sort of sub-machine gun, a mound of revolvers, boxes of ammunition, a typewriter and what appeared to be grenades. And as he looked he heard the sound of a car outside. It had pulled into the drive and even to his untrained ear it sounded like the Aston-Martin. Cursing himself for not listening to his innate cowardice, Wilt struggled to get back along the plank to the door but the bag was in the way. He banged his head on the rafters above and was about to crawl over the bag when it occurred to him that the submachine gun might be loaded and could well go off if he prodded it in the wrong place. Best get the damned thing out. Again, that was easier said than done. The barrel got caught in the end of the bag and by the time he had disentangled it he could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs below. Too late to do anything now except switch the light off. Leaning forward across the bag and holding the machine gun at arm's length Wilt joggled the switch up with the muzzle before crouching down in the darkness.
Outside in the garden the quads had had a marvellous afternoon with old Mrs de Frackas. She had read them the story about Rikki Tikki Tavi, the mongoose, and the two cobras, and had then taken them into her house to show them what a stuffed cobra looked like (she had one in a glass case and it bared its fangs most realistically) and had told them about her own childhood in India before sitting them down to tea in her conservatory. For once the quads had behaved themselves. They had picked up from Eva a proper sense of Mrs de Frackas' social standing and in any case the old lady's voice had a distinctly firm ring to it or as Wilt had once put it, if at eighty-two she could no longer break a sherry glass at fifty paces she could still make a guard dog whimper at forty. It was certainly true that the milkman had long since given up trying to collect his payment on a weekly basis. Mrs de Frackas belonged to a generation that had paid when it felt so inclined; the old lady sent her cheque only twice a year, and then it was wrong. The milk company did not dispute it. The widow of the late Major-General de Frackas, DSO etc. was a personage to whom people deferred and it was one of Eva's proudest boasts that she and the old lady got on like a house on fire. Nobody else in Willington Road did and it was almost entirely because Mrs de Frackas loved children and considered Eva, in spite of her obvious lack of breeding, to be an excellent mother that she smiled on the Wilts. To be precise, she seldom smiled on Wilt, evidently regarding him as an accident in the family process and one that, if her observation of his activities in the summerhouse of an evening was correct, drank. Since the Major-General had died of cirrhosis or as she bluntly said, hob-nailed liver, Wilt's solitary communion with the bottle only increased her regard for Eva and concern for the children. Being also rather deaf she thought them delightful girls, an opinion that was shared by no one else in the district.
And so this bright sunny afternoon Mrs de Frackas sat the quads in her conservatory and served tea, happily unaware of the gathering drama next door. Then she allowed them to play with the tiger rug in her drawing-room and even to knock over a potted palm before deciding it was time to go home. The little procession went out of the front gate and into Number 9 just as Wilt began his search in the attic. In the bushes on the opposite side of the road the officer whom the Superintendent had warned not to use the radio watched them enter the house and was desperately praying that they would come out again straightaway when the Aston-Martin drove up. Gudrun Schautz and two young men got out, opened the boot and took out several suitcases while the officer dithered but before he could make up his mind to tackle them in the open they had hurried in the front door. Only then did he break radio silence.
'Female target and two males have entered the zone,' he told the Major who was making a round of the SGS men posted at the bottom of the Wilts' garden. 'No present withdrawal of civilian occupants. Request instructions.'
In response the Major threaded his way through the gardens of Numbers 4 and 2 and accompanied by two privates carrying a theodolite and a striped pole promptly set this up on the pavement and began to take sightings down Willington Road while carrying on a conversation with the officer in the hedge.
