behind her. Her arms were folded tight across her chest, and her face was set, stern. The question was inevitable.
'Your man, Malachy Kitchen, would he know when to back off? Where he's gone, would he have the nous to recognize the impossible and step back?'
No answer necessary, but he shook his head.
She beat on the wall with her stick, hammered at it.
Behind Millie Johnson, in her little kitchen, the kettle whistled, and beside the hob was the teapot with the bags in it and a plate on which she had placed biscuits
– the sort she thought he liked.
Her impatience was curbed only when her bell rang.
She struggled from her chair, used the stick to move towards the door and unlocked it. On the far side of the barred gate was the social worker, not him.
Because she felt it, there must have been – like a murmur of it – disappointment on her face. Twice that day, and twice the day before, she had beaten on the wall and hoped he would come.
'Only me, Millie,' Ivanhoe Manners said. He pulled a face, his teeth flashed, and he shrugged. 'Second best, am I?'
'Did he go?'
'Dropped the keys in – no note, nothing – left the place clean like he was never there. Gone, as if he was finished with us. What I came to say, you have new folk next door from tomorrow. A mother and her daughter, from Sudan. I thought you should know…
Did he not say goodbye to you?'
She said gruffly, 'You'd better go and make the tea, and you can have a biscuit.'
She slumped back in her chair. She heard the rattle of the cups, then the kettle's whistle was cut and water poured.
'I'll let it stand a minute,' he called to her. 'Did you learn anything about him?'
'He didn't tell me – told me nothing – but he'd been a soldier. I tell you, believe me, he was a soldier.'
'Nothing about where he was going?'
She looked out of her window, down over the plaza and up to the blocks and flat roofs of the Amersham.
She felt frail and the pain was in her arm. She felt aged and alone, and she remembered what Dawn had said to her about the High Fly Boys and about the dealer at the lamp post. His kiss was on her forehead.
She said tartly, 'I have one and a half sugars…
Going to do? What soldiers do, I imagine, find somewhere to go and fight.'
He played chess. Victory was assured because Frederick Gaunt competed against himself.
The train thrashed north at speed and the roll of the carriage on the track bumped his knees against those of the man opposite. Other passengers beavered over work files or peered at the screens of their laptops, but Gaunt had his chess, and the man who obstructed his leg room and had joined the train at Rugby had his newspaper. After each move, Gaunt rotated the pocket set. He could not have brought work files or a laptop with him: in these times, it was damn near a capital offence to lose either on public transport.
There was a grunt across the table but Gaunt was not sure if it had been obscenity or blasphemy. He pondered the moves of the little plastic figures on his board and thought of the futility with which he wasted his journey time: did it matter if a blue bishop was lost or a red knight?
Perhaps…
Perhaps it mattered greatly…
Perhaps it mattered more than his mind could articulate.
He studied the positioning of his kings and queens, bishops and knights, the pawns. Was Wilco a pawn?
Most certainly the minder who had died in Prague, burned, had been a pawn. Was Timo Rahman a knight? Was the co-ordinator, who had escaped them, a bishop? Was the city where he lived, worked, the queen that must be protected? He began to move the pieces. Pawns were lost, removed. A knight fell. A bishop moved against a queen… Not a bloody game.
Quite deliberately, he kicked out his leg and his toecap caught the ankle of the man opposite. He smiled sweetly.
When he played against himself, he always won – but it was not a bloody game when Polly Wilkins, the pawn, was on the board, and not a bloody game if the queen could not be protected by the bishop's move. He was quiet, hunched, and his eyes did not leave the board and the plastic pieces. He felt cold, as if he were intimidated. She was not the only pawn: the bishop, too, had them and would sacrifice them, the sleepers.
He did not know the codename that had been given him. He worked in the Fast Friar food outlet in the conurbation of Hounslow to the west of London. It was nineteen months since he had last been to the mosque. Then he had been told what he should study and that he should not return there for worship.
Neither did he know that his true name and the address of the Fast Friar, where he scrubbed the cooking surfaces and cleaned out the frying vats, were spoken of in caves in the mountain landscapes of the tribal areas of Pakistan and in safe-houses in a town of eastern Yemen; and that they were in the mind of a man who travelled ever closer. He was a few days short of his twenty-first birthday. He lived with his parents and two sisters a bus ride from the Fast Friar, and nineteen months before he had, as instructed, taken down from his bedroom wall the posters celebrating the jihad in Iraq and pictures of mujahidin fighters in Chechnya. He was on no list – as he would have been had he continued to attend the mosque – of potential activists compiled by the Security Service or the Special Branch or the Anti-terrorist Unit of Scotland Yard, In nineteen months he had not seen the imam who had recruited him, but he harboured in the depths of his mind the promise made and the instruction given him. His family, second-generation immigrants from Karachi, had no access to his mind.
The promise made him was that one day – at a time not known – a man would come to him, would seek him out, would use him. The instruction given him was that he should spend every waking hour, when he was not at the Fast Friar, down the A4 road at Heathrow airport. He had gained, because of his dedication, a near encyclopedic knowledge of the perimeters and their wire defences, the patterns of the patrols, and dead ground on the flight paths for landings and take-offs, and his friends who worked inside never realized they were gutted for information. He did not go to the mosque, did not worship with his family, but his concept of faith burned bright in him and what he would do for his God. A man would come one day to his home or to the Fast Friar and would lead him to the side, beyond the earshot of his family or his employer, and would quote from the Book, 2:25: 'And give good news to those who believe and do good deeds… ' And he would answer: '… that they will have gardens in which rivers flow.' It would happen, and everything he knew of the airport would be told.
The door to Eternal Paradise would be opened to receive him.
Polly listened – had little choice – as she climbed the stairs and followed the woman.
'You'll enjoy it here, of course you will. Such a lovely building, so impressive. Dates back a hundred and sixty years. We're so fortunate to be here but – I'm being frank – after all the downsizing, we five Brits, and I'm not counting the locally employed staff, we rather rattle around here. It's so good to have a visitor and an excuse to open a bit more up.'
She was at 8a Harvestehuder Weg, the seat of the British Consulate in Hamburg. The taxi had dropped her outside a white stucco-fronted building that was indeed magnificent, opulent. The woman escorted her to the top floor where there would be a door reinforced with steel plate and behind it a room available to the Service.
'A shipping magnate built it, then sold it on to a Chilean family who were in the saltpetre trade, but they went under in the great Stock Exchange crash of
'twenty-nine. In 1930 everything inside was auctioned off – quite extraordinary, among the items under the hammer were three hundred pairs of antlers and, would you believe?, four and a half thousand bottles of wine of best vintage going back nearly forty years.
Then it was headquarters for an SS Gruppenftihrer.
Very convenient, because Kaufmann, who was top Nazi for the city, was just a few doors down, where the Americans are now. It missed all the bombing – a providential wind blew the Pathfinder marker flares away from this district. The annexe was built by concentration-camp inmates from Neuengamme.
Anyway we came, got our feet under the table, and have been here ever since. We're very lucky.'
She knew she was escorted by a junior member of staff because the consul-general would not want to be
