"Harry, let's just get out of here." He had to say it; he knew it wouldn't make any difference. Maxim put the camera down, picked up a poker from the hearth and started for the stairway.
The stairs creaked, even where he placed his feet carefully at the wall side, and the ludicrous self-portrait of himself as a householder, properly armed with a poker, goingupstairs to hunt burglars made him stop to tauten his thoughts. He reached the top charged with a cold, dangerous instinct, as he needed.
Street lighting seeped into the tiny landing from an open door, so at least some curtains were undrawn and he daren't use the torch. The open door might be an invitation, but he didn't want to turn his back to it. He planted one foot carefully to stop the door being swung in his face, and took a breath of air that was wrongly warm and sour. Then the door moved.
It jerked his foot, banged his knee and was yanked back open. He jabbed the poker at chest height of a moving figure and then his eyes were stung closed with pain.
He threw himself forward, touched and held an arm, was hit in the stomach but clung on, dropping the poker and hauling the man to him. The man clasped him, foolishly, because in Maxim's blindness contact was safest. He jerked his arms loose and reached for the head, trying to blink the searing pain from his eyes. He couldn't; in his double darkness, he had no choice. He killed the man.
In the gasping aftermath, he had no idea of where he was, nor how much noise he had made. It must have been a lot. His blind hands found the still-open door and then there was George, very close, whispering: "Harry, what happened, are you all. right?"
"I'm blinded. Where's a wash-basin?"
"Christ…"
Maxim swamped his eyes with water, time and again, dulling the pain except when he tried to see. It was better to keep his eyes closed.
George was back at his shoulder. "How is it? What was it?"
"Chilli powder, I think." Some of the water had stung Maxim's lips and tongue.
"You know he's dead?"
"Sorry. I didn't know if he was armed or… Who was he?"
"God, I don't know. Come on, I'll help-"
"Get his wallet. Something."
"Harry, d'you know what they've done toher?"
"What?"
"She-she's dead anyway. Come on."
"Get his wallet.".
George had himself once been a soldier. He didn't tell himself that, since he was no longer on speaking terms with himself, he just obeyed an order and rummaged through the man's pockets as if he were checking a suit going to the cleaners'. Then swabbed the wash-basin clean, guided Maxim downstairs and found their shoes and socks, moving with a numb efficiency that abstracted him from the terrors of his imagination. The last minute had left him naked in a desert of infinite horror. He would live for ever with the torchlight glimpse of a wide-eyed corpse dribbling blood from a broken neck, and see Miss Turkey's eyes above the gag that smelled of vomit and was stained with more blood from, he had to realise, a deliberately bitten tongue…
From the ramparts of Whitehall he had got no glimpse of such realities of the secret world, no hint from the sanitised prose of intelligence reports. And if that showed how high the ramparts were, they seemed immeasurably higher from the outside. They would never accept him back. Career, family, home-all had been ruined in a few seconds. He found himself making imploring promises to God, then retreated into hating himself, and Maxim of course.
"Take the picture," Maxim ordered, still blind.
"What?"
"The photograph on the wall, the one. Take it. It won't matter now."
What could anything matter now? And then they were in the sanctuary-however temporary-of the wide cool night.
15
He started the car by letting it run downhill-Maxim had insisted they park so that there would be no give-away noise of the starter-and drove steadily for several miles. Almost as steadily, he told Maxim of what had happened to Miss Tuckey.
"Sounds as if she killed herself, then," Maxim deduced.
"She was handcuffed…"
"Who was the man?"
They were out on the anonymous A40; George pulled into a lay-by and gingerly fingered through the wallet with renewed twinges of horror. There was only money and a driving licence.
"Oldrich Praeger," he read. "Address in SW16, he must be… thirty-four," working out the age from the licence expiry date at age seventy. "Have been," he added gloomily.
"We can get it chased up, but it's probably one they hand out to anybody about the right age when they're on the job." Having no photograph, a driving licence is thin proof of identity. "All it tells us is he must'vehad a foreign accent, for them to give him a name like that. I should have got you to photograph him," he added. George came close to retching.
When he'd swallowed he said: "The police will find him. And then…"
"D'you really think so?" Maxim turned his red-rimmed eyes at George, winced with pain even at the feeble car light, and shut them again. "Those boys are going to go back. They've got a lot of clearing up to do-more than they expect, now. But the police won't find a thing unless we call them."
"Harry-youkilled that man!"
"I've said I was sorry-"
"Sorry? We were there illegally, we broke in, when they find that out they'll…" But the future horror was too big for words.
"George, they aren't going to find out a thing if we don't tip them off. Don't you see who we're up against? Your Kilo Golf Bravoes."
The truth was that George hadn't been thinking about anything except himself. Maxim's assumption came as a relief- and a very obvious fact. He had wondered how the KGB would react to the Reznichenko Memorandum; now he saw they must have been analysing the pattern long before it had occurred to him. The Abbey would simply have stampedproven on their file.
Maxim was well ahead in his thinking. "They must have bugged her for the same reason we went to see her: she was somebody unofficial but experienced in underground work-They'd know they were up against some British group, not the CIA. Perhaps they bugged a dozen other people as well, but they'd only hear you and me talking about naming names on her bug. It's probably one that picks up conversations in the room as well as just on the phone, but I can show it to the boys at-"
"Harry" -impossibly, yet further darkness had dawned on the total blackness of George's conscience-"then we led them to her. We got her killed!"
Exasperated, Maxim opened his eyes and glared through the pain. "They're killers. They had her phone. bugged before we even thought of going there-and they were never going to leave her alive once they'd started asking her questions; how could they? Just as they couldn't leave that bug in her phone. She did the one thing she could to screw them up by killing herself first. So don't waste that: make an anonymous phone call."
George turned the ignition key, very slowly, and jumped when the engine started. "But-what will the police think happened to… him?"
"Who cares?" Maxim sat back, closing his eyes against his ineffective tears.
George came out of the call box sounding shaken and pensive. "I told them it was a murder and all they wantedto know was my name… Does holding a handkerchief over the mouthpiece really disguise your voice?"
"I shouldn't think so, but-"
"They always do it in films."
"You're not a public figure, nobody knows your voice. What did theysay?'
"They wanted more details and I said it was a murder, dammit, and why didn't they do something about it, and he said 'Another of those,' and… well, theymust do something. Mustn't they?"
"It's Saturday night, they probably get a lot of hoax calls from drunks." Maxim wished he had made the call himself, even if George had had to look up and dial the number for him. But the police wouldhave to react -wouldn't they?
George was in no mood to hang around: he wanted to be back in the safety-illusory though it might be-of the big city, with a drink in his hand. He had some memory of having promised God to give up drinking, but God hadn't turned the clock back, so that didn't count any more. He skimmed Oxford on the bypass and settled to a steady seventy mph on the M40.