Death Comes for the Fat Man

4

Pascoe was having lunch with Dave Freeman.

It had been Sandy Glenister’s idea.

“With Dave acting as liaison, it’s time you two started hitting it off a bit better. You’ve a lot in common,” she’d said.

So she’d noticed their antipathy, thought Pascoe. Sharp eyes she had, though what they’d spotted he and Freeman had in common he couldn’t imagine.

Or was it his own eyes which were developing a squint through looking at everything connected with the Lubyanka sideways?

As he and Freeman moved from the counter of the staff canteen and started unloading their trays, he noticed that they’d made almost identical choices. Perhaps Glenister was right.

Or perhaps Freeman had deliberately echoed his choices…

There I go again! he thought.

But certainly as they picked over their salads, it became apparent that Freeman was making a real effort at rapprochement.

He talked to Pascoe freely about CAT’s resources and the quickest way of tapping into them, then invited questions. Pascoe asked for some background on Tim and Rod.

“I like to know the people I’m working closely with,” he said.

“Me too,” smiled Freeman. “I’ll send you my CV later. OK. Tim and Rod…”

By the time he’d finished talking, Pascoe’s initial image of the pair as young Work Experience students, already considerably modified, had vanished completely. Freeman talked of them as equal colleagues, with their feet firmly on the Security Service career ladder.

Tim Chetwynd was in fact twenty-seven, married, with three young children. Rod Loxam was twenty-three, unmarried but rarely unattached.

“If,” said Freeman dryly, “you can call the kind of relationships Rod usually has attachments. He is what is called in the vernacular, I gather, a babe magnet. Among our canteen staff I understand he is known as Hot Rod.”

“Good Lord,” said Pascoe, conjuring up a picture of the young man. Amiable, attractive, yes, but a babe magnet…?

“Introduce your wife to him and you’ll soon see what I mean,” said Freeman, observing his doubts. “It is a talent not without advantage in our line of business, if only because long-term relationships often cause real problems.”

“Tim seems to have managed.”

“It was an in-house romance,” said Freeman. “Nice if it happens, but we’re a bit short on available tottie at the moment, unless dear Sandy takes your fancy. Tim came up the conventional route, university, spotted by a talent scout and recruited before he’d done his finals. Rod left school in the sixth form, drifted for a couple of years, did casual work, got a job with a gardening firm who did maintenance on Lukasz’s garden…”

“Komorowski? Yes, he was telling me that gardening was his hobby.”

“Was he now?” Freeman regarded Pascoe as if impressed by the revelation of an unsuspected talent. “You could do worse than brush up on your bedding plants, Pete, Lukasz is a good man to have on your side. I’ve never seen his garden-he’s got this place with a couple of acres out near Guildford-but I gather it’s really something. Impossible for one man to look after even if he didn’t have a job like ours, hence the maintenance firm. So Rod delved, Lukasz was impressed, did a bit of delving of his own, and eventually recruited him.”

“Romantic,” said Pascoe, using the word broadly, but Freeman misinterpreted and said, “Wrong tree. As I told you, Rod’s definitely a fig-and-melons man and from all accounts Lukasz was never short of a bed warmer in his younger days. No, he just saw potential and snapped it up. Now, is there anything else I can help you with, Peter, before you apply your nose to the grindstone?”

“What’s the situation with Lyke-Evans?”

“Oh yes. Ffion, the Silurian Circe. I believe she’s still watching daytime telly in Safe House Four, which is one of our more comfortable hideaways. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered if they’d got anything more out of her.”

“Not that I know of. Seems that her connection with Youngman was exactly what she said, professional with generous side helpings of sex.”

“So when will she be released?”

“Once we’re persuaded she won’t be heading straight to the Voice with her exclusive.” said Freeman.

“How will you manage that? By appealing to her patriotic loyalty?”

“You’re joking! No, in such cases, which are more frequent than you might imagine, the conventional alternatives are bribery and threat. We have a little specialist team we call the Fitters who work out the details. That bugger in the hospital, the one sharing a room with your man, Hector, now he was easy. The Fitters checked his background and it turns out he’s got three child-support payment orders outstanding against him, each with a different woman. The last thing he wants is his details splashed all over the front page. Could make his next visiting day very interesting! Unfortunately, though it’s hard to believe, Silurian Circe seems to have led a pretty blameless life.”

