Lovers and Liars Trilogy (9 page)

There was a silence. Nicholas Jenkins looked well pleased. He leaned back in his chair. “Fascinating, don’t you find? The patterns of obsessive behavior. And Hawthorne a man with so much to lose….”

“It’s ridiculous,” Gini began a second before Pascal. “It’s trash. Garbage. Colorful, sure—and beyond that, Nicholas, I have to say I don’t believe a word.”

“Nor do I.” Pascal rose. “This is a total waste of time. Once a month, every month? For God’s sake, Nicholas, the man’s an ambassador. He used to be a U.S. senator. To arrange something like that, other people would have to be involved. Aides, bodyguards. A man like Hawthorne is protected, rarely alone. There’s no way on earth you could keep that kind of thing under wraps. Two months, three at most, and the story’s all over town.”

“I know.” Jenkins’s smile became complacent. “Yet I hear it’s been going on for years. Four years at least—that’s a great many blondes.”

“You must have taken leave of your senses.” Pascal now made no attempt to disguise his impatience. “You flew me to London for this? I might as well go now.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. You haven’t heard it all. Just listen. Consider—my reaction was exactly the same as yours. The first time it was put to me, well, I wouldn’t have given it a second’s credence. And I certainly wouldn’t have flown you in, not at your rates.” Pascal flushed; Jenkins waved him back to his chair. “Sit down, there’s a good fellow. And let me explain. There’s one very obvious question, isn’t there? Who was my source?”

“Okay. Five minutes.” Pascal sat down. “Who
was
your source? One of the girls?”

“Certainly not.” Jenkins looked offended. “You think I’d react this way to some story from a two-bit tart? My source is right in there, close to the ambassador.”

“You’ve talked to this source yourself?”

For the first time, some of Jenkins’s ebullience diminished. He shifted his gaze slightly. “No,” he admitted in a grudging way. “I haven’t. Not yet. My information was filtered, if you like. It came through a third party.”

“Who?”

“The name’s not likely to mean anything to you or Gini. It’s a man. James McMullen. I was at school with him, as it happens. I’ve known him for years.”

“McMullen?” Pascal glanced across at Gini, who shook her head. “And who is he, this school friend of yours?”

“Nobody much,” Jenkins replied, and there were signs his confidence was returning.

“Well-connected. Clever—up to a point. In fact, he was an Oxford scholar. But a bit weak maybe—vacillating, no drive. Left Oxford without a degree, spent some years as an army officer, then resigned. Took a few jobs in the City. Became a bit of a drifter—a handsome, charming drifter. Good-hearted. Honest. A bit of a throwback—not in touch with the modern world. He first approached me about three months ago. Out of the blue. I hadn’t laid eyes on him in years.”

“He told you the story about the blondes?” Gini asked, watching him closely. “Was he selling it? How much did he want?”

“Nothing. My friend James doesn’t operate that way. He’s a gentleman, one of a dying breed. I doubt he even knows newspapers pay for information, and if he did, he’d be appalled. No. He didn’t want money. He wanted something more subtle. He wanted the truth about Hawthorne to come out.”

There was another silence. Gini could see Pascal thinking, calculating. His impatience had gone.

“All right,” he said when Jenkins volunteered nothing further. “Your friend McMullen was an intermediary, bringing you information on someone else’s behalf. How close is that person to the ambassador?”

“Oh, very close indeed.”

“And you can substantiate McMullen’s link with that source?”

“Pascal,
please,
of course. That was my opening request. That groundwork’s done. It was arranged for me to witness McMullen lunching with his source. There’s no doubt they know each other. They’re old friends. And then…” He paused, smiling. “Then—also at my suggestion—James recorded a telephone conversation between them with equipment I provided. The tape’s being copied now. I’ll let you have it tomorrow. When you hear it, you’ll see. James wasn’t lying. And he’s very close to his source.”

Pascal shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s take that as a given for now. McMullen is close to this source, and the source is close to Hawthorne. How close? Someone employed in the household, or at the embassy? A maid? A driver? One of his aides? Some security man?”

“Closer than that.”

“Someone in Hawthorne’s family? His brother? One of that tribe of cousins?” Gini suggested, then shook her head. “No. I can’t believe that. A united front. No one in that family would talk.”

