CONDITION BLACK MASTER

by Unknown

  " Y o u want to stretch your legs?"

  "Not particularly."

  " Y o u want a coffee from the stall?" Rutherford gestured towards the open-sided van at the edge of the car park.

  " N o , thanks."

  " Y o u want to see the stones?"

  "I should?"

  Rutherford said evenly, "Those stones were cut and erected four thousand years ago. Each one weighs more than 100 tons and was brought 200 miles overland on rollers, by sea on rafts.

  We still don't understand how prehistoric man achieved that feat.

  Nobody in this much bull-shitted century has achieved anything that can outlast what the men who laid out these stones did here.

  So, yes, you should, just for five minutes forget about being a policeman and be a human being. I do it regularly myself. It gives me a balanced perspective."

  The wind tore at their trouser legs as they circled the cage, and Erlich smiled his admiration of the great stone circle.

  "Well, we mustn't lose time, must we?"

  Rutherford said, "Tell me, then, who in this age of miracles can be set against the master designer of Stonehenge?"

  "I am afraid you will have to take account of the men of the Manhattan Project," said Erlich through chattering teeth. "They will be remembered as long as there is history. And now, mind-boggling as this shrine of yours is, I think I need one of those coffees."

  Turk, Station Officer for Tel Aviv, always responded immediately to a summons from that office, cancelled whatever appointments he had. Tork's time there was never wasted. And after the affair in the Beqa'a Valley, he was trusted. A famous mission organised by Tork's London masters - an Israeli sniper with an English guide - had killed a P . L . O . training-camp commander.

  Tork was shown the transcript of a brief conversation. The text totally underlined in red ink, he was told, was that of the Director of Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission.

  Tork had been Station Officer in Tel Aviv for eleven years. He had learned that there were no favours handed out. He had learned also that if there were a continuing nightmare in Israel then it was that an Arab enemy might one day possess the capability to strike at the Jewish heartland with nuclear weapons.

  "I'll get it off to Century at once."

  " B u t will they act on it?"

  "It's not a lot to go on."

  " B u t you will give it a 'most urgent' rating."

  " A t my end, of course."

  She had lived all her life in the street running alongside the railway, and since she had retired from her late father's business, a haberdashery store in Wimbledon, since she had sold it to a family from Northampton for a good price, Hannah Worthington walked each day to the shop at the end of the street. She never bought more, nor less, than she would need for her housekeeping for the next 24 hours. It was one of the rituals of this lonely spinster's life that every day she would take her chihuahua to the shop on the corner and back again.

  Miss Worthington was a small woman. In her winter coat she appeared to be little more than a central pole with a tent draped from her shoulders. She wore a dark grey hat taken from the store on her last day as owner, and that was 17 years ago, and a plain grey scarf round her throat, and leather gloves that had stood a long test of lime. In her flat and comfortable lace-up shoes, she made good progress on her daily outing.

  She walked towards the shop.

  In her wicker basket there was a shopping list for a packet of porridge, one pork chop, some oven-ready chips, a carton of frozen broccoli, one apple and one orange, a small loaf of wholemeal sliced bread, and an 8oz tin of Pedigree Chum. What she liked about the shop was that it was open for business on every day of the year, liven on Christmas Day, after church, she could walk to the shop and buy her necessaries.

  Of course, the street had changed mightily in the years since her birth in 1909, the year King Emperor Edward the Seventh died. Before the Great War, and afterwards also, this had been a street where bank managers and principal shopkeepers lived.

  After the Second World War, the street had changed, and she knew that had brought sadness to her late father. He had talked about moving, but after his passing her late mother had simply refused to countenance what she had called "evacuation". Miss Worthington often felt it would have been an unendurable sorrow to her parents if they had lived to witness the extent of the deterioration. To start with, every single front door in the street, excepting her own, was now festooned with illuminated bell buttons, marking the division of fine family homes into little warrens of flats. To go on with, in the former days, between the Great War and the Second World War, there would never have been men working on cars in the street, as if the place were a communal garage. She saw the taxi inching down the street.

