Edie Investigates Page 4

  All of which had made him just a little more open to ideas of foul play. Perhaps that was why he was here, now. If all this was on the level, that experience was worthwhile in this situation. But sitting in the Copper Kettle, with that infuriating old dear behind him exchanging increasingly barbed apologies with the manageress, he could feel the dead spot between his shoulderblades lighting up, and knew that something, somewhere, was very much awry. But for the life of him, he couldn’t see what it was.

  “Really, Mrs Mandel,” said the old dear, “you shouldn’t use such language, and in front of the young gentleman. He’s terribly shocked.”

  “ ‘Buck up’,” the manageress said icily. “I said ‘buck up’. Not anything else, I’m sure.”

  “Well, no doubt you did. You really won’t let me pay?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Banister,” Mrs Mandel replied.

  “The Linzertorte was excellent,” the woman said, and Mrs Mandel huffed loudly, and marched back to her perch by the till.

  Rice had ducked into what passed for an alley in Shrewton: a grim little sidestreet between a church and a post-office sorting office, lined with dustbins. He called Gravesend. “Hullo, Lizard here again.”

  “Hello.”

  “Is that Gravesend?”

  “Yes, Lizard, it is, as you well know. How is Mrs Lizard?”

  “Very much the same. I did wonder if I myself might be coming down with something.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I did. I wondered if you happened to know whether La Grippe was contagious.”

  “It can be.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Did you read the file?”

  “I did.”

  “You have it with you?”

  “Yes. I rather—”

  And the line went dead.

  Tom Rice knew of a very small number of reasons why that might happen. A cellular phone might drop a connection, but this wasn’t one. It was a government thing which could use cell, satellite, or, in an emergency, a high-power multi-frequency radio signal to a local relay. The call should not have dropped—unless Gravesend had got everything she needed from the discussion and hung up. For a moment, he felt a bit panicked. In the old century, certain enemies of the industrial powers had been unwise enough to accept gifts of such phones from men they knew less well than they thought, and had used them in some cases for days before the moment was deemed right and a single missile had dropped along the line of transmission and blown them out of their shoes. He pulled himself together. It did not seem likely that he was about to be exploded just off Shrewton High Street. Really not at all.

  He considered throwing the phone away, but couldn’t think of anywhere to throw it which wouldn’t be dangerous to someone. He was still wondering whether the pond in the middle of the Shrewton Green roundabout would be isolated enough, and aware that, were he the target of such a strike, the entire internal discussion would already have ended in a loud bang which he would never have heard, when he saw the familiar shape of his driver coming around the corner, accompanied by a small man he did not recognise.

  Mrs Mandel had been joined at the counter by Mrs Russet and Miss Adele, and from them proceeded such a stream of gossip that Edie was momentarily struck dumb. She was aware, in theory, that old women gossiped. She had not appreciated the degree of it. Perhaps these three were especially talented, but the depth and clarity of their knowledge of the love lives and peccadillos of those around them were formidable. Secrets Edie was relatively sure had been entrusted to parents in deepest confidence had been winkled out and were now traded as scurrilous currency. She turned her face to the window and watched the bilious civil servant wander into a sidestreet. The boy, she decided, was not an idiot after all. She had seen him working his way through the Barikad file, and been impressed by the rapid flicking back and forth, the concentration. She knew the process of analysis from within, and could recognise it. Whoever had given him the file had underestimated him. He was seeing through it. Good lad.

  The door chimed, and a group of people who were gigantically out of place walked into the Copper Kettle. One was fat, with a jacket which advertised his allegiance to a particular camera company. The others were younger, a little subservient, and Edie recognised them as his crew. Finally, there was a girl—no, a woman heavily made-up, and with perfect hair—in a yellow overcoat. Her eyes danced around the room, saw the gossips, and saw, to Edie’s deep discomfort, Edie seeing the gossips. Their eyes met, and the woman smiled and walked over. Edie took a moment to admire her legs.

  “Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Gina Day. I’m with the BBC.”

