'Have you ever thought,' Angus said, 'that it might all end in tears?' They had encountered each other after prep in the New Library. 'Why would it?' Mungo hooked seriously puzzled. 'We never do anything illegal.' 'You sail near the wind sometimes. And things go wrong, even things that start innocently. You could get yourselves expelled, you could get into some disaster.' 'You sound like Dad.' That was on 29 June, the day Mungo sent out a directive to his agents to ignore all further Spytrap commands and adopt Armadillo Army Three. It went out in Spytrap and the direction for the new code referred to the third story in the Yves Yugall collection, a sharp little thriller called 'Gila Haunt'. He preserved the Utting photograph Charles Mableldene had taken in a file marked 'Most Secret'. The two books on yachting were restored to Bruce Reynolds and the photograph of the Whittakers' damaged car conveyed, via his brother, to the elder Ralston. No efforts on the part of Mungo or any of his experts had been able to break Stern's code, nor was there any clue as to what that preliminary number and those ultimate numbers signified. During the first week of July Unicorn received a letter from his father which seemed to indicate the possible imminent loss of 53 Ruxeter Road. Unicorn's father wrote to his son of the possibility of buying a flat in Pentecost Villas when the block had been converted. Demolition, it seemed, was no longer envisaged. Mungo, in Armadillo Army Three, instructed Basilisk and Empusa to find out more. The blow fell when Unicorn, paying a routine call to the horse trough drop, picked up a message to abandon Pentecost Villas research. He had given up all work on the elaborate plan to have his father secure building dates and plans and on his own initiative called off Basilisk, before the discovery was made by Mungo that the directive was a false one and came from Stern or Stern's mole. Moscow Centre had broken the July code. This didn't necessarily mean that Stern knew the location of the safe house. In all commands, since the primary reference to it when its precise address had been given, it was referred to as PV for Pentecost Villas. Stern very likely didn't know. But he had broken the code within days of its formulation. Mungo, three days before the end of the summer term, changed the code from Armadillo Army Three to Armadillo Army Seven, reasoning that such a daring choice wouldn't be suspected. The change, initially, was known only to Unicorn, Basilisk, Medusa and Charybdis. On the last day it was also imparted to Dragon who was Charles Mabledene.

14

Jennifer's letter came on the first day of John's holiday. Of course he wouldn't be going away. He would have a go at the garden, maybe redecorate a room, spend a day with Cohn and his mother, visit his aunt. How dull it sounds, he thought. In spite of the world-changing pieces of knowledge he held in his mind, he felt himself lapsing back into the old John. Outwardly, there had been no alteration in the way he lived. But he knew he was waiting for a sign and perhaps that sign was contained in the letter. He opened it slowly, not at all in a feverish anxious way.

Dear John,

You said you would think about what we asked you when Peter and I came to see you. That is over a month ago now and we haven't heard from you. You said you would think about a divorce, if you wouldn't divorce me for adultery that you might at any rate let us have a mutual consent divorce after two years apart. We have been talking to a solicitor and he has told me that I would have a right to a share in the house, even possibly as much as a third of its value. This may sound a bit outrageous seeing that the house is basically yours and I didn't pay for it or anything. But the law works like that and of course I have nothing of my own, as you know, except what I got from selling my flat which had a big mortgage on it anyway. Peter has nothing, absolutely no assets at all. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we are on the breadline. But what I want to say is this, that if you will let me have a divorce so that we can get married I won't ask for anything from you. I mean that I promise I won't ask for any alimony and I won't demand any share in the house. I think that is quite a fair bargain to make. Please do think about this. I am not going to threaten you, John, but you must understand that if I have to wait five years I would have to have some support during that time and some sort of capital sum at the end of it.

Yours ever, Jennifer

Peter Moran had put her up to that, John thought. So that he wouldn't have to get a job, or rather, so as to reconcile himself to being unable to get a job. Could a woman who had only lived with her husband for two years, a childless woman, claim a share in his house? John didn't know and he didn't want to ask a solicitor. He would never do that, he wouldn't need to. It was only just nine in the morning. They might not be up, but he didn't want to think about that. He gave Peter Moran's address to directory enquiries and they found the number for him. Thought, consideration, might have given him pause but he didn't think. He lifted the receiver and dialled the number. The spare economical voice with the beautiful accent answered. John nearly put the receiver back. He said hesitantly: 'This is John Creevey.' As if he had never been to his house, drunk his wine, stolen his wife, 'Yes?' 'I'd like to speak to Jennifer.' No request for him to wait, hold the line. Silence and then the sound of footsteps going away. It seemed a long time before Jennifer came. 'Hallo, John.' 'I had your letter,' he said. 'It's just come.' 'Don't say no just like that, John. Think about it. You don't have to give me an answer now.' 'I wasn't giving you an answer. I want to see you. I've got something to tell you.' 'Can't you tell me now?' What did she think it was? That he was moving? Changing his job? Had even found another woman? 'I can't tell you on the phone. When can we meet?' He added quickly, 'Just the two of us, mind. I don't want him there.' He heard her sigh, a sad troubled sound. 'I've got a job,' she said. 'Only part-time but it's better than nothing. It's secretarial, with a firm in Feverton. How about Thursday afternoon? I stop at lunchtime on Thursdays and you do too, don't you?' 'I'm on holiday,' he said. She told him where she worked and agreed to meet him on Thursday at one o'clock. After he put the phone down, the enormity of it hit him. It wasn't long enough for the thinking he needed to do, four days wasn't long enough. Then he reflected on how readily she had said she would meet him. She had even seemed to want to meet him. Was the boorishness of Peter Moran proving too much even for her? He looked again at the letter, convinced anew that Jennifer hadn't written that unaided. Newspapers had never been delivered to the house in Geneva Road after Cherry's death. When John wanted a paper he went out and bought one - the Free Press usually. Paying for his paper and taking a copy from the top of the pile, he wondered if perhaps the story of Peter Moran's conviction and sentence had in fact appeared in the Free Press. How would he have known whether it had or not? If it had, Jennifer might already know. She might always have known... A heatwave had begun. Funny that you could always tell, that you always knew when a fine day was going to be isolated, a flash in the pan, and when it was the start of a hot spell. He walked along the embankment and over Randolf Bridge into Feverton. Jennifer had told him she was working for Albright-Craven in the Feverton Square complex. They were a building firm about fifty times larger in scale thar Maitland had been, yet the analogy with Cherry couldn't ignored. His life seemed full of parallels and omens. She would be there now. Mondays, Tuesday mornings, Wednesdays, and Thursday mornings, she had told him. He looked up at the windows, wondering which was her office, as in days gone by he had stood opposite Pete Moran's cottage, watching for her. The sky was a strong dark blue, the sun on all that glass and silver metal making a blaze that seared the eyes. He thought of walking, or more likely taking a bus, over Rostock to cats' green but he had been there several times in the past weeks and there had been nothing inside the central upright. It seemed that his mini-Mafia had once more gone into retreat. Nevin Square was full of people. Like a piazza in some foreign city, he thought, milling with tourists. The sun had brought them out. The council had done the flowerbeds with coleus in brilliant variegated oranges, browns and sharp green, alternating with cockscombs, red and gold silken plumes, and Amaranthus caudatus that was called love-lies-bleeding. John sat on the low wall that surrounded the statue of Lysander Douglas, looking at the trailing crimson tails of blossom, and beyond them to the fountains in whose vaporous spray the sun made rainbows. Once, one hot day, when he was a big child and she a small one, Cherry had dared him to jump into the basin under the fountain, but he hadn't been adventurous and he hadn't dared. Now he opened the paper for something else to look at and his eye fell at once on a story about the court appearance of members of a protection racket. Two of them had been charged with demanding money with menaces. It was an old story, though more familiar to John from the pages of thrillers than from his experience of life. The gang, if gang it was, had promised various shopkeepers and pubhicans freedom from vandalism in return for a weekly tariff. One of the witnesses was the licensee of the Beckgate and there was a photograph of the Beckgate in the text, showing that very hanging basket over the saloon-bar doorway which had come from Trowbridge's and which John had himself chosen and recommended. The licensee said in evidence that when, after paying for week after week the rather paltry sum which had been demanded, he finally refused, the telephone in the passage at the back of the building was smashed and the chair seats in the small lounge bar ripped open. Half a dozen more witnesses were lined up and the case was expected to continue for several days. John turned back to the front page and saw that the missing schoolboy James Harvill's drowned body had been found in a lake somewhere in the Midlands. It was more than two months since he disappeared. John shivered a little in the heat.

15

'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing,' Mungo sang, 'Fill our hearts with joy and peace; Let us each, Thy love possessing, Triumph in redeeming grace...' When the whole school was assembled in the chapel at Rossingham it was so crowded you had to keep your elbows tucked in not to prod the next man. Most days they had to hold staggered services, third and fourth forms first, fifth and sixth second, but it was different on the last day of term, the last of the school year. There was talk of extending the chapel, the Rossingham intake had increased so much. It was rather hard to see how this could he done without ruining what his father said was a monument to Pre-Raphaelitism. Mungo glanced round at the blue and crimson windows, moneychangers and bird-sellers, lilies of the field, fowls of the air, loaves and fishes, and back along the neighbouring pews. 'O refresh us, Travelling through this wilderness.' It was extremely hot, the shafts of sunlight stained azure and vermilion holding a suspension of dust motes. Graham O'Neill stood next to him, mouthing the words only because he was tone-deaf and forbidden to sing, while his twin, three men down the pew, sought refreshment in the wilderness in a fine true baritone. The Lower Fourth were in front, Patrick Crashaw and Charles Mabledene piping in yet unbroken voices, Robert Cook braying in a near-tenor, Nicholas Ralston a little bit flat as always. 'Let us pray.' Not for the first time Mungo thought it a bit odd asking to depart in peace, as if they were all going to die. But there probably wasn't a suitable bit in the Bible about a school breaking up. Graham was coming home with him for part of the holidays and accompanying the Camerons to Corfu while Keith went with his aunt and uncle camping in Sweden. And when they came back next term they would be in the Fifth, O-Levels ahead, private studies, greater freedom. But first I'll break Stern's code, said Mungo to himself. He had got permission on the previous afternoon to go down into Rossingham St Mary but there was nothing from Charybdis under the horse trough. Next year he wouldn't need permission. Signing the book would be sufficient. Strange really that Angus had given up the directorship just at the point when he attained the freedom essential to the head of London Central. As they filed out Mungo could see Angus ahead of him and for a moment he was aware of something he seldom felt even when Angus was mildly admonishing him, the gulf in ages between his brother and himself. It was an abyss that he too must leap one day, the girlfriend and the applications to medical schools waiting on the other side. But now no more school for eight weeks, the formal goodbyes to Mr and Mrs Lindsay, the obligatory word of thanks to the linen lady, the final survey and clear-up of the study one was quitting for next year's larger room and lower floor. He seemed to have more baggage than anyone else. The London Central 'most secret' files, and various books associated with what Angus persisted in calling Spookside, took up a whole case. 'Have you seen my Armadillo Army? I need it for the code.' 'It's already in with the files.' Graham said. 'I thought you'd changed when Stern got wise to it.' 'Only from Three to Eight. I reckoned that was rather subtle.' They got Robert Cook to help them down with the cases. In Fergus's day he would have been obliged to do it and had a beating with a hairbrush if he had refused. In the present liberal climate with fagging the dirtiest word, they had to pay him. 'Those were the days,' said Mungo. Mr Lindsay shook hands all round. He looked as if he couldn't wait to get to his health farm. 'Send me a postcard from Corcyra,' he said. Angus sat in the front seat, Mungo and Graham behind Fergus, who, remarking on the discovery of James Harvill's body, said to Mungo that he hoped he was aware of the danger to people of his age from unknown men who might make overtures. 'Dad,' said Mungo patiently, 'I'm taller than you.' And was - just. 'They'd be scared of me.' The so-called climate control on the car failed to work and circulated hot air. They opened the windows instead. Fergus said worriedly that Mabledene's had promised to do the air conditioning but had let him down. 'I'm not surprised,' said Mungo and he and Grahan exchanged glances. Later that day, from the audacious drop Stern used in very heart of Mungo's empire, the narrow space between bronze hand of Lysander Douglas and the book he held open, Mungo extracted a piece of cardboard six centimetres by ten with a message on it in the indecipherable code. always, he copied it and replaced the card between hand and book. It was still extremely hot. Indeed, looking up at CitWest tower, Mungo couldn't remember ever seeing the particular combination of figures before: eight-thirty-one twenty-six degrees. He remarked on it to Graham who was waiting for him in the Laughing Burger where they had eaten their evening meal. They walked up Nevin Street towards Ruxeter Road. It was at the point where the street widened and the shops began that Mungo realised they were being followed. He slowed down and dawdled at a window full of fishing gear. He said to Graham, 'Don't look but Stern's put a tail on us. I think I recognise him. His name's Philip Perch.' 'Carrot-haired kid with a prosthesis?' 'That's one way of putting it. I'd call it a brace.' They separated, Mungo to take Howland Road, Graham to continue northwards along Ruxeter but on the left-hand pavement. How Graham could possibly have seen from that distance and without even looking back that Philip Perch wore a brace on his teeth, Mungo couldn't fathom. He must have amazing eyesight. It was he, Mungo, whom Perch had decided to follow. Presumably he thought Western Intelligence's goal more likely to be in a back street than on a main road. Through the dusty streets Mungo led him and round the back of Fontaine Park, any area he was sure he knew a lot better than Perch would. The gates to the park were locked and on this side a high wall surrounded the green lawns and shady avenues. Mungo walked alongside the wall, knowing Perch wouldn't dare follow until he had reached the end where trees grew out of the pavement and big houses began and at this evening time there were areas of deep shadow. The air was hot and windless, full of flying insects. Where the wall ended and before the first garden, a narrow alley went down. Mungo stepped over the low railing into the garden instead, an extensive shrubbery of laurels and hollies and bushes he didn't know the name of. There he lay down on the ground, on leaf mould creeping with insect life, feeling against his skin the prickle of dried holly leaves. A minute or two and Perch came trotting up. Without hesitation he turned down the alley and Mungo heard him start to run, his trainers making a soft thumping on the tarmac. Mungo didn't waste time. He got up, brushed off his jeans, and ran the last bit down into Fontaine Road. A chained bicycle fastened to one of the meters told him that Charybdis was already there. He needed to be more discreet, Mungo thought, making a mental note to tell him so. At this time of the year the long garden of the central house in Pentecost Villas was like a piece of savannah. You wouldn't have been surprised to see some wild beast stalking through the long grass, pushing aside metre-tall thistles, man-high grass. Not Mungo-high though, not quite. Like some old-time explorer - like, perhaps, Mungo Park himself - he strode through the wilderness, his head just above the Stinging nettle tops, the thistle sword blades, while bramble tendrils caught at his legs. They were all there, on the top floor. It was lightest up there, the electricity in the house having long ago been cut off. It was also hottest. Reasoning that it would be quite safe, Mungo pushed up the sashes on a couple of windows but it didn't make much difference. The temperature on the digital clock still stood at twenty-four. It winked away up in the jewel-blue sky. Charles Mabledene sat cross-legged on the floor up against the far wall, his pretty infant's face a little flushed from the heat, his fair silky hair longish the way his mother liked it. Spotty Patrick Crashaw who was called Basilisk was the first to deliver his report. There was a battle of wills going on at Moscow Centre, a vying for supremacy between Ivan Stern and Rosie Whittaker, and Rosie had Guy Parker, that _�nence grise_, on her side. 'Stern's not thinking of resigning, is he?' Mungo asked. 'Not yet. He may not. But there's a split coming.' Nigel Hobhouse, or Charybdis, reported entry by way of a family chain to the Conservative Association Headquarters at Chamney where his sister's boyfriend's sister, secretary to the Secretary, an Utting teacher, had added names of Mr Mungo Cameron and Mr Graham O'Neill to the wine and cheese party guest list. Their invitations arrived in course of time, Mungo, anticipating cocktails, disappointed. Nicholas Ralston reported the successful outcome of Autoprox. His brother had written to the takers, visited the Whittakers and produced Dragon's graph, and they had finally agreed to meet the first hundred pounds of the repair bill. Mungo congratulated Dragon in the rather austere way he had, receiving in response a modest inclination of the fair head. Almost immediately a dozen balloons which no one had noticed before, though they must have been there, floated down from the ceiling to brush the floor and bounce lightly. Mungo was annoyed. He tried to ignore the balloons and talked about the new projects, finding out when building was to start on this house, reviewing the new Rossingham intake - would anyone, for instance, be coming from Utting Junior as Charles Mabledene once had? - and the breaking of the Stern code, the task that was always with them, the unalterable goal, their delenda est Carthago, as Mr Lindsay might have said. Mungo talked on, his eyes resting longer on the impassive face of Charles Mabledene than on any other. Was he Stern's mole? Mungo's conviction that he was had been a little shaken by the photographs. The yachting books meant nothing, the merest sop they were, but those photographs, especially the shot of Philip Perch's brother's room, gloomy and obscure though it was, with all the books about and the posters on the wall and the poised telescope on the windowsill - would Stern's mole have taken that? Of course the argument was that Stern's mole, with access to almost any corner of Utting, would be the most likely to have taken it. Basilisk, Unicorn, Charybdis, their attentive faces watching him - it might be any of them. It might be Empusa who lived down in Cornwall but wasn't out of the running in term time. It might - unpleasant thought - even be Keith O'Neill, called Scylla, who was at this moment probably crossing the North Sea, bound for Gothenburg. He would subject Charles Mabledene to a test, think up a task for him which no mole of Stern's could creditably carry out, only at the moment he had no idea what such a thing could be. He could merely set Dragon, along with Basilisk, the job of enquiring into building plans for 53 Ruxeter Road. And while using the flyover drop for fairly innocuous messages, see how quickly Stern learned the current code was based on another story from Armadillo Army. The light was fading. If they stayed much longer they would need to get out the candles that were kept in a drawer in the basement. Mungo closed the windows and they began to leave, going separately, remembering Philip Perch the tail who would not have disappeared, who would be about somewhere, hoping for something, fearing Stern's wrath. Only Graham and Mungo left together. They left last, Graham remarking that the rope which held up the stepladder to the roof was badly frayed at the point where it first wound round the cleat. 'That would make a hell of a crash if it came down,' said Graham. 'We'll see if the builders are coming. If they're not for months, say, we'll renew the rope.' They made their way down the staircase which at the top here was very steep. It had grown suddenly quite dark. Twenty-two steep stairs led down to the landing where the shallower flight began. Mungo counted them. Light from the street lamps outside Fontaine Park, shed through a window in the stairwell, made orange-coloured geometric patterns on the dusty broken floor. And above the [...] which lay like a bright mist, the sky was a dark mysterious blue, full of stars.

16

The case against the men running the protection racket ended on Wednesday; both were found guilty and given prison sentences. Among the witnesses was a shopkeeper who claimed to have been beaten up and another who said had been in fear of his life. John read all this in the copy of the Free Press he went out specially to buy. What surprised him was that the messages had begun again. The gang had apparently been undeterred by retribution striking two of its members. He copied down the message he found inside the green pillar, though its meaning, of course, eluded him. A yellow kitten, its sire's double, came rubbing itself against his trouser leg. John didn't dare bend down to stroke it. He thought ruefully of how he had discovered the source of the Bruce-Partington code at the very hour at which its usefulness was over. He must try again with this one but it was already the nineteenth of the month... The meeting with Jennifer loomed ahead of him. After collecting her from Albright-Craven, he must of course take her out to lunch. That would be fine in one way, to impart such a piece of news in a restaurant, across a table. In the newspaper library he had asked if he might make a copy of the page with the story about Peter Moran on it. They hadn't allowed this but said that they would do it for him and ten minutes afterwards a Xerox had been handed to him. This sheet of paper, his lodestone, he would almost certainly have to produce to confirm his story. Passing it across the tablecloth seemed grotesque. But perhaps she wouldn't want to eat. John was sure that once he had told her, if he did this immediately after they met, she wouldn't want to eat at all. If he had had a car they might have sat in it. All the city centre pubs were very crowded at lunchtime. She wouldn't come home here alone with him. It was necessary to be realistic, to face facts, and he was grimly sure of that fact. The phone rang in the middle of the afternoon as he was coming in from cutting the lawn. He had a premonition it was Jennifer phoning to cancel their meeting, but he was wrong. It was Gavin. The mynah was off its food, had eaten nothing since the previous morning, and its feathers looked dull and ruffled. Should Gavin take it to the vet? John had never really thought of vets as being bird doctors, but why not? He told Gavin to wait another day and then if the mynah was no better to take it to the vet after Trowbridge's closed at lunchtime. How coincidences happened, he thought as he picked up Armadillo Army which he had left face-downwards on the settee and saw it was open at the story called 'Mynah Magnum'. He remembered how he had tried the June code against the first lines of some of the stories in this book and tried them in vain. That had been before he started to read it. Now he saw the book was nearly a week overdue. The espionage genre was perhaps not well suited to the short story. At any rate he hadn't enjoyed the three stories he had read in this collection nearly as much as Yves Yugall's novels and had no inclination to finish it. The library was closed all day Wednesdays. He would take Armadillo Army and the other two books back in the morning, but first why not try the coded message in his notebook against the first lines of these short stories? The first lines of the stories yielded only a jumble of nonsense. He tried 'Armadillo Army', 'Mynah Magnum', 'Gila Haunt', 'Rodent', 'Strontium Strain'. The seventh story was called 'Brontosaur'. John wrote the letters of the alphabet under the letters in its first lines and tried it against the message. Immediately he knew that once more he had broken the code. It was extraordinary the feeling of triumph he had. Nothing in his personal life had changed, his two tragedies were still with him, the momentous events that were to take place on the following day still hung over him, but he felt suddenly euphoric, bubbling with excitement almost. He felt on top of the world. For not only had he done it, had he broken the July code, but he now had the key to every future coded message, since instructions as to the source of the next one must of necessity appear in the current one at the end of each month. John read the message he had deciphered: 'Leviathan to Dragon and Basilisk: Thursday p.m. find Whittakers' fisherman. Remove and eliminate.' It was mysterious, not quite meaningless, but you had to be in the know, you had to be privy to the gang's secret knowledge. For the first time he was aware of an element of menace, even of violence, in one of the messages. Of course he had long known that the gang itself indulged in violence but this was the first message with anything sinister in it. The tiny sensation of alarm he had was like a splash of water from a fountain on to warm skin. What did that last bit mean? What did 'remove and eliminate' mean?

PART THREE

1

The Whittakers lived half-way between Utting and Chamney in a red-brick house of such size, proportions and general appearance as can be found in the wealthier suburbs all over England. Its front garden was an extensive rockery through which a stream trickled over slabs of limestone. The stream, Charles Mabledene remarked to Patrick Crashaw, must be pumped electrically. It wouldn't be a natural spring. They had been keeping the house under observation for most of the morning. A cricket field opposite was divided from the road by a fence of wide wire mesh along which trees and lengths of hawthorn hedge grew. Charles and Patrick were in the field, walking up and down, sometimes sitting on a bench. 'What do you reckon he wants it done for?' Patrick said. 'Ours not to reason why.' 'OK, but don't you want to know? I mean it's only an old gnome. What's he want it smashed for?' 'For a start he never said he wanted it smashed. He says "eliminate". If he wanted it smashed I'd think it was like the heads of Napoleon in the Sherlock Holmes story.' Patrick gave him a puzzled stare. 'One of them had diamonds inside,' Charles said. 'Do you reckon Rosie Whittaker's old gnome's got diamonds inside?' 'No,' said Charles coldly. 'No, Crashaw, I don't.' He turned his head to look once more across the road. The object of his attention was a plaster figure in red cap and green jerkin which, seated on a stone that jutted out above one of the small waterfalls, trailed a fishing line in the Water. 'How do you eliminate a gnome except by smashing it?' Patrick asked. Charles ignored him. He was watching the rising and folding of a door on the garage opposite. The car he had photographed at the 'works', now repaired and resprayed, began slowly to emerge. From the other side of that garage he had long ago seen Rosie's father's Mercedes come out. That had been just before nine, Charles having been brought into town by his mother and dropped off on her way to the salon. Rosie and her mother were still inside. Or had been. He saw Rosie get out of the passenger side of the car, close the garage door and return to sit beside her mother. She had all the gear on, he observed, black footless tights, black tee-shirt, black jacket and her black hair standing up in spikes and streaked with green. Then something curious happened. The car stopped in the middle of the drive, Mrs Whittaker jumped out and ran back into the house. Within seconds the stream, which had been quite a rushing torrent, slowed up, became a trickle and ceased. Charles started laughing, he couldn't help himself. For reasons of economy, no doubt, the Whittakers switched the pump off while they were out. Literal-minded, very logical, Charles took Leviathan's command precisely to the letter. If he said p.m. he meant after twelve and it was still only ten to according to his watch, which, admittedly, had been losing lately. He was getting a new watch for his fourteenth birthday, along with a tregetour's special outfit made with twelve secret pockets. You couldn't see the CitWest tower from here, or not from the ground. You probably could from upstairs in the Whittakers' house. Mrs Whittaker came back and she and Rosie drove off. The fisherman looked rather ridiculous now, trailing his line on a drying river bed. Was he going to smash it? The alternative way of eliminating would presumably be to drown it, drop it off Alexandra, say. Moving off towards the gate in the cricket field fence with Basilisk by his side, Charles came to a decision. He would very slightly disobey the command he had been given.

