HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  "I'll do what I can, George."

  "She was a lovely girl, Lucy, before all this . . . "

  "Everything we can do, that is a promise. You'll give my love to Libby. I'm so very sorry."

  "Oh, you'd by God be sorry if you had seen how Lucy died, how she was - dead - and where she died. Libby will need the strengh of twenty to survive this. In my heart of hearts I have known, for almost a year, how it might end but I couldn't imagine the depths of it. You must see it day in and day out, but this time the minuscule statistic on your desk is my dead daughter and I am going to hold you to your promise."

  The detective worked his way steadily through the diary. He found an asterisk in red biro on every third or fourth day of the last few weeks, the last against the date on which the girl had taken her overdose. There were also telephone numbers.

  There was a string of seven-figure numbers, almost certainly London numbers, which for the moment he discarded. He had wrung from the others in the squat that Lucy Barnes had not been away from the town in the last days of her life.

  The local numbers were five-figure numbers. There was one number underlined in the same red biro. The local detective worked to a formula. He would work into the early evening, and then lock away the papers on his desk, put on his coat and drive home. What other way? If he and his two juniors worked 25 hours in the 24 they would still make no noticeable dent on the narcotics problems that had spread even to this country town. Where did the bloody stuff stop? The detective went to the area seminars, he had heard endlessly of the big city problems. And their problems, the problems of the major city forces, were his. If he hadn't shut it away, locked it into the drawer of his desk each evening, then the scag and coke would do for him too.

  Before he put the key back into his pocket, he told the better of the two juniors to get onto the telephone exchange and cut all incoming and outgoing calls from the underlined number.

  He wished them well, bade them a "Good evening", and left for home.

  "The gloves off, is that what you're asking for?"

  He was a former Chief Constable. He had seen it all and heard it all. He wanted the guidelines crystal clear, and from the horse's mouth. He headed the National Drugs Intelligence Unit, based on New Scotland Yard, with responsibility for co-ordinating efforts to stem the flow of narcotics into the country.

  "Yes, I suppose that's it. Yes, that is what I am asking for."

  The Home Secretary shifted in his seat. His own Private Secretary was busy at his notepad, and at the back of the room the policeman's aide was scribbling fast, then looking up to see whether there was more. The Home Secretary wondered how similar their two notes would be.

  "What I could say to you, Home Secretary, is that I might be just a little concerned at hard-pressed and limited resources being diverted on to one case, however tragic, merely because the victim happened to be well connected. You would understand that I could say that, would be entitled to say that."

  "It's no doubt a straightforward case. It's nothing that hasn't been successfully dealt with countless times. I just want it solved, and fast," the Home Secretary said.

  "Then I'll tell you, sir, what's landed on our desks over the last few days . . . Four Blacks bullock their way into a house and shoot the mother and her schoolboy son, the boy's dead.

  That's drugs related. A blind widow is beaten up in the West Country, for a hundred pounds in her pension book. That's to pay for drugs. Twenty-eight policemen injured in two months in West London in one street, in 150 yards of one street, because we're trying to put a stop to trafficking in that street. What we call designer drugs, cocktail amphetamines, there are at least 1 wo new laboratories in East London which we haven't found.

  A six-year-old kiddie who's hooked on reefers, and his Mum's come in to tell us that he pinched £150 out of her handbag to pay for them. . . That's what's hitting our desks at the moment.

  Now do I hear you rightly, sir? Do I correctly hear you say that that type of investigation, pretty important to the men and women involved, goes on the back burner?"

  "Yes."

  " . . . because the daughter of a Cabinet Minister is dumb enough to squirt herself an overdose?"

  "Don't let's play silly buggers."

  "Thank you, sir, I'll attend to it."

  "And be damn certain you get a result."

  There was a wintry smile on the policeman's face, a smile that sliced the Home Secretary's defences. He looked away, he didn't want to see the man's eyes, the message of contempt that a man in his position could break the civilized order of priorities because he had given his word to a colleague.

