'OK,' she said.
'I'll tell you. We're setting up a lookalike at his house. A Special Branch guy. We've got the place ringed with police marksmen. George himself has been pulled out of circulation.'
'You think that'll work?'
'Look, I admit we were a little bit slow off the blocks with Gidley, but we're very much on-message now.
'On-message,' said Alex.
'Right.'
'This Watchman,' Dawn went on patiently.
'He's one man, he's on his own, he's got no support system to speak of It's not constructive to be too afraid of him.'
'He's a murderer,' said Alex.
'He's Regiment-trained. And he's spent several years in the field with the most sophisticated terror organisation in the world.'
'You sound as if you admire them.'
'Professionally speaking I do admire them. If I'd been born a working-class Catholic over the water I'd probably be a volunteer myself and most Regiment blokes will tell you the same thing. It doesn't mean you aren't prepared to do your job and waste as many of the fuckers as you can, but ultimately when you put a bullet through one of those boys and you look into his dying eyes you can see yourself as you might have been, and that's the truth.'
From the long habit of counter-surveillance, Alex glanced up at the rear-view mirror. The small movement and the dizzying motion of the reflected cars reminded him how much vodka was still in his bloodstream and he pressed the button to lower the passenger window. Fresh air rushed in. The sun had not yet burnt off the dew in the fields.
'The PIRA are good,' he continued, 'and the thing they're better than anyone else at is security. They won't hesitate to cancel a hundred-man operation if one dicker's instinct tells him or her there's something not quite right that one too many cars has passed or that a man's coat's hanging wrong or there are no birds in a hedge where there should be birds. Our man Meehan will have absorbed all that. He'll wait as long as it takes. That's why I respect him. And that's why you people should respect him too.'
'Respect him, yes,' Dawn agreed, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.
'Fear him, no.'
'Given a choice between fear and arrogance,' said Alex mildly, 'I'll take fear every time. Nothing gets you killed faster than arrogance.
'We'll see, shall we?'
'I'm afraid we will, yes.
They settled into a sour, antagonistic silence.
When they got to Goring, Alex asked Dawn to park several hundred yards from the house.
'I want to approach the place as the Watchman would have done,' he explained.
'See it as he would have seen it the first time he came down here.'
'No one noticed any strangers in the village,' said Dawn.
'We've asked a few questions about that.'
'He wouldn't have been noticeable,' Alex told her.
'My guess is that he would have come on foot first time round, probably in hiking gear and on a wet Saturday.
Or by bicycle, perhaps. Anorak hoods, clear glasses, cycle helmets they're all good disguises. Those just- passing-through, rambler-type people are invisible in a semi-touristy place like this. You see them at the side of the road eating a sandwich and swigging a soft drink, but you don't really see them. You couldn't describe them two minutes later.'
She nodded. They continued in silence along the roadside.
Dawn frowned.
'But what would he...'
'Shush a minute,' said Alex, cutting her off. The Gidleys' house was just coming into view and he wanted to see it had to see it through the Watchman's eyes. At his side, as he marshalled all his senses and instincts to this end, he was vaguely aware of Dawn bristling with irritation.
Women, he thought.
Meehan would want an OP a place he could observe from without being seen.
Somewhere away from the road and out of range of the dogs, but close enough to check out the arrangements. He'd have planned for at least a week's surveillance.
He wouldn't have compromised with just a day or two. He would have gone up with food and water and a bag to crap into, and noted everything. Where would he have watched from? A building? Were there any other buildings in sight? No. No farm sheds, garages, outhouses, nothing. Their absence would have been one of the factors that attracted Gidley to the house in the first place. So was there anywhere at ground level he could lie up? Didn't look like it, because wherever he lay the wall surrounding the property would block his vision. He wouldn't be able to get enough height on the place. The contours were against him.
Man-made OPs? There were telegraph poles running along the road and connecting to the property, and it was theoretically possible that he'd nicked aBT van and overalls to fit the deactivator. But he wouldn't have been able to stay up there for long enough to establish anything worthwhile within moments of his appearing the Box security people would have been on to BT to check him out.
Trees, then. Alex had reckoned from the start that Meehan had gone for a tree, but he'd wanted formally to eliminate all other possibilities. There were a horse chestnut and a sycamore overhanging the road on either side of the Gidleys' perimeter wall, but he dismissed these. Tempting, but just too close to the house and the orbit of the dogs. Besides, in consideration of the security hazard they posed, all the trees near the property wall had had their lower limbs sawed off.
Climbing them would have necessitated scaling equipment and any climber would have had to take the risk of being seen either from the house or the road.
On the opposite side of the road was a field of young corn bisected by a public footpath. Mature trees stood at the side of this path at irregular intervals. Alex scanned them from the road. The ideal observation point was a large beech, from whose boughs a clear hundred-and-fifty-yard sight line on the house and grounds was available. Without a word, with Dawn sighing behind, he marched down the road, swung his leg over the stile into the field and moved at pace towards the tree.
His head was clear now, his brain singing with the pleasure of the pursuit.
'I'll have you, you bastard!' he murmured to himself.
'I'll fucking have you!'
They arrived at the foot of the beech and Alex climbed expectantly over the elephantine grey roots. Meehan, he was sure, would have climbed the trunk on the far side from the road, using ropes and scaling equipment. Carefully, he examined the trunk. Nothing. No sign, no scar. Shit! It had to be this tree. But the trunk showed no sign at all, not a single scratch, scar or abrasion that might have been made in the last month. After searching the fine grained silvery surface for more than twenty minutes he was forced to concede that if Meehan had used this tree he had not climbed it by the trunk. Nor were there any branches hanging anywhere near the ground.
Dawn remained expressionless, but Alex could tell that his frustration gave her quiet satisfaction. Finally, and meaningfully, she glanced at her watch.
'Come on,' he said, marching her further up the path.
The next tree that might have afforded a view over Gidley's property was a horse chestnut. Its large leaves and candle-like white blooms made it a lot harder to see out of but at the same time, Alex noted, a lot harder to see into.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe. Warily, he circled the trunk. Like the beech, it was fine-skinned and any scratch would have shown. But once again, there was nothing.
'Is it possible,' asked Dawn demurely, 'that you might just be barking up the wrong...'
'No!' he snapped.
'It bloody isn't. He was here somewhere.'
