The Watchman (19 page)

"Didn't you get laid last night either?"

"As a matter of fact I did," said Dawn mildly.

There was a heartbeat's silence.

"So, who's the lucky guy?" Alex asked, rather more sharply than he intended.

In answer Dawn just laughed and shook her head.

"That pencil was a good find," she said, cutting a pickled onion in half "Forensics can get stuck in. There should be dabs."

"There won't be," said Alex.

"He meant us to find it. It's a message.

"How d'you know that? How d'you know he didn't make a mistake? Just leave it there?"

"He wouldn't do that. He doesn't make mistakes."

"That's just your ego talking. You're Regiment-trained, he's Regiment-trained.

In your mind you can't make a mistake, therefore he can't make a mistake."

"All that I'm saying is that trained guys like him don't make mistakes concerning operational procedure. You arrive at an OP with a pencil, you leave with a pencil, end of story."

"OK. So what, in your opinion, is the message?"

"I think it's part and parcel with the nails. Some kind of reference to the undercover days. That knot hole was rather like a dead-letter drop, didn't you think? Perhaps returning the pencil is his way of saying that things have gone beyond words. That the only possible medium of communication left is murder."

She stared at him.

"My guess is that he's way ahead of us," said Alex.

"My guess is that he knew you'd bring in someone like me and so he put that pencil where only someone like me would find it."

"I found it," said Dawn.

"You know what I mean. It's a message for me. As if to say hello, brother. I was wondering when you'd be along."

"You think he wants to be caught?" asked Dawn.

"I don't know about that but I know he means to do a fair bit more killing first."

Dawn frowned.

"I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there's something that probably wasn't in those reports you were given. They analysed the nails that were used to kill Fenn and Gidley, and found something very strange indeed."

Alex looked at her.

"They were well over fifty years old. Nails haven't been made by that process or of that particular alloy since before the Second World War."

"The pencil," said Alex. Using a paper napkin he removed it from his shirt pocket. It was of dull, plain wood, and bore no marking of any kind.

They peered at it.

"I'll bet you anything you like it turns out to be the same age," said Dawn.

"Any idea what that's all about?"

"Search me." Dawn half smiled.

"Except that you've already done that once today, haven't you?"

"Not as thoroughly as I'd have liked," said Alex.

"I'm sure there are a few more surprises in store."

"More than you'll ever know," said Dawn.

FOURTEEN.

That afternoon Alex took a train to Hereford, picked up his car from the garage where it had been repaired, collected some clothes from his flat and drove out to the SAS base at Credenhill. There he went straight to see Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Leonard, the CO. Howard was expecting him, and the Adjutant showed Alex straight through to the spare, utilitarian office with the steel furniture and the black-and-white photos on the wall.

"So how's it going with the Box investigation?" asked Howard, pushing away the laptop computer at which he had been tentatively poking. The CO was a short, broad-shouldered Yorkshireman with untidy brown hair, an enquiring blue gaze and fists the size of frozen chickens. A few years back he had played rugby for the army and many of his former opponents still bore the scars to remember him by.

Bill Leonard was a far cry, Alex had always considered, from the public-schooled Ruperts who had preceded him. This was one of the reasons why Alex had decided to approach him and to disregard the order from Angela Fenwick not to discuss the Watchman case with hisS AS colleagues.

"They're not letting me anywhere near it," said Alex.

"My job is basically to wait on the sidelines until they find the guy, and then go in and waste him."

"Are they going to find him?"

"Doubt it. He may be nuts but he's still a lot faster on his feet than they are.

They've set up some lookalike in the home of the guy they suspect is next in line, but he'll suss it a mile off."

Howard nodded.

"I've seen his file. He looks pretty switched on. Or he certainly was then. You think he'll whack this next bloke?"

"I reckon I can probably cut down the odds of that happening if they'll let me.

But you know what they're like."

"I know exactly what they're like. What are you doing?"

"Well, I'm doing what I'm told, which basically means fuck all. The trouble is, I suspect this guy's expecting someone like me to come after him."

