Behind, he heard the drone of the Renault heading back. The man with the microphone put it down and shut the door, putting out the light, and the second man came around the back of the van zipping up his trousers. Maxim leaned out around the corner pointing the little revolver and said: "If you move I'll Jh7/you."
He was fairly sure he was starting a gunfight, although he wasn't worried about the outcome. They would be tensed up, almost certainly armed, reckoning on the darkness and a two-to-one superiority… But then the vital first milliseconds flowed away, they felt the surge in their bowels and ideas of pain and death welled up inside them. Then he was herding them against the side of the van, spread your hands and feet, more, more I said, but staying back and waiting for Blagg and the shotgun. A part of his easy victory was explained already: one man had his right wrist wrapped in a rigid plaster bandage right up to the palm.
Blagg noticed that, too. "It looks just like somebody shot you there, don't it? And on account of I'm a great detective, I'd say it happened in Rotherhithe, know where I mean? I'd even say it happened in back of Neptune Court, while you was trying to blow me away. Would you remember that?" He was rubbing the shotgun mu/zle up the man's spine.
"Leave it, Ron," Maxim ordered. The man – 82 – hadn't even been armed.83 had had a Czech VZ5O automatic in his pocket.
Agnes came from the back doors of the van, "She's in there; all right, I think, but…"
"Ron, you're in charge."
"Could I have your.38, Major? The noise of this thing…"
"You're in poaching country here; Lincolnshire starts about ten metres down that road. Nobody'll lose a drop of sleep over a shotgun going off; just stay well back so you don't get splattered." He wasn't talking to Blagg and nobody thought he was.
There was a dim interior light in the van, which was fittedwith a bunk bed on either side. Mina lay on the right one, her head on a grubby flower-pattern cushion and her left hand loosely shading her face. She wore a jumble of old clothes including a stretched woollen cardigan. The van smelt of habitation.
"She's pretty much sedated," Agnes said. She nodded at a box of Valium phials and disposable hypodermics on the other bed. Maxim sat beside them rather than stand in an awkward stoop.
"So here's the last chorus of Plainsong," he said, feeling a sudden weariness. "Did they try to get her to talk?" He picked up the drugs box and shook it. "There's no sign of sodium pentathol or anything like that."
"You don't need that, "Agnes said, a little angry. "She'sjust an arthritic old lady with no training in how to resist. Fear's the best truth drug for people like her, and itcornescheap."
Maxim just nodded, reached across and lifted Mina 's hand gently away from her face. Her eyes opened with drugged slowness, then a sudden spasm of revulsion.
"It's all right, " he said soothingly. "We've come to take you back home. It's all over." He eased the other hand out from under her neck, so that he held each of them, stroking her knuckles reassuringly with his thumbs. "We'll get you back to the Dales. What was the name of the village?"
"Ramsley," Agnes said softly.
"Back to Ramsley. Just one thing: did they ask you questions?"
Mina moved her head fractionally.
"Did you tell them? Did you say you'd helped kill Brigitte Krone?"
"Harry," Agnes said warningly.
"We have to know what they know. Did you tell them?" He reached around and stroked the back of Mina 's neck, as if to soothe a knot of muscles under her back hair. Her eyes widened and she said faintly: "Yes. I did tell them."
"Fine. You told them you and Gustavhad killed Brigitte."
"Yes."
He put her hands back, but she took a moment to discover them, and rearrange herself in slow motion. Her eyes closed.
"I told you it was cheaper than drugs, " Agnes said in a bitter voice.
"She's lucky: I saw the last person Sims started questioning. I want to say something. "
But when they stepped down from the van, all he said was: "Did you bring out the radio?" and she showed it him, propped by the aerial against the barn. He put it on top of the van, for maximum range, then got a pair of handcuffs from the holdall and locked the two men together, wrist to wrist but around the front bumper of the Bedford so that they sprawled awkwardly on the grassy track ahead of it. But they said nothing, and neither did he or the watchful Blagg; it could have been standard moves in a game of chess where, Agnes recalled, you also stay silent and only win by the other side's mistake.
Blagg sat down against the barn, husbanding his strength. Maxim came back to Agnes.
"You were going to say something," she reminded him. "Or was that it?" (Why does this man always get me angry?)
"Yes. Mina – that isn't arthritis she's got. Not in her hands, anyway. The muscles in her left hand are flat, wasted, compared with the right."
"Arthritis was just what I heard. I'm not a doctor."
"No, you drive a car pretty well -" (now I remember why I get angry with this man, she thought) " – but you haven't spent six months in hospital or ten years married to an Army nurse. We got a lot of these cases, people applying for a disability award years after the event. A wound sort of hardens up and it can squeeze the nerves controlling a limb. They call it fibrositis when they can't think of a fancier name."
"So she's been wounded now, has she?"
Maxim glanced back, but Blagg was interested only in the two men and the radio. "Yes, high up in the neck, where the nerves for the hands come out. You can feel the scar. I think somebody tried operating there, too, probably when her hand started to go numb and seize up."
"All right, but what's this got to do with anything?"
"That was the wound the wife,Brigitte, wassupposed to have got in Dornhausen, back in '45."
"D'you mean this isn't his sister but hiswife?'
"Same person. He got his sister pregnant and married her to make it look better. There wouldn't be any problem – they were both using roadnames at the time. If that's the little secret he's been keeping all the time I'm not surprised how hard he's been working at it. "
"God Almighty."
"He's seen worse in His time. "
Chapter 27
Mina Linnarz-or Eismarkor Kroneor Schickert or her real name in the Dales – lay with her eyes half-closed under the dim light in the van, breathing with a slight rasp but steadily and deeply. The mousy sharpness of the little neat face was unfocused by wrinkles, the hair a thin grey tangle, no longer peroxided for a far more urgent reason than to look truly Aryan. Even if the American officer hadn't wax-pencilled out the young mother in the Dornhausen photograph, probably nobody could have recognised her now. And Gustavhad stifled even that chance by coming back to steal the photograph.
But no matter. There would be other proof- now they knew what to prove. There would be, in some other Standesamt, the real death certificate of the real Brigitte Krone to prove she died young and not in the parish where her birth certificate was filed. That – and her being an orphan – had been why the Communist underground had picked her to create a new Brigitte. Just as they had created a new Rainer Schickert from the real one whose birth and death certificates were also in different Standesamter. That was standard technique, just as uncovering it would be. No need for truth drugs.