Sea Leopard

'Whether or not, he will work.' He indicated the drawing of the Proteus. 'He has to do something about this, after all. Doesn't he?'

It was almost three before Quin was finally ready to depart. His luggage, which consisted of one small suitcase and an overcoat, had been a means of delaying his departure. He had driven Hyde to the edge of rage again and again, and then capitulated, afraid of the Australian in a more immediate way than of the other figures and dangers that crowded his imagination. Aubrey had telephoned the cottage at noon, and had been frustrated and angered at the further delay. After that, Hyde had handled Quin like unstable explosive; cajolement and masked threat had eventually subdued him.

He stood now at the door of the whitewashed cottage, hesitant while Hyde carried the suitcase to the TR7. Tricia Quin was at his side like a crutch, touching his arm, trying to smile him into complacency. In some obscure and unexpected way, she had strengthened during the day, adopting much of Hyde's attitude and many of his arguments. It was as if she had adopted the plight of the Proteus as a charitable cause worthy of contribution; or perhaps she sensed her father needed help, that the greatest danger to his health lay in his present solitary surroundings. Hyde wondered what Quin would have made of the Outback, even the dead centre of Australia. The unnerving silence was audible there. The Lake District hummed and buzzed with life, by comparison.

He looked away from Quin and his daughter, towards the stretch of water that was The Tarns, and then at the road and the land falling away, down from Black Fell behind him through the firs towards Coniston Water two miles away. The land pressed in upon the cottage, and Hyde admitted a claustrophobic isolation so different from the Australian hinterland. Perhaps it wasn't surprising Quin couldn't take it after all, staying in that cottage and its garden for a week without seeing another soul after his daughter left. They'd quarrelled about her going to see her mother, apparently. That might have set him off, created his sense of abandonment amid danger.

Hyde shrugged, and opened the boot. The weather was windier now, moving the low cloud but breaking it up, too. Gleams, fitful and unoptimistic, of blue sky; a hazy light through the clouds. It had, at least, stopped drizzling.

The bullet whined away off the yellow boot before the noise of the gunshot reached him. He stared at his hand. The bullet had furrowed across the back of it, exposing the flesh. An open-lipped graze which still had not begun to hurt, matching the furrowed scar on the boot lid. He looked stupidly around him.

A second shot then, chipping pebble-dash from the wall of the cottage two feet or so from Quin's head. His frightened, agape features, the girl's quicker, more alert panic, her hands dragging at her father's arm, the shrouded hills, the distant dark trees — he took in each distinct impression in the moment that he heard the heavy report of the rifle, and then the pain in his hand began, prompting him like a signal. He began running for the door of the cottage.

Part Three Plumber

Chapter Ten: RESCUE?

'What are they waiting for? Why don't they do something?' Quin's voice was plaintive, fearful; yet the words sounded strangely irritated, as if the men outside had disappointed him.

'You' ve seen the bloody cowboy films, haven't you?' Hyde replied, almost snarling, weary of Quin's unabated nerves. 'The lynch-mob always waits for dark.' The man seemed to possess an infinite capacity to remain on edge, and his emotions rubbed against Hyde's attempts to evolve a solution to their situation like sandpaper against skin.

'Why are they waiting?' Tricia Quin asked in studiedly calm tone, sitting near him on the floor beneath the cottage window.

Hyde turned to her. 'Petrunin can't be here yet.'

'Who?'

'The bloke who chased us — the big cheese. He's got a face everyone will have a copy of. Must be hard to get out of Manchester. They'll be waiting for orders.'

'How many of them do you think there are?'

Hyde watched Quin as he listened to the girl. The man was sitting in a slumped, self-pitying posture with his back against the wall, near the settee with its stained stretch covers. Hyde disliked Quin intensely. The man got on his nerves. He was a pain in the backside. He was going to be useless to Aubrey, even if he delivered him.

'Two, maybe three.'

'You don't think they might try something before dark?'

'Why? They'll assume I'm armed, they know I'm a professional, just like them. They're not going to volunteer to get their balls blown off. Your dad's here, and he isn't going anywhere.'

She studied her father, then looked away from him.

'What about your people? This man Aubrey?'

'When we don't turn up in Manchester, he'll worry. He knows where we are.'

'Will he worry in time?''

'That's what I'm worrying about.' He smiled, and studied her face. 'How are you?'

'I'm all right.' She avoided looking at her father.

'What are you going to do?' Quin asked.

'For Christ's sake, stop moaning!'

'It's your fault — you brought them here! This is just what I tried to avoid — what I came here to get away from,' Quin persisted. Hyde perceived deep and genuine and abiding fears, disguising themselves in self-pity. He could almost feel sorry for Quin; might have done so, had their situation at that moment been less acute. And had Quin's voice been less insistent, less whining. 'I knew I couldn't be adequately protected, that no one took my fears seriously, and now look what's happened — they're out there, the very people I tried to avoid. And you — you brought them here. You' ve as good as handed me to them on a plate!'

'All right. So they stuck a bleeper under the car. Sorry.'

That won't do us any good.'

'Shut up! It's your bloody fault we're all stuck here.'

'Leave him alone,' Tricia Quin pleaded softly.

'All right. Look, once it's dark, I can try to get to a telephone that hasn't had its wires cut. But I'm not walking out there just at the moment. He'll have to sit it out, just like us.'

'As long as nothing happens to him.'

'It won't. Petrunin's in a corner himself. It's a stalemate. Nothing's going to happen to Dad — unless I break his bloody neck for him!'

Quin scowled like a child sulking. Hyde looked at his watch. Just after three. Patience, patience, he instructed himself. Aubrey has got to catch on soon.

He wondered, without letting the thought tinge the bland expression on his features, whether Petrunin's orders might not have changed because of the capture of the submarine by the Russians. The death of Quin, rather than his capture, might be a satisfactory conclusion to the operation.

It was hard to discard the thought, once he had admitted it. It was unlikely, but possible. Of his own death, he did not think. That, he had considered almost as he closed the cottage door behind him after he had run from the car, would be inevitable whether Petrunin wanted Quin alive or dead. He looked at his hand, wrapped in his handkerchief. His gun made an uncomfortable, pressing lump against the small of his back. It was not entirely a stalemate, it merely gave that impression. Petrunin wanted Quin badly. Petrunin was finished in the UK anyway, after this. When he went, he'd want Quin with him. As soon as it was dark, he'd come for him.

* * *