A Sentimental Traitor (37 page)

The assistant at last peeled his eyes away from the magazine. ‘Cash or credit card?’

‘Which do you prefer?’

The young man gave Harry a look that suggested he might have landed from a planet located in the farthest reaches of the solar system, then led him through a clutter of computer bits to the end
of the shop where several machines were lined up on a bench. He spent several minutes outlining the prowess of the most expensive before Harry cut across him.

‘What’s the deal on these?’

‘Six months warranty, labour and parts. So long as you don’t drop it in the bath. Take one with you now and I can do you a deal.’

‘Try before I buy?’

‘Take your pick.’ For the first time the assistant looked curious. ‘You from round here?’

‘Moved in recently,’ Harry muttered, bending over one of the laptops, trying to obscure his face.

The young man shrugged and retreated behind his counter as Harry began manoeuvring with the mouse and tapping at the keyboard.

Jemma had been waiting to hear from Harry, anxious about the progress of his day, reluctant to call him – funerals were rarely the right moment for phones to ring –
but growing ever more anxious as the hours passed without any contact or message. To cover her unease she picked up the cat phone and set once more to her task. She was two-thirds of the way
through her list, well into the economy class, had eliminated almost all of what she had seen as the more obvious possibilities and, although she hated herself for it, was beginning to lose heart.
She was reduced to going through what remained of her list alphabetically, putting any form of judgement to one side, trusting to blind luck. As she made her next call, she wondered why she had
overlooked Farrokh Maneckjee, not put him on her initial list of likely suspects. He was a little on the young side, had no identified occupation. She hoped it hadn’t simply been because of
his Indian background; she was better about that than her father, wasn’t she? But why had Maneckjee been on the flight? There was only one way to find out.

When a woman answered the phone, Jemma slipped into her well-practised script, explaining carefully and slowly how saddened she was to make this call, apologizing for the intrusion, enquiring
about Farrokh, yet the accent of the woman – his mother – was so lilting and deep that Jemma had considerable difficulty in understanding much of what was being said, a struggle made
all the more difficult by the other’s evident emotion. As she spoke about her son, the words came pouring out at incomprehensible speed. Jemma began to lose the flow of what was being said,
until one word hit her that she couldn’t possibly misunderstand.

‘Russia’.

It was there, so eventually he found it. Hidden, elusive, yet nonetheless undeniable. It was almost impossible to hide in a world where the merest detail, real, imagined or
simply manufactured, was captured and computerized. Run a search on Rupert Bunnyrabbit or Patsy Dipstick and something will turn up. The European External Action Service got more than fifty million
hits, but searching out the European Anti-Terrorist Agency was like trying to find butterflies in a desert. Of the entries the search engines did find, many were some years out of date, others
opaque and confusing, many more were from websites that saw conspiracy lurking in every corner and demanded open government. As for Patricia Vaine, there were practically none at all. There were
any number of Vaughans and Vauns and Vanes, but Patricia Vaine found only three direct hits. The first two came from people search directories based in the US which, although they promised to be
interrogating billions of public records, kept timing out and came up with nothing.

Yet the third was all he needed. A brief, formal employment notice, twenty months old, about a woman who was being employed as a senior liaison officer within the European External Action
Service, the mothership of EATA.

He had found her.

Russia. The word kept ringing in her ears. Jemma began dancing around the room of many colours with the cat in her arms, knowing she had found what they had been searching for.
The missing link. The cause of it all. Not the details of it, but enough to know that they were very close to discovering why Speedbird 235 had been ripped from the sky. Yet even as she danced and
rejoiced, her happiness was about to be stripped from her, so savagely that it caused her to cry out in pain. For now her new, vibrant, joyful world had grown altogether too colourful. Lights of
acid ice blue were burning through her window, overpowering even Caitlin’s garish ideas of taste. Outside, on the road below, Jemma saw two patrol cars and many men. Mrs Gracie had done for
her, after all. She knew there was no way out; the premises didn’t have a fire escape and Jemma didn’t do drainpipes. She was lost. She sat on the sofa, cradling Sammi in her lap, in
tears, waiting for what was to come.

