‘Can you get that light out of my eyes please?’
Andrew Morson stepped forward, to stand beside Simon near the bins. He wore a waxed coat over his pyjamas, and wellington boots. He was smirking.
‘Just worried about you going through my bins. But you seem to have found what you wanted, Johnno.’
He was too quick. He had grabbed the watch before Simon had time to realise what he was doing. He shone the torch on it, turned it over, examined the small buttons on the side.
‘Odd, don’t you think? Where did you get this?’
‘At a service station, a fiver with a fill-up of diesel. Can’t remember exactly.’
Morson held the watch up. ‘Really worth all that cloak-and-dagger stuff just to get this back?’
‘Just didn’t want to lose the only timepiece I’ve got.’
‘You’re behaving like a kid that lost his teddy … Interesting array of knobs here. You get this sort of thing on a Patek Philippe or a Rolex.’
‘Hardly. They’re just dummies, aren’t they?’
‘Are they? Let’s give them a go.’
Simon shrugged. He knew that the buttons only worked if pressed in the correct sequence, and the chances of that were fairly low – but on the other hand, there were only four buttons.
Morson fiddled about for a moment. Nothing. Or, at least, there were no beeps or flashes.
‘So why bother to come down and sort through the bins at half three in the morning? Maybe I’m missing something obvious. Am I? But in my job, it never pays to do that, so generally I don’t.’
His voice was silken, his head was cocked slightly on one side, and he was almost smiling. But not quite. His eyes, as they met Serrailler’s, did not blink. Simon’s left hand twitched.
‘Well, never mind. You’re here now, whatever time it is. Odd though. Can I keep this? It’s only worth a fiver. I’ll give you a fiver.’
Serrailler took a pace back. ‘You’d be welcome to it except that I don’t have another, and to be honest, I’ve got a bit attached to it. I’ve had it inside for a long time.’
‘Like your old teddy bear. Your constant companion. Sort of talisman, is it? I understand totally. I feel like that about my ancient shooting jacket. Still, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to it, Johnno.’
He pressed the buttons: one, two, three, four.
Simon lunged forward suddenly, and the torch went out as Morson hit the ground and he ran fast into the darkness.
The side path led to the drive, and he knew that the gates could only be opened by the activation of an electronic barrier. They were impossible to scale. He kept close to the high wall and ran to where the garden gave onto a rising meadow which had a ring of trees at its crown. There was no hiding place here but the rise dropped down quickly on the far side, and then towards a thick hedge. Beyond that was open country – too open. He expected an alarm to have started up but there was silence and the security lights had not been switched on. It was possible that he had knocked Morson out cold and now had a head start. He did not let himself think further.
It was still pitch dark but he found a weak gap in the hedge, and pushed his way through, tearing his shirt and his arm on brambles. There was a ditch on the other side. He dropped down and lay until his breathing slowed. He had no means of making contact with base and no idea at all of what Morson might do.
However, he had come to suspect that Johnno Miles was not Johnno Miles; now he would be certain of it, though he had no way of finding out his real identity. That was irrelevant. He had been clever enough to start probing. The explanation about the plastic watch being a beloved object because it had been with him in prison had not held water for a moment. But when he came round, he might play about with it until he discovered what happened when everything was pressed in the right order. Nobody would reply, there would be no voice, no beeping, but Simon was certain that Morson was suspicious enough to investigate further, and perhaps even discover that ‘Johnno Miles’ was an undercover cop.
Something scurried close to his feet at the bottom of the ditch and he got up quickly. A rat bite was the last thing he needed.
He had to hide out, moving across country, until he came to any sort of house, service station, farm. Even better, if he came to a village he would be able to get access to a phone – probably by simply asking for it. The news blackout on their escape meant that he would not be recognised, and although he looked scruffy, he thought he could provide a plausible explanation for that.
He stayed long enough to eat the banana he had taken from the house, which gave him a shot of energy, and then moved on. He had about two and a half hours before dawn. The countryside was silent, he had not heard a single vehicle or seen any headlights. It would be safe, at least for a time, and much faster, to get onto a road.
Morson was winded and disorientated. He was also angry. He had come round after ten minutes, realised that he was not badly hurt and unlikely to suffer any damage beyond a sore head. He got up cautiously. Took a few deep breaths. Went back into the house, to make two phone calls.
A few minutes later, he heard the Range Rover start up in the yard.
Painkillers and brandy took some time to work on his blinding headache and he lay thinking, not about ‘Johnno’ – that would be taken care of now – but about how the ring could have been cracked and then disabled, who had let anything slip, what information might have leaked out. Email addresses, servers, ISPs, they all led somewhere in the end.
Everyone had been alerted on a separate server and gone offline. There were other ways of keeping contact going though it would be unwise to use them.
No one knew better than he did how big the risk was now, how high the stakes, but most of them had everything to lose if it came to public exposure.