Inside Enemy
Authors: Alan Judd
Praise for Alan Judd
‘John le Carré has no peer among contemporary spy novelists, but Judd is beginning to run the master close …’
Daily Mail
‘Judd is a masterful storyteller, with an intricate knowledge of his subject and a sure command of suspense’
Daily Telegraph
‘Rivetingly accurate’
Observer
‘Judd has an infallible grasp of intelligence’
Spectator
‘Belongs to the classic tradition of spy writing’
Guardian
‘Alan Judd writes exceedingly well’
Evening Standard
‘Judd keeps plot and action centre-stage … he has written a novel perfect for brightening up a drizzly winter Sunday’
Mail on Sunday
Also by Alan Judd
Fiction
A Breed of Heroes
Short of Glory
The Noonday Devil
Tango
The Devil’s Own Work
Legacy
The Kaiser’s Last Kiss
Dancing with Eva
Uncommon Enemy
Non-Fiction
Ford Madox Ford (biography)
The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (biography)
First World War Poets (with David Crane)
The Office Life Little Instruction Book
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Alan Judd, 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Alan Judd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978-1-47110-250-9
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-47110-251-6
eBook ISBN 978-1-47110-253-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To John, Jan, Tom and Ben.
Prologue
T
he clock repair shop closed early on Wednesdays. The keeper, in his forties with greying hair and gentle brown eyes, secured the door and window
grilles with padlocks. The shop was the front room of a terraced cottage, with the back room as the workshop and a bath and toilet in an extension beyond. Upstairs were two rooms and a box room
which the shopkeeper shared with a woman and her twelve-year-old son. That day, the boy was at school and his mother was out cleaning the houses of richer people. That suited the man’s
purpose.
Grilles were needed in that part of Hastings, up on a ridge away from the sea, although there was little in the shop for local thieves. They might think it had cash, but there was little enough
of that. Businesses like his were always marginal but trade had slowed since he had learned it in prison, years before. Few people had mechanical watches or clocks worth repairing now and there
were days when his only interruption was someone wanting a battery replaced. But that at least allowed him to get on with restoring antique timepieces he could still pick up cheaply in junk shops.
In other towns, such establishments had long since elevated themselves into antique shops, but here they clung on amidst the rusting cars, boarded-up buildings and neglected dogs, serving a drab
and poor population. The man sold his restorations in the auction rooms of Rye, Eastbourne, Lewes, even London, and increasingly on eBay.
It was a living, just, though not one that would have paid for his two-year-old Triumph Sprint 1050 in the lock-up a mile or so away in the industrial estate. But no-one associated him with the
160 mph motorcyclist in his black full-face helmet and belted Belstaff Trialmaster jacket. A man needed something to supplement a meagre living, he would tell himself on rare occasions when he felt
the need for self-justification. The bike had paid for itself already and the work he did with it added variety to life.
It was unseasonably warm and bright that day, which made choice of cover easy. He put on a crumpled blue beach hat, white T-shirt, blue jeans and old trainers, carrying under his arm a rolled-up
towel and small black rucksack. Outside the shop, where he could keep an eye on it, was his Ford Fiesta van, twelve years old and sufficiently scuffed not to stand out on that street. But the tyres
were nearly new, the interior was spotless, it started instantly and ticked over quietly. Like all his kit, it was in good order
He cruised into town, keeping to the speed limit, slowing before traffic lights, anticipating zebra crossings. In the underground car park beneath the promenade he chose a space in full view of
two CCTV cameras. He got out without his hat, bought a ticket from the machine, returned, collected his towel and rucksack, locked his van, went a few steps, then returned for his hat. If the
cameras were working they could not fail to register a man in no hurry, a relaxed man with nothing difficult or dangerous on his mind.
He sauntered along the promenade towards the Old Town where the fishing boats were drawn up on the beach. Although it was autumn, the day was warm enough for a few young people to sit on the
shingle and for children to play on the never-to-be-completed harbour groyne. The sea was calm and sparkling and the tide was in, with its usual offering of plastic detritus. There were even a
couple of hardy aged swimmers, which also suited his purpose.
He picked his way between the winched-up fishing vessels and the tall black net huts, stepping over wires and buoys en route to the public lavatory. There he entered a cubicle and emerged a few
minutes later wearing brown corduroy trousers, a blue long-sleeved shirt and a black wig. His rucksack and other clothes he carried in a green Marks & Spencer’s bag.
