them.
She sat with her mug of tea and her shame and her despair.
'Now then, Mrs Bissett, can we get on?'
His elbows were out over the kitchen table. He overwhelmed the chair on which Frederick usually sat. If he had come through the door at that moment, her husband, into her home that was being wrecked, she might have taken a kitchen knife to him.
'When did you first know, Mrs Bissett, that your husband was a traitor?'
But, he was her husband…
'Come on now, Mrs Bissett, I don't wish to be unpleasant, but my inescapable duty now is to minimise the damage your husband can do to this country. I need answers, and I need them quickly. It would be very nice, Mrs Bissett, if we could sit down in your lounge, make some small talk, and eventually ease round to the business of my visit. But that's not possible. I am in charge of security at A. W. E. and from the point of view of the national interest, that is the most sensitive base in Britain. So I don't have time to mess around. Believe me, I get no pleasure seeing what is happening to you and your children and your home, but I will have answers, and fast.'
He was her husband, and she had chosen him, for better and for worse…
' H o w long has Dr Bissett been in the pay of the Iraqi Government?'
She had told him that he owed them loyalty. She looked into the slug's face across the table.
' M r s Bissett, if you do not co-operate then it will come a great deal harder for you, and a great deal harder for your children.'
He had said that what he did was for her, and for their boys, whatever anybody would say…
'Where is he?'
'I don't have to answer questions, Mrs Bissett.'
There was her brittle and frightened laugh. 'Don't you know where he is?'
'That's other people's work, to find him. My work is to close down the damage he has done to A.W.E… You're an educated woman, Mrs Bissett, I don't need to spell out to you how intolerably unstable a world it could be if people like the Iraqis can buy their way into the nuclear club… What did he take with him?'
'I have nothing to say to you.'
'Did he take papers with him?'
'1 have nothing to say.'
'It's the worst sort of traitor, Mrs Bissett, your greedy little rat.'
'Nothing.'
The eyes of the Security Officer were beaded at her. 'I suppose that he thought he had a grievance, was that it? There are 5000 people working at the Establishment. Life is not roses for all of them, for some of them, life is damned hard. They soldier on, they don't believe there is an alternative, they weather their problems. Your husband is unique in the history of the Establishment, not for having a sense of grievance, nor for finding life hard. He is unique in that, the greedy little rat, he took foreign gold, and he betrayed every trust that had been put in him.'
She shook her head, she had nothing to say.
She thought that her life was destroyed. She thought that her children would struggle into manhood before they could shrug off the disgrace brought to them by their father. She heard a floorboard above them, in the bathroom, splinter and break. She heard a cackle of laughter.
She scraped her chair round, she faced the door. She thought of the man at Debbie's party who had been called Colt. Her back was to the Security Officer. She thought of the eyes of Colt, blue and cold. She thought of the man who had taken her husband from her.
The voice behind her intoned, 'You are making life harder for yourself, Mrs Bissett.'
She turned and spat, 'What did you do for him? What did any of you do for him, ever? When he cried for help, which of you answered?'
She would not say another word. She would sit through the rest of the evening while her home around her reverberated with the search.
It was for her that he had done it, that is what her husband had said, for her and for their boys.
She would sit for the whole of the rest of the evening not hearing the questions of the Security Officer, not listening to the breaking of her home, and she would stare out of the window in the kitchen door into the blackness of the night.
He had taken a position in the shadow under the old kitchen-garden wall, very near where he had crossed it with James so few hours ago. There was an owl calling in the oak beyond the wall, and before it had settled onto a perch close to the ivy drape of the main trunk, he had seen the white silent wing flap as it had swooped close to him. He had cowered from the bird, but now the bird with the haunting call was his company. Erlich who was hidden by the wall of a kitchen garden and the silver-white owl on the perch above him, watched the Manor House together. It was good to have the owl there. He thought that when the owl went, flew away in fear, then he would know that Colt had come back to the Manor House. There was a light on the stairs. He could see no other fight in the house, and he had seen no movement. For comfort, and because his spirits were so low, he said to himself:
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
And the verses were short comfort. His mind turned, was driven to those whom he had destroyed by that ambition to climb the success ladder. James Rutherford was dead and pretty Penny Rutherford was bereaved. And he would have lost the respect, so important to him, of Dan Ruane.
Snap out of it, Bill. Stop whining and get the job done.
It was, to Bissett, madness.
He thought they were all yobs in the pub, louts, all of them except for the old man who was little better than a tramp, and except for the girl. It was quite ridiculous to have gone into the pub.
Colt stood with his back to the open fire, and the old man with the rough torn trousers and the winter overcoat held together at the waist with baling twine was sitting. All the rest were standing, and the pub bar was alive with their talk, country accents, and their obscenities and their excitement and their laughter. It was the court of King Colt. He stood in front of the fire, a pint glass in his hand, the handle of the Ruger pistol bulging from his belt and the fat shape of the silencer tautening his trousers below his hip. Sheer madness.
The girl was pretty. He noticed that. He did not often think that a girl was pretty. But there was something extravagant and untamed about this girl, and the rich red of her hair was thrown back long on her shoulders, and he could see blood stains with the dirt on her fingers, and there were down feathers hooked to the thread of her sweater, and her boots scattered mud on the flagstone floor. She had kissed Colt when they came in and held his body and squeezed herself against him. He watched the girl… The girl was moving among them, and each in turn, with the play-acting of reluctance, was adding to the rolled wad of bank notes in her blood-stained, dirt-stained hands.
Of course, they needed the money. The money was vital to them. The money was for their ferry tickets, but Colt had said in the car that their time was short. They should have taken the money in the car park, not switched off the engine, taken the money and gone, made for the coast. She had been round all of the men… how was it possible that these yobs and louts had so much money in their hip pockets? And the old man who looked like a tramp took? 1 0 notes out of a tobacco tin and put them in the girl's hands. Bissett watched her as she went to the bar, and he heard the tinkle bell as the till sprung open, and the man behind the bar gave her more.
She passed the money to Colt. They were all applauding, all of the yobs and louts. This was their hero. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed… None of them looked at him as he stood beside the door. He had refused a drink.
