Part 11 (1/2)

Howard was always asking if you were aware of whatever.

'It's like chess, Howard,' Amos said kindly. 'You can watch it for hours and think nothing's going on. But that's because you're only seeing what's happening on the surface.'

'Thank you. Where's the child?'

Crane looked at his watch. 'Tucked up in bed.'

'She's not to be harmed. You know that.'

'Safe as houses,' Crane a.s.sured him.

There was a pause while both men thought about houses recently brought to their attention.

'And your brother?'

'I doubt he's in bed yet.'

Howard sat on the edge of Crane's desk, then stood up again when the other man looked at him. He sat on a chair instead. 'I've had a lot of complaints about his action.'

'You said.'

'I can't protect him for ever.'

Amos smiled.

'Any word on Downey?'

'He's keeping his head down. As I mentioned he would.'

'But he'll come looking for the child.'

Made as a statement, but he was after rea.s.surance. There was a kind of boss Amos Crane had read about: the seagull manager. Who flaps in, makes a lot of noise, s.h.i.+ts over everything and leaves. Howard aspired to that, but he was hampered by his personality. Unless he got a lot more secure quite quickly, he was never going to be able to f.u.c.k things up in anything but a minor way. So Crane said, 'He'll be looking for the child, Howard. I promise you that. And if he finds her and we'll make it easy for him he'll be sticking his head right into our box.' He chopped the edge of his hand down on to his desk. 'And we'll cut his head clean off, Howard. No mess. No waste. No more Downey.'

'Whereabouts?'

Crane told him.

Howard thought about it, then nodded. 'Makes sense. Has a kind of symmetry about it.'

'Thanks.'

'And the child won't be hurt.'

Crane held up his palms: Who, me?

'I'll hold your f.u.c.king brother responsible.'

'I'll make a note of that.' He wrote something on a Post-it. Howard stood, turned to go, then turned back reluctantly. 'Something else?'

'It's probably minor.'

'But I ought to know. Oughtn't I?' asked Amos Crane.

Howard reached into his inside pocket, and drew a letter out. 'This came the other day. To the Ministry. It was intercepted, of course.'

'Of course.'

'I knew there'd be a fuss. Your b.l.o.o.d.y brother . . .'

Amos was already tucking the letter away in his own pocket. He knew what kind of thing it would be. 'I'll see to it,' he said soothingly. 'It'll be like it never came at all.'

'No bombs.'

'Don't worry.' Be happy. Howard was really going this time. Amos said, 'Oh, and Howard?'

'Yes?'

'You couldn't protect my brother if he used you as a condom.'

For a while, it looked as if Howard had something to say about that, but at the last he just turned and walked away. Crane settled back into his comfortable darkness. Howard was harmless his major failing but he offered occasional amus.e.m.e.nts, such as Mongolia where, in the course of germ-warfare experiments in the early forties, the Soviets kept prisoners chained in tents with plague-infested rats. Crane couldn't remember offhand the point at issue. Anyway: a prisoner escaped, and a minor epidemic was halted by an air strike, with the usual collateral damage. Round about four thousand Mongols died. n.o.body was actually counting. The bodies were burned with 'large quant.i.ties of petrol'; a description Crane had read in a book. Large quant.i.ties of petrol. And Howard had said You can't compare us to them, and Crane had laughed and laughed. He hadn't been scoring moral points. He'd just found Howard's a.s.sertion unbelievably funny.

'Course not, Howard,' he muttered now, as he leaned forward and killed the monitor. For a brief moment, a trinity of dots shone in his eyes red, blue, green then they too died. In that moment, Amos Crane was thinking about Axel, and about how Downey wouldn't just be looking for a child, but looking for revenge, too; and this was a man trained to kill. Perhaps he should be worried about his brother. And then he smiled again, at the notion of worrying about Axel, and patted his breast pocket where Howard's letter now nestled. Whoever sent that should be worrying about Axel. And he turned the Anglepoise off also, and sat for a while in the dark.

Chapter Three.

The First Station of the Cross I.

Monday morning she had the panic, and was a.s.saulted by the dead.

It happened shopping. During the summer months Oxford fell prey to hordes of foreign students hungry for the cultural experiences the city had to offer, chief among these being found in McDonald's on Cornmarket Street. As Dennis Potter once remarked, Pardon me while I spatter you with vomit. Though on the other hand, Sarah conceded, these were kids far from home, and you couldn't blame them for congregating in the one corner of this foreign field that might have been Mainland Europe. But back on the first hand, they got in the way and left litter everywhere. She crossed the road and entered the covered market.

Everywhere else, a covered market was for cheap food, end-of-line clothing, plastic shoes and party junk. Oxford being Oxford, it was where you bought stuffed olives, Greek bread and T-s.h.i.+rts costing thirty pounds. But there were still ordinary shops, mostly butchers', and through one of their windows now she watched a boy in a white coat arrange a tray of offal: heart, tongue and liver neatly displayed according to a set pattern, as if butchery were an ancient religion, and this its sacrament . . . For some reason she was thinking about Gerard Inchon; about her new-found conviction he was responsible for the explosion up her road. Over the phone she had shared this with Joe, who wasn't impressed.

'He was late for your dinner party.'

'And arrived without his briefcase.'

'Sarah. How can I say this to you? They lock people up for less.'

'I'd think we need more evidence,' she said doubtfully.

'I meant you. Paranoid fantasies, you're a danger to yourself.'

'Do you never get moments of inspiration, when you just know you're right about something?'

'And then I wake up. Sarah, this man, he's got money, right? Lots of it.'