At Risk

by Stella Rimington

  She folded her arms tightly over her chest. She had made herself genuinely angry now. “Listen to me. The number of Grenadier House is 99 Horseferry Road. It is the headquarters of the personnel department of the Home Office, and it is the responsibility of that department, amongst other things, to make sure that Civil Service staff are properly protected. That means ensuring that people making decisions about immigration, say, or prison sentencing issues can’t be harassed or threatened or pressured over the phone by any Tom, Dick or Harry who has picked up their name. Now as it happens I was away from my desk all last week, working at the Croydon office. I expect I’ll find your messages first thing tomorrow. Satisfied?”

  He had been, more or less. But it was a side of him that she had never seen before, and she was glad that, during training, they had role-played a question-and-answer session very similar to the one that had just taken place. She was under no illusions, though, that he would let the matter rest there.

  “I’m sorry,” he had said. “It’s just that that side of your life is such an … area of darkness. I imagine things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She had smiled, and they had made breakfast, and later that day they had gone for a walk along the Grand Union Canal towpath, from Limehouse Basin up past King’s Cross to Regent’s Park. It had been a windy winter’s day, much like this one, and the kite-flyers had been out in force in the park. It was the last time that she saw him. That evening she had written and posted a letter, saying that she had met someone else, and that they couldn’t see each other any more.

  The weeks that followed had been truly wretched. She had felt flayed, as if an entire layer of her life—all that gave it colour and excitement—had been ruthlessly stripped away. She had thrown herself into her work, but to begin with its painstaking slowness and multiple frustrations had just made her feel worse. Along with several colleagues, she had been trying to acquire intelligence about a recently formed association of southeastern crime families. The work—processing and analysing surveillance reports and phone taps—was grimly routine, and involved scores of targets.

  It was Liz who finally spotted the minute chink in the syndicate’s armour that had led to the breakthrough. A driver for a west London crime syndicate had agreed, in return for a guarantee of immunity from prosecution, to provide information to her. He was her first personally recruited agent, and when the Met had rolled up the entire Acton-based network, together with a cache of firearms and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of crack cocaine rocks, she had felt great satisfaction. Cutting away her relationship with Ed, agonising though it had been at the time, had been the only possible course of action.

  It was at that point that she had finally realised the truth. That she was not, as she had sometimes thought, a square peg in a round hole. She was the right person in the right job. The Service’s recruiters had known her better than she knew herself. They had recognised that her quiet sage-green gaze masked an unflinching determination. A hunger for the fierce, close-focused engagement of the chase.

  It was for this reason, she supposed, that she chose men who, while attractive, were also ultimately disposable. Because when all was said and done—when the passion that had ignited the thing in the first place threatened to turn to something more demanding and complex—they would be disposed of. Each time—and there had been perhaps half a dozen such affairs, some longer-term, some shorter-term—it had promised to turn out differently, but each time, looking back on it, it had turned out the same. She had found herself unable to compromise her independence in order to accommodate the emotional needs of a lover.

  That this cycle led to her denying her own emotional needs she was well aware. Each parting was an excision, a scalpel’s downstroke, for which the only cure was immersion in work.

  “Tape’s here,” said Goss, materialising at her side.

  “Thanks.” She snapped herself back to the present, to the wind and the high tide. “Tell me something, Steve. How obvious was it that there was a CCTV set-up at the Fairmile Café?”

  “Not obvious at all. It was wired up in a tree. You wouldn’t have seen it if you didn’t know it was there.”

  “I thought the idea of those things was deterrence.”

  “It is, up to a point, but in this case it had got beyond that. There had been a number of thefts from rigs, and the café owners had a fair idea who was responsible. Basically, they wanted evidence they could use in court.”

  “So a general recce of the place wouldn’t have told anyone that there were cameras there?”

  “No. No way.”

  “A good place for an RV, then, or a drop-off.”

