Watchman

by Ian Rankin

  Jack laughed, as Miles had hoped he would.

  “What are you laughing at?” asked Sheila, annoyed.

  “Listen to you,” said Jack. “The best part of three bottles of wine, and you can still spout economics like Milton Keynes.”

  “That should be Milton Friedman,” corrected Miles. “Or do you mean Maynard Keynes?”

  Jack looked at him, a little puzzled. “Why?” he asked. “What did I say?”

  “You said Milton Keynes,” said Sheila, bursting into laughter and throwing herself forward.

  “Is there any wine left?” Miles asked now, sure that his wife and son were less of a combined force than he had at first feared. Sheila was still laughing, and Jack studied her in stilted horror.

  “Loads,” said Sheila. “Get another bottle. And watch out for that rising damp.”

  “Wet rot,” Jack corrected quickly, his voice stabbing the air.

  “Well, whatever,” mumbled Sheila, all laughter gone.

  “Right,” said Miles, examining the quietened room, “let’s have ourselves a little party, shall we?”

  But the room remained silent after he left. The party had already finished.

  He wondered whether Sheila could really always hear him outside the door. Until recently, he had thought himself infallible. Now he knew differently.

  He brought another bottle of wine into the room. Sheila was reading, while Jack still played with his empty glass.

  “Here we are then. You could well be right, Jack. There does seem to be a patch of rot in the floor timbers. We’ll have it inspected.”

  He opened the bottle and poured three generous glasses, then set his own aside for the moment, allowing the young wine at least a slender chance to breathe. Jack gulped his own down without tasting it.

  “Sorry about lunch, Jack. I had to see Billy Monmouth. It was all shoptalk.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “What was Billy saying, then?” Sheila turned the page of her book.

  “You know Billy. Gossip mainly.”

  “We haven’t had him round for a while, have we?”

  The fact was, they had no one round these days. Their friends—the married couples—had disintegrated like old houses.

  “No, we haven’t,” said Miles, and the conversation stopped there. Dead.

  TEN

  HE WAS BEING FOLLOWED, AND none too subtly. Already in a bookshop a man had approached him asking for a light, though no smoking was allowed. Then another man—different face, same eyes—had asked him the time. So Pete Saville was moving now, weaving through the narrow streets of the city, trying to lose the men. He didn’t want the streets to get too narrow though, or too quiet, for that would be asking for trouble. He had enough trouble as it was.

  He didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t mean anything. Their accents were English, but that meant nothing either. He had counted four of them so far, four or just maybe five. Oh God, what had he done? He was sure that it had something, everything to do with Miles Flint. Mr. Partridge had warned him. Miles bloody Flint and his bloody snooping. He dived into another street, seeking a telephone box, not knowing who to ring. Perhaps he should turn and confront them. Yes, why not? Every reason in the world.

  Pete Saville was scared.

  This was no game, no Armorgeddon. It was real, and it was dangerous, perhaps lethal. He glanced back. Two following on one sidewalk, two on the other. Walking briskly. Hands by their sides. Almost casual.

  What had he done?

  He turned corner after corner. Saw a bus and made a run for it, but it moved off ahead of him, leaving him flailing at the wind. There were people about, some of them giving him curious looks. He could tell them, but tell them what?

  Oh, he was scared, how he was scared.

  So run, and keep on running. But they had decided to make their move. They were gaining effortlessly, coming nearer, nearer. And now a fifth man was calling out his name, patiently, as though paging him in a hotel. Pete Saville didn’t feel as though he were in a hotel.

  The smell of the abattoir was in the air.

  Pete’s heart was melting with the heat in his lungs. His brain was singed. He could taste cordite on his tongue. He stopped, leaning his head against a car. But when they were a few yards from him, he took to his heels again, willing himself on with the last of his being. He rounded a corner and was confronted by policemen. They were cordoning off an area of pavement, unraveling a length of red and white tape with which to make the road impassable. A small crowd had gathered on the other side of the tape, watching. It was being broken up by several uniformed policemen. Damn, it was a dead end. But the men would do nothing, not with the police here. No, Pete was safe.

