Watchman

by Ian Rankin

  “Over and out, eh?”

  Macfarlane rubbed at the flesh on either side of his nose. He looked not only tired—he always looked tired—but somehow beaten into submission by life.

  “Look, Jim, I’m loath to say this. I’m a reporter too, remember. I don’t like it when someone pulls the blinders over my eyes and then leads me through a field full of shit. But the world works that way sometimes. There are jockeys riding us, and sometimes when you peep out from behind the blinders you see what’s better left alone. End of story.”

  “That’s very nice imagery, Terry, but it doesn’t add up to much.”

  “Then let me take it a stage further. You, Jim, are one step away from the glue factory.”

  Stevens rose from his chair.

  “Thanks for the warning. I haven’t a clue what it’s a warning about, but I’ll keep on my toes, Terry.” He opened the door. “You might even say I’ll keep on trotting.”

  He closed the door behind him, but softly, and walked back to his desk. What was that all about? Sizewell was the obvious answer. He hated arguing with Macfarlane. It was rumored that the guy had something seriously wrong with him, that he worked through a lot of pain. Didn’t we all? He recalled their last falling-out. He had been sent to cover a suicide. Some bank employee had jumped from his sixth-floor office, leaving behind a young wife. Stevens had filed the story, only to be growled at by Macfarlane: what about the wife? Was she attractive? No, not especially. Well, why not say so anyway? The story’s too dull, almost dead. So you want lies? Jim Stevens had asked. And Macfarlane had nodded. Go for the sordid jugular, then alter the facts by cosmetic surgery. Why bother? he had thought. Why try to tell the truth when the truth isn’t wanted anymore?

  Journalism these days meant stakeouts, infrared lenses, false identities, bugs. It was all change, desperate change. These days, news was twisted around into a corkscrew with which to extract the twenty or thirty pence from each punter’s pocket. He should have listened more patiently to Sinclair aka Hickey, should have gone by the old rules, but he had grown weary of trying to turn babbled stories into good copy.

  The telephone rang again. Despite himself, he answered it.

  “Crime desk, I suppose.”

  “Mr. Stevens?”

  Recognizing the voice, he brightened up.

  “Hello, Mr. Hickey. It is Mr. Tim Hickey, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Listen, I’m glad you called. In fact, I was just thinking about you. I’m sorry about our last meeting. I had a raging toothache, not in the best of moods, sorry. But I’d like us to meet again.” He was working now, pen in hand. Someone up there had given him a second chance, and he would kick like a mule until Macfarlane’s “jockeys” had all been unseated. “I’d like to hear your story. Really I would.”

  Miles Flint had spent a rare free morning in the reading room of the British Museum. He had not been given this time off; he had been ordered to take it, ordered by Richard Mowbray, who said that he was worried about Miles’s ability to function after so long on the surveillance. Take some air, Miles. Don’t let us see you for a day. So he had trekked into the city and caught upon some articles about beetles in the recent journals.

  Leaving the museum, he bumped into Tony Sinclair.

  “Tony!”

  “Hello, Miles.” Sinclair seemed surprised, and not very pleased to see him. “What are you doing here? Keeping tabs on me?”

  “Why should I do that, Tony? No, it’s just my day off. I was doing some research. And you?”

  “Killing time.”

  Miles nodded. “I heard you’d moved on.”

  “There was no volition in it. I was pushed out. Didn’t you know that?”

  Sinclair was eying him warily, glancing at the passersby.

  “No,” said Miles. “This is news to me. I’m a bit out of touch, I’m afraid.”

  “You had nothing to do with it, then?”

  Miles shook his head, and Tony Sinclair seemed to relax.

  “I was never even asked for a report on you,” Miles said.

  “I don’t understand it, Miles, really I don’t.” Sinclair’s voice was becoming elegiac.

  “Well, neither do I, Tony.”

  But Miles had wondered about it, oh yes, he had wondered.

  “Look,” said Sinclair, checking his watch, “I really must be going. I’ve a meeting with someone.”

  “Which way are you headed?”

  “Charing Cross Road.”

  “Fine, I’ll walk there with you.”

  There were way too many questions in Miles’s head for any order of importance to be ascertained, and so he ended up asking none. He had wanted to meet Tony Sinclair, yet now that he had, he was reticent, not knowing if he wanted to know any more than he already did. Knowledge was weakness sometimes. He knew that now.

  At the corner of Oxford Street they parted. Miles had refrained even from asking for Sinclair’s telephone number. So that was that. He watched him disappear, to be swallowed up by the midday crush, then started along the obstacle course that was Oxford Street. Some workmen were putting in a new window to replace the one which had been blown out. Miles shivered, remembering that day. People had fear in their eyes: any one of these windows might be treacherous. They walked past almost on tiptoe. As he made to move into the road, a hand grabbed his arm.

  It was Tony Sinclair, his teeth brightly displayed.

  “Latchkey stinks to high heaven,” he snarled. “You already know that, so why aren’t you doing anything about it? I’m going to do something, that’s a promise. I’m going to find out why.”

  And with that he was off again, forcing his way past the protesting office workers, a man beating against the tide.