2

Telemann's Suite in A Minor, the andante, poured out of Angus's room, reaching the ears of Mungo on the top floor and Lucy who had just come from the hospital and was standing in the hall. In the outside cupboard, where deliveries were put, laundry and cumbersome mail and things of that sort, she had found a large awkwardly shaped parcel marked 'fragile' and addressed to Mungo. Lucy put it on the hall table. It felt like some kind of statuette and she hoped they weren't going to have it standing about down here. She would tell Mungo to keep it in his own room. All the afternoon Mungo had been working on Stern's code, principally with the aid of the latest messages which he had copied down at the Nevin Square drop. Stern was very confident. He must be well aware London Central knew about that drop. For one thing, Philip Perch had probably been following him for some time before he, Mungo, saw him in Ruxeter Road. Perch must also have seen him take the message out of the hand of Lysander Douglas. Since then there had been another. They were still using the drop. It was obvious they didn't care how often Mungo read their messages, so confident were they in the impenetrability of the code. Each of the messages, like each one he had ever read of Stern's commands, began with a number and ended with a number or row of numbers. You couldn't tell whether the end one was supposed to be one large number or a series of single figures. First came a single number of one or two digits, as it might be 6 or 17, then letters all run into one another without a break, then a series of digits: 22 NDITBHGTYIBSWONMWPSCSWXAPNUGN 931, it might be, and the second message, 24 WQBHT. SOPMHPSTRITVCXWJFYRN 1003. The second ultimate number was higher than the first by eight but that didn seem to get anywhere. He tried adding the figures together. nine plus three plus one equals thirteen and trying a code based on an alphabet starting at the thirteenth letter which is M. Then he tried adding one to three and a code based on an alphabet starting with the letter E. Neither worked. And what about the 22 and 24 anyway? The window was wide open because it was very hot. He worked by the window, since the air was too still to blow his papers about. Angus's music drifted in through his open door. Maybe there was some way he could get Angus to put the code on his computer but even a computer couldn't tell him what those numbers were, could it? Graham with Ian and Gail came into view walking up Hill Street. They had all been swimming at the municipal pool in Fevergate. A green van with Mogul Palace printed on its side drew up down below in Church Bar. The driver got out and unloaded a stack of circular aluminium containers. Next to Indonesian, Mogul cuisine was Mungo's favourite, and he leant out of the window hoping for a sniff of it but the containers were too tightly sealed to give anything away. He made his way downstairs as the Mogul van man disappeared round the back way. The numbers might be pages of a book, he thought, only it would have to be a pretty long book. The Bible? A whiff of tandoori chicken which greeted him, coming up the stairs from the kitchen, suggested it might even be the Koran. Were there a thousand and three pages in the Koran? The parcel on the hall table was addressed to him. Mungo knew what it was by the feel of it through the paper. He was somewhat appalled and his hunger, which up to that moment had been raging, slightly abated. He began picking off the sticky tape. The last thing he had expected was that Dragon and Basilisk would actually do it - well, Dragon you might as well say, for he had no doubt whose had been the directing force. He had been sure Moscow Central would have been alerted well in advance and the fisherman moved before Charles Mabledene got there. Of course there was a possibility Rosie had tried to move it but had been prevented by her parents to whom the truth could not be told. But somehow Mungo didn't believe this. Angus ran down the stairs and on down to the kitchen, turning briefly to look at Mungo, frowning. The fisherman now unwrapped, Mungo stood it on the crumpled brown paper and stared at it. Charles Mabledene had been instructed to eliminate it but presumably had had misgivings about that. He was getting too big for his boots. Mungo sighed. He had been so certain the fisherman wouldn't be there that he had given no thought to the result if it was there. There was no doubt that this was stealing and he had always drawn the line at actual stealing. He couldn't help thinking of what Angus had said about things ending in tears or even disaster. Still, disaster wasn't going to come by way of this fishing gnome if he could avoid it. And as to Charles Mabledene being the traitor, nothing was proved except his deviousness, his subtlety. 'Mungo!' 'Coming,' called Mungo, but his father had already appeared at the head of the stairs. At the sight of his youngest contemplating a large plaster figurine fresh from its wrappings, Fergus said worriedly: 'Now, Mungo, what on earth possessed you to buy that? It must have cost a fortune. You haven't got that kind of money. We don't want that kind of thing here anyway. It'll have to go back.' 'Yes, Dad, I know,' said Mungo. 'Don't you worry, it's going back tomorrow.'

3

Jennifer came down the steps of the Albright-Craven building at a few minutes past one. She was wearing a light summery dress of white cotton with grey spots and flat white sandals and she had sunglasses on with very wide frames and dark lenses which concealed a good deal of her face, hardening it and robbing it of character. She came up to John unsmiling, so much hidden behind those black glasses. 'It's terribly hot. I can't stand this kind of heat, it's so humid.' He had never known her complain about heat before. She had seemed to long for the sun and revel in it when it came. He thought she looked tired and strained. On his way he had gone into a wine bar in Fevergate and seeing that they had tables out on the pavement with striped sunshades over them, had booked one. The table they had given him was in the deep shade cast by the largest remaining fragment of city wall, a bastion of narrow Roman and mediaeval brickwork hung with wallflowers and virginia creeper. Jennifer, who had hardly spoken, sank down into the cane chair, laid her arms on the table and said in a rather breathless pleading tone: 'Have you thought about what I asked you? Are you going to do it?' She seemed to have forgotten the purpose of their meeting. 'Would you like a drink, Jennifer? We could have a bottle of wine or a soft drink, something cold.' 'I don't mind. Wine, if you like.' She looked up and said rather miserably, 'I expect you think I was threatening you, it did look like that. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I wouldn't take any money from you, you know, I wouldn't dream of taking a share of your house.' He felt as if a hand had wrenched at his heart. He thought, I know why people, those old writers and poets, talk about the heart, about the heart breaking, it's because that's where you feel it, in your chest, in the middle of you. 'I want us to share the house,' he said. 'Do you know how much I want that?' She was shaking her head. A waitress came and he ordered the wine and some ice in case it wasn't cold which it probably wouldn't be. Jennifer said: 'I wish I smoked. There are times when it would be wonderful to have a cigarette, only I don't smoke. I never could take to it.' 'Nor me.' We have so much in common, John thought, we feel the same about such a lot of things. He was sure now that like him she wouldn't want to eat though there was a menu here written up on a blackboard. 'I don't want anything to eat,' she said. 'It's too hot.' He wasn't wearing a jacket, just a thin cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In his trouser pocket he could feel the sheet of paper, folded in four, on to which the newspaper library had photocopied the Peter Moran story for him. The slippery surface of the paper felt cool against his fingertips. 'We should never have got married,' Jennifer said suddenly and rapidly. 'It was an awful mistake. I married you because I couldn't have Peter, you must know that. I was fond of you but I wasn't in love with you. I ought to have known he'd come back one day.' 'Has he ever told you why he went away?' She seemed surprised by the question. Before she could answer the wine came. After the fashion he had learned from Mark Simms but never would have followed in the old days, John drank a glassful down. Jennifer's answer wasn't really a reply. She said, looking into the golden faintly sparkling wine in her glass: 'I have to be with someone who needs me. I've found out I have to be with someone who needs me to look after them. Most of my life I've looked after people, my father was ill all those years, and then my mother. Well, you know all that. There's something wonderful about feeling you hold someone in the hollow of your hand, their fate, their life. They're absolutely in your keeping. I thought you wanted looking after, John, but you don't, you're strong. You were going to look after me. Peter depends on me, he leans on me, he'd be lost without me.' John's voice shook. 'I am lost without you.' 'No, that's not true. You're a survivor. He's not. He clings on to me as if I were - well, some kind of life-support machine. I have to ask you again, I have to keep on asking you, will you give me a divorce? Please, John.' John poured himself a second giass of wine. He thought, now or never. It's right to tell her anyway. It's right for her to know. I am her husband and any means I can use to get her back are right for me to use, any lodestone that will draw her to its pole. Why then did he feel he was about to do something wicked and wrong? She had bowed her head and sat there patiently. The black glasses still covered her eyes but now she put up her hand and took them off. John's hand slowly withdrew the folded paper from his pocket and as he looked up he saw over Jennifer's shoulder that Mark Simms was sitting at one of the tables near the wine bar's entrance. He was alone, a carafe of red wine in front of him and a plate of some sort of salad which he seemed to have left untouched. John turned his head sharply away. He said: 'I said to you on the phone I'd got something to tell you.' 'I'd forgotten,' she said. 'What is it?' He was certain then that she already knew. That was what she meant by all that life-support stuff. It was a damp squib after all, this revelation of his. Perhaps it was better that way. He began to talk in a rapid neutral voice, setting out the facts, telling her what he had learned, giving a pr�s of the newspaper story. When he got to the part about Peter Moran pleading guilty to molesting the child, he saw that all the colour had drained out of her face. She was quite white, with a purplish bruise-like mark on the bridge of her nose where the sunglasses had pressed. 'I don't believe you,' she said when he had finished. 'You didn't know, then? I thought you might already know.' 'You've made it up.' Feeling sick now, he pushed the paper across the table to her. A drop of spilt wine made a grey stain in the middle of it. He drank some more, pouring and spilling some more. She read the account, one hand up to her forehead. There was sweat in beads on her upper lip, on that livid whiteness. He looked away. He looked at Mark Simms and then wished he hadn't, for Mark saw him and raised one hand in a tentative wave. To his horror, Jennifer began to cry. At first she sobbed soundlessly, dry-eyed, sitting stiffly upright, then she lowered her head to the table, on to her folded arms, and wept bitterly, her whole upper body shaking. People going by looked curiously at her. John felt nothing but a kind of emptiness, a deadness. He remembered a phrase that came from he didn't know where about being cruel only to be kind. He had been that, he had had her welfare at heart, or he thought he had. Had it only been his own? 'Jennifer,' he said. 'Jennifer, I'm sorry.' She made no answer. He touched the shaking shoulder and had the dreadful experience of feeling the flesh shrink away under his hand. His eyes briefly squeezed shut; he asked himself what he was going to do, what was the next step? He opened his eyes to find Mark Simms bending over him. 'Is there anything I can do?' 'No,' John said. 'Thanks, but no.' 'I thought perhaps I could help.' 'How can you help? Just leave us alone. You've done enough damage.' Jennifer suddenly flung up her head. She looked terrible, white and feverish and distraught, her face swollen and actually wet with tears. 'I'm going,' she said. 'I must go. I must go back.' She didn't say she must go home, John noticed, and exulted in the midst of his fear. Mark Simms stood there, looking at them, waiting for an introduction. Moving like an old woman, Jennifer struggled to her feet. She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. John took a handkerchief, which was clean though not ironed, out of the pocket where the newspaper photocopy had been and offered it to her. It was absurd how his heart leapt when she didn't refuse it, but took it, covering her face, spreading hand and handkerchief across her face. 'I'll go and get a bus,' she mumbled through her fingers. 'You're not fit to go on your own.' John had to find the waitress and pay. He looked round rather wildly but she had disappeared inside the wine bar. Jennifer had sagged against the table, leaning there, supporting her body on her arms. The whole thing was suddenly taken out of John's hands by Mark Simms - whose presence, whose existence, he had forgotten - saying: 'You're Jennifer, aren't you? My name's Mark, I'm an old friend of John's. Let me help, let me take you home.' The taxi seemed to materialise before them, it was as if Mark summoned it out of the air. John's eyes met Jennifer's and they held each other's eyes for a long moment. Then she was gone and the taxi gone before he had even paid for the wine. What had he expected? That she would promptly repudiate Peter Moran and throw herself into his, John's, arms? Or that she would defy him and declare herself loyal to Peter Moran whatever he had done? One or other of these he had expected while knowing things are never as you anticipate them. At home, pottering about the garden after an almost sleepless night, John tried to tell himself things were good, the outcome of their interview had been the best possible. He must allow for the effects of shock and simply wait for it to wear off. Nothing that could happen now would surprise him, he felt. If Peter Moran himself arrived raving or Mark Simms turned up as a self-appointed intermediary, if Cohn rang to say it was a different Peter Moran, he had made a mistake, if Jennifer phoned asking for time to make up her mind, she was no longer anxious for a divorce - if any of those things happened he would be prepared. For half the day, though, he felt he shouldn't go far from the phone. But when it didn't ring and no one came, as the hot sultry day shambled on towards afternoon, he took his books back to the Lucerne Road library and on an impulse walked the further half-mile down to the flyover and cats' green. There was a message inside the upright. John opened the plastic package, copied down the message and deciphered it there and then. 'Leviathan to Charybdis,' he read, 'Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, investigate and report.' Who were these people? Shopkeepers, proprietors of small businesses the gang wished to intimidate? And why did he care? Surely he had more pressing personal matters to concern him. He replaced the message in the upright. There were no cats about today - or was that a gleam of yellow fur under the last stunted bush where the curve the road dipped to meet the ground? John hardly knew why he went closer. Perhaps because of the stillness of it, the absence of glinting eyes. He pushed through the dusty coarse grass, the litter of picked bones. The king cat lay stretched out dead, its eyes open and glazed, in this heat the flies already busy. Yet there seemed no mark on the body, no blood. The stiff muzzle had a white frosting, he had been an old cat, perhaps old enough to die a natural death. John didn't even like cats and this one had been no purring pet but a savage near-wild animal, yet he felt absurdly moved, distressed even by this death in the heat, this untended corpse left a prey to scavengers. If it had been possible to bury the cat he would have done so but all he could do, in a futile gesture, was pull up handfuls of grass and cover the body with it. By the time he had finished he was choking and gasping for breath. Whatever it was in feline biology that promoted asthma, it survived death. It was a slow homeward journey he made, his chest full of phlegm and his eyes weeping. He might actually have been crying, he thought, for the king cat and for his own loneliness and Jennifer's pain and for Cherry. But no one he passed looked at him. In stupefying heat people didn't look at each other, they lost their alertness, their desire to observe. The phone was ringing as he entered the house. He thought it must be one of them, any of them, Jennifer, Mark Simms, Cohn, even Peter Moran. But it was only Gavin. 'I thought you'd like to know Grackle is OK again.' For a moment John couldn't remember who Grackle was. Then, when he did realise, he thought aggrievedly that it was only because he was alone, a kind of widower who never went away or did anything exciting, that Gavin thought he could call him up like this and talk nonsense. Gavin was going on and on in his barely comprehensible slang about the mynah's illness, some kind of bird virus, and its B-cells, whatever they might be. He had taken it to the vet three times. 'I suppose the firm is expected to foot the bill,' John said and immediately wished he hadn't, for after all the mynah belonged to Trowbridge's and was worth a lot of money. 'I'll pick up the tab for that,' said Gavin. The phone didn't ring again. This was his holiday, John thought when it got to seven, and he hadn't been anywhere, he hadn't even been to see his aunt. Constance Goodman answered when he phoned Cohn's home and seemed to take it for granted that the invitation to go out somewhere for a drink would include herself, so John found himself in the snug of an unpopular country pub where the tables were dirty and the licensee indifferent, apparently committed to an evening of conversation with Mrs Goodman on the subject of the decline in standards of British primary school education. No one mentioned their last meeting or Peter Moran but after a while Mrs Goodman began to talk in a very dogmatic way about modern marriage, how glad she was Cohn had never married, for he and his wife would surely have split by this time. Mrs Goodman scarcely knew of any marriage in which the parties were under fifty which had lasted, and enumerated the many she knew of that had come to grief. Cohn yawned. 'I'm sorry if I'm boring you, Cohn. If that's the way you feel I'm sorry I gave in when you insisted I should come.' 'I insisted? That's rich, that is. That's very funny. John rang up and you'd rushed in where angels fear to tread before I even got into the room.' 'Are you calling me a fool, Cohn?' They went on sparring like that until John got up and said he had to get back. He and the Honda returned to the city via the village of Ruxeter and down Ruxeter Road. A glance at 53 told him nothing, for the house was in darkness and the windows of the lower storeys still boarded up. The clock on the CitWest tower registered nine fifty-three and twenty-one degrees. A bright star, a smaller, more brilliant light, passed behind the green digits and reappeared on other side, a meteorite or a satellite perhaps or just an aircraft very high up. John went over Alexandra, over the glassy river, reflecting lights like a mirror, down into the hinterland of the east, into Berne Avenue, Geneva Road. It wasn't until afterwards that he noticed the car, the Diane. There were many cars parked on both sides of the street at night. He was humping the Honda up over the pavement to shove it through the gate and down the side way, when she came toward him out of the shadows like a ghost. She seemed to glide from under the branches of his flowering tree, to stretch out her hand and lay it on his arm. 'Jennifer!' 'I've been waiting for you for two hours,' she said and her eyes were glittering in a wild white face.

4

The admiring circle round the mynah's cage broke up when John came in, Sharon drifting back to her check-out, Les resuming his sweeping of the floor, and only Gavin and the two customers, a young couple, remaining to hear the mynah utter once more and incredibly: 'I'm an empty nester!' John was late. 'Thought you'd forgotten it was back to work today,' Sharon said. He tried to smile. The young couple went off towards the fertilisers and seed packets with their wire basket. Gavin turned to John. 'Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? I taught him.' 'Congratulations.' 'What's with you, then? A right Tafubar, by the looks.' 'A what?' said John. 'Things are fucked up beyond all recognition.' 'I'm an empty nester,' said the mynah bird. 'Gracula religiosa,' said Gavin, 'is the world's best talker, better even than your grey parrot.' It was Monday morning. John put on his canvas coat and walked through into the greenhouse where the chrysanthemums were, their bitter scent which he rather disliked making a tingle in his nostrils as he opened the door. Rain drummed on the roof and ran down the glass walls so that all you could see of the outside was a blur of various greens. The heatwave had broken on the previous night in a spectacular thunderstorm which kept John awake, though he probably wouldn't have slept anyway. A deep depression, a trough of low pressure, the meteorological people said. This change in the weather had a similar effect on him, casting him into his own deep depression. For up until yesterday evening, though unhappy, devastated, almost distraught, he had still been full of rage, a need to fight, a desire for revenge. It was in that mood that he had gone back to cats' green and taken that curious step, an action he couldn't explain to himself at the time or later, of taping his own coded message into the central upright of the flyover. Someone had taken away the cat's body. He had approached the place shrinking a little, expecting a swarm of flies, a foetid smell, but when he looked towards the pile of grass he had made, when he forced himself to look, there was nothing. Even his grass had gone. Had there ever been anything, a death, the covering of a corpse? Was the cat dead or had he imagined it? In the heat of the day, the sun that made sizzling mirages on the deserted roadways down here, the melting tarmac, in the absence of the cat's body, John had a sense of unreality, a feeling of being in an uncomfortable dream. Without thinking, or thinking only of his hatred of Peter Moran, whom nothing could expel, whom nothing apparently could dislodge from Jennifer's consciousness, he had removed the message from its plastic envelope and substituted another of his own devising... He passed along the central aisle of the greenhouse and on into the next one where the seedling alpines were and the begonia leaf cuttings. Gavin had taken care of everything efficiently in his absence. The plantlets were damp but not wet, green and healthy-looking, the place swept clean. But John could feel no enthusiasm for it, only aware of a dreary sensation that he might as well be here as anywhere else, he might as well be here as at home. For a while he had believed that his interview with Jennifer marked the last occasion on which they would ever meet and this certitude returned to him now. Yet when she had come up to him, white-faced, out of the shadows, he had thought with a leap of the heart that she was returning to him. And she had said nothing, only preceded him into the house when he unlocked the front door, gone straight into the living room ahead of him as if it were still her home, as if he and she would sit down in there together, have a nightcap perhaps, turn out the lights and go upstairs to bed. What had actually happened was that she turned to face him as soon as they were together in that room. He switched on the new table lamp. The atmosphere was warm and rather stuffy. Her face was grim, almost tragic. He had never seen her look like that before, a changed woman. 'I decided to come and tell you what you've done,' she said. He said nothing, he just looked at her. 'I've been waiting for you for hours but I'd have waited all night.' To repeat that he had made that revelation to her for her own sake suddenly seemed the rankest hypocrisy. He stood facing her. Oddly, the settee was between them, she holding on to the back of it as if to a barricade. 'I'll be honest,' he said. 'I told you to put you against him. I was in possession of a piece of information that I thought would turn you against him. I saw it as being to my own advantage and I used it - as a weapon.' She nodded, as if he had confirmed what she already knew. 'The police came - after that little boy went missing, the one who was found drowned. Drowned,' she said, her voice hoarse, 'after being - abused. The police came to question Peter. I didn't know why. How could I? They talked to him alone, I wasn't there. Did you send them?' 'Of course I didn't. They go to people like him as a matter of course when something like that happens.' 'I hate you, John.' Her voice was still sweet, she couldn't change that. 'As if Peter would hurt a child... Whatever he may have done he wouldn't do that.' 'I don't know.' John was still wincing from what she had said. 'I don't know what he would do.' 'You thought telling me would get me back. I want you to know it was the worst thing you could have done. Do you think that makes you love a person, telling them a thing like that? You hate any bearer of bad news, it's well known. And when it's that sort of news - John, I was angry with you before, I was bored with you, I was sick of it all but I didn't hate you. This has made me hate you.' He shivered under the onslaught. His body shook. Instead of defending himself, he said: 'You can't still love someone who has done what he's done. You can't love a man who molests little boys.' 'I hate you for telling me,' she said, her tone growing calmer, colder. 'You didn't have to tell me. If you love someone the way you say you love me, you ought to want their happiness, you ought to want to protect them from suffering.' That one didn't work, he knew that, though he couldn't have said why. 'What good did it do, telling me? What did you think, that I'd jump into your arms and say it had all been a dreadful mistake?' Some curious intuition, some reading of her mind that was in itself an agony because it bore witness to their mutual knowledge, made him say with slow realisation: 'It's made you feel differently about him though, hasn't it? It has changed you. You don't care for him so much.' A wave of pain passed across her face, or rather it was as if something under the skin, inside the features, dragged briefly at the muscles. She wouldn't lie to him, he thought, she never would, even though now it would have been easy, it would almost have been expected of her. She said remotely, in the tone of one who has been dealt a blow: 'It has made a difference, yes. I don't feel the same about Peter. How could I? You did that, you're responsible for that.' 'I'm not sorry.' 'No, you wouldn't be. But I'll tell you something. It's made me understand he needs me to look after him more than ever, he needs me to protect him - from himself as well as other people. While he wants me I'll stick to him whether you divorce me or not. And there's another thing, John. Maybe you never considered this. I know why he left me the way he did before our wedding. It wasn't for another woman or because he didn't love me, I know that now. It was because he thought what he'd done would come out and he might go to prison.' 'And suppose he goes to prison in the future? What then?' She made no answer. She turned and walked out of the room, looking over her shoulder and saying as she reached the front door: 'I'll never willingly see you again, John. I'll never speak to you again.' Regrets first for playing it the way he had and saying the things he had said, then anger, then a desire for revenge. Wriggling in among it a worm of hope, the only vital thing in that carcase of negative emotions. If her passion for Peter Moran, her starry-eyed love, was over, killed by what she now knew, there was hope for him, wasn't there? Yet she had said she would never see him again. At cats' green on the Sunday he took the message from the inside of the pillar and added Peter Moran's name to the two names already printed there in the 'Brontosaur' code. The message now read: 'Leviathan to Dragon: Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, Peter Moran: observe and tail.' What was the good of it John hardly knew. He had some vague idea of thus harassing Peter Moran, of causing him anxiety or even fear, and he derived great satisfaction from what he had done for quite a long while. He felt better, he felt that at last he had made an attack on Peter Moran instead of waiting passively and effecting no retaliation. Besides, what was the use of being in possession of the key to the codes if he never took advantage of it? But during the early hours of the morning, this morning, while the storm rumbled in the surrounding hills and the rain pounded on his bedroom window, he awoke out of an uneasy doze to a kind of shocked realisation. What had he done? What absurd game was he playing? Was he really setting a bunch of gangsters on to his wife's lover? Dismay soon gave place to reason. They wouldn't know who Peter Moran was. He didn't have a phone, they wouldn't be able to find him. It was then that, inexplicably, depression descended and enclosed him, remaining with him now, dulling all his perceptions, as he walked through the green-houses and out into the covered way that led to the gardens and the tree and shrub grounds. The rain was falling in straight rods with a perfect steady evenness. He turned back into the shop and was immediately appealed to by a woman wanting to know how to get her last Christmas's poinsettia to bloom again this year. The rain went on all Monday evening and through most of the night. They probably didn't pick up those messages at cats' green every day, John thought, and heavy rain like this was as likely to stop their activities as other people's. If he went there before going to work in the morning he might be in time to change the message back again, to remove Peter Moran's name. When he inserted it into the message he must have been a bit mad. Well, not mad exactly but off balance, unhinged as his mother used to put it, as if the mind were a room with a door to it that somehow got slewed off its hinges. And it was true that he had felt like that in the heat and humidity and in his misery. The temperature had fallen dramatically. A fresh breeze ruffled the water that reflected a sky of clouds and rare patches of blue. The rain had laid the dust of summer and everywhere had a washed look as of a huge clean-up operation that extended even to the leaves on the trees and the annuals in the flowerbeds. Pools of water still lay in the hollows on Beckgate Steps, a lake of it on the landing of stone slabs. John shied away from thoughts of Cherry as he had done ever since Mark Simms's confession and his revelations as to her true nature. He gave his attention instead to the Beckgate pub, closed of course at this hour, a slow drip-drip of water falling from the hanging basket over the saloon-bar door. The gang he was involving himself with had damaged furniture and a phone in there and threatened worse violence. John climbed the Beckgate Steps rapidly and broke into a run up the lane, impelled now by an urgent need to get to cats' green as soon as he could. A steady rumble came from the flyover, carrying its morning load of traffic southwards. A thin young tomcat with wet orange fur was licking itself dry, sitting on an upturned wooden box which hadn't been there on Sunday. Was this the new king? John didn't want a repetition of Friday's asthma attack and he kept well clear of the cat. Because of this he didn't see the interior of the upright until he was close up to it. For the first time, there were two messages inside, two plastic envelopes taped to the metal. But even before he took them down John could see that the one to which he had added Peter Moran's name was gone. He had a curious unaccountable feeling of excitement. And as he unfolded the papers he remembered how he had used to think of his investigations into these messages as a kind of therapy. His interest in them and his curiosity about them had saved him from falling into total despondency. He ought now to be aghast at his action in giving the gang Peter Moran's name, that he was too late to remedy the mischief, but he felt no remorse. He had an inexplicable desire to laugh but of course he couldn't start laughing there, out in the open street. He read the two messages with the aid of the key in his notebook. The first said: 'Unicorn to Leviathan: Stern resignation confirmed effective 1 August.' The second meant more to him personally. Reading it, he had a momentary sensation of dizziness. 'Dragon to Leviathan: Peter Moran not known. Address required soonest.' John replaced the message about Stern in its envelope and attached it once more to the upright, using a fresh length of tape from the roll he had brought with him. The other he put into his pocket. As he walked away and up to the bus stop the excitement seemed to ebb away and depression to return. Without knowing why such an idea should have come to him as he walked along a street where there was nothing to evoke her, not a name or a picture or an object to remind him, he realised suddenly and clearly that Jennifer would never leave Peter Moran. Somehow he had never quite accepted this before, he had always had hope, always believed that marriage itself, the solid fact of it, would draw her back. Now he didn't. While Peter Moran remained she would stay with him, and the lodestone, instead of exerting a magic pull over her, seemed to have further toughened the bond between them. They - or he whose code name was Dragon - had actually asked for Peter Moran's address. John kept on thinking about this and in a kind of wonderment, perhaps at the fact that his own message had been taken seriously. But why not? How could it have been otherwise? Dragon believed the message to have come from Leviathan and he was obviously accustomed to obeying Leviathan's commands. The code would change at the end of the week, John thought, and he might easily miss the announcement of what the new code was to be. Therefore, if he wanted to pass any information to them he ought to act in the next few days. A sense of reality returned to expel these ideas. He was a law-abiding citizen, middle-aged and respectable, too dully respectable perhaps. If he had been a lawbreaker with criminal tendencies his wife might have loved him, have stayed with him. The ideas came back again when he returned home to his lonely empty house in the evening. Most people in his position wouldn't hesitate, he thought, people who found themselves by sheer chance with access to the services of hit men. What did they call it? Putting a contract out on someone? Gavin would know but of course he couldn't ask Gavin. On the Wednesday evening he did what he had been promising himself to do for some time, he phoned his aunt, and as a result found himself spending the following afternoon and evening with her and his uncle. They didn't know about Jennifer and he didn't tell them, just said she was at work. Returning home on the Honda, taking a route via cats' green was one of the possible options, so of course he went that way. The message inside the upright read: 'Leviathan to Dragon: October Men to take over from Sunday.' John got out his notebook and added to the foot of it in Brontosaur: 'Twenty-two Fen Street Nunhouse.' He replaced the message, telling himself that by not inserting Peter Moran's name he had not really taken any significant step, he hadn't done anything wrong. But on the next evening when he saw the police car draw up outside the house and the man and woman - plainly CID people - get out of it, he thought they had come to him.

