There were eight floors to Cripps House. The estate had been built in 1949 and was ageing, decaying, but the housing authority always found resources to daub new paint on the doors and windows. The lift was regularly maintained. There were no muggings or thievings in that block, no drugs sold and no syringes left on the landings. On the eighth floor, at the end of the open walkway, perched like a sentry tower with a view to the main road and the parking areas, was the home of Herbie Packer, retired bus driver, widower, never in trouble with the police. Elizabeth Packer, who, when she had worked, had cleaned rooms at the Waldorf Hotel, had been dead now for four years. By the time Albert, not yet Mister, had been twelve years old the regular visitors to the top-floor flat had been teachers and social workers. When he was fourteen they'd been replaced by uniformed and plainclothed police. The refrain from Herbie and Elizabeth Packer to them all had been: 'He's a good boy, really, heart of gold, trouble is he's just got caught up with the wrong crowd.' There was no shifting them on that, even when the police came and arrested him and he went down, aged fifteen, for a year in the youth detention centre at Feltham – and at nineteen, when the door was broken open at dawn and he had been taken away to do two years in Pentonville. And still, as he proudly told it, they refused to blame him. He took the lift up. In any of the other blocks on the estate, all named after cabinet ministers of the day, he would have seen graffiti on the lift walls, and the contact numbers of tarts and pushers. There would have been the screwed-up paper balls on the floor that held heroin wraps, and even in daytime there would have been a mugging risk in the airless shadowed hall beside the lift shaft. But his father lived in Cripps House and the use of a pickaxe handle and electric terminals had secured the safety of the older residents, and small sums of money in plain brown envelopes judiciously placed in the right hands ensured that the building stayed clean and painted and that the lift worked.
Out of the lift, he paused on the walkway and looked across Albion Road to the more distant Highbury Grove. His sight line travelled past the Holloway Road and locked on to the central tower of HMP Pentonville. By screwing up his eyes, straining, he could make out the regimented lines of cell windows on the back of D Wing. During his two years there, he had made the critical contacts of his adult life. As a result of time in Pentonville he had met the men who armed him, distributed for him, dealt for him, and the Eagle, and there his ties to the Cruncher had been strengthened. He swore softly… His eyes raked back over the dull skyline of towers, church spires and chimneys. Over the wall of the walkway were Dalton House and Morrison House, then the largest of the estate's blocks, Attlee House. Attlee House had been the Cruncher's home.
He could put his life into boxes. To each he allocated a varied amount of time and commitment.
One held the matter of the priority of discipline and respect, and had been dealt with. Another box was his father. He rang the doorbell and set the smile on his face.
The matter of the missing Cruncher was isolated in its own box.
He held his father in his arms and felt the thin bones of the old man's shoulders. Years ago he could have bought a bungalow for his parents down on the coast but his mother had always refused to leave Cripps House. Now, in his seventy-fourth year, his father was the same, wouldn't move closer to Vicky, Alex, May and Julie, his daughters. He stayed put: it was his home. They went in through the door and Mister kept his arm round his father's shoulders. The living room was dominated by the outsize widescreen TV and a soap was playing with the sound turned high because the old man's hearing was going.
'You're looking well, son.'
'Not too bad, Dad, considering.'
'I'm not too bad myself.'
'Is there anything you want, Dad?'
'No, nothing, I want for nothing.'
'You just have to shout. You know that.'
'Nothing, you're a good lad… I'm pleased to see you back. Hasn't been right without you being around.'
'Just a bit of a mistake, Dad. They was putting two and two together, making five. Nothing for you to worry about.'
It was as close as they ever came to talking about his life. He sat on the settee that had been pulled apart, half a dozen times a year, in the old days by the CID from Caledonian Road, his heels resting on the same carpet that had been lifted by the police so many times. Beside the television was the shelf and cupboard unit that had never fitted together properly since the detectives had dismantled it for the first time thirty-two years before. Whatever the teachers and social workers had said of him, that he was a hooligan and a thug, his father had never criticized him, never raised a hand or a voice in anger to him. All he had been allowed to provide for the flat was a new cooker and fridge for the kitchen, the fancy electric fire with lit artificial coal, and the widescreen television. In turn, he hadn't allowed his father to visit him on remand, for the same reason that the Princess had not been permitted to come to Brixton, or to sit in the public gallery at the trial. They talked about the programmes on the TV, and the new striker from the Cameroons just signed by Arsenal up the road in Highbury, and the weather, and the girls' babies; mostly he listened and his father talked.
When it was time for him to be moving, he said, 'I thought I might call in at St Matthew's, Dad – thought I might do that.'
They were on the walkway. Over his father's shoulder was the looming mass of Attlee House and he could see the boarded-up window where the Cruncher had been a kid. He kissed his father and hurried away.
The diplomat's signal moved electronically to the Secret Intelligence Service building on the south bank of the Thames river. The name, Duncan Dubbs, and the address, 48 River Mansions, Narrow Street, London E14, were fed into their computers. They failed to register a trace. The Sarajevo signal was recopied and passed back over the river to Thames House, home of the Security Service.
He asked for Matron.
'What name is it, please?' the receptionist asked curtly.
'Packer, Albert Packer.'
The receptionist was new. He hadn't seen her before and his name meant nothing to her. 'Do you have an appointment?'
'I just called by.'
'I know she's rather busy this afternoon.'
'Just tell her that Albert Packer's here. Thank you.'
From the outside it was a depressing Victorian building with a high facade of grimed brick. Inside there was all the light and warmth that fresh-cut flowers could muster. With his eldest sister and his father, he had brought his mother here four years ago.
The tumour in her stomach had been inoperable. The receptionist spoke on the phone and he saw the surprise she registered. She told him that he should go up, the implication being that Matron would clear her desk for him, and he said he knew the way. His mother had lingered for a week in St Matthew's Hospice before ending her life in peace. He loved the quiet of the building, and the smell of its cleanness, the light in the corridors and on the stairs, the scent of the flowers. It no longer held terrors for him.
Matron met him outside her office, wearing a prim blue uniform always decorated with her medal from the British army's nursing corps, and from her chest hung an old gold watch. She was a tall, gaunt-faced woman from the west of Ireland. She was formidable until she spoke, severe until a stranger saw the sparkle of wit in her eyes. On a cold February afternoon, four years ago, when he had brought in his mother, and he'd been refusing to accept the doctors' diagnosis, and he'd seen Matron for the first time, he'd asked defiantly, 'Is it ever possible, does it ever happen, that a patient walks out of here?' Looking him straight in the eye, she'd replied, 'No, it never happens, it isn't ever possible and it would not be helpful to think it.' Few people told Mister the truth, unvarnished, with no adornments. In the next bed to his mother had been an artist who had exhibited with the best, and on the other side of her had been a retired colonel from the Brigade of Guards. His mother, the hotel cleaner, had been between talent and status, given equal care, equal love, equal amounts of pain-killing drugs.