The Man With No Face Page 13

  The other man was struggling to disentangle himself from Bannerman’s legs. Then he was up and running, heavy steps beating their retreat down the length of the corridor towards the lifts. But Bannerman had no interest in pursuing him. He rolled over and spat blood and saliva on to the floor. His head cleared a little, but his throat hurt like hell. He pulled himself up to his feet with the help of the edge of a desk, and took several unsteady steps to the light switch.

  The glare filled his head with fire and he pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. His mouth tasted of blood and sick. ‘Shit,’ he whispered softly to himself. This was getting to be a bad habit. You’re going to have to take more care, son, he told himself.

  He let his head drop between his knees for several minutes while he breathed deeply. Then he sat upright and saw a narrow-necked water jug and glass on Mademoiselle Ricain’s desk. He reached over and filled the glass left-handed. He rolled the first swig around his mouth and gargled in his throat before spitting it out on the carpet. Then he took a long draught and felt the smooth cold water track all the way down to his stomach. He turned his attention to his right arm. It was the fleshy bit of the forearm that had taken the blow. He slipped his jacket off and rolled up his sleeve. Already the arm was swollen and bruised. But nothing broken. His fingers seemed to have locked, and his arm was bent at the elbow and hurt badly when he tried to straighten it. Must have got a nerve, he thought.

  The next few minutes he spent slowly, painfully, making fists with his right hand and working his arm straight and then crooking it. Gradually the muscles and the nerves eased and he got a pins-and-needles sensation from shoulder to fingertips. But that passed and he leaned back in his seat to look around the office. It seemed much as it had earlier in the day. There was no evidence of an intruder. He got up and crossed to Slater’s desk, pulling open the drawer. The folders were gone. So was the contacts book. Someone had known what they were looking for and exactly where to find it. That narrowed the field considerably. He sat for a few minutes more, then took out his notebook, flipped over several pages, picked up the phone and dialled. He wasn’t sure why he was calling her. A cry in the dark. The number rang out and he hung up.

  He stood up and swung his head to either side to ease the stiffening in his neck. He switched out the light and closed the door behind him, making sure it was well and truly locked.

  III

  A light shone from the window of the top-floor flat in the apartment block in the Rue de Commerce. Bannerman might not have noticed it except that there were only two other lights showing in the entire block. Slater’s car, a dark blue Volkswagen, sat at the kerbside. Bannerman paid off his taxi and watched the vehicle move off down the street. It was only a fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from the IPC building, but he had not felt like walking.

  He shuffled about on the pavement, unsure what to do. He looked up again at the light in the window, weighing the possibilities. But he was too tired and too sore to think too much about it. It was cold out here, his breath billowing yellow in the street lights, melting the big snowflakes that were falling all around him. Inside he started up the stairs, listening to his footsteps clattering back at him off the walls. It seemed even colder in the stairwell than it had outside. The landing lights were mercilessly icy in the chill of their glare. But the light they cast on the stairs was feeble.

  At the door of the apartment he fumbled with his keys and then carefully opened it, standing well back and letting it swing inwards. The landing light spilled into the darkness of the hallway, and at the far end he could see a crack of light framing the door of the living room. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The air was warm and dusty and touched with a faintly familiar scent. He stood perfectly still as the crack of light widened ahead of him and a long shadow reached out across the hall as if to touch him. The figure in the doorway was silhouetted against the light behind. Bannerman couldn’t see her face, but he knew who it was.

  ‘Hello,’ Sally said. Her voice sounded very small. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. Quite a long time. It’s kind of scary sitting alone in a dead man’s house.’

  Bannerman slipped out of his coat and dragged it along the length of the hall behind him. He stopped in front of her and looked down into her shadowed face. ‘How did you know I would be here?’

  She was disconcerted by his closeness. ‘I didn’t know for sure. I’ve still got a key, so I came up. I found your clothes in the bedroom, so I guessed you’d be back. I . . . I was frightened I might not see you again.’

  ‘Why? Would that matter to you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He smelled her perfume, warm and musky, and sensed her reserve. ‘Why is it so difficult to get close to you?’

  There was a very long silence. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last, knowing that she did. Then she looked up a little more brightly. ‘I brought some wine. I put the refrigerator on and left it in there to chill.’ Bannerman lowered his head and let his lips brush hers. It was what she had wanted, and yet still she drew back. ‘I’ll get some glasses.’

  He followed her into the living room, puzzled, disappointed, wondering why she had come, and yet glad that she had.

  She went into the kitchen. He heard her open the refrigerator then the sounds of her searching for glasses. He switched off the overhead light, turned on a table lamp and sat back in the settee staring at the painting over the mantelpiece. The browns and blacks, blues and greens, their starkness against the white of the snow that covered the scene. A group of weary hunters returning from the kill, mean-looking dogs slinking at their feet, a fire being lit at the inn on the hilltop. Through the trees they looked down on to two square frozen lakes where tiny figures wrapped in winter coats were skating. There was a great peace about the painting, a strange sense of satisfaction in it, men and women frozen in the painter’s mind below the palest of winter blue skies that faded almost to yellow.

