"Easy, old chap."
"It is not easy to break out of Iran and then to come home to an inquisition."
"Quite right, point taken. Mattie, there were times that you fainted, other times when you were semi-conscious. When you were really groggy, could you have named him then?"
The room was shadowed and dingy. The light came from a ceiling triple, but one of the bulbs had popped early in the evening and George had stated that he had no replacements and would not be able to buy more bulbs until Monday. The furniture was old but lacking in quality, a Sotheby's man wouldn't have given the room a second glance, not as good a room as the dining room.
"When you're in a place like that, Henry, you cling to anything that's sacred. You hold on to your family, to your Service, your country, your God if you have one. Any damned thing that is important in your life you hold on to. When the pain's so bloody awful, the only things you can hold to are the kernels of your life. You have that feeling that if you broke, you would be giving them all that is sacred to you."
"I just have to be sure, that I understand you."
And it was such a damn shame… He thought that old Henry, tatty old Henry Carter who wouldn't have known a thumb screw from a bottle opener, might just be a better interrogator than the investigator in Tabriz.
•**
Park drove, and Parrish was beside him with the directions written on a sheet of paper. He'd asked where they were going, and Bill had said that the building was called Century House. He'd asked why they were going there, and Bill said it was because the Chief had told him to present himself with Keeper in tow. No point in any more questions, because Bill hadn't any more answers.
They came down the Albert Embankment, and the tower blocks loomed against the night skyline. There was only one block alive with light.
Parrish waved for Park to pull into the forecourt. The Chief Investigation Officer was on the steps, and looking at his watch, and the ACIO was beside him, and then coming forward to organize the parking space. They climbed from the car, and Park locked the doors. They walked towards the main entrance. He saw a small brass plate for Century House.
The Chief Investigation Officer nodded curtly at Parrish then moved to stand in front of Park.
"Inside, your opinion isn't wanted, you just listen."
They were offered drinks, and on behalf of all of them the Chief declined.
Not an evening for social pleasantries, Park thought, just an evening for learning the realities of power.
He stood in front of the desk and the Chief Investigation Officer was beside him, and the ACIO was on the other side and a half pace behind, and Parrish was out in the secretary's office with a young twerp watching over him. Parrish hadn't even made it inside. The lesson was delivered by two men.
One sat in an armchair, and did the talking, and was called DDG, and the other sat on the front of the desk. The one in the armchair drawled and the one on the desk, with his socks held up by suspenders, had a voice that was silk and honey.
He heard it from the armchair.
"You don't have a right to the detail, Park, but I will tell you what I can, and you should understand that everything I propose has been considered and approved by your immediate superiors… In your work for Customs and Excise Investigation Division, you are a signatory to the Official Secrets Act. That signature of yours is an obligation to life-long confidentiality, whatever recent events may have suggested to the contrary. What you hear in this room is covered by the Act. Between your superiors and ourselves, Park, there is a deal. You are being volunteered… "
"That's nice. What have I done to deserve this?"
"Just button it, Park," the Chief said, side of mouth.
"… Charlie Eshraq runs heroin. He is also a field agent of some value to the Service. Mr Matthew Furniss is one of the finest professional officers to have been reared by this Service in the last two decades. That's all fact. Eshraq, for reasons that are not your business, is about to return to Iran and he will be taking across the frontier a certain amount of hardware, purchased, as I am sure you will have deduced, with the proceeds of the sale of his last load of heroin. He is going back into Iran, and he will be staying there. He will be told tomorrow that should he renege on an agreement with us, should he ever return to the United Kingdom, then he will face prosecution on the basis of the evidence that you and your colleagues have collected against him.
"You will join Eshraq on Monday, you will accompany him to Turkey, and you will satisfy yourself and your superiors that he has indeed travelled back into Iran. Following your return to the U K, it has been decided by your superiors that you will then be posted as DLO to Bogota in Colombia. I can assure you that it will be my intention to make certain that you have there the full cooperation of Service personnel in that region. That's the deal."
"All neatly wrapped up between you, no loose ends. And if I tell you that it stinks, that I don't believe it? He doesn't belong to your outfit and if he does I'd like to know what's the point of my going to Bogota if you lot are running the stuff in the back door from Iran?"
"Watch it, Park."
"No, Chief, I won't… Just to get Mr Furniss' young friend off the hook and just to get me out of the way. That's it, isn't it?"
"Quite right, Park, we may just have to get you out of the way. Do you remember a Leroy Winston Man vers. An early morning interrogation, unsupervised, quite outside the book…? You do? I gather the file isn't closed yet, some ugly first shots across the Division's bows from his solicitor.
Isn't that so, Chief?"
"I think you're shit, sir."
"Five years' imprisonment, minimum. You could bet money that we'd know the judge. For the beating of a helpless black prisoner, it could be a bit more than five. Goodnight, Park. You'll enjoy Bogota. It's full of your type. Goodnight, gentlemen."
Park went for the door.
If he had looked into the face of the Chief Investigation Officer then he might just have put his fist into the man's teeth, and if he had looked at the ACIO then he might just have kneed the bugger.
"By the by, Park, a little note of warning…" The voice drawled behind him, an incoming tide over shingle. "Don't play any clever games with Eshraq, I think he'd give you more of a run for your money than Man vers did."
The dog slept in a wicker basket beside the Aga in the kitchen, on its back with its legs in the air, and wheezed like a drayman.
The sound of snoring filled the night quiet of the house. He thought that a burglar would have to have kicked over the kitchen table to have woken the brute. But it was not the Rottweiler's growled breathing that kept Henry Carter awake.
He would have been asleep by now, well asleep because it had been a hard enough day and rounded off with a good malt, if it had not been for the nagging worry.
The descriptions of the torture had been so wretchedly vivid. The telling of the brutality had been so cruelly sharp.
Never, not ever, would Henry have accused Mattie of telling
"war stories". Nothing was volunteered, everything had to be chiselled for, but in his own laconic way Mattie had transported Henry into a world that was deeply, desperately, frightening.
He understood why he had been chosen for the debrief.
Quite impossible that the Director General would have permitted any of those aggressive youngsters that now seemed to fill the building to be let loose on a man of Mattie's stature.
Perhaps the Director General had been wrong. Perhaps one of the young men, brash and cocksure, would have been better able to understand how Mattie had survived the pain, had survived and kept Eshraq's name safe.
God forbid that he should be selling Mattie short, but Henry, coward that he was and without shame of it, could not understand it.