At that moment, Meryl hated them.
"Do you hear everything? What I say to Frank, what he says to me, are you listening? Is that how you spend your days?"
She could hear the rising pitch of her own voice. Paget wiped old crumbs from his mouth and looked away from her. Rankin passed her Stephen's tractor. She snatched it. To her, they were huge, dark shapes in the baggy boiler suits with the big vests over their chests. They were older than her, older than Frank, and they seemed not to care. Standing at the door before they'd known she was there, she'd seen one of them grin at the smooth reassurance being dished out to Frank.
"You get a big laugh out of what we say. Do you snigger when you hear us in bed? Not much noise when we're in bed, is there?"
Her control was gone. Meryl was over the edge. They would think her hysterical, stupid, or just a woman. They would wonder why she didn't just shut up, start the ironing, do the dusting, make the beds. She squeezed the tractor in her hand, tighter, hurting herself. Nobody told her anything. The wheels fell off the tractor. When any of them talked to Frank, and she came close, they stopped, and Frank cut short what they'd said. She was not included, not need-to-know, just a woman who was a nuisance.
"How long are you here? For ever? Is that my life, for ever, having you listening?"
The short one, Paget, said quietly, "We're here, Mrs. Perry, till Wednesday night. That's the end of our shift."
The tall one, Rankin, said gently, "Thursday morning's a lieu day, Mrs. Perry, then we start our long weekend."
"Actually, Mrs. Perry, we'll have clocked up twenty-eight hours overtime in the week, so they won't mess with our long weekend."
"Then we're on the range for a day not an assessment, just practice."
"After that, we might come back and we might not. We're always the last to be told where we're going…"
Rankin took the tractor from her then crouched to pick up the wheels. The tears were filling her eyes. She thought they were indifferent as to whether they came back to this hut, this house, her life, or were assigned to another location. Rankin had the tractor wheels back under the toy's body and Paget passed him a small pair of pliers. She was just a makeweight woman who had lost control. She turned and leaned against the wall of the hut, her eyes closed to pinch out the tears. When she opened her eyes, the picture was in front of her three or four inches from her face. It was hazy, a grey-white image of the bottom fence of her garden, the apple tree and the sand pit Frank had built for Stephen. The shape of the man they sought stood out and the silhouette of the rifle.
Her voice was brittle, fractured.
"What'll you do when you drive away from us for your long weekend?"
"We were thinking of going fishing, Mrs. Perry, off the south coast."
"You get a good rate on a boat this time of year, Mrs. Perry."
Paget smiled. Rankin gave her back the repaired tractor.
She smeared the tears off her face.
"Will you stand in front of us, before you go fishing, in front of Frank and Stephen and me?"
Rankin said, "I won't lie to you, Mrs. Perry. We're not bullet-catchers. I don't expect to get killed on the say-so of a fat-cat bureaucrat sitting in a safe London office. If the opposition, him…" He gestured harshly towards the picture Sellotaped to the wall. '… if he wants to die for his country then I'll willingly help him along, but I don't aim to go with him. If he wants to end up a martyr, famous for five minutes, that's his choice. I'm here to do the best that's possible, and Joe is, and that's as far as it goes. If you don't like it then you should get your suitcase down off the top of the wardrobe… That's the truth, Mrs. Perry, and I'm sorry no one told it you before."
"Thank you."
She turned for the door. The cloud had covered the sun and her home; what was precious to her seemed both drearily mundane and terrifyingly dangerous. She held the door-handle for a moment to steady herself.
It was Joe Paget who called to her.
"I'd like to say something, Mrs. Perry. We didn't do well last night, but we learn. It won't be like that again. We'll kill him if he comes back, and that's not just talk." He paused.
"You should get back in the house and make yourself a fine pot of tea. I don't know him, or anything about him, but I'll shoot him, or Dave will. You can depend on that, we'll kill him."
The husband stared belligerently at the sofa as Cathy Parker wrote briskly in her notebook.
