21

London

Frank Pagan looked from the window of the Boeing 727 as the electric coastline of Florida faded and the darkness of the ocean replaced land. Then there were clouds, becalmed in the storm’s aftermath. He pretended to read the in-flight magazine but his attention was drawn time and again to Steffie Brough in the seat beside him.

She was lost in a glossy magazine of her own, a world of models, a synthetic reality, clearly preferable to the one she’d just experienced. She was oddly quiet most of the trip, unwilling to answer even the most innocuous of Pagan’s questions. He realised that sooner or later this little girl was going to need expert help, a counsellor, a therapist. Ruhr had left his mark on her – the question was how much damage had been done?

Pagan, who had no great mastery of small talk, made idle comments, and Steffie Brough responded, if at all, in a dull way. Strangers with nothing to share, Pagan thought, which in one sense was true – he a London cop, she a horse-breeder’s daughter from farmlands, what could they have in common? The girl, though, had a certain dead look in her eyes, as if curiosity were a capacity she didn’t have; no questions about Pagan’s investigation, no gratitude. Although Pagan sought none, he nevertheless would have thought it natural in the circumstances. She flipped magazine pages, picked at her airline food – chicken pellets with almonds, a glutinous matter masquerading as rice. She was quite lost to Pagan’s efforts to reach her, beyond any kindness he showed, any concern he demonstrated. And he tried; despite what he considered a lack of any natural affinity for kids – here he underestimated himself – he made a good effort. Her retreat defeated him.

It was after five a.m. when the flight reached London, a grey English dawn with a spiteful, jaundiced sun. Heathrow was out of the question – too many journalists and photographers waiting for snapshots of that most beloved of human occurrences, the tearful reunion. Consequently, the plane was diverted to Gatwick, and Stephanie Brough’s parents were taken there in an unmarked car.

Pagan disembarked with the girl. Outside, in a lounge set aside for the child’s return, a small crowd had come to meet her – her parents, a grandmother, a brother (a gangling youth of unsurpassed awkwardness who had somehow contrived to break the stems of roses he brought to his sister), a dozen or so uniformed policemen, half of them women, detectives in plain clothes, Billy Ewing from Golden Square, and Martin Burr, who clapped Pagan’s shoulder as if to say it was a job well done. And so it was, but Burr was never expansive in his appreciations. A professional did what was expected of him, a professional needed no special thanks. Later, there would be reports and interviews, but not for the moment.

Pagan, tired, trying not to yawn, was thanked by the gushing parents and the grandmother who planted a perfumed kiss on his lips. All he wanted was to drift away, go back to his flat, sleep for days. It was a lonely prospect and he was apprehensive about the possibility of bad dreams, a missile rising into the launch position, the sight of a small aeroplane burning in a Cuban field – but it was time to slow down his private clock.

He watched the happy crowd inside the lounge, the smilingly tearful family, Steffie’s mother with her white insomniac face lit like a bright lightbulb, Mr Brough in a check suit with a camel hair waistcoat, Steffie herself clinging quietly to her mother.

And yet Pagan felt weird. Displaced. Out of sorts. A feeling that had nothing to do with his fatigue. There was something not quite right about this whole gathering.

He walked to a drinks machine, pressed in a coin, heard a can of Coca-Cola come hurtling down the chute. He popped it, sipped the stuff, longed for a dram of the Auchentoshan to spike it up, and wondered what it was that left him so chilled, that sense of missing something. And then he knew what it was even before Billy Ewing – hushed, confidential, looking like a bookie’s clerk – grabbed him by the elbow and took him aside. They stepped out of the lounge and into the grubby dawn, where Billy blew his nose with distinctive flair, a trombonist of the sinuses.

“It’s Foxie,” Billy Ewing said.

Of course, Pagan thought. That was it. Foxie wasn’t here. Good old Foxie hadn’t shown up. He gazed at Billy Ewing and waited for more, but the Scotsman hadn’t much to add.

“He hasn’t come back yet, Frank. Off he went to Glasgow, called in with one message, and that was the last we heard from him.”

