Vicious Circle (21 page)

‘I can hide nothing from you, tsarina. I shook Aazim Tippoo Tip’s hand and found no blood on it. Then I allowed Tariq Hakam to go with his God,’ Hector conceded and stood up. ‘To tell you the truth, I feel better for those two things. Now I need a few hours of sleep. We will all meet here after breakfast in the morning, to consider where we now stand.’

‘I can tell you, for free, exactly where you now stand, Hector Cross. You are back at square one and lucky to be there.’ Nastiya tried to sound stern, but there was a tiny spark of blue in her eye.

*

Hector held Catherine on his lap as he fed her the bottle. She made small grunting sounds of appreciation as she attacked the teat with gusto, totally oblivious of the interested audience seated on the rising tiers of seats confronting them in the cinema.

‘Only man I know who can plot mayhem and death and at the same time feed an infant,’ Paddy O’Quinn remarked and Nastiya punched his arm.

‘You know nothing about babies, husband. Watch Hector and shut up your mouth.’

‘That’s enough, my children. Cut the squabbling and settle down. We have work to do,’ Hector admonished them. ‘I did not argue with Nastiya last night when she said we were back to square one. However, this is not entirely true. We do still have a tenuous lead to work on. This was suggested to me by Tariq Hakam. I give him full credit for that. We were discussing how the Beast set up the ambush for Hazel, and Tariq asked a simple question. He said, “How did they know?’”

Hector paused and let that sink in. Then he repeated, ‘How did the Beast know that Hazel was coming up to London that day to see her gynaecologist?’ They stirred and murmured agreement.

‘The only ones that knew on our side were Hazel and me and Agatha, her PA, who set up the appointment. I phoned Agatha yesterday evening and she was absolutely adamant that she had told nobody. She was extremely distressed that I even made the suggestion. She has worked for Hazel for fifteen years and she is completely reliable.’

‘Hazel’s gynae knew,’ Nastiya volunteered.

‘Yes, you are right. Mr Donnovan knew. I am returning to London this afternoon to speak to him, but it’s going to be a little embarrassing to suggest to him that he broke patient confidentiality. I want Paddy and Nastiya to come with me, and yes okay, Dave, I saw you looking anxious. You can come along. There is a good chance that we will need you.’ Dave Imbiss smiled with relief. Hector went on. ‘For the time being, Catherine will be safe and well cared for here at Seascape with Bonnie and all her back-up team.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Time is nine thirteen. There is a flight at eleven thirty for London Heathrow. If you all move arse we can make it.’

*

The four of them dined that night at Number Eleven. From the head of the table Hector raised his glass to them. ‘I have just realized that exactly four months have passed since Hazel left me. It seems like a much shorter time. I still walk into every room in this house and expect her to be there. I want you to join me in wishing her Godspeed.’

Hours later, when Paddy and Nastiya went up to their own room, Nastiya sat before the dressing-table mirror in a pink satin robe and brushed out her hair. She watched Paddy in the mirror as he lay on the bed with the evening paper. ‘Do you know what Hector needs?’ she asked him.

‘Tell me,’ he grunted as he turned the page.

‘He needs a good woman in his bed to help him forget.’

Paddy sat bolt upright and crumpled the news-sheet with alarm.

‘Don’t you dare suggest that to him! He will kill you, you callous Russian tart.’

‘Callous I don’t know. Tart I do know, and it’s good and sweet. I can give you a little taste if you like.’

*

Early the next morning Hector found parking in Harley Street, and he walked half a block to Alan Donnovan’s clinic. He climbed the stairs rather than take the lift and when he entered the reception area it was empty. He stood at the desk for only a few minutes before the receptionist returned from Alan’s room carrying an armful of patients’ files.

‘I am so sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Cross.’

‘That’s all right, Victoria.’ She seemed a little flustered to see him, but he put that down to the pressure of working for a man like Alan.

‘Mr Donnovan is running quite a bit late. Do you have something else you need to do?’

‘That’s all right. I am in no hurry. I can wait,’ Hector told her.

She stacked the files on her desk. In her free hand she held an iPhone S4, and now she laid it down beside the pile of files as the intercom rang.

‘Excuse me, Mr Cross. Everything seems to be happening at once this morning.’ She picked up the intercom and spoke into it. ‘Yes, Mr Donnovan. Yes, at once.’ She dropped the intercom in its cradle. ‘Please excuse me again, Mr Cross.’

