'Nobody gets their hooks into Jake. The best we can hope for is that he'll be willing to trade with you, Hugh.'
'You', not 'me'! Roskill groaned. This was the same convenient formula Audley had invoked earlier at the Queensway Hotel, but after his objection to it Roskill had hoped it would be allowed to die a natural death.
'Hell, David – he's your buddy. I hardly know the fellow. You go trade with him.'
'I want to keep out of it as long as I can, Hugh. As soon as Jake dummy2
knows I'm involved he'll be likely to raise the price.'
'But you're a friend of his.'
'Friendship doesn't stretch this far. But don't worry – he's not likely to ask you anything about aircraft. Missiles, maybe, but most likely tanks, and I can get you that Anglo-Belgian report on the Scorpion and the Scimitar. Offer him the inside information on that welded aluminium armour of theirs. He'll be sure to like that'
Audley sounded suspiciously like the Foreign Office man who thought no one would know anything about desalination.
'But supposing he doesn't?'
'Give him the Ryle Foundation, then – I'm damn certain he'll go for that.'
It was lamentably clear that Audley was perfectly prepared to see Roskill compromise himself with anybody and everybody in the higher cause of his own tortuous designs, so there was no point in prolonging the conversation. Any moment now Isobel would be arriving beside the car, and he hated the idea of her standing waiting for him in the shadows of Bunnock Street.
'Where do I find Shapiro, then? And don't forget I've got to go down to Firle tomorrow morning, either.'
'That's just it, Hugh. You can reach him tonight: he'll be in a fly-blown club called Shabtai's in Silchester Lane – just behind St.
Bartholomew's Hospital. He'll be there about ten thirty – he's currently wooing a doctor in Bart's.'
'A doctor?'
'A female doctor, man – there's nothing odd about Jake. He's dummy2
ambitiously normal, you might say. His sense of humour's neanderthal, but he's a decent chap if you don't try to double-cross him too obviously. Just don't let him bully you, and whatever you do don't try and keep up with him when he's drinking – he's got a leather liver.'
Razzak and Shapiro sounded equally formidable in their different ways, Roskill reflected unhappily. They were both tank men and therefore had to be mad to start with – anyone who chose to enclose himself in a slow, vulnerable steel coffin couldn't be wholly normal, whatever Audley might say.
He could only hope that Audley had guessed correctly, and that he was about to enlist the aid of the right madman.
By the time he had returned to the car he had managed to convince himself that it could hardly be so very far from the mark. If it was based on what looked like a string of coincidences, that was in its favour. Strings of coincidences were like unicorns and mermaids –
they simply didn't exist in nature, and sensible men treated them with suspicion.
Alan had been killed deliberately and Alan had been at Firle when Shapiro and Razzak had passed so close to each other. And certainly, if anyone was mixed up with Hassan it would be Razzak
– and if anyone had reason enough to spy on them it was Shapiro.
Yet for all that he would have preferred to have met the Israeli after his expedition to Firle, not before it. He had great hopes of Firle: if there had been any sort of meeting there, it had probably dummy2
been set up in the belief that those wide open downs were a private place. But that was a very typical mistake a foreigner and a townsman might make; in reality there were very often watching eyes in the countryside, ready to note strange faces which would have passed unnoticed in the anonymity of a crowded city street.
Perhaps no one else had seen as much as Alan had, but the chances were at least fair that someone else had seen something.
There was a click from the passenger's door and a rapid tapping on the window – Isobel's characteristic tap.
He reached over and unlocked the door, and Isobel slid hurriedly on to the seat.
'Start the car, Hugh,' she said urgently. 'Drive off!'
Roskill frowned at her: Isobel was not totally unflappable, but this urgency had the sound of fear in it.
'There are two men in the churchyard watching you,' she whispered. They're just out of the lamplight – I took the shortcut and I almost bumped into them. I'm certain they were watching you – let's get away from here, Hugh, please.'
He fought the urge to turn around. If they were watching him from just inside the churchyard, beyond the radius of the last lamp, then he wouldn't be able to see than anyway. Whereas underneath the lamp beside the car his every movement would be clear to them.
He looked, ahead down Bunnock Street, which stretched empty and malevolent before him. Isobel could hardly be imagining things: there was nothing else here for anyone to watch. And her dummy2
instinct for flight was simple common sense – Bunnock Street was not a place to linger in when seventy-five yards and five seconds away, beyond the curve of the terraced houses, was the safety of the main road.
He reached forward towards the ignition, but even as his fingers closed on the key a fearful thought exploded in his brain, paralysing his hand.
Underneath the lamp beside the car.
'Start the car, Hugh!'
Beside the car!
'That's interesting,' Alan had said. And he had stared at something for a split second and there had been a white, blinding flare of light . . . torn metal and flesh slapped against the floor and walls of the pit, the crack of the explosion magnified in the confined space of the underground garage, echoing still while pieces of the one-time Vanden Plas Princess bounced from the ceiling and clattered to the floor...
Roskill's fingers slowly left the key. He didn't have to look down to see that his hand was shaking — he could feel it shaking.
'What's the matter, Hugh?'
The blind moment passed, and Roskill felt cold and calm – it had been like that when the Provost had suddenly changed from a beautiful little flying machine into an uncontrollable and disintegrating piece of flying junk: the moment of panic and then the businesslike preoccupation with saving himself which was half the battle. Only believe and ye shall be saved ...
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'Somebody's moved the car, Bel,' he said gently. 'There's just a chance they might have – tampered with it.'
'How do you know?'
'I parked right nest to the lamp-post, Bel – the passenger's door couldn't be opened when I left it.'
'But I got in?'
Roskill nodded. He had been slow, almost fatally slow, sidetracked by his own thoughts and then by Isobel's fear – slow to remember the Vanden Plas Princess.
'Tampered with?' Isobel was calm now, too – beautifully and wholly Isobel, and not to be fobbed-off with half-baked explanations.
'It could be nothing. But if those chaps back there in the churchyard had anything to do with Alan, then they know how to booby-trap cars.'
It could be nothing – but to bug the car they had no need to move it. And if they had done nothing but that to it there would be very little point in hanging around to see the fireworks.
But there was no need to spell that out to Isobel.
'I see. And just what do you propose to do about it, Hugh?'
She was sitting more stiffly, but the tone of her voice was still perfectly controlled – altogether much more the experienced charity president questioning her treasurer over an adverse financial report that the female half of the illicit liaison caught sitting on something hot.
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'Well, we're safe enough so long as we don't do anything,' said Roskill. 'I doubt you came into their calculations, but just to make things look convincing I'm going to put my arm along the back of your seat and you can cuddle up to me – just to allay any fears they may have.'