5

They agreed that Graham should set the test for Charles Mabledene. It was neither more nor less than that Dragon should get Stern's code - or Rosie Whittaker's code, as they must now call it. If he had the 'in' at Utting which he claimed to have this should be possible, only loyalty to Moscow Centre would prevent it. If he got the key to the code he would prove his loyalty to London Central beyond a doubt. Graham wasn't going to use the flyover drop - indeed, Mungo didn't think he even knew of the location of the drop, using for his particular agents (Scylla, Wyvern and Minotaur) another near the Shot Tower - but intended to meet Dragon at the safe house. Mungo usually looked forward to Corfu but this year his expectations were tempered with doubt. Could he afford to be so long as a fortnight away from the centre of operations? The situation was especially touchy now that Rosie Whittaker had taken over. Mungo suspected Rosie of a special brand of dynamism. And he wondered who would be coming into Utting among the autumn term's intake, more effective recruits for Moscow than Martin Hillman and Trevor Allan, he thought, whom Basilisk had reported as being scared by the prospect before them both academically and (as Basilisk put it) spy-wise. Graham had packed his case before he went off to Ruxeter Road but not put his digital travelling clock in, Mungo noticed. They could do with that, he would remind him when he got back. Strains of Monteverdi filled the house, mixing oddly with the smell of dim sum and black bean sauce hanging on from their supper. Angus was sulking - or going about looking grim and stoical which was his way of sulking - because they couldn't take his girlfriend Diana with them. He understood of course that this was only because the request to take her hadn't been made till after their flight and hotel were booked but it was still hard to take when Gail was coming. Gail, in fact, would be staying the night because they were making such an early start in the morning. The Chinese takeaway meal having been eaten an hour and a half ago, Mungo went downstairs to find something in the fridge. His mother was making coffee and reading the Lancet while she waited for the kettle to boil. His father paced up and down. 'If anyone had ever told me when I was a young man,' Fergus was saying more in sorrow it sounded like than in anger, 'that a request would be made to me for my son's girlfriend to share a bed with him under my own roof, I would have laughed in derision.' 'Not laughed, darling. Sneered in derision.' 'Well, sneered then. What does it matter? Is this going to go on while we're in Corfu? Are they to go in the same room? I find it bewildering, I find the assumption bewildering.' 'Times have changed since you were young. I'm always telling you. Anyway, you're not going to refuse, are you? If you do they'll only creep about in the middle of the night and you'll think it's burglars, you know what you are.' 'I find it so terribly worrying, Lucy. I mean, the assumptions and the possible consequences, the whole concept.' 'Oh, darling, there won't be a concept, I promise you.' Fergus made an impatient gesture. He realised for the first time that his youngest son was in the room. 'Mungo, I didn't know you were there. Have you heard what we've been saying?' 'Yes,' said Mungo, eating the last slice of a mushroom quiche. 'Well, you must try to put it out of your mind.' Another awful revelation struck Fergus. 'You booked, Lucy. You must have booked them a double room.' Lucy poured boiling water on to the coffee. 'If Mungo's to put it out of his mind you'd better not say any more till he's gone.' Previously uninterested, Mungo began to find the issue intriguing. But the anxious misery on his father's face swayed the balance. He reached for his mug of coffee. 'I'm on my way.' Angus sat hunched over the computer, a bag of chocolate truffles beside him for comfort. 'There's coffee for you if you want it,' Mungo said, adding, 'Make a bit of noise before you go in though, fall down the stairs or something.' Up in his room he studied the latest of Stern's codes. As always it began and ended with numbers, 9 followed by a row of letters, 1132 to end. The previous two he had read began with a 5 and a 17 respectively and ended with 931 and 1003; the first he had ever seen, the one which appeared after Moscow Centre realised the West was in possession of Guy Parker's codebook, had begun with a 4 and ended with 817. What did they have in common, those numbers? Nothing much, as far as he could see. The initial numbers were all quite low, the ultimate numbers all quite high. He had never seen an ultimate number below 700, for instance, or come to that anything higher than 1258. Could those final digits be house numbers? Only in North America did house numbers come that high. Or phone numbers? That was more likely. But the difficulty with that was that here in the city after the four-digit code you always got a six-digit number, or a completely arbitrary three-digit number following a more or less fixed three-digit number. Well, 931 and 817 might be the last digits of in total ten-digit numbers... Mungo went to shut the round window under the eaves. Nights had been cold this past week but they wouldn't be cold in Corfu. There wouldn't be clouds there either, there wouldn't be mountain ranges of vapour, scored with darkness and topped with gold, white foaming glaciers splitting them, green sky like marble appearing between... On the other side of the river scaffolding had gone up round the Shot Tower. Was there time for a quick message to Unicorn to find out why and how long for? Probably not. He hadn't packed yet. Round the corner from Hill Street came Graham in the Octopus tee shirt, wearing his crazy sunglasses even at this hour, black hair falling down over his forehead. Mungo raised his hand in a salute and Graham waved back. dropped his cigarette and trod it out.

6

Never in his life had he felt fear of the police. There had always been the feeling they were on his side and this had specially been true since Cherry's death. Perhaps the comfort his parents and he had had was the support of the police, the knowledge that they and the police were united against the man who had broken in and destroyed their happiness. Mark Simms, if only they had known it. A middle-aged ordinary-looking man and a young pretty woman. How had he known they were police? For he know it from the moment they stepped out of that anonymous lampless unmarked car. Perhaps it was because the driver remained behind, impassive at the wheel, reminding John of police drivers from that time sixteen years before. But it was of his own intervention in the gang's activities that he thought as he saw the man open the gate and walk up the short path towards the front door. That also told him they were police. Almost anyone else would have opened the gate for the woman with him and let her go first. The doorbell rang. Though he knew it must ring, the sound of it still made him jump. He thought, they have come to me because of all the men in this city I am the one to have the biggest grudge against Peter Moran, I am his chief enemy. Somehow they have found the message and somehow discovered Peter Moran is unknown to the gang. Things will be worse for me if I tell lies... Almost the first thing the man said to him, after he said good evening and that he was Detective Inspector Fordwych, was that there was nothing for him to worry about. His face must have looked worried. They probably said that to you just before they arrested you, it meant nothing. He said to come in and led them into the living room. It was then that he recognised the inspector, or had a vague sense of recognition which only crystallised into certainty when Fordwych said: 'I've been in this house before. It was sixteen years ago. I was a DC then. I don't suppose you remember.' 'I think I do,' John said. probably he had changed as much as this man had. They were both forty now and if time hadn't made them fat, it had thickened their muscles and their bones, put grey into their hair, blurred their features and dulled their eyes. By contrast, the girl who had been introduced as Detective Constable Aubrey looked wonderfully young, fair-haired, fresh-faced, buoyant with energy. John looked helplessly from one to the other. He could think of nothing to say and he was already convinced Fordwych would play with him, keeping him in suspense for minutes before coming to the point. 'May we sit down?' John nodded. He was remembering more about Fordwych now. He had been keen and lively in those days, probing whenever he got the chance into every detail of their domestic life, inquiring, intuiting, ambitious seemingly. His ambition had got him promotion but it had not advanced him very high and it hadn't lifted him out of this backwater. 'I don't know if you have any idea why we've come, Mr Creevey?' 'Should I have?' It was the cautious reply of the guilty that the police often hear. 'Not if I've calculated correctly and there's been nothing yet in the media.' John felt himself close his eyes briefly. He thought, Peter Moran, something has happened to him. For the first time the girl spoke. She had a voice like her face, fresh, earnest, rather intense. 'I expect it's still painful even after so long.' So long? What did she mean? Even to someone of her age two days wasn't very long. 'I'll explain why we've come, Mr Creevey. A man has been arrested in Bristol and charged with the murder of a young woman. The likelihood is that later on he will also be charged with the murder of a second girl and of your sister Cherry.'

7

Mark Simms, they had arrested Mark Simms. John stared at them. He tried to say something but all that happened was a trembling of his lips. 'It's a shock for you,' the policewoman said. Fordwych was less tender with him. He said in the tone which had once been eager but had become characterless and automatic: 'He's a man who was living here up until about sixteen years ago. He'd no record, he'd even got a steady job in one of the factories up at Ruxeter. When he left here he spent several years as a voluntary patient in a mental hospital.' John said hoarsely, 'What's he called?' 'I think I can tell you that. It'll be in the papers tomorrow. He appeared in court this afternoon. His name is Maitland, Rodney George Maitland. He's the son of the man who employed your sister.' They had charged the wrong man. Out of some reserves of strength John had managed to summon enough voice to ask for the name, but now it was lost again. If he spoke he knew it would come out as a croak. Fordwych was explaining the reason for their visit. To inform him, as Cherry's only surviving relative, in advance. To warn him he might be asked for further information. To warn him also that he might have to appear as a witness at the Crown Court. John was aware that the girl was looking at hin compassionately. Of course she must think he was so bowled over because the business of his sister's murder was be revived. And he was, he was. But the chief reason for the feeling of total shock was his private knowledge that Rodney Maitland - a man he thought he had once met, had at any rate seen - must be innocent, at least of Cherry's murder, for Mark Simms was guilty. He managed to stammer out a question. 'When did you say - when - he's appearing in court today?' 'In the magistrates court, yes. But as I said, it's likely he'll go back again to be charged with your sister's murder.' 'And someone will want to come and - talk to me?' 'Just routine, Mr Creevey. Of course we have your original statement and your parents' on file. I expect you'll merely be asked to confirm one or two things.' How much did they know of Cherry's true character? All of it, no doubt. This stolid unimaginative man must know all about her and this sweet-faced girl would know too. I must tell them the truth, John thought, I have no choice. But not yet perhaps, I can wait a day or two, I can think about what I know, weigh it all up. The man they have charged is, after all, probably guilty of the other murders, and he won't be kept in a remand prison on account of a murder he didn't commit. 'I'm sorry we've given you such a shock, Mr Creevey,' Fordwych was saying as he got up to go. The words were sympathetic but the expression on his face sardonic. He evidently felt John was a poor thing, not much of a man. These sentiments came out in his exit line. 'You'll come to see things differently, I expect, when you've pulled yourself together a bit and seen this as a matter of justice being done at last.' But Detective Aubrey gave him a sweet smile, wrinkling up her nose a bit as if to say, take no notice, or even, it'll come all right, really it will.

8

The diminutive size and babyish face of her son Charles were a source of pleasure to Gloria Mabledene who was less happy being seen about with her daughter Sarah, a tall well-developed girl. Charles was often taken for no more than eleven and the mother of an eleven-year-old might easily be under thirty. It was a pity he insisted on having his hair so short, though. The tips of golden locks, showing an incipient curl, tumbled to the floor as Donna snipped away. Charles, seated between a blue-headed seventy-year-old having a perm and a middle-aged redhead undergoing lowlights, demanded coldly in the voice that only this week had disconcertingly begun to lose its treble note: 'Shorter!' 'Darling,' Gloria wailed, 'you're not having a crew cut!' She put out one hand, the nails lacquered violet, to stay Donna's scissors. Charles reached behind and drew from her flowing sleeve string after string of coloured beads, red, blue and yellow plastic, not at all Gloria's style. She let out a nervous shriek. 'I nearly nicked your ear,' said Donna. 'Now you stay still and I'll be done in two ticks.' Charles got down from the chair, well-satisfied with cropped head. He had come into town with his mother and would either return home with her at five or with his sister at six-thirty. It was still quite early. He came out of the salon into Hillbury Place and looked up at the tower which told him the time was nine-twenty-two and the temperature eighteen degrees. Three buses an hour went out to Nunhouse. The next was due at nine-thirty. Charles walked up to the bus stop at Hill Street and the bus, a few minutes early, arrived just he got there. He sat in the front, on the right-hand side, which meant he would be able to see the flyover drop as the bus passed. There would be a split second during which the bus turned left into North Street and thence into Nunhouse Road when, if you knew where to look, you could catch a glimpse of the inside of the central upright. It was unlikely anything would be there, for Mungo Cameron had gone away on holiday on Friday and would be away for two weeks, but there was a rare possibility a message might left for him by Basilisk or Unicorn. As it happened the bus went rather fast and took the turning fast but Charles was on the look-out and saw enough make sure there was nothing taped inside the pillar. He could just remember when the route the bus took was a country road, nine or ten years ago it must have been, but that was all changed now. It was built up with housing estates and shopping malls all the way to Nunhouse. The bus pulled up by the old village green which still remained and Charles got off, looking for Fen Street. He made enquiries of an old lady who called him dear and he feared was going to pat him. Number twenty-two was an old house, a cottage really and rather tumbledown. The front garden reminded him of the garden at the back of the safe house, though the nettles weren't quite so tall. On a patch of relatively bare ground, scattered with gravel, stood a dusty Citro�Diane. Charles looked through a pane of glass in the shack which must serve as garage or wood shed but could see inside no evidence of the occupancy of some near-contemporary of his own. Still, not all teenagers had bicycles or toboggans or footballs or even wellington boots. There was nothing in the shack but a couple of oildrums. Charles went up to the front door, saw there was no bell and tapped on the door knocker. He knew he was being over-bold but he couldn't think of any other way of entering the place and getting the information he wanted. A woman came to the door, dressed as if to go out in a blue leather jacket. She looked at him. She didn't speak. Charles said, 'Have you any jobs you want doing?' She came out on to the doorstep, looked at the car, the weeds, the front gate from which one of the hinges was missing. 'Hundreds. What can you do and' - she hesitated - 'how much would you want?' Charles wasn't anxious to over-exert himself. 'I could clean the car,' he said. 'Two pounds to clean the car.' 'That seems quite reasonable. My - er, there's someone here who'll pay you. I have to go to work. I'm late already.' She retreated into the house, called out, 'Peter! I'm off. There's a boy here who's going to clean the car. Two pounds - OK?' Charles couldn't hear what reply was made. But she had told him what he wanted to know, that someone called Peter lived in the house. Her son presumably, a future Rossingham man, part of the new Lower Fourth intake. She came out, carrying a handbag this time, told him to find a bucket inside, in the kitchen, and went off hurrying down Fen Street. The house was better inside. There was no one about, no teenage boy or father of teenage boy. Charles found the kitchen and a bucket with a wrung-out cloth folded over it. He looked out of the window into the back garden, a similar wilderness. If he could find the boy and have a preliminary word with him he wouldn't have to clean the car, an activity of which he had no experience apart from seeing it done by the car wash at the works. Stairs led up out of a living-dining room. Carrying a bucketful of water, Charles stood at the foot of these stairs looking up and listening. He could hear someone moving about up there. At least he wasn't alone. Sooner or later this Peter Moran would appear. He set about cleaning the car in a half-hearted sort of way, his thoughts elsewhere, concentrated in fact on magic, or what others called conjuring tricks. It was time he progressed from such simple sleights of hand as producing strings of beads or coloured paper from people's sleeves. Learning to do card tricks was a good discipline, he had heard. He began swilling water about on the bodywork of the car. The sun had come out and the water dried rapidly in dusty streaks and patches. He thought he heard a window opened upstairs in the house but when he looked up there was nobody there. The water in the bucket was dirty now and he emptied it away down a drain. He returned to the house with the empty bucket and met a man coming out from the living room. The man was tallish and fair with lank yellow hair, a fringe of which fell across his forehead, a bony face and dark-framed glasses. His skin had a white unhealthy look. They contemplated each other for a moment and then the man said: 'Is it you she said was cleaning the car?' Charles nodded, smiling slightly. 'Have you come in for more water?' Another nod and Charles was going to walk past him towards the kitchen when the man took the bucket from him. 'Here, let me.' It was an opportunity Charles thought he had better take and he said carefully, 'Is your son about?' 'My what?' The man stared at him over his shoulder and the water from the running tap flowed over the top of the bucket into the sink. 'She - the lady - called out Peter. I thought that must be your son.' 'That was me,' he said. He carried the bucket outside, leaving a trail of drips. Charles followed. He realised that he had made a mistake, though he couldn't understand how. In assuming that Peter Moran belonged in the same category as Martin Hillman and Trevor Allan, was in other words a thirteen-year-old future Rossingham pupil, he had been in error. Aware that Mungo was testing him, his loyalty to the West, he wondered if this were part of the trial process. Further instructions would perhaps appear. In the meantime, he had better finish the job on this car, for he might as well get something out of it, if only the two quid. The man called Peter Moran had gone away again but now he reappeared to ask Charles if he would like a cup of coffee. Charles said OK in his economical way. Peter Moran looked at the car and said it was fine, it hadn't been so clean for years. This gave Charles, following him into the house, something to think about. It was glaringly obvious that the car was not very clean, was streaky and blotchy and the glass parts filmed with scum. Peter Moran began fumbling around in some very untidy drawers in a sort of sideboard. He handed Charles three, not two, pound coins and a good deal of loose change. 'Go on, you may as well have it. You've done a good job.' He smiled. Charles, who was able to assess people in a detached way, decided that the smile was ingratiating, even inviting, but not at all friendly. The man's eyes, pebble-like and still, were not involved in the smile. And then Charles did one of his feats of intuition or character-reading or whatever you called it, and knew in an instant what kind of a man Peter Moran was, a man who liked or fancied male persons of his age. The eyes moved now, flickering from Charles's face down his body, the smile cooling to ice. An intense expression replaced it. Charles didn't feel afraid, for the front door which led straight into this room stood wide open. It was more an interest that he felt and a measure of admiration for his own sensitivity, his own discernment. How had he known what this man was while at the same time not really knowing, except in a blurred vague way, the kind of things he would like to do to him? He was in no doubt as to the nature of the payment that was being made to him. But he took it just the same, being rather short at the moment, having already made big inroads into his August allowance. He took the mug of coffee too. The money is to make me like him, he thought, no more than that. Yet. Peter Moran indicated a chair at the table and when Charles didn't take up the offer, pulled it out for him. Charles sat down, looking at Peter Moran across the table. What did Mungo require of this man? What was supposed to come of their meeting? Beyond Peter Moran, as part of the back of the ancient sideboard, was a mirror in which Charles could see his head and shoulders reflected. If he had ever been ignorant of his own 'prettiness', choirboy or cherub-like graces, his mother would soon have put him wise to them. She positively fostered them. Behind Peter Moran's intent rapt face he saw his own angel face, the clear and innocent blue eyes, the golden, albeit very short, hair, and felt a cold thrill along his spine as if a key had been dropped down his back. Peter Moran said: 'What made you think a boy lived here?' 'Mr Robinson told me.' This was an answer Charles had long ago formulated for any questions of this kind put to him by adults. 'I don't know any Mr Robinson.' Charles was ready for that one too. 'He knows you.' This had a better effect on Peter Moran than Charles could have hoped for, had indeed intended. He could hardly have grown paler but his face seemed to blank. His eyes shifted and he pushed his chair back. 'Are you a scout or something?' 'Because I cleaned your car? No. I have to go now. Thanks for the coffee.' A hesitation, a pause, as if some inner argument were going on behind those glasses, that broad pale forehead. Then carefully: 'I might have another job for you in a day or two. Not here though. We could meet. We could have a coffee in town somewhere.' Charles smiled. He could afford to. He was out on the doorstep and two women with shopping bags had appeared, gossiping on the pavement. 'You haven't told me your name.' 'It's Cameron, Ian Cameron,' said Charles. 'Church Bar. It's in the phone book.'

