Rat Poison (15 page)

‘Suppose he's taken ill, say, in a restaurant.'

‘I'm listening.'

‘Or trips over something in the street and breaks his ankle – taken out of circulation to be questioned that way.'

‘I agree. It probably wouldn't arouse suspicion.'

‘Then my question stands and you really mustn't let your imagination run riot. Would you like me to find out more?'

‘You'll have to sell it to me a bit more,' Greenway murmured.

‘Has he been followed to where he lives?'

‘No, not yet. It's only within the past couple of days that he's been spotted at the address in London.'

‘Could you arrange it? I'm not volunteering as it's possible he's been hanging around in Hinton Littlemore.'

‘OK, I'll do that.'

‘Then we'll be able to work out his routines. If he's got any – he might just have been visiting when Matthew saw him.'

‘I'd rather you didn't kick your heels while the job's being done,' the commander said as we all rose to leave. ‘No, sorry, that sounded as though I think you're in the habit of—'

‘Kicking my heels?' Patrick interrupted with a smile. ‘Ingrid and I will use some of the time for firearms training. This affair isn't going to end with everyone handing around bunches of flowers. Did you have another job in mind?'

‘We've discovered that Joy Murphy doesn't live at the Hammersmith address but has a top floor flat in a high-rise block in Notting Hill. Have a quiet look round. But don't under any circumstances make contact with her.'

The kind of weapons training that Patrick and I undergo is not merely firing at targets on an indoor range, although that is part of it. Far more interesting, useful and terrifying is the next stage where one is tossed, sometimes literally, into a mock-up in the bowels of a Ministry of Defence building where any kind of scenario can be created. Maze-like constructions, with interconnecting tunnels and cellars, are constructed out of blockboard, polystyrene and other materials supported by scaffolding and fronted by camouflage netting and painted cloths similar to those used on film and stage sets. There are always teetering stacks of fairly lightweight ‘stone pillars' – once upon a time it had been piles of tea chests – that can be nudged over by hidden gizmos to complicate matters together with the added interest of bare live but low voltage wires with a few potential water leaks to make them really bite. As its situation would suggest this second training ground is nothing to do with the police but belongs to the military. It is probably the fact that he helped set it up and wrote most of the original ‘scripts' that has ensured that Patrick appears to be a life member.

There were new authors now, of course, but the challenge remains: you start at one end and have to make your way to reach the other, usually a high point, perhaps a tower of some kind. There is a time limit. We use live ammunition on the mobile cardboard targets – the usual figure of an armed man carrying a sub-machine gun – that pop up like magic when things get difficult and if you do not hit them meaningfully within five seconds you lose a ‘life', of which you are given three. This goes on while operatives with a handy line in unarmed combat stalk the tunnels and others, from up on a gantry by the control room, take careful aim at you with handguns, loaded with, yes, live rounds. It is a point of honour with Patrick that he gets round inside the time limit without losing a life and there is a tradition that they try to overpower him before he goes in for some serious demolition just for the hell of it.

People often end up needing hospital treatment – health and safety there is absolutely none and I know for a fact that Commander Greenway is completely unaware of our participation. Otherwise he would want to have a go as well and the answer would be no. The reason for this is that, although the set-up is sometimes used by the police, for those without the right preliminary training, which Patrick and I received when working for MI5, it is very dangerous.

‘We're bloody rusty,' was Patrick's magnificently encouraging conclusion on having completed the first stage at another venue, driven a short distance across London and, having arrived, travelled downwards for what had seemed half a mile in a lift.

We donned dark blue tracksuits and non-slip boots, the latter I reckoned being the only generous nod to us staying in one piece. There were no ear defenders as with them we would not be able to hear people creeping up behind us.

‘As you're with me they won't play too dirty,' he added.

‘It hasn't felt like that on previous occasions,' I commented dourly, thinking my accuracy so far had not been too bad. ‘If a bloke grabs me can I kick him in the goolies?'

‘No!'

‘I distinctly remember a marine shoving a freezing-cold soaking-wet sponge into my knickers.'

Patrick tut-tutted and went off.

Was it irresponsible doing what we did with five young people to look after? I was sure it was. Nothing could change that. But from the moment Patrick, at the age of almost eighteen, had walked into my parents' kitchen – our fathers had arranged that he helped me with my physics homework – seated himself and glowered at me, my life had been set on this path. Drawing a neat line under the words specific gravity I had known, instantly – and there are those who would sneer at such sentiments – that here was the man I wanted for ever and ever. There would be no halfway measures: you were either with him or you were not.

My one and only claim to fame at school was that I had nabbed the head boy. Eventually we had married but by that time everything had changed. Patrick had joined the police on leaving school but left, finding it not exciting enough, and opted for the Devon and Dorset Regiment instead. Suddenly he had a life where there were places to visit, adventures to be had; the whole world at his feet. Despite this, he wanted children. I did not. We saw less and less of one another, and on his leaves there seemed only to be a newly arrogant and aggressive man with whom I had bitter rows. This culminated one night when I threw his classical guitar down the stairs, smashing it and then threw him out too: it was my cottage, bought with the royalties from my books and some money left to me by my father. Eventually, we divorced.

Then, on secret operations in the Falklands, the second youngest major in the British army, there was an accident with a hand grenade, not of his doing, and he was horribly injured. Strangely, no one was more horrified about it than the perpetrator, an Argentine undercover soldier they had captured who Patrick interrogated and who had come to quite like and admire him. Initially terrified – an old pony had come in out of the rain into the shepherd's hut they were hiding in, laid down and fallen so soundly asleep that Patrick was leaning back on it, using it as a sofa – and the man thought they had killed it to sit on. But the following morning, by which time the pony had gone, he had tried to warn his own side by grabbing a grenade and throwing it, only for it to bounce off a rock and explode inside the hut.

