that…What did you call it?”
Danny felt his knees weaken. “You
“So have I,” said the voice, casually. “Very good ones, too. I wrote them myself, just now. I think it’s time you came home.”
Suddenly Danny noticed that the hair on the back of his neck was beginning to rise. “Just a moment,” he said. Then his phonecard ran out.
The phonecard revolution, like the French, American and Russian revolutions, is a phased phenomenon. In Phase One, they scrapped all the corn-boxes and replaced them with cardboxes. In Phase Two, whenever that comes about, they will start providing outlets where you can buy phonecards. We may not see it, nor our children, nor yet our children’s children, but that is really beside the point. Every revolution causes some passing inconvenience to the individual. Ask Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
As he wandered through the streets (or rather street) of West Bay in search of an open Post Office, Danny was thinking hard. So there was going to be a cover-up, was there? A cover-up of the original cover-up. But what was this cover-up really covering up for? Not the original cover-up, surely; that was already well and truly covered, and nobody in his right mind would risk blowing the cover for anything so trivial as the cost of a few hours’ helicopter hire. The only possible explanation was that this rather obvious warning to lay off was designed to get him off the story he was on; in other words, it was a sublimated or double-bluff cover-up. Despite his natural feelings of anxiety, Danny couldn’t help licking his lips. It was the sort of situation he had been born to revel in, and revel in it he would, just as soon as he could get somewhere where he could sit down and get all the complications straight in his mind with the aid of a few charts and Venn diagrams. Then he would see about helicopters.
He found the camera crew in the Rockcliffe Inn, which had opened again shortly after Jane and Vanderdecker had left. Soon it would close again.
“Right,” said Danny briskly, “drink up, we’d better get on with it while there’s still some light left.”
They ignored him, but he was used to that. He changed a five-pound note, found the telephone in the corner of the pool room, and called a number in Shepherd’s Bush.
“Dear God,” said the voice at the other end, “not you again. Do you ever do anything besides call people up on the phone?”
“Yes,” Danny replied. “From time to time I make television programmes. That’s when establishment lackeys aren’t trying to muzzle me, that is. Lately, that’s tended to happen rather a lot, which means I have to spend more time telephoning. Cause and effect, really.”
“Are you calling me an establishment lackey?”
“Yes.”
“Another one who gets his vocabulary from the Argos catalogue. Look, I couldn’t care less what you think of me. I get called ruder things on “Points of View”. But if you think I’m going to put up with you wandering round seaside resorts spending the Corporation’s money on your idiotic persecution fantasies, then you’re a bigger fool than I took you for. And that, believe me, would be difficult.”
“Cirencester,” said Danny.
There was a pause. “What did you say?”
“I said Cirencester,” Danny said.
“I thought you said Cirencester,” replied the voice, “I was just giving you a chance to pretend you’d said something else.”
“And what’s wrong with me saying Cirencester?” Danny asked politely.
“Nothing, given the right context,” said the voice smoothly. “In a conversation about Cotswold towns, nothing could be more natural. In the present case, though, a less charitable man than myself might take it as proof that you’ve finally gone completely doolally.”
The pips went, but Danny was ready for them. He shoved in another pound coin. “I said Cirencester because I know you know what it means,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the voice, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me. What are you gibbering on about?”
“About the Cirencester Group,” said Danny, trying to sound cool and failing. “About your being a member of it.”
There was another pause. A long one, this time. “So?” said the voice. “What of it?”
“I was thinking,” Danny said, “just now, when you were trying to muzzle me. I thought, why is this man trying to muzzle me? Then it hit me, right between the eyes. Cirencester. It’s not you that’s trying to muzzle me, it’s the whole bloody lot of you. The Group.”
“What possible connection is there between a select private literary society and you not making very silly documentaries?”
“I like that,” Danny said. “Select private literary society. On that scale of values, the Third Reich was a bowls club. I know what you lot get up to in that neo-Georgian manor house on the Tetbury road.”
It must be pointed out at this juncture that Danny hadn’t the faintest idea what went on there, although this was not for want of very strenuous trying. But the silence at the other end of the wire made it obvious that he had hit on something here. The effect of his previous threat had been pleasant, but this was incomparably better.
“What was it you said you wanted?” asked the-voice.
“A helicopter.”
“Any particular make?”
Danny was taken aback. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“Gazelle? Lynx? Sea King? I believe Sea Kings are very comfortable.”
“That sounds fine,” said Danny. “So I can hire one then, can I?”
“Wouldn’t hear of it,” said the voice. “I’ll order you one myself. Much quicker that way.”
“Oh.” Danny frowned with surprise. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Not at all,” said the voice, “no trouble whatsoever. What’s the use of having a desk with six phones if you never use them? Where do you want to be picked up from?”
“Wherever suits you,” Danny said, not to be outdone. “I don’t know where the nearest airfield is, but…”
“Airfields!” said the voice, forcefully, “who needs them? Go down to the beach and I’ll get someone to pick you up there. Give me half an hour.”
The line went dead. Danny pocketed his remaining change and went to the bar for a drink, just as the towels went back over the pump-handles.
Cornelius and Sebastian rowed Jane ashore in the skiff. They had to land her at a rather remote spot for fear of making themselves conspicuous, and the walk to the road over rocky, and troublesome country was not to Jane’s liking, since she was feeling tired enough already. She had packed quite a lot into this one day already without gratuitous exercise.
It was all very well saying she would find Montalban, as if all she had to do was look him up in Thompson’s Local under Alchemists. It was all very well saying that once she had found him she would pass on Vanderdecker’s message. The reality might be somewhat trickier. And was he back from Geneva yet?
As she finally joined the road, she was nearly blown off it by the downblast of the blades of an enormous helicopter that roared by apparently only inches over her head. She said something very unladylike to it as it went past, but it was very unlikely that it heard her, what with the noise of the rotor blades and all. Probably just as well.
After a long walk she reached West Bay, unlocked her car and took her shoes off. Then she wrote down Vanderdecker’s message on the back of an envelope, just to make sure she didn’t forget it. Montalban. Who did she know who might know where to find him?
Oddly enough, it was just conceivable that Peter might know. There was not a lot, when all was said and done, that Peter did know. He wasn’t particularly well up in female psychology, that was certain, and she had her doubts if he had a firm grasp of the basics of tying his own shoelaces, but he was a scientist. Scientist. He lived in a little white box in north central Oxford and did research into semiconductors, whatever they were. All she knew about them was that they had nothing to do with buses or orchestras.
That seemed to be a likely place to start off her enquiries, then. All she needed to do now—was to locate his
