Gerald Seymour - Home Run

When he looked into his rear view mirror, he saw the motorcyclist. That was an excellent way to travel. The motorcycle was exactly the right transport for going into the city in the early morning's heavy traffic.

It was the motorcycle that had been parked on the side of the highway. The executioner looked ahead, then checked in his sidemirror, and he saw that the motorcyclist had pulled out from behind him, and was now poised to come alongside him, and to pass him, coming through the narrow gap between the Hillman Hunter and the Dodge pick-up. That was free-dom, to be able to weave in and out of the heavy trucks…

He saw that the young man on the motorcycle had reached inside his bag that hung across his chest, that he steered the motorcycle only with his right hand.

He was aware of the shape beside him, looming close to his wound down window.

He saw that the motorcycle was virtually against the side of his car.

He saw the grin on the face of the rider, the rider grinning at him, and the rider's arm was outstretched above the roof of his car.

He heard the thump of an impact on the roof of his car.

His window was filled by the grinning face of the rider.

Cold sweat, sweat racing on his chest, in his groin. He could not stop. He could not pull over. If he braked hard he would be swept away by the refrigeration lorry behind him, 60 kilometres an hour and constant.

It never crossed the executioner's mind that he might be the victim of an innocent joke. He was reaching for his pistol, and he was watching the motorcycle power away ahead of him, he flicked off the safety, but what could he do? He couldn't fire through the windscreen. There was a moment when the motorcycle rider, the young man in the blue tracksuit seemed to swivel in his seat, and wave back at the old Hillman Hunter, and then was gone. He no longer saw the motorcyclist, only the lorry tail. He did not know what to do… Where to turn to

…

He was staring into the mirror above him, and he saw the image of his own eyes. So many times he had seen staring, jolted, fear filled eyes.

Charlie had had to turn one last time to wave, and to see that the box was held to the roof of the low-slung yellow car.

The metal box contained two pounds weight of commercial explosive, a detonator, and a stop-watch athletics clock wired to explode the detonator and the polar-amon gelignite 45 seconds after the control switch had been pulled. A nine-pound strain magnet locked the tool box to the roof of the Hillman Hunter.

He waved, he saw the tool box stuck like a carbuncle on the car's roof.

He twisted the accelerator handle, then stamped up through the gears. Great thrust from the motorcycle, taking him speeding past a cattle lorry.

Charlie, in those stampeding moments, could imagine the stench of fear inside the car, the same fear smell as the man would have known when he took the arms of those who had been brought to him. He swerved in front of the cattle lorry.

The explosion blew in from behind him, buffeted him.

The thunder was in his ears.

The hot wind rushing over his back.

And the motorcycle speeding forward.

He took a right turning, he was off the main highway. He accelerated along a lane and scattered some grazing goats that were feeding on the verge. He took another right. He careered forward, full throttle. He was on a track parallel to the main highway, two hundred yards from it. He glanced to his right and could see above the low flat-roofed homes the climbing pall of smoke.

He went fast, and he was whistling at the wind on his face, and he was blessing the present that had been given him by Mr Matthew Furniss, who was his friend.

' So why hasn't it been given straight to us, why are the 'plods' involved?"

There was a sort of democracy inside the Investigation Division. A military type of rank structure had never been part of the Lane's style.

The Assistant Chief Investigating Officer showed his patience. He did not object to the directness of the challenge, that was the way of the ID. "The police are involved, David, because at this stage of the investigation the death of Lucy Karnes is still a police matter."

" They'll cock it up," Park said. There was quiet laughter mi the room, even a wisp of a smile from Parrish who sat beside the ACiO. The whole of April team was in the room, and they didn't mind the interruptions from Keeper. When He wasn't hanging round the edges in the pub, when he was at work, Keeper could be good value, and he was good at his Job.

The ACIO rolled his eyes. "Then we will have to sort out what you regard as an inevitable cock up, if and when we gain control of our friend."

It was one of the working assumptions of the Investigation Division that its members were superior creatures to policemen. The senior officers did little to suppress the boast.

Morale was critical to the esprit de corps for the war against the fat cats and the traffickers and the money bags. Most men in the ID would have put their hands on their hearts and sworn that a policeman just wasn't good enough to be recruited into one of their teams. Unspoken, but at the depths of the resentment of policemen, was the pay differential. The guys on April and the other teams were civil servants, and paid at civil servant rates. True, there were allowances to boost their take-home, but they were poor relations. There were plenty of stories of the bungling of the plods. Customs had targeted the Czech-born importer and overseen his arrest following a ?9 million seizure, the plods had been guarding him when he had escaped out of a police cell. Customs sitting at Heathrow and waiting for a courier to come through with all the surveillance teams ready and poised to follow the trail to lead to the real nasties, except that the plods had flown over to Paris and picked up the creep there and blown all chances of the arrests that mattered. Near open warfare. The police had suggested they should form an elite squad to tackle drugs; Customs said the elite squad was already in place, the Investigation Division, a squad in which no man had a price, which is more than you could say of… and so on and so on.

"For us to gain control, what has to happen?"

They were on the upper floor of the building. No self-respecting policemen would have tolerated such premises.

There were cracks in the plaster of the walls, there were no decorations other than annual leave charts and duty rosters.

The lukewarm green carpet was scarred from where it had been heaved up for the new wiring, and from the latest shift round of the desk complexes. They were all on top of each other, the desks, and half large enough once the terminals and keyboards had been shoved on to them. It was home for the April team, and at the end tucked away behind a plywood and glass screen was Parrish's corner. The ACIO and Parrish sat on a table and shared it with a coffee percolator, and dangled their legs.

"Right, if the whining's over… Lucy Barnes was supplied by Darren Cole, same town, small time. Darren Cole names as his dealer a Mr Leroy Winston Manvers, about whom the courts have not yet been told, about whom CEDRIC is a mine of happy information… "

For effect, that wasn't needed, he held up the print-out from the Customs and Excise Reference and Information Computer. A good deep shaft of a mine with a quarter of a million names, and room for half a million more, CEDRIC was their pride. They didn't reckon the plods could hold a prayer to it, and bitched every time Central Drugs Intelligence Unit at the Yard wanted a peep at their material.

"… Leroy Winston Manvers, aged 37, Afro-Caribbean origin, no legit means of support, Notting Hill Gate address, a real bad bastard. I am not going to read the form to you, try and manage that for yourselves… What has been agreed by CDIU is that we shall mount a surveillance on the address we hold for Manvers, while our colleagues of the police will be investigating all background leads, associates, etc. It is, however, important, gentlemen, that one point remains high in your minds. We will be happy to put Manvers inside, happier still if we can get a conviction which permits seizure of assets, but the principal reason for our involvement at this early stage of an investigation is to move beyond Manvers, the dealer, and into the area of the distributor. The identity of the distributor is our headache. We want the body who is providing heroin to Leroy Winston Manvers. Do not doubt that this investigation has a high priority… Questions?"