The Cambridge Theorem (46 page)

“Don't do anything, George. I can take care of myself.”

H
E FELT A STRONG SENSE
of unreality as he drove back down Huntingdon Road, although he felt unnaturally calm. The street lamps seemed unusually bright, and the note of the car engine was a soft and insistent purr. The familiar streets rose and fell. He parked and pushed open the broken door. The hall light was on. Pinned to his inner door was a note from his landlord.
What happened here? Call me at work immediately. Les
.

Inside the wreckage of the flat he worked methodically. He reached down a canvas bag from the top of the storage cupboard. He found his hiking boots at the bottom of the wardrobe and threw them in. Most of his clothes were on the floor. He stuffed a few handfuls into the bag. In the bathroom, he looked down at the cowboy boots in the toilet. He felt a little lightheaded, and the boots looked a long way away. He packed a toilet bag. He hung his raincoat on the hooks in the hall and found his parka. Then he stepped over the broken furniture in the living room and was on his way again.

His sense of unreality was intensifying. As he stood at the cash machine, punching in the numbers, his hands looked miles away, detached from his body, as if he were staring down the wrong end of a telescope. He headed east out of Cambridge, towards the motorway. He lit a cigarette from the lighter in the dashboard. His hands were steady.

Someone just tried to kill you
, he told himself.
But she failed, because you killed her. The first time you've fired a gun in ten years on the force and you blew ber head off. Just like that
. He thought he would head north and west, take the advice, go to the Lake District for a few days. He needed to think.
Sorry about that. Well done. You were right about everything. Just static. Derek, you can't believe, I'd never let one of my men…

He noticed he was driving very slowly. There were few cars on the road, but everything was overtaking him. God, he had fallen for everything, hadn't he? He should have known, realistically, she could see nothing in him. But the sex? Was it just faked? He saw her face, rocking in the darkness above him. Then he saw his father's frown, an echoing voice.
You should think about the police, you know, in case you want to settle down
. Then Beecroft.
It's got to do with betrayal. It makes you angry somewhere, very deep down, and you need some kind of revenge, even if it goes against your grain
.

Suddenly, the shaking started. Mildly at first, and he started to pull over, then uncontrollably. There was a petrol station, and beyond, a motor inn.
Traveller's Lodge
, said a large white sign.

He parked and put his head on the wheel and wept. His arms and shoulders shook. His legs shook. He could not stop shaking, and he could not stop crying. His father, George, Lauren. He thought he might be sick again but there was nothing in his stomach.

After a long interval he climbed unsteadily out of the car and entered the lobby of the inn. The light was too bright. Sickly music oozed from an overhead speaker. There was a large artificial plant standing by the registration counter, where a clerk in an ugly uniform greeted him with a large artificial smile. He said something to Smailes which he did not hear. He went into his wallet and found a credit card. “Room,” he said. “One night.”

He lay on the bed in the dark and the shaking began again. It's shock, he told himself. It's natural, you nearly got killed. At some point he thought of the white Rover and panicked. He got up to the window and looked out, but there were no white Rovers in the car park. He took off his parka and tried to take off his shirt but the shirt was stuck. He realized he was still wearing the gun and shoulder holster. He took them off and threw them in a drawer. Then he opened the drawer and put the gun on the nightstand. When he took off his shirt he found the mike still taped to his chest and the battery pack clipped to his belt. He tore them off and threw them at the wall. Had they even bothered to listen? He lay down naked under the sheets, shivering, staring at the ceiling. Cars passed occasionally outside the window.

They were making love again, hungrily, he had his hand in the thick black curls, but when he looked down to kiss her her mouth was making its dreadful noiseless movements and her throat was torn open. He woke up suddenly, terrified, a weak metallic light was pushing its way into the room. He got up heavily and showered. In the light he saw that his trousers and shoes were covered in mud. He put on jeans, boots. The inn had a restaurant. He needed coffee, food. He had survived.

