Hidden Faces

I

Bannerman stared out across the blinding whiteness that lay below like an Arctic landscape. The sky was a clear, deep blue, sunlight flashing on the windows of the jet as it swung east. He sipped his whisky and felt the plane begin its long descent. Somewhere below would be the Belgian coastline. They would be in Brussels in under twenty minutes. He checked his watch. Almost ten thirty, Friday morning. They would lose an hour flying into Central European time, he remembered, and turned his watch on sixty minutes.

The two seats beside him were occupied by an elderly American couple, he a minor cog in the wheels of NATO, she a vigorous, unselfconscious woman who seemed well used to speaking for them both.

‘We’d rather you didn’t smoke, young man,’ she had said shortly after they left Edinburgh. Bannerman had turned, genuinely surprised, the unlit cigar still between his lips.

‘You could always sit elsewhere,’ he said tersely. ‘There are non-smoking seats further down.’

‘Oh, we don’t smoke, neither of us,’ she said. ‘Do we Henry? And it doesn’t really matter where you sit.’

Henry had shaken his head and smiled, a little embarrassed. He stretched out his hand across his wife to Bannerman. ‘Henry Schumacher,’ he offered, his fat amiable face broadening into a grin. ‘And my wife Laura-Lee.’

Bannerman shook the proffered hand. ‘Neil Bannerman,’ he said and lit his cigar.

‘We disapprove of smoking,’ Mrs. Schumacher persisted. ‘We believe in the freedom of the individual, but we also believe that the individual who feels free to smoke is inhibiting the freedom of others to breathe good clean air. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Bannerman?’

‘Yes,’ Bannerman said.

She watched the smoke curl up from his cigar. For a moment there was silence then Bannerman sighed in exasperation and reluctantly stubbed it out. And when the last traces of smoke had been whisked away by the air conditioning, Laura-Lee had begun a monologue, peppered with frequent questions which Bannerman was never allowed time to answer... The Schumachers’ dreary, early married life in Chicago, the unconvincing and undistinguished rise of Henry Schumacher in American politics. The move to Washington, the invitation to a White House social gathering and the firm handshake of the President — ‘The proudest moment of our lives. A great man, Mr. Bannerman, a great man’. The attachment to NATO and the now frequent trips to Brussels — ‘A damned unfriendly place, Mr. Bannerman, unless you know the right people’. Bannerman had listened with a patience that was gradually giving way to irritation. The Schumachers’ bluff harmlessness and good intent, the man’s smiling adoration for his wife, his wife’s misplaced belief in her husband’s importance. They sketched themselves into Bannerman’s consciousness like caricatures, their obvious sincerity being their only saving grace.

The panel at the front of the plane lit up — fasten seat belts: no smoking. They had come down through the clouds and you could see the patchwork fields below.

‘What was it you said you do, Mr Bannerman?’ Mrs. Schumacher asked vaguely, clipping her seat belt in place.

Bannerman sighed. ‘I sell vacuum cleaners.’

Schumacher leaned forward. ‘What company is it you’re with?’

‘The Quick-Clean Vacuum and Brush Company.’

The American nodded as though he was familiar with it. ‘Does it have any ties in the US? I might know someone...’

‘I doubt it,’ Bannerman said.

The plane was curling in above the airport, descending rapidly. ‘I don’t know how you think you’re going to sell anything to the Belgians,’ Mrs. Schumacher said. ‘They are the strangest people. They can’t even make up their minds whether to speak French or Flemish. You’ve never been in Brussels before, you said? You’ll find it very confusing.’ She smoothed down the front of her print dress. ‘Well, it looks like we’re coming in to land, Henry. Have you got the passports ready?’

The terminal building was busy, a great, soulless, modern structure where the traveller is anaesthetised by relentless subliminal piped musack. There were dark-uniformed Belgian policemen patrolling the floor carrying small sub-machine guns and pistols in leather holsters on black belts. A legacy of the terrorists.

Bannerman watched the Schumachers drag a luggage trolley off towards the taxi ranks. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet you again, Mr. Bannerman,’ Mrs. Schumacher had said seriously. ‘It’s been a great pleasure.’

‘Yes indeed, sir, a great pleasure.’ Schumacher had shaken his hand and presented him with his embossed card. ‘Any time you’re in the States...’

You can’t dislike such people, Bannerman thought. He picked up his case and made his way to the telephones, where he had to wait five minutes in a queue and then decipher operating instructions in French and Flemish. He pumped the box full of Belgian francs and dialled.

‘Allô, IPC,’ came a girl’s voice.

‘Extension cinq, zero, cinq.’

‘Ne quittez pas.’

A few seconds of silence and then a receiver lifted. ‘London Herald.’

‘Tim Slater, please.’

‘I’m sorry, you’ve just missed him. He’s left for the twelve o’clock press briefing. Can I help?’

‘Neil Bannerman, Edinburgh Post. I’d arranged to meet him for lunch.’

‘Ah, yes. He said you might call. You’re in Brussels?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then your best bet is to intercept him after the briefing. You know where the Salle de Presse is?’

‘’Fraid not.’

‘Ah. It’s in the Commission building, the Berlaymont, in the Boulevard Charlemagne. Do you have press accreditation?’

‘Is this a third degree?’ Bannerman asked.

The girl laughed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Bannerman relented. ‘Yes, I do have accreditation. The paper fixed it up before I left.’

‘Then you’ll have no problems,’ she said. ‘The Salle de Presse is on the first floor. Just ask when you get there.’

‘Thanks...’

‘Mademoiselle Ricain. I’m just the secretary. Not only do the Post and the Herald share an office, they share me too — secretarially speaking.’

Bannerman laughed. ‘Of course. Thanks, Mademoiselle.’ He hung up and squeezed past a fat Belgian who was anxious to get to his phone.

Outside it was warmer than it had been in Edinburgh, the sky heavy and grey, the first drops of rain beginning to fall. Bannerman felt the first pangs of rootlessness that always came when he arrived in a strange place. The disorientation, the sense of being utterly alone. It was always then that you re-discovered your affection for home. Bannerman thought about the cluttered tenement flat in Edinburgh that for him was home. Somewhere in all its drab familiarity was a sense of belonging. The grey routine of the Post, the close, dark winter streets of the northern city, the parochial insularity of it all; gems of security to be taken out and polished during lonely nights in strange hotel rooms under foreign skies.

The taxi ride from the airport took only twenty minutes, through the industrial outskirts on the north-west fringe of the city, past the Centre Commercial on the Avenue Leopold III, down on to the Boulevard General Wahis and the Boulevard Auguste. Streets where once German tanks had rolled in from the east, defeated Belgians watching from windows and doorways with a quiet hatred. Now the city was being re-built, adapting to a new world. The hammers of the demolition workers smashing down the past — rows of grey terraces and cobbled squares, tall crumbling tenements that had known better days, and worse. Bannerman wondered what kind of future today’s planners were building.

