‘I’m sorry about your car . . .’ I said.
He did explode.
‘Bugger the car. It’s only a fucking car.’
I was too surprised to be surprised.
‘And I’m sorry about Pat . . . Corporal Tobin.’
‘Ah.’ He held the glass up to the light, and squinted through the amber liquid. That’s something that men, in particular, do when they don’t know what to say next. Women don’t have that problem.
‘Yes. Poor Pat. He’s been with me since Suez.’
‘I know. I was there with you.’
‘So you were . . . so you were. Did you see the GC who got him?’
I picked up the clue fairly quickly. Watson and Collins must have cooked up a story between them.
‘No, we were just getting out of the car when it happened. It was over in seconds. Collins’s woman got a few rounds off in the general direction. I don’t think she hit anyone, although she’s very good.’
‘I know . . . and this hermit chappie? Involved?’
‘No, nothing like. He fought for Pat’s life afterwards.’ I’ve told you before. When you lie to someone you like, it’s important to do it well.
‘Did Corporal Tobin say anything?’
I cast my mind back for anything Pat had ever said to me.
‘He wanted to say sorry to someone called Mary Walters, but I think in his mind he had gone back to being a teenager again. We’d better forget it.’
‘Fine by me. Both parents deceased, no siblings, so it will be a service funeral at Wayne’s Keep in a few days. You’ll be there?’
‘Of course. My duties permitting.’
‘Your duties will permit. From now on you won’t have much more to do. You can clock on to Ibn Saud occasionally so we can verify that the system’s up and running. Apart from that, Cyprus is your oyster, as long as you keep out of trouble. I plan to send you home in a few weeks anyway. Cheers.’ He drained a quarter-pint of brandy in a oner.
‘Cheers, sir.’ I sipped mine. What I was thinking was, That was quick. All of a sudden they wanted to get rid of me. Get me off the island perhaps, before anyone started asking questions. I sipped my drink because Watson looked determined to get drunk, and that worried me. Just as the words the system had worried me. You noticed them of course. He splashed himself another drink. Something else was coming.
‘You have a son Carlo, don’t you? Mother called Grace? Grandfather Lord So-and-So-Something-Baker, the arms manufacturer? Trust you to keep bad company.’ I half rose from the chair, but Watson said, ‘Bloody well sit down, Charlie, and now do what you’re told. Swallow your drink.’ I did both. He poured me another whopper.
When I had my breathing back under control, and decided that I didn’t need to cry until I was on my own, I asked him, ‘What?’ And then, more sensibly, ‘What’s happened to Carlo?’
These events happen to all of us, don’t they? It’s the ordained way of things. I’m sure you’ve been there. A million things tear through your mind all at once, and there’s usually a face in the middle of them. Grief hits you like an atom bomb.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘What then?’
‘His mother’s been killed.’
Time stops.
‘Grace?’
‘Yes.’
It was as if all of the air had been squeezed from my lungs, then pumped in, and then squeezed out again. I felt almost physically sick. Words, facts began to slot together in my head.
‘Not Carlo?’
‘No. Grace.’ He looked confused.
I had a few sips of the brandy. Didn’t taste it. Then I said, ‘Thank God for that,’ and immediately felt like the worst kind of traitor.
Watson said, ‘You look a bit pale, old man. Would you like to get some air? Come back in a min?’
‘Yes. Good idea.’
I walked up and down the dusty road outside his ridiculous wooden cabin. Fiona came out and walked with me, not saying a word. We must have looked odd because she towered over me.
For three years I’d feared I might have shot and killed Grace Baker. I had loved her, but she got mixed up with the Stern Gang in Israel and we’d ended up on opposite sides. Funnily enough it had been quite like Thirdlow’s shooting of Pat. Grace had shot at me, and I returned fire almost without thinking about it. She’d got two shots in at me first, and had winged me. What had Thirdlow said about the scrap at the bridge? Something like, If I have to talk to God about that fight I think you’ll find we were morally ahead. Is that what I was supposed to believe?
Finding out she’d been alive all this time, but was now dead, was like being a child who’d been offered something wonderful, only for it to be snatched back when I reached for it. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t want her. I just didn’t want her dead. I’d always harboured the hope that I could introduce Carly to his mother one day.
Back inside, I sat in front of Watson again, and was prepared to listen.
‘First of all, are they sure it’s her?’ I asked. ‘Grace can be a bit of a slippery fish.’
‘Yes. They’re sure. Her parents identified her – there’s no mistake. It was Lord Baker who asked the Foreign Office to find and notify you. It’s taken a few days, I’m sorry about that.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘She was in Greece. No one knows what she was doing there. The signal hinted she had kept some pretty rum company in the last few years. She married some sort of gangster in Israel – did you know that?
‘She did it to get a passport, and divorced him a year later.’
‘Anyway, she was shot and robbed in an old open-air theatre she was visiting. It was late evening, and the other tourists had left. They shot her
