The Lucifer Network (7 page)

‘Of course. We'll be as quick as we can.'

‘Sorry about this,' Sam mumbled as he followed Denise Corby towards the sleeping end of the room.

When the woman started fingering the bedclothes, Julie felt sick. She watched her pillow and mattress being checked, then saw the hands feeling through the sheets and the duvet.
God!
What did they think she was up to?

Sam opened the top drawer of the chest.

‘Hang on a minute,' Julie scowled. ‘I thought you said you were a businessman?'

‘That's right.' Sam smiled uncomfortably. He'd moved without thinking.

‘Then how come you're involving yourself in all this police-state activity?'

‘Just trying to hurry things along,' he rejoined sheepishly. ‘I realise how unpleasant this must be for you.'

Julie wanted to believe him. To feel that
someone
here was on her side. But when he began his search of the
chest by putting his hands in amongst her underwear she angrily turned her head away. The two were a pair. As bad as each other.

Sam hesitated. The girl was right to be incensed at what they were doing, but it was a job and he couldn't afford sympathy. He pushed aside tights, pants and bras to see if they concealed anything.

They did. An opened packet of fruit-flavoured condoms.

He glanced towards the girl again, just as she spun back to face him. Her glare warned him that passing comment on his little discovery wouldn't be wise. He moved quickly on to the next level – pullovers and T-shirts – idly wondering whether she had a regular lover or if the prophylactics were for chance encounters.

The bottom drawer was empty. He closed it and turned his attention to the wardrobe. A couple of pairs of trousers dangled next to a skimpy black dress. The clothes smelled of cigar smoke. On the floor were some trainers and a Chinese lacquer box. He took it out and set it down on top of the chest. When he opened the lid music tinkled. Swan Lake.

Suddenly Julie propelled herself towards him. ‘That's private,' she snapped. She grabbed the box from him and banged the lid down. The music stopped.

‘We'll need to see inside,' he told her apologetically.

‘
We,
' she mimicked. ‘Some
businessman.
'

‘Please don't be difficult.'

‘I said it's private,' she repeated. This whole process was beginning to feel like rape.

‘Tell you what,' he suggested gently, ‘why don't
you
take the stuff out while I watch? It's a nice box, by the way.'

‘No it's not,' she retorted. ‘It's cheap tat. But my dad gave it to me for my twelfth birthday . . .'

‘Then I can understand why it matters so much to you.'

Julie had been given it full of emeralds, but she wasn't going to tell
them
that. The stones weren't worth anything. Chippings from the mines her father had said, but to her they'd been jewels worthy of a princess. Today they were in a muslin bag at her mum's house for Liam to play with.

‘Please,' Sam pressed. ‘It's important.'

After a few more moments she relented. Despite her certainty by now that he worked for the same organisation as the Corby woman, he had a totally different way about him. It was his eyes. There was a hazel softness about them that made her think of old cardigans.

As she opened the lid, the music tinkled again, imperfectly. Some of the notes were broken through excessive use. She took out the photographs and old letters that were faded with age, then replaced them in the box one by one as if dealing cards. One of the envelopes looked thicker than the others.

‘May I?' He reached in to take it.

‘That letter's years old.'

She was right. The Zambian postmark said 1989.

‘From your father?'

‘Yes. He sent it to me when I went to college. He wrote to say how proud he was.'

Sam checked it cursorily then dropped the letter back in the box. ‘What did you study?'

‘Biology.'

‘Of course. Hence your work.'

The last items were snapshots which she replaced in rapid succession, as if wanting to gloss over the years they represented.

‘Who's that?' Sam pointed to a picture of a young man with long dark hair and a leather jacket.

‘Liam's father,' she told him curtly. ‘Brendan.'

‘Not still around?'

‘No.'

‘There's someone else?' he asked idly. ‘Some other bloke?'

‘Mind your own business.'

