Before she went he gave her a receipt for the contents of the safe. They were a sealed letter from Sarling and a bulky brown-paper parcel. The parcel held, in notes of one, five and ten pounds’ denomination, two thousand pounds. He didn’t bother to check the amount. Where money was concerned he was sure that both she and Sarling would be meticulous.
With the girl out of the way he sat down, lit a cigar—there was a box of Bolivar Regentes on the sideboard—and opened the envelope. Clipped together were some sheets of lined quarto writing paper covered in Sarling’s large script. He read:
Conduct of operations and communications from Mount Street. Miss Vickers will take care of commissariat and all incidental financial aspects. All communications with me will be made through her.
Payments to outside people for operational duties, or retainers pending operational duties, will be made in cash from the two thousand pounds provided.
Chain of command, some security notes. At no time will you, in dealing with subordinates, let it be known that there is anyone in authority over you. At no time in dealing with subordinates will you use your real name or reveal your Mount Street address. The only people known personally to one another will be me, you, Berners and Miss Vickers.
Selection of operators. There are in existence at Park Street—Downham House—the files of over fifty people—men and women—who have, to choose an all-embracing word, certain discrepancies in their past. On indication to Miss Vickers of the type of person required she will supply a selection of files from which a choice can be made.
Raikes leaned back in the chair and blew a cloud of smoke towards the stampeding horse picture. He read on, almost bored now, anger and belligerency long gone from him.
There was some more stuff about security details and the need for the minimum appearance of himself and Miss Vickers in public together. Why that, when the whole of Galway House would know within a fortnight that they were living together up here? Didn’t Sarling know the world held porters, postmen, chars and nosey neighbours?
The last sheet of paper was headed PRELIMINARY OPERATION, and read:
1. All the relevant facts appertaining to this operation are listed below. The success of this operation is vital to the main one to follow. It will be planned by you and Berners. Only one condition is imposed by me. The operation must be completed within the next two weeks.
2. There is an Army Supply Depot at M.R. 644550. Ordnance Survey Sheet No. 171 (One-inch map). Hut 5 contains six crates, painted green, with usual War Department markings, and all stencilled in white paint with the identification BATCH Z/93. SERIES GF1. One of these crates is to be stolen. All their contents are similar. The crate is to be lodged in some safe place.
3. The operation will be carried out with the minimum of violence. Either you or Berners will take an active part in it.
Raikes folded the sheets of paper carefully and put them in his inside breast pocket. Batch Z/ 93. Series GF1. It all sounded a far cry from the kind of operation which he and Berners had carried out.
He went out and bought himself the Ordnance map. The Army depot was in Kent, near Wrotham. Just after he got back, Belle Vickers came in carrying a large suitcase. He got up, took it from her and carried it into the other bedroom. She took off her coat and he saw that she had changed into a plain green dress with the silver franc piece pinned to her breast.
He said, ‘ If you make us a cup of tea we can have a chat. There are some things I want to get straight.’
Over the tea he said, ‘ Where did you go for your stuff—Park Street?’
‘Yes. I’m either there or down in Wiltshire. It was more interesting, in a way, when I was in the City with him.’
‘You sleep with him?’
‘I used to. Not now.’ It was so unimportant it roused no feeling in her.
‘What happened to his face?’
‘So far as I know it was burned when he was a young man. I don’t know how.’
‘Have you any idea what he’s after? This collecting people and using them?’
‘I think it began just in a business sort of way. You know, get the dirt on someone, and then use it to swing a deal.’
‘And it’s grown from that to something else?’
‘If you say so.’
‘He warned you, of course, that I would pump you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll tell him that I have.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d like to be free of him, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So would I. We might do something together.’
‘He said you would suggest it.’
‘So, what’s the answer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, take your time. Now let’s get down to business. Have you any idea of the instructions I have received?’
‘No.’ She was easier with him now, even though she could not help a certain curtness in her tone; and, anyway, she suspected him, she just had to. He didn’t care a damn for her. Just himself. How he was to get out of whatever fix it was that he was in, was all that bothered him.
