They didn't need to know, in the Legion bar, about Major Anstruther and the gang in the cave led by Mehmet Rahman.
Percy Capel didn't buy drinks. Could have done.
He had his war pension and his old-age pension, and he lived for free with his son and daughter-in-law and wanted for nothing, and he had the hundred a week in cash that Ricky gave him. Ricky knew about Albania and Mehmet Rahman, and had traded on his grandfather's war. Percy hated his grandson but still took his money.
He was in full flight. 'I was doing this job, a real big property down in Esher – that's a bit off my beat but I'd read in the paper who these folk were – and I'm upstairs and pocketing the stuff and a bloody dog, sounding like a wolf, is up and roaring at the closed door. I'm doing a double-fast runner, down the drainpipe, when…'
Ricky stood at the far end of the bar. Hand up, finger beckoning.
'Sorry, guys. Got to go. My round next time. Doesn't like to be kept waiting.'
He shuffled towards the door, leaving the laughter stifled and his drink unfinished. The talk at home, over the years, about Major Hugo Anstruther and Mehmet Rahman, the little case of mementoes under his bed, had launched the little piece of vermin. He was responsible in part for the empire of his grandson
… God, it weighed on him.
'Coming, Ricky. Good of you to collect me.'
Everyone danced to Ricky, just as Percy Capel did.
Harry, who was Sharon Capel's brother, danced any way that Ricky wanted him to dance. By dancing, he kept the dream alive.
He was in the wheelhouse and rocked gently in the skipper's seat as the Anneliese Royal swayed at its mooring ropes. She was ready to sail, except for the ice. Before dawn they would be gone. In an hour Billy and young Paul would drive up to the quay, the ice would be loaded, they would slip the ropes and be gone into the night. Billy had monitored the forecast and told him that for this week weather conditions were predicted as good, not the week after.
He read and he dreamed, and the dream was his sole escape from Ricky Capel.
The dream was of finding a Brixham-built trawler, a boat from the south Devon yards of eighty years ago.
It might be up a creek in the south-west, or tied up and forgotten on the Hamble, or left to rot on the mudflats outside a port in Scotland or on the Isle of Man. If after all those years of inactivity – because the diesel engine had taken over from sail power by the late 1940s, which had dictated the dumping of the old trawler fleet – he could discover a trawler with a sound hull and a good keel, Harry's dream would be launched. In his retirement, free of Ricky Capel, he would potter on the carcass of the boat and hope that, before his death, he would have resurrected it, placed in it a new mast, scrubbed the decks and varnished them till they shone, and could put to sea, move across the water at a crisp seven or eight knots in a south-westerly with the full red sails that were the colour of Devon earth – and be in heaven.
He had an hour to read before they brought the ice on board.
But dreams needed paying for. Without Ricky's money, the dream would die.
The book – reminiscences and anecdotes of life on the old powered trawlers – was faded, frayed and had stains on the pages from fingers that had dripped with the fluid of fish stomachs.
When he finished a favourite passage, he locked away the book and waited for the pickup's headlights to spear across the quay. They would fish for five days
– without having to navigate towards a marker buoy off Cuxhaven or the rock outcrop of Helgoland to collect a waterproof package – then come back and moor in harbour during the length of the forecast storm, and maybe go to the west and home.
Finally, she had been permitted inside.
Past midnight, and Polly had climbed the stone staircase and had allowed Ludvik's hand to remain on her arm as she stepped over the debris left by the firemen.
A mass of floodlights used by the police and men of the BIS played over the interior. The rain came through the ceiling where the fire had destroyed the roof and pattered on her head. From the doorway, four ladders were laid out over the exposed floor beams because the planks had gone. Two had been placed so that they gave access to either side of the charred heap that had been left untouched by the fire crew.
She shuddered. The smell of the burning, which had been doused by the hoses, then damped by the rain, caught in her nose, but overriding it was a stronger stench, sweet and sickly. She had never been close up to it before, but instinctively she knew it.
Quite deliberately, not brooking argument, she pushed Ludvik aside, then sharply tapped the shoulder of a man in front of her and gestured for him to move out of her path. He shifted, and the lights dazzled her through her steel-rimmed, unfashionable spectacles. She shoved her hair out of her face and hitched her skirt high over her knees; if her tights laddered that was of no importance. She slipped plastic gloves over her hands. She had authority because the BIS, the successor to the former Communist regime's StB, had been trained in modern counter- intelligence techniques by agencies from the United Kingdom. She knelt on the ladder to the left of the heap, steeled herself, then reached for a further rung and began to edge out over the open beams.
She was slight but the ladder creaked under her weight, and the cold snatched at her bared legs. She came closer to the source of the stench, and called over her shoulder: 'Has anything here been touched or moved?'
Ludvik answered her: 'Only by the fire, not by us.'
The lights stayed on the heap and the stench drew her forward. She reached out towards the growing clarity of the shapes. Nearest to her was the machine pistol, scorched and lying among burned bedding. At the Fort, above the coast outside Portsmouth, she had done weapons training with the bland instructors who thought all recruits were idiots. Polly had been one of the few who had listened… She lifted the barrel, held it pointing to the rainclouds between the beams and passed it behind her, careful that the trigger did not snag. It was taken. She found five blackened magazines and knew from their weight that their bullets had been exhausted. As her hands groped closer to the largest unrecognizable shape in the pile, a sharp, wounding little memory came back to her. She had been driving with Dominic to Scotland for their first week away after they had met. They had been near the border and had stopped to picnic but a cloud had come dark over them from Longtown, made by the funeral pyre of the animals slaughtered to contain the epidemic of foot-and-mouth. They had hurried on but the stench had stayed in the car, even with all the windows open. Dominic was gone, but not the memory of the stench.
She held a hand.
There was a gasp behind her, then nervous titters.
The lights were on the gloves she wore and the black bones of a hand in hers. The clothing was gone, and much of the flesh. She thought she might vomit. She put down the hand, detached from the wrist because the muscle had burned. She felt the shape of the arm, then the torso and her fingers flickered up to the skull.
A jawbone, an open mouth, eye sockets. It seemed to her that she learned more from the touch than from the glare of the lights on the face. They had called him Muhammad Iyad. She wondered how it had been for him in the final spasms of his life, his mouth wide with agony. Had his faith in God sustained him, or the love of his woman, or had he died in terror – cursing those he served? Her head bobbed, and she shook the thoughts from her mind. Her fingers dismantled the heap and found nothing more.
'Right,' Polly said briskly, to the men behind her.
'That's one of them. Where's the other?'
A murmur of voices behind her, then Ludvik's hang-dog response. 'They have found only one cadaver.'
'You had the building sealed, you told me.'
'Only one body was found.'
It was as if she were a child, and a present in gaudy wrapping was offered her, and when she reached for it the present was snatched away. The prize was gone.
She turned and started to crawl back along the ladder. With the time differential between Prague and London› it would now be 10.35 p.m. at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, and Gaunt would be waiting. With the certainties of night following day, and spring following winter, she knew Gaunt would be at his desk with his shoes up on it, and waiting for her signal.
Polly Wilkins swore obscenely, and came off the ladder.
Frederick Gaunt read the latest epistle from the whey-faced creature who had written the report, now heavily circulated, on the Service's future.
