“He said — you’ll kill me now.” She seemed distracted, about to weep again. “He said he needed information about you. It was my second assignment. I was to go to New York to meet you. To find out who you were selling out to—”
Suddenly, beyond the dark window, in the darkness of Belfast, there was a sound like an explosion from a far way off. The window of the room rattled slightly as though a train had passed or a puff of air had struck it.
“You were suspected — are suspected — of being a double agent. It was my assignment to find you. To… make love to you. To—” She could not speak for a moment. She finally took the water and drank the glassful at a gulp. “Hanley said because I had known you. And then, when you were not in New York, I was sent to London to wait for you.”
“And do what?”
“To find out about you. To become… your friend.”
She did not look at the black pistol.
“You work for R Section.”
“Yes,” she said.
“For how long?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Who recruited you?”
“Hanley.”
“Describe him.”
She described a man.
“Where is the Section?”
She told him.
“What is your status?”
“I’m a field man.”
“Why am I here?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at her. She looked again at the pistol.
“Why am I here?”
“I don’t know. That wasn’t part of my assignment.” She did not continue.
“Who is Blatchford?”
“He’s with the Section as well.”
“I never met him.”
“I know. Hanley knows.”
“Why did Blatchford try to kill me?”
“I don’t believe that. It wasn’t part of the assignment.”
He let it go. “Why did he have your picture?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he take it?”
“Yes. He must have. I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could he have taken it?”
“In my room. In London. Before you came. I didn’t know it was missing. I never look at it. I carry it.”
“How could he have taken it?”
She felt drained, tired, sick.
“How?”
“When we… When Blatchford and I were together. I don’t know.”
The demon was gone now. His hand shook. But he still held the pistol, pointed at the floor.
“Why did Blatchford try to kill me?”
She shook her head. “You killed him—”
It was not necessary to bring in Denisov now. He nodded.
“God.” She shivered. “I didn’t know. You killed him.”
He felt an absurd need suddenly to justify himself. To this tired woman with matted brown hair and rain streaked on her cheeks.
He stood in the light.
“Look,” he said.
She recoiled from the ugly weal across his throat.
“He did that?”
“Yes. And he killed another man before he tried to kill me.”
“No.” She shook her head.
“Elizabeth. Who is the child?”
She seemed confused. And then she looked at the picture. “Do you have to know everything? Do you have to dirty everything I feel—”
“Who is the child?”
“David. My son.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
There really was nothing more to ask her. He wanted to touch her, to pity her, to tell her. What? What comfort could he give her?
Hanley had sent them. Elizabeth and Blatchford. To spy on him and to murder him.
And why had Denisov become his guardian angel?
Devereaux stared at Elizabeth. You warmed me. You reminded me of my other life. You touched me.
Slowly, he put the pistol on his belt and drew his jacket over it. She saw this but she did not move. She sat holding herself, trying not to shiver.
“Do you know a man named O’Neill?”
He had no need for the pistol now. Or the threat.
She shook her head.
He believed that.
“Now.” He looked at her. “Begin. Tell me about R Section and why they sent you to spy on me.”
Slowly, wearily, she started at the beginning.
The silver sliver in the sky broke through the galleons of clouds sailing off the west coast. The sliver fell in the afternoon sky, catching the rare November sun on its wings, turning and dipping, it fell again, toward the large field below.
At that moment, Brianna Devon stood at the window in an immense lounge at Shannon Airport and watched the sky. She could not see the plane yet.
She wore fashionably tight French jeans, their cuffs stuffed into long, sleek brown boots. Her hair was an auburn red, cut short and severe. Her face, which was quite pretty, was clouded with worry. Her dark eyes searched the field before her but she could not see anything.
She was annoyed by the presence of the man next to her. He had been sent down from Galway City’s gardai. He was a tall, ungainly man with neatly plastered black hair and a lantern jaw and large, cowlike eyes. He had dressed in plainclothes that could not have been more conspicuous if he had worn his uniform. He looked like nothing so much as the universal policeman in plainclothes for the first time.
He’d told her that Chief Inspector Cashel was going to visit them in the morning at Clare House. It was all so horrible, made more horrible by the police. All Brianna wanted was her father and Deirdre. She thought of Deirdre, who had been more like a sister than a tutor to her. Thought of her little laughing face. Deirdre.
“They’ll be comin’ along shortly, now, miss,” said the garda from Galway City. “I’ve just got the signal. Yer father’s landed.”
And she had not even seen it. She ached for him. Her father was distant, and frightening even, but, somehow, she had found love in him. An offhand love that suited her.
She saw him at the end of the immense corridor. They had taken him through a special door, away from the customs area and the gaudy tax-free shop where weary hours were spent waiting for planes by buying bottles of Irish whisky and bolts of Irish cloth.
She did not wave. They did not wave or shout to each other — that wasn’t their way. Like the horse. On her fifteenth birthday, she had awakened and dressed and gone down to breakfast, but he had not been there. Rushing from the house, she ran down along the stony road to the stables and there it was — a big brown stallion with coltish eyes. Farrell — old Farrell — was standing there holding the rein for her. Her father was not at the stable. He had gone away, but that was all right; she understood it was not indifference in him but an embarrassment at showing love.
Coming toward her now, he looked so tired, so sad. His hand was bandaged. When they were close enough, he beckoned for her to come to him and hug him.
“Hello, Brianna,” he said softly.
The Rolls purred effortlessly up into the burren hills of Clare, along the coast road around Galway Bay. Winter in the west country: The hills were empty ridges of stone, treeless, fenced with stone fences of a thousand families who had finally fled the inhospitable land in the face of English landlords and Irish famines.
Brianna and Lord Slough did not speak. The bleak scenery comforted them. They had known it all their lives, from the time when Slough bought the crumbling castle and restored it and defiantly decided to live in it — an English lord in the midst of the impoverished Irish west.
The black car flashed through the little town of Innisbally, wipers silently driving the tears of rain from the windscreen. A drunk stumbled in the street on his way to the pub; he paused and let the immense car splash past him. His face was stupidly amazed. And then gone. Brianna barely saw it. She sat back in the comfort of the cushions, in the silent world of wood paneling that smelled of oil on the leather, and warmth.