The Walking Dead

'God, you're in a foul mood. Mary— she seems a sweet girl — rang, behind your back, to talk about the leaving bash they're giving you, and what you'd like as a present. The DG can't make it, and the deputy DG is on leave, but one of the assistant DGs hopes to be there…Anyway, your present. Well, I said that we had clocks littered all over the house, and didn't want another. I also said that we had a perfectly good cut-glass drinks set and no room for more of the same. I suggested a greenhouse, not a big one, but where you can grow tomatoes in the summer and keep the geraniums and fuchsias in the winter, somewhere you can potter. That's what you're getting — Mary thought it an excellent idea. There'll be vouchers for it.'

He should have gone on out through the front door, after kissing Anne's cheek, and should have started out on a brisk walk to the station. He'd turned. Said malevolently, 'And what did Daddy have, bloody golf clubs?'

'You know he did.'

'And was the director general at his bash to make the speech and hand them over?'

'You know he was.'

Then, too late, he'd tried to do the kiss but her head had turned away and his lips had pursed against thin air. He'd snorted and gone. It had been a cross he'd carried since his first day with the Service, thirty-nine years before, that his father-in-law had not only been an iconic counterintelligence figure with legendary status and the right to take an early-evening sherry or gin with successive DGs, but had put a word in an ear that had ensured his son-in-law was recruited for employment as a junior general-duties intelligence officer. He had never matched the importance in the Service carried by Anne's father — but only when he goaded her was he reminded of his failings. Her, father, before heading off to the golf links, had tracked traitors, the pathetic, dangerous creatures who had sold out their loyalty to their country and passed military secrets to the agencies of the Soviet Union. Those creatures had gone to the Old Bailey for high-profile trials and inordinately long sentences of imprisonment. Dickie Naylor, after thirty-nine years' hacking at anything thrown down on his desk, had never rivalled her father's favoured position. The proof of it for all to see: the top cats would not be at his party, and he would be getting a flat-pack greenhouse — if he were ever able to assemble it — for tomatoes and frost-endangered plants. All arranged by Mary Reakes.

So little time left, and what made it worse — hardest to accept — was that there was bugger-all, sweet damn all of nothing, for him to look back at and feel a shimmer of pride in. He was a journeyman. He had failed at nothing but succeeded at less, and a week on Monday would see him wrestling with the sections of a greenhouse, and no one would have noticed his going. He snorted annoyance. There was nothing on his computer screen now that had not been there the day before.

The section he headed, overseeing Mary Reakes who had officer rank and four women who did not, had twin responsibilities in Riverside Villas. It was tasked with identifying the possible arrival into the United Kingdom of a suicide-bomber of foreign origin, and — considered of greater importance and therefore greater threat — the arrival of what the neighbouring sister 'Firm' in Ceauescu Towers across the river called a 'coordinator' and the residents of the Villas described as a 'facilitator'. Since Nine-Eleven and the formation of his section, neither had appeared on the horizon…Dickie and Anne had not been blessed with children, therefore were denied grandchildren. There would be no small boy to sit on his knee and ask, 'What did you do in the war, Gramps?' and get the answer, 'Nothing, darling, because on my watch the bloody enemy never came.' Plenty to tell the kid, who didn't exist, if he had been following the money trails of that enemy's credit-card frauds, which financially supported their planning; too much to tell, if he had been setting up informants in mosques and madrassa schools where the principles of the Koran were taught and the texts learned by heart; or he could have talked of the computer records of those youths from north London or the west Midlands who shuffled passports and took flights to Karachi or Rawalpindi…Nothing to recount and nothing to speak of, and Dickie Naylor's time was slipping away.

He rehearsed what he would say, turned away from his screen and dialled home. He apologized, curtly and awkwardly, stuttered through it.

Naylor heard her: 'Don't be silly, nothing to be sorry for. Everyone has to do it, retire and start a new life, as I said. You just caught me as I was going to the supermarket — it'll be nice, you being able to come with me.'

He grimaced, and replaced the receiver.

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