Out of the Sun (34 page)

"Your mother's never liked me, has she?" said Zohra as she filled Harry's cup. "She looked daggers at me when you told her we were going out for the afternoon."

"She's never understood why I married you, that's all. I've tried to explain, of course, but marriage other than for lifelong union and the procreation of children is an alien concept to her."

"In a sense, I agree with her."

"Well, so do I, but.. ."

"As a matter of fact, it's what I want to discuss. I've met somebody. A new junior in the practice. He ... well... he wants to marry me. And I ... want to marry him." She smiled at Harry nervously, as if he were a guardian whose approval she was seeking, though his co-operation was actually what she required. "You and I have lived apart for more than three years now. It should be relatively straightforward to... take the necessary steps."

"Divorce, you mean?"

"Well, yes. I'd make all the arrangements, of course. I'd make sure you weren't put to any trouble or expense. It's only a formality."

Zohra was right, of course. It was only a formality. He had been her saviour. But salvation was no longer required. It was understandable. It was natural. But still he could not help wishing it had happened sooner or later any time but now, when further proof of his expendability was the last thing he needed.

"I'll never forget what you did for me, Harry. I've told Neil all about it. You'll like him, you really will. And we'll stay in touch, won't we? This won't change anything."

"No. I don't suppose it will."

"So ... you'll help speed things along?"

"Oh yes. Don't worry, Zohra. I won't cause you any trouble at all."

In the wake of Zohra's visit, Harry found it difficult not to think more than just another year was ending in his life. Events had prodded him into looking forward as well as back. And the road seemed empty in both directions. On New Year's Eve, he walked out to the house in Holyrood Close that Claude Yenning had hired him to paint back in the long-ago summer of 1960. It looked remarkably unchanged, except that the garden was more overgrown and the wooden doors and windows had been replaced with double-glazed UPVC units. They had no need of a painter now. His day was done.

Harry saw in the New Year with desperate gusto at the Glue Pot and spent the first day of it too hung over to speak much, let alone concentrate on the challenges awaiting him back in London. First among them would be finding a job. There was certainly nothing like economic necessity to take a fellow out of himself, as Harry knew from experience. He assured his mother it would be a top priority. She looked sceptical, but still gave him a farewell breakfast next morning that would have been sufficient to sustain a railway navvy for a week.

"You've been looking pasty to me ever since you arrived, Harold. Is something ailing you?"

"Age, Mother. That's all."

"You should take better care of yourself."

"What for?" Harry was tempted to ask. But instead he summoned a reassuring smile. "I will. From now on."

The man sitting opposite Harry on the train to London spent the journey immersed in a newspaper. Harry found himself studying the articles on whichever page was folded towards him. To his horror, he spotted the word Globescope in a headline presented for his inspection just after Didcot and could not refrain from reading on. It turned out to be a speculative piece on whether Project Sybil's dire predictions for the year 2050 should be taken seriously. Expert opinion was evidently divided on the point. Byron Lazenby, it seemed, was not the only forecaster who believed in telling people what they wanted to hear. Which merely served to underline the pointlessness of David's death. The only comfort it gave Harry was to remind him he would not be around in 2050 to find out how right or wrong David, Donna and the rest of them had been. Time would tell. But it would not tell him.

It was a bank holiday, the last in the long Christmas and New Year sequence. The Stonemasons' was open all day on the strength of it. Stopping off there on his way home, Harry found himself staying longer than he had planned. It did not matter unduly. Mrs. Tandy was not due back from learning ton until Wednesday. He could arrive as late as he chose and in whatever condition suited his mood.

It was, in fact, gone four o'clock on a cold and already frosty afternoon when he slid his key into the lock at 78 Foxglove Road. He stepped into the passage and dumped his bag, then turned back to close the door, resolving in his mind to spend no more lunch times that stretch till dusk in the Stonemasons'. They were no way to initiate the overdue process of pulling himself together. He would not continue January the way he had begun it. That much was

The door flew open as he moved towards it and a figure burst into the passage, flinging him back against the wall and pinning him there, a hand grasping him by the collar of his shirt, a knee wedged between his legs. Which he saw first the gun pointing at him from such close range that the barrel was blurred, or beyond it the sweating contorted face of Byron Lazenby was hard to tell. But suddenly he felt stone-cold sober and very very frightened.

