Second Wind

Chapter 9

Kris had been knocked out by the last going-nowhere impact and was half hanging in his seat belt and half lying on the control column. I’d felt in myself a sort of resilient cracking bounce in my chest, disorienting but not disabling, nothing to stop me from trying to unlatch the door which, when it came to the point, I couldn’t do as it seemed to be bent.

I’d reached a woozy level of thinking ‘fire’ and ‘dammit, we have fuel in both wing tanks this time’, and various comforting little items along those lines, but the rescue mob outside jemmied the door open and scooped us carefully and quite fast out of our nose-down cabin and covered the fuel leaks around them and us with foam and expedition.

Kris woke up moaning, a noise that shocked him into silence and a weak grin. By the time the first news camera with microphone was seen advancing among the uniforms, his concern had been wholly transferred from the living to his mangled treasure, which no one would let him inspect.

I could have told him that the obvious damage was a nose wheel with broken struts, three burst tyres and propeller blades bent into right angles.

I stood on the grass, shivering, while someone with kindness wrapped a blanket round my shoulders, and I watched Kris lose the battle against stretcher-bearers and other good-natured forms of restraint.

It was inevitable, I supposed, that the question of why had the oil leaked out of the engine should be one of the first needing an answer and almost the last to get it.

For some reason my mind was inclined sometimes to clear sharply in a crisis, and it was then with a jolt that I remembered Kris’s friend setting out the landing lights at White Waltham. Our saviour from the Luton tower, coming down from his heights, promised amiably to alert him, with a consequent widening of the bad and good tidings, and no chance of a modest disavowal. Everyone at White Waltham chatted onwards and agreed that the weathermen had nine, or better, twenty-nine lives.

Being carried off by paramedics — against his will — Kris urgently told me as he passed to stay with the Cherokee to the death (or to the scrap heap) as oil should not have got past his eagle-eyed checks; and indeed I was well aware, as he was carted protestingly to onward transport, that we had in fact flown safely to Doncaster a few hours earlier with the engine oil intact.

I folded the blanket from around my shoulders, returned it non-committally to an ambulance and, covering most of my too easily recognised face with a hand, became a gawping bystander among others. Never mind that Kris wanted to know, I too was fairly anxiously curious. Except for the direction-finder and its operator in Luton’s control tower, and but for Kris’s ‘give-it-all-you’ve-got’ semi-crash landing, the BBC would have lost two forecasters permanently, and on a cloudless fine evening, no less.

Inevitably in the end Kris and I became news-fodder with names, but I did stay with the Cherokee to the crane-lifting stage, for which Kris next day (out of hospital custody), said ‘Thanks, kiddo’ absentmindedly and demanded to know what I’d learned.

I said, ‘When we... er... landed, there was no dipstick in the engine.’

He stared at me fiercely. We were up in my attic surrounded by the Sunday papers he’d brought with him. All the later editions had given us front page slots with a frame or two of the nose-down wreck and our best BBC faces, with unstinted and not unduly complimentary comments on our recently reported escape from our flight through a hurricane. Two crashes within two weeks was excessive.

‘It was not pilot error,’ Kris asserted, deliberately ignoring any possible embarrassing reference to fuel tanks. ‘You saw me use the dipstick yesterday morning when we took off. I wiped the stick clean and put it into the engine sump to make sure there was enough oil, and there was. And I put the dipstick back and screwed it up tight, and no oil came out on the way to Doncaster.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘And I didn’t look at the oil level again at Doncaster. Go on, say it, I didn’t do that check again as we hadn’t come far from White Waltham — like I didn’t check the oil that day for coming home from Newmarket. No one checks the oil after such a short flight.’

I said, ‘You certainly did not remove the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.’

‘You’d swear to it?’

I’d been semi-asleep at Doncaster but I would have bet my life on his carefulness... as indeed I had done in Odin... and nearly drowned for it...

At Doncaster there had been no pressure on him. The panic scale had registered zero. He wouldn’t have made an elementary mistake.

