Gerard got up and turned the TV off.
She said, "Do all your weekends end like this?"
"With me the last man standing?"
She nodded at Mark. "With your guests comatose, yes."
"Everybody arranges these things differently. I mean, how would I go about capping that evening at yours? Blow the neighbours up?"
"I wouldn"t put it past you."
"They"d have to really annoy me. Wear brown shoes, or whistle in the mornings."
"Heinous crimes like that."
"We"ve all got standards. That husband of yours, drink a lot, does he?"
"Depends on the company."
"I would, in his posish." Gerard had, even in his own. But except for a bloodening round the eyes and the occasional verbal stumble, you wouldn"t know it. Not bad going, with a dozen empties about the place.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning his job. Keep your hair on." He clumsily poured another gla.s.s of red. "So how"s it going, anyway? Your little problem?"
"My what?"
He waggled his fingers. "BHS."
"Vino veritas," she said. "You couldn"t keep up the pretence, could you?"
"Which pretence is that?"
"That you"re not a s.h.i.t."
"Ah, Sarah. Now, the thing is. What you have to do." He belched, softly. "You really have to learn who your friends are."
Mark stirred and mumbled something in an alien tongue.
"This is really good advice you"re giving me."
"You want good advice? I can give you that. Batten down the hatches, girl. You"ve got big trouble coming."
"So have you."
He ignored her. "You"ll be wishing you were bored again. Soon. Trust me on this."
"I don"t trust you on anything."
"Time zhit?" said Mark.
Gerard looked at him, then back at her. "If I was you, I"d get out while you can."
"Thank you, Gerard. You"re a prince among men."
Mark sat up straight very suddenly. "G.o.d. Must have dropped off."
"Must have."
"Did I miss anything?"
"Only Cary Grant."
Mark rubbed his eyes. "Cary was here?"
"Come on, old son," Gerard said. "Better be getting you upstairs."
Ten minutes later they were all in bed, and what felt like ten minutes after that, Sarah was awake again. Downstairs, a shockingly healthy-looking Gerard was making tea for a gratifyingly woebegone Paula: they looked like a normal couple, d.a.m.n them, Gerard having reverted to his Brilliant Host role, pouring tea from a caddy straight into the pot.
"That"s a lot easier to gauge if you use a spoon."
"There"s not a spoon to be had. They"re all in the dishwasher."
The downside of technology. Michael Crichton was probably writing a book about it. Gerard made a tray for her to take upstairs, and told her he and Paula were just off to ma.s.s, they"d be back in an hour or so. Sarah was mildly surprised, but hoped it didn"t show.
She went back to bed. Mark was well out of the running, only coming round long enough to make it clear he didn"t want breakfast and hadn"t appreciated the offer. So Sarah drank tea alone and unattended, reflecting as she did that there were two whole rooms in the cottage she"d not been in yet. Probably she"d have been able to sleep if that thought hadn"t arrived.
She showered, giving temptation time to wither and die, which it didn"t, and took their bedroom first. There wasn"t much to it; it looked, in fact, like a second guestroom, with even the clothes in the wardrobes having the air of being extras, spares. She imagined matching counterparts in other wardrobes in their London house; could almost picture Gerard and Paula buying two of everything, to save carting back and forth.
But poking around in other people"s bedrooms was a grubby business. She shut the door quietly behind her and thought seriously about forgoing the other room, which might only be a cupboard after all. So really there was no harm in looking, she decided; a piece of deductive justification which might have been more impressive had she reached the end of it before opening the door.
This room was tiny, little more than a boxroom, but it looked like Gerard got a dual purpose out of it anyway: part office, part gallery to his ego. On a table which was surely too big to have got through the door squeezed a PC, a telephone, a fax machine next to what might have been a baby photocopier plus a stack of papers and a palmtop. And around the walls hung framed photographs of Gerard at different stages of his important life: young and chubby, adolescent and chubby; prosperous and fat. In one of the older shots he stood in front of a low wall, flanked by, presumably, his parents. In the way old photographs have, this one looked as if black-and-white weren"t just the medium but the subject: the adults appearing straitened, uncomfortable; their very postures suggesting that their post-war years had kept oozing on into the sixties, the way they had in the North. In contrast young Gerard looked simply impatient, as though even at eight or nine he"d been waiting for the coloured times to arrive. He was holding a model aeroplane in a proprietorial way that left no doubt he had built it himself, but Sarah couldn"t discern much pride from his demeanour; more dissatisfaction that toys were all he had to occupy himself. His mother was pretty and slight. His father, much taller, stood with one hand on Gerard"s head, as if attempting to keep him where he belonged.
