Hidden Faces

I

The telephone woke Bannerman just after eleven. Long, single rings that brought to an end the strange dreams that come just before waking. He slipped from the rumpled bedsheets, still woozy from the restless hours of shallow sleep. He had lain awake almost until dawn, unable to stop his brain from replaying the events of the last forty-eight hours. He was still stiff and his head and face still ached. The air in the flat was cold as ice and he shivered as he went through the hall. He lifted the phone in the living room and sat heavily on the settee.

‘Bannerman.’

He ran a hand over the stubble on his jaw.

‘Tait. That was a good piece you sent us last night, Neil.’

‘That’s what you pay me for.’ Bannerman’s voice was flat and sarcastic. He heard Tait sigh.

‘I’m flying out to Brussels tomorrow,’ Tait said. ‘For the funeral. I’ve been in touch with the Belgian authorities. Slater had no living relatives, so I didn’t see the point in having the body flown back for burial.’

‘Save the paper money, will it?’ Bannerman asked. Tait ignored the remark. He would not be baited.

‘The arrangements are made,’ he said. ‘The funeral will be at the Cimetière de Bruxelles tomorrow afternoon. Two o’clock. I want you to stay in Brussels until this whole thing is cleared up. You can stay at the Rue de Commerce. We’ll be making arrangements for the disposal of Slater’s things. Oh, and you’d better pick up his car. I understand it’s been taken to the police car pound.’ He paused, but there was no response from Bannerman. ‘I’ll meet you at the office tomorrow around midday, we can have lunch and then you can drive me out to the cemetery.’

‘What about the child?’

Tait cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s a bit of an unknown quantity. I suppose the paper has some kind of responsibility... Anyway, I’ll see about that after the funeral. Meantime you stick with the story. Give me a call before the five o’clock conference and let me know what’s happening.’

‘Sure.’ Bannerman hung up. It was all over already. He could read between the lines. By tomorrow night the story would be dead and buried along with Slater. The Post was embarrassed by it. There would be echoes of it in the other dailies and in the Sundays, but the Post would want it over and done with as expeditiously as possible. Bannerman heaved himself out of the settee and went into the bathroom to shave.

Hard, blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror as he soaped his battered face. The politicians, too, would be happy to see the whole affair blow over. The Belgians, like the Post would be embarrassed by it, but for different reasons. A British Government Minister shot to death in the Belgian capital. They would not be relishing the publicity. And the British Government would be worried about electoral repercussions. They could not afford a scandal with a General Election less than three weeks away. The perceptiveness of du Maurier’s warning the previous day only now made its full impact on Bannerman. He was right, of course.

Bannerman sluiced his face and neck with cold water and went back through to the bedroom to dress. He eased himself into a dark, crumpled suit and again sifted everything through his mind. He lit a cigar and stared out from the window across the rooftops that shone black from a fine, wetting drizzle.

He began with du Maurier’s certainty that Slater and Gryffe had been murdered. If he was to work from that basic assumption then it was clear that it would be necessary to find either the murderer or the motive. Find one and you would find the other, he told himself, but without much conviction. The difficulty was knowing where to start.

He turned away from the window and sat on the bed. The murderer, apparently, had left no clues, except that the child had seen him, though Bannerman doubted if the child would ever be capable of identifying him. The motive might be easier to unearth. There was the hostile relationship between Slater and Gryffe, the file of cuttings on the Minister that Slater kept in his office, the money in the suitcase.

Bannerman got up and went through to the living room, lifted the phone and put a call through to the Post. He waited uneasily as the number rang distantly. He felt a lack of commitment to the story. Tait, he knew, would not want him to push it, and he felt a disconcerting lack of personal motivation. It worried him.

‘Edinburgh Post.’

‘Give me the library.’ He waited through a series of clicks and then a receiver lifted.

‘Library.’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Jean, it’s Neil Bannerman.’

‘Hello, Neil. You still in Brussels?’ And without waiting for an answer, ‘Poor Timothy. What a terrible thing to happen.’

‘Yes.’ Bannerman said. ‘Do me a favour, Jean. Look out any cuttings we’ve got on Robert Gryffe, and anything we may have in the obit. file. I want to know everything we know about the guy.’

‘Are you in a hurry for it?’

‘Yes. Just photocopy the stuff, stick it in an envelope and give it to the editor. He’s flying over here tomorrow. He might as well bring it with him.’

‘Okay, Neil.’

He hung up, and drew the curtains open and stared thoughtfully down into the street. Then he turned his gaze round the living room. He might as well make a start with the flat. It took him less than half an hour to go through it room by room, drawer by drawer. There were extraordinarily few personal things. The safe was locked, and most of the drawers were empty. It was not until he had begun his search that he noticed just how tidy the flat was. Slater had not struck him as being such a fastidious man. Of course the place would have gone over by the police, and when a good policeman does his job properly he almost always leaves the searched place tidier than he found it. But still, it was more than just tidy. It was as though the flat had not been lived in. Even the child’s room seemed naked, except for the rag doll lying on the armchair where Bannerman had dropped it the night before. Here, too, the drawers were empty. Bannerman opened the wardrobe. A dozen coat hangers rattled and swung freely. Bannerman frowned as a suspicion grew in his mind. He went through to the kitchen and found the food cupboard. There were a few cans of soup, a tin of spaghetti and a nearly empty coffee jar. The refrigerator had been switched off, and its shelves were bare. Then into Slater’s bedroom, again to find an empty wardrobe, empty drawers in the bedside cabinet.

Bannerman sat on the bed and lit a cigar, letting his eyes wander about the room. They came to rest on three suitcases piled on top of the wardrobe. He took a chair from under the window and placed it below the wardrobe, climbed onto it, cigar clenched between his teeth, and reached up. The cases were heavy and he lifted them carefully, one by one, down to the floor, raising a dusty stoor from the top of the wardrobe. He climbed down and opened each case in turn. Two of them were filled with men’s clothing, underwear, socks, personal odds and ends. A photograph in a frame lay on top of the child’s clothing in the third case. Bannerman turned it over and found himself looking at the face of an attractive young woman. It was a black-and-white photograph. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties. Bannerman knew the face. He had met her once, not long before she died. She was a good-looking woman, and had a look of her daughter about her. Slater had taken it badly when his wife died, but still Bannerman was surprised to find her photograph packed away for the departure that Slater had obviously planned. Perhaps, even after three years, he had still been taking it badly.

He closed up the cases and pushed them against the wall. Now, at least, he knew why Slater had been so agitated by Bannerman’s arrival. If he had been planning to take his daughter and slip quietly out of the country on the Sunday night or even the Monday morning, after his meeting with Gryffe, then the presence of Bannerman must have made things difficult for him. But why? What did Slater and Gryffe have going? It seemed like such an unlikely alliance. And du Maurier? He must have known about the packed suitcases. Why, when he had told Bannerman so much, had he not spoken of this? Bannerman shook his head, confused, and sat again on the bed, drawing deeply on his cigar.

