Gerald Seymour - Condition black

Sara knew what she should have done, and she had not done it. And she should not have sat in her car before switching the ignition, and rejoiced that it was her art group again in two days and wondered if Debbie's husband… she should straightaway have made up the lost time.

It had taken them time, hut they were getting there.

They were a good team and there was nothing that an investigation could throw up that, between the three of them, they had not confronted before. No rush, but the hours had been worked, and the picture had emerged.

The pieces had started to slot together when Don had received from Ruane, down the wire from London, the photograph of Colin Tuck. Don thought that young Erlich had done well to have gotten the name of Colt, and the photo. He had made an asshole of himself at Athens Counter-Terrorism, nothing but criticism for closing down that source, but this was good work.

Don had sent Vito and Nick out with the photograph, and he had booked the best table at the best restaurant in the Piraeus, and he had treated the head of Counter-Terrorism to the sort of meal that was going to lift an eyebrow or two when the docket reached Administrative Services Division. Smoothly he had opened the doors that had been slammed in young Erlich's face.

Opening the doors had given the team a good young liaison who would go anywhere with them, get past any block, and was at their disposal from the time they woke to the time they hit the sack. The Agency's Station Officer, across on the other wing of the Embassy, said that no one had ever oiled such co-operation out of those Greek mothers as Don had. With the doors open and the liaison in place, Don could sit back in the office and collate what came in. They had the place, the rented room, where Colt had spent the night before the killing, and they had a kind of identification from a Yugoslav who still stayed there, but the room had been cleaned and there were no prints that helped.

Vito and the liaison had done the airport. Every check-in desk for every flight that had gone out from Athens that morning and that afternoon, and when that showed nothing, then he and Nick had worked the lists of the cabin crews of all the Olympic flights.

A stewardess, a week later, back from the mid-morning flight to Ankara had been shown the photograph. She had remembered the man in the photograph as a passenger He had refused coffee and refused food. She had given Vito and Nick a seat number, and the airline computer had given them a name, and the name and the Irish passport had been checked with the Emigration officers on duty that morning. They had had a flight to Ankara.

Of course, the passport was rubbish, not important…

Pleasantly calm for Don, Athens, once Vito and Nick had flown to Ankara. A round of golf in the Ambassador's four-ball, a cocktail party at the Station Officer's home. Vito, through on secure communications from the Embassy in Ankara, had reported that he had found the check-in girl who had done the duty that late afternoon. The check-in girl had nodded when shown the photograph. The Iraqi flight had been delayed. There would have been a passport switch in transit at Ankara, a British passport used. She remembered the British passport, and she remembered that she had been shown the Iraqi visa. Ankara airport didn't carry a passenger list for the flight, and they weren't inclined to go asking the Iraqi officials if they had a flight list. Didn't matter… They had him, the little bastard, out of Athens and into Ankara transit, and they had a passport switch, and they had him on a delayed flight to Baghdad.

It had taken them time, but they had gotten there.

They sat in the room they had been allocated at the Embassy, and they had a portable radio playing in the room and they talked under the sound of the radio. Old professionals, doing it the way it should be done.

When he had finished the longhand draft of their report, Don read it back.

Nick said, "That's shit in the fan, guys."

Vito said, "Respectfully, Don, that's for the Director's desk."

Don said, " I ' m not arguing."

Nick said, "It's just too clean, to well-organised, for Colt to be hitting for an asshole group."

Vito said, "It's state-sponsored, and what Big Wimp will want to do about that, I just don't know,"

Don shuffled the sheets of paper together. The Athens end was over.

Don said, "We shouldn't take that kind of crap, least of all from a government."

He reached for the telephone. He rang the restaurant down in the Piraeus to hook the table by the plate-glass window with a view over the yacht harbour. Next, he rang the Station Officer to say they'd be gone in the morning.

After dark, Colt left the house and walked three streets to where he had parked the car.

Colt was the moth, his mother was the flame. He headed for his home and for her bedside.

"Of course, I wanted her to see you but, God help me, I don't want you taken… "

" I f you shout, you'll wake her, and she needs all the sleep she can get."

"Damn you… "

The boy was his agony. Still so clear in his mind, the dawn raid of the police. He and Louise in their dressing gowns in the hall while uniformed men and detectives swarmed over the house.

The detectives had carried handguns when they had run through the hall in the moment after he had opened the front door.

The armed detectives and uniformed men, who carried pickaxe handles and sledgehammers that would have taken down the door if he had not immediately opened it, had ransacked their home in frustration. The whole village had known. The road outside the main gate to the drive had been blocked for an hour, and there had been more guns outside, guns carried in the garden and in the fields beyond the paddock at the back. That was what the boy had done for them, sentenced them to the dropped lace curtains when they walked the village street and to dropped voices when they used the shop that was also the Post Office. After the raid there had been the surveillance and the clicking interruptions on their telephone line and the delay on their letters that most often took four days from postage to delivery.

"You're just a bloody fool to go to the pub."

"Nobody'll tell on me."

"You're so bloody arrogant, and so bloody naive."

"They're my friends."

"Friends?… You don't have any friends. They're junk, trash.

You have your mother, and you have me… You have no one else, Colt."

His mother's hair had still been fair, soft sunlight gold, when the police had come that early morning. Now it was grey-white.

The medical people that they had traipsed to see, from one specialist to another, searching for better news, said that extreme stress hastened the spread of the cancer. The raid had only been the worst. There had been the time when Colt had stayed away a week, and the papers and the radio had carried the story of the bludgeoning of an animal scientist in his own home. Nothing had been said, but they had known.

After the raid, the two of them, together, had tidied the house.

Neither of them had mentioned the boy's name, not for hours, not until the work was finished. If he had mentioned the boy's name she would have broken. But he wasn't a rogue dog that he could have had put down if it bit the postman, he was their son.

There was no escape from the love, whatever the agony, whatever the confusion.

"Is there anything you want?"

"I didn't come here to take anything. I came only to see my mother."

" D o you want money? I could go to the bank… "

"I need nothing. I have more money than I can spend."

"You're a whore… " And he bit on the word. He stepped back because for the briefest of moments he wondered if his son would strike him. Facing him was only the total calmness of the boy. It was, he thought, as if Colt had been through hell and fire and tempest and to be called an abusive name was merely trivial.