Westwind

by Ian Rankin

  ‘Cheerio then,’ the barman called in response.

  ‘There’s a lot of queer folk about,’ said one local. The others nodded agreement and went back to their drinks. The rest of the night was to come as something of an anticlimax.

  28

  Hepton considered that he had seen Sanders’ driving at its absolute worst. The journey back to London, however, served to impress upon him that this was an age without absolutes. Sanders seemed seized by demons, and determined to get back to the relative safety of the city as soon as he could. The men at the Bull had angered him, that was for sure. He was used to being undermined by his superiors, but not by people he would consider his inferiors by a fairly large margin. The needle on the dashboard flickered wildly around the seventy mark on the narrower roads, and Hepton felt sick in his stomach, the beer inside him sloshing wildly. On wider roads, they hit one hundred and ten miles per hour. It was, thank God, the only thing they hit.

  Hepton, however, said nothing. He too was keen to get back to the safe house. Keen to watch the video tapes and see what he might discover. It was dark when they arrived, the sky spotted with yet darker clouds. The air was growing chill, so that they had to close the car windows and put on the heater for a little while. The night became greenish-yellow as the London street lights began to shine.

  ‘Here we are,’ Sanders said as they entered St John’s Wood and turned into Marlborough Place. There had been little conversation on the drive back. It struck Hepton that the two of them had nothing in common, and that if they had not been thrown together like this, they would never have chosen one another as companions.

  ‘Hold on,’ Sanders said in warning as the car approached the house. His eyes had narrowed to slits, his face close to the windscreen.

  ‘What is it?’ Hepton was looking, too, but could see nothing out of place. Sanders drove past the house without stopping. ‘What is it?’ Hepton repeated in a low hiss.

  ‘Too many lights on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All the lights inside the house are on. So is the light outside the front door, and the one to the side of the garage. It even looks as though there might be lights on in the garden.’

  ‘So?’ Hepton didn’t want to think about what Sanders might be implying.

  ‘So, something’s wrong.’ He pulled the car in to the kerb and stopped, shutting off the engine and killing the lights.

  ‘What are we going to do? Just wait here? Jilly’s in there! We can’t—’

  But Sanders was staring at the number plate of the car parked in front of them. The car itself was a Vauxhall Cavalier like his. He seemed not to have heard Hepton’s outburst.

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘That’s Thommo’s car.’

  ‘Thommo? Who’s Thommo?’

  ‘The other lot. MI5. He’s one of their … well, men.’ He stared at Hepton, his face draining of colour. ‘We better go in, but slowly. Keep with me.’

  They opened the car doors and closed them – as Sanders instructed – quietly. Sanders was already pulling his gun from its holster as they approached the house. Hepton was frantic now. What had happened? There was no one to meet them at the front door, no guard. Sanders pushed open the door. There were voices coming from within, though muted. Everyone was being very quiet indeed. Then someone came into the hall, saw them, and turned his head back into the living room.

  ‘Sir,’ he called. ‘Visitors.’

  Another man, balding but not yet middle-aged, his moustache thickly black, popped his head into the hall, stared at Hepton and Sanders, then lifted his eyes towards the ceiling and gave a great groan of relief.

  ‘Sanders, you bastard. Thank God. I thought they’d got you.’

  Sanders was slipping his pistol back beneath his arm. He had become very businesslike, his voice like something lifted from cold storage.

  ‘Fill me in,’ he said.

  The man looked from Sanders to Hepton, then back to Sanders. Sanders turned towards Hepton, who knew what he was going to say and cut in first.

  ‘I’m not leaving. I’ve got a right to hear it too.’ He looked at the man. ‘Is Jilly all right?’

  ‘She’s not here,’ the man said levelly. ‘They’ve taken her with them, I suppose.’

  ‘What about Bentley and Castle?’ asked Sanders.

  ‘Dead,’ said the man. ‘A neat job, clean. One knifed in the back, the other done with a garrotte.’

  Neat, clean. Hepton was thinking of only one person: Harry. Sanders seemed to have read his mind, and nodded towards him before turning again to the man.

