Gerald Seymour - Home Run

"Walking out of Iran, I suppose. It's pretty strange."

"You've spoken to Mrs Furniss?"

"Had a few words with her, thank you. Woke her up at first light, poor thing, but she was in good form… Flapping a bit, but don't they all?"

"There's grand news through from the medics. A very good bill of health, no bugs."

"I just feel a bit shaken."

Henry looked into Mattie's face. The man was completely shattered.

"I'll tell you something for nothing, Mattie… In twenty years' time, when the DG's been forgotten, when no one at Century will know my name, they'll still talk about 'Dolphin's Run'. Dolphin's run out of Iran is going to go into the history of the Service."

"That's very decent of you, Henry."

"Don't thank me, you did it. The fact is that the Service is buzzing with collective pride. You have given us all, down to the tea ladies, one hell of a lift."

He saw Mattie drop his eyes. Perhaps, he had been over the top, but he knew the psychology of the debrief, and the psychology said that an agent back from abroad, where he'd had a rough time, needed praise, reassurance. A colleague of Henry's, with a brood of children, had once likened the trauma of return to a woman's post-natal depression. Henry couldn't comment on that, but he thought he knew what the colleague had meant. He had told the Deputy Director General when he had been given his marching orders, before finding that his carburettor was playing up, that he would take it gently.

It would have been scandalous to have taken it otherwise, after a man had been tortured and broken… oh yes, the DDG had been most sure that Mattie would have been broken.

"Thanks, Henry."

"Well, you know the form. We'll hammer through this over the next few days, and then we'll get you back home. What you've been through is going to be the basis of study and teaching, no doubt, at the Fort for the next decade… Shall we get down to things some time this evening? Mattie, we're all very, very excited by what you achieved."

"I think I'd like to be outside for a bit. Can't walk too comfortably just yet, perhaps I'll sit in the garden. Can you keep that ghastly dog at bay?"

"By all means. I'll ask George to put him in the kennel.

And I'll see if Mrs Ferguson can find us something rather special to drink this evening. I don't think we can hold out much hope for the meal itself."

A good early start, because Henry Carter thought that Mattie would feel stronger at the beginning of the day. They ate breakfast of tepid scrambled eggs and cold toast. They discussed the possible make-up of the team for the first Test.

They had a chuckle over the new switch in the Socialists' defence policy. Henry told Mattie about Stephen Dugdale from Library who had been laid low last week with throm-bosis. It was a good room, the old dining room, fine sideboards, and a glasses cabinet, and a carving table, and the main table could have seated twelve in comfort. The worst thing about eating in the dining room and at the big table, in Carter's opinion, was that Mrs Ferguson having polished the table then insisted that it be covered with a sea of clear polythene.

"Shall we make a start then, Mattie?"

"Why not?"

He settled in the chair by the fireplace. Across the hearth rug from him Carter was fiddling with a cassette player. It was the sort of cassette player that Harriet had bought the girls when they were teenagers. He saw the spools begin to move on the cassette player. He could see the investigator, he could see the cellar walls, he could see the bed and the leather thongs, he could see the hook on the wall, he could see the length of electrical flex wire…

"How long is this going to take?"

"Hard to say, Mattie. Depends on what you've got to tell me. My immediate target is to get home."

"Goes without saying… Where shall we begin? Shall we start in Van?"

Mattie told the tape-recorder everything about the way the attack on his car had been carried out. He felt uncomfortable describing his carelessness. Henry looked rather schoolmarm-ish but didn't interrupt. Mattie's account was perfectly lucid.

He seemed to Henry to take pleasure in the clarity of the narrative, in the orderly compilation of details that would one day be of value at the Fort. At eleven Mrs Ferguson knocked and came in with coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives.

Mattie stood at the window until Henry said, "This house they drove you to?"

"I was blindfolded when we got there, I didn't see it. When I went out of it then, it was dark."

"Tell me what you can about the house."

"They didn't take me on a tour, they weren't trying to sell it me."

He saw the puzzle at Henry's forehead. Stupid thing to have said.

…

"Is there a problem, Mattie?"

"I'm sorry – of course, there's a problem. You are asking me to recall a house where I was tortured, where others have been put to death."

"We'll just take it slowly, that way it won't be so painful.

You've nothing to be ashamed of, Mattie."

"Ashamed?" He spoke in Henry's soft voice. He rolled the word. "Ashamed?" Mattie spat the word back at him.

The conciliatory raising of the hands. "Don't misunderstand me, Mattie."

"Why should I be ashamed?"

"Well, we've been working on the assumption…"

"What assumption?"

"We had to assume that you had been taken by agents of the Iranian regime, and that of course you would be interrogated, and in due course that you would be, well, broken or killed…

That was a reasonable assumption, Mattie."

"Reasonable?"

"You'd have made the same assumption, Mattie, of course you would."

"And at what stage did you decide that Mattie Furniss would have been broken?"

Henry squirmed. "I don't know anything about pain."

"How could you?"

"Myself, I wouldn't have lasted a day, perhaps not even a morning. I think just the knowledge of what was going to be done to me would have been enough to tip me into the confessional. You shouldn't feel bad about it, Mattie."

"So, I was written off?"

"Not by the Director General. I am afraid almost everyone else did."

"Most touching faith you had in me. And did you shake the dust off my obituary? Had you booked St Martin's for a Memorial? Tell me, Henry, who was going to give the Address?"

"Come on, Mattie, this isn't like you. You've been on this side of the fence. You know what the form is."

"It's just abominable, Henry, to realize that Century believes a senior officer of the Service will cave in at the end of the first day, like some damn Girl Guide – I'm flattered… "

"We made our assumption, we aborted the field agents."

A sharpness in Mattie's voice, "They're out?"

"We aborted them, they're not out yet."

Mattie sat upright in his chair, his chest heaved. There were still the pain pangs deep in his chest. "You assumed that I would be broken within 24 hours, can I assume that you aborted as soon as I went missing? How can it be that two weeks later the agents are not out?"

"It was felt, I believe, that aborting a very precious network was a big step, takes years to rebuild. It took them a little time to get to the sticking point. Part of it was that the DG convinced himself that you would never talk. All sorts of waffle about Furniss of the old school. Frankly, I don't think he knows the first thing about interrogation. Anyway, wiser heads prevailed, as they say, and the messages were sent, but the agents are not yet out. .. "

"Christ… "

Mattie stood. Dreadful pain in his face. Pain from his feet that were bandaged and inside bedroom slippers that would otherwise have been three sizes too large.

"It wasn't easy, knowing nothing, hearing nothing."

A cold whip in Mattie's voice. "I clung on, I went through hell – yes, hell, Henry, and at Century you couldn't get your fucking act together… it makes me sick to think of it."