Haddock went home, taking care to avoid observation. There was still plenty to do. He put on dark, loose clothing and soft-soled boots, first removing all labels. In a small rucksack he packed spare shoes, trousers, a pullover, and a T-shirt. He added a pencil torch, not to be used save in extremis. He readjusted his watch by the radio and sat down. At nine o’clock, he got the golf bag out of the loft, and at exactly a quarter past nine, he turned off all the lights.
Then he stood for a moment in the bedroom, asking himself whether he really wanted to go through with it. He didn’t, but he would. The chase, the hunt, immemorial passion had got to him. He had failed everything in life, his job, his business, his marriage, and now he was going to win. He knew himself to be the master of every technique needed for the job he intended to do.
Besides, he hated the bastard with a real, profound hatred. Lukas, the foreigner, the man who had destroyed his life, taken his wife, stolen his possession. Lukas was a robber. He, Haddock, was a cop.
He checked his watch and left the house by the side door, taking exactly the same route as before. The moon was rising, but it was pitch black in the plantation where he left his spare bundle and the empty golf bag. He pulled a balaclava over his face and adjusted the eyeholes. Then he set off down the track, planting his soles squarely on the surface to minimize noise. Not that it was exactly quiet on this May evening, with rabbits scurrying, bats squeaking, and the noise of an owl in the dark trees overlooking Lukas’s place.
Once in the yard, he was safe in the moon’s shadow by the barn. As he had expected, there was a light in the curtained ground-floor window of the house; the upper floor was unlit, curtains open. He’d be unlucky if he got no chance of a shot, and at that range, Haddock needed only one.
There was just one bad moment. The bridle track behind the barn was very little used by traffic. But now, just as he crouched in the barn’s shadow inside the yard, he heard a car moving quite slowly down it. He saw nothing but a passing gleam-almost as though it were unlit-and to his relief, it passed on, tires lightly crunching the ground, and out of earshot.
Haddock remained motionless for a minute, listening, and then slipped into the barn and up the wooden ladder. He laid down his gun carefully, flat on the timbers where he could see it by the refracted light of the moon. Then he moved to the back of the barn and carefully opened the upper door over the road, fixing it by its bar against the wall. He might need it for a line of retreat. For a moment, he peered into the silent wall of trees opposite, two arm lengths away, and finally moved back to the unglazed window. He squatted, picked up the gun, and then lay on his stomach, his favorite position for accuracy, and trained the gun roughly in the direction of the unlighted window across the yard, which he calculated to be the bedroom.
As he lay there, a nasty thought came to him. When he had done what he intended, what should he do with the gun? He could leave it, but all his instincts were against that. Equally, to hide it anywhere in the neighborhood might indicate that whoever had used it was not far away. Should he take it with him and put it back in the loft? But there would be one hell of a hunt when they found Lukas missing half his head, with a bullet embedded in the opposite wall.
He was pondering this, when he had a shock so terrible that for an instant his heart seemed to circulate above his body and then plunge straight down into his stomach. “Hello.”
The voice was half-familiar, almost mocking. There was no body attached so far as he could see in the dim light. He heard a sort of moan. It was all the air escaping from his lungs.
“Do keep quiet,” the voice said. “We didn’t reckon on you joining the party. You’d better hand over that nasty thing you’ve brought with you. It looks dangerous.” He tried to speak but couldn’t. It was the girl, the girl he had seen that morning.
A deft hand reached out and picked up the gun from the floor and put it behind where she was crouching, clearly visible now, about three feet away. She leaned forward, so he could see her.
“My name is Liz,” she whispered. “Liz Carlyle. And you are going to be very quiet, Mr. Haddock. Quieter than you have been so far. Quiet as a mouse, please. Just lie there and watch.”
My God. She knew his name. He’d better do what she said. He lay there and watched, trembling slightly with shock.
In the window opposite, a light came on. A figure moved to the curtains, stretched, drew them. The guy was lucky, Haddock reflected. If he’d had the gun, he’d have shot him. Half his mind had come back, but not the half that would have told him he was pretty lucky himself.
It was a signal. Immediately all hell let loose. Beyond the conifer hedge on the other side of the house, a blinding light shone-from his own garden, Haddock realized. The yard below seemed suddenly full of figures. Two men in black, who seemed to have no faces, smashed open the farmhouse door. No problem in recognizing armed policemen. Haddock knew exactly what was going to happen. The two men reappeared half-carrying a struggling figure. They bundled him around the hedge out of Haddock’s view, and a car started up and drove off, accelerating.
Every light in the house was on now, plus a light from a generator that had appeared miraculously in the yard. The house was being ransacked from cellar to attic.
Haddock sighed. It seemed the only thing to do. “Who are you?” he asked the girl who was still in the barn.
“Government service.”
“You mean MI5?”
“It’s you who are going to do the explaining, Mr. Haddock.”
A torch shone.
“Where did you get this gun?”
“I had it.”
“So I’d thought. You were armed police yourself, weren’t you? Is that standard issue?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe?”
Truculence came back to Haddock and washed over him in a warm, familiar wave. He grabbed some of it, like a drowning man grabs water. “Why should I answer your questions? You aren’t police. Anyway, you seem to know a lot already. How do you know my name?”
“I know your wife.”
“You know my wife?” It didn’t make sense.
“And that’s the reason we could just be able to deal with this unofficially. You haven’t actually done anything, after all. Or we could hand you over. There are plenty of your old pals milling around. Please yourself.”
“How do you know Phyllis?”
“Well, she’s on our payroll, for one thing. Part-time. She retired when she married you. Or rather, she didn’t. Come on down the ladder, and maybe I’ll explain.”
They were standing now on the cobblestones of the yard. His legs felt so shaky, he nearly fell down.
“Right, then,” said the girl. “We have been watching this man for quite some time-on and off, of course. That’s where Phyllis came in. That’s why you live in your present house. I suppose Phyllis didn’t explain that. Know what a ‘sleeper’ is?”
“Someone that sleeps around?”
“You aren’t that dumb, Mr. Haddock. A sleeper is a spy, an intelligence agent, who does nothing till he gets his instructions. Then he acts as required. As sleepers go, Lukas was pretty active. He’d had his instructions and he was carrying them out. Our technique if we find a sleeper is to watch and wait. We learn a lot that way, so long as we are satisfied they aren’t dangerous, of course. We may even feed them information, to keep their bosses happy. But we have to keep close to them-it doesn’t do to lose sight. So that’s how Phyllis got her part-time job. She watched and reported. She was around here with me this morning.”