He went down the steps from the gallery and out to the front of the court. Diagonally across the square stood a big four-wheel-drive – the Shogun. He looked towards it and an arm waved out of the open window.
Unsuccessful experiments, Sir Greville had told the inquiry. Rage had been discontinued, he’d said. The Americans had bought Chempropa.
He walked up to the vehicle and looked in at Ray Mackeson, alone in the driver’s seat.
‘How was the show?’ said the American.
‘Violent.’
‘Your girl friend got off?’
‘Yes.’
‘Guess you got something for me, then?’
‘It was you?’
‘Hell, I just made sure the guy had a good breakfast.’
‘Rage? You gave him Rage?’
‘I gave him orange juice. You complaining?’
Johnny reached into the lining of his jacket, brought out the papers and handed them over.
Mackeson looked at them. ‘No copies?’
‘No copies.’
‘Don’t sound like that. It’s simpler this way.’
‘You’re going to sell that horrible stuff?’
‘Not me, son. Anyways, your stepdaddy was a little free with the truth there. That stuff has side effects like you wouldn’t believe. You want some fun? Go back and see what the Sergeant’s doing now.’ Mackeson broke off and looked past Johnny. ‘Uh oh,’ he said, ‘your girl friend’s coming looking for you. Time I was gone.’
Johnny turned as Mackeson sped away. Heather was walking towards him.
He ran to meet her, stopped, held his hands out smiling, but she stepped back, staring at him with an expression he didn’t like at all.
‘That was the American. The one from last night.’
‘Yes.’
‘You gave him something. What did you give him, Johnny?’
‘I did it for you, Heather. They had us over a barrel. It was the only thing I could do.’
‘You did it for me? I don’t remember you asking me.’
‘There was no chance.’
‘There was this morning.’
‘I had to say yes or no last night.’
‘Yes or no to what, Johnny? What did they do?’ Then she too got it. ‘So that wasn’t just Hayter blowing his cool.’
‘I think they must have helped him.’
‘Rage?’
He nodded.
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘and you gave that man the plans we found?’
‘There wasn’t any other way. It was the only way I could stop you being put in prison. It was worth it, Heather.’
Her voice was very cold. ‘No, it was not,’ she said, ‘that was your decision, not mine. That piece of paper gave us the chance to prove what Ramsgill Stray is doing for the first time ever and you gave it away.’
‘For you.’
‘No, not for me, for you. Because you think you want to be with me. Don’t you see, you stupid spy? I would happily have served two years for those plans and what we could have done with them. You didn’t have the courage, damn you, so you decided for me.’
She turned on her heel and began to walk off and he found himself speaking in a new voice.
‘Wait,’ he said, ‘come with me. We’ll settle this right now.’
She stopped and looked back at him, startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I gave away your plan. That was just a piece of paper, Heather. I’m going to put that right – put it beyond all doubt. I want you to meet me on the moor in… let’s see, what’s the time now?’
It took him two hours with Yellow Pages, a street map and a credit card but at the end of that time a pick-up truck carrying a heavy load hidden under a tarpaulin was bumping along a rough track on Blubberhouses Moor. Every lurch sent little jabs of pain through Johnny’s chest as he squinted out of the windscreen at the bulk of the Raven Stones tower. He saw Heather’s little Citroën ahead and pulled up next to it.
‘Here?’ he said, winding down the window.
She looked in and it was like a stranger’s gaze – the curiosity there but still swamped by the anger. ‘Fifty yards ahead.’
He drove on a little further and she followed on foot.
He got out, looked at the ground in front and squinted back the way he’d come then he knelt, inspected the marks on the mossy grass and nodded.
Heather walked up behind and stood silently.
‘This is it,’ he said, ‘I’ll unload.’
He went round to the back of the truck, undid the ties and took the cover off the little Kubota excavator sitting in the back on its miniature tracks. Letting down the tailboard, he pulled heavy metal ramps out and set them in position, then swung himself up and sat in the driving seat with more assurance than he felt and pressed the starter.
The digger inched its way down the ramp. The instructions he’d been given at the hire centre had been basic and it took him a few minutes to get the hang of the hydraulic controls. All the time, he kept one eye on the track behind them and the loom of the Stray’s domes in the distance, expecting at any moment to see a line of police vans, blue lights flashing, coming to stop him. His ribs were hurting like hell.
He was now beyond all reason. He wanted to settle the matter for its own sake. What Heather thought of it all became almost irrelevant. He tugged the lever and the shovel bit down into the turf. He registered in a detached way that there were no surveillance cameras on the tower. Come to that there was no official reason for the Americans to be interested in the tower and if they turned up out of the blue it would be a bit of a give-away.
In fifteen minutes, he had dug a ragged cross trench stretching twenty yards at right angles to the invisible line connecting the tower and the Stray, as near as they could judge to the spot where Heather had first seen the other digger. It was, for the most part, about a yard wide and four feet deep. He couldn’t go any deeper than that – the bucket of the digger was scraping on solid rock.
He switched off and the clatter of the Kubota’s engine was replaced by the singing of a lark.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said, ‘after all that, there’s bloody well nothing there.’ He climbed out and his ribs grated so that he gasped for breath. ‘It was just some bloody fantasy, wasn’t it?’ He realized he was shouting.
‘Stop it,’ said Heather.
‘There’s no cable,’ he went on. ‘BTRS? By-pass bloody Trunk Reserve or whatever the man said. Just bloody fantasy.’ His chest hurt so badly that he sank down to his knees, almost pitching forward into the trench. His head was down, close to the edge of the ditch. She said something else but it was just a vague far-off backdrop to the hammering in his head and the pain in his chest.
Then he saw it.
In the exposed side of the ditch was a square patch of a different colour, measuring about three feet by three feet. He reached in and pulled at it. It was looser and there were bits of root and stalk all torn up and mixed into it. It was the cross section of another trench, a trench that had been filled-in.
‘Heather,’ he said, ‘look.’
There was no answer.
He clambered to his feet, looked round, all too slowly, just in time to see, fifty yards off, the door of her Citroën close and a blue haze curl up from the exhaust as she started the engine.
‘Heather!’ he yelled but it was too late. The car was bumping and swaying off down the track.
Driven by fury and despair, he started the digger again and went back to work at right angles to his first effort. It was easier. This time there were no tough roots to snare the bucket. In a quarter of an hour, he’d dug fifteen yards, making a giant cross on the moor, scooping out the loose in-fill of this earlier trench.
When he finished he looked along its rifle barrel length, pointing straight at the white domes of the Stray. Turning to look the other way, he saw it line up perfectly on the base of the tower.