Watchman (novel)

by Ian Rankin

  So be it.

  She was far too early yet for work, but would not sleep again, and had no intention of waking Miles, so she tiptoed through to the kitchen and made coffee. Waiting for the kettle to boil (percolated coffee would be too noisy), she studied her kitchen. Yes, hers. She had chosen every detail, every last cup and spoon. Miles had nodded at each purchase, sometimes not even noticing that he was eating off new crockery. She sat on her stool at the breakfast bar and set her mind to the previous day’s crossword. “Finally does creep slowly forward to watch.” Three letters. Sleep while you can, Miles. I have my secrets, too, a whole chest full of them.

  Reaching for a pen, she folded back the paper and filled in the three empty boxes with the word “spy.”

  The telephone call from Colonel Denniston served only to bring into the waking world all of Miles Flint’s nightmares.

  “Flint? Denniston here. There’s a meeting in my office in one hour. Be there.”

  “Yes, sir. Has anything happened?”

  “Too bloody right it has. Some Israeli official’s been decapitated outside his own house. Sounds like your man Latchkey, doesn’t it? See you in an hour.”

  Lying in his hot bath, stiff from an uncomfortable sleep, Miles closed his eyes for a few precious moments. Of course there had been an assassination, and a crude one by the sound of it. What else could he have expected? There was a knocking at the door. Miles never locked the bathroom door, but Sheila didn’t come in anymore if he was there.

  “I’m going now,” she called.

  “I might be back late again tonight,” he answered. “So I may as well apologize now. Sorry.”

  There was silence as she moved away. Then the front door slammed shut, leaving the house somehow colder. As far as Sheila was concerned, Miles worked for internal security, and that was that. Security, yes, but now Miles had evidence of a leak somewhere in the firm, for how else could the Arab have known about him? Then again, what sort of evidence was a smile? It seemed inadmissible.

  Looking around the bathroom, Miles appeared to see everything anew. The shapes of sink, toilet bowl, bath seemed strange to him, and even the bathwater felt curiously new as he ran his hands through it. In this reverie, he let his mind go blank until an internal alarm system reminded him of his appointment, and the world fell back upon him like the last wall of some condemned building.

  FOUR

  COLONEL “H” DENNISTON, SECTION CHIEF of the Watcher Service, MI5’s surveillance and report unit, liked the simple life. His apartment near to Victoria Street was rented, renting giving so many less complications to one’s life. Denniston didn’t like to feel tied, and disliked the niggling difficulties of life, like shopping, shaving, changing lightbulbs. The widow upstairs from his flat, taking pity on him perhaps, would buy a few things for him if he wished, and if he decided to decline her offer, then Denniston would plan his own shopping trips like military maneuvers.

  Denniston had been in charge of the watchmen for only three years, but already had built around himself a reputation for severe correctness and efficiency. He used this reputation like a shield, and he was as angry as hell that a dent had been made in it. He sat at his teak desk and studied some papers from a slim folder. In front of him sat Flint, Phillips, and young Sinclair, lined up in a row like schoolboy truants. Sinclair had his hands in his lap as though he might be needing to urinate, while Flint made a show of cleaning his glasses. Phillips, though, arms folded, legs crossed, looked relaxed and a little too confident. His pink tie outraged Denniston, an army man of thirty-one years with a military dislike of the flamboyant.

  “You were the responsible agent at the time Latchkey went missing, weren’t you, Phillips?”

  Denniston saw his question have the immediate and hoped-for impact. Phillips unfolded his arms and gripped his thighs with his hands, perhaps to stop them from shaking.

  “Well…no, sir, not really. You see, I…ahm…”

  “You were, at the time, acting under orders given by a senior officer?”

  “Yes, yes, actually, I was.”

  “Hmm.” Denniston looked at the papers again, rearranging them, sifting through as though in search of something specific.

  Miles Flint coughed.

  “What do we know, sir,” he said, “about the dead man?”

  “We know, Flint, that he was garrotted around midnight, and that the Israelis kept it to themselves until five this morning.”

  “Do we know when he was actually found?”

  “No, but it seems that he was found by his own people, so there were no cries of foul murder in the streets.”

  Staring past the colonel’s bowed head, Miles watched the windows of the office block across the way. Government offices too, of course. He saw secretaries hurrying past, weighed down with sheaves of paper.

  “We know, too,” the colonel was saying, “that the dead man, though attached to the embassy, was no ordinary aide, though that may be his official title. He seems to have been working on the periphery. Something of an arms dealer in an earlier incarnation. All very discreet, of course, but he was on our files.”

  “Any links with Mossad, sir?” asked Phillips.

  “Again, no.” Denniston looked across to Tony Sinclair. “That’s Israeli security, you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sinclair in hushed tones. “I know.”

  “Best outfit in the business as far as I’m concerned.”

  Denniston was about to go back to his reading when the door opened and the deputy director came hurrying into the room.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said crisply, drawing a chair over to the desk and seating himself beside a now flushed Colonel Denniston. “Briefing your men, Colonel? Very wise, I should think. There will be an investigation, of course.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  “And the old boy himself wants to see us in fifteen minutes. But I thought I’d say my piece first.”