  ‘All right, Thommo. I need details.’

  ‘When you weren’t here, I had to contact your department.’

  ‘I appreciate that. Has anyone arrived?’

  ‘Not yet. We only got here ourselves quarter of an hour ago.’

  ‘Did you get anything on tape?’

  ‘That’s how we knew. No voices, though, apart from the woman’s.’

  ‘Jilly,’ Hepton said. His voice was close to cracking.

  ‘So if your surveillance team heard it all,’ Sanders said, his tone accusatory, ‘how come everyone had gone before you got here?’

  ‘Surveillance is just that, Sanders. They called us, we came. All told, it took us about five minutes. But by then …’ He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘This is a mess,’ Sanders said, rubbing his temples.

  ‘Jilly,’ Hepton repeated. Sanders put an arm around him.

  ‘Go sit down,’ he ordered, ‘I’ll fix something to drink.’

  Hepton began to move towards the living room.

  ‘Not in there,’ the man said. ‘That’s where we took the bodies.’

  Sanders nodded. ‘Go upstairs, Martin. I’ll bring a drink up to you.’

  Hepton felt beaten, utterly beaten, for the first time in what seemed an age. Harry had won, Villiers had won, they’d all won. And he had lost. He nodded his head and began to climb the stairs. Sanders and the other man – Thommo – were speaking together in hushed tones before he had reached the first-floor landing. He caught a few phrases.

  ‘Clean-up party … how did they know? … tapes … phone call …’

  Tapes! Hepton looked down and saw that he was clutching the carrier bag to his body. He ran his fingers over it. He still had the tapes. He walked across the landing, but instead of going into his own room, he entered what had been Jilly’s. She had been reading: there was a paperback lying open, face down, on the bed. It was one of the titles from the living room shelves, a modern romance. On her bedside cabinet sat a cup half full of tea. Hepton touched it; there was still a hint of warmth to it.

  He had no doubts at all about who had taken Jilly. He even thought he knew why: as a warning to him, a personal warning not to go any further. They had to be desperate. They must know that it was not only Hepton’s battle now; that others were involved. Yes, they had to know that. And yet they still wanted to scare him off. Why? Because of what he thought he knew, that portion of the secret he had not yet revealed to anyone? Whatever the answer, it was clear that they still saw him as a threat.

  That thought gave him heart.

  What was more, the sooner he solved the final riddles, the sooner he might be reunited with Jilly. But he had to be careful. Her life was in their hands now, in Harry’s hands. He had to be very careful indeed. And sitting here wasn’t going to do anybody any good. He needed a TV monitor and a video recorder. Ideally, he needed two monitors and two recorders – good recorders at that, with a freeze-frame facility that actually froze the frame, and didn’t make it twitch or smear. A hard image, that was what he needed.

  He realised that he wasn’t going to go to pieces; that the worst was over. He felt calm and controlled. God knows why, but he did.

  There was a knock at the door, and it opened. ‘Oh, there you are.’ Sanders entered, carrying a bottle of whisky under his arm and a crystal glass in each hand. Hepton shook his head.

  ‘That’s not what I need,’ he sai
d. ‘What I really need is a TV lab. Your surveillance personnel probably have one. Get me there, then I’ll show you what’s on these.’ He slapped the tapes.

  Sanders studied him, to ascertain whether he might be suffering from shock or something similar. All he saw was determination and a mind ready for work.

  ‘I’ll call in,’ he said. ‘I think I know just the place.’

  ‘One question,’ said Hepton. ‘How did they know about this place?’

  Sanders shook his head. ‘I wish to God I knew.’

  29

  It was after midnight, but the man they had summoned back from his bed and his wife to this cold building in the middle of a bleak industrial estate near Notting Hill seemed not to mind.

  ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘This is what makes it all worthwhile.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hepton. The man had introduced himself as Graeme Izzard. Thommo had assured them that he was the best ‘pictures’ man in the business.

