Blaze Away

  She continued to watch for the Golf but became confident after a few more miles that she was safely solo, alone in the fieldworker’s field. Perhaps the sarong woman didn’t care for the police and had told them left out of the street, not right. People said the middle classes didn’t always support the police these days. Given the adventurous gear and that Georgian byway, she’d be middle class and perhaps trendily anti-law, until her charming, beautifully preserved house got burgled. ‘Yes, go left, Mr Golf, and you may yet find her.’ And then a brief, private, interior chuckle at her shameless mischief-making and bolshy behaviour, pinko to chime with the property.

  Liz drove at modest pace now around the countryside setting of Darien, checking that approach roads, getaway roads, farm traffic, general traffic and gated railway level crossings were all pretty much as they had been on her previous reconnaissance visits. She had her self-made maps and detailed guidance notes on local conditions in an A4-size ring binder open for reference on the passenger seat. She systematically covered all that ground, re-familiarizing herself and making sure there had been no major alterations – no land slips, bridges down, flooding, diversions. She’d amend her A4 stuff where necessary.

  Although Liz remained proud of her professional zing and thoroughness, she had begun to wonder seriously whether the planned hit on Lamb and Darien would ever happen. Could ever happen. The idea was very nice, but didn’t it look exceptionally prone to all sorts of possible catastrophic snags? Although George had some good information, from herself and other sources, weren’t there too many unexplained factors about this scheme, starting with the gunfire and talk of art-purchasing at The Monty club; then the sight of Gordon Loam leaving The Monty, seemingly on friendly terms with Ralph, despite the Blake victimization; an utterly mysterious call at the Silver Bells nursery; the pavement encounter with Gordon Loam near it; and, from there, the Golf hounding her until she sweetly gave it the elbow?

  Liz had experienced too many conundrums, too much vagueness, too much outright blankness, in fact. No matter how dogged and inspired she might be in her researches, there were areas she did not understand, knew she did not come anywhere close to understanding, and would not be able to help George Dinnick and/or Justin to understand. It was as if the situation said to her: ‘So, you’re a fieldworker. Gee! Well, fuck fieldworking, you’ll get no harvest from this field.’

  For Liz, Justin was the essence of it all. As she felt so far, she could not back a plot that put him into positions full of bewildering complexities and unknowns. These might add up to a stack of lethal dangers. This was Liz trying to do one of her wide, deep, unflinching surveys. But she feared George would listen to her story of doubts and obscurities and decide she had become pitifully, contemptibly, overcautious and nervy because she and Justin had a hot love affair on the go. Dinnick might suspect she would do all she could to keep him from risk by calculatedly exaggerating the difficulties with the Darien job, her aim to get the operation killed off, in her view a considerably better development than Justin killed off. Maybe – maybe – George would have it part right. She’d admit this to herself. Would she be so opposed if she were scouting the locations ahead of somebody other than Justin?

  She had a feeling George would regard her objections as selfish, cowardly, treacherous. George could turn very rough. George could become very determined. Her scheme was to show by the rigorousness of all her fieldwork, including careful update revisions, that she took a totally sensible, businesslike attitude to the Darien project and that her inescapable anxieties about some aspects of it should be respected – should be regarded regretfully – yes, regretfully – as an irresistible case for abandonment. At times, fieldwork could produce a negative, a firm, wise, powerfully valid negative. That could be as good a contribution as to OK a go-ahead. Live to pillage another day. Would George see it like this, though? There was some big money stuff at Lamb’s place. These opportunities didn’t come all that often. He might feel carpe fucking diem – seize the nearest day, not another day. Seize the day and the paintings, soonest.

  She couldn’t get too near Darien in her tour. That was the trouble with a country house, or perhaps the advantage: there came a stage where the road led only to that property; nothing else around. A strange car would raise alerts. She took a narrow hill route up towards Chase woods, a straggling collection of ash, beech and willow. She stopped on the edge of the wood and got out of the car with a pair of field glasses. From here she could look down on all but the far side of Darien. A couple of miles to the east she could just about make out another manor house, rich in chimneys. She’d looked up Darien on the Internet before her previous visit. It was sixteenth century, with additions and alterations of later years, but maintaining the basic, Elizabethan serene style. Apparently, the house had been a stronghold for Royalist forces in the seventeenth-century Civil War.