The Berlaymont stood in the heart of the commercial sector of Brussels, a massive building shaped like a star if seen from above, towering over the city skyline, great walls of glass curving inwards. Each office was glass from floor to ceiling, so that looking in from the outside you felt that half the building had been chopped away, like a half-demolished tenement, and you at once had a private view into every room or office where people worked and fought and hatched plots. Out front was the Metro, across the boulevard the lesser white-stone office block that housed the Council of Ministers.

The press briefing was still in progress, five men, the Porte Parole, sitting along a table at the top end of the Salle de Presse addressing a clutch of fifty or more reporters in French across a loud speaker system. The journalists were arranged along five rows of benches set in a semi-circle around the top table, like a mini conference chamber; microphones at each place, headsets linked to translation booths in galleries set high up along either side. They were all empty. The journalists asking questions seemed fluent in French.

Bannerman came in at the back of the room and moved round to a bar on the right side and ordered a beer. A number of reporters were seated along the bar drinking beer or coffee, chatting quietly or reading papers — Le Monde, The Guardian, La Belge Soir, Die Weld, La Stampa, The Times. Very few of the newsmen seated round the benches seemed to be paying much attention. There was an oddly casual atmosphere of informality, or perhaps indifference. Two secretaries moved constantly between the rows delivering press releases in various languages. Bannerman leaned against the bar, sipping his beer, his cigar burning in an ashtray. He had picked out the thin figure of Slater with his distinctive red beard. He had only once met the man, several years before when he worked on the Chronicle. That was before Slater had been sent out to Brussels as the Post’s EEC correspondent. He had aged considerably, Bannerman thought, his face pale and drawn. The long, thin nose seemed more pinched than it had been.

The briefing broke up, and as the journalists gathered into their little nationality cliques, Slater caught sight of Bannerman and made his way over to the bar. He was unsmiling and seemed distracted. ‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘You can buy me a beer.’ He risked a smile. ‘The prices here are subsidised.’

Bannerman leaned across the counter. ‘Deux bières,’ he said and pushed a fifty franc note at the barman. ‘Much doing?’ he asked Slater, watching the pale freckled face and the green eyes that kept avoiding his.

‘Not this week,’ Slater said. ‘The only real topic of conversation is the British Election. The Germans and French are worried shitless that the Government’s going to lose. If the Opposition get in the opinion here is that progress towards European unity will take yet another backward step — not that it takes many forward anyway.’

Bannerman sensed a great uneasiness between them and a certain hostility in Slater that made him uncomfortable in the man’s presence. And I’ve got to live with you for the next month, he thought. Slater lifted his beer. ‘Cheers.’

They were joined by another two reporters whom Bannerman had seen drifting slowly towards them. One was dark and wrinkled, about sixty, dressed in a neat dark suit. The other was younger, less formal, a shock of fair hair over a cherubic, bland face. This one patted Slater on the back. ‘Waste of time today, Tim. You get anything to interest you?’

Bannerman smiled. It was the old game that reporters played. They always needed the reassurance that they hadn’t missed something. Years ago when Bannerman had been starting out he had very quickly learned that reporters did not compare notes for the sake of accuracy. It was all a matter of confidence, or the lack of it; the instinct being to hunt with the pack rather than rely on your own judgement and ability. As his own self-confidence had developed so he had taken cruel satisfaction in leaving the pack in confusion with a parting, ‘bloody good story’, when they had been busy reassuring each other that there was ‘nothing in it’. Nothing was better designed to ruin their day, even if there had been nothing in it. But Slater just said, ‘Not a thing,’ and then reluctantly made the introductions. ‘This is Neil Bannerman, the Post’s investigative reporter. Jim Willis, Roger Kearney, respectively of the London Standard and the Euro-News Agency.’

Kearney, the fair-haired one, said, ‘Ah, yes. I know you by reputation, Bannerman. What brings you to Brussels?’

‘I’ve come to rake a little muck,’ Bannerman said. ‘If there’s any to be raked.’

Willis laughed. ‘Fertile ground for you, my old son. The place is alive with corruption. You want to take a look at the EEC system of awarding grants to the Third World. Some fantastic rip-offs there. Large backhanders to Commission officials from some of these African dictatorships where about half the country’s gross earnings are spent annually on building royal palaces and luxurious watering holes in the country for fat politicians with delusions of grandeur. It wouldn’t take much to dig something out there.’

Kearney took a slug of beer and pointed a finger at Bannerman. ‘And there’s the allocation of contracts to companies in member countries for building roads and the like. There’s almost certainly fraud involved there. Why, for example, does France get more Community money for road building than any other member country, when a God-forsaken place like Eire gets damn all?’

‘And agriculture’s another minefield of fraud if you care to try and negotiate it,’ Willis added.

Bannerman made no attempt to disguise his contempt. ‘Then why the hell do some of you people not dig it out yourselves?’

Willis frowned. ‘Oh piss off, Bannerman. We got a living to make. Why rock the boat?’

Bannerman gulped down the last of his beer. ‘Because you’re newspaper men. Or are you? You’ve got it pretty cushy here, haven’t you? Everything laid on. Maybe you should try working in the real world.’

Slater was eyeing Bannerman with distaste. What was his game?

‘You can bloody well get stuffed!’ Kearney’s voice rose angrily and some heads turned in their direction. ‘It’s all right for you. You can just float in, fling the mud around and then bugger off. You’ve got no pitch to queer. Smart-assed bastard.’

‘Struck a sore point, have I?’ Bannerman asked.

‘Let’s get out of here.’ Slater took Bannerman firmly by the arm and steered him away from the bar towards the door. In the corridor he stopped him. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Bannerman?’

Bannerman lit another cigar. ‘Just pricking a few reporters to see if they bleed.’ He looked at the distraught Slater, a small man — five feet eight or nine — painfully thin, curly red hair and beard, an open-necked white shirt with the collar out over a faded blue denim jacket. And he relented a little. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m just a bit pissed off at being here at all. How about lunch?’

II

Kale got his holdall down from the rack and pulled on his coat as the train braked coming into the Gare du Nord, drawing up alongside great long trolleys that sat along the platform piled high with mail bags. A sullen youth who had sat smoking Gauloises all the way from Ostend, and a fat ruddy-faced Belgian peasant woman whose knitting lay in a shapeless grey heap on her lap, both watched him curiously. He was a foreigner. They knew that, even though none of them had spoken through the hour and a half to Brussels when dark had fallen over northern Belgium. A wordless communion had passed between the youth and the old woman, two Belgians in a railway carriage with this stranger who carried about him an air that was more than just foreign. Both felt something akin to relief when Kale slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor. A strange tension that had been a presence among them, like the clicking of the old woman’s needles or the impatient tap of the youth’s foot, seemed to blow away with the cold rush of air that swept into the carriage with the opening of the door. The old woman smiled at the youth who shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and lit another Gauloise, turning his sullen stare out of the window.

