“We’ll ring your wife from the station,” Banks said.
As they walked out front to the car, Banks thought he had probably had too much to drink to be driving—a can of beer with dinner and a couple glasses of wine in the fairly short time Wyman had been there. He was also in a pretty shaky emotional state. But it was almost midnight, and he didn’t feel at all impaired. What else was he going to do? Send Wyman back to wander the moors in the rain? Give him a bed for the night? The last thing Banks wanted was Derek Wyman skulking around the house in the morning. He could do that perfectly well himself. He knew he wasn’t destined for sleep tonight, anyway, so he might as well take the silly bugger to the station, get him off his hands for good and go back to nursing his broken heart over another bottle of wine. It was unlikely that MI6 would turn out for a meeting in the middle of the night, but if Wyman was too nervous to go home, Banks would be more than happy to put him in a cell for a night, then arrange for a solicitor to attend in the morning to thrash it all out.
There were no streetlights on the road to Eastvale, and only Banks’s headlights cut through the darkness and the steady curtain of rain ahead, the windscreen wipers beating time.
Then he noticed the distorted glare of someone’s headlights in his rear-view mirror, too close and too bright for comfort. They started flashing.
“Shit,” said Banks. He realized that they must have been watching his place, either hoping he would lead them to Wyman, or that Wyman would fetch up there looking for help after they’d put the wind up him. Parasites.
“What is it?” Wyman asked.
“I think it’s them,” Banks said. “I think they were staking out my house.”
“What are you going to do?”
“It seems as if they want us to stop.” Banks readied himself to pull over at the next lay-by, which he knew was a good half mile ahead. He was still driving quite fast, definitely over the speed limit, but the car behind was still gaining, still flashing its headlights.
“Don’t stop,” Wyman said. “Not till we get to town.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t trust them, that’s all. Like I said, I want a solicitor present the next time I talk to them.”
Banks sensed Wyman’s anxiety and felt a little surge of paranoia himself. He remembered the callous brutality these people had shown at Sophia’s, a brutality that he was certain had led to what happened between him and her. He also remembered stories he had heard, things Burgess had said, how they had frightened Tomasina and Wyman, and that it was still possible they could have been responsible for Silbert’s murder. He remembered Mr. Browne’s veiled threats. And he didn’t like the way they had tried to warn him off one minute and then use him the next.
Call me paranoid, Banks thought, but I don’t want a confrontation with MI6 out here in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, with no witnesses. If they wanted to have it out, they could bloody well follow him to Eastvale and have a nice cozy chat in the security of the police station, with a mug of cocoa and a solicitor present, just the way he and Wyman wanted it.
But they had other ideas. As soon as Banks overshot the lay-by and put his foot down, they did the same, and this time they started to overtake him on the narrow road. The Porsche was powerful enough, but they were driving a BMW, Banks noticed, and weren’t lacking in power themselves. There was a corner coming up, but they obviously didn’t know about that when they started to edge to their left, about half a car length ahead. No doubt they intended to bring Banks to a smooth halt, but either because of the rain or not knowing the bends in the road, or both, they misjudged terribly, and Banks had to turn the wheel sharply to avoid a collision. He knew this part of the road well, so he braced himself as the Porsche broke through a section of drystone wall and flew over the steep edge.
Banks was strapped in the driver’s seat, and he felt the jolt of the seat belt as it absorbed the impact. Wyman, in his distracted state, had forgotten to fasten his belt, and he shot forward through the windscreen, so he lay half on the bonnet, his lower half still in the car. For some reason, the air bags hadn’t released. Banks unbuckled his seat belt and staggered out to see what had happened.
Wyman’s neck was twisted at an awkward angle, and blood pumped all over the bonnet from where a large sliver of glass had embedded itself in his throat. Banks left it there and tried to hold the wound closed around it, but he was too late. Wyman shuddered a couple of times and gave up the ghost. Banks could feel him die right there in front of him, feel the life go out of him, his hand resting on the dead man’s neck.
Banks fell back against the car’s warm bonnet, slick with blood, looked up to the heavens and let the rain fall on his face. His head throbbed. Disturbed by the noise, a few sheep baaed out in the field.
Two people were walking down the slope toward him, a young man and a young woman carrying torches, the slanting rain caught in their beams of light.
“Bit of a mess, isn’t it?” the young man said when they got to the Porsche. “Nice car, too. Not quite what we had in mind at all. We only wanted to talk to him again. Find out what he was doing putting a tail on one of our men. You should have stopped when we flashed you.”
“He couldn’t tell you anything,” said Banks. “He was just a bloody schoolteacher.”
The man shone his torch on the bonnet of the Porsche. “Dead, is he? We’ll never know what he was up to now, will we?”
Banks could think of nothing to say to that. He just shook his head. He felt dizzy and weak at the knees.
“You all right?” the young woman asked. “You’ve got blood on your forehead.”
“I’m fine,” said Banks.
“We’ll take it from here,” she went on. “This is what we’ll do. My friend is going to phone some people. They’re used to cleaning up situations like this. We’ll have your car back outside your cottage again by tomorrow morning, as good as new.” She paused and looked at the Porsche. “Make that the day after tomorrow,” she said. “It can sometimes be hard to get replacement parts for foreign cars. We’ll make sure they fix the air bags, too.”
Banks gestured toward Wyman. “What about him?”
“Well, there’s nothing anybody can do for him now, is there? Best let us take care of it. He was distraught over what he’d done. He went walkabout and either he jumped or he fell off a cliff. We don’t want any fuss, do we? I’d just go home if I were you. Walk away.”
Banks stared at her. She was pretty in a slightly hard-faced sort of way, but her eyes didn’t flinch; there was no milk of human kindness in them. “But he didn’t do anything,” said Banks.
“Maybe not,” the woman said. “Mistakes get made sometimes. It doesn’t matter. Let us deal with it now.”
“But you killed him.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said the young man, squaring up to Banks. “That rather depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? From what I could see, you were driving way too fast. You’ve obviously been drinking. And he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. You should have had your air bags checked, too. They malfunctioned.”
“And you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If we wanted you both dead, you’d be dead in much easier circumstances to clean up than this. It was an accident. Besides, don’t forget he was responsible for the death of one of our best men, and if you’d had your way he’d have simply walked away. Hard-castle never asked him to put a tail on Silbert. The whole thing was his own twisted, crazy plan.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“I can understand you probably got the transcripts of the interview. The chief constable would have given you those. But how did you know that was all a lie, that Wyman...?” Banks paused as the truth dawned on him. “You bugged my cottage, didn’t you? You bastards.”