‘Doesn’t seem all that bothered,’ Vosse observed, wondering why, at the very least, Pavkov hadn’t texted the Iranians to warn them that the police knew what had happened to Kite. ‘Are you sure he didn’t meet someone on the Tube? Pass a message in Tesco? Send a WhatsApp on a burner phone we know nothing about?’
‘Hundred per cent, Bob,’ said Tess, who was by then sitting on a bench in a park overlooked by the flat, waiting for Matt Tomkins to take over. ‘Never left our sight. Didn’t talk to anyone, not even a checkout girl.’
Another four hours went by before Zoltan Pavkov finally contacted the Iranians. In that time, Swinburn and Dean had gone home, Matt Tomkins had come on shift and the Serb had closed the lid on his laptop, bringing an end to any possibility that Vosse would be able to continue to watch what he was doing.
‘I think he’s gone to bed, sir,’ Tomkins observed just before one o’clock in the morning. ‘Heard the toilet flushing five minutes ago, sound of someone brushing his teeth. Lights have been switched off in the kitchen and living room. Feels like he’s called it a day.’
‘Must have,’ said Vosse wistfully. Tomkins wondered why he sounded disappointed. Surely this was the boss’s chance to go home and get a few hours’ sleep? ‘All right then. Keep your eyes peeled. Call me if anything changes. I’m not going home, I’ll sleep here in Acton. Eve and Villanelle will be there at seven to see what comes next.’
It was only when Vosse had hung up that Tomkins understood the nature of the boss’s frustration: he had been hoping that Zoltan would slip up and lead him straight to the Iranians. That seemed naive. A MOIS team weren’t going to allow a man like Pavkov to make such a basic mistake. No, if Five were going to find Lachlan Kite, they were going to have to do it the hard way. That meant Tomkins sitting on his arse in the driving seat of a banged-up Ford Mondeo for the next nine hours while everyone else on the team got some precious sleep. Tomkins felt the injustice of his predicament as a personal slight. What the hell had he done to merit working the night shift? Why was it always Cara who got the sweet gigs – dressing up and going to the funeral – while he was forced to sit around and wait and pick up the dregs of the operation? It wasn’t even as if Zoltan was particularly useful to them. Tomkins was 99 per cent certain that the Iranians were going to kill Kite. On that basis, everything he did for the next nine hours – the next nine days, the next nine months – would likely be a complete waste of his time.
He sat back and looked down at the tablet on the passenger seat. If Pavkov made a call or sent a text, the screen would let him know. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t – and Tomkins didn’t expect it to. He was wearing AirPods which picked up sound on the microphones inside the flat; they also allowed him to answer incoming calls from Vosse. The earpieces left a permanent low static hiss in Tomkins’s ears, as well as occasional clicks and snaps of feedback, all of which intensified his annoyance and frustration. While Cara slept a soundless sleep less than two miles away in Hackney Marshes, Tomkins was getting cramp in a stakeout Mondeo with no music to listen to and a Serbian migrant across the street more likely to invite his neighbours round for an all-night barbecue than he was to get on the phone and contact the men who had kidnapped Lachlan Kite.
Tomkins looked up at Zoltan’s one-bedroom flat on the second floor of the rundown, Brutalist residential block that the Serbian called home. In a way that he couldn’t fully explain to himself, because he had read a lot of books and talked to a lot of intelligent, liberal people, Matt Tomkins didn’t like Serbians. When he had first heard the name ‘Zoltan Pavkov’ from Vosse that afternoon, he had instantly felt a mixture of threat and resentment. It was the same with Bulgarians or Albanians or Romanians: Tomkins’s guilty secret was that he didn’t like any of them, male or female, young or old. In the same way that his father thought the country was full and there were too many foreigners clogging it up, Tomkins didn’t think that anything good or constructive could come from allowing too many more Serbians or Albanians or Romanians to settle in the United Kingdom. He realised that it was wrong to think and feel this way – that it was actually illegal to think and feel this way – but he couldn’t help himself. He would be fired from MI5 if anyone ever found out. Tomkins wasn’t proud of the fact that he resented men like Zoltan Pavkov for