Harry’s ear was bothering him. It had once been attacked – cut off, in fact – but the repair work had been superb and it no longer gave him pain. Ever since
the surgery that had sewn it back, his new appendage had revealed an uncanny knack of warning him of approaching danger, growing hot, itching, responding perhaps to some innate inner sense that saw
just that little bit further ahead. It hadn’t bothered him in ages, yet now it was talking to him once more, tingling, warning him. He glanced over his shoulder at the shop assistant; he was
standing at the counter, shuffling, pretending to be engrossed in his magazine, but his eyes kept darting to the door, and then to Harry. When he saw Harry returning his gaze, he blushed and tried
to bury the guilt amongst the pages of tattoos.

Harry knew he had been betrayed. A phone call made while he’d been pursuing his prey across the Internet. He wondered how much time he had left, yet already the answer was screeching to a
halt outside the door. Two police officers jumped out, a male and female, and made straight for the door. There was no time for Harry to run.

By the time they accosted him from behind, Harry was back, bent over his computer.

‘Mr Jones? Mr Harry Jones?’ they demanded, addressing the back of his head.

He hit the delete button and switched off the computer, his back still towards them. ‘You mean Harry Jones, the one they want to question about a murder and violent assault on a woman in
London? Yes, that’s me.’ He stood up. Only then did he turn to face them. His right hand was in his suit pocket. He was clutching a highlighter pen, stretching the cloth. Just as the
barrel of a gun might.

‘You’re kidding!’ the young male constable said.

‘You’re really willing to take that chance? After what I’ve done?’

Harry knew that if the constable laughed he was done for, but instead he was glancing sideways at his colleague.

‘Ron?’ the WPC asked, her voice wavering in uncertainty.

‘There’ll be another squad car here any second,’ Ron insisted, but it seemed from the tic in his lips as though her doubts were becoming infectious.

‘Any second, you say. But until then, there’s just you and me.’

‘Oh, bugger,’ Ron’s colleague cried. Ron was trying to stand tall, firm, but his hand hadn’t moved any nearer the weaponry on his belt.

‘Do you get paid enough for this?’ Harry asked.

And Ron backed off.

‘Back of the shop, no one gets hurt,’ Harry instructed, waving them on with his hidden highlighter, wondering where he’d come up with such a dreadful line. Whatever life he had
to live after this, it would never be as a Hollywood scriptwriter.

Yet they did as they were told, joining the assistant, whose eyes bulged behind his glasses in paralysing confusion. They squeezed themselves tightly into a corner behind the counter.

A traffic warden suddenly appeared outside the window, walking slowly past, inspecting the patrol car. It distracted Ron. And that was when Harry ran.

They weren’t far behind him, once they had scrambled from behind the counter, but Harry needed little time. The hapless Ron had left the keys in the ignition, and Harry was away even as
the wretched man was reaching for the door handle. As he glanced in the mirror Harry saw the policeman almost obliterated by a plume of burnt rubber, twisting in frustration, barking frantically
into his radio. Harry dropped the highlighter onto the seat beside him. He might have laughed out loud like some vaudeville villain, if he hadn’t been thinking of Jemma, and Sloppy, and of
what was to come.

There had been a time, some years before, when Jemma had lost her temper with her mother. Mrs Laing had found a lump on her breast, and done nothing about it for months apart
from sitting at home and praying for it to go away. Now Jemma was doing the same. She could hear the policemen banging at the front door, so ferociously it was sure to bring the elderly lady from
the rear flat to open it. Her own door would be broken down if she didn’t let them in. Her time was almost out.

But it was not gone, not yet. She still had perhaps seconds, and a secret to share. Desperately she grabbed the phone once again.

Harry’s mobile began burbling as he was speeding recklessly along a country road, watching for signs of the inevitable pursuit. ‘I can’t talk now!’ he barked at her.

‘We won’t be able to talk later. I’m just about to be arrested. They’re about to break down the door.’

He almost missed the corner. ‘Jemma!’

‘Shut up and listen! I think I’ve found it. Farrokh Maneckjee is the name, lived in Andover. Worked in Russia. Can you take down his mother’s details?’

‘I’m driving at eighty trying to kill myself.’

‘Then you’d better have a bloody good memory, Jones!’

She gave him the information he would need, while he offered a short prayer of thanks for the ability he’d developed for remembering numbers, like map references, when an error would have
cost him his life. And as he listened, in the background he could hear muffled shouts and banging, like a door being smashed off its hinges.

‘One more thing,’ she shouted above the confusion and noise. ‘Do you think there’s any chance of us getting cells next to each other?’ She was trying to laugh, be
brave, but he couldn’t mistake the tremble of fear in her voice.