EIGHTEEN

LONDON

TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING GUNDERSON, PAGAN WENT UP INTO THE attic at Golden Square, a chilly space filled with a complex arrangement of pipes that ran between floors down to the ill-tempered boiler in the basement. It was in the attic that Foxie, unable to find a suitable space elsewhere in the building, had set up an old-fashioned slide projector and a makeshift screen fashioned from an old dust-cover.

I can call you Frank, can’t I? If we’re going to spend hours in each other’s company, why bother with formalities? Or do you prefer Mr Pagan? Pagan remembered this now: fine hands, fine long fingers slightly spatulated, slender wrists. Her fingernails are varnished a secretive black. She crosses her long legs, her very short black suede skirt rides her thigh, her legs are bare, Pagan looks away. She knows her power. She knows exactly. She knows how to hold, how to captivate. You smoke too much, you know. You should really cut down. Think of your lungs. Have you ever seen pictures of cancerous lungs?

Foxworth fidgeted with the projector and a beam of white light created a circle on the screen. ‘Give me a minute before I get this thing running properly.’

‘Why isn’t this material on computer?’ Pagan asked.

Foxie said, ‘Actually it is. But we can’t access it yet.’

‘We’re not linked up, is that it?’

‘Interfaced is the word, Frank. We’re not one hundred per cent interfaced with the mainframe.’

Pagan loathed these computer terms. He understood the need for the new technology, the way facts could explode on screens before your eyes, the hours of slog from which you were liberated, the information that could be summoned from a thousand sources at the press of a couple of buttons, but the language – pixels, batch processing, fact allocation files: they made him feel he belonged to a new class of illiterates.

He shut his eyes, waited. Perhaps I’ll join you in a cigarette, Frank. I like one from time to time. It’s one of my lesser vices. Do you want to know what the others are? Some of them are amusing. Shall I tell you? Shall I confess the things I like to do? Are you blushing, Frank? He remembers: he reaches across the table, a struck match held in one hand. He tries to light her cigarette but she pulls her face back and the flame burns his fingertip. He realizes she has done this deliberately. Let’s try that again, Frank. I don’t understand why your hand is shaking. Am I having a bad effect on you? He offers a second match, applies it to her cigarette. She doesn’t inhale. She blows a stream of blue smoke straight at him and smiles and his eyes are caught in hers and he has the feeling he’s a fleck of iron drawn into a magnetic field, can’t resist it, the pull, the energy, the sheer dazzling fact of her beauty. To her, beauty is power. Beauty is what you inflict on other people. A punishment, a surgical instrument.

Pagan said, ‘She’s been inactive for years. Years. Why make a comeback now? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘We’re not even sure this is the woman, Frank,’ Foxie said. ‘We don’t have fingerprints. We don’t have evidence. All we’ve got is Gunderson’s hypothesis that the message was left by a female – that, plus your memory. And memory isn’t always reliable.’

It’s reliable in this case, Foxie, Pagan thought. Believe me. The attic made him feel claustrophobic. Ten years ago the windowless interrogation room he’d shared with the woman had made him feel the same, but even more so, because she dominated the space, she controlled the mood, she played on his tensions as if they were keys on a clarinet. I unsettle you, don’t I? I can’t think why I should bring that response out of you. Why don’t we relax, try to make this easier? Her voice had a sultry quality, sometimes a low-pitched whisper, sometimes the half-hoarse cadence of a torch-singer. He remembers: she crushes her cigarette on the floor and reaches across the table to touch his hand, a moment of intimacy unnerving in its unexpectedness, her flesh is soft and warm and her fingertips slide across the ridges of his knuckles, and he doesn’t pull back his hand, doesn’t move, he simply lets her skin remain in contact with his, because he likes it, because he enjoys the feeling, because for a few crucial seconds he’s completely lost in the woman’s force field. And he recognizes in himself the unmistakable sensation of desire. She says: It might have been fun to meet under other circumstances, don’t you agree? I think we might have had a fine old time of it. He turns his face to the side, embarrassed because she’s intuited his desire. And then he feels her foot under the table, she’s kicked off a shoe and is stroking his leg with her toes—

Foxie pressed a button. Pagan opened his eyes. The image on the screen was almost black, lacking contrast. ‘I need to adjust this gismo, Frank. A minute.’

Pagan leaned against the wall, a web touched his forehead, he brushed it aside. From tunnels to attics, he thought. This investigation was all over the place, which he certainly didn’t like. Give me form. Shapes. He felt like a man puzzling over an abacus on which somebody of malice had rearranged all the beads. And one of those beads was a woman he hadn’t seen in ten years, hadn’t thought about in a long time, somebody shipwrecked in his memory.

‘Ah,’ Foxie said. ‘There we are.’

On the screen was a photograph of a long-haired woman of about twenty-three. It had clearly been taken without the woman’s knowledge. Her face was turned to one side; a good profile, beautiful and strong and determined. She was dressed in the style of the early seventies, beaded jacket, flared jeans. A ribbon flowed from her hair. The background was that of a European city, evidenced by the kinds of car and licence-plate numbers that were also in the shot.

Foxie said, ‘Nineteen seventy-eight. Athens.’

