limousine. They’ve been checking him out at Rosedene, and he seems all right.’
‘Unfortunately, the driver was killed. I think he was closer to the car and the bomb went off prematurely,’ Dillon said. ‘Ferguson’s going to play the whole thing down as some sort of engine failure leading to the explosion. No talk of bombs.’
‘Well, that makes sense. I can see where he’s going. But for this to happen to Charles Ferguson, on top of everything else tonight, is hardly a coincidence.’
‘Which is why I’m going to call our two pilots now. We’re leaving instantly.’
‘Well, don’t let me hold you, gentlemen. I’ll stay in touch.’
Perhaps an hour and a half later, their Gulfstream lifted out into the Atlantic, leaving the lights of New York behind and rose to thirty-thousand and headed east. Miller and Harry sat on either side in wide comfortable seats, and Parry, one of the pilots, entered the cabin.
‘If there’s anything you want, it’s in the kitchen area. You know where the drinks cabinet is, Sean.’
‘You’re too kind,’ Dillon told him. ‘How long?’
‘The weather in the mid-Atlantic isn’t perfect, but at the worst, I’d say we’ll make Farley Field in six hours.’
He went out and Dillon’s Codex sounded. It was Clancy. ‘Have I got news for you.’
Dillon put his phone on speaker and leaned towards Miller.
‘I traced Barry to Mercy Hospital, and get this. He was waiting to go into the operating room when some guy in scrubs turned up and stuck a hypodermic in him. A nurse discovered him, he knocked her out and ran for it. Long gone, my friends.’
‘Whoever was behind Barry didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut,’ Dillon said. ‘But how did they find out where he was so quickly?’
‘I’ve seen the nurse’s statement. When he was in great pain and waiting to be prepped, she heard him call somebody on his mobile, very worked up, very agitated. He said, “It’s me, you bastard, I’m in Mercy Hospital with a bullet in my knee and you’d better do something about it or else.” She said she took the phone from him and put it on the side table.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Dillon said. ‘It’s gone.’
‘So no way of tracing who his employer was. No point in showing the nurse any faces. The guy was in green scrubs, a face mask, skullcap, the works. Oh, the police will go through the motions, but I’d say that’s it. You’re still out of it, Major, which is the main thing. Stay in touch, and if you make any sense out of the prayer card thing, let me know.’
Dillon switched off his phone. Got up, went to the kitchen, found a half-bottle of Krug champagne in the ice box, thumbed off the cork, took two glasses and returned to his seat. He filled one glass and handed it to Miller, then filled the other.
‘Are we celebrating something?’ Miller asked.
‘Not exactly, it’s just that champagne always concentrates my mind wonderfully. Drink up, and we’ll decide who’s going to call Roper.’
Roper listened with considerable calm under the circumstances, but then as the man constantly at the centre of the storm at the Holland Park safe house communication centre, he had long since stopped being surprised at anything.
‘So one prayer card is certainly interesting, and two, more than a coincidence.’
‘Exactly,’ Dillon said. ‘And three would be enemy action.’
‘George Langley’s doing the post-mortem now on Pool, so Ferguson’s still at Rosedene. I’ll give him a call and ask him to have a look in Pool’s wallet. I’ll be back.’
‘There you go,’ Dillon said to Miller. ‘Mystery piles on mystery.’
‘We’ll wait and see,’ Miller told him. ‘What about a little shut-eye?’
‘On a plane? Never.’ Dillon rose and picked up the empty half-bottle of Krug. ‘I’m sure there was another half-bottle in the kitchen. I’ll go and see.’
At Rosedene, Maggie Duncan, the matron, a no-nonsense Scot, produced Pool’s ravaged and bloodstained suit in the anteroom next to the theatre where Professor George Langley was performing the post-mortem on the corpse of the unfortunate chauffeur. She wore latex gloves, as did Ferguson, and gingerly emptied the pockets and laid the contents on a towel spread on a table.
A half-empty pack of cigarettes, a plastic lighter, what looked like house keys on a ring, a comb, a car key with a plastic black-and-gold tab with a telephone number, but no name.
‘Do you want to examine the wallet, General?’ she asked.
‘No, just take out what you find.’
She did. There was cash, forty-five pounds in banknotes, a driver’s licence, a national insurance card, a Premier credit card, a cheaply printed business card which she found in one of the pockets and handed over.
Ferguson examined it. ‘Henry Pool, Private Hire, 15 Green Street, Kilburn.’ He put it down on the towel and, as he did, she extracted another card.
‘This is interesting,’ she said. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.’ Ferguson took it from her. ‘Is it important?’ she asked.
‘It certainly is, my dear.’ Ferguson put the card down, took out his Codex and called Roper. ‘It’s here,’ he said, when the major answered,’ also a business card, Henry Pool, Private Hire, 15 Green Street, Kilburn. Check it out and let Dillon and Miller know. And here’s an interesting point that I just remembered. Pool had a slight cockney accent, but when I was following him along the pavement from the Garrick, a limousine drove past, splashing him. He got very angry and abused them. I remember what he said because his accent suddenly sounded a little Irish. He said “Holy Mother of God, you’ve soaked me, you bastards.” Then he turned to me as if embarrassed and said he was sorry—but with the cockney back again.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser, especially since his address is in Kilburn, the Irish quarter of our city since time immemorial. I’ll see you soon.’
Doyle brought Roper a mug of tea as the man in the wheelchair worked his keyboards. ‘Making progress, Major?’
‘I think so. Look at this: Henry Pool, born in London in nineteen forty-six, mother Irish, Mary Kennedy. She came to England in the Second World War, worked as a cook, married a Londoner named Ernest Pool who served in the army, was wounded in April forty-five, and received a medical discharge plus pension. They moved to Fifteen Green Street, Kilburn.’
‘He must have got down to work sharpish, old Ernest, for the baby to be produced in nineteen forty-six.’
‘The bad news is he died of a stroke two years later,’ Roper said. ‘The wound had been in the head.’
‘Poor sod,’ Tony said.
‘The mother never remarried. According to her Social Security records, she continued as a cook until her late sixties. Died four years ago,