  He was safe!

  He heard his name called again, and pushed his way past some onlookers, slipping under the cordon. Someone shouted at him, a different voice this time, then someone screamed. He thought he heard the word “bomb” and stopped in his tracks. He was outside a small restaurant, and saw for the first time the soldiers, who were everywhere. And beyond them, his pursuers, watching with the rest of the crowd, smiling at him, not about to follow him past the cordon.

  Bomb? Oh God, what had he done?

  The police stood at the tape and told him to come back from the building. But no, he couldn’t do that. The building was his sanctuary. He could pass through it and out of the other side, could lose the men that way. Making up his mind, he headed into the restaurant, vaguely aware of two army men working at the back of the tables.

  There was a sudden suction, a huge, dusty gust of hot wind, and the roar of jet engines, of thunder overhead. When the dust cleared and the screams abated, and people were blinking and shaking fragments from their clothes, Pete Saville wasn’t there anymore, and neither were the two bomb disposal experts. Even the hunters seemed to have disappeared, leaving behind them only the police and the civilians, most of them in shock, and the man called Andrew Gray, standing at a safe distance beside a lamppost, watching.

  ELEVEN

  “YOU KNOW ABOUT IT, THEN?”

  “Cynegetics?” Mowbray laughed. “Of course I do.”

  “Why am I always the last to hear about these things?”

  Mowbray shrugged, looking more transatlantic than ever in tinted glasses and a sheepskin jacket. He was supposed to look like an estate agent who showed people around the large Forest Hill house which the firm had procured for Harvest. Harvest was supposed, so Billy Monmouth had said, to bring forth a “bumper crop” of IRA sleepers, soon to be activated now that a full-scale campaign was under way. Three more poor bastards had been blown up, one a civilian. Nobody knew who he was. He had just run into a cordoned-off area at the wrong moment, and a bomb had gone off prematurely. There was nothing solid enough left to identify.

  The Harvest cell had been under surveillance for weeks, three Irishmen and a woman in a house across the road from the watchmen. The occupants were, variously, an unemployed electrician, a groundskeeper, a mechanic, and a secretary on a building site. If they were sleepers, then they were sleeping soundly. It looked like yet another waste of time, but Miles knew that no one could afford to become complacent.

  “There isn’t even a bloody telephone in the house,” said Mad Phil. “There’s never been a cell that didn’t have a phone in the house.”

  Mad Phil enjoyed complaining and liked to think that he excelled in it. He was neither mad, nor was his name Phil, but those were the letters after his name: Graham Lockett, MA, D.Phil. Billy had coined the nickname, and it had stuck, just as “Tricky Dicky” and “Mauberley” had stuck for Richard Mowbray.

  “Doesn’t it worry you, Richard?”

  “What?”

  “That Cynegetics are on to you.”

  “Not in the least. What is it I’m doing that’s wrong?”

  “Have they been to see you?”

  “Yes, several times, and Partridge has had a word, too, but I repeat, what am I doing that’s wrong? If the fir
m is clean, then why should anyone worry about my little dossier?”

  Suddenly Miles could see the beauty of Mowbray’s tactics: those who opposed him must have reasons for doing so, and so were suspects themselves, while those who aided him would be thought clean.

  “You’re right, Richard.”

  “Of course I am, Miles.”

  “Shift’s nearly over,” said Mad Phil, checking his watch. For once, there was not a trace of complaint in his voice.

  Jack had left London, off to visit friends in Oxford before heading north. Miles had slipped him fifty pounds as he left.

  “Bye then,” he had said, and that had been that. They had not managed to agree on a time for their lunch together, and so it had never taken place. It hung between them in the air, just another broken promise.

  “Thank God,” Mowbray said to Mad Phil. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothing much. I thought I might try that new wine bar in Chelsea. The Lustra. Have you heard of it?”

