CONDITION BLACK (11 page)

Debbie said, "But you've got to come . . ."

Sara shook her head. She pulled a face. "Just no can do."

"So, what do I tell them?"

"Tell them whatever the hell you like . . . "

He heard the door close.

Absurd of him, because at the end of the following week the annual staff assessments were due to be drawn up by the Superintendents. His own assessment was written up by Boll.

"Nice to see you, Dan."

"And you too."

"Wife enjoy herself?"

"Very much, apart from the prawns."

" A h , the prawns. Not universally successful, the prawns."

Erlich sat back. The chair was not comfortable, but at least they were allowed inside the building. What a heap . . . They had come back across the river and they were in a street close to the Embassy. He had seen the building the day before when he lit upon a trattoria for his supper, without of course realising what it was. He was learning. The lesson said that neither the Secret Intelligence Service nor the Security Service advertised themselves. There had been no sign on the doorway, just a number. Erlich wondered how men and women could work in such depressing surroundings. They had been allowed in, they had gone past the uniformed security, and then had had to sit and wait in a grey-painted lobby, watched by the plainclothes minders, before the man had come down for them. They were in the building, but only just. They were a dozen paces down a ground floor corridor, and then ushered into an interview room.

"I'd like you to meet Bill Erlich, F . B . I . "

"I'm Bill, pleased to meet you."

"James Rutherford. My pleasure."

Erlich looked across the bare table at Rutherford, He saw a solid man. good shoulders on him and a squat neck and a good head of dark hair. He thought the guy would be about his own age, certainly not more than mid thirties His working clothes were bottle-green cords and a russet sweater worn over an open check shirt.

"What do I call you?"

"What you like, Bill."

"Most people just call him 'Prawns', 'Prawns Rutherford',"

Ruane said.

"James will do nicely."

Ruane said, "Christ, are we formal? Okay, work time . . .

Harry Lawrence, Agency, shot dead in Athens, am I going too fast for you?"

"I read the reports."

" T h e bad news is that the trail leads right into your front garden. Tell him, Bill."

Erlich told Rutherford what he knew of the assassin who spoke with an English accent, and to whom the word "Colt" had been shouted.

"Is that
all?"

"That's all I've got so far."

Rutherford hadn't made a note. He had just nodded his head, and then returned to the talk about the social evening, and how difficult it was to be safe with prawns, and he had wanted to know if Dan and his lady would be coming to the Service's New Year's Eve party.

Out on the pavement, Erlich said, "Thanks, Dan, but I wouldn't classify that guy as a picture of enthusiasm."

There was a moment of sharp anger from Ruane. "He's as good, for his age, as they've got, and his wife is one of the sweetest women I know in this town. If you just happen to stick around here you'll learn to sing his praises. He can be a friend, a really fine friend. Oh, and don't tell him your war stories because they might just seem trivial to him."

Debbie said, "But you've not to come . . ."

Sara shook her head She pulled a face. "Just no can do,"

"Sara, we are a group of middle-aged, well, nearly middle-aged, housewives, who amuse ourselves while the men are toiling, with a little bit of painting, sketching. There's no one in our cosy little set-up who has a quarter of the talent you have. I won't hear of it."

"It's just not possible."

Debbie persisted. "We go after the kids are safely in school, we're back before they come out. Everyone's got kids. We'll be back in yonks of time . . . "

Sara looked away. She turned her back on Debbie. She looked out of the window. They were in the dining room of Debbie's house. She looked out through the big picture window and across the manicured lawn and down towards the ponds and away towards the line of birches at the bottom of the garden. It was a big house, at least four good bedrooms, and the garden must have been the best part of two acres.

"Is there a problem? I mean, tell me. Is it just because we're
amateurs?"

The classes were at Debbie's house. When she had rung in response to the advertisement card on the board in the Tadley Post Office, she hadn't thought of where the classes might be.

