Death and Other Lovers Read online

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s better that way—safer.”

  “For whom?”

  Again he could not lie to her. “For both of us.”

  She seemed to reach a decision, then straightened up. “All right. I’m going to need some clothes. I’ll buy some for you too, and a couple of suitcases. Get together what you can salvage, and I’ll see you back here in a couple of hours.” She took his wallet: her money was lost with the rest of her belongings.

  She had the sense to get him a case big enough to leave room for his files. She said, “Can you drop me some place?”

  “I’m not taking the car,” said Flynn. “Or only as far as Heathrow. You could keep it, but Fahad will have the number. Tell you what, sell it. It’ll give you something to live on until we sort this mess out.”

  Laura’s face had gone still. “You’re going to fly? You’re going too far to drive?”

  “Yes. Please don’t ask where.”

  They had spent too long sorting through their affairs. Now they hit the evening rush-hour. Flynn was driving. “Don’t worry, I know a short-cut.” He took them a way of wharves and warehouses, through a goods yard, beside a derelict canal.

  Flynn was not the only one who knew this way. Coming through the goods yard they picked up the brake-lights of a pale gold Porsche. Coming up from the canal they picked up a police escort.

  At first Flynn thought it was him the police wanted and he slowed down, but the car passed him and went in pursuit of the Porsche. When Flynn caught them up both vehicles were stopped, practically blocking the road, and the occupants were getting out. The man in the Porsche, a young black of about twenty-two, was snarling, “Jesus, man, not again?”

  The larger of the two policemen said stolidly, “Is this your car, sir?”

  “Yes it’s my car. It’s still my car. It was my car yesterday, and three days ago, and last Sunday afternoon when you asked. I have made no arrangements to transfer its ownership since then.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve stopped you before, sir.”

  “Well, if it wasn’t you it was some other white cop who don’t like to see a black brother doing himself well.” He grinned, a sudden feral flash of white with no humour in it. “You all look the same to me.”

  The policeman’s expression never flickered. “Can you show me some documents, sir?”

  “Yes, I can show you some documents. I can show you my driving licence and my insurance. I can show you my tax return, proving that I earn about ten times what you do every year. I can show you the sleeve of my latest album, which has a picture of me driving this car on it. And I can show you my diary, with a note of every time I’ve been stopped, checked and allowed to proceed by you people in the last six months. It makes an interesting statistic.”

  “No need to be like that, sir,” said the policeman, still stolidly, “we’re only doing our job. If somebody stole it off you, wouldn’t you be grateful if we stopped him?”

  “Sure I would.” The singer’s tone was derogatory. “And if he was white and you stopped him, I’d be more than grateful—I’d be amazed.”

  Flynn was already getting out of his car, quietly, a camera—the little chain-store job from the glove-compartment—in his hand. He said softly, “There’s going to be trouble here. Stay in the car.”

  Laura stared at him. “How do you know?”

  “Stay in the car.” Everything about him was suddenly different: his face, his voice, even the way he moved, purposeful and professional and predatory. With cat-like stealth he edged up on the scene developing ahead.

  In his exchange with Laura he had missed something of what had been said at the Porsche. Presumably it was more of the same, for now tempers were growing shorter. The singer was shouting. “Now you’ve got my driving licence and insurance, and I want your number and his number, and if I don’t get them I’m going to pick up this yuppie mobile phone and call one cop shop after another until someone admits to owning you two.”

  Flynn could not swear to precisely what happened next. It was his impression that the driver was reaching inside the Porsche for his car-phone; someone closer might have had reason to suppose it was something more sinister he was being threatened with. So perhaps the policemen were justified in hauling the man out of his car backwards by the belt of his trousers. It was harder to justify them hitting him with their fists until he fell down and then kicking him.

  It was the classic photographer’s dilemma: whether to record or to intervene, to witness or to participate. Flynn chose, as he usually did, to do his job.

  In any event the effect was much the same. The first policeman who glanced up and saw Flynn and his camera barked a warning and they both staggered back, Flynn taking the opportunity to add full-face portraits to the action shots on the film. Then they came towards him purposefully, stepping over the curled-up body of the man on the ground. Flynn took another shot as they came.

  Before they had the chance to ask he said, “No, you may not have my camera. If you try to take it I shall bring charges of assault and theft.”

  They broke their stride, exchanging a glance as if trying to judge if he was bluffing. While they wondered he went on calmly, “If I was not on my way to the airport I would do something about this”—he indicated the young man climbing to his feet—” right now. I may still do something once my own business is attended to. For now what I shall do is tell both you and him how you can find me if you want me. Call any major newspaper and ask for Mickey Flynn. I won’t be there, but I’ll get the message.”

  The police car left first, then the Porsche, the driver waving Flynn a grateful salute as he went. Flynn put the camera in his case, then he too drove out of the back street.

  At the airport he gave Laura the keys, the documents and a scribbled authority to dispose of the car, then took his case off the back seat. “Well—so long.” He was not sorry she did not want to come inside with him. He waited on the pavement until she was out of sight.

