Close Call by J.M. Gregson Page A

occupation. He had the windows open tonight, as he tried to engineer a small, cooling current of air and get it to blow through the flat. He didn’t favour open windows, as a rule. They made him uneasy. He was intensely conscious of security. He also felt much safer when the windows and doors around him were locked and barred.
    He was an inch above what the latest surveys said was now the height of the average Briton. He wore dark-blue trousers and a lighter blue leisure shirt, with grey suede slip-on shoes. He had his hair cut short, but not shaved to the scalp in the way some men affected. He would be forty next month, but with his lean figure and his thin, rather intense, face he looked rather younger than that. He had a small scar on his left temple, which he still inspected from time to time in the mirror; it had grown shallower and less white with the passing years, but was still quite noticeable in photographs.
    This man did not care to be noticeable. Every adjustment he made to his appearance was designed to make him more average, more unremarkable in the world in which he moved.
    He looked at the electronic clock on top of his television set. Ten fourteen. Another sixteen minutes before he could ring. He had never enjoyed waiting. Not like this. He should have been used to it by now, he told himself wryly. His life contained a lot of waiting; it was ironic that when everyone thought of you as a man of action, you should do so much more waiting than acting.
    He found himself thinking unexpectedly of his wife and his two children. He wasn’t mawkish. It was only very rarely that he indulged his emotions at all, so it must have been the waiting that turned his thoughts this way now. He hadn’t seen either his wife or his children for seven years, and he didn’t miss them. He had never cared much for children, and never met a woman who didn’t want commitment from him. Well, there were plenty of women available for money; women who were there when you wanted them, not when they wanted you. Much better that way.
    He much preferred a life without complications. It enabled him to concentrate. And concentration was an absolute necessity in the occupation he had chosen for himself. Or which had chosen him: he was never quite sure how he had arrived here.
    He enjoyed a good book. Never went anywhere without one. There were plenty of hours to kill, plenty of time for reading, in his work. People found it strange that he always had a book with him among the tools of his trade, but it seemed to him perfectly logical. Time which could have been extremely boring passed much more quickly if you had a good book.
    But tonight he hadn’t been able to read. It was perhaps just the excessive heat, but he thought it was more likely the unexpected complication which had cropped up in his work. One of those complications which upset him, which disturbed the beautiful simplicity of his schedule; it was a thing you couldn’t possibly have foreseen.
    He’d never been one for television. He switched off the film he’d long since ceased to follow. The time was almost at hand. He would phone precisely at the moment arranged, timing it to the very second. Precision. Probably the man waiting for his call couldn’t care less about absolute precision, and any time around ten thirty would have been acceptable to him. But precision mattered a lot to the man waiting by the open window in the Birmingham flat.
    He had to nerve himself to use the agreed sentence. He could see the necessity for it: you never knew who was listening to phone conversations these days. But the phrasing seemed ridiculous: probably the man who had arranged the call had a taste for the melodramatic. Whereas to his mind, melodrama was best avoided. The more cold and clinical you could be, the less you allowed any sort of emotion into your life, the more efficient you were likely to be. And efficiency was a
sine qua non
. Without it, you