'By everybody chairman, treasurer, secretary. We want it back.' He was determined to make her spell it out, word by bloody word.
'But it's not finished.'
'We'll finish it ourselves.'
He said evenly, 'She'll bring it herself to the meeting on Tuesday.'
'She's not wanted there. We don't want her at our meeting.'
The day after he, Meryl and Stephen had moved in, Peggy had brought a fresh-baked apple pie to the house. Of course, she'd wanted to look over the new arrivals, but she had brought the pie and talked about infant schools for Stephen with Meryl, the better shops and the reliable tradesmen, and introduced her to the Institute. She had made Meryl feel wanted… He didn't curse, as he wanted to. He saw that the grin had chilled off the detective's face.
Perry said quietly, 'I'll get them. Would you like to take the stuff for the Red Cross? Have they decided that Meryl is a security risk too? It'll save you two visits.'
'Yes,' she said loudly.
'That would be best.'
He went inside. Meryl called down to him to find out who was at the door. He said he would be up in a moment. He went into the kitchen. Last night's supper plates were still in the sink, with the whisky glass.
He took the folders from the cupboard where Meryl kept her typing and flipped through them. There was the scrawled handwriting of minutes and deliberations by the group and the committee members, the chaotic mess that had been dumped on his Meryl. Her typed pages were clean, neat, because trouble was taken over them, because care was important to her. As he turned the pristine, ordered pages of her work, his resolve began to founder. Because of him, his past, his betrayal and his damned God-given obstinacy, she suffered. He turned the pages of her typing prize lists, outings, letters of thanks to guest speakers all so bloody mundane and ordinary, but they were the necessities of her life… Like an outcast, he felt the touch of plague.
There was a church, St. James's, outside the next village down the coast, which had been built on the site of a lepers' hospital. Dominic had told him that when the church was built, a hundred and fifty years back, the labourers digging the foundations had found many skeletons, not laid out as in Christian burial, but in rejected disarray. When the first sore appeared, suppurating, and the first bleeding, and a man was sent to the lepers' place, had his friends still known him? Or, had they turned their backs?
He gathered Meryl's pages back into the folders and took them to the front door, reaching past the detective to hand them to Peggy.
She dropped the folders into her bag.
So much he could have said, but Meryl wouldn't have wanted it said.
'There you are, Peggy, everything you asked for.'
He knew that by not cursing, not swearing, he destroyed her. Her chin shook, and her tongue wriggled and spread the lipstick on her teeth.
'I was sent. It wasn't my idea.
'You're with us or you're against us,' that's what they said. If I'm against them I'm shut out. Doesn't matter to you, Frank, you can move on. I've nowhere else to go. It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. If I don't bring those papers back, I'm out. I'm a victim, too. It's not personal, Frank.'
She ran to her bicycle.
He let Davies shut the door on her, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. There was never a good time for telling a bad story. She was wiping the sleep out of her eyes.
'I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. Peggy came to take away your typing for the Wildlife Group and the Red Cross. She's going to do it herself. We are not wanted… I could have thrown it all at her face and made her grovel down in the road to pick it up. I didn't. I know what I'm doing to you.' He paused and drew a breath.
'They say he's still out there. He may be hurt but, if the injury isn't severe, he'll come again. They say the dogs found a scent, then lost it… Peggy's going to do the typing herself.' She screamed.
The shrill staccato burst of her scream filled the room. She convulsed in the bed.
The scream died and her eyes stared up at him, wide and frightened.
Still in his pyjamas. Stephen was in the doorway, holding a toy lorry and gazing at him.
He told Stephen that his mother was unwell. He tried to hold him but the boy recoiled. He left the bedroom, where there were no lights, no pictures, where the glass of the mirror on the dressing-table was scarred with adhesive tape. He walked slowly down the dark stairs, as if descending into the lower reaches of the bunker.
He stopped at the dining-room door.
'How much worse does it have to get?'
'Does what 'have to get', Mr. Perry?'
'How much worse does it have to get before I'm told the Al Haig story?'
'A bit worse, Mr. Perry.'
He hung his head.
'And how much worse does it have to get before I say I'm at the end of the road, before I'm ready to run, quit?'
The detective, sitting at the table, the machine-gun beside his hand, looked up keenly.
'That door was open once, but not any more. I think it was on offer a bit ago, but it's not an option, Mr. Perry, not now.'
Cathy Parker had used one of the sleeping hutches at the top of the building to catch four hours' rest. She came down to the floor. Fenton was there with Cox. She riffled through her papers for the address in Somerset. It would be a good drive; she'd enjoy the blessing of being clear of Thames House.
She might have time to call in for tea or a sherry with her parents afterwards. Fenton was talking, convincing.
'You worry too much, Barney, you'll go to your grave worrying. You heard what the American told young Geoff, this man is essentially a civilian. He is not military, doesn't have the mindset of manuals. He will think like a civilian and move like one. You don't put the military in against him, you put another civilian there. If it had been the military then you've lost control and that's some thing to worry about. God, the day I side with a politician is a day to remember.'
She walked past the grinning Fenton, and Cox whose face was an enigmatic mask, and paused at the closed, locked door. She took a pen from her handbag and made a decisive line through the writing on the sheet of paper fastened there. She wrote boldly, DAY FOUR, and moved off down the dull-lit corridor.
The Iranian crude was offloaded. The tanker was buoyed up, monstrously high above the waves rippling against its hull, riding to its anchor. The radio message had still not been received.
Perplexed, the master called the terminal authority, reported a turbine problem and requested that a barge come alongside to take his crew ashore. He did not understand why the order to make the rendezvous had not reached him.
All day Peggy had anticipated the opportunity to call on the new people who had moved into the cottage on the opposite side of the road to the church. It was a dingy little place, only three bedrooms. Old Mrs. Wilson, now in a nursing home, had always said the damp in the walls of Rose Cottage had wrecked her hips. The ride home had settled her after the confrontation with Frank Perry, and she'd collected the pie, wrapped it in tinfoil and balanced it under the clip on the rack over the back wheel of her bicycle.
She had hoped to be invited inside, but she had had to hand over her welcoming gift on the step. A man had answered her sharp rap at the door, wispy-haired, slight, raggedly and dully dressed, and seemed to be astonished that a complete stranger brought an apple and blackberry pie to him.
He said his name was Blackmore. There were half-emptied packing cases in the hall behind him. He told her no more about himself other than his name. A woman came down the stairs, picked her way between the rolled carpets and the boxes, but the man did not introduce her and awkwardly held the pie he had been given.
Peggy chattered… Her name, where she lived, the societies and groups in the village… The woman had a sallow skin, a foreigner, perhaps from the Mediterranean… The bus timetable, the early closing day in the town, the best builder in the village, the walks, the milk delivery… Neither the man nor the woman responded… The lay-out of the village, the pub, the hall, the shop, the green -and they should not go near the green because of the disgraceful attitude of the people who lived there, endangered the whole community, protected by guns, showed no respect for
