I'm Five's liaison officer with the Regiment.'
It came back to him now. He'd been introduced to a bunch of Security Services suits when he'd first taken over the RWW team. This Farmilow character had been one of them.
'I remember, Gerald,' he said.
'I'm sorry it's been a bit of a long night.'
'Congratulations, by the way,' said Farmilow.
'An excellent result.'
Alex nodded. He felt dry-throated and in need of a shower. And some halfway sensible clothes.
Farmilow glanced at his watch, a wafer-thin sliver of gold and enamel, and nodded towards the red-faced man in the Barbour.
'Alex, George will tell you what this is all about.'
He held out his hand.
'I've got to push off back to Millbank.'
A brief handshake and he was gone. Identification effected. Mission completed.
'I'm George Widdowes,' said the man in the Barbour, opening one of the Mondeo's rear doors, 'and this is Tom Ritchie.'
The driver mutely raised his hand.
'I'd also like to add my congratulations to Gerald's,' Widdowes continued.
'I understand you had a major success last night.'
Alex looked at him noncommittally and climbed into the car. He wasn't about to discuss Regiment business with these people.
Widdowes nodded approvingly.
'Lips sealed. Quite right. Look, Captain Temple, we've got a good hour's drive ahead of us we're going out to Goring, in Berkshire so I'll put you in the picture as we go. Do you smoke?'
Alex shook his head.
The younger man drove, Widdowes sat in the back with Alex. Alex's overnight bag joined a laptop computer that was lying on the front seat. No one spoke until they were crawling along the exit road towards the M4 with the rest of the evening rush-hour traffic, but finally Widdowes half turned in his seat.
'I'm sure I don't need to say this, but it's essential that you don't repeat a word of what I'm about to tell you to anyone. Colleagues, senior officers, other security services people ..
Alex didn't bother to reply. Leaning against the back seat of the Mondeo with his eyes half closed, he felt a little of the tension leaving his shoulders.
'Good. Right, then. Had to say that. You know how it is.'
Alex nodded.
'Right .. . Well, here goes. A fortnight ago there was a murder committed in Chertsey, just inside the M25 in Surrey. Know it?'
'Isn't there an MOD arms sales place there?'
'That's right. Which is why the victim one of our fairly senior people, a man named Barry Fenn happened to be staying in the area.'
Alex nodded. He was suddenly and acutely aware of his appearance in his flowered shirt and flip-flops he looked and felt ridiculous. Typical of Box to get you at a disadvantage.
'Go on,' he said levelly.
'You weren't here, obviously, but even if you had been you wouldn't have heard or seen anything about it. We found him, we cleaned him up, we disappeared the body. Officially Barry Fenn died of heart failure in an ambulance en route to St. Peter's Hospital, Chertsey. In fact, he was killed in the early hours of the morning in a third-floor bedroom at the White Rose Lodge by a person or persons unknown. The killer I'm assuming it's one person disabled the exterior floodlight warning system, scaled the back of the building, climbed in through a window, eliminated our man, returned the way he came and vanished.'
'How did he kill him?' asked Alex.
'Horribly,' said Widdowes, closing his eyes.
'Barry Fenn was a good friend of mine. Had been for twenty years odd.'
Alex waited. Widdowes steepled his fingers again.
'The killer tied his wrists and drove a six-inch nail through the side of his head. When he'd done that he cut his tongue out.
Alex said nothing. Widdowes' words had fired off a number of warning flares in his mind, but he showed no outward sign of this. The SAS were deeply wary of the other security services, whose human resource management they considered fatally flawed. David Shayler had gone a long way towards making monkeys of Five by public ising their involvement in the Muammar Gaddafi assassination plot and Richard Tomlinson had performed much the same service for Six when he outlined plans to whack Slobodan Milosevic with the help of the RWW. In general it was not a good time to be sharing a sleeping bag with Military Intelligence.
'I'm sorry,' Alex said neutrally.
'I'm sure he was a good man.
'He was,' said Widdowes.
Alex glanced at his plastic flip-flops and sunburnt toes, and thought of Africa and Don Hammond and the screams of the wounded RUF men. Although the leech marks were still fresh on his arms and legs and groin, the bloody events of the night before already seemed a world away.
'Let's cut to the chase, Widdowes,' he said.
'What do you want from me?'
The MI-5 man turned to him.
'We're going to the site of a second murder. Another of our desk officers, a man named Craig Gidley. Exactly the same modus operandi, except that this time the killer gouged his eyes out.'
A moment's silence.
'Go on?' said Alex.
'And we've got reason to think the killer's one of our guys. Or to be precise, one of your guys. An SAStrained undercover agent.'
Alex stared out of the window. They passed a flooded gravel pit, a coppice, fields.
'We need this man found, Captain Temple, and soon.'
The dead man's house stood a short distance outside the Thames-side town of Goring. A high flint wall surrounded the property; inside, a converted Georgian farmhouse was fronted by a neat lawn, yews and a lime tree. On the gravel led drive in front of the main entrance several cars were drawn up.
Ritchie found a space for the Mondeo, opened Widdowes' door for him and returned to the driver's seat, patting his pockets for cigarettes. Widdowes led Alex round to the back of the house, where two men and two women were sitting at an ironwork garden table. They looked as if they had been there for some time.
Widdowes led Alex round the table, first to the older and obviously senior of the two women, whom he introduced as 'our deputy director', then to the two men, who were respectively a service pathologist and a forensics officer. The final introduction was to an anonymous-looking younger woman whose name was Dawn Harding.
With these formalities complete the pathologist and the forensics man excused themselves and returned to the house. In response to a gesture by the deputy director, Alex and Widdowes took their vacated chairs.
'Thank you for coming at such short notice, Captain Temple,' said the deputy director. She was an austerely handsome woman in her fifties, grey-haired.
Alex nodded cautiously.
'I believe George has brought you up to date with events?'
'In general terms, yes.
'And with what we want you to do.'
'He's given me a fair idea.'
'And?'
'And my answer to him was the same as my answer is to you:
that I'm a soldier, not a policeman. I can track a man through the jungle or over mountains, but not through
