“Not according to the doctor he isn’t. And you were trying to use him anyway.”
“At a distance,” Callows qualified.
“Run him,” Tansey-Williams said with finality.
At last, Callows relented. “I’ll make John Burmeister his controller.”
“Not Burmeister. Look in the files. There’s no love lost between ‘em. Berlin in ‘81.”
“I know about Berlin,” Callows said protectively. “But everyone gets one mistake, surely?”
“Not with Quayle, it seems. I will be recalling Hugh Cockburn from Prague. He and Quayle go way back. Anyone gets him onside again, it will be Cockburn…”
*
Quayle had watched the policemen round the house for half a day now, and the pattern seemed set. One constable in the garden walking an irregular patrol round the rear of the small garden shed and back up the narrow driveway around Black’s car. There was a Panda parked up the street with two others, but they hadn’t moved all morning, sitting in the car, allowing a second passing patrol car to drop them sandwiches just before noon. A tall dark-haired woman had stepped from the front door and walked up the street midmorning, one of the pair in the car stepping out and escorting her up to the grocery store on the corner. What Quayle noticed was that he hadn’t been carrying her bag back. His hands had been in the jacket pockets.
Armed police were still a rarity in Britain, and those walking with their hands close to their guns even rarer. Something must have happened since the first hit. He watched for another hour, then climbed back out over the roof of the empty house and walked down to the public house on the main road where he had left the car.
Visiting hours at the hospital were varied, but few visitors were admitted after eight at night. He would wait until then. Driving down to the high street, he left the car in a commercial car park and walked until he found a stationer’s shop. There, in amongst the cards and magazines and road maps, he found a lined pad, two different coloured pens, and a small pad of yellow sticky Post It notes. Stopping in a another small shop that had pre-wrapped sandwiches and pies in a warmer, he bought the least offensive looking plastic offering and a can of something that claimed to be real orange juice. He then sat in the car, and began to jot notes on the lined page of the pad, then similar references on the Post It notes, which he stuck above and below a centre line with dates, rather like a critical path analysis. Every now and then he stopped jotting, to lift up the can and drink, the sandwich dry and deserted on the seat beside him.
He worked until he needed the interior light to see, positioning the pieces of the puzzle as best he could – both on the paper and in his mind – and then, finally grunting in frustration, he put the pad face down on the seat and rubbed his eyes tiredly. Twenty minutes later, he was in the car park of the hospital, and soon he was walking through the front door, his new identity in his pocket. He took the lift, smiling dryly at the staff as they entered, and exited on the fifth floor, his tired looking overcoat and sensible black shoes identifying him as a policeman to anyone who bothered to look.
Down the corridor, sitting outside a door trying to look alert, was a real police officer, a second chair beside him unoccupied. Quayle ambled down toward him, pulling a warrant card from his pocket. He had had it for some years, but the design hadn’t changed that much and he knew it would work.
Acting bored, he held it up to the seated officer, who was rising putting his cap on.
“Go get a cuppa, son. I’ll be inside for half an hour or so.”
The officer looked puzzled.
“No visitors was what I was told.”
“I’m not a bloody visitor. I’m Special Branch. Now, be a good boy and go get a cuppa or something. I don’t want to be disturbed. Call your nick if you like...” Quayle pushed past him, knowing, like a confidence man, that the permission to call his station would be enough to prevent him doing it.
“No, that should be OK, sir,” the constable said.
Quayle just grunted and pushed the door open, silently closing it behind him.
Inside, Black sat up in the bed, his face still heavily bandaged.
“That you, nurse?” he asked. Staff usually announced who they were on entering. There were even some whose footsteps he already recognised.
“No,” Quayle said, “it’s not.”
The voice made every muscle in Black’s body turn rigid. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” he asked, pulling himself up awkwardly.
“Don’t shout out,” Quayle began. “Mr Pope asked me to give you a message.”
“Pope? He’s... Oh, my God! Quayle, you’re Titus Quayle!”
“I am. How are the eyes?”
Black was taken aback by the question. “No news is good news. What do you want?”
“Half of Europe is after me. I don’t like it much. I want to know what you know about it. I need your help.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes,” Quayle countered. “Just like that.”
“I told ‘em you didn’t do it,” Black said. “Quayle, I’m out of it now.”
“I didn’t figure you for a loser. Not the way Pope spoke of you…”
“Fuck you! Want to know the problem? Try taking my dog for a walk. Be a bit messy, Quayle! Dragging his guts around outside his body and with a cut throat. They said my wife’s next. And I don’t have any fucking eyes, so I can’t fucking see ‘em coming. OK?”
“No,” said Quayle, understanding the police presence round Black’s home. “But I can. I was at your house today. You wife is better protected than the PM.”
“I know she is,” Black snapped.
“So help me. No-one will know.”
“Why?”
“Someone threw acid in your face. That’s tough, but stop lying there feeling sorry for yourself. You
