The Only Game

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I think not,’ he’d said, willing to explain his reasons to her, though Billy would have got a simple, terse no. ‘I think this will be the old telephone runaround till he makes sure I’m by myself. There’ll be no trouble this time. All he wants is to find out the starting price. He’ll probably make an offer. I’ll tell him that’s fine. If he wants to pay on the instalment plan, that’s how he’ll get the boy. In instalments. In fact maybe I should take a finger on account so he’ll know we’re serious.’

  Bridie had regarded him thoughtfully, then said, ‘He’s surely known you long enough to know you’re a very serious person, Jonty.’

  And Thrale had laughed. Bridie Heighway was the only person who ever made him laugh.

  ‘You’re right. And knowing me, he’ll know the starting price, and the finishing price too.’

  ‘So why does he want to see you?’

  ‘To make arrangements. He’ll insist on confirming the boy’s alive. And because he’s a real tricky bastard, he’ll hope when that happens that he can find a way to get him away from us.’

  ‘You think the money means that much to him?’

  ‘I think he knows that whatever the starting price, my finishing price includes his bones,’ Jonty Thrale had said.

  And during all of this, Billy Flynn had said nothing, had offered none of his usual stupid suggestions, had not even uttered that faint incredulous snicker which was the nearest he dared come to saying out loud that he thought they were a pair of outdated old farts.

  Thrale knew he should have taken more notice, made enquiry – made very serious enquiry if need be – as to the state of Billy’s mind. But he’d been tired after the drive, conscious of the need for rest before he set out for his rendezvous with Beck, conscious too of the closeness of Bridie, of the warm, exciting and excited smell of her flesh beneath her old woollen dressing gown.

  He hadn’t slept long but he’d slept deep. Bridie did that. She pursued every last pulse of pleasure along his veins, breathed on every last ember of desire in his flesh, till finally there was nothing left, just dead meat with his mind a blank screen from which all disturbing images had fled. He’d always been able to make do with very little sleep, but a couple of hours of this kind of unconsciousness saw him rise rejuvenated.

  They’d breakfasted alone. Billy was out in the little garden, kicking a ball around with the boy while the transistor blared pop music from the top of a frozen water butt.

  ‘He’ll disturb the beasts,’ he’d said.

  ‘The beasts are all safe inside this time of year,’ Bridie had laughed. ‘And what would the local peasants expect from the mad townies but a lot of that kind of row?’

  It had occurred to him how pleasant this was, sitting over their coffee together, chatting idly like any other couple in any other house. And then he had reacted against the soft sentimentality of the thought and stood up abruptly, saying, ‘I’d best be going. I’ve a call to make.’ But the feeling hadn’t left him and it had been strong enough to mask again any curiosity as to Billy’s cooperative behaviour, Billy’s tuning of the radio to a non-news programme.

  Now he knew. His first instinct was to head back to the cottage, pack up, put Billy – willing or not – into the boot, drive away. But that would mean another safe-house. Easy to arrange, but not without the old men in Dublin knowing. And they’d know already that his ‘quiet’ operation was making far too much noise. And when, as he certainly would, Oliver Beck contacted one of the Listeners again, they’d know Thrale had failed to keep his appointment with the man this was all about.

  It wasn’t the old men’s anger he feared, it was their joy. A Thrale operation falling apart. And though he might blame Billy and make him pay the price, the old men would know where to lay their blame.

  He turned onto the motorway approach road. Billy wasn’t going to show his face, that was for sure. The police were looking for some building site worker who had probably had it away on his toes. They might do house to house in the village and all its new development, but they probably wouldn’t bother with a cottage three miles out in the sticks.

  He was, he acknowledged with that cold clarity of vision which had always kept his head and his hand steady in the most terrifying of situations, into excuses rather than reasons. Reasons decided what course of action you should follow. Excuses might sound just the same but they came after the decision.

  He was heading north partly to protect his reputation, but mostly because he had the scent of Oliver Beck in his nostrils, and it had one thing in common with the scent of Bridie’s body on heat – it was not to be denied.

