6

Norfolk, England

Gunther Ruhr listened to the tiresome sound of a ping-pong ball clicking on the surface of a table. He rose from the narrow iron bed and went to the doorway of the living-room, on the far side of which two men were casually playing table tennis. Everything here irritated Ruhr, not just the noise of the ball but also this isolated house surrounded by mud and broken chicken coops and the bitter smell of dry rot that filled his nostrils night after night. A chill rain fell predictably every afternoon, but mainly what depressed him was the company he was obliged to keep.

There were four men in all. They had taken part in Ruhr’s rescue from the English police, and he admired their reckless courage – but on a simple social level they tended to talk in single syllables, or when speech failed them, as it often did, they grunted. When you’d been stuck for days in a run-down farmhouse with no fellowship save the noise of the rain on the window and nothing to read but a mildewed Baedeker’s 1913 Handbook for Paris (the only volume he’d found in the whole house), you needed some kind of diversion.

The two preening Argentinians, Flavell and Zapino, were dark-faced characters who spent a great deal of time running combs through their slick black hair. Now and again they’d congratulate themselves for the successful rescue of Ruhr, as if they were men at a school reunion remembering old pranks. When there was nothing to interest them on the old black and white TV, they dismantled weapons and cleaned them. They looked like contented lovers at such times. Yesterday morning Flavell had accidentally discharged a pistol, firing it into the ceiling and causing great consternation.

The other pair, the ping-pong players, were the Americans, one a cadaverous man called Trevaskis (the most articulate of the four; no great compliment), the other a pale white giant known, rather ordinarily, as Rick. The Americans kept to themselves, conversing in a form of English that Ruhr found hard to follow. Street patois, slang, mangled words. Trevaskis, who was all bone, and whose eyes shone with a missionary fervour, looked across the room at Gunther Ruhr.

There was contempt in the look. It was an expression Ruhr inspired in many people, one he’d seen all his life. People tended to step away from him, as if they intuited some terrible quality in him, a thing both lifeless and contagious. When they were too stubborn to move, they gazed just as Trevaskis was doing now, trying to stare down the demon. It amused the German. He sometimes thought of himself as a prism in which other people might glimpse a blackly intimidating aspect of the human condition.

Trevaskis, something of a joker, said, “Sleep well, Mr Claw?”

The giant Rick, dressed in white T-shirt and blue jeans, smiled. He smiled at everything Trevaskis said. The two Argentinians put their combs away and turned to look. Ruhr remained in the doorway, folding his arms across his chest. The Claw. He neither liked nor disliked his nickname. It had been created by the press, merchants who traded in revulsion.

The same press had bestowed the status of legend on him, and he was pleased by that. He kept clippings under the floorboards of the tiny attic apartment he secretly maintained in the Sachsenhausen area of Munich. These invariably referred to his lack of moral values and his coldness toward human suffering. He was called barbarous, a monster. He sometimes leafed through the cuttings and felt removed from these descriptions. They missed the point. It wasn’t so much his lack of certain qualities, it was more the fact that he considered ordinary human virtues undesirable. Everybody wanted love and affection: therefore they were commonplace and debased. Everybody deplored needless violence: therefore it was acceptable. Ruhr’s logic was based on perversity. What other men might strive for, Ruhr wanted to destroy. What some men might exalt, Ruhr ridiculed. The sea of his feelings ran contrary to any common tide. Even his physical deformity, which he liked because he thought it mirrored the inner Ruhr, separated him from other people. He was alone in the world. He’d never felt any other way.

Ruhr stepped into the living-room. He raised the perfect hand to his face, stroked the firm jaw. An intriguing aspect of the recent misadventure in Cambridge was that suddenly, after years of anonymity, he had recognisable features! He was a public figure whose photograph had been printed in newspapers all over the world! His face was almost as well known as that of any movie star, which was not an altogether unpleasant novelty. He liked it the way any actor, formerly obliged to perform as a masked character, might enjoy recognition after years of doing his best work in the shadows.

