‘As you have now?’ said Dingley, not trying to hide the disbelief.
‘It’s the best, the only, explanation I can give you,’ said Johnson, no longer unsettled. ‘I realize my not being able to account for it until now might have caused some confusion, misled you even. I’m really very sorry about that.’
‘It seems perfectly understandable to me,’ said Clarkson. ‘I see it as yet another example of my client doing everything he can to co-operate and help an ongoing criminal investigation.’
Once again the similarity between the answers of Helen Montgomery and Peter Bellamy indicated close rehearsal. And once again the interviews were cluttered with interventions and objections by their respective lawyers. There was no contradiction between the two officers as to who listed the contents of Rebecca Lang’s handbag: the woman said she itemized everything, for Bellamy to create the inventory.
‘How, exactly, did you do that?’ Dingley asked Helen Montgomery. ‘Did you take things out individually, one at a time? Or what?’
‘I think I tipped everything out on the table and separated them, piece by piece, for Pete to write down.’
‘Separated them how?’ asked Benton.
The woman frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘By hand?’ prompted Dingley.
‘Maybe. Maybe with a pencil, so that they wouldn’t be marked. And I kinda think I kept my driving gloves on.’
‘You didn’t get given that handbag until you got back to the station, right?’ said Dingley.
‘Right,’ she agreed.
‘After you’d left Harry Johnson back at McLean?’ said Benton.
‘Yes.’
‘How’d you explain the piece of paper with the AF209 flight number that you told us you found in Rebecca Lang’s purse having Harry Johnson’s thumb print on it?’ said Dingley.
Helen Montgomery showed no uncertainty or surprise. Neither her personal lawyer, Donald Sinclair, nor the Metro DC police attorney intervened.
‘Ms Montgomery?’ pressed Benton.
‘I can’t,’ said the woman, calmly. ‘Haven’t you asked Harry?’
Instead of answering, Benton said: ‘Did Harry Johnson give that flight number to you at McLean, to put among Rebecca Lang’s belongings?’
‘That…’ started Phillip Brack, the police attorney.
‘… is not an improper or inappropriate question,’ refused Benton. ‘Please answer it, Ms Montgomery.’
‘Absolutely not!’ the woman refused, the indignation sounding genuine. ‘The first time I saw that piece of paper was when I emptied the purse on to the table. I didn’t even know, guess, it was a flight number until I opened it out.’
‘So, you did touch it?’ demanded Dingley. ‘Handled it?’
‘Like I said, I think I had my uniform gloves on.’
‘And you didn’t find it difficult, clumsy, to open a scrap of paper wearing thick leather gloves?’
‘I guess not.’
‘The Metro DC dispatcher didn’t say anything about Ms Lang’s car being forced over into a gorge, when you got sent to McLean,’ said Benton. ‘We got the transcript.’
‘I must have got that wrong,’ said Helen Montgomery, without any hesitation. ‘I think I told you before that I wasn’t sure. I must have been told when we got back to the station and got it mixed up in my mind.’
‘As a police officer, do you often get things mixed up in your mind?’ asked Benton.
‘Officer Montgomery declines to answer that question,’ said Brack.
‘On the instructions of us both,’ added her lawyer.
Peter Bellamy was only slightly less assured than his partner, most obviously when Dingley disclosed Johnson’s thumb print, and let his lawyer, Hilda Jeffries, reply for him that there was no way he could answer such a question, which should be put to Johnson. She did not let him respond to the accusation that either he or Helen Montgomery had planted the paper after being handed it by Johnson when they first arrived at McLean, protesting that the suggestion was preposterous.
‘We got a chink to prise open,’ insisted Dingley. It was a sandwich lunch again, both men anxious to review the morning’s work, neither of them with any thought of celebrations on 14th Street.
‘That big,’ objected Benton, narrowing his thumb against his forefinger so closely that there was no visible gap.
‘It’s something,’ insisted Dingley. ‘And we’ve still got Grant.’
‘Who’ll meet us fully briefed by the company lawyer,’ predicted Benton.
‘He doesn’t know about the telephone tap.’
‘Which hasn’t produced anything worthwhile to put before a court,’ refused Benton. ‘So far we haven’t learned much more than that Johnson likes telephone sex to jerk off to, and pepperoni and chilli home-delivered pizza.’
‘In Italy pepperoni and chilli pizza is probably a crime.’
‘Pity it isn’t a federal offence here.’
‘They’re good, all three of them,’ reluctantly conceded Dingley, seriously. ‘Too damned good.’
‘Which is how they got away with everything in 1996.’
‘You really think Johnson was on Dubette’s payroll, before he left the force?’
‘I’d bet my pension on it.’
‘If we can’t prove that Johnson is lying, about the flight number
… if all we’ve got is his explanation… then there’s no terrorism link, and if there’s no terrorism link there’s no grounds for FBI involvement,’ said Dingley.
‘If Grant is in some way involved, it’s conspiracy across State lines. And that’s us, whether terrorism is in the mix or not,’ contradicted Benton.
‘According to Ed Pullinger, the gods at the J. Edgar Hoover Building are pissed off up to here with the heat they’re getting from the Department of Homeland Security and every media outlet as far away as Outer Mongolia, wherever the hell that is,’ said Dingley. ‘And you and I ain’t got Teflon asses.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that, either,’ said Benton.
‘I’m not looking forward to New York as much as I was.’
‘Neither am I.’
Richard Parnell had only ever been to Manhattan twice, both times before taking up the Dubette genetics directorship, tourist map in hand, exhausted walking towards skyscraper landmarks he could see but which never appeared to get any closer, like retreating mirages in a high-rise desert. Beverley had promised to take him to the real parts he’d never seen, which served things other than hamburgers and hot dogs, and as the shuttle turned over the bay into Le Guardia, Parnell resolved to take up the promise, uncomfortably yet again remembering Rebecca’s mockery of his not knowing America beyond a 17-mile-long traffic lane into north Virginia and a mile walk into Georgetown. Parnell was surprised at the summons to Dubette headquarters, as he was by the continued absence from McLean of Dwight Newton, whose personal assistant was now saying she had no idea when the research vice president would be medically allowed to return.
Which concentrated Parnell’s mind on why he was in New York, no longer the tourist. He was glad he was here in person, not trusting Newton as the warning intermediary. How much – how far – could he trust Edward C. Grant, the Big Brother lookalike? Not an immediate consideration. The immediate – absolutely essential – consideration was getting the assurance from the man in authority that every available warning was circulated as widely as possible throughout the African countries they distributed to, about an unknown quantity of potentially fatal medicines. And if he didn’t get that assurance, he needed to decide what he personally was going to do. There was nothing really to decide, he thought at once. He supposed he should talk first to Barry Jackson, although ethically the confidentiality restrictions didn’t apply and it would be too late for Dubette to invoke them anyway. He had to find his own way to sound the alarm, and as his taxi crossed the Triboro Bridge, he looked down the East River to the United Nations skyscraper and decided that would be a convenient start.
It was a magic-carpet ascent to the penthouse level when Parnell identified himself at the ground-floor reception, the door to Edward Grant’s panoramic-view office already open in readiness for his arrival, the smiling, white-haired man slightly back from the doorway to prevent his shortness being too obviously framed in the
