She walked slowly across to the fax machine. Four lines of type were already visible. Names. Sums of money. Tens of thousands. She twisted her head sideways. Hundreds of thousands. She squinted in the dim light. A Jersey address at the top, and a phone number. Abruptly, the machine stopped and a yellow light on the side began to blink. She looked at the instruction symbols printed on top of the machine. ‘Call discontinued,’ it read, ‘pending re-connection.’ She glanced at her watch. The chandlery would be closing any minute. Already she’d kept them waiting. She must go now, return later.
She collected her attaché case and keys from the desk where she’d been working, and ran quickly out of the office. At the front door, she hesitated, remembering Cartwright’s instructions. Pull the door shut, and she’d never get back in. She looked at the door, heavy oak. She opened her attaché case and sorted quickly through it, finding what she wanted at the bottom, a thick leaflet from a company pushing Aegean sailing holidays. She folded it twice and wedged it carefully between the tongue of the lock and the door itself. She tested the door a couple of times, the lightest of pressures, making sure it wouldn’t swing open, and then ran to the car.
The chandlery was barely a minute away. The man behind the counter gave her the chart and accepted a cheque in payment. She thanked the man and ran back to her car. Then she hesitated, wondering for the first time whether she wasn’t being a little hasty. Cartwright, after all, was an accountant of some standing. It was highly likely he’d still have business to attend to, deals to close, clients to service, even at this late hour. Perhaps she’d got it wrong about Jersey. Perhaps she’d simply confused one scheme with another. Perhaps it was some obscure code, two clever businessmen conferring in a private language of their own. She looked down at the chart on the passenger seat beside her. Perhaps, after all, she’d pay a precautionary visit to the dock, meet the skipper, hand over the chart, do what she was told, secure the office afterwards, confident – after all – that everything was OK. She smiled to herself. Martin’s baby, she thought. Our very own child.
Davidson and Quinn stood together on a small hummock on the very crest of the Hill. Fifty feet beneath them, buried under the chalk, the Bunker was at last fully operational. They could hear the faint hum of the generator, transmitted up the ventilating shaft which emerged beside them, squat concrete louvres, hardened against blast.
Davidson glanced across at Quinn. The invitation to a discreet talk had been his own idea, broached in a lull between conferences. He’d led the way out of the Bunker, using a small rear staircase, then a series of iron ladders up to the ventilation shaft. Now, they stood together, gazing down at the city. Faintly, in the far distance, he could hear the wail of a police siren, one of Quinn’s patrol cars. He thought of Goodman again, kneeling amongst the rubble in the shadow of the flats, looking for his glasses. Then, he’d seemed shaken, but not visibly hurt. Now, only hours later, it was a very different story.
‘I think he’s going mad,’ he said quietly, ‘nervous collapse.’
Quinn said nothing for a moment or two. In a year and a half of intermittent contact, it was the first time Davidson had seen the policeman smoke. Small filter-tips, the smoke drawn deep down into the lungs. Davidson watched him, thinking of Goodman again. His detachment. The cave into which he’d retreated.
‘I tried to stop the broadcast,’ he told Quinn. ‘You should know that.’ Quinn turned away from the view.
‘How?’
Davidson smiled. ‘I suggested a retake.’
‘And?’
‘He refused.’
‘And?’
‘I phoned our friend Bullock. About half an hour ago.’ He paused. ‘I wondered whether it was strictly necessary to … ah … transmit the wretched thing …’
He let the sentence trail away. The call had been a mistake, the first he’d made since arriving in the city. Bullock had been curious at once, wanting to know why the sudden request, why the volte-face. He’d picked up far more than Davidson had realized about what was happening to Goodman, the tell-tale facial twitches, the strange gleam in his eye, his public refusal to toe the Whitehall line. Quite what the editor made of it all wasn’t clear, but he’d played the conversation very cleverly, fishing for more information, baiting traps, tempting Davidson to compound his original error and reveal exactly why he’d made the call in the first place. This, of course, Davidson declined to do, but Bullock had closed the conversation by confirming that he would gladly withhold the broadcast, providing the order came directly from Goodman himself, a condition that Davidson couldn’t possibly meet. Now, he watched Quinn take a final pull on the cigarette, and flick the glowing end out into the darkness, down towards the sandbags below.
