I passed another window and saw grazing white cattle, marshland, and the bridge, and was grateful to be restored to nature. I passed a third closed door but kept going, determined to launch my reconnaissance from the front entrance rather than by axe through the back door. Also I am right-handed, and if I was going to behave like a middle-aged storm trooper, I preferred to attack doors that were on my left side, holding the gun in my right. That might not be how they do it at training school or in films, but it was what came naturally at my age, and I was damned if I was going to give both hands to the gun.
Age was concerning me a lot just now, the way it used to concern me each time I went to bed with Emma: Am I up to this? Am I too old for my passions? Wouldn't somebody younger do it better? I had reached the entrance hall. Go cold, Cranmer. Walk, don't run.
"Anyone around?" I called in a more conciliatory tone. "It's Cranmer. Tim Cranmer. I'm a friend of Sally and Terry."
Soft chairs. A coffee table, a pile of dog-eared magazines from the fine-rug and antique trades. A counter with a home telephone exchange and answering machine: the still-functioning answering machine. A woman's umbrella, unfurled, drying in the umbrella stand, though it was dry. Was it raining that day? What day? Remember the footprints in the mud outside the back door.
On the wall, Asian embroideries and a poster of jet fighters tearing across the desert at low altitude. On the table, three used teacups and one ashtray in the shape of a miniature car tyre, overflowing with untipped cigarette stubs. The tea dregs thick black, no milk or sugar. Russian tea? It would have been sweet. Asian tea? It would have been weak. Tea from the great barrier between the two, perhaps. And Russian cigarettes like Larry's.
About to address the first door, I paused to listen for a footfall, or a car coming down the track, or a postman's knock on the front door and a cheery call of "Anyone at home?" The country is never silent, as I knew, but I heard nothing to increase my alarm. I turned the handle without testing it and shoved it away from me as hard and fast as I could. I hurled myself after it in the forlorn hope that if anyone was inside, I would surprise them if they weren't dead. But the surprise had happened already, because the room had been systematically devastated. Desk drawers had been turned upside down and stamped on. Fax machines and copiers clubbed out of recognition. The desk chair sliced so viciously that its entrails hung free of its skin. Filing cabinets flung facedown to the floor and beaten head to toe. Curtains shredded with sweeping knife thrusts. The very sex of the room's missing occupant a mystery until my researches slowly revealed the absence of a woman: a fragment of a fake-leather shoulder bag, not Emma's taste at all; a crumpled face tissue stained with nothing worse than a cheap lipstick that Emma would never have worn; the lipstick itself, crushed flat; face powder scattered like human ash; a lady's money purse with coins to fit a parking machine; a Volkswagen key with remote-control locking switch, smashed.
And a pair of shoes. Not mud-caked buckskin or the waif's black lace-up boots that Emma favoured, but decently polished nearly-new women's low-sided brown shoes of a sort to kick off when you've been slogging at your desk all day and are in need of a bit of Christian air round your poor old feet, size five. Emma was size three.
There had once been two doors linking Aitken Mustafa May's secretary to her master. They had been set about ten inches apart and upholstered in a vile green plastic, buttoned. But whatever privacy May had hoped to derive from this arrangement, it had been rudely disturbed, for the first door had been reduced to matchwood and the second flung giddily across his desk, awakening images of some mediaeval torture in which the victim was stretched flat and a board laid on top of him and he was pressed to death by the literal weight of his misdoings: in this case, by heaps of magazines for would-be freebooters and mercenaries and shooters; arms catalogues, inventories, and price lists from potential suppliers; and shiny photographs of tanks, artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, battle helicopters, and torpedo boats.
Stepping fastidiously amid the chaos, I was struck by the deliberation of the intruders. It was as if every idolatrous symbol must be methodically sought out and destroyed—and some symbols that were not, to my knowledge, idolatrous at all, such as the washbasin in the adjoining bathroom, and the glass shelving flung into the bathtub, and the curtains stuffed into the lavatory bowl.
