The Watchman (28 page)

At the pick-up she relayed Alex's description and the nature of the Watchman's injuries. Afterwards she walked round the cellar, examined the gashed wet suit and the small pile of Alex's belongings.

"We've got people covering the ground for a ten-mile radius," she told him.

"Helicopters, tracker dogs, everything. Countrywide the police'll be looking for a man in his mid-thirties, around five foot eleven and strongly built, with a broken nose and injured hand. We've put it around that he's a paranoid schizophrenic, armed, who's escaped from the high-security wing of Garton Hill. Do not approach, et cetera."

Alex was silent. There was nothing useful left to say.

Five minutes later Max whip-finished the sutures on his cheek.

"Right," he said.

"Let's get on with that ear. Tell them upstairs I'll be at least another forty minutes." He turned back to Alex with a rueful smile.

"Think sweet thoughts, my friend. This is going to hurt."

That afternoon Alex was driven in a private ambulance to the Fairlie Clinic in Upper Norwood, London. In theory this facility is available to the paying public;

in practice it is reserved for the use of the security services. Several super grasses Alex had heard, had received reconstructive facial surgery behind its unremarkable doors.

There, he was walked to a windowless private room and his clothes were placed in a locker. A male nurse brought him a cup of tea, a painkilling dose of Volterol and Coproxamol, and the use of a radio tuned to Classic FM. The rest of the day passed slowly.

Shortly before midnight Alex awoke to hear his mobile phone juddering in his locker. It was still switched to vibrate, he realised. He was lying in total darkness against cotton pillows, the painkillers had worn off and his stitches were burning.

"Alex," came the voice, quiet but insistent.

"It's Stevo, man.

"Stevo?" he asked blankly, then remembered talking to the sniper team leader at Don Hammond's post-funeral piss-up.

"Stevo, yeah, tell me! How are you?"

"Fine, man listen, I don't know what you want Den Connolly for but I can tell you we've had all manner of lairy buggers asking after him recently."

Box people, thought Alex. Might have guessed it.

"Basically the lads have kept schtumm," Stevo continued.

"But I'll tell you what I know."

"Go on."

"He left after the Gulf and hooked up with some outfit doing marine security in the Mediterranean. Don't know the details, but apparently he started hitting the Scotch or the job went arse up or whatever and the next thing anyone heard was he was into armed robbery."

"Yeah?"

"Word is, he was the trigger man on that job off the North Circular."

"Park Royal?" murmured Alex.

"A security van? Something to do with cash points

"Yeah. Basically three of them did the Bank of Scotland for a million and a half Not a massive take, but good enough for Den and he fucked off to Spain."

"D'you know where?"

"A village outside Marbella called El Angel. One of the lads went down there last summer. Apparently Den got some Spanish front guy to buy a bar for him and hangs out there."

"What's the bar called?"

"Pablito's. Nice little place, apparently. Den's in a bit of a downward spiral, though."

"And officially no one knows about this place?"

"Bill Leonard certainly doesn't, because he called us in a week ago and asked if anyone had any ideas where to find him. Then there were a couple of obvious Boxheads in Saxty's asking after him. We all assumed it was something to do with the Park Royal job."

"How do you know it isn't?"

"I don't know. I reckon you'd tell us the form if it was anything like that."

"I promise you, I'm not going to grass him up."

There was a brief silence.

"The RSM was wondering: is it anything to do with a certain former student?"

Alex smiled and, as so often before, marvelled at the subtlety and accuracy of the Regiment's NCO grapevine.

"Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil," he said eventually.

"Like that, is it? Wise monkeys?"

"Something like that. Thanks, Stevo."

TWENTY-ONE.

He offered Dawn his resignation the next day.

"You can't just ... walk out!" she protested.

"You're the only one to have seen Meehan face to face."

"He's the one who's seen me, not the other way round, and I don't look exactly anonymous with these stitches all over me. I won't be able to get within miles of him."

"And Angela Fenwick? What's going to happen when he comes after her?"

"Your people are going to have to stop him," said Alex.

