Lovers and Liars Trilogy (84 page)

She stared at this white face with its glittering eyes, and turned away. She began to pace the room, up and down, up and down. After a short while an expressionless Malone returned. He closed the door, plugged in the telephone he was holding, and held out the receiver. As Gini took it, she heard John Hawthorne’s voice.

She gave a low cry of relief and began talking very fast, the words tumbling over one another. Hawthorne interrupted her at once.

“Gini,” he said. “Gini, you’re all right? What’s happened? Where were you?”

“It’s McMullen.” Gini was speaking very fast. “It’s McMullen. He isn’t dead. I’m sure he’s not dead.”

“Gini. It’s all right. Try to be calmer. Listen, we know that. My people know that. The results of the post mortem came through at four
P.M.
today. The blood group was wrong. Gini, listen to me—”

“He isn’t
here.
They’re looking for him here,” Gini said. “He was here earlier—at least I think he was. He has a cottage here, up in the woods on the other side of the valley opposite your house. I went there—and I think he was there too. He locked me in. But that was hours ago. At four, or maybe five. Then he left. He took my car. I think he took my car—someone did.”

“Wait.” Hawthorne’s voice was suddenly very sharp. “Just wait a minute, will you, Gini? Don’t say any more on this line. Put Malone on. Will you do that?”

Malone had been watching her closely throughout this exchange. Silently, she handed him the telephone, then sank down into a chair. Malone stood next to her. She could hear the faint sound of Hawthorne, speaking rapidly; Malone said little, and his face remained expressionless throughout. After a few minutes he nodded, then handed the telephone back to her.

“Gini,” John Hawthorne said, and he sounded much calmer, much warmer, so his voice was like a lifeline. “Gini, I want you to listen to me very carefully. It’s nearly three in the morning—did you know that? Malone says you’re in shock. He says your face and hands are badly cut. This is what I want you to do. I want you to let them help you clean yourself up, and make sure you’re not hurt. I want you to have something to eat and drink—no, Gini, don’t interrupt. Then, in about an hour, I want you to come here in the car with Malone, because I need to talk to you myself and I can’t do that on the telephone, not even this telephone. Now, do you understand that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Gini, Malone will stay with you the whole way. Door to door it’s an hour at this time of night. If I can’t be with you as soon as you get here to the residence—and I might not be able to be because we have a few problems on this end as well—then I’ll be with you just as soon as I can. You understand? But I have to see you, Gini, and I have to talk to you.” He paused, and dropped his voice gently. “You remember what I said to you before, about giving me a few more days?”

“Yes. I do. But…”

“It’s hours now, Gini. Hours—that’s all. Now, listen to me. Don’t discuss this with Malone, or with anyone else. Just come straight here, you promise me?” He paused and sudden amusement lifted his voice. “I have to tell you,” he went on, “that you don’t have a great deal of choice in the matter. I intend to make sure you’re safe.”

Gini looked at Malone uncertainly. She could hear the same seductive directness in Hawthorne’s tones that she had heard in her apartment on Friday night She said, “I’ll do that but on one condition…”

“A condition? And what is that?”

“I have to call Pascal. I have to call him now.”

There was a silence, then a sigh. “Of course,” he replied evenly. “Put Malone back on. He won’t let you near a telephone, I’m afraid, unless I give the word. I’ll see you shortly. Good night.”

Gini handed the telephone once more to Malone, who again listened to his instructions with an expressionless face. When the conversation was over, he unplugged the phone without a word, left the room, and returned with a different instrument. He plugged this in and remained by her side while she dialed. With shaking hands Gini dialed the St. John’s Wood house. She listened to silence, to nonconnection, then redialed twice.

She tried the number twice more in the next hour, during which time she was escorted to a bathroom, where she washed her hands and face, and then escorted back to that small sitting room, where she was given coffee, and some food she could not bring herself to eat.

Precisely one hour later, Malone rose to his feet and checked his watch. “We should leave now, ma’am,” he said.