He caught the ping-pong ball in mid-air and closed his left hand around it. “We have work to do. Tomorrow is the day.”

The four men were silent. They watched Ruhr closely. They were more than his rescuers, more than the soldiers in his command, they were also his guards, instructed by the Cuban to keep him from harm, to limit his movements and make sure he didn’t repeat the disastrous business in Cambridge. Ruhr had nothing but disdain for the men who bought his services. He had no sense of being an employee. Instead he considered himself the master of those who hired him. Nor did he ever trust the men who paid him because they were usually slaves of one ideology or another, lackeys to this obsession or that. They seldom had themselves under control; consequently, they were unable to control anything around them.

The Cuban, for example: Ruhr no more trusted him than he believed in God. You could see all the Cuban’s wretched ambition in his eyes, in every word he spoke, every gesture he made. He’d come here two days ago, breathing fire, warning Ruhr not to screw things up, trying to hide the fact he was afraid because his aspirations were menaced, and Ruhr had played the obedient little dog with a theatrical contrition the Cuban, wrapped up in his own aims, apparently missed. Yessir, yessir. I’ll be good, sir.

What the Cuban did not know was that Gunther Ruhr always took precautions for his own safety; documents, papers, numbers of bank accounts, copies of cashier’s cheques, diaries describing assignments and naming names – these were in sealed boxes in the possession of a certain Herr Wilhelm Schiller, a lawyer in Hamburg, who had instructions to open them only in the event of Ruhr’s death or disappearance. Ruhr believed in protecting himself.

Now the four men were watching over him, sentries circling the cage of an unpredictable madman. Ruhr was thrilled by the idea of creating tension in other people.

“Get the map,” he said.

The Argentinians produced a detailed Ordnance Survey map. Ruhr spread it on the table. He had an amazing memory, a mind that seized the essential details of anything and stored them for instant recall at any future date. He had studied this map once and he didn’t need to look at it again for his own sake. He was rehearsing the others.

He pointed to a minor road that ran between woodlands. There was a windmill to the east, a canal in the west. A mile past the windmill was the crucial fork in the road. A thin pathway ran in one direction toward a dairy farm; the other tine, smooth and concrete, sliced through more woodland, lovely and dense and unfenced, affording marvellous opportunities for concealment and surprise. Here and there on the map were villages and hamlets. The only village of interest, Ruhr said, was the one known as St Giles. Six miles beyond it was the airfield of the East Anglia Flying Club. This was the most crucial location in the whole operation. If Ruhr and his men were somehow prevented from reaching the airfield, they would separate. If they were not already dead, Ruhr added, and smiled in his usual thin way, the expression of a man whose sense of humour, misunderstood by all, had doomed him to a life of smiling alone.

The Argentinians asked questions about time. They both wore very expensive watches and they believed that these instruments had to be “seenchronised”. Ruhr told them that time was his own business, something he kept to himself for security reasons. The South Americans understood and became silent.

Ruhr folded the map. He went inside the kitchen. Eggshells, bacon rinds, twisted pieces of cellophane, matches, cigarette butts, open jars of meat paste – trash everywhere. Ruhr filled a glass with water, drank slowly. He didn’t like the chaos in this room. He preferred a world of clean angles and well-defined spaces. But it wasn’t always possible to live in such a perfect universe. All too often there were intrusions, such as this kitchen and its dirty disorder.

Or the girl in Cambridge …

He remembered her unsunned thighs and the way she’d shivered when she’d taken her jeans off and how she’d drawn a thin curtain across the window, trying to look provocative but succeeding only in appearing pathetic. And then the expression on her face when the steel gleamed on his hand – she’d screamed, and after that came the chaos and ignominy of capture.

