‘Why didn’t you tell me all this to start with?’ I asked.
She gave me a look.
‘Classified,’ I sighed.
We’d moved to sit side by side by the fire, along with a bottle of Australian Shiraz I’d bought for us to share. The bar was busy, and most of the tables were taken up by people having supper. Not a bad night for a midwinter Wednesday and the good thing was that nobody was close enough to overhear us, especially since the conversational noise levels were up, and we kept our voices down.
‘Not just classified,’ she said, ‘but we didn’t want the Saint getting wind of the fact we had him in our sights. That we had not just one, but two agents in his organisation. And since you didn’t know anything, he remains oblivious to the fact and I’d like it to stay that way now, and in the future.’
She shot me a meaningful look. Jesus. I wish she hadn’t done that. My palms dampened at the mere thought of the Saint questioning me again. Unlike Susie, I hadn’t had any training in how to withstand an interrogation, and if George Abbott got his hands on me again, I had no doubt I’d find it almost impossible not to spill every bean I had.
I cleared my throat, trying not to show my nerves. ‘What about now?’
‘After Tony’s murder, Rachel and Rob both going missing, assumed dead, not many agents were willing to step up to the plate.’
‘Right,’ I said, moving along. ‘Rob wasn’t chasing you.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘We were both running like hell.’
The story was that when she’d arrived that night, she’d gone up to the third floor. She hadn’t seen Rachel or Rob, but she’d heard gunshots. She knew Rob had gone in armed and, pierced with horror, she ran down the corridor toward the sound. Rob erupted from the furthest office, wild-eyed and covered in blood, and she shouted at him, wanting to know what was going on, but he’d come at her, waving his gun and screaming like someone demented.
‘Run!’
She had turned around, and ran for the stairwell with Rob right behind.
‘He wasn’t going to hurt me,’ she said, but for some reason, she didn’t sound too convinced. ‘He’d just lost it. Gone nuts. He was terrified, and he terrified me.’
‘You think he killed Tony?’
She put her head in her hands. ‘Christ knows.’
I still hadn’t shown her the photographs of the crime scene, and I wriggled on my chair, brought out the envelope. ‘I received these in the mail,’ I told her. ‘They’re pretty disturbing, sorry.’
‘It’s okay. I see a lot of pretty awful stuff in my job.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘Show me.’
I pulled them out and handed them over.
She looked at them for a long time.
‘At least now I know what happened to Rachel.’
‘But her face… You definitely know it’s her?’
‘I can’t think who else it would be, dressed up like that.’ Susie frowned, studied the pictures more closely. ‘Yes, it has to be her. Same height, nice figure, great tits. Whoever did this to her was really, really angry. This wasn’t someone in full control of their emotions. They went berserk. They wanted to obliterate her. Smash her to pieces. Literally.’
I turned away, feeling nauseous. ‘I can’t see Rob doing that. Even if he was on drugs, I just can’t see it.’
‘For what it’s worth, neither can I.’ Susie slipped the photos back inside the envelope. ‘I know he looked like a madman chasing me across the foyer like that, but he wasn’t going to hurt me. He was simply terrified. I can still hear him yelling at me, “Run!” He just wanted us to get out of there.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I ran flat out for the tube station. I hurdled the barriers, can you believe it? I’ve never done that before, or since. When I looked back, he wasn’t there. I don’t think I lost him, I think he took a different route. I waited for him to ring me, contact me or the Office, but he never did. The next we knew, he’d drowned. We weren’t sure whether to believe it or not. We considered the fact he might have staged the accident in order to give himself some time, but when he never surfaced, we had to face the fact he may well have drowned after all.
‘And now he’s back.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘I’d quite like to wring his neck.’
‘Get in the queue.’
I stared through the darkened window, trying to think what else might have happened that night. I felt Susie take my hand, gently turn it over. ‘How did you get these?’
She was looking at the cuts I’d sustained from crawling through the glass on the floor at Klaudia’s flat.
‘I went to see Klaudia Nowacki.’
‘Good God.’ Susie’s eyes widened. ‘She used to clean for the Mayfair Group. What did she have to say?’
I told Susie everything that had happened the previous night, except the fact Rob apparently owned the Range Rover which had whisked the shooter away. I wasn’t sure why I kept that from her, but I think it was because I didn’t want her totally biased against my brother.
I said, ‘Klaudia was shot when she moved to answer the doorbell. When she came into clear view. The last thing she said was that she didn’t see anyone else at the Mayfair offices except Rob and Rachel. The last words Klaudia spoke was that it was strange, because Rachel was normally so proud of her looks… and then Klaudia was shot.’
‘Rachel was proud of a lot of things.’ Susie sighed. ‘Especially her figure, her talent for luring men into having sex with her and telling her things they normally wouldn’t. She loved being a spy. She revelled in it, the power she thought it gave her.’
I reached over and picked up the bottle of wine. Topped up our glasses. Finally, I told her I’d met Rob. By the time she’d finished questioning me, we’d drunk the wine and were on coffee. I leaned back, stretching out my legs. ‘Another thing,’ I said. ‘Is that Rob told me he didn’t know who the middle-aged woman was.’
Susie arched her eyebrows. ‘He knew it was me all right. Why would he lie about something like that?’ She trailed off, frowning. ‘I don’t think he’d be protecting my MI5 status, not with you. So why say he didn’t know me? I don’t get it.’
‘You weren’t exactly looking like yourself. Flat shoes, tweedy skirt, grey hair. Even I didn’t recognise you.’ Which I have to say I found extremely disconcerting. Wouldn’t I have recognised something about my wife, the woman I loved and had lived with for eleven years?
‘No, no.’ She was shaking her head, baffled. ‘He knew it was me.’ Her expression cleared. ‘He would only lie to you if it was really important, say, to cause a smokescreen. I have no doubt he lied for all the right reasons, but it would be nice to know why.’ She gave a groan. ‘God, I wish we could just bloody see him together so we could sort all this out, once and for all. You could ask him everything you want, and I could clock him round the head for being such a pain in the bloody backside.’
It was at that point I decided to get us all three together. Something inside me knew that only by doing so would I get the absolute truth.