Gerald Seymour - Home Run

Parrish was there, but out on the walkway. April's team leader was taking a side seat, leaving the tactics to the Case Officer.

Keeper did not believe that the stuff was not there.

The flat had been under 24-hour surveillance for a full week. The flat had had the works – check on all movements and photographic record. Each pusher visit logged. Each movement out by Leroy tailed. Each meeting listed. Eighteen hours a bloody day, Keeper had done in one or other of the surveillance vans. He could have kicked the tail off the dog, because the stuff had to be there.

"Are you sure}" A venom when he spoke to the handler, like it was her fault.

"Not me, dearie, I'm not sure," the handler said. "And she's not saying there's nothing there, she's just saying she can't find anything. That's different to being sure it's clean."

The straight search had already been done. Leroy and family in the main bedroom while the living room and the kitchen and the kids' rooms were gone over. Leroy and family in the living room while the bathroom and the main bedroom were gone over. All the beds stripped, drawers out, cupboards opened, everything gone through, but that shouldn't have been necessary because the dog should have led them to it.

What to do? To start again? To begin from the front door again?

The two constables were watching him. Customs had their own Search Warrants, and their Writs of Assistance that meant they could do just about anything short of shoving a broom handle up Leroy's backside, but they were obliged to lake the constables with them. Supercilious creatures, both of them. They were armed, the April team were not. The constables were there to see there was no Breach of the Peace, that April didn't get shot up.

He could pack it in. He could take Parrish into the kitchen, and he could tell him that in his humble opinion Leroy Winston Manvers just happened to be clean, and they could all go home to bed. It didn't cross David's mind that he should do any such thing.

Back at the Lane they had a photographic record of the nine known small-time pushers visiting Manvers within the last seven days. No way the place was clean…

"Take the place apart," he said.

He showed them how. Down on his hands and knees in the hall, both hands on the carpet, and the carpet ripping off the holding tacks. Crowbar between the floor boards, and the scream of the nails being prised up and the boards splintering. Parrish in the doorway looked away, like he was contem-plating a cash register of claims for compensation if the search didn't turn something up. Plus Racial Harassment, and the rest of the book, all coming his way. But he didn't intervene.

The sounds of a demolition job inside the flat. One of the team watched Leroy every moment, watched his face, tried to read apprehension, tried to find a clue from his face as to whether the search was warming, and not just lifting boards.

There was the shout, a coarse whoop of celebration, and Duggie Williams, codename Harlech, was lifting out from under the kitchen floor an insulated picnic box. The top came off. There were at least a dozen cold bags, and there were the packets at the bottom.

The dog handler said, "It's not her fault, dearie, don't go blaming her. I've always told you that she can't cope with frozen stuff."

By the time they had finished, and sealed the flat, and taken Leroy off down to the Lane, and dumped his wife and kids on the Council's night duty Housing Officer, going home didn't seem worth it to Park. The last two nights she'd left the spare bed made up for him.

Not worth going home anyway, because he wanted to be up early and talking with Leroy Winston Manvers.

Bill Parrish always went home. Whatever time he finished, whatever time he had to start again, he went home for a snuggle with his wife, a clean shirt, and a cooked breakfast.

Park reckoned he couldn't have been in his house above an hour. He would have taken the early train from Charing Cross down into Kent, walked from the station to his modern estate semi-detached, had his snuggle and his shirt change and his shave and his breakfast, and walked back to the station to be amongst the first of the morning's commuters back to Charing Cross.

David had changed his shirt in the Gents, and he had shaved, he had gone without breakfast, and he hadn't thought about Ann, and he hadn't slept. He lolled back in his chair, he didn't stand when Parrish came in reeking of aftershave lotion. The clerical assistants wouldn't be in for another half an hour, and the rest of April would come straggling back to the Lane over the next two hours. Parrish wasn't fussed that his Keeper didn't stand for him. Customs and Excise had their own esprit de corps and it wasn't based on a military or a police force discipline.

He saw that the coffee percolator was bubbling gently, and he rinsed out his own mug that was still on the tray beside the coffee machine, tide-lined, from the briefing before they had gone out to bust Leroy Winston Manvers.

"Been to see Leroy?"

" N o. "

"What's in the other cells?"

"Nothing, empty."

"Better not let him sleep too long."

Wouldn't have been worth coming in early if he had not been able to guarantee that Keeper would be sitting back in his chair at his desk in the April office.

"You've told the ACIO we've got him?"

"Certainly. He's impatient."

"A result is what matters?"

"Very much David, a result matters. He's got the CIO on his back. The CIO has CDIU standing over his shoulder.

The CDIU is under pressure from the politician. They want to hear what Leroy has to say and they want it in a hurry."

"And I'm covered?" Keeper asked.

"Like it never happened."

It went against Parrish's grain. To Parrish, 30 years in Customs and Excise, 26 years in the Investigation Division, it was out of order for an investigation to take priority because of connections. But he was a part of a system, he was a cog, he didn't argue.

"Then we'd better get on with it."

Keeper led him down the stairs, didn't use the lift, because the lift would be getting busy with the early risers coming to work. All the squeamish ones would be in early – the secretaries and the accountants, and those from the Value Added Tax sinecures, and the computer boffins. Didn't want to see them. Down the stairs to the basement of the New Fetter Lane building.

They came to the reinforced door of the Lane's cell block.

Park pressed the bell, and stood aside for Parrish to come forward.

A short chat. Parrish would be taking charge of the prisoner.

The guard could go and take a cup of tea and some pieces of toast in the canteen, and have a cigarette, and chat up the girls there, and not hurry himself. The guard looked from Parrish to Park, and saw the expression on Park's face, and said that he would be pretty happy to have a cup of tea and some toast.

Park went inside the cell. Parrish leaned against the wall in the corridor, and thought that he might throw up his cooked breakfast.

The dealer wasn't that often on his feet before midday and he had made the mistake of sleeping naked. He came warily off the cell bed when Park tore the blankets away from him.

"My lawyer… " the man said.

"We'll deal with him next. You first."

With a short left arm punch, Park hit Leroy Winston Manvers in the pit of his stomach. The man's body bent, and as it uncoiled, the man gasping for breath, Park's knee jerked into Leroy Winston Manvers' groin. The man collapsed, folding himself into and over the pain. Park pulled him upright by his hair. One violent heave. And then, very calmly punched him. Again and again.

All the blows were to the body, those parts of the body that were hard to bruise, except for the testicles.