  ‘I work mainly for Special Branch,’ Izzard told Hepton. ‘Serious Crime, that sort of thing. You know, someone walks into a building society and shoots dead a teller. They capture the whole thing on camera, but the image is too blurred to be recognisable. I clean it up until it’s sharp from arsehole to breakfast time. Which reminds me …’ He looked at his watch, then turned to Sanders. ‘There’s an all-night caff, just up the road and turn right. You can’t miss it. There’ll be about a dozen cabs outside. It’s where the drivers go for their break. Get us, let’s think, something hot, a sausage sandwich, something like that. Plus some cold sandwiches for later, corned beef or salami. And tell Alfie, the man behind the counter, that Izzard says he’s to give you a flask of tea. Got that?’

  Sanders looked devastated. He had been demoted to tea boy by a man if anything a year or two younger than himself, with straggly shoulder-length hair and a T-shirt advertising a heavy-metal band. This was the third blow of the evening.

  Hepton’s first impression of Izzard had been similarly coloured by his youth – he looked no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven – and his clothing. He had a London accent, too, harshly grained, the sort of voice heard at market stalls and football matches. But there was no doubt that he had a certain swagger that told you not to muck him about or underestimate him.

  He offered Sanders a five-pound note from a wad pulled from his jeans pocket, but Sanders shook his head and stumbled away, still shell-shocked. Izzard watched the door close behind him.

  ‘Stuck-up sod,’ he said. ‘I hate bloody SIS. Mind you, the other lot are no better. Give me Scotland Yard every time. Their heads aren’t in the clouds. A bit more down-to-earth, you know?’

  Hepton nodded, unable to think of any reply. Izzard had brought them into a large warehouse of modern corrugated construction. There were crates neatly stacked against one of the high walls, but this was no ordinary warehouse. Much of the floor space was taken up by another, smaller building of more solid, prefabricated construction. Izzard went to the door of this smaller building and unlocked it. An alarm sounded, and he switched on the lights before finding another key on his heavy chain and turning it in the alarm box, cancelling the ringing. He looked satisfied. They were in a small antechamber. On another door was a numerical keypad and a tiny keyhole. Izzard pushed five digits and turned a slender key in the lock, and the door clicked open.

  Inside this room, there was an air-conditioned chill. Izzard swung an arm around proudly. ‘The lab,’ he said.

  Hepton, used to technical labs, nodded, impressed. There was hardware aplenty: computers, monitors, video cameras, recorders, a huge studio-style machine for editing and splicing film, projectors, and workbenches covered in all manner of electrical instruments, bits of chopped film, broken-open cassette cases. The place was a mess, evidence that a lot of work was done here.

  ‘All this Russian-doll stuff, a box within a box within a box, it’s really to cut down vibration from outside more than anything,’ Izzard explained. He bounced on the floor in his Dr Martens shoes. ‘Decoupled from the rest of the building,’ he said proudly. ‘That was my design, actually.’

  ‘This is incredible,’ said Hepton. He had been attracted to the computers, and stood over one now. He frowned. ‘I don’t recognise—’

  ‘That’s my design, too,’ said Izzard, running a finger over the keyboard. ‘We do our own software and, in this case, hardware. It’s just a number-cruncher, really. Do you know about computers?’

  ‘I work in a tracking station,’ said Hepton.

  Izzard looked impressed and pleased. His face became more boyish than ever. ‘You track satellites?’ Hepton nodded. ‘I love all that stuff. Signals intelligence, comms intelligence.’

  ‘That’s what’s on these tapes,’ said Hepton, brandishing the bag. Izzard looked like a child offered sweets.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, reaching out a hand. ‘Well then, let’s put them on the machine and take a look.’ His tone became more serious. ‘What is it that you want exactly?’

  ‘I want to examine the pictures,’ Hepton said, following Izzard to one of the benches. ‘Side by side if possible.’

  ‘Very possible.’

  ‘And then maybe concentrate on a few shots.’

  ‘I can put them side by side on the same screen.’ Izzard turned to him. ‘If you like.’ Hepton smiled and nodded.

