The Lucifer Network (6 page)

Julie nodded. ‘Of course.'

Corby straightened her back and cleared her throat. ‘First, if you don't mind, I'd like to know a little bit more about your relationship with your father.'

Sam raised his eyebrows, surprised by Corby's indirect
approach. As far as he was concerned there was only one question that needed asking.

Julie recoiled. The big notebook. The inquisitorial stare. Suddenly this was an interrogation. ‘How d'you mean?'

‘Well, with him living in Africa and you in England, you can't have seen each other very often,' Corby continued.

‘No. We didn't.' That much was obvious.

‘You were pretty young when your parents' marriage broke up.'

‘I was two.'

‘So you would hardly have known him when you were small. How often did you actually see him?'

Julie wondered why this could possibly matter. ‘I don't know. Once a year, perhaps.'

‘You must have resented his abandoning you and your mother,' Corby suggested, in a ham-fisted attempt at being sympathetic.

Julie bristled. ‘That's hardly any of your business.'

Sam wondered if departmental budget cuts had eaten into interview training for SIS desk officers.

‘It's just that your father gave my colleague here the impression that you and he were really close,' Corby explained, steaming on regardless. ‘I wondered if that's the way
you
saw it, that's all.'

Close? How could one be truly close to someone who was hardly ever there when you needed them? Julie squared her shoulders and directed her response at Sam.

‘What
exactly
did dad say about me when he was dying?'

‘He said he thought you were great,' Sam soothed, finessing the truth. ‘I think he loved you very much.'

The tears came back. Julie turned away. ‘Well . . .' she sniffed. She didn't want to talk about it, yet in a sense she
did. ‘People show their love in different ways, I suppose. His was mostly with a chequebook.'

Denise Corby hunched forward. ‘Meaning?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' she floundered, wishing she hadn't got into this. ‘Meaning that I may not have seen him very often, but he did pay for me to go to a nice school. He funded me through university and . . . and he bailed me out when I was having personal problems.' The last part spilled out before she'd thought to stop herself.

‘Personal problems?' Corby prodded. ‘Would that have been to do with your becoming a single mother?'

Julie jerked bolt upright. ‘You know about Liam?'

‘It's on the file.'

Sam raised his eyes to the ceiling.

For the first time Julie began to wonder exactly who these people were. A chilly finger ran down her back, as if some unseen presence was warning her to take care. She was recalling a late night conversation with her father on his last visit home. Talk of his having got involved with MI6, saying they were people he didn't trust. He'd been rambling and she'd paid no heed to his words. But she vaguely remembered mention of letters he'd written about MI6, to be posted if something happened to him.

‘How old would Liam be now?' Corby asked, softening her tone.

‘Seven.'

‘And your father helped with the boy. Financially?'

Again Julie wondered why it mattered. She hesitated, thought carefully, then told herself that she really had nothing to hide when it came to her son.

‘Liam was a kind of catalyst for our family,' she explained. ‘In a way, his birth brought my father back into my life. The bloke I'd been having a relationship with had dumped me, you see. In the same way that Dad had dumped my mother twenty years earlier.'

‘History repeating itself,' Corby noted.

‘That's what he felt. That he'd passed his own bad judgement about relationships on to me. There was more contact after that – letters, phone calls. And there'd been almost none before.'

‘And in recent years?' Corby pressed. ‘The letters continued? He was still writing you cheques?'

Julie bristled. ‘Look, I earn my own living, right?' She snatched the spectacles from the table and put them back on. ‘What
is
the point of all this?'

‘I'm simply trying to establish how close you two were,' Corby pleaded. ‘In order to judge how much you'd have known about his business activities.'

‘Nothing,' Julie insisted. ‘He never talked to me about his work.'

Denise Corby glanced at Sam as if to say
I told
you
so.
He took it as a cue to intervene.

