Adrian Magson - No Tears for the Lost

Palmer’s Saab was already in the small car park behind the pub when Riley arrived in the village, a collection of small, stone-built cottages half a mile from Colebrooke house. She locked the Golf and ducked through the low front door, and found Palmer nursing a fruit juice at a table in one corner. Another glass stood across the table. He looked half asleep, but she wasn’t fooled for a minute.

She dropped copies of the earlier emails from Tristram on the table in front of him, and sat down while he read them.

‘This is what brought you up here yesterday.’ His face remained blank, but she felt sure incredulity might be lurking beneath the surface. ‘Not the wedding. I might have known.’ He slid the emails back across the table. ‘It’s a crank,’ he said finally. ‘Somebody with an overactive imagination. Do you have any proof — any hard details of what Myburghe is supposed to have done?’

She knew Palmer wasn’t being as cynical as he sounded. He wasn’t stupid, and knew perfectly well that not all the people he worked for were innocent or paranoid. Nor were they all driven to surround themselves with visible protection as a mark of their celebrity status. Some genuinely had reason to fear for their safety — even if merely from the exposure of their family routine by the work of the paparazzi. Where he could, she knew he vetted clients before accepting contracts. Anyone overtly criminal, he left well alone. In other cases, he trod carefully and made his judgements as he progressed.

‘I’ve only got what Tristram tells me,’ she said. ‘But there’s something about it that has the ring of truth.’

He shrugged and said nothing, waiting for her to make out a case for what she was suggesting. He needed to be convinced.

‘Okay, so it’s thin,’ she admitted. ‘But we’ve both worked with less than this before. I know you often go by gut feeling. This is my turn.’

‘Maybe. But this isn’t just anybody.’

‘That’s my point. Even if this Tristram is making this up, why pick Myburghe — unless he’s got something against him? He’s your protectee or whatever you call them. What if Tristram’s driven to do more than send a few cranky emails?’ She paused to let that sink in, then asked, ‘When did Myburghe first go to Colombia?’

Frank pursed his lips. ‘Years ago. He pretty much made it a career posting. Why?’

‘As far back as the eighties?’

‘Eighty-one was his first tour.’ Then he sat up, his antennae twitching. ‘You’ve had more emails, haven’t you? What did they say?’

Riley took out the latest communication from Tristram and slid it across the table. Palmer read it once, then again, before looking at her and shaking his head. ‘This could mean anything.’

‘Come on, Palmer,’ she protested. ‘This is getting too close to the core, isn’t it? Nineteen eighty-two was the Falklands. Where was Myburghe at that time?’

He sighed deeply and stared at the ceiling, then leaned across the table, one eye on the nearest customers. They were too engrossed in their drinks to be paying any attention.

‘Okay. I’ll tell you what I know. But this isn’t for publication, got it? I’ve only just been briefed about it. In any case, it might not have anything to do with what this Tristram is alleging.’ He took a sip of his juice. ‘Sir Kenneth Myburghe has two daughters, the elder of which, Victoria, is getting married. He also has an eighteen-year-old son named Christian. Sir Kenneth recently returned to the UK after spending most of his life overseas — almost all of it in Latin America. He did it the hard way, working his way up the ladder from consular assistant to vice consul and then up to the plum post of ambassador in the embassy in Bogotá. Four months ago, they pulled him back. The implication was that it was prior to another posting. That hasn’t happened.’

‘Why?’

‘No idea. He should have got one by now. But that’s by the by. A few weeks ago, he began receiving threats.’

‘What sort of threats?’

‘Phone calls to begin with. Silent calls, nobody there — that kind of thing. He thought it was computerised call centre dialling, but they became too insistent. Occasionally there were a few words whispered down the line before the caller hung up. Nothing specific, just vague threats. Then there were messages on his answer phone saying he was going to die. Three weeks ago he got a stream of letters. Some contained a single black feather, others a crushed spider.’

‘Yuck. It could be this Tristram.’

‘It’s nasty, whoever it is. Most of the threats arrived by post at his home. Sir Kenneth dismissed them; said he couldn’t concern himself with every crank call or letter he received.’

‘Big of him. What else?’

‘Else?’

‘You said most of the threats. That means there’s an else. The elses are what make your eyes light up.’

‘Ah. You mean the fake parcel-bomb.’

‘See? I told you. How fake?’

‘Clock, wires, batteries and something called Silly-Putty, which was once big among ten-year-olds, apparently. It arrived before I came on the scene. Myburghe called the bomb squad for that one. They weren’t impressed; they only like going out to poke things that really do go bang. Childish pranks annoy them.’

‘I take it Sir Kenneth doesn’t have grandchildren with fertile imaginations?’

‘No. The latest threat was last week, just before his son Christian was due back from a trip to the States.’

Riley sensed Palmer was about to tell her something nasty.

‘Christian didn’t come back, did he?’

‘No.’

‘He’s probably working his way through all the girls on Venice Beach. He’ll turn up when he runs out of money. Or stamina.’

Palmer shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The boy didn’t come back, but one of his fingers did.’

********

‘What the hell could Myburghe have done to deserve that?’ Riley asked, her voice low. They had moved in one giant leap from a diplomat receiving threats, to fake parcel bombs and now body parts in the post. How much worse could this get? She was beginning to view the shadowy Tristram in a whole new light.

‘Maybe being our man in Colombia was enough.’

Riley wasn’t sure. In journalistic terms, mentioning Colombia rarely brought thoughts of their coffee or other edible crops. It was more the powdered export that sprang to mind — the kind which doesn’t come decaffeinated but has the power to send people to sleep. For good.

‘By ‘our man’, do you mean there was more to his position than Ambassador?’ As she knew, the term could mean all manner of things, from the senior embassy position to someone with an altogether more secretive role.

‘No, he was just the Ambassador.’

‘Oh.’ As brief as her research had been so far, she already had a fund of information about the reality of power and influence in Colombian life. The families running drug production in the hills of Colombia were notoriously brutal in their methods and indiscriminate in their targets, especially when someone threatened their lucrative operations. The British and Americans had been trying for years, with little real success in spite of destroying acres of poppy-producing fields, laboratories and supply-lines. The country was rugged enough and the rewards vast enough to mean that whenever one operation closed down, another sprang up overnight in a new location. That required more teams of soldiers in helicopters to scour more miles of hills and valleys and the use of fires to halt production wherever it was discovered. It made the people running the operations very unpopular among the poverty-stricken locals.

‘He’d have still found it easy to make enemies,’ Palmer said, guessing what she was thinking. ‘It’s one of the reasons why the embassy in Bogotá has a round-the-clock close protection team of Royal Military policemen and some thick armour-plated glass on cars and buildings.’