Old Enemies (11 page)

‘We need to establish a psychological profile,’ Hiley said apologetically. He moved slowly and spoke softly, but his muscular outline and sense of pent-up energy suggested he was the sort who spent his weekends in continuous bouts of cage wrestling. Now he chewed thoughtfully on the end of his pen. ‘How . . .
resilient
might the victim be?’

‘His name is Ruari,’ Terri chided, standing in the doorway with a fresh pot of coffee in her hand.

Hiley glanced up in embarrassment.

‘And since the kidnapper’s South African,’ she told them, relying on Harry’s advice and placing the coffee in front of them, ‘that means he could be a mercenary. In a hurry.’

‘I doubt that, Mrs Breslin,’ the other assessor, Brozic, said. ‘Not many mercenaries get involved in this sort of thing. Kidnap’s dirty work in their world.’

‘Oh, I see. They prefer the cleaner stuff, you mean. Assassinations and civil wars.’

‘We can’t even be sure he’s South African – the voice might well be disguised. But we’ll record him when he calls back. We can find out all sorts of things through voice pattern analysis, whizz things through the computer, that sort of thing. We’ll be on his trail very shortly, I promise you.’

Whizz things through the computer? She wanted to scream. The pillock was trying to patronize her and she’d have been happier pouring the bloody coffee into his lap, but they had already lowered their heads and were back to their discussions, leaving her outside the circle. Unsuitable work for a woman. She left them, returned to the kitchen, rummaged through several drawers and a cupboard, and finally found what she was looking for. She lit one of J.J.’s cigarettes. She hadn’t smoked in years.

Workmen were in the early stages of erecting a lofty Christmas tree as Harry entered the covered streets of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. He was glad to get here, beneath the glorious wrought-iron and glass canopies that kept the place dry. It was raining hard outside, threatening sleet from a steel-grey sky, and his sock hadn’t yet dried. Leadenhall was a place of bustle, of butchers and cheesemakers and purveyors of provender that was little different from when the Romans had gathered on this spot at the heart of ancient Londinium. In the passage of years since then the market place had been burned, abandoned, looted, bombed, but always rebuilt, most magnificently by the Victorians who had filled it with cobbles, soaring columns, imperial pomp and a large number of watering holes. It was to one of these that Harry was now headed. ‘Brokers’ was a first-floor wine bar overlooking the centre of the market. Harry found a seat at a window and watched the struggle of the workmen. They had just finished erecting the tree and were decking it out with lights when a man in a broad chalk-stripe suit, extravagant shirt cuffs and a pronounced limp placed a large glass of something white in front of him.

‘Happy Christmas,’ Jimmy Sopwith-Dane – ‘Sloppy’ to those he recognized as friends – declared as he sat opposite.

Harry ignored the comment. He wasn’t in the mood, and never much was at this time of year. Christmas as a child had always proved to be a perilous festival, when his father would return, often after an absence of weeks, with an abundance of presents to fill the many gaps and missed dates that had marked the previous twelve months. At the age of thirteen Harry had discovered that most of his father’s gifts had been chosen by a secretary of Scandinavian origin who had managed to misspell his name on the labels. ‘It’s with a
y
, Dad, not
i
,’ he’d rebuked his father, but not in front of his mother. Even at the age of thirteen, Harry had learned to tread with extreme care around the suggestion that his father had another life.

‘To survival,’ Sopwith-Dane said, raising his glass.

‘Hope springs eternal,’ Harry responded, pursing his lips in appreciation of a fine Burgundy.

It was easy to misjudge Sopwith-Dane. He had a manner that some would regard as foppish, almost Edwardian, and the limp slowed him down, but only physically, yet those who underestimated Sloppy normally ended up trailing far behind. He had served with Harry in the Life Guards and forged their friendship in the bandit country of Armagh. One night on patrol he had taken a bullet intended for Harry; it had made a monumental mess of Sloppy’s knee, and with it his military career. ‘No more arse-kicking for me, I suppose,’ was all he had ever said by way of complaint. So he’d taken his gammy leg and Etonian humour off to the City where, with an extravagant smile and a deft hand, he’d managed to carve out a big enough niche to salvage both his marriage and the ancestral home. He also kept a close watching brief on Harry’s very considerable investments.

