‘So,’ I continued, ‘you promise we can still call you Patterson?’
‘Absolutely. That’s my name; it’s on my passport, on my bank accounts, attached to my National Insurance, NHS record, state and civil service, everything.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ Shirl intervened. ‘I thought you guys were pretty much public figures these days.’
Patterson nodded. ‘At the very top level, yes. The heads of the intelligence and security services aren’t called by a single initial these days; they’re publicly accountable to a parliamentary committee. But the rest of us, those of us lower down the ladder? Hell, no. We work in the dark.’
‘Like the man in the woods?’ I murmured.
‘Not in the same way at all.’
‘So you were management, rather than field level.’
‘Senior management latterly, but always an office worker.’
‘What did you do?’ Shirley asked.
‘I can’t tell you any more than I have already, love, honestly. And please, you can never talk about it to anyone else.’ He looked at me, directly. ‘Either of you. Are you all right with that?’
‘I am,’ I told him. ‘I’ve already spoiled your scent for the police. As for this old trout here, I trust her with my secrets, and you can do the same. How’s your Russian?’ I added.
‘Crumbled, through disuse. I can still understand some, but that’s it.’
I pushed it a little further. ‘And your Arabic?’
‘Non-existent. It never existed. Now please, Primavera.’
‘Okay,’ I promised. ‘I will probe no further, and I won’t ask any more questions.’
He smiled. ‘There would be no point. Your friend Mr Kravitz doesn’t know about me. I’ve never appeared on his radar, and when I was active I never had occasion to make use of his skills and services.’
If he said that to shake me up, he succeeded. Mark Kravitz was a guy I’d known for years. Oz and I met him when he provided minder services for Miles on a movie project. After that he did some discreet stuff for Oz on occasion and he’s been more than useful to me from time to time. For most of his career he’d styled himself a ‘security consultant’, a broad-brush picture of what he actually does. Mark was a fixer, and an intelligence gatherer; he operates on the edge of that community.
Patterson had meant to make a point by mentioning his name, and I took it. He was letting me know that when he’d been tipped off that I was checking up on him, he’d had the same job done on me, and that he was much better placed in that respect than I was.
‘I never even thought of speaking to Mark,’ I told him. ‘He can’t afford to go rattling cages in MI5. Besides, his MS limits him pretty badly these days.’
‘So I understand.’ He grinned. ‘You have a limitation yourself, of course. When you accepted your attachment to HM Diplomatic Service, you signed the Official Secrets Act.’
‘I don’t have that job any longer,’ I pointed out.
‘It doesn’t matter. That signature doesn’t go away, and its meaning can be interpreted very widely.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘God, no,’ he protested. ‘One of the things I was told about you was that threatening you would be a waste of time. Indeed it might even be counterproductive. But there are some people in my former walk of life who aren’t as circumspect as me, and who have no sense of humour.’
‘I know. About three years ago I met one of them, a woman who called herself Moira.’
He smiled. ‘Yes, I believe that she did threaten you, and that a friend of yours made sure that it backfired on her. It’s all on your MI5 file. You may be interested to know that she’s now an administrator in GCHQ. . and she hates Cheltenham with a passion, it’s said. But there are others like her, only a lot more subtle; old guard who do not believe in freedom of information. So no, it’s not a threat, just a word of caution.’
‘I’ll take it on board. You appreciate that all I was doing was looking out for Shirley’s interests, just as she’d do for me. The last thing I want to do is compromise you.’ I paused. ‘Mind you,’ I continued, ‘I still think that for the dead guy to choose your pocket to pick, out of all the people in St Martí that night. . that’s a hell of a coincidence.’
‘I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’d still like to know who he was.’
‘And who killed him?’
‘Maybe I don’t want to know that.’
‘You don’t think that you might have caused it, do you?’
‘You don’t mean that I might have ordered it, do you?’
‘No,’ I said, defensively; that had never occurred to me. ‘But could someone in your old service have been. . how do I put it. . a wee bit over-protective?’
He shook his head. ‘No, no; not for a second. I’m not that important, Primavera.’ He smiled as he said it, but there was something in his eyes that suggested to me that he might not have been as convinced as he was trying to sound.
Seven
I’m not going to sit here and claim that by next morning I’d forgotten all about the man with no face; I’m probably as squeamish as you are. I’ve been able to hide it when necessary, but no kidding, my close-up view of that guy is still burned into my brain, and it always will be.
However I did have a diversion, to stop me from dwelling upon it. Jonny had to be fed, watered and got ready for the first day of his new professional life. His ‘new boy’ late starting time was something of a blessing, in that we didn’t have to be up and about any earlier than was normal on a school day. In fact, Jonny might have been better staying in bed until Tom had left for school, for he was quizzed mercilessly over breakfast about his chances, so much that I could see faint cracks appearing in his super-confident image, and told my son, fairly sharply, to shut up and concentrate on his own forthcoming day at the office. I did give him one concession, though. I wanted to stay with Jonny right to the end of his round, and so I told Tom that he could take Charlie along to Vaive after school, and stay on the beach until seven, under the careful and caring eye of the xiringuita owners, friends of ours. After that, if I wasn’t there when he got home, he could set the table for dinner.
Jonny left for the course at nine thirty; my plan was to go down around midday, meet Patterson and Shirley for lunch, and then with or without them, as they chose, be my nephew’s gallery for the whole of his round. . or until my presence started to make him nervous and he asked me to leave. (I’d made him promise that if that happened, he would.)
I busied myself with housework (a word you don’t hear me use too often, but I’m not a slut, honest) for a couple of hours, did some preparation for the evening meal, then went down to the beach and swam for a while. I was ready to go, when the house phone rang.
‘Primavera.’ It was Alex. ‘How’re you doing? I thought I’d give you a call to let you know how badly we’re doing. We can’t find a trace of our murder victim, not anywhere. The post-mortem’s been no help either. Other than the scar, the man had no distinguishing marks and no signs of any medical interventions during his lifetime, no surgical history to offer any leads. The only thing that’s definitive is a report by a forensic dentist. Judging by his teeth, his opinion backs up Tom’s, that the man wasn’t British. . or, to be more precise, that his dental work wasn’t done there.’
‘That’s no help at all, is it,’ I sighed ‘if it means you can’t identify him by his dental records.’
‘There never was any chance of that,’ he replied. ‘Our expert didn’t have a complete mouth to look at. He couldn’t say where the guy’s dental work had been done, only where it hadn’t. Not Britain, not Russia, not Spain, but we’re left with the rest of Europe as a possibility. No blame to him. The upper left jawbone was missing completely, and there was other damage. You saw that for yourself.’