Second Wind

Chapter 12

In some strange way the adulation and respect shining out of Jason Wells’s sloppy face, together with his professionalism and dedication, re-awoke in me the feelings of self-worth that had slept through a wretchedly debilitating illness and had for far too long let a brain used to ten thousand revs a minute waste time looking for one across.

Jason Wells might find that a sloppy exterior was right for him, but it didn’t match my normal on-screen self. It was time, I decided, for the on-screen self to go to work.

My grandmother’s grand tweed cape-coat wasn’t just Edwardian, it was splendid; it had presence. My clean-shaved chin was after all much better smooth. My hair, recombed, fell naturally again into its usual shapely BBC cut. I bought enough in a chemist’s for cleanliness, and a shirt, tie and trousers in an outfitter’s, in order to look pressed. I acquired an overnight bag to contain everything, and some films, a new camera and batteries from Jason Wells.

All I needed after that was to stand up straight, give out my name, explain my needs, and ask. Never mind that I still felt uncomfortably queasy. I’d forgotten, during the past battering weeks, the extent of my clout.

I wish to take a train to Heathrow airport, I said.

‘Certainly, Dr Stuart, this way. We have the Heathrow Express which takes fifteen minutes non-stop to the airport.’

I want to fly to Miami.

‘Certainly, Dr Stuart. First class, of course?’

I need to deposit this cheque with the credit card company in order to be in funds for the whole of my trip.

‘Certainly, Dr Stuart, the credit card company will send a representative to the first-class lounge at once to arrange it. And you’ll need some dollars, of course.’

I would like a shower before boarding.

‘Certainly, Dr Stuart. Our special services department will see to your every need.’

I have to make a phone call to my publishers in Kensington, and I would like to use a private room for a business meeting.

‘No trouble at all, Dr Stuart. Our business centre is in the Executive Club lounge.’

Cosseted in every way I found myself inevitably watching a television set. Equally inevitably, someone had switched on a channel showing the weather in store across the Atlantic.

‘Bad weather ahead in Miami, Dr Stuart,’ I was told, with happy nods. They thought bad weather was naturally the motive for my journey, though only my last call, to the Met Office, had given me even a five-day notice of coming trouble.

Standing in front of Heathrow’s best accurate weather update I heard that a weak cyclonic system might be developing in the Caribbean very late in the season. If it developed, which on past probability was unlikely, it would be designated tropical storm Sheila.

At present the millibar pressure of 1002, looked bound for a fizzle-out, but then so had Odin not so very long ago.

An announcer was explaining how modern methods of storm prediction saved money and lives. Preparedness, he said, couldn’t deflect a storm but it could lessen some of its effects. Knowing in advance was invaluable.

A world-weary businessman standing beside me, shot glass with ice in hand, looked with cynicism at real advances in atmospheric technology, and in boredom said, ‘So what else is new?’

Doppler radar was new, I thought, and research had led to new satellites and computer generated 3-D models... and there were idiots like hurricane hunters who flew into hurricane eyes and all but drowned. All those tremendous efforts had been made so that bored cynical businessmen could keep their gin and tonics dry.

Special Services collected me from there, offering armchairs, things to eat, newspapers with crosswords, London area telephone calls. I punched in my grandmother’s number and, as I’d rather hoped, found my call answered by Jett, who’d started her week there and sounded relieved to hear my voice.

‘Where did you get to last night?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Kris says he has been looking for you everywhere. I was talking to him just ten minutes ago. He thought you might be here.’

‘And I don’t suppose,’ I said regretfully, ‘that he was at all pleased with me.’

‘I wouldn’t have told you, but no, he was very very angry. So where are you, anyway?’

I thought: if I can swim through a hurricane I can find my way through a labyrinth. I’d begun to understand where I was going, and I felt a shade reckless and light-headed.

‘Wait for me,’ I said, smiling, ‘forsaking all others...’

‘You’ll be lucky!’

‘Keep thee only unto me.’ Why in hell, I thought, did I ever say that?

‘For as long as we live? Do you know what you’re quoting from?’

I answered her this time with conviction, ‘For better or worse.’

‘Are you sure?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Or it this just a joke?’

‘No one jokes about marriage on a Monday morning. No or yes?’

‘Then... yes.’

‘Good! Tell my gran that this time it’s for keeps... and... er... if I solve that crossword I’ll be back later this week.’

‘Perry! Is that all? It’s not enough.’

‘Take care of yourselves, both of you,’ I said, and put down the receiver as she said protestingly, ‘Perry!’ not wanting me to go.

Did I mean it, I thought wildly? Did one really coolly suggest marriage on a Monday morning? Was it a stupid impulse or a forever sort of thing? Impulses like that, I answered myself, that seemed to come from nowhere, they weren’t really impulses at all, they were decisions already made but waiting for an opportunity to be spoken aloud.

While I day-dreamed about Jett John Rupert and Ghost travelled to Heathrow, found their way to the business centre, and both, from their expressions, were unprepared for the grandeur of my grandmother’s cape-coat and the tidiness, strength of purpose and revived power of Stuart, P.

I smiled. How did they think I had ever climbed the meteorology ladder? And, thinking about ladders, were my publisher and my ghost writer on rungs going up or going down?

On the telephone I had promised them an interesting package if they would drive to Terminal 4, and when they arrived I gave them the German orders and invoices, and also fresh copies I’d just made on the machines all around us.

