“On the quiet side of the house, if possible, please,” I told her while she examined her list of bookings.
And that was when my eye fell on the sheet of printed numbers that lay upside down at her bare elbow. I have little memory for figures as a rule, but I have a nose for danger. There were no names, just groups like groups on a code pad, each group four digits and each line four groups. The heading on the page read WATCHLIST, the source was the credit card company of which Colin Bairstow was a long-standing member.
Not any longer, however. The number of my Bairstow credit card was printed in the bottom right-hand column of the sheet, beneath the word CURRENT in capitals.
“How would you be wishing to pay your bill, sir?” the receptionist asked.
“Cash,” I said, and with a fairly steady hand invented a new name for her book of registered guests: Henry Porter, 3 The Maltings, Shoreham, Kent.
I sat in my room. The car, I thought. Ditch the car. Take off the number plates. I willed myself to calm down. If the Ford was hot, then the Ford was a liability. But how hot was it? How hot was I? How hot could Pew-Merriman allow me to be without blowing their interest to the police? Sometimes, I used to tell my joes, you have to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and jump.
I bathed and shaved and put on a clean shirt. I went down to the dining room and ordered a bottle of the best claret. I lay in bed listening to the sibyl voices: Don’t go north, Misha. . . . Misha, take heed, please. . . . If he has started his journey, he should please discontinue it.
But the journey was not of my choosing. I was being conveyed, never mind whether The Forest, or the whole valley of the shadow, was watching me pass through.
The hill was steep, and the house a stern old lady with her feet firmly planted amid elderly friends. She had a Sunday school face and a stained-glass porch that glowed like heaven in the morning sun. She had pious lace curtains and a hint of grief, and boxed hedges and a bird table and a chestnut tree that was shedding gold leaves. The hill’s gorse summit rose behind her like the green hill in the hymn, and behind the hill lay several different heavens: blue for sunshine, black for judgment, and the clear white sky of the north.
I pressed the doorbell and heard the drumming of strong young feet on the stairs. The time was 9.25. The door flew open, and I stood face-to-face with a pretty young woman in jeans, bare feet, and a checked shirt. She was smiling, but her smile faded when she realised I wasn’t whoever she’d hoped I was.
“Oh, sorry,” she said awkwardly. “We thought you were my friend, giving us a nice surprise. Didn’t we, Ali? We thought it was Daddy.” Her voice was antipodean but soft. I guessed New Zealand. A barefoot half-Asian boy peered from behind her waist.
“Mrs. May?” I said.
Her smile returned. “Well, near enough.”
“Sorry to be a bit early. I’ve got a date with Aitken.”
“With Aitken? Here at the house?”
“My name’s Pete Bradbury. I’m a buyer. Aitken and I deal a lot together. We have an appointment here at nine-thirty.” My tone still brisk but kindly: just two people chatting on a doorstep on a sunny autumn morning.
“But he never has buyers to the house,” she objected, as her smile became supplicatory, and slightly disbelieving. “Everyone goes to the store. Don’t they, Ali? That’s the rule. Daddy never brings his business home, does he, pet?” The boy took her hand and swung from it, trying to draw her back into the house.
“Well, I’m a pretty substantial customer of his, actually. We’ve been trading some while. I know he likes to be private as a rule, but he said he had something a bit special for me to look at.”
She was impressed. “Are you the big, big buyer? The one that’s going to make us all mountainously rich?”
“Well, I hope so. I hope he’ll make me rich too.”
Her confusion increased.
“He can’t have forgotten,” she said. “Not Aitken. He thinks about your deal day and night. He must be on his way.” Her doubts returned. “And you really, really don’t think you’ve made a mistake and you should be at the store? I mean he could easily have driven straight there from the airport. He keeps weird times.”
“I’ve never been to the store. We’ve always met in London. I wouldn’t even know where to find the store.”
“Me neither. Ali, stop it. I mean he just never, never does this. He’s abroad, you see. Well, he’s on his way back, obviously. I mean he could be here.”
