Death and Other Lovers Page 16

3. Kehama’s Reign

  Chapter One

  First thing in the morning, unaware of the man lying unconscious and the other dead drunk in the respectable flat in the respectable building in Kensington, Superintendent Donnelly and his sergeant visited Deering Pharmaceuticals in their tall building overlooking the river. Donnelly asked first for Dr. Hehn. It took a flash of warrant card to persuade the chemist’s secretary to make room in the great man’s schedule for a quick interview with some policemen.

  He saw them in his office, which was divided from the laboratory by a glass partition and a Venetian blind. The blind was three-quarters closed, but Donnelly could tell from the shifting patterns of light that someone was working in there. By sitting down at his desk in his white coat, Hehn suggested quite forcibly that the laboratory was the only proper environment for a scientist and as soon as he could dispose of this interruption he would be back in there too.

  Apart from that he was charming. He was a man in his mid-fifties, built to much the same specification as the breeze block—not a curve in his body unless dictated by strict biological necessity, otherwise he was composed entirely of solid rectangular planes. The severity of the basic design was reinforced by the voice, which was deep and gravelly, and by the dark-framed rectangular glasses he wore, but alleviated by the improbable twinkle in the eyes behind them.

  In a man of half his years or one growing towards a cuddly old age, it might have seemed mischievous. Men in their fifties with heavy German accents, heads like breeze blocks, rectangular spectacles and wiry dark hair cut in the latest style from the Heinrich Himmler Salon generally find it difficult to express good-natured impishness, but Dr. Dieter Hehn was doing his level best despite the fact that his lab-coat stretched ominously across his square chest and his biceps strained the sleeves.

  He said, with ponderous good humour, “What’s the problem, Superintendent? Have we let the homunculus escape again?”

  Donnelly did his amiable smile. “Not to worry, sir. It’ll probably start its own pop group and make you a fortune.”

  He had not got to be a Detective Superintendent with enough of a track record to be given a job of this magnitude by charging at an enquiry bull-headed, accusations first. Instinct fed by experience told him that Flynn’s photograph of this man was the reason why Flynn had been persecuted and, as a consequence of that, why two hundred and twenty people on a trans-Atlantic airliner had been blown out of the sky. That did not necessarily mean that Hehn was to blame for it, or even knew about it; or if he did, that he could be made to talk about it. Softly softly catchee monkey was still an approach with much to recommend it, even in the days of faxed crime sheets and genetic finger-printing.

  So he did not ask Dr. Hehn what it was that he was up to that had to be hushed up whatever the cost. He did not ask what it was in Flynn’s photograph that threatened to give the game away, or how they had found a professional fixer of Laura Wade’s stature to tidy up after them. He said, “Purely routine enquiry, sir. We’re trying to reconstruct the contents of the baggage hold of Flight 98.”

  Hehn frowned and waited a suitable moment before remembering. “The New York flight? The one that crashed?”

  “The one that was bombed, that’s right. I don’t know if you’re aware, sir, but negatives of a photograph taken of you were on board.”

  Again the short pause suggesting the matter was not at the fore-front of his mind. “That’s right. That young American who was here, he was on board. But didn’t he get off?”

  “He did, but his bag—with his negatives in it—stayed on the plane.”

  The heavy brows drew down on a powerful stare. “My God. Was he the one responsible? The young man who came here—Finn?” It was perfectly possible that Hehn’s interest in and recollection of the disaster were no greater than this, that he hardly remembered Flynn and did not much care what happened to either him or his negatives. But Donnelly did not believe it. He believed that the photograph of this man had cost two hundred and twenty lives, and now he had met him he felt Hehn knew all about it.

  And he knew that in the absence of incontrovertible proof Hehn might take the secret to his grave. He was a tough, solid man, not easily bullied or panicked, and a mind as agile as his might withstand any amount of quite pointed interrogation.

