Hutchman put his micrometer aside with a growing sense of relief, tempered with the guilty joy which comes with a lowering of one’s standards. Two hours’ work was all that was required to finalize the alignments and complete the machine; however, there was no point in it now. He debated dismantling the apparatus there and then, but he had opened the floodgates of weariness which had been building up inside him for a month. His legs began to tremble gently. He surveyed the machine soberly for a moment, making his peace with it, then walked out of the room and locked the door behind him.
Several times on the drive back to Crymchurch he annoyed other drivers by slowing down when there was no external reason for it, but all urgency seemed to have fled from his mind. He wanted to coast, in every sense of the word, to immerse himself in the warm flow of life from which he had so painfully crawled for a time. The mural of broken bodies had ceased to pulse in his vision, and once again he was ordinary. Great sighs interspersed themselves with his normal breathing as he drove on through the darkness, and he had a sense of being at an important turning point in life. Massive doors seemed to be clanging into place, sealing off dangerous avenues of probability.
Hutchman was disappointed to find an unfamiliar car parked in his driveway. It was a two-seater coupe, plum-coloured or brown — it was difficult to decide in the dim light from the house, and part of his mind noted irrelevantly that it was parked with its nose toward the gate, as though the owner had given thought to leaving with minimum delay. If there was a stranger in the house he would not be free to tell Vicky the things he wanted to tell her. Frowning, Hutchman put his key in the front-door lock and twisted it, but the key refused to turn. The Yale mechanism was double-locked on the inside.
Hutchman stepped back from the porch, examined the house, and saw that the only light was a faint glow from David’s bedroom window. A visitor in the house but no lights on? The enormity of the idea which came to him caused Hutchman to move quietly to the side door and try to get in. It, too, was doublelocked. He ran back to the front door and now the lounge lights were on. He hit the door with his fist and pounded steadily on it until the lock clicked. Vicky was standing there, wearing a bluesilk kimono.
“What do you think you’re doing?” She demanded coldly. “David’s asleep.”
“Why were the lights out and the doors locked?”
“Who said the lights were out?” Vicky continued to stand in the opening, as if refusing him admittance. “And why are you home so early?”
Hutchman walked straight at his wife, ignoring her startled gasp, and threw open the door of the lounge. A tanned, darkhaired man of about forty, whom Hutchman identified vaguely as the owner of the local service station, was standing in the center of the room. He was pulling his trousers up over blacksatin briefs and his shocked face, above the weight-trained torso, was — an image flashed into Hutchman’s chilled brain — that of Lee Harvey Oswald just as Ruby’s bullet hit him.
“You!” Hutchman snapped, his mind still working with unexpected cryogenic efficiency. “Get dressed and get out of here.” He watched the other man slip into his shirt, noting that even in a moment of presumed stress he did so in the classical locker-room manner, one leg slightly bent, abdominal muscles tightly contracted to present a flattering posture.
“This is unforgivable,” Vicky breathed. “How dare you spy on me, then speak to my guest like that!”
“Your guest isn’t objecting. Are you, guest?”
The heavily built man stepped into his shoes and lifted his jacket from a chair without speaking.
“This is my house, Forest,” Vicky said to him, “and you don’t have to leave. In fact, I’m asking you right now not to leave.”
“Well…” Forest looked at Hutchman, the bafflement slowly fading from his eyes to be replaced by a tentative belligerency. He flexed his shoulder muscles like a cobra spreading its hood.
“Dear me,” Hutchman said with affected weariness. He stepped backward into the hall, lifted a three-foot machete from its hooks on the wall, and returned to the lounge. “Listen to me, Forest. I’m not angry with you about what happened here earlier — you simply happened to be walking by when the fruit machine paid off — but now you’re intruding on my privacy and if you don’t go away from here I mean to kill you.”
“Don’t believe him,” Vicky laughed shakily and moved closer to Forest.
Hutchman glanced around the room, picked out a Hepplewhite chair which Vicky’s father had given to her the previous year, and split its shield-shaped back in two with the machete. Vicky gave a low scream but the act of vandalism seemed to have proved something to Forest, who headed determinedly for the front door. She followed him for a few paces, then abruptly appeared to lose interest.
“Destroying that chair wasn’t very bright,” she said disinterestedly. “It was worth money.”
Hutchman waited till the car outside had started up and moved away before he spoke. “Just tell me one thing. Was this the first night your… guest was here?”
“No, Lucas.” Vicky’s voice was incongruously tender, unmanning him. “This wasn’t the first night.”
“Then…” Now that there was no outsider present for Hutchman to play to he was, for the second time in an hour, confronted with reality. He grasped its white-hot metal. “Then I was too late.”
“Much too late.” Again the cruel tenderness.
“I wish I could make you see how wrong you’ve been, Vicky. I’ve never been unfaithful to you. I… .” Hutchman stopped speaking as his throat closed in pain. All these years, he thought. All the beautiful, flawed years thrown away. And for what?
“You started this, Lucas. At least be man enough to go through with it without crying.” Vicky lit a cigarette as she spoke, her eyes hard and triumphant behind a writhing mask of smoke.
“All right, Vicky,” he managed to say, and for a moment he could almost see the antibomb machine interposed between them. “I promise I’ll go through with it.”
CHAPTER 5
“If you have something on your mind, domestic or otherwise, which is affecting your work — why don’t you tell me about it?” Arthur Boswell, head of missile research and development at Westfield’s, put on his gold-rimmed spectacles and looked closely at Hutchman. His eyes were very blue and very inquisitive behind their flakes of glass.
“There isn’t any special problem, Arthur.” Hutchman faced the older man across an expanse of rosewood desk and wondered if he should have admitted to some kind of a personal crisis if only to make the next few days in the office a little easier.
“I see.” Boswell let his gaze travel nostalgically around the big office, with its twenty-year-old photographs of missile firings on the paneled walls. “You haven’t been looking at all well, lately, Hutch.”
“Ah… no.” Hutchman too glanced around the office, wishing he could think of something useful to say, but his mind kept dwelling on the idea that missile photographs were incongruous in the atmosphere with which Boswell was trying to surround himself. They should have been brown prints of stick-and-string aircraft, dating from Asquith and Lloyd George, with fragile, organic-looking wings. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t been sleeping properly for some time. I suppose I ought to see the quack and get some pills.”
“Sleep’s important. You can’t manage for long without it,” Boswell pronounced. “Why can’t you sleep?”
“No special reason.” Back to square one, Hutchman thought. Arthur has something on his mind.