Secret Asset (27 page)

60

T
he marksman in the Sheldonian's cupola was still there. Turning round, Liz noticed another sniper, holding his carbine, on the roof of Blackwell's music shop at the corner.

Something about the scene was bothering her. She looked at Charles, and suddenly a thought came from nowhere. “I think Tom is here,” she suddenly said. “He'll want to see all this.”

Wetherby was startled. “Really?” he said doubtfully. Then he seemed to think about it. “Maybe you're right. As far as he knows, we're still in London, wondering where the devil he's gone.”

Matheson came back to them again. “We've got about thirty people still in Blackwell's, downstairs in the Norrington Room. We put them there for their own safety. I'm about to let them out, unless you have any objection.”

“No, that's fine,” said Wetherby, and Matheson was on his way to the bookshop when Liz called after him. “Excuse me,” she said. “Could we just check everyone as they leave?”

He looked at her, surprised, then turned to Wetherby, who nodded approval and said, “If you bring them all out through the same door, we could have a quick look.”

They walked over, and stood at the Trinity College end of the shop front, where at the back of a small ground-floor room a steep staircase led down to the cavernous Norrington Room. Matheson and a tall policeman stood with them outside as the customers—most looking impassive, a few irate—emerged.

There was no one they recognised.

“I need to find out what they've done with the suspect they arrested,” declared Wetherby. He turned back to Dave and Liz as he set off. “Have a final look inside to be extra sure.”

“Can you keep someone here in the front?” Liz asked Matheson.

“All right,” he said reluctantly, clearly thinking he had better uses for his men.

And Dave was shaking his head. “I know great minds think alike,” he said, gesturing first at the retreating figure of Wetherby, then pointing his finger at Liz. “But if Tom had been anywhere near here, he'd be long gone by now. And if he was in the bookshop, wouldn't he have just gone out the back door?”

“No.” It was a Northern voice, and belonged to a stocky man in a check jacket. “I'm from Blackwell's,” he said. “When the police said they wanted everyone downstairs, I locked the staff exits at the back. It was more to keep anyone from wandering in than to keep anyone from leaving. But it would have done that too.”

“Come on,” said Liz to Dave. “Nothing to lose by looking.” He shrugged, and they went together through the shop's main entrance. They stood for a moment on the ground floor, looking at the tables stacked with newly published books. “It's much bigger than it looks from outside,” said Dave without enthusiasm.

“Let's split up,” said Liz. “You start downstairs. I'll go to the top floor and work down. We can meet in the middle.”

“Okay,” said Dave. “Watch yourself,” he added, but by then Liz had started up the staircase.

The first floor was eerily empty. The café was deserted, though its tables still held coffee cups and half-eaten pastries—clearly people had been moved out at speed. She looked down towards the other book-lined end of the first floor, also deserted. The effect was slightly spooky—Liz felt as if she were in a museum after closing time. Noises filtered through from the street, dimly audible, but here inside there was only a heavy silence—except for the sound of her footsteps, which clattered on the wooden stairs.

She moved on to the second floor and kept climbing—she would cover these lower floors on her way down. Reaching the top floor, she found a swing door on her left and a sign for the toilets. Liz went through cautiously, then opened the door to the ladies' room. Both cubicles had their doors wide open; there was no one in the room.

Slightly hesitantly, she went into the men's room. The single stall was empty, but the window was open at the bottom. Ducking down, she peered out. The vast front quadrangle of Trinity loomed in the distance. Sticking her head out, she saw directly below her a small, inner courtyard. From the window to the paving stones was a straight drop of almost fifty feet. Tom wouldn't have survived that, thought Liz.

As she came out again into the main corridor, Liz heard a noise—a long low gliding sound, as if something were being dragged along. Was it downstairs? She stood still, listening hard, but didn't hear it again.

Suspicious, she walked cautiously around the corner into a long light room full of second-hand books. There was a faint aroma of old leather and dust. At the end of the room a door was marked
STAFF ONLY
, and Liz was walking towards it when she saw the window in the corner. It was wide open.

Moving quickly, she looked out. Immediately below her was the low roofline of a modern annexe of the College which adjoined the shop.

An easy way out, Liz thought. And then she saw him.

Leaning against the slanted line of tiles, holding on to the frame of a wooden skylight cut into the roof.

It was Tom.

He was trying to open the skylight, and Liz realised that if he succeeded, he would jump down and disappear into the building. Yes, Matheson's men might find him, but since Liz imagined warren-like interiors with hundreds of places to hide, she wouldn't want to bet on it.