‘So, dear boy,’ he declared as a waitress placed a bowl of whitebait in front of them, ‘how the blazes are you?’

‘On the scrounge, Sloppy.’

‘Good. Glad to see that nothing’s changed. What is it this time? The car, the villa, the wife – no, Harry, I draw the line at any of the daughters, even for you, old chap.’ His eyes sparkled along with his cufflinks.

‘J.J. Breslin. Know him?’

‘The newspaper chappie, you mean? Met him a couple of times. Rather dour, not the ideal companion for a long voyage, if you ask me. Surprisingly worthy for a media tycoon. Remember his wife rather better, though. Oh, yes, desperately distracting, that one. In a word – hot!’

‘What about the newspaper?’ Harry asked, hoping he hadn’t visibly flinched.

Sloppy’s brow wrinkled. ‘Ah, not so hot. The man is Napoleonic in ambition but desperately overextended. Currently engaged in the long retreat from Moscow and got himself firmly stuck in the snows, by all accounts. Assets on the point of being frozen. Wolves snapping at his heels.’

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘You know what the newspaper industry’s like, robbed blind by the Internet, blood everywhere. He’s not as big as the other players, doesn’t have as much fat to live off in these harsh times. Mr Breslin needs the luck of his Irish ancestors, otherwise my fellow looters and pillagers will be upon him and he’ll be belly up by next spring. Off to a prolonged exile in St Helena with his Josephine.’

‘Terri,’ Harry muttered distractedly as he rolled his glass between his palms.

‘What?’

‘She’s called Terri.’

‘Is she, by golly? I can think of worse ways to spend my old age.’ He was chuckling once more, but his keen eye had spotted the firm set of Harry’s face. ‘You all right, old chap?’

‘Of course,’ Harry lied, but not well, looking out of the window and examining the ancient meat hooks for the rabbits, ducks and pheasants that still hung above a butcher’s window.

‘In need of some distraction, eh?’

‘Something truly sinful.’

‘Oh, dear, the wife’s going to be no use to you there, I’m afraid.’ He sighed in disappointment. ‘But I know a young lady at a nearby art gallery who—’

‘Just keep an eye on it, will you, Sloppy?’

‘My very great pleasure.’

‘No, you bloody idiot, Breslin’s company. Let me know if you hear any rumblings, pick up any rumours.’

‘A little light reconnaissance? My pleasure. But hope you’re not in too much of a hurry.’ He raised his glass and emptied it. ‘Got the rest of the bottle to finish.’

So they took care of the bottle, and another. Sloppy owned a chunk of the wine bar and was anxious to deal with ‘a couple of rather exotic bin ends’, as he put it, ‘to make space for the Christmas rush’.

And Harry was grateful for the diversion. The workmen had finished decorating the tree and the lights from around the market were beginning to burn more brightly as the afternoon faded into an early winter’s evening. Harry’s mood soaked up some of the rising festive spirit as he relaxed with his old friend. Then his phone rang. It was Mary Mishcon. Applying her own brand of gentle pressure. The Prime Minister anxious to hear about his decision . . .

‘Mary, can’t hear you well, the signal’s terrible here,’ Harry exaggerated, distracted, knowing he’d had too much to drink to tackle that particular obstacle course. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he promised.

‘You used to be much better at lying,’ Sloppy chided as Harry put the phone down on the table.

‘Hell, I used to be better at lying to myself.’

Sloppy looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s all rather cryptic. I’m almost afraid to ask,’ he said, reaching for the bottle and pouring with a heavy hand, ‘but I will. Tell me about her.’