  Sally came in with the bottle uncorked and set it down with two glasses on the stained wooden coffee table in front of the settee. She sat down beside Bannerman and followed his eyes to the painting. ‘Brueghel,’ she said. ‘So gentle by comparison with the horrors and madness of his later work.’

  Bannerman wondered if the choice of painting reflected anything in Slater. It was a curious choice for such a man. Perhaps it had come with the apartment. He dragged his eyes away from it and turned his head to watch Sally pour the wine. The bottle was misted, and the glasses misted too when she filled them. Now she raised her glass to her lips. ‘It hardly seems right to toast anything,’ she said, and took a sip. Bannerman lifted his glass and took a mouthful. It was dry and a little fruity and was cool in his throat, which still hurt where he had been kicked. Sally put her glass down and without looking at him, asked, ‘What happened to your face?’

  He told her. About the assault in the apartment, and the assailant who’d attacked him in the darkness of his office. She turned in amazement.

  ‘You mean there was someone in here waiting for you?’

  ‘Not waiting for me. He was after something in the safe. I disturbed him. I suppose he got what he was looking for, but he must have thought the house was empty.’ He hesitated. ‘Let me ask you something. You normally came on Sundays. Why did you not come yesterday?’

  She looked at him curiously, a hint of uncertainty, suspicion, in her green eyes. ‘You don’t think I . . .’

  ‘I don’t think anything. I’d just like to know.’

  ‘I had a lunch engagement with a professor of English from a very exclusive language college in Rome. There’s a post available and I have applied for it. It’s a full-time job and it pays well.’ There was a hint of hostility in her voice. ‘Usually I took Tania out on Sunday mornings. To Mass. They were Catholics, you know. I’m not, but I took her anyway. She seemed to get something out of it.’

  Bannerman nodded. ‘And that’s why whoever it
was that clobbered me expected the house to be empty.’

  She picked up her glass and half-emptied it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought that maybe you thought I . . .’ She stopped. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No.’ He leaned forward and refilled both their glasses, a slight, sharp intake of breath as the pain returned to his outstretched arm.

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill Mr Slater?’ she said suddenly.

  Bannerman passed her the glass. ‘Because he was blackmailing Robert Gryffe. Because someone else felt threatened and decided that the best way out was to kill them both. Then he came here to get whatever it was that gave Slater a hold over Gryffe. And maybe cash, if there was any in the safe.’ If he said it often enough he might believe it. He took in her look of incredulity.

  ‘But how can you possibly know that?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t. But it fits with the known facts.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s easier to believe than what you’re going to read in tomorrow’s evening papers.’

  She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Interior Minister is going to make a statement tomorrow announcing that the police are satisfied that Slater and Gryffe shot each other during some private quarrel. The case is already closed.’

  She said nothing, raising her glass slowly to her lips and sipping at it several times. She got up and walked to the window, and stood tracing patterns with her finger in the fine condensation. Outside the snow still fell, brushing the glass, lining the ledge. ‘A cover-up?’ Her voice was quiet and the words were almost lost.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Bannerman replaced his glass on the table and went to the window, standing behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

  ‘But why?’ she asked.

  He sighed. ‘I have no idea. But I mean to find out.’

  She turned then to face him, her eyes turned up to meet his. ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘Nothing in life is fair,’ Bannerman said, and she was stung by the bitterness in his voice. ‘Right now there are tens of thousands of children with swollen bellies who haven’t eaten in days, or even weeks. Arms and legs so thin they might break if you so much as looked at them. We’ve all seen those pictures in the papers. Staring, hopeless eyes. Some of them have days, maybe only hours left to live. There is no food for them. Only disease and despair. And we sit sipping our wine and warming our anger because two men have died and someone doesn’t want us to know why. Is that fair?’

  She saw the intensity in his face as he paused to choke back his emotion.

  ‘A little girl was born with autism. She lost her mother to cancer and saw her father shot to death yesterday. Maybe she’d like to tell us how it was. Maybe she’d like to say, “I loved my Daddy.” But she can’t, because her autism won’t let her. Do you care? Do I care? Does anybody care? That doesn’t really seem very fair either, does it? You can’t go through life expecting it to treat you fairly. God, if He exists, either had an off-day when He put us on this planet, or else He’s playing some ether­eal game of chess where we’re all pawns, expendable in the greater scheme of things, whether we think it’s fair or not. You can talk about right and wrong, and even that is different for each of us . . . But nothing is fair.’

  She listened in silence to his rancour. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘And, God knows, I should know about fairness, or the lack of it. But wouldn’t it be sad if we all thought the way you do?’

  Bannerman looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Was it a man?’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it always?’ She turned away.

  ‘No, not always.’ He turned her back to face him and cupped his hands either side of her face, tilting her head upwards. ‘It needn’t be,’ he said. And he bent to kiss her. She responded, soft lips, the smell of wine on her breath. She pulled her head away and pressed it into his shoulder.

