Ron Haddock usually knew what he wanted to do. Just now, he wanted to put a bullet through the rear tires of the ancient Bentley convertible sitting on the drive in front of his living room window. But he couldn’t, any more than he could grind his teeth. He couldn’t grind his teeth because he’d got the chewing gum habit during his years as an armed policeman, standing out in the rain guarding embassies or waiting for criminals to make their next move, and he was chewing now to keep calm. And he couldn’t shoot up the Bentley’s tires because the car belonged to his next-door neighbor, and it had every right to be there. The drive that led from Haddock’s gate to his front door didn’t belong to him, due to some ridiculous property rights that went back to the time of William the Conqueror. The bastard next door actually had the right to park his car there, which made Haddock angry.
Everything about his next-door neighbor made Haddock angry. It made him angry that the bastard had planted a hedge of conifers fifteen feet high between his house and Haddock’s bungalow, a hedge that took all Haddock’s light at front and back and incidentally blocked the best track out into the fields when Haddock wanted to go rabbit-shooting.
Perhaps his neighbor shouldn’t have made him quite so angry, because after all, the man was away on business more than a third of the time. But that made him angry, too, because Haddock didn’t like people who came and went; it was shifty and unreliable. Criminals, the lot of them, deserved to be shot. The bastard had even woken him up one day in the early morning to get him to unjam his garden gate to let the Bentley in. And he wouldn’t sell the drive. When Haddock had approached him about that, he’d said he needed the space for his second car. His number-one car was an Audi that he kept outside his own house, invisible behind the conifers. Evidently he liked to have a second exit when he needed it. Something very fishy about that, in Haddock’s opinion.
Where was Phyllis? Haddock asked himself, looking at his watch. It was past noon, and she was supposed to be back from the gym by now to get his lunch. That was the arrangement between them. Three times a week she went to the gym, came back, and made lunch. Then it was his turn-down for the afternoon to the gun club.
With guns, any kind of gun, Haddock was an artist, because he really loved them. Guns were straight. They did as you told them and didn’t argue. They were facts, powerful facts, things you could hold, things you could fondle without any comeback, with no complications. He specialized in veteran guns, Lee-Enfields, Webleys, Mausers, Colts. None of that modern arty-farty Russian stuff, or modern anything for that matter. Except for just one gun, his pride and joy, his Barrett sniper rifle, the one gun he really possessed because no one knew he had it. His unlicensed gun, the gun he could only ever use outside, at night, with its wonderful night sight, and then not often. Not just unlicensed-it had never been registered in England at all, because Haddock had picked it out of the hold of a small boat that was running guns to the IRA when he had been on antiterror duty, all of fifteen years ago. Yes, he’d taken a risk, a big one. He’d have been out of the force the day they found out that he’d retained any criminal property, never mind an unlicensed, unregistered firearm.
Haddock grinned to himself. He’d outsmarted his own people and got away with it. Then he stopped grinning. After all, they had thrown him out. Thrown him out of Armed Response, anyway, and that to him was out of everything. So he had retired, about five years ago, married Phyllis, and started chicken farming. She’d been some kind of policewoman herself, but she had inherited money and was prepared to settle down. The chicken farming hadn’t worked out, so they’d moved here, living mostly on Phyllis’s capital and pension in a down-market bungalow in rural Norfolk.
His dismissal from Armed Response had been a bad time- all other people’s fault, of course. He’d been at an anti-Iraq War demonstration, part of an Armed Response team. They’d been sitting quietly on the edges of the action, just waiting for something to happen, never thinking they’d be needed. Then this bloke had come along-well, he was being shoved along by about a dozen of the demonstrators, waving their placards and yelling their slogans, with him in front. He was carrying what was obviously a gun, wrapped in brown paper. He waved it at some of the uniformed guys, threatening them. Had he heard Haddock’s challenge? Of course he had, they all had, but the Enquiry didn’t think it had been properly made. The Enquiry- he snorted to himself-a gang of snooty bastards who’d never seen police action in the raw, never faced a screaming crowd, thought it was all as easy as policing a church garden party. Well, Haddock had shot him, and when they’d ripped off the brown paper, it had turned out to be a wooden chair leg he’d been carving. Served the idiot right for trying to deceive the police. What had the fool thought he was doing, brandishing an offensive weapon that looked like a gun? How many people had he been going to hit over the head with it?
