Secrets Read online

  Insistent voices, too far off to make out the words or even the language. Like voices off stage. Out of the action.

  And then, there were hands. Hands pulling him upright. Steadying him when he thought he was about to fall. Arms, thrust beneath his own, keeping him on his feet.

  Joseph could not move. Joseph was certain that he could not move, but they dragged him forward.

  His head dropped towards his chest and the sun-baked ground scraped against his feet as they manhandled him, pulling him towards the half open tent flap.

  They must have taken his boots.

  Grit beneath his nails. Sandy, fragmented earth rasping against his skin.

  He tried to move his feet, place them flat on the ground but Joseph found that he couldn’t quite remember how.

  His legs buckled but they dragged him on. Pain in his right side as one of his captors pushed close, recalling the sharp memory of someone kicking him there. Throwing him to the floor, kicking at his side with hard-toed boots.

  The pain grew worse as they forced him to bend beneath the tent flap. Then the brightness as they turned his face towards the sun.

  Joseph could feel his skin begin to tighten under the sudden heat and he could smell the sweat on his own body, pungent and musky, mixed with the scent of sun-dried earth and summer dust. The smell of sunlight, hot and harsh, breathed into pain-scorched lungs.

  He could smell them too. The one’s that held him. Sweat long dried on unwashed bodies. A smell that matched his own, strong and sour, and filled with too much heat.

  Joseph felt what little strength was left in his legs diminish. Pouring out through his feet and into the dust. And then the other one was there.

  Joseph fought hard to put a name to the scent. Put a face to the man who came now, to stand, almost companionably at Joseph Bern’s left shoulder; to speak so softly in his ear. This one’s scent, clean and newly washed, redolent with soap and fresh drawn water, laced with just the merest tang of woodsmoke.

  ‘I’m letting you live, Joseph. Letting you go. We will agree to differ on this matter and you will agree to leave.’

  Joseph could see the other’s face, now, in his mind’s eye, as clearly as if he stood before him, blocking out the blinding brilliance of the sun. The sweet half smile, the pale blue eyes, soft with regret as though he had no wish for any of this unpleasantness.

  And that was all.

  They dragged him forward once again, feet scraping the ground as they moved him far too fast for his feet to gain a purchase.

  Then lifted by the arms, thrown face down on to the wooden flat of an open truck.

  Pain cut into him, lancing into his belly and drilling into the ribs on his right side. Vibrations of pain as the truck engine started. Rattling and shaking through his frame, a network of pain, resonating with an almost musical cruelty orchestrated by the engine noise, the shifting gears, the bumps and ruts of the mean excuse for a track that they were travelling along.

  Joseph moaned, tried to shift his weight a little to ease the pain on his right side.

  Joseph could feel the wood, rough and splintered, beneath his outstretched hand and beneath his cheek. Sun-warmed. Trapped heat. Trapped scents of wood and oil and dirt.

  He tasted blood in his mouth.

  And there was grit beneath his fingernails …

  ‘Mr Bern.’ A soft hand touched his face and then came to rest, gently, on his shoulder.

  Joseph opened his eyes.

  For a moment, he was back in Africa, back in that filthy flatbed truck with the pain vibrating though his body, lancing, knife-like, as he woke and moved.

  But it was a woman’s face he saw when he opened his eyes, and a woman’s voice he heard and the pain was now, not the pain of more than fifty years ago.

  And there was no sun, here. Only a patch of grey cloud, seen dimly through a blinded window and the lash of late September rain against the glass.

  And the ironic thing, Joseph thought, was that back then he had not been the one to have taken the moral high ground. That time, it had been Clay.

  ‘Do you want some water?’

  ‘I’d rather have a whisky.’

  She smiled. ‘In a little while, Joe. I’ll bring it before I go off duty. You’ve already had too much today.’

  ‘Won’t kill me,’ he said and laughed harshly.

  She lifted him and put the glass to his lips. It was getting harder to swallow. They’d offered him more pain relief. A morphine pump that he could control himself, but he’d resisted, knowing that really would signal the end and he wasn’t quite ready yet.

