And yet according to Steve Goss the man in the garage had volunteered the information that she was attractive. Did he mean that she was pretty in the conventional sense, Liz wondered, or something else? Some men were subconsciously attracted to women in whom they detected low self-esteem, or fear. So was this woman afraid? Did she sense Liz’s faint but insistent step behind her? From the moment she learned of Gunter’s death she must have known that the operation was compromised.
No, Liz decided, she wasn’t truly afraid yet. The arrogance was still curtaining off the fear. Arrogance and a trust in the controllers to whom, psychically or actually, she remained leashed. But the strain must be telling. The strain of remaining inside the hermetic cocoon that she had created for herself-the cocoon within which any mayhem appeared justifiable. Reality and the outside world must be beginning to bear on her now. England must be bleeding through.
By 5 p.m. the light had faded and afternoon had become evening. After the initial promise of the encounter at the garage at Hawfield, the Identifit portrait had proved disappointingly generic and unrevealing. The woman was wearing a blue-black baseball cap and olive-coloured aviator sunglasses and looked vaguely like Lucy Wharmby, although the eyes were a little wider-set.
The portrait was quickly e-mailed to Investigations, and to all the police forces involved. In response Judith Spratt requested a call-back, and, when Liz had once again made her way to the phone box that had practically become her second home, told her that the police had drawn a blank on all the non-EU seventeen to thirties.
Eighty-odd women checked. And none of them the target.
“So what do you want me to do?” asked Judith. “The area police chiefs want to know whether to have relief teams standing by for this evening. Do you want me to go with the French women?”
“I think we’re going to have to.”
“You sound unsure.”
“I just don’t believe she’s French. Instinctively, I know she’s English. Still, I guess it’s got to be done.”
“Go for it, then?”
“Yup. Go for it.”
When Liz got back to the Trafalgar, Mackay had returned, and was holding a Scotch up to the light in the bar.
“Liz. What can I get you?”
“Same as you.”
“I’m having a malt. Talisker.”
“Sounds good.” And maybe it’ll help nudge the answer into place about our phantom Eurostar passenger, she thought tiredly. It wasn’t Cherisse behind the bar, but a girl with a bleached crewcut, barely eighteen. Between her and Mackay a faint but detectable tension hung in the air.
“So what kind of day have you had?” he asked, when they were installed at a quiet corner table.
“Mostly, a bad one. Wasting the time of half a dozen police forces and running up the Service’s phone bill amongst other activities. And failing to identify our invisible. On the credit side, I had a nice toasted sandwich with Steve Goss at lunchtime.”
He smiled. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”
She tilted her chin at him. “It’s no contest. Steve’s a considerate guy. He’s not arrogant. He keeps me in the picture.”
“Ah, so that’s the trouble.” He sipped his whisky. “I thought I left a message.”
“Yeah, and the cheque’s in the post. Ring me, Bruno, OK. Keep me in the loop. Don’t just bugger off.”
He looked at her steadily, which she guessed was the nearest thing she was going to get to an apology.
“Let me fill you in now,” he said. “I’ve had a quiet word with our friends at Lakenheath, all of whom seem very together and switched-on and generally prepared… and I’ve stressed the need for them to continue to be so. End of story, really, and I tell you, when you see those places-the sheer size of them-you do begin to wonder what a single bloke and a girl could achieve in the way of damage. Have you ever eaten a twenty-ounce steak?”
“Not to my knowledge. Steve Goss thought the USAF would feed you hamburgers.”
“A fair guess. Hamburgers were indeed on the menu. But this Lakenheath steak… Unbelievable. I’ve had girlfriends with less meat on them. And frankly, a couple of chancers like our two, well, they’d be very hard pushed to get near enough to fire a Stinger or anything like that and have any hope of hitting an aircraft. I mean, I guess they might just about take out a couple of the guys at the gate, but even that would be pretty difficult.”
“I’ve seen those bases, and I was thinking much the same thing. My instinct says that they’re after a softer target.”
“Like?”
“Like I don’t know. Something.” She shook her head. “Damn it!”
“Relax, Liz.”
“I can’t, for the moment, because I know there’s something I’ve missed. When we’ve finished these drinks I want you to have a look at that passenger list, see if anything suggests itself.”
“I’d be glad to. We’re assuming that up to the point when Gunter was killed, our girl had no reason to disguise her actions in any way, right?”
“Right. All she had to do was make sure she wasn’t picked up by the police for a driving offence. As long as she kept clean in that respect, she was fine: her only vulnerability was that stolen driving licence. So she’s got to be on that list somewhere. But they’ve drawn a blank on every British woman between seventeen and thirty on that list. Every one.”
“So it’s a French woman. A French woman who sounds English. Plenty of those.”
“I guess you’re right,” shrugged Liz, unconvinced.
“Look, for the moment there’s nothing we can do. Why don’t we see what sort of a dinner Bethany can rustle up for us, order a decent bottle of wine…”
“I thought you were full of T-bone steak. And who on earth’s Bethany? That sullen-looking adolescent behind the bar?”
“She’s twenty-three, in fact. And the memory of lunch is fading fast.”
Why not? thought Liz. He was right; until the French women had been checked there really was nothing they could do. And she really ought to try and unwind a few notches.
“OK, then,” she smiled. “Let’s see what Mr. Badger and his catering team can do.”
“You’re on. And until then, let’s retire to your boudoir and examine this passenger list.”
“Perhaps you should let your little friend Bethany know that we’re eating here.”
“Oh, she knows,” murmured Mackay, throwing back the last finger of Talisker. “I told her when I got in.”
A sudden paroxysm seemed to seize the windows. Outside, as the wind got up, the rain streaked against the leaded panes, blurring the yellow streetlights. Beneath these, Liz could see a white hatchback with police markings crawling along the sea front, checking the parked cars.
38
Twenty minutes later the white hatchback came to a stop in the car park below the Dersthorpe council flat where Elsie and Cherisse Hogan lived. Zipping up his dripping police waterproofs, Sergeant Brian Mudie reached under his seat for the heavy Maglite torch.
“Looks like they’re mostly lock-ups,” said PC Wendy Clissold, peering along the rain-hatched beam of the headlights. “I wouldn’t leave a car out in the open in a dump like this. You’d come back and it’d be sitting on bricks.”
Mudie considered staying in the car, and just shining the torch out of the window as Wendy Clissold cruised round the place. Don Whitten’s instructions to them, however, had been to get out, to look through garage windows and behind walls-generally poke around and make nuisances of themselves. And so once again he pulled on his wet cap. The cap’s elasticated rain cover was in the glove compartment, but Mudie left it there because he thought it looked daft, like a woman’s shower cap.