She passed her map across. It was a large-scale walkers’ ordnance survey, one inch to the mile. The sergeant scanned it for a second or two, then placed one large finger on a square ten miles to the southeast of the city. There, in an area with few villages, among open fields and woods, a solitary bridge took a minor road over the rail line.
“There,” he said. “See that bridge? Miles from bloody anywhere. It was right there.”
Gini refolded the map without comment. Not miles from anywhere exactly, but close, very close to where she had been two days before with Pascal.
Outside, in her rented car, she examined the map more closely, frowning and trying to remember the terrain. Yes, here was the church and the graveyard where she and Pascal kept watch. Here, in the valley below, was Hawthorne’s house. Here, on the far side of that valley, were the woods and the cottage where McMullen had holed up. And here—a tiny square—was the cottage itself, and the track McMullen had driven.
The track continued beyond the cottage. That continuation had been invisible in the dark, but on the map its route was clear. It wound down through the woods behind the cottage. Three miles farther on it joined a minor road. That junction was fifty yards from the bridge where McMullen died.
And not just close to the bridge either. She started the engine, stopped, checked the map one last time. On the map the boundaries of John Hawthorne’s estate were clear. McMullen had ostensibly met his death less than half a mile from the high stone wall of Hawthorne’s estate. And, of course, for a man obsessed with pointing the finger at Hawthorne, that was a very suggestive place to die.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly two. She just had time to call Anthony Knowles, and then make it to the rail line and to the cottage in the woods before the light failed.
She drove a short way, found a phone booth, and dialed Christ Church. A polite porter informed her that Dr. Knowles was unavailable. He had left that morning for a conference in Rome, and would be away for three days. No, he regretted, but they were not permitted to give out numbers.
Gini hung up the phone. She leaned her face against the cold glass of the door panels. She watched the traffic go past. It was beginning to rain again lightly. Just two days earlier she and Pascal had walked this way, on their arrival in Oxford, filling in time before that meeting at the Paradise Café. On the corner of the street over there, just there, Pascal had looked down at her and taken her hand. The pain was suddenly overwhelming. She felt it surge through her and clench at her heart. In her purse she had the number of the rented house in St. John’s Wood. Taking it out, her hands trembling, she picked up the phone and dialed.
By midday Pascal had completed his camera setups. Two telephoto lenses, their cameras mounted on tripods, one trained on the entrance steps to Hawthorne’s villa, the other on the windows to the rear. He had pushed all the furniture in the room against the wall so he could move fast and without hindrance in the window region, even in the dark. In addition to these, he had four other cameras, two loaded with monochrome, two with color, all to be hand-held.
As long as he was intent on these preparations, he could keep the pain at bay. The minute they were completed, it returned. He sat there, in that ugly, incongruous room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Why had he said those things? Why had he done those things? He buried his face in his hands. He felt filled with rage and anxiety and self-hate, he thought: I am a fool.
He knew why he had acted as he did to some extent. He had been so desperate to prevent Gini from leaving alone that he was prepared to use almost any means to stop her. He had been convinced that if he loaded her choice in that way, he would prevent her going. The instant he realized she would still not be dissuaded, even if it meant ending their affair, he had been caught up in a hideous spiral of pain and anger and incomprehension and doubt. Jealousy of Hawthorne, that too; and continuing uncertainty as to what exactly could have happened between Hawthorne and Gini the previous evening. His mind had leapt from one crazy facile conclusion to another She could not love him; she was concealing something; she was not concealing something. …He rose to his feet with an angry exclamation and began to pace the room.
Pride, he thought: He was guilty of indulging wounded pride, of being obstinate, foolhardy, intemperate, incautious—and what was the result? He had thrown Gini a key. Thrown it, in a horrible, contemptuous way, not even given it to her, and spoken to her in that vile, cold, distanced way he had perfected in the years of his marriage. He had done all these things at a moment when all he truly wanted to do was take her in his arms—and then, not surprisingly, she had left. Walked out. She was now somewhere in Oxford. Alone. He couldn’t call her or contact her—and he knew, just knew, that she was every bit as proud and obstinate as he was, and so she would never contact him, she would not phone.
