on the sea's horizon line. He looked at the house and the drawn curtains on the bedroom window, and he wondered how they would be… He was walking to the front door when the neighbour spilled out from the next-door house.
'A word, I want a word with you.'
Wroughton, the neighbour, was in a dressing-gown and slippers. His hair wasn't combed and he hadn't yet shaved. Davies saw the wife behind him, half hiding in the hall's shadows.
'How can I be of help?'
'What happened here last night?'
'I'm not aware that anything happened.'
'There was a car… 'Was there really?'
'And shouting.'
'Must have been a television turned up too loud.'
'Are you telling me that nothing happened here last night?'
'If there's anything you need to be told, Mr. Wroughton, you'll be told it.'
He stared into the neighbour's eyes, challenged him, then watched him back off and go back inside. Bill Davies could be a quality liar and a good-grade bully. He saw the woman's face at the window beside the door, smiled cheerfully at her and waved. A man with a high-velocity assault rifle had been, in the darkness, a few feet from where that woman, her husband and children had lain in their beds and listened to tyre screams and panicked shouts. There were enough complications in Bill Davies's work day without added responsibility for the neighbours. He felt the burden of it, and stamped up the path to ring the bell. The previous week, he would have sworn it couldn't happen, that he would be emotionally involved with his principal's family.
Blake told him that a dog team had arrived three hours earlier, found a trail through the gardens down the green, across rough ground and had lost the trail in the river. Apparently there was no blood on the trail. The dogs had worked the riverbank, Blake said, but had failed to regain the scent. A van had come an hour before and collected the assault rifle.
How were they, in the house? Blake shrugged, they were predictable.
What was predictable? They were on the floor.
Would they get off the floor? And again Blake shrugged, as if it wasn't his concern, but the woman had cried in the night and twice the man had come down the stairs and poured whisky, swigged it and gone back up. They'd had the kid in the bed with them.
Was Blake, ten hours later, sure he'd hit the man? Blake was sure and, to emphasize his certainty, led him to the car and showed him the sharp dent in the paintwork over the near side wheel.
A small car, a city runabout type, came towards them. Instinctively, his hand slipped inside his outer coat and rested on the Glock.
He saw a young man at the wheel, his eyes raking the ground ahead as he approached. Bill Davies thought he was looking for the evidence of what had happened in the night but there was nothing for him to see. It was like the aftermath of a road accident when the fire brigade had hosed down the tarmac, the traffic police had swept up the glass and the recovery truck had towed away the wrecked vehicles.
The car stopped. The window was lowered. The young man, stubble on his face, tie loosened, held up an ID card. Davies thought he had been up all night.
'I'm Markham, Geoff Markham, I'm the liaison from Thames House. Are you Bill Davies?'
He nodded, didn't bother to reply.
'Pleased to meet you. They're singing your praises at our place, up to the rafters. I mean, it was a quality defence of a target. We'd have expected unadulterated chaos, but what you did was brilliant. There's a big meeting this morning, up at secretary-of-state level, that's why I'm here, for liaison. There has to be an evaluation of how the target will take the pressure waste of time, really, because your report indicates exceptional calm. We'd have reckoned they'd be screaming and bawling and packing their bags. What was it like?'
Davies tried a thin smile.
'Well, it's what you're trained for, yes? We understand the dogs lost him on the way to the marshes going south… I'll talk to your principal later, when I've had a walk about the place and found somewhere to bed down. Hope I won't be in your way. There's talk of putting the Army in to flush him out, but that's for the meeting to decide…'
'I won't have it, I can't accept it.' The secretary of state flexed his fingers nervously, ground the palms of his hands together.
'We should be there, we've the expertise.' The colonel had driven from Hereford through the dawn hours.
'Out of the question, there has to be a different way.'
'Special Forces are the answer, not policemen.'
Fenton was there with Cox, at the side of the secretary of state but a step back from him. It amused Fenton to see the politician writhe in the confrontation with the stocky, barrel-bodied soldier. He understood. The Regiment's commitment to Northern Ireland was reduced: the colonel was touting for work for his people, and for justification of their budget.
'With the military and their back-up, all their paraphernalia, equipment, we escalate way beyond any acceptable level to government.'
'Policemen cannot do it, Counter-revolutionary Warfare wing should be deployed,' the colonel demanded.
'The military going through those marshes, like it's a pheasant-beat, a fox-hunt, ending in gunfire and a corpse. That's an admission of our failure.'
'Then you take the risk on your shoulders for the life of this man, and for the lives of his family we can do it.'
The colonel wore freshly laundered camouflage fatigues and his boots glowed. Fenton and Cox were, of course, in suits. The politician was of the new breed, dressed down for a Sunday morning in corduroys and a baggy sweater. At Thames House, they harboured no love for the Special Air Service Regiment. The gunning-down by plain-clothes soldiers of three unarmed Provisional IRA terrorists in daylight, in a crowded street in Gibraltar had been, in the opinion of the Security Service hierarchy, simply vulgar. Each time, the moment before he launched himself in speech, the secretary of state glanced at Fenton and Cox as if they might offer him salvation, and each time both men gazed away.
'It would smack of persecution. We have close to two million Muslims in the country, the effect of a military gun-club drive could be catastrophic for race relations in the United Kingdom.'
'Do you want the job done or don't you?'
'Those relations are fragile enough. Even now we're walking a tightrope between the cultures. Deployment of the Army against what is probably a single individual, and his inevitable death, would create dangerous tensions, quite apart from the effect on international dialogue… The colonel thwacked his fist into the palm of his hand.
'The idea of sending policemen into those marshes, that sort of terrain, against a dangerous fanatic, is preposterous.'
'Another way, there has to be.'
'No. My men have to go in for him.'
The politician rocked and reached out to his table to steady himself. Perhaps, Fenton thought, he saw an image of camouflaged soldiers dragging a body from the water of those hideous marshes that bordered the road going away from the godawful place.
Perhaps he saw an image of young Muslims barricading streets in old mill towns of central and northern England. Perhaps he saw an image of a British diplomat being pulled from his car by the mob in Tehran or Karachi, Khartoum or Amman. Every politician, every minister of government he had ever known, was traumatized when the men came from the dark crevices at the edge of his fiefdom, did not confide, demanded free-range action, and dumped on the desk a sack-load of responsibility. The colonel had his finger up, wagged it at the secretary of state as if he prepared to go in for the kill…. there is no other way.
It was Fenton's moment. He enjoyed, always, a trifle of mischief. He looked at Cox, and Cox nodded encouragement.
Fenton smiled warmly.