Sam watched her close the box. As she bent down to replace it on the floor of the wardrobe, her shoulder-length hair fell forward to reveal a neck as slender as a child's. Creamy white skin with soft, cirrus cloud tufts at the nape. He was in love.

He looked up to find Denise glaring, as if she'd caught him doing something disgusting behind the bike sheds. She marched over to them, questioning Julie about whether her father had been in the habit of leaving papers at her mother's place.

‘For safekeeping. Legal documents. That sort of thing.'

‘Never seen any. At the bank, maybe. He had an account at Barclays in Ipswich.'

‘But there might be letters at the house in Woodbridge, even if you've never seen them?'

‘It's possible,' Julie wavered, dreading going through a repeat performance of this.

‘We'd like you to accompany us there,' Corby announced. ‘To Woodbridge.'

‘What,
now
?' Julie turned to Sam, hoping to play him off against the woman, but he averted his eyes. ‘I'll need to ring the lab,' she stated testily. ‘I don't have a phone here, but there's a callbox on the corner.'

‘You can ring from the car, if you like,' Sam told her, pleased to be having her company for a little longer. ‘I'll lend you my mobile.'

Julie rubbed her temples. ‘Hang on a minute. It's the weekend coming up. I'll be staying on at Woodbridge, which means packing a bag.'

‘Five minutes long enough for you?' Denise offered.

‘I suppose.'

‘We'll wait outside in the car.'

As they emerged from the house, a black teenager was pushing a buggy along the cracked pavement with a grizzling child in it. She didn't look up. Denise unlocked the Vectra and they sat inside.

‘Better get their mail intercepted from tomorrow,' she fretted. ‘But what a waste of time. There is no red mercury, Sam.'

He didn't reply. There
was
a point to it all. Because whatever Harry Jackman had been trading in, it had put him in fear of his life.

IT WAS JUST
before midnight when Sam paid off the cab a few hundred yards from his rented flat overlooking the river at Brentford. He never let a taxi drive him right up to the door. These days he was super-conscious of security after having to move from his old home down the river because of the keen interest shown in him by a hit squad. The vehicle swung in a U-turn back towards central London where Denise Corby had dropped him twenty-five minutes earlier. As the head office woman had predicted, the visit to Woodbridge had proved a waste of time.

The house where Harry Jackman's first wife lived was in a recently converted sailmaker's loft on the Deben estuary, an upmarket development with most of the apartments owned by weekenders. They'd found no letters there relating to red mercury, a pair of words as meaningless to Julie's mother as they'd been to Julie herself.

The Jackman home had been modest in size, three bedrooms, a decent living room, a playroom and a kitchen. Seven-year-old Liam had had an attractive, curly-haired wildness about him. He'd flung himself at his mother as soon as she opened the front door and refused to leave her in peace until she settled on the sofa
and read him a story. Sam had liked the way Julie had been with the boy. They'd shared a sense of belonging. Of being integral to each other's life. Sam had felt pangs of jealousy watching them. They had something he didn't.

Mrs Maeve Jackman had the same wide cheekbones as her daughter. With the docility of a woman well used to having her life messed about, she'd shown them around her home, letting them delve into anything they wanted. She'd behaved with a patent honesty which neither Sam nor Denise Corby had been inclined to doubt. If Harry Jackman had written them a letter explaining red mercury, then it was still in the post.

There'd been rain in the last few hours and the Brentford air smelled of it. He could see the vaulted roof of the apartment block where he lived, towering over a pub at a bend in the road. He pulled the phone from his pocket and dialled the number of his flat. The answerphone voice that cut in was not his. Security had prepared the tape for him, rapper style, complete with funky music. Sam pressed four numbers in quick succession and the tape stopped. He heard a hum and then a digitised voice telling him the intruder alarm had detected no motion in the flat since the day he left it nearly a week ago. He put the phone away, walked on briskly and let himself into the building.

The plane from Lusaka had been full last night and he'd found it hard to sleep. By now he was dog tired. He dumped his suitcase on the floor of his bedroom, deciding to wait until the morning before unpacking it.

