The Dark Chronicles (18 page)

‘Robert!’ Manning shouted at me as I entered the arrivals terminal. He was keen to rectify his earlier mistake, even if it meant making a few more in the process. He marched towards me, waving away a small collection of flies buzzing around him. He’d traded the nightwear for a khaki linen suit and deck shoes – it made him look only slightly more trustworthy.

I asked him if Pritchard had landed yet, and he shook his head.
‘Some sort of a hitch in Madrid, apparently.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Look, Paul, I really think this situation—’

‘Did they say how long the delay was?’ Perhaps there was time to go to the embassy and come back – it wasn’t so far away. Perhaps Pritchard’s flight would have to turn tail to London, and he wouldn’t come out at all.

Manning dashed the thought: ‘An hour at the most.’ He suddenly noticed the case. ‘I do hope that’s not what I think it is.’

It admittedly wasn’t ideal, carrying the thing around in the airport, but it wasn’t safe leaving it at the hotel either. I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on tradecraft from Manning.

‘Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough on the phone,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘Everything that happened last night was necessary. Everything except for the police shooting at me, that is. That might have been because the nightclub you’d never heard of was a KGB drop.’

He quietened down then. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Jungle dancing’s not really my thing, you know.’ He tried to get a smile out of me, but when he realized it wasn’t going to happen he swivelled his head around the hall theatrically, then leaned over and handed me the newspaper, from one end of which peeked a plain brown dossier. By the time he’d finished the manoeuvre, even the woman cleaning the floor was watching.

‘Turns out we have a dossier on the family,’ he said.

‘Anywhere in here sell food?’ I said, trying to move the conversation to a safer subject. There didn’t seem to be any police around, but I didn’t want to attract more attention if it could be helped – one trip to the dungeons had been enough.

‘There’s a stall in the car park,’ said Manning. ‘Nowhere else is open yet.’

I fished some coins out of my pocket and handed them to him. ‘Fruit if they have it,’ I said. ‘Bananas or citrus. Failing that, anything with sugar in it.’

He didn’t disguise his anger at being ordered around, but I was London – I might be in trouble with Pritchard, but he knew that a few choice words about his cock-up over the Afrospot could force him into early retirement. So he chewed his lip and waggled his eyebrows, and walked over to the exit.

I found a seat and examined the front page of the
Daily Times
. ‘
CORPSES ON THE GOLF COURSE!
’ was the headline, and the story contained full descriptions of both men and some lurid speculation from unnamed sources about their manners of death – but no clue as to the perpetrator. I read it twice and decided I was fairly safe: it would be very difficult for the police to prise anything out of the Russians, and judging by the number of other crimes reported in the city on the inside pages, they already had a fair amount on their plate.

I turned to the dossier. It was a dull affair, by and large, filled with lengthy accounts of impossibly trivial matters relating to seemingly every member of the extensive Thompson-Bola clan. After struggling through it, I came out with two files of interest. One involved a Daniel Talabi, the cousin Thompson-Bola had mentioned at the club: he was a writer who had been imprisoned by the government for aiding the ‘rebels’.

But by far the most substantial dossier was on Thompson-Bola’s mother, Abigail. The harmless-looking woman in glasses and headdress was apparently something of a firebrand. She had a decades-long history of anti-colonial protest – and was, according to the file, a hardened Communist. She had been one of the first African women allowed behind the Iron Curtain, where she had met Mao. If there had been any doubts in my mind about the family’s knowledge of the drop, this put paid to them, and she was now my prime suspect for the contact.

Manning returned with my breakfast: an unripe banana and a bottle of Fanta.

‘I checked on the flight’s progress,’ he said. ‘No news.’

The hour had passed – the delay was now edging up to two. I
decided enough was enough, and told Manning to set up a meeting with Pritchard for the afternoon – I had a few errands to run.

‘Are any of your safe houses near the Afrospot?’ I asked. But he wasn’t even listening to me – he was focusing on something over my right shoulder. I asked him if he had heard, and his eyes flicked over to meet mine. He pointed across to the customs official taking down the barrier in front of passport control.

‘They’ve landed,’ he said.