His wife spoke: "I wouldn't know anything about her, except that when my aunt died I had the job of sorting through her papers. My uncle had passed on three years earlier. It was a sort of surprise to find any reference to my cousin, but she'd written two or three times a year to her mother, my aunt. I say it was a surprise because my uncle never spoke of Edith, it was like she didn't exist. My uncle was an engineer with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation, based in Abadan. I think they lived pretty well, servants, a good villa, all that. He just couldn't accept that his nineteen-year-old daughter should fall for and want to marry a local. Ali Hossein was a medical student in his early twenties. My uncle did all he could to break the relationship and couldn't, and gave up on Edith. He didn't go to the wedding and forbade my aunt to go. He just cut her off, pretended there had never been a daughter, an only child. I don't think he ever knew that my aunt kept in touch with her…"
She was a neat, fussy woman. On her lap were old letters and a small bundle of photographs held together by a frayed elastic band.
"It was a traditional Muslim wedding. She must have felt very alone with just Ali's relations and friends. Her letters, over the years, were sent to a post office near where my uncle and aunt lived in their retirement, up north, and my aunt collected them. It was a sad little bit of subterfuge but necessary because my uncle's hostility never lessened, not till the day he died. The letters stopped coming in 1984 and my aunt, in the following months, badgered the Foreign Office to find out why. She made up excuses to be away for a whole day, and went to London and nagged the diplomats for information. Eventually they told her that Edith had been killed in a rocket attack in Tehran, and she never told my uncle. But it's their son, Edith's and Ali's boy, that you want to know about?"
Cathy Parker was quiet. It was the photographs she had come for, but it was her way never to appear eager. She let her informant talk.
"He was called Vahid. I think Edith had a sense of guilt about the way she and Ali brought him up. Ali was involved in dangerous politics, he was even arrested and beaten by the secret police, and Edith supported him to the hilt. The child, Vahid, was left to himself, and it wasn't a surprise that he became a tear away a street hooligan. He was involved in demonstrations, in fighting with the police. Myself, I'd have been horrified, but Edith wrote of her pride in the boy's determination. After the revolution, when that awful man, you know, the Ayatollah, came back and there were all the executions, public hangings and shootings, the boy went into the military and was sent away to the war with Iraq. He was at the front line when Edith and her husband were killed by the rocket."
Behind their heads Cathy Parker could see an ordered, well-tended small garden. Their bungalow was on the outskirts of a small village west of Chard in Somerset. She thought how difficult it would have been for this elderly woman, reading the letters, to understand the world of revolutionary Iran, but she made no show of sympathy.
"I wrote to him, after I'd gone through the letters, to tell him there were blood relations alive in England, but the only address I knew of was the house where his parents had been killed. It was pretty silly, the house would have been destroyed by the rocket, and I never had a reply. So, why have you come from London and why is the Security Service interested in Edith's boy? You're not going to tell me, are you?… He's a nice-looking lad well, he was a nice looking lad in the last photograph, but that was taken a long time ago. He'd be thirty-seven now. Would you like to see the photographs?"
The bundle was passed to Cathy Parker. She flipped through them, feigning indifference. They were what a daughter would have sent to her mother. It was the usual progression: a baby, a toddler, a child in school clothes, at a picnic and kicking a football, a teenager. Only the last two pictures interested her: a young man holding a Kalashnikov rifle and posing with others in ill-fitting fatigues at a roadblock, and the mature man he'd become sitting hunched and dead-eyed in the front of a small boat with water and reed-banks behind. She didn't ask, just put the last two photographs into her handbag.
"A good-looking boy, yes?"
Cathy made her excuses. She had seen the dead, aged and cold eyes of young men in Ireland, and seen the misery they could inflict. She thanked Vahid Hossein's aunt for the photographs that might help to kill him.
Andy Chalmers was driven to Fort William in Mr. Gabriel Fenton's Range Rover.
He sat, truculent and quiet, in the front seat, with the dogs behind him. The light was going down to the west of the big mountains and the sea loch as they approached the station.
