"Just taking sensible precautions, Jerry. You're getting soaked."
"Frank, no pissing, who's that joker in the car?"
"I'm right in the middle of a bit of work. Bring it back when you've finished with it, no hurry."
The door closed and the neighbour retreated. He'd have been sent by his wife, neighbours always were. He'd report that he hadn't really learned anything. That wouldn't satisfy the wife, and she'd be round in the morning to beg a half-pint of milk or borrow a half-pound of flour. And they'd fret through the evening, the neighbour and his wife, about the cables and the camera, and whether a wave of thieving was about to strike their small corner of heaven.
The boy came home, and the woman who drove him gave Davies a grinding glance before she pulled away. He doubted this little place could survive without knowing every soul's business. His lunch-box was finished, except for the apple he always kept till last. It would be another hour before Leo Blake turned up to do the night shift. He polished the apple on his sleeve and listened. He'd made his suggestion, how they should tell the boy. They might have been at the bottom of the stairs or just inside the kitchen. His mother did it. There were faint voices.
Frank used to work for the government abroad. He'd made some enemies. He did secret work, and it was still secret, and Mummy's secret and Stephen's. Frank's going to be protected by the police just for a few days… "Are we going to have to go? Will we have to leave here?"
"No." Her clear voice.
"There's nothing to worry about we aren't leaving our home."
Davies put the apple core in his lunch-box.
The evening had come.
The car was parked in a deep lay-by used in the summer by tourists for picnics. It was hidden from the road by trees and evergreen bushes. Yusuf Khan had reclined his seat and dozed. The small bedside alarm clock in his pocket, synchronized to the watch of the intelligence officer, would rouse him thirty minutes before it was time to move.
It was the most comfortable car seat he had ever sat in, a BMW 5-series with a 2.6-litre injection engine, high power, high technology, high luxury. His own, left behind in Nottingham, was an eleven-year-old Ford Sierra, 1.6-litre, under-powered and under-maintained; the carburettor had choked on the 150-mile journey to the north-west. They had needed to call out a mechanic to fix it and had sweated to get to the hospital in time to see the target, Perry, the car he used, and the logo of the salesroom that had sold it to Perry. Farida Yasmin's car was a nine-year-old Rover Metro, cramped and with a small engine, good enough to get them to the car salesroom in Norwich where a story had been told and information received, and good enough to get them into and out of the village by the sea where the photographs had been taken that had lit up the eyes of the intelligence officer.
Yusuf Khan's car was unreliable, Farida Yasmin Jones's car was too small. The cash float given him by the intelligence officer included enough for him to hire a fast, reliable, comfortable vehicle when he had come off the train. It was fantastic, the BMW, but difficult to handle: once, he had been off the road and a tyre width from a ditch because he had underestimated the speed into a corner. There was caked mud on the driver's-side doors. He didn't use the radio because all the stations on the pre-tune buttons played degenerate, corrupting music.
He imagined the man he had been sent to meet, who would come out of the darkness. The sausage bag was behind his reclined seat, on the carpeted floor. He felt a sense of pride that he had been shown such trust, and Yusuf Khan dozed, waiting.
He tried to concentrate but the words mocked his efforts. They registered then they blurred, their message was lost.
Markham sat on the rug in front of the electric fire in Vicky's apartment. She didn't like the word flat, it was an apartment but the problem with it was the size. Smart but small, as his was dingy and small. Neither's home was big enough for two, so he read the books she'd bought in her lunch-hour and left for him in a neat pile. Everything about the room was neat, organized, like his Vicky.
Vicky was with a girlfriend at aerobics, and then they would be going on for a pizza. The books, they'd have cost her a small fortune, were on business management, self-expression, leadership and finance he'd have gone down to a library and borrowed, if he'd had time. He tried to remember what she had told him. For the interview he was Geoffrey. not Geoff, his father was in banking, not a high-street deputy manager out on his neck last year with downsizing, his mother organized one of the princess's causes, wasn't a two-days-a-week helper in a charity clothes shop; he was ambitious, he carried ambition round in wheelbarrow loads… But the thoughts strayed back to Frank Perry. There had been enough of them in Ireland, bloody-minded Presbyterian hill farmers, running beef stock over poor land, doing evenings in the part-time military, who were threatened by the Provos' policy of ethnic cleansing. The obstinate old beggars had stayed put and taken a sub-machine-gun out in the tractor cab when they went to muck-spread, wouldn't have considered quitting and running. He'd admired their courage.
What Vicky had drilled into him… He wanted responsibility. What Geoffrey Markham wanted more than anything was the responsibility of handling the investment of clients' savings.
Nothing rash, but the careful placing of their money and the safeguarding of their pension schemes. He was not frightened of responsibility. Nor, if the markets slumped, of crisis.
And Geoff Markham couldn't cling to the interview's strands. Always bloody damn frightening when a player went missing, and Yusuf Khan was missing like he had been bloody frightened in Ireland when a Provo player disappeared and they had no word, had to wait for the Semtex to detonate or the blood to drip on the pavement and they had lost the trail of the girl who was the only associate thrown up by Rainbow Gold.
Wavering back with his concentration… And he expected to work hard, play hard, had always believed physical fitness went hand in hand with psychological stability weekend hiking, after-work weights and tennis… He was to decline the offer of a drink, old trick, with a friendly refusal, and he was to be polite but not smarm deference… And they shouldn't know it was the only shortlist interview in his locker. He was to wear the new tie she'd bought him, and his best suit but he could take the jacket off if they suggested it, though not loosen the tie. And be sure to thank them for fitting him in during a lunch-hour… The interview was the next afternoon and he couldn't read the pages in front of him, or remember what she'd told him.
Rainbow Gold was gone cold on them. Without this job there was no home for him and Vicky, no bright ambitious future. An armed protection officer was at Frank Perry's home.. Of course Geoffrey Markham wanted a career in banking.
It might have helped relieve the frustration of his work if Markham had had a really good friend at Thames House. It had been better in the early days when the probationers had hung around together and made a social life inside their own restricted, secretive clan. He had no friends now. The probationers who had lasted were dispersed in the building and inter-Section friendships were discouraged. The society was a mass of hermetically sealed cells; it was not appropriate for East bloc personnel to fraternize with Irish or narcotics personnel loose talk followed, the old hands said. The former friends were married off anyway, had babies and didn't go to the pub after work but hurried home. He'd taken Vicky to one insider dinner party, which had been a disaster: she'd thought the men were under-achieving and the women were little mice. Actually, thinking about it, the Fentons of Thames House were the lucky ones. They had no expectation of changing the world and used the system as a personal fiefdom for fun and entertainment. Set around with rules, regulations and procedures, Geoff Markham believed himself a small, irrelevant cog. He would never matter and never be noticed. He wanted out.