A man got out of the van and Maclaren pulled up his binoculars. But in the dim light he could only see that the man was big built. He watched him walk to the porch and try to turn the handle on the big white door. For a moment the man looked up at the first-floor windows and then walked to the corner of the house to be lost in the shadows.
Maclaren lowered the glasses and waited. Fifteen minutes had gone by when he heard the shouting, and a girl screaming, and five minutes later the front door was flung open, and in the bright light from inside the house he saw the girl, and the man from the van. He was holding her by her hair, her head thrown back to ease the pain, and she was whimpering as the man shoved her towards the van. She was wearing a light summer coat and Maclaren could see that she was naked except for the unbuttoned coat. She cried out as the man struck at her face as he bundled her into the passenger seat of the van. Moments later the car turned and backed, obviously deliberately, into the side of the Mustang, and then as its headlights came on he watched it head towards the gate pillars. Then it was bouncing down the pot-holed lane until eventually its red rear lights disappeared.
Looking back at the house, Maclaren saw that the big white door still stood open, the lights from the hallway sending an orange swath across the gravel drive on to the grass below the edge of the small copse. And gradually the silence settled back again. Maclaren turned his watch to the moon and saw that it was only half an hour since the van had appeared.
He waited another half hour but there was no sound from inside the house and the door was still wide open. He slid off his shoes and walked to the edge of the copse, across the gravel path to the steps that led to the door. At the door he brushed the soles of his socks and slid his shoes back on, all the while watching the stairs that he could see facing him on the far side of the hallway.
Slowly and quietly he walked inside. It was a big square hall with a stripped pine floor, and he didn’t notice the small pool of blood until another drop splashed loudly on to the wooden boards. When he looked up he saw the man’s head hanging over the side of the landing between two broken bannisters.
Maclaren walked up the thickly carpeted stairs to the landing and bent down beside the man’s body. He knew from the bleeding that he wasn’t dead, but the blow had exposed the blue-whiteness of his cheekbone and left a deep, open wound above the ear. There was not much blood from the skull wound but a trickle of colourless liquid was accumulating in the dent of the wound itself. The blood was coming from the cheek. Maclaren put his hand on the man’s chest and turned back one eye-lid. Then he stood up and looked around. He wasn’t dead yet but it wouldn’t take long.
He tried all the doors until he found one that was locked and he guessed that that was the room that mattered. It had a double lock set in a shining brass plate, and the door didn’t give as he braced his foot and shoved. He walked back to the bedroom with the light. It came from a pink-shaded bedside lamp that lay on its side on the floor. The girl’s bra, panties and dress were still in a heap beside the bed, and a silk dressing gown hung from a chair by the window. A well-cut light grey suit was draped over a stool in front of a dressing table. There was a bunch of keys in the trousers’ pocket and two brass keys on a ring in the jacket pocket.
When he had unlocked the door he switched on the light and walked inside. The room was almost bare except for a black Yaesu transceiver on a trestle table, its red digital display winking away, two telephones, two Revox tape-recorders and a double-drawer metal filing cabinet. A couple of cheap, folding wooden chairs were propped against a bare wall.
The transceiver was set at receive and as Maclaren flipped up the power supply switch the red digital read-out showed 15206 megacycles and an American was reading a news bulletin at dictation speed in basic English. It was a Voice of America broadcast. Flicking off the switch, Maclaren turned to the filing cabinet. Not only was it not locked but it didn’t have locks, and Maclaren walked over to the window pulling aside the curtains. He knew there would be some form of security for the stuff in the room. A heavy angle-iron frame was screwed to the brickwork and the window frame to prevent the window from opening, a thin loom of wires sprayed out from a rubber suction pad in the centre of the window, and a slightly thicker wire ran down to a metal Klaxon alarm screwed to the floor.
There were no files in the top drawer, just a batch of one-time pads with its adhesive band still wrapped round it, and a microdot reader that looked as if it had never been used.
In the bottom drawer were five standard blue file covers, none of them very thick, and Maclaren lifted them out and opened one of the wooden chairs putting the files beside him on the floor. The first one was marked “Personal” and it was a collection of letters from a doting mother, a whole string of girls from Texas to Teheran, notifications of dividends and correspondence
