London was blowy, a light rain carried in the wind, encapsulating spots of city smut. And the wind blew in Sally’s face as she hurried down Fleet Street from the tube station. Past the rising glass windows of the Daily Express.
There was a quiet desperation in her now, a disturbing sense of disorientation. Perhaps, she was thinking, she was only compounding her original mistake. There was a dreadful hopelessness about her pursuit of this man she might love half-way across Europe. How would he react? What if he did not want her? Why had she ever gone in the first place? And then there was the child. She felt an ache inside her.
After leaving du Maurier’s office she had taken a taxi back to the airport in time for the two o’clock flight to London. The city seemed strange to her, alien after the months in Brussels. She felt nothing in common with the people she passed in the street and they barely seemed to notice her passing.
She found the Post’s London office at the bottom end of the street, a grey sandstone Victorian building rising into the late afternoon sky from its grim basement to its bright, yellow-lit windows at the top.
Heads in the newsroom turned as she came in and looked helplessly about her for a familiar face. ‘Can I help you?’ a young man at the nearest desk asked.
‘I...’ she broke to catch her breath. ‘I was looking for Neil Bannerman.’
‘Oh, you’ve just missed him, love. He left about an hour ago to get the Glasgow train from Euston.’ A pause. ‘Stood you up, has he? I’m Tom, by the way. I mean, if you’re looking for a bit of entertainment tonight, I know a nice little restaurant...’ But she was gone, the door swinging behind her.
In the street below she had to wait nearly five minutes before she got a taxi. ‘Euston station,’ she told the driver. ‘Please hurry.’
‘Well I’ll do me best, Miss. But you picked the wrong time to try and get through London in a hurry. Bloody traffic. It’s diabolical at this time of day.’
It took over half an hour to get to the station, and she ran up the steps from the covered rank and across the concourse towards the barriers, searching frantically for the Glasgow sign. She grasped a porter’s arm. ‘The Glasgow train,’ she said breathlessly, ‘has it gone yet?’
‘Fraid so, Miss. About ten minutes ago. But there’s another one at quarter to six.’
She turned away, the weight of the case straining at her arm. She felt her disappointment bring tears to her eyes. And for a moment she wondered if it was not a sign, if she should give up and turn back to the life she had left only eight hours earlier.
II
The car bumped and shook its way across the rough, rutted mud track, its headlights picking out the grass verge and the blasted wood fence posts. In the distance the lights of the house twinkled erratically through the branches of tall, dark trees that swayed in the wind. It was a wild night.
Bannerman turned the wheels over a small humpbacked bridge across a narrow gushing stream and the track broadened a little and was lined with trees along the right side. He did not know what to expect, or what he was going to say to the old man, but he felt, somehow, that this time it really would be an end to it all. The car clattered over the cattle grid and pulled up on the asphalt courtyard.
He had left the train at Preston and hired the car at a garage not far from the station to drive the ten or twelve miles south west on the A59 and A565 to Armsdale House near the tiny Armsdale landfall. He switched off the lights and stepped out into the bluster that drove in from the west across the Irish Sea. But there was a warmth in the air, a mildness and a smell of rain.
The house itself was a big, stone, turreted affair, almost a small castle. It stood dark and impressive in its setting. The door was opened by a short, thick-set man with a crop of white, wiry hair. His face was tanned and leathery with age. He had a heavy tweed jacket on over a thick sweater and thick tweed trousers. He stared at Bannerman suspiciously and the reporter noticed his big working-man’s hands, hard-skinned and calloused. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve come to see Lord Armsdale.’
‘And who’s wanting ’im?’
‘My name is Neil Bannerman. I’m the investigative reporter of the Edinburgh Post.’
There was a pause as the man considered this. ‘Does ’e expect you?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Then you’d better come and wait in the ’all and I’ll see if ’e’ll see you.’
Bannerman waited in the big hall, worn old flagstones beneath his feet, a staircase rising up to an unlit floor above. It was cold in here. He thought about Tania and felt guilty. Not knowing if she was alive or dead. He should have been there... A door opened on his left and a shaft of warm yellow light fell out at his feet. ‘In ’ere.’ The white-haired man beckoned. Bannerman went through the door and found himself in a large, cluttered living room filled with old, cumbersome articles of furniture. A sofa, two big old easy chairs, a writing desk, bookshelves, walls hung with old paintings. A cheery fire burned in a large stone fireplace and Lord Armsdale sat languidly by it in one of the easy chairs. He was pulling gently on the stem of a pipe and the eyes in his old narrow face twinkled sadly as they turned towards Bannerman.
‘Take a seat, Mr. Bannerman. Will you have tea?’
‘Thank you, no.’ Bannerman sank into the softness of the chair opposite the old man and felt strangely at home in this warm, friendly room. It was a lived-in place. Nothing pretentious or fancy. But comfortable. Lord Armsdale surveyed Bannerman shrewdly for some seconds.
‘Would I be right in thinking I know what you have come about?’
Bannerman nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘I think so.’
The old man looked beyond him towards the white-haired man who still stood at the open door. ‘That’ll be all, Arthur, thank you.’ The other turned reluctantly and pulled the door to behind him. Lord Armsdale went on puffing at his pipe, lost in a gentle euphoria of smoke and thought. At length he said, ‘He has been with me a long time. Arthur. Almost from the start. A good man. He carried my messages for me, found the men for the job. He trusted me implicitly, has always trusted me. In a way I suppose I have let him down as well. He’s always done everything for me. My chauffeur, my secretary, my housekeeper, my gardener. He worked in the mines when he was a boy. I wonder how he will manage without me. I think, perhaps, he needs me as much as I have needed him.’
Then suddenly he looked at Bannerman as though coming out of a dream. ‘I have been expecting a visit such as this since I heard the news yesterday. I had no idea who it might be, but in a way I suppose I should have guessed it might be you. I have heard that you are very good.’ He paused again to take comfort in his pipe. ‘At the beginning I took a great many precautions, you know. I thought it was foolproof. But then, when it went wrong, the business of the child, I think I knew that it would end this way.
‘But please,’ he pointed the stem of his pipe at Bannerman, ‘do not get me wrong. I regret none of it, except that it has failed, that by my own actions I have endangered the Party, the Government I tried to save.’ He seemed without emotion, calm and relaxed. ‘Will the child live or die?’
‘She has a chance.’
‘Good, good. I’m glad. You must think me some kind of monster. I suppose history will condemn me as being a misguided old man. But you see, Mr. Bannerman, what are the lives of two or three people when compared with the justice and dignity that my Party is trying to bring to millions? Do we not place far too much importance on life itself, on the unbounded freedom of the individual at the expense of others less able to exploit the world about them?’