Witch Hunt Read online

  ‘Yes, son,’ admitted Crane. ‘She was something.’

  She changed quickly. The rucksack contained quite a lot, including several changes of clothes and shoes. It also contained air pockets to help keep it afloat. She deflated these. The rucksack had been heavier early on in the evening. She smiled at the memory. Wrapped in polythene in an already waterproofed pocket was a diary, and beside it some odds and ends of make-up. The make-up was like a talisman to her. Make-up was the beginning of disguise. What else was in the rucksack? You could tell a lot about a woman from the contents of her bag. If you tried hard, this rucksack would tell you a lot too. Passport, driving licence, money. A few small tools. Some packages of what looked like plasticine. A tarot pack. A handgun. That was about it. She didn’t look out to sea, but she listened to it. The steady clash of waves, the whistling wind. Exhilarating. Her hair, pinned back, was still drying quickly, her scalp chilled by the wind. A sharp salt smell clung to her. Her eyes were closed slightly as she listened. Then, in the distance, she heard a loudish pop, there and then not there. Like the meeting of balloon and pin at a children’s party. She knew she had measured the amount of the charge well, and had placed it well too, down in the bowels of the boat. The hole blown in the hull would be a couple of metres in diameter. The vessel would sink in seconds, seconds of shock and horror for its crew. And if the explosion didn’t kill the two men outright ... well, what chance of their reaching land? No chance for the older man, minimal for the younger. Minimal was as much as she liked to leave to chance. But she hung around for a while anyway, just in case anyone did reach shore. There was a certain amount of shelter so she did not freeze. In fact, the breeze was growing almost warm. Or perhaps she was just getting used to being back.

  No sign of the two men. She waited seventy-five minutes, then unpinned her long hair, letting it fall forwards over her face. A simple trick, but one which reduced her age by several years, especially when she was not wearing make-up. She thought of the boat a final time. It would be a mere oil slick now. Perhaps banknotes were floating on the tide. Useless things anyway.

  She made her way to the main road and began to walk. Hitching along the south coast. Going to visit a friend in Margate. (Or Cliftonville: dare she say Cliftonville?) Didn’t get a lift out of Folkestone, so spent the night there, sleeping rough by the roadside ...

  That was the story she would tell to whichever motorist picked her up. Someone would pick her up. Some man, most probably. She was a single woman, young. They might lecture her about the dangers of hitching alone. She would listen. She was a good listener. A lorry driver might even go out of his way and take her to Margate or Cliftonville in a single run. Of course, he would expect a favour in return, something more than her good ear. Her good mouth maybe. But that was all right. That wasn’t a problem for her. She was someone else after all, wasn’t she? And tomorrow she would be someone else again ...

  Cassandra

  Tuesday 2 June

  Everyone in the Collator’s Office had what might be termed a ‘clerical mind’. Which is to say that they were scrupulous in their filing. They were, in fact, a kind of pre-information technology production line, feeding data into the central computer. This was their purpose in the Collator’s Office. It was up to the computer to decide whether some news item or other might be important. The computer was capable of taking a petrol station hold-up in Kelso, the abduction of a girl in Doncaster and the finding of a body in rural Wales, and making of them a pattern. But most of the time it didn’t. Most of the time it just sat wherever it sat, a glutton’s bottomless stomach, ingesting story after story, item after item, without excreting anything in return. A lot of false roads were taken, a lot of palpable nonsense spewed up by the computer. And occasionally a nugget of truth, but not often. No, not very often.

  There were times when Collator’s Assistant Jack Constant thought that the only things keeping him sane were the editions of French newspapers which he brought into work with him. Constant thought he’d plumbed the depths of boredom and futility during his year-long stint as Clerical Assistant in the office of Her Majesty’s Collector of Taxes. He’d spent the year sending out demands and reminders and final notices, noting payments and passing the non-payers onto his boss. A year of ledgers, producing in him a ledger mentality. But then computerisation had ‘saved’ him by taking over his most onerous tasks, and a series of shuffles between departments had seen him dropped finally into the Collator’s Office. The pit.

