HOME RUN (12 page)

"Mr Furniss, this is Turkey, not Beirut. We don't have Improvised Explosive Devices on every street corner."

"Hear me out, Terence . . . Your car is not armour-plated, your tyres are not run flats, and I would hazard a guess that the petrol tank is not self-sealing . . . "

The Station Officer said, "Run flat tyres cost three thousand pounds each, Mr Furniss. I don't have a budget for that sort of carry on."

"I will take it up with London . . . this room has been furnished by someone who has ignored every precaution in the book. Windows without the blinds drawn, anyone from that building, that one over there, can see you inside, could shoot you. That painting, is that shatter-proof glass? An elegant cocktail cabinet, but glass-fronted. Has no one told you that glass splinters and flies when explosives are detonated?"

"This is not a High-Risk posting, Mr Furniss."

' Neither is Athens, nor is Brussels. We were scraping chaps off the walls there who a few moments before would have happily said those cities were not High-Risk."

"I'll get them fixed, sir."

"Very wise. . . Now I'd like to turn to matters Iranian . . ."

Mattie Furniss set out in detail the kind of information he would be requiring in future from the Station Officer on the Iranian theatre. He painted a picture that filled the young and fast promoted Terence Snow with bleak despair. He required minutely recorded and frequent de-briefs of Iranian refugees who had successfully legged it through the mountains and the river gorges, past the patrols, and into north-east Turkey. He had no use for the opiate dreaming of the exiles in Istanbul, he wanted fresh, raw intelligence.

They walked down the staircase together. Mattie said that the next morning he planned to head off towards the World War One battlefield at Gallipoli. He said that his father had been there, a gunner, never talked much about it. And then his voice lit up, and he said that they would follow that visit with a couple of days pottering amongst the excavated ruins of Troy. Did Terence know that all of the finest examples of Trojan jewellery had been lodged in the Berlin museum, and then pillaged by the Soviets in 1945? No, he did not.

"And then I think we'll go up to Van together."

Good grief. Three days non-stop tutorial. Terence's spirits sank. "I'll enjoy that, Mr Furniss."

The council flat was home to Leroy Winston Manvers and his wife and his four children. The door was sledge-hammered, off its hinges, and the wind brought the rain in from the walkway outside. It was three in the morning and the dog had failed.

The dog was a decent enough looking spaniel, and the handler was quite a good-looking girl, a bit butch in her dark slacks and the tightness of her navy regulation sweater. Park hadn't noticed her. Great while the dog was still searching, the dog had kept the adrenalin moving for them all. But the dog had failed and was sitting quietly at the feet of the handler, and all the rest of the team were looking at Park, because he was the Case Officer, and the decisions were his. Couldn't talk in the living room. Leroy had the sofa with the children in blankets beside him, and his wife hugging her knees in the only other easy chair. Park was in the corridor, standing over the dog and the team were milling around him, still hanging on to the pick-axe handles and the sledge-hammers that had taken the door off, what they called the keys. Pretty calm Leroy looked to Park. Vest and underpants, hair dreadlocked, and the composure that Keeper could best have wiped with a pick-axe handle.

Parrish was there, but out on the walkway. April's team leader was taking a side seat, leaving the tactics to the Case Officer.

Keeper did not believe that the stuff was not there.

The flat had been under 24-hour surveillance for a full week. The flat had had the works - check on all movements and photographic record. Each pusher visit logged. Each movement out by Leroy tailed. Each meeting listed. Eighteen hours a bloody day, Keeper had done in one or other of the surveillance vans. He could have kicked the tail off the dog, because the stuff had to be there.

"Are you
sure}"
A venom when he spoke to the handler, like it was her fault.

"Not me, dearie,
I'm
not sure," the handler said. "And she's not saying there's nothing there, she's just saying she can't find anything. That's different to being sure it's clean."

The straight search had already been done. Leroy and family in the main bedroom while the living room and the kitchen and the kids' rooms were gone over. Leroy and family in the living room while the bathroom and the main bedroom were gone over. All the beds stripped, drawers out, cupboards opened, everything gone through, but that shouldn't have been necessary because the dog should have led them to it.