  “Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Miles hated to see a grown man cry, and that was just what the colonel was doing. Not outwardly, of course. His tears were directed inward, but all the more pitiful for that. He was crying from the soul.

  Employees of the firm, at every level, called the deputy director “Partridge” or, more often, “Mr. Partridge.” He seemed to have no known Christian name and no military title. The “Mr.,” Miles assumed, came from his gentlemanly dress sense and expensive manners. Butlers, too, were called “Mr.” by the menials of the household, weren’t they? But Partridge was no butler.

  Miles had met him many times before, when being assigned to surveillance cases for which he was the senior watchman. The last of these occasions had been only eight days ago, when “Latchkey” had come into being. Partridge, looking across the table and seeing Miles watching him, smiled quickly, the smile, thought Miles, of the tiger beetle. It was Denniston, however, whom he had termed the department’s tiger beetle. He had marked Partridge down, perhaps wrongly, as Platyrhopalopsis melyi.

  Platyrhopalopsis melyi was a small beetle, not much more than a centimeter long, which lived in ants’ nests, and was sustained by the ants, who in turn licked a sweet secretion from the beetle’s body. Miles had never been able to find out as much as he would have liked about this faintly arousing symbiosis. The first time Partridge and he had met, Partridge had reminded him of the tiny beetle, something in the man’s attitude prompting the comparison.

  Perhaps, though, this had been a rash decision, for the more Miles saw of Partridge, the more there was in him of the tiger beetle, Cicindelidae, a ferocious and powerful predator. Partridge had managed to turn Denniston into a weak, glandular schoolboy. It was quite a feat.

  “I suppose you have spoken of the murder, Colonel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And have filled in what we know of the victim’s background?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Turning to the three guilty-looking men on the other side of the table, Part
ridge placed his hands delicately in front of him as though he were counsel for the defense in a difficult case, anxious to reassure his doomed clients.

  “This is a serious matter, gentlemen, of that there’s no question. But it’s not quite as serious as it might have been. The murdered man’s employers want everything kept quiet, or as quiet as possible under the circumstances. There were, it seems, certain visa irregularities which neither they nor we would wish to have to pursue. Moreover, they do not know that we were keeping an eye on Latchkey, which gives us a decided advantage in the matter. I can now tell you that Latchkey did not return to his room last night. He left behind all of his things, including a fairly good bottle of brandy and several new suits. Even his passport was left behind, though I think we can assume it is a forgery and that he will by now have left the country.”

  Miles saw now that the switch had been very cleverly planned. The phone calls to Harrods and Jermyn Street, the purchase of a bottle of spirits and some reading matter, and even the meeting with the contact—all had been designed to make anyone think that a long surveillance was in progress, lulling the watchmen into a false sense of being in medias res. Clever, clever, clever.

  “Yes,” Partridge was saying, “I’m afraid that, in soccer terminology, we’ve been caught a bit square. Their man has scooted past us to score.” He allowed a smile to form on the palimpsest of his face, then to melt away again as if it had never existed. Nobody in the room had dared smile back. Their futures were being decided, and it was no joke. “We’ve got Special Branch onto the man with whom, as one of us was not quite quick enough to spot, Latchkey changed clothes. We don’t think they’ll get much from him. This was probably a strictly one-off job for him, and he’ll have nothing to fear. Likewise, Latchkey’s contact, who went back last night to his fairly substantial apartment in NW1. He’s been on our files for some time actually, though we won’t be acting against him at this time. So, gentlemen”—Partridge gave each of them a two-second glance—“we’ve been bloody lucky in one respect, in that this is not going to damage our reputation or our standing with a friendly nation. In another respect, however, we’ve thoroughly botched a resolutely straightforward surveillance operation, and a man is dead as a result. There will be a full internal inquiry.”

  Miles wondered how long it had taken Partridge to prepare his speech, which now ended with a reshuffling of papers. Phillips, Sinclair, and Colonel Denniston, who had been sitting bolt upright, shifted in their seats, lecture over.

  “Well,” said Partridge, rising, “I’ve had my say. Let’s see what the boss has to add, shall we?”

  And they followed him in near-reverential silence to the lift.

  The director was, so the office gossip went, close to retirement. Certainly, as they entered his curiously small office, Miles scented a world-weariness, an old man’s smell, as though oxygen were being pumped out, leaving a vacuum.

  “Sit down, please.”

  It was not that the old boy was old, not particularly, though to the likes of Phillips and Sinclair he might appear so. Responsibility always made people look older than their years, and in that respect the director looked about a hundred and twenty. He had plenty of hair, albeit of a distinguished silver and yellow coloring, and his face was relatively unwrinkled. But Miles could sense the aging process upon the man: his clothes were old and his movements were old.

  He was standing, staring from his uncleaned window onto the street below. Rather than sitting down himself, Miles felt that he should be offering a chair to the elder statesman. But then he remembered the old boy’s reputation as a tenacious and quick-witted administrator, and his links with the all-powerful, and Miles sat down with as much respect as he could muster.

