The assassination of Pyotr Aleksandrov had been carried out in the same exemplary manner as all of their other work. If it was to be their final operation, they could hardly have ended on a more satisfactory note. They had done what they had been asked to do and, once more, had demonstrated to anyone else foolish enough to consider working against the motherland that the reach of the SVR was long, and that nowhere was safe.
“The next stop on this service will be Winchester. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform edge.”
Beck got up, lowered his case to the floor, and made his way to the vestibule where he waited for the train to pull into the station. It had been a straightforward journey. There had been only a handful of passengers in the carriage with him, and none of them had given him any cause for alarm.
The train rolled through into the station and he saw the time on the glowing departure board that was suspended halfway down the platform: it was eleven. The train stopped, the doors opened and Beck disembarked. He went over to an empty bench and sat down, taking advantage of his age so that it might appear that he needed to take a breath. He counted ten other passengers who disembarked, but none of them had been in his carriage. None of them were repeats from earlier. He waited until they had made their way through the barriers, waited another minute, and then followed them. It was impossible to be sure, but he was as confident as he could be; he had been thorough and careful, and he had seen no indication that he was being followed.
He was black. It was safe to proceed.
There was a taxi rank outside the station, with three cars waiting to pick up passengers. Beck opened the rear door of the first car in line and lowered himself inside.
“Where to?”
“King’s Worthy, please.”
“Right you are.”
The car pulled away and Beck allowed himself to relax a little. He had been doing this for years and yet, despite his experience, it never got easier. Nervousness and anxiety were part and parcel of the work, but that was good. It was as he always reminded his agents: nerves kept you sharp. Relaxation was a symptom of complacency, and succumbing to complacency was often the final mistake an agent would make.
It was a little after eleven when the taxi arrived at the house. Beck paid the driver and waited until he had pulled away before he used his fob to open the gates. He walked up the gravelled drive to the front door, thinking about how quintessentially English this all was: the village, the ancient church, the wisteria and roses climbing up the wall of the house, the owl hooting in a nearby tree.
He knocked on the door and waited.
Nothing.
He looked through the letterbox. The hall light was lit, but, save that, there was no other sign that anyone was home. They would be conducting a thorough dry-cleaning run. They were careful, and that, usually, would have been good. Tonight was different. They needed to get out of the country as quickly as they could.
He took out his key, unlocked the door and went inside to wait.
Southwold
24
The SOCOs had finished their work at Aleksandrov’s property and Kennedy said that a small intelligence team could now go inside. Tanner stayed behind, but Milton, Ross and Shah were driven in two unmarked police cars to Wymering Road. It was a residential street, entirely unremarkable except for the fact that it had been closed, with two police cars parked nose-to-nose at one end and another two at the other. There was a tighter cordon around the Aleksandrov property and its neighbours, and the only people allowed inside were police, military and security service personnel. The crime scene technicians were gathered outside, next to a plain white van, removing their anti-contamination suits and storing the evidence that they had collected. A team of officers were removing the parts of an evidence tent from the back of a police van. It would be erected around the front door, a temporary measure until the property could be professionally secured to prevent unauthorised access.
The driver of the car told them to wait. “Let me check that they’re clear.”
Shah’s phone buzzed and he stepped aside to take the call.
Milton took out a packet of cigarettes, put one to his lips and lit it.
Ross turned to him. “Can I bum one?”
Milton gave Ross the packet. She cupped the end of the cigarette and Milton lit it for her.
“This has got to be one of the weirdest evenings I’ve ever had,” she said, blowing smoke.
“It’s up there,” Milton replied.
“I mean, seriously—this is the last thing that you would expect to find in a place like this. I know they’ve hit people in London, but here? It’s nuts.”
“I doubt it makes much difference to them.”
She gestured over toward the house. “You think they did it? The Russians?”
“I don’t know,” Milton said, blowing smoke. “But Aleksandrov was one of theirs for a long time, and he did a lot of damage. The SVR has a long memory.”
“Have you dealt with them before?”
“The SVR?”
She nodded.
“Once or twice,” Milton said.
“And?”
“And I wouldn’t be surprised if we find their fingerprints all over this.”
Ross looked like she was going to probe him for more, but the driver said that they could go in. They went inside the front door and were led along the corridor and into the kitchen. Milton took it all in with a practiced, professional eye: it was an unremarkable room, without much in the way of personality, and distinguished only by the fact that a dead body was laid out across the floor. Milton saw the gunshot wound and concluded, from the scorch marks around the entry wound, that the weapon had been fired at close range. There was blood on the floor, already congealing across it and over the grouted lines between the tiles.
Milton looked over at Ross. She was pale and had put her hand down on the counter to steady herself.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“First time you’ve seen a dead body?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
“I’m not sure I want to.”
The police had taken the necessary photographs, but a technician was still in the room with a video camera. He focused on the body and then backed up to take in the rest of the room. Milton took Ross by the wrist and guided her back out into the corridor so that they would be out of his way.
“There’s not much for us to do here,” he said. “Best to leave it to the professionals.”
They went outside. Shah had finished his call and was waiting for them.
“Change of plan,” he said.
Ross turned to him. “What is it?”
“Leonard Geggel,” he said. “We have a lead.”
25
Ross and Milton were driven out of town in the back of an unmarked police car. The cordon was opened to allow them to pass through. A crowd of locals had gathered there to look down the High Street and they gawped into the car as the driver slowly accelerated away.
Shah had explained to them both what had happened. Geggel hadn’t answered his phone, and so a junior officer had been sent to visit his house. It was empty; Geggel was a bachelor, and there was no one inside the property that they could speak to. Shah had asked GCHQ to run a trace on Geggel’s phone and, to his surprise, they had reported that he had been in Southwold that afternoon, arriving at around two-thirty. They couldn’t be precise as to his movements, but his signal was received from a telephone mast close to the Lord Nelson pub. The signal was then detected leaving the town and was last seen transmitting from somewhere near to the junction of the A12 and the A1095.