“So is boiling in oil,” observed Becket, “but that wouldn’t deter anybody in Flaxborough, once they’d got into the habit.”
Grail reappeared after about twenty minutes. He looked calm and benevolent. “I’m going into town for an hour or so,” he announced. “I’ll want you with me, Birdie. Then if Ken and Bob will improvise an Odeon in the meantime, we’ll all have an improving movie show when we get back. Right?”
A light drizzle had begun to fall. Grail and the girl hurried across the gravel, the already wet stones slithering away beneath their feet. Grail climbed into the Rolls and leaned across to admit Birdie to the seat beside him. The affability had left his face but his expression was one of anxiety rather than annoyance.
She settled herself into a hunched, half-curled position, indifferent to the expanse of thigh revealed. For a few moments she stared through the rain-stippled windscreen at the stripped harvest field, of whose lines of brown stubble the height of the great car gave a view above the hedge.
Grail, too, was gazing blankly ahead. Becoming aware that he had made no move to switch on the ignition, she looked across at him.
He lowered his eyes and turned the key about in his fingers, as if wondering what it was for.
“Something wrong?”
He remained silent a little longer. Then he said: “Look, love, I know you’re not wildly enamoured of this story...”
“Christikins.” The snapped glass of her laugh cut him short. “Is anybody? Is Bob? Ken? Like hell. It gets worse all the time. Thinner and smellier. You’ve been conned, boy. And we have to push on because you won’t admit it.”
“No,” he said, softly. “No.” He shook his head. “You’re hopelessly over-simplifying.” The key went home and turned. As the car glided forward, he shook his head again.
The girl seemed to find the mildness of his response puzzling. She watched him carefully, as he guided the car between the green banks of the lane that led them to the main road.
“When you talk of ‘over-simplifying’,” she said, “I take it that you mean I haven’t thought up as many excuses as you have.”
“Excuses for what?”
“For going to town on a story you can’t authenticate.”
He gave a short laugh. “Authentication, dear girl, is in that film you’ll see later today. I’m not worried on that score.”
There was a slight pause.
“But you are worried,” she said.
“A little, yes. Not for the reasons you suppose.”
“Why, then?”
“I think there are dangers involved that we hadn’t reckoned on. Not libel. Nothing like that. More direct. Nastier. Do you see?”
Birdie gazed at him reflectively. The pale, ascetic face, as carefully groomed and cherished as a vain woman’s, had lost something of its customary patina of calm self-sufficiency. In particular, his eyes now were alert and nervous.
She spoke with deliberation, still watching him. “No, darling, I do not see. Tell me more.”
The probe irritated him at once. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let us get prosaic about this. It’s just a feeling I have.”
“Of danger? What kind of danger?”
“Of harm. Of physical harm. To us.”
“To you, you mean.”
“Primarily, dear girl, to me. Naturally. I’m glad you put first things first. But by a supreme effort of selflessness I brought everyone in. The team.” Grail stressed the word so that it sounded silly.
“If you’re being serious,” Birdie said, “I think you should tell me and the others at once exactly why you’re so bloody nervous. You get paid for risking martyrdom. We don’t.”
They had reached the town’s outskirts. In the veil of rain, the big, square, Victorian villas built for the founders of Flaxborough’s prosperity loomed amidst their bays and laurels like mourners.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Birdie asked.
“To see your little editor friend. The man who gives you a piece of candy with one hand while he stirs you a mug of hemlock with the other.”
Birdie uncurled and sat upright. “Oh, come off it, darling. Kebble was very accommodating. He didn’t have to be. He’s a nice old boy. You leave him alone.”
Grail slowed the car at a junction. “Where’s his beastly little office?”
“I shan’t tell you.”
“Look girclass="underline" don’t try pissing me about, or you’ll find yourself out on your little fanny pretty damn quick, and I am not joking, believe me.”
She was shocked not by the words, but by the transfiguration of his face. As he wrenched viciously at the wheel to bring the car into the town-bound traffic stream, the smooth, disdainful features were tightened and sharply lined into an expression of vulgar fury. It was as though a respected statesman had suddenly, in full public view, reverted to his beginnings as party tout and heckler.
Something much more serious, she decided, than Grail’s usual pre-revelation nerves was working on his mind this time. Quelling her instinct to counter the abuse, she sulkily gave him directions until the Rolls drew to a halt in the narrow side-street in which was the works entrance to the Citizen building.
Mr Kebble rose in a flurry of surprise and delight from his half-acre desk and welcomed Birdie as if she had been Florence Nightingale, making the Citizen her very first call on the way back from the Crimea.
Grail had had time to re-compose himself into the image of a distinguished London journalist on a goodwill tour of his lesser dominions. Mr Kebble seized Clive’s somewhat limp hand and held it in his own firm, warm grip long enough to impart his sense of the significance of the occasion.
“They tell me,” began the editor, in characteristic acknowledgment of those ubiquitous but anonymous informants who seemed to throng Kebble’s Flaxborough like the voices on Prospero’s island, “that you’ve turned up quite a nice little story here, old chap.”
“As an old newspaper man,” said Clive, graciously, “you will appreciate its flavour, I think.”
Mr Kebble was peering at both visitors in turn, with a mixture of friendliness and respect. “Of course,” he conceded, “we people on the spot are often sitting on a story without knowing it. That does happen, you know.”
Grail waved a spray of white fingers. “Often a matter of sheer luck, old man. And the nationals do have an unfair advantage in the matter of resources. Take this story, for instance. We were put on to it by our Baghdad office.”