“You’ve tried to contact him?”

“Oh, aye, last night I talked with Glasgow Central myself.”

“And?”

Billy Ewing shrugged. “And nothing. No trace. He borrowed a car belonging to Glasgow CID – and it hasn’t been returned.”

“Do you have a copy of his last message?” Pagan asked.

“Back at the office.”

“We’ll go in your car, Billy,” Pagan said.

“Whatever you say.”

They went in Ewing’s Ford through Central London, through streets springing to daily, prosaic life, and by the time they reached Golden Square, Frank Pagan’s sleepiness had evaporated, replaced by a general sense of uneasiness.

The message was already two days old and as Pagan fingered the flimsy piece of paper he had the unsettling feeling, given perhaps only to mediums and soothsayers, that Foxie’s silence indicated a serious condition.

“Mibbe he’s following up on something,” Ewing suggested. “Mibbe he’s on to something hot.”

“And he couldn’t find change for a telephone call, Billy?”

Ewing, baffled, shrugged. He knew as well as Pagan that Foxworth was a diligent man who paid conscientious attention to detail. Pagan went inside his office and sat for a time on the sofa. He shut his eyes, rubbed them, worried about Foxie.

He looked up at Billy Ewing. “Get me on the next available flight to Glasgow, Billy. And get me a gun.”

“Do you want some company, Frank? I know the territory, after all.”

Pagan shook his head, stood up, felt an immense pressure in his chest. He didn’t want company, talkative or otherwise. He would follow Foxworth’s trail alone. He borrowed Ewing’s pistol, a Smith and Wesson, and Billy drove him from Golden Square out along the motorway to Heathrow.

On the way Billy Ewing mentioned the result of his inquiries into Harry Hurt and Sheridan Perry. Pagan could barely recall having made the request; it seemed such a long time ago. Rich pair of buggers, Frank, was how Billy Ewing phrased it. “But wealth, as my old Grannie used to phrase it, is no guarantee of immortality.”

“Meaning?”

“Harry Hurt was assassinated in Washington, and Sheridan Perry has disappeared.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Pagan said.

Billy Ewing sighed. “There’s a lot of dying going on, Frank.”

Scotland

The flight to Glasgow was uneventful. It was just after eight a.m. when Pagan arrived and took a taxi to the city centre. Morning sunlight in the city, an unexpected state of affairs, and lovely, the breeze off the River Clyde bracing, the clouds rushing across a clear blue sky. In the heart of Glasgow Pagan went at once to the offices of the Executive Motor Car Company in West Nile Street. This was the new Glasgow – gone was a certain tired, washed-out drabness, a weariness of the soul that had given the city the appearance of some Baltic capital. Uplifted, scrubbed, renewed, it was as if the city had overcome an inferiority complex after many years of arduous, expensive therapy.

Pagan found the Executive Motor Car Company located over a philately shop. He climbed the stairs. Halfway up, winded, he paused. A telephone rang somewhere above him, a kettle whistled. This was the way Foxworth had come, these were the stairs he must have climbed. Pagan reached the landing where a lovely young woman stood in a doorway, holding in one hand a mug of hot tea.

“You don’t look terrific,” she said. “Are you feeling sick? Can I get you anything?”

Pagan smiled, shook his head, showed his ID, asked about Foxie. The woman said her name was Miss Wilkie and, yes, she remembered Foxworth, he had been very charming, very much a gentleman of the kind one rarely saw these days – and she blushed, Pagan noticed.

Miss Wilkie frowned, as if she had become suddenly concerned about Foxworth’s fate. “Has something happened to him?”

“I’m not sure,” Pagan replied. “Where was he going when he left here?”

“I gave him very specific directions, Mr Pagan, to a house in Ayrshire. In fact, I kept a copy of the map our driver made for him. It’s a bit rough, but easy to follow.” She paused. She had small, trim hands that gleamed because they had recently been rubbed with skin lotion. “He hasn’t come back yet, is that it?”

