At Risk

24

Pulling her coat tightly around her, Liz installed herself on the bench overlooking the sea. The mudflats were underwater now, and the incoming tide slapped fretfully at the sea wall in front of her. A seagull landed heavily beside the bench, saw that Liz had no food with her, and swung away again on to the wind. It was cold, and the sky was hardening to an ominous slate grey at the horizon, but for the time being the village of Marsh Creake remained washed in light.

The enhanced CCTV tape, according to Goss, was expected back from Norwich at noon. The Special Branch man had been surprised to see Liz back so soon, he had told her, given that Whitten’s investigation had thrown up no clue as to Ray Gunter’s killer. The detective superintendent had told Goss that he was “ninety-eight per cent certain” that the murder was connected with drug-smuggling. His theory was that Gunter had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had seen a consignment brought to shore, and received a bullet in the head for his pains. Whitten wasn’t particularly worried by the untypical calibre of the fatal round; British gangsters, he reckoned, used any firearms they could get their hands on.

Liz continued to turn over in her mind the facts that she had learned from Peregrine Lakeby and Cherisse Hogan. At another level, she came to a decision about Mark. As far as she was concerned, the affair was now over. There would be moments when she would long for his voice and his touch, but she would simply have to endure them. Quite quickly, she knew, such moments would become fleeting, and then they would cease altogether, and the physical memory of him would fade.

It would not be a painless process, but it would be one with which Liz was familiar. The first time had been the worst. A few years after joining the Service she had attended the private view of an exhibition of photographs by a woman she had known at university. She had not known the woman well, and several address books must have been trawled through when the guest list was made up. Amongst the others present was a handsome, scruffily dressed man of about her own age. His name was Ed, and like her he had only the faintest of connections to their host.

They escaped to a Soho pub. Ed, she discovered, was a freelance TV researcher, and was currently involved in putting together a film about the lifestyle of New Age travellers. He had just completed a fortnight’s stint accompanying one such tribe as they moved from campsite to campsite in an old bus, and with his rough-edged, wind-burned good looks he might easily have been one of their number.

She proceeded with caution, but their mutual attraction had an air of inevitability about it, and she was soon spending nights in the converted warehouse in Bermondsey that he shared with a shifting cast of artists, writers and filmmakers. She told him that she worked in one of the personnel departments of the Home Office, that her job was fulfilling in an unspectacular sort of way, and that she couldn’t be contacted at work. Ed, not on the surface the possessive type, appeared to have no problem with this. His researches took him away for days and sometimes weeks at a time, and she was careful never to press him for details of these absences, in case he should do the same thing to her. They lived lives which were physically separate for the most part, but which were lit by passionate points of contact. Ed was clever, he was entertaining, and he viewed the world from a fascinatingly oblique perspective. Most weekends there was a party, or something like one, at the Bermondsey flat, and after a grim week with the Organised Crime Group, the arty, kaleidoscopic world of which she had part-time membership provided a blissful escape.

One Sunday morning she was lying in bed in Bermondsey, the papers strewn about her, watching the slow progress of the barges and the Thames coalers on the river.

“Where exactly did you say you worked?” he asked, flicking through the pages of a colour supplement.

“Westminster,” said Liz vaguely.

“Whereabouts in Westminster exactly?”

“Off Horseferry Road. Why?”

He reached for his coffee mug. “Just wondering.”

“Please,” she yawned, “I don’t want to think about work. It’s the weekend.”

He drank, and returned the mug to the carpet. “Would that be Horseferry House in Dean Ryle Street, or Grenadier House in Horseferry Road?”

“Grenadier House,” said Liz warily. “Why?”

“What number Horseferry Road is Grenadier House?”

She sat slowly upright and looked at him. “Ed, why are you asking me these questions?”

“What number? Tell me.”

“Not until you tell me why you want to know.”

He stared ahead of him. “Because I rang the main Home Office enquiries number at Queen Anne’s Gate last week, trying to get a message to you. I said you worked in personnel and they gave me the number of Grenadier House. I rang it and asked to leave a message for you, and the person I spoke to had clearly never heard your name in her life. I had to spell it for her twice, and then she thought she had put me on hold but she hadn’t, and I could hear her talking to someone else, and that someone else explaining that you never confirm or deny people, just get the caller to leave a name and number. So I left my name and number, and of course I never heard back from you, so I rang again, and this time someone else took my name and number but wouldn’t say if you worked there or not, so I rang a third time, and this time I was passed on to a supervisor, who said my earlier calls were being processed, and no doubt the officer in question would get back to me in her own good time. So I’m wondering, what the hell is this all about? What have you not told me, Liz?”

She folded her arms tightly over her chest. She had made herself genuinely angry now. “Listen to me. The number of Grenadier House is 99 Horseferry Road. It is the headquarters of the personnel department of the Home Office, and it is the responsibility of that department, amongst other things, to make sure that Civil Service staff are properly protected. That means ensuring that people making decisions about immigration, say, or prison sentencing issues can’t be harassed or threatened or pressured over the phone by any Tom, Dick or Harry who has picked up their name. Now as it happens I was away from my desk all last week, working at the Croydon office. I expect I’ll find your messages first thing tomorrow. Satisfied?”

He had been, more or less. But it was a side of him that she had never seen before, and she was glad that, during training, they had role-played a question-and-answer session very similar to the one that had just taken place. She was under no illusions, though, that he would let the matter rest there.

“I’m sorry,” he had said. “It’s just that that side of your life is such an… area of darkness. I imagine things.”

