A Season in Hell. Jack Higgins
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Finally, he nodded. ‘Right, Tony, drop everything else or get someone in the department to handle it. I’ll leave you to sort this one out. Top priority. Keep me informed.’
It was a dismissal. He replaced his glasses and Villiers took the reports and the heroin and put them in his briefcase. ‘There is just one more thing, sir, on the personal side.’
Ferguson looked up in surprise. ‘Well?’
‘Eric had a stepmother, sir, Sarah Talbot. She’s an American.’
‘You know her?’
‘Oh, yes. She’s a very unusual woman. Eric adored her. His own mother died when he was born and Sarah meant a great deal to him, as he did to her.’
‘And now you’ve got to tell her about this tragic business. How will she take it?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Villiers shrugged. ‘She was a Cabot from Boston. Very Blue Book. Her father was a millionaire several times over. Steel, I think. She’d had no mother from an early age, so they were close. She was a typical spoiled rich bitch, as she once told me, who still managed an honour’s degree from Radcliffe.’
‘And then?’
‘She underwent a sea-change at twenty-one. Hated what was happening in Vietnam. Lost a boyfriend there. Two or three years later, she ran for Congress. Almost won, too. But the voters grew progressively disenchanted with her politics, she lost the election, gave up politics entirely, got her MBA from Harvard and joined a Wall Street firm of investment brokers.’
‘Helped by Big Daddy’s money?’
Villiers shook his head. ‘Started from scratch on her own and now has a considerable reputation. She met Edward on a visit to London, in the National Gallery one Sunday morning. She told me once that she forgave him for being a soldier because he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in a uniform and red beret.’
‘And there was the boy.’
‘As I said, it was love at first sight for both of them. I don’t mean this in the wrong way, sir.’ Villiers sounded awkward. ‘But I sometimes felt she loved Eric more than his father.’
‘Women go with the heart, Tony,’ Ferguson said gently. ‘Where is she at the moment?’
‘New York, sir.’
‘Then you’d better get it over with.’
‘Yes, I’m not looking forward to that.’
‘Of course, this Irish connection making it a security matter does mean you could legitimately make the whole affair the subject of a D-notice. That would keep it out of the newspapers, television and so on.’ Ferguson shrugged. ‘I mean, no need to make things any more unpleasant for the family than they already are.’
‘That’s good of you, sir.’ Villiers walked to the door, paused, then turned. ‘There is one more thing I should mention, sir.’
‘More, Tony?’ Ferguson said wearily. ‘All right, tell me the worst.’
‘Sarah, sir. She’s a very good friend of the President.’
‘Oh my God!’ Ferguson said. ‘That’s all we needed.’
Victoria Station was crowded with people, queues for some of the express trains. Albert wore a brown suede jacket and jeans as he pushed his way through the throng carrying the bulging holdall filled with heroin. Locker number forty-three was locked, of course. He took the key from his pocket and opened the locker. All very simple. He put the bag inside, locked the door and walked away.
He hesitated just by the main entrance, intrigued. He had to know, it was as simple as that, and none of Bird’s overprotective hysteria could put him off. He turned round and walked back, going into one of the cafés, ordering a coffee and finding a seat by the window from which he had a clear view of the lockers.
The café was already busy and two women came and sat at the table, crowding him in, and then the whole thing was over in an instant. He’d been looking for a man, of course, not the grey-haired, stout old woman in a man’s raincoat and beret, already at the locker, key in hand.
She got the bag out as Albert struggled to get past the women at his table, had disappeared into the crowd by the entrance to the underground before he could do anything. He stood outside the café, angry for a moment, then shrugged and walked away.
Smith, from his vantage point beside the newsagent’s where he had witnessed everything, shook his head and said softly, ‘Oh, dear, I’m really going to have to do something about you, aren’t I?’
Manhattan was, as Manhattan always is on a wet November evening, busy, the traffic quite impossible, the sidewalks crowded with people hurrying through the rain. Sarah Talbot eased down the window of the Cadillac and looked out with conscious pleasure.
‘A hell of a night, Charles.’
Her chauffeur, a tough-looking young man in a smart black suit, his cap on the seat beside him, grinned. ‘You want to get out and walk, Mrs Talbot?’
‘No thanks. My shoes are by Manolo Blahnik. I got them in London on my last trip and he definitely wouldn’t like me to go out in the rain in them.’
She was a month away from her fortieth birthday and looked thirty, even on a bad morning. Her dark hair was held back by a simple velvet bow leaving the face clear, grey-green eyes sparkling above rather prominent cheekbones. It was not that she was beautiful in any conventional sense, but people always looked twice. Just now, she was particularly elegant in a black velvet suit by Dior. She was on her way to her favourite restaurant, The Four Seasons, on 52nd Street, to dine alone, strictly from choice. A personal celebration, for that afternoon she’d pulled off the deal of her career, the takeover of a chain of department stores in the Midwest, and against tough male opposition. Oh, yes, my girl, she thought, Daddy would have been proud of you tonight. Which didn’t give her any particular satisfaction.
She said, ‘I need a vacation, Charles.’
‘That sounds fair, Mrs Talbot. The Virgins are nice this time of the year. We could open the house, get the boat out.’
‘You’d be down there every other week if I let you, you rogue,’ she said. ‘No, I was thinking I might fly over to England. Visit Eric at Cambridge.’
‘That’s nice. How’s he doing over there?’
‘Fine. Just fine.’ She hesitated. ‘To be honest, I haven’t heard much from him lately.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that at all. He’s a young guy and you know what students are like. Girls on their mind all the time.’
He swore softly, swinging the wheel as the car in front braked, and Sarah sat back, thinking of Eric. It had been two months since she’d had a letter and when she’d tried to get him on the phone he’d simply not been available. Still, as Charles said, students were students.
The chauffeur passed a newspaper over. ‘Good story in there you maybe missed. That big Mafia trial, the members of that Frasconi mob. The judge handed them down two hundred and ten years between them.’
‘So?’ Sarah said as she took the paper.
‘Look who they got a picture of coming out of court. The guy who was responsible for putting them all away.’
The man in the photo on the courtroom steps was at least seventy, heavily built, with the fleshy, arrogant face of an ancient emperor. An overcoat was draped over his shoulders and he leaned on a cane. The caption read: Ex-Mafia boss Rafael Barbera outside the court.
‘He’s smiling,’ Sarah commented.
‘He should be. He owed those guys from way back. The Frasconis killed his brother in the Mafia wars twenty years ago.’
‘Twenty years seems a long time to wait.’
‘Not