"Don't take any shit from them, Andy. I've said it before and I'll say it again do it your way and the way you know. They'll be superior and they'll treat you like dirt, but don't take it. You're there at Mr. Harry's invitation, there because you're bloody good. You may be a kid but you're the best stalker and tracker between here and Lochinver, the best I've ever seen and my brother knows that. Don't let me down. There'll be plenty there who'll want you to fall on your face in the mud, and fail, and you're going to disappoint them. I thought I was useful, in the Radfan up from Aden, but I hadn't a half of the skill you're blessed with. Mr. Harry's out on a limb for you, that's his degree of trust. Take care, Andy. Find this bastard and if you bring me back his ears then I'll have them mounted and hung in the hallway that's a joke, you understand, a joke…"
He trailed, from the Range Rover, behind his estate owner into the station and he jerked his dogs to heel. It would be the first time in Andy Chalmers's life that he had left the mountains that were his home. Mr. Gabriel Fenton collected the first-class ticket, return, and the sleeper reservation, pointed through the doorway to the waiting train, cuffed him cheerfully on the arm and left him. Chalmers walked towards the platform and heaved the dogs after him, ignoring the scowl of the attendant and the amusement of other passengers, before picking up his dogs and climbing on board.
"Please, Mr. Fenton, you have to listen to me. I've just come from that house. Believe me, it's horrendous in there. We've created a monster, and I'm not overstating the case here…"
There was a secure line in the newly created crisis centre at the police station in the town of Halesworth, twelve miles inland from the village. Down the line Fenton told Geoff Markham he was suffering an attack of melodrama, should pull himself together.
"You're not here. If you were here then you'd understand. Let me tell you, it's dark, there's hardly a light on, they're bouncing round off their furniture. She's the problem. Sometimes it's hysterical weeping, sometimes it's just sitting, withdrawn. She's traumatized. He'll follow her, he thinks he's going to lose her he's got the guilt bad, keeps saying it's all his fault. It'll be worse in the morning because the kid doesn't have a school to go to. They're near to quitting. We're crucifying this family, and he's close to demanding a safe-house, a new identity."
Fenton told Geoff Markham that his job, down there, was to keep Frank Perry in place.
"That may seem reasonable enough in London, Mr. Fenton, but viewed from where I've been today it seems poorly informed rubbish. I am trying to stay calm, of course I am. What do you suggest I do? Do I tell him what use was made, in Iran, of the information he provided, how much blood there is on his hands? Do I tell him about a tethered goat? That'll really get to him, Mr. Fenton, too right… I'm not losing it, Mr. Fenton, I merely try to explain the situation confronting me."
Fenton told Markham that policy dictated Frank Perry should stay there.
"What do I do? Lock him in the bloody broom cupboard?"
Fenton told him to get Perry's friends in and get the bottles out.
"If you only listened to me, Mr. Fenton. The friends have all quit the ship, they're jumping off the decks. All right, most of their friends. I'm planning to meet the vicar in the morning, seemed a decent man. I thought if the village saw the vicar with him that might spark some conscience…"
Fenton told him to take the Perrys out for the evening, splash out on a smart meal, no expense spared, to sweet-talk them and relax them.
"I'll do that, Mr. Fenton, I'll book a table for tonight for them and a busload of police should be a really jolly evening. I'm sorry to have troubled you at home… Maybe we can find a restaurant that serves boiled goat."
Donna should have stayed the extra year at school. At eighteen she was already as much on the shelf as the tins of beans, sweet corn and quick-cook curries that she stacked at the supermarket in the town. She was trapped and she knew it. She wrote in a child's laborious hand for jobs in hair salons and with beauticians, but most of her letters were ignored and a few were rejected in three lines. She was unskilled and unqualified. In the village, only Meryl Perry had time for her and gave her the old magazines with which she could dream of smart salons and bright beauty shops where rich women would come to her for advice, gossip about their private lives and offer her respect. Only the Perrys cared enough to fuel the dream, and she broke the boredom of home, and her parents, for ever sitting in front of the blaring television, with little pockets of relief when she stayed with Stephen while Frank and Meryl were out for an evening. They picked her up, they dropped her back, they gave her a small sense of importance.
He came in through the door, murmured his request to Davies, took a big breath and strode into the kitchen.
Markham said brightly, "I think we need an evening out, Frank. It's time for a splash on my masters' expenses, to cheer ourselves up."
Sausages were frying on the stove. The packet of instant mashed potato was ready at the side. Perry looked at him, astonished.
