The Watchman (17 page)

"Bloody Mary?"

Alex looked down to see a tiny, large-busted girl in a tri colore cap, holding a tray. She giggled.

"Or Bloody Marie-Antoinette, I suppose I should say."

Alex took one of the glasses and drank. It was almost fifty per cent pure vodka and fiery with tabasco.

"Bloody strong, whichever."

She laughed.

"I know. I thought I'd loosen this lot up a bit. Come the revolution, they'll all be for the chop."

"They certainly need culling," said Alex morosely, taking a deep hit of his drink. It occurred to him a few seconds later that he was feeling rather over-sorry for himself. These people weren't so bad. He threw back the remains of the drink, helped himself to another and took a deep swig. He began to feel very much more cheerful. Get a life, Temple, he told himself Have some fun for a change!

"Shall I just stay here?" she asked.

"Let you help yourself?"

He smiled. Small girl plus big tits equals hard-on.

"You could do worse," he said.

"Are you one of the caterers?"

"Sort of. Part-time. I'm actually trying to get into the fashion business."

"You should speak to Sophie Wells. She's over by the entrance, or was when I last saw her."

"She's a right snotty cunt," said the girl, as Alex took a third glass.

"D'you know her?"

"Mm. A bit."

"Which bit?"

"Go on." He smiled.

"Piss off before we're all in trouble!"

"Hey, Alex from Clacton!"

"Stella! How's it going?"

She gave him an uneven grin.

"All right, apart from the smell of this perfume.

It's like fish guts at low tide."

"I guess the original guillotine wasn't too fresh," said Alex.

"What have you been up to?" she asked.

"I haven't seen you for a bit."

"I've been in Africa," said Alex.

"Yeah? How was that?"

He shrugged.

"Tell me something, Stella."

"OK."

"If you wanted to hide if you absolutely had to hide, life or death where would you go?"

"I'd go where I always go," she said, as if the question were the most normal one in the world.

"The past."

He stared at her. Heard someone calling her name.

She smiled and the crowd drew her away.

"Believe me," she said, fluttering her fingers.

"There's nowhere like it."

He found Sophie again and was just about to hand her her drink when something irregular registered at the edge of his vision.

At the entrance, by the glass doors, two tall heavy-set figures were forcing their way past the security guards. The guards were doing their best, but they were no match for the red-faced, guffawing newcomers. One of them, a beef-fed, tiny-eyed giant of at least six foot two inches in height, was wearing a rugby shirt while the other, city-suited, was only a shade shorter. The crowd backed away from them uneasily.

"Shit!" said Sophie quietly at Alex's side.

"Gatecrashers."

She stepped with confidence into the path of the two men.

"Look, guys..." she began.

"This is a private... "Charlie," roared the taller man, throwing a massive arm round Sophie's shoulders.

"Take a look at what I've..

But the other was forcibly slapping a passing guest on the back.

"You, sir!" he brayed.

"Are you by any chance an arsebandido?"

Both gatecrashers had public-school accents, Alex noted. Everything about them spelt money and arrogance. Well, they were about to get what was coming to them.

"So, my darling'." The bigger of the two reached drunkenly for Sophie.

"You were saying... A split second before his hand reached Sophie's chest, a fist crunched into his nose. The blow carried with it every ounce of resentment that Alex had ever felt towards the privileged classes.

"Alex!" he heard Sophie scream.

"No!"

The man turned to Alex, amazed. Blood poured from his flattened nose as if from a tap and streamed down the front of his rugby shirt. The other man stood there, swaying. There was a moment of absolute silence, then the bleeding man drew back a fist the size of a bowling ball.

Alex swerved, felt the wind of the blow pass his cheek and, half turning, seized the oncoming arm by the wrist. Forcing his shoulder into his attacker's armpit, and using the Hooray's own weight and momentum, he threw him hard on to his back.

The giant frame seemed to pinwheel in the air for a moment and then crashed down over a crate of champagne bottles.

"Alex!" screamed Sophie again.