9

The hotel was not a building but a collection of little circular huts with grass-thatched roofs, very fancy inside and incorporating bedroom, bathroom and sun terrace. Mungo and Graham O'Neill shared one of these. After dinner with the family at a seafood restaurant in the village they came back here and wrote a postcard for Mr Lindsay, putting Corcyra instead of Corfu at the top next to the date. A sop to Cerberus, was the way Graham put it. So they wrote that as well, thinking it would please the frustrated classicist. 'Cerberus would do as an agent's name,' said Mungo. 'I don't know why we never thought of that one.' 'You can confer it on Martin Hillman,' said Graham, lighting a cigarette. 'Do you have to smoke? If Dad comes by he'll go bananas worrying about your lungs.' 'OK, I'm going to give it up but you can't expect me to give it up on holiday. A man must have some pleasures. You're such a bloody Calvinist. I suppose it's the Scot in you.' 'If you don't mind,' said Mungo. 'Calvin was French.' Graham fell asleep first. He usually did. Mungo sometimes thought it was the smell of cigarette smoke that kept him awake. The glass doors to the terrace stood open and the moon was very bright. Mungo lay in bed watching a lizard on the stucco wall just beyond the open door. The moonlight gave it an elongated very black shadow with flaring crest. If he half-closed his eyes and squinted a bit the lizard appeared to grow very large, assuming dragon-like proportions. This reminded him of Charles Mabledene and thence of the Moscow Centre code. Somehow he didn't have much faith in the possibility of Dragon finding the key to that code. Not unless, that is, Rosie Whittaker had decided to abandon it for a new one. He turned his head to look at Graham's digital clock on the bedside table between them. There was something of his father's nature in Mungo and he worried quite badly if he thought he was missing out on sleep. A digital clock wasn't the best sort for someone of that temperament because you could actually see the minutes clicking away. But it wasn't light enough in here to depend on watches. The clock told him it was eleven forty-three and in that moment, in a flash of illumination, Mungo understood what the numbers at the end of Moscow Centre's messages were. Not house numbers or phone numbers but the time. It was as simple as that. They were times, nine thirty-one, three minutes past ten, twelve fifty-eight. He considered waking up Graham to tell him but he didn't do this. Instead he got up and lay on the airbed out on the terrace, looking at the lizard which had become a dragon walking with slow relentless deliberation across a vast empty plain.

10

The police didn't come back. John racked himself all weekend, trying to decide what to do. He thought of going to see Mark Simms and telling him of the interview with Inspector Fordwych, and he did get as far as picking up the phone and dialling. But there was no answer from Mark, though he made repeated attempts. News of Rodney Maitland's court appearance was in the papers, the Free Press as well as the nationals, and on television too. But he had been charged with only one murder, that of the Bristol girl whose death had taken place in June. Unless things changed and they charged him with Cherry's murder, John decided he need take no action. One effect the police visit did have on him was to send him back to cats' green to try to put things right there. We ought to learn from our experiences, John thought, and there had been a lesson in the fear he had felt when Fordwych and the girl called Aubrey arrived. Better take action to exonerate himself now than risk the consequences of a real involvement. The difficulty was that he didn't know the code for August. He looked at the note he had of the last message. 'October men to take over from Sunday.' He remembered that he hadn't understood it at the time. Now he studied it. It was the last message which had appeared at the drop during July and according to what seemed to be the rule should have contained in the old code an announcement of the new one. As far as he had understood it at all when he read it on the previous Thursday, he had taken October men to be a group of the gang, some recruits perhaps due to start in October. Yet it said they would begin operations on Monday and Monday had been 1 August, the first of the month when a new code would begin. Could October Men be the title of a book? John called in at the library in Lucerne Road on his way home from work and asked the librarian if a book existed called October Men. It did. A novel of espionage by Anthony Price. They had a copy but it was out and an enquiry of the computer established that the central library copy and Ruxeter Road copy were also out. Probably all borrowed by gang members, John thought. Next morning he did something he had never done before, scarcely knew you could. But you didn't know what you could do till you tried. This seemed to him a profound philosophical reflection and with particular application to himself. It cheered him up too. He phoned Hatchard's and asked them if they had a copy October Men. Several, they said. John went out at once buy the paperback, missing his lunch to do so but thinking it worth while. It rained heavily all afternoon and Trowbridge's had few customers. The one woman who did come in after four left without buying anything after Gavin had upset her. John heard her ask for orange blossom or was its proper nam syringa? In a superior tone Gavin told her it was neither, these were names wrongly used by the ignorant. It was philadelphus. She said she was sure it wasn't, she didn't know what to do now, and left saying she would try the Tesco garden centre. Gavin returned to feeding the mynah pin nuts which he called pignolias. In the houseplant house John sat on a high stool with October Men on the bench in front of him and worked out the August code based on its lines: "The General sat quietly in his car at the airport terminal waiting for his mother and his mistress..." Gavin put his head inside the door. 'OK if I take Grackle home for the night?' He had got into the habit of doing this most nights. Whe he got the money from John didn't know but he had acquired a Metro and he said the mynah enjoyed a ride in the car. 'As far as I'm concerned,' John said. On a piece of paper torn from his notebook he wrote in October Men: "Leviathan to Dragon: Discontinue P Moran enquiry. Do not tail, do not observe." He put it in one of the small plastic bags they used for snowdrop an crocus bulbs. The rain still rattled down on the glass roof. It had been too wet that morning to come in on the Honda. He ran to the bus stop but by the time he got there the rain had stopped, the clouds spread out to the horizon and the sun started to blaze down. The long white wet road glittered in the sunlight, too bright to look at. At cats' green he looked up into the inside of the central pillar. There was nothing. From the roll of sticky tape he had been carrying about with him in his jacket pocket for weeks now he broke two lengths and taped his message to the metal surface. For the first time this evening he was aware of the passing of the year. By eight it was growing dark. Only three months now and it would be a year since Jennifer left him. He sat eating his meal of French bread, cheese, and pickled onions - what the landlord of the Gander called a ploughperson's lunch - and read October Men. At nine he put on the television for the BBC's evening news. The first item was about the arrest of a man for the murder of a child in Lancashire. The little girl, missing for two weeks, had been found in a wood after being sexually assaulted and then strangled. John irresistibly thought of Peter Moran. These men probably didn't intend to murder their child victims. They killed them from panic, out of a fear of discovery, or to silence the crying and the pleas for help. It made John shudder. Suppose Peter Moran were to kill one of his victims? Of course it might be that he no longer had victims, that his court appearance and sentence, mild though that had been, had frightened him into controlling his impulses. But somehow John didn't believe this could be so. These propensities weren't so easily subdued. It was all very well for Jennifer to say he wouldn't hurt a child. How could she know? It was almost at the end of the news, after all the stuff about Northern Ireland and South Africa and the Common Market and the Queen Mother, after all that, that the newscaster, almost idly it seemed, mentioned that Rodney Maitland, arrested last week for the Bristol murder, had today been charged with murdering Marion Ann Burton in 1970 and Cherry Winifred Creevey in 1971. Once more John tried to phone Mark Simms. The phone rang and rang. It looked as if Mark might be away on holiday. John thought there was something astounding, unreal, about being able to do ordinary normal things, about being able to enjoy yourself, go away on holiday, that sort of thing, after you had done what Mark had done. Surely now Mark would confess to the police? Surely he wouldn't let an innocent man - or innocent at any rate of that crime - take punishment for his own crime? He tried the phone again at ten and when there was again no answer he rang Gavin. The mynah didn't exactly answer the phone but could be heard gabbling away very near the mouthpiece. 'Ha ha ha, damn!' it said. 'I'm a basket case, I'm an empty nester.' 'I'll be late in in the morning, Gavin. I won't be in around eleven.' Gavin didn't seem interested. 'Yeah. Right,' he said. 'No problem. Listen, can you hear him?' 'Grackle rules OK,' shouted the mynah.

The police station he went to was the one in Feverton. Fordwych had said he could be found there. John walked all the way. He knew he had to go but he wanted to postpone getting there. His route took him past the remains of wall at the feet of which the council had made lawns and planted coleus and this summer's favourite, love-lies-bleeding. The tables outside the wine bar were all crowded. John knew he would never be able to pass it without thinking of Jennifer and remembering how she had cried. In the police station he asked for Detective Fordwych and was told to wait. It was as bad as being at a hospital out-patients' department. He waited and waited. The police station had windows which when you stood outside looked opaque, but when you were inside you could see out all right. You could see people who walked by and stole glances at their own reflections. At last he was told Fordwych would see him now and to come this way. It was Detective Constable Aubrey who came to fetch him. She took him into a small impersonal office with maps and charts on the wall. Fordwych got up from behind the desk, came over and rather surprisingly shook hands with him. 'I don't want to have to tell you about this,' John began, 'but I don't think I have any choice. I can't just leave things as they are.' 'This has some connection with the death of your sister, Mr Creevey?' Now he was actually there and facing Fordwych, John felt that he was about to commit an unforgivable betrayal. But he couldn't think what other course to take. He was there now, he must do it. What loyalty did he owe Mark Simms? The truth was that he should have gone to the police weeks ago, as soon as he knew. He could hardly recall now why it was he hadn't gone. A glimpse of something else, something deeper came to him as he sat there silent, looking at Fordwych. Knowing what Mark had done, what an ordinary man like himself had done and got away with, had somehow corrupted him, had helped to make him feel it was permissible to do things outside the law if the provocation were great enough, it was all right setting hit men on to Peter Moran... He began to speak. Quite baldly and lucidly he told Fordwych of Mark Simms's confession. He told how, after weeks of prevarication, Mark had at last broken down and kneeling in front of him confessed to the murder of Cherry. Fordwych listened. He didn't say anything and his eyes didn't meet John's. With his elbows on the desk and his fingertips meeting at a right angle, he kept his face averted as if the view outside the window - the CitWest tower flicking over, nine forty-two, nine forty-three, nine forty-four, eighteen degrees, eighteen degrees, eighteen degrees - were absorbingly fascinating to him. When John had finished and found himself inwardly trembling from the effort of it, though outwardly calm, Fordwych, who had previously not uttered so much as a 'go on', said in a measured detached way: 'You were quite right to come and tell us.' John nodded. He didn't know what other sign to make. 'Why didn't you come before?' 'I thought it was too late. I didn't think it mattered to anyone now if he was punished or not.' 'Justice isn't important?' John heard the girl behind him draw in her breath. found a plain honest reply and uttered it. 'It's because of justice that I've come now.' Fordwych got up. He began to walk about. He stood at the window and then he stood by the desk in front of John looking at him. 'What would you say if I said that what you've told us couldn't be true? That it bears no relation to the truth from beginning to end?' John felt the blood come up into his face. 'I haven't been lying to you. I've told you the exact truth.' He couldn't remain sitting there. He got to his feet, held on to the back of the chair so tightly his knuckles went white. The girl was looking at him with a strange expression. He thought it was pity. 'I've told you what he told me. He confessed to me he'd murdered my sister. He even gave me details, the time, the place, everything.' 'Sit down, Mr Creevey. Don't blow your top. Let me tell you something. We've got it all on record and of course we've been taking a good look at our records since Maitland was arrested. You may never have been told any of it - you and your parents I mean. It was probably thought distressing. But your sister clawed at the man who strangled her and she must have made deep scratches. Her fingers were full of blood and tissue. Don't you suppose Mr Simms was the first to come under suspicion? Of course he was. His movements were checked and double-checked and everything he said sifted and examined. We're not complete fools, you know, Mr Creevey. We do even sometimes know what we're doing. In the light of what we found under your sister's fingernails, he was the first man to be given a blood test, and he couldn't have been more finally exonerated. Mr Simms' blood is Group B negative. The blood under your siste fingernails was Group O positive which incidentally is the same as that of Rodney Maitland.'

11

Everyone was away on holiday. Even the traffic in the city had got lighter. Leviathan and Chimaera and Medusa, in other words Mungo and Angus Cameron and Graham O'Neill, were in Corfu. Scylla, or Keith O'Neill, was in Sweden. Unicorn or Nicholas Ralston and Basilisk or Patrick Crashaw had gone off somewhere or other with their families. Charybdis and the rest of the Hobhouse family had moved out to their cottage at Rossingham St Mary for a month. Only the Mabledenes, for some reason to do with Charles's mother's and father's respective businesses, would not be off until the last week of August. Charles, therefore, expected to find no messages at the flyover drop. He was busy enough without that. It was proving surprisingly difficult to find out when the work of gutting and redesigning the interior of the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road was due to begin. Nor had he got very far with his overtures to Martin Hillman, the apparently more enterprising of the London Central two possible recruits. An appointment had been made to meet Hillman at a cafe halfway between the Shot Tower and the Beckgate but when he got there, the only customers were Rosie Whittaker and Guy Parker. Rosie had put green dye on her spiky hair and was wearing black glasses with wire rims like Graham O'Neill's. Both were dressed from head to foot in fashionable dusty black. They addressed him cordially and Rosie actually asked him if he would like a Coke. Charles refused and went off in a thoughtful frame of mind. He wouldn't touch Martin Hillman now with a two-metre-long pole and he would give Mungo similar advice. His new digital watch told him it was six twenty-four. His father would be leaving for home at seven which gave him nice time to get to the garage by bus. Charles decided he might as well call it a day. The bus wasn't the same one as he had taken out to Nunhouse three days before but it followed the same route as far as Rostock Bridge. Sitting in the seat he always picked if it was vacant, the right-hand side up front, Charles reflected on the Peter Moran affair. You couldn't say he had had a lucky escape, of course, because he had never been in danger. The front door of the cottage had been open all the time and besides that, he had himself almost from the first been aware that a definite threat existed. And this was always half the battle. Indeed, Charles felt rather proud of himself on that score, mentally patting himself on the back for his undoubted sophistication. But he couldn't help thinking how horrified and really frightened for him his parents would have been had they known about it. Only a couple of years back his sister Sarah and a couple of girlfriends of hers had got talking with some man they met and had allowed him to treat them to the cinema. Sarah had been unwise enough to tell her parents about this. Nothing had happened, the man had merely been friendly and enjoyed their company, but Charles had thought his father was going to have a stroke or something. And as for his mother...! At the time Sarah started on all this his mother had been showing his father some new dress or or whatever she had bought that day. If he had been told anything would distract his mother from a thing like that wouldn't have believed it, but this had. She had burst into screaming and crying and made Sarah solemnly swear not to speak to any man again as long as she lived. Well, almost. There had been an awful fuss. Charles could see that just as bad a fuss might be made over his encounter with Moran. Not that he had the slightest intention of telling his parents about it. It was over anyway and no harm done. From force of habit he glanced to the right as the bus swung left at the flyover. There was a message in the centre upright. Well, it was unexpected but not impossible. No doubt it came from Charybdis, who had perhaps come in for the day from Rossingham. After all, he was always coming from Fenbridge, the distance was much the same. Charles jumped off at the next request stop. It was still only six forty, he could run the rest of the way across Rostock Bridge and his father would certainly wait for him. October Men the code was. He had a note of it in his pocket. He wouldn't have dreamt of going out without that. Charybdis had put the package in very high up. Charles wouldn't have thought he could have reached that high, he could scarcely reach it himself. He had to jump and tug to pull it down. Stuffing the plastic into his pocket and unfolding the message quickly, Charles looked at it in some astonishment. Of course he couldn't read it just like that, most of it was incomprehensible, but the first word contained nine letters and he was pretty sure from his acquaintance with the October Men key that it was Leviathan. He was almost certain the first three words read: 'Leviathan to Dragon'. How could that be when the message was a new one, put into the upright in the past three days, while Mungo had been in Corfu for six?

'What have you been doing with yourself all day?' his father asked genially as they got into the Volvo. Charles thought this expressed his intelligence activities, conducted solitarily, rather well. 'This and that,' he said and opened his notebook at the October Men key. He began a rapid deciphering. Usually on these trips his father and he maintained a placid silence. When he was with his mother in her car she talked incessantly. Charles could have done with silence this evening but it seemed his father was determined to talk. There was something coincidental about the subject he had chosen: the danger to people of Charles's age, particularly those who were not large for their age, from molestation by those he called 'sick' adults. He also called them paederasts, mispronouncing the word, as Charles noticed rather sadly. It was the arrest of some man for assaulting and murdering a child up in the north which had led to this. The man had been mobbed and threatened by the crowd as he was hustled out of court by police. It had all been on television. 'I thought it would be a good idea to have a chat about this when your mother and sister aren't around.' Charles reflected that they had been chatting, if that was the word, about it all his and Sarah's lives. But he only said OK and nodded. It would be rude to continue to look at his notebook. Besides, he had already deciphered the message: 'Discontinue Peter Moran enquiry. Do not observe, do not tail.' His father's tone grew embarrassed as he tried to describe the kind of overtures such a man might make. Charles had a terrible urge, which he knew he must resist, to magic around with his father's Silk Cut so that when he reached for a cigarette he would pull out ten metres of purple ribbon instead. Their route took them along the river. Nunhouse could be seen on the other side and Charles thought he could locate Fen Street and what was probably the roof of Peter Moran's cottage. He was aware of a nasty little chill of fear. One of Charles's strengths was his willingness to admit to himself that he was frightened but to conceal it from everyone else behind a face of inscrutability. Having more or less switched off his hearing, he made mechanical replies to his father. The decoded message was in his head and he repeated it over to himself with increasing disquiet. Apart from the fact that Mungo couldn't have written and sent the message, the language was wrong. Mungo wouldn't have used 'discontinue' and 'enquiry' but would have said: 'Abandon Peter Moran project'. Therefore the message didn't come from the Director General of London Central but from someone else, Moscow Centre presumably. The October Men code had been broken - a simple matter with a mole in the department - and this message concocted by an imposter who didn't know Mungo was away. Possibly even by Whittaker herself. After all, when Charles had seen her she had been no more than a quarter of a mile from the drop. All this would scarcely have been important, an occasion merely for congratulating himself on seeing through the deception so early on. But it wasn't so simple. If Moscow Centre had countermanded Mungo's instructions they must have some good reason for doing so, they must be afraid of the outcome of the successful observation of Peter Moran. It was they, not Mungo, who wanted Peter Moran left alone. 'I think I've made it clear enough,' Charles switched on to hear his father say, 'that you don't in any circumstances whatever let anyone, even someone young and friendly, get himself alone with you. The people you get to know you meet at home or at school. It just isn't worth it, Charles. The risk is too great. In a nutshell, to use the old clich�you don't talk to strange men.'

12

Without actually being rude or offensive, Fordwych had indicated to John that he suspected him of stirring things. He suspected him of trying to make things look bad for Mark Simms, out of some kind of undefined malice, presumably. John didn't understand any of it. Well, he understood that Mark Simms was innocent of Cherry's murder and that for some reason he had lied. Was it possible he had lied about her manner of living as well? He had gone to work eventually but he couldn't concentrate. This didn't much matter as they got less custom in August than perhaps during any other month. Walking about the rose gardens, nipping the dead heads off pink Wendy Cussons and vermilion Troika, he was aware of an unexpected feeling. It was relief. His sky was lightening. His hands full of petals, he looked up at the overcast heavens and felt easier, less tense and stressed. The past had been wiped a little, if not washed clean. The immediate past too seemed less agonising and less incomprehensible. And he hadn't committed the unforgivable crime, the crime he could hardly now imagine he had contemplated, of perpetrating some act of violence, perhaps worse than that, against Jennifer's lover. Gavin was putting the mynah through his paces for the benefit of an elderly couple and their grandchild John remembered seeing at Trowbridge's two or three times before. The mynah uttered all its newly learned phrases obediently. Gavin rewarded it with offcuts of Mars bar. It was Thursday and they closed at one, Gavin and the bird he called Grackle going off inevitably together. John began thinking on the way home how Jennifer had said she hated him and would never forgive him for what he had told her about Peter Moran. Had he been wrong to tell her? Perhaps he had because he had told her from the wrong motive. Probably it was all in his own head, the idea of Peter Moran killing anyone or even of returning to his old tastes. It derived from all this stuff on television about the Lancashire child-killer and rapist. As soon as he got home, without even bothering about lunch, John sat down and wrote to Jennifer. He began the letter 'Dearest Jennifer', thinking that no matter what became of them, however distantly they might be parted and whatever other partners she might find, he would always write to her like that.

Dearest Jennifer,

If you still want a divorce after we have not been together for two years I will agree. I will do anything you want. I can't bear you to hate me and I tell you honestly that I am saying this so that you won't hate me. A kind of bribe to make you like me, if you want to put it that way! I am not going to say anything more about Peter. People do change. You changed me, as I expect you know, perhaps you have changed him too. I want to say that I love you. Nothing has changed that. If you change your mind about a divorce, come back to me. I will want you back.

There were too many repetitions of 'change' and 'changed' but never mind, it was what he felt. Tears had come into his eyes and he felt them slowly run down his face. They wer tears of self-pity, he thought, and he rubbed them furiously away. Remembering their love-making didn't help, the tenderness, the gradual mutual learning of joy. He to write pleading words, to ask her for reassurance, just to tell him it hadn't all been pretence on her part, that she had for a while felt love and desire for him. But he was afraid that if he asked she would never answer that part of the letter, so he wrote only: 'always your loving John' and ended it. Cohn and his mother were supposed to be coming at about four, calling in during one of their drives. They had been away for a week's holiday in the Lake District where it had rained all the time. John got himself another ploughperson's lunch and then went out to post his letter. Most of the afternoon he spent looking at Cohn's holiday snapshots. There were also a lot of slides which had to be put into a contraption Cohn had brought with him and peered at with one eye shut. They were all views of green mountains and grey skies, not a living creature in sight. Constance Goodman, immediately on arrival, had asked him oddly: 'Any news?' 'Leave it, Mother,' said Cohn. It took John a while to realise - and by then they were looking at photographs - that they had expected to find Jennifer there, that Jennifer had returned to him as a result of the information they had given him. This was an attitude that now seemed naive, though he too had had faith in it once. The Goodmans had read about the arrest of the man for Cherry's murder. Would John have to give evidence? Would Mark Simms? Constance wanted to know if the police had been in touch with him. 'He doesn't want to talk about it, Mother. You can see that.' 'Not everyone is as inhibited as you are, chickie.' 'If someone is inhibited the parents are presumably to blame, notably the mother, I should think.' They bickered for a while. John gave them tea, took them round the garden, showing off his fuchsias and the pink lavender. The greenhouse was admired, though Constance said what a shame he had to keep the Honda in there, and they left with a basketful of tomatoes and capsicum. It was a daunting thought that for the rest of his life the majority of his evenings would necessarily be spent alone. This was the first time he had faced it. In the fiction he read single men were always in demand by hostesses, but John had never found that this applied to him. No doubt, he didn't move in those social circles. He couldn't recall that he had ever been invited to one of the drinks parties given by neighbours in Geneva Road. A murdered sister, a departed wife, set a man apart; people were wary of him, not knowing quite what approach to make, what subjects to avoid. He watered the greenhouse, removed the yellowing lower leaves from the tomato plants. The aubergines were very susceptible to greenfly and though it went rather against the grain he sprayed them, choking at the noxious fumes. When the door bell rang he hoped it might be Jennifer. Was he going to feel like that for years every time the phone or the bell rang? You had no control over your initial reactions, he thought as he went to the door. All your resolutions, determined cheerfulness, 'pulling yourself together', were of no avail in preventing the leap of the heart, the spring of hope, the rushing into mind of the beloved name... The woman who stood there wasn't Jennifer but Detective Constable Aubrey. She said, 'Good evening, Mr Creevey. May I come in for a moment?' He nodded. He knew he must look mystified. 'There's nothing to worry about. This isn't an official call.' She followed him into the living room. The Goodmans had left their photographs behind and views of Skiddaw and Ullswater lay scattered all over the coffee table. 'Have you been away?' 'No, I'm afraid not. They belong to some people I know.' Why hadn't he said friends? Why not 'friends of mine'? He began gathering up the pictures, replacing them in their yellow envelopes. She said: 'May I sit down?' He flushed. 'I'm sorry. Yes, of course.' She was wearing jeans, a striped shirt and a zipper jacket, masculine clothes, a man might have worn them without looking odd, but she remained powerfully feminine. He had seen that face in a picture somewhere, a reproduction in a book perhaps, those delicate features and that rosy translucent skin, the barely defined eyebrows, the red-gold hair. It was a pleasure to look at her, though academic only while Jennifer existed and came between his eyes and all other pretty faces. She said in her pleasant gentle way, 'I came to talk about your sister Cherry, Mr Creevey.' He nodded, wary now. 'Your visit on Monday, your talk with Mr Fordwych, it seemed to leave so much unanswered. What I really want to say is if you're upset or worried about what Mr Simms said to you, could you try not to be? Making false confessions is so common, it happens all the time.' 'But why?' he said. 'Why would anyone say he'd - done murder, when he hadn't? I thought you didn't believe me,' he added. 'Oh, we believed you. Let's just say we rather wondered that you ever believed him. It occurred to me that you might have been in a particularly receptive state for that sort of thing. Forgive me if I seem to probe. Had you been very depressed or nervous or anything?' He looked at her, beginning to understand many things. 'I think I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown for months but I never quite tumbled in.' He said quickly, 'I still don't see why he'd make something like that up.' 'There are quite a few possible reasons,' she said thoughtfully. 'He might have resented something about you. I mean, perhaps he thought you weren't really interested in him, didn't listen while he talked? Is that possible? That he was lonely and wanted your attention and felt he didn't really get it because you - well, you had problems of your own?' 'It's more than possible,' John said. 'Miss Aubrey - Detective Constable - I'm sorry, but what do I call you?' 'Call me Susan.' Somehow he didn't feel he could quite do that. He was sorry she had suggested it. It was too intimate. He framed his question again. 'Are you saying he was prepared to do anything to get my attention?' 'Something like that. People do suffer intolerable feelings of rejection, solitariness, sensations of being in glass walls, belljars, you know. And then he might also feel guilty about your sister. I'm not saying there's any possibility he killed her, there isn't, but he might feel guilty in other ways. Perhaps, for instance for not calling for her that evening when he said he would but nearly an hour later. You didn't know that? It's all in his statement he made sixteen years ago. He had been going to break with her. He was going to tell her but he got there late and she had already left - with the man who is charged with murdering her, as we now know.' John stared at her. 'So he did feel responsible for her death?' 'In a way. How much do you know about your sister, er, John?' So it was true. Mark hadn't lied about that. 'Everything I think.' 'Mark Simms had found out she had other lovers. Of course he felt he would have liked to kill her. Do you begin understand now?' 'Are you a psychologist?' John asked. 'I used to be. I did psychology at university.' He offered her coffee and she said thank you, yes, she would like that. While she drank it he talked a bit aboui Cherry, not speaking of her multifarious inexplicable 1ove affairs or of her and Mark, but asking why she had been killed. Had she - and he tried to put it delicately - behaved in such a way to Rodney Maitland as to bring about her own death? Susan Aubrey said she didn't think so, Cherry knew him, after all, had probably gone innocently with when he offered her his escort to her bus stop. Maitland who lived in London, had only come home to his native -that afternoon, had left again immediately after the killing. That was why he had never been investigated, never suspected, while hundreds of local men were fingerprinted and their blood groups examined. He was, it appeared, one of those men who derived sexual satisfaction simply from killing a woman, from surprising her by sudden attack and strangling her before she could utter. Cherry had fought him, she had put up more fight than the others, she had not submitted to her fate... Susan Aubrey's sympathetic manner tempted John to begin confiding in her about Jennifer, to tell her what had brought about his near-breakdown, but he resisted doing so. He had an idea that people who were trained psychologists kept a scientific attitude towards an opening of the heart, 1istening to confidences with a clinical detachment. It was only after she had gone, thanking him for the coffee, calling him John, that he thought how, if he had told her of his mental state he must also have told her of his therapy, the mini-Mafia and its codes he had penetrated. Perhaps he should have told her. The novel idea came to him that it was his duty as a citizen to tell the police about this gang's activities and such instructiOnS as that of 'remove and eliminate', for example. Now he had extricated himself from it with no harm done, he ought at least to inform the police of the drop at cats' green. He would do so on the following day. During lunchtime he would do it, he resolved, setting off for work on Friday morning. It wouldn't do to take any more time off. Within an hour of his reaching Trowbridge's something happened to put everything else out of his head.

