‘Very good,’ said Miles, wagging a finger. ‘A boating accident, as with poor old Philip Hayton. Yes, very professional. Well, shall we go back in?’
He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, and for just long enough Collins was fooled into moving on ahead of him. Miles brought out his own gun and pressed it into Collins’s back, pressed it hard so that there could be no mistaking it for a piece of wood or a bluffed finger.
‘One move and you’re no longer of this earth.’ It was hissed, snakelike, into the suddenly frozen ear. The breath that had seemed so full of drunken gaiety was filled now with nothing but sober, real threat. Miles grabbed the gun from Collins’s pocket and stuffed it into his own. Then he stepped back one pace.
‘Turn around slowly,’ he said, breathing deeply. The sudden implant of adrenaline was threatening to make him really drunk, and he gulped air as though it were water, diluting the alcohol.
Collins’s face was a mask. Was there hate there, or surprise, or a touch of relief that the weight had been shifted from him? His arms dangled now as though the life had left them. He was acting like a puppet, trying, thought Miles, quickly to do to me what I’ve just done to him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe you’d have taken me out to sea, Collins, but I’ve no such finesse. I’ll shoot you here and now if you so much as sneeze, so I hope you haven’t caught my cold.’
‘What now?’ said Collins. Miles shrugged.
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ he lied. ‘I’ve got time to think now. A rare luxury on this trip.’ He took the car keys from his pocket and held them up in front of him. ‘You’ll be doing a bit of the driving from now on. It gives me a sore back.’
He dropped the keys at Collins’s feet and stepped back.
‘Pick them up very slowly indeed.’ Collins did so. ‘Now, I would imagine that you know some fishermen in this part of the world?’ Collins furrowed his brow, uncomprehending. ‘We’re going to do a little fishing,’ said Miles. ‘I wonder what kind of fish we’ll find.’
As they moved across the car park and out onto the road, Miles could hear Mrs. Nightingale’s voice as it cooed to him from the oaken door:
‘Mr. Scott? Mr. Scott? Mr. Scott?’
4
Homing
Twenty-Three
The office telephone rang, and since Billy Monmouth was alone, he was forced to answer it for himself.
‘Monmouth here.’
The receiver clicked and went dead. Billy replaced it with a sigh, but left his hand hovering above the desk. The ringing recommenced, and he pounced.
‘Monmouth.’
‘Billy, it’s Andrew Gray. Any word on your friend Miles?’
Billy sighed again.
‘I was about to ask you the same thing,’ he said. ‘No, there’s been nothing at this end.’
‘He’s probably alive then?’
‘Or probably dead. Who can tell?’
‘I bet our mutual friend is shitting himself all the colors of the rainbow.’
‘I doubt that, Andrew. Our “friend,” as you put it, is not one to make himself conspicuous. But let’s hope something happens soon. What about Sizewell?’
‘Leave him to me, Billy.’
‘That’s what frightens me, Andrew.’ And with that he dropped the receiver back into its cradle, which chimed once and once only.
Sheila phoned again from the office, but Colonel Denniston had no news, and Billy had no news. Had her husband disappeared then? she had asked, but both had been cagey in their replies.
‘Well, we don’t know where he is,’ said Denniston, ‘but he may well have gone off on his own for a few days. He completed his work in Belfast before he vanished. You must realize, Mrs. Flint, that Miles has been under rather a strain of late, hasn’t he? Too much pressure and all that.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Merely that he may have felt the need for a break.’
‘Without telling you? Without telling his own wife?’
‘A complete break, Mrs. Flint. I have to say that he had been acting a little strangely.’
‘How strangely?’
‘That’s not for me to say.’ Denniston sounded suddenly and irrevocably bored. ‘Look, I’m sure there’s no cause for concern, but we’ve let the chaps in Belfast know to keep an eye open for him. If there’s been no contact or sighting in the next day or so, we’ll reconsider the situation, reevaluate it.’
‘You talk as though he were a row of figures.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, Mrs. Flint.’
‘Nothing, Colonel. Thank you so much. Goodbye.’
Colonel Denniston was not stupid. He knew that something was wrong in Ireland. But there were other, more important things on his mind. Another head was due to roll, probably from the very top of the heap. He read again the newspaper report in front of him, its subdued headline — KEW TERRORIST ATTACK KILLS ONE, INJURES SEVEN — serving only to highlight the horror. Londoners were agog. At times like these, he had noticed in the past, a sense of wartime stubbornness overtook the capital. People went about their business, jaws set defiantly against the enemy, and everyone talked to everyone else in bus queues, showing once more that humanity bloomed in adversity.
Heads would roll, for it was already evident that one of those responsible for the bomb was the gardener who had been involved in the Harvest surveillance, and the surveillance, if sustained, must surely have put a halt to this atrocity. Good-bye to the old boy then, and, most probably, hello, Mr. Partridge. Partridge was no friend to Colonel Denniston. There would be hard times ahead, arguments over accountability, the need for a new broom, a clean sweep. All the old clichés of business. It was bound to come out sooner or later that the firm had known about the gardener. Special Branch would blabber, in order to cover their own backs. And who had ordered the surveillance to cease? Mr. Partridge. Perhaps that, if nothing else, would save the watchmen from his wrath. But, of course, they would be in the firing line for everybody else’s sticks and stones. Everything would hit them and would stick to them.
Nothing, of course, would stick to Partridge. He was the Teflon man.
Harry Sizewell wanted to make statements from his hospital bed, but the doctors weren’t having any of it. The best he could manage was to relay messages to the press outside via his agent, and then watch the television in his room as Giles repeated it all to the waiting cameras at the hospital gates. Not very telegenic, old Giles, too nervous, trying to answer any queries truthfully rather than handing out the stock responses. And those journalists knew it. They asked more and more barbed questions, honing them each time, and Giles looked into the camera as though he were a Peeping Tom at somebody’s keyhole. Blast the man. But bless him, too. He had been at Harry’s bedside constantly, probably having nowhere else to go. The whole situation was tailor-made for the creating of political capital and public sympathy, but Giles just wasn’t up to it. Why not? The man had been involved in politics for years, after all. Ah, but always as an invisible man, always one step behind Harry. He was not meant for limelight and the immediacy of media pressure. Poor man. He was making a mess of the whole thing.
The door of Harry Sizewell’s airy room opened silently, and the attractive nurse came in. ‘All right, Mr. Sizewell? Got everything you want?’
‘Oh, just about, nurse, just about.’ And he laughed with hearty false humor. Yes, he’s sitting up and making jokes with the staff, said one pretty nurse earlier today. He’s not the kind of man to let something like this stop him or defeat his principles.