He remembered the policeman called Pagan who had asked all kinds of questions. Ruhr had made up stories, weaving them off the top of his head. Like any good storyteller, he believed in his fictions. He was a salesman with a line in time-share condominiums, an absent-minded Egyptologist on a backpacking vacation, an urbane professor of Swiss Literature (a part-time occupation, you understand, he’d said to an unsmiling Pagan) – identities, some of them amusing to him, flooded Ruhr as fast as he could assume them.

Pagan refused to be entertained by the ever-changing cast of characters. He’d been demanding. Frustrated, he’d thump his fist on the table in the interview room. At other moments he tried to disguise his irritation by falling silent and looking directly into Ruhr’s eyes. The Englishman had determined grey eyes, but Ruhr had met their challenge without flinching. And now the English cop was wounded, or so the TV news had said. Lying in a hospital bed, Ruhr thought, frustrated and angry and desperate. A man like that could be extremely dangerous if he were out on the streets. A man like that wasn’t likely to be confined too long to a hospital.

But he had the measure of Pagan; he was confident of that. Pagan was dogged, but clearly not inspired. In a contest between himself and the Englishman, his own superiority would triumph every time. Pagan had intuitions, of course, but they would be dull compared to Ruhr’s own. Ruhr could slip in and out of other souls; Frank Pagan, at best, could only hope to read – by means of emotional braille – other people’s behaviour and through this slight empathy predict their future actions. Guesswork! Ruhr had no affinity with anything so unreliable. He put his credence only in certainty, and the supreme certainty was his faith in himself.

Ruhr raised his glass to his lips. The memory of the girl was still strong. She hadn’t been beautiful, perhaps not even pretty, but Ruhr didn’t care about ordinary beauty. Her paleness, her fragility, glass to be shattered – that was what had attracted him. But then he’d become blinded by his need to put the deformed hand inside her and twist it upward into her womb, and hear flesh come away, that soft whimpering sound of skin and sinew torn and muscle cut. Usually the girls fainted. Sometimes they bled to death. At such times it seemed to Ruhr that he wasn’t entirely involved in these acts, that he stood outside himself, hypnotised by his own need to dominate and hurt, entranced by the simplicity, the purity, of power. There was another factor too, and that was his curiosity about the female anatomy: the way it worked, the intricate arrangement of womb and tubes, a fascination that had begun when he’d first seen a medical text at the age of eight and glimpsed, in a rose-coloured sectional diagram, the soft pink secrets of the female interior, and its essential vulnerability. The sight of it aroused a perplexing hunger inside the young boy Ruhr had been, and he’d never forgotten those detailed sketches. For a time he had toyed with the notion of becoming a doctor, perhaps a gynaecologist, but the idea had lost its intrigue, vanquished by Ruhr’s preference for destruction over restoration.

Now what troubled him was to have been caught in Cambridge so stupidly! Was it slackness? Was he too old at thirty-seven to be as cautious, as vigilant, as he’d always been? Why hadn’t he clamped a hand round the girl’s mouth and silenced her? Was he becoming simply blasé, arrogant to the point of indifference? Or had it come down to something else: the idea of creating a contest for himself, his own brilliance matched against another mind, a protagonist – Frank Pagan, for example? Was Pagan even worthy of that consideration?

Trevaskis came into the kitchen. “It’s cold, Ruhr. The guys want permission to light a fire.”

“No fire,” Ruhr said. He disliked Trevaskis. The other men were acquiescent, but Trevaskis had an independent streak that was going to prove troublesome in the end. The American would have to be watched over. “What would happen if somebody saw smoke from the chimney? Perhaps you would rather go up on the roof and wave a big red flag?”

Trevaskis shrugged. Ruhr’s sarcasm didn’t go down big with him. A silver St Christopher around his neck shimmered. “This place isn’t exactly a day at the beach, Ruhr.”

“As long as I’m in charge, my friend, there will be no fire. When you remember how much you’re being paid, Trevaskis, you’ll find that discomfort has a way of becoming tolerable.”

