The message gave him a sharp pang of wanting, and he lay in a deep hot bath and thought about her,
remembering small details of conversation and shared experience that suddenly were of inflated value.
While he towelled himself he regarded his image in the steamed mirror with a critical eye. He was lean and hard and burned dark as a desert Arab by the Pacific sun. He watched the play of muscle under the tanned skin as he moved, and he knew that he was as fit and as mentally prepared for action as he had ever been, glad that Magda was safely beyond the reach of Caliph’s talons so that he could concentrate all his energies on what his instincts told him must be the final stage of the hunt.
He went through to his bedroom with the towel around his waist and stretched out on the bed to wait for the cocktail hour in Pat Stride’s rigidly run household.
He wondered what made him so certain that this was the lead which would carry him to Caliph, it seemed so slim a chance and yet the certainty was like a steel thread, and the steel was in his heart.
That made him pause. Once again he went carefully over the changes which had taken place within him since his first exposure to
Caliph’s malignant influence; the fatal miasma of corruption that seemed to spread around Caliph like the poisonous mists from some evil swamp seemed to have engulfed Peter entirely.
He thought again of his execution of the blonde girl at
Johannesburg what seemed like a thousand years before, but with mild surprise realized was months not years ago.
He thought of how he had been prepared to kill both Kingston
Parker and Magda Altmann and realized that contact with violence was brutalizing, capable of eroding the principles and convictions which he had believed inviolate after almost forty years of having lived with them.
If this was so, then after Caliph if he succeeded in destroying him what was there after Caliph? Would he ever be the same man again? Had he advanced too far beyond the frontiers of social behaviour and conscience?
Would he ever go back? he wondered. Then he thought about Magda
Altmann and realized she was his hope for the future, after Caliph there would be Magda.
These doubts were weakening, he told himself. There must be no distractions now, for once again he was in the arena with the adversary. No distraction, no doubts only total concentration on the conflict ahead.
He stood up from the bed and began to dress.
Steven was delighted to have Peter at Abbots Yew again, as Pat had predicted.
He also was tanned from the short stay in Spain, but he had again put on weight, only a few pounds, but it would soon be a serious problem, good food and drink were two of the occupational hazards of success: the most evident but not the most dangerous temptations that face a man who has money enough to buy whatever idly engages his fancy.
Peter watched him covertly during the lunch, studying the handsome head which was so very much like his own, the same broad brow and straight aristocratic nose, and yet was so different in small but significant details, and it was not only Steven’s thick dark mustache.
All right, it’s easy to be wise afterwards, Peter told himself, as he watched his twin brother. Seeing again the little marks, which only now seemed to have meaning. The narrower set of eyes, slightly too close together, so that even when he laughed that deep bluff guffaw of his they seemed still to retain a cold cruel light, the mouth that even in laughter was still too hard, too determined, the mouth of a man who would brook no check to his ambitions, no thwarting of his desires. Or am I imagining it now? Peter wondered. It was so easy to see what you looked for expectantly.
The conversation at lunch dwelt almost exclusively on the prospects for the flat-racing season which had opened at Doncaster the previous weekend, and Peter joined it knowledgeably; but as he chatted he was casting back along the years, to the incidents that might have troubled him more if he had not immediately submerged them under an instinctive and unquestioning loyalty to his twin brother.
There was Sandhurst when Steven had been sent down, and Peter had known unquestioningly that it was unjust.
No Stride was capable of what Steven had been accused of, and he had not even had to discuss it with his brother. He had affirmed his loyalty with a handshake and a few embarrassed muttered words.
“Thank you, Peter. I’ll never forget that,” Steven had told him fervently, meeting Peter’s gaze with steady clear eye.
Since then Steven’s rise had been meteoric through the post-war years in which it seemed almost impossible for even the most able man to amass a great fortune, a man had to have special talents and take terrible risks to achieve what Steven had.
Now sitting at his brother’s board, eating roast saddle of lamb and the first crisp white asparagus shoots of the season flown in from the Continent, Peter was at last covering forbidden ground, examining loyalties which until then had been unquestioned. Yet they were straws scattered by the winds of time, possibly without significance. Peter transferred his thoughts to the present.
“Stride,” Magda’s control at Mossad in Tel-Aviv had said.
Just the two names: “Cactus Flower” and “Stride.” That was fact and not conjecture.
Down the length of the luncheon table Sir Steven Stride caught his brother’s eye.
“Wine with you, my dear fellow.” Steven lifted the glass of claret in the old salute.
“Enchanted, I’m sure.” Peter gave the correct reply, a little ritual between them, a hangover from Sandhurst days, and Peter was surprised at the depth of his regret. Perhaps Caliph has not yet succeeded in corrupting me entirely, Peter thought, as he drank the toast.
After lunch there was another of their brotherly rituals.
Steven signalled it with a jerk of the head and Peter nodded agreement. Peter’s old army duffle coat was in the cupboard below the back staircase with his Wellingtons, and he and Steven changed into rough clothing sitting side by side on the monk’s bench in the rear entrance hall as they had so often before.
Then Steven went through into the gunroom, took down a Purdey
Royal shotgun from the rack, and thrust a handful of cartridges in his coat pocket.
“Damned vixen has a litter of cubs somewhere in the bottoms,
playing merry hell with the pheasant chicks—” he explained as Peter asked a silent question. “It goes against the grain a bit to shoot a fox but I must put a stop to her haven’t had a chance at her yet-” and he led the way out towards the stream.
It was almost a formal beating of the bounds, the leisurely circuit of the estate boundaries that the two brothers always made on
Peter’s first day at Abbots Yew, another old comfortable tradition which allowed them time to have each other’s news and reaffirm the bond between them They sauntered along the riverbank, side by side, moving into single file with Steven leading when the path narrowed and turned away from the stream and went up through the woods.
Steven was elated by the success of his visit to Spain, and he boasted of his achievements in obtaining another parcel of prime seaftont property on which to build the new golf course and to extend the hotel by another five hundred rooms.
“Now’s the time to buy. Mark my words, Peter we are on the verge of another explosion.”
“The cut-back in oil price is going to help, “I’d expect, Peter agreed.
“That’s not the half of it, old boy.” Steven turned to glance back over his shoulder and he winked knowingly at Peter. “You can expect another five per cent cut in six months, take my word on it. The Arabs and the Shah have come to their senses.” Steven went on swiftly,
picking out those types of industry which would benefit most dramatically from the reduction in crude prices, then selecting the leading companies in those sectors. If you have a few pounds lying idle, that’s where to put it.” Steven’s whole personality seemed to change when he spoke like this of power and great wealth. Then he came out from behind the fao de of the English country squire which he was usually at such pains to cultivate; the glitter in his eyes was now undisguised and his bushy mustache bristled like the whiskers of some big dangerous predator.
He was still talking quickly and persuasively as they left the woods and began to cross the open fields towards the ruins of the Roman camp on the crest of the low hills.
