deal to answer for.
He opened the file in front of him and looked briefly at the top page. ‘They were heading for Manchester, I understand, though the work they would have found there might not have been what they were expecting.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I understand several people are in custody. The crew of
Sami’s heart began to beat faster and he could feel perspiration on his palms. He rubbed them on his immaculate trousers. Walshaw looked at him, this time thoughtfully. Suddenly, putting both his hands together, he leaned across the table, speaking softly but directly. ‘We haven’t got much time, Mr Veshara, so let me come to the point. In a few minutes you are going to be interviewed, and very probably charged. Like it or not, we take a dim view in this country of the kind of trade you’re involved in. Frankly, I’m not sure they’d think much of it in your country either. You need to make a decision.’
Sami gulped. The situation was running out of his control. Who was this man and what did he want? ‘What sort of decision?’
‘You can take your chances with the British justice system, or you can talk with me. I’m not in a position to offer you anything, but I am not… without influence. If you help me, it will be taken into account and it could prove useful to you.’
There was something lulling about this voice. Sami felt as if he were trapped in a pressure cooker and had suddenly been shown the safety valve, but without knowing how to turn it on. What did this man want?
‘What would my talk with you consist of?’
Walshaw took his time replying, picking up a pencil and tapping it lightly on the table. At last he said, ‘We already knew a bit about your business interests, and after the seizure of
‘What does matter to me is where you’ve travelled in the Middle East in the last few years. What you’ve seen there, and who you have been talking to about it. In Lebanon, of course. But in other countries as well. In fact, why don’t we start with Syria?’
Sami stared at this man Walshaw, whose eyes were unyielding now. It was tempting to start talking straight away, to calm his nerves, but if he told this man everything, the next time he set foot in the Middle East his life wouldn’t be worth a Lebanese piastre. He hesitated.
Walshaw said, ‘If we’re going to be able to help you, Mr Veshara, then you need to start talking. Otherwise, I’ll tell the inspector that you’re ready for him.’
It would be a great gamble. He would effectively be putting his life in this Englishman’s hands. But if he didn’t, he knew he faced arrest, trial, a prison sentence. Prison. The prospect was too ghastly to bear. He could live with the disgrace; he knew his wife would stand by him; conceivably his businesses might even survive his absence. What he couldn’t contemplate was the physical fact of incarceration. It was his worst nightmare.
He exhaled noisily, then sat back in his chair. ‘I hope you are not in a hurry, Mr Walshaw. It is a long story I have to tell.’
As Charles Wetherby listened, making the occasional note, Sami Veshara told him how, five years or so ago, two Israelis had come to his office in London. They had threatened that if he didn’t help them, they would report his people-trafficking business to the British authorities. It was at a time when he was cultivating some government ministers through a charity he had founded, and he was hoping to be recommended for a peerage.
The men were from Mossad. They knew about his regular visits to Lebanon and his contacts there. They knew he travelled around the country buying figs and other produce. They wanted him to go to Lebanon whenever they asked him to, to travel to the south and, using some equipment they would give him, to send signals which they told him would help them locate the positions of Hezbollah rocket launchers.
He had done what they wanted. He had not seen them again in London, but had met them in Tel Aviv from time to time. He described two men, one built like a squashed bowling ball, the other lean.
But to Charles’s enquiries about his contacts with Syrians, Sami gave a flat denial. He had no contact with Syrian intelligence people or with Government officials and had to the best of his knowledge never met any. He had no particular hostility or friendship towards them, he said, and Charles could not shake his story.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Remarkable,’ the consultant had said. You are very lucky, Miss Carlyle. You’re making a truly remarkable recovery.’
Liz wished she felt quite so remarkable now, as she sat drowsily in a deckchair in her mother’s garden at Bowerbridge on her fourth day out of hospital. She had wanted to go back to her flat, but Susan Carlyle wouldn’t hear of it. What Liz didn’t know was that Charles Wetherby had met Edward in London. The two men had liked each other immediately and Charles had been frank with Edward about his concern that Liz might still be at risk from whoever had attacked her. Edward had undertaken to keep a very close eye out for anything unusual around Bowerbridge and to contact Charles immediately if he had any anxieties. Now Susan sat knitting on a garden bench, watching Liz carefully, like a mother hen.
It was September now and the apples were swelling on the trees at the bottom of the lawn. The huge white flowers of a hydrangea paniculata were attracting heavy, slow-moving bees and the musky scent of an old- fashioned climbing rose was wafting down from a wall. Liz had been in the Whittington two weeks, though the first few days were not even a memory. Amazingly, she had not broken a single bone in her ‘accident’ – but she hadn’t escaped unscathed. Far from it: she’d had severe internal bleeding and, most ominously, a ruptured spleen. A quick-thinking paramedic had spotted that as she lay half-conscious in the ambulance. On arrival she had been whisked straight into emergency surgery. The consultant told her later that another ten minutes and she would not have made it.
So I shouldn’t complain, thought Liz, though even walking from the house to the garden still tired her. She’d realised for the first time that just because she was out of hospital, it didn’t mean she was well again.
In the first few days, between the lingering effects of the anaesthetic and the codeine-based painkillers, Liz had been entirely out of it. She’d sensed her mother’s presence, and in the background saw a man she dimly recognised as Edward Treglown. Once she could have sworn Charles had been sitting in the chair at the foot of her bed.
As she’d slowly come to, more visitors had arrived -Peggy Kinsolving, trying to act her usual positive, cheerful self, but more subdued than Liz had ever seen her. Flowers had arrived from Geoffrey Fane and, typically, a bottle of champagne from Bruno Mackay. Miles Brookhaven had sent flowers too, and Peggy said he’d rung twice to ask after Liz.
She had had ample time to think about what had happened to her. Her mind kept flashing back to the sight of the oncoming car as she’d turned around, but she could remember nothing after that. There was no doubt in her mind that she had been deliberately run down, but no one had come up with any clue as to who had done it, or why.
It would not have been easy to plan. Someone would have had to follow her to find out where she lived. How long had they been watching and waiting? She might easily have stayed that night in Harwich. Or taken her car to work instead of the Underground. Presumably they would have just come back another day. Liz fought back a shudder at the thought they might try again.
She couldn’t stop going over it all. It must be someone she’d encountered in the course of work. She reviewed what she’d been doing in the past few months, but nothing pointed to any explanation. Was it some kind of revenge attack? No doubt Neil Armitage, the scientist convicted of passing secrets to the Russians, in whose case she’d given evidence, nursed a massive grudge, but he was safely behind bars and in any case he didn’t know who she was.
Which left the Syrian Plot, as she was beginning to think of it, even though it had a dearth of suspects who might want Liz out of the way – only two, in fact: Chris Marcham and Sami Veshara; and possibly the Syrians.
Marcham had certainly been peculiar, and she had sensed there were secrets he didn’t want her to know. But not about Syria, which was her only real concern with the man. He seemed so chaotic (she thought of the mess in
