Turquoiselle Page 4

  Latham’s voice stopped. (It had been his bleak voice, the one he used for such, and similar, announcements.)

  Herons spoke: “Who did it?”

  Latham shrugged, “We have no idea. Unless just possibly it was Dusa herself.”

  “Why?” That came from Ireland, smoking his fifth cigarette in the corner. Unlike every pub and office in England, this room had no smoking ban.

  “Why is the thing we want to learn, of course,” said Latham flatly. “Why, and if not, who. But there’s very little about her on record, beyond the obvious profile-monitoring we all undergo. Read her file. It is now available to everybody present here.”

  “What’s next, then?” asked Herons.

  “Nothing yet. We do our homework. We keep our heads down and antennae up. Be ready. This is a Level Blue.”

  “So low?” Herons seemed affronted.

  “So far. But it might go up to a Green tomorrow.”

  They murmured.

  Carver had risen to leave the room with the rest, but Latham directed at him a smile and the smallest shake of his head. Carver therefore turned back, pretending to select a pen from the cluster on the table.

  Latham, as he walked past, muttered, “Give it a couple of minutes, then drop by my room, will you?”

  Carver did as Latham said. There were frequently clandestine signals it was necessary to follow. He wondered what Latham would want him to do, and was glad again that Donna was away from the house. Under the circumstances the task might be complex and mean more hours to put in, and though she was used to what she called his extra-curricular outings, if she was still unsettled it might have caused problems. He wondered if Dusa had had relatives, apart from the mother, who must now be informed of her death, and if so who would see to it, the normal authorities, or Mantik. This job would not fall to him at least.

  When he reached Latham’s room, (a miniature of Stuart’s on the floor above), the lights were lowered to a sociable level, and the vodka and glasses had broken free of the cupboard. Outside, beyond the blinds and the drawn curtains, an innovation Latham preferred, tarpaulins flapped and scaffolding rattled in a thickly rising wind.

  “Sorry to drag you in on your R and R, Carver, but it seemed best.”

  “That’s fine, Mr Latham.”

  “Good, good. Take a drink, yes, go on, we can sort out your travel arrangements in a minute, no worries. I think we owe you a cab home.”

  Carver poured the vodka, and drank a meagre sip. What did Latham want? Something, plainly, that he meant to build up to.

  “Take a seat. Yes, that’s it. Just something I want to play over with you. I suppose you knew Silvia a little, did you?”

  Carver said, “Not really.”

  “Just used to meet her in the corridor, yes? Yes. But the odd exchange of chat, I expect?”

  “No, Mr Latham.”

  “That’s the trouble, you see. That’s just what everyone says. Kept to herself. And a bad temper. Typical sulky Latin, that’s Herons’ version. But I think he tried to get under her duvet.”

  Carver said nothing. Herons liked to imply he could get under most female duvets, Latham should be well-enough educated in such facts not to mention their veracity or falseness.

  “So she was a social mystery, then,” said Latham, and his voice, which had become the plum-jam version, was sticky now with regret. “Bloody shit of a way for a girl like that to go. Not even thirty yet. Clearly something weighing on her mind, wouldn’t you think? Some deep problem. And never spoke to anyone. Felt she couldn’t trust them.”

  He knows. Carver took another nearly non-existent nip of the vodka, scarcely more than a taste of its fumes. He knows she approached me.

  “Well any way, Carver,” said Latham, downing his own generous glass with a deliberately finalising flourish, “before I let you go, just one last thing. I’d just like you to listen to something for me.”

  As Latham touched the sound control button, and the yellow light winked on, Carver, if quite incoherently, somehow knew also what was coming. Not the perhaps predictable thing, but the nonsensical one; it was surreal and absurd, unbelievable, and could not happen.

  Then out of the 3P disc-player he heard Silvia Dusa’s voice, not yet thirty, let alone forty. “You see, Car,” she said as she had on the bench under the trees, “I have – I’ve done something stupid.” And behind her voice, if more muffled now, the intermittent rumbling of the council contraption relining the paths .

  The gap which followed was not, he thought, as long as it had seemed to be at the time. But there – in it as before, he could count the three choruses of the machine.

  And then his own voice: “You mean about your mother.”

  Carver glanced at Latham. But Latham sat listening, relaxed yet intent, his chin on his hand and the empty glass, of very polished crystal, resting carefully to one side. He might have been concentrating on a world class radio play, one he had pencilled in, as he might have said, because it was by a writer he greatly liked, or about a subject that intrigued him.

  Silvia Dusa had done what she had accused Carver of doing. She had taken out with her, and then activated, a 3P – a Third Person – the infallible Mantik recording device which, allegedly, could even pick up conversation through the rush of running water or a loudly played stereo.

  Dusa was spitting out her dislike of the mother now, her mother’s irrelevance, filial fear or love, in this case, inapplicable. And then she said, as before, “...when not thinking clearly. I have – given something to... someone.”

  And now Carver would calmly say, as he had done, “You need to talk to Jack Stuart,”

  But instead Carver said something else.

  Carver said: “All right. You’d better tell me, then.”

