The remainder of the message ran:
… W-I–L-L F-W-D-H-O-M-E O-F-F-I–C-E.
‘He’s wasted another minute telling us that,’ said Woodcock, as the pointer fell back to zero for the final time. ‘I’m off, anyhow,’ he added, and he turned a switch on the ABC, and began sauntering away towards the trees.
‘ Where are you off?’ I called after him.
He half-turned and said, ‘We have an agreement, mind,’ at which he entered the woods, and was gone from sight. He was on his way — I would discover later — to steal thirty pounds from the safe in the booking office at Adenwold station, and then to disappear.
I sat by the tracks contemplating the ABC.
Was my business with it concluded? I didn’t fancy lingering beside it in case it rang again, followed by some further query or contradiction from Pilmoor. Come to that, I didn’t even know if Woodcock had left the switch open to receive. But I felt duty bound to sit by the thing, and I did so until the rain had quite stopped, the sun was raying down and the Adenwold chimes of eight had floated faintly across the drying field towards me.
In the silence that followed, I lay back and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the sky had washed itself light blue. A bumble bee bounced into view, and I heard the call of a wood pigeon, a steady, urging-on sound. It seemed to keep time with a regular noise from the woods, a tramping of feet. I looked up, and thought for a moment I saw Hugh Lambert all in white, breaking free of the woods, but it was not Hugh. It was of course John, changed from his evening suit into the clothes in which I’d first met him. The sunlight flashed upon his spectacles. He put his hand up to them, and stood at the border of the woods, watching. I rose to my feet, and saw, from the corner of my eye, another man advancing to my left. He too wore white, and he limped. It was Cooper in his dust- coat. He held a shotgun, but somehow I dismissed that from my mind. He would hold a shotgun. John Lambert — who carried no weapon — was the one to pay attention to. I called out his name. He was looking at the ABC, head tilting in wonder as his eyes roved up and down the wire joining it to the telegraph lines.
‘Is the connection made?’ he said, and he began to advance.
‘It is,’ I said, ‘and I trust that your brother has been saved.’
Cambridge man, first-class degree and brilliant intellect, yet he looked baffled; and when Cooper’s shot hit him in the chest, the look of bafflement increased, and kept on increasing as he slowly collapsed. I looked towards Cooper, and he had the gun trained on me, weighing up the wisdom of a second shot.
PART FOUR
Chapter Thirty-Four
We walked along Whitehall in the rain. The black cabs came on and on like one long funeral. Tiny trees along the pavements; the buildings were grey cliffs and every man held an umbrella except for the Chief and me, and the two policemen in capes who happened at that moment to be lumbering along beside us like carthorses. We passed the entrance to Downing Street — one tradesman’s van was parked a little way along it with a white horse in the shafts.
‘Do you suppose Mr Asquith’s at home?’ I said.
The Chief made no answer, but looked at his watch.
‘We’ve an hour to kill,’ he said.
The letters on the side of the van read: ‘Williams of Pimlico’.
I said to the Chief, ‘You’d think they’d put “Williams of Pimlico: Suppliers of Bread to the Prime Minister”.’
‘Full of good ideas, you are,’ said the Chief.
He stopped and eyed me for a moment before adding, by way of making amends, ‘The Tories wouldn’t buy the bread if it was a Liberal prime minister and the Liberals wouldn’t buy if it was a Tory.’
‘Expect not,’ I said.
‘Shall we take a pint?’ said the Chief.
The pub was like a tiny baronial hall, with shields on the wall, and criss-crossed with high beams; and it reeked of past-food. As the rain streamed down the windows, and the Chief bought two pints on expenses, the man at the next table was talking about India. ‘Do you see yourself going out there?’ he kept asking the woman he was with. It was pretty bloody obvious enough that he wanted her to go out there, so why didn’t he just say so? Another fellow, steaming on the same bench as me, said to a man standing before him in a coat with a fur collar: ‘For the first time in years I’ve been able to do a bit of shooting,’ and as he spoke, the pub was filled with the sound of the Westminster bells, which were so deep-toned they might have been inside your head.
‘Care for another?’ the man at the table asked the woman.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘Well, I know I don’t fancy going out in that,’ the man said, contemplating the streaming windows.
Why must he go round the houses so? He put me in mind of the Adenwold bicyclist. The lengths that fellow had gone to just to get a fuck! He’d even made a show of taking the bloody machine to the blacksmith’s to get the wheel fixed. As if anybody had been interested! Well, I had been, and the wife, too; she’d always suspected him, just as though one bicyclist might prove as important in the whole business as the combined forces of the state.
The Chief was saying something about the fellow we were going to see — Major somebody or other. His name came in two parts: Henderson-Richards or some such hedging of bets. I imagined him as a man who couldn’t decide between Henderson and Richards, who considered them both good names and had determined to have the best of both worlds.
He was in the Special Police, or army intelligence, or both. It was the office for muffling-up, anyhow, and our meeting with him would mark the end of the business that had begun with the transfer of Hugh Lambert at York. It would all be laid to rest, and with no undue ceremony beyond my own name being put to a paper.
My name evidently counted for something in this — otherwise, why would they have called me down to London for the signing (even if it had taken them three months to get round to it), and that with a special first class travel warrant and with the Chief as chaperone?
‘Take another?’ asked the Chief, draining his glass and watching me over the top of it.
He was altered in his approach towards me since the Adenwold events — more watchful. I’d brought off something big, after all: Hugh Lambert had been released and pardoned, if that was the term. Usher had fixed it all after talking to Hardy and Mervyn — this in spite of his strongly held opinions against men of Hugh Lambert’s type. Lambert had evidently had a handshake from the governor of Durham gaol, a letter from the governor of Armley and an armful of money and a rail pass into the bargain.
This last he’d used to come up to York station in the middle of August.
As before, old man Wright and I had been the only ones in the office. Wright had a scar on his forehead — nothing to the Chief’s scars but very noticeable all the same. He’d slipped and fallen on his July week-end in Scarborough — taken a tumble down the steps from the Marine Parade to the beach. I couldn’t help thinking it was his own fault for having talked it up so much in advance.
Also as before, it was a day of unbreathable heat on Platform Four, and the sparrow had been outside the door, for I’d had my snap in front of me as on that earlier occasion. But this time Hugh Lambert had practically trodden on the poor thing — didn’t give it a glance. He’d marched up to me and put out his hand, and I was that shocked to see him that I forgot to stand. Old Wright did so, however, and sharpish, as if he’d seen a ghost, for he’d heard all about Hugh Lambert.
‘I owe you my life, Detective Stringer,’ Lambert said, and he sounded none too happy about it.
‘I’m sorry for what happened to your brother,’ I said. ‘I called to him at the wrong time. They thought the