He sensed rather than saw the second man's rush. Grabbing a Bollinger bottle by the neck he turned and swung it with all his strength. The bottle smashed against the man's skull with a crunching, gassy sigh and in a white explosion of foam. With spectacular effect his head turned blood-red, his eyes rolled upwards and he crashed to the floor. Screams joined the spatter of broken glass and the groans of the first attacker who was writhing beneath one of the caterers' trestle tables.

The pushing started, then, and the panic. A drinks table went over, then another, and within seconds the floor was covered in spilled champagne, canapes and broken glass. Someone activated the fire alarm. Hanging over everything was the acrid stench of "Guillotine'.

"Alex!" Sophie screamed for a third time, waving her fists at him.

"What do you think you're doing?" Around them, people were jostling for the exit.

"What do you mean?" asked Alex, dropping the smashed bottleneck.

"Did you really want those pissed-up yobs grabbing at you?"

"They were two boys who'd had too much to drink, that's all. It's you who's ruined the party!" She stared despairingly at the departing guests and then down at the fallen men.

"Could someone please ring an ambulance?" she pleaded.

"Boys?" asked Alex, amazed.

"Look at the fucking size of them. I can't believe you're siding with them." He turned to her thoughtfully and smiled.

"But then I suppose they're your type, aren't they?"

"Don't be so stupid. You totally overreacted and you know it. You could have .. ."

She shook her head, incoherent with anger. Beside her, one of the caterers was dialling 999.

"Killed them?" Alex regarded the fallen and bloodied figures dispassionately.

The first man, still groaning, appeared to have badly injured his back and the second was unmoving and bleeding copiously from the head.

"No such luck, I'm afraid. I'd say your perfume got its publicity, though." He sniffed the air.

"Stella was right, it is a bit fishy."

She rounded on him, eyes blazing.

"And what the hell would you know, you... you psychopathic hoohgan?"

Alex began to laugh. He couldn't help himself.

"I'm sorry!" he managed eventually.

"Really, Sophie, I'm sorry."

Drawing back her hand she slapped him as hard as she could across the face and marched furiously off.

Alex caught up with her.

"Please," he said.

"I'm sorry, Sophie. Really I am. I wasn't laughing at you. It's just the whole thing."

She shrugged him off. Her voice was shaking with anger.

"The whole thing, as you call it, has turned to shit. I open up my life to you, introduce you to my friends, and you just .. . just crap all over them. You can make your own fucking way home and you needn't bother to call me again. Find someone else's life to smash up."

At this moment, as they stood there facing each other, speechless, the little waitress with the big bust appeared at the foot of the stairs.

"So, is this a good moment to talk about work?" she asked Sophie brightly.

Sophie glanced at her uncomprehendingly.

"No," she said quietly.

"It isn't."

The waitress shrugged.

"Told you she was a cunt!"

Alex watched Sophie slam the door of the silver Audi. When the snarl of her exhaust had died away he reached into his suit pocket. The safe-house key was still there.

THIRTEEN.

The first hour of the drive up to Goring in Dawn Harding's Honda was conducted in near silence. Alex had a mild hangover and was feeling a bit guilty about the way the previous evening had turned out. He shouldn't have laughed, he told himself.

The trouble was, the row had exposed all the differences that existed between them. He couldn't be bothered with most of her friends, when all was said and done, and he couldn't be bothered to obey the rules that people obeyed in her world. She considered him an unreconstructed macho dinosaur, and in return he found her spoilt, shallow and over privileged. They brought out the worst in each other.

And yet they wanted each other. Often.

The night in the Pimlico flat had been a cheerless one. A 1970s Bulgarian defector might have felt at home in the place, with its stained orange carpet and fusty, boarding-house smell, but Alex could have done with something a little less Cold War.

He should get some flowers, he told him seW present himself at Sophie's front door that evening with an apologetic face and a big bunch of roses. Would roses do the trick? They were supposed to, but then in Sophie's picky and obsessive circle roses might be considered naff.

"Do you like roses?" he asked Dawn.

She looked at him suspiciously.

"Why?"

"If someone gave you roses, what would you think?"

"A man, you mean?" she asked.

"For the sake of argument, yes.

