A Very Big Bang Read online

  She had brilliant dark eyes, now staring right into Simon Shard, Detective Chief Superintendent, because of his appointment to Hedge’s side a very top copper. Knowing it didn’t show, he prayed just the same. Her voice was clear and spoke beautiful English with only a trace of an accent: “This is the man?”

  Terry said, “Yes.”

  “He is safe?”

  “I think so. There’s still things for checking — but I reckon he’s all right. In any case … he doesn’t know anything yet.” That, Shard said to himself, is what you think. He smiled at the girl — she was little more, he fancied, just about out of her teens, but she must have broken more hearts than Casey’s already. They matured fast along the Mediterranean, along the Red Sea, the Gulf, the Arabian Sea. This one looked fully experienced. Remembering Casey, Shard made the smile cautious, a mere politeness. He said, “That’s right, what the man says. Me, I’d like to know more.”

  “As soon as possible, Mr Pearson.” She smiled back, an approving smile that let the even white teeth show briefly against red lips. She liked the well-built look, the shoulders, the thighs, all muscle and no fat, the flat, well-kept stomach, the chin and mouth: he could read all that in her dark eyes flanked by thick dark hair that tumbled with the world’s most natural-looking artifice down the satin-stnooth cheeks, palely brown in the electric light. For a moment Beth’s image flashed before his mind like a warning ghost: this woman, this girl, was bloody lovely and in no time at all could slide snake-like beneath the toughest copper’s skin. Beth, however was not the only warning: from behind Nadia Nazarrazeen a man came, also of the Middle East though not Shard’s image of an Arab: there was none of the hauteur or the dignity, none of the hawkish face and the hooked nose, no soup^on here of the flashing scimitar’s blade. This man, though young, was short and all flesh, with a puffy hairless face. Probably strong though, and currently with a lover’s possessive snarl in his eyes. Definitely, however passionate, unworthy of Nadia. Casey’s killer? Probably: Shard marked him indelibly in his mental book.

  The man put himself squatly between Shard and his Eastern beauty. “Come,” he said in English. “Before the light, we must go. Yes?” He looked at Nadia, and she nodded, but — curiously — her face was scornful. She moved for the door into the farmyard, out to the smell of cow and pig. Every movement of the body was sex, was a loud invitation. Dressed as an English girl she wore tight jeans, moulded to all the crevices. Shard, feeling her in his very bloodstream, watched the caressment of buttocks, one against the other. She vanished, and along the slipstream of her perfume, Shard was herded by Terry and Nigel and the squat lover, who looked as though he could be of Levantine extraction.

  In the yard, still under the night’s cover and the rain, stood a Dormobile — an Austin Motor Caravan, off-white with a darker stripe whose true colour only daylight would show. Nadia Nazarrazeen was already embarked, sitting on one of the passenger seats with curtains drawn across the side windows. The squat Levantine, query, sat himself fatly by her side. Shard was told to take a seat level with these two across the gangway; and by him sat Terry, with Nigel taking the front passenger seat. Already in the driving seat sat the driver: a thin man with a bilious complexion wearing a brown anorak zipped up the front to the neck and with the hood in place, giving him, from the rear, the appearance of a monk. With the farmhouse door shut and locked behind them, and the car in which Shard had been brought a few hours earlier driving out behind in the care of the third man from York, the Dormobile headed away from Stalling Busk, taking Shard once again along the rutted track past Semerwater, dark and ghostly, and on for the A684 that ran through from the A19 to Kendal in Westmorland. Reaching the main road, the Dormobile turned left, heading for the small market town of Hawes. On the outskirts of Hawes they turned off right along a road that, after two more turns, began to climb steeply into the fells above Gotterdale, heading for the Butter-tubs Pass. The sky was lightening now, but there was a good deal of mist around, damply clinging, so thick at times that the beams of the headlights themselves seemed lost in it. On a bend in the high mountain road where the wreathing mist concealed a steep drop into the dale on their right, Nadia Nazarrazeen, who had been preoccupied and silent since leaving Stalling Busk, spoke sharply to the driver.

  “These are the Buttertubs. Stop now.”

  The Dormobile, moving slow on a tricky road, eased its speed further. The headlights showed a shallow pull-in to the left, and light fencing with springy turf beyond. The driver pulled in and stopped alongside the fence.

  “The lights off.”

