Tracers

SIX

As he drove south through the village and out the other side, Harry rang Jennings with the news. He kept it brief. The lawyer was silent for a few moments, then said briskly, ‘There’s nothing you can do. It was probably the Libyans. There was a danger they might take direct action if they located him — especially somewhere remote like that. They probably reasoned it would look bad if someone else recovered the money for them.’

Harry felt a prickle of irritation. ‘And you didn’t think it worthwhile warning me?’ He didn’t mention that he had been armed, so therefore not exactly incapable of defending himself. Carrying a gun was no guarantee of survival, and there were some things Jennings was better off not knowing.

‘Time to move on.’ The lawyer ignored the question. ‘Someone else will come out to deal with Matuq. Report to my office tomorrow morning. Noon. I have an urgent job for you.’

‘What about Param?’ The other assignment on his list. So far, he had done no research on this runner, an investment manager from a London firm who had disappeared along with sizeable sums of money siphoned off through a batch of illicit accounts.

‘My office. In the morning.’ The connection was cut.

Harry dropped the mobile and concentrated on driving, trying to push Matuq’s murder to the back of his mind. It wasn’t easy. After a stint in the army, including Kosovo and Iraq, followed by several years in MI5 on the anti-terror and anti-narcotics teams, death was no longer a stranger to him. Even less so after a drugs operation had gone wrong and his near-fatal punishment was a posting to a security services outstation in Georgia that he wasn’t meant to survive. But each death he’d seen had carried some kind of explanation or motive, some reasoning — even if not always a rational one. The shooting of Matuq, however, seemed pointless. Random.

Yet he knew it wasn’t.

It had been too efficient. Like an execution.

‘Christ on horseback.’ It seemed only minutes later when he sat upright and stared through the windscreen at the road ahead. He’d been driving on automatic pilot, the miles being eaten away without conscious thought or awareness. He gazed around; saw familiar landmarks streaming by under the glare of overhead lights, and a steady rumble of late night trucks on a motorway. He was just crossing the M25 around north London. He rubbed his eyes, gritty through lack of sleep, and lowered the window to get a blast of air on his face. He felt guilty at this loss of concentration; how he’d driven from a rural backwater to the outskirts of London, all without being totally conscious of the road before and behind him.

Backwater.

Suddenly he knew what had been puzzling him about Jennings’ earlier comment; what had finally jerked him back to reality.

The only thing he had sent Jennings from Blakeney was the photo of Matuq taken on his mobile. There had been no details other than his name. No location, no directions, no indication of where it was taken — not even a county. That would have followed later when asked for. Confirmation first, then specifics; it was how Jennings liked to work.

So how could the lawyer have known that the location was ‘remote’, or where to send his people to deal with the body?