I didn’t know what the hell this Laagerbond was, but it had an extremely select membership. The list was dynamite. I couldn’t simply take it, because it would be missed. I considered briefly removing it and copying it down, but I thought it would be safer to sit in the car. That way, if the worst came to the worst and the meeting finished, I might have time to close up the briefcase and invent some story. So I rushed inside and grabbed a pen and this diary, and copied the names down in the back.
I had just about finished when Caroline interrupted me. I’m afraid I snapped at her, poor girl, and she ran off, but it scared me and I decided to put everything back in the briefcase, which I replaced under the raincoat on the back seat.
Then I set off up here and took the diary with me.
So what the hell is going on? Who are Impala and Eland and what is the Laagerbond? And why are they approaching Neels?
9
Calder hurried back to his sister’s house in Highgate to pick up his stuff. Anne had offered to give him a lift from there to Elstree Aerodrome. They climbed into Anne’s new luxurious black Mercedes 4×4 and set off on to the thoroughfares of north London.
Calder’s thoughts were fixed on the phone call he had received from Kim. He had been wrong not to take her suspicions seriously. Someone had tried to murder Todd and hadn’t cared that they might have killed him as well. He recalled those frantic couple of minutes when he had fought for control of the Yak and brought it down on to the sandbar. He remembered the explosion, Todd’s pale face, his head wound. They hadn’t been victims of bad luck or faulty workmanship, but of a cold-blooded killer. For the last few days he had experienced the intense relief of the survivor. The relief was turning to anger.
‘What’s wrong, Alex?’
Calder glanced at his sister and smiled. Anne was very small for such a big car. She had spiky black hair and was wearing a purple top and flower-patterned jeans. She and Calder had always been close, but since their mother’s death when he was fifteen and she twelve, they had become even closer. They looked after each other. ‘Oh, nothing. Just thinking about the flight back.’
‘Aren’t you nervous, getting into an aeroplane again after that dreadful crash?’
‘I was fine coming down from Norfolk,’ Calder said. ‘It won’t be a problem. It’s like riding a bicycle. You have to get back on.’
Anne looked at him doubtfully. ‘A bit worse than falling off a bicycle, don’t you think?’
Calder grinned. Although he had told her all about the Yak’s engine failure, he had no intention of telling her about the police’s discovery of sabotage. He knew from long experience that Anne would worry.
‘Heard anything from Father?’ he asked, to change the subject. Their father was a doctor in the town of Kelso in the Borders of Scotland.
‘Yeah. I phoned him last week. He sounded quite chirpy. They’re allowing him to stay on at the surgery for another year, part time. Apparently there’s a national shortage of GPs.’
‘That will keep him happy. The concept of Father in retirement worries me a little.’
‘Has he sent you any more cheques?’
‘I think so. I got an envelope in March in his handwriting. I returned it unopened.’
‘So you’ve no idea how much it was?’
‘No. Nor where he got the money from.’
Anne pulled out on to the A1 in front of an old lady in a small car. The old lady hooted. Anne ignored her. ‘I went up to Kelso with the kids three weeks ago. We had a nice weekend. Everything seemed OK.’
‘No sign he’d sold anything?’
‘Nothing I could see. I did look around. The furniture, the paintings, the silver: it was all still there as far as I could tell.’
‘And no copies of the Racing Post?’
‘Not lying around. I didn’t go through his drawers.’
‘No, of course not.’ Calder stared out of the window at the traffic.
‘How much was it?’ Anne asked. ‘That you bailed him out for?’
‘A lot.’ The year before Calder had discovered that his father had run up massive gambling debts. Calder had paid them off, £143,000 of them. But he had never told his sister the full amount. To discover that their father, an upright Calvinist who had always disapproved of his son’s speculative career in the City, gambled regularly on the horses had been quite a shock to both his children.
‘I’d be happy to pay my half,’ Anne said.
Calder smiled. ‘Thanks. But I’d rather that it was all forgotten. It’s not a debt that either you or he owes me.’
They drove on in silence.
‘How’s Sandy?’ Anne asked. ‘You haven’t mentioned her.’
‘Not good,’ Calder said. ‘We’ve only managed to see each other three or four times over the last year. When we do see each other, everything’s great, we get on really well. We had a wonderful week together in Italy last September. But it’s been impossible to pin her down.’
‘Because of her work?’
Calder nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s appalling the way these US law firms treat their staff. I mean, I went over to New York to see her last month, just for a long weekend. She wasn’t there when I arrived, she’d had to fly off to Dallas or somewhere. I only saw her for an hour before I got my own flight back on the Sunday night. I’m afraid I had a sense-of-humour failure. I said some pretty unpleasant things. We haven’t spoken since.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anne said. ‘I know how much you like her. Is there any chance you can sort something out?’
‘I doubt it. She says she would have to change her job, and I don’t want to ask her to do that. I can’t help thinking it ought to be possible for her to manage things slightly better. I suppose it’s just not going to work.’
‘Shame.’
‘Yeah. Shame.’ Calder stared glumly out of the window. ‘Clever of you to find William.’ William was Anne’s husband of eight years. At first Calder had thought him a little stuffy and boring, but he had grown to appreciate the man’s consideration for his sister, and the way he put up with her chaotic existence.
There was no reply.
Calder glanced at Anne. She was biting her lip.
‘Are things OK with you two?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’ve grown apart these last few months. Like Sandy he works so hard. Never home before nine, often working over weekends. It’s a funny thing but when I was running around like a lunatic after the children all day, I didn’t mind. Oh, I complained, but I could put up with it. But since both the children are at school now, I get the odd minute to think about it and it rankles.’
William worked for a venture-capital company. Anne had been a barrister until a year after Phoebe was born, when she had given up. William’s firm had struck gold in the dot-com boom, and weathered the bust, and he had made some good money. But he was nowhere near as bright as Anne. This was something that was obvious to Calder, and presumably was to Anne herself. Calder had always suspected that this bothered his sister, but he had never seen any sign of it.
Anne glanced at her brother. ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a bad patch. All marriages have them, don’t they?’
‘I suppose they do,’ said Calder.
It was a pleasant flight back to Langthorpe from Elstree. Anne was right, Calder’s experience in the Yak was slightly more serious than falling off a bicycle, but he was pleased that he hadn’t found it difficult to climb back into an aeroplane. The cloud cover at 2,000 feet over Hertfordshire broke as he flew north and the Southern drawl of the USAF controller guided him through blue skies above the airbases of Lakenheath and Mildenhall. He descended to 1,500 feet over Thetford Forest and within a little over an hour from his departure from Elstree he spotted the familiar patch of green that was Langthorpe Aerodrome, with the poplars to the right, the village church with its round tower set on a small hill to the left, and the North Sea shimmering ahead. He joined the circuit a safe distance behind Jerry and an erratic student in a Piper Warrior and landed smoothly on the grass runway.