The Watchman (32 page)

"Gear?"

"Covert resistance stuff. Transceivers, morse sets, one-time pads, time-pencil detonators that sort of thing, all packed away in grease proof paper. So he takes some bits and pieces up to his dad, who can't believe his eyes, because although the gear's all World War Two vintage it's still in mint condition."

"A cache in case of enemy invasion," suggested Alex.

"That's what they eventually figure. And they find other stuff, too, hidden away beneath the other houses. Electrical bits and pieces, radio components, ironmongery, what have you. A real Aladdin's cave for a young lad."

"So how come no one had found this stuff before them?"

"I dunno. I'm guessing that it was because the only other people who'd been near the place for decades had been dossers and tramps. A few bikers, perhaps, and maybe the local satanist coven but..

Alex nodded.

"Go on."

"Well, the boy's all for helping himself to the gear but the old man puts his foot down. They haven't committed any offence yet, he says it's not trespassing to walk through an open gate, after all and he doesn't object to their having a look at all this stuff, but they're not taking it away. So they poke around, Dad explains how it all works, and then they pack it away again, reseal the boxes and off they go, make their way back to wherever they left the caravan.

"Anyway, to cut a long story short, Joe persuades the old boy to shift the caravan to a farm a couple of miles away and they go up to the old house every day creeping around like a couple of commandos, Joe said, and having a good old sticky beak at all this secret resistance gear. Happiest time he ever knew, Joe says. Best days ever. And when it's time to go home, he tells me, he does a funny thing. He goes and buys his own padlock and chain, and locks the place up properly. Puts up all the old notices again MOD Property, Strictly no Entrance to the Public and so on.

"Why does he do that?"

"Not sure. My guess is that it was something to do with deep-freezing the experience. Sealing it away. And also to do with the fact that his dad could have made a lot of money out of flogging the gear without anyone being any the wiser but chose not to out of principle. There were a few of the old Mark III transceivers down there, apparently the SOE suitcase jobs. They'd have to be worth a few grand apiece now. I suppose Joe didn't want anyone else having them away.

"You know what I'm going to ask you next, don't you?" said Alex.

"Yeah and I'm afraid I honestly don't know the answer. I really don't. All I can remember is that the place was on the edge of one of the national parks Peak District, Snowdonia, Dartmoor.. . You must've trained people yourself- you know how you listen to what they say and you don't quite listen, and sometimes you deliberately forget."

Alex nodded. He knew what the other man meant. Part of you kept friendship at arm's length when you were sending a man into a situation of acute danger.

"So why was he telling you all this?"

"It was a place we went in Wales an MOD property in Eppynt Forest we were using for an escape and evasion exercise. There was a line of clapped-out cottages there and he said it reminded him of this place he'd once discovered with his dad, and told me the story." Connolly frowned and blinked, and downed his whiskey.

"There was one other thing. The last time I saw him before the Box people came to take him away, we were up at the camp at Tregaron. We shook hands and I wished him luck, and he smiled and held up a key. At the time I had no idea what he was on about, but..."

"You think it was the key to that property?"

Connolly shrugged.

"Who knows?"

"And you can't think of any detail that might point to where this place was?"

"Alex, it was a dozen years ago. Anything was possible in those days and everyone you met had a weird story to tell. These things wash over you.

"Happiest time he ever knew?" mused Alex.

"Best days ever," confirmed Connolly and flicked his cigarette butt over the low parapet on to the beach. 1 "Leaving out Scotland for the moment," said Alex, thoughtfully kicking off his deck shoes, 'you've got the Lake District, the Peak District, the Cheviots ..

They had been back from Pablito's for less than ten minutes. Marie had called them a taxi and they'd left the hire-car at El Angel. the North York Moors, the Dales, Kielder..

"Alex," said Dawn quietly, turning to the open hotel window and the twinkling lights of the port, 'could you please shut the fuck up and kiss me?"