Pagan nodded. “That’s it exactly.”

“He asked about some men – let me think a minute. They had names that began with the letter C. One was called Chap, Chap something or other.”

“Chapotin?”

“I believe you’re right,” said Miss Wilkie. “The other man was named Caporelli. Both these men used our limousines to visit the country house in which Mr Foxworth showed such interest.”

Pagan felt a very small pulse in his dry throat. He tried to imagine Foxie’s excitement when he uncovered the information that both Chapotin and Enrico Caporelli had visited the same house. That link, that complex knot tying together Caporelli and Chapotin, the same knot that brought both Rosabal and Gunther Ruhr into its ornate folds and twists.

“He might have been in an accident,” Miss Wilkie said in a kindly, hesitant way. “Some of the roads are bad. Then there are cliffs …” She left this line of thought alone, and smiled, and there was bravery in the expression. “You’ll find him, you’ll see. People always turn up.”

But in what condition? Pagan wondered. He took the copy of the map, studied it, felt dizzy. He asked about renting a car and Miss Wilkie said she could oblige very easily. A few forms to complete, that was all. Pagan filled in the requisite paperwork, thanked Miss Wilkie, shook her hand, went down into West Nile Street. The city seemed unduly loud to him suddenly, the clatter of buses, clogged streets. He found a small coffee shop near Royal Exchange Square and went inside, drank two cups of strong Kenyan quickly, then returned to Executive Motor Cars Limited to pick up his hired car, a Fiat Uno.

Out of the city and on his way south; easy enough on paper, but his sense of direction was skewed and he went in circles for an hour before finding the route that would take him into Ayrshire, presumably the same route Foxworth had taken before. Pagan drove carefully; sleep kept coming in now, dark wave after dark wave. He studied Miss Wilkie’s map now and then, and, noticing the sparkling greenery of the countryside through which he drove, wished he were a tourist and this some casual jaunt directly into the heart of beauty.

He stopped in Ayr, stretched his legs near the harbour, breathed the sea air into his lungs, watched gulls squabble like spectators in search of a sport. Perhaps Foxie had come this way too; pursuing a ghost, Pagan thought. He half-expected to see Foxie by the side of the road, his automobile broken down and young Foxie resting indolently upon a grassy bank while awaiting the arrival of a mechanic. But Pagan saw no Foxworths and no broken-down cars. He drove south out of Ayr and almost at once the countryside became forlorn – lovely, yes, but in a different way, more starkly melancholic, with ancient, whitewashed stone cottages and old farmhouses erected in quiet isolation, and here and there a TV antenna to bring another world, an incongruous one, into old parlours. Pagan continued to drive south.

He parked in a place overlooking the sea, examined the map again. He saw Ballantrae on his rough map, and out of that village led a narrow track, and there – an inked rectangle, underlined – was presumably the house. It was unnamed, a simple inky square on copy paper. Had Foxworth gone there? Had he found it? If so, why hadn’t he called Golden Square to say so?

Pagan’s head throbbed as much from anxiety as pain; dread created a stress all its own. He drove again, thinking that Foxie could take care of himself, he was a grown man, a good cop, he knew how to handle situations: so why all this damned worry?

The town of Girvan, sunlight on deep grey water, seabirds, a miniature fairground, tarpaulined for the dead season, near the sea. Pagan was blinded by bright sun rippling on the tide. And then Girvan was behind him and he was headed for the village of Ballantrae, remembering that Robert Louis Stevenson had once written a novel entitled The Master of Ballantrae, but Pagan had never read it, never read a word of Stevenson; how remiss of him, he thought now. Foxie, who had gone to an expensive school, had probably read the lot.

The track outside Ballantrae was narrow. Birds flew from hedgerows – bright starlings, thrushes, plain little sparrows, and once a plump plover that flew toward Pagan’s windshield as if intent on bringing to a swift conclusion some avian depression. The hedges that rose on either side prevented any kind of view of what lay beyond, and Pagan wondered if Foxie had come this way and felt the same sensation of isolation, almost an eeriness that the forceful sun could not dispel.