  ‘So how goes the Font of All Knowledge?’ asked Cynthia Crockett, a fellow CA. Each day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes after the lunch break, she asked this question with the same quizzical smile. Maybe she thought it was funny.

  ‘Foak knows,’ replied Constant, FOAK being the Font of All Knowledge, the central computer. Another CA, Jim Wilson, had another name for it. He called it the Fat Controller, or, when in a bad temper, even the Fat Bastard. He’d once come into work wearing a T-shirt printed with the legend WHO’S THAT FAT BASTARD? Mr Grayson, the office head, had summoned him into the inner sanctum for a quiet, disciplined word about dress code.

  Afterwards, Wilson had not been mollified. ‘Wants us wearing suits and bloody ties. I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with the public, is it? We never see anyone. Nobody except old Grayskull himself.’

  But he hadn’t worn the T-shirt again.

  Constant suffered his colleagues, even ‘old Grayskull’ of the shiny head and tweed-knit ties, drifting towards his pension. Mr Grayson’s wife packed him exactly two salmon paste sandwiches, one apple, and one small chocolate biscuit for his lunch every day. Yvette would never do that. It would be a fresh baguette and some Camembert, maybe with pickles or a small salad with vinaigrette. The French took their food seriously, and Yvette, Constant’s girlfriend, was French. She lived in Le Mans, which meant that they met only for holidays and occasional frantic weekends (trips barely sustainable on a CA’s salary, not when his phone bill was so big). Yvette was still studying, but would soon come to England for good. She’d get a job as French assistant in some school. They would be together.

  Meantime, he had his newspapers. Usually Le Monde but occasionally one of the others. He read them to improve his French, and also because Yvette didn’t seem so far away while he was reading. So whenever a break was due, Jack would reach into his desk drawer and bring out his French newspaper, something to digest with the unspeakable coffee.

  He read the snippet of news again. It was squeezed onto the front page below a much longer story about forest fires in the Mediterranean. A boat had sunk in the Channel, barely twenty kilometres from its home port of Calais. There were no survivors. Four sailors dead. The story jogged Jack Constant’s memory. He’d filed a story earlier in the day, something about a boat sinking off the south coast of England. Coincidence? He wondered if he should mention it to someone. He looked up from the paper and saw that Mr Grayson had appeared from his inner sanctum. He was looking around as though bewildered to find himself there. He saw Constant looking at him and decided to approach for a conversation. Another day, someone else would suffer. Past the computer screens and the brown file-cases and the newspaper cuttings and the print-outs and the fax sheets he came. Past the clack of keyboard and the sizzle of disk-memory. Towards Jack Constant.

  ‘Jack.’ Constant confirmed this with a nod.

  ‘Everything quiet?’

  ‘Quiet as it gets, sir.’

  Grayson nodded seriously. ‘Good.’ His breath smelt of salmon paste. With a sad half-smile, he began to turn away.

  Why not? thought Constant. It might pep the old bugger up a bit. ‘Oh, sir?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story here might be of interest.’

  Mr Grayson seemed to doubt this. To be honest, Constant was doubting it too.

  Wednesday 3 June

  In the service, there was always someone above you. But the information ladder could splinter - a missing rung. The information ladder depended on people like Jack Constant reporting so
mething to someone like Mr Grayson. And it depended on Grayson’s instinct or ‘nose’, his ability to weed out what was interesting from what really was mere coincidence. The information was then passed up the ladder to his superior, who might make further inquiries before either filing the piece or passing it on to someone more senior yet. These were lofty heights now. Working from his own small office Grayson had never met his superior’s superior. He’d once received an inquiry from that person. The inquiry had been dealt with as a priority. Mr Grayson’s office had never had to deal with inquiries from yet higher officials.

  The item, the bare comparison of two sinkings on a single night, was passed quickly from rung to rung until it reached an office somewhere in central London where a twenty-five-year-old man, only two years older than Jack Constant himself, read it. He was humming an aria and chewing a pencil and had his legs stretched out in front of him, one foot crossed over the other. He had pushed his seat out from his desk to facilitate this, his legs being too long to stretch beneath the desk itself. There was a wall immediately in front of the desk, with memos and postcards and fire instructions pinned to it.

