The Diary of Lies, page 18
“No, not just mine . . . You know, it’s the blind men and the elephant.”
Tallis smiled faintly. He knew the old legend from India: a group of blind men, all standing around a fallen elephant. One man holding the trunk. Another, the wispy tail. Another, the feet. None of them feeling the true picture. None of them being able to fathom the descriptions of all the others.
“All we know is—”
“You have made for a poor green man,” Tallis said. “You are not focused enough, not controlled enough. No subtlety. Green men take weeks, months, even years, for their work to bear fruit. This is why I called them green men: they are growers. They sow seeds. They inveigle and suggest. They lay trails for others to follow, create false stories of misdirection and misremembrance. They must write a diary of lies for the targets to read and digest and believe and thus act upon. And yet here you are, blundering in like an amateur, although I accept the war games are a weakness of mine—a good access point.”
“Thanks.”
“But you are too young, and you really don’t know what you’re doing. We used to lace our targets for years. Decades. Green men in Greenpeace, in the unions, in the media, in the IRA, MPs, MSPs, subterranean, hidden . . . You didn’t even do your research properly. I’d have had you sent to the marshes, little man. How long have you been in the service?”
“Seven years,” Fisher said.
Tallis laughed. It was a dry sound, like gravel sliding down a chute. “I am genuinely at a loss as to how to explain how disappointed I am that you are here,” he said. “They should have kept you as a red man. Anyone can do that.”
Outside, heavy rain began to fall. It pattered against the window, like nervous fingers.
“I was sent in a hurry.” Fisher shrugged and drank more whisky.
“And still, time is not on your side,” Tallis said. “I am considering what to do with you. I am minded to send you back to your masters with a simple report card. A fail.”
Fisher looked at the old man, his eyes sharper, harder. “They said you were weak. Easy to influence. You lost your focus. Lost your mind. After your son was killed. You disappeared. They said you had a breakdown.”
“I did not bloody disappear,” Tallis spat. “Who sent you? Who’s your line manager?” He stood up and moved closer to Fisher, who leaned back in his chair, instinctively. Tallis pulled up a chair and sat close, aiming the hard gun at Fisher’s soft face. “Go on.”
“Don’t know what you mean,” Fisher said. He knew the weapon was loaded. One pull of an arthritic finger and his brains would be pulverised.
“Stop trembling,” Tallis said. “I’m not going to kill you. This is my home. I want to live here. I don’t want your brains all over my kitchen floor. I just want you to go, to be honest.”
“Go?” Fisher said.
“Go away. Go back to your masters, whoever they are. To be honest, I don’t care. I’m long retired. I don’t even know who the director is anymore. Or, more accurately, I don’t want to know. Who trained you? Muppets.”
Fisher eyed him levelly. Here was the old warrior, twenty years past his prime. But like old warriors, he had one more dragon to slay. If he could be convinced of it. “That may be the case,” he said. “But I can tell you something. New information was recently entered into the system—information about your son.”
There was a long silence. The sea turned and broke. Somewhere in the village, a cat knocked over a bucket and yowled. On a distant road, tyres rolled.
“Go on,” Tallis said eventually.
Fisher cleared his throat. The gun barrels moved until they were barely inches from his eyes. “Days ago, a prisoner in . . . prison . . .”
“Doing well so far, son,” Tallis said. “A prisoner in a prison. I assume there will be more revelations.”
“A prisoner,” Fisher went on, “was under interrogation. He was a hitman. Organised crime.”
“Where?”
“A Northumbrian team. He killed your son. He killed him with a tent peg.”
The shotgun wavered slightly. Two black eyes swaying like a cobra. The heat of the stove was now becoming uncomfortable. Tallis again told Fisher to go on.
“He said he killed him on the orders of three people. A gallery director, Mr. Carver, whom we believe you killed. His body was found in Leith harbour, full of holes.”
“Hmm.”
