by Ian Rankin
“Looking for someone?”
“Well, you never know who’ll turn up at these dos, do you?”
“Still cracking jokes.” This from Collins. “Aye, you’re a tough one all right, but we’ll see just how tough.”
Miles rested a hand on the tensed arm of the younger man, and left it there.
“I think,” he said, “we should make a clean breast, don’t you, Partridge?”
Partridge shrugged his shoulders, rubbing his numbed hands together. He dearly wanted to push them deep into the woolen haven of his pockets, but felt that it was important to keep his body gestures open, unlike the heavily attacking stance of the Irishman.
“You know,” Miles began, “I was never a threat to you, never.”
“With respect, Miles, I have to disagree. The very fact of our meeting here today is proof of that.”
“It wasn’t until you sent me to Ireland, sent me to my own execution, that I began to piece things together, and then only with the help of Mr. Collins. I was never close to finding out your dirty little secret. It was Billy you should have been watching, Billy and his friend Andrew Gray.”
“Gray?”
“An American operative. He was putting a sweat on your friend Sizewell.”
After a moment’s thought, Partridge shrugged his shoulders again and looked back along the platform.
“Well, what does it matter now? I’ve never been one for postmortems.”
“Just so long as the executions went off all right. This all started so neatly, didn’t it? A single death, all those years ago, hidden by time as you thought. But it’s been growing, Partridge. And you can’t kill everyone.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” He pointed to Collins. “Except him. Give him to me, Miles, and that can be the end of it.”
“What about the tapes?”
“They can be recovered. It’s him I want.”
Collins made a leap forward. “You filthy bastard!”
Miles’s hand tightened its grip on Collins’s arm, and he looked at him the way a parent would look at an errant son.
“I’m going to have him, so help me,” hissed Collins.
“This man is our enemy, Miles,” said Partridge, “you must see that. He’s everything we’ve been fighting against for twenty-odd years. What’s more, he murdered Peter Saville, or, rather, one of his devices did.”
“Pete?”
“Blown to bits in Ganton Street.”
“But they said in the papers that they couldn’t establish identity. So how the hell can you know that it was Pete?”
Partridge faltered, looked down at his feet.
“Unless,” said Miles, “your Cynegetics bullies, your little private army was following him. Maybe putting the chill on him, eh? Frighten him off, was that it? Yes, I’ll bet that was it. Your own little army. I’ll bet that appealed to you, didn’t it? Speaking of which, how did you inveigle Phillips’s help?”
“Simplicity itself. He had a fairly shaky time getting into the service. I helped him. Old family ties, you understand. So he owed me something deeper than loyalty to the firm.”
Miles nodded, trying to look calm though his nerves were like sparklers.
“And you were the man at the Doric Hotel, the man who paid that girl to keep me occupied?”
“Yes. Jeff telephoned me. I live close by, so it was no trouble. The firm had used Felicity before, so I thought she might be there. Actually”—Partridge’s voice had taken on a confidence it should not have possessed—“speaking of Phillips, there’s something I’ve brought with me to trade off for our friend here.” He nodded toward the far end of the platform, where Phillips was standing with his hand firmly attached to the arm of a woman in a green coat. Miles thought he recognized that coat…
Good God, it was Sheila’s!
“Sheila,” he whispered.
“Quite so,” said Partridge, seeming to grow physically, while the color flooded back into his cheeks, the drought of uncertainty at an end.
“You’ll never—” started Collins.
“Oh, but I will, won’t I, Miles? A fair swap, I think. I’m told that Sheila and you are getting along quite famously now.”
Miles seemed to wilt. His grip on Collins’s arm was already loosening, and Collins could feel, with the release of pressure, that he was being pushed away from his ally and toward his assassin.
“No,” he hissed. “For Christ’s sake, Miles!”
“Well, Miles?” Partridge’s was the smug voice of every schoolboy smarter than Miles and every tutor who had rebuked him, and every moralistic preacher and politician. It was the voice, too, of a universal evil, a hypocrisy that had taken over the world, the sweet-smelling breath of chaos. It always won, it always won.
“It always will,” he whispered from his tainted mouth, where bile and fear had suddenly become tangy beneath his tongue.
“Well, Miles?”
He couldn’t see Sheila too clearly, she was muffled up against the chill, but that was definitely her coat. People were walking up the platform now, boarding the train that still waited there, ready to take them to their momentous destinations. Yes, that was the green coat he had bought for her on a whim…
And that she had never liked.
A guard was standing nearby now, checking his watch. He too looked along the platform, saw that no one was hurrying for the train, then blew his whistle.
That coat, she had hated it. Hadn’t she said something to him? What was it? Yes, hadn’t she said that she was throwing it out for jumble? Jesus Christ, yes, and she had thrown it out, he had watched her doing it. She could never have worn it here today, unless…Unless…
“That’s not Sheila!” he shouted above the new roar of the engine.
“What?”
“That’s not my wife. I know it’s not!”
“Son of a bitch,” said Collins, reaching into his coat. Miles made no attempt to stop him; rather, as had been half formulated but never really discussed between them, he opened one of the train’s slowly moving doors and heaved himself in.