"It's as simple as that."

She stared at him.

"Alex." She hesitated over the use of his name.

"Please.

Don't make me beg you to finish the job."

"It's more likely to be Meehan who's finishing the job," said Alex wryly, touching his bandaged face.

"Alex." she lowered her voice.

"You can catch him and you can kill him.

You're the best. That's why we came to you.

He glanced over at her. Today she was dressed completely in steely grey the grey of her eyes.

"What would it take," she murmured, 'to keep you on the case?

In charge of the case, calling the shots?"

Would you credit it, he thought. She's actually schmoozing me. He closed his eyes. He'd never yet walked away from a challenge.

"You could have whatever..

"Spain," he intermpted her flatly.

She stared at him.

"We have to fly to Spain. There's someone we need to see." He gave her a censored version of the facts. She listened in silence.

"I don't see why you can't simply tell me who this man is, so that I can send someone over to talk to him."

"He won't talk to you or to anyone you send," said Alex firmly.

"It's got to be me. Once I've talked to this guy I'll hand the information over to you and you can do what you want with it. You brought me in for my speciali sed knowledge you might as well get your money's worth."

She looked at him uncertainly and he shrugged. If he could help MI-5 nail Meehan it might make up in some small way for his negligence towards George Widdowes. It was all that he had left to offer.

"If anyone knew Meehan," Alex continued, 'it was this guy. Day after day, week after week, down at that bunker in Tregaron .. . You get to know someone pretty damn well under those circumstances. You talk to each other because there's nothing else to do. Blokes I've trained I know things about them their wives certainly don't."

She nodded, took her mobile from her bag and left the room. By the time she returned he had finished the coffee. Her eyes travelled over the ugly, black scabbed stitches that cut across his face.

"Angela's flying to Washington this morning for two days and I think we can assume she'll be safe from Meehan during that time. But it means we have to get to Spain pretty much immediately and be back within forty-eight hours. Do you think you can travel in that state?"

They went first-class that afternoon. At the Fairhe Clinic they knew all about short recovery times, and the male nurse who had attended Alex the day before gave Dawn a swift tutorial on the care of knife wounds and packed a kit containing all the bandages, dressings and painkillers that she would need.

At Heathrow, at Alex's insistence, they had bought a beach bag and swimming kit. In Alex's case this had meant a pair of blue shorts, in Dawn's a red bikini that Alex had exchanged for the severe one-piece she herself had chosen.

"We've got to fit in," he told her as the plane circled Malaga airport.

"The more official we look the less he'll tell us. If we look like a couple of civil servants on expenses I can guarantee that he won't even speak to us. And we both know you look good in red!"

She'd ignored the last comment and reluctantly agreed, as she had agreed that no official mention would be made of their contact's name or location, and that whatever she learnt from the visit no criminal prosecution would be set in motion.

"The other thing you have to remember," Alex had told her, 'is that the world our man occupies is not run by Guardian readers but by hard-core criminals. The deal with girlfriends is that they wear a lot of lipstick, they're treated like princesses and when it's time to talk business they make themselves scarce. So when I feel that point's coming I'll expect you to do just that, OK?"

"I don't know why you need me along at all," she complained.

"To make the whole thing kosher. Our guy's sure to have some sort of woman in tow and a single male visitor unbalances the household. He constitutes a threat, a sexual challenge, a physical invasion all sorts of negative things. A man with a girlfriend, however, is quite another matter. You and his chi ca can push off and talk about blonde highlights or vibrators or whatever and leave the men to put the world to rights over a bottle of ten-year-old malt."

"I can't wait."

"Look, we want a result, we've got to press the right buttons." She narrowed her eyes.

"And all that male-heroic, bimbo girlie stuff is a million miles from your own enlightened, neo feminist views, right?"

"Absolutely," said Alex.

"I'm the original new man, me.

The seat belt sign came on and a broad swathe of brilliant Mediterranean blue appeared beneath them. It was 4.15 local time.

