“We better use the facilities now, while we have the chance,” Pim said.
Gaunt followed; it all seemed like an absurd dream to him. The two men unzipped their flies and aimed at the ancient trough built into the base of the dark, damp wall.
“You see, I had to save us,” Pim said. “The mission was blown when Felker took off. Reed was no use to us. You see that, don’t you?”
In the trough, their mingled urine steamed in the cold. They zipped their trousers and stood still for a moment, staring at the wall of the lavatory.
Gaunt thought now that he understood. The thought came as a weight to him; it pressed on his chest. Now the whole trip to Anglia took on a different shading, as though the melancholy premonitions of the black fields viewed from the train window had been directed to prepare him for this moment.
He followed Pim outside into the cold wind.
“Where is Reed, then?”
Pim looked at him. “Do you understand?”
Gaunt nodded.
“In the boot.”
“My God. How long?”
“This afternoon. I didn’t want to leave him. I thought it best if the body wasn’t discovered for a couple of days. It will give us a chance to act. To put out a net for Felker in a quiet way. Obviously, we know more about him than the Americans. Or the Russians.”
“Was it necessary?” Gaunt’s face was bloodless, and he realized his hands were cold.
“Felker must be seen to have been the beginning and end of the network. The Soviets can’t get wind that a whole damned section of Auntie is involved in spying on our American friends on a continuing basis. This had to be a onetime encounter, Felker to Reed. And Felker killed Reed and then decided to resume his previous status as an…independent agent.”
“Felker had been with us for seven years.”
“He wasn’t even British,” Pim said, as though that explained everything.
“What are you going to do with…with…”
“Our friend? In the boot? I wanted to wait until evensong was over and traffic was light. Everyone abroad is in the pubs now. I think it’s the best time for this sort of thing.”
“How can you talk about this? You had no sanction to eliminate Reed. And on home soil, yet?”
“Don’t go on about that,” Pim said. “It’s in your interest as much as mine to arrange a convenient story for the death of Reed. It explains Felker, it shifts the burden back to Med Section, they fobbed the fairy onto us in the first place, they assured us Felker was absolutely reliable. You and I, Gaunt, we never completely trusted him, did we? But our hands were tied.”
“This is madness. Auntie will never accept such thin lies.”
Pim was now leading the way up the high street back to the black Ford Escort. Despite his longer legs, Gaunt felt like a schoolboy trying to keep up with the older children.
“Auntie accepts such lies all the time; Auntie will believe whatever she wants. It will be convenient for Q to think that Med Section bollixed the matter. Q has been down on Med and their work, especially in Malta.”
“You know so damned much about the politics at Auntie…”
Pim permitted the briefest of smiles. “After all, I am an intelligence agent.”
“And why am I here? Why couldn’t you have done what needed to be done and then come down to London and given me a fill?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it, Gaunt?”
“Dammit, Pim, you had no sanctions.”
“What’s done is done.”
They entered the car, and Pim quickly pulled out of the quiet village and followed the meandering A highway past the cricket grounds and toward the American air force facilities. As they neared the top of a small hill, Pim switched off the lights and the automobile plunged into the blackness of a side road that Gaunt had not even seen. In the distance, the faintest rim of half-light marked the horizon and indicated there was still a sun somewhere in the world; that there was still light.
“Here,” Pim said. He stopped the car but did not shut off the engine. The motor purred quietly.
Pim got out of the car. Gaunt hesitated for a moment and then opened his side. “Don’t you have a torch?”
“Do you want to advertise?”
“But how can we see?”
“Your eyes will adjust in a moment.”
“Where are we?”
“At the edge of a farmer’s field. He plowed last week, I don’t fancy he’ll be down this way for a while. There’s always the chance, I suppose, but I think we should have three or four days at least until the body is discovered.”
“This is horrible.”
“It’s been a long time since you were in the field, Gaunt.”
“My God, I never did anything like this.”
“The occasion never demanded it,” Pim said. “There. I’ve got my night vision.”
He opened the boot of the car. Reed had been a tall man with fair hair. His head was twisted down unnaturally and the whole body bent double. One of his hands was bloody, but the blood was congealed. Gaunt looked closely and felt sick.
“Banged his hand when I slammed the lid of the boot down against it. Had to sort of wedge him in,” Pim said, like a clerk explaining the packaging of a new product.
“I’m going to be ill,” Gaunt said.
“No.” The voice was small and mean again. “You’re gonna do what you got to do. Help me.”
Pim reached around the middle of the bent corpse and tugged. For a terrible moment it seemed the body would not be moved, but then it came squeezing out of the narrow opening, gradually, the head lolling like a broken doll’s head.
“Damn you, pick up his head, I don’t want blood on the padding.”
Gaunt moved in a dream. He felt the cold burden of the head in his hands. He pulled. He had touched a skull once, as a child, a skull in a display at the British Museum. Colombian art or something; a horrible thing. It had not frightened him in the museum, but later, in dreams in his own bed in the house off Bloomsbury Square, he had been seized by the most horrible nightmares. The bad dreams had lasted for years. The nightmares concerned the faces of the dead, and as he had grown older, he had seen the death mask in his own features.
He was not afraid now. He helped the little man carry the burden up the grassy incline. Once he almost fell when his foot stumbled into a rabbit hole.
The nightmares would come later, in his own bed again in London, in the darkness.
“Now push him over,” said Pim.
The body of the dead agent tumbled cleanly over the precipice and splashed into the waters channeled at the edge of the plowed field.
“That should do it,” Pim said, a shopkeeper closing for the day. “Don’t linger now.”
Pim touched the damp sleeve of Gaunt’s coat. Gaunt was pulled out of his reverie. He hurried after the little man down the incline to the waiting car.
Pim closed the boot lid softly, and the two men got inside. Slowly, he started off down the one-lane road.
“Lights,” Gaunt said nervously.
“Wait till we get back to the highway. I can see well enough.”
“What if you go into a ditch?”
“I told you, this is my territory — my area of expertise, you might say.”
Gaunt closed his eyes.
He felt the burden of the skull beneath his hands. He opened his eyes and blackness remained, dead and formless as oblivion must be. Pim’s territory. But the nightmare would be his own.
4
“Devereaux resigned.”
The Old Man took the news without visible sign. He picked up the black briar pipe from the rosewood pipe stand on his desk and slowly began to tamp shreds of rough-cut tobacco into the stained bowl. He worked smoothly, his fingers darting into the bowl and around its rim like spiders fixing webs.