Haddock looked in the fridge for a can of beer that he wasn’t supposed to have before Phyllis got back, and, as he did so, a noise outside the window caused him to turn around and look out. The door of the Bentley was open and there was Mr. Next-Door leaning in, fiddling with the passenger light. Haddock hadn’t even known he was at home, and now there he was, off again. He’d already opened the drive gate. Haddock watched him climb into the car. The car rolled slowly down the drive, turned left at the road, and drove away. And he didn’t get out to shut the gate. The bastard never did.
Haddock watched him go. How much did he know about the man? Only that he came and went more than was good for him. Foreign sort of name, Lukas, spelled with a “k.” There were immigrants all over the place nowadays. He was an average-looking sort of guy, medium build, rather sharp-faced, nothing noticeable, one of those people you could describe in twenty seconds or else it took you half an hour. He wasn’t British-not English anyway. Maybe he was Welsh. Unreliable people, the Welsh. Haddock had known a Pole with a German accent who had turned out to be a Welshman from Caernarvon.
Whatever way you looked at it, he wasn’t a local, not a Norfolk man. He was some kind of a radio buff, too. He had every kind of gadget in there; you could see some of them from the bridle track that went past his place. Aerials on the chimney. They didn’t fit with a thought that Haddock had often had, that he might be one of those secret womanizers, covering up his antics with girls behind a conifer hedge. If he was burying bodies in the garden, Haddock wouldn’t be able to see him at it.
A sudden thought struck Haddock. Given that the bloke was certainly dodgy, probably a criminal, did he carry a gun? It was something that had been part of his life’s business to recognize, something that could cost you your life if you got it wrong. It was axiomatic with him to run the rule over any stranger, even one in a top hat at a wedding. He hadn’t noticed any of the usual slight bulges or the absence of them, for that matter. But that in itself was interesting; maybe the bloke did carry, but made it his business to conceal the fact. That made him a professional. There were ways of moving, ways of not standing still, that kept even an expert guessing. Haddock knew them all, but he still didn’t know whether the guy carried a gun, and that was starting to worry him.
He heard the side door opening. That would be Phyllis. It was Phyllis, still in her tracksuit and trainers, with her clothes in a duffel bag over her shoulder. Haddock forced a smile, wrenching his mind away from his neighbor and the fact that he was hungry, and she’d want to have a shower before she did anything about lunch. Why was she so late? His sessions at the gun club were only three hours, and he was in line for losing half an hour already. But it didn’t do to shout at Phyllis. She had her ways of getting back.
“Something kept you, darling?”
She clicked her tongue. One of her irritating habits. “Did you remember to empty the kitchen bin? Something’s smelling,” she said.
“I forgot. Sorry.”
“Well, do it now. I’ll be down when I’ve powdered my nose.”
It was true that her face was red and her nose looked as though it needed powdering. And for that matter her hair looked as though she’d been pulled through a bush backward.
“Tough routine at the gym today?”
She gave him a glance and disappeared around the corner and down the corridor to the bathroom.
He stored it away in his mind, where it collided with an identical thought that had been lying there since Monday, her last gym session. Same sequence. Just after Lukas had gone out, Phyllis appeared, twenty-five minutes late, looking as though she’d been through the mangle.
Phyllis. Cool, cool Phyllis. Twenty years younger than himself. Not yet forty. Maybe it was best not to say too much, just try to take it easy. Damage limitation, that was the mode with Phyllis. One thing that never went down well with her was curiosity. Any kind of inquiry about what she had been doing or who she’d seen, and she took offense.
