Our Game (34 page)

I started up the hill, half running, half walking. The grass was tufted and knee-high like the grass at Priddy, and after three steps my trousers were soaked through. A stone wall jogged at my side. Lone bare trees, split from their bark by lightning and silvered by the sun and rain, poked their thin fingers at me. Twice I stumbled. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the hut, but it was parted where the tyre tracks passed through it. The but was rectangular, no more than twelve feet by eight, but at some point in its life a crude extension had been added, of which only a wooden skeleton survived. The cloud had vanished. From either side of the valley black peaks glowered down at me, their bracken flanks stirring with the wind.

I was searching for a door or window, but a first tour of the perimeter yielded nothing. I looked again at the tracks and saw that they had stopped on the uphill side of the hut, short of a point in the wall where a door had once been, for the stone lintel and wood frame were still legible, though the opening had been filled with random granite stonework and plaster. And I saw a patch of churned and trampled mud at the foot of the doorway, and footprints leading to and from the tyre tracks: the same male footprints I had seen outside the kitchen door. I saw no blood, but when I took a coin from my pocket and dug into the plaster, it was softer than the plaster in the wall outside the doorframe.

And here I had a second intimation concerning the intruders: that they were not only desecrators and men of the knife, but men of the rough country too, outdoor men, accustomed to the dour life. All this I was telling myself as I prodded inexpertly at the plaster with a bit of old iron. I prodded until I could prise, and having prised, looked in. Then I tore my face away and retched as the stench poured out at me, because by then I had seen by the single shaft of light three bodies with their hands tied above their heads, and their mouths open in the same silent chorus. But such is our egotism in crisis that in the very midst of my revulsion I was still able to offer a wordless Allelujah of relief that neither Emma nor Larry was of the company.

Having replaced the stones as best I could, I walked slowly down the hill, my soaked trousers chafing my legs. In the presence of death we cling tenaciously to banalities, which no doubt was why I returned to the reception room and, as a matter of routine, extracted the incoming sound cassette from the answering machine and crammed it into my long-suffering pocket. From there I passed from room to room, retracing my steps and considering what else I should take with me, and whether it was worth my time trying to remove the evidence of my presence. But my fingerprints were everywhere, my footprints too. I took another long look at May's office. I patted what was left of his suit jacket and rummaged among the debris of his desk. No wallet. No money. No credit cards. I remembered the black attaché case.

Returning at a slow pace to the Mercedes, I hunted through May's bunch of keys until I came to a thing that was no more than a tiny chrome-coated can opener. I unlocked the attaché case and found inside a file of papers, a pocket calculator, a German fountain pen and matching propelling pencil, a fat British passport in May's name, travellers' cheques, U.S. dollars, and a folder of air tickets. The passport was of the same type as Bairstow's: blue-bound, ninety-four pages, exotic visas, entry and exit stamps galore, ten years' validity, height 1 metre 70, born Ankara 1950, issued 10 Nov 1985, expires 10 Nov 1995. The fresh-faced photograph of the bearer on page three had little in common with the middle-aged gentleman bestriding the log with his loved one. And none at all with the bound and mutilated corpse in the hut. The air tickets went to Bucharest, Istanbul, Tbilisi, London, and Manchester, so his girl had been wrong about Ankara and Baku. Only the Bucharest flight was booked, and he had already missed it. The remainder of his journey, including the homeward leg, remained open.

I put everything back into the attaché case, fetched my own luggage from the red Ford, restored the .38 to my briefcase, and loaded them into the boot of the Mercedes. I was making a choice between two hot cars: the Ford, which together with the person of Colin Bairstow might or might not be on every policeman's wanted list; and the blue Mercedes, which, from the moment the bodies were discovered, would be the hottest car in the country, but until then nothing. And after all: if seven days had passed already, why not an eighth? Aitken May, as far as anyone knew, was abroad. He collected his mail from a postbox in Macclesfield. No postman had occasion to come here. And how long would it take anyone to notice that the Odd Couple were absent from their remote cottage on the moors?