  And after another pause, “Come on, Silvia. You wouldn’t have spoken to me in the first place, would you, if you weren’t going to confide. Felt you had to. So let’s get on with it, shall we? And I’ll see what I can do.”

  Four

  “You’re too sure. It can’t be so straightforward. How could it be? No – I don’t. I can’t. I shouldn’t have spoken. No. I – am sorry, I apologise. It was nothing,’’

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Silvia. It’s obviously something.”

  “Nothing. No. I was mistaken, Car.”

  “You can’t go back on it now.” (He heard the man who was him, confident and persuasive, with a numbed aversion that did not amount to doubt). “Simply tell me the rest. Oh come on, we’ve all done unwise things, from time to time. It happens. We can sort it out, you and I.”

  “No. I see now, I must go to Jack Stuart–”

  “Oh God, Silvia, do you really think that?” (The man – himself – gently laughed.) “Stuart? He’ll hang you. He is very able, at that.”

  And then the rising note of purely physical alarm in her voice, “Let me go. Let go of me–” And a kind of scuffling quite discernible over the on-off rumble of the path repairs. A bird gave a shrill alarm call, even its retreating wings were to be heard. And then she hissed like a cat, or one of those snakes the nicknamers said she hid in her black hair.

  Both of them were breathing quickly, as if they had been running together, or hungrily kissing, or having sex. And then the disc roared into a huge chasm of silence, and nothing else rose from it. It had, maybe, offered up enough.

  Although, of course, the sounds – machine, bird, voices, breath – went on playing. Replaying.

  “We’re almost there, Mr Carver. There’s the church – houses – and the pub. The Bell, isn’t it?”

  “All right. You can let me out here.”

  “Er, Mr Latham said all the way to your door, Mr Carver.”

  “My partner,” Carver said, “is ill. The noise of the car will disturb her.”

  “Well, Mr Carver, if it comes to that, I expect you will, too, when you go in – can’t avoid it. And it’s a bloody windy night. Temperature’s dropped to 9. No, I’ll drop you off up the lane, by your house
. Nice and snug.”

  What did the Mantik cabby think Carver would do? Leap out and sprint for the woods? Vanish in the vast wild terrain that so briefly surrounded this English suburban village? He could do it, anyway, surely, once the cab had gone.

  “Yes. OK.”

  And “Let me go,” insisted the panting, struggling Dusa-voice in his skull. “Let go of me–”

  “The disc’s been tampered with, Mr Latham.”

  “Oh, come on, now, Carver. Don’t be a twat. 3P’s can’t be fiddled about with. That’s the whole point of them. They can be used for all kinds of legit recording or audio surveillance, or blocking of same. But once they have the record, that is it. The old days of course were different. As they say, that was then.”

  “I didn’t speak to her the way I seem to be speaking on the disc.”

  Latham, non-vocal, pursed his lips.

  “I told her myself to go to Jack Stuart at once. I said I couldn’t help, she had to see to it.”

  “How odd,” said Latham, in a quick, flighty, bantering way. “I wonder what it was she did though. Or did she let you in on it, Carver? After she turned the 3P off – or whatever happened to it. It sounded to me rather as if it had been dropped. But then she must just have grabbed it, mustn’t she, and run for cover. Was that it? Frustrating. It must have been. Last straw. What you were doing, you were playing her along, weren’t you, trying to tease it out of her. I can quite see that. Then you could just have gone straight to Stuart yourself and spilled the full Heinz. Yes?”

  “No,” Carver said stonily. He stared at Latham, into Latham’s pouchy clever eyes. “However that disc was prepared – sampling, a backtrack from the park and then a voice mimic for me, perhaps – I didn’t say anything about her telling me, and my helping her out. I actively discouraged that. I told her not to tell me, to tell only Stuart, and as quickly as she could. Or if she couldn’t face him, go to you.”

  “Me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Latham’s eyelids had gradually folded to half-closed, as Carver had seen them do now and then over a drink, a steak, an ice-cream. “It’s an odd one, isn’t it? What was it you suggested? And actor mimicking your voice? That’s a rare thought. Normally detectible. And why? The disc,” Latham added softly, “was found in her bag, on the floor of the Ladies. Luckily the thing was in its casing, so the blood didn’t get into it. It could have been cleaned up. But mucky.”

  Carver had stopped talking. Latham did not believe him.

  Understandably. Third Persons were reckoned impervious virtually to anything, no blood, no human meddling could eliminate or distort their message. The very latest backroom science. And so, Carver was lying.

  Did Latham therefore think Carver, having failed to get in on whatever tempting treachery or idiocy Silvia Dusa had undertaken, had later killed her? How had he done that, then? There were no drugs in her system or marks elsewhere on her body. She had not been, presumably, blind drunk. So Carver, perhaps sneaking in from the smoker’s garden, had told her to sit back on the loo floor, put on plastic gloves, and then neatly cut her wrist vein lengthways, without an objection, or a single razorous slip.

  He imagined Latham would have to detain him, no doubt leaving him first to stew, then suggesting Carver sleep over on the sixth floor, where there were a series of cell-like bedrooms, used for the nocturnal sojourns of those on duty, on watch, exhausted, or held in mild-mannered custody.

