by Ian Rankin
“A chance,” Miles continued, licking his parched lips, “that you’ll die without ever knowing why. At least if we go to London we might find out what it’s all about.”
He jumped off the gate, hoping it wasn’t too dramatic a gesture, and began to walk down the field, just as Collins had done. Will Collins was not a stupid man, and Miles was sure that finally he would agree to go. There was just the one problem now.
Would they reach Billy Monmouth alive?
Collins was lighting another cigarette from the butt of the old, and Miles, approaching, was about to say something about chain-smokers dying before they were forty. But he thought better of it when he saw the pistol in Collins’s hand.
“No,” Collins said, “no, we’re not going to England, Mr. Flint. We’re going to Drogheda, where I can be rid of you once and for all.”
TWENTY-TWO
“IT’S ON THE COAST, THEN, this Drogheda?”
Collins nodded. He had been silent throughout the rest of the drive, and had given Miles a cold look whenever he had attempted to start up a conversation. So Drogheda was on the coast. The coast meant boats, and boats meant quick and invisible trips across the Irish Sea. Perhaps things were working themselves into a pattern much more to his advantage than anything he could have planned.
“Drogheda,” said Collins at last, as they turned into the town. Miles imagined himself as Perseus, entering the stony land of the Gorgons, but it was no use. The last thing he felt was heroic.
“It was near here I killed Hayton. We went out to sea, and I shot him.”
“Very neat,” said Miles.
“Not really. Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Flint? Neatness doesn’t enter into it. There’s blood everywhere. It finds you and sticks to you. I kept finding flecks of it on me for days afterwards.”
“And no questions were ever asked about Hayton’s disappearance?”
Collins shrugged.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I went back to Belfast and tried to forget all about it.”
“Until you found out you’d been tricked.”
“You know, I’ll be glad to be rid of you, Flint. You sound like a conscience, but your eyes are full of tricks.”
Miles tried to smile. “I’m parched,” he said. “Can we get something to drink soon?”
Collins pondered this. Yes, they had not had anything to drink for a long while, and there had been much talking since then. Miles watched as Collins was forced by the workings of his own mind into a remembrance of their joint confessions.
“Yes,” he conceded finally, “let’s find a pub.”
While Miles finished his whiskey, Collins made a telephone call, watching him intently from the wall-mounted pay phone. Miles smoked, feeling a taste in his lungs as though he had smoked twenty a day since childhood. He studied the bar, wondering what the chances were of a sudden, dashed escape. Will Collins’s stare told him that they were nil; his mind had been read. Collins was no fool. He knew that the nearer a man walked toward execution, the stronger became the life force, the desire to struggle and kick.
The bar’s conveniences lay somewhere outside at the back of the building. A straggle of men wandered in and out of a great oak door that bore the legend CAR PARK AND GENTS. The Land Rover was not parked out there, however. It lay some hundreds of yards away outside a fish and chip shop that had been opening for the evening as they had arrived. Collins had eaten a bag of chips, but Miles had not felt hungry. The whiskey, however, was beginning to bite at his empty stomach, the fumes as heavy as smoke within him. He examined his empty glass philosophically, motioned to Collins that he was having another, and approached the bar. Collins indicated that he did not want another drink. His half pint of stout sat on top of the telephone, a few sips missing from the top. He had not spoken into the receiver for some time, and this was his second call. Perhaps there was no judge and jury to be found at this time of the evening.
“Another Jameson’s, please,” said Miles, and the barman, nodding, sullen, went off toward the row of gleaming optics, while the few regulars, looking comfortable in their regular seats, stared into space, resolutely ignoring the Englishman and his English accent. An old and well-worn Rolling Stones record was playing on the jukebox, the sound so muted that it might as well not have been playing at all. Miles sneezed three times and blew his nose, wishing of a sudden that he could announce his Scottishness. I’m not English, he would tell them, I’m not to blame. To which they would, he knew, have replied that the worst of the Protestant incomers had been Scots. So he kept quiet, paying for the drink with the money given to him by Collins. He had not had the chance to change any of his own money, and he wondered, in a mad second, whether he could claim expenses from the firm for this part of his assignment.