Kale shivered in the cold night air and walked the length of the platform. He seemed to be the only passenger to alight here. A guard nodded and the railwayman at the barrier waved him through. Down steps into a shopping concourse and out through glass doors into a great empty marble hall, his footsteps echoing back at him. He followed a sign out into the Rue du Progrès and headed north along the dark, cobbled street past tall crumbling tenements with steel-shuttered windows and doors. A tram emerged from an underground tunnel that led to the Pré Metro and rumbled past below the railway line that ran along the top of the embankment. Three scruffy kids on bicycles raced past in the opposite direction.

Along this street one window was lit below a neon BAR sign. A hefty middle-aged woman in a short, low-cut dress from which she bulged at all points, sat in the window looking bored and smoking a cigarette. She raised a semihopeful eyebrow when the figure of Kale passed, but it fell again into its set boredom when he did not stop. At the end of the street the lights from a café spilled out across the pavement. Kale pushed open the door and stepped into the smoky warmth.

Working men in grey jackets and cloth caps looked up from their beers and eyed him suspiciously. He was not a regular and nobody but regulars drank here. Kale drew up a chair at an empty table and dropped his bag on the floorboards. The crude wooden table rocked unsteadily, one leg shorter than the others. The barman came out reluctantly from behind the counter. ‘Monsieur?’

Bloody foreigners, Kale thought. Why can’t they speak English? ‘Bière,’ he growled and lit a cigarette. The barman poured a half litre of draught Stella and sloshed it down on Kale’s table. Kale looked at the beer that had spilled across the wood and then turned his gaze on the barman. The Belgian hesitated a moment. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered. But there was something compelling and slightly sinister in the stranger’s dark eyes. He took a cloth off the counter and lifted the beer to wipe the table and the bottom of the glass before replacing it on a cardboard beer mat.

‘Trente-cinq francs.’

Kale remained impassive and made no move to pay and the barman shifted uncomfortably. Finally he took out a pad and scribbled 35F and tore it off the sheaf, laying it down in front of the stranger. Kale looked at it, nodded, and peeled a one hundred franc note from a wad in his wallet. The barman took it and counted the change from his pocket. The half dozen other clients in the café watched in silence, a silence that became oppressively obvious. A younger man turned his gaze away from Kale and began playing the pinball machine. Subdued conversations were struck up, but the atmosphere was heavy and there were frequent glances across at the stranger.

Kale was oblivious. The beer tasted cool and good after the long eight hour journey from London. It was impossible for him now to fly anywhere on a job. The international airports were all equipped with sophisticated anti-terrorist equipment through which it would be almost impossible to carry his hardware undetected. Damn the hi-jackers, he thought. He could not understand men who would risk their lives for political ends, and they had only made life more difficult for him.

It had been a dreary trip. The ferry from Dover to Ostend had been full of winter tourists heading for ski resorts in Germany and Switzerland and Austria. A girl with long, dark hair and a careless laugh. Perhaps she would spend the cold January nights in some ski lodge drinking Schnapps with friends round a log fire. For she was sure to have friends. A girl like that. She had not noticed him sitting in a corner on a lower deck, listening uncomfortably to the innocent ramblings of an elderly German lady who remembered days in Paris after the War, and the death of her husband nine years before on holiday in Majorca. She did not seem to have felt his sour presence as others always did, as maybe the girl had and pretended not to notice. Kale had gone up on deck to escape the old lady’s innocence. There was no place for innocence in his life. It troubled him.

There had been few people on deck and it suited him better. White paintwork streaked wet with rust, the flaking varnish on the empty rows of wooden deck benches, the lifeboats that had never left their cradles. The cold, clean air had been good to breathe, the wind stiff in his face, the strange warmth of the sun on this unusually mild January day. Seagulls cawed and wheeled overhead against the palest of winter blue skies. The wash of the sea was green in their wake, England having faded from sight, the Belgian coast not yet in view. He had remained there, huddled in his coat, a solitary figure among the empty deck chairs, away from the warmth below where children wailed and ran between the benches, where their parents drank duty-free spirits and smoked duty-free cigarettes, and young people laughed carelessly, like the girl, and talked earnestly about life. His exile from life, their life, was self-imposed, he thought with some satisfaction, and for always. That way he could be almost at peace with himself in his empty existence.

He finished his beer and left the café with all its staring eyes, turned hard left into the Rue Masui, and walked another hundred metres to the dark little hotel where he had booked a room. The streets were as familiar to him as if he had lived there all his life. Every area of operation in the city had been studied carefully on the town-plan map. Each street and alley he might use were painstakingly etched in his memory.

Kale dropped his passport on the reception desk and watched as the clerk took him in and then glanced at the document. It had been carefully forged by a contact in London. A small, bespectacled jeweller near Leicester Square who was one of the few remaining true artists in his profession. Utterly discreet. Kale would have trusted no-one else.

‘Ah, oui, Monsieur Ross,’ the clerk said, studiously avoiding eye contact with the foreigner. ‘Sign here, please.’ Kale signed the form and the clerk copied details from the passport before handing it back with a key. ‘Room twenty-two. Fifth floor.’ Kale crossed the dark hall to the old fashioned elevator and pulled open the wrought-iron gate. The clerk watched him disappear as the cage moved slowly upwards, and he shivered. Perhaps it had been the cold air that had come in with the stranger.

Kale’s room was drab and bare and smelled stale. The short, narrow bed sagged in the middle. He dropped his bag by a cracked porcelain washbasin and lay back on the bed, lighting a cigarette.

He closed his eyes and smelled again the cordite and the dust that had stung his nostrils on that scorching African day so many years ago. The sergeant, a heavy ignorant man, was shouting above the bursting of shells — a vivid image that had recalled itself often. The soldier beside Kale was dead, a man whom he hardly knew. Soon the flies would settle on the body, feed on the wounds in the heat of the sun. Kale was sweating, pricked by fear and by heat. The whitewash walls of the village had been reduced to rubble by the shelling from the rear. And still the rebels refused to move. Dark-skinned men with Russian rifles. Kale crouched in the crater, his eyeline at ground level, trying to pick out the surviving figures in the smoke and dust that billowed out from the destruction. Five men from his unit had already moved a hundred yards out to his left and were trying to circle the north side of the target. The clipped tac, tac, tac of a machine gun came from not too far ahead and Kale saw two of the soldiers fall. This time the shots had not come from the enemy marksman who had so successfully kept them pinned down. Tor Christ’s sake give the bastards cover!’ the sergeant was bawling. Kale moved up, head and shoulders above the crater, his mouth dry. Again the machine gun sounded and this time Kale saw the rebel, moving through a gap in the wall to his right. He sighted quickly and fired. The figure dropped in the dust. The gap had been no more than three feet, maybe two hundred metres distant. Almost immediately a bullet struck the rim of the crater and threw up dust and rock splinters in his face. Kale pulled his head down sharply, blinking furiously as the dust stung his eyes. ‘Get that damned bloody sharpshooter for Christ’s sake!’ the sergeant was shouting further along the line. ‘We can’t move till we get him.’ But he was not firing himself.