“And two others—an heiress named Farquharson, who we believe had committed tax fraud. We believe your son had uncovered this in his role as an art expert for the UK government. There was a painting involved.”
“The Goldenacre,” Tallis said, nodding. “I’m aware of it. And who else?”
“A man named Reece Proctor.”
“Who is he?”
“Lower the gun.”
Tallis dropped the gun to Fisher’s chest.
“An interesting man,” Fisher said. “A one-way mirror. He’s the money man for the Newcastle crime mob. Has been for several years. He launders the money from drugs, human trafficking, online fraud, illegal waste dumping, taxi firms . . . They’re into everything, so he has his hands full. But he is very good at it.”
“What did my son have to do with this?”
“Proctor made some kind of deal with the Farquharsons. Might have been to do with land, might have been something else. We don’t know. Special Branch couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”
“I’m surprised.”
“But we do know there was quite a complicated financial deal involving the painting, which your son disrupted—unintentionally, possibly even accidentally. I have a document which explains what we know . . . It’s quite a story. I have it in the caravan.”
“Tell me more . . .”
“Proctor’s straight name is Robert Cotton.”
“Right.”
“And, as Cotton, he’s been clean as a whistle. Upstanding member of the international finance community. Tangentially involved in politics. Set up a policy think tank called Dovetail. It’s had some influence.”
“Busy boy. And?”
“Cotton and Farquharson and a whole circle of their friends will be at Stag Hall this weekend to celebrate a significant business deal. And there’s more.”
“Pray tell.”
Fisher’s eyes were trained on the gun. “According to the killer, Cotton had what was left of your son’s body removed from a lake in the Borders and buried beside the M6, near Tebay. That’s where he is now. Not in Scotland. He’s in a hole beside a road.”
Tallis blinked minutely.
“Chopped up and buried like a fucking dog in a bin,” Fisher said.
The gun did not move.
Fisher looked momentarily to the window, out to the darkness, and his mind turned inwards.
When he was a child, an angry, neglected and disruptive child, his foster parents had an orchard, and in that orchard, there were crab apple trees. They were low-hanging and easy to climb. He would climb one in particular. He knew where to put his feet as he climbed, where to stretch and grip his hands, where to duck as he crested its height to avoid scraping his head. He knew it so well he could climb it with his eyes closed. And he knew when he could stand tall at the top and survey the house, and the houses beyond, and their gardens, and the long-grassed field behind, which led to scrubland and deserted roads, and, further, the headland of a chalk cliff, which rose above the sullen sea like a great stained tooth. In that cliff there were smugglers’ caves. And from his tree, he could see all this, and no one could touch him—only the tree, holding him like a giant might hold a prince. In those great hands, he could feel the warmth of the sun, and the fresh pitiless rain, and the cold of the winter, and see the wet lies of spring, when all seemed green but was doomed to wither and die.
One day he returned from his hideous school, battered and bruised as usual, to find that his foster father had cut down all the apple trees. Their sawn corpses were piled on a flatbed truck belching diesel fumes. It was never explained why the trees were cut down, but he heard the grown-ups talking in front of the TV one night about how much better the reception was, now that the trees were gone.
And Fisher, waiting for the old man to speak, was lost in that memory of trees, of his own beloved tree—its gnarled branches and its sharp, inedible apples, green and smooth like fat little frogs—when the butt of the shotgun struck him hard in the head and he fell to the kitchen floor and slipped into an agony of darkness.
PART III
THE AMBER WOMAN
23
“I can’t actually believe it,” Shona said.
It was late morning, and she was sitting opposite Adam Rokeby in the café of the Scottish National Gallery. High windows looked over the enclosed valley that held Princes Street Gardens and the main railway line into Waverley Station. No trains moved along the black tracks. The jagged Scott Monument stood like an abandoned temple beneath the Old Town’s skyline of tenement, tower and spire.
Shona had a copy of the Edinburgh Post in front of her. On page twelve, beneath an advertorial for a golf course, was a short news story:
Police Scotland are investigating the death of a man in West Register Street yesterday.
