Death and Other Lovers Page 21

  The single gunshot sent every bird in the spinney rocketing into the sky, and the sound of their rising all but swallowed the muffled thump of a body’s soft falling.

  The man with the briefcase thanked the girl who showed him to Hehn’s office, tapped on the door and walked in. He told Hehn’s secretary that he was here to speak to the doctor and no, there was no need to bring him in from the laboratory. Seeing the unmistakable monolithic outline against the glass, he let himself in at the connecting door without waiting for an invitation.

  By nothing more meaningful than a coincidence he found Hehn working alone. In a way that was convenient, although his business extended also to Hehn’s associates. He put his briefcase on a handy worktop, unlatched it and lifted the lid. He was a careful man and so he checked his facts before proceeding. “You are Dr. Dieter Hehn”—he read out an address in Mayfair—” senior research chemist at Deering Pharmaceuticals?”

  Hehn stared at him. The accent was surprising: you do not expect English policemen to be anything other than English. But there was no mistaking that liturgy, it was the prelude to an arrest. He drew in a slow breath, using the time to think. He was a big square man with big square lungs and the breath seemed never-ending. The man with the briefcase waited patiently.

  Finally Hehn said, “I am. But I would like my lawyer to hear anything else you have to say.” He moved towards the telephone extension by the blackboard.

  “I’m sure you would, sir,” the other man said politely. “But don’t worry, he’ll know all there is to know very soon.”

  Hehn looked back at him, puzzled by his words and irritated by his presence but not worried, not yet. He knew his value to Deerings. He knew that those in the upper echelons who had known the nature of his special project, the one that had nothing to do with antibiotics, would mortgage their company cars and stake their pensions to keep him at liberty and at work; and those who had known nothing, quickly realising that their cars and pensions too were on the line, would do the same.

  Six months from today Dr. Hehn confidently expected the drama to be over, the threat of prosecution averted by one means or another, the police advised firmly that they had been humoured long enough and should now pursue their enquiries elsewhere. At that point Dr. Hehn expected to be offered a new establishment in a different part of the Deering empire where he could return to the project that had absorbed him these nine months and which he had been on the brink of completing when the exciting, ill-timed news of the Sondheim Prize came through.

  Three months after that he confidently expected Deerings—obviously, not under its own name—to have cornered the market with its cheap (but still seriously profitable) cocaine substitute. Once the formula—the one that lived now only in his head, evolving and developing there like a foetus approaching term—once that was right, it could be manufactured on a cottage-industry scale anywhere there was water and electricity. Manufacture close to point-of-sale would eliminate the need for dangerous smuggling. The advantages of local manufacture over the importing of cocaine grown in Central America were, like the potential pay-off, colossal. As a commercial venture, as an achievement of chemistry, it was a breakthrough of global proportions and Hehn was proud of his work.

  And from an ethical point of view? No-one had ever paid Dieter Hehn to make moral judgements, and in the absence of such an incentive whatever natural inclination he might once have had to do good in the world withered and died. The prospect of profiting from drug addiction troubled him no more than the human cost of destroying that unfortunate photograph. He had not arranged that, Spalding had, but it had seemed to him a reasonable response to a serious danger. The element of overkill had simply not occurred to him.

  Nor had the idea that he would not ultimately be free to continue with his work. He knew it might take a little time. He knew it might cost Deerings something in legal, and other, expenses. But he had thought that all it really needed was for Spalding and himself to hold their tongues in the face of whatever that colourless, clever policeman might throw at them; and he knew he could, and he was pretty sure about Spalding.

  That was when he turned back from the phone, puzzled and irritated but still not worried, and saw the gun that the man in the raincoat had drawn from his briefcase.

  He had time to notice the curious bulbous sheath on the short barrel. He may have had time to register the soft flat cough that was the only sound to emerge from the silencer. Whether or not, he still looked surprised when he fell over, taking the blackboard with him, and by then he was already dead.

