Gerald Seymour - Home Run

The punches belted into the flab body of the big man. When he was on the tiled cell floor, when he was whimpering, when he thought his body would break in the pain, then the questions came…

Through the running pain, Leroy Winston Manvers could hear the question.

"Who is the chummie?"

He could hear the question, but before he could focus on it he was once more flung upright, crashed into the corner, bent, protecting his groin.

"You supplied Darren Cole, what is the name of the chummie who supplied you?"

And his eyes were filled with streaming tears and he could hardly breathe and he thought that if he didn't kill this fucker then he was going to be dead, and he threw a flailing blind hook with his right fist, and a huge explosion of pain landed and blossomed in his guts and his head struck the floor, and the voice came to him again, the same as before, "The chummie that supplies you, who is he?"

"He's Charlie… "

Park stood back. He was sweating. He stared down at the demolished man on the cell floor.

"I'm listening, Leroy."

The voice was whispered, wheezed. "I know him as Charlie

… Charlie Persia. The stuff is from Iran… "

"Keep rolling, Leroy."

"He's from London, Charlie Persia, but he goes to get it himself."

"And he is Iranian?"

"But he lives here."

"What age?"

"Your age… less maybe… ah Jesus, man."

It was a minute since he had been hit. Another fear winnowing in the mind of Leroy Winston Manvers. "You get me killed."

"That's OK, Leroy. You're quite safe here. Charlie'll be dead long before you get out of here."

"Don't you tell that I grassed."

The dealer crawled to the bunk against the cell wall, and he lifted himself on to it, and his back was to Park. He said nothing more.

The guard was hovering by the door to the cell block corridor. Park told him that the prisoner was tired and should be allowed a good sleep.

Park took the lift up to the April office with Parrish white-faced beside him, his fist locked on the notebook.

The lights were on. The girls were at the keyboards and answering telephones, and Harlech, in his shirtsleeves, was massaging the shoulders of the redhead as she worked.

"Go home now, Keeper, just go off home." Parrish said.

Hiss pasdar uniform was folded into Charlie's rucksack.

He had travelled by bus from Tehran to Qazvin. From Qazvin, after a long wait under the plane trees of the Sabz-i-Meidan, he had joined another bus heading for Resht on the Caspian Sea. He got off by the river near Manjil, and had hitched his way along the track beside the fiercely running water. He had no fear. His papers were good, as they ought to have been at the price he had paid for them in Istanbul.

He had a ride from a local official on the pillion of an ancient USA for fifteen painful miles, and he had been thankful to have been able to spend two hours mostly asleep in a donkey cart.

He had reached the village shortly before noon.

The stone dwellings, too few, too insignificant to be marked on any map of the region, nestled at the base of hills and alongside the river. Once every decade on average, when the spring came following a particularly heavy snowfall in the mountains, the river would overspill and leave a deposit of loam soil across the washed down fields. The plain beside the village was an excellent area for all crops.

Because of its isolation, and because of the quality of the fields beside it, the village was a place of quite startling prosperity. There was no outward sign of that wealth. The American dollars and the Iranian rials that the headman had accumulated he kept buried. It was his persistent fear that the village would one day attract attention, that the wealth of his community would be discovered and that he would be taken by the Guards to Qazvin and put to death in the yard of the Ali Qapu. Charlie had never been able to prise from the headman how he planned to use the cash that he risked his life to amass.

He had eaten with the headman, and the headman's sons and brothers. They had slaughtered and roasted a goat in his honour. He sat now on the carpet that covered the dirt floor of the principal room of the headman's house. They would be good Shi'a Moslems in the village, they would follow the teaching of the Qur'an. He looked for the fault in the pattern, the mistake of the craftsman weaver. There was always a mistake in even the most precious carpet. Only God could make what was perfect. For a human creature to attempt perfection, to try to imitate God, was heresy. He could see no flaw… He had eaten too much, he had allowed the rich meat of the goat to blunt his wits. In the evening he would need to be at his sharpest. He would negotiate with the headman then.

The village was condemned to sleep for the afternoon. The sun belted into the tin roofs of the houses, and scorched the alleys between. There was a corner of the room where he had been told to leave his rucksack and where blankets had been laid out.

He stood in the doorway of the headman's house and gazed out towards the grey brown of the flowing river, across the rich fields, over the shimmering scarlet of the poppies in flower.

The packets taken from the picnic cold box in Leroy Winston Manvers council flat had been sent to the Scotland Yard forensic laboratory in Lambeth for analysis. And with the packets had gone the instruction of the ACIO that absolute priority was to be attached to the first, if superficial, study.

There were only 24 scientists at Lambeth who specialized in drugs-related investigations, and their backlog was soaring. A cocaine possession charge had just a month earlier been thrown out by an inner city magistrate after he had been told at five remand hearings that forensic had not yet come through with its results. Simple analysis was now subject to a nine week delay. So the ACIO had demanded that all else be dropped, this was a matter for the best and the brightest. He could do that once in a while, heaven help him if he made a habit of it.

When he was bawling down a phone line, when he was trying to extract blood from men and women already drained dry, it was inevitable that the ACIO would ask himself whether they were all, all of them at the Lane, wasting their bloody time.

Was government, parliament, authority, really serious, when they confronted the drugs epidemic with just 24 scientists? buggered if he knew whether they were serious, buggered if he cared. He was long enough in Customs and Excise to realise the absurdity of getting steamed under the collar about resources. In the last week he had been up before the National Audit Office to justify the way he ran the drugs teams, and the week before that he had had to defend a paper to the Staff Inspection and Evaluation Board. He had talked to Bill Parrish. He knew what had happened in the cell early in the morning after the door had closed behind his Case Officer.

Typical of Parrish, that he had gone straight into the ACIO's office and shared the dirt, spread the load up the ladder, so that if the shit was flying then it would be the ACIO fielding it and not dear old Bill.

When he was alone in his office, when he was not spitting about the delays in forensic analysis and the scrutiny of the National Audit Office and the nit-pick ways of the Staff Inspection and Evaluation Board, the ACIO could understand the way the system worked. The system was pretty bloody rotten. The system said that if a Cabinet Minister's daughter took an overdose because she didn't know that the heroin was of a purer quality than she was used to, then her disgusting self inflicted death took priority over the very similar deaths of the ordinary and the humble. It was a surprise to him that young men like Park ever chose to get themselves involved or stay involved, and he thanked the good Lord that they did.