Lovers and Liars Trilogy (64 page)

“Remember our appointment Sunday,” he said. “You know where to come, Gini. Come after dark. And wear the black dress, Gini….”

There was a click, then the dial tone. Pascal stared across the shadows of the room, and fear for Gini rose up in him, he felt it clench around his heart. He replaced the receiver and took her in his arms. Her body was taut with tension and fear.

“What did he say? Pascal, what did he say?”

“Darling, nothing. Very little.” He began to stroke her hair.

“The same as before?”

“Yes. And then he hung up. Darling, don’t think about it. I’m here….” And then, because he knew it always calmed her, he switched to his own language, all those soothing phrases that he had used to her years before in Beirut—
Soyez calme, tu sais que je t’aime, reste tranquille.

This gentle incantation worked for her: Her breathing became regular and quiet as she became calmer and then slept. They did not work for Pascal. He lay awake, staring into the dark.

A
T ELEVEN FORTY-FIVE ON
Friday, Gini was sitting in the downstairs bar at The Groucho. At twelve the first customers began arriving: a cluster of advertising people; one or two journalists she knew; an actor who was currently king of advertising voice-overs…but not the man she was here to see. Jeremy Prior-Kent, McMullen’s close friend at school and at Oxford, was not a punctual man.

She ordered a mineral water, opened her newspaper, and flicked quickly through its pages. The front page led on the current round of IRA bombings; continuing royal scandals occupied pages three and four; on page five was a photograph of the U.S. ambassador’s wife. Lise Hawthorne had visited Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital the previous day. She was currently chair of its fund-raising committee. There was a photograph of her looking radiant and concerned, with a group of young leukemia victims.

Gini folded up the paper. A group of new arrivals had entered the bar, but none approached her table. It was now a quarter past twelve; Prior-Kent was already fifteen minutes late. She glanced down at the photograph of Lise once more, the woman McMullen had described as a latter-day saint. That morning, after returning from Oxford, she and Pascal had spent hours on the telephone at the Hampstead house, trying to check out the few details McMullen had let slip.

They had established that his claim to a connection with Lise Hawthorne’s distant cousins, the Grenvilles, was true, but they had been unable to discover any more about the illness McMullen had mentioned, which had led to his stay with them in 1972. That “illness,” coming after his abrupt and unexplained departure from Oxford, interested her:
Why
had McMullen thrown up his studies so quickly? What had been the exact nature of that illness, and how long had it lasted? This, she hoped, was a question Prior-Kent might be able to answer—if he ever showed.

She glanced down at her watch. Pascal was due back to get her at one-fifteen. While she was here, he was continuing his checks into McMullen’s firearms license, and his past army career. He would pick up the keys to the St. John’s Wood house before meeting her, and intended to move in there to set up his cameras the next morning. Gini felt a familiar sense of frustration. Sunday was now very close, and although she had not said this to Pascal, she was not optimistic that he would obtain the pictures they hoped for. Was it really likely that Hawthorne would turn up at the gothic house, that he would conveniently stand there on the doorstep with the latest hired blonde? No, it seemed to her it was extremely
unlikely
—in which case they would be back to square one, still attempting to prove or disprove this story by other means.

Later that afternoon they were meeting the woman Suzy from the escort agency, and it was possible that either she, or even Prior-Kent, would provide some sudden breakthrough, but if neither of them produced strong leads, then she and Pascal were still thwarted: All this work, and still no absolute proof. She looked up as a new group of people entered the bar, but none was Jeremy Prior-Kent. It was another group of journalists, whose faces she knew. One of them was Lindsay. Her friend saw her at exactly the same moment, and quickly crossed to her side.

“Hi, Gini. D’you want to join us? We’re just going in for lunch.”

“I can’t, I’m afraid. I’m meeting someone. How was Martinique?”

Lindsay made a face. “Idyllic. Fraught. I got back yesterday—and all hell is breaking loose at the
News.
Have you heard?”

“No, I haven’t been in the office for a couple of days.”

“Well, you should go.” Lindsay grinned. “High drama. It’s getting to be like some Jacobean play—heads rolling, murder and mayhem on the fifteenth floor.”

