Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Ardnamurchan, but that was behind him. They walked briskly.

'I wouldn't want you to misconstrue, Mr Gough, but I don't see the signs of great progress. I'm not complaining at your telephoning me in the dead of night – Cann's last report – but I'm not getting an impression of action. Can we liven it up a bit?'

'I was never one to rush things.'

'Create a frisson of excitement. Put them off balance. Isn't that the road to mistakes?'

'It's a two-sided game. Hurry when you should be walking and it's not just them that can make mistakes.

We can make mistakes.'

'I want Packer and his crowd to feel pressured. I've a minister sitting on me. We've taken prime position in this investigation. I've elbowed aside both the Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, I've refused to share with them. Without a result, and a quick one, I may not survive.'

'That's the way of the game.'

'The young man we have there, Cann – it's interesting what he's turned up but it doesn't move us forward. Frankly, I'd have thought he'd have done better by now. It's all fat we've learned, not meat. I shouldn't, but I lie awake at night and think of that man, Packer, and he seems to turn to me, in the street, wherever, and laugh at me.'

'I sleep well at night.'

'Where I used to work we believed in the gospel of proaction. Leading and dominating, not merely reacting.' Cork remembered that he had minuted himself to refer to the dangers of over-confidence in surveillance, but he erased the minute.

'It's your bad luck you don't still work there, sir.'

'Dammit, Gough – Mr Gough – if Packer isn't nailed to a courtroom bench, I'll go down as a failure.

You tell me what Cann has unearthed, what has been in his communications that has been important.'

'Learn to be patient. You have to sit for hours, days,› to see a fine dog-otter off the rocks at Kilchoan or on the beaches under Ben Hiant. No patience, no reward

… "Target One is unaware of current surveillance."

That's important.'

The minute was forgotten. 'I'd better be getting back.'

Gough leaned on the rail above the river, smoked his pipe and pondered. The camel coat was disappearing among the pedestrians. Dougie Gough had plans, of course he had, for 'jarring' and 'pressuring'

Mister and Mister's clan, but they would not be discussed and negotiated with a man who had dandruff on his shoulders and who worried about the future of his career. It was about patience, and crucial to the fruits of patience was Joey Cann, a shadow, unseen, tracking Mister on Sarajevo's streets.

'Hello, dear. Just popped round, have you?'

'Thought I'd tidy up, and make sure everything's all right.'

The girlfriend, Jennifer, was rather pretty, Violet Robinson thought, and a decent girl, attentive and dutiful. Violet was fond of her. As freehold owner of the house in Tooting Bee, and the landlady, she made it her business to know all of the comings and goings in the building. She had two young women in the basement, both City professionals, and she rather hoped – for their benefit – they'd get themselves married off and find places of their own. Joey, she'd always had a soft spot for him, had the top-floor room under the eaves. When the girls in the basement moved out, it was her idea that Joey and his girlfriend could take it over. She'd be comfortable with them in her house. She thought young Jennifer was strained, tense.. . She'd checked the room after Joey had gone in that early-morning rush for his plane and thought it puritanically tidy. But perhaps there was ironing that was needed, or somesuch excuse, but more likely this little soul was lonely and had come over from Wimbledon simply to be in his single room.

'That's lovely, dear. Have you heard from him?'

'He rang to say he'd arrived. Didn't tell me much.

He hasn't rung since.'

'You know you can always use the phone here.'

'He didn't give me the number.'

Violet Robinson had been a widow for eight years.

Her late husband had been with the diplomatic corps and had been taken from her by a rare strain of fever with an unpronounceable name and beyond t h e skills of the American hospital's doctors in Asuncion. Perry had been acting ambassador to Paraguay, h a d gone down overnight and been too ill to be f l o w n out to better facilities in Buenos Aires. With the d e g r e e of independence expected from a seasoned "Foreign Office wife she had set to and divided up t h e i r home in Tooting Bee. The ground and first floor s h e had kept for herself, but the basement and attic w e r e converted to rented accommodation. Joey had b e e n with her for five years. Until young Jennifer came into his life, she'd thought that he would still be t h e r e when she was carried out by an ambulance crew or an undertaker, had been almost at the point of d e s p a i r of him meeting the right sort of girl – and then _ Jennifer had arrived.

'Well, ring his work, ask them for it.'

'They wouldn't give it me, it's agaii*ist the regulations.'

'Of course they would, in an emergency. Not to worry, I'm sure he's all right there.'

'Yes… I keep expecting him to ring from the airport. It's only a few days.'

It was her opinion, a little of it from vanity, that Joey confided in her more than he did in his girlfriend, Jennifer. At least once a week, when he came back late at night from work, she would invite him into her sitting room off the ground-floor hall, and sit him down in Perry's old chair. She'd make him strong coffee, cook him Welsh rarebit or an omelette, pour him a stiff whisky and let him talk. She was used to discretion. She knew everything about the working days of what he called Sierra Quebec Golf, and everything about the life of Albert William Packer. To pass long days and long evenings she watched the soap operas, but there was nothing on television that was remotely as interesting as the work of SQG and the life of Mister. Joey had told her that he only gave the barest skeleton of it all to Jennifer. It gave her pride, and some little purpose, to know the heart of the story.

'And we're missing him, aren't we?'

' 'Fraid so – anyway, I'll get on.'

'He's a sensible young man and, what you should remember, they wouldn't have sent him if he wouldn't be all right there.'

'Of course you're right – and thanks for saying it.'

Young Jennifer's back was to her, going up the stairs, and she wouldn't have seen Violet's shiver.

Perry had told her often enough that when diplomats, soldiers or intelligence officers were sent abroad, were far from home, they lost their sense of self-preserving caution. It had been a theme of his. Men and women, on duty and overseas, shed the ability to recognize the moment to step back. It was about the isolation, Perry had said. They felt invulnerable, discarded the armour of carefulness, and walked close to cliff edges

– he often talked about it.

She called up the stairs, 'Don't you worry yourself.'

The answer came down to her, and the surprise:

'Why do you say that, Mrs Robinson? I'm not worried.'

'Of course you're not, and you've no cause to be.'

'I won't be long – just get it shipshape. I've got to get back for the c a t… '

When she'd checked the room after he'd gone, Violet had noted that the photograph was no longer on the wall. As she'd put her own rubbish sack in the outside bin for the refuse men, she'd found it ripped to small pieces. It had been an ugly picture of an ugly man, like an odour in her house. She went back into her room. She hoped Joey, spare, slight, with his big spectacles, was not drawn close to a cliff edge. High above her, carried down the staircase, she could hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

'Is that so?'

To another man, a lesser man, what Mister was told by Serif would have been a pickaxe into the stomach.