In the train he had with him the morning papers. There had been nothing in the Sunday papers of the raid on the depot. But all the morning papers had, tucked away somewhere as an unimportant item of news, a report on the break in at an Army depot in Kent, nothing of importance stolen. Raikes had the impression that the authorities had decided to play down the incident. He settled with The Times and forgot the depot, putting everything that was London behind him. Everything that was Belle Vickers he had already put behind him the moment the flat door had closed on her.
As he was taking his first drink before dinner, the telephone rang. It was Belle. Sarling was back and she had seen him, reporting that the depot affair had been successful. Sarling had said that he would not want to see Raikes for a week or two, but that she, Belle, was to stay on at the flat. Once she had given the message, he sensed that she wanted to go on talking, wanted to keep this tenuous thread with him unbroken for as long as possible. Relying on her understanding, he said that he had people in for drinks and couldn’t stay on the phone any longer. He went back to his drink. Whatever part he had to play with her in London, he didn’t want even an echo of it to follow him down here. But as he began to push her out of his mind he had a memory of her face as he had made love to her the morning of their second night. Her eyes had been shut, the lips a little parted, hardly breathing, the life in her as fragile and muted as that of a sleeping child, a stranger’s face below him, wiped, clear of all lines, all strains, bathed with fresh innocence. For about five seconds he had been oddly moved, stripped of possessiveness, sensing the slow urge to protect and shield whatever it was that spoke to him from the face below his. Remembering it now, he thought he must look at Mary’s face the next time. Maybe this was some transcendental, dew that bathed them all as they dropped away into warm, unthinking bliss. Transcendental dew, for Christ’s sake—that was a new line for him. All he wanted from her was that she should commit herself, be on his side against Sarling—and he knew that when he went back to London he would get it. She would be falling over herself to help.
The next morning, after telephoning Mary, he went up to Alverton Manor to talk with the outgoing owner. Before going in, he sat in the car, halfway up the drive, looking at the grey-stone, gabled and mullioned-windowed house. Every window, every ledge, every chimney and roof space he knew, had climbed them, fallen from some, knew the holes in the masonry where the daws nested, and the exact crotch in the climbing virginia creeper where the fly-catchers raised two broods each year. He knew the outside and the inside as he knew himself, the one his skin and the other his guts. The present bastard had added a low, glass-roofed, modern loggia affair at one end. The first thing he would do when he took possession would be to pull it down because it stood on the site of his mother’s small herb garden. The herb garden should come back, just as it had been, for Mary. He spent an hour going round making an inventory of the furniture he would like to keep, accepting nothing but the furniture which had belonged to his father and had gone at auction. In his present house he had some of the rest, and what he still lacked, a dealer in Exeter was tracing and buying for him.
Driving over to Mary’s house in the afternoon, he had, packed in his overnight case, the small canister he had taken from the Z/93 crate. He was taking her out to dinner, then on to a dance at one of their friends’ houses and staying the night with her. He made a long detour, knowing exactly where he wanted to go, time on his hands.
He drove up Dunkery Beacon from the south side on the Porlock road. Right on top of the moor was a small side road that led from the summit down to a deep valley which had been high-dammed to form a reservoir. He pulled off the road just before the turning. It was an overcast day and the cloud was low, an even, wind-drifted veil of thin mist that left furze and heather and wortleberry growth dewed with leaden water drops. The world existed for fifty yards, and then vanished.
Sitting in the car, he took the canister out of his case and examined it. It fitted the hand, not as a grenade would, but as though its shape had been based on a fat, eight inch roll of clay, held and squeezed gently by fingers and thumb to give a natural, moulded grip. The only markings on it, in raised bakelite, read Z/93. Series GF1. The body of the canister had been moulded into raised rhomboids, much as the body of a grenade was moulded for fragmentation on explosion. The base was slightly concave. At the top, set flush with the flat surface, was a thin strip of light metal, a narrow tongue, the tip of which was held down in a small bridge. A steel pin ran through the top of the side supports to hold the tongue down. Holding the tongue in place with a finger, Raikes tried to pull the pin out. He couldn’t move it. Then he saw that one end of the pin was flattened out into a small disc shape, the edges knurled. He turned the disc and the pin revolved and moved out a fraction. He screwed it back into place and got out of the car.