  ‘It’s hard,’ she said, ‘not knowing if you can ever really trust anyone again.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’ And she pushed away from him, turning again to the window.

  He stood for a moment, then crossed to the coffee table and retrieved his glass. ‘I’d like to see Tania,’ he said, and drank what was left of his wine.

  ‘I’ll take you. Tomorrow?’

  ‘Evening. If it’s possible.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’ll be going to the funeral?’

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon, two-thirty at the Cimetière de Bruxelles.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know. Yes, I’ll be there.’ She paused. ‘Why do you want to see her?’

  He looked up sharply. ‘I don’t know.’ And he had no idea why. He knew there was very little chance of her communicating anything he didn’t already know. And it was only then that he realized she had been flitting around the edge of his consciousness all day. A small, clumsy, barefoot child whose cold hands had touched his face in the darkness. Then he remembered something else.

  ‘The other night, when I came back drunk. Did I . . . Did we . . .?’

  She smiled at his unusual bashfulness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We didn’t.’ She hesitated, then, ‘I could stay tonight.’

  ‘No, I’ll take you home.’ He said it a little too quickly and it hurt her, and he realized too late his mistake.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to apologize.’

  There was an awkward silence, then Bannerman asked, ‘You want some more wine?’

  ‘No, it’s getting late.’

  He fumbled absently in his pocket and then frowned. ‘The police brought Slater’s car back. I saw it outside. But I guess I don’t have the keys.’

  ‘They’re on the mantelpiece.’ Sally crossed the room. ‘They must have put them through the letter box. I found them lying on the floor in the hall when I came in. But don’t bother, I’ll phone a taxi.’ He would have argued, but he saw in her face that she would not be argued with. And he thought, I could love you.

  *

  It was fifteen minutes before the taxi came and parp-parped down in the street. They’d had time to finish the wine and say many things. They had done neither. ‘I’ll come down with you.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘I’ll come down with you.’

  He helped her on with her coat and they walked down the stairs in silence. The taxi was revving impatiently at the kerb, clouds of exhaust fumes rising into the darkness. She stopped in the doorway and relented, turning to kiss him quickly on the lips. He held her arm to stop her from going. ‘Did you . . . did you get the job in Rome?’

  She looked at him quizzically for a moment. ‘I don’t know. They said they’d be in touch. See you tomorrow.’

  He watched her climb into the taxi. The car purred off down the Rue de Commerce, leaving black tyre tracks in the thin layer of snow, and he wondered if she would always be leaving.

  Back in the apartment all that remained of her were lingering traces of her perfume and the faintest smear of lipstick on her empty glass. He finished the wine, drinking slowly, listening to the clock ticking in the silence and feeling the dull ache in the stiffening muscles of his right arm.

  IV

  A silent figure stood in the snow, pressed against a gable end, the eaves too high above him to afford any protection from the thickly falling flakes. The tyre tracks of the taxi had vanished already, only a slight, slightly whiter impression remaining in the whiteness of the road. The man shifted his feet, but the feeling in them had long since gone. Even the muscles of his face seemed to have frozen. His hands, pushed deep in his pockets, were raw cold and stiff. His eyes were dull and sunk deep in shadow, and yet still they watched. It was a pointless vigil now,
but perhaps for the first time in his life Kale was afraid of the loneliness of his hotel room, locked away in the dark listening to the throbbing early morning music that came drifting up from the basement nightclub in the adjoining block. There would be too much time to think during the sleepless hours. There were things that would trouble him, dark thoughts coming like strangers in the night to blacken the blackness in him.

  The light in the top-floor apartment went out, and still he could not bring himself to move. The woman had been gone twenty minutes and there was no way the man would lead him to the child tonight. And yet he stood on, like a punishment. A mean, lost soul in a foreign city where people spoke words he could not understand, where he had killed two men without a second thought. Only now it was a prison. There was no escape. Every eye watched him, every voice accused him. There was a dreadful inevitability about it all, like death itself.

  Of course, there was a way out, but somewhere beyond his grasp, there just to torture him. He had only to leave. By morning he could be in Ostend, by teatime in London. But it was not to be. A child had seen him commit murder, a child with a troubled mind, a child who would probably never identify him. But she might. He knew that, his employer knew that, and there were others who knew it too. It was expected of him to negate that possibility. He expected it of himself. He had killed before. It was easy, it was necessary, and yet standing there in all the cold and snow on this black winter night, he did not know if it was possible.

  It was the uncertainty that trapped him here. He had thought he knew all the dark territory of his mind. Had no illusions about who or what he was. It was something he accepted, like life or death. But somewhere in that inner darkness he had stumbled on something unfamiliar, something he could not come to terms with. To kill a child with his secret locked somewhere in her head. A note in a locker, three words on a scrap of paper, and he had discovered in himself the seed of destruction that is in the souls of all men.