The alternative had to be faced. Someone else, not Kris, had taken out the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.

Kris shook his head to any question about Robin Darcy, but in good spirits collected his newspapers and went down my stairs, slowly for him because of the medics’ warning of dizziness and concussion; and I finally admitted to myself, chiefly as a result of a stabbing indrawn breath, that I’d possibly cracked a rib or two at Luton.

I’d been treated well there, courtesy no doubt of my employment by the Weather Centre, and I’d learned how very lucky we had in fact been, as the single wide runway and the airport itself lay on a hill above the town. The control tower people, aghast, had seen our first heavy bounce throw the Cherokee off its straight course, and we’d been heading across grass towards a steep downwards slope when Kris had opted for his dramatic full stop.

Kris’s Cherokee would be stowed safely in their hangar, they said, and there it would stay until the accident inspectors came to write their report. I would please meanwhile not talk about no dipstick. Silent as mushrooms, I said.

I phoned my grandmother and dispelled a flourishing outbreak of heebie-jeebies. The Stuart feet, I assured her, may have been in the recent wars but were this time safely on the ground. She could however hear the lighthearted relief in my voice and unerringly understood it.

‘You might not always escape,’ she said worriedly. ‘Wear a bullet-proof vest.’

By Monday morning we had yielded the front page to an eloping heiress and there was no denying the fact of my cracked ribs. Maybe two, I thought: not more. And no lung-piercers, the really extremely bad news.

I’d done much the same damage once before by falling down a Welsh mountainside. A visit to a doctor resulted at that time in ‘grin, bear it and take aspirins’ advice: after Luton there seemed nothing to improve on that, except the distraction attained by looking up snowfalls in Europe.

Glenda surprisingly was apparently right. If her dominating George had reported icy temperatures as an excuse for infidelity, he hadn’t been truthful, regardless of faithful.

I made a list of the actual air temperatures and inches of snowfall for all the places and cities I’d been given, and none of them matched. Either Glenda or George, or both, was playing winter games.

I telephoned Belladonna, reckoning to catch her at breakfast after she’d come in from riding morning exercise, and I located her with Loricroft and Glenda, eating cornflakes in the Loricroft kitchen. Racehorse trainers, it seemed to me, led half their days in the kitchen. It was warm there in winter, Bell explained.

Kris had refused sick-leave, she said, and would be forecasting on Radio 4, as scheduled, and he had already told her that for the five weekdays ahead, starting on that day, Monday, I would be doing television forecasts in the evening after the six o’clock and nine o’clock news.

‘Mm,’ I agreed. ‘Could you and Glenda spare me any time tomorrow morning, if I come over?’

‘Is it good news for Glenda? Do you want to talk to her? Will you be bringing Kris?’

I said ‘Maybe. Perhaps. And no.’

‘Hang on,’ Bell said and put her hand over the receiver I guessed, while she asked her boss and his wife for their reaction, because in a minute or two she was saying, ‘Perry? How about Wednesday? George says if you’re here early enough you can see his jumpers going over the schooling fences.’

I gathered I was being offered a medium honour which it could be impolite to refuse: I agreed on eight-thirty Wednesday, though I would rather have gone a day sooner.

Until then... Until then there was first of all Jett van Els, whose third week with my grandmother had concluded that Monday morning. At ten she had changed places with another of my grandmother’s ‘dear girls’, and at one o’clock she met me in a sandwich bar for lunch.

She came dressed not in the nurses’ uniform familiar to me, but in black trousers, a thick white sweater and a boxy scarlet coat with black and gold buttons. I greeted her with frank admiration and the first thing she said was, ‘You’re not well.’

I kissed her anyway.

‘I’m a nurse, remember,’ she said, ‘and I’ve seen pallor in too many faces.’

She made no more fuss about it, however, but hung her coat on a nearby peg and read the possible menu with half her attention.

‘What job do you start next?’ I asked, settling on cheese and chutney in brown bread for myself, but not caring much what I ate.

