She said, “When you saw the picture of the boy, you remember?”

  “Oh, yes. He was all mussed up and untidy. Like any boy out for a day’s fun.”

  “You said he had something on his hand or on his wrist. Couldn’t you see what it was?”

  “No, I couldn’t. It was a very muzzy picture.”

  “Was it large or small?”

  “Largish. I thought at first it might be a table tennis bat.”

  Miss Rainbird agreed to telephone Blanche in a few days, to let her know if she would like another meeting at Reed Court. But as she was driven home, a small figure lost in the back of the Rolls-Royce, she had no doubt that she would want Madame Blanche to continue to help her. Although she had decided to say nothing today about it, Madame Blanche had impressed her with the description of the boy. When she had described Harriet and the officer walking by the river she had had a vivid picture of the scene. With it had come back a small scrap of detail that Harriet had once given her when she had talked of her love affair. The Irish officer was passionately interested in falconry and—so Harriet had said—on one of his visits he had brought over with him a kestrel he had trained. They had walked along the river with the bird to hunt starlings. The son could have inherited the same love. She was sure that the thing on his wrist had been a hawk of some kind. As Madame Blanche had described the boy she had seen it vividly in her imagination. An untidy schoolboy, carrying a hawk. How very extraordinary.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE AFTERNOON LIGHT was going. The sun was already low, hidden behind the high-banked clouds in the west. Northwards, ten miles away, clear in the frost-bound air, Martin Shoebridge could see the grey glint of the sea with the high plug of Steep Holm rising rocky and green-capped from the water. Farther out was the lower, squat shape of Flat Holm. In another hour the light out there would come on marking the mouth of the Severn River. In another two hours he would be on his way back to school, the week-end exeat over. Although he liked most being at home, the thought of school gave him no concern. He handled things as they came, liking some, stoically accepting others.

  He went steadily up the long limestone scarp of the hills, the red setter bitch at his heels, the hooded goshawk on his gloved fist, the crisp feel of frosted, sheep-bitten grass under his feet and his old canvas satchel thumping gently against his side. His eyes watched and assessed every movement and change of light, his ears marked all sound above the low sough of the northeasterly breeze. This was what he liked, to be alone with the hawk and the dog. Liked most because also it was what his father liked. They understood it all without having to talk about it. Being alone, being yourself.

  At the crest the wind strengthened in his face and ruffled the slaty-blue feathers of the goshawk’s wing coverts. In the valley below him he marked roads, villages and farmhouses, and the dull shine of the Blagdon and Chew Valley lakes. He’d fished there often with his father for the stew-pond-bred trout. He liked it, but loved more the fishing in small, wild Welsh mountain streams. Halfway down the hillslope was a hangar of tall beech trees. He had time to work through the top half before he would have to turn for home. Fifty yards from the edge of the trees he stopped. He loosened the braces at the back of the hawk’s hood with his free hand and his teeth and let her slip. He manned and used his birds to his own rules. His father was the purist, not he. He watched her rake away low and then rise, long-tailed and short-winged, to the first high branch of an outlying tree. She settled, and the dog behind him whined. He stopped it with a touch of his hand on its wet nose. He didn’t like other people’s rules. You had to find your own way of doing things. If he lost birds flying them in a high gale of wind, then he lost them, but they never carried swivel-link jesses to trap them on post or wire. They flew to freedom.

  He went into the trees without a glance at the hawk. She would follow from tree to tree and he would hear the small, sharp sound of her bell. He sent the dog ahead to work the bushes and underscrub and the tall patches of winter-brown grass and dead nettles that hid the fallen beech mast.

  Within fifteen yards the dog put up a rabbit and the boy called, “Hoo-haaa!”; not to set the waiting hawk on but because he liked to call. The hawk was already past him, swooping low between the trees, wings fast beating, twisting and turning and then plunging in a short stoop to the rabbit, binding to it as it moved, so that fur and feather rolled together for a few yards.