Foxie: where the hell are you?

What did you find in this place?

The track grew worse; the hedgerows eclipsed the low morning sun. Pagan felt the Fiat bump and shudder, but it was nothing compared to the ride in Bengochea’s chopper. He slowed where the hedges thinned, seeing flat meadowlands vanish toward stands of trees, an empty landscape with neither animals nor people. Only a solitary hawk, casting a squat shadow, suggested motion. He ought to have reached the house some time ago, but then he understood that this roughly drawn map bore no resemblance to actual scale.

When he finally saw the house it surprised him. It rose in sunlight and shadow as though it were a deformed sandstone dream, grand circular towers and narrow windows, a pretension here in a landscape without airs of grandeur. He stopped the Fiat, got out, peered through the hedgerow at the edifice, then pushed his way through – branches springing at him with unexpected harshness – and stepped into a swampy meadow littered with yellow wild flowers.

The house glowed red in morning sunlight. In crannies, in abysses of brickwork, between turrets, shadows were wine-coloured and warm. Pagan walked across the sponge-like grass toward the mansion, then paused when he reached a copse of trees. Somebody had been working there – a wheelbarrow was propped alongside a tree, a spade stuck in the soil, there was the soft scent of good earth newly turned over. A sizeable trench had been dug in the ground. Pagan stepped between the trees, paused, looked off in the direction of the house, which was a half mile away.

A car was parked in the drive, a Jaguar, he thought, but sunlight obscured the lines of the vehicle; there was also a jeep just behind it. Nobody moved, though; the house showed no sign of life. Had it not been for the presence of spade and wheelbarrow and the clammy black perfume of newly shovelled earth, he might have thought the estate abandoned. He took a few steps forward between the overhanging branches of the trees, and loose leaves, disturbed by his passage, drifted to the ground around him. Earth made soft by recent rains sucked at his shoes.

Bloody hell, he was tired. He leaned against a trunk, listened to the lazy buzz of a bee nearby, a lark impossibly high in the sky. There was a narcotic conspiracy here, something to lull a man towards sleep.

The sound of a footfall made him open his eyes and turn around. The twin-barrelled shotgun, large and vicious, was held by a short man with centre-parted hair and the relic of a hare-lip that had been removed surgically years before. A feeble moustache had been grown over the scar.

Pagan reached inside his pocket for his identification, but the man gestured with the shotgun. Frank Pagan stood very still. The man, whose voice had a nasal edge, poked the barrel closer to Pagan and said, “Another bloody snoop.”

Pagan finally fished out his wallet, but the man was unimpressed and didn’t even look. Another bloody snoop: had Foxie been the first one?

“I’m looking for somebody,” Pagan said.

“Are you indeed?” the man said.

“A colleague of mine.”

“A colleague, is it?” The man raised one thin eyebrow. For some reason he didn’t immediately understand, Pagan’s attention was drawn to the spade propped against the tree, the mound of earth inside the wheelbarrow. These simple perceptions, rustic and yet sinister, shook him and he didn’t know why; but now the sunlit day seemed bleached, as if colour had drained out of it.

“The man’s name was Foxworth. Detective Foxworth.”

“Is that a fact?” asked the short man.

“From Scotland Yard.”

The man was still unimpressed.

“Could you lower your gun?” Pagan asked. “You make me nervous.”

The shotgun stayed where it was, level with Pagan’s heart. The man glanced through the trees toward the house. Pagan turned, saw three figures coming across the landscape, perhaps a half-mile distant and small. There was an instant familiarity about two of them; after a moment Pagan recognised the man who walked in front as Foxworth. The red hair, made almost blood-coloured by sun, was unmistakable.

Pagan’s relief at the sight of Foxworth alive and breathing was immense but brief; immediately behind Foxie was a man who carried a shotgun trained on his spine.

