LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 8

      He set out for London early on Friday morning while the mists were still grazing the fellsides like the ghosts of old flocks. The pain he felt at leaving all this behind surprised him, but as he’d sat and talked to Bryant the day before, he had known he had to go. Jacob was in London, and only Jacob could tell him why Bryant had been targeted and whether the instruction was still active since the deadline. Further than that, he could not think.

      The journey down had a dreamlike quality. He drove with automatic ease, his body at rest in a soundproof cocoon, with soft upholstery, even-temperatured air and gentle music from the stereo cassette. He tried to fix his thoughts on the problems ahead but they kept on drifting back to the quiet joys of the land behind him. Four hours later, when he parked his car and stepped out into the din of Central London, it was like leaving a monastery cell for an iron foundry.

      Quickly he made his way to his flat on the west side of Soho. It was twenty years since he had come to live here. The sixties were just beginning to swing. Then, the district’s aura of urban picturesque with hints of Bohemian low-life had seemed a perfect match for the times; the old inhibitions were dying and the age of openness, freedom, and guiltless joy was being born. Not that Jaysmith had been very receptive to such optimism then, but now, for the first time, he was aware with more than just his eyes and ears of the squalid side-channels all that flood of high promise had been diverted into.

      What had seemed Bohemian was now Babylonian; what had begun as openness was now exhibitionism; the porn merchants had worked out that there was more money in joyless guilt than guiltless joy, and the only freedom celebrated in these littered streets was the one civil liberty that civilized societies never denied their citizens – their right to seek degradation and self-destruction any which way they liked.

      His flat occupied the top floor of a building which had once had a Greek restaurant at street level. Now there was an Adult Video shop. He turned into the doorway leading onto the narrow stair which ran up the side of the building. At the foot of the stairs squatted two youths with their arms round each other. One had his head shaved smooth except for a spikey orange-dyed coxcomb; the other had lank black hair and the ten o’clock shadow of an Arafat beard prickling his jowels and jaw. The Coxcomb had his face in a plastic bag, held tight around the neck. He was breathing in with pig-like snorts and when he raised his face, the glue in the bag was running like mucus round his nostrils and lips. Arafat took the bag, while he stared vacantly at Jaysmith. Neither made any attempt to move out of his way.

      Holding back his anger, Jaysmith stepped over them and made his way up the stairs. At his door he paused and looked back in case the glue-sniffers had ambitions to become muggers too. All was quiet. He opened his door. It had two deadlocks on it and the windows had internal steel shutters so that the flat was in complete darkness despite the smokey sunshine outside.

      He flicked on the light and glanced at the strip of lightsensitive photographic paper which he always placed on the floor near the door immediately before leaving. As he watched, it turned black.

      He poured himself a drink and looked round, horrified at what he saw. There was no shortage of comfort – he’d been given a good start, and the money had come pumping in, thick and regular as arterial blood, after that. But what he had constructed was a prison.

      He pressed the rewind-and-play button on his answering machine. There was very little on it. Few people had his number, and fewer of those were likely to be making social calls. In fact only one message caught his attention, not really a message at all, but readable as one.

      A man’s voice exclaimed Jaysmith! That was all.

      He checked the timing of the call. It had come through less than an hour after he had phoned Enid to cancel his contract on Bryant.

      He listened to the word again.

       Jaysmith!

      The word was distorted in anger, bitten off short as though there was much else to follow but the speaker had recognized the folly of committing it to an answering machine.

      Despite the distortion, despite the brevity, he had no difficulty in recognizing the voice. It was Jacob, no doubt of that. That precise, rather nasal accent was unmistakable, even though the usual drily ironic inflexion had been replaced by something approaching rage. Any emotion which brought Jacob so close to breaking his own security must have been extreme indeed.

      The flat had two bedrooms, or rather a bedroom and a boxroom. This last contained a small workbench with a vice and various metal working tools. The kind of repairs and modifications Jaysmith occasionally wanted to make to his equipment were not to be doled out to some jobbing craftsman. Now he carefully unwrapped the soap taken from the bathroom at Naddle Foot and set about producing keys which matched the imprints in the cake.

      He worked swiftly and with tremendous concentration and ninety minutes later he was satisfied. Carefully he wrapped up the three keys with a small tungsten file for on-the-spot modification and put the resulting package into his inside pocket.

      Now he relaxed and realized he was hungry, not having eaten anything since his breakfast at the Crag Hotel. The freezer held a selection of made-up meals. He selected one at random and put it in the microwave oven. It turned out to be lasagna. He ate most of it, washed down with a half bottle of his best Chablis. Suddenly he felt rather restless and looked at the telephone and thought of ringing Anya in Cumbria. It was a crazy notion, instantly dismissed. He then thought of ringing his Enid number, to let them know he was here. But that would be a mistake too. He had retired. He must not seem to have any desire to make contact. And in any case he guessed that they would know he was back by now and if they wished to contact him, eventually they’d get round to it.

      He forced himself to relax, and went through to the bedroom, and lay on his bed, and waited for Jacob.

      The first time he ever saw Jacob, he had been lying on his bed.

      He swam out of a drug-filled sleep into a world of physical pain and then burst through that into a world of mental and emotional agony, more bitter by far, and finally opened his eyes in desperate search of a physical image to blot out the horrors in his mind.

      And there was Jacob.

      Just a man in a dark double-breasted suit totally unsuitable for the hot, humid climate of South-East Asia, yet there was no sign of discomfort as he sat by the bed, still as a lizard on a wall, his squashed-up face wearing its customary expression of weary puzzlement at the foolishness on display before him.

      ‘You’re awake, are you?’ he asked. ‘Can you move?’

      He tried. The pain in his body shifted around a bit but didn’t get much worse until he tried to speak. Then he realized that the left side of his face must have been badly cut. A long strip of plaster covered perhaps a dozen stitches.

      ‘Where’s Nguyet?’ he managed to whisper.

      The dark-suited man shrugged.

      ‘I should think she’s dead, wouldn’t you, Mr Collins?’

      ‘I saw her, she was alive …’ His voice tailed off as he recalled his last glimpse of that golden body,

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