Security Service interested in Edith's boy? You're not going to tell me, are you?… He's a nice-looking lad well, he was a nice looking lad in the last photograph, but that was taken a long time ago. He'd be thirty-seven now. Would you like to see the photographs?'
The bundle was passed to Cathy Parker. She flipped through them, feigning indifference. They were what a daughter would have sent to her mother. It was the usual progression: a baby, a toddler, a child in school clothes, at a picnic and kicking a football, a teenager. Only the last two pictures interested her: a young man holding a Kalashnikov rifle and posing with others in ill-fitting fatigues at a roadblock, and the mature man he'd become sitting hunched and dead-eyed in the front of a small boat with water and reed-banks behind. She didn't ask, just put the last two photographs into her handbag.
'A good-looking boy, yes?'
Cathy made her excuses. She had seen the dead, aged and cold eyes of young men in Ireland, and seen the misery they could inflict. She thanked Vahid Hossein's aunt for the photographs that might help to kill him.
Andy Chalmers was driven to Fort William in Mr. Gabriel Fenton's Range Rover.
He sat, truculent and quiet, in the front seat, with the dogs behind him. The light was going down to the west of the big mountains and the sea loch as they approached the station.
'Don't take any shit from them, Andy. I've said it before and I'll say it again do it your way and the way you know. They'll be superior and they'll treat you like dirt, but don't take it. You're there at Mr. Harry's invitation, there because you're bloody good. You may be a kid but you're the best stalker and tracker between here and Lochinver, the best I've ever seen and my brother knows that. Don't let me down. There'll be plenty there who'll want you to fall on your face in the mud, and fail, and you're going to disappoint them. I thought I was useful, in the Radfan up from Aden, but I hadn't a half of the skill you're blessed with. Mr. Harry's out on a limb for you, that's his degree of trust. Take care, Andy. Find this bastard and if you bring me back his ears then I'll have them mounted and hung in the hallway that's a joke, you understand, a joke…'
He trailed, from the Range Rover, behind his estate owner into the station and he jerked his dogs to heel. It would be the first time in Andy Chalmers's life that he had left the mountains that were his home. Mr. Gabriel Fenton collected the first-class ticket, return, and the sleeper reservation, pointed through the doorway to the waiting train, cuffed him cheerfully on the arm and left him. Chalmers walked towards the platform and heaved the dogs after him, ignoring the scowl of the attendant and the amusement of other passengers, before picking up his dogs and climbing on board.
'Please, Mr. Fenton, you have to listen to me. I've just come from that house. Believe me, it's horrendous in there. We've created a monster, and I'm not overstating the case here…'
There was a secure line in the newly created crisis centre at the police station in the town of Halesworth, twelve miles inland from the village. Down the line Fenton told Geoff Markham he was suffering an attack of melodrama, should pull himself together.
'You're not here. If you were here then you'd understand. Let me tell you, it's dark, there's hardly a light on, they're bouncing round off their furniture. She's the problem. Sometimes it's hysterical weeping, sometimes it's just sitting, withdrawn. She's traumatized. He'll follow her, he thinks he's going to lose her he's got the guilt bad, keeps saying it's all his fault. It'll be worse in the morning because the kid doesn't have a school to go to. They're near to quitting. We're crucifying this family, and he's close to demanding a safe-house, a new identity.'
Fenton told Geoff Markham that his job, down there, was to keep Frank Perry in place.
'That may seem reasonable enough in London, Mr. Fenton, but viewed from where I've been today it seems poorly informed rubbish. I am trying to stay calm, of course I am. What do you suggest I do? Do I tell him what use was made, in Iran, of the information he provided, how much blood there is on his hands? Do I tell him about a tethered goat? That'll really get to him, Mr. Fenton, too right… I'm not losing it, Mr. Fenton, I merely try to explain the situation confronting me.'
Fenton told Markham that policy dictated Frank Perry should stay there.
