HOME RUN

by Gerald Seymour

  He went to his desk. He flipped open the notepad beside the telephone. He wrote a name and a London telephone number. He tore the sheet of paper from the pad. He held it, tantalisingly, in front of him.

  "I get ten per cent."

  "That's fair."

  There was no handshake, just the passing of the paper, and the sound below of the front door opening.

  Jamil Shabro went to the doorway, and he shouted into the music upstairs that he was going out, and that her mother was home. She had struggled up the stairs, cloaked in a fur coat and weighed down by two plastic Harrods bags and a third from Harvey Nichols. Perfunctorily, as if he did it because there was a stranger watching, he kissed his wife.

  "This is Colonel Eshraq's boy, Charlie, dear. He needs a drink . . . Charlie, my wife."

  "Very pleased to meet you, Mrs Shabro."

  "I don't know when I'll be back."

  The bags were dumped on to the carpet, the fur coat draped over them.

  "What would you like, Mr Eshraq?"

  "Scotch would be excellent, a weak one, please."

  He heard the front door shut. He thought that Jamil Shabro hadn't been able to get out of the house fast enough, not once his wife had returned. It amused Charlie, the way she punished him, spending his money. She brought him the drink in a crystal tumbler, and there wasn't much water, and then she was back to the sideboard, lacing vodka with tonic. He sipped his whisky. From the window he could see Jamil Shabro bending to unlock the door of his car. The door was pulled open and he saw the man's glance flash up to the window, and his wife waved vaguely to him.

  "Cheers."

  "Cheers, Mrs Shabro."

  She stood beside him. He wondered how much money she spent on clothes each month.

  "I'm exhausted - shopping is so tiring in London."

  Charlie watched the three-point turn. He heard the scratch of the gears. He saw a battered van parked at the top end of the mews. The turn was complete.

  "I'm sorry, she's rather a noisy child, my daughter."

  The car burst forward.

  He saw the light.

  The light came first.

  The light was orange fire.

  The 5 series BMW was moving, lifting. The passenger door separating from the body, and the boot hatch rising.

  The windscreen blowing out. The van alongside rocking.

  The body emerging, a rising puppet, through the windscreen hole.

  He felt the blast. Charlie cringing away, and trying to shelter Mrs Shabro. The full length window cracking, slowly splintering into the half drawn curtains, and the hot air blast on his face, on his chest. The same hot air blast as had hammered his back on the wide road leading into Tabriz.

  He heard the thunder. The thrashing of an empty oil drum. The dead hammer blow of military explosive detonating.

  He was on the carpet. There were the first small blood dribbles on his face, in his beard, and his hands were resting on glass shards, and the woman was behind him.

  Charlie crawled on his knees to the open window, to beside the ripped curtain shrouds. The sound had gone. The 5 series BMW no longer moved. There was the first mushroom of the smoke pall. The body of Jamil Shabro was on the cobbles of the mews, his right leg was severed above the knee and the front of his face was gone. His trousers seemed scissored at his groin. Charlie saw the back doors of the van opening.

  A man spilling out, with a camera and a long lens hanging from his neck, and the man was reeling drunk. A second man coming. The second man clutched, like it was for his life, a pair of binoculars. Two drunks, neither able to stand without the other, holding each other up, pulling each other down.

  Two men, and they had a camera with a long lens and binoculars.

  Charlie heard the shout.

  The shouting was above the screaming of the woman on the carpet behind him. The woman was nothing to Charlie, the shout was everything.

  "April Five to April One, April Five to April One . . . for fuck's sake come in . . . This is April Five, Police, Fire, Ambulance, immediately to April Five location . . . Bill, there's a bloody bomb gone off."

  Charlie understood.

  "There are casualties, Bill. Tango Four's been taken out by an explosion . . . Just get the fuckers here, Bill."

  There was a girl running into the mews. Running for dear life towards the two men, and she had a personal radio in her hand.

  Surveillance. His meeting with Jamil Shabro had been under surveillance.