I waited while she talked herself round.
“Look. All right. Why don’t you come indoors and have a cup of tea till he shows up? He’ll be terribly angry. If people stand him up, he goes totally spare. He’s not a bit Oriental in that way. I’m Julie, actually.”
I stepped after her into the house, took off my shoes, and put them with the family’s in the rack beside the door.
The living room was a kitchen, playroom, and living room all at once. It had an old doll’s house and cane furniture and pleasantly disordered bookshelves with books jammed upward and sideways in English, Turkish, and Arabic. It had a silver-gilt samovar and Koranic texts and silk embroideries. I recognised a Coptic cross and Ottoman carnations. A magic eye in gold and green hung above the door to ward off devils. In a carved wall cabinet, a mother-cult goddess rode sidesaddle on a very obvious stallion. And on the television set stood a studio photograph in colour of Julie and a bearded man seated among pink roses. The television was showing a children’s animated film. She turned the sound down, but Ali grizzled so she turned it up again. She made a pot of tea and set shortbread biscuits on a plate. She had long legs and a long waist and a model’s stu-diously casual walk.
“If you knew how unusual this was, it’s so stupid, it’s so untyp-ical of him,” she said. “You didn’t come all the way from London just for—well—this, did you?”
“It’s not a tragedy. How long’s he been away?”
“A week. What’s your specialty?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What do you deal in?”
“Oh, you name it. Hamadan. Balouchi. Kilims. The best of everything when I can afford it. Are you in the trade yourself?”
“Not really.” She smiled, mostly at the window because she was keeping watch. “I teach at Ali’s school. Don’t I, Al?”
She went to the next room, and the boy went after her. I heard her telephoning. I snatched a closer look at the portrait of the happy couple. The photographer had been wise to pose them sitting, for straightened out, Mr. Aitken Mustafa May would have been a bearded head shorter than his lady, even allowing for the raised heels of his high-gloss, buckled shoes. But his smile was proud and happy.
“All I ever get’s the answerphone too,” she complained, coming back. “It’s been the same all week. There’s a storeman there and a secretary. Why don’t they switch off the machine and answer the phone for themselves? They’re supposed to have been there since nine.”
“Can’t you reach one of them at home?”
“Aitken just will hire these way-out people!” she protested, shaking her head. “He calls them his Odd Couple; she’s a retired librarian or something, he’s ex-army. They live in a cottage in the moors and don’t talk to anyone except their goats. Which is why he hires them. Honestly.”
“And no telephone?”
She had placed herself at the window again, bare feet apart. “Water from the well,” she said indignantly. “No mains, no phone, no nothing. You’re absolutely certain he didn’t say the store, aren’t you? I don’t mean to be stupid or rude or anything, but he just never, never has business people here.”
“Where’s he been travelling?”
“Ankara. Baghdad. Baku. You know how he is. Once he gets on a scent there’s no stopping him.”
She drummed her fingertips on the window.
“It’s his Muslim side,” she said. “Keep the women out of it. How long have you known him?”
“Six years. Seven maybe.”
“I just
wish he’d talk about the people he meets. I’ll bet some of them are really, really interesting.”
A taxi came up the hill and drove past without slowing down. It was empty.
“I mean what’s he pay them for?” she protested in exasperation. “Two grown-up zombies sitting on their backsides listening to a machine. I’m just so sorry for you. Aitken’ll kill them, he really will.”
“Oh dear.”
“He has this really ridiculous superstition thing about not telling me which plane he’s on, too,” she said. “He thinks they’ll blow him up or something. I mean he’s so spooky sometimes. I wonder—you know, am I going to be like him, or is he going to be like me?”
“What car does he drive?”
“A Merc. Metallic blue. Brand-new. Two-door. It’s his pride and joy. It’s your deal that paid for it,” she added.
“Where does he leave it when he goes abroad?”
“At the airport sometimes. Sometimes at the store. Depends.”
“He’s not with Terry, is he?”
“Who?”
“Sort of half partner of mine and Aitken’s. Terry Altman.