He could hear Phyllis in the bathroom now, and it came to him in a flood that he was jealous-dead, mad jealous, angry jealous. Of course it was rubbish; of course Phyllis had been at the gym; of course she wasn’t having it off with that Czecho-Hungarian sod who lived next door. But what if she was? By God, if he found she had been, he’d flog her with his police belt, studs and all. Come to think of it, he’d always wanted to do that. He’d flog her to death, and then go out and kill the bastard and then turn the gun on himself. He stopped, suddenly, almost choking, breathing fast, eyes watering, and tried to get a grip on himself.
“Something the matter, dear?”
Cool, ironic Phyllis. He said nothing.
“Well, I mean, you look such an idiot standing there panting with that smelly plastic bag in your hand. Look, give it to me. I’ll put it in the bin. Lunch is in that carrier bag. I got it from Marks and Spencer. Your favorite chocolate pudding. Two for one offer today.”
“I don’t want lunch. I’m going for a walk.”
“Relax, Ron, and just sit down. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. They don’t come in daylight, you know.”
He sat down, ate his lunch, and thought. The gun club was off. While Phyllis had her afternoon nap, he was going to look around next door. Now that it occurred to him, he was amazed that he had never thought to do it before.
The bedroom door closed. He looked at his watch. Half past two. He slipped his mobile into his pocket.
“Bye, darling.”
“Bye. Have a good time. Don’t shoot anybody you shouldn’t.”
He made a face at the bedroom door and set off down the drive. Police training kicked in. There was no question of making a frontal approach. At the end of the drive, he turned to the right. Forty yards up the road, he vaulted a gate, walked across the field up to the corner of the forest plantation, and turned right toward the hay barn that now lay between him and the two properties. There was no need for concealment-Phyllis couldn’t see him from the bedroom and Lukas was out-but he was still glad of the sunken lane that connected the barn to his objective. Leaning against the barn, he took out his mobile and dialed a number.
“Gemini Health Club.”
“Is Mrs. Haddock there? I had been expecting to meet her for lunch.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“My name’s Ron Morley. A friend.”
“Sorry, Mr. Morley. I can’t help. Mrs. Haddock didn’t come in this morning. Can we give her a message if she does come in?”
Haddock depressed the call button and slipped the mobile into his pocket. He was thinking clearly now. If not the Czecho bastard, then someone else. Her story had better be good.
He walked down the hill. It was early May. The apple trees were covered with blossoms; the countryside looked beautiful, but Haddock didn’t notice it; he didn’t do beauty. He reached the bridle path past Lukas’s place.
This house was much older than Haddock’s bungalow. It was originally a farmhouse, maybe a couple of hundred years old, but small, not more than five rooms. All the land had once belonged to the farm, but at some point a piece had been sold off for the bungalow, hence the problem of the ownership of the drive. The farm outhouses and barns were still standing around the yard, cleaned up now, but you could faintly smell cows and hay. No sign of life.
Haddock walked across the yard and gently tried the house door. Locked. The lower windows were closed, but one on the top floor was open a bit. He needed a ladder. He walked across to the bigger of two outbuildings and pushed the door. A scurry, then silence. A rat. The place was an empty double-story barn. He climbed the wooden ladder that led to the top floor. There was a range of openings in the front wall flush with the floor, windows once perhaps, that looked directly across to the house. At the back of the barn, a door with a wooden beam above it gave onto the bridle path, presumably once used to hoist in hay from a piled cart. He opened the door and looked out onto the path, then closed it again. He walked back to the front and, squatting down, peered across at the house through one of the openings.
Then he saw the girl. She was standing inside the partly opened door of a one-story stable fronting the yard at a right angle to his barn. It occurred to him that she must have watched his arrival and didn’t mind being seen-at any rate, not by him. She now walked out into the yard and, looking up at him, said, “Interesting place.”