At the rear, moving with brisk steps, hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a laird walking his terrain, was the third man. Pagan had one of those odd moments in which inversions take place – the sky tilts, the sun darkens, the heart is suddenly stilled, and perceptions are tunnelled as if through reversed binoculars.

A mistake, Pagan thought.

It had to be.

A resemblance, nothing more.

But as the three figures came closer Pagan saw Freddie Kinnaird sweep a lock of hair from his forehead in that characteristic gesture he had. There was a smile on the famous face, but cold, very cold.

No mistake.

Pagan couldn’t swallow. Astonishment and a brutal, burning anger denied him that simple reflex. He thought of all the information to which Kinnaird had been privy. Everything that passed across Martin Burr’s desk eventually reached Freddie. He thought of how Freddie Kinnaird had known of Gunther Ruhr’s route through Shepherd’s Bush, of how Freddie must have passed that juicy item along the line to Rosabal, who had arranged the drastic rescue of Gunther and rented the country hideout. At every turn, every angle, nothing of substance had been withheld from Sir Frederick Kinnaird. And he must have shared everything with his associates who had come to this house in the secret depths of the Scottish countryside – Chapotin and Caporelli, perhaps the late Herr Kluger and the two Americans as well, a tight little gang of old pals.

Pagan raised his face to the sun. He was hot in his raincoat. Freddie Kinnaird approached, stopped some yards away. Pagan glanced at Foxie, who had the slightly red-eyed look of a man who has been held captive for days in a dark room and now sunlight astounds him.

“Well, well, well,” Kinnaird said with a certain cheerfulness. “Frank Pagan himself.”

Pagan said nothing. He had the unbearable urge to reach for Kinnaird and grab him and crush that smug face until nothing recognisable was left of it. But how could he move with a shotgun shoved into his back?

“We had that whole damned island sewn up,” Kinnaird said and grabbed air in his hand and made a fist, as if what he held there were locks of invisible hair. “We had it all. Why did you have to stick your nose in?”

Pagan gazed upward again. The lark he’d seen before was imposed against the sun, like an inscrutable punctuation mark in the sky. “It’s my job to stick my nose in, Freddie. You know that.” There was an ugly note in Pagan’s voice, which came close to breaking. Control yourself, Frank. It wasn’t easy. The depths of his own loathing astonished him.

Kinnaird appeared to be elsewhere, concentrating on some inner lyric of his own. He had in his eye a very small, sharp light that suggested some quiet, well-bred form of craziness. “You helped bollix the whole damned thing.”

“I think you overestimate me, Fred. I’d dearly love to take the credit for fucking your scheme up, but it wouldn’t be fair. All I did was get a young girl out of Cuba. That was my job. I wanted to bring Ruhr back to stand trial, also part of my job. I lost that one. I did the best I could with what I had. But I’m not personally responsible for screwing up your plans for Cuba, Fred. I didn’t kill Rosabal. Blame Magdalena Torrente. Blame Rosabal himself for choosing the wrong woman to fuck up over. Blame any damn thing you like. All I did was my job.”

“I rather think you’re hiding your light under a bushel, Pagan. After all, you managed to save Magdalena Torrente’s life in Miami.”

Pagan shouldn’t have been surprised by Kinnaird’s knowledge of the murder attempt, because it was plain that very little had escaped Freddie. He’d obviously learned from the Commissioner that Pagan was going to be in Miami with Magdalena Torrente. That simple. But somehow Pagan was surprised anyway, although he wasn’t going to give Freddie the satisfaction of showing it.

Kinnaird, who looked all at once like a large, sulking boy, said, “If you hadn’t saved her, she’d never have gone to Cuba. And if she hadn’t gone there –”

“If she hadn’t gone there, Rosabal might have fired his missile.”

“Nonsense. There was never any question of firing it.”

“That’s not the way I saw it.”

“Then your observations are very wrong,” Kinnaird said impatiently. “Rafael wouldn’t have fired the bloody thing. It was a prop, a piece of scenery. What the devil does it matter now anyhow? Castro is still in charge of Cuba – did you see that as part of your job, Pagan? To help keep him in power?”

