by Clare Carson
The Watcher’s eyes were on the Commander, hypnotized, ensnared by his own inner demons, the trammels of his past. The Commander sighed impatiently. His words mingled with the crack of a bike’s engine. Louder. Nearer this time. The rider appeared round the corner of the station, thundering down the slope from the taxi rank. The Yamaha drew level. Sam watched as the rider pushed his hand into his leather jacket. Pulled out a compact, metallic object. Packet of Benson and Hedges. It wasn’t. He lifted his arm. Shoot position. The Watcher’s face turned, expression locked, mesmerized by the barrel. Horrified, she saw death reaching out from the depths of the Watcher’s eyes a moment before she heard the shot. Suspended for a split-second between life and nothing. The crack of the engine firing followed the whip of the pistol as the bike revved and sped off towards the Cut.
Pink spittle bubbled from one corner of the Watcher’s mouth, the smouldering fag still clamped in the other. She gasped. He toppled to his knees, body flopping forward, his face hitting the pavement heavily, black blood quickly congealing on the curve of his cranium, head touching the gutter, the worn soles of his mock crocs upturned. In the unearthly silence that followed she inhaled the acrid scent of singed hair and burned flesh as the dead weight of his body extinguished his final cigarette.
She instinctively moved away, fearful of tripping over the invisible borderline, falling into oblivion. She looked up and saw the Commander smile.
‘I don’t think anybody is going to miss him.’
She returned his smile, too relieved to care about the clinical coldness of his reaction.
‘You must be Sam,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Jim talked about you a lot. He was very proud of you. He had a nickname for you he used all the time. Now what was it?’
She shrugged. He paused, glanced up to the sky and back. Moved on. ‘I’m so sorry about Jim’s death. It must be a very difficult time for you and your family.’
She felt herself warming to the Commander.
‘I was very sad I couldn’t join you at Jim’s funeral,’ he said. His face registered slight offence at the recollection and she thought she had better offer him an explanation for the prohibition.
‘That was Liz really. Jim had said he wanted the funeral to be friends and family only and my mum took it a bit literally. I’m sure he didn’t mean to exclude you.’
The Commander smiled again. ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. We were always very close. He always was…’ he paused. ‘He always was my favourite.’ The end of the Commander’s sentence was almost drowned out by the screeching of a couple of rooks fighting in the road over a scrap of greasy bacon. Carrion birds.
‘Well, I don’t want to waste any more of your time,’ he continued briskly. ‘I suspect you’ve had a long day. So perhaps you’d like to hand over anything that you might have… taken from Jim.’
She flushed slightly, embarrassed by the fact that he was clearly aware of her theft of the envelope. She looked swiftly over her shoulder, caught sight of Avis. What was she doing still standing there? Sam was slightly surprised to see that she hadn’t disappeared as soon as the Commander had appeared on the scene. In fact, Avis had slipped along the road in their direction, as if she was closing in for the kill. That was odd. Something sparked in her brain. Some faulty connection. She couldn’t quite grasp it. The Commander stepped closer to her now as well.
‘It doesn’t matter how you acquired the information. So long as you give it to me.’
The undercurrent of impatience had returned to his voice.
‘You’re totally welcome to it,’ she said.
She dug her hand into her cargo trouser pocket and pulled out the manila envelope. She was about to hand it over to him when she caught sight of Jim’s doodled feather on the back. She paused. What was it about the feather that made her think that Jim had meant her to take the envelope all along? She sighed. Some things would just remain forever unexplained. Jim and all his peculiar manoeuvres, his cryptic hints, his jokes, his pointless instructions. The ban on coppers at his funeral, for example. She could almost have thought that the very purpose of Jim’s funeral instructions was to prevent her from communicating with the Commander. Stop her from handing the papers over to him. She hesitated. There wasn’t any reason for Jim to try and prevent her from communicating with the Commander. Was there? Somewhere in a distant corner of her mind she heard her father’s voice. You have to watch your back in this game. You can’t afford to trust anybody. Not even the people you think are on your side. Especially not the people you think are on your side.
‘The papers please.’
