The Rhythm Section. Mark Burnell

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СКАЧАТЬ had noticed that it was intact. Or maybe the killer was after something else – something that was actually retrieved. A piece of hard information, perhaps? A secret locked in Proctor’s mind? Would he have surrendered it? He must have known that he was going to die so did he try to take it to the grave? How resistant had he been to the pain? How resistant would she have been?

      Stephanie picked up the phone. She pressed nine once, then twice. Think about it. Then she stopped, before replacing the receiver. There was nothing she could do for Proctor now. She was all that was left. She wondered whether she was in danger herself. Had the intruder expected to find both of them in the flat or was Proctor the only target? And who had the intruder been? Bradfield? An associate of his? Or someone else, someone invisible to her?

      She needed time to think and somewhere safe to do it.

      Auto-pilot engaged and emotions temporarily suspended, she drifted through the flat. Her little rucksack was in the corner of the living room, its contents scattered across the cherry table. The money she had stolen from her King’s Cross clients was gone, everything else – the worthless stuff – had been left. The panic rose within her but she beat it back. She returned her belongings to the bag and searched for Proctor’s overcoat. That was what he had been wearing when she had seen him leaving St Mary’s Paddington. She found it in the bedroom among a heap of clothes on the floor. The wallet lay beside it. The cash was gone. Only the cards remained; Barclays Connect and Visa. She rummaged through her own pockets and found six pounds seventy.

      She put his wallet into her rucksack and went into Proctor’s office. She examined the computer screen. It was a letter to a features editor of a magazine she did not recognize. She scrolled down the page. The content was innocuous. Then she remembered that he had told her that he kept nothing of value on his desk-top. The necessity for torture became more apparent.

      It seemed Proctor had kept his filing cabinet locked and had not been forthcoming over the whereabouts of the key since it had been prised open with a hammer and a screwdriver, which had both been left lying on top of it. The files had been examined and discarded. Stephanie got down on her hands and knees and began to sift through the papers.

      It took thirty-five minutes to find the slip of paper with the PIN code for the Visa card on it. She found no number for the Connect card but made a note of Proctor’s birth date, his phone numbers, his fax number, his National Insurance number, his passport number. A three-month-old bank statement revealed a nine hundred and eighty pound credit in Proctor’s current account. She hoped his Visa card was as healthy.

      She took the screwdriver from the top of the filing cabinet and went to the bathroom, where she unfastened the panel and retrieved Proctor’s lap-top and the plastic pouch containing the seven floppy-disks. There was too much to squeeze into her rucksack so she found another small shoulder bag on the bedroom floor. She helped herself to a tatty Aran jersey, a relic from a bygone era in Proctor’s personal fashion history. She also took some thick socks, three T-shirts and a navy blue silk scarf, which she wrapped around her throat. On the cherry table, by her rucksack, she noticed Proctor’s portable phone, which was recharging. She took it.

      Her scavenging concluded, Stephanie wanted to do something about Proctor, to cover him, or to arrange him in some way that looked less awkward – less pained – and then to alert someone. But she did none of these things.

      Instead, she gathered her bags and left the flat, taking care to double-lock the front door as Proctor had always insisted she should.

      It had started to rain when she stepped on to Bell Street. She looked left and right, half-expecting an approach from a stranger, or a dark-windowed car to screech to a halt beside her. Or the cold dart of pain as the tempered steel slipped between her ribs, courtesy of an invisible hand. But there was no one and nothing. She turned right and headed for the Edgware Road. Cash was her first consideration.

      She tried the Connect card at the first two ATMs she came to, using variations of the month and year of Proctor’s birth and the last four digits of his phone number for the PIN code. All were rejected. At the Halifax ATM, on the junction of Edgware Road and Old Marylebone Road, Stephanie played safe and inserted the Visa card for which she had a valid PIN number. She withdrew two hundred pounds and turned her attention to the next priority: getting off the street.

      Sussex Gardens offered plenty of cheap, anonymous accommodation, the dingy terraced hotels set back from the road behind railings and hedges. She could have picked any one of two dozen places but settled for the Sherburn House Hotel for the flimsiest of reasons: its name. Sherburn was the village outside Durham where she had stayed on the night that flight NE027 had plunged into the Atlantic.

      She paid cash and registered under a false name that she forgot almost instantly. Her room was on the second floor. The single bed had an orange bedspread, the curtains were maroon. There was a single-bar electric heater mounted on a wall. The wallpaper had been buttercup yellow once – the original colour was preserved in a rectangle where a picture had hung for years – but now it was dirty cream, with patches of brown where the damp was worst. In the corner, there was a sink with a small green bucket beneath it, to catch the drips leaking from the U-bend in the pipe.

      Alone, Stephanie dumped her bags on the floor and sat on the bed. The springs squeaked as she sank into the quicksand mattress. She put her head in her hands.

      What now?

      A cigarette. I’d give anything for a cigarette right now. And maybe a drink. Maybe two. A shot of vodka would help, especially if it was a double. The first of several, perhaps. And then maybe something a little stronger, just to be sure.

      I am standing at the crossroads. Again.

      I have been here before. Of the choices that are available to me, I know one well and I can feel it drawing me towards it. It is the path that offers to numb the pain. It is the path which promises the bliss of ignorance as a solution. It is the path I chose last time.

      Proctor’s lap-top was operating Windows 98. The last time Stephanie had used a computer she had been a student and Windows 95 had been the freshest thing on the menu. She never cared much for computers, or for the sad souls who were so infatuated by them, but she had learned the basics. At the time, she had been surprised by how easy she found it. Now, two corrosive years later, she felt less complacent. Working cautiously, it took her two hours to refresh her memory to a standard that allowed her through the system.

      There was a list of the material stored on Proctor’s desk-top. Most of the files from the original investigation were on that; the interviews with the families and friends of those who had perished aboard NE027. She supposed that included Christopher and wished she could have seen what he’d said to Proctor. How had he coped over the last two years? Stephanie had done all she could to bleach her own memory but her brother wasn’t like that. Since his emotions rarely rose to the surface, what lurked beneath remained a mystery.

      There was a form of diary on the second of the seven disks that she inserted into the computer, a chronological report for Proctor’s investigation. It showed the order in which he had contacted the bereaved and each of their responses to his request for an interview. Where granted, there was a file reference for the interviews themselves, all of which were stored on the desk-top. Most people had only been interviewed once, either by phone or in person, but some had been interviewed twice or even three times. The chronology also showed Proctor’s travel schedule and the actual dates for all the interviews he had conducted. Stephanie saw that Christopher had only been questioned once.

      The computer record also told Stephanie something about Proctor’s MI5 contact. At first, she thought Smith was part of Proctor’s initial enquiry, someone close to one of the three hundred and eighty-eight dead. But the СКАЧАТЬ