‘I can’t yet,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Can’t what?’ Ralph said through the boarding.

  Roy Verity-Wright also left the Volvo. He had no gun but stood alongside their car. ‘We heard shots,’ he said. ‘Two.’

  ‘The gun’s under her bowler,’ Harpur told Tracy. ‘Because of the ladder.’

  ‘How do you mean, Mr Harpur?’ Roy said.

  ‘In which respect?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘“Because of the ladder”,’ Roy said.

  ‘She needed something to grip,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Women do,’ Margaret said.

  Tracy straightened and lowered the Glock. ‘Did Mr Iles arrange all this, sir?’ she said.

  ‘That question keeps coming up,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Verity-Wright said.

  ‘Really?’ Margaret replied.

  She had reached the ground. Tracy raised the Glock and pointed it at Margaret again. ‘Stay where you are,’ Tracy said. ‘Put your gun on the floor and step back one pace from it. Roy will approach and recover your gun.’

  Margaret bent to put the gun on the floor. She moved backwards away from it.

  ‘OK Roy,’ Tracy said.

  He did as Tracy had ordered. He picked up Margaret’s gun and went to stand by Tracy with it. Tracy lowered her Glock and took the pistol from Roy. She put it in a pocket. Harpur retracted the ladder’s extra length and then brought it down and replaced it with the others.

  Ralph came out from the main entrance to the house. He’d obviously realized that the search inside was pointless. He walked quickly to Margaret and kissed her on the cheek. She handed him his bowler. But he laughed and put it back on her head and down to her ears. ‘Fashion,’ he said. She didn’t remove it this time. ‘Your poor dear bare feet,’ he said.

  Another car, an Audi, entered the drive at a gentle speed and stopped near the Volvo. Iles got out. He was in plain clothes – one of his suave suits, a red cravat on an open-necked blue shirt, grey woollen slacks and desert boots. ‘The folk at Apsley Farm called to report a lot of late-night activity at Low Pastures,’ he said. ‘Knowing my abiding interest in and affection for Low Pastures and its family, the Control Room rang me, despite the hour. And then en route did I hear gunshots? I stopped for a while and looked about. Nothing, though.’

  ‘Just to let Ralph know where I was,’ Margaret said.

  ‘That would be vital,’ Iles said.

  ‘We’ve done a good examination of the planks up and down,’ Margaret said. ‘They’re fine. Couldn’t be stauncher.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Iles replied. ‘It’s improbable that you’ll ever find anyone more accomplished at examining planks up or down than Col. Show him a plank and he’ll purr like a she-cat. There’s a note about it on his CV. In the space for Special Interests, it says “Planks”.’

  ‘Everything here is normal, sir,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Normal?’ Roy Verity-Wright said.

  SIX

  Ralph concentrated on watching himself approach the house carrying that good-sized spanner. If spanners could be iconic, this one was what the present spanner was. There was a deep, almost mystical rightness about this combination, the spanner and him. As spanners went, it might seem quite ordinary, but Ralph couldn’t think of it as like that. By taking the spanner with him in this specific way – flourished near an open door of a terrific house – he was turning it into a special kind of spanner, chosen very selectively from a car boot.

  It would have been the same no matter who was carrying it to the house, as long as the intended purpose was the same, though Ralph did feel that because it was he, Ralph W. Ember, bearing the spanner, sometimes with two hands, sometimes the right only, this gave it not merely a special status but something extra special within that special status, like special status squared.

  CCTV covered the porch area of Low Pastures, and in the Entertainment Suite at Low Pastures he privately ran that sequence of the film a few times. It showed him arriving in the Mercedes, then opening the driver’s door as if about to get out immediately, but pausing with his body slewed to leave the car seat and his feet on the ground, while he stared towards the open front door of the house. At that hour, as Ralph or anyone else would have expected, it was a startled stare, though. He remembered exclaiming, ‘Where the fuck are they?’ Ralph lip-read that now on the film.