  The driver flicked a switch, and turned in his seat. For a moment there was silence. The atmosphere was curiously tense: Shard, feeling this strongly, could not have said quite why, nor could he have forecast what was about to happen. In that fraction of suspended time, that time of silence, Nadia Nazarrazeen stared ahead through the mist-blocked windscreen while the others waited for her to speak — to issue, no doubt, her further orders. No one, Shard believed afterwards, saw her hand move. But when the extraordinary silence had lasted for perhaps thirty seconds, the man by her side, the lover from the Levant, gave a brief moaning sigh and then slid into the space between the seats as limp as a discarded pair of nylon tights, with blood spreading through his shirt, messily visible as the heavy jersey rode up his body.

  Then the girl spoke, calm and remote as the shrouded fells behind the mist: “The blood — stop the flow and clean the spillage. Undress him, bundle the clothing, and stow it out of sight. All of it. We shall get rid of that later. When he is completely naked, take him outside, but be careful with the bleeding.”

  Even Terry and Nigel, so controlled and dangerous as interrogators, seemed rocked: their faces pale, they did as bid. The fawn-coloured Levantine, stripped naked, had even less dignity than before. In his left side Shard saw the tiny slit where the knife had slipped in, just right for the heart, between two ribs. Nigel dabbed with the tail of the Levantine’s shirt; to Nadia Nazarrazeen’s orders, Terry plugged the wound itself with one of the removed socks. Then rough bandaging was wound round and pulled tight, the rear doors were thrust open, and Terry got down. Inside the Dormobile Nigel and the driver lifted the Levantine towards the rear, and he was carried out. Nadia spoke to Shard.

  “You have heard of the Buttertubs, Mr Pearson?”

  Shard nodded. “I’ve seen them.” Curious, he thought, what the forces of nature could accomplish over millions of years: erosion had formed the Buttertubs, deep but narrow limestone shafts that had driven into the high fell in the dawn of prehistory. “Do I take it your late friend is going down one of them?”

  “Yes.” She examined her finger-nails in the increasing, mist-filled dawn. “He will of course be found eventually, but not in time for it to matter to me.” She wound down the window alongside her seat, and called to the men, passing the final disposal orders; then she turned back to Shard. “A warning, my friend: that man was stupid. Because he was jealous, he killed a man who was valuable to — what I have to do.”

  “Which is?”

  The girl smiled. “Patience! One lesson at a time is enough. May I suggest you learn this present one well? I am not to be trifled with, John Pearson.”

  Shard sat in silence as the men got back in and checked the interior for the smallest signs of blood. The Levantine’s clothing, bundled up neatly and cleanly, was pushed into the cupboard at the Dormobile’s off-side rear corner. There was one thing sure: Casey’s killer, now lying broken on the rocks at the bottom of one of those time-worn limestone shafts, was way beyond arrest. But the girl was still the moral killer, with as much blood on her slim, elegant fingers as had the wretched Levantine on his. As the Dormobile pulled away from deep-down death, back on the road into Muker and Swaledale, Shard was bidden to take the dead man’s place beside Nadia Nazarrazeen. He obeyed, his body rigidly half-expectant of the killing knife: it was a weird feeling! From the corner of his eye he studied the face, the high cheekbones, the patrician nose,
the mouth’s sexy line, the tumbling dark hair. Tom Casey, poor Tom Casey, had been rather less than a good copper to allow himself to dilute duty with sex: but — and quite apart from his own built-in predilection for good-looking women — he may have had no option: sex could be considered, in the circumstances, to be duty! A copper had to convince, after all. And Nadia Nazarrazeen could be something of a man-eater.

  *

  Mile after mile, taken slow at first on the tricky, descending road, mist-shrouded still, the long drops invisible but very present. Mile after mile of sitting close up against the girl, smelling her scent, smelling her hair. She didn’t utter a word: she just sat with her pointed chin cupped in a soft brown-skinned hand — just sat, and disturbed Shard — looking out of the window as later the sun came up to dapple the dales with light and life and colour. After a long, long silence, Shard risked her displeasure by asking, “Where are we going?”

  A shrug, a smile from eyes briefly slanted in his direction. “Oh … a long way.”

  “Tell me?”

  She laughed, lightly. “Very well, why not? To London.”

  “London?” Shard felt the increased beat of his heart.

  “We have finished in the north.”

  “Then things are moving … towards a conclusion?”

  “There is always,” the girl said with a mocking glint in her eye, “movement in that direction, from the start. Is this not so?”

