‘Hold on,’ Sanders said in warning as the car approached the house. His eyes had narrowed to slits, his face close to the windscreen.
‘What is it?’ Hepton was looking, too, but could see nothing out of place. Sanders drove past the house without stopping. ‘What is it?’ Hepton repeated in a low hiss.
‘Too many lights on.’
‘What?’
‘All the lights inside the house are on. So is the light outside the front door, and the one to the side of the garage. It even looks as though there might be lights on in the garden.’
‘So?’ Hepton didn’t want to think about what Sanders might be implying.
‘So, something’s wrong.’ He pulled the car in to the kerb and stopped, shutting off the engine and killing the lights.
‘What are we going to do? Just wait here? Jilly’s in there! We can’t—’
But Sanders was staring at the number plate of the car parked in front of them. The car itself was a Vauxhall Cavalier like his. He seemed not to have heard Hepton’s outburst.
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘That’s Thommo’s car.’
‘Thommo? Who’s Thommo?’
‘The other lot. MI5. He’s one of their... well, men.’ He stared at Hepton, his face draining of colour. ‘We better go in, but slowly. Keep with me.’
They opened the car doors and closed them — as Sanders instructed — quietly. Sanders was already pulling his gun from its holster as they approached the house. Hepton was frantic now. What had happened? There was no one to meet them at the front door, no guard. Sanders pushed open the door. There were voices coming from within, though muted. Everyone was being very quiet indeed. Then someone came into the hall, saw them, and turned his head back into the living room.
‘Sir,’ he called. ‘Visitors.’
Another man, balding but not yet middle-aged, his moustache thickly black, popped his head into the hall, stared at Hepton and Sanders, then lifted his eyes towards the ceiling and gave a great groan of relief.
‘Sanders, you bastard. Thank God. I thought they’d got you.’
Sanders was slipping his pistol back beneath his arm. He had become very businesslike, his voice like something lifted from cold storage.
‘Fill me in,’ he said.
The man looked from Sanders to Hepton, then back to Sanders. Sanders turned towards Hepton, who knew what he was going to say and cut in first.
‘I’m not leaving. I’ve got a right to hear it too.’ He looked at the man. ‘Is Jilly all right?’
‘She’s not here,’ the man said levelly. ‘They’ve taken her with them, I suppose.’
‘What about Bentley and Castle?’ asked Sanders.
‘Dead,’ said the man. ‘A neat job, clean. One knifed in the back, the other done with a garrotte.’
Neat, clean. Hepton was thinking of only one person: Harry. Sanders seemed to have read his mind, and nodded towards him before turning again to the man.
‘All right, Thommo. I need details.’
‘When you weren’t here, I had to contact your department.’
‘I appreciate that. Has anyone arrived?’
‘Not yet. We only got here ourselves quarter of an hour ago.’
‘Did you get anything on tape?’
‘That’s how we knew. No voices, though, apart from the woman’s.’
‘Jilly,’ Hepton said. His voice was close to cracking.
‘So if your surveillance team heard it all,’ Sanders said, his tone accusatory, ‘how come everyone had gone before you got here?’
‘Surveillance is just that, Sanders. They called us, we came. All told, it took us about five minutes. But by then...’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘This is a mess,’ Sanders said, rubbing his temples.
‘Jilly,’ Hepton repeated. Sanders put an arm around him.
‘Go sit down,’ he ordered, ‘I’ll fix something to drink.’
Hepton began to move towards the living room.
‘Not in there,’ the man said. ‘That’s where we took the bodies.’
Sanders nodded. ‘Go upstairs, Martin. I’ll bring a drink up to you.’
Hepton felt beaten, utterly beaten, for the first time in what seemed an age. Harry had won, Villiers had won, they’d all won. And he had lost. He nodded his head and began to climb the stairs. Sanders and the other man — Thommo — were speaking together in hushed tones before he had reached the first-floor landing. He caught a few phrases.
‘Clean-up party... how did they know?... tapes... phone call...’
Tapes! Hepton looked down and saw that he was clutching the carrier bag to his body. He ran his fingers over it. He still had the tapes. He walked across the landing, but instead of going into his own room, he entered what had been Jilly’s. She had been reading: there was a paperback lying open, face down, on the bed. It was one of the titles from the living room shelves, a modern romance. On her bedside cabinet sat a cup half full of tea. Hepton touched it; there was still a hint of warmth to it.
He had no doubts at all about who had taken Jilly. He even thought he knew why: as a warning to him, a personal warning not to go any further. They had to be desperate. They must know that it was not only Hepton’s battle now; that others were involved. Yes, they had to know that. And yet they still wanted to scare him off. Why? Because of what he thought he knew, that portion of the secret he had not yet revealed to anyone? Whatever the answer, it was clear that they still saw him as a threat.
That thought gave him heart.
What was more, the sooner he solved the final riddles, the sooner he might be reunited with Jilly. But he had to be careful. Her life was in their hands now, in Harry’s hands. He had to be very careful indeed. And sitting here wasn’t going to do anybody any good. He needed a TV monitor and a video recorder. Ideally, he needed two monitors and two recorders — good recorders at that, with a freeze-frame facility that actually froze the frame, and didn’t make it twitch or smear. A hard image, that was what he needed.
He realised that he wasn’t going to go to pieces; that the worst was over. He felt calm and controlled. God knows why, but he did.
There was a knock at the door, and it opened. ‘Oh, there you are.’ Sanders entered, carrying a bottle of whisky under his arm and a crystal glass in each hand. Hepton shook his head.
‘That’s not what I need,’ he said. ‘What I really need is a TV lab. Your surveillance personnel probably have one. Get me there, then I’ll show you what’s on these.’ He slapped the tapes.
Sanders studied him, to ascertain whether he might be suffering from shock or something similar. All he saw was determination and a mind ready for work.
‘I’ll call in,’ he said. ‘I think I know just the place.’
‘One question,’ said Hepton. ‘How did they know about this place?’
Sanders shook his head. ‘I wish to God I knew.’
29
It was after midnight, but the man they had summoned back from his bed and his wife to this cold building in the middle of a bleak industrial estate near Notting Hill seemed not to mind.
‘No, really,’ he said. ‘This is what makes it all worthwhile.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hepton. The man had introduced himself as Graeme Izzard. Thommo had assured them that he was the best ‘pictures’ man in the business.
‘I work mainly for Special Branch,’ Izzard told Hepton. ‘Serious Crime, that sort of thing. You know, someone walks into a building society and shoots dead a teller. They capture the whole thing on camera, but the image is too blurred to be recognisable. I clean it up until it’s sharp from arsehole to breakfast time. Which reminds me...’ He looked at his watch, then turned to Sanders. ‘There’s an all-night caff, just up the road and turn right. You can’t miss it. There’ll be about a dozen cabs outside. It’s where the drivers go for their break. Get us, let’s think, something hot, a sausage sandwich, something like that. Plus some cold sandwiches for later, corned beef or salami. And tell Alfie, the man behind the counter, that Izzard says he’s to give you a flask of tea. Got that?’