… But facts have to be faced.'
'I'm familiar with the facts. We were unlucky, that's all.' He heard his own voice and thought it petulant.
He'd never been easy with the new man, the outsider, the blow-in from the intelligence community. Never been able to talk to him the way he had with his bosses when they were promoted from inside, closed shop.
'For heaven's sake, Brian, be adult. It's not a time for sulking. Millions of pounds have been spent. We were laughed out of court… Packer is the nearest thing we have in this country to a superleague organized-crime player. You had every resource you wanted, everything you asked for.'
'A witch hunt, is that what this is, and I'm the bloody broomstick?' He hadn't combed what hair he had. His head was throbbing, along with his anger.
The new man wore a perfect suit, a perfect shirt and a perfect tie with some bloody image on it that the SIO couldn't quite focus on, something from the spook days he supposed. And the CIO was Cambridge and connected, and had the ear of the elite.
'You can either be transferred to VAT investigations for the last few months or, if you think it more appropriate, take early retirement. Pension won't be affected, goes without saying.'
'That's remarkably generous of you.' Sarcasm never came naturally to him. His wife, who'd been with him as long as he'd been in the Church, said that when he tried sarcasm he demeaned himself. It was ignored.
'Looking at you, Brian – I don't get any pleasure from saying this – gives me the impression you slept in a hedgerow last night. Senior men getting drunk with juniors is seldom wise.'
'I took the team out. Bloody hell, don't you understand? It's what we always do when a case goes down. These men, these women, they'd put their lives into this, everything else secondary, and me. We went for a drink or three, so what?'
'Not a habit I sympathize with. I would have thought an assessment of the disaster, and it was a disaster, would have been better prepared while minds were clear, not through a hangover…'
The SIO laughed, a hoarse snigger.
Glacial eyes gleamed at him. 'Why is that so funny?
Enlighten me, please.'
'Cann did that. Cann stayed behind. He was at the computer all night. Why? 'To see what we did wrong.' We didn't do anything wrong. It was the system, the process… '
The CIO had the palms of his hands together, fingers outstretched, a bishop in prayer. 'Always somebody else's fault. I hear you, Brian. Keep saying it often enough and you might gain some comfort from it. Anyway, I'm afraid that's the end of the line.
Sorry, there cannot be sentiment, not when a man as prominent as Packer walks free. So, what's it to be?'
There wasn't going to be a party. There might be a carriage clock sent on in the post, and there might be a seedy secretive gathering in a pub and the handing over of a sherry decanter bought with a whip-round.
He said quietly, 'I'd like the rest of the day to clear my things up, and say a few goodbyes.'
'Sensible choice. The pension people will be in touch.'
He flared. He was on his way out, headed for the rubbish heap. 'God, look, I wanted to put him down, I wanted it as much as anyone.'
'But you didn't, did you, put him down? That's the difficulty, Brian. Good luck.' The CIO smiled.
'Goodbye. Let's hope others manage where I failed.'
'Yes, with the right people I'm sure we will.'
The SIO was on his way to the door.
The voice behind him was sham matter-of-fact. 'Oh, the one in the team who resisted your leadership demand to get drunk, give me his name again.'
'You don't want to worry about him – he's not a team player, but then he was only the collator, did the archive, kept the paper in order. He's a nobody.'
What's 'nobody's' name?'
'SQG12. Joey Cann.'
Joey turned into the road. He had never been there before. He had filed perhaps two hundred photographs of it; he knew its every detail – when the trees were in blossom, in leaf, or bare, and the gardens when they were stripped down or coming into flower.
It was as if he had lived in that road through the lenses of cameras secreted in canvas BT shelters, parked vans and abandoned cars. The road was usually in monochrome but it made little difference to his ability to recognize it.
He was a driven creature. In the world of legal process, a defence brief could have ripped to small pieces the slight-built young man, pale-faced, hair dark and tangled, with the large spectacles and the crumpled jeans who had turned into the southern junction of the road and who now sauntered along it towards the playing-fields at the top end. He had no authorization to be there, no permission for intrusive surveillance. Merely being in the road broke Church practice and bordered on the edge of legality. He could not have stayed away.
'Excuse me,' a voice shrilled behind him.
He drifted to the side of the pavement and a woman pushed a baby buggy past him. She turned and gave him a withering, suspicious glance. He knew her, from photographs, as Rosie Carthew.
He understood that he would have looked an out-of-place cuckoo, and she might have smelt his body. Her husband brought into the country Italian top-of-the range ladies' dresses, skirts, blouses and handbags.
He also knew that, eighteen months before, Rosie Carthew had twice phoned the local police to complain about suspicious vehicles in the road, and twice surveillance operations had been killed off.
A woman was sweeping the pavement of hedge clippings. From the pictures he recognized her as Carol Penberthy. Three months before Mister's arrest, at dead of night, the Security Service A Branch
'watchers' had buried a fish-eye camera in the brick gatepost on the drive of the house opposite his.
Nothing to do with Neighbourhood Watch but she must have been restless and up at her bedroom window as they worked. The next morning Carol Penberthy had been filmed by the fish-eye trooping out of her own doorway, down the pavement and up to the Packer doorway for a fast, whispered conversation with Mister in his dressing- gown and slippers.
That night a ramshackle van had come down the road and the fish-eye's last image had been of its front fender before it had crashed into the brick column and destroyed the camera.
He doubted that either woman was in conspiracy with Packer – just inquisitive, and nosy, with flapping tongues.
Joey was outside the house. He had seen it through all the hours of the clock, days of the week, weeks of the month, months and seasons of the year. He knew the setting and size of the bricks of the walls, the number of glass panes in the front bay windows on either side of the porch, and the positioning of the spyhole in the door, the chimes in the hall from the bell – a year before the arrest a microphone had been set into the bark of the blossom tree by the front gate; it had lasted a week before being prised out; they'd muttered then that either Mister had got lucky, or that the information tap had leaked once again – and the patterns on the curtains, and the mesh on the net. Behind the door and the curtains he knew the layout of the rooms. The house had been 'burgled' by the A Branch watchers, the first time they had been involved. They were the clever cats introduced to go where plodding policemen and mediocre Church men couldn't reach: they'd put a bug behind the cover where the TV aerial came into the living-room wall and a pinhead probe inside the ventilation grille in the bedroom, which had lasted four days. Both had gone out when the rubbish was put in the bin on the pavement. He knew the rubbish went on a Monday morning. The A Branch intruders had been in the house for seven minutes and had had time to photograph every room. He knew everything about the pictures on the walls, fine landscapes in watercolour but not mega- money, and the wallpaper, the pills in the bathroom cupboard and the food in the fridge. It was as if he had been a house guest.
'Can I help you?'
A woman was getting out of her car in the drive-way opposite and two doors down. Leonora Govan.
Separated, going on divorced, two children.
Surveillance said she was more often inside Mister's home for coffee with the Princess than any other woman in the road.
'No,' Joey said.
