Free The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour

Then it was Stone’s Justices’ Manual, then Criminal Procedures and Sentencing in Magistrates’ Courts. He had a tight memory, no need for note-taking. The books went back on the shelf. He locked the door of the flat behind him.
    All that he owned, all of his life, was left in the two small rooms behind the locked door. Mrs Adie Barnes, red-eyed, had told him that her Tracy was in trouble.
    He went to his car, humble and old, parked on the street, and wiped the windows with a cloth. A bit of his history stirred in him.
    The cell was cold. The central heating did not function. She had refused the blanket. The tray he had brought, cereal and milk, three slices of bread, jam and a mug of tea, was untouched. There was an electric fire in the cell that he used, but he had not demanded heating for her. He sat in front of her on a hard chair with his overcoat across his shoulders. The ceiling light beamed down on her, as it had all night.
    ‘I think you reckon you’re being a clever little girl, Tracy. I think you reckon you can see me off. Did my arithmetic just now. It’s forty-nine hours since you last slept, it’s forty-something hours since you last ate. You’re exhausted, famished, but you’re conceited enough to believe you can see me off. Don’t you believe it. I’m here for as long as it takes. . . Only me, Tracy, nobody else. The Colonel isn’t going to chuck me out, nor the old fart, nor the limp dick with the dog, because I have control of you. Inside the wire they all hate you because they’ve had to bluster their apologies to their honoured guest, washed their hands of you. Outside the wire doesn’t count. Nobody’s in your corner, Tracy. You’re alone. Do you hear me? Alone. So shall we stop being clever and start to be sensible? I want to know if you have evidence of murder. What is the evidence of the murder in cold blood of Hans Becker at the hand of Hauptman Dieter Krause? Is there evidence?’
    Goldstein watched him. For an hour they had sat in the outer room. Raub had the ranking and it was for him to make the report to the senior official.
    They waited. They were brought coffee and biscuits.
    Goldstein thought he looked better, as if he had slept well in the house where the BfV always accommodated him when he came to Cologne, as if the anger at the scratch scars had slackened. They had been up since dawn and were the first appointment of the senior official’s day.
    There was movement, at last, at the door. It was half opened, as if a final word was exchanged.
    Goldstein marveled at the calmness of the man. He regarded Krause as predictable and boring, but the calm was incredible because his future would have been thrashed out by Raub and the senior official. If they had decided, over the last hour, that Krause was to go forward then it was Washington in two weeks and his position was confirmed. If they had decided to cut the link then he was back to Rostock, removed from the ‘safe’ house, the money dried up, the account closed and he was on the streets, grafting with the rest of the Stasi scum for his food and shelter.
    Raub called them in.
    The inner room was filled with the senior official’s smoke. Goldstein coughed hard. A junior man had to go through all the exit security from the building and huddle in the winter cold in the back yard where the vehicles were parked to smoke his cigarette, then return to the building through the entry security. The official flapped his hand to clear the smoke cloud in front of his face and waved Krause to a chair. Krause settled . . . and Goldstein wondered whether he would have found old Gestapo men merely boring.
    The senior official stared down at his notes, then eased the spectacles from his face. ‘I am happy to hear, Doktor Krause, that your injuries are not severe. Notwithstanding, the attack raises important questions, and those questions must be answered.’
    ‘Ask me the questions and I will answer them.’
    ‘Is it accepted, Doktor