The solution, after a reconnaissance of the environs of Harwich, turned out to be a single-storey motel whose cabins gave directly onto numbered parking bays, and whose unpleasing male receptionist required payment in advance.
"Been on long?" I asked him conversationally as I counted out my thirty pounds.
"Too bloody long."
I was holding an extra five pounds in my hand. "Shall I see you tonight? I'm catching the ferry."
"I'm off at six, aren't I?"
"Well, here, have this," I said generously: and for five pounds established that he would not be there to see me in my new persona as I left.
My final act before leaving England was to have the Mercedes washed and polished. Because when you are dealing with official minds—I used to teach—if you can't be humble, then at least be clean.
* * *
Frontier posts have always made me nervous, those of my own country the most. Though I count myself a patriot, a weight rolls off my shoulders each time I leave my homeland, and when I return I have a sense of resuming a life sentence. So perhaps it came naturally to me to play the outgoing passenger, for I entered the queue of cars with a good heart and advanced cheerfully towards the immigration post, which was manned, if that was the word, not by a posse of officers provided with a description of me, but by a youth with a white peaked cap and blond hair to his shoulders. I flapped May's passport at him. He ignored it.
"Tickets, mate. Bill-etti. Far-carton."
"Oh, sorry. Here."
But it was a wonder I could speak to him at all, for by then I had remembered the .38. It was nestling, together with sixty rounds of ammunition, not four feet from me, on the floor of the passenger seat in Bairstow's bulky briefcase, now the property of Aitken Mustafa May, arms dealer.
* * *
On deck a fierce night wind was blowing. A few hardy passengers huddled among the benches. I staggered towards the stern, found a dark patch, leaned over the rail, and, in the classic pose of a seasick passenger, allowed first the gun and then the ammunition to slip into the blackness. I heard no splash, but I could have sworn I smelled the grassy smells of Priddy racing past me on the sea wind.
I returned to my cabin and slept so deeply that I had to dress in a hurry to reach the Mercedes in time and consign it to a multistorey parking garage in the docks. I bought a phone card and from a public call box dialled the number.
"Julie? It's Pete Bradbury here from yesterday," I said, but I had barely got even this far before she cut in on me.
"I thought you said you were going to ring me," she burst out hysterically. "He still hasn't come back, I'm still getting the answering machine, and if he's not home tonight I'm putting Ali in the car and I'm going out there first thing in the morning and—"
"You mustn't do that," I said.
A bad pause.
"Why not?"
"Is there anyone with you? Apart from Ali? Is there anyone with you in the house?"
"What the hell's that to do with you?"
"Is there a neighbour you can go to? Have you got a friend who will come round?"
"Tell me what you're trying to tell me, for Christ's sake!"
So I told her. I had no tradecraft left, no tactical aids. "Aitken's been murdered. All three of them have. Aitken, his secretary, and her husband. They're in the stone but on the hill above the store. He dealt in arms as well as carpets. They got caught in the crossfire. I'm very sorry."
I had no idea anymore whether she was hearing me. I heard a shout, but it was so shrill it could have been the child. I thought I heard a door open and shut and the sound of something crashing. I kept saying, "Are you there?" and getting no answer. I had a picture of the receiver swinging on its cord while I talked to an empty room. So after a while I rang off, and the same evening, having removed my beard and restored my hair and skin to something of their former colour, took the train to Paris.
* * *
Dee's a saint, she is saying from the window of my bedroom.
Dee took me in when I was down-and-out, she is saying as we stroll together on the Quantocks, her two arms locked round one of mine.
Dee put me back together again, she is reminiscing drowsily into my shoulder as we lie before the fire in her bedroom. Without Dee I would never have made it out of the gate. She's been mother, father, chum, the whole disaster for me.
Dee gave me back to life, she is saying, between earnest discussions of how we can be most useful for Larry. How to make music, love, how to say no . . . Without Dee I would have died. . . .
Until bit by bit my agent-runner's pride takes exception to this other controller of her life. I wish Dee forgotten and discourage further talk of her—this Dee of the fabulous empty castle in Paris, nothing in it except a bed and a piano—this Dee whose aristocratic name and address are lovingly illuminated in Emma's pop-up book: alias the Contessa Ann-Marie von Diderich, with an address on the Ile St.-Louis.
THIRTEEN
WET CHESTNUT LEAVES stuck to the cobbled pavement. This is the house, I thought, staring up at the same high grey walls and shuttered windows that I had pictured in my dreams. Up there in the tower is where Penelope sits, weaving her shroud, and remains faithful to her Larry in his wanderings, accepting no substitutes.
I had watched my back for hours. I had sat in cafes, observed cars, fishermen, and cyclists. I had ridden on the metro and in buses. I had walked through classical gardens and perched on benches. I had done everything that Operational Man could think of to protect his unfaithful mistress from Merriman and Pew, Bryant and Luck, and The Forest. And my back was clean. I knew it was. Though the experts say you never know for sure, I knew.
A wrinkled old woman opened the door to me. She wore grey hair knotted behind her and the coarse blue-black tunic of a menial. And wooden therapeutic sandals over lisle stockings.
"I would like to see the Contessa, please," I said severely in French. "My name is Timothy. I am a friend of Mademoiselle Emma."
I could think of nothing to add, and for a while neither apparently could she, for she remained on the threshold, tilting her head and screwing up her eyes as if to get me into focus, until I realised she was measuring me minutely, first my face, then my hands and shoes, and then my face again. and if what she saw in me was an uncomfortable mystery to both of us, what I saw in her was an intelligence and a humanity that were almost too powerful for the rumpled little frame that was obliged to accommodate them. And what I heard, faintly from upstairs, was the sound of a piano playing, whether live or recorded was anybody's guess but mine.
"Kindly follow me," she said in English, so I walked behind her up two flights of stone steps, and with each step the sounds of the piano grew a little louder, and I began to feel a sickness of recognition that was like a giddiness from altitude, so that the views of the Seine through the windows at each half-landing were like views of several different rivers at once, this one fast-flowing, another calm, and a third strict as a canal. Brown-skinned children watched me from a doorway. A young girl in the bright cottons of Arabia flitted past me on her way downstairs. We reached a high room, and here through the long window the rivers joined together and became the Seine again, with appropriate anglers in berets, and lovers arm in arm. In this room the music was much fainter, though my recognition of it was no less, for it was some obscure Scandinavian piece that Emma used for her finger exercises at Honeybrook before the Hopeless Causes took her over. And this morning she was still sticking on the same little phrases, replaying them over and over till she had them to her satisfaction. And I remembered how, where others might have tired of this constant repetition, I had always been deeply taken by it, empathising with her, trying almost physically to help her over every hurdle, however many shots it took, because that was basically how I had seen my role in her life: as her conductor and devoted audience, as the fellow who was ready to pick her up each time she fell.