Strangers Page 24

  Somewhere in that complex equation was Haroun Patel and the questions Joe Massey had been asking. Someone didn’t want the details of that story known. Had that someone achieved what he wanted by driving them all out of the Kingdom, or was there more to come?

  He decided to call Rai, who had promised to monitor developments in Riyadh. He sounded cheerful when he answered Damien’s call. ‘You are well?’ he said.

  There had been developments in the Massey case. The police investigating the case were able to confirm that Massey had made it to the hospital. The jacket his wife said he had been wearing was in his office in the pathology department. And they had a witness who had seen his car driving away from the hospital car park. It had been picked up later by a camera on the main road from Riyadh.

  The map of Riyadh was still clear in Damien’s head as Rai explained where the car had been spotted. Massey had been heading west, on the side of the city where the party had been held, but the route that Rai was describing wouldn’t have taken him to the suburb where the Bradshaws lived. It would have taken him towards the city’s outer limits.

  ‘There is something else…’ Rai was warming to his story. ‘He has fellow traveller.’

  ‘Fellow…?’

  ‘There is someone in car with him.’

  Damien sat in thought for a while once he had put the phone down. Joe Massey had gone some-where after he’d talked to his wife. The last known sighting of his car had been on the road out of Riyadh, the road that led to the desert where his body had been found. And there had been someone in the car with him. Joe Massey had driven his killer to the place of his death.

  Suddenly he felt himself come alert. During his time in Riyadh, he had got used to the constant watchfulness that was necessary to survival. It had become second nature. He was used to monitoring the behaviour of people around him, to knowing who was there, who was changing places, who they were talking to and what they were doing. Something had aroused his subconscious watchman.

  He picked his phone up again, and keyed in the number for rail enquiries. As the automated system ran him through a series of options, he spoke briefly, letting his gaze wander around the café. No one seemed to be paying any attention to him, no one was suddenly interested in the menu or their newspaper, no one turned their face away.

  He smiled at the waitress, the phone still to his ear, and opened his hand slightly to show her the bank note he was holding. She nodded. He tucked it under his plate in her sight, and stood up. He walked straight out of the door, his senses alert for someone getting hurriedly to their feet, and crossed the road. He went down the steps into the Métro, then placed himself where an information screen shielded him while still allowing him to see who was coming down from the street. He was being paranoid, he knew, but the habits of Riyadh were hard to break.

  People streamed down the steps and past him through the ticket barriers. He waited for a while, then walked back up the steps. The feeling of unease had gone.

  Paranoia.

  He decided not to go back to his hotel but to stay with the crowds heading along the river towards the Louvre. The wind tugged at his scarf and cut into the exposed skin on his face.

  The gallery itself was closed. The courtyard opened up around him, a few people wandering across the expanse, looking up at the walls that surrounded them. A small crowd had gathered around the pyramid entrance, talking and gesturing. Plane leaves skittered across the ground as the wind caught them then died away. The last time he’d been here, it had been a bright spring day, and the stone that now looked grey and forbidding had looked golden in the sun. For that short afternoon, he and Catherine had been able to pretend they were happy.

  An intermittent sound echoed across the courtyard, and he looked round, trying to locate it. There was something familiar, something evocative about it. He scanned the courtyard trying to locate it, and then the walls, up and up.

  High on the wall, impossibly balanced on a ledge below a balcony, a small child sat playing his drum. His serious eyes gazed into the distance, his neat, dark hair undisturbed by the breeze that carried the leaves across the ground. Damien moved closer, curious and alarmed by the almost surreal image of a child drumming high on the walls of the Louvre. Then, as he looked, he saw the repetitive movements of the tiny wrists as they wielded the drumsticks, saw the blank stare of the face, and realized that he was looking at an automaton.

  ‘Realistic, isn’t it?’

  He turned round. A man was standing behind him, contemplating the drummer. He was wearing a heavy coat and a fedora hat. A scarf muffled his ears. Despite the cold, he looked debonair and jaunty.

  Arshak Nazarian.

  ‘Nazarian.’ Damien felt a bleak satisfaction that he’d been right. Someone had been watching him. He hadn’t been careful enough. ‘Last I heard, you were in Damascus.’

  Nazarian’s eyes were on the automaton. ‘It would be easy to mistake it for a real child,’ he said. His gaze moved to Damien. ‘No, Damascus was just a port of call. I felt the need to be out of the way for a while. I see you have made the same decision. That was probably wise.’

  ‘What brings you to Paris?’

  ‘Business,’ Nazarian said shortly. ‘You?’

  ‘Nostalgia.’

  Nazarian’s eyebrows raised in polite incredulity, but he didn’t pursue the topic. ‘I heard you were looking up old friends.’

  ‘Only the kind you find in places like this. Buildings, statues, memorials…’ Damien looked up at the automaton again, and waited to see what Nazarian wanted.

  ‘You’re not the only one who needs to talk to Amy Seymour, O’Neill. If you find her before I do, tell her to contact me. Tell her it’s important.’ He slipped a card out of his wallet and handed it to Damien.

