Saad Rashid was a shrewd man, good with figures, but it did not take his shrewdness to know that a sentence of death would have been passed upon him by those who had once been his colleagues in Baghdad.
It was a month since he had made the initial transfer. Twenty-nine days earlier he had personally visited the National Westmins-ter Bank in Lower Regent Street, and in the office of the Deputy Manager he had ordered the movement of 500,000 American dollars from the account of Iraqi Airlines (London) to a numbered account in Dublin. Twenty-eight days earlier he had travelled to Dublin to transfer that sum to a second numbered account in Liechtenstein. Twenty-seven days earlier he had, by telephone, moved that same sum out of Liechtenstein and into the secrecy-shrouded computers of the Credit Bank of Zurich. On the day on which Saad Rashid had received the confirmation of the transaction from Switzerland, he had tidied his desk at the back of the Iraqi Airlines office, taken what few personal possessions he kept there and placed them in his briefcase, locked his door, pocketed his key, and told his assistant manager that he believed he was showing the first symptoms of the 'flu that was sweeping London. He had gone then to the Syrian Embassy and had applied for a visa for himself, for his English-born wife, for his two daughters. On that day, twenty-seven days earlier, he had travelled from the Syrian Embassy back to his rented home in Kingston-upon Thames, and there he had, for the first time, informed his wife of their changed circumstances.
They had moved out that evening from the house in Kingston-upon-Thames. They had spent two nights in bed-and-breakfast accommodation before taking a month's let on a furnished flat close to Clapham Junction mainline railway station. Twenty-five days of suffocating in the one-bedroomed flat with his wife and the two children. He was a man used to taking his favoured clients to the Ritz or to Claridges. When he was on business away from home he stayed and entertained in the Hiltons and Sheratons and InterContinentals. The children wanted to go back to school.
Zoe wanted to go shopping in Knightsbridge. He was suffocated.
The third night, above the rattling progress of a late train, he had pummelled Zoe with his fists, and not heard the frightened crying of his children, when she had said that no fucking way was she going to be holed up for the rest of her days in bloody, bloody Damascus. It was the first time that she had forgotten the place of the Arab's wife. He had beaten her, cowed her, instilled in her once more the rule of obedience.
Zoe Rashid now accepted that she could not visit her mother before she flew out to Syria. She understood that she could only leave the flat to shop for food at the Indian-owned store at the end of the street. She accepted – rather, she understood – her position because she was never allowed from the flat with both daughters at the same time. Rashid had left the flat only once, to go by taxi to the Syrian Embassy to press further his application for asylum, and on that occasion, while he had talked and drunk coffee in an inner office his two daughters had sat outside with their colouring books and crayons.
It was prudent of Saad Rashid to hide himself and his faintly away. A Shia cleric, an enemy of the regime, had been shot dead in a hotel lobby in Khartoum. Qassem Emin, the political activist, who had made free with his denunciations of the Chairman ol the Revolutionary Command Council, had been tortured and had his throat slit in Turkey. There was the wife of a Communist who had been stabbed to death in Oslo. There was Abdullah Ali, a businessman in exile, who was known to Rashid, and who had eaten in a restaurant in London with men he believed to be his friends, who had died in St Stephen's Hospital of a rat poison that had been sprinkled on his food during a moment of inattention.
What decided Saad Rashid to steal half a million dollars and seek a life of exile in a country reviled by his homeland was the telephone call from his cousin's wife. On a poor line from Baghdad he had been told, in a voice distraught with tears, that his cousin was under arrest, charged with treason, held in the Abu Ghraib gaol. It was their way, the men from the Department of Public Security, to take one man, and then trawl through his family for any small hint of the cancer of dissent.
It was 27 days since Rashid had left his office at Iraqi Airlines for the last time.
With his two daughters, one holding each hand, he came down the long staircase from the top-floor flat. He had first checked from the window that the taxi he had telephoned was waiting.