Yes, Pagan thought. ‘Keep going.’

‘Click,’ said Foxworth.

The second image was ostensibly that of the same woman, but the difference between the pictures was remarkable. Her hair was shorn in an irregular way and she appeared boyish. She wore a two-piece suit that might have been tailored for a man. She had a necktie loosely knotted at her throat. Androgynously lovely. There was even an element, altogether misleading, of vulnerability about her in this shot. Behind the woman was another figure, shadowy, slightly out of focus. Whether he was in her company or merely a pedestrian who’d come into range, it was hard to tell.

Pagan moved, took a closer look.

Foxie said, ‘Taken in nineteen eighty-two, Rio de Janeiro. Photo courtesy of Brazilian police surveillance. I’m not quite sure how we came by it.’

‘Who’s the fellow just behind her? The one with the shades?’

Foxie shook his head. ‘Can’t say he looks familiar, Frank. Not even sure he’s in her company.’

Pagan went directly to the screen. He studied the man’s features. He had an irritating sense of familiarity, a murmur at the back of his mind, but it slipped away from him before he could define it. ‘He reminds me of somebody.’

Foxie scrutinized the shot. The man in the picture was blurred. The photograph had clearly been taken with a long-distance lens. Pagan snapped his fingers, a measure of frustration. He’d seen the face before, he was sure of that, but where in his memory did it belong? He played with vague associations in his head – was the man connected in some way with the fashion industry? cosmetics? movies? – but these produced nothing fruitful. Why had he come up with these areas of activity? What random linkage was floating free in his mind? He had the distinct impression, based on no observation in particular, that the man was definitely in the woman’s company.

‘Skip it. Keep going,’ he said. But the man’s face nagged him.

‘This is the last one, Frank.’

A police mug-shot appeared on the screen, a picture sliced in two: one side showed only the profile, the other was full face. She looked defiantly pale in these images, contemptuous of the police photographer. It was a marvellous face, filled with cavalier resonance, a flare of sexuality that would initially incite a man and then ultimately undermine him. You could imagine that the business of being her lover would be an endless war fought on terrain of her own making. There would be skirmishes, battles, frail, unreliable truces, blood in the trenches. The depths in the eyes were a little scary. But she could do anything with those eyes, he remembered. They could be ice, they could be alluring, they could be incongruously innocent, childlike.

‘Nineteen eighty-four,’ Foxie said. ‘New York City. Arrested on charges of sedition. Plotting the overthrow of the US Government.’

Pagan stared at the face. ‘Then she escaped. Went underground.’

‘Correct.’ Foxie flicked through the pages of a manila folder. ‘She belonged to an organization – some splinter group of the Weathermen – responsible for planting bombs in Washington. One was discovered close to the Washington Monument, another was defused in a parking garage next to the House of Representatives. She was sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury and managed to disappear within a matter of a few weeks. Thin air. Reported sightings include Los Angeles nineteen eighty-seven, Frankfurt the same year. She had an apparently close call in a hotel in Deauville in nineteen ninety-one where she was recognized by a retired FBI agent on vacation. The hotel was promptly surrounded by the local heat. But the lady had vanished. She’d registered under the name of Charlotte Pike. She appears to have a fondness for aliases involving creatures. God knows why, but she’s called herself Caroline Starling, Cara Raven, Carola Fox.’

Pagan stepped in front of the projector beam. ‘Carlotta. That’s what we always called her. That’s what the press always called her.’ Carlotta, he thought. The name had the timbre of a bell rung in a far-off steeple, a puzzling summons.

Foxie was quiet for a moment. ‘Do you want to fill me in on the personal background, Frank? What makes you certain it was Carlotta who left you the message?’

‘I have to go back a bit, Foxie. Ten years. Nineteen eighty-five. There was a tip from Belfast. She was supposed to be jobbing for a fringe of the IRA. She was suspected of trying to smuggle explosives into the UK. We had everybody watching the ports, railway terminals, airports. I’d just begun working with Martin Burr then. I spent six days behind a one-way mirror at Heathrow watching everybody coming through customs. A yawn of a job. But the tip was supposed to be the genuine article. Carlotta was coming to England to finalize the details of the smuggling. I had her photograph in front of me for a week.’ He looked at the mug-shot on the makeshift screen. ‘That does her absolutely no justice. She was – the word is gorgeous, I suppose. But that’s not quite right either.’

He pressed his hands together. He could recall obsessing over the woman’s picture. He’d lived and breathed Carlotta for days, establishing a queer kind of intimacy with her image even before he’d met her.

‘What happened?’ Foxie asked.

‘I intercepted her at Heathrow on the sixth day of my surveillance.’

‘And?’