  “When you leave this office, gentlemen, I would like you to go and draft full reports on this matter, and I do mean full. Security will be along to see you in due course, and will cross-check everything.” He turned from the window and examined them, seeming to photograph them with his clear blue eyes. “This,” he said, “has been a bloody farce from start to finish. I had thought of suspending every one of you, of asking for resignations even.” He paused, letting his words sink in. It was as if Partridge had set them up for this kill.

  “Colonel Denniston,” he continued, “you have led your section efficiently for several years. It’s a pity this had to happen. There has to be a tightening-up of procedure. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” Denniston was making a good showing. He had his pride, that was sure. His eyes met those of the director without blinking.

  “Good.”

  Miles noticed that Jeff Phillips had gone very pale, as if he had just realized that he, too, would have to suffer the caning, and was afraid that he would not accept it with the same strength as his friends. The director’s eyes met those of Phillips and Sinclair, then came to rest on Miles.

  “If there’s anyone to blame, Flint, it’s you.” With the slow drama of a Shakespearean actor, the old boy took his seat, placing his hands on the leather-topped desk. “You are to blame. You were careless, sloppy even. We don’t expect that of you, and we cannot accept it of you. Perhaps you should take a long hard look at yourself and your future here. It may be that you need a change of scenery, who knows?”

  “With respect, sir, I like the scenery here.”

  “Do you?” whispered the director. He leaned forward confidentially, his eyes filling with a malign humor. “Flint, you’re a bloody fool. You should never have been in that hotel in the first place. You should have been at home with your family.”

  Partridge turned to look at Miles now, as though to indicate that he was in agreement with his superior’s words. His eyes were like tunnels burrowing deep underground. You are a tiger beetle, thought Miles.

  “If it hadn’t been me, sir, it would have been someone else.”

  “And which would you have preferred?”

  There was another silence while Miles, looking as though he were considering this, thought about nothing in particular.

  “That will be all,” said the director. “Partridge, I’d like a word, please.”

  When Partridge rose, they all did. Miles, his legs unsteady for the first few seconds, noticed the relief on Colonel Denniston’s face. Perhaps the old boy was right. Perhaps Miles did need a change, something to challenge him. He had made an error of judgment, and that very error had already jolted him part of the way back into place. Something was askew, was very wrong about this whole thing, and, with his watchman’s mind, he needed to find out—for himself this time—what it was.

  FIVE

  WITH TWO FINGERS, AND WITH multiple mistakes, corrections, and additions, Miles worked on his report, wishing that the section had a word processor, and knowing that he would not, in any case, have had the guts to use it. He mentioned the visit to the Cordelia, the scene and situation there, his wish to become involved in the surveillance, and then the scene in the Doric. He mentioned his conversation with the girl, but not his speculations as to her possible involvement in the case. There were one or two things that, for the moment, he would keep to himself. After all, if there was a mole in the firm, then he would need to be more careful than he had been up till now, and certainly more careful than the poor Israeli. Although the office was stuffy, he felt himself becoming encircled by a cold, icy wasteland of his own creation. Silence was his best defense now, silence and surveillance.

  Of course he did not mention the Arab’s smile. Over and over again he played back that moment in his memory, trying to freeze the frame to see if he had missed something. But already the picture was losing its clarity. The edges were fading away, leaving only the smile, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  Moreover, the Arab’s smile led him back to the previous afternoon and his extended lunch with Billy Monmouth, his friend’s laughter just a shade off normal. Such subtle shades were Miles’s preoccupation now, and he gave the lunch more attention. What had been worrying him? He scribb
led Billy’s name onto a piece of paper, thought better of it, and decided on a coded series of letters instead. Thoughtfully, he began to assign a letter to every person he could think of who might be the mole, including, after much hesitancy, his wife.

  Billy Monmouth bought his lunch at a sandwich bar and carried it back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the office. In the lift, he peeled the wrapping away from what was supposed to be a tuna fish roll. All he could see was mayonnaise.

  A piece of string lay on the coffee table in his lounge, meaning that he had had a visitor. He put down the roll and, wiping his hands, went over to one wall, along which was arranged a large and catholic selection of record albums. The stereo itself sat in a corner of the room, cruelly underused. Many of the albums he had never played and never would. He had bought them only for the names of their artists.

  He crouched and examined the spines of the record sleeves. The first four albums were by Andy Williams, Paul Anka, Janis Ian, and Tchaikovsky. The message contained in their arrangement was simple: W-A-I-T. Nothing more, for the record that came after Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was by Miles Davis, and an album by Miles Davis, they had agreed, would mean “message delivered.” He had his instructions.

  Skipping lunch, Miles decided to calm himself by visiting his favorite shop, a grimy jazz emporium on the edge of Soho. On the way, he encountered a routine London car crash. A Rover had gone into the side of a spanking new Renault 5, and the driver of the Renault was being helped, shakily, from his crumpled car, while the driver of the Rover explained to a bored-looking young constable that it really was not his fault.