  As Nazarian spoke, his eyes moved briefly to Damien’s injured hand. Damien resisted the impulse to conceal it in his pocket. ‘If I see her, I’ll pass the message on.’

  Nazarian registered the non-intent in his voice. ‘I don’t know if Amy has any plans to return to the Kingdom,’ he said. ‘She would be well advised to talk to me first.’

  ‘If I see her, I’ll pass the message on,’ he said again. ‘Are you staying in Paris?’

  Nazarian’s eyes travelled over the bleak courtyard. ‘Not much longer. You?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Then I was lucky to run into you.’ He nodded a curt farewell.

  Damien watched Nazarian walk away. Luck had nothing to do with it. Nazarian had known he was in Paris all along. He had a bad feeling that the only outcome of his own search would be to lead Nazarian closer to Amy.

  The cold had penetrated to his bones. After years of living in the Kingdom, his body had no defences against it. He took the Métro back to his hotel. His injured hand felt heavy and clumsy; when he looked at it, he could see the skin had a bluish tinge.

  Once he was back in his room, he logged on to the internet and did a quick search for the hospital Amy had visited during her stay.

  It was a world-renowned centre for maternity and neonatology. So maybe Amy had told Roisin the simple truth. She had left Riyadh to be with her sister who was about to give birth. He wondered why, in that case, she had chosen to stay in a hotel rather than with her sister. Family tensions? And then she’d signed out, leaving no forwarding address.

  Arshak Nazarian was looking for her as well. Amy’s dealings with Nazarian, whatever he might think of them, weren’t his business, but he wasn’t going to help Nazarian to find her.

  Joe Massey had been cut, viciously cut. His death had been ugly. And the people who had killed him were still out there. Damien didn’t like knives and he didn’t like the people who wielded them. If he kept on digging around in Amy’s life, he might do more harm than good. But he knew he wasn’t going to stop.

  37

  Roisin couldn’t get the visit from the police out of her mind. She could still see the detective standing in her doorway asking, Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn�
��t have an extradition treaty with the UK?

  If they were investigating a murder, and if they thought that Joe was implicated, would they continue the investigation now that he was dead? She could remember reading about cases where the prime suspect had died, and the bland comment: The police are not looking for anyone else. It was tantamount to an accusation of murder, and one that the accused had no way of refuting.

  She needed to know more about the death, more about the inquest where Joe had given evidence. It was several days before the obvious solution occurred to her and she took the tube out to Colindale in the bleak suburbs of North London to visit the British Library newspaper archive.

  She presented herself at the desk and after a short wait was issued with a day pass. She’d made notes on her journey out there, and after a quick search through the catalogues, accessed back issues of the Evening Standard which were available electronically for the previous eight months. The Standard should have reported the incident in some detail. The nationals, she wasn’t sure about.

  The sheer volume of information was so vast, and the bit she was looking for so tiny, she felt daunted. The detectives had said the woman had died in September the year before. So…she tried searching using woman, drown, Thames and different combinations of the words, but she got no useful hits. Then she started on the sections recording the findings of the Coroners’ Courts in September and October.

  There were two records of people drowned in the Thames in September. One was recorded as suicide, the other was the death of an unknown woman in her early twenties. The verdict had been an open one.

  Armed with a date, she began hunting for news reports, and at last she found them. There was the first report of the body being washed up, and then, a couple of days later, a much briefer report noted that a woman had died from drowning. Roisin kept going, now having to resort to a page-by-page search. She almost missed the story, though it had been given more prominence than either the discovery of the corpse or the cause of her death: DEAD WOMAN ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT’ screamed the headline.

  The opening two paragraphs were devoted to the dead woman in the river. She was probably from the Indian subcontinent. She carried the marks of a recent beating. She was wearing a distinctive ring. No one had reported her missing and no one had claimed her.

  But most of the story was devoted to the number of illegal immigrants in the country, how they came here and the problems they caused. It went on to discuss the problem of trafficking, and the way that women from poor countries were lured to the UK by promises of work, only to find themselves forced into prostitution when they got here.

  Roisin sat back in her seat, massaging her temples. The woman had died in the first week of September. The inquest had been towards the end of the month. The dates were etched in her mind. She had a memory for dates that could be her curse: a year ago today, we met. A year ago today, we first made love. A year ago…She didn’t have to check the date of the inquest again to know it happened a few days before Joe had told her about his plans to return to the Gulf, and had asked her to marry him.

  Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK…?

  She printed off the article. She didn’t know where to go now with the information she had. All the way on the long tube journey back to the flat, she swayed to the movement of the train, hanging on to the overhead rail, oblivious to the people crowding on and off at each station. It was the rush hour. She could almost be back a year ago, heading home from work, looking forward to an evening with friends, a glass of wine, a shower–nothing too much on her mind.

  She was pushed and jostled as she fought her way through the crowds at King’s Cross and headed up the road towards the flats. ‘Goddammit, Joe, I need to talk to you!’ She was angry with him for being dead, for leaving her with all of this to plague her and no answers to be found. She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until she heard a voice saying, ‘What?’

