by Oliver Tidy
‘Miss Manson? It’s Detective Tallis’s mother. We spoke earlier today.’
Sansom picked up tinny sounds coming out of the handset.
‘I’m sure you can imagine,’ said the old woman. ‘We can talk more about that later. Miss Manson, I appreciate that what I’m about to say to you might seem odd, but please understand that I am deadly serious and you will have only one opportunity to comply with my request. Your answer will depend on how badly you want your exclusive with me.’
More distorted words.
‘Good. Then we must meet tomorrow morning first thing, somewhere very private and there can only be you and me present. I have a story for you that could make you, Miss Manson. I am staying in London tonight. My hotel is out of the question.’
Tallis’s mother let the woman think about and suggest locations, none of which she had any intention of considering.
‘Not private enough.’ More tinny sounds. ‘Too exposed and it’s going to rain tomorrow.’ More tinny sounds. ‘I could come there, yes. Do you live alone?’
Sansom understood an affirmative.
‘Good. Then I’ll see you there tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp. Read your address carefully to me.’
Sansom flicked on the interior light.
Mrs Tallis scribbled it down and read it back to the reporter. ‘Nine o’clock then – and please remember what I said about privacy. Good night, Miss Manson.’
‘Tomorrow at nine?’ said Sansom. ‘What are we going to do until then?’
She turned and bestowed a disappointed look on him. ‘Find somewhere that might sell an A-Z of London. We’re going there now, of course.’
‘And if she’s got company?’
‘She’ll have to get rid of them, won’t she?’
Sansom had no doubt that finding Mrs Tallis on her doorstep issuing instructions the journalist would do exactly that even if she had Brad Pitt round for tea.
*
On the motorway they stopped at a services. Tallis’s mother filled the tank and went in to pay while Sansom kept low and vigilant in the driver’s seat. She returned with take-away coffee, shrink-wrapped sandwiches and the A-Z. He said his thanks.
‘Got to keep our strength up.’ She checked the time and consulted the map. ‘We should be there within two hours.’
‘And then what?’
‘It was your idea originally. What were you proposing to do when you confronted her?’
‘I hadn’t thought through the details.’
‘Well, we’d better start, hadn’t we? It’ll be enough of a surprise for her to find me on her doorstep. Better let me talk to her first. Prepare her.’
‘You seem very confident that she won’t scream the place down; she’ll just welcome me into her home.’
‘I told you at Stanley’s, I can offer you credibility. I still believe that. Of course, she’ll react, but she’s no fool. I read her paper. She’s actually not a bad journalist. I have confidence that she’ll be cooperative. She’ll at least be curious enough to hear us out; as a journalist it’ll be in her DNA.’
*
The traffic was light. They made good time if not much conversation. Mrs Tallis was understandably subdued and busied herself with the A-Z and Sansom had his own thoughts to occupy him.
As they approached the capital, she proved herself unusual in his experience – a decent female navigator. She guided them through the labyrinth of streets towards their destination with precise, timely and confident instructions.
He brought the vehicle to a halt in a quiet side road of the contemporary, middle-class residential area. The hour was not particularly late, but the closed curtains and lack of activity on the streets hinted at most residents being tucked up in their homes for the night. Bright flashes behind thin fabrics suggested either domestic gun battles or televisions rotting brains.
Indicating a road that ran perpendicular to their current location, she said, ‘Her home will be somewhere in that street.’
Sansom had his hand on the door. ‘I’ll go and find it. What number?’
‘No. You wait here. I’ll go. She lives in a flat. There’s bound to be an entry phone system. She’ll recognise my voice.’
‘But she’s not expecting you.’
‘I know that.’ She volunteered nothing more. She passed him back her mobile phone. ‘Keep it where you can hear it. I’ll call you.’
‘What will you say to her?’
‘I think I’ll just whet her appetite. She won’t be expecting you, so bear that in mind when you arrive. Don’t go scaring her any more than you’re likely to just by being there.’ She sat staring out of the windscreen for a long, quiet moment. ‘She’s likely to be our one and only hope of getting me justice and you in the clear. Remember our conversation about being hot-headed and reckless? I don’t know anything about this woman as a person. It could be that I may have misjudged her journalistic instincts and her likely willingness to engage with us. It might be that she likes to play it safe and that she’ll not only want nothing to do with you, but that she’ll want to raise the alarm. It’s likely that when she realises how she’s been played and who she’s being confronted with, she’ll not be too happy either.’
‘You’re trying to tell me to watch my manners?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am. One other thing that we should bear in mind.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If she wants to get involved with us she’ll instantly be putting her life at risk. She may not want to, of course, but if she does then her life will become the responsibility of both of us.’
It was a sobering truth and again he gave her some credit for her reasoning.
He watched her get slowly, and it seemed with some awkwardness, out of the car and was reminded once more that she was an old woman. She might not be hopeless and pathetic, but she was aged nonetheless. In the dim street-lighting, he noticed, as she walked away, that she favoured her left leg.