She stared at the feather, the black bars striping its barbs. Kestrel’s feather. That’s what it was. It had to be. A feather from a kestrel’s tail. She touched the doodle with her finger and, for some reason, she found her head was spinning. She focused on the drawing, trying to find her centre of gravity, and she remembered then the kestrel’s feather her father had given her that day at Tilbury. Its peculiar lightness and strength. Funny things feathers, Jim had said. Who would have thought something so flimsy could hold a bird aloft? She glanced down and realized the ground was tilting alarmingly. Everything was topsy-turvy. Getting smaller. Further and further away. She was on a rising thermal. Looping and looping. Soaring. Surveying the tower-blocks and wastelands of south London. Following the amber river towards the far horizon. And now when she looked down, everything made perfect sense, the pieces below fell into place. It was all so obvious: the repeat patterns of the landscape, the shape-shifting characters telling the age-old story. And there was Jim. Standing at the Commander’s shoulder. The Commander and Jim, his right-hand man. Odin and Munin, his favourite raven spy. I fear for Hugin that he will not come back, Odin said. Yet I tremble more for Munin. Of course he was more worried about Munin, because we always fear betrayal most from those to whom we are closest. She could see Odin clearly from up high and, even though his trilby was tipped to cover his face, she could tell that he was concerned, suspected that his favourite spy would fly off, leave him, take all his dirty secrets to the other side. Concealed in the manila envelope. And so the Commander had unleashed his wild hunt, searching out the traitor, turning on his own beloved right-hand man. Stung by the treachery. Chasing down Munin. Cornering Jim. He had to go. The Commander had to get rid of him. She knew that now. He couldn’t let his once-trusted raven fly free. She felt a tear trickling down her cheek and for a moment she thought she might not return to earth.
‘You have to be sensible if you don’t want to find yourself in serious trouble.’
She looked into the Commander’s face, his thin-lipped mouth and his dead-fish eyes. And she could tell then that he had seen too much to bother with second thoughts, the benefit of the doubt. Regrets. She could sense his mind reckoning, totting up the debits and the credits, coming to unavoidable conclusions. Calculating the collateral damage. She didn’t move.
The roar of the returning bike broke the deadlock. She watched the reflection of the black Yamaha advancing in the Commander’s steel-rimmed glasses. The rider drew level. Feet on ground. Controlling the weight of the bike with one hand. Slipping the other into his leather jacket. Metallic flash. Pistol. Her turn to get it in the neck. Pay the price for her smart-arsery. She gasped. Closed her eyes. Squeezed tight.
Nothing.
Opened her eyes. The rider’s arm was raised. Shoot position. His pistol aimed at the Commander. He jerked his head towards the station slip-road.
‘Run,’ he said.
She remained rooted to the spot, numbed by uncertainty. Exhaustion.
‘Run.’ He spoke more urgently this time. ‘Go. Now. Quickly. Leave me to sort this fucker out.’
She came to her senses, allowed her limbs to obey his command, bolted up the slope. The South African accent of the rider rang in her ears, ricocheted around her mind.
‘You shit. You fucker. You think you can make me do anything just because I’m on the run. Well, you’re fuc
king wrong. There are limits to what you can tell me to do. I obeyed your fucking order to shoot her father, but I’m not going to kill a teenage girl. I’ve had enough of your fucking games.’
The pistol shot came as she reached the entrance to the mainline terminal. One crack. She halted in her stride. She couldn’t help looking back. Staring at the corpse of the Commander, face down in the gutter, blood oozing out around his lopsided trilby. She stood hypnotized as Avis chased along the street, heading in her direction. Drawing nearer. Reaching the taxi ramp. But, just at that moment, the rider revved his bike and intercepted Avis’s path. He turned and waved his pistol at Sam, gesturing, telling her to scram. She couldn’t shift. She was riveted. It was like watching a film – a thriller, not real life. She wanted to know what happened next. How the story ended. A police siren wailed through the air, jolted her back to her senses. And finally, she managed to move her legs and sprint for the cover of Waterloo station.
