Death and Other Lovers Read online

  “She didn’t know I was flying. She thought I was taking the car. If it had gone off halfway up the M1 I might have taken a couple of people with me, probably not more. The plane took her by surprise—I saw that at the time. I guess she was wondering what to do. Well, we know what she decided. She dropped me at the door and drove away. I thought she didn’t want to start crying, but she didn’t want to be around if the bomb was discovered. That’s why she never called you, Gil. She wasn’t afraid I was on Flight 98: she reckoned I had to be, otherwise it wouldn’t have blown up.”

  Todd said softly, “Do you know why?”

  Mechanically, Flynn shook his head. “No. But it was always going to end something like that. It’s what she was hired for. There must have been something she needed to find, or find out, first or she’d have blown me away the first time we met. She had it all worked out, down to the fine detail.” He tried to laugh and the anguish spilled out of his eyes. “I fell in love, Gil; and she was carrying out a contract.”

  “What about the fire?” asked Donnelly.

  Flynn looked at him and looked away. “It wasn’t Fahad. Laura set it. Maybe it got out of hand and trapped her, or maybe she had to make it look like that when she saw me coming back early. The fire was real enough, but the intruders weren’t. She knew about my problems with the PFLP, must have seen the wanted posters on Fahad. She knew I’d recognise his picture even if no-one else did.”

  Talking was leaching some of the tension from him. When he had loosened up enough he slumped into a chair. “I think it was my negatives she was after more than my life. She was interested in the darkroom, came in and watched me working. I keep—kept—current negatives in there, she may have thought they were all I had. When I went out she laid a fire in there to destroy them.

  “The story about Fahad was to cover her when I came back and found her still there. We should have realised something was wrong when she put together a picture not of the man who held her at gunpoint but the one who disappeared into the darkroom. Anyway, when I recognised the picture it all seemed to fit. That’s why she chose Fahad: the built-in motive. She didn’t want anyone enquiring too deeply into the reasons for it, at least not until she could check that she’d done what she set out to and then get off-side. She’s quite a pro, my Laura.

  “So she came back to the apartment with me, and saw me rescue the surviving negatives from the safe under the floor. She even looked through them—to see what they were, if they’d still print, whatever. When I said we’d have to split up she argued—she wanted to stay close to those negatives until she could destroy them. When I insisted, she went out to buy us some gear. That’s when she put the bomb in my bag. I don’t know if she made it herself or collected it someplace. But since I had damn-all left in the world, she was pretty sure that me, those negatives and that bag would be together for the immediate future.

  “She must have set the time fuse when she handed me the thing at Heathrow. There couldn’t have been more than half an hour on it: maybe she thought I couldn’t be in the air by then. If it had gone off in the terminal it might have killed me, or a baggage handler, maybe a by-stander or two, but nothing like a plane-load of people. I’d like to think that’s what she had in mind. If you find her,” he said to Donnelly, “will you ask her that for me?”

  “We’ll find her,” Donnelly said with absolute conviction. An astute observer would have seen a quiet savagery in the backs of his eyes, heard it in the quiet resonance of his voice.

  “Don’t count on it,” said Flynn. “She didn’t do this because of something I said, or because I was a disappointment in bed. She was doing what she was paid to do, and since it’s taken us three weeks to realise it I kind of think she does it rather well. She’ll be on the other side of the world by now with a different name, different appearance, different identity. Laura Wade never existed. She’s a professional killer. Half the police forces in the civilised world must be looking for her, even if they don’t know it. Maybe you can succeed where they’ve all failed, but you shouldn’t stake your pension on it.”

  Superintendent Donnelly was returning his gaze with an odd mixture of compassion and dislike. He could guess how much this was hurting Flynn, could admire his determination to see it through, to say everything he had to say regardless of what it cost him. At the same time he had any law officer’s resentment at being told he had been outsmarted by a criminal. He quelled his instinct to snap back and breathed lightly for a moment. Then he said, almost mildly, “Well, if we can’t bring the killer to book, let’s have a go at the people who hired her.”

  Flynn stared. Todd said, “Do we know who hired her?”

  “Not yet. But we know a lot about them—maybe enough, now we’ve got Flynn back on our side. You are back to stay, are you?” he added, not without a hint of sarcasm. “Grand Tour finished for the moment? There’s no-one else you’d like to paint a target on your shirt for? Oh good.”

  There was nothing Donnelly, or someone a lot nastier than Donnelly, could level at him in the way of criticism or abuse that Flynn had not already levelled at himself. Mere words had lost their sting and he had no difficulty ignoring these. It was the other thing Donnelly had said which had captured all his attention. “You think we can get at who did this—who’s behind it? How?”

  “They’ve done something else.” Already Donnelly was a little ashamed of his small show of phlegm. “At least, I think they have.” He explained, for the second time in an hour, about the break-in at Pretext.

  Flynn listened in silence. Todd saw him make the connection with the destruction of his negatives in the two earlier incidents. He had no colour left to lose, but it was another kick in the face for him. When the policeman finished he said, “Can I see the list?”

  Donnelly passed it to him. “Can’t you remember what you sent to Pretext?”