I said, ‘These copies are enough to madden Oliver Quigley and Caspar Harvey, the Traders who are searching for them day and night. The originals were the collected works of George Loricroft, Trader deceased. He collected these orders from customers who met him for the purpose on racecourses, mainly in Germany. If he hadn’t died he would have distributed these orders, one by one, to those who could either fill the order themselves, or pass it to someone who could. I suppose the contents of these folders are always fluid — I should think the number of buy or sell items is sometimes small, but this time, by good luck, there are fourteen.’ I briefly paused. ‘Belladonna Harvey’, I said, ‘doesn’t know what’s going on. Nor does my fellow meteorologist, Kris Ironside. If you have any influence at all with whoever you call in to unzip the Traders, see if you can keep those two out of trouble.’

My ‘authorities’ said they would try: but even if they succeeded, I thought, I’d lost two friends for ever.

I looked at John Rupert and at Ghost with respect and growing affection. Few enough people gave their time as they did, living double lives without recognition. Ghost, as if feeling for me something of the same emotion at the same time, said he hoped we really would, one day, get to writing Storm.

‘You’d better, after that huge advance,’ John Rupert said with irony.

Ghost, with a sudden urge, broke all secret-operative rules. ‘Perry,’ he said, his face full of private liking and professional indiscretion. ‘Feel better. Your friends aren’t likely to be prosecuted. Nor are Harvey or Quigley, unless they do something foolish. Our superior officer has decided to leave those two in place to start again. What we actually stalk the Traders for is what you’ve just given us, the written lists of the materials they are currently expecting their clients to buy and sell. If we manage to acquire a list — like this one, pure gold — we send each order, each component of the package, to our counterparts in Germany or wherever the activity is taking place, and they prosecute or close down or use whatever force they like. We, John Rupert and I and some others, we see our job as identifying Traders (or whatever they happen to be calling themselves this year, this month, whatever) and then from that identification we set out to obtain or copy their requisitions, preferably without them knowing. Very often, like we’ll do this time, we leave the Traders in place and active, so we can steal from them again. Those German letters you’ve found for us will put all those people who wrote them, who aimed to buy or sell — it will put all those people in court or out of business, some in a violent way, and it will collect and put into safe storage the materials they were offering for sale. Acquiring papers like those you have just given us, that is our job. That’s how we choke off acts of terrorism, even before the terrorists get as far as their own detailed planning stage. You can’t make a nuclear bomb if you can’t get the hot stuff.’

He stopped, but not from regret at what he’d said: more in satisfaction.

John Rupert, the one who might more likely have disapproved of this frank disclosure and have tried to stop Ghost’s abandonment of ‘need to know’ — even John Rupert was nodding in approval.

‘You’ll see now that we know more about uranium and so on than we admit to,’ he confessed. ‘We hide behind ignorance to be safe. We wanted to enlighten you on Friday in the hospital. Our superior officer won’t be pleased that we have.’

‘Don’t tell him,’ I said.

I shook their hands, one by one, with commitment and warmth.

John Rupert said, ‘What we’re always looking for are red hot letters like those in the folder you first came to tell us about. All those foreign scripts!’

‘As far as we know they’ve never resurfaced,’ Ghost said. ‘They are so sensitive they must be in someone’s safe keeping. Funny if they’re back where they started.’

John Rupert thought the idea frivolous. Ignoring it, he said, ‘There are anti-terrorist governments in Russia and in Germany and of course in many other countries. They welcome what we can send them. We never know exactly when we prevent sabotage or blackmail, but we receive intense expressions of thanks.’

‘But,’ Ghost warned, ‘do you remember we told you about the man in the Everglades...’

‘The one who was shot for seeing too much?’

‘That’s right,’ Ghost said. ‘We knew him. So take care, Perry. The Traders are sometimes not lethal, as you know, but the basic bomb merchants, the ones who physically write their orders for enriched uranium, they almost always are’

Before I could make any promise, the Special Services man bustled up kindly to fetch me, and he set off at a fast walk, carrying my hold-all and telling me the aeroplane had boarded all except for me.

I waved briefly to John Rupert and my ghost. They’d told me for certain what I’d mostly surmised. The Traders were middlemen, and John Rupert, Ghost and others like them, were middlemen catchers.

I walked into the humming engine noise of the almost full aeroplane to be greeted by a chorus of knowledgeable eyes staring and elbows going nudge-nudge, and I wondered how many million years made up the half-life of a Trader-hunter.

The Special Services Department had outdone itself by arranging a rental car to be ready for me to collect at Miami, and the one I picked up had the added unexpected blessing of a talking map display. ‘Turn left at the next intersection for the Federal Highway to Sand Dollar Beach...’

I twiddled knobs and found a radio weather channel busy with things to come.

An extremely rapid voice rattled off, ‘There has been a weakening trend and a change in the direction of the upper winds over the western end of the Caribbean, with a consequent strengthening of the cyclonic system further east, which we have just heard has now officially been designated tropical storm Sheila, with sustained winds of over 50 miles an hour. Co-ordinates of Sheila, as of four o’clock Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, were 16 degrees North, 78 West, moving north-west at approximately 10 miles an hour. Now we’ll bring you your local forecast, after these messages...’

The voice sounded as if he were uninterested, except for trying to complete the weather bulletin as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the commercials, always (as the source of the channel’s income) more important than the formation of gale-force winds.

