Ian Rankin - Westwind

Just another suicide.

‘I said, what’s going on?’

Hepton snapped out of his reverie, went to the man and shook his hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said, then began to jog back the way he had come, leaving the man standing there uncomprehending.

He arrived at his car without further incident. They wouldn’t want his death to look suspicious, so he didn’t bother to check for bombs under the chassis or snipers on the rooftops. He just got in and drove, trembling throughout his body, heading south towards Boston and further on to Peterborough, and beyond that London.

He stopped once for petrol and asked the attendant where he might find a telephone. There was a payphone on the wall outside the gents’. A man was coming out of the toilets, his face wet. Hepton had noticed a car parked beside the pumps. The man smiled.

‘Never any bloody paper in these places,’ he said, explaining the wet face. Hepton nodded. ‘Needed a bit of a splash, though,’ the man went on. ‘Driving to Leeds tonight. Bloody long way, but the roads are quieter at night than through the day. I’m a rep, you see. You get to know these tricks.’

Hepton smiled again, but offered no reply. The last thing he needed was a lengthy conversation with a professional traveller. The man seemed to take the hint and moved past him, towards the station shop. Hepton turned his attention back to the telephone. He lifted the receiver, slipped a ten-pence piece into the slot and dialled the number of the base.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’d like to speak to Nick Christopher if he’s around.’

It took a minute or so, then Nick’s voice came over loud and clear.

‘Nick here.’

‘Nick? It’s Martin.’

‘Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?’

‘I just wanted to check something. You didn’t leave a note at my flat, did you?’

‘A note?’

No, of course he hadn’t. Because he was in Binbrook, not Louth. Because the note had been written by Harry. Which meant she knew Nick Christopher was Hepton’s best friend...

‘Nick,’ Hepton said. ‘There hasn’t been someone there asking questions about me, has there? A woman in her late twenties, short blonde hair, attractive?’

‘No, can’t say there... Hang on, yes, there was somebody here like that. Saw her go into Fagin’s office. Tasty piece.’

That was it then. All she’d had to do was ask Fagin who Hepton’s closest friend on the base was. Then she’d used his name to lure Hepton into the trap. Not the cleverest of traps, but then it had probably been devised in haste, now that she saw him for the threat he really was.

He rang off and found another ten-pence piece, then took from his pocket the card Harry had given him. He had begun to feel a kind of strange elation at having cheated death. In fact, he felt more alive than he had done in months, perhaps even years. He dialled the number, ready to taunt whoever answered, but heard only a continuous whine from the receiver. He tried again, with the same result. Disconnected.

Had they cleared out then? Or changed the number when they had decided Hepton must die? There didn’t seem any other explanation as to why Harry would have given him the card. Unless... He studied it more closely. Thick card, inflexible, covered in a plastic coating. Quite a robust thing, really, given that all it contained was a telephone number, and a discontinued one at that. He asked the attendant if he possessed such a thing as a knife. The man looked dubious, but they went to the shop, where he found a Swiss Army knife. The rep was whistling cheerily, selecting a dozen or so chocolate bars before moving on to the sparse display of music cassettes. Hepton chose the thinnest blade on the knife and began to cut along the edge of the card, the attendant watching, unsure what to expect. The rep came over too, his selections made.

The plastic was tough, but once he was through it, Hepton noticed that the card itself was very thin, more like paper. He began to peel it off, revealing a thin piece of metal studded with solder.

‘What is it?’ asked the rep, intrigued now.

‘It’s a PCB,’ Hepton answered, quite calmly.

‘A what?’ asked the attendant.

‘A printed circuit board. Smallest one I think I’ve seen.’

There could be no doubting that it was a transmitter of sorts. Crude, as something this size needed to be, but probably effective. Hepton smiled, shaking his head. No need to check your car’s wheel arches these days for an unwieldy magnetised box; something the size of a business card would do the job every bit as well.

‘Can I pay for these?’ the rep asked the attendant and, show over, the attendant nodded, taking back his knife and going behind the counter. Hepton stood beside the rep, waiting his turn to pay for petrol.

‘I’d like a receipt too, please,’ the rep said to the attendant as Hepton held the transmitter between forefinger and thumb and gently, surreptitiously, slipped it into the man’s jacket pocket. He held his breath, then stepped away. But the rep hadn’t noticed anything, and with any luck he would continue all the way to Leeds still in blissful ignorance.

‘Have a good trip,’ Hepton called to him as the man went out to his car. Then, having paid for the tankful of petrol, he went out to his own vehicle, started it and headed off in the opposite direction, whistling.

As he drove, he remembered something and reached into his pocket, bringing out the note Harry had left for him, the one that had led him by the nose towards his intended death. He rolled down the window and threw it out. Was there anything else she had given him? No, nothing, not unless she had planted something on him without his knowledge. He would have to check his clothing.

Wait a minute, though... she had given him something else: a ten-pence piece to pay for the call she said she had made yesterday evening. He angled a hand into his trouser pocket and brought out all his loose change, scattering it on the passenger seat. Then he picked out the three ten-pence pieces that lay there and threw them out of the window too. He hoped someone would pick them up. If one of them contained a backup transmitter, Harry might have another long, hard and fruitless journey ahead of her.

Something else was niggling him. Several things really. For one, Fagin had ordered him to talk to Harry, to tell her everything he knew. So was Fagin in on it too? Or was he merely obeying orders? And who the hell was Villiers? What was it Harry had said? Something about ‘my employers, who are, ultimately, your employers’: but who — ultimately — was Hepton’s employer? The Home Secretary? The head of the MoD? Someone in London, he’d bet on that. But it might take a journalist’s nose to discover the final answer. A good journalist. Someone he could trust.

Supposing, that were, Jilly would even want to speak to him again.

In fact, the smooth-dressed, smooth-spoken Parfit did not return, and Dreyfuss, who had been keening like a young whelp, grew first agitated and then worried and then frustrated. Parfit had said he was coming back to take him away from Sacramento General, away from the vicious General Esterhazy and the cunning Frank Stewart, away from nurses who weren’t real nurses and drugs that did more than merely put a man to sleep. So where the hell was he? What was he doing?

The evening stretched into night, and the night saw Dreyfuss sleepless, pounding the floor of his room on aching feet. A night-duty nurse looked in on him, but he growled at her and she quickly fled. A male attendant, black, uncertain, asked him if he wanted anything.

‘Nothing,’ he snarled, and paced the cage again.

When breakfast arrived, he found himself waking on top of the bed, still wearing slippers and a dressing gown, his forehead damp with sweat.