What to do? To start again? To begin from the front door again?

The two constables were watching him. Customs had their own Search Warrants, and their Writs of Assistance that meant they could do just about anything short of shoving a broom handle up Leroy's backside, but they were obliged to lake the constables with them. Supercilious creatures, both of them. They were armed, the April team were not. The constables were there to see there was no Breach of the Peace, that April didn't get shot up.

He could pack it in. He could take Parrish into the kitchen, and he could tell him that in his humble opinion Leroy Winston Manvers just happened to be clean, and they could all go home to bed. It didn't cross David's mind that he should do any such thing.

Back at the Lane they had a photographic record of the nine known small-time pushers visiting Manvers within the last seven days. No way the place was clean . . .

"Take the place apart," he said.

He showed them how. Down on his hands and knees in the hall, both hands on the carpet, and the carpet ripping off the holding tacks. Crowbar between the floor boards, and the scream of the nails being prised up and the boards splintering. Parrish in the doorway looked away, like he was contem-plating a cash register of claims for compensation if the search didn't turn something up. Plus Racial Harassment, and the rest of the book, all coming his way. But he didn't intervene.

The sounds of a demolition job inside the flat. One of the team watched Leroy every moment, watched his face, tried to read apprehension, tried to find a clue from his face as to whether the search was warming, and not just lifting boards.

There was the shout, a coarse whoop of celebration, and Duggie Williams, codename Harlech, was lifting out from under the kitchen floor an insulated picnic box. The top came off. There were at least a dozen cold bags, and there were the packets at the bottom.

The dog handler said, "It's not her fault, dearie, don't go blaming her. I've always told you that she can't cope with frozen stuff."

By the time they had finished, and sealed the flat, and taken Leroy off down to the Lane, and dumped his wife and kids on the Council's night duty Housing Officer, going home didn't seem worth it to Park. The last two nights she'd left the spare bed made up for him.

Not worth going home anyway, because he wanted to be up early and talking with Leroy Winston Manvers.

6

Bill Parrish always went home. Whatever time he finished, whatever time he had to start again, he went home for a snuggle with his wife, a clean shirt, and a cooked breakfast.

Park reckoned he couldn't have been in his house above an hour. He would have taken the early train from Charing Cross down into Kent, walked from the station to his modern estate semi-detached, had his snuggle and his shirt change and his shave and his breakfast, and walked back to the station to be amongst the first of the morning's commuters back to Charing Cross.

David had changed his shirt in the Gents, and he had shaved, he had gone without breakfast, and he hadn't thought about Ann, and he hadn't slept. He lolled back in his chair, he didn't stand when Parrish came in reeking of aftershave lotion. The clerical assistants wouldn't be in for another half an hour, and the rest of April would come straggling back to the Lane over the next two hours. Parrish wasn't fussed that his Keeper didn't stand for him. Customs and Excise had their own
esprit de corps
and it wasn't based on a military or a police force discipline.

He saw that the coffee percolator was bubbling gently, and he rinsed out his own mug that was still on the tray beside the coffee machine, tide-lined, from the briefing before they had gone out to bust Leroy Winston Manvers.

"Been to see Leroy?"

" N o . "

"What's in the other cells?"

"Nothing, empty."

"Better not let him sleep too long."

Wouldn't have been worth coming in early if he had not been able to guarantee that Keeper would be sitting back in his chair at his desk in the April office.

"You've told the ACIO we've got him?"

"Certainly. He's impatient."

"A result is what matters?"

"Very much David, a result matters. He's got the CIO

on his back. The CIO has CDIU standing over his shoulder.

The CDIU is under pressure from the politician. They want to hear what Leroy has to say and they want it in a hurry."

"And I'm covered?" Keeper asked.

"Like it never happened."

It went against Parrish's grain. To Parrish, 30 years in Customs and Excise, 26 years in the Investigation Division, it was out of order for an investigation to take priority because of connections. But he was a part of a system, he was a cog, he didn't argue.

