Intelligence is mostly assumptions. Tea, however, is fact. " Agnes stood up purposefully.
The tea was handed round by a posse of mothers who greeted Agnes in a friendly but appraising way which infuriated her. She knew she was overdressed for the occasion but hadn't realised it would make her look both predatory and incompetently so, since one of the main adult sports at Chris's school was trying to get that nice Major Maxim remarried. That, and trying to recruit him to the Parents' Association committee (which was almost the same thing, as the most active women members were divorcees).
"We only meet about three times a term," one drastically lean lady was telling him; "and the dates are always fixedwell in advance so all you have to do isarrange to be free on that evening."
"The trouble with my job at the moment is that J, can't guarantee to be free at any given time. "
"Surely it's just a matterof arrangement. My brother works for the Department of Health and he can alwaysarrange to get away if he knows the date far enough in advance. "
"My job just isn't that predictable. "
"My brother is veryhigh in the Department of Health, " she said warningly.
"That's just the trouble," Agnes chipped in. "When you're more junior your life simply isn't your own. If somebody sends you off to – say – Acton or Rotherhithe, you don't have a choice. You just have to go."
"Acton? Rotherhithe?" The lady looked mystified. "Who'd want to go to those places?"
"Nobody in his right mind," Agnes agreed. "They were just random examples. But I do know the difficulty the Major has in getting away to do his own things. It can be very frustrating."
She could feel Maxim's steady glare.
"Well," the lean lady said, "I still feel that something could bearranged. My brother has always found the civil servicemost accommodating…" She drifted away, trailing aromatic dissatisfaction.
"Thank you, " Maxim said in a sort of growl.
"Any time."
Chris appeared with a handful of rather sweaty egg-and-cress sandwiches and a smaller boy who wore spectacles and had a problem. Chris explained: "James here is our scorer and Mr Marshall signalled four wides when there was a wide and the ball went to the boundary, but the other side's scorer says you can'thave four wides at once, only one, and the other three must count as byes. What do you say, Daddy?"
Maxim was still wondering what to say when Agnes said: '"Certainly you can have four wides off one ball. Look it up. 'All runs that are from a "Wide Ball" shall be scored "Wide Balls", or if no runs be made one run shall be scored.' It doesn't mention the boundary, but it must be implicit. It's Rule 29, isn't it?"
James dropped his pen, adjusted his spectacles and fumbled through the back of the score-book. "Gosh, yes, 29: 'The ball does not become "Dead" on the call of "Wide Ball" '… Do you know all the rules by heart?"
"Most of them, yes." The two boys gazed at her with such blazing admiration that she came close to blushing. "When I was your age I spent almost every summer weekend scoring for my father's village team. And pouring jugs of beer and passing bowls of pickles at the 'tea' intervals."
"It must be very useful, "James said with utter sincerity, "to know all the rules of cricket by heart."
"Not quite as much as it used to be. I don't do much scoring nowadays."
"Don't you?" Maxim asked.
"We don't get pickles," Chris said, staring at his crumpled handful of sandwich. "Have you finished talking work?"
Maxim and Agnes looked at each other. "Not quite," she said in a small serious voice.
"Are you in a rush to get back?" Maxim asked.
"No-o. I'mjust the messenger. I'll have to ring George and my office any way…"
"Why don't you stay on and have dinner with us? – at my parents' place?"
There were a lot of reasons why she didn't want to get involved in Maxim's domestic life, particularly when he seemed to be intent on jumping from the tenth storey of his career structure – but in the end, why not? Curiosity was oneof her best-developed talents.
"You're sure it'll be all right?" She glanced quickly at Chris, but he was grinning broadly.
"My mother keeps an open-house policy. Chris is always bringing somebody home. "
"Then I'd love to. I'll go and ring George now. The message is, you don't know nuffin' – right?"
"I could ring a couple of people, or go and see them, about trying to find you-know-who, but…" He shrugged.
"I don't think George wants you doing any more on your own initiative."
"Then he can bloody well tell me so himself. "
"I was under the impression that he had." She grinned suddenly. Her smiles were light, acted expressions, but her grin was wide and uninhibited. "But I'll pass the thought on. " She picked up her jacket and handbag and headed for the distant clubhouse. Behind, she heard another parent swoop on Maxim. "Oh, Major, did you get the message about our little wine and cheese party for…"
Chapter11
Corporal Blagg had spent his childhood – those parts of it the local authority hadn't been able to control – in the courts, alleyways and concrete 'gardens' of Rotherhithe's blocks of flats. He had learned to fight there, to ride there, to play football there, and at last how to get his hand inside Betty Tanner's jeans there. He knew those courts and gardens, not just as places and secret short cuts, but as a whole pattern of life and behaviour. And he knew immediately that the two men walking towards him didn't belong, were wrong. They couldn't have been more wrong if they'd worn Father Christmas suits.
But they'd seen him the moment he saw them, so he kept on walking towards them. They might not know him by sight, or might not be looking for him at all. They weren't police; one of them had a rather foreign look. He put his hand casually into his jacket and touched the butt of the Spanish copy of the Colt.38. They were about five yards apart and he was just deciding they weren't anything to do with him when they both took out pistols.
He shot one twice, in the middle, and he collapsed against the other, blocking Blagg's aim. The second man brought up his gun and fired from the cover of his wounded companion. Blagg tried for a head shot and missed, felt a punch in the chest that made his knees fold, but he fired again and saw the pistol fall loose. Then the man was running, and Blagg could have shot him in the back but he had only one round left.
The first man lay there, moaning. Blagg started to run, too, in the other direction. He moved fast and confidently, but when he had gone only three hundred yards he began to feel breathless, long before he should have done, and realised whatthat one shot might have done. He started desperately to think of a place to hide.
Something in the sea air must act as a mind-blowing drug on English architects, Agnes decided. Mining towns, garrison towns, purpose-built New Towns – all those were fairly hideous in their own ways, but they offered no contest to the English seaside. There, an impregnable first line of defence against any invader with visual taste, stood hundreds of miles of small houses that could have been assembled by retarded monkeys dipping randomly into a box of building styles.
The little semi-det that Maxim's parents had bought when they retired to the outskirts of Littlehampton sported a Georgian bow window, timber cladding above the garage – which had a metal door – and tile-hung patches around the first-floor windows, whose balconies were just big enough for a seagull to stand on. And that was restrained compared with the green pantiles, Spanish ironwork, Provençalshutters and stained-glass leaded windows spattered along the rest of the road.
Or maybe they just didn't have architects within three miles of the sea. Maybe it was all done by builders' baby daughters: "Draw Daddy a nice house and Daddy will build it. "
Maxim's mother was a cheerful, bustling little woman; his father wore a moustache, smoked a pipe and said very little but, Agnes guessed, listened a lot. She learned that Maxim had an elder sister – oddly, she'd always assumed he must have been the first child-who had married a Quaker schoolmaster and lived up North, had three children and didn't work, "Except at disapproving of the Army," Maxim added. They were just finishing the apple pie when the phone rang.