  There are occasions in police work when an investigating officer knows who committed the crime, and how and why, and has the culprit where he can throw at him every shot in the legal armoury, and still, unless he loses his nerve and either confesses or tells demonstrable lies, there is insufficient evidence to try let alone convict him. It was too soon to start panicking, but Donnelly’s first impression of Dr. Hehn was that he was precisely the type of strong, self-contained individual who would sit calmly under the hundred-watt bulb—interrogation had been hit by spending cuts like everything else—and deny everything, and challenge Donnelly to prove what he knew. If Hehn was the weakest link in this chain, God help them.

  He said, “Mickey Flynn, that’s right. But no, we don’t think he’s responsible. We think he was the target.”

  “But if he got off—?”

  “He had all the luck on the plane that night. Some colleagues of mine tried to arrest him. By the time the misunderstanding was sorted out, the flight had left.”

  The eyes behind the rectangular lenses were unwinking. “Then who was responsible?”

  “I’m working on that,” Donnelly said smoothly. “This photograph of you—can you describe it?”

  Hehn laughed, a sound like a train leaving a station. “It was me, looking absurdly pleased with myself and rather as if I’d been sniffing my way through the solvents cabinet. I had just received the letter, you understand, about the prize. It was a very pleasant surprise. But surely Flynn told you this.”

  “Some of it. But he takes a lot of photographs, he can’t remember them all in much detail. I’m hoping the pictures will have made a bigger impression on the people in them.”

  He was keeping the tone casual, but Hehn had not missed the central implication. “You think that something in one of these photographs was the reason for what happened?”

  Donnelly feigned a slight helpless shrug. “Dr. Hehn, we don’t know. It’s a possibility. So—essentially it was a portrait, was it?”

  “I have a copy somewhere,” Hehn said unexpectedly and started rooting through the drawers of his desk. Donnelly breathed lightly and declined his sergeant’s invitation to exchange significant glances. “Yes, here.” Hehn pulled out a copy of the magazine Context and put it in front of the Superintendent.

  The big rectangular head, the bulky rectangular body, the rectangular spectacles and the SS haircut were the same. The only difference was the silly grin beaming out at him from the magazine’s cover. Hehn had not exaggerated: he did look to be high on something.

  Donnelly smiled. He had seen the magazine before. Then he glanced around the office. “That wasn’t taken in here, was it?”

  Hehn shook his head, precisely, once. “In the laboratory.”

  The blind forming the backdrop, then, was the other side of this at the glass partition. There was the corner of a bench on the right-hand side, with glass jars and retorts and a shimmer of distortion probably caused by a Bunsen burner, and the edge of the blackboard on the left. There was nothing else in the photograph, and nothing anyone could have wanted to hide.

  “Yes, I see.” Donnelly handed it back. He looked expectantly towards the connecting door. “Before I go, could I have a quick look at the laboratory?”

  Again the unwinking gaze. “Whatever for?”

  Donnelly shrugged carelessly. “The picture was taken there. It might tell me something.”

  “You don’t think it’s this picture that …?” He spread a large, eloquent hand, the blunt fingers stained with chemicals, the nails ruthlessly manicured.

  “I don’t know which picture it is. I don’t know for sure that it is a picture at the root of this. Police work is an empirical scien
ce: you try different things until one of them works.” He stood up.

  Hehn passed him edge on, opened the door. “This way.”

  There was the bench—different glassware, same burner—there the blackboard and the blind. Flynn must have been up against if not actually perched on that range of cupboards. The internal wall was covered with graphs and charts, the exterior one was made of glass and looked over intervening roofs to the river. There were two people working here, both in white coats: a young man and a woman. They nodded politely at the visitors although Hehn did not introduce them.

  In three minutes Donnelly had learned all he was likely to by looking. “What is it you do here, Dr. Hehn?”

  One of Hehn’s eyebrows lowered while the other stayed put so that he looked like a coy breeze block. “Our competitors would pay thousands for the answer to that question.”

  Donnelly smiled. “In lay terms. And on the clear understanding that Sergeant Herriot here is not a spy for Boots.”