  "You'll keep me informed," the Home Secretary told his Private Secretary. "And you can ring down for my car."

  ''Charlie Eshraq rang," Harriet Furniss said.

  Mattie was heaving out of his overcoat. "Did he now?"

  Reaching to hook it tidily behind the front door. "And what did he have to say for himself?"

  It was Mattie's way that he did not bring his office home.

  He had told his wife nothing of his dealings with the boy, nor that Charlie, whom Harriet Furniss treated as a son, had killed two men on his last journey home. They had been married for 28 years, and he had spent 21 of them as a member of the Secret Intelligence Service and he had stuck to his rule book, and the rule book said that wives were no part of the Service.

  "He said that he was sorry that he had missed you. He was off tonight . . . "

  "Was he now?" Mattie made a poor fist of unconcern.

  Harriet would have noticed, but she would not have commented. Harriet never attempted to draw him out.

  "He said that he had a rather good job for a few weeks, something about playing courier to tourists in the Aegean."

  "That'll be nice for him."

  "He said thank you for the present."

  "Ah, yes. Just a little something that I saw, and posted to him," he said, too fast. He could lie with the best of them at Century, and was a miserable failure at home.

  "He said it would be very useful."

  "That's excellent. The country this weekend, I think, Harriet. Some reading to be done."

  He kissed her on the cheek, like it was something that he should have done earlier. In all his married life Mattie had never looked at another woman. Perhaps he was old fashioned.

  He thought a little more each day of his advancing years - his next birthday would be his 53rd - and happily acknowledged that he was just damned lucky to have met and married Harriet (nee Owens) Furniss.

  He opened his briefcase, took out the black cloth-bound book that was all of its contents. He went to work each morning with a briefcase, as if it were a part of his uniform, but he never brought it home filled with office papers. He showed her the elegant lettering on the spine, The Urartian Civilization of Near Asia - an Appraisal. She grimaced. He opened the book and showed her the receipt from the anti-quarian bookseller.

  "It had better be your birthday present."

  His birthday was not for another nine weeks. She would pay for the book as she paid for most of the extras in their lives, as she had paid the girls' school fees, as she had paid the airfare for Charlie Eshraq to come over from California to London years before. Mattie had no money, no inherited wealth, only his salary from Century, which looked after essentials - rates, mortgage, housekeeping. Their way of life would have been a good deal less comfortable without Harriet's contributions.

  "How did Charlie sound?"

  "Sounded pretty good. Very buoyant, actually . . . Supper'll be frizzled."

  They went down the hallway towards the kitchen. He was holding his wife's hand. He did it more often now that the girls had left home.

  "You'll have something to get your teeth into for the weekend?"

  "Indeed I will . . . That wretched man who's bought the Manor Farm, he's ploughed up the footpath across Ten Acre.

  I'll have plenty to keep me busy."

  God help the poor bastard, Mattie thought
, the newcomer from the big city if he had come down to the countryside and ploughed up a right-of-way and made an enemy of Harriet Furniss.

  She looked into his face. "The Urartians, aren't they Eastern Turkey?" She saw him nod. "Is that where you're going?"

  "Gulf first, but I might get up there." There were times when he wanted nothing more than to talk through his days, to share the frustrations and to celebrate the triumphs. But he had never done it and he never would.

  In the kitchen he made himself a weak gin and tonic, and gave Harriet her schooner of Cyprus dry sherry. Supermarket gin and cheap imported sherry, because drinks came out of the housekeeping. He was quiet that evening. While she washed up the pots and loaded the dishwasher, Mattie sat in a chair by the window, and saw nothing through the opened curtains, and wondered how far on his journey Charlie Eshraq had travelled.

  "Come on, Keeper, for Christ's sake . . . get a wiggle on."

  The pub was full, getting near to closing time, and the swill underway before "Time" was called.

  David Park was away from the bar, outside the group. He stared back at them.

