A Ghost at the Door (13 page)

For the next three days Harry and Jemma stumbled around each other, glad of the excuse that it was Harry’s arm and bruised body that kept them from sharing a bed. They
didn’t share much else, either; he continued worrying away at things she no longer wanted to know about; he didn’t offer, she didn’t ask. It couldn’t last, something had to
give, and it was Jemma who made the first move. She came back from school and discovered him staring at the photograph of Susannah Ranelagh that he’d propped up on the bookshelf in place of
the one of his father on the beach. She sighed. It was time to build a few bridges.

‘I like your father’s long hair,’ she suggested, dropping her bag and heading for the bottle of Sauvignon in the fridge.

‘You recognize it’s him?’

‘No mistaking him,’ she said, returning from the kitchen with a generous glass. She waved it in his direction, enquiring if he wanted one himself, but he shook his head. Painkillers.
And confusion. She’d spotted his father, done instantly what had taken him hours to figure out. ‘I got trained by the best in British Intelligence to analyse faces but you’re just
way ahead,’ he lamented.

‘I’m a woman, Harry. We do faces. We’re a congregation that spends half our lives praying before our mirrors.’

They exchanged a smile, their first in days.

‘Who are the others?’

‘I wish I knew. Susannah Ranelagh’s the one in the middle. As for the rest . . .’

Jemma picked up the photo and studied it. Eight by eleven, or thereabouts. Four men and three women, which made for five strangers. Circular dining table, formal black tie, young faces laughing
at the camera, relaxed, casual arms on receptive shoulders, one pair of spectacles slightly askew, the scene awash with alcohol and half-eaten puddings. Friends, probably very close. ‘Early
sixties, judging by the awful fashions. Those frills look like they’re designed to throttle the girls and you could hide an army beneath those petticoats. University chums, were
they?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Pay attention, Jones. You told me your father was at Oxford in the early sixties.’

‘Yes. That’s right.’ He felt sheepish. Now he could see it, of course: the photo screamed of youthful indulgence. So his father and Susannah Ranelagh went back that far . . .
Damn, he needed to sharpen up. Shove the painkillers. ‘I’ll have that glass of wine after all,’ he said.

‘So?’ she said as she handed over his drink.

‘Indulge me in this. Please, Jem?’

‘I’ve got schoolwork to prepare,’ she responded, heading off to the bedroom. At least she hadn’t thrown it back in his face.

The wine seemed to mark a turning point in Harry’s recovery. The painkillers went in the bin and with them the dullness that seemed to have filled his mind with fog. Harry began making
calls. The first was to Cecil Pisani, a Cabinet minister when Harry had first entered Parliament and who was now in graceful semi-retirement as an emeritus professor at Johnnie’s old college.
He readily returned Harry’s call and extended an invitation to dinner on the college’s sumptuous High Table. ‘You’ll have to bear with me, Cecil,’ Harry pleaded.
‘I’m afraid I’m a bit crocked.’

‘The entire wretched country is crocked, old boy,’ Sir Cecil Pisani replied in the comic patrician accent that had probably cost him any preferment higher than Culture Secretary.
‘Better do some damage to what’s left of the college cellar before we have to sell it to the Chinese.’

He tried to make a call to the photographer whose details were printed on the back of the image, only to discover that the telephone number was no longer valid. The company had long gone out of
business but it had been taken over by another Oxford photographic firm who understood the value locked up in old images. ‘We don’t throw nothing away, Mr Jones,’ the helpful
young woman on the other end of the phone told him. ‘Trouble is, all that old stuff arrived on the back of a truck and got dumped in our warehouse. Photos, negatives, unpaid bills. Quite a
few rats, too. All jumbled up, and for a while the rats were winning. I tell you, trying to find anything in that warehouse is like going down a coal mine without a lamp.’

Yet she promised to try. Harry gave her the reference number on the back of the photo and waited. At the very end of the week she called back. ‘I’ve got something, not much. Are you
ready?’ she asked. ‘Hilary term 1964, it was. Can’t tell you more, no names or nothing, except there’s a scribbled note on the negative sleeve that suggests they were
members of the university’s Junior Croquet Club. Does that ring any bells?’

His father indulging in the genteel summer sport of croquet? Pimm’s among the petunias? About as likely as a tax rebate. His father had always embraced any excuse for a drink but this
connection seemed farfetched, although he suspected it might have suited Miss Ranelagh down to her cotton socks.

