'You don't want it, Dwight, so keep your bad-mouthing to yourself.'
'What I'm saying-'
'Don't.'
'You goddam hear me, Ray. What I'm saying, we are professionals and we are trained and we are paid. The young woman that he's got his hooks into – hear me, because I didn't just take time on the computer for Moen's file, I went into current assessments of La Cosa Nostra, down in Sicily, that's a killing ground – the young woman is an innocent.'
The Country Chief, a moment, softened. 'Maybe, Dwight, you sell us all short, maybe we're all thinking like you. And maybe we should all clap our hands and sing our hymns and get on our knees and thank our God that He didn't give us the problem. Have you got the budget figures for last month? Trouble is, it's a good plan. Might not, but might just get to work. Bring the budget through, please.'
When she looked from the window, she saw him lying back, eyes closed, in his car. She thought of the grief of a retired major and how he would writhe in self-guilt. She thought of the body on the trolley.
Anyone who knew her or worked with her would have described Mavis Finch as a difficult person. Her family was up north, she had no friends in London, there was no one who would have shouted her corner. Those who lived in the same block of two- and one-bedroom maisonettes in a south-west suburb of the capital would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's complaint flow about the noise of their televisions, about their pets, about their litter, about late visitors. Those who worked with her in the bank in the Fulham Road would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's carping criticism of balance sheets produced late, of account errors, of extended lunch hours, of days taken for minor illness. She was unloved and unliked by both neighbours and work colleagues. To the more charitable she was someone to be pitied, to the less charitable she was a vindictive bitch. But the life of this lonely thirty-seven-year-old woman, without a man or a child or a friend or a hobby, was governed by a rule book. The rule book laid down the volume of her neighbours' televisions, what pets could be kept, when their litter should be put out, up to what time visitors were permitted to come banging on doors…
It was because of the needle eye of Mavis Finch for the pages of her rule book that Detective Sergeant Harry Compton, S06, took an early dinner in the hotel fronting onto Portman Square. Her rule book for conduct in the bank on the Fulham Road extended beyond matters of lateness, delays, mistakes, sickness. Regarded by her managers as best kept distant from customers, it had been, the previous June, a combination of holidays and pregnancies and sickness that had forced them to detail Mavis Finch to counter work. It was because she had been at the counter, mid-morning, nine months before, that DS Compton, Fraud Squad, toyed with a cod mornay in the dining room of a five-star hotel. Probably, Mavis I inch, that long-ago morning, would have been alone among the counter clerks in having read in full the texts of the Drugs Trafficking Act (1984), the Criminal Justice Acts (1988 and 1993) and the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1994). The Acts, taken in lotality, made it obligatory for a bank to disclose
'suspicious and large transactions'. Of course, that mid-morning, Mavis Finch reported the deposit of?28,000 in?50 notes because had she not reported it, she would, herself, have been guilty of criminal conduct. She had taken the name, Giles Blake, the address, she had noted what she described in the spidery handwriting of her report as an
'impatience' by the customer… Compton watched the target, sipped mineral water, listened.
And so typical, Compton thought, that the buggers at NCIS should have taken from June to March to evaluate the bank's disclosure before passing the detail to Fraud Squad. Bloody typical. To Harry Compton, the National Criminal Intelligence Service should more often get its hands out from under its butt.
He had, because time was precious and allocated fiercely to priorities, around five hours of desk time and an evening to decide whether to hold open a file on Giles Blake or whether to scrawl across the existing seven sheets that 'no further action' was warranted.
The desk time had produced nothing tangible, no evidence of illegality, but Compton had a nose, nostrils, that sensed an incomplete picture. A nice house in Surrey for Mr Blake, a nice wife and children for Mr Blake, bank accounts and stocks and money in building societies for Mr Blake. Too much that was 'nice', and not enough to substantiate it. Compton had gone as a young detective from the Harrow station to Anti-Terrorist Branch, and found the surveillance of Irish 'sleepers' in smoky and beer-stinking pubs to be a decent definition of boredom. He had sought and found stimulation, he had transferred to Fraud Squad. He liked to say, if he met up, increasingly rarely, with guys from Harrow or Anti-Terrorist, that S06 was the steepest learning curve in the Metropolitan Police. He was studying, nights, business management and accountancy, and when he'd those qualifications he'd be going for law. But the old nose still counted.
What had twitched the nose of Harry Compton, stung the nostrils, was the guest that Giles Blake had brought to dinner.
The tables were adjacent. They liked to boast, from top to bottom of S06, that their surveillance procedures were the best, better than Anti-Terrorist, better than Flying Squad. The ethos was 'proximity'. They had to blend, they had to risk burning out. It was not sufficient merely to observe, long range, they needed 'proximity' to listen.
He'd heard once on a course, a hot afternoon, central heating turned too high, head beginning to drop, a lecture line that had hit him. 'The accountants are more dangerous than the killers – the killers are small-time scumbags, the accountants threaten a whole society…' He had used up the five hours of his allocated desk time, he had started to burrow into his evening's surveillance time, tracked Giles Blake from his London office to Portman Square, to the hotel, to the reception desk, to the bar, to the restaurant. The guest had come to the restaurant, shaken hands, hugged, sat down.
'A good flight?'
'It's every day, every week, not in your papers here, a strike of the airline workers, just two hours – so we were late away. Nothing changes in Palermo.'
His nose twitched, his nostrils smarted.
The light came on over the porch. Axel flicked the wiper switch and the windscreen was smeared clear. She came out of the door. The windscreen blurred with the rain. She hurried through the small gate and she was hunched small with her arms tight around her body as if that would keep her dry. At the car she rapped her fingers on the passenger window. He did not hurry himself. He tossed the Time magazine copy behind him and onto the back seat and then he pulled out the ashtray and stubbed the cigarette. The rain ran on her hair and her face and she hit the passenger window with her fist. He leaned across and unlocked the door, pushed it open.
She ducked into the car and was wiping the rain off her head and from her face. She turned to him, angry. There was a brightness in her eyes, but her face was wrecked because her mouth was screwed, good anger. It was useful for Axel Moen to see how she handled good anger.
'Thanks, thank you very much.'
'What do you thank me for?'
'Thanks for making me stand out there, get bloody wet, while you read your magazine, smoke your cigarette-'
'Care for one?' He held the packet in front of her, Lucky Strike, out of the carton from duty-free at Fiumicino.
'It's a dirty habit. Thanks for keeping me in the rain while you read and smoke, before you open the door-'
'So you got wet, how's that cause to thank me?'
'Are you stupid?'
'Sometimes, sometimes not.'
'It was sarcasm. In thanking you for getting me wet, I was being sarcastic.'
'I find it best, Charley, always, so there's not misunderstandings, to say what I mean.'