“Morning.”
Professor Briggs blinked into the light. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“You know where she is, don’t you? Your wife?”
They were stopped by a big roadside pub whose sign creaked in the wind. Briggs looked back at the steering wheel. “Sort of. I think.”
Carmichael called over from the driving seat of the police car, “Get in the back. We’ll take you there.”
Sitting in his Daimler, gloved hands on the wheel ahead of him, Briggs hesitated. “All this mess,” he said. “You don’t have to make it public, do you?”
Breen said, “Out of the car, please.”
“I don’t really care for myself,” said Briggs. “It’s just it would embarrass Mrs. Briggs if this got out. I’ll put in a word with your boss. I do have some influence, you know. I know the Commissioner very well.”
“Out,” shouted Breen.
It was a house by the sea in Suffolk. Their getaway place; the couple spent weekends there in the summer.
“Did she take Sam Ezeoke there?”
Briggs didn’t answer.
Later, in the dark of the A12, Carmichael driving down the empty road, headlights on full beam, he said, “We have a caretaker. I called her up after you’d left my house and asked her to look in on the place. She said, ‘Oh. I thought you were there. The light was on.’”
They traveled east into the darkness.
“Why here?” asked Breen.
“I don’t know. We have a boat. A twenty-six-foot Seamaster. Perhaps she wants to get him away in that.”
As they got closer to the coast, the mist hung in patches. Carmichael looked pale. He said little beyond swearing at a cattle truck that was blocking the road and asking Breen to light his cigarettes.
“What if they’ve taken the boat already?” said Breen.
“They haven’t. I asked the caretaker to check for me.”
“Can she handle the boat on her own?”
The professor laughed drily. “I’m the landlubber. The boat is her toy.”
They were doing around forty down a narrow, straight black road, short hedges on either side, when Carmichael braked suddenly, sending the professor hurtling off the backseat and into the space between the two front seats. “For God’s sake,” he shouted. “Be careful.”
Muddy water splashed up as Carmichael pulled the car into a lay-by.
“What’s wrong?” said Breen
Without answering, Carmichael kicked open the door and dashed out into the blackness.
“What the devil has got into him?” said Professor Briggs.
“I don’t know,” answered Breen, getting out to follow Carmichael. It was a dark, starless night and it took Breen a minute for his eyes to adjust. He leaned back inside the car and pulled the torch from the glove compartment.
Carmichael had clambered over a fence and disappeared into a newly planted field.
“John?” called Breen.
A faint groan returned from the black field.
“Are you all right?” asked Breen.
Another groan. Breen switched on his torch; dazzled by the light, John Carmichael was squatting on the brown earth, trousers about his ankles, the pale skin of his legs luminous in the bright beam.
“Switch it off!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t laugh. I just shat my trousers,” said Carmichael.
“I’m not laughing, I promise.”
Carmichael groaned. “Go away,” he said.
The night was cold; wind came unhindered over the flat land. An owl screeched somewhere. Breen returned to the car.
“What’s wrong?” asked Professor Briggs.
“Detective Sergeant Carmichael is ill,” Breen said, rummaging again in the glove compartment. There was a pad of license-producer forms but the paper looked flimsy.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Food poisoning, I think.”
“Oh for pity’s sake.”
Breen went round to the boot, opened it and shone the torch inside. A set of spanners lay wrapped in a copy of the Mirror. He took the newspaper and clambered over the fence with it. “Best I could find,” he said, offering it to Carmichael.
“Thanks.”
Breen and Professor Briggs waited in the car, heater on. The land around them was flat and empty. There were no lights on the horizon. No cars came past.
“I suppose I should call someone at the hospital and let them know I’m going to be late,” said Professor Briggs, pushing his hair back from his eyes. “What time should I tell them I’ll be in?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“That is not particularly helpful.”
Breen turned round and glared at the man in the backseat. “There would have been no need for any of this if you had told us where you thought your wife was in the first place.”
The professor turned his head away, as if looking at something of great interest beyond the blackness outside the car.
Breen got out of the car. “How are you doing?” he called.
“I feel like shit,” said Carmichael.
Breen looked at his watch. It was almost three in the morning. They still had at least three hours to drive.
“Are you going to be long?”
“I keep thinking I’ve finished and then I start again.”
Breen peered into the blackness around them and wished they had contacted the Suffolk police before they’d left civilization.
Eventually Carmichael rejoined them; his eyes looked sunken, his hair was matted against his forehead. He slumped into the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, then took it back into neutral again. “Not sure I can drive,” he said.
“Good grief, man. Is that you? You smell to heaven,” said the professor. “What did you do to yourself?”
Breen turned to the professor: “Right. You drive,” he said. After the fall that morning, he wasn’t up to a long session behind the wheel.
“You must be ruddy joking,” said Briggs.
“I wish I ruddy was,” replied Breen.
In the darkness, the professor was a nervous driver. He paused at every corner or junction; if any vehicles approached from the opposite direction, headlights shining into his eyes, he slowed to a virtual standstill. As dawn approached, the roads became fuller; huge lorries packed with beets loomed within feet of the rear bumper. Their presence slowed Briggs down even more, sending the truck drivers into a rage of impatience. One blared his horn until Briggs found a lane he could pull over into.
Carmichael lay on the backseat, groaning occasionally. By the time they stopped at a small all-night petrol station somewhere in Suffolk, a thin line of deep blue light was starting to form to the east.
The attendant was asleep in a chair inside. Breen banged on the window to wake him. He emerged, rubbing his eyes, dressed in a long brown cotton coat with Esso written on the chest pocket. “Fill it up,” said Breen. “Oh. And you got a key for the toilets?”
Breen passed the key to Carmichael, who tottered out to the back of the station clutching it.
“Is he going to be all right?” asked Breen, as the attendant put the nozzle into the tank.
“How would I know?” answered Briggs.
“Well, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
The professor didn’t answer.
When Carmichael returned he was looking a little less white, though he still got into the backseat. He sat up straight this time in the corner and lit a cigarette. “Drive,” he said.
“I’d rather you didn’t smoke,” said the professor.
“I’d rather you just shut up,” said Carmichael.
Thirty-three
The graying light revealed flat, dull land. The roads were straight and the hedges were even. Small pockets of fog loomed in fields filled with flocks of lapwings and geese.
And then the sea was ahead of them: a gray line beyond the dark fields. They pulled up a hundred yards away from the house, a small white two-storey cottage at the end of a thin strip of village lying along the coast. The road lay between the houses and a shingle beach; a few black-hulled fishing boats were pulled up on the stones alongside tar-painted sheds.