Her colour was rising, turning the deep tan to the colour of bloody battlefield mud. Her eyes had a glassy, wild stare in them. Sir Greville took one appalled look and changed the subject. Sibley’s relief was quickly demolished when he found what the new subject was.
‘This Quill character,’ said Sir Greville, ‘he’s still around.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid the first phase of our deterrent programme was nullified because he received a substantial inheritance. He turned down the job offer.’
‘I know that.’
‘We then took certain other steps to persuade him it would be in his interests to leave. One of my staff made the point to him in a rather direct way.’
‘And?’
‘He still appears obdurate. He did pay a visit to the local police to complain but we were able to pre-empt that by placing information in the system that indicated he had a somewhat unreliable personal history.’
‘Which leaves us where exactly?’
‘Which leaves us with the need to take a more firm approach still if you will sanction such a step.’
Sir Greville looked away and waved a dismissive hand. ‘I pay you to get results, Sibley. It’s no business of mine how you get them. I know you’ll stay within the law, of course.’
Always careful, thought Sibley. Perhaps he thinks I’m recording him. If so, he’s right.
Lady Viola hadn’t been listening. She had been sitting stiffly upright, staring with her eyes open unnaturally wide at the wall, drumming her fingers on the table. Now she turned abruptly back to Sibley.
‘I want to know exactly what’s going on with my son,’ she said. ‘Who knows what may have happened in Yorkshire? He’s an incredibly stupid boy and Michael Parry is a snake. Put someone on to it.’
‘You want Johnny under surveillance?’ asked Sibley incredulously, thinking of the organizational problems that would create.
‘Well, it shouldn’t be difficult, should it? Put a girl on to him or something. That girl, Maggie. She looked his sort.’
Maggie, thought Sibley hysterically. Johnny’s sort? Only if he buys a whip.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said with extraordinary self control.
‘Is she suitable?’ asked Lady Viola. ‘Does she come from a good family?’
Chapter Twelve
Johnny had Matthew Quill on his mind. Sibley had teamed him up with Maggie again for a black-bag job. She seemed more friendly, even flirty, this time and he wasn’t sure how to take her. They arrived outside Quill’s flat in an anonymous Rover with hire company stickers.
‘We’ve got an hour,’ said Maggie. ‘He’s gone to the cinema. The film finishes at five past ten and it should take him eight minutes to cycle back.’
‘And if he doesn’t like the film?’
‘We’ll get a shout.’ Maggie held up a mobile phone, ‘Martin’s outside the cinema.’
The job sounded simple enough. They were to check the house for papers, anything related to CN512 and the same name list as last time. Johnny saw Jean Davies’s name again and it gave him brief pause for thought. What had happened after they reported her letter to Quill? Had she come in for so much criticism that she killed herself, or was something else going wrong in her life?
Maggie had a key and they went quietly up the stairs and into the flat.
‘You take the bedroom, I’ll start in the sitting-room. Whoever finishes first does the kitchen,’ she instructed. She had automatically adopted the senior role.
‘Where’s the copier?’
‘No copier this time. Anything you find, we take with us, right?’
That made no kind of sense. ‘But he’s going to know.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, but he still looked hesitant. ‘Special circumstances. Just do it, OK? It’ll make sense later. Really.’
He stood there, irresolute, thinking it went against everything he’d ever been taught.
She took two steps closer to him, smiled and ran her fingers down his shirt to stroke the crotch of his jeans. ‘Pity there’s no one around to interrupt us this time,’ she said, and turned away leaving him seriously confused.
The bedroom yielded nothing except several bags of new, unworn clothes, labels still attached by their plastic umbilicals. Quill had been indulging himself. Johnny checked carefully in every possible hiding place. He took equal care putting things back, though if Quill was going to know about their visit as soon as he spotted any missing papers it was hard to see the point. Maggie was still searching the desk when he went back into the living-room. There was a file and a pile of loose sheets of paper on the floor and as he walked in, she added another one to it. The kitchen never looked promising, being small, bleak and ill equipped, and he wasn’t at all surprised when it yielded nothing extra.
‘OK, I’m through,’ she said as he came back in. She put the file and the papers in her bag and looked at her watch. ‘Fifteen minutes in hand,’ she said, ‘not bad.’
They saw no one on the stairs on the way back to the front entrance and anyway they could have been coming from any of the flats in the block. Maggie got in the driving seat and started up.
‘We might as well have a ringside seat for part two,’ she said. ‘Part two is when you see why taking the papers made sense.’
She drove the car no more than a hundred yards to where the main road crossed their path and they pulled in to the kerb close to the junction. She dialled a number on the phone and Johnny could hear Martin’s distorted accents in the voice at the other end.
‘Film’s just ended,’ the voice said, ‘they’re starting to come out.’
‘We’re outside,’ she said and putting the phone down, looked at her watch.
‘Eight minutes then,’ she said and, turning to him, she shook her head so the fine, long, black hair flew around it. She reached across slowly and traced a line along his thigh with a finger nail.
‘I always get horny after a job,’ she said.
‘You didn’t last time,’ he replied, disconcerted.
‘Oh, that…’ She shrugged. ‘You were new. I was just keeping my options open.’
‘I believed you.’
‘Did you?’ she said, moving towards him, and her lips stayed parted. Her arms and upper body seemed to snake in his direction around the obstacle course of the handbrake and gear lever and before he had much more time to consider his part in it all, her hair fell across his face and her mouth met his with a savage urgency that blocked out rational thought. He just had time to think that it wasn’t very professional before her tongue reached in and turned off his brain.
Matthew Quill had found the film disappointing but the cycle ride back made up for it. The new bike was fast and light and the gear shift was a joy. His bank manager had changed his attitude completely when he’d seen the solicitor’s latest letter about the legacy. An overdraft until the house was sold? Certainly, sir. The college was quite happy to let him go on using the labs if he was funding his own pay cheque and the new set of tests was going well. He dropped a couple of gears and stood on the pedals up the slight rise towards the junction, glanced over his shoulder and pulled into the middle of the road ready for the right turn up towards the flat. There was a car coming down the main road towards him so he waited, a car coming fast, very fast. A Ford Escort Cosworth, favoured wheels of teenage car thieves everywhere, stolen from Peckham that morning. Stolen on purpose just to be here at this junction, at this moment.
He had no time to escape and nowhere to escape to. He was trapped in the centre of the road, the bull on the dartboard, and the dart was a ton of steel doing sixty-five miles an hour. In the second and a half left, when he realized the Escort was swerving towards the centre of the road, he could have flung himself from his machine and he might have made it. Instead he tried to save the bike and himself, believing quite wrongly that the car simply hadn’t seen him. In that second and a half he got no more than six feet and for the Escort’s driver, the tiniest wrist movement was enough to correct his aim. The car hit the bike and Matthew’s left leg at the same moment, scooping him over the bonnet. His cycle helmet made only a marginal difference as his head hit the top of the windscreen by the roof, shattering his skull. He was dead before his limp body windmilled to the ground and the Escort was out of sight before the wheels on the bike stopped spinning.