He took his time approaching the house.
He did one full circuit around it at a distance of half a mile, then closed in and circled it again. If anyone was watching for him, they were well concealed. He knew policemen, and knew they weren’t trained that way. For one thing, they liked their creature comforts; for another, they didn’t have the necessary patience. There might be a presence inside the house, but he’d swear there was no one out here with him.
Silently, he entered the compound, crouching low, keeping to the shadows along the walls. There was an added advantage to staying close by the walls: the drive itself was gravel and noisy underfoot, but there was a two-foot border of earth between the driveway and the walls, a concession to Joan, who had planted small flowers and climbers there. Reeve crushed them underfoot in silence.
He had the keys he needed in his free hand, the keys to the killing-room door. But the police had been there first. They’d taken a sledgehammer to the door, which looked like it had re-sisted their onslaught bravely. The door swung inwards to the touch. He wondered what they’d thought when they’d found the room, with empty cartridge casings on the floor and shop-window dummies acting as hostages. He knelt down in front of the baseboard and shone the flashlight against it. It looked undisturbed. Reeve pulled it open and reached in, touching the oiled rags, feeling the metal bulk beneath their wrapping.
And he smiled.
He unwrapped the Beretta and found the right pack of ammo for it, filling his pockets as well as the gun. Pushing his hand back into the wall, he pulled out a package of plastic explosive with all the trimmings. The material itself was fairly fresh; he’d been using it to rig up explosions some weekends, to keep his soldiers on their toes. Reeve checked for detonators, wire, and wire cutters; everything he needed was in the package, including the crocodile clips, which acted as triggers. He put everything in his holdall, then replaced the baseboard and made sure he’d left no footprints.
He crossed the courtyard, moving slowly on the gravel and pebbles. Peering through the kitchen window, he saw nothing. He circled the house, looking in the windows on all four sides: still nothing. He couldn’t tell about upstairs. It was just possible that a guard could be asleep in one of the bedrooms. The curtains in Allan’s room were closed, but maybe he’d just forgotten to open them the morning they’d been cleared out.
Reeve unlocked the front door and entered the hall. He didn’t need to disable the alarm: the police must already have done that. He wondered how long it had rung before they’d found a way to silence it. Not that it mattered out here; the nearest croft wasn’t within hailing distance.
He double-checked the downstairs rooms then made for the stairwell. The second step from the bottom was the creaky one, so he avoided it, just as he avoided the middle of the third step from the top. He didn’t use the banister for fear of a warning sound. On the landing, he held his breath and listened. There was no noise. He waited there three full minutes: when someone’s asleep, they usually make some sort of sound every three minutes or so. Reeve suspected that a policeman would have some regard for property, so any guard would probably choose to sleep in the guest room. He opened the door slowly and pointed his pistol through the crack. The curtains weren’t closed, and moonlight filled the room. The bed was made up, with several throw pillows and costume dolls arranged on it. Joan’s work. She’d spent a lot of time lovingly decorating a room nobody ever came to stay in.
He turned and crossed the landing, opening Allan’s bedroom door. The room was a mess: bedclothes thrown onto the floor, pajamas draped over the end of the bed, comics everywhere; the computer’s power light shone lemon-yellow in the gloom. Either Allan had left it on, or the police had checked it and forgotten to turn it off. Reeve left the room and quickly checked the main bedroom and even the bathroom.
Then he breathed a sigh of relief.
Downstairs he found milk in the fridge, but it was sour. There was an unopened carton of orange juice, and he cut it open with scissors, then gulped from it. There was an unopened packet of ham in there, too, so he peeled it open and lifted out two slices, rolling them up and stuffing them into his mouth. Back in the living room, he assessed the visit by the police. They had dusted. Probably they wanted his fingerprints for the file they were opening on him. It looked like they’d shifted everything and put it back not quite in the right place. Searching for clues, he supposed. He unscrewed the telephone handsets. The bugging devices had been removed. He suspected this had been done by Dulwater rather than the police.
He didn’t suppose anyone would be listening in, so he went upstairs and took a quick hot shower, thanking God for the in-stantaneous water heater. He left the light off in the bathroom, though he couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was because it felt like procedure.
He dried himself off and searched for clean and, above all, warm clothes. There were a few other things he needed, but they were in his workshop. He walked into Allan’s room again, restless, unable to sit down. The yellow light caught his attention. The screen was black, but when he nudged the mouse it came to life, showing him the games menu from the hard disk. There were a couple of good games there, and some which must have been new from the last time he and Allan had played together.
Then Reeve saw the game Allan had loaded from the disk sent to him by Jim. The game Allan couldn’t get on with. It was called Prion.
“Jesus,” Reeve whispered. Prion, as in PrP, as in the bad chemicals which had started this whole nightmare. His hand was fairly steady as he moved the pointer onto Prion and double-clicked to load the game.
When the title screen came up though, it wasn’t called Prion at all. It looked like a fairly straight arcade game called Gumball Gulch, which is what Allan had called it, Reeve recalled. Which screen was it Allan had said he couldn’t get past? Five? Six?
It took Reeve a while to follow the instructions and get into the game. As far as he could tell, he was a turtle in the Wild West, just made sheriff of the town of Gumball Gulch. In screen one, he rode into town and was voted sheriff after killing the three bad guys who had just shot the sheriff to bust their comrade out of the jail. In screen two, there was a bank robbery to foil. The graphics, so far as Reeve could judge, were pretty good, as were the sound effects, complete with voices.
After maybe half an hour, he was in screen four. In screen three he’d had the option of taking as deputy a one-legged drunk. Reeve had accepted “Stumpy,” who now guarded the villains from the bank robbery.
Suddenly Reeve paused. “What the hell am I doing?” he asked himself. But he kept on going.
Screen four was a difficult one. Reelection time was coming up, and Reeve’s popularity was only 40 percent, two of the bank robbers having escaped, and one innocent bystander having been gunned down during the shoot-out. Reeve granted a new license to the Brawlin‘ Barroom, which pushed his popularity to 50 percent. But then the rowdiness factor increased, and soon the cells were bursting. Reeve opted to take another deputy, a fresh-faced young kid.
“This is Rio Bravo,” he muttered.
The real trouble started on screen five. There was a mass breakout attempt at the jail. Stumpy had the place locked tight with himself inside. He wasn’t letting anyone in, the sheriff in-cluded, which left Reeve outside with one kid deputy, a restless populace, and a possible lynch mob. In a little while, the escaped bank robbers would be coming into town intent on revenge. Reeve’s guns and ammo, of course, were in the jail.
And Stumpy was asking for the password.
Reeve tried a few obvious things, some only a Rio Bravo buff would know. Then he sat back, arms folded, and did some thinking. Jim had changed the name of the game to Prion. Why? Suddenly it became clear. As Marie Villambard had said, Jim was a journalist from his head to his toes. He would have kept files. He would have kept backups, and kept them well hidden.