‘I took her in for questioning. Keep in mind the fact that everybody wanted her. Everybody wanted the glory of capturing Carlotta. Special Branch. The CID. The FBI was waiting in the wings. She was an escaped felon, after all. Careers would have been made overnight. I had this bright idea I’d be an instant hero. Instant promotion. Watch my jet-stream.’ Pagan laughed at himself; the brashness of old ambitions, of youth.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t exactly know how to describe her. She projected – I can only call it a kind of bewitching sexuality, Foxie. OK. Like a spell. I was stuck with her in an interrogation room for two days. She had an answer for everything. She was in London to visit a dying aunt. That story checked out nicely. The strange thing is, it was damn difficult to imagine anyone with her looks being involved in the sordid business of terrorism. When I spoke to her I had the unsettling sense of interrogating an angel. A sexy angel, admittedly. But that’s how she looked. She charmed us all. She seduced us. Even Martin Burr, who knew his way around an interrogation. I think she fluttered old Martin’s heart. I know she did a small number on mine.’ He was editing his story for Foxie, sanitizing it. Her hand on his, the heat in his blood, the abrupt fissure of lust she’d released in him – how could he tell Foxie any of this? Ten years ago he’d been a different person. Ten years ago he’d been married only five or six months, in love with his wife – and Carlotta, like a messenger from the abyss, had forced him to recognize, quite deliberately, that he was capable of entertaining notions of infidelity and betrayal. Is this a wedding band, Frank? Tell me about your wife. Is she smart? Pretty? Is she faithful? Are you true to her? He remembers her fingertips closing over the thin gold ring, the palm of the hand clasping the finger in an undeniably suggestive way. He remembers the feel of her palm on bone, his reluctance to have her stop. You have to learn to relax, Frank. You have to learn a whole lot of things, don’t you? But then you’re what – thirty-three, four? You haven’t really begun to live.

‘We couldn’t hold her,’ he said. ‘We had no reason. So we decided to turn her over to the FBI, who had more positive reasons for wanting her.’ Pagan paused. ‘They sent a couple of agents from Washington.’

‘And?’

‘We put her in a hotel under guard while our friends from Washington were on their way to fetch her. Nobody knows exactly how she got away. There was some speculation she dressed as a maid and just walked out. Another story has her bribing a room-service waiter into helping her. Who can say for sure? A few days after she vanished, there was an explosion at an RAF base in Norfolk. Was she behind it? Nobody ever knew.’

He remembered the hotel room, the corridor where half a dozen uniforms kept watch, he remembered ushering Carlotta inside the room. She sits on the bed and says: This feels fine, Frank. Not too soft, not too hard, just right. She raises her eyes, looks at him, stretches a hand out toward him, fingers stretched. The short skirt reveals the softness of thigh; he looks at the breasts under the white silk blouse. A bad moment, time turned upside-down, the turbulence of feelings. Why don’t you lock the door, Frank? Sit down beside me, have a cigarette. Nobody’s going to disturb us. He takes a couple of steps toward her, fevered, emboldened by his desire, unthinking, career jettisoned, wife forgotten, all his responsibilities tossed into a bonfire of amnesia, and he watches her hand stroke the quilt, watches the way she spreads her legs, stretches them, sees how one hand moves to her own thigh, fingertips caressing her own flesh. And then her hand disappears under the hem of the skirt into darkness. She tosses back her head, lips parted, eyes still focused on Pagan as if she sees straight through him, divining the nature of his arousal. He knows it’s a game, but it’s a desperate one, and reckless, because he can’t see the consequences of it, and he takes another step toward her, a step closer to the edge. Her hand, invisible to him, moves between her legs, and she says his name a couple of times in a breathless way. She keeps watching his face. What is this doing to you, Frank? Is this turning you on? Is this getting to you? In somebody else the whole thing might have been crude and tawdry, but she carries it off. What are you waiting for, Frank? Come on, what the hell are you waiting for? Lock the door. And then he’s standing over the bed, looking down at her, gazing into her face and going out of control, yielding to berserk notions, watching the rise and fall of her breasts, the tantalizingly slow movements of her hand, the shadows in her thighs.

Then she reaches out toward him. Frank, Frank.

He had no way of knowing what might have happened next because Martin Burr chose that moment to come inside the room, and if the old man sensed anything sexually conspiratorial, any charge in the air, he made no remark. Must keep the prisoner comfortable, was what he said. She’s going back to Washington in the morning. Carlotta smiled and smoothed her hands on her legs, Pagan stared uncomfortably from the window, and Burr surveyed the room, as if assessing the security of the place. Then, locking the door, Pagan and Burr had left.

If no physical contact had taken place, the realization that he’d betrayed Roxanne – at least in his intentions, his yearnings – altered his perceptions of himself for a time, depressed him. He’d wanted this woman, this Carlotta; he’d wanted, for lack of a better expression, the debasement of indulging himself in an infidelity. Lust, commonplace, banal, was finally inexplicable; and it was demeaning to realize you could surrender to it so easily. Everything you held in esteem – marriage, career, loyalty – had flown like crazed birds from open cages. He recalled returning the woman’s photograph to the files, and thinking at the time that it had been a tiny act of exorcism. But the face had lingered for weeks in his head. The touch had remained on his hand. And he’d been unsettlingly aware of a hitherto unknown side of himself, a destructive urge in his character.

Pagan moved away from the projector. The attic had a small oval window directly overlooking Golden Square. He peered down into the early afternoon activity. Office workers buzzed to or from lunch. A solitary eccentric in a raincoat sat with a thermos flask on a cold bench.

