CONDITION BLACK MASTER Read online

" Y o u did well in Northern Ireland."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Tell me, Rutherford, why did you join the Service?"

  "I thought I would be doing something worthwhile."

  " D o you still believe that?"

  " I f I didn't, sir, I'd leave."

  "Committed to the Service, Rutherford?"

  " Y e s , sir."

  "What's the hardest thing about maintaining that commitment?"

  " T h e enforced privacy, sir."

  "It's true. We're a lonely breed. Can you cope with that, being outside the pale?"

  "I hope so, sir."

  " T h e Service has to be first, always first."

  The Director General walked to his cabinet. He knew that young Rutherford had been drinking already, could smell it. No concern of his. If he had run an abstainers' show then Curzon Street would have been as empty as a cemetery at night. He poured two whiskies. He added a splash of water.

  It was his pleasure, from time to time, to chat with his junior Executive Officers. Something to do with growing old, he supposed. He liked their company, he enjoyed their certainty.

  " T h e American, Erlich, what do you make of him?"

  "He's an ex-teacher, not the usual F . B . I , material, and not terribly skilled - you couldn't imagine him surviving a day in Belfast, for example. I have no doubt this is his first major assignment and he wants to make double certain it works for him. Career-wise, he doesn't intend the grass to grow under his shoes. He's a curious mixture. He'll go through a brick wall and back, he's belligerent and impatient, and he knows more Victorian poetry than I can bear to listen to."

  "Not your run-of-the-mill gunslinger, then?"

  " O h , he'd shoot, sir, shoot first, ask questions afterwards . . .

  that's metaphorical, of course."

  " A n d the feelings of Erlich for the Tuck boy?"

  "It's become a very personal thing, sir. The Agency man who was killed in Athens was Erlich's friend. And some days ago Bill Erlich was jumped - we were watching the Tuck place at night

  - and got himself pretty badly beaten. That looked like Colt's work, too."

  "He'd want him dead?"

  " I f he had the chance, sir, no question."

  The Director General had started to pace. They were good strides, they would have graced a fairway. There was a swell in the filled tumbler and then a trail behind him of whisky splashed on the carpet. He couldn't call in a committee to evaluate the competence of young Rutherford. Young Rutherford didn't fidget, and he liked that. Young Rutherford stood his ground. It was his decision. If he was right, well, then, he would receive no praise because his decision would never be known of. If he was wrong, well, then, disgrace . . .

  "Major Tuck told Mr Barker and Erlich that his son had been at home. He said that his son was now gone."

  " D i d he, sir?"

  "If this boy, this Colt, were still in Britain, where would you look for him?"

  "His mother's dying, sir. That's where I'd look for him."

  "Find him, please, Rutherford, and take Erlich with you."

  " Y e s , sir."

  "What will you do when you find him?"

  " T h e local P.C. is a very good man, sir . . ."

  " N o , no, no. I wouldn't do that, Rutherford." The Director General gazed into Rutherford's face. He thought this could have been a pleasant young man if he had had a proper job, if he hadn't chosen to work in Curzon Street. " T h e political implications here are as long as your arm. The Iraqi connection, etc. etc. No, the best way out of this hornet's nest would be to get Erlich to kill him. No publicity, please, just dead."

  14

  The fire was heaped with coal, burning well. He sat in the easy chair and the cat was on his lap. It was a woman's room, he could see that. There was a neatness about the small pieces of furniture and the light-coloured curtains and the delicate china ornaments and the arrangement of the print pictures on the walls. It was a room to be at home in, and there was the smell of the witch hazel.

  Bill had not known such a room since he had left his grandparents' home, down by the yacht harbour at Annapolis, since he had gone west to college at Santa Barbara. The room was where to end a great day.

  She had poured him good wine. She had cooked him tortellini, good sauce. She was just a hell of a fine girl, she had welcomed him into her home and sat him by the fire, and she had rubbed the witch hazel into the yellow dark bruising of his face and his crotch.

