The Bell Ringers (16 page)

Link, a short man with a narrow, furtive face, unwrapped his scarf. A
shelf of fine hair was brushed forward over his forehead and he blinked from inside the drained complexion of a night worker. ‘It's the film that was on TV, as you said.'

‘No, you idiot, I mean these sculptures. They were carved in 645 BC, or thereabouts. Astonishingly lifelike aren't they?'

Link shrugged. ‘About the film,' he said.

‘The DVD you've got there is a second- or third-generation copy so . . .'

‘So, we won't be able to tell whether the camcorder wrote all the film to the original disc. You should have emailed it to me or used the post. It would have saved us both a lot of time.' Link looked at him hard. He knew there was something else Kilmartin wanted from him.

‘It's good to see your face, Murray. Good to see you prospering in the private sector.'

Link shrugged. He had been removed from the Technical Department of MI6 after being found guilty of one too many lapses in security. He went on to set up Blink Forensics in East London. ‘Only part of the film was shown in court and on TV,' continued Kilmartin. ‘There's some material at the beginning before the main action. I want you to examine it and see if anything strikes you. We're looking for any known faces and anomalies – anything which tells us more about that afternoon in Cartagena and the death of David Eyam.'

‘You think we killed him?'

Kilmartin gave a shake of the head. ‘You've spent a lot of time analysing films of explosions from the Middle East and Pakistan, Murray. You know what to look for.'

‘It wouldn't be the first time local hoods did our work for us.'

Kilmartin's eyes returned to the herd of gazelle – a male turned its head towards the sound of the king's men who were about to drive the herd into the arms of death – and considered the idea of David Eyam's assassination. ‘The question is whether we believe David Eyam was more of an inconvenience alive, or dead. You could argue that he was more of a threat dead, because he had nothing to lose. A man like Eyam would not go gentle into that good night. He wouldn't take it lying down, Murray.'

‘I'll look at the film over the weekend. Are you in a rush?'

‘Yes.'

‘Right, I'll be getting along then. Where should I send the bill for the analysis?'

‘Of course! I'm sorry. I was forgetting you're in business these days. Would you like me to give you something upfront? Or you can send the account to St Antony's and I will settle up at the end of your work.'

Link looked embarrassed. ‘I'd welcome something now. It'll come to about a thousand pounds – say half.'

Kilmartin moved to a small gallery off the main rooms where there were no other visitors, wrote out a cheque for the full amount and blew on the ink before handing it to him. ‘There was something else, if you wouldn't mind sparing a little more of your time, Murray.'

Link folded the cheque and placed it in his inside pocket. His manner softened. ‘How can I help?'

‘I know none of us is meant to gossip; cross fertilisation between agencies is frowned upon. But we all know things are occasionally shared between the technical departments – the various specialists at the office and with MI5 and GCHQ. You get to know each other, you talk the same language, share your problems.'

‘That's what they chucked me out for.'

‘Yes, I know. But I wonder if you have come across the name SPINDRIFT? Have you ever heard it referred to?'

‘Sounds like a fucking washing powder. No, I haven't.'

Kilmartin persisted. ‘We're both grown-ups, Murray. We're intelligence practitioners – signed the Official Secrets Act. You're not passing anything to the enemy, to the outside. And you should know that I am working at the request of the highest authority.'

‘Then why don't you ask that
high
authority?' said Link.

‘That's not possible, but come on, Murray, your friends and colleagues must have heard of this, surely.'

Link eyed him for a few seconds. ‘What scenario are we talking about?'

Kilmartin had an unreasonable hatred of the word ‘scenario'.
‘Context,'
he said without thinking. ‘I have little sense of the context. But this is something the Joint Intelligence Committee is aware of.'

‘Has it got a label?'

‘What sort of label?'

‘The one that says, “This will burn your fucking face off.” I mean, if I go typing the name into Google it will set off government trip wires; next they'll be ripping my fingernails out before I know it, Mr Kilmartin.'

‘See what you can find out anyway, Murray. Have a word with your friends. It's important.'

‘If you say so; but I'll need paying for the information – properly.'

‘Of course, Murray,' said Kilmartin, his eyes drifting to the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old relief of a lioness speared and crippled, dragging herself through the desert sand.

Kate moved gingerly to the side of the Audi, aware of the smell of petrol. It was much darker in the thicket of hazel and holly where the car had come to rest at an angle. The front had ploughed into the far bank of a ditch with a savage force, reared up then tilted at twenty degrees. There was a good deal of water in the ditch, which perhaps explained why the car had not caught light. She worked her way along the driver's side and, placing a foot on the trunk of a fallen tree in the ditch, looked inside the car. Held by the seat belt, Russell's body sagged over the passenger seat; his head lolled forward and his arms had dropped from the wheel. That struck her as odd. He would surely have tried to control the car until the last moment, unless he had passed out before hitting the brush. There was far less blood than Nock had made out. A lot of mud had come through the smashed windscreen. Russell was cut below his right eye.

She moved round to the passenger side, climbed down into the water and pulled the door open. As she examined the body, her mind replayed his amiable conversation on the way to Dove Cottage. He had spoken about family holidays in Scotland, the outing in June every year to the Opera at Glyndebourne and the annual weekend in France's vineyards with university chums. A creature of habit was the way he apologetically described himself, and she had liked him for that. His face had frozen in a look of mild expectation, almost a smile. Controlling her shock, she reached out and touched his neck with the hand that had shaken his in the cafe a little over twenty-four hours before. Russell was utterly cold. He must have died instantly, though she couldn't see what injury had killed him. Possibly it was the blow to the head from the night before: a
delayed haemorrhage perhaps, which struck suddenly as he left the drive.

