Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

‘I’m the crisps, the bacon ones, Doug.’ He was a veteran of Suez, artillery. ‘Do they really like it, being out there and having the world watching them? Nothing like that in our day – were popped down out there. Seems unnatural to me, like it’s a spectacle – I’m not criticising you, Doug.’

‘Fair enough. I was chatting with a sergeant from a unit last month, and he said the military and the families appreciate people being there – like it’s recognition. Could be called appreciation. It’s what’s said… I tell you, when they finish coming through Bassett I don’t know what I’ll do with myself… Right, four pints, one crisps and we’ll have two nuts.’

He went to the bar.

His neighbours thought it was morbid, and had told Beryl so, him and her going off so regular on the first bus to Swindon, the second bus to Wootton Bassett, and the long reverse journey. While he was down at the Legion, the night before a repatriation, she would be running the iron over his charcoal slacks to get a decent crease and brushing the shoulders of his blazer, the one with the Pay Corps badge. If she’d time she’d polish his three medals, and before he’d come out he’d do his shoes so that they gleamed and put the whitener on his formal gloves. Last thing, she’d check there were no crumples in the black ribbon she tied with a flourished bow at the top of the standard pole. His neighbours had empty, vacant lives and nothing to lift them. Doug Bentley thought himself blessed, and also that a hole, wide enough for a volcano to spew from, would be left in his remaining years when the repatriations stopped coming into the Lyneham base, and the hearses no longer drove up the hill into the town.

He brought the drinks back to their table, with the crisps and the nuts, and the artillery veteran asked if there was time for a cribbage game, and the paratrooper – who had last jumped thirty-nine years before – said there was; the Pioneer Corps man, who had spent two years digging latrines on tank ranges in Germany, agreed. Then they’d all three looked at Doug Bentley for his opinion: time for a cribbage game? They had to nudge him.

He’d been far away, just down the High Street from the Cross Keys, waiting for the command to raise the standards and… He said he’d enjoy that.

Len Gibbons watched.

Too many years since he’d been in a long raincoat and a trilby, hugging shadows in a doorway and listening: it was enough to make a new man of him. He saw the target, the target’s wife and the medical man. They paused on the step and the sleet had eased. He saw also the car across the width of the pavement close to the kerb. The driver reached back and flicked open the rear passenger door.

The car had been there, on a restricted-parking line, all the time Gibbons had been in place, but the opening of the door, and the flooding of the interior with light, enabled him to see the driver: hardly a taxing identification. Dark-haired, swarthy, stubble, and a shirt buttoned to the throat without a collar. The car, an Opel saloon and granite grey, did not have Corps Diplomatique plates, but Gibbons reckoned it was an embassy vehicle. He had, of course, done his discreet walk round the block, the cafe across the campus street. The car was all the security offered to the target and his wife. He used a little of a veteran’s tradecraft. He had good ears, could hear – Catherine said – every cat that came into the garden to scratch up the new bedding plants; he wore a hearing aid. It was a tip he’d picked up from the Provos: they had worn them when their hit teams advanced on potential attack sites and needed to know if they were covered by military or police guns; with an aid, they could hear better when a weapon was cocked. Gibbons had borrowed one from the technical people in the basement annex. It fitted comfortably, and was good value.

It was said first in German, as if the consultant made his point in that language, then repeated in English, but not in Farsi. The consultant had personally escorted them to the doorway, and said, ‘I shall look at the MRI and the X-rays overnight. Tomorrow I can tell you what is possible and what is not. Please, your appointment with me is at eight thirty. You understand that I can promise nothing.’

He was gone. The target supported his wife down the one step and across the pavement, then helped her into the car. Gibbons saw her face, haggard, and saw the target’s, numbed. The door slammed, the light was cut, and the car drove away, no ceremony… Incredible. The lack of security, the absence of a full escort, astonished Gibbons. It told him that as yet the authorities had not reacted to a capture in the marshes. Extraordinary. He didn’t follow the car and had no need to know where the target would sleep that night. He didn’t want to test the professionalism of the driver and give him the opportunity to recognise a tail in place. But it had been a satisfactory evening that nothing had blighted. He had gained the knowledge that would facilitate a killing, its location and time. His step was almost jaunty as he walked to his own vehicle.

The Cousin was across the street and low in his car – it was near to the bus stop where parents were waiting for their youngsters to get back to Roeckstrasse. He attracted no attention. He saw the big car, symbol of an individual’s triumph in his chosen field, sweep off the road into the driveway, the tyres scattering gravel. The house was dark, obviously empty, and offered no welcome. The car door was swung shut.

The breadwinner was home and no one greeted him. That stirred a chord with an old warrior from the Agency: he was now, most of the time, out to grass, and would only be dragged back – not, of course, inside the Langley complex – when deniable work was called for. In his own life, before she’d finally quit, there had been times enough when he had come home late, tired, to find she’d decamped to her mother, her best girl friend, her worst girl friend, any fucking place. He understood. Woman trouble: couldn’t live with them, and couldn’t live without them. He saw the consultant, who hadn’t drawn the curtains or dropped a blind, pace in a room on the ground floor and eat what looked like a slice of cold pizza. He had no more, there, to learn.

The Friend took the young man into the city, parked near to the cathedral, then invited him to walk.

Had he had a good journey on the ferry? He had. Had the weather been bad in the Baltic? Not a problem. How had he passed the long hours? On the deck, reading. What had he read? Just a magazine. That had settled the Friend’s opinion that the spear-carriers of the state were best left to themselves, and that banal conversation was meaningless.

Both wore caps with deep peaks and both had scarves over their faces, but that was natural in the cold cloaking the city that night, with the threat of the first severe snowfall. They went past the cathedral, with its massive floodlit sharp-tipped spire. The streets were narrow, and old houses pressed close to them. Little side turnings went into brief cul-de-sacs with small homes that might have dated back four centuries, when his own country had been sand, camels and migrant Bedouin. He did not tell the man that the apparent age of the streets they walked was bogus, that the British bombers had come at the start of an Easter feast and destroyed the city with incendiaries: that Lubeck had been rebuilt with care for its history. They went by the modernised church of St Anne, a Franciscan building, and he stopped to gaze for a moment through an iron-barred gate that was unlocked and slightly ajar. At the end of a paved path was the door to a brick building and above it a dull light burned. He said it was the synagogue of Lubeck, and led the way.

At the door, he rapped the knocker, then pressed the bell. Feet padded noisily towards the door, a bolt was drawn back, a key turned. Sparse light fell on them, and they were admitted to a wide hall.