The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour Page A

the lorry hit him.’
    ‘We’d had posters up, all the usual appeals, nothing. Nobody wants to get involved. How many did you go and see? A hundred?’
    ‘Might have been more.’
    ‘You found the star witness, Mr Mantle, and I didn’t. You put that scumbag away, and I didn’t. You should feel quite proud for having done the graft, stood up for her when we failed her.’
    ‘Decent of you to say it,’ he said.
    ‘Gives you a good feeling, doesn’t it, if you’ve given your hand to someone when nobody else will? Fox and Hounds, yes? Wish I had. You’re only a legal executive, aren’t you?’
    ‘Afraid I’m not quite that, not qualified yet. Just a glorified clerk.’
    They went inside. The pub had opened only minutes earlier. The bar smelt of yesterday’s beer and the polish on the tables. The barrister was clapping his hands, the beam of success on his face, for the attention of the woman behind the bar, who stubbornly polished glasses. The senior partner, Bill Greatorex, was talking with the widow. She wasn’t listening — she caught Mantle’s eye. She was a pretty young woman. She’d dressed in black for the court, skirt and jacket, and deep tiredness showed round her eyes. He’d thought of her, and her small children, all the hours that he’d tramped round the industrial estate in search of a witness. He’d kept her in his mind through all the disappointments and all the shaken heads and all the dismissals from those who hadn’t the time to stretch their minds back to the moment of the death of her husband. The barrister bellowed, ‘God, there’s a serious risk in here of death from thirst.’
    She walked away from Bill Greatorex, left him in mid-sentence and came to Mantle. The detective constable backed off. ‘What they tell me, Mr Mantle, is that that bastard who killed my Bob, if it had been left to the police, would have been fined five hundred pounds and banned for twelve months. Because of you, he’s been put away for three years where he can’t drink, drive, kill. Me and the children, all the family, we’re very grateful.’
    ‘Thank you,’ he said.
    She reached up, rather too quickly for him, took his face in her hands and kissed his cheek. ‘Very grateful.’
    She was gone, back to Greatorex. The barrister had the barmaid’s attention and was reciting the order.
    The detective constable was beside him again. ‘Don’t think I’m out of order, Mr Mantle, but what age are you? Fifty-three, fifty- four? I’ll bet you’re on the money a twenty-year-old would get, a kid with spots all over his face. What that tells me, and I’m no Sherlock, you’ve a bit of a history.’
    ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘You’ll excuse me.’
    He went towards the door. He heard the shout of the barrister behind him, what was ‘his poison’, pint or a short? He went out onto the street. He did grubby little case-work in a grubby little town, and across the road was a grubby little court-house. He walked back in the drizzle to the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe. He touched the place on his cheek where she had kissed him, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the skin hard.
    The sleep was in her eyes and her head rocked. She sat on the bed. The food on the tray beside her was untouched.
    Perkins yawned, grinned. ‘Yes, Tracy, we know there was a man-hunt on the base, across the peninsula where the base was — actually most of it’s a wildlife park now, we know that from radio traffic. Yes, we can assume that Hauptman Krause would have been called out from Rostock when the Soviets started howling. The radio traffic ended, and we didn’t have a monitor on their landlines. We have a lost agent, we have the assumption that Krause arrived in that area at some time that evening. That is not evidence of murder. You should try and get some sleep. As soon as you’re asleep, I’ll wake you and I’ll ask you again about evidence...’
    ‘Bloody movement, at last.’
    ‘You going to do a