Tom is brilliant with faces. I decided not to argue. ‘When was this?’
‘A few months ago. April, just after school started again. Remember the day the old car broke down when you were coming to pick me up, and I had to come home on my bike and wait for you in Can Coll?’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
‘It was then. I saw her then, and I spoke to her.’
‘You mean she spoke to you?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I spoke to her. I asked her why she was videoing our house.’
‘She was doing what?’
‘I told you, Mum.’ I was trying his patience.
‘As in, she was filming the whole village?’
‘No, just here, so I asked her why, and she just laughed at me and told me not to be nosy, so I told her it was our house, and that you wouldn’t like it.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then she went away, out of the square, just as the man at Can Coll came over to see what was happening.’
‘Well, isn’t that something?’ I murmured.
My telly is fed through a very clever little box. Among other things it lets you rewind programmes, and that was what I did with the Sky News bulletin, running it back until I saw that upwardly mobile house and its self-satisfied occupants. The box also lets me freeze frames. I’d never used the facility until then, but when I did I saw that it gave a clean, sharp image. I went right up to the screen and peered at Mrs Mayfield.
It took a second or two, but I realised I’d seen her before too. She hadn’t been blonde then. She’d been dark-haired, and she’d been calling herself Lidia Bromberg.
I tossed the remote to Tom so he could watch what he liked, and dashed into the hall. I was about to pick up the phone, when I remembered Moira and thought better of it. I had reported my mobile lost and they’d given me another, but I still had Adrienne’s. I used that to call Mark Kravitz on his.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him. Even as I spoke, my mind was working, adding pieces to a jigsaw.
‘Perfectly all right. I have a condition, Primavera; I’m not an invalid. I’ve had an okay day, in fact.’
‘Then I’m about to upgrade it to brilliant. Would you like to shove one up that Moira woman?’
‘In the sense of retribution, yes.’
‘Then dig up all you can for me about the wife of the new Home Secretary. I think my son has just made her day as bad as yours has been good.’
Forty-two
‘You realise we have to be careful here,’ said Mark, as he reversed his car into one of the parking spaces that had been cleared in front of the Mayfield house. ‘We may know what we know, and you may suspect what you suspect, but this man is now the Home Secretary, not the middle-ranking ministerial wanker you met in Barcelona.’
‘Yes, and that’s good. But remember, the higher you climb. . and all the rest of that metaphoric stuff.’ I looked at him and saw his anxiety. ‘I’ll behave myself appropriately,’ I promised him, ‘but what about you? You were threatened along with me, and so was your business. If you want to stay in the car with Tom and let me do this, I’ll be perfectly happy about it.’
He grinned, and I saw that his concern had been about me alone. ‘You know what?’ He chuckled. ‘After you left I started thinking about Moira and what she’d said, and I realised that I don’t give a toss about her and her crew. I’m comfortably off, I’m well insured against incapacity, and I don’t have any dependants they can threaten. Anyway, what are they going to do? Sabotage my wheelchair? ’
‘In that case, let’s go.’ I turned to my son, in the back seat. ‘We won’t be long, love,’ I told him. Don’t worry, I had no intention of taking him in there to confront Mrs Mayfield. But when I’d known I had to go back to London, I’d realised I couldn’t leave him in St Martí, not so soon after bundling him off to Monaco, so I’d decided to take him with me and make it a holiday for him. (We left Charlie with the guy in El Celler Petit; he has dogs and said that one more wouldn’t make that much difference to him.) We’d done the Tower that morning, and Madame Tussaud’s in the afternoon. He was quite happy to sit in the car and play with his Game Boy, while Mum did a bit of business.
For the purposes of that business, we were supposed to be researchers for an American television company that was planning a feature on the fastest-rising political couple in the land. Mark had made the appointment, using one of his cover names.
His wheelchair was in the luggage space of the estate car, but he left it there, and used elbow crutches instead. There were two uniformed police officers, one male, one female, on guard duty at the Mayfields’ door. ‘Mr Crossley and Miss Gregg,’ Mark announced as we approached them, ‘to see the Home Secretary.’
Our names were checked on a list, then the young lady officer. . once again, it was with great sadness that I calculated that I was old enough to be her mother, if I’d got myself knocked up at around seventeen. . announced us through a video-phone, and the door was opened.
We were met in the narrow hallway not by the new cabinet member but by a pallid woman in a mannish suit, middle aged, wedding ring but no other jewellery, bad hair day, with an intense expression and the hollow cheeks of a heavy smoker. ‘Martina Smith, Press Office,’ she announced, as Mark put all his weight on his left crutch to shake her hand. ‘We spoke on the telephone. You understand the ground rules?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘We recite the list of questions I gave you, one by one, and they recite the answers you’ve drafted for them. That’s how it works, isn’t it?’
I had the impression that she didn’t know whether to scowl or smile: she compromised by doing neither. ‘There will be some scope for supplementaries,’ she said stiffly, ‘as long as they’re appropriate and relevant. I’ll be the judge of that; I’ll be sitting in, as usual.’
She swung a door open and stepped into a drawing room, beckoning us to follow, like courtiers. Mark led the way, and I followed.
I was much better dressed than I had been in the Hotel Arts, and much better groomed, and so it took Justin Mayfield a few seconds to recognise me. When he did, the politician’s smile was wiped from his face like chalk from a blackboard. He glared at the press officer, and I knew that somewhere down the line she was going to pay, big-time, for not checking out our bona fides. ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith,’ he murmured, in a tone that would have etched steel, ‘we won’t be needing you for this one.’
‘But, Home Secretary,’ she protested, ‘it’s standard practice.’
‘This won’t be a standard interview. Leave us.’
As Martina Smith obeyed, he turned back towards me. ‘Primavera,’ he blustered, ‘what the hell is all this about? If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was ring my office.’
‘It isn’t really you I’ve come to see, Justin,’ I told him. ‘As soon as I saw Lidia on telly the other night, I knew we had to renew our acquaintance.’ I smiled at Mrs Mayfield.
‘My wife’s name is Ludo.’ If he’d been in the dark about the whole operation, I’d have known it then, by the way he said those words. But his tone was wrong, his simple denial. There was no bewilderment there. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
‘Sure,’ I said, nodding, ‘short for Ludmila. But in Sevilla, and on the website of a fraudulent hotel and casino project, she calls herself Lidia Bromberg. When she and an associate tried to kidnap me two weeks ago, that was the name she was going under. She had a black hair job then, but the cut was the same as she has now. I’m pretty sure I could tell you who her hairdresser is. My sister goes to him every time she’s in London.’
‘Woman’s mad,’ Mrs Mayfield snapped, and turned her back on me, as if she didn’t want me looking at her any longer.
I couldn’t help myself. I forgot my promise to Mark, that I’d be cool, and I kicked her, hard, on the right buttock. She screamed, arching her back as her hand flew to her rump; I was glad that the door had looked exceptionally thick, so that the sound wouldn’t carry to the outside. Mind you, she wasn’t the only one who was hurting. I’d thought that my broken toe had healed, but it hadn’t, not completely. A spear of burning pain tore into my foot.