At length he went through to his own room, lifted his coat and left the flat. In the street he checked his watch. It was a little after midday. He pulled up his collar against the drizzle and brushed past a small, sallow-faced man in a shabby raincoat. He thought nothing of the brief glimpse he got of the mean, dark eyes that turned to watch him after he had passed.

He stopped at the café in the Boulevard Charlemagne where the German pressmen drink, and had a coffee and a couple of croissants before walking across the street to the International Press Centre. A pretty girl at the reception counter smiled at him as he went past to the lift and rode up to the sixth floor.

Mademoiselle Ricain looked up as he walked into the office shared by the Post and the London Herald.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Neil Bannerman. We spoke on the phone a few days ago and met briefly the other night.’ He saw that her face was pale and she may have been crying.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A pity we couldn’t have met under happier circumstances.’

‘Quite.’ He crossed to Slater’s filing cabinet. It was locked. ‘Keys?’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I...’

‘I’ll be working from here for the next few days,’ Bannerman said. ‘I take it the police have already been?’

‘Yes. They called me out yesterday... I... they said not to re-open the filing cabinet or touch any of Tim’s stuff.’

‘Well, that’s all right,’ Bannerman said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’ She had long, fair hair and a thin unattractive face with muddy brown eyes. Again she hesitated, then reluctantly she opened a drawer in her desk and lifted out a small square key.

‘How about the rest of the keys? The door, the desk? As I said, I’ll be working out of here...’

She looked at him icily. ‘Pity,’ she said. It was an effort for her to match his bad manners and he relented a little.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I’m a bit abrupt. It’s the way I feel right now. I didn’t particularly like Slater, but I saw no reason for anyone to kill him. Someone cracked me on the head yesterday and played footsie with my ribs while I couldn’t do anything about it, and I don’t see much reason for that either. An austistic girl who saw murder committed is shut away in some institution somewhere and no-one really gives a damn about her. There’s been a lot of mud slung around in the last couple of days and I’ve got the feeling that the powers that be are planning a whitewash job. There’s no reason why I should give a damn about any of it, but I do, and I don’t know why. So maybe I’d like to find out.’ Bannerman stopped to take stock. He had not meant to say any of this; he had not even known he had felt that way. But the words, without his thinking about them, had given shape and direction to all the muzziness that had been in his head since the phone woke him that morning. He saw that the girl was watching him curiously. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She smiled weakly and took out another two keys from her desk drawer and held them out for him. ‘And I’m sorry, too,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll get on okay. Though I think we’re going to disagree about Tim. You didn’t like him. I did.’ She choked a little on that. Bannerman turned to the filing cabinet and unlocked it.

‘What did you like about him?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ she got up and turned towards the window. ‘He was just a nice sort of man. He was considerate about a lot of the little things that men don’t usually think about. It’s difficult to say what exactly. It’s just the way a man behaves with you. I liked him. I knew him, I think, better than a lot of people did. People are never just what they seem when you only know them a little. Of course he could be irritable or tetchy, and sometimes he would get really down. You know, withdrawn, morose. He had a lot to be down about. You’ve got to understand people.’ She glanced at Bannerman, suddenly self-conscious and a bit of colour rose on her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ Bannerman said lamely, and he thought, she must have loved him. The sadness of it touched him. All those years, working for him, loving him, without ever saying, without ever wanting it to be known. These were the saddest people. The unattractive people, the people with nothing to offer except the love they are afraid to admit, knowing it will not be returned. In a way they had both, Bannerman and the girl, opened their souls a little to one another, without knowing why, without bonds or reason. Sometimes it was easier that way, with strangers. There could be no retributions. The girl knew it too. She came away from the window and lifted her bag from the desk.

‘Excuse me,’ she said and she left the office.

Bannerman leaned for some moments on the cabinet and lit a cigar. He always regretted getting involved, but there was never any way you could avoid it. You had to be involved. He crouched down on his hunkers and pulled open the bottom drawer. There were about a dozen files. He lifted them out and carried them over to Slater’s desk and sat down. Mostly they contained cuttings of stories Slater had done on the EEC, a back reference divided into different groups — agriculture, fisheries, transport, taxation and so on. Two of the folders were unmarked. One of them held the cuttings on Gryffe. Bannerman went through them carefully.

They didn’t seem to fall into any category. Altogether there were about forty cuttings, not stories that Slater had written, but taken from different newspapers. They went back about two years, covering important speeches the politician had made at home and abroad, his appointment eighteen months earlier as a Junior Minister at the Foreign Office, a piece from The Times on his growing importance as a figure of charisma and influence in the Party and the country, and forecasting his probable rise to leadership of the Party within the next ten years.

There were a number of photographs. Gryffe, shaking hands with some African Head of State, Gryffe speaking at the Party’s annual conference, Gryffe relaxing at the side of a swimming pool with a young lady on holiday in Malta. He even appeared in the columns of the society diarists; best dressed man in Britain; the most eligible bachelor; a romance with Royalty (the punters would like that, though some of his Party colleagues would not); a man of the people destined for the top.

Bannerman had not been aware of just how fast this man had become a popular and fashionable figure in British political life. He had known about Gryffe all right, but not as much as this. Working in Scotland you tended to become parochial, insular like the rest of them. It was too easy to lose touch with what was happening in the south. Most of the cuttings, he noticed, were taken from the English papers. He should have known more, but then, you can only know so much about so much.

He crammed the cuttings back in the folder and pulled the second unmarked one open. There were fewer cuttings here. A dozen in all. They were all taken from Belgian newspapers, some in French, others in Flemish. There were two names that emerged, though they didn’t seem to be connected. From a smudged, single column pic Bannerman was able to put a face to one of the names, Michel Lapointe. It was a short, fat face, but the quality of the reproduction was poor and it was a face you would pass in the street without recognising. There was no pic with the cuttings specific to the other name, René Jansen. It was a name that rang a bell somewhere distantly in the back of Bannerman’s mind, without his being able to place it. He slipped the cuttings back in their folder, pushed the two unmarked ones aside and put the remainder back in the cabinet.

He sat for a moment, pulling the last smoke out of his cigar before stubbing it in the ashtray. Then he took out a spiral-bound notebook and took a fresh page. He pulled out a pen and wrote four names, one below the other; Tim Slater, Robert Gryffe, Michel Lapointe and René Jansen.

There had to be a common factor. Something that linked all four. Or did there? Certainly there had been something between Slater and Gryffe. It was possible that Lapointe and Jansen were simply red herrings. Bannerman could waste a lot of time checking them out. He tossed the possibilities around in his mind and looked out through the window at the heavy grey skies. There were times, he thought, when you had to chase red herrings, because there was nothing else to chase. He would need something before Tait got in tomorrow, because Tait would fight it. He would need something.