Trevaskis fingered his medallion. He had never worked with Ruhr before. He thought the German unstable, like an unpinned hand-grenade in a closed fist. The business with the metal claw – what sort of sick shit was that? And then the goddam rescue, which had cost the lives of the Australian and the other guy, the little Swede called Anderssen – all that stoked Trevaskis’ general resentment. He wasn’t going to get into a fight with Ruhr, though. When this job was finished, there was going to be a quarter of a million dollars in hard cash, and you didn’t blow off that kind of bonanza. You didn’t let Ruhr do anything to fuck it up either. The Cuban guy had quietly promised Trevaskis there would be a big bonus if Ruhr behaved himself.

“You’re the boss,” Trevaskis said. The fucking Führer, he thought.

Ruhr drained his glass and set it down in the sink. He let his left hand touch the pistol tucked into the waistband of his corduroy trousers. “Keep that fact in mind, Trevaskis.”

“It’s like tattooed right here,” and Trevaskis tapped his head. Asshole. He shivered in an exaggerated way, blowing on his hands as he shuffled toward the door of the kitchen.

“One other matter,” Ruhr said. “This room needs to be cleaned. If the men are complaining of cold, a little hard work might quickly warm them up.”

“Great idea,” Trevaskis remarked.

“You’re so agreeable I feel I can delegate the task to you with every confidence.”

Trevaskis smiled oddly. “Spick and span. Shipshape. Every surface like a mirror. Count on it.”

Ruhr said, “You know what cleanliness is next to.”

“I’ve heard.”

Ruhr raised his deformed hand suddenly and laid the palm on Trevaskis’ shoulder. He watched with some delight the American flinch, then try to conceal his gesture of revulsion behind a stupid little grin.

“Godliness,” Ruhr said. “If you believe in God.”

Trevaskis didn’t move.

“I have no such belief,” Ruhr went on. “This hand, for example. Would a caring God allow a child to be born with a deformity like this? Why would any God wish to punish an innocent child? What sin could I possibly have committed in my mother’s womb to deserve to be born a freak?”

Trevaskis said nothing. Ruhr’s touch offended him. But how could he back away without admitting a surrender of some kind?

“I lie,” Ruhr said. “I wasn’t born this way at all, Trevaskis. I was born with five fingers. Perfectly natural. When I was twelve I took my mother’s kitchen-knife and I hacked off the two middle fingers. I remember a rather boring juvenile desire to understand pain. So I experimented on the only subject available – myself.”

Trevaskis moved an inch or so, getting out from under the hand. But Ruhr was quick. He brought his palm up to Trevaskis’ cheek and laid it there. It was an odd gesture that might have been affectionate in some other circumstances, but here it was sinister. Ruhr’s clammy flesh had a strange smell to it, like decay. Trevaskis stood motionless. He wanted to smack Ruhr’s hand away. This close to the German you could practically hear him ticking.

Ruhr said, “I was a child wonder, Trevaskis. A marvel. At the age of eight I had read Kant. I found the Categorical Imperative less of a directive than the urge to discover what lay under a girl’s skirt, which I did at ten.” Here Ruhr laughed in a dry, quiet way.

“By the time I was eleven, I knew how to make gunpowder. First the intellectual pursuits, then the sexual, finally the destructive. I learned one thing with great certainty: the effect of a bomb is more immediate than all Kant’s philosophy. The only way to kill a man with Kant is to strike him over the head with the Complete Works in German.”

There were elements of truth in Ruhr’s brief narrative. He had read Kant at eight, as he claimed, and he had indeed learned to make gunpowder at eleven. But these strands had become so interwoven with myth that they were hard to separate: he no longer knew if he’d been born deformed or caused it to happen. He no longer cared either way. The reality of his past was often mundane, so he altered it. Self-mutilation was much more intriguing than some genetic error.