The co-ordinates given put Sheila about four hundred miles south-east of Grand Cayman island; not enough of a threat yet for Michael and Amy Ford to nail onto their huge house panels of sea-repelling plywood.

I switched channels.

‘Continue down Federal Highway, straight ahead over the next intersection, take the left fork ahead...’

The car took me to the street and a memory for numbers took me to Robin Darcy’s spreading house.

It was dark by then. I rang the bell with a feeling of stepping off a cliff.

It wasn’t Robin himself who opened the heavy medieval-type front door. Evelyn, slender in floor-length black and iridescent with long ropes of bugle beads and pearls, had been expecting someone else. Her welcoming smile faded to a shrewd inspection of me from toes to eyebrows while she acknowledged unwillingly to herself that she knew my name, that I’d been a guest in her house three weeks earlier, and that she now regretted it. ‘Perry Stuart,’ she said accusingly, ‘why are you here? Surely Robin can’t be expecting you.’

Robin himself appeared, framed in a double doorway across the marble floored hall. There was an essential stillness in him, none of the flutter of host towards valued guest.

‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘Perry Stuart. Yes, I was expecting you. Maybe not tonight, maybe tomorrow, but yes, expecting you. How did you get here?’

‘British Airways and Hertz,’ I said. ‘And you?’

He smiled faintly. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘American Airlines and wife.’

I walked forward into the centre of the entrance hall and stopped under the lit chandelier. Ahead, as I remembered, lay the sitting-room with, beyond that, the terrace where we’d sat in the evening, and below that, the pool. Standing where I was, I had the bedroom I’d slept in on my right. Robin and Evelyn inhabited unmapped regions to my left, along with kitchens by the square mile and, in its furthest reaches, the big room which had been allotted to Kris.

‘Well?’ Darcy asked.

Behind me, unmistakably, Evelyn cocked a handgun.

‘Don’t shoot him.’ Darcy said it without heat. ‘It would be unwise.’

Evelyn protested, ‘But isn’t he the one — ?’

‘He’s the one,’ Robin Darcy agreed, ‘but he’s not much use to us dead.’

I was wearing the new white shirt and dark grey trousers, but not the Edwardian great-coat, and in general looked as I had at Caspar Harvey’s lunch.

Robin too, conventional, unimpressive, chubbily round, Robin with tepid eyes behind the black owl frames — he too looked as if his day to day business occupation, his propagation of sods, made up the total pattern of his life.

I stood quietly under the chandelier thinking I would have miscalculated disastrously if his curiosity wasn’t strong enough to keep me alive. After a tense little pause he walked round to his wife, and although I couldn’t stifle an involuntary swallow altogether, I managed not to move or speak.

‘Hmph,’ he said. ‘Cold under fire.’ He walked round in front of me, holding the gun loosely and removing the bullets. ‘What do you think of,’ he asked with evident interest, ‘when you’re not sure the next instant won’t be your last? I’ve seen you twice stand motionless like that.’

‘Petrifaction,’ I said. ‘Fear.’

He twitched his mouth and shook his head. ‘Not in my book. Want a drink?’

Evelyn made a no-no gesture, but Robin turned and walked back into the sitting-room where a champagne bottle stood open alongside four crystal glasses.

‘As you ran away from me last night in London,’ he said to me as I followed him, ‘or to put it more accurately, early this morning, I am to conclude, am I not, that you have come to apologise and return what Kris wanted to give me?’

I tasted the champagne; dry but with too many bubbles. I set the narrow flute down. ‘I don’t think you should conclude anything like that,’ I said peacefully.

‘Get rid of him,’ Evelyn urged, looking at her watch.

Robin also looked at his watch and then, nodding to Evelyn, said ‘Of course, you’re right, my dear,’ and to me, ‘Can you come back tomorrow? Same sort of time?’

It sounded a most normal invitation. Which of us, I wondered, looked the more trusting and meant candour least.

Evelyn ushered me fast to the front door. Robin, when I glanced back, was watching my departure with expressionless eyes. Whatever he wanted to say to me could not be said in front of his wife.

Outside in the warm night, with the door closed firmly behind my back, I retrieved the rental car, drove it to the nearest area of busy shops, parked it outside a four-screen cinema and walked the short distance back to the Darcys’ house.

Bright lights now shone on the driveway and on the heavy door. I waited concealed in rampant greenery across the road as near as possible to the house, knowing the expected guests could be strangers but from Evelyn’s urgency, hoping not.

Evelyn the Pearls had done a splendid semaphore act with her watch, and also Robin with his four waiting champagne glasses, but they had flagged only half of the story. When the guests arrived both Evelyn and Robin appeared in the brightly lit doorway to greet them.

The guests, unmistakable anywhere, were Michael Ford and Amy. Evelyn and Robin welcomed them effusively, and the car’s driver, in a black baseball cap, slipped quietly out of the long vehicle and into hiding not far from where I crouched, stepping out later from deep cover to move in and out of the striped shadows of palm fronds, slowly making a bodyguard’s circuit to keep his employers safe.

The only real difference between him and me was that he carried a gun and I didn’t.

The bodyguard-chauffeur finished one of his mostly invisible circuits and stopped in the roadway by Darcy’s gates, directly opposite my own patch of concealment. In the deep starlight he leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette, and there he stayed on watch, without alarm of any sort, the sweet smell of burning tobacco drifting across as the evening’s sole entertainment.