‘Carlotta,’ Pagan said, as if to himself. There was a time when her name had been synonymous with terrorism, like Baader-Meinhoff. Or Danny the Red. Or Jig. Nothing had been heard of her in years, if you didn’t count the various sightings that were always reported when it came to enigmatic terrorist figures who’d somehow captivated the public’s interest. She was said to have been working with Khadaffi, organizing training-camps for potential terrorists in the desert. She was reported to be ‘counselling’ the IRA in County Armagh. Nothing had come of these allegations. Legends flourished around people like Carlotta; notorious terrorists were sighted like UFOs, strange configurations in the sky.

Foxie said, ‘She’s quite a piece of work, Frank. This file contains stuff from the prison shrink in Danbury. Our girl was born into a family of considerable wealth, ran away from boarding-school at the tender age of ten after stabbing a friend with a kitchen knife. You wouldn’t want to be her chum, would you? More boarding-schools, more unhappily violent incidents. She drifted into the radical underground when she was sixteen. She did the rounds. A bombing in Denver. A bank job in Des Moines. The sabotage of a train carrying a shipment of arms to a naval base in San Diego. According to the shrink’s report, she has an extraordinary IQ. Fluent in French, Russian and German. She has – and I quote – a penchant for violence. Which is to say she doesn’t always have to be politically motivated to do her thing. She’s probably not even interested in politics as such. They’re merely a pretext for her acts of violence.’

‘And now she turns up in London,’ Pagan said in a flat tone.

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Foxie said.

‘The reference to Heathrow. The thing about smoking. She kept telling me I smoked too much, which was true enough in those days. She kept saying it was bad for my health, I ought to give up. Foxie, nobody else fits. Nobody.’

Weary, he gazed down into Golden Square. He’d relegated Carlotta into a forbidden zone of recollection; a crypt of memory he never visited. It was damp and unpleasant down there.

‘I get the impression …’ Foxie started to say.

‘What impression?’

‘You’re not telling me everything. You’re holding something back.’

Pagan was silent. What was he supposed to say? Look, I wanted the woman, I wanted to fuck her, I wanted to play her game.

‘I think you got to know this woman better than you’re prepared to say,’ Foxie suggested.

‘You spend forty-eight hours almost non-stop in somebody’s company, you learn a few things,’ Pagan said. ‘Why don’t we leave it at that?’

‘As you wish.’ Foxie fidgeted with the projector in a slightly sullen way. Pagan’s secret heart: an impenetrable shield. ‘Let’s say Carlotta killed the girl. Let’s go with that for a moment. Let’s take the speculation a little further. On the very day of the girl’s murder, a bomb goes off in a Tube station no more than a mile away from the girl’s flat. Given Carlotta’s terrorist background, is that coincidence?’

‘I seriously doubt it.’ Pagan walked away from the window, gazed at the mug-shot again. He remembered the scent of the hotel room, the furniture polish, the smell of apples in a wicker basket. The encounter with Carlotta was a bleak episode in his life – so why was there still some relish in the memory? A shiver of pleasure, a frisson of self-dislike?

Foxie said, ‘She puts a bomb in the Underground then walks a few blocks, picks up this wretched girl, goes back to her flat and stabs her to death with a pair of scissors. Why? A hundred or so people aren’t enough for her. Is that it? She needs another kind of satisfaction. Hands-on stuff. She needs to see the blood and the suffering. She needs personal involvement.’

Pagan said, ‘Maybe you’re right. She’s unfulfilled because she can’t get to watch the faces of her victims in the Tube. So she wants a bigger and better rush. She wants to look right into the eyes of somebody dying.’ Hands in his pockets, he strolled round the attic. ‘If she put the device on the Tube, it doesn’t tell us a damn thing about the purpose behind it. So what are we looking at, Foxie? An unmotivated piece of destruction? I don’t buy into that one. I don’t see Carlotta placing the device on the Tube because she was having a bad day. She had some reason. And then to leave the message …’

‘What did Gunderson call it? Nose-thumbing? Maybe he’s right. Perhaps she wants to goad you. She wants to say Come on, Frank, catch me. Let’s see how bloody good you are. Find me.’

Pagan was drawn into the circle of light on the white screen. If you looked long enough you might imagine yourself hypnotized. Sleep, Frank. Relax. Everything’s going to be warm and comfortable. The central-heating pipes knocked and moaned and vibrated for a few seconds. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

They went down from the attic and entered Pagan’s office. He sat behind his desk, banged his hands together. ‘OK. First we need to find out how she entered the country. And then how she left, assuming she didn’t want to hang around. Put Billy Ewing on that. Airline companies. Trains. The usual. Tell him the kind of aliases she likes to use.’

‘Will do,’ Foxie said.

Pagan drifted a second, trying to imagine Carlotta descending into the Underground station, moving through rush-hour crowds to the platform – but he couldn’t force the vision along. It lay in his mind ill-formed, a Polaroid picture eaten round the edges by acid. He got up, walked the room.

