package tours.'
Dawlish said, 'If we went ahead, it would be with a U.S. submarine.' He looked at Schlegel. 'Until we can be quite sure who Toliver has got working with him, it would be safer using an American submarine.'
'Uh-huh,' I said. Hell, why would these two high-powered characters be conferring with me at this level of decision.
It was Schlegel who finally answered my unasked question.
'It's us that will have to go,' he said. 'Our trip: you and me, and
'Oh, now I begin to see the daylight,' I said.
'We'd consider it a favour,' said Dawlish. 'No order — but we'd consider it a favour, wouldn't we, Colonel?'
'Yes, sir!' said Schlegel.
'Very well,' I said. They were obviously going to let me bleed to death until they got their way about it. My arm was throbbing badly by now and I found myself pressing it to still the pain. All I wanted was to see the army medical orderly. I wasn't cut out to be a wounded hero.
'We think it's worth a look,' said Dawlish. He collected my empty cup. 'Oh, for God's sake, Pat! You're dripping blood all over the carpet.'
'It won't show,' I said, 'not in that lovely humming-bird pattern.'
Chapter Seventeen
Environment neutral. The environment neutral condition is one in which weather, radio reception, sonar operation and water temperatures remain constant throughout the game.. This does not change the chance of accidents (naval units, merchant shipping, air), delays of material or communications or random machine operation.
The sudden cry of an alarm clock was strangled at birth. For a moment there was complete silence. In the darkness there were only four grey rectangles that did not quite fit together. Rain dabbed them and the wind rattled the window frame.
I heard old MacGregor stamp his way into his old boots and cough as he went down the creaky stairs. I dressed. My clothes were damp and smelled of peat smoke. Even with the window and door tightly closed, the air was cold enough to condense my breath as I fought my way into almost: every garment I possessed.
In the back parlour, old MacGregor knelt before the tiny grate of the stove and prayed for flame.
'Kindling,' he said over his shoulder, as a surgeon might urgently call for a scalpel, determined not to take his eyes from the work in hand. 'Dry kindling, man, from the box under the sink.'
The bundle of dead wood was dry, as much as anything was dry at The Bonnet. MacGregor took the Agatha Christie paperback I'd left in the armchair, and ripped from it a few pages to feed the flame. I noticed for the first time that many other pages had already been sacrificed on that same altar. Now perhaps I would never know whether Miss Marple would pin it on the Archdeacon.
MacGregor breathed lustily upon the tiny flames. Perhaps it was the alcoholic content of his breath that made the fire flicker and Start to devour the firewood. He moved the kettle over to the hob.
'I'll look at the arm,' he said.
It had become a ritual. He undid tie bandage with studied care and then ripped away the dressing so that I gave a cry of pain. 'That's done,' said MacGregor. He always said that.
'You're healing well, man.' He cleaned the wound with antiseptic spirit and said, 'Plaster will do you now — you'll not need a bandage today.'
The kettle began to hum.
He applied the sticking plaster and then treated the graze on my bads with the same care. He applied the sticking plaster there too and then stood back to admire his work, while I shivered.
'Some tea will warm you,' he said.
Grey streaks of dawn were smeared across the windows, and outside the birds began to croak and argue — there was nothing to sing about.
'Stay in the parlour today,' said MacGregor. 'You don't want it to break open again.' He poured two strong cups of tea, and wrapped a moth-eaten cosy round the pot. He stabbed a tin of milk with the poker and slid it across the table to me.
I pressed the raw places on my arm.
They are beginning to itch,' said MacGregor, 'and that is good. You'll stay inside today — and read. I have no use for you.' He smiled, sipped some tea and then reached for the entire resources in reading matter.
He put the books alongside me, poured me more tea and added peat to the fire. 'Your friends will be coming today or tomorrow,' he said.
'When do we go on the trip — did they tell you?'
'Your friends will be coming,' he said. He was not a garrulous man.
MacGregor spent most of that morning in the shed, with the power-saw reduced to its components and arranged on the stone floor round him. Many times he fitted the parts together. Many times he snatched at the starter-string so that the engine turned. But it did not fire. Sometimes he swore at it but he did not give up until noon. Then he came into the parlour and threw himself into the battered leather armchair that I never used, realizing that he had a prior claim. 'Bah!' said MacGregor. I'd learned to interpret it as his way of complaining of the cold. I prodded at the fire.
'Your porridge is on,' he said. He called all the food porridge. It was his way of mocking Sassenachs.
'It smells good.'
'I'll have none of your caustic London irony,' said MacGregor. 'If you do not fancy a sup — you can run down to the wood shed and wrestle that damned wood-saw.' He clapped his hands together and massaged the red calloused fingers to bring the blood back into them. 'Bah,' he said again.
Behind him, the view from the tiny window, deepset into the thick stone wall, was partly obscured by two half-dead potted begonias. I could just see sunlight picking up traces of snow on the distant peaks, except when a gust of wind brought the chimney smoke into the yard, or, worse, brought it down into the parlour. MacGregor coughed. 'It needs a new cowl,' he explained. 'The east wind gets under the eaves and lifts the slates too.'
He followed my gaze out the window. 'That will be a London car,' he said.
'How do you know?'
'Hereabouts folks have vans and lorries — we don't go much on cars — but when we do buy them we choose something that will get us up the Hammer or over the high road in winter.
At first I thought it might turn off at the lower road, go through the village and along the coast. But the car continued on the road. It meandered along the slopes on the other side of the valley, so that we could see it climbing each hairpin for the first two or three miles. 'They'll want dinner,' said MacGregor.
'Or at least a drink,' I said. I knew that it was a gruelling tun for the last few miles. The road was not good at any time of the year but with the pot holes concealed by srtow, the driver would have to pick his way past the worst bits. He'd, need a drink and a moment by the fire.
'I'll see that the bar room fire is alive,' he said. It was only the constant replenishment of fires, at back and front, that kept the house habitable. Even then he needed an oil heater near his feet in the bar, and the bedrooms were cold enough to strike the lungs like a stiletto. I tucked Agatha Christie behind the striking clock.
The car turned in on the gravel. It was a DBS, dark blue with matching upholstery. But the Aston was dented and spattered with mud and filthy snow. The windscreen was caked with dirt except for the two bright eyes made