“What sort of things?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She had smiled, and they had made breakfast, and later that day they had gone for a walk along the Grand Union Canal towpath, from Limehouse Basin up past King’s Cross to Regent’s Park. It had been a windy winter’s day, much like this one, and the kite-flyers had been out in force in the park. It was the last time that she saw him. That evening she had written and posted a letter, saying that she had met someone else, and that they couldn’t see each other any more.

The weeks that followed had been truly wretched. She had felt flayed, as if an entire layer of her life-all that gave it colour and excitement-had been ruthlessly stripped away. She had thrown herself into her work, but to begin with its painstaking slowness and multiple frustrations had just made her feel worse. Along with several colleagues, she had been trying to acquire intelligence about a recently formed association of southeastern crime families. The work-processing and analysing surveillance reports and phone taps-was grimly routine, and involved scores of targets.

It was Liz who finally spotted the minute chink in the syndicate’s armour that had led to the breakthrough. A driver for a west London crime syndicate had agreed, in return for a guarantee of immunity from prosecution, to provide information to her. He was her first personally recruited agent, and when the Met had rolled up the entire Acton-based network, together with a cache of firearms and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of crack cocaine rocks, she had felt great satisfaction. Cutting away her relationship with Ed, agonising though it had been at the time, had been the only possible course of action.

It was at that point that she had finally realised the truth. That she was not, as she had sometimes thought, a square peg in a round hole. She was the right person in the right job. The Service’s recruiters had known her better than she knew herself. They had recognised that her quiet sage-green gaze masked an unflinching determination. A hunger for the fierce, close-focused engagement of the chase.

It was for this reason, she supposed, that she chose men who, while attractive, were also ultimately disposable. Because when all was said and done-when the passion that had ignited the thing in the first place threatened to turn to something more demanding and complex-they would be disposed of. Each time-and there had been perhaps half a dozen such affairs, some longer-term, some shorter-term-it had promised to turn out differently, but each time, looking back on it, it had turned out the same. She had found herself unable to compromise her independence in order to accommodate the emotional needs of a lover.

That this cycle led to her denying her own emotional needs she was well aware. Each parting was an excision, a scalpel’s downstroke, for which the only cure was immersion in work.

“Tape’s here,” said Goss, materialising at her side.

“Thanks.” She snapped herself back to the present, to the wind and the high tide. “Tell me something, Steve. How obvious was it that there was a CCTV set-up at the Fairmile Café?”

“Not obvious at all. It was wired up in a tree. You wouldn’t have seen it if you didn’t know it was there.”

“I thought the idea of those things was deterrence.”

“It is, up to a point, but in this case it had got beyond that. There had been a number of thefts from rigs, and the café owners had a fair idea who was responsible. Basically, they wanted evidence they could use in court.”

“So a general recce of the place wouldn’t have told anyone that there were cameras there?”

“No. No way.”

“A good place for an RV, then, or a drop-off.”

“It would have looked like one if you weren’t in the know, yes.” He looked sombrely up at the darkening sky. “Let’s hope that we’ve finally got something. We badly need to move this thing forward.”

“Let’s hope,” said Liz.

In the village hall, a good fug had been got up. Ashtrays had been distributed, a kettle installed, and a hot-air blower roared quietly beneath the stage. As the female constable rewound the tape in the VCR, and Liz and Goss found themselves chairs, Whitten and three plainclothes officers milled purposefully in front of the monitor. There was a faint smell of conflicting aftershaves.

“Can you find the bit when Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs?” one of the plainclothes officers asked the constable, to sniggers from the others.

“Dream on, Fatboy,” she retorted, and turned to Whitten. “We’re cued up. Shall I run it?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

“They’ve eliminated the first vehicle we saw on the tape yesterday,” Goss murmured to Liz. “It was just some bloke parking up his rig for the night.”

“OK.”

As the police team retreated to their chairs, a frozen wide-shot of the vehicle park filled the screen. The enhanced version had a flaring, bleached-out look to it, and Liz found herself narrowing her eyes against the glare. The footage had been edited down, and the time code began to flicker at 04:22. It ran for a minute, and then the silvery image of a truck wobbled into the picture, its lights scribbling white trails. Unhurriedly, the truck negotiated a three-point turn in the centre of the puddled ground so that it was facing the exit. The headlights were then extinguished.

Stillness for several seconds, and then a bulky figure jumped down from the cab. Was that Gunter? wondered Liz, seeing a pale upper-body blur that might have been the fisherman’s sweater. As the figure made for the truck’s rear doors and disappeared, a light flared briefly in the cab, illuminating a second figure on the driver’s side.

“Lighting a cigarette,” murmured Goss.

Two shapes climbed from the back of the truck. One was the original figure from the cab, the other an anonymous blob, possibly carrying a coat or rucksack. The two seemed to drift together for a moment, and then separate. A pause, and then the darker figure began to walk in a straight line out of frame. Twenty-five seconds passed, and then the other followed.

The image cut to black, and then restarted. The time code now read 04:26. The truck was still in place, but no light showed inside the cab. After sixty seconds the darker of the two figures returned from the direction in which it had gone, and disappeared behind the truck. Forty seconds later a parked car switched on its headlights and reversed at speed out of its parking space. Inside the car, the pale figures of a driver and a passenger were briefly visible, but the vehicle itself was no more than a black and almost shapeless blur, and there was clearly no question of recovering its registration number. Swinging round the truck it drove at speed towards the road and exited the frame.

When it was over there was a long silence.

“Thoughts, anyone?” asked Whitten eventually.