Death and Other Lovers Read online

  A police car arrived, another fire-engine and an ambulance. For the first time properly, Flynn looked at the tall straight woman beside him. “Are you all right?”

  Long slender hands swept the hair back from her face. It stood out round her head in a mass of dense curls like a black halo. Her eyes were laced with red and tears, but she smiled and nodded. “You?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He was not, not quite. The door handle had burned the palm of one hand; burning matter in the air had left its mark on the back of the other, on one cheek and a shoulder. None of it needed more than first aid or promised more than an uncomfortable night. He would lose more sleep when he discovered the irreparable damage to his jacket, that was not so much a garment as a security blanket.

  But reaction or relief or something set a nerve twitching behind his knee, then the muscle went momentarily to jelly and he sat down abruptly on the doorstep. Then the ambulance men moved up with their oxygen, and after that the policemen moved up with their questions.

  Chapter Two

  When Laura told the police what had happened, Flynn turned very white. He had had no chance to hear it before and had assumed that the fire was some kind of a freak accident. He reckoned to be careful with his chemicals and equipment, but anyone could make a mistake or be plain unlucky. The idea of men breaking into his apartment, starting a fire and deliberately locking his woman in with it chilled him to his very soul. And more, not less, because he felt he should have expected it.

  For seven years he had worked as a news photographer. In that comparatively short time—shorter if you subtracted the months he had spent hors de combat—he had become one of the top names in the field: partly for the quality of his images, which were strange and violent and disturbing and lingered on the mind long after the headlines had passed on, but partly too for his reputation for capturing these arresting images by sticking his neck out further than was common or wise.

  This was not the first time someone had had a go at him. He had displeased a lot of violent, corrupt and unscrupulous people in seven years. He had been threatened, he had been hurt because of it. He expected that, tried to watch his back for it. But this he had never expected, and he thought now that he should have done.

  They adjourned to the police station. Laura—they had found her some more suitable clothes—made her statement, then they set her to work with a PhotoFit expert. Meanwhile Inspector Ford, who had clearly received some surprising information about Flynn via his computer, sat him down with a mug of coffee and eyed him speculatively.

  “We have requests from two foreign police forces to keep an eye on you.”

  Flynn was too drained, mentally and physically, to manage much of a reaction. “Only two?”

  “A friendly eye,” explained the Inspector, “a protective eye, but an eye for all that.”

  Flynn’s tired gaze found him through the steam. “So where were you this morning?”

  Ford sighed. “Keeping a less friendly eye on a lot of other people. What can I tell you?—we can’t mount a twenty-four-hour guard on people for years at a time. It was a good job you got back when you did.”

  Flame bloomed again in Flynn’s eyes and he shuddered. “It was a bloody miracle.”

  “So who might hate you this much, Mr. Flynn?”

  Flynn thought for a moment. “Alphabetically or chronologically?”

  He had had “I’ll get you for this” hurled at him more times than he could remember. Mostly it was rhetoric, spat out by people who would not have known how to set about making him pay even if they had stayed mad long enough to want to. Mostly the people who had the money, the clout and the reason to vent their serious displeasure on him also had the sense not to warn him first.

  But this was no spur-of-the-moment retaliation, a flung fist, a drawn knife, even a car grinding him into the brick wall of a dark alley. It was colder than that, more calculating. If they had wanted to burn him they would not have waited until mid-morning when his car was gone. They wanted to burn something dear to him instead, and not just his home. Four days Laura had been here with him. Before that there had been nobody he would have grieved over. So they had waited and watched.

  Four names he could think of, four men who might have hated him that much, and that coldly, that they would watch for months or years until he had something he cared about and then destroy it. Obregon, Loriston, Wylie and Fahad; not necessarily in that order.

  He saw from Ford’s face that none of the names were new to

  him. Still he asked, “Who are they? What did you do to them?”

  Flynn shrugged. “I took their photographs.”

