'You fool!' he said. 'What are you doing here?'
'I was looking for you!'
'Why? Why do you have to prowl? Why can't you leave me alone?'
Laura could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. And she was fully aware that he had not for an instant relaxed the grip on the knife.
'You're my husband!' she cried. 'I wanted to see you! I wanted to talk to you!'
'You should have stayed home and waited for me!'
She felt her courage rallying. 'And wait for what?' she demanded. 'Wait until you bloody well felt like coming home and talking to me? What are you doing up here?'
'Nothing that you would understand.'
'No? And that?' She stared angrily at the knife, then back at her silent husband. And next there was a horrible moment as she looked into Stephen Fowler's eyes and no longer saw her husband. She saw something cold, mean, and evil that had always before been beneath the surface. But now, when she saw it, the look explained everything.
She saw the man before her for what he was. As his eyes riveted upon her, there was only sheer, paralyzing terror, knowing that the hands that had been intimate hundreds of times with her had manufactured bombs and strangled a strange woman. She knew that Peter Whiteside had been right in everything he had last said about him. And she knew that somehow she had come very close to her husband's secret. Something about this place…
Then she realized. Bill Cochrane had told her. Radio transmissions. A spy. The steeple was the highest point for miles around. That's what had attracted the F.B.I. agent and that was its significance to her husband.
It all came together to her in the space of three seconds, along with the fact that Stephen was intent on killing her. Now! She could tell from his eyes. She could tell by the way his fingers played nervously on the hilt of the knife.
She could think of only one way to save her life.
As his eyes remained locked with hers, she pressed her hand between his thighs. Gently, as she suppressed a shudder, she rubbed him.
The savagery in his face softened with the surprise. Good, she thought, she had done the unexpected.
'Don't you understand?' she asked with a conciliatory voice. 'I don't know what you're doing and I don't care. I just want my husband to make love to me. I've missed you.
Can't you comprehend that?'
She did her best to smile receptively. All the while she feared that he would stab her with one sudden upward thrust of the knife.
'I love you, Stephen,' she said. 'I'd never do anything to betray you. Don't you know that?'
The words were barely out of her mouth when she realized it was the first lie she had told him in more than two years of marriage.
'Let's undress,' she said. 'Now. Right here. Please, Stephen?' She unbuttoned her blouse as she spoke.
'I'm going to teach you who the master is,' he said. 'I'm going to punish you for following me.'
'Stephen…?'
He raised the knife, then threw it onto the floor, where, point-first, it stuck. Then he looked at his wife, drew back his hand, and slapped her hard across the face, just as he had once struck Charlotte.
Laura's face was on fire where he had hit her. She raised both her hands to where she had been struck and looked at her husband with wide horrified eyes. He grinned. He struck her again. She bolted to flee him, but he held her by the wrist.
'You'll finish undressing,' he told her, biting off the words. 'You'll do exactly what I tell you, Laura. Nothing less! You belong to me, Laura. You said so yourself. Now, don't you forget it.'
She undressed as he watched her in silence. As her undergarments came off, Stephen seemed to be devouring her with his eyes, assessing her as a rapist might a naked schoolgirl. She was completely nude. She covered a small area on the floor with her clothing.
When she turned and looked at Stephen again she realized that there had always been within him a need to brutalize a woman. He had never done it to her before, but obviously he had been doing it somewhere else. She wondered what connection it had with the dead woman behind the church.
Then as he pulled his own clothes off, he made her kneel. He held her by the hair and forced her to take him into her mouth. She had never done that to him before, much less been forced to. As an act of love, had he ever asked, she would have. Today, with a deceitful man whom she knew to be a spy and a killer, it filled her with revulsion.
But then he made her lie back, and he was on top of her. She managed to keep her face away from his as he pushed inside her. He could not see her tears. He was rough and fast, like she imagined a man might he in a whorehouse. And when she felt him finish, she was relieved. Horrible as it was, at least it was over.
He moved off her, breathing heavily. He lay near her and she sensed him to be more of a stranger than any man she had ever made love with. She was afraid to speak. She looked at the knife, which still stuck in the floor nearby. She realized that he could still kill her. She would have to see this terrifying hour through to the end.
'I like you as a sexual animal,' she lied, wondering all the time how she was managing to maintain her facade.
'Get dressed and get out of here,' he said. Apparently, she realized, he had decided to keep her alive. She stood and reached for her clothing. Stephen grabbed her by the wrist.
'And Laura,' he snapped, holding her so tight that it hurt, 'you never come up here again. I have things to do that a woman couldn't begin to understand. Do you hear me?'
'Yes, Stephen,' she said.
'Now, go.'
She did.
Laura returned to their bedroom in the rectory. She looked in the mirror at her ashen, tear-streaked face, felt something welling inside her, and threw up.
She went downstairs. She found a bottle of Scotch, took a drink, and after several minutes it seemed to calm her. She would have to maintain the act until the right opportunity came along, she told herself. No, she could barely tolerate thinking about or looking at this man again, much less have him violate her. But she did know where she could find friends. She only needed the right moment.
Stephen forced his new, brutal form of sex upon her again that night and the next. Then, mercifully, he announced on Wednesday morning that he was traveling again. He departed on the noon train to Trenton and Philadelphia.
Within another hour, she too was gone. She traveled first by bus, using some dollars she had put aside in her kitchen. In Newark she walked from the bus depot to the train station and found a southbound express for Washington. There, at Union Station, she deciphered a confusing city map and started her way to the British Consulate, praying that Peter Whiteside would still be there.
THIRTY-FIVE
The drive to Pennsylvania from Washington wasn't as smooth as Cochrane's previous trip. There had been traffic around Philadelphia, then a closed two-lane highway around Stroudsburg. Cochrane had to drive along the slower route that went through the mountains. Then, as was Mauer's quaint habit, there had been the meeting at the farmhouse door with the German holding a shotgun across his chest. Mauer lowered the weapon as soon as he saw Cochrane was alone.
Mauer shuffled back into the house, leading Cochrane, and went to the armchair from which he ruled his domain in exile. He stood his shotgun against a table, no more than an arm's length away. He sat down.
'You'll excuse the gun again, I hope,' Mauer began in German. 'Only a precaution.'
The two men gazed at each other for a moment and a slow, ironic smile crept across Mauer's lips.
'So, you were saying,' Mauer said. 'Fired? From your Bureau?'
'Fired,' Cochrane confirmed.
