Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

She flopped on to her unmade bed. He remained standing.

‘Pat Greenwald is dead.’ Megan quickly described what she had discovered from her Internet searches of the previous evening.

‘So you think Henry Greenwald might know something about his mother’s activities?’

‘Maybe. She might have left him papers. Or he might have seen something as a child.’

‘It’s worth a shot, I suppose. How are we going to contact him?’

‘Not we. Maya. I messaged her last night in New York, and she agreed to go and see him. Maya can be persuasive if she wants to be. Especially with men.’

‘Bill won’t like it if he finds out. And neither will Alice.’

‘ If they find out,’ said Megan, with a mischievous smile.

After a satisfying plate of sausages, fried egg and baked beans for breakfast, Toby’s presence was requested at the police station in King’s Lynn to meet the MI5 officer, Prestwitch.

Having dutifully guarded Pear Tree Cottage overnight, the police had accepted breakfast from Alice and then left. Toby was on his own. He still had no idea how badly the man who had shot Lars wanted to kill him too, and it disturbed him, as it disturbed Alice.

He appreciated the drive alone in his car on the empty Sunday morning roads. It gave him time to think. He checked his mirror regularly, and was relieved that there was no would-be assassin following him.

His initial reaction to Lars’s death was to repeat to MI5 all he had been told by Bill, in the hope that they would pass the information on to the police who would use it to solve the two killings, and throw whoever was responsible behind bars before he could murder anyone else. Like Toby. Or Bill, or any of the Guth sisters.

But now things were not so simple.

Firstly, most of what Bill had told him would be known by Admiral Robinson. He was there in the control room on the submarine when Lars had attacked Commander Driscoll. He had arrested Bill for assaulting Craig. And he would almost certainly have been informed about the leak to the KGB, if only to answer questions from the FBI about it in 1996.

Had Robinson told MI5 any of this? And had Prestwitch told the police? These were questions Toby was curious to know the answers to.

That left the obvious point that very little of the information Toby could give Prestwitch was new, or at least new to Robinson.

And then of course there was Alice’s demand that he trust her. In particular that he not tell them about Pat Greenwald. He wasn’t sure what to do about that.

As soon as he arrived at the station, he was met by Prestwitch, who ushered him into an interview room where Admiral Robinson was waiting for him. Prestwitch seemed a little more agitated than he had been the previous morning: the tip of one of his prominent teeth peeked out beneath his pursed lips. Robinson looked much cooler.

‘Thank you for coming in, Toby,’ said Prestwitch. ‘And thank you also for not talking to the police yesterday. You did the right thing by asking to speak to us.’

‘I hope so,’ Toby said. He glanced up at a camera pointed right at him.

‘The recording equipment is off,’ said Prestwitch. ‘No one else will hear whatever you say to us.’

‘I’m not sure I am concerned about that,’ I said.

‘We are,’ said the admiral.

I bet they are, Toby thought.

‘OK,’ Toby said. ‘There had been some discussion over Thanksgiving about the death of Lieutenant Craig Naylor, who, it turns out, is Justin Opizzi’s natural father.’

‘Tell us about it,’ Prestwitch said.

So he told them about Lars claiming he had killed Craig on the submarine, and about how Bill had subsequently told him and Megan that he had been the one to incapacitate the weapons officer. He tried to gauge their reaction as he did so, especially Prestwitch’s. Was this new information to him? Prestwitch showed no surprise, but he was listening carefully.

Admiral Robinson was just watching him.

‘Was there anything else?’ Prestwitch asked when Toby had finished.

Was there? Should Toby mention Pat Greenwald? He wasn’t yet sure.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Now, can I tell the police this? Or have you already told them?’

Prestwitch glanced at Robinson. ‘We haven’t, but we will. With two murders, there is no doubt that it is relevant, especially since Justin was Craig’s son.’

‘Didn’t you think it relevant yesterday?’

‘That’s a good question. You now know what happened on board the Alexander Hamilton in 1983, and I am sure you appreciate why we need to keep that secret, even now. But we should tell the police that Craig Naylor was killed on the submarine, and you should tell them about Justin Opizzi believing Lars da Silva killed his biological father. But on no account describe the circumstances of Lieutenant Naylor’s death. That is and will remain Classified.’

‘All right,’ Toby said. ‘But won’t the police need to know why Craig died?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Prestwitch. ‘MI5 will keep a close watch on this investigation, and we will advise the police as necessary.’

That didn’t sound ideal to Toby, and he was willing to bet it didn’t sound ideal to the police either.

He turned to the admiral. ‘Have you told Mr Prestwitch everything that went on on board that submarine?’

Robinson’s face remained impassive. ‘Everything that could conceivably be of use to the investigation.’

‘Not everything, then,’ Toby said, looking at Prestwitch.

But Prestwitch didn’t seem bothered by Admiral Robinson’s answer. ‘I only know in broad terms what happened on the Hamilton . I don’t know the details, and I don’t need to. That’s why we are fortunate the admiral has flown here to help us.’

‘To keep things covered up?’ Toby said.

‘Absolutely,’ said the admiral. ‘That’s a lot of what intelligence services do. Preserve national secrets.’

Things became just a little bit clearer to Toby. He believed MI5 wanted to find out who had killed Sam Bowen and Lars da Silva, but they wanted to keep the near-launch quiet even more.

There was even a chance that they had been involved in the murders, although Toby couldn’t really believe that.

But repeating what Bill had told him about Pat Greenwald would serve no purpose. They almost certainly knew about it already — or at least Robinson did. Plus Alice had made him promise not to. Toby decided it was better to trust his wife than MI5.

Prestwitch asked Toby to wait while he and the admiral briefed the police. Toby fled the station to a small park nearby, and sat on a bench staring at the town’s war memorial, still adorned with the armistice wreaths from a couple of weeks before, and the old medieval tower of a long dismantled friary. He tried to make sense of what he knew and what he didn’t know, and to decide how much of that to tell the police.

After half an hour, he returned to the station, where DC Atkinson met him and led him back to a different interview room. Inspector Creswell showed up and the recording equipment was switched on.

‘Thank you for coming in, Toby,’ the inspector began. ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t talk to us yesterday, but I do understand why. We’ve just spoken to MI5, who have briefed us on what happened on the submarine back in 1983, but I would be grateful if you could tell us all you know in your own words.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Toby said. ‘I can’t tell you everything. Only what Mr Prestwitch has cleared me to say.’

Creswell pursed her lips. ‘All right. I understand that too. Tell me what you know about Craig Naylor’s death.’

Toby told them as much as he thought he could, and probably a bit more. He also told them about Justin’s anger at Craig’s death, and Lars’s false admission that he was responsible. He felt guilty when he recounted Brooke’s visit the evening before — he was quite sure Brooke would not have expected what she said to her family to be repeated to the police.