‘No.’
‘You kept him secret from MI5?’ I was fairly incredulous.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I love the way you lie.’
She flinched, but didn’t elaborate.
‘Were you careful? Could you have been seen?’ I’d always thought McCallen crazy, but there usually seemed to be an internal logic to her actions. Mixing business with pleasure, if that’s what she’d done, was as dumb as it gets. She’d exposed him to danger and herself to blackmail with all types of criminal permutations in between.
‘Possible, but unlikely.’
I thought about it. As an intelligence officer, McCallen could be on any number of bad guys’ radar. That meant whoever was seen with her was also at potential risk. But then she already knew the score in that regard. She was the expert. I was merely an educated outsider.
‘Are the police doing their job properly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Examining relationships and connections?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Her eyes met mine once more.
‘Which could lead straight back to you.’ And when the truth was out, her job would be on the line. Now I got it.
‘Precisely.’
‘Presumably you covered your tracks, gave Lars assumed code name.’
She swallowed and nodded. ‘The police are concentrating their efforts on the couple, which buys me a little time.’
‘Why the focus on the couple?’
‘Griffiths-Jones had a large sum of money that can’t be accounted for deposited in a private Swiss bank account.’
Hence her lie regarding the money trail. ‘Fiddling the books?’
‘That’s my take.’
‘White noise,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Lars.’
‘A German national who split his time between London and Berlin.’
‘So not a tourist at all.’ I was surprised how easy it was to catch McCallen in another lie. Signalled she was under considerable pressure. Typically, she went all pedantic on me. ‘He was touring the New Forest at the time of his death.’
‘Why recruit him?’ An artist didn’t strike me as typical spy material. It had to be down to a connection, the company he kept. I didn’t expect her to reveal operational details and, true to form, she chose her words with care. ‘Let’s say that the UK has seen a rise in right-wing militants. A certain group has energetic links with neo-Nazis in Germany. The latest breed are drawn from all sorts of disparate cliques: the disillusioned and unemployed, flat-earthers, anti-Muslim, anti-capitalist, anti-nuclear, anti-globalisation, animal rights activists, most without clear political aims.’
‘Rent-a-mob,’ I pitched in.
‘We’re talking the extreme end of the spectrum.’
‘And Lars, where does he fit?’
‘Thanks to an old art school friend, he had an in to a particular group of anarchists in Berlin who have heavy connections here.’
‘Then look no further. There’s your answer. He was bumped off because he got rumbled, either by his contacts in the UK or those in Germany.’
McCallen shook her head. ‘Lars had bailed months before. There was no reason to kill him.’
I didn’t like to point out that I’d killed men for weaker reasons. When a seriously bad guy got an idea in his head that someone was for the chop, there wasn’t much that could be done to dissuade him.
‘You said the association was over and that he’d extracted himself from his buddies, so what was Lars doing in Hampshire eight months ago?’
She viewed me with instant suspicion. ‘How the hell do you know the timing?’
‘Don’t be so damn suspicious.’ I indicated the aerial shot. ‘I’m good with trees. If you want a nature lesson, I’m happy to give it,’ I said, arch. Actually, the countryside had never done it for me, but my grandfather ensured that my Gloucestershire roots were not wasted. In later life, it had proved useful.
She looked at me a second longer than was comfortable. I’d often thought that talking to McCallen was like throwing jelly at the wall and seeing if it would stick. ‘I genuinely don’t know why he was in the New Forest,’ she said. She looked quite unhappy. However, this time, I reckoned she was being straight with me.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘End of January, and once briefly two months before his death.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘No,’ she said, slow-eyed.
‘No subsequent contact?’
‘A couple of phone calls.’
‘When?’
‘March.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘The weather.’ She looked ticked off.
‘Fine, don’t tell me.’
Her expression told me that on this we were in agreement. ‘Nothing you need to know,’ she added.
‘Maybe Lars wasn’t what he seemed.’
‘That’s what I’m beginning to think.’
The penny didn’t drop; two-pound coins rained down on my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If you’ve allowed yourself to be compromised, that’s your lookout. No way in hell am I going to get involved, investigate, or anything else.’
‘I can’t go to Berlin, but you could.’
‘Which bit of my answer don’t you understand? And aren’t you forgetting something? One step outside the United Kingdom and a Mossad hit team will be snapping at my heels.’ The shout lines of my last job boxed my ears. With McCallen’s help, I’d foiled a plot to sell an ethnically specific biological weapon to an extreme fundamental terrorist group, and had killed one of my old clients, Billy Squeeze, in the process. During the fallout, it had emerged that Mossad was out to get me for an unspecified crime. I’d never properly worked it out. I might have jeopardised one of their operations by taking out a player. I might have unwittingly killed one of their informers. Whatever the detail, they’d only called their dogs off because I’d removed Billy, a man on their hit list, but I knew that it was only a temporary reprieve.
McCallen responded by doing what she does best – she threw me a curve ball. ‘What if Pallenberg was killed to get to me?’
I blinked. Was this the part of the story she hadn’t told me? I knew that there had to be another reason and my curiosity and lust for excitement meant that I was a millimetre from being dragged into her web. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Threats.’
This was my cue to ask her to spill all. If she did, then I’d be done for. She threw me a look that could best be described as ravishingly doomed. My jaw clicked because all I really wanted to do was sweep her into my arms and tell her that I’d help in any way I could.
‘Not my problem,’ I said.
She stood up. ‘You know how to get hold of me if you change your mind.’
‘I’m not going to change my mind.’
She