  “I haven’t, no.”

  “Then I’ll probably finish up at the Cathay, since I’m in the area. Best Chinese food in London.”

  “Sounds good. What about you, Miles?”

  Miles had thought of going back to the office, but knew now that his every move would be subject to Cynegetics’ scrutiny. He had not been in touch with Pete Saville, but a call to Billy had brought the gossip that Saville had been moved on, though nobody knew where.

  “What do you suggest, Richard?”

  “I suggest we go along with Phil here to this Lustra place. Sounds kinda fun.”

  “It’s a bit of a distance from here,” said Miles.

  “A few miles,” said Mad Phil grudgingly. He was seated at the window, a pair of high-powered binoculars in his hands. Everyone was at home across the road.

  “I suppose I could phone my wife,” said Miles. Anything to keep him away from the house.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Mowbray. “It’s settled then, Phil can drive us in the company car.”

  Mad Phil didn’t look altogether happy. Perhaps, thought Miles, he liked to drink alone. Well, for this one evening, Phil would have an audience for his complaints against life.

  The Lustra turned out to be everything Miles had expected, and it appalled him. There were mirrors everywhere, half hidden by various potted plants and creepers.

  “Great place, eh?”

  The clientele were opening-night vampires, the chic underbelly of London whose sole intention in life was to “get noticed.” It was not the place for an “invisible man.” The clothes were loud, the music marginally less so, but everything was drowned out by the shrieking, vacuous voices of the young things. Miles’s whiskey had been drowned, too, scoop after scoop of the barman’s ice shoveled into it. It now resembled an iceberg looking for a disaster. Disaster, in fact, was all around.

  “Great place, eh, Richard?”

  “Absolutely, Phil, absolutely.”

  Mowbray, slapping one hand against the table out of time with the music, looked almost as out of place as Miles.

  “My round,” he said now, heading off to the distant bar. Mad Phil pointed to a figure somewhere at the back of the lounge.

  “She’s a celebrity,” he said, “though I can’t remember why.”

  “Doesn’t that disqualify her from the title?” asked Miles, loosening after the first two drinks.

  But Mad Phil hadn’t heard him, and was surveying the crowd again.

  Mowbray returned, his large hands cradling three tumblers. Miles was not surprised to see that they were doubles, and said nothing. Mad Phil did not seem to notice that the drinks were larger than his own round or Miles’s had been, and he polished off a sixth at one gulp. Miles waited. Mowbray’s kind could never remain quiet about their acts of generosity, for it was not generosity in itself, but rather a keen desire to impress; which was, in fact, the opposite of generosity.

  “This,” said Mowbray, on schedule, “is what I call a drink. Cheers, Miles.”

  “Cheers,” replied Miles, stifling a schoolboy smirk.

  “You know, up in Scotland they serve fifths or even quarter gills. No wonder they’re a nation of alcoholics.”

  “They’re not, actually, a race of alcoholics, Richard. And they possess the most civilized licensing laws I know of.”

  Miles sounded hurt.

  “Sorry,” said Mowbray, “I keep forgetting you’re Scottish. It was just a joke.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “This is quite a good place really,” said Mad Phil, turning to them both.

  Miles left the Lustra early, feigning tiredness, and walked to South Kensington station, changing onto the Jubilee Line at Green Park. He caught the mid-evening hiatus, and only a few washed-out businessmen sat in his carriage. Mowbray had started his speech about circles within circles, infiltration, double agents and double-double agents, and Miles had felt a need to leave.

  “Jeff Phillips believes me,” Mowbray had said. “So do others in the firm. If anything goes wrong on a case, one of our cases, we’re suspicious.”

  “Then I would have thought, Richard,” Miles had said, “that I would have been on your files as a potential double agent.”

  “But you are on our files, Miles. You’re under suspicion.”