Parking the Ford out of sight between the Dormobile and the pony cart, I hauled down a bale of hay and spread it over the roof and bonnet. Then I drove across the white bridge, knowing that every hour that I delayed was likely to be my last.

Emma was talking to me again. Insistently. I had never heard this tense, commanding voice from her before.

"Hardwear," said the first message. "This is Sally. Where are you? We're worried about you. Call me."

"Aitken. It's me again, Sally," said the second. "I've got a very important message for you. There's a bit of trouble on the way. Call me, please."

"Hardwear, this is Prometheus again," said the third. "Listen. Terry can't make it. Things have changed. Please, when you hear this, wherever you hear it from, drop everything and phone. If you're away from work, stay away. If you have family, take them on holiday. Hardwear, talk to me. Here's the number in case you've lost it. Cheers, Sally."

I switched off the tape.

I was in a state of horror deferred. The moment I allowed myself to sink through the thin ice of my composure, I was lost. Whatever doubts I might have had about my errand were swept away. Larry and Emma were at terrible risk. If Larry was dead, Emma was in double jeopardy. The fire I had kindled in him half a life ago, and stoked for as long as it had served us, was out of control, and for all I knew, its flames were lapping at Emma's feet. To bare my soul to Pew-Merriman would be to compound my guilt and achieve nothing: "They're worse than thieves, Marjorie. They're dreamers. They've enlisted in a war that nobody's heard of."

I had two passports, one for Bairstow, one for May. I had luggage for May and Bairstow, and I was driving May's car. In my head I set to work testing combinations of these blessings. Bairstow's passport was a liability, but only within the United Kingdom, since I could not imagine the Office, with its congenital terror of exposure, would risk passing Bairstow's name to Interpol. May's passport was in better health than its owner, but it was still May's, and our features were comically dissimilar.

Ideally I would have liked to replace the third page of May's passport—which carried the photograph but no personal particulars—with the third page from Bairstow's, thus giving the bearer my face. But a British passport lends itself badly to adaptation, and vintage models such as May's and Bairstow's are the worst. No page exists in isolation of any other. Sheets are concertina'd, then stitched into the binding with a single piece of thread. The printer's ink is water based and runs the moment you start to fiddle with it. Watermarks and colour gradations are impressively complex, as the resentful white-coated instructors of the Office forgery section never tired of telling us: "With your British passport, gentlemen, you do better to suit your man to the document rather than the document to your man," they would intone, with a venom more commonly associated with army sergeants addressing officer cadets.

Yet how could I suit myself to May's passport when it gave him a height of one metre seventy—even allowing for his raised heels—and my own height was a metre eighty-three? A black beard, a slight darkening of the complexion, blackened hair—these, I supposed, were all more or less within the reach of my inexpert skills. But how on earth was I supposed to reduce my height by thirteen centimetres?

The answer, to my joy, was the Mercedes driver's seat, which, by the depression of a button on the inside of the door, turned me into a dwarf. And it was this discovery that, an hour out of Nottingham, persuaded me to pull in at a roadside café, take the travel agent's luggage labels from May's folder of tickets, write May's name and address on them, and substitute them for the Bairstow labels on my own luggage; then book myself and the Mercedes in the name of May a passage on the ferry from Harwich to the Hoek of Holland, sailing at nine-thirty that night; and, having done all this, to consult the yellow pages for the nearest theatrical costumier and supplier, who turned out unsurprisingly to be in Cambridge, not fifty miles away.

In Cambridge also I bought myself a lightweight blue suit and gaudy tie of the sort May appeared to favour, as well as a dark felt hat, a pair of sunglasses, and—since this was Cambridge—a secondhand copy of the Koran, which I placed, together with the hat and glasses, on top of the attaché case on the passenger seat, in a position best suited to influence the casual eye of an alerted immigration officer leaning through the window of my car in order to compare me with my passport.