  He brought the dog to heel and went forward. The rabbit was already near dead, the claws of the long-legged hawk strangling it. He took the hawk to his fist, rewarded it with a small piece of meat from his satchel, and then picked up the rabbit by its hind legs and smacked its head against the smooth grey bole of a tree to finish it off. He stuffed it into the game pocket at the back of his satchel and put the hawk on the wing again. She went up ahead of him to a tree and he moved forward again with the dog.

  They worked caterways down the slope and through the trees. They took another rabbit, winter-thin, lost a wood-pigeon that came up fast from foraging in the beech mast, and raised a magpie from a holly bush to be killed in a short fast stoop that sent a scattering of black feathers idling into the wind. He had no feeling about killing, made no excuses to himself that the rabbits would feed the other birds in the mews, or that the magpie was a nest-robber. He and the hawk and the dog were hunting. It was a completeness of action that held a never diminishing pleasure. They were doing what it was natural to bird, beast and man to do. Each time that the hawk jumped to his fist for her reward after a kill, he knew his own reward for the days and weeks of patience and training that had brought this moment. He had had better birds, and he would have better birds again, but for the time being this was the only bird.

  At the far edge of the wood he called her down by voice and she came, swinging round him twice in a tight circle which was always her habit and then settling to the fist and the meat reward. He hooded her and the three left the wood and went along the hill slope, climbing gradually to the long high shoulder of the downs and to the track that led to home.

  An hour later, fed and dressed for school, he stood by the car and said goodbye to his father. Usually his father and his step-mother drove him the fifty miles back to school. Today his step-mother drove him. His father had work to do. Martin understood. His father made his usual joke about the prison gates opening again. He smiled. He liked his step-mother, but his father was the only person in the world that he loved. He got into the car alongside his step-mother and the setter jumped into the back of the car to keep her company on the return journey. His step-mother switched the radio on and he settled back to think about his ferrets. He had to have a new place to keep them because his tutor had put a ban on them. He’d have to find some farm or cottage that would take them. He would bring them home at the end of term. He wanted to try the goshawk with them on some of the hill warrens. That meant he would have to get the hawk used to them otherwise she’d kill them. . . . They’d have to go in the mews with her. In a cage close to her where she could see them and get used to them. . . .

  Edward Shoebridge watched the car’s rear lights disappear around the turn of the drive and went back into the house. He locked the front door and went through the long wide hall to a small oak door at the end which opened onto a flight of stone steps. Immediately at the foot of the steps on his left was the door to his studio. He went in and locked the door.

  It was a large room. Part of the wall at the far end was taken up by a projection screen. To the left a low bench ran the length of the wall. It was backed for part of its length by a home-made console system. The right-hand wall was occupied by rows of bookshelves and at the near end by a set of storage cupboards. Behind the cupboards was concealed a door which led to the secret cellar system below the house.

  Shoebridge sat sideways to the console and switched on the projector. He ran fifteen minutes of disjointed film, holding it in single frame occasionally while he made a note on a pad at his side. All the film had been taken from some concealed point, mostly from the back of a car or from the safety of natural cover. It had been shot sometimes from quite close range and occasionally through a telescopic lens. In nearly all the shots the same man was the subject, an elderly man in his midsixties, a distinguished-looking man, a man with authority written into his manner, intelligence and understanding marking his face. When the film was finished Shoebridge pulled an ordnance survey map, one inch to the mile, to him and a foolscap sheet marked with timings and mileages. He fixed a sheet of transparent paper to the map and, working neatly and without hurry, began to mark out a series of routes. Although he was absorbed in his work he was never completely lost in it. Always some part of him remained detached, aware of his surroundings and alert to catch the slightest sound or sign of the unfamiliar. He did not smoke. His fingers were free of nicotine. His hair was fair, his eyes blue, and his middle-statured body hard and finely muscled beneath his casual clothes. Although he was in his middle thirties he could run the twenty-mile-long crest of the downs on which he lived with ease. He had a deliberately acquired indifference to pain or bodily appetites, acknowledging only his intellect as his master. His personal relationships were confined to two people, to his son and to his second wife. He had been relieved when his first wife had died when the boy was three years old. He had little use for most of the civilisation he knew around him. In two weeks he was going to take the last step to free himself as far as possible from it. Nothing was going to stop him. If it meant the taking of human life he would take it. He was the most dangerous of all creatures, an intelligent man with a ruthless obsession for escape; a dreamer who longed for an earthly paradise, and meant to find it. If any outsider could have known this and called him mad, he would have agreed, saying that he preferred to live according to the terms of his madness and to reject the other madness which the world called civilisation. What he would never have accepted, which was the truth, was that his was merely another variation among the distortions of the human psyche which kept the prisons of every country in the world overcrowded. Not even the person who featured in his films, with all the compassion and wisdom at his command, could have convinced Shoebridge of this.