  She heard the taxi before him. She cut herself short in her description of how it was to be married into the Service. She had been sitting on the sofa, her ankles tucked up beside her, her skirt tight above her knees.

  The taxi drove away. She had stopped talking and her head was raised, listening. The cat hadn't moved. The cat didn't care who came, who went, as long as the lap was warm. Erlich heard the scraping of a key at the front door. He had to grin . . . James Rutherford coming home, and not able to get his key in the hole.

  Hell of a start to your evening home. The third failure with the key, and she swung her legs off the sofa and stamped out into the hall in her stockinged feet.

  Erlich heard the front door opened.

  He listened.

  "Hello, darling."

  "You're pissed."

  "Good cause, darling."

  "Always a good cause."

  "Blame the D . - G . "

  "Come the other one."

  "Honest, darling, he had me in, really. He had me in, he poured me a killer."

  The softening in Penny Rutherford's voice, anxiety. "Are you in trouble?"

  " Y o u don't get half pints of Scotch if you're in trouble."

  "What did he want?"

  " Y o u won't believe it . . ."

  " T r y me."

  " H e wanted to talk about Buffalo Bill . . ."

  Erlich heard the relief of her laughter.

  "Who?'

  " Y o u know, chap in your bath, Erlich."

  "What did you tell him?"

  Erlich heard the bright chime of Penny Rutherford's giggle.

  "I said that he was impetuous, more. I said he was too scholarly for the Service, too poetical, really, and anyway, I said, you turn your back on him for the length of a cornflake and he's in the bath with your wife. No, I black-balled him, ha! ha! ha!"

  "Come on in, before you fall down."

  Penny led. She had the mischief in her eyes. Erlich thought that Rutherford would be struggling out of his coat, and there was the thudding of his overnight bag onto the polished floorboards in the hall. She was beautiful, and the mischief in her was explosive.

  Rutherford came in.

  Rutherford stopped.

  "Oh, Christ . . . "

  "Evening, James," Erlich said.

  "What the hell are you doing here?"

  Erlich said, quiet and easy with a bit of a drawl like he came from cattle country, "I came to take a bath."

  "Come on, you two. We'll watch James have his supper. I think you've had enough to drink, darling. Go and sit down and I'll heat it. Bill, catch him if he looks like falling."

  Rutherford stood straight. He stood like he was on parade. He even straightened his tie.

  "Apart from the bath . . . ?"

  "I was bringing back your laundry, for which, again, thanks."

  "Ah, yes, the laundry . . . I hope they haven't used starch on my shirt," Rutherford said. "The rest of it is fixed, by the by.

  We're given carte blanche to track down Colt. This is my full-time priority. No more side-shows, you'll work alongside me because that's the way you'll get to Colt . . ."

  Somewhat later, they both kissed Penny Rutherford goodnight, and slipped out through the front door into the street.

  Rutherford let him drive. When he wasn't dozing, when he wasn't giving the directions for the turn off the M3 onto the A303

  and the right-hand fork at Stonehenge, he thought of Penny.

  That was the trouble, too much thinking about Penny, n
ot enough time to do anything about Penny. Pretty Penny, the wife left at home . . . Bedrock of Curzon Street, the wives that were left at home. On his floor, in the D Branch, he knew of four men who had moved out of their suburban houses that year, and exchanged their own homes for an inner London bedsit, bachelor apartment, studio, or whatever . . . She could have warned him, she could have whispered and pointed to the sitting room door Perhaps it was her bit of fun, pretty Penny little laugh, to let him lead with his big foot. Actually, all jokes aside, they were washed up. All the excuses could be tripped off, But , no, she hadn't warned him because she hadn't given a toss that he had made a rude bore of himself. He just thanked his stars he hadn't given away the true gist of it. The hair rose on his neck at the thought of it. Still, some comfort there. Tight as an owl and still a good Service man. A good Service man and a piss-awful husband. Go on the way they were heading and he'd be for the bachelor flat in no time, sure.

  They both pretended to be asleep, and they were both awake.