  "Bloody hell, Keeper, are you in this round or are you not?" There were six of them up at the bar, and some had shed their jackets, and all had loosened their ties, and their faces were flushed. A hell of a good evening for all concerned, except for David Park. He hadn't made his excuses and gone home to Ann, but he hadn't played much of a part in the piss-up that had been inevitable after Mr Justice Kennedy's remarks following the sentencing.

  "Keeper, it is your round."

  True, it was David Park's round. He drained his bitter lemon. He made his way to the bar. In a quiet voice, and the barmaid had to heave most of her bosom onto the beer mats to hear him, he ordered six pints of Yorkshire bitter, and a bitter lemon with ice. He passed the beers from the bar to the eager waiting hands.

  "Bloody good, Keeper. . . . Cheers, old mate . . .'Bout bloody time too . . . Keeper, my old love, you are something of a wet towel tonight . . . "

  He grinned, fast, as if that were a weakness. He did not like to acknowledge weakness.

  "I'm driving," he said calmly. He slid away from the heart of the group, back to the fringe. His radio call sign was Keeper, had been ever since he had been accepted into the Investigation Division. He was Park, and so some bright creature had labelled him Keeper. Mucking in, getting pissed-up, falling around, they weren't Park's talents. He had other talents, and Mr Justice Kennedy had remarked on them and commended the April team's dedicated work, and to everyone else in April that was reason enough to be on their seventh pint with a cab home at the end of it. Mr Justice Kennedy had handed down, late that afternoon, a Fourteen, two Twelves, and a Nine. Mr Justice Kennedy had called for Bill Parrish, Senior Investigating Officer and in charge of April team, to step up into the witness box so that the thanks of "a society under threat from these hellish traffickers who deal in wickedness" could be expressed. Bill Parrish in a clean white shirt then had looked decently embarrassed at the fulsome praise set out by the old cove. Parrish earned, basic,

  £16,000 a year. David Park earned, basic, £12,500 a year. The bastards who had gone down, for Fourteen and Twelve and Nine, were looking at a couple of million hidden away in the Caymans, and not touchable. It would take Park 40 years to earn what the bastards had waiting for them after their time, less remission, and by then he would be retired with his index-linked pension to cuddle. He liked the chase, cared little about the kill, couldn't care less once the 'cuffs went on.

  Parrish would get a great welcome from his wife when he made it home after closing, and she'd pour him another jug full and sit him down on the settee and roll the video so that he could belch his way through the recordings of the two main news bulletins of the evening and hear the message to the nation that Customs and Excise was super bloody marvellous, and keeping the nation safe, etc, etc. Park hoped Ann would be asleep.

  April team was Iranian heroin. Park had been four years with April and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Iranian heroin. He had been the front man in this investigation, deep inside the guts of the organisation that was doing the running of the scag, he had even driven for them. Ann knew sweet nothing about what he had been at. Best if she were asleep when he reached home.

  He watched the group. He thought they looked stupid and very drunk. He couldn't remember when he had last been the worse for wear in public. One of the reasons he had been selected, that he could be relied upon invariably to stay the right side of the bottle. To be less than 1000 per cent, clear-headed on a covert operation would be real bad news, like a shotgun barrel in the back of the neck. He didn't tell Ann what he did. He told her the generalities, never the details. He couldn't have told her that he was insinuated into a gang, that if his cover were blown he'd be face down in the Thames with the back of his skull a bloody remnant. He thought one of the guys was going to fall over.

  Bill Parrish had detached himself from the group at the bar session, made his way stiffly to Park. An arm looped around his shoulders. He took the weight.

  "Mind if I say it . . . ? When you want, you can be awe-somely priggish, David."

  "You can say it."

  "April's a team, a shit hot team. A shit hot team stands or falls on being together. Being together doesn't match with one bugger on the edge and looking down his nose."

  Park disentangled the arm, propped it onto the mantelpiece of the bar's fireplace. "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that this has been a great scene, worth celebrating . . . "

  Park dragged the breath down into his lungs. Parrish had asked for it. He'd get it.

