"Are you staying all day?" A young female staff member from the coffee shop was standing at my elbow.
"Sorry?" I asked.
"Are you staying all day?" she asked again.
"Is there a law against it?" I asked. "I've ordered lots of coffee, three orange juices and a Danish pastry."
"But my friend and I think you're up to something," she said. I turned in my chair and looked at her friend, who was watching me from behind the relative safety of the chest-high counter. I turned back and checked the street outside.
"Now, why is that?" I asked.
"You're not reading that newspaper," she said accusingly.
"And why do you think that?"
"You've been on the same page for at least the past hour," she said. "We've been watching. No one reads a paper that slowly."
"So what do you think I'm doing?" I asked her, still keeping my eyes on the mailbox shop.
"We think you're keeping watch for bank robbers." She smiled. "You're a cop, aren't you?"
I put a finger to my lips. "Shhh," I said, with a wink.
The girl scuttled back to her friend, and when I looked at them a minute or two later, they both put fingers to their lips and collapsed in fits of giggles.
I had half an hour to go before the Taj Mahal opened, but I reckoned I couldn't stay here any longer. I wasn't keen on the attention I was now receiving from just about all the coffee-shop staff, as well as from some of the customers.
I beckoned the girl back over to me.
"I've got to go now," I said quietly, paying my bill. "My shift is over. But remember"-I put my finger to my lips again-"shhh. No telling."
"No, of course not," she said, all seriously.
I stood up, collected my unread newspaper and walked out. I thought that by lunchtime she would have told all her friends of the encounter, and half of their friends' friends would probably know by this evening.
I walked away down the street, certain that my every move was being watched by the girl, her friend and most of the other coffee-shop staff. I couldn't just hang around outside, so I went into the shop right next door to the Indian restaurant. It sold computers and all things electronic.
"Can I help you, sir?" asked a young man, approaching me.
"No thanks," I said. "I'm just looking."
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.