It was a bright April Sunday morning and he felt an odd clarity as he accelerated up the ramp to the M1, Britain's jugular vein of steel and rubber, and pointed the car north. It had been Standiforth's plan, from the start. Both he and George had argued in favor of driving straight over there with uniformed backup and pulling her in on suspected murder. Standiforth had stood his ground. There was no evidence against her in either of the murders. Bowles was officially a suicide, and Allerton's body had yet to be found. She was obviously an illegal of some sort, but which sort? He argued heatedly that unless they could trap her into some form of confession she could invoke the protection of her Embassy and then God knows where they would end up. It meant the Cousins would find out the wrong way. We need to control that briefing, he had said. And besides, he was concerned she was a double. Maybe the Cousins had been onto Gorham-Leach for years, had sent their own agent to confirm him, not trusting the British. Did anyone believe a major defense contractor would hire an engineer with a background like hers? He had argued for the remote mike and the receiver and cassette recorder in the car. They had had to call in the technical people to rig it all up. It was a Saturday so it had taken hours. Smailes had argued angrily at first, that she was a killer and a spy and that they were wasting time, but eventually he had gone along with Standiforth's plan. He was quite prepared to confront her himself, and there seemed to be no undue danger. Smailes still had his weapon, Standiforth carried an automatic. George, whose gun permit was still expired, eventually deferred to Standiforth also. He had shaken his head in disbelief at first when Smailes told him about his affair with the American girl. We'll talk about this later, Sergeant, he had said.

But now Smailes was not sure the whole thing wasn't a fraud. They had known about Lauren. They must have. They let him stroke his chin and make the calls and think he had nailed her himself, so that they could send him in as point man, then hang him out to dry.
Certain arrangements have had to be made
, had been Standiforth's line. You bet. He just didn't believe the story about the vacuum cleaner and the static. Modern electronics were better than that. And he wondered that George wasn't part of some plot, despite his protests. He thought back over some of his strange moves, his insistence on closing the case, his acquiescence in the Fenwick business, the speed and venom with which he'd suspended him. As he thought about it, he was convinced that George would grab his forelock if the brass invoked his patriotism, particularly brass like Standiforth.

Anger had cleared his head. He drove into the Midlands and through the neat angular brick rows of the Birmingham suburbs. Men were out in their gardens, trying to turn the soil for the new planting season, as they had done for centuries. He felt oppressed by the senescence of his culture, by the earthbound race of the British, bowed beneath their leaden skies and ancient divisions. There was such determination to resist.
We need to control that briefing
. God forbid an accounting should be made.

North of Birmingham he joined the M6 and the land gave way to tamed contours of pasture and arable land. Plump sheep and placid cows rested in the mild afternoon. Electric pylons strode away towards the spires of distant churches. He had thought to turn off into the Lake District but was adrift in his thoughts and drove right past both turnings to the South Lakes and Kendal. He climbed Shap Fell and began the slow descent towards Carlisle and the border country.

He was well over the border into Scottish lowlands when he saw the petrol gauge almost empty and felt around with his finger in an empty packet of cigarettes. A sign pointed to Cormond, and Smailes turned off on a B road that soon gave way to granite bungalows and then the sandstone terraces of the dour little town. The green hillsides swept down into the town itself, punctuated with sheep and patterned with dry stone walls. He passed a gray Victorian hotel on his left, the cars of the Sunday drinkers parked neatly in front, then guesthouses, a baker's shop, a cafe and a stationery store, which looked open. He drove through to the town square where the war memorial stood, an iron statue of Victory, brandishing a laurel wreath like a deck quoit above the names of the fallen. He circled around and drove back down the main street and parked outside the stationery store. Next to it was a sign announcing
Sandie's B and B
. He stepped out onto the street. A man in a tweed jacket and flat hat was loading a tray of seedlings into the back of a Land Rover. A young woman pushed twins towards him, in an animated discussion with her mother.

He entered the small shop abstractedly, feeling like an alien, a refugee from a world of lawlessness and treachery. He glanced at the headlines on the ranks of Sunday newspapers on the counter.
Showdown looms in South Atlantic
, blared the tabloids. The young woman behind the counter beamed at him. “Yes, sir?” she asked, with her lovely ancestral sibilance.