13

It was the first day of the sale. All those plants that no one was going to pay the full price for at this season, overblown geraniums, herbs that had flowered and grown straggly, bushy begonias, were to be displayed on trestle tables at thirty pee each. It should have been set up by the time the garden centre opened but at ten-thirty Gavin was still selecting the plants and trundling them out of the greenhouses. That was when the elderly couple and their granddaughter or whatever she was turned up. They made as usual for the mynah's cage. 'Those two, they treat this place like a zoo,' Sharon said to John, 'always bringing that kid to see the mynah. They've never even bought a packet of seeds.' 'They don't do any harm,' John said. Les had come up to them. 'They want to buy the mynah.' 'There you are, Sharon,' John said. 'That's better than a packet of seeds.' He went over to the man, explained that the price of the mynah was eighty-five pounds. 'It's not in the sale then?' 'No, it's not in the sale,' John said, smiling. 'It's a lot of money but we reckon it's worth it, don't we, Mother? We've taken a long time to make up our minds, it's not a snap decision, we've really thought about the responsibilities involved.' The serious tone and earnest look suggested it might be the fostering of a child he was embarking on 'We've read up on the subject, we've had books from the library.' John was tempted to say something to the effect that he knew he could safely entrust the mynah to their keeping but of course he didn't. It was at this point though that he thought of Gavin. He felt glad Gavin was out in the back, busily occupied, for although at that time he had no real notion of how strongly Gavin felt about the mynah he suspected that if he had been in the shop he would have attempted to discourage the sale. Started talking about Newcastle's Disease or Gracula religiosa being dangerous to children. In fact the little girl was poking her fingers into the cage, feeding the mynah from a packet of assorted fruits and nuts, and it was taking her offerings quite gently. The man meant to pay cash for it. Four twenty-pound notes and a five-pound were carefully unrolled. They had evidently called at the bank on their way here. 'Do we get his cage as well?' said the little girl. 'Yes, how much is that?' A look of near-dismay made it plain he had made no provision for this in his budgeting. 'The cage comes with the bird,' said John. 'Part of the package.' They went off, carrying the mynah, towards the car park. John was watching them place the cage, with absurdly care, on the back seat of an aged Morris Minor, when Gavin came into the shop from the back. He started telling John that two of the shubunkins had fungus. Then he saw the empty space where the cage had been. 'Who's moved him?' 'That old couple bought your Dracula.' Sharon's tone was very slightly malicious. 'They've just this minute gone. Never even gave him a chance to say goodbye.' Gavin rushed out of the front door. The Morris Minor had already gone, would by now probably be turning out on to the main road, but he was off in pursuit of it, pounding up the long gravel drive. 'He was very keen on that bird,' Les said. After a minute or two Gavin came back, not flushed but white-faced in spite of his exertions. His eyes had a wild look. He said hoarsely: 'We've got to get him back. I'll buy him off them. I was going to buy him anyway, I've been saving up. I'd nearly got enough.' 'Why didn't you say?' John said. He was beginning to understand. 'You could have had him at a discount or on hire purchase or something.' 'It doesn't matter. We'll get him back. I'll go and see them, I'll go now. I'll tell them there's been a mistake. I'll tell them he's mine. John was appalled. He felt guilty, he felt he had betrayed Gavin by his thoughtlessness. 'Gavin, I don't know their name or where they live. They paid cash.' 'You don't know their name?' 'Look, I'm sorry, Gavin, but you know I can't refuse to sell customers something that's on sale.' Until then the shop had been empty but now the swing doors opened and there was a sudden influx of customers. A woman picked up one of the wire baskets and came up to John with an enquiry. What it was he never found out, for Gavin, his face working and his eyes wild, turned and delivered at the table on which the mynah's cage had stood a powerful kick. It was a long table that also held terrariums and gardens in bowls and troughs. The kick dislodged a pyramid of glass vessels which juddered and crashed to the floor, sweeping the grass cloth with it, causing a cascade of stone urns and copper pots, flying earth and broken leaf. The noise it made was loud and reverberating and the woman who had come up to John gave a shriek. The other customers stopped where they were and stared at Gavin. The attention he got seemed to fuel him. He drew back his arm and made a backhanded sweep along a shelf of bowls and vases. Some of these were of plastic but more were pottery. They shattered and the pieces flew. Gavin went mad then. He began grabbing at everything in sight hurling it to the floor, plants in pots, vases, jars, wire basi tools. An elaborate barbecue device of metal and wood glass he wrenched into its component parts and cast them to right and left, overturning a stone nymph and breaking a window. One of the women started to scream. 'Can't you stop him?' a man shouted. 'Can't someone stop him?' Gavin was trampling on the broken bits of glass and pottery like a wounded elephant. His arms flailed among bamboo mirrors. Upraised hands tugged at two hanging bowls from which ivy trailed. His voice had been silent while his body made mayhem but now he began shout and a stream of obscenities poured from him like the sc from the broken bowl. Les had got behind him and one of the men customers looked as if prepared to help. Paralysed for a while by the horror of it, John now came from behind the counter and began moving towards Gavin. Seeing him advance, Gavin leapt for the drum that bristled with a variety of garden tools like umbrellas in a stand. He grabbed a long-handled fork, its head small but with four sharp stainless steel prongs, and holding it like a javelin, made a lunge at John. It was all ridiculous, grotesque. It was also frightening. John had sidestepped behind a stand hung with bulbs packets but the lot came crashing down as Gavin rushed, and this time his efforts succeeded. He let out a triumpha yell like some primitive warrior, jabbed at John with the fork, catching him a glancing blow on the shoulder. The pain was intense, savage. Gavin would have followed up the stroke with further stabbings, would perhaps have gone on until John was severely wounded or even dead, but as he aimed a second lunge Les and the customer grabbed him from behind, trying to pin his arms behind his back. Gavin fought them tigerishly, snarling and squealing and grunting, throwing back his head, twisting his neck and trying to break Les's hand. Holding on to his shoulder from which blood was welling through his clothes, through the thick canvas coat, John was aware that Sharon was phoning the police. It took the three of them, one of the women holding the door open, to get Gavin into the office. The blood was now actually flowing from John's wound. They shoved Gavin into the desk chair and Les was all for tying him up, trapping and immobilising him inside one of the fruit cage nets. But John wouldn't have that. Gavin was still holding on to his pike but he let John take it away from him. His hands were as limp as dying leaves. He hung down his head and sobbed.

PART FOUR

1

Mungo would be home on Friday or Saturday, Charles couldn't remember which. But that was a week ahead. Of course he could do absolutely nothing about Peter Moran until Mungo came back. He could simply do nothing and await further instructions. Charles could see that this really wasn't on. For one thing, this was obviously the test Mungo had said he would set him, this was the test of his loyalty, to follow and observe the behaviour of Peter Moran. Secondly, if he could ever be in doubt of the value of this exercise, the command to abandon it from Rosie Whittaker or Michael Stern or whoever confirmed its importance. He did nothing on Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday anyway he couldn't do anything as neither of his parents went into town. Most of the day he practised card tricks. One of the things he practised was doing a waterfall, holding half the cards in each hand and letting them trickle from his palms in such a way that they interwove, one from the left, one from the right, feathering into a single pack of fifty-two. He hoped to be good enough at this to give a casual, apparently unrehearsed, demonstration to Sarah and his parents after tea, but he wasn't satisfied with his performance. If you are a perfectionist you are a perfectionist and there isn't much you can do about it. It was said that Mungo was afraid of growing any taller, that he hoped desperately he had stopped growing. Charles was still only just over five feet. He knew he would get taller eventually, for his parents were of average height, but he would have liked some of that growth now. Looking at himself in the mirror, he considered dispassionately that if these things went on appearance alone what a marvellous child actor he would make. The male Shirley Temple of the eighties. His angel face gazed back at him and he recognised in it that other-worldly expression, as if the eyes were fixed on some distant beatific vision, which painters of the past gave to their cherubs and their infant saints. It was in the eyes of course, but in the delicate mouth too and faintly pearly translucent skin. Even his hair had achieved some unwanted growth in the past week, shaping itself into little curly tendrils. Bloody hell, thought Charles. Oh, shit... Did Mungo know the kind of man Peter Moran was? Was this part of the test, the terrible part you either survived, thus proving your allegiance, or else perished in the attempt? Charles thought of what he had read somewhere about novice druids, in order to attain promotion, having to lie all night composing epic poetry in tanks full of icy water. Such an ordeal might almost be preferable to what lay before him. Picking up the cards again, splitting the pack into two, he felt a grudging admiration for Mungo, for his nerve, his ruthlessness. In the past he had often felt London Central was simply not tough enough. Mungo, and apparently Angus before him, had been stern about no actual lawbreaking, no theft, forgery, violence against the person; so much so that Charles had certain changes in mind when he succeeded Mungo as he meant to do. There would be no place in his organisation for all this squeamishness. In view of that he ought to be glad Mungo was coming out of the scruples closet. If only he hadn't been the object of this departure. Fear ran down his spine in as precise a trickle as the falling cards. It was hot again but his hands had felt cold all day. At any rate, he had perfected the trick, he would never do it wrong now, it was there, mastered, controlled, forever. He went downstairs to show it off - well, to pick his moment when he could do it in full view of all of them as casually as anyone else might pick up and open a book. 'Good God,' said his father. 'Amazing. Do that again.' Charles smiled the closed-lips smile they had all learned from Guy Parker, it seemed very long ago. He thought again and inescapably of how different his father's reaction would be, of his anger and fear, if he knew his son contemplated establishing a rapport with a paederast. But he had decided to postpone a second confrontation. Going into town with his mother rather late in the morning, sitting beside her in the Escort, Charles had no plans to make the trip out to Nunhouse that day. Another one of those cold shivers erected the hairs on the back of his neck when he thought of Peter Moran phoning the empty Cameron house. Today, though, he would put all that out of his head, no point in worrying about it at this stage. He was on his way to the building firm of Albright-Craven whose tender, he had at last discovered, had secured the contract for the conversion of Pentecost Villas. How exactly he was going to penetrate the place and make his enquiries he hadn't yet decided. Smallness of stature and juvenile looks were again a grave disadvantage. As it turned out he never did get inside the building that day, for quite by chance he encountered Peter Moran again. By then it was late lunchtime. Somebody had parked on Charles's mother's ratepayer's parking space in Hillbury Place and they had to put the Escort a long way off in the underground car park in Alexandra Bridge Street. Then Gloria wanted to buy Charles a track suit she saw in Debenham's window, which Charles didn't want and wouldn't have worn. Nor would he let her buy him lunch at Debenham's roof-garden restaurant. He was afraid Albright-Craven might close for lunch. It would take him half an hour on foot to get there anyway. It was gone one by the time he reached Feverton Square that lay just outside the old city walls. He had seen the CitWest clock indicating twelve fifty-seven and twenty-five degrees and a moment or two later as he passed through the Fevergate he heard the cathedral clock strike one. It was always a fraction fast. Because it was a hot sunny day the square was full of people sitting on benches or lying about on the grass or eating sandwich lunches. The strange thing was that though Peter Moran wasn't far from his thoughts, couldn't be in the nature of things, but so to speak lurking just behind the threshold of his consciousness, he didn't see him sitting there on the top of a low pillar at the foot of the Albright-Craven steps. He was about as observant as you could get was Charles, but still he didn't see him until he was himself no more than a yard or two away. Peter Moran was sitting there with his back to the pavement, looking up the steps to the big ornate silver and black swing doors. He was wearing a very old white tee-shirt with short sleeves that showed pale hairy arms. His head was bent back a bit so that his rather long, greasy, fair hair touched the neck of this tee-shirt. As is so often the case with fear (though bearing this in mind never seems much use for next time, as Charles reflected) it went away immediately in the actual presence of what caused it. He could probably have got up those steps, or nearly all the way up them, before Peter Moran saw him but he dared not miss this opportunity. And there were people about everywhere. He was quite safe. 'Hallo,' he said. Peter Moran turned round. Charles had anticipated a delighted wonder would be registered but in fact he didn't look altogether pleased to see him. 'Oh, hallo. Hi.' A glance up the steps and then the pale pebble eyes returned to Charles's face, the expression growing friendlier. 'What brings you here then?' 'This and that,' said Charles. His courage had almost resumed its total proportions, which were considerable. 'Sorry if I was out when you phoned.' 'I did phone, since you ask. I didn't get any reply.' He was only a man, a fellow human being, of average IQ no doubt. Not all that bright. Charles was in the habit of assessing people quite coldly like this. He was also not a very large man, slight of build, a bit unhealthy looking, no more than - what? Five feet nine or ten? That voracious look that seemed suddenly to distort his features, maybe that was only because he was hungry. For food, that is, thought Charles. 'You said something about having a coffee.' The glance went back up the steps. 'Not now. I couldn't now.' It was said repressively as if not he but Charles had made the initial overtures, as if he were having second thoughts. And Charles was going to move off, either go into the building or return later, was going to think again about observing and tailing this man, perhaps observing and tailing were all he needed to do, when Peter Moran whispered - or it would be nearer to say hissed - getting to his feet and starting up the steps: 'This time Wednesday. Fevergate Cafe. Where they have the tables outside.' Charles didn't say yes or no. A party of people strolling along the pavement, several of them his own age, engulfed him. Some would call it a piece of luck, for it removed the possibility of his being recognised by the woman Peter Moran had gone up to meet, the woman who had answered the door to him at the cottage in Nunhouse. They were coming down the steps together, not looking at one another, not holding hands or anything, but undeniably together. Charles drifted on with his new companions, foreign visitors they were, tourists with maps in their hands. Peter Moran's coolness was explained. You could understand he wouldn't want other people - sister? Housekeeper? Surely not a wife? - to know what he was up to. At the thought of what he might be up to Charles felt another cold tremor. He didn't have to go to the Fevergate Caf�n Wednesday. He hadn't committed himself. Even if he had committed himself he wouldn't have to go.

2

Almost the first thing they did at the hospital was to give John an anti-tetanus injection. After his wound had been cleaned and stitched up he thought they might let him go home but they said they would like him to stay in for a couple of days. He had lost a lot of blood. The hospital was on top of one of the high suburb-clad hills and from where he lay he could look across the valley. On the other side of Hartlands Gardens he could see Fonthill Court where Mark Simms lived. The sun shone on the big picture windows turning them all to golden mirrors. Next day he phoned Cohn to tell him where he was and Cohn came in to see him, promising to go back to Geneva Road and see the greenhouse got watered. But Cohn was his only visitor. He wished he could rid himself of the absurd hope that Jennifer would come. Useless to tell himself that Jennifer didn't know, that there was no reason to suppose Cohn would have told her, that even if she did know she wouldn't come. When visiting time came and the wives and girlfriends and mothers arrived, bursting in like a herd of hungry animals admitted at last to where the corn was, he found he was holding his breath, eyeing them, searching for her. Then he lay back on his pillows with an inner sigh of resignation. Fortunately there were only two such occasions. On Sunday they had let him go home with instructions to keep off work for a few days. It was the first time he had been away from the house overnight since his honeymoon. It felt as if it had been shut up for years, the unmade bed, October Men lying face down on the coffee table, a tea mug and bread and butter plate in the sink Marie-Celeste-like evidence of some long-distant moonlight flit. There was no reply from Jennifer to his letter. He saw what he had done quite clearly, poisoned her mind against Peter Moran without at all advancing his own cause. She would stick to Moran because on his account she had been through fire and water, but she had no enthusiasm left at the prospect of a new marriage or the dissolution of the old. Cohn had flooded the greenhouse plants and the tomatoes, their leaves yellowing, stood in pools of water. John poured away the surplus water and stood there in the stuffy little lean-to that was full of buzzing insects, thinking about Gavin and about love, objects of love. Somehow he had always thought Gavin must have some wild sex life, a succession of glamorous girlfriends, a happy family, devoted mother and sisters too. Perhaps he had but it was a mynah bird he had loved. How astounded those people with the grandchild would be if they knew what their purchase of the mynah had led to! Next day it was made clear to him that they would come to know. The police arrived to tell him Gavin was to be charged with something or other, unlawful wounding it seemed to be. It was in vain that John protested. Apparently, it wasn't up to him to decide. When he asked where Gavin was now they said - sheepishly, he thought - that he had been taken to Summerdale. This was the psychiatric hospital that in John's parents' time had always been known as Copplesfield after the district where it was, and called in those days a lunatic asylum. He would have liked to ask questions and he would have done if Susan Aubrey had been there but it was two policemen he had never seen before, wooden-faced, officious, talking as if tapes of requisite cop-speak played out of their mouths. No sooner had they gone than the phone rang. John had given up trying to cure himself of thinking it was going to be Jennifer. He even elaborated on this. He even started thinking, it's looking after people she likes, it's people in need of care, dependent people, when she knows what happened to me... The voice of Mark Simms, not at all diffident or wary, said: 'Hallo, John. How are you then?' He had no reason to replace the receiver now - or had he perhaps more reason? 'OK,' he said. He knew of old how pointless it would be to tell Mark anything about his encounter with Gavin, anything about his injury or being in hospital. Mark was probably going to apologise. John said, going carefully, to show Mark the way, give him a chance, 'I suppose you've seen they've got someone for the - for Cherry's murder.' There wasn't even a pause. 'That's what I was ringing up about, as a matter of fact. Well, partly that. I wasn't sure if the police had been to you. They've actually kept me quite thoroughly informed, which was a bit unexpected to say the least.' 'They've been to me too.' 'Oh, good. I mean quite right too, but you never know with them. Well, all that's cleared up then, John, the questions answered, the mysteries solved. Old Maitland's son - would you credit it? I knew him by sight. Well, that door's closed for ever. Time to start afresh with a clean slate. And talking of starting afresh, who do you think I'm seeing tonight? Three guesses.' 'I don't know any of your friends, Mark,' John said. 'You know these. Scarcely friends yet though, but who knows? Jennifer and Peter, how about that? I'm invited round for a meal. They said to bring someone, they meant a woman of course, but I don't know any women. You know what a hermit I am. Much like yourself really. You're about the only person I could take and that wouldn't exactly do, would it?' John said it wouldn't do. He put the phone down, having managed to resist promising to go out for a drink some time. It was a strange feeling this, being talked to by someone whose behaviour seemed to defy all the laws of normal human interchange. Weeping and cowering, exposing himself to blows, Mark had cringed at his feet and confessed to a murder he hadn't done and couldn't have done. Whatever his motive - loneliness, guilt, a desire for attention, drunkenness - he had forgotten all about it now, John was sure of that, he had even forgotten it had happened. Drink would do that too probably, wipe away everything except perhaps a vague memory that he had made a fool of himself. And how did he know Jennifer? How did he know Peter Moran? The Fevergate Cafe, of course, when Jennifer had cried and Mark had got a taxi for her, had done more than that, it seemed, had taken her home in that taxi. After a bottle of wine or two he would maybe fall at Jennifer's feet and make some other false confession - that he had murdered his wife, for instance, or (shades of Cohn's hints) had a homosexual affair with him, John. Anything was possible with Mark Simms.