Harry sighed. Sloppy was a persistent bugger, and Harry didn’t want to lie to him, too. He reached for his phone, intending to switch it off and avoid further disturbance, yet he hadn’t even touched it when it began vibrating again. In frustration Harry glanced at the screen, then muttered another colourful Arabic oath.

It was Terri.

Gingerly Ruari ran his fingers around his face. The swelling was slowly beginning to subside, but not the fear, least of all the choking sense of humiliation. His sight was improving as the puffiness around his eyes faded, and at last they had relented and given him one or two things to help him pass the time, a couple of old
National Geographic
magazines and a chess set with three black pawns missing. He didn’t mistake this as an act of kindness, he knew it was nothing more than a means of keeping him distracted and quiet. They had no desire to find themselves with a hysterical teenager on their hands.

What he was finding more difficult to deal with was the increasing pain from his wrist caused by his shackles – handcuffs that tethered him to a heavy chain, which in turn was fixed to the metal frame of the bedstead. Right from the first he’d tried to test it for any sign of weakness, but whenever he moved it rattled and chafed, leaving abrasions on his wrist that had already cut deeply through the skin. The chain allowed him to move no more than three feet, just enough to roll over in bed, or sit up, or use the red plastic bucket that was all he had as a toilet.

As the hours turned to days, his routine became set. They brought him three meals a day – porridge and pasta mostly, no meat, nothing that would need a knife or fork; he had to make do with a spoon. They also left him a bottle of tap water. And whether he ate, drank, peed, crapped, cried or slept, there was always a Romanian on guard, well armed, sitting in a chair on the far side of the room by the window.

Occasionally de Vries would descend upon them on a tour of inspection. He kept the guards on a tight leash, insisting they concentrate only on Ruari, snatching away the portable media players and reading material they used to while away the monotony. Harsh words were thrown in both directions. The guard was changed every two hours, but still they resented the South African’s interference. Whenever these arguments erupted, Ruari kept his head down, feigning sleep, afraid the guards would be tempted to take their frustration out on him, but none did. They were too afraid of the South African to risk that.

No one spoke to Ruari, not a word, unless it was to complain about the bucket that the guards were forced to empty. Having already failed with both English and French, Ruari tried swearing at them to force some sort of reaction, but he got nothing more than a painful kick in the leg for his troubles. That was from Cosmin, whose face was swollen and blotchy and had turned vivid shades of yellow and blue. That gave Ruari a little satisfaction, even though he guessed his own face looked far worse.

His mind ran back to a film he’d once watched on his laptop, after lights out when he was supposed to be asleep, about a young girl named Patty Hearst. She was a Californian newspaper heiress who’d been kidnapped and had her mind filled with so much gunk by the pigs who snatched her that she’d flipped and gone over to their cause, even helped them rob a bank. That sort of behaviour had a name – the Stockholm syndrome. To Ruari it seemed like a form of madness. Identifying with your abductors was supposed to be a common affliction but that wouldn’t happen to him, he vowed, no, never to him. Looking across the room at Cosmin, with his scraped knuckles, Ruari concluded there were many, many things he’d like to do for the bastard, but helping him wasn’t anywhere on the list.

During the endless hours he spent lying tethered on a soiled mattress beside that stinking bucket, Ruari tried to fathom the meaning of what they were doing to him. He had an analytical mind that wandered across the landscape inspecting many possibilities, but at the end of these journeys he arrived back at the same point. They wanted to keep him alive, at least for the moment. The one thought that jarred against this was the fact that none of his captors used a facemask or disguised their features in any way; he could identify every one of them down to that bastard Cosmin’s last pockmark and crooked tooth. If a day of reckoning ever came, they wouldn’t want him picking them out and providing testimony, and perhaps from the start they never intended he should see that day, planned to do away with him before this was all over. He hoped there was another explanation. Perhaps they were simply arrogant, calculating that the world was more than big enough to swallow them without trace.