  The secretary in the office heard the clatter of the falling board, not the gunshot, and started to her feet. She could not see Hehn for the furniture between them and the blackboard over him, but she could see the man in the raincoat doing something under the lid of his briefcase. Then he closed the lid and came back into the office, leaving the briefcase behind.

  He said calmly, almost conversationally, “Dr. Hehn is dead. I’ve left an incendiary device in the laboratory—no, don’t think of touching it, no-one else need get hurt. You’ve five minutes to clear this floor, a little longer to clear the building. I think you should start now.” He pressed a slip of card into her hand. “Give that to—someone,” he added vaguely. Then he left.

  Someone said, “You can open your eyes now.” If he had not known better Flynn would have thought it was Fahad. Fahad as St. Peter?—he hardly thought so. It seemed to suggest he was still alive.

  He was not only still alive, he was still vertical. If Laura—he could not think of her by any other name—had shot him in the head, or anywhere else, even if it had not killed him it would have knocked him down. He considered with almost scientific detachment the fact that the great crash of sound which had sent his heart lurching into his rib-cage and a consequent spasm through the length of his body had not been accompanied by the physical shock that a man experienced on being shot. Was it conceivable that, from a range of inches rather than feet, she had missed him?

  He cranked one eye open a slit. It was Fahad’s voice he had heard. The little Arab was standing in front of him, looking up at him and softly, not unkindly, laughing. It occurred to Flynn, in the last of these surreal moments before his soul properly returned to the body it had half thought itself finished with, that for a man who had caused him fear and pain and tried to take his life, Fahad had always treated him kindly.

  He croaked, “What—?”

  “—happened?” Fahad smiled, his eyes brilliant with triumph. “A moment before she could shoot you, Mr. Flynn, I shot her.”

  “Laura?” He lurched round, long legs twisting.

  She lay on her back in the leaf-mould, her legs crossed at the knees and her arms flung out as if Fahad’s bullet had taken her down spinning. Her gun lay in the litter a few inches beyond her open right hand, the oddly pale palm uppermost. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted on the gleam of white teeth. Blood drenched her left side in a semi-circle as if a shark had bitten at her waist. Pale dapples of light through the canopy played over her still form.

  Nothing in Flynn’s experience, which had been liberal, equipped him to deal with the violent death of a woman he had loved in the moment she was preparing to kill him. He still went weak in the presence of her beauty. Of course he knew differently, but some part of him was still struggling to believe it had been a misunderstanding, a tragic mistake, that she was still the Laura Wade who had taken possession of him in his heart and in his bed. In spite of everything he needed to hold her. He sank to his knees beside her.

  Fahad’s iron grip on his arm pulled him to his feet, dragged him back to reality. “The other one needs you more.”

  “Shimoni?” Unforgivably, Flynn had forgotten about her. “Is she all right?”

  “Oh yes. A black eye, a cut lip, maybe rope-burns on her wrists—nothing more. But she’ll be anxious to know who’s dead and who’s alive.” Fahad left the track and led the way into the wood.

  Still weak-kneed, Flynn could n
ot keep pace with him. He stumbled and Fahad waited patiently for him to pick himself up. But for a moment Flynn stayed where he was, crouching among the tree-roots, looking up at the Palestinian. His eyes held a desperate ache. His voice was low and rough. “I don’t understand. How. Or why.”

  “How?” Fahad showed small white teeth in a vulpine grin. “How was easy. I did what she did: tried your flat, then Mr. Todd’s, then Mr. Todd’s partner’s. Without leaving written directions you could hardly have made it easier.”

  “The police were going to move me someplace else tonight.”

  “Tonight would have been too late.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Flynn got up, dusting leaves and moss from his clothes. For a man who cared little about his appearance, he was aware that he always met Fahad at a sartorial disadvantage. “Then why?”

  “I told you. She was getting terrorism a bad name.”

  The muscles tightened in Flynn’s face. “Damn you, Fahad, answer me!”