  He read the item through three times. Spotted in Le Monde of all places. Either somebody was on the ball or this man ... what was the name, Grayson? Yes, this man Grayson ran a tight ship. Poor metaphor under the circumstances. The item had grown unwieldy by now, attached as it was to notes from the various offices through which it had passed. But though unwieldy it was also irritatingly flimsy, constructed from thin sheets of fax paper. It had been faxed (standard practice) by the last office to see it. The real thing would turn up here eventually, but the fax was supposed to save valuable time. Michael Barclay did not like faxes. For a start, no matter how often the Engineering Section explained it to him, he couldn’t see how they were safe from a tap. Tap into a fax line with your own fax, and you’d get a copy of anything sent to the original machine. Codes could be decoded, scramblers unscrambled. As he’d told his colleague from Engineering, ‘If you can make something, you can unmake it.’ To prove his point, he’d rigged up his own interception device. It had worked, just, proving his point if nothing else. After all, GCHQ made a living from information intercepts, as did the listening posts dotted around the UK. If anything there was an intelligence overload these days. Too much information to assimilate.

  Assimilate? There was too much to sift, never mind taking any of it in. Which was why this little story interested him. It was a fluke that it had come this far. The image that popped into his head was of a particular sperm breaching an egg. A fluke. This fluke called life: those very words were printed on a memo above his desk.

  Well, this particular fluke did have its curiosity aspect. It would bear investigation. There was only one thing for it. Barclay would have to show it to his superior.

  Michael Barclay did not think of himself as a spy. Nor would he even say he belonged to the secret service or the security service - though he’d agree security was at the root of much of his work. If pressed, he might nod towards the word Intelligence. He liked the word. It meant knowing a lot. And ‘Intelligence’ meant knowing at least as much as and preferably more than anyone else. This was the problem with the word ‘spy’. It belonged to the old days, the Cold War days and before. Breaking and entering, sleeping with the enemy, microfilm and microphones in ties and tunnels under embassies.

  These days there was no black and white: everyone spied on everyone else. This was no revelation, it had always been the case, but it was more open now. More open and more closed. Spy satellites were toys only the very rich and the very paranoid could play with. The spying community had grown larger, all-encompassing, but it had also grown smaller, forming itself into an elite. All change. He’d actually used the word ‘paranoid’ in one of his selection board interviews. A calculated risk. If the service didn’t want to think of itself as paranoid, it would have to recruit those who suspected it of paranoia. Well, he’d passed the exams and the tests and the interviews. He’d passed the initiation and the regular assessments. He’d begun his own slow crawl up the ladder. And he’d seen that the world was changing.

  No spies any more. Now there were only the technicians. Take telemetry for example. Who the hell knew what all that garble of information meant? Who knew how to ungarble it? Only the technicians. Machines might talk to machines, but it took a wonderful human mind to listen in and comprehend. Barclay had done his bit. He’d studied electronic engineering. He’d been a dab hand with a few microchips and LEDs ever since his early teens, when he’d constructed his own digital clock. At sixteen he’d been building loudspeakers and amplifiers. And at seventeen he’d bugged the girls’ showers at his school.

  At university he’d been ‘noticed’: that was the way they’d phrased it. His work on long-range surveillance had been noticed. His grasp of geostationary satellite technology had been noticed. His special project on miniaturisation had been noticed. Fortunately, nobody noticed that he’d cribbed a lot of the project from early R&D done by Japanese hi-fi companies. A career path lay ahead of him, full of interest and variety and opportunities for further learning. A career in Intelligence.

  Michael Barclay, Intelligence Technician. Except that he’d ended up here instead.

  He didn’t need to knock at Joyce Parry’s door. It was kept wide open. There was some argument in the office as to why. Was it to keep an eye on them? Or to show solidarity with them? Or to show them how hard she worked? Most of the theories bubbled to the surface on Friday evenings in the Bull by the Horns, the frankly dreadful pub across the road from the office block. The Bull was a 1960s creation which looked no better for its 1980s refitting. In the 80s, refitting had meant a lot of fake wood, eccentric ornaments and books by the yard. The effect was kitsch Edwardian Steptoe and Son, with sad beer and sad graffiti in the gents’. But on the occasional Friday night, they managed somehow to turn the Bull into a cosy local, full of laughter and colour. It was amazing what a few drinks could do.

