The bedroom door closed. He looked at his watch. Half past two. He slipped his mobile into his pocket.
“Bye, darling.”
“Bye. Have a good time. Don’t shoot anybody you shouldn’t.”
He made a face at the bedroom door and set off down the drive. Police training kicked in. There was no question of making a frontal approach. At the end of the drive, he turned to the right. Forty yards up the road, he vaulted a gate, walked across the field up to the corner of the forest plantation, and turned right toward the hay barn that now lay between him and the two properties. There was no need for concealment-Phyllis couldn’t see him from the bedroom and Lukas was out-but he was still glad of the sunken lane that connected the barn to his objective. Leaning against the barn, he took out his mobile and dialed a number.
“Gemini Health Club.”
“Is Mrs. Haddock there? I had been expecting to meet her for lunch.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“My name’s Ron Morley. A friend.”
“Sorry, Mr. Morley. I can’t help. Mrs. Haddock didn’t come in this morning. Can we give her a message if she does come in?”
Haddock depressed the call button and slipped the mobile into his pocket. He was thinking clearly now. If not the Czecho bastard, then someone else. Her story had better be good.
He walked down the hill. It was early May. The apple trees were covered with blossoms; the countryside looked beautiful, but Haddock didn’t notice it; he didn’t do beauty. He reached the bridle path past Lukas’s place.
This house was much older than Haddock’s bungalow. It was originally a farmhouse, maybe a couple of hundred years old, but small, not more than five rooms. All the land had once belonged to the farm, but at some point a piece had been sold off for the bungalow, hence the problem of the ownership of the drive. The farm outhouses and barns were still standing around the yard, cleaned up now, but you could faintly smell cows and hay. No sign of life.
Haddock walked across the yard and gently tried the house door. Locked. The lower windows were closed, but one on the top floor was open a bit. He needed a ladder. He walked across to the bigger of two outbuildings and pushed the door. A scurry, then silence. A rat. The place was an empty double-story barn. He climbed the wooden ladder that led to the top floor. There was a range of openings in the front wall flush with the floor, windows once perhaps, that looked directly across to the house. At the back of the barn, a door with a wooden beam above it gave onto the bridle path, presumably once used to hoist in hay from a piled cart. He opened the door and looked out onto the path, then closed it again. He walked back to the front and, squatting down, peered across at the house through one of the openings.
Then he saw the girl. She was standing inside the partly opened door of a one-story stable fronting the yard at a right angle to his barn. It occurred to him that she must have watched his arrival and didn’t mind being seen-at any rate, not by him. She now walked out into the yard and, looking up at him, said, “Interesting place.”
She was good-looking, except that she was a little too slim for his taste and her blue-gray eyes too noticing for beauty. He wondered if she was a lesbian. He climbed down the ladder and walked out into the yard.
“Looking around?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m considering buying the place.”
“You local?”
“Kind of.”
Suddenly he noticed something he might have seen before, but for interruptions. A woman’s sandal was lying at the edge of the yard just by the barn wall. A flip-flop he’d last seen on Phyllis’s foot when she’d left for the gym this morning. No wonder she’d been wearing trainers when she came home. She must have dropped it, or someone had pulled it off. He wrenched his eyes from it and tried to concentrate on the girl.
“You looking around as well?”
“Not really,” she said, looking carefully at him, as if to gauge his reaction. “I live here.”
“You live here? Are you Lukas’s wife?”
“Not exactly”
This was getting complicated.
“He’s gone.”
“Yes. I’m going, too.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Not my business.”
“What exactly is your business?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. -?”
“Pearson.”
“Right, Mr. Pearson. This is getting a bit personal. Let’s leave it there.”
She was wearing a parka. She zipped it up.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Pearson. Best of luck with your reconnaissance.”
She walked out of the yard and, a moment later, he heard a car start farther up the bridle path and drive off.
A little breeze swirled last autumn’s leaves. He’d seen enough, too much. He felt sick, ready to vomit. But he knew what he was going to do, come what may.
He went home, scarcely knowing which way his steps took him. He lifted the latch of his garden gate, passed the flattened turf where the Bentley convertible had stood, put his key in the lock, walked along the corridor, and kicked open the bedroom door. He tore the bedclothes off Phyllis, grabbed her by the hair, and started hitting her. He slapped her with his palm, then hit her with the back of his hand, then punched her with his fist, so her head jerked back. Then he paused, gathering his strength, and she kneed him hard in the groin, so he fell off the bed onto the floor, where she kicked him hard in the ribs.
“You bugger!” she said. “You absolute bugger!”
And that was all. He watched her while she piled some clothes and jewelry into a suitcase. Then, deliberately, slowly, she tidied her hair, applied some makeup, and walked out of the bedroom, pausing only to say, “I’ll be back for the rest. And the house.”
He heard the car leave.
He got slowly up, sat down again, and went over every action, every word, in the last four hours. His intention was fixed; he only wanted to be sure that he could do what he intended and stand a reasonable chance of getting away with it. One thing he knew-cold, furious as his wife might be, she would never offer evidence against him. Her own pride would stop her. As for the girl in the yard, she had lied when she’d said she lived in the place. He had never heard her or seen her, and she didn’t know him. What she had been doing there he could not imagine, but one thing was sure: she wasn’t police. Maybe she was just a rather intrusive sightseer.
The main question was, when would the bastard come back? He walked up the corridor, positioned a stepladder under the trapdoor in the ceiling, and drew down a long parcel. Calmly, he unwrapped it and laid the parts on the kitchen table, first drawing the curtains. He inspected and cleaned each one with a rag, fitted them carefully together, then slipped the complete gun into an old golf bag. He put the bag and its contents back into the loft, stroking it lovingly. His gun.
As he finished, he heard the noise of the Bentley, moving quite slowly up the drive. That was odd; when Lukas took the Bentley he was usually away for several days at a time. Other times, he used the Audi. Where had that been during his afternoon’s visit? Must have been in the stable, he decided. So the girl would have seen it. “So what?” he said aloud.
Tonight, then? No, not tonight. He was too done up, like a man without sleep for a fortnight, or maybe like a man whose wife has left him for good without a sausage in the refrigerator. He went to bed.
Next morning, Haddock got up, showered, breakfasted, and, taking his binoculars, followed a route identical to that of the previous afternoon, but he stopped in the shadow of the plantation. He sat on the ground, his back against a tree, warm sun on his left shoulder, and scrutinized the countryside inch by inch, pausing again and again on the two houses. Lukas was certainly there; at one point he emerged and walked into the stable, coming out with some piece of apparatus. Was that what the girl had been looking at? No one else seemed to be there and, above all, there was no sign of Phyllis. In fact, there was nothing moving in the whole of lazy Norfolk but a line of slowly turning wind turbines and the occasional vehicle on the road that passed his property.