‘If she did the train, who instructed her?’ he asked. ‘Who’s the paymaster, Foxie? I don’t see her randomly blowing up a train. I don’t imagine she woke up one morning and said, Hey, what a bloody good idea to put a bomb in the Tube. No, somebody contracted her services. And the reason she didn’t call and leave a fake message blaming the business on the IRA or some other terrorist outfit is because she wants me to know that she’s the one responsible. She knew I’d see her message. She knew I’d make the connection.’ He thought: A game, another of her games. This one especially deadly. This one beyond a simple, if persuasive, attempt at seduction. This one in an altogether different category.

Billy Ewing suddenly appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve got full identification of the victims now. I’ve run all the names. They’re clean. Nothing strange. Except for one small thing, which probably doesn’t have any connection with our business.’

‘And what’s that, Billy?’

‘There was an American in the carriage. Name of Harcourt. Bryce Harcourt.’

Pagan experienced a certain quickening, an alertness. ‘What about him?’

‘Nothing really. It just so happened he made out a complaint to the Hampstead police about his car the day before the explosion. Seems somebody slashed all four tyres. The usual mindless vandalism. Expensive tyres, I’d say. The car’s a Mercedes, top-of-the-line job.’

Pagan glanced at Foxie, who said, ‘Isn’t he the chap from the US Embassy?’

Pagan nodded. ‘Is there an address for Harcourt?’

‘There is.’

‘Let me have it, Billy.’

Ewing wrote it down, handed Pagan a sheet of paper torn from his notebook. The address was in Hampstead, a street close to the Heath.

They drove through St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage. On Finchley Road Pagan watched hapless shoppers scurry around beneath umbrellas. He told Foxie about his meeting with Victoria Canningsby and her description of Harcourt as a frightened man.

‘Harcourt’s name comes up once. Fine,’ he said. ‘I don’t pay it much attention. It comes up a second time, I get interested. Three times now. Three times intrigues me, Foxie.’

‘This Quarterman fellow led you to understand Harcourt was a researcher of sorts—’

‘Which caused Mrs Canningsby a moment of amazement.’

‘Why would Quarterman mislead you?’

‘I can only think of one reason. Harcourt was working in a sensitive area. Grosvenor Square has its share of spooks. We all know that. If Harcourt was one of them, Quarterman wasn’t going to announce it. So he wants to defuse any intrigue instantly by calling on me and telling me poor Bryce was low on the totem at the Embassy.’

Pagan turned his face from the sight of the rainy street. ‘It’s going to be damn hard to get to the bottom of it anyway. Grosvenor Square’s like the Kremlin. You can’t just start poking round the place. The marines would have you in front of a firing-squad in no time.’

Foxie turned the Rover in the direction of Hampstead Heath. ‘Consider this,’ he said. ‘What if Harcourt, because of his job, was the target? What if he was the only target?’

‘You keep coming back to this notion of a single victim, Foxie, which throws my head into turmoil. Somebody – we’ll assume Carlotta – goes to the trouble of wiping out more than a hundred lives to get one man. Why, for Christ’s sake? There are more economical ways to dispose of an individual. A single bullet in the skull on a dark night would be infinitely easier.’ He had the urge to light a cigarette but then remembered he’d left them in his flat. He tapped the pockets of his coat in the hope of finding a stray that might have fallen from the packet. Nothing.

He turned to look at Foxie. ‘OK. Let’s say for the sake of argument your hypothesis has some plausibility. Then it’s a short simple step to the idea that somebody deliberately hobbled Harcourt’s car—’

‘So that he was obliged to travel by Tube.’

‘Exactly. He’s obliged to take the Tube because that’s where he’s going to be killed. Where does that leave us?’

‘One thought does occur, Frank. And it isn’t altogether pleasant. The whole thing’s a diversion. A show. A bit of the old legerdemain.’

‘It’s a bloody awful diversion. We’re supposed to think it’s an act of terrorism – carried out by Carlotta – when what we’re really dealing with is the murder of a single man. Harcourt’s just another name on the list. Another number. We don’t pay him too much attention because we don’t have the time, the manpower, et cetera. Everybody’s in a state of shock. The nation is outraged. So the death of one American isn’t going to attract attention – that’s what you’re saying.’

‘It’s only a suggestion,’ Foxie said.

A diversion, Pagan thought. A smokescreen. A massacre in the tunnel because one man had to be eliminated. He had to stretch for this concept.

Foxie parked the Rover outside a Victorian house, a well-maintained structure of solid yellowy brick that extolled the imperial virtues of another time, when the world wasn’t jerrybuilt and bricklayers knew their game and waistcoated businessmen listened to their daughters play the pianoforte on Sunday afternoons.

Pagan got out of the car. He stared in the direction of the Heath, where wind and rain rubbed raggedly against trees. He stepped towards the house, followed by Foxie, whose coat was caught by the wind and whipped back. In the driveway was a silver Mercedes 450SL with flat tyres. Pagan bent down, examined the slashes in the rubber. A pretty thorough job, done with enthusiastic malice.

He moved up the driveway. The house had been split into two separate flats. Harcourt’s name was on the upper bell. The lower nameplate said: Gilman. Pagan pressed Gilman’s buzzer and within moments the front door was opened by a thin barefoot man who wore a white silk robe and black glasses. Pagan showed his ID. The man, who said his name was Victor Gilman, swayed slightly in the doorway; there was a whiff of booze on his breath. He was about five cocktails down, Pagan thought.

