Gerald Seymour - Home Run

The detective heard them out, then muttered a lukewarm congratulation. He could play politics with the best of them.

Nothing too fulsome, because that way he gave the impression that it wasn't a miracle that they had done it right. When they had finished, and bowed their way out of the presence, the detective addressed himself to his seniors. He had the file. He glossed through the prime detail. Cole, Darren Victor. Age, 24 years. Address… Previous: Possession (fined), Possession (fined), Possession (6 months). Common-law wife, two babies.

Income: No visible means. Upsum: Hick, second-rate villain, pusher and user… Young Cole was what would be expected in a country town. Small time, small beer, not the sort of chummy who would ever expect to be confronted in the interview room by big shots from headquarters.

They left the local detective with no doubts. He was working to them, they were in charge, they had taken over. He would do as he was told and be thankful for it. He didn't complain, had never in his police career tried to buck the system. He was to go back to Darren Cole's address with his two juniors and a dog, relieve the uniformed constable who had been left to watch over the woman and her brats, and take the place apart. He would not be required for the interview with chummy, and God help him if he came out of that house with at least one evidence bag not filled.

In the interview room they dismissed the policewoman. They introduced themselves, a Superintendent and a Chief Inspector. They sat and tilted their chairs back as if that were more comfortable. They looked at Darren Cole like he was filth, like they'd want a good wash after being in the same room with him.

Their chummy's eyes flickered, hovered from one to the other.

They let him soak it in, they wanted him soft.

"It's Darren, right? Darren Cole, is that right?" The Chief Inspector said softly.

Their chummy pursed his lips, stayed quiet.

The Superintendent said, "I am going to assume, Darren, that you are not wholly retarded. I'm going to give you the benefit that you are not completely dumb. Now it's not every day that the likes of my colleague and I miss our breakfast to get down here to talk with a shit bag such as yourself, Darren.

Have you got me?"

Young Darren nodded, nervous and showing it.

"Can we start again, Darren?" The Chief Inspector passed his pack of cigarettes across the table, and Darren Cole fished one clear and his hand was shaking as he held the cigarette to his mouth. It was lit for him. Neither of the big shots took a cigarette. "You are Darren Cole, is that right?"

A feeble reed reply. "Yes."

"Good boy, Darren… I said to my colleague that Darren Cole was cute enough to know what's good for him. I said that Darren Cole would know how to behave. You push scag, chummy."

"Might have done…"

"You push it regular."

"Maybe."

The Chief Inspector's voice hardened. "Regular."

"So, I do."

"You pushed to Lucy Barnes."

"I don't know the names."

"To Lucy Barnes."

"Perhaps."

"Getting silly again, Darren… To Lucy Barnes."

"Yes."

"You gave Lucy Barnes her scag."

Darren shrugged.

The Superintendent said, "Lucy Barnes is dead, chummy.

On the slab. Don't tell me that you didn't know. Christ, is this bloody cow town so bloody slow…?"

There was a quiet knock at the door. A uniformed policeman came in and handed the Superintendent a folded message sheet. He read it slowly, he smiled slowly, then he handed the message sheet to the Chief Inspector. Another smile and then the fast look of satisfaction between the two of them. Darren Cole saw the signs. He was shrivelling in his chair.

"The dog's been down at your place, Darren. I tell you what, when you get through this, when you've done whatever's coming your way, then I'd learn to hide things a little better.

I mean that approximately 400 grammes of what we are presuming to be a prohibited substance, namely heroin, could be better hidden than under the bloody mattress. That's making it easy for the dog, Darren, oh dear, oh dear me… "

"That's not very clever, chummy," the Superintendent shook his head.

They had the well oiled routine, they had been working in tandem for more than a decade. Straightforward, this one, a roll over.

"You are looking at a bad scene, Darren," the Chief Inspector said it as if it hurt him.

"I didn't know she was dead."

"You've only done an open prison, Darren. Closed prison isn't the same. The Scrubs, Pentonville, Winson Green, Long Larton, Parkhurst, they're not the same as where you were.

They are nasty news, Darren. Do you know what you're looking at, Darren?"

Cole did not reply. His head was sinking.

"You could be looking at a tenner, Darren, because of who and what Miss Lucy Barnes was. God's truth, Darren, a tenner. A very hard time in those places, Darren, if we weren't speaking up for you."

The voice was muffled through the hands, pathetic. "What do you want?"

"We don't want_yow, chummy, that's for sure, we want up the chain from you. We'd speak up for you, if you gave us the name of the dealer."

A long silence in the Interview Room.

The Superintendent said easily, "Just the name of your dealer, chummy."

Cole's head burst upwards. He was actually laughing. His shoulders and upper body were convulsed, like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. His mouth was frothing.

"You trying to get me blown away? I don't get less than a lenner if I grass, I get stiffed. You get a name and they don't ever forget. Shove it, mister."

For the next hour Darren Cole stared fixedly ahead of him.

His mouth never opened.

The big shots from Constabulary Headquarters seethed, shouted, bribed, and won nothing. The local detective had a quiet chuckle around lunchtime when he heard how well they had done.

In cumbersome longhand, using a thick-nibbed pen, in handwriting that only Miss Duggan could decipher, Mattie wrote out the signals. There were those to the Station Chiefs around the Iranian frontiers and sea boundaries, where the watchers of events inside that closed country operated, and there were those that would be received inside Iran. The Station Chiefs in Dubai, Bahrain and Ankara were informed by coded teleprinter messages beamed by the aerials on the roof of Century House to a radio farm in Shropshire and then on to a booster clinging to the summit point of the Troodos mountains in Cyprus, that Codeword Dolphin was coming. Signals to inside Iran were drafted for transmission on the evening Farsi language commentary as broadcast by the World Service of the BBC from Bush House. Those signals would be received by a man who worked in the Harbourmaster's Office at the newly developed port of Bandar Abbas, by a man who had a carpet business in the close and covered alleyways of Tehran's bazaar, and by a man who repaired heavy goods vehicles in a yard behind the old railway station at Tabriz.

When she had sent down the messages and signals to the basement, his PA reverted to form. She began to fuss him with detail. Were Mr Furniss' inoculations up to date? When could he manage an appointment with the medical staff for malaria pills, stomach pills, sleeping pills for the aircraft? She would go to the third floor for his travellers' cheques, but would he sign this authorization? And for his tickets. Please sign here, here and here. And would he be wanting the car to collect him for the airport directly from home, or from Century? Should a final appointment be arranged with the Director General? And inside the passport was a folded slip of paper as a reminder not to forget the girls, nor Mrs Furniss, of course. "I don't suppose she was taken in for one moment by that cardigan I found in the Strand the last time you came back."