The smell of the abattoir was in the air.
Pete’s heart was melting with the heat in his lungs. His brain was singed. He could taste cordite on his tongue. He stopped, leaning his head against a car. But when they were a few yards from him, he took to his heels again, willing himself on with the last of his being. He rounded a corner and was confronted by policemen. They were cordoning off an area of pavement, unraveling a length of red and white tape with which to make the road impassable. A small crowd had gathered on the other side of the tape, watching. It was being broken up by several uniformed policemen. Damn, it was a dead end. But the men would do nothing, not with the police here. No, Pete was safe.
He was safe!
He heard his name called again, and pushed his way past some onlookers, slipping under the cordon. Someone shouted at him, a different voice this time, then someone screamed. He thought he heard the word ‘bomb’ and stopped in his tracks. He was outside a small restaurant, and saw for the first time the soldiers, who were everywhere. And beyond them, his pursuers, watching with the rest of the crowd, smiling at him, not about to follow him past the cordon.
Bomb? Oh God, what had he done?
The police stood at the tape and told him to come back from the building. But no, he couldn’t do that. The building was his sanctuary. He could pass through it and out of the other side, could lose the men that way. Making up his mind, he headed into the restaurant, vaguely aware of two army men working at the back of the tables.
There was a sudden suction, a huge, dusty gust of hot wind, and the roar of jet engines, of thunder overhead. When the dust cleared and the screams abated, and people were blinking and shaking fragments from their clothes, Pete Saville wasn’t there anymore, and neither were the two bomb disposal experts. Even the hunters seemed to have disappeared, leaving behind them only the police and the civilians, most of them in shock, and the man called Andrew Gray, standing at a safe distance beside a lamppost, watching.
Eleven
‘You know about it, then?’
‘Cynegetics?’ Mowbray laughed. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Why am I always the last to hear about these things?’
Mowbray shrugged, looking more transatlantic than ever in tinted glasses and a sheepskin jacket. He was supposed to look like an estate agent who showed people around the large Forest Hill house which the firm had procured for Harvest. Harvest was supposed, so Billy Monmouth had said, to bring forth a ‘bumper crop’ of IRA sleepers, soon to be activated now that a full-scale campaign was under way. Three more poor bastards had been blown up, one a civilian. Nobody knew who he was. He had just run into a cordoned-off area at the wrong moment, and a bomb had gone off prematurely. There was nothing solid enough left to identify.
The Harvest cell had been under surveillance for weeks, three Irishmen and a woman in a house across the road from the watchmen. The occupants were, variously, an unemployed electrician, a groundskeeper, a mechanic, and a secretary on a building site. If they were sleepers, then they were sleeping soundly. It looked like yet another waste of time, but Miles knew that no one could afford to become complacent.
‘There isn’t even a bloody telephone in the house,’ said Mad Phil. ‘There’s never been a cell that didn’t have a phone in the house.’
Mad Phil enjoyed complaining and liked to think that he excelled in it. He was neither mad, nor was his name Phil, but those were the letters after his name: Graham Lockett, MA, D.Phil. Billy had coined the nickname, and it had stuck, just as ‘Tricky Dicky’ and ‘Mauberley’ had stuck for Richard Mowbray.
‘Doesn’t it worry you, Richard?’
‘What?’
‘That Cynegetics are on to you.’
‘Not in the least. What is it I’m doing that’s wrong?’
‘Have they been to see you?’
‘Yes, several times, and Partridge has had a word, too, but I repeat, what am I doing that’s wrong? If the firm is clean, then why should anyone worry about my little dossier?’
Suddenly Miles could see the beauty of Mowbray’s tactics: those who opposed him must have reasons for doing so, and so were suspects themselves, while those who aided him would be thought clean.
‘You’re right, Richard.’
‘Of course I am, Miles.’
‘Shift’s nearly over,’ said Mad Phil, checking his watch. For once, there was not a trace of complaint in his voice.
Jack had left London, off to visit friends in Oxford before heading north. Miles had slipped him fifty pounds as he left.
‘Bye then,’ he had said, and that had been that. They had not managed to agree on a time for their lunch together, and so it had never taken place. It hung between them in the air, just another broken promise.
‘Thank God,’ Mowbray said to Mad Phil. ‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘Nothing much. I thought I might try that new wine bar in Chelsea. The Lustra. Have you heard of it?’
‘I haven’t, no.’
‘Then I’ll probably finish up at the Cathay, since I’m in the area. Best Chinese food in London.’
‘Sounds good. What about you, Miles?’
Miles had thought of going back to the office, but knew now that his every move would be subject to Cynegetics’ scrutiny. He had not been in touch with Pete Saville, but a call to Billy had brought the gossip that Saville had been moved on, though nobody knew where.
‘What do you suggest, Richard?’
‘I suggest we go along with Phil here to this Lustra place. Sounds kinda fun.’
‘It’s a bit of a distance from here,’ said Miles.
‘A few miles,’ said Mad Phil grudgingly. He was seated at the window, a pair of high-powered binoculars in his hands. Everyone was at home across the road.
‘I suppose I could phone my wife,’ said Miles. Anything to keep him away from the house.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Mowbray. ‘It’s settled then, Phil can drive us in the company car.’
Mad Phil didn’t look altogether happy. Perhaps, thought Miles, he liked to drink alone. Well, for this one evening, Phil would have an audience for his complaints against life.
The Lustra turned out to be everything Miles had expected, and it appalled him. There were mirrors everywhere, half hidden by various potted plants and creepers.
‘Great place, eh?’
The clientele were opening-night vampires, the chic underbelly of London whose sole intention in life was to ‘get noticed.’ It was not the place for an ‘invisible man.’ The clothes were loud, the music marginally less so, but everything was drowned out by the shrieking, vacuous voices of the young things. Miles’s whiskey had been drowned, too, scoop after scoop of the barman’s ice shoveled into it. It now resembled an iceberg looking for a disaster. Disaster, in fact, was all around.
‘Great place, eh, Richard?’
‘Absolutely, Phil, absolutely.’
Mowbray, slapping one hand against the table out of time with the music, looked almost as out of place as Miles.
‘My round,’ he said now, heading off to the distant bar. Mad Phil pointed to a figure somewhere at the back of the lounge.
‘She’s a celebrity,’ he said, ‘though I can’t remember why.’
‘Doesn’t that disqualify her from the title?’ asked Miles, loosening after the first two drinks.
But Mad Phil hadn’t heard him, and was surveying the crowd again.
Mowbray returned, his large hands cradling three tumblers. Miles was not surprised to see that they were doubles, and said nothing. Mad Phil did not seem to notice that the drinks were larger than his own round or Miles’s had been, and he polished off a sixth at one gulp. Miles waited. Mowbray’s kind could never remain quiet about their acts of generosity, for it was not generosity in itself, but rather a keen desire to impress; which was, in fact, the opposite of generosity.