Agnew tapped out his pipe with a gentle clicking sound and went to sit in the car. Remmert sat down on the low garden wall and appeared to take an intense interest in cloud formations. Wishing the others would go away and leave him, Garrod took a final walk around the garage and saw a fragment of glass close to the wall which adjoined the house. He knelt and picked it up, but the simpkst test—moving a finger behind it—showed that it was ordinary glass.
Remmert stopped inspecting the sky. “Get anything?”
“No.” Garrod shook his head dispiritedly. “Let’s go.”
“You bet.” Remmert pulled the overhead door part way down, darkening the garage.
Garrod’s face was close to the unpainted inner wall and as he moved, in the very instant of straightening up, he saw a faint circular image appear on the dry boards. There was a dim silhouette of a rooftop, a ghostly tree waving its branches—and they were upside down. Spinning on his heels, he faced the outer wall of the garage and saw a bright, white star shining there, about five feet above the floor. There was a small hole in the woodwork. He approached it and put his eye to the tiny aperture. A jet of cold air from outside played on his eye like a hose, producing tears, but he saw through to the sunlit world of ascending hillside and houses nestling in baskets of shrubbery. He went to the door, stooped below its lower edge and beckoned to Remmert.
“There’s a small hole in this wall,” he said. “It’s angled downwards slightly, so you don’t notice it when you’re walking about.”
“What difference…?” Remmert stooped and looked through the hole. “I don’t know—do you think it’s big enough to be of any use?”
“Of course!” If Sala really had been moving around in here an outside observer would see the chink of light blinking on and off—but if he wasn’t here, only programmed into the slow glass in the windows, the light will have remained constant.
“How many houses can you see through there?”
“Ah…twelve for sure. Some of them are pretty far away though.”
“It doesn’t matter. If one of those houses has a Scenedow facing this way you can wind up the case this afternoon.” Garrod kicked the fragment of glass he had discovered out into the shifting sunlight—he was certain a slow glass witness would be found.
Remmert stared at him for a moment, then punched his shoulder. “I’ve got binoculars in the car.”
“Go and get them,” Garrod said. “I’ll make a location sketch of the houses we’re interested in.”
He took out his notepad and looked through the hole again, but decided the sketch was unnecessary. The hill had been plunged into cloud-shadow, and even with the naked eye he could see that one of the houses had a window which glittered green with transposed sunlight, like a rectangular emerald.
Chapter Fourteen
The news that Ben Sala had been arrested for the murder of Senator Wescott was broadcast in the late afternoon. Garrod was alone in his olive-and-gold suite, waiting for Jane to finish her day’s secretarial work with John Mannheim. For almost an hour he had been standing at a window looking at the street twenty storeys below, and he had not been able to rid himself of the sense of apprehension which heaved coldly in his stomach.
Arriving back at the hotel after lunch, he had received a message from Esther, one he had been expecting. It said: I am arriving in Augusta this evening and will be at your hotel by 79.00. Wait for me. Love, Esther.
Since sending his own message he had been hoping to hear from his wife, wanting to get the final confrontation tucked into the past where it ought to be—but now, suddenly, he was afraid. His wife’s final sentence—Love, Esther—read in context, meant there was not going to be a clean break, that she still regarded him as her property. It was all going to be drawn-out, bloody and abrasive.
Analysing his own feelings, he realized he was afraid of his own moral softness, the almost pathological inability to hurt other people, even when it was necessary, even when all parties would benefit from a swift, decisive stroke. He could think of dozens of examples, but in the introspective mood his mind sprang to the very earliest, back when he he was a boy of ten running with a small gang in Barlow, Oregon.
The young Alban Garrod had never fitted in very well and he was desperately anxious to win the approval of the gang leader, a plump but physically powerful boy called Rick. His chance came when he was walking home from school with an unlikeable lad named Trevor, who was high on the gang’s “execution list“. Trevor incautiously made a disparaging remark about Rick, and—in spite of feelings of self-revulsion—Alban reported the incident to Rick. Rick accepted the news gratefully and conceived a plan. The gang was to surround Trevor in an alley and Rick would utter a formal accusation. If Trevor admitted his guilt he would be worked over to teach him a lesson, and if he denied it he was calling both Rick and Alban liars, which would earn him an equally severe punishment. Everything went well until the crucial moment.
After the ritual ripping open of his fly, which was always done to put an enemy at a psychological disadvantage, Trevor was backed against a wall, with his lapels gathered in Rick’s fist. He frantically denied ever having uttered the fateful words. In accordance with his own obscure code, Rick was not yet entitled to deal a blow. He looked at Alban for confirmation.
“He said it, didn’t he?”
Alban stared at Trevor, a boy he despised, and quailed when he saw the terror and pleading in his eyes. Feeling sick inside, he said, “No. I didn’t hear him saying anything about you.”
Rick released his hold on his prisoner and allowed him to scurry away to safety, then he turned to Alban with a look of bafflement which changed to contempt and anger. He advanced with heavy fists swinging. The ten-year-old Alban accepted his beating with something approaching relief—all that mattered was that he had not had to crush another human being.
With Garrod’s personal history, and without Jane actually there to steady him, there was a possibility—a very faint one, but a possibility nonetheless—that if Esther came at him the right way he would agree to go back home with her and become a dutiful husband again. The thought brought a tingle of cool perspiration to his face. He leaned his head against the glass of the window and stared down at the minute coloured rectangles which were automobiles and the even smaller specks which were people in the street below. Seen from almost directly overhead the pedestrians had no identity—it was barely possible to separate men from women—and he found it difficult to accept that each of the creeping dots regarded itself as the centre of the universe. Garrod’s depression grew more intense.
He went into his bedroom, lay on top of the bedcovers and tried to doze, but sleep was impossible. After twenty restless minutes he broke one of his strictest rules by activatine the bedside viewphone and calline his Portston headquarters to check on how things were going. He spoke to Mrs. Werner first and got a rundown on the important developments of the past few days, then he talked to several divisional and deoartment heads, including Manston who wanted euidance on how to handle Garrod’s connection with the current news break. Another was Schickert, in a near-panic over the fact that a Governmental purchasing: agency was nlacing new priority orders for Retardite particles so quickly that even if the new Liquid Light Paints plant had been in ooeration it would have been impossible to keep up. Garrod soothed him down and spent an hour in conference with other senior management.