What Patrick has revealed about it – not everything, I feel – still haunts me. He could not understand how his sergeant, who had been blown against a wall and was only suffering from a broken arm, could scream with his mouth closed. Then he realized that it was him. Carlos Savadra, the Argentinian, he remembers, knelt by his side weeping, praying and begging his forgiveness all at once while the others gave him first aid. The enemy did not notice that small bang in the hills above Port Stanley.

Several operations and lengthy stays in hospital later he was offered a job with MI5, the only stipulation, as socializing was involved, being to find a female partner. It was reckoned that lone men, especially one with a bad limp and a somewhat saturnine demeanour, were conspicuous. The injuries having left him with a severe lack of self-confidence as far as the opposite sex was concerned, he asked the only woman on the planet he knew would not want to go to bed with him: me. How could I refuse to help the man I had once been deeply in love with, who was convinced he was crippled for life? He wasn't. He was wrong and we sorted out the sex bit. A little later we had remarried. And now? Three children of our own and two adopted? Sometimes when the house is in uproar with them we just look at one another and laugh.

I caught up with him in the armory where he was in receipt of his own Glock 17, handed in to be thoroughly checked over while we had got changed. The short-barrelled Smith and Wesson was still in the secret cubbybox in the Range Rover – it is always kept there – as I am not the slightest bit superstitious when it comes to using anything but my own, unlike Patrick – any one will do. They are not really standard issue any more but I am permitted to keep it as I am not called upon to use firearms very often. Not only that, but specialist training with a new weapon would also cost money and the Ministry of Defence budget was being sliced to the marrow.

We would not know what kind of scenario we would be faced with until we actually arrived.

‘OK, as you're together you have three lives between you,' said a gimlet-eyed combats-clad man in an if-rhinos-could-speak voice. He gave me a thunderous frown that told me that a woman's presence was about to seriously pollute his fantastic piece of theatre.

In receipt of my weapon I beamed sunnily by way of a reply. It was all part of the process, together with giving us only three lives: moves designed to undermine self-confidence and give a little frisson of fear.

Damn their professionalism.

TEN

I
t started before we had even reached the door at the end of the short, gloomy tunnel that led into the complex, a couple of dark figures springing from nowhere to grab Patrick and wrestle him to the floor. At least, that was the idea but he had anticipated something might happen and, like me, had both hands free, our weapons in shoulder harnesses. One went bowling head over heels back the way he had come; the other had his arm twisted up his back until he grunted his surrender. He was released and we proceeded and I was not worried about them at all for they were fit young servicemen who would laugh about it afterwards with a man twice their age.

Any warm feelings I might be harbouring now were ruthlessly negated when suddenly I was seized, hauled backwards, feet trailing, and then slid head first down a chute of some kind. After an impossibly long descent with a few bends in it there was a heart-stopping drop on to what felt like damp cardboard boxes. They turned out to be exactly that, with a nice built-in smell of bad drains just for me. They do usually try to split up the pair of us at some stage in the proceedings but this simply was not cricket. I rolled off the stinking pile and crouched down, drew the Smith and Wesson and listened.

My surroundings resembled a large sewer and as I was standing in around four inches of stinking liquid perhaps they had dug down and borrowed one from Thames Water. The only light, albeit dim, was coming from somewhere ahead in a tunnel and through a small round hole in the planking above my head. Some kind of continental-style urinal? Over to my left was a dark opening of some kind. The only sounds were the slow drip of water and a strange humming noise which I put down to the set-up's running gear. I then thought of the time limit: no one had said what it was.

I moved off and as soon as I did a target popped up in the tunnel ahead of me. Getting it comprehensively right in the heart, the shot oddly muffled by my surroundings, and knowing from past experience that it was in a dead end I headed for the dark opening, pausing at the entrance. It was absolutely pitch dark down there. I set off, dreading holes it was planned I should fall into.

‘Boo!' someone whispered right behind me.

‘How did you get here?' I hissed, having jumped out of my skin.

‘Down some stairs and through a door,' Patrick answered, pushing past me. ‘Did you hit the target?'

‘Of course. How much time do we have?'

‘God knows. Don't follow me too closely.'

Fat chance, he had gone.

There was no indication that anything nasty had happened to him so I set off in his wake, groping, aware he would be really, really mad with me if I walked into him at a crucial moment. But nothing happened and we emerged a few yards after rounding a right-angled bend into a dimly lit and slightly wider area with a tall set of steps in it that appeared to give access to an aperture in the ceiling above. I had learned never to take anything for granted in connection with this war games complex.

‘You go first,' Patrick whispered. ‘Then if these damned things are designed to collapse I can catch you.'

The steps were wobbly but I went up them and poked my head out through the opening and gazed around. There was not much to see, just a very small room with three corridors off. At least the lights were on.

There was a slight click behind me, like an old-fashioned gun being cocked, but I knew what it was. I straightened my knees, spun round off-balance, and somehow got the target in the guts. Then got goosed from below by Patrick in a real hurry and jumped off the top of the steps still off-balance, tripped over my own feet and crashed on to the boarded floor. He dealt with another target, firing across me like a cowboy taking cover behind his dead horse.

‘I suppose that could have looked as though we meant it,' he muttered.

‘It was your fault for tweaking me like that,' I countered.

‘The bastards sent a few volts through the steps.'

And we were, of course, being watched and overheard over most of the course courtesy of CCTV cameras and microphones.

Two targets down, one corridor remaining. We went down it at a thoughtful speed – it pays to be cautious – arriving at a door. The handle was nice shiny metal and there was a distinct fizzing noise coming from the vicinity of it.

‘They're not really trying to kill us,' Patrick said, grasping it and opening the door. His hair did not stand on end so I reckoned we were safe.