'Exactly like that.'
'Where are you?' she said. 'Not at home… I tried there.'
'An evening off,' I said. 'I'll tell you when I see you.'
'Do come on Sunday.'
'Yes, I'll try.'
We spent more time than necessary saying goodbye. I thought that I could easily have talked to her all evening, and wished vaguely that she felt secure enough to travel and drive alone.
Tony came back soon after dawn, waking me from a shallow sleep.
'There are two possibles out of those eleven places,' he said, stripping off for a shower. 'Nine of them are occupied by bona-fide effing holidaymakers. I went into four to make absolutely sure, but there they were, tucked up nice and unsuspecting, dads, mums, grannies and kids, all regular law-abiding citizens.'
Tony's skill, as he immodestly said, would make any professional night burglar look like a herd of elephants. 'A creeper as good as me,' I'd heard him say, 'can touch a person in bed and get them to turn over to stop them snoring. I could take the varnish off their nails, let alone the wallets from under the pillows. Good thing I'm effing honest.'
I waited while he stepped into the shower and sluiced lavishly about. 'There's two of those places,' he said, reappearing eventually and towelling his sandy-brown hair, 'that gave me bad vibes. One of them's got some sort of electronic gadget guarding the door: it sent my detection gear into a tizzy. I'd guess it's one of those do-it-yourself alarms you can buy anywhere to stop hotel creepers fitting you up while you're sleeping off the mickey the barman slipped you.' He dried his neck. 'So I left a couple of bugs on that one, and we'll go back soon and listen in.'
He wrapped the towel round his body like a sarong and sat on Miranda's bed. 'The other one's got no electronic gadgets that I could see, but it's three storeys high. Boatshed on the ground floor. Empty. Just water and effing fish. Above that, rooms overlooking the creek. Above that, more rooms. There's a sort of scrubby paved garden on two sides. Not much cover. I didn't fancy going in. Anyway I stuck two bugs on it, one on each of the upper floors. So we'll listen to them as well.'
'Cars?' I said.
'Can't tell.' He shook his head. 'Neither place has a garage. There were cars along the streets.' He stood up and began to dress, 'Come on then,' he said. 'Get out of the effing pit, and let's go fishing.'
He meant it literally, it seemed. By eight-thirty we were out on Itchenor Creek in the chilly morning in his rented rowing boat, throwing lines with maggots oh hooks over the side.
'Are you sure this is the right bait?' I said.
'Who cares? Bass swallow bare hooks sometimes, silly buggers.'
He paddled the boat along like a born waterman with one oar in a loop of rope over the stem. No creaking rowlocks, he explained. Ultra-silent travel: high on the S.A.S. curriculum.
'The tide was low at five this morning,' he said. 'You can't get a boat ashore at low tide in a lot of places, so if they landed the kid from that motor-boat it was probably somewhere where there's water at half-tide. Both our possibles qualify, just.
Our rowing boat drifted along on slowly flooding water. The fish disdained the maggots and there was a salty smell of seaweed.
'We're just coming to the place with the electronic bulldog, Tony said. 'Hold this aerial so it looks like a fishing rod.' He untelescoped about six feet of thin silvery rod and handed it over, and I found there was a line tied to the end of it with a small weight. 'Chuck the weight in the water,' he said, bending down to fiddle with the radio receiver in what looked like a fishing-gear box. 'Keep your eyes on the briny and pin back the lugs.'
I did all of those things but nothing much happened. Tony grunted and did some fine tuning, but in the end he said. 'The lazy so-and-so's aren't awake. The bugs are working. We'll come back when we've checked the other house.'
I nodded and he paddled a good way northwards before stopping again to deploy the lines. Again we drifted on the tide, apparently intent on catching our breakfast, and Tony bent to his knobs.
The voice when it came nearly tipped me out of the boat.
'Give the little bleeder his breakfast and tape off his noise if he starts whining.'
The voice - unmistakably the voice - which we had heard on the tape in John Nerrity's house. Not over loud, but crystal clear.
'My God,' I said numbly, not believing it.
'Bingo,' Tony said with awe. 'Holy effing hell.'
A different voice on the tape said, 'He won't eat it. What's the point of taking it up there?'
'Son,' said the first voice with exaggerated patience, 'do we want our little goldmine to starve to death? No we don't. Take him his bread and jam, and shut up.'
'I don't like this job,' the second voice complained. 'Straight up, I don't.'
'You were keen enough when I put you up for it. Good work, you said; those were your words.'
'I didn't reckon on the kid being so…'
'So what?'
'So stubborn.'
