The Man With No Face Page 11

  Bannerman sat on the bed and let his eyes wander about the room. They came to rest on three suitcases piled on top of the wardrobe. He took a chair from under the window and placed it below the wardrobe, then climbed on to it and reached up. The cases were heavy and he lifted them down carefully, one by one, raising a stoor from the top of the wardrobe. He opened each case in turn. Two of them were filled with men’s clothing, underwear, socks, personal odds and ends. A photograph in a frame lay on top of Tania’s clothing in the third, smaller case.

  Bannerman turned it over and found himself looking at the face of an attractive young woman. It was a black-and-white photograph. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties. Bannerman knew the face. He had met her once, not long before she died. She was the mirror-image of her daughter.

  Slater had taken it badly when his wife died. But still, Bannerman was surprised to find her photograph packed away for the departure that Slater had so clearly planned. Perhaps he had never quite got over her death.

  He closed up the cases and pushed them against the wall. Now, at least, he knew why Slater had been so agitated by Bannerman’s arrival. If he had been planning to take his daughter and slip quietly out of the country after his meeting with Gryffe, then Bannerman’s appearance must have thrown a spanner in the works. But why? What had Slater and Gryffe been up to? It seemed like such an unlikely pairing.

  And du Maurier? Surely he must have known about the suitcases. Why, when he had told Bannerman so much else, had he failed to mention them? Bannerman shook his head, confused, and sat again on the bed.

  Finally he went through to his own room, lifted his coat and left the apartment. In the street he checked his watch. It was a little after midday. He pulled up his collar against the drizzle and brushed past a small, sallow-faced man in a shabby raincoat. He thought nothing of the brief glimpse he caught of an unremarkable face, unaware of the dark eyes that turned to watch him after he had passed.

  *

  He stopped at the café in the Boulevard Charlemagne where the German pressmen drink, and had a coffee and a couple of croissants before walking across the street to the International Press Centre. A girl at reception smiled at him as he went past to the lift and rode up to the sixth floor.

  Mademoiselle Ricain looked up as he walked into the office.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Neil Bannerman. We spoke on the phone a few days ago.’ He saw that she had been crying.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m still in shock.’

  He nodded, uncomfortable, then tilted his head towards Slater’s filing cabinet. ‘Do you have keys?’

  She hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I . . .’

  ‘I’ll be working out of this office for the next few days, Mademoiselle,’ Bannerman said. ‘I take it the police have already been?’

  ‘Yes. They called me out yesterday . . . I . . . they said not to reopen the filing cabinet or touch any of Tim’s stuff.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right,’ Bannerman said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’ She had long, fair hair and a plain face drawn by grief. Again she hesitated, before reluctantly opening a drawer in her desk and lifting out a small square key.

  ‘How about the rest of the keys? The door, the desk?’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘I’m not at all sure about this,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should call the police for authorization.’

  Bannerman kept his sigh to himself and softened his tone. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I seem a bit abrupt. I’m just as shocked as you by what happened to Tim. I don’t know why anyone would have wanted to kill him, but I’m going to find out. Someone cracked me on the head yesterday and played footsie with my ribs while I couldn’t do anything about it. And I want to find out who did that, too.’ He stopped to draw breath. ‘A wee lassie who saw her father murdered has been shut away in some institution somewhere and no one seems to care. And if I don’t do something about it I don’t know who else will. And here’s the thing, Mademoiselle, I don’t have much time. They’re going to bury Tim tomorrow, and paint whitewash all over this whole fucking mess. So I need you on side. Because, God knows, I’ve got no other friends in this city.’

  Bannerman stopped to take stock. He had not meant to say any of this, perhaps unaware that it was even how he felt. But the words had tumbled out before he could stop them.

  Mademoiselle Ricain managed a wan smile and took a further two keys on a ring from her desk drawer and held them out. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help. Tim was a lovely man.’ She fought back the tears that had stained her face earlier. Bannerman looked at her curiously. Lovely was not a word he would have used to describe Slater. But Mademoiselle Ricain had seen something more in him.