"We're going out, enough of being shut up in here. We're going out to drink a restaurant dry, to murder their menu. No argument, no hesitation, and I'm picking up the tab."
Perry asked, hesitant, "Where are we going at this time on a Sunday night, who'll have us?"
"We leave that to Bill. He's the expert, spends half his time getting his principals into restaurants that say they're full." He tried to laugh.
Meryl asked, flat-voiced, "Who's going to look after Stephen?"
He turned and saw her blank, reddened eyes.
"I'm sure you've a regular babysitter. Let's get a call to her, we'll collect. Don't you worry about the detail, Mrs. Perry, just get yourself ready and let us take the strain."
Perry said, "I'm not sure-' "Yes, you are, Mr. Perry. It's what's going to happen."
Meryl said, "I don't know that I want to go out."
"Yes, you do, Mrs. Perry. It's what's best."
He manipulated them, they danced for him. He had boasted to the man and woman at the bank that he was prepared to use people in the interests of policy and here he was, doing it. Meryl Perry was lifting the frying pan off the cooker and muttering that the sausages would do for tomorrow, and that she'd already fed Stephen. Perry was at the telephone and scanning the list above it for Donna's number.
Bill Davies leaned through the doorway and said the local police had given him the name of a place but it was twenty-two miles away and they'd have to shift themselves. He'd called the restaurant and he'd organized people to check it out. Markham thought she looked so cudgelled, so damned helpless. He asked her gently if she wanted to change, and wished that Harry bloody Fenton were here to see her. Meryl went out and he heard her deadened step up the stairs.
"Do you have a girl, Frank, to come in?"
"Thick as two planks, but decent and loyal Meryl's been great to her and she's fond of Stephen." Perry lifted the phone and dialled.
Two cars were pulling up outside Blake coming to take over inside the house and the change of shift for the hut. Markham drew a sigh of relief: at least he had achieved something. His mind flipped back to London: the letter would be at his flat in the morning, with the terms of employment. He would ring Vicky later if they survived the meal and ask her to go round and collect it, to read it to him. Once he'd resigned they would boot him out of Thames House so fast his feet wouldn't touch the ground. How would it be, a year later, ten years later, when he walked down the Embankment and went past the bullet-proof windows and the concrete bollards? Would he feel fulfilled, streaming with the commuter hordes into the City? He had played God before, with agents' lives, and was playing God now. He wondered how it would be playing God with savers' investment accounts and pension holdings. If he hadn't met Vicky, he would know sweet nothing about investments and pensions. He heard the anger in Frank Perry's voice.
"What do you mean, you're not coming? Is it you can't come, or won't? It's nothing to do with your father, nothing to do with anyone but yourself. Listen here, we've been damn good to you. We're about the only bloody people in this place who have been. I thought better of you."
Perry's hand trembled as he tried to return the telephone to the wall-fitting. Then, he took a pen and scratched out Donna's name and number from the list on the wall. Over his shoulder, Markham could see the list. Donna was inked out along with most of the others. There were pitifully few names and numbers left unscathed.
At the kitchen door, Bill Davies took the radio away from his face.
"Dave Paget and Joe Rankin will stay on. They've had kids themselves, God help the poor blighters. They can do child-minding.
Meryl came down the stairs.
If her eyes hadn't been red and puffed, Markham thought, she would have looked marvelous. The poor damn woman had made the effort. He noticed Bill Davies take her hand and murmur something in her ear, but he didn't catch what was said. When they'd gathered in the hall, the detective told Paget and Rankin that there were sausages and mashed potato on the stove for their supper. The two men, in their boiler suits and vests, with their pistols hanging from their waists, thanked him balefully.
Blake came through the front door, carrying five fire extinguishers. He dumped them down noisily, then went to the car again, retrieved a heavyweight blanket from the boot with a box of gas grenades, and staggered back into the house. Markham thought it predictable that there should be more fire extinguishers inside, one for each room; the additional bullet- and shrapnel-proof blanket was for draping over a chair to make a wider protective barrier; the gas grenades were standard. But he wished that Meryl Perry hadn't seen them.
She asked where Donna was, and was told.
