HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  That's what he used to tell his students at the Fort. "No future in getting a good hammering if the only witnesses to your pride are a gang of lowlife thugs."

  The one who had hold of Mattie's hair kept his head bowed.

  He could only see the floor. He could only see the steps down. He was propelled forward.

  They were going fast down the stairs and then across the entrance hall of the building, and towards the back of the hall, and into a narrow doorway. Down a flight of breeze block steps, into the cellar.

  A room of white, bright light. He saw the zinc bathtub. He saw the hose pipe that was attached to a wall tap. He saw the heavy hooks protruding at different heights from the wall. He saw the plank bed with the leather thongs fastened at each end. He saw the lengths of insulated cable lying casually on the floor.

  He saw the table and the two chairs, and the white, bright light was facing one of the chairs. That chair was empty. In the other, his back to the light, was the investigator.

  He was put down on to the empty chair. He wriggled on the hard seat to get the waist of his trousers back up from his hips. The men who had brought him down the two flights of steps were all behind him. He could hear their breathing, but he could not see them. He could only see the face of the investigator, and if he looked past the face of the investigator then there was only the ferocity of the white, bright light. He could feel the tremble in his thighs, and in his fingers. He could feel the sinking of his stomach and the looseness.

  He heard the creaking turn of a tape-recorder's spools. He thought the machine was on the floor beside the feet of the investigator. He could not see the microphone. The investigator put a small attache case on the table and opened it. He took out the sheets of paper Mattie had written, and a single cardboard file holder. He closed the attache case, put it back on the floor.

  The investigator pushed the file halfway across the table.

  The light fell on it. The title of the file was " D O L P H I N " .

  The investigator took the handwritten sheets of paper and held them in front of Mattie's face and tore them into small pieces.

  He saw them flake to the floor.

  "I am not stupid, Mr Furniss, and I had not expected that you would be stupid either."

  As soon as he was out from under the railway bridge, the rain streamed down over his face.

  He turned, but no one stirred or watched him go.

  Because Charlie had brought a bottle of sherry he was good news amongst the dossers who used the pavement under the bridge. He hadn't had more than one swig himself. The bottle had passed from hand to hand, and he had even been lent a sheet of cardboard packing to use as a blanket. Good guys.

  Didn't bother with questions. Guys who had accepted him because he'd passed round the bottle.

  The rain was dribbling off his nose. He might be back, and he might not. He was another of the city's flotsam, footloose for the day and congregating for the night where there was shelter from the rain. He could have gone to a hotel, or to a boarding house, but Charlie had reckoned that was risk. He had felt safer in the dossers' sleeping place. He had been aware of the light of a policeman's torch on his face, past three in the morning. They wouldn't be looking for him amongst the dossers, no way.

  At the Underground entrance he ducked out of the rain. He bought a newspaper; scanned it fast. He saw the photograph of I

  the burned out, blown up car, and he saw a picture of Jamil Shabro, and the caption "dedicated monarchist". Three dead.

  Shabro, the traffic warden, DOA, and an old lady who lived right above the blast. Five seriously injured, the old lady's sister among them, blinded in both eyes. No mention of a surveillance operation. He had not dreamed it, and he had no means, even now, of gauging what was the scale of the hunt.

  They'd pick him up, sure as hell, because they'd mounted surveillance on his meeting, they'd have him held at the airport whenever he flew back.

  And then the jigsaw pieces started tumbling. They had spotted him at Heathrow on the way in. That was what the performance at the airport was all about. He'd been under surveillance ever since. They could have lifted him and the rucksack at any time. Why had they not? What were they waiting for? Maybe they would think Jamil Shabro was his dealer. If so, that gave him a tiny breathing space. One less hand at his throat.

  Inside the ticket hall he dialled the number that Mr Furniss had given him in St James's Park.

  He was answered by a secretary. He asked for Mr Stone.

  He said he wouldn't give his own name.

  "Yes?"

  "Who is speaking?"

