Gerald Seymour - Home Run

"Mr Parrish, have you any idea what life is like for me because you can't manage your bloody office for ten minutes without my David?"

"I went to your wedding, and I'm not daft… just wake him up."

"He's exhausted and he's hurt, and he needs the rest."

"Don't accuse me, young lady, of not caring. Have you forgotten Aberystwyth…?"

She would never forget Aberystwyth. They hadn't been married then. A stake-out on the Welsh coast, waiting for a yacht to come in from the Mediterranean and drop a load off on a beach. A ruined cottage had been the base camp for the April team, and David was the new boy, just selected, and the wedding had been postponed until after the knock. Bill Parrish had broken every rule in the C amp; E's book. Parrish had told his Keeper to get his fiancee up to a camp site four miles from the cottage, and he'd made damned sure that David slipped away to the tent where his Ann was every single night. She had cooked their supper over a calor gas burner, cuddled him and the rest in her sleeping bag, and sent him back to the stake-out each dawn. It had been heaven for her, and Bill Parrish had fixed it, and it had never happened again.

"He wouldn't do it now," she said. "Why can't you get someone else?"

"We're all in the same boat, and it's the way we work, and if we don't work like that then the job doesn't get done."

"Oh boy, have I heard that before."

"Do me a favour, wake him up."

Her voice was breaking. She was across David and she could hear the constant rhythm of his breathing. "You're destroying us, you're breaking us apart."

"He'll be collected in half an hour. Tell him there's movement on the target."

She put the phone down. She woke him. She saw the flare in his eyes when she told him what Parrish had said. She watched him dress fast. She fed him some scrambled egg and toast in the kitchen, and all the time he was looking out of the window, waiting for a car's headlamps. When she saw the lights she could have cried. She cleared away the plate. She heard the doorbell. He grabbed for his anorak, shrugged into it, opened the door.

Ann still wore her slip. She stood in the kitchen, and she could see through to the front door. There was a girl standing there. A boyish, stocky girl, with her hair cut short, and a windcheater like a sleeping bag. She saw her husband go out.

They walked across to the car. She could see them. When the tail lights had gone, then Ann Park cried.

Token talked, Keeper listened.

"It's the oldest one I know. There was a notepad beside the telephone in Shabro's flat. The Anti-Terrorist people had a look at it, and there was an indent. A name and a number.

They checked, there's quite a bit on the name at Criminal Records, all drugs-related, so they fed it over to CEDRIC.

He's hot. He's been busted for possession and went inside, but that was years back. More important, just a couple of years ago he was in the slammer and went to the Bailey. He should have got a Fifteen for dealing, but the bastard had a nobble. Four of the jurors came out for him. The trial had cost nearly a million, had run for four months. Public Prosecutions didn't go back for another bite. His name was written on the notepad in Shabro's house. It's Shabro's writing. The top note wasn't in Shabro's pockets. If that doesn't add up to Tango One finding himself a dealer in lieu of Manvers, I'll do a streak round the Lane. Cheer up, David, it's going to work out.

We've got taps on him, and we've got surveillance on him.

… Your Missus, David, what was up with her?"

Two guards carried Mattie back up the two flights from the cellar.

He was not unconscious – that had been before, many times. He was conscious and the water dripped from his head.

To himself, he was now detached from the pain in his feet, and he was aware of what went on around him. He could hear no traffic in the street outside. He thought that it must be very late in the night. He had no sense of how many hours he had been in the basement, nor could he remember how many times he had lost consciousness, and how many times he had been dunked in the zinc bathtub.

He thought that he was still in control of himself. He could understand that there was no longer any more point in them beating him because the pain had begun to cancel itself out.

He was carried because he could not stand on his feet. His head was sagging, and he could see his feet. His shoes were gone. His feet were grotesque, bloody and swollen. He could not count how many times in that long day they had thrashed the soles of his feet with the heavy electrical flex, and how many times he had lapsed, thank the Good Lord, into unconsciousness.

They took him into his room, and they let him fall from their arms and on to his bed. He lay on his bed, and the pain came out of the numbness of his feet. The pain came like maggots tunnelling from rotting meat. The pain spread from the soft ripped flesh at the soles of his feet and into his ankles, and into his shins and calves, and into his thighs, and into his guts.

It was just their beginning.

Through the long day, into the long night, the investigator had not asked Mattie a single question. Softening him. Beating him and hurting him. Just the start, unless he would scream for the pain to stop. The questions would follow when they thought it opportune, when they judged it best to peel from his mind the names held there.

The pain throbbed in him, welled in him. He lay on the bed and he writhed to escape from the pain, and with his eyes clenched tight he could see all the time the sweat forehead, the exertion, of the man who swung the electrical flex back over his shoulder and then whipped it back on to the soles of his feet.

They had given him nothing. Not even the dignity of refusing their questions.

"How are we this morning, Mr Furniss?"

Nothing to say. Mattie took in the greater heat in the airless cellar.

"The doctor came, yes?"

Nothing to say. It was a ritual. Of course the investigator knew that the doctor had been to examine him, because he had sent the doctor. The doctor had been sent to make certain that no serious damage had been done to the prisoner. A slob of a man, the doctor, and his eyes had never met Mattie's because the bastard had betrayed his oath. The doctor had glanced at the feet, taken the pulse, above all checked that his heart would last, stretched up the eyelids to see the pupils, and checked with a stethoscope for Mattie's breathing pattern.

"How are your feet, Mr Furniss?"

Nothing to say. He could stand, just. He had leaned on the shoulders of the guards who had brought him down, but his feet could take some weight.

"Please, Mr Furniss, sit down."

He sat, and the pain sang into his legs as the weight came off the feet.

"Mr Furniss, it has been broadcast on the World Service of the BBC that Dr Matthew Owens, an archaeologist, is missing in Turkey… " The smile was winter water. The voice was powder snow soft. "They are trying to protect you, and they cannot. Do you understand that, Mr Furniss?"

Nothing to say.

"They cannot protect you."

Stating the bloody obvious, dear sir. Tell me something I don't know… Through all his mind was the memory of the pain, and the memory of the dying that seemed to come each time he had lapsed towards unconsciousness. That was yesterday. The art of resistance to interrogation, as taught by Professor Furniss, was to take it one day at a time, one step at a time. Yesterday had been endured, survived. .. but they had not questioned him. Yesterday was gone, so forget yesterday's pain. Yesterday's pain was what they wanted Mattie to remember. The "old school" had been put through the full works on the Resistance to Interrogation courses at the Fort – the old school in the Service reckoned that they were a tougher breed than the new intake – resist at all costs, never crack, hang on to the bitter bloody end, and some fearful disasters there had been on simulated interrogation sessions. Queen and Country, that's what the old school believed in.