The passports, with the visa stamps, were waiting at the Embassy.
He would fly that night to Damascus with his wife who had once been a dancer and with his children whom he loved. In his head was the account number at the Credit Bank of Zurich.
He closed the outer door behind him. He hurried with his daughters down the steps and towards the taxi.
He watched as the taxi pulled away.
It was 28 hours since he had driven the clapped-out Ford Capri into the street, and counted himself lucky to find a space to park that was pretty near opposite the front door from which the man had emerged with his two small girls.
He would hand it to the Colonel: given the motivation they could, by God, do things right. Colt knew that the target was a thief, that he had been observed entering the Syrian Embassy when that Embassy was under regular Iraqi surveillance. Colt knew that the target had been followed to the house in Clapham.
Colt knew his target at once from the photograph that he had been given. Colt thought it a serious mistake by his target to have gone in person to the Syrian Embassy.
He had found the Ruger under the mattress in his Bayswater hotel room, and with it the keys of the Capri, and the tool box, and the overalls, plus the scrap of paper on which was the street and the number. The bill was prepaid, so that he was away from the hotel before the front desk was manned, and the car had started first turn.
For the whole day and all the previous evening, he had the hood up and tinkered with the engine. He worked his way through a bag of sandwiches and four cans of Pepsi. When night fell, he had slept in the back of the Capri, slept and dozed.
They wanted it over and he wanted it over. It was his deal with the Colonel, that once the business was finished then he was free to go west, head back to his roots.
He lay on his back. His head was under the outside front wheel housing. He could not avoid it, he took a lungful of the diesel fumes from the taxi as it pulled away. The pistol was under the main chassis, in a plastic bag, and the magazine was in place, and the safety was off. He had reached for the Ruger as soon as he had seen the taxi pull up, and he had had the Ruger in his grip when the front door opposite had opened, and he had loosened the grip when he had seen that the target carried no cases, only had his daughters' hands in his. He'd be coming back… The time would be when the target returned.
When the taxi had cleared the street, Colt pushed himsell out from underneath the Capri. He pulled the woollen cap that had been in the pocket of his overalls further down over his close cut hair. When he had lifted the hood of the Capri, and fastened the arm to hold it open, then he bent again and readied under the chassis to retrieve the plastic bag holding the Ruger. He put the plastic bag on top of the battery, always close to his hand. The taxi, when it came back to the street, would be crawling because the driver would be looking for the number.
They were pretty children, Colt thought. Pretty clothes and their hair well brushed… Not easy if the target had hold of both the kids when he came out of the taxi.
It was as though he had come into work on a Sunday. Not that he had been to work on a Sunday for several years, but that was how he remembered it.
This one was a big strike. Different from the time the Radiologi-cal Protection Unit had been out, and different from the Boiler-makers' stoppage. This was the real thing. This was clerical staff and Health Physics surveyors and instrument technicians, even the 'Ploot' grinders. They were all at the Falcon Gate, banners and placards, with the Transport and General Workers Union convenors haranguing them over loudspeakers.
It was hushed as a mid-week chapel inside H3 because Carol and her typing tribe were all out in the rain with banners bearing crudely daubed exhortations to the government to raise their pay. Bissett had heard there was even talk of the fire cover being withdrawn.
Frederick Bissett was a member of the Institute of Professional Scientists, and a fat lot of good that did him. He had joined the Institute in his first year at the Establishment because at that time the organisation seemed to have some sinew to it. He had been to the Top Rank entertainment centre in Reading when all the scientists had gathered one evening to formulate a demand for a 40 per cent pay rise. Whistling in the wind, that had been, because they had settled for half, and never recovered from the shame of behaving in the same way as the typists and fitters and laboratory assistants. Waste of his time, the Institute of Professional Scientists, which was why the annual assessments, prepared in his case by Reuben Boll, were so crucial. Be interesting, of course, if fire cover were withdrawn, because then they would have to rustle up the R. A. F. crews from Brize Norton who wouldn't know their big toes from their elbows when it came to plutonium and highly enriched uranium and chemical explosive.