  “It would have looked like one if you weren’t in the know, yes.” He looked sombrely up at the darkening sky. “Let’s hope that we’ve finally got something. We badly need to move this thing forward.”

  “Let’s hope,” said Liz.

  In the village hall, a good fug had been got up. Ashtrays had been distributed, a kettle installed, and a hot-air blower roared quietly beneath the stage. As the female constable rewound the tape in the VCR, and Liz and Goss found themselves chairs, Whitten and three plainclothes officers milled purposefully in front of the monitor. There was a faint smell of conflicting aftershaves.

  “Can you find the bit when Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs?” one of the plainclothes officers asked the constable, to sniggers from the others.

  “Dream on, Fatboy,” she retorted, and turned to Whitten. “We’re cued up. Shall I run it?”

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  “They’ve eliminated the first vehicle we saw on the tape yesterday,” Goss murmured to Liz. “It was just some bloke parking up his rig for the night.”

  “OK.”

  As the police team retreated to their chairs, a frozen wide-shot of the vehicle park filled the screen. The enhanced version had a flaring, bleached-out look to it, and Liz found herself narrowing her eyes against the glare. The footage had been edited down, and the time code began to flicker at 04:22. It ran for a minute, and then the silvery image of a truck wobbled into the picture, its lights scribbling white trails. Unhurriedly, the truck negotiated a three-point turn in the centre of the puddled ground so that it was facing the exit. The headlights were then extinguished.

  Stillness for several seconds, and then a bulky figure jumped down from the cab. Was that Gunter? wondered Liz, seeing a pale upper-body blur that might have been the fisherman’s sweater. As the figure made for the truck’s rear doors and disappeared, a light flared briefly in the cab, illuminating a second figure on the driver’s side.

  “Lighting a cigarette,” murmured Goss.

  Two shapes climbed from the back of the truck. One was the original figure from the cab, the other an anonymous blob, possibly carrying a coat or rucksack. The two seemed to drift together for a moment, and then separate. A pause, and then the darker figure began to walk in a straight line out of frame. Twenty-five seconds passed, and then the other followed.

  The image cut to black, and then restarted. The time code now read 04:26. The truck was still in place, but no light showed inside the cab. After sixty seconds the darker of the two figures returned from the direction in which it had gone, and disappeared behind the truck. Forty seconds later a parked car switched on its headlights and reversed at speed out of its parking space. Inside the car, the pale figures of a driver and a passenger were briefly visible, but the vehicle itself was no more than a black and almost shapeless blur, and there was clearly no question of recovering its registration number. Swinging round the truck it drove at speed towards the road and exited the frame.

  When it was over there was a long silence.

  “Thoughts, anyone?” asked Whitten eventually.

  T he fenland village of West Ford, some thirty miles southeast of Marsh Creake and the coast, offered little in the way of entertainment. There was a panel-beating and exhaust repairs business, a small
village store incorporating a sub post office, and a pub, the George and Dragon. But precious little, reflected Denzil Parrish, to engage the imagination of a sexually frustrated nineteen-year-old with time on his hands. And Denzil, over the next fortnight, would have quite a lot of time on his hands. The evening before, he had arrived home from Newcastle, where he was at university. He had considered staying in his Tyneside hall of residence until Christmas Eve; there were any amount of parties going on and a wild time had been prophesied by all. But he hadn’t seen much of his mother in the last year—since her remarriage, in fact—and had felt that he should try and spend some time with her. So he had done what he considered the decent thing: packed a rucksack and crammed himself into a southbound train so crowded that the ticket collector had given up trying to push his way through—just as well, because Denzil had no ticket—and after several delays and missed connections had arrived at Downham Market station well after dark, and with no prospect of a bus to West Ford. He had walked over four miles through the rain, jerking out his thumb at every passing car, before an American airman from one of the bases had stopped for him. He had known the village of West Ford, and had joined Denzil for a beer at the George and Dragon before speeding on southwards to the USAF base at Lakenheath.

