She showed no impatience at the pedantic question. “You just navigate a course that we’ll provide you.”
“What course?”
“Jesus! How do we know? That’ll depend on the weather, right?
All you have to do is keep a radio watch at the times we tell you, and that’s it. The easiest four hundred thousand you ever earned, right?”
I smiled. “Right.” That word, with its inflection of compliance, had been hard to say, yet I seemed to be convincing Jill-Beth with my act. And it was an act, a very amateur piece of acting in which I was struggling to invest each utterance with naturalness so that, consequently, my words sounded heavy and contrived. Yet, it occurred to me as I tried to seek my next line, Jill-Beth herself was just as mannered and awkward. I should have noted that with more interest, but instead I asked her what would happen when I had navigated Wildtrack to wherever I was supposed to take her.
“Nothing happens to you. Nothing happens to the crew.”
“But what happens to Bannister?”
“Whatever Yassir wants.” She said it slowly, almost as a challenge, then watched for my reaction.
I was silent for a few seconds. Jill-Beth’s words could be taken as an elliptical hint of murder, but I doubted whether she would be more explicit. I think she expected me to bridle at the hint, but instead I shrugged as though the machinations of Kassouli’s revenge were beyond me. “And all this,” I asked with what I thought was a convincing tone of reluctant agreement, “on the assumption that Bannister murdered his wife?”
“You got it, Nick. You want the hundred thousand now?” I should have said yes. I should have accepted it, but I baulked at the gesture. It might have been a necessary deception, but the entrapment was distasteful.
“For Christ’s sake, Nick! Are you going to help us or not?” Jill-Beth thrust the handbag towards me. “You want it? Or are you just wasting my time?”
I was about to accept, knowing the money was the final proof that Micky needed, when a strangled shout startled me. It was a man’s cry, full of pain.
I turned, but instantly, and treacherously, my right leg numbed and collapsed. I fell and Jill-Beth ran past me. I cursed my leg, knelt up, and forced myself to stand. I used my hands to straighten my right leg, then, half limping and half hopping, staggered on from tree to tree. I wondered whether my leg would always collapse at moments of stress.
I found Jill-Beth twenty yards further on, stooping, and I already knew what it was she crouched beside.
It was Micky. There was fresh vivid blood on his scalp, on his wet shirt, and on his hands. He was alive, but unconscious and breathing very shallowly. He was badly hurt. The bag lay spilt beside him and I saw the radio receiver but no sign of the small tape-recorder.
Whoever had hit Micky had also stolen the evidence.
“Did you bring him?” Jill-Beth looked at me accusingly.
“Get an ambulance.” I snapped it like a military order.
“Did you bring—”
“Run! Dial 999. Hurry!” She would be twice as fast as I could be.
“And bring blankets from the pub!”
She ran. I knelt beside Micky and draped my jacket over him. I tore a strip of cotton from my shirt-tail and padded it to staunch the blood that flowed from his scalp. Head wounds always bleed badly, but I feared this was more than a cut. He’d been hit with too much power, and I suspected a fractured skull. Blood had soaked into the dry brown needles that now looked black in the encroaching and damp twilight. I stroked his hand for, though he was unconscious, he would need the feel of human warmth and comfort.
I felt sick. I’d guarded Sycorax against Kassouli, but I had not thought to guard Micky. So who had done this? Kassouli? Had Jill-Beth brought reinforcements? Had she suspected that I might try to blow Kassouli’s scheme wide open? Those questions made me wonder whether she would phone an ambulance and, leaving Micky for a few seconds, I struggled to the edge of the trees and stared towards the village. My right leg was shaking and there was a vicious pulsing pain in my spine. I wasn’t sure I could limp all the way to the village, but if Jill-Beth let me down then I would have to try.
I cursed my leg, massaged it, then, as I straightened up, I saw headlights silhouetting running figures at the bridge. I limped back to Micky. He was still breathing, grunting slightly.
Footsteps trampled into the trees. Efficient men and women, trained to rescuing lost hikers from the moors, came to Micky’s rescue. There was no need to wait for an ambulance for there was a Rescue Land-Rover nearby which could take him to hospital. He was carefully lifted on to a stretcher, wrapped in a space blanket, and given a saline drip.
I limped beside him to the Land-Rover and watched it pull away towards the road. Someone had phoned the police and now asked me if I’d wait for their arrival. I said I wanted to go to the hospital, then remembered that Micky still had the car keys.
“I’ll drive you,” Jill-Beth said.
I hesitated.
“For Christ’s sake, Nick!” She was angry that I did not trust her.
She held out her car keys. “Do you want to take my car?” I let her drive me. “Who is he?” she asked.
“A newspaper reporter.”
“You’re a fool,” she said scornfully.
“Not me!” I snapped. “You’re the bloody fool! Just because Kassouli’s rich doesn’t mean that he’s right!”
“His daughter was murdered!”
“And who did that to Micky?” I waved towards the Land-Rover which was a mile ahead of us on the road. “You brought your thugs along, didn’t you?”
“No!” she protested.
“Then who, for Christ’s sake?”
She thought about it for a few seconds. “Did you drive straight here from London?”
“No. I went…” I paused. I’d gone to Bannister’s house and seen evidence that Fanny Mulder was there. I hadn’t thought, not once, to check that anyone had followed Micky and I to the moor. “Oh, Jesus,” I said hopelessly. “Mulder.”
Jill-Beth shrugged, as if to say that I’d fetched this disaster on myself. We drove in silence until we reached the hospital where the Land-Rover was standing at the entrance to the casualty department. An empty police car, its blue light still flashing, was parked in front of it.
Jill-Beth killed her engine. “I guess this means you’re not going to help us, Nick?”
“I won’t be the hangman for a kangaroo trial.”
“You don’t want the money?” she asked.
“No.”
Jill-Beth shrugged. “It wasn’t meant to be this way, Nick.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Americans against the Brits. Truly it wasn’t. Kassouli believes his daughter was murdered. If you shared that belief you’d be helping us.”
I opened the car door. “It isn’t America against us,” I said; “it’s just a conflict of old-fashioned honesty, that’s all. You don’t have proof. You don’t have anything but suspicion. You’re playing games to make a rich man happy, and if he was a poor man you wouldn’t be doing it at all.”
She watched me get out of the car. “Goodbye, Nick.” I didn’t reply. She started the motor, put it in gear and drove away.
The hospital smelt of disinfectant. It brought back memories I didn’t want. I waited beneath posters which told me to have my baby vaccinated and that VD was a contagious disease. I waited for news that, at last, was brought to me by a very young detective constable.
Mr Harding had a fractured skull and three broken ribs. He was unconscious. Why had I come to the hospital and asked after him?