Brian Freemantle - Dead End

Jackson tried silently to pick his way through the jumbled declaration. ‘You think there is something to link Dubette with terrorism?’

‘Absolutely not. But there’s something.’

‘Something big enough – important enough – to have got Rebecca killed?’

‘Maybe. But this is another route we’ve travelled before!’

‘You got the slightest whisper – the slightest feeling, nuance, square uncertainty that won’t fit into a round hole – of proof?’

‘You mocking me?’

‘No,’ denied the lawyer, at once. ‘I’m trying to balance what you’re saying – suggesting – against what precious little else makes sense.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing,’ said the scar-faced man. ‘Maybe that’s the cleverness of the whole thing.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Parnell, exasperated by the too familiar protest.

‘It’s too clever to understand.’

‘I’ll accept that philosophy in experimental science. But not having stood at the graveside of someone who’s been murdered. Murder can’t be too clever to understand or solve!’

‘Sometimes it is,’ said Jackson, flatly.

‘This isn’t going to be one of those times.’

The lawyer shook his head. ‘Didn’t you tell me the FBI guys warned you against the way you’re thinking?’

‘Whoever set this whole thing up, did what they did, killed Rebecca like they did, has got to be punished… found, exposed and punished.’

‘Which is why we’re going where we are now, to try to achieve that,’ reminded Jackson. ‘Mine’s the legally protective presence. You’re the guy they’re going to be talking to. You don’t wander on about amorphous conspiracy theories without a single jot of evidence to substantiate them. You listen to the questions and you answer them as honestly – but most importantly, as succinctly – as you can. I don’t want you talking yourself into a different dead end from the one I’ve already got you out of.’

‘I’m not going to talk myself into anything,’ insisted Parnell.

‘That’s what I’m coming along to stop you doing. Why it’s essential that I do come along. And even more essential that you don’t, ever, think you can do things by yourself.’

‘I’ve already had that lecture!’

‘Have it again. Listen – really listen – to it again. You’re right about nuances and uncertainties. Don’t entangle yourself in them. Remember what I said about not representing losers.’

‘I’m not a loser,’ insisted Parnell. ‘Nor will I be. Ever.’ He’d probably come close, he acknowledged. But suddenly, now, he felt he could climb the mountains and swim the oceans again. It was a feeling he welcomed back.

It was a different, larger, room at the FBI field office, with easy chairs and plants with polished leaves instead of desk and stiff-backed-seat formality. Parnell thought he recognized the third waiting FBI man, but it wasn’t until Jackson made the reintroduction that he remembered Edwin Pullinger as the Bureau counsel from the court hearing and later, brief, anteroom hearing.

Parnell said at once: ‘How can I help you further? I didn’t get the impression I contributed much last time.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ agreed Benton.

‘You had any more thoughts about that airline flight number?’ asked Dingley.

It was a clever, almost hypnotic double act, Parnell finally recognized, each man so finely attuned that one could pick up upon the other to weave the loose ends that Jackson had warned about into a snare. ‘I thought we’d covered that?’

‘So did we,’ agreed Dingley. ‘But you know what? We can’t find any Dubette-destined way-bill on that flight out of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle for the last three months.’

‘Which leaves us with a problem,’ took up Benton. ‘What was Ms Lang doing with a number of a Paris to Washington DC flight that wasn’t carrying anything for Dubette? But was, it turns out, a flight that got cancelled four times in a row on the advice of anti-terrorist electronic intercepts?’

‘I don’t know,’ conceded Parnell, dry-throated, seeing the mountains grow higher, the oceans wider. ‘What I do know, and what I’ve already told you, is that Rebecca Lang was totally apolitical, had no connection, interest or association whatsoever with terrorism and that the only possible explanation is that it was planted in her bag, like paint from my car was used to make it look as if I was the one who forced her over the canyon edge.’ The FBI lawyer wasn’t taking part in the interrogation, Parnell realized.

‘That’s not quite my recollection,’ said Dingley. ‘My recollection is that the last time we talked you said it would have been a flight carrying a Dubette shipment from its Paris subsidiary.’

‘The last time we talked I said I thought it would have been carrying something for Dubette,’ rejected Parnell. ‘You’ve just told me it wasn’t. So, the next possible explanation is that it was planted.’

‘What about your political views, Mr Parnell?’ asked Benton, abruptly.

Parnell laughed, genuinely amused. ‘I don’t have the right to vote in this country, which I’m sure you know. In England I voted for the Liberal Democrats, the smallest of the three English political parties. I have never been a member of any radical political movement or organization, am not a Muslim nor do I subscribe to any fanatical Islamic movement or jihads or suicide bombings…’ He looked at Jackson. ‘Anything I’ve left out?’

‘I don’t think so,’ frowned the lawyer, uncomfortably.

Benton said: ‘That wasn’t a question to be treated lightly.’

‘I wasn’t treating it lightly. I was treating it with the contempt it deserved.’ Parnell felt his lawyer’s warning pressure against his arm and recognized his returning confidence was tipping over into arrogance.

‘Did you have a key to the Bethesda house?’ asked Dingley, in one of his sudden directional changes.

‘No,’ said Parnell.

‘Did Ms Lang have a key to your apartment?’ asked Benton.

‘No.’

‘You moved back and forth, between the two?’ queried Dingley, rhetorically. ‘You were going to set up home together. Yet you didn’t have keys to each other’s homes?’

‘It never came up, as a problem. We’d have got around to it, when we started to live together – arriving and leaving at different times.’ He was making another bad impression, Parnell accepted. He had to correct it – correct it and try to discover what, if anything, they had learned. Find out why they were so obviously treating him with the suspicion that they were. Before either agent could speak, he said: ‘What about Bethesda?’

‘Sir?’ questioned Benton, in return.

‘Had it been entered, before you got there with Giorgio Falcone’s key?’

There was the familiar exchange of looks between the two men.

‘We think so,’ said Dingley.

‘Was it or wasn’t it?’ insisted Parnell, impatiently.

‘Looks that way,’ admitted Benton.

‘ How does it look that way?’ persisted Parnell.

‘Like I think I told you before, everything was very neat. Too neat,’ said Dingley.

‘Which brings us to our request,’ picked up Benton. ‘We need fingerprints… for elimination. Yours will be about the place, won’t they?’

‘My client’s not required to provide them, unless he agrees,’ intruded Jackson, at last.

‘Of course I agree,’ said Parnell, before the FBI group had a chance to reply. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Addressing the two agents, he said: ‘You think something was taken from Rebecca’s house?’

Benton gave another of his open-palmed gestures. ‘We’ve got no way of telling. We don’t know what was there in the first place.’