‘You don’t know what they’re going to do. But you’re prepared to protect them regardless?’
‘It’s none of my business.’
‘None of your business? It’s your business to uphold the law of this country. They’re foreign nationals doing illegal phone tapping and you say that it’s none of your business. How can you say that?’
Davis didn’t answer. Hayter, standing outside, stopped talking into his radio and opened the back door. ‘You button your fucking lip, you fucking bitch. What I want to know is—’
Johnny swung round in instant anger, astonished by the man’s words. ‘Don’t you use that sort of language to a woman, Sergeant. I won’t have it.’
‘It’s all right, Johnny,’ said Heather quickly, ‘they’re just modplods. They don’t behave like real police.’
The sergeant gave a mocking laugh, looking at Johnny. ‘You won’t have it? I want to know a bit more about you, Mister er—’ he made a big show of looking at his notebook. ‘Kennedy or whatever your name might be.’ He got in. ‘Back to the office, Gary. I want a word with these two.’
Johnny and Heather were sitting opposite each other, flanked by the policemen. Johnny looked at Heather and she gave him a troubled look in reply, clearly worried by the Sergeant’s words. Unusually, she was silent for the short journey back to the police post.
They were hustled into an interview-room and searched. The jacket lining escaped their scrutiny. It surprised Johnny that they were kept together.
‘Now,’ said Sergeant Hayter again, ‘let’s have that name and address again, shall we?’
‘I told you, Kennedy, Three, Cadogan Mansions, Oakley Street.’
‘Yes, but you see the owner of that address is given as Mr John Kay, not Kennedy, and we’ve found a Mazda car parked next to a Citroën belonging to Miss Weston up the road that’s registered to that same Mr Kay.’
Heather and the sergeant were staring at him with equal intensity.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘so what? Technically my name’s still legally Kay. I can’t stand it for… for personal family reasons. I’m changing it to Kennedy, OK?’
‘Well that may be, sunshine, but legally speaking what you just did there was to give me a false name and I’ve got a perfect right to take action against you for wasting police time. You’d better show me some I.D. Mr Kay or whatever it is.’
Johnny tossed over a driving licence.
‘Got anything else?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
The sergeant’s voice took on a harder, bullying note. ‘Empty your pockets. Right now. On the table.’
As Johnny did so, his pilot’s licence was conspicuous in the small pile. The Sergeant picked it up and looked at it and comprehension dawned across his face.
‘A flier boy,’ he said, ‘right. That was you, then, doing circles, was it?’
‘Yes,’ said Johnny shortly.
‘Very unsafe, what you were doing, round here. Low flying. I think we might have to report that.’
‘Sergeant, I was above five hundred feet and I wasn’t breaking any regulations. Go ahead and report me.’
Hayter gave up on that one, took some notes and put the licence back on the table. Johnny stood up to get it back and Hayter stood up too.
‘I don’t want to see you on my patch again, right?’ His voice started rising. ‘I’ve told your friend here a million times and so far I’ve been very, very patient. She knows what can happen. She’s going to be put away for what she did and she fucking deserves it so—’
‘You mind your language, Sergeant,’ said Johnny, ‘I’ve told you before.’
Hayter stepped up to him, chin thrust forward towards him and shoved him aggressively backwards with both hands, using a stiff jab to the chest which spoke of more to come if his control snapped. Johnny’s head banged sharply against the wall behind and a red rage started to well up in him. He fought it back. This is a policeman, he thought, I’ll really blow it if I hit him. He clenched his fists at his sides.
They were marched out of the gate and watched by Hayter and his band as they set off down the road back towards the cars.
‘I don’t bloody believe it,’ said Johnny, ‘how can that man get away with it?’
‘He’s done far worse things than that,’ said Heather soberly. ‘Remind me to tell you what he did to my friend Jo. That was nothing, believe me.’ She glanced at him, noting the obvious anger in his face. ‘But what of you? You’re a man of mystery, aren’t you, Mr Kay?’
Chapter Nine
It was a day whose ripples were already spreading in many surprising directions. Before Johnny and Heather even had time to reach their cars, Hayter had made his report to Chief Inspector Reed. The Chief Inspector, mulling it all over, decided to refer it down the line to London at once, to his section head at the Ministry of Defence. He didn’t get the chance. Before he could take any action, the phone summoned him to an urgent meeting with the Base Commander.
Here we bloody go again, he thought wearily. Forget chains of command and division of responsibilities. Bloody Yanks know what’s going on quicker than we do. I wish someone would tell me who I work for.
There were two people already with the Base Commander when he went in, Oily Gandrell, as ever at the Commander’s elbow, and the other man, the one with the leathery skin whom no one ever introduced.
‘Now tell me, Reed,’ said the Base Commander instead of a greeting, ‘this man you picked up, Kay. What have you got on him?’
‘I’ll put his name through channels and as soon as I know anything, you’ll get the report.’
‘I didn’t ask what you’re gonna do, I said what have you got?’
Reed sighed. ‘He gave us a different version of his name. When we pressed him he claimed he prefers to call himself Kennedy. That was him flying the Cessna earlier. Drives a Mazda MX5 sports car, wears expensive clothes and lives in a smart part of London.’
‘What does he do?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Why was he here?’
‘He came in with Heather Weston.’
The leather-faced man butted in. His voice was husky, damaged. ‘He’s not your usual peace protester. Give us your best guess, Mr Reed.’
‘He’s got money. He didn’t look like a journalist. If you really want a guess, my sergeant reckons he fancies Weston. Hayter said he kept leaping to her defence.’
‘Not the cleverest of men, your Mr Hayter,’ said the man.
The Chief Inspector didn’t disagree but he wasn’t going to say so.
Olly Gandrell seemed to think the conversation had moved far enough down the pecking order for him to be allowed a turn.
‘Did they see anything?’
‘They were inside the new bunker. There’s not a lot to see.’
‘You’re meant to have a guard on the gate.’
‘We did. Your contractors dug an access duct into the bunker, left it wide open and didn’t tell us. We found their footprints inside it. You also left a stack of briefing notes in the bunker.’
‘Did they see them.’
‘They weren’t there long enough to read them and when they were searched, they didn’t have a copy.’
He saw Leatherface making a note and his temper showed for a moment in his voice. ‘I can tell you, it’s no joke having to push our luck with the trespass laws. You think we’d miss a chance to do them for something real like theft or criminal damage? If I had my way we’d leave them a whole lot longer after we picked them up on the cameras. We’d let them do something they’d regret, something that would really stick, like the charge Weston’s facing for attacking Hayter.’
The Base Commander just looked at him. ‘Camera thirty-nine? That was the camera that picked them up?’