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Authors: Mick Herron

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Suspense, #(¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)

Smoke & Whispers (7 page)

BOOK: Smoke & Whispers
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While she herself, of course, was empty-handed.

It seemed a paltry return. There must be something she could salvage, to convince herself this hadn’t been a pointless breach of trust . . . ‘Well, all right, then,’ she said out loud. Sheer bravado. But all right, then. One last look.

The laptop remained tempting, but was hopeless; the suitcase, she’d already searched. On the dresser was the same scatter of loose change, tissues, house keys, and business cards – she picked these up, and slipped them from their elastic band. Topmost was one Brian Harper: a name and two numbers; landline and mobile. The name was vaguely familiar, but too ordinary for her to be sure. She thrummed the deck as if it were one of those flickbooks, with little stickmen dancing under her thumb, and surveyed the room. The wardrobe – she hadn’t checked the wardrobe. This didn’t take long to rectify, but it held nothing to grab her attention: shirts and suits on hangers, a spare blanket on a shelf. Sarah dropped to peer under the bed. Nothing there either, bar a flock of dust bunnies. She rose slowly, brushed her knees with her free hand, used the other to steady herself on the bed, and dropped the business cards, which hit the floor and fanned out wide:
bugger
, she thought, stooping to gather them up. He wouldn’t have memorized their order, surely? Brian Harper was topmost; the rest she stacked as they came to hand. One or two had landed face down. She turned them over. The first was Zoë’s.

Sarah rewrapped the cards in their elastic band and put them back where she found them. Then turned the light off and left the room.

6

The restaurant, tucked off one of the main shopping arteries, had mirrors lining the walls on which the day’s specials had been scrawled in red crayon. This rendered them illegible, but the effect was nice. Half a dozen pairs of lunchers provided ambient chatter, while over in a corner two tables had been pushed together. She could see Gerard, his back to her. With him were three others. ‘
We’re
famished,’ he’d said. She hadn’t noticed at the time.

She faltered at the doorway, and might have turned and slipped away if one of Gerard’s companions hadn’t spotted her first.

Jack Gannon waved; mimed
over here
.

There was no turning back. As she approached the table Jack stood, and pulled a chair out.

‘Thank you.’

‘Fruitful morning?’

‘I did what needed doing. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were having a business lunch. Gerard, you should have said.’

He really should have.

‘All done and dusted,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been wandering round. Taking in the sights.’ He put invisible quote marks round the word.

‘By yourself?’

‘These chaps had better things to do. We’ve just reconvened. Did you meet Harper last night? Brian Harper, Sarah Tucker.’

Harper was the white-haired man from last night. ‘We weren’t introduced.’ He shook Sarah’s hand. ‘But I saw you of course. Brightening the room.’

‘Token woman,’ John M. Wright offered. A beat or two after the other men, he too had made it to his feet.

‘Does that charm school do refunds?’ Gerard asked Jack. Then said to Sarah, ‘You met Mr Wright, I think. And Jack Gannon.’

They sat. Harper poured Sarah a glass of wine. Jack handed her a menu. Wright stared, lips pursed. Perhaps he was worried she’d eat his share of lunch.

Eat? Drink wine? After the morning she’d had? It would be like picnicking over a grave. But she was hungry.

She glanced at Gerard, who was studying his menu. He had Zoë’s business card among his collection, and coincidence’s lease had just expired.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Successful meeting?’

‘Could be,’ Gerard said.

‘Mr Inchon is very interested in my research,’ Wright said.

Jack said, ‘I’m sure Ms Tucker doesn’t want to hear about a business meeting.’

Ms Tucker was pretty sure she did. Anything that might cast light on what Gerard was up to.

Brian Harper asked her, ‘Have you visited the Baltic yet?’

Small talk. It was like hitting a sharp curve in a road. ‘The gallery? Not yet, no. Not this time, I mean. I’ve been before.’

‘How about the Laing?’

‘The Laing?’

‘More art. Less modern.’

Jack Gannon leaned across. ‘They have a number of John Martins. Do you know his work?’

‘The name rings a bell. I might be thinking of someone else.’

A waiter came, took their orders, collected menus.

‘Local artist,’ Jack went on. ‘Nineteenth century. He painted these big biblical extravaganzas, full of sound and fury. Very popular in his day, but he’s fallen from favour since.’

‘Story goes, they used to need crowd control when he exhibited new work,’ Harper said. ‘He was the Hollywood blockbuster of his time.’

‘I don’t see the point of art,’ Wright said.

‘Well,’ Gerard said after the moment of silence that followed this. ‘That’s admirably focused of you.’

‘I just don’t see its use.’

‘Which doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach us,’ Gerard said smoothly. He picked up his glass; revolved it by rolling the stem between finger and thumb. Light splintered off its contents. ‘This Martin chap. Didn’t he paint the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?’