She had her mobile phone in her bag—she could call and make sure the building was surrounded by police. But by the time she got through—and to whom? Dave was downstairs, Charles at St. Aldates checking on the surviving terrorist—Tom might have escaped.

“Tom!” she shouted, leaning out of the window. Her voice rang out, echoing in the tiny courtyard below.

He paused, but only momentarily. He didn't look back, but deciding to give up on the skylight, began to edge his way along the roof.

He was headed towards the line of older buildings. There he could move at greater speed along the gabled roofs stretching to the gardens at the back of the College. Then he'd be off.

“Tom!” she called again. “There's no point. You might as well come back. They're waiting for you on the ground.”

This time he did react. He hauled himself up onto the roof ridge. Crouching there, he looked almost boyish, like an undergraduate, climbing in after the gates were locked at night. Slowly he turned around, and his eyes swept across until they reached the window where Liz stood.

There was nothing playful in his steady stare. His eyes were steely, and his face looked filled with determination.

“Tom,” Liz said again, mildly this time, trying to keep her voice under control. But before she could say anything else, he shook his head emphatically. And then, swinging nimbly down the far side of the slanted roof, he disappeared out of view.

Liz stood stunned for a fraction of a moment, waiting for Tom to reappear. Then realising he wasn't going to, she acted at once, running towards the staircase. She was halfway down when she ran into Dave Armstrong, coming up. “Quick,” she said, grabbing his arm and turning him round. “He's on the roof next door. Hurry!”

As they ran out of the shop onto the Broad, blinking in the bright sunlight, they could see Matheson standing next to an ambulance, talking to two uniformed policemen.

“He's next door,” Dave shouted out to him, and he and Liz kept running fast towards the entrance to Trinity. The small gate by the lodge was open. The porter came out, trying to stop them.

“Police!” Dave shouted. “Get out of the way!” Liz veered around the man and, ducking under the branches of an enormous cedar tree, headed right across the quad. The lawn and paths were empty and she wondered if the College had been evacuated with the rest of the street. That would make it easier for Tom to escape, she thought, as her eyes scanned the line of gables for any sign of him.

Dave yelled, “I'll take the far end.” Liz continued towards the courtyard under Blackwell's window. Coming through its archway, she slowed down, her neck craned skyward, examining the roof where she had last seen Tom. The skylight looked undisturbed—he had not come back this way.

She heard a footstep behind her and started. “It's all right,” a voice said, and she turned around to find Matheson with a young policeman. “I've got men searching the College,” he said.

“We'll need them on the rooftop too,” said Liz, pointing upwards. She suddenly stopped, listening intently. “What's that noise?”

“What noise?”

Then she heard it again. Through a second archway, leading back into the recesses of the College on this side. It was a low wailing sound, as if someone were in distress. Its painful keening was almost animal.

She moved quickly through the archway and found herself in a long, outside gallery, bounded on three sides by College buildings. At the open far end Liz could see the flowering shrubs of a large garden. There was no one in sight. So what had she heard?

And then to her left she saw a girl—she looked barely out of her teens. She was standing by the entrance to a stairwell, crying uncontrollably. Behind her, almost in the corner, there was a man on the ground, lying flat on his back, motionless.

Liz walked quickly over to the girl. “It's all right,” she said gently, as Matheson went over and knelt down by the man.

The girl stopped crying and looked up at Liz, with a face that was young and fearful. From the far end of the gallery, Liz heard a shout and looking up, saw Dave running towards them.

“What happened?” Dave demanded, looking first at the girl, and then at the body in the corner. Matheson was holding the prone man's wrist, checking for a pulse. He stood up, looked at Liz and shook his head.

“He must have fallen,” said Liz quietly. And she raised her eyes to indicate the roof above them.

“Unless he jumped,” said Dave.

Stifling her sobs, the girl spoke for the first time. “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “He didn't jump.”

“Did you see it?” asked Liz.

The girl nodded her head. “I was asleep,” she explained. “I woke up and realised I was late for my tutorial. When I came out I saw”—she hesitated—“this man walking across the roof. I thought that's odd because he seemed too old to be up there.” She gave a nervous laugh, and Liz put her arm around her—the last thing they needed now was hysterics.

“Then suddenly he seemed to slip and started sliding down the roof. He tried to grab on to the tiles, but he couldn't. He just kept sliding until…he fell off.” And she began to cry again.

Liz looked past her at the figure lying on the ground. Letting go of the girl she went and stood next to Matheson, then looked down at the man. She'd known it was Tom from the moment she'd seen the body.

In many ways he looked as he always did, smart and handsome in his blue suit, looking as if in a minute he would bounce up and be his old self again. Which self is that? thought Liz bitterly. The man she'd thought she'd begun to know? The big man, tall and rangy, confident but easygoing, soft-spoken but knowledgeable, charming—at least when he wanted to be.