  She fancied that period of British history. You had clear opposites – the king and the decapitators. Politics were so wishy-washy now. She’d never thought much of a famous poem about the execution of Charles I at that time: ‘He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene.’ For the sake of a cheap rhyme the poet turned this into a ‘scene’ – a bit of harmless theatre starring ‘the royal actor’ – instead of the actuality of an axe hacking the best way it could through flesh, sinew and divine-right bone. But that’s what the arts, and art, were all about, weren’t they – turning reality into something that could be represented in a poem or a largo or a frame? After all, ‘picturesque’ meant fit to be put into a picture, a picture possibly priced at something very tidy and therefore worth nabbing. Someone had suggested there should be the term ‘literatesque’. Her life story? Maybe one day.

  As before, she could identity in her overview of Darien what would be stables, barns, an outdoor swimming pool, staff bungalows, two garages, flagstone terraces to the front and rear. She had not much interest in the rear of the house. If that became important it could only mean the operation had foundered and crisis ways of escape were needed. This should be a coup where the works were lifted, brought out through the front door to their vehicle, a fast departure down the larch-hemmed, gravelled drive and on to one of the double-checked getaway roads.

  Alarms and pursuit were unlikely because most probably some or all of the works in Lamb’s gallery had a crooked history, and he would not want full-scale involvement in his business by the police. ‘So, just for the record, tell us how you came by these works that have been stolen, Mr Lamb, would you, please?’ The Cog trawl, if it did take place, would be a hijack in the proper, original sense of the word – theft of items that had previously been thieved, or got by similar special methods. What she hadn’t been able to discover on her previous surveys, and couldn’t discover now, was the number of people normally around in Darien; impossible to tell whether all three of what she assumed were staff bungalows had occupants, nor what kind of occupants. Did Jack keep a live-in private security contingent? If so, how many? Armed? Round-the-clock rotas? The only way to count personnel in a place like this would be to watch non-stop for hours, perhaps days, and chart the comings and goings, see how many rooms and buildings were lit up at night. Liz could give only a couple of hours. She’d stick by her plan to leave for London later today. She saw no comings or goings of any kind at the house or in the grounds now.

  She did, though, hear from behind her in the wood women’s voices, having what seemed a sporadic, relaxed conversation, and the sound of one or two horses’ footfalls, hoof-falls, approaching slowly. Quickly, she opened the Peugeot rear door, put the field glasses on the back seat and covered them with a coat. She leaned over to the front and flipped closed the ring binder on the passenger seat. Then she gently, noiselessly shut the car door.

  She turned. Two women in riding gear, and on very classy, tall, chestnut horses, had come out from the wood and were moving at walking pace towards her and the car. She recognized them, of course, from her previous reconnaissance trip – presuma
bly Jack Lamb’s girlfriend, and his mother from the USA. The women were of very different ages, the older one probably in her sixties, the other maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. If Liz hadn’t carried out that earlier identification she might have thought mother and daughter. But Liz saw no physical resemblance – not facially, nor in figure, the ‘mother’ long legged, long bodied, aquiline featured, very upright in the saddle; formidable, Liz thought. Her nag would know who the boss was – no maverick, unauthorized gallops, no rearing and melodramatic snorting. They stopped, and the younger woman dismounted, in a smooth, easy movement. She was pale skinned, wiry, mid-height, some blonde wisps of hair trailing from under her black helmet. She wore jeans, tucked into brown boots, and a tweed jacket. The older woman had on proper jodhpurs, boots, a similar tweed jacket and black helmet.

  ‘Well, hi!’ the older one said. ‘You’re enjoying the view, I see. We’re not crowding you, I hope.’

