it was, he swayed and half stumbled, but managed to stay on his feet as his shoulder swung back hard against the car. His pulse was racing as he struggled with the rear door to look for his hat. He leaned into the relative cool of the back seat and fumbled with his panama and, resting there a few seconds, began to feel better. The episode had taken less than fifteen seconds. Hammer, who was on the other side of the car, saw nothing.
The two men stepped away from the road, marvelling. The heat created a form of synaesthesia. It was loud, vulgar, it towered over them, its weight pressed down on their heads, and it leaped up from the ground and struck their faces. Who would believe that a photon had no mass?
'Here it is,' Beard cried, miming triumph with a raised clenched fist to disguise his strange turn and reassure himself with the sound of his own voice that he was still the same man. 'This is the power!'
'All power to the power!' Hammer said. 'But I've had enough.'
Hammer got back in the car, behind the wheel, and that was a relief, Beard thought as he climbed in beside him. He was still too shaky to drive. Now they were travelling close to eighty and in less than half an hour were through Hachita and Playas, then crossing the Continental Divide below the Pyramid Mountains, in Hidalgo County, in the boot heel of the state. Their site was barely an hour away, on the far side of Lordsburg, and as they got nearer they became noisy and jaunty, more like country boys on their way to a hoedown than men in their sixties with awesome responsibilities. They sang 'The Yellow Rose of Texas', the nearest to a cheerful song about New Mexico that they knew. The way had been long and hard, they had travelled together uncomfortably, sometimes miserably in the Middle East, and tiringly through the American South-West. The lab work and the office work had driven them apart at times, and now, finally, they were about to share their secret, the ancient secret of plants, and astound the world with their version of cheap, clean and continuous energy. For old times' sake, and because it was their favourite spot, they turned south at the Animas junction and pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Panther Tracks cafA© and parked right beside the local sheriff's patrol car.
Hammer had mythologised Animas as the friendliest rural community in the States. The day it acquired sidewalks, he said, he would stop coming. The cafA© – the finest west of the Mississippi – was a white painted shed with few windows. Stepping out of the heat of the early afternoon, they paused in the doorway to let their eyes adjust. The sheriff and another cop were in quiet conference over mugs of coffee and were the only customers. In the Panther Tracks you did not order what you wanted, but what was available. Today it was pancakes and bacon. The coffee was the specially weak brew favoured across the American South. While they waited, Beard took out his palmtop. It had absorbed new messages that morning in the hotel, but he had not yet opened them. What caught his attention straight off was the name of P. Banner, his fifth ex-wife, Patrice, now married to a cosmetic dentist, Charles, who doted on her almost as much as Beard had nine years ago. She was briefly a headmistress before producing three babies in four years. And all those times she had told Beard that she never wanted children. Not his, anyway. Interesting, that Charles was short, plump and had even less hair than Beard and was two years older. As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.
A year ago he had bumped into her in Regent's Park with her son, a delicate five-year-old with girlish curls. She was friendly, and he thought she was still beautiful. They sat on a bench and chatted for fifteen minutes. By devious means, Beard managed to pose the one question on his mind. Was she still an unfaithful wife? Yes, she might be, was her equally devious implication, but he did not stand a chance, if that was what he meant.
Dear Michael, This might not be news to you, but in case it is you should know that five weeks ago, Rodney came out of prison. He tried to get in touch with me. He has all sorts of mad ideas I won't begin to describe. Charles's lawyer went to court and got a prohibitive-steps order that means he'll be arrested if he phones or writes or comes within 500 yards of our house. Now I've just heard from friends of friends that he's gone to the States to look for you. Perhaps he wants to thank you personally for giving evidence against him at his trial! Anyway, I think you should be warned. It's half-term tomorrow and we are all off to the Shetlands in the pouring rain. All best, Patrice.
Yes, that Turnip at the Camino Real hotel. It was one of the quaint decencies of English law that well-behaved murderers served only half their terms. An internet search on Beard's name would lead to Lordsburg easily enough, and to the site. So what? Despite the air conditioning, he felt the pricking sensation of sweat forming above his upper lip, and a tightness across his chest that caused a pain at the base of his throat. The pancakes came, twenty in each stack, the friendly lady said, and a pitcher of maple syrup to douse them with, a pile of streaky bacon six inches high, and a top-up of coffee of palest brown.