He went down the side road fifty yards to a small sheep track that wound across the hillside. The wind was blowing into his back. After a while he stopped and listened. From somewhere ahead of him and up to the right there came the rough, bronchial fluke-cough of a sheep. He left the path and moved up towards the sound, going slowly through the knee-high heather. The ground dipped to a hollow ahead of him. Cropping on the windward side of a large granite rock were a couple of ewes and three well grown lambs. One of the ewes looked up, saw him, moved nervously for a moment and then went back to her feed. Raikes wetted his finger, held it to check the wind, edged a couple of yards up the hill to bring it on his back, and then holding the metal tongue firmly down began to unscrew the pin. The sheep were forty yards from him and now and again they were lost in a swirl of mist. He freed the pin and tossed the canister underhand twenty yards, hearing the click of the hinged tongue as it sprang free. The container landed on a patch of grass, rolled and came to stop against the stems of a bracken patch. Stepping backwards slowly, he began to count to himself. The sheep fed on undisturbed. At ten there was a soft phut and the canister jerked a foot into the air and must have fragmented for he could see no more of it. In fact he could see nothing. There was no obvious escape of gas.
He looked at the sheep. They were still cropping. If there had been anything in the canister, he thought, it must have gone downwind to them by now. Then it happened. Just for a moment the nearest old ewe looked up and then she went down, legs collapsing under her. As though it were some act, some circus trick, done at a signal, timing and co-ordination beautifully, precisely drilled into them, the other sheep went down. Not sideways, or staggering or protesting, but dropping, surrendering their weight to the pull of gravity. They went down and they stayed down. As he watched, he saw a stonechat come flirting across them four feet from the ground rising to land on the granite rock outthrust. Abruptly from mid-flight, from an eye-catching flicker of red, black and white-flecked wing and throat, airborne, wind-coquetting, the earth claimed it and it dropped like a stone.
Raikes turned and walked back to the car.
Mary came into his room that night as she always did, even when her parents were at home, and she stayed with him until the first light began to come up. As she lay beneath him, full of his morning love before leaving, he looked at her face. It was Mary’s face. The face he knew, the face of the girl who was going to fill Alverton with children. Of transcendental dew there was no trace. Sensing he was looking at her, she opened her eyes and then winked at him.
She said, ‘Love me?’
He nodded.
She reached up, kissed him, and said, ‘Not one of your first-class performances. You were drinking too much last night.’
Driving back he made a detour to Dunkery, parked the car and went down to the place of the sheep. There would be no danger now. Whatever had been in the canister must have long been dissipated by the wind.
There was no mist this morning, only bright sunshine on the bronze bracken.
In the shadow of the granite rock lay one of the old ewes, dead. The bird lay there, too, dead. But with the dead ewe, trotting away as he approached, was one of the lambs, crying and then half turning back, but not for milk for it was long past that need from her. Of the other ewe and lambs there was no sign, and no sign of their removal. Although he searched around for them but could not find them, he was sure that they were all right. Nobody had been up here since yesterday. The nearest point a tractor could make was the road a hundred yards away and there would have been signs of the removal of the other bodies. In the heather and bracken close to where the canister had exploded, he found a few bakelite fragments but he left them there untouched.
He drove back, wondering why the ewe had died and the bird, but not the others. He got back home in time to pick up the phone which was ringing. It was Mary.
She said, ‘ How much did you drink last night?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’ve gone off without your case. I’ll bring it over. I’m coming that way later.’
He phoned Berners from Devon and two days later met him at the R.A.C. and told him about the canister.
‘What the hell does Sarling think he’s going to use them for?’
‘God knows. I should think they were part of some riot-control stock, kept handy in that depot for quick distribution to the police or army in Kent and Sussex.’
Raikes said, ‘I shouldn’t want to see a crowd of people go down the way those sheep did. Some of them would never get up again. What the hell was it?’
‘You’d have to ask the boys at Porton or Fort Detrick, Maryland, about that. Sounds like a G-agent or nerve gas. Most of them in an enclosed space will kill.’ Berners caressed his bald crescent. ‘ It’s a great civilization and neither you nor I are any credit to it. I’ll try and find out what the stuff is.’
‘We’ve got to do something about Sarling before he lands us in some wild scheme using the stuff.’
‘The only thing we need for that is the help of Miss Vickers. She can get us all the information we want.’
‘And she’s going to.’ Raikes stood up. ‘ I’ll speak to her when I get back and phone you tomorrow.’
He took Belle out to dinner that night and half-way through the meal he began to talk to her about the canister, telling her what had happened in Devon. It was better to talk to her about it here, surrounded by people so that she couldn’t get emotional or make any vigorous protest. He put it to her as though it were a business proposition, an unexceptionable discussion of alternative methods.
‘He’s going to get us all involved with the use of that stuff. That could mean that a lot of people are going to die. God knows what crazy idea he’s nursing. You don’t think I can stand by and let that happen? Could you? A lot of people being snuffed out just because of Sarling? The only thing to do is to get rid of him. He’s got to go and you’ve got to help us, Belle. Can’t you see that?’
‘You don’t really know he’s going to have you use it.’
