The hearse left the relatives, friends and supporters clutching each other, wiping eyes and sniffling. It edged past old men who had brought out their medals for the day, the television satellite dishes, scanner vans and cherry-picker cranes. Another police car came behind it, a back-up hearse and a four-wheel drive for the Military Police. Some, he knew, had predicted that what they called ‘grief tourism’ would suffer from ‘fatigue’, that the crowds would dwindle – but they had been bloody wrong. The kid – the guardsman with a child’s face and a helmet too big for him – had been shown the same respect as any serviceman coming through six months and a year before.
Up the High Street, the hearse again stopped briefly. The funeral director and the driver gathered up what flowers had not fallen away and laid them inside with due but brief reverence. Then the party drove at growing speed, with the motorcycle escort, down the road and towards the motorway.
In the first minutes after the convoy had cleared the town, the standards were raised, then lowered, and the command was given for the old servicemen to fall out. A few words of conversation slipped between them but the appetite for jocularity and the recall of times past seemed spent. Hands were shaken and they moved off to start the journey home. The family and its party had returned to the room at the Cross Keys, where the management provided coffee and biscuits, but a few lingered outside to drag on cigarettes. Most of the crowd who had borne witness to the sacrifice of a young life in Helmand Province stood around on the pavements, as if unsure what should follow: pensioners, veterans, shop workers and the idly curious seemed reluctant to break the mood of pensive resignation and quiet . . . The traffic managed that. Petrol tankers, removal lorries, supermarket delivery trucks jostled to accelerate up and down the High Street. Doug furled his standard, collapsed the staff and threaded the parts into the canvas carrying bag. He said his goodbyes, almost stepped on a single red rose and went to look for Beryl.
He went past a dry-cleaner’s, a bakery, a motor-accessories business, a fish bar, the Oriental Aroma, a picture-framer and a charity shop. He remembered what someone had said about IEDs – that the bombs were a new form of warfare, more deadly than anything the army had faced in the last half-century. He knew next to nothing about explosives, but could reflect on the T-shirts and the mother’s weeping. He thought that by standing in the road with his lowered standard he had played his part. And he knew he would not be able to do so much longer. They were planning to move the repatriations to Brize Norton. He dreaded that: much of the purpose of his life would be extinguished when the hearses and their escorts no longer came through Wootton Bassett. The mood of the town would never be recaptured at another location. He didn’t want to think about it.
He searched for Beryl and couldn’t see her. She might be in the library, or in a bank, just window-shopping or— Damn near bumped into a woman on the pavement, tears streaming down her face. Quite pretty, she might have been in her early thirties. She had fluffy blonde hair in sort of curls and her mascara was smudged. She wore a scarlet skirt that Doug Bentley reckoned was some way short of decent and a white blouse that was not buttoned high. At her neck was a thin gold chain and a pendant that spelled out her name: Ellie. Ellie cried from her soul and gazed up the road where the hearse and its escort had gone.
‘Are you all right, love?’
Just a choke, as if a sob was caught in her throat.
‘It’s these bloody bombs,’ he said. ‘The bloody bombs . . . Are you family, love?’
She sniffed heavily.
He produced a handkerchief, and she blew hard into it, then used it to wipe her face. She grimaced. ‘They’re all heartbreaking, love,’ he said. ‘I’m with the Royal British Legion, represent my branch. We’re here every time to show our respect . . . It’s a terrible loss to you and—’
‘I’m not family.’
‘Just came to give them solidarity. Most people do that and—’
‘They’re heroes, aren’t they?’
‘Serving Queen and country, making the ultimate sacrifice. Heroes? Yes.’
‘The bravest of the brave. Heroes, all of them.’
Doug Bentley still couldn’t see Beryl. He didn’t know how to react to this woman’s grief. His wife wasn’t there to tell him, and he thought it was probably only five minutes now until the bus left. ‘Just take it one hour at a time, then one day at a time, then one week—’
‘They’re heroes and their families must be so proud of them.’
