“I don’t know.” Ryan looked at his reflection in a window. “It would mean more time away from the family. We’re expecting another one this summer, you know.”
“Congratulations, that’s good news. I know you’re a family man, Jack. The job would mean some sacrifices, but you’re a good man for it.”
“Think so?” I haven’t exactly set the world on fire yet.
“I’d rather see people like you over there than some others I know. Jack, you’re plenty smart enough. You know how to make decisions, but more importantly, you’re a pretty good fellow. I know you’re ambitious, but you’ve got ethics, values. I’m one of those people who thinks that still matters for something in the world, regardless of how nasty things get.”
“They get pretty nasty. Father,” Ryan said after a moment.
“How close are you to finding them?”
“Not very close at –” Jack stopped himself too late. “You did that one pretty well.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Father Tim said very sincerely. “It would be a better world if they were off the street. There must be something wrong with the way they think. It’s hard to understand how anyone could deliberately hurt a child.”
“Father, you really don’t have to understand them. You just have to know where to find them.”
“That’s work for the police, and the courts, and a jury. That’s why we have laws. Jack,” Riley said gently.
Ryan turned to the window again. He examined his own image and wondered what it was that he saw. “Father, you’re a good man, but you’ve never had kids of your own. I can forgive somebody who comes after me, maybe, but not anyone who tries to hurt my little girl. If I find him — hell, I won’t. But I sure would like to,” Jack told the image of himself. Yes, it agreed.
“It’s not a good thing, hate. It might do things to you that you’ll regret, things that can change you from the person you are.”
Ryan turned back, thinking about the person he’d just looked at. “Maybe it already has.”
Chapter 20
Data
It was a singularly boring tape. Owens was used to reading police reports, transcripts of interrogations, and, worst of all, intelligence documents, but the tape was even more boring than that. The microphone which the Security Service had hidden in Cooley’s shop was sound-activated and sensitive enough to pick up any noise. The fact that Cooley hummed a lot made Owens regret this feature. The detective whose job it was to listen to the unedited tape had included several minutes of the awful, atonal noise to let his commander know what he had to suffer through. The bell finally rang.
Owens heard the clatter, made metallic by the recording system, of the door opening and closing, then the sound of Cooley’s swivel chair scraping across the floor. It must have had a bad wheel, Owens noted.
“Good morning, sir!” It was Cooley’s voice.
“And to you,” said the second. “Well, have you finished the Marlowe?”
“Yes, I have.”
“So what’s the price?”
Cooley didn’t say it aloud, but Ashley had told Owens that the shop owner never spoke a price. He handed it to his customers on a file card. That, Owens thought, was one way to keep from haggling.
“That is quite steep, you know,” Watkins’ voice observed.
“I could get more, but you are one of our better clients,” Cooley replied.
The sigh was audible on the tape. “Very well, it is worth it.”
The transaction was made at once. They could hear the rasping sound of new banknotes being counted.
“I may soon have something new from a collection in Kerry,” Cooley said next.
“Oh?” There was interest in the reply.
“Yes, a signed first edition of Great Expectations. I saw it on my last trip over. Might you be interested in that?”
“Signed, eh?”
“Yes, sir, ‘Boz’ himself. I realize that the Victorian period is rather more recent than most of your acquisitions, but the author’s signature . . . ”
“Indeed. I would like to see it, of course.”
“That can be arranged.”
“At this point,” Owens told Ashley, “Watkins leaned over, and our man in the jewelry shop lost sight of him.”
“So he could have passed a message.”
“Possibly.” Owens switched off the tape machine. The rest of the conversation had no significance.
“The last time he was in Ireland, Cooley didn’t go to County Kerry. He was in Cork the whole time. He visited three dealers in rare books, spent the night in a hotel, and had a few pints at a local pub,” Ashley reported.
“A pub?”
“Yes, he drinks in Ireland, but not in London.”
“Did he meet anyone there?”
“Impossible to tell. Our man wasn’t close enough. His orders were to be discreet, and he did well not to be spotted.” Ashley was quiet for a moment as he tried to pin down something on the tape. “It sounded to me as though he paid cash for the book.”
“He did, and it is out of pattern. Like most of us he uses checks and credit cards for the majority of his transactions, but not for this. His bank records show no checks to this shop, though he does occasionally make large cash withdrawals. They may or may not match with his purchases there.”
“How very odd,” Ashley thought aloud. “Everyone — well, someone must know that he goes there.”
“Checks have dates on them,” Owens suggested.
“Perhaps.” Ashley wasn’t convinced, but he’d done enough investigations of this kind to know that you never got all the answers. Some details were always left hanging. “I took another look at Geoff’s service record last night. Do you know that when he was in Ireland, he had four men killed in his platoon?”
“What? That makes him a fine candidate for our investigation!” Owens didn’t think this was good news.
“That’s what I thought,” Ashley agreed. “I had one of our chaps in Germany — his former regiment’s assigned to the BAOR at the moment — interview one of Watkins’s mates. Had a platoon in the same company, the chap’s a half-colonel now. He said that Geoff took it quite hard, that he was quite vociferous on the point that they were in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, and losing people in the process. Rather puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?”
“Another lieutenant with the solution to the problem.” Owens snorted.
“Yes — we leave and let the bloody Irish sort things out. That’s not exactly a rare sentiment in the Army, you know.”
It wasn’t exactly a rare sentiment throughout England, Commander Owens knew. “Even so, it’s not much of a basis for motive, is it?”
“Better than nothing at all.”
The cop grunted agreement. “What else did the Colonel tell your chap?”
“Obviously Geoff had a rather busy tour of duty in the Belfast area. He and his men saw a lot. They were there when the Army was welcomed in by the Catholics, and they were there when the situation reversed. It was a bad time for everyone,” Ashley added unnecessarily.
“It’s still not very much. We have a former subaltern, now in the striped-pants brigade, who didn’t like being in Northern Ireland; he happens to buy rare books from a chap who grew up there and now runs a completely legitimate business in central London. You know what any solicitor would say: pure coincidence. We don’t have one single thing that can remotely be called evidence. The background of each man is pure enough to qualify him for sainthood.”
“These are the people we’ve been looking for,” Ashley insisted.
“I know that.” Owens almost surprised himself when he said it for the first time. His professionalism told him that this was a mistake, but his instincts told him otherwise. It wasn’t a new feeling for the Commander of C-13, but one that always made him uneasy. If his instincts were wrong, he was looking in the wrong place, at the wrong people. But his instincts were almost never wrong. “You know the rules of the game, and by those rules, I don’t even have enough to go to the Commissioner. He’d boot me out of the office, and be right to do so. We have nothing but unsupported suspicions.” The two men stared at each other for several seconds.
“I never wanted to be a policeman.” Ashley smiled and shook his head.
“I didn’t get my wish, either. I wanted to be an engine driver when I was six, but my father said there were enough railway people in the family. So I became a copper.” Both men laughed. There wasn’t anything else to do.
“I’ll increase the surveillance on Cooley’s trips abroad. I don’t think there’s much more to be done on your side,” Ashley said finally.
“We have to wait for them to make a mistake. Sooner or later they all do, you know.”