“I didn’t help keep anybody in power. I don’t give a shit who runs Cuba, Freddie. Castro or some other old geezer – it doesn’t make any bloody difference to me in the long run. They’re all the same when you get right down to it.”

“What a dreadfully narrow view of the world stage,” Kinnaird said. His expression was that of a man who finds some foul morsel of very old food between his teeth.

Pagan shrugged. Of course it was a narrow view; he’d never found a broad perspective conducive to his sense of right and wrong. If your view was too wide you encountered too many ambiguities. If you sat around pondering all the issues, and trying to understand all the sides, you froze eventually into inactivity. So he always tried to keep it simple, tightly focused. He didn’t know how to do his job any other way.

Kinnaird looked down into the hole in the ground, nudged a pebble with his foot, watched it drop inside the trench.

A grave, Pagan thought. Of course. Foxie’s grave. Make it a double. A chill went through him.

He said, “Here’s what I wonder, Fred. How is it that your friends and associates keep getting themselves killed off? How does that come about? If I was a cynical kind of fellow – and I’m not, as anybody will tell you – I’d say you developed some pretty bloody selfish ideas. I’d say you did a hatchet job on your chums. What was it? Afraid there wasn’t going to be enough Cuban pie to go around? Needed more than your share, Fred?”

“We all need a little more than our share at times,” Kinnaird said. He folded his arms across his chest. He reminded Pagan of a squire in a magazine ad, a handsome tweedy figure advocating the merits of a certain Scotch, something expensive.

“But now there’s no pie, Fred,” Pagan said. “The cupboard is bare and there’s no damned pie at all! Pardon this malicious smirk you see on my features, but I find that hilarious.”

Foxie laughed at Pagan’s remark. It was a nervous little sound, but Pagan welcomed it; it established an audience, it gave him a sense of support. He stared at Kinnaird – Sir Freddie, darling of his party, beloved by the electorate, man with a Great Future, tomorrow’s England, tomorrow’s Europe, Freddie, slavishly devoted to wealth and position and seemingly equipped with a vampire’s appetite for blood. Dear Freddie. Dear, crazy Freddie.

Pagan went on, “I’m not saying you did the hatchet job on your own, Fred. I’m not saying you personally pulled any triggers. You don’t have the guts for that. You had some help along the way. Maybe you had other associates, maybe you saw a way of slicing the pie up in thicker pieces. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get an answer to how it was all supposed to work.”

“Certainly not from me, Pagan. I owe you absolutely nothing. No explanations. No details. Nothing.”

Pagan looked down at the hole in the ground. “You think you can fit us both in there, Fred?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Bit tight,” Foxie remarked. A brave little comment, a flippancy that almost worked, but Foxie’s anxious eyes revealed his fear.

“I really don’t think it’s going to cause either of you any discomfort,” Kinnaird said. “Actually, it’s all rather convenient for me. Two for the price of one.”

Pagan sniffed the air deeply, like a man doing something he enjoys for the very last time. The smell of earth in his nostrils was the stench of death; simple, unaffected, plain old death. He glanced at the man who held the shotgun at Foxie’s back. He was a bulky character with thin white hair flattened across his large skull. The other gunman, the one with the moustache that covered the scar, stood about three feet behind Pagan. It was one of those situations in which there could only be one outcome. You could try to stammer and stall, you could put up this objection and that, and play for time, but finally the result would be the same – a double-decker grave.

Pagan moved his feet very slightly; he was practically standing on the lip of the trench. Less distance to fall when the time came, he thought. He looked down inside the grave, saw a black stag beetle pick its way laboriously through its ruined territory, then he raised his face back to Kinnaird.

Stall. Kill time.

Pagan put one hand to his chest, which had begun during the last few minutes to ache. Ghose’s stitches were perhaps coming undone again. What did that matter? He was about to be administered the ultimate painkiller anyway. He stared across the grave at Foxie, whose expression was one of discouragement, as if he’d just frantically searched through his own box of tricks and found no way of pulling a rabbit, at the last possible moment, out of a hat.