Harper nodded. ‘Yes. He did.’

‘There you go,’ Gerard told Wright. ‘The terrible vengeance of a righteous God. We can all learn something from that.’

Gerard, Sarah decided, would only surprise her when he stopped being surprising. It didn’t look like their current encounter was going to involve that.

When the waiter brought their starters, she had to be reminded what she’d ordered.

All of this had a surreal quality, as if she’d wandered from one story into another. If she looked at her watch, she’d know to the precise minute how long it had been since she’d borne witness to that body on the slab; how long since she’d cowered in Gerard’s bathroom, listening to breathing on the other side of a locked door. And now there was duck salad, and conversation in a well-lit restaurant with three men she didn’t know and a fourth who was hiding something. The impulse came to heave cutlery to the floor. But she couldn’t. Partly, of course, this was social training. But underneath was the awareness that both stories were part of a whole; that whatever had brought Zoë to Newcastle was bound up with what Gerard was doing here . . . There’d been a soggy clump of business cards in Zoë’s drowned wallet; a single pristine example in Gerard’s collection. It would be difficult to ask him about this without revealing that she’d been in among his things.

Conversation had slipped back Gerard’s way.

‘First advice I give about taking over a company,’ Gerard said, ‘is sack the HR and PR departments.’

‘How very broad-minded of you,’ she said.

‘Not really.’ Sarcasm bothered him the way kittens bother tanks. ‘It’s like buying a second-hand car. Before you do anything else, you knock the rust off.’

‘You’ve never bought a second-hand car in your life.’

‘But I’m capable of making that imaginative leap.’

‘I thought we were staying off business?’ Brian Harper reminded them.

John M. Wright’s knife scraped against his plate, making everyone else jump.

Jack Gannon said, ‘Well, we’d better steer clear of religion and politics too. How about family. You got a son and heir waiting to take up the reins, Gerard?’

He seemed to lose focus. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘You have children?’

‘Never been blessed, old man.’ He picked up the wine bottle and waggled it in the air, indicating its emptiness to the waiter. ‘How about you?’

‘A daughter. She lives with her mother.’

Harper had two children: one of each, both grown. Wright offered no information.

The waiter delivered another bottle, sparing Sarah’s contribution to the topic.

‘Aye, thanks,’ Brian Harper said. His accent was thicker addressing the waiter than it was when talking to her or Gerard.

But there was nothing unusual about that. Most people adjusted their social face depending on who they were talking to. And she liked the Geordie voice; was collecting specimens of it.
How, man, woman, man
, she’d heard an exasperated male address a female companion: Sarah hadn’t parsed that yet, but ‘man’ was obviously doing two jobs. She’d also divined that ‘wuh’ meant both ‘us’ and ‘our’, and also ‘me’ and ‘mine’. And possibly other things too.

Harper asked Gerard, ‘How long are you here?’

‘Plan to be back in civilization day after tomorrow at the latest.’

‘Well, we’d hate to keep you longer than you’re comfortable.’

‘No danger of that, old man.’ He’d finished his first glass from the new bottle already. Sarah, who’d never dream of tallying anyone else’s drinks, wondered if she’d seen him quaffing at this rate before. ‘So if you want me to look at this place of yours, this afternoon might be the time.’

‘Works for me.’

‘Mind if we tag along?’ Jack Gannon asked.

The
we
presumably covered John M. Wright, who’d finished eating, and whose abstracted expression suggested he was remembering something more interesting that happened to him once somewhere else.

‘What place is this?’ she asked.

‘A property,’ Gerard said abruptly.

‘It’s a cinema,’ Harper told her.

‘You own a cinema?’

‘Not quite. But I have an interest in a concern that owns a building that used to be a cinema. On a pretty prime site, in fact, but legal wrangles have kept it in development limbo for some time.’

‘But it’s still a cinema?’

‘A fleapit,’ Jack said. ‘One of your actual local picture houses, exactly like you don’t get any more. Only it hasn’t shown a film in, what, ten years?’

‘More than,’ Harper said. ‘But if you mean, does it still have an auditorium and all the rest, then yes, it does. Bit dilapidated, mind.’

‘I saw
The Italian Job
there,’ Jack offered. ‘And
The
Magnificent Seven
.’

‘Ah, sweet bird of youth,’ Gerard said.

He’s drunk, Sarah thought. Maybe I am, too. She’d had just one glass, but added to what she’d put away last night, it had probably tipped her back into the ditch.

She said, ‘Moving into the entertainment biz, Gerard?’

He looked aghast, as if she’d suggested he was planning a chain of brothels. ‘It’s a
property
,’ he repeated, slowly. ‘It
used
to be a cinema.’

Wright said, ‘It might be just the place I’ve been looking for.’