Ruhr had been born in Munich, the child of itinerant fundamentalists who were members of a proselytising American sect with headquarters in Baton Rouge, hard-core scriptural believers who thought Galileo and Darwin brothers of Satan. Ruhr’s parents, both rather distant persons who considered their very bright child something of an unexpected encumbrance, moved around Europe with such frequency that a three-week lease on a cheap apartment was deemed stability. It became clear to Gunther Ruhr that he was needless baggage to his parents – gaunt people with bright, spacey eyes and a disarmingly naïve zest for accosting strangers on street corners and shoving fundamentalist pamphlets into their hands. They despised the child, and he in turn was embarrassed by them and what seemed to him the sham of their religious beliefs: God was a mass of philosophical contradictions, so why bother with Him? Life was simpler without a deity.

Somewhere along the way, Ruhr’s parents managed to leave him behind. Either they simply forgot him in their religious obsession or were too troubled by his outspoken cleverness, and his inclination toward atheism, to want his company. He was boarded out at a variety of schools where his natural brightness overwhelmed all around him. Abstract subjects were grasped in moments and committed forever to a memory that was a well-tooled trap. Other students bored him, wasted his time. He befriended nobody. At the age of sixteen he qualified for a place at the University of Hamburg, which he entered during a time of social unrest when student activists were erecting barricades in streets. Attracted by destruction, thrilled by streets made foggy from tear gas and the daily battles against the police, Ruhr came to life as he’d never before. He discovered in himself a knack for subterfuge, an affinity for the cellars where people made up revolutions and schemed to bring society down. He was a natural.

At the age of seventeen, he took part in his first bank robbery, led by a student radical shot and killed in the course of the theft. Ruhr took the fallen leader’s place without asking or being asked. For the next two years he and his gang robbed banks throughout Europe. During this time Ruhr developed all manner of alliances that would later form the foundation of his terrorist network.

In 1974, he was contacted in Rome by a representative from a certain Middle Eastern nation who needed some “demolition” work done – the bombing of an aeroplane, to be specific. Ruhr, amazed that he was being offered such a large sum of money to undertake a task he might have done for nothing save expenses, accepted the assignment.

It was his first real act of mercenary terrorism. By contrast bank robberies were trifles, small local jobs with no international significance. The aeroplane, with crew and one hundred and eighteen passengers, exploded on the ground at Tel Aviv. Ruhr remembered the fascinating newspaper pictures, the TV shots. It was at this time he began to make a scrapbook of his deeds. The press, interested in Ruhr’s terrorist activities for some time, uncovered his role in the tragedy and began to delve into what little was known of his history. With that strange fascination newspapermen always reserve for people of high intelligence gone somehow “wrong”, journalists turned Ruhr into that archetype of brilliance and violence combined, the “mad genius”, “the sick boy-wonder”. It was at this time too he first wore the strange stainless steel prosthetic device and discovered that his taste for destruction, that unfathomable need, went beyond the bombing of aeroplanes.

Now Ruhr smiled at Trevaskis, then let the hand fall back to his side. “You hated me touching you, didn’t you?”

Trevaskis’ mouth was dry. “It didn’t faze me, Ruhr.”

Ruhr said, “You’re a bad liar. Nobody likes me to touch them. I can feel their revulsion. This interesting appendage” – and here he turned the hand over and over – “creates abhorrence in other people, which they try either to disguise as sympathy, or ignore. Such fools. I see through people, Trevaskis. I read the fine print on their hearts.”

Trevaskis moved toward the kitchen door. He wanted to get away from Ruhr. Sometimes you looked into another man’s eyes and what you saw there was unknowable. It was like dark mysterious water when you had no sounding instrument to probe the depths. Ruhr, whether truthful or lying, gave Trevaskis the impression of an unpleasant illusion done with mirrors.

“Now clean this horrible place,” Ruhr said.

The giant Rick appeared just then, bending his head a little to clear the top of the door. He had watery brown eyes and a mouth too small for his enormous white face. He gave the impression of great physical strength without a mind to direct it.