  ‘You and Tim got on well, then?’

  ‘Oh.’ She got up and turned towards the window. ‘He was just a nice man, Monsieur Bannerman. Considerate. About a lot of the little things that men don’t usually think of. It’s difficult to say what exactly. It’s just the way a man behaves with you. I liked him. I knew him, I think, better than most others here did. People aren’t always what they seem.’ She glanced at Bannerman, suddenly self-conscious. Colour rose high on her cheeks, and Bannerman realized that she had been in love with him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said lamely, and found himself unexpectedly touched by sadness. Whatever Mademoiselle Ricain had felt for Slater had not, he was sure, been reciprocated. She moved away from the window and lifted her bag from the desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ And she hurried from the office.

  Bannerman stood for some moments before crossing to Slater’s filing cabinet and unlocking it. He crouched down and pulled open the bottom drawer. It was half-empty, about a dozen suspension files hanging on their runners. He lifted them out and carried them over to Slater’s desk and sat down. Mostly they contained cuttings of stories Slater had done on the EEC, a back reference divided into different groups – agriculture, fisheries, transport, taxation. Two of the folders were unmarked. One of them held the cuttings on Gryffe. Bannerman sifted through them.

  They didn’t seem to fall into any category. Altogether there were about forty pieces, not stories that Slater had written, but cut from different newspapers. They went back over two years, covering important speeches the politician had made at home and abroad, his appointment eighteen months earlier as Minister of State for Europe, a piece from the Telegraph on his growing importance as a charismatic figure of influence in the party. And the country. It forecast his likely rise to challenge for the leadership in the not too distant future.

  There were a number of photographs. Gryffe shaking hands with some African head of state, another in the Middle East. Gryffe speaking at the party’s annual conference. Gryffe relaxing by a swimming pool with a bikini-clad girlfriend on holiday in Malta. He even appeared in the columns of the society diarists; best-dressed man in Britain; most eligible bachelor; a romance with Royalty (the punters would like that, though some of his party colleagues would not); a man of the people destined for the top.

  Before this week Bannerman had only been aware of Gryffe in his peripheral vision. The journalist’s focus had been on corruption, political and financial, in Scotland. But Gryffe, it seemed, had become a popular and fashionable figure in London social life as well as in politics. Most of the cuttings, he noticed, were taken from the English papers. He cursed himself for somehow having taken his eye off the ball.

  He crammed the cuttings back into their unmarked folder and opened the other. There were fewer cuttings here. A dozen in all, clipped from Belgian newspapers, some French, some Flemish. Two names kept cropping up, Michel Lapointe and René Jansen, although they didn’t appear to be connected. From one smudged, single-column pic Bannerman was able to put a face to Lapointe. A short, fat face. But the quality of the reproduction was poor and it
was a face you would pass in the street without recognizing it. There were no photographs of René Jansen, although it was a name that rang a distant bell. Bannerman slipped the cuttings back in their folder, kept the two unmarked files to one side, and put the remainder back in the cabinet.

  He sat for a moment in solemn contemplation before taking out his spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and flicking to a fresh page to jot down four names one below the other: Tim Slater, Robert Gryffe, Michel Lapointe, René Jansen.

  There had to be a common factor. Something that linked all four. Why else had Slater kept cuttings on them in unmarked folders? But the link was tenuous. There was no doubting the connection between Slater and Gryffe. However, it was possible that Lapointe and Jansen were simply red herrings. Bannerman could waste a great deal of time chasing them down. He tossed the possibilities around in his mind and looked out of the window at the heavy Belgian skies. There were times, he thought, when you had to chase red herrings, because there was nothing else to chase. He would need something before Tait got in tomorrow. Because Tait was going to want him to shut this thing down. And Bannerman would need something to convince him otherwise.

  He became aware that his head was still hurting. There was a bad taste in his mouth from lack of sleep and his stomach was complaining that it needed more than the coffee and croissants he had fed it earlier. He got up and searched about the desks for a telephone directory. He found several and spent three or four minutes searching for the number he wanted.