He had H3 almost to himself. Boll was over in F area because the Director had summoned all the Superintendents to a planning meeting. Wayne had rung in to say that he was sick, which meant that the little creep didn't want to drive past the picket line. Basil was in his office, probably hadn't registered that anything was different.
In the late morning he locked his safe, checked to see that all of his desk drawers were secured, and shut down his terminal.
Because there was a strike, because their own laboratories were idle, the high and the mighty of A area were prepared to squeeze in a visit from lowly Frederick Bissett of H3.
He drove across Second Avenue, and past the new colossus that was the A90 building. The building was a great show box of concrete. He had never been inside the box, nor had he seen the Decontamination Centre that was alongside, nor the Liquid Waste plant. At least they were working on the complex that day, at least the civilian contractors had been able to bribe their private work force to cross the picket lines. It was said that A90 and its ancillaries would end up costing the taxpayer? 1. 5 billion. He'd heard that stainless steel was going inside that box at such a rate as to absorb the country's entire annual output, and that the rip-offs were a scandal. It was being said that when A90 came on song there wouldn't be enough people to work it and there wouldn't be enough plutonium to make it work. Naturally, there was enough money for A90… money, money, money… not a squeak out of the bank manager that week.
He cut across First Avenue. Ahead of him was what those who worked there called the Citadel.
The Citadel was the A area.
The Citadel was where nuclear warheads were made. Inside the Citadel, in Bissett's opinion, there was little that was innovative, much that was wasteful – but then what else could be expected of engineers? The Citadel was a sprawl of buildings, erected in various bursts of haste and always in secrecy since the early Fifties. Everyone who worked oulside it said that the Citadel buildings creaked with age, improvisation, and therefore danger.
There was AI, in at the birth panGs of the British weapon, where the plutonium was heated in the furnaces so that it could be shaped into the melon-sized spheres for the inner workings of the warheads, and it was no secret amongst the Establishment staff that a dozen years earlier cancers had been rampant amongst the technicians. There was A45, the Materials Assembly unit, where the plutonium sphere was wrapped in a second concentric sphere of highly enriched uranium before the sealing of the lethal elements in 22-carat gold foil. Bissett had once met the gaunt technician from A45 who had apparently received through a faulty glove a particle of plutonium the size of a pinhead and whose body had been cremated six months later before there could be an inquest. There was A 1 2, Waste Management Group, where the plutonium and highly enriched uranium and beryllium and tritium were taken from weapons that had achieved their shelf life in the guts of submarines and the bunkers of Air Force camps, then reworked for newer and more potent devices. There were the open-air vats alongside A 1 2 where acid burned out the plutonium before the sludge could be reprocessed.
Bissett had only to see the wire of the Citadel's perimeter, to see the smoke from the Citadel's chimneys, to feel a loathing for the place. He was required to leave his car outside the perimeter fence.
In the walkway inside the high double fencing, an alsatian, an ugly and vicious-looking brute, dragged at its handler's leash. The dog, leaping at the wire, snarling its frustration, frightened him. The Ministry policeman, flak jacket unfastened over his chest, sub-machine gun hooked on a strap over his shoulder, checked his I/D card at the entrance to the razor-wire tunnel, consulted a list of the day's expected visitors, thumbed him through. The machine gun unnerved him, always had and always would.
At the second check, at the end of the wire tunnel, his name was searched for again, and he had to hand in his H area card in exchange for a temporary pass, and a phone call was made ahead.
He was kept waiting. He could never have worked in AIi or Ai/
I or A45 or A 1 2. Every time that he had been inside the Citadel he went home as soon as his day's work was finished and scrubbed his body from toe to scalp. He could never have taken his urine and faeces samples once a week to Health Physics. He could not have endured the clamouring siren bells that marked an alarm and that caused A area to be sealed down, passage in and out of the Citadel suspended until the malfunction was located. He was ushered forward after cooling his heels for four minutes.
