‘Yes.’ Cornish put the car back into gear and they cruised past the property. ‘And that’s where you come in. I need to access the manifests without causing suspicion. I need surveillance, logistical support, a way of tracking the containers. I need to get into Henderson’s bank account and I need a tap on his phone.’ Cornish shrugged. ‘I could get all that, but we’re a small force and it will take time. MI5 could do it with a simple click of the fingers.’
‘Sure, but we need to keep a lid on this.’ Holm turned to Cornish. He sighed, knowing his next words weren’t going to go down well. ‘And, for now at least, you need to steer the investigation in another direction. Western’s death was nothing to do with what goes on here at the port. Perhaps he had gambling debts, perhaps he had an affair and the relationship turned sour. Whatever, SeaPak is to be allowed to continue operating. Henderson needs to be left alone.’
‘No way!’ Cornish looked horrified. ‘I’m not letting go of this now.’
‘I’m not asking you to let go of it. I’ll get the manifests, the bank account details, surveillance, all that, but not a word of what we’ve discussed goes beyond your lips until this is in the bag.’
‘National bloody security again, right?’ There was anger all of a sudden. Sarcasm. Cornish’s easy-going manner of the past few hours gone. ‘You’ve got no jurisdiction here, no power to command me to do anything. I’m answerable to my chief constable and him alone.’
‘Of course, Billie,’ Holm said softly. ‘But my boss happens to be Thomas Gillan, the Director General of MI5, and he has the ears of both the home secretary and the prime minister. I think your chief constable is answerable to them, don’t you?’
Later, after she’d finished work, Silva wandered over to the Barbican and sat in a bar at the quayside. The shadows grew long and the sun hovered low and weak in the west. She made a bottle of Corona last an hour, sucking on the lime wedge when she’d finished. The envelope was back on the saloon table alongside Sean’s card. In terms of gravity the contents of the envelope should have been uppermost in Silva’s mind, but it was Sean’s words she kept coming back to: Sorry. Can we talk? Love, Sean. He deserved better, and before long he’d undoubtedly luck out. She had a vision of him in a garden surrounded by a white picket fence. Smoke from a barbecue. Bottles of beer in a bucket of ice. Kids running amok. A woman on a veranda with a plate of cookies. She wasn’t sure if that was her. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
She bought a cappuccino and shivered as she sipped the foam from the top. She fended off a polite offer from a hopeful young man to buy her another drink with a ‘no thank you’ and a smile and pushed herself up and walked to the Hoe.
As she stood at the top of Madeira Drive and looked down at the sea, a car pulled alongside her. A BMW. Black. Tinted windows. The same car that had followed her on the motorway. A door clicked open and a man got out.
‘Ms da Silva,’ the man said. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a sober tie. He was mid-forties and his brown hair was short and neat. A pair of rectangular, rimless glasses completed the outfit and made him look like a bank manager or an accountant. ‘Might I possibly have a word?’
The accent was impeccable, with the pure vowels and precise consonants. She wondered if he was an associate of Fairchild’s.
Silva bounced on the balls of her feet. ‘What is it?’
‘We can walk, if you’d like,’ the man said. He indicated the route up to Plymouth Hoe. ‘Or we can stop here.’
Silva shook her head. Wondered what the heck was going on in her life to make strange middle-aged men hit on her.
‘I don’t know what the hell you want, but you’ve got one minute and then I’m off.’
‘Right.’ The man nodded back into the open door of the car. There were two others in there. A man in the driver’s seat and a woman in the rear. The woman had an overcoat on her lap and her right hand lay under the coat in an odd way. ‘One minute is quite enough.’
‘Well?’ Silva faced the man, aware her back was to a low wall. Beyond, the sea frothed on rocks far below.
‘We’re with the government.’
‘Good for you. Can I see some identification?’
‘My name is Simeon Weiss. There’s no need to be alarmed, Ms da Silva, we’re just here to help you.’
‘Sure you are.’
‘I’ve come to warn you that Matthew Fairchild is mentally ill and his schemes are ill-thought out and dangerous. He snatches at threads and constructs elaborate scenarios, dreams up stories, lives in a world of make-believe.’
‘Make-believe?’
‘Yes.’ Weiss paused and smiled. ‘And that brings me on to your mother. She stumbled on a minor discrepancy to do with a multimillion-dollar arms deal. The story might have made the business pages, but your mother wanted more. She elaborated the facts, embellished the story to the point where it was unpublishable garbage. Fairchild went one better and twisted the whole thing into a tale of dark forces spreading across the globe. He’s quite mad and, for the safety of you and your family and friends, you’d really be better off not having anything to do with him.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘It’s advice. Good advice.’ Weiss sidled closer. ‘And people who ignore our advice usually come to regret doing so.’
In a blink the distance between them vanished and Weiss was up close, his hand at Silva’s neck. As Silva’s arm went up in a block, something jabbed into her stomach. She looked down to where Weiss’s other hand held a