‘I’m taking a week off, and next Monday I’ll be back with Mrs Mevagissey.’ She spoke calmly as if this programme were usual. Normally, if a nurse returned, it would be after at least a month.

‘Did she agree?’ I queried, my eyebrows rising.

Jett smiled at my surprise. ‘Your grandmother warned me severely not to grow fond of you, as you were inconstancy personified, or words to that effect.’

‘She doesn’t want you to be hurt.’

‘And will I be?’

It wasn’t the sort of exchange I’d ever before embarked on.

I said weakly, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’

‘I’ll negotiate terms of disengagement.’

We ordered food. She chose tuna, which I’d never liked, and I found I hoped her future plans wouldn’t take her far away. Jett van Els, with or without Belgian father, was more likely to leave Perry Stuart in tatters than the other way round.

‘Seriously,’ she said, having healthily despatched the tuna, ‘what’s hurting you?’

‘Onset of broken heart?’

She shook her head, smiling, ‘I saw the papers yesterday, with your grandmother. It’s amazing you and your friend Kris survived at all.’

I said I’d probably cracked a rib or two, which could be a bit frustrating in the active love department, for a couple of days.

‘Think in terms of a week or two,’ Miss van Els instructed. ‘Or a month or two.’ She smiled with composure. ‘The first rule of disengagement is to take your time at the beginning.’

‘How about lunch tomorrow, then?’

‘All right,’ she said.

Although I wouldn’t do my act before the cameras until well after six o’clock, I was always at work in plenty of time before two, when the twice-daily conference on world atmospheric conditions took place.

One had to consider as a whole the jacket of air swirling round the spinning planet and to foresee if possible how far the low pressure systems in hot areas might deepen further still, to give rise to gales.

I had always found it extraordinary that people turned their backs on physics as a subject at school and university, even if public opinion was at last gradually changing. Physics was the study of the hugely powerful invisible forces that ruled the way we lived. Physics was gravity, magnetism, electricity, heat, sound, air pressure, radioactivity, and especially radio, the mysterious forces that clearly existed, whose effects were commonplace, whose powers were unlimited, and which could not be seen. Every day I dealt with them as friends.

No one at work made much comment on Kris’s or my Saturday escapade, as our colleagues seemed to have exhausted their ‘welcome backs’ after Odin. Their matter-of-fact approach suited me fine, though perhaps I would have preferred a more concerned response to enquiries into the fate of a missing dipstick further north. When I telephoned for news, I got nowhere, as it wasn’t my dipstick, I was told. When Kris telephoned, at my prompting, he still got nowhere, as nothing could be discussed unless he made the journey to talk to them in person.

‘Get Luton to ask,’ I suggested, but Luton received only a suggestion that Kris himself should be more closely questioned.

‘What does that mean?’ Kris demanded.

I said, ‘It means they haven’t found a dipstick at their end. It means they think you didn’t screw your dipstick in tight and they are trying to say it was your fault the oil came out.’

Kris scowled, but when I went to Kensington on Tuesday morning to pretend to be engaged on a text book, John Rupert took the leaking oil to be a bona fide attempt to put Kris and myself underground.

‘I fly my own plane,’ John Rupert said. ‘I’ve been a weekend pilot for twenty years, and I wouldn’t like to try to land blind. A year ago, oil on the windscreen killed four people who crashed into Kent cliffs on their way back from France. Their dipstick was found on the ground where they’d topped up their oil before setting off for home. It was in all the papers.’

‘Poor sods,’ I said. ‘I remember it.’

‘No one,’ John Rupert observed with conviction, ‘could have expected you both to be back at work unharmed.’

The door opened quietly for the advent of Ghost. He shook hands with stretched sinews and finished off the single ginger biscuit overlooked by John Rupert himself.

‘News?’ Ghost suggested laconically, quietly crunching. ‘Thoughts?’

‘Apart from attempted murder by oil,’ John Rupert said.

‘Because you both lived,’ Ghost said dryly, ‘no one will consider it an attempt...’ He broke off and asked me straightly, ‘Could it have been by any means an accident?’

