He had answered her mockingly, quoting from one of the Chinese poems she had introduced him to when she was still a teenager. Li-Tai-Po, the drunk, the revelling hedonist… Dark is life, so is death. She had hated that because it had been true. Nothing really mattered.
Contempt for life made you a Buddhist or a bandit, OK, Marian?
That, perhaps, had been the day when they had finally seen the gulf between them, each on opposite sides of a deep canyon.
He smiled, re-reading the e-mail, then turned back to the window. A pigeon continued to strut aimlessly along the windowsill above the traffic, occasionally thrusting out its wings as if uncertain of its ability to fly or woo. He returned to his desk and abruptly pressed the transmit key, sending the e-mail to Strickland's PC, wherever it was on the planet. Days, perhaps a week, and Strickland would come out, blinking like a mole in the sunlight to be beaten on the head with a spade.
The still-green buds of rhododendrons were like spear points at the edge of his vision as he sat hunched in the concealment of the thick bushes that leaned out over the stream. He had moved upstream for perhaps half a mile. The bushes were dusty and old. Insects buzzed outside, suggesting that the rhododendrons were impenetrable, that he was safe. Sunlight dazzled beyond the outermost bushes, through the gold, red and pink of opened flowers.
He studied the map, checking the location of the Cessna. They would have found it, he insisted to himself. There'd be someone waiting for him… or, just to make certain, they would have emptied the fuel tank or damaged the controls. His finger traced the stream towards the nearest village. Maybe there—?
He recollected the tiny village from the air as the Cessna banked over it, a curl of water around it, the old lauze — roofed houses crouching beneath the abbey church, fortified and threateningly large in its surroundings. The slopes of the land, the narrow valley emptying into the Vezere, parked cars, hot sunlight and dark shadows in the cramped streets. Should he make for the village? Beyond the rhododendrons was a small copse of trees, then open fields dropping away towards the village. The Cessna sat in a field he would be able to see from the edge of the copse.
The dust from the bushes, the heat of the afternoon, irritated his throat. One man had passed noisily along the bank of the stream above him ten minutes before. The crackle of his RT and unheard instructions interrupting birdsong. Gant was becoming stiff in his hunched position, he needed to move. He listened beyond the hum of insects and the birds to the heavy afternoon silence. The distant noise of a cow, of a vehicle on some hidden road.
He turned on his stomach and began wriggling through the undergrowth, catching at his breath with each movement as a cough threatened. He emerged into the copse of holm-oak and poplar and rose to his knees, listening again as his heartbeat died back to quiet. Then, standing, he slung the rucksack across his shoulders and began moving through the shadows, avoiding the splashes of sunlight as if they were irradiated.
Crackle of an RT, an answering, harsh whisper. Off to his left, perhaps fifteen yards. He moved behind the hole of a tree. There was more sunlight, the ground was beginning to drop away. He moved his feet gently, gliding from the cover of one tree to another.
He raised the f ieldglasses to his eyes. The lenses misted, then cleared. He scanned the fields to the west of the village, where the Cessna's livery was suddenly bright and incongruous amid grass, near the shade of trees. He could see no one, not even the farmer to whom he had explained his engine fault, his need to seek parts, his return in no more than three hours… Around the Cessna, like an exaggeration of the afternoon heat, a haze he at once realised was evaporating fuel.
They'd drained the tank rather than more obviously damaging the airplane. To the left of the Cessna, no more than a hundred yards away from it, a momentary gleam of sunlight on metal.
Disappointment wrenched at his stomach. He leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, staring up at the canopy of leaves, letting his breath exhale in an expression of defeat. Sweat ran into his eyes…
Minutes whole minutes had been wasted. He felt drained, raising the glasses once more with weak arms. The Cessna, but only for an instant, then cows and sheep sweeping through the lenses, trees, and lines of willow and poplar that marked streams, ditches. To Gant the landscape became more covert, military; a map of trench works from a long-forgotten war, each hedge or screen of willow and poplar marking water or a ditch where he could move unobserved. He traced the lines carefully, fixing each stretch of cover, each exposed area.
A hundred yards to the first parade of poplars… another seventy yards before he had to break cover again… fifty yards to a belt of oak, then another long field, then more trees that had advanced like a besieging force up to the fortified walls of the abbey church. Two cars and a pickup moved like bright, carapaced insects along the winding, shadowy street of the village, sunlight flashed from windscreens on a minor road. He listened behind him. Someone was blundering with slow, elephantine caution away from him.
He tensed, then began hurtling down the slope towards the first line of poplars, which waited like a still troop of men for his assault. He heard shouting, and his blood racing. The grass was noisy with his passage, a cow veered away from him.
He ran brokenly at first, then in a straight line, despite the first shots away to his left. Sheep that had discovered the shade of the poplars moved away in truculent panic as he blundered into shadow, and reached the rivulet the trees had marked.
He jolted himself to a halt against the bank. The ditch was no more than four or five feet deep, the water just inches. He splashed along its slippery, stony bed, his breath roaring. He remained crouched as he scuttled rather than ran, hearing shouts of pursuit.
He collided with something, was struck. Then something grabbed him, even as it shouted for support. He smelt food on the man's breath, arms pushed him off balance his feet slipped, hands closed on his throat. A face, as distorted as if it were garbed in a stocking mask, pressed against his eyes. Gant struggled, shaking his head to rid his throat of the man's grip. His vehement denial seemed impossible to transmit to the rest of his body. The man pressed him back against the bank, his hands still tightening around Gant's throat. He tried to snatch at air, his mouth twisted wide, but he was unable to swallow.
Breathing became almost impossible Black lights flickered before his eyes, blocking out the sunlight streaming through the tracery of poplar branches. The man's stub bled rounded face was contorted with effort.
His hands were tight on Gant's throat, whose back was arched against the bank, his hands scrabbling with dirt and grass and roots as if he were frantic to escape underground. The RT was somewhere close, dropped into the water or in a pocket, and it was urgent with exhortations to hold him and with promises of immediate help.
He couldn't reach the revolver, didn't know where it was, dropped or still thrust into his belt… His hands still clawed the dirt of the bank, panicking at the encroaching loss of consciousness, his feet shuffling in the water. Scrabbling… as if he was being pulled into a narrow space… black lights, flecks big as fragments scrabbling… the man's face filled with effortful blood and triumph… His arms came up together, threading through the man's arms then flinging them wide, breaking the grip around his throat-breath… coughing breath
… He brought his arms together again as the man lunged back at him, striking with one forearm, then with the flat of his hand to the throat in what seemed a palsied effort. Coughing, he punched twice at the midriff, once to the head, then struck again with his flattened hand, then with a thrust of his knee, slipping on underwater stones. He hit the man again and again, beating him to his knees then into a prone lump, face down in the inches of clear water… No coughing. He staggered, leaning back against the bank… A shadow amid the dappling of the poplars, twenty yards along the ditch. He struggled for the revolver, still in his waistband, drawing it out exaggeratedly, like a drunk. The shadow glanced aside behind a narrow tree hole.