HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  They were in that section of the third floor occupied by Assistance (Photographic) when he was passed a telephone by Ben Houghton. For a moment he was puzzled. He had spoken to the woman at breakfast time.

  He listened.

  "No, no, Mrs Furniss, you were quite right to reach me

  . . . intolerable behaviour. Rest assured, Mrs Furniss, you won't be troubled again."

  The four wooden packing cases and the two cardboard boxes were the first items to be loaded into the container. The lorry had backed into Herbert Stone's driveway. He gave the driver a manifest for the packing cases that listed Machine Parts for Agricultural Equipment. Later the container would be filled with more machine parts for tractors and refrigeration units.

  The haulage company was a regular carrier of machine parts to Turkey.

  When the lorry had left he went inside his house, and into the quiet of his work room. He telephoned the number Charlie Eshraq had left him and told him that the soap was on its way, and he gave him the name of a contact, and where he should go and when.

  "I tell you, Bill, it wasn't sensible behaviour."

  "If you want London to become like Amsterdam, Chief, then sensible behaviour would be the order of the day."

  "And I don't want a press office handout."

  "My guys have worked their balls off, we just don't like to see it go down the plug hole."

  Parrish had been at the Lane for one and a half years longer than the Chief Investigation Officer, and for two and a half years longer than the ACIO. He rarely spoke his mind. When he did he could get away with murder.

  The ACIO said, "If you'd come to us first, Bill, cleared it with us . . ."

  "You wouldn't have let me go."

  The CIO was hunched forward in his chair, elbows on his desk. "There's another way of looking at it, Bill. We are stretched so damn thin that in effect we are a fraud. We intercept a minute proportion of what's brought in. I know that, you know that . . . When you are losing the battle, as we are, then we need friends where friends matter . . . "

  "You have to go for the throats of the bastards and hang on."

  "It's a great world that you live in, Bill, and it's not a world I see much of across this desk."

  "So, who are the friends we need?"

  "They're the high and the mighty . . . and right now they're peeved with you."

  "I just gave the nest a little shake."

  "Very self-indulgent of you, Bill, and no help to me, because I am summoned to a meeting this afternoon with the faceless wonders at Century House. What do I tell them, Bill?"

  "To get fucked."

  "But my world isn't your world, more's the pity, and I'm looking for friends . . . I have one man in Karachi, one DLO

  on his ownsome, and when he goes up to the North-West Frontier, who escorts him? The spook escorts him, and drives the Landrover. Why does my D L O ride in the spook's Landrover? He rides in it because I don't have the funds to provide a Landrover of our own. I have one DLO in Cyprus, and how does one man get to know what's coming out of Jounieh, how does he know what's sailing from any Lebanese port? Cyprus is awash with spooks. . . . I am trying to cultivate friends, Bill, not shake the nest and telling them to get fucked."

  "I promised Park, and he's the best I have, that I wouldn't let your friends the faceless wonders stand in our way,"

  "Then you opened your big mouth too wide. Tell us about your Keeper, Bill. We begin to hear quite a lot about Master Park. Is he ready for a move upwards, do you think?"

  "We're going to have a celebrity on our hands," the Director General mused.

  "How so?"

  "I anticipate great mileage out of Furniss. They'll want him at Langley. The Germans'll want him, and I dare say even the French will recognize that they could learn a thing or two."

  The Deputy Director General said coolly, "I'd put that out of your mind for a start. If I were in this office, I would make double damn certain that no one outside this building gets to know that we allowed a Desk Head to plod about on a hostile frontier without a semblance of security. It'll get out sooner or later, of course. As like as not Tehran will be drafting a press release even as we sit here: Why We Let British Spy Go, and, by the way, not a few people will be wondering already."

  The Director General scowled. "I don't mind telling you that I told Furniss that the whole Service was proud of him."

