Close Call (3 page)

‘That looks like fun.’ Peggy Kinsolving was standing in the doorway.

Liz looked up. ‘I thought you were at the conference.’

‘I am. It’s the lunch break, so I nipped back to check how that surveillance operation is going on.’ Peggy was running an investigation into a group of young men in Camden Town who had just come back from Pakistan.

‘Anything happening?’

‘No. No movement at all so far. I think they’re all still in bed.’

Liz nodded. Peggy had transferred to MI5 from MI6 several years ago. She had been a diffident, shy girl but a genius at research. She would follow a lead like a bloodhound but if you’d asked her to go out and interview someone she would have panicked and frozen with nerves. But over the years, under Liz’s guidance, she had grown in confidence and now she was running her own operations, and directing a small team. Peggy had become a skilled interviewer, and had discovered a talent for finding out what made people tick, getting underneath their reserves and breaking down their defences.

But though her personality had developed, her appearance had hardly changed from her days as a librarian. She was a little short of medium height, with long brown hair she tied back in a wispy ponytail. Her spectacles, round and brown, seemed to be too big for her face and were forever slipping down her nose. The sight of Peggy pushing back her spectacles was often the preface to a remark that would begin the unravelling of some knotty problem.

‘What’s going on at the conference? Any good?’ Liz asked. It was a Home Office-run conference aimed mainly at regional police forces, and designed to draw their attention to a nationwide growth in gun crime. Little of the agenda had much direct connection with the work of Liz’s team, but she had thought it worthwhile to send someone to register an interest and demonstrate that they were taking their watching brief seriously.

Peggy said, ‘Actually it’s not been too bad. This afternoon might be quite interesting.’

‘Really? What’s happening?’

Peggy seemed to be struggling not to laugh. ‘Well, it was meant to be a keynote address from the Foreign Office. You remember Henry Pennington?’

Liz groaned. She’d crossed swords with Henry ­Pennington several times over the years. A long lean man with a large nose that dominated his thin face, he was a panicker. Any indication that something might be going wrong caused him to begin rubbing his hands together in a washing motion and breathing heavily. At such times he was liable to make sudden decisions, which on one or two occasions had landed Liz in difficult situations. She never forgot the time he had volunteered her services as an undercover protection officer for a Russian oligarch, almost succeeding in getting her killed in the process.

‘But sadly,’ Peggy went on, ‘Henry’s indisposed. So they’ve put together a panel instead. Some senior officers from the North and the Midlands are going to be talking about their experience of the arms trade. I thought you might be interested.’

Liz thought about this. Her interest was in illegal arms shipments abroad, but there might be something worth hearing and the alternative was the pile of assessment forms on her desk. ‘I think I’ll come along.’

When they arrived at the conference room in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Parliament Square the session had already started. The room was three-quarters full and they slipped into seats at one side of a back row. There were three people on the stage, sitting in a semicircle so that Liz could only see two of them clearly. They were discussing the impact of Britain’s gun laws, and Liz recognised one of the speakers – a senior policewoman from Derbyshire, notorious for her impatience with junior officers. The man next to her, who was obviously from the Home Office, was praising the government’s tough stance on firearms as if one of his political masters were in the audience. He contrasted the UK’s ban on handguns with America, where more often than not there didn’t seem to be any gun laws at all. The policewoman from Derbyshire agreed with him that the total ban on handguns in the UK was a great thing.

Suddenly the third member of the panel, who Liz couldn’t see properly, interrupted. ‘Make no mistake, this country has a gun culture too – it’s just invisible to most of us. All the government has really managed to do is drive gun sales further underground. We only hear about them when some drug dealer gets shot in Merseyside. Things have got worse in the last ten years, not better. We need to remember that when we congratulate ourselves on not being like the Americans.’

The bluntness of his remarks would have seemed out of place if the delivery had not been so self-assured, and as it was there was a murmur of assent round the room. The Home Office man looked uncomfortable. Liz sat up and leaned over to try to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. There was something in the voice that was familiar.

Peggy noticed. ‘What is it?’ But Liz put a finger to her lips. The man she couldn’t see properly was still talking.

It couldn’t be, Liz told herself. She could see that the man was dressed in a suit, not a uniform, and from what she could see of him he looked pretty smart for a policeman. The man she was thinking of had always been a bit of a clothes horse.

Then he shifted in his chair and she could see his profile. She recognised the sharp nose and rugged chin. The hair now was thinner than before, but well cut, with only a few flecks of grey. He was still good-looking; whatever you thought of him you had to give him that.

‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ whispered Peggy.

Liz sighed, leaning back in her chair as the Derbyshire woman started up again. ‘It’s not a ghost,’ she said at last. ‘Just somebody I used to know. Though it was a long time ago.’

Chapter 5

Liz had been in MI5 just eighteen months. She had applied on the spur of the moment, in her last year at Bristol University. She had been thinking vaguely and without much enthusiasm that she might stay on at the university to do research when the chance remark of a visiting lecturer had coincided with an intriguing newspaper advertisement for logical, level-headed and decisive people to do important work in the national interest. She had sent in her cv, such as it was, without much hope of any response, and had been amazed to be called for an interview. After that the recruitment process had ground slowly on until, at the end of it all, she’d found herself a member of MI5, Britain’s Security Service.

Although she was still on probation and in the training period, Liz felt settled and comfortable in the Service. Each morning when she left the flat in Holloway that she shared with four other Bristol graduates to take the underground to Thames House, she looked forward to the day.

Even though she’d been at university in a city, she wasn’t really a city girl. She had grown up in the Wiltshire countryside where her father had been the land agent for a large estate. He was dead now and the estate had been broken up after the death of the last owner without an heir, but her mother still lived in the octagonal Gatehouse where Liz had been brought up. Susan Carlyle managed the flourishing garden centre that now occupied the old kitchen gardens of the estate.