Gini was allowed to try the St. John’s Wood number one more time. This time, to her surprise, it connected, and actually rang. An answering machine picked up. Gini was about to replace the telephone, to try her Islington number or the Hampstead number, but then she looked at Malone’s face and had a quick, sure instinct: He would not allow her to do that.

He was looking at his watch even now as the answering machine at the other end fed her its prerecorded message.

“Pascal,” Gini said quickly. “I’m well. I’m safe. I’m returning to London now….”

“Ma’am…” Malone took a step toward her. He shook his head.

Gini looked at him and knew she had to think very quickly. She had to give Pascal a message she was sure he would understand, a message Malone—or anyone else listening in on this line—could not interpret. “Darling,” she said quickly. “I’ll see you later today. Meantime, I’m thinking of you, and remembering…”

“Ma’am…”

“I’m thinking of Beirut, darling. And all those places we used to meet…”

The telephone went dead. Malone, who had just bent and unplugged it, straightened up. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, still in that flat voice, still with that expressionless face. “My apologies.” He took her arm firmly. “It’s time to go.”

He said nothing more, and led her out to the black car waiting outside. He opened the front passenger door for Gini, then moved around and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Gini turned her face to the window. The floodlights had been cut. The house, driveway, and road beyond were dark. She was feeling stronger now, calmer, and much more alert. By the time they reached the end of the drive and turned out fast into the road, her eyes were becoming accustomed to the moonlight.

As Malone swung the car toward the village and the highway beyond it, she kept her head turned, looking up the hill to her left. She peered at the woods at the top of that hill, where McMullen’s cottage was concealed, and the wide expanse of fields leading up to those woods. She could just see men, fanning out across the fields, making their way silently up the slope. This puzzled her, and she thought it puzzled Malone also, for he too noted the searchers and frowned.

“I don’t think they’re going to find anything—anyone—up there,” Gini said. She glanced at Malone.

“Neither do I,” he said.

The remark was flatly made, but it surprised her, coming from a man usually so uncommunicative. He kept his eyes on the road ahead.

“Still, I guess they have to be thorough,” she said.

“The Brits are certainly trying to be thorough…” Malone said.

“Those are British security people up there?”

“Some of them are British. Some American. As to who’s actually involved, I can’t comment on that.” He increased their speed. “I don’t give instructions around here. The ambassador does.” The remark was made in a tight-lipped way. She saw him hesitate, then glance at her. “At that cottage…” He paused. “Did you actually see this man McMullen? Or anyone else?”

“No.” Gini looked at him. “You heard me. I thought I made that clear.”

“I thought you did too.” He gave her a cool, assessing and intelligent glance. “You also made it clear that whoever was up there left. Around eleven hours ago, right?”

“Yes.” Gini hesitated. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no,” he replied. “Let’s just get you to London, okay?”

She knew he would say nothing more, and she was right. Malone maintained a thoughtful silence the entire way to London. Once on the motorway, he drove very fast. There was little traffic, but the route was heavily patrolled, Gini noted. They passed no less than four police cars in fifty miles. None pursued, or made any attempt to flag them down—and Gini found this lack of reaction strange.

Malone was driving at just over one hundred miles an hour. The traffic might be light, but he was exceeding the speed limit by thirty miles an hour, at least.

When they reached the residence, it was a few minutes before five in the morning, and still pitch dark. They turned into Regent’s Park, passed the mosque, and were waved in through the residence’s lodge gates.

Malone escorted her into the hall she remembered, past the pinkish drawing room, which was empty, up some stairs, and into a small, anonymous room at the back of the house. It did not have a telephone, but Gini was not surprised to see that. Malone drew out a chair for her politely, asked her to remain there, then left the room, closing the door behind him.

The minute he left, Gini rose to her feet. She moved to the window and lifted the curtain aside, but she could see little. Behind her was the darkness of the residence gardens, beyond that the park itself, locked at night, and beyond the park, the lights of London. She let the curtain fall and looked around the room. It had two armchairs, a table with some magazines. There was an empty grate, with a large mirror over its mantel. She listened. This house, in contrast to the sense of urgency and alarm in Oxfordshire, was silent. She could hear no footsteps, no voices.