“Mr. Scott!”
Turning sharply, he found Millicent Nightingale beaming at him, her handbag clutched to her prodigious bosom. Behind her, three more members of the tour party were glancing around them, having just entered the bar.
“Mrs. Nightingale!”
“Millicent, silly. Call me Millicent.”
“Millicent, how good to see you again.” Looking across to where Collins stood, the receiver limp at his ear, eyes wild, Miles knew that the moment had come to a crisis. “Did you get my note?”
“Your note, Mr. Scott?”
“Yes, saying that I’d had to dash south on urgent business. Don’t say they didn’t give it to you at the hotel?”
“But Mr. Scott, the guide told us that you’d been taken ill.”
“Really? How strange.”
“Anyway, you’re here now. Are you going to join us for the rest of the trip?”
“Why, yes, Millicent, I might just do that.”
Collins had slammed down the receiver and was approaching. Miles decided to take the initiative. The whiskey had given him a poise that he hoped would outlast the situation.
“Millicent, this is Mr. Collins. Will, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Millicent Nightingale.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Nightingale.” Collins made a pretense of checking his watch. “Eh, we’d better be going, hadn’t we?”
“Nonsense,” screeched Mrs. Nightingale, “not now that I’ve caught up with you at last, Mr. Scott. We must have one drink at least. The trip has been so exciting. There’s lots to tell you. We’re going to the cathedral tomorrow to see the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett. And besides, how can you leave when you haven’t even started your drink?”
Miles, smiling broadly, jiggled his glass of whiskey in Will Collins’s face as proof of this final remark. Drinks were being bought by the other members of the party, and Miles professed the need of another Jameson’s. It was then, seeing the look of complete and utter panic on Collins’s face, that Miles felt sure for the very first time that he would return home safely. It was a nice feeling, and he drank it in. Collins’s eyes might be as cold as the contents of an ice bucket, but nothing could scare Miles anymore, not even the obvious patting of a jacket pocket. He felt sure that everything was preordained, and therefore it made no sense to dither. He would get home safely; that was the main thing. How he went about it was, really, of little consequence and worth little preparation. He knocked back the whiskey in one satisfied gulp.
“Just nipping out to the little boys’ room. Won’t be a moment.” He smiled at Mrs. Nightingale, then at Collins, and headed toward the oak door.
Before he was halfway outside, Will Collins was behind him.
“People will start to talk,” Miles whispered, beginning to chuckle. He continued to chuckle on the short walk across the gravel-strewn yard.
“What the hell was all that back there?” hissed Collins. “And none of your tricks this time.”
“That,” said Miles, his mouth slack, “was the divine, the enchanting Mrs. Millicent Nightingale, executive officer in Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, visiting this fair country. I met her in Belfast. I’d come across here, you see, in the guise of a holidaymaker.
Quite the most ridiculous and obvious cover imaginable. My name was Walter Scott. You know, the novelist, Waverley and all that.”
“You’ve had too much to drink,” said Collins.
They had reached the toilet, a ramshackle affair with an ancient, soured urinal and a dark, festering object in one corner that might once have been a washbasin. Miles relieved himself noisily, smelling his whiskey breath in the chilled air. Collins stood in the doorway, arms folded.
“Not having any joy contacting your friends?” Miles asked, zipping himself in the half-light.
“Not yet. But they know I’m in town.”
“It’s a start.”
Miles was in the doorway now. He stared at Collins, his eyes a little glassy.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking that it would be nice to shoot me here and now. Then you could relax. But your bosses wouldn’t be very happy about that, because they would have wanted to interrogate me first, and they might think it a bit suspicious that you killed me before they’d had the opportunity. They would trust you less than ever, especially after your friend died at the factory and you managed to escape. Besides, what would Mrs. Nightingale say?”
Collins smiled.
“No,” he said, “if I was going to kill you, I’d do it out at sea.”