  Between the Great War and the Second World War there were always taxis in the street, not now. Taxi drivers came down her street in this day and age as if in fear of their lives.

  Her dog sniffed for a moment at the ankle of the young man who worked at the engine of his car. She pulled the dog away.

  The taxi passed her.

  Her chihuahua was making its "business" in the gutter, and that was a relief because it meant she wouldn't have to take him out again in the evening, and wait around for him. There was poor enough lighting in the street, and so many peculiar people . . .

  "Good boy." she murmered. "Well done, little boy."

  She heard the taxi stop and the door open.

  She heard the charge of feet behind her.

  She heard the shout.

  "Hey, there."

  There was a faint rattle, metal being drawn across metal. There was the slight sound, a light and muffled drum beat.

  Miss Worthington turned.

  She thought the man was drunk.

  It was the middle of the day, and the man reeled, staggered.

  That's what had happened to her street, drunks in the middle of the day. She stepped out into the road. The man could barely stand. She would cross over.

  The man fell.

  She saw the man on the pavement, beside the driver's door of the taxi, and he was writhing, a thrashing fish. She saw the blood across the grey white of the man's shirt.

  She saw two little girls, nicely dressed, running up the steps to the nearest house, starting to beat at the paint-scraped wooden door.

  She saw the man with the fat-barrelled gun held out from his shoulder. She saw the man with the gun shoot again at the man on the pavement. She was a dozen paces from the man with the gun, and she heard nothing. She saw his wrists jump from the recoil. She saw the man on the pavement shudder, and the thrashing cease.

  She saw that the man with the gun had on his head a woollen cap.

  She saw that the cap was tilted. She saw the splash of short fair hair.

  The man with the gun turned. Eyes meeting. The eyes of a killer

  . . . and the eyes, masked by heavy Health Service spectacles, of a spinster in her 8ist year. There was a moment, God's truth, she would not forget it, when the man with the gun seemed to smile at her, God's truth and she did not trifle with that.

  She saw him run.

  As he ran she saw the man working the gun into the front of his overalls, and she saw him also, with his free hand, drag the woollen cap back down across his forehead.

  The Chihuahua strained on its narrow leather lead to be clear of the shooting, and the shouting, and the crying of the little girls. The vet had said that the dog's heart was weak and that the dog should not be over-excited.

  She picked up her dog, put it under her arm, and walked briskly to her home.

  Safe in her own hallway. Miss Worthington bolted the front door, turned the master key. She could not bear the thought ol returning to the street, going to the shop, to get the tin of dog food for her chihuahua's midday meal. She was in her first-floor sitting room, secure in her easy chair, when she heard the first sirens, saw the first police cars turn into her street.

  It hadn't been real. It was like
a disagreeable dream and she wasn't going to have anything more to do with it. She turned her armchair away from the window.

  The body was gone. The blood was on the pavement. The children had been taken upstairs. The growing crowd was a hundred yards back, behind the white tape. The discharged cartridge cases were in the roadway and the gutter, close to the back wheel of the taxi.

  The taxi driver said, "You tell me he was shot, he looked like he'd been shot. I didn't hear no shooting. I heard a man running, but I ain't seen nothing."

  Of course, they started with a house to house, but it was the sort of street where most of the flats, bedsitters, were empty during the day. When a constable knocked on one door, at the extreme end of the street, he heard the distant yapping of a dog, but no one came to the door. He presumed the dog must have been left alone in the house. At the other extreme of the street, Mr Patel was able to confirm that a man had been working the ptrvions day, and that morning, on the Ford Capri that was still there, still with the bonnet raised, still with a plastic bag on the battery, No, Mr Patel was very sorry, no, he had not seen the face of the man who worked on the car. When Mr Patel had passed, the previous evening and that morning, the man's head and shoulders had been underneath the car, and no, he had not come into the shop at all.

