Illegal Action

51

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Peggy had already sent a text message—RETURN TO LONDON URGENTLY. RING ASAP—and had phoned half a dozen times to no avail. What had Liz said in her message? I’m going to Ireland with Brunovsky in his private jet to see this new picture that’s turned up. We’ll be back this evening but I’ll ring again when we get there to let you know where we are. But no call had come, so where were they?

Normally, this was just the sort of problem Peggy enjoyed solving but she wasn’t enjoying herself now. The possibility that Liz was in danger was making her heart thump uncomfortably as she worked. She began by checking back through all Liz’s reports to see if there was any mention of the location of this supposed new picture, but all Liz had said was that it was owned by a Miss Cottingham who lived near Cork. Peggy had great faith in the Internet as a starting point for puzzles and she was pretty sure that she would be able to find Liz within a few minutes. Googling “Cottingham + Ireland” produced only the useless information that Lewis Cottingham was the architect of Armagh Cathedral. Liz had said the old lady owned a large country house, but a trawl through landowners and tourist sites turned up nothing useful. The Irish telephone directory listed only four Cottinghams in the entire country—three in Dublin and one in Belfast, none of them obvious owners of large country houses, none of them likely candidates for the perpetration of an art fraud.

Airports next, thought Peggy, trying to keep calm. Where would a small plane land? They were heading for somewhere near Cork, so probably Cork airport. But it could be Kerry. Or even Shannon—if they had a helicopter standing by they could reach almost any point in southwest Ireland within half an hour. There were thirty-six airports in Ireland and even when she had discounted the twenty-one with unpaved runways, that still left fifteen possibilities.

At this point Peggy telephoned the office of the Garda Siochana in Cork and found herself speaking to a soft-spoken man named O’Farrell, head of Special Branch. She told him that she needed urgently to contact a colleague who was on her way to visit a country house somewhere in the county, owned by an old lady. “I don’t know the name of the place, and was hoping you could help.”

O’Farrell gave a gentle laugh. “Ireland’s full of old country houses inhabited by almost equally old ladies.”

“I’ve got the owner’s name,” she said eagerly. “It’s Cottingham—a Miss Cottingham. But I can’t find her in any directory.”

“The name doesn’t ring a bell, but then, I’m not a student of the Irish gentry. Let me ask around. I’ll get back to you.”

What next? thought Peggy, drawing what felt like her first breath for half an hour. “When in doubt,” her Anglo-Saxon tutor at Oxford had once told her, finding her half in tears when stuck with a particularly tricky passage in Beowulf, “the answer is to move on.” So now Peggy did.

The news in the message from the Danes that she had shown to Brian, that Greta Darnshof was not who she claimed to be, would in other circumstances have thrilled Peggy. Now it frightened her. The Danes had run Greta Darnshof’s name against a programme intended to help expose identity theft and they’d hit the jackpot. At first the search had come up negative—the Danes had focused on 1964 when Greta claimed to have been born, and 1965. But when they widened the search they found Greta Darnshof, a five-year-old girl, died with her mother and father in a car crash in 1969, thirty kilometres from the town of Horsens. About six years ago someone else had assumed her identity and three years later, the new Darnshof had moved to Norway. Herr Beckendorf was convinced this was his Illegal and now she was living in London, dead thirty-eight years yet miraculously reborn as the editor of Private Collection. Neither the Danes, the Germans nor Peggy knew what her mission was, but it was looking increasingly likely that it had something to do with Brunovsky.

Peggy rang the office of Private Collection in Hanover Square. “Miss Darnshof is unavailable,” said a tired, Sloaney voice over the phone.

“Will she be available later on?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” said the voice, this time audibly suppressing a yawn.

“Well, is she in town? I’m an old friend from Denmark,” added Peggy, wishing she’d thought of this in time to add a slight accent. “I’ll ring her flat—unless you think she’s gone to Ireland.”

“I don’t know if it’s Ireland, but she was flying somewhere.” The Sloane seemed to wake up at last, and regret her indiscretion. “What did you say your name was?”

“Thanks very much,” said Peggy, and after this non sequitur put down the phone, suddenly feeling sick at the thought of Greta Darnshof in Ireland. If anything happens to Liz, she thought with sudden helpless anger, I hope they hang Brian Ackers up from a lamp post on Millbank.

Why didn’t Liz ring? She must have landed by now. Perhaps she couldn’t find a private place to make a call, but Liz would always find some way to keep in touch. She tried to still the racing thoughts in her head, stretched both arms out and took a few deep breaths to keep her circulation flowing. Pushing her glasses firmly up her nose, she reminded herself that sometimes the answer was so obvious you ignored it. What obvious thing had she missed?

Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, she remembered that even a private plane had to file a flight plan. A few phone calls got her to Northolt, then a brief argument, another call to the airport police, and eighteen minutes later Peggy was staring at the faxed copy of Brunovsky’s itinerary. Then she rang O’Farrell of the Garda again.

“You say Shillington airport?” he said when she’d explained. “That would make sense. It’s new, about thirty miles west of Cork. Small but with a long enough runway to take private jets. It gets a lot of use from the money that’s been coming into Cork by the coast. Do you want me to send someone there to pick her up?”

And then Peggy looked at her watch and with a sinking feeling realised it was too late. Liz would have landed by now. Brian Ackers had told her to play it low-key with the Garda. “We don’t want to cause an unnecessary international incident,” he’d said. She decided to disobey him.

By the time she had given an astonished O’Farrell a version of what she thought was going on, he had agreed to send two officers to meet Michael Fane, now en route to Heathrow, when he landed at Cork airport. Then they would take him to… where? Peggy hoped that by then she would have been able to make contact and would know where Liz had gone.

She thanked O’Farrell, agreed to keep in close touch, hung up, then picked the phone up again.

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