CONDITION BLACK (44 page)

He was her husband, and she had chosen him, for better and for worse . . .

" H o w long has Dr Bissett been in the pay of the Iraqi Government?"

She had told him that he owed them loyalty. She looked into the slug's face across the table.

" M r s Bissett, if you do not co-operate then it will come a great deal harder for you, and a great deal harder for your children."

He had said that what he did was for her, and for their boys, whatever anybody would say . . .

"Where is he?"

"I don't have to answer questions, Mrs Bissett."

There was her brittle and frightened laugh. "Don't you know where he is?"

"That's other people's work, to find him. My work is to close down the damage he has done to A.W.E. . . . You're an educated woman, Mrs Bissett, I don't need to spell out to you how intolerably unstable a world it could be if people like the Iraqis can
buy
their way into the nuclear club . . . What did he take with him?"

"I have nothing to say to you."

"Did he take papers with him?"

"1 have nothing to say."

"It's the worst sort of traitor, Mrs Bissett, your greedy little rat."

"Nothing."

The eyes of the Security Officer were beaded at her. "I suppose that he thought he had a grievance, was that it? There are 5000

people working at the Establishment. Life is not roses for all of them, for some of them, life is damned hard. They soldier on, they don't believe there is an alternative, they weather their problems. Your husband is unique in the history of the Establishment, not for having a sense of grievance, nor for finding life hard. He is unique in that, the greedy little rat, he took foreign gold, and he betrayed every trust that had been put in him."

She shook her head, she had nothing to say.

She thought that her life was destroyed. She thought that her children would struggle into manhood before they could shrug off the disgrace brought to them by their father. She heard a floorboard above them, in the bathroom, splinter and break. She heard a cackle of laughter.

She scraped her chair round, she faced the door. She thought of the man at Debbie's party who had been called Colt. Her back was to the Security Officer. She thought of the eyes of Colt, blue and cold. She thought of the man who had taken her husband from her.

The voice behind her intoned, "You are making life harder for yourself, Mrs Bissett."

She turned and spat, "What did you do for him? What did any of you do for him, ever? When he cried for help, which of you answered?"

She would not say another word. She would sit through the rest of the evening while her home around her reverberated with the search.

It was for her that he had done it, that is what her husband had said, for her and for their boys.

She would sit for the whole of the rest of the evening not hearing the questions of the Security Officer, not listening to the breaking of her home, and she would stare out of the window in the kitchen door into the blackness of the night.

He had taken a position in the shadow under the old kitchen-garden wall, very near where he had crossed it with James so few hours ago. There was an owl calling in the oak beyond the wall, and before it had settled onto a perch close to the ivy drape of the main trunk, he had seen the white silent wing flap as it had swooped close to him. He had cowered from the bird, but now the bird with the haunting call was his company. Erlich who was hidden by the wall of a kitchen garden and the silver-white owl on the perch above him, watched the Manor House together. It was good to have the owl there. He thought that when the owl went, flew away in fear, then he would know that Colt had come back to the Manor House. There was a light on the stairs. He could see no other fight in the house, and he had seen no movement. For comfort, and because his spirits were so low, he said to himself:

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

And the verses were short comfort. His mind turned, was driven to those whom he had destroyed by that ambition to climb the success ladder. James Rutherford was dead and pretty Penny Rutherford was bereaved. And he would have lost the respect, so important to him, of Dan Ruane.

Snap out of it, Bill. Stop whining and get the job done.

It was, to Bissett, madness.

He thought they were all yobs in the pub, louts, all of them except for the old man who was little better than a tramp, and except for the girl. It was quite ridiculous to have gone into the pub.

Colt stood with his back to the open fire, and the old man with the rough torn trousers and the winter overcoat held together at the waist with baling twine was sitting. All the rest were standing, and the pub bar was alive with their talk, country accents, and their obscenities and their excitement and their laughter. It was the court of King Colt. He stood in front of the fire, a pint glass in his hand, the handle of the Ruger pistol bulging from his belt and the fat shape of the silencer tautening his trousers below his hip. Sheer madness.

The girl was pretty. He noticed that. He did not often think that a girl was pretty. But there was something extravagant and untamed about this girl, and the rich red of her hair was thrown back long on her shoulders, and he could see blood stains with the dirt on her fingers, and there were down feathers hooked to the thread of her sweater, and her boots scattered mud on the flagstone floor. She had kissed Colt when they came in and held his body and squeezed herself against him. He watched the girl . . . The girl was moving among them, and each in turn, with the play-acting of reluctance, was adding to the rolled wad of bank notes in her blood-stained, dirt-stained hands.

Of course, they needed the money. The money was vital to them. The money was for their ferry tickets, but Colt had said in the car that their time was short. They should have taken the money in the car park, not switched off the engine, taken the money and gone, made for the coast. She had been round all of the men . . . how was it possible that these yobs and louts had so much money in their hip pockets? And the old man who looked like a tramp took £ 1 0 notes out of a tobacco tin and put them in the girl's hands. Bissett watched her as she went to the bar, and he heard the tinkle bell as the till sprung open, and the man behind the bar gave her more.

She passed the money to Colt. They were all applauding, all of the yobs and louts. This was their hero. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed . . . None of them looked at him as he stood beside the door. He had refused a drink. He coughed. He thought that by coughing he could hurry Colt.

Colt looked at him, and there was the raffish, reckless smile.

Colt thrust the wad of money into his trouser pocket. He came to Bissett.

"It's your business, Colt, I know, but we've lost an awful amount of time."

Colt said, "Won't be much longer. I'm sorry, Dr Bissett, just a little bit longer . . . "

" W e don't have any more time to waste."