‘And what can I do for dear old Scotland Yard?’ Gilman asked. ‘What can I do for London’s finest, eh?’

‘We want to talk about Bryce Harcourt. Your upstairs neighbour.’

‘A gentleman from head to toe,’ said Gilman. ‘Altogether delightful.’

‘We need access to his apartment,’ Pagan said.

Gilman lost his balance a second, slipped against the door frame, laughed. ‘Pardon my equilibrium. I had a bad night. And I was obliged to take the cure today. Naughty of me.’

‘Very naughty,’ Pagan said, and stepped past Gilman into the hallway, followed by Foxie.

‘Have you got a warrant?’ Gilman asked.

‘I don’t have time for niceties, friend,’ Pagan said. ‘Harcourt has been killed.’

‘Killed?’

‘Believed murdered.’

‘Murdered? Dear God. Murdered?’ Gilman’s silk robe parted, revealing a pair of red briefs and thin white hairless legs. ‘Murdered?’

‘Do you have a key to Harcourt’s flat?’

Gilman took off his dark glasses. His eyes were bloodshot. ‘Who would murder a sweet fellow like Bryce, for heaven’s sake?’

Pagan moved along the hallway to the foot of the stairs. Gilman, robe flapping, followed.

‘I don’t have a key,’ Gilman said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Pagan was already halfway up the stairs and Gilman, with the lurching movements of the drunk, was following.

Pagan reached the landing. The door to Harcourt’s flat was sturdy. The lock was a simple business, though, a Yale. He looked at Foxie, ‘Do your thing,’ he said.

Foxworth said, ‘It’s been a while, Frank. I may be rusty.’ He studied the lock a second, then took from his pocket a Swiss Army knife. He inserted a thin blade into the Yale and twisted it a couple of times. Gilman was still bemoaning Harcourt’s murder.

Foxworth withdrew the knife. ‘I must have lost my touch, Frank. I can’t shift it.’

Pagan stepped back. ‘We’ll do it my way.’ He lunged, kicked the door hard, heard the wood around the lock splinter as the door shuddered and sprung open.

Gilman was making retching sounds. ‘Murdered. I can’t believe it.’ He was sick all at once; a sticky substance bubbled from his lips.

‘Why don’t you go back to your flat and lie down,’ Pagan said.

‘Great idea.’ Gilman stumbled across the landing. ‘Lie down. Yes. Indeed. Will do.’ He made more retching sounds, and clutched his stomach as he descended in his clumsy manner.

Pagan and Foxworth went inside Harcourt’s flat. It was furnished sparsely but with a certain taste, if you enjoyed the minimalist look. Chrome and black leather, a coffee table that was some kind of transparent perspex cube. Harcourt clearly hadn’t liked clutter. The dining-room contained only a glass-topped table and four simple chairs. No pictures on the walls. The bedroom was simple enough – large unmade double-bed, burgundy silk sheets, bedside lamp.

Pagan glanced round the bedroom, looked inside the bathroom, tiles and mirrors and recessed lights, everything tidy, toothbrush in place, razor placed neatly on a tub of shaving-soap, clean towels hung in precise arrangements. He wandered inside the living-room, which contained a leather sofa and a single armchair; shelves of books, mainly old Penguin paperbacks. Harcourt’s desk was situated beneath the shelves. A telephone, an answering-machine, a small stack of bills. Pagan had that curious sense of trespass he always felt in the apartments of the dead. Harcourt’s life had been cut off abruptly and his possessions had the aura of objects displayed in a museum, of things no longer useful.

He sifted the bills. Harcourt used an American Express Platinum card extensively; his bill consisted mainly of restaurant charges, expensive ones, but there were also three charges from florists. Flowers for his girlfriends, Pagan thought. Also an electricity bill, and a letter written by a young woman called Louise who lived in Chicago. It’s bitterly cold here right now. I wish the summer would come. I wish we could be together.

He opened the desk drawers. There was more correspondence from women, affectionate letters written by lovers or former lovers. Harcourt had obviously been the kind of man who knew how to break off an affair without acrimony. Quite a gift, Pagan thought.

In another drawer he found some unused stationery from the American Embassy. There was also the predictable collection of rubber bands, paper-clips, matchbooks, and a stapler. Nothing unusual. There was no sign of a diary, an appointment book.

Foxie came in from the bedroom. ‘He bought expensive shirts and suits,’ he said. ‘He also had a goodly supply of condoms in the drawer of the bedside table.’

‘Busy man,’ Pagan said. He closed the desk drawers. ‘Funny. I don’t get much of an impression of this person. I know he was fond of women, but what else? There’s something absent from this place. It’s as if he didn’t really live here. Or if he did he didn’t leave any marks behind.’ He thought of his own flat in Holland Park, a place of clutter, a lived-in place, scarred and scuffed and crumpled. There was no crumple in Bryce Harcourt’s flat.

‘Maybe he was just tidy,’ Foxie said.

Pagan sat on the sofa. ‘He doesn’t have a music collection. There’s a radio but no turntable, no CD player, nothing like that. A seducer of women who doesn’t play music. I find that odd.’