She started towards the inner rooms. She left her iPhone lying beside the files. Hector noticed that the device was identical to his own. It triggered something in his mind and suddenly it all seemed to drop into place. The answer to the conundrum had been staring him in the face all along. He had overlooked Victoria as though she was a piece of furniture. He was chagrined by the fact that he had not worked it out long before.

‘Listen, Victoria,’ he called after her. ‘I have just remembered something else I should do. It wasn’t really important that I see Mr Donnovan today anyway. Please cancel my appointment, and I will call you again next week to make another.’

‘Oh, are you sure? All right, but I am so sorry for this, Mr Cross.’ She fled for Alan’s door.

As it closed, Hector leaned across the desk and scooped up the girl’s iPhone. He slipped his own out of its pouch on his belt and switched them. He hoped that it might be some time before she tumbled to the exchange. He was not worried that he might have left vital information in the girl’s hands. Dave Imbiss had taught him how to keep his phone impregnable and squeaky clean. He left the clinic and went down to where he had parked. He drove back to No. 11, where he found the other three members of his team in the library.

‘That didn’t take you too long, boss. We didn’t expect you back so soon,’ Dave Imbiss told him.

‘I went to get you a little present. Here you go.’ He tossed him Victoria’s iPhone.

‘Thanks a thousand.’ Dave caught it neatly. ‘But I already have one.’

‘One like this you ain’t got,’ Hector assured him. ‘What I want you to do is take it down to the workshop and strip every bit of information out of it. I want the full list of its contact numbers. All the messages received and sent, either in voice or SMS. I want copies of all the videos in memory. I want you to look particularly hard at everything dated from the week of Hazel’s death up to the present time.’

‘Where did you get this, boss?’ Dave examined the iPhone with sudden keen attention, turning it over in his hands, not even glancing at Hector as he asked the questions. ‘Who does it belong to? How did you get your hands on it?’

‘I stole it from the receptionist at Alan Donnovan’s clinic. Alan is Hazel’s gynaecologist. The receptionist’s name is Victoria Vusamazulu. She is a cute little African number and her name in Zulu is a political war-cry meaning “Rouse the Zulu Nation”. I am not sure about the nation, but with her physical assets I have little doubt she could rouse a few of the dead. She has probably woken up to my switch of her phone already, but I can stall her until tomorrow. You have got until then to suck her iPhone dry. Apart from her boss, Victoria is the only one who knew that Hazel was coming up to London on the day of the ambush.’

Dave grinned with delight at the challenge. ‘It won’t take that long. This little Zulu number will soon have no secrets from me. Excuse me, folks.’

Hector resisted the urge to follow Dave down to the workshop in the basement. Dave was one of the best in the business but he would work even better without unsolicited advice and chivvying. Hector left him to get on with it, and he went up to his study.

Agatha had digitized all Hazel’s information from the time she first came to work as her PA. On Hector’s desk she had left an external hard drive that contained all of it; many hundreds of gigabytes.

Now that the trail of Hazel’s killer had gone cold in Mecca, Hector was determined to go right back to the beginning of Hazel’s dazzling career, and search out all the rivals she had left along the road. As dearly as he loved her, Hector never once doubted Hazel’s capacity for making enemies. She had kicked and clawed her way to the top of a tall heap, and she had never backed away from a fight.

If you spend your entire life shaking the mountains, churning the oceans and beating the jungles, as Hazel had done, you are bound to flush out some pretty scary creatures. Hector began a fresh search for one of these. The most vicious and vindictive of them all; the enemy who would make a great white shark seem like a toothless Chihuahua.

He had been at work for only a couple of hours when the intercom rang. It was Agatha.

‘Good morning, Mr Cross. I have the receptionist from Mister Donnovan’s clinic on the line. I tried to put her off, but she is most insistent. Will you take the call?’

‘Thank you, Agatha. I’ll take it.’ He made a mental note to have a serious talk to Agatha. He badly needed a personal assistant, and she would be perfect in the job. Hazel had been her whole life. Perhaps now she might transfer that loyalty to him. A side benefit in the arrangement was the fact that there would be no danger of any emotional entanglements. He put that thought aside, and spoke into the handset. ‘Cross.’

