his Section Head.
'Just off then, Bren?'
Well, he was at the door with his raincoat on and his briefcase in his hand… 'Just off, Mr Wilkins.'
'You didn't call me.'
'Nothing came through that was Priority.'
'Thank the good Lord for that.'
'I checked through the statistics, sir. It's the first week in the last ten that we haven't had either a shooting or a bombing, or even a failure.
Good morning, then, Mr Wilkins.'
He looked back at his desk, to be certain that it was cleared, that all the sheets of paper that he had headed DONNELLY JJ had gone to the shredder. There would have been a small frown from Mr Wilkins if he had left any vestige of his night's work on the desk. It was what he wanted, what he prepared himself for, to be taken onto the team working on DONNELLY JJ. He had spent two and a half hours after three o'clock trying to extract from the computer database any pattern in the present campaign of attacks. It was about all that he had come up with, that there had not been a shooting or a bombing for seven days, the longest clear time in ten weeks.
'You at home over the weekend?'
'Yes, Mr Wilkins.' There was a gym near his flat and if he left home over the weekend he would go there, pump weights; he would fight the heavy bag on Saturday for two hours and he would do a half-marathon on Sunday.
'Not escaping to the country?'
'No, Mr Wilkins.'
'Thank you, Bren…'
Old men with nothing more in their lives to fear came out to walk behind the hearse to the parish church, and women who had slipped into their shopping coats against the cruel wind, and a few children with them. Not more than 150 souls took it upon themselves to accompany the family of Eddie Dignan, the informer, to the funeral Mass. Most of that tight community in the housing estate stayed indoors, or gathered at their front gates. He was the man who had betrayed his own. Eddie Dignan had taken the Crown's gold. His widow, and she was much liked by her neighbours, walked with her children around her, and those that knew her best said afterwards that her face showed more shame than grief. They walked behind the hearse, the widow of the tout, the children of the tout, the friends of the tout. A little tide of hard, pain-etched faces went slowly past the news cameras, and up the steps into the church.
Across the plain coffin, over the small bunches of fresh flowers, over the heads of the widow and her wee ones, over the bowed shoulders of the few inside the great church, the priest said, '… Eddie was trapped between two groups of unscrupulous men, one of which – as covert agents of the state – has a skein of respectability masking its work of dark corruption. They too work unseen, seeking victims like Eddie whom they can manipulate for their own ends…'As they waited for the widow and her children to ride away in the big black car from the graveside, it was muttered that the greater blame lay with the bastard British who had used Eddie Dignan, not with the Provo gunman who had shot him dead.
It was a more comfortable thought.
He had slept on the bench at Paddington railway station, and then he had gone to the Left Luggage and collected the grip bag with his clothes and the canvas holder that held his carpentry tools. He had bought his ticket, paying cash, and taken the early train to the west.
Jon Jo stood on the platform at Newton Abbot. It was near to nine o'clock. The cold morning air seemed to blast off Dartmoor and swirl across the open space of the station. He had come off the fast train, and the slow train was running late. It was nearly nine o'clock. After a hit, there was a room in London that he could use, in Hackney. There was another always available to him in a Victorian house divided up into bedsitters in Guildford. A third room in Reading, west of London, had also been rented for him. Those rooms had been chosen and paid for by deep cover operatives. The room in the Devon summer resort town of Paignton, he had found for himself. It was where he felt most safe.
Jon Jo took a Walkman from his grip. Methodically he untangled the wires and tuned across the babble of the stations until he caught the chimes of nine o'clock. There was the abbreviated news bulletin. The Gulf, the trade figures, the storm force winds approaching the northwest, the still unsuccessful hunt for a missing child, a soccer transfer record for a central defender… The introduction to a phone-in broadcast on Equal Opportunities… He tore off the earphones, and buried the Walkman back in his grip-What the feck had happened? Every morning, winter and summer, the target left for work at twenty minutes past seven. The surveillance report had been definite on that. If the gouging of the window with his screwdriver had been s p o t t e d… Or if the target had sat so heavily into the driver's seat as to shake off the magnets, and the fall had not thrown the tilt switch. I f… But the road of the target house would have been swarming with police. There should still have been, 'News is coming in of…'
For the first time since he could remember, the first time since he had crossed the water, he felt the sweat of the fear of failure run in the pit of his back.
The platform was crowded. Men and women and school children jostled their way onto the two-carriage train going south and west to the coast towns. Jon Jo was amongst them, his bottom hp white between his teeth.
His P.A. had been sent with a fistful of loose change to the shop across Curzon Street to buy the sandwiches and two large bottles of Perrier.
They were talking through the lunch break because Wilkins knew that Carthew would be off at three to meet his wife at the airport, and Foster would be wanting to get away early so that he could get onto the M4 before it seized up at the start of his drive to Exmoor. Carthew was certainly work-shy, and Foster might just be certifiable if he intended to pitch a tent against the elements at this time of year.
'So, it's Brennard, is it, until we can get Ferdie back?'
Foster said, 'He's the obvious one, the one we'd miss the least.'
Carthew said, 'He's a prickly little beggar.'
Foster said, 'Prickly is an understatement.'
Carthew said, 'You know, when he first came, and I called him Gary, I thought he was going to do me Criminal Assault.'
'He's the one that I would think most suitable,' Wilkins said quietly.
'It had crossed my mind to move him to the Donnelly team, give him something tougher to cut his teeth on. I'd say he was a little frantic for some meat, in rather a hurry, oh yes. He deserves the chance… but I would be less than honest if I did not make plain my disappointment with the reaction of other members of our section…'
Foster said, 'I thought Bill was going to have a coronary…'
Carthew said, 'No one in their right mind actually wants to go..
Foster said, 'Trouble with Charles is that he's got the private means cushion to fall back on. I think if he were posted he'd quit. Be a waste if we pushed him too hard.'
Carthew said, 'Ulster's hardly the place for a pressed man…'
Foster said, 'The only other one that I could think of was Archie.
Quite simply, he declined. I suppose it's because he's taken on that place in the country. The problem is, Ernest, that no one who has a halfway normal life to lead is going to be ambitious for a posting in that dreadful country.'
Carthew said, 'Brennard's particularly well-suited…'
Objectively, of course, it was not satisfactory to put in a raw young man, but it was temporary. Foster would check out the position on Ferdie Penn, when he could be recovered from the training programme he was running down in Nairobi. Might be a month, might be two…
Brennard wouldn't need to be told that it was just a temporary thing because that would be demotivating.
They chewed at their sandwiches. Wilkins mused, 'It's a life that none of us older men were trained for. Alright, we have our Watchers, and we do that well, but for the most part we are a collating agency. All of this frigging around in ditches, carrying sidearms, running sources, it's a new science… You don't think Brennard will let us down?'
Foster said, 'Be working under Parker, won't he?'
Carthew said, 'With Parker in charge, you could send a babe in arms.'