He became aware suddenly that his head was still hurting. There was a bad taste in his mouth from lack of sleep and his stomach was complaining that it needed more than the coffee and croissants he had fed it earlier. He lit another cigar and thought, I’m smoking too much. He got up and searched about the desks for a telephone directory. He found several and spent three or four minutes searching for the number he wanted.

Mademoiselle Ricain came back in as he lifted the phone. She smiled. ‘Dial zero,’ she said, ‘if you want an outside line,’ Bannerman saw that she had powdered her face and put fresh colour on her eyes and lips. He dialled zero and then dialled his number. A girl’s voice crackled in his ear.

‘Inspecteur du Maurier,’ he said.

‘Ne quittez pas.’ He waited, then the policeman’s voice came across the line.

‘Du Maurier.’

‘Inspector. Neil Bannerman.’

‘Ah, Monsieur, how are you today?’

‘I’d like to talk.’

‘Bon. Good. When?’

‘Whenever it suits.’

‘Hmmmm.’ He hesitated. ‘Say five o’clock?’

‘That’d be fine,’ Bannerman said.

‘But not here.’ The policeman cleared his throat. ‘At the Café Auguste in the Boulevard de Waterloo. It’s not far from the Rue des Quatre Bras.’

‘Okay.’ Bannerman hung up, searched through the keys Mademoiselle Ricain had given him and found one that fitted the drawer in Slater’s desk. He pulled it open and slipped in the two folders. He was about to slide it shut when he saw a battered old notebook squeezed down one side. It was Slater’s contacts book.

Bannerman took it out and thumbed through it, a record of all the people a dead man had known. People from whom information had been squeezed. Information that had sometimes been given freely, because it had come from a friend, sometimes had to be prised from unwilling lips. A good journalist was not only good with words, but he was good at getting information, and that was all about knowing the right places to look, the right people to ask.

As he thumbed through the pages that were carefully filled by Slater’s neat hand, it occurred to Bannerman that he might look under J for Jansen and L for Lapointe. It was so obvious he might not have thought of it. Like when you are trying to track down a home number for some obscure union chief and you search every contacts book in the office and wade through the office contacts file, only to find half an hour later that he’s listed in the telephone book. It was a simple lesson that Bannerman had learned many years earlier. Never overlook the obvious. And this time, too, it paid off. There were home and office numbers listed for both men. Bannerman carefully noted them opposite the names he had written in his notebook. And then, as an afterthought, he looked up Gryffe.

There were three numbers listed. One would be the flat in the Rue de Pavie, another was Gryffe’s London mews house and a third number, another Belgian number. It had an H marked beside it to show that it was also a home number. Bannerman frowned. He had not known that Gryffe had two houses in Brussels.

He noted all three and put the contacts book back in the drawer. Mademoiselle Ricain was watching him over her typewriter. She smiled. ‘Anything I can do...?’ she said.

Bannerman shook his head. ‘Thanks,’ he said distractedly. He saw the night stretching ahead of him, lonely dark hours in Slater’s flat or in some bar getting drunk. Then an idea came to him, forming slowly, like a light growing in the darkness. ‘Sla... Tim had a girl who came in and looked after his child during the day,’ he said. ‘Any idea where I can get in touch with her?’

The secretary thought about it. ‘Sally Robertson. Her number’s probably in Tim’s contacts book.’

‘Of course,’ he said and took the book out again. The number was there. He got an outside line and dialled. He let it ring about ten times before he hung up. So that was that. But he took a note of the number anyway.

The door opened behind him and a middle-aged man with a crumpled face and an equally crumpled suit came in. He had an untidy mop of dark hair going grey, and heavy eyebrows that met in the middle above a pair of small, piggy eyes. He carried a dog-eared notebook between the ink-stained fingers of his right hand. Half a dozen pens and pencils stuck out of the breast pocket of a jacket of indefinable colour and shape. He raised his eyebrows when he saw Bannerman, rounded the first desk and sat at his own, at right angles to Bannerman.

He slid the chair back and threw his legs up so that his feet rested on the edge of his desk, a desk piled untidily high with the debris of the last month’s reports, press releases and stories. Without taking his eyes from Bannerman, he took out a match and stuck the end in one corner of his mouth, allowing himself a small, humourless grin. He wore his self-assurance sloppily, like he wore his clothes. ‘Neil Bannerman, I presume,’ he said at last in a voice gravelled by years of drink that showed clearly in the red veins on his nose. ‘Someone been having a go at you?’ He was looking at the yellow bruising down Bannerman’s face. The hostility in his voice was as identifiable as the smell of liquor on his breath. It was always the same. If you had a reputation then either people respected you for it or they tried to knock you down.

‘I fell,’ Bannerman said. ‘Maybe if I was drunk like you I’d have bounced and been none the worse for it.’ He could feel Mademoiselle Ricain’s discomfort without having to look at her. He knew her face would be flushed. People usually felt sorry for drunks and tolerated them. But any fool can be a drunk. Not a muscle moved on the crumpled face. The grin remained fixed.

‘Smart bastard, eh? That figures.’ He moved the match from one corner of his mouth to the other. ‘I heard about you the other day. Shooting your mouth off at some of the lads like you were God Almighty.’

Bannerman flicked ash from his cigar on to the floor. He was in no mood for exchanging wisecracks with a drunk. All the same, he said, ‘Maybe I am. And maybe some of the lads need a good kick up the arse.’ He paused. ‘Palin, isn’t it? Eric Palin. London Herald, ageing hack sent out to grass and pickle what remains of his liver.’

Palin snorted and his amusement seemed genuine. ‘You can think what you like.’

‘Oh, I do. And I will. I know you’re good, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Some of the best reporters around are drunks. They don’t operate at a hundred percent unless they’re half-steamed, and when they operate they’re good, damned good. But I don’t see why I should tell you that.’

‘You just have.’

‘The trouble is,’ Bannerman said, ‘it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’re a drunk you’re only half a man. And half a man is no damned good to anybody. You can’t trust him. Your editor knows that. He’s taking a calculated short term risk in sending you out here. You’ll keep it up for a year, maybe two, then you’ll start slipping, because people like you always do. And then you’ll be out of a job so damned fast you won’t know where you’re next half s coming from.’

Palin was sharp enough to know the truth when he heard it, the truth that a man like that will never admit to himself. It hurt, because the truth usually does. ‘Go to hell,’ he snapped, taking his feet off the desk. He took the match from his mouth and leaned across the desk. ‘Think you know it all, eh?’ Amidst the anger, there was a smugness in his voice. ‘Well, you don’t know half of it, Mr. God Almighty Bannerman.’ He tapped his nose knowingly.

‘You’d better watch that,’ Bannerman said. ‘You might burst a blood vessel.’

Palin grinned his humourless grin. ‘We’ll see who it is that bursts blood vessels,’ he said.

