Rounding the corner, he saw them sitting together over a tea table. Midge was doing the talking. Joe listened. What, he wondered, would she find to say? ‘I’m engaged to be married but my father is a multiple murderer. It’s probable that my affianced will be murdered during the course of the day.’ Something of that sort? But no. He overheard a highly coloured account from Midge of her adventures at her finishing school in Switzerland. She was even describing what she’d worn at an end-of-term dance, how much it had cost and confessing that she hadn’t yet paid for it.
Kitty listened with affection, obviously enjoying herself, prompting Midge by shrewd questions to further and indiscreet revelations.
He made himself known and joined them both on the verandah. After a while and to Joe’s acute embarrassment, Prentice rode up the drive. He was dirty and sweaty. He’d obviously been working.
‘Morning, Kitty. Morning, Sandilands. There you are, Midge. Looking for your young man. Any idea where he is?’
‘On the polo ground,’ said Joe, having just seen him there. ‘Knocking a ball about with the Greys. I’ll ride down with you.’
‘If you find him, Daddy, you’re to be nice to him,’ said Midge. ‘Not like you were last night!’
She turned to Kitty. ‘Daddy doesn’t quite approve of Dickie.’
‘I don’t disapprove of Dickie especially,’ said Prentice equably. ‘If I disapprove of anybody – I disapprove of you!’
It was affectionately said.
‘Who,’ asked Kitty, ‘could disapprove of Midge Prentice, I’d like to know?’
‘Daddy can,’ said Midge.
‘I wanted to see Templar,’ Prentice confided as they rode down together. ‘Midge is right. I was a bit brusque with him last night. I don’t approve of this engagement. I expect you’ve heard all about it? Minette’s far too young – and young for her age. But I came the heavy rather. Some excuse, of course, but I said more than I meant. No call for a row.’
In the face of such normality, it was difficult – it was almost impossible – to believe in the existence of the dark current. And the encounter between Dickie Templar and Prentice had – so far as such a thing could be in the circumstances – been entirely normal. Prentice, on the one hand, reserved but friendly, Dickie polite but determined.
Joe heard Prentice say, ‘We should talk. Now, you’re off the day after tomorrow – correct? Today’s a bit full already but there’s nothing wrong with tomorrow. Why don’t we make an appointment as it were? Come and lunch with me at the Club. There are rather a lot of women about the place here, what with Midge, and Nancy. And, indeed, the all-seeing Kitty. I feel a bit – scrutinised. Let’s have a moment or two when we’re not being scrutinised. Eh?’
The long afternoon wore on.
With no hope of sleep that night and mindful that he would have to be on duty at midnight, Joe lay down on his bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, his Browning automatic pistol with a full magazine in its holster, and linked his hands behind his head. He gazed at the ceiling. His thoughts chased him down dark corridors and he longed to put on a light, to read a book, or check for the tenth time that his gun was properly loaded and ready but, they had agreed, nothing unusual. So – no light at this hour. The police detective, if anyone were watching, was fast asleep as normal.
He went over in his mind the road he would have to follow in the dark to reach Nancy ’s bungalow to relieve Andrew’s watch. He had looked it over, even paced it carefully in the daylight when he was sure that Prentice was at work, exercising on the maidan a good mile away. He had borrowed a pair of gym shoes from Andrew and was confident that he could arrive unannounced by betraying noises.
But now, with his watch held up to the moonlight saying thirty minutes to go before he relieved Andrew, Joe was tense. He was not deceived by the softening conversation between Dickie and Prentice. In fact, the more he thought of it, the more contrived it seemed.
Prentice was sending a signal which read, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all.’ He was more than ever convinced that Prentice would strike that night. He was a military man after all, like Joe, and Joe reasoned that any soldier with two nights to carry out a vital offensive would not leave it until the second night. If he was unsuccessful on the first occasion he would have another one available to him.
Twenty minutes to go. He calculated that it would take him seven minutes walking carefully along the shadowed route he had picked out to reach the bungalow and another minute to slip in through the back door and take his place on the verandah outside Dickie’s room. It was vital that he appear at exactly five minutes to midnight as he had arranged with Andrew. Any earlier or later and he might find himself taken for an intruder and have his head blown off. He swung silently out of bed and padded to the window to judge the strength of the moonlight. The moon and the stars combined to create an illusion of daylight, a clarity so intense Joe felt he could have read a book by their gleam. He slipped a concealing dark jacket over his white shirt and waited.
He looked down in the direction of the Drummond bungalow, wondering whether Dickie, exhausted by his practice on the polo field, had managed to snatch any sleep at all. He knew, in the circumstances, he would never have been able to sleep himself. All was quiet.
Prentice looked in the other direction towards the military lines and Curzon Street.
‘Prentice! You bastard! What are you thinking tonight?’
He was aware of Dickie’s imminent departure, was perhaps obsessed by it. He had to move and he had to move soon. Tonight? Tomorrow night? Waiting!
‘If we were hunting, I’d say that we’d stopped the earth, stopped the fox. That’s what I am! I am the earth-stopper!’
Again, his mind weary from this exercise, he went over their arrangements. Three watchers watching the earth, thinking round the problem, thinking through it, thinking of all angles, relevant or irrelevant.
‘Dickie, are you all right? Midge, are you all right?’
He smiled to himself at the thought that, imperceptibly, in his mind, the two lovers had become one. Impossible to think of one without the other.
He gazed through the window and looked up at the yellow moon, the March moon, and a thought so chilling, a thought so devastating, hit him with an intensity that for a moment threatened to loosen his bowels.
‘We’ve stopped the wrong earth!’
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘Prentice has all the murderous patience of a Pathan in pursuit of a blood feud. Prentice is a man of method. He is not going to abandon his established pattern. His ritual. For Christ’s sake! – he doesn’t want Dickie dead! He wants him alive and suffering! Like all the others! He wants him deprived of the love of his life with the rest of his life to live in that knowledge. And marriage doesn’t come into it! That’s our own Western way of thinking. It’s enough for him that Dickie loves her and Prentice reasons like a Pathan. An eye for an eye, a loss for a loss. Appropriateness. Fittingness. Dickie has never been in any physical danger himself.’
And a second thought to agitate him – ‘March! We’re still in the month of March! He doesn’t need to wait for another year.’
Kitty’s voice came back to him, scathing, acerbic, amused, ‘… and leathery old villains are known to have killed their own offspring if they thought the code demanded it…’
‘We’ve been wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’
The horror of his conclusion froze his muscles. He was unable to move. Unable to make a decision. Run to the Drummonds for help?
Yes!
No! That would be to add a mile to his journey. It was probably too late anyway! His mouth was dry, his eyes staring, ears straining for any sound.
The paralysis passed away and he found himself without further thought outside his bungalow and running on silent feet in the moonlight. Running to Curzon Street. Running to the Prentice bungalow.