There were two of them in the back, he guessed, as hands began to rummage through the pockets of his suit, working down from his jacket to his trousers, pulling everything out. To compound his folly he had removed every indication that he was a police officer-his warrant card, his Federation membership card, his entry card to the gym and pool, his pass for the forensic labs. All they would learn from the contents of his wallet was that he lived in Barnet, not Liverpool. And then they found the tape recorder.
‘Shit!’ one of them said, and they began whispering urgently together. Not in English, he realised, and probably not Hindi, of which he knew a little, but something similar. Maybe Urdu.
Finally, after removing the tape and batteries and testing all the buttons they seemed satisfied, that it wasn’t a transmitter probably, and they moved on to pull his mobile phone apart.
They were heading east, through the West End to the City, then on through light traffic. He caught a glimpse of the Monument, then the silhouette of the Tower, and still they continued eastward, in the general direction of UCLE. But before they got as far as that Darr turned off the main road and into a maze of small lanes hemmed in by tall unlit blocks. He brought the car to an abrupt halt and switched off the engine, opened his door and stuck his head out. There seemed to be no sound at all. Satisfied, Darr and one of the men in the back got out while the third held his knife at Leon’s throat. His door was jerked open and he moved carefully, thinking that this was probably his best chance to run for it, but the thought had barely formed when both his wrists were seized and jerked vertically up his back. He cried at the sudden, excruciating pain in his shoulder blades as the two men pushed him forward to follow Darr who was striding ahead towards a low wall. Out of the corner of his vision, his eyes still unused to the darkness after the car’s headlights had been turned off, Leon thought he made out a cement mixer and scaffolding behind a wire fence. Then they were at the wall and forcing him to stumble up onto it, and in a sudden sickening heave of vertigo he found himself swaying forward over a void. He seesawed back and forward crazily, trying to balance, feeling as if only the burning pain itself was holding him back from flying into the empty dark. And then his vision cleared, and he made out, far below, the sheen of the writhing current.
Darr began shouting at him. He was very angry about something, but Leon couldn’t take in half of what he said; by now he was focused on his certain impending death. As the shouting became more furious he was certain that he had only moments left. The knife would slide in, burning into his kidneys, he would be pitched forward into the swirling black current, and another anonymous corpse would be carried out to sea. With a teetering detachment he considered what his last thoughts should be. He thought regretfully of his mother and her ambition to become a perfect middle-class English lady, and of Kathy, with whom, had he been stronger and more honest, he could have been very happy.
He became aware that Darr was repeating something, again and again.
‘You are a spy! Confess you are a spy!’
Leon sucked in a lungful of freezing air laced with diesel fumes and gasped, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘You’re a detective!’ Darr yelled, and again Leon agreed, yes, it was true, waiting for the blade. Would it be very painful? Was it better to die by stabbing or to drown?
There was a tremendous wrench on his arms and he found himself sprawled on the gravel on the landward side of the wall. The other two men-he thought he recognised them now from the pictures he’d been shown of the two Iraqis from CAB-Tech-hauled him up onto his knees and held his arms while Darr grabbed hold of his tie and began to slap his face, hard enough to make his head spin and his nose bleed. At the same time Darr was talking again, bitter and spitting, though at first Leon couldn’t make out what he was going on about.
‘You want to know about his wife, do you? Well, I’ll tell you about his wife! She pesters me, she rings me up, she wants me to show her where I take our foreign guests. That’s why she was at the club last night, pestering me, wanting me to buy her drinks, then take her somewhere discreet…’
Darr stopped slapping Leon and looked with disgust at the blood on his hands, giving his victim a moment to ponder this strange diatribe. Darr pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands fastidiously, then raised a finger and waggled it in front of Leon’s nose.
‘But you can tell him that I haven’t touched that drunken English bitch! I haven’t laid a finger on her! You tell him that!’
Into Leon’s mind came the image in the mirror behind the bar at Thoroughbreds, of the distant figures of Darr and a blonde woman. Haygill’s wife he thought, his mind suddenly clear. He thinks I’m spying on him for Haygill, a detective.
‘And you can tell him something else, too. You can tell him that I won’t work for a man who treats me like a peasant, who sets spies on me! Eh? Eh?’
Leon mumbled, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Eh?’ Darr repeated, leaning down, his face close.
‘Yes,’ Leon nodded, and a tremendous blow between his shoulder blades sent him sprawling forward onto his face. He lay stunned on the gravel and heard the crunch of their footsteps receding into the night, the growl of the car engine, then silence.
Kathy had reached Poplar, and was beginning to wonder what she could reasonably expect to do when she got to UCLE, when her phone went. She pressed the button and a voice she barely recognised whispered, ‘Kathy… Kathy…’
‘Leon!’ She skidded the car to the kerb and pressed the phone harder to her ear. ‘Is it you?’
‘Kathy… yes, I’m sorry…’
‘Are you all right?’ she demanded, hearing the panic in her voice. His sounded unnatural, as if he were being strangled, and there were sounds of other people in the background. ‘Where are you?’
‘Kathy… I’m sorry…’
‘For God’s sake, Leon!’ she almost yelled. ‘Never mind about being sorry! Are you all right?’
‘I’ve had a bit of bother. I was wondering if you could come and pick me up.’
He was on Commercial Road in Limehouse he said. She told him not to move and rammed the car into gear. At the next red light she rang Brock and told him she’d made contact and would ring back when she knew more.
Within five minutes she spotted him outside the pub he’d described, leaning in a patch of shadow against the wall. Her headlights caught him as she swerved to the kerb, and he jerked upright, looking dishevelled like a tramp. The lights seemed to alarm him and he stumbled as he turned to run.
‘Leon!’ She raced across the pavement and caught him.
‘Kathy! How… how did you get here so fast?’ He seemed astonished, disoriented.
‘Are you hurt?’ His nose was bloody she could see, and he was moving stiffly, but he was moving, and on his feet.
He shook his head and she threw her arms round him, laughing with relief. Her laughter seemed to drain the remaining tension out of him and he leaned back against the pub wall, holding onto her. They clung together in the shadow like that for a while until she whispered, ‘You’d better tell me what happened, you stupid bastard.’
They went into the pub where Leon had told the landlord that he’d been mugged and had persuaded him to give him coins for the phone. Kathy repaid the money and bought the barman a beer and Leon a brandy while he went to the gents and tried to clean himself up. The bar was glaringly bright and crowded, the music from a jukebox deafening, and she found a small formica table as far from the machine as possible. She watched Leon weave slowly through the beer drinkers towards her and remembered the government scientist’s words, ‘We’re all vulnerable’. Leon was looking very vulnerable at that moment, his hair and clothes more in order but his usual poise gone, his pride a major casualty. He sat opposite her and muttered a thanks and took a gulp of the drink and told her the story.