'What do I do? Lock him in the bloody broom cupboard?'
Fenton told him to get Perry's friends in and get the bottles out.
'If you only listened to me, Mr. Fenton. The friends have all quit the ship, they're jumping off the decks. All right, most of their friends. I'm planning to meet the vicar in the morning, seemed a decent man. I thought if the village saw the vicar with him that might spark some conscience…'
Fenton told him to take the Perrys out for the evening, splash out on a smart meal, no expense spared, to sweet-talk them and relax them.
'I'll do that, Mr. Fenton, I'll book a table for tonight for them and a busload of police should be a really jolly evening. I'm sorry to have troubled you at home… Maybe we can find a restaurant that serves boiled goat.'
Donna should have stayed the extra year at school. At eighteen she was already as much on the shelf as the tins of beans, sweet corn and quick-cook curries that she stacked at the supermarket in the town. She was trapped and she knew it. She wrote in a child's laborious hand for jobs in hair salons and with beauticians, but most of her letters were ignored and a few were rejected in three lines. She was unskilled and unqualified. In the village, only Meryl Perry had time for her and gave her the old magazines with which she could dream of smart salons and bright beauty shops where rich women would come to her for advice, gossip about their private lives and offer her respect. Only the Perrys cared enough to fuel the dream, and she broke the boredom of home, and her parents, for ever sitting in front of the blaring television, with little pockets of relief when she stayed with Stephen while Frank and Meryl were out for an evening. They picked her up, they dropped her back, they gave her a small sense of importance.
He came in through the door, murmured his request to Davies, took a big breath and strode into the kitchen.
Markham said brightly, 'I think we need an evening out, Frank. It's time for a splash on my masters' expenses, to cheer ourselves up.'
Sausages were frying on the stove. The packet of instant mashed potato was ready at the side. Perry looked at him, astonished.
'We're going out, enough of being shut up in here. We're going out to drink a restaurant dry, to murder their menu. No argument, no hesitation, and I'm picking up the tab.'
Perry asked, hesitant, 'Where are we going at this time on a Sunday night, who'll have us?'
'We leave that to Bill. He's the expert, spends half his time getting his principals into restaurants that say they're full.' He tried to laugh.
Meryl asked, flat-voiced, 'Who's going to look after Stephen?'
He turned and saw her blank, reddened eyes.
'I'm sure you've a regular babysitter. Let's get a call to her, we'll collect. Don't you worry about the detail, Mrs. Perry, just get yourself ready and let us take the strain.'
Perry said, 'I'm not sure-' 'Yes, you are, Mr. Perry. It's what's going to happen.'
Meryl said, 'I don't know that I want to go out.'
'Yes, you do, Mrs. Perry. It's what's best.'
He manipulated them, they danced for him. He had boasted to the man and woman at the bank that he was prepared to use people in the interests of policy and here he was, doing it. Meryl Perry was lifting the frying pan off the cooker and muttering that the sausages would do for tomorrow, and that she'd already fed Stephen. Perry was at the telephone and scanning the list above it for Donna's number.
Bill Davies leaned through the doorway and said the local police had given him the name of a place but it was twenty-two miles away and they'd have to shift themselves. He'd called the restaurant and he'd organized people to check it out. Markham thought she looked so cudgelled, so damned helpless. He asked her gently if she wanted to change, and wished that Harry bloody Fenton were here to see her. Meryl went out and he heard her deadened step up the stairs.
'Do you have a girl, Frank, to come in?'
'Thick as two planks, but decent and loyal Meryl's been great to her and she's fond of Stephen.' Perry lifted the phone and dialled.
Two cars were pulling up outside Blake coming to take over inside the house and the change of shift for the hut. Markham drew a sigh of relief: at least he had achieved something. His mind flipped back to London: the letter would be at his flat in the morning, with the terms of employment. He would ring Vicky later if they survived the meal and ask her to go round and collect it, to read it to him. Once he'd resigned they would boot him out of