“I think my wife would give you an argument there,” said Pascoe.

“I’m talking about things a publicist might be ashamed of,” said Freeman. “I’m sure the Fitters will come up with something. Of course if they don’t, it may be poisoned-umbrella time. Quicker, cheaper, and a lot more certain.”

He spoke very seriously. Then he grinned and said, “So it’s down to you, Pete. Get us Youngman and the fair Ffion can be let loose to talk to the tabloids all she wants.”

“I presume she’s been interrogated again? Could I see the transcripts?”

“No problem. Anything else?”

“I’d like to talk to someone in the SAS who’d be able to fill me in on Youngman.”

Freeman said, “I’m sure you’ll find his service record in the large pile of bumf Tim and Rod are doubtless already sorting through on your desk.”

“I was thinking something a bit more impressionistic than that. The kind of stuff you’d really like to know about a man you may be crawling through a minefield with.”

“Ah. Getting that kind of stuff may not be all that easy.”

“Why?” said Pascoe. “Surely they’ll be keen to help?”

“About as keen as we would be to drop our knickers if they got in touch to say they thought one of our agents had gone rogue. I doubt if you or I would get very far if we approached them direct. Lukasz is your man. He worked closely with them when he was with MI6. Knows how they think. I’ll have a word. Now let’s get you to work.”

Any hope that his upgrade might have raised him to an office with a window was quickly shattered as Freeman led the way back down to the basement.

At least the computers down there were now all at his disposal, and there was a new arrival, a state-of-the-art coffee machine.

“A welcome prezzie,” said Freeman. “If you need anything else, just ring me.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Pascoe, the old tag about Greeks bearing gifts drifting across his mind. But instantly he dismissed the thought as ungenerous. And illogical.

If they wanted to keep tabs on him, they already had computers, telephones, and security cameras at their disposal. Why gild the lily with a bugged percolator?

As Freeman had forecast, his desk was covered with files and folders that Tim and Rod had already started putting in order.

Pascoe looked at the stacks without enthusiasm then turned to the percolator.

“First things first,” he said. “Which of you two can work this thing?”

As usual at the beginning of an inquiry the main task was clearing away the brushwood so you could see the bare earth beneath the trees.

By midafternoon, they’d made positive progress. On the Hedley-Case website Rod found a filmed interview Youngman had done to publicize his second book. In it he assured his readers that every significant incident in the story was based on fact.

Perhaps I should tell Uncle Bernie that our best way forward is to wait for the next book, which should read like a confession, thought Pascoe.

Without waiting to be asked, Rod had sent a copy of the interview to AV, asking them to compare it with the voices on the Mazraani tape. Half an hour later, it came back with the 90 percent conclusion that Youngman was the man calling himself Andre de Montbard, the one who’d done the actual beheading.

“Well done,” enthused Pascoe. “Now let’s see if we can tie him in with the Mill Street explosion and the Carradice killing.”

He had some hope that this might be possible in the former case. A CAT search team had taken Youngman’s cottage apart, finding several automatic weapons and traces of Semtex, which proved to be of the same type used in the Mill Street bomb.

“Great!” said Pascoe. “Now all we need to do is put the bastard close to Mill Street on the Bank Holiday.”

Since Sunday, a lot of hard work had already gone into correlating possible sightings of Youngman. One which looked pretty definite was that of a man turning up at a car body shop in Bishop Auckland on Friday morning and paying over the odds for a rush job tidying up the nearside wing of his black Jaguar. He’d left the car with them for a couple of hours which was going to make it pretty well impossible to get down to Nottingham for Carradice’s acquittal. It would have been possible for him to be involved later in the actual killing of Carradice and placing the body on the reservoir which, as a note from Bernie Bloomfield suggested, could explain why he’d backed out of Fidler’s Three, but Pascoe found this unpersuasive. To him the Carradice business looked carefully planned, and if Youngman were directly involved, why would he have headed back north instead of south after his attempt on Hector?