Other photos, of more recent vintage, showed Gerard fully emerged from the coc.o.o.n of childhood, not that the result resembled a b.u.t.terfly. A happy slug came to mind. Here was Gerard breaking ground on what an accompanying picture proved an office block (Inchon Enterprises); Gerard spraying champagne over somebody getting out of an expensive car; Gerard becoming married in (of course) top hat and tails, while Paula posed winsomely beside him in a dress even Sarah could see cost well into four figures. She did, it had to be said, look lovely. Even Gerard came out of this one well. Something solemn had crept into his face, forming a solid foundation for what was obviously happiness. The result was to firm up his otherwise slack features; hardly putting him in heart-throb territory, but at least bestowing a visible sense of purpose you could mistake for integrity. Sarah found the same effect in another recent picture which showed him handing a cheque to a tall, priestly man; the pair of them standing in front of a small crowd of children. The background, mostly obscured, seemed to be an inst.i.tution of some sort; a noiceboard behind them had part of what was probably a name, rimat, visible between young heads. Some religious setup, she hypothesized. Catholic or very high: he"d said ma.s.s.
She turned her attention to the clutter on the desk, hoping to find a bomb-maker"s manual among it. Nothing doing, but she picked up the palmtop to look at. She"d seen such toys but never operated one; was not really what you"d call a card-carrying member of the technological society, though had enough experience to know the average computer could take you from How Hard Can It Be? to What The h.e.l.l Happened There? in two seconds flat. That was the downside. The upside was it was very small with an obvious on-b.u.t.ton and where was the harm in trying? This b.u.t.ton proved remarkably simple to operate and the little screen came to life immediately, flashing a prompt she guessed was its demand for a pa.s.sword. What kind of pa.s.sword would a man like Gerard use? She went for blindingly predictable, and keyed Paula. Invalid Pa.s.sword it countered. Not a single other word came to mind. It was as if her brain had been rinsed of all vocabulary.
"What are you looking for?"
She nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Sarah?"
"I wasn"t looking for anything. I was just looking." She put the machine down before turning round, hoping he wouldn"t notice, then switched topics in what she prayed was an undetectable, natural manner. "My G.o.d, you look awful."
"I feel awful." Mark ran a hand across his forehead. "That wine must have been a bit dodgy."
"That fifth bottle was corked, probably. Come on, I"ll make you some coffee."
Mark took a detour via the bathroom and by the time he joined her in the kitchen, dressed, the others were pulling up outside. "They may be G.o.dly, but at least I"m clean," he said.
"I suppose I should be grateful you didn"t go with them. Keep the client sweet."
He gave her a hard look.
"It was a joke, Mark."
"It needs work."
"And you need this." She gave him a cup of coffee.
"No, what he needs is a hair of the dog," said Gerard, entering. Then, at the look Mark gave him, laughed and said, "But it"ll keep. Actually, I wanted a word, Mark, since you"re up. Don"t mind, do you?" He addressed the question to Sarah.
Be a good girl, now. Run along and play. But residual guilt from snooping, or from being caught snooping, left her unable to object.
Gerard handed her a bunch of newspapers and took Mark up to his study, while a still interestingly pale Paula mumbled something about a lie-down, and disappeared. Sarah took her bundle into the garden, and spent the next hour reading what appeared to be the same set of articles in three different papers, before drifting softly to sleep in the sunshine. She was woken by a hand stroking her cheek, though Mark"s words weren"t as affectionate as his gesture.
"When you were in Gerard"s study," he said suspiciously, "did you mess with his palmtop at all?"
"Did I what?"
"His electric notebook. Only it wasn"t closed down properly."
"Maybe he forgot to last time he used it," Sarah said, fully awake this time.
"That"s what I said. He said, Hmmm."
"I only turned it on. I"d never seen one before."
"Jesus, Sarah! That"s like looking at somebody"s diary. It is looking at somebody"s diary."