“There’s somebody out front,” he said. His voice was a whisper.

“Who?” Ruhr asked.

“I didn’t get a real good look. I saw somebody step across the front yard and go behind the vehicle.”

“One? More than one?” Ruhr asked.

“Only saw one,” Rick replied.

Ruhr moved quickly out of the kitchen. He went from the living-room to his bedroom, the window of which looked directly out into the yard. He parted the damp yellow blind an eighth of an inch: all he saw was the Range Rover in the heavy, slanting rain. And yet he had a feeling of a scene recently disturbed, a stillness through which some trespasser has moved. He couldn’t say why, simply an old instinct. He took the pistol from his waistband and returned to the living-room. When he moved with stealth and speed he was impressive, graceful, a man whose quiet elegance had been honed by more than fifteen years of surreptitious acts.

The Argentinians had automatic rifles clutched in their arms. Trevaskis and Rick carried handguns.

“Flavell, Zapino, stay at the windows, but don’t show yourself,” Ruhr said. “Trevaskis, you and Rick cover me from the kitchen.”

“You’re going out there?” Trevaskis asked.

Ruhr didn’t answer. He was already moving to the kitchen. There was a side-door that opened on to the place where the run-down chicken hatches were located.

“Wait,” Trevaskis said. “Let somebody else go outside. You oughta stay here.”

Ruhr heard nothing. When he was involved in action he closed his senses down to anything extraneous. Action was everything, single-minded, demanding all one’s concentration. He opened the kitchen door softly. The cold mid-afternoon rain stung his face. He loved the sensation. Trevaskis stood behind, whispering his useless objections.

Ruhr stared across the mud. Raindrops rattled the old coops. He took a step outside. He was insubstantial now, merging with the elements, a kind of transformation that Trevaskis could only admire from the kitchen doorway. This was no ordinary man sneaking through the rain with a gun: Ruhr melted into the greyness of the weather, as if the rain created a funnel of camouflage around him.

Ruhr reached the corner of the house. He looked at the Range Rover. The muddy yard was empty. He stood motionless against the wall of the house. Water ran from his thin hair over the lids of his eyes. Then he heard the sound, something that lay under the incessant squabble of the rain, a wet noise but different, a squelching pressure on soft mud.

And there she was.

A child, a girl dressed in school uniform, short black skirt and maroon blazer and long maroon scarf trailing over her shoulder. She was running, breaking free from the cover of the Rover, but the black mud fettered her movements and disturbed her balance. She was heading towards the slope that rose up behind the farmhouse, arms stretched on either side for equilibrium, a dancer in the slime. Ruhr went after her, enjoying the certainty of catching her. He moved with long strides, strong ones, cutting down the distance between himself and the girl at will. Her beret flew off. Her short blond hair quickly became soaked with rain.

Ruhr grabbed her around the waist before she was even halfway up the slope. He swung her round to face him and she blinked from all the rainwater in her eyes. Through her soaked blouse could be seen the small white brassière she wore. She tried to tear herself away, but Ruhr, laughing, moved behind her and locked one arm tightly under her chin, forcing her tiny face back.

“Why were you spying?”

“You’re hurting me.”

Ruhr applied more pressure. “What were you doing sneaking around my house?”

“Nothing … cross my heart … let me go!”

Ruhr released her and she rubbed her neck at the place where he’d bruised her.

“I can hardly breathe,” she said.

“You’ll be all right.”

“I live a few miles away, I wanted to say hello, introduce myself, but you’re obviously not friendly –”

Ruhr said, “If you’re so innocent, why did you run?”

She shook her wet hair. “Scared.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“The gun in your hand,” the girl said. She walked a few steps, reached down to pick up her beret, turned it round between her fingers. Ruhr watched the short skirt rise upon her young thigh. The expanse of flesh between the knee-length socks and the hem of the risen skirt was all the more provocative for its innocence. She was slim, and pretty in the awkward fashion of the young; insecure about her own looks, uncertain about her place in the world.

