Sabbathman (11 page)

‘Come here,’ he said.

‘I just did.’

‘No …’ He found himself frowning again. ‘Please.’

Annie wriggled into the black one-piece and did up the buttons at the top. Then she ran a comb through her hair, opened the window, and settled in the armchair beside the television. She had
a small, thin mouth and when she was angry it puckered slightly at one corner.

‘You’re pissed off,’ Kingdom said.

‘No. Just paying attention. The way you like it.’

‘Have I ever said that?’

‘No. That’s why I’m surprised. I thought’ – she shrugged – ‘we’d got things pretty well organised, that’s all. We’ve had some nice times. Why spoil them?’

‘Had?’ Kingdom blinked.

‘Yeah. Had.’ She nodded, hooking her bag towards her with her foot. ‘So where do you want to start? Carpenter? Bairstow? The other guy? Do we have a plan here? Some kind of agenda? Only that matters …’ she smiled thinly, eyeing the semi-circle of hair on the carpet in front of the mirror, ‘… to us working girls.’

Kingdom closed his eyes a moment. Then he swung out of bed and went into the bathroom. The remains of his cigarette made a small, sizzling noise as he dropped it in the lavatory. For a second or two he examined himself in the mirror. He looked half-crazy, a lost soul from the asylum, some demented fool who’d given the nurses the slip and made it over the wire. He fingered the worst of the damage, semi-bald spots patterned randomly over his scalp, and he thought suddenly of his father, poor Ernie, sitting in the darkness, nursing his precious briefcase. Then he shook his head, and doused his face in cold water. What mattered, what really mattered, was Annie. This thing they had between them, raw and strange and lop-sided though it undoubtedly was, had kept him sane for the best part of a year. It had come from nowhere, a frank exchange of glances in one of the interminable RUC liaison meetings, and it had taken hold of both their lives, an insatiable urge for each other, a physical journey without end. In the space between two busy lives, they’d created a small pocket of warmth, a refuge, that he knew he didn’t want to lose. Not now. Not ever.

Kingdom squeezed the flannel dry and laid it carefully over the side of the basin. Then he returned to the bedroom. Annie was lighting one of his cigarettes, the first time he’d ever seen her smoke, and it shook him because it was so obviously something she did often, in some other life. He sat on the edge of the bed, a towel around his waist. He held out a hand. She didn’t respond.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t as serious as it sounds.’

She looked at him a moment, then ducked her head behind a cloud of smoke. ‘Isn’t there someone else they could have found?’ she said bitterly. ‘Isn’t it a bit obvious sending you along?’

Kingdom awoke in total darkness. The digital clock on the bedside table read 04.37. He could feel a presence beside him, someone bending over him, and for a second he didn’t know who it was.

‘You awake?’ Annie whispered.

Kingdom grunted, rolling over. Their interdepartmental meeting had lasted all of five minutes. Despite the third bottle of wine, the rest of the evening had been a disaster.

‘Here,’ Annie said now, ‘drink this.’

She found his hand in the darkness and gave him a glass. It was water.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes.’ Kingdom could see her teeth in the darkness. It meant that she was smiling. ‘You could back off. It’s not too late. You could tell them you don’t want the job.’

‘This job? Allder? Tell him I can’t cope?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then we wouldn’t have all this … you know … we could just get on with it. Like before.’

‘You in your job?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me making the tea?’

‘Don’t be silly. You’d just go back to ordinary duties. They’d understand.’

Kingdom laughed. ‘You’re joking,’ he said tersely. ‘In any case, I need the fucking money. What with Dad and everything.’

‘I thought you said your brother-in-law had chipped in?’

‘He has.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

Kingdom peered up at her in the darkness. ‘You know how long a grand lasts?’ he said, ‘at agency rates?’

‘No.’

‘About a month. Just over.’

‘So what happens then? Come November?’

‘You tell me.’ Kingdom sipped at the water again. ‘But what I don’t need is Allder on my back. With that guy, you either hack it or you’re out. Ordinary duties isn’t a phrase he understands.’

Annie didn’t say anything. Kingdom could hear her swallowing the last of the water.

‘What about you?’ he said at last. ‘Why don’t you back off? Make a little room for us?’

There was another silence, then a soft laugh and a clunk as she returned the empty glass to the bedside cabinet.

‘Is that some kind of joke,’ she said, ‘or are you serious?’

