She ate a biscuit and some cheese, and I waited.
‘Alastair Yardley,’ she said. ‘The laundry people said he is a good sailor. Better than most of his kind. He often takes yachts from one place to another, so that they’ll be wherever the owner wants. He can handle big boats, and is known for it. He sails into Andraitx four or five times a year, but three years ago he had a flat there, and used it as his base. The laundry people said they don’t really know much about him, except that his father worked in a boat-building yard. He told them once that he’d learned to sail as soon as walk, and his first job was as a paid deck-hand in sea-trials for ocean-racing yachts. Apart from that, he hasn’t said much about himself or who he’s working for now, and the laundry people don’t know because they aren’t the prying sort, just chatty.’
‘You’re marvellous,’ I said.
‘Hm. I took some photographs of the boat, and I’ve had them processed at an overnight developers.’ She opened her handbag, and drew out a yellow packet, which contained, among holiday scenes, three clear colour photographs of my first prison. Three different views, taken as the boat swung round with the tide.
‘You can have them, if you like,’ she said.
‘I could kiss you.’
Her face lit with amusement. ‘If you shuffle through that pack, you’ll find a rather bad picture of Alastair Yardley. I didn’t get the focus right. I was in a bit of a hurry, and he was walking towards me with his laundry, and I didn’t want him to think I was taking a picture of him personally. I had to pretend to be taking a general view of the port, you see, and so I’m afraid it isn’t very good.’
She had caught him from the waist up, and, as she said, slightly out of focus, but still recognisable to anyone who knew him. Looking ahead, not at the camera, with a white-wrapped bundle under his arm. Even in fuzzy outline, the uncompromising bones gave his face a powerful toughness, a look of aggressive determination. I thought that I might have liked him, if we’d met another way.
‘Will you take the photos to the police?’ Hilary asked.
‘I don’t know.’ I considered it. ‘Could you lend me the negatives, to have more prints made?’
‘Sort them out and take them,’ she said.
I did that, and we lingered over our coffee.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you have thought once or twice about... the time we spent together?’
‘Yes.’
She looked at me with a smile in the spectacled eyes. ‘Do you regret it?’
‘Of course not. Do you?’
She shook her head. ‘It may be too soon to say, but I think it will have changed my entire life.’
‘How could it?’ I said.
‘I think you have released in me an enormous amount of mental energy. I was being held back by feelings of ignorance and even inferiority. These feelings have entirely gone. I feel full of rocket fuel, ready for blast off.’
‘Where to?’ I said. ‘What’s higher than a headmistress?’
‘Nothing measurable. But my school will be better, and there are such things as power and influence, and the ear of policy makers.’
‘Miss Pinlock will be a force in the land?’
‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.
I thought back to the time I’d first slept with a girl, when I was eighteen. It had been a relief to find out what everyone had been going on about, but I couldn’t remember any accompanying upsurge of power. Perhaps, for me, the knowledge had come too easily, and too young. More likely that I’d never had the Pinlock potential in the first place.
I paid the bill and went out into the street. The April air was cold, as it had been for the past entire week, and Hilary shivered slightly inside her coat.
‘The trouble with warm rooms... life blasts you when you leave.’
‘Speaking allegorically?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
We began to walk back towards the office, up the High Street, beside the shops. People scurried in and out of the doorways like bees at a hive mouth. The familiar street scene, after the last three weeks, seemed superficial and unreal.
We drew level with a bank: not, as it happened, the one where I kept my own money, nor that which we used as a firm, but one which dealt with the affairs of many of our clients.
‘Would you wait a sec?’ I said. ‘I’ve had a thought or two this week... just want to check something.’
Hilary smiled and nodded cheerfully, and waited without comment while I went on my short errand.
‘O.K.?’ I said, rejoining her.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Where did they keep you, in that van?’
‘In a warehouse.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Do you want to see it? I want to go back for another look.’
‘All right.’
‘My car’s behind the office.’
We walked on, past a small, pleasant-looking dress shop. I glanced idly into the window, and walked two strides past, and then stopped.
‘Hilary...’
‘Yes?’
‘I want to give you a present.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.
She protested her way into the shop and was reduced to silence only by the sight of what I wanted her to wear: the garment I’d seen in the window; a long bold scarlet cloak.
‘Try it,’ I said.
Shaking her head, she removed the dull tweed coat and let the girl assistant lower the bright swirling cape on to her shoulders. She stood immobile while the girl fastened the buttons and arranged the neat collar. Looked at herself in the glass.
Duck into swan, I thought. She looked imposing and magnificent, a plain woman transfigured, her height making dramatic folds in the drop of clear red wool.
‘Rockets,’ I said, ‘are powered by flame.’
‘You can’t buy me this.’
‘Why not?’
I wrote the girl a cheque, and Hilary for once seemed to be speechless.
‘Keep it on,’ I said. ‘It looks marvellous.’
The girl packed the old coat into a carrier, and we continued our walk to the office. People looked at Miss Pinlock as they passed, as they had not done before.
‘It takes courage,’ she said, raising her chin.
‘First flights always do.’
She thought instantly of the night in Cala St Galdana: I saw it in the movement of her eyes. She smiled to herself, and straightened a fraction to her full height. Nothing wrong with the Pinlock nerve, then or ever.
From the front the warehouse looked small and dilapidated, its paint peeling off like white scabs to leave uneven grey scars underneath. A weatherboard screwed to the wall offered 10,500 square feet to let, but judging from the aged dimness of the sign, the customers had hardly queued.
The building stood on its own at the end of a side road which now had no destination, owing to the close-down of the branch railway and the subsequent massive reorganisation of the landscape into motorways and roundabouts.
There was a small door let into a large one on rollers at the entrance, neither of them locked. The locks, in fact, appeared to have been smashed, but in time gone by. The splintered wood around them had weathered grey with age.
I pushed open the small door for Hilary, and we stepped in. The gloom as the door swung behind us was as blinding as too much light; I propped the door open with a stone, but even then there were enfolding shadows at every turn. It was clear why vandals had stopped at breaking down the doors. Everything inside was so thick with dust that to kick anything was to start a choking cloud.
Sounds were immediately deadened, as if the high mouldering piles of junk were soaking up every echo before it could go a yard.