  All the way here, except for the incident near the canal, he had been wondering what plane to get on. New York was the obvious choice—it was his home town, he knew his way round, could get help there if he needed it. For the same reasons, of course, it would also be obvious to Fahad.

  It came down to what he hoped to achieve by running. Just keeping a step ahead of the man hunting him? Shifting the action to where it would not threaten Laura? Was there a way he could get Fahad off his back, or was he only delaying the inevitable once again?

  He did not know. Laura’s jibe had struck home. Of course he did not want to let Fahad win, drive him from pillar to post until one day he should trap him where he could not run and kill him there. But he did not know what she expected him to do: stand his ground and die there instead, and have her die with him? No police force in the world could protect them indefinitely from a fanatic with time and a sense of grievance on his side.

  At least in New York he would not be worrying about Laura. If they met in New York he would be fighting on home ground; he could maybe get hold of a gun and— He sighed. There was a small chill space inside him, a hollowness, an emptiness. He recognised it as fear: the chill, still fear of things for which action offers no remedy. Actually there was nothing he could do, in New York or anywhere else, to make it harder for Fahad to kill him. He could keep running away, that might work for a while yet. But any time he stopped he was going to be right back here: back in the apartment with the roar of flames about his ears, the sear of naked heat on his skin. Fahad was not going to let him go. He was not even going to let him die easily.

  At least in New York he could hope that, whatever happened to him, Laura would be safe. On that basis he would fight Fahad for his life. He bought a ticket to the Big Apple; one-way.

  There were empty seats on a flight preparing to depart and he took one of them. He warned the security staff about his negatives and they took appropriate care in checking him th
rough. Of course, they knew him, both his face and his name. For a large part of seven years he had been a regular commuter on this route.

  Being the last to board, he was expecting the plane to leave as soon as he could find the other half of his seatbelt. But it just kept sitting there, its electrics ticking over desultorily, with occasional slightly tetchy apologies from the flight-deck for the delay. Circumstances beyond their control, they said, which could have meant anything.

  Flynn spent the time looking for somewhere to put his long legs and playing the faces game with his fellow passengers. The old man was a famous Hungarian conductor. The teenage boy uncomfortable in his best suit had been bequeathed a controlling interest in a publishing company by his canny Scottish grandmother and was on his way to save the family’s honour from a take-over by a soft-porn house. The business-woman with the briefcase was carrying plans for a revolutionary new under-arm deodorant and was being pursued by agents of a rival cosmetics firm.

  Actually, he supposed she was nervous about flying. He said, “Don’t worry, we’re pretty near the back.”

  She looked at him as if for the first time, with a perplexed and edgy smile. “I’m sorry?” She was an American.

  He gave her his grin that sent brave men scampering for trees. “Planes almost never back into mountains.”

  It may not have been the right thing to say. She disappeared into her briefcase like a Jack Russell down a rabbit-hole.

  Finally the waiting ended, not with the little lurch of a tractor taking up the tow but with the opening of the cabin door which had been closed ten minutes before. Two men came aboard and made their way slowly down the length of the plane, their eyes scanning the rows of faces.

  From his first glimpse of them Flynn knew two things: that they were policemen, and that they were looking for him. His mind juggled the possibilities. Had they caught Fahad? Dear God, had he caught up with Laura? The other prospect was that they wanted to talk about the business with the Porsche.

  They spotted him from three rows ahead. “Mr. Flynn? I wonder if we could have a word.”

  “Is Laura all right?”

  “Laura?” The older of the two men frowned. “Who’s Laura?” So it was not about her, or the fire.

  So it was about the Porsche. Flynn stayed where he was, deliberately not touching his seatbelt. He stretched his legs under the seat in front. “Sure. What can I do for you?”

  The man smiled thinly. “Not here. There’s an office at the terminal we can use. More private. If you’ll come—”

  “How much privacy do we need? Say what you have to say, this plane’s about to leave.”

  The policeman breathed heavily. “I’m sorry, Mr. Flynn, I must ask you to accompany me back into the building.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “Do I need one?”

  He went with them. He had no good reason not to. Besides, since they were not going to get their own way on the major issue it was in the interests of press/police relations to allow them this small victory.

  They took him to a room where a tray waited with cups and a coffee-pot on the desk. Flynn raised an eyebrow at it. “I don’t think the captain will be happy if we settle down to make an evening of this.”

  The policeman who was doing the talking, who on the short walk here had introduced himself as Inspector Harris, shook his head. “Don’t you worry about the captain, sir. He’ll do what he’s told.”

  It was about the Porsche. They understood Flynn had witnessed an incident involving a motorist and two uniformed police officers. A complaint had been made and was being investigated. It would be helpful in establishing just what had happened if they could have the film he had shot.

  “I’ll send you prints, from New York.”

  They did not want to put him to that much trouble. If he would leave the film with them, they could print what they needed and forward the negatives to him when they were finished. Where was the film?

  “In my camera.”

  And the camera was—?

  “In my bag. In the hold. You want to ask the captain to off-load all his baggage while he’s waiting?”

  Inspector Harris did the thin smile again. He did not think that would be necessary. He thought Flynn’s bag could be extricated and the film removed without too much difficulty, given Mr. Flynn’s co-operation.