  Without question, Tomas Obregon was the most evil of the four. He was probably the most evil man Flynn had ever met; also one of the most urbane, cultured, charming. The walls of his white house in Florida were covered with mostly modern masters: Picasso, van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Modigliani. He supported a youth theatre in Miami, a writers’commune in Nassau, several orphanages and a resettlement programme for Cuban exiles. He paid his taxes, and his big white car obeyed speed limits.

  But the money for the car, and the paintings, and the house, and the assorted orphans and exiles and writers, came from the drug trade. Tomas Obregon was one of the top half-dozen drug barons in the world, and everyone in that world knew it. The difficulty lay in proving it. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had tried. Some of their agents had died trying, but it was no easier to prove him a murderer.

  It was not so much that Flynn had succeeded where the FBI had failed, more that he could do things which it could not, and achieve his effect with mere careful suggestion where the FBI required hard evidence that would stand up in a court of law.

  Thus began a brilliant, bizarre campaign that over a period of five months shredded the apparently impervious cloak of respectability Obregon had spent fifteen years weaving; a campaign that made no allegations against Obregon, that only once mentioned him by name; a campaign spread through a dozen newspapers in as many cities.

  The first photograph appeared in all the papers, to the considerable if short-lived gratification of its subject. It showed Mr. Obregon stepping out of his distinctive long white car to attend the opening night of the Miami youth theatre that bore his name. It was a very pleasant photograph, if a shade tame by Mickey Flynn’s standards, and the kindly mien of the dapper middle-aged Hispanic, the stylish opulence of his favourite car and the happy pride of the multi-coloured ragamuffins welcoming their patron ensured it a prominence that perhaps its content alone could not have justified.

  The second photograph was also taken in Miami, a dramatic study of the docks made one thunderous early morning with the heavy clouds picked up by a moody filter. Three-quarters of the frame was filled by the high flaring bow of a Panamanian freighter, her name Cartagena in rusty white letters at top right, behind her the Miami skyline. Bottom left, parked on the quay by the freighter’s gangway, was a long white car. The picture carried Flynn’s by-line and some cosy caption about day beginning early for those who work on the Miami waterfront.

  Elsewhere on the page, connected by nothing more substantial than coincidence, was a paragraph about the Cartagena being allowed to proceed on her passage from Miami to Norfolk, Virginia, after being delayed by a customs search.

  The third photograph showed a great panorama of fall coming to the wooded mountains of Pennsylvania. It was in colour, which was hardly more archetypal Flynn than the Wonders of Nature style of photography but which showed the autumn growing down the sides of the hills from the scalped peaks, through as many shades of red and yellow and auburn and umber as there were leaves on the myriad trees, to meet the green of late summer in the valley. Behind the peaks the sky was that particular pale, intense blue that comes with the first cold.

  From edge to edge the picture must have captured four miles and two thousand feet of Allegheny Mountain land, and in all that vast expanse there was only one indication of human intrusion. Halfway up the mountain, v
isible through the thinning boughs, ran a road and on the road, nose to nose, tiny as toys from a Christmas cracker, were two cars. One was long and white. The other had steer horns on the grill.

  And elsewhere on the page was a reference to the arrest, on charges of drug trafficking, of a Philadelphia businessman whose sole interest was hitherto believed to be beef cattle and whose stocky figure, Stetson hat and horn-bedecked limousine were a familiar sight at state fairs the length and breadth of the country.

  By now those most closely involved, and a good many others besides, were alert to the game being played and watching for its next move with feelings ranging from glee to black fury, depending on the degree and nature of their involvement. They were not kept waiting long.

  In New York Flynn photographed the long white car outside a lawyer’s office. The ostensible subject of the picture was some street theatre. On the same page was news that the lawyer had been retained to defend two men accused of breaking legs in a dispute over who should sell what drugs on which street corner.

