Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

Erika shrugged. ‘The details are correct, but you can’t prove you were the woman.’

‘I swear on my mother’s life, I was.’

‘Then why object when we take serious action against the fascists?’

‘Because you’re into wholesale slaughter, and there’s no obvious proof that you’re targeting the right people.’

‘But we are.’

‘To say that, you must have substantial proof, or at least enough to get a legitimate investigation going. Why not hand over your evidence to the police?’

‘Conventional investigations are too polite and too prone to end in flabby liberal leniency. Our way is better.’

‘Erika,’ Sabrina leaned close again. ‘I can’t spend any more time arguing. I have a job to do. I need to know who your hatchet man is. I’m prepared to do what it takes to get an answer. I wasn’t kidding about the Pentothal.’

Erika was staring into the bedroom. Gregor had come round. He lay coughing feebly against the carpet.

‘I don’t want you to hurt him,’ she said, the hardness gone from her voice.

‘Then talk to me.’

For a long moment Erika stared at Sabrina. Then she nodded. ‘Take the cuffs off him. Give him water. Then I’ll talk to you.’

‘You want me to let him loose before you’ve talked?’ Sabrina shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not until–’

‘It’s a promise!’ Erika whispered hoarsely. ‘A promise. I never go back on a promise! Now in the name of God help Gregor. Help him!’

The black pickup was parked on a rocky bluff high over a stretch of open land between two dense clumps of woodland. The sun was high and the temperature inside the pickup, in spite of the windows being open, was 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

For more than two hours Chuck and Billy had sat behind the dusty windshield, observing Chadwick’s station wagon parked on the open ground below them, its grey-and-blue paintwork baking in the heat.

‘All that time in a wagon in this heat with a dead man,’ Chuck said. ‘That guy ain’t natural. What kind of man could put up with that?’

‘He’s English, don’t forget.’

Since parking the station wagon Mr Beamish did not appear to have moved. He had simply stopped on the dirt road linking the clumps of woodland, the same dirt road that led right through that sector of the Greenbelt Park. When he stopped he switched off the engine, sat back behind the wheel and folded his arms.

‘He does have air-conditioning in there,’ Billy said. ‘But I don’t think that would give him too much protection, not after all this time.’ He groaned. ‘I promised Mr Chadwick I’d clean the inside of that wagon after this character’s done with it.’

At that moment Malcolm Philpott, sitting in the station wagon, could see what the two men in the pickup would have to use their scopes to identify, a small bulk-liquid transporter with a fat blue chemical tank on its back. It approached along a branch road and came slowly down the hillside to the spot where Philpott was parked.

The driver was Russ Grundy. ‘Mr Beamish?’ he called.

‘That’s right.’

‘Are we being watched?’

‘Yes we are. Get into your part, Russ. You have a keen-eyed audience up on the hill over there behind me. Please don’t look in that direction.’

Grundy got out. He was dressed in the uniform of a US State Trooper. He came across to the station wagon and held the door as Philpott got out.

‘What do I have to do now?’

Philpott pointed to the back of the station wagon. ‘There’s a roll of carpet in there. In the interests of verisimilitude, there are two half-filled plastic sacks of water taped to the centre of the roll. I want you to help me carry that carpet over to your empty tanker and poke it in through the lid on top, which of course you will first open.’

‘Can you tell me why I’m dressed like a lawman?’

‘Why do you ask? Do you need to know what your motivation is?’

‘No. I’m just eaten up with curiosity.’

‘In my experience,’ Philpott said, ‘it’s the really baffling visible evidence that burrows deep into people’s credulity. I mean, what in heaven’s name is a state trooper doing driving a tanker? And what’s he going to do with the carpet-wrapped corpse he’s loaded into the tank?’

‘It’s bizarre, I’ll give you that.’

‘Thank you.’

From the pickup high on the bluff Chuck and Billy watched through their scopes as the ominous roll of carpet was manhandled on to the pickup and slid, after some struggling, down into the tank. They watched the trooper close the lid, get down, shake hands with Beamish, and drive away. After a couple of minutes Beamish drove off in the opposite direction.

‘I’ll be real glad when this day is over,’ Billy said to Chuck.

Back in Dallas Philpott parked the station wagon at a quiet spot near his hotel, as arranged with Chadwick. Before he closed and locked the door, he sprinkled three drops from the phial of cadaverine Grundy had obtained for him. Within seconds the unmistakable odour of decaying human flesh began to fill the interior of the station wagon. He shut the door quickly.

‘Mission accomplished,’ he whispered with satisfaction. He’d enjoyed this little jaunt. It felt good to be back in the field again. As he walked back to the hotel he whistled softly, thinking ahead to a hot bath, a fine dinner, then a late flight back to New York.

‘Memories threaten me,’ Uli Jürgen said. ‘I hate the way they invade my present.’

‘Really? How strange.’

Marianne Edel was on a high-legged stool in the centre of the bare-floored studio, her face and her uncovered shoulders mercilessly sunlit by tall windows and wide fanlights. When she spoke she tried not to move.

‘How else would you make contact with memories?’ she said. ‘They have to invade the present before you become aware of them.’

‘They always seem to challenge my safety. So I try to leave the past undisturbed.’

Jürgen stepped back from his easel and put down the brush he had been using. He smiled at the canvas, being careful to frown at the same time, so he would look self-critical. The picture pleased him. It gave him a secure, competent feeling. All his good commercial work did that.

‘I think we are finished, Frau Edel.’

At six sittings over four weeks he had painted a perfect likeness of his sitter, which any half-adequate portraitist could have done. But he was Uli Jürgen, so his picture was much more than a likeness. He had been described as an artist who could invest a portrait with the spirituality of its subject. The picture of Marianne Edel was a true likeness invested with a dozen ingenious falsehoods – at the eyes, the mouth, the jawline, the neck. Her skin sagged and wrinkled in exactly the places it did in reality, but in the picture the sagging and the furrows were softer-edged and looked more like silken drapery than tired epidermis.

‘May I look at it now?’

‘Well…’

Individually the falsehoods were unremarkable, but the collective effect was to flatter Marianne Edel shamelessly, and brilliantly. A stranger looking at the picture would see a convincing harmony of line and tone and colour which suggested, powerfully, that the vigour and sexuality in the image must be a true reflection of those qualities in the sitter. Uli Jürgen had known Marianne Edel only a little over a month, but he doubted she had ever looked half as good as his creation.

‘Yes, come and look,’ he said.

She stepped down carefully from the stool and stood beside him. For a minute they were silent, he thinking about his meeting later with his accountant, she bedazzled by a talent that could make her resemble so strongly her own idea of herself.