Ruhr put the gun in his waistband.

“I’ll leave,” the girl said. “I won’t bother you again, I swear it.”

“Tell me your name first.”

“Steffie.”

“What a very ugly name,” Ruhr said.

“Stephanie then.”

“That’s better.” It occurred to Ruhr that he could let this girl walk away. By tomorrow morning he’d be gone from this place anyhow. What did it matter? He looked down at the house; he thought he saw the shadows of the two South Americans in the windows.

“Well,” the girl said, and there was a flutter of fear in her voice. “I suppose I’d better leave.”

Ruhr watched her face. There was renewed anxiety in her eyes and her mouth had become very tense. And of course he knew why.

“I can’t let you go.”

She backed away. “I didn’t see anything. I swear I didn’t.”

He stepped toward her. She slipped as she moved backward. She lay in the mud, the skirt above her waist, white underwear showing, her legs raised and bent at the knees. He stood over her.

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

She shook her head, tried to rise, slipped again. “Please,” she said. “I won’t say anything. Not to a living soul. I promise.”

“You saw my picture in the newspapers. You saw this,” and he raised his right hand.

Tears rolled over her cheeks. “I only want to go home.”

“We all want that, Steffie.”

He reached for her arm, hauled her to her feet, led her down the slope to the house. She wouldn’t stop crying; he hit her once, rather softly, across the side of her face. After that she sobbed in silence, as if something inside her had begun to break. He pushed her into the house, slammed the door shut.

“What the hell is this?” Trevaskis asked.

“A little gem,” Ruhr said. “Isn’t it surprising what a man can find in an otherwise dreary English landscape?”

At the summit of the slope, under bare, sodden trees, the girl’s horse whinnied, a sound obliterated by wind and rain.

Nobody in the farmhouse heard.

London

Martin Burr dreaded visits to the Home Secretary’s office. It was a vast oak-panelled room hung with faded oil paintings of politicians past. Under the scrutiny of the portraits the Commissioner felt like a defendant in the dock of history, judged by the stern faces of an awesome jury – the first Earl of Chatham, Gladstone, Lord Acton, Sir Robert Peel. Their faces glowered disapprovingly into the room as if abruptly summoned from a long, well-deserved sleep. Martin Burr looked round the room for a sign of something less imposing, less official, and found it parked in a dim corner – a small, bedraggled canary in a brass cage. The little bird shivered in misery.

Burr turned when the door opened and the Home Secretary came in. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, Martin.” He tossed some folders down on his enormous desk, then rummaged in a drawer and brought out an eye-dropper filled with clear liquid. He went to the bird cage and pushed the dropper through the bars, letting fluid drip into the canary’s food dish. “Bird’s got some kind of flu. This stuff’s supposed to help it. It’s touch and go, I fear. We live in hope.” The Home Secretary gently rattled the cage, bringing his face very close to it and whispering to the canary. “Don’t we, Charlie? Don’t we live in hope?”

He walked back to his desk, sat down. “Now then. This bloody Ruhr business. Where are we exactly?”

Burr, who half-expected to be axed, gazed at the window. The afternoon sky over the Thames was low and leaden. “Not as far along as I would have liked, Secretary,” he said. “The search continues. Sea ports are being watched. Air terminals. Railways. All public transport. Ruhr’s picture is plastered everywhere. Frank Pagan’s office is examining all known terrorist connections.”

“Pagan? Shouldn’t he be in hospital or something?”

“He’s a stubborn bastard,” Burr said. That damned Pagan. “He discharged himself yesterday.”

The Home Secretary turned his face toward the window and appeared to consider this information. Then he turned back to the Commissioner. “What news of the leak, Martin?”