Several rifles were cracking around Kale now and the soldier on his left fell suddenly across him, half of his head torn away. Kale kicked the man off him and watched the thick, sticky blood staining the khaki of his shirt. The shelling had stopped to allow the troops to move in, but no-one stirred from his cover. The five men who had moved out earlier were all dead. And now the slightest movement brought the crack of a rifle from somewhere out ahead. Almost without fail the marksman was making a hit. Kale shifted his position slightly and picked up a dead soldier’s helmet out of the dust. He threw it along at the sergeant. ‘Stick that up on your bayonet so he can see it,’ he shouted.

The sergeant glanced grimly at him and saw that there were only the two of them left alive in the crater. The others were sheltering behind a wall away to their left. ‘Who’s giving the mucking orders?’ he growled. Kale said nothing and the sergeant spat and then hooked the helmet over the top of his bayonet and pushed it above the level of the crater. Almost as soon as it appeared a bullet spun it away behind them and the sergeant heard a second shot from only a few feet away as he pulled himself tight into the rim. Kale had caught only the briefest glimpse of the marksman as the man shot at the helmet. But it had been enough. Enough for him to get in his shot and feel a tight satisfaction as the sharpshooter toppled from his cover at the end of what had once been the main street of the village. Two more figures moved in the shadows. His rifle cracked again, twice, and both figures fell. ‘That’s some bloody shooting, Private Kale!’ The Sergeant grinned momentarily and then thought better of it. ‘You can hang in here and give us cover when we move in.’

Kale had been as accurate in practice but it had meant little to him. Strangely, now there was something precious in the skill. When he saw how he could cut men down. The sergeant noticed the slight, humourless smile on Kale’s lips and frowned. What the hell was there to smile about? But in these last minutes Kale had discovered a sense of purpose. In the final event it was the only thing the army gave him. It led him to find in himself the cold, calculated ability to kill men, to hit back. An ability that transmuted all his crippled bitterness into a perfect and tangible expression. Out of all those long, hot days under the relentless African sun, the long, cramped, unsanitary nights among the cockroaches and the sweating bodies, had emerged a vocation, and with it an inner confidence that had finally enabled him to stand apart from a world he despised.

Kale stared up at a crack in the ceiling of the hotel room. He had one day left before the hit. He would use it well.

III

Bannerman looked from the window of this office on the top floor of the IPC building, down into the back courts below. Mean little yards bounded by brick walls that formed geometric patterns between the terraced rows. Beyond them, against the night sky, two cranes rose high above the houses that were being swept away in the redevelopment.

He had spent the afternoon sitting in the press lounge at the Council of Ministers, drinking coffee and watching the curious behaviour of the lobby men. These creatures of strange habit sat about in the lounge among the potted plants, drinking, talking, or working behind a smoked-glass screen where stood rows of desks and typewriters and banks of telephones. From time to time groups of reporters would launch themselves suddenly from their seats as they spotted various officials whom they would follow into little rooms off the lounge, a well-practised ritual that required no signs. In these tiny rooms impromptu press conferences were held. The press relations officials held court. Pens scribbled in sacred silence as the high priests delivered careful words to the scribes. The ceremonies were, without exception, performed in French. Questions were frowned upon, brushed aside. The sermons concluded, the journalists would then drift away, sometimes back to the lounge, sometimes to the press room, dependent upon whether ‘the words’ were relevant to a particular country or reader-ship. It was a strange performance, baffling to the outsider. Only those in the inner sanctum who could read the faces and interpret the words were privy to its secrets.

In one corner, the Italian Minister for Agriculture, making a rare personal appearance, had delivered a diatribe to a group of excitable Italian pressmen whose voices rose and fell; arms waving, frequent laughter. In another, a clutch of British reporters was gathered round a Junior Minister from the Foreign Office; notebooks in pockets, wary eyes on the earnest face of the Minister as he spoke. Bannerman had recognised him: Robert Gryffe, an Under-Secretary of State, earmarked by the Prime Minister for a senior post if the Government won the election — or so it was rumoured. Gryffe was a popular public figure. He had that quality, rare amongst post-war politicians, of charisma. He was an outspoken moderate, a ‘man of the people’. The Party had been using him frequently in recent months in their party political broadcasts. Bannerman watched him with distrust. He had grave suspicions about men of the people.

When he left the Council of Ministers it was dark, and he had walked up the Boulevard Charlemagne, past a bar where disinterested German journalists spent their days, to the IPC building where he had found Slater in his office. It was well after seven now and he turned away from the window to take in the figure of Slater crouched by the open drawer of a filing cabinet. The Herald man had left and the secretary, Mademoiselle Ricain, a blonde unattractive girl, was on her break. ‘I won’t be long,’ Slater said.

Bannerman looked round the cluttered office. Four desks were pushed together to form a square. They were strewn with discarded press releases, overflowing trays of copy blacks, technical journals, wordy reports and empty coffee cups. The walls were plastered with charts and maps and a door led off to an anteroom where the teleprinter shared by the Herald and the Post was set up on a trestle table. The panoramic windows looked out east across the rooftops, a forest of leaning chimneys and television aerials. Bannerman pulled up a chair and sat down, and reached for an open file. It was filled with loose newspaper cuttings from various papers. He saw a grey, smeared picture of Gryffe and he picked up the cutting. He was bored, uninterested already in Brussels and the EEC, depressed at the thought of spending as long as a month in this dreary place. He let his eyes wander over the cutting. ‘Mr. Robert Gryffe, a Junior Minister at the Foreign Office, yesterday warned at a meeting of the EEC Council of Ministers in Brussels of an impending slump...’