Or the different, secret self of someone she'd never really known at all? A man possessed by internal demons she had never remotely imagined.

Torn between tears of sadness and tears of rage, Liz shut her eyes and shed neither. Turning sharply on her heels, she walked back towards the crying girl. She could comfort her. There was nothing she could do for Tom.

61

I
n contrast to the morning, the drive back to London seemed to take forever. As they left Oxford, low scudding banks of cloud moved in from the south, dispelling the sun and turning the sky a dull hazy grey. Rain began to fall, first in fierce short-lived downbursts, then in a steady monotonous drizzle. The M40 soon clogged up in an unending line of slow-moving lorries and cautious cars.

Numbed by what had happened, not quite certain whether to be pleased that they had prevented an atrocity or dismayed that they had almost allowed it to happen, Liz and Charles barely spoke to each other at first. Then as if by mutual consent, they talked almost compulsively about anything and everything. Except the events of the day. Favourite holidays, favourite restaurants, favourite parts of the country, even
The Da Vinci Code,
which neither she nor Wetherby had read. Personal talk, but not intimate: Wetherby's wife Joanne wasn't mentioned, and Liz didn't say who had accompanied her on any of those favourite holidays. It was an almost manic defence against the sheer unbelievability of what they had just witnessed. And a defence, too, against the questions, the accountability certain to come.

Yet both being realists, the avoidance strategy couldn't last. As they swept down into the large bowl at High Wycombe, Wetherby sighed, cutting short his account of a particularly happy holiday spent sailing around The Needles. “How did you know Tom would be there?” he asked.

“I can't say I knew,” said Liz. “It was just a hunch.”

Wetherby gave a small snort. “I have to say your hunches are better than most of the rational analysis I receive.”

It was a compliment, but Liz couldn't help feeling that luck had played as large a role as prescience. And what if Tom hadn't slipped? She felt in her bones that he would have got away.

Wetherby seemed to read her thoughts. “Where do you think Tom was going to go?”

Liz gazed at a golf course carved out of the side of a hill, and thought about this. Presumably Tom would have left the country, and gone on the run abroad. But where? It was not as if Tom had had some cause or place to defect to—he wouldn't have gone unnoticed for forty-eight hours in Northern Ireland and, in any case, the IRA wouldn't want him anywhere near their newly peaceful selves.

“Tom spoke fluent Arabic,” she said at last, “so conceivably he would have tried to slip into one of the Middle Eastern countries, and carve out some sort of new career for himself with a new identity.”

“He'd have run the risk of being spotted. It's a small world—Westerners in the Arab world.”

“Perhaps he'd have gone to New York,” said Liz. “You know, following his father's footsteps. I think there was certainly more he wanted to do.”

“More of the same?” asked Wetherby mildly.

“Who knows? But revenge on some other institution, I think. The newspaper who fired his father. MI6, I would imagine. Then he'd probably have had another go at us.”

“He'd have had to keep moving, whatever new identity he tried to assume.”

“That's true,” said Liz. “But maybe that would have suited him.”

They were nearing the junction with the M25, and the road signs listed Heathrow, which somehow seemed appropriate for this talk of Tom's plans. “But why did he run in the first place?” she asked rhetorically. “I mean, if he had stayed put, what exactly would have happened to him? Or more precisely, what would we have been able to pin on him? O'Phelan's death wasn't solved—no witness, no fingerprints, no trace of Tom in Belfast. The same with Marzipan. The forensic investigation found absolutely nothing to point towards his killer.”

Wetherby smiled wistfully. “I see your reasoning, but I think you are missing the point. Tom fled because Tom wanted us to know.”

“But why? What difference would that make?”

“To Tom,” said Wetherby patiently, “all the difference in the world. For Tom, the point was to humiliate us. He wanted us to be in his control. He wanted us to feel powerless and small. Helpless actually.”

“Like his father must have felt,” murmured Liz.

“I suppose,” said Wetherby. “But my point is, Tom's motives weren't political. If they had been, the detonators would have worked.”

“And he wouldn't have made the phone call.”

“Quite. He didn't want to kill dozens of people. He just wanted us to know he could have. And he would have wanted to show us that again and again, each time probably killing one or two people who got in his way—like Marzipan. The irony is, he probably would have ended up killing as many people as he would have today with a bomb.” Wetherby shook his head in dismayed wonder.

“So was he simply mad?” asked Liz.

“We'll never know now,” said Wetherby. “What we do know is that he wasn't who we thought he was.”