She wasn't given time to think about it. She was made to run to the open car door, her heels clattering down the path. There was an escort vehicle in front and another behind. Their front windows were down and Markham could see the machine-guns. Well done, Harry Fenton, another great idea. As he helped to hustle her through the gate and pitch her into the car, he thought it was all, already, unravelling. Bill Davies came after him and seemed to be shielding Perry.
Markham drove. Beside him, the detective sat awkwardly because he'd twisted his body so that his hand could rest free on the pistol in his waist holster. Off for a night out with friends well done, Harry bloody Fenton.
The helicopter had been over at last light, and Vabid Hossein had gone into the water at the first sound of its approach. Long after it had disappeared he had returned to the marsh shore. He lay in the darkness in the depth of the cover.
The policemen who watched the marsh, from the village side, on the higher ground of Hoist Covert and East Sheep Walk, had been replaced by fresh men, and he had noted their positions.
The harrier was close to him but he could not see it, could only hear its movements as it scratched in the ground for the last scraps of meat.
The girl had come to the rendezvous point in the late afternoon, bringing food and ointments for the bruising. She had been withdrawn, subdued. When he had told her what she should do the next day, she hadn't argued.
He was curled up on his side in the bramble thicket to keep the weight of his body off the bruising. The skin was bared at his waist and hip, and he could feel the soothing cool of the ointments. He'd thought she wanted to smooth on the ointments herself and he'd refused her. He could not allow himself to be dependent on a woman. He heard the sounds of the bird and tried to shut from his memory the softness of her fingers, seeking instead to recall the sight and touch and feel of Barzin, who was alone in their bed in the house at Jamaran… Each time he summoned the image of her and the touch of her hands, the image dissolved and was replaced always it was her fingers, the girl's… He called to the bird.
The bird was his truest friend, and would not corrupt him. It did not challenge him, was his equal. His love of it did not make him weak.
When it was finished and he was home, he would never talk to Barzin about the bird. She would not understand. He was alone; he was in darkness; he was sodden wet from immersing himself in the water, sucking his air through the reed tube he had fashioned, when the helicopter had circled overhead. He spoke soft, gentle words to the bird, hushed so as not to frighten it, told it what he was planning to do.
Vahid Hossein shifted slightly, so that he could reach out with his hand beyond the tangle of thorns. The bird pecked at it as if he might have held a last piece of rabbit flesh… A lack of patience had caused him to make mistakes: trying to break into the house without sufficient preparation; taking the assault rifle… He criticized the bird for its laziness it should hunt, it was strong enough now… He should have taken the rocket launcher, it would be the RPG-7 next time, he told the bird. His fingers found the neck and crown of the bird's head and smoothed the silky feathers. He hoped it would hunt in the dawn light and that he would see its power and beauty as it dived to kill.
He trusted the bird as his friend.
They sat at a corner table.
Frank Perry was drunk.
"What did I do?"
The restaurant had cleared, and he had taken on a drunk's aggression.
"Will some bugger tell me what I did?"
The principal was in the angle of the corner, his wife was to the right of him and the detective to the left, with a clear view to the door. Markham had his back to the room. The evening was a disaster, he thought, of titanic proportions.
Perry snatched at the bottle and poured again.
"I've the bloody right to know what I did."
One of the cars was out at the front with its driver, but its passenger sat with his gun across his knees close to the glass door. The other car was at the rear of the car-park, covering the outer entrance to the kitchens. A policeman was sitting by the swing doors through which the waiters had brought the French food. The customers who had been there when the late party had stampeded in, seven of them, at three tables, had stuffed themselves, gulped their drinks, paid up and were long gone.
Perry swilled the wine, the most expensive on the list. Drops dribbled from his mouth and ran on his jaw.
"Why can't I be told what I did? Why won't any bastard tell me?"
Meryl hadn't spoken a word through the meal. Twice, after wiping her lips with the napkin, she had dabbed her eyes. The detective's contribution had been to ask for various condiments to be passed him. The waiters had brought the coffee and retreated to the kitchen.
Frank Perry belted his hand on the table.
"Right, no one tells me, then we're off. We get the hell out and that's that, end of story."