He met three men inside A45. For half an hour he took tea and biscuits with them, and discussed the problems of weight reduction through additional use of gallium worked into plutonium. Weight was the key to a warhead. He could have sat down with only one of them and achieved the same guidance on weight and machining capability, but three of them came to the meeting, which he thought typical of engineers. A sniff of tea, a whiff of biscuits, and there would soon be a crowd. Because of the shortage of plutonium, because of the call on plutonium by the Trident programme, he was required to reduce the warhead weight for the cruise system. As he left, the engineers were on their third cup and discussing last week's retirement party.
But he had had some valuable help.
He went out through the "airlock" system of the wire tunnel.
He was handed back his identity card. The dog was still there, still straining to break through at him.
It was always the same when he came out of there, he thought there was an itch at his back as if he had been touched. They actually wore, those engineers, four different samplers on their chests and pinned to their jackets or shirts.
He drove back to H area.
At least the post was not strike-bound. Carol, on her picket line, would be suffering in the knowledge that a whole delivery of post would escape her. A bundle of recycled internal envelopes for Boll, mostly journals and magazines for Basil, an O.H.M.S. for Wayne, a motley of envelopes for the technicians from H3's laboratory. He saw his own name on a plain white envelope.
Because Carol wasn't there, wasn't arching her head to see the contents of a letter, it was not necessary for him to take the envelope into his own office.
He read the neatly typed letter…
Dear Frederick,
Hoping this finds you well. As you will see, I am now the Professor of Physics here. In an effort to make life more interesting for our younger members of staff and our graduate element, I have been inviting past students back to lecture on any aspect of their current work.
Obviously much of what you do is restricted, but come and give us a talk on anything unrestricted that you think would be of interest.
You are something of a legend here still and would be assured of a fine welcome, a passably good dinner, and a bed at my humble abode – plus travel expenses.
Perhaps you could test the water at your end, and let me know when you could come. Thursday evenings are our best.
Yours,
Walter Smith
PS: What on earth do you do with yourself these days?
Surely they must be about to close the bomb shop down.
Sara could see the raindrops falling from the bare branches of the apple tree in the garden, and she could feel the freshness of the wind on her arms.
She stood at the drying frame with her box of pegs and her tub of washing.
It was a strange thing, really strange to her, that she could feel her underclothes against her body. It was the third day after she had dressed, gone out, without wearing her underclothes, into her car, driving on the main road through Tadley, driving all the way to Kingsclere, knocking at the front door of the home of a woman who was almost a stranger, going into a house that she hardly knew.
Her underclothes had been neatly folded in the bottom of her handbag. No sketcher nor painter nor artist wanted to see the elastic weals on a model's shoulders and chest and hips and thighs, every model left her underwear off for as many hours as possible before posing.
The eyes of the man in the doorway had been a reawakening for Sara. It was more years than she cared to remember since she had last seen a man stare at her in frank admiration. When had she last seen Frederick stare at her, worship her? Back beyond memory.
When she had been at art college, but that was just kids hunting for trophies, and they hadn't meant a toss to her. She had turned her back on the lot of them, and married Frederick Bissett, from a terraced house in Leeds, bright boy of the street. That was her statement to her parents, to her school, to her upbringing. She could not remember when poor old Frederick had last gazed in lust at her naked body, not like Debbie's husband had.
It had been better, a long time ago it had been better, when their loving had made Frank, and better up to the time of Adam's birth. Such excruciating pain and three weeks premature, and fast, but with the pain, and Frederick on his one and only trip to New Mexico.
Alone in her agony, she had vowed that the responsible bastard would go short… He'd gone short and the trouble was – she pegged his flannel pyjamas to the frame – that he didn't seem to care.