Five minutes passed. Then another, slower, five. Fourteen minutes after they had parted, despite his growing expectation that she would soon walk back around the street corner refused entry, the phone fractured the silence, startling him.
‘Follow the way I went and turn right at the end of the road. Stay on that side of the street. It’s about fifty yards along. Chrome and glass entrance. Press the button for number seven.’
He wanted to ask her how it had gone, but she had already rung off. He put on his dark glasses and pulled the cap down. Stepping out of the vehicle, he stretched, took a good look around, tucked the pistol into the back of his trousers, locked up and moved off. He’d gone only a few paces before he remembered his box and how some of what was contained within it might prove useful in tipping a balance. He went back for it.
***
15
Enunciating every single syllable in his obvious irritation, while simultaneously playing up his sense of incredulity, Smith said, ‘Inspector, are you trying to tell me that he simply vanished into thin air, like a ghost?’
‘All I can tell you, sir,’ replied the officer in charge on the ground, who had taken an instant dislike to this pompous phone-bully from some remote government department, ‘is that my officers were in pursuit of someone that the dog indicated had been in recent contact with the vehicle. They never once got a look at the suspect, so we are unable to say who we were after, let alone whether it was a man or a woman, or, in fact, how long ago the car had been abandoned. They tracked the person through the forest and across farmland and the trail went cold on the road.’
‘You had road blocks set up in good time?’
‘Yes, sir. Very good time. As soon as we were aware of the possibility that it was Sansom.’
‘How many vehicles passed through them?’
‘About a dozen before the road was closed both ends.’
‘And they were all searched thoroughly?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The Inspector couldn’t be absolutely sure of this, but that had
been the instruction and he had passed the point in the conversation where he would offer the caller any ammunition to be used against him and his officers.
‘I’d like a list of those vehicles and their drivers faxed to my office tonight,’ said Smith. It was a pedantic request and they both knew it.
‘Very good, sir,’ said the officer in his most patient voice.
‘What about fingerprints recovered from the car?’
‘Fingerprints have been taken, sir. We are waiting for confirmation regarding who they belong to, assuming that the owner is on record.’
For Smith this would be a formality. He knew in his gut that Sansom had taken the car that had gone missing from Sansom’s father-in-law’s lock-up on the night of the London shootings. ‘They’ll be on record; you can be sure of that. As soon as you know, I want to know. Is that clear, Inspector?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Smith’s parting shot was, ‘Humour me, Inspector – if it was Sansom and he wasn’t picked up by a car and he didn’t simply disappear into a parallel dimension, how else could he have evaded your officers?’
‘We have considered that, of course, sir,’ said the policeman, barely suppressing the inclination to tell the caller to go and fuck himself. ‘The trail went cold on the railway bridge. As I said, it could have been cold for a while. We simply don’t know how long the vehicle had been abandoned. It’s also possible that we might have been closer to him than we were aware and he knew it and in his desperation to escape he jumped on to the roof of a passing train.’
‘And?’
‘It’s not something that he could have survived without breaking every bone in any limb that aided his landing. Naturally, we are following this up with the railways and the hospitals in the area.’ He let this settle for a moment before adding. ‘We believe that by the time we were on to him he was long gone.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Smith. Although he didn’t elaborate on why, his meaning was clear. ‘Fingerprints and the lists of vehicles with drivers ASAP, thank you, Inspector.’ Smith rattled off a fax number and further insulted the senior officer by having him read it back to him before terminating the call.
Smith sank back into the chair from which he had made many difficult decisions in this latter stage of his career in clandestine operations. It was a chair from which he had sanctioned murder, intercontinental political assassination, blackmail, entrapment, extortion and other serious breaches of the law of the land, none of which kept him awake at night like Sansom’s continued liberty had begun to.
Smith valued his sleep as he valued the air that he breathed. And his deprivation of it was a source of great personal chagrin. He prided himself on not allowing the sordid details of his professional existence to impact on the routines of his private life. And until this business with the soldier’s resurrection and return to the UK, he had managed, largely, to maintain this working ethos, such was the confidence he had in the people who worked for him, the decisions he made and the immunity that went with his position. Immunity, that was, from prosecution – not vengeful and determined killers with nothing to lose.
Smith’s office overlooked the Thames and, of the very few who had been privileged to visit it, all had commented on his enviable view of the capital and the historic waterway that lay across the earth like some enormous shimmering serpent. Smith could find no distraction with that now. As London went about its business in the gloom below, his gaze was fixed on a point of wood panelling directly across from him. But even this he was unaware of as his mind’s eye roved around the soldier’s reasons for being not five miles from the place where that very afternoon his dead confederate, Tallis, had been interred in six feet of England. The question that he kept coming back to since hearing the news of the man’s likely presence was what had Sansom been doing there? Smith could just not believe that the soldier was foolish enough, or sentimental enough, to have risked his life – for that is surely the way the man must now be viewing the reality of his situation – simply to say farewell to the dead policeman.