  In Washington Flynn photographed the long white car in traffic alongside a delivery van for a major, and wholly respectable, pharmaceuticals outlet. Both vehicles had been held up for the parade that was the alleged focus of the picture. But the placement of the caption describing it had necessitated cropping most of the van’s side panel including its owners’ names. Only the word “druggist” hung over the top of the white car like an accusation.

  Then Obregon took his two young nephews to a flying display. He had his car parked as centrally as a generous tip could ensure, and adjacent to a static display of veteran planes. If he noticed that one of them had its propellers on the trailing edges of the wings he thought nothing of it until Flynn’s photograph of the plane, the white car clearly visible in the background, appeared under the headline PUSHER.

  Tomas Obregon was not the man to take all this lying down. But even the high-powered help he could afford found it difficult to formulate a tenable complaint. A series of unconnected newspapers had published a series of unconnected photographs on divers topics, in which the assiduous reader armed with a magnifying glass might spot in the background a car which might possibly be Mr. Obregon’s. So? There was no suggestion, in words or pictures, that the vehicle was anywhere it should not have been, or doing anything it should not have been doing. Was Mr. Obregon denying that he had been to a flying display? Was there libel potential in indicating that he had driven through a Pennsylvanian wood?

  Obregon might not have restricted himself to legal remedies, nor probably to breaking legs; but about that time the snowball Flynn had so carefully shaped and set rolling began to develop a momentum of its own. Things that had been secret were now public knowledge, the stuff of jokes. One New York cartoonist began to include a white car, vanishingly small but still quite distinct, in the background of his sketches. Embarrassment at past failures led to a political will to deal with Obregon which had previously been lacking. A new determination and a new priority, together with new funds, entered a renewed investigation of Tomas Obregon.

  And at just that time Obregon gave up his house in Florida and shipped his paintings, and his car, to a property he owned in Barranquilla, across the Caribbean in Colombia, out of reach of U.S. law. It was not the best end that Flynn had hoped for when he began his crusade, but nor was it the worst. Crimes had been acknowledged, and even if the criminal had escaped justice for now, his time might yet come. All the rewards of his crime, except for the money, were forfeit: the respect he had enjoyed, the status. The youth theatre closed down and the orphanages changed their names.

  And for a little while Mickey Flynn was as careful as he knew how to be. But there was no hint of retaliation, no sign that Obregon deigned to acknowledge his existence. Until one morning the post brought him an envelope plastered with South American stamps. There was no letter inside, only a small cartoon. It showed a graveyard, and a stone cross from the shoulders of which hung a camera, and in the background driving away was a long white car.

  Flynn framed the cartoon and hung it in his bathroom.

  Peter Loriston was not an evil man. He was not even a dishonest one, although following the scandal that led to his resigning his seat at Westminster he was perceived almost universally as not merely dishonest but corrupt.

  As the Honorable Member for Chingley South and a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence, Loriston made three serious mistakes in the course of one heady week that turned him from one of the government’s young lions into one of its banana skins.

  The first mistake he would probably have been forgiven, since it was merely cheating on his wife and there was ample parliamentary precedent for that. The second, which was lying to the House, was much more serious, but even that he might have got away with if he had refrained from providing proof of the rumours that ran at the speed of an inspired leak through the corridors of power. The real mistake he made, the fatal one, the one that clinched it and made him overnight into a politician with a great future behind him, was being photographed on a yacht with the daughter of the man to whose company Loriston’s ministry had just awarded a fat contract.

  There was only one way the press, the public and particularly Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were going to read that. Like the name of the latest soap-opera starlet, suddenly the cry “Corruption!” was on everyone’s lips. Hadn’t Peter Loriston, MP, been in a position to influence the award of this important defence contract? Hadn’t the choice of Coxton Electronics been a controversial one? Hadn’t Mr. Loriston assured the House, in the most direct and unambiguous terms, that neither he nor anyone else involved in allocating the contract had any association with Coxtons prior to or other than their dealings on the current matter?