  Midnight chimed on the clock downstairs in the living room.

  Sara knew the problem was new. He had slept after the last session with the bank manager, and he had slept after he had come back from being held by the Establishment police. He had played Scrabble with them, and he had made sure that it was always either Frank or Adam who won. He had been like any other parent. He had been like the fathers she saw at the school gate meeting their kids. Beside her, he twisted and turned.

  She reached to touch his shoulder, felt him start away from her.

  "What is it, Frederick? What's happened?"

  It flew from him in a torrent.

  "Whatever I've done is for you and for the boys. Whatever I am going to do, is only for you and for Adam and Frank. Only for you, only for them. Whatever I've done, whatever I'm going to do, don't listen to anyone. It's only for you . . . " And then nothing more.

  Her questions rebounded from his angular shoulder.

  The car was where it had been the last time, in the driveway of the policeman's house, left in front of his darkened windows.

  This night there was more light, half a moon and broken quick moving cloud, and they had skirted the village and come to the wood from the east side.

  He heard the crushing of the dead leaves.

  He lay in the wood loam. He was using his bivouac as his groundsheet. There was a big wind up high. but where he was the trees shielded him from the cold. There wern't trees heaving, not this night. He hadn't heard the collapse ol a lulling branch.

  It wasn't a branch, broken off, that had crushed the leaves.

  Rutherford was off to his left, beyond reach IFrom where he was, Rutherford could see the front gate of the Manor House, and could look over the outbuildings of the place, what had once been the pony and trap sheds, right to the front gate. Erlich watched the light on the stair window and he could see the kitchen door.

  There was a light on in the empty kitchen

  He heard the cracking of a twig.

  He heard a soft, dried-breath throat growl

  Fast, sudden movement. The weight buckled down onto Erlich. The blow of the weight onto his shoulder, and his back.

  The stab of pain at his neck. Groping lot the holsiter. The weight was on his back and heaving down on the fist that scrabbles for the handle of the Smith and Wesson. The throbbing roar in his ears, and the torn hurt in his skin. Hand on the gun, the gun clear, twisting and rolling. The weight and the pain following him as he twisted, rolled. The gun put. The gun pressed against his chest. Foul breath spilling at his lace. The growl roar, and the weight, and the pain.

  He fired . . .

  Kept firing . . .

  Erlich kept firing until there was no more noise, until the weight was gone, through the six slugs in the Smith and Wesson chamber, and on round, until there was just the sound of the hammer hitting dead cartridge heads.

  Rutherford was above him, and Rutherford's torch played over the tree branches and roots around him, and over the bramble undergrowth. Rutherford asked if he were all right. He heard the concern in Rutherford's voice. Yes, he was O.K. There was pain in the hack of his neck, and the breath had been sucked clean out of his lungs by the weight, and his ears were blasted from the deep throat growl and the hammered gunfire, Bit he was O.K. The torch wavered, came close to him. The torch found it. God, the bastard was huge. Laid out, it's full length stretched, and there was blood at its mouth, blood on its teeth.

  He'd only once seen a bigger German Shepherd, half pulling a warden over, at the Federal gaol at Marion, Illinois. There was a head shot and there was a chest shot, and there was a shot that looked to have broken the dog's right rear leg.

  They heard the advancing footfall. There was no attempt at concealment. The footfall drove without hesitation through the undergrowth, from the depth of the wood. Goddam fingers shaking. Revolver up, cylinder out, palm of the hand belting the barrel to shake the spent cases clear. The footfall closing on them.

  Prising the new cartridges into the chamber.

  The torch picked her out. There was her dirt-smeared oil jacket, the jeans and the big boots. There was the rich red flame of her hair. Erlich went to the crouch and to the aim. He could see that she carried no weapon, but he went to the crouch and the aim and his right index finger was crooked level with the trigger. Rutherford held her in the beam of his torch. She never slowed. She seemed to see through the power of the beam that dazzled her. Erlich remembered, too damn well, the beating and the kicking. He remembered his own screams. He remembered the smell of her, when she was a foot from him as he crouched and aimed. She never looked at him.