  Fahad took a step back in mock alarm. “Breath of the Prophet, it bites!”

  “Why? I have to know.”

  The Arab relented. “Not for you; not really. I did tell you: she was going to get me killed. My people were being blamed for the bomb on Flight 98, and some of my people were blaming me. It was necessary, if I wished to continue working or indeed living, to prove them wrong. If she had killed you, that proof would have been hard to come by. Also, no-one will say she was working for me now I have killed her. I can go home now.”

  “You knew she was coming here?”

  Fahad shrugged elegantly. “It seemed a safe bet. We move, after all, in interlocking circles: when I learned she was back in London, I guessed why. I found you and waited for her to find you too. There was no certainty of being able to save you—she was, after all, a professional—but even if she killed you, my position would be safeguarded when I killed her. Forgive me, but that was my main consideration. I don’t very much care what you people do to one another, but I have a nation to create and your antics were keeping me from doing it. Now I can get back to something that matters.”

  “You’re a bastard, Fahad,” Flynn said with certainty.

  Fahad sniffed. “You Westerners are so emotional.” He turned away, peering into the trees, and nodded. “There.”

  Shimoni was tied to a tree in the time-honoured manner of romantic fiction heroines. Admittedly, on close inspection there was a degree of bruising, not to mention puffiness, down one side of her face that most leading ladies would have considered unnecessarily authentic, and the handkerchief stuffed in her mouth for a gag was more effective than attractive too.

  Still, the comparison just about hung together until Flynn gently eased the gag past her broken lips while Fahad cut her free. Then she issued a string of blasphemy and invective in three languages that surprised and impressed Flynn and actually made Fahad blush.

  Mainly it was a way of releasing tension. She had been very frightened, for herself at first, then for Flynn as it became clear that the woman with the gun had no interest in killing her, only using her, and every intention of killing him. She had seemed so professional, so calm and unruffled, almost more mechanical than methodical, that Shimoni could not imagine her being thwarted, at least not by the impetuous emotional hagridden Flynn and the dogged Sergeant Ferris. She knew nothing of Fahad’s presence in the spinney. When she heard the shot that sent all the birds clamouring for the sky, she believed as if she knew it that Flynn’s soul was soaring with them and his body was just so much bloody rubbish littering the spinney door.

  At that an unexpected grief surged through her, and a bone-shaking rage, and after that an awareness of her own part in his destruction. She could not know that he had left the relative safety of her house in full consciousness of what was waiting for him, an act of sacrifice rather than one of carelessness; but she knew that Ferris would have guessed if Flynn had not, and Ferris would have made sure he understood the likely cost of her redemption. At the shot which she believed ended his life, Shimoni cried out—inaudibly, because of the gag, but from the anguished depths of her spirit. Not the least part of the horror was that she would have to tell Todd how he had died.

  When he wandered through the trees towards her, dazed and decorated with leaf-mould yet not only alive but essentially unhurt, relief and disbelief had tried to turn her inside out so that she would have exploded had she not found some outlet for the towering emotions raging within her. So she swore, and she struck at Flynn wildly with her numb fists, and then she collapsed in stormy tears and he gathered her to him as if she were an overwrought child. She spent the worst of her distress against Flynn’s chest, with his chin resting on top of her head.

  Fahad cleared his throat. “Your police will be here any time: I must be on my way.”

  Flynn’s eyes had cleared a lot in the last few minutes. He shook his head fractionally. “I don’t know that I understand it any better now. But, thanks.”

  Fahad raised a neat hand in salute, smiling impishly. “Stick to photography. You lack the aptitude for intrigue.” Chuckling to himself, he turned away and left them and headed back towards the track, a small middle-aged man in a tweed jacket walking with the loose stride of his desert forebears through an English wood.