  And then hadn’t Mr. Loriston, MP, forty-six-year-old ex-Guards officer, married man and father of two, been photographed aboard a floating gin-palace at anchor in a remote Sardinian bay washed by the wine-dark Tyrrhenian Sea, plainly engaged in an illicit Mediterranean idyll with the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the eponymous head of Coxton Electronics?

  Those closest to the affair knew that Loriston’s involvement with the girl was a bit of mid-summer madness, a frivolity, nothing more. It had in no way affected the government’s business with Coxtons—nor could it have been allowed to, because what Coxtons had to offer was worth a great deal more than one junior minister at the MoD. Unfortunately for Loriston, what Coxtons had to offer was also secret, so that the award of the contract could not be publicly explained and justified.

  Besides, the Honorable Member for Chingley South had lied to the House. There was no alternative but the Chiltern Hundreds. That one heady week had cost the ambitious, arrogant, able Mr. Loriston his career, his wife, his home and even, now her father had found out, his bit on the side. A week is indeed a long time in politics.

  Flynn had no particular scruples about invading the privacy of a junior minister playing hooky with the daughter of a defence contractor, but nor did he consider the photograph one of the highlights of his professional career. He would not have included the embittered but probably still essentially honest Mr. Loriston on his list of Men Most Likely except for one thing. He rather thought Mr. Loriston had tried to kill him once before.

  It was hard to be sure. It might have been only a moment’s carelessness. It might have been a rather vicious joke devised to extract a small revenge for the damage Flynn had done him. But Flynn had seen his face in the split-second before he was leaping for his life, and it was his firm and abiding impression that Loriston was in absolute earnest.

  Nine months had passed since their previous encounter, through a telephoto lens off the coast of Sardinia. Flynn had hardly thought of Loriston in that time. Now here he was on the public relations staff of a firm of architects showing him round the shell of a Wapping warehouse they were converting into a vertical village using startlingly modern technology that Flynn wanted to photograph.

  They exchanged cool greetings and m
ade no allusion to their earlier confrontation, but Loriston had neither forgiven nor forgotten. It showed in the stiff squareness of his broad shoulders, the almost gladiatorial way he moved round Flynn. Of course, he had been a soldier.

  Flynn was not interested in Loriston. He was interested in the monster machines, in the play of structures hung over London at church-spire level, in the stark surreal views he hoped to see from the roof. Height had always fascinated him.

  A rigger took them up as far as was safe. Flynn wanted to go higher. The rigger objected but Loriston saw no problem and, leaving his coat across a beam, began to climb. They scaled steel for another storey. Loriston pointed out the views downriver towards the Thames Barrier and up it towards St. Paul’s. Flynn grafted himself to a girder by casually crooking one long leg round it and unshipped the camera he carried round his neck.

  It was then that he saw Loriston looking at him. A moment later a cry of alarm and warning above him took his gaze racing up in time to see the grab of a crane opening to drop its contents of broken masonry and mortar dust into a skip below.

  Looking back he was not sure that, if he had stayed where he was, rooted to the girder like ivy to an oak, the debris would have hit him. It might have poured straight past. Leaping back from the girder with no clear idea where he would find another was probably more dangerous than staying put, and he was lucky to have escaped with nothing worse than a racing heart and a lost filter. But in his own mind he was sure of one thing. Loriston had hoped the roaring debris would tear him from the face of the building and smash him to bloody pulp in the skip thirty feet below.

  Even in his own mind, Flynn had never been able to decide whether Michael Wylie was an evil man or not. What he did was certainly illegal in the places where he did it, but in those places it was not always safe to equate illegality with wrongdoing. Besides, when Wylie was successful, very often the laws were changed. As history is written by victors, there were places where Wylie was regarded as a hero of the liberation and others where his life stood forfeit for revolutionary insurgency. Often these places stood cheek by jowl on the map, alternating like squares on a chess-board.