‘Don’t fucking lose him, Cagney. I don’t have a fix on whatever phone he’s using. There are no other eyes on this except yours. It’s old school. No triangulation.’
‘I understand that,’ Tomkins replied.
He was determined to succeed – to follow Zoltan discreetly, to work out where he was going, to lead Vosse to the Iranians – but at the same time Tomkins was overcome by self-doubt. He knew that he didn’t yet possess the skill to tail a moving car without giving himself away. Pavkov was acting in a clandestine manner. He was finally aware of a threat from surveillance. Why else go to the trouble of keeping the lights off inside his bedsit and slipping out in the dead of night with a carrier bag containing who knows what?
‘Can you hear that, sir?’
The mikes in the Fiat had caught the sound of Pavkov rustling around in the bag. Tomkins lowered the volume on the AirPods to stop them deafening his eardrums. He frowned as he concentrated on the noises, trying to pick out what was happening.
‘I can hear it,’ said Vosse. More rustling of plastic, then the noise of something hard banging against a pane of glass. ‘What can you see?’
It was against all protocol to sit inside a stationary surveillance vehicle and to train a set of binoculars on a target, but Tomkins did exactly that. He needed an advantage.
‘He’s doing something to the dashboard,’ he told Vosse, adjusting the focus.
‘Fuck. Taking out the microphone?’
‘Don’t know, sir. Unclear.’
The banging and the clattering and the general rustle of plastic continued. Tomkins saw the Serbian repeatedly reach forward towards the windscreen, as if he was trying to attach or remove a sticker from the glass.
‘Wait. I’ve got it.’
He again adjusted the focus and Zoltan’s head became crystal clear. The Serb had left the lights on inside the Fiat to help him carry out whatever task he was trying to complete. That was when Tomkins saw the pale blue glow on the screen of a TomTom. Pavkov was busily attaching it to the windscreen.
‘I think it’s a satnav, sir.’
‘Say that again.’
‘An old-fashioned TomTom. A GPS. He doesn’t have a smartphone so he’s using it for directions.’
‘Good for him,’ said Vosse. ‘But where the fuck is he going? Doesn’t help us if he’s navigating by the stars or being drawn in by smoke signal. We still don’t know his destination.’
Tomkins started the engine on the Ford Mondeo. He had only passed his test eighteen months earlier and wasn’t a particularly experienced driver. He had lived in London for the past four years and went everywhere on public transport. If Pavkov ran a red light or got away from him on a dual carriageway, Tomkins didn’t trust himself to be able to keep up.
‘He’s pulling out, sir,’ he told Vosse, leaving his headlights off for as long as possible so that Zoltan wouldn’t see them flare in his rear-view mirror. ‘Maybe Lacey could help? You could wake her up.’
‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ said Vosse. ‘This thing will be over in less than ten minutes. You just stay on his tail, son. You don’t let that bastard out of your sight.’
14
Kite had fallen asleep in his blacked-out cell.
He was dreaming of Martha Raine when he heard the key turning in the lock. He woke in the darkness to Isobel’s face staring at him from across the pillow, the mirage disrupted by a burst of light from an opened door.
‘Time to get up,’ Torabi shouted. He was standing next to Strawson. ‘WHO WAS BILLY PEELE?’
‘What?’ said Kite, sitting up. He was sweating and the lights had gone out. He said: ‘Torabi?’ into the room but there was nobody there.
Kite had dreamed it all: Martha and Isobel, Strawson and Torabi, twisting through his unconscious mind like a helix. He reached down for the plastic bottle and drank some water. He had no idea of the time, no idea how long he had been asleep. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He could still hear Torabi’s voice in the fever dream:
Who was Billy Peele?
He was my teacher, but he was more than a teacher.
He was the brother I craved, yet he was not my brother.
He was a father when I had no father. He was my guide and instructor – and every young man needs a mentor.
Billy Peele was everything to me.
* * *
Three days have passed since Xavier has issued Kite with his seemingly innocuous invitation to spend part of the summer holidays at his father’s house in Mougins.
The two friends are in a low-roofed, prefabricated Alford classroom at the edge of the school campus, close enough to the racquets building to hear the exhilarating metallic contact of the ball as it echoes and strikes against the stone walls of the court. It is a piercingly clear February morning, nine boys in tailcoats awaiting the start of Double History with William ‘Billy’ Peele. Cosmo de Paul, who has already taken the Oxbridge exam and requires only two E grades at A level to secure his place, is among them. De Paul is wearing Pop trousers and a Salvador Dalí waistcoat purchased for him by his mother in honour of the recently deceased Catalan surrealist. Leander Saltash, soon to be Kite’s opening partner in the cricket first XI, is also in the room, as is Kite’s friend, Desmond Elkins, who will be killed fighting for the SAS in Afghanistan fourteen years later.
Peele, as always, is late. The boys, all approaching or past their eighteenth birthdays, are too old to be flicking ink or throwing balls of paper around the classroom. Instead they pass the time boasting about the girls they have snogged at a recent Gatecrasher Ball and the quantities of ‘snakebite’ they consumed at the weekend in ‘Tap’, the school pub in which boys are permitted to drink alcohol. At ten to twelve, there is the familiar approaching squeak of Peele’s