“Murder?”

“Not
literally,
just a sort of night of the long knives. You mean you really haven’t heard?”

“Not a word. What’s happened?”

“Well, first—
Daiches
was fired. By Jenkins himself.”

“No!
Daiches.
I can’t believe it.”

“Well, apparently they had some huge bust-up. Practically came to blows. Nicholas accused him of going behind his back to Melrose. According to Charlotte, there’s some big story Jenkins had been nursing along. Melrose told him to kill it, and Jenkins
pretended
to play ball. Then he went on with it behind Melrose’s back. And dear Daiches, like the loyal lieutenant he is, thought Melrose ought to be informed.” Lindsay’s smile was a perfect blend of joy and malice. “Unfortunately, Nicholas had ordered up all these files or something, so Daiches could prove what he said was true. Anyway, the upshot was that Daiches was fired, and stayed fired for about three hours, then Melrose turned up, and stormed into Jenkins’s office—”

“This was when?”

“Yesterday. Raised voices behind firmly closed doors. Shortly after Melrose finally left, Daiches was back in his office. Reinstated. The company Cassius. All smiles.”

“And Jenkins?”

“I don’t know.” Lindsay grinned. “We’re all just going in to discuss it now over lunch—but the word is, Jenkins could be out of the building by the end of this afternoon. We’re opening a book on it. You want to place a bet? We’re giving odds on whether Jenkins will be fired, and who will succeed
him.
”

“What’re the odds on Daiches?”

“Fifteen to one originally—now down to nine to one and shortening all the time.”

“Oh, great. If Daiches gets the job, I’m unemployed.”

“Me too. We can resign together. Sign on together at the labor exchange. On the other hand”—Lindsay gave her a dry glance—“we could start putting out feelers elsewhere. I’m going to hit the phones after lunch. You should do the same.”

“I can’t. Not today. No time.” She gave a shrug. “Still, maybe this is good news in disguise. It concentrates the mind wonderfully. There’s no way I’m staying at the
News
to work for Daiches.”

“Me neither.” Lindsay turned round to wave at her friends.

“I must go, Gini. See you soon. Oh. By the way”—she looked at Gini closely—“did it resolve itself—that Pascal Lamartine business?”

“In a way. Yes.”

“I thought so.” Lindsay smiled, this time with genuine warmth. “It shows, you know. Just a kind of light, in the eyes. …See you, Gini.”

She turned away and disappeared with her friends to the restaurant upstairs. Gini sat there, quietly considering this news. Suppose Jenkins were fired? She began to run down a list in her mind of other newspapers or magazines she could approach with this story, should she need to do so. She was halfway through making this list, when at twelve-thirty, some thirty minutes late, the door opened, and a man came into the bar. A tall man, a familiar man, not a man you would forget: He was thin with reddish hair tied back in a ponytail. As before, he was wearing a flamboyant mustard-yellow Armani suit. She saw him scan the tables, then begin to move across to her. So McMullen’s old friend had not, it seemed, spent the last three days scouting for film locations in Cornwall. He had been otherwise engaged, directing a sex education video, overseeing an escort agency, making sure Bernie dealt with eighty-six telephone sex lines.

Reaching her table, he gave her a long, appraising look, then a broad smile. “You must be Genevieve Hunter, yes?” he said. “We meet at last. Sorry I’m late. So tell me—what have I done? Why the sudden interest from the
News
?”

Gini’s first impression of the man was that he was—or intended to be—disarming. He seemed very relaxed; he ordered himself a Mexican beer, which he drank in a modish way, from the bottle with a twist of lime. He lit a cigarette, chatted away about nothing in particular, complained in a rueful way that he’d been at a party the night before, and was nursing the mother of all hangovers. He must have been in his forties but looked younger. He had a soft, freckled, almost girlish face. His manner was mildly flirtatious, but he had alert greenish-blue eyes, and she suspected that beneath all his badinage, he was no fool.

That impression was rapidly confirmed the second she mentioned James McMullen’s name. Kent was not ingenuous, as his employees Hazel and Bernie had been; she was scarcely into her preamble before he stopped her with a little lift of the hand.