Alex blinked. A warm tide of ephedrine-tempered alcohol raced through his bloodstream but for some imponderable reason his mind was clear. He stared at her. The Dawn Harding that stood before him now was no relation whatever of the vengeful bitch that he had been so unwillingly paired with in London. This Dawn Harding's face was flushed, her eyes were bright, her posture was challenging and expectant. A warm breeze touched her hair. With great care this was definitely no time to fall flat on his face he crossed the room towards her. His hands found the small of her back. Her eyes closed at his touch, her lips parted and she pressed against him, breathing hard. Wanting all of her at once mouth, eyes, neck, breasts -he practically lifted her off her feet.

"Quick," she murmured, her fingers in his hair.

"Get me out of these clothes."

Alex kissed her again until she was gasping and her fingers had left his hair and were scrabbling at the buttons on his shirt.

She tore the last two, but by then he had pulled the tight white top over her head and unsnapped the fierce little Wonderbra. Her breasts were pale, their upper curves touched by a slight pinkness from the morning's sun and very faintly damp.

She tasted of sweat and smoke.

Falling to his knees, he forced himself to slow down, explored her stomach with his mouth, ran the tip of his tongue down the line of tiny translucent hairs that descended towards the gilt stud of her jeans. Popping the stud, he eased down the zipper and began to pull down the jeans.

They stuck. He pulled again and she staggered, giggled drunkenly, and fell on to the bed with her legs in the air and the white Versace jeans around her knees.

Taking one of the legends, he tried to pull it over her feet.

"They're too bloody tight," he breathed, swaying.

"Come on, Captain," she said, looking up at him archly.

"If you can take down a Scud launch site behind enemy lines, surely you can manage my jeans in a hotel bedroom!"

Bracing his foot against the edge of the bed, Alex gave an extra-hard tug. They jeans came off in a rush and he fell heavily backwards on to his stitched thigh. The pain was intense and for a moment he lay there on the floor in his own half-undone trousers, swearing and laughing.

After a moment Dawn peered over the edge of the bed and saw the blood rapidly beading through the cotton. Lowering herself to Alex's side, she eased the trousers off and then hurried to the bathroom for cotton wool and surgical spirit.

"That's rather blown the romantic mood, hasn't it?" she murmured, pressing a swab to the wound.

"Still, while I'm down here I might as well have a look at the rest of the damage."

As she poured and dabbed, Alex said nothing. The surgical spirit was cold against his skin. The sway of her small, neat breasts over his body proved a very effective anaesthetic.

He lay there as she eased off the dressings on his face and arm. He had been right in his early guess that a sensuous body lay beneath all that formal puritan grey. Her palely curvaceous form was overlaid with the faint musculature of one who exercised when there was nothing better to do with her time, but not otherwise. Her stomach was flat but soft, tapering towards the dark-blonde scribble of her pubic hair.

To tend to his arm she hunkered down over his hand. As bees to honey as she must have known they would his fingers moved upwards to meet her. She closed her eyes, pressed herself briefly and slickly against his palm, then continued in a businesslike way with her ministrations.

"Wait," she told him a moment later.

"I'm concentrating."

"So am I!"

"Let me get these bandages off I'm not into sex with Egyptian mummies."

To remove the dressings from his face, she sat astride him so that Alex could feel the damp heat of her crotch against his chest. But her expression was serious, and when he reached for her breasts she frowned absently and slapped his hands back down to his chest.

"I hope you don't behave like this with all those army nurses.

"We don't get nurses in the SAS," breathed Alex.

"We get some sweaty corporal called Dave or Ginge."

"I told you to leave them alone. I'm going to have to be very rough with you if you don't."

"I've been roughed up by experts." Alex grinned.

"I can take it.

A moment later she straddled him and lowered herself on to him. For a moment she was still, then he felt a series of hot, up drawing waves. Nothing mattered except the absolute intensity of the feeling that for all their antagonism he knew they shared at that moment. And then, with a desperate dying cry which might have come from either or both of them, it was over and Dawn gently subsided on top of him. She seemed very young almost childlike with her scrubbed face and sleepy eyes.

"That was fun," she murmured.

"Wasn't it?"

