Derek Lambert - I, Said the Spy

‘As you wish. I’m going back tomorrow evening before flying to Geneva. I’ll see you in London, Goodbye, Suzy.’

‘Goodbye, Paul,’ she said.

The anger was still there. She called the Château again and said: ‘Put me on to Mr Nicholas bloody Foster.’

‘ Pardon , madame?’

‘Mr Foster. One of your managers.’

‘I’m afraid Mr Foster isn’t available.’

The smug bastard. ‘Make him available. This is his sister. There’s been a death in the family.’

‘You don’t understand. Mr Foster isn’t in the hotel. We’ve been trying to contact him all morning.’

A whisper of apprehension. ‘Have you tried his room?’

‘D’accord. His bed has not been slept in.’

Fear pushed aside her anger.

The telephonist said: ‘I’m putting you through to the manager. He asked—’

Suzy replaced the receiver.

The rain was thickening but Suzy was hardly aware of it. She went back to the inn and ordered a coffee. The woman served her in the bar and stuck out her hand for the money.

Suzy sipped the coffee and relived the terrible moments of the previous evening. ‘Good evening, Suzy… I’m sorry I haven’t got time to talk just now… Some other time, Suzy….’

Nicholas would never have talked like that unless…. And she hadn’t even questioned his attitude. Had instantly believed that he had snubbed her. So much for her trust.

She tried to think methodically. He had been walking purposefully as though…. Two men had been behind him. Anderson, the security guard, and another man.

She closed her eyes tight and concentrated on their images. The other man was vaguely familiar. Where had she seen him before? At Paul Kingdon’s?

Anderson’s image was unforgettable. Tall, black, commanding, immaculate…. But one of his hands had been in the pocket of his jacket. Awkward….

It was then that Suzy realised that he had been holding a gun.

Somewhere Nicholas was a captive. If he was still alive. Shock broke up Suzy’s reasoning and it was a few moments before she was able to concentrate once more on the sequence of events the previous evening.

Nicholas had been walking towards the car park with the two men behind him. She had waited for a few moments, then headed towards the gates.

Something had occurred on the way to the gates. Something only faintly printed on her consciousness.

Tyres crunching on gravel. A car. That was it. A car without lights on the drive. She saw its outline mistily. A big car, an American car. And it must have left the car park at roughly the same time that Nicholas reached it.

After it had passed through the gates, its headlights had been switched on. And then from the window of her room she had seen the same car….

Suzy put down her coffee cup. The rain was sluicing down outside. She went upstairs and fetched her raincoat and tied a scarf over her hair.

The car had been six doors away. Which didn’t necessarily mean Nicholas was behind that particular door. It was, in fact, the door to the bakehouse; a man with flour on his hands was standing in the doorway as she walked past.

He smiled at her and asked if she wanted to take shelter. She shook her head, crossed the street and surveyed the buildings. The rain was bouncing on the cobblestones; her scarf was saturated and water ran down her back.

Bakehouse, greengrocers, inn, tabac …. In the terrace, between bakehouse and greengrocers, stood a derelict house, its windows boarded, a wooden plank nailed across the door. Beside the house was a passage like a narrow tunnel.

Suzy recrossed the street and entered the passage. It was dry to start with, beneath the roofs of the adjoining houses, and Suzy paused. Should she inform the police? Then she thought: ‘Anderson is police’ and walked on into an overgrown garden. On one side was a dripping stone wall.

At the end of the garden, in which fresh green weeds were pushing through the dead tangle of winter, she saw an outhouse. She walked cautiously forward.

There was a padlock on the door. It was undone and hung loosely. She opened the door. The light inside was poor and on the floor were a few rotting vegetables.

She stepped inside. Nicholas was sitting to her left, his hands and feet bound by rope. His eyes seemed to be trying to warn her….

Simultaneously she felt a gun barrel in her back and a very English voice saying: ‘Please don’t shout or move, Miss Okana.’

Paul Kingdon was puzzled by Suzy Okana’s decision to return to London but not perturbed. She had served her purpose, helping him to retain his image by bringing a girl ‘of dubious reputation’ into the château. The Establishment had trembled. (Nothing compared with the bloody great shudders when they read Brossard’s column and realised the extent to which he had got out of dollars before them!)

So there was no further point in her staying in France. He would meet her in London and they would fly together to Switzerland, where he was already negotiating the purchase of gold from the traders on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse and Paradeplatz. A compact, private fortune with a glittering core of diamonds.

The price: $5 million. Blackmail, but it wouldn’t be the first time he had clinched deals through methods which weren’t far removed from extortion. Five million worthless dollars, he reminded himself.

And if anything went wrong with Brossard’s grandiose scheme, then he would go public and fight as he had fought before, because Paul Kingdon always hedged his bets, and when he’d won the fight he would get Prentice to recommence his investigations into the London branch of the Gerard banking family and uncover some deal that would put the flabby shit in the dock at the Old Bailey.

He invited Brossard to his room for lunch. They ate lobster and drank a bottle of fine dry Sancerre. Kingdon had considered checking the room for bugs but remembered that Anderson had swept all the rooms that morning; a thorough man Anderson.

Brossard picked at his lobster, took sparrow sips of white wine.

Kingdon said: ‘All set, Pierre?’

Brossard nodded. His wounded arm lay on the table beside him. Like a cumbersome piece of cutlery, Kingdon thought. ‘The column appears tomorrow. But some of it will be leaked tonight to catch the markets in different time zones.’

‘And the Russians?’

‘As I told you, they are poised to sell on a massive scale.’

‘And the speculators?’

‘You have nothing to fear,’ Brossard said.

‘What if the OPEC countries renege on their decision to cut off oil supplies to America? If that part of your story’s true….’

‘It will be too late to save the dollar.’

Kingdon cracked a lobster claw and said: ‘How did you get all this information about the Russians’ intentions, Pierre?’

‘You don’t imagine I’ll tell you?’

‘Do a bit of work for the Russians on the side, do you?’ ‘I didn’t accept your invitation to lunch to be interrogated.’

‘Never answer a question, do you, Pierre?’ Kingdon poured himself more wine.

‘Not stupid ones.’

‘Funny thing is, back in England you had me by the short and curlies. Now it’s the other way round. You can’t back out of a bleeding thing.’ Kingdon drank some wine. ‘You know what I think, Pierre?’

‘I don’t really care what you think.’

‘I don’t think anyone was trying to kill you yesterday. I think you work for the Kremlin. I think they were just giving you a little warning. Balls this one up, Comrade Brossard, and we won’t miss next time.’

Brossard pushed his plate away as though he had lost what little appetite he had possessed.