‘Constitutionally …’ he mused, ‘it’s very tricky.’
‘So I gather.’
‘If he’s really mad, we’ll need to get him certified …’ He paused, hands in pockets, thinking the thing through. ‘But if he’s really mad, that in itself would be an appalling admission.’ He turned to Quinn again. ‘Can you imagine? Powers of the kind we’ve conferred on him? Life and death? A hundred and fifty thousand people? And we choose a lunatic?’ He winced. ‘Have you thought about what the Bullocks of this world would make of that …?’ He paused again. ‘Afterwards?’
Quinn nodded. ‘Tricky,’ he said.
‘Quite.’
There was another silence. The police siren, abruptly, had stopped. Davidson stirred. It was nearly dark now.
‘This curfew …’ he began.
The uneasiness was obvious in his voice. Quinn shook his head, dismissive, quite sure of his ground.
‘No one will get shot,’ he said.
‘Thank God for that.’
‘My pleasure.’
Davidison laughed, genuine appreciation. It was the first time he’d heard Quinn make anything approaching a joke, and he didn’t want the occasion to go unmarked.
‘There’s another spot of bother …’ he began, ‘you may have heard.’
Quinn looked across at him. ‘The boat?’
‘Yes. I came across his manifest. He’s been playing it rather close to his chest. I only hope he knows what he’s doing. There are lots of kids on that boat.’
‘Including mine,’ Quinn said grimly.
‘Quite.’ He paused. Goodman had kept the evacuation plan remarkably quiet, only approaching a handful of key personnel, discreet conversations on the internal phone system, the assurance of a berth down Channel, and a bed in southern Ireland. At first he’d put a mental tick against the idea, sensible initiative, but now he wasn’t so sure. He looked at Quinn again.
‘Who’s organizing it all?’ he said.
‘Man called Cartwright.’
‘Do we know Cartwright?’
Quinn smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘everyone knows Harry.’
‘So should we be worried?’
The policeman looked at him for a moment or two. Then shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s all under control.’
Ingle sat on a stool in the dark-room, eating a plate of corned beef sandwiches. The laboratory technician had rung him, as instructed, the moment the first prints were expected from the bath of fixer. Now, the negatives hung in strips in the deep red glow of the tiny overhead bulb, clothes-pegged to a line he’d hung across the sink. The negs had already been through the developer, and in a minute or two he’d ease the first prints from the fixer bath, sluice them under the tap, and offer them to Ingle for formal inspection. Ingle peered up at the negatives, making enough sense of the shapes in the frame to recognize a park bench, two figures, a man and a woman.
The lab technician swirled the fixer in the sink, grunted approval, and reached for a pair of plastic tongs. He lifted out the first of the prints, and let it drip for a moment or two before pegging it to the clothes line. Ingle leaned forward on the stool, frowning with concentration. He recognized the faces from Reese’s earlier shots. The man on the bench w
as Goodman. The figure beside him was his girlfriend. Of Reese, he was glad to note, there was no sign.
He patted the technician on the back, and murmured his thanks. Outside, in the corridor, he paused for a moment, looking out into the gathering darkness. The photographs had been taken by the man Gillespie. The photographs had been lifted from the reporter, McPhee. Logic suggested that they were, at the very least, friends. Goodman was the man in charge, the man whose authority he’d been sent to protect. Time, therefore, to talk to Gillespie.
Ingle walked slowly down the corridor, and into the consulting room that now served as a communications base. A man in plain clothes sat at a small console, reading a very old copy of the Sun. There was a microphone in front of him, and a half-finished packet of chocolate biscuits. The man glanced up, folded the paper, and pushed the biscuits towards Ingle. Ingle took two of the biscuits, and leaned back against the door, closing it.
‘This fella Gillespie,’ he said. ‘Tell Reese I want a word.’
Gillespie finally found Reese in a lay-by near the dock. For nearly half an hour, he’d cruised slowly up and down, trailing his coat, offering himself as a target, as obvious as possible, trying to tempt the other man out. But wherever he looked, wherever he drove, he drew the same blank.
