‘Why are you grinning like that, Sergeant?’ she said in an irritated voice.
‘I was just thinking you’re a very beautiful woman, ma’am,’ he said, with mock solemnity.
She nodded her head in her Hanlon equivalent of laughter. It was an almost Whiteside comment and it cheered her up more than she could say. ‘I know that,’ she said, matter-of-factly. She stuffed her clothes into the small bag. It was obviously waterproof. She turned and said in a warning tone, ‘Ten o’clock.’ He nodded and watched Hanlon as she walked down to the beach and slipped into the water, as sleek as a seal or a porpoise.
A mile or so away from them, the unknown man whom Hanlon had named the Joker was examining the Volvo with a flashlight. His brow was furrowed thoughtfully. He was 90 per cent sure it was hers, but he was a man who liked to know. If it was Hanlon’s, then he was sure he could guess her next move. He walked over to the barbed-wire fence and by the light of his torch looked carefully. Hanlon’s light feet had made no trace on the ground, but he could see in the bent grass the marks of shoes and some deeper prints from a heavier weight than the detective inspector’s. There on the fence was a torn piece of cloth caught on a barb of the wire. He smiled grimly and nodded to himself.
He climbed over himself, first breaking open the shotgun he was carrying for safety purposes. The two copper shells gleamed in the moonlight. He himself was no longer young and he was cautious with firearms. He didn’t want any accidents.
He walked down to the stream and in the mud by the side of the water he saw the confirmation he was looking for. There they were, the two sets of footprints he was expecting. He smiled to himself. The Volvo had been a neat touch and he congratulated her forward thinking. She’d guessed he would investigate any stray vehicle, and she had nearly had him fooled. The Volvo was perfect. He’d been checking for either her Audi or a car he would associate with that fat idiot sergeant. He snapped the shotgun closed and slid the safety off. He was not the kind of man who underestimated Hanlon.
35
Half an hour later Hanlon emerged from the sea, downwind of the jetty, just in case Conquest had brought his dogs. She was bitterly cold and her body ached with effort. Natural swimming, as opposed to a pool, is by its very nature unpredictable. She had guessed before she entered the water that it would be tough, but the current had been stronger than she’d imagined and the sea viciously choppy. It was only as she reached a few hundred metres from shore and entered the protection from the offshore breeze of the lee of the island that the water became calmer and she could relax. It had been more of a battle than she’d anticipated.
She was now about a hundred metres from the simple, blockstone jetty. The rocks around her were large and black, their surface a mixture of slick, slippery stone and cheesegrater-rough barnacles, fringed with iodine-smelling bladderwrack seaweed. She felt her way to the dryness of the tideline, careful not to cut her feet on the sharp edges of the mussels that were attached to the boulders, unzipped her bag and quickly put on her clothes and shoes. Now she pulled a ski mask over her head, so that only her eyes were visible. On her hands were dark, fingerless gloves. There would be no white flash of skin colour to give her away. She was completely invisible in the shadows. She studied the house in greater detail while her heart rate slowed after the exertion of the swim.
Like the lodge on the mainland, it was brightly lit by spotlights. She couldn’t see or hear any dogs, which she was grateful for. The building was Victorian, fairly unremarkable. She guessed it would have half a dozen bedrooms upstairs. She had no way of knowing how many people it contained. The two front rooms had lights on behind drawn curtains. The front of the house gave on to a lawn and a grey stone balustrade with a stone staircase, both mottled with patches of lichen, which led down to the illuminated jetty. The side and rear of the house were in darkness.
Hanlon made her way to the back of the house. The fact that there were lights on in the front rooms led her to think that was probably where Conquest was. She guessed that one would be a living room with a sea view, it was the obvious place for a lounge; the other, she had no way of knowing. She crept round the side of the house. The hill she had seen from the shore of the mainland was directly behind it. The house was practically built in to the rock, snuggled up to it as if for comfort. She guessed that the winds coming from the sea would be so strong that it made sense to position the house in the lee of the high ground. It was this shelter too that protected the small harbour and made it viable.
She climbed up the hill through pungent low bracken and tall grass — the gradient was practically sheer — on hands and knees until she was parallel with the eaves and guttering, and looked again at the back of the house.
From her current position, she could see into the windows of three rooms at the rear. One, on the right, was in darkness; the one in the middle was brightly lit. It had no curtains and its windows were frosted glass. Obviously a bathroom, she thought. The third set of windows on the left were curtained. They’d been drawn but not fully and, from where she was crouching, some six or seven metres away, she could see the end of a bed and a pair of naked legs. As she watched, the legs swung off the bed and in a sudden movement the curtains were drawn back. There, framed in the window, the open robe exposing his stick-like limbs and naked chest with its sparse, grey hair and pendulous, aged, man-breasts, was the figure of Lord Justice Reece.
He lifted up the sash of the window about thirty centimetres and lit a cigar. It was sizeable, about the length and thickness of a candle, and she could see its tip glow red periodically as he puffed on it. Momentarily she wondered why he was leaning out of the window to smoke it, like a guilty schoolboy. Then she saw the plastic circle and flashing warning light of a smoke alarm on the ornate ceiling with its moulded decorative plaster friezework. She guessed that any smoking inside the room would trip the alarm.
Reece turned round as if summoned by someone, so she could see his back, and the door to the bedroom opened. As she watched, the muscular back of a freakishly tattooed shaven-headed man came in, carefully walking in reverse, pulling a trolley. It was like room service in a hotel, except lying on the trolley, without moving, was the body of a fair-haired boy. Her heart beat faster; this had to be Peter. She saw the man speak to the judge and the latter point to the bed. The tattooed skinhead lifted the boy carefully as if he weighed nothing, the huge muscles standing out on his body like an anatomically correct drawing, and laid him gently down. Then he withdrew from the room, taking the trolley with him and closing the door. There was a bolt on the door and she watched the judge as he pushed it home to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed. He stood looking at the boy, one hand playing gently with himself, the other holding a glass of red wine that he sipped carefully. He shrugged off his robe and Hanlon saw his flabby, elderly buttocks, their loose skin swaying as he walked round the bed like a predator eyeing its prey, on his spindly legs. Then he turned and went to the curtains and pulled them across. As he did so, Hanlon saw he was fully aroused, the shaft of his tumescent penis swollen with heavy, dark blue veins.
She unrolled herself from the crouch she was in and slipped gracefully down the hill to the back of the house. Below the lighted window of the bathroom was a thick drainpipe. As she had hoped, it was the same age as the house, made of cast iron. It wasn’t a modern, thin plastic one. It would easily take her weight. She pulled her shoes and socks off, tied the laces together and hung the shoes over her neck. She started climbing the drainpipe. Its surface was pitted and corroded and it provided a wonderful non-slip surface for her powerful grip, while the rough stone of the walls of the house gave her purchase with her toes and the soles of her feet. Like all climbers, she leaned hard into the surface she was climbing up. She excelled at climbing. She had that wonderful mix of a head for heights, balance, mental and physical, and huge strength. Hanlon could do one-armed push-ups and she could also pull her own body weight up by her fingertips on one hand. The ascent for her was ridiculously easy.