She had wanted to draw again, and to paint, and she had not wondered before the first class as to the group she would be joining. She was the outsider. She came from a housing estate in Tadley, and her husband worked at the Establishment behind the Falcon Gate. She had not stopped to think that she might be inserting herself into a social scene that she had walked away from when she had left home. Rich wives, with rich husbands, simply amusing themselves twice a week. She liked them, that was the trouble.

After the class they treated themselves to lunch, cold poached salmon the first day and the best cut of cold beef the next, and wine to go with it, and a raffle amongst the six of them for a bottle. Five pounds for each class . . . And there had been her materials. She could say, in all honesty, that she had looked out her college paints and brushes but they had been dried up and beyond recall. It must have been a dozen years since they were last used. For the first class she had just taken two soft pencils, and she had sketched while the others had mixed watercolours for the still life ol a bowl of apples, oranges and pears. For that day's class she had taken her own watercolours, bought with the Visacard in Reading . . . They were going by minibus to London for the visit to the Tate Gallery, with a driver, and the transport alone was £ 1 5 3 head.

Just a miserable mistake.

She had waited behind after lunch. She had helped Debbie clear away. She had wanted to speak to Debbie after the others had left, and all the talk over lunch had been of the trip to the Tate.

She could have bought each of the boys a pair of trainers for what she had spent on the watercolours.

"It's nothing to do with whether I'm good, whether I'm lucky enough to have been given more talent than you, the rest of you . . ."

It was to do with money, bloody, bloody, money.

She turned back to Debbie. She felt dirtied in her old jeans, and her old student painting smock. The other women hadn't pulled something out of a bottom drawer to come to the classes.

The other women, Debbie and her friends, would have been shopping in Newbury or Hungerford, run round the boutiques, for something careless and suitable. Debbie's husband owned a software business outside Newbury.

"Bloody hell, am I stupid." Debbie's voice had softened.

Sara turned to her. There was a turquoise stone set in a pendant and hanging from a fine gold chain at Debbie's throat. The chain was long, too long, and Debbie had unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse so that the stone wouldn't be hidden, Sara thought the stone would have cost all of their own take home money for a month after the mortgage was paid.

"It's boring old money, isn't it?"

Sara nodded She should have been at home. She should have been thinking about the boys' tea, and about Frederick's dinner

"Well, I have the solution," Debbie said. "You're going on the payroll, Sara. You're going on a freebie to the Tate because you're going to be our guide. And here, too, because when we need a model, you will be our model."

She wanted so much to belong, could not help herself.

Debbie said, "You're prettier than any of us, anyway. You'll be brilliant."

Sara said, "I really don't . . . "

"You're not
modest,
are you?"

The Chief Inspector was not a snappy dresser. If he had been working for three days and three nights then it was in the suit he was wearing now, and his shoes had mud on them, and Erlich didn't think Ruane would be impressed.

A yawn, then a big sigh. They were in a small office on the fourth floor, and one wall of the office was glass, and the heater was full on. Again the yawn.

" N o w , what can I do for you, gentlemen?"

Erlich was getting sharp on the routine. He could get through it in a minimum of words. The voice was English, the face was Caucasian. Height, about 5' 10". Age, mid-twenties. Eyes, bluish.

Complexion, tanned. Build, solid without spare weight. Hair, short and fair. The name he answered to, "Colt".

The Chief Inspector of Special Branch no longer yawned. " A n Englishman shoots a C.I.A. staff man and an Iraqi journalist in Athens, that's a pretty bizarre set-up, Mr Erlich. What's the motive?"

"Iraqi state-sponsored terrorism. Our opinion, they would have set it up, used your national as the contract man."

"Can't be all that many Englishmen qualified for work of that sort, don't grow on trees. A single shot, you say, through the head at twelve paces. He ought to be quite an interesting young man."

Erlich said, "I want an identification."

" I ' m sure you would . . . Working for Iraqi intelligence? An Englishman? If we find him for you, I fancy we'd value a few minutes of his time ourselves, if we find him . . . "

And the yawn broke again on the Chief Inspector's face.

Erlich said, " I ' m asking for your best effort, sir."

" D o what I can, can't promise more."

