“I’ve heard those rumours too,” Kit said. “All lies.”
“And if I did offer Alfie help, it would be immunity from what?”
“General wickedness, I imagine…Unless you know something I don’t.”
“So he didn’t knife de Valois?”
“No,” said Kit. “He didn’t.”
The Brigadier sighed. “I was afraid of that. You do realise, don’t you, that your prints are all over that blade?”
“Quite possibly,” said Kit.
“Anyway,” the old woman said, “let’s get back to Alfie. What can he give me?”
“Something to upset the Met…”
“Really?”
Kit grinned. It was a tired grin, one that barely made it onto his face but it was still a grin. He felt it catch the side of his mouth like a hook setting. “Thought that would interest you,” he said. “Armand de Valois was paying Sergeant Samson in women as well as cash for information…”
Brigadier Miles laughed.
“It gets better,” Kit added. “The Sergeant and Ben Flyte were a team. In fact, I’d bet it was Sergeant Samson who told Flyte that de Valois was dead, right after that shooting in Germany. I can see the attraction. All that heroin with no owner. What’s a crooked cop to do? Only, Armand wasn’t dead. A bit like Ben Flyte.”
“Flyte?”
“Last seen in South London, I believe…sometime yesterday.”
He had the Brigadier’s attention, the hook set as firmly into her mouth as it was set in his.
“What you’ve got,” said Kit, “is a murdered terrorist, and a society drug dealer as your chief suspect—and providing Alfie talks—a currently suspended officer from a South London drugs squad who’s the only known connection between the two. If I were you, I’d offer Alfie anything he wants.”
“I’m going to make some calls,” said the Brigadier. “Give me a number where I can call you back.”
“I need a favour in return.”
“A favour?”
“The name behind a construction company in Tokyo.”
Silence greeted this request. A handful of seconds of static and doubt. And then the Brigadier was back. “And how do I get that for you?”
“You must have friends,” said Kit.
“Not in Tokyo,” said Brigadier Miles.
“People like you,” Kit said, “have friends everywhere.”
CHAPTER 57 — Monday Morning, 2 July
All of the rooms at Herberg Statholder had double beds, their own glass-topped vanity tables, satellite television, discreet minibars, music systems, and wireless internet. Laptops were provided for guests who forgot to bring their own.
Meals could be served at any time of day or night and in any place, although the sky café apparently offered unrivalled views across the slate roofs of Amsterdam, and all guests got preferential booking at a Michelin-starred brasserie less than three minutes’ walk from the hotel.
The Herberg Statholder had money. It had money because its guests had money and matching expectations. Herberg Statholder pulled off that difficult trick of offering the expensively shabby and casually exclusive. Although a wooden panel in the lift was cracked, the brass fittings were hand-polished and the lift’s single picture was signed and numbered and came from one of Chagall’s shorter runs.
Kit took the lift alone because Sophie refused to accompany him, her anger so obvious that he began to wonder if it was with Mary rather than him.
Room 12.
Herberg Statholder avoided numbering its rooms according to floor. With only twelve bedrooms such fussiness was irrelevant. The narrow corridor onto which Kit’s lift opened led to the Sky Café in one direction, and to three bedrooms in the other: servants’ quarters, made fashionable by their rooftop view and the tectonic shifts of history.
“Come in…”
He would have known the voice anywhere. Kit was still wondering what to say when Mary pulled herself up and adjusted the pillows behind her head.
“Long time,” she said.
He nodded.
“I didn’t mean you to find me,” said Mary, then added, “Sophie called me, while you were on the way up. You read more into my card than was there.”
“No,” Kit said. “I didn’t.”
She looked at him.
“Why send it then?” demanded Kit. “At least, why that card and those words?”
“To hurt you,” Mary said. “So you knew what really happened. I was tying up my life’s loose ends and you were one of them.” Her window was open on the other side of the bed, a vase of orchids stood on the vanity table and an open copy of Vanity Fair lay discarded on the floor. It made no difference. The room reeked of illness.
“Sit down,” said Mary, and that was when Kit realised he was still standing in her doorway.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A mistake, we shared needles. Ben was in remission and I didn’t even know he was ill. I came apart in a matter of months.” She nodded towards a chair. “Sit,” she said.
A child could be heard outside, chattering excitedly about nothing very much. A bicycle went past in need of oiling. A woman talked to herself, or on the phone. “You hear all that?” said Mary, indicating her open window.
He nodded.
“It’s called life. That’s what I’m leaving behind.”
“I don’t suppose,” said Kit, when he’d listened some more to the noises outside and seen Mary smile, “there’s much point in my asking why you staged a fake suicide?”
“You don’t know?”
“How would I?”
“Because you always boasted you knew me better than I knew myself.”
Kit shrugged. “I must have been lying.”
Mary’s laugh was thin. “Take a guess,” she said.
“You were escaping Armand de Valois.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because the man wanted his heroin back.”
“My choice had nothing to do with Ben,” she said, sitting back. “Or that dealer of his. Anyway, I couldn’t have told de Valois where his drugs were because I didn’t bloody know.”
“If Ben wasn’t the reason?”
“Oh God,” said Mary, “work it out.”
Sitting on a chair, beside a bed in a room in the attic of an absurdly over-priced hotel in Amsterdam, Kit did. It was a very Mary reason.
“You couldn’t stand Pat and Kate watching you die.”
She nodded.
“You wanted to spare them the pain.”
Mary laughed, hard enough to set her coughing again. When Kit patted her back he felt mostly bone. “Oh God,” she said, catching her breath. “All that black leather and cynicism and fucked-up back history. And you’ve still got a heart of pure marshmallow. You’ve seen how my father is. You’ve seen how my mother fusses. I wanted to spare me the pain.”
They sat in silence, with a warm wind carrying sounds and a slight sourness from the canal through Mary’s open window. The orchids were new, the paper open on her bed was that day’s issue. Someone was obviously looking after her.
“Anyway,” said Mary, into the silence. “Enough about me. Tell me about you. Are you married? What’s Tokyo like as a place to live? Do you have kids?”
There was no easy answer to any of those. So Kit told her about Neku instead. About how cos-play dressed and how his bar had been a drinking club for bozozoku. And how he’d finally worked out the reason he liked Tokyo so much was that everyone spent most of their time pretending to be someone else.
“You met this child on the street?”
“In a Roppongi doorway. I gave her coffee. She cried.”
“And now you’ve got her at the flat in London?”
“It’s not like that,” said Kit, explaining what it was like, as Mary listened intently or asked the occasional question, until she had what she needed to know.
“So you’re using this girl to repay a debt you owe me?”
Kit nodded.
“I can live with that,” she said.