‘These files. I can have what I want from them?’
‘That’s what he said. But he’ll know which ones you get.’
‘Right. You’ve got a good memory?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want a man, somewhere in the forties, English, and who’s been in the Army or the Navy. Someone who can wear a uniform and knows the drill. Someone who knows about cars and not an educated type. Someone, who could look after himself in a fight. Got it?’
‘Yes. Today?’
‘No, tomorrow will do. I’ve got two weeks to work with. We’ll begin as from tomorrow. That leaves us the rest of the day. Are you a good cook?’
‘No. Nothing turns out right.’
‘Then I’ll take you out to dinner.’
With a touch of alarm, she said, ‘You can’t do that. He told me we’re not to be seen in public together.’
He grinned. ‘His own words are “a minimum appearance” in public. Once is as minimum as you can get.’
He got up and moved toward his bedroom. From the door, he said, ‘If there’s a film you would like to see we could take that in first.’
They went to see The Sound of Music at her choosing. Within a few minutes she was completely absorbed in it. That pleased him. No matter what she’d done in the past to put herself in Sarling’s hands (and it must have been something that had aroused Sarling’s respect which meant that she had a courage and hardness of her own) she was at the core a romantic. He wasn’t going to have any trouble with her at all. Perhaps this was Sarling’s big mistake, putting her with him.
Afterwards he took her to the Pastoria in St. Martin’s Street; whitebait, fillet steak, and a bottle of Chateau Beychevelle of which he drank little.
Walking across Leicester Square afterwards to find a taxi, he said, ‘I want a car tomorrow morning by ten. It’s got to be a station wagon. Hire it in your name, but don’t use Galway House as an address. You’d better say we want it at least for a month. I’ll be back sometime in the late afternoon. Could you have the files waiting for me then?’
She nodded and he took her arm and steered her across the road. She was still probably dancing and singing somewhere with Julie Andrews. (Actually she was telling herself that he had decided to be nice to her, to play her along, and that meant, of course, that he had decided to have her gang up with him against Sarling. She enjoyed it when he was nice to her. He’d been amusing and attentive—only just now and again a touch of curtness coming in, like about the car and the files. Whether she would play along with him, she didn’t know. Sarling might be odd at times but he was no fool. He had money, power, his own intelligence and the brains of other men that he could call on. This man might not have a chance against him, and for the sake of her own skin she had to be on the right side. She would have to think about it. Anyway, there was no need to make a decision yet.)
He sat and had a nightcap while she went off to bed. Down in Devon he had scores of male acquaintances and friends, but nobody who had come really close to him since school. Berners was his only friend. They were two of a kind. He smiled as he thought of the first job they, had ever done together. A simple operation directed from one room in the Strand—The International Sportsmen’s Directory; a mailing list of sports celebrities, bought from a legitimate mail-list agency for a few pounds, and then a first-class brochure to catch the eye and a form for filling in biographical details—to be returned with a three-guinea subscription which covered the entry and a copy of the directory when published. Simple and as old as the hills, and they’d netted two thousand pounds and cleared out within three weeks. God, his father would have turned in his grave.
She was back with the car at ten minutes past ten. Quiet, efficient, no fuss, he liked that. In the flat before he left, he handed her twenty pounds.
‘Buy yourself a second-hand wedding ring. We don’t want any unnecessary talk about us. Have a chat with the porter sometimes, and mention your husband. And twice a week post some letters to us here. Separately and both together, Mr and Mrs stuff. I don’t have to tell you to change the handwriting and postmarks, do I?’
Stiffly, she said, ‘I hadn’t thought about the ring, but I’d already decided to arrange the letters. You’d like me to say something nice in the ones to you?’
He chuckled. ‘Plain paper will do. Sorry if I’m a bit brusque, but you know the reason why. Nobody likes a half-nelson on them and their face pushed into the dirt.’