She was good-looking, except that she was a little too slim for his taste and her blue-gray eyes too noticing for beauty. He wondered if she was a lesbian. He climbed down the ladder and walked out into the yard.
“Looking around?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m considering buying the place.”
“You local?”
“Kind of.”
Suddenly he noticed something he might have seen before, but for interruptions. A woman’s sandal was lying at the edge of the yard just by the barn wall. A flip-flop he’d last seen on Phyllis’s foot when she’d left for the gym this morning. No wonder she’d been wearing trainers when she came home. She must have dropped it, or someone had pulled it off. He wrenched his eyes from it and tried to concentrate on the girl.
“You looking around as well?”
“Not really,” she said, looking carefully at him, as if to gauge his reaction. “I live here.”
“You live here? Are you Lukas’s wife?”
“Not exactly”
This was getting complicated.
“He’s gone.”
“Yes. I’m going, too.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Not my business.”
“What exactly is your business?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. -?”
“Pearson.”
“Right, Mr. Pearson. This is getting a bit personal. Let’s leave it there.”
She was wearing a parka. She zipped it up.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Pearson. Best of luck with your reconnaissance.”
She walked out of the yard and, a moment later, he heard a car start farther up the bridle path and drive off.
A little breeze swirled last autumn’s leaves. He’d seen enough, too much. He felt sick, ready to vomit. But he knew what he was going to do, come what may.
He went home, scarcely knowing which way his steps took him. He lifted the latch of his garden gate, passed the flattened turf where the Bentley convertible had stood, put his key in the lock, walked along the corridor, and kicked open the bedroom door. He tore the bedclothes off Phyllis, grabbed her by the hair, and started hitting her. He slapped her with his palm, then hit her with the back of his hand, then punched her with his fist, so her head jerked back. Then he paused, gathering his strength, and she kneed him hard in the groin, so he fell off the bed onto the floor, where she kicked him hard in the ribs.
“You bugger!” she said. “You absolute bugger!”
And that was all. He watched her while she piled some clothes and jewelry into a suitcase. Then, deliberately, slowly, she tidied her hair, applied some makeup, and walked out of the bedroom, pausing only to say, “I’ll be back for the rest. And the house.”
He heard the car leave.
He got slowly up, sat down again, and went over every action, every word, in the last four hours. His intention was fixed; he only wanted to be sure that he could do what he intended and stand a reasonable chance of getting away with it. One thing he knew-cold, furious as his wife might be, she would never offer evidence against him. Her own pride would stop her. As for the girl in the yard, she had lied when she’d said she lived in the place. He had never heard her or seen her, and she didn’t know him. What she had been doing there he could not imagine, but one thing was sure: she wasn’t police. Maybe she was just a rather intrusive sightseer.
The main question was, when would the bastard come back? He walked up the corridor, positioned a stepladder under the trapdoor in the ceiling, and drew down a long parcel. Calmly, he unwrapped it and laid the parts on the kitchen table, first drawing the curtains. He inspected and cleaned each one with a rag, fitted them carefully together, then slipped the complete gun into an old golf bag. He put the bag and its contents back into the loft, stroking it lovingly. His gun.
As he finished, he heard the noise of the Bentley, moving quite slowly up the drive. That was odd; when Lukas took the Bentley he was usually away for several days at a time. Other times, he used the Audi. Where had that been during his afternoon’s visit? Must have been in the stable, he decided. So the girl would have seen it. “So what?” he said aloud.
Tonight, then? No, not tonight. He was too done up, like a man without sleep for a fortnight, or maybe like a man whose wife has left him for good without a sausage in the refrigerator. He went to bed.
Next morning, Haddock got up, showered, breakfasted, and, taking his binoculars, followed a route identical to that of the previous afternoon, but he stopped in the shadow of the plantation. He sat on the ground, his back against a tree, warm sun on his left shoulder, and scrutinized the countryside inch by inch, pausing again and again on the two houses. Lukas was certainly there; at one point he emerged and walked into the stable, coming out with some piece of apparatus. Was that what the girl had been looking at? No one else seemed to be there and, above all, there was no sign of Phyllis. In fact, there was nothing moving in the whole of lazy Norfolk but a line of slowly turning wind turbines and the occasional vehicle on the road that passed his property.
