Maitland banging the machine, and the man had accepted that the big dishevelled man with the little bedraggled blonde dolly-bird added up to something that was not what it seemed. 'Yes, sir - Colonel Butler and Mr Cable have gone to Thornervaulx.'
'And Paul Mitchell?' said Frances.
'Yes - ' For the life of him, in spite of her warrant card, he couldn't bring himself to add 'madam' ' - Mr Mitchell's gone there too.'
'To see Trevor Bond?' It fitted too well to be wrong: O'Leary needed a safe house close to the University, and there, just across the high ridge of heather within sight of the top of the Science Block on a clear day, was someone Colonel Butler of all men would never have forgotten. It would be so close to the surface of his memory, the remembrance of that name and that place, that it was a certainty. And because it was a certainty it was more than that, was her fear: it was the bait on a hook for Colonel Butler if things went wrong.
Or was she imagining everything? And was David Audley imagining everything?
The man didn't answer her directly, and Audley started to growl something angry in his throat.
'Yes - ' The man's answer pre-empted Audley's anger.
'We have to get a message to Colonel Butler - at once. About O'Leary,' Audley converted the anger into a command.
'I'm afraid we can't do that, sir.'
'Why the hell not?' Audley pointed to the banks of equipment. 'You've got enough there to transmit to bloody Moscow!'
'The system is deactivated, sir.' As the man's voice strengthened Frances's heart sank: he was no longer scared because he was sure of his ground. 'I'm only here to watch over it - and to take any calls.' He nodded towards the telephone on the table beside him.
Audley pounced on the phone. 'Well - give me the line to Thornervaulx then, for God's sake. There has to be a line, damn it!'
'Yes, sir - but there isn't at the moment - '
'Why not?' Audley shook the receiver impotently.
'The line is out. Sergeant Ballard phoned me half an hour ago - not half an hour, sir.
The Post Office says there's probably water in the cable somewhere. They've sent men out to look for the trouble, but ... but we haven't been able to get through for an hour or more. Sergeant Ballard says. They're doing all they can - ' He broke off abruptly, and Frances saw that he at last was beginning to become frightened too. Then he brightened.
'Sergeant Ballard said he was sending men out to tell the Colonel, sir.'
Audley looked at Frances, and the look confirmed her own fear - and Sergeant Ballard's too.
If the line was out, that might mean there was water in the cable - it happened, and there was enough water to make it happen now. But she could remember Sergeant Ballard's cool competence, and she knew that even in the most torrential downpour he wouldn't accept water as the only answer to a breakdown in communications.
Well ... there was a flicker of hope there, kindling against the bigger blaze of fear.
Perhaps Colonel Butler's disdain of complicated modern electronics might warn him now, where a totally secure communications system wouldn't have hinted that someone was trying to isolate him. And even if it was a much fainter hope than the fear - not only because O'Leary was a kamikaze assassin, but also because he had no reason to believe that he was now O'Leary's target - then at least he would by now have Sergeant Ballard's reinforcements beside Cable and Mitchell to make the hit more difficult.
But it was still only a hope.
'Frances. We must go.' Audley's tone betrayed the same inescapable conclusion.
'You'd better drive.'
* * *
'How much further?' repeated Audley.
'Not far now - ' It was no longer a childish question. But childish memories, which she had never recognised as having registered at the time, came from nowhere to help her. 'There's a bridge up ahead, over the stream - we go along beside the stream, and then we come to the bridge. It's a little narrow bridge - '
She knew what he was thinking, his thoughts burned her.
* * *
'Why did you phone Control?'
'Why?' Frances pressed her foot down to the floor. Why indeed!
'It was finished. I wanted to get it over and done with.'
Not true. Or, not the whole truth, anyway. She had been very pleased with herself, very full of the pride before which every fall had to go, very pleased with her own cleverness, with her own unerring instinct.
She hadn't known how the instinct had come to her, but she'd been consciously saving that up for consideration at leisure, like a favourite sweet to be smuggled up to bed, past the tooth-cleaning ritual, to be sucked secretly and selfishly in the darkness after lights-out. Four out of ten had become ten out of ten.
And she had wanted the smug sod at the end of the telephone. Extension 223, to squirm - she had wanted to hear him squirm as she gave him the answer he hadn't expected.
