‘Make it soon.’ She turned and walked briskly away towards a black limousine parked further along the line of cars.
Bannerman watched her go and thought he was probably wasting his time. Sally touched his arm and he turned, a little startled, for he had not heard her approach. She turned her eyes in the direction of Marie-Ange’s car. ‘Interested?’ she asked.
Bannerman grinned and shook his head. ‘No.’
‘I’m glad.’ She looked down, embarrassed. Then, ‘Is seven thirty alright? For going to see the child.’
‘Sure. I’ll pick you up.’
‘No, I’ll come to the Rue de Commerce. Around seven.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘Incidentally, I forgot to give you my key for the flat last night.’
‘Keep it.’ He looked at his watch then glanced across at Tait still standing by the car. ‘I’ll have to go.’
‘Who is he?’
‘My editor. I’m not exactly his golden boy at the moment. I’ll see you at seven.’
In the car Tait took out a folded foolscap envelope and handed it to Bannerman. ‘I almost forgot,’ he said coldly. ‘The stuff you wanted on Gryffe.’ Bannerman took it, and looked inside at the photostat sheets. There were about two dozen. Copies of the various obituary pieces on Gryffe that had appeared in the important British papers, plus a selection of the cuttings from the Post’s obit, file on him. He chucked the envelope into the back seat. ‘You can drop me at the airport,’ Tait said. ‘I’m catching a flight to London tonight. I’ll be back in Glasgow the day after tomorrow. I may require you to put the child on a plane. I’ll be in touch.’ With that he lit another cigarette.
Bannerman sat for a few moments then started the car, and as he pulled away from the kerbside, he saw a taxi in his rear-view mirror pull out from the line of cars behind him. He did not notice the face of the passenger in the back seat. If he had, would he have recognised it as the face he had passed in the Rue de Commerce the day after the killings? It is doubtful, since he only had a glimpse of that face, and there was no particular reason why he should remember it. He had not paid any attention to the taxi that sat outside the church during the mass and then again at the cemetery, though its passenger had never stepped out. There was no reason why he should. The streets were full of taxis. Later it would occur to him and he would wonder bitterly why he had not thought of it before. These were things he should have noticed.
For Kale, drawn and fretful in the back of the taxi, none of this had been easy. There had been the problem of language, the difficulty of making the driver understand. But money was a language all men understood, though Kale was only too aware that money would not erase the driver’s memory. Kale had a face that most men remembered. These were risks that he would never have taken before. They tortured him. They were the twisting of the knife.
An inch of ash fell from the end of his cigarette and burned a tiny hole in his coat. He was unaware of it and drew more smoke into his lungs.
The driver caught sight of Kale’s face in the mirror and felt a slight chill run through him. He did not like this fare. If it hadn’t been for the money... Perhaps when he had finished the job he would go to the police. But what could he say? That an Englishman with a face that put a chill through him had paid him over the odds to run around after a blue Volkswagen? More than likely they would laugh at him. Was he in the habit of running to the police every time he took a dislike to the face of a passenger? What was it about this face whose still, dark eyes stared out from the back seat? What could he tell them? He was being silly, and yet he could not shake himself free of the disquiet that had grown in him. He turned his attention to the road and the Volkswagen ahead of him.
IV
The office was empty when Bannerman got back to the IPC building. It was just after five and already it was dark outside. He was frustrated and tense. In twenty-four hours he had got exactly nowhere. The office was warm and stuffy and he threw open one of the windows, allowing a gust of cold air to sweep in carrying with it the odd flake of snow that landed on the sill to melt almost at once. At this time the previous night he had been sitting with du Maurier in the Café Auguste. What had he achieved since then? He had been attacked here in this office, punched a colleague in the face, spoken with Platt, fallen out with his editor and been to a funeral. But he had achieved nothing.
He turned from the window and found a note on his desk from Mademoiselle Ricain. Inspector du Maurier had phoned twice. There was a number to call back. It was the same number the Inspector had given him the other day. There was also an invitation to the British Press correspondents to attend a dinner at a Brussels restaurant that night when Her Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs would announce the arrangements for shipping Gryffe’s body back to London for a State Funeral. There was an embargo on it until ten a.m. tomorrow when an official Government statement would be put out on the wires. Dress would be informal.
Ironically, the invitation was addressed to Timothy Slater Esq., Edinburgh Post EEC Correspondent. Bannerman chucked it disgustedly in the bin. Yet another Government exercise in public relations. The tragedy was that their attempts to smooth over the affair would probably be successful. Most pressmen were susceptible to good food and drink and the gentle persuasions of such an arch diplomat as the Foreign Secretary. After all, most of them were in the same boat as Kearney and Willis, a boat which they freely admitted they did not want to rock. It was the outsiders, the staffmen sent over from London to cover that morning’s press conference, who would remain stubbornly unconvinced, who would ask the awkward questions. But it was unlikely that any of them would stay long enough in Brussels.
Bannerman sat down and examined his swollen knuckles. The hand had stiffened up. He wondered what Palin would do now, where he had gone. Was he getting drunk somewhere? And Mademoiselle Ricain. She would not understand. The world was filled with people who would not understand, who would never understand. Bannerman took out the envelope with the photostats on Gryffe, lit a cigar and began reading his way laboriously through them.
It took him half an hour to read them all twice. There was no sudden revelation, no sudden understanding of what had happened or why. Just the bare bones of a man’s life. Not much more than he had known already from the file of cuttings Slater had compiled.
Gryffe had been forty-four years old when he died. Born in a London suburb, the son of a wealthy lawyer, he had been educated at a lesser-known public school before going on to academic distinction and an honours degree in political science at Cambridge. His background did not suggest that his politics would fall on the side they did.
It was while at Cambridge that he first became involved in the youth movement of the Party he would later represent, initially in the Commons and then in Government. He was an enthusiastic convert at first, but broke with politics for a while after leaving University to take up a lucrative job as a junior executive with a US-based company that built tractors in seventeen countries. During his ten years with the company he travelled widely, rising quickly in the firm, latterly establishing new plants in a number of Third World African States.
At the age of thirty-three he had finally joined the Party with which he had flirted in his early twenties. A year later he was nominated as a Parliamentary candidate for a ‘safe’ Welsh constituency and was elected the following year with a majority of fifteen thousand. Almost from the start of his political career he had become the protégé of the Party’s ageing chairman and guiding light of the previous thirty years.