Fool, he said to himself. Fool, fool, fool. He stared around at the pink brocade, and suddenly it was unbearable to be there any longer. He slammed out of the house, went as far as the garden gate, then realized he had no bike, no car, no transportation. What if Gini were in trouble? What if she needed him? He slammed back into the house, called the nearest car rental company, stormed out again, remembered he had not switched on the answering machine, ran back in, stared at the telephone, and then started on a series of frantic calls. The Thames Valley police were helpful, but the sergeant dealing with this case was on his lunch break. No, they couldn’t say where he was, he wasn’t answering his office phone. Pascal then tried Christ Church. When he learned Dr. Knowles was away, his spirits rose. Perhaps that meant Gini would give up and leave Oxford. Maybe, after all, she would come here, that evening, on her return. He left an incoherent message with the porter, switched on the answering machine. He went straight to the car rental company and hired the fastest car they had available, a black two-door with a souped-up engine. Pascal hated it on sight. He drove it away from the garage toward the rented house steering fast and recklessly, slamming up through the gears. Then, deciding suddenly, he shot past the cul-de-sac entrance, did an illegal U-turn to the accompaniment of a cacophony of horns. He accelerated back the way he had come, slammed on the brakes, parked on a yellow line where parking was forbidden, got out of the car, and went into Regent’s Park. Avoiding the ambassador’s residence to his right, he turned left and took a path between bare plane trees, past the buildings of London Zoo and into the open spaces of the park itself. He came to a halt. He stared unseeingly at these acres of trees and grass. From behind him, where the zoo’s animal enclosures were, came one long, high-pitched cry. It could have been the cry of a bird or an animal. It was a prison-house cry, suggestive of hunger or desolation. It was not repeated. Pascal walked on.
He came to a halt, finally, some distance behind the ambassador’s residence. He could just see its roof through the trees, and beyond it the glittering dome, the minaret of the mosque. The sky was a clear, sharp blue-white. To look at it hurt his eyes. My love, Pascal thought; the pain was acute. He could locate it exactly: Heartache was not a generalized or a metaphoric term—that was where the actual pain actually was: in his heart.
He turned and walked back very fast to his car. He drove back to the rented house over-fast, and parked badly. If these actions drew attention to himself, he no longer cared. He could not understand at all what had possessed him to leave the house. Suppose Gini had called? It was one forty-five. The little red light on the answering machine was not blinking: So—Gini had not called. He felt a sense of absolute despair. He went upstairs and stared at his cameras. They failed to distract him or to console.
Christ, he said out loud, and punched the wall. He ran downstairs to the telephone again, picked it up, and dialed the number of Gini’s apartment in Islington. He did this at precisely the second that Gini, in Oxford, dialed his line. As she was listening to the busy signal, Pascal was talking to the answering machine in her flat.
“Darling,” he said. “Call me. Please call me. Call me the second you return.”
&nbs
p; He slammed the receiver down and tried to think. Maybe, when she returned to London, she would go to that safe cottage in Hampstead first to collect her things. He could see her now, doing just that, letting herself in with the key he’d thrown at her. With a groan he picked up the receiver and dialed the number there. He left the same message. Then he hung up. Then he decided it was a bad message and said all the wrong things. So he dialed both numbers again and added a longer corollary. “Gini, I love you. I love you with all my heart, darling. Call me the second you get home.”
He replaced the receiver. He was about to dial both numbers a third time, because he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to say he was sorry, forgotten to explain his remorse. He reached out his hand to the receiver, and at that second it rang.
Pascal snatched it up. He said Gini at exactly the same second that she said Pascal.
As he did so, a black car with tinted glass turned into the cul-de-sac behind him. From where he stood, Pascal could just see it. It turned in, drove to the end, paused outside the gothic villa, then circled, drove out, and disappeared.