3

Nothing much could happen in a restaurant. Charles knew now that he was going to have to keep that appointment, he had done well and he couldn't stop now. And nothing would happen. There would be some talk and possibly some suggestions made that he would find unpleasant and even frightening, but nothing he couldn't handle in that cool laid-back style he had cultivated and which was now second nature. The odd thing was that notwithstanding all this, he was still afraid. inescapably in his mind throughout all this was a kind of shocked wondering feeling. It was amazing and shocking that he should be contemplating this in the climate currently prevailing, a climate of universal or at any rate national terror of paederasty, assaults on kids, child-rape, child murder and all the rest of it. Adult reaction would be to label him innocent, ignorant even, naively unaware of what might happen to him. Charles, however, was not in the least unaware. Whatever state of ignorance he might have been in a week before, he had remedied this since and now knew more about sexual abuse of juveniles than his parents did. The library and then, when that failed, Hatchard's shelves, had afforded him all he could wish to know and more. He was going into it with his eyes open. He watched the television news with his parents and Sarah. There was something on it about the schools sex education controversy. Should this be left to teachers or to parents? Boys, apparently, seldom if ever discussed these matters at home. Charles, amused in spite of himself, reflected that it might be left to the kids themselves who could do it all in libraries and bookshops. Then a new child's face flashed up on the screen, a newly missing boy. Twelve years old this time. Younger than he was but, according to the description, taller. It was happening all the time, as many boys as girls. This one came from Nottingham. Charles was acutely conscious of himself as they sat there, of his sex and his size and yes, of his golden hair and angel face. He felt his parents' eyes glance fearfully at him and away. The missing boy's mother came on the screen, weeping, wringing her hands, crying when asked if she had anything to say, whoever's taken Roy, please, please, send him back... 'It isn't right, exploiting people like that,' said his father. 'She doesn't have to do it.' 'I'd rather die,' said Gloria. 'If something like that happened to one of my children I should die, I know that.' His poor mother. Charles thought quite dispassionately how ridiculous it would be if the police came to break the news to her that her son was dead and there she was in turquoise blue tights and a skirt above her knees. He wondered what had happened to Roy - one of the nasty things described in his books, he supposed. The papers were full of child-abuse cases. Charles, who had picked up the Free Press, laid it aside. Probably there were no more of these cases than usual, it was his heightened awareness that drew his attention to them, like when he got his music centre for his thirteenth birthday and every paper was full of pieces about the newest albums and every other shop sold record players. He went in with his father in the morning. There was no talk of paederasty. Charles did the cigarette packet trick with the purple ribbon and this was appreciated with guffaws and compliments, especially as the full Silk Cut pack was quickly produced. It was getting on for ten-thirty when they got into town but Charles still had a lot of morning to kill. A mist lay on the surface of the river and a haze, golden with sun, hung in the alleys between buildings on the eastern side. Someone was fishing from the embankment at the foot of the Beckgate Steps. Charles walked across Rostock Bridge and up to the green where the flyover drop was. If Moscow Centre didn't know Mungo was away they might have put another of their messages there, a message which by the very falseness of its commands might be of help to him. But there was nothing inside the central upright. Charles made cat noises. These were not the usual mewing sounds humans make when they want to sound like cats but carefully studied long-practised soft yowls. The effect was immediate and then Charles wished he hadn't mewed so persuasively, for he had nothing to give the six or seven cats who came rubbing themselves against him and pushing whiskery faces against his jeans. It was too far to walk to Feverton even in the interests of using up time, so he went to the bus stop, trying to think positively about the meeting ahead. I have to know what it is Mungo wants, he thought, I have to know the purpose of this contact. It can't just be a test, can it? And if it is just a test, how will I know whether I have passed it or failed it? What I really need is a sign. The Albright-Craven exercise proved in the end one of the easiest Charles had ever undertaken. It just went to show how pointless worry was, how wasteful of time and energy was all this speculation. He tried to make a resolution to stop worrying, to cease speculating. For he had no sooner entered the building by those flashy black and silver doors, had not even approached the lift or been accosted by the porter from the window of his cubbyhole, when he saw the pyramid-shaped stand in the middle of the foyer that proclaimed the Albright-Craven Pentecost Project. On one of the triangular panels was an artist's impression of what the five houses in Ruxeter Road would look like when Albright-Craven had put new windows in and plastered their outsides and put up new balconies, and on another their renewed insides with arches and split levels and kitchens and bathrooms. On the third panel were all the details, specifications and costs and - more to Charles's interest - the projected dates when work on the building would commence and when be finished. 'Starting October,' it said, 'for completion by early summer.' But prospective buyers should secure units now as the demand was expected to be enormous. The porter came over. 'Was there something you wanted, son?' 'I was looking for Mr Robinson,' said Charles. 'There's no Mr Robinson here.' Charles went out into the sunshine. There was plenty of time still, time enough to put a message for Mungo about the fate of the safe house into the flyover drop. On the other hand perhaps not. Moscow Centre had the October Men code. Angus Cameron knew about the flyover, Angus had passed it on to his brother, Charles had heard. Suppose - was it possible? - Angus Cameron or Chimaera, the former head of London Central, was the mole in the department? It was dismaying even to think of it. Charles walked slowly riverwards. The mist had lifted, the water lay a perfectly flat clear silvery-blue, and a herd of swans came up out of the deep shadow under Randolph Bridge. It was all gardens and walks along the river here. Charles bought himself a Cornetto, chocolate mint, from the mobile ice-cream vendor parked in the open space a one-time Labour council had named Rio Plaza. On the river wall, throwing gravel chips into the water, sat Graham O'Neill's brother Keith, code name Scylla. They didn't know each other very well, Charles and he, and their greeting was the bare acknowledgement of a lifted arm. I could go up to Hillbury Place instead, he thought, and get Mummy to buy me lunch, Chinese maybe. With embarrassment he realised he had used in his inner reflections the name for his mother he had cast off two years before. Mummy indeed! Whatever next? Like a child... Up the steep street he went and through the Fevergate. There was a plaque here claiming the walls of the city to be of Roman origin. Charles stood reading the plaque which had been familiar to him since he could first read. It was still only twenty to one but he didn't want to get to the restaurant before Peter Moran did. He wanted to see Peter Moran arrive. From here he could see the Fevergate Cafe with its awning and the tables spread with pink cloths set out underneath it. Peter Moran would also be able to see him. He moved along the wall into one of its embrasures, at this time of the year a mass of pendulous dusty plants. Charles squatted down on his haunches, licked the last of the ice cream out of his Cornetto and offered the wafer tip to a flock of sparrows. He couldn't see the CitWest tower from here and he wasn't wearing his watch but it seemed to him that Peter Moran arrived rather early. He had made sure of arriving before his guest. He swung up the open space between the tables and into the comparative darkness of the restaurant. Charles got to his feet. He was queasily imagining being in a dark corner in there with Peter Moran when the man came out again and took his seat at one of the tables under the awning. It was a relief. Charles waited until he heard a single brazen stroke from St Stephen's clock and then he sauntered across the wide paved walking area where no cars were permitted to go. Peter Moran looked up and smiled. It made him think that there were some people, otherwise quite ugly, whose faces became nice when they smiled. He was wearing an open-necked shirt that looked quite clean and this somehow comforted Charles, though the fact that a silver chain hung against the pale hairs on his chest equally unaccountably did not. 'Hallo, Ian.' For a moment Charles couldn't think what he meant and then he remembered he had given his name as Ian Cameron while they were in the cottage at Nunhouse. He sat down, saying nothing but doing his Guy Parker face, the enigmatic smile Guy was said to have achieved as a result of studying a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Then something dreadful happened, or it seemed dreadful at first. Charles's skin and flesh shrank against his bones. Peter Moran leaned forward, put out his hand and touched Charles's face, one finger touched it anyway, at the corner of his mouth. 'You'd got ice cream on your chin.' The lifted finger showed a brown and green trace. Charles nodded, dumb. 'What would you like to eat, Ian? I mean I suppose that ice cream isn't going to last you long. There's a menu up on that blackboard.' The simple coffee idea had been forgotten then. 'Only don't have the specialities de la maison, so called, do you mind? I'm a poor man, your majesty. Frankly, I'm usually on the breadline. You don't mind my being honest, do you?' Charles shook his head. He knew he had better say something and now. 'What do I call you?' 'Peter. We will be Peter and Ian. Do you know, it never crossed my mind to call you Mr Cameron?' Nothing can happen out here with all these people about, thought Charles. The funny thing was that while he was waiting in the embrasure of the wall he had actually wondered if he could have been wrong about Peter Moran and he wasn't a paederast, he was just a lonely person or someone who missed not having children of his own. The finger touch on his chin had put paid to any wishful thinking of that kind. He did another Guy Parker Mona Lisa, forced himself to read the blackboard and told Peter Moran he would have spaghetti bolognaise and chips. This didn't seem to be too expensive and Peter Moran had it too. He also had wine, cheap wine perhaps because it arrived in a glass jug, but a good deal of it, maybe a whole litre. For Charles there was a can of Coke. Peter Moran began talking about food, Italian food mostly, telling Charles about pasta in Italy, coffee-flavoured tortellini filled with cream and blocks of chocolate, coloured orange or bright green, and cakes of marzipan made in the shape of heads of maize or pods of peas. He evidently thought Charles had a sweet tooth, evinced by the ice cream perhaps. It all brought back from infancy days tales of men who lured children with bags of sweets. 'Enough of this nonsense,' Peter Moran said suddenly. 'Now tell me about yourself. Tell me about Ian Cameron.' Make up as little as possible, thought Charles, who understood the science of lying. He lived in Church Bar, he said, with his parents and his brothers. Although it went against the grain, it was almost painful to have to do it, he lowered his age by two years. Peter Moran seemed to have no difficulty in believing he was only twelve. 'Where do you go to school?' 'Rossingham,' said Charles. 'I'll be starting at Rossingham next term.' The spaghetti came. Charles didn't feel hungry but he knew he would have to force himself to eat it. Peter Moran poured himself a third glass of wine. He said: 'I was at Rossingham.' Charles looked at him. A year at the school had impressed on him its code of neatness and cleanliness. It wasn't unusual to take two showers in one day, commonplace to wear two clean shirts. This had already been Charles's way but some newcomers found it almost bizarre. Yet they conformed, they learned the habit. Peter Moran looked, if not dirty, scruffy. On each occasion Charles had seen him his hair needed a wash. So you could lapse post-Rossingham apparently, you could backslide. The accent was right, Charles suddenly realised, the accent which curiously had puzzled him by its familiarity. It was the Rossingham voice that Peter Moran had, that he too would have some day if he didn't already... The subject had been changed while he was considering and now Peter Moran was talking about interests, hobbies. What did Charles like to do? Was he good at games? Did he collect things? How about the theatre? The cinema? Charles reluctantly admitted to a liking for films. His plate clean, he took the pack of cards out of his jeans pocket and did a waterfall, only a passable one though, not the tour de force with which he had entertained his parents and sister. Peter Moran was impressed. He asked for a repeat performance. As the cards fell for the second time, interweaving, feathering from the left and from the right and from the left, Charles thought how he must get the conversation back to Rossingham. He was aware of an uneasy chilly feeling, in spite of the warmth of the day. 'We might go to a movie together,' Peter Moran was saying. Charles nodded, his smile small and tight. He put the pack away. 'Are you busy on Friday?' 'Friday evening?' said Charles. 'Well, maybe the five-thirty show if you don't have to be late home.' The thick glasses had a way of deadening his eyes according to how his face turned against the light. Sometimes they were just thick glasses, magnifying the pale eyes behind them to preternatural size, sometimes mirrors reflecting Charles's own desperate angel face, and sometimes opaque planes like roundels of dull metal, pewter perhaps, or lead. There was quite a lot of sweat on his skin and it reminded Charles of the drops of moisture that are exuded from stale cheese. He hazarded a suggestion. A try-on it was. If Peter Moran agreed he didn't quite know what he would do. But he was sure he wouldn't agree. 'Do you want to call for me at my house?' The glasses turned to lead as Peter Moran's head gave one of its sharp turns. 'I don't think that would be a very good idea, do you?' That was coming out into the open, Charles thought. That was what he had once heard his father say wasn't calling a spade a spade but a bloody shovel. Peter Moran named a film. It was something Japanese and obscure and showing at the Fontaine in Ruxeter Road. They could meet outside, he said. He gave a broad smile that somehow this time didn't make him look attractive or nice but - Charles sought for a word and came up with an unwelcome one - wolfish. He didn't have to go to the cinema, he didn't have to go near the place. Hadn't he done enough, far over and above the call of duty? 'When were you at Rossingham?' he asked quite abruptly. 'Oh, dear. That would be telling. You'll be asking me my age next. I always give the same answer. Somewhere betwee thirty and death.' He poured the last of his wine, turned and flicked his fingers at the waitress. 'Now it has to be paid for, Ian. Like everything you get in this life, whether it's love or farinaceous strings in tomato sauce. I went to Rossingham in the year of grace nineteen sixty-five. You'll see my name on the list of past pupils in the chapel, hardly a roll of honour. I was in Pitt House and in my last year the incoming housemaster was a dusty eunuch of a latinist called Lindsay.' Charles stared at him, feeling the beginnings of an understanding of Mungo's purposes. 'Don't you believe me? The chapel will prove it to you. And if you need more, if you actually have to put your hand in my side and feel the mouth of the wound...' The grin was wide and humourless again, not flecked with foam of course, but somehow looking as if it should be. 'When you get to Rossingham have a look in study seven in Pitt House, in the old part, not the extension, and under the lower bunk you'll see something - not so much to your advantage as proof positive.' It was the sign, thought Charles. It was what he had been waiting for. Did he need further evidence that Peter had something or knew something Mungo wanted? Wasn't study seven the very study Mungo shared with Graham O'Neill and two others? He watched the man, the ex-Rossingham man, wine-drinker and paederast, paying the bill with a dribble of coins, feeling into the depths of pockets for the last necessary ten pee, and it took all the strength he had not to run away.

4

Lady Arabella's Garden was still white, still fresh and blooming in August. The cupolas and trellises were hung now with the creamy fronds of the russian vine, and still flowering between the flagstones and in the borders amongst ox-eye daisies and bleached tobaccos were the white violas lasting summer through. John sat on a stone seat looking at the flowers, a seat that was carved with maidens and lions and swags of leaves and which grew damp with green mould in spring and autumn but was dry as dust now. His shoulder pained him with a dull rheumatic ache. He had come here to try to heal himself of various bruisings, physical and mental. From encounters with the police at Feverton it was the obvious place to visit for such a purpose. One set of the gates to Hartlands Gardens faced the opaque deceitful one-way windows of the police station. The two people who talked to him, a man and a woman, were not that man and woman he had seen before. They didn't want much from him, only that he should look through the statement he had made sixteen years before, reconfirm it, add to it if he had anything to add. Reading Cherry's name hurt and now caused a curious embarrassment as well. But it was all over and done with in fifteen minutes and the whole empty Thursday afternoon, and a hot sunny one, stretched before him. He sat and looked at the flowers in the sunshine and marvelled again how only white butterflies seemed to come in here, as if they knew. That morning, from the central depot in Bristol, they had sent him a replacement for the mynah bird just as last Monday a replacement had arrived for Gavin, a lively redcheeked young woman who had been one of a team of gardeners at some open-to-the-public showplace. Trees really her field, she told John, which struck him as amusing. The mynah bird's successor was a snow-white and silent cockatoo. John rested his head back against the stone loin of a lion and thought how he had lost his sister for ever. I would never now be able to speak of her to others as once had with reverence and sorrow. There would always be her excesses to remember and get in the way of grief, Mark Simms's absurd false confession that he had swallowed so gullibly. These things would now be inseparable from memories of Cherry in life and death. He understood now that those memories, unspoilt as they then were, had been something for him to hold on to after Jennifer had gone. They were lost as his code-makers, that other consolation, were lost. What was left to him now? Library books, thrillers and Victorian novels. Cohn and mother. Trowbridge's. Tired of this list of questionable assets, he got up and moved away, his arm heavy in its sling, his shoulder stiff. The prospect of the evening ahead to frighten him, for he could think of absolutely nothing to do with it, nowhere to go, no one to visit or phone, nothing he wished to read. And he realised that in all his unhappiness he had never quite felt this. He had never felt panic at the idea of a future, only sadness and - hope. From the white garden he had achieved what he expected, a soothing of wounds. But nothingness, negation, vacancy, can be worse than wounds and all that shimmering scented pallor, those fluttering white wings, had in some strange way shown him a vision of emptiness. Thinking like this. struggling against a rising fear, he walked along the terraci where in the spring, before there was a leaf on these tree that were now foliaged past their prime, he had looked down and seen Jennifer sitting at one of the tables below. Then had fancied himself unhappy but he had been full of a hope which had taken a lot of quenching, and his state retrospect seemed to him enviable. He was looking there now - inevitably - but he wrenched his eyes away, looked ahead of him and saw Susan Aubrey approaching along the terrace path. Since his last sight of her, in Geneva Road when she had come on what was almost an errand of mercy, he had been glancing through the photographs in a library book, an art book about the pictures in the Frick Collection in New York, and had seen the face hers had reminded him of. It was that of a pale blonde young girl with translucent skin and red-gold hair in a painting by Greuze called The Wool Winder. Remembering this somehow intimate thing made the blood come up into his cheeks now they were face to face again. She didn't greet him. She said instead in a voice of consternation, 'What happened to your arm?' Incongruous that he should suddenly think of Peter Moran. He suspected, without real knowledge, that Peter Moran was a person who could make that kind of thing funny, tell it wittily. A madman who was in love with a talking bird duffed me up with a pitchfork, he would say. Something like that. John wasn't able to do it himself and never would be able to. Perhaps that was what Jennifer liked about the one of them she did like. Never mind all that stuff about people depending on her and needing her. He told Susan Aubrey the history of his injured shoulder in quite a straightforward way and then they were walking down the steps towards the tables and the cafeteria. It was she, not he, who happened to choose the very table he and Jennifer had sat at when she had told him she wanted a divorce. When he had fetched their tea on a tray and two matchbox-sized pieces of fruit cake wrapped in cellophane, he told her about it. He thought, what the hell, why not, and he told her. It had something to do with the empty feeling and nothing much mattering any more. He would have told her about Peter Moran being convicted for sexual abuse of a child only his inhibition on naming things like that in front of a woman, even a policewoman, held him back. 'You've had a bad time,' she said. 'A sea of troubles. I'd say the tide's bound to turn now.' 'I hope you're right. My father used to say, "Cheer up, things might be worse, so I cheered up and they got worse."' She laughed and he felt that perhaps being a wit was possible even now. He was glad he hadn't added that his father never said that or anything like that after Cherry died. And then, as she finished her cake and brushed crumbs off her dark blue skirt, flicked with a fingernail a sugar gram from the Greuze chin, he thought, why don't I ask her to have dinner with me? Tonight - well, this evening, supper really, or a meal at that Indian place I went to with Mark, the Hill Station? For two reasons, he thought. They had got up and were moving out of the circle of tables, about to separate, she to continue northwards across the gardens, he to seek the Feverton entrance. Two reasons - I would keep thinking of Jennifer, I would wish she was Jennifer, I might even make a fool of myself and call her Jennifer. And then I am afraid, I am afraid she would say no. Perhaps that's really why I haven't asked, I can't ask, he thought as they parted and she turned back once and waved. I haven't the nerve or the resources to face rejection...

5

On the crown of the hill, at a viewing place, a telescope was sited for a better appreciation of the panorama of rocks, cypresses, olive groves, broken columns, and gushing water below. A certain amount of drachmae had to be put into slot in order to see more than a blur but the telescope no longer functioned and even its coin slot was blocked with dust. Mungo leant over the low wall, inhaling - so deep was his pleasure - rather than merely smelling the scent of the hillside herbs, the thyme and oregano and bay. It wasn't hard to imagine gods come to earth here, larger-than-animated statues he saw them as, in robes like fluted cloud. Down the slope Ian and Gail were chasing butterflies, not to catch them but to get a closer look at wing spans and colours unknown at home. The heat was intense, but somehow light and dry. 'Seems funny to think this place once belonged to us,' said Graham. 'What do you mean, to us?' 'Well, it was a British Protectorate after the Napoleonic Wars. We had a governor here for about fifty years.' Graham was marvellous on history, he was going to do history at university. While Angus asked him about it, about how the British ever managed to get a foot in the Ionian Sea, Mungo turned to examine the telescope. It was stupid having it here if it didn't work, its ineffectual presence an affront to nature. Then, as he touched the blackened brass band on the cylinder, a fuse of memory was lit and the solution he had been seeking for months exploded. 'Ang,' he said, 'Graham.' 'What?' Angus had already started down the slope. He turned round under the bay trees. 'I've broken Moscow Centre's code,' Mungo said. 'It just came to me in a flash of enlightenment. God, it was like one of those experiences mystics have. Everything was explained and made clear.' 'Saint Bean,' said Angus. 'You can mock but it was like that.' Mungo had his code-book out and was turning to his lists of Stern's messages, all with their ultimate numbers. 'Listen. We knew the numbers at the end were the time. I realised that last week - I told Graham, didn't I? - I realised those numbers were times, not nine hundred and forty-two but nine forty-two, not one thousand and three but three minutes past ten. And I knew they were on a digital clock because Graham's got his with him in our room, but what I see now is that it's a particular digital clock. It's the one on the CitWest tower.' 'How did you see that on a hill in Corfu?' Graham said, grinning. 'Not because I'm a visionary. It was the telescope.' Graham's eyebrows went up. He was wearing the tee shirt he had bought in Corcyra with a genuine jellyfish printed on it. 'Charles Mabledene took that photograph of Perch's room when he got into Utting. You remember that, don't you? It's in the departmental archives. The photograph didn't show much but it did show he keeps a telescope on the windowsill. That was the clue to the code only we never saw it. You couldn't see the clock on the CitWest tower from as far away as Utting but you could through a telescope. You couldn't see the tower from Rosie Whittaker's - not at ground level you couldn't. But you would be able to from the top floor of their house. The rest of Moscow Centre's agents would all be able to see the tower with the naked eye, or if not, with telescopes or binoculars.' Angus gave an angry twitch of his head. 'So what? When are you going to get over all this, Bean? I mean, isn't the joke wearing a bit thin?' He who never lost his temper roared suddenly, 'You have to live, do you know that? You have to be a normal human being. When are you going to have a life instead of a game?' And he plunged down the slope towards his father and mother unpacking picnic things. 'Take no notice,' Graham said kindly. 'It's just that he' pissed off over Diana not coming.' Mungo wasn't concerned. 'What they do is, start with the date the person getting the message is to act on. That's what the first number is. Then they write the message in the code they directed yesterday or whenever and at the end they put the time in digits. It's the time on the prearranged date at which whoever gets the message is to look at the digital on the CitWest tower and note the temperature. Say, for example, the message begins with nine and ends with nine two three. That means the recipient has to look at the CitWest clock at twenty-three minutes past nine on the 9th and if the temperature is twelve degrees, start making a code alphabet from the twelfth letter of the alphabet.' Mungo was writing now, dashing off numbers and letters in his notebook rested on the old stone wall. Graham came and looked over his shoulder. 'It does work. It's working out beautifully. You see, here's the last message we picked out of Lysander Douglas's hand. If you work from the message previous to that it directs with the numbers two seven then one O one five. That means Perch, say, had to look at the CitWest clock on the twenty-seventh at ten fifteen, record the temperature and work the code from whatever number in the alphabet the temperature was.' 'But we can't. We don't know what the temperature was.' 'No, but we can make guesses. Somewhere between twelve and twenty degrees, wouldn't you think? On the twenty-seventh of July at ten fifteen in the morning? Or, that is to say, starting the code alphabet somewhere between L and T. 'You couldn't do it with Fahrenheit,' Graham said. 'You could only do it with Celsius and in a climate where the temperature hardly ever goes above twenty-six.' 'If it does I expect they start again from the beginning, twenty-seven being one and twenty-eight two and so on. We'll try it later, we'll start by assuming it was fifteen degrees. That's Dad yelling for us. He worries some of us will get lost and carried off by brigands.' Graham nodded, grinning. He held out his hand in a funny grown-up old-fashioned gesture. 'Congratulations.' They shook hands. Mungo got embarrassed suddenly and vaulted over the wall and went running down to the picnic.

6

'Someone was asking for a monkey puzzle,' said the girl called Flora, the new assistant manager. Flora in a garden centre among the flowers, it was absurd. 'Araucaria araucana, the Chile pine.' She was as bad as Gavin with her Latin names, John thought. 'I suppose we might get her one.' 'I told her they'd gone out of fashion. You never see them.' 'There's one of them trees in John's road,' said Sharon, protruding sea-anemone lips into her handbag mirror, starting to outline them with red pencil. 'Geneva, is it, John, or Lucerne?' 'Geneva,' he said, having no idea how she knew about the monkey puzzle, and not much caring. She could walk along there much as anyone else was free to do. He made an effort. Everything had become an effort, every utterance, even the 'Can I help you?' to customers. 'It's a fine specimen, I daresay a hundred years old from when they were fashionable.' 'I'll come down and look at it one of these fine days. I'm partial to the old Araucaria.' The top flowerpot from the stack Flora was holding toppled and fell to the ground with a crash. That was the fourth thing she had smashed since she came less than a week before. John thought her one of the most accident-prone and giddy creature he had ever come across. 'Sorry. Still, it's only a pot.' John didn't say anything but went into the greenhouse, into the warm damp and the bitter scent. it Friday, a Friday coming to its end, and another weekend waited over the brink of it. You could easily reach a point in this world when you didn't know anyone, when you had no acquaintances, still less had friends. You could reach point when all days were exactly the same, limbo, neither happy nor sad. And there could come a time - for him he thought it might already have come - when all your memories were too painful to revive and although they were all you had, there was nothing for it but strive to crush them into oblivion. People would call it self-pity but that implied being sorry for oneself and he didn't feel pity for anyone much, least of all himself. It was rather as if he had withdrawn from involvement. With Jennifer only was there something left, fear for her really, as to what would become of her in her chosen role of guardian and protector to Peter Moran. He walked along the aisle, testing the dampness of the soil in the pots with his forefinger. Someone had slightly over-watered them. Flora, probably. John didn't want to go home, would have liked the afternoon to go on and on, five-thirty never coming, the shoppers continuing to trickle in, taking their trolleys or baskets, choosing their little pots of alpines, cacti, or herbs, lingering outside in the hot perpetually four o'clock sunshine, forever. Les had gone out as he always did about this time for the evening paper and four Marathon bars. Trowbridge's sold only healthy snacks, tropical mix fruit and nuts, sunflower seeds, harvest crunch. It hadn't been a busy afternoon and the place was empty now. Sharon, reading the paper, said to Flora: 'They found that missing boy, the Nottingham one.' 'Alive, d'you mean?' 'Are you kidding? They never are alive.' Half a dozen people came in through the swing doors. John went to help a man who said rather hectoringly that it was roses he was interested in, only roses. As he passed Flora on his way to the rose-garden exit he saw that, facing the shelves, her back turned, she was quietly weeping and he knew, with a kind of hopeless wonder, that it was for a child she didn't know in a place she had very likely never been to.