Stall.

“As a matter of curiosity, Fred, how do you propose to get away with our murders?” Pagan asked. A desperate question, a last bleat.

Kinnaird clasped his hands behind his back in a pontifical manner that Pagan despised because it suggested superiority and power; Freddie Kinnaird must have thought he was invincible. “You forget I’m the Home Secretary, old chap. I’ll take an active interest in your disappearance. I’ll stage-manage the investigation, if I need to.”

“Martin Burr’s going to go after this one very hard. He’s a tenacious bastard. He’ll find his way here. After all, Foxie did. And so did I. It’s not exactly a cold trail, old chap.”

“But you never came here, Pagan. Nor did your young friend. Nobody saw you. Your car will be found on some side street in Glasgow. You and your associate will simply become mysteries that start on page one and then find their way to page five, and after that oblivion and amnesia and God rest your souls, etcetera.”

“Burr can be persistent,” Pagan said.

“Then I’ll fire him,” Kinnaird remarked.

“You’ve really got it covered, Freddie.” There was that anger inside him again, rising in his throat with the persistence of a gas. What wouldn’t he have given to have Kinnaird alone in a locked room for sixty seconds? It was useless to feel such a sense of violence when there was nothing you could do to vent it. But it wouldn’t leave him.

“Farewell.” Kinnaird turned away, then stopped, looked round again. “I’d stay for the finale, but some things simply do not attract me on an aesthetic level.”

“One last question, Freddie. How do you sleep? How the hell do you manage to sleep?”

Kinnaird said nothing. He moved between the trees.

Pagan called out, “You ever have bad dreams, Kinnaird? Do you have bad dreams about Shepherd’s Bush? Does that ever cross your bloody mind?”

Kinnaird stopped, looked round. “I never dream.”

Then Kinnaird kept going. Pagan, who heard the faraway song of the lark again, felt the shotgun against his spine. He clenched his hands at his side in useless anger. The sun, unseasonably hot, beat at his face; he raised a hand, wiped sweat from his eyelids, blinked across the trench at Foxworth, who looked haggard and resigned.

“This isn’t how I imagined an ending,” Pagan said. He felt the pressure of the shotgun and heard the gunman say Move your arse, Jack, in his harsh nasal way. He was being forced back to the edge of the grave.

“Nor me,” Foxworth said. “In my pyjamas. Middle of the night. Heart attack in the arms of some gorgeous thing. I always thought that was the way to go. Bit of bliss for the big ending.”

“I don’t think I expected to die in Scotland either,” Pagan said.

“Do you think it’s unhallowed ground, Frank?”

Banter on the steps of the guillotine. A quip or two for the executioners. Gallows humour.

The man with the white hair pushed Foxie toward the trench too. Pagan and Foxie faced one another across the hole. There was a moment of intense silence suddenly, as if nothing flapped or flew, sung or buzzed. Pagan saw Freddie Kinnaird still walking between the trees, perhaps now three or four hundred feet from the killing place and stepping briskly, hurrying away from the distasteful scene he had himself arranged. Strangely Kinnaird made no sound either, no crackle of leaves underfoot, no whisper of clothing against tree trunks or low branches. The whole world had become mute.

Pagan stood at the very edge of the trench. He held his breath, thought about the gun in his coat pocket, imagined trying to turn, trying to wrestle the shotgun from the man who held it, but he had nothing going for him, no advantage, no chance to surprise, because the shotgun was pressed to his spine and if he made even one aggressive gesture it would go off immediately.

Out of time, Frank.

He looked down into the bleak cavity, then raised his face in the direction of Freddie Kinnaird.

The man in the black raincoat who stepped unexpectedly from the trees shot Freddie Kinnaird through the skull with a pistol.

It was done swiftly, with professional economy, one bullet that shattered Kinnaird’s head and demolished half of his face. Freddie Kinnaird went down on his knees, then pitched forward, and the gunman – the same killer Frank Pagan had last seen shooting Caporelli in his Paris apartment, and who clearly had no interest in anything other than the task he’d just accomplished with such ease – disappeared through the trees like a man accustomed to sudden vanishing acts.