"He'd be a fool if he didn't expect that," said Howard, studying his massive fingers.

"You think he'll have a go at you?"

"If I get in his way, yes."

"You want to draw a Sig or something from the armoury?"

"It might be sensible. What I'd really like to do is speak to anyone who trained him. Are any of those blokes still contact able

Howard frowned.

"It was a fair old time ago, but you could give Frank Wisbeach a ring. His name's in the file as one of the Watchman instructors."

"Do you know where I could find him?"

"He was driving a minicab in town the last I heard of him, poor old sod. Clarion cabs, I think they're called."

"It might help to have a word," said Alex.

"Anything that gives me an angle on Meehan and on the way his mind might be working."

"If you do get an inside track, there could be a lot we can learn. About agent stress, breaking points and so on. We need a lot more information on that sort of thing."

"Well, if I find myself face to face to him, I'll ask him what exactly turned him into a serial killer," said Alex.

"How many people do you have to take out before they classify you as a serial killer?" Howard wondered aloud.

Alex shrugged.

"Four, I read. Up to that point you're just a killer. After four you're serial."

Howard smiled wolfishly.

"Like us, you mean?"

It was an hour before Frank Wisbeach returned Alex's call and when he did he was apologetic, explaining that he had been on an airport job. He was free that evening after 7.30, he told Alex, and they arranged to meet for a drink at a small pub on the outskirts of the city.

Driving back into town, Alex wondered what he should do about Sophie. For starters give her a call, he thought, and dialled her home number on his mobile. It rang unchecked; she hadn't put the answering machine on. He tried her mobile number but got the message service.

He didn't want to leave a message, he wanted to speak to her directly.

Something about the morning's encounter with Dawn Harding had made him want very much to sort things out with her.

Later, he told himself Later.

The Black Dog was not a pub that many Regiment members went to and this was why Alex had chosen it. It was a dim, dingy sort of place with an over-loud jukebox and the sour smell of spilt lager and cheese-and-onion crisps. Frank Wisbeach arrived shortly before eight and Alex was a little shocked by the sight of the gaunt figure in the cheap windcheater who had been his first Close Quarter Battle instructor.

"How are you, son?" asked Wisbeach, transferring a crumpled inch of roll-up to his left hand for the duration of their handshake.

"I heard they made you an officer."

"They did," said Alex.

"I'll be shuffling paper for the next few years.

"Don't knock it, son think of the pension. You're knackered before your time in this game. If it's not your knees it's your back. All those bloody Bergan runs.

Wisbeach certainly looked knackered, Alex reflected as he bought the first round. It was the old story that of the regimental hard-man who couldn't quite hack it without the army's visible and invisible support systems. Frank Wisbeach had left the SAS at the end of the 1980s after a distinguished career as an NCO which had taken in Oman, the Falklands War and several tours of Northern Ireland, and signed up with a private security company with training contracts in the Middle East. Alex was uncertain of the details, but the word was that a big client had then defaulted on months of back pay and expenses, bankrupting the company and several of its employees.

A series of body guarding jobs followed, but by then Wisbeach had been too old a dog to learn the ways of spoilt pop stars and bored Arab wives. A short fuse, an unwillingness to suffer fools gladly and a taste for the drink had ensured a swift professional decline, and by the mid-1990s he was living in a caravan and manning the doors in a provincial nightclub.

"So what brought you back to Hereford?" Alex asked, placing the other man's pint of bitter in front of him.

"I heard you were down in Luton."

"Marriage, mate. Marriage brought me back. I came up for a reunion with a few of the lads from the Regimental Association and somewhere along the line I can't quite remember the details but a pub lock-in was certainly involved I found myself proposing to Della. Arse on her like a four-tonner but a nice smile and a half-share in a hairdressing business on Fortescue Road. Frank, my lad, I thought, it's time you settled down. Ever drink so much you pissed yourself?"

"No, I don't think so.