I now encountered a dilemma that was new to me and which in happier circumstances I would have found diverting: where can an honest male spy spend four hours altering his appearance, when by definition he will enter the place as one person and leave it as another? The golden rule of disguise is to use as little of it as possible. Yet there was no getting round the fact that I would have to rub a darkening agent into my hair, lower the English country tone of my complexion, not forgetting my hands, paint mastic on my chin, and provide myself, strand by strand, with a greying black beard which I must then lovingly trim to Aitken May's flamboyant taste.

The solution, after a reconnaissance of the environs of Harwich, turned out to be a single-storey motel whose cabins gave directly onto numbered parking bays, and whose unpleasing male receptionist required payment in advance.

"Been on long?" I asked him conversationally as I counted out my thirty pounds.

"Too bloody long."

I was holding an extra five pounds in my hand. "Shall I see you tonight? I'm catching the ferry."

"I'm off at six, aren't I?"

"Well, here, have this," I said generously: and for five pounds established that he would not be there to see me in my new persona as I left.

My final act before leaving England was to have the Mercedes washed and polished. Because when you are dealing with official minds—I used to teach—if you can't be humble, then at least be clean.

Frontier posts have always made me nervous, those of my own country the most. Though I count myself a patriot, a weight rolls off my shoulders each time I leave my homeland, and when I return I have a sense of resuming a life sentence. So perhaps it came naturally to me to play the outgoing passenger, for I entered the queue of cars with a good heart and advanced cheerfully towards the immigration post, which was manned, if that was the word, not by a posse of officers provided with a description of me, but by a youth with a white peaked cap and blond hair to his shoulders. I flapped May's passport at him. He ignored it.

"Tickets, mate. Bill-etti. Far-carton."

"Oh, sorry. Here."

But it was a wonder I could speak to him at all, for by then I had remembered the .38. It was nestling, together with sixty rounds of ammunition, not four feet from me, on the floor of the passenger seat in Bairstow's bulky briefcase, now the property of Aitken Mustafa May, arms dealer.

On deck a fierce night wind was blowing. A few hardy passengers huddled among the benches. I staggered towards the stern, found a dark patch, leaned over the rail, and, in the classic pose of a seasick passenger, allowed first the gun and then the ammunition to slip into the blackness. I heard no splash, but I could have sworn I smelled the grassy smells of Priddy racing past me on the sea wind.

I returned to my cabin and slept so deeply that I had to dress in a hurry to reach the Mercedes in time and consign it to a multistorey parking garage in the docks. I bought a phone card and from a public call box dialled the number.

"Julie? It's Pete Bradbury here from yesterday," I said, but I had barely got even this far before she cut in on me.

"I thought you said you were going to ring me," she burst out hysterically. "He still hasn't come back, I'm still getting the answering machine, and if he's not home tonight I'm putting Ali in the car and I'm going out there first thing in the morning and—"

"You mustn't do that," I said.

A bad pause.

"Why not?"

"Is there anyone with you? Apart from Ali? Is there anyone with you in the house?"

"What the hell's that to do with you?"

"Is there a neighbour you can go to? Have you got a friend who will come round?"

"Tell me what you're trying to tell me, for Christ's sake!"

So I told her. I had no tradecraft left, no tactical aids. "Aitken's been murdered. All three of them have. Aitken, his secretary, and her husband. They're in the stone but on the hill above the store. He dealt in arms as well as carpets. They got caught in the crossfire. I'm very sorry."

I had no idea anymore whether she was hearing me. I heard a shout, but it was so shrill it could have been the child. I thought I heard a door open and shut and the sound of something crashing. I kept saying, "Are you there?" and getting no answer. I had a picture of the receiver swinging on its cord while I talked to an empty room. So after a while I rang off, and the same evening, having removed my beard and restored my hair and skin to something of their former colour, took the train to Paris.

Dee's a saint, she is saying from the window of my bedroom.

Dee took me in when I was down-and-out, she is saying as we stroll together on the Quantocks, her two arms locked round one of mine.

Dee put me back together again, she is reminiscing drowsily into my shoulder as we lie before the fire in her bedroom. Without Dee I would never have made it out of the gate. She's been mother, father, chum, the whole disaster for me.