‘Julie . . . That evening I spent with your father, he had something on his mind.' Sam spoke gently. If she knew anything it would need to be coaxed from her. ‘He hinted at it during dinner. Some business transaction he'd done that was troubling him. After he was shot he started telling me about it, but didn't get far. He was fading fast. But the very last thing he said was that
you
knew about it.'

‘
What?
' Julie shivered, sensing that finger down her spine again. ‘What was I supposed to know about?'

‘Something to do with
red
mercury,
' Corby interjected.

‘What the hell's that?'

Sam sensed the girl's bafflement was genuine.

‘Your father never talked to you about it?' Corby pressed.

‘Never.'

‘And he hasn't written to you about it recently?' Sam asked. ‘He told me he'd prepared letters to be posted in
the event of something happening to him. They haven't come your way?'

Julie frowned. ‘Certainly not. Nothing like that at all.'

Sam sat back, arms folded, suddenly fearing he'd got it wrong.

‘What
is
red mercury?' Julie asked, looking from one face to the other.

By the time Denise Corby finished explaining, Julie had understood precisely why these people had come hotfoot to see her.

‘I can assure you I know nothing about it,' she repeated, looking hard at Sam.

He found her certainty puzzling. Jackman had been so definite that ‘Julie knew'. All at once it dawned on him. The gun-runner must have meant she
would
know very soon. Because after he'd died a letter would be in the post to her. Posted from where? From Zambia might take an age. But if it was from London then it could have already arrived.

‘Had the postman been before you left home this morning?' he asked.

Julie shook her head. ‘He comes mid-morning.'

‘You see I think your father
had
written to you about red mercury,' Sam suggested. ‘Very recently. One of those letters that were to be sent after his death.'

‘I doubt it. I told you. He never wrote about business,' Julie insisted.

Denise Corby cleared her throat. ‘Nonetheless we'd better go back home with you in case it arrived this morning,' she announced, retaking control. ‘You share a flat or live alone?'

‘It's just a room,' Julie protested. ‘In a grotty part of Acton. You can't seriously want to go there.'

Corby nodded.

‘Just to see if the postman's brought anything? I can ring you this evening after work.'

‘Please, Miss Jackman. It's in the national interest that you co-operate.'

National
interest.
Julie shivered. She felt certain by now that these people were to do with intelligence. ‘I'll . . . I'll have to see if the lab can spare me,' she whispered, standing up.

‘Do it now, please. We'll wait by the main door until you've got it sorted.'

Out in the corridor she hurried along to her own office. In reality she was playing for time. There'd be no problem about getting away for a couple of hours. What concerned her was the
real
reason these people had come. It had suddenly occurred to her that red mercury could be a red
herring.

Her father had been drunk when he'd ranted about the untrustworthiness of MI6 a few months ago, and at the time she'd dismissed it as paranoia. But supposing it wasn't? What if her father had been on the point of exposing some of their dirty tricks when he died? What if
they'd
killed him? To silence him . . .

‘Oh God . . .' Her mind was running away with itself.

Suppose a letter
had
arrived that morning? Her father relying on her to expose the dirt he'd been stopped from revealing.

She hovered by the door to her office, torn as to where her duty lay. The law-abiding half of her character told her she should assist these agents of the government. But the stronger half said that somehow she had to make damned sure they didn't get their hands on anything her father might have sent her.

DENISE CORBY DROVE
the Vectra west through the lunchtime traffic with Sam beside her in the front and their reluctant passenger in the back. Sam felt his neck prickling. The girl was no fool and he realised she was suspicious of them. She was different from what he'd imagined. He'd expected a creature with Harry Jackman's deviousness, yet he felt she'd been open with them so far. He cautioned himself not to judge her too kindly, however. He was attracted to her. Her compact sensuality and the flashes of feistiness she'd displayed in response to Denise's left-footed questioning had stirred up his hormones. And the tears. He was a sucker for tears.

Denise Corby drove for forty minutes before being directed from the back seat into a particularly dreary west London street.