“You mean it?” Gini was saying. “I love you, Pascal. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t think for happiness. Also, I’m crying. I don’t know why. I started crying when the line was busy. I’m sorry, Pascal. I’m so sorry. You’re right. I am all those things you said I was….”
Pascal smiled. “So am I. Darling. I have to have you here with me. Come home.”
“The next direct train, the fast one, is at four-thirty. It gets to Paddington around five-forty. I’ll get a taxi from there. I’ll be with you by six, I swear.”
“Can’t you get an earlier train?”
“There’s no point, Pascal. The four-forty is an express. Besides, I’ve talked to the police and there is something odd about this. I’m just going to look at the place where he died, if he died—”
“If?” Pascal said sharply.
“I won’t explain now. But the police have been lied to. Pascal, I’ll just do that, then I’ll go straight to the station. I promise you I’ll catch that train.”
Pascal was about to burst out with another flood of arguments, another set of pleas. He stared at the wall and forced himself to remain silent. He said, and it cost him great effort to say that little, “You promise me, darling, you will take care?”
They talked on while Gini kept feeding coins into the slot. She told him about her conversation with the police sergeant, and she read him the list of items found on McMullen’s body. Pascal copied it down. Gini searched in her purse: She had run out of change.
“Darling,” she said. “I’ll have to go. I’m running out of money. It’ll get dark very soon. I’ll see you at six. That’s only three hours and a bit….”
“It’s three hours and a bit too long, Gini.” They talked a short while longer, then the call-time expired.
In Oxford, Gini walked out into an ordinary street which felt made in heaven. There was a made-in-heaven sky, and made-in-heaven rain. She lifted her face rapturously to the rain and let it wash her face.
In London, Pascal, dazed, stared out at an empty cul-de-sac, and a dazzling blue-white sky. He made himself some coffee, smoked several cigarettes, listened to silence and to joy.
Later, when he was calmer, he looked down the list Gini had read to him: a wallet, credit cards, keys, money, cigarettes, a lighter, a wristwatch, a handkerchief, a signet ring. He stared at this ordinary list, very little different from the contents of his own pockets, and he saw almost immediately that if these were the objects found on McMullen’s body, then something was badly wrong.
The place where McMullen had died was a bleak one. By the time Gini reached it, after losing her way twice, it was just past three, and the light was beginning to fail. She stood for a short while, shivering, on the bridge over the rail line. The area was deserted. She was surrounded by newly plowed fields. To her right was the track that led up to the back of McMullen’s cottage. It was rutted, visible for perhaps a half-mile, then it disappeared into a dark copse of pine, and an older stand of beech trees at the crest of the steep hill.
The rail lines below her, just as the police had said, ran as straight as a die. Rooks cawed. Two black crows were scavenging below on the line. The nearest house, an abandoned farm, was two miles farther back down the road. A fine and private place, she thought grimly, for a man to kill himself, or be killed.
She scrambled down the bank from the bridge to the rails. They had been fenced off once, but the wooden palings were rotten and broken down. Rusty barbed wire looped among dead brambles and nettle stalks. In front of her the tattered remnants of the plastic strips used to cordon off the area fluttered in the wind. At the edge of the lines there was a welter of rubbish—rusty cans, plastic bags, a bicycle wheel. Directly ahead of her, the stone chippings between the rails were stained a brownish color. She stared at this, then averted her eyes.
Suddenly, the rails thrummed with life; there was a loud palpitation in the air, a burst of deafening sound. Then, glaringly fast, came the lights. The train was on her in seconds. From three yards back she felt its rush and its suck. The suddenness frightened her. She reeled back with a cry, slipped, and fell. The train was past and gone before she lifted her head. The air rocked. From the distance came the banshee wail of the train’s hooter. The rooks rose up screeching from the oaks.
