At Risk

33

A little over seventy minutes later, a dark green Rover pulled up out side a small terraced house in Bethnal Green, east London. The car doors opened, and two nondescript men in their mid-thirties made their way down the short flight of steps to the basement, where the taller of the two rang three long, insistent blasts on the bell. It was a cold night, and a pale edge of frost showed on the area steps. After a short pause the front door was unlocked by a blinking, worried-looking young man with a beach towel round his waist. A step or two behind him hovered a woman, perhaps a few years older, in a lemon-yellow kimono.

“Claude Legendre?” asked the taller of the two men at the door.

“Oui? Yes?”

“We have a problem at the Avis office in Waterloo. We need you to bring the keys and accompany us there now.”

Legendre stared beyond the men at the pinkish glow of the night sky, clutched at the knot of his towel, and started to shiver. “But… who are you? What do you mean, a problem? What sort of problem?”

The tall man, who was wearing a denim jacket over a heavy black sweater, held out a plastic-laminated identity card. “Police, sir. Special Branch.”

“Let me see that,” said the woman, reaching past Legendre to snatch the card from the taller man’s hand. “You don’t look like police. I don’t-”

“I’ve just explained the situation to your London area manager, sir,” the shorter man interrupted her. “Mr. Adrian Pocock. Would you like me to call him now?”

“Er, yes please.”

Patiently, the shorter man took a phone from the pocket of his olive-green Husky jacket, dialled a number, and handed it to Legendre. Several minutes of conversation ensued, in the course of which the woman fetched a blanket from inside the house and draped it over Legendre’s narrow shoulders.

Finally the young Frenchman nodded, snapped the phone shut, and returned it to the shorter of the two men.

“What’s happening, Claude?” asked the woman, her voice shrill with concern. “Who are these people?”

“A security problem, chérie. J’expliquerai plus tard.” He addressed the two men standing outside. “OK. Two minutes. I come.”

Liz’s phone woke her at 7:45. She rolled over unwillingly, her mouth dry with the previous night’s cigarette smoke and her hair smelling of it, and pressed the answer button.

After a drive conducted largely in silence, she and Mackay had arrived back at Marsh Creake shortly after 3:30 a.m., and as she was preparing to go to bed in Temeraire one of the Investigation team had rung to say that they had identified the manager of the Avis car-hire outlet at Waterloo Eurostar station and were on their way there to go through the customer and CCTV records.

“We’ve got a fix on the Astra,” he told her now. “It was hired by an English-speaking woman, last Monday, and she paid cash in advance. She also showed a British driving licence. The manager, who’s French, like most of his customers, handled the transaction himself and vaguely remembers her, because she insisted on a black car and did not use a credit card. The cash was put in the safe on the Monday night, banked midday Tuesday, and is now effectively untraceable.”

“Tell me about the driving licence,” said Liz, reaching for the pen and notebook on her bedside table.

“Name of Lucy Wharmby, age twenty-three, born in the United Kingdom, address 17A Avisford Road, Yapton, West Sussex. Photograph shows brown-haired Caucasian woman, oval features, no distinguishing marks.”

“Go on,” said Liz fatalistically, certain of what was to follow.

“The driving licence, along with credit cards, cash, a passport and other documents, was reported stolen to the British consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, in August. Lucy Wharmby is a student at the West Sussex College of Art and Design in Worthing, and was provided with a replacement licence shortly after the beginning of the last academic term, and this replacement licence is currently in her possession.”

“You contacted her?”

“I rang her. She was at home in Yapton where she lives with her parents. Their telephone number’s in the directory. She claims never to have visited the county of Norfolk in her life.”

“And the Avis CCTV?” asked Liz.

“Well, it took us a bit of time, but we found the right person eventually. The customer’s a woman, about the right age as far as I can see, and definitely dressed to beat the cameras. She’s got sunglasses on and a peaked cap pulled down over her face, so you can’t see her features, and she’s wearing a long parka-style coat, so you can’t see her figure. She’s also got a small rucksack and a valise-type case with her. All I can say for sure is that she’s white and somewhere between five seven and five nine in height.”

“The invisible,” murmured Liz.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing… Just thinking aloud. We need to keep a whole team on this-can you clear that with Wetherby?”

“Sure. Go on.”

“I want you to get the passenger list for that Monday morning’s Eurostar arrival-the one immediately preceding the woman’s visit to the Avis counter. Check if the name Lucy Wharmby’s on the list, and if not, find out what name she came in on. My guess is that the person we’re looking for is a UK citizen and passport holder aged between seventeen and thirty and will have used her own passport for the journey. So in the first instance go for English names, female, seventeen to thirty. This is still going to leave you with a pretty long list-the train was probably full of people coming home for Christmas-but every single one has to be checked and accounted for. Hit the phones, and if necessary get local uniform out checking. Where were these women on Monday night? What have they been doing since? Where are they now?”

“Got you.”

“Call me the moment you hit an anomaly. Anyone who looks or sounds wrong. Anyone who, for whatever reason, hasn’t been where they ought to have been. Anyone who hasn’t got a rock-solid alibi for that night.”

“It’ll take a bit of time.”

“I know. Get everyone you can on to it straight away.”

“Understood. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Do that.”

She fell back against the pillows, fighting the fatigue that was dragging at her. A session beneath Temeraire’s unreliable-looking shower, a couple of cups of coffee downstairs, and things might seem a little clearer. The pursuit was taking shape now. There was the shooter and there was the invisible-the man and the woman-and both of them had been seen in the flesh. There was the car, the black Astra, clearly chosen for its indeterminate signature on CCTV film, just as the woman’s clothing had been chosen for its concealing qualities.

Reaching out to the bedside table, she found her pen and notebook. Opening it, she wrote the words: What, who, when, where, why?

The five essential questions.

She could answer none of them.