‘Not really. Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Flint? Neatness doesn’t enter into it. There’s blood everywhere. It finds you and sticks to you. I kept finding flecks of it on me for days afterwards.’
‘And no questions were ever asked about Hayton’s disappearance?’
Collins shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I went back to Belfast and tried to forget all about it.’
‘Until you found out you’d been tricked.’
‘You know, I’ll be glad to be rid of you, Flint. You sound like a conscience, but your eyes are full of tricks.’
Miles tried to smile. ‘I’m parched,’ he said. ‘Can we get something to drink soon?’
Collins pondered this. Yes, they had not had anything to drink for a long while, and there had been much talking since then. Miles watched as Collins was forced by the workings of his own mind into a remembrance of their joint confessions.
‘Yes,’ he conceded finally, ‘let’s find a pub.’
While Miles finished his whiskey, Collins made a telephone call, watching him intently from the wall-mounted pay phone. Miles smoked, feeling a taste in his lungs as though he had smoked twenty a day since childhood. He studied the bar, wondering what the chances were of a sudden, dashed escape. Will Collins’s stare told him that they were nil; his mind had been read. Collins was no fool. He knew that the nearer a man walked toward execution, the stronger became the life force, the desire to struggle and kick.
The bar’s conveniences lay somewhere outside at the back of the building. A straggle of men wandered in and out of a great oak door that bore the legend CAR PARK AND GENTS. The Land Rover was not parked out there, however. It lay some hundreds of yards away outside a fish and chip shop that had been opening for the evening as they had arrived. Collins had eaten a bag of chips, but Miles had not felt hungry. The whiskey, however, was beginning to bite at his empty stomach, the fumes as heavy as smoke within him. He examined his empty glass philosophically, motioned to Collins that he was having another, and approached the bar. Collins indicated that he did not want another drink. His half pint of stout sat on top of the telephone, a few sips missing from the top. He had not spoken into the receiver for some time, and this was his second call. Perhaps there was no judge and jury to be found at this time of the evening.
‘Another Jameson’s, please,’ said Miles, and the barman, nodding, sullen, went off toward the row of gleaming optics, while the few regulars, looking comfortable in their regular seats, stared into space, resolutely ignoring the Englishman and his English accent. An old and well-worn Rolling Stones record was playing on the jukebox, the sound so muted that it might as well not have been playing at all. Miles sneezed three times and blew his nose, wishing of a sudden that he could announce his Scottishness. I’m not English, he would tell them, I’m not to blame. To which they would, he knew, have replied that the worst of the Protestant incomers had been Scots. So he kept quiet, paying for the drink with the money given to him by Collins. He had not had the chance to change any of his own money, and he wondered, in a mad second, whether he could claim expenses from the firm for this part of his assignment.
‘Mr. Scott!’
Turning sharply, he found Millicent Nightingale beaming at him, her handbag clutched to her prodigious bosom. Behind her, three more members of the tour party were glancing around them, having just entered the bar.
‘Mrs. Nightingale!’
‘Millicent, silly. Call me Millicent.’
‘Millicent, how good to see you again.’ Looking across to where Collins stood, the receiver limp at his ear, eyes wild, Miles knew that the moment had come to a crisis. ‘Did you get my note?’
‘Your note, Mr. Scott?’
‘Yes, saying that I’d had to dash south on urgent business. Don’t say they didn’t give it to you at the hotel?’
‘But Mr. Scott, the guide told us that you’d been taken ill.’
‘Really? How strange.’
‘Anyway, you’re here now. Are you going to join us for the rest of the trip?’
‘Why, yes, Millicent, I might just do that.’
Collins had slammed down the receiver and was approaching. Miles decided to take the initiative. The whiskey had given him a poise that he hoped would outlast the situation.
‘Millicent, this is Mr. Collins. Will, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Millicent Nightingale.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Nightingale.’ Collins made a pretense of checking his watch. ‘Eh, we’d better be going, hadn’t we?’
‘Nonsense,’ screeched Mrs. Nightingale, ‘not now that I’ve caught up with you at last, Mr. Scott. We must have one drink at least. The trip has been so exciting. There’s lots to tell you. We’re going to the cathedral tomorrow to see the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett. And besides, how can you leave when you haven’t even started your drink?’
Miles, smiling broadly, jiggled his glass of whiskey in Will Collins’s face as proof of this final remark. Drinks were being bought by the other members of the party, and Miles professed the need of another Jameson’s. It was then, seeing the look of complete and utter panic on Collins’s face, that Miles felt sure for the very first time that he would return home safely. It was a nice feeling, and he drank it in. Collins’s eyes might be as cold as the contents of an ice bucket, but nothing could scare Miles anymore, not even the obvious patting of a jacket pocket. He felt sure that everything was preordained, and therefore it made no sense to dither. He would get home safely; that was the main thing. How he went about it was, really, of little consequence and worth little preparation. He knocked back the whiskey in one satisfied gulp.
‘Just nipping out to the little boys’ room. Won’t be a moment.’ He smiled at Mrs. Nightingale, then at Collins, and headed toward the oak door.
Before he was halfway outside, Will Collins was behind him.
‘People will start to talk,’ Miles whispered, beginning to chuckle. He continued to chuckle on the short walk across the gravel-strewn yard.
‘What the hell was all that back there?’ hissed Collins. ‘And none of your tricks this time.’
‘That,’ said Miles, his mouth slack, ‘was the divine, the enchanting Mrs. Millicent Nightingale, executive officer in Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, visiting this fair country. I met her in Belfast. I’d come across here, you see, in the guise of a holidaymaker. Quite the most ridiculous and obvious cover imaginable. My name was Walter Scott. You know, the novelist, Waverley and all that.’
‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ said Collins.
They had reached the toilet, a ramshackle affair with an ancient, soured urinal and a dark, festering object in one corner that might once have been a washbasin. Miles relieved himself noisily, smelling his whiskey breath in the chilled air. Collins stood in the doorway, arms folded.
‘Not having any joy contacting your friends?’ Miles asked, zipping himself in the half-light.
‘Not yet. But they know I’m in town.’
‘It’s a start.’
Miles was in the doorway now. He stared at Collins, his eyes a little glassy.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking that it would be nice to shoot me here and now. Then you could relax. But your bosses wouldn’t be very happy about that, because they would have wanted to interrogate me first, and they might think it a bit suspicious that you killed me before they’d had the opportunity. They would trust you less than ever, especially after your friend died at the factory and you managed to escape. Besides, what would Mrs. Nightingale say?’
Collins smiled.
‘No,’ he said, ‘if I was going to kill you, I’d do it out at sea.’