  Thereafter things happened quickly. A sudden snatch of two-tone music beyond the cottage announced the arrival of police cars. Fahad broke his stride and looked up the track and then rapidly back to where Flynn was still standing with Shimoni in the compass of his long arms. He shouted something they could not make out, and dropped into a crouch and was pulling at his pocket when, shockingly close, a shot rang out. It picked Fahad up and flung him momentarily into the air, and then threw him down among the roots like a bundle of old clothes that had never contained a human being.

  Then, before Flynn could unfreeze his muscles enough to relax his grip on Shimoni, another figure moved among the trees scant yards to his right, and Laura Wade stepped into the open, her gun cradled carefully in both hands. She said quietly, “I think he was warning you about me.”

  Chapter Six

  Flynn had thought she was dead and clearly she was not. But he had not imagined the blood. Her clothes were heavy with it all down her left side. It still pumped, thick and slow, from entry and exit wounds at her waist, six inches apart and neatly transected by the side-seam of her shirt. Her eyes under the lowered lids were deep with shock and her skin had lost its roseate glow. Only sheer determination—professionalism—was keeping her on her feet.

  Incredibly, Flynn was moved to help her. It had to be his hormones thinking: he knew what she was there for. He started to put Shimoni behind him. “Laura, let me—”

  Professionals do not jerk their guns. They do not do anything with them except fire them. Laura’s gun remained where it was, rock-steady on the centre of Flynn’s face; her eyes flicked at him instead. “Stay where you are, Mickey.” The breath was catching in her throat. Cramping pain in her left side kept her from drawing the long, slow, deep breaths she needed. That did not matter with him being so close. She could put the bullet through the pupil of his eye at this range.

  Flynn could not believe that she meant to go on with this. “Laura, that’s the police. Let me get them. They’ll have you in a hospital in ten minutes, you’ll be all right.”

  And Laura Wade could not believe that, after everything that had happened to and around and because of him, he was still such an innocent. She shook her head minutely. Then she said slowly, enunciating clearly, “Mickey, I have to kill you.”

  He stared at her, still without any real comprehension. He jerked a hand towards the cottage. “They’ll be here in a minute. They’ll hear the gun. The state you’re in, you can’t make a run for it. You’ll—”

  “Go to jail?” She smiled, half amused and half malicious. “Not for killing you I won’t. Killing you won’t cost me an extra day, not an extra hour. For bombing an airliner with two hundred and twenty people on board t
hey’ll give me the maximum they can. You might rate a line on the charge-sheet, in the interests of tidying up, but they can’t actually do anything to me for killing you. A line of type is all your life is worth.”

  Shimoni believed her. “Oh no,” she said in a low voice. Then she said it again, and again, and the pitch of her voice rose until she was screaming it in an insane litany while Flynn, shaken, held her by the arms to stop her throwing herself at the woman with the gun. “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!”

  “Leah. Leah!” Flynn bent down to look her in the face. “Listen. I think maybe Laura and I can work this out. If we can just have a bit of time alone. Will you do that for me? Will you find Donnelly and have him keep his distance while we get something sorted? Laura, what do you say—is that OK?”

  Wade had moved a little to put a tree at her back and seemed to be leaning on it. Her grip on the gun was unaffected. She shrugged negligently. “Sure. She can go.”

  “Mickey, she means to kill you!” Shimoni’s eyes were wild, not with hysteria but with a very real appreciation of what was happening.

  He shook his head to reassure her. “I know what she said. It isn’t going to happen. Laura and me—Well, she isn’t going to kill me. Unless Donnelly barges in here and forces her hand. Will you stop him?”

  She was unconvinced. He had left her no option. She snatched a glance at the older woman, hating her.

  Flynn misinterpreted the look. “She won’t hurt you. Will you, Laura?” Wade smiled remotely and shook her head. “Go on. Go now.” He pushed her firmly towards the track, the shapeless bulk of Fahad’s body marking the way. The second step she took alone, hesitantly, looking back. Then she began to run.

  When they were alone Wade said, her voice slowing to a drawl, “You don’t believe that, do you?—that I’ll let you live because we were good in bed. That really would be too naive.”