He ordered a second pint while I still dawdled about on my first. His slightly piratical dark little pointed beard and his obvious physical strength turned heads our way. I might be of his age and height, but no one sidled away at my approach, or found me an instinctive threat.
“It was only a week ago tomorrow.” he said, “that they hammered you until you could hardly stand.”
I thanked him for my deliverance.
He said, “Worthington wants you to stay away from any more trouble of that sort. Especially, he said, while he’s in Switzerland.”
I listened, though, to the Tom Pigeon view of that course of inaction. He sounded as bored with the safe road to old age as Worthington himself had been the day he had goaded me to go to Leicester races.
“Worthington’s coming across like a father,” Tom said.
“A bodyguard,” I commented wryly, “and I miss him.”
Tom Pigeon said casually but with unmistakable sincerity, “Take me on board instead.”
I reflected briefly that Tom’s offer wasn’t what Worthington had intended to spark off, and wondered what my dear constable Dodd would think of my allying myself to an ex-jail occupant with a nickname like Backlash. I said regardless, “Yes, if you’ll do what I ask...”
“Maybe.”
I laughed and suggested how he might spend his Sunday. His eyes widened and came to vivid approving life.
“Just as long as it’s legal,” he bargained. “I’m not going back in the slammer.”
“It’s legal,” I assured him; and when I caught the train the following morning I had a new rear defender in the guards’ van, accompanied by three of the most dangerous-looking black dogs that ever licked one’s fingers.
There was only one possible train combination to travel on that would achieve the same time of arrival at Lorna Terrace as I’d managed the previous Sunday. It would be the time that Victor meant. Tom had wanted to rethink the plan and go by car. He would drive, he said. I shook my head and changed his mind.
Suppose, I’d suggested, this is not the ambush that Worthington feared, but just the frantic need of a worried boy. Give him a chance, I’d said.
We would compromise, though, about the awkward return journey. We would rent a car with driver to follow us from Taunton station, to shadow us faithfully, to pick us up when we wanted and finally drive us to Broadway and home.
“Expensive,” Tom Pigeon complained.
“I’m paying,” I said.
Victor himself was waiting on the Taunton platform when the train wheels ran smoothly into the station. I’d traveled near the front of the train so as to be able to spot and to pass any little unwelcoming committee where I had plenty of space to assess them, but the boy seemed to be alone. Also, I thought, anxious. Also cold in the January wind. Beyond that, an enigma.
Tom’s dogs, traveling at the rear of the train, slithered down onto the platform and caused a sharp local division between dog lovers and those with antifang reservations.
I reckoned, or anyway hoped, that Victor himself wouldn’t know Tom or his dogs by sight, even though Rose and the rest of her family probably would, after the rout of the black masks in Broadway.
I needed no black mask to meet Victor, but learning from the plainclothes police, I wore a baseball cap at the currently with-it angle above a navy-blue tracksuit topped with a paler blue sleeveless padded jacket. Normal enough for many, but different from my usual gray pants and white shirt.
Bon-Bon’s children having sniggered behind their hands, and Tom having swept his gaze over me blankly as if I had been a stranger, I walked confidently and silently in my sneakers to Victor’s back and said quietly in his ear, “Hello.”
He whirled around and took in my changed appearance with surprise, but chief of his emotions seemed to be straightforward relief that I was there at all.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said. “Not when I heard them saying how they’d smashed you up proper. I don’t know what to do. I want you to tell me what to do. They tell me lies.” He was shaking slightly, more with nervousness, I guessed, than with cold.
“First of all, we get off this windy platform,” I said. “Then you tell me where your mother thinks you are.”
Down in front of the station the driver I’d engaged was polishing a dark blue estate car large enough for the occasion. Tom Pigeon came out of the station with his dogs, made contact with the driver and loaded the Dobermans into the big rear space designed for them.
Victor, not yet realizing that the car and dogs had anything to do with him, answered my question and a dozen others. “Mom thinks I’m at home. She’s gone to see my dad in jail. It’s visiting day. I listened to her and my auntie Rose planning what they would say to me, and they made up some story about Mom going to see a woman with a disgusting illness that I wouldn’t like. Every time she goes to see Dad they make up another reason why I stay at home. Then, when I listened some more, I heard them say they’re going to try again, after Mom sees Dad, to make you tell them where the tape is you had from Granddad Payne. They say it’s worth millions. My auntie Rose says its all nonsense for you to say you don’t know. Please, please tell her where it is, or what’s on it, because I can’t bear her making people tell her things. I’ve heard them twice up in our attic screaming and groaning and she just laughs and says they have toothache.”
I turned away from Victor so that he shouldn’t see the absolute horror that flooded my mind and assuredly appeared on my face. Just the idea of Rose using teeth for torture melted at once any theoretical resistance I might have thought to be within my own capacity.
Teeth.
Teeth and wrists and hell knew what else...
The need intensified to a critical level to find out what secrets I was supposed to know, and then to decide what to do with the knowledge. Victor, I thought, might be able to dig from the semi-conscious depths of his memory the scraps I still needed if I were to glue together a credible whole. I had pieces. Not enough.
I asked with an inward shudder, “Where is your auntie Rose today? Did she too visit your dad?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know where she is. She didn’t go to the jail because Dad’s not talking to her since she shopped him.” He paused, and then said passionately, “I wish I belonged to an ordinary family. I wrote to Martin once and asked if I could stay with him for a while but he said they didn’t have room. I begged him...” His voice cracked. “What can I do?”
It seemed clear that Victor’s need for someone to advise him stretched very far back. It wasn’t odd that he was now close to breakdown.
“Come for a ride?” I suggested with friendliness, and held open for him the door behind the estate car driver. “I’ll get you back home before you’re missed, and before that we can talk about what you need.”
He hesitated only briefly. He had, after all, brought me there to help him, and it appeared he was reaching out to someone he trusted even though his family considered that person to be an enemy. Victor couldn’t invent or act at this level of desperation.
If this were an ambush, then Victor was the lamb who didn’t know it.
I asked him if he knew where I could find Adam Force. The question caused a much longer hesitation and a shake of the head. He knew, I thought, but perhaps telling me came under the category of squealing.
Tom Pigeon sat beside the driver, making him nervous simply by being himself. Victor and I sat in the rear passenger seats with the dogs behind us, separated from us by a netting divider. The driver, taciturn from first to last, set off as soon as we were all aboard and headed at first through winding Somerset country roads and then out to the wide expanses of Exmoor. Even in the summer, I imagined, it would be a bare and daunting place, grim with sunny dreams unfulfilled and long skylines blurring into drizzly mist. On that Sunday in January the cloudless air was bright, cold and crisp and on the move. The driver pulled off the road onto an area consolidated for tourist parking, and with a few spare words pointed to a just perceptible path ahead, telling me it led onto trackless moor-land if I went far enough.