A tall, lean figure in a long overcoat was standing at the balcony, staring towards a band of light in the east. The blood-orange half-disc of the sun could be seen, squatting in a gap between the horizon and a line of thick cloud.
“Good morning, major,” Carl Legister said without turning around.
He was hatless, his dark hair slicked back on his scalp, delineated by the sharp lines of a recent haircut.
“Where is she?” he asked.
His men took up flanking positions. Both carried Sterlings. They were compact and lightweight, capable of single shots or rapid fire. At close range they could put a hole through you the size of a fist.
It was obvious Legister was asking about Marisa. A muted panic blossomed in him. He’d had vivid nightmarish dreams in the few hours he’d been asleep, dreams of flight, of chases, of corpses and ghosts pursuing him across blasted landscapes. Before that, there had been his conquest of Marisa. The empty aftermath. Her face at the door, hair still damp from the shower. After that? He couldn’t remember. It was all completely blank.
“She’s gone,” was all he could muster.
Legister didn’t move. “That much is evident, major. The question is—where?”
Owain was still trying furiously to recall. Nothing would come.
Legister turned to face him. “You don’t deny she was here?”
Owain knew that before he spoke, he had to think. I sat perfectly motionless within him, wanting to do nothing to disturb the dangerous fragility of his situation.
“You know that already,” he said. “Didn’t you send her?”
Legister’s hands were buried in the pockets of his overcoat. He had the look of someone engaged in a tiresome distraction, who wanted swift answers but knew that the protocols of their respective positions would have to be observed, if only for the sake of his own decorum.
“You say she’s gone,” he remarked. “An interesting choice of phrase. In what sense do you mean exactly?”
“She left. Hours ago.”
“What time?”
“I’m not sure. Around midnight.”
Legister made a motion of his head to the men, who retreated out of earshot. Owain was confident that their weapons were still trained on him. He wondered if Legister was also holding his own gun in his right-hand pocket. The thick navy serge of his overcoat made it difficult to be sure. No, he decided; it wouldn’t have been dignified.
“Was the rendezvous pre-arranged?” Legister asked softly.
“Why are you asking me?”
A slow exhalation that sounded like a sigh of impatience. “Tell me, major.”
It was hard to get his thoughts in order, especially when they contained such a crucial gap.
“She was here when I arrived home,” he admitted. “I wasn’t expecting her.”
“What time was this?”
“I’m not sure. I’d had a few drinks. Ten, eleven o’clock.”
“And then what?”
He had penetrating eyes and the capacity for making his whole being go so abruptly still that he became like a lens concentrating your attention, making you the focal point of his.
“We had coffee. Talked. She left.”
“Is it a sexual relationship?”
Owain managed to turn his surprise into a soulless laugh.
“Aren’t all the details of my recent conquests on file? My endless affairs and frequent visits to the city’s brothels? I imagine you have a good account of such activities.”
Legister didn’t react to this. He merely waited. Owain hadn’t considered until now the impact of negative evidence. It was perversely redemptive: a secret disclosed through the very absence of disclosure.
“Didn’t she tell you?” he said. “About my—difficulties? I thought that was part of the appeal.”
Nothing altered in his face. “She left around midnight?”
“I think so. I wasn’t watching the clock.”
“And you did—what? “
“Went to bed. Slept. Until your wake-up call.”
“You saw her drive away? “
“Yes.”
There was no way of telling what he was thinking. But if the car was gone, Marisa or he must have driven it. If he had done so, perhaps he had killed her. But no memory would surface. How long had he been sleeping? When had he actually gone to bed?
“I assumed she was going home,” he said, trying to project himself into the spirit of his fabrication.
Legister turned to one of men flanking him. “Go back inside and take a thorough look.”
He did so, the other remaining in position.
Owain didn’t move but merely stared beyond Legister, watching the burgeoning dawn. The sun had already been absorbed into the cloudbank, its light drowned. He heard the commander shift his position, moving behind him. There was the chink of something on his Sterling. Owain had a sense of being impaled between Legister’s stare and the unseen muzzle of the man’s weapon.
I couldn’t believe how calm he was remaining. Partly it was his training, of course, but I thought I detected a new brazenness in him. I continued to keep myself very much in the background, doing nothing to endanger us. At the same time I was eager to discover what had become of Marisa.