He drove down into Kent, along the A. 20 to Maidstone. At Wrotham Heath he turned right past the golf course along the Mereworth road. The Army depot was two miles down the road on the right-hand side. It stood in a small wood, the trees and brush cut down to form a twenty yard ride all along the road perimeter railings. He went slowly past the entrance gate, had a glimpse of Nissen huts, decorated with fire hoses and stirrup pumps, roads lined with whitewashed stones, and a small hut just inside the gate. The gate was closed and there was no sign of a sentry, no sign of anyone.
He drove past it as far as a pub called the Beech Inn. He turned and went back. A hundred yards from the gate he checked to see there were no cars on the road. He slowed to a crawl and dropped the car’s nearside wheels into the shallow road ditch close up against the raflings. Holding the car with the brake he spun the back wheels, digging them further into the soft ground.
He got out and surveyed the car. She was nicely canted over and securely held in the ditch. A car came towards him, slowed momentarily as though to stop and help and then accelerated by. He was glad. He wasn’t in need of any good Samaritans. He knelt down by the bogged rear wheel, scooped up some of the loose earth, rubbed it on his trousers and face and worked it into his hands and then headed down the road for the main gate of the dump.
There wasn’t the slightest nervousness in him. It was just as it always was with himself and Berners when they got under way, a cold sustained sense of confidence in their own ability and an unforced manner that made truth out of every falsehood they developed.
There was a middle-aged civilian clerk in the office. Raikes told him that he was stuck up the road and wanted to phone a garage for a breakdown truck to come and pull him out. The clerk obliged with the number of the nearest garage and indicated the telephone. Raikes went to it and called the garage, at the same time making a mental note of the subscriber’s number on the telephone dial. While he waited, he lit a cigarette, chatted over his shoulder with the clerk and casually studied a layout map of the site that was pinned to the wall. It showed the roads in the dump and the huts, and obligingly each hut was numbered. Hut 5 was on the main road into the trees from the camp entrance, the third on the left. The huts on the right-hand side were even numbered.
He got the garage and arranged for them to come out and pull him from the ditch. Ringing off, he turned to the clerk, held out his filthy hands and said, ‘Anywhere I could have a wash-up?’
He knew there was. It had been marked on the site plan. An ablution hut between numbers six and eight up the main site road. The clerk told him where it was and he strolled up the road.
He washed up in the hut. There was no one else there. From the window he studied Hut 5 across the way. It lay end on to the road, and was entered by a normal sized door. Small windows flanked the sides of the door. There were no bars across them and the door had a simple mortice lock. A soldier in battledress cycled up the road whistling and went out of sight.
Raikes went out of the back door of the ablution hut and around the back of Hut 6, which was a Nissen hut of the same style as No. 5. It had a door in the rear as well as the front. He went back down the road to the gate hut.
He thanked the clerk for his kindness and then walked up the road to the car to wait for the garage truck to arrive.
He was back in London by half-past four.
Belle Vickers was there. There were three orange-covered files on the table. On top of them were two pound notes and a two shilling piece.
He picked up the money. ‘What’s this?’
‘The change from the ring.’ She held out her left hand, with a plain gold band on the third finger. ‘ You’ll be glad to hear it was a very simple ceremony. Just the jeweller’s assistant who patted my bottom once. He was damn sure, of course, that I wanted it for a dirty weekend. Sarling noticed it, too. He laughed. At least, I think he did. It’s difficult to tell.’
He gave her back the money, thrown for a moment by her mood.
‘Buy some cheap brandy. I don’t like using Hines with ginger ale.’
‘So that’s it. Now we’re married we have to economize?’
He gave her a grin. ‘ You’ll be surprised at what we’re going to have to do—once the honeymoon is over.’
He sat down and picked up the files. Apart from Berners—and he could be left in peace for the moment—he wanted one other man.
He went to visit him the next morning.