  Well, good for you, thought Miles, good for you, Tony Sinclair. You’ve reminded me of something I was longing to forget.

  All the same, the way things were going he did not give Tony much hope of success. He felt a wintry gust, and it was as though he were already in the funeral parlor, staring into the open coffin.

  The phone rang and rang but she wasn’t answering. Where the hell was she? Out doing research? In bed with some athlete? Stevens didn’t care. But he needed her help. It had been an unprofitable lunch; Sinclair aka Hickey had known a bit after all. So the Israeli’s assassin had been followed and lost by the spies, and the murder itself had been hushed up by the Israelis. It was front-page news, but Stevens wanted more.

  “Answer, Janine, for Christ’s sake,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  He knew now that he had something, and that his hunch about the murder had been correct. Here was something more for Janine to work on. Well, if she wouldn’t sleep with Harry Sizewell, she’d have to earn her pennies the hard way. He touched at his temporary filling. There was something rotten behind it all. That went for the tooth, too.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Janine?”

  “Oh, hello, hell-raiser.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “OK, OK, just joking. What’s got into you today?”

  “Where do you want me to begin? The world caving in on me or the terminal disease?”

  “Like that, huh? And I don’t suppose you’re phoning up for sympathy?”

  “I’m phoning because there’s some ferreting I want you to do.”

  “OK, just show me the rabbit hole.”

  “My, we are sharp today, aren’t we?”

  “Is it Sizewell?”

  “Not this time. Different story, same pay.”

  “Pay? Is that those coins you give me every Friday?”

  “You just got demoted to a three-day week.”

  “On parity with you now then, eh? I’ll tell my union about you.”

  “Look, Janine, I yield to your wit, OK? Now, you are a beautiful young woman, intelligent, charming, and you’re going to go places. And the first place you’re going to go is the Israeli embassy in Palace Gardens.”

  The order came down by
way of Partridge.

  “Mr. Partridge said that?” asked Mad Phil, a complaint forming within him.

  “Yes,” said Mowbray, “Mr. Partridge said that.”

  Harvest had been declared dormant, and Miles would have to seek other accommodation, leaving the unfolding story of the mechanic and the secretary. He knew now how Mowbray had felt on that night when he had discovered the gap in his novel. He supposed a hotel would be the answer now. He knew of a good, cheap place near Russell Square. It had been used by the firm in the past for various purposes, but was now, so far as he knew, dormant, too.

  “You’ll be moving your stuff, won’t you, Miles?” Mowbray asked, making it sound like the order it was. “This place will be going back on the market tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’ll move out in the morning, if that suits.”

  “Well, the property chaps won’t be along before lunchtime,” said Mowbray faintly. He was staring out of the window. “Three months. For close on three goddamn months we’ve been watching that place, and for what? A great big nothing.”

  “As usual,” said Phil, not allowing the opportunity for a quick grumble to pass.

  “Yes,” agreed Mowbray, “as usual, eh, Miles?”

  There was a long pause while Mowbray realized that Miles’s last case had not exactly ended in a whimper.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s all right, Richard,” said Miles. “It’s nice to have had a quiet mission for a change. Peace and quiet. It’s been a nice break for me.”

  And he gave a smile that seemed to unnerve his companions more than it cheered them.

  That night, Miles was alone as he watched from the window in the darkness. The house was silent, and he was left to his thoughts. The living-room curtains flickered with blue light from the television set, but there was no listening apparatus now, and an engineer would visit the house tomorrow to retrieve the bugs.

  The girl was in the house alone, which was unusual. Miles had passed her in the street and in the local supermarket, had smelled up close the perfume she wore, had heard her voice. He rubbed at his chin, feeling a day’s stubble. His thoughts were nervous companions, flickering like the television. He knew that it was not uncommon for a watchman to come to empathize with his quarry, to feel a bond of something like friendship. But he was a senior, trained to near perfection in his art. He should not be allowing these emotions such free rein.

  But he did.

  So it was that he found himself in the garden of her house, wandering freely beneath the street’s sodium glare, picking his way toward the living-room window, the flashing blue of the curtains, and her, the woman, somewhere within. The garden was overgrown, but not yet too far gone. He did not make a sound as he moved, the grass underfoot wet and yielding. Some condensation on the windows showed that she was alive, was breathing only feet away from him. He was absorbed, not thinking, hardly daring to breathe himself, just watching.

  So he did not notice, in this new scheme of things, when the blue of the television became a sharper, brighter blue, the blue of a police car, which sat outside the house as the two officers approached him slowly and asked him to accompany them to the station for questioning. She stared out from behind her curtains as he was led gently away, and a neighbor across the way shouted out something that, mercifully, he did not catch . . .

  The room had been freshly painted, and he liked its simplicity, the way it said, I am a place of detention, not to be imprinted with the personalities of my occupants.

  “We can’t even get a name out of him,” he heard someone say.

  “Never mind that. We’ve checked the stuff in his wallet. He’s quite an important fish, as it happens. Something in the Home Office. Somebody’s coming from there to pick him up.”

  “What? At this time of night? He must be important.”

