“That’s correct.”
“Perhaps we better have a chat, Mr Quayle. There have been one or two problems in London and I have been sent out to guard her.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Not my department,” Pope answered stiffly, “but my brief is to make sure that Mrs Clements is covered until further notice.”
“She has reverted to Morton,” Quayle said absently, his mind racing. Jesus, what is going on? The service putting a bodyguard on Holly?
“How are your instructions coming in?” Quayle asked.
Pope said nothing, which didn’t surprise him. He was now an outsider, and so hadn’t really expected an answer.
“So be it,” he said, “on your way. When you decide to advise me of the nature of the threat to my guest then I might allow you close enough to do your job. Until then, bugger off!”
Pope shrugged. It was a fairly normal reaction. People didn’t like being guarded and normally didn’t see themselves as threatened. He would wait until his first call scheduled for the next day and advise his controller in London of who his body was staying with.
At that moment, Holly stepped smiling onto the veranda, rubbing her hair with a big yellow towel. Pope looked at her carefully, as if logging her features in his memory. She seemed happy enough: no tension, no fear. There was no way she was being held here against her will here, that he could see. She was as safe here as she was with anyone. He remembered Titus Quayle well.
Nodding formally to her, he tipped his hat. “Good Morning, Mr Quayle. Miss Morton.” And, with that, he began to walk back down the hill, his hat and suit incongruous on the rocky steep slope.
“Who was that?” Holly asked brightly.
“Never mind,” Quayle said, “just a man I used to know.” But, as he spoke, his eyes scanned the hill, not seeing its beauty or its majestic fall to the gorge like she did, but seeing the shadows and the caves and outcrops and the places a man could hide, like he had done every day since arriving.
That evening, he talked Holly out of eating in the village and they ate indoors, Quayle making light of the unusual situation by putting a candle on the table and producing a bottle of old Cognac from a dusty box. The atmosphere was tense and he barely drank and Holly noticed that. She also noticed when he rose with the dawn, walked silently to the living room window and looked out across the landscape with a pair of binoculars.
“What’s going on, Ti?” she asked softly. She knew it was no ordinary morning, because it had been no ordinary night. He had lain awake most of it – not with the nightmares, just awake and alert. Now he was tense and preoccupied.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Don’t patronise me…”
He turned and looked her squarely in the eye. “I wouldn’t ever do that,” he said.
“Well, what is going on? Eating up here? Indoors? Awake all night. Now you watching outside with field glasses?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at her.
“I’m not a bloody idiot, Ti! It was that man yesterday, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “He was here looking for you”
She was angry now. “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I know him,” he answered softly.
“What sort of answer is that?” she snapped. Then, with her face blanching, she realised exactly where Quayle knew him from. “Oh God, he’s one of...”
“Yes he is.”
“What does he want with me?”
“He wouldn’t say. His name is Pope. He’s a close protection specialist. What you would call a bodyguard.” Even as he said the word, he knew that he was much more than that. They only put Pope on people who had a bloody good chance of getting killed because someone was after them. “He is rather good at it.”
“A bodyguard. For me? What on earth for?”
“I told him to stay away until he’s prepared to tell us. He’ll have to get authority to do that from London.”
“Someone has probably made a mistake,” she said with forced cheerfulness.
“Yes, possibly,” he agreed, smiling. But his eyes weren’t in on the smile. He had seen Mr Pope up on the hill above the house. He must have been there all night.
It was that afternoon, after they had made love, Quayle lying on the bed with the sheets tangled and damp and scrunched up beneath him, that he knew that he loved her. He was watching Holly wash with water from the big china jug, bars of sunlight filtering through the shutters and striping the shiny glow of sweat on her back, her heavy breasts rising when she lifted the hair off her neck to allow the cool breeze to move over her skin. And he knew, in that moment, that, if anything happened to her, it would be because he was already dead and her God wasn’t in heaven after all.
Adrian Black had spoken with three of his list of people when he began walking back to his car in the NCP. The interviews were long and he had only managed four the day before, but at least he was steadily eliminating names from the list. He had checked for a tail several times that day – and, finding no-one, had stopped taking precautions. So it was Adrian Black’s misfortune that, as he returned to his car that evening, he didn’t notice that he was being followed, not by one man, but by two.
Black took the stairs down into the car park two at a time and so was looking straight down at the steps when he was attacked. A figure loomed up from behind a car, Black getting no more than a fleeting peripheral glimpse, and with lightning reactions his own arm flashed up defensively. But it was too late. The container the man had been carrying crashed into him, and in an instant, there was a searing caustic burning in his face. He tried not to scream as he went down, clawing at the pain as the
