'Hey, there.'
There was a faint rattle, metal being drawn across metal. There was the slight sound, a light and muffled drum beat.
Miss Worthington turned.
She thought the man was drunk.
It was the middle of the day, and the man reeled, staggered.
That's what had happened to her street, drunks in the middle of the day. She stepped out into the road. The man could barely stand. She would cross over.
The man fell.
She saw the man on the pavement, beside the driver's door of the taxi, and he was writhing, a thrashing fish. She saw the blood across the grey white of the man's shirt.
She saw two little girls, nicely dressed, running up the steps to the nearest house, starting to beat at the paint-scraped wooden door.
She saw the man with the fat-barrelled gun held out from his shoulder. She saw the man with the gun shoot again at the man on the pavement. She was a dozen paces from the man with the gun, and she heard nothing. She saw his wrists jump from the recoil. She saw the man on the pavement shudder, and the thrashing cease.
She saw that the man with the gun had on his head a woollen cap.
She saw that the cap was tilted. She saw the splash of short fair hair.
The man with the gun turned. Eyes meeting. The eyes of a killer
… and the eyes, masked by heavy Health Service spectacles, of a spinster in her 8ist year. There was a moment, God's truth, she would not forget it, when the man with the gun seemed to smile at her, God's truth and she did not trifle with that.
She saw him run.
As he ran she saw the man working the gun into the front of his overalls, and she saw him also, with his free hand, drag the woollen cap back down across his forehead.
The Chihuahua strained on its narrow leather lead to be clear of the shooting, and the shouting, and the crying of the little girls. The vet had said that the dog's heart was weak and that the dog should not be over- excited.
She picked up her dog, put it under her arm, and walked briskly to her home.
Safe in her own hallway. Miss Worthington bolted the front door, turned the master key. She could not bear the thought ol returning to the street, going to the shop, to get the tin of dog food for her chihuahua's midday meal. She was in her first-floor sitting room, secure in her easy chair, when she heard the first sirens, saw the first police cars turn into her street.
It hadn't been real. It was like a disagreeable dream and she wasn't going to have anything more to do with it. She turned her armchair away from the window.
The body was gone. The blood was on the pavement. The children had been taken upstairs. The growing crowd was a hundred yards back, behind the white tape. The discharged cartridge cases were in the roadway and the gutter, close to the back wheel of the taxi.
The taxi driver said, 'You tell me he was shot, he looked like he'd been shot. I didn't hear no shooting. I heard a man running, but I ain't seen nothing.'
Of course, they started with a house to house, but it was the sort of street where most of the flats, bedsitters, were empty during the day. When a constable knocked on one door, at the extreme end of the street, he heard the distant yapping of a dog, but no one came to the door. He presumed the dog must have been left alone in the house. At the other extreme of the street, Mr Patel was able to confirm that a man had been working the ptrvions day, and that morning, on the Ford Capri that was still there, still with the bonnet raised, still with a plastic bag on the battery, No, Mr Patel was very sorry, no, he had not seen the face of the man who worked on the car. When Mr Patel had passed, the previous evening and that morning, the man's head and shoulders had been underneath the car, and no, he had not come into the shop at all.
Later, an Anti-Terrorist Branch detective would tell his Inspector, 'Middle of the day, well-used street, and no bugger saw anything, not even the little kiddies, nothing that's half a description. It's hard to bloody credit… '
Just about the time they had seen the signpost, the rain had started in earnest.
Erlich's first impression was that this place was closed to outsiders. They drove the length of the village. Rutherford was muttering something about a by-pass always changing a country community, as if he felt the need to apologise for the place. Erlich said that he wanted to walk.
Rutherford said that he would give him a 20-minute start, then drive back through the village and collect him.
Erlich took his raincoat off the back seat, the heavy Burberry that he had paid a fortune for in Rome. He shrugged into the coat. He walked.
Small houses of grey and weathered stone on which the lichen had fastened; small windows to the small houses, some of them mullioned; gutters overflowing because they were clogged with leaves; tiny front gardens flattened by the ravages of the winter.
He thought the houses, on the road, were low-set, as if for pygmies. A tractor powered past, pulling a trailer loaded with silage rings – shit – had splashed straight through the puddle round the silted-up culvert. Godammit! Mud on his Burberry, on his trousers, all over his shoes… Past a bigger garden piled high with abandoned cars. Past a small shop where there were farmers' boots and garden forks and rakes stacked outside despite the rain, and stickers in the window for frozen foods. Past a house that was larger, set back from the road, beyond a lawn on which the rain made ponds, and he saw the flash of an old woman's face at a window and then the falling of a lace curtain. Past the entrance to a farmyard rutted deep in soft mud, and he could see the slipped roofing of the barns where the fallen tiles had been replaced by corrugated iron. Past a gateway, and the wide gate had long ago subsided, and the driveway was leaf-scattered and weeded, and there was a house way back behind beech trees and the trunks of the trees were running green with water. There was the jabber of a car horn in his ear. He was looking up the driveway, trying to make out the shape of the house through the trees. It was the biggest house he had seen so far in the village.
He damn well jumped. If he hadn't jumped then the car would have hit him. He jumped for the pavement and a small car swept past him. He saw a woman in the rich blue of a nursing uniform at the wheel. She didn't acknowledge him. She drove up the drive. Past more small, stone houses. A man came towards him.
The man was elderly, bearded, bow-legged in his farm boots, and his old army greatcoat was fastened at the waist with twine, and the man carried a broken shotgun across his forearm. The man didn't give way, and Erlich stepped into the road to let him pass. Past the pub, and the noise of laughter and the music of a jukebox and the bell chime of gaming machines. He was at the end of the village. He stood beside a muddy soccer pitch.
The rain dripped down his neck. His shoes and his feet were soaked. His raincoat was heavy with damp.
Colt's village.
He heard the car squelch to a stop behind him.
They drove back the way they had come. They stopped in the next village two miles away. They stopped at the modern bungalow that was the home and office of the local police constable.
He was Desmond, he was young and bright and flattered that a man had come from the Security Service to see him, and agreeably surprised that a Field Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ended up in his stockinged feet in his front room. Desmond's wife brought them tea and a sponge cake that was still warm.
The rain drummed on the windows.
Erlich had out his ballpoint and his notebook.
Desmond said, 'I've never seen the lad. I was posted here barely a week after he went missing. But what you have to understand is that he's the biggest thing in these villages, so he has to be the biggest thing in my life. What I normally do is vandalism, poaching, driving without insurance, petty opportun-ist larceny. Master Tuck faces Attempted Murder, Arson… and if you're here then, I suppose, it has to be worse than that. ..
Start with the name. Round here he's Colt. Not just because of his initials, but because of what he is, young, unbroken, wild.
He represents something exciting to this community, two fingers to the authorities. O. K., so he was involved with the Animal Liberation Front, serious crimes. What I hear, people talk to me, took a time but they do, is that the Front was just a vehicle for him, that there were no deeply held principles in it, more that he was in love with the
