A Delicate Truth A Novel

Elliot in the same steady tone. ‘Not till I agree, there isn’t. We’re not shooting at each other in the dark, thank you. Confirm you copy me, please. Elliot, did you hear what I just said?’
    Still no answer, as Quinn returns in a flurry.
    ‘Paul? That light inside house seven. You saw it? You had eyes-on ?’
    ‘I did. Yes. Eyes-on.’
    ‘Once?’
    ‘I believe I saw it twice, but indistinctly.’
    ‘It’s Punter . Punter ’s in there. At this minute. In house seven. That was Punter holding a hand torch, crossing the room. You saw his arm. Well, didn’t you? You saw it, for Christ’s sake. A human arm. We all did.’
    ‘We saw an arm, but the arm is subject to identification, Nine. We’re still waiting for Aladdin to turn up. He’s lost, and there’s no indication that he’s on his way here.’ And catching Jeb’s eye: ‘We’re also waiting for proof that Punter is on the premises.’
    ‘Paul?’
    ‘Still here, Nine.’
    ‘We’re re-planning. Your job is to keep the houses in plain sight. House seven particularly. That’s an order. While we re-plan. Understood?’
    ‘Understood.’
    ‘You see anything out of the ordinary with the naked eye that the cameras may have missed, I need to know instantly.’ Fades and returns. ‘You’re doing an excellent job, Paul. It will not go unnoticed. Tell Jeb. That’s an order.’
    They’re becalmed, but he feels no calm. Aladdin ’s vanishing act has cast its spell over the hide. Elliot may be repositioning his aerial cameras but they’re still scanning the town, homing at random on stray cars and abandoning them. His ground cameras are still offering now the marina, now the entrance to the tunnel, now stretches of empty coast road.
    ‘Come on, you ugly bastard, show !’ – Don, to the absent Aladdin .
    ‘Too busy having it away, randy sod’ – Andy, to himself.
    Aladdin is waterproof, Paul , Elliot is insisting across his desk inPaddington. We do not lay one single finger on Aladdin. Aladdin is fireproof, he is bulletproof. That is the solemn deal that Mr Crispin has cut with his highly valuable informant, and Mr Crispin’s word to an informant is sacred .
    ‘Skipper’ – Don again, this time with both arms up.
    A motorcyclist is weaving his way along the metalled service track, flashing his headlight from side to side. No helmet, just a black-and-white keffiyeh flapping round his neck. With his right hand he is steering the bike, while his left holds what appears to be a bag by its throat. Swinging the bag as he goes along, displaying it, showing it off, look at me. Slender, wasp-waisted. The keffiyeh masking the lower part of his face. As he draws level with the centre of the terrace his right hand leaves the handlebars and rises in a revolutionist’s salute.
    Reaching the end of the service track, he seems all set to join the coast road, heading south. Abruptly he turns north, head thrust forward over the handlebars, keffiyeh streaming behind him and, accelerating, races towards the Spanish border.
    But who cares about a hell-bent motorcyclist in a keffiyeh when his black bag sits like a plum pudding in the middle of the metalled track, directly in front of the doorway leading to house number seven?
     
    *
     
    The camera has closed on it. The camera enlarges it. Enlarges it again.
    It’s a common-or-garden black plastic bag, bound at the throat with twine or raffia. It’s a bin bag. It’s a bin bag with a football or a human head or a bomb in it. It’s the kind of suspicious object which, if you saw it lying around untended at a railway station, you either told someone or you didn’t, depending how shy you were.
    The cameras were vying with each other to get at it. Aerialshots followed ground-level close-ups and wide-angle shots of the terrace at giddying speed. Out to sea, the helicopter had dropped low over the mother ship in protection. In the hide, Jeb was urging sweet reason:
    ‘It’s a bag , Elliot, is what it is’ – his Welsh voice at its gentlest and most persistent. ‘That’s all we know, see. We don’t know what’s in it, we can’t hear it, we can’t smell it, can we? There’s no green smoke coming out of it, no external wires or aerials that we can see, and I’m sure you can’t either. Maybe it’s just a kid doing a bit of fly-tipping for his mum … No, Elliot, I don’t think we’ll do that, thank you. I think we’ll leave it where it is and let it do whatever it was brought here to do, if you