‘Only if it was random mischief by a stranger, which is, I believe, what the local investigators think.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘No.’

‘And is that why you’ve come back to us?’

I blinked. ‘I expect so,’ I said.

Ghost smiled: a fearsome facial expression threatening the wicked with decades in limbo.

I said, ‘I don’t know exactly who whisked out the dipstick, but I’ve brought you a list of possibles.’

They read them. ‘All from Newmarket,’ Ghost commented. ‘All except this last one, Robin Darcy.’

‘I don’t think it was him,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘He shook hands with both of us. Separately, that is.’

‘You’re old fashioned,’ Ghost said. ‘Shakespeare was bang up to date. One can smile and smile and be a villain.’

‘I don’t want it to be Darcy,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ Ghost sounded satisfied. ‘Gut feelings... those I believe in.’

John Rupert studied the list. ‘Tell us about these people,’ he said. ‘What about Caspar Harvey? And Belladonna, his daughter?’

I was surprised at how much I’d learned about each of them and it took me a good hour to roam round the perimeter of quivery Oliver Quigley (old and new perceptions) and George Loricroft, a bully who believed himself entitled to dominate his semi-bimbo wife, who was much brighter than her husband realised or allowed for and who half-understood too much but not quite enough, and was therefore a danger to herself, though she didn’t know it.

‘I don’t think the dipstick was Glenda’s doing,’ I explained, drawing breath. ‘I don’t think she wanted Kris and me dead. She wanted us to be alive, to be weather-men, and to check on her suspicions.’

I explained about the snow and ice discrepancies in Loricroft’s actual and professed journeys.

Ghost listened intently. John Rupert said merely, ‘Expand.’

‘Well...’ I collected a few thoughts. ‘When I came to you... sought you out... I knew the names of three of the Traders, and I didn’t tell you them because...’

‘Because,’ Ghost said disapprovingly, as I hesitated, ‘you sentimentally wanted to save them from prosecution as they hadn’t killed you when they had the opportunity. Correct?’

‘I guess so.’

‘And?’

‘And that was fact, but what I can tell you now is inference and supposition.’

‘Glad to have them,’ John Rupert said with mock formality. ‘Fire away.’

‘You may ridicule...’

‘Leave that to us.’

‘The Unified Traders...’ I said slowly. ‘Well, these Unified Traders, it seems to me, are more amateur than professional. That’s to say, they’re dishonourable enough in intent, but not slick or hard enough in performance. For instance, leaving their folder of essential information lying about for so long was plain stupid, so was engaging Kris to collect it. On the surface it seemed a reasonable quid pro quo, as Kris would have done more or less anything in exchange for a chance to fly through a hurricane.’

John Rupert nodded.

I said, ‘Caspar Harvey and Robin Darcy are very long-time colleagues, and apart from Harvey’s barley and Darcy’s turf farm, they are both used to handling things in small packets. Harvey sells birdseed and Darcy sells vacuum-packed exotic mushrooms. Darcy set up a small mushroom operation on Trox Island, but I was told, second-hand, by full-scale mushroom growers, that the Trox operation was too small to succeed. In the end it was used, as I told you before, to frighten away the whole population of the island. But it was their ability to think small that started them off, I reckon, on arranging the introduction of buyers to sellers of tiny amounts of radioactive materials.’

John Rupert said, ‘I suppose if you put enough small packets together you get a haystack.’

‘Or a bomb,’ said Ghost.

‘Or enough of a bomb,’ I said mildly, ‘to raise the bargaining power of that amount. But I don’t think the Traders actually handle the uranium or plutonium themselves. It’s very dangerous stuff. But they do have small-scale know-how.’

I stopped, but both men wanted more.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘and frankly I’m guessing, that Darcy recruited Caspar Harvey as a Trader, and Harvey drew in Oliver Quigley and George Loricroft... and for a while the middlemen operation ran smoothly and immensely profitably with the three Traders across the Atlantic, each of the group of six acting on the old musketeers’ principle of “All for one and one for all”.’