'Nirvana!' Hammer said, banging his hands together, still in the mood that had just deserted Beard.
He had always known this moment must come, but he had grown used to knowing it, and he had thought there was a good chance that Tarpin would serve his full term, and that time would dilute everything, and prison weaken him, and that, after all, it was Patrice who obsessed him, that she was the one who did for him at the trial. In fact, Beard's true accomplishment, a masterstroke of self-persuasion, was to half believe that Tarpin, because he was violent, because he had been tried and found guilty and was in prison with other guilty men, was tainted by association, and was indeed guilty, and not only that, but he knew it and was resigned to his fate. Beard, after all, had killed no one, and his story in court was unarguable, his witness from the Institute of Physics impeccable. As the years had passed, those events, on the morning he had returned from the Arctic, had begun to appear dreamlike, unprovable, without consequences. But lying below these appearances, like a stratum of impervious rock, were other assumptions, no, certainties, that in his busy life he had managed not to dwell on. Just as Beard had dreaded that the police and Patrice would assume that he, the jealous husband, had murdered Aldous, so Tarpin was bound to think so too. Who else would want to frame him with the tools from his bag? So what did an unjustly imprisoned violent man, working out his bitter rage in the prison gym every day for eight years, do on his release? No shortage of cheap flights to Dallas.
As long as the sheriff and his friend were there, on the next table, Beard felt safe. All the same, when the cafA© door swung open with a bang against its frame, he started, and the tightness round his chest intensified. It was a boisterous group of four local teenagers, three boys and a girl, wanting Cokes. The presence of two cops did not subdue them. They greeted each other like family members. Perhaps two armed policemen could do nothing against Tarpin. He might be ready to kill Beard in full view, and spend the rest of his life in the cells, morbidly content with a settled score. No shortage of handguns in this part of the world, and as easily purchased as fishing tackle.
'Off your food, Chief?' Hammer had finished his stack. 'Bad news from home?'
'No, no,' Beard said automatically, though even as he said it, he saw below Patrice's name a message marked urgent from Melissa. 'Just something I need to sort out. But I'm not hungry. It's too hot. Have mine.'
He pushed his plate across and Toby started in on his twenty-first pancake as Beard, after a half-minute's hesitation, opened Melissa's message. He supposed he should read it before he was killed.
'Michael, phone me, please. I need to talk to you about the other night.'
The other night? He struggled with this. Then he remembered Terry, the symphonic lover. She had dumped Terry, or she was marrying him. Beard could not decide at that moment which he would have preferred. If the latter, he would hide in Darlene's trailer. Tarpin would be no match for her. Or he would kill them both. He was not thinking straight, and he was in no condition for a matters-of-the-heart exchange with Melissa. He never would be. He scrolled through the names on the other twenty-seven messages – all but one was work- related, most in the pure, exalted domain of artificial photosynthesis. He opened the one from Darlene.
'Come quick! Something to tell ya!!!'
He did not deserve these distractions. They were encircling him, women, an Albuquerque lawyer, a north-London criminal, the unquiet cells of his own body, in a conspiracy to prevent him making his gift to the world. None of this was his fault. People had said of him that he was brilliant, and that was right, he was a brilliant man trying to do good. Self-pity steadied him a little. He and Toby were due to meet the engineers for a final inspection of the site that afternoon. Then Beard would give a speech to the assembled team. They should get on. But to drive towards Lordsburg was to drive towards Tarpin. The sight of Hammer's pancakes, or rather, the vision of him eating so many, doused in syrup, topped with the partially burned strips of the flesh and fat of pigs, sickened him. Muttering an excuse, he went through the cafA© to the men's room, believing that he might be able to think more clearly if he could be sick. He stood waiting, slightly stooped, like a diligent waiter, over the porcelain bowl. How sparkling clean it was, just when a little disgust, the chocolate arabesque of another man's
