Gerald Seymour: Home Run

"Everything we can do, that is a promise. You'll give my love to Libby. I'm so very sorry."

"Oh, you'd by God be sorry if you had seen how Lucy died, how she was – dead – and where she died. Libby will need the strengh of twenty to survive this. In my heart of hearts I have known, for almost a year, how it might end but I couldn't imagine the depths of it. You must see it day in and day out, but this time the minuscule statistic on your desk is my dead daughter and I am going to hold you to your promise."

The detective worked his way steadily through the diary. He found an asterisk in red biro on every third or fourth day of the last few weeks, the last against the date on which the girl had taken her overdose. There were also telephone numbers.

There was a string of seven-figure numbers, almost certainly London numbers, which for the moment he discarded. He had wrung from the others in the squat that Lucy Barnes had not been away from the town in the last days of her life.

The local numbers were five-figure numbers. There was one number underlined in the same red biro. The local detective worked to a formula. He would work into the early evening, and then lock away the papers on his desk, put on his coat and drive home. What other way? If he and his two juniors worked 25 hours in the 24 they would still make no noticeable dent on the narcotics problems that had spread even to this country town. Where did the bloody stuff stop? The detective went to the area seminars, he had heard endlessly of the big city problems. And their problems, the problems of the major city forces, were his. If he hadn't shut it away, locked it into the drawer of his desk each evening, then the scag and coke would do for him too.

Before he put the key back into his pocket, he told the better of the two juniors to get onto the telephone exchange and cut all incoming and outgoing calls from the underlined number.

He wished them well, bade them a "Good evening", and left for home.

"The gloves off, is that what you're asking for?"

He was a former Chief Constable. He had seen it all and heard it all. He wanted the guidelines crystal clear, and from the horse's mouth. He headed the National Drugs Intelligence Unit, based on New Scotland Yard, with responsibility for co-ordinating efforts to stem the flow of narcotics into the country.

"Yes, I suppose that's it. Yes, that is what I am asking for."

The Home Secretary shifted in his seat. His own Private Secretary was busy at his notepad, and at the back of the room the policeman's aide was scribbling fast, then looking up to see whether there was more. The Home Secretary wondered how similar their two notes would be.

"What I could say to you, Home Secretary, is that I might be just a little concerned at hard-pressed and limited resources being diverted on to one case, however tragic, merely because the victim happened to be well connected. You would understand that I could say that, would be entitled to say that."

"It's no doubt a straightforward case. It's nothing that hasn't been successfully dealt with countless times. I just want it solved, and fast," the Home Secretary said.

"Then I'll tell you, sir, what's landed on our desks over the last few days… Four Blacks bullock their way into a house and shoot the mother and her schoolboy son, the boy's dead.

That's drugs related. A blind widow is beaten up in the West Country, for a hundred pounds in her pension book. That's to pay for drugs. Twenty-eight policemen injured in two months in West London in one street, in 150 yards of one street, because we're trying to put a stop to trafficking in that street. What we call designer drugs, cocktail amphetamines, there are at least 1 wo new laboratories in East London which we haven't found.

A six-year-old kiddie who's hooked on reefers, and his Mum's come in to tell us that he pinched?150 out of her handbag to pay for them. .. That's what's hitting our desks at the moment.

Now do I hear you rightly, sir? Do I correctly hear you say that that type of investigation, pretty important to the men and women involved, goes on the back burner?"

"Yes."

"… because the daughter of a Cabinet Minister is dumb enough to squirt herself an overdose?"

"Don't let's play silly buggers."

"Thank you, sir, I'll attend to it."

"And be damn certain you get a result."

There was a wintry smile on the policeman's face, a smile that sliced the Home Secretary's defences. He looked away, he didn't want to see the man's eyes, the message of contempt that a man in his position could break the civilized order of priorities because he had given his word to a colleague.

"You'll keep me informed," the Home Secretary told his Private Secretary. "And you can ring down for my car."

''Charlie Eshraq rang," Harriet Furniss said.

Mattie was heaving out of his overcoat. "Did he now?"

Reaching to hook it tidily behind the front door. "And what did he have to say for himself?"

It was Mattie's way that he did not bring his office home.

He had told his wife nothing of his dealings with the boy, nor that Charlie, whom Harriet Furniss treated as a son, had killed two men on his last journey home. They had been married for 28 years, and he had spent 21 of them as a member of the Secret Intelligence Service and he had stuck to his rule book, and the rule book said that wives were no part of the Service.

"He said that he was sorry that he had missed you. He was off tonight… "

"Was he now?" Mattie made a poor fist of unconcern.

Harriet would have noticed, but she would not have commented. Harriet never attempted to draw him out.

"He said that he had a rather good job for a few weeks, something about playing courier to tourists in the Aegean."

"That'll be nice for him."

"He said thank you for the present."

"Ah, yes. Just a little something that I saw, and posted to him," he said, too fast. He could lie with the best of them at Century, and was a miserable failure at home.

"He said it would be very useful."

"That's excellent. The country this weekend, I think, Harriet. Some reading to be done."

He kissed her on the cheek, like it was something that he should have done earlier. In all his married life Mattie had never looked at another woman. Perhaps he was old fashioned.

He thought a little more each day of his advancing years – his next birthday would be his 53rd – and happily acknowledged that he was just damned lucky to have met and married Harriet (nee Owens) Furniss.

He opened his briefcase, took out the black cloth-bound book that was all of its contents. He went to work each morning with a briefcase, as if it were a part of his uniform, but he never brought it home filled with office papers. He showed her the elegant lettering on the spine, The Urartian Civilization of Near Asia – an Appraisal. She grimaced. He opened the book and showed her the receipt from the anti-quarian bookseller.

"It had better be your birthday present."

His birthday was not for another nine weeks. She would pay for the book as she paid for most of the extras in their lives, as she had paid the girls' school fees, as she had paid the airfare for Charlie Eshraq to come over from California to London years before. Mattie had no money, no inherited wealth, only his salary from Century, which looked after essentials – rates, mortgage, housekeeping. Their way of life would have been a good deal less comfortable without Harriet's contributions.

"How did Charlie sound?"

"Sounded pretty good. Very buoyant, actually… Supper'll be frizzled."

They went down the hallway towards the kitchen. He was holding his wife's hand. He did it more often now that the girls had left home.

"You'll have something to get your teeth into for the weekend?"