7

A customer was coming in to view and test-drive one of the big Volvos. This was the reason Charles's father had made an exception to his rule of not coming in on Fridays. He brought Charles in with him at three and to his son's consternation, started showing some interest in why he wanted to come in at all. Charles said truthfully that he was going to the cinema but untruthfully that it was to see Aliens at the Odeon. 'How are you going to get home?' 'The last bus, I expect.' Getting home seemed an unreal concept. Or as if he were getting to the end of a journey and the limousine that awaited him was standing in sight, but between him and it was a deep gulf probably too wide to Jump. 'The last Fenbridge bus goes from the station at nine.' 'You weren't thinking of hitching, I hope.' Truthful again, Charles said he hadn't been. His father started on another of his lectures about not speaking to strangers. Then he said Charles must get a taxi, not a bus at the station, and he gave him the money for the fare. Charles thought it was like deliberately spending a night in a leper hospital after you'd been told to mind and not catch a cold. He hung about the garage for a while. In the shop when you paid for petrol they sold chocolate bars and knick knacks and weird things like cut flowers and plastic toys. Charles helped himself to a couple of Yorkies and, almost as an afterthought, to one of the penknives stuck on coloured card that hung up among the ballpoints and rings. He took it off its card and opened the blades. If they were each five centimetres long that was all they were and just remotely capable of injuring someone if handled, say, by a really experienced surgeon who knew exactly the location of the hyoid or the medulla or one of those things. Charles grinned ruefully to himself but he put the penknife into his pocket.

Just before four-thirty he went to get the bus. He intended to be early. This would be the first time he had ever been to this cinema, the Fontaine, which for as long as he could remember had shown foreign or controversial or less generally popular films. There was no sign of Peter Moran. Charles started walking round a bit, though the area was familiar to him, harbouring as it did the safe house. It hadn't occurred to him that Peter Moran might come by car, though he knew he had a car, having of course cleaned it at their first meeting. He recognised it at once parked on a meter in Collingbourne Road. It was clear to him that while he had been walking round the other way via Lomas Road and Fontaine Road, Peter Moran had parked here and gone to wait outside the cinema. Charles decided to try to avoid getting in that car if he could help it. He was wearing his watch today and saw that it was close to five. The heat had been intense all day, thirty degrees he had noticed when he saw the CitWest clock from the top of his bus. It made him wonder how high that digital record could go. Forty degrees? Forty-five? Perhaps they made different ones for different climates. The heat had somehow thickened during the afternoon and the sky grown overcast without much diminishing the sun's glare. He was aware of a powerful smell compounded of petrol and diesel fumes, gas and drains, something which he had noticed in the past was strongest just before a storm. He noticed something else different too. The corrugated metal was gone from the fronts of the houses in Pentecost Villas and their shabby front doors were exposed. Builders or architects or someone had been in. Peter Moran was standing outside the Fontaine, apparently studying the poster of Samurai swordsmen. He had his white tee-shirt on. From the back he looked very thin and fleshless, his elbows knobby, his legs like sticks. As Charles approached he turned round. 'Hi, Ian.' 'Hallo,' said Charles. 'I have to warn you I never make comments on the weather, however extreme.' Charles smiled, saying nothing. He hoped the cinema would be crowded. They were directed into what was no more than a large room, carpet-lined, air-conditioned, claustrophobic - and empty. It was Charles's first moment of real fear. He had the sensation that he wouldn't have been able to get out if he had wanted to, of the doors having been locked behind them, though this of course must be nonsense. Their tickets were not numbered and Peter Moran chose to sit four rows from the front and in the centre. That at any rate was better than being at the side up against the wall. A curtain of black velvet with a gold pattern on it hung in front of the screen. It was silent when they entered but as soon as they sat down music of the popular classical kind began playing and Charles couldn't escape the rather uneasy conclusion that it had only started on account of their presence. It wasn't the sort of cinema where they sold ice cream and soft drinks. Peter Moran had brought a bag of wrapped chocolates with him and these he passed to Charles while he talked about Rossingham. He talked about starting at Rossingham and the people he knew there and Pitt House and the man who was housemaster there before Mr Lindsay. Charles knew that this was what it was all about, it must be. This had to be the object of the exercise. Sooner or later Peter Moran was going to tell him some vital fact and he sensed too that he would know it immediately he heard it. But he couldn't help noticing Peter Moran's smell. He smelt very clean, of soap and possibly even some sort of cologne. And he had washed his hair which stood out soft and yellow with ragged split ends - with a mother like Charles's you observed that kind of thing - and which also smelt scented. Just before the lights dimmed three more people came in. Being English, they sat as far away from each other and from Charles and Peter Moran as was possible. The curtain was swept aside and the ads and previews, followed by a cartoon, began. Charles felt better having the other people there. The lights came up again and Peter Moran excused himself to go to the men's. Charles hoped the other people would note his appearance and Peter Moran's just in case anything happened and he went missing and they needed witnesses. He stared into the faces of the two behind him, trying to give them a good view. Peter Moran came back and at last the Japanese picture started, almost an hour after they had come in. It seemed darker in the cinema than during the cartoon. The film was not dubbed but sub-titled and there was not even much of that, for on the whole the characters, of whom there were dozens, didn't talk. It was beautiful to look at, Charles could see that, and there was some elaborate stylized dancing but just the same it was incomprehensible. Peter Moran seemed fascinated by it. Not so absorbed, though, as to keep from putting his arm lightly round Charles's shoulders. The arm was only on the back of his seat at first. When he felt the hand touch him, though he was expecting it, he couldn't help a sort of leaping flinch. But he controlled himself, he made himself relax. And then he could almost feel the gratitude in the hand, the fingers pressing with relief at not being flung furiously away. In this small auditorium it was quite cold. The air conditioning created the temperature of an autumn day. Charles was rather glad of the cold, of feeling he wasn't wearing quite enough clothes, for it distracted him from his revulsion and his gradually increasing fear. Soon, he he would start shivering. The film was fairly noisy, drum beats and strange music and the clash of weapons, not with talk, but Charles could hear an occasional heavy rumbling as well. If this had been about the Second World War or Vietnam or something like that he would have thought it gunfire. Then there came a crash like a bomb and Charles knew it was thunder, outside and not in the film, that he was hearing. The film seemed interminable. In a lighter sequence, the screen lit with Japanese sunshine, Charles looked at his watch and saw that it was already past eight. By the time they got out of here it would be getting dark. The thought horrified him. But then, before another five minutes had gone by, without any apparent warning in the story, it was all over and the lights were coming on. Peter Moran's arm had been quickly withdrawn. 'Strange stuff,' he said, 'or was it all crystal clear to you?' 'I couldn't follow it at all.' 'I'm sorry about that. My mistake. Mea culpa, as house-master Lindsay might say. Should I have taken you to A Hundred and One Dalmatians?' They were leaving the Fontaine and a brilliant lightning flash, followed by a clap of thunder sounding like wooden planks tossed on to a concrete floor, cut off Charles's answer. True to his claim never to speak of the weather, Peter Moran said: 'I expect you're hungry. I've got something to eat in the car. I mean I brought it with me. As I may have told you, I'm an impecunious beggar, erratically supported by my woman who sometimes lets a few crumbs fall in my direction.' Charles had eaten nothing since his lunch but the two Yorkies washed down with a cup of tea someone had given him at the garage and two of Peter Moran's chocolates. He wasn't in the least hungry though; he felt very slightly sick, his throat gagging. As they crossed the road, passing the front of Pentecost Villas, the first drops of rain began to fall, making big black circular splashes on the pavement. Once he got into that car, he thought, he would have no control at all over his movements. Peter Moran could drive them anywhere, out into the country perhaps, to some remote place of heath or woodland. And by then it would be dark. The car was now in sight and Charles had a premonition Peter Moran would suggest they run for it before the rain came on harder. He thought of the safe house, empty, supplied with candles, well known to him and not known at all to Peter Moran. A truly 'safe' house in that it contained rooms into which one could if necessary lock oneself. 'I used to live there,' he said. 'My family used to live there. We moved out because they're going to turn it into flats. The middle one was our house.' Peter Moran had a parking ticket stuck under one of the windscreen wipers. He tore it off, cursing. He hadn't put enough money in to last from five till six-thirty metering ended. Opening the car door and feeling inside, tie said: 'Who lives there now?' 'Nobody lives there now. I've got a key.' 'Have you now?' Peter Moran looked at him. It was a strange look, Charles couldn't have said what it expressed, but he didn't like it. He didn't like the tightening of the muscles and the moistening of those pale lips with a curiously pale tongue. 'Are you saying we could go in there and eat our grub? Shelter from the rain?' He began to smile. 'Better than a car, maybe?' 'We have to go in the back way,' said Charles. Peter Moran removed from the back of the car a half-full carrier bag from which the neck of a wine bottle protruded. 'Tuck,' he said. 'You'll have to see if they still call it tuck at Rossingham. I get the impression you rather like hearing me talk about Rossingham, don't you?' 'Very much.' The rain began in earnest as they turned the corner into Fontaine Road. As the thunder receded to grumble softly the distance, the heavens seemed to open. 'Can we run for it?' 'Sure,' said Charles. He opened the gate into that wilderness of a garden. The back of the house reared up like a cliff. Lightning flared and showed them a rampart with blank or broken windows, a peeling facade hung with dying creeper. Charles went ahead knowing he must get there first so that Peter Moran wouldn't see he didn't actually have a key. Some deft deceiving finger movements were made and the door pushed open. Down here it was pitch dark but there were candles in the table drawer and matches beside them. Charles lit the candles and pocketed the matches. He felt the knife there, the small useless penknife. 'You come here often, I can see that,' said Peter Moran. 'We'll go upstairs. It's nicer upstairs. Charles led the way. It grew lighter as they climbed. He held two candles and Peter Moran one. The rain roared on the windows, throbbing through the house. Charles was quite wet, his shirt sticking to him and water dripping from his hair. The first thing he looked for on the threshold of the big room where the furniture was, was the key. He looked on the inside of the door and the outside but the key wasn't there. 'Nice place you have here,' Peter Moran said, holding his candle aloft and looking round. 'I particularly like the day bed.' The long windows shimmered and looking out of them was like looking into an aquarium, flowing water only, streams of water, and distantly beyond it, dark blueness and a goldfish speck of light. A stuffy dusty warmth made Charles feel he was steaming. The food and drink was tumbled out on to the metal garden seat, a couple of wrapped pies, biscuits, a can of Coke. Peter Moran felt the wine bottle and pronounced it warm. 'But I don't suppose you have a fridge?' Charles shook his head. The place was subtly different. It was changed, things had gone, two of the chairs, for instance. The long ragged pink curtains and as far as he could see most of the cobwebs had gone. And the keys had gone. Unless they were inside the doors, and London Central had never kept them inside, all the keys on this floor were gone. 'You're soaking wet,' Peter Moran said. 'So are you.' 'I could dry you on my jacket. I've got a jacket in here.' In the bottom of the carrier, a woolly thing. Charles closed his eyes and felt a sinking of the heart, of more than that, as if all the organs of his body dropped, at his folly in coming in here, in coming up here. The cataracts flowing down the glass seemed to close them in more firmly than mere bricks and windows. He could see beyond the waterfall something green and distant winking on and off. The woolly folds of Peter Moran's sweater, sheep-smelling as soon as it absorbed the water, enveloped his head. Hands began a gentle rubbing. The two candles on the arms of the metal seat burnt with elongated steady flames. Their shadows were cast long and black, a Frankenstein monster, thin and stretched, Peter Moran looked like, grasping in its paws some hydrocephalic creature, strangling it perhaps or punching its wobbly head. Charles broke free but not in a panicky way. He pushed his fingers through his damp hair, smoothing it. Peter Moran was very close to him, looking at him without actually touching him. He said: 'Come and sit down. We can have the food.' He sat on the rotting silk cover of the chaise longue, patted the seat beside him. Charles felt himself creep to it, feeling his way as if he were blind. 'Come here.' No power on earth, no act of will or need could have made Charles move nearer. The rain had become even more violent and the crashing it made against the facade and windows of the house gave Charles the illusion it was in his own head, his blood roaring. Peter Moran shifted up close to him, said in a bashful nervous monotone: 'When I was about your age and starting at Rossingham I was very lonely, I felt alone and abandoned. I was very happy at home and I didn't want to go away to school. I couldn't settle in at Rossingham, no one seemed to like me and I didn't like anyone.' Charles was thinking about upstairs, about getting out on to the roof. It was quite possible, Mungo and probably Graham too had done it. You went up through the trap into the loft, pulling the ladder up behind you, and out of the loft on to the slates through a sort of hatch... 'There was this gardener at Rossingham, a groundsman I suppose you'd call him. Just an ordinary working man, young you know, about twenty. He was kind to me, he was loving to me - do you know what I mean?' Peter Moran's voice was breathy and excited. 'I'm talking about physically loving. I made him happy and after a bit I was happy too, I wasn't lonely any more.' 'I'm not lonely,' Charles said, his voice coming out as a squeak, babyish, terrified. He was curiously hypnotised, unable to take his eyes off Peter Moran's pale windowed unblinking eyes. A paralysis held him still, listening to the sounds that might be the noises of the storm or his own blood beating. Yet there was still a cold intellectual core somewhere a very long way inside him, a mind that said, is this it? Is this what I am supposed to discover? Peter Moran put out his hand and laid it on Charles's thigh. It burned through his jeans like a hot iron and he jumped up, grabbed one of the candles and ran to the door. The flame streamed and the shadows flew like a flock of monstrous birds. Peter Moran shouted: 'Ian, come back!' Charles was out of the door and running up the last flight. Hot wax poured down the candle and the flame guttered. Peter Moran came out of the room holding the other candle. At the top of the steep stairs Charles leapt across the landing to the open door, the keyless door, and his candle went out. He turned, dreadfully at bay, the rooms, the doors, useless to him. Peter Moran stood two stairs from the top, lit by the flame he held, his own features and his glasses casting shadows on his face, and a great black shadow of the whole of him stark on the wall behind. 'You little devil. What the hell do you think you're doing?' Charles's hand crushed the matchbox in his pocket. His thumb flicked out one of the small blunt blades of the penknife. In the light from the single candle he could see wound round the cleat the rope that held the heavy double ladder close up to the ceiling. The worn bit on the rope showed, no one had replaced it. Charles pulled the knife out of his pocket. He dropped the candle and the saucer broke. Peter Moran was looking at the knife and somehow Charles could see he thought he was going to throw it. He came up one stair. He said: 'Give me that.' Charles shook his head. He couldn't speak, he had no voice, but his fear was going just the same. His fear was being sucked out of him and replaced by a springing hard energy, like pain. He put out the hand that held the knife, holding it steady, his thumb pressed hard down on the handle. He held it as if for an overarm stab. One stair more Peter Moran came up, made a lunge for the knife, and as he did so Charles raised it and brought it down hard on the frayed rope. Afterwards he thought, he hadn't meant that, he only wanted the ladder. He only wanted even then to escape by the roof. It was the quickest way to undo the rope. But it wasn't really true any of that; he had meant it, he knew what he was doing, he knew in his adrenaline high what the outcome would be, what would happen. It happened horrifyingly fast. There was no creaking hesitation, no pause or tremor before the cumbersome mass of wood and metal fell. It swept down in an avenging arc missing Charles by inches but enough inches, and as if for this accurate strike, smashed into the man's jaw. He had tried to duck, he was aware enough for that, and he did duck, but it struck his jaw just the same with a sickening crunch of bone and, sweeping on, cast him backwards down the stairs. The extinction of the candle and Peter Moran's scream, a howling cry of pain, happened simultaneously. The ladder swung wide over the head of the stairs, back towards Charles who leapt aside, and shuddered to a stop. Charles was left up there in the doorway in the darkness. He had fallen on to his hands and knees and he was screaming too, involuntarily, short sharp screams like a very young child.

PART FIVE

1

There was silence. The rain had ceased. Charles stopped making those childish sounds. He got to his feet and stood still, forcing himself to take deep breaths, feeling the trembling in his legs gradually grow less. After a moment or two he bent down and, grubbing about in the dark, picked up the candle Peter Moran had dropped and the saucer it was in which had not broken. He re-lit the candle and, carrying it, crept across to the head of the stairs. The storm, which he had thought past, reasserted itself in a last violent flare, a huge lightning flash irradiating all of this top floor, the stairwell, the angled slopes of the ceiling, the open doors and hollow empty rooms, the ladder, that engine of destruction. Thunder, as loud and sharp as the ladder striking the floor, followed in a split instant. In the flood of light Charles saw Peter Moran lying broken and twisted at the foot of the steep narrow stairs. He put his hand across his mouth to stop himself crying out again. The darkness came back, walls of it outside the leaping circle of candlelight. Charles began going downstairs. With head averted, he passed the man who lay half on the bottom stair, half on the landing floor, and went into the room that had furniture in it. Peter Moran's woolly garment, the thing he had dried Charles's head with, lay on the chaise longue. Sprawled across the floor, where Peter Moran had perhaps kicked them over in his pursuit of Charles, lay a packet of sandwiches, crumpled paper napkins, the tissue wrappings of the wine bottle. The windows, washed clean, showed a clear brilliant darkness shot with jewel-like bright-coloured lights, the winking green clock: nine-sixteen and fourteen degrees. The temperature had fallen sixteen degrees since they went into the cinema. So much had happened since they went into the cinema! Charles was still shaking. It was something he couldn't handle. Deep breathing failed to control it. He was shaking so much he was afraid of actually dropping the candle and he set it down in its saucer on the edge of the metal garden seat. Now he knew he must look at Peter Moran, he must make himself go over there and bend down and look at him. Charles took the matches out of his pocket. He lit a match to help him out of the room, leaving the candle behind him, lighting up the room, the metal seat casting a shadow of ribs and arcs like some strange, non-human skeleton. The door swung behind him, cutting off the light. His match burnt down, he lit another. He opened his eyes, which he had closed without meaning to, and made himself look at Peter Moran. Gradually he dropped into a squatting position. Another match was needed. The initial bright flare of it showed Charles the dreadful purple contusion on the side of his jaw where the ladder had struck his face. The cheek was cut, lacerated by some metal protrusion probably, and had been bleeding but it wasn't bleeding now. Charles thought, I can't touch him. At once he knew he had to touch him, he had to know. The match burnt out, burnt his fingers. He was in darkness alone with Peter Moran, alone, still and silent. Curiously, the shaking had stopped. Peter Moran must have struck the back of his head on the skirting board which stuck out at the foot of the stairs in a sharp-angled wedge. He had fallen backwards very hard and struck his head. Still in the dark - it was somehow better in the dark - Charles put out his hand, his hand crept to Peter Moran's face and felt the skin, felt the forehead. It wasn't cold but it was cool. It wasn't warm as his own forehead was warm. Charles was holding his breath and he expelled it now. He put his hand on his own chest and found his heart. It was beating away like anything, a strong young healthy heart that drove highly oxygenated blood round the body to cope with fear. Charles found the same spot on Peter Moran's chest and laid his hand there. For a moment he felt a terror that Peter Moran would suddenly sit up, clasp him in his arms. But nothing like that happened; nothing happened. There was a slack heavy stillness under his hand. Charles drew in his breath with a harsh rattling gasp. He pulled away his hand as if something had bitten it. And yet he had known all along really, he had known from the moment the ladder struck, that Peter Moran was dead. Another match dropped to the floor. He lit the last he was to light there. He touched Peter Moran again, feeling the skin again, feeling it colder surely, dislodging the head somehow so that it slipped and lolled on to the other side, the mouth falling open and showing a bloodiness inside. Charles shouted out in shock, it was too much for him, it was the pits of horror. He dropped the matchbox and made for the stairs, running down in the dark past the grey streaming window, holding on to the bannister. At the foot there was grey light, about as dark as light could be, coming in from open doors. He stumbled across to that kitchen they sometimes used for meetings, to the back door he and Peter Moran had come in by, pushed it open and stood on the back step in cold fresh air. The air felt as if it were new, or like pure oxygen. And at his feet Charles saw water, more than puddles, less than a flood. A great still pool of water lay covering the remains of a path. Avoiding it, he slopped through the wet long grass, under the dripping trees, up to the gate in the wall. He didn't look back until he was out in Fontaine Road. Then he wished he hadn't looked back, up to the window set high in the wall of the stairwell between the first floor and the attics. For there was a light on in there, a light of a pale orange colour that moved and leapt behind the glass. He wasn't dead, Charles thought. How would I know if anyone was dead or not? He wasn't dead but he had got up and lit the candle and was coming down the stairs holding the candle aloft... Charles started to run. He ran past the parked Diane, through the puddles, the sheets of water, across the road and down Ruxeter Road, putting the house and Peter Moran and the moving light far behind him.

2

His arm was out of the sling and only a small dressing was on the wound but perhaps it was a mistake to go out on the motorbike again so soon. His shoulder ached. It was a mistake too calling on people without forewarning them. John realised that he hadn't phoned Cohn because he was afraid of not being wanted, of being put off. But that was an unwise way to go on. And yet the worst he thought could happen was that Cohn and his mother would be out and he would have had a fruitless journey. All the way out there the idea was with him that he could talk to these two, especially to Constance, tell her of his inability even to think about Cherry, use Constance as a kind of psycho-therapist. Cohn came to the door. His face fell when he saw John. He looked almost laughably like Harpo Marx when he has done something wrong and is in trouble for it. Constance was out, he said, she was out as she always was on Friday at some over-sixties whist club she belonged to. John hadn't known that, hadn't known about this Fridays club, or had forgotten. Of course Cohn had to ask him in, but it was a near thing. John went into the living room and sitting on the sofa was a woman, a youngish quite pretty woman with lipstick spread over her chin but none on her mouth. Awkward introductions were made. John stayed not more than ten minutes, refusing the drink that was offered him. Was this what Cohn did every Friday evening when mother was out? John had never dreamt of it. It had shocked him rather and - yes, this must be confessed - made him envious. Returning home on the Honda, he heard a fire-engine siren behind him as he came into town. He was in Ruxeter stil coming into Ruxeter Road, and he pulled in to let the engines pass him, travelling at high speed, their sirens howling. Ahead of him he could see a dense pall of brown smoke with a red glow in the heart of it. An inch of rain must have fallen just before he left home and in places the gutters were still full of water from overflowing drains. The wheels of the Honda were deep in gutter water. John pulled back on to the crown of the road. A few hundred yards along, diversion signs had been put up, directing the traffic round to the right. The diversion led westwards nearly as far as the station. The slow heavy stream of traffic wasn't directed out again until Nevin Square was reached. There a policeman was directing traffic, letting more fire engines through, an ambulance. John wondered if some building back up there had been struck by lightning. It took him a further half-hour to get home and he had scarcely put the Honda away when the phone started to ring. John, who had believed he would never hear the phone again without expecting it to be Jennifer, didn't now even consider Jennifer as a possibility. It was very late for anyone to phone - or late by his standards. Perhaps, though, it was Cohn, feeling the need to offer an explanation. John sighed. He picked up the receiver, said hallo. Jennifer's voice, anxious, rather sharp, seemed to penetrate his body and run through his bones, to find the wound and pluck at it. 'John, is Peter with you?' 'Peter? With me?' He heard himself stammering. It was such a shock, it was so unexpected. 'Why would Peter be with me?' And he added, 'The last place surely...' 'I don't know. He might have come to you, I did suggest he ought to talk to you himself. About the divorce and the house and everything. I'm phoning everyone we know, everywhere he might be.' Being lumped with 'everyone we know' hurt very much. 'He isn't here.' 'He was going to the cinema,' she said, 'with some friend of his, someone he was at school with. But it was the early showing. He said he'd be back by nine at the latest.' He has left her again, John thought. He has left you, he wanted to say but he didn't say it. 'A bit premature, aren you?' he said. 'It's only half-past ten.' His voice softened; he couldn't help that. 'Don't worry,' he said, and then, 'I'm here if you need me. Phone me again if you need me.' After he had put the receiver down he thought, why didn I say I would come to her? Why didn't I say I'd come and take charge? He lifted the phone to call her back but the line was engaged. He has left her, he has left her, he repeated over and over, silently first and then aloud to the empty house. Hope began once more to revive. When he has left her for the second time she will come back to me...

