Gerald Seymour - Home Run

He smiled, a real hangman's smile. He reached for his wallet in his inside pocket. When he knocked on the door he had the wallet open so that his identification card was visible.

She came to the door.

She was radiant.

Park handed her the keys, and Parrish showed the ID and she grinned at the keys, like a small girl.

"Mrs Furniss?"

"Thrilling, isn't it? Do come in. It's quite wonderful. I suppose they sent you down when I wasn't answering the phone.

I've been at my elder daughter's… You've come all the way from Century, a wasted journey? You'll have a cup of coffee before you go, of course you will. I suppose really I should be opening the champagne, the DG said that he opened champagne last night. He said the whole Service was proud of Mattie, that's a splendid thing to have said of your husband… "

"When will Mr Furniss be home?"

"You will have coffee, I'm so excited, do come inside…"

She had stepped aside, then stopped, spun. "You should know when he's coming home."

Parrish asked calmly, "Did you look at my ID?"

"You're from Century, yes?"

"Customs and Excise, ma'am, Investigation Division."

Her voice whispered, "Not Century?"

"My name is William Parrish, and I am investigating heroin trafficking from Iran. My colleague here is Mr Park."

Her hand was across her mouth. "I thought you were from my husband's office." She stiffened. "What did you say you want?"

"I'd like to know when I can interview your husband."

"What about?"

"In connection with a guarantee given by your husband to a man now under investigation."

She barred their path. "We don't know anyone like that."

"Your husband knows a Charles Eshraq, Mrs Furniss. It's about Eshraq, and your husband standing guarantee to him that we've called."

She stared up from her eyeline that was level with the knot of Parrish's tie. "Have you been through Century?"

"I don't have to go through anyone, Mrs Furniss."

"Do you know who my husband is?"

Park could have smiled. Parrish wasn't smiling. He would be later, right now he had his undertaker's calm.

"Your husband is the guarantor of a heroin trafficker, Mrs Furniss."

"My husband is a senior civil servant."

"And I serve my country too, Mrs Furniss, by fighting the importers of heroin. I don't know what threat your husband safeguards us from, but where I work the threat of heroin coming into the UK is taken pretty seriously."

She was shrill. "You come here, you barge into my house, you make preposterous allegations about a boy who is virtually a son to us, on the morning that my husband has just returned home after breaking out of an Iranian torture gaol."

"So he's not here at present?"

"No, he isn't here. I should think he will be in hospital for a long time. But if he were here, Mr Parrish, you would be terribly sorry you had had the disgraceful manners to break into this house.. .. "

Parrish said, "Maybe it's not the best time… "

She went to the hall table. She picked up the telephone.

She dialled fast.

Her voice was clear, brittle. "This is Harriet Furniss, Matthew Furniss' wife. I want to speak to the Director General… "

Park said, "Come on, you disgraceful person, time we barged out."

They left her. When they were at the gate they heard her voice rise in anguished complaint. They reached the car.

"Shall I serve my country and drive?"

"I tell you what, Keeper, that wasn't one of my happiest initiatives, but we did shake the nest."

He had spoken to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister had asked after Mattie Furniss and said he must be a quite remarkable man, and the DG bathed in reflected glory. He looked forward rather keenly to the first of the debrief papers that would be coming through in a couple of days, and he would certainly send a digest across to Downing Street. Now he was making a tour, being seen, as he put it to Houghton.

They were in that section of the third floor occupied by Assistance (Photographic) when he was passed a telephone by Ben Houghton. For a moment he was puzzled. He had spoken to the woman at breakfast time.

He listened.

"No, no, Mrs Furniss, you were quite right to reach me

… intolerable behaviour. Rest assured, Mrs Furniss, you won't be troubled again."

The four wooden packing cases and the two cardboard boxes were the first items to be loaded into the container. The lorry had backed into Herbert Stone's driveway. He gave the driver a manifest for the packing cases that listed Machine Parts for Agricultural Equipment. Later the container would be filled with more machine parts for tractors and refrigeration units.

The haulage company was a regular carrier of machine parts to Turkey.

When the lorry had left he went inside his house, and into the quiet of his work room. He telephoned the number Charlie Eshraq had left him and told him that the soap was on its way, and he gave him the name of a contact, and where he should go and when.

"I tell you, Bill, it wasn't sensible behaviour."

"If you want London to become like Amsterdam, Chief, then sensible behaviour would be the order of the day."

"And I don't want a press office handout."

"My guys have worked their balls off, we just don't like to see it go down the plug hole."

Parrish had been at the Lane for one and a half years longer than the Chief Investigation Officer, and for two and a half years longer than the ACIO. He rarely spoke his mind. When he did he could get away with murder.

The ACIO said, "If you'd come to us first, Bill, cleared it with us…"

"You wouldn't have let me go."

The CIO was hunched forward in his chair, elbows on his desk. "There's another way of looking at it, Bill. We are stretched so damn thin that in effect we are a fraud. We intercept a minute proportion of what's brought in. I know that, you know that… When you are losing the battle, as we are, then we need friends where friends matter… "

"You have to go for the throats of the bastards and hang on."

"It's a great world that you live in, Bill, and it's not a world I see much of across this desk."

"So, who are the friends we need?"

"They're the high and the mighty… and right now they're peeved with you."

"I just gave the nest a little shake."

"Very self-indulgent of you, Bill, and no help to me, because I am summoned to a meeting this afternoon with the faceless wonders at Century House. What do I tell them, Bill?"

"To get fucked."

"But my world isn't your world, more's the pity, and I'm looking for friends… I have one man in Karachi, one DLO on his ownsome, and when he goes up to the North-West Frontier, who escorts him? The spook escorts him, and drives the Landrover. Why does my D L O ride in the spook's Landrover? He rides in it because I don't have the funds to provide a Landrover of our own. I have one DLO in Cyprus, and how does one man get to know what's coming out of Jounieh, how does he know what's sailing from any Lebanese port? Cyprus is awash with spooks… I am trying to cultivate friends, Bill, not shake the nest and telling them to get fucked."

"I promised Park, and he's the best I have, that I wouldn't let your friends the faceless wonders stand in our way,"

"Then you opened your big mouth too wide. Tell us about your Keeper, Bill. We begin to hear quite a lot about Master Park. Is he ready for a move upwards, do you think?"

"We're going to have a celebrity on our hands," the Director General mused.

"How so?"

"I anticipate great mileage out of Furniss. They'll want him at Langley. The Germans'll want him, and I dare say even the French will recognize that they could learn a thing or two."

The Deputy Director General said coolly, "I'd put that out of your mind for a start. If I were in this office, I would make double damn certain that no one outside this building gets to know that we allowed a Desk Head to plod about on a hostile frontier without a semblance of security. It'll get out sooner or later, of course. As like as not Tehran will be drafting a press release even as we sit here: Why We Let British Spy Go, and, by the way, not a few people will be wondering already."