  But Latham merely suggested they go down to the foyer-hall, where Latham could access transport, and Ken could arrange for Carver another fake cab.

  “Oh, just one last thing perhaps I ought to show you,” Latham remarked in a throwaway style, as they descended to the third floor. The lift, already programmed, halted. Carver noted Latham, as Jack Stuart was inclined to, seemed to be repeating a lot of the same words – just, last. Did it mean something? Or was it just one last gambit to induce, (or allay?) unease?

  They walked into one of the small side rooms. Latham hit the lights and woke the automatic on the computer. The large screen brightened, and without pause flooded up the static drowned image of a dead woman on a mortuary slab. Dusa,naturally.

  How young, how agonisingly un-grownup she looked. No, she was not in her forties. This was a well developed teenager, sixteen, eighteen, perhaps. And how dead.

  It was a fact some corpses, for by now Carver had been shown, both on screen and in photographs, several, could look startlingly youthful. But in converse cases it went the other way – a sixty-year-old boy who had died of rat poison at the age of twelve; a hag of seven left pristine but empty by the side-blast of a bomb. They always shocked you. But the shock altered. After the very first, for Carver, the impact was lessened. Not in any trite or pragmatic way. More as if some shield was now flung up before and about him in the very second his brain accepted what his eyes revealed.

  She had been beautiful, it was undeniable, Silvia Dusa. Decently covered by a sheet, needing only her face and her left arm and wrist to be displayed, yet the contours, valleys and soft full mounds of her body were explicit. Her black hair, thick and vibrant enough still to have retained, in those moments of visual capture, its luxuriance and scope, lay under her face, throat and shoulders, the perfect backdrop: ebony under honey.

  “A waste,” said Latham. “A true waste. Still a virgin.” He spoke the leery words respectfully and with regret. “A damned bloody shame.”

  Acting all this, one assumed. He would be studying Carver’s reactions.

  Carver said, emotionless yet grave, “What about her mother?”

  “Oh that. She didn’t have one. That is, the woman died years ago – ‘90’s, 80’s. In Venice, I believe. Death In Venice. Just goes to show.”

  They stayed motionless and dumb before the icon of dead Silvia for another few minutes. And reluctantly, but clinically, Carver took in the drained wrist, with its rucked, red-black lesion. The skin, the opened vein, seemed strangely frozen, a sort of meaty-ice had formed on and out of them.

  “Let’s see about cars,” said Latham.

  The screen sank through violet, the overhead lights through scarlet, to oblivion.

  Outside the wind kicked at the scaffolding. Like some giant hell-harp its poles and joints twanged and plinged in impotent answering rage.

  Carver made coffee in the kitchen of his house. The fake cab was still parked, ticking and unlit, outside in the lane, and exacerbating the security light. When Carver turned off the downstairs house lights, the cab eventually roused itself and drove smoothly off. He suspected it might nose back again later, as if cruising, but did not bother with checking whether it checked on him.

  When next Carver drove himself, it went without saying, he could expect to be tailed. But that could happen anyway, at any time. Mantik took care.

  Why had he been let go?

  Why not, if they thought he really was innocent, had just been rather naive in attempting to lure the facts of Dusa’s misdemeanour out of her – only wanting thereby to get her into bed.

  (A virgin. That had thrown him. More than his mistake on her age.)

  They would certainly have him back for an in-depth meeting, however. He could not evade that. He had never had to undergo anything really serious in that line. But now he would.

  He could not fathom what had happened with the Third Person, or the voice that was his own yet was not his at all.

  It was all a game though, in its way. Everything. What was the Whitehall Mantik office’s nickname for its staff? The Enemies. Which could indicate, demonstrably, they were the enemies of designated adversaries, or of increepers and traitors, but too of each other, friendly enemies in that scenario – but all en garde, one against another. Ready at any time to duel, to stitch up, to outwit and condemn. To punish.

  Carver went upstairs. It was late. Despite Donna’s absence he would not sleep in the main bedroom. From the spare room he could, at an angle, glimpse the faint blue-green sheen reflecting on the birch trees. The le
aves were falling, thinner, routed by the wind, which now had sunk. The window-glass felt cold to the touch, despite the radiator below.

  Was that the cab-car cruising back outside? Probably.

  He went to bed in the dark, and dropped down into the fog of sleep, seeing, as he did so, where a dead woman lay on a grey bare slab, but he only floated past her, a swimmer deep in the lagoon, to the thick soft mud of unconsciousness below.

  Andy walked out of Woolworths with the packet of toffees he had bought, the striped sort his mother liked, and a tube of five coloured pencils in one of his jacket pockets. In the other pocket was a small assortment of Woolworths delicacies, a rubber, two biros – one blue and one red – a tiny gold action figure in a plastic pouch, and a lipstick in a shade he believed was called Firebrand. This last was also for his mother, and also bought.

  It was her birthday on Tuesday. He had no idea if she would like the lipstick, but she always effusively said how lovely and thoughtful it was of him to save up for a present for her from what she called his ‘dole’ – the money, mostly in coins, she gave him when she could.