Dead Line

THIRTY-NINE

The call came just as Liz arrived in her office. She was juggling a mug of coffee with the same hand that held a newspaper; her other gripped her handbag and she had her office pass in her mouth. She managed to pick up the phone on the fourth ring.

‘Ms Carlyle? It’s DI Cullen. It’s about Christopher Marcham, that friend of Alexander Ledingham, the man who was found in St Barnabas.’

‘St Barnabas? Oh, the Man in the Box,’ she said instinctively. Then she tensed a little: something must have happened if Cullen was calling her.

‘I’ve got some bad news. Christopher Marcham’s been found dead.’

What? She was shocked by his simple declaration. It hadn’t been forty-eight hours since she’d seen the man. ‘Where was this?’

‘In his house in Hampstead.’

‘How did he die? Was it a heart attack?’

‘No, no,’ said Cullen, hastening to put her right. ‘That’s the peculiar thing. He asphyxiated himself. Just like Ledingham did. Looks like he was involved in auto-eroticism too. He was tied up to the bed posts, and, um, he didn’t have any clothes on.’ The policeman coughed to cover his embarrassment. Liz sensed that DI Cullen thought dimly of such practices. She asked, ‘Are you sure it was an accident? It seems quite a coincidence.’

‘Well, I don’t think he was trying to kill himself, if that’s what you mean. There’re a lot of simpler ways to do that. But it’s not that unusual for people who go in for that sort of thing to get it wrong. It’s a dodgy business.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Liz, forcing herself to restrain her impatience. ‘I meant, are you sure that no one else was involved?’

‘As sure as we can be at present, though the scene of crime boys will be going in later this morning. They’ll find anything there is to find. But there were no signs of forced entry; the house was all locked up when the cleaner arrived – she’s the one who found him.’

‘I saw him the day before yesterday, as we agreed. He was perfectly OK when I left.’

Cullen coughed again. ‘Yes, I’ll need to take a statement. You may have been the last to see him alive. But we should be able to keep it quiet if it’s as open and shut as I think it is.’

‘When was he discovered?’

She heard him turning the pages in his notebook. ‘About four pm yesterday. We haven’t got the pathologist’s report yet, but the attending physician said he’d probably been dead less than twenty-four hours. It’s a good thing it was the day the cleaner came, or he might have been lying there quite a while. Apparently she’s new. Gave her quite a shock. She’s wondering what she’s got herself into.’

When Cullen had rung off, Liz sat at her desk, wondering why Chris Marcham was dead. Another freak accident? She didn’t believe it for a minute. The coincidence was too great and he’d told her he didn’t go in for the same practices as Ledingham.

Trust your bones. That’s what her father had always said about intuition. And Liz felt in her bones that this was no accident. She couldn’t prove it, she knew that, but that just meant that Marcham’s killer was not only ruthless, he was also clever. Which made him even more dangerous.

Perhaps it was her fault. She shouldn’t have insisted on doing that interview. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She’d been too oblique. She should have warned him instead of just asking him vaguely about Syria. Well, there was no point in worrying about that now. The only thing worth thinking about was whether his death had any connection with the Syrian plot. After all, that had been what initially stirred her interest in the man. If this was all part of it, what was going to happen next?

She remembered her first visit to the small Hampstead house, and an image came to her, of that mysterious gardener. Tall, lean, dark, with those giveaway shoes -slip-ons, last seen disappearing over the back wall of Marcham’s garden.

There was something troubling about the picture, almost a form of déjà vu – a sixth sense linking it to some other image stored in her head. She sat thinking fruitlessly, trying to place the face in another context. Had she seen him somewhere else? Could it have been in Essex, where she’d gone in pursuit of Sami Veshara’s illicit business? Or even Bowerbridge, when she’d first tentatively emerged from her sickbed, visiting the nearby village shops with her mother?

No, she couldn’t place it. And then suddenly she understood why. She hadn’t seen the man in another place; she’d seen him in a photograph. And the photograph was sitting in an envelope in the cupboard in the corner of her office. She twirled the combination lock to open the cupboard and took out the envelope, tipping the prints onto her desk impatiently.

There he was, sitting next to Andy Bokus, high in the stands of the Oval. Suddenly two different worlds collided, and the name Danny Kollek, which had come to represent Mossad for her, joined the image of the sinister man snooping around Marcham’s house.

So Kollek had known Marcham. Why? Had he been running him for Mossad? There seemed no other conceivable explanation. In which case, why wasn’t Marcham’s name on the list Bokus had supplied, of all the agents run by Kollek here in London? And what about Hannah?

There were too many questions she couldn’t answer. But what bothered her most was that she didn’t think the Americans – Andy Bokus, or Miles Brookhaven – could answer them either. She was sure Bokus hadn’t been holding out on MI5; he simply didn’t know. He thought he was running Danny Kollek, but it was starting to look the other way round.