Eye of the Needle(70)
She took away the handkerchief and looked at her thumb. It was still bleeding. (Yes, you did. And, God knows, you have.)
“A bandage,” he suggested.
“In the kitchen.”
He found a roll of bandage, a pair of scissors, and a safety pin. He filled a small bowl with hot water and returned to the living room.
In his absence she had somehow obliterated the evidence of tears on her face. She sat passively, limp, while he bathed her thumb in the hot water, dried it, and put a small strip of bandage over the cut. She looked all the time at his face, not at his hands; but her expression was unreadable.
He finished the job and stood back abruptly. This was silly: he had taken the thing too far. Time to disengage. “I think I’d better go to bed,” he said.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing,” she told him. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Her tone was harsh. He guessed that she, too, felt the thing had got out of hand.
“Are you staying up?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Well…” He followed her through the hall and up the stairs, and he watched her climb, her hips moving gently.
At the top of the stairs, on the tiny landing, she turned and said in a low voice, “Good night.”
“Good night, Lucy.”
She looked at him for a moment. He reached for her hand, but she turned quickly away, entering her bedroom and closing the door without a backward look, leaving him standing there, wondering what was in her mind and—more to the point—what was really in his.
22
BLOGGS DROVE DANGEROUSLY FAST THROUGH THE night in a commandeered Sunbeam Talbot with a souped-up engine. The hilly, winding Scottish roads were slick with rain and, in a few low places, two or three inches deep in water. The rain drove across the windshield in sheets. On the more exposed hilltops the gale-force winds threatened to blow the car off the road and into the soggy turf alongside. For mile after mile, Bloggs sat forward in the seat, peering through the small area of glass that was cleared by the wiper, straining his eyes to make out the shape of the road in front as the headlights battled with the obscuring rain. Just north of Edinburgh he ran over three rabbits, feeling the sickening bump as the tires squashed their small bodies. He did not slow the car, but for a while afterward he wondered whether rabbits normally came out at night.
The strain gave him a headache, and his sitting position made his back hurt. He also felt hungry. He opened the window for a cold breeze to keep him awake, but so much water came in that he was immediately forced to close it again. He thought about Die Nadel, or Faber or whatever he was calling himself now: a smiling young man in running shorts, holding a trophy. Well, so far Faber was winning this race. He was forty-eight hours ahead and he had the advantage that only he knew the route that had to be followed. Bloggs would have enjoyed a contest with that man, if the stakes had not been so high, so bloody high.
He wondered what he would do if he ever came face to face with the man. I’d shoot him out of hand, he thought, before he killed me. Faber was a pro, and you didn’t mess with that type. Most spies were amateurs: frustrated revolutionaries of the left or right, people who wanted the imaginary glamour of espionage, greedy men or lovesick women or blackmail victims. The few professionals were very dangerous indeed; they were not merciful men.
Dawn was still an hour or two away when Bloggs drove into Aberdeen. Never in his life had he been so grateful for street lights, dimmed and masked though they were. He had no idea where the police station was, and there was no one on the streets to give him direction so he drove around the town until he saw the familiar blue lamp (also dimmed).
He parked the car and ran through the rain into the building. He was expected. Godliman had been on the phone, and Godliman was now very senior indeed. Bloggs was shown into the office of Alan Kincaid, a detective-chief-inspector in his mid-fifties. There were three other officers in the room; Bloggs shook their hands and instantly forgot their names.
Kincaid said: “You made bloody good time from Carlisle.”
“Nearly killed myself doing it,” Bloggs replied, and sat down. “If you can rustle up a sandwich…”
“Of course.” Kincaid leaned his head out of the door and shouted something. “It’ll be here in two shakes,” he told Bloggs.
The office had off-white walls, a plank floor, and plain hard furniture: a desk, a few chairs and a filing cabinet. It was totally unrelieved: no pictures, no ornaments, no personal touches of any kind. There was a tray of dirty cups on the floor, and the air was thick with smoke. It smelled like a place where men had been working all night.
Kincaid had a small moustache, thin grey hair and spectacles. A big intelligent-looking man in shirtsleeves and braces, he spoke with a local accent, a sign that, like Bloggs, he had come up through the ranks—though from his age it was clear that his rise had been slower than Bloggs’s.
Bloggs said: “How much do you know about all this?”
“Not much,” Kincaid said. “But your governor, Godliman, did say that the London murders are the least of this man’s crimes. We also know which department you’re with, so we can put two and two together about this Faber…”
“What have you done so far?” Bloggs asked.
Kincaid put his feet on his desk. “He arrived here two days ago, right? That was when we started looking for him. We had the pictures—I assume every force in the country got them.”