Solomon was back on Post Office Tower duty, and O’Neal was frowning.
‘Do you really believe that?’ he said. ‘I mean, do you think that’s possible?’ I could see that he was desperate for a handle, any handle, even if it came off with the first flush.
‘Yes, I think it’s possible. No, I don’t believe it. But I’m recovering from a gunshot wound, and it’s the best I can do.’ O’Neal started to pace the floor, runninghis hands through his hair. The heat in the room was getting to him too, but he didn’t have time to get rid of his coat.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘somebody may want Woolf dead. I can’t pretend that Her Majesty’s government would be heartbroken if he walked under a bus tomorrow. Granted, his enemies may be considerable, and normal precautions useless. So far, so good. Yes, he can’t take the war to them,’ O’Neal rather liked that phrase, I could tell, ‘so he puts out a fake contract on himself. But that doesn’t work.’ O’Neal stopped pacing and looked at me. ‘I mean, how could he be sure it would be fake? How could he know that you wouldn’t go through with it?’
I looked at Solomon, and he knew I was looking at him, but he didn’t look back.
‘I’ve been asked before,’ I said. ‘Offered a lot more money. I said no. Maybe he knew that.’
O’Neal suddenly remembered how much he disliked me. ‘Have you always said no?’ I stared back at O’Neal, as coolly as I could. ‘I mean, maybe you’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Maybe you suddenly need the money. It’s a ridiculous risk.’ I shrugged, and my armpit hurt.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘He had the bodyguard, and at least with me he knew where the threat would come from. Rayner was hanging around me for days before I got into the house.’
‘But you went to the house, Lang. You actually…’
‘I went there to warn him. I thought it was a neighbourly thing to do.’
‘All right. All right.’ O’Neal got stuck into some more pacing. ‘Now how does he "let it be known" that this contract is out? I mean, does he write it on lavatory walls, put an advertisement in theStandard, what?’
‘Well, you knew about it.’ I was starting to get tired now. I wanted sleep and maybe even a plate of something brown and foul-smelling.
‘We are not his enemies, Mr Lang,’ said O’Neal. ‘Notinthat sense, at any rate.’
‘So how did you find out that I was supposedly after him?’ O’Neal stopped, and I could see him thinking that he’d already said whole volumes too much to me. He looked over at Solomon crossly, blaming him for not being a good enough chaperon. Solomon was a picture of calm.
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell him that, Mr O’Neal,’ he said. ‘He’s had a bullet through his chest through no fault of his own. Might make it heal quicker if he knows why it happened.’
O’Neal took a moment to digest this, and then turned to me.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We received the information about your meeting with McCluskey, or Woolf…’ He was hating this. ‘We received this information from the Americans.’
The door opened and a nurse came in. She might have been the one who patted my hand when I first woke up, but I couldn’t swear to it. She looked straight through Solomon and O’Neal, and came over to fiddle with my pillows, plumping them up, pushing them about, making them considerably less comfortable than they had been. I looked up at O’Neal.
‘Do you mean the CIA?’
Solomon smiled, and O’Neal nearly wet himself. The nurse didn’t even flicker.
Six
The hour is come, but not the man.
WALTER SCOTT
I was in hospital for seven meals, however long that is. I watched television, took painkillers, tried to do all the half finished crosswords in the back numbers ofWoman’s Own.And asked myself a lot of questions.
For a start, what was I doing? Why was I getting in the way of bullets, fired by people I didn’t know, for reasons I didn’t understand? What was in it for me? What was in it for Woolf? What was in it for O’Neal and Solomon? Why were the crosswords half-finished? Had the patients got better, or died, before completing them? Had they come into hospital to have half their brain removed, and was this the proof of the surgeon’s skill? Who had ripped the covers off these magazines and why? Can the answer to ‘Not a woman (3)’ really be ‘man’?
And why, above all, was there a picture of Sarah Woolf pasted on the inside of the door of my mind, so that whenever I yanked it open, to think of anything - afternoon television, smoking a cigarette in the lavatory at the end of the ward, scratching an itchy toe - there she was, smiling and scowling at me simultaneously? I mean, for the hundredth time, this was a woman I was quite definitely not in love with.
I thought Rayner might be able to answer at least some of these questions, so when I judged myself well enough to get up and shuffle around, I borrowed a dressing-gown and headed upstairs to the Barrington Ward.
When Solomon had told me that Rayner was also in theMiddlesexHospital, I’d been, for a moment at least, surprised. It seemed ironic that the two of us should end up getting repaired in the same shop, after all we’d been through together. But then, as Solomon pointed out, there aren’t many hospitals left inLondon these days, and if you hurt yourself anywhere south of the Watford Gap, you’re liable to end up in the Middlesex sooner or later.
Rayner had a room to himself, directly opposite the nurses’ desk, and he was wired up to a lot of bleeping boxes. His eyes were closed, either from sleep or coma, and his head was wrapped in a huge, cartoon bandage, as if Road Runner had dropped that safe just once too often. And he wore blue flannelette pyjamas, which, perhaps for the first time in a lot of years, made him look child-like. I stood by his bed for a while, feeling sorry for him, until a nurse appeared and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted a lot of things, but would settle for knowing Rayner’s first name.
Bob, she said. She stood at my elbow, with her hand on the door-knob, wanting me to leave, but deferring to my dressing-gown.
I’m sorry, Bob, I thought.
There you were, just doing what you were told, what you were paid to do, and some arse comes along and hits you with a marble Buddha. That’s rough.
Of course, I knew that Bob wasn’t exactly a choirboy. He wasn’t even the boy who bullies the choirboy. At the very best, he was the older brother of the boy who bullies the boy who bullies the choirboy. Solomon had looked Rayner up in the MoD files, and found that he’d been chucked from the Royal Welch Fusiliers for black-marketeering - anything from army boot laces to Saracen armoured cars had gone through the barrack gates under Bob Rayner’s jersey - but even so, I was the one who’d hit him, so I was the one who felt sorry for him.
I put what was left of Solomon’s grapes on the table by his bed, and left.
Men and women in white coats tried to get me to stay in hospital for a few more days, but I shook my head and told them I was fine. They tutted, and made me sign a few things, and then they showed me how to change the dressing under my arm and told me to come straight back if the wound started to feel hot or itchy.
I thanked them for their kindness, and refused their offer of a wheelchair. Which was just as well, because the lift had stopped working.
And then I limped on to a bus and went home.
My flat was where I’d left it, but seemed smaller than I remembered. There were no messages on the answering machine and nothing in the fridge besides the half-pint of natural yoghurt and stick of celery that I’d inherited from the previous tenant.