‘For a research lab?’ She couldn’t see it, somehow.

‘We’re a long way off that,’ Gerard said. ‘A very long way.’

This, too, was said slowly.

Wright’s eyes turned flinty, but he didn’t reply.

Harper said, ‘Well, like I say, I’m free this afternoon. We could go and have a look now.’

‘Let’s finish eating, first.’

‘Of course. I didn’t –’

Gerard grinned evilly.

Sarah looked at Harper, and decided it was quite an effort for him to swallow a response.

They ate, and another bottle of wine was drunk. Sarah switched to fizzy water. But whenever the conversation stalled, whenever the ring of cutlery echoed round the restaurant, she was dragged back to her morning’s viewing: a white body, with curly black hair, stretched out on a slab like cold meat.

‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked her.

‘I’m – yes, I’m fine. Thanks. I’m all right.’

‘You look a bit out of it.’

‘Probably train lag.’

Over coffee, Gerard regaled them with tales of business triumph. She suspected there were various hidden messages here, not least of which was that he wanted them to think him the kind of bore who would blather on about his business triumphs; while at the same time letting them know about some of his business triumphs. The suspicion forced her to revise her opinion of how drunk he was.

When the last refill had been seen off, and Gerard had settled the bill without even pretending there was any chance he wouldn’t, they gathered outside on the pavement. It had grown colder, and the wind had picked up. A lost seagull swam across the sky.

‘So how do we get to this place of yours?’

It seemed Sarah was part of this excursion. That was okay. She wanted to stick to Gerard for the moment.

‘We can take the Metro.’

‘The
Metro
?’

‘It’s a good service.’

But Gerald was looking puzzled. ‘Is there a taxi strike?’

‘When was the last time you took the tube?’ Sarah asked.

‘Can’t recall. It was full of Bay City Rollers fans, if that helps.’

‘Seriously, Inchon, it’ll take half the time.’

‘Oh, well. If we must.’

Sarah suspected that all he’d wanted was the Lady Bracknell moment.

The nearest station was round the corner, and Brian Harper took charge: bought tickets, ushered them down the escalator, positioned them at the optimum point on the clean and tidy platform. ‘It’s not so much like the tube, is it?’ he asked.

‘More like Barcelona,’ Sarah offered.

Harper liked that, she could tell. ‘Feels like it, some days,’ he said. ‘Number of foreign students we get.’

Probably not the way to impress Gerard, Sarah thought but didn’t say. Then an emerging wind from the tunnel heralded the arrival of the train.

She was delighted to find that you could sit at the front of a Metro and look out of the window. She’d never seen a train tunnel unwind in front of her before; didn’t get much of a chance to do that now, because the train pulled overground all too soon. And then they were in the northern suburbs; the train riding through a small valley whose edges were lined by scrabbly bushes. The next stop was theirs.

‘Told you it wouldn’t take long,’ Harper said.

‘Probably full of drunks in the evening,’ Gerard said.

‘And some lunchtimes too,’ Sarah suggested.

They crossed the tracks on the pedestrian bridge, and already they could see it. The cinema – it called itself a picture house; the words painted across its upper storey in large letters – sat on a corner diagonally opposite the station entrance, and had evidently been closed for years. Bare brick oblongs on its whitewashed walls indicated where posters for future attractions had hung, but that future seemed used up. No windows were visible, barring a row of blackened, book-sized panes at attic-level. The shelter covering its doorway might once have kept rain off the queues, but now resembled the lowered eyelid of a building just barely conscious.

‘You called it a fleapit,’ she said to Jack.

‘And I don’t think I can be accused of talking it up.’

John M. Wright said, as if answering a question, ‘Lack of natural light is actually an advantage when you’re trying to maintain a controlled environment.’

Harper and Gerard reached the foot of the steps and crossed the road first. There were parked cars, but few people in sight. The shape of the junction suggested that there’d once been a station car park, perhaps occupying the space where a housing development now stood. Undramatic residential streets fed away somewhere more central, that lay out of sight. The whole place seemed to be holding its breath.

The cinema, on the other hand, seemed to have breathed its last.

Flanked by Gannon and Wright, she joined Gerard and Harper on the opposite pavement. Heavy metal security panels were bolted in place across the doors. From one hung a padlock the size of Sarah’s hand. Even as she noticed this Brian Harper was approaching it, taking from his pocket a key twice the size of Sarah’s finger.

‘I can’t help feeling there’ll be spiders,’ Sarah said.

‘There’ll be no spiders,’ Gerard promised.

‘What makes you so sure? There’s bound to be spiders.’ The word
spiders
had dropped from a web in Sarah’s mind and was scuttling round, enjoying a sticky purchase on her imagination. Spiders.

BOOK: Smoke & Whispers
9.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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