Five minutes later she was sitting in Wetherby’s office and Wetherby was smiling his uneven smile. If you didn’t know him, she thought, you might think him a faintly donnish figure. A brogues and bicycle clips sort of man, more at home in some cloistered quadrangle than at the head of a high-tech counter-terrorism initiative. Facing him, but invisible to Liz, were two photographs in leather-look frames.
“What exactly do you think you would establish by going up there?” he asked her.
“At the very least I’d like to eliminate the possibility that there’s a terrorism angle,” said Liz. “The calibre of the weapon worries me, as it obviously does the Norfolk Special Branch, given that they’ve got a man sitting in on the investigation. My gut instinct, bearing in mind Zander’s call, is that Eastman’s had his organisation hijacked in some way.”
Wetherby rolled a dark green pencil thoughtfully between his fingers.
“Do the Special Branch know about Zander’s call?”
“I passed the information on to Bob Morrison in Essex-that’s Zander’s current handler-but there’s a good chance he’s going to sit on it.”
Wetherby nodded. “From our point of view, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing,” he said finally. “Not a bad thing at all. I think you should go up there, have a quiet word with the local Special Branch man-what’s his name?”
“Goss.”
“Have a quiet word with Goss, and see what’s what. Give the impression that you’re interested in the organised crime component, perhaps, and I’ll wait on your word. If you’re not happy I’ll speak to Fane and we’ll move on it straight away. If there isn’t anything there for us, on the other hand… well, it’ll give us something to talk about at the Monday morning meeting. You’re sure Zander isn’t just making the whole thing up?”
“No,” said Liz truthfully. “I’m not sure. He’s the attention-seeking type, and according to Bob Morrison is now gambling, so almost certainly has financial problems. He’s an unreliable agent at every level. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t speaking the truth on this occasion.” She hesitated. “It didn’t sound made up to me. He sounded scared stiff.”
“If that’s your judgement,” said Wetherby, returning the pencil to a stoneware jar that had once held Fortnum and Mason marmalade, “then I agree that you should go. Having said that, there’s only that 7.62 rifle round to suggest that the killing wasn’t the result of a falling-out between drug-dealers. Or a people-smuggling operation gone awry. Perhaps drug-smugglers have started carrying assault rifles. Perhaps Gunter was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw something he shouldn’t have.”
“I hope that’s what happened,” said Liz.
He nodded. “Keep me informed.”
“Don’t I always?”
He looked at her, smiled faintly, and turned away.
15
In the tiny bedroom at the east end of the bungalow, Faraj Mansoor slept in unmoving silence. Was this something he had learned to do? the woman wondered. Was even this aspect of his life subject to control and secrecy? Slung over the bedhead was the black rucksack that he had been carrying when she met him. Would he trust its contents to her? Would he be open with her, and treat her as a partner? Or would he expect her, as a woman, to walk behind him? To behave as his subordinate in all things?
In truth, she didn’t care. The essential thing was that the task should be executed. The woman prided herself on her chameleon nature, her preparedness to be whatever she was required to be at any given moment, and was happy to assume whatever role was required of her. At Takht-i-Suleiman, to begin with at least, the instructors had barely acknowledged her existence, but she hadn’t minded. She had listened, she had learned, and she had obeyed. When they had told her to cook, she had cooked. When they had told her to wash the other recruits’ sweat-stinking combat fatigues, she had carried the baskets uncomplainingly to the wadi, squatted on her haunches, and scrubbed. And when they had tied her eyes with a scarf and told her to field-strip her assault weapon, she had done that too, her fingers dancing fast and fluent over the machined parts whose names she had only ever known in Arabic. She had become a cipher, a selfless instrument of vengeance, a Child of Heaven.
She smiled. Only those who had undergone the experience of initiation knew the fierce joy of self-nullification. Perhaps-inshallah-she would survive this task. Perhaps she would not. God was great.
And in the mean time there were things to do. When he woke Mansoor would want to wash-the smell in the car the night before had been of stale body-odour and vomit-and he would want to eat. The water was heated by a temperamental Ascot which seemed to gasp and die every five minutes-half a box of spent matches lay in the bathroom bin-and the Belling electric stove looked as if it was on its last legs too. The salt air, she guessed, probably shortened the lives of these kind of goods. The fridge whirred noisily but otherwise seemed to work, and after Diane’s departure the day before she had driven into King’s Lynn and stocked up with oven-ready meals from Tesco. Curries, for the most part.
Her name was not Lucy Wharmby, as she had told Diane Munday. But what she was called no longer mattered to her, any more than where she lived. Movement and change were in her blood now, and any kind of permanence was unimaginable.
It hadn’t always been so. In the far beginning, in a past over which a kind of frozen unreality now shimmered, there had been a place called home. A place to which, with the simplicity of a child, she had thought she would always return. She could remember, in great detail, isolated moments from this time. Feeding stale bread to the greedy, snappish geese in the park. Lying in her paddling pool in the tiny south London garden, looking up at the apple tree and pressing her neck downwards on the rim of the pool so that the water rushed out through her hair.
But then the shadows had begun to fall. There was a move from the cosy London house to a cold block in a Midlands university town. Her father’s new teaching job was a prestigious one, but for the bookish seven-year-old it meant permanent separation from her London friends and a hellish new school in which bullying was rife, especially of outsiders.
She was desperately lonely, but said nothing to her parents, because by then she knew from the tense silences and the slammed doors that they had their own problems. Instead, she began to withdraw into herself. Her schoolwork, once sparkling, deteriorated. She developed mysterious stomach pains which kept her at home but which refused to yield to any kind of treatment-conventional or otherwise.
When she was eleven her parents separated. The separation would conclude with their divorce. On the surface the arrangement was amicable. Her parents walked around with fixed smiles on their faces-smiles which didn’t quite reach their eyes-and made a point of telling her that nothing would change. Both, however, quickly took up with new partners.
Their daughter moved between the two households, but kept herself to herself. The mystery stomach pains persisted, further isolating her from her contemporaries. Her periods failed to materialise. One evening she punched her fist through a frosted glass door and had to be given ten stitches in her hand and wrist by a junior houseman at the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital.