find common ground had made them like a pair on an initial singles-club meeting. It had been a strange chemistry, stilted conversation, but each recognized the wounded solitariness of the other. Dinners had followed, and pecks on the cheek, and both of them had realized that they needed the other to put some foundation into their lives. They'd bought the house on the green together, furnished it and moved in. The first night there, with the wind on the windows, and Stephen in the next room, they'd slept together and loved each other.
It had been accepted by both from the start, that their previous lives harboured secrets. The ground rules were set: no inquisitions, no interrogations. She didn't ask where he'd come from, why he had no anniversaries, no relations sending him cards and letters. He didn't quiz her on Stephen's father. They buried their past under their new happiness and mutual dependence. He could justify to himself the cordoned-off areas of his life. He was a changed man. If anyone from the old Newbury office, a one-time colleague of Gavin Hughes, had met Frank Perry, they wouldn't have known him. But the past seemed now to rush around him, and he wondered whether an old lie was replaced by a new one.
At the last light of the day, going to get a story-book for Stephen from the living room, he paused and looked out of the window. The man in the suit, the stranger, with a raincoat loose on his lap, remained motionless on the bench on the green.
Chapter Five.
The door opened, and he held up his warrant card. In better times Lily had said it was a rotten photo that didn't do him justice; that morning, like as not, she would have said it flattered him. He was tall, had no surplus weight, with a pale face and cheeks drawn in under the bones. His nose and chin were over-prominent, his hair was dark, cut short, and his light blue eyes were dominant. He said briskly, 'Morning, Mr. Perry. I'm Detective Sergeant Bill Davies.'
He could hear a child's and a woman's voice in the depths of the house. He saw Perry's jaw fall and then tighten. There was never a right time to start the process of protection. He thought of himself as a shadow cast over the principal's life; he could have come in the late afternoon as the family was preparing for supper and television, or in the evening when they were readying for bed, or early in the morning when they were starting a day at the breakfast table, but there was never a best time to arrive on a stranger's doorstep.
'They called you last night, yes? Sorry it had to be the duty officer, but my guvnor tried to reach you in the afternoon and you weren't at home. Sorry it worked out like that.'
God help anyone called by the night duty officer the guvnor, the superintendent, would have been familiar with tact, might have thought through what was appropriate to say, and certainly would have had the file to dictate his tone. But not the NDO. It would have been blunt and to the point what the protection officer's name was, at what time he was arriving, and goodnight.
Perry swivelled, looked behind him, back towards the kitchen door and the voices.
Davies said, with confidence, 'Just getting the lad off to school? It's Stephen, Mrs. Perry's lad, right? If you don't want me around for the moment that's no problem, Mr. Perry. I can wait till he's on his way, and then we'll do the business. I've got my car here, I can sit there.'
It was all about getting off to the right start. It didn't work if the principal refused to co-operate with the protection officer. He needed, from the beginning, to set the tone of the relationship. No call for diving in, breaking the routine of the family, jarring them, then having to mend fences because there was a lingering bitterness. Most principals, in his experience, were frightened half to death when he first came to their homes. The women were worse, and the kids were the big problem, always the headache. Best to go gentle. If his guvnor had called there would have been a few crumbs of detail on why the threat had ratcheted up, but there'd have been none from the night duty officer. The principals were never given the full picture, not even senior persons in government, certainly not judges and civil servant administrators and this principal, Perry, was only a civilian with a past and he would get no detail. The threat was not a matter for debate and discussion.
He had worked late into the night in his room at the bed-and-breakfast, and early in the morning before his breakfast, on the file and the village. He'd had the electoral list, the large-scale map that showed every house, digests of police and local-authority files on residents, and had written names against houses. Only one property, currently for sale, was unoccupied. With that mass of information digested, he had made the plan of how they would work together, him and the principal.
'I'll be in my car, Mr. Perry.'
Perry said, in a low voice, 'My wife knows, the boy does not.'
'That's not a problem. We'll let him get off to school, then we'll talk.'
'He's being picked up, the school-run, in about five minutes.'
'You know where to find me, Mr. Perry.'
There was a shout from the kitchen, from the woman, about the door being open. Who was there? Perry turned and yelled back into the depth of the house that he wouldn't be a moment. There was defiance in his face; there usually was at the start from the principals.
'I'll see you in a few minutes, Bill…'
'Detective Sergeant or Mr. Davies, please, and you are Mr. Perry and your wife is Mrs. Perry it's the way we do it.' He said it brusquely, coldly. There wasn't call in the job for familiarity. What they said at the Yard, in the SB protection unit, get too close and the principal starts to run the show. That would not happen with Bill Davies's principal. He had a job to do, he was a paid hand, and it mattered not a damn whether he liked or disliked the man. He would tell him later about the workmen and the technicians, who would be crawling round the house by late morning, up the walls, through the rooms, in the garden. There was no soft way of making a start.
'The neighbours don't know.'
'No reason why they should we're used to discretion. The less they know the better.'
Perry frowned. He was a moment summoning up the question, then rushed it.
'Are you armed?'
'Of course.'
'Has the situation got worse?'
'The doorstep isn't the place to discuss it. When you're ready, come and get me out of the car.'
The door closed on him. Of course he was bloody armed. Perry would have said all the brave things when the Thames House people had come on their visit and been rejected. Now, he would be realizing where the brave things had led him.
Davies sat in his car. He had a good view of the house, and the green in front of it, the road and the homes on the far side of the house, the sea. The car was from the pool. It looked like any other Vauxhall sold for company fleet driving, but it had the big radio with a pre-set console linking Davies to the SB's operations centre, a fire extinguisher, and the box with the comprehensive first-aid equipment. In a metal container, reached by lifting the rear seat central arm rest, was a compact case holding a Heckler amp; Koch machine-gun, with ammunition and magazines, and a dozen CS gas grenades. In the boot was an image-intensifier sight for the
H amp;K, a monocular night-sight, a bullet-proof square of reinforced material, which they called the ballistic blanket, the gas masks and the television monitor with the cables and the headset.
Bill Davies waited. By his feet was the lunch-box given him by Mrs. Fairbrother at the bed-and-breakfast, and his Thermos, which she had filled with coffee black, no sugar. He had discarded the shoulder holster, left it locked in his bag in the room, gone for the waist-belt holster and put his loose change into his suit-jacket pocket; weight in the pocket so that the jacket moved decisively back if he had to draw his firearm fast. He saw the neighbour leave for work with his wife, bustling out of his weathered, brick-built house, before stopping and peering at him as he sat in the car. Finally, the child ran from the house and into a car.
From the doorway, Perry waved for him to come inside. Davies, of course, had a trained eye for descriptions: Perry was of average height, average build, with fair hair and a face with no particular distinguishing marks. He was ordinary and unremarkable, the sort of man who was easy to miss in a crowd.
He took his time, straightened his tie and checked in the mirror that his hair was in order, then eased out of his seat. He didn't hurry. He was not there to be at the beck and call of the principal. The Glock in the waist holster lapped against his hip as he walked towards the door. He would set the rules, start as he meant to go on. He went
