his knees as the torch was shone into the cavity at the back of the bramble thicket.
He had queried it again, rejecting what he didn't want to hear.
He had been dragged up, pulled towards the water. He capitulated and said it was all right, yes, he accepted Chalmers's conclusion. If he had queried again he would have been pulled in his city clothes into the water and he'd have been propelled towards a tree-trunk and a submerged oil drum.
There was a crunched sound under his feet. The torch beam pointed out the stripped rabbit bones he stood on.
'I just want reassurance there is no other explanation?'
'He's gone.~
He had been lost. He had driven round a web of lanes. He had finally found Chalmers sitting with his dogs by the gate of a field. He. had expressed his first doubts at the grunted report of the tracker, then been hijacked and taken off into the woods. He didn't want to believe what he was told because of the catastrophic implications of Chalmers's assessment.
'Could he merely have moved deeper into the marshland?'
'No.'
He said, bitterly, 'But we don't know where he's gone.'
'Gone in the car.'
'Could he be returning?'
'No gear left hide's empty. He's cleared out.'
They walked back to his car. It was the worst situation. He would be on the secure line to Fenton from the crisis centre to report that they had lost their man. There'd be the hissed slip of Fenton's breath, and he would repeat that they had lost their man, and then a volley of oaths would bleat in his ear. He was familiar with analysis and intellectual storm sessions and with the computer spewing answers. What he had been shown was a short length of tyre marks in the dirt at the side of a lane and, by torchlight, a hollowed place in the depth of a bramble thicket. He took on trust the description of the hiding-place. The torch had been switched off. They came through the dense woodland and the low branches all seemed to whip his face and not Chalmers's, and where there was a soft pit in the ground his feet found it and not Chalmers's. With his scratched face and sodden feet, he followed the smell and could not see the man ahead of him until they reached the car.
The stench of the man and the filth of the dogs filled the small interior. The water dripped off Chalmers and the mud on the dogs was smeared across the seats.
'I want to go home.'
'Too right,' Markham snapped.
'Home you will go, but not much of the journey in my bloody car.'
He drove at savage speed down the lanes towards the main road and the town, and the crisis centre. They had lost him. It would end at the house on the green, where the bloody goat bleated at the end of its bloody tether. He hit the brakes, swung the car through the lanes' bends, pounded the accelerator. Beside him, Chalmers, stinking and dripping, slept.
'Do you like to talk about it?'
'No, Mrs. Perry, I don't like to.'
'I don't want to pry.
'I will say one thing to you only, and then, please, it is a closed book… It was over. Molotovs don't win against tanks. We went back to our homes, which was stupid. I was denounced by people who lived in my street. When the soldiers came, I and others tried to flee over the roofs from my parents' apartment. We were identified by the people in our street. When we were on the roofs they pointed the soldiers towards us. They were the same people I had lived with, played with as a child. They were my friends and my parents' friends, and they showed us to the soldiers… We saw what happened last night. We heard what Mr. Perry said.'
'Thank you, Luisa, thank you from the depths of my heart.'
'What I like to talk about is old furniture, and gardening.'
'It's a good time to get cuttings in,' Meryl said.
'I'd like to help you with that.'
Blake was long gone, back to the house. Bill Davies had dozed on his bed. The room was in chaos, Blake always left it that way, clothes on the floor, towels on the bed. Davies was reminded, and it hurt, of the room his boys shared. He still hadn't rung home, couldn't face it… He climbed off the bed and sluiced some of the tiredness out of his eyes at the basin. He'd call by at the house to collect his car, then search for another dreary little pub to eat in… He reflected that the home where Meryl had been taken in was oft-limits, but he'd have preferred to have gone there, talked to her. She'd kissed him when she'd thanked him, and had cried as he'd held her awkwardly. She'd been so bloody soft and vulnerable. Too long since it had been like that with Lily… He changed his shirt. Couldn't go back to the house in a shirt with Meryl's lipstick on the collar.
He went down the stairs. The door to their living room was half open.
He realized she had been waiting for him, listening for his descent. She came with a quick, scurrying step out of her living room and he could see her husband in his chair by the fire, and the poor bastard had some shame in his eyes. She held the sheet of paper in her fingers. He understood.
She handed him the account.
He didn't argue, and didn't say that he had seen her standing in the shadows behind the mob. He took the banknotes from his pocket and paid her for his bed and for Blake's. He went back up the stairs and packed their bags.
She was waiting by the door.
She said, 'It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. We need the money. We wouldn't be doing anything like bed- and-breakfast unless we had to. It was Lloyds that took us down, we were Names, you know. What my husband had set aside for retirement went to Lloyds. We can't exist without the money. I've nothing against those people, the Perrys, but we have to live… It'll be remembered, long after you've gone, that we put a roof over your head. It won't be forgotten. I'm only trying to limit the damage to our business. A man like you, an educated man, I'm sure you understand.'
The door closed behind him.
He carried the bags down the carefully raked gravel drive. He stopped in the road, saw the light peeping from the curtains where she was, then turned and walked towards the village and the green. He was called on the radio and was told the stalker's report: the man had moved, was lost. He started to run.
He pounded down the road towards the house.
There was the slight scent of damp in the air as Meryl unpacked in the small bedroom.
She took from the suitcase only what she would need for that night, and what Stephen needed.
Simon Blackmore came up quietly behind her.
'She was tortured. What they did to her was unspeakable. Amnesty International members from all over the world bombarded the dictatorship with letters demanding her freedom, but above all it was her own courage that saved her life, and her determination to come back to me.~ 'You make me feel small, and my own problems minuscule. Inevitable, I suppose, but already I regret leaving Frank.'
'I don't think it appropriate that we start a seminar on man's inhumanity, but it's necessary that you understand us. We all have our own opinions and thank God our own consciences to drive us. Enough of that. Now, Meryl, smile, please.'
She did, her first in six days.
'I'm going to talk to Luisa about antiques and gardening there's places round here where you can still get a good old table or a chest at a real knock-down price.
'And I'll talk about wine, and downstairs there is a bottle open and waiting.'
'So, you've lost him.'
Cox was hurrying, and for once ignored his habits: didn't go to his office first to shed his coat, smooth his hair and straighten his tie. Straight to the central desk in the work area. He had been called from dinner.
'Bloody marvelous. What else have you got?'
He was the man in charge, and he threw the responsibility of failure at his subordinates.
'Thought there were a few things I could rely on, wrong again, thought I could rely on you not to lose him.'