However, with some of the idiotic decisions that Sansom had been guilty of in Turkey, Smith found himself unable to dismiss the notion completely. It was Sansom’s predilection for the reckless and the foolish that made Smith unable to rule out anything regarding the motivation for his actions. It was also this unpredictability in Sansom, combined with the guardian angel of good fortune that seemed to watch over him, that had given Sansom his measure of success, seen him evade capture and made him impossible to second guess. Under different circumstances Smith could have done with Sansom working for him. He needed fearless men who knew how to ride their luck.
As he sat and brooded in the semi-darkness of his unlit sanctuary, his thoughts were disturbed by his mobile phone trilling on the desk in front of him. Scowling at the caller’s identity, he answered, ‘I said I’d call you when there was news.’
‘I know what you said,’ replied Bishop, bridling at Smith’s obvious rebuke, ‘but that was over two hours ago.’
‘It seems that they have lost him,’ said Smith, neutrally. He found some perverse pleasure in the idea of how this information would make Bishop squirm and sweat. While Sansom’s continued freedom caused Smith some anxiety it was nothing compared to the ulcers that would be feeding off Bishop’s tormented state.
A pathetic, whining, ‘How?’ was all the politician could manage.
‘You’ll have to ask them yourself, but between us, I don’t think they have a clue. My understanding is that they couldn’t run a bath let alone the lock-down of an area.’
‘How can you be so flippant?’
‘No use crying over unlocked stable doors when the horse has spilt the milk.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You’re sounding hysterical.’
‘Hysterical? I think I’m bearing up rather well considering that this afternoon I attended the funeral of a police officer that....’
‘That’s enough,’ broke in Smith. Even in the inner sanctum of his private offices that was swept regularly for listening devices, Smith was constantly wary of discussing the intricate, incriminating and dirty details of operations, especially when those details broke laws and even more so when easily accessible phone lines were being employed.
It was quiet for a moment. When Bishop spoke again he had begun to collect himself. ‘I would remind you about what is at stake for all of us in this, but I think I’d be wasting my breath.’
‘You already are,’ said Smith.
Bishop sighed hopelessly down the line. ‘Any news, call me.’
‘I said that I would. Goodnight.’
In the descending darkness, Smith’s features were grim. Bishop had become a dangerous element in his existence and his business, like the cannon below decks that slowly works itself loose of its fastenings and ends up threatening the safety and security of all those around it. Smith despised such weakness in a man. If the opportunity didn’t present itself in the unfolding of events for Bishop to become part of Sansom’s ‘killing-spree’, then he would certainly have to arrange a tragic accident for the former Minister when the dust finally settled. Everyone was expendable and everyone was replaceable. And most importantly, dead men tell no tales.
The technology in the corner of the room awoke from its slumber. A display was illuminated. A motor whirred. The noise of paper going through machinery seemed unusually loud as it broke the silence. Smith went over to view what the fax had spewed out. He glanced down the list of vehicles and drivers’ names that the Inspector, whose name he had already forgotten, had forwarded to him. None made any impression on him until he got to the letter T. And then because of the years of devious workings of his mind one name leapt off the page at him and in an instant everything about Sansom’s presence in the area and his subsequent disappearance was explained. His epiphany also revealed to him where he should now be sending his most trusted and ruthless men to find the ‘cop-killer.’
Smith walked
quickly back to his desk, put his hand on the phone and then removed it and sat. No point following it up with the local plod. Nothing to be gained from it. No need to alert them to his interest in her. Alone in the dark, he allowed himself a moment of magnanimous congratulation for Sansom – how had he managed to convince the policeman’s mother to aid and abet him? How had he managed to convince her of his innocence? Smith found the image of Britain’s most desperate and wanted man for some years relying on the help of a little old lady amusing. And then he found that he was smirking at how it would cramp Sansom’s style and slow him down. It was almost comical. Or it would be when it was all cleaned up. He took out his mobile and called his second best team, briefly lamenting that his best were still unaccounted for, probably lying dead in a ditch somewhere. That mustn’t be allowed to happen again.
*
Sansom passed no one on his short walk to the building. Looking through the porthole window of the main entrance door into the foyer showed it as empty. He pushed the button for the woman’s flat and was immediately buzzed in. Ignoring the lift, he took the deserted stairs and exited the stairwell into a warm dimly-lit and carpeted corridor two storeys up. He moved along to the front door, put his finger over the spy hole and tapped lightly. As he stood uneasily on the mat, he wondered who Tallis’s mother had told the reporter to expect. And then the door was opening and the woman’s face that stared up at him from behind large spectacles cycled through cautious curiosity, confusion, vague recognition and then open-mouthed horror. Her reaction was to slam the door in his face; his was to put his foot in it. She opened her mouth wider and he saw that she was inhaling. Expecting a scream, he pushed her back into the room, kicked the door shut behind him, dropped his box and put his hand over her mouth. With his free hand he yanked the pistol from his waistband and showed it to her. Her eyes were huge behind the magnifying lenses.
The scuffle brought Tallis’s mother into the small hallway.