  He drove steadily northward, five to ten miles per hour under the limit, and reached the Woodall service area of the Ml in South Yorkshire at ten to twelve. The main restaurant complex was on the other side of the motorway. He crossed the bridge and descended into the foyer where the phones were. The one he was supposed to stand by was occupied, but after a couple of minutes the woman using it moved away. He examined her closely, decided it would be a pointless risk for Beck to have put someone in there to hold the phone for him, and moved in himself. Pretending he was making a call, he held the cradle depressed and waited for his instructions.

  Twelve noon came and passed. After five minutes he began to feel uneasy. After ten, he reviewed the situation coldly.

  Two possibilities. One was that Beck had been prevented from making contact. It wasn’t worth speculating about possible reasons. The other was that Beck had deliberately not made contact. Here speculation ran rife, but one possibility headed the pack.

  Suppose he was here because Oliver Beck wanted him to be as far away from Grazey Lane Cottage as he could get him?

  His mind turned it round and round. From one angle it looked absurd. There was no way that Beck could have uncovered the boy’s hiding place. No way. Then his heart twitched like a small fish that feels the bent pin in its palate. Beck’s message had been for him personally. Beck to Thrale. How had he known? A not unlikely guess? Or a leak in the system? Or a direct sighting?

  And if either of the last two … Suddenly he was looking at things from quite another angle and it no longer looked absurd.

  Suppose he was here because Beck was planning a rescue attempt and wanted to get the man he most feared well out of the way?

  He stared in cold, helpless fury at the phone. It was no use to him. Grazey Lane Cottage didn’t have one. There were others he could ring of course. He could have reinforcements round there in half an hour. But not without the risk of drawing attention from curious locals already alerted by the murder hunt. And not without the certainty of the old men in Dublin drooling over another crack in the Thrale crystal.

  No. His fears might be groundless. Or, if not, there was still Bridie, who had proved herself the match of many a man. And young Billy might be a Grade A idiot, but when it came to action, he had a proven track record.

  In any case, he himself could be back there almost in the time it would take to raise assistance and get it in position. Whatever the reason, the bastard wasn’t going to ring now.

  He banged the phone back hard on the rest and set off at a trot up the stairs to the bridge.

  Oliver Beck watched him go. Standing by his car with a small pair of field glasses he tracked Thrale’s progress across the bridge, then he got into his car and started the engine. There was no need to hurry. Thrale had a three-mile drive north before he could turn and head back south. Carefully Beck slipped into the traffic. He drove steadily, using only the two inner lanes. After twenty minutes, he spotted Thrale in his mirror coming up fast in the outside lane. He let him get by, then he stamped on the accelerator and, smiling complacently at his own cleverness, let himself be hauled along to his kidnapped son.

  4

  Dog Cicero squatted on a mossy log under the trailing branches of a willow tree and waited.

  He was forty yards from Grazey Lane Cottage. Between him and the building was a wedge of coppice badly in need of trimming,
but at one point the lattice of twigs and branches left a small diamond of clear space through which he could see the front door. Thirty minutes earlier as he approached from the road he had heard a child’s voice. Silence might have tempted him closer, but after hearing that unrepeated noise, he had not been able to take any risks. So here he sat, oblivious to the cold seeping slowly into his bones, unmoving, unblinking, waiting for one confirmatory glimpse.

  He was not going to tell Jane Maguire that he thought he knew where her son was or that he might have heard his voice. He wanted to give her certainty.

  His left leg suddenly raged into pain from cold and cramp. Still he did not move. If you can’t keep still then move all the time, Endo had advised. But stillness is best. Then anything you do, picking up your cards, pushing out your chips, anything, gets them worried shitless.

  But why suffer when there was no them?

  There’s always a them, said Endo.

  The door opened.

  A woman came out and stood on the threshold. It could be the woman he had met as Mrs Tobin but he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure. That woman had been middle-class English with the poise, the facial set, the physical carriage, of her type.