A drink was what he needed most urgently. He opened the cocktail cabinet that was an integral part of the rented flat's furnishings, scowling as it struck up a tune. One day when he found the time, he would work out how to kill it. He poured himself a good measure of whisky and water, then took the tumbler to the
picture window overlooking the river. The apartment block was just upstream from Kew Bridge. Directly below it, cormorants nested. Beyond the far bank lay the botanical gardens. The residence had been designed for the smart and the well-heeled and he felt out of place in it. He'd moved here two months ago because of its security arrangements – electronic gates and security guards. For the past couple of years there'd been many changes of address for him as he'd kept ahead of those intent on killing him. He tossed back the whisky and poured himself another. Two shots would be enough to put him to sleep.

He switched on Sky News, just to make sure the world hadn't come to an end while he'd been chasing phantoms in Suffolk. A tedious piece about some spat in the House of Commons was followed by a report on Kosovo. He sat down to watch. The newscaster revealed new UN figures estimating that 300,000 Kosovars had been driven from their homes by the Serbs' summer offensive and had taken refuge in the mountains. The video showed wide-eyed children and weeping grannies. He pitied them. There'd be no quick solution to their problems.

The report turned its focus to one ethnic Albanian family that had decided to seek a better life outside their homeland. Sky would be following their progress, the reporter declared, as they searched for asylum in western Europe. Sam winced. Good TV, pulling at the heartstrings, but he hated the kind of journalism that flipped the minds of politicians, driving them to react with emotion rather than sense.

The phone rang, startling him. He looked at his watch. It was well after midnight. He wasn't used to calls this late, not since the days of Chrissie, when she would ring in the middle of the night to say she'd escaped from her husband again and wanted to share his bed for a couple
of hours. He switched off the TV and snatched up the receiver.

‘Yes?'

‘Sorry about the late hour.' Sam recognised the Ulster growl of his controller. ‘But I understand from our mutual friend that you've only just got back.' The diligent Denise Corby had reported in already.

‘What's up?' He could tell from the background noise that Waddell was in his car.

‘We need to talk.'

‘In the morning?'

‘No. Right now. You know where.'

‘Well, yes.' They had a rota of locations for short-notice meetings. ‘You sure it can't wait?' Stupid question.

‘Absolutely. See you there in five.'

‘If you say so.'

Sam crossed the wood-block floor to the window again, wondering. He guessed that some new mission must have come up. A flight back to Africa first thing in the morning, with Jackman's red mercury being left to the Vauxhall Cross pen-pushers to follow up – if they bothered.

Outside, the night sky was clear. A half-moon cast a silvery reflection on the water. The aircraft which at peak times filed past every ninety seconds on their way into Heathrow had stopped for a few hours to let those on the flight path sleep. Sam finished his whisky and patted his trouser pocket for his keys. He switched on the TV again, pushing the button for channel O, the security camera concealed outside his front door. It showed the landing to be empty.

He took the lift to the underground garage, and unlocked his Mondeo estate. His inclination was for older, more characterful machines, but the 1984 Mercedes
which he'd owned for many years had had to be sold, along with his share in a 31-foot Moody sloop and several other trappings of his former life. All in the interests of preventing the Odessa mafiya picking up his trail.

At the garage exit gate he swiped a security card and the pole lifted. The Kew Gardens car park which was this week's meeting place was a couple of minutes away, just the other side of the river. The traffic over Kew Bridge was light but fast moving. He stuck himself in the right-hand lane with his indicator going, praying that the nocturnal boy racers who touched sixty over the bridge would spot him in time before running into his boot. If the cops breathalysed him it would be he who got the blame.

He turned onto Kew Green past the beautifully preserved Georgian houses, then hooked right into the lane running parallel to the river which ended in a large parking area for visitors to the Gardens. Packed during the day in the summer, there were just two cars there now. Lovers or dog-walkers, he decided. He drove to the far end, turned the headlamps towards the river and switched off.