Haddock grinned to himself. He’d outsmarted his own people and got away with it. Then he stopped grinning. After all, they had thrown him out. Thrown him out of Armed Response, anyway, and that to him was out of everything. So he had retired, about five years ago, married Phyllis, and started chicken farming. She’d been some kind of policewoman herself, but she had inherited money and was prepared to settle down. The chicken farming hadn’t worked out, so they’d moved here, living mostly on Phyllis’s capital and pension in a down-market bungalow in rural Norfolk.
His dismissal from Armed Response had been a bad time- all other people’s fault, of course. He’d been at an anti-Iraq War demonstration, part of an Armed Response team. They’d been sitting quietly on the edges of the action, just waiting for something to happen, never thinking they’d be needed. Then this bloke had come along-well, he was being shoved along by about a dozen of the demonstrators, waving their placards and yelling their slogans, with him in front. He was carrying what was obviously a gun, wrapped in brown paper. He waved it at some of the uniformed guys, threatening them. Had he heard Haddock’s challenge? Of course he had, they all had, but the Enquiry didn’t think it had been properly made. The Enquiry- he snorted to himself-a gang of snooty bastards who’d never seen police action in the raw, never faced a screaming crowd, thought it was all as easy as policing a church garden party. Well, Haddock had shot him, and when they’d ripped off the brown paper, it had turned out to be a wooden chair leg he’d been carving. Served the idiot right for trying to deceive the police. What had the fool thought he was doing, brandishing an offensive weapon that looked like a gun? How many people had he been going to hit over the head with it?
Haddock looked in the fridge for a can of beer that he wasn’t supposed to have before Phyllis got back, and, as he did so, a noise outside the window caused him to turn around and look out. The door of the Bentley was open and there was Mr. Next-Door leaning in, fiddling with the passenger light. Haddock hadn’t even known he was at home, and now there he was, off again. He’d already opened the drive gate. Haddock watched him climb into the car. The car rolled slowly down the drive, turned left at the road, and drove away. And he didn’t get out to shut the gate. The bastard never did.
Haddock watched him go. How much did he know about the man? Only that he came and went more than was good for him. Foreign sort of name, Lukas, spelled with a “k.” There were immigrants all over the place nowadays. He was an average-looking sort of guy, medium build, rather sharp-faced, nothing noticeable, one of those people you could describe in twenty seconds or else it took you half an hour. He wasn’t British-not English anyway. Maybe he was Welsh. Unreliable people, the Welsh. Haddock had known a Pole with a German accent who had turned out to be a Welshman from Caernarvon.
Whatever way you looked at it, he wasn’t a local, not a Norfolk man. He was some kind of a radio buff, too. He had every kind of gadget in there; you could see some of them from the bridle track that went past his place. Aerials on the chimney. They didn’t fit with a thought that Haddock had often had, that he might be one of those secret womanizers, covering up his antics with girls behind a conifer hedge. If he was burying bodies in the garden, Haddock wouldn’t be able to see him at it.
A sudden thought struck Haddock. Given that the bloke was certainly dodgy, probably a criminal, did he carry a gun? It was something that had been part of his life’s business to recognize, something that could cost you your life if you got it wrong. It was axiomatic with him to run the rule over any stranger, even one in a top hat at a wedding. He hadn’t noticed any of the usual slight bulges or the absence of them, for that matter. But that in itself was interesting; maybe the bloke did carry, but made it his business to conceal the fact. That made him a professional. There were ways of moving, ways of not standing still, that kept even an expert guessing. Haddock knew them all, but he still didn’t know whether the guy carried a gun, and that was starting to worry him.
He heard the side door opening. That would be Phyllis. It was Phyllis, still in her tracksuit and trainers, with her clothes in a duffel bag over her shoulder. Haddock forced a smile, wrenching his mind away from his neighbor and the fact that he was hungry, and she’d want to have a shower before she did anything about lunch. Why was she so late? His sessions at the gun club were only three hours, and he was in line for losing half an hour already. But it didn’t do to shout at Phyllis. She had her ways of getting back.
“Something kept you, darling?”
She clicked her tongue. One of her irritating habits. “Did you remember to empty the kitchen bin? Something’s smelling,” she said.
“I forgot. Sorry.”
“Well, do it now. I’ll be down when I’ve powdered my nose.”
It was true that her face was red and her nose looked as though it needed powdering. And for that matter her hair looked as though she’d been pulled through a bush backward.
“Tough routine at the gym today?”
She gave him a glance and disappeared around the corner and down the corridor to the bathroom.
He stored it away in his mind, where it collided with an identical thought that had been lying there since Monday, her last gym session. Same sequence. Just after Lukas had gone out, Phyllis appeared, twenty-five minutes late, looking as though she’d been through the mangle.
Phyllis. Cool, cool Phyllis. Twenty years younger than himself. Not yet forty. Maybe it was best not to say too much, just try to take it easy. Damage limitation, that was the mode with Phyllis. One thing that never went down well with her was curiosity. Any kind of inquiry about what she had been doing or who she’d seen, and she took offense.
He could hear Phyllis in the bathroom now, and it came to him in a flood that he was jealous-dead, mad jealous, angry jealous. Of course it was rubbish; of course Phyllis had been at the gym; of course she wasn’t having it off with that Czecho-Hungarian sod who lived next door. But what if she was? By God, if he found she had been, he’d flog her with his police belt, studs and all. Come to think of it, he’d always wanted to do that. He’d flog her to death, and then go out and kill the bastard and then turn the gun on himself. He stopped, suddenly, almost choking, breathing fast, eyes watering, and tried to get a grip on himself.
“Something the matter, dear?”
Cool, ironic Phyllis. He said nothing.
“Well, I mean, you look such an idiot standing there panting with that smelly plastic bag in your hand. Look, give it to me. I’ll put it in the bin. Lunch is in that carrier bag. I got it from Marks and Spencer. Your favorite chocolate pudding. Two for one offer today.”
“I don’t want lunch. I’m going for a walk.”
“Relax, Ron, and just sit down. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. They don’t come in daylight, you know.”
He sat down, ate his lunch, and thought. The gun club was off. While Phyllis had her afternoon nap, he was going to look around next door. Now that it occurred to him, he was amazed that he had never thought to do it before.