Looking through the window.
"Just call if you want anything," he said, and he returned to where he was fiddling with the insides of a stripped-down computer.
"I will," I assured him.
I stood by a display case at the window and went on watching the shop across the road through the glass. I glanced at the display case. It was full of cameras.
"I'd like to buy a camera," I said, without turning around.
"Certainly, sir," said the young man. "Any particular one?"
"I want one I can use straightaway," I said. "And one with a good zoom."
"How about the new Panasonic?" he said."That has an eighteen-times optical zoom and a Leica lens."
"Is that good?" I asked, still not turning around to him.
"The best," he said.
"OK, I'll have one," I said. "But it will work straightaway?"
"It should do," he said. "You'll have to charge the battery pretty soon, but they usually come with a little bit of charge in them."
"Can you make sure?" I asked.
"Of course."
"And can you set it up so it's ready to shoot immediately?"
"Certainly, sir," said the young man. "This one records direct to a memory card. Would you like me to include one?"
"Yes please," I said, keeping my eyes on the mailbox shop.
"Two-gigabyte?" he asked.
"Fine."
I went on watching the street as the young man fiddled with the camera, checking the battery and installing the memory card.
"Shall I put it back in the box?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Leave it out."
I handed him my credit card and looked down briefly to enter my PIN, and also to check that I wasn't spending a fortune.
"And please leave the camera switched on."
"The battery won't last if I do that," he said. "But it's dead easy to turn on when you need it. You just push this here." He pointed. "Then you just aim and shoot with this." He pointed to another button. "The camera does the rest."
"And the zoom?"
"Here," he said. He showed me how to zoom in and out.
"Great. Thanks."
He held out a plastic bag. "The charger, the instructions and the warranty are in the box."
"Thanks," I said again, taking the bag.
I went swiftly out of the camera shop and into the adjacent Taj Mahal Indian restaurant just as a waiter turned the CLOSED sign to OPEN on the door.
"I'd like that table there, please," I said, pointing.
"But, sir," said the waiter, "that is for four people."
"I'm expecting three others," I said, moving over to the table and sitting down before he had a chance to stop me.
I ordered a sparkling mineral water, and when the waiter departed to fetch it, I opened the curtains in the window a few inches so I could clearly see mailbox 116.
The package was collected at twenty past one, by which time the Indian waiter no longer really believed that another three people were coming to join me for lunch.
I had almost eaten the restaurant out of poppadoms and mango chutney, and I was again getting desperate to have a pee, when I suddenly recognized a face across the road. And I would have surely missed the person completely if I'd gone to the loo.
It took only a few seconds for the collector to go into the mailbox shop, open box 116 with a key, remove the contents, close the box again and leave.
But not before I had snapped away vigorously with my new purchase.
I sat at the table and looked through the photos that I'd taken.
Quite a few were of the back of the person's head, and a few more had missed the mark altogether, but there were three perfect shots, in full-zoom close-up. Two of them showed the collector in profile as the package was being removed from the box, and one was full face as the person left through the shop door.
In truth, I hadn't really known who to expect, but the person who looked out at me from the camera screen hadn't even been on my list of possible candidates.
The face in the photograph, the face of my mother's blackmailer, was that of Julie Yorke, the caged tigress.
14
On Saturday morning at nine o'clock, I was sitting in Ian's car parked in a gateway halfway up the Baydon Road. I had chosen the position so I could easily see the traffic that came up the hill towards me out of Lambourn village. I was waiting for one particular vehicle, and I'd been here for half an hour already.
I had woken early again after another troubled night's sleep.
The same questions had been revolving around and around in my head since the early hours. How could Julie Yorke be the blackmailer? How had she obtained my mother's tax papers or, at least, the information in them?
And in particular, who was she working with?
There had to be someone else involved. My mother had always referred to the blackmailer as "him," and I had heard the whisperer myself on the telephone, and was pretty certain that it had been a man.
A motorized horse van came up the hill towards me. I sank down in the seat so that the driver wouldn't see me. I was not waiting for a horse van.
I yawned. I was tired due to lack of sleep, but I knew that I could exist indefinitely on just a few hours a night. Sometimes I'd survived for weeks on far less than that. And my overriding memory of my time at Sandhurst was that I was always completely exhausted, sometimes to the point of collapse, but I somehow kept going, as had all my fellow officer cadets.
I had again left Kauri House in Ian's car well before dawn, and before the lights had gone on in my mother's bedroom. I'd driven out of the village along the Wantage Road and had chanced driving in through the open gates of Greystone Stables, and up the tarmac driveway. I'd crept forwards slowly, scanning the surface in front of me in the glow of the headlights. My two sticks remained exactly where I'd left them, leaning on the small stones. Still no cars had been driven up here since the gates had been unlocked.
It had been a calculated risk to drive up to the sticks, but no more so than leaving the car down by the gate and walking. As it was, I'd been there no more than a minute in total.
I had then driven on into Wantage and parked in the market square under the imposing statue of King Alfred the Great with his battle-ax in one hand and roll of parchment in the other, designed to depict the Saxon warrior who became the lawgiver.
I'd bought the Racing Post from a newsagent in the town, not having wanted to buy one at the shop in Lambourn village in case I was spotted by someone who thought I was dead, or dying.
According to the paper, Ewen Yorke had seven horses running that afternoon at two different racetracks: three at Haydock Park and four at Ascot, including two in their big race of the day, the Group 1 Make-a-Wager Gold Cup.
Haydock was about midway between Manchester and Liverpool, and a good three hours' drive away. Ascot, meanwhile, was much closer, in the same county as Lambourn, and just a fifty-minute trip down the M4 motorway, with maybe a bit extra to allow for race-day traffic.
Ewen had a runner in the first race at both courses, and if he was going to be at Haydock Park in time for the first, he would be expected to drive his distinctive top-of-the-range white BMW up the hill on the Baydon Road sometime around ten o'clock, and by ten-thirty at the very latest.
So I sat and waited some more.
I turned on the car radio, but like the handbrake, it didn't work too well. In fact, it made an annoying buzzing noise even when the engine wasn't running. It was worse than having no radio at all, so I turned it off again.
I looked at the new watch I'd bought in Newbury the previous afternoon. It told me it was nine-thirty.
At nine forty-five I recognized a car coming up the hill towards me. It wasn't a white BMW but an aging and battered blue Ford-my mother's car.
I sank down as far as I could in the seat as she drove by, hoping that she wouldn't identify the vehicle in the gateway as that of her head lad. Even if she'd done so, I knew she wouldn't have stopped to enquire after "staff," and I gratefully watched as her car disappeared around the next corner. As I had expected, my mother was off to the Haydock Park races, where she had Oregon running in the novice hurdle, his last outing before the Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival. Ian had told me that he was looking forwards to watching the race on Channel 4.