  This one had an air of animal wariness which still remained even as she relaxed and held her face up to the wintry sun and took in deep draughts of the wintry air.

  Then she smiled, said something, stood aside, and through the door came a blond-haired youth, stooping low to avoid banging the head of the child who clung to his back.

  Even now there was no positive identification, but it would be a coincidence beyond … then as the youth straightened up, the child threw back his head and laughed, and Dog forgot all about coincidences. This was Jane Maguire’s son. He had seen and heard her laugh only once but this came unbearably close to a second time.

  They moved out of sight now. He massaged his cramped leg and began to retreat through the copse to the road. His mind was already racing through methods of getting the boy out safely. But one image remained constant through the mental turmoil.

  It was the look he imagined in Jane Maguire’s face when he told her he’d found her son.

  ‘Tinkerbell’s on the move,’ said Sergeant Stott, turning from the radio.

  ‘Good,’ said Tench. ‘Seems you were right and two meant one. Who’s tagging her?’

  ‘Young Gill.’

  ‘Tell him to keep her in sight. I’ve known them bugs fall off before now.’

  Stott obeyed. They were sitting in what from the outside looked like a small removal van. Inside, it was a mobile surveillance HQ. It was cramped but Tench preferred it to taking over a room at the local station. He liked to keep the plods at arm’s length unless he wanted to punch their silly heads. There were too many flapping ears beneath those pointy hats.

  ‘Think it was Beck who made that call?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘No. Whoever it was, she’d met him recently to make the arrangement, and if it had been Beck, I doubt if she’d have put herself back near us.’

  One of the three phones rang. A young woman picked it up, spoke softly into it, listened, then passed it to Tench.

  ‘Captain Hook,’ he said.

  He listened, smiled, tossed the receiver back to the girl.

  ‘Tommy, on your feet. Cynthia, my sweet, get onto young Gill and tell him I’ll be coordinating from my car. When I give the word, I want him to close up and let her know she’s being followed. She’ll try to lose him. I want her to succeed.’

  As they made their way to Tench’s car, Stott said, ‘You onto something, guv?’

  ‘Could be. That call. I had Fred Harper checking out hotel registers in the area. Tinkerbell had to stay somewhere last night and I thought it might be interesting to find out if she’d made any calls, or taken any. Long shot and tedious, but Harper needs his nose held to the grindstone from time to time. Well, this time it hit bone and struck sparks. The Clareview Motel. No Maguire on their books, but there was a Miss J. Smith, and you know whose plastic paid the bill? My friend and your friend, DI Dog Cicero, suspended!’

  They got into the car. Stott started it up while Tench made radio contact with Gill.

  ‘Captain Hook to Wendy One, await my instructions,’ he said. ‘All right, Tommy, straight ahead, turn left when you hit the junction and I’ll see if I can get this box of tricks working.’

  He started fiddling with the knobs on the electronic bug decoder but all he got was a lot of static. Then the radio crackled and Gill’s voice said urgently, ‘Wendy One to Captain Hook, I’ve lost Tinkerbell. I say again, I’ve lost Tinkerbell.’

  ‘I said, wait till I give the word,’ Tench yelled into his microphone.

  ‘She can’t have heard you, guv,’ said Gill. ‘She went up on the pavement, cut up a lorry, jumped a light. She must’ve turned off and got a couple of blocks between us because I’m not getting a dicky on the detector.’

  ‘You’ll get more than a dicky when I see you,’ retorted Tench. ‘Out.’

  He started poring over a street map.

  ‘He’s a cheeky young sod, that Gill,’ said Stott.

  ‘Remind me to kick his arse. Turn right, Tommy, then straight over the roundabout.’

  ‘You reckon she’s going back to this motel to meet Cicero?’

  ‘We’ll make a cop out of you yet, my son,’ said Tench. ‘Aha! There. Listen.’

  A faint pulse began to sound, growing stronger.

  ‘Seems you were right, guv,’ said Stott. ‘It’ll give me great pleasure to get my hands on the bugger’s collar!’

