Snark Read online

  “Distribution?” Bellman asked.

  Stingley nodded. “There are prints of three people in the flat. The victim, the killer, and a third person. The prints of the victim and the third person—who, we guess, is the husband, or what have you—are just everywhere. Plates, tables, the flush handle on the WC, all the places you put your fingers when you live somewhere. The killer left his dabs on the weapon, and a few wild prints about the flat, but nowhere near the number of the other two. He may have been there longer than a few minutes, but he wasn’t living there.

  “The only reason we put the picture out is that we want to talk to him. It looked like being a case where he came home, found the body, and buggered off in a panic. Now, of course, if he’s an international terrorist, that could explain why he wanted no part of a police inquiry.”

  “If you find him, I want to know about it. Miss Grace will give you a telephone number.” She did so. They thanked him for his time and trouble and rose to go.

  The phone rang as they were on their way out. Stingley picked it up, listened, then told his caller to wait a second. “Miss Grace,” he called. “Mr. Bellman, I don’t know if this makes a difference to you, but the coroner says that Margaret Hepwood was pregnant. About three months gone.”

  Bellman took the news deadpan, nodded his thanks. They left. Through the door he could hear Miss Grace say, “Now, what the hell was that in aid of?” but he didn’t hear Bellman make an answer.

  THIRD

  “I engage with the Snark—every night after dark—

  In a dreamy delirious fight:

  I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,

  And I use it for striking a light;

  “But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,

  In a moment (of this I am sure),

  I shall softly and suddenly vanish away—

  And this notion I cannot endure!”

  —The Hunting of the Snark

  Fit the Third

  1

  YOUNG DAVE HAMILTON STOOD in Robert Tipton’s office like a boy summoned to the headmaster. Respectful, so far. Polite. Hoping nothing would happen to the fragile pride he kept within him to make him obliged to act otherwise.

  Tipton hastened to reassure him. “Sit down, Mr. Hamilton,” he said. The boy sat, feet together, back not touching the upholstery. His heavy lace-up boots looked incongruous against the plush blue carpet.

  “First of all, I wanted to thank you for working the extra hours.”

  Young Hamilton smiled. “Yeah,” he said, running a finger against the colored plastic in his ear. “When Miss Grace told me about the job, she said we wouldn’t be working union hours, and all.”

  “Where have you put up Miss Grace and Mr. Bellman?”

  “At the Bellingham, sir. It’s a good respectable place on the shingle some way west of the marina. Private baths, lifts. I got them separate rooms, I hope that’s all right, sir.”

  “You had no instructions to the contrary, Hamilton. Quite all right.”

  “The rooms do adjoin, sir.” Hamilton raised his eyebrows in query.

  This time Tipton smiled. “Good. I like to see my people have that kind of initiative. But I didn’t call you in here just to check on your work.”

  “Before we go on, sir, speaking of initiative, and all, I’d like to ask you for your permission to update the accommodation program for Brighton. When I punched in the requirements this evening, the machine was all set to put through a call to the Grand Hotel down there. We couldn’t have that, now, could we?”

  Tipton told him they certainly could not. He should get together with Research and update the entire accommodation program.

  “But the reason I called you in here was to tell you that you’ve been awarded a rise in salary. This reflects not only the growing importance of the computer to the Section, but your continued good work with the computer. I was going to send you a notice tomorrow—I still will, in fact—but since we were both working late, I thought I’d tell you in person.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tipton. Me mum will be tickled. Will that be all? I’ve got some expense accounts to process.”

  “That’s all, Hamilton, keep up the good work.”

  “Yes, sir. Cheers.”

  One of the phones on Tipton’s desk rang while the young man was still rising from his chair. Tipton picked it up and heard a voice say, “Robert?”

  Tipton tried to keep his voice calm. “Yes?” he said, then he put his hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, “Hamilton!”

  The young man stopped and looked at him eagerly. His coxcomb of hair seemed to vibrate with anticipation. Spy fever, Tipton thought. It gets us all in our younger days.

  And apparently, he reflected, in our second childhood, too, because this was Sir Lewis Alfot on the line, the Secure Line, checked daily, a line to which only the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence and the man who sat at the desk it rested on were supposed to have the number.

  “It’s me, Robert. Free, and only a little the worse. Listen to me. Your phone is secure, but not mine. Don’t mention any names...” He went on with similar shilling-shocker nonsense. Tipton took the time to whisper to Hamilton to rush down to Communications and get them to work on tracing this call.

  “Where are you?” Tipton demanded. “We’ve been worried sick about you, the PM is after heads, and the Americans have been treating us like buffoons. Tell me where you are, and we’ll send someone for you immediately.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not yet. You put me out to pasture, but you were wrong. I have work to do.”

  “You have a bloody report to deliver, or the Americans will leave us with a totally bare bottom.”

  “Bugger the Americans. We can clean up our own bloody messes.”

  The idea now was to keep the old man talking. “Listen,” Tipton began.

  “You listen, Robert. There is something wrong.”