  She picked up the dog. She picked it up like it was a sheep, or a dead deer. It must have weighed 40 kilos. She slung it across her shoulders, and the blood from the dog's mouth dribbled down her jacket.

  She looked at him then, and he felt the hate in her.

  She walked away, back into the depth of the wood.

  He was crouched, he aimed at her all the time that the torch brain held her.

  The sounds carried over the fields where the light frost was gathering. He heard all of the shots fired.

  He had only slept fitfully since his son had last sat with his wife, held her hand. Not a poacher's shotgun, not a hunting rifle.

  He had recognised the full chamber of a revolver discharged.

  There were no revolvers in the village, none that he had ever heard of. Revolvers were for soldiers, and for armed policemen.

  He lay on his back in the cold and companionless bed.

  A man had told him once, a friend of his father, a man who had shot game in Tanganyika between the wars, that the most dangerous animal in the bush was the leopard. The man had said that a leopard was only safe when its head had been sliced off.

  He thought that the American at the Reform Club would have thought of his boy as a leopard. And if the bruises on the man's face were anything to go by and the screams in the wood in the night a week ago, then the American was right about the leopard.

  And six shots were for killing. Six shots were what he would have fired, nearly 50 years before in France, for killing.

  He lay on his back, he stared up at the darkness of the ceiling.

  He would be told, they would come to tell him. He listened for the scratch of car wheels on the gravel of the drive.

  The shots were heard all around the village.

  Every living soul fed from the gossip that Colt had been home, that a car had been stripped of its tyres, that an American had been savaged until he screamed for his life in the high copse behind the Manor House, that Colt was watched for.

  Billy and Zap and Charlie and Kev and Dazzer and Zack and Johnny, and the bank manager from Warminster, and the solicitor from Shepton, and the District Nurse, and old Vic in the pub, and the woman above the Post Office, and the tenant of Home Farm, they all heard the shots, and they all thought of Colt.

  When Fran reached her home, the cottage on the dirt track past where the
church bad once been, old Brennie was in his chair beside the stove. Fran stood in the doorway with the dog, her Rocco, on her shoulders and she saw the anger that he shared with her. They took a spade, and the flash that he used for pinioning rabbits in their fear, and they went to the old tumbled stone wall that marked the edge of the disused cemetery of the church. There had been enough rain to make it easy for deep digging. They took their turns, they dug in silence.

  To Erlich it was pointless that they should stay, but he wasn't going to be the first to call a halt. He had picked up the cartridge cases, they had scraped leaves over the dog's blood, they had moved a hundred yards east. It was still just possible to see the kitchen door of the Manor House, and most of the driveway.

  At the first grey dawn smear Rutherford broke the long silence between them.

  "Where did you get that thing?"

  "I got it, and I'm keeping it."

  "It's a miracle half the county's police aren't scouring the woods for you. Perhaps they are. They won't make a hundredth of the noise you made."

  "What would you have had me do?"

  "Bloody good covert surveillance, a real A-team."

  "Don't piss on me. I'm not some Rambo kid out of the mountains . . . "

  " N o , indeed."

  "You'd have had me use a kitchen knife? That monster would have had my throat."

  "I was merely observing that we have gone rather public."

  Erlich said, "But there's nowhere else."

  Rutherford said, "That's the pity of it. It's where we have to stay."

  "Every goddam night till he comes . . ."

  She didn't have to look so damned surprised. He had only said that he would take the boys to the school gate, drop them, and then drive to the Establishment. She didn't have to look as though he had suggested running naked round Buckingham Palace.

  It was Frederick Bissett's decision to take the boys to school and to arrive 15 minutes later than usual at the Establishment.

  He would decide when he should telephone Colt. He would decide whether or not he would accept their offer of employment.

  For once she didn't argue with him. Just that once she didn't dispute her husband's authority. She wasn't going to dispute anything when he was head of a department, when he was running a research unit, when he was rich and respected.