Gant struggled to run, one hand massaging his throat, the other holding the gun as if he wished only to drop it. He turned wildly and fired behind him, the weight of the rucksack across his shoulders unbalancing him. Then he staggered on before launching himself at the low bank of the ditch and scrambling out. Oaks next… oaks. Then another field, then trees… Shots. He dropped.
On one knee he watched a man in a check shirt and denims hurry from beneath the poplars into the afternoon sunlight. He fired twice, holding the revolver stiff armed his left hand clasping his right wrist. The target was clipped backwards, to lie prone, as quickly and non-humanly as on a practice range. Gant got to his feet and ran brokenly down the field towards the oaks, blundering into their shadow, hurrying through patches of sunlight and shade, out into the long, sloping field above which a skylark poured a song that rippled outwards to encompass the whole field. The song seemed to fill his ears.
More trees… He dragged himself to a halt, gripping the trunk of an oak, staring wildly back up the field towards the other clump of trees.
There was a figure kneeling beside an invisible something, and another man hovering at the edge of the oaks, uncertain now that he was exposed. He had, perhaps, two or three minutes. The noise of traffic, the hoot of a horn and the acceleration of an engine, urged him to move.
The ground rose in a hump, as if there was a mass grave beneath, then dropped towards the abbey church's squat, frowning tower. He realised he was walking over buried fortifications. He emerged from the trees at the end of the village street. Hot, shadowy normality. The yellow limestone wall of the church flung its afternoon shadow over him. Two men, unsurprised by his sudden appearance, were talking beside a Citroen pickup. One of them wore a beret, the other a black soutane — parishioner and priest. There was a smell of sun-warmed vegetables from the back of the truck. Its engine remained idling; the only noise of which he was aware. He glanced behind him. There was still no sign of his pursuers, the killing had slowed them, as if they were the next terrified cattle to enter an abattoir. He controlled his stride, walking with the casual dislocation and curiosity of a tourist.
The priest and the pickup's driver remained engaged in their own rapid conversation, aware of him, anticipating that they would have to struggle with English or German or some other language in order to set him on his course.
He half-raised his hand in polite enquiry, apologising for interrupting them. The young priest seemed less reluctant to acknowledge his existence… his face altering its expression as surprise seeped into it. Gant had climbed into the cab of the pickup. The gears clashed, harsh as the owner's cry of protest. He let off the brake and accelerated the Citroen, skidding as he over steered then righting the truck, its engine small-sounding as a sewing machine, the protests of its owner fading behind him, like his diminishing figure in the rearview mirror. The priest stood with his hands on black hips, bemused. Then there was a third figure beside the two, then a fourth-He wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his windcheater. His hands were clammy on the steering wheel. Relief made him weak. He struggled the map from his breast pocket. He needed side roads, they knew what vehicle to look for Already champagne flutes together with the odd crumpled napkin or bone-china plate carelessly decorated the tops of the illuminated glass cases which displayed engravings. A little of modernity in the first-floor room of the Musee des Beaux Arts which austerely celebrated Bruegel.
Marian was standing in admiration before the painting known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. White, thrashing legs sticking out of the green water as a peasant ploughed unconcernedly at a stubborn headland's soil, a shepherd rested on his crook, and a third man fished, ignoring the tragedy. A ship sailed unaware towards a white port. She felt as if she had foolishly snatched a moment in which to reassert her bluestocking credentials amid a noisy, headlong party; and her vanity was making her parade her intellect and taste.
There was, of course, a fourth man in the picture, almost hidden by bushes, at the end of the ploughed land. His head, white-haired and balding, stuck out from the undergrowth; he was dead, unexplainedly so.
No one noticed him, either. She shivered, as if she had moved apart simply in order to be afraid. She rubbed her arms beneath the stuff of the scarlet jacket. That and her blouse ought to have been sufficiently warm the temperature at which one viewed priceless paintings in museums was stifling. Nevertheless, she felt very cold.
As she had tried to nap in the suite at the Amigo, take her shower, makeup carefully in the bedroom mirror, their faces had continued to appear to her like a troop of ghosts in a dream.
She, the soldier's daughter, could neither discipline nor defeat her fears. So, she continued to stare at the painting, the noise of the cocktail reception behind her solid as a wall, while the images of
David, Campbell, the lout Fraser, Rogier, Laxton, others, continued their effort to take form within the canvas. Her attention could be distracted only by the waving, drowning legs and the sticking-out head of the dead man.
Later, they would dine at the outrageously expensive La Maison du Cygne in the Grand' Place, but this preliminary was cultural Brussels almost as if designed solely to seduce her. Her colleagues, for the most part, glanced at the paintings as if they were passing through a room in a museum of anthropology amid the flotsam and potsherds of a lost civilization. To her, the room whispered Come and join us, we're civilised, too… but in the voice of the Commission.
The feeble joke palled. The dead man was still there in the painting, Icarus had still fallen into the sea for flying too high, not knowing his place and showing good sense. Just like her. Campbell and Rogier, the Commissioner who had been Michael Lloyd's superior, seemed aware of her unsettled fears, and too aware of their complicity to be quite natural in their manner. It was as if they were waiting for David to arrive to pull their puppets' strings. Icarus the boastful, his hybris punished in one small corner of the canvas, was surrounded by indifference… Her demise would be just like his.
She twitched visibly at the sound of a drawling voice beside her.
"I take it I was reading your habitual Leveller preoccupations again in last week's Economist, Marian? Fittingly anonymous, of course." Peter Cope, nudging at junior ministerial office head butting at the door, some preferred to observe.
Small, neat, expensively suited and coif fured; blameless, lifeless eyes. Someone had said of him that they had never known utter lack of ideas and beliefs could be engaging until they met Peter Cope.
"Yes, Peter, you were," she drawled in riposte.
"Mea culpa, I'm afraid again." Even Peter Cope had his uses. She rallied because of the banter. The article was one she had contributed to a continuing debate on the future of the British constitution, hers under the title Who is Represented? Even Peter Cope had heard of the seventeenth-century Levellers.
"You're becoming in need of a new tune, Marian," Cope ridiculed.
"No one's going to bring back the Civil War just to please you."
She smiled faintly, mockingly.
"And my father would certainly have been a King's man I know. But the party has to do something, Peter even the Barbours and the green wellies are deserting us in droves and at high speed in their off-road vehicles," she added.