  Later, an Anti-Terrorist Branch detective would tell his Inspector, "Middle of the day, well-used street, and no bugger saw anything, not even the little kiddies, nothing that's half a description. It's hard to bloody credit . . . "

  Just about the time they had seen the signpost, the rain had started in earnest.

  Erlich's first impression was that this place was closed to outsiders. They drove the length of the village. Rutherford was muttering something about a by-pass always changing a country community, as if he felt the need to apologise for the place. Erlich said that he wanted to walk.

  Rutherford said that he would give him a 20-minute start, then drive back through the village and collect him.

  Erlich took his raincoat off the back seat, the heavy Burberry that he had paid a fortune for in Rome. He shrugged into the coat. He walked.

  Small houses of grey and weathered stone on which the lichen had fastened; small windows to the small houses, some of them mullioned; gutters overflowing because they were clogged with leaves; tiny front gardens flattened by the ravages of the winter.

  He thought the houses, on the road, were low-set, as if for pygmies. A tractor powered past, pulling a trailer loaded with silage rings - shit - had splashed straight through the puddle round the silted-up culvert. Godammit! Mud on his Burberry, on his trousers, all over his shoes . . . Past a bigger garden piled high with abandoned cars. Past a small shop where there were farmers' boots and garden forks and rakes stacked outside despite the rain, and stickers in the window for frozen foods. Past a house that was larger, set back from the road, beyond a lawn on which the rain made ponds, and he saw the flash of an old woman's face at a window and then the falling of a lace curtain. Past the entrance to a farmyard rutted deep in soft mud, and he could see the slipped roofing of the barns where the fallen tiles had been replaced by corrugated iron. Past a gateway, and the wide gate had long ago subsided, and the driveway was leaf-scattered and weeded, and there was a house way back behind beech trees and the trunks of the trees were running green with water. There was the jabber of a car horn in his ear. He was looking up the driveway, trying to make out the shape of the house through the trees. It was the biggest house he had seen so far in the village.

  He damn well jumped. If he hadn't jumped then the car would have hit him. He jumped for the pavement and a small car swept past him. He saw a woman in the rich blue of a nursing uniform at the wheel. She didn't acknowledge him. She drove up the drive. Past more small, stone houses. A man came towards him.

  The man was elderly, bearded, bow-legged in his farm boots, and his old army greatcoat was fastened at the waist with twine, and the man carried a broken shotgun across his forearm. The man didn't give way, and Erlich stepped into the road to let him pass. Past the pub, and the noise of laughter and the music of a jukebox and the bell chime of gaming machines. He was at the end of the village. He stood beside a muddy soccer pitch.

  The rain dripped down his neck. His shoes and his feet were soaked. His raincoat was heavy with damp.

  Colt's village.

  He heard the car squelch to a stop behind him.

  They drove back the way they had come. They stopped in the next village two miles away. They stopped at the modern bungalow that was the home and office of the local police constable.

  He was Desmond, he was young and bright and flattered that a man had come from the Security Service to see him, and agreeably surprised that a Field Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ended up in his stockinged feet in his front room. Desmond's wife brought them tea and a sponge cake that was still warm.

  The rain drummed on the windows.

  Erlich had out his ballpoint and his notebook.

  Desmond said, "I've never seen the lad. I was posted here barely a week after he went missing. But what you have to understand is that he's the biggest thing in these villages, so he has to be the biggest thing in my life. What I normally do is vandalism, poaching, driving without insurance, petty opportun-ist larceny. Master Tuck faces Attempted Murder, Arson . . .

  and if you're here then, I suppose, it has to be worse than that . . .

  Start with the name. Round here he's Colt. Not just because of his initials, but because of what he is, young, unbroken, wild.