  He gladly noted that the resemblance to Charlton Heston remained intact, and if anything was an improvement – strong but less craggy, gentler. Maybe gentleness wasn’t the kind of looks you needed if you were going to win a chariot race, which was what Chuck did, of course, in his film, Ben Hur, standing right up close to horses’ rears. But Ralph had different needs. Anyway, it was probably his stand-in who did the race.

  This pause by him, part out of the Mercedes, part in, was brief. He considered it definitely had not indicated paralysis through fear. No! Ralph considered it a pause of someone wisely taking several moments while he adjusted to a quite unexpected situation: the front door open and unattended at around 4 a.m. Second thoughts.

  Perhaps aided by memory, Ralph could read in his face on the screen a calm resolve to deal with this problem head-on. The word ‘undaunted’ buzzed in his brain but he tried to dismiss it as overblown and vain. ‘Staunch’: that was how he’d describe himself as he left the driving seat and walked quickly to the rear of the car and opened the boot: important for the walk to be quick and decisive, this was commitment. Naturally, he’d known that the camera would be on him. He absolutely had to go through with his plan to find a weapon and get armed, otherwise he would be a nothing, a showboat. It didn’t matter that he might be the only one who saw the film. The shame would still savage him. There were times when Ralph had the idea he might actually be a bit of a showboat, and he didn’t want that idea in any way, or to any amount, increased. It was bound to be a hazard when someone had achieved so much and meant to go on achieving. Part of the justified reward for success was recognition of that success by others.

  There might be indentations in the metal at the handle end of the spanner to help someone’s grip – Ralph’s, on that occasion. This had heartened him as he drew it from the boot and he could see that satisfaction in Ralph’s features on the film. ‘Come to me’, they seemed to say, so warmly to the potential, resting bludgeon. The satisfaction was limited, of course. After all, the spanner was only a spanner, even a Mercedes spanner. It could be used as a weapon but was not actually a weapon. That is, it was not a gun. Its function was with bolts. Some would describe it as hopelessly not a gun. They’d regard this situation as the sort Chuck Heston had envisaged when he said that citizens should have the total right to defend themselves with a firearm.

  Ralph did own guns, but only very rarely carried one. An evening and night catering for Intelligent Percy’s triumphant do at the club hadn’t seemed that kind of occasion. One thing Intelligent was intelligent about was not getting drawn into gunfire turf battles. It would have been different if he’d been called ‘Clever Percy’ or ‘Smart Percy’. These words did contain praise but they also suggested a sort of short-term craftiness. Intelligent Percy always went for a wide, thorough view of things and behaved with restraint, at least until violence became in his personal estimate inevitable.

  And so Ralph had realized that he might have to take on people with guns though he had only a spanner, probably with an indented shaft. What did ‘take on’ mean here? It had meant get close enough to any intruders to do effective damage with a swinging spanner. And, next, what did ‘effective’ mean? It meant landing at least one full power blow before shots could be fired. No guarantee. Bullets might stop him and the spanner while they were still nearing at a harmless distance, the way big-game hunters might stop a charging lion. Ralph didn’t like this comparison in all its aspects, of course, but he did favour the nature and guts of the lion, even though the animal was doomed.

  He felt the spanner deserved better than this. It wasn’t any old spanner, or even any old big spanner. Tools were kept in a multi-pocket rack most likely, and it had taken him a full minute to select the most suitable one for a set-to. Although he had walked so swiftly to the boot, speed in actually picking this brilliantly specific spanner would have been an error. The boot had bright internal lighting and this, plus the porch bulb, helped make his choice the right one. He closed the boot and the driver’s door very quietly, though he’d realized at the time that these precautions might be pointless because any enemies in the house would certainly have heard the Mercedes arrive. His behaviour had been more or less automatic.

