. I would much regret us going up that route.'
He eyed the man sitting across the desk from him and playing with a pencil. Konig would sleep that night, as he had for the previous week, in a police hostel for single men. In a month, perhaps, if time had permitted it, he would hope to find two furnished rooms in a street well back from the lake in St Georg.
The man spiralling his pencil over the desk lived in a mansion in Blankenese, and probably banked in a week what a policeman of Konig's rank earned in a year. He despised such men.
'A warning. Ingratiating yourself with your neighbour might be tempting, but it would not be wise. If you were foolish enough to provide information to him concerning cameras and directional microphones that we put in place, then – and this is my second promise – you will face imprisonment for, probably, seven years. Seven years in Fuhlsbuttel gaol is a long time to reflect on a warning ignored. You tell your family what you care to but the responsibility for secrecy is yours – seven years.'
The man who owned a prosperous travel agency nodded pathetic acquiescence. He was told that a delivery van would bring the equipment and a time later in the day was fixed for it. The business was done. Konig left the premises. He could not, quite, identify the mistake made by Timo Rahman, but he believed it existed. When it had been identified it could be manipulated. Later, back at Headquarters, a surveillance request would be drafted and would go to a magistrate, and the necessary paragraph of justification would describe activities of a flasher, a potential molester of women, in a residential side-street in Blankenese, and it would go through on the nod. It surprised him, when he reached his office, that there was no message for him reporting the progress of the British intelligence officer in unravelling the fugitive's story – what he did hear, in fulsome detail, was that every crew of Albanian foot-soldiers scoured the city's streets for a quarry.
She did not interrupt. She sat close to him, no longer smelt his clothes or his body.
'I left him there. He was all trussed up on the lamp post and there was no chance of him breaking the knots, and he'd the tape – half a dozen times – round his face. He couldn't shout. I put the toy gun back into my pocket, picked up what was left of the rope and the tape, and went home. I didn't feel good.
Felt sort of flat, sort of empty… In my mind I'd this picture of a ladder, and I was two rungs up it, and that was still nothing. Didn't feel I'd done anything. Knew it wasn't enough. There was this guy – don't even think about it, because I'm not telling you and you won't learn about him from me. He knew the way the pyramid was built. Above the pushers is the dealer, up higher than the dealer is the supplier. The dealer didn't give me what I needed – thought I needed.'
She could watch the main path through the garden.
From the bench, in the sunken area, through a gap in the surrounding bushes and through the light cloud of falling blossom, she saw them.
'I was told who supplied the estate's dealer. I went after him, went with a canister of petrol. I suppose, in terms of conscience, I could square it, but not easily. I didn't think I was an avenging angel – couldn't have said that what I did was the redemption road. The supplier was a target, and I needed a bigger and better target than a dealer.'
An older man, swarthy and short, was on the path and another walked on a thinly seeded space of grass to his right, but the older man made gestures to his left as if he directed more men who were under his command. Two joggers went past the older man but he seemed not to notice them. Swarthy, as if they were tanned from old exposure to the Mediterranean sun, and slight – the same complexions and the same build as the men who had carried clothes from the hotel doorway on Steindamm. She had told Malachy
Kitchen that a price was on his head.
'The supplier had this house out in the country.
Would have been worth near a million. I'm not ashamed of what I did, but I took no pleasure from it.
The family weren't there. I broke a window and spilled petrol inside… '
She saw the older man use his arm and fingers to point into the shrub bed above the small cobbled garden with the pond, where they were, where they sat on the bench, and she heard an answering cry but did not know the language.
'I slopped the carpet and curtains with the stuff, then I threw a match on to… '
Polly Wilkins, officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, a well-brought-up girl whose mother had lectured her as a teenager never 'to be easy', reached up – two hands – took his face in them, felt the roughness of unshaven cheeks and gulped. 'Kiss me.'
'… the petrol. God, it caught, half burned my face and… '
'Do it, you bloody fool,' she hissed. 'Kiss me.'
She could have laughed. On his face was shock, then bewilderment, then a sort of naked terror. He had no idea why… She pulled him closer, her lips on his face but he screwed his mouth away.
'Not for fun, idiot. Do it like you mean it.'
He softened. Maybe he had heard, now, a heavy breath spurt behind his shoulder, maybe he had heard the snap of a dead twig under a shoe. She did it like she meant it, lips on lips. She had her eyes almost closed, as if passion gripped her, and she saw a younger man hovering in the bushes and gazing down on her. She thought he was coming closer. She screwed her tongue between the teeth.
She growled at him, 'Use your bloody hands.'
He did. Like she was precious, might break, his hands came up and caught her shoulders and he pulled her nearer him. Two rainsodden bodies entwined and his mouth was opened wider and her tongue could roam more fully. God, and the taste of his mouth was foul. And his clothes stank… Polly Wilkins had not tongue-kissed a man since that pathetic creep, Dominic, had flown to Buenos Aires – had near forgotten how to. The man standing above her, with the bushes waist high around him, watched, and then there was a shout from where the main path would have been, and the rustle of his feet as he moved away. He might look back. She kept her tongue in place and let the hands hold her shoulders.
When the voices were distant, low, she broke away and gasped.
'Don't get any bloody ideas.'
The colour flooded his skin under the bristle growth on his cheeks. 'No.'
'They'd have had you,' she said, with emphasis, as if the explanation was important. She rattled on, 'Did you know how badly you stink? No, you wouldn't…
Right, where were we?'
'I fired the supplier's home, perhaps a million pounds of it.'
'You said, 'but I took no pleasure from it'. Right?'
'Right.'
The laughter burst in Polly. 'Didn't seem to me you took much pleasure from what's just happened.'
'I'm grateful to you.'
'Don't, please, bloody thank me. That I cannot take.'
She stiffened, touched her hair, smoothed her skirt and eased away from him. 'Where were we? Yes, we were into assault, probably grievous bodily harm, and we've just hit arson. What's next, Malachy?'
She could have bitten the tongue that had been far into his mouth. He winced. She thought she had wounded a man already hurt and down. Damage done. She did not apologize. What she knew of Malachy Kitchen had come in a terse one-page signal from Gaunt that was bald and without humanity. It would have been easier for her to sit as judge and jury on him if he had made a callow admission of guilt or had writhed behind a catalogue of mitigation. He had said: 'I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.' She'd thought he spoke the truth.
She had tapped into vulnerability and she felt ashamed of her laughter.
Polly said quietly, 'You burned down the home of a supplier, but you were still short of satisfaction. What had happened to you, everything, conspired to goad you forward – as if, Malachy, you're on a treadmill.
But they always go faster, don't they, treadmills? So, who is above the supplier?'
'I had a name given me. Ricky Capel of Bevin Close, that's south-east London. He was the importer.'
'Going there, that's climbing higher,' she said bleakly. 'Higher than most would have.'
'Going there got me a kicking.'
She saw, for the first time, a smile – rueful, uncertain
– crack his cheeks, and she listened and believed she could comprehend the burden of shame that had driven him. She thought it past the time for laughter, and for goading him. He told the story of it with detachment, as if