  Edie smiled. “Hello, dear.” The second word nearly stuck in her throat. Grandmotherly, she told herself firmly. I am an old local trout. Yes.

  “I wondered if you knew anything about this Caspian business. I’m down here from London. I think we’re ahead of the pack, but it’s going to get awfully noisy soon.”

  “What Caspian business, dear? Old Donny? I heard he was killed by a falling urn.”

  “Did you know him?”

  Yes. He was a friend, a really good one, a million years ago.

  “Oh no, dear. I keep myself to myself, mostly.”

  “I’m afraid it was murder, you see. We had a call from a lady—she wouldn’t say who she was—but apparently he was sleeping with a local girl—someone quite young, not more than twenty—and her brother took against it.”

  Donny? Shacked up with some doxy? Well, yes, actually. Entirely plausible. He would be one to retain his vigour, and he was, let’s be honest, mountainously rich, which can be awfully attractive to a girl. But something in that made Edie nervous. Journalist. Sex. Anonymous call.

  “I understand he was a banker, our Donny,” she said to Gina Day.

  “Yes, I believe so. Kept his head in the sub-prime thing, apparently. Tried to make people listen, but they wouldn’t, so he made his clients a lot of money. We had him on Newsnight a few weeks ago. He was very good.”

  Through the window, Edie watched the sergeant—no, she was sure now that he’d be Navy—amble over to a parked car and joke with the man behind the wheel. The man got out and both of them walked in the direction of the bilious civil servant in his alley.

  Barikad. Sex. Journalists. Bankers. Spies. Money.

  And something else. Something about the way the second man moved, a familiar fluidity.

  She didn’t know what was happening, not in the main. But she had a fair guess as to the shape of it, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt what was about to happen across the street. Alas, poor bilious … She should walk away. That was the done thing, when you didn’t know the stakes. Except that Donny wouldn’t have. Donny would have jumped in, because that was what Donny did. Donny was the sort of fellow who’d sail his open boat into the teeth of La Belle Dame for a girl he barely knew. And Donny was dead, which left Edie.

  Bugger.

  “Well, that’s a terrible shame, then, isn’t it?” she said brightly. “I mean, all those silly sods who lost the pension money—my pension money, you know!—and they’re all fine, and here’s a nice old gentleman dead, and he was one of the good ones. Very sad. But bless me, dear, I’m most dreadfully late, would you mind if I left you to it? Mrs Mandel will know all about him, I’m sure, she knows absolutely everything that happens in Shrewton and of course she makes wonderful Austrian cakes! You must ask her…” and with this last piece of sheer vindictiveness, Edie gathered up her umbrella and ran, actually ran, for the door.

  “I’m sorry about this, Tommy,” the driver said, without a hint of regret. “I really am. You seem like a nice enough fella. Could I ask you to be gentlemanly about it, and it’ll be over quite quick.”

  Tom Rice stared at him. “What will?”

  “This,” the driver said, and the other man stepped lightly towards Rice, like a fox investigating a dustbin.

  This, Rice realised, was his death. Not by missile, but by thug. A
nd with a secret file in his hands which connected Caspian with some mad Russians. He revised his estimates. CIVIL SERVANT BEATEN TO DEATH IN ALLEYWAY was almost enough to make up for the lack of a girl. Two bodies looked ever so much more like a conspiracy than one. He wondered if something was happening to his bank accounts right about now, something which would tie him to Caspian, and thought it probably was.

  Bank accounts. Donny Caspian had been the Legacy Board’s banker. The Legacy man had let Rice know that, had made a point of saying it aloud in that bloody meeting, in front of more than a few senior people. Caspian had lost them money. Them alone, of all his clients. Or, no. No, that was the point, Rice thought. He hadn’t.

  Of course, he hadn’t.

