The Third Woman. Mark Burnell

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Day Four

      She woke with a start and checked her watch. Three-twenty-five. As a teenager, she’d been a hopeless sleeper. As Stephanie, she still was. But Petra had been trained to take sleep wherever she could, no matter how hostile the environment.

      They were in the sitting-room. Newman was slumped in his chair, his head lolling to one side. Stephanie was on the sofa behind him. She’d chosen it deliberately for the small psychological advantage of being invisible to him.

      Silently, she rose from the sofa and went to the bathroom. She showered then wrapped herself in one of his towels and sorted through his ex-lover’s wardrobe. The black jeans were the right length but Stephanie’s waist was slimmer. She pulled on a navy long-sleeved T-shirt, a chunky black jersey and the silver trainers.

      She felt human again. As human as Petra could be.

      In the kitchen she filled a kettle. While the water heated she investigated Newman’s study. On a large oak desk beside the window were two slim Sony monitors and a cordless keyboard. She looked in the drawers; stationery, bills and receipts, correspondence, cash – euros, dollars, Swiss francs – an Air France first-class boarding card from Singapore to Paris, and two American passports.

      The first passport belonged to Robert Ridley Newman, aged forty-eight. It had been issued two years before but there were already dozens of stamps in it, some recurring frequently; Damascus, Riyadh, Beijing and Shanghai, Tehran, Jakarta. The second passport was seven years older. She flicked through the pages. There were only twelve stamps in it, nine of them issued at Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv.

      In the bottom drawer on the right she found a Vacheron watch with a leather strap. On the back was an inscription and a date: Robert, with love, Carlotta, 10–11–2001. A birthday? She checked the passports. Not his.

      Back in the kitchen, she switched on the TV suspended over the slate worktop. Bloomberg was playing. She flicked through the channels until she came to BBC World, which was showing archive footage of Anders Brand. He was shaking hands with Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton to one side, the three of them sharing a joke. At the bottom of the screen the caption read: Former Swedish diplomat named among Paris dead.

      A résumé unfolded; posts in Manila, Baghdad, Rome and Washington, as a junior diplomat, followed by two forays into business with Deutsche Bank in New York and Shell in London. Later, Brand had returned to the Swedish diplomatic service, serving in the Philippines, then Spain. After that, he’d joined the United Nations in New York, filling a series of increasingly undefined roles as his star rose. Divorced for almost twenty years, Brand was survived by his ex-wife, the former actress Lena Meslin, and their two adult sons.

      A little late but just as Stern had predicted.

      Stern.

      Painfully, Stephanie surrendered to the one thought she’d been resisting since the Lancaster.

      You set me up.

      Now, more than ever, she needed information. For years, he’d been her preferred source. Information from Stern was bought at a premium but was cheap at the price. She’d never had reason to question its quality. He’d never sold her out. On the contrary. There had been occasions where he’d volunteered information to protect her. Or rather, as he usually put it, to protect his investment.

      Safe from one another, their relationship had evolved into a form of sterile, electronic friendship, neither of them interested in finding out too much about the other because they both understood that security lay in anonymity. But in the beginning it had been strictly business; request, negotiation, payment, delivery. Cold and clinical.

      Stern traded information, not affection. The faux relationship that Stephanie had allowed to develop between them had come to obfuscate that uneasy fact. Stern owed her nothing, nor she him. At the end of every transaction they were equal. It was true that he’d made money out of her. Just as she’d made money out of the information he’d sold her. She’d come to assume that he’d never trade her because she was valuable to him. But why not, if the money was right? She’d never guaranteed him anything. Each transaction ran the risk of being the last. Stern existed in a transitory environment; the currency of information tended to devalue with time. In both their worlds, it paid to seize the moment.

      Ultimately, Stern’s fidelity was always going to be a question of price.

      At first, he thought he’d imagined it. The sound of running water. A shower. His shower. He tried to straighten himself. Had he fallen asleep? Perhaps, but not in the regenerative sense. Sleep was nothing more than a brief lapse between uncomfortable bouts of waking. СКАЧАТЬ