  Hehn returned the smile with a jovial version of his own. “Well, in that case … I am searching for new antibiotics. The problem with antibiotics—and don’t worry, Sergeant, Boots already knows this—is that the pathogens they are used to combat become resistant with repeated exposure. Since they are exposed not only to those we treat our own ailments with but also to those used to treat livestock reared for food, the problem of obsolescence is continually with us. We have to keep producing new antibiotics to replace those which are losing their effectiveness. Otherwise one day we’ll meet some virulent strain of typhoid, say, in a major centre of population and have nothing capable of dealing with it.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Donnelly. “Well, thanks for your help. I don’t expect I’ll have to trouble you again, but if I do—?”

  “I’ll be here, Superintendent,” promised Dr. Hehn. Donnelly did

  not doubt it for a moment.

  Leah Shimoni had strong teeth, a fact which she attributed to a childhood crammed with sunshine and oranges. Dental checks were swift, uncomplicated occasions for her. This particular morning she had an appointment at nine, was in the chair at five past, left at quarter past and—for no better reason than that she found herself in the area—was ringing Todd’s doorbell before half past.

  There was no reply. She rang again and waited. His car was outside, and anyway it was too early for him to be out. He was not a morning person. She thought he would be surfacing just about now and could give her some breakfast.

  Still no reply. She frowned. The morning papers—four of them, he might as well have declared his profession on a brass plate beside the door—were wedged in the letter-box and the milk had not been taken in, so he had to be in there. Probably they both were. She leaned her thumb on the bell and, very slightly anxious now, kept it there. She knew it was working, could hear its bray like an asthmatic donkey through the door.

  After what seemed an age she heard movement within and released the bell. A hand fumbled with the lock and the door swung in. When no invitation was forthcoming she pushed it wide and stepped inside anyway.

  The first thing she saw was Mickey Flynn, and the state of him was such that for a moment her mouth dropped open in shock. Then it clamped tight with disgust.

  He was just about upright, though the wall could have had something to do with that. He stank of stale whisky. His head hung so that his hair trailed lank in his face, and his eyes would not focus enough to meet hers: it might have been shame, or hangover, or a combination. His face was ashen but for dark moons under both eyes and purple bruising along the angle of his left jaw. He had almost no clothes on and his long body was shuddering with cold.

  Shimoni said, in her teeth, “What in God’s name happened to you?” and thought she knew. He mumbled something she could not understand. “What?”

  He dragged his eyes up from the carpet. The whites were muddy, shot with blood. He really did look ill, enough for Shimoni to feel a twinge of conscience. His voice was thick, his breathing too ragged or his brain too fogged to manage a complete sentence. “Gil. See …”

  So the second thing she saw was Gilbert Todd on the living-room floor, a quiet mound lying on his side with a cushion under his head and his hair thick with congealed blood. She could hear his stertorous breathing from where she stood, and as she stared aghast one hand twitched laxly by his face.

  If she did not yet know what had happened, she knew who she blamed. She spun on her heel, her eyes aflame, and struck Flynn once in the face, very hard. Because she was right-handed it was the left side of his face she hit. Because she was five-foot-two and he was six-foot-two she did not expect him to fall over, drunk as he clearly still was. But he did, and lay against the skirting board, long body curled foetally, nursing his face and moaning.

  Shimoni lifted the phone and called for an ambulance.

  After leaving Dr. Hehn, Donnelly asked for Mr. Spalding of the public relations department. Mr. Spalding was in fact the executive responsible for public relations and his secretary could not say when or even whether Mr. Spalding would arrive at the office today, but just as she was saying it Spalding walked in. He might have walked out again but Donnelly recognised him from Flynn’s description and did not give him the chance. He steered him briskly into his own office before his secretary could tell him the policemen had just come from Dr. Hehn’s.

  Byron Spalding was tall—perhaps as tall as Flynn—and narrow, with long limbs and a long lean face. There the resemblance ended. Spalding dressed with meticulous care and taste. He wore hand-made shoes which he polished, or had polished, to a glorious conker gleam. He bought suits in wonderfully tasteful fabrics, made up with just the right acknowledgement to fashion: twin vents when, and for as long as, appropriate, trouser legs as wide or narrow as they should be. He never matched his tie and his handkerchief and would probably have shot himself rather than wear a shirt with a contrasting collar.