He and I both waited two and a half hours for Michael and Amy to reappear. The chauffeur came to life with ease to open rear car doors and drive away, and I, still pinned with stiff muscles, was about to cross the road to where Robin stood in his doorway looking at his guests’ departing car when Evelyn, appearing behind him, put her hand persuasively on his shoulder and drew him into the house.

The inside lights went off progressively until they shone only in their owners’ bedroom, and I saw no likelihood that night of getting Robin on his own. Evelyn was a complication and a nuisance.

Thanks to her I’d wasted a long time learning the leaf-shapes of enveloping Florida bushes, and thought them a poor exchange for the rear end registration number of the visitors’ car, which showed its home state unsurprisingly to be Florida. To Michael and Amy, I learned later, the Cayman Island house was a weekend cottage. An equally grand house north of Miami was home.

My rental car, collected from outside the cinema, had been too far away for me to be able to follow Michael and Amy if I’d tried, but it was Robin alone I wanted. I hadn’t known Michael and Amy wouldn’t be in their house on Grand Cayman, and they weren’t anywhere in sight when I returned to the middling motel one road back from the beach that had seemed to me a faceless place to stay.

In the frugal but reasonably comfortable room I wrote a long letter to Jett, telling her on paper all the loving things I found it difficult to say to her face. My dear grandmother might warn her that I’d loved and left three times in the past, but Jett was different... and how did one define ‘different’? except that anyone who could love Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X was as different as Pu-239.

The television in my room predicted a short life for tropical storm Sheila, now located over open water at 16 degrees North, 79 degrees West and still travelling north-west at 10 miles an hour. A map was screened briefly, with a storm-warning issued for a place called Rosalind Bank.

By morning it was raining on poor old Rosalind Bank, but tropical storm Sheila, although now circling with 60 mph winds, showed few serious signs of organisation and was travelling north.

Tropical storm Sheila, I mentally calculated, was about six hundred miles due south of Sand Dollar Beach. If she went on travelling due north (very unlikely), she would hit the Darcy house in roughly sixty hours, or nine o’clock in the evening on Thursday, two and a half days ahead.

Tropical storm Sheila perversely then wriggled round to north-west again and, speeding up, earned Hurricane status, Category 1.

Apart from swimming in the still blue and tranquil Atlantic I spent a good part of the day filling hours as profitably as possible by buying and making revealing lists from a detailed Florida racing form newspaper. I sent a copy of my labours to Kensington by courier and then spent time repacking both clothes and mind, and used some of the hours left talking to Will on the phone at the Miami Hurricane Center (Sheila strengthening nicely) and to Unwin to thank him for the camera.

Unwin had an answering service that said he was out, but at my third try he lifted his receiver and after surprised hellos said he was real pleased to hear I’d got pictures out of that little mud-bucket.

I asked him about Amy’s day on Trox and learned some new four-letter profanities. Never again, Unwin said, would he fly that woman anywhere. And yes, he agreed, she had had the safe open and shut again, and wouldn’t let anyone else near it.

He listened carefully to what I suggested, and after he’d thoroughly sucked his long yellow teeth and considered things he said there would be no difficulty, and he would call me back.

It was much later than I’d intended to be still at the motel when he at length came on the line, but the delay had been worth it. Tomorrow was all fixed. He’d completed the paperwork.

‘Sleep well, Perry,’ he said.

I drove and walked to the same place as the evening before, and at Robin Darcy’s house pressed the bell.

This time, as if he’d been waiting there, Robin Darcy opened the heavy door himself immediately, and stood there unmoving, the light from inside shining on his back making his whole body immobile in silhouette.

He looked, not exactly deadly, but most definitely a threat.

From his point of view he saw, lit from in front against darkness beyond, a man taller than he, and younger and thinner and certainly with better eyesight, but one with only a fraction of the knowledge and experience he needed.

Darcy didn’t ask me in; He said, ‘Whesre are George Loricroft’s letters?’

I replied flatly, ‘Germany.’

‘For whose benefit?’

‘If you don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ll go home.’

A triumphant voice of West Berkshire origin grated suddenly and loudly behind me, ‘You’re going nowhere, mate. And this bit of hardware jamming into your kidneys, this is no toy, it makes holes in silly boys.’

I said lightly to Robin Darcy, ‘Do you have an endless supply of these things?’ and I saw the flash behind the glasses that perhaps meant a warning. In any case he turned on his heel, jerked his head at me to follow, and walked silently in felt slippers across the marble and into the distant sitting-room.

I didn’t need to be told that it was Michael Ford’s shoes squeaking behind me, nor that it was Amy’s sandals tip-tapping away beside him in an echo of Glenda Loricroft’s high-heeled boots.

‘Stop there and turn round,’ Michael ordered, and the brief view I had of anxiety on Darcy’s face, as I did what I was told, reminded me unsettlingly of alligators.

Michael wore khaki-coloured knee-length shorts with a white short-sleeved top that purposefully revealed his weight-trained biceps. The slight bow to his legs gave, as before, the impression that his muscular shoulders were too heavy for his knees, and his thick neck left no doubt that, in general, opposing his strength was futile.