The drive from Malaga airport took the best part of forty minutes in their hired Mercedes. It was a beautifully clear day, the air was warm and the pace of the traffic on the coast highway leisurely. From Malaga to Marbella seemed to be one long strip of holiday, golfing and marina developments. Some of these were completed, some were still at the bricks-and-mortar stage and all offered extravagantly generous terms to potential buyers.

"We should put a deposit down on a condo." Alex yawned contentedly as they bypassed Marbella.

"We can retire here and play golf when we finally hang up our shoulder holsters."

"Endless boozing with retired villains," said Dawn acidly.

"I think not."

"Oh, get a life, girl! The sun's shining. We're on the Costa del Sol. Let's at least try to enjoy ourselves."

"There's something very creepy about this place. Where are all the young people, for a start?"

"Having sexy siestas would be my guess. That or lying on the beach."

"Hm. Planning the next Brinks-Mat robbery more likely."

"Look," said Alex, 'there's the sign for El Angel."

They drove past the turning and on to Puerto Banus, where they had booked accommodation for two nights. The Hotel del Puerto, they discovered, was a class act. A fountain surrounded by dwarf palms played in the reception area and their luxurious balconied room overlooked the port.

The room was a double. Alex had no reason to suspect that Connolly would check their accommodation, but he knew two singles would definitely spook him in the unlikely event that he did bother. Dawn had not been enthusiastic about a shared bed and Alex had drily promised to sleep on the floor.

And here they were. Beneath them sparkling white yachts rocked gently at anchor, and on the quay side expensively dressed holiday makers sauntered past the bars and shops. Even Dawn brightened at the prospect before them and when Alex suggested they went down for a snack she readily agreed.

He unzipped his bag on the double bed, stripped uncomfortably to his boxer shorts the wound in his thigh was particularly painful after the journey and replaced his jeans and T-shirt with lightweight chinos and a Hawaiian shirt printed with dragons. The stitches he covered up with Elastoplast.

"How do I look?" he asked Dawn.

, "Like a beaten-up pimp," said Dawn.

"If you'll excuse me, I'll change in the bathroom.

She re-entered in a short cocktail frock in her signature dove-grey and the faintest suggestion of scent. Her hair and her eyes shone. Alex stared at her.

"You look..

"Yes, Captain Temple?"

I as if you're on holiday."

"Good," she said.

"Let's go."

They chose a bar more or less at random. It was a little past five in the evening, and the glare had lifted from the sea and the gin palaces in front of them. The tables near them held middle-aged men in yachting gear and much younger women with implausibly huge breasts.

Their food arrived, plus a couple of Cokes. Alex had warned Dawn that some fairly serious drinking lay ahead. From his pocket he took a small plastic container holding a dozen ephedrine tablets. These, drawn from the Fairlie Clinic, had the dual effect of sharpening the senses and keeping drunkenness at bay.

"Bottoms up!" He grinned, downing two of them and handing the container to Dawn.

"Cheers!" rejoined Dawn rather more soberly. She took two and placed the container in her bag for safe keeping.

"Glad to see you're taking deodorant," observed Alex, peering A down into the bag.

"Things could get a bit sweaty."

"Funny guy," said Dawn.

"It's actually a can of Mace. Anyone tries any monkey business including you they go down."

"Riot girl, huh?"

"You bet."

The drive took fifteen minutes.

El Angel was a very different proposition from Puerto Banus. Not so much a village as an arbitrary strip of land between the highway and the sea, it comprised a clutch of new and not-so new hacienda-style developments. The largest of these a bowling and fast-food centre was windowless and uncompleted, and from the weathered appearence of its plaster work had clearly been so for some time. A large painted sign showed the development as its architects had envisaged it~ bustling, youthful and cosmopolitan but in truth it looked merely forlorn.

Parking the Mercedes on the highway, Alex and Dawn followed the track towards the sea. This passed through low scrub and between areas which had clearly once been intended to be gardens.

Now, however, they only contained builders' rubble, rusting angle iron and other construction detritus. The evening breeze carried a strong smell of dogshit.