  * * * *

  There had been ten people within the last five years who had been members at some time or other of both the Tiverton Golf Club and the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club. Four of them were women.

  There had been sixty-eight people in the same period—not members of the clubs—who had played as guests at both of them. Twenty-eight were women.

  For the members of the two golf clubs addresses were available. For the guests there were seldom addresses. Sometimes a town was indicated but more often the name of the golf club of which they were regular members.

  Bush passed the information on to Sangwill so that he could detail some of the staff to carry out a private survey of all the joint members and as many of the guests as could be traced. A complete check, Bush knew, would take weeks. He gave instructions that he wanted a daily progress report.

  He had lunch in the department canteen and did the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle.

  * * * *

  George had lunch at the Red Lion, bread and cheese and pickles, sitting at the bar. He’d had a very pleasant morning considering his new life while he walked around the Cathedral and its precincts.

  He had decided to go into business. The idea had struck him while he was musing in front of the tomb of Sir John de Montacute, who had fought at the battle of Crecy and died in 1390. The worthy knight’s effigy lay there almost featureless from Time’s attrition, his sword broken and his feet resting on a lion whose tail was missing. Time’s winged chariot, thought George—it was fast leaving him behind, too, to rot and crumble.

  It came to him like a revelation. There were hundreds of new houses going up all over the place. Here, Winchester, Southampton, and in all the towns around. And new houses had to have gardens, gardens that had to be made from scratch most of them. He would become a landscape gardener and do contract work for small householders who were too busy or too lazy to attack the virgin soil. He would need a van, equipment, and a strong lad to help him. Maybe later he would take on more men, buy more vans . . . expand, make a real ‘do’ of it. For the time being he would have to put his back into it alongside the lad. That would do him good. Get some of the old turn down and knock him into shape.

  Working it out on the back of an envelope at the bar, he reckoned he could get the whole thing off the ground for five hundred pounds. Second-hand van, second-hand equipment, take no wages himself—there was always his allowance—and operate from the cottage. Good spot that. He had an acre and a half of garden, a wilderness now, but when things were really turning over he could open a garden centre there. Only a few miles from Salisbury, on a good road. He’d make a mint. All he needed was the five hundred to start with. He had a few shares he could sell. Say two hundred pounds. All he wanted was another three hundred. Surely that wouldn’t be difficult? Blanche could advance him that without turning a hair. Don’t know, though. Sometimes she could be funny about money. Well, if she wouldn’t there must be other people. On the back of the envelope he began to make a list of friends who might be good for loans. He wrote down five names, considered them, and scratched out four. He considered the fifth for a while and finally scratched that out. A fiver, maybe, but not three hundred. Undepressed he bought a couple of sausage rolls and went out to his car and gave them to Albert to eat as he drove up to Blanche’s place. Blanche it would have to be. For a moment or two he considered the wisdom of waiting until she made her next visit to the cottage. Catch her in the right mood. . . . No, better to get it over. No point in wasting time. Anyway, spring was coming. That was the best time to get started on gardens. He whistled as he drove, going over the colour he would paint the van, seeing the sign on the side— Lumley Gardens? G. Lumley, Garden Contractor?