Martin Burr imagined he saw Sir Robert Peel frown. He glanced up at the portrait of the man who had founded the London police force in 1829. Then he looked elsewhere. “I’ve imposed unusually strict limits on the number of people who have access to the paperwork generated by the Ruhr investigation. Memoranda and confidential reports on the affair no longer circulate in the usual way. Pagan has tightened his own departmental security – restricted access to computer data, telephone scrambling devices, that sort of thing. When we communicate with each other in the future, we do so directly, either face to face, or on a safe line. No third parties.”

“But you haven’t sniffed out the culprit?”

“No, but that isn’t our top priority, Secretary. After all, the damage caused by the leak is already done. We’re concentrating exclusively on Ruhr. When we catch him, then I can turn my attention to our internal shortcomings.”

The Home Secretary was silent for a time. “Sound approach, Martin,” he said finally.

This unexpected vote of confidence startled Burr. He poked his walnut cane into the weave of the Secretary’s Persian rug. He had come here expecting his own execution or, at best, a severe reprimand. The Home Secretary wasn’t famed for a kind heart. A compliment from him had been known to make otherwise sombre men light-headed for weeks. Perhaps the Secretary’s mild approval was merely a way to soften the inevitable blow. Burr braced himself.

“Do we have any idea why this German is here?” the Secretary asked.

Martin Burr shook his head. “There’s a list of possibilities that grows longer by the moment.”

“Possibilities or guesses, Martin?”

“Guesses,” Burr said.

The Secretary was quiet for a time. “When six policemen die, when we have an atrocity of that magnitude, it’s common to look immediately for an individual to take the total blame. The obvious choice, Martin, would be you. Commissioner of Scotland Yard, the man in charge of Ruhr’s transport, the responsible commanding officer, etcetera etcetera. The great masses, who have quite a taste for the blood of fallible officials, would not be unhappy with a public hanging.”

Burr sighed and nodded his head. A public hanging: he saw himself turned out of office, a long retirement at his house in the Sussex countryside. He saw himself stooped and ancient, pottering around in a garden whose fruits and flowers didn’t remotely interest him but were merely things one grew on the way to the grave.

“What damn good is a scapegoat?” the Home Secretary asked. “Your record is distinguished, Martin. And I stand squarely behind you. I will say so in public at any time.”

Surprised, Burr brightened at once. “I appreciate that.”

“I am one of your staunchest supporters, Martin. And I am certain the Commission of Inquiry will exonerate you in due course.”

Burr felt a surge of gratitude that rose to his head like blood. He wasn’t sure what to say. He saw the Home Secretary reach across the desk and extend his hand, which Burr shook. It was a vigorous grip between two men who have sworn to uphold the laws of a nation.

“Go back to work with a clear mind, Martin,” the Home Secretary said. “I don’t want you to be hindered by criticism. I don’t want the Commission of Inquiry to distress you in any way. Remember this. You have an ally in me.”

“I’m very grateful, Secretary.”

“No need. If you were an incompetent buffoon I would have you out of office in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. But you’re not. Your record speaks for itself.”

Burr rose from his chair. A weight had been removed from him and he felt quite spry all at once. Even the portraits appeared less uncompromising, as if Burr had passed some kind of test and his examiners were, for the moment at least, pleased with him.

The canary cheeped bravely. The Home Secretary walked to the cage and looked inside. “Bird’s first sound in days. Perhaps it’s a good omen.” He drew a fingernail over the bars, making a dull harp-like noise. “Keep me posted daily, Martin. That’s all I ask. When anything comes up, I will expect to hear from you.”

“Of course, Sir Frederick.”

The Home Secretary smiled. It was the easy expression of a man who, though born into wealth, prides himself on having the common touch. For this reason he was never called Sir Frederick in the newspapers. It was always the more colloquial Sir Freddie.

He walked Martin Burr to the door.

“Good luck, Commissioner.”

“We’ll need it,” Burr said.

Still smiling, clapping Martin Burr on the back, Sir Freddie Kinnaird closed the door.