Jenkins was not listening. His gaze was now directed toward the windows, and the fading light of a winter afternoon. Gini could see how much he was relishing this, and she had an intuition: Jenkins loved scoops, he loved the coup de grâce. He would have saved the best, and the nastiest twist, for the last.

“In a way,” he began slowly in a meditative tone, “you could say that the source is almost the ambassador himself. Because there’s another aspect to those monthly rituals, one I didn’t mention before. It seems that when Hawthorne returns from one of his sessions, he likes to go over its details, chapter and verse. Blow-by-blow descriptions, as you might appropriately say…It’s the conclusion to the night’s entertainments, apparently. And from what I gather, for Hawthorne it’s the most satisfying part of all.”

“You mean he
tells
someone all this?” Gini stared at him in astonishment. “That can’t be true. You mean he comes back, sits down by the fireside, and
describes
what he’s done? Nicholas…”

“Not by the fireside, I hear.” Jenkins’s smile was now one of malicious delight. “In bed is the favored location, or so I’m told.”

“In bed? You mean…”

“I mean, my dears, that our source is the ambassador’s wife. Lise Hawthorne herself. She told McMullen, her old friend, confidant, and self-appointed protector, and eventually McMullen told me. Rather naive, as I’m sure you’ll agree, handing a stick of dynamite to an editor. But then, my friend James
is
naive, and so I’m beginning to suspect is the ambassador’s wife. Naive, frightened, trapped, and increasingly desperate…And such a beautiful woman too.”

Jenkins had finally obtained his hoped-for reaction. He bathed a few minutes in the glow of their astonishment, then rose to his feet.

“Mrs. Hawthorne wants this story to come out,” he continued more briskly. “Since she’s a devout Catholic, a divorce is ruled out. Now, a divorce court, of course, would bring the truth to light—but since she hasn’t that option, she’s turned to the press. To us.” He paused. “On one condition. We have to substantiate this story without any apparent assistance from her. She cannot be revealed as its source.”

“You mean we can’t talk to her?” Gini interrupted. “We can’t approach the main source directly?”

“My dear Gini, absolutely
not.
Under no circumstances. That’s the first rule, the first condition McMullen laid down. No interviews with the lovely Lise.” Jenkins favored both of them with a benign and possibly gloating smile. “Legwork, my dears. No cozy phone calls to the ambassadorial residence. No cozy tête-à-têtes with Lise. No inquiries to staff that get back to the ambassador three seconds after you hang up the phone.”

“Damn.” Gini had opened her Filofax meanwhile. She was flicking through its pages. “I was just checking how the Sundays fall. It’s eleven days to the third Sunday this month.”

“I know,” Jenkins replied. “And you’ll need every one of those days. There’s a lot to check out. And annoyingly, there were gaps in my friend James’s narrative. We know when these meetings allegedly take place—”

“But not where,” Gini finished for him.

“This shouldn’t be so much of a problem.” Pascal rose. He looked at Jenkins thoughtfully. “After all, McMullen’s told you everything else. He’s been a very obliging kind of source. Location shouldn’t be a difficulty. Where is your friend Mr. McMullen, Nicholas? How do we contact him?”

Pascal’s tone had been sarcastic. Jenkins seemed pleased to have riled him.

“Ah, tiny problem,” he said cheerily. “I should have mentioned it before. McMullen’s disappeared. Gone to ground. We were due to meet just before Christmas. McMullen had promised to provide the next assignation address. Unfortunately, he never showed. He hasn’t been in his London apartment for over two weeks. None of his friends has clapped eyes on him. He hasn’t written, hasn’t telephoned…. Most mysterious. As if he’s dead…Still, I’m sure you’ll both track him down.”

He gave them both a jovial salute. Gini felt that for some reason he now chose to forestall further questions. “Must rush. Late for my own editorial meeting. Here, Gini.”

He slid a card and a photograph across the table. The picture must have been taken some years before, Gini noted, for in it McMullen wore a uniform. A good-looking, fair-haired man wearing combat fatigues. It was not a very good photograph, nor a very clear likeness.

“That’s his address, and the only picture I could get hold of. Just to give you both a start. Pascal, talk to my girl Charlotte. I know she’s booked you a room somewhere comfortable. Check back with me in a couple of days, when you’ve got some results. Be ingenious, my dears. Have fun.
Ciao.
”

“I
S JENKINS ALWAYS LIKE
that?” Pascal asked sometime later as they left the
News
building.