Bannerman got up and slipped his notebook in his pocket. ‘Be seeing you.’

‘You’ll be going to the press conference, then?’ Palin asked.

‘Which one is that?’

Palin’s grin widened. ‘Tomorrow at the Rue des Quatre Bras. Minister of the Interior on the Slater deaths. Didn’t you know?’ He knew Bannerman could not have known. It had only been circulated half an hour before. Mentally he notched one up.

‘I do now,’ Bannerman said. He nodded at Mademoiselle Ricain and left. He walked the length of the corridor slowly. Palin worried him. His smugness, his self-assurance. He knew something. And not just about the press conference. He had worked in the same office as Slater for nearly a year. You don’t work as closely with someone for that length of time and not get to know something about them. However obnoxious Palin might be, he was still a good journalist. It would worry him for a while.

Palin watched the door close, anger and alcohol hardening the line of his mouth. He took out a cigarette and lit it with an unsteady hand before turning to Mademoiselle Ricain and catching the pity in her eyes. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he snapped. ‘What are you looking at?’ She flushed deeply, lowering her head quickly and starting back with her typing. ‘Take a powder, love,’ Palin said a little less harshly. She was all right. He shouldn’t have spoken to her that way. Without a word she collected her bag and left.

Palin sat for several more minutes, undecided. Then he went to the filing cabinet, unlocked it and began going through Slater’s files. They were gone. God dammit. Bannerman must have taken them. He stood up and looked quickly around the room. Then he crossed to Slater’s desk where Bannerman had been sitting and opened the top drawer. Ah, there they were. He took a flask from his hip pocket, laid back a quick snort and smiled a sort of nasty smile.

He lifted out Slater’s contacts book, shut the drawer and picked up a phone. He got an outside line, found the number he wanted and dialled. A voice reached him from the other end. He spoke French slowly and clearly. ‘Give me Monsieur Jansen’s secretary.’ He waited quite a while before another voice burned in his ear. ‘I’d like to speak to Monsier Jansen... No, he won’t know me. Just tell him I worked with a man called Timothy Slater and that I have some information to sell him. I think he’ll speak to me.’

II

The Boulevard de Waterloo was thick with people wrapped in heavy coats and brightly-coloured rainwear. They clutched umbrellas and briefcases and shopping bags, hurrying, heads bowed, through the darkness and the big white flakes of snow that fell brightly through the lights from the cafés and shops. The snow was wet and was not lying on the pavement. It came drifting in lazily over the tops of tall buildings, dark against the orange glow reflected in the thickly clouded sky, turning white in the light of the street, slapping softly against faces like the merest touch of icy fingers.

The rush hour traffic on both sides of the boulevard crawled noisily in frustrated fits and starts, carrying weary bread-winners home after long, noisy, frustrating days in anonymous offices. It was just another dark January evening in an undistinguished European capital.

Bannerman walked west from the Metro at the Porte de Namur, brushing the shoulders of people hurrying the other way, getting wet from the snow and catching the drips from passing umbrellas. It was odd, he thought, how you were no more a stranger in a busy street at the rush hour in a foreign city than you were in your home town. They were the same faces you passed anywhere. The same people you didn’t know that lived the same lives in which you played no part. He might have been just like them.

There was a time when he might have married, raised a family, mortgaged a nice house in the suburbs, taken a nice safe job in the city and been hurrying home along some city street with nothing more to worry about than what TV programme he would select to while away the night. There had been a time; but that had long since passed. He had made his choices, and some of them had been made for him. He hardly ever regretted it, though there were times when he lay alone in the dark listening to dogs barking to each other in the night and wondered how it might have been if he had followed the well-worn path, how it might have been to have had someone to come home to, someone to share a life with. But thoughts like those came only in the darkest hours, and usually he would decide it was as well things had turned out the way they had.

A newsboy was standing under the awning of the Café Auguste, a bundle of evening papers under his arm. He had no need to shout. Business was good. News was bad. They were still carrying the story of the shooting and the girl’s drawing. People liked to sit back in comfortable armchairs in front of fires after their evening meal and read about the horrors of life from the safety of their own warm little boxes. So long as it didn’t touch them.

Bannerman bought a copy of La Belge Soir and glanced briefly at the front page. There were pics of the death house, single column pics of Gryffe and Slater and a reproduction of the drawing. The by-line of the story was Richard Platt’s.

He folded the paper under his arm and walked into the steamy warmth of the café. The place was filled with people and noise, a strong aroma of coffee and cigar smoke. It was a typical Belgian café. A big barn of a place crammed with tables and chairs, mirror squares all along behind the bar and big, scarred pillars supporting an ornately corniced ceiling almost obscured by the fog of smoke and damp that people make on wet days. Two waiters in white jackets and black trousers darted between tables and bar conveying endless orders of coffee and beer on brightly-coloured trays. These guys really earned their money.

Du Maurier was sitting at a table at the far side of the café behind a square-panelled pillar. He raised an arm to wave Bannerman over. ‘What will you drink, Monsieur?’

Bannerman eased himself into a chair opposite the policeman. ‘Whisky.’

Du Maurier barely moved his head and one of the waiters was at his arm, a thin, dark-skinned man with a small black moustache and a permanent scowl. ‘Inspecteur?’ Du Maurier ordered a whisky and an absinthe. The waiter was called Jacques. When he had gone the policeman pulled at the hair growing out of his nostrils and lit a cigarette. Then he sat back and smiled curiously at Bannerman, dark, dark eyes sharp and watchful. ‘Well?’

‘So they’re going to pull the plug on you tomorrow.’

The smile widened. ‘They have already done so. The case is closed. Tomorrow is just an exercise in public relations. The dirty work is done. I have to admit, I did not expect them to move so quickly.’

Bannerman thought about it. ‘Then there is more to it than embarrassed politicians?’

Du Maurier seemed so relaxed he was almost liquid. ‘That is for them to know and you to find out.’

‘And you?’

Du Maurier leaned forward and placed his elbows carefully on the edge of the table, clasping his big-knuckled hands below his chin. ‘The case is closed.’

‘Is it?’

‘Officially I can do nothing.’

‘And unofficially?’

Jacques arrived with the drinks on a tray and left the cheque in a saucer. Du Maurier reached for a jug on the table. ‘Water?’ Bannerman shook his head and the Inspector poured water into his absinthe and watched it turn cloudy. He picked up his glass and sipped the drink. ‘The case,’ he repeated very deliberately, ‘is closed.’ He took a bigger slug and then studied Bannerman thoughtfully. ‘What do you need to know?’

Bannerman took his first sip of whisky and kept the glass close to his mouth. ‘Michel Lapointe and René Jansen. Who are they?’