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Slater snatched the cutting from his hand and lifted the folder from the desk, clutching it protectively. Bannerman looked up, surprised, mildly irritated. Slater eyed him suspiciously, a fragile, ill-looking figure, all his wasted years stretching behind him like chains. He was a man who had started out on his journalistic career full of ambition and enthusiasm, only to have both gradually battered out of him through long, tired years of endless fires and murders, of knocking on doors and carving initials on court benches. There had been the anonymous pubs and reporters, drinks and stories, night shifts and fictitious expenses. And there had been, too, the moves from paper to paper until the faces had all begun to look the same, the conversations predictable, the copy more turgid. The Brussels job had come out of the blue, like suddenly rounding a bend in a long dark tunnel and for the first time seeing light at the end. It had resurrected old hopes and held out great new prospects of a brighter future. But it too had gone sour, as he should have known it would, settling into an old familiar pattern. The Post’s interest in the EEC had been too narrow. They wanted parochial Scottish angles on everything. That had limited his interest, as had the EEC itself.

He saw the Commission as a great, slow-moving machine whose purpose was simply self-perpetuation, self-justification. The Brave New Europe had never emerged and, he believed, never would. All its processes were too tortuous and obscure without ever being fully productive. Thousands of civil servants sat in spacious offices dreaming up ideas for yet more intricate legislation to weave into an already complex tapestry of international rules and regulations. The only purpose they served was to complicate further already difficult relations between member countries. And even then they were no more than ideas, though often they ran into hundreds of pages in fat, incomprehensible reports that had still to go before the Council of Ministers. Then there were the lengthy processes of review and change before some would finally go to the European Parliament, when it sat, in Strasbourg or Luxembourg. And it too, Slater thought bitterly, was an impotent body, even after direct elections.

If he had not met the girl there would have been no hope at all. Now there was the chance of escape from it all — from the crippling cynicism and loneliness of Brussels, from the memory of his wife, from the worry of his daughter. Maybe now the child would have a real chance too. Specialist treatment. But there was Bannerman, damn him. What was he after? Only a few more days and Slater could leave all this behind him. Surely Tait couldn’t know anything, have sent Bannerman to find out. Gryffe wouldn’t have talked. He wouldn’t dare. Slater decided to take a chance. ‘What are you really here for, Bannerman?’

Bannerman frowned. He had sensed Slater’s ill-ease at their first meeting, and now his extraordinary behaviour over the file of cuttings on Gryffe. ‘I already told you,’ he said. ‘What are you so jumpy about?’ He watched Slater carefully. But the reporter turned away and slipped the Gryffe file back in the cabinet and locked it. He turned again, hesitantly, to face Bannerman and seemed to consider what he should say.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t like you, Bannerman. Never have. Coming over here, digging around where you’re not wanted, imposing yourself on me for the next month, insulting guys I have to work with.’

‘Hey,’ Bannerman snapped. ‘You know none of this is my idea. The Post owns your flat here, and if Tait reckons he can save the paper money by having me shack up there then that’s up to him. If you have any objections you know where you can take them.’ He lit a cigar and Slater seemed to relent.

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I... I, well this place gets to you after a while.’

‘Really? I thought you people had it easy out here.’ Bannerman’s sarcasm seemed to revive some of Slater’s antagonism.

‘Oh, sure, if you like the idea of quietly vegetating amongst all the decaying political ideals of a generation of squabbling Europeans.’ He hesitated and crossed to the window so that Bannerman could not see his face. ‘This is a cold, lonely city, Bannerman. It’s a God-awful place. There are more than 200,000 temporary or permanent immigrants in Brussels. Thousands of civil servants and politicians and journalists from all over Europe who have never integrated with the local population. Most of us live in the Euro-ghettos.’ He laughed sourly. ‘Sprawling wealthy suburban areas on the edge of the city where life is divided into nationality cliques and private clubs and expensive social functions. All that if you can afford it.’ He turned back to face Bannerman accusingly. ‘You think I can, working for the Post? There’s no way a paper like the Post can compete with the money that’s being earned even by the average EEC official. These guys can get anything upwards of a basic three thousand pounds a month, with all kinds of additional allowances for home entertainment, household, family, school, cost of living.’

Bannerman felt the man’s bitterness as powerfully as if he could touch it. Something about Slater intrigued him. He was more than just a disillusioned newspaper man, more than just bitter. But it was not easy to know what more there was. Bannerman knew that Slater’s wife had died shortly after the move to Brussels, that he had been left to support his autistic daughter — a girl who could not speak, who could barely write, whose terrible mental deficiency was her inability to communicate.

Slater was still talking. ‘The Belgians are okay to work with,’ he was saying. ‘But there is no way you will get to know them socially. A Belgian will never invite you into his home, even if you have known him for months, or years. They are a strange, introverted, suspicious people. I don’t like them.’

‘It seems there are a lot of people you don’t like.’

‘That’s right.’ Slater stared at him, almost defiantly, then turned to lift his coat from the stand. ‘Time we went home.’

Bannerman stood and pulled on his coat, glancing at this odd-looking man with his red hair and beard, pale face, and dark-ringed green eyes. And in that moment he knew what he had sensed in Slater. It was guilt. He had seen before how it could affect men. Perhaps it was something in his past. The death of his wife. Or maybe to do with the child.

Slater locked the door behind them and they walked in silence the length of the hushed corridor to the elevator. There, as they waited for the lift, Slater turned to him. ‘Don’t expect any help from me, Bannerman.’ And, almost as though he knew what Bannerman had been thinking, he added, ‘And keep your nose out of my affairs.’

IV

The child sat alone in the darkened room, the muted light from the street lamps seeping in through net curtains. She had been sitting there for nearly half an hour and her eyes had grown quite accustomed to the dark. She could follow clearly the lines of the old dresser, the book shelves and the desk. She could pick out the faded pattern of the old worn rug, the shape of the fireplace, the armchair opposite, the bed. From the kitchen came the sounds of Sally preparing the evening meal, from the street the occasional passing car.

It had been a bad day for her. Twice she had lost control; the screaming, the flailing arms and legs, the aimless striking out. She had tried, God how she had tried, to control it. But the frustration had been growing, taking hold of her in a way she did not know how to control. There had been the patient faces, the firm hands, and then the angry words. The vacant, staring faces of the other children who knew also how it was, but could not tell it. Sally had talked to her on the way home; silly things, just chatter. But it had helped in a way. Now she was at peace again, or as much at peace as she could be, and control was easier. If she closed her eyes and sat back here in the dark, then she could speak, not aloud, but with some inner voice. She could walk to the window if she wanted and touch the curtain, feel its silkiness in her hand. It meant little, but it was contact with something. It was good when she could touch things, feel things, embrace things; express her love, express herself. But such moments were rare, though they had seemed more frequent recently. Perhaps as she grew older it would improve even more. They always said it would. But, in the past, as it had improved, so her frustration had increased at those times when the improvement was not there and she could not make contact. God gave with one hand and took with the other. Still, there was always the drawing, she thought, and when that came it was like every good thing she knew concentrated in a few furious moments of expression that flowed through her arm, her hand, her fingers, through the pencil and out on to that vast white landscape of fresh, crisp paper. And then afterwards, there was such pleasure in seeing it.