  For all that, and the ready smile on his aristocratic face, Byron Spalding was not a superficial man. He was a man who took immense pains to get things right. Donnelly could understand Flynn thinking him no more than a middle-aged trendy getting excited every time he saw Deerings’name in print and sending photographs all over the world in the hope of drumming up a little more glory.

  But actually Spalding was a much more substantial character than that. Donnelly supposed that the job of selling a corporate image in a competitive industry required a man to pay ruthless attention to details. He thought that that neat, fussy exterior was probably another of Spalding’s creations, and that behind it the man was a consummate professional. In his own way he was as impressive, and as difficult to out-guess, as Hehn.

  “Well, Superintendent,” he smiled, “how can I help you?”

  Donnelly repeated the preamble he had given Hehn. “So I’m looking for one of the prints Flynn sent you.”

  “Right,” Spalding said promptly. His brow creased in thought. “I must have one somewhere. Of course, I sent most of them off to different people. Free advertising, you know, it’s the best kind. I’m afraid I was a shocking nuisance to young Flynn, and he only came in to borrow our view.” An idea struck him. “I know. Make yourselves comfortable, I’ll be right back.” He was gone before Donnelly could ask where from.

  He returned with a triumphant smile and a print that was identical to the one on Context’s cover. “There you are. I kept that one for the house mag. Hold onto it if it’s any help, we’ve made a PMT.”

  Donnelly accepted it with suitable gratitude. Actually he was disappointed. He had felt sure Spalding would find some reason not to produce it. It was inconceivable that he could have conspired at the bombing of a passenger jet in order to destroy a negative in the baggage hold, then calmly produce a print from that negative at first time of asking. It left Donnelly with almost nothing more to say so he took the print and left, acutely aware that he could still be wrong about this.

  By the time the ambulance reached the hospital Todd was showing signs
of returning to consciousness, mumbling and searching vaguely with his fingers for the source of the pain in his head, and Flynn was shaking uncontrollably. At the casualty entrance, staff whisked them in two different directions, Todd straight to X-ray, Flynn to a screened cubicle.

  Shimoni was left waiting alone on a plastic chair, between a policeman with a bandaged hand and a boy who had glued his fingers, wondering why she always reacted to Flynn with violence—of thought or word, or in this case strong right arm.

  A blind man could see he was sick. A man with half a brain would know that Flynn could not have hurt Todd, neither deliberately nor carelessly, sober nor drunk. It was literally incredible; yet she had fallen on that most unlikely explanation for what she found almost with glee, because of the opportunity it gave her to punish Flynn. She did not like what that told her about herself. She rather suspected there was a problem there that she ought to be tackling.

  Flynn had tried to tell her what happened. Between his swollen jaw, his concussion and the alcohol still running riot in his bloodstream, he had not made a great deal of sense. But from the way he kept repeating the name, she gathered that Fahad had been there, and that the condition of both men was a consequence of that. She called Donnelly’s office and left a message for his return.

  A nurse came to reassure her about her two casualties. Todd had a hairline fracture of the skull but there was no displacement and no reason to anticipate lasting damage. He was coming round now, although after five hours’unconsciousness he was inevitably very groggy. He would be in hospital under observation for some days, but there was every reason to hope for an uneventful recovery.

  There was not much they could do for Flynn. The poison that could destroy him, that had all but destroyed him once before, was already in his blood and out of the reach of a stomach pump. He had no option but to see it through now.

  It might not be as bad as all that. Half a bottle of whisky, especially when he had not fallen off the water-wagon but been thrown off, might not be enough to make a drinker of him again, not after seven dry years. Partly it would depend on his reaction to it, whether he came out of it angry or frightened, ready to fight or already beaten. It would be some little time before he would know, and for that time he would need looking after and even watching. His friends would be invaluable to him now.