  After he had gone Denzil had scanned the pub. Typically, there wasn’t an unattached girl in the place, so there really wasn’t a viable reason to go on drinking, although he would have liked to. But money was too tight to blow on solitary drinking—drinking that had no hope of yielding any kind of female acquaintanceship. With tuition fees and the rest of it he was already thousands of pounds into the red. He really should have stayed up north. Right now he could be at a party, drinking someone else’s lager for free. And with a bit of luck locked on to some cheerful Geordie lass into the bargain. But it was not to be, and after the American’s warm VW Passat had vanished into the wet darkness he had foot-slogged home, only to find the place empty except for a gormless creature who had identified herself as the night’s babysitter. His mum, she had explained without taking her eyes off the TV, had gone to a function somewhere. A dinner-dance. And no, no one had said anything about anyone arriving from Newcastle. Denzil had dug out a frozen pizza and joined the babysitter in front of the TV. He was so dispirited he couldn’t even bring himself to make a pass at her.

  At least the sun was shining today. That was a plus. His mother had apologised for being out when he arrived home, given him a quick kiss and hurried off to mix up a new bottle of formula. What was the woman thinking of, wondered Denzil vaguely. Having a second baby at this time of her life. It was just undignified, surely? But what the hell. Her life. Her money.

  Denzil had decided to get out his wetsuit and do some canoeing. He had had a vague project in mind for the last couple of years—since they had moved to West Ford, in fact—which involved the systematic exploration of the area’s interconnecting grid of drainage channels. The Methwold Fen Relief Drain was only ten minutes’ drive away, and promised many miles of deserted but navigable water. He might even take the fishing gear out, and see if he could pick up a pike. The single advantage of his mother’s post-natal state was that she didn’t use her car so much. He’d be able to borrow it for hours at a time. The knackered old Honda Accord wasn’t exactly what you’d call a babe magnet, but then, mused Denzil pessimistically, rural Norfolk wasn’t exactly troubled by a babe overload.

  The problem, for all their geniality and likeability, was the Americans. There were hundreds of them, mostly single young men, and they had nowhere to go off-base in the evenings except to the local pubs. West Ford was several miles from the nearest base, but you still got a handful of them at the George most evenings, and while this was fine in itself it meant that a single, impoverished geology student didn’t stand a great chance in the event of a halfway-decent-looking girl fronting up there.

  Throwing his wetsuit into the back of the Accord, Denzil manoeuvred the glass-fibre kayak out of the garage and on to the car’s roofrack, where he secured it with a couple of bungee cords. The kayak had belonged to the house’s previous owners, or more precisely to their daughter, who had lost interest in it and left it behind when the family moved. It had been gathering dust and house-martin droppings in the garage rafters for several years when Denzil had decided to clean it up. Initially his idea had been to sell it, but he had taken it out for a trial run on the relief drain and enjoyed himself more than he had expected to. It wasn’t something that he revealed about himself on first dates, but Denzil was a keen birdwatcher, and his silent glides between the rushy banks of the fenland cuts and channels had brought him into rewardingly close contact with bitterns, reed warblers, marsh harriers and other rare species.

  On the way out of the village he was forced to brake the Honda behind a tractor and trailer which were blocking the road. The tractor’s driver was attempting to back the trailer, which was loaded with fertiliser sacks, into a field. His inexperience, however, ensured that the trailer kept jacknifing into the gatepost. Realising that the operation was going to take some time, Denzil switched off the Honda’s ignition and settled philosophically back in his seat. As he waited, he noticed a young couple in hiking clothes crossing the field towards him. They were covering the ground fast—much faster than tourists or sightseers usually did—and their step was purposeful. Or at least the woman’s step was purposeful. The man, an Asian-looking guy, was more laid back. His arms swung loosely at his sides, and he appeared not so much to be walking over the damp, uneven ground, as floating over it. Denzil had only ever seen one person cover ground like that, and that had been the wiry old ex–Royal Marine sergeant who ran the Snowdonia climbing school he’d worked at in his gap year.