She heard the front door opening and her father’s voice. There was someone else with him. A voice that she did not know. She listened now in the darkness, finding as she always did that the presence of a stranger in the house unsettled her. Routine was something she clung to without knowing why. There was a great security in the familiar, a devastating uncertainty in the unknown or unusual. Always she looked forward to her father’s return from work. She found an odd comfort in it, though she had no love for him. She had long since been aware that he had no love for her. The memory of her mother, a pretty, smiling, caring woman, had faded quickly, leaving her with nothing more than the hollow affection of her father. He went through the motions of love, was almost always gentle. But he spent so little time with her, and she felt his lack of interest with an extraordinary perception. Still, it did not affect the comfort she sought in his presence. If only it was possible to say what she felt, to tell them the things that were in her head.

Her father and the other man were in the living room now and she listened carefully. There was something oddly familiar in the stranger’s voice. He spoke English with an accent like her father, but there was another quality in it that she felt, almost like a hand touching her. She had already detected the hostility in both voices, though neither man was arguing and there were no harsh words. It was simply there, and she sensed it clearly. She pulled her bedroom door gently inwards so that it stood slightly ajar, enough for her to see through into the living room.

Her first sight of Bannerman affected her in the same way as his voice had done. There was something more than just the man she saw; the set, sarcastic face, the hard blue eyes, the relaxed liquidity of his body in the chair. She sensed in him an aggression, perhaps frustration. Yet more, there was a feeling of contact, as though they were touching, the way she had felt his voice touch her. It was important somehow, she knew, though she didn’t know why and she was seized by a sudden foreboding. Everything about him and all she felt about him filled her with a great confusion and uncertainty. It was clouding her mind — thoughts that had not come in words (for she had no real sense of words) but in some inner understanding of things that words could never make as clear. With the clouding, the frustration was returning, and the control was slipping away. She left the door and crossed to the window. Her hands were starting to tremble and then she heard her father’s voice calling her. The door opened and she saw him framed in the doorway against the light.

‘It’s all right, Tania,’ he was saying. ‘There’s a man come to see you. He’ll be staying with us for a while. He wants to meet you.’ All she heard was the false gentleness. He came to the window and took her hand and she allowed herself to be led passively to the door and into the living room. There she stopped and pulled back. The man had risen from his chair and was standing by the fireplace below the big, framed painting. He turned to look at her. All her self control began dissolving under the gaze of those blue eyes and she felt herself pulling her hand from her father’s.

Bannerman was startled by the first shriek and alarmed when this clumsy, unattractive child, who only seconds before had appeared so passive and uninterested, clutched at her hair with both hands and began backing away into the darkness behind her. The screams ripped into the quiet of the flat. Slater became quickly flushed and he tried to pull the child back towards him, coaxing, appealing with soft words that only seemed to increase her distress.

‘It’s all right, Tania. It’s all right, little one. There’s nothing to worry you.’ She lashed out with a tightly clenched fist, catching him a sturdy blow on the side of his face. ‘For Christ’s sake, child!’ he shouted and snatched her arm, half turning towards Bannerman. ‘Damn you! I knew this would happen.’

The girl was struggling and pulling against him, tears streaming down her cheeks, her voice hoarse already with the screaming. Bannerman’s confusion gave way to a strange, stinging embarrassment. He stared numbly, sensing a great inner pain behind the child’s dark eyes. And there came to him the first glimmer of understanding of why Slater was like he was. Father and daughter were grotesquely tangled, the child’s arms still trying to beat on her father who had lifted her and was clutching her to him. And still the screaming went on, filling the room, the dreadful cries of a disturbed mind.

Suddenly Bannerman was aware of another presence in the room. He turned to see a dark-haired young woman, perhaps in her middle twenties standing in the open doorway to the kitchen. She was watching in silence and Bannerman thought she looked tense. She glanced in his direction and smiled, but it was a troubled smile. ‘You never quite get used to it,’ she whispered.

Slater carried the child into the bedroom and closed the door on the screaming. He was quite pale, his lightly freckled face almost grey against the red of his hair and beard. He looked viciously at Bannerman. But the young woman stepped into the room before he could speak. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven, Mr. Slater. It’ll be about fifteen minutes. I have to go.’

Slater plunged a hand into his pocket and threw a bunch of keys to Bannerman. ‘Take my car and run her home, will you?’ he said curtly. ‘And do me a favour. Eat out. I want the child asleep before you get back.’

Bannerman shrugged and nodded. The young woman untied her apron and lifted her coat from over the back of the settee. ‘You still want me for tomorrow night, Mr. Slater?’

Slater nodded distractedly. ‘Yes, yes.’

‘Only I won’t be able to make it on Sunday.’

Slater’s head snapped up. ‘Why the hell not?’ His anger was sudden and unexpected and even she seemed surprised.

‘Personal business,’ she said defensively.

‘Damn!’ he muttered. He opened the door of the child’s room and went in, slamming it behind him, leaving Bannerman and the girl in an embarrassed silence.

She tried a smile which didn’t quite work. ‘Well, it looks like we’re dismissed. I’m Sally Robertson.’

Bannerman picked up his coat. ‘Hello, Sally,’ he said. ‘I’m Neil Bannerman. It seems I’m taking you home.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Or since I’m going to have to eat out maybe I can take you to dinner.’

Sally smiled again, and this time it was her real smile, lips spread wide across a disarmingly open and pretty face. And her green, impish eyes smiled even more than her mouth. ‘I’d like that,’ she said.

Outside the night air was thick, almost humid, great dark clouds clustering overhead, having blown in from the west during the day. There was still a winter edge of cold, but when you walked you were warm and the air felt warm on your face.

‘Leave the car,’ Sally said when they got out of the apartment block. ‘We can walk and then take the Metro. It’s a good night for walking.’

Bannerman allowed her to take his arm and they walked the length of the Rue de Commerce and turned up into the Rue de la Loi. ‘I suppose you must feel pretty bad about the child,’ she said. He gave no sign that he had even heard. ‘They’re all pretty much like that, autistic children,’ she went on. ‘A break in the routine, a stranger, or maybe a pet phobia. Any of these can set them off on a screaming fit. Sometimes it can last an hour, or two hours, or even more. But they always come through.’

Bannerman kept an even pace and did not look at her. Ill-pasted posters flapped on the hoardings, behind which workmen sweated under floodlights on excavations for the foundations of yet another office block. ‘What’s she like?’ he asked. ‘The child.’

Sally swept her hand through a vague gesture. ‘It’s difficult to know,’ she answered. ‘She doesn’t speak, you see. It’s not that she can’t speak, physically I mean. It’s just that... well, she doesn’t. She can write a little when the mood takes her, but she can’t construct sentences. She gets what she needs by gestures. A kind of sign language. But you’ve got to know her pretty well to understand it. The doctors say she understands what is going on around her, but her only positive responses to anything are the fits. She takes it all in, but she can’t seem to communicate what it all means to her.’