He ordered his cigarettes and commented on the weather, drawn to this first genuine human contact since the blur of night and death.

“Och, it's no bad the day, but it's been awful. It really has. Are ye going far?”

“I'm not sure. I'm on holiday.”

“Oh, that's nice.”

He noticed her blue nylon work coat, the same color as her eyes. He felt an urge to ask if she'd talk to him, listen to his terrible story.

“I'm thinking of doing some hiking.”

“Aye, well there's plenty of hiking paths around here. Of course, it's no the Highlands.”

He left the shop and stood in the street, looking back towards the statue of Victory, and the sandstone turrets of the town hall that stood behind it. Somewhere there was a link between this ugly dance he had made and the implacable decency of this Scottish town. He realized he had no desire to drive further. He turned and looked at the sign for
Sandie's B and B
, and pushed open the door.

Sandie Cook was a suspicious woman in her mid thirties with thick, fair hair, broad shoulders and broad hips. She accepted his deposit and showed him into a small room next to the bathroom on the ground floor with a single bed, a sink, a dressing table and chair and a portrait of the Monarch of the Glen on the flowered wallpaper. She apologized for the lack of towels. She had not expected guests so early in the season.

That night Smailes strolled down to the Black Bull in the town square which sold good beer and better whisky. From the public telephone out by the men's toilet he put in a call to Iain Mack.

Iain listened intently as Smailes tried to give him a condensed version of what had happened since they had last met in Cambridge. He interrupted with the occasional “No shit?” or by asking him to repeat something, but largely he just listened. When Smailes recounted the events of the previous night his tone became more urgent and he found himself stopping to take pulls on his whisky. He found the visual images still vivid and had difficulty explaining everything in order. Iain had him go back over the chronology, from the death of Gorham-Leach to the calls to the FBI to the decision to set up Lauren and their final, terrifying drive to Girton village and the golf course car park.

“Derek, are you telling me this bitch was about to shoot you and Dearnley and the other guys are nowhere?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't believe it. Go on.”

Smailes had difficulty with the final act and his voice actually broke as he described the bullet hitting the dirt two inches from his ear and the dreadful gurgling sound from Lauren's throat as her life expired.

There was a silence from the other end of the line, then Iain said, “Where did say you are?”

“Cormond. Just over the border.
Sandie's B and B
.”

“I'm coming, okay? I'll get off early Thursday, take the train, you can get me in Carlisle or somewhere, right?”

“Right, but…”

“No buts. I'm coming. Look, will you be okay this week, on your own?”

“Yeah, I'm just shaken up. I'll do some hiking, some thinking. Iain, you know what bothers me most?”

“Yeah, that Dearnley and this bloke from MI5 just wanted you and her to shoot it out, no witnesses, right?”

“It sounds like that to you too?”

“I don't know. I need to think about it too. I'll call you tomorrow with the time of the train. Get some rest.”

“Sure. And Iain?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

The weather stayed clear for the next several days and Smailes spent long hours tramping over low moors and through isolated glens. All he saw were sheep and crows and the occasional farm building. Once, miles from any road, he came across a battered Land Rover and a man who must have been in his seventies slowly repairing a collapsed section of dry stone wall. The wind was high and raw and Smailes had to shout his greeting. The man looked up calmly and nodded. “Isn't it lonely out here?” yelled Smailes. “Och, when you've got your work ye dinna notice,” the man replied.

Another time he climbed through a stile into a wide field to find himself confronted by a bizarre, long-haired animal which looked like an evil-tempered Highland cow without horns. The beast snorted and made a run at him and Smailes had to hurry to get back through the stile. He descended past the side of the field and down a track to a low farm building where brightly colored pennants flapped from long poles in the breeze. A stocky young man, who did not look like a native, stood outside the door wearing Wellington boots, oilskin and woolen hat. He was holding a large cabbage. Smailes greeted him and asked about the animal that had chased him.