The principal was trying to push back his chair but he was wedged in the corner. Then he tried to shove the table forward, driving it into Markham's stomach. Bill Davies was snapping his fingers at the policemen by the main door and the kitchen swing doors, and they were adjusting the straps that held their machine-guns and mouthing into their microphones… Geoff Markham thought how it would be on the telephone that night to Harry Fenton. He'd failed, the principal was running. The failure would be the marque to end his career at Thames House. However many years he lived, decades, he would be dogged by that failure… He took out his wallet and extracted a credit card. The owner came hurrying God, he'd be glad to see the back of them and took it. He straightened his tie, then rammed the table away from him, trapped the man.
"You want to know?"
"I've the bloody right to know!"
The bill was waved under his nose. It must have been prepared and ready. Without checking it, he scrawled his signature on the docket and took back the card. He waved the owner away, gestured for him to retreat and give them space.
"What did I do?"
There was at Thames House, and it would be the same at the bank, a culture against honesty. No advancement ever came from telling it as it was. He was hemmed in at work, and it would be the same in the future, by men and women who weighed their words for fear of giving offence. It had been the same at home, and the same at university. He had drunk nothing but carbonated water, he was utterly sober. For the first time in his life, Geoff Markham thought the moment had come for sheer honesty, the whole truth.
He spoke quietly, "You were a second-rate salesman. You were a grubby little creature on the make. You were into illegality, fraudulently writing out false export declarations for Customs and Excise. You were greedy, so avaricious for the commissions you were getting that the chasing of the money became more important to you than that your wife was screwing on the side and your marriage was gone-' Perry swung a wayward fist at him and missed the target, Markham's chin, but hit the bottle's neck and toppled it.
"You were on a fast ride and going nowhere, but the greed held you and you wouldn't back off. To hell with the wife opening her legs, the money kept rolling in, and then, one day, comes the morning after, the dawn hangover, and there's a call from a lady and most persuasively she's asking for a meeting. You thought you were in control until you sat down with Penny Flowers. Do you remember her, Frank? I hope you do, because where you are now is down to her. You dangled from her little finger…"
In the background romantic piano music played serenely. The wine stained a path across the tablecloth from the toppled bottle.
"She was asking you for a little bit of help and if you didn't care to do so, she was offering you a big bit of a prison sentence, like seven years and, of course, you chose to help. When you walked away from that first meeting with Penny Flowers you'd have thought you could handle it, without breaking sweat, and you were wrong. She's a tough bitch, but you know that now. You don't get clear of Penny Flowers's claws. It starts easily enough, always does. It's the classic way, Mr. Perry, of agent handling. Did she tell you that she liked you, that you were really important? She would have regarded you as cheap dross, because that's the way all controllers regard all agents."
The wine stain reached the edge of the table and the first drip fell into Meryl's lap.
"At first, it would have been sketch-maps of the plant, then character profiles of the prime personalities. After that, it's documents, later it's photographs with a supplied camera. Cheap dross you may be, but not an idiot. You understand now that you're into espionage, and you know the penalty in Iran for espionage. The sweat's started. The sweat becomes colder each time you fly there, and you're looking over your shoulder because it only takes one mistake to alert the security there. Each night in your hotel room, you'd have wondered whether you'd made that mistake. But you couldn't shake clear of Penny Flowers, and there was always one more trip back, always one more question she wanted answered…"
Frank Perry stared into Geoff Markham's face, and in his eyes was the fear, as if he lived it again.
"You told Penny Flowers, just happened to mention it, that they'd changed the schedule for your next meeting, brought it forward a week she'd not have looked that interested, it's a handler's skill never to seem interested in what an agent says but she'd have probed deeper, done it in easy conversation. If you'd understood the way a handler works, the few extra questions, and always the studied indifference, then the alarm bells would have rung. Just before you flew to Iran that last time you would have known it was the danger time. A debriefing the night before you travelled, not just Penny Flowers but hard-faced bastards telling you what was wanted. It was about a party, yes, a celebration dinner for heads of section?"
Frank Perry, grim, sobering, nodded.