  "I am a friend of Mr Matthew Furniss."

  "Of Mattie's?"

  "He said I should call you."

  "Did he now - in what connection?"

  "To discuss business with you."

  He heard the hesitation. "Mattie said that?"

  "He told me to come to you."

  "What's the name? No name, no meeting."

  "Charlie."

  "Hang on. Shan't be a second."

  Flossie Duggan responded to the winking light, lifted her telephone. Neither of her telephones had a bell. Mr Furniss did not like telephones ringing all day around him. She was still red-eyed and her waste paper basket was a quarter filled with screwed up Kleenex.

  "He's not here at the moment, Mr Stone. . . . Yes, he knows Charlie. Old friend of Mr Furniss' family. Is there anything else, Mr Stone? . . . And best wishes to you, too."

  He fed more coins into the machine. He wrote down the address and the time of his appointment, then rang off.

  Inside the station he paid for a key to a left luggage box, and at the box, and masked by its open door, he lifted a Sainsbury's bag from his rucksack, before squeezing it into the locker. He wound the top of the plastic bag round his wrist. He went back to the telephones.

  Another call, another meeting set up.

  Charlie carried away from the Underground station one packet containing a full kilo of pure and uncut heroin.

  "Good God . . . What are you doing here?"

  Park didn't think, too tired to think, just opened his mouth.

  "Bill told me to get home."

  She had a super mouth, except when it was twisted, when she was bloody furious.

  "Marvellous, you came home because the philanthropic Mr Parrish said it was alright, remind me to grovel to him. . . .

  What's that on your head?"

  His hand went up. He felt the Elastoplast, and it was curling at the edges. "There was a car bomb . . . "

  "The Iranian?"

  She must have just come back from work. She had an apron over her work dress, and the vacuum cleaner was out of the cupboard and plugged in.

  He said, "We were on a surveillance, the car went up about 30 yards away. We got chucked about a bit."

  "It's today, afternoon. That was yesterday, morning."

  He hadn't kissed her yet. He was still in the doorway. And so hellishly tired, and it was an old script.

  "We had a panic on."

  "All the telephones down, were they?"

  He didn't know whether she was picking an argument, or whether she was concerned that he had been close to a car bomb. Her cheeks were flushed. He reckoned she wanted the fight. He could remember holding Token's hand the previous day - never understood why Token didn't have a steady fellow

  - he just wanted cocoa hot in his throat, and his head cool on the pillow.

  "I said a panic. We picked up a target the other night at the airport. I don't know how much, but he's got a substantial amount of stuff. Yesterday morning he visited Shabro, the Iranian who died. The target got away. We don't know where he's gone. It was my decision to let him run, and we've lost him, plus a hell of a load. . . . That's what I mean by a panic.

  That's why I didn't think of ringing you . . . "

  "David, what the hell is happening to us?"

  "I'm just pretty tired."

  "When are we going to talk about it, when?"
<
br />   "Right now, I want to go to sleep."

  She flounced aside, made a way for him. She snapped the switch on the vacuum cleaner and he had to step over the cable to get to the bedroom. At least the suitcase was back on top of the wardrobe.

  He didn't register that the vacuum cleaner had gone off.

  She came into the room. She sat on the bed beside him.

  "Is it really bad for you?"

  "If I foul up? Yes."

  "How bad?"

  "Kiss goodbye to a Liaison Officer posting . . . "

  "In Bogota?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, that's the best news I've had all week. It sounds like hell on earth, does Bogota."

  "It just seems important to me."

  "More important than anything?"

  "I'm very tired, Ann. . . . I'm sorry I didn't ring."

  She went to the dressing table. She took off it an opened envelope, and picked an invitation card out from the envelope.

  "What is it?" His eyes were hardly open.

  "Invitation . . ." She laughed, a brittle ring. "The ID

  Mid-Summer Ball . . . are we going, David?"

  "It'll be awful."

  "I want to meet all of those wonderful people who are so important to your life. I am going to talk to all those fantastic people who have the power to send us to Bogota . . . "

  "We'll go."