George Gilpin threw an old tyre on the bonfire, then stepped back, waiting for the black rubber to begin to frizzle and fry and burst into flame, thick, smoky, sulphur yellow flame, black trails of oily smudge whirling high into the sky. Someone would phone from the bungalows up the road in a moment complaining. They always did. Every Thursday when he had his bonfire. Well, let ’em. A garage always had junk to burn, cartons, crates, old tyres, oily rags. A sword-shaped tongue of flame slashed in a great curve from the edge of the fire. He watched it grow, delight on his red, sweating face. Wonderful thing, fire.
His wife came round the corner across the garage yard and out to him on the waste plot. A wave of smoke, billowing in the wind, made him move back a few feet. He saw her coming. Someone must have phoned already. She’d got on her sky-blue office overalls with Gilpin’s Garage embroidered in red across the front. Even the overalls did something for her. Shape, that’s what she had, shape; and no matter how she dressed it came out and shouted at you. A jolly, rollicking, plump, plumper than it needed in places, kind of shape which was one of the delights of his life. He laid a big hand on her bottom as she stood beside him and then slid it up around her waist. Her coarse blonde hair tickled the side of his face.
‘Who is it, old girl? One of the old tabbycats got her washing out. All her woollen drawers getting smuts in ’em. Which is all they ever will.’
‘No. Some bloke out front. Interested in a car.’
‘Then tell Dickie—oh, he’s out, isn’t he? What car?’
‘The Zephyr station wagon.’
‘Nice to get that off me hands. O.K. Some fire, eh? Got to get rid of the rubbish.’ He gave her breast a squeeze. ‘Save us a slice of that for tonight, love.’
She thumped him in the middle of his broad back and he went into the rear of the garage. He washed up in the toilet, straightened his red and white spotted bow tie and slipped on his jacket. He jerked a little more of his breast pocket handkerchief into view and gave himself an approving nod in the mirror. Good old Georgie, nice little business, always a wallet of fivers to flash in the pub, have a drink everyone and meet the wife but keep your hands off her, not that I mind normally, but we’ve just come back from Majorca and she’s a bit over sunkissed in places.… The Zephyr, eh? Three hundred and fifty quid, perhaps; stood him in at two-seventy. Anyway, not a penny less, than three twenty-five.
He shook his head, chiding himself in the glass. You’re doing too well, Georgie; eating too well; hardly pushing forty yet and putting it on. Must be the beer.
The man was standing by the station wagon. Nice enough looking bloke. Gent. Shouldn’t think he was pushed for a hundred quid ever. No crumbly haggling and fencing with him. Some of them were the limit, cutting it down in half-crowns at the end and wanting you to take in a couple of old perambulators and a Lambretta in part exchange, and then what about hire purchase arrangements? Lived beyond their income they all did, keeping up with the bloody Joneses. Colour television in No. 1 at the beginning of the month and there was colour television all down the avenue by the end. The women shopping round the supermarkets for twopence off, bloody harassed, working themselves up for a good scream at the kids when they got in from school. Yes, a bloody hard life for some, and mostly their own fault.
‘Mr Gilpin?’
A good voice, educated. That’s something you can’t buy late in life.
‘That’s me. Not a bad looking bus, eh?’
‘Smith’s my name.’ He put out a hand.
‘Glad to know you, Mr Smith.’ He pumped the hand briefly. ‘Kind of thing you’re looking for? Not a lot on the clock. But you know and I know what that means sometimes. However, we’ve been right over her. Nothing wrong.’
‘Could I try her?’
‘Why not? John o’Groats and back if you like.’
Chuckling, George Gilpin removed the placard from outside the windscreen which read—GILPIN’S BARGAIN OF THE WEEK. £400. ONE OWNER ONLY.
They moved off, Mr Smith driving.
George Gilpin chatted away. Mostly you had to because there was usually something to hide and you wanted to take the customer’s mind off things. But it wasn’t necessary with this car. Habit kept him at it.
