Evening Standard led on John Hawthorne’s speech the previous night. The headline was: U.S. Ambassador Slams “Nazi” Arab States. An incendiary description of Hawthorne’s comments, she thought—and the comments seemed to have had an inflammatory effect. According to the Stop Press, demonstrations had begun outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, and outside the London headquarters of several American banks. There had been clashes with the police.
Gini drank some coffee, waited fifteen minutes, then left. There were telephone booths near the entrance, and from there she telephoned first the number of Pascal’s studio in Paris, then his wife’s number, on both lines, an answering machine was the only response.
Perhaps he was returning, even now, as she called. This thought made her heart lift. She was still unwilling to give up on this museum. She had now been here an hour. One more try, she decided.
This time she took the stairs that led down to the basement galleries. Here, the overall illumination was dim, and the individual sculptures, which included some of the museum’s glories, were bathed in angled light. She passed along the Elgin marbles, and a battle frieze that had once decorated the Parthenon. She looked at the great rearing marble haunches of the horses on the frieze, at the minutely observed weaponry, and at the frozen attitudes of dying men. Nothing. No one. Silence. She passed into a farther gallery, and still another, and found herself in a part of the museum she had never penetrated before, in the Assyrian rooms.
Here, bathed in an angled light, were walls of massive stone reliefs. They were somber, detailed, and magnificent: She stood, listening, before a great procession of ten-foot kings and warriors and priests. They were carrying offerings, and Gini tried to concentrate on the bundles of corn, the bowls of wine, the sacrificial animals. The phalanx of men reminded her of that security phalanx that protected John Hawthorne wherever he went, though in the modern world, of course, their offerings were automatic weapons, and modern princes like Hawthorne were rarely accompanied by priests.
She bent to read the label that explained the symbols of these past events, and heard movement behind her—a single footfall, the brush of stone against cloth.
At last. She swung around sharply and scanned the room. From the corner of her eye, in the shadows of the far entrance, she thought she saw darkness move. She turned, and it was gone. She ran across to the entrance, but the gallery beyond was empty. Massive reliefs rose up on either side of her. She stepped back, peering beyond them and dazzled by the lighting that now shone directly in her face. There was no one there. There was no one in the rooms behind her—but there were three other exits from this place. She checked each of them in turn, but each led to corridors and stairs, and if someone had been there, he was gone.
She came to a halt and looked around her with a sense of angry frustration. Why was McMullen playing these cat-and-mouse games? She was now standing at the foot of a back staircase, in a small, ill-lit lobby. From there she had a clear view back into the room where she had been when she first heard the noise. She could see the huge relief she had been studying, with its procession of warriors and priests. Just as she was about to turn away, a shadow moved across the face of the sculpture, and then a man came into sight.
He was wearing the same dark overcoat he had worn before, and he moved silently, on those soft-soled shoes described by Lise Hawthorne. Frank Romero. He stood in front of the relief, staring up at it for a moment. He touched it. He peered behind it, then bent to examine the floor in front of it. He began to move silently and stealthily around the room, examining each carving in turn, as if he were searching for something, some message left, perhaps.
Gini edged back into the shadows and toward the stairs. A hand came out of the darkness and clamped itself across her mouth. She felt a moment’s pure fear. Before she could struggle, or even think, she felt a man pulling her closer against him, so his mouth was against her ear. She could feel his breath on her face.
“Don’t scream, and don’t speak,” he said in a low, calm English voice. McMullen’s voice. “I’m going to give you a number. Call it tomorrow at noon. You understand? If you do, nod your head.” Gini nodded. “Don’t look round. Can you remember numbers?” Gini nodded again.
McMullen repeated the numbers, slowly and quietly. “You’ve got that? Call it at noon tomorrow. Use a safe phone. Noon. Not five minutes before, not five afterward. Now go up these stairs, turn right, then second left. You’ll be in the main hall. Buy some postcards, as if this were a normal visit, then leave. No, don’t look round. You’ve got that?”
He released her, and Gini did as he said. She fled silently up the stairs, reciting the number to herself. Once she was safely back in her car, she took out a notebook and pencil and wrote it down, her hand shaking. The number had an 0865 prefix. An Oxford number.
A familiar Oxford number too—at least she thought it was, but she couldn’t be certain, and she had left her address book at home in her flat.
She drove north as fast as she could, but the rain was still heavy, and street after street was gridlocked with traffic. She used every back-street rat run she knew, but even so it took her almost an hour to drive the five miles.
She parked in the square and ran down the area steps, inserted her key in the lock. The address book was on her desk, just next to the telephone. She swung the living room door open. As she closed it, something soft brushed her face.
She continued a few paces on, toward the desk. Then the terrible wrongness of the room registered. She stopped. Sickness welled in the pit of her stomach. Something soft had brushed her face as she closed the door. There was nothing there, there should be nothing there to brush against her in that way. On the back of that door was an empty hook.
She turned, looked, and cried out. She ran across to the door, but it was too late—at least an hour too late.
Whoever had killed Napoleon had made a neat job. The black stocking sent her the previous week had been used to strangle him. They had wound the nylon around his throat, throttled him, and then left him to hang from the hook by this noose. His body was already stiffening. There was blood on his mouth and nostrils. There were scratch marks on the door panels where he had scrabbled with his feet.
Gini thought: How long did it take him to die? She cradled his body, lifted him down, and held him close. She began to cry, and pressed him tight against her chest. His eyes were closed and her fingers fumbled to undo the stocking. She rocked him, and wept. Her fingers would not move too well, but in the end she unwound the noose. She sat down on the floor and crooned to Napoleon. She stroked his marmalade fur and tried to believe that love could resurrect. Napoleon lay inert in her arms. It cut her to the heart, the littleness of his body, in death.
She stroked his fur and touched the beauties of his whiskers and his feet. After a long time, the wildness calmed and the tears stopped. She sat there and made herself a final promise: No one would stop her now, not after this.
She was still sitting there, holding Napoleon, when Pascal’s taxicab drew up in the street. She did not hear the cab’s engine, or his footsteps on the sidewalk. She heard and saw nothing until he was in the room with her. Then she heard his closeness, and looked up. She saw his face change as he took in the stocking discarded on the floor and the bundle in her arms. He was angrier then than she had ever seen him, and she had a brief groping sensation of how formidable, in anger, he might be. Whoever made an enemy of Pascal made a mistake. Then his face became gentle, an extraordinary tenderness lit in his eyes. With a few low words, he bent, and gathered her close.
He said, “My darling, don’t cry. We’ll find them, I promise you, whoever did this.”