  Mademoiselle Ricain returned as he lifted the phone. Her smile was strained. ‘Dial zero if you want an outside line,’ she said. Bannerman saw that she had powdered her face and put fresh colour on her eyes and lips. He dialled, and a girl’s voice crackled in his ear.

  ‘Police Judiciaire.’

  ‘Inspecteur du Maurier.’

  ‘Ne quittez pas.’

  He waited.

  ‘Du Maurier.’

  ‘Inspector. It’s Neil Bannerman.’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur. How are you today?’

  ‘I’d like to talk.’

  ‘Bon. Good. When?’

  ‘Whenever it suits.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’ He hesitated. ‘Five o’clock?’

  ‘Fine,’ Bannerman said.

  ‘But not here.’ Du Maurier cleared his throat. ‘At the Café Auguste in the Boulevard de Waterloo. It’s not far from the Rue des Quatre Bras.’

  ‘Okay.’ Bannerman hung up, then tried the keys that Mademoiselle Ricain had given him until he found the one that fitted Slater’s desk drawer. He pulled it open and slipped in the two folders he had set aside. He was about to slide it shut when he saw a scarred, leather-bound notebook squeezed down one side. Slater’s contacts book.

  Bannerman thumbed through it, a record of all the people a dead man had known. People from whom information had been prised, or tip-offs received. Sometimes freely, sometimes under duress. A good journalist was not only good with words, he was good at getting information, research. Knowing where to look, who to ask.

  As he thumbed through the pages it occurred to Bannerman to look under J for Jansen and L for Lapointe. So obvious the thought might have passed him by. There were home and office numbers listed for both. He noted them opposite the names he had written in his notebook. And then, as an afterthought, looked up Gryffe.

  There were three numbers listed. One was the flat in the Rue de Pavie, another was Gryffe’s London mews house. The third was a Belgian number with an H in brackets beside it indicating Home. Bannerman frowned. Had Gryffe possessed two homes in Brussels?

  He noted all three out of habit and replaced the contacts book in the drawer. Mademoiselle Ricain was watching him over her typewriter.

  ‘Anything I can do . . .?’

  Bannerman shook his head. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Not right now.’ He was distracted. The day was slipping away from him. After his meeting with du Maurier he knew the night would stretch emptily ahead, lonely hours in Slater’s flat or in some bar getting drunk. Depression settled on him like dust. Then an idea came, forming slowly, a burgeoning light in the darkness. He said to Mademoiselle Ricain, ‘Tim had a young woman who came in to look after Tania sometimes. Any idea where I can get in touch with her?’

  She thought about it. ‘Sally Robertson. Her number’s probably in Tim’s contacts book.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Why hadn’t he thought of that? He took the book out again. The number was there, of course. He got an outside line and dialled. He let the phone ring several times before hanging up. No one home. He saw Mademoiselle Ricain watching him and tried not to show his disappointment. Carefully he made a note of the number in his own notebook.

  The door opened behind him and Bannerman swivelled to see a middle-aged man shuffle in, accompanied by a rush of cold air and the smell of alcohol. He had a weary face as crumpled as his raincoat, and an untidy mop of greying hair that tumbled over heavy eyebrows. A dog-eared notebook was clutched between the ink-stained fingers of his right hand. He threw his coat over the remaining free desk, and half a dozen pens and pencils revealed themselves in the breast pocket of a jacket of indefinable shape and colour. He raised his abundant eyebrows when he saw Bannerman.

  ‘Neil Bannerman, I presume,’ he said in a voice gravelled by years of drink. He rounded his desk and slumped into a creaking chair to kick his feet up and rest them on the edge of it. ‘Someone been having a go at you?’ He screwed up beady eyes to examine the bruising on Bannerman’s face and took out a match to stick in one corner of his mouth. He allowed himself a small, humourless grin.

  ‘An accident,’ Bannerman said. ‘And you are . . .?’