Bannerman tried to imagine what it might be like. To be trapped like that. Your body like a cage. The world can come in but you can’t get out. He pictured the child. Shoulder length brown hair cut straight. A small, plain, expressionless face dominated by large, dark eyes. The grey jumper and skirt. Heavy black shoes. The clumsy limbs. ‘But she can draw like I’ve never seen a child draw,’ Sally said. ‘Fantastic living drawings that she makes with a pencil. Drawings that leap out of the page at you. She has this tremendous sense of depth and perspective. They’re worth seeing.’

The streets were poorly lit and quiet here, still in the commercial sector, and they climbed the hill then in silence to the Metro at Schuman below the Berlaymont. There no longer seemed a need to speak, and the lack of words between them was an easy thing. Bannerman felt relaxed in the company of this woman with her hair cropped short like a boy’s, but with a smile and touch and smell that were warm and feminine. But still, he could not shake off his distress, and she seemed to appreciate his distance and disquiet.

The child had touched some inner nerve end, a severed memory, and in his mind he kept replaying the scene in Slater’s flat. Her eyes were always the focal point. Sad, appealing eyes, deceptive in their dark passivity, even at the height of the screaming. Only now, with the short passage of time, were they having their full effect on him. He knew why. Somewhere inside he knew why, but would not or could not admit it.

He remembered the small, gloomy office of the weekly newspaper where he had first got a job as a reporter. A raw young man full of anger at the world. But his cynicism then had not fully blunted the power of his youthful idealism and romanticism. He had always been arrogant, a kind of self protection, and had not endeared himself to the other reporters. They had made it hard for him there, and he had learned the toughest way you can learn — without friends. And it was in this period, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, that the relationship had formed. A relationship that had moulded his future, sealed his insularity.

She had been a timid girl in tele-ads, fresh out of school, impressed by his self-confidence, starry-eyed at what she saw as the romantic world of newspapers and newspaper men. He had embodied all that she, as a young girl, might have dreamed of in a young man. And he had grasped her vision of him, as a lonely man does, and played to it, built on it.

He had allowed her adoration to fill out his ego, and he would lie awake at night in his attic digs overlooking the canal, playing the game, making the rules and breaking them. He felt the way it gave him power to have her love him when he did not love her. Though when you play that kind of game, sometimes the division between fantasy and reality becomes blurred and that is when it can become dangerous.

It had been a small, cold room high up in the roof of the stone terrace, and he had hated it. The dull, damp wallpaper. The miserable view out across the canal, the railway line and the dark empty trees. The dirty, threadbare carpet over the blackened linoleum and the smell of stale cooking that drifted up from the floor below where an old woman lived in a cluttered room. She peed in a bucket, the students in the room below her said. They would wake up at night and hear the squirt of the old lady’s urine against the side of the galvanised bucket. They hoped she had a good aim, they said. And Bannerman had lain in the darkness, hating himself for all the falseness that he needed, remembering how he had made the girl from tele-ads cry, how they had fought and he had made her unhappy. And there had been his own tears in all this unhappiness, there in that room, the tears of a callow eighteen-year-old boy trying to find in himself what others always seemed to find with such ease, but resorting in the end to the hollow pursuit of self-deceit. It had never really occurred to him at the time, in the midst of his own selfish unhappiness, that it was not only himself that he was hurting, but that piece by piece he was also destroying another human being whose trust and love he was betraying.

He had thought of her as a rather foolish, if attractive, girl, and he thought bitterly now how he could not even remember her face, how he had never seen the child she bore him.

They went down into the Metro on escalators, through vast, empty, ersatz marble halls. Sally bought them tickets and they queued on the platform under fluorescent lights. ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked. ‘We can ride anywhere in the city on these tickets.’

Bannerman looked at her. ‘Somewhere to eat and get a little drunk and talk,’ he said.

A shining new orange carriage whisked them through the new Brussels Metro, through broad lit tunnels to De Brouckere where they changed and caught one of the trams that run on the Pré Metro below the city centre before burrowing upwards like moles to run overground into the suburbs. They ate in a steak house on the Boulevard Adolphe Max; steak au poivre washed down with a strong red wine. Their conversation was desultory, a little awkward, each inhibited by the other’s strangeness and the memory of the scene at Slater’s flat. But Bannerman liked the smell of wine on her breath and the way she wore no make-up except on her fine lips. He found it easier to look at her than to talk. He saw now that she was older than he had first thought. Her thick, short hair was a rich auburn flecked with the first signs of a premature grey. Her eyes, below finely stretched lids, were a deep, solemn green speckled with brown, only the finest of lines etched out from their corners betraying her youthful appearance. Her nose was short, but not too short, and a little pinched around the nostrils. It was a delicately structured face without being beautiful, and you thought you could tell from her smile and her eyes that she knew how to look after herself. She had a bright laugh, and always when she laughed she flicked back her head in a small, careless way, and Bannerman guessed she must recently have worn her hair long. She must have been about thirty, he thought.

They left the steak house a little wanner and a little closer, and walked further down the boulevard towards the Place Rogier where the towering Manhattan Centre of concrete and glass rose powerfully into the night sky. ‘You’re a strange, quiet sort of man,’ Sally said without looking at him, her eyes fixed high up on the Manhattan building on a large Martini neon.

‘Only when I’m strange and quiet,’ he replied.

She smiled wistfully. ‘You still want to get drunk?’

‘Not drunk. Gently... tipsy.’

‘We can go in here.’

The Manhattan was a small, classy café near the end of the Boulevard Adolphe Max, emulating the American bars of Thirties’ movies. A row of tall stools stood along a bar of polished mahogany, below a wooden canopy hung with beaten copper light shades. Small, round tables and chairs stood in clusters in little alcoves. The walls were panelled in the same polished mahogany and along behind the bar, stickers advertised Scotch, American beers and Stella Artois. It was almost empty, and they filled two empty stools along the row. A bored, neat waiter in black waistcoat and pants, white shirt and bow tie, who had been leaning against the end of the bar smoking a cigarette when they came in, snapped to attention and approached them crisply to take their order. They asked for whiskies which were brought in short glasses and placed on mats on the counter in front of them. Bannerman raised his glass. ‘Slainthe.’

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘It’s Scots for good health.’

She smiled. ‘Slainthe then.’ They took their first sips in silence and Bannerman took out a cigar. He peeled back the cellophane and trimmed the end carefully then lit it with a match, rolling the end until it was well lit and smoking the way he liked it. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing much to tell.’

He allowed the thick blue smoke to drift lazily out the corners of his mouth. ‘Now why do people always say that?’