  “Yes,” Shard said. The girl seemed disinclined for more talk as the Dormobile, beginning to leave the mist behind, joined the A1. They by-passed Boroughbridge, heading towards Wetherby and on for the motorway. Shard sat wrapped in her scent, feeling the close intimacy of her body, the pressure of her thigh against his own. Her hair, taken by the wind coming through the wound-down window, blew silkily against his face. She was totally relaxed and seemed to be enjoying the drive: Shard wondered what pleasure such a girl got from killing, from the planning of mass death, all in the name, presumably, of some all-important national image, some deep-seated insane desire to impress the Western world with the latent power of her own country, whichever that might be. There had still been no suggestion of any more positive aim, of anything concrete to be gained by threat; Shard was more than ever certain that there was no blackmail of authority involved in this: it was to be mass slaughter of the most pointless kind, slaughter simply to terrify, to weaken the confidence and security of the West, as he’d said to the Garda chief in Dublin.

  The Dormobile made the journey south in good time; stopping only for petrol, eating snacks on the move, they hit the end of the motorway at three thirty in the afternoon and headed along the North Circular for Gunnersbury and Kew Bridge and thence down into Twickenham. In Twickenham they pulled into a yard littered with odds and ends, a scrap-dealer’s yard behind high brick walls. As the Dormobile stopped, a man with a cigarette dangling from thin lips came out from the back door of a house adjoining the yard, nodded casually at the driver, and went to shut the gate, dropping a heavy iron bar across after. Then he approached the driver’s window.

  “Good run, eh?”

  “Very good. All okay this end?”

  There was a slight pause, barely noticeable. “Yes. All okay.” Just for a moment, eyes stared at Shard: a brief flash, maybe of no more than curiosity, but Shard for some reason didn’t like it — didn’t like it any more than he’d liked that so-brief pause. Beside him, the girl moved, and he got up to let her out. He came out last but one, the driver behind him. There were no guns visible as the driver put a hand on his shoulder and guided him in a friendly way towards the back door, following in the girl’s scented wake: but to Shard’s highly-tuned mind atmosphere was emerging in waves from the thin-lipped man. Ahead of him he saw the thin-lipped man whisper into the girl’s ear, saw her give him a quick, sharp look, then nod. Nadia turned to face the others. “The cellar,” she said. “There is whisky. I shall come down in a moment.”

  She went ahead with the thin-lipped man, vanishing through a door. Shard was ushered to another door which when pushed open revealed wooden steps: a light went on below, in a clean dry cellar. Shard descended. The place was littered with unmarked packing-cases, and on a plain deal table were maps and drawings which Terry and Nigel, going down ahead of Shard, gathered up into a large cardboard file and put out of sight: the new recruit, evidently, wasn’t going to see the work-out yet. Across one corner of the cellar was a bar, the shelves behind it holding a number of bottles of Scotch but little else. Two of the men threw themselves into easy chairs, yawning, stretching away the cooped-up miles of motorway, calling for whisky: Nigel it was who went behind the bar to act as barman. He cocked an eye at Shard. “Scotch?”

  “Thank you.” Shard moved towards the bar.

  Nigel poured, was about to shout at the others to come and get it when the door at the head of the stairs opened and Nadia Nazarrazeen came down with the thin-lipped man. Both had their guns out, and both were pointing them meaningly at Shard, who knew now that he had been dead right earlier about atmosphere. He remained standing by the bar, staring at the girl, leaving it to her to speak. She didn’t keep him waiting long.

  “John Pearson,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Yes …”

  “Who are you, John Pearson? Tell me!”

  He was aware of all the eyes, like animals, waiting with claws out to rip and tear. He asked, “Why the enquiry? Why do you doubt me?”

  She was at the bottom of the steps now. “A man, a dropout, has been found in a dosshouse south of York. They call him Nose. You know him?”

  Shard nodded, feeling cold. This, he could not deny. “I know him. So?”

  “So you went to Larger’s shop … from the police station, John Pearson. What does this mean, please?”

  The eyes seemed to close in: the seated men got to their feet, brought out the support guns. But they held off, waiting for word from the summit. Shard said, sounding casual, “Oh, that’s easy enough. They’d picked me up with Nose — hauled us both in, off the street.”

  “Why?”

  “A question about a job done down this way — a break-in, a screwing job. I had a record, you see. In the copper mind, that tends to click out an answer.”

  “But they let you go, John Pearson?”

  He said. “I hadn’t done it, had I?”