  No, Donny Caspian had done well for the Legacy Board. Had made them rich, probably a hundred-times richer. And they had reported a loss. Not for peculation or personal enrichment, Rice suspected, as two men bent on his extinction moved almost politely towards him, but for an even more important goal in a department’s life: immunity. Impunity. Independence. No budget cuts, no oversight committees, no hard questions at all. Not with an unacknowledged and untaxed fund sitting somewhere, in the hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of pounds. The Legacy Board would be able to do whatever it pleased, forever. So long as Donny Caspian didn’t object. So long as he would fudge the books.

  Which he wouldn’t, Rice suspected, because he was honest. He didn’t like it when people disappeared money from the economy, from the government, not now when it was needed. Didn’t like it at all. Didn’t approve, and wouldn’t help. And now he was dead. Rice had no notion of how. A special gun. A compressed-air cannon and a block of ice. Or had the whole scene been staged?

  He wondered if there was any way he would ever be able to prove it, or even say it aloud, and decided: probably not.

  The driver reached out gently. “Don’t look, Tommy. You don’t need to see it coming. All right?”

  And a scratchy female voice said: “Atten-shun! Officer on deck!”

  The driver twitched but did not actually salute. The other man swayed slightly and appeared to have changed position without actually moving. Rice would have said—to a policeman, for example, if one should happen by—that the man was partly South-East Asian, except that he had a friend from Portsmouth with a Welsh mother who looked almost exactly the same, with black hair and a broad, pale face. Guessing ethnicities was a mug’s game, and one wise civil servants didn’t play. Part Gurkha? Or something more obvious? He was the assassin, quite obviously. The driver was just there to see it through.

  The old lady strode over to stand by Rice. “All right, young’un?”

  “Well—”

  “A man of few words, I like that. Well, boys, is this a party, or what? Shall we adjourn to the pub and talk it out? Because we can’t have witnesses and such. Messy. Unless you fancy your chances?”

  The driver laughed, and gestured to the assassin, who nodded. Two for one is fine, he seemed to say. If it must be done at all. Tom Rice looked at the old woman, and then looked again, harder. Mrs Mandel had called her Banister. It was utterly ridiculous to imagine. and yet, here she was.

  “Edie Banister?” he asked incredulously.

  She tutted. “In the file, was it? That’s a bit of a bugger, then. Well, yes. Edith J. Banister, Commander RN, Retired. At your service. And you,” she added, pointing to the assassin with her umbrella, “stay where you are or I’ll have you.”

  The little man shrugged, and took one quick step forward. Edie Banister shifted slightly at the hip and shoulder, and he stopped. He stepped very deliberately from one foot to the other, and watched her closely. To Rice’s eye, nothing happened, but the little man’s eyes widened slightly, and he stepped back, then moved his heel to a new position. Edie snorted, and settled a little where she was. Rice could not have said exactly what she did, but she seemed abruptly more solid, as if she had just now properly arrived. The man nodded confirmation to himself, breathed in and out, and he too compressed and strengthened. Rice found himself edging away, as if there was a line between them which it might be dangerous to touch. He saw the driver, startled, do the same.

  Edie Banister tutted like a disappointed headmistress, and Rice expected her to get heavier still in answer to the challenge. Instead, with no diminution of the focus which glinted in her, she became an absence. From one moment to the next, the unconscious sense of her he had had, the knowledge that she was standing next to him, simply vanished. He glanced over to reassure himself.

  She had not moved. She was precisely where she had been. He turned back to the little man, and saw on his face an expression of shock. Rice felt a brief flash of sympathy.

  “Get on with it,” the driver said.

  The little man ignored him, his attention now wholly on Edie. He cleared his throat. “I had thought,” he said, “that I knew all of my father’s students.”

  Edie sighed. “You probably do,” she said. “He hadn’t even been conceived when your great aunt taught me.”

  The little man blinked, then nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I did not think. But,” his eyes flickered to her body, probing, “that would make you more than eighty.”

  “Ueshiba,” Edie Banister observed blandly, “was known in late age to take on several senior students at a time, and win quite handily. No doubt his bones ached terribly the following day. Mine always do.” She extended a hand in a graceful arc, indicating her limbs. The fingers spread and regathered, like the feathers of an eagle’s wing.