  She laid him down and Joseph turned his face towards the window, so he could watch the rain.

  He’d arrived in the Congo before the rest of them, getting there just before the elections in May of 1960, paid by one of the big mining corporations to look at the logistics involved in shipping out the copper they planned to mine. The infrastructure wasn’t as badly neglected as some places Joseph had known. Katanga, the state that produced almost two thirds of the Congo’s mineral exports, had been shipping copper for fifty years. So, there were roads. More or less.

  Joseph had surveyed for the company by day and watched as the political situation unfolded, going into Elizabethville most nights. There’d been something like eighty different political parties, Joseph remembered. But only two men stood out from the herd; Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu.

  Joseph heard the nurse coming back into his room.

  ‘I thought you were going back to sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Too much on my mind.’

  ‘You want to tell me? I like your stories.’

  Stories, Joseph thought. That’s all they were to her, this young woman, probably not even into her thirties.

  Probably no older than he’d been back then.

  ‘Sit, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk for a little bit.’

  He waited until she sat next to him, leaning her arms on the bed and putting her head close, so he didn’t have to raise his voice.

  ‘The Americans were scared,’ he said. ‘Lumumba had the backing of the Belgian Communists and the AAR and he’d persuaded some of the Belgian businesses to stay.’ Joseph managed a harsh laugh. ‘Not that he wanted them. Wanted the white colonists out, just like that Nkrumah, in Ghana. Said they should drive all the white colonists out of Africa.’ He smiled. ‘You know how many attempts there were to kill him? Man was like Castro, seemed to have a charmed life. CIA even sent him poisoned toothpaste.’

  ‘I heard they sent Castro an exploding cigar.’

  Joseph choked out a laugh, but his eyes were closing. He felt her move, then tuck his hand beneath the sheet before leaving softly.

  He recalled how he had continued with his survey and he and that geologist … Joseph could not recall the man’s name. They had discovered what looked like new reserves. The only fly in the ointment was that they were on Baluba land. Not, Joseph thought, that anyone actually cared what the Baluba thought. A favourite sport of the mercenaries that Joseph remembered from Elizabethville, was to go out hunting the Baluba.

  The Baluba didn’t seem to have any part in this new and promised world of independence and profitability.

  Joseph shifted awkwardly on to his side. It was all in the file he had given Adam, all of Joseph’s guilt, all of his mistakes. But more important than that, there was Clay, running through every page; guilt, written in blood. Joseph knew, had he been less of a moral coward, he might have revealed all this years before. But he was implicated; as guilty, as bloody as any other, and to betray Clay would have been to betray himself.

  The pain had receded just a little and finally allowing his eyes to close, he drifted into sleep.

  THIRTEEN

  If asked for a description, the one thing people always said about Clay was how pale his eyes were. There had always been light, but looking in the mirror – which he bothered to do only when shaving – he had to admit that the passing years had leached even more of the
colour from them.

  The second thing people said was that his eyes changed with his mood. That often that strange shift from blue to almost steely grey was the only clue to what he really thought about anything. The only clue they had that life was about to get that much harder. At rest, when he felt happy, when he woke from sleep the pale blue was almost the colour of washed-out forget-me-nots and, since retirement, or what passed for it in his world, the man had actually been happy more of the time than he’d been enraged or frustrated or simply irritated, which was good news for those who happened to cross his path.

  Right at this present moment, though, he was anything but and the young man with him was both conscious of the potential threat and, oddly, amused by it.

  ‘Secrets,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Not the ones we are looking for.’

  ‘Were they ever?’ Nathan allowed himself a smile. Clay did not intimidate him; he’d known the man too long, grown up in his shadow. Seen the moods and tides too often to be afraid. Besides, Nathan wasn’t sure he knew how to be afraid.

  ‘Maybe Annie was right,’ he said. ‘Maybe there is nothing left for anyone to know. Maybe no one ever knew as much as you thought they did.’