  Flynn snorted. “You any idea how many photographs I’ve taken in the last seven years? How many of them have been published? Greg Miller’s had maybe twenty of them. You want me to remember which twenty?”

  But the images came back as he scanned down the list. And he stopped at the place where Todd had stopped, and said pretty much what Todd had said. “Jeez, not them again?”

  The policeman and the journalist traded a swift, significant glance. Donnelly asked, “Deerings?”

  Flynn looked up, startled. “Yeah. Why?”

  Donnelly did not answer. “The photograph of Dr. Hehn: why did you send it to Miller?”

  “He runs a science magazine. I thought he could use it.”

  “Did he?”

  “Damn right he did.” For a moment Flynn sounded indignant, as if his workmanship was being challenged. “First shot of a prize-winning chemist? Of course he used it.”

  “That was the negative Deerings wanted to buy?”

  “Yes. But I don’t sell my negatives, not ever. I made them some prints.”

  “So the Hehn negative was in your flat when the fire occurred, on the aeroplane when it blew up, and a print was in that office until someone stole it.”

  “There were other negatives at the apartment and in my bag on the plane.”

  “Any of them on that list of Miller’s?”

  Flynn read it again. It was not a long list but he wanted to make sure. “These negatives would all have gone in the fire. Except for Hehn.”

  “Are there any other prints anywhere?”

  “Just the ones I sent Deerings.”

  It could still so easily be a coincidence. No-one knew it better than Donnelly. If he accused an important corporation of complicity in the bombing of an aircraft on no more evidence than this, he would be lucky if he was still a Superintendent at the end of the week. He would be quite lucky if he was still a policeman. “Perhaps they just wanted what they said they wanted, plenty of copies. Perhaps they have nothing to do with the rest of it.” He sounded unconvinced.

  Flynn stood up, his long body unfolding abruptly. “I can check on that.” He picked up
the phone, looking at Todd. “Remember I gave their PRO Aiden McNally’s number? Let’s find out if he used it.”

  It was not a lengthy call. Flynn was waiting longer for McNally to answer the phone than for him to answer the question. It had been twelve days since he gave McNally’s number to the Deering PRO to meet his urgent and excessive need for photographs. But when Flynn put the names of Deering and Hehn and Spalding to him, McNally only answered, “Who?”

  “Perhaps they decided they had enough photographs after all,” mused Todd. His gaze slid across to meet Donnelly’s. “Or perhaps they’re satisfied that they now have all the prints that negative is ever going to yield.”

  Donnelly was nodding slowly. “You think there’s something in that picture they don’t want people to see?”

  Todd raised his shoulders in confusion. “How could there be? The damn thing was published weeks ago—two or three weeks before the fire, even. If there was anything remarkable about it, somebody’d have noticed.”

  Donnelly asked Flynn, “Was there anything unusual about it?”

  “Christ, I don’t know! I didn’t even want the picture, it just seemed churlish to refuse. So they stood the guy up in his laboratory, holding his letter of notification and grinning, and I photographed him. Then I sent the print to Greg Miller for Context because it was his line and he doesn’t get too many first bites of the cherry. The magazine came out and Deerings started deluging me with requests for extra prints.”

  “And asked to buy the negative.”

  “I thought they were offering to print it themselves instead of keep asking me.”

  “So you kept the negative in your flat until after the fire, then transferred it to the case Laura Wade gave you.”

  “Yeah.” Even now he could not talk about her with any degree of detachment. His voice was gruff, his eyes veiled. After a moment he looked away.

  Todd said quietly, “And your man at Deerings—Spalding?—kept asking for one more print until you said the negative was gone. After the fire, and after the plane. He was checking to see if the job had been done.”

  Donnelly said flatly, “I don’t believe in that amount of coincidence. That picture is the key to all this.”

  Flynn sighed. “You mean it was. It’s long gone now.”

  “No,” said Donnelly, “it’s not. You supplied a lot of prints to Deerings. They’re going to need one hell of a good excuse not to be able to find me one when I ask.”

  “OK, so you get a copy of the print,” said Flynn. “What’s it going to tell you that the picture in the magazine didn’t?”

  “God knows,” Donnelly said morosely. “Maybe nothing at all. But I’ll still be interested to talk to Hehn, and to see your Mr. Spalding’s face when I ask for one of his pictures.”

  It was late evening before Donnelly left for the second time. Todd made some supper and refrained from asking any more questions. Compared with the black torment in his face when he arrived on the doorstep two hours before, Flynn was looking better—more relaxed, more at ease in his body and his mind. If sharing his discovery had hurt, at least it had left the wounds clean.

  Now he looked dog-tired. For the last three weeks he had been running on nervous energy, first the rage at what had been done, then the slowly mounting hope that perhaps the worst of it was not because of him after all. Now the rage was gone, and the hope was gone, and even his anxiety about Laura Wade was gone, and half the substance seemed to have gone from his body. Todd sent him to bed. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow, too tired even to dream.

