natural hazard of duty.
* * *
Frances clasped the name like a straw. Paul was Colonel Butler's last chance. Paul was always suspicious, Paul always had his eyes open. Paul, in the unseen presence of O'Leary, would have his hand on that gun of his, of which he was so proud, with which he was so born-to-the-manner good, as he was good at everything. Paul was the best.
She frowned.
Paul - ?
* * *
'There's the bridge,' said David Audley. There was the bridge. Childhood's memory had been wrong - No. It wasn't so high, or so narrow as she had remembered, or as the ordeal bridge of Al-Sirat, between life and death. But as they had come up to it eighteen years ago there had been a big orange coach swinging on to it, and Mother had said
* * *
Paul? The youngest and best?
* * *
She twisted the wheel just in time, almost too late. Another second's hesitation would have carried them on up the valley, to somewhere she'd never been. A great splash of rain from the saturated branches of the trees above obscured the windscreen for a moment, then there was a bump as they crossed the bridge and the windscreen wipers swept the water away.
Hard left and hard right - her father's hands on the wheel, impossibly remembered, swung them on to the car park which the old Ministry of Public Buildings and Works had carved out of the monastic gardens, the wheels spinning and the gravel spurting.
Daddy had never driven that fast - Daddy had parked carefully under the trees on the right, between the wall and the ice-cream van from which he had bought her a choc-ice, and himself a choc-ice too -
But the path to the abbey ruins was at the top, on the left: she had walked across the gravel with him, licking the melting chocolate off her fingers - and he had been licking the chocolate off his fingers too, and grinning at her, while Mother unloaded the picnic with Uncle John - it was at the top, the path. She swung the wheel the other way, skidding round the vividly-striped police car - the day-glo orange and white flashed in front of her and was gone as though it had never existed.
'Christ!' said Audley.
She stood on the brakes, feeling the car slither under her.
Now she knew: Butler was a dream - the girls' dream which she had started to dream against all reason and all reality. Butler was already invulnerable - he had always been invulnerable, from the start, the stars in their million courses were running for him, as they had on his battlefields; his bad luck would always come from a different direction, from where it had always come.
It would be
Frances slammed out of the car, leaving the door swinging.
There was a man ahead of her. Audley shouted something, but the words were lost to her.
She could run. She had always been able to run. Some women couldn't run, their hips got in the way, their breasts went every whichway. But Frances Warren never saw anyone's back in the 100 and 220, no girl could touch her.
The man was gone, open mouthed. It was not James Cable, she saw only that - it was not James Cable, so James Cable was also up ahead somewhere, with Jack Butler and Trevor Anthony Bond - and with
There were steps up, between modern stone walls. She knew where she was going, it was past the lay brothers' dormitory, past the great kitchen and the wide quadrangle of the ruined cloister -
* * *
'Now sweetie: you're standing in the middle of the cloister - so you know where the Chapter House and the Parlour are ... the Parlour where they were allowed to
to each other ... and the Warming House where they lifted their cassocks and warmed their
- '
Not the Chapter House, not the Cloister, not the Parlour - the wall ended with the Galilee Porch.
There was a reason for
