Silk edged forward. “Let’s see the colour of your blood,” he snarled. A line as bad as that had to be snarled. He wondered what he would do if he hit Gladstone once, hard, and the man fell down. What then? Pick him up, the way Tucker picked up the bookie? Gladstone looked a hefty, meaty specimen. Silk’s arms were beginning to tire. Then: “Christ Almighty!” he cried, and stepped forward, too late.
Stevens held the cello by its neck, swung it like a sledgehammer, and smashed the soundbox against Gladstone’s head so hard that the woodwork shattered and the splintered wreckage lay on Gladstone’s shoulders. He collapsed to his knees. Blood cascaded from his bald head. Stevens was left holding the neck of the cello, and he clubbed Gladstone twice. The second blow sent him sprawling. Stevens dropped the club, stooped and eased Gladstone’s false teeth from his gaping mouth. “We don’t want the poor fellow to come to any harm,” he said. He wrapped the dentures in a handkerchief, and tucked them into Gladstone’s jacket pocket. “His remark about moving pictures was in very poor taste, I thought.”
Silk had never seen such an act of violence, even in the war, when bombing from twenty thousand feet made violence remote. His mouth was dry; he had to swallow before he could say: “Is he dead?”
“Does it matter, sir?” Stevens asked.
“He’s still breathing,” Tess said. “See the bubbles.”
Without the dentures, Gladstone’s face looked thin and weak. Blood-tinged bubbles were leaking from his mouth. “You maniac,” Silk said. “That cello was priceless. It was a Cabrilloni. Irreplaceable.”
“It was rubbish,” Tess said. “I got it from a junk shop for thirty shillings.”
“You said…”
“Yes, well, I say a lot of things. It amuses me.”
Silk turned on Stevens. “You didn’t know that.”
“I know there is no Cabrilloni in the Groves Dictionary of Music. If you will guard the scene, sir, I shall fetch the shooting brake.” He walked away.
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Silk told Tess.
“Well, for a start, your under-butler is not who he seems to be,” she said. The bull terrier waddled past her and sniffed Gladstone’s head, and was not impressed. It waddled away and collapsed on its belly, all its legs splayed. “Those threats about telling your commanding officer. Does he take such a dim view of illicit sex?”
“Yes. No. It’s not so much the sex as the blackmail.”
Tess was rubbing the dog’s belly. “I’m glad I saw it. You could live your whole life, and never see anyone get brained like that. Like a perfect smash in tennis. And with a cello.”
Silk used his foot to scrape together fragments of wood. “We should cover him up. What if somebody comes along?”
“Never fear. I’ll set the dog on them.”
Silk looked at the sleeping dog, and the bleeding body, and the lovely face of an unworried woman, and he gave up. Stevens backed The Grange’s shooting brake towards them at high speed. They loaded Gladstone, still unconscious, into the back. Silk kissed Tess. Why not? Everyone knew. He got into the brake. Stevens drove. “Where are we going?” Silk asked. “Better you don’t know,” Stevens said. “Do you think you would have punched him?”
“Certainly.” Silk didn’t like the sound of that. Too brash. “Dunno.”
“The cinema has a lot of answer for. Just when a scenario demands swift and brutal action, the hero and the villain waste time in cheap dialogue. I lost patience with your confrontation. Blame my low threshold of boredom.”
After about five minutes, there was a long groan from the back. Silk turned to look. Gladstone’s face was striped red with blood, and some of the ruined cello still hung around his neck. He made a toothless statement, all pain and saliva. “That’s not English,” Silk said.
“Polish,” Stevens said. “Freelance, on a retainer from KGB in the hope that he’ll find someone like you they can blackmail for secrets.”
“But he wanted money.”
“Yes. He got bored, got greedy, got reckless. End of his career. Forget him.”
Silk watched the outskirts of Lincoln drift by. “You’re MI5, then,” he said.
“I might be, but then so might Tess Monk. So might you. For all I know, you two were running a sting operation to get the Pole to break cover. Or perhaps I’m KGB and the Pole is MI5. Or neither. We’re all rogue males, fighting for our territory. Take your pick.”
They drove into the grounds of a private hospital. Stevens went inside. The Pole groaned, and vomited onto his legs, and spat. “Watch your language, vicar,” Silk said. “You’re not in church now.” His own arrogance impressed him.
Stevens came out with three men dressed in white. They put the Pole in an ambulance and drove away. Stevens got in the brake and opened the windows. “Men who are knocked out invariably throw up,” he said. “Something else the cinema gets wrong.”
“Why the dogcollar?”
“Why not? It worked. He certainly had you rattled. KGB doesn’t hire agents with fur hats and bad English.”
“Gladstone. That was a nice touch.”
“Real name Paretek-Sasak.” Stevens concentrated on getting past a couple of tractors towing loads of straw bales. “Too cocky, too greedy. If he’d asked nicely for a couple of hundred, you might have paid.”
“No can do. Zoë’s got the money, not me. You know that.”
“So ask her for it. Tell her you’re being blackmailed.”
“Oh, sure. Tell her Tess and I…”
“She knows that. Knew from the start.”
Silk stared out of the window as a field went by. They were burning the stubble: raw red flame under thick black smoke. “Bang goes my marriage, then.”
“Not necessarily.” Stevens was back to his old smoothness. “By no means necessarily.”
He dropped Silk at the Citroën. Tess was still standing by the gate. She was watching the bull terrier gnaw on a large bone. “He’s too tired to go inside,” she said. “Easier to feed him here.”
“He’s lazy. You spoil him.”
“In dog-years he’s the equivalent of eighty. Maybe you’ll be glad of someone to bring you a bone when you’re his age.”
Silk looked at the farmhouse. “Shall we go inside?”
“No. Go away, Silko. I’ve had enough of men for a while. You’re just small boys. Everything you can pick up, you want to break.”
He thought about that. “Not entirely untrue, I suppose.”
“You owe me for your last lesson.” He gave her five pounds and she said: “A quid for the cello.”
“A quid. For a Cabrilloni. Fair enough.” He paid her, and they shook hands. He half-turned away but he was reluctant to go. “Isn’t there anything, you know, happy to be said?”
“Nothing.” She was wide-eyed and cheerful. “Nothing is best. Otherwise you’re bound to misunderstand it.”
He drove to Kindrick, trying hard to make sense of events. All he knew for certain was he wouldn’t have to heave that bloody cello about any more. That was one big improvement.
THE MOB FOUGHT THE WRECK
When Freddy told Silk he was the tenth assistant deputy director on the right as you went into Air Ministry, he was being modest, for tactical reasons. In fact he was deputy head of the department that administered Bomber Command. When his boss retired, everyone expected Freddie would move up.
His boss came back from lunch. Freddy was waiting.
“There’s a direct line between C-in-C Bomber Command and C-in-C Strategic Air Command in Omaha,” Freddy said.
“I helped negotiate it,” his boss said. “As you know.”
“It’s not working. Nobody answers the phone.”
This had never happened before. The British and American commanders were on first-name terms; normally they talked every day, often twice a day. When one of them crossed the Atlantic he was welcomed in the other’s headquarters, and into the most secret operations rooms. Now, suddenly, SAC had shut the door.