Ghost, his eyes shrewdly narrowed, asked ‘Why did the original Traders need more recruits? Why didn’t Darcy and Harvey keep the proceeds to themselves?’

‘I think...’ I found all my thoughts coming out as speculations. ‘I think Harvey found Loricroft had a gift for sniffing out the truffles. George Loricroft has travelled all over Europe — and especially throughout Germany — telling his wife lies about the local weather to explain why he hadn’t been where he was supposed to have been, and always treating her as an idiot, and in fact it’s possible that all those places he lied about were trading posts. They were nearly all in Germany, and as Loricroft is internationally known as a racehorse trainer, there is nowhere in the world more suitable or less conspicuous for him to trade and exchange information than on racecourses.’

I looked down at my shoes, dodging their undoubted incredulity, but I’d gone too far to withdraw.

‘I told you I could remember only Hippostat as a word in the heading of one of the letters, but I know another. It came to me when I wasn’t concentrating... it just drifted back from my subconscious memory.’

Ghost said impatiently, ‘What is it?’

‘Well...’ I looked up, ‘it’s Rennbahn. It’s Baden-Baden Rennbahn.’

John Rupert smiled vividly. ‘And do you know what Rennbahn means?’

‘Racecourse,’ I said. ‘I’ve looked it up. Baden-Baden Racecourse. It was written in German script in a letter in another language that I didn’t know.’

‘We have German dictionaries downstairs, and every other sort of dictionary you care to mention,’ John Rupert said. ‘Would you remember any more if you... er... browsed?’

I said doubtfully, ‘I don’t know.’

‘We can try.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Ghost said, ‘tell us about the other two Traders in Florida, Robin Darcy’s colleagues.’

‘They’re in the Cayman Islands, not Florida,’ I explained, and described Michael and Amy Ford. ‘And they may be in the game because of idealism or political motives... I simply can’t tell, but they also may be the original Traders. In any case, they are, I’d say, the richest of the whole group.’

‘Why do you think so?’ Ghost wanted to know.

‘I stayed in their house... and Amy’s aeroplane, that we ditched in the hurricane, that plane was a perfect beauty. They said Amy had sold it to Darcy.’

‘But you doubt it?’ John Rupert asked.

‘Well, I do, yes. But that’s only an impression. None of them seemed to be terribly upset by losing it. I don’t know about insurance. None of them mentioned it.’

There was a pause. John Rupert then said, ‘Is that the lot?’ and prepared to rise, and I said with diffidence, ‘One more thing...’

‘Yes?’ He relaxed in his chair, attention unending.

I picked at my fingers. ‘Well... it’s only that the Unified Trading Company doesn’t have a boss. They don’t have a hierarchy.’

‘Are you sure?’ John Rupert enquired doubtfully. ‘Every organisation I’ve ever dealt with has had a hierarchy.’

‘I’m sure,’ I nodded. ‘In an ordinary company, the lower members report upwards, and then receive their instructions from above. But in the Unified Trading Company they each act on their own ideas and report afterwards what they’ve done. They act first and tell the others after. As a result they duplicate some things and omit others entirely, and they get in a muddle.’

Both John Rupert and Ghost were showing more and more doubt.

‘If both of you had been for a long time accustomed to rule,’ I said, ‘which of you would make the decisions?’

They answered quickly and in unison, ‘I would.’

‘Who would?’ I asked. ‘Which of you would give commands?’

‘I would.’ They answered as one again, but more slowly, and then both of them looked thoughtful.

‘The Traders so far identifiable,’ I remarked, ‘have each run their own business, and are accustomed to command. Michael Ford owned and ran a chain of profitable gymnasiums. His wife Amy made a fortune from video rental stores. Robin Darcy farms turf, which in Florida is like growing gold. Caspar Harvey too is a farmer, but also makes trillions out of birdseed. Both George Loricroft and Oliver Quigley are racehorse trainers and both succeed only by controlling their workforce. All of those six people are accustomed to making the decisions. They’re not used to being told what to do. Also they don’t like being told what to do, so they do what they think is best, independently. And because of that, things, overall, go wrong.’