  The shock of the open door must have crushed his thinking powers. But, looking back now from where he sat in the Entertainment Suite, he felt that – although his actions then were not completely sensible – he’d known he must try to control the situation somehow, and do what was possible. The thought that people in the house might have heard him draw up had troubled Ralph badly at the time. It meant, didn’t it, that they could be ready for him, might be waiting for him? He’d appear spotlighted and framed in the door space when he entered Low Pastures. Somehow – and he didn’t altogether understand that somehow – somehow, he’d forced himself to keep going, and he’d walked doggedly into the dark house. He’d feared Margaret and the children might be in danger and he had an undodgeable duty to protect them. Bravery would occasionally take over Ralph, despite himself, especially when it was a matter of family, Low Pastures or the club. ‘Courage’, wasn’t it, that Churchill said was the most desirable quality in a man or woman – because it made the others possible.

  Ralph had also realized at the time that if nobody came out of the house to discover who had just turned up, despite these engine and tyre sounds, it could prove there was nobody in the house who shouldn’t be. Hell, he’d hated this interpretation of things. Didn’t it negate his valour? He didn’t go in for valour very much, and when he did he wanted it nicely treated. Of course, there had been another possible reason for nobody appearing from the house. Ralph hadn’t liked to dwell on it. He hadn’t definitely known there was anyone alive in the property.

  Overall, Ralph knew what irritated him most about the incident at Low Pastures. It was that he never seemed to start anything, initiate something. Wasn’t he always following up what had been said or done by someone else? He reacted because someone had acted, had prompted him so forcibly. He didn’t know what the opposite of proactive was, but he often felt like he might be it. This seemed to Ralph a poor sort of role for someone of his unquenchable creative flair – a flair that pointed him towards The Monty’s splendid potential and glistening promise.

  Looking at himself now on this film, Ralph could see no evidence of flair. He had been pushed – compelled, dragooned – into stalking supposed enemies with a spanner. The initiative was totally theirs, if they existed. He had to respond, and not elegantly. They set up the situation and he had to deal with it, try to deal with it.

  The CCTV film couldn’t follow him into the house. Memory had to do. He’d switched lights on and eye-searched first what Margaret and he called the Round Room, because of its two curved walls. They generally ate here. It had a four-leaf mahogany table, a mahogany chiffonier, six straight-backed dining chairs, a chesterfield in dark red moquette. Ralph was very fond of chesterfields. Their fat arms seemed to promise a welcome, and a specific kind of sit-down. The room had, too, four big Edwardian or Victorian armchairs, also in dark red moquette. It had naturally been one of the ground-floor rooms he’d searched first when he thought Margaret and the children missing. He’d been scared but enraged as well: it seemed so disgraceful that someone, or more than one, should get into Ralph’s personal, elite home, and contemptuously menace his family – contemptuously and contemptibly.

  Upstairs, when he’d looked in at their bedroom and switched on the lights there, he saw that Margaret was absent, though her side of the bed had obviously been occupied at some time tonight. Next he’d checked the children’s rooms. Both were sleeping. The difference had confused him, increased his anxieties: only his wife targeted, why?

  But ‘targeted’? Margaret had a mind and a will, didn’t she? Had she decided for herself to go? Had she planned something like this, carried out something like this? These thoughts and others similar had begun to pile up in Ralph’s brain. He’d desperately asked himself where was she and why and how was she where she was? And was she alone? If not, who was with her?

  And after another moment or two, he’d had an answer to these queries. She was outside at the east end of the property, apparently up a ladder. There was what sounded to him like gunfire – two shots – and then Margaret yelled, ‘Yippee!’

  It wasn’t a word he’d ever heard from Margaret before, but he recognized her voice at once. Soon after, she called his name. It sounded as though she had put her mouth close to the boards the builders used to seal off temporarily any gaps caused by their day’s work. ‘Hear that, Ralph, dear?’ she’d said. She’d meant the gunshots. She’d sounded proud of them, as though they indicated splendid high spirits. This had infuriated Ralph and still did. She had been trying to make a foolish joke of this situation whereas he had been deeply, oh, very deeply, suffering, half crushed by Fate and intolerable mystery. It was heartless of her – flippant, mocking.