  "You stand me up . . ."

  "I said that we'll go."

  " . . . and we're dead."

  "I'm just so tired. . . . Ann, I don't want us to be dead."

  "Then do something about it."

  She had the apron off and her shoes and her dress, was half undressed, when she saw that he was asleep.

  At the airport he had worn a blazer with the badge of a travel company sewn on to his breast pocket. The travel company knew nothing of a Charlie Eshraq, had employed no courier in Turkey during the period of Charlie's last trip out of the United Kingdom.

  In his flat they found a receipt from a bucket shop - followed up, blood out of a stone and the threat of a V A T inquiry before the blood started to trickle. Three return tickets to Istanbul.

  No address book. No cheque stubs. The place was eerily clean. Fingerprints, yes they had all that. But that wasn't going anywhere. Not a single photograph to build on. Nothing to say whether Eshraq was his real name. The coffee shop and the laundromat knew him, had never seen him with anyone, if you know what I mean. The owner of the flat had never met him and an estate agent, who blushed rather prettily Statesman thought, said he paid always in cash, always on the nail. There were three possible leads. Manvers, who may have known nothing about him at all. The man in the Import-Export business in Kensington, who turned out to be the brother, wouldn't you just have guessed it, of the Iranian in the car, so his office was shut very tight and the family scarpered and the Anti-Terrorist people were taking the line that if the ID were going into the film business and if Mr Park thought he was Mr David Puttnam that was all very well, thanks for the tip-off, and do us a favour, son, don't ask us to tell you where Mr Shabro's brother is, because you people are bad news and anyway you're so clever that you can surely find him without assistance from Anti-Terrorist Branch. Mr Corinthian's film? No, it was still being examined. No, the Met would probably want it for a couple of days. Expect it in a week or so.

  And there was Furniss of the FCO, as Harlech called him.

  The ACIO said that Leroy Winston Manvers was now on remand at Brixton prison and out of reach, and that they'd had their chance with him, and no way were they going back there now that the dealer was in the hands of a Legal Aid solicitor.

  So Parrish had said to the ACIO that this Matthew Furniss was the key, and the ACIO had not been able to contradict him.

  Three of them went to the Home Office. The ACIO had roped in the head of the National Drugs Intelligence Unit, they'd gone round to New Scotland Yard and picked him up.

  They'd leaned on him, so that he couldn't excuse himself.

  Into the Home Secretary's office.

  The ACIO did the talking. Bill Parrish did the prompting.

  The head of the NDIU was the weight behind them.

  "What it comes down to, Home Secretary, is that we are being denied access to this Matthew Furniss. Now, we've played this very straight. We have not, I repeat not, chased this man and sought him out. We accept that he may be a sensitively placed government servant, and we have gone through the correct channels, and we've been blown off. . . .

  Let's not beat about the bush. We were instructed to carry out an investigation into the supply of the heroin that ultimately killed Lucy Barnes. Quite disproportionate resources have been deployed . . . and we're being blocked. It's right that we should be frank with each other, Home Secretary.

  You wanted a priority made of this case."

  "You've lost this man Eshraq, and you've lost his heroin?"

  "Correct, Home Secretary. We lost him in freak circumstances, you will agree. If we are to get him back, and get his stuff back, without wasting an immense amount of time then we have to have Matthew Furniss."

  "I'll look into it."

  "Either that or the investigation has to go into the trash-can, sir."

  "I said that I would look into it, Mr Parrish. Thank you, gentlemen. Good day to you."

  Parrish, not a vindictive man, thought that the Home Secretary looked like a cornered rabbit. Not his to reason why, but he didn't mind taking a small jolt of consolation from the man's discomfiture.

