Liz moved forward slowly, taking in the comfortable furnishings. On the desk lay a neat stack of files; she picked up the top one, then showed its label to Peggy who was standing beside her. Fraternal Holdings Q4. This must be Piggott’s office.
The sergeant was pointing to something in the corner of the room. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘It’s a folding bed, miss.’
Binding said, ‘Surely Piggott didn’t sleep here.’
‘I suppose he might have done. Or possibly,’ Liz said grimly, ‘it’s where they kept Dave.’
Just then a young constable came running down from the kitchen, his shoes clacking loudly on the stairs. ‘Sarge,’ he said, panting breathlessly, ‘they’ve found something in the grounds. Can you come?’
‘What is it?’ asked Binding.
The constable hesitated, and looked to his sergeant for guidance. ‘Go on lad,’ said the sergeant. ‘Spit it out.’
The constable nodded. ‘It’s graves, sir. Two of them. They said you’d want to know right away.’
Liz counted seventeen people, all of them male, including two pathologists and a deputy superintendent of police. Three hours had elapsed since the youthful policeman had run down the stairs to the cellar, time that seemed endless to Liz as she waited for what she felt was certain to be bad news.
The wind had dropped and the rain had turned to a steady drizzle as she and Binding and Peggy stood huddled together under one of the tall oaks. Someone had produced coffee in plastic cups and they warmed their hands as they waited for news in the fading light. Not fifty feet from them two white tents had been erected over the graves – temporary morgues. Inside them the grisly work of disinterment proceeded. There had already been a leak to the press – they’d heard that several reporters had arrived, but were being held at the police post in the National Trust gatehouse.
At last a policeman beckoned and Liz went forward. Binding touched her arm, but she shook her head – she’d do the identifying, since she was more likely than he to recognise the second body. They would all be able to identify one of them, she thought grimly.
She stooped down to enter the tent and was momentarily blinded by the dazzling light of the halogen lamp hanging from the top pole. A curious, sickly, chemical smell hung in the air. The pathologist looked eerie in his white suit and surgical gloves and beside him a constable in uniform stood looking. A sheet covered the body on the ground.
‘Ready?’ asked the pathologist.
Liz nodded, taking a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for the worst. The constable pulled back the sheet and she looked down.
She allowed herself to breathe out. It wasn’t Dave. A young man with dark hair lay on his back, looking startlingly peaceful. He could have been asleep, were it not for the black hole in his temple. The bottom of one of his trouser legs was darkly stained, as if it had been soaked in ink.
‘Do you recognise this man?’ asked the constable.
‘No,’ said Liz quietly, and saw out of the corner of her eye that Michael Binding had come into the tent. ‘But I think I know who it is. Tell me how tall he is. I can’t judge, looking down at him like this.’
‘Between five six and five seven,’ said the pathologist.
Liz turned to Binding, who was still blinking as his eyes adjusted to the harsh light of the overhead lamp. ‘It’s almost certainly Sean McCarthy. He was the gunman who shot Jimmy Fergus. Jimmy hit him in the leg when he fired back at him. He described him as short and dark-haired.’
Binding nodded, looking stunned. Liz took another deep breath. ‘Right. Now let me see the other one.’
They followed the pathologist and the constable in a sombre procession, outside through the drizzle and into the adjacenttent. Again, a sheet covered a disinterred corpse lying on the ground. And the same sickly smell hung around.
Liz felt sick and as she stepped forward she gritted her teeth to prevent her gorge rising. Why had Dave been so stupid? And why hadn’t she rung from Paris, or London? Anything to avoid this. She waited as the police officer reached down to pull back the sheet, bracing herself for how the familiar features would look. She only hoped it had been quick for Dave at the end.
‘No!’ she shouted as the sheet went back. For the face that stared up at her with dead blank eyes was not Dave’s. Someone else lay on the ground. A much older man than Dave. But the face was familiar.
‘What is it, Liz?’ Binding demanded, seeing her astonishment.
‘This is Dermot O’Reilly.’ Her voice trembled with a mixture of relief and horror. ‘It’s Dave’s informant, Brown Fox.’
44
Nausea. Whenever it seemed to subside, it would quickly come back. Dave couldn’t think about anything else, as fresh spasms gripped him.
He felt the floor beneath him rocking gently, and heard a faint smacking sound – water slapping against wood. He must be on a boat, below deck, in some kind of hold. The throbbing background noise was the engine; the rocking, which was making him feel so sick, was the boat’s movement through choppy waters.
Dave had no idea where he was, but he knew that he had been out of it for a long time. He wanted to flex his arms, but as he tried to lift one he found it held fast to his side. He was lying on a low camp bed and he saw that he had been tied up – very neatly, like a chicken painstakingly trussed before cooking.
So he was a prisoner. But whose? He tried to remember how he had got here. Gradually coming to, he found images were flickering in a bewildering sequence through his head. A small room, with a desk and chairs. Across the desk a man, speaking with a strong accent – a foreigner, who had been trying to sell Dave something, hadn’t he? He remembered the voice behind him, guttural, foreign, and a bulky man with a gun in his hand.
Then another room, some sort of library this time, and the cold unfeeling eyes of the man who’d injected him in the arm. What was his name?
Suddenly the hold door swung open and Dave was half-blinded by an incoming rush of light. He blinked and made out a figure looming in the doorway. A familiar man with a dark face – did he know his name either? – who was holding a tray, which he put carefully on the floor. Reaching down, he suddenly grabbed Dave with both hands and flipped him over like a fish, so that he flopped off the bed and lay face down on the floor.
He could feel the man fiddling with the rope that bound his hands. ‘Where are we?’ Dave managed to ask. The man ignored him. When he’d untied the knots he hauled Dave roughly up onto his knees and put the tray down with his free hand in front of Dave.
‘Eat,’ he said tersely.
Dave looked down at the plate, where a watery stew lay on a small pile of mash. It looked revolting, and his nausea surged again. He clenched his jaw, but there was nothing he could do to stop himself as he vomited straight onto the plate.
The foreign man stepped back in disgust, then quickly left the room. Dave moaned and retched again, propping himself on his hands and trying to still the spasms in his stomach. I need to get out of here, he told himself dimly, realising that his legs were still tied. He reached down and touched the knots of the ropes at each knee, then tried to pick at them with his fingernails.
The foreigner returned. He held a syringe in one hand and a pistol in the other. He pointed the gun at Dave and motioned him to leave the knots alone. Then the man leaned down, ignoring the spattered plate on the floor, and plunged the syringe straight into Dave’s arm before he had time to object.
‘Where are we?’ Dave asked again, this time more feebly. He felt fatigue settling on him like snow, and struggled to keep awake. It was no good; he barely noticed as his head fell back against the wall, and realised he could no longer keep his eyes open.