  "Not clever . . . I'm going to run a fine toothcomb over Terence Snow. The report on how Mattie came to get himself kidnapped is pretty conclusive. Indeed, I doubt that he has any sort of future here. He'll have to go back to Ankara in the short term. There may just be a way he can be useful to us in the short term."

  "You're a hard man."

  "I am what the job requires."

  The snort of the Director General, "And Furniss, has he a future?"

  "Very probably not, I am afraid."

  The Deputy Director General reported that a man had been sent down to Bibury with the instruction to break the bones of any Customs Investigation creature who came within a hundred yards of the Furniss cottage, and he said that he would be at the Director General's side at the meeting with the Customs hierarchy.

  "What sort of people will they be?"

  "I expect you'll be able to charm them, Director General.

  Think of them as glorified traffic wardens."

  He had no doubt that his life depended upon the success with which he stood his ground against the inquisition of the clerics.

  Ranged on the far side of the table to him were four of them. They were the power and the glory of the Revolution of today, and once he would have called them fanatics and bigots. They were the ones who had been to maktab where the Mullahs taught the Qur'an to boys aged four, and then they had become the talabeh who were the seekers after truth as handed down from the wisdom of the Ayatollahs. They had taken child brides because it stated in the book that a girl should not experience her first bleeding at her parents' home.

  They had spent time in the holy city of Qom. It was the failure of the S A V A K that these creatures still existed. They were his masters. He claimed that he had already bled the British spymaster dry before his escape. He told them of the young Eshraq, and they were quiet as he explained the mission of Eshraq, heading back towards Iran, and they heard of the precautions that were in hand to prevent the traitor crossing over the frontier with armour-piercing missiles. He said that Eshraq's first target was the Mullah who sat immediately in front of him. He saw the way that the others turned sharply to the one amongst them who had been singled for attack, and he told them that he, himself, was the target that would follow.

  For more than an hour and a half he defended himself, and at the end he told them of his arrangements to prevent Eshraq crosssing the border.

  It was implicit in his argument that if he were removed, if he were sent to Evin, then the shield in front of his masters would have been dismantled.

  The life of Charlie Eshraq would safeguard the investigator's life. Nothing more, nothing less.

  He had flown back to Tehran from the Gulf that morning to resume work at the new power station to the west of the city.

  He browsed in the bazaar. He was on the Bazar e Abbas Abad, amongst the carpet shops.

  He paused. He could not linger for more than a few seconds.

  In front of him were the heavy steel shutters, and fastening them to the concrete paving was a powerful padlock. His eye caught that of the man who stood in front of the next cavern of carpets, open - and the man ducked back into his shop.

  There was no sign, no explanation of why this one business should be shut. If there had been illness, if there had been bereavement, then he would have expected an explanation from the merchant's neighbour.

  He walked on. He walked into the warmth of the sunlight beyond the bazaar's alleys. He took a taxi back to his hotel, and in his basin he burned the message that he had been paid to carry.

  Henry was late getting down to Albury.
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  Everyone who knew Henry Carter, which wasn't many, had told him that he should dump the Morris 1000 Estate on the nearest Corporation tip and failing that at the side of any road, and buy something reliable. Trouble again with the carburettor.

  He was late getting down to Albury, and Mattie had already arrived, and the men who had brought him from Brize Norton were fretting to be on their way. He ignored the show of annoyance as he struggled through the front door with his bag and his Wellington boots and two weatherproof coats, binoculars, camera with a long lens, and tape-recorder. Typical of the sort of youngster they recruited into the Service now, neither of them offered to help, and they scarcely bothered to report that Mattie was in one piece, sound asleep now, before they were off.

  There weren't many of them, the old brigade, left at Century these days, and it was obvious that the Director General would have wanted one of the long servers to be down at Albury to take Mattie's debrief. He would not have called himself a friend of Mattie Furniss, rather a colleague.