"Well, if it had been a diary, I"d not have been interested," she lied. "I was thinking of getting you one for Christmas. I wanted to see how they work."
He became thoughtful. "It"d come in very useful."
"I can"t get you one now, can I? It wouldn"t be a surprise."
She left him to mull that over and went inside, where Gerard was in the kitchen, preparing lunch: a joint of beef, the usual veg. Traditional, as she"d have expected, though he wasn"t the one she"d have thought would be preparing it. "Anything I can do to help?"
"I think it"s under control, thanks."
She looked out of the window at Mark, who"d settled down with the papers now; was reading the Middle East news with a worried frown which might have related to world events or just to his hangover, she couldn"t tell. When she turned back Gerard was studying her with an evil look on his face.
"Is there a problem?"
"One thing would be useful."
"Yes?"
He pointed at the bottles on the table. "You could clear up the dead soldiers," he said.
IV.
Amos Crane tall, grey, crewcut, a bit of a problem; his face that of a man in the last stage of something wasting sat in the glow of a VDU, whose green wash made unearthly the crags and hollows of his head. Beneath the surface wreckage, though, everything pumped in order. The body was a tool. An early riser, Amos Crane jogged three miles before breakfast; ran past Chinese supermarkets as they opened, blowsy strip clubs as they closed, and considered the lives grouped round these exits and entrances as being connected to his own by an invisible network of alliances. Crane was not a Londoner, and never imagined himself one. But on the city"s early streets he felt part of a larger community, and regarded the tired dancers and busy grocers as his equals, at least in as much as they led lives outside the jobsworth"s timetable. He was their secret sharer. He understood their pa.s.sions. Now, though, he was at his desk.
He preferred to work without overhead lighting; with just an Anglepoise bent so low it scorched rings on the desk"s surface, and the light of the computer screen, whose lettering reflected on his spectacles. A computer, too, was a tool only. He had no patience with those who subst.i.tuted this magic box for the real world, looking to it for answers: it held only clues. All the information in the world didn"t give you the answers. For these, you had to close with flesh and bone.
His brother used to accuse him of attempting philosophy.
"It doesn"t hurt to think," Amos would say. And then amend it, adding, "It doesn"t hurt me to think. I can see where you"d have problems."
"Always the kidder."
"You rush into things." Serious now; it was Axel"s big fault. Always doing, and working out the total later. Or letting somebody else do that part, which bored him.
Axel would blow him a smoke ring. Change the subject. But it was true: over the years, Amos had tried to steer his brother right over and over. Telling him a hundred different ways, he had to get a grip on the politics of the situation. Probably there was nowhere left in the world you could do the wet work and not worry about the consequences. Well, America. The Far East. Africa too, come to think of it. And most of Eastern Europe. But Oxford, no, you had to be more circ.u.mspect. Blowing up a house, even Axel had to a.s.sume there"d be raised eyebrows afterwards.
"It got the job done."
"Half the job done."
Axel had blown another smoke ring.
And it had been up to Amos to work out the details: get the kid out of hospital, fashion a lid to pop on the story; plus the tricky bit, which was letting Howard believe he"d been the one doing all the work. Credit had a way of calming him down. Thinking about Howard now, he tapped out a little riff on his keyboard, squirting a meaningless jumble of letters on to the screen.
"Your brother," Howard had said, "is certifiably wacko."
"Please."
"You"re supposed to be his control on this operation. Did you have any idea what he was planning?"
"The agent in the field has the last word. Or didn"t you know?"
Howard was strictly a desk-man, and didn"t enjoy being reminded of the fact. He"d flushed, said, "An innocent woman was killed. Are you aware of that?"
So Amos had told him about the early forties, in Mongolia. The experiments with the rats and the prisoners.
"You can"t compare us with them," Howard had said. And then shut up, perplexed, while Amos laughed at him.
He"d just come into the room, now. Howard. Without turning, Amos knew it was him: something about the clumsy way desk- men moved, even (especially?) when they thought they were sliding like grease. On the nights he worked late which, to be fair, were frequent Howard always let you know. "I was in the office till almost twelve last night": not complaining, just filling you in. Wanting everybody to appreciate, Amos Crane thought now, that he had it tough too. Till almost twelve.
"Howard," he said, before the other announced his presence.
"Any . . . developments?"
"Not exactly."
"Are you aware of the pressure I"m under?"