‘Only one owner, you know. Schoolmaster in Watford. Looked after it like a baby. His school was just around the corner, so he hardly ever drove it, ’cept once a year he used to take it abroad for a month. Great camper. Used to sleep in the back.’ He was going to add, ‘Probably with a different French tart each night,’ but decided against it. This bloke wasn’t that kind.
They went up the road towards Hemel Hempstead, then swung away left-handed, George Gilpin giving a direction now and then, and finally hit the common at Chipperfield. George nodded at the pub on the edge of the common and said, ‘Hot morning. Care for a jar? They keep good beer in the Two Brewers.’
‘A good idea.’
Ah, he was all right then. Not too toffee-nosed to drink with the hoi-polloi.
Mr Smith sat on a bench in the garden of the pub, and George Gilpin went and fetched the beer. He raised his glass to Mr Smith and said, ‘ Well, here’s how.’
‘Cheers.’
‘What you think of her?’
‘It’s quite a reasonable car. But not at four hundred.’ Mr Smith smiled and went on, ‘If I really wanted her I’d give three-twenty or thirty. No more. But I don’t want her.’
‘You don’t want her? Then why—’ What had he got here, some screwball, an awkward customer, wasting his time?
‘What I really wanted was to have a quiet talk with you—well away from your wife and the garage.’
‘Oh. What about?’
‘About you.’
‘That so?’ He was cautious now. Nobody had anything on him, and his record was clean, and the garage was clean—that was one thing he had determined on from the start. But this bloke suddenly gave him an unquiet feeling: Sitting there, easy in his tweed suit, pulling out a silver cigarette case and lighting up, and in no hurry at all.
‘You used to live in Wolverhampton, didn’t you, Mr Gilpin?’
George Gilpin decided to play it politely until he knew what it was all about. ‘That’s right. I was a bloody good engineer. Still am. What’s your business with me, Mr Smith? Time’s money, you know.’
Mr Smith nodded agreement, and said, ‘I imagine you remember a firm called Nardon Baines Ltd., in Birmingham. Paint and varnish manufacturers.’
‘Name seems familiar. But I didn’t know Brum well.’
‘You should do, Mr Gilpin. There was Harris and Leach–Distributors Ltd., and the West Midlands Furnishing Company.’
A moment of panic struck George Gilpin and he could feel the beer turning sour in his stomach.
‘Here, what the hell you getting at?’
‘You were a good engineer, Mr Gilpin. Good at anything with your hands, engines, clocks, fuses—and explosives. The three firms I’ve mentioned all went up in smoke over a period of a year. Nardon Baines was the last one. That went wrong. Only three-quarters of it burned. The caretaker and a fireman lost their lives in the blaze, and one of the three devices you made to start fires in three separate places at once failed to work.’
George Gilpin stood up. If there was fear in him, there was too much else also for him to bother about it. He said, ‘You’re asking for trouble, Mr Bloody Smith. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do know this—so far as I’m concerned I’ll take you back to your car at the garage and after that, if I ever see you again, you can take the consequences. You’re a nut case.’
Mr Smith shook his head. ‘Sit down and don’t draw attention to yourself. The Birmingham Police still have your little device and also very good records of the fingerprints on it. You were such a good craftsman, Mr Gilpin, you would never believe that anything you made wouldn’t work—so you didn’t wear gloves. I know you haven’t got a record—I wouldn’t be here otherwise—but all I have to do is to give the police an anonymous call and you’d be in trouble. Just you, because the man who hired you and worked with you is dead. Finkel was his name. Herbert Finkel. And you never knew who he worked for. You were just anxious to collect two thousand pounds for the three jobs and come south to start your garage.’
George Gilpin sat down. He was a practical man. He recognized spilt milk when he saw it and didn’t bother crying over it.
He said, ‘You’re playing a bloody dangerous game. How much?’
Mr Smith smiled. ‘I want about two days, maybe a little more, of your time—and I’ll pay you five hundred pounds for it and then forget that you ever existed.’
‘You’ll pay me?’
‘Yes.’