  It was a well arranged meeting. No chances taken. Charlie liked that. He had been under surveillance, and he was pretty sure that he had busted the surveillance, but he liked the style of the Greek and the meeting. He had been picked up in Chiswick in West London by an anonymous little bastard with a sallow face and bad eyes. That had been arranged on the telephone. He was pretty sure that the rendezvous was checked out, that they were watched by the Greek's payroll. He was told to take the Underground to the end of the District line in Wimbledon. His description must have been telephoned on, because after he had kicked his heels and had a couple of coffees at the station cafeteria, he was met again. They put him in the back of a van and they drove him round for an hour and a half, and when the van stopped, and he hadn't an idea where he was, then the back doors had opened, and the Greek had climbed in beside him.

  The Greek was thorough. He had Charlie stripped down in the van to his underpants. No way he was going to be stung, that Charlie was going to get away with a microphone in his clothes. That was the preamble, then there was the business.

  A quarter of a kilo of pure heroin on display. The Greek was no baby in the game, and the Greek knew the stamp on the wrapping. Enough of the stuff to have covered a teaspoon was taken out of the packet, and was passed in a small see-through sachet through the slightly opened back of the van. Going for analysis, running a fast check. Good style, Charlie liked it, more thorough than Manvers had ever been. The check came back. The sachet was passed again into the interior of the van, there was an anonymous raised thumb. They'd talked business while the analysis was being done.

  "Cash is hard."

  "Cash, or no deal."

  "You brought it in yourself?"

  "From the Qazvin district. I collected it myself."

  "And there's going to be more?"

  Charlie lied. "Yes, it'll be regular, and top grade."

  "And you're looking for . . . ?"

  "A quarter of a million, for seven kilos."

  "Two hundred."

  "Two fifty."

  "If it's tomorrow, in cash, two hundred thousand is top whack for seven kilos."

  "I'll call tomorrow for a meeting."

  They shook hands. There was a clinging oiled sweat on the Greek's hands. Charlie thought it was a good deal. The Greek would get double what he was paying Charlie, but Charlie didn't cough at that.

  "What's it for?"

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  The Greek smiled. A twist
ed smile. He had a deep scar at the side of his chin from far back, from a school playground fight with Stanley knives. "Just that this isn't your scene - so, what's it for?"

  "Something you won't ever hear about."

  "What on earth does he want?"

  Benjamin Houghton could see the nervousness in Miss Duggan's face. The likes of Flossie Duggan were never called to the nineteenth floor. She was a few years short of retirement, less than Mr Furniss had left to him, but she had had his promise that he would get an extension for her, she would go when he went. It was her whole life, being the Personal Assistant to Mr Furniss. More than anything else she dreaded the day when she must hand in her polaroid cards and try and pick up old age away from Century. She had joined the Service in 1950 after she had read an advertisement in a smart magazine in an optician's waiting room that called for applications from "Girls of good education for position in London with good prospects and possibility of service abroad

  - aged 18 to 30". She would be going, when she handed in her polaroid card, to Weston-super-Mare where her sister kept a guest house, open only in the summer season. She would have her debrief, a day or two of counselling, and she would be out on her neck with her memories. To Flossie Duggan, genteel and poor and loyal, Mr Furniss was the finest gentleman that it had been her privilege to work for.

  "He just wants a little talk with you."

  "He's already stolen Mr Furniss' floppies."

  "That's not fair, Flossie . . . "

  "Miss Duggan." The boy would never have been so imperti-nent if Mr Furniss had been there.

  "The Director General is entitled to see the computer records of a Desk Head even when those records are stored in the Desk Head's personal safe and not where they belong, in Library. So can we go, please."

  He saw the neatness of Mattie's desk, his ashtray had been cleaned ready for his return. His pencils were in a holder, sharpened. His In tray and Out tray were empty. He thought that the photograph on the shelf behind the desk, Mrs Furniss, had been polished. There were some late daffodils in a vase beside the photograph. She was registering her defiance, taking her time to cover up her keyboard with its plastic shroud, and then she was riffling in her handbag for her lipstick. Again, he could see her nervousness, because the effect of the vivid lipstick against her pale and puffed skin was appalling.