Saskia Brandt: Deja Vu Part 7

's.h.i.+t.' Tom Sawyer with a .44 Magnum shooting a partridge in a pear tree and getting five gold rings as payment. 'OK, I'll remember. What is it?'

'The cipher.'

She took his hand and led him to the corner of the tor. The two policemen were thirty feet away. David glanced at her, ready to panic, but said nothing. Her lips were moving. David looked back. The policemen had split to approach the tor from opposite sides. 'Whatever the next part of the plan is,' he said, 'can we please proceed to it?'

'Every police vehicle in the UK is fitted with a trip code in case of hijack. When you send the code, the vehicle locks down and returns to its depot. The instruction cannot be countermanded. Check the car.'

David leaned out. He saw the doors of the patrol car close. A moment later, the sound reached the police officers. They stopped and exchanged a glance. The taller policeman touched his throat and radioed to the other.

'The policemen are wondering why that happened,' said the woman. 'The short one has just realised. Now they're wondering if they can get back in time.'

David watched them dash to the car. Their runs were ungainly on the slippery rocks. 'What about the helicopter?'

She seemed to consider his question. 'The pilot took it calmly. He's having a coffee. His co-pilot is agitated. But the flight computer will return them safely to the heliport.'

The helicopter tipped forward and, as David stared, became a receding dot. 'How do you know all that?'

'I can't answer any more questions.' Absently, she moved a lock of his hair. 'There's no more time. I'm sorry. All will be well.'

'Why should I trust you?'

'Take this. I know you want it. I stole it from the evidence locker in McWhirter's suite a few minutes ago.'

She handed him the pink sheet. It was Jennifer's drawing. But, as it fluttered in the wind, David noted that its edges were pristine. Its fold marks had not yet scored the paper. And, below the crayon house and the three stick figures, no code had been written.

'Now I understand even less. But thank you. I didn't want to lose this.'

'Let the parachute do the steering.'

'What?'

'See ya.'

She sprinted towards the cliff edge, launched like a long jumper, and was gone. David felt his stomach drop in sympathy. He looked around the side of the granite pile. The policemen seemed angrier than before. They were almost at its edge. The patrol car had gone. David looked into the cobalt sky and hoped his shoes would keep their grip on the gra.s.s. As a talisman, he rolled the pink paper and held it in his fist.

He ran towards the edge.

Chapter Eleven.

Saskia looked at the reflection of her bare stomach. The striations unsettled her. The physique was not bulky - it was suited to running, perhaps gymnastics - but she could hardly imagine the level of exercise required to maintain it. She had found no birthmark. There was an appendix scar, a vaccination mark and two dots either side of her left nipple, where a ring had once hung. She smiled at her reflection until the macabre turn of the moment struck her: A girlish compliment to the dead body she had infected. How different was she from Beckmann, who had commanded her movements in the office the day before?

Coldly, she dressed in a navy-blue trouser suit. She put on some nice shoes and selected a black, short-handled handbag. When she had finished, her wardrobe was empty. She brushed her shoulder-length hair until it crackled with static. She applied eye shadow. She painted her fingernails red. She looked at them and remembered her Russian nickname, the Angel of Death.

She opened the curtains and the windows too. The gloom left with a bow. On the threshold of the apartment, her phone rang.

'Never mind the office,' said Beckmann. 'The Proctor situation has escalated. You're to fly to Edinburgh. Have you read the doc.u.ments I provided?'

She had not.

'I'm...still familiarising myself.'

'Here.'

Like a blooming flower, the knowledge appeared in her mind. She gasped and slumped against the doorframe. A distant voice said, 'You have it now,' then said no more.

Chapter Twelve.

Saskia took a taxi to Schonefeld airport. She shopped for a long coat, some T-s.h.i.+rts, two blouses, shoes, and jeans. She also bought some tampons. Thanks to Beckmann, she had no idea when she had had her last period.

Her flight landed in London Gatwick at 10:40. Waiting for her connection, she eavesdropped on a businessman listening to something called Hamlet on his media player. Her eyes narrowed in astonishment. There was a fundamental question in the play that found an answer on the echoless steppe of her memories. 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' When the businessman rose to leave, she gripped his hand and said, 'Warte,' but he frowned and backed away.

Who wrote that? she asked, forlorn in her seat.

At the turn of midday, sitting in an old Boeing 737 as it rolled into the air, she donned a disposable sleep mask and wept that so bright a light as Shakespeare could be extinguished.

In Edinburgh Airport's baggage reclaim, she pa.s.sed an advertis.e.m.e.nt for something called Fiddler on the Roof. Each question reset the bearing of her path through an unknown culture: What is a musical?

Who was Topol?

What is a Jew?

What was the holocaust?

She fled to a toilet and sat in a cubicle. Her open eyes saw newsreel footage. Uncoloured bodies in drifts. Mounds of hair, shaved. Troves of treasure, surgically stolen. Ash. Almost a century buried and burned, those bodies, and yet their memory had been rekindled in repet.i.tion, by a fear of rot from the heart outwards.

