danger, the risk of arrest. I'm not a psychologist, but I read, and I would say that attitude gives him a colossal arrogance.
' T h e Serious Crime Squad come down, and sometimes I'm told when they're on my patch, most times I'm not, they keep the Manor House under observation, on and off, but they've not picked up any scent of him. Recently, they've been more often.
His mother was big in his life and she's, well, she's not long to live, it seems. It's sad, actually, she's a very respected woman in the village. His father's respected, but in a different way. She's respected and she's loved. If Colt knew, then he'd be back, but it looks like he never made contact from the day he disappeared, so he won't know. He had a girl here too, but I doubt that meant too much, as wild as him.'
They had drained the teapot, finished the cake and Erlich offered his thanks. He understood more, much more, of the man who had looked into Harry Lawrence's face, and shot him dead.
They booked into a guesthouse on the far side of Warminster, and they had time to get into the High Street before the shops closed to buy Erlich a pair of Wellington boots, and a rainproof coat that wasn't so City, and a hat.
'Absolutely out of the question.'
'It's not as if I'd ever touch on…'
' W e do not go outside and give lectures.'
' D o I have to spell out to you how important this is to me?'
' D o you think you are the only one who is asked to give lectures? Myself, I get a dozen invitations a year… Basil, he must get 50. But one doesn't give it a thought. One has no choice.'
'But this is absurd, it wouldn't be about my work…'
'Frederick, you are being truly stupid. Anything you talk about is of interest to outsiders, because of where you are employed. And how can you lecture about anything other than your work? What have you the chance to know about other than your work?'
'That's offensive, Reuben, and your attitude altogether…'
'Frederick, I am very busy, I have lost a day in meetings…
I appreciate that your vanity was stirred by this invitation, and of course I understand your regret at having to decline it, but frankly I think your friend is a little jejune. He knows perfectly well what the rules here have to be.'
'Is that your last word?'
' M y last word. Good night, Frederick.'
He had allowed himself to hope. He had looked forward to a day in the sun, the simple admiration of colleagues, young scientists. There were tears of frustration in his eyes when he was back in his office and scrawling his letter of regrets in longhand to his former tutor. He was a prisoner in the Atomic Weapons Establishment. The best years of his mind he'd sacrificed to this godforsaken place and precious little did he have to show for it.
7
He sat in the old chair beside the bed. It had not been recovered since the black cat had massacred the upholstery, and the black cat had been buried under one of the beeches more than ten years. Colt's fingers played with the short lengths of frayed yarn.
His mother was still sleeping,
The sight of the lost flesh on her face had shocked him because he had not, quite, stopped to consider how he might look.
Getting there, that had been his aim, Finding her alive, his only hope.
He was very still. His breathing was regular and matched the breathing of his mother
They had done him well, The organisation had been better this time than in Athens. An empty stree, just the old woman. That Wasn't organisation, that was luck. The old woman had been looking not at him but at her dog. The taxi drivr hadn't been looking at him either, head down in his change bag. A sprint to the end of the street, the cut through to the footpath, the lock-up garage. The small Bedford van, and the bag with the change of clothes. He had seen no one on th footpath, and no one saw him go into the lock up garage, he woukl have sworn on that. Driving the Bedford van along the fringe of the capital, south to west, over Putney Bridge, hitting the small streets of Fulham, and all the instructions had been precise. A second lock-up garage behind an arcade of shops, The van into the second lock-up garage The chance to squirm out of the overalls, strip off the rubber gloves, discard the woollen cap, get into the new set of clothes, put the pistol in the pocket of the overalls in the bag. On the other side of the yard from the second lock-up garage had been the Escort.
He had driven away. He had felt a new man. He reckoned that when they were sure he was clear they would send someone down to drive away the Bedford van, to retrieve the Ruger, and return it to the Embassy arsenal. He had driven out of London on the M4, past Heathrow, and then taken the Hungerford turning, and then turned again for Marlborough. He had slept after he had killed the man on the road that led arrow-straight south of Perth, He had slept, back in the apartment on the Haifa Street Housing Project, after he had killed two men in Athens.
He had come off the Marlborough to Devizes road, bumped onto a mud track in a forestry plantation and slept so that he could be at his most alert when he approached home. He had slept while the evening had closed on the afternoon, until night had overtaken the evening.
There was a grey light seeping between the heavy drape curtains at the window. The room had been his childhood refuge. He had always come to this room when he was small and his father made a play at disciplining him.
The light from between the curtains had settled on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece, in an old wooden frame, was the photograph of a bearded man wearing a battledress blouse and with a neckerchief knotted at his throat. His much younger father. It was the photograph that he saw every time he came back to the refuge and safety of this room. When he had been suspended from preparatory school, when he had been expelled from public school, when he had screwed up the Mendip Hunt and the Master of Fox Hounds had called to threaten his father wilh a civil court action, when he had taken the Stanley knife to the great ibex head trophy in the hall and they had wrestled and kicked and bitten on the hall floor, when he had had the call that warned him of the raid on the squat, he had come, each time, to sit in the old chair at his mother's side of the bed and he had seen the photograph of his father. His father had called him, successively, an idiot and a fool and a saboteur and a hooligan and a terrorist. What did his father expect? Colt was his father's son.
The dog stirred, sighed, stretched, lapsed again to sleep across Colt's feet.
The light was spreading in the room. He saw the marks on the carpet. It was the mud from the kitchen garden. It was the way he had always come back to the house when he came in secret.
Through the hole in the kitchen garden wall, where rain and frost had undone the mortar and the stonework, past the ancient privy now cascaded in ivy, to the back door where a spare key was always lodged above a beam and below the slates of the porch.
He heard a door open. He heard his father's first cough of the day. The dog heard his father's tread on the landing and settled closer to Colt's legs.
They were the first down to breakfast, and the first to check out from the guesthouse.
Erlich's Burberry was in the boot of the Astra with his shoes.
He wore the new boots which he now realised were a size too large, and the waterproof coat. Rutherford wore a heavy sweater and ankle-length walking boots.
Once they were off the by-pass, into the lanes, Rutherford drove fast. They surged out and past a lone milk cart. They squirted through the rain puddles in the road. Erlich saw the isolated cottages where the lights were only on upstairs, and he glanced down frequently at the map spread out across his knees.
It was a good time to be calling at Colt's place.
He had gone downstairs and had quietly called the dog and there had been no response. He had looked into the room off the kitchen where the washing machine and the freezer were, and he had seen the empty basket. It was after he had filled the iron kettle and set it on the Aga's hotplate that he saw the mud prints on the kitchen