He saw a broad wedding ring on her hand and with it a diamond-crested engagement ring, which looked expensive. ‘Are you from an army family, Ellie? Is that why you’re here?’
She seemed to snort, as if the question invited derision. ‘Absolutely not – no heroes among my lot. His people must feel so honoured by him.’ She shrugged.
He was confused now. ‘It’s none of my business, and I don’t want to intrude, but did you come today to be with the boy’s family, show your support?’
‘No . . . God, no. I was filling up with petrol, at the Shell. The road was blocked and I wandered down. Seen it on the telly, of course, but it’s different when you’re . . . you know . . . I’m all right now. Thanks for your time.’
She wandered away without a backward glance, and he realised Beryl was now close behind him. Ellie’s backside swung as she walked.
They went for the bus, where already a good-sized queue waited. His wife told him he had been chatting up a bit of a tart. He said that one minute the woman had been in floods of tears and the next quite off-hand but jabbering about ‘heroes’.
Beryl followed her with an eagle eye. ‘You know next to nothing about anything, Doug,’ she said. ‘Not that I’m holding that against you.’
They walked together to the bus stop, her arm tucked in his.
Chapter 1
An unobtrusive man, he was noticed by few of the pedestrians who shared the steps with him that climbed to the pavements of Vauxhall Bridge in the November rain. He left behind him the cream and green walls and the darkened plate glass expanses of the building that those outside the disciplines of the Service called ‘Ceausescu Towers’ – the headquarters of MI6. He walked briskly. It was his job to move unseen and not to attract attention, even inside the Towers. Len Gibbons was known to few of those who passed through the security gates, morning and evening, alongside him, or shared the lift to and from the third floor where his desk, East 3-97/14, stood, or waited in the canteen lunch queue with him. The few who did know him, however, regarded this middle-grade manager as a ‘safe pair of hands’ and in the trade that was about as good an accolade as could be handed out. As a ‘safe pair of hands’, he was entitled to trust and responsibility and he had received both that afternoon at a meeting with the director general: no notes taken.
The word of the day was
deniable
. The meeting in itself was deniable, the matter discussed was deniable, and the conclusions reached were deniable. The actions that would be taken were also deniable. Len Gibbons had been called to the upper floors and briefed over a pot of tea and a shortbread biscuit.
Take the bastard down, Len, would be the vulgar way to put it. Take him down and leave him on a kerb so that his head rolls in the gutter and the blood runs down the drain. Not, of course, that we like vulgarity. We might more politely call it ‘interdiction’. Actually, I prefer ‘take the bastard down’. It’ll be deniable. My diary has me in the Cabinet Office fifteen minutes ago, and there all afternoon. So, go to it, Len, and know that many men – and widows – will be cheering you on. If you bring him down there will be cheering to the rafters. It’s not the sort of thing we’ve done in years – a first in my time – but it has my total support . . . as long as it stays deniable.
Half an hour later he had cleared his desk and, with a filled briefcase, had allowed his assistant to leave ahead of him. He had switched off the lights, locked the doors, and they had gone down to the central hall in the lift. They had swiped their cards at Security, walked out into the rain and headed for the bridge. He did not look back at the building, did not know how many days he would be away from it, and whether he would win or lose . . . But the job would get his best effort. That, Len Gibbons guaranteed.
Across the bridge, he headed for the Underground station. He preferred to mingle with the masses that crowded the trains. He bought the two tickets and passed one over his shoulder, no turn of the head, no smile, to Sarah and felt her take it quickly, discreetly. Descending on the escalator he had the briefcase held tight across his chest, his coat sleeve hanging far enough forward to mask the chain linking the handle to the handcuff attachment on his wrist. Inside the briefcase were the maps, charts and lists for coded contact that would assist towards the state-sponsored killing of an individual whose life was considered forfeit . . . all, of course, deniable.
