Banks had never been very good at recognizing them. The Big Dipper and Orion were about as far as he got, and he couldn’t see either of them tonight.
Banks thought he heard a sound from the woods, and he had the odd sensation that he was being watched. It was probably just some nocturnal animal, he told himself. After all, he heard them often enough. There were badgers, for a start, and plenty of rabbits around.
He mustn’t allow his nerves to get the better of him. He shook off the feeling and sipped some more wine. The water f lowed on, here a touch of silver as it parted around a rock, a f lurry of white foam as it dropped a few feet over a terrace, and everywhere else shifting shades of inky blue or black.
It was nothing, Banks told himself, nothing but the wind through the trees, the Icelandic music and a sheep, frightened by a fox or a dog, baaing on a distant daleside. Like the streets, the woods were full of shadows and whispers. After a while, even those sounds ended and he was left in a silence so profound that all he could hear was his own heart beating.
9
THE FINE WEATHER HAD BROUGHT OUT THE CROWDS
by Wednesday lunchtime, and Oxford Street was clogged with the usual array of tourists, street vendors, shop workers and people handing out free newspapers or f lyers for language schools. Banks had taken an indirect route to Sophia’s, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed. Not that it mattered. Mr. Browne had known enough about Sophia already.
Banks had parked his car—a Porsche was hardly out of place on a Chelsea side street, and he was also legal there—left his grip in the house, then headed for Tottenham Court Road by tube, stopping to look in a shop window every now and then on his way. There were so many people about, however, that he had soon realized there was no way he would be able to pick out someone who was following him, especially if that person was well trained. Still, it was best to make caution a habit.
He had worked undercover for varying periods in his twenties and early thirties, and he still had the rudiments of tradecraft. Also, one of the reasons he had done so well at it was that most people said he didn’t look like a policeman, whatever that meant. He could blend into the crowd. In Waterstone’s, just down the street from the tube station, he bought an AA street atlas of London, not willing to trust his memory of years ago, then he called in at one of the electronics A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S
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shops on Tottenham Court Road and bought a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile, paying cash. It would need charging, but that could wait. He wasn’t in a hurry. It was Wednesday afternoon, and he had spent Tuesday gathering most of the information he needed to do what he had to do in London.
As he walked along Tottenham Court Road, he was overwhelmed by memories. The last time he had been in London doing detective work alone had been when his brother Roy disappeared. And look how that had turned out. Still, there was no reason to think that this time would turn into a disaster of similar proportions. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the spare key to Laurence Silbert’s Bloomsbury f lat. He knew it was the right one because it had been marked with a neat label when he’d found it in Silbert’s study drawer that morning. He remembered seeing it when he and Annie had carried out their search. The rules called for Banks to get in touch with the local police, let them know he was on their patch and ask permission to visit the house, but he hadn’t done so. No sense inviting trouble, he thought, or paperwork. Besides, he was on holiday.
He turned up Montague Place between the British Museum and the university and found the street he wanted off Marchmont Street at the other side of Russell Square. He was in the heart of the University of London campus area now, and there was also a healthy sprinkling of hotels for the tourists. The house he wanted was divided into f lats, and the names under the brass number plates still listed an L. Silbert in f lat 3A. It was a well-appointed building, not dingy student accommodation, as he would have expected for a man in Silbert’s position, with dark thick-pile carpets, f locked wallpaper, framed Constable prints on the landings and a hovering scent of lavender air freshener.
Banks didn’t know what he hoped to find, if anything, after the local police, and probably Special Branch, had turned over the place.
He certainly didn’t expect any messages scrawled in invisible ink or written in a fiendish code. He told himself that he was there more to get a feel for Silbert and his London habitat than anything else.
The door opened into a tiny vestibule, hardly bigger than a hall cupboard. There were three doors leading off, and a quick check told him that the one on the left led to a small bedroom, just big enough 1 6 0
P E T E R R O B I N S O N
for a double bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers, the one on the right to a bathroom—new-looking walk-in shower, toilet and pedestal washbasin, toothpaste, shaving cream, Old Spice—and the door straight ahead led to the living room with a tiny kitchenette. At least there was a view of sorts through the small sash window, though the narrow alley it looked out upon wasn’t much, and the buildings opposite blocked out most of the sunlight.
Banks started in the bedroom. The blue-and-white duvet was ruff led and the pillows creased. On impulse, Banks pulled the duvet back. The linen sheets were clean but wrinkled, as if someone had slept on them. More than likely, Mark Hardcastle
There were a few clothes in the wardrobe: sports jackets, suits, shirts, ties, a dinner jacket and trousers, designer jeans creased along the seam. Banks found nothing hidden on the top or at the back of the wardrobe.
A copy of Conrad’s
The top drawer held folded polo shirts and T-shirts. In the middle drawer was an assortment of odds and ends, like his grandmother’s old rummage box, which he used to love to root around in when he visited her. None of it was of much interest: old theater ticket stubs and programs, restaurant and taxi receipts from earlier in the year, a tar-nished cigarette lighter that didn’t work, a few cheap ballpoint pens.
No diary or journal. No scraps of paper with telephone numbers on them. No business cards. The room had a Spartan feel about it, as if it were somewhere merely functional, a place to sleep. The restaurant receipts also indicated an appetite for fine food: Lindsay House, Arbu-tus, L’Autre Pied, The Connaught, J. Sheekey and The Ivy. Clearly more Silbert’s than Hardcastle’s tastes. The bottom drawer held only socks and underwear, nothing sinister hidden among them.
The bathroom held no surprises and the living room was every bit as neat and clean as the bedroom. There was a small bookcase, mostly Conrad, Waugh and Camus, mixed in with a few Bernard Cornwells and George MacDonald Frasers and a selection of hardcover biogra-phies and histories, along with the latest Wisden. The small stack of A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S