22
She cut across the mainline terminal, tacking through knots of people huddled around train timetables, and headed to Waterloo East. On the far side of the station bridge she spotted a telephone box, sprinted to the door. Slumped inside. Sirens still wailing all around. She scrabbled around in her trouser leg pocket and grasped the scrap of paper with the phone number written on it, the one that Tom had found under Jim’s bed. Message in a bottle. She squinted at the 01 London number. She had nothing to lose anyway; she might as well try it. She balanced a ten-pence piece in the coin slot and dialled. The phone rang. Nobody answered. Perhaps nobody was there. Perhaps it was a non-number. She was about to replace the receiver when somebody did pick up. She fumbled with the coin, jammed it into the slot.
‘Hello,’ said the voice at the other end. Gruff. Male. ‘Hello. Russian Embassy.’
She almost dropped the phone. That wasn’t what she had been expecting. Jim had assured her this wasn’t anything to do with the KGB. He said he’d lost those Soviet contacts ages ago, and now it turned out he had been wandering around with the number of a direct line to the Russian Embassy all along. He was the Kim Philby of the Force, a double agent. He was directing her towards a poison-tipped umbrella. How stupid of her to think that a scrap of paper found in a whiskey bottle under Jim’s bed might have been useful; that Jim might actually have somehow done what he had told Ruth he was going to do and left her a number to call in case she needed help. She should have known better.
‘Hello, Russian Embassy,’ said the voice again. In a distinctly non-Soviet accent. ‘Garage extension,’ the voice added. Garage extension? She frowned, trying to recall something Jim had said. Something about a sitting-down position. She pushed the coins into the machine.
‘Chauffeur speaking,’ the voice said.
She hesitated. ‘Are you on diplomatic duties?’ she asked uncertainly.
There was a pause at the other end now. ‘Yes… Is that the third man?’
The third man. Tilbury. Everything went back to the day at the docks. It all began at Tilbury. She was the third man, Jim had said. He had made up his mind. It was her. The third man. That was Jim’s nickname for Sam.
She took a deep breath. ‘Yes. This is the third man. I have something for you. I need to hand it over. Urgently.’
‘Are you in town?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know Charlie the lift-man?’
Charlie. Greenwich foot tunnel. Let’s face the music.
‘I know Charlie.’
‘How soon can you be there?’
She glanced up at the clacking departure board above the ticket office – the Greenwich train posted and due to leave in fifteen minutes.
‘About an hour.’
‘I’ll find you at the bottom.’
Distant voices drifted on the river’s current. The glass dome glittered against the violet sky. The shadow of a man was leaning against the railing, staring out across the oily water. It was Jim. She was eight years old again and Jim was there by her side, holding her hand. We’ll have to hurry. Or Liz will have our heads chopped off, he said. The concertina lift-gate was open and Charlie was sitting on the wooden bench reading a paper. He glanced up as she approached.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said.
He searched his dimming memory for her face. She smiled.
He nodded his head in recognition, returned an old man’s toothless grin. ‘Hello, princess. You’ve not changed that much.’
‘Neither have you,’ she lied.
‘I heard your dad had passed. I’m sorry. He was a good bloke. So long as you were on the right side of him.’
She smiled again, unable to form words reliably in her lumpy throat.
‘Going down?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Business?’
He pulled the gate shut across the cavernous lift and, as they descended, he whistled the lament for Tom Paine’s bones. Jim’s favourite song. The tune dawdled mournfully in the air as she stepped out into the eerie green light of the white tiled tunnel.
She paced under the Thames, stared straight ahead as the last notes of Charlie’s whistle dwindled and the rushing of water echoed above her head. It was cold down here, beneath the river. Colder than she remembered. Cold and damp and clammy, the air dank with the fetid traces of the tunnel’s inhabitants: late-night piss-heads, dead rats, slimy vegetation. River water seeping through. She shuddered. And when she heard the footsteps pacing up behind her, she began to fear she might have made a mistake. Jumped to the wrong conclusion. She turned sharply at the sudden weight of a meaty hand on her shoulder. Faced the hefty figure looming up behind her – cropped black hair, boxer’s nose, leather bomber, trainers.
‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Thank Christ it’s you and not some nutty Russian. Do they know they’ve hired a cop for a chauffeur?’
‘Course they do.’ He smiled benignly. Moved swiftly on. ‘I was half expecting you to call.’
‘Were you?’ She was too exhausted now to care or even to be surprised.
He dug around in the pocket of his bomber, pulled out a postcard.
‘It arrived yesterday. The old bugger hadn’t put the right stamp on it so I had to pay the difference.’
She examined the card. Postmarked Inverness. The Ring of Brodgar on the front and on the back Jim’s scrawl danced like the scribble on a planchette, a message from the other side.
The third man may need your help. Jim.
‘The third man,’ he said. ‘That’s what Jim always called you. Family joke I assumed.’
She grimaced, too many memories stirring, thought she heard a whisper, a footfall, glanced over her shoulder. Nothing. Nobody.
‘So what do you have for me anyway?’ Harry asked.
She stuck her hand into the side pocket of her combat trousers, removed the manila envelope.
‘Information from Jim. Everybody seems to be after it. That’s why he was killed. Here. Take it. Please.’
Harry held the envelope, turned it over thoughtfully. ‘Slaughter told me about the hit,’ he said.
‘Slaughter?’
‘Kevin Slaughter. Mortuary assistant. Another of Jim’s jokes. East End Borstal Boy. Jim helped him get the job. Thought it would give everyone a laugh to have a mortuary assistant called Slaughter who looked like a skeleton.’
She muttered, ‘Sometimes Jim’s jokes were a bit painful.’
‘Everyone has to find their own way of dealing with the difficult stuff.’ He rolled his bottom lip down, raised his eyebrows. ‘And some people have more difficult stuff to deal with than others.’
He shrugged. ‘You’d better tell me what’s been going on anyway. I know the gist of it. Jim told me he was heading up to Orkney to pick up the gen on Intelligence and their funny business. I assume that’s what this lot is.’ He wafted the envelope in the air. ‘And I’ve just heard over the airwaves that there’s a bit of a mess down in the swampland that needs to be cleaned up before forensics start dusting the place for fingerprints. The
Commander. That’s certainly put everybody in headless chicken mode. Word is that the other stiff is that creep who had it in for Jim and me when we were at Tilbury; Intelligence shit worker.’
‘The Watcher.’
‘The Watcher? Yes. Him.’ He harrumphed dismissively. ‘What was he doing in Waterloo? Was he after the information?’
‘The Watcher was the middleman for the Intelligence operation to fix the miners’ strike. When Intelligence found out that Jim’s contact had some information on the operation, they set the Watcher after him to try and retrieve it. But he didn’t manage to get hold of the envelope in Orkney.’
Harry nodded. ‘Jim told me that the Commander had instructed him to ask that old mate of theirs to provide a courier to pick the papers up in Orkney. American. Ex CIA.’
‘Don Chance,’ Sam confirmed. ‘He sent his daughter, Avis. She works for Ventura, his security company.’
‘So why didn’t Jim pass the envelope on to her?’
‘When Jim looked through the papers, he must have worked out that South African Steve, the agent provocateur hired by the Watcher, had also been employed by Don Chance through another of his companies – Shaba Security. And that made him suspect Chance was working with Intelligence in some way and would probably destroy the information rather than pass it on. But I reckon Chance also wanted the envelope because he was worried there might be something in it that linked Shaba Security to a load of shootings that took place at this mine they were supposed to be guarding. Shinkolobwe. He would obviously want to try and erase any connection to that. So when Jim failed to drop the envelope at Brodgar, South African Steve was ordered to hijack Jim’s car on the way back from Kensington Olympia Station. Made him drive to Vauxhall.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to recount the event. ‘Faked the car crash.’
Harry took a sharp intake of breath. ‘That’s a bit wild west,’ he said. ‘Those kind of tactics are usually saved for overseas operations.’
‘Well, I suppose Chance is more used to working overseas. And he’s obviously a bit of a crackpot.’