‘There isn’t a TV either,’ said Foxie.

‘That’s to his credit,’ Pagan said.

Foxie looked at the bookshelves, removed a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, skimmed the pages, then returned the book. ‘He obviously preferred books to telly.’

Pagan strolled inside the kitchen. Pots and pans hung on the walls. The tiled work surfaces were spotless. The cabinets contained an array of Baxter’s soups. Scotch broth. Cream of pheasant. The refrigerator was practically empty; a carton of milk, an apple shrivelled to the size of a walnut, two jars of spaghetti sauce, a single brown egg to which a fleck of feather adhered. There were no notes pinned to walls or magnetized to the refrigerator. No reminders, no shopping lists, no telephone numbers. Inside a closet Pagan found a half-drunk bottle of Rémy Martin and a couple of prescription bottles. One contained sleeping pills, the other antibiotics. The antibiotics hadn’t been used, but the sleeping pills had. So Bryce needed a little help dozing off at night.

Pagan went back into the living-room. Foxie was standing at the desk, gazing at the answering-machine, whose red light was blinking.

‘Let’s hear the messages,’ Pagan said.

Foxie pushed the playback button, the tape whirred a second. A woman’s voice said Bryce, sweetheart, why don’t you give me a call? You know my number. Have you made any decision about Robin’s party? The message ended. The voice hadn’t been Mrs Canningsby’s. The next message was from another woman. Bryce? This is DeeDee Gauge. Are you interested in making up the numbers at a dinner party next Friday night? It’s at Daxen’s place and I suppose it will be a bit of a bloody bore because they always are but a promise is a promise is a promise. Anyway. Do let me know, will you? Love and kisses. There was a sucking sound and then the message ended.

‘He had women coming out the woodwork,’ Foxie said. ‘Maybe he suffered from satyriasis.’

The machine was silent a second before the third and final message played. This time it was a man’s voice. Bryce. This is Jake Streik. Listen. Listen. If you’re there, pick up. OK. I need to talk with you. How are things holding up at your end? I got problems. Listen. I’ll get back to you later tonight if I can. You want my advice, get the fuck outta London. Get away from The Undertakers, unnerstand? Walk away from all that shit. If you don’t you’re a dead man … Bryce? You there? Bryce?

Pagan listened attentively. ‘Play that one again, Foxie.’

Foxie rewound the tape, turned up the volume because the sound was faint, distant, as if the call had originated in another country. Pagan listened to the message a second time. When it was over, he walked to the window and looked out at the rainswept heath. He remembered Victoria Canningsby’s words. I believe I’m correct in saying Bryce feared for his life. And now this Streik: if you don’t you’re a dead man.

‘He sounds desperate,’ Foxie said.

‘Panic-stricken. I wonder what his problems are and how they’re connected to Bryce Harcourt. Why was he urging Harcourt to get out of London?’

‘And who are The Undertakers?’ Foxie asked. ‘Is Streik using a euphemism along the lines of Grim Reaper?’

Pagan turned from the window. Something was shifting in his head, a gear changing, as if all at once this investigation was drawing him in directions he didn’t want to go. Foxie’s suggestion that Harcourt’s presence on the train was the only reason for the bomb – this suddenly shed its outer skin of implausibility. He wasn’t prepared to accept it completely just yet, but it had taken shape at the back of his mind as a possibility, a small fungus in a cellar. What the hell was there in Harcourt’s life that had made him a victim, that had Jake Streik so worried about him? Why had he lived in fear? Get away from The Undertakers.

Pagan didn’t like how his thoughts were becoming fractured, webby little strands that billowed this way and that.

‘OK. Let’s say Carlotta planted the device. Let’s imagine Bryce was the only target. What the hell did he do to deserve to be killed? Why would somebody hire Carlotta to kill him?’ He sat on the sofa and looked round the room in a stricken manner. ‘What I want to know is the connection between Streik and Harcourt. I want to know what kind of trouble Harcourt and Streik were in.’

‘Exactly how do you propose to achieve that?’

Pagan rose, picked up the telephone directory, looked up the number for the American Embassy. ‘The logical place to start would be with a certain Al Quarterman. Maybe he can throw some light on the matter.’

He dialled the number. The phone rang for a long time before it was picked up by a woman who said, ‘United States Embassy.’

Pagan asked to speak with Quarterman.

‘Can I say who’s calling?’

‘Frank Pagan.’

Pagan waited. There was a certain amount of clicking on the line. Then he heard Al Quarterman’s voice.

‘Frank. What can I do for you?’

‘I’d like a meeting.’

‘Has something come up?’

‘You might say that.’

‘I don’t have anything on this afternoon so far as I can see.’

‘You know Brown’s Hotel?’

‘I can find it.’

‘Meet me there in an hour.’

‘Fine.’ Quarterman hung up.

Pagan looked a moment at the answering-machine. He slipped the cassette out of the machine and put it in his pocket.

Traffic in Mayfair was congested. Buses slugged through heavy rain, taxis idled in eclipses of their own pollution. Foxie travelled side streets, but even these were clogged with delivery vans and cars. He managed to find a parking space a block from Brown’s. Al Quarterman was already waiting for them in the lobby.