Stop. I don't want to know any more.

She recalled her conversation with Klutikov. 'You're brand new. You're not answerable for the crimes of your body any more than you can be responsible for the crimes of your parents. Understood?'

No, she thought, wiping her eye. Behind it something craven watched, a conscience sicklied over. No.

A man waited beneath the sensor that opened the automatic doors. He held a sign that read 'Brand'. She shrugged. Close enough. DI Philip Jago was in his mid-fifties. In Britain, she knew, police officers could serve a maximum of twenty-five years. He would be close to retirement. His cheeks were purpled with blood vessels. He escorted her to a car and they got in the back. It was an unmarked, manual Ford.

'In your own time,' he said to the driver. He spoke in a way that reminded Saskia of Bavarian German. She could not guess what would happen next, and was relieved when they pulled away. 'Your luggage has been sent on. You're staying in Whitburn, as you requested. Any reason? The last sighting of Proctor was further south.'

'"Murder",' she said, '"most foul".'

Jago flicked some ash from the window. She wondered what he thought of her and was surprised - given the British politeness that ran through her fading memory of Simon - to be told immediately.

'Get this straight, Detective Brandt. When you're on this island, you play nice. You don't use your firearm unless I say so. You tell me everything you're thinking, including hunches, and you'll share your sources. We find Proctor and we deliver him to Special Branch, then we shake hands and say auf wiedersehen. Alles Klar?'

'Klar gnuck fur mich. Hast du ein Problem, oder?'

'Look.' His sigh was blue. 'Last bloke from the FIB shot our suspect and f.u.c.ked off to Paris. Are you an a.s.sa.s.sin too?'

a.s.sa.s.sin. From the Arabic.

'An eater of has.h.i.+sh. Or a person in the control of Ha.s.san-i-Sabah.' She licked her lips. 'I need a cigarette.'

He seemed amused. 'I won't stop you.'

'May I have one of yours?'

'Of course.'

'People seldom smoke these days.'

'They do in the police.'

'Why?'

'New to the job?'

'Yes.'

'Light?'

'Please.'

He took out a gold Zippo and clicked his fingers, striking the thumbwheel. Saskia looked at the flame as she leaned into it. She had seen that trick before, before. She held Jago by the wrist to study the flame. But soon the lighter was only familiar. Then, even the familiarity was gone.

Jago stared at her.

'Brandt, you may be s.e.x on a stick, but I've been unhappily married to my desk for twenty years and, between us, I only get it up when the Hibs put one in. So turn it off, eh.'

She let go of his hand. 'I didn't mean to -'

'Here's my ID, hen. Next time, ask for it. Any t.w.a.t can hold up a sign.' Softening, he produced his warrant card. She took it, nodded, and showed him her gold badge. He raised an eyebrow. 'Ex tabula rasa?'

'Just so.' Saskia thought of the empty steppe inside her. She was no police officer. Beckmann had employed her on the basis of her gut instinct. It was the only skill she counted as hers. 'DI Jago, I would please like to go to the West Lothian Centre.'

'Where? The community centre?'

'No. The scene of the terrorist activity.'

'You mean the Park Hotel. Waste of time.'

'Why?'

'Our contact there has government connections and doesn't have to cooperate. The situation is covered by the Official Secrets Act.'

'What's that?'

'Once you've signed a secrecy contract, they can stop you talking about certain things. The act means that we can't know everything about the murder.'

'That makes it rather difficult to investigate, DI Jago.'

'Yes, Detective Brandt, it does.'

'Kommissarin.'

'Our job, Kommissarin, is to find him, not investigate anything. My Super and a sheriff looked at the evidence. They're satisfied he's guilty and have authorised all reasonable force in grabbing him. We should start at the shed where he landed.'

'No.'

'No?'

'DI Jago.'

'We're going to be thick as thieves, I can tell.' He tapped the driver. 'Park Hotel. Just out of Whitburn, on the way to Harthill.'

A low sun hung in reflections, across stonework, on the patina of snow that had fallen during the night. She stepped from the car. Her eyes narrowed in the sudden cold. She could hear the dapple of nearby water. The battlements of trees loomed and she was held, albeit briefly, by the urge to run into that woodland and just be, where it was silent and safe. The wings of the hotel flanked the gravelled car park. At its the centre, Saskia noticed a fountain set with a stone Prometheus, stopped as he pa.s.sed the gift of fire to man.

'Brandt?' prompted Jago.

Prometheus, who had been chained to a rock by Zeus for his treachery. Prometheus, who had suffered a hawk eat his liver. The liver that grew back; the hawk that returned.

The chains...

'Revenge should have no bounds.'

...the hawk that returned.

The Zippo lighter. The gesture.

The hawk that returned.

Were these the weeping wounds of her stolen memories, uprooted in the dark?