Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

…" He passed her a small piece of paper. She read a name and the address of Alpha Security, and a telephone number. '… I'm sorry that I can do so little." He was walking away. She said after him, soft, "And women with obsessions are always tiresome, correct?" "God, what's happened to you?" Deirdre stared up at him from her desk behind the typewriter. Not that he had interrupted her typing, and her magazine of knitting patterns lay across the keys. Penn said, "Just, the chummy didn't want to take it…" He tried to grin, and that hurt his lower lip, but his pride was hurt more than his lower lip. He was learning the business of 'skip-tracing', the trade's vernacular for the locating of debtors, and learning also that not everyone enjoyed being pitched out of bed at dawn and greeted at the front door with the Service of Legal Process. Chummy was a little taller than average, a little heavier than Penn, and had stood in his doorway, his belly bulging his singlet, and swung a mean right jab from nowhere. The pride was hurt because Penn was trained to hit where it mattered and to hit so that a man stayed down, but to hit now was to invite a counter charge of assault. So he had dropped the Legal Process on the front mat and beetled it back to his car. The split lower lip was not bad enough for stitches in casualty, but blood had run down onto his shirt front. "You look a right mess, Mr. Penn…" And he felt a right mess… and he felt a right wimp… and a toe rag who was behind on the payments to the finance company for a four-year-old Vauxhall had stuck one on him. "Does it show?" Deirdre was secretary to Alpha Security. She ruled the outer office, and she probably had a thing going with Basil, one-time CID, who had founded the private investigation agency nineteen years back along with Jim, one-time Fraud Squad, and Henry who had once been with Telecom as an engineer. He definitely thought she was an item with Basil, and that anything that crossed her laser vision would go back, pretty damned fast, to Basil. It would go back to Basil that the new boy, young Penn, had come back from Service of Legal Process with a split lower lip… Good for his battle honours, another medal to set alongside the kick down the flight of stairs from the boot of the man who was wanted as a defence witness, filling up the trophy cabinet. Deirdre snorted, not necessary for her to tell him that his split lip was viewable at a hundred paces. "Your client's here." He had his handkerchief out and he dabbed the wound, and that hurt hard. He looked through the glass and into the waiting room, into the drab little room that hadn't enough light, nor enough comfortable chairs, nor any recent magazines. She was half an hour early. It was because she was coming that he had hurried the Service of Legal Process, blundered in, and caught the right fist to the lower lip. She was a tall woman, almost beautiful, and she wore clothes of a cut that wasn't seen every day in the office of Alpha Security above the launderette. She had her head down and there was a tissue in her hands that she squashed, pulled, squashed, in a nervous rhythm. She wore a good suede coat and a long black skirt, and there was a bright outsize scarf looped over her shoulders. He thought it was the first time for her, first time in the office of a private investigation company. She had quality diamond stud earrings and he could see the pearls at her throat. Penn accused, "Didn't you offer her a coffee?" Deirdre bridled. "Stupid fart, Henry, didn't put the milk back in the fridge last night, milk's off. I can't just swan off and leave the phones…" "I want some coffee and I want it now." "You're not much of a sight, Mr. Penn, not for a new client." "Bugger the phones," he said. "Coffee, now…" And that would go back to Basil, soon as he trooped in, mid-morning. A sledging from dear Deirdre, that Mr. Bill Penn, quite aggressive, quite rude, and no call

… but she was collecting her handbag. He had a split lower lip and blood on his shirt and he strode to the door of the waiting room. Never explain, never apologize, a good creed. She must have heard him coming and as he opened the door she was looking up and for a moment there was the startled rabbit stare, and then the forced composure. And what he had to do was remember, and hard, that Alpha Security now paid the mortgage and the gas bill and the electricity and the food, and put the clothes on his back and on Jane's and the nappies on Tom's backside, and split lips and kicks down tower-block steps and solo surveillance were part of the game for a guy heaved out of Five and he had better remember it… She had a public face on. The composure was set as if the nerves and the fear had never been. He closed the door behind him. She was looking at his mouth but she was too polite to remark on the split lower lip and the blood on his shirt. "Mrs. Mary Braddock? I'm Bill Penn "I'm early, the traffic was less than I'd expected…" "It's not a problem," Penn said. "What can I do for you?" "I expect you're a busy man…" "Sometimes." '… So I won't waste your time. My daughter was in Yugoslavia. She was there when the fighting was in Croatia. She disappeared at the end of 1991, she was listed as missing. Last week I was informed that her body had been identified from the exhumation of a mass grave, in that part of Croatia that is now under Serb control. She had been dead for fifteen months, buried and hidden. I want to know what happened to her. I want to know how she died and why she died. She was my only daughter, Mr. Penn." He interrupted, "Isn't this a job for…?" "You should let me finish, Mr. Penn… But since you raise it… Shouldn't this be a job for the Foreign Office? Of course it should. Do you know anything about government departments, Mr. Penn? They're useless. That's a generalization and a true one. Good at cups of tea in a First Secretary's office, good at booking a hotel room, good at platitudes, and they don't give a damn, just some silly woman using up their day. I have been to Zagreb, Mr. Penn, I was there when Dorrie, my daughter, was missing, and I was there to bring her body home. I thought it was their job to help people like me, and I was wrong. Arnold is a good friend. Arnold gave me your name…" High excitement coursing, yesterday, when he had been told by Deirdre that Arnold Browne had left the message for him to call, immediately. He had sat in the cubbyhole area where Basil had given him the desk, and savoured the moments before he had picked up the telephone. All some mistake, a mistake to have let him go, and of course they wanted him back… or

… pretty bad cock-up, losing him, but the Service had plenty of scope for work by outsiders who were trusted and proven, nice little one for him, and of course he was not forgotten. And what brutal disappointment crushing him, yesterday, when he had dialled the direct-line number, spoken to Arnold bloody Browne, been told that a neighbour had a problem, needed a bit of uncomplicated ferreting, needed a good plodder was what the bloody man meant… He ran his tongue over his lower lip.

"What was it you wanted of me?"

She had her handbag open and she had taken the ointment tube out. She didn't ask his permission. She squeezed the ointment onto her forefinger and reached forward and, casual, gentle, she smeared the salve onto the split of his lower lip.

"I want you to go to Zagreb for me. I want to know how my Dorrie died, and why."

He thought her so bloody vulnerable, she shouldn't have been there. She shouldn't have been in the waiting room that doubled as clients' interview room in a shabby, God-awful, dreary little office. He told her that he would think on it overnight, that if he took it he would come down in the morning, if… She gave him an address. He would think on it and consider it. He walked her out of the office and they passed Basil on the stairs, and the one-time CID man gave her the look-over of a bloody farmer evaluating livestock. They stood on the pavement outside the launderette.