Amusing chap. Talks a lot. Got a beautiful new girlfriend called Sally. Sally Anderson. But her friends call her Emma for some reason.”
“If they’re business, forget it.”
I stood up. “Look. There’s been a muddle. Why don’t we abandon this, and I’ll go down to the store and see if I can rouse the secretary. If I find anything out, I can give you a ring. Don’t worry. I’ve got the address. I’ll just wander down the hill and get a cab.”
I took my shoes from the rack and laced them up. I stepped into the sunlight. A knot had formed in my gut, and there was a singing in my ears.
12
The hills darkened as I drove, the roads grew steeper and smaller, the rock peaks of the hilltops were blackened as if burned. Stone walls enclosed me, and I entered a village of slate roofs, crumbling walls, old car tyres, and plastic bags. Piglets and hens wandered in my path, inquisitive sheep eyed me, but I saw no human soul. My ordnance survey map lay open on the passenger seat beside Ockie’s list of Aitken May’s addresses.
The stone walls gave way, and I was flying over wide valleys patched with sun and crossed with streams. Chestnut horses grazed in perfect rectangular meadows. But in my apprehension everything was too late, and I sensed not pleasure but despair. Why had I never played here as a child, walked here as a boy? Run in that field, lived in that cottage, made love beside that stream? These colours, why had I never painted them? Emma, you were all these hopes.
Pulling up in a lay-by, I consulted the map. From nowhere an old man appeared at my car window, and his gnarled face reminded me of the groundsman at my first boarding school.
“Past yonder reservoir . . . turn right at t’gospel hall . . . go on till th’ sees t’mill in front o’ thee . . . then keep on going till th’ can’t go no further. . . .”
I drove over humpbacked hills into a plantation of blue conifers that turned green, then polka dot. I scaled the first hump and saw Larry in his broad hat standing at the roadside with one arm raised to stop me and his other arm round Emma, but they were just two travellers with a dog. I scaled the second and saw them in my driving mirror, giving me the finger. But my fears were worse by far than these anxious fantasies. They were composed of the uncompleted warnings still ringing on the path behind me. A week, Julie had said. All I ever get’s the answerphone. . . . It’s been the same all week.
A gospel hall loomed at me. I turned right as the old man had instructed and saw the wrecked mill, a monster with its eyes put out. The road became a track; I crossed a ford and entered a rural slum of rotting cauliflowers, plastic bottles, and the collected filth of tourists and farmers. Hard-jawed children watched me from the threshold of a tin shed. I crossed a second stream or the same one, skirted the stone face of a quarry, and saw a glitter-paint orange arrow and the words HARDWEAR WHOLESALE ONLY stencilled below it. I followed the arrow and discovered that I had descended further than I realised, for a second valley now opened before me, its lower slopes heavy with trees, and above the trees squared green fields and brooding moors, their tops cut off by cloud. Another arrow pointed me towards a wooden gate. A yellow sign said private road. I pushed the gate open, drove through, closed it behind me. A sign said: HARDWEAR STRAIGHT ON (TRADE ONLY).
Barbed wire ran either side of the track. Tufts of sheep’s wool clung to the barbs, white cattle grazed among the rocks. The track led uphill. I followed it and saw at three hundred yards’ distance a chain of stone farm buildings of no merit, some with windows, some without, and together resembling a freight train with the tallest cars at the left, and tailing to a run of chicken houses and pigsties. The track led over a white bridge and an island of brown marshland to reappear before the main entrance. A sign said: INVITED VISITORS. An orange arrow pointed directly at the house.
I crossed the bridge and saw a blue Mercedes parked in the front drive, its bonnet towards me. Metallic, she had said. But I couldn’t tell whether the blue was metallic or not. Two-door, she had said. But the car was facing me, and I couldn’t count the doors. Nevertheless my heart beat faster in spite of my forebodings. Aitken May’s here. He’s back. In the house. With them. Larry’s here too. Larry came north despite the warning: when did Larry ever heed a warning? Then he went to Paris to find Emma.