  He went fast.

  He went down the stairs. He went out through the garage door at the back into a small garden, and he went over the high trellis wood fence at the back because he could see that the gate was bolted. He sprinted the length of the alleyway to the jeep.

  The body had not been moved, but it was covered now with a groundsheet. The leg was in a plastic bag, holding down a corner of the groundsheet. Harlech's traffic warden, hardly a stitch of clothing left on her, had been tenderly loaded into the first ambulance and driven slowly out of the mews. Too slowly, Park thought, for survival. The scene of crime photographer went about his work. The mews was sealed off but there was a great melee of men round the car. There were men from the local force, uniformed and plain clothes, there were Special Branch, there were Anti-Terrorist squad, and two who stood right back and didn't seem to Park to know quite what they were doing there. He had those two as Security Service. There were a couple of WPCs in the house, and all of them out in the street could hear the crying. There were ambulance crews still in four other houses in the mews. Two cars close to the blast had been wrecked.

  Corinthian had gone to hospital. He'd been taking a photograph of Tango Four as the BMW had driven towards them, he'd had the body of the camera heaved into his nose, cheek-bone and eyebrow. He'd have some stitches and a technicolour eye.

  He had seen quite a deal in his time, but he had never seen anything remotely like the havoc in the mews. He was on the outside, so was Token. They were the ID and they had strayed into police territory. Of course, the local force had not been informed that April were on their patch. Of course, the Anti-Terrorist squad had not been informed that an Iranian exile, on their files as "at risk", was being targetted. So naturally Keeper and Token were getting the cold shoulder.

  They'd be caught up with, later. They'd be interviewed when the mess was cleared. Park was still dazed. He had the noise in his ears. He had the ache in his shoulder from when he had been pitched across the dark interior of the van. He was lucky to be alive.

  Parrish arrived. He strode past the constable who held out an ineffectual hand to stop him and into the mews. He walked straight to Park.

  No rubbernecking, no preamble.

  "Where did he go, Tango One?"

  "He's not in the house now," Park said.

  "You were round the back, Amanda. Did he come out of the back?"

  She was looking at the cobbles. She had her handkerchief tight in her hand. "I heard the bang, I came running. They could have been killed."

  Parrish snarled. "Next time you want to play Lady with the Lamp, for Christ's sake get a relief first."

  Parrish had his personal radio in his hand. There was a tight anger in his snapped words. "Alpha Control, this is April One. If any of April team are not doing good works could they be got soonest, if it does not interfere with visiting hours, to Tango One's home location, and report back on whether Tango One is in residence. Out."

  They walked out of the mews. Park thought half the plods were looking at him like it was his fault, like it had happened because the ID had nosed in. The muzzy haze in his ears was clearing. He hadn't done it before, but he took Amanda's hand in his and gave it a squeeze.

  The message came back into Parrish's earphone when they were close to the Lane. He heard it. He didn't take his eyes away from the traffic in front. He turned to Park, all phlegmatic.

  "Tango One's done a bunk. He went off in a hell of a hurry, didn't even close his front door. Well done, Florence Nightingale
, we've lost the bastard. That hurts. It hurts rather more that we've lost a heap of scag."

  "Leave off it, Bill. She did what anyone would have done.

  That wasn't a firework. Another thirty paces and we'd have been gone."

  "Rotten old world, Keeper, you can quote me . . . You going to be fit for the Foreign Office?"

  "Yes," Park said.

  * * •

  When the body had been moved, when the widow had left with her daughter to go to the home of the dead man's brother, a team of detectives went inside the mews house. There was no point at that time in trying to interview the widow and her daughter, both hysterical and about to be tranquillized.

  "I regret, Mr Parrish, that Mr Furniss will simply not be able to contribute to your investigation."

  "We would like to establish that for ourselves."

  "You misunderstand me . . . there is no question of Mr Furniss being able to talk to you."

  Park thought that if he had been a yobbo and lost his passport in Benidorm, then they'd have treated him better.