She sat down in one of the chairs, listening, wondering if John Hawthorne would come to her soon, and what he would say when he did. Time passed. The silence of the room began to lull her. She felt her eyes begin to close, and realized for the first time how tired she was. She sat there for some time, half asleep, half awake, and then she heard a noise that jolted her upright.

It was a low, steady sound, somewhere between a whine and a hiss. She tensed, fully awake now, and rose to her feet. She stared at the door. The noise was louder now, she could hear it approach. A second before the door opened, she realized what it was. It was the noise of an electric wheelchair moving fast along the thickly carpeted corridor outside.

Then Frank Romero opened the door and the wheelchair, and its occupant, came into sight.

S. S. Hawthorne propelled himself into the center of the room. He stopped the chair, swiveled it fast so he was facing her, and smiled at her in a way so like his son that Gini was shocked into silence. He held out his hand to her.

“Ms. Hunter? John has been held up. He has to talk to the security people. Sit down, please. While you’re waiting for John, I thought you and I might have a brief talk.”

He motioned her into a chair facing the fireplace, with its mirror above. With that low hissing whining sound, he maneuvered his chair so that he had his back to the fireplace and was facing both her and the door behind her. Gini tensed, and glanced over her shoulder. Romero, she saw, had not left the room, but was standing in front of the door, his arms folded across his chest. S. S. Hawthorne looked across at him.

“You can bring them in now, Frank,” he said in a curt way. “I don’t want to waste time on this.”

Romero at once left the room, closing the door behind him. Gini could feel Hawthorne’s eyes on her face. She turned back to look at him. It was the first time she had seen him close up. The energy he could convey even in photographs was, at a distance of four feet, intense. It radiated from him just as it did from his son. Despite the wheelchair, despite the black blanket folded neatly across his legs, despite the fact that she knew him to be paralyzed from the waist downward since the last stroke, he emanated will. She could sense it in the room; she could see it in the way his finely formed hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair, and above all, she could see it in his face.

As a younger man, she thought, he must have been at least as handsome as his son, perhaps more so. Even now, and even in a wheelchair, he could convey physical strength. Over six feet tall, she judged, upright for all his age: His back was straight, his shoulders and arms powerful. His handsome face, patrician and cold, was dominated by the strong jut of his nose, which gave him a hawklike, predatory look, and by his eyes, much lighter in color than his son’s, which were finely shaped, deep set, like splinters of blue ice. They were the coldest eyes she had ever seen, and their gaze was unwavering. He sat there, not troubling to speak, giving her a hard, cold, assessing stare that began at her feet, traveled the length of her legs, then rested on her hips, her waist, her breasts, her neck, her hair, her face.

He examined and assessed her in a way both sexual and oddly commercial. Gini had the sensation that he was undressing her as he looked at her, that this was his practice when looking at women, and that as he did so, he made his own valuation of what he saw, employing the same brutal dispassion with which some butcher might assess and value a side of meat.

The inspection made her acutely self-conscious. She began to wish that she were wearing different clothes—that the narrow black trousers she had on were less tight, that she was wearing a jacket over her black sweater, a jacket that could have concealed her breasts. Then her own reaction angered her. She stared back at Hawthorne in the same cold way. For some reason, this appeared to please him. He smiled.

“At times like this,” he said, “I regret my age. I regret these useless things.” He gestured toward his legs. “Still, I’m interested to meet you. John had prepared me to some extent. I do begin to see—” He broke off. “Ah, Frank. Thank you. On that table, I think.”

Romero walked silently across the room. He was wearing, Gini saw, the same clothes as before: dark knife-edge-creased pants, a black blazer with brass buttons. He was carrying a small tape recorder and several boxes of tapes. He put them down on the table next to Hawthorne and glanced at him.

Hawthorne nodded. “Yes. If you’d be so good.” He looked back at Gini. “I don’t share my son’s confidence in journalists, or in you, Ms. Hunter. Before we go any further, I’d like Frank to make some checks. Please don’t interfere.”