Now though, nearly out of petrol, he’d found him. He drove slowly past, watching the man in the rear-view mirror, the slow unhurried movements, the tell-tale puff of blue exhaust smoke, the careful signal indicating left, the Cortina easing out, resuming the chase. At the end of the road, he pulled a U-turn, making absolutely certain, not wanting to end up the victim of his own paranoia. Sure enough, after a discreet pause, a glance up and down the street, the Cortina turned with him, heading back into the city.
Gillespie eyed the fuel gauge. It was three miles to the area of wasteland he’d mentally earmarked at the south-eastern tip of the island on which the city was built. He might just make it.
He dropped the Marina into top gear as early as he dared, squeezing out every last spoonful of fuel, crawling along the empty seafront at barely 30 mph. Both cars had their lights on now, but the Cortina was silhouetted against what little was left of the daylight, and Gillespie could see the driver quite clearly. A smallish man, he thought, the most difficult kind.
At the end of the seafront, the road swung briefly inland, and then seaward again, along a bumpy tarmac track that led to the anchorage. He knew the area by heart, every yard of it. Off to the right, between the track and the sea, was a big expanse of waste ground, baked hard by the summer. Couples came here a lot to screw, and he knew at least two marriages that had finally come to grief in the bitter privacy of a parked car. It was a place for intimacies, and secrets, and confessions. Rather appropriate, he thought grimly, as he pulled the old Marina off the road and onto the first of the rutted tracks that led across the wasteland to the sea.
It was quite dark now, and he drove for fifty yards or so at walking pace before he dropped the car into neutral, and opened the door, and rolled out into the darkness, letting the car coast on, away, lights still on. The impact with the damp grass knocked the breath out of his body, and he lay still for a moment or two, listening for the wheeze of the Cortina behind. For a while there was nothing, just the odd bump as his own car slowed to a halt. Then he heard the Cortina. He got up on one knee, saw it turning in from the road. The man was driving on sidelights only, feeling his way.
Gillespie got up, crouching, cautious at first, then bolder. Staying low, he ran to the left, careful where his feet went, remembering the clumps of tussock and the deep ruts where the kids spun their old bangers. The Cortina was moving slowly forward, the driver uncertain of his bearings. Gillespie closed on the car from the side, eyes fixed on the shadowy profile of the figure behind the wheel. The lights from the dashboard gave his face the slightest tinge of green. He looked older than Gillespie had expected, perhaps forty, forty-five.
The car stopped. The driver seemed to have sensed danger. He looked around, began to get out. Gillespie let him put one foot on the ground before he stepped out of the darkness, driving hard at the door, slamming it shut against the man’s body, hearing him grunt with pain as the metal bit into his arm and shin. Gillespie took his arm, and pulled the man towards him, spinning his body as he did so. The man’s arm came nicely up behind his back, high up, inches from the point where the first ligaments in his shoulder would start to tear. The man lashed out backwards with his feet, more pride than anything else, and Gillespie took a handful of his hair, and drove his face hard against the car roof. The man gasped, his nose broken, and Gillespie did it twice more before the body went slack in his arms, and he let it fall to the ground, sacklike, spent. The encounter had taken no more than ten seconds, faster than he normally worked, and he found the gun almost immediately, a short-barrelled Smith and Wesson, good in a tight corner, dodgy beyond twenty yards. He checked the chambers in the headlights. Six bullets. Double action trigger. He stuffed the gun into his jeans pocket and quickly examined the contents of the man’s wallet. A mug shot on the Scotland Yard pass showed a face that had never learned to smile. The man’s name was Reese. He worked for Special Branch. Gillespie gazed at the pass a moment longer before putting it in his pocket. He’d got the man’s age wrong by five years. He was younger than he looked.
He bent to the body by the car, and rolled the man over onto his back. Blood was beginning to cake on his face, but his breathing was OK. His nose would recover in time, and a good dentist would rise to the challenge of what was left of his mouth. Gillespie stepped over the body and got into the car. The fuel gauge was half-full, and the engine was still running. He eased it into gear and slipped the clutch, bumping over the wasteland towards his own car. In the back of the Marina was the empty fuel can. Now, at last, he could buy diesel.