  Well, good luck to them. Good luck to the Mauberley Barmy Army and its witch hunt. Perhaps Mowbray thought this a speedy and efficient way to make his mark on the firm, and more important, on its overseers. But it was also going to make him an awful lot of enemies. He was staking all or nothing on plucking a fine, sharp needle from the haystack. Perhaps Miles should remind him that needles have a way of making people go to sleep for a very long time . . .

  Darkness was falling, early and cool. His car was parked a distance from the house, not for security reasons but because parking spaces were so difficult to find. A bird had left a large token of its esteem on the roof of the Jag. His father had always said that birdshit was lucky. His father had nurtured some curious notions.

  He was still a distance from his house when he saw a man emerge from the gate and walk confidently away in the opposite direction, toward Abbey Road. Through the dusk, Miles was uncertain for a moment whether it had been his gate or not, but as he neared the house he felt sure that it had been. The man had looked familiar, too, even from a distance. He had disappeared now, and Miles walked thoughtfully to his front door, opening it quietly, standing in the hall for a moment, sensing its warmth, seeking a scent, a presence.

  He went to the living-room door and listened, then, remembering Sheila’s words, opened it quickly. The room was empty. There was a bottle of wine on the floor, and, quite correctly, a single glass beside it. The bottle was half empty, and a little of the missing half was still in the glass. Nothing was out of place. Leaving the room, he gave the hall scant attention, moving up the staircase silently. He could hear Sheila now. She was in the bedroom, humming a tune. But first he went to Jack’s room. Here, too, everything was as it should be. There were posters on the walls, curling, faded memories of adolescence, and paperback books on the floor and packed into a secondhand bookcase. Miles had studied this room before, curious as to its secrets. Nothing was wrong.

  Except the fact that the low single bed was still warm with a slight musk of body heat.

  Downstairs again, sweating, Miles opened the front door and slammed it shut. He opened the living-room door, looked in, then closed it again.

  “Miles? I’m up here.”

  He took the stairs two at a time and entered the bedroom. Sheila was packing some clothes into a small case. Miles felt his insides jolt, as though they wanted suddenly to be his outsides.

  “Hello there,” Sheila said, folding a cardigan.

  “What are you doing?”

  “This? Oh, I’m throwing a lot of my old clothes out. There’s a jumble sale at the church, and I thought they might be glad of . . .Miles? What’s wrong? You look ghastly.”

  “N
o, no, I’m all right. Been a busy day, that’s all.” He sat down on the stool at the dressing table.

  “This doesn’t mean that I’m about to embark on a spending spree, you know,” said Sheila, as though this might have been what was worrying him. But Great God, he had thought for a second that she was leaving him, he had really believed it.

  “You’re back early,” she said now.

  “Am I?” He checked his watch. “Yes, just a little, I suppose.”

  “What was wrong? Company not to your liking?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s always been your problem, Miles. You’ve never learned to adapt. You’d never make a diplomat.”

  “And what have you been up to?” he asked quickly, giving her the chance to recall that someone had just left.

  In reply, she picked up a green coat from the heap on the bed and studied it.

  “Do you remember this, Miles? You brought it home one day, said you’d bought it on impulse. The only coat you ever bought me. It’s well out of fashion now.”

  “You never liked it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I can’t remember you ever wearing it.”

  Sheila just shrugged, perhaps thinking him a little drunk and edgy, and folded the coat into the case. The case was now full, and she pulled the clasps shut.

  “Shall we go downstairs?” she suggested.

  In the living room, he mentioned the wine.

  “Well,” said Sheila, “if you can go slinking off to barrooms with your friends, what the hell, I can drink by myself.”

  “Fair comment.”

  “What was the pub like, anyway?”

  “It was a wine bar.”

  “Pardon my mistake. Why are you so snappy?”

  “Snappy?”

  “Yes, snap, snap.” She clapped together her hands as though they were an alligator’s jaws. “Snap, snap.”

  “Well, the wine bar was bloody foul.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”