‘It’s an interesting theory,’ Ghost said.

‘For instance,’ I said, ‘Robin Darcy expected Kris to be able to pick up the folder without difficulty because he’d left it in a desk, but someone else, unknown to him, had removed the desk and installed a safe, using Darcy’s own password. Like I said, they get things wrong, and Kris didn’t find the folder at all.’

I was fast running out of energy and felt sore along the protesting ribs. More than ready to leave, I asked, ‘Is there anything else I can do? If not...’

They indecisively shook their heads. ‘Only the dictionaries...’ so I went downstairs with them into a busy world of books. There were indeed dictionaries by the hundred, but after a survey of incomprehensible scripts, with no reliable recognitions, I finally scraped together enough impetus to leave and meet Jett in her scarlet coat for lunch.

‘You’re ill,’ she said over curried egg salads, and I hadn’t the vigour to deny it.

‘Tell the BBC you need sick leave.’

‘It’s only ribs. They’ll be better tomorrow.’

‘Let me drive you to Newmarket, then, in the morning.’

I’d told her I was going to Newmarket to see George Loricroft’s horses school over fences. She’d wanted to come anyway, and although I thought it incautious, I gratefully accepted her offer.

I got through the working day somehow, but when Jett arrived at my front door at six-thirty the next morning she said I wasn’t fit to travel anywhere and should see a doctor.

We had agreed we would go in her own Honda as she felt happier driving it than sitting behind the wheel of my compact runabout. She said she knew a good doctor and I said we were going to Newmarket, and maybe for the last time with Miss van Els, I got my way.

At George Loricroft’s house Bell greeted me with a kiss, switching her gaze past me to see how Jett reacted to the embrace. Waste of time. Jett was cool.

Glenda wrapped her arms lavishly around me so that her mouth ended up by my ear.

‘Don’t tell George...’ it was scarcely more than a whisper. Then more loudly she said, ‘How divine of you to come, luv.’ And George himself, unenthusiastic about me at all times, cheered up considerably when introduced to Jett. A thoroughly sex-conscious bunch of hellos, I thought, and couldn’t eat any breakfast from nausea.

Glenda and Bell rejoiced again about the landing Kris had achieved on Saturday, and George, looking at his watch impatiently, crossly said that in his opinion Kris had been in too much of a hurry to set off from Doncaster before dark and that he’d left the dipstick on the ground and clipped the engine cowling shut without it in place.

‘Easy done,’ he said. ‘Get ready, girls. It’s time to go.’ And he strode out to his horses without looking back.

George, with well-developed brusqueness, had seemed considerably out of tune with his wife, and she from time to time had shot him searing glances of anxiety mixed with ill will. Neither was any longer bothering to pretend devotion to the other, an awkwardness for everyone else.

At a moment well out of her husband’s sight, I gave Glenda her list of the icy venues George had sworn to that were contradictory to the freezing truth, and I watched her cheeks flush with justification and — I thought — with a sort of disappointment and disillusion that she’d been right.

Bell put an arm round Glenda’s drooping shoulders and walked with her into the depths of the house, returning alone to mount a horse out in the stable-yard and lead Jett and me (driving George’s jeep) to the promised jumping practice. I was glad Jett seemed genuinely interested and that Bell, although herself due to ride one hustling breath-stopper over three rattling flights of hurdles, spent time explaining schooling routine in advance to me and the next-best-thing to Florence Nightingale, the Miss van Els, who was that day wearing olive-drab trousers and jacket over the thick white sweater. She and I walked from the jeep to a vantage point near the hurdles, to hear and be part of the noise and commitment.

After the jumping and out of breath from the speed, Bell trotted her mount over to where we stood and dropped down from his back, surprisingly saying to us both with a smile, ‘I’ve not known you long, brother Perry, but I know a good brain when it flashes under my nose, and you and your Jett van Els, you’re both loaded.’

