"Yes, I think I do." He wasn't even sure who she was supposed to be. "What do you want?"
"I wanted to see my mummy."
If that was meant to convince him, it achieved the opposite: she sounded grotesquely self-conscious to him, an actress who might be able to convince a distraught mother but who didn't impress him at all. His cold rage was growing. "If you come here I'll take you to her."
"I can't. I wanted to meet her somewhere."
"Then perhaps you'd better meet me instead."
This time her silence was much longer. He mustn't have sounded sufficiently convinced by this voice that was trying ------------------------------------205
to pretend it was thirteen years old. Perhaps it was the lopsided woman, who hadn't caught a train at all but had dodged out through another station exit. He was cursing himself--she had been almost within reach, if only he hadn't sounded too eager--when she said, "All right."
"You'll meet me? Now?" His delight was so extreme that he was sure she wouldn't be able to tell how cold it was.
"As soon as you can get there. Come as quickly as you can." She gave him directions; it didn't sound far. "You've got to come alone," she said, "and don't tell anyone you're coming."
"You needn't worry about that."
She rang off immediately. Smiling tightly, he hurried upstairs for his coat. He hesitated only a moment outside Barbara's door before striding downstairs. Even if she weren't asleep, she would be the last person he would tell where he was going. At last he had the chance to find out for himself what kind of game her persecutors were playing. ------------------------------------206 ------------------------------------207
207
Twenty-five
Chasing the woman from Broomielaw must have taken more out of him than he'd thought. Halfway up the steep road he had to stop, for the raindrops felt like acid on his skin. The black sky squatted over the dripping roofs; a plane or a gust of wind passed overhead. Somewhere a flagpole's cord tapped like an impatient finger. When Ted had taken a few deep breaths he recommenced climbing.
The road was deserted, and so was Sauchiehall Street at the bottom. The sloping tarmac was streaming, the pavements looked oily beneath a couple of streetlamps; cars with their tails in the air were parked on blurred impressions of themselves. He climbed past a college that was locked up behind bent spikes and reached Hill Street, where he'd been directed to turn.
Hill Street consisted of terraces with bulging bay windows. Roads plunged from it toward a highway; graffiti ------------------------------------208
glimmered through the rain on walls, seemed to jerk and writhe; one huge long-legged scrawl looked flattened like a spider against the side of a house. Ted unbuttoned his coat--the rain was lessening, humidity crawled over his skin--as he strode along the terraces. Beyond the porches, flat dwellers stood talking in lit halls or even sat at tables; people sat on front steps between pillars that were peeling like wallpaper. If the phone call was a trick, as he'd begun to suspect at once, then whoever was responsible wouldn't find it so easy to get him alone.
Soon the houses grew less welcoming. Their stone balconies looked drowned, eroded by the rain. Patches pale as grass beneath a stone gleamed beside porches, where nameplates had been removed. The gardens were a mass of drooling weeds. The empty sockets of streetlamps dripped in the dark.
He wasn't nervous, he told himself. He looked daunting enough to deter most attackers, and there was certainly enough of him to take them on, if necessary. Nevertheless it unnerved him to feel watched, though a touch of paranoia was hardly surprising under the circumstances. The scuttling in the gardens behind him was rain. He didn't glance back, for that would have been absurd. In any case, the scuttling was now ahead of him.
A stray headlight beam showed him where he was to turn, at the next side street down to the highway. A spidery caricature clung to the wall at the corner, amid a web of graffiti. As he reached the street the headlights groped along the terrace and lingered on the wall. It was a mass of graffiti, but he couldn't disentangle from it anything like the long-legged glimmer that he'd seen a few moments ago. Of course it had been only a glimpse, a trick of light and rain.