Walking briskly now, he bought a return ticket to the Silverhill industrial estate from the machine by the bus stop, paying cash. He got off outside a tyre-fitter, a car-parts warehouse and a
block of flats behind which were two rows of lock-up garages with black doors. Some had cars, others the overspill of various businesses. Amidst the coming and going, loading and unloading, no-one
heeded the man in the sober blue shirt who unlocked number seventeen and stepped quickly inside, lowering the door before switching on the light.
Half the garage was filled with the long cases of absent grandfather clocks and other bits of usable wood. In the other half, beneath a black plastic sheet, stood the gleaming black Triumph, its
battery connected to a trickle charger. He uncovered it, disconnected the charger, tested the ignition, then took a screwdriver from the toolbox on the floor and removed the number-plate. Next he
went to the up-and-over door and unscrewed the reinforcing panel surrounding the lock. Beneath it, pressed against the inside of the door, were three alternative number-plates. He selected one,
fitted it, and hid the original with the others. Then he took off his wig and put on the boots, Belstaff and full-face helmet that hung from hooks on the wall. After checking the contents of the
large pannier box and adding his wig to them, he opened the door and pushed the bike out. At the Silverhill traffic lights a BMW abruptly changed lanes, cutting in front of him and forcing him to
brake hard. He did no more than wave his gloved finger once. When on a job he was a stickler for road manners.
He headed out through Battle and after some miles turned off into the Weald, wooded country with narrow winding lanes, small farms and high hedgerows. He cruised on little more than tick-over
until a series of tight bends where he turned off again into a single-track lane, which eventually became an unmade road leading to a farm. He cruised along that through a chestnut coppice and a
meadow until a rutted earth track which took him left through a field and shaw into a smaller field of rough grass. On the far side was an old black barn, recently thatched and painted with black
double doors approached by a brick step. The track led past it to a gate and stile, with a rising field beyond.
The man parked his Triumph behind the barn, then took his time unzipping his jacket and removing his helmet and gloves. He looked about him, taking in the neglected apple trees down the slope in
what had been a garden, the three beehives and the bramble-covered remnants of a ruined cottage. His gaze lingered on a post and rail pen to his right, with a small shed that looked like a
pig-sty.
He walked round to the front of the barn and swung open the doors. Inside it was dark and clean with a brick floor and sandblasted rafters. Around the walls were posters describing flora and
fauna and in a corner were piled plastic chairs and a couple of tables. A notice explained that the owner had restored the barn for free public use. The man took a packet of cigarettes from his
jacket pocket and went outside to light up. On the small terrace was a round table with three plastic chairs. He rested his foot on one while he smoked, seemingly absorbed by the shallow
grass-filled pond before him.
After a minute or two he ambled down through the rough grass to the remains of the cottage, the walls just a couple of stones high now. When he had finished his cigarette he flicked it into the
hedge and walked back up to his motorbike, keeping clear of the beehives. After another leisurely look round, he took a collapsible trenching tool from his pannier, climbed into the pen and ducked
through the low door of the pig-sty.
The floor was loose dry earth, with a few weeds. He knelt at the back, away from the door, and probed the earth with the pointed end of his trenching tool before beginning to dig. Within less
than a minute he was brushing soil from the lid of the buried Army surplus ammunition box.
Inside was a bundle wrapped in old jeans and a box of 12-bore shotgun cartridges, number 4 shot. Inside the jeans was a dismantled sawn-off shotgun, its brutally shortened barrels extending only
just beyond the stock. He reburied the box, reassembled the gun, put it to his shoulder a couple of times, dismantled it again, wrapped it in the jeans, put the bundle in his pannier and rode back
the way he had come.
At the village of Bodiam he waited patiently in the short queue of traffic at the bridge over the Rother while two coaches pulled out of the National Trust car park by the castle. When the
traffic moved he kept a steady pace out of the village before turning right. Two cars followed him. He continued all the way to the village of Sandhurst, noting without turning his head the cattle
grid at the start of a gravelled drive, shortly before the 30 mph signs and the church. Reaching the village, he turned left as soon as the following cars indicated right. Once they were out of
sight he turned round and headed back to the drive with the cattle grid.
It led up a short steep hill to reveal, hidden from the road, a Georgian house with floor-to-ceiling ground-floor windows and a beach-pebble turning area in front. It overlooked a fenced paddock
which fell away towards the lane below. The few grazing sheep ignored the motorcyclist weaving his way between the gravelled ridges and holes.