Bell started walking her horse round in a small circle nearby, to cool him, while I tried to keep up with her and talk as well.

‘Like Robin Darcy?’ I suggested.

She took ten seconds of silence to surf her memory, and came up with a straightforward account of bits of her father’s lunch party. ‘I told you not to be fooled by his cuddly shell.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘And I tried to warn Kris that Darcy was way outside his league, but that day Kris wouldn’t have listened to me if I’d been the angel Gabriel.’

Kris had listened to Robin that day and ever since.

‘Kris and Robin talked for ages at Doncaster,’ I said.

Bell nodded. ‘They talked when I went to the loo. Darcy asked Kris to spend another holiday with him and Evelyn, and to take me with him!’

‘A marriage trip?’

‘Sometimes I think we’ll never get to the wedding.’ She looked undecided herself, and then unexpectedly said, ‘Stay here with Jett and hold my horse by his bridle and I’ll go and fetch George’s jeep. Honestly, you look pretty grey.’

I couldn’t understand it, because the cracked ribs in Wales hadn’t caused sickness but only discomfort, but I did accept her offer and stood beside her steaming mount, pleased to be near the great primeval creature under the wide, cold, cloudless skies of Newmarket Heath.

Bell brought the jeep and we exchanged conveyances; she rode the horse and I drove myself and Jett slowly back to George’s yard and felt awful.

In the warm kitchen George and Glenda were standing rigidly opposite each other, glaring as if ready to kill, and the reappearance of others hardly began to melt the cutting edges of hate.

George, in his mid-forties, always emanated heavy forcefulness, but at that moment the handsome set of his shoulders, thick smoothly-brushed dark hair, the thin fingers clenching and stretching with tensile grace, all the stylishness served only to intensify the positive malevolence of his intention.

George’s anger would, I thought, have erupted already into a physical attack on his wife if it weren’t that she herself seemed to wear an impermeable and invisible armour.

Jett and I silently retreated, with Bell on our heels looking worried and trying to say, ‘I’m sorry... I’m so sorry...’

‘Don’t be,’ I said, but I couldn’t reassure her, not with only two brief words.

We walked across George’s parking area and stopped by Jett’s Honda. I looked back at the big Loricroft house and saw only prosperity and peace. Tissue paper over an abyss, I thought.

‘Bell...’ I begged her uneasily, ‘leave Newmarket and move in with Kris in London.’

She was shaking her head before I’d finished speaking.

‘I can’t leave. And what for? Kris doesn’t need me, he said so.’

Neither Bell nor Jett felt any of the urgency making my intestines cramp and my scalp itch. My grandmother, I realised, would have recognised this deep unease as heebie-jeebies, but I didn’t know whether the feelings I was having derived from reason or instinct or simply queasiness.

I said only, but with as much persuasion as I could manage, ‘Bell, I mean it. Leave Newmarket. I have an intuition... you could call it premonition... call it anything, but leave here...’

Jett said, ‘You’re ill.’

‘Maybe... But ill or not, Bell, leave Newmarket now.’

Both she and Jett, puzzled by my vehemence, nevertheless began to waver. I found it impossible to tell her that her father and her employer and Quigley and Robin Darcy were all involved in a conspiracy to supply to many lawless parts of the world and to many a clique and brotherhood, the information needed to acquire tiny quantities of the highest grade fissile material for weapons. Tiny quantities, if enough of them were gathered together, made a threat, an aggregation... a bomb.

All four men, and surely they knew it, were dealing in death.

One or two of them were themselves personally lethal.

Loricroft, the seeker and collector of the stuff of profitable deals, he certainly, with his conviction of his own superiority, with his wife ever nearer on the trail of his transactions, he most of all was closest to detonation.

I thought him dangerous, as likely to cause heartless damage as any of his cold-blooded customers.

I said to Bell, ‘If Glenda wants out, take her with you.’

Bell shook her head.

‘I’ll come back in an hour,’ I said, and asked Jett to drive me in her car through the town.

‘To the hospital?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Sort of,’ I said.