Shaken, she hauled herself to her feet. Slipping and scrambling on the muddy bank, she climbed back up to the bridge. She turned and looked at the track that led up to McMullen’s cottage. She thought she could get the car up it if she was careful. She was no more than twenty minutes from Oxford and the station: She just had time. She looked at the dark woods at the summit of the hill and hesitated. The light was now thickening. She had no great wish to venture up there in the gathering darkness, but she had not come this far to lose her nerve. She thought briefly of Hawthorne, the previous evening. Don’t believe all the lies, he had said.
She shook herself, ran back to her car, and eased it forward carefully onto the track. The going was easier, and quicker, than she had expected. She made it almost all the way to the summit. At this point, about sixty yards below the cottage itself, there was a clearing in the woods. The residue of the track was impassable. She cut her lights, switched off the engine, and climbed out of the car.
The silence was startling. The only sound was the whispering and creak of branches. Stepping quietly and cautiously, she edged her way up the overgrown track through the gloom.
She came out from the shelter of the trees into a small yard to the rear of the cottage. She stopped and listened. There were no lights, no sounds. She began to inch her way across the flagstones of the yard to the wall of the lean-to kitchen at the rear. There was a door here; she turned its handle, but it was locked. The boarded windows were impenetrable. Feeling her way along the walls, peering ahead of her into the shadows, she edged around to the front of the house.
She listened. Absolute silence. The wind had died down. She moved quietly to the front door and gave a gasp of fear and surprise. The door was unlocked. As she touched it, it swung open silently on well-oiled hinges. The room beyond was black. She could see nothing at all.
She had come here without a flashlight, she realized, and silently cursed. She stood on the brink of the room. From some distance beyond, across the track, a bough creaked, and there was a tiny scuffling noise. She froze, but there was no further sound. An animal, she told herself, some small animal, that’s all. She stepped into the room, shut the door behind her, pressed herself back against the wall, and reached for the light switch.
The light immediately steadied her. There was no one there. The room was exactly as before. She looked around it quickly: the sticks of furniture, the two paperback books, the pile of newspapers, the whisky bottle and glasses, the paraffin heater.
There was something wrong though, something inching its way forward from the back of her mind. The rucksack was gone, for one thing, but it
was more than that. She looked around, and then she realized. The room was not cold. When they had come here before, it had been icy. With a low exclamation she moved quickly across the room. She touched the paraffin heater, and recoiled sharply. The metal was still warm.
She stood there rigid, her heart beating very fast. Someone had been here, and very recently too. She went silently to the kitchen. The container of gun oil Pascal had described was gone. She darted back into the main room, crossed to that newspaper stack, and picked up the topmost paper on the pile.
It was a local paper, the Oxford Mail, Friday’s edition. Yesterday’s edition. She stared at the date. Dead men did not buy newspapers. How did McMullen acquire that paper, bring it here, when at six on Friday morning he had been lying dead on the railroad track three miles away?
Her eyes moved slowly around the room. A bottle of Scotch, two paperbacks, three unwashed glasses, a still-warm paraffin stove; a lie to the police as to McMullen’s whereabouts the night before his death.
Was he dead—or was he alive?
Her mouth felt dry with fear. Her skin felt shivery.
The house was silent. She made herself do it. She crossed to the stairway door and eased up its latch. She stood for a moment, shivering, peering into the dark at the top of the stairs.
The stairs creaked as she mounted them. There was no banister, no light switch. They led straight into a single upstairs room. Above her head, high in the roof eaves, there was an unboarded skylight. She crept into the room and pressed her back against the wall. She waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom.
Gradually, she began to discern shapes from the patches of faint light and shadow. There was no furniture. Across the room, under the skylight, there was a makeshift bed—a strip of carpeting, and the hummocky outline of a sleeping bag. For one horrible instant she thought the bag had an occupant; her skin crawled. Then she realized it was empty. She was looking at crumples and folds of puffy material, no pillow, no sign of any clothes, but next to the bag there were some objects on the floor.