  The officers seemed like humanoids made out of nuts and bolts, creaking their way toward the dawn like tired old machines. The station itself was run like a garage. Who would fetch him, Mowbray or Denniston? Had he blown another case? He supposed he had. But why should a bunch of terrorists need a groundskeeper, and why did a groundskeeper let his garden go to weeds?

  “Do you want a cup of tea or something?”

  “Yes, please. Milk and no sugar.”

  The young constable had become less frosty upon hearing that Miles was such an “important fish.” The tea was placed before him, a spoon sliding against the rim of the mug. Old stains mottled the circumference, as if the machine that washed the crockery was running down.

  “All right, sir?” This was a detective, suited and with rather an awkward brown and green tie hanging limply around his neck. He seated himself opposite Miles, spreading sheets of paper before him, paperwork to be checked and filed.

  “You don’t pay your parking fines very often, do you, sir? But then you don’t need to. It’s better than diplomatic immunity what you buggers have got.”

  “I specifically asked for sugar in my tea,” Miles said calmly. “This tea doesn’t have sugar in it.”

  “Constable, fetch our guest here another cup of tea, will you?”

  “But sir, he didn’t—”

  “Just do it, laddie.”

  Peeved, the constable picked up the mug and left, much to Miles’s satisfaction. He studied the detective now.

  “Are you Scottish, officer?”

  The detective nodded, lighting a cigarette for himself and offering one to Miles, which, after debate, he declined.

  “How did you know? I didn’t think I had much of an accent left.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. It was your use of the word ‘laddie.’”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’m Scottish myself. From the east coast.”

  “I’m from the west.” The detective was growing edgy. The conversation was slipping away from professional matters. He shuffled his papers together and cleared his throat. “What were you doing in that garden?”

  “That’s classified,” said Miles.

  There was nothing for him to fear, nothing save the grilling he would receive from his own people. But he could invent excuses enough for the purpose. He had seen something suspicious, and, having no contact with base, had decided to move in closer. Arrested by mistake. It had happened to watchmen before.

  “Classified?”

  “Under a Home Office directive.” But of course they knew who he was anyway: it’s better than diplomatic immunity what you buggers have got.

  “I see,” said the detective.

  “There’s a phone number I can write down. You could pass it to Special Branch.”

  The detective nodded, seeming bored all of a sudden. He shuffled his papers again. They were playing a little game now, weren’t they, a waiting game, of no consequence.

  Just then the door opened. There was someone outside. The detective seemed relieved, smiling at Miles as he left the room. The door closed again and Miles was alone with himself. He felt mildly drunk, as though coming out of a heavy session. He knew that he had messed things up. Something had snapped inside him in that empty house. He had become feral.

  He had slipped up.

  Again.

  It was not lost on him that this might be just what the old boy needed in order, politely of course, to get rid of him. He was becoming a thorn in the old boy’s side, and a public one at that.

  The door opened again. Billy Monmouth was standing in the doorway.

  “Come on, Miles,” he said matter-of-factly. “Let’s go.”

  FIFTEEN

  IT WAS ONE OF THE firm’s cars, another Rover, or perhaps the same one that had taken Jeff Phillips and him to the Doric. Billy seemed preoccupied with the perils of night driving in London. Unmarked police cars jockeyed for position in outside and inside lanes, trying to intuit the villains and the drunks. Security bells rang out all around like old-fashioned alarm clocks.

  “There’s been another bombing,” said Billy finally.

  “
Oh? Where?”

  “In an underground car park. We think they were trying to hit a knight of the realm.”

  “I see. I didn’t get you out of bed, did I?”

  “I was in the office when the message came through. I asked to be the fetcher.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure now. It seemed like predestination.” He laughed a quick, haunted laugh, a reconnaissance into the no-man’s-land between them. “How are you, Miles?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, just dandy, thank you for asking.”

  “Sheila and I haven’t met, you know, not since . . .Well, it’s all over. But listen, Miles, nothing happened between us. All she wanted was someone who would listen to her. I was the listener. That was all. Oh, I daresay that in time we might have . . .” Seeing the look on Miles’s face, Billy shut his mouth. Miles had noticed that his speech was a bit stiff, as though the blow from the exhibition catalog had done some lasting damage.

  “But you told her?”

  “I telephoned. Cowardly, don’t you think? I telephoned that night and told her.”

  All she wanted was a listener. Sure, but why Billy Monmouth?

  “We’re going to a small hotel near King’s Cross,” Billy said at last.

  “I think I know the one,” said Miles. “For debriefing?”

  “It’s routine in cases of arrest or identification. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” asked Miles, sensing Billy flinch from the question. A palpable hit.

  “Miles, what do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want me to say?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Miles!”

  A car flashed past them, pursued by a brilliant orange and white police car, its blue flashing light reminding Miles of the garden and the soft voices of the policemen coming to him from far away.

  He had experienced a short, sharp night of the soul, but he had come out of the other side in one piece, hadn’t he? He did not want to drill a hole in Billy’s head, and he did not particularly want to hit him. He was torn between wanting to understand and wanting simply to put the whole thing behind him and make a “new” start.