  “I had a feeling there might be,” Tipton said. “Where the bloody hell are you?”

  “Something wrong in the Section,” Sir Lewis went on. “In the whole apparatus of our business. In the Kingdom.”

  Tipton squeezed the bridge of his nose, as if he were trying to pinch off the words forming in his brain from reaching his mouth.

  “I’ve seen it, Robert. And I am bloody well going to do something about it! I always have done, haven’t I?”

  “Yes,” Tipton said wearily, “you alw—”

  The click told him the old man had hung up. He replaced the handset. A few seconds later the telephone next to it buzzed. Communications. No trace. Naturally. But they did have a recording of most of the conversation.

  “Splendid,” Tipton said wearily. He had to hope for a miracle if he wanted to keep the Americans from learning the truth now. He rubbed his eyes. He was beginning to see how sitting in this chair had sent Sir Lewis mad.

  2

  SHE DIDN’T COME TO him during the night. Bellman had had no expectations one way or the other, so he wasn’t disappointed. When they met the next morning for breakfast (bangers, eggs, fried potatoes, toast, jam, and tea), Felicity was impatient and irritable. Maybe I was supposed to go to her, Bellman thought.

  “Do we have any plans today?” she asked.

  Bellman looked at her. From the bag she’d grabbed from her office before they started down to Brighton last night, she had managed to put together the perfect “off-season holiday outfit,” a bulky black sweater over a white turtleneck, black slacks, black silk scarf holding back her hair. She had also managed to retrieve her boots, and was therefore probably armed.

  “Well,” he said. “First I’m going to work on finishing this breakfast; that will take a while. Then I’d like to get up to Sir Lewis’s place and look around there a little.”

  “People have been over it and over it,” she said.

  “I know, I’d just like to see it.”

  “All right, it’s a twenty-minute drive, we can do it a
ny time. Anything else?”

  “It might be a good idea to get me a gun. I didn’t like the ones we confiscated at the airport.”

  It bothered him that Felicity took a casual but thorough glance around the room before answering. She might have known he would have checked before bringing the topic up.

  “I’ve an extra in my bag. Thirty-two automatic all right?”

  “Perfect. I’ve even got a holster for one somewhere.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Why? You want some time off? Doctor? Beauty parlor? Can’t stand the sight of me anymore?”

  “I can stand it,” she said grimly. “I want to show you something. Maybe tell you something.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I said maybe. I’ll see how I feel.” She looked at him long and hard; her eyes were like bright blue searchlights. Bellman got the feeling that his answer would have a lot to do with the future of their working relationship. And for professional reasons (and reasons more personal than he wanted to admit), their working relationship was something he wanted to take good care of.

  “All right,” he said softly. “We’ll see how you feel.”

  She drove him down the beach to the Grand Hotel, parking illegally across the road from it. She gestured him out of the car, leaned against a wing, and pointed.

  Bellman had read about what had happened here, had seen some of the reports that had made their way into the Congressman’s files. The explosion had ripped upward through the middle of the building that October night. It missed wiping out the entire Thatcher government. It had succeeded in killing a few, crippling several, and wounding dozens.

  The IRA insisted it was war. The photos had certainly looked like it, the great V-shaped wound in the middle of the building might have been caused by a blockbuster dropped from an airplane rather than a hand-carried device wrapped in a garbage bag to thwart the noses of explosives-sniffing dogs.

  It didn’t look that way now. They’d been working on the building, clearing away the rubble, squaring off the ragged edges, getting it ready for repair. It now resembled nothing so much as a tooth the dentist was about ready to fill.

  Against the morning sky, one of the shocking electric-blue kind Britain will offer about once a month in contrast to the usual gray, it seemed even more benign. Under construction, routine repairs.

  “That’s what we’re up against,” Felicity said, and Bellman knew she was still seeing it as the orgy of confusion and destruction and pain it had been immediately after the blast.

  “That’s the symbol of all of it, Jeffrey, that building.”

  Bellman maintained an encouraging silence. It occurred to him that lately he had been taking a lot more of what Felicity Grace said at face value. That ole debbil sex, he thought, then pushed the notion away. Let the woman talk. There was plenty of time to be skeptical.

  “I love this country, you know,” she said. “That’s not quite back in fashion here the way it is in America, but I do. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t.”

  To look at them, you would have thought they were just another couple of tourists, come to rubberneck at the scene of some particularly dramatic human misery.

  “They’re out to destroy us, you know. Britain is the target right now. They’re trying to break us.”

  “They’re trying to break all of us,” Bellman said.

  “They are concentrating on Britain,” Felicity said. “The IRA gets training and money, and probably the very bomb that blew up this lovely old building, from the Libyans. Who are backed by the Russians. Who, along with the Libyans, are funneling in money to the NUM, with their bloody eternal coal strike.”

  “Which is dividing the country, and hurting the economy, and victimizing the poor stupid innocent bastards in the union itself, and screwing over the economy and ruining life in a lot of villages probably forever,” Bellman said. “I know. Every country goes through something like that from time to time. We had ours in the late sixties and early seventies—”

  “Don’t teach me history, dammit. You Americans are very little better, anyway.”