Du Maurier shook his head sadly. ‘You are on the wrong track, Monsieur. Oh, yes, we found those cuttings from the newspapers too. But there is nothing to connect them in any way with Monsieur Gryffe or what happened in the Rue de Pavie.’ He paused to consider his words. ‘René Jansen is a very powerful man in this country, Monsieur. His business interests are enormous as is his bank balance. He wields much influence, but not that much. He is a big man, but not that big. The decision to close the case is a political one and Jansen is not a political animal. This is not his affair.’

‘And Lapointe?’

‘A legal man. A company lawyer. Look, Monsieur, there is no connection.’

‘Any connection could do them harm?’

Du Maurier sighed. ‘Perhaps.’

Bannerman emptied half of his glass. ‘Why are you trying to protect them?’

The policeman was annoyed, and his annoyance seemed genuine enough. ‘Perhaps I have made a mistake,’ he said curtly, ‘I thought you were an intelligent man.’

‘So did I,’ Bannerman said. ‘And I see no reason for changing that opinion. You see, I’m just naturally suspicious and I also see no reason why you should be talking to me at all. Oh, I know what you told me yesterday. Justice, morality, the law. All very noble. But I’m just too cynical to believe all that. Forgive me. As I said, I have a suspicious nature.’

Du Maurier nodded, and his years seemed more deeply etched in the lines of his face. ‘Okay. There’s no reason why you should believe me. My motives are my own. Perhaps they are not very noble, but they are real enough and I don’t see why I should go into them with you.’ He wet his lips with a sip of absinthe. His mantle of defeat settled more heavily on his shoulders. ‘Of course I was not mistaken. You are a very astute young man. But you should know that the last thing I would want to do is protect a man like Jansen. Men like Jansen are a cancer in our society, the intrinsic weakness that one of your political leaders once described so nicely as the unacceptable face of capitalism.

‘I am no socialist, but I believe in democracy. Men like Jansen make a mockery of what we call democracy. It doesn’t really exist except in the hearts of idealists. It is true that the people elect their representatives, but the candidates are picked by the parties and the parties do not run on fresh air. They need money to fuel them. And it is men like Jansen who provide that money. Surely none of us is naïve enough to believe that this money is provided for love of party. No, no. Such benefactors seek influence if not control, benefits if not power. Jansen’s business interests sail very close to the wind when it comes to the law, and sometimes he will steer a course that is clearly, though discreetly, outside the law. But he has influence, you see. He has paid for it, and so he survives. I would dearly love to bring such a man down, but that is not the way of things. Who am I? I’m too old and tired for all that. But I have no reason to protect him. The case is closed and even if I thought Jansen was involved there would be little I could do about it. You would be well advised to take my advice. My instinct would be not to tangle with Jansen, or even Lapointe.’

Bannerman nodded slowly. ‘I believe you,’ he said, ‘but my instinct is a journalist’s instinct. If Slater went to the trouble of putting together a folder of cuttings on Jansen and Lapointe and filed it along with his cuttings on Gryffe, then there was a reason for it. They may be connected with what happened, and they may not. But my instinct is to check it out.’

Du Maurier shrugged. ‘Then follow your instinct,’ he said.

‘I always do.’

The Inspector smiled wearily and finished his drink. He pushed back his chair. ‘I must go.’

‘There’s more,’ Bannerman said quietly.

Du Maurier’s face set. ‘What more?’

Bannerman called Jacques and the waiter materialised beside him. Bannerman said, ‘Encore.’ Jacques nodded and disappeared into the fug of people and smoke from which he had come. A group of working men in the far corner raised their voices in laughter. Some bawdy joke. Bannerman took out a cigar and du Maurier lit it for him and then set fire to another cigarette. ‘Slater was planning to leave,’ Bannerman said.

Du Maurier looked at him emptily. ‘You have had a busy day. You searched the flat?’

Bannerman nodded. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘No. I didn’t tell you. There are many things I haven’t told you, things I am not going to tell you, things you will have to find out for yourself. Things that only I could have told you — and there are people who would know that. I am prepared to help you, for reasons of my own, but I am not going to be your, or anyone else’s, sacrificial lamb.’ He paused as Jacques brought the drinks then he leaned across the table again. ‘He had booked a flight for Sunday evening for himself and his daughter. London,and then a connecting flight to New York. Tickets and passport were in his inside jacket pocket.’

Bannerman felt tiny needles of shock prick his skin. For the first time he began seriously to doubt that there had been a third party, doubt the interpretation of the child’s drawing. ‘It is just possible then that Slater went with a gun to the Rue de Pavie intending to kill Gryffe, take the money and skip the country.’

‘It is possible,’ du Maurier conceded, ‘but I doubt it. It is a theory with very little to support it. Do not forget all that I told you yesterday. Before I was instructed to drop the case, we found no way of connecting the gun to Monsieur Slater. In fact, I don’t think we ever would. The registration number had been filed off, and I doubt ballistics would have a record of it. It was a professional’s gun. A once only job. And Monsieur Slater was not a professional. Also, he was not stupid. A man is shot dead, a man whom others knew was meeting Monsieur Slater in his house that morning. Monsieur Slater disappears. Those are the actions of a stupid man. Too, Monsieur Slater’s flight to London was not until Sunday evening. Even if he had meant to murder Monsieur Gryffe and run, as you say, he would not wait nearly twelve hours. He would never have reached the airport.’

Bannerman conceded du Maurier’s logic with something like relief. Since finding the packed cases there had been a niggling doubt in the back of his mind about Slater. At no point until then had he thought Slater capable of being involved in murder. Du Maurier’s confirmation of Slater’s intention to flee the country had brought that seed of doubt to flower. But now it withered as quickly and left a greater clarity. ‘Then we are left with the original question of what business Slater had with Gryffe. Blackmail?’

Du Maurier smiled. ‘Go on.’

‘If Slater was blackmailing Gryffe then there would be no need for him to make a hurried departure. Maybe,’ he drew on his cigar, ‘maybe if Slater had been blackmailing him for some time, Sunday was to have been the final payoff. A quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money, but I wouldn’t have thought it was enough to make Slater give up everything here. Certainly not overnight.’

Du Maurier poured water into his absinthe. ‘It’s all possible,’ he said. ‘Personally I like the idea of blackmail. It answers many questions, though not all of them by any means. If, for example, Monsieur Slater had been blackmailing our friend for some time, where is the rest of the money? He certainly did not bank it either here or in England. There was no money in the flat, though it is possible that money was removed from the safe by your intruder. Somehow I don’t think so. What was taken would more likely be evidence, whatever it was that gave Monsieur Slater a hold over Monsieur Gryffe. So, if there was more money, where is it?’

‘A numbered account in Switzerland.’

‘Again, possible, but I think not. We would have found some record of such an account among his personal belongings.’

Bannerman took a slug of whisky. ‘Seems you, too, have been busy.’

Du Maurier smiled and ran a hand through the remains of his black, wiry hair. ‘More importantly,’ he went on, ‘blackmail does not furnish us with any motive for murder by a third party.’