  “Damn co-operation,” said Flynn tersely, except that he did not say “damn.” “You want my film because you don’t want those pictures finding their way into the papers. Well, I don’t part with my films—not ever—and you have no legal grounds for compelling me to do so. You want to stop me leaving the country with my camera and my film in it, you get a court order. If you’re prepared to tell a magistrate why you want it. But you’d better do it now.” He was already on his feet and making for the door.

  The younger policeman was standing by the door, not exactly obstructing it and not exactly not. The older one did not move from his chair. He folded his hands in his lap. “So you don’t feel you can help us, sir.”

  The way he said it was not quite right. He should have been trying harder, either shouting or wheedling by now. Even the regret in his voice had a certain complacency about it. He would not have liked having to do this, trying to pull some other officers’ chestnuts out of the fire; particularly he would not have liked trying and failing; most especially he would not have enjoyed being told where to go by the likes of Mickey Flynn. He just had no business now looking and sounding so god-damned smug.

  “Well, if you won’t you won’t. You don’t mind me asking, I hope, sir?” Flynn shook his head silently. He knew there was a punch-line coming, just did not know yet what it was. “Well, that’s very decent of you. Sergeant, I think it’s time you escorted Mr. Flynn back to his aeroplane.”

  The sergeant moved away from the door, stepped to the window, parted the Venetian blind with two fingers. “Oh dear, sir,” he said woodenly, “I think Mr. Flynn’s aeroplane has gone without him.”

  That was the punch-line. That was what the pantomime had been about—why they had let him board the plane before coming for him. They did not expect him to give them the film. The object of the exercise was to part him from the camera. When his bag arrived unaccompanied in New York someone from security would take charge of it, and before Flynn could get it back it would have suffered some misfortune—an overdose of X-rays, perhaps, a broken zip that left the camera vulnerable to a passing baggage trolley, perhaps nothing more sophisticated than being dropped from a great height. Whichever, the film would be destroyed. The airline would compensate him, of course, unaware that it was not carelessness on the part of its staff that was responsible, but money would not replace what was in that camera. There were his files too. The Sondheim Prize chemist might pose for him again but Obregon would not.

  Flynn said a lot of things, none of them printable, as he strode to the window and with the sergeant watched the New York flight in its distinctive livery taxi slowly towards the perimeter, disappear for some moments out of sight behind the airport buildings, then come surging past, accelerating towards take-off speed. The tricky moments between V1 and V2 passed without incident and the great gleaming fish sailed up the sky carrying the roar of its engines out of earshot as it headed north.

  “Would you believe that?” said Inspector Harris, hardly bothering to disguise the satisfaction in his broad face and full-bodied voice. “And I asked him to wait. Didn’t I, Sergeant? I certainly meant to.”

  His lip curling savagely, Flynn turned away from the window and back to the Inspector. He dredged his memory for some insults he had not used recently. He said, “If you seriously think you can—”

  Still at the window the sergeant said, “Jesus Christ,” with such a hollowness of tone that Flynn stopped in mid-diatribe and Inspector Harris got up from his chair and went to see what his colleague was looking at.

  It was autumn and the evenings were already drawing in. Dusk was unrolling its slow blanket over
England: it was no longer daylight, not yet dark. Lights twinkled palely among the terminal buildings. Cars on the roads were driving mostly on side-lights.

  Light like a great pink chrysanthemum bloomed far away over the distant perimeter, hanging high in the quiet air. Others would describe it as a fireball and speak of the deep booming roar as the fuel tanks, full to capacity at the start of the plane’s long run, exploded. But no sound reached inside the little office, double-glazed and already ten miles away, and Flynn’s abiding impression was of a great flower blossoming halfway down the sky.

  After long shocked moments Inspector Harris found a voice, and to his great credit it was a voice without hysteria saying something sensible. “John, you were watching—was that an aircraft?”

  The sergeant nodded slowly. The shock that had wiped the expression off his face seemed also to have kicked him temporarily into slow-motion. “An aircraft. The aircraft.” At last and with an effort he dragged appalled eyes away from the fading pink light and they found Flynn. “The one we pulled him off.”

  Chapter Four

  Gilbert Todd was on his way out to dinner when news of the disaster came over the car radio, interrupting a programme on the trout-streams of Scotland. He stopped the car and listened until the newsflash finished. Then he made two calls on the mobile phone, both of them to women. One was to his dinner partner, apologising for the fact that he was going to let her down yet again and wondering if she would risk giving it another try another night. The other, and first, call was to his photographer Leah Shimoni, who lived with a Saluki in a pepper-pot gate-lodge near Windsor. She too had just heard the flash and was about to call him.

  The explosion had blown the wings off, but the fuselage had hung together until it had plunged into a water-meadow beside the Thames north of Slough. The impact had dug a deep crater in the soft ground and scattered wreckage over a wide arc on both sides of the river. With the wing-tanks gone there had been no further fire, a fact that might assist the accident investigators who were already on the scene but which had no implications for the survivors. There were no survivors.