Partridge found his mouth opening in a silent O as he saw the gun appear in the Irishman’s hand, but then there was too much noise all around him and a hissing of pressure in his ears as he fumbled at his own coat, wherein was hidden, too deep, too late, his own pistol.
And then he screamed as the bullet leaped within him, burrowing its way like a beetle into the warm, dark interior. Collins, his teeth bared, turned to look at the train, but there was no sign of Miles Flint’s head from any of the carriage doors. He hadn’t even bothered to watch.
Past the guard, who was running in a stiff panic back down the platform, Collins could see the other man let go of the woman’s arm and begin toward him, before thinking better of it. But by that time Collins had made up his mind. He moved past Partridge, who was frozen against a dripping pillar, and homed in on the other one. He’d have as many of them as he could. Now that Flint had left him, what else could he do? The train had been the only means of escape. He was at the end of a blind alley, and the only way out of it was to move back into the heart of the station, back toward the terror of the crowd, the shouts of the guard. He passed the woman in the green coat. She had tripped and fallen, revealing short fair hair beneath her hat. Miles might have recognized her as Felicity, but Collins did not even glance down at her.
Phillips was climbing some stairs, loud metal stairs leading to a walkway. He looked scared to death and tired out, his legs moving with fatal slowness. Collins knelt and took aim, while people dived to the floor or knelt behind their cases.
“Will, no!”
The shot went wild, about a meter high of the target, but it froze Phillips. Collins took aim again.
“Will!”
It was Janine, running toward him, having shaken herself free of Jim Stevens. Stevens was holding a camera by its strap. He had been taking photographs of the whole thing! Collins gritted his teeth and brought the pistol in an arc until he
had Stevens dead in the sight.
But Janine swerved into his path, blocking out the reporter.
“Get out of the way!” he yelled. But she had stopped and didn’t seem able to move.
But Phillips was moving, damn him. He had found the top of the stairs and was above Collins now, careering along the walkway toward street level. Collins rose to his feet and followed, ignoring the cries from behind him. He took the steps two at a time, feeling able almost to fly, and heard the sirens below him, entering the concourse, filling the air with new panic. So quickly? Perhaps they had been alerted by that snake Monmouth. Well, he’d get him too, one of these days. So help him. But first this one.
On the street, though, there was no sign of Phillips, no sign at all. He hid his gun beneath the folds of his coat, Miles Flint’s old coat, and looked up and down the street. A car swerved toward him and screeched to a halt at the curbside. The passenger door was pushed open from within.
“Get in!”
He had his gun out again, the gun Miles Flint had given back to him that morning. His hands shook almost uncontrollably as he tried to aim it at this new stranger in his life.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Gray, Mr. Collins, and right now I may conceivably be the only person in the world who wants you kept alive and well. Get in. I can always use a man like you.”
The approaching howls of more police cars made up Will Collins’s mind. There could never be any escape for him. Not now, not ever.
He stepped into the car.
ENVOI
MILES FLINT SAT ON THE terrace and sipped a glass of the local wine. He looked out across two untended fields toward a forest where wild boar were said to live. It was early spring, and already the sun was doing what sun is supposed to do, warming him as he opened the newspaper. He had to drive into Castillon-la- Bataille for the English papers, which arrived three days late and at exorbitant prices, but he didn’t mind in the least. The townspeople knew that he had bought the dilapidated farmhouse near Les Salles, and they thought him eccentric but friendly. In fact, he fully intended to renovate the house and the two small fields that had now become his. Everything in good time. Meanwhile, he opened his newspaper with a keen and knowing smile on his face, eager for the latest part of James Stevens’s exposé of spy shenanigans in England and Ulster, exclusive photos and all. It was fairly obvious that much of Stevens’s material had been subjected to this and that D-Notice, but there was still enough there to make a sizable four-part “investigation” into corruption and the misuse of power. Harry Sizewell would be standing trial soon, and there were others, too, Miles knew, who would be nervous about every phone call and every knock at the door for a very long time to come.
He did not even know if he himself was safe. This part of the Dordogne was isolated enough, but one could never be wholly safe, not in his world. All one could do was enjoy the present, and he was certainly doing that. He sloshed more wine around his mouth, then swallowed luxuriously. Perhaps he could plant some vines in those fields…
“Miles?”
“I’m on the terrace.”
Sheila, looking tanned and fit, came around from the side of the house. Her hands were cupped, and she was walking quietly, as though afraid of waking a child.
“What is it?” he asked, and she opened her hands to show him. “It’s a little beetle,” he said, impressed.
“Yes, I just found it in the vegetable garden. Any idea what kind it is?”
“I haven’t the faintest.” Sheila transferred the tiny, brightly colored creature to his own open palm. “But I can find out. I’ll just go to the study and check.” And with that he was off, back into the farmhouse, weaving between unopened packing cases, beneath the gaping rafters of the first floor, until he reached his study, which was in fact the bathroom. He kept a few books there beside the toilet. Placing the beetle on the rim of the bath, he settled himself down and opened a page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IAN RANKIN is a worldwide number one bestselling writer, and has won an Edgar Award, a Gold Dagger for fiction, a Diamond Dagger for career excellence, and the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
1
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
2
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
3
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
4
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
ENVOI
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