  Ralph found that reminiscing about this episode brought too much pain. He left his den in the Entertainment Suite and went out into the grounds of Low Pastures. He needed to see the solidity, the quiet sureness and strength of the building as a correction of all those intolerable memories. Instead of Margaret up one of the ladders and behaving outrageously last night, that damn nightdress fluttering so trivializingly in the wind, there was now a workman climbing expertly from the ladder on to the roof to do some re-slating needed for the new join between two parts of the house. The boards were no longer in use but stacked tidily near the foot of the ladder. To Ralph this was a scene of serious progress, not a site for random gunfire and daft shouting. Had she been drinking?

  The man up the ladder called out: ‘All coming along very nicely, Ralph. You’ll have a grand extension of floor space, to be filled with objects of real beauty. Many congrats, I’m sure. No wonder Low Pastures is spoken of so admiringly, and that will certainly continue when these improvements are complete.’ Ralph didn’t mind them using his first name, or talking as though they were partners not hired labour. They were doing the job and adding to the prestige of Low Pastures. That’s what counted. This was a property that spoke of present success and of a magnificent history. He was the custodian of both, and a guarantee for the future. This was not, repeat not, the kind of achievement that could be summed up in a screeched, ‘Yippee!’

  SEVEN

  A stranger, or strangers, would occasionally turn up at Harpur’s house in Arthur Street wanting to discuss something urgent – in their eyes urgent, at least. Harpur didn’t always agree, but he would generally try to give a sympathetic listening. After all, he more or less invited these visits. He’d never gone in for anonymity, though most detectives did. His name and address were in all the directories. It was a bit of a pious fetish with him: he believed that if someone had bad trouble and needed help, Harpur should be available, supposing help was possible. Iles regarded it as lunacy, a kind of self-punishment, but Harpur was totally stuck with this awkward, compulsive sense of duty. Iles referred to it as ‘Old Ma Harpur’s Comfort Corner’. Generally speaking, Harpur could put up with – ignore – this kind of mockery from Iles or anyone else. Now and then, though, it irritated him, might make him wonder if he still had the right temperament for modern policing. It could even make him think occasionally about early retirement. Very briefly he had discussed that prospect with his daughters. He’d floated the idea with them of quitting the Force and launching himself as a private investigator. Hazel had been very hostile – said he wasn’t the right sort for that kind of career. She insisted that he needed a structure for him to operate inside of, and only a police force provided that. Harpur half agreed with her and the plans had been dropped – didn’t really get as far as plans: half-baked urges.

  ‘Well, hello, my dear. You must be one of his, your name being …?’

  ‘Jill,’ Jill said. As often happened she had responded faster than Harpur to the doorbell. He stood behind her now in the hallway, not part of the conversation, or not part yet. He didn’t recognize the woman outside, and it was obvious Jill didn’t know her, either. She would be late twenties, very cared-for teeth and complexion, grey-blue eyes, white, about five foot ten or eleven, and the proper weight for that. She had on what Harpur thought to be a brilliantly expensive, pinstripe, London navy suit, as fine a piece of work as the dead man’s. Jill had taken a stance that barred the woman’s way into the house, but Jill’s voice sounded welcoming.

  As happened now and then with Harpur, his mind would lock on to something or some things that appeared fairly trivial and make it or them grounds for what might turn out to be important positive guesswork. The similar tailoring did that today, plus the woman’s London accent. He thought this caller was in some way linked to the man he’d found dead at the wharf. It hadn’t taken long to identify the corpse and Harpur had put Chief Inspector Garland to investigate the crime. The dead man was Lawrence Ilk Masel from Enfield, a London district. The Metropolitan Police had no knowledge of him, other than the death.

  ‘It’s my dad you want, I expect,’ Jill said at the front porch. ‘We get quite a few people looking for him, don’t we, Dad?’ Graciously, she turned her head a little to draw Harpur into the meeting, as long as he could keep up.