"Hi, Norm," said Lazenby in a breathless rasp. "Or is it Harry?"

"I ... Look, for God's '

"Never mind that now. I have a more important question for you. A real brain-teaser." Lazenby grinned and cocked the revolver. "Can you think of a single reason I mean a single goddam one why I shouldn't blow your fucking head off?"

FIFTY-FIVE

They had moved awkwardly, like two tangled crabs, into Mrs. Tandy's sitting room, knocking one of her Indian brass trays off the wall in the process. It had hit the floor with the noise of a clashing cymbal, convincing Harry for a strangely serene split-second that Lazenby had fired the gun. Death, it seemed, was like travelling on the tube: noisy but painless.

In reality, however, death was still only a threat, evident in the cold hard prod of a gun-barrel beneath his jaw. But the threat was real and horribly immediate. Lazenby had backed him up against the sofa, tightened his grip on his collar and repeated the question to which he could not seem to articulate any kind of answer.

"What do you say, Harry? I'm tempted oh so tempted to pull this trigger. Aren't you going to try to convince me I shouldn't?"

"Look, can't we talk? I mean '

"We are talking. Not very persuasively in your case."

"All right, all right." Harry gulped, feeling the gun like a lump in his throat. "Let's be reasonable. I hear .. . the law can't touch you. Why change that? Why become ... a wanted murderer?"

"Why?" Lazenby grinned. "For the satisfaction, you sonofabitch. Don't you know what you did to me? I almost wish I was being prosecuted rather than eaten alive by the piranhas of every newspaper, magazine and TV current affairs show in the western world. My business has been bankrupted. My reputation's been shredded. My entire life's been taken apart. I'm public enemy numbers one, two, three and keep on counting. I don't even get a chance to clear my name in court. All that's down to you, Harry. So don't ask me why. Tell me why not."

"Because .. . you did it to yourself. You killed four people and got away with it. You wouldn't.. . get away with this."

"Don't give me that crap. Everybody else thinks I'm guilty. Naturally. But you know I'm not."

"You're surely not trying to '

"To hell with this! I'll give you the reason your brains aren't already splattered over that wall over there. Because I want the truth, Harry. I want the goddam truth. Why did you do it to me? Just tell me. Just give me the full story and maybe if I'm sufficiently moved by your candour I'll let you live."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Lazenby had asked for the truth and Harry had spoken it. But it was not what Lazenby wanted to hear. His cold blue eyes bored into Harry's, their unblinking message clear to see. He was in earnest. And there was no way out for either of them. "Honestly. I don't. I stole the tape to stop you killing anybody else. To expose what you were doing. David Yenning was my son."

"I heard all that from Ablett. I don't want to hear it again. We both know you're playing a deeper game. But I'm blowing the whistle. The game's over."

"Ablett? I don't understand."

"If you expected a slimeball like him to keep his mouth shut, you're an idiot, which I don't happen to think you are. He told me the lie you peddled them in Dallas about Hammelgaard's dying message. About being Venning's father. He told me everything. And I didn't even have to hold a gun to his head to make him."

"It wasn't a lie."

"Listen to me, Harry. Listen good. The world believes I commissioned four murders. And I can't convince the world it's wrong. But I know it is. Because I know I didn't do it. I'm an innocent man. You and I are both well aware of that."

"No. I'm not. This is '

"Your last chance. That's what this is. I'll make it easy for you. I'll tell you what I've already figured out. It's something to do with Slade, right? Something to do with higher dimensions. Hammel-gaard and Yenning researched them. Slade bragged about using them in his act. That's the connection. It has to be. Nothing else fits. And I've done my research. You were in Copenhagen when Hammelgaard died and Slade was the last person to speak to

Yenning before he fell into a fatal coma. That's on the record. Plus Slade was in Paris the day Mermillod got his. And you .. . well, where were you when Kersey breathed his last? Montreal, by any short stretch of the imagination? I know Slade was on stage here in London at the time. So it has to be you, doesn't it?"