"I'd think either he was trying to get something from me, or he was apologising."

"Right."

"If they were really special, though.. . I mean if they weren't just those boring, limp, half-frozen things you buy at the tube station in a twist of cellophane but properly scented old English roses grown in a garden, well, I might at least listen to what he had to say." She glanced at him shrewdly from the driving seat.

"In trouble, are we?"

"No. Just wondering."

"Ah. Wondering. Well, my experience is that most girls do, in fact, quite like to be given roses." She narrowed her eyes at the road ahead.

"Even the posh ones like your Sophie."

He nodded. He guessed he was going to have to say goodbye to any kind of private life for as long as he was working with Box.

"Can I ask what you're actually doing to locate this Watchman character?" he asked.

Her expression remained unaltered but her eyes froze over.

"Put it this way," she said.

"We've got pictures, we've got DNA, we've got dabs, we've got handwriting, and we've got vocal and facial recognition systems in place. I think you can say that we're adequately covered."

"And Widdowes? What are you doing to protect him?"

"George Widdowes is an experienced intelligence officer."

"So were Fenn and Gidley. Didn't help them much when laughing boy showed up, though, did it?"

"Forewarned is forearmed."

Alex shook his head despairingly and rubbed his eyes.

"You don't get it, do you?" he said quietly.

"Meehan will kill him. He's programmed to do it and he will do it."

She was silent for a minute or two.

"OK," she said.

"I'll tell you. We're setting up a lookalike at his house. A Special Branch guy. We've got the place ringed with police marksmen. George himself has been pulled out of circulation."

"You think that'll work?"

"Look, I admit we were a little bit slow off the blocks with Gidley, but we're very much on-message now.

"On-message," said Alex.

"Right."

"This Watchman," Dawn went on patiently.

"He's one man, he's on his own, he's got no support system to speak of It's not constructive to be too afraid of him."

"He's a murderer," said Alex.

"He's Regiment-trained. And he's spent several years in the field with the most sophisticated terror organisation in the world."

"You sound as if you admire them."

"Professionally speaking I do admire them. If I'd been born a working-class Catholic over the water I'd probably be a volunteer myself and most Regiment blokes will tell you the same thing. It doesn't mean you aren't prepared to do your job and waste as many of the fuckers as you can, but ultimately when you put a bullet through one of those boys and you look into his dying eyes you can see yourself as you might have been, and that's the truth."

From the long habit of counter-surveillance, Alex glanced up at the rear-view mirror. The small movement and the dizzying motion of the reflected cars reminded him how much vodka was still in his bloodstream and he pressed the button to lower the passenger window. Fresh air rushed in. The sun had not yet burnt off the dew in the fields.

"The PIRA are good," he continued, 'and the thing they're better than anyone else at is security. They won't hesitate to cancel a hundred-man operation if one dicker's instinct tells him or her there's something not quite right that one too many cars has passed or that a man's coat's hanging wrong or there are no birds in a hedge where there should be birds. Our man Meehan will have absorbed all that. He'll wait as long as it takes. That's why I respect him. And that's why you people should respect him too."

"Respect him, yes," Dawn agreed, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Fear him, no."

"Given a choice between fear and arrogance," said Alex mildly, "I'll take fear every time. Nothing gets you killed faster than arrogance.

"We'll see, shall we?"

"I'm afraid we will, yes.

They settled into a sour, antagonistic silence.

When they got to Goring, Alex asked Dawn to park several hundred yards from the house.

"I want to approach the place as the Watchman would have done," he explained.

"See it as he would have seen it the first time he came down here."

"No one noticed any strangers in the village," said Dawn.

"We've asked a few questions about that."

"He wouldn't have been noticeable," Alex told her.

"My guess is that he would have come on foot first time round, probably in hiking gear and on a wet Saturday.

Or by bicycle, perhaps. Anorak hoods, clear glasses, cycle helmets they're all good disguises. Those just-passing-through, rambler-type people are invisible in a semi-touristy place like this. You see them at the side of the road eating a sandwich and swigging a soft drink, but you don't really see them. You couldn't describe them two minutes later."