It did not occur to him until after nearly an hour of fruitless searching among the chaos in the house that it might be among Gryffe’s things in London. The thought stopped him as suddenly and effectively as if he had walked into a stone wall. He righted the upturned desk chair and slumped into it, hot and frustrated. Through the open window he saw that the sun had become a big red globe hanging over the distant horizon, and he realised that the room had sunk into a deep pink gloom. He felt drained and disappointed. The card would have given him access to the box. It was just possible that there would still be mail there for Gryffe that had never been collected.
The drawers down either side of the desk had been pulled out and then not replaced. They lay about the floor where they had been dropped or thrown. Instinctively Bannerman felt under the leaf of the table and found the small round knob of the tray drawer that slides in above the top drawer of most work desks. He pulled it out. The card lay in the tray section among a scattering of paper clips and pins. Carefully, Bannerman lifted it out and examined it before slipping it into his jacket pocket and allowing a little smile to crease his face. ‘Got you,’ he said, softly, and the whisper seemed thunderous in the stillness of the room.
He unwrapped a cigar and lit it slowly, deliberately, taking long, slow pulls and watching the thick blue smoke drift lazily upwards into the quickly fading last light of the day. Everything slowed. His thinking, his breathing, the burning of the cigar, even time itself. It would have been impossible to say how long he sat thus, allowing the passing time to wash over him.
He saw a face peering through a misted waiting-room window. A little girl was shouting, but there were no words. She ran towards him, arms outstretched, but she seemed to go through him and was gone. A hand wiped away the mist from the other side of the window and another face appeared. Bannerman tried to see it. There were features; eyes, a nose, a mouth. They were there, and yet he had no conception of them. He could not see them. But they were there.
He awoke with a start and blinked in the darkness, momentarily confused and a little frightened, until he remembered where he was. He was cold. The room was like ice. A little moonlight filtered through the window he had opened. His cigar, still between his fingers, had gone out and the smell of its smoke had turned stale.
The match he struck to re-light it brought a brief, flickering life to the room. Then he stood up and found his legs and arms stiff with the cold. He picked up his holdall and stumbled across the room in the darkness to find the door. He crossed the hall and went into the bedroom where he had come in the window. The moon, rising in the south, flooded the room with a light that reflected no colour and threw deep black shadows across the floor. The sky was a chaos of stars, and already the frost was glistening on the snow.
Bannerman threw his bag out of the window and then pulled himself up onto the sill. A small red spot of light fluttered momentarily on the wood of the architrave beside his head. As he saw it, the architrave split and threw jagged splinters into his face. The crack of a rifle shot echoed away into the night. An owl in a tree just outside the window screeched and flapped off into the dark. For just a moment Bannerman was confused. He drew his hand from his face and saw his fingers running with blood. He had no time to take in the fact that someone had shot at him before he heard again the crack of the rifle and felt the bullet whistle past, no more than two inches from his left cheek, and smash into the plaster of the wall at the far side of the room. The gap between the two shots may only have been seconds, but it seemed like hours. It was the full realisation that came with the second shot that brought the fear. He recoiled instinctively and fell backwards from the sill.
He landed clumsily in the darkness and felt the broken glass from the window slicing through his trousers and into his right knee. He rolled clear of it and lay on his back on the floor, listening to his breath coming hard and fast. And there, on the wall, was the same spot of red light, no bigger than a half-penny. It moved slowly along the broken plaster then vanished. It had to be some kind of sighting device, but its remoteness, deadliness, was quite chilling.
A jumble of thoughts went tumbling through his mind. Those that stuck brought no comfort. Somewhere out in the snow a man with a rifle was trying to kill him. They were miles from the nearest village. There was no-one to hear the shots. He was on his own.
He turned over and scrambled to his feet, keeping in the shaded part of the room. His hands were shaking, but he felt no pain from his injured face and leg. He searched about the room for something he could hold up at the window. A pillow lay at his feet. It had been cut open and some of its down scattered across the floor. If the sniper had not moved... He would have chosen a position from which he had maximum coverage, the south, west and east sides of the house. The north side had to be blind.
Bannerman thought it out carefully, but he could not bring himself to move. He remained crouched for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes until his teeth began chattering with cold and fear. The perspiration formed like ice on his face. Maybe he could sweat it out until daylight. What was the bastard waiting for? In the silence a twig snapped. It didn’t seem far off. Bannerman’s nerve broke. The yell ripped out from his throat as he threw the pillow up at the window. Almost immediately the rifle cracked in the moonlight beyond and the pillow was flung back in a cloud of feathers. The room seemed filled with them. Bannerman’s indecision was stultifying. Surely he would be safer to hold out. His chances of success in trying to escape across the snow seemed less than remote. And yet he was drawn by the second alternative.
But then the luxury of choice was sharply removed. The first thing he heard was movement in the snow outside, and then a small, dark cylindrical object hurtled through the window and into the room. It clattered across the floor and immediately began to issue a thick vapour that spread quickly in the stillness. Bannerman coughed, tears springing to his eyes as the stink of the acrid vapour stung his nostrils and burned his throat. He made a lunge for the door, pulled it open, and stumbled blindly across the hall and into the room opposite.
There was still a little light here from the window he had left open and the air was fresh and cold. He tripped as he made for the other side and struck his head on the edge of the desk. The pain filled his head, but the instinct to get out was stronger. He pulled himself up and made the opposite wall. His fingers fumbled infuriatingly with the window catch. It seemed to him that it was taking him hours and he felt a dizziness overtaking him. He took long deep breaths and it cleared a little.
Finally the window pulled open and he unhooked the shutters and pushed them out. As he pulled himself up so that he filled the frame it struck him, with a kind of gripping horror that for a second almost paralysed him, that there might be more than one of them. That any moment a man lying in wait to cover the north side would gently squeeze on a trigger and snuff him out with a single, simple shot. He almost felt it. But it did not come, and he jumped down into the cold and was almost buried in the snow that had drifted up against the wall.
For several seconds he foundered in it before he was clear of its burning cold and staggering towards the fence that bounded the house. He felt the friction of icy air on his skin and was aware of pieces of snow dropping from his coat as he ran, like sparks flying into the night. Most of all he felt the crushing vulnerability of being in the open.
The dizziness he had shaken off a few moments earlier was returning. He was over the fence now and running across the field as fast as the foot-and-a-half of snow would allow. All the time he was waiting for the bullet in his back. Surely he would come into the sights of his assailant at any time. He glanced back. He had made several hundred metres and there was no sign of movement anywhere around the house. Ahead, maybe a kilometre or more distant, lay the dark belt of trees he had seen earlier in the day. At least they would provide some kind of cover. And beyond the trees, he knew, there was a village. He had seen the spire.