When she had finished hanging out the washing, before she went for the weekly shop at SavaCentre, Sara applied her lipstick, and around her throat she squirted the toilet water which she had had for three years and never before used.
Debbie's husband would have cared if he had gone short, oh yes.
Rutherford was in a poor humour, because the best that the pool could provide was a two-year-old Astra with 70,000 on the clock, and a ticket on the windscreen. He couldn't have been more than two, three minutes collecting Erlich in South Audley Street, but there it was. Accounts would be pleased.
He couldn't use his own car because they were going to be way out of radio range, and he needed the car telephone with the scrambler attachment. He had argued with the pool supervisor, but it was the Astra or nothing. He detested starting the day with an argument. At least he hadn't argued with Penny. She never fussed when he said that he was going down to the country and didn't know when he'd be back. Best thing that had ever happened to him, Penny.
Erlich had the passenger seat as far back as it would go and he still shifted his weight about as if he needed another six inches of leg-room.
They had come off the M3 and were cruising on the dual carriageway A303. That was the Astra's optimum pace, a reasonably quiet 70 m.p.h. It had no guts left in it. Pool cars were watchers' cars, and were hammered.
There was the fork ahead of him, and he slowed for a gap in the oncoming traffic.
The stones were wonderful. There was light shafting off the Plain ahead, cutting down behind the stones. He loved that place.
He had loved the magic and mystery of Stonehenge since early childhood. On the way down to their holidays in Cornwall his parents had always stopped at Stonehenge for a slow coffee break while he had crossed the road to walk around the stones. Penny only wanted a West Country holiday, not the least ingratiating thing about her, and they took the same cottage that his Mum had rented, and they stopped, he and Penny, for the same coffee and the same stroll round the monument. Well, nowadays you could get no closer than the wire cage around the perimeter, thanks to the hippies or the busloads of Americans or druids maybe, who knew? He pulled into the car park.
" Y o u want to stretch your legs?"
"Not particularly."
" Y o u want a coffee from the stall?" Rutherford gestured towards the open-sided van at the edge of the car park.
" N o, thanks."
" Y o u want to see the stones?"
"I should?"
Rutherford said evenly, "Those stones were cut and erected four thousand years ago. Each one weighs more than 100 tons and was brought 200 miles overland on rollers, by sea on rafts.
We still don't understand how prehistoric man achieved that feat.
Nobody in this much bull-shitted century has achieved anything that can outlast what the men who laid out these stones did here.
So, yes, you should, just for five minutes forget about being a policeman and be a human being. I do it regularly myself. It gives me a balanced perspective."
The wind tore at their trouser legs as they circled the cage, and Erlich smiled his admiration of the great stone circle.
"Well, we mustn't lose time, must we?"
Rutherford said, "Tell me, then, who in this age of miracles can be set against the master designer of Stonehenge?"
"I am afraid you will have to take account of the men of the Manhattan Project," said Erlich through chattering teeth. "They will be remembered as long as there is history. And now, mind-boggling as this shrine of yours is, I think I need one of those coffees."
Turk, Station Officer for Tel Aviv, always responded immediately to a summons from that office, cancelled whatever appointments he had. Tork's time there was never wasted. And after the affair in the Beqa'a Valley, he was trusted. A famous mission organised by Tork's London masters – an Israeli sniper with an English guide – had killed a P. L . O. training-camp commander.
Tork was shown the transcript of a brief conversation. The text totally underlined in red ink, he was told, was that of the Director of Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission.
Tork had been Station Officer in Tel Aviv for eleven years. He had learned that there were no favours handed out. He had learned also that if there were a continuing nightmare in Israel then it was that an Arab enemy might one day possess the capability to strike at the Jewish heartland with nuclear weapons.
"I'll get it off to Century at once."
" B u t will they act on it?"
"It's not a lot to go on."
" B u t you will give it a 'most urgent' rating."
" A t my end, of course."
