He had caught every shower of the day, and the winds from the west had spurred him along. He had seen deer and he had seen a dog fox, and he fancied that he might have found the holt of an otter. And he had decided that he would return to London, end his indefinite compassionate leave. The decision made the wet and the cold worthwhile. Impossible to have made the decision at home, under his mother's watching eye.
He was coming fast down the hill, looking for a bath, looking for a mug of hot sugared tea. He could see her face, he could feel her arms round his neck, he could hear her voice. In the rain on the moor he had cried to her, in the wind he had shouted to her.
He saw the front door open. He saw his father come out, and look up the road and discover him and wave to him.
The front garden was a picture. Daffodils and crocuses, and the leaves sprouting on the shrub bushes, and the path cleanly swept. He reached the gate. He saw his father's wheelbarrow piled with winter debris and the fork and the secateurs and the broom leaning against the wheelbarrow, as if the work had been disturbed.
"Been waiting ages for you, Holt. There's a chap here who's driven down from London to collect you. A Mr Martins. Percy Martins, I think he said."
It was as if ropes tightened on his wrists.
He saw her face, felt her body, heard her voice.
"Don't be childish, Holt."
"Decent-seeming sort of chap," his father said. "Just a trifle impatient. Your mother's given him tea."
7
Holt walked gingerly down the staircase.
The carpet had had so much use that he thought his mother would not even have offered it to Oxfam. Most of the dull brass rods were loose. There were three oil paintings on the wall above the stairs just decipherable as Victorian military and all apparently smoked for years over a damp log fire. In the early morning light the house looked in even worse a state than it did by night.
But he had had a good sleep, and at least the sheets had been aired.
Peeping through a door at the back of the hall was an elderly woman in a housecoat. She had a headscarf over her hair and the sharp angles told him that she had slept in her curlers and not yet removed them.
"Good morning," Holt said. He did his best to sound cheerful.
She told him that she was Mrs Ferguson, that she kept house.
He hadn't seen her the night before. It had been a five-hour drive from Exmoor, and when they arrived there was hardly a light on in the place, and no food waiting, and no sign of a welcoming drink, even.
Martins had been true to form, hadn't talked all the way, having muttered right at the start that he wasn't going to go off half cock, that he would keep the mysteries until the morning. Better that way, that was Holt's opinion. He could be patient.
Away behind closed doors he could hear the muffle of Martins's voice, on the telephone.
"He'll be having his breakfast in fifteen minutes,''
Mrs Ferguson said. She seemed to reproach him, as if by coming downstairs he had caught her unprepared as if he should have stayed in his room until called.
Holt prised open the bolts on the front door and slipped the security chain. He could still hear Martins on the telephone. Thirteen minutes until breakfast. He had the impression that breakfast was like a parade. The lock on the door was a new expensive Chubb, and he had seen the fresh alarm wiring at the windows.
He stood on the front steps. He gazed around him The house was a tower at his back, faded red Surrey brick, probably sixty or seventy years old with rounded corners topped by farcical battlements. In front of him were lawns, uncut since the previous autumn, and daffodil swards and beds of daisies and rose bushes that had escaped a winter pruning. There was a clatter of pigeons in flight from the oak and beech and sycamre trees that fringed the grass. He heard the stampede escape of a squirrel in the overgrown rhododendrons that hid the curve of a shingle drive. Holt thought the garden could have been a paradise.... A dog was charging towards him. Heavy shouldered, black and tan, ears swept back, a mouth of white teeth. Holt was good with dogs. There had always been dogs at home.
He stood his ground, he slapped his hand against his thigh, welcoming. He heard a bellow, a yelling for the dog to stop, stand, stay, come to heel. The dog kept on coming, stripping the distance across the grass. Holt recognised the markings and weight of the German Rottweiler. Round the corner of the house came an elderly man, built like his dog, hobbling in pursuit, and shouting his command, and being ignored.
The dog reached Holt. The dog sat in front of him and licked Holt's hand. The dog had dreamy pleasure in the wide mahogany eyes.
The man reached them. He was panting.
"You shouldn't be walking outside, not when her's out. Damn bastard spiteful she can be . . . "
He wasn't looking at the dog. The wet of the dog's tongue lapped the back of Holt's hand.
" . . . She's a trained guard dog."
"She's soft as a brush, a lovely dog. My name's Holt."
"I'm George, and you'd best not be taking liberties with her. Vicious, she can be."
Holt was scratching under the dog's chin. He could see the rank happiness in the eyes. Holt believed there must be method in the madness. A dog that was loving and called vicious, a garden that was beautiful and left to sink to ruin, a house that was magnificent and nearly splendid but was obviously not cared for. He could be patient, but, by God, he'd require some answers by the end.
"Breakfast, Holt." The shout from the doorway. He saw that Martins wore corduroy trousers and a Guernsey sweater.
"And keep that beast under control, George."
Holt walked away. He turned once, briefly, to see the dog watching him going. As he went through the front door, Martins battered him across the shoulders with forced camaraderie.
"Sleep all right? Fine place. You shouldn't just take yourself outside, you were lucky that George was there to control that bloody animal. Word of warning about breakfast, eat everything, she takes it personally if you leave a crumb or a quarter of an inch of bacon rind.
