Jonno raised an eyebrow. “You’ll sign the chit?”
“Yeah.”
“Good enough. What’s the job?”
“Minder. Could be very boring, but if it happens I want the best you have. No qualms, no questions. I don’t want some gung-ho little prat. Give me a man who’s been round the traps a few times. A bloke who can keep his mouth shut and do the invisible shield bit.”
“Pity. I have lots of gung-ho prats. Invisible shield?”
“Yeah.”
“Strenuous stuff?”
Black shook his head and sipped his drink. It burnt like fire in his throat.
“Mr Pope,” Jonno said.
“Christ, he must be sixty!” Black shot back.
“Best close protection man I’ve ever seen. He’s been around and he knows the business. He looks like apensioner and he moves like a ferret.” He stood and walked awkwardly to the filing cabinet against the wall. After pulling a buff folder clear, he passed it to Black. “Most of his jobs go of without a hitch, and when there is a hitch the hitch ends up in a morgue. The last time was that Israeli diplomat. Remember in the foyer of the Guild Hall? That was Mr Pope. No-one saw a thing, not even the cameras. Well, Pope did. Took out the Hezbollah guy from across the room. Two rounds, one between the eyes and the other under the jaw as his head flicked back from the first round...” He paused. “Anyway, he is all we have available.”
“The Israeli was five years ago,” Black argued scanning the files contents.
“He’s retiring next month. Nice quiet job for the last time.”
“Oh fucking magic Jonno,” Black moaned.
“Do you want someone or not?”
“Yes... yes I do. I also want to draw a firearm. For me.”
“Oh dear!” Jonno laughed. “You have been making friends haven’t you?”
He briefed Jonno as best he could on the body and the job and finally handed over a piece of paper with the address in Greece. Nowhere on the paper did it mention the name of the friend she was staying with, and in fact Adrian Black didn’t know. He also said that Pope was to report to him and him alone.
The next morning Black briefed Sir Martin Callows and, as Black left with a travel bag heading for Cambridge, the D D-G called John Burmeister into his office, and briefly covered the gist of Black’s report. “I have had enough of this one John,” he concluded. “I have lost good men. When we find whoever is responsible, don’t bother with Five or Special Branch. Get a couple of those psychopaths downstairs to take care of it. I don’t want to know the details. Understood?”
Burmeister smiled bleakly and nodded just once.
Pope stepped off the ferry gangway awkwardly, an old black raincoat over his left arm, his suitcase in his left hand, a trilby hat firmly on his head. Only someone looking for it would have noticed that his right hand was free. He looked like a retired policeman, or perhaps a retired non-commissioned army officer, with a short grey bristly moustache that ran to exactly the edge of his lip either side. He wore steel rimmed spectacles and beneath the round lenses his brown eyes were flat and hard. Although pressed, his charcoal grey suit was shiny with age at the knees and elbows and his black shoes were polished to a high gloss.
Here on the small wharf he stood out like a sore thumb and he knew it. He would have to get some other kit if it looked like being a long job.
No-one in the service had ever called him anything but Mr Pope. He was the kind of man who was mocked, in his absence, with a certain amount of fear by his younger colleagues, but given a goodly amount of respect by most when actually present. He lived with his sister in a small terrace house in north London and took the Underground to work and read the Daily Mail. In his spare time he worked on a complex network of miniature railway lines that ran through the converted attic, that on Sunday mornings would carry the perfect replica model trains he loved. He knew that the Americans would have taken one look at the attic layout and called him a control freak, but it wasn’t control. It was the detail, the miniature perfection of it all. His sister constantly referred to them as toys and he would fix his flat eyes on her for a second and she would remember they were models.
To the people at Milburn he was just Mr Pope, an old fashioned operative from a time when to be an Acton Fairy was to be respected, a tired old war-horse in a technological age where ethics were dying.
Walking down the waterfront amongst the jostling happy tourists, he turned suddenly up an alley and disappeared from sight.
*
Later that afternoon, as Quayle was reading on the veranda and Holly was washing her hair inside, he looked down the path to see a figure walking steadily up towards the house. It was not one of the locals. He closed the book and sat watching. It was only as the figure got nearer that his eyes narrowed with recognition. Mr Pope, he thought. You are not welcome here, none of you are. Not any more. He stepped up the edge of the low wall and, as Pope took the last steps up the steep pathway, he too with some surprise recognised the other.
“Mr Quayle, isn’t it?” he said.
“What do you want?”
Pope wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. There had been no brief to expect an ex-service man. No-one had said that Titus Quayle was involved. If he was here, then no-one needed a body guard.
“I am looking for Mrs Clements, nee Morton,” he said formally.
“What for?” Quayle asked softly, his suspicion rising.
Pope knew then that Quayle knew nothing of any threat.
“Is this your place, Mr Quayle?”
Quayle nodded.
“So Mrs Clements is your