  ‘Yeah? Well, it’s a pleasure you’ll have to defer. I want Dog running loose a bit longer.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He’s not rendezvousing with Tinkerbell to enquire after the state of her health,’ said Tench patiently.

  ‘You reckon he’s onto something? Don’t seem likely, guv,’ said Stott doubtfully.

  ‘You reckon? Listen, my son, that bastard without any help or encouragement has managed to stick his finger deeper into this pie than our whole team put together. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if old Dog had managed to dig up something interesting. So you behave yourself till I turn you loose, right?’

  As they talked the signal had grown stronger.

  ‘She’s behind us,’ said Tench. ‘And there’s the Clareview up ahead.’

  ‘Shall I go into the car park?’

  ‘No. If Dog’s waiting for her, he’ll be keeping a watchful eye. Turn in here and make like a customer.’

  They turned into the car park of the superstore opposite the Clareview and took up a position which gave them a clear view of the motel.

  The beep got louder.

  Behind them Dog Cicero came out of the superstore entrance with a large carrier bag. It was the car number he spotted, not the occupants. The Branch had its own range of numbers. If a traffic cop checked one out via the police computer, he would be warned to stay clear. At some time in the past Dog had had occasion to glance down the complete list. Now they were all imprinted on his memory. He sat down on a low wall and opened his bag. His heart sank as he regarded the odd collection of items it held. He hadn’t purchased according to a plan but had moved swiftly through the store, impulse buying. The nearest he had managed to real weaponry was a gardener’s pruning knife and a child’s water pistol which bore a distant resemblance to a Beretta Model 20. His final purchase had been a pair of tennis shoes. He removed his brown slip-ons which were fine for driving and the office, but not for action man. The tennis shoes fitted snugly and gave him a sense of buoyancy and athleticism. From the bag he now took a small aerosol can of black paint which the label assured him was a perfect match for small scratch repairs on most Ford models. The Branch vehicle was a Vauxhall and it was blue, but in the circumstances it didn’t seem to matter.

  A dirty white Metro came into sight, flashing to turn into the motel car park. He caught the glow of the driver’s red hair and felt his heart lift up. Then he
was moving swiftly forward.

  The Branch watchers had spotted the Metro too and their engine was running. He walked casually past, turned, met Toby Tench’s unbelieving gaze, then obliterated it with a haze of black cellulose paint across the windscreen.

  Now he was nimbling across the carriageway, dodging between braking cars, leaving an audio-trail of blaring horns and swearing drivers. Jane was negotiating gingerly into a parking space when he pulled open the door and slid in beside her.

  ‘Keep going,’ he ordered.

  She was startled but she obeyed without question, sending the Metro screaming across the car park and out of the far exit. After a couple of hundred yards they had to stop at lights behind a builder’s pick-up. Dog opened the door, got out, went round the back of the car and stooped out of sight. The lights changed. He reappeared, and lobbed something into a pile of sand on the truck ahead as it edged forward and turned right.

  ‘We go left,’ said Dog, getting back in. ‘No need to rush now.’

  He smiled at her and she made herself smile back at him. It was not the faith of trust but the faith of necessity, he recognized that. But it was faith and for the moment it would do very nicely.

  It was twenty minutes before Tommy Stott, peering waterily through the hole he’d smashed in the windscreen, came up behind the pick-up. The detector was beeping madly on Tench’s knee. He switched it off.

  ‘Oh, what a clever little Dog it is,’ he said softly. ‘Full of tricks. I wonder if he knows how to roll over and die for his country.’

  ‘Do I stop him, guv?’ asked Stott, nodding at the pick-up.

  ‘Certainly. Can’t have government property roaming loose across the country. You sort it out, my son, while I whistle up the local plods to get us a change of transport before we freeze to death. Then it’s back to the magic box.’

  He patted the detector.

  Stott began flashing his headlights as he overtook the truck.

  ‘You mean there’s another bug?’ he said.