‘The one who was shot for seeing too much?’
‘That’s right,’ Ghost said. ‘We knew him. So take care, Perry. The Traders are sometimes not lethal, as you know, but the basic bomb merchants, the ones who physically write their orders for enriched uranium, they almost always are’
Before I could make any promise, the Special Services man bustled up kindly to fetch me, and he set off at a fast walk, carrying my hold-all and telling me the aeroplane had boarded all except for me.
I waved briefly to John Rupert and my ghost. They’d told me for certain what I’d mostly surmised. The Traders were middlemen, and John Rupert, Ghost and others like them, were middlemen catchers.
I walked into the humming engine noise of the almost full aeroplane to be greeted by a chorus of knowledgeable eyes staring and elbows going nudge-nudge, and I wondered how many million years made up the half-life of a Trader-hunter.
The Special Services Department had outdone itself by arranging a rental car to be ready for me to collect at Miami, and the one I picked up had the added unexpected blessing of a talking map display. ‘Turn left at the next intersection for the Federal Highway to Sand Dollar Beach...’
I twiddled knobs and found a radio weather channel busy with things to come.
An extremely rapid voice rattled off, ‘There has been a weakening trend and a change in the direction of the upper winds over the western end of the Caribbean, with a consequent strengthening of the cyclonic system further east, which we have just heard has now officially been designated tropical storm Sheila, with sustained winds of over 50 miles an hour. Co-ordinates of Sheila, as of four o’clock Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, were 16 degrees North, 78 West, moving north-west at approximately 10 miles an hour. Now we’ll bring you your local forecast, after these messages...’
The voice sounded as if he were uninterested, except for trying to complete the weather bulletin as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the commercials, always (as the source of the channel’s income) more important than the formation of gale-force winds.
The co-ordinates given put Sheila about four hundred miles south-east of Grand Cayman island; not enough of a threat yet for Michael and Amy Ford to nail onto their huge house panels of sea-repelling plywood.
I switched channels.
‘Continue down Federal Highway, straight ahead over the next intersection, take the left fork ahead...’
The car took me to the street and a memory for numbers took me to Robin Darcy’s spreading house.
It was dark by then. I rang the bell with a feeling of stepping off a cliff.
It wasn’t Robin himself who opened the heavy medieval-type front door. Evelyn, slender in floor-length black and iridescent with long ropes of bugle beads and pearls, had been expecting someone else. Her welcoming smile faded to a shrewd inspection of me from toes to eyebrows while she acknowledged unwillingly to herself that she knew my name, that I’d been a guest in her house three weeks earlier, and that she now regretted it. ‘Perry Stuart,’ she said accusingly, ‘why are you here? Surely Robin can’t be expecting you.’
Robin himself appeared, framed in a double doorway across the marble floored hall. There was an essential stillness in him, none of the flutter of host towards valued guest.
‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘Perry Stuart. Yes, I was expecting you. Maybe not tonight, maybe tomorrow, but yes, expecting you. How did you get here?’
‘British Airways and Hertz,’ I said. ‘And you?’
He smiled faintly. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘American Airlines and wife.’
I walked forward into the centre of the entrance hall and stopped under the lit chandelier. Ahead, as I remembered, lay the sitting-room with, beyond that, the terrace where we’d sat in the evening, and below that, the pool. Standing where I was, I had the bedroom I’d slept in on my right. Robin and Evelyn inhabited unmapped regions to my left, along with kitchens by the square mile and, in its furthest reaches, the big room which had been allotted to Kris.
‘Well?’ Darcy asked.
Behind me, unmistakably, Evelyn cocked a handgun.
‘Don’t shoot him.’ Darcy said it without heat. ‘It would be unwise.’
Evelyn protested, ‘But isn’t he the one — ?’
‘He’s the one,’ Robin Darcy agreed, ‘but he’s not much use to us dead.’
I was wearing the new white shirt and dark grey trousers, but not the Edwardian great-coat, and in general looked as I had at Caspar Harvey’s lunch.
Robin too, conventional, unimpressive, chubbily round, Robin with tepid eyes behind the black owl frames — he too looked as if his day to day business occupation, his propagation of sods, made up the total pattern of his life.
I stood quietly under the chandelier thinking I would have miscalculated disastrously if his curiosity wasn’t strong enough to keep me alive. After a tense little pause he walked round to his wife, and although I couldn’t stifle an involuntary swallow altogether, I managed not to move or speak.
‘Hmph,’ he said. ‘Cold under fire.’ He walked round in front of me, holding the gun loosely and removing the bullets. ‘What do you think of,’ he asked with evident interest, ‘when you’re not sure the next instant won’t be your last? I’ve seen you twice stand motionless like that.’
‘Petrifaction,’ I said. ‘Fear.’
He twitched his mouth and shook his head. ‘Not in my book. Want a drink?’
Evelyn made a no-no gesture, but Robin turned and walked back into the sitting-room where a champagne bottle stood open alongside four crystal glasses.
‘As you ran away from me last night in London,’ he said to me as I followed him, ‘or to put it more accurately, early this morning, I am to conclude, am I not, that you have come to apologise and return what Kris wanted to give me?’
I tasted the champagne; dry but with too many bubbles. I set the narrow flute down. ‘I don’t think you should conclude anything like that,’ I said peacefully.
‘Get rid of him,’ Evelyn urged, looking at her watch.
Robin also looked at his watch and then, nodding to Evelyn, said ‘Of course, you’re right, my dear,’ and to me, ‘Can you come back tomorrow? Same sort of time?’
It sounded a most normal invitation. Which of us, I wondered, looked the more trusting and meant candour least.
Evelyn ushered me fast to the front door. Robin, when I glanced back, was watching my departure with expressionless eyes. Whatever he wanted to say to me could not be said in front of his wife.
Outside in the warm night, with the door closed firmly behind my back, I retrieved the rental car, drove it to the nearest area of busy shops, parked it outside a four-screen cinema and walked the short distance back to the Darcys’ house.
Bright lights now shone on the driveway and on the heavy door. I waited concealed in rampant greenery across the road as near as possible to the house, knowing the expected guests could be strangers but from Evelyn’s urgency, hoping not.
Evelyn the Pearls had done a splendid semaphore act with her watch, and also Robin with his four waiting champagne glasses, but they had flagged only half of the story. When the guests arrived both Evelyn and Robin appeared in the brightly lit doorway to greet them.
The guests, unmistakable anywhere, were Michael Ford and Amy. Evelyn and Robin welcomed them effusively, and the car’s driver, in a black baseball cap, slipped quietly out of the long vehicle and into hiding not far from where I crouched, stepping out later from deep cover to move in and out of the striped shadows of palm fronds, slowly making a bodyguard’s circuit to keep his employers safe.
The only real difference between him and me was that he carried a gun and I didn’t.