  “Are you done looking at the building?” Bellman said.

  “What if I’m not?”

  “Then let’s sit in the car before we get loud enough to draw a crowd.”

  She glared at him for a second, then got in and started the motor. Bellman had to step lively to get around to the left side of the car before she drove off without him.

  “All right,” he said, “tell me about Americans.”

  “What good will it do?”

  “You never know.”

  “You’re so bloody smug. You make me sick.”

  “Who? Americans in general? American spies? Or just me?”

  “Take your pick.” Felicity turned the car away from the ocean. “Here you are, with all this thunderous backing, the White House and the rest, to come and show us how to do it. You have no conception of the problems we’re up against, what Tipton and Sir Lewis before him had to put up with.”

  “I do now,” Bellman said. “You just explained it.”

  “You are not funny. If you just let us hold up our end—”

  “The Russians march into Afghanistan, while the union takes a tea break. Who next, Canada?”

  “We can do our job!”

  “And we can’t take any chances over it. The work has to be done, all right? Whether it’s you or us doesn’t matter—if it isn’t, your country and my country are in deep shit, if I may use an Americanism. Slow down if you don’t want to crack us up or get us arrested.”

  “We’ve got a friend on the Sussex police,” she said grimly. “Why worry?” But she eased up on the accelerator.

  “I happen to have,” Bellman said, “an overriding affection for Britain. This is the country that invented capitalism. And sportsmanship. And trial by jury, and freedom of speech. Most of the things that make America most worth fighting for are direct bequests from Britain. You people built an empire, stood out alone against Hitler, led the world in science and technology.”

  “And everything you’ve mentioned is in the past tense,” she said.

  “I know. And it doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s just too much greatness in the gene pool here for this country to have gotten as screwed up as it is.”

  “People write great fat books about the reasons. The Class Structure is a big one. The war. Treachery from Within. The Cruel System of Capitalism. The Welfare State. Which do you fancy?”

  “Take your pick,” Bellman said. “They all contribute, but at the bottom they’re nothing. The only thing that could really yank the curtain down on you is the attitude I see that says nobody can do anything about it.”

  “‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?’” Felicity said.

  Bellman grinned. “How about this one? ‘Some chicken; some neck.’”

  “Beautiful words, Mr. Bellman. But why is it that I feel my country, my Section and me are being a bit used?”

  “Beats me,” Bellman said.

  “How much do you really care about Sir Lewis Alfot? And how much of your visit is concerned with this international terrorist of yours? One glimpse of him on the telly, and you drop everything to come down here.”

  Bellman tightened his lips and nodded. “I’ve been wondering if you were going to bring this up. I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you I made it all up to have a story for Stingley.”

  “I would not. Why the mad rush down here then? We could have just as well stayed in London. You could have watched Doctor Who. We could have made love again. Not that I’m giving you any news, but you’re quite good at it.”

  “When I have the proper inspiration.”

  “More lies.”

  “Not that one. All right. I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  Felicity made a noise. “I don’t expect the truth. Just a little respect. As a colleague. A professional.”

  “Sure. I’ll give you both. I tell the truth s
ometimes just to hear what my voice sounds like when I’m doing it. Helps me give more verisimilitude to my lies. Are you ready?”

  Felicity nodded.

  Bellman told her the truth. Not all of it. Nothing about the Cronus operation, or his dubious past and his love/hate relationship with his father. He did tell her that he wasn’t the original Jeffrey Bellman, that he replaced the agent who’d had that name and who’d been assigned to help in the hunt for Sir Lewis. He told her that Leo Calvin, the international terrorist in question, had a personal grudge against him, and that Calvin had had something to do with the death of Bellman’s namesake.

  “So yes,” he concluded, “I have a personal ax to grind. I want Calvin off my case so I can sleep in peace.”

  “He’s probably in Russia, drinking tea with Kim Philby.”

  “He is not. He’s here, and he’s running for his life. The Russians are angry. But he’s still working on having me killed. It’s long past time for a showdown.

  “But it’s all tied in. Calvin and the Russians and Sir Lewis—the death of the previous agent tells us that. And that composite drawing ties him in with the Sussex Cyclops, though God knows how.”

  “There’s no proof of that.”

  “Proof? Of course not. Police work on proof. We have to work on possibilities. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that the Cyclops, with fifty-five million people in the Kingdom to choose from, wound up killing the girlfriend of my own personal playmate?”

  Felicity said nothing.

  Bellman piled on questions. “After the way I inherited the case? After Sir Lewis had been approached by a local deputation to look into the killings and Sir Lewis disappeared?”

  “No,” she said at last. “I suppose I don’t believe it’s coincidence.”

  “Feel respected now?”

  She kept her eyes on the road and drove. Bellman took the opportunity to look at the scenery. Fields mostly, dormant under a crust of old snow, sloping gently away from the sea. This would be beautiful in the summer, he thought. It’s not so bad now.

  “I think I will tell you,” Felicity said.