This street was even steeper than the one he'd climbed. As he went down between a high wall and a building that ------------------------------------209
glistened like tar, he had to stamp to prevent himself from going too fast. He was dazzled by the floodlights high on stalks above the main road, beyond which the windows of tower blocks were feeble candle flames, but he could make out that the entire sloping street was covered with graffiti. Down at the bottom the caricature with spindly limbs and elongated head must be an afterimage, for when he arrived at the foot of the slope, there was nothing like it on the wall.
His knees felt bruised, dislocated by the slope. He stood for a moment and stared along the road, which led over a highway and two other main roads. At least it was bright as lightning, though that showed him how deserted the pavements were. Only a drunk was picking his way along the thin concrete island between the traffic lanes.
Ted walked quickly to the top of the pedestrian walkway beside which he was meant to wait. Soon the drunk vanished among the gray houses piled on the hills above the road, and the desolation was complete except for cars sweeping by. A flicker of pale movement near the walkway must have been rain in headlights.
The lanes of the road had split into two overpasses which bridged the Inner Ring Road, a four-lane highway sandwiched between two other roads. Traffic passed constantly on all of them; the noise was appalling. Bushes and shrubs and weeds, white as mold beneath the floodlights, hemmed in the concrete ramp of the walkway. Would whoever met him come up the ramp?
For a while he gazed down there. Leaves twitched with rain, but nothing else moved. He stared at each car that went by, spraying rain, though it was unlikely that whoever was coming would arrive by car; that wouldn't look convincing. There was nothing else to watch. He felt like Cary Grant, waiting in the middle of the desert in the ------------------------------------210
Hitchcock film. Certainly the Inner Ring Road was as desolate.
He'd begun to march back and forth along the pavement, patrolling for lack of anything else to do, before he became suspicious. Suppose it really had been Angela on the phone and they had prevented her from coming? He was unwilling to believe that--he still didn't believe in Angela-- but the likely alternative wasn't encouraging. Had he been lured out here so that they could have Barbara to themselves?
They couldn't harm her. If they called they wouldn't be put through to her room, if they dared to go to the hotel they wouldn't be told what room she was in or allowed to go up. Still, he wondered uneasily how soon he could go back to her. Another quarter of an hour--it was one in the morning now. He was patrolling, and arguing mutely with himself, when a face peered up at him from the bushes.
No, it couldn't have been a face. It must have been a scrap of litter which had caught momentarily in the branches and then had blown away. He had already explained to himself why he felt watched. Even so, when he glimpsed the long pale thing again, gleaming whiter through the whitish leaves--perhaps headlights on the highway were catching part of the foliage--he went down, to prove to himself there was nothing.
The walkway was much darker than the roads. Foliage made the concrete ramp narrower, fragments of floodlight blinked through the leaves. The undersides of the overpasses swarmed with graffiti. He leaned over the railings and peered into the bushes, but as far as he could tell, they concealed nothing. He hurried down the ramp, to see where it led--to see if anyone was hiding there, watching him.
Halfway down it divided, beside metal arrows whose directions had been scratched out by graffiti. A ramp led down to a pavement at the edge of the Inner Ring Road; a ------------------------------------211
concrete path led above the highway, parallel to the lanes. He could see there was nobody at the bottom of the ramp. He went along the path be
tween the jerking bushes.
Once he rounded a curve he was surrounded by concrete. The two branches of the road where he'd been waiting led above him, the highway glared below. Noise pressed in from all sides; he couldn't hear his own footsteps. He could see nothing but roads and slivers of wasteland between them.
Beyond a cobbled slope which led down from the gap between the overpasses, the path curved again between bushes. He stepped forward, though he was sure there would be nothing to see. The thin pale limbs beyond the foliage were stalks, of course, shifting in a humid breeze. When he reached the spot he couldn't even see them. Another empty ramp led up to the pavement opposite the place where he'd waited.
He'd had enough. The desertion was beginning to look like a joke at his expense. Perhaps that was why they'd brought him here, to teach him not to try to get the better of them. In any case, he'd left Barbara alone long enough: suppose she woke and couldn't find him? He hurried back through the crowd of concrete pillars above the highway, and round the curve. There he halted. Between him and the ramps, beside the erased metal arrows, two blankfaced men were waiting.
