Standing on the pavement outside the surgery, I breathed heavily, feeling the thick fog sting my eyes and nostrils. Ten yards away, a parked car lurked in the short arc of a street lamp. My watchers? I strode to the car, slammed my hands on the roof, and yelled, "Anyone there?" The echo of my voice sped away into the fog. I marched twenty paces and swung round. Not a shadow dared approach me. Not one close sound came back at me from the fog's grey wall.
My quarry has changed, I remembered. I am no longer searching fearfully for signs of Larry's life or death. I am looking for both of them alive. For their conspiracy. For the reason why.
I hastened in and out of light cones, down side streets, under spiky overhanging trees. The muffled shapes of refugees flitted past me. I pulled on my raincoat. I found a flat cap in the pocket and pulled that on too. I have changed my profile. I am invisible. Three dogs were padding round each other in a melancholy changing of the guard. I stopped again, listening to nothing. I walked back a distance. My watchers have departed.
* * *
After ten years, the house still scared me. Though I had escaped from it, I haunted it. Behind its grey walls, clad in the mauve half-mourning of wisteria, lay the remains of my dreams of lifelong happiness. When I had first removed myself to a humble flat further out of town, I would take detours on my journey to the Office rather than go past its door. And if necessity led me in its direction, I would fantasise about being hauled back inside to serve another sentence.
But after a time my revulsion gave way to a furtive curiosity, and the house attracted me despite myself. I would leave the tube a stop early and scurry across the Heath just to peer into its lighted windows. How do they live? What do they talk about, apart from me? Who was I when I lived there? That Diana had left the Office I knew only too well, for she had written Merriman one of her letters.
"Your darling ex has decided we're the Gestapo," he announces, seething with outrage. "And she's been bloody rude with it. Unconstitutional, incompetent, and unaccountable, that's us. Did you know you were nursing a viper to your breast?"
"That's just Diana. She lets fly."
"Well, what's she going to do about it? Wash her conscience in public, I suppose. Splash us all over the
"Do you?"
She's studying to become a psychotherapist, I hear on the grapevine. She's a marriage counsellor. She's lost weight. She attends yoga classes in Kentish Town. Edgar's an academic publisher.
I rang the bell. She opened the door at once.
"I thought you were Sebastian," she said.
It was on the tip of my tongue to apologise for being the wrong person.
* * *
We perched in the drawing room. I had forgotten how low the ceilings were. Perhaps Honeybrook had spoiled me. She was wearing jeans and a Cornish fisherman's top from our holidays at Padstow. It was faded blue and suited her. Her face was lighter than I remembered it and wider. Her complexion creamier. Her eyes less shaded. Edgar's books went from floor to ceiling. Most were on subjects I'd never heard of.
"He's on a seminar in Ravenna," she said.
"Oh, right. Great. Jolly nice." I had no natural voice in which to speak to her. No ease. I never had. "Ravenna," I repeated.
"I've got a patient coming in about half a minute, and I don't keep patients waiting," she said. "What do you want?”
“Larry's disappeared. They're looking for him."
"Who is?"
"Everyone. The Office, the police. Separately. The police can't be told of the Office connection."
Her face hardened, and I feared she was about to give me one of her diatribes on the need for us all to tell each other everything straight out, and how secrecy was not a symptom but a disease.
"Why?" she said.
"You mean why can't they be told or why's he disappeared?"
"Both."
Where did she get this power over me? Why do I stammer and placate her? Because she knows me too well—or never knew me at all?
"He's supposed to have stolen money," I said. "Scads of it. The police suspect me of being his accomplice. So does the Office."
"But you're not."
"Of course I'm not."
"So why've you come to me?"
She was sitting on the arm of a chair, back straight, hands folded on her lap. She had the professional listener's mirthless smile. There was drink on the sideboard, but she didn't offer me any.
"Because he's fond of you. You're one of the few women he admires and hasn't been to bed with."
"You know that, do you?"
"No. I assume it. It also happens to be the way he describes you."
She gave a superior smile. "Does it really? And you're prepared to take his word for it, are you? You're very trusting, Tim. Don't say you're getting soft in your old age."
