How were they, in the house? Blake shrugged, they were predictable.
What was predictable? They were on the floor.
Would they get off the floor? And again Blake shrugged, as if it wasn't his concern, but the woman had cried in the night and twice the man had come down the stairs and poured whisky, swigged it and gone back up. They'd had the kid in the bed with them.
Was Blake, ten hours later, sure he'd hit the man? Blake was sure and, to emphasize his certainty, led him to the car and showed him the sharp dent in the paintwork over the near side wheel.
A small car, a city runabout type, came towards them. Instinctively, his hand slipped inside his outer coat and rested on the Glock.
He saw a young man at the wheel, his eyes raking the ground ahead as he approached. Bill Davies thought he was looking for the evidence of what had happened in the night but there was nothing for him to see. It was like the aftermath of a road accident when the fire brigade had hosed down the tarmac, the traffic police had swept up the glass and the recovery truck had towed away the wrecked vehicles.
The car stopped. The window was lowered. The young man, stubble on his face, tie loosened, held up an ID card. Davies thought he had been up all night.
"I'm Markham, Geoff Markham, I'm the liaison from Thames House. Are you Bill Davies?"
He nodded, didn't bother to reply.
"Pleased to meet you. They're singing your praises at our place, up to the rafters. I mean, it was a quality defence of a target. We'd have expected unadulterated chaos, but what you did was brilliant. There's a big meeting this morning, up at secretary-of-state level, that's why I'm here, for liaison. There has to be an evaluation of how the target will take the pressure waste of time, really, because your report indicates exceptional calm. We'd have reckoned they'd be screaming and bawling and packing their bags. What was it like?"
Davies tried a thin smile.
"Well, it's what you're trained for, yes? We understand the dogs lost him on the way to the marshes going south… I'll talk to your principal later, when I've had a walk about the place and found somewhere to bed down. Hope I won't be in your way. There's talk of putting the Army in to flush him out, but that's for the meeting to decide…"
"I won't have it, I can't accept it." The secretary of state flexed his fingers nervously, ground the palms of his hands together.
"We should be there, we've the expertise." The colonel had driven from Hereford through the dawn hours.
"Out of the question, there has to be a different way."
"Special Forces are the answer, not policemen."
Fenton was there with Cox, at the side of the secretary of state but a step back from him. It amused Fenton to see the politician writhe in the confrontation with the stocky, barrel-bodied soldier. He understood. The Regiment's commitment to Northern Ireland was reduced: the colonel was touting for work for his people, and for justification of their budget.
"With the military and their back-up, all their paraphernalia, equipment, we escalate way beyond any acceptable level to government."
"Policemen cannot do it, Counter-revolutionary Warfare wing should be deployed," the colonel demanded.
"The military going through those marshes, like it's a pheasant-beat, a fox-hunt, ending in gunfire and a corpse. That's an admission of our failure."
"Then you take the risk on your shoulders for the life of this man, and for the lives of his family we can do it."
The colonel wore freshly laundered camouflage fatigues and his boots glowed. Fenton and Cox were, of course, in suits. The politician was of the new breed, dressed down for a Sunday morning in corduroys and a baggy sweater. At Thames House, they harboured no love for the Special Air Service Regiment. The gunning-down by plain-clothes soldiers of three unarmed Provisional IRA terrorists in daylight, in a crowded street in Gibraltar had been, in the opinion of the Security Service hierarchy, simply vulgar. Each time, the moment before he launched himself in speech, the secretary of state glanced at Fenton and Cox as if they might offer him salvation, and each time both men gazed away.
"It would smack of persecution. We have close to two million Muslims in the country, the effect of a military gun-club drive could be catastrophic for race relations in the United Kingdom."
"Do you want the job done or don't you?"
"Those relations are fragile enough. Even now we're walking a tightrope between the cultures. Deployment of the Army against what is probably a single individual, and his inevitable death, would create dangerous tensions, quite apart from the effect on international dialogue… The colonel thwacked his fist into the palm of his hand.
"The idea of sending policemen into those marshes, that sort of terrain, against a dangerous fanatic, is preposterous."
"Another way, there has to be."
"No. My men have to go in for him."
The politician rocked and reached out to his table to steady himself. Perhaps, Fenton thought, he saw an image of camouflaged soldiers dragging a body from the water of those hideous marshes that bordered the road going away from the godawful place.
Perhaps he saw an image of young Muslims barricading streets in old mill towns of central and northern England. Perhaps he saw an image of a British diplomat being pulled from his car by the mob in Tehran or Karachi, Khartoum or Amman. Every politician, every minister of government he had ever known, was traumatized when the men came from the dark crevices at the edge of his fiefdom, did not confide, demanded free-range action, and dumped on the desk a sack-load of responsibility. The colonel had his finger up, wagged it at the secretary of state as if he prepared to go in for the kill…. there is no other way.
It was Fenton's moment. He enjoyed, always, a trifle of mischief. He looked at Cox, and Cox nodded encouragement.
Fenton smiled warmly.
"I think I can help. I think I can suggest an alternative procedure…"
He had been there through the night and all of the day before. The necessary stillness and silence were as second nature to him.
In that time he had eaten two cold sausages given him by his mother and not needed more.
He sat motionless, sheltered by a rock from the worst of the wind. He was a thousand feet above the small quarry beside the road where the police waited, two hundred feet above the escarpment of raw stones and weathered tree sprigs where the eyrie was. He had his telescope and the binoculars but he did not use them; he could see all that he needed to see without them. There was only the wind's light whistle to break the silence rippling around him; it was an hour since he had last whispered into the radio the police had given him, and the birds at the eyrie were quieter now.
When the egg thieves came to the mountains the police always called him because, as they told him, he was the best.
The anger burned slowly in the young man's mind… When he had climbed to his vantage-point, using dead ground, never breaking the skyline or making a silhouette, the birds had been frantic at the eyrie, wheeling and crying. It was impossible for the young man to comprehend that a collector would hire people to come to the eagles' eyrie to take eggs, and harder than impossible for him to understand that those same eggs, a pair of them, would be valued by the collector at a figure in excess of a thousand pounds. The notion that the collector would hide the dead, smooth eggs away from sight and keep them only for a personal gratification was impossible for him to believe… He loved the birds. He knew every one of the nine pairs that flew, soared, hunted, within twenty miles of where he now sat.
The previous afternoon he had seen the decoy come down the mountain. It was intended that the movement should be seen. There was a routine and he had learned it. The eyrie would be hit in darkness. A pair of men would climb to it with the aid of passive infrared goggles, and would lift the eggs. They would move them down a few hundred metres and hide them. They would be clean when they reached the road and their car. A decoy would go on to the mountain the next day and appear to make a pick-up, would search in the heather or among boulders, would seem to lift something, and would then come down. Were he stopped and arrested, the decoy, too, would be clean, the surveillance would be blown and the eggs abandoned. If the decoy were not stopped then a man would come for the pick-up the following day. The pick-up man had gone close in the misty dawn light to a group of hinds, had been within thirty yards of them and not disturbed them, had been good. But, he had disturbed a solitary ptarmigan, and that had been enough for the young man at his vantage-point. He had followed the pick-up, his eyes needling on him. He had seen him lift the eggs from a hiding-place and start, with great care, to come down from the mountain. He had told the police over the radio where he would reach the road.