‘Somebody else who felt threatened,’ Bannerman suggested. ‘If Slater had dirt on Gryffe, then some of that dirt could possibly have stuck to the third party.’

The policeman scratched his old chin. ‘Assuming that was true,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘would the murderer then have left the money behind? Not only is it a lot of money, it also provides a possible clue as to motive.’ He sighed. ‘There is little point, Monsieur Bannerman, in speculating. We could talk around the subject all night and only create for ourselves more questions that we cannot answer.’ He emptied his glass.

Bannerman placed a hand on his arm to stop him rising. ‘One final question. Gryffe had another house in Brussels. Where?’

The Inspector frowned. ‘He had no other home in Brussels. Only in the Rue de Pavie.’

Bannerman shook his head. ‘You are not as thorough as you might have been,’ he said. ‘Slater lists two home numbers in Brussels for Gryffe. They are in his contacts book. Presumably one of them is the Rue de Pavie.’ He took out his notebook and flipped through to the page where he had noted the numbers, and pushed it across the table at du Maurier. The other man’s frown deepened.

‘The first number is the Rue de Pavie,’ he said, ‘what makes you think the second number is Belgian? It could be anywhere.’

‘In the contacts book it was preceded by a code in brackets. The international dialling code from Britain to Belgium.’

Du Maurier shook his head. ‘It is not a Brussels number. Provincial perhaps.’ He took out a small black notebook and a pen and copied the second number into it. ‘I will check. Because the case is closed it will not be easy. Perhaps a few days.’ He scribbled another number on a fresh page, tore it out and handed it to Bannerman. ‘If you need to call me, phone that number. Speak to no-one else but me. Do not come to the Rue des Quatre Bras.’

Bannerman took the sheet of paper and folded it into his top pocket. He said, ‘I shall want Slater’s car from the pound.’

Du Maurier stood up. ‘I will arrange to have it taken to the Rue de Commerce. Au revoir, Monsieur.’ He pushed his way out of the café and Bannerman stared at the remains in his whisky glass. He knew more now than when he had come in, but still not enough. He drank the last drop of whisky and noticed that du Maurier had left him to pick up the bill. He drew out a five hundred franc note and dropped it in the saucer, and then left the warmth of the Café Auguste to brave the snow and the raw night.

The newsboy was still selling papers. The news was still bad and business was still good.

III

Bannerman ate alone in a bistro off the Avenue de la Toison d’Or, a small, cheap eating house where they served good steak and Bordeaux wine by the carafe.

It had stopped snowing when he left. He headed back along the Boulevard Waterloo toward the Porte de Namur. Over the meal he had thought again about Palin with some disquiet. The man bothered him, without his knowing quite why. He had known plenty of drunks, abusive ones at that. But with Palin it was something else. Bannerman checked his watch. It was after eight. He had been unwise to leave the cuttings in the office, and he decided it would be safer to stop off at the International Press Centre and pick up the folders. They would be more secure at the flat. There was no way he wanted to risk Palin getting his hands on them.

At the Pone de Namur he rode the escalators down into the Metro and spent twenty-five francs on a ticket to Schuman.

There were only a few lights still showing in the windows of the IPC building. A bored-looking telephone girl sat behind the reception counter. Up steps and beyond the desk, across a wide, thickly carpeted lobby, the sound of voices oiled by alcohol came from the press bar. Bannerman took the elevator up to the sixth floor.

The corridor was dimly lit, every second light switched off for the night. He watched his shadow overtake him, fade like a giant and then drift by him again as he passed under the next light. All the offices were empty and the floor was quiet as death except for the distant rumbling of traffic that came up the Boulevard Charlemagne from the Rue de la Loi. Bannerman looked out his key and thought about phoning Sally again from the office. The key wouldn’t turn in the lock. He swore softly and tried another key. The same again. ‘Shit!’ He tried the handle and the door pushed open. Someone had forgotten to lock it.

Maybe it was because it was night, and the hours of darkness are the hours of fear and danger, or maybe it was something he heard or the slightest movement registering in the darkness. It might even have been that intrinsic sixth sense that warns of the presence of another human being when you can neither see nor hear him. Whatever it was, it triggered in Bannerman a reflex action, his crooked arm rising swiftly to take the full brunt of a blow that would surely have cracked his skull. The pain tore up his arm to his shoulder and his knees buckled. He staggered into the darkness, falling, tangling with the legs of his unsighted attacker. The other man lost his balance and toppled heavily over Bannerman’s back, grunting as he fell. A foot caught Bannerman’s throat. Bannerman choked back the vomit and felt fire in his head and chest. His right arm and hand had gone numb already.

The heavy figure of the other man was frantically disentangling itself from Bannerman’s legs. Then he was up and running, heavy steps beating their retreat down the length of the corridor towards the lifts. But Bannerman was not interested in the other man at that moment. He rolled over and spat blood and saliva at the floor. His head had cleared a little, but his throat hurt like hell. He pulled himself up to his feet with the help of the edge of a desk, and took two or three unsteady steps to the light switch.

The glare filled his head again with fire and he pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. His mouth tasted of blood and sick. ‘Shit,’ he whispered softly to himself. This was getting to be a bad habit. You’re going to have to take more care, son, he told himself.

He let his head drop between his knees for several minutes while he breathed deeply. Then he sat upright and saw a narrow-necked water jug with a glass over it on the desk. He reached over with his left hand, lifted off the glass and poured some water into it. The first swig he rolled around his mouth and gargled in his throat before spitting it out on the carpet. This was no time for niceties. Then he took a long draught and felt the smooth coldness all the way down to his stomach. He turned his attention to his right arm. It was the fleshy bit of the forearm that had taken the blow. He slipped his jacket off and rolled up his sleeve. Already the arm was swollen and bruised. But nothing broken. His fingers seemed to have locked, and his arm was bent at the elbow and hurt badly when he tried to straighten it. Must have got a nerve, he thought.

The next few minutes he spent slowly, painfully, making fists with his right hand and working his arm straight and then crooking it. Gradually the muscles and the nerves eased and he got a pins-and-needles sensation from shoulder to fingertips. That passed and he took out a cigar with his left hand, peeled it one-handed and stuck it between his lips. He lit it and drew deeply. The kick in the neck had probably burst a small blood vessel in his throat. He didn’t know if the smoke would help, but right then he didn’t particularly care.

He leaned back in the seat and looked around the office. It wasn’t a shambles. It looked much as it had looked earlier in the day. There was no evidence of an intruder. He turned to Slater’s desk drawer and pulled it open. The folders were gone. So was the contacts book. Whoever it was had known exactly where to look. That narrowed the field considerably. He sat for a few minutes more, then he took out his notebook, flipped over several pages, picked up the phone and dialled. He wasn’t sure why he was calling her. A cry in the dark. The number rang out and he hung up. It wasn’t his night. He stood up and swung his head to either side to ease the stiffening in his neck. He switched out the light and closed the door behind him and locked it.