  Joyce Parry’s door was closed.

  Unexpected refusal at first hurdle. Barclay, who had rolled the fax sheets into a scroll the better to brandish them, now tapped the scroll against his chin. Well, no matter. She was in conference perhaps. Or out of the office. (That was one thing: when Mrs Parry wasn’t at home, her office door stayed firmly locked.) Barclay might do a little work meantime, so he could present her with not only the original item but with his notes and additions. Yes, why not show willing?

  John Greenleaf had the feeling that somewhere in the world, every second of the day, someone was having a laugh at his expense. It stood to reason, didn’t it? He’d seen it happen with jokes. You made up a joke, told it to someone in a pub, and three months later while on holiday in Ecuador some native told the joke back to you. Because all it took was one person to tell two or three people, and for them to tell their friends. Like chain letters, or was it chain mail? All it took was that first person, that someone who might say: ‘I know a man called Greenleaf. Guess who he works for? Special Branch! Greenleaf of the Branch!’ Three months later they were laughing about it in Ecuador. Inspector John Greenleaf, ex-Met and now - but for how long? - working for Special Branch. So what? There were plenty of butchers called Lamb. It shouldn’t bother him. He knows Greenleaf is a nice name, women keep telling him so. But he can’t shift the memory of last weekend out of his mind. Doyle’s party. If you could call twenty men, two hundred pints of beer and a stripper, a ‘party’. Greenleaf had debated skipping it altogether, then had decided he’d only get a slagging from Doyle if he didn’t go. So along he went, along to a gym and boxing school in the East End. That was typical of Hardman Doyle who fancied himself with the fists. Raw animal smell to the place, and the beer piled high on a trestle table. No food: a curry house was booked for afterwards. There had been five or six of them in front of the table, and others spread out across the gym. Some were puffing on the parallel bars or half-vaulting the horse. Two took wild swings at punch-bags. And the fi
ve or six of them in front of the table ... They all muttered their greetings as he arrived, but he’d heard the words that preceded him:

  ‘... eenleaf of the Branch, geddit?’

  He got it. Nothing was said. Doyle, his smile that of a double glazing salesman, slapped him on the back and handed over a can of beer.

  ‘Glad you could make it, John. Party’s been a bit lacklustre without you.’ Doyle took another can from the table, shook it mightily, veins bulging above both eyes, then tapped the shoulder of some unsuspecting guest.

  ‘Here you go, Dave.’

  ‘Cheers, Doyle.’

  Doyle winked at Greenleaf and waited for Dave to unhook the ringpull ...

  And Greenleaf, Greenleaf of the Branch, he laughed as hard as any of them, and drank as much, and whistled at the stripper, and ate lime chutney with his madras ... And felt nothing. As he feels nothing now.

  New Scotland Yard ... Special Branch ... this is supposed to be Big Time for a copper. But Greenleaf has noticed something curious. He has noticed the truth of the saying, ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief.’ Some of his present colleagues don’t seem so different from the villains they pull in. As narrow-minded as terrorists, as devious as smugglers. Doyle was a good example, though effective at his job. He just didn’t mind cutting corners. Doyle refused to see the world in black and white, as a sharply defined Us and Them, while Greenleaf did. For him there were the good guys and then there was the enemy. The enemy was out there and was not to be suffered. If it was useful as an informant, then fine, use it. But don’t reward it afterwards. Don’t let it slink away. Lock it up.

  ‘John?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘My office.’

  Oh hell, now what? His last big job had been putting together a report on aspects of security at the forthcoming London summit. It had taken him a fortnight, working weekends and nights. He’d been proud of the finished result, but no one had commented on it - yet. Now here was the Old Man himself, the Chief, the Boss, here was Commander Bill Trilling summoning him into the office which smelt perpetually of peppermint.