Straight after, we'll talk business."
They took breakfast in a dining room that could have, probably once had, housed a full-size billiard table, but the flooring was linoleum and there were five small square tables each covered with a plastic cloth. Holt thought it was a civil service canteen, and the food was right for a canteen, and the coffee was worse. Martins said that the house had been bequeathed to the nation in 1947, and that since no one wanted it the Service had been lumbered. He said that it cost a small fortune to run and to heat. He said that Mrs Ferguson was the widow of a Special Operations Executive agent who had been parachuted into France just before the invasion, captured and shot. He said that George was a former serviceman, wounded by mine shrapnel in the Cyprus Emergency, and kept on by the Service as caretaker, gardener, driver, maintenance man. Holt wondered if Jane had ever been in a place like this.
Martins led the way across the hall and into a huge drawing room. The dustcovers were piled in the centre of the carpet, and the fire had not been cleared or laid again. Martins cursed. He lifted the pile of dust sheets, took them to the door, flung them out. At the fireplace he emptied the hod into the grate and then buried a fire lighter under the fresh coal, and lit it. When the smoke billowed across the room he cursed again and went back to the door and left it ajar.
"Typical of houses like this. You have to leave a door open if you want a fire, otherwise you're smoke gassed.
Why the Service has to put up with it defeats me ... I imagine you're pretty cut up about Miss Canning."
They were there, the patient waiting was over.
Martins was bent over the fire, prodding with a grimed poker. Holt stood in the centre of the room and stared through the windows. He could see the dog slouching disconsolately towards a rose bed, then squatting.
"I've done a fair amount of thinking while I've been at home."
"You must have been devastated, only natural."
"I was at fi
rst, but I've come to terms with it. I'm going back to FCO. Life is for living, that's what Jane's mother said to me."
"I don't quite follow you."
"I'm going back to work, I'm going to try to put Yalta out of my m i n d . . . "
Martins was up from the fire, and the poker was left across the grate. Shock in his eyes, the colour flushing to his face.
"Your girl killed, shot down in cold blood, butchered in broad daylight, and you're talking about 'life is for living', I don't believe my ears."
"Don't sermonise me, Mr Martins. My feelings are in no way your business, not anyone's business but mine."
"Oh, very nice. Hardly dead, and you're talking about forgetting her, abandoning her memory . . . " There was a waft of contempt in Martins's voice, and a tinge that Holt saw of anxiety.
"She was my girl, I loved her and she is dead."
"And to be forgotten?"
"You're an arrogant bastard, Mister Martins. What I said is that I intend to go back to work, to go on with my life."
"Then, young Holt, you are a selfish little creep."
"If you brought me half way across England to this slum to insult me . . . "
"I'm merely astonished to hear this gutless crap from a young man who said of his girl's killer, 'I'd want him killed'."
"And what bloody option do I have?"
"That's more like it. That's the question I wanted to hear." Martins smiled quickly.
"What the hell can I do?"
"Much better." Martins heaved the air down into his chest, like a great weight had been lifted from him.
"You had me rather worried for a minute, young Holt.
You had me wondering whether there was an ounce of spunk left in your body."
"I don't see what more I can do for you," Holt said simply.
Martins spoke fast, as if unwilling to lose the moment.
"You are, of course, a signatory to the Official Secrets Act, you are aware that such a signature places upon you an oath of silence on all matters concerned with the work of the Service. Everything that I am about to tell you is covered by the terms of that Act, and violation by you of those terms would lead, as night follows day, to your appearing in closed court charged with offences under Section One of the Act."
Just as if he were falling, as if the ground opened under him, as if he could not help himself.
"What can I do?"
Far in the distance the dog was barking. Holt could see the leaping body and the snarling mouth, and George waving a stick at shoulder height, teasing the animal.
"You can help the man who murdered your girl to an early grave . . . "
The turmoil rocked in Holt's mind. She had been the girl with whom he had planned to spend his youth and his middle years and the last of his life.
"And you can assist your country in an act of vengeance."
There had been no mention of Ben Armitage, no mention of an ambassador assassinated. But then the arm twist was on him, and Armitage was not personal to him.
The turmoil blasting him. He despised violence. He despised Jane's killer. But he had seen the eyes of the killer, he had seen the work of the gun of the killer.
"What are you asking of me?"
"That you join a team that will go into the Beqa'a valley in east Lebanon, that you identify Abu Hamid, the murderer of your girl."
"And then?"
" Then he is shot dead."
"And then we all just walk home?"
"You walk out."
"And that's possible?" Derision in Holt's voice, staring up into Martins's face, into the smoke cloud of the fire.
"If you've the courage."
"Who do I walk with and who fires the shot?"
"A man who is expert at crossing hostile territory, a man who is expert at sniping."
"One man?"
"So you're better off that way. He'd be better off alone, but you are the only man who saw the target. You have to go."
"Could it work?"
Martins waved at the billowing smoke. "We believe so."
"I'm a bloody puppet and you're a crude sod when it comes to manipulation."