  ‘It’s so lovely,’ Liz said. She gave the words a degree of thrum, but nothing goofy or madly lavish. ‘I just had to get out of the car and pinch a little time. From a hillside like this one can see so much of the country. And there’s what I take to be a manor house – lots of chimneys – over there.’ She pointed into the distance. ‘Plus, in fact, one just below us here. But I expect you know this, are familiar with the scenery and so on.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ the older woman said. ‘Helen and I, we come out here quite a deal, as it happens.’ Her accent seemed part local, but with a kind of American intonation now and then. Her horse bent its neck and foraged in the grass. She let it.

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ Liz said, ‘if all this is on your doorstep.’

  ‘Are you just visiting these parts – passing through?’

  ‘Yes, a visit,’ Liz said.

  ‘In a way that’s like Alice,’ Helen said, her voice cheerful, amiable, utterly local, nothing Yank about it. ‘She’s over for her regular hols from the States.’ So, Liz had done a good inventory – Helen, the girlfriend; Alice, almost certainly Lamb’s mother.

  ‘And the USA is fine, fine,’ Alice said. ‘I live in a desirable spot near my daughter and her husband on the edge of San Francisco. But it’s important for me to come back here, stoke up my Britishness for another year, check on the national mood and make sure Nature is still doing its wholesome best.’

  These days some people did call a parent by her/his first name, but Liz got the feeling now that the pair were not mother and daughter. Alice spoke of ‘my daughter’, as if Helen were something else.

  Alice said: ‘When I praise Nature and its beauty, I don’t want you to think I’m opposed to all advancement.’

  ‘Alice is not against wind farms, for instance,’ Helen said.

  ‘Consider Van Gogh,’ Alice replied.

  ‘Van Gogh?’ Liz said.

  ‘Alice means windmills,’ Helen said.

  ‘What are some of Van Gogh’s most cherished paintings of?’ Alice said.

  ‘Are you interested in art?’ Liz said.

  ‘There are three or four Van Gogh windmills that are among his most esteemed and valuable canvases,’Alice replied. ‘People speak of their vibrancy and quiet power. Does this put you in mind of anything?’

  ‘She means wind farms,’ Helen said. She sounded apologetic, as if Alice preached vandalism. ‘Vibrancy. Power.’

  ‘Quiet power,’ Alice said.

  ‘Some living near them say they’re not so quiet,’ Helen said.

  ‘You know a lot about art, do you, Alice?’ Liz said.

  ‘Think of coal-driven power stations,’ Alice replied. ‘Huge, noisy lorries and trains delivering constant new supplies. None of that with wind farms. Helen’s young, touched by sentimentality, wants these hillocks preserved undeveloped, left as they have ever been, which is admittedly glorious. But this terrain and its gales and breezes should surely contribute something more than mere appearance and weather. Oh, forgive, that might be the US side of me talking now – a bold determination to exploit – in the best sense – to put land and its conditions to profitable use.’

  While Alice spoke, Helen, holding her mount’s rein near the bit, was moving about with the horse, as though to get a better view of the landscape, but giving the Peugeot quite a stare, outside and in, Liz thought.

  ‘Let me put it like this,’ Alice said. ‘I was married for a while in the States. These things happen. One can’t be eternally clear-headed. My husband would never go out with less than one and a half thousand dollars on him, small and large denomination notes. Various pockets. What do I make of that, you’ll ask. What I make of it is money brings power – power, in his case, to buy himself out of trouble, the mixed value bills from multiple nooks about his person giving him scope to negotiate a skin price – his – depending on the measure of the mugger’s scare factor. But the reverse also is true – power is money. A wind farm on these hills would help light half a city. This is gain, this is enterprise. This is what they call over there “another dollar”.’

  ‘A company wanted to put a wind farm here,’ Helen said, ‘Planning permission was refused, though.’

  ‘And you’re pleased, aren’t you, Helen?’ Alice said. ‘Well, I guess you’re entitled. But that’s not the same as being right.’

  Helen got into the saddle again, and they said goodbye.