She was now aware that she was shaking and had a curious stale taste in her mouth. She stood up and controlled herself, withdrew from the car and went to join Nock in the road. There were no skid marks visible, no signs of any other vehicle being involved; merely evidence that Hugh Russell had swerved on the stony track as he approached the gateway and, rather than slowing down as he met the road, slammed his foot on the accelerator and careened through the stand of hazel on the other side.

Nock gave her a roll-up to smoke.

‘Jesus,' he said.

She blew out the smoke and shivered. ‘Did you hear anything? See anything?'

‘No – my dogs noticed something had happened first. I wouldn't have seen it if the terrier hadn't dived in there.'

‘Where are they?'

‘They took themselves off back to my place.'

‘Oh God,' she said, looking back at the car. ‘Poor Hugh. This is awful.' She was still shaking and she held her hand very tight to stop Nock seeing.

Twenty minutes later the accident investigation team arrived and paced out the likely sequence of events under arc lights. There seemed no good explanation for his bolting across the road like that, and the skid marks on the gravelly incline puzzled them. It was as though he had shot off from a standing start. A pathologist arrived and examined the body in
situ
with a head torch, while murmuring into a digital recorder. When he withdrew his head from the passenger window Kate approached and told him about the injuries Russell had received in the attack at his office. The man listened carefully to her description and asked whether Russell had fallen forward in the attack. She thought not.

‘Then my gut tells me that this man suffered some other kind of trauma. That's what I am feeling.'

Presently the body, wet and drenched in petrol, was removed from the car by two policemen and was laid on a stretcher where the
pathologist examined Russell again. A few minutes later he stood up in the headlights of one of the police cars and called out to the inspector. ‘You should see this. I believe this man was shot. The cut below his eye is a bullet wound.'

The operation to lift the Audi on to a flatbed truck was immediately halted and quarter of an hour later a .22 calibre bullet was found in the roof of the wreckage. That probably meant it had passed through the open window on the driver's side as Hugh Russell approached the road. The skid mark on the gravel marked the spot where he had been hit and his foot came down hard on the accelerator in reaction.

‘I should have seen it before,' said the pathologist, pointing with latex finger to Russell's face for the edification of a group of officers. ‘You see the stretch marks running like tears down the face away from the point of impact. That is always a classic sign of a gunshot. They follow the tension lines in the region of the eyes and the nasolabial folds. A bullet can freeze the face in the victim's most characteristic expression.'

And in this case, thought Kate, it had produced neither agony nor aggression but the straightforward cordiality of a country solicitor.

‘And the exit wound?' asked one policeman. ‘We didn't see any signs of it.'

‘That was because the bullet exited beneath the bandage at the back of the victim's head. It simply lifted one corner of the dressing and continued on its way. The dressing fell back and covered the wound when the body dropped forward.'

A team of three detectives arrived and began to work out the geometry of the attack. The position and angle of the car and the line indicated by the exit and entry wounds and the final position of the bullet led them to believe that the killer had lain in wait about twenty paces below where the car came to rest. A large area was cordoned off so that a minute search could be conducted at first light. Then the site was cleared of people.

Just past nine, Kate drove the Bristol back down the track with a police officer in the passenger seat and Nock in the back. She was now sure that Eyam had been assassinated in Cartagena. The bomb must have been intended for him. He had known the risks, which was why he
had planned his funeral, prepared a will and had taken steps to leave her the dossier. But why go to Colombia, where it would be a simple task for his enemies to disguise his murder? From what Swift had said, there was good reason to believe he'd left the country using a false passport, but then he checked into the hotel using his own name with a credit card in his own name, thus giving anyone looking for him an exact location. It didn't add up, but more than that this was not the kind of mistake the patient and calculating Eyam would make.

Russell presented a different problem to the killers. There was no time to fake an accident, or disguise his murder any other way. He had to be eliminated immediately because he was the one person who knew what was in Eyam's dossier, and they could not allow him to remain alive with that knowledge. The only conclusion to draw was that her last-minute decision to stay at Dove Cottage had saved her life. If she'd left with him, she would certainly have been killed too. She must accept that she was already a target, or would become one the moment they thought she knew the contents of that dossier.

Nock was questioned in the back of a police van parked in the drive, while she made an exhaustive statement to a detective inspector named Jim Newsome. She gave an exact account of her day from the moment Hugh Russell picked her up at the hotel to the discovery of the Audi by Nock. They went back over the funeral and her first meeting with Russell in the cafe. She kept as close to the truth as possible, but there was much she had to omit – her presence in Russell offices, all mention of the documents and of course the child porn she'd found on Eyam's computer. She filled out the day with plenty of detail about exploring the house, her walk and her calls to New York. Newsome nodded a lot and took down notes. He was polite, but she knew that any experienced investigator would sense the omissions soon enough, and Newsome had a hard, proficient air about him. He asked her a lot of questions about her decision to stay overnight at the cottage and let Russell drive back to town when clearly he should not have been at the wheel of a car. She answered that Russell had begged her to give the place a chance before putting it on the market and indeed during the afternoon she had begun to understand what Eyam had seen in Dove Cottage. It was very peaceful, she said.

‘Peaceful but unlucky,' observed Newsome dryly. ‘After all, the place has been associated with two violent deaths in as many months. We must at least consider the possibility of a connection. Can you think of any reason why both men were killed?'

‘I don't see how there can be a connection,' she said.

‘But if there is it would put you in the line of fire, wouldn't it? Because you are the common denominator.'

‘Not in any real sense: Mr Russell was David Eyam's lawyer for a long time before I came on the scene.'

‘But you knew them both, particularly Mr Eyam.'

‘Yes, he was my closest . . . my oldest friend. We hadn't seen much of each other over the last two years.'

Newsome pondered this. ‘And yet he leaves this place to you. Did you know he was going to do that?'