Close Call Read Free Page B

restless and irritable.
    ‘That looks like fun.’ Peggy Kinsolving was standing in the doorway.
    Liz looked up. ‘I thought you were at the conference.’
    ‘I am. It’s the lunch break, so I nipped back to check how that surveillance operation is going on.’ Peggy was running an investigation into a group of young men in Camden Town who had just come back from Pakistan.
    ‘Anything happening?’
    ‘No. No movement at all so far. I think they’re all still in bed.’
    Liz nodded. Peggy had transferred to MI5 from MI6 several years ago. She had been a diffident, shy girl but a genius at research. She would follow a lead like a bloodhound but if you’d asked her to go out and interview someone she would have panicked and frozen with nerves. But over the years, under Liz’s guidance, she had grown in confidence and now she was running her own operations, and directing a small team. Peggy had become a skilled interviewer, and had discovered a talent for finding out what made people tick, getting underneath their reserves and breaking down their defences.
    But though her personality had developed, her appearance had hardly changed from her days as a librarian. She was a little short of medium height, with long brown hair she tied back in a wispy ponytail. Her spectacles, round and brown, seemed to be too big for her face and were forever slipping down her nose. The sight of Peggy pushing back her spectacles was often the preface to a remark that would begin the unravelling of some knotty problem.
    ‘What’s going on at the conference? Any good?’ Liz asked. It was a Home Office-run conference aimed mainly at regional police forces, and designed to draw their attention to a nationwide growth in gun crime. Little of the agenda had much direct connection with the work of Liz’s team, but she had thought it worthwhile to send someone to register an interest and demonstrate that they were taking their watching brief seriously.
    Peggy said, ‘Actually it’s not been too bad. This afternoon might be quite interesting.’
    ‘Really? What’s happening?’
    Peggy seemed to be struggling not to laugh. ‘Well, it was meant to be a keynote address from the Foreign Office. You remember Henry Pennington?’
    Liz groaned. She’d crossed swords with Henry ­Pennington several times over the years. A long lean man with a large nose that dominated his thin face, he was a panicker. Any indication that something might be going wrong caused him to begin rubbing his hands together in a washing motion and breathing heavily. At such times he was liable to make sudden decisions, which on one or two occasions had landed Liz in difficult situations. She never forgot the time he had volunteered her services as an undercover protection officer for a Russian oligarch, almost succeeding in getting her killed in the process.
    ‘But sadly,’ Peggy went on, ‘Henry’s indisposed. So they’ve put together a panel instead. Some senior officers from the North and the Midlands are going to be talking about their experience of the arms trade. I thought you might be interested.’
    Liz thought about this. Her interest was in illegal arms shipments abroad, but there might be something worth hearing and the alternative was the pile of assessment forms on her desk. ‘I think I’ll come along.’
     
    When they arrived at the conference room in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Parliament Square the session had already started. The room was three-quarters full and they slipped into seats at one side of a back row. There were three people on the stage, sitting in a semicircle so that Liz could only see two of them clearly. They were discussing the impact of Britain’s gun laws, and Liz recognised one of the speakers – a senior policewoman from Derbyshire, notorious for her impatience with junior officers. The man next to her, who was obviously from the Home Office, was praising the government’s tough stance on firearms as if one of his