‘Beggars can't be choosers,' Julie apologised. ‘Anywhere decent in London is prohibitively expensive, especially when you've a child to support. Liam doesn't like it when I buy his clothes at Oxfam.'

‘The trainers are the worst, aren't they?' Denise replied. ‘I've two kids of my own. Where do I stop?'

‘Here on the right. The house with the broken washing
machine out the front. The landlord's been promising to shift it for months.'

Julie's heart hammered as the Vectra pulled up. She had no idea how she was going to handle things if there
was
a letter from her father. She pushed open the car door and hurried towards the house, hoping to get in ahead of them and work some sleight of hand. The Yale lock played up however, and by the time she opened the front door the other two were beside her.

The hall was carpeted in blue cord and on a small, oak table the morning's mail had been laid out neatly by one of the other residents. Julie blocked their view until she was sure there was nothing for her.

‘What did I tell you?' she said, shoulders sagging with relief. ‘You've had a wasted journey.'

‘Which is your flat?' Denise Corby asked, disregarding her remark.

Julie indicated a door at the far end of the hall.

‘We'd like to see it.'

‘I'd rather not. The place is a tip. I wasn't expecting visitors.'

‘We're not fussy.'

‘Well
I
am. Look. You wanted to know if there was a letter. There isn't. If there's one tomorrow or the day after, I'll ring you. Okay?'

‘We'd like to see your flat please.' Denise Corby squared up to her like a rugby player.

Julie responded by jamming her hands onto her hips. ‘Why?'

‘To see if there's a letter from your father,' Corby snapped.

‘Please, Julie,' Sam intervened, fearing the women were about to come to blows. ‘It won't take long.'

Julie gave in – because it was the man who'd asked her, and she liked him. Liked him better than the Corby
woman, anyway. And when men whom she liked asked her to do something, she tended to comply.

The bedsit was long and narrow, two small ground floor rooms knocked together. At one end was the sleeping space with a double bed and rumpled sheets. Julie walked over to it and jerked the duvet up to the pillows to tidy it. Beside the bed stood a wardrobe and a chest of drawers in bargain-basement pine. A panelled-off section in the corner contained a shower and toilet. At the other end of the room was a sitting area with a grey-covered sofa in a window bay facing the street. Halfway along stood a small dining table draped with a plastic cloth. Next to it a tiny kitchen alcove, its draining board stacked with unwashed plates.

Julie stood with her back to the cooker, pushed her spectacles onto the bridge of her nose, then folded her arms.

‘As I told you, I just sleep here,' she repeated, trying to excuse the mess. ‘It's dirt cheap. My money goes on Liam.'

‘You see your little boy every weekend?' Corby asked, with what passed for maternal interest.

‘Yes. And during the week if there's a problem.' Julie told herself to control her anger. She had nothing to hide. She opened a cupboard to see what she could offer in the way of a drink. Nothing. She'd forgotten to shop.

‘I'm afraid I'm out of coffee,' she mumbled.

‘That doesn't matter. We'll just do a quick search.'

‘There isn't a letter,' she told them.

‘Then it won't take long, will it?'

Sam considered that for someone who a few hours ago had been dismissing Harry Jackman's red mercury as ‘delirium', Denise Corby was taking her investigating role remarkably seriously. It was a power thing with her, he decided.

‘You know you've no right to invade my privacy like this,' Julie protested.

‘I could get a warrant very quickly . . .' Corby told her.

Sam winced. It was a lie. A magistrate would probably refuse.

‘God!' Julie's mouth set in a thin angry line. ‘And people think we live in a free country . . .'

‘It's because people make threats to that freedom that we have to act high-handedly at times,' Corby stated primly.

Julie pictured her in court, sitting in a judge's seat with a silly wig on.

‘Then get it over with,' she snapped. ‘And quickly, because my work is important both to me and to the people in the lab, and I want to get back to it.'