Page 109 - double revenge 3.

THE COTTAGE

TH
MONDAY APRIL 27 1998

‘Bryant, I don’t know how far you have got but I want to hear now everything you know. Your
report was scant to say the least. I want to know about Anne’s part in all this and why she was
working as an agent. Moreover, I want to know why you have been in New York and why you
booked your tickets privately and not through the department. I also want to know why you
skipped our last meeting, who was murdered?’

‘A wouldn’t say boo to a goose middle age lady who worked in a business accommodation office.
She was murdered just on the one in a bloody million chance she just might have a clue where this
bloody Guatemala memo might lay. George, I am sick of this. For God’s sake, tell Barker to find the
memo himself.’

George visibly shrank into himself. ‘This is taking too many lives.’ He murmured. He was silent for a
long while.

‘I know how you feel but I cannot overstress how imperative it is that we, you, find the memo. We
do not want redactions and alterations such as happened to Frank Furlong’s report.’

‘You can’t know how I feel; your wife hasn’t been murdered. Do you think I would have agreed to
this assignment if I had known my wife was killed because she was looking for the same damned

memo you want me to find? I am sorry George, I know that doesn’t sound impartial and
professional but at the moment I feel my priority is to discover the identity of this pathological
killer. I can’t really give two hoots about a memo which might no longer exist, if it ever did.

‘And was that the reason for your trip to New York?’

‘Partly, I thought the person I was looking for might be Anne’s murderer, he was with her shortly
before she was killed, but I don’t think that is the case.’

‘Look, I can see you are upset. Let us meet tomorrow and go through your report then.’

‘No, I would rather get it done as soon as possible.’

I had not made any notes; Warner’s story was still very fresh in my mind. George beckoned me to
the sofa rather than the formal seat opposite him, a gesture to show where his loyalty lay; we had
been colleagues and friends for a long time.

‘Firstly, a corpse lies in a mortuary that everyone, including the murderers, believes to be Arnold
Warner,’ I began. ‘The man lying on that slab had been tortured and then beaten to death because

he would not tell them what they needed to know, the whereabouts of the so called Guatemala
memo. He could not tell them that simply because he knew nothing of a memo, he was not Arnold
Warner.