father.
There had been FCO people outside, but Holt understood. The Director General of the Secret Intelligence Service could not stand in front of the cameramen, nor could his people sign their names on the wreaths. He wondered what had become of Jane's camera, what had happened to her photographs from the plane. He felt a surge of anger, as if these nameless men and the Director General of the Service were responsible for her death.
It was a short service. He sat alone behind her parents.
He couldn't find his voice when they sang the 23rd psalm. He watched the coffin roll away from him, he watched the curtains close. He was crying in his heart.
He remembered her voice, her grey eyes, her soft hair, and her lifeless hand. He remembered the man with the rifle. He saw her parents walk back up the chapel aisle and they didn't turn to him. He sat in his seat and stared at the closed curtain.
'You're young Holt, yes?'
He turned. The chapel had emptied fast. The man was thickset with a fine head of grey hair and the brush of a military moustache was squashed between nose and mouth.
'I am.'
'We have to be moving. They'll be queuing up outside for the next one, damn conveyor-belt operation.
Do you have wheels?'
He had steeled himself to spend the day with Jane's mother and father. He had made no arrangements to get himself away, and now it had been made plain to him that he was not expected back to the semi-detached home in Motspur Park.
'I don't.'
'Have you the afternoon to spare?'
His studio flat in London was rented out. The tenant had signed for a year. Ahead of him was only a train journey back to Devon, plenty of trains, they ran all afternoon and evening. His father would come down to Exeter to collect him. An usher appeared beside the man, trying to hurry them.
'For what?'
'My name's Martins, Percy Martins, I'm from the Service. Your initial debrief by the FCO people landed on my desk.'
He looked up at Percy Martins. He saw clear pale blue eyes that never wavered from his glance. 'What is there to talk about?'
'What you saw, what happened.'
Holt felt the control going, voice rising. 'I thought everyone knew what bloody happened. I thought they all swallowed the Soviet crap.'
'Not swallowed by everyone – come on.'
Holt followed obediently. He noticed that Martins walked out of the chapel well ahead of him, so that he would not be included when Holt was again the cameramen's target. Holt reached a small estate car.
Martins was already behind the wheel, engine started, pushing the door open for Holt.
'My son is at university in York. He's playing a match in London today, that's where we're going. My wife'll kill me if I get home tonight and haven't seen him. We can talk when we're there.'
He drove fast and in total silence, occasionally peering down at the dashboard clock. On the M25 nothing passed them. Holt thought it must be a hell of an important game, a league decider or a cup final. He felt no urge to speak, was relieved to be left to his own company.
He had had enough talking. Two whole days in London going through the programme that he had confirmed for the ambassador, and working over and over his description of the shooting, and each time he had questioned what appeared to be the general acceptance of the Soviet version of the killings he had just been shushed and assured that all was being put into place.
They came to the playing fields. During the drive it had stopped raining, but now it had started again. Percy Martins flung himself out of the car and scampered round to the boot to fetch a pair of Wellingtons.
Holt saw that the back of the car was filled with fishing gear. An outsize rod bag, a cavernous landing net, a solid tackle box. He had to run to catch the man.
It was the farthest soccer pitch.
'Who's playing?' Holt said, when they reached the muddied touchline.
'York chemists against a gang of lawyers from University College, London.'
'Is your boy good?'
'Bloody awful.'
'Which one is he?'
'The one who can't kick with his left foot and hardly with his right.'
'So what the hell are we doing here?'
They were the only spectators. There was no protection from the weather. Holt thought it was the worst game of football he had ever watched.
'As I told you, the report on your debrief landed on my desk.'
Holt turned into the rain. He had to shout over the wind. 'Why are you buying all this bullshit about a criminal robbery?'
'It suits us.'
'Who can it suit?'
'Everybody – nearly everybody, anyway.'
'Who is everybody?'
'Good question. Look at it, young Holt. There is a shooting in the Soviet Union, a highly embarrassing shooting, and they haven't a clue who is responsible.
Best way to calm the matter down is to come up with a plausible story that cannot be disproved, that has the culprit removed and that does not show the Ivans in a particularly poor light. Just a bit of bad luck, wasn't it?
Wrong place at the wrong time. They might just as easily have been walking along the. pavement and a car had blown a tyre and swerved into them. Professionally speaking one has to see it as a successful exercise in damage limitation…'
'And everyone's so supine that they accept this con-venient lie.'
'I'm not everybody.'
'Why aren't we saying out loud that this killing was the work of an Arab – that our ambassador and Miss Canning were set up by the Soviets to be murdered?'
'I think you've jumped too far. I believe you are right in thinking the killer was Arab, but not that the Soviets set it up. Highly embarrassing, as I said. In my opinion, this was an act of terrorism in Soviet territory. They can't admit that, can they? Oh Christ Almighty…'
One of the players had tried to kick the ball that wallowed in ankle deep mud, missed and fell on his back, and left the ball to be slotted into the net.
'That's my son and heir. God, he's pathetic, his mother's boy.. . FCO wouldn't see they've much choice but to go along with Ivan's version.'
'So I've been brought to this absurd game to be given a lecture in Anglo-Soviet relations.'
'You're being asked to help. Jane Canning was a member of the Service, and we will not take her death lying down.'
Holt saw that the player who had given away the goal had been dismissed to the wing. The young man was pencil thin and pale. He was beginning to feel sympathy for the kid, particularly if his father was a pompous ass called Percy Martins.
'What does that mean in practice – not taking it lying down?'
'What it says. Holt, you were in the Crimea, in the centre of the Crimea is Simferopol. In Simferopol is a military academy which takes groups of foreign cadets for periods of up to… '
'Where is this getting us?'
'Listen, will you?… Among the foreign cadets are always Syrian-sponsored Palestinians. The shooting was at lunch time; that same Saturday evening a Syrian Air Force transporter put down at Simferopol and then flew on to Damascus… '