  He woke, hours later but still long before dawn, with the memory of a sound he had been sleeping too deeply to hear echoing round the edges of his mind. He rolled onto his back and lay a long time in darkness, listening and hearing nothing. He tried to persuade himself that there was nothing to hear, that what had woken him had been nothing more than one of the middle-ranking civil servants or building society branch managers who formed the bulk of Todd’s neighbours coming home well-oiled from a back-stage party at the Royal Opera House and banging his front door.

  Noises off were more significant when you lived in an abandoned warehouse in a part of London where the street-lamps were a fond memory and the neighbours were a basement full of winos. Todd lived in a respectable middle-class building with respectable middle-class neighbours, lifts, no graffiti and a uniformed porter. A man could start a reign of terror with a feathered whoopee-whistle in a place like this.

  So Flynn lay listening to the silence until the silence became oppressive, staring wide-eyed into the darkness until the darkness crawled, more wakeful with every minute that passed. Finally he gave up trying to sleep, thought he would raid the fridge instead. He pushed the blanket off his legs and padded to the door.

  Todd had moved the furniture since he last spent any time here. Aiming for the kitchen on automatic pilot Flynn bumped into the back of an armchair and the sharp edge of the dining table, unseen in the black room, then stumbled over something soft at floor level and went sprawling on his hands and knees on the hearthrug. He had let out a string of virulent expletives before he remembered the reason he had not switched the light on in the first place was that he was trying not to disturb Todd.

  Then the light came on anyway. Flynn put up a hand to shield his eyes. At least he had not woken Todd; nor, for the immediate future, was he likely to. The soft thing Flynn had stumbled over was Todd, and he was lying down there because someone had cracked his skull open.

  Chapter Seven

  Todd lived in a respectable building with responsible neighbours and a porter, not in a derelict warehouse in a part of London’s dockland that had gone downhill since Fagin left. So he had never bothered with the extra locks, and indeed extra doors, that were indispensable to the security of Flynn’s home, in the days when he had one, and the peace of his mind. The consequence was that Todd’s front door had proved laughably easy to broach. But that was not what Flynn had heard.

  But Todd, sleeping more lightly than the young man collapsed exhausted in his spare room, did hear something unfamiliar and, thinking it might be Flynn stumbling round the dark flat, pulled his dressing-gown on and went to see. He saw nothing. As he came through his bedroom door with the light behind him, something heavy and hard and swung with force connected with the back of his skull and pitched him into a deeper blackness than that of the curtained room. Blood exploded behind his eyes and he was unconscious before his face hit the rug.

  Flynn knelt over the quiet bulk lying face-down on the floor in its paisley dressing-gown, possibilities racing through his mind. In spite of all that had been happening, his first thought was that Todd was not a young man, nor a fit one, and that even normally he led a fairly stressful life, and Flynn was afraid that Todd’s heart had given out. He struggled with the body, easing it onto its side, searching anxiously for pulse and respiration.

  But before he found them he remembered that the light had come on after he was already falling over the man on the floor, which meant someone else was here with them. He looked up quickly, and now his eyes were sufficiently adjusted to the light to pick up the figure standing by Todd’s open door, and to recognise from the distinctive position of its hands that it was armed.

  Then Flynn was afraid that the sound that woke him was a gunshot, too worried to realise that such a sound in the confines of a three-room flat would not so much have woken him as projected him bodily out of bed and left him crouched quivering in the tightest corner he could find. His shocked gaze snapped back to Todd and he ran his eyes and hands over the big man looking for wounds.

  He stopped when he found one, not a bullet hole but a ragged tear in the scalp behind his right ear. Todd had been not shot but sandbagged. Flynn looked up again with anger in his gaze, a deep resentment at this overspill of violence from his own life into his friend’s home.

  And only then did he find time to wonder who the intruder was. His mind went first to Laura, but the outline was wrong: shorter and
despite that essentially masculine. It was too short for Spalding, too slight for Hehn.

  When he spoke, Flynn recognised his voice. There was no chance in the world of Flynn ever forgetting that voice. “In view of everything you’ve been saying about me, Mr. Flynn,” said Jamil Fahad, “I thought we should talk.”

  The fear and frustration of three weeks, the pain and the grief and the guilt, all came to a head in a quick blaze of fury that paid no heed to the heavy gun in Fahad’s hand and the certainty in Flynn’s heart that he had come here to use it. Rage snapped in his eyes, cracked in his voice like ice. “You bastard, Fahad! He’s an old man. What have you done to him?”

  The Arab made a minimal shrug. His lightly accented voice was negligent. “Nothing. I knocked him out, that’s all. He’s all right.”

  “All right? Look at him!” Todd had not responded to Flynn’s hands. His eyes remained not only shut but still. His broad face was pale, the muscles that animated it flaccid. His head was bleeding freely. Flynn looked round for something to staunch it with. All there was within reach was what he was wearing—a T-shirt and a pair of pyjama trousers Todd found for him. They must have been a Christmas present from someone who knew Todd when his waistline was twenty years younger.

  He pulled off the T-shirt, and with Todd propped against his knees wadded the material firmly against the back of his head. Bent there, his scarred back a bony bow, Flynn looked up fiercely at the man with the gun. “What’s the matter,” he demanded nastily, “they running out of old men you can beat up where you come from?”