*

Pritchard came through ten minutes later, striding confidently past his fellow passengers. In his dark suit and tie, white shirt and dark glasses, he looked like an upmarket funeral director. He caught sight of us and walked over.

‘Hello, Henry,’ said Manning, beaming. ‘Welcome to Lagos.’ It was evidently his line for airports.

‘Hello, Geoffrey,’ said Pritchard. ‘How’s Marjorie?’ They shook hands and exchanged a few more pleasantries. Then Pritchard turned to me, and gave me the kind of look I saved for dead rats.

‘Paul,’ he said, dipping his head.

‘Henry,’ I nodded back.

Manning lifted Pritchard’s bag and we walked back outside and hailed a taxi.

*

The return journey was conducted in silence, save for Manning’s barked instructions at the driver. Pritchard sat next to me, staring sullenly at the landscape. It made sense that he didn’t want to talk shop with others present, but what was he thinking in the meantime? I ate my banana and tried to clear my mind.

About forty-five minutes later we reached a large square, in the centre of which a street market was setting up. Manning paid the driver and led us through the aisles, past traders laying out their wares. One stall was apparently a grocer’s, but although the fruit
and vegetables were abundant, they were rotten and already covered in flies. A handful of Westerners were wandering around, waving their money and cameras, and I realized that this was probably where the photograph of Slavin had been taken.

Manning made a show of haggling over an intricately carved knife for a couple of minutes, before leaving off and pointing us to a grand colonial house on the corner of the square. He led us through a side entrance and down a narrow dirt path until we came out at a small garden in the rear of the property. He pushed open a rickety door and we followed him through several rooms. Chandeliers, chaises longues, candelabra: it was like walking onto the set of
The Forsyte Saga
after hours. Some of the furniture was in covers, and fat balls of dust sat contentedly in the corners. Manning explained that the local building industry had long been dominated by the Ibos, but that most of them had returned to the East when it had seceded, leaving dozens of unfinished and unsupervised buildings dotted around the city.

It was an unconventional choice for a safe house, but I had to admit he wasn’t quite as daft as he looked. The market was popular with tourists, meaning that white faces were less likely to stick out, and the building was so conspicuous that nobody would think twice about anyone who entered it.

We climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor, which was home to a large ballroom that Manning had cleaned up a bit. I sat in an easy chair by a large electric orchestrion, and Pritchard walked over to the window and looked out at the rooftops.

‘Depressing-looking country, isn’t it?’ he said. He swivelled on his heels and inspected his Patek Philippe. ‘So. What time did you tell Slavin to get here for?’

Manning looked over at me anxiously.

Pritchard registered it. ‘Problem?’

I broke the news. He didn’t react for a long time, just stared at a spot on the floor in front of his shoes. Then he looked back up at Manning.

‘Thank you, Geoffrey,’ he said. ‘You’ve done very well. We can take things from here.’

‘Oh,’ said Manning. ‘Right-oh, then. I’ll be at the office if you need me.’ He gestured to a phone on a mahogany dresser, then scuttled away, leaving me alone in the room with Pritchard.

‘So,’ he said, removing his sunglasses and placing them carefully inside his jacket. ‘You came to meet me. You’ve got balls, Dark, I’ll give you that.’

‘You’re still angry I left London ahead of you, then,’ I said.

‘Angry?’ He tilted his head and considered the idea. Then he walked over to me, the heels of his brogues clicking loudly across the floor. He came right up, until his face was just a couple of inches from mine. ‘Put it this way,’ he hissed. ‘If you ever do something like that again, I will
destroy
you.’ He rocked back on his heels, pinching his nose as though trying to stop the rage from bursting out. ‘Do you understand?’

I said I did, and let silence consume the room for several seconds.

‘But you decided to run me anyway.’

He stepped away and laughed a joyless laugh. ‘Believe me, this wasn’t my idea. I pushed for them to recall you, but Farraday told me to make the best of the situation and come out as your control.’

‘Farraday is a fucking fool,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘He’s also our fucking Chief at present, and unless you’re tendering your resignation we are going to do precisely what he fucking says.’