  It was the omissions in this splurge of quaint, rural talk that registered most with Liz. There’d been no mention by them of Darien, lying nearby, though Liz had referred to it, half implied it was their ‘doorstep’. Hardly any indication of where these two had come from was given. San Francisco had been the only geography. They hadn’t asked Liz her name, as though they didn’t want to show they might be curious about her, put her on guard. They’d decided, had they, that she was ‘passing through’, was simply ‘visiting’? Passing through from where to where? That, apparently, didn’t concern them. Or did it concern them a lot, but they hadn’t wanted her to realize it concerned them a lot because, if she was up to something – and they’d very probably guessed that she was up to something other than counting chimneys on a distant manor house – yes, if she was up to something, they would like to surprise her by being very ready to blitz whatever it was she was up to when she tried to reach the next bit of what she was up to, perhaps the crunch bit and ultimate reason for the ‘visit’? And would this be centred somehow on Darien, which they’d seemingly ignored, because that’s where the terminal surprise would kick in and they didn’t want her forewarned? Solution: have some fanciful, mad discourse about wind farms and Van Gogh.

  But Liz did feel forewarned, thanks to their attempt not to forewarn her. This was the kind of subtle, contrary mind she assumed she’d been born with and which she constantly worked hard to improve. When Alice said ‘San Francisco’, in an utterly surplus statement about her home-life, Liz had speculated that Alice’s purpose was to take the focus off the immediate locality – up the hill from Darien – and, instead, on to almost anywhere else that was far off, such as the Pacific side of the USA, though still a long way from the original Darien. That monumentally irrelevant chat about her ex-husband’s money fetish was to direct the subject matter from the here and now and on to something foreign and emphatically yonder, the dollar: fifteen hundred dollars.

  Oh, yeah, there was the San Francisco mention, but also there was the scrutiny of something much nearer, i.e., the Peugeot and its contents, though the contents wouldn’t tell much because of Liz’s scampered precautions. But, of course, they might apply similar obverse logic to that of Liz: if the contents didn’t reveal anything it must be because those contents had something to reveal but had been given the treatment so they couldn’t – a closed ring binder, a coat over something significant.

  Maybe they’d go back home, and Alice would say to Lamb, ‘A woman casing the property, Jack. She didn’t hear our approach until a little too late, and we saw her hide field glasses and shut a ring binder in a rush, then close the door with super-quietness so as no
t to draw attention to what she’d just done. A Peugeot. We’ve got the number. Possibly, you have a salaried chum in the DVLC who’ll handle the tracing?’

  Helen might say: ‘Alice did her stuff to make them think she must be dim and radiantly harmless – someone who’d marry a mugger-obsessed idiot, and someone who didn’t quite understand the difference between a windmill and a wind farm. Madam Peugeot would imagine she’d successfully fooled this pair of horse-borne twerps.’

  Liz got back into the car and opened the ring binder. She read her previous notes on Darien and Jack Lamb. They were slightly more speculative than her knowledge now, but not bad, all the same. Anyway, this hillside encounter confirmed what Liz had already begun to suspect – that the Darien project was menaced from a bevy of directions and too hazardous for anyone to attempt, but especially for Justin to attempt, on her say-so. She and he had discussed the Darien project several times privately, of course, most recently at his place one evening a while ago now. He’d axed some logs from the thick branches of a lopped tree in the garden of the apartment block, and they’d sat comfortable and content in front of the wood-burning stove talking Darien, and talking Darien very positively, very confidently. That was before she’d been confronted by this tangle of possible hazards, though. She was a pathfinder, and she’d found the path impenetrably overgrown.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When Jack Lamb had something especially confidential and salty to tell Harpur they’d meet at a downtown launderette and talk quietly while watching through the glass front panel of the washing machine as the items rotated, whirled or lay like doggo, momentarily at rest in a programme pause. Harpur greatly liked those periods of stillness: after the seemingly random, haphazard jostling and plunging, there would come this imposed stoppage. It demonstrated, didn’t it, that, despite so much apparently ungoverned, frantic activity, there was, in fact, a carefully timed, systematic procedure under way: no chaos of soaked garments and linen, but an immaculately organized progress towards cleansing, towards renewal. Harpur considered that policing must achieve something similar, even policing graced by someone like Iles. Good order should be established and devotedly maintained where there would otherwise have been very sketchy order or none at all.