"What needs to be done?" he asked heavily.
"Can she still be warned off? You've always said she couldn't be bought—"
"No. How do you mean warned?"
"Banks needs attention, too. That would cut off all corroboration…
The security man saw no camera. She won't be able to get back on site.
Would she go to people with what she's seen, suspects?"
"I no, I don't think so. It's not much, at the moment. Clues, nothing more.
She'll go on asking questions for some time yet. Talk to Aubrey—"
"I don't like that," Fraser offered. That old bastard having his finger in the pie."
"I agree. I don't think we have any alternative there but to await his becoming bored. He'll come to see me, I suspect. Look, I have to go, Fraser have you any suggestion as to what we can do about Marian?"
"Surveillance tightened. Proper surveillance."
"Anything else?"
It was as if he were prompting Fraser, nudging him into uttering the unthinkable, one child taunting another into hurting a cat, starting a small fire.
"Aubrey's hands are tied by his friendship with my father," he announced with sudden, certain clarity.
"He's in a dilemma. I'm sure he would prefer nothing to emerge. But Marian—"
"Can she be frightened? Lots of the most unlikely people can be moral crusaders quite often become easily unnerved."
"Very well," Winterborne replied after a silence. He sighed.
"If you think she could be frightened off, try it. But no harm to her."
To Banks?"
"I don't care what you do to keep Banks quiet!" Then he added: "I must go. Handle this carefully, Fraser—"
"I always do." Again, the professional insolence, the quasi-military contempt for the civilian, the man whose hands remained clean.
"One other thing—"
"What?"
"Roussillon. Keeping an eye on the pilot, Gant."
"Well?"
"Vance's pilot filed a flight plan for Oslo, then on to the States.
That just came in."
"Has Roussillon people he can use in Oslo?"
"Yes."
"Then keep Gant under surveillance. You're sure there are no leads to Strickland?"
"None."
Then he matters less than Marian. Good night, Fraser."
Winterborne put down the telephone. It had been discomfitingly clammy against his ear. He paused for a moment to compose his expression, then got out of the car, waving instantly to Burton at the top of the house steps.
Tim!" he called, taking the steps as eagerly as a lover. Thank you for seeing us at such short notice."
They shook hands. He and Coulthard were ushered into the house.
Everything was as it should be… The past had no authority, no right or claim to intrude.
She realised that she had fallen asleep in the armchair and that the notepad and the papers she had been studying had fallen from her lap on to the floor. She saw that it was after one in the morning and sensed her exhausted tiredness. She did not realise what it was that had awoken her. Perhaps just her leaden hand and arm slipping from the chair, tugging her awake.
She yawned and stretched. More papers fell from her lap. She vaguely glimpsed scrawled columns of figures, like a child's arithmetic, on the floor near her feet her estimate of the vastness of the sums diverted from the regeneration project to Aero UK, Winterborne Holdings, dozens of eager pockets — she held her head, which ached. Her vision was blurred; the room seemed filled with thick white smoke. She smelt something. As she tried to stand, she fell back in the armchair. Struggled upright again, pushing with her arms smell? Burning She formed the thought gradually, and was shocked into wakefulness by her realisation.
Burning- she could smell burning. The room was grey with weblike smoke she coughed. A noise, low down on the scale like a tape-hiss played back in slow motion. She opened the door to the kitchen and flame roared at her, striking with the speed of a snake towards her head and arms.
"Are you sure about this?" Cobb asked.
The rear windows of the flat glowed with a lurid light. Behind them, the cathedral was massive against the stars and the minster pool reflected the string of lamps along its banks.
"What—?" Jessop replied, adding: "Sure I'm sure. I vos only obeying orders." He chuckled. Fraser was told to frighten her. This should do it vandals, someone cheesed off with her politics or the way she treated their whining, chucked a home-made firebomb through her window.
Standard issue on most council estates these days, everyone knows how to make them." Jessop studied the spread of the fire and nodded in satisfaction.
"If it kills her, so much the better. Fraser takes the blame if it isn't liked, anyway."
"She will be frightened off, then?" Cobb asked.
"Wouldn't you be if you were just a civilian, I mean?"
"Yes. Never did like fire."
"Neither does she. She's still got the evidence of a skin graft on her right arm, so the file says, from a childhood accident with a fire…"
He paused, inspecting his handiwork, then he said: "She doesn't seem to be coming out, does she?"
The fact that you jammed the front door shut wouldn't help, would it?"
"I suppose not."
"Shouldn't we—?"
"Yes, I suppose so. Some member of the clergy might already have rung for the fire brigade. Come on, then let's go and tell Fraser what good little Boy Scouts we've been. We should get our Firelighter's badges for this." As he turned away, he murmured: "She still hasn't come out shame!"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fire, Lies and Videotape He stood in the passenger doorway of the small jet more as a gesture towards their past than anything else, in case she wanted to say something more, required further reassurance. When he was certain, by her expression, that all she desired was the continuation of the flight her flight from the scene of the destruction of Vance Aircraft he nodded to her and descended the passenger steps.
That late at night, Vance's aircraft was cleared for almost immediate takeoff. He waved his hand at the smudge of white in the cockpit window that was the pilot's face. Then he walked away from the plane.
The engines wound up once more and he sensed rather than saw the plane move away towards the taxiway and the threshold. He deliberately did not turn back or pause in order to watch its departure, but continued walking towards the opendoored maintenance hangar. Oslo's airport was little more than a garishly lit island above the subdued glow of the city and the darkness of the Oslof jord and the Skagerrak beyond it.
His sports bag brushed gently against his leg. He could already see the tailplane of an airliner being serviced, just as two nights before the
494 had been.
And, just like him, someone had walked into this hangar and announced he was from Vance Aircraft and had been sent to check out the fuel computer system. One of maybe a dozen men, most of whose identities he did not know, with the dark talent to create a computer-generated piece of sabotage.
Behind him, he heard a four-engined airliner lift into the night. Jimmy would have put Vance's jet on to the end of the runway by now. He glimpsed in his mind Barbara's face at one of the windows, the features of a stranger seen on a passing train, drained, weary, tragic like those of a woman in a Hopper painting. Out of which he had again walked, probably forever. He blinked in the lights of the huge hangar.
The dock gantry girdled the airliner like a whalebone corset. At once, but perhaps for no more than display, he was approached by a security guard. The man was in his early sixties, overweight, wary, the armpits of his uniform shirt stained by the perspiration of a hot night and nerves.