  He looked back through the front door. He had heard the call. He was festooned with his gear. He saw the bird. Picus Viridis. The Green Woodpecker was halfway up a dead elm across the lawn. There would be gaps in the debrief for him to set his camera on a tripod, and to rig his microphone. He went inside. It would be something of a reunion for him, coming back to the country house in the woodland of the Surrey hills. Mrs Ferguson greeted him. She was rather a dear woman, the housekeeper, and there had been a time when he had actually thought of making a proposal of marriage to her, but that was quite a long time ago and he had been at the house for weeks on end. It was her cooking that had settled it. It was awful. She pecked his cheek. He saw George behind her, hovering at the kitchen door. George touched his cap.

  He wore a cap always now, since the baldness had set in, wore it even in the house. A loyal fellow, George, but lazy, and why not, with so little to do. Through the kitchen he could see that the outside door was closed, and the door shook and there was ferocious scratching from the far side of it.

  "Am I not to be greeted by old 'Rotten'?"

  George grinned. "Your gentleman doesn't like dogs, and he certainly doesn't like Rottweilers."

  Not many did. Henry had a fear of some men, and of most women, but of no animal, not even an animal that weighed more than a hundred pounds and was famously unpredictable.

  "Then make sure the brute's kept clear of him."

  He had to smile . . . Wouldn't do for Mattie Furniss to have fought his way out of an Iranian prison only to find himself savaged by the safe house Rottweiler. He looked around him. He could see the glimmer of fresh paint on the woodwork and the carpet in the hall had been cleaned. Things were looking up.

  "Where is he?"

  "He's just come down. Been asleep ever since he got here.

  He's in the library."

  He left George to carry the bag and his kit upstairs. He hoped that he would have his usual room, the one that overlooked the vegetable garden where the songbirds gathered to feed off the groundsel and dandelion seeds.

  He walked through to the library. His feet echoed on the bare board floor. It had been a bare board floor since the pipes had burst in the freeze of three winters before and the carpets had been ruined and not replaced. He opened the door. He was almost obsequious. He went on tiptoe into the room. To call the room the library was somewhat overstating the case.

  Of course, there were books on the shelves, but not many, and few of them would have held anyone's interest. The books had been a job lot when a local house had been cleared out on the death of a maiden lady without surviving relations.

  Mattie was in a chair by the empty hearth.

  "Please, don't get up, Mattie."

  "Must have just nodded off."

  "You deserve a very long rest . . . I mean, what a change

  . . . where were you, Mattie, 24 hours ago?"

  "Walking out of Iran, I suppose. It's pretty strange."

  "You've spoken to Mrs Furniss?"

  "Had a few words with her, thank you. Woke her up at first light, poor thing, but she was in good form . . . Flapping a bit, but don't they all?"

  "There's grand news through from the medics. A very good bill of health, no bugs."

  "I just feel a bit shaken."

  Henry looked into Mattie's face. The man was completely shattered.

  "I'll tell you something for nothing, Mattie. . . . In twenty years' time, when the DG's been forgotten, when no one at Century will know my name, they'll still talk about 'Dolphin's Run'. Dolphin's run out of Iran is going to go into the history of the Service."

  "That's very decent of you, Henry."

  "Don't thank me, you did it. The fact is that the Service is buzzing with collective pride. You have given us all, down to the tea ladies, one hell of a lift."

  He saw Mattie drop his eyes. Perhaps, he had been over the top, but he knew the psychology of the debrief, and the psychology said that an agent back from abroad, where he'd had a rough time, needed praise, reassurance. A colleague of Henry's, with a brood of children, had once likened the trauma of return to a woman's post-natal depression. Henry couldn't comment on that, but he thought he knew what the colleague had meant. He had told the Deputy Director General when he had been given his marching orders, before finding that his carburettor was playing up, that he would take it gently.

  It would have been scandalous to have taken it otherwise, after a man had been tortured and broken . . . oh yes, the DDG had been most sure that Mattie would have been broken.

