It was a familiar sensation, and Tina struggled to remember what it reminded her of.
It was only when she was in the lift heading back to the car park that she remembered. One of her first customers had been an obese man with horned-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses who wheezed at the slightest exertion. He'd wanted to take her home, and at first Tina had refused because all the girls on the street where she worked had told her that she was safer staying in the punter's car, but he'd offered her more money and eventually she'd given up and gone with him, only after insisting that he paid up front.
Home was a two-up, two-down house in East London with stained carpets and bare light bulbs in the light fittings. He'd shown Tina into his front room and stood at the doorway, wheezing as he watched her reaction to the dozens of glass tanks that lined the walls. In the tanks were snakes. All sorts of snakes. Big ones coiled up like lengths of hose pipe small ones that dangled from bare twigs, some asleep, others watching her intently with cold black unfeeling eyes, their tongues flicking in and out.
The man made Tina give him a blow job in the middle of the room, and he stood there wheezing as she went down on her knees in front of him, her eyes shut tight as she tried to blot out the image of the watching snakes.
Afterwards, after she'd wrapped the used condom in a tissue and tossed it under one of the tanks, he'd taken out a large python and made her stroke it. At first she'd refused, but then he promised to give her an extra twenty quid so she touched it, gingerly at first. When she realised it wasn't going to hurt her she became more confident and ran her hands down its back. She'd thought it might be wet and slimy but it was cool and dry and she could feel how strong it was, how easily it could crush the life out of her if it should ever coil itself around her. The punter had got all excited at the sight of Tina caressing the snake and had offered her money for some really weird stuff, stuff that Tina didn't like to think about, and she'd rushed out of the house without the twenty pounds he'd promised. Tina shivered at the memory and groped for her cigarettes.
Assistant Commissioner Latham paced up and down in front of the window.
'I'm still not convinced that we're doing the right thing here,' he said.
Gregg Hathaway unhooked the clock from the wall and placed it on the table.
'Morally, you mean?' Hathaway was wearing a dark brown leather jacket, blue jeans and scuffed brown Timberland boots. He had a slight limp, favouring his left leg when he walked.
Latham gave Hathaway a cold look.
'I was referring to their training and handling,' he said.
Hathaway shrugged carelessly.
'It's not really my place to query operational decisions,' he said.
'I leave that up to my masters.' He was a short man, thought Latham: even if he didn't have the limp, he wouldn't have been allowed to join the Met. He was well below the Met's height requirements, even though they'd been drastically lowered so as not to exclude Asians. The intelligence services clearly had different criteria when it came to recruiting, and there was no doubting Hathaway's intelligence.
'They applied to join the police, not MI6,' said Latham.
Hathaway went back to the wall and pulled out a length of wire that had been connected to the small camera in the centre of the clock. The wire led through the wall and up into the ceiling to the video monitor on the floor above, from where Hathaway had watched all three interviews. Latham had been upstairs to check that there was no video recording equipment. Under no circumstances was there to be any record of what had gone on in the office, either on tape or on paper. Officially, the three interviews hadn't taken place. Latham's diary would show that he was in a private meeting with the Commissioner.
'I suppose you do get a different sort of applicant than we do at Six,' said Hathaway, coiling up the wire and placing it on top of the clock.
'They've been trying to widen the intake, but it's still mainly Oxbridge graduates that get in. Wouldn't get the likes of Cliff Warren applying. Fullerton maybe.'
'I suppose so. How do you think they'll do?'
Hathaway ran a hand through his thinning sandy hair.
'You can never tell. Not until they go undercover. Fullerton's a bit cocky, but that's no bad thing. Warren's probably the most stable of the three, but he's not been put under pressure yet. The girl's interesting.'
'Interesting?'
'She worked hard to get away from the life she had. Now we're going to send her back. I'm not sure how she'll cope with that. I was surprised that she agreed.'
'I'm not sure that she had much choice.' Latham looked at his watch. His driver was already waiting in the car park downstairs and there was no reason for the Assistant Commissioner still to be in the office. No reason other than the fact that he still had misgivings about what he was doing.
Hathaway put the clock and the wire into an aluminum briefcase and snapped shut the lid.
'Right, that's me, then.' He swung the briefcase off the table.
'Take care of them,' said Latham.
'I haven't lost an agent yet,' said Hathaway.
'I mean it,' said Latham.
'I know they're not my responsibility, but that doesn't mean I'm washing my hands of them.'
Hathaway looked as if he might say something, but then he nodded curtly and limped out of the room.
Latham turned and looked out of the window. He had a nagging feeling that he'd done something wrong, that in some way he'd betrayed the three individuals who'd been brought to see him. He'd lied to them, there was no doubt about that, but had he betrayed them? And if he had, did it matter in the grand scheme of things? Or did the ends justify the means? He looked at his watch again. It was time to go.
Tina wound down the window and flicked ash out. Some of it blew back into the car and she brushed it off the seat.
'Sorry,' she said to the driver.
He flashed her a grin in the rear-view mirror.
'Doesn't matter to me, miss,' he said.
'First of all, I'm a forty-a-day man myself. Second of all, it's not my car.'
'You work for the police, right?'
'Contract,' said the driver.
'Former army, me. Did my twenty years and then they said my services were no longer required.'
Tina took another long pull on her cigarette.
'Do you want one?' she asked, proffering the pack.
The driver shook his head.
'Not while I'm driving, miss. You know what the cops are like. They did that sales rep a while back for driving with a sandwich on his seat.'
'Yeah. It was in all the papers, wasn't it? You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, right?'
The driver nodded.
'You'd think so. Mind you, army's pretty much the same. It'd all go a lot more smoothly if there was no bloody officers, pardon my language.'
Tina smiled and settled back in the seat.
'You know what that was about, back there?' she asked.
'No, miss. We're mushrooms. Keep us in the dark .. .'
'And feed you bullshit. Yeah, you said.'
'It's got to be important if they're using us, that much I can tell you. Our company isn't cheap.'
Tina closed her eyes and let the breeze from the open window play over her face. She wondered who would contact her. Her handler, Assistant Commissioner Latham had said. No name. No description. Her handler. It had the same echoes as pimp, and Tina had always refused to have anything to do with pimps. When she'd worked the streets, she'd worked them alone, even though a pimp offered protection. So far as Tina was concerned, pimps were leeches, and she'd despised the girls she'd seen handing over their hard-earned money to smooth black guys in big cars with deafening stereo systems. Now Tina was getting her own handler. The more she thought about it, the less comfortable she was with the idea, but when doubts did threaten to overwhelm her, she thought back to Assistant Commissioner Latham, with his ramrod straight back and his firm handshake and his immaculate uniform.
