The Oktober Projekt by R. J. Dillon Page B

the end of trail to begin searching for an answer.
‘If you’re finished, am I cleared to leave now?’
    ‘I most certainly am not,’ Hawick erupted. ‘First thing Monday
morning I want you back here for a formal debriefing. I want solid answers. I
want to know exactly what went on in Moscow and I want to know what Wynn was
working on.’
    ‘Now can I leave?’
    ‘Do not bother returning to Vauxhall Cross, do not return to
the Mad House, do not contact anyone currently or previously in the employ of
the Service. You are in isolation until I or C say otherwise,’ announced
Hawick, raising himself on his toes. ‘Naturally we have arranged transport for
you.’
    ‘What, back to Moscow?’
    ‘Home, we’ll be taking you home,’ Hawick said finding somewhere
for his eyes to assess.
    ‘Bugger off while you’ve got the chance,’ Blackmore said with a
wink, arranging the point on a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.
    ‘We had these sent over from your office,’ said Hawick, handing
over a set of keys.
    ‘Thanks.’ Nick turned them over in his hand, the keys to his
house, his marriage and maybe his future. He’d always left them in his office
in the custody of a senior secretary to be collected on his return, up until
what had now become his official excommunication.
    ‘Nick,’ called Blackmore as Nick started down the corridor.
‘You need a ruddy shower and a change of clothes,’ he advised with a broad
smile.
     
    • • •
     
    Instead of the Galaxy that delivered
Nick to Aspley that morning, a black Toyota Prius waited for him at a side
entrance to the interrogation block. A pasty woman officer from the
interrogation staff with short straight hair sat needlessly over-revving the
engine. I bet she loves doing body searches, Nick decided sliding onto the back
seat. On the quarter-light, two large pendants warned that it was against the
law to smoke in this vehicle. Nick lit a cigarette and saw her top lip
quivering, its fine line of dark hair unsettling him all through the drive back
to London.  
    Dropped at the corner of Upper Richmond Road and Gwendolen
Avenue, he refused her offer of setting him down at his door on Ulva Road,
preferring to settle into a loafing walk, taking a winding excursion home. He
filed his way through Putney in what was left of a dull afternoon. Tomorrow
I’ll take Angie shopping, to the Tate Modern if she’s interested, give her some
room to get her head together. Tonight I’ll book a table; Chinese, Japanese,
Thai, Indonesian, or whatever his wife’s whim dictated, just the two of us
rekindling an old flame. In twenty-years they’d achieved what? An acrimonious
existence as separate as if they were divorced Nick decided, and a dead son
who’d only valued him for the presents he’d brought from his travels. After
Thomas was killed by a hit and run driver when he was five, Angela blamed Nick
for being away when she needed him the most. Everything was always laid at
Nick’s feet; he had become the blame guru.
    The fickle light was evaporating and children home from school
were playing out in groups, their sharp voices slicing through the damp air
around the mellow walls of the Methodist church. Nothing else moved along the
road and he felt the adrenalin tingle as he turned his key in the barrel of the
night latch.
    ‘Angie?’
    The hallway floor was tiled in black and white mosaics, tiny
diamonds stretching away into the large house built for a family not a broken
home. An antique coat stand acted as a semaphore for who was in and out. Angela
was definitely in. He called her name again and wondered if she had gone out,
not bothering to use the mortise lock, her latest bête noire .
    ‘Angie?’
    She had a way with silence, her method of direct retribution,
of punishing him for his absences, for not being a good husband, a good father.
If Nick remained in the hallway he was safe, he could stand here all night and
not be drawn into an exchange in this mutually agreed