‘I suggest the bar,’ Pagan said. He introduced Foxie, who shook Quarterman’s rather clammy hand with his usual good-natured vigour.

The bar was empty. Quarterman sniffed the air of the hotel, as if he thought old English authenticity might have a scent all its own. Pagan had found that most Americans were afflicted by an exaggerated affection for anything that suggested antiquity. They were like rather amiable vultures feasting with great fascination on old bones. He found this trait touching at times.

Pagan ordered three lagers, which the waiter brought to a corner table. Quarterman sipped his, then smacked his thin lips. His jaundiced complexion seemed even more pronounced than it had before.

‘So, Frank. What’s on your mind?’

‘Bryce Harcourt.’

Quarterman looked into his lager. ‘Poor Bryce. What a way to die.’

‘I need some information. Such as – what did he actually do at the Embassy?’

‘I thought I’d covered that ground before.’

‘Look. I don’t want to trespass on anything remotely sensitive—’

‘Sensitive?’

‘But Harcourt was in some kind of trouble, and I want to know if it was connected with anything he might have done at the Embassy. If it’s within your authority to tell me—’

‘He was a researcher. That’s it. I’m not sure what direction you’re taking, Frank. I don’t know anything about deep trouble. He seemed OK to me. If he had problems, I would have known about them. Here’s a guy I knew socially, a guy I saw every working day of my life.’

‘Does the name Jake Streik mean anything to you?’

‘You come out of left field, don’t you?’ Quarterman looked thoughtful.

‘Streik left a bizarre message on Harcourt’s answering-machine. A warning.’

‘Why this flurry of interest in Harcourt anyhow? Where did all this suddenly come from? What led you to Harcourt’s apartment? The guy died in the goddam explosion, Frank. He was the unfortunate victim of some kind of terrorist attack. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why are you probing into his life?’

‘Because it’s my job.’

Quarterman smiled his sombre smile, and set down his lager. ‘You’re not saying, right?’

‘Let’s get back to Streik. Does it ring any bells?’

‘I can’t say it does, Frank. Sorry.’

Pagan sat back. ‘Streik mentioned something about undertakers, which was presumably a reference Harcourt would have understood. What does that mean to you?’

‘Undertakers,’ Quarterman said. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’ He reached for his glass. As he did so, an expression of pained surprise crossed his face. His features contorted, his mouth dropped open, and he slumped back in his chair, his arms dangling at his sides. For a second Pagan thought the man had suffered a sudden heart attack but then he saw blood flow from Quarterman’s chest and he got up, kicking aside his chair and turning to the door in time to see a man in a dark-green overcoat hurry toward the street exit.

Pagan dashed across the bar, reached the lobby, saw the man rush into the street. He charged after him, mindless of pedestrians in his way, scattering aside two fur-coated old women who swore viciously at him from under their shared umbrella. The man was swift, swifter than Pagan, younger, fitter, but Pagan kept going anyway, pushing hard as he could even as he realized that the man who’d shot Quarterman was drawing away from him. Breathing heavily, lungs aching, he sprinted up the street, thinking of his own gun stuck uselessly in his office desk.

The gunman had already turned a corner and was probably more than a hundred yards away by this time. But Pagan kept at it, blood thundering in his head. He saw the gunman turn another corner and still he chased. The man was pulling further away with every step: he gave the impression of a dark-green blur. His long sandy hair bounced against his collar as he fled. Puffing, Pagan forced himself through space, conscious of his blurred reflection in the windows of shops. He looked crazed, coat flying, face flushed, a halfwit in the rain.

The gunman turned yet another corner.

Why doesn’t somebody stop him, whatever happened to citizen’s arrests, doesn’t anybody have a conscience these days?

Pagan reached the corner – but there was no sight of the man, who might have gone in one of several directions or even into one of the buildings. How could you tell? He collapsed against a wall: a monstrous pressure rose in his throat. Fireflies buzzed in his eyes. This isn’t good enough, Frank. This is ignominious. It will say on your epitaph: Ran Himself Into The Ground. He was sweating heavily.

He remained motionless for a long time and when he’d recovered his strength he walked slowly back to the hotel. Inside the bar Foxworth was standing over Quarterman. He’d unbuttoned the American’s shirt. He raised his face, looked at Pagan, shook his head.

An assortment of hotel staff was fussing around, clucking. ‘Clear the room,’ Pagan said. ‘Everybody out. Now!’

‘I don’t think he knew what hit him,’ Foxworth said when the room was empty.

Pagan looked down at the dead man. Then he sagged into a chair and shook his head. He drew a hand wearily across his damp face.

‘What are we not supposed to find out about Bryce Harcourt and Jake Streik?’ Foxie asked. A muscle in his neck strained. ‘What is so bloody important that a gunman takes the risk of shooting a man in the middle of Mayfair in broad bloody daylight, for God’s sake?’

Pagan licked his dry lips.

He had a sensation of being lost in the Underground tunnel, that he’d taken a wrong turning somewhere and wandered into abandoned passageways where trains no longer ran and rails had rusted long ago, secret shafts where the air was unbreathable and no light ever fell and everything was shrouded by the dank bloom of mystery.