Hollerday Phoenix House spread wide in one central block with two long wings. I walked around to the impressive front door and found that the building I entered at the conclusion of the spooky path was definitely of the twenty-first century, and in no way the haunt of apparitions.
The entrance hall looked like a hotel, but I saw no farther into the nursing home’s depths because of the two white-coated people leaning on the reception desk. One was female and the other grew a coat-colored beard, and did indeed wear orange socks.
They glanced briefly my way as I arrived, then straightened with resigned professional interest when I presented with cuts and bruises that actually, until they peered at me, I had forgotten.
“Doctor Force?” I tried, and White-Beard satisfactorily answered, “Yes?”
His fifty-six years sat elegantly on his shoulders, and his well-brushed hair, along with the beard, gave him the sort of shape to his head that actors got paid for. Patients would trust him, I thought. I might have been pleased myself to have him on my case. His manner held authority in enough quantity to show me I was going to have difficulty jolting him the way I wanted.
Almost at once I saw, too, that the difficulty was not a matter of jolting him but of following the ins and outs of his mind. All through the time I was with him I felt him swing now and then from apparently genuine and friendly responses to evasion and stifled ill will. He was quick and he was clever, and although most of the time I felt a warm liking for him, occasionally there was a quick flash of antipathy. He was powerfully attractive overall, but the charm of Adam Force, it seemed to me, could flow in and out like a tide.
“Sir,” I said, giving seniority its due. “I’m here on account of Martin Stukely.”
He put on a sorry-to-tell-you expression, and told me that Martin Stukely was dead. At the same time there was a rigidity of shock on his facial muscles: it wasn’t a name he’d expected to hear up Hollerday Hill in Lynton. I said I knew Martin Stukely was dead.
He asked with suspicion, “Are you a journalist?”
“No,” I said. “A glassblower.” I added my name, “Gerard Logan.”
His whole body stiffened. He swallowed and absorbed the surprise and eventually pleasantly asked, “What do you want?”
I said equally without threat, “I’d quite like back the videotape you took from the Logan Glass showroom in Broadway on New Year’s Eve.”
“You would, would you?” He smiled. He was ready for the question. He had no intention of complying, and was recovering his poise. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Doctor Force made a slow survey from head to foot of my deliberately conservative suit and tie and I felt as positive as if he had said it aloud that he was wondering if I had enough clout to cause him trouble. Apparently he realistically gave himself an honest but unwelcome answer, as he suggested not that I buzz off straight away, but that we discuss the situation in the open air.
By open air it transpired he meant the path I’d just ascended. He led that way and sneaked a sideways glance to measure my discomfort level, which was nil. I smiled and mentioned that I hadn’t noticed any ghosts on the prowl on my way up.
Should he be aware of small damages to my face and so on, I said, it was as a result of Rose Payne being convinced either that I had his tape in my possession, or that I knew what was on it. “She believes that if she’s unpleasant enough, I’ll give her the tape or the knowledge, neither of which I have.” I paused and said, “What do you suggest?”
He said promptly, “Give this person anything. All tapes are alike.”
“She thinks your tape is worth a million.”
Adam Force fell silent.
“Is it?” I asked.
Under his breath Force said what sounded like the truth, “I don’t know.”
“Martin Stukely,” I murmured without hostility, “wrote a check for you with a lot of zeros on it.”
Force, very upset, said sharply, “He promised never to say...”
“He didn’t say.”
“But...”
“He died,” I said. “He left check stubs.”
I could almost feel him wondering “What else did Martin leave?” and I let him speculate. In the end in genuine-looking worry he said, “How did you find me?”
“Didn’t you think I would?”
He very briefly shook his head and faintly smiled. “It didn’t occur to me that you would bother to look. Most people would leave it to the police.”
He would have been easy to like all the time, I thought, if one could forget Lloyd Baxter’s epileptic fit, and a missing bank bag full of money.
“Rose Payne,” I said distinctly, again... and somewhere in Adam Force this time her name touched a sensitive reaction. “Rose,” I repeated, “is convinced I know where your videotape is, and as I said before, she is certain I know what’s on it. Unless you find a way of rather literally getting her off my back, I may find her attentions too much to tolerate and I’ll tell her what she’s anxious to know.”
He asked, as if he hadn’t any real understanding of what I’d said, “Are you implying that I know this person, Rose? And are you also implying that I am in some way responsible for your... er... injuries?”
I said cheerfully, “Right both times.”
“That’s nonsense.” His face was full of calculation as if he weren’t sure how to deal with an awkward situation, but wouldn’t rule out using his own name, Force.
On the brink of telling him why I reckoned I could answer my own questions, I seemed to hear both Worthington and Tom Pigeon shrieking at me to be careful about sticks and wasps’ nests. The silence of the dark fir forest shook with their urgent warnings. I glanced at the benevolent doctor’s thoughtful face and changed my own expression to regret.
Shaking my head, I agreed with him that what I’d said was of course nonsense. “All the same,” I added after quizzically checking with my two absent bodyguards, “you did take the tape from my shop, so please can you at least tell me where it is now.”
He relaxed inwardly a good deal at my change of tone. Worthington and Tom Pigeon went back to sleep. Doctor Force consulted his own inner safeguards and answered the question unsatisfactorily.
“Just suppose you are right and I have the tape. As Martin could no longer keep the information safe, there was no longer any need for it. Perhaps, therefore, I ran it through to record a sports program from first to last. That tape might now show horse racing and nothing else.”
He had written to Martin that the knowledge on the tape was dynamite. If he’d wiped the dynamite out with racing, boasting he’d poured millions down the drain (or past the recording head), he still surely had whatever he needed for a clone.
No one would casually wipe out a fortune if not sure he could bring it back. Nobody would do it on purpose, that was.
So I asked him, “Did you obliterate it on purpose, or by mistake?”
He laughed inside the beard. He said, “I don’t make mistakes.”
The frisson I felt wasn’t a winter shudder from a daunting fir forest but a much more prosaic recognition of a familiar and thoroughly human failing: for all his pleasant manner, the doctor thought he was God.
He stopped by a fallen fir trunk and briefly rested one foot on it, saying he would go back from there as he had patients to see. “I find business is usually completed by this point,” he went on and his voice was dismissive. “I’m sure you’ll find your own way down to the gate.”
“There are just a couple of things,” I said. My voice sounded flat, the acoustics dead between the trees.