  Izzard brought the tapes out of the bag. There was a note inside one of the boxes. You owe me a beer, Vic! He handed it to Hepton, then turned his attention to the tapes themselves.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘High-resolution tape, and plenty of it.’ Even Hepton could see that there was a good deal of tape on each spool: perhaps as much as a couple of hours’ worth. Yes, he owed Nick Christopher a beer.

  He noticed that he had rested his hand on a small modem. He tapped it.

  ‘Ever done any hacking?’ he asked.

  Izzard’s face lit up again. ‘Yes, years ago. I used to love it. What about you?’

  ‘I’ve done a little.’

  ‘I got into a couple of big companies’ systems,’ Izzard said, warming to his tale. ‘Left messages there for the staff. Stuff like: “Do you know what your wife’s up to right this second?” Childish, but still a lot of fun.’

  Hepton smiled. ‘Wasn’t it difficult working out the code words?’

  ‘Hellish difficult, yes.’ Izzard had put down the tapes. ‘Typing in everything from aardvark to zygote.’

  He went to a large steel cupboard and opened it. There were bits and pieces of equipment arranged along the shelves inside. He found what he was looking for and brought it out, closing the door again. It was a small black box, the size of one of Nick Christopher’s crossword dictionaries. Built into its top surface was what looked like an old-fashioned LED pocket calculator.

  ‘It was difficult,’ Izzard said proudly, ‘until I made this.’ He handed Hepton the box. Hepton examined it, but without success. The several home-made switches and push-buttons were unmarked.

  ‘I give up,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s another number-cruncher of sorts,’ Izzard explained, pleased that Hepton hadn’t known. ‘Some of the companies use long numerical codes, and those were the worst to crack. All I needed to do was plug this box into my modem and it did all the work for me.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Hepton, examining the box more carefully.

  ‘No,’ said Izzard, ‘what’s really ingenious is that I cooked up a chip that put the other computer on hold while my computer was pumping the code numbers into it.’

  Hepton saw the implications at once. ‘So you didn’t need to sign off and try again every time you got the code wrong?’

  Izzard nodded his head vigorously, then gave a childish, high-pitched laugh.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Hepton. ‘I hope you took out a patent on it.’

  ‘No,’ said Izzard, calming a little. ‘But I sold the idea to the military for fifteen thousand pounds.’ He lifted the black box out of Hepton’s
hand and returned it to its cupboard. ‘God knows what they wanted it for,’ he said with finality.

  As he closed the cupboard, a buzzer sounded. ‘That’ll be our spy,’ said Izzard, ‘wishing to come into the cold.’ He pressed a button on the wall, and the door clicked open again, admitting Sanders.

  ‘Cheery lot, those cab drivers,’ Sanders said grumpily. He was carrying a cardboard box. Hepton could smell the waft of fried sausage coming from within it, and realised he was hungry.

  Izzard seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘Never work on an empty tum,’ he said, making for the box.

  As the work continued, becoming ever more painstaking, Sanders fell asleep perched on a stool, his head and arms resting on a bench top. Izzard, however, seemed to grow more awake as the night progressed, while Hepton, though not feeling tired, began to feel disoriented, even hallucinatory for a few strange minutes.

  Having examined the two tapes, they ran them side by side, and then started freeze-framing particular shots, shots of similar buildings taken from similar angles. On the top left corner of each was an hour-and-minute counter, and they used this to align the two tapes temporally, checking differences in light and in the quality of the shadows cast by the evening sun. Izzard never seemed satisfied, and would run a section again, sharpening the focus, enlarging a shot onscreen: this enlarging process was again of his own design and the unit he operated his own construction.

  ‘I haven’t perfected it yet,’ he admitted, though the results were, to Hepton’s eyes, impressive enough.

  At four o’clock, Izzard suggested they pause for breakfast. Sanders was snoring, so they left him to his sleep and went outside. Birds were chirping hesitantly in the distance, and a few early cars and lorries were on the road. After the cool of the lab, the morning seemed already oppressively warm. Izzard walked with hands in pockets.