"It beats arguing."

She settled herself against his shoulder.

"Please, will you be nice to me from now on?" she asked.

"I mean really, really nice?"

"I promise," murmured Alex.

"And will you kill for me?"

He looked at her.

She wrinkled her nose at him and grinned.

"Well?" she asked.

"Will you?"

He smiled.

"OK."

TWENTY-THREE.

"OK," said Angela Fenwick.

"The position is this .

It was 10.30 a.m." and Alex and Dawn were seated with the deputy director in her office. Florence Nightingale looked benignly down from the walls; the cafetiere steamed on the table between them.

Despite her overnight flight from Washington Fenwick looked fresh, groomed and alert. Alex and Dawn, by contrast, who had taken an 8 a.m. flight from Malaga, were looking rather less impressive. Alex, in particular, had a raging thirst and a cracking headache that reminded him of its presence with every step that he took. The knife cuts, well on the mend now, were itching crazily.

Dawn, for her part, was paler and quieter than usual. They had not discussed the events of the night before their departure from the hotel to the airport had been a hurried one nor had her behaviour towards him changed greatly. But there had been little things. In the queue for Customs she had turned to him and pressed her face into his shoulder. In the taxi from Heathrow she had settled herself, catlike, beneath his arm. There was a complicity between them.

And for all that he was feeling lousy, the time spent with Dawn and the few hours spent in bed with her had reshaped things in Alex's mind. He didn't want to back out now, he wanted to go all the way, whatever the cost. He wanted to see the Watchman dead at his feet.

And it was possible more than possible. Meehan had seemed uncatchable but he wasn't uncatchable. He was a man and men sooner or later made mistakes.

Confiding his childhood memories to Denzil Connolly had been Meehan's first mistake and sparing Alex's life had been his second.

"We got the analysis of those Meehan tissue samples back yesterday evening from the Forensic Science Service labs," Fenwick continued.

"And they told us something rather interesting."

She opened her briefcase and removed a paper.

"The hair that Captain Temple extracted for us has been confirmed as Meehan's against DNA samples from the other crime scenes, and it showed abnormally high medium-term traces of a substance known as perchloroethylene. Known as PCE, perchloroethylene is a solvent used in the tanning process. Due to its high toxicity I won't bother you with the details PCE is on the European Community's black list of chemicals whose use is strictly controlled. In this country, however never a front-runner in environmental terms these controls are regularly ignored by industry and run-off from tanneries into rivers is often accompanied by excess PCE levels.

"Now we've been on to the various ministries overnight, and we've talked to the National Rivers Authority and all the water companies this morning, and between them they've provided us with a list of nine tanneries from which high levels of PCE run-off have been ..

There was a knock at the door, and a hurried entrance by a young man holding a folded document and a book.

"Excuse me, ma am,~ he said, handing the articles to her.

"These have just been couriered over from Room 1129 at the MOD."

"Excellent," said the deputy director.

"Thank you." She glanced at the document - a map, as it turned out.

"Dawn, would you be so good?"

Taking the map, Dawn rose from her seat and pinned it out on the display board opposite them. It was a map of England and Wales, flecked with larger and smaller areas of red.

"Following your call early this morning about the possibility of our man holing up at an old MOD property," said Fenwick, "I spoke to a couple of people in Whitehall. This map apparently shows everything, large and small, that they own. Quite a portfolio, isn't it? Billions of pounds' worth of land."

Alex stared at the map, daunted by the sheer scale and number of the holdings.

There had to be several hundred of them.

"If we could add the tanneries, please, Dawn," said Fenwick, handing the younger woman a printed list.

Dawn stared at it, and reached for the first black mapping pin.

"Hurley, Staffordshire," she read out.

"On the River Blithe."

And the second: "Mynydd, Powys, on the Afon Honddu."

And the third: "Beeston, Lanes on the River Douglas."

She continued to the end of the list.

She stood back and the three of them stared at the map. The pins were spread erratically over the country, with a slight cluster detectable between Birmingham, Coventry and Northampton.