'He's not that bad. Pining, most like. You concentrate on the payola and get up the bleeding stairs.'
Tony flipped a couple of switches and for a while we sat in silence listening to the faint slap of the water against our own drifting boat; and then the second voice, sounding much more distant, said, 'Here you are, kid, eat this.'
There was no audible reply.
'Eat it,' the voice said with irritation, and then, after a pause, 'I'd stuff it down your throat if you were mine, you snotty little sod.'
Tony said 'Charming' under his breath and began to pull in the lines. 'Heard enough, haven't we? That second bug is on the top floor, facing the street.'
I nodded. Tony reversed his switches and the second voice, downstairs again, said 'He's just lying there staring, same as usual. Gives me the willies. Sooner we're shot of him, the better.'
'Patience,' the first voice said, as if humouring an idiot. 'You got to let the man sell his horse. Stands to reason. One week we gave him. One week is what he'll get.'
'We're not collecting the five million, though, are we?' He sounded aggrieved. 'Not a chance.'
'We were never going to get five million, stupid. Like Peter said, you 'demand five to frighten the dads and take half a million nice and easy, no bones broken.'
What if Nerrity calls in the Force, and they jump us?'
'No sign of them, is there? Be your age. Terry and Kevin, they'd spot the law the minute it put its size twelves over the doorstep. Those two, they got antennae where you've got eyes. No one at the hotel. No one at the house in Sutton. Right?'
The second voice gave an indistinguishable grumble, and the first answered. 'Peter knows what he's doing. He's done it before. He's an expert. You just do what you're bleeding told and we'll all get rich, and I've had a bellyful of your grousing, I have, straight up.'
Tony put the single oar over the stern of the boat and without fuss or hurry paddled us off towards where we'd set out, against the swirling incoming tide. I rolled up the fishing lines and unbaited the hooks, my fingers absentminded while my thoughts positively galloped.
'Don't let's tell Eagler until…' I said.
'No,' Tony answered.
He looked across at me, half-smiling. 'And let's not tell the Chairman either,' I said. 'Or Gerry Clayton.'
Tony's smile came out like the sun. 'I was afraid you'd insist.'
'No.' I paused. 'You watch from the water and I'll watch from the land, OK? And this evening we'll tell Eagler. On our terms.'
'And the low profile can rest in effing peace.'
'You just get that vacuum pump purring like a cat and don't fall off any high walls.'
'In our report,' Tony said, 'we will write that the police found the hideout.'
'Which they did,' I said reasonably.
'Which they did,' he repeated with satisfaction.
Neither Tony nor I were totally committed to the advice-only policy of the firm, though we both adhered to it more or less and agreed that in most circumstances it was prudent. Tony with his exceptional skills tended always to be more actively involved than I, and his reports were peppered with phrases like 'it was discovered' and 'as it happened' and never with the more truthful 'I planted a dozen illegal bugs and heard…' or 'I let off a smoke canister and under its cover…'
Tony steered the boat back to where we'd left the car and rapidly set up a duplicate receiver to work through the car's aerial.
'There you are,' he said, pointing. 'Left switch for the lower floor bug, middle switch for the top floor. Don't touch the dials. Right switch, up for me to talk to you, down for you to talk to me. OK?'
He dug around in the amazing stores he called his gear and with a nod of pleasure took out a plastic lunch box. 'Long term subsistence supplies,' he said, showing me the contents. 'Nut bars, beef jerky, vitamin pills - keep you fighting fit for weeks.'
'This isn't the South American outback,' I said mildly.
'Saves a lot of shopping, though.' He grinned and stowed the lunch box in the rowing boat along with a plastic bottle of water. 'If the worst should happen and they decide to move the kid, we're in dead trouble.'
I nodded. Trouble with the law, with Liberty Market and with our own inescapable guilt.
'And let's not forget,' he added slowly, 'that somewhere around we have Terry and Kevin and Peter, all with their antennae quivering like effing mad, and you never know whether that crass bastard Rightsworth won't drive up to Nerrity's house with his blue light flashing.'
'He's not that crazy.'
'He's smug. Self satisfied. Just as dangerous.
He put his head on one side, considering. 'Anything else?'
'I'll go back to the hotel, pay the bill, collect the cases.'
'Right. Give me a buzz when you're on station.' He stepped into the boat and untied its painter. 'And, by the way, do you have a dark sweater? Black, high neck?'
'Yes, I brought one.'
'Good. See you tonight.'
I watched him paddle away, a shortish figure of great physical economy, every movement deft and sure. He waved goodbye briefly, and I turned the car and got on with the day.
