Thunder in the Blood by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online

8 July. He was smiling broadly. The CT scan had caught the offending bug. Wesley had TB of the stomach. Now they could set to work and make him better.
    And they did. Within ten days, still very weak, Wesley left the hospital with Mark and took a taxi back to Stoke Newington. Waiting for him there, a nice touch, was a letter Aldridge had sent by courier that same afternoon. In it he promised Wesley that his job was safe for as long as he wanted it and that he should take his time getting better. Only at the end of the letter did he mention the Irish story. The piece, he wrote, was sensational. Wesley had done a fine job. But certain aspects had proved especially sensitive and after a great deal of thought Aldridge had decided not to run it. Nothing personal. Just an old-fashioned editorial decision he hoped he’d understand. Wesley didn’t understand, but what was more important was the realization that, just now, he didn’t much care. Mark, coming in from the kitchen with yet more soup, had watched the letter flutter to the floor. Years later, he still remembers the expression on Wesley’s face: pure indifference, a residue of the fever that had very nearly killed him.
    My own career, meanwhile, had ground to a halt. By now, I’d been at Curzon House for well over a year. The novelty had gone, the challenge had worn off and I’d had more than enough time to ask myself some of the harder questions. One or two of them had to do with a growing sense of claustrophobia. The offices themselves were dull and airless. No one ever seemed to laugh. There was no spark, or sense of real involvement. My colleagues, most of them, were obsessed by status and petty slights. My superiors were largely invisible. And away from the building, outin the real world where the product was gathered and spent, there was only a mysterious void. I’d said yes, all those months ago, because I thought I could contribute. Now, I spent my working life in front of a computer screen, a million miles from what I fondly thought of as the action.
    MI5 has a form for moods like these. It’s called an HR7. You fill it in and send it upstairs. After a while, if you’re lucky, they ask to see you. In my case, it was autumn before the summons came, a peremptory phone call telling me to report to an office on the fourth floor. I recognized the voice at once. It was a voice you didn’t forget: flat South London vowels half-buried under a thin, nasal whine. It belonged to the younger of the two men I’d met with Rory at the Soho restaurant, the one who’d subsequently reappeared at my formal interview. Since then, I’d seen him perhaps half a dozen times, awkward meetings in lifts or the central lobby, a nod and a grunt and a passing reference to the weather, nothing I could dignify with the word ‘conversation’. The only thing I really knew about him was his name, Eric Stollmann, and that fact that he’d come to us a couple of years back from Customs and Excise.
    The latter was occasionally a subject of canteen gossip. Customs and Excise were well known as zealots, keen-eyed shock-troop types with terrible complexions and inner-city educations and absolutely no sense of humour. As far as I could judge, Stollmann was the perfect example of all three. Quite why he’d transferred his affections to our little brotherhood no one seemed to know, but he was universally mistrusted, not least because no one had a clue what he did.
    I knocked twice on his office door and stepped in. He was sitting behind a desk with his back to the window. The sun, low, cast a long shadow over the blotter. He was toying with a paper clip, thin bony fingers, bitten nails. For the first time ever, he smiled.
    ‘Long time,’ he mumbled, ‘no see.’
    We talked for nearly an hour. I remember everything about the conversation because – to be frank – it was the first time I’d got any real sense out of any of my superiors. He began by saying he was sorry. My induction had