  When he got to Blanche’s house it was to find that she was engaged with a couple of clients. He went into the kitchen to wait for her to be free and to have a chat with her old mother. Blanche’s mother had lived with her for years and although the old girl was broadminded enough, she was the reason advanced by Blanche why George never should stay the night at the house, that and the fact, too, that Blanche felt that strong, earthly sensual vibrations about the place would upset the ethereal atmosphere so necessary to have when her clients called. Personally George felt it was just to avoid neighbourhood gossip.

  Mrs. Tyler had been born of half-fairground half-gypsy parents. She kept Blanche’s house spotless, a spry worker at sixty-eight, but she still longed for the freedom of the roads and the fairgrounds and the joy of sleeping with four wheels at the corners of her home and the old mare tethered outside. She made him a cup of coffee and as he drank it George put a fifty-pence piece on the table and held out his hand. It was a ritual every time he met her alone in the kitchen. George never ceased to wonder at the variety of futures life held for him according to Mrs. Tyler.

  Today, because he was thinking of his gardening enterprise, he scarcely listened to her trot out the usual predictions. He was going on a journey. He would cross the sea and meet a tall dark stranger who would offer advice . . . bad advice. He was to keep away from horses. They could only bring him bad luck. (George hated horses, anyway, and if he went within a yard of one it gave him hay-fever, and the old girl knew it.) She saw great happiness for him, many children, but one of them would die young. George lit a cigarette and let the old lady drone on. He’d advertise in the local papers, ginger up his chums at the Red Lion and get them recommending him. Tomorrow he’d collect some catalogues of mechanical garden equipment and aids. He’d have to find a nurseryman, too, for supplying plants, shrubs, trees. There’d have to be a commission in it for him of course. Through his reverie something the old girl was saying came through, half catching his attention.

  He said, “What was that, ma?”

  Mrs. Tyler grumbled, “Half I say you don’t listen to.”

  “I do, you know. I don’t chuck a half-a-nicker around without getting value. What was that bit about ‘venture’?”

  “I said, you’re goin’ to start a new venture. Something different.”

  “Well, seeing that I’ve got no venture at the moment, it would have to be different, wouldn’t it? What kind of venture?”

  “Something like visiting houses. Very busy with people.”

  “You don’t say? Rent collecting, perhaps? Or selling insurance? No thank you, ma.”

  “And you keep away from high places. I don’t like the look of your heart line; it’s there, right above the Mountain of the Moon. High places, you watch them.”

  “What kind of high places? Like the Lord Mayor’s Banquet or Mount Everest?”

  “You can scoff.”

  “Well, my hand’s the same as it was last week. Why didn’t you tell me then? Tell you what—do you see any flowers or gardens in my hand. Or a nice yellow van with green sign-writing on it.”

  The old lady gave him a withering look, dropped his hand and pocketed her money. Then her eyes steadily on him she said after a while, “I can see a van. But it ain’t a bright van. It’s dark, black almost, and you’re a-sittin’ in it wishing you weren’t there.”

  George laughed. “Could be. The Black Maria.” As he spoke he heard the front door going and knew that Blanche was letting her clients out. He left Mrs. Tyler and went through to the hall to find Blanche. He led her into the sitting-room, put her in a chair, leaned forward and kissed her, and said, “Sit there and listen. I’m going to make over my life, my love. And all I need is five hundred pounds. Strictly on loan—with interest. Or, say, four hundred at a pinch. Now, what I’ve got in mind is this.”

  Enthusiastically George outlined his plan and Blanche listened to him patiently. She liked him when he was just George. She liked him even more when he got some wild idea going and began to talk about it. You could see the boy behind the man. You could see, and be pleasantly warmed with love and tenderness, the pathetic belief in something that would never be more than a dream. Dear old George—he was never going to change. So long as he had that cottage and his allowance he would always be the same. Momentarily she thought, if I get this Temple of Astrodel I might marry him. Look after him. . . . No, no that wouldn’t do. She had to be a priestess. It wouldn’t look good with a husband knocking about the’ place. George on the side, discreetly away, yes. But not a husband.