“Go on, Guv’nor. It’s free.”
“True, Clissold. Very true. Have you heard from Brian Mudie this morning?”
“What d’you mean, Guv?”
He looked at her wearily. “When he rings you, tell him I want that inventory on the forensic from the bungalow fire ASAP. Everything. Every button, every razor blade, every Kentucky fried chicken bone. And packaging. I particularly want to know about packaging.”
Clissold looked uneasily at her fingers. “As it happens, I have just been speaking to Sergeant Mudie. They’re still making up the inventory…”
“Go on.”
“There was one thing he said…”
“Tell me.”
“When you were a kid, Guv, did they have that stuff called Silly Putty? That bouncy stuff you squeeze and…”
Whitten seemed to sag in his chair. Beneath the strip lighting, his skin was the colour of a corpse’s. “Tell me,” he repeated.
“More than a dozen melted containers, Guv. All empty.”
His eyes met Liz’s. “How much would that make?” he demanded tonelessly.
“Depends on the size of the containers. Enough to flatten this building, though.”
Wendy looked from one to the other of them, mystified.
“C4 explosive,” explained Liz. “Putty’s one of the principal ingredients. The toy shop sort is best.”
“So what’s the target?” Whitten demanded.
“RAF Marwell seems to be the popular favourite right now.”
“You don’t think that, though?”
“I haven’t got a better suggestion,” said Liz. “And we’ve rather run out of time.”
Whitten shook his head. “That lot over there”-he nodded at the Army officers-“think that Mansoor and D’Aubigny are just going to walk slap-bang into one of our search teams. They’re crediting them with no intelligence whatsoever.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps we’re overcomplicating things. Perhaps the two of them are just going to find the largest concentration of people that they can, and…” He made a starburst with his hands. From the Army officers’ table, there was more laughter.
“I told Jim Dunstan,” said Whitten. “I said we wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you.”
Liz shook her head. “Wouldn’t be where? Inside a razor-wired enclosure trying to pretend we know what we’re doing? Waiting for a couple of trigger-happy maniacs who could be anywhere in East Anglia to do us the favour of showing themselves?”
Whitten regarded her in silence. Liz, angry at herself, took an exploratory bite of her toast, but she seemed to have lost all sense of taste. More than anything she wanted to walk out to her car, and leave. Draw a line under the case. Leave it to the police and the Army. She had done all that she could do.
Except that she knew she hadn’t, quite. There was still a single thread, tenuous but nevertheless logical, to be followed. If the D’Aubigny parents thought that their daughter had no connection of any kind with East Anglia, and had never been there, then they would unquestionably have said so. Julian Ledward could huff and puff as loud as he liked, but the fact was that the D’Aubigny parents’ silence had to mean that they knew of a connection. And if this was the case, given that they didn’t have much clue about the path their daughter’s life had taken after she left home, the chances were that it was a connection established before she left home. Which took her-and Liz-back to school, and Garth House.
Go for it, Jude. Find the key. Unlock the door.
“It’s like a bullfight,” said Wendy Clissold.
Liz and Whitten turned to her.
“I went to one once, in Barcelona,” explained Clissold hesitantly. “The bull comes in, and the matador comes in, and everyone knows that… that there’s going to be a death. You dress up, put perfume on, and buy a ticket to watch a death. Then you go home.”
Whitten tapped a cigarette on the plastic tabletop. His eyes were the colour of old beeswax. “Key difference, love. At a bullfight, you’re pretty sure who’s going to be doing the dying.”
57
From the confluence of the Lesser Ouse and the Methwold Fen Relief Drain to West Ford was about three miles as the crow flew, but the towpath distance was closer to four. The going was not uninterruptedly easy, either. There were broken-down stiles to negotiate, stretches hundreds of yards long where the towpath became impassable cattle-trodden marshland, and places where farmers had interrupted the right of way by running barbed-wire fences to the water’s edge. All of these obstacles had to be surmounted or bypassed, and by 10 a.m., despite the cold of the riverbank and the gusty wind, Jean was sweating freely.
They saw several helicopters, but these were far away, swarming like gnats over the dim eastern horizon behind them. None came within five miles of them; above their heads there were only the clouds, racing thinly on the wind. And with every step she and Faraj lengthened the distance between themselves and the search’s epicentre at Marwell.
They passed several people on the riverbank. There were walkers hunched into jackets and coats, there was a pair of elderly fishermen with thermos flasks, keeping a chilly vigil beneath their umbrellas, and there was a blowsy woman in a turquoise windcheater chivvying an elderly Labrador along the towpath. None of them paid Faraj or Jean any attention, preferring to remain enclosed in their private worlds.
Finally, at about quarter to eleven, the edge of the village came into view. The first dozen or so houses passed by the towpath were red-roofed boxes with pseudo-Georgian detailing, part of a late-twentieth-century speculative development. Beyond these, the river narrowed and passed between, on the north side, a stand of mature yews marking the boundary of the churchyard, and on the south side a coppice of rough evergreen woodland bisected by a public footpath.
Jean and Faraj were on the south bank of the Lesser Ouse, and a flight of shallow stone steps led them into this patch of woodland. When Jean thought of it, it was as it had been that summer ten years ago-a place of slanting green light and curling hash smoke. In December, however, there was little magic about it. The path was boggy and littered with bottles and fast-food wrappers, and the trees had a dank, sodden look about them.
But they provided cover, which was all that was necessary at that moment. Beyond the wet trees stood the village cricket ground. By following the path through the woodland it was possible to approach the back of the cricket pavilion, a crumbling 1930s structure resembling a miniature mock-Tudor villa.
There was a rear door through which the pavilion could be entered, secured by a simple lock. It quickly yielded to Jean’s Banque Nationale de Paris credit card, and scrambling into the dimness with the rucksacks, they pulled the door closed behind them. Exhausted by the release of tension, they slumped down on to a wooden bench that ran the length of the back room. Having weighed up the risks, they had agreed that as long as they kept completely silent and showed no lights, they were probably safe in there. If there was a danger, it was that other people might try to break into the place. Kids, perhaps, looking for somewhere to do drugs or have sex. Beyond that, neither of them could think of a reason why anyone would want to go into a cricket pavilion in midwinter.
Jean looked around her. They were in some sort of changing area, lit by two small, high, cobwebbed windows. A line of hooks ran along the wall above the wooden bench, a couple of them still holding limp cricket shirts, and a heavy stoneware sink stood in one corner. Beside the sink a door led into a toilet stall. There was a faint residual smell of damp and linseed oil.
Cautiously, she opened the door to the forward part of the pavilion. This was an open area, wooden-floored, fronted by a locked door and two sets of green-painted shutters covering windows through which players could watch the game. As in the back room two high side windows admitted a thin light to the interior, showing stacked deckchairs and wicker laundry baskets holding pads, bats and batting gloves. On the long wall hung a pair of umpires’ coats and several dusty team photos.