'Why pull me out of the Sierra Leone jungle when you could have had Hereford chopper a bloke down this morning? Why waste the best part of a day?'
The deputy director gave the faintest of smiles.
'Because I wanted you, Captain Temple, not just some 'bloke'. I've been led to understand that you're the best.'
Alex looked away.
'Who told you that?' he asked sardonically.
'Commissioned from the ranks at thirty-four after a decade's exemplary service. RW~[ team leader while still a captain .
The facts speak for themselves.'
Alex shrugged. He guessed that, one way or another, he'd managed to keep his nose clean over the years. And managed it without brown-nosing the brass, which he privately considered to be his real achievement.
'Let me get this right,' he said.
'You're in the process of trying to locate the man who murdered Feun and Gidley. Assuming that you do locate him, you want me to move in and eliminate him.
'That's about the shape and size of it.'
Alex nodded.
'If I'm going to do that, I'm going to need to know everything you've got on him.'
'That's not a problem.
'And I'm going to need to ask you some pretty sensitive questions.'
'And I'll do my best to answer them, Captain Temple.
There'll be no secrets between us. We want this man taken off the streets, and fast. For reasons I'm sure I don't have to go into, I want the whole thing tied up before the police get wind of it.
Or, God help us, the press. That means days, Captain Temple.
Not weeks. All of this is urgent.'
Nodding his assent, Alex looked out across the evening stillness of the garden. Midges whirled in the scented air. Was it his imagination or had she emphasised the word 'captain', as if to suggest that promotion would accompany success. Or that demotion would follow refusal, perhaps .. . Not that he had a hope in hell of getting out of this.
'OK.' He nodded.
The deputy director swept her papers together.
'Good,' she said briskly.
'I'll see you in my office at 9 p.m.
tomorrow. By then we'll have photographs and the bulk of the forensic information, and I can give you some of the background to all of this. Meanwhile you'll be liaising with Dawn, who'll take you back to London. Anything you need, just ask her.' With that she got up, briefly extended her hand to Alex he pressed it, perhaps more gingerly than was strictly polite and swept into the house.
'I'll wrap up here, Dawn,' said George Widdowes.
'Why don't you and the captain make a move? Unless of course' he turned to Alex 'there's anything else you need to see?'
'I don't think so,' said Alex and turned his attention for the first time to the woman who had been sitting in silence at the far end of the table.
SEVEN.
Alex's first impression was of toughness: tough grey eyes, tough posture and tough attitude. She had nondescript blonde hair, hadn't bothered with make-up and was wearing a black short-sleeved sweater, black trousers and flat-heeled elastic-sided boots.
The impression didn't last. The clothes, if plain, were clearly expensive and accentuated rather than concealed the smooth curves beneath. If she was wearing no make-up it was because she knew she looked fine without it. And she certainly wasn't tough in the way that the 14th Int women he'd known in Belfast had been tough. Women like Carol Denny or Denise Foley who would match the Regiment guys drink for drink after a good terrorist kill and would have been perfectly happy lying up in a freezing hide with a Heckler and Koch snipers' rifle and doing the job themselves. Denise, he remembered, used to bake a cross-shaped cake every time the Det or the Regiment took a player out.
Nor was Dawn Harding much like the Box girls he'd met over the water. For the most part they had been bright, ordinary-looking types, much more deskbound and secretarial than their Det colleagues. Most of them, according to Don Hammond who'd always had a bit of a way with words were 'gagging for a bit of Regimental pipe'.
But not this one. This one was decidedly unimpressed and it wasn't just because he happened to be dressed like a West African pimp. It was because she wanted to impress on him from the start that there was a distinct difference in status between some Johnny-come-lately ex-squaddie and a fast-track MI-5 desk officer to be. When she turned to him it was with the polite but very slightly patronising look that all executive-stream Box personnel seemed to acquire sooner or later.
'So,' she said.
'Back to London. Have you got anywhere to stay?'
It was a good question. Since clearing Customs at Heathrow, Alex had not had a moment to himself and he certainly wasn't about to ring Sophie with all these wan ky spooks hanging around. He didn't even want to call her from his mobile until he was well clear of them mobile phones were a pushover in surveillance terms and although it was unlikely that a scanner was being operated from the cars at the front of the house, he didn't want to take the chance.
There was one call he could and would make, though. Tersely excusing himself and deliberately marching a good twenty yards away from Harding, he put a call through to Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Leonard, the CO of 22 SAS. This, Alex knew, was in direct contravention of Widdowes' request, but bollocks to that.
Howard was still at his desk at the Regimental base at Credenhill, near Hereford.
'Well done last night,' he said quietly.
'Overall, a bloody good show. You're in Berkshire I gather, with friends.'
On insecure lines the Regiment used the minimum of military jargon. There would be no 'sirs' or 'bosses' or departments named.
'That's right. They have some... cleaning they want me to do.'
There was a brief silence. Finally Howard spoke.
'I
want you to lend them a hand on this one, Alex.
Accepting an upgrade like you did last year means eating a shit sandwich from time to time and this is one of those times.'
'Yeah, but ..
'No buts, Alex. This problem of theirs has got to be dealt with and I can't think of a better man than you to do it. I'm sorry, Alex, but that's a must. What I can promise is choice of posting when you're done.
You've got my word on that.'
Alex said nothing. By the time he was done, he reflected if he was ever done things would have changed. The 'choice' would dissolve, as it always did.
'How's Karen?' he asked. Karen was Don Hammond's widow.
'Bearing up, as is Sue. They've both got people round with them. I'll have someone call you about the funerals.'
Sue, Alex guessed, must have been the wife of the dead Special Forces pilot.
'Help our friends out, Alex. There's no room for manoeuvre on this one.'
The phone went dead.
Dawn Harding drove a two-year-old Honda Accord and drove it with an almost aggressive respect for the speed limit. When she was cut up at traffic lights outside Reading she merely slowed to let the other driver get away, while on the M4, where the prevailing speed was around 80, she seemed happy to roll along in the high 60s.