  He and Parrish were in iron framed chairs in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office interview room. There were two men on the other side of the polished table, one of whom didn't speak. The one who spoke wore a three-piece suit, a stiff collar in this day and age, would you believe it, and a Brigade of Guards tie puffed out, and his voice was a drawl as if it were almost as much as he could manage, having to speak to the likes of Park and Parrish. Park felt a pillock anyway, because at the Lane the duty nurse had put an Elastoplast over a dressing soaked in witch hazel across a ridge of bruise on his forehead.

  "We usually find that we are the best judges of who can, and who cannot, help us with our inquiries."

  "Let me try it out on you, Mr Parrish, with words of one syllable . . . You will not see him."

  "I am a Senior Investigation Officer in the Investigation Division of Customs and Excise. I am working on a case involving the importation from Iran of several hundred thousand pounds' worth, street value, of heroin. My principal suspect, the importer, was issued with a Stateless Person's travel papers naming Matthew Furniss as a guarantor . . . I hope I haven't gone too fast for you . . . that makes Mr Furniss necessary to my investigation as I build up a profile of a resourceful and dangerous criminal."

  "You should exclude Mr Furniss from your investigations, Mr Parrish."

  "We are getting dangerously close, I must warn you, to obstruction. Obstruction is a criminal offence."

  "I doubt it, in this case."

  "In some quarters the importation of heroin is regarded as a very serious matter."

  "Quite rightly, but Mr Furniss will not be able to help you."

  "I'll go over your head."

  "That's your privilege, but you will be wasting your time My advice would be to stay with the essentials."

  "You'll eat those words."

  "We'll see. Good luck with your investigation, gentlemen."

  They drove back to the Lane. Marooned in traffic, Parrish turned on Park.

  "You were a lot of help."

  "Stood out a mile."

  "Tell me, clever clogs, what stood out a mile?"

  "He's a spook."

  "Enlighten me."

  "Secret Intelligence Service, the jokers over the Thames in the tower block. He was telling you to piss off, Bill. If a spook is sent over to tell us to go away, then it stands to reason that Matthew Furniss is an intelligence wallah, presumably pretty big. Otherwise they wouldn't try that sort of high and mighty shit."

  "Sickening, but you're probably right."

  "I want a promise, Bill."

  "Shoot."

  "They're going to try and block us, I bet you. Right now the phones are purring. We've got Iranian heroin, Iranian exiles, we've got car bombs, and we've got a big boy spook.

  They don't want grubby little Customs sniffing into that."

  "What's the promise?"

  "That we don't back off, Bill, just because a stiff white collar tells us to."

  "Promise."

  "Screw them, Bill."

  "Too right, young Keeper, screw them."

  He started to sing "Jerusalem". Parrish was in full flood by the time they made it back to the Lane.

  In the evening, when his food was brought to the door, Mattie gave his guard three sheets of paper filled with his handwriting.

  The text detailed his study over many years of the Urartian civilization that had been based around the present day Turkish city of Van.

  10

  There was a good term he used when he gave the lectures. It was one that he had heard himself when he had first attended a kidnap briefing: "emotional rape". It was a good enough description for Mattie to be going on with. He was without his watch and the belt for his trousers and the laces for his shoes. He was without contact. The breakfast tray had been brought to his room, left inside the door, taken away an hour later, nothing said, no eye contact.

  His father had been a regular soldier. His father had been a hard and austere man with no gift for conversation, living his life to high standards. Mattie had followed him into the army. Mattie had been the young officer in the Brigade of Guards, and brought up to the same standards. Perhaps he had rebelled against those standards, his father's rigid code, perhaps that was why he had left the military and gone to Century, and yet the standards and the code remained his bed-rock. The pure soldiering had appealed to him less and less. He had spent too much time as a young officer as liaison in Iran, wearing his own clothes and mixing with civilians, but the deep base of disciplines had stayed with him. He had been lectured, and he had himself lectured, on personal standards as a weapon against the despair that came after the shame of the "emotional rape".