"Then we'd better get on with it."

Keeper led him down the stairs, didn't use the lift, because the lift would be getting busy with the early risers coming to work. All the squeamish ones would be in early - the secretaries and the accountants, and those from the Value Added Tax sinecures, and the computer boffins. Didn't want to see them. Down the stairs to the basement of the New Fetter Lane building.

They came to the reinforced door of the Lane's cell block.

Park pressed the bell, and stood aside for Parrish to come forward.

A short chat. Parrish would be taking charge of the prisoner.

The guard could go and take a cup of tea and some pieces of toast in the canteen, and have a cigarette, and chat up the girls there, and not hurry himself. The guard looked from Parrish to Park, and saw the expression on Park's face, and said that he would be pretty happy to have a cup of tea and some toast.

Park went inside the cell. Parrish leaned against the wall in the corridor, and thought that he might throw up his cooked breakfast.

The dealer wasn't that often on his feet before midday and he had made the mistake of sleeping naked. He came warily off the cell bed when Park tore the blankets away from him.

"My lawyer . . . " the man said.

"We'll deal with him next. You first."

With a short left arm punch, Park hit Leroy Winston Manvers in the pit of his stomach. The man's body bent, and as it uncoiled, the man gasping for breath, Park's knee jerked into Leroy Winston Manvers' groin. The man collapsed, folding himself into and over the pain. Park pulled him upright by his hair. One violent heave. And then, very calmly punched him. Again and again.

All the blows were to the body, those parts of the body that were hard to bruise, except for the testicles.

The punches belted into the flab body of the big man. When he was on the tiled cell floor, when he was whimpering, when he thought his body would break in the pain, then the questions came . . .

Through the running pain, Leroy Winston Manvers could hear the question.

"Who is the chummie?"

He could hear the question, but before he could focus on it he was once more flung upright, crashed into the corner, bent, protecting his groin.

"You supplied Darren Cole, what is the name of the chummie who supplied you?"

And his eyes were filled with streaming tears and he could hardly breathe and he thought that if he didn't kill this fucker then he was going to be dead, and he threw a flailing blind hook with his right fist, and a huge explosion of pain landed and blossomed in his guts and his head struck the floor, and the voice came to him again, the same as before, "The chummie that supplies you, who is he?"

"He's Charlie . . . "

Park stood back. He was sweating. He stared down at the demolished man on the cell floor.

"I'm listening, Leroy."

The voice was whispered, wheezed. "I know him as Charlie

. . . Charlie Persia. The stuff is from Iran . . . "

"Keep rolling, Leroy."

"He's from London, Charlie Persia, but he goes to get it himself."

"And he is Iranian?"

"But he lives here."

"What age?"

"Your age . . . less maybe . . . ah Jesus, man."

It was a minute since he had been hit. Another fear winnowing in the mind of Leroy Winston Manvers. "You get me killed."

"That's OK, Leroy. You're quite safe here. Charlie'll be dead long before you get out of here."

"Don't you tell that I grassed."

The dealer crawled to the bunk against the cell wall, and he lifted himself on to it, and his back was to Park. He said nothing more.

The guard was hovering by the door to the cell block corridor. Park told him that the prisoner was tired and should be allowed a good sleep.

Park took the lift up to the April office with Parrish white-faced beside him, his fist locked on the notebook.

The lights were on. The girls were at the keyboards and answering telephones, and Harlech, in his shirtsleeves, was massaging the shoulders of the redhead as she worked.

"Go home now, Keeper, just go off home." Parrish said.

* * *

Hiss
pasdar
uniform was folded into Charlie's rucksack.

He had travelled by bus from Tehran to Qazvin. From Qazvin, after a long wait under the plane trees of the Sabz-i-Meidan, he had joined another bus heading for Resht on the Caspian Sea. He got off by the river near Manjil, and had hitched his way along the track beside the fiercely running water. He had no fear. His papers were good, as they ought to have been at the price he had paid for them in Istanbul.