Иэн Рэнкин - Watchman

Reaching for a pen, she folded back the paper and filled in the three empty boxes with the word ‘spy.’

The telephone call from Colonel Denniston served only to bring into the waking world all of Miles Flint’s nightmares.

‘Flint? Denniston here. There’s a meeting in my office in one hour. Be there.’

‘Yes, sir. Has anything happened?’

‘Too bloody right it has. Some Israeli official’s been decapitated outside his own house. Sounds like your man Latchkey, doesn’t it? See you in an hour.’

Lying in his hot bath, stiff from an uncomfortable sleep, Miles closed his eyes for a few precious moments. Of course there had been an assassination, and a crude one by the sound of it. What else could he have expected? There was a knocking at the door. Miles never locked the bathroom door, but Sheila didn’t come in anymore if he was there.

‘I’m going now,’ she called.

‘I might be back late again tonight,’ he answered. ‘So I may as well apologize now. Sorry.’

There was silence as she moved away. Then the front door slammed shut, leaving the house somehow colder. As far as Sheila was concerned, Miles worked for internal security, and that was that. Security, yes, but now Miles had evidence of a leak somewhere in the firm, for how else could the Arab have known about him? Then again, what sort of evidence was a smile? It seemed inadmissible.

Looking around the bathroom, Miles appeared to see everything anew. The shapes of sink, toilet bowl, bath seemed strange to him, and even the bathwater felt curiously new as he ran his hands through it. In this reverie, he let his mind go blank until an internal alarm system reminded him of his appointment, and the world fell back upon him like the last wall of some condemned building.

Colonel ‘H’ Denniston, section chief of the Watcher Service, MI5’s surveillance and report unit, liked the simple life. His apartment near to Victoria Street was rented, renting giving so many less complications to one’s life. Denniston didn’t like to feel tied, and disliked the niggling difficulties of life, like shopping, shaving, changing lightbulbs. The widow upstairs from his flat, taking pity on him perhaps, would buy a few things for him if he wished, and if he decided to decline her offer, then Denniston would plan his own shopping trips like military maneuvers.

Denniston had been in charge of the watchmen for only three years, but already had built around himself a reputation for severe correctness and efficiency. He used this reputation like a shield, and he was as angry as hell that a dent had been made in it. He sat at his teak desk and studied some papers from a slim folder. In front of him sat Flint, Phillips, and young Sinclair, lined up in a row like schoolboy truants. Sinclair had his hands in his lap as though he might be needing to urinate, while Flint made a show of cleaning his glasses. Phillips, though, arms folded, legs crossed, looked relaxed and a little too confident. His pink tie outraged Denniston, an army man of thirty-one years with a military dislike of the flamboyant.

‘You were the responsible agent at the time Latchkey went missing, weren’t you, Phillips?’

Denniston saw his question have the immediate and hoped-for impact. Phillips unfolded his arms and gripped his thighs with his hands, perhaps to stop them from shaking.

‘Well... no, sir, not really. You see, I... ahm...’

‘You were, at the time, acting under orders given by a senior officer?’

‘Yes, yes, actually, I was.’

‘Hmm.’ Denniston looked at the papers again, rearranging them, sifting through as though in search of something specific.

Miles Flint coughed.

‘What do we know, sir,’ he said, ‘about the dead man?’

‘We know, Flint, that he was garrotted around midnight, and that the Israelis kept it to themselves until five this morning.’

‘Do we know when he was actually found?’

‘No, but it seems that he was found by his own people, so there were no cries of foul murder in the streets.’

Staring past the colonel’s bowed head, Miles watched the windows of the office block across the way. Government offices too, of course. He saw secretaries hurrying past, weighed down with sheaves of paper.

‘We know, too,’ the colonel was saying, ‘that the dead man, though attached to the embassy, was no ordinary aide, though that may be his official title. He seems to have been working on the periphery. Something of an arms dealer in an earlier incarnation. All very discreet, of course, but he was on our files.’

‘Any links with Mossad, sir?’ asked Phillips.

‘Again, no.’ Denniston looked across to Tony Sinclair. ‘That’s Israeli security, you know.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Sinclair in hushed tones. ‘I know.’

‘Best outfit in the business as far as I’m concerned.’

Denniston was about to go back to his reading when the door opened and the deputy director came hurrying into the room.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said crisply, drawing a chair over to the desk and seating himself beside a now flushed Colonel Denniston. ‘Briefing your men, Colonel? Very wise, I should think. There will be an investigation, of course.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

‘And the old boy himself wants to see us in fifteen minutes. But I thought I’d say my piece first.’

‘Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Miles hated to see a grown man cry, and that was just what the colonel was doing. Not outwardly, of course. His tears were directed inward, but all the more pitiful for that. He was crying from the soul.

Employees of the firm, at every level, called the deputy director ‘Partridge’ or, more often, ‘Mr. Partridge.’ He seemed to have no known Christian name and no military title. The ‘Mr.,’ Miles assumed, came from his gentlemanly dress sense and expensive manners. Butlers, too, were called ‘Mr.’ by the menials of the household, weren’t they? But Partridge was no butler.

Miles had met him many times before, when being assigned to surveillance cases for which he was the senior watchman. The last of these occasions had been only eight days ago, when ‘Latchkey’ had come into being. Partridge, looking across the table and seeing Miles watching him, smiled quickly, the smile, thought Miles, of the tiger beetle. It was Denniston, however, whom he had termed the department’s tiger beetle. He had marked Partridge down, perhaps wrongly, as Platyrhopalopsi s melyi .

Platyrhopalopsi s melyi was a small beetle, not much more than a centimeter long, which lived in ants’ nests, and was sustained by the ants, who in turn licked a sweet secretion from the beetle’s body. Miles had never been able to find out as much as he would have liked about this faintly arousing symbiosis. The first time Partridge and he had met, Partridge had reminded him of the tiny beetle, something in the man’s attitude prompting the comparison.

Perhaps, though, this had been a rash decision, for the more Miles saw of Partridge, the more there was in him of the tiger beetle, Cicindelidae, a ferocious and powerful predator. Partridge had managed to turn Denniston into a weak, glandular schoolboy. It was quite a feat.

‘I suppose you have spoken of the murder, Colonel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And have filled in what we know of the victim’s background?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Turning to the three guilty-looking men on the other side of the table, Partridge placed his hands delicately in front of him as though he were counsel for the defense in a difficult case, anxious to reassure his doomed clients.

‘This is a serious matter, gentlemen, of that there’s no question. But it’s not quite as serious as it might have been. The murdered man’s employers want everything kept quiet, or as quiet as possible under the circumstances. There were, it seems, certain visa irregularities which neither they nor we would wish to have to pursue. Moreover, they do not know that we were keeping an eye on Latchkey, which gives us a decided advantage in the matter. I can now tell you that Latchkey did not return to his room last night. He left behind all of his things, including a fairly good bottle of brandy and several new suits. Even his passport was left behind, though I think we can assume it is a forgery and that he will by now have left the country.’