He stopped by the Marina and threw the can into the back of the Cortina. On the way back towards the road, he paused briefly by Reese’s body. The man was beginning to stir, his eyes half open, his brain trying to cope with the pain, and the lights, and the shadow that fell across his face. As Gillespie got back into the Cortina, he could hear a voice from Reese’s personal radio. The voice was indistinct, muffled by several layers of nylon anorak, but the irritation was obvious.
‘Reese, you clown,’ the voice was saying, ‘where the fuck are you?’
Suzanne drove carefully round the dock, looking for some sign of Cartwright. His Jaguar she’d already spotted, parked outside the pub, but he wasn’t at the bar and when she asked a fisherman whether he’d seen a small guy in a suit, he’d just shrugged and turned away.
Now, on her second circuit, she spotted the Timothy Lee under the floodlights, recognizing the name from the message on Cartwright’s ansaphone. She pulled up on the quayside and got out. The boat was smaller than she’d expected, and a lot shabbier. Cardboard boxes were piled up beneath the wheel-house, and there were a couple of shadows, cats probably, sniffing around a sack of onions. The only access to the boat was via an iron ladder. She ran back to the car, and retrieved the chart. Then she began to clamber down the ladder, one hand for the pitted old ironwork, one for the precious roll of cardboard, with its bearings and its depths, and its curt reminders to beware of this maritime hazard or that.
She got to the foot of the ladder and stepped onto the deck. The fish hold was open, a huge rusty mouth, and she dimly recognized the shapes of the mattresses below. The smell was appalling, a mix of engine oil, and fish, and urine. She shook her head, amazed, and walked aft, to an open door of the bridge. It was dark inside, and she paused to let her eyes make sense of the deep shadows.
Slowly, she began to distinguish shapes, more doors, a narrow companionway. She moved slowly aft, towards the trawler’s stern and came to a door. The door opened. She stood there, beginning to regret her curiosity, her diligence. She could hear a man breathing, slow, shallow breaths, someone asleep. She backed away deciding to leave, to abandon it all, to get back to the ladder, and into
her car, and away, but as she turned, her foot slipped on the greasy deck, and she fell heavily on one knee, hearing her own small yelp, surprise rather than pain.
The breathing paused. A man grunted. A hand fumbled in the darkness. A light came on. Suzanne got up, embarrassed, feeling foolish. She brushed herself down. Her skirt was black with grease and oil. A man of about fifty-five blinked up at her from an ancient armchair. His skin was tanned, the texture of old leather, an outdoor face. He wore an ancient blue sweater, holes at the elbows, and there was a bottle of whisky on the table by his side. The bottle was a third full. The glass on the floor by his foot was empty.
‘Who are you?’ the man said. A Scots accent, thickened by age and alcohol.
Suzanne blinked at him, introduced herself, told him she’d come to give the skipper a chart, the directions he’d need, a destination.
‘Destination?’ The man frowned. There were charts already spread on the table baside the bottle. She glanced at them. Central Channel. Wight to Cap de la Hague. There was a heavily pencilled line slanting south. It ended in Jersey. East coast. St Helier. She blinked.
‘You’re the Skipper?’ she asked.
‘Aye.’
‘Mr Cartwright’s?’ She paused. ‘Small man? Suit? Moustache?’
The man nodded again, reaching slowly for the bottle, beginning to frown.
‘Aye,’ he said again.
‘I see,’ Suzanne nodded, offering him her own chart, totally out of her depth.
Behind her, in the darkness, she could hear footsteps on the iron ladder, voices. The boat shuddered a little as someone jumped the last few feet. The footsteps got nearer. Someone tripped and cursed. Someone else laughed. She picked up the chart again, and straightened her skirt, precautionary, instinctive movements. She turned towards the door. A tall man came in first, with a big Afro perm, and a wide smile. He stopped and gazed at her. Another man pushed in behind him, smaller, somehow meaner, a narrow face, short hair. Last of all was Cartwright. He waved the other two into the cabin, terse flaps of his hand. The man with the Afro looked at Suzanne, and then at the Skipper, and laughed. The cabin smelled suddenly of beer, a hot, yeasty smell that made her want to retch. She turned towards the door, towards the fresh air, but Cartwright stood in her way. He was looking beyond her. At the table. At the map.
Rules of Engagement Page 27