‘What if I refuse?’

‘Apart from getting the sack, you mean?’ He smiled. ‘I’ll blow your cover to the Nigerians and you’ll be locked up and being buggered by the natives before you know it.’

He took off his jacket and placed it over the back of a nearby chair. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing pale but muscular forearms. It was a clear signal: beneath the funeral director’s garb was a man it would be wise not to mess with. But I already knew that.

‘Now before you give me a thorough explanation for the complete
shambles
you seem to have created since arriving here,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to tell me what really happened in Germany in ’45. You can start with Larry.’

He’d thrown it out fast, but I’d been expecting it. ‘I wish I knew,’ I said, and ignored his open look of disbelief. ‘He disappeared looking for Meier,’ I went on. ‘Remember him?’ Pritchard nodded slowly. I took out my pack of Players, lit one, and sucked in the rich welcoming glow. ‘We’d found all the others, but Meier had been much harder. We just hadn’t seemed to be able to pick up his trail. Then, in September, Father announced he had traced him to somewhere near Hamburg. He left in the jeep that afternoon – and never came back. Obviously, something happened with this nurse, and I mean to find out exactly what.’

He pondered this for a moment, then sprung: ‘Why did he leave alone? Why didn’t you go with him?’

‘You remember what happened with Shashkevich,’ I said, and did my best to look ashamed.

‘I see. But why didn’t you mention at the Round Table that you were in Germany at the end of the war?’

I took another drag of my cigarette, and said I could well ask him the same question.

He ran a finger along the mantelpiece, then inspected the dust that had gathered on it. ‘So you were just waiting for me, is that it?’

‘You heard William: there were hundreds of people working in intelligence in Germany at that time.’ I let a note of righteousness creep into my tone. ‘Anyway, we were discussing a traitor in our midst. Your theory was that he might even have been in the room, so it hardly seemed like the best moment to reveal it.’

‘You could have told Farraday after the meeting, surely? Unless you think
he
might be the traitor?’

‘Why, after all these years, would I tell Farraday about Sacrosanct and risk—’

‘Incriminating yourself?’ he inserted. Then he relaxed a little and smiled. It looked painted on. ‘I can see your point. I felt the same myself. But perhaps Farraday should be let into the secret now. It might look worse if he learns about it later and neither of us had mentioned it.’

I couldn’t read his tone, but I didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

‘How could he learn about it?’ I asked. ‘Seeing as you and I are the only two who know? Anyway, I’m not sure he would understand even if we did tell him.’

‘Oh, don’t underestimate Farraday,’ he said. ‘He’s sharper than he looks.’

Sharper indeed, I thought, remembering the way he had steamrollered Osborne at the meeting.

‘Tell him, then,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s too late for all the repercussions you and Father were worried about, anyway.’ I ground out my cigarette on the floor and opened the bottle of Fanta by tilting the top against one of the arms of the chair. It tasted warm, flat and oddly metallic. ‘Perhaps you could also give him a thorough account of your operations in Gaggenau at the same time.’

His eyes were tiny marbles devoid of recognizable emotion. ‘I think,’ he said finally, ‘that you could now debrief me on the current situation.’

We left it at stalemate, and I did as he had asked. It didn’t take me long: one pyjama party, two dead Russians and a car chase.

‘What about the bodies?’ he said when I’d finished. ‘What did you do with them?’

I handed him the newspaper. He read through it quickly and then put it to one side.

‘Well, that’s sure to enrage the Russians – let’s see what they do.
Have you looked into Grigorieva yet? Slavin claimed she recruited the double, so she would appear to be key to the whole thing.’

‘I haven’t had time to stake out the embassy yet, but I imagine they’ve trebled their guard now. What do you have in mind? Approaching her as a possible defector herself?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Although if she was recruiting double agents twenty years ago, I imagine she’d be a fairly hard nut to crack. And I’d like to have at least some idea beforehand of why her death was staged.’

‘What about Chief – has he not turned up yet?’

He walked back to his position by the fireplace and shook his head.

‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to wonder if Farraday might have been right. This hit on Slavin makes me think he might be involved in this, after all.’