Liz was enjoying living in London and felt guilty that she didn’t go down to Wiltshire more often, as she knew her mother was lonely. Susan Carlyle didn’t disguise the fact that she would like Liz to abandon what she thought of as a ‘dangerous job’ and marry a nice young man, a solicitor or a doctor or something safe. Liz couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less.

Between them Liz and her flatmates had a fairly wide circle of friends. There was a faint shadow over Liz’s social life in that she couldn’t join in enthusiastically when everyone else was talking about their work, but she had taken those she lived with into her confidence and told them that she worked for one of the intelligence agencies, so they protected her and didn’t question it when they heard her telling casual acquaintances that she worked for a PR agency.

The secondment to Merseyside police came as a considerable jolt. Liz knew that at some stage, as part of the training programme, she would be sent off on attachment to learn how a provincial police force and its Special Branch worked, but she wasn’t expecting it so soon. And Liverpool was alien territory to her – she had never been further north than Nottingham.

It was the period before the Peace Process had taken hold in Northern Ireland and she was one of a team collating intelligence on the threat from the Provisional IRA. Liverpool had an established community of Irish expats, many with nationalist sympathies and a few with actual links with the Provos. The Special Branch had some sources that from time to time provided useful intelligence, so she’d already had some dealings with Merseyside Special Branch officers and she had not much liked them. As she’d travelled up on the train to Liverpool that gloomy, showery day she was feeling nervous.

As it turned out she had good reason to be, but not because of the IRA. In the police headquarters’ rectangular red office block near the docks, a gloomy middle-aged sergeant with a pencil behind his ear had sent her upstairs with a grunt and a jerk of his thumb. One floor up she found a large open-plan room with a dozen or so desks in untidy rows, about half of them occupied by men, some young, some middle-aged, some in shirtsleeves, some in leather jackets, some typing, some talking on the phone. Cigarette smoke hung in the air in a blue uncirculating haze.

Every man looked up as Liz came into the room. She asked where Detective Inspector Avery could be found, and one of them pointed to the back of the room where a small office had been partitioned off with opaque glass. As Liz walked through the rows of desks, someone gave a low wolf whistle. Liz tried not to react, but she felt herself blush.

She knocked on the door, and a gruff voice said,
Come in
. Opening the door, she found a wide-shouldered man in shirtsleeves, with a tie pulled down an inch or two from his collar. He looked close to retirement age, and had greying hair cut very short, though he had let his sideboards grow in some misguided youthful impulse.

Avery looked annoyed by her interruption. ‘What can I do for you, miss?’

‘DI Avery?’  The man nodded. ‘I’m here from Box 500,’ said Liz, using the acronym by which the police referred to MI5. ‘My name’s Liz Carlyle.’

He stared at her. ‘You’re Carlyle?’ He sounded astonished. ‘I was expecting a George Carlyle, or a John Carlyle, or even a Seamus Carlyle. But nobody said anything about a
Liz
Carlyle.’ He was looking at her with distaste; Liz didn’t know what to say. Avery suddenly added, ‘I suppose you’re a graduate.’

‘Yes.’ Never had she felt less proud of it.

‘Good. You’ll be used to reading then.’ He pointed to three stacks of papers on a side table. ‘You can start with them. I’ve got more important things to do than read bumf from the Home Office all day. Come back in the morning and you can tell me what’s in it.’

After this welcome, Liz reckoned things would have to get better. She was wrong. By her third day she had acquired a nickname – Mata Hari – but not much else in the form of contact with her new workmates, whose initial curiosity was swiftly followed by the hazing rituals of an American college fraternity. The first morning when Liz went to the desk she had been allocated, she found a large cigar lying on the desk top. An hour later when she came back with a cup of muddy coffee from the vending machine in the hall, she found that someone had moved the cigar suggestively to the seat of her chair. While the men around her watched surreptitiously she broke the cigar in half and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

The next morning another cigar was in place. Again Liz threw it away, and this time she said loudly, without looking around, ‘I hope you boys can put cigars on expenses. If this goes on, it’s going to cost you a fortune.’

All week she ate lunch alone and saw no one after work. The only other woman in the office, the typist for DI Avery, was a middle-aged woman called Nellie who came in at exactly nine in the morning and left at precisely five at night. She had clearly never read Germaine Greer or heard of sister-solidarity; she made a point of ignoring Liz.

Not all the men joined in the harassment. Some just ignored her and one in particular was quite polite – McManus, a tall, sharp-featured detective sergeant who dressed better than the others.

The work itself was dull, a relentless progress through mind-bogglingly dense papers from the Home Office. Liz was desperate to get her teeth into something real; otherwise she would finish her secondment without knowing any more about how a police force ran than she had when she came. She resented Avery’s using her as an intellectual dogsbody, covering his back in case some civil servant expected a response to one of the documents sent seemingly by the truckload from Whitehall and Scotland Yard.

The harassment persisted, though not any longer with cigars. Purvis, a tall man with a dimple in his chin, seemed particularly intent on making Liz feel unwelcome. ‘Ask our new graduate colleague,’ he would say when someone had a question at the weekly briefing meeting.

Liz ignored this as best she could, but it made for stressful working hours, and she wasn’t sure how long she could put up with it in silence. Part of her was determined not to let these bastards get to her; another part wanted to run back to London. Then one morning she arrived to find a bundle of dirty shirts on her desk, with a note pinned to them.
Washed, ironed and folded by Thursday please.
She felt the eyes of the room upon her as she stood by her desk. Suddenly furious, she picked up the shirts, walked over to the open window and dumped them out into the alley below.