flat-roofed homes the climbing pall of smoke.
He went fast, and he was whistling at the wind on his face, and he was blessing the present that had been given him by Mr Matthew Furniss, who was his friend.
' So why hasn't it been given straight to us, why are the 'plods' involved?'
There was a sort of democracy inside the Investigation Division. A military type of rank structure had never been part of the Lane's style.
The Assistant Chief Investigating Officer showed his patience. He did not object to the directness of the challenge, that was the way of the ID. 'The police are involved, David, because at this stage of the investigation the death of Lucy Karnes is still a police matter.'
' They'll cock it up,' Park said. There was quiet laughter mi the room, even a wisp of a smile from Parrish who sat beside the ACiO. The whole of April team was in the room, and they didn't mind the interruptions from Keeper. When He wasn't hanging round the edges in the pub, when he was at work, Keeper could be good value, and he was good at his Job.
The ACIO rolled his eyes. 'Then we will have to sort out what you regard as an inevitable cock up, if and when we gain control of our friend.'
It was one of the working assumptions of the Investigation Division that its members were superior creatures to policemen. The senior officers did little to suppress the boast.
Morale was critical to the esprit de corps for the war against the fat cats and the traffickers and the money bags. Most men in the ID would have put their hands on their hearts and sworn that a policeman just wasn't good enough to be recruited into one of their teams. Unspoken, but at the depths of the resentment of policemen, was the pay differential. The guys on April and the other teams were civil servants, and paid at civil servant rates. True, there were allowances to boost their take-home, but they were poor relations. There were plenty of stories of the bungling of the plods. Customs had targeted the Czech-born importer and overseen his arrest following a ?9 million seizure, the plods had been guarding him when he had escaped out of a police cell. Customs sitting at Heathrow and waiting for a courier to come through with all the surveillance teams ready and poised to follow the trail to lead to the real nasties, except that the plods had flown over to Paris and picked up the creep there and blown all chances of the arrests that mattered. Near open warfare. The police had suggested they should form an elite squad to tackle drugs; Customs said the elite squad was already in place, the Investigation Division, a squad in which no man had a price, which is more than you could say of… and so on and so on.
'For us to gain control, what has to happen?'
They were on the upper floor of the building. No self-respecting policemen would have tolerated such premises.
There were cracks in the plaster of the walls, there were no decorations other than annual leave charts and duty rosters.
The lukewarm green carpet was scarred from where it had been heaved up for the new wiring, and from the latest shift round of the desk complexes. They were all on top of each other, the desks, and half large enough once the terminals and keyboards had been shoved on to them. It was home for the April team, and at the end tucked away behind a plywood and glass screen was Parrish's corner. The ACIO and Parrish sat on a table and shared it with a coffee percolator, and dangled their legs.
'Right, if the whining's over… Lucy Barnes was supplied by Darren Cole, same town, small time. Darren Cole names as his dealer a Mr Leroy Winston Manvers, about whom the courts have not yet been told, about whom CEDRIC is a mine of happy information… '
For effect, that wasn't needed, he held up the print-out from the Customs and Excise Reference and Information Computer. A good deep shaft of a mine with a quarter of a million names, and room for half a million more, CEDRIC was their pride. They didn't reckon the plods could hold a prayer to it, and bitched every time Central Drugs Intelligence Unit at the Yard wanted a peep at their material.
'… Leroy Winston Manvers, aged 37, Afro-Caribbean origin, no legit means of support, Notting Hill Gate address, a real bad bastard. I am not going to read the form to you, try and manage that for yourselves… What has been agreed by CDIU is that we shall mount a surveillance on the address we hold for Manvers, while our colleagues of the police will be investigating all background leads, associates, etc. It is, however, important, gentlemen, that one point remains high in your minds. We will be happy to put Manvers inside, happier still if we can get a conviction which permits seizure of assets, but the principal reason for our involvement at this early stage of an investigation is to move beyond Manvers, the dealer, and into the area of the distributor. The identity of the distributor is our headache. We want the body who is providing heroin to Leroy Winston Manvers. Do not doubt that this investigation has a high priority… Questions?'
'Why?' Park asked.
'Goddammit, Keeper, wash your head out.' Parrish snapped.
'Facts of life, young man,' the ACIO said sharply. 'And don't give me shit about it. The facts of life are that the only child of the Secretary of State for Defence dies from a heroin overdose. That Secretary of State has a good cry on the Home Secretary's shoulder. That Home Secretary pulls a load of rank and calls the shots. That's why… More questions?
No? Bill will give you all the details… Last point, I have laid down for you the priority, adhere to that priority. Thank you, gentlemen.'
After the ACIO had left, Parrish sorted out the initial details of the surveillance that would be mounted from late that morning on a third floor council flat in Notting Hill Gate.
Because he had opened his mouth, because he had had too much to say, and because he never seemed to care what hours he worked, it was pretty well inevitable that Park would start the surveillance duty. He wasn't complaining. And he didn't ring Ann to tell her that he didn't know when he'd be home.
He did not ring her because he was not thinking of her. He was studying a photograph, covertly taken, and recent, of Leroy Winston Manvers. Just staring at the photograph and absorbing the features.
'… Our entire land is now engulfed with the bereavement, separation, death, destruction, homelessness, corruption and despair brought about by the clerics' anti-human rule and catastrophic war. The clerics have brought ruination on our people. Do you know, ladies, gentlemen, that because of the chronic economic situation more than 8,000 factories in Iran have had to shut. Our oil revenues were the envy of the world, but we now find that production is down by more than one half, because of the war… Perhaps you are less interested in the cold figures of economics, perhaps you are more interested in the fate of human beings. I tell you, nevertheless, that economics have brought poverty, unemployment and starvation to millions of our people. But I will tell you about the effect on human beings of this cruel war, fought with the cynicism of those clerics while they themselves are safe behind the lines. Do you know that to continue this thirst for blood the clerics now send children to that front line? Don't take my word, take the word of a newspaper. A newspaper wrote:
'Sometimes the children wrapped themselves in blankets, rolling themselves across the minefield, so that fragments of their bodies would not scatter so they could be gathered and taken behind the lines, to be raised over heads in coffins.'
Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever heard anything more obscene? That is the regime of the clerics, a regime of bank-ruptcy, a regime of blood, a regime of callousness… '
When he paused, when he mopped perspiration from his forehead, he was loudly applauded. It surprised him that so many had come to listen to him during a lunch time in the City of London. It saddened him that he did not see his brother in that audience. He had urged his brother at least marginally to involve himself in the political world of the exiles. He could not see his brother, he accepted that failure.
He sipped at a beaker of water.
At the back of the hall was an Iranian student, enrolled at a Bayswater college, and taking a detailed note of all that Jamil Shabro said in his vilification of the reign of clerics.
Jamil Shabro spoke on for twenty minutes. When finally he sat down he was warmly applauded, and his hand was pumped by well-wishers, and he was congratulated for his courage for speaking out against tyranny.
And that afternoon the student in the English language took his written notes to a mosque in West London in which hung a photograph portrait of the Imam, and upon production of his Islamic Republic of Iran passport was admitted to an inner office.
In the outer corridor to the Cabinet room, after the meeting had broken up, the Secretary of State for Defence made the opportunity for a private word in the Home Secretary's ear.
