The Untouchable by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page B

drunk, give me his name again.'
    'You don't want to worry about him - he's not a team player, but then he was only the collator, did the archive, kept the paper in order. He's a nobody.'
    What's "nobody's" name?'
    'SQG12. Joey Cann.'
    Joey turned into the road. He had never been there before. He had filed perhaps two hundred photographs of it; he knew its every detail - when the trees were in blossom, in leaf, or bare, and the gardens when they were stripped down or coming into flower.
    It was as if he had lived in that road through the lenses of cameras secreted in canvas BT shelters, parked vans and abandoned cars. The road was usually in monochrome but it made little difference to his ability to recognize it.
    He was a driven creature. In the world of legal process, a defence brief could have ripped to small pieces the slight-built young man, pale-faced, hair dark and tangled, with the large spectacles and the crumpled jeans who had turned into the southern junction of the road and who now sauntered along it towards the playing-fields at the top end. He had no authorization to be there, no permission for intrusive surveillance. Merely being in the road broke Church practice and bordered on the edge of legality. He could not have stayed away.
    'Excuse me,' a voice shrilled behind him.
    He drifted to the side of the pavement and a woman pushed a baby buggy past him. She turned and gave him a withering, suspicious glance. He knew her, from photographs, as Rosie Carthew.
    He understood that he would have looked an out-of-place cuckoo, and she might have smelt his body. Her husband brought into the country Italian top-of-the-

    range ladies' dresses, skirts, blouses and handbags.
    He also knew that, eighteen months before, Rosie Carthew had twice phoned the local police to complain about suspicious vehicles in the road, and twice surveillance operations had been killed off.
    A woman was sweeping the pavement of hedge clippings. From the pictures he recognized her as Carol Penberthy. Three months before Mister's arrest, at dead of night, the Security Service A Branch
    'watchers' had buried a fish-eye camera in the brick gatepost on the drive of the house opposite his.
    Nothing to do with Neighbourhood Watch but she must have been restless and up at her bedroom window as they worked. The next morning Carol Penberthy had been filmed by the fish-eye trooping out of her own doorway, down the pavement and up to the Packer doorway for a fast, whispered conversation with Mister in his dressing-gown and slippers.
    That night a ramshackle van had come down the road and the fish-eye's last image had been of its front fender before it had crashed into the brick column and destroyed the camera.
    He doubted that either woman was in conspiracy with Packer - just inquisitive, and nosy, with flapping tongues.
    Joey was outside the house. He had seen it through all the hours of the clock, days of the week, weeks of the month, months and seasons of the year. He knew the setting and size of the bricks of the walls, the number of glass panes in the front bay windows on either side of the porch, and the positioning of the spyhole in the door, the chimes in the hall from the bell - a year before the arrest a microphone had been set into the bark of the blossom tree by the front gate; it had lasted a week before being prised out; they'd muttered then that either Mister had got lucky, or that the information tap had leaked once again -
    and the patterns on the curtains, and the mesh on the net. Behind the door and the curtains he knew the layout of the rooms. The house had been 'burgled' by the A Branch watchers, the first time they had been involved. They were the clever cats introduced to go where plodding policemen and mediocre Church men couldn't reach: they'd put a bug behind the cover where the TV aerial came into the living-room wall and a pinhead probe inside the ventilation grille in the bedroom, which had lasted four days. Both had gone out