As soon as they saw him their faces grew even blanker. When they stepped forward he turned at once and strode beneath the overpasses. He didn't know if the men were a trap that had been set for him, but he wasn't about to find out here, not while he had a means of escape. He hurried along the stretch of concrete above the highway--if they caught him there, nobody would hear--to the curve between the shifting bushes. Once he reached the main road he might turn on the men--except that two more, their ------------------------------------212
faces identically blank, were marching down the other ramp toward him.
When he turned, the first two were almost upon him. One of them, a starved youth with monkish hair, he thought he'd seen before. Ted ran at them, looking as fierce as he could, but they blocked his way. A random glare of floodlight through the restless foliage made their faces seem even more like masks.
As soon as the monkish youth was close enough, Ted hit him. His chin felt like a sharp rock inside a thin padding of stubbly flesh. He sat down against the railings above the highway and clutched his face, but clambered to his feet at once. Though Ted's knuckles felt as if he'd hit them squarely with a hammer, the youth seemed to feel nothing.
The diversion gave Ted the chance to run, though not very far. Two of them caught him by the cobbled slope between the overpasses. When they pinioned his arms he tried to kick one of them in the groin, but lost his balance on the wet concrete. They threw him backward on the slope. Cobbles dug into him, grit and shards of glass stung his hands.
He could still struggle and curse them, even though he couldn't hear himself. It took three of them a while to immobilize him sufficiently for the largest of them to punch him viciously on the back of the neck. At once his head felt like a half-deflated balloon; he grew dizzy and hideously sick. The glare of a truck above him seemed to burst in his eyes. He felt so dislocated that when the old woman appeared round the curve she meant nothing at all.
But she was a passerby, an old woman whose hair was white except for a wide silver streak, and she'd seen what they were doing to him. They hadn't noticed her yet, and she was limping away from them as fast as she could. He tried to struggle in order to distract them, though that made ------------------------------------213
his nausea worse. He was willing her to be quick, to get out of sight before they saw her, to call the police or anyone who could help.
She was almost round the curve when she fell. Perhaps that was all--she tripped and fell through a gap between the railings. Headlights flickered through the leaves, everything was oozing through his brain, and he couldn't be sure that a figure had been clinging amid the graffiti beneath the overpass. Perhaps it was only a flurry of branches. Surely nothing with a long whitish head could have scuttled down to drag the old woman into the bushes.
The men heaved him to his feet and rushed him down the path, though his legs were melting. His thoughts were all he could control, and it occurred to him that if any of the drivers saw him they would take him for a drunk who had to be supported home. For a moment he was afraid that his captors were about to fling him onto the highway. Instead they shoved him into the bushes, twigs clawing at his hands, an undergrowth of litter tripping him. Beyond all this, a ramp composed of rubble led down to a house.
It seemed impossible that a house was there, on an island of wasteland beneath the overpasses. It must have been allowed to remain until it was beyond demolishing. He was speculating to convince himself he could at least think clearly, for he was helpless to prevent himself from being carried forward to the house. A grubby curtain parted like a reptile's eyelid; he was expected. The front door opened as he was dragged to it, his heels catching on rubble. The men threw him into the dark hall, and the noise closed in. ------------------------------------214 ------------------------------------215
215
Twenty-six
Barbara couldn't tell if she was dreaming. Sunlight streamed between the curtains and spotlighted her empty rumpled bed, or was she lying there invisible to herself and dreaming that she was looking down at it? If not, was Arthur really somewhere close to her?
He was there, but he was shrinking. If she didn't find him soon he would have gone, and she sensed how anxious he was. She hurried to the window, but none of the heads bobbing by in the street was his. She was on her way to look in the bathroom when she realized how absurdly she was behaving. Her sense of him dwindled at once; his face receded into the darkness of her mind, grew smaller than an atom, and she was fully awake.