She had lived all her life in the street running alongside the railway, and since she had retired from her late father's business, a haberdashery store in Wimbledon, since she had sold it to a family from Northampton for a good price, Hannah Worthington walked each day to the shop at the end of the street. She never bought more, nor less, than she would need for her housekeeping for the next 24 hours. It was one of the rituals of this lonely spinster's life that every day she would take her chihuahua to the shop on the corner and back again.
Miss Worthington was a small woman. In her winter coat she appeared to be little more than a central pole with a tent draped from her shoulders. She wore a dark grey hat taken from the store on her last day as owner, and that was 17 years ago, and a plain grey scarf round her throat, and leather gloves that had stood a long test of lime. In her flat and comfortable lace-up shoes, she made good progress on her daily outing.
She walked towards the shop.
In her wicker basket there was a shopping list for a packet of porridge, one pork chop, some oven-ready chips, a carton of frozen broccoli, one apple and one orange, a small loaf of wholemeal sliced bread, and an 8oz tin of Pedigree Chum. What she liked about the shop was that it was open for business on every day of the year, liven on Christmas Day, after church, she could walk to the shop and buy her necessaries.
Of course, the street had changed mightily in the years since her birth in 1909, the year King Emperor Edward the Seventh died. Before the Great War, and afterwards also, this had been a street where bank managers and principal shopkeepers lived.
After the Second World War, the street had changed, and she knew that had brought sadness to her late father. He had talked about moving, but after his passing her late mother had simply refused to countenance what she had called "evacuation". Miss Worthington often felt it would have been an unendurable sorrow to her parents if they had lived to witness the extent of the deterioration. To start with, every single front door in the street, excepting her own, was now festooned with illuminated bell buttons, marking the division of fine family homes into little warrens of flats. To go on with, in the former days, between the Great War and the Second World War, there would never have been men working on cars in the street, as if the place were a communal garage. She saw the taxi inching down the street.
Between the Great War and the Second World War there were always taxis in the street, not now. Taxi drivers came down her street in this day and age as if in fear of their lives.
Her dog sniffed for a moment at the ankle of the young man who worked at the engine of his car. She pulled the dog away.
The taxi passed her.
Her chihuahua was making its "business" in the gutter, and that was a relief because it meant she wouldn't have to take him out again in the evening, and wait around for him. There was poor enough lighting in the street, and so many peculiar people…
"Good boy." she murmered. "Well done, little boy."
She heard the taxi stop and the door open.
She heard the charge of feet behind her.
She heard the shout.
"Hey, there."
There was a faint rattle, metal being drawn across metal. There was the slight sound, a light and muffled drum beat.
Miss Worthington turned.
She thought the man was drunk.
It was the middle of the day, and the man reeled, staggered.
That's what had happened to her street, drunks in the middle of the day. She stepped out into the road. The man could barely stand. She would cross over.
The man fell.
She saw the man on the pavement, beside the driver's door of the taxi, and he was writhing, a thrashing fish. She saw the blood across the grey white of the man's shirt.
She saw two little girls, nicely dressed, running up the steps to the nearest house, starting to beat at the paint-scraped wooden door.
She saw the man with the fat-barrelled gun held out from his shoulder. She saw the man with the gun shoot again at the man on the pavement. She was a dozen paces from the man with the gun, and she heard nothing. She saw his wrists jump from the recoil. She saw the man on the pavement shudder, and the thrashing cease.
She saw that the man with the gun had on his head a woollen cap.
She saw that the cap was tilted. She saw the splash of short fair hair.
The man with the gun turned. Eyes meeting. The eyes of a killer
… and the eyes, masked by heavy Health Service spectacles, of a spinster in her 8ist year. There was a moment, God's truth, she would not forget it, when the man with the gun seemed to smile at her, God's truth and she did not trifle with that.
She saw him run.
As he ran she saw the man working the gun into the front of his overalls, and she saw him also, with his free hand, drag the woollen cap back down across his forehead.