  The little man laughed in genuine appreciation, and stepped back. “No,” he said to the driver.

  “What?”

  “No. You must make another plan. I cannot help you.”

  “Because she knew your bloody auntie?”

  “No,” the little man said. “I would still fight her—although I think you have lied to me about what is happening here. I do not believe you are an honest man, any more. But in any case, she would win. She is better than me.” He shrugged. “I regret.”

  The driver scowled and seemed about to argue, then dipped into his pocket and came out with what Rice identified with horror as an actual gun. British civilians in general have a superstitious fear of guns, because they are not part of the life of the nation. Guns are for soldiers and crooks.

  “I’ll just fucking shoot her then, won’t I?” the driver was saying as he pointed the gun, and the phrase turned into a yelp of agony as something bright and shining slapped down hard on his wrist and went “bong”. The gun fell on the ground, the driver to one knee. The shining thing zipped and zigged and returned to the handle of Edie’s umbrella, and only in memory did Rice recognise it for a concealed weapon, a ribbon of metal perhaps eighteen-inches long.

  “You just stay right there,” Edie told him.

  “Wakizashi,” the little man said, seemingly à propos of nothing. Edie nodded, and glanced briefly over at him, then said “Fuck,” which struck Rice as rude until he realised she was now looking back at the driver, who had produced a second, smaller gun from his leg and was bringing it up.

  Rice, feeling that something of the sort was called for, dragged her out of the way of the shot, and Edie squawked an exasperated yodel of “Oh, you silly sod!” The driver came to his feet and gave chase, firing again. Something plucked at Rice’s sleeve and he realised he had sustained an actual fleshwound. Edie Banister reversed course as if she had forgotten something, slipping back along the line of her footsteps, and the driver’s momentum carried him onto her. The gun went off and Edie Banister said “Fuck” again in an irritated voice and the driver said “Oh”. And everything was very still.

  Rice realised he had been hiding behind his hands, and somewhat shamefacedly took them down and looked.

  The bullet had caromed along the umbrella and ripped it apart, taking with it a two-inch piece of white steel which glinted in the gutter. The rest of Edie’s little sword was buried to the handle in the driver’s chest, and his eyes had a
fish-on-a-slab look which Rice suspected meant he was no longer in residence.

  For a moment, no one said anything. Edie looked at Rice and apparently considered giving him a bollocking, then changed her mind. She opened her mouth and Rice thought she might go with “Thank you”, but she didn’t, and shut it again. Rice looked at the body and at the alleyway and thought, gosh, my life is over. How odd.

  The assassin said: “Give me the file.”

  Rice looked at Edie, who looked at the little man and the corpse, then back at Rice. She raised her eyebrows.

  “It is the same,” the little man said. “There is a dead man, and the file. They will not care. It is the same. Maybe better. I think possibly he was sent to kill Caspian also. Put the file by him. The gun was very loud.”

  Rice looked at Edie, who nodded. He laid the Barikad file down on the ground. The assassin rubbed the handle of the sword with a cloth.

  “We didn’t win,” Tom Rice objected. “They got everything they wanted.”

  “Attacker’s advantage,” Edie replied. “You lived, which is something. And Donny doesn’t care if his name’s mud. He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  “But they won.”

  “Yes, they did.” She sat back in consideration of that. “They did.”

  The BBC had covered the story with musty sobriety, and left the frenzy to the tabloids. There was—intentionally, she was sure, on the part of those who had contrived the scene—no clear narrative. Rumours swirled around Donny: the money, the girl, the spying. It was a rich banquet of implication and innuendo. A perfect fog to hide a cold, hard kill.

  Overhead, the public-address system announced Rice’s flight. He was going to Istanbul first, and after that Edie had told him not to tell her, but it better not be Manchester. “Don’t be bloody clever,” she had said.

  Rice had a vague idea of what he would do next. He had a friend from university, now a lawyer of dubious reputation, who might help. But he couldn’t tell her that he’d be all right. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure. But as she said, he was alive.