If he had looked into the face of the Chief Investigation Officer then he might just have put his fist into the man's teeth, and if he had looked at the ACIO then he might just have kneed the bugger.
'By the by, Park, a little note of warning…' The voice drawled behind him, an incoming tide over shingle. 'Don't play any clever games with Eshraq, I think he'd give you more of a run for your money than Man vers did.'
The dog slept in a wicker basket beside the Aga in the kitchen, on its back with its legs in the air, and wheezed like a drayman.
The sound of snoring filled the night quiet of the house. He thought that a burglar would have to have kicked over the kitchen table to have woken the brute. But it was not the Rottweiler's growled breathing that kept Henry Carter awake.
He would have been asleep by now, well asleep because it had been a hard enough day and rounded off with a good malt, if it had not been for the nagging worry.
The descriptions of the torture had been so wretchedly vivid. The telling of the brutality had been so cruelly sharp.
Never, not ever, would Henry have accused Mattie of telling
'war stories'. Nothing was volunteered, everything had to be chiselled for, but in his own laconic way Mattie had transported Henry into a world that was deeply, desperately, frightening.
He understood why he had been chosen for the debrief.
Quite impossible that the Director General would have permitted any of those aggressive youngsters that now seemed to fill the building to be let loose on a man of Mattie's stature.
Perhaps the Director General had been wrong. Perhaps one of the young men, brash and cocksure, would have been better able to understand how Mattie had survived the pain, had survived and kept Eshraq's name safe.
God forbid that he should be selling Mattie short, but Henry, coward that he was and without shame of it, could not understand it.
18
Sunday morning, and the light catching the east side of the Lane. Empty streets around the building, no rubbish wagons, no commuters, no office workers. The buses were few and far between, there were taxis cruising without hope.
The bin beside Park's desk was half filled with cardboard drinking beakers. He had long before exhausted the dispenser, which would not be filled again until early on the Monday, and he had been reduced to making his own coffee, no milk left over the weekend. Stiff black coffee to sustain him.
Some of it he had read before, but through the night he had punched up on to his console screen everything that the ID's computer had to offer on Turkey and Iran. That was his way.
And a hell of an amount there was… And he read again what little had been fed into CEDRIC on Charlie Eshraq. It was his way to arm himself with information, and it was also his way to dig himself a pit when circumstances seemed about to crush him. He couldn't have gone home, not after the visit to Century. Better to get himself back to the Lane, and to get his head in front of the screen. He'd been alone until dawn, until Token had shown. She'd shown, and then she'd gone heaven knew where and come back with bacon rolls.
She sat at the desk opposite him. He was latching the plastic sheet over the console.
'I spoke to Bill last night, when he'd got home.'
'Did you now?'
'He said you'd had a pretty rotten evening.'
'And he was right.'
'He said that Duggie took your wife home.'
'I asked him to.'
'He said that you might be in need of looking after.'
She didn't wear make-up, and she hadn't combed her short hair, and her anorak was slung on the hook on the wall between the windows that looked down on to New Fetter Lane. She wore a sweatshirt that was tight over her radio transmitter. He thought that he knew what she was saying, what Parrish had said to her.
'Have you finished?'
'I've finished with the computer, I don't know what else I've finished with.'
'Another day, another dime, David.'
'You know what…? Last night they walked all over us.
We were the little chappies who had stepped out of their depth, and we were being told how to behave, and the Chief took it… I still feel sick.'
'Like I said, another day. Do you want to come home with me?'
'What for?'
'Don't be a cretin… '
'I'm going home, got to change.'
'Might be best to give home a miss.'
She was the girl he ought to have married, that's what he thought. He knew why she offered her place, her bed. He knew why she was on offer, if she had spoken to Bill Parrish on the phone.
'Thanks,' he said.
He came round the desk and when she stood he put his arms around her shoulders and he kissed her forehead. It was a soft kiss, as if she was his sister, as if she could only ever be a friend.
'Don't let the bastards hurt you, David.'
He slung his suit jacket over his shoulder. Still in the buttonhole was the red rose that Ann had said he should wear for the dance. He walked out on Token, who would have taken him home to her bed. He started up the car. It was a fast drive through the desert that was the city and it took him little more than an hour to reach home, and he'd bought flowers at a railway station stall.
She'd left the lights on.
The lights were on in the hall and in the bedroom and in the bathroom.
She had left the wardrobe door open, and inside the wardrobe there was a chasm, her dresses gone. The bed wasn't made, and the envelope was on the pillow, the pillow, for God's sake.
He went into the bathroom because he thought that he was going to throw up, and her dressing gown was on the bathmat and her bath towel, and beside her bath towel was his.
Perhaps that was the way it always was, that a marriage ended. The flowers were in the kitchen sink and he didn't know how to make a display of them.
There was a light knock at the door. Mrs Ferguson, beckoning Carter out. He went, and smiled an apology at Mattie.
If there was a way back then Mattie did not know it. He paced in the room. He faced the alternatives, and his future.
There was no going back. To go back, to admit the lie, that was resignation. He was a member of the Service, and if the lie were admitted then he would be out of the Service.
'Sorry, Mattie, so sorry to have abandoned you. The telephone is one of the great tyrannies of modern life. Things are a little more confused. Our message to our man in Tehran, the message for him to abort, it didn't get through.'
'Why not?'
'Seems that our man had disappeared, couldn't be traced.
That's a shame.'
A long sad silence in the room. And Henry's eyes never left Mattie's face. He walked across the carpet and he stood in front of Mattie.
'What I've always heard, and you know that I've no personal experience, when you start talking under pressure then you cannot ration yourself. If you start then you have to finish,' he said.