The Chihuahua strained on its narrow leather lead to be clear of the shooting, and the shouting, and the crying of the little girls. The vet had said that the dog's heart was weak and that the dog should not be over-excited.
She picked up her dog, put it under her arm, and walked briskly to her home.
Safe in her own hallway. Miss Worthington bolted the front door, turned the master key. She could not bear the thought ol returning to the street, going to the shop, to get the tin of dog food for her chihuahua's midday meal. She was in her first-floor sitting room, secure in her easy chair, when she heard the first sirens, saw the first police cars turn into her street.
It hadn't been real. It was like a disagreeable dream and she wasn't going to have anything more to do with it. She turned her armchair away from the window.
The body was gone. The blood was on the pavement. The children had been taken upstairs. The growing crowd was a hundred yards back, behind the white tape. The discharged cartridge cases were in the roadway and the gutter, close to the back wheel of the taxi.
The taxi driver said, "You tell me he was shot, he looked like he'd been shot. I didn't hear no shooting. I heard a man running, but I ain't seen nothing."
Of course, they started with a house to house, but it was the sort of street where most of the flats, bedsitters, were empty during the day. When a constable knocked on one door, at the extreme end of the street, he heard the distant yapping of a dog, but no one came to the door. He presumed the dog must have been left alone in the house. At the other extreme of the street, Mr Patel was able to confirm that a man had been working the ptrvions day, and that morning, on the Ford Capri that was still there, still with the bonnet raised, still with a plastic bag on the battery, No, Mr Patel was very sorry, no, he had not seen the face of the man who worked on the car. When Mr Patel had passed, the previous evening and that morning, the man's head and shoulders had been underneath the car, and no, he had not come into the shop at all.
Later, an Anti-Terrorist Branch detective would tell his Inspector, "Middle of the day, well-used street, and no bugger saw anything, not even the little kiddies, nothing that's half a description. It's hard to bloody credit… "
Just about the time they had seen the signpost, the rain had started in earnest.
Erlich's first impression was that this place was closed to outsiders. They drove the length of the village. Rutherford was muttering something about a by-pass always changing a country community, as if he felt the need to apologise for the place. Erlich said that he wanted to walk.
Rutherford said that he would give him a 20-minute start, then drive back through the village and collect him.
Erlich took his raincoat off the back seat, the heavy Burberry that he had paid a fortune for in Rome. He shrugged into the coat. He walked.
Small houses of grey and weathered stone on which the lichen had fastened; small windows to the small houses, some of them mullioned; gutters overflowing because they were clogged with leaves; tiny front gardens flattened by the ravages of the winter.
He thought the houses, on the road, were low-set, as if for pygmies. A tractor powered past, pulling a trailer loaded with silage rings – shit – had splashed straight through the puddle round the silted-up culvert. Godammit! Mud on his Burberry, on his trousers, all over his shoes… Past a bigger garden piled high with abandoned cars. Past a small shop where there were farmers' boots and garden forks and rakes stacked outside despite the rain, and stickers in the window for frozen foods. Past a house that was larger, set back from the road, beyond a lawn on which the rain made ponds, and he saw the flash of an old woman's face at a window and then the falling of a lace curtain. Past the entrance to a farmyard rutted deep in soft mud, and he could see the slipped roofing of the barns where the fallen tiles had been replaced by corrugated iron. Past a gateway, and the wide gate had long ago subsided, and the driveway was leaf-scattered and weeded, and there was a house way back behind beech trees and the trunks of the trees were running green with water. There was the jabber of a car horn in his ear. He was looking up the driveway, trying to make out the shape of the house through the trees. It was the biggest house he had seen so far in the village.
He damn well jumped. If he hadn't jumped then the car would have hit him. He jumped for the pavement and a small car swept past him. He saw a woman in the rich blue of a nursing uniform at the wheel. She didn't acknowledge him. She drove up the drive. Past more small, stone houses. A man came towards him.