A light shone from the window of the top floor flat in the apartment block in the Rue de Commerce. Bannerman might not have noticed it except that there were only two other lights showing in the entire block. Slater’s car, a dark blue Volkswagen, sat at the kerbside. Bannerman paid off his taxi and watched the car move off down the street. It was only fifteen or twenty minute walk from the IPC building, but he had not felt like walking.

He shuffled about on the pavement, unsure about what to do. He lit a cigar and looked up again at the light in the window, weighing up the possibilities. But he was too tired and too sore to think too much about it. And it was cold out there, his breath billowing out yellow in the street lights, melting the big snow flakes that were falling all around him, settling on his head and shoulders. He went inside and started up the stairs, listening to his hollow footsteps clattering back at him off the walls. It seemed even colder in the stairwell than it had outside. The landing lights were harsh, each landing icy in their cold glare. But they didn’t light the stairs too well.

At the door of the flat he fumbled with the keys and then carefully opened it, standing well back and letting it swing inwards. The landing light spilled into the darkness of the hallway and at the far end he could see a crack of light framing the door of the living room. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The air was warm and dusty and touched with a faintly familiar scent. He stood perfectly still as the crack of light widened ahead of him and a long shadow reached out across the hall as though to touch him. The figure in the doorway was silhouetted against the light behind. Bannerman couldn’t see the face, but he recognized the slightness of the outline and the hair cut close around the head. ‘Hello,’ Sally said. Her voice sounded very small. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. Quite a long time. It’s kind of scary sitting alone in a dead man’s house.’

Very slowly Bannerman slipped his coat off and dragged it along behind him the length of the hall. He stopped in front of her and looked down into her shadowed face. ‘How did you know I would be here?’

She was disconcerted by his closeness. ‘I didn’t know for sure. I’ve still got a key, so I came up. I found your clothes still in the bedroom, so I guessed you’d be back. I... I was frightened I might not see you again.’

‘Why? Would that matter to you?’

‘Maybe,’ she said.

He let it lie for a while, smelling her perfume, warm and musky, and he sensed her reserve. ‘Why is it so difficult to get close to you?’

There was a very long silence. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last, knowing that she did. Then she looked up a little more brightly. ‘I brought some wine. I put the refrigerator on and left it in there to chill.’ Bannerman lowered his head and let his lips brush hers. It was what she had wanted, and yet still she drew back. ‘I’ll get some glasses.’

He followed her into the living room, puzzled, disappointed, wondering why she had come, and yet glad she had.

She went up into the kitchen. He heard her open the refrigerator then the sounds of her searching for glasses. He switched off the overhead light, turned on a table lamp and sat back in the settee staring at the painting over the mantelpiece. The browns and blacks, blues and greens, their starkness against the white of the snow that covered the scene. A group of weary hunters returning from the kill, mean-looking dogs slinking at their feet, a fire being lighted at the inn on the hilltop. Through the trees they looked down onto two square frozen-over lakes where tiny figures wrapped in winter coats were skating. There was a great peace about the painting, a strange sense of satisfaction in it, men and women frozen in the painter’s mind below the palest of blue skies that faded almost to yellow.

Sally came in with the bottle uncorked and set it down with two glasses on the long, stained coffee table in front of the settee. She sat down beside Bannerman and followed his eyes to the painting. ‘Brueghel,’ she said. ‘So gentle by comparison with the horrors and madness of his later work.’

Bannerman wondered if the choice of painting reflected anything in Slater. It was a curious painting for such a man. Perhaps it had come with the flat. He dragged his eyes away from it and turned his head to watch Sally pour the wine. It was a white wine, the bottle misted that way that makes it so irresistible. The glasses misted too when the wine was poured into them. Sally raised her glass to her lips. ‘It hardly seems right to toast to anything,’ she said and took a sip. Bannerman lifted his glass and took a mouthful. It was dry and a little fruity and tasted good, cool over the hotness of his throat which still hurt where the blood vessel had burst. Sally put her glass down and without looking at him, asked, ‘What happened to your face?’ He told her and she turned in amazement. ‘You mean there was someone in here waiting for you?’

‘Not waiting for me. He was after something in the safe. I disturbed him. I suppose he got what he was looking for, but he was clearly under the impression that the house was empty.’ He hesitated. ‘Let me ask you something. You normally came to the house on Sundays. Why did you not come yesterday?’

She looked at him curiously, a hint of uncertainty, suspicion, in her green eyes. ‘You don’t think I...’

‘I don’t think anything. I’d just like to know.’

‘If you must know I had a meeting with a professor of English from a very exclusive languages college in Rome. There’s a post available and I have applied for it. It’s a full-time job and it pays well.’ There was a hint of hostility in her voice. ‘Usually I took Tania out on Sunday mornings. To Mass. They were Catholics, you know. I’m not, but I took her anyway. She seemed to get something out of it.’

Bannerman nodded. ‘And that’s why whoever it was that clobbered me thought that the house would be empty.’

She picked up her glass and half emptied it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought that maybe you thought I...’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No.’ He leaned forward and re-filled both their glasses, a slight, sharp intake of breath as the pain returned to his outstretched arm.

‘Why,’ she said suddenly, ‘should anyone want to kill him?’

Bannerman passed her her glass. ‘Because Slater was blackmailing Robert Gryffe. Because someone else felt threatened and decided the best way out was to kill them both. When he had killed them he came here to get whatever it was that gave Slater a hold over Gryffe.’ If he said it often enough he might believe it. He took in her look of incredulity.

‘But how can you possibly know that?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t. But it fits with everything we know.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s easier to believe than what you’re going to read in tomorrow’s evening papers.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The Minister for the Interior is going to make a statement tomorrow morning announcing that the police are satisfied that Slater and Gryffe shot each other during some private quarrel. The case is already closed.’

She said nothing, raising her glass slowly to her lips and sipping at it several times. She got up and walked to the window, and stood tracing patterns with her finger on the fine condensation. Outside the snow still fell, brushing the glass, lining the ledge. ‘A cover-up?’ Her voice was quiet and the words were almost lost.

‘Something like that,’ Bannerman said. He replaced his glass on the table and went to the window and stood behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

‘But why?’ he heard her ask.

He sighed. ‘Who knows. There are several possibilities. I don’t know. But I mean to find out.’

She turned then to face him, her eyes turned up to meet his. ‘It’s so unfair.’

‘Nothing in life is fair,’ Bannerman said and she was stung by the bitterness in his voice. ‘Right now there are thousands of children with distended stomachs, arms and legs thin and brittle like twigs, staring, hopeless eyes. They have days, some of them maybe only hours, to live, because they have not eaten for weeks. There is no food for them. Only disease and despair. And we sit sipping our wine and warming our anger because two men have died and someone didn’t want us to know why. Is that fair?