  It was Mari, the woman who had moved into George’s flat, who must also just have fought her way out of King’s Cross, hampered by a heavy pushchair. ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. Then, because that seemed abrupt, she said, ‘How are you? I haven’t seen you lately.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Mari’s voice sounded clogged. Her nose was red and as Roisin watched she fished a tissue out of her pocket and blew it resoundingly. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said unnecessarily. She joggled the pushchair by way of illustration. ‘This one’s been keeping me up.’

  Roisin made a sympathetic face. She could remember when a friend of hers, talking about her own new baby, had said, Happiness just means getting enough sleep. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’

  They started to walk up the road together. She could hear Mari’s snuffling breath. ‘Do you want me to push him for a while?’

  ‘OK.’ Mari handed over the pushchair with relief.

  Roisin took the handle and smiled at the baby, who was awake. He was a beautiful child with a mass of fair hair. His eyes were dark blue. He still had the slightly crumpled look that babies have in their first weeks. ‘Hey, Adam,’ she said, smiling again and leaning towards him. This time he seemed to register her, and his eyes fixed on her face.

  Mari was silent, so Roisin chatted to the tiny child as she pushed the buggy along the road, which sloped almost imperceptibly upwards. She tried not to puff too audibly. ‘Thanks for finding that address for me,’ she said to Mari. ‘I went to see George. He’s fine.’

  ‘George? Oh, the old man. Yeah. Good.’ She sneezed.

  ‘He said someone came looking for me, just before he left. No one’s been since you moved in, have they?’

  Mari shook her head. ‘There’s not been anyone visiting at all,’ she said.

  Roisin studied her covertly as they walked up the road. She looked tired and ill. Adam was only a few weeks old. Mari must have barely recovered from the birth, and now she was living on her own with full responsibility for her baby. Roisin wondered how she would have coped at Mari’s age.

  When they reached the flats, Mari opened the security gate and stood back as Roisin manoeuvred the heavy pram over the threshold.

  ‘If you come along to mine for a minute,’ she said, ‘there’s a letter for you. It got put through my door by mistake. I’ve been meaning to bring it up.’ She led the way as Roisin followed with the pram.

  ‘Home,’ she said to the baby as Mari unlocked the door. She unbuckled the straps and lifted him out, carefully supporting his head. ‘Hello, Adam,’ she said, holding him up to her face. He gazed at her with unblinking eyes. ‘Shall I take his bonnet off?’

  ‘It’s a hat,’ Mari said. ‘He’s a boy.’

  ‘His hat,’ Roisin corrected herself, carefully loosening the ties and easing it off the child’s head. She freed him from the tight wrappings, and looked round for somewhere to put him.

  ‘I’ll take him,’ Mari said, carefully cradling him. ‘He might go to sleep now. Here’s the letter.’ She handed Roisin a rather battered manila envelope.

  Roisin took it. ‘Thanks.’ She remembered how she had got to know George through the postman’s inability to tell the difference between 13 and 31. ‘Listen, I meant it about baby sitting,’ she said. ‘Here—’ She scribbled her number on a piece of paper.

  Mari studied it. ‘It doesn’t seem right to leave him,’ she said.

  ‘If you need to catch up on your sleep, or if you decide you want to go out, just call. Any time.’

  ‘OK,’ Mari said. ‘Thanks.’

  Roisin stuffed the envelope into her bag as she went up the stairs. Mari’s flat, from her brief glimpse of it, looked spartan and comfortless, but there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. She’d made friendly overtures, and she’d offered to baby sit. Anything else would be intrusive.

  Besides, she had other things to think about.

  Damien called her two days later to say he was back. She felt uncertain with him, remembering, but only half-remembering, her drunken confidence
s. His voice sounded cautious as they talked, as if he was wary of what she was going to say. Maybe he thought she regularly drank herself into oblivion to cope with Joe’s death, not knowing that, before the oblivion, the dreams came, and they were far worse than anything she endured sober.

  ‘Something happened the day after we met,’ she said. ‘The police came looking for Joe.’

  ‘The police? What did they want?’

  She told him about the interview, and the disturbing remark that the man had made as they left. ‘I looked the case up in the newspaper archives. There was an inquest–they said the woman had drowned.’

  ‘I’ll come over,’ he said. ‘OK?’

  Half an hour later, he was at the flat, shaking the rain off his mac as he came through the door.

  ‘You’re soaked.’ She offered him a towel.

  ‘I walked,’ he admitted, rubbing the worst of the wet off his hair. ‘You forget…in Riyadh, when it rains, it’s warm. Here…’ He gave her back the towel. He was dressed more casually than she had seen him, in jeans and an open-necked shirt. His hair was tousled where he’d rubbed it dry. He touched his fingers to the radiator, and gave a rueful smile when he realized she’d seen him. ‘I can’t seem to get warm.’

  ‘You’re what my grandfather would have called nesh.’

  ‘Nesh?’

  ‘It’s a Yorkshire word. It means you feel the cold.’ But what he was feeling was more than that, she knew. He was still recovering from his injuries, and he had not long since come from one of the hottest places in the world. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

  He followed her through to the kitchen and leaned in the doorway, watching her as she filled the kettle and spooned coffee into a jug. ‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ she said.