'Get off me, you pigs. I'm a police officer. Get your pig-shit hands off me.'
The thought in Famy's mind was immediate. Just two days earlier on the road to Boulogne the police had been waiting for them. Now here, in the supposed 'safe house', the police were again close to him.
'How did they know?' he shouted. 'How did they know we would be here?'
McCoy saw her reaction to what Famy had said, the flick of her head forward to stare at the shadowy face above her. It was that movement that sealed his resolution.
His hands came down, settled on her throat, and tightened.
She tried to speak of drugs and hippies, but the air was already denied her. Then there was nothing, only the sinking, and pressure of the hands and the blackness when she tried to see.
When McCoy had finished he realized that Famy was no longer beside him. It had been easy. In the world in which he moved and fought the penalty for touts was clear-cut. There was coughing in the far corner.
'Pull yourself together, you stupid bugger,' he said. 'Get your things in your bag. We're moving out.'
The house was quiet, at rest, as they went down the stairs, through the door and on to the street.
While McCoy drove, fast and with studied concentration heading south toward the river, Famy sat rock-still beside him. The Arab's mind was moving at pace. It was the first time that he had encountered violent death, and the speed with which life had been crushed from the girl amazed him its simplicity, its suddenness. And the doubts he had felt about McCoy had vanished in those few seconds. When the time came the Irishman too was prepared to kill. Famy knew, and it was a feeling he had not entertained before, that they were now a team. In the darkness of the attic bedroom the links between the two men had been irrevocably joined, and with that his last lingering uncertainties about the success of his mission had gone.
'Where are we going now?' Famy asked.
McCoy did not take his eyes from the road ahead.
'Down into the hills south of London. Into Surrey, where the guns are.'
'And where do we sleep?'
'We sleep rough tonight and tomorrow. We have to ditch this car, get another. Come back to London on Tuesday, probably late. This car will do us for a few hours more, but when the balloon goes up we'll have to have another.'
'How long do you think before they find her?'
'Some time, not immediately. And when they do they'll have the bloody commune on their hands. And they won't make much headway with them.' it was necessary to kill her.' Famy said it quietly, but as a statement.
'Course it bloody was.'
'She knew who we were?' The question again.
'Shouldn't think so.' McCoy sensed the other man's surprise at his answer. He went on. 'Probably there on the drugs scene. Could have been bomb squad and out Provo-hunting. You've got two alternatives. Bluff it out, or the other. And when you start knocking shit out of the girl that narrows it down to the other.'
'How far do we have to go?'
'About another hour and a half. Get some sleep.' It was an instruction. McCoy wanted to drive without chatter in his ear.
Famy closed his eyes. The Irishman, he thought, he would be able to sleep. But with himself there was no possibility of it. As the car jolted its way along the road the image that endlessly repeated itself was of the girl and her eyes that bulged and pleaded, and of the hard calloused fingers on her neck.
But the killing of Doris Lang had not gone entirely unnoticed.
The woman who had nursed her child to sleep a floor below had been unable to sleep herself. She had lain with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The sounds she had heard baffled her at first. There had been bumps on the boards above, a half-stifled scream recognizable as such though short and cut off. There had been hurried footsteps across the floor, then the noise of struggle, then shouts, too muffled to understand. There had been scuffling, indeterminate and difficult to follow, and then quietness before the footsteps came hurriedly past her door.
The main door had slammed and there had been noise on the pavement, and the sound of a car starting up and driving away.
She had clung to the child that slept, not prepared to go and see for herself whatever had been left in the room. It was light before she summoned up the courage, and by then the men had been gone nearly two hours. When she did go, her child left behind on the mattress still curled foetus-like in sleep, her screams, hysterical and piercing, woke the building.
Henry Davies was drinking tea in the police station canteen. It was thick, strong-brewed, laced with sugar, and hot. He could only sip at it, but always regarded his early morning cup as the essential way to end night duty. He had signed off now, but usually spent fifteen minutes in the canteen, waiting for the day shift handlers to come on, to exchange a few words of gossip and police talk with them.
He had heard on his radio of the flap on the far side of the area covered by the station, but a dog had not been required, and he had methodically continued his patrol, checking factory, shop and warehouse doors.
He was sitting on his own when the sergeant came in.
'Lad, the DI's been on the radio. Wants you down Englefield Road. Number one-six-two. Wants you down there as fast as you can.' It was the standard joke in the station that he called everyone under the age of forty 'lad'.
'What for?' Davies asked.
'I don't know,' the sergeant lied, but did it well, and Davies couldn't read it. 'He asked specifically for you. Slip on down there, lad.'
They'd radioed ahead when he drove out of the station yard, and the Detective Inspector was waiting on the steps of the house for him. There were three police cars parked haphazardly at the side of the street, and a small knot of half-dressed onlookers. Davies got out of the car. A constable who stood on the pavement and who knew him looked away.
Then the inspector walked toward him, unshaven, roused from his Sunday morning bed.
'I've bad news, Henry. I'm very sorry… It's Doris.
Some bastard's killed her.'
He stopped, letting the words sink in. He saw the mask of overt self-control slide across the police constable's features.,
'When did it happen?' Davies said.
'Early this morning. We had a call about forty minutes ago. I've identified her. Do you want to go and see her, Henry?'
' There'll be all the cameras there, prints. All the bloody paraphernalia. I don't want to see her like that. Not with them all working round her.' is there somewhere you can go?'
'I'd like to go to her Mum's. Has she been told?'
'Not yet.'
'I'd like to go there, then. Thank you, sir.'
'I'll get someone to drive you round. Fred can come down and pick up your motor, and take your dog home and give it a meal. You can collect him tomorrow.'
'Do you know who did it?'
'I think so. But they're long gone. Two of them. They're telling us a bit inside. More than they usually do.'
The inhabitants of the commune were herded into the main living room on the ground floor while the coffin with Doris Lang's body in it was carried down the stairs to the unmarked hearse. The Detective Inspector watched it go, then walked back into the room. He had spotted the spokesman for the group, older than most, a fragile and defiant figure. He called him out and went with him to the room behind, used as sleeping quarters. Blankets were strewn on the floor in the position they had been left in when the screaming had started.
'You've been helpful, quite helpful, before I was called out. I want it to go on that way.'
The other man looked up at him, without responding.
'The woman who found the body, she tells me two men left after she heard noises upstairs. Some time after half-past four. Who are those two men?'
The man said nothing, but instead spread out his fingers and pushed them through his hair.
