‘No, it’s getting late.’
He fumbled absently in his pocket and then frowned. ‘The police brought Slater’s car back. I saw it outside. But I guess I don’t have the keys.’
‘They’re on the mantelpiece.’ Sally crossed the room. ‘They must have put them through the letter-box. I found them lying on the floor in the hall when I came in. But don’t bother, I’ll phone a taxi.’ He would have argued, but he saw her face that she would not be argued with. And he thought, I could love you.
It was fifteen minutes before the taxi came and parp-parped down in the street. They had had time to finish the wine and say many things. They had done neither. ‘I’ll come down with you.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘I’ll come down with you.’ He helped her on with her coat and they walked down the stairs in silence. The taxi was revving impatiently at the kerb, clouds of exhaust fumes rising into the darkness. She stopped in the doorway and relented. She turned and kissed him quickly on the lips. He held her arm to stop her from going. ‘Did you... did you get the job in Rome?’
She looked at him quizzically for a moment. ‘I don’t know. They’re going to let me know.’
‘Oh.’
‘See you tomorrow.’
He watched her climb into the taxi and the car purring off down the Rue de Commerce leaving black tyre tracks in the thin layer of snow, and he wondered if she would always be leaving.
Back in the flat all that remained of her were lingering traces of her perfume and the faintest smear of lipstick on her empty glass. He finished the wine, drinking slowly and listening to the clock ticking in the heavy silence and feeling the dull ache in the stiffening, bruised muscles of his right arm.
IV
A silent figure stood in the snow, pressed against a gable end, the eaves too high above him to afford any protection from the thickly-falling flakes. The tyre tracks of the taxi had vanished already, only a slight, slightly whiter impression remaining in the whiteness of the road. The man shifted his feet, but the feeling in them had long since gone. Even the muscles in his face seemed to have frozen. His hands, pushed deep in his pockets, were raw cold and stiff. His eyes were dull and sunk deep in shadow, and yet still they watched. It was a pointless vigil now, but perhaps for the first time in his life Kale was afraid of the loneliness of his hotel room, locked away in the dark listening to the throbbing early morning music that came drifting up from the basement night club in the adjoining block. There would be too much time to think during the sleepless hours. There were things that would trouble him, strange dark thoughts coming like strangers in the night to blacken the blackness in him.
The light in the top floor flat went out, and still he could not bring himself to move. The woman had been gone twenty minutes and there was no way the man would lead him to the child tonight. And yet he stood on, like a punishment. A mean, lost soul in a foreign city where people spoke words he could not understand, where he had killed two men without a second thought. Only now it was a prison. There was no escape. Every eye watched him, every voice accused him. There was a dreadful inevitability about it all, like death itself.
Of course, there was a way out, but somewhere beyond his grasp, there just to torture him. He had only to leave. By morning he could be in Ostend, by tea time, in London. But it was not to be. A child had seen him commit murder, a child with a disordered mind, a child who would probably never identify him. But she might. He knew that, his employer knew that, and there were others who knew it too. It was expected of him to negate that possibility. He expected it of himself. He had killed before. It was easy, it was necessary, and yet standing there in all the cold and snow on this black winter night, he did not know if it was possible.
It was the uncertainty that trapped him there. He had thought he knew all the dark territory of his mind. He had had no illusions about what he was. It was something he accepted, like life or death. But somewhere in that inner darkness he had stumbled on something unfamiliar, something he could not come to terms with. To kill a child with his secret locked somewhere in her disturbed mind. A note in a locker, three words on a scrap of paper, and he had discovered in himself the seed of destruction that is in the souls of all men. To kill the child would be to kill himself. He knew it with such a dreadful clarity. You choose your own road to hell and you think you know every twist and turn. Then you discover that hell is not the end of the road. He was a person, after all, a human being, and there was a point beyond which you could not go. It is no use, he thought. I will think about it whether I stand here punishing myself, or whether I lie awake in my room. The man whose head he had cracked, whose ribs he had kicked, would lead him eventually to the child. He was no longer in control of his own destiny. He was being drawn towards his own destruction as helplessly as the man being swept into the vortex of a whirlpool. For somewhere in all his lack of humanity, he had discovered a conscience.
He moved stiffly away from the wall against which he had sought some shelter and began walking along the Rue de Commerce. Somewhere he would find a bar to spend some time before he could face the room he had taken across town, and the long hours before morning.
Chapter Six
I
People hurried by without even glancing at the solitary figure sitting at one of the red-painted metal tables under the awning. The market stalls were being removed. The early morning trade had been poor because of the weather. Piles of snow were dotted about where ways had been swept clear for the stalls. Lines of cars stood at the far side gleaming in the morning sunshine and the snow was melting on the black flagstones where great slabs of sunshine fell between the buildings. The sky was a clear, pale blue and reminded Bannerman of the sky in the painting over the mantelpiece back at the flat. It was still cold, though, out of the sun.
He sat at one of the tables near the end of the awning, where the sunshine still splashed in under the yellow canvas, warming the air. The coffee, too, warmed him inside. He smoked a leisurely cigar, not thinking too much about anything, watching the men and women moving the stalls.
The Grande Place was dominated on one side by the ornate splendour of the Town Hall with its tower and tall, tapering spire. It was an impressive square, the centre of the city, full of life and colour and gaiety, the old guild houses, mediaeval gabled buildings, lining the other three sides. Now they were fronted by souvenir shops, restaurants and cafés, though you could still tell the trades they had once represented; the boatmen’s guildhouse with its roof shaped like the stern of a seventeenth century vessel, the archers’ house with its carved statue of St. Sebastian holding a bow, the weigh-house with a pair of scales above a balcony supported by two negroes.
Across the Place, several workmen on ladders were washing down the walls of one of the houses, and repainting the gold decorations. Bannerman took it all in, enjoying it. The sun had lifted him and he felt good, relaxed. He might have been a tourist basking in the winter sun without a care in the world.
But now, as the sun rose higher, the shadow of the awning moved across the table and he was no longer in the warmth. He finished his coffee then stood up and checked his watch. It was a little after ten. He dropped some francs in a saucer and stepped out across the square. His day seemed clearly mapped out before him. The press conference at the offices of the Judicial Police was at eleven. He would have to meet Tait at the office, and there was the funeral in the afternoon. Then at night, he would go and see the child. He found that increasingly he thought about the child with a strange affection, a blend of pity and something else that he was not sure about.