I drew near to the house, and a curtain of white cloud rolled off the hill to prevent me entering, then rolled over me and down the track. There were two other cars, one a Volkswagen Golf, the other a battered grey Dormobile, with a triangle of faded red flag on the aerial and flat tyres. The Volkswagen was parked on the far side of the forecourt. The Dormobile stood forlornly in the hay barn, which seemed to be its final resting place. I saw now that the Mercedes had two doors, that its paintwork was indeed metallic, and that its windows were coated with grime. It’s your deal that paid for it, Julie had said. I saw the telephone aerial and remembered the proud, not quite English voice: “Hullo, Sally, this is Hardwear, calling from the car. . . .”
Parking my red Ford, I was faced with a problem I should have solved already: to take the briefcase with me or leave it in the car? Keeping my back to the house and using the open door for cover, I fished the .38 revolver from the briefcase and jammed it once more in my waistband. I was getting a little too used to it. I locked the briefcase in the boot. Passing the blue Mercedes, I brushed my knuckles against the bonnet. It was stone cold.
The front entrance to the house was protected by a storm porch of quarried black stone. The door was painted green. The doorbell was linked to an intercom. Beside the bell was a brushed-steel plate with numbers on it. Either you rang the bell or you punched in the combination. The door had an eyehole and strips of stained-glass window either side of it, but the glass had no luminosity, and I guessed it was boarded on the inside. A curled visiting card read: “Aitken Mustafa May, BADA, Oriental Carpets, Objets d’Art, Chmn, The Hardwear Company, GmbH.” I pressed the bell and heard it ring inside the house: one of those sleigh-bell chimes that are supposed to calm spirits but drive them to the brink. I rang a second time, my eyes fixed upon the Volkswagen. This year’s registration. Local licence plates, like the Mercedes. Blue, like the Mercedes. And its windows, like the Mercedes, coated with grime and weather. When Aitken’s ship came home, everyone got a new car, I decided. Are you the big, big buyer? The one that’s going to make us all mountainously rich? No, that’s my friend, actually: the one with thirty-seven million stolen pounds to spend on carpets from the Caucasus.
I pressed the bell three times. Rather than listen to any more sleigh bells, I walked along the front of the house in search of another door to try, but there wasn’t one, and the windows gave onto a narrow corridor of white-painted brick. And when I tap-tapped on the glass, no smiling, friendly face appeared to welcome me, not even Larry’s.
I walked round to the back, picking my way through the remains of an old timber mill
: rusted circular saws, cumbersome engines with frayed belts, a pile of sawn logs that lay as they had fallen years ago, a rusted axe, heaps of sawdust overgrown with weed and lichen, all abandoned as if at a single summons. And I wondered what it was about this place that, however many years ago, a sawyer and his mates should have stopped sawing and fled, leaving everything exactly as it was now; and that Aitken Mustafa May and his storeman and his secretary had abandoned their nice new cars and followed him.
Then I saw the blood, or perhaps I had seen it already and was finding other things to think of: one patch of unisex blood, Emma’s or Larry’s equally, one finely fretted island about a foot long and six inches wide, congealed, lying across the sawdust; but so rich, so assured, that as I stooped to it I perceived it first as solid rather than liquid, and was half inclined to pick it up—until I saw my hand recoil and fancied Emma’s pale dead face staring up at me through the sawdust. I delved. The sawdust turned out to be common sawdust all the way to the ground.
But no gruesome trail, no telltale drips or stains led the keen-eyed detective to the next clue. There was the patch of blood, and it lay on the pile of sawdust, and the sawdust lay five paces from the back door. And between the sawdust and the back door I made out a lot of busy footprints in both directions, not unisex this time but distinctly male: either track shoes or just standard flat-soled shoes with nothing special to distinguish them. But still emphatically male, and going back and forth enough times and with enough male haste and vigour to establish an oily river of churned mud, ending at the island of poured blood that seemed so determined to remain separate from the sawdust it had settled on.