‘Sorry, I was out of the country.’
‘I gained access – for which you owe me lunch – and managed to get a sample which I’ve sent to your home address.’
‘You didn’t! That’s terrific. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’
‘I know it’s there because it was delivered by one of Rafi’s couriers.’
‘How the hell did you pull that off?’
‘Rafi disapproves so I’ll explain when I see you. I pray I got enough of what you want.’
Herrick thanked her profusely and said she’d let her know how things turned out.
‘What was that about?’ asked Dolph.
‘Did Lapping find out anything in Sarajevo yesterday?’ she asked.
‘Not much, but I know he will.’ Dolph had taken off the hat and was brushing his hair back.
He caught her look of appraisal. ‘What’re you thinking?’
‘I was blank – sorry.’
‘Well,’ he said, replacing the hat so it was tipped forward over his brow. ‘I did find something for you. There was a woman I knew, Helene Guignal, a terrific looker. She spent most of the period from 1993 to 1995 in Sarajevo filing for Agence France Presse. For part of that period she had an affair with a man who was one of the defenders of Sarajevo. He was important, a kind of liaison between the Bosniaks and the foreign Muslims.’
‘Has she got a photograph of him?’
‘I didn’t ask because she had no time to talk. I have tried to reach her but she’s proving remarkably elusive.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Brussels.’
She thanked him and gave him a peck on the cheek. Dawn was breaking and a thin layer of mist had settled over parts of the airfield.
‘We need to get Joe Lapping onto this.’
‘Yeah well, it’s difficult because we’ve all got our hands full. I mean Lyne and the other guys never let up. We don’t seem to be able to flit about the place like you, Isis.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Three hours later a cab dropped her at the end of the one-way system on Gabriel Road, which was now decked out in the full municipal splendour of almond and cherry blossom. With her bag over her shoulder, she walked the remaining hundred yards to her house, telling herself that once she’d showered and had breakfast at the cafe round the corner she wouldn’t feel so tired.
She reached her front door and lowered the bag to the ground to search for her house keys. As her hands moved from pocket to pocket, her eyes ran over the house and came to rest on an upstairs window where the curtains were drawn. She was sure they hadn’t been left that way because when she was leaving for Tirana she had stood at the window watching for the cab. She put the key in one of the two locks and found it had already been turned; only the Yale lock was keeping the door shut. She placed her ear to the letter-box. The cool air from inside the house brushed her cheek like a breath. There was something wrong – a smell of someone, a sense of occupation.
She turned the Yale lock and slipped inside. There was a sound coming from upstairs: someone was moving about at leisure, unaware that she was in the house. She stepped back into the garden and dialled the emergency services on her mobile. The woman instructed her not to confront the intruder but to wait at a distance from the house, which was what she planned to do once she had retrieved a baseball bat she kept in her umbrella stand. She darted inside again, but as she seized the bat a dark shape appeared at the top of the stairs. She dived from the house, conscious only of the need for room to swing the bat. In almost no time at all, the man had rushed the stairs and taken hold of her, and was trying to drag her inside. She screamed and slipped from his grasp, then let the bat slide through her hands until she felt the knob at the top of the handle. She drew it back over her shoulder and brought it down against the side of the man’s head, causing him to yell out. A second, much cleaner shot concentrated all her energy into the fat end of the bat and felled him, unconscious, into the path of another man who had come down the stairs. The obstruction gave her a fraction of a second to run through the gateway and dive behind the hedge, but in that moment she registered that the man had pulled a gun from his waistband. A bullet whistled through the hedge and tore into a car parked in the road, setting off its alarm. She spun round and ran a few yards down the street to shelter behind a van, hearing the screech of a police patrol car in the road. Two officers tumbled out just before bullets exploded in the bodywork and windscreen of their vehicle. A stocky man in trainers and an oversized leather blouson stepped into the road. The policemen had dropped behind the patrol car, but instead of running off, the gunman kept moving forward, taking aim and firing with cool deliberation. Herrick popped up and saw his close-cropped head through the front windscreen of the van and decided that unless she did something, he would kill the officers.
Crouching low, she hurtled along the gutter and rounded the front of the van. The man was obscured from her, but from the sound of two further deafening shots she judged he was only a matter of feet away. She moved a few paces, saw his back then lunged at him, leading with her left foot and bringing all her weight down with the blow. She connected squarely with the back of his neck and knocked him forwards. But the gun was still in his hand. She jumped to the right, knowing that she had just one chance, and struck him with all her might across the shoulder, aware of the tennis-serve grunt that escaped her lungs. The man was still on his feet, but the gun had flown from his hands and landed under the van. For a split second they looked at each other, then he scrambled away, his feet slipping momentarily on the snowfall of almond blossom, to flee down the centre of the road with his arms working double time like a character from a silent movie. Herrick crouched to retrieve the gun and without straightening, swung round and fired at the retreating figure. She missed, aimed again but didn’t pull the trigger because one of the policemen yelled at her. ‘Hey, Stop that. Put the gun down!’ She stood up and handed it to him, and both officers set off after the man, but by now he was fifty yards away and opening a car door. In one movement he slid behind the wheel and started the car engine. Seconds later his car had vanished.
With a burst radiator and a flat, the police car was hardly in a state to pursue him. The officers radioed details of the fugitive and returned to examine the injured man, who had come round but was still lying on the ground in a daze. His head was bleeding copiously and Herrick went to fetch a cloth from her kitchen to stem the flow. She told the policemen that the incident should be regarded as a security matter and that she would need to make a call. They stood looking a little bemused as she phoned one of the Chief ’s assistants at Vauxhall Cross and asked him to get in touch with the local station.
The injured man struggled to a sitting position and began to curse and wail in a foreign language.
One of the officers knelt down beside him. ‘What the hell’s he speaking?’
‘I think you’ll find it’s Albanian,’ replied Herrick. She looked down at the stocky little man with russet-coloured skin and slightly protruding ears. He could be the Albanian interrogator’s brother.
‘With the way you must have hit him, miss, he’s lucky to be alive.’ He pressed the cloth to the gash on the side of the man’s head. ‘But by heck, I’m glad you dropped the other fellow. He meant business.’
The other officer looked at the gun and read the inscription on the side of the barrel. ‘Desert Eagle fifty AE pistol – Israel Military Industries Limited.’ He paused. ‘You only have to see what it’s done to the car to know you don’t want to be in the way of that thing.’
People began to gather in the street and soon afterwards an ambulance and three other squad cars arrived. The man was taken away for treatment under guard while Herrick went inside with one of the two constables to find the house turned upside down. The policeman observed that burglars normally made a pile of the things they intended to steal, but in this case the obvious items of value – the TV set, jewellery, CD player, and odd bits of antique silver – had been left untouched.
‘What would two Albanian villains be wanting to search your house for?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said.
She made a statement, which he took down at laborious speed in his notebook, contriving to extend two or three minutes’ action into a forty-minute feature. Herrick tidied and filled the drawers and cupboards while he