‘No thanks. I’d rather pay you. I got a good business, nice wife, plenty of friends. I don’t do any jobs. Fact, I never did any but those three and I think I was crazy to do them ’cept I wanted some cash to start with. I hope Finkel is in hell.’
‘You’ll do a job for me, Mr Gilpin. Not a fire-raising job. Something quite simple. And you get five hundred.’
There was no way out. He knew that. One phone call would bring the police and that would be the end and he didn’t want any bloody ends. There was a lot of years of kick left in him yet and he meant to have them. He said quietly, ‘Well, it looks like you got me, don’t it? What’s the job?’
‘Let’s drive back. We can talk in the car.’
Two hours later George Gilpin and his wife were sitting in the living room of their flat over the garage, a bottle of whisky on the table between them. George Gilpin was in his shirt sleeves and had jerked his bow tie free and opened his collar.
‘I tell you, old girl—I don’t know anything about the job or him. He’s going to phone me when he’s ready to put me in the flaming picture. All he says is, get a Land-Rover, Army type, paint it khaki green and muck it about a bit.’ He tapped a sheet of paper on the table in front of him. ‘And then he wants all these numbers on it, and them markings. Royal Artillery they are. I’m going back in the bloody army.’
‘Oh, no you’re not. You know what you are going to do, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do! I’m not having him on me back for the rest of my natural. First this job and then another. I know his kind. I’m going to do the bugger. He may make me do this job, but he won’t ever make me do another.’
‘George—you got to be careful. How you going to do it?’
‘Dunno. I got to think. Depends how things are. But I’ll do ’im.’ He drained his whisky glass and pushed it to her to refill.
She shook her head. ‘You’ve had enough.’
‘Maybe. Comes of feelin’ sorry for oneself.’ He got up and went to her, standing behind her. He slipped his hand down the front of her blouse and massaged one of her big, loose breasts. ‘Don’t worry, old girl, Georgie will fix him.’ He bent and kissed the top of her head. ‘Wonderful, ain’t it? Bloke can be right down in the dumps, but one good feel of you and the world’s a good place.’
That evening, Belle Vickers came back to the flat just after six. Raikes was sitting by the window. He gave her a nod, watching her go into the bedroom to take her outdoor clothes off. The bird’s nest hair do had gone in favour of her old style. After a while she came back to the room and went to the sideboard to get herself a drink.
‘Would you like one?’ she asked.
‘Not yet, thanks. Where’ve you been—Sarling?’
‘Yes, I took the files back. I’ve also found a lock-up garage where we can keep the car. It’s got a small loft over it with one of those sort of ladder affairs … you know, that come down from the trapdoor when you pull a rope. I paid six months’ rent in advance under the name of Smith. It’s a turning off the Edgware Road. A bit of a walk.’
‘Good. How was Fu Manchu?’
She looked at him in surprise for a moment, and then laughed. ‘That’s how you see him?’
‘Why not? He’s not real, is he? Some green fluid instead of blood in his veins.’
‘He wanted to know which man you picked.’
‘Did he? Well, I don’t intend to tell him.’
‘You mean, you want to protect him just in case he isn’t a man of his word?’
‘Could be. Could be just bloodymindedness.’
‘Could be both. Though from what I’ve seen of you it’s more likely the last.’
‘That’s how you see me?’
She sat down and sipped her drink. ‘ Now and then. I don’t mind. Suppose I must seem the same sometimes. We’re both hooked—that makes us touchy, difficult.’
‘If I asked you how he hooked you, would you tell me?’
‘Not now. Sometime I might. What about you—would you ever tell me?’
‘No. Anyway, you know enough about me. I was all set to stay where I was—then you came along with a sealed envelope. All that back there in Devon is my real life. This’—he stood up and waved a hand round the room—‘is the nightmare. And it’s a nightmare that will last so long as Sarling and his files are around.’
‘And the photostats.’
‘Where does he keep those? In the country, at Meon Park?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever consider leaving him … just disappearing?’
