‘Dunno, man, he took off. Cops wanted to talk to him, but Harry was gone.’
‘I don’t blame him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No point trying his door?’
‘The place is picked clean. Cops didn’t put a lock on it, so kids went in and ripped off everything. We had to chase them off, too.’
I nodded, though suspecting that the bulk of Harry’s goods were now sitting in a pile in the flat above his.
‘Thanks for helping him out,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ he shrugged, ‘what are neighbours for, right?’
Back in my room, I lay on the bed and read the Disciples of Love? project. Eleanor Ricks had been planning little less than an assassination of her own. The cult had its roots in the Pacific north-west of the USA, an area I knew, but its branches stretched all around the world. There were more than a dozen communes in Europe, but only one in Great Britain. Prendergast’s daughter had actually belonged to a commune in south-west France, but the focus of Ricks’s investigation was the British enclave on the Scottish west coast.
According to some notes added at the back of the file, she’d twice visited Scotland, but was planning a much longer visit once she’d completed what she called her ‘primary research’. Only she’d never been allowed to finish that research.
The funding of the sect seemed to be the key. So long as no one would explain it, you could guess any way you liked: drugs, prostitution, blackmail, coercion. There were press cuttings in the file referring to stories about other cults, not just the Branch Davidian in Texas but the Children of God in Argentina and some Southern Baptist splinter groups in Louisiana and Alabama. As far as I could see, cults in general provided a useful service: they kept the arms dealers in business. Koresh’s group in Waco had stockpiled enough weapons for Armageddon and beyond. I’d visited Texas. To buy a gun, any gun, all you needed was a state driver’s licence and a form you completed yourself stating you’d never been in an asylum and you weren’t a drug addict. They have about four guns in Texas for every man, woman and child. And those are the legal ones. I knew there were plenty of gun dealers who didn’t require any ID from their buyers, just a wad of cash. I’d once bought a night-vision scope from a man with a military haircut after I got talking to him in a bar in Lubbock. I paid half the market price. It was the only good thing that happened to me in Lubbock, until I met Spike. Spike was, Max and Bel apart, the closest thing I had to a friend in the whole overpopulated world.
And Spike was crazy, gun crazy.
Bel gave her knock and came into my room. She was red-cheeked as she flopped on to the bed beside me.
‘I must’ve walked for miles,’ she said. ‘How did it go?’
‘I don’t think we can hang around much longer.’
‘Well then, that makes it easy.’
‘What do you mean?’
She rolled on to her side and propped her head on one hand. ‘I’ve just spent an hour in a café reading through the file.’ She nodded at my copy. ‘And the way I see it, the Disciples of Love are as likely suspects as anyone.’
‘How would they know what clothes she’d be wearing?’
‘They must have had someone watching her, otherwise they couldn’t have compiled all that information they gave you. Maybe the watcher spotted that she wore similar clothes every day, or every interview she did.’
Yes, I’d thought of that myself. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Look,’ said Bel, ‘there’s the jealous husband, the misunderstood teenage son, the producer who wanted to jump into bed with her, the lawyer who might have been just behind him in the queue.’
It was true that the solicitor, Geoffrey Johns, had professed a more than merely professional interest in Eleanor Ricks when we’d talked to him.
‘So we’ve got a lot of possible paymasters,’ I said.
‘Agreed, but none as strong as the Disciples of Love. Look at what she was saying about them. I mean, from those American press clippings these aren’t people to toy with.’
Bel had another point. The Disciples of Love had been in trouble in the USA after a journalist had been beaten up and another pummelled with his own camera.
‘We don’t know they’d go as far as assassination.’
‘We don’t know they wouldn’t. Besides, there’s my final point.’
I smiled. So far, we’d been thinking along such similar lines that I knew what was coming.
‘The need to get out of London,’ I said. Bel nodded agreement.
‘We’ve got two choices,’ she said. ‘We either wait it out here until Shattuck comes back, since he’s the only one who can tell us for sure who hired you. Or we scarper. We can always come back later, and meantime we could be doing something useful like checking on the Disciples of Love.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ I said. ‘And I can always drop you off at Max’s on the way.’
‘What?’ She sat up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Bel, I needed you here to give me some cover. I don’t need any cover in Scotland.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do. They’re not combing the streets for an assassin up there.’
‘But there’s this man Hoffer. If he’s figured things out this far, what’s to stop him going to Scotland?’
‘What if he does? Are you going to shield me from him?’
I was smiling, but she wasn’t. With teeth gritted she started to thump my arms. ‘You’re not leaving me behind, Weston!’
‘Bel, see sense, will you?’
‘No, I won’t.’ She was still thumping me. ‘I’m going with you!’
I got off the bed and rubbed my arms. Bel put a hand to her mouth.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I forgot! Michael, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. There’ll be bruises maybe, but that’s all.’
‘Christ, I’m sorry, I forgot all about...’ She got off the bed and hugged me.
‘Hey, not too hard,’ I said. I was laughing, but when I looked at Bel she had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m a haemophiliac, not a paper bag. I won’t burst.’
She smiled at last, then embraced me again.
‘I’m coming with you,’ she said. I kissed both her eyes, tasting salt from her lashes.
‘We’ll talk to Max,’ I said.
13
‘Come in, Mr... ah...’
‘Hoffer.’
‘Absolutely. Take a seat, won’t you?’
Geoffrey Johns’s office was everything Hoffer loathed and loved about England. It was old-fashioned, a bit dusty, and fairly reeked of centuries of history and family and tradition. There was something upright and solemn and confidential about it. You couldn’t imagine Johns in red braces and Gekko-slick hair, doing billion-dollar deals on the telephone. He was more father-confessor than lawyer, and though he wasn’t so old, he put on a good act of being wise, benign and endearingly fuddled. Like making Hoffer introduce himself, even though he knew damn fine who he was. Hoffer wanted to flick the man’s half-moon glasses into the wastebin and slap him on the head, try to wake him up. The twentieth century was drawing to a close, and Geoffrey Johns was still working in the Dickens industry.
‘Now then, Mr... ah... Hoffer.’ He’d been shuffling some papers on his desk. They were little more than a stage-prop, so Hoffer bided his time, sitting down and smiling, arms folded. The solicitor looked up at him. ‘Some tea perhaps? Or coffee, I believe you Americans prefer coffee.’
‘We prefer, Mr Johns, to cut through all the shit and get down to business.’
Johns didn’t peer through his spectacles at Hoffer, he dropped his head and peered over them. ‘There are courtesies to be observed, Mr Hoffer. Mrs Ricks’s family is still in mourning. I myself am still in a state of some shock.’