‘I am sorry to bother you, Mr Cross. This is Vicky Vusamazulu. There seems to have been a mix-up. I noticed on your first visit to the clinic that you have an iPhone S4, exactly like mine…’

‘Yes, I have,’ Hector replied, and then he groaned. ‘Oh, damn it to hell. Now I understand what must have happened. I have been unable to open my phone. It’s been refusing to accept my password. I was standing at your desk this morning when you left the room. I was going to make a call, and then I changed my mind. Instead I went to the toilet. Then I realized I had left my phone in your office. I returned to your reception. You weren’t in the room, but I saw an iPhone lying on the desk. I thought it was mine and I took it. I do apologize, Vicky. It was very stupid of me. You don’t have my phone, by any chance, do you?’

‘That is why I am calling you, sir. I do have yours. I know it’s yours because you have written your number inside the back cover. Mine has a lot of very personal information on it. Can I come to your house after work this evening to exchange phones with you?’

‘Please forgive me, Victoria. I am going out in the next few minutes, and I won’t return until late tonight. But I will take your phone with me, if it has very sensitive information in it. Can’t trust anybody these days. I will stop by your office first thing in the morning to make the exchange.’

‘Oh dear! You can’t make it any time today? It really is inconvenient for me.’

‘Sorry, Victoria. Tomorrow before ten a.m., I promise you.’ He hung up before the girl could protest further.

Dave Imbiss called him on the intercom a few minutes after five that afternoon.

‘Sorry, boss. It took longer than I thought. Miss Vusamazulu is a cunning little vixen. She put a whole bunch of booby traps into her machine. But I have got it all out for you at last.’

‘Good man. Tell me about it.’

‘Better you come and have a look and a listen for yourself. We will need to use the cinema. I have got about an hour of videos to show you. Before you come, you should take a calm pill, or maybe even two. What I have for you is going to blow your mind, boss.’

‘I’ll be down in five. Give Paddy and Nastiya a call to join us for this gala performance.’

Paddy and Nastiya were sitting in the centre of the second row of seats when Hector entered the theatre. Dave was fiddling with the electronic equipment. He looked up as Hector swung one long leg over the first row and dropped into the seat beside Nastiya.

‘Sorry to disappoint, folks. We ain’t got no commercials. So, I’ll go straight to the main features,’ Dave told them. ‘Firstly, some selected conversations. A fact that most iPhone owners do not know is that nothing is ever lost; no matter how many times you delete it we can always get it back. Miss Vusamazulu had two shots at deleting this particular conversation, but here it comes again, recorded on the day that Hazel had her final consultation with Alan Donnovan.’ Dave started the audio machine. The first sound was the single ring tone of a mobile phone and immediately afterwards there was click as the receiver was lifted. There was a pause and then a woman’s voice.

‘Hello. Is that you, Aleutian?’

The answer came immediately.

‘I told you not to name names, bitch.’ The cadence was American hip-hop. The delivery was arrogant. The woman’s soft gasp of contrition was barely audible. Then her voice took on a submissive pleading tone.

‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘Then don’t forget to delete this call when we finish. Now tell me! Has she come?’

‘Yes, she is here. But her husband has gone out. He told Doctor that he would return at one thirty.’

‘Good!’ said the male voice, and the line went dead. Dave switched off the audio. They were all silent for a while.

Then Hector said, ‘Aleutian. Was that the name she used?’

‘That’s what it sounds like. Anyway, it’s probably a gangland handle; a
nom de guerre.
Not his passport name, if you know what I mean.’

‘Play the call again.’

Dave ran it back and started it again. They all leaned forward to listen. When it ended Paddy agreed. ‘Aleutian. Definitely Aleutian. So at least we have some sort of name to work with now.’

‘The time and date are right. I dropped Hazel at Donnovan’s clinic and went to run a few errands around town,’ Hector agreed. ‘What else is there, Dave?’

‘The next call was at nine forty-five the same evening,’ Dave told them. ‘This is Aleutian calling Victoria.’

He started the recorder. There were four ring tones, and then the girl’s unmistakable voice and intonation.

‘Hello. This is Victoria.’

‘I’ll be there to pick you up in ten minutes. Wait for me downstairs, outside the tobacconist. I am driving a rented blue VW.’