  He represents something exciting to this community, two fingers to the authorities. O . K . , so he was involved with the Animal Liberation Front, serious crimes. What I hear, people talk to me, took a time but they do, is that the Front was just a vehicle for him, that there were no deeply held principles in it, more that he was in love with the danger, the risk of arrest. I'm not a psychologist, but I read, and I would say that attitude gives him a colossal arrogance.

  " T h e Serious Crime Squad come down, and sometimes I'm told when they're on my patch, most times I'm not, they keep the Manor House under observation, on and off, but they've not picked up any scent of him. Recently, they've been more often.

  His mother was big in his life and she's, well, she's not long to live, it seems. It's sad, actually, she's a very respected woman in the village. His father's respected, but in a different way. She's respected and she's loved. If Colt knew, then he'd be back, but it looks like he never made contact from the day he disappeared, so he won't know. He had a girl here too, but I doubt that meant too much, as wild as him."

  They had drained the teapot, finished the cake and Erlich offered his thanks. He understood more, much more, of the man who had looked into Harry Lawrence's face, and shot him dead.

  They booked into a guesthouse on the far side of Warminster, and they had time to get into the High Street before the shops closed to buy Erlich a pair of Wellington boots, and a rainproof coat that wasn't so City, and a hat.

  "Absolutely out of the question."

  "It's not as if I'd ever touch on . . ."

  " W e do not go outside and give lectures."

  " D o I have to spell out to you how important this is to me?"

  " D o you think you are the only one who is asked to give lectures? Myself, I get a dozen invitations a year . . . Basil, he must get 50. But one doesn't give it a thought. One has no choice."

  "But this is absurd, it wouldn't be about my work . . ."

  "Frederick, you are being truly stupid. Anything you talk about is of interest to outsiders, because of where you are employed. And how can you lecture about anything other than your work? What have you the chance to know about other than your work?"

  "That's offensive, Reuben, and your attitude altogether . . ."

  "Frederick, I am very busy, I have lost a day in meetings . . .

  I appreciate that your vanity was stirred by this invitation, and of course I understand your regret at having to decline i
t, but frankly I think your friend is a little jejune. He knows perfectly well what the rules here have to be."

  "Is that your last word?"

  " M y last word. Good night, Frederick."

  He had allowed himself to hope. He had looked forward to a day in the sun, the simple admiration of colleagues, young scientists. There were tears of frustration in his eyes when he was back in his office and scrawling his letter of regrets in longhand to his former tutor. He was a prisoner in the Atomic Weapons Establishment. The best years of his mind he'd sacrificed to this godforsaken place and precious little did he have to show for it.

  7

  He sat in the old chair beside the bed. It had not been recovered since the black cat had massacred the upholstery, and the black cat had been buried under one of the beeches more than ten years. Colt's fingers played with the short lengths of frayed yarn.

  His mother was still sleeping,

  The sight of the lost flesh on her face had shocked him because he had not, quite, stopped to consider how he might look.

  Getting there, that had been his aim, Finding her alive, his only hope.

  He was very still. His breathing was regular and matched the breathing of his mother

  They had done him well, The organisation had been better this time than in Athens. An empty stree, just the old woman. That Wasn't organisation, that was luck. The old woman had been looking not at him but at her dog. The taxi drivr hadn't been looking at him either, head down in his change bag. A sprint to the end of the street, the cut through to the footpath, the lock-up garage. The small Bedford van, and the bag with the change of clothes. He had seen no one on th footpath, and no one saw him go into the lock up garage, he woukl have sworn on that. Driving the Bedford van along the fringe of the capital, south to west, over Putney Bridge, hitting the small streets of Fulham, and all the instructions had been precise. A second lock-up garage behind an arcade of shops, The van into the second lock-up garage The chance to squirm out of the overalls, strip off the rubber gloves, discard the woollen cap, get into the new set of clothes, put the pistol in the pocket of the overalls in the bag. On the other side of the yard from the second lock-up garage had been the Escort.