She hefted it in her hand, slapped back the magazine, and thumbed the safety catch on and off. Both of them knew that if she was forced to use it, the end would not be far away.
“They decided that I should be armed, then?”
“Yes.”
Fetching her waterproof mountain jacket, she unzipped the collar section, pulled out the hood, and zipped it up again with the Malyah inside. The hood effectively hid the slight bulge.
Mansoor nodded approvingly.
“Can I ask you something?” she said tentatively.
“Ask.”
“We seem to be taking our time. A recce today, a rest day tomorrow… What are we waiting for? Why don’t we just… do it? Now that the boatman is dead, every day makes it more likely that…”
“That they’ll find us?” He smiled.
“People don’t get shot here every day,” she persisted. “There will be detectives, there will be pathologists, forensics people, ballistics… What’s that round of yours going to tell them, for example?”
“Nothing. It’s a standard calibre.”
“In Pakistan, perhaps, but not here. The security people here aren’t stupid, Faraj. If they smell a rat they’ll come looking. They’ll send their best people. And you can forget any idea you might have about British fair play; if they have the faintest suspicion of what we are planning to do-and a search of this house would give them a pretty good idea-they will kill us outright, proof or no proof.”
“You’re angry,” he said, amused. Both of them were conscious that it was the first time she had used his name.
She lowered her fists to the table. Closed her eyes. “I’m saying that we can accomplish nothing if we are dead. And that with every day that passes it becomes more likely that… that they will find and kill us.”
He looked at her dispassionately. “There are things that you don’t know,” he said. “There are reasons for waiting.”
She met his gaze for a moment-the gaze that at times made him look fifty, rather than a score of months short of thirty-and bowed her head in acceptance. “I ask only that you don’t underestimate the people we are up against.”
Faraj shook his head. “I don’t underestimate them, believe me. I know the British, and I know just how lethal they can be.”
She looked at him for a moment, and then, taking the binoculars, opened the door, stepped outside on to the shingle, and scanned the horizon to east and west.
“Anything?” he asked, when she returned.
“Nothing,” she said.
He watched her. Watched as her eyes flickered to the jacket containing the concealed Malyah.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shook her head. Took an uncertain step back towards the front door, and then stopped.
“What is it?” he said again, more gently this time.
“They’re looking for us,” she replied. “I can feel it.”
He nodded slowly. “So be it.”
24
Pulling her coat tightly around her, Liz installed herself on the bench overlooking the sea. The mudflats were underwater now, and the incoming tide slapped fretfully at the sea wall in front of her. A seagull landed heavily beside the bench, saw that Liz had no food with her, and swung away again on to the wind. It was cold, and the sky was hardening to an ominous slate grey at the horizon, but for the time being the village of Marsh Creake remained washed in light.
The enhanced CCTV tape, according to Goss, was expected back from Norwich at noon. The Special Branch man had been surprised to see Liz back so soon, he had told her, given that Whitten’s investigation had thrown up no clue as to Ray Gunter’s killer. The detective superintendent had told Goss that he was “ninety-eight per cent certain” that the murder was connected with drug-smuggling. His theory was that Gunter had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had seen a consignment brought to shore, and received a bullet in the head for his pains. Whitten wasn’t particularly worried by the untypical calibre of the fatal round; British gangsters, he reckoned, used any firearms they could get their hands on.
Liz continued to turn over in her mind the facts that she had learned from Peregrine Lakeby and Cherisse Hogan. At another level, she came to a decision about Mark. As far as she was concerned, the affair was now over. There would be moments when she would long for his voice and his touch, but she would simply have to endure them. Quite quickly, she knew, such moments would become fleeting, and then they would cease altogether, and the physical memory of him would fade.
It would not be a painless process, but it would be one with which Liz was familiar. The first time had been the worst. A few years after joining the Service she had attended the private view of an exhibition of photographs by a woman she had known at university. She had not known the woman well, and several address books must have been trawled through when the guest list was made up. Amongst the others present was a handsome, scruffily dressed man of about her own age. His name was Ed, and like her he had only the faintest of connections to their host.
They escaped to a Soho pub. Ed, she discovered, was a freelance TV researcher, and was currently involved in putting together a film about the lifestyle of New Age travellers. He had just completed a fortnight’s stint accompanying one such tribe as they moved from campsite to campsite in an old bus, and with his rough-edged, wind-burned good looks he might easily have been one of their number.
She proceeded with caution, but their mutual attraction had an air of inevitability about it, and she was soon spending nights in the converted warehouse in Bermondsey that he shared with a shifting cast of artists, writers and filmmakers. She told him that she worked in one of the personnel departments of the Home Office, that her job was fulfilling in an unspectacular sort of way, and that she couldn’t be contacted at work. Ed, not on the surface the possessive type, appeared to have no problem with this. His researches took him away for days and sometimes weeks at a time, and she was careful never to press him for details of these absences, in case he should do the same thing to her. They lived lives which were physically separate for the most part, but which were lit by passionate points of contact. Ed was clever, he was entertaining, and he viewed the world from a fascinatingly oblique perspective. Most weekends there was a party, or something like one, at the Bermondsey flat, and after a grim week with the Organised Crime Group, the arty, kaleidoscopic world of which she had part-time membership provided a blissful escape.
One Sunday morning she was lying in bed in Bermondsey, the papers strewn about her, watching the slow progress of the barges and the Thames coalers on the river.
“Where exactly did you say you worked?” he asked, flicking through the pages of a colour supplement.
“Westminster,” said Liz vaguely.
“Whereabouts in Westminster exactly?”
“Off Horseferry Road. Why?”
He reached for his coffee mug. “Just wondering.”
“Please,” she yawned, “I don’t want to think about work. It’s the weekend.”
He drank, and returned the mug to the carpet. “Would that be Horseferry House in Dean Ryle Street, or Grenadier House in Horseferry Road?”
“Grenadier House,” said Liz warily. “Why?”
“What number Horseferry Road is Grenadier House?”
She sat slowly upright and looked at him. “Ed, why are you asking me these questions?”
“What number? Tell me.”
“Not until you tell me why you want to know.”
He stared ahead of him. “Because I rang the main Home Office enquiries number at Queen Anne’s Gate last week, trying to get a message to you. I said you worked in personnel and they gave me the number of Grenadier House. I rang it and asked to leave a message for you, and the person I spoke to had clearly never heard your name in her life. I had to spell it for her twice, and then she thought she had put me on hold but she hadn’t, and I could hear her talking to someone else, and that someone else explaining that you never confirm or deny people, just get the caller to leave a name and number. So I left my name and number, and of course I never heard back from you, so I rang again, and this time someone else took my name and number but wouldn’t say if you worked there or not, so I rang a third time, and this time I was passed on to a supervisor, who said my earlier calls were being processed, and no doubt the officer in question would get back to me in her own good time. So I’m wondering, what the hell is this all about? What have you not told me, Liz?”