The man was elderly, bearded, bow-legged in his farm boots, and his old army greatcoat was fastened at the waist with twine, and the man carried a broken shotgun across his forearm. The man didn't give way, and Erlich stepped into the road to let him pass. Past the pub, and the noise of laughter and the music of a jukebox and the bell chime of gaming machines. He was at the end of the village. He stood beside a muddy soccer pitch.
The rain dripped down his neck. His shoes and his feet were soaked. His raincoat was heavy with damp.
Colt's village.
He heard the car squelch to a stop behind him.
They drove back the way they had come. They stopped in the next village two miles away. They stopped at the modern bungalow that was the home and office of the local police constable.
He was Desmond, he was young and bright and flattered that a man had come from the Security Service to see him, and agreeably surprised that a Field Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ended up in his stockinged feet in his front room. Desmond's wife brought them tea and a sponge cake that was still warm.
The rain drummed on the windows.
Erlich had out his ballpoint and his notebook.
Desmond said, "I've never seen the lad. I was posted here barely a week after he went missing. But what you have to understand is that he's the biggest thing in these villages, so he has to be the biggest thing in my life. What I normally do is vandalism, poaching, driving without insurance, petty opportun-ist larceny. Master Tuck faces Attempted Murder, Arson… and if you're here then, I suppose, it has to be worse than that. ..
Start with the name. Round here he's Colt. Not just because of his initials, but because of what he is, young, unbroken, wild.
He represents something exciting to this community, two fingers to the authorities. O. K., so he was involved with the Animal Liberation Front, serious crimes. What I hear, people talk to me, took a time but they do, is that the Front was just a vehicle for him, that there were no deeply held principles in it, more that he was in love with the danger, the risk of arrest. I'm not a psychologist, but I read, and I would say that attitude gives him a colossal arrogance.
" T h e Serious Crime Squad come down, and sometimes I'm told when they're on my patch, most times I'm not, they keep the Manor House under observation, on and off, but they've not picked up any scent of him. Recently, they've been more often.
His mother was big in his life and she's, well, she's not long to live, it seems. It's sad, actually, she's a very respected woman in the village. His father's respected, but in a different way. She's respected and she's loved. If Colt knew, then he'd be back, but it looks like he never made contact from the day he disappeared, so he won't know. He had a girl here too, but I doubt that meant too much, as wild as him."
They had drained the teapot, finished the cake and Erlich offered his thanks. He understood more, much more, of the man who had looked into Harry Lawrence's face, and shot him dead.
They booked into a guesthouse on the far side of Warminster, and they had time to get into the High Street before the shops closed to buy Erlich a pair of Wellington boots, and a rainproof coat that wasn't so City, and a hat.
"Absolutely out of the question."
"It's not as if I'd ever touch on…"
" W e do not go outside and give lectures."
" D o I have to spell out to you how important this is to me?"
" D o you think you are the only one who is asked to give lectures? Myself, I get a dozen invitations a year… Basil, he must get 50. But one doesn't give it a thought. One has no choice."
"But this is absurd, it wouldn't be about my work…"
"Frederick, you are being truly stupid. Anything you talk about is of interest to outsiders, because of where you are employed. And how can you lecture about anything other than your work? What have you the chance to know about other than your work?"
"That's offensive, Reuben, and your attitude altogether…"
"Frederick, I am very busy, I have lost a day in meetings…
I appreciate that your vanity was stirred by this invitation, and of course I understand your regret at having to decline it, but frankly I think your friend is a little jejune. He knows perfectly well what the rules here have to be."
"Is that your last word?"
" M y last word. Good night, Frederick."
He had allowed himself to hope. He had looked forward to a day in the sun, the simple admiration of colleagues, young scientists. There were tears of frustration in his eyes when he was back in his office and scrawling his letter of regrets in longhand to his former tutor. He was a prisoner in the Atomic Weapons Establishment. The best years of his mind he'd sacrificed to this godforsaken place and precious little did he have to show for it.