Colin Forbes - The Janus Man

Tweed hurried back to the exit. Diana stood by her bag and kept looking at her watch, as though expecting someone to collect her. She'd make a very useful addition to my staff, Tweed thought, and was careful to keep away from her.

The man who looked like Newman was still standing in the same place. Tweed saw Corcoran, a tall man and heavily-built with sandy hair, walking fast. Behind him two other men hurried to keep up with him.

Another crowd of passengers from a flight was pouring out of the exit. Tweed positioned himself so the waiting man couldn't see him. Corcoran came straight up to him, his two companions staying discreetly a few feet back.

`That man in the check suit,' Tweed said. 'See the one I mean? He's just lit a small cheroot. I want to know who he is, why he is here, where he has come from…'

`Leave it to us,' said Corcoran and moved towards the target. Tweed waited only long enough to witness Corcoran and his two colleagues surround the man as Corcoran started talking to him. He walked quickly across to Diana and picked up her bag.

`I have a car outside. That chap can't follow you any more. I hope you approve,' he said as they walked to the outside world, 'but I don't trust a hotel. You'll be safer in Newman's flat in South Ken. It's quite a nice place.'

`Will Bob mind?' Diana asked as Tweed led the way into the lobby of Newman's flat and placed her case on top of a chest of drawers in a large bedroom at the back. 'Mind my being here?'

`Why should he?'

And to hell with him if he does, Tweed thought. He's dumped Diana in my lap without so much as a by-your-leave. Tweed had obtained the key to the flat from Monica before leaving for the airport: she had agreed to keep an eye on the place while Newman was in Germany.

He showed her the bathroom, the large sitting-room at the front with bay windows overlooking the street, the compact kitchen which was like a ship's galley set back inside an alcove with two steps leading up to it from the sitting- room.

Diana walked into the sitting-room and stopped. She gazed up at the high ceiling where the original cornices with a design of bunches of grapes and intertwined vine leaves had been left intact.

`What a lovely spacious room. This is like the England I used to know.'

`An old Victorian house converted into flats by a developer,' Tweed remarked. 'The value has soared since Newman bought the place two or three years ago. This year the value has gone up like a rocket. You'll be all right here?'

`I love the place. I'll be just a few minutes unpacking in the bedroom…'

Tweed used the opportunity of being on his own to call Park Crescent. He dialled his private number and Monica answered at once.

`Did you collect the package safely?' she asked.

`Yes. Good job I went myself. There's another package I want examining urgently. It's being held by Corcoran of Airport Security. Rush someone down there. Harry Butler or Pete Nield…'

`Harry is with me now. I'll send him at once. You'd like to speak to him?'

`Let's waste no time. I want the origin of the package, where it was despatched from. Who sent it. That's it. Expect me in an hour.'

He put down the phone, went into the kitchen and opened cupboards. Time for a chat with Diana over a cup of tea. It would have to be powdered milk, but he wanted to tell her where the local shops were, that he'd be back later to take her out for dinner, to settle her in. Over dinner he could explain how she could help him.

`Harry Butler has reported back,' Monica informed Tweed as he entered his office.

`That was quick.' Tweed sat in the swivel chair behind his desk and felt the tension drain out of his system. He had half-expected to find Diana was not aboard the flight. He was surprised to realize how much he had worried about her.

`Tell me,' he said.

`Harry waved the Official Secrets Act at the Newman look- alike, threatened him with God knows what. He's a German. One of ours. Walther Prohl. Fully paid-up member of the BND from Pullach…'

`Oh, God!' Tweed doodled a German eagle on his pad. 'That I didn't expect. I thought he was opposition.'

`So the news is good…'

`No, it simply could be worse. How did the BND get in on the act?'

'Prohl doesn't know too much. He was ordered to impersonate Newman and fly from Hamburg to Heathrow, wait there, then catch the next flight back. He's pukkah – he was carrying identification proving he is BND. But he travelled on a forged passport under the name Robert Newman, which means it appears on the passenger manifest.'

`That thought had already occurred to me. I don't like any of it. Did Prohl give any clue as to why he was ordered to do this?'

`None at all. Harry is convinced he doesn't know. He received his instructions from Peter Toll…'

`This is getting worse.' Tweed took off his glasses and started polishing them as he continued. 'Toll is the youngest man ever to be promoted to Deputy Director – or the equivalent – of the BND. I rate him as Al for detailed planning, but he's ambitious and that makes him reckless. He's a gambler for high stakes.'

`Not a man you'd choose as sector chief?'

`Only after a period of retraining – with emphasis on obedience to orders from me…'

`And in some way he's in touch with Newman?'

`Sounds horribly like it. That might explain…' Tweed stopped. 'Oh, never mind. What about the trace you put out on the mysterious Portman Paula Grey referred to in her diary?'

`You really shouldn't have done that,' Monica chided, 'read her personal diary…'

`Ethics I can dispense with when lives are at stake – when four girls have been horribly murdered. To say nothing of tracking down the odd man out who sat in at my conference this morning…'

`You really think there's a connection?'

`What about Portman?' Tweed repeated irritably.

`Samuel Portman, I think. Portman Private Investigations. He has a grotty little office in Dean Street, Soho. He's the only Portman known in the business. I checked with the Association.

Discreetly through a friend. The address and phone number are on that folded sheet of paper under your blotter.'

Tweed glanced at the sheet, refolded it and slipped it inside his wallet. 'I'll have to pay Mr Samuel Portman a visit in the near future.'

`Surely it's obvious what's bothering Paula?' Monica protested. 'She thinks Hugh is playing around with some other woman. Maybe she just wants to know – some women are like that…'

`You really think that sounds like Hugh Grey?'

`Not really. Now…' Her expression became dreamy. 'If it were Harry Masterson, I'd believe anything. He's capable of having three on the go at once – and concealing from each the existence of the others. But then his wife did walk away.'

`Which reminds me, where are they all now? Gone back to their burrows for their week's leave?'

`Harry is down at his country cottage near Apfield in Sussex. I don't think anyone is with him – he's painting. In oils. And playing classical records.' She paused with a puckish look, waiting for Tweed to ask her how she knew. He remained stolidly silent. 'I know that,' she said, a trifle piqued, 'because I phoned him with an excuse to check. I guessed you'd want to know where they all were.'

`I'm listening.'

`Guy Dalby is down at Woking in that Georgian estate house he lived in with Renee before she hopped it to France. He's painting, too – the walls of his house. That's two out of four whose wives walked,' she mused. 'The divorce rate is climbing. One out of three for the country in general, one out of two for service personnel…' She flushed suddenly. She had been thinking aloud. God! She'd clean forgotten for the moment that Tweed was separated, that his wife was living it up with some Greek millionaire in Rio. Unless by now she'd moved on. She began talking rapidly.