‘A little girl was born with something wrong in her head. She lost her mother when she was five and she saw her father shot to death yesterday. Maybe she’d like to tell us how it was. Maybe she’d like to say, “I loved my Daddy.” But she can’t, because the thing that is wrong in her head won’t let her. Do you care? Do I care? Does anybody care? That doesn’t really seem very fair either, does it? You can’t go through life expecting it to treat you fairly.

‘God, if he exists, either had an off-day when he put this lot together — the world, humanity — or else He’s playing some ethereal chess game where we’re all expendable in the greater plan of things, whether we think it’s fair or not. You can talk about right and wrong, and even that is different for every individual... but nothing is fair.’

She listened in silence. There was bitterness in him, but not venom. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘And, God knows, I should know. But wouldn’t it be sad if we all thought the way you do?’

Bannerman looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Was it a man?’ he said.

‘Isn’t it always?’ She turned away.

‘No, not always.’ He turned her back to face him and cupped his hands either side of her face, tilting her head upwards. ‘It needn’t be,’ he said. And he bent to kiss her. She responded, soft lips, the smell of wine on her breath. She pulled her head away and pressed it into his shoulder.

‘It’s hard,’ she said, ‘not knowing if you can ever really trust anyone again.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ And she pushed away from him, turning again to the window.

He stood for a moment, then crossed to the coffee table and retrieved his glass. ‘I’d like to see the child,’ he said and drank what was left of his wine.

‘I’ll take you. Tomorrow?’

‘Evening. If it’s possible.’

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘You’ll be going to the funeral?’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, two thirty at the Cimetière de Bruxelles.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know. Yes, I’ll be there.’ She paused. ‘Why do you want to see her? Professional or personal reasons?’

He looked up sharply. ‘I don’t know. A bit of both, maybe.’ Why indeed? he thought. He knew there was very little chance of getting more out of the child than the police had already done. And it was only then that he realised she had been flitting around the edge of his consciousness all day, a small, clumsy, barefoot child whose cold hands had touched his face in the darkness. Then he remembered something else. He said, ‘The other night, when I came back, drunk. Did I... Did we...? I remember some of it, but not that.’

She smiled at his unusual bashfulness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We didn’t.’ She hesitated, then, ‘I could stay tonight.’

‘No, I’ll take you home.’ He said it a little too quickly and it hurt her, and he realised too late his mistake.

‘Fine.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...’

‘You don’t have to apologise.’

There was an awkward silence, then Bannerman asked, ‘You want some more wine?’

‘No, it’s getting late.’

He fumbled absently in his pocket and then frowned. ‘The police brought Slater’s car back. I saw it outside. But I guess I don’t have the keys.’

‘They’re on the mantelpiece.’ Sally crossed the room. ‘They must have put them through the letter-box. I found them lying on the floor in the hall when I came in. But don’t bother, I’ll phone a taxi.’ He would have argued, but he saw her face that she would not be argued with. And he thought, I could love you.

It was fifteen minutes before the taxi came and parp-parped down in the street. They had had time to finish the wine and say many things. They had done neither. ‘I’ll come down with you.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘I’ll come down with you.’ He helped her on with her coat and they walked down the stairs in silence. The taxi was revving impatiently at the kerb, clouds of exhaust fumes rising into the darkness. She stopped in the doorway and relented. She turned and kissed him quickly on the lips. He held her arm to stop her from going. ‘Did you... did you get the job in Rome?’

She looked at him quizzically for a moment. ‘I don’t know. They’re going to let me know.’

‘Oh.’

‘See you tomorrow.’

He watched her climb into the taxi and the car purring off down the Rue de Commerce leaving black tyre tracks in the thin layer of snow, and he wondered if she would always be leaving.

Back in the flat all that remained of her were lingering traces of her perfume and the faintest smear of lipstick on her empty glass. He finished the wine, drinking slowly and listening to the clock ticking in the heavy silence and feeling the dull ache in the stiffening, bruised muscles of his right arm.

IV

A silent figure stood in the snow, pressed against a gable end, the eaves too high above him to afford any protection from the thickly-falling flakes. The tyre tracks of the taxi had vanished already, only a slight, slightly whiter impression remaining in the whiteness of the road. The man shifted his feet, but the feeling in them had long since gone. Even the muscles in his face seemed to have frozen. His hands, pushed deep in his pockets, were raw cold and stiff. His eyes were dull and sunk deep in shadow, and yet still they watched. It was a pointless vigil now, but perhaps for the first time in his life Kale was afraid of the loneliness of his hotel room, locked away in the dark listening to the throbbing early morning music that came drifting up from the basement night club in the adjoining block. There would be too much time to think during the sleepless hours. There were things that would trouble him, strange dark thoughts coming like strangers in the night to blacken the blackness in him.

The light in the top floor flat went out, and still he could not bring himself to move. The woman had been gone twenty minutes and there was no way the man would lead him to the child tonight. And yet he stood on, like a punishment. A mean, lost soul in a foreign city where people spoke words he could not understand, where he had killed two men without a second thought. Only now it was a prison. There was no escape. Every eye watched him, every voice accused him. There was a dreadful inevitability about it all, like death itself.

Of course, there was a way out, but somewhere beyond his grasp, there just to torture him. He had only to leave. By morning he could be in Ostend, by tea time, in London. But it was not to be. A child had seen him commit murder, a child with a disordered mind, a child who would probably never identify him. But she might. He knew that, his employer knew that, and there were others who knew it too. It was expected of him to negate that possibility. He expected it of himself. He had killed before. It was easy, it was necessary, and yet standing there in all the cold and snow on this black winter night, he did not know if it was possible.

It was the uncertainty that trapped him there. He had thought he knew all the dark territory of his mind. He had had no illusions about what he was. It was something he accepted, like life or death. But somewhere in that inner darkness he had stumbled on something unfamiliar, something he could not come to terms with. To kill a child with his secret locked somewhere in her disturbed mind. A note in a locker, three words on a scrap of paper, and he had discovered in himself the seed of destruction that is in the souls of all men. To kill the child would be to kill himself. He knew it with such a dreadful clarity. You choose your own road to hell and you think you know every twist and turn. Then you discover that hell is not the end of the road. He was a person, after all, a human being, and there was a point beyond which you could not go. It is no use, he thought. I will think about it whether I stand here punishing myself, or whether I lie awake in my room. The man whose head he had cracked, whose ribs he had kicked, would lead him eventually to the child. He was no longer in control of his own destiny. He was being drawn towards his own destruction as helplessly as the man being swept into the vortex of a whirlpool. For somewhere in all his lack of humanity, he had discovered a conscience.

He moved stiffly away from the wall against which he had sought some shelter and began walking along the Rue de Commerce. Somewhere he would find a bar to spend some time before he could face the room he had taken across town, and the long hours before morning.