  Had it been possible to speak with his guards, then he would have spoken with courtesy, but hard to be courteous to a pair of sods who never caught his eye, never acknowledged his thanks. He had already done his exercises, and that was important, always important to stay mentally and physically fit. He went to the wash basin beside the lavatory. There was no brush to clean the pan of the lavatory, and that was a small wound to him because he thought he would have benefitted from being able to set a standard of a clean lavatory. He went to the wash basin. There was no cloth to wipe clean the basin, but he could make something of that with his fingers. Only one tap. He was denied hot water. Well, Mattie Furniss could live without hot water. He turned the tap. A few moments of pressure and then the spurt was reduced to a dribble. The water ran ochre brown. God alone knew what filth was in the water, but the rules demanded that he wash. His hands were cupped to take the soiled water, and he closed his eyes tight, and splashed the water on his face. He took off his shirt, cupped his hands again, and washed underneath his arms. He could not shave, of course, and the growth on his cheeks was an irritation. When he had finished washing he began to wipe the basin clean, to peel away the grime.

  Tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, he would wash his shirt. Today he rinsed his socks. He could wear his shoes without socks. Christ, Harriet, how do I dry my bloody socks?

  . . . Harriet . . . who would have been to see her? He had once been to visit a Century wife in crisis. Just her own crisis, not the Service's crisis, just that the lady's husband had piled in with his car on a road out of Sharjah. He hadn't made much of a job of telling her the news, but he and Harriet still received a Christmas card from her every year. He wondered how they would be with Harriet . . . Harriet always washed his socks at home, and she knew how to dry them, even when it was too wet for them to go outside, and in the days before they had a proper heating system in the cottage at Bibury. The poor darling who washed his socks, and knew how to dry them, he had never, ever, talked to her about the risk . . .

  never. Not when he was Station Officer in Tehran, not when he was running the show down in the Gulf, not when he was packing the clothes as she passed them to him from the wardrobe for this trip. If Harriet had ever said to him that, God's truth, old boy, this life rea
lly pisses me off, this life is for kiddies, this life is not for us, old boy, then Mattie would have been shaken to the roots, but he would have packed it in. He hoped they would have sent a good man to see her.

  After he had hung his socks on the bedframe, he had cleaned the basin again. Good lord, made in the UK. He could see the manufacturer's emblem, and the symbol of the Queen's award to industry. Must have been a good little export order.

  Purveyors of bathroom ceramics to His Magnificence.

  "Christ, Harriet. . . I am so afraid . . . " His lips mouthed the words. "These charming domestic scenes will surely end, my darling."

  "Survive, old boy." That's what she would say and that was the name of the game, survival. Survival was going back to Harriet, one day, going home. And the price of going home, at any rate going home in a skin she would recognize, well, that price was unthinkable. "Don't think it, old boy. You can't afford to think it because you know so much. So many lives depend on your silence."

  "You'll tell the girls, won't you? Get them to come and take care of you until this is all over. Oh yes, it will be over. Sooner or later, most probably later, it will be over. I rather fancy there'll be a debriefing of sorts and then they'll drive me to Bibury and you will be at the door. It will be summer still, oh yes." He wiped the underside of the basin with his hands and saw the beetles. Small black beetles on the floor. They had an entry point where the tiles were poorly fitted against the wall.

  He started to count the beetles. They were difficult to count, because the little blighters were meandering all over the floor under the basin.

  He had not heard the footfall, nor the bolt being drawn back, nor the key being turned.

  He was counting beetles, and there were three men in the room. There was a moment of annoyance when he lost his place among the beetles. The men came fast. He was dragged upright. His arms were twisted behind his back. One of the men buried a fist in Mattie's hair and pulled him across the room. Pain on his scalp, and pain at his shoulders from his bent back arms, and his shoes flapping loose and his trousers dribbling down over his hips.

  He was trying to remember the rules. At all times courtesy and good manners. Bloody important. Bad mouth them back and he'd get a kicking. Fight them and he'd get a beating.