“Very good,” said Miles, wagging a finger. “A boating accident, as with poor old Philip Hayton. Yes, very professional. Well, shall we go back in?”
He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and for just long enough Collins was fooled into moving on ahead of him. Miles brought out his own gun and pressed it into Collins’s back, pressed it hard so that there could be no mistaking it for a piece of wood or a bluffed finger.
“One move and you’re no longer of this earth.” It was hissed, snakelike, into the suddenly frozen ear. The breath that had seemed so full of drunken gaiety was filled now with nothing but sober, real threat. Miles grabbed the gun from Collins’s pocket and stuffed it into his own. Then he stepped back one pace.
“Turn around slowly,” he said, breathing deeply. The sudden implant of adrenaline was threatening to make him really drunk, and he gulped air as though it were water, diluting the alcohol.
Collins’s face was a mask. Was there hate there, or surprise, or a touch of relief that the weight had been shifted from him? His arms dangled now as though the life had left them. He was acting like a puppet, trying, thought Miles, quickly to do to me what I’ve just done to him.
“Well,” he said, “maybe you’d have taken me out to sea, Collins, but I’ve no such finesse. I’ll shoot you here and now if you so much as sneeze, so I hope you haven’t caught my cold.”
“What now?” said Collins. Miles shrugged.
“I’ll have to think about that,” he lied. “I’ve got time to think now. A rare luxury on this trip.” He took the car keys from his pocket and held them up in front of him. “You’ll be doing a bit of the driving from now on. It gives me a sore back.”
He dropped the keys at Collins’s feet and stepped back.
“Pick them up very slowly indeed.” Collins did so. “Now, I would imagine that you know some fishermen in this part of the world?” Collins furrowed his brow, uncomprehending. “We’re going to do a little fishing,” said Miles. “I wonder what kind of fish we’ll find.”
As they moved across the car park and out onto the road, Miles could hear Mrs. Nightingale’s voice as it cooed to him from the oaken door:
“Mr. Scott? Mr. Scott? Mr. Scott?”
4
HOMING
TWENTY-THREE
THE OFFICE TELEPHONE RANG, AND since Billy Monmouth was alone, he was forced to answer it for himself.
“Monmouth here.”
The receiver clicked and went dead. Billy replaced it with a sigh, but left his hand hovering above the desk. The ringing recommenced, and he pounced.
“Monmouth.”
“Billy, it’s Andrew Gray. Any word on your friend Miles?”
Billy sighed again.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said. “No, there’s been nothing at this end.”
“He’s probably alive then?”
“Or probably dead. Who can tell?”
“I bet our mutual friend is shitting himself all the colors of the rainbow.”
“I doubt that, Andrew. Our ”friend,“ as you put it, is not one to make himself conspicuous. But let’s hope something happens soon. What about Sizewell?”
“Leave him to me, Billy.”
“That’s what frightens me, Andrew.” And with that he dropped the receiver back into its cradle, which chimed once and once only.
Sheila phoned again from the office, but Colonel Denniston had no news, and Billy had no news. Had her husband disappeared then? she had asked, but both had been cagey in their replies.
“Well, we don’t know where he is,” said Denniston, “but he may well have gone off on his own for a few days. He completed his work in Belfast before he vanished. You must realize, Mrs. Flint, that Miles has been under rather a strain of late, hasn’t he? Too much pressure and all that.”
“What are you saying?”
“Merely that he may have felt the need for a break.”
“Without telling you? Without telling his own wife?”
“A complete break, Mrs. Flint. I have to say that he had been acting a little strangely.”
“How strangely?”
“That’s not for me to say.” Denniston sounded suddenly and irrevocably bored. “Look, I’m sure there’s no cause for concern, but we’ve let the chaps in Belfast know to keep an eye open for him. If there’s been no contact or sighting in the next day or so, we’ll reconsider the situation, reevaluate it.”
“You talk as though he were a row of figures.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, Mrs. Flint.”