  "Thanks, Henry."

  "Well, you know the form. We'll hammer through this over the next few days, and then we'll get you back home. What you've been through is going to be the basis of study and teaching, no doubt, at the Fort for the next decade. . . . Shall we get down to things some time this evening? Mattie, we're all very, very excited by what you achieved."

  "I think I'd like to be outside for a bit. Can't walk too comfortably just yet, perhaps I'll sit in the garden. Can you keep that ghastly dog at bay?"

  "By all means. I'll ask George to put him in the kennel.

  And I'll see if Mrs Ferguson can find us something rather special to drink this evening. I don't think we can hold out much hope for the meal itself."

  17

  A good early start, because Henry Carter thought that Mattie would feel stronger at the beginning of the day. They ate breakfast of tepid scrambled eggs and cold toast. They discussed the possible make-up of the team for the first Test.

  They had a chuckle over the new switch in the Socialists'

  defence policy. Henry told Mattie about Stephen Dugdale from Library who had been laid low last week with throm-bosis. It was a good room, the old dining room, fine sideboards, and a glasses cabinet, and a carving table, and the main table could have seated twelve in comfort. The worst thing about eating in the dining room and at the big table, in Carter's opinion, was that Mrs Ferguson having polished the table then insisted that it be covered with a sea of clear polythene.

  "Shall we make a start then, Mattie?"

  "Why not?"

  He settled in the chair by the fireplace. Across the hearth rug from him Carter was fiddling with a cassette player. It was the sort of cassette player that Harriet had bought the girls when they were teenagers. He saw the spools begin to move on the cassette player. He could see the investigator, he could see the cellar walls, he could see the bed and the leather thongs, he could see the hook on the wall, he could see the length of electrical flex wire . . .

  "How long is this going to take?"

  "Hard to say, Mattie. Depends on what you've got to tell me. My immediate target is to get home."

  "Goes without saying. . . . Where shall we begin? Shall we start in Van?"

  Mattie told the tape-recorder everything about the way the attack on his car had been carried out. He felt uncomfortable describing his carelessness. Henry looked rather schoolmarm-ish but didn't interrupt. Mattie's account was perfec
tly lucid.

  He seemed to Henry to take pleasure in the clarity of the narrative, in the orderly compilation of details that would one day be of value at the Fort. At eleven Mrs Ferguson knocked and came in with coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives.

  Mattie stood at the window until Henry said, "This house they drove you to?"

  "I was blindfolded when we got there, I didn't see it. When I went out of it then, it was dark."

  "Tell me what you can about the house."

  "They didn't take me on a tour, they weren't trying to sell it me."

  He saw the puzzle at Henry's forehead. Stupid thing to have said. . . .

  "Is there a problem, Mattie?"

  "I'm sorry - of course, there's a problem. You are asking me to recall a house where I was tortured, where others have been put to death."

  "We'll just take it slowly, that way it won't be so painful.

  You've nothing to be ashamed of, Mattie."

  "Ashamed?" He spoke in Henry's soft voice. He rolled the word. "Ashamed?" Mattie spat the word back at him.

  The conciliatory raising of the hands. "Don't misunderstand me, Mattie."

  "Why should I be ashamed?"

  "Well, we've been working on the assumption . . ."

  "What assumption?"

  "We had to assume that you had been taken by agents of the Iranian regime, and that of course you would be interrogated, and in due course that you would be, well, broken or killed. . . .

  That was a reasonable assumption, Mattie."

  "Reasonable?"

  "You'd have made the same assumption, Mattie, of course you would."

  "And at what stage did you decide that Mattie Furniss would have been broken?"

  Henry squirmed. "I don't know anything about pain."

  "How could you?"

  "Myself, I wouldn't have lasted a day, perhaps not even a morning. I think just the knowledge of what was going to be done to me would have been enough to tip me into the confessional. You shouldn't feel bad about it, Mattie."