  One of Clay’s dogs wandered over to where he sat and lay a muzzle on the arm of his chair. Nathan stoked it absently. Clay had two of these great big hounds, Hugin and Munin he called them. Thought and Memory, like Odin’s ravens. Nathan liked them both; big and impressive looking, but gentle as lambs, they seemed at odds with everything else Clay embraced.

  Clay frowned; that in itself was a rare expression of emotion and Nathan logged it thoughtfully. In his opinion and in Annie’s, Clay was obsessed about something that no longer concerned anyone. The fears and anxieties of his youth had come back to haunt him and neither Annie nor Nathan could quite put their finger on why. Had something actually happened that had raised Clay’s concerns? Or was it, as Annie had suggested in a seemingly outrageous moment, the onset of senility?

  Nathan had known she had a point, but they’d both just looked at one another for a moment and then Nathan had shaken his head. ‘No, not Clay.’ And Annie had pretended to agree. Neither of them had mentioned it again until the day that Clay had finally consented to see the doctor and the doctor had referred him for a brain scan and the results of that had been … .

  ‘You should have sent someone to just talk to Molly Chambers,’ Nathan said.

  He’d said it before, Clay had disagreed then and he did now.

  ‘Molly wouldn’t talk, not to anyone. Any more than Edward would, we none of us talked.’

  Nathan shrugged. True, he thought. The old guard and their code of silence. Or was it just the old guard? Annie was probably the only one alive who knew Nathan’s secrets and, for that matter, Nathan was probably the only one who knew hers. As far as Clay was concerned, that would mean that they’d both confided in one person too many.

  Clay assumed he knew everything, Nathan supposed. It was what Clay did; it was unlikely he would have even conceived of a situation in which secrets could be kept from him. That, in Nathan’s view, was perhaps his one weakness.

  ‘Sometimes you could just ask, you know. Once people are dead, they’re a little on the silent side. Shooting them before they can tell is not always the best option.’

  Clay looked at Nathan with those cold grey eyes of his and said nothing. Most people would have been intimidated by that and, for a brief moment, Nathan considered it. He discarded the idea immediately. ‘Clay, why now?’ He voiced the question he and Annie had mulled over. ‘What happened to make all of this stuff break surface again? It’s ancient history.’

  Clay shook his head and Nathan watched as he seemed to wrestle with that concept. ‘Not to me, it isn’t,’ he said finally. ‘It’s as clear as yesterday and just as important. Lives depend on us, you should know that more than anyone. Identities, Molly knows too many of them. We have to protect our own, Nathan.’

  The younger man nodded solemnly. He didn’t think it was the right moment to remind Clay that most of those they counted ‘their own’ were dead anyway and the rest were either so well hidden even they couldn’t remember who they’d once been. Or they were like himself and Annie. Outside of it all, except when they chose to become involved, bound only by habit and what, he supposed, they still owed to the likes of Edward and Molly and Clay.

  He glanced over at the older man. The old man, Nathan corrected himself. He wasn’t sure how old Clay actually was; Annie doubted even Clay knew how old he actually was, but older than the likes of Molly and Edward Chambers, that was for sure. And a man who’d given his entire life to the job he’d done. He knew nothing else.

  Nathan knew that Annie felt sorry for their one time mentor and Nathan had asked her once if she actually liked Clay or if she knew anyone that did. She had thought for a moment and then shaken her head. ‘Nothing to like,’ she said. ‘Respect, yes, feel grateful, yes, but like? No, I don’t think so. It’s a bit like you can admire, respect, even see the beauty in something like a great white shark, but would you really bring it home to meet your parents … always supposing you had parents for it to meet.’

  ‘Always supposing another great white hadn’t got to them first,’ Nathan had joked, knowing he was the only one she’d ever accept such humour from.

  ‘Supposing that,’ Annie had agreed.

  Nathan studied the man with pale eyes. They were closed now as if he’d fallen asleep. Nathan always found it wisest to assume that he had not. In repose, the lines on the tanned face were pale, a whole network of them spidering out from mouth and eyes and down on to the jaw.

  And Nathan wondered if Annie was right about something else. It there’d come a moment when it was down to them, to Annie and Nathan to put an end to all this. To either finish what Clay had started … or to finish Clay.

