If this investigation was called off George Walker was never going to live a normal life and he’d never even know why. And Debbie Shaw, a pretty girl, would never come out of that mental research unit. Even if she did she was always going to be vulnerable. Always under tensions that she didn’t understand that would send her poor brain back to its nightmares. They had been ruthlessly abused, the two of them. And they were totally innocent. Picked almost at random, and methodically turned into zombies. No rewards, no praise, no pensions, no medals, they could be abandoned when they were no longer of use. Abandoned with a slow fuse burning to the bomb inside their brains.
So telling Cartwright was out. At this stage anyway. He didn’t know enough about what the two had been used for and how to convince Cartwright to stand up against Carter. That meant that he had no real choice. He had to find out what had been done. Symons and Petersen were probably the only ones who knew.
He dressed and shaved slowly and worked out the first stage of what he had to do.
The armoury officer placed the two guns side by side on the table. One was a Walther and the other a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed Magnum.
“They’ve both been stripped and re-calibrated, sir.”
Boyd nodded, pursing his lips as he looked down at the two guns. They were both double-actioned and he was used to both models. He would have preferred the Smith and Wesson just because revolvers were more reliable than pistols. But there were too many protuberances that could snag on a pocket or a sleeve. He pointed and said, “I’ll take the PPK.”
“Right, sir. How many rounds do you want?”
“How do they pack them now?”
“Same as before, Mr. Boyd. Packs of fifty and a hundred.”
“I’ll take four fifties and a spare magazine.”
The armourer raised his eyebrows but said nothing as he turned away to the metal shelves. Two hundred rounds was a bit above the odds. Boyd sent him back for a pair of handcuffs.
From Facilities he drew a miniature transceiver with an electric speaker, and from Finance he drew an Amex card and a Barclaycard and £300 in cash. He walked in the drizzle from Century House to the bridge and hailed a taxi. He felt depressed and guilty leaving London and not seeing or phoning Katie. But there would be too much to explain and he needed to keep all the pieces of the jigsaw constantly in his mind or they would slip away again as they had done so often on this operation. Most operations went in sequence. A led to B, and B to C. But this operation was disjointed. Almost nothing that he uncovered seemed to connect to anything he already knew. It was almost as if two, or even three, different operations had got mixed up somewhere. Every ladder seemed to lead to a snake’s head and back to square one.
He bought two drip-dry shirts, some underwear, and half a dozen pairs of socks and stuffed them in the canvas holdall with the gun and the other hardware. At St. Pancras station he booked a sleeper and had a meal at the station hotel. Twice he got as far as putting a coin in the phone-box meter to phone Katie, and twice he reluctantly removed it and walked back to the lounge. An hour later the train rumbled out on its way to Newcastle.
It was six o’clock when the train pulled into the station at Newcastle Central and Boyd walked to the station hotel, bathed and shaved and breakfasted. At eight o’clock he walked to the roundabout and crossed the road to the police station. He showed his card, but the duty Special Branch man was not expected until mid-day.
The CID checked with several estate agents for the ownership of Percy House. The house was in the name of a family trust and was let on long lease to two Canadians. Their references said that they were both doctors from Kingston University, Ontario, on a two-year sabbatical. They were both writing books. One was Anthony Smith and the other was Peter Pardoe, and the lease was joint and several. There had been no complaints about damage from the quarterly inspection and the payments had been prompt and in advance.
The estate agency which had been responsible for the letting sent round the sales details of the house, a set of plans that had been done in 1920, and a couple of up-to-date photographs of the front of the house. When he saw the size of the house and grounds Boyd was sure that there would be servants. CID phoned the local constable who confirmed that a married couple lived in a converted outbuilding about fifty yards from the house. Their name was Chatton and they had worked at the house for ten years. He sent out to the bookshop for a six inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map covering Craster, and the three adjoining sheets.
He waited until noon but the Special Branch man hadn’t shown up and Boyd walked down to Neville Street and hired a Rover 3500. At the supermarket at Gosforth he bought several packs of long-life milk, coffee, cheese, bread, butter, and half a dozen tins of pressed meat. A tin-opener and a knife, a razor, blades, shaving foam and a Camping Gaz heater completed his purchases.
An hour later he stopped to check the map, and a mile