As for Mill Street, that looked a real possibility when news came that the team trawling through A1 speed camera tapes had picked up a black Jag heading south into Mid-Yorkshire on the Bank Holiday afternoon. Confirmation that it was Youngman’s quickly followed, but the timing was wrong, an hour or more after the explosion.

“Could be he was on his way to do a debriefing,” said Rod.

“The Semtex traces suggest he might have acted as quartermaster too,” said Tim.

“Which makes him a really important player,” said Pascoe. “It’s looking like this isn’t just a two-man band. There have to be at least two teams out there, possibly three.”

There could of course be even more, but Pascoe doubted it. The more people involved, the greater the security risk. And if his suspicions were right, there was someone behind the Templars who would be very au fait with security risks.

He was reading the transcript of Ffion Lyke-Evans’s interrogation when Tim coughed a discreet Jeevesian cough behind his hand. It wasn’t the sound itself but its repetition a few moments later that attracted Pascoe’s attention.

He looked up to see Chetwynd pointing at the wall clock, which read 5:30.

“I didn’t realize spooks kept office hours,” said Pascoe.

“Whenever we can,” said Tim. “To compensate our nearest and dearest for the innumerable times we can’t. Of course if there’s something urgent…”

He recalled that Tim had a wife and family. There’d been plenty of times when, sidetracked by Fat Andy into the Black Bull, he’d promised himself he would never let anything but professional necessity make him put obstacles between a man and his home.

“No, nothing. Off you go. See you bright and early tomorrow. Thanks for helping me hit the ground running. You too, Rod.”

“I’m not in a hurry,” said Rod. “Shift doesn’t start till eight.”

“Sorry?” said Pascoe, puzzled. “You do shift work?”

“He means the husband’s shift,” said Tim from the doorway. He sounded disapproving. Married man with three kids knows where his loyalty lies, thought Pascoe.

“In that case,” he said to Rod, “you can spend a couple of hours in church, praying for salvation. Now bugger off before I find you something really nasty to do!”

Just because he wouldn’t do a Dalziel and keep them hanging around didn’t mean he had to forget all the lessons he’d learned!

He worked on for another half hour till he found his eyes beginning to glaze. To be caught on video sleeping at his desk would be a cause of at least amusement, so he slipped the interrogation transcripts into his briefcase and set off upstairs. As he checked out, he noticed Lukasz Komorowski in the foyer, meticulously examining the plants in the trough and giving them an occasional shot from an insecticide spray.

“Red mite and greenfly,” he said as Pascoe passed. “Like most mindless terrorists, persistent, fecund, and deadly.”

“But susceptible to a quick squirt from a spray can,” said Pascoe. “Pity we can’t say that about them all.”

Komorowski said, “You sound as if you might have some sympathy with direct action, Mr. Pascoe. A dangerous ambiguity in your new job, I should have thought.”

“No. No dangerous ambiguity,” said Pascoe. “Just harmless fantasy.”

“I’m glad to hear it. We have to play by the rules we are trying to defend.”

“That sounds very English.”

The man smiled at him.

“But I am English, Mr. Pascoe. Born and bred here.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“I know you didn’t,” said Komorowski. “It’s the name, of course. In America it would pass unnoticed, but here anything un-Anglo-Saxon still gets people speaking very slowly in a loud voice. But I’m glad my family ended here, not in the States. They have no rules over there, just laws. By the way, Freeman said you would like to talk to someone about this man Youngman’s military service. You might try this number.”

He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and handed it over.

“Thank you,” said Pascoe. “Is there a name?”

“No name. Ring anytime you like. They don’t keep office hours. Ah, there’s one. Got you! Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Pascoe. At least that’s one good thing our rules provide for by making it difficult for us to take work home.”

His gaze flickered to Pascoe’s briefcase.

Oh shit, thought Pascoe. I should have got authority to remove the transcripts of Ffion’s interrogation. But he can’t know they’re in there. Can he? What the hell’s it matter anyway? It’s not like I’m stealing the plans of the latest Star Wars system!

“Good night,” he said, and went out into the rich fumid air of a Manchester summer evening.