"I was doing that most nights. And shitting myself too at weekends. There comes a point you review your options."

Alex nodded sympathetically.

"So I married Della fuck knows what she sees in me, but there you go and picked up a bit of cab bing to help with the bills. Best thing I ever did. You ever been married?"

Alex shook his head.

"Take my advice, son, save it. Let the army look after you for as long as it wants to and then find a woman with a comfy pair of tits on her and a bit of money of her own, and hang your fucking boots up.

"Sounds good," said Alex.

"It is good, mate," said Wisbeach, one-handedly rolling himself another cigarette.

"It is good."

The deftness of the gesture reminded Alex of the skilful combat instructor that the older man had once been.

"You taught me a lot, Frank."

Wisbeach shrugged and put a match to his roll-up.

"You were a good soldier, son. Saw that straight away."

"That's not what you said at the time!"

"Well, you've got to dish out the old bollocks, haven't you. That's what you're there for on Training Wing."

Alex smiled.

"I guess. Do you remember a guy called Joe Meehan?"

Sparks of wariness appeared in the other man's eyes. He seemed to sink into his cigarette smoke.

"It's a long time since I heard that name mentioned. A very long time."

"You trained him, didn't you?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Bill Leonard suggested I speak to you."

Wisbeach nodded slowly.

"Did he indeed. What's the whisper on the lad you mentioned, then?"

Alex wondered how much to confide. Sober, Wisbeach retained the Special Forces' soldier's habit of discretion. He hadn't even admitted to knowing Meehan.

But pissed-up . "The whisper is that he went over the water and they turned him."

Wisbeach looked Alex in the eye and Alex saw from the slow freeze of his expression that the former NCO had guessed what he had been ordered to do.

Knew that he was looking for Meehan in order to kill him.

For several moments neither man spoke. Above their heads, a pseudo-Victorian fan paddled stale cigarette smoke around the ceiling. On the jukebox, All Saints sang in mournful harmony.

"I'm sorry for the both of you," Wisbeach said eventually, regarding his nicotined fingers with a kind of depthless exhaustion.

"There's no fucking end to it all, is there?"

"No," Alex agreed.

"There isn't."

"How will you ..

"I don't know," Alex said.

"I just have to locate him." Wisbeach seemed to come to a decision.

"Joe Meehan was very good," he said briskly.

"Technically you couldn't touch him. He was one of those people weapons always worked for. I was the same, so I knew it when I saw it. Mentally, too, he was very tough. Not in a laugh-it-off sort of way like most Regiment blokes more like one of those Palestinian or Tamil Tiger suicide bombers. He was a true believer, if you know what I mean."

"Was that a strength or a weakness?"

"Well, you wouldn't have wanted to go out on the piss with him, put it like that.

He was a total loner and dead serious all the time. But then we weren't training stand-up comedians, we were training secret agents and assassins. In fact, I felt sorry for the poor bastard."

"Why?"

"Because guys like that always destroy themselves in the end. They just bash on and on, never giving up, until there's nothing left of them." He stared at the huddle of customers near the window and took a deep swallow of his beer.

"I'm told they're burying young Hammond in the morning."

"That's right," Alex confirmed.

Wisbeach shook his head.

"Africa, eh. What a fucking dump of a place to cop it. Get you another?"

"Yeah. Same again please."

Wisbeach made his way to the bar. As he returned with the two full glasses three teenagers wearing earrings and flashy sports gear pushed roughly past him, spilling both drinks. None bothered to look round or to apologise.

"Excuse me, lads," said Wisbeach mildly, turning to them.

"Bit of an accident.

Do you mind filling up these glasses?"

The three looked round, incredulous and sniggering.

"Fuck off, Grandpa," said the heaviest, whose doughy features were topped by a greasy centre parting.

Bloody hell, thought Alex. Here we go.

"Forget it, Frank," he called out across the room.

But the ex-NCO was not of a mind to forget it, and placed the spilt drinks carefully on the bar.

"Come on, lads," he said, the ghost of a smile touching his features.