Three hours later, waking again, Kingdom heard the soft thud of the newspaper he’d ordered being dropped outside the door. He was still retrieving
The Citizen
when Annie emerged from the bathroom. She was wearing a stylish two-piece, cut low around the neck, and she was having trouble with one of her earrings. Kingdom returned to bed. The glass of water in the middle of the night had done nothing for his headache, and he felt slightly sick. He began to unfold the paper, taking in the enormous headline. SABBATHMAN, it ran, WORLD EXCLUSIVE.

Annie knelt on the bed beside him. She offered him the earring, one of a pair Kingdom had given her in Belfast, a delicate silver circle with the shape of a dove suspended inside.

‘Please?’ she said.

Kingdom laid the paper on the wreckage of the bed. Beneath a blow-up of the latest Sabbathman communiqué, there was a line of three photographs: Blanche, Bairstow, and now Carpenter.

Kingdom began to ease the silver hook into Annie’s earlobe. Trying to focus on the tiny hole made his head ache even more. Annie had finished with the front page, turning over. On page two, another photo. This time it showed the executive from
The Citizen
whom Allder had mentioned delivering a large envelope to
a uniformed policeman outside New Scotland Yard. Below, in a signed article, the paper’s editor explained just how responsibly
The Citizen
had behaved. The headline, this time, warned: WHY THEY MUST BE CAUGHT!

Kingdom finished with the earring. He was frowning. ‘They?’ he said. ‘Why they?’

Annie was looking at the paper. She pointed to another piece on the facing page. The paper’s Northern Ireland correspondent was warning that the Provisionals had ‘mobilised’. There were rumours out of Belfast that ‘terrorist chiefs’ had ordered ‘the big push’. The link with the mysterious Sabbathman was evidently explicit. ‘Are these the perfect killings?’ the final paragraph began. ‘A lethal weekly message from the Provos – aimed at the heart of the British establishment?’

Kingdom looked up. Annie was standing by the door. She had her suitcase in one hand and her car keys in the other.

‘Off already?’ Kingdom asked.

Annie nodded, doing her best to smile. For the first time, Kingdom realised that she’d been crying.

‘I’d suggest breakfast,’ she said bleakly, ‘but I don’t want you upsetting the waitresses.’

The hotel was on the edges of Havant. By nine o’clock, Kingdom was sitting in a barber shop in the town centre, listening to a youth with a nose stud explaining why a Grade One crew cut was his only sensible option.

‘What happened, man?’ he kept muttering. ‘Traffic accident?’

Kingdom ignored the jibe. High on the back wall of the shop was a television. It was tuned to one of the morning magazine shows, and Kingdom could watch it in the mirror. Already, back in the hotel, he’d seen a little of the news coverage. The BBC, it seemed, had established some kind of presence outside Clare Baxter’s house, and the presenter in the London studio was firing questions to a succession of interviewees about the progress of the investigation. Hampshire’s Deputy Chief Constable was promising ‘a nationwide hunt’ while a pundit from some think tank or other had speculated darkly about ‘the threat to legitimate government’.
There was no such thing, he seemed to be saying, as ‘absolute security’. Anyone with support, and determination, and the relevant skills could blow a large hole in the most carefully laid plans, and for this proposition the Sabbathman killings appeared to be ample proof. Pressed to explain the word ‘support’, the pundit acknowledged at once that no one on his own could have pulled off all three murders. Somewhere along the line he had to have backing, which meant that the nation was confronting not a solo killer, a lone assassin, but some kind of conspiracy. This latter thought was put to the last of the interviewees, and Kingdom had returned from the shower, towelling himself dry, to find Arthur Sperring’s face on screen, pondering the question. ‘Someone’s been killed,’ he growled at last. ‘If you’re talking about facts, that’s all we know.’

Now, in the barber’s chair, Kingdom’s eyes left the television and watched the last of his hair disappearing under the busy clippers. The face that was emerging beneath the bristle was the face of a stranger: pensive, hollow-cheeked, the eyes deeply sunk, the beak of a nose somehow longer and thinner than ever. The image was mildly shocking, not the person he thought he knew, and looking at himself, Kingdom was reminded of the faces he’d first seen at school, the afternoon the history teacher had shown the ‘O’ level year a film about the Nazi holocaust. The sequence that had stuck in his mind had nothing to do with gas chambers or burial pits. Instead, it showed men jumping into the snow from a line of railway cattle wagons. Stumbling upright, some of them had looked straight into the waiting camera lens, and they were mirror images of what Kingdom now saw before him. They looked suspicious. They looked bewildered. They’d come a long way in great discomfort for no good purpose. And now, deep down, they knew there was worse to come.

