per diem they had been obliged to exchange at the official one-to-one exchange rate, on some of the uninspiring ‘honest English fare’ in one of the state-run Corner House restaurants. But instead of searching out an eating house without a queue or making for a cab back to the checkpoint, and the supposed culinarydelights of Westminster, he ambled the hundred metres or so down to the Victory Embankment.
He looked like nothing so much as ‘some poor bloke stood up by his bird’, one of the more colloquial junior observers had reported. And indeed, it could have been a poignant spot for a lovers’ tryst by the river as the daylight faded. But if Fairweather had come to gaze on the grimy Waterloo sunset he was doing so alone. No one came to meet him as the American stood and smoked his Marlboro on the waterfront, apparently rapt in admiration of the more exotic elements of Norman Shaw’s architectural flourishes on the turrets of New Scotland Yard.
In fact he had shown a greater than usual interest in one monument on the banks of the Thames, the tank that sat on its pedestal outside New Scotland Yard. Indeed he had gone out of his way to take an artistic photograph of it, from an angle that would have included in the background the Gothic turret that housed the offices of CID. And one corner office in particular, that of Detective Inspector Harry Stark.
That was when, a little later perhaps the colonel would remark in caustic comments to his surveillance teams, the penny finally dropped. The call to the Barbican had quickly been routed to Marchmain’s office and within seconds an unmarked car with siren sounding and lights flashing was pushing through traffic down Ludgate Hill, along Fleet Street and the Strand. Sirens and lights had been doused by the time it drew up to the faded splendour of the Savoy Hotel’s main entrance, where it delivered four very ordinary-looking members of the public. The porters and receptionists took no notice of them whatsoever as they quickly passed through the down-at-heel grandeur of the public rooms, descending a level en route to the River Entrance,the grand name for the hotel’s back door, where they left again to blend with the stream of nobodies jostling along the Embankment. These were professional nobodies, the crème de la crème.
They were already there, one buying cigarettes from the kiosk by Charing Cross Tube station, one buried deep in the bus queue on Northumberland Avenue and two shuffling arm-in-arm along the Embankment by the time DI Stark, the crime scene detective from the morning’s incident, instantly recognisable in the same grubby trench coat in which he had made his reluctant cameo appearance on the BBC lunchtime news, emerged, head down like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and plodded in the direction of Charing Cross Tube, with Benjamin T. Fairweather (PIN rapidly upgrading to CN) immediately in ill-concealed pursuit.
Nobody followed him; the sort of nobody who wore the drab brown suit that defined the lower-ranking apparatchik civil servants who formed the bulk of inner-city commuters, and kept his eyes as blank and unfocused as the rest of them. The second nobody was a youth in the universal jeans and trainers outfit worn by a southerner with good connections or a slightly dowdy Northern tourist kid, who clicked his fingers annoyingly and whistled a poor version of some Merseyside beat anthem. Stark, who might be presumed to have more of an eye for a tail if he were at all suspicious, which he had no obvious reason to be, could not help but notice the shabbily-dressed middle-aged woman who affected a virulent early spring cold. She was, as she put it later with a laugh, ‘right in his face’; certain conspicuous behaviour, she was fond of saying, was even better than invisibility.
Nobody else was a wet-nosed myopic old man with thick glasses, a flat cap and a grubby scarf pulled right around his neck, who sat seemingly staring
He looked like nothing so much as ‘some poor bloke stood up by his bird’, one of the more colloquial junior observers had reported. And indeed, it could have been a poignant spot for a lovers’ tryst by the river as the daylight faded. But if Fairweather had come to gaze on the grimy Waterloo sunset he was doing so alone. No one came to meet him as the American stood and smoked his Marlboro on the waterfront, apparently rapt in admiration of the more exotic elements of Norman Shaw’s architectural flourishes on the turrets of New Scotland Yard.
In fact he had shown a greater than usual interest in one monument on the banks of the Thames, the tank that sat on its pedestal outside New Scotland Yard. Indeed he had gone out of his way to take an artistic photograph of it, from an angle that would have included in the background the Gothic turret that housed the offices of CID. And one corner office in particular, that of Detective Inspector Harry Stark.
That was when, a little later perhaps the colonel would remark in caustic comments to his surveillance teams, the penny finally dropped. The call to the Barbican had quickly been routed to Marchmain’s office and within seconds an unmarked car with siren sounding and lights flashing was pushing through traffic down Ludgate Hill, along Fleet Street and the Strand. Sirens and lights had been doused by the time it drew up to the faded splendour of the Savoy Hotel’s main entrance, where it delivered four very ordinary-looking members of the public. The porters and receptionists took no notice of them whatsoever as they quickly passed through the down-at-heel grandeur of the public rooms, descending a level en route to the River Entrance,the grand name for the hotel’s back door, where they left again to blend with the stream of nobodies jostling along the Embankment. These were professional nobodies, the crème de la crème.
They were already there, one buying cigarettes from the kiosk by Charing Cross Tube station, one buried deep in the bus queue on Northumberland Avenue and two shuffling arm-in-arm along the Embankment by the time DI Stark, the crime scene detective from the morning’s incident, instantly recognisable in the same grubby trench coat in which he had made his reluctant cameo appearance on the BBC lunchtime news, emerged, head down like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and plodded in the direction of Charing Cross Tube, with Benjamin T. Fairweather (PIN rapidly upgrading to CN) immediately in ill-concealed pursuit.
Nobody followed him; the sort of nobody who wore the drab brown suit that defined the lower-ranking apparatchik civil servants who formed the bulk of inner-city commuters, and kept his eyes as blank and unfocused as the rest of them. The second nobody was a youth in the universal jeans and trainers outfit worn by a southerner with good connections or a slightly dowdy Northern tourist kid, who clicked his fingers annoyingly and whistled a poor version of some Merseyside beat anthem. Stark, who might be presumed to have more of an eye for a tail if he were at all suspicious, which he had no obvious reason to be, could not help but notice the shabbily-dressed middle-aged woman who affected a virulent early spring cold. She was, as she put it later with a laugh, ‘right in his face’; certain conspicuous behaviour, she was fond of saying, was even better than invisibility.
Nobody else was a wet-nosed myopic old man with thick glasses, a flat cap and a grubby scarf pulled right around his neck, who sat seemingly staring
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