Читать книгу The Heights - Parker Bilal - Страница 10

The Moonstone was quiet at that hour. The only customers being a skinny, white-haired man in a cloth cap reading a well-creased newspaper and a postman furtively downing half a lager. Drake fetched a large white wine for Crane and a bottle of IPA for himself. They sat in the far corner.

‘What happened to your hand, by the way?’ she asked, indicating the bandage.

‘A mishap in the kitchen. Opening a tin, if you must know. Don’t let anyone tell you cooking is fun.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’ Crane paused as she stared into her glass. ‘He’ll call back.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘The air of desperation about him.’

Drake wasn’t entirely convinced, but he let it go. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see Foulkes again. A ray of sunshine sneaked through the window, briefly lifting the tired air.

‘So, Sir Edmund? You kept that quiet.’

Crane swallowed two large gulps out of her glass.

‘It’s not the kind of thing that comes up in conversation.’

‘Right, but to be clear, we are talking about Edmund Crane? The Iraq War? The fake dossier?’

Crane winced. ‘No need to rub it in.’

Drake was surprised at how much the subject still angered him. It was a long time ago and Ray had nothing to do with it, but still. ‘Sorry,’ he managed to say, quite evenly. ‘I just never saw that coming.’

‘Family. What can I say?’

It was a little more than that. Three years ago, Drake had read the Chilcot report into the Iraq war. Not that he’d expected to find any answers. He’d been in the Met for long enough to have pretty low expectations when it came to bringing politicians to book. They lied and then they were forgiven, or forgotten. It was the name of the game. He never voted, for that same reason. There wasn’t a single one of them that he trusted.

Drake had seen the consequences of their actions. He’d lived through it. The roadside bombs, the men, women and children covered in ash and grey dust. The bodies of mates twisted into unrecognisable corpses in a split second. At a certain point it felt as if there was no enemy, just death. The hot metal of destruction thrust through blood and bone.

He’d read the report because he wanted to know who or what had sent them to their deaths. There wasn’t a day went by when he didn’t think what he would like to do to the people who had engineered the war. He wanted to understand, to come to terms with what he’d seen out there. Later on he realised that he never would, not fully.

One thing he had learned was the name Edmund Crane. One of the foremost architects of the intelligence dossier that linked Saddam Hussein to WMDs. The dossier was a sham, a piece of imaginative fantasy designed to dig into the fears of the nation, offering a forty-five-minute countdown before weapons of mass destruction could be launched. If there was one person in Drake’s eyes who deserved a long and slow death in the lowest depths of hell, it was Edmund Crane.

‘I haven’t seen him in over ten years,’ Crane said, adding, ‘Not after what he did to my mother.’

Drake was beginning to get a sense of how deep this ran with her. He watched her get up and walk over to the bar. He waited until she came back with two large whiskies. So far he’d barely touched his drink, but he sensed this wasn’t the moment to quibble.

‘When Blair decided to throw his lot in with Bush’s crusade to rid the Middle East of anyone willing to stand up to America, my father was the one who constructed the fake dossier.’

‘Tell me about it. I read the report.’

‘Let me ask you a question.’ Crane sipped her drink. ‘What made you join up?’

‘It seemed like a way out.’ Drake sighed. ‘I was trying to get away from something.’

‘You didn’t believe in the war?’

‘I didn’t believe in anything.’ Drake studied the golden colour in his glass before correcting himself. ‘Maybe I just needed a place to belong.’

Ray nodded. They were times when she thought she understood him, perhaps more than he realised.

‘I never figured out what brought my parents together,’ she said, going back into her own thoughts. Marco Foulkes had walked into the office and suddenly this. Everything she had spent so long getting away from. ‘The whole thing has always been a mystery to me. Why would two people so clearly unsuited to one another get together.’

‘Maybe it was just instant attraction. No logic to love.’

‘Of course not. Besides, this was the seventies. They were lost in some kind of late hippiedom. They thought they could do anything.’

‘I think drugs had something to do with that.’

‘In his case, for sure. He was a pot head for years.’

‘This would be before he went into the Secret Intelligence Services.’

‘His kind aren’t governed by the same rules. Privileged background, which he always denied, until he didn’t. When he decided to button down and follow the family tradition, the doors opened and he was whisked all the way to the top.’

‘Does this have anything to do with that guy you used to work for?’

‘Stewart Mason?’

‘That’s the one. What did you do for him exactly?’

Crane considered the question. What did she do for Stewart? A lot of things, was the answer to that one. Most of which she was not allowed to talk about.

‘Mostly I wrote assessments.’

‘About?’

‘Risk. Outlining possible outcomes, feasible scenarios. It’s not that complicated.’

‘So you say. Where does Foulkes come into the picture?’

‘Like I said, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house.’ Crane stopped herself. ‘It’s kind of an estate, really.’

‘Fancy name for a castle, isn’t it?’

‘Not quite a castle, but it’s big.’

‘And Marco was across the street.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Crane took another belt of her whisky. ‘Marco comes from that background. He downplays it on television because it’s not too cool for his public image as a common or garden writer of the people.’

‘So, this is all just coincidence? He goes home to visit his mother. She takes him over to see your father and he happens to mention that you are running an investigations bureau?’

Crane frowned. ‘I’m not even sure how he would have known that. Like I said, I haven’t spoken to my father in years.’

‘So how did Foulkes find us?’

‘We’ll have to ask him, or rather, we could have asked him before you chased him away.’

‘What happened to the air of desperation that would bring him running back?

Crane smiled. ‘Are you having second thoughts?’

Drake slumped back with a sigh. ‘I’m not sure I’m cut out for this private sector gig.’

‘We’ve been over this. We both know you would never have lasted at the Met. You’re not the institution type. You hate authority, having it or submitting to it. It’s against your nature.’

‘I thought we were talking about the case, not analysing me.’

‘You don’t need me to tell you all this. You’d have got yourself suspended again. It was only a matter of time.’

Drake knew she was right. It was something he had known for years.

‘They scapegoated you, sacrificed you for the good of the force. You were never going to come back from that. They undermined your trust in the whole system.’

‘I made a mistake.’

‘We all make mistakes. You were doing your job within a corrupt institution.’

‘Explain how this conversation turned around from your father to me?’

‘It’s what I do,’ Crane said, lifting her glass in salute. ‘You’re not upset, are you?’

‘Not really. Just so long as I don’t have to go and apologise to Foulkes.’

‘No, I suppose I’ll have to do that.’ Crane gave a long sigh. ‘You shouldn’t have scared him off.’

‘Now you’re being mean.’

‘Sorry. You’re right. I’m a little edgy.’ Crane sat back. ‘I have a date tonight.’

‘Anyone I know?’

Crane threw him a wary look as she reached for her glass. Before she could speak her phone began to buzz. She glanced at the screen.

‘Please don’t say I told you so.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Crane.