‘I suppose I have. But it wouldn’t work. I gave up thinking about it. Some day he’ll die.’
‘Rich people can live for a long time. They’ve got the money to buy time from doctors, servants … places in the sun. For some people, death should be hurried.’
‘You’re not … well, sort of serious about that?’
He turned, standing above her. The glass in her hand was silvered with bubbles coming up from the tonic water; the hand that carried their wedding ring, a broad, dull band of gold. There were times when just the way she spoke, her ‘ supposes’ and ‘ well, sort ofs,’ irritated him, when just the sight of her roused dislike in him. But all this had to be suppressed.
He needed her.
He said, ‘You’ll see how serious I am. You think he doesn’t know what kind of man I am? You know he does. He’s even said it to you, hasn’t he?’
She didn’t answer.
He put a hand down and took her chin, the grasp firm, turning her face up to him. ‘Hasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then—let’s be honest about it. I want him dead. Just that would be easy. But I want those files and those photostats. All of them. I want to see them burn. Killing him without them would be useless.’ He smiled. ‘Do you like your nice cage so much?’
‘It isn’t all that bad. Particularly now that he doesn’t come into the cage and muck about with me. You’re not really serious are you, though?’
‘About wanting to kill him?’
‘No. About thinking that I would … well, sort of help.’
‘Why shouldn’t you? It’s the obvious thing to do.’
His surprise was genuine. She could tell that. Suddenly, she had a sense of sheer fright that came from looking at him, seeing him there, tall, hardset, all strength and health, talking of death—no, for God’s sake, murder—as though he were discussing the day’s racing form. Given security about the files and photostats, he would kill. Swat Sarling out like a fly against the windowpane.
She said alarmed, ‘But it would be murder.’
‘You want to stay tied to him until he dies naturally? He’s a bit crazy now. He could get worse. You might find yourself having to do something which could end up by destroying you. Anyway, I wouldn’t be asking you to do much. Just a little information.’
He went to the sideboard and began to mix himself a drink. She watched him. Everything he said was true. Sarling had changed since she had first known him. God knew she wanted her freedom. But even for that there could be too high a price. That was where she was different from this man. He wanted freedom and he didn’t care how much he paid, or what he did. That came from the self-confidence in him, the hard certainty of his own strength and intelligence. Why, she thought, did I ever put my hand out and take that first tin of talcum powder from Marks and Spencers? A first wrong move, and me blissfully ignorant of where it was all going to lead.
She said, ‘ What would I have to do?’
‘Very little.’ He came over and gently drew the back of his knuckles across the long line of her chin. He was deliberately working on her. She knew that. Deep down, she wanted him to work on her … she had nothing, nobody … only a kind of urge in her, drawing her guts out, to surrender to somebody, somebody who would take her in, wrap themselves about her and give her peace.
‘First of all we’d have to be loyal to one another.’ He gave her his warm, fear-chasing smile. ‘Put ourselves in one another’s hands. Seem reasonable?’
‘Well … yes.’
‘You’ll do it then?’
‘I don’t know. What would I have to do … I mean apart from being loyal to you?’
‘It wouldn’t be much. It could mean your freedom. Don’t think’—he laughed—‘that I’m going to ask you to poison his milk or stick a knife in him. You wouldn’t know anything about that kind of thing.’
She stood up suddenly, drink slopping over her glass.
‘I don’t want to hear any more. What you’re talking about is murder!’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘ Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Let’s forget it. You’d better mop up that stain on your dress.’
She looked down at the mark the drink had made, and then went into the bedroom, closing the door.
Nothing came easily, or quickly, he thought. Anything that was too easy had to be suspect. But she would come his way. The outburst marked a stage. She had to have time to get used to the idea of murder. She’d come round, she’d help him, and Sarling would be murdered … and after Sarling, she would have to go. Back in Devon, Alverton and Mary were waiting for him. His country, his birthright, his woman, waiting to have his children sired on her … his destiny, marked out more surely in his mind than anything else. Only Sarling stood in his way.