"I knew I could depend on your help, Holt We'll have some coffee."
"I don't have the chance to say no."
"We'd be disappointed if you did . . . I'll make the coffee.He's a first class man that you'll be travelling with,quite excellent. He goes by the name of Noah Crane''
"Catarracta is the Latin word for 'waterfall'. Cataract is what you have in your right eye, it is an opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye. At your age it is not at all surprising that you display the early stages of what we call the senile cataract."
To the ophthalmic surgeon he was simply another patient. The examination was over. After the expla-
nation, a cheque would be written out at the reception desk. He knew the man was from overseas, he assumed that he was required for diagnosis, a second opinion, not for treatment.
The patient lay back in the padded examination chair.
He showed no emotion.
"In the cataract-affected eye there is a hardening and shrinking at the heart of the lens which in time will lead to the disintegration of the lens. The cataract itself will lead to a deterioration in your short sight. Now, Mr Crane, a cataract can be treated, but regrettably there looks like being another complication . . . "
They had been through the symptoms before the detail of the examination. Noah Crane had laconically described the frequency of the headaches while the viewing power of the eye was stretched, and the mul-tiplication of bright lights in the distant dark. He had said that he saw better at dusk.
"The complication behind the cataract is - and I would have to carry out a further examination to be certain - that the retina of your right eye is probably diseased. I don't beat about the bush with my patients.
Disease of the retina negates the type of successful surgery that we can carry out to remedy the cataract."
"How long do I have?"
"You have years of sight."
"How long do I have with my sight as it is?"
"You have no time. Your sight is already deteriorating. Everyone's is, of course, after a certain age. Mine is. Yours is. Without the problem of the retina I would say we could get you back to where you were a couple of years ago, but we have the retina, and that means your sight will gradually diminish . . . I should have qualified that. The affliction is purely in the right eye.
Your left eye is in excellent shape. Do you work indoors?"
''Outside,''
''Then you should not be unduly pessimistic. Outside you will be using your long sight, shortsightedness is not so important You should see a surgeon when you return home."
"I understand that there's a place in Houston . . . "
"But the American techniques of treatment are unproven. You could spend a great deal of money, Mr Crane, a huge sum, and have no guarantee of success."
The chair straightened to upright. Noah Crane sat for a moment with his head bowed and his hands clasped together. He could aim only with his right eye. He could not tell the ophthalmic surgeon that although he worked outside it was short range vision that mattered to him, was what his life depended on. No long range vision was required to peer into the magnification of the 'scope sight'. He climbed out of the chair, he walked out of the room.
So he knew. He had asked and he had been told. Time was slipping from him.
In the street he felt the bitter cut of the wind. The wind lashedfrom a side street into Wimpole Street. He wore light trousers and a light shirt that was open at the neck, and a light poplin anorak, Too many clothes for home in Kiryat Shmona at the base camp, not enough clothes for London in spring. In a small grip bag were all his possessions. A change of clothes, a wash bag, and a photograph in a leather wallet of his mother and her sister, and a small brown envelope. No other possessions, because everything else this man used was the property of the Israeli Defence Force.
He walke
d across central London, and then across the bridge to the railway station. He had seen his mother's sister, he had negotiated his price in the bare room on the third floor of Century, and the sight of his right eye was ebbing from him, he had no more business in London. He was ready to take the train.
The light was failing in the room, the shadows leaping from the fire. Percy Martins stood with his back to the flames.
"Crane being recruited was a master stroke You'll learn, Holt, that when the Service wants something it gets it. When the Service wants a man, it gets that man.
You're to be a team, a two-man team. Neither of you can fulfil your task without the other. Crane cannot identify our target without you, you cannot eliminate the assassin without Crane. Two men with one aim, that's the way it has to be."
Holt was less than six feet from Martins, taking what heat he could that was diverted around the flanks of Martins's legs. He wondered why the man spoke as if lecturing to a full briefing room.
"Noah Aaharon Crane is 48 years old. I expect that's a relief, eh? No worries about keeping up with an old timer like that. His father was a British soldier stationed in Palestine at the outbreak of the Second War, married locally, got himself killed in Normandy.
"By the time he was 18 he had spent his childhood in Israel, and his adolescence in the UK. He joined the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, that was 1959.
He served with the Regiment in Borneo and Aden and in Northern Ireland, he made it to sergeant and his records speak of a first-class soldier. But his mother died in 1971, and for reasons that are close to him, Crane left the British army, flew to Israel and joined up with what they call the Golani Brigade. The file indicates that he had a sense of guilt at not having visited his mother - who was Jerusalem born and bred - for many years during the last part of her life, that a sense of blame took him back to her country. As an infantry man he earned a glittering record after his induction into the IDF. He was with the Golani at the retaking of Mount Hermon in 1973, he was in Lebanon in '78, he was a member of the assault squad on the old Crusader castle of Beaufort in '82. He was good enough to be a regular, he was hardened by combat experience, but he seems to have next to no interest in promotion. In fact it is difficult to locate what interests outside the I D F he does have. His only living relative is his mother's sister, living somewhere in North London. He has never married.
At Close Quarters Page 10