Hector Stricken, 49, a civil servant, was struck by a large black vehicle, which exited the street and proceeded to drive across St. Andrew Square towards Queen Street.
Stricken, a former journalist of this paper, is survived by his partner, Sandy, a nurse, and their young son.
The street remains closed to traffic.
Police are appealing for witnesses to the incident . . .
Shona stopped reading. Adam stirred his coffee. She had not met Adam before. She had heard Hector mention him, but she never paid too much attention to what Hector did outside work. His social life had always seemed tedious to her: interminable folk festivals, climbing Munros, hiking and tents. She assumed Adam had been a legal contact for Hector, a source of stories, of tip-offs, affirmations or denials. Now he sat before her, darkly handsome and trim and sorrowful.
“I hope he died instantly—that there was no suffering,” Adam murmured.
“There’s not much description of the car,” Shona said, staring at the inky type.
“Nope,” he said. “The security cameras should have caught it.”
She visualised grainy CCTV images of Hector being struck and killed and realised she felt like crying. She bit her lip. There had been too much crying recently. Too much sorrow. And her head, although healing, still hurt.
“Poor Hec,” she said at last.
“Do you know his partner?” Adam asked. “Sandy?”
Shona shook her head. She had never met her, didn’t even know what she looked like. Until his email arrived, Hector hadn’t called or messaged her for weeks, maybe months. They had known each other for years, and for a spell had sat across from each other at the reporters’ desk at the Edinburgh Post. Back then, they had met often outside work. For coffees, for drinks. He was fond of her, she knew. But she had pushed all that away. She had never had the time and certainly not the inclination for that kind of relationship. He had been a good friend. That was the worst of it—now a good friend was gone. A lost companion. Like all the others.
“I texted Sandy. She said she was at the hospital,” he said quietly. “With the . . . body . . . She called me back after a while, but she was distraught. She doesn’t know what to do. Her folks are on their way from Quebec, which is a blessing. I’ll see her later today.”
Outside, birds were gathering. Fluttering shapes against the melting snow. Framed by the window, none of it seemed to be real. It could have been a projection on a screen. The world was black and grey and white. Colour had been bled away.
Adam was speaking: “. . . with the baby . . . and a funeral . . . I can’t begin to imagine—”
“He emailed me,” Shona said, feeling a catch in her throat.
“Oh, yes?” Adam said. His large brown eyes were watery, tinged pink at their corners.
“He mentioned this thing,” she said, lowering her voice. “It was a tip-off. I was going to meet him.”
Beside Adam was a work bag. Adam reached into it and brought out some paper, a security pass on a lanyard. He put the pass on the table. In the picture Hector was smiling—a new man in a new job.
Adam leaned into Shona, his face close to hers. He spoke in a deep, earnest voice. His accent was elusive. He could be from Glasgow or Edinburgh, Dumfries or Inverness. “Was this thing called Grendel?”
Shona’s heart caught on a snag. “How do you know?”
Adam laid out his thoughts. Hector had stumbled across something odd at his work, something extremely sensitive. A project called Grendel. He explained how they had been drunk and each had taken home the wrong bag. Now he had Hector’s belongings. There was no way of accessing the government laptop—it required three separate passwords—but he had this office pass and a printed document.
“Show me the paper?” Shona said.
“It’s barely anything,” he said. “It’s an agenda note for a meeting.” He passed it over to her.
CARS/OUWO/CRASH MEETING
Attending: Legal Dept (CARS), Chief Exec, Bruce Cowie (SpAd), Comms (?)
Agenda
1. OUWO/ECHR/CARS outline (if necessary)
2. GRENDEL confirmations (SpAds). Summary memo: with SpAds.
3. Bird table.
4. AOB.
“What the hell is OUWO?” she said. “O.U.W.O.”
“Sounds like an owl,” he said vaguely.
“Shut up,” she said.
“Well, it’s an acronym,” he ventured.
