"Get your fucking hands off me this instant, Gordon, and go home to your wife and family." She struggled free, yanked her attache case from the back seat, almost crowning him with it, and opened the door with such force that the hinges groaned. She got out of the car. "Understand this. Liking isn't loving. Thanks for the ride." She slammed the door on his blank hurt face.
Once inside the silent empty house her anger dissolved like instant coffee granules into some other murkier emotion.
She scooped up the mail from the mat and left it on the hall table without looking at it, and went straight into the kitchen, switching on the radio to drown the silence. There was no lingering regret at Frank's departure. That particular episode had played itself to a standstill months before he got the job in Boulder with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Still, it had been two years and a few months of her life. She hadn't even missed the sex much, which had been the only department where they saw, in a manner of speaking, eye to eye.
Cheryl made lemon tea, trying to decide whether or not she was hungry, and carried the glass in its plastic holder into the living room and flicked on the TV for company. Clint Eastwood was killing somebody with a Magnum .45. Had someone killed Theo not with a gun but with a car? For five years she had lived with that unanswered question. The police had filed it away under "Hit and Run." Just another fatality to add to the road accident statistics. Cheryl had no contradictory proof, except the inadmissible kind of doubts, fears, suspicions.
Why did she remain unconvinced? It could have been an accident. Yes, it could have been but wasn't. Because Theo had been a pain in the ass to the authorities, that's why. Because he kept plugging away with articles and lectures and letters to journals and newspapers, telling everyone and anyone who'd listen. Because he knew what was corning and certain people knew it was coming and didn't want others to know.
Her mind was a muddle and she was tired. She'd taken on her father's crusade, and as with him it had become an obsession. It had also become her reason for living, her entire life.
She finished her tea and went through the hall to the bedroom, collecting her attache case on the way but leaving the mail untouched and therefore not seeing the envelope with the Russian postmark, which was third in the pile.
The mail would still be there in the morning, and tomorrow, thank God, was another day.
"Everyone needs a label," John Ware said. "That's why I'd like you to do this series for us. You've established a reputation and the public trusts you."
He might have been taken more for a city stockbroker than the editor of a monthly political and current affairs magazine. Pinstripe suit. Old school tie. Well-fed face and plump pink hands resting on the starched white tablecloth. And accent to match. "What was that thing you did for the BBC?"
" 'Personal Crusade,' " said Chase.
"Good stuff, pitched at just the right level. Intelligent without being abstruse. I spoke to several people and they were most impressed."
"I'm glad several people watched it."
"What I'm after is hard-hitting factual stuff, fully documented. None of that "a spokesman said" or "a highly placed source informed me" crap. Opinions like that are two-a-penny. Or at any rate the price of a phone call. You get the idea."
Chase did, though he wondered at John Ware's motives. Most likely the editor wanted a big topical theme to boost his AB readership. A chance remark in a Fleet Street pub had sparked off the idea to hire Gavin Chase to research and write a series of pieces on environmental problems worldwide, so here he was, being given the full expense-account treatment and lashings of bonhomie in the Unicorn Press Club at ten-past-three on a dismal Tuesday afternoon.
"Now, as to timing," John Ware said, with the briskness of a stockbroker closing a deal. "How soon could you leave for the States?"
"Three weeks," Chase said, having already thought about it. He'd need that length of time to make arrangements.
"What about your bits for TV? Contractual obligations?"
"I'm not under contract. They just call me in on a free-lance basis whenever they need an 'expert's' viewpoint." Chase spoke casually, with a hint of irony. "As you say, John, everyone has to have a label."
"No personal ax-grinding though," the editor warned him. "Keep it hard and factual and to the point." He raised his brandy glass. "Here's to a successful trip and a terrific series."
Chase acknowledged the toast and drank. Obviously John Ware, editor in chief of the glossy Sentinel, saw nothing amiss in sealing a bargain such as this with five-star Cognac.
Chase took a chance that the tube was running and walked up Chancery Lane to Holborn Station. You could never be sure since London went bankrupt which services were operating and when. He was in luck and rode through, changing at Oxford Circus to get on the District Line, to Chiswick Park. The easiest way would have been via Notting Hill Gate, but nobody used that station unless he was black or Asian.
He walked through the drizzle to his flat in Wellesley Road, passing the lines of derelict cars rusting at the curbside. At Belgrave Court he showed his ID to the armed security guard and was admitted. Every window was wreathed with barbed wire. He had a standing arrangement with a neighbor whose little girl went to the same school as Dan to collect his son and look after him till five. The little girl, Sarah, fussed around Dan like a mother hen, but at least he was safe and off the streets.
The word processor that served as his desk in the book-lined living room was inches deep in copies of Science, Nature, New Scientist, and Science Review. These supplied background research for a two-thou-sand-word piece on computer weather modeling, as yet only half-writ-ten.
Meeting Theo Detrick in Geneva eight years ago had changed his life; getting married to Angie and then divorced had changed it even more, Chase suspected.
For it was actually her leaving him that spurred him on to pursue his new career. While still married he'd been contributing bits and pieces to the scientific press, so it wasn't a completely new departure when he terminated his ICI Research Fellowship at Durham and came to London to try his hand at free-lance science journalism. It was one hell of a gamble, though, and the first couple of years had been tough, especially with a young child to support and bring up. For a while he was even reduced to graveyard-shift lab work. Then the journalism started to pay, and when television came along he was able to provide an above-average standard of living for Dan and himself. At thirty-five he was beginning to feel established at last, though he still found it a precarious and unsettling occupation, subject to the vagaries of the media and the whims of editors.
But as John Ware had pointed out at lunch, television had made Gavin Chase's reputation as a science popularizes Much to his own surprise he'd made the transition from straight science reporting to the mass media, where the personality selling the message counted for as much, if not more, than the message itself.
The sight of the work to be finished made him restless, though it was probably pointless until two cups of strong black coffee had cleared the brandy fumes. Besides, there was the ritual of Dan's bath and bedtime story, which Chase looked forward to. He sometimes grumbled that it disrupted his schedule and derailed his train of thought, but it kept him sane and put things in their proper perspective. The end of the world would have to wait until after Dan's bedtime story.
Ironic, really, that he had the women's movement to thank. With the change in the social-sexual climate of opinion, every custody case was considered on its merits, without bias one way or the other. Angie had forfeited her rights to the child when she left the family home and, in the words of the judgment, "cohabited with another person in a separate dwelling." The other person was not Archie Grieve (she'd never slept with him, Chase learned) but a tall, balding BBC light-entertainment producer called Derek Chambers, whose name occasionally popped up on variety shows and quiz games for the mentally retarded.