LANCASTER
LANCASHIRE
The man was huge, Deborah thought. He filled more than his side of the car. He wasn’t fat, merely enormous. His seat was pushed back as far as it would go, but still he had difficulty keeping his knees out of the way of the steering wheel. Despite his size, he wasn’t an intimidating presence, however. There was an odd kind of gentleness to him, which she reckoned had to make him a fish out of water when it came to his chosen employment.
She was about to comment on this when he made a remark about what he supposed to be her line of work instead. With his eyes on Alatea’s car far ahead of them, he said to Deborah, “Wouldn’t have taken you for a cop. I wouldn’t have known who you were at all if you hadn’t been nosing round Arnside House.”
“What did I do to give the game away, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I just have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Can sniff ’em out pretty easily, if you know what I mean. Goes with the territory. Has to, doesn’t it.”
“What territory are we talking about?”
“Journalism. Thing is,” he said expansively, “you have to be able to see more than what’s just on the surface in my line of work. Investigative reporting is about more than sitting at one’s desk and waiting for some bloke’s lifelong enemies to ring up with details of a story that’ll bring down the government. You have to be adept at digging. You have to get into the hunt.”
Deborah found this nonsense impossible to resist. “Investigative reporting,” she said contemplatively. “Is that what you call working for
“Just using that as an example,” he said.
“Ah.”
“Hey, it’s a living,” he declared, doubtless picking up on her ironic tone. “Anyway, I’m a poet otherwise. And no one supports himself on poetry these days.”
“No, indeed,” Deborah said.
“Look, I know it’s a rag, Sergeant Cotter. But I like to eat and have a roof over my head and this is how I do it. Your line of work isn’t much better, I reckon, looking under stones to dig out society’s scum, eh?”
Mixed metaphor, Deborah thought. Odd for a poet but there you had it. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” she said.
“There’s more than one way to look at everything.”
Up ahead of them, Alatea drove onward. It became apparent soon enough that she was heading for Lancaster. Once in the environs of the city, they had to take care not to be seen by her, so they dropped back with five cars between them.
They wound through the streets. There was no question that Alatea knew exactly where she was going. She ended up in the city centre, in the small car park of a stout brick structure, which Deborah and Zed Benjamin passed by. Thirty yards from this place, Zed pulled to the kerb. Deborah swivelled in her seat to look back at the building. In some forty-five seconds, Alatea came round the corner of it from the direction of the car park and went inside.
“We need to find out what that place is,” Deborah said. Considering Zed’s size, he wasn’t the one to accomplish this task unseen. Deborah got out, said, “Wait here,” and dashed to the other side of the street, where she could keep herself somewhat hidden by using the cars parked there.
She went as far as she needed to go to be able to read the lettering above the building’s entrance.
Deborah considered Alatea’s place of birth, which she knew was Argentina. This took her ineluctably to the Falklands War. She wondered about the likelihood of an Argentine soldier ending up here for some reason, someone whom Alatea was visiting.
She was thinking about other possible wars — the Gulf Wars being the most recent ones — when Alatea emerged. She wasn’t alone, but she wasn’t with anyone who looked remotely like a disabled veteran. She was instead with another woman, tall like Alatea but stocky. Her appearance and ease of movement suggested she was someone who regularly favoured the type of clothing she was wearing at the moment: a colourful long skirt, loose pullover, and boots. Her long hair was unstyled, dark in colour but peppered with grey, and she wore it pulled back from her face and held with a hair slide.
They walked in the direction of the foundation’s car park, talking earnestly. Considering what this meant, Deborah dashed back to where Zed had parked. She got into the car saying, “She’s going to be on the move. She’s got someone with her.”
In response, he fired up the engine and readied himself to follow once more. He said, “What was that place?”
“Disabled soldiers’ home.”
“That who’s with her?”
“No. She’s got a woman with her. I s’pose she could be a soldier, but she’s not disabled as far as I could tell. Here they come. Quickly.” Deborah lunged at Zed. She threw her arms round him and drew him into what she hoped appeared to a passerby as a lovers’ passionate embrace. When over Zed’s shoulder she saw the car pass, she released him and saw that his face was flaming. “Sorry,” she said. “It seemed best.”
He stammered, “Yes. Right. Course,” and he pulled out of the parking space and got back onto Alatea Fairclough’s tail.
They headed out of the city centre. Traffic was heavy, but they managed to keep Alatea’s vehicle within view. Zed Benjamin was the one who twigged first where Alatea was headed. Clear of the centre of Lancaster, it wasn’t long before a hillside topped with a variety of modern-era buildings came into view.
“She’s going to the university,” he said. “This could take us nowhere in our information.”
Deborah didn’t think so. If Alatea was heading towards Lancaster University with a companion, there was going to be a reason why. She had a feeling of what that reason would be, and she reckoned it had nothing to do with a desire to pursue higher education.
Parking in this area while remaining out of sight of their quarry was something of an iffy situation. Vehicles heading to the university were made to use a peripheral road, and once they found themselves upon it, Deborah and her companion discovered that parking was restricted as well. There were cul-de-sacs for it, but very little scope for hiding within them. Obviously, Deborah thought, the university had not been designed with the thought of individuals skulking along on the tail of someone else.
When Alatea turned into one of the cul-de-sacs, Deborah told Zed to let her out of the car. When he started to protest — they were, after all, supposed to be doing this tailing of Alatea Fairclough together and he wasn’t exactly sure of Scotland Yard’s cooperation, he pointed out — she said, “Look. We can’t go in there after them, Zed. Drop me off, and drive on. Park somewhere else. Ring me on my mobile and I’ll tell you where I am. It’s the only thing that’s going to work.”
He didn’t look happy. He didn’t look trustful. That couldn’t be helped. She wasn’t there to earn his personal faith in her character. She was there to get to the bottom of Alatea Fairclough. He’d braked the car, and that was good enough for Deborah. She hopped out, saying, “Ring my mobile,” and she dashed into the cul-de-sac before he could protest.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew he couldn’t be seen by Alatea Fairclough or the gaff would be blown in a very large way. Deborah couldn’t be seen either, but it was going to be far easier for her to hide herself from the Argentine woman and her companion than for Zed to do so.
Following them proved simpler than she had thought it would be. Providence helped. It began to rain. The downpour was sudden and it was heavy, requiring umbrellas. What better way to conceal one’s identity? Deborah fished hers out of her shoulder bag and thus was able to obscure her face and, more important, cover her coppery hair.
She kept a good distance between herself and the other women. They made for the university buildings.