Harry had less success when he tried to call Tallon, his father’s lawyer. He left a telephone message with his secretary asking him to return his call urgently. He got a text message from
him in reply, explaining he was away from London. Harry texted him back asking if he’d ever heard of Susannah Ranelagh. Simple. Yes or no. He was to hear nothing for a week; eventually he got
a curt message stating there was no mention of any Susannah Ranelagh in his father’s papers.

He had to track her down, yet she remained obstinately elusive. She had arrived at Heathrow. And she had vanished. Harry had an extraordinarily wide circle of friends from his days in the Army
and at Westminster and he began putting them to use. He spoke to retired policemen, old Army chums now working in the private security field; he even spoke to a couple of investigative journalists
who owed him a favour and asked them to help trace her whereabouts. It all came to nothing, so he made one last call.

‘Very formally, Harry, old chap, I have to tell you to go screw yourself.’ The lilting Welsh tones of Detective Chief Inspector Hughie Edwards travelled down the phone. ‘Good
God, man, you know the Metropolitan Police can’t go peddling information like that. Right to privacy and all that bollocks. And you should know: it was your lot what passed the bloody
legislation.’

Harry sighed. No one was willing to take the risk, not after the phone-hacking scandal had taken down an ill-assorted collection of journalists, policemen and private investigators, leaving
politicians who had stood too close covered in all sorts of collateral shit.

‘But you know all that,’ the Welshman sighed, ‘so I have the sneaking suspicion that this is important to you.’

‘Very. She may have tried to kill me.’

‘Then make an official complaint.’

‘It was in Bermuda.’

‘Ah. I see.’ The Welshman sucked his teeth. ‘Then all I can suggest is that the next time someone tries to kill you, you arrange for it to happen on my patch. Then I can be of
some assistance, you see. But for now, old chap, you’re buggered.’ More sucking of teeth. ‘So, having got all that official cobblers out of the way, isn’t it about time we
caught up with each other, you and me? Been a while, hasn’t it? Why don’t you buy me a drink tomorrow? About midday? Red Lion? And don’t be bloody late.’

The Red Lion pub is something of a Westminster institution. Sandwiched between Parliament and Downing Street, it claims to have served beer to every prime minister for more than five hundred
years right up to Edward Heath, who refused to enter the place. It was one of many fine old traditions the curmudgeonly Heath broke. Yet the Red Lion survived with its reputation intact, which was
rather more than could be said for its antagonist. Harry was a few minutes early, lingering outside its black-gloss door, when he spotted a former colleague, an ambitious backbench politician, one
of the upwardly servile who had survived the last election cull and whose ear was now firmly screwed to his phone. He was walking towards the pub and gazing quizzically at Harry, as though chasing
a faint memory. He almost stopped, then suddenly quickened his step and scurried by.

At least the policeman recognized him, just. His arm was still clad in its sling and plaster cast, his face still scarred. ‘Sweet Jesus, Harry, who did that to you?’ the man blurted
out as he took in the signs of disaster. ‘No, don’t tell me, not that little old lady of yours in Bermuda?’ Edwards began laughing. ‘The entire Iraqi Republican Guard
couldn’t nail that ugly arse of yours, and now this.’

‘Fell off my bike,’ Harry replied doggedly.

‘You’re slowing down.’

‘Thanks. Makes me feel so much better.’

And again Edwards laughed. ‘I’ll buy the drinks. Looks like I’ll bloody well have to carry them, too. You wait here, we’ll drink outside.’ And soon he had returned
with two froth-spilling pints. Edwards was in his civvies, a man a few years older than Harry and of considerably bigger girth, front-row stock, with a large broken nose, stormy eyes and two
Cox’s pippins for cheeks. ‘Still, look on the bright side,’ he said, setting Harry’s drink down on the brass windowsill. ‘At least you’re safe for
now.’

‘Meaning?’ Harry said, sipping clumsily. He’d bitten deep into his lip during the accident and it was swollen and sore.

Edwards drew a little closer, lowered his voice a notch. ‘That
missing-person
case you brought to our attention,’ he said, his eyebrow arching cryptically, his accent adding
further emphasis. ‘I can’t tell you where she is.’