He wore the years well, fifty-nine, and was physically fit, mentally alert, with good colour in his face. His trade demanded ordinariness rather than eccentricity, and there was little about him that those on the platform would remember: no sign of the hairstyle under the trilby and behind the beige scarf, no sight of his shirt or tie because the raincoat was buttoned high. The briefcase bore no EIIR, embossed in gold, which would have shown he was a servant of the state. If any had noted him, glanced quickly at the trilby, they might have thought him a rather boring man whose employment shelf life drifted to a close. They would have been wrong. God, in the Towers, had known Gibbons the length of his professional career, would have judged him a man of insight and acumen, but handicapped by a throw of the dice: those damned events that could derail any intelligence officer’s career. He might appear a buffoon, might cultivate that image, might use it as a cover to divert attention from the reality of a stiletto-sharp mind. He trekked into the heavier rain as the afternoon closed dankly on Central London.
The Underground behind them, they passed the entrance to the Ritz Hotel, then skirted the south side of Piccadilly Circus – neither looked up at the Eros statue – and turned down into Haymarket. She came level to his elbow and murmured the number they should look for. He nodded. They were a team. The rain’s drips fell regularly from his hat brim and her hair was soaked, but they made no small-talk about the awfulness of the weather. Probably her mind was swamped as his was with the enormity of what they hoped to achieve in the next hours and days – not weeks.
There was a doorway and, inside, newspapers were scattered instead of a mat. A man in commissionaire’s uniform sat at a desk but they were not challenged and declined to use the lift. Instead they walked up two flights and slipped along a corridor of closed doors, none of which boasted the legend of a company or business. She had a Yale and two mortise keys out of her handbag and he stood at the side while she unfastened the door. Gibbons did not know when the Service had last used the premises, whether they were regular or occasional visitors. He assumed that a front company held the lease and that all connections to the Towers were well disguised. Old procedures died hard. No interior lights were switched on until Sarah had gone to the windows of both main rooms, the kitchenette behind a partition, the toilet and shower room and pulled down the blinds. There was a room with a desk, a chair, and a small settee for him, and a room with a desk, chair, portable TV and a folded single bed for her; there were cupboards for each of them, a safe with a combination lock. Now, the reserve on his face faded: that buzz, the adrenalin flush and the excitement surge replaced it. He was a bureaucrat and a small cog – by fate of circumstance – between large wheels and he accepted that, but he took pride in what he did. Usually he succeeded in providing what was asked of him. Bare walls confronted Len Gibbons and a wintry smile settled on his lips. She had emptied his case of photographs and the big folded map, and had the roll of Sellotape in her hand. She did not bother to ask him where she should display the images.
A ceiling light lit the desk on which were his phone, lap-top, notebooks, pencils and the paraphernalia that travelled with him. She chose the wall in his direct eye-line as the place to stick up the photographs. Some were classified and others were not. She fastened them in the same haphazard jumble in which they had been displayed before. There were pictures of armoured vehicles, all shapes and sizes, all wrecked – some turned right over, some on their sides and some left as debris because the wheels had gone, or the tracks. The craters in tarmacked roads leading straight across flat sand landscapes were great gouges – in some a soldier could have stood, the top of his helmet hidden. Still-frames, a quarter covered with Arabic text, showed a moment of detonation that had been downloaded from websites. There were clear portraits, taken with a macro-lens in extreme close-up, of the gear used in the bombs and their sophistication. He liked to know his enemy and thought it important to display the enemy’s work and skills, to have them present around him at all times . . . There were photographs from the party last Christmas at a rehabilitation home where young men with military haircuts, all amputees, waved stunted limbs defiantly at the camera . . . and there was one magnified picture of a procession, slow and black, in the High Street of a country town. He had been with the operation from the beginning and thought now that, if his Maker was willing, it approached the end. At the beginning, two years and three months before, a man had sneezed.
He might have caught the mild dose of influenza from his wife or children. He had sneezed and gone back to his labour on the electronics bench.