Amy, her small-boned pared-down little face smiling with satisfaction, clearly thought me a total fool to have walked into such a simple ambush. She too, in fawn trousers and similar white shirt to Michael’s, carried also a lookalike gun.

Ignoring the gun as if it were invisible I said to her with gushing pleasure, ‘Hello, Amy, how lovely to see you! It seems so long since I stayed with you the night I was rescued from Trox Island.’

I meant what I said as simply a way towards sheathing the swords, so to speak, but Amy frowned and snapped back very sharply, ‘You were never,’ she said, ‘on Trox Island.’ Into my obvious amazement, she said, ‘Trox Island is mine, and no one has any claim to anything on it since Hurricane Odin. I repeat, you were NEVER there. You must have been saved from some other island. You have got them mixed up.’

Michael nodded in agreement with watchful eyes, and said, ‘Everything on Trox Island is Amy’s. If you have never been there, which of course you have not, you cannot claim it or anything on it.’

‘Kris...’ I began.

‘Your friend Kris agrees he never went there either.’

My friend Unwin might tell it differently, I thought, and put Trox for the while on hold. The immediate present needed more like an intensive care unit, emergency room treatment. I still wanted to get Darcy alone.

Michael, Amy and Robin Darcy, I thought in clarification: three were active Traders, active middlemen. Then there were three more, at least, in their group. There was Evelyn, and the one who had done bodyguard duty the evening before, patient and loyal and carrying a gun. A sixth was perhaps the pilot who had flown the Downsouth rental aircraft that I had ridden in blindfold.

All of them at times had borne arms, but I judged Evelyn in her jewels and grooming and forceful opinions to be most trigger happy. She, of them all, I feared most at my back.

I said to Michael, turning in the sitting-room to face him, ‘Why the artillery? What’s the point?’

‘Letters in German.’

I said, ‘What letters?’

Even Robin Darcy didn’t know exactly, I saw. If Kris hadn’t told him about his joke on Oliver Quigley, the others probably wouldn’t have known the German letters existed.

Probably... but nothing was certain in their mixed-up world.

Michael said, ‘Who did you sell those letters to?’

Shit, I thought. I said again, ‘What letters?’

Darcy said to me, ‘Tell him for your own good.’

I thought only that the conversation, if one could call it that, was on many levels unsatisfactory. They wanted one thing, and I another. My turn. Plunge in.

I said to Amy, ‘How did your horse run at Calder races on Saturday?’

I might as well have thrown a bomb myself. Shock waves visibly ran down Amy’s shooting arm until the round black hole at the end of the barrel pointed to the floor instead of my navel. Her intense reaction proved satisfactorily to me that she too used racecourses as trading posts. The long list that I had sent to Kensington had been of dates and places where, as an owner, Amy had cover. The lists had been, in my mind, one of the possibilities awaiting proof. After this, I thought, John Rupert and Ghost might know where to look.

Robin Darcy stiffened.

Michael Ford flexed his awesome muscles.

Evelyn walked in with the uniformed chauffeur-bodyguard-general purpose help. No one introduced him, though the others called him Arnold. He no longer wore the baseball cap or showed any sign of being a servant, and I wouldn’t have recognised him if I hadn’t watched him smoking a whole packet of cigarettes for nearing two hours.

Arnold, in his black shirt, wore his pistol bolstered under his left arm with straps like braces to hold its weight.

Brought up from childhood in a no hand-guns culture, I’d never fired a shot, and had never before regretted it, but in the Darcy house I felt naked. To go bare-handed into a gunfight promised a short cut to the hearse.

Evelyn carried, of course, her weapon of yesterday, presumably now refilled with bullets. It would be pointless to ask her to lower the rising temperature of threat in the room when she was more likely with her loud menacing voice to stoke things up.

Only Robin Darcy, at the moment unarmed, made anxious attempts at common sense.

Michael Ford’s opening attitude of belligerence had increased as if self-generating. He bunched his muscles repeatedly until it seemed it was solely for destruction’s sake that he had developed them. Those descriptive words ‘spoiling for a fight’ flickered across my own pacific mind and I sought automatically for body language that would defuse him.

The Perry Stuart of his grandmother’s cape-coat, however, thought cringing to be not much of an option. Whatever Michael read of involuntary defiance in my face, it only enraged him more.

Amy, who seemed to read her husband as clearly as the Racing Post, quite obviously put her money on the champ, not just to win but to deter any thought I might have had of taking him on again afterwards. She was smiling. She likes to see him fight, I thought. She’s aroused by it. She would have howled for blood in the Coliseum.

‘Go on, Michael,’ she urged him, ‘make him tell you what he really did with those German orders. You can’t let him get away with it. Chop him up, Michael.’

None of them bar Robin Darcy showed any wish, or indeed any ability to discuss anything, including the German letters, except at the point of a waving firearm. They violently invented gruesome threats (but not about alligators) until, encouraged and wound up by noise and shouting from the others, Michael’s core of basic lawlessness let go like an avalanche, at first beginning in a slow slide and then pouring itself out at an increasing speed until its momentum couldn’t be stopped.

In Michael Ford terms, an avalanche meant a full heavy attack with bunched fists and with lifting his victim clean off the floor and throwing him against sharp-edged furniture to the accompaniment of cheering from his wife.

Evelyn and Arnold applauded.

Only my host was silent.