‘Of course I do. He didn’t get me to steal it just as a boy scout test. Sarling never wastes time on things like that. Belle I know it’s a hell of a thing to ask you—but you can’t escape it. You’re either going to have the death of Sarling or the deaths of other people to deal with. One or the other. And what’s Sarling matter to you or to me when we can save other people and also free ourselves? Can’t you see that?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. When you put it like that.’
‘That’s the way it is. Anyway, you don’t have to do anything positive about Sarling. All we want is information. Just think of it that way. A few facts. You give them to us and then you forget all about it …’
She looked down at her wine glass, fingering it, twisting it slowly round. ‘The whole thing frightens me.’
‘If you help us nothing can go wrong. Berners and I will see to that. Belle, I need you in this. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone … Are you going to help?’
It was a long time before she looked up at him. There were a hundred things she wanted to say but she knew that none of them would do her any good, none of them would stop him having his way. All she had to do was to stand up and walk away, away from him and from Sarling and let events take their course. But she knew there was no power in her to do it. He needed her. She wanted to be with him. She raised her head and nodded.
His hand came out and held hers across the table. ‘You won’t regret it. Now let’s forget about it and enjoy ourselves. I’ll tell you what we want later.’
That night, lying in bed with him, she listened to him talk, the darkness, and his words all fantasy, each sentence from him, unopposed by her, committing her deeper and deeper. He was telling her now what he needed to know. So much about Sarling and his houses, so much detail … on and on. For God’s sake why did he want to know about clothes? Two nasty grey-black tweeds, the colour of wet granite pavements, two dark grey flannel, smooth, unmarked slate. Taking it all in, she added her own commentary, marking things unlisted as though it were a game, played in the mind, to see who could go on longest … What about his bowel movements, regularity or otherwise of and duration? Toothpaste used and colour of brush. Dressing and undressing programme, shoes then trousers and then socks, or did socks follow shoes and then trousers. And a flipping camera, not to be hidden between her tits or under her girdle … you never knew, Belle, when some bastard’s hands would stray … Nor in any body orifice, the word coming to her memory-shed from some article on natives and diamond smuggling … And she going round Meon and Park Street like a five-bob stately homes tourist, snapping and gawking. Click, an angled view of bed and sidetable with drinking carafe, sleeping pills and the unopened Bible; click, a badly focused shot of the study carpet, a chocolate brown spread with one single white line all the way round, six inches from the sides … For Pete’s sake, it was a game. It had to be a game, lying here in the dark, right after making a woman of her, and still doing it, his passionless but now possessive hand moving over her, the sliding touch keeping the lines of communication open. A game. All these bloody men played games. No matter how serious it was they made a game of it, a serious game, but a game. Stamp out Sarling—colourfully boxed, any number from three upwards can play. Shake dice and collect your clues and rewards and the first one to complete the murder kit got the pleasure of shooting, stabbing, poisoning, strangling or just with fingertip upsetting the man on the parapet so that he went spinning and cart-wheeling down. After the smash on the pavement, a shuffle of chairs and then, ‘ Well, what do we do now? Monopoly or have a drink and just chat?’
Raikes beside her said, ‘Are you taking all this in?’
‘Yes.’
It was his cool voice, county to her, cool, sure, and full of that security which she knew she would never have, evenly accented with the right to enter, speak, demand and question, anywhere, anytime and anyone. Right against the grain of all he was saying, she told herself ‘All I want is to love and be loved.’ Didn’t he know that? Even if he didn’t, wasn’t there a kind of magic in the wish itself which had to work itself into him? Love was a habit. She was full of it; surely some of it would rub off on him, grow on him?
He said, ‘ The one thing, Belle, that can’t be risked, is to give him any idea that you’re doing this. It could lead to hell for both of us.’
‘I understand.’ That was her secretary’s voice, notebook closing, rising to her feet, one hand sweeping the lapcrease from her skirt, spoken deliberately because his hands had momentarily left her and she knew the deadly seriousness in him.
To the darkness above him, he said, ‘He’s got to go. Clean out of this bloody world with a doctor’s certificate as a safe conduct—for us.’ Then to her, a hand coming back, ‘Almost everything depends on you.’
The hand eased her round to him, her face feeling his face close in the dark. ‘I’m putting myself in your hands. If you wanted to, you could betray me and still be safe yourself. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes. But I don’t like you to say it.’
‘I never will again.’
Then, from some impudent malice in her, she said, ‘And what happens when it’s all over? I mean, to me and to you?’
Without hesitation, without any break in the flow of his hands which were heralding the rise of desire again in her and in him, he said, ‘We can talk about that when we’re out of trouble and free.’
And, while she moved to him, ready and longing to be used, she told herself that she had asked for it and got it, got exactly what she knew she would get. The meeting was adjourned sine die.