Gerald Seymour - Home Run

"I regret, Mr Parrish, that Mr Furniss will simply not be able to contribute to your investigation."

"We would like to establish that for ourselves."

"You misunderstand me… there is no question of Mr Furniss being able to talk to you."

Park thought that if he had been a yobbo and lost his passport in Benidorm, then they'd have treated him better.

He and Parrish were in iron framed chairs in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office interview room. There were two men on the other side of the polished table, one of whom didn't speak. The one who spoke wore a three-piece suit, a stiff collar in this day and age, would you believe it, and a Brigade of Guards tie puffed out, and his voice was a drawl as if it were almost as much as he could manage, having to speak to the likes of Park and Parrish. Park felt a pillock anyway, because at the Lane the duty nurse had put an Elastoplast over a dressing soaked in witch hazel across a ridge of bruise on his forehead.

"We usually find that we are the best judges of who can, and who cannot, help us with our inquiries."

"Let me try it out on you, Mr Parrish, with words of one syllable

… You will not see him."

"I am a Senior Investigation Officer in the Investigation Division of Customs and Excise. I am working on a case involving the importation from Iran of several hundred thousand pounds' worth, street value, of heroin. My principal suspect, the importer, was issued with a Stateless Person's travel papers naming Matthew Furniss as a guarantor… I hope I haven't gone too fast for you… that makes Mr Furniss necessary to my investigation as I build up a profile of a resourceful and dangerous criminal."

"You should exclude Mr Furniss from your investigations, Mr Parrish."

"We are getting dangerously close, I must warn you, to obstruction. Obstruction is a criminal offence."

"I doubt it, in this case."

"In some quarters the importation of heroin is regarded as a very serious matter."

"Quite rightly, but Mr Furniss will not be able to help you."

"I'll go over your head."

"That's your privilege, but you will be wasting your time My advice would be to stay with the essentials."

"You'll eat those words."

"We'll see. Good luck with your investigation, gentlemen."

They drove back to the Lane. Marooned in traffic, Parrish turned on Park.

"You were a lot of help."

"Stood out a mile."

"Tell me, clever clogs, what stood out a mile?"

"He's a spook."

"Enlighten me."

"Secret Intelligence Service, the jokers over the Thames in the tower block. He was telling you to piss off, Bill. If a spook is sent over to tell us to go away, then it stands to reason that Matthew Furniss is an intelligence wallah, presumably pretty big. Otherwise they wouldn't try that sort of high and mighty shit."

"Sickening, but you're probably right."

"I want a promise, Bill."

"Shoot."

"They're going to try and block us, I bet you. Right now the phones are purring. We've got Iranian heroin, Iranian exiles, we've got car bombs, and we've got a big boy spook.

They don't want grubby little Customs sniffing into that."

"What's the promise?"

"That we don't back off, Bill, just because a stiff white collar tells us to."

"Promise."

"Screw them, Bill."

"Too right, young Keeper, screw them."

He started to sing "Jerusalem". Parrish was in full flood by the time they made it back to the Lane.

In the evening, when his food was brought to the door, Mattie gave his guard three sheets of paper filled with his handwriting.

The text detailed his study over many years of the Urartian civilization that had been based around the present day Turkish city of Van.

There was a good term he used when he gave the lectures. It was one that he had heard himself when he had first attended a kidnap briefing: "emotional rape". It was a good enough description for Mattie to be going on with. He was without his watch and the belt for his trousers and the laces for his shoes. He was without contact. The breakfast tray had been brought to his room, left inside the door, taken away an hour later, nothing said, no eye contact.

His father had been a regular soldier. His father had been a hard and austere man with no gift for conversation, living his life to high standards. Mattie had followed him into the army. Mattie had been the young officer in the Brigade of Guards, and brought up to the same standards. Perhaps he had rebelled against those standards, his father's rigid code, perhaps that was why he had left the military and gone to Century, and yet the standards and the code remained his bed-rock. The pure soldiering had appealed to him less and less. He had spent too much time as a young officer as liaison in Iran, wearing his own clothes and mixing with civilians, but the deep base of disciplines had stayed with him. He had been lectured, and he had himself lectured, on personal standards as a weapon against the despair that came after the shame of the "emotional rape".

Had it been possible to speak with his guards, then he would have spoken with courtesy, but hard to be courteous to a pair of sods who never caught his eye, never acknowledged his thanks. He had already done his exercises, and that was important, always important to stay mentally and physically fit. He went to the wash basin beside the lavatory. There was no brush to clean the pan of the lavatory, and that was a small wound to him because he thought he would have benefitted from being able to set a standard of a clean lavatory. He went to the wash basin. There was no cloth to wipe clean the basin, but he could make something of that with his fingers. Only one tap. He was denied hot water. Well, Mattie Furniss could live without hot water. He turned the tap. A few moments of pressure and then the spurt was reduced to a dribble. The water ran ochre brown. God alone knew what filth was in the water, but the rules demanded that he wash. His hands were cupped to take the soiled water, and he closed his eyes tight, and splashed the water on his face. He took off his shirt, cupped his hands again, and washed underneath his arms. He could not shave, of course, and the growth on his cheeks was an irritation. When he had finished washing he began to wipe the basin clean, to peel away the grime.

Tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, he would wash his shirt. Today he rinsed his socks. He could wear his shoes without socks. Christ, Harriet, how do I dry my bloody socks?

… Harriet… who would have been to see her? He had once been to visit a Century wife in crisis. Just her own crisis, not the Service's crisis, just that the lady's husband had piled in with his car on a road out of Sharjah. He hadn't made much of a job of telling her the news, but he and Harriet still received a Christmas card from her every year. He wondered how they would be with Harriet… Harriet always washed his socks at home, and she knew how to dry them, even when it was too wet for them to go outside, and in the days before they had a proper heating system in the cottage at Bibury. The poor darling who washed his socks, and knew how to dry them, he had never, ever, talked to her about the risk… never. Not when he was Station Officer in Tehran, not when he was running the show down in the Gulf, not when he was packing the clothes as she passed them to him from the wardrobe for this trip. If Harriet had ever said to him that, God's truth, old boy, this life really pisses me off, this life is for kiddies, this life is not for us, old boy, then Mattie would have been shaken to the roots, but he would have packed it in. He hoped they would have sent a good man to see her.

After he had hung his socks on the bedframe, he had cleaned the basin again. Good lord, made in the UK. He could see the manufacturer's emblem, and the symbol of the Queen's award to industry. Must have been a good little export order.