'And the people who had a chief interest in stopping her were your likely heirs. Your children.'
He was silent.
I said, 'Also perhaps their husbands and wives, also perhaps even the witches.'
'I don't want to believe it,' he said. 'How could I have put a murderer into the world.'
'People do,' I said.
'Ian!'
The truth was that, apart from poor Robin, I didn't know my half- brothers and half-sisters well enough to have any certainty about any of them. I was usually on speaking terms with them all, but didn't seek them out. There had been too much fighting, too many rows: Vivien's children disliked Alicia's, Alicia's disliked them and me, Vivien hated Joyce and Joyce hated Alicia very bitterly indeed. Under Coochie's reign, the whole lot had been banned from sleeping in the house, if not from single-day visits, with the result that a storm of collective resentment had been directed at me whom she had kept and treated as her own.
'Apart from thinking,' I said, 'what have you been doing since Friday night?'
'When the police had gone, I… I…' he stopped.
'The shakes came back?' I suggested. 'Yes. Do you understand that?'
'I'd have been scared silly,' I said. 'Stupid not to be. I'd have felt that whoever had tried to kill me was prowling about in the dark waiting for me to be alone so he could have another go.'
Malcolm audibly swallowed. 'I telephoned to the hire firm I use now and told them to send a car to fetch me. Do YOU know what panic feels like?'
'Not that sort, I guess.'
'I was sweating, and it was cold. I could feel my heart thumping… banging away at a terrible rate. it was awful. I Packed some things… I couldn't concentrate.'
He shifted in his seat as the outskirts of Cambridge came up in the headlights and began to give me directions to the hotel where he said he'd spent the previous four nights.
'Does anyone know where you're staying?' I asked, turning corners. 'Have you seen any of your old chums?'
Malcolm knew Cambridge well, had been at university there and still had friends at high tables. It must have seemed to him a safe city to bolt to, but it was where I would have gone looking for him, if not much else failed.
'Of course I have,' he said in answer to my question. 'I spent Sunday with the Rackersons, dined with old Digger in Trinity last night… it's nonsense to think they could be involved.'
'Yes,' I agreed, pulling up outside his hotel. 'All the same, go and pack and check out of here, and we'll go somewhere else.'
'It's not necessary,' he protested.
'You appointed me as minder, so I'm minding,' I said.
He gave me a long look in the dim light inside the car.
The doorman of the hotel stepped forward and opened the door beside me, an invitation to step out.
'Come with me,' my father said.
I was both astounded by his fear and thought it warranted. I asked the doorman where I should park, and turned at his suggestion through an arch into the hotel's inner court way From there, through a back door and comfortable old-fashioned hallways, Malcolm and I went up one flight of red-carpeted stairs to a lengthy winding corridor. Several people we passed glanced down at my torn trouser-leg with the dried-blood scenery inside, but no one said anything: was it still British politeness, I wondered, or the new creed of not getting involved? Malcolm, it seemed, had forgotten the problem existed.
He brought his room key out of his pocket and, with it raised, said abruptly, 'I suppose you didn't tell anyone I would be at the sales.'
'No, I didn't.'
'But you knew.' He paused. 'Only you knew.'
He was staring at me with the blue eyes and I saw all the sudden fear-driven question marks rioting through his mind.
'Go inside,' I said. 'The corridor isn't the place for this.'
He looked at the key, he looked wildly up and down the now empty corridor, poised, almost, to run.
I turned my back on him and walked purposefully away in the direction of the stairs.
'Ian,' he shouted.
I stopped and turned round.
'Come back,' he said.
I went back slowly.
'You said you trusted me,' I said.
'I haven't seen you for three years… and I broke your nose…'
I took the key out of his hand and unlocked the door. I supposed I might have been suspicious of me if I'd been attacked twice in five days, considering I came into the high-probability category of son. I switched on the light and went forward into the room which was free from lurking murderers that time at least.
Malcolm followed, only tentatively reassured, closing the door slowly behind him. I drew the heavy striped curtains across the two windows and briefly surveyed the spacious but old-fashioned accommodation: reproduction antique furniture, twin beds, pair of armchairs, door to bathroom.
No murderer in the bathroom.
'Ian…' Malcolm said.
'Did you bring any scotch?' I asked. In the old days, he'd never travelled without it.
He waved a hand towards a chest of drawers where I found a half- full bottle nestling among a large number of socks. I fetched a glass from the bathroom and poured him enough to tranquillise an elephant.
'For God's sake…' he said.
'Sit down and drink it.'
'You're bloody arrogant.'
He did sit down, though, and tried not to let the glass clatter against his teeth from the shaking of his hand.
With much less force, I said, 'If I'd wanted you dead, I'd have let that car hit you tonight. I'd have jumped the other way… out of trouble.'
He seemed to notice clearly for the first time that there had been any physical consequences to our escape.
'Your leg,' he said, 'must be all right?'
'Leg is. Trousers… can I borrow a pair of yours?'
He pointed to a cupboard where I found a second suit almost identical to the one he was wearing. I was three inches taller than he and a good deal thinner but, belted and slung round the hips, whole cloth was better than holey.
He silently watched me change and made no objection when I telephoned down to the reception desk and asked them to get his bill ready for his departure. He drank more of the scotch, but nowhere was he relaxed.
'Shall I pack for you?' I asked.
He nodded, and watched some more while I fetched his suitcase, opened it on one of the beds and began collecting his belongings. The things he'd brought spoke eloquently of his state of mind when he'd packed them: about ten pairs of socks but no other underwear, a dozen shirts, no pyjamas, two to welling bath-robes, no extra shoes. The clearly new electric razor in the bathroom still bore a stick-on price tag, but he had brought his antique gold-and-silver- backed brushes, all eight of them, including two clothes brushes. I put everything into the case, and closed it.
'Ian,' he said.
'Mm?'
'People can pay assassins… You could have decided not to go through with it tonight… at the last moment…'
'it wasn't like that,' I protested. Saving him had been utterly instinctive, without calculation or counting of risks: I'd been lucky to get off with a graze.
