Thunder in the Blood by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online Page A

taken rather longer than had been planned, more the firm’s fault than mine. Unexpected resignationsin Registry had left the department undermanned. In consequence, I’d been obliged to backfill. Under the circumstances, the view was that I’d done rather well. A series of source reports I’d analysed on certain developments in Northern Ireland had attracted a great deal of attention. I obviously had a knack for the work. I could recognize what was important and what was rubbish. I had the intellectual courage not to qualify my conclusions. I was bright and forthright and I obviously wasn’t frightened of hard work. One of the things he wanted to say, he muttered, was thank you.
    By this time, as you might imagine, I’d rather warmed to the man. With the blinds down on the window behind him, shielding me from the sun, I had the opportunity to take a real look. He was certainly young – I guessed maybe early thirties – but the tightly cropped hair was beginning to grey at the temples, and his face was hollow with fatigue. Physically, he was medium height, thin, with a white, indoor face and coal-black eyes. He was carefully dressed – blue shirt, subtly striped, nicely cut suit, quietly original tie – and there were no rings on his fingers. The desk, likewise, was virtually bare – blotter, wire basket, telephone, internal directory, two cheap Biros in a plain white mug – and it somehow matched the impression I was beginning to form about the man himself. It looked spartan. It spoke of efficiency, hard work and long hours. Empty of photographs or ornament, it made no concessions to a life outside.
    After a while, he enquired whether I’d like tea. I asked for coffee instead and he grunted, smiling at my usual obduracy, lifting the phone. When he put it down, he opened a drawer and took out a file. It was a red file. Red files, at Curzon House, are subject to internal restrictions. He slid it across to me.
    ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some biscuits somewhere.’
    I opened the file. Inside was a thin sheaf of source reports. The numbers on the tops of the pages weren’t consecutive. I was only getting part of the story. I read the first report. It quoted at length from a letter which had been received a week and a half earlier. It was on House of Commons notepaper and signed by an MP called Lawrence Priddy whose name I recognized from the papers. I glanced up.
    ‘Tory? Somewhere in the West Midlands?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    I nodded, returning to the file. Priddy had received a visit from a constituent, a woman called Beth Alloway. She’d come, in strictest confidence, because she was worried about her husband. Clive Alloway was a businessman. He ran a small consultancy in the engineering field. Priddy had evidently met him on a number of occasions and described him in the letter as ‘a minor player’.
    There was a tap on the door and the coffees arrived. I began to close the file but Stollmann signalled for me to read on. I did so, dunking the first of his stale digestives in the thin black liquid, committing the information to memory, brick by brick, the way I’d been taught. Clive Alloway sold high-tech tooling, much of it for export. In consequence, he spent a great deal of time abroad, winning orders, doing deals, troubleshooting hiccups. For the last year or so he’d been in Iraq a lot, often for weeks at a time. In ways that only a wife can recognize, these trips appeared to have changed him. He’d become secretive, evasive. He wasn’t sleeping well at nights. Strange calls on the house phone had begun to disturb him.
    Beth Alloway had answered one or two of these calls herself when her husband wasn’t at home and it had always been a foreign voice at the other end, polite enough but never offering a name or a number for a return call. This had made her wonder a bit but then, very recently, she’d been readying one of his jackets for the dry cleaners and she’d found a plain brown envelope,