And there was nothing to distract her from her fears-- from the worst of them, which she hadn't mentioned to Ted because she was afraid to admit it to herself. If the ------------------------------------216
cult had stolen Angela because they feared her power for good, that meant it was too strong for them: Angela's calls proved that her sense of herself had survived--but what might they have done to her, or be planning to do, to break her down?
Nothing too bad, to judge from the tone of her calls--or was she too trusting to realize what they were doing? Suddenly Barbara didn't want to be alone. She pulled on clothes and hurried out to knock on Ted's door. There was no reply.
She knocked more loudly and stared along the corridor. On a tray outside a room one coffee cup was trying clumsily to mount another. Bedroom radios played relentlessly cheerful tunes. When a trolley full of linen nudged open the fire doors she called out to the chambermaid, "What's the time?"
"Nearly ten."
Her watch wasn't wrong, after all. He'd said he would meet her for breakfast, but he must have decided to let her sleep. She washed hastily and hurried downstairs. A few people were scattered about the spacious restaurant, beneath yellowed chandeliers; an old lady waited to be wheeled away, a man with a silver mustache lowered his newspaper and bade Barbara good morning. The loudest sounds were the rattle of a spoon in a cup, the scrape of a knife on toast. None of the breakfasters was Ted.
One of the waiters thought that Mr. Crichton might have breakfasted, though he clearly wasn't sure. She ordered breakfast and tried to be patient; no doubt he'd gone out for a walk. Or could he be searching on her behalf? The last breakfasters strolled away, waiters began to set tables for lunch. All at once her nerves couldn't stand their discreetly muted sounds. She hurried out to the foyer to see if he'd left a message for her.
There was no message, the girl said, but his key was at ------------------------------------217
the desk. She was turning away--an impatient tweedy woman was banging the nipple of the bell on the counter-- before Barbara thought to ask when he had left the key. "I'm afraid I don't know," the girl said over her shoulder. "It must have been left before I came on."
"When was that?"
"Half past six."
Surely that must have been addressed to the tweedy woman--but when Barbara reflected, that didn't seem an unlikely time for
the day staff to begin work. Where could he have gone so early? Even if he'd been unable to sleep-- sometimes he was--wouldn't he have left a message unless he had meant to return before now?
When the girl had dealt with the impatient woman she looked faintly annoyed to find Barbara still waiting. "Are you absolutely sure that Mr. Crichton left no message?" Barbara said.
"Well, if he did it's certainly not here."
Could the message have been lost? Perhaps that was a reassuring possibility, though not reassuring enough to let Barbara eat breakfast. "I'm sorry," she said to the waiter who headed for the kitchen as soon as she appeared, "I've had some bad news," and wished at once that she hadn't said so, however guilty he had made her feel.
For a while she waited in the foyer. Guests passed her in slow motion, tapping their walking sticks, gazing from wheelchairs. The gleam of the revolving doors snagged the edge of her vision, pestered her constantly to glance across and make sure it wasn't Ted. She ought to be glad that he didn't feel tied to her, that he felt free to go out for a walk. His message for her must have gone astray.
Eventually she forced her way through the revolving doors--they jammed for a moment, trapping her in the smeared glass cage with a ghost of pipe tobacco--and waited outside the hotel. Now and then a head rose above ------------------------------------218
the chaos of faces, but it was never Ted's. Wasn't it enough that she couldn't find Angela? She wished she could look for him, but she had no idea where to start. If he returned while she was looking he wouldn't know where she was.
She ventured as far as the opposite pavement and gazed along Sauchiehall Street. One direction led to the Inner Ring Road, where the buildings looked gray as fumes. At the opposite end was a pedestrian precinct, the roadway paved over. People bunched outside the shops, workmen climbed scaffolding outside Charles Rennie Mackintosh's tearoom like spiders rebuilding a web, a board outside a doorway announced the viewing before an auction of books. Ted had wondered what they might be auctioning.
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