My efforts at lessening Michael’s onslaught by punching where I could, at dodging and at kicking or crashing his head on the wall weren’t enough. I couldn’t ever at the best of times have beaten him at his own professional skill.

He took his time. He was deliberate. He made every contact count.

At one point when I’d escaped from him across the room, and he was pausing to take breath, I rolled on Evelyn’s best rug and kicked Darcy’s feet from under him. I pulled his head down by the hair, his ear to my mouth, and I said clearly but intensely, and with no little desperation, ‘Open the terrace door and go to bed.’

I saw his eye-widening astonishment before Michael came roaring back from his breather, and with increasing mindless urging from his cohorts set about proving again the pulping potential of his muscles and it seemed that he himself was unleashing his maximum power simply because he had so few opportunities for it in real life.

Exhausted defeat was already a close certainty, and I was on my knees, both in fact and metaphorically, when Darcy reached the heavy sliding glass doors to the terrace. I couldn’t by then have pulled even one of those open myself at any speed, but when I saw Robin Darcy yank a huge glass panel aside against friction and heard the grate of the door’s gliders, when I heard the waves down below on the shore and smelled the salt air, when a way out of being kicked to extinction lay there for the taking, then from somewhere I scraped up every vestige of resilience uneaten by myco-bugs, and I rolled under Michael’s hammering foot and crawled a yard like an infant and thrust every enfeebled sinew into panic action... and I was out through the glass door and halfway across the terrace before they began with shouts to follow.

I stumbled as if inebriated down the stone staircase from terrace to pool, and untidily fell rather than dived into the water, horrified by the weakness that made a futility of my efforts to swim at even half of my normal speed in my own natural element.

If I’d hoped the one-sided fight would end at that point, I was wrong. Michael Ford’s appetite merely changed direction. He decided against following me fully clothed into the water but instead snatched his gun back from Amy and shot at me, the bullets splashing with appalling heat a great deal too close.

The prospect of a dead well-known meteorologist in a private pool in Florida, a body moreover plugged with bullets from a registered gun, still seemed not to deter Michael, nor get it through the thick skulls of Michael’s pack that his success would be their time in jail.

I no longer tried swimming in fast circles to avoid straight lines from his barrel. I could no longer work out lines of refraction. I simply clung in wretched feebleness to the bar round the inside of the top of the pool and I shrank into the too-small shadow of the tiled overhang while Michael whooped with undiminished bloodlust and, having no success from where he stood, galloped round the pool to get at me from the other side.

The water slowed the bullets’ speed, but not enough. Refraction as a really useful shield in water worked better the deeper the target, as the bent rays of light made the target appear where it was not. If one shot at the apparent victim, one would miss the real one. Deep water... I gulped air and swam downwards, and the bullets missed, but Odin hadn’t taxed my lungs more.

It seemed ages, this time, before the floodlights poured onto the terrace and pool, until the swarm of navy-blue uniforms erupted from the bushes with sirens and loudhailers and shouts and meaningful guns. It seemed familiar that I should be ordered at rough gun-point to get out of the water and to kneel and be pressed down with a heavy hand at my neck, and be screamed at in gibberish in my ear and have handcuffs clicked onto my wrists behind my back.

The police weren’t the same ones as those that had come before. These were if anything more afraid and in consequence more bullying. As I’d virtually summoned them to save my life, I couldn’t complain.

Across the pool, Michael, in the same ignominious kneeling position, was talking his way out. ‘A bit of fun, officer, merely a game,’ and claiming friendship with the police captain and with the commissioner further up the scale.

Arnold, along with Evelyn and Amy, could none of them understand why they should be treated this way. It was outrageous. The police would be demoted, every one.

‘What’s your take-home pay?’ Michael was asking. ‘I could double it.’

Into this over-dramatic scene ambled Robin Darcy, yawning, clad in a silk dressing-gown, seeking out the highest blue rank and apologising that his guests should have set off all the intruder alarms. ‘Very sorry, Lieutenant. The alarm sets itself on a timer to summon you automatically.’ Darcy promised the false alarm wouldn’t happen again. He was afraid his guests had been playing boisterous party games. It was his fault entirely for having forgotten to switch off the system. He would of course be pleased to contribute as usual to the Police Ball Fund.

Robin Darcy, with small anxious-looking steps, then accompanied the lieutenant around, followed by a disappointed blue uniform wielding an undo-handcuffs key. They came with liberation via a spitting-mad Amy, a loudly furious Evelyn (in my own house!) and a growling deep bass from Arnold.

Michael, though violently threatening unspecified revenge on everyone, was unlocked also, to my extreme dismay.

‘We might have booked all your guests for aggressive behaviour,’ the top rank said, slotting away his notebook and pen, ‘if it weren’t for Sheila.’

Darcy reminded him that I still knelt there patiently, though in fact at the time the patience was at least half too much tiredness to do anything else.

‘Who is Sheila?’ Darcy asked.

The blue uniform raised his eyebrows. ‘Hurricane,’ he said succinctly. ‘We don’t want our cells filled with playboys.’

His assistant unlocked my wrists, but Michael had more or less pulverised my ability to stand. The lieutenant, seeing it, warned that hurricane or no hurricane Mr Ford would find himself behind bars if there was any more trouble.

The policemen, job done, put up their guns and departed, and Evelyn, in bossy hostess mode, shepherded her guests, even including Michael, back into the house. She gave me merely a furious glance and left me outside.

