“Oh, he fixed it all right. Alberto is rotting in Dartmoor now. Twenty years, wasn’t it, Bertie boy?”
“I tried, Pauli! I tried. For god’s sake man, I can’t buy all the judges,” pleaded Wilson.
“We had a deal. You broke it. It’s payback time. You can go, Danny. And let me know your answer ’bout the other thing, won’t you?”
I looked at Wilson. I looked at Pauli. I knew my answer. I’d sooner rot in Dartmoor with his cousin than join forces with this hoodlum. Instead, I smiled.
“I’ll be in touch, Pauli. Go easy on him.”
Wilson thrashed in his ropes. “Don’t leave me, McRae! Don’t go. They’ll kill me!
I’ll help you find her. They’ll listen to me. Don’t go…!”
I led my lads from the warehouse, and never looked back. Even when I heard the screams. There was nothing I could do for Wilson. Not against three guns. Even if I wanted to.
TWENTY SEVEN
Two months passed. Eve had vanished without even a mention on the inside pages.
No one noticed, no one cared. Though I took comfort from the fact that they hadn’t reported finding a body. I clung – stupidly – to the idea that the Yanks would let her go eventually. In the meantime, the only evidence of her existence was her notebook. I’d worked through every coded phrase and deciphered every word to see if I could pin down this butterfly that had flitted through my life.
Given the notebook’s importance to her I wondered why she’d left it behind. I would have loved to bounce the matter around with Prof Haggarty, but he’d signed me off a month ago. Still, it was worth a phone call to the lovely, tight-hipped Vivienne.
“Hi, Viv, it’s Danny McRae. Are you doing anything on Saturday? Fancy the Palais? I bet you’re a great dancer.”
“Certainly not!”
“In that case, I’d like a word with your lord and master.”
I could almost see her cheeks sucking in as she fought for her dignity. “That’s quite impossible. The Professor is in consultation all morning. Besides, you are no longer one of his patients.”
“Viv, it’s not impossible. Not for a girl like you. Leave a message for the Prof and ask him to call me, there’s a good girl. And if you change your mind about Saturday…?”
“Hmphh.” She cut me off.
Haggarty called me within the hour. “You’ve been upsetting my lovely receptionist again, Danny. She’s going to be a bag of thorns all day.”
“Sorry about that, Professor. It’s hard to resist. She needs to loosen up a bit.”
“I do the analysis around here, thank you. I thought I’d cast you adrift? You’re not having a relapse? Need a dream deciphered? Your bumps read?”
“Do you ever get off duty? Can I buy you a beer? I mean drop the patient-doctor thing? Now I’m not on your list?”
“Why not? A quick one, mind. After work tonight. There’s a pub round the corner here. Marylebone High Street. The Cambrai.”
His first Guinness hardly touched the side. He was a big man and I could see that he planned to get bigger. We batted the breeze for a while and then I got down to it, at his urging.
“This girl I was seeing.”
“The reporter lassie?” He started on his second pint.
“That’s the one. Turns out she was a spy.”
“All women are.”
I laughed. “A real spy. A German spy, as it turns out.”
“Sounds like a good story. A four pint story. I’ll line them up.”
Over the barrier of brimming black glasses I told him about her. Told him of Berlin and how I tracked her down with her notebook.
“That was the strange thing, Prof…”
“You don’t drink with me and call me Professor. It’s Mairtin.”
“Mairtin, then. It was precious to her. She never went anywhere without it. Why did she leave it for me to find?”
“Maybe you’ve just answered that.”
“She could have done it to make it look good. The kidnapping.”
Haggarty was shaking his grizzled head. “No need, if I understand your story.
No, I think she left it for you to find. She wanted you to come after her.
Whether she knew it or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just puppets, Danny, and it’s our subconscious that pulls the strings.
Partly we’re in thrall to the habits we picked up as kids. But mainly we just follow the groove of our nature. Free will is a grand notion.” He went quiet.
“But I think it’s a bit of a con, so it is.”
I must have looked sceptical.
“Take a look at yourself. How did you react when you found she’d gone to Berlin?”
“I went after her. I loved her, Mairtin.”
“One man in ten, or a hundred, might have done what you did. Most would have stayed at home and pined. Not you. She probably knew that’s how you’d react. She was counting on it.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t want to go, I guess. Her heart wasn’t in it. Or maybe she was just plain scared and needed to know you were going to ride in on your white horse, Sir Galahad. It’s like suicides. Some, anyway. They make sure they take an overdose just before their loved one comes home. Or they jump off a bridge into the river and find their arms making swimming motions involuntarily.”
I took these thoughts home with me and nursed them to me as evidence that this affair hadn’t been so one- sided after all. Whether she realised it or not. Of course in some ways it made things worse. I missed her funny face. I could only picture her in the early days, when she was full of challenge and fun. And love.
While Eve’s vanishing act had failed to cause a public ripple, Wilson’s disappearance had generated plenty of column inches, often on the front page. It began slowly but then grew to a crescendo of speculation about a brave policeman missing in gangland. There was one cautionary call from Cassells just before I was raided and interrogated for eight hours at Charing Cross nick. But they had nothing to pin on me, not a shred other than a chance meeting the day before he disappeared. Why had I met him? What did we talk about? Did I still have a grudge over the Caldwell business? What was the link between me and the spy Ava Kaplan? And so on. But once I started to ask them about her, the whole apparatus closed down. I was ejected into the street and left alone after that.
Then things went quiet. The press were off chasing the latest accusations of corruption at the Board of Trade. Then Cassells called me and asked to meet.
I sat on the bench in St James’s Park watching the ripples on the grey water.
Summer had long gone and the trees were melting back into the earth. Their gold and yellow finery lay mouldering round their bases, and a cold wind probed my overcoat. I checked my watch. It was time to go. I left my park bench and walked round to the ale house. It was the same tawdry atmosphere. The same lack of customers. Cassells was nursing what looked like a shandy.
“What happened to the pub idea?” I asked.
“What?”
“You were going to buy a pub. Fill it with big-breasted serving wenches. Drink yourself to a happy retirement.”
I swear he blushed. “A chap has dreams.”