  Absently, his thoughts touching briefly on the question of whether fancying a woman in a cagoule and mountain boots constituted sexually aberrant behaviour, Denzil watched the pair out of the car window. Neither was smiling, neither gave the impression of being on holiday. Perhaps they were a couple of those high achievers from the City that one heard about. People who could never fully unwind, and who, even away from work—even here, in soggy East Anglia—felt the need to submit themselves to rigorous and competitive activity.

  Up close, he saw that the woman was quite attractive in a no-nonsense, no-make-up sort of way. All that was missing was a smile on her face. The answer to the perversion question, he guessed, was that you were perfectly safe up to the point when you actually had to dress women up in foul-weather clothing to fancy them. Thereafter you were in trouble.

  The car behind him beeped, and Denzil saw that the tractor driver had finally managed to steer his load into the field and that the road ahead was clear. Engaging the Honda’s ignition, he moved forward in a shudder of exhaust and non-specific erotic fantasy, and promptly forgot all about the couple in the hiking gear.

  S o tell me,” said Liz, when she and Goss were established, once again, in the saloon bar of the Trafalgar.

  Goss considered. “Going on the evidence of that tape, I’d say we were still in the dark. I think Ray Gunter was one of the two people in the cab of that truck, and I think he followed whoever was in the back to the toilet block, and got himself shot. The question is, who was in the back? Don Whitten, I know, thinks that we’re looking at a people-smuggling operation, and that the person that Gunter let out was part of the cargo, but there isn’t a shred of evidence to support that theory. All sorts of people travel in the backs of trucks, and most people-smugglers take their cargoes to one of the cities, they don’t drop them off at rural transport cafés to be collected by people in saloon cars.”

  “Looked more like a hatchback to me,” said Liz. She felt slightly guilty for keeping the Special Branch officer in the dark about “Mitch,” Peregrine Lakeby, and the Zander calls, but until she had spoken to Frankie Ferris, as she was due to do this evening, she could see no sense in sharing what she had discovered. What had happened, she was now almost certain, was that a low-level Melvin Eastman people
-smuggling operation had been hijacked in order to bring a specific individual into the UK unannounced. Someone who, for whatever reason, couldn’t risk coming in with a false passport. Eastman’s “Pakis and ragheads” rant suggested that the individual in question was probably Islamic, and assuming that this was the case, the use of the PSS pistol suggested a specially armed operative. Whichever way you looked at it, it was worrying.

  “Two haddock and chips,” said Cherisse Hogan breezily, depositing large oval plates in front of them and returning a minute later with a bowlful of sauce sachets.

  “I hate these bloody things,” said Goss, tearing at one of the sachets with his large fingers until it more or less exploded in his hand. Liz watched him without comment for a moment, and then, taking a pair of scissors from her bag, neatly decapitated a tartare sauce sachet and squeezed it on to the side of her plate.

  “Don’t say it,” warned Goss, wiping his fingers. “No brain versus brawn gags.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of any such thing,” promised Liz, passing him the scissors.

  They ate in companionable silence. “Beats the Norwich canteen,” said Goss after a few minutes. “How’s your fish?”

  “Good,” said Liz. “I’m just wondering if it was one of Ray Gunter’s.”

  “It’s had its revenge if it was,” said a familiar voice.

  She looked up. Bruno Mackay stood at her elbow, car keys in hand. He was wearing a tan leather jacket and carrying a laptop computer in a satchel over one shoulder.

  “Liz,” he said, extending his hand.

  She took it, forcing a smile. Did his presence mean what she thought it meant? Belatedly, she glanced at Goss, frozen opposite her in an attitude of enquiry.

  “Er … Bruno Mackay,” she said, “this is Steve Goss. Norfolk Special Branch.”

  Goss nodded, lowered his fork and guardedly extended his hand.