  "Did you see them in there? Did you see them when they were being sent down? They were laughing at us, Bill. One Fourteen, two Twelves and a Nine, and they were looking across at us like it was some sort of crack. Did you see their women in the gallery? Deep tans from the Costa. And that wasn't paste on their fingers, ears, throats . . . Hear me, Bill.

  What we are at is a confidence trick. We aren't even scratching at these pigs, and here we are pretending we're winning. It's a confidence trick the Judge plays too, and that way the British masses go to their beds tonight thinking everything is hunky-dory. We're kidding ourselves, Bill. We're not win-

  ning, we're not even doing well. We're drowning in the bloody stuff . . ."

  "That's daft talk, David."

  "How's this for daft talk? Heroin's an explosion, cocaine's gone through the roof, 'phets are up, with cannabis we're talking tonnage not kilos. We're deluding ourselves if we pretend we're on top of it. We're down on the floor, Bill. Yes or no, Bill?"

  "I've drink taken, I'm not answering."

  "Sorry, out of order. You know what I think . . . ?"

  He saw Parrish roll his eyes. Wouldn't be the first time that Keeper had spouted his view of salvation.

  "Give it me."

  "We're too defensive, Bill. We should be a more aggressive force. We should be abroad more, we should be ferreting down the source. We shouldn't just be a line of last resort with our backs against the wall. We should be out there and after them."

  Parrish gazed into the young face in front of him, into the coolness of the eyes that were not misted with drink, at the determined set of the youngster's chin. He swayed. "And where's out there? 'Out there' is the arse end of Afghanistan, it's the happy little villages of Iran. My darling, you go there on your own. You don't go there with your old Uncle Bill."

  "Then we might just as well give up - legalise the stuff."

  "For a joker who's going to get a Commendation, who's just had the Judge's praises sung up his bum, you are mightily hard to please, Keeper. . . . You should go home. In the morning, a good shit and a good shower and a good shave and you'll feel no end better."

  Parrish had given up on him, headed back for the group.

  He stood a few more minutes on his own. The rest had now forgotten him. He could not help himself. He could not turn it off, like they could. He was right, he knew he was ri
ght, but none of them came over to join him, to hear how right he was. He called across to say that he was on his way. None of them turned, none of them heard him.

  He drove home. He observed the speed limit. He was stone cold sober. It meant nothing to him that the Judge had singled him out for praise. It only mattered that there was a war, and it was not being won.

  Home was a two-bedroom flat in the south-west suburbs of the city. He could afford to live in the flat because of his overtime and Ann's work in a local architect's office. He garaged his Escort at the back of the block. He felt half dead with tiredness. He was a long time selecting the right key.

  What made him tired, what made him want to throw up, had been their looks from the dock as they had heard sentence.

  The bastards had laughed at April's best effort.

  Inside there was a note on the narrow hall table.

  " D . I've gone to Mum's for the night. Might see you tomorrow if you've the time, A . "

  The detective, bright and early, thanked the supervisor at the exchange. A small country town, of course there were easy and unofficially good relations between the exchange and the police. The number that had been disconnected last evening had been reported out of order three times during the night.

  One caller had left his name and telephone number. And not a name that surprised him. Young Darren was quite well known to the local detective. He suggested to the supervisor that it would be quite in order for the telephone to be reconnected.

  In his office he told his subordinates when they came in not to take their coats off, and he handed them the address, and told them to bring in Darren Cole for a chat.

  He was whistling to himself, Gilbert and Sullivan. He would enjoy talking old times to young Master Cole, and talking about Lucy Barnes' purchases. A fine start to the day until his clerical assistant informed him that he was required in the Chief Superintendent's office, and that two big shots were down from Constabulary Headquarters.

  3

  He was dressed as a pasdar in the loose-fitting dun khaki uniform of the Revolutionary Guards, and he walked with a limp that would be noticed but which was not ostenta-tious.