Kingdom frowned, surprised and disturbed by the way his mind was working. His eyes returned to the television. On the magazine show they were still discussing the Carpenter killing but the focus had changed from the earlier news shows. Now, in the studio, the wife of a backbench Tory MP was confirming that the pressures of contemporary politics were intolerable. Parliamentary hours were absurd. The facilities were mediaeval. Family life was a
joke. Small wonder the weaker brethren went to the wall. The show’s presenter, heavily pregnant, eased into the obvious question: was Carpenter the exception or the rule? How could any political marriage survive?

The MP’s wife squirmed on the sofa, laughing nervously. ‘My husband’s never been shot,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re getting at.’

Back at the police station, Kingdom found Arthur Sperring in his office. His morning appearance on nationwide television seemed to have cheered him up. Expecting a dig or two about the haircut, Kingdom was relieved when the DCS nodded gleefully at the telephone.

‘You know what they’ve given me now?’ he said. ‘Now that the penny’s dropped? All this coverage? Radio? Telly? The press boys?’ he grinned. Three hundred men. ‘Three hundred blokes. Can you imagine the catering problems? Getting them all down there? Transport? Can you imagine how thrilled my clerks are? Getting all those door-to-doors into the system?’ He shook his head. ‘If it wasn’t happening, I’d never believe it. Someone upstairs must be shitting bricks. Three hundred blokes. Jesus …’ He pushed his chair back from the desk, reaching for an ashtray on the windowsill, and for a moment Kingdom thought of Clare Baxter, waking up to find the street full of white Ford Transits, and men from the BBC with anoraks and fancy clipboards. Sharing a little of Max Carpenter’s life had, in the end, carried a certain price.

Kingdom leaned forward, refusing a cigarette. ‘I was looking at the timings,’ he said, ‘that chronology your lads put together. If I’ve got it right, our friend never had time to get off the island, not by road.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’ve kept the road block on? Ever since?’

‘Yeah. Twenty-four hours a day. Priority from HQ. The Guv’nor insisted.’

Kingdom nodded, unsurprised. The Chief Constable would have got the word about Sabbathman as early as Monday,
presumably from the Commissioner at the Yard. Given the likely headlines, maintaining a checkpoint on the island’s only bridge would pre-empt the obvious criticisms. Nothing made the guys upstairs dive for cover quicker than the threat of publicity.

‘So matey’s either still there,’ Kingdom mused, ‘or he’s come out some other way. By sea? Boat of some kind?’

‘Could be.’ Sperring nodded. ‘We’re still checking, but yes.’

‘Marinas? Jetties? Moorings?’

‘One marina on Hayling. Up in the north-east.’ Sperring frowned. ‘Then there’s a new one over the water, on the Portsmouth side. Plus moorings on the harbour, as you say.’

‘And?’

‘I told you. We’re still checking.’

‘But supposing there’s nothing? No trace? What then?’

‘Then we carry on with the door-to-doors.’

‘The whole island?’

‘Of course.’ Sperring yawned. ‘What else do I do with three hundred blokes?’

Kingdom found an empty corner in the Incident Room. Handwritten reports were already piling up from the newly extended search area and there were operators at all the computer terminals, their fingers blurring over the input keys. Kingdom reached for the telephone and dialled his father’s number. The voice, when it answered, was unfamiliar, a deep, rich baritone.

‘Angeline?’ Kingdom queried.

‘Barry. Angeline’s not here.’

‘Ah … so where’s Angeline? The nurse I hired? My name’s Alan Kingdom. Ernie’s son.’

‘She’s sick, sir. I’m Angeline. For the time being.’ Barry laughed. ‘You want to talk to your father, sir? I’ll get him.’

‘No. Wait. How is he?’

‘Fine. OK. Nice man.’

‘Is he eating? Does he talk to you?’

‘All the time. Talk, talk, talk. Lovely man. Hey, you wait a moment–’

‘What?’

Kingdom stared at the phone, hearing a door slam at the other end. Last time he’d spent an evening with his father, nothing could make him talk. Now, it seemed, he couldn’t stop. Barry came back on the phone. In the background, he could hear his father singing. He hadn’t done that, either. Not for years.