I sat in one of the pool chairs and gazed at the peaceful sky.

I supposed I could put up with the discomfort that washed in waves through my protesting body; I could put up with it better if anything had been achieved, but it was too soon to say.

Somewhere distant in the house a telephone rang and was answered. The security firm, I remembered, checked that all was well in the household, after a police raid ending without arrest.

It was thanks to Sheila that there had been no arrest.

Robin Darcy, alone, came down from the terrace and took the chair beside me.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and he nodded.

He sat for a while without speaking, watching me as if I were some kind of beetle. All he could see, I imagined, was the stiff soreness that made movement a trial, the legacy of Michael’s ferocious fists and feet.

I asked if Michael were still around, and Darcy said no; because of the police warning Michael had gone tail down to the house he and Amy owned north of Miami.

Like a fed lion, I thought. Sated.

‘He can be brutal when he gets going,’ Darcy said.

‘Yes.’

Minutes passed.

I said, ‘Will you fly with me tomorrow to Trox Island?’

He stood up abruptly, as if I’d drawn a knife on him, and jerkily walked a circuit round the pool. Returning, he sat as before and asked, to my surprise, ‘How do you see me?’

I smiled involuntarily. ‘When I went to Caspar Harvey’s lunch that Sunday,’ I said, ‘Bell Harvey told me you’d been born clever, and I wasn’t to be fooled by your cosy appearance.’

‘Bella! I didn’t think of her as so perceptive.’ He sounded put out by it.

‘I listened to her,’ I said, ‘but on that day I didn’t imagine I needed to pay much attention to what she said.’

‘And on the whole, I thought you were hardly bright enough for your job.’

He sounded suddenly depressed, saddened beyond expectation, as if he’d lost a major game. He had believed in himself too much, I thought.

‘I listened to Bell,’ I said, ‘and during our stay with you and with Michael and Amy, and after our disaster with Odin, following which I learned about the Unified Trading Company, I saw that you were the one who knew how to achieve things, and because I liked you, I regretted very much that you dealt in deadly metals.’

He said, ‘And do you now think I don’t deal in those metals?’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’m certain you do.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

I said, ‘Your purpose is inside out.’

‘Perry...’ He was restless. ‘You talk in riddles.’

‘Yes, so do you. You sent me a message to find my way through a labyrinth, and... well... I have.’

Robin Darcy looked stunned.

I said, ‘You are John Rupert’s superior officer.’

I waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t. He looked pale. Breathless. Horrified.

‘John Rupert and Ghost consult you,’ I said, ‘and you tell them what to do. They are part of a hierarchy of which you are the top.’

Robin Darcy stared, blinked, took off his owl frames, polished them needlessly, replaced them, cleared his throat and asked how I came to such a conclusion.

I merely said that that morning I’d understood the workings of instinct and impulse, ‘And it simply crept into my mind,’ I said, ‘that if I trusted my instinct in liking you, then you weren’t evil, and if you weren’t evil you weren’t selling death. You were more likely defeating those that did. If you see things that way round it means that when you gather together a whole lot of destructive transfers, you prevent the worst ones from going through, and sometimes you manage to lose others, but you yourself remain unsuspected by your fellow Traders. You lead a very dangerous double life. Michael would probably kill you if he found out. So you needed me — or someone like me — to be your eyes, without me knowing it. Everything I told John Rupert and Ghost went straight to you.’ I smiled ruefully. ‘We’d have done better if we’d talked face to face.’

Robin was shocked. ‘I couldn’t have done that.’

I guessed, ‘It was outside “need to know”?’

He heard my irony, but he’d long trodden a double path where ‘need to know’ divided life from death.

‘So... will you come to Trox?’ I asked again.

‘What about Sheila?’

‘I’m afraid she may be along for the ride.’

‘Who’s going with you?’ he asked.

‘You, me and the pilot.’

‘What pilot? Not Kris?’

‘Not Kris,’ I agreed.

He sat in another long silence, then he said, ‘You’re not fit to go anywhere. Why are we going?’

‘Hope,’ was all I said, but he turned up the next morning at the General Aviation aircraft park at Miami Airport, early, as arranged.

I introduced him to Unwin and reunited him with the aeroplane, which was the same one, chartered from Downsouth, that he had flown in to Trox before.

Unwin gave me a broad grin and patted Robin Darcy on the back. Amused at the mixed Darcy expression at this piece of presumption, I checked again with our pilot how our trip looked for weather as I stowed my hold-all in the cabin.

‘The lady Sheila,’ he said, ‘has overnight picked up her skirts and hiked north-east. She’s Category 2, and building, and if I lived on Grand Cayman island, I’d be hiring me this morning to go and fly me out.’

Long years a professional, Unwin moved economically around the aeroplane and forgot nothing. I’d thought Kris a good pilot, but Unwin flew like silk. In his hands Trox Island appeared punctually in its co-ordinates and the solidified grass strip accepted the rented turbo-prop twin without lurch or slither. When he had braked to a standstill near the ruined church, Unwin climbed down alone and walked off by himself towards the remains of the village.

It seemed strange for me to be back on that land and stranger still to have Robin Darcy beside me.

As we sat in the seats behind the pilot’s, I said to Robin, ‘You heard Amy say the island’s hers?’

He nodded. ‘She maintains it’s hers as no one else had set foot on it for months. Some sort of ancient law, I believe.’