"A few minutes only."

"What on earth for . . . ?"

A terrible sadness pinched Colt's face. " T o go home."

The heavy oak plank door of the back bar whined open.

18

The village constable stepped into the back bar of the pub.

Because he lived in the next village along, he was not seen in this community as often as he would have liked. Once a fortnight, at least that, he committed himself to spending an evening, whatever the weather, just walking through the village. It was nearly half past nine when he came into the back bar of the pub . . . He had been away from his car for an hour now. His car was parked, and locked securely, beside the football pitch and the play swings. He was quite unaware of the increasingly anxious radio traffic beamed from Warminster towards that car.

And, on the back seat of the car was his personal radio, gone down that morning, crossed wires or something broken in its innards, and ready to be taken to the Warminster stores in the morning for replacing.

Desmond nodded to old Vic, a good publican who kept a good house, a proper village pub. He thought old Vic didn't look well.

Being away from his car for an hour had been breaking pretty basic rules because he was out of radio contact all that time. He had called in on Mrs Williams to check that the new wire window-guards were ready to be erected on the shop next week, and he had knocked on the solicitor's door to remind him that his shotgun licence needed renewing, and as was his custom, he had stood for 15 minutes against the trunk of one of the big beech trees at the end of the Manor House drive until he had felt a sense of shame at prying on the world of the bereaved. He had been on his way back to his car when he had passed the pub car park and seen that two vehicles there had their lights still on.

The noise died around him. The talk, the chat, fled the back bar. O . K . , O . K . , so the local Law had wandered in, but it wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last. There was no call for them to be reacting like he was Inland Revenue . . . and old Vic looked fit to drop behind the bar counter.

"Evening, Vic, a Cortina and a Nova out there, lights on. The time you close this place up, they'll be dead in the batteries . . ."

Old Vic had his mouth hanging open. The jukebox was playing.

". . . Know whose they are?"

He turned.

He smiled affably. They were scattered around the back bar and they all stared at him. He knew them all . . . old Brennie, Poaching, convictions going back 48 years, last time done under the Armed Trespass Act of 1968 . . . Fran, nothing ever proved, should have been, and would be . . . Billy and Zap both for Receiving and Handling lead off a church roof in Frome . . .

Zack, Larceny and Aggravated Assault, gone inside for it . . .

K e v , once breathalysed for an eighteen-month ban, twice in court for Driving without Insurance, fined . . . Johnny, still on probation for Vandalism, smashing up the bus shelter . . . He knew them all, and he smiled warmly to each in turn. Normally, every other time that he came into the pub, his ritual visits, he took a bit of banter. Coexistence, wasn't it? He was local, they were local. Normally, there was banter that didn't go way over.

Desmond didn't mind the banter . . . Not a bloody sound in the back bar of the pub to mix with the God-awful noise of the juke box. Old Brennie looking at his flies, Fran at the smoke-stained ceiling, Billy and Zap in their beer and caught in mid-sentence, Zack in his fag packet, Kev rooted with the handful of coins he was going to feed into the jukebox, Johnny blushing because he was the youngest and the one who always ended with the rap.

He saw the feathers on Fran's jersey. He didn't care, bigger game around than pheasants off the estate, and she'd only be making 75 pence a bird off old Vic, and that was plucked.

He knew them all. They were the flotsam of the village and they were the strength of the village, they were the heart of it . . .

He saw the young man.

He saw the young man, and then behind the young man he saw the stooping figure with the heavy-frame spectacles and the curled black hair receding and the sports jacket that was a half size too small. He saw the young man.

The young man gazed back into his face. Every last one of them other than the young man seemed to cower away from him, even Fran who was wild was back on her heels. Not the young man.

He saw the tan. He saw the short-cut fair hair. He saw the eyes that were bright with anger at him. There was no fear in that face. He had seen the photograph.

They had shown it him the first day that he had been assigned to the posting in the village up the lanes. It had been a good photograph.

He saw the metalled handle of the pistol bulging out from the young man's belt.

He looked into the face of Colt.

The jukebox died.

The silence suffocated the back bar of the pub.

He knew it was Colt.

Desmond had been to the Ashford Police Training College. At Ashford they taught a young constable how to look after himself if he were trying to break up a fight outside a pub at closing time, how to intervene in a domestic row, how to tackle a fleeing thief.

He had been good on unarmed combat. Not firearms, though, they didn't teach firearms. Guns were for the zombie men who guarded the Northern Ireland politicians who had their gentry farms in the county, and for the squads that were detailed to protect the Royals when they came to open a new annexe in the hospitals of the local market towns. He knew sweet nothing about confronting an armed man. He was into the back bar, halfway across it towards the bar counter. Couldn't just turn, not on his bloody heel, like nothing had happened, and walk out. At the Police Training College they had said that if guns were involved then there were no heroes required, whistle up on the radio and get scarce till the professionals arrived. He had no radio. He could not turn back for the door. He saw the hand of Colt on his hip and close to the handle of the pistol.

No, he wasn't a hero . . . It was his instinct for survival.

He was a vertigo man on the cliff top.

He lunged.

If he had not tried to prise out the truncheon from his slim hip pocket as he went forward . . .

If he had watched both hands and not the pistol handle in Colt's belt . . .

He was launched when he knew that the heel of Colt's hand

. . . not the pistol, not the bullet. . . was the threat.

Razor fast, the heel of the hand, rising at his throat.

There was the ripple shock through Colt's wrist and the length of his forearm. The heel of his hand took the centre point of the police constable's neck. And the policeman went down. He did not stagger or topple, he went down like a dropped sack of potatoes.