"I've never been to Montreal in my life. I don't know anything about this."

"Drop the act, Harry. I'm your audience. And I can do much worse than throw rotten fruit."

"It's no act. It's the There was a sound elsewhere in the house. A clunk, followed by a slither. Harry knew what it was at once. Neptune, fed in his and Mrs. Tandy's absence by Mrs. Edwards from number 75, was making his entrance via the cat-flap, in search of whatever gourmet dish Mrs. Edwards had prepared for him. But Lazenby was ignorant of such pet-minding trivia. His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"What the hell was that?" he whispered.

"I don't know. I'm not sure."

The kitchen door creaked. It sounded as if Neptune had detected their presence and was coming to investigate.

"There's someone out there," murmured Lazenby. He half-turned towards the door. The barrel of the gun slipped away from Harry's throat. It was the glimmer of a chance he knew he had to take. He lunged to one side, swung his right arm back and struck Lazenby across the jaw with his elbow. Lazenby grunted and fell against the sofa, then down onto the floor as if stunned. Hoping he was for the few seconds needed to escape Harry flung himself towards the door.

He was halfway there when he tripped. He knew from the squeal behind and beneath him that Neptune the stupid overweight interfering mouser was the cause. He heard the cat scampering away as he toppled onto all fours. Then his ears were booming and his brain whirling in the gale of an explosive roar. There was a crater in the wall where the light-switch had been. Plaster was raining down around him, brick-dust and cordite stinging his eyes and nostrils.

"Stand up very very slowly," said Lazenby.

Harry stood up just as slowly as his trembling muscles could manage, fixing his eyes on the mangle of exposed wires in the wall where the bullet had hit and imagining the bloody mess it would have made of his bones and arteries.

Turn round."

Harry obeyed and found himself staring straight into Lazenby's face. Hollow-eyed, unshaven and wearing a suit so crumpled and creased he might well have slept in it, he was a far and desperate cry from the slick-toned businessman Harry had met in Washington. A horrible realization was seeping through the fear. Lazenby was telling the truth. He had been set up. And he had every reason to believe Harry was one of those who had set him up.

"Guess you borrowed one of the cat's nine lives there, Harry. You won't get lucky a second time, believe me. It just doesn't work like that. Let me explain something to you. Whether I kill you or not is a marginal decision. It could go either way. Depending how much my jaw aches when the numbness wears off, for instance. Or whether I like your choice of phrase. Know what I mean? You're on a fraying tightrope, friend. Over the deepest drop there is. I don't advise you to try anything that might tip the balance."

This is the truth, Byron. As God's my witness. I am David's father. Hammelgaard did ask me to carry a message to his friends about the tape. I had nothing to do with his death or any of the others. I stole the tape in good faith, to prevent more of the murders I believed you were responsible for. I thought you had to be stopped. I thought you were behind it all."

"What do you think now?"

"I don't know what to think. If it wasn't you ... then who? And why?"

"It was you and Slade. Like I told you. As to the why, you tell me' Lazenby stepped closer, raised the gun and pressed the point of the barrel against Harry's forehead. For a second, Harry felt sure he meant to pull the trigger without another word. He wondered if his heart would stop from sheer fright before the bullet entered his brain. Then Lazenby said: "Come on, Harry. What's it all about?"

"It's about Project Sybil and David's attempt to blackmail you. It's about the steps you took to stop their report seeing the light of day. What else can it be about?"

"That's not good enough."

"It's all I know."

"It can't be."

"It is."

This is no time to hold out on me. You're bluffing with a losing hand."

"I'm not bluffing."

"Goodbye, Harry."

"Wait. For Christ's sake .. ."

"I'll squeeze the truth out of Slade. D'you realize that? I'll find out anyway. You'll die for nothing."

"I've told you as much as I know."

"This is your last chance. Your very last chance."

The gun seemed to bore into Harry's skull as Lazenby's stare bored into his eyes. His last chance was no chance. There was nothing he could say or do. Instinctively, he closed his eyes and took a deep final breath. There was a click, the prelude, he assumed, to oblivion. Then