“No shit. I thought you lawyers were meant to be smart?”
“Oh, no. We just have good memories.”
“Like most liars.”
“Funny. Who knows what it stands for?”
“Organisation Underground . . .” Shona shook her head. Guessing was futile.
“Operational something, I am going to surmise,” he said. He looked around the café. A thin man in a grey suit sat nearby, reading from a tablet. Adam caught a waiter’s attention and indicated that he wanted to pay the bill.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I want to move. Who knows who’s listening in here,” he said. “Who knows who’s watching.”
Shona was about to call him paranoid but stopped herself. Proctor, or Cotton, was dead. An assassin had chased her across England. And now Hector was dead. Maybe they had killed him too. She could not quite believe it, even though she knew it possible. Hector only had this thin meeting agenda; he was not a man who knew too much—he hardly knew anything.
Adam pulled on an expensive, tailored coat. Shona pulled on her ratty woollen hat and jacket with a tear under its left armpit and gripped her stick. They left the café. Adam suggested they walk down to Stockbridge, a pretty, bourgeois quarter, full of high-end charity shops, bespoke tailoring, candle emporiums and pâtisseries, down by the Water of Leith. They could get another drink there. Shona agreed.
They set off across Princes Street, which felt empty, navigating the piles of dirty snow and slushy pavements. They did not speak for a while, walking side by side as they picked their way downhill through the New Town.
“What’s the stick for?” Adam said at last.
“To walk with,” she said.
“Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I meant why do you need it?”
“So I can beat irritating lawyers to death,” Shona said.
He shrugged.
“I got shot by a gangster in Venezuela,” she lied. “Lost a leg.”
He looked at her and chuckled. “Okay, fine. I won’t ask.”
“Neither should you,” she said. “It’s rude.”
She looked down at his highly polished black shoes and his maroon socks. His clothing was annoyingly pristine, his honey-coloured skin similarly flawless.
“I know a bit about Grendel,” she said quietly, her breath steaming before her.
He seemed startled. “Oh?”
She hesitated for a moment. “It’s not a person or a thing. It’s a list of companies that have agreed to something. I got the list from a contact in London.”
“How curious,” he said. “A list?”
“Yes. But the list doesn’t say what these people are doing, or why they are on the list at all. What they have agreed to. It’s quite a long list, mind.”
“Grendel as a plural,” he said, musing. “They sound like some kind of stakeholder group. Something tied to this OUWO. People and businesses with a shared interest.”
“So Hector attended a meeting about this?”
“Yes.” Adam nodded and readjusted his cashmere scarf. The air was getting colder, sharper. The leafless trees in a private garden cast a spray of shadows on Adam’s shoulders. Shona watched him move against the backdrop of the elegant buildings. He walked with an easy motion, his back straight.
“He mentioned this Grendel when we met,” he said.
“And now . . .” She opened her palms.
“Exactly,” he said. “But we cannot, we should not, draw a link between that and his death. We must not assume a link between the two. That way madness lies. We don’t live in a gangster state. Let the police investigation run its course.”
She stopped. “I think we already are, though—aren’t we?”
Adam halted. He turned his head slightly to her. “I can see why Hector liked you,” he said.
She screwed up her face and huffed. “I can’t,” she said. “Did Hector ever mention someone called Moriah?”
“Maria?”
“Moriah as in—”
“What—Lord of the Rings? Wasn’t that the castle where all those little squirrels lived?” he said, with a quick grin.
“What? No. No. As in . . . It’s a reference to something biblical . . . or so I believe.”
“No, he never mentioned it. Why?”
“Never mind.”
They were walking down the steep hill to Stockbridge. The stone buildings about them changed from the impersonal, poised elegance of the New Town to a more jumbled Scottish vernacular, with cobbles, pitched roofs, older stonework and a kind of scrambled neighbourliness. They passed a block of grey modernist flats and crossed an old bridge that spanned the fast-flowing Water of Leith. Bubbles and foam tumbled down its tree-lined course.