‘Maybe because it’s true.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Everyone’s got a story to tell.’ He took another mouthful of whisky and allowed it to slip back easily over his tongue and down his throat so that it left a nice warm sensation in its wake. ‘The editor of a paper I worked for once always said that behind every window there’s a story. Same thing really.’

‘Can I ask a question?’

‘Sure.’

‘Why do reporters always ask questions?’

He grinned at her. ‘It’s their job.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah. We’re a nosy breed.’

‘Only you seem quite different from Tim Slater or some of the other reporters I’ve met.’

‘That’s probably because I am.’

She tutted, partly with irritation, partly with amusement. ‘Why do you always have to be so clever?’

‘I don’t. I’m just enjoying breaking the ice on our relationship.’

‘Oh? Do we have a relationship?’

‘I don’t know yet. Maybe.’ He paused while he drew in smoke from his cigar. ‘So tell me something about yourself. We met during a scene, we’ve travelled together across half of Brussels, had a meal together, and all I know about you is that you’re English and you keep house for Slater — or do you?’

She sighed. ‘All right. Yes, I’m English, I’m thirty-two years old and unmarried — and that’s not an invitation. I’ve lived in Brussels for two years and teach English at a private college three days a week. On the other days I keep house for Mr. Slater and take Tania to and from her special school. I look after her on Sundays and sometimes babysit in the evenings when he goes out with his fancy woman. Is that enough, or would you like my life story from day one?’

Bannerman smiled. ‘Quite talkative when you like. Why do you need to work for Slater when you’ve already got a job?’

‘Because I don’t make enough from teaching alone. Brussels is an expensive place to live.’

He paused, then asked, ‘So what’s an attractive young lady like you doing living alone in a place like this?’

‘None of your damned business.’

Her sudden sharpness surprised him. ‘I’m sorry.’ There was an uneasy silence for some moments, then, ‘Tell me about Slater’s fancy woman.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because I’m asking.’ He drained his glass and saw that Sally’s was empty too and he signalled the ever watchful waiter and ordered them another two glasses.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘His lady friend is about thirty, a very good-looking woman, plenty of money, or do they call it class nowadays? You get the impression she’s stepped down out of her class. Slumming. Or maybe he’s out of his. Though I’ve nothing against Mr. Slater. He’s all right. It’s just...’

‘What?’

‘They seem a strange couple. Badly matched. She’s not exactly affectionate.’

‘She Belgian?’

‘Uh-huh. Marie-Ange Piard. Divorced.’ She half emptied her glass then looked at him seriously. ‘You know, it occurs to me that I know as little about you as you did about me. How about me asking some of the questions? Like, why don’t you tell me something about yourself?’

Bannerman grinned. ‘There’s nothing much to tell.’ He looked up and saw that she was smiling too.

‘Bastard,’ she said.

Bannerman raised an eyebrow and drained his second glass. ‘I get a lot of people that way.’

Her smile faded slowly and there was a long silence. Then, suddenly self-conscious, she turned her eyes away.

‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She pushed her half-finished glass away from her. ‘I’d like to go home now. It’s late.’

They left the Manhattan and she insisted on taking a tram home on her own. ‘Will I see you again?’ he asked.

She said, ‘Maybe.’ And he watched the tram move off along the tracks, carrying her away into the night.

V

Bannerman rode the Metro over to the east side and found the door of Slater’s flat off the latch. He went in and closed it quietly behind him. Then he walked the length of the hall, feeling the quiet of the house around him, and found Slater sitting in the dark in the living room, his cigarette end glowing red as he drew on it. ‘She’s asleep,’ Slater said, surly and subdued. ‘Your bag’s in your room. Along the hall, the last door on your left.’

Bannerman could not see his face, but he nodded and felt all the disquiet returning through the gentle whisky haze in his head. ‘I’ll find a hotel on Monday,’ he said.

Slater turned towards him, his face half lit by the street lamps outside whose soft light only deepened the shadows in the room. ‘Okay. Thanks. What will you tell Tait?’ Bannerman said nothing, and Slater waited in the silence. Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go out tomorrow night. A social function. A party if you like. EEC officials, some politicians, some people from NATO. A boring affair. But I’ve got contacts to keep up.’ He paused then, ‘They’re my bread and butter,’ he added almost accusingly. ‘I suppose you’d better come with us. I don’t want to leave you here.’

‘Us?’ Bannerman asked.

Slater shifted uncomfortably and said, with something approaching an apology, ‘Three years is a long time for a wife to be dead. A man needs a woman.’

‘Sure.’

Bannerman lay in the bed with a faint grey light creeping in through the shutters. He thought that, after all, he had no right to intrude on the private pains of a man like Slater. Then he thought about Sally, her bright pretty face, her sudden withdrawal just when it seemed they were beginning to make contact. All the loneliness of the first night in a strange bed closed in about him like a fist, before the drowsiness of approaching sleep scattered his thoughts and numbed his depression.

He was not sure how long he had been dozing. It might only have been a matter of minutes, or it might have been hours. And he was not certain at first what had reached into his subconscious and forced him up to break the surface of wakefulness. The moment of waking was one of confusion; the strange room, the unfamiliar bed and the smell of dampness. The room was washed with the same grey light. Then beyond those first seconds of confusion came an awareness, an awareness of a presence in the room. Nothing he could see or smell or hear. He just felt it and there was a momentary flutter of fear in his chest. He jerked up on to one elbow and saw the child standing in a long, shapeless white nightdress, bare feet on the bare linoleum. She was only a couple of feet away, watching him, big dark eyes, that peaceful passive expression resting easy on her face. She seemed small, more fragile, more childlike. His first thought was that she might scream and he felt his body tighten with tension. But she just stood there.

He could hear his own breathing, loudly, clearly, and he could feel the blood pulsing at his temples. Something told him that it would be a mistake to speak and a little of the tension seemed to slip away. And as though the child knew it, she took two small steps forward and reached out to touch his face. The fingers of her hand were icy against his skin and he felt a trembling in them. At first they rested on his cheek and then after a few seconds they began to follow the contours of his face, running along the line of his cheekbone, his nose, his lips, his jaw. He raised his own hand and placed it over hers, stopping it, feeling the coldness of it, and he squeezed it gently. A tiny smile lit her face and the dark eyes stared into his, and he found himself extraordinarily moved. Then the small hand slipped from his and she turned and padded to the door, opening it and closing it behind her without looking back. Bannerman remained motionless for a minute, maybe more. His head swam with the strangest feelings, the sensation that he had experienced something precious. But something he could not explain.

A dog barked somewhere in the courtyards behind the apartment block and broke into his thoughts. He dropped on to his back and stared up at the ceiling, and realised for the first time that he also was cold.