“Nothing, Colonel. Thank you so much. Goodbye.”
Colonel Denniston was not stupid. He knew that something was wrong in Ireland. But there were other, more important things on his mind. Another head was due to roll, probably from the very top of the heap. He read again the newspaper report in front of him, its subdued headline—KEW TERRORIST ATTACK KILLS ONE, INJURES SEVEN—serving only to highlight the horror. Londoners were agog. At times like these, he had noticed in the past, a sense of wartime stubbornness overtook the capital. People went about their business, jaws set defiantly against the enemy, and everyone talked to everyone else in bus queues, showing once more that humanity bloomed in adversity.
Heads would roll, for it was already evident that one of those responsible for the bomb was the gardener who had been involved in the Harvest surveillance, and the surveillance, if sustained, must surely have put a halt to this atrocity. Good-bye to the old boy then, and, most probably, hello, Mr. Partridge. Partridge was no friend to Colonel Denniston. There would be hard times ahead, arguments over accountability, the need for a new broom, a clean sweep. All the old clichés of business. It was bound to come out sooner or later that the firm had known about the gardener. Special Branch would blabber, in order to cover their own backs. And who had ordered the surveillance to cease? Mr. Partridge. Perhaps that, if nothing else, would save the watchmen from his wrath. But, of course, they would be in the firing line for everybody else’s sticks and stones. Everything would hit them and would stick to them.
Nothing, of course, would stick to Partridge. He was the Teflon man.
Harry Sizewell wanted to make statements from his hospital bed, but the doctors weren’t having any of it. The best he could manage was to relay messages to the press outside via his agent, and then watch the television in his room as Giles repeated it all to the waiting cameras at the hospital gates. Not very telegenic, old Giles, too nervous, trying to answer any queries truthfully rather than handing out the stock responses. And those journalists knew it. They asked more and more barbed questions, honing them each time, and Giles looked into the camera as though he w
ere a Peeping Tom at somebody’s keyhole. Blast the man. But bless him, too. He had been at Harry’s bedside constantly, probably having nowhere else to go. The whole situation was tailor-made for the creating of political capital and public sympathy, but Giles just wasn’t up to it. Why not? The man had been involved in politics for years, after all. Ah, but always as an invisible man, always one step behind Harry. He was not meant for limelight and the immediacy of media pressure. Poor man. He was making a mess of the whole thing.
The door of Harry Sizewell’s airy room opened silently, and the attractive nurse came in. “All right, Mr. Sizewell? Got everything you want?”
“Oh, just about, nurse, just about.” And he laughed with hearty false humor. Yes, he’s sitting up and making jokes with the staff, said one pretty nurse earlier today. He’s not the kind of man to let something like this stop him or defeat his principles.
“Good. Just ring if you need me.” And with that she was off, vanishing as briskly and as efficiently as Jimmy Dexter had when the bomb had gone off. It had been like a vacuum inside Harry Sizewell’s head, everything being sucked in toward the center, more implosion than explosion, and there had been a smattering of warm rain, light, dust, heat. A moment’s silence, and then the first scream, male, but piercing, and the recognition of carnage, a shattering of the whole scheme of things.
The Home Secretary was elsewhere, probably in a more private room than this private room, or a more private hospital even. But then his injuries were greater than Sizewell’s, if the media were to be believed. Burns, it was said. A team was being flown in from Belfast, best burn specialists in Europe. Well, one could see why. And Jimmy Dexter sprinkled over the turf like so much fertilizer, nourishing the very tree that they had gone there to plant. So there would be a vacant post for someone, and surely he would be the obvious choice from the media point of view.
“And now today’s other news…”
He pressed the gadget and the television burned out to darkness. Yes, there had been a bout of immediate nausea, followed by a frightening darkness. Dear Lord God, I’m going to die, he had thought, though the notion had seemed quite absurd. In any event, he had wakened to searing white echoes, and then had been given gas, slipping away again, wanting to kick and to shout and, above all, to stay awake. I may never wake up again, you bastards.