Erlich thought that he wouldn't be doing anything before he'd put his head down. Trouble was, if he put his head down then he might not wake up again for 24 hours.

He went through the hallway of New Scotland Yard with Ruane, past the flame that burned alongside the Book of Remem-brance. Outside, he braced himself as the wind lashed them.

"Will he do us the business, Dan?"

"Maybe. He'll do his best."

Erlich said, "I didn't get the message we were exactly priority."

Ruane said, "They may have a crowd in town from Abu Nidal.

That's to say, they do have a very dangerous crowd, they just think they're Abu Nidal. They have no line on a target, but they have four addresses staked. He came off that to meet you."

"Good to hear that somewhere at least the killing of an American matters."

" N o , it's not t h a t . . . he owes me at poker."

Colt was escorted into the Colonel's office.

He was invited to sit, he was offered a cigarette. He sat opposite the Colonel. He declined the cigarette, he lit for himself a small cigar. The Colonel beamed across at Colt.

Not for Colt to ask why he had been summoned to the Intelligence Section of the Ministry. He rarely asked questions of them.

He had learned early on that they did not appreciate questioning.

They appreciated only answers to their own questions. He jolted.

Away along the corridor from the Colonel's office, a man screamed. A rising wail of pure agony. And then a shorter second scream. And then silence.

Colt had already shut the sound from his head, and the colonel showed no sign of having heard it. When a rabbit was in a snare, pinioned, and the fox closed in, then the rabbit screamed in tear and agony. Colt knew the sound, he knew the ways of the regime that was his host.

"Are you well, Colt?"

"Very well, sir."

"Not damaged?"

"Girls I know, sir, could have hurt me worse."

The Colonel smiled. "I won a bet on you, Colt."

"I hoped you would, sir."

"I bet my friend, who commands the 4th Battalion of the Presidential Guard, that he could deploy $0 men and that none of them would lay hands on you. But you were impertinent to take their kit."

"I hope it was a good bet to win, sir."

"The favours of a Thai whore . . . "

Colt grinned, and the Colonel laughed. Colt sat upright in the chair, there was less ache in his spine that way, less of a throb in his kidneys. His body was still a rainbow of bruises.

"Colt, will you tell me about your father?"

He spoke in a flat monotone, suppressing all the emotion he might have felt. " H e comes from what in England is called a good family. His parents had status, what a good family means.

He is 70. Being of a so-called good family doesn't mean much these days, and the sort of money required to keep things ticking over a few years back doesn't get you anywhere now. After the war, when he was out of the army, he tried his hand at several things, and they were all pretty much a disaster. The money he had inherited with the house just wasn't enough. He tried business, just about anything. When I was a child he was selling insurance, then he was offloading imported sheepskin coats in the London street markets, then it was free range eggs. None of them worked. I really don't know where the money comes from these days They live, him and my mother, in one of those damn great draughty houses in the country. I suppose it's just about falling to pieces. It was after the war that he married. My mother is French, they met in the war. Truth is that everything that was best in my father's life happened during the war. He was a young regular officer, Brigade of Guards, at the start of the war, and he went to France with the Expeditionary Force. You'll have heard that they lifted the army off the beaches at Dunkirk. They took most of them off, but the rearguard and the wounded were left behind. My father was in that last line that protected the beach-head. When he knew they were going to surrender in the morning, he slipped away from his unit. I suppose you could say that he deserted. He moved out into the countryside, and eleven months later he was back in England. He had moved himself right across France and through Spain to get himself repatriated.

Early in the war, in London, they set up something called Special Operations Executive, and my father was a natural for it. He was recruited. In the next three years he was twice parachuted into Occupied France. There are parts of France, used to be anyway, where he was almost a legend. Won't be too many places he'd be remembered these days, all those who could remember him are dead, or trying to die. He was an explosives man. Signal boxes on the railway, power lines, bridges. When they sent more men across, to liaise with him, it didn't work. He was his own man, never a team player . . . As long as the planes came to drop his explosives he didn't give a damn for the rest of the war effort.