"It's not him in hospital. But he could be on the run. He could be wounded." He let the car drift to the kerb and stopped with the lights off, watching the rear-view and wing mirrors.
"Where did he get a gun?"Dannasked.
"If it is him, he had it all along. Now: do you have any idea where he might have gone?"
He might've gone to the gym -"
"I doubt it. That was being watched when I was there. They picked him up there but he shook them off. "
"Look, who are these buggers? Did you say they'd got my phone tapped?"
"I said probably. They're Our Side, the Good Guys. Not the police, the ones you're not supposed to talk about. Our Ronnie's mixed up in more things than he knows about. "
Dann's outrage was mounting. "Isn't there any bleeding law in this country any more?"
"Yes. There's the one that says you can get up to two years for 'incitement to disaffection'. Hiding a deserter, that means."
"Then what aboutyou, Major?"
"Oh, I'm not threatening anybody. I'm so far up the creek myself that when they throw the book at me it'll be the whole library. The point is, we're neither of us in a position to complain. Now-anywhere you can think of? Could he have gone to Dave Tanner?"
"He might have done, if there was nowhere else,"Dannsaid grudgingly.
"Where does he live, d'you know?"
"Place called Neptune Court."
"Damn!" Maxim slammed the steering wheel with both hands, nearly hard enough to break it, certainly hard enough to make both palms sting. "The shooting was there. He must have been hiding out with Tanner, or gone round to scrounge a meal."
Why, he thought, why couldn't Blagg have gone out of town, to some place he knew, like Hereford or… Of course not. The only other places somebody who'd joined the Army at sixteen would know were Army places. And as a deserter those were just where he daren't go.
"Anywhere else, at all?" His voice sounded tired and defeated, even to himself.
"We could just drive around Rotherhithe, "Dannsuggested without enthusiasm.
"A couple of hundred police have already had that idea. I came through and it was blue lights from wall to wall… We'd better ask Tanner. "
"Hold on. If you said the cops are all over, they'll be all over Dave Tanner."
Maxim switched on the car lights. "Not necessarily. I don't think they know it's Blagg they're looking for, and if they don't know that, they won't know about Tanner. They probably talked to him already, they'd have talked to everybody in that block, just asking if they saw or heard anything. Routine."
A fresh gust of rain bounced off the bonnet as he pulled away from the kerb.
The police had stationed their Major Incident Vehicle, a glorified caravan with radio aerials, temporary telephone lines and a flashing blue light on a small mast, in a small crescent at the end of Neptune Court. There were several other police vehicles parked around, and a small group of men working under floodlights and umbrellas at the back of the court itself, but that was all. If you're trying to catch somebody immediately after a crime, you grab every man you can and smother the area. But after two or three hours and nil results, you have to accept that the trail is cold and you can't justify that level of manpower. Out there on the unpoliced streets beyond the floodlights, other people are getting stabbed, mugged, raped, burgled, sometimes even just run over. A death by gunshot is only one item on the programme of a Friday night. And with luck, it could turn out to be a bit of gang warfare which nobody is – unofficially, of course -going to bust a gut trying to solve.
Maxim drove past and parked a little further on, and Dannsaid suddenly: "What am I doing here?"
"You can wait in the car. "
Dannchanged his mind back. "No-o. The kid knows me. I'll come in." It was quite likely that, after Wednesday night. Tanner wouldn't want to be alone with Maxim.
Tanner was distinctly unhappy to see Maxim again. He lived with his wife, a thin and rather nervous girl with ragged blonde hair, in a second-floor flat that belonged to her widowed mother. The rooms were small, warm and smeltdamp, filled with brightly varnished furniture that looked well made but nevertheless home-made. A motorcycle jacket and a vivid red helmet lay on one end of the small dining table.
After a couple of minutes' polite talk and the offer of a cup of tea, Mrs Tanner went away to talk to mother.
"We're looking for Blagg," Maxim said abruptly.
Tanner swallowed and nodded. He had seemed pale and jittery ever since they had come in.
"It's for his own good, "Dannput in. "The Major thinks he could be hurt."
Tanner nodded again. "Yes. The coppers said he – whoever it was-could be."
"They don't know it's him?" Maxim asked.
"No, they didn't seem to. "
"But he was staying here?"
"Yes. He come round last night. Said could he sleep on the sofa a couple've nights. I mean, he's an old mate. I didn't think anythink like this was going to happen." He shuddered. "I mean, what could happen to me?"
"Nothing, if we reach him first. Now -"
"I mean he's left his gear here, hasn't he? That's his bag in the corner, innit? And the cops standing there asking me if I knew anything and all the time it's his gear they're looking at. I mean-"
"I'll take it away," Maxim soothed him. "Now, any idea where he might go?"
Tanner thought for a moment and shook his head.
"Think. We're assuming he's wounded and had to hide nearby. When you're hurt, you regress. I mean, you want to run home to mother. Okay, so he hasn't got a mother. But he might go back to some part of his childhood. "
"I don't see him going back to the Council,"Dannsaid banteringly. Maxim shot him a furious look.
"He might not be hurt," Tanner temporised.
"If he's not, he's probably in Norwich by now and still running. But we have to look at the worst possible case. Is there anywhere round here?'
There was a long silence. Then Tanner said slowly: "We had this sort've a gang, once. Just when we was kids. I mean, wehad this sort of hideout, meeting place. It was an old air-raid shelter, I think. Only they'd blocked up the way in, like, and you could only get in through… I dunno, maybe it was some sort of ventilation thing. If you kept that covered up, most people didn't even know it was there. "
"Show us."
Chapter 13
George had switched to drinking coffee laced with cognac – "The complete cycle, the disease and the cure in one simple package," and Agnes had muttered something about vitamin C and gone across the big room to play a Mozart piano concerto on the stereo. She felt drained. It had been a long day at the end of a busy week, but that wasn't all of it. At dinner in Littlehampton she had acted perfectly, had been friendly but not familiar, always cheerful, talking enough but not too much – but always acting. There were so few homes where she could relax and, without talking about the hidden things, not be consciously hiding them. It was that, the holding of your thoughts like holding your breath, that broke so many of them in their forties. She had seen it far too often: the self-inflicted divorces, the ones you had to talk to before lunch because the rest of their day was an alcoholic marsh, those shunted to a not-too-responsible job in the Registry or an early pension-Peace hath its victims no less renowned than war. I have perhaps ten more years. Will it all have been worth it?
Suddenly Mozart seemed too busy and clever, and she started sorting in the cupboard under the turntable until she found a record of Papillons, and lay back surrounded by Schumann's fluttering primary colours.
George looked around. "If I'm not to be allowed Mozart, why not somebody with an appropriate gloom quotient like Mahler? What are we doing back in the nursery?"
"I suppose it was that meeting. You remember Sladen talking about Wilhelmina Linnarz, the pianist defector? I'd been wondering what made me think of Schumann."
He grunted. "You're regressing, young Algar… There must be a file on that woman. "