A Prospect of Vengeance

— the ones who realize that it could have been different: they are the sad ones.' Another wise nod. 'They don't like what they've become, so they pretend to be someone else. And now I think about Marilyn . . . yes, I'm sure that she wasn't really like that. She was just playing a role — ' She blinked suddenly. 'But that isn't helping you, is it?'

'On the contrary — '

'No.' She sat up very straight. 'As regards Miss Francis, Mr Robinson, I think your best bet would be a certain Gary Redwood.'

'Gary — ' His repetition of the absurd Christian name seemed to tighten her mouth. 'A boyfriend?'

'No.' Her expression belied the question even before she'd rejected it. 'Whatever Gary was to her, he most certainly wasn't that.' She turned away from him abruptly, to stare at a pair of steel filing-cabinets which seemed oddly out-of-place in an otherwise computerized office.

'Who is he?' It disconcerted him oddly that she didn't move dummy2

to consult the cabinets' contents, but merely stared at them, as though their entire contents were already on disc in her memory.

' Was, as far as this company is concerned, Mr Robinson.

Yes.' She switched back to him. 'He was our messenger boy, while Miss Francis was with us ... and for a brief time after that. Gary Redwood — his mother, who was a perfectly decent woman, worked in our canteen. They lived in Albion Street, near the railway line. But you won't find him there.'

She looked at her watch. 'If he has continued to stay one jump ahead of the Police, you should find him in Messiter's timber yard, Mr Robinson — '

' Redwood — ?' He cupped his hands round his mouth to direct his shout at the man over the shriek of the circular saw.

' Eh?' The man tapped his protective ear-muffs.

This wasn't Gary Redwood, he was too old by a dozen years: even now the former Brit-Am messenger boy would only be in his mid-twenties. ' Gary Redwood?' Ian's voice cracked.

An uneven piece of mahogany fell away from the saw. The man picked it up and pointed with it towards a stairway before tossing it aside.

The noise fell away behind Ian as he ascended the stair. He still wasn't at all sure what he was really doing; or, at any rate, whether it really had any bearing on what had dummy2

happened to Philip Masson. For the link between Marilyn Francis and Philip Masson was hardly more than a tenuous sequence of November days in early November, with David Audley in the middle of it. Dr Harrison, of British-American, had been jailed for passing high-tech secrets to one of Russia's East European colonies — Hungary, was it? Or Bulgaria? And Marilyn Francis had quit Brit-Am (and Dr Harrison) on November 7, 1978, to keep an appointment with 'Mad Dog' O'Leary's bullet (or somebody's bullet) in Dr Audley's presence four days later; and, as things stood at present, Audley was playing Macbeth to Philip Masson's Banquo, his victim, if Jenny had heard more than a rumour.

But there lay a full week between those two deaths, and a week was a long time not just in politics.

'Mr Redwood?' There was only one person in the timber-loft, so it had to be Gary. And as the man turned towards him from the pile of planks he was sorting the identification was confirmed: the acne-ravaged face and the stocky build filled Mrs Simmonds' 1978 description to the life.

'Yeah?' Gary straightened up, balancing himself among the planks.

'I believe you may be able to help me, Mr Redwood.' He returned Gary's empty gaze with a smile of encouragement.

'You used to work at British-American Electronics just down the road, didn't you?'

'Yeah — ' A fraction of a second after he began to answer, as though his brain was slower than his tongue, Gary's dummy2

expression changed from the blank to the wary ' — who says?'

Mrs Simmonds' name was not the one to drop, decided Ian.

And, in any case, he had a much better name to open Gary up. 'You had a friend there — ' As he spoke, Mrs Simmonds'

parting words echoed in his head: ' She let them chat her up

— even a dreadful ugly little beast like Gary. At the time, I thought it was disgusting. But perhaps I was wrong: perhaps she was just being kind to him!'; but now he observed Gary in the pitted flesh neither conclusion quite fitted ' — a Miss Francis — Miss Marilyn Francis, Mr Redwood — ?'

A succession of different emotions twisted across the moonscape face, ending with a scowling grimace. 'Who told you? Not that fucking old bitch Simmonds?' Gary spoke with surprising clarity as well as bitterness. 'You don't want to believe anything she says — right?'

It would be a mistake to underrate Gary, in spite of appearances. 'She only said you were a friend of Miss Francis, Mr Redwood.'

Gary shook his head, as at some crassly stupid statement.

'About Miss Francis — Marilyn . . . she's who I mean. You don't want to believe anything the old bag said about her —

right?' The corner of his mouth twisted upwards. 'It don't matter what she said about me. Who gives a fuck for that, eh?'

There had been a sum of unaccounted petty cash outstanding dummy2