  The guns pointed still, all of them; but there was still a little time for talking. The girl asked, “And Nose? He had done nothing either?”

  “That’s right. They only picked him up because he was with me when they found me.”

  “And they let him go too —”

  “Yes.”

  “But differently.”

  Shard lifted an eyebrow. “Come again?”

  The gun jerked. “I said, but differently. Nose left the police with his filthy clothes, you did not. When you were picked up — and do not try to deny this — you were dressed like this Nose. When you went to the newsagents, you were not. Tell me, John Pearson: do the police hand out clean clothing to people accused of crime, if they are found not to have done these crimes? Is this a part of your national welfare, John Pearson?” Nadia Nazarrazeen’s eyes narrowed killer-like. “Or can there be, perhaps, John Pearson, some other reason for your fresh clothing?”

  It was, he knew, all over: Beth’s widowhood was now going to be for real. That, he read unmistakably in the girl’s brilliant eyes. He saw the same message, repeated in the other faces, the differing facets of fear, fury, outrage, revenge and hatred. Nadia also seemed to read those faces, and she reacted sharply. “Do not shoot,” she said. “He can’t get away. Put away your guns, all of you.”

  They stared, began a reluctant back-down accompanied by protest: “Look, he’s —”

  “Do as I say. Put your guns right away in case of — accidents. John Pearson will have things to tell us, and he is not to die before he has done so. Now!”

  The guns went back into holsters. Shard, keeping his end up, still hoping against all reas
on, leant back against the bar. From the corner of his eye, as the girl moved towards him, beautiful, sexy and lethal, he saw the open bottle of Scotch. He moved fast, very fast, and with a total lack of gallantry: Johnny Walker flew strong through the air and took the girl hard in the mouth, and Shard was right behind it with one hand taking the gun in an iron grip and the other going where the bottle had landed but right around the head too, slewing the girl to place her neatly between himself and the ring of guns.

  Eight

  Shard held the gun against the girl’s body, right between the shoulder blades. With her hair soft against his face, he gave his orders.

  “Over to the wall, that side.” He gestured left of the bar. “Move!”

  They moved, taking it slow, eyes on Shard.

  “Turn round, faces to the wall.”

  They obeyed: the girl, who had struggled at first, was quiet and motionless in Shard’s encircling grip, breathing fast, a snake in his bosom all ready to take advantage of the smallest slip. Shard, called towards the line of backs. “With great care, gentlemen, and one at a time, bring out your guns and throw them behind you. Man nearest the bar first. Go!”

  They did so: weapons clattered singly on the cellar floor. Only one man, Terry, third in line, made a bid towards heroism. His gun didn’t come out spinning, it came out pointing, but it never fired. Shard’s bullet ripped the thumb away at the joint and went on to score a furrow along a rib and then embed in the wall. Blood and strong language flowed: a point had been made and a broad hint taken. There was no more trouble as Shard pushed the girl ahead of him, away from the bar, along the cellar behind the silent line of rumps, towards the wooden stairway. He paused en route to pick up the cast guns: revolvers, automatics, quite an armoury. Stuffed as to pockets and trousers waistband, feeling like an arsenal, he reached the stairs and started up backwards, dragging his hostage and keeping wary eyes on the line of disarmed men below. They stayed like statues: he was known, now, to be a dangerous shot. Presumably they were also respecting the threat to Nadia Nazarrazeen, for they stayed like statues even after Shard had reached the top of the stairs and was emerging into the passage. It looked very much like an almost bloodless battle due to end in total victory: a flick of the door lock, then contact with a telephone to bring Hesseltine’s heavies down to Twickenham and a nice easy pick-up, sunshine all the way. But it didn’t come out quite like that. At the top of the steps, just before she passed out of salvation’s reach, Nadia Nazarrazeen reacted twice, fast and vicious: pearly small teeth that felt diamond pointed sank deep in Shard’s gun wrist, and at the same instant of time a swivelling and forcefully up-jerked knee took him very, very hard in his tenderest part. As he doubled up, the girl went down the steps like lightning. Behind her went two of the captured guns, bouncing and spinning, having exited from Shard’s waistband when he fell. Using his will-power, Shard set his teeth and hinged his body upright: sweat streamed as he jerked the cellar door shut and locked it — just before a heavy man thudded against the panels. Shard heard the resulting curse, then jumped aside as bullets tore through the wood. The lock, as he had seen, was not brilliant: it wouldn’t hold out for long, in fact it was already splintering away.