‘Welcome home,’ Mike said. ‘How was England?’
‘Strenuous.’
‘Did you remember my Bath Olivers?’ Whitlock said. ‘Or did they get forgotten in the whirl of events?’
Sabrina pointed to a Fortnum and Mason’s bag on the sideboard. ‘Six packets. Enough to turn up the flame of nostalgia till it hurts.’
‘Bless you.’ Whitlock pecked Sabrina’s cheek. ‘Those biscuits are all I really miss about my student days.’
‘You must have really lived it up,’ Mike said. ‘What did you do - crumble them into a chillum and smoke them?’
‘Right.’ Philpott looked up from his fax and pointed at the table. ‘Sit down, will you? I’ve a busy day so we must keep this brief.’
Whitlock and Mike brought coffee to the table and sat opposite each other as they always did. Sabrina sat somewhere different every time. She did that in case anyone imagined there was significance in the way the only permanent female member of the unit sat in relation to the other two operatives and to the chief. Today she sat at the top of the table on the same side as Whitlock, adjacent to Philpott.
‘You’re all familiar with the superficial details of the Emily Selby shooting,’ Philpott said, opening a folder in front of him. ‘Lucy is here this morning to add anything that might help in formulating at least the nucleus of a procedure. I can add to what you all know about the case by telling you that early on Saturday, a call was received here at the UN from Colonel Wolrich of Security Liaison, working out of the US Embassy in London. He talked about the case with the Deputy Secretary General of the Security Council. As a result of their discussion, the Selby inquiry has been made our business.’
‘So my weekend wasn’t a complete waste,’ Whitlock said.
‘Why did they pass it straight to UNACO?’ Lucy asked.
‘Well, there’s the hard evidence the gunman was a trained assassin, and a high-profile one at that. There’s the fact that he travelled West to kill an American who happened to be a Jew, and who happened to be working for the government, right inside the White House. That bare-bones synopsis alone makes this our kind of case. We have a strong enough indication of international crime, with the attendant danger of escalation, to warrant UNACO intervention.’
‘I can vouch for the killer’s prominent profile,’ Lucy said, crossing and uncrossing her long legs as she spoke. ‘They were very proud of Yaqub Hisham in the Lebanon.’
‘Ever meet him?’ Sabrina said.
‘He wasn’t a social animal, but yes, I was in the same big tent as him one time, along with maybe fifty others, while I was doing a hill-gypsy routine for cover. He was nothing unusual as terrorists go, except he was maybe luckier than most, or more foolhardy. Until he got too hot a target for the Israelis, he was really the main man. Scourge of the Jews, they called him. When things warmed up and Mossad started closing in, it was a top Arab surgeon that volunteered to change Yaqub’s face. A big freebie, carried out in one of the finest hospitals in Egypt.’
‘Was it business as usual after the face-change?’ Philpott said.
Lucy shook her head. ‘Mossad got leaked a picture of him. From Yaqub’s point of view it was a waste of time. He ended up with a face he thought wasn’t nearly as pretty as his real one, and the way things turned out he might as well have hung on to the old face. He had to get back into hiding. That’s why he went to Morocco. Hard for the avenging Israelis to get at him there.’
Philpott looked at Mike. ‘Fill us in on what you learned.’
Mike gave them a summary on the Arab’s un-exceptional stay in London, up to the time he killed Emily Selby and then shot himself. ‘Lucy could tell us more, but the things we most need to know are his reason for killing Emily Selby, and the source of the gun he used. So far, those things remain a mystery.’
‘Sabrina?’
Sabrina explained how she got into Emily Selby’s hotel room, and what she found during her search. ‘For a tourist Emily carried a lot of stuff, but the key and the list were the only items out of the ordinary. The key wouldn’t be half so interesting if it hadn’t been stitched into her jacket.’
‘What impressions did you get about the woman herself?’ Philpott asked.
‘Tidy and well organized, though perhaps to a pathological extent.’ Sabrina explained about the piece of ruler she had found, and about clothes stored by colour, bottles in the bathroom regimented by size. ‘The kind of clothes she wore indicated she had good fashion sense, but she was also reticent, modest probably, because she had what I call an extravagance-shut-off. She had limits and barriers, she showed flair but with enough of a conservative streak to stop herself from being flamboyant.’
‘Overall impression?’ Philpott said.
‘That she was intelligent, gifted and inquisitive, with a tragedy at the centre of her life, supported by the evidence of her compulsive neurosis,’ Sabrina said. ‘Compulsive rituals, notably in the behaviour patterns of intelligent people, indicate that they use rigid and complicated routines to divert their minds from areas of pain.’
C.W. was nodding. So was Lucy.
‘Emily Selby’s history supports that interpretation,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Her employment record, which I read as soon as I got here this morning, shows she was widowed three years ago. She suffered a compound tragedy, because her husband and father died at the same time and in the same place.’
Philpott tapped the photocopy in front of him. ‘Lake Cayuga, Ithaca, New York State,’ he said. ‘A fishing accident. Verdict of drowning on both men. We will look into the details. Now, Sabrina, did you find anything at all to link Emily Selby with Erika Stramm, the woman with her in the picture?’
‘I’m assuming the pencilled initials ES at the bottom of the list stand for Erika Stramm. But that’s all I have. I’m still working on a connection.’
Philpott looked at Whitlock. ‘Tell us how you fared with the list.’
Whitlock had his folder open, the sheets of information spread out before him. ‘It’s a list of thirty German names and addresses, and all the names are male,’ he said. ‘I sifted the criminal records first, but there was nothing. Whatever else they are, these are law-abiding citizens. Then I had to go the slow route, with the help of Interpol. Everybody was very helpful, and eventually I got expansion -as much as is known - on every name on the list.’
‘What’s their connection?’ Mike said.
‘Nothing worthy of the name. They don’t appear to be related by blood or commercial ties. They’re apparently prospering in various quiet ways, but that’s all they seem to have in common. Well, except for one factor. We know that fifteen of the men on the list were adopted. They were war orphans.’
‘And the others?’ Philpott said.
‘No childhood records extant. Destroyed by enemy action. The bombing of Dresden and Berlin and countless other communities wiped out millions of official histories. It simultaneously provided a blank slate for the creation of others.’ C.W. spread his hands. ‘About two-thirds of the population records collated in Germany during the immediate post-war years are just not reliable, from an investigative standpoint.’
‘What’s the men’s professional range?’ Sabrina asked.
‘Everything from bookbinding and carpet-tile manufacture to medicine and law - there are two doctors and two lawyers - the rest are one-offs. Interpol tried a few test searches with the records of marriages but no links showed up.’
Mike asked if they were all about the same age.
‘It’s tight, between fifty-nine and sixty-five years old.’
‘I think there might be something in the fact there are so many orphans,’