  ‘Eric Palin.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Sent out to grass by the Herald and to pickle what remains of his liver, I heard.’

  Palin was unimpressed. ‘Smart bastard!’ And he moved the match from one corner of his mouth to the other. ‘I heard about you, too. Shooting your mouth off the other day at some of the boys, like you were God Almighty.’

  Mademoiselle Ricain looked uncomfortable and busied herself with some paperwork. Bannerman was in no mood for exchanging wisecracks with a drunk. All the same, he said, ‘Maybe I am. And maybe some of the boys need a good kick up the arse.’

  Palin snorted, and his amusement seemed genuine. ‘Aye, maybe they do.’

  Bannerman said, ‘And maybe when you’re sober you can tell me what you know about Tim Slater. And his relationship with Gryffe.’

  Palin snorted. ‘What makes you think I would share information with the opposition, Bannerman? You might figure I’m just some drunk. And I won’t deny I enjoy a dram or three. But I’m still a fucking good reporter . . .’ He glanced towards Mademoiselle Ricain. ‘Apologies for the French.’ Then back to Bannerman. ‘This is the hottest story that’s broken in this shithole of a city in all the time I’ve been here, and I’m not about to give you a head-start on it.’

  Bannerman leaned forward and said, ‘It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’re drinking you’re no damned good to anybody, Palin. You can’t be trusted. By anyone. Your editor knows that, so he’s taking a calculated short-term risk in sending you out here. A fresh challenge. A new start. And you’ll probably do okay. Keep it up for a year, maybe two. Then you’ll start slipping, because people like you always do. And then you’ll be out of a job so damned fast you won’t know where your next half’s coming from.’

  Palin was sharp enough to know the truth when he heard it, a truth that he might never admit to himself. And it hurt, because the truth usually does. ‘Fuck off!’ He dropped his feet to the floor and took the match from his mouth. ‘Think you know it all, don’t you?’ Amid the anger, there was a smugness in his voice. ‘Well, you don’t know half of it, Mr God Almighty Bannerman.’

  Bannerman got up and slipped his notebook into his pocket. ‘See you around.’

  ‘At the press conferenc
e, no doubt,’ Palin said.

  Bannerman turned. ‘What press conference?’

  Palin’s grin widened. ‘Tomorrow at the Rue des Quatre Bras. Minister of Justice on the Slater deaths. Didn’t you know?’ He knew Bannerman didn’t. The announcement had only just been made. Mentally he notched one up.

  ‘I do now,’ Bannerman said. ‘Appreciate you sharing with the opposition.’ He nodded at Mademoiselle Ricain and left.

  In the corridor he took his time walking along to the lift, replaying his joust with Palin. Something worried him. Something in Palin’s demeanour. Smugness betraying knowledge. Something he knew that Bannerman didn’t. And not just the news about the press conference. Palin had worked in the same office as Slater for nearly a year. You don’t work as closely with someone for that length of time and not get to know something about them. However obnoxious Palin might be, he was still a good journalist, even if he was just a shadow of the man he might once have been.

  *

  Palin watched the door close, anger and alcohol hardening the line of his mouth. He took out a cigarette and lit it with an unsteady hand before turning to Mademoiselle Ricain and catching the pity in her eyes. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘What are you looking at?’ She flushed deeply, lowered her head and started to type. But he wanted her out of there. ‘Take a hike, love,’ he told her, and without a word she abandoned her typewriter, lifted her bag and left.

  When she had gone Palin sat for several minutes, un­decided. Then he went to Slater’s filing cabinet, unlocked it and crouched down to open the bottom drawer. He riffled quickly through the suspension files before realizing that the unmarked folders were gone. Fuck! Bannerman must have taken them. He stood up and felt the blood rush to his head. He took a moment to steady himself and looked quickly around the room. Then he crossed to Slater’s desk and yanked open the top drawer. He expelled a sigh of relief. There they were! He took a flask from his hip pocket, took a quick snort and smiled his satisfaction.