Gini shrugged and pulled her coat tighter around her. It was almost dark now, at three-thirty in the afternoon. It was cold; rain alternated with sleet. “You’ve met Nicholas before. You should know. And yes, he is.”

“He’s a shit,” Pascal said in a gloomy way. “I always thought that, and now I’m sure. He gloats.”

“Sure. He enjoys other people’s misfortunes. He’s not alone in that.”

“It’s a wild-goose chase.” Pascal glanced at the yellowish sky and turned up the collar of his jacket. “None of this will stand up. It’s too farfetched.”

“Maybe. I’m not so sure of that. Nicholas knows a good story when he hears one. Think about it—from his point of view, it could work two ways. If the allegations about Hawthorne are true, that’s headline stuff. If they turn out to be untrue, there’s still a story: Lise Hawthorne, peddling lies about her husband to the press.”

“Maybe. Maybe so.”

There was a small awkward silence. She could feel Pascal’s gaze, and averted her face. She looked around her. The
News
offices, in former years after the move from Fleet Street, had been under siege to union pickets. They were a grim place. “Fortress Docklands” they’d been nicknamed, and the tag was apt. From where they stood, just outside the brutalist office building itself, they were ringed by fifteen-foot walls, barbed-wire fencing, and electronic, security-manned gates. A few blocks beyond, through a maze of grim housing projects and converted warehouses, was the river Thames. The proximity of the river and its low-tide mud flats made the air dank.
I work in a prison,
Gini sometimes thought.

“Genevieve?”

Pascal had turned to her. He touched the sleeve of her coat, then quickly withdrew his hand. His use of her full name, and the French manner in which he pronounced it, brought the past roaring back. For one brief and painful instant Gini remembered how it had once been in that little room by the harbor. She remembered how the dance-hall music made the floor pulse, how the lights of the fishing boats glittered across the water at night, how it felt when Pascal took her in his arms.

She averted her face, and kept her eyes fixed firmly on the security gates.

“I’m sorry.” Pascal hesitated. His manner was awkward. “I wasn’t told I would be working with you. I promise you, Gini, until you walked into that room, Jenkins had said nothing. I had no idea.”

Gini turned to look at him. “If you had known in advance, would you have agreed to work with me or refused?”

A shadow passed across his face, but the Pascal she remembered had always been honest, and he gave her an honest answer now. “If it had happened a few years ago—yes, I’d have refused. I was trying to make my marriage work. There was Marianne—my daughter.” He paused, looked toward her, then away. He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, half shrugged. “So, yes, if this had happened a few years back, I would have refused. You know why, I think.”

“Too many memories?”

“Partly. And too much risk.”

There was a little silence. Gini stared hard at the gates. Eventually, she said, “Risk?”

“We quarreled once. I had no wish to do so again.”

It was not the answer Gini had hoped for. She began to move across the yard in the direction of her car. She pushed her wet hair back from her face. Pascal came after her and touched her sleeve. She came to a halt.

“Why do you ask?” he said in an agitated way. “You don’t want to work with me now, is that it?”

Gini turned to look at him. His face was pale and drawn, his hair wet from the rain. She could both feel his tension and see it written on his features.

“If that’s the case, just say so, Gini. I’ll understand. I’ll tell Jenkins I’m pulling out. It doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of other work. I’ll do that, Gini. I’ll tell him right now. If you want.”

Gini hesitated. The sleety rain was cold against her cheeks. Tiny wet particles clung to her eyelids and lashes. She blinked.

“No,” she said eventually. “No, don’t do that…. After all, it’s a good story. It could be a major story. There’s no reason why we can’t work together as a team. I might have found it hard too, a few years back. But not now. Now it’s fine. I’m over all that….”

“I see.”

“It was a long time ago, Pascal. Twelve years.”

He touched her shoulder and made her face him. He looked down at her intently, then, with a half-smile, tilted up the brim of her cap.

“Why the disguise, Gini? A boy’s cap, a man’s overcoat, your lovely hair, all tied back? Trousers, boots. Are you trying to change your sex?”

“No, no, of course not.” She gave a quick, protective, irritable gesture. “I just don’t like to look too female, that’s all. Not when I work. I work with men all the time, and…I find it’s simpler, that’s all.”