Haddock went home, taking care to avoid observation. There was still plenty to do. He put on dark, loose clothing and soft-soled boots, first removing all labels. In a small rucksack he packed spare shoes, trousers, a pullover, and a T-shirt. He added a pencil torch, not to be used save in extremis. He readjusted his watch by the radio and sat down. At nine o’clock, he got the golf bag out of the loft, and at exactly a quarter past nine, he turned off all the lights.
Then he stood for a moment in the bedroom, asking himself whether he really wanted to go through with it. He didn’t, but he would. The chase, the hunt, immemorial passion had got to him. He had failed everything in life, his job, his business, his marriage, and now he was going to win. He knew himself to be the master of every technique needed for the job he intended to do.
Besides, he hated the bastard with a real, profound hatred. Lukas, the foreigner, the man who had destroyed his life, taken his wife, stolen his possession. Lukas was a robber. He, Haddock, was a cop.
He checked his watch and left the house by the side door, taking exactly the same route as before. The moon was rising, but it was pitch black in the plantation where he left his spare bundle and the empty golf bag. He pulled a balaclava over his face and adjusted the eyeholes. Then he set off down the track, planting his soles squarely on the surface to minimize noise. Not that it was exactly quiet on this May evening, with rabbits scurrying, bats squeaking, and the noise of an owl in the dark trees overlooking Lukas’s place.
Once in the yard, he was safe in the moon’s shadow by the barn. As he had expected, there was a light in the curtained ground-floor window of the house; the upper floor was unlit, curtains open. He’d be unlucky if he got no chance of a shot, and at that range, Haddock needed only one.
There was just one bad moment. The bridle track behind the barn was very little used by traffic. But now, just as he crouched in the barn’s shadow inside the yard, he heard a car moving quite slowly down it. He saw nothing but a passing gleam-almost as though it were unlit-and to his relief, it passed on, tires lightly crunching the ground, and out of earshot.
Haddock remained motionless for a minute, listening, and then slipped into the barn and up the wooden ladder. He laid down his gun carefully, flat on the timbers where he could see it by the refracted light of the moon. Then he moved to the back of the barn and carefully opened the upper door over the road, fixing it by its bar against the wall. He might need it for a line of retreat. For a moment, he peered into the silent wall of trees opposite, two arm lengths away, and finally moved back to the unglazed window. He squatted, picked up the gun, and then lay on his stomach, his favorite position for accuracy, and trained the gun roughly in the direction of the unlighted window across the yard, which he calculated to be the bedroom.
As he lay there, a nasty thought came to him. When he had done what he intended, what should he do with the gun? He could leave it, but all his instincts were against that. Equally, to hide it anywhere in the neighborhood might indicate that whoever had used it was not far away. Should he take it with him and put it back in the loft? But there would be one hell of a hunt when they found Lukas missing half his head, with a bullet embedded in the opposite wall.
He was pondering this, when he had a shock so terrible that for an instant his heart seemed to circulate above his body and then plunge straight down into his stomach. “Hello.”
The voice was half-familiar, almost mocking. There was no body attached so far as he could see in the dim light. He heard a sort of moan. It was all the air escaping from his lungs.
“Do keep quiet,” the voice said. “We didn’t reckon on you joining the party. You’d better hand over that nasty thing you’ve brought with you. It looks dangerous.” He tried to speak but couldn’t. It was the girl, the girl he had seen that morning.
A deft hand reached out and picked up the gun from the floor and put it behind where she was crouching, clearly visible now, about three feet away. She leaned forward, so he could see her.