It was a diversion, shocking in its abruptness, and Pagan seized the unattended moment with all the passion of a survivor; he brought one clenched hand up and back, swinging the fist in a tight, powerful arc that ended when his knuckles made noisy thudding contact with the forehead of the hare-lipped man, who gasped and moaned and lowered his shotgun involuntarily. Something was broken in the man’s face – the upper part of the nose, the ridge of bone above the eyes. Pagan, whose hand felt weirdly numb, wasn’t sure what. The man bled profusely through the nostrils and made a choking sound. Pagan raised a foot, kicked at the shotgun, struck the barrel, but didn’t force the gun out of the man’s hands. The man stepped back, the contours of his face filled with flowing blood, his flop of a moustache turned scarlet. Pagan whipped the Smith and Wesson out of his pocket and fired it directly into the man’s chest even as the other gunman, who had been standing behind Foxie, pulled the trigger of his shotgun despite the fact that Foxworth, alert as only a frightened man can be, had brought his shoulder into contact with his guard, knocking him just slightly off-balance.

The sound of the shotgun was so deafeningly loud that it rolled through Pagan’s head like a thunderstorm. He fired his gun once at the white-haired man who took the bullet in the eye – but then Pagan was slipping, tumbling, earth crumbling under the soles of his shoes, and he was going down inside the very grave he’d tried to avoid, a weird view of the world, all sky and branch seen through eyes made half-blind by pellets of damp soil. He spat earth from his mouth, wiped it from his eyes, rose, clawed the sides of the trench, hauled himself up to a standing position.

Foxworth was looking down at him. He extended a hand towards Pagan, who grabbed it, and pulled himself out of the hole. Breathing heavily, badly, he shook clinging earth from his overcoat and hair, but it was everywhere – in his ears, his mouth, his shoes, fragments of the grave.

For a time Pagan said nothing. He surveyed the trees, the quiet landscape, the house in the distance. He looked at the two men who, only seconds before, had been potential executioners. The white-haired one was dead and had fallen under a spray of dark green fern so that his face, thankfully, was concealed from view. The other sat slumped against the trunk of a tree, holding both hands over his chest and groaning in pain.

“He’ll need an ambulance,” Pagan said. “We can call from the house.”

Pagan, followed by Foxworth, walked to the place where Kinnaird lay. Ants, having scouted an abundant source of unexpected protein, were already filing in an unruly manner over the ruined side of Freddie’s face. A fat horsefly crawled across Freddie’s hair. Pagan spat a crumb of black earth out from between his teeth.

Foxie said, “I was never more glad to see you, Frank. I’d been stuck in the cellar of that bloody house for God knows how long. Our guards here were waiting for Kinnaird to turn up and make some kind of decision pertaining to my fate. When he finally showed up he didn’t waste time deciding what to do with me. I’ll say that for Freddie. He wasn’t the vacillating sort.”

Pagan smiled by way of acknowledging Foxie’s remarks, but it wasn’t much of an expression. He had no energy left to him. It seemed to him that he stood outside of himself, that he had left his own body and was floating like some weird wind-lifted speck toward the sun, a strange sensation. But the pain in his chest brought him back to earth.

“New tenants are already moving in, I see.” Foxworth nodded down at the armies of ants. “I only hope they find Freddie edible. Who killed him anyway?”

“It’s a long story. We’ll talk about it later.” Pagan’s voice was dry, cracked, almost gone. He walked away from the corpse of Kinnaird. Followed by Foxie, he went down through the meadow toward the big red house. He paused once, looked up at the sun; in the distance, the smallest flash of silver, was a tiny aircraft that could be heard droning, then it was gone and the sky, too blue for this season and this country, was empty again. Inevitably he thought of Magdalena, but it was one of those thoughts that opened and closed like a certain kind of ghostly flower.