Barbed wire ran either side of the track. Tufts of sheep's wool clung to the barbs, white cattle grazed among the rocks. The track led uphill. I followed it and saw at three hundred yards' distance a chain of stone farm buildings of no merit, some with windows, some without, and together resembling a freight train with the tallest cars at the left, and tailing to a run of chicken houses and pigsties. The track led over a white bridge and an island of brown marshland to reappear before the main entrance. A sign said: INVITED VISITORS. An orange arrow pointed directly at the house.
I crossed the bridge and saw a blue Mercedes parked in the front drive, its bonnet towards me. Metallic, she had said. But I couldn't tell whether the blue was metallic or not. Two-door, she had said. But the car was facing me, and I couldn't count the doors. Nevertheless my heart beat faster in spite of my forebodings. Aitken May's here. He's back. In the house.
With them. Larry's here too. Larry came north despite the warning: when did Larry ever heed a warning? Then he went to Paris to find Emma.
I drew near to the house, and a curtain of white cloud rolled off the hill to prevent me entering, then rolled over me and down the track. There were two other cars, one a Volkswagen Golf, the other a battered grey Dormobile, with a triangle of faded red flag on the aerial and flat tyres. The Volkswagen was parked on the far side of the forecourt. The Dormobile stood forlornly in the hay barn, which seemed to be its final resting place. I saw now that the Mercedes had two doors, that its paintwork was indeed metallic, and that its windows were coated with grime. It's your deal that paid for it, Julia had said. I saw the telephone aerial and remembered the proud, not quite English voice: "Hullo, Sally, this is Hardwear, calling from the car. . . ."
Parking my red Ford, I was faced with a problem I should have solved already: to take the briefcase with me or leave it in the car? Keeping my back to the house and using the open door for cover, I fished the .38 revolver from the briefcase and jammed it once more in my waistband. I was getting a little too used to it. I locked the briefcase in the boot. Passing the blue Mercedes, I brushed my knuckles against the bonnet. It was stone cold.
* * *
The front entrance to the house was protected by a storm porch of quarried black stone. The door was painted green. The doorbell was linked to an intercom. Beside the bell was a brushed-steel plate with numbers on it. Either you rang the bell or you punched in the combination. The door had an eyehole and strips of stained-glass window either side of it, but the glass had no luminosity, and I guessed it was boarded on the inside. A curled visitor card read: "Aitken Mustafa May, BADA, Oriental Carpets, Objects d'Art, Chmn, The Hardwear Company, GmbH." I pressed the bell and heard it ring inside the house: one of those sleigh-bell chimes that are supposed to calm spirits but drive them to the brink. I rang a second time, my eyes fixed upon the Volkswagen. This year's registration. Local licence plates, like the Mercedes. Blue, like the Mercedes. And its windows, like the Mercedes, coated with grime and weather. When Aitken's ship came home, everyone got a new car, I decided. Are you the big, big buyer? The one that's going to make us all mountainously rich? No, that's my friend, actually: the one with thirty-seven million stolen pounds to spend on carpets from the Caucasus.
I pressed the bell three times. Rather than listen to any more sleigh bells, I walked along the front of the house in search of another door to try, but there wasn't one, and the windows gave onto a narrow corridor of white-painted brick. And when I tap-tapped on the glass, no smiling, friendly face appeared to welcome me, not even Larry's.
I walked round to the back, picking my way through the remains of an old timber milclass="underline" rusted circular saws, cumbersome engines with frayed belts, a pile of sawn logs that lay as they had fallen years ago, a rusted axe, heaps of sawdust overgrown with weeds and lichen, all abandoned as if at a single summons. And I wondered what it was about this place that, however many years ago, a sawyer and his mates should have stopped sawing and fled, leaving everything exactly as it was now; and that Aitken Mustafa May and his storeman and his secretary had abandoned their nice new cars and followed him.
Then I saw the blood, or perhaps I had seen it already and was finding other things to think of: one patch of unisex blood, Emma's or Larry's equally, one finely fretted island about a foot long and six inches wide, congealed, lying across the sawdust; but so rich, so assured, that as I stooped to it I perceived it first as solid rather than liquid, and was half inclined to pick it up—until I saw my hand recoil and fancied Emma's pale dead face staring up at me through the sawdust. I delved. The sawdust turned out to be common sawdust all the way to the ground.
But no gruesome trail, no telltale drips or stains led the keen-eyed detective to the next clue. There was the patch of blood, and it lay on the pile of sawdust, and the sawdust lay five paces from the back door. And between the sawdust and the back door I made out a lot of busy footprints in both directions, not unisex this time but distinctly male: either track shoes or just standard flat-soled shoes with nothing special to distinguish them. But still emphatically male, and going back and forth enough times and with enough male haste and vigour to establish an oily river of churned mud, ending at the island of poured blood that seemed so determined to remain separate from the sawdust it had settled on.
Or perhaps the river did not end there after all. For beyond the pile of sawdust I now saw the tyre tracks of two single wheels acting in tandem. They were too narrow for car wheels, but they would have been all right for a motorbike, except that there was only one wheel to each track and therefore—my mind had decided to travel slowly now, being mostly occupied with the possible ownership of the pool of blood—and therefore something more in the nature of a farm vehicle.
A trailer? The sort of carriage that pulls a sailing boat down busy roads and holds up bank holiday traffic on its way through Somerset? A gun carriage? A funeral carriage? That sort of trailer? As to where it had gone, that was anybody's guess, because after a few yards the tracks mounted a concrete path and thereafter held their peace. And the concrete path led nowhere at alclass="underline" for another white, fresh, hard-edged cloud was already rolling down the hill.
The back door was locked, which first frustrated me, then quickly made me angry, although I knew perfectly well that of all the useless emotions I might have given way to—grief, despair, frustration, terror—anger was the least productive and the least adult. I had actually started towards the cars with the intention of taking a methodical look at them, when my anger stopped me in mid-stride and yanked me round and made me attack the locked door. I beat on it with my fists. I shouted, "Open up, damn you!" I shouted, "Larry! Emma!" I hurled myself several times against it, with little effect on the door or, more remarkably, my shoulder. I had the immunity that comes of heedlessness. I shouted, "May! Aitken May! Larry, for Christ's sake! Emma!" I remembered the rusted axe beside the log pile. A more adept spy would have shot the lock out with the .38, but I wasn't feeling adept, and in my distraction I didn't really consider whether the door was locked. I simply hit it, rather as I had lashed out at Larry, but with an axe.