‘She said I’d never been here.’

‘Yes,’ Robin said, explaining, ‘she wants her claim unopposed.’

‘I suppose you know,’ I said to Darcy, ‘she stands to make a million or so from pasteurisation techniques if she can keep that herd of cattle isolated. You must actually know that, as you helped her chase off the whole population with your radioactive mushrooms. You came back and tested that herd again in radiation protection suits the day you took me blindfolded to Cayman. The herd isn’t radioactive and will be worth several fortunes... maybe.’

‘How do you mean... maybe?’

I said, resigned, ‘I drank the milk of those cows, and it gave me a unique illness now called Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X.’

He said with understanding, ‘So that’s why you were in that hospital! But you’ve obviously thrown it off. That won’t prove that you were on the island.’

‘The antibodies will.’

He said, ‘Oh,’ and then ‘Oh,’ again. ‘And culture dishes by the hundred, I suppose.’

‘Those too.’

‘So you can prove you were on the island.’

I said, ‘Not only that. Amy won’t like the illness you can get if there is a glitch in pasteurisation. It’s a fierce disease, acute at first and lingering after. It seems I still have weeks of treatment ahead before I’m cured.’

I didn’t care much to think about it, and to change the subject I said to Robin, ‘What became of the original folder full of letters in strange foreign scripts?’

‘The one you saw here, that you managed to get out of the safe?’

‘That one,’ I agreed.

‘I was astounded when John Rupert reported you’d seen it.’

‘But you came back here for it,’ I said. ‘And you took it away the day you shipped me blindfolded to Cayman — and thank you for that.’

He smiled. ‘It didn’t fool you, though.’

‘Just saved me from a watery grave.’

‘Michael was all for dumping you,’ Robin nodded, and went on with gloom, ‘and he was also keen to get on with making profits from the orders in the folder, as there had already been too many delays, so he took it when I wasn’t looking.’

Robin had had trouble with the Traders insisting on doing their own thing. He said, ‘Only last night Michael told me he wasn’t very good with all those different scripts so he had given the folder to Amy to put it back in the safe here on Trox Island with all her cow stuff while he worked out what to do, and as far as I know it’s still there. That must be one of the reasons why Michael will fight anyone anywhere, because he’s made a fool of himself.’

‘Do you want that folder?’ I asked.

‘Of course. But the safe won’t open.’

‘Who says?’ I asked.

‘Amy says it won’t open so no one can take her cattle records.’

‘It might not matter,’ I said. I brought Jason Wells’s careful envelope of photos out of my hold-all. ‘I took all of these on the island,’ I said. ‘The first ones are of the raked clean mushroom sheds before the hurricane, and of the village and cattle before the hurricane, and the last one of cows and the three of the foreign scripts are from after.’

Robin looked with fascination at the pictures of the scripts.

‘I’ll use these,’ he said. ‘Better than nothing.’

I opened the aircraft’s rear unfolding door and stairs and, blown sideways by the wind, I walked down them, not blindfolded and with clothes and shoes on, and Robin hesitantly stopped, holding onto the handrails.

‘Come on,’ I encouraged him. ‘There’s no danger of radiation. The residents here were scared away by something like George Loricroft’s little packet of alpha particle powder, which gave off a lot of noise but made no one sick.’

Robin shrugged and followed me down the steps, and we walked in the blustery wind together towards the second of the thick-walled huts.

There were bulls about in the ruined village, and Friesian cows that mooed and rubbed against me as I patted them with fondness despite the rotten time they’d given me. They were, after all, the world’s only source of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X.

Robin and I went into the hut away from the gathering gale, and looked at the safe.

Robin tried 4373 3673 (HERE FORD) and nothing happened.

‘Amy’s right,’ he said, frustrated. ‘It doesn’t open.’

‘Try 3673 4373,’ I said, ‘FORD HERE.’

Robin gave me a gruesome look of scepticism but punched in the numbers. Still nothing, still immovable door.

‘Hopeless,’ Robin said. ‘Amy was right.’

‘Amy was right,’ I agreed. ‘Amy knows her way about video rentals, and she may know about pasteurisation, and she also knows about safes.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s no electricity on this island,’ I said.

‘I know that...’

‘So what powers the safe door?’

Robin, clever in all ways except in elementary science, frowned and didn’t answer.

‘Batteries,’ I said.

I slid downwards the small metal plate located under the display of numbers and letters, and there, side by side, stood a row of three very ordinary double A batteries.

‘But,’ Robin objected, ‘it’s got batteries in it, and it still doesn’t open.’

I said, ‘It’s got three batteries, but it’s got space for four.’ I fished in my hold-all, brought out the unopened pack of four double As that I had bought with my camera and, removing the three old ones, I pushed the four new ones into place and closed the flap.

I pressed 4373 3673, listened to the sharp click, lifted the flat lever upwards and opened the door.

Inside there was Amy’s row of cattle files and one buff familiar folder. I lifted it out, checked its contents, and with a slightly ceremonial gesture handed it to Robin.

Astonished, he said, ‘How did you know how to open the safe?’

I answered him, ‘I spent four days alone on this island. I know this safe well. I discovered its password. I checked its batteries. I just couldn’t decipher the scripts.’

‘I’ll get that done,’ Robin said. ‘I’ll use them. Nothing you have done will be wasted.’