‘I understand that, Hughie, but I was hoping for maybe a hint—’

‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t tell you where she is because I don’t bloody know, do I? Can’t find her. Not a ruddy trace. Oh, she landed at Heathrow all right,
like you said, but since then your Miss Ranelagh seems to have vanished as effectively as my overdue promotion. Not used her credit card, her Internet account, her mobile phone. Nothing. Not a
dicky.’

‘Isn’t that a little odd?’

‘Too damn right it’s odd. Not supposed to happen nowadays, no matter how many right-to-privacy laws you politicians pass.’ He paused. ‘Oh, I was forgetting, you’re
not a politician any longer. Thinking of going back into that den of iniquity, are you?’ he asked, nodding towards the Parliament building.

Harry shrugged; the effort made him wince. ‘Got other things on my plate.’

‘Politics. Like pneumoconiosis, so it is: no shifting it, not once it gets into the lungs. Never been my game. Thankless sodding task. Like my old dad used to say, it might seem like a
rich seam of coal to you, boyo, but it’s just a few bags of nutty slack to them out there.’ The policeman’s tired eyes betrayed a tired soul; he was closing in on retirement and
the constant compromises of his job had ground away at his enthusiasm.

‘So what can we do, Hughie?’ Harry asked, bringing him back to the business in hand.

The policeman shook his head. ‘There’s nothing more I can do, not without someone making a formal request. I’ve already dangled my manhood over a meat grinder on this. I
can’t push it any further.’

‘Damn.’

‘My old copper’s nose tells me something’s up with your Miss Ranelagh. When little old ladies disappear from the face of the earth it often means they’re under it. But
that’s instinct. We need hard information and there is none.’ He glanced at his watch and placed his glass back on the windowsill. ‘I better be disappearing myself.’

‘You’ve hardly made a dent in your drink.’

‘Well, at least no one can accuse you of touching me up for information, then, can they? Can’t be too careful nowadays.’ He laughed his deep baritone laugh once more, but the
red eyes didn’t join in and the trace of humour died quickly beneath the noise of passing traffic from Parliament Street. His expression was dark. ‘I know you, Harry Jones. You’re
a mad bastard, so you are. Look at the state of you already. Tread safely. You mark my words, there be dragons out there.’

Dragons. He felt he’d been living with one since his return from Bermuda. His fault. Both he and Jemma were angry, but trying to make the best of it.

‘You’ll need some physio once that comes off,’ she’d remarked across the breakfast table, waving a knife smeared with Dundee thick-cut in his general direction.
‘I’ve got a friend, Tanya, she can sort you out. We did our teacher training together. Blonde. Excellent hands.’

‘Thanks!’ he said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

‘Just make sure it’s only your shirt you take off.’

Was it a joke? Or a test, a sign she didn’t entirely trust him? He’d given her no cause to doubt him since they’d been together but a man with a hands-on past like his was
always liable to conviction rather than be given the benefit of reasonable doubt. But Harry loved her, owed her, and not simply for all the things he couldn’t do for himself with only one
arm. This was just a bad patch. So he decided to surprise her, fix dinner, even with only one arm. Couldn’t be too difficult, not for a man whose extreme survival training at Hereford had
included killing and cooking a chicken with one arm strapped behind his back to simulate a battle injury. Simple enough. Pick up the chicken. Place teeth around head. And pull. It was astonishing
how easily a chicken’s head came away from its body, although it did tend to flap around in protest for a while after. Anyway, a bowl of penne wasn’t going to put up too much of a
struggle, didn’t even cluck.

Even so, there was a price to pay. Every time he stretched or stirred, he hurt, and every time he hurt, his thoughts came back to Susannah Ranelagh. He knew he couldn’t drop it. He was
standing in the small galley kitchen of Jemma’s apartment trying to chop herbs and growing increasingly frustrated. Why did women never keep their knives sharp enough? He reached for the
phone.

‘Hi, Delicious.’

‘Harry, is that you? Harry Hero?’ she responded, recognizing his voice and sounding glad of it. ‘How’s the arm? The head? The rest of you?’

‘Suffering.’

‘You need to be back in Bermuda, not in that cold climate of yours. I did so tell you.’ She laughed.

‘Any news?’

‘Well, I went out with this new guy last weekend, but I don’t reckon on him becoming my life partner. Seems like he was more interested in getting off a speeding ticket than getting
off with me.’ She laughed again, a rich, throaty sound that hinted of candlelight and long tropical nights.