3

From this part of town there was no bus direct to the main-line station in South Hartland. Charles knew that no taxi driver he stopped in the street would be prepared to ta him fifteen miles out into the country at this time of night. He had to get to the station, walk it in fact. But walking is not easy when you are in a state of shock. His legs trembled and, behaving like a paraplegic's, did not obey his brain's commands. They simply would not move quickly. What he probably needed, he thought, was brandy. Not that he had ever tasted brandy, and if what people said was true, it was the last thing one ought to have on an empty stomach. Charles's stomach was very empty, having received nothing but the Yorkies and half a dozen of Peter Moran's chocolates since lunch. Whatever that light might have been it was not Moran pursuing him. He knew that now. Most likely it the candle he now remembered he had left burning in room with the furniture. Perhaps the door to that room had blown open and revealed the light. Something like that. Ruxeter Road was quite crowded and with a lot of traffic. It was a busy part of town with pubs and cinemas and restaurants and this was Friday night. Charles crossed the street and trudged on northwards, his pace steadying and quickening after a while as control returned. The evening behind him he had expelled from his mind or perhaps his own consciousness had blanked it off, but now it gradually came back. He supposed he had murdered Peter Moran. Killed him anyway, killed him in self-defence. How odd. How peculiar that he should have done such a thing. He didn't feel any different and he supposed he didn't look any different. It was quite something to have actually killed someone when you were only just fourteen, something that probably hardly ever happened. At first he didn't take much notice of the sirens. You couldn't tell anyway if they were on police cars or ambulances or fire engines. Charles did think for a split second that they could be police cars in pursuit of him, but this he dismissed immediately. It was impossible. Then he saw a fire engine, coming westwards from the fire station at Feverton, its siren blasting away, the cars pulling in to let it pass. He hadn't far to go now; he had already turned into the long King's Avenue that would become Station Road. King's Avenue went uphill and then down again to where the station and the marshalling yards were. The hill was the highest point in the city after Fonthill Heights. Another fire engine came over the top and Charles turned to watch it charge down the other side. He could see the fire now, about a mile to the south. Neither then nor at any time until he saw the local television news on the following morning did it occur to him that the fire might have been in Pentecost Villas, in the safe house. That the candle, precariously balanced on the edge of the garden seat, might have fallen and ignited all that paper, never crossed his mind. Only the idea of the fire itself interested him. He wished he were nearer to it or it to him so that he might see what happened. There were no taxis on the rank when he walked into the station approach. That meant a train must have just come in and the taxi drivers swooped on the passengers. He might have to wait as much as twenty minutes. The station sweet stall was shut; all the local eating places were shut except the pubs which he wasn't allowed into and which would soon shut anyway. Charles walked slowly up to the station entrance and then saw his father's car parked by the car park exit. His father was sitting at the wheel, reading the evening paper. Or pretending to read the evening paper. Clairvoyant intuitive Charles could sense his anxiety, his pretended casualness, from here. His father would probably spin him some tale about having to bring someone to the station or forgetting to do something at the office and on the way back thought he might as well... He sauntered up to the car. His father lowered the paper and relief poured into his face, making it go red and soft-looking. He said: 'Oh, there you are. I had a package to put on the London train for a client so I thought I might as well look out for you.' It could never happen to six-feet-four-tall Mungo. But then none of it could have happened to Mungo, thought Charles, getting into the car beside his father. Momentarily a wave of horror broke over him. It was something that was to happen a few times in the next eight or nine hours. Through the years to come it would happen occasionally. The horror broke and he thought, I killed a man. They drove southwestwards, crossing Ruxeter Road some half-mile north of the fire. The sirens were silent now but you could smell smoke everywhere. I killed a man, Charles thought, and he felt the penknife in his pocket with a little bit of fibre from the rope caught under its blade.

4

It was an extraordinary experience for the two of them, going to the safe house for the meeting there with Basilisk and Scylla, prearranged before Corfu, to find it razed to the ground. 'Like Carthage, old Lindsay would say,' said Graham. 'Only the Romans ploughed over the site of that. Probably stirred salt in too, I shouldn't be surprised.' It was Sunday afternoon. They had seen no papers, heard no radio, watched no television. The whole household in Church Bar had only just got up. Mungo and Graham stood on the opposite side of Ruxeter Road, part of a small crowd gaping at the blackened space, the few remaining struts and timbers, the whole ruin now surrounded by a temporary wire fence. Mungo had the wild idea that Moscow Centre had done it: it had been only a matter of time before the location of the safe house became known to Rosie Whittaker. She was said to be ruthless and intrepid. She might even have done it herself, or some agent of hers... No, it was impossible, he mustn't let his imagination run away with him, it was far more likely to have been builders with a blow torch. Graham lit a cigarette. He was wearing his sunglasses, though the day was overcast and rather dark and grey for mid-August. Mungo thought he only needed one of those soft slouch hats to look like a spy in a film of the thirties. 'There's not much to be done about that,' he said. 'We shall have to find another safe house,' said Graham. 'My brother says there's a house scheduled for demolition in Hartlands.' Graham's brother Keith, or Scylla, should have been at the meeting. Of course he hadn't turned up because he must have known about the fire from the newspapers or TV. Mungo heard a man standing behind them say: 'There was someone in there. They found a body. They haven't identified it yet.' 'Yes, they have.' This from someone who had perhaps read a more recent paper or seen a more recent programme. 'It was a man. They found his car outside.' Mungo and Graham began to walk off. They discussed going to the cinema, to the Fontaine, where a fairly appropriate old film, The Mask of Dimitrios, had succeeded the Japanese picture, but Graham said he might go to his aunt's instead, he might go and have a talk with Keith. Mungo went home, making a detour round Nevin Square to see if there was anything held in the statue drop but the hand of Lysander Douglas was empty. He had been anticipating with some excitement deciphering the next message, expecting it to begin, very likely, with seventeen for the date and end with something around ten fifteen for the time. The empty hand was a bit disappointing.

5

Pentecost Villas had been struck by lightning. That was one theory put forward in the newspapers. Another was that it had been arson and that Peter Moran was the arsonist who had fallen downstairs and stunned himself before he could escape. He was identified by the presence of his car outside, by the remains of his glasses and his watch and the bridgework in his mouth. Not much else of him remained. Charles read about it in the Free Press. Peter Moran was dead so they could say more or less what they liked about him. They quoted the police as saying that he had been convicted four years before of assault on a child under the age of thirteen. A patron of the Fontaine then told the Free Press that on the evening of the fire he had seen Peter Moran in the cinema with a boy of about ten. An inquest was opened and adjourned. Charles understood that as far as he was concerned it was all over and he had to swallow his indignation at being described as about ten. But he put a message in October Men into the flyover drop, asking for a meeting with Leviathan as soon as would be convenient.

Mungo also read about it in the paper. The only thing of much interest to him was that when he first moved into the study he had last year he had been groping about on the floor underneath his bunk and, looking up, read the name Peter Moran carved on the woodwork of its underside. There was a date there too: 1965, and a dash. It wasn't necessarily the same person. He retrieved the message from Dragon next day. The difficulty was that they no longer had a safe house. presumably Dragon would have to come along to Church Bar. There would have to be a showdown anyway, for according to Graham, Charles Mabledene had not passed the test set for him. What could you do with a traitor? No more than expel him, Mungo thought. He sat down on one of the boxes someone had provided as cat shelters and concocted his reply: 'Leviathan to Dragon...' It was rush hour and the traffic going south rumbled overhead. Mungo put his message into Dragon's plastic zip-up bag and taped it back inside the central upright, remembering not to put it too high up out of Charles Mabledene's reach. Dragon as traitor was probably capable of setting fire to the safe house. Mungo wondered if that was what had in fact happened. The new king cat, a bull-shouldered stringy-bodied yellow tom, rubbed himself in hopeful fashion against his legs, and Mungo bent down to stroke him. There was a strong civet smell, a nice perfumey sort of smell until you knew what it was. Still thinking about Charles Mabledene, wondering what he wanted, Mungo went down Bread Lane and the Beckgate Steps to the river. A barge was coming up under Rostock with a dog standing in its bows, barking at the fishermen. The sun shone white and soft behind mist. For a moment he couldn't see the top of the Shot Tower and then the mist moved like a scarf unwinding. This was Medusa's drop in the base of the tower, but it was empty. The cathedral floated out of the haze and the sun painted it with a pale wash, so that the hundred saints on its east front seemed to step forward out of their niches to feel the light. The deepthroated bell on the clock began tolling the hour, ten o'clock, as Mungo walked westwards over Alexandra Bridge. He was nearly across when the mist uncurled and melted from the crown of the CitWest tower, or as it seemed to be, the tower like the cathedral saints stepped out of the whiteness into the sun where it showed in twinkling green: ten-O-one and seventeen degrees. Mungo had been going straight home but it wasn't far out of his way into Nevin Square. He thought he saw the Stern brothers in the doorway of Marks and Spencer's diagonally opposite but when he looked again they were gone. There were people sitting on the wall round the plinth on which Lysander Douglas stood and they turned to stare when Mungo stepped over it to take the folded paper out of the bronze hand. His habit was to copy it down there and then but not under those curious eyes. He took it to one of the seats on the paved walks among the flowerbeds. Mungo, who knew practically nothing about horticulture, wondered why the council planted those crimson flowers that trailed bleeding plumes like offal, like butchers' discard. Before he attempted a deciphering, as soon as he looked at the paper, he knew something was wrong. There was no number to open the message, no number to close it. Moscow Centre had changed the code. In the week since he had the key to the code they had changed it. That could only mean they knew the old code was broken. He seemed to hear distant triumphant laughter but he was imagining it; there was no one there to laugh. Slowly he crossed the square and replaced the message in the statue's hand. But he had told no one that he had broken the code, or no one who could possibly... Certainly he had said nothing to Charles Mabledene, had had no opportunity to say anything. Had he been wrong then about Charles Mabledene? Perhaps he had. But it was not true that he had told no one.

6

It must have been like when Cherry died and the police came to tell them. The police were with Jennifer for a long time questioning her about Peter Moran. A man and a woman, Jennifer said, and from her description John knew the woman must have been Susan Aubrey. John hadn't seen Jennifer but had spoken several times to her on the phone. She told him dully that she wanted to feel grief, she would have wanted to be stricken with grief, for she had thought of Peter Moran as the great love of her life, but all she felt was resignation and pity. The implication - though she didn't say this - was that John had been responsible for her indifference. John's telling her the truth about Peter Moran had spoiled her feeling for him. But John thought, if I hadn't told her when I did, she would know now. She would know from the papers - or the police. It wouldn't have made her hate them, so why should she hate me? He phoned her every day. She wouldn't see him but she had stopped saying she never wanted to see him again. She had forgotten once saying she would never speak to him again. In the middle of the week after Peter Moran died he phoned her and a man answered. The police probably, John thought, a policeman who was with her at that interminable questioning. There was something about the voice he thought he recognised, so perhaps it was Fordwych, the detective inspector. The voice, though very familiar, was unidentifiable. Thursday afternoon he spent in Hartlands Gardens. It was the day of the inquest. John thought that today perhaps he wouldn't phone but would go to her, would go straight to Nunhouse without returning home first. Old feelings of hope had reasserted themselves powerfully. He had left the Honda in the car park just inside the main gate. Emerging on to the road that wound up to Fonthill Heights, he sat waiting for the ascending stream of traffic to pass. It progressed slowly with frequent stops and John turned to look into each driver's face, hoping for the nod and the raised hand that would indicate he was to be let through. The third driver he looked at, sitting at the wheel of his red Escort, was Mark Simms. Beside him in the passenger seat was Jennifer. Mark Simms lifted up his hand. It might have been the motorist's courtesy wave or something more, a sign that he recognised John behind the goggles and under the crash helmet. Or it might not. His headlights briefly flashed on, perhaps only because John hadn't moved but remained poised there, taking in what he saw, understanding the import of what he saw. Jennifer was looking at Mark Simms, she was talking to him, and she didn't turn her head. As far as John could see they weren't actually touching, only sitting side by side. He moved out quickly in front of the Escort, turning right, coming up behind a stream of traffic descending the hill. It seemed to him that superimposed over the back of the car in front of him was that picture his eyes had indelibly registered, that little scene of Jennifer in Mark Simms's car. He understood. That voice answering the phone, that had been Mark Simms. She had rejected his, John's, offer help in favour of Mark Simms. Anyone's company, anyone's sympathy, was preferable to his, this finally proved it, this was the end. If it hadn't been Mark Simms it would have been someone else; it would always be someone else. In that moment he understood how strong his hope had been, how he had hoped on and on in the face of all odds, even after she had asked for a divorce, even after she had rounded on him for telling her the truth about Peter Moran. And after Peter Moran's death hope had positively burgeoned; he had believed her return inevitable. The homeward route he hardly seemed aware of. The horse knows the way, though, the Honda knew the way. Usually he was very careful to switch off the engine before putting the motorbike away. He was afraid of damage to the plants with carbon monoxide. It wasn't the most convenient place to keep the Honda and he sometimes thought of getting a shed specially for it; he could get one at a discount from Trowbridge's. He sat on the saddle, pointlessly twisting the handlebar grips, lightly revving the engine. The greenhouse door and its windows were wide open, for it had been a very warm day, was still warm. Without switching off the ignition, John went into the greenhouse and shut the windows. He took off his crash helmet and goggle and gloves and laid them on one of the slatted shelves in front of the pots of capsicum. His mind had become blank and he seemed aware of only one thing: his intense loneliness in this city of indifferent thousands, this world of untold millions. Beyond the gingko tree, beyond the garden hung with a multi-flowering dark blue clematis, the sky was orange with sunset. The Honda purred evenly, animal-like, a useful beast of burden, friendly but ridiculous as it might have been an elderly fat donkey. Instead of turning the key and letting the engine die preparatory to humping it into the greenhouse where he would jack it up for the night, John got back into the saddle and coasted the motorbike in through the doorway. He pulled the door behind him and closed it. The greenhouse was now quite tightly sealed up. He got off the saddle, still holding the handlebars, lightly twisting the grips. Already the fumes were strong. Gingerly he leaned the bike against the shelf, keeping the engine running, moving his hands rhythmically on the grips, staring out at the fading orange of the sky. He stared hypnotically at the sky, his hands rolled the grips automatically, he breathed in the choking chemical vapour. A dizziness began. It was then that he heard the footsteps. He didn't take his hands from the handlebars. He didn't even wonder who it might be. He knew who it couldn't be. Slowly he turned his head and saw coming out of the side way, walking towards him, Flora the tree girl. An immediate onset of panic must have made his face appear aghast; he was aware of his eyes becoming wide and staring. She flung open the greenhouse door as he snatched his hands off the grips and the engine stalled. 'What on earth were you doing? This place is a gas chamber. You could have gassed yourself.' He muttered something about only putting the bike away. 'Are you sure?' She was looking penetratingly at him. 'You weren't trying to...? You weren't, were you, John?' The very fact that he knew what she meant implied the truth of it. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'No, of course not.' And he hadn't been, had he? He hadn't really meant to kill himself. When the fumes got too strong he would have got out, wouldn't he? He had only perhaps killed the capsicum. 'I haven't done the plants much good.' He was outside now, breathing clean evening air. Had she saved his life, this bright-faced curly-haired tree expert, or only provided him with an evening's company? 'Did you come to see the monkey puzzle?' She sounded shocked, dazed. 'I was out looking at flats - well, bedsits really, somewhere to live. Then I remembered about Geneva Road and Araucaria and I came down this way. I haven't seen the tree.' Her eyes went to his face, then up at Cherry's bedroom window. 'Do you live all alone here?' He nodded, still thinking, did I really? Might I be dead now? Shall I be glad one day that she came in the nick time or shall I convince myself...? 'I've got two spare rooms,' he found himself saying, and then, 'Come on, I'll show you the monkey puzzle.'

7

Having slept on it, Mungo knew what he must do. First though he went to the flyover drop to pick up the message from Dragon, his agreement to a meeting later that day. Somehow and without making a drama out of it, he knew he would never come here again, never pick his way among the copse of metal posts or attach a message to the inside of the central upright. Angus would say it had happened, what he predicted. Mungo didn't much care what Angus said. There was a new Yves Yugall coming out in September. Actual copies hadn't appeared yet but a poster advertising it was up in Hatchard's window: Lion Loot, "his scintillating new bestseller". Mungo thought it was a rotten title or was it perhaps just that he was fed up for the moment with that kind of fiction? He crossed Nevin Square, not bothering to see if Lysander Douglas was holding anything, into Fen Street, into Church Bar. Graham had said he was going to the new pool out at Ruxeter with Ian and Gail, they were all swimming mad, but he would be back by lunch. His father's car was half-in half-out of the garage, he had finished his morning calls early and had no surgery on a Friday afternoon. Mungo let himself in by the side door and went downstairs to the kitchen. Fergus was seated at the table, reading The Times and drinking a cup of his famous cocoa. He offered to make Mungo a cup but Mungo, as always, as they all did, said no thanks. 'I didn't know Graham smoked,' Fergus said, his forehead all creased up. 'Didn't you?' 'He must have been very secretive about it, not to say deceitful. I had no idea. It's disturbed me very much.' Mungo had a dreadful desire to burst out laughing, though it wasn't funny, none of it was funny. The irony... 'He thought I was out, I daresay. There he was, down here smoking a cigarette. The great majority of smokers begin as teenagers. It's in adolescence that addiction starts. Did you know that, Mungo?' 'I did as a matter of fact.' 'Do you ever smoke Graham's cigarettes?' 'No,' said Mungo, and because the simple negative wasn't enough, 'I don't smoke any cigarettes. I don't like the smell.' Fergus was looking searchingly at him. 'Excuse me, Dad, there's something I have to see to.' He only knew the music drifting down was Albinoni because Angus had often told him so. A respected Venetian composer of over forty operas admired by Bach, Angus said. Mounting the stairs, Mungo thought of Angus's old friendship with Guy Parker, a friendship he had vaguely heard about, dimly remembered. Had Angus betrayed Guy Parker, reneged on him? Or was it nothing like that? Was it the other way about? He would never know. The door, as usual, was wide open. The allegro stopped and Angus was changing sides to the adagio, a book held in his left hand. 'The death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths,' said Angus. 'You don't happen to know who said that, do you?' 'Me? No, I don't know. Why would I?' 'What d'you fancy for lunch? I told Mum I'd go out for takeaway. She phoned, she's got an emergency. How about Greek?' Mungo, who hardly ever swore, said violently, 'Not bloody Greek, anything but that,' and he saw, quite plainly, one of what Ian would call his visions. He was standing on the hillside, on the viewing point, about to expound his solution to the code, but Angus hadn't stayed to hear, he had turned and said something about living life instead of playing games, said it angrily, and before Mungo again was crashing down the slope among the scented herbi between the olives and the cypress trees. Mungo looked at his brother, at his puzzled kindly face, and the vision receded - like mist from the Shot Tower. 'Sorry,' he said. 'You know me, it's always Indonesian for me.' Up the stairs went Mungo towards his own room. He stationed himself at the little round window under the roof. I shall have to take up collecting something. Take up fencing again maybe. Or just read a different sort of book. Graham and Ian and Gail were coming along from the Hill Street end. The others had their swimming things in a Sainsbury's carrier but Graham held his rolled up under his arm. He extinguished his half-smoked cigarette just before they vanished from Mungo's sight between the pavement and the side gate. Presumably that was what his father meant by deceitful. Mungo came out of his room and went slowly down the top flight. Ian and Gail wouldn't come up, they would go down to the kitchen and make themselves the coffee they everlastingly drank. Mungo stood on the landing outside Graham's door, noticing that Angus had gone out. That was the only time Angus's door was shut - when he wasn't inside. His hair still damp, plastered down like black paint over the crown of his head, Graham came up the stairs two at a time. He had the old tee-shirt on, the one with the octopus motif. Mungo said: 'Can we talk?' He saw all the light and all the enthusiasm die out in Graham's face. Graham pushed open his bedroom door and let it slam softly behind them. They stood facing each other. 'You're the mole, aren't you?' Mungo said. 'I know you are, so don't try and deny it.' 'I wasn't going to deny it.' 'I ought to have known that time I made a mistake in the number of the Armadillo Army story, but I didn't. I was stupid. It was a genuine mistake. I told you "eight" when I meant "seven". That was why Moscow Centre couldn't break that code.' He felt a fool talking about Moscow Centre, as if it were real, as if it weren't all pretence. 'I wonder why you never told them where the safe house was. Or maybe you did and they didn't care. I never cottoned on. I trusted you.' Graham lit a cigarette. 'It's only a game, isn't it?' 'What difference does that make?' He didn't expect an answer and he didn't get one. 'Why?' he said. 'Why? If it was only a game' - he spoke carefully -'and after all we're young, we're still at school - I mean, you can't have been offered anything. Not money, not a bribe. Unless - ' An idea came to Mungo. 'You weren't blackmailed, were you?' Graham shook his head. He was tall but he still had to look up to Mungo. 'What would anyone blackmail me about, Bean?' 'Don't call me that. Only my brothers call me that.' The scorn made Graham go red. 'It was for - the hell of it. Oh, God - it was for fun.' 'You betrayed me for fun?' There was silence. A long way downstairs a door slammed. Mungo thought he knew what that thing Angus had said to him meant, about the death of a mouse being the whole sack of whatever it was. He went to the door of his room and opened it, for he had heard voices on one of the lower flights. Behind him Graham said: 'I'd better tell you. I was waiting for an opportunity to tell you. I'm leaving Rossingham, I'm starting at Utting next term.' Angus's head appeared above the top of the stairs. 'Charles Mabledene is here, Bean. He says he's supposed to see you at one.' Once Mungo would have said with some pomp: Show him up. 'OK,' he said. He had forgotten all about the appointment with Dragon. 'He can come up here if he wants.' Who had made the appointment, Charles Mabledene or he? Mungo couldn't remember, still less why it had been made. He stood aside, holding the door open, leaning against it, to let Graham pass through. He kept his head averted, not daring to look at Graham because he was afraid of these unknown untried emotions that might make him do something he would later be ashamed of. The room stank of cigarette smoke. Charles Mabledene came in sniffing, turning his head and sniffing like some small fastidious animal. 'Hallo.' Mungo nodded, silent. 'I've got some things to ask you.' The voice was still a treble, though a breaking one. He looked impossibly neat and clean as if bathed and polished up at that hairdresser's his mother had. 'Some questions.' Charles Mabledene hesitated before going on. Mungo didn't let him go on. 'I'm resigning,' he said. 'I'm giving up as head of London Central.' A small pink tongue came out and moistened Charles's lips. 'Ah,' he said, and then, 'I suppose Medusa will be taking over from you?' Mungo uttered a violent 'No!' They looked at each other. Fergus' voice called from downstairs that lunch would be on the table in five minutes. Mungo said: 'I thought you might care to...' 'Yes,' said Charles. 'Yes, I would.' 'That's settled then.' 'You're going to have your meal, so I'll go now. I can see myself out.' He had suddenly started talking like someone of forty. But he had always been a bit like that. After he had gone Mungo just stood there in the middle of the room. He had a curious feeling he might as well stand there for ever - well, for a long while, anyway - empty, rather cold, pretty depressed really, for there seemed nothing else to do and as if there never would be. Presently he moved, screwed up his eyes, shook himself and, soldiering on, went down to have his Indonesian lunch.

8

It had been a near thing. Charles remembered just in time that he couldn't really ask Mungo those questions as to why he had been tested in that way, why he had been sent as decoy or prey to Peter Moran. He was a murderer, after all, and subject to the law. It was not something he was ever going to be able to talk about to anyone or even hint at. He didn't mind. He could live with it. Probably he was going to go on dreaming of Peter Moran falling backwards down those stairs, hearing the sickening crunch, seeing that bloody jaw flop backwards - and waking up with a yell. His mother or father come rushing in, concerned. They said it was the onset of puberty. He could live with it, anyway. He could live with anything now he had got what he wanted: Charles Mabledene, alias Dragon, Director General of London Central. They would see some changes now. Mungo-style scruples - relaxed inexplicably only in the matter of Peter Moran - would have no place in the new regime. When you considered what could be accomplished with scruples, all that planning and information, the Ralston car affair, the retrieval of property, the rearranged invitations, how much more was possible when scruples were discarded? That code nonsense should go. It had always been artificial. What was the phone for? The ban on what Mungo rather naively called 'dishonesty' - that must be the first to go. A kind of Mafia, Charles decided he had in mind, but run by the cream of a rising generation, the country's best brains, a youthful public school elite, headed by one who had already killed his man... A beautiful day: three minutes past one and twenty-four degrees. Charles crossed Hillbury Place towards the salon where his mother would be about to take her lunch break. About to entertain her son to lunch, he corrected himself. He pushed open the door and as she turned round from her conversation with a client, he smilingly drew from one of the overhead driers a clutch of painted eggs and a fluffy blue rabbit. He would have liked to produce a flock of doves but he hadn't learned how to do that yet.

The End

[Proofed by The Burgomeister on 8th August 2007. In the absence of an original paper copy for comparison, some speculative insertions and a few deletions were necessary in places where the OCR was illegible or unaccountably blank.]