"You would have gone back the last time, to all those people who welcomed you. I doubt you slept on any of those nights because you'd have been going over every question you'd asked where was the party, who was going, when was the bus leaving? and wondering if the mistake had been made. They were the heads of section for the chemical-warfare programme, and the designers of the warhead. They were the big people in the big picture, and you were just a bloody ant by comparison. Your only importance was that you had access… They'd have hanged you, not so that your neck broke but so that you strangled and kicked the air.. . I couldn't have done it myself, Mr. Perry, I wouldn't have had the courage. I would have crumpled with the fear. I sincerely admire what you did. I don't mean to embarrass you, but I haven't ever met anyone of such raw bravery… Do you still want to know?"
Frank Perry mouthed his answer ~ softly that Markham couldn't hear it.
"The Jews do the dirty work for us. They understand about survival better than we do. They won't, again, go naked into the sheds and have cyanide crystals drop on them. They are, in modern jargon, proactive. The Israelis wouldn't have needed much persuasion because those warheads could fall on them. A squad was put on shore after being ferried across the Gulf. They landed up the coast from Bandar Abbas. They intercepted the bus on its way to the restaurant. A piece of charity fell off Penny Flowers's desk, probably the only time it has. What happened to the bus was an accident, you understand me. It created confusion and bought you time to build a new life before the Iranians realized the enormity of the crime and at whose door it lay…"
The music played on. Markham felt so sorry for the man.
"The bus was stopped, then burned. It was made to look, before a detailed examination produced the truth, like an accident. There were no survivors. The director, the engineers, the scientists, all died in the fire."
Frank Perry jerked the weight of his body up, his lips gibbering, but he could not speak.
"You wanted to know. It is why the Iranians will hunt you, track you, try to kill you, and all those with you. There'll be files on you that are stacked high enough to eat lunch off. They will never forget you. What you did was buy time. I'd like to say that the time was well used, that the programme was seriously delayed. I can't – I don't know. I don't know whether the time you bought with your courage, Frank, was well used or was frittered.." but I recognize your bravery because it humbles me."
Meryl was crying quietly. Markham pulled back the table and let Perry stagger to his feet. The rain had started outside and the street glistened. He took Perry's arm gently and steadied him through the door and across the pavement. Davies held Meryl close to him. Her dress, from the spilled wine, was stained red like a wound. Markham thought it was what Perry was owed, and he was glad he'd done it.
He climbed the stairs slowly.
It had been a distressing evening for Simon Blackmore. Two months earlier, a surveyor had checked Rose Cottage, and described the damp as minimal. Late that evening, without an appointment, a man who described himself as a builder and decorator had prised his way into the cottage. He called himself Vince, and explained that he always dropped by on new people moving into the village. He'd walked around and pointed out at least half a dozen places where the wallpaper peeled and the plaster work was stained, tut ting and frowning at the cost and his schedule. But the work needed doing, must be done. He'd spoken of Mrs. Wilson's rheumatism and laid the blame for it on the damp. He'd settled immovably at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. They were both so tired, exhausted from the unpacking of boxes, but they had listened with courtesy as he'd talked of the village, his lifetime home, and his central place in it. And he'd told them, as if it were a kindness to them, that they should keep away from the green at the far end of the village because there were armed police there, guarding a family that no one in their right mind wanted to know… "But they've got the message, there's no one'll speak to them, they'll be bloody frozen out of here." It had been an age before he'd finished his coffee, insisted that he would send in an estimate for necessary work, and left.
Simon went up the stairs and into their bedroom, where Luisa was undressing. They hadn't yet unpacked the shades for the ceiling bulbs. The garish, harsh light fell on his wife and highlighted the old burn marks on her breasts and stomach before the nightdress covered them.
The train hammered on the track, jerking and rolling.
Andy Chalmers lay on his side on the bunk bed, on the clean white sheets and the blankets. He had not undressed. His dogs, alert, were curled against his body and gave him warmth. Behind him, distanced, were the birds and their eyries on the crag cliffs, and the bog heather uplands where the deer grazed, and the mount am lochans that held the small brown trout, and the glens that were home to the plovers and wheat ears and curlews. Ahead lay an unfamiliar terrain.
Andy Chalmers came south, to track a man.