Written in Blood(88)
‘What absolute bastards.’
‘It’s the name of the game, Rex.’
‘Poor devil!’
‘Forever after he felt the disgrace of it.’
‘He would, of course.’
‘Naturally the last thing he wanted was to have all this painfully revived.’
‘Why didn’t he say? I would have understood. It is my field after all.’
‘They take an oath.’
‘Ah.’
‘So you see—’
‘Hang on. Jennings. Isn’t that an Irish name?’
‘I think he comes from—’
‘By Jiminy!’ And then a softly muttered soldier’s curse. ‘I believe we’re fingering the IRA here.’
‘I shouldn’t jump—’
‘We must ring the police.’ Briefly his attorney rested her head in her hands. ‘The Terrorist Squad. New Scotland Yard.’
Sue spent the next quarter of an hour dissuading Rex from immediate action before she felt it safe to transfer her attention to practical matters. These included bathing his face and hands and talking him into shaving. She made some fresh tea and drew up a short list of things he needed from the shop.
‘I’ll get them in the morning.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m going to switch the immersion on now. Promise me you’ll have a hot bath and a lovely long rest.’
Rex agreed and meant it, for combined exhaustion and unhappiness had left him feeling he could sleep forever.
‘In the morning you can put on some nice clean things and I’ll take these grotty ones for a whizz in my machine. Now.’ She leaned forward and kissed the deep ridges across his white, dry forehead. ‘You’re going to be all right, aren’t you?’
Rex just trapped a yawn and Montcalm, who had been sitting at his master’s feet throughout, smiled in the strange way that dogs have, stretching his blackish-grey top lip, wrinkling back his nostrils and slightly opening his mouth.
And it was on that positive note that Sue had left them. Sitting side by side in the dim, squalid little kitchen, not nearly so distraught as when she arrived but still, she feared, capable in an instant of tumbling back into remorseful sorrow.
Now, back in her own front room, Sue stopped biting her nails, sprang up from the sofa and started pacing about. She had to dream up a method of keeping them happy. And also find a way to stop Rex racing all around the village with tales of Republican mayhem.
Oh, it was all too much for one person to handle. She needed to share this new responsibility. Obtain assurance that she had done the right thing. Perhaps get some advice on what her best course of future action should be.
Then, stopping almost in mid-stride, it came to her. There was someone. Not a person with whom she was especially friendly or had anything in common with, but a member of the Circle nevertheless. And, as such, bound to be interested in Rex’s revelations.
Sue sat down again, pulled the phone on to her lap and dialled Laura’s number.
Laura was glad, after all, that she had gone into work. Several nice things had happened and, while before last Monday most would have barely registered, today, cumulatively, they had almost cheered her up. She had decided to treat these incidents as omens; small signposts indicating possible ways out of the morass of misery in which she was so helplessly floundering.
First, there were two cheques in the post. One, for over three thousand pounds, from a couple who had ignored all her previous letters and invoices and proved persistently evasive on the telephone. Laura had been finally compelled to threaten them with a summons.
Then Adrian McLaren, the man who had brought the linen cupboard over in his Land Rover, had asked her out for a drink. She had said no, naturally, but had recognised, even at the moment of refusal, a faint but surely healthy glimmer of satisfaction.
But best of all had been lunch. Laura had always had a friendly relationship with the owners of the Blackbird bookshop. They occasionally took in each other’s parcels and kept an eye generally if one or the other was absent. Every now and again Avery Phillips would ask Laura round for what he called ‘soup and bits’ and she always went, for he was a wonderful cook.
Today she had said she really didn’t feel up to it which was true, for by one o’clock the nearly imperceptible buzz given by the drinks invitation had worn off and she was feeling utterly dreary again. But Avery had insisted and she had had neither the will nor the energy to argue.
It was not as if, she told herself climbing the steep unvarnished stairs, she would have to make conversation. Avery always talked a blue streak, never waiting for a response or listening if one came.
The somewhat dusty room over the shop was mainly used for storage, over half the space being taken up by boxes and brown-paper parcels of books. Obsolete posters urgently hyping past bestsellers were stuck to the walls. One corner held a small sink and a Baby Belling. In the window bay a small, round table was beautifully laid for three. Stiff white cloth and napkins, plain but elegant wine glasses, bistro cutlery. A bottle of wine, Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon, was uncorked and breathing.