  FOURTEEN

  DI Barnes took both Naomi and Alec by surprise and turned up at their hotel just after breakfast. They found a corner of the bar, not open at this time of the morning and drank tea by the big bay window.

  ‘So?’ Alec prompted when the small talk had run dry.

  ‘So, have you spoken to your aunt?’

  ‘Spoken to and been told what to do with our advice and that she knows nothing more.’

  ‘And do you think she’s telling the truth?’

  Naomi laughed. ‘Molly always tells the truth,’ she said.

  ‘What Naomi means,’ Alec interpreted, ‘is that Molly’s sins are always one of omission rather than commission. She only tells anyone what she thinks they need to know or would want to hear. The rest, as they say, is silence.’

  DI Barnes sighed. ‘And your feelings are?’

  ‘That she didn’t necessarily recognize him. The man who shot himself may not have been known to her per se, but she knew what he was; recognized the type, maybe something about him that she had seen or known about before. Molly’s been around the block a few times.’

  ‘I’m not sure I completely understand. Recognized what? That he was a killer? I think the gun might have been a giveaway there.’

  ‘Ah, but he didn’t, did he? Kill her, I mean,’ Naomi pointed out. ‘And maybe that’s the most interesting question. Why didn’t he?’

  ‘I have two murder enquiries,’ DI Barnes said, ‘The SIO of each one is waiting to see if I can provide information that might break the case. They, in turn are being pressured to now close what seem to have been solved cases, in the who did it category at least, even if we’re no further on as to motive. Having a name, would be an advantage. The media like names and our bosses like to satisfy the media.’

  ‘I mean, she recognized him as a professional,’ Alec said. ‘Bill, this wasn’t some random stranger wandering into another random stranger’s house and blowing their own brains out. Naomi’s right. We’ve talked about this and we’ve no doubt that your other victims were killed either by the same man or the same organization and there must be a link. Why—’

/>   ‘Organization?’

  Alec ignored the interruption.

  ‘So, Naomi is right. The interesting question is, why the hitter didn’t make this hit.’

  Barnes was silent for a moment, considering, then he said. ‘Neither of you seem terribly surprised that someone would want Molly Chambers dead,’ he said. ‘You’ll excuse me if I find that a little peculiar.’

  Naomi laughed again. ‘You’ve just not spent enough time with her yet.’

  ‘That aside,’ Alec said. ‘Molly and her husband, Edward, spent almost their entire married life attached to some embassy or other, Edward and I suspect, Molly, though she’s never told me directly, were involved in negotiating truces with Afghan Warlords, Beirutie kidnappers and Venezuelan opposition parties, and that’s just the little bits I know. They made powerful friends and even more powerful enemies. I know Edward retired almost ten years ago, but I also know that retirement didn’t mean pottering in his garden. He acted as consultant to a number of government agencies and some very big corporations. I don’t think his security clearance was ever revoked. Get a map of the world and stick a pin in it and I’d bet you a damn good dinner Molly would have been there or know someone that had. It was what they did. What, I think, she’d always done. Get her to show you her official photo albums, Bill, they’re a who’s who of every damned world leader, of whatever political persuasion from here to … Zanzibar. Edward lived for this stuff and Molly … Molly lived for Edward.’

  ‘And you think this shooting, this suicide, was something to do with her diplomatic past? I don’t see how that links to our other victims. Or even if it does.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be a link, and it’s one that whoever authorized this wants to be identified,’ Naomi said. ‘Think about it. What assassin uses the same, unusual weapon, three times over? It would flag up in a half dozen different searches. Someone is sending a message; you just need to figure out what it is and who it’s for.’

  ‘Couldn’t they just send a bloody postcard?’ Barnes grumbled. He paused thoughtfully. ‘Look, I’m not sure you are right about any of this, in fact I hope you’re not, quite frankly. I prefer my murders to be straightforward, not all cloak and dagger. Look, Alec, I’m meeting a colleague of mine later today, at the flat of the second victim, Herbert Norris. I’ve got permission for you to tag along if you’d be interested.’