“My name is Liz,” she whispered. “Liz Carlyle. And you are going to be very quiet, Mr. Haddock. Quieter than you have been so far. Quiet as a mouse, please. Just lie there and watch.”
My God. She knew his name. He’d better do what she said. He lay there and watched, trembling slightly with shock.
In the window opposite, a light came on. A figure moved to the curtains, stretched, drew them. The guy was lucky, Haddock reflected. If he’d had the gun, he’d have shot him. Half his mind had come back, but not the half that would have told him he was pretty lucky himself.
It was a signal. Immediately all hell let loose. Beyond the conifer hedge on the other side of the house, a blinding light shone-from his own garden, Haddock realized. The yard below seemed suddenly full of figures. Two men in black, who seemed to have no faces, smashed open the farmhouse door. No problem in recognizing armed policemen. Haddock knew exactly what was going to happen. The two men reappeared half-carrying a struggling figure. They bundled him around the hedge out of Haddock’s view, and a car started up and drove off, accelerating.
Every light in the house was on now, plus a light from a generator that had appeared miraculously in the yard. The house was being ransacked from cellar to attic.
Haddock sighed. It seemed the only thing to do. “Who are you?” he asked the girl who was still in the barn.
“Government service.”
“You mean MI5?”
“It’s you who are going to do the explaining, Mr. Haddock.”
A torch shone.
“Where did you get this gun?”
“I had it.”
“So I’d thought. You were armed police yourself, weren’t you? Is that standard issue?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe?”
Truculence came back to Haddock and washed over him in a warm, familiar wave. He grabbed some of it, like a drowning man grabs water. “Why should I answer your questions? You aren’t police. Anyway, you seem to know a lot already. How do you know my name?”
“I know your wife.”
“You know my wife?” It didn’t make sense.
“And that’s the reason we could just be able to deal with this unofficially. You haven’t actually done anything, after all. Or we could hand you over. There are plenty of your old pals milling around. Please yourself.”
“How do you know Phyllis?”
“Well, she’s on our payroll, for one thing. Part-time. She retired when she married you. Or rather, she didn’t. Come on down the ladder, and maybe I’ll explain.”
They were standing now on the cobblestones of the yard. His legs felt so shaky, he nearly fell down.
“Right, then,” said the girl. “We have been watching this man for quite some time-on and off, of course. That’s where Phyllis came in. That’s why you live in your present house. I suppose Phyllis didn’t explain that. Know what a ‘sleeper’ is?”
“Someone that sleeps around?”
“You aren’t that dumb, Mr. Haddock. A sleeper is a spy, an intelligence agent, who does nothing till he gets his instructions. Then he acts as required. As sleepers go, Lukas was pretty active. He’d had his instructions and he was carrying them out. Our technique if we find a sleeper is to watch and wait. We learn a lot that way, so long as we are satisfied they aren’t dangerous, of course. We may even feed them information, to keep their bosses happy. But we have to keep close to them-it doesn’t do to lose sight. So that’s how Phyllis got her part-time job. She watched and reported. She was around here with me this morning.”
“I know she was here. I found her flip-flop.”
“Did you? She must be getting out of practice.”
“I thought she was having it off with Lukas.”
“You do have rather a habit of jumping to conclusions, don’t you, Mr. Haddock? We did think of bringing you into it all. But we decided it might be too much for you-and you do have rather a complicated past.”
Haddock rubbed the back of his neck, then spat his chewing gum onto the floor and ground his teeth. He didn’t like this girl. She was making him feel stupid, and he suspected she was laughing at him. He’d quite like to hit her but he didn’t dare. Nothing else came into his head for a bit. Then he said, “Phyllis. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. You have work to do with her, Mr. Haddock, if the opportunity comes your way. In your own interests, I’d give her a miss for quite some time.”
“You mean, I don’t call her, she calls me?”
“Yes and no.”
“Oh, hell. Can I go now?”
“Yes and no. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
He went. They found him in the morning in the plantation. He was fast asleep with his head on his golf bag, snoring.