'Oh, that's good, "help". Didn't "help" enough to walk her there and back – no, no.'
Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me… '
'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'
'She didn't ask.'
'You came down from a great height – right? Hit the bottom – right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'
His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.
He kept his hands tight on his face, could feel the stubble on his palms.
'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one… Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'
He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.
'There's an easy road and a hard one – most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'
Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.
The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building – an architect's dream – blocked his path.
Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.
Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life – that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.
Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking to be vulgar.
The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.
Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep – not the one that now turned in his mind.
'You haven't touched them – you have to eat.'
Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'
He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.
Once he had been on the cusp of the Service's investigations – before he was moved aside: a victim of the Service's need to produce scapegoats after its greatest ever, and most humiliating, intelligence failure. Now he was again at the centre. Little, irrelevant, corrupt, fourth-world Albania was top of the tree. He chortled to himself. He had been at his desk till ten o'clock last night, back in at a few minutes after five that morning, and would be there that evening long after the day shifts had finished.
'I really do insist that you eat.'
It had been the day when al-Qaeda came to Albania: what he had lived and dreamed for. He thought they must have almost forgotten, down on the AQ desks, that Frederick Gaunt still inhabited a little corner of their space. A link was made – and he'd have admitted it was a tortuous one – between the kings of the terrorist war and the barons of European criminality. Happy days, happy times.
'Please, Mr Gaunt – please, eat something.'
'What never ceases to amaze me, Gloria, is that they still use the old telephone. God, will they never learn?'
One file listed an address in the city of Quetta in west-central Pakistan, in the foothills of the mountains that straddled the Afghan border – probably close to where the venerable Osama was holed up in a damp cave – with an estimated population of 200,000, and among them was Farida, wife of Muhammad Iyad: listed occupation, bodyguard. She lived there with the kids, but he was long gone.
The second file was of the life and times of Muhammad Iyad: more important, whom he guarded, all choice items.
The third file comprised a security report from Islamabad of a surveillance team's witnessing of a gift-wrapped parcel being hand-delivered to the house. Included were black-and-white still-frame images of her showing her mother a gold chain necklace. Anyone close to her would have passed the gift to her in person. Who other than a husband in hiding somewhere would have sent a married woman an expensive present? Records, attached, showed it to have been her wedding anniversary when she received the gift.
The fourth file listed a telephone call made on the landline from the house to a number in Dubai, in the Gulf. The transcript of the brief call listed, no names, her 'love, gratitude and always my prayers'.
The fifth file was slim. The only overseas call made from the Dubai number – no transcript provided – was to a satellite phone in southern Lebanon.
The sixth file, again a single sheet of flimsy paper and again no transcript, recorded a call from the satellite phone located inland from the city of Sidon to a number in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
The seventh file, courtesy of the BIS in the city, identified a message received in Prague on a number that was tapped. The transcript was one line: 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' The number in Prague to which the message had been sent was monitored because it was used by an Albanian national, believed involved in the organized-crime racket of moving Romanian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian girls to northern Europe for prostitution. The warmth of his smile spread because Wilco's signature was on the cover note.
In front of him now, brought to him by his faithful PA – and he'd have sworn she had the same caring eyes as her spaniel – was Wilco's latest message. The Albanian was a cafe owner and prosperous. Records showed he also owned a third-floor apartment in the Old Quarter of Prague, and the unpronounceable name of a street was listed. He began to wolf his sandwich, gulping it down, then swilling his mouth with the water. 'Satisfied?'
'It's only you I'm thinking of, Mr Gaunt.'
She could have called him Frederick or Freddie – she had been with the Service for twenty years, fifteen of them running his desk at home and abroad – but she was never familiar. Without her, his professional life as a senior intelligence officer would have been so much the poorer. He said, 'I'm going off to see the ADD, dear Gilbert, to tell him I want to run with this.