As she ran (as best she could in her heels) down the stairs, she could hear him laughing. Then he slammed shut the door, and it boomed and echoed like cannon fire all the way out to the street.
Barclay could see that she was in a furious temper. She threw the bits of paper onto his lap, got behind the steering wheel, and shunted her way out of the parking space and into the road.
“You were in there for hours,” he said into the silence. “What happened?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Only up to where he had Dawn go make you coffee.”
“He put his arm around me.”
“Probably pulled loose a connection. You’ll have to tell me the rest.”
“First I need a drink. I need to get rid of the taste in my mouth.” She reached under her T-shirt and ripped off the transmitter, tossing it on to Barclay’s lap beside the bits of paper.
She was quiet all the way to her favored corner bar, where she collapsed into one of the terrace chairs and ordered a pression. What the hell, it had just gone eleven. Barclay ordered one, too. She still didn’t seem to want to talk, so he glanced through the literature she’d thrown at him, and which he had brought with him to the café.
“Well, well, well,” he said, holding one pamphlet up for her to see. It was concerned with “European Freedom Fighters.” There was mention of the Italian group Croix Jaune, and of the German Wolfgang Bandorff. There was, to Barclay’s eyes, a lot about Wolfgang Bandorff, with a final call to all “lovers of freedom” to follow Bandorff’s dicta, to motivate and mobilize and to let “actions speak where the mouths of the oppressed are gagged.”
“Interesting,” said Barclay. He’d got Dominique’s attention. She read through the pamphlet, but didn’t speak until the beer had been placed in front of her, demolished, and another one ordered.
“Bandorff was mentioned in the Witch file,” Barclay reminded her.
“Yes, he was in Scotland when the Pope visited.”
“It can’t be just coincidence.”
Dominique didn’t say anything. She was running her tongue over her gums, as though washing them clean of something.
“So what happened up there?” he asked.
Her second beer arrived, and this time she drank it slowly, taking her time as she told him all about John Peter Wrightson.
Roadworks impeded Elder’s progress on the route to Brighton. There were times when it seemed to him the whole road network of England was being coned off and dug up. He was sure he could remember a time when there’d been no contraflow lanes. But of course there’d been less traffic then, too. It was taking him a little while to get used to Doyle’s car. It was fast and certainly nippy in traffic, but the clutch seemed to have a mind of its own. Doyle had complained when Elder asked for his car. But it was only reasonable. They’d traveled down in the one car — Doyle’s — and now that car was needed. Besides, as Elder pointed out, Doyle was staying in the town. What did he need his car for? And if a car were needed, he could always borrow one from the police.
“So what’s stopping you doing that, too?” Doyle had said.
“I’m in a hurry.”
“I can’t see there’s any rush.”
Elder had already filled both Doyle and Greenleaf in on his planned trip, and the reasoning behind it, so he stayed silent and let Doyle have his grumble. As ever, Greenleaf wasn’t saying much. The silent type.
They looked like they’d been working together on interrogations for years. They looked confident, successful. They looked like a team.
“If you scratch it,” Doyle said at last, digging his hand into his trouser pocket, “if you so much as fart on the seat fabric...” He held the keys in the air for an instant, not letting Elder have them.
“Understood,” he said. “It’ll get a full valet service before I bring it back.”
Doyle spoke quietly, spacing each word. “Just bring it back.”
Elder nodded. “Will do.” He reached out his hand and took the keys from Doyle.
There was nothing for him to do in Cliftonville anyway. The note was already in the forensic lab. The paper and envelope would be analyzed, since Witch rather than the barman had provided them. Sometimes you could tell a lot from a sheet of paper: brand used, batch number, when produced, where stocked. Same went for fiber analysis. They would take the envelope apart with surgical precision, just in case there was a fiber or anything similar inside, anything that could tell them anything about Witch.
Joe the barman had been little help. And so far no one they’d spoken to had seen or heard anything that Sunday night. The thing to do was get the local police involved and have them do the leg work. Time was pressing. They needed to be in London. The summit would start on Tuesday; hardly any time at all to recheck security. A few of the delegations, Elder knew, had already arrived. Most would arrive over the weekend. The last to arrive, the Americans, would touch down on Monday morning. Thirty secret servicemen would protect the President. But they couldn’t protect him from a single sniper’s bullet, from a well-placed bomb, from most of the tricks Witch had learned.
Sitting in a slow-moving queue, Elder leaned forwards the better to scratch his back, just where it itched. He’d had the itch for a long time. It hadn’t really bothered him in Wales, not often, but now it had started up again. There was just something about a traffic jam that set it off. At least, he kidded himself it was the traffic jam.
Finally, he reached the outskirts of Brighton. He knew the town well, or had known it well at one time. He used to have a friend just west of the town in Portslade, beyond Hove. A female friend, the partner in a veterinary practice. He remembered her bedroom faced onto the sea. A long time ago... He made friends with difficulty, kept them with even more difficulty. His fault, not theirs. He was a slovenly correspondent, forgetful of things like birthdays, and he found friendship at times a heavy baggage to bear. That was why he hadn’t made a good husband: he didn’t make a good friend in the first place. He sometimes wondered what kind of father he’d have made, if Susanne hadn’t been taken from him.
He drove through Brighton until he hit the seafront. There was no sign of a traveling fair. He couldn’t see any posters, either. Nothing to say whether it had been and gone, or was still to arrive. Nothing. But what he did notice were kids — kids lounging about, kids with nothing to do. High-school graduates, probably, their exams over. Or the unemployed youth of the town. There were tramps, too, and younger men, somewhere between graduate and tramp. They tried begging from passersby, offering swigs from their bottle as trade. Living in rural Wales, Elder was accustomed to the occasional hippy convoy, but nothing like this. The unemployed men he knew in his local village had been hard-working men who wanted to get back into hard work.
He drove slowly all the way along the front and back, studying the faces he saw. The world was changing; time was slipping into reverse. It was like the 1920s and ’30s, or even the Victorian world described by Dickens. In London, he’d seen teams of windscreen washers, something he’d only before seen on American TV dramas. Young men — predominantly black — would wait at traffic lights and, when the lights turned red, would wash windscreens, then ask to be paid. One group Elder had seen had brought a sofa to the curbside, so that they could relax in comfort between shifts. He wondered how much they made. He’d arrived in London without his car. A car would have protected him from the worst of it, from the beggars waiting for him in underpasses, the buskers in the Underground, the cardboard boxes which had become people’s homes. That hopeless, toneless cry: “Spare change, please, any spare change. Spare change, please, any spare change.” Like rag and bone men expecting society’s leftovers.