They walked east to begin with, as far as Creake Manor, where Liz told him about her initial recce of the village and her calculations concerning the sailing club. After passing the Manor they turned, and strolled back to Headland Hall, which Mackay examined with interest.
Liz filled him in. Zander’s calls. The conclusions she had drawn from the armour-piercing round. Her questioning of Cherisse Hogan and Lakeby. Her near certainty that the man in the front of the truck with Ray Gunter was “Mitch.” Her hope that Mitch was an associate of Melvin Eastman, and that Zander would be able to help identify him.
“And if you do get an ID on this Mitch?” asked Mackay.
“Give him to the police to pick up,” said Liz.
Mackay pursed his lips and slowly nodded. “You’ve done well,” he said without condescension. “What’s the score on Lakeby? Are you going to have him lifted too?”
“Not much point, I’d say-he’s just one of the links to Mitch. Once we’ve got Mitch in the bag and talking, we won’t need Peregrine Lakeby.”
“Do you think he knew what was actually going on on that beach of his?”
“Not really. I think he preferred to take the money and not think about it. Hid behind the idea that they were honest smugglers bringing in a few cartons of booze and fags. He may be a snob and a bully, but I don’t think he’s any kind of traitor. I think he’s just someone who found out that when you start taking the bad guys’ money, the ratchet only ever turns one way.”
“What kind of sweets do you like?” asked Mackay after they had taken another half-dozen paces.
“Sweets?”
Mackay grinned. “You can’t walk along an English sea front without a paper bagful of something brightly coloured and sugary. Preferably poured into the bag with a plastic scoop.”
“Is that official MI6 policy?”
“Absolutely. Let’s go and see what the village store has to offer.”
Inside the small shop a woman in a blue nylon overall was straightening copies of the Sun and the Daily Express. Elsewhere there were plastic toys, knitting patterns, and shelves of dusty sweet jars.
“Flying saucers!” Liz heard Mackay exclaim in reverent disbelief. “I haven’t seen these since… And Love Hearts!”
“You’re on your own,” said Liz. “Those fish and chips were enough for me.”
“Oh go on,” said Mackay. “At least let me stand you a liquorice bootlace. They make your tongue go black.”
Liz laughed. “You really know the way to a woman’s heart, don’t you?”
“Gobstopper?”
“No!”
In the end he left with a bag of flying saucers. “At school,” he said, as the door chime rang behind them, “I used to empty the powder out of these and sell it for a fiver a line. No finer sight than a group of well-heeled public schoolboys snorting lemon sherbet and then trying to persuade themselves that they’re completely off their heads.” He passed the bag to Liz. “What do you think our man’s here to do?”
“Our man?”
“Our shooter. Why do you think he’s gone to so much trouble to get himself here in particular?”
She and Wetherby had discussed this the night before, but without reaching any particular conclusion. “Some sort of spectacular, perhaps?” she hazarded. “There are the USAF bases at Marwell, Mildenhall and Lakenheath, but they’re on a very high state of alert, and would represent very difficult targets for a single individual or even a small team. There’s the Sizewell nuclear plant, I suppose, and Ely Cathedral and various other public buildings but again, a very tall order. More likely, to my mind, is the assassination possibility: the Lord Chancellor’s got a house in Aldeburgh, the Treasury Chief Secretary’s got a place at Thorpeness, and the head of the DTI’s up at Sheringham… Not the most high-profile of targets, internationally speaking, but you’d certainly make headlines if you managed to put a bullet through one of them.”
“Have their people been warned?” asked Mackay.
“In general terms, yes, they’ve been told to step things up.”
“And the Queen’s at Sandringham for Christmas, I suppose.”
“That’s right, but again, you’d really be pushed to get anywhere near there with a weapon of any kind. Security’s as tight as a drum.”
Mackay placed a flying saucer into his mouth.
“I guess we’d better get back and see what the plods have uncovered. What time do you want to make a move for Braintree?”
“Not later than five?”
“OK. Let’s go back to the Trafalgar, order up a pot of coffee from the lovely Cherisse, spread out a few Ordnance Survey maps, and try and think ourselves into this man’s mind.”
27
This is a strange country,” said Faraj Mansoor, ejecting the five-round magazine of the PSS into his hand and placing it carefully on the table. “It is very different from the place of my imagination.”
The woman who had borrowed the name of Lucy Wharmby was peeling potatoes, stropping the blade in fast efficient sweeps so that the strips of peel curled damply over her left hand. “It’s not all like this,” she said. “It’s not all so exposed and bleak…”
He waited for her to finish. Outside, the sun still cast its pale glaze over the sea, but the wind was whipping at the wave caps, lifting them into a fine spray.
“I think the country makes the people,” he said eventually, checking the action of the PSS before slapping back the magazine. “And I think that I understand the British better for seeing their country.”
“It’s a cold country,” she said. “My childhood was spent in a cold flat with thin walls, listening to my parents arguing.”
Pocketing the handgun, he tightened his belt. “What were they arguing about?”
“I was never quite sure at the time. My father was a university lecturer at a place called Keele. It was a good job for him, and I think he wanted my mother to become more involved in the life of the university.”
“And she didn’t want to?”
“She had never wanted to move there from London. She didn’t like the place and she didn’t make any effort to get to know the people. She ended up having treatment for depression.”
Faraj frowned. “What were her beliefs?”
“She believed in… books and films and holidays in Italy and having her friends round to dinner.”
“And your father? What did he believe in?”
“He believed in himself. He believed in his career, and in the importance of his work, and in the approval of his colleagues.” She reached for a kitchen knife, and began quartering the potatoes with short, angry strokes of the blade. “Later, when my mother’s depression became serious, he believed that he had the right to sleep with his students.”
Faraj looked up. “Did your mother know?”
“She found out soon enough. She wasn’t stupid.”
“And you? Did you know?”
“I guessed. They sent me away to school in Wales.” She wiped her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s very different countryside from this. There are hills, and even one or two you might call mountains.”
He looked at her, his head inclined. “You’re smiling. That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.”
The smile and the knife hand froze.
“You were happy there? At this school in the hills that were almost mountains?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I was. I’ve never thought about it… in those terms.”
Unbidden, a memory rose before her, a memory she had not revisited for some years. It had been her friend Megan who had discovered the magic mushrooms growing in the pine woods behind the school. Hundreds of them, clustered on the rotted logs on the pine-needled forest floor. Megan-at fifteen already a formidable biochemist, particularly with reference to Class A narcotics-had recognised them immediately.
The following day, as the school permitted and indeed encouraged them to, the two friends had signed themselves out of classes in favour of a nature ramble. Armed with a tin sandwich box and a bottle of diluted orange squash, they had hurried to the woods, downed a half-dozen mushrooms each, spread out a groundsheet, and settled themselves down to wait for the psychotropic toxins in the mushrooms to take effect.