“Hey, slow down just a second. Let me get this straight. That’s why it was so urgent to see me? You want to ask about
James
? Why?”

Gini had anticipated this. “Can this be confidential?” she asked.

“Sure. Sure. What fun. Go on.”

“Well, I can only give you an outline. James McMullen had been helping me with a story I’m working on, and—”

“What story would that be exactly?”

“It’s an investigation. I’d prefer not to go into the details. …”

“Oh, dear.” He gave a small smile. “I think you’re going to have to. After all, James is a friend.”

“Very well. It’s a story on British mercenary organizations. There are a number of them in existence. Their fortunes fluctuate. They’ve been especially active recently in Bosnia.”

“Sure. I’ve read that in the papers….”

“Most of them are run by ex-army personnel. It’s a secretive world, and it’s not easy to get leads. James McMullen was one of my best sources. Then he disappeared, just before Christmas.”

“James did? Well, well, well.” He gave her an appraising look. “Go on.”

“I want to find him again. Fast. His former regiment is no help at all. I’ve tried his sister and a number of friends—no luck. I thought you might know where I could track him down.”

“Is that all?” He smiled. “And I thought it was me you were interested in. What a shame.” He took another swallow of beer. “Can’t help, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen James in ages—not since last summer. James does take off, you know, for months at a time. He’s done it before.”

“But you did see him last summer?”

“Sometime then. July, August—I can’t remember. He rang up out of the blue. We had dinner together, a rather drunken dinner—on my side anyway. James doesn’t drink much, as you may know. We went back to that flat of his, down by the river—you’ve been there?”

“Yes, I have. It’s a great apartment.”

“Isn’t it just? Anyway, we went back there, talked for a while, I toddled off, late, around three in the morning, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Were you surprised to hear from him? Like that—out of the blue?”

He shrugged. “Not really. James and I aren’t that close anymore. We see each other from time to time. Catch up on the news, what we’ve both been up to workwise, womanwise, that sort of thing.”

There was a pause. Gini considered the date of this meeting, which must have taken place around the time McMullen had been staying in Oxfordshire with the Hawthornes. She would have liked to date it more precisely, to know whether it took place before or after McMullen had heard the story of her marriage from Lise.

“So tell me,” she went on. “When you had that meeting, did McMullen seemed changed in any way? Did he discuss with you any major event that had happened to him recently?”

Kent considered, then shrugged. “A major event? Nothing I can remember. But then, James doesn’t really go in for confessionals—it’s not his style. He’d thrown up that dreary banking job his father had foisted on him, but that was much earlier that year.” He gave her another of those rueful, engaging smiles. “I probably did most of the talking. Banged on about the films I was making, that kind of thing. Two drinks and I become a monomaniac.”

He glanced away toward the bar. Catching the eye of the voice-over king, he gave a little gesture of greeting. He took another long swallow of the Mexican beer. Gini hesitated. Prior-Kent was not the type of man she would expect to be behind an escort agency, or sex education videos, and she could foresee this interview dwindling away into amiable anecdotes that were no use to her at all. Thanks to his lateness, she was now running out of time. What she needed, she decided, was some leverage.

“So,” she began carefully, raising her eyes to his. “When you had that conversation with James McMullen, and you were telling him about your work, did you mention your other activities, or just the ads you make for TV?”

There was a small silence. Kent put down his beer. “Other activities?”

“Your less public activities. The ones you don’t list for Salamander Films in the trade directories. The sex education videos you make, for instance. Or the escort agency your company runs from the same address. Or your telephone sex line operations. Did you tell James McMullen about those?”

The question had been risky, and the silence following it was long. Gini would not have been surprised had Kent ended the interview there and then, but, instead, he gave her a long, considering look. She saw amusement begin in his eyes; he smiled, and then he laughed.

“Oh,
fuck.
Oh, bloody
hell.
” He sighed. “Mistake, Jeremy, my old son. Rule number one, never talk to reporters. Rule number two, be especially wary if they have blond hair and beautiful eyes and a sweet smile. I suppose I should have known. Ah, well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later. What am I facing now, a full-scale exposé in the
News?
The porn king revealed?”