John Gardner - Seafire

In the hallway the front door had been left open, blowing a chilling wind into the shell of the house. Some debris, papers or leaves, flicked through the door, making a scratchy sound on the quarry-tiled entrance.

In the hall, by the foot of the stairs, he saw something small, hunched, and black, which at first he thought was a cat or, worse still, a large rat. He kicked out in a reflex, and to his surprise the object skittered along the floor, hitting the skirting board with a dull thud and the sound of a bell. It was an old telephone, still attached to the wall.

He lifted the receiver, expecting nothing, and almost jumped with fright as he heard the dial tone. Automatically he dialed the contact number. It was a female back at the distant end.

"Brother James," he said, hearing the rasp of his dry throat and realizing that he was out of breath.

"Give me the answer to question three, Brother James."

Obviously nobody back in London was taking any chances. Before leaving for Cambridge they had been through the usual list of word codes and what they liked to call telephone security. Bond viewed all this with a certain amount of cynicism, but he dragged the correct word out of his memory.

"Just hold one moment, sir."

"James?" It was the voice of Bill Tanner, M's former Chief of Staff who was now officially the Secretary of MicroGlobe One. "James, where the hell are you?"

"I haven't got a clue. You'll have to do a trace. It's somewhere the other side of Stanstead Airport. Not certain of the exact location. Old Victorian property falling to pieces. I think it probably belongs to the Tarns, because they've just left here."

"They can't have." Tanner sounded almost shocked.

"Well, put a trace on this damned telephone."

"Yes, we're doing that."

"And why can't the Tarns have just left here?"

"Because," Bill Tanner said slowly, "they were killed in a car accident just outside Cambridge last night. I've seen the bodies myself. Sir Max, Lady Trish, and their driver."

"You've seen the bodies?"

"What's left of them. Burned out of recognition, but it couldn't have been anyone else."

Behind him, Bond could hear Flicka calling out from upstairs. In the creaking darkness of the old building her voice echoed shrill, leaving behind it the wail of a banshee.

"So, nobody actually saw the accident?" Bond looked up from the pile of grisly photographs that lay on the table before him. Weak late-afternoon sunshine slanted through the window and across the highly polished table, around which the members of MicroGlobe One were seated. They were back where things had started, in the reading room at the Home Office, with the events of the previous day lingering uncomfortably in everyone's mind.

Two police cars and a further three vehicles used by the Security Service had arrived at the house within fifteen minutes of Bond's conversation with Bill Tanner. Only later did they discover that the property – Hall's Manor – was a crumbling relic of better days, five miles south of the village of Hope End.

Originally built by a mid-Victorian businessman, one Sir Brent Hall known for Hall's Peerless Pills – a useless placebo that made him a fortune by shrewd advertising and a society who would take anything for minor ailments – the rambling house was locally thought of not only as a "Folly" but also a place of hauntings. People in nearby villages usually steered well clear, and recently there had been stories of lights in the night, and other forms of ghostly activity.

The Hall family had followed in the path of so many similar self-made Victorian clans who had struck it rich with a good-selling contrivance. The Halls, they said, had gone from rags to genteel poverty in three generations, leaving the dilapidated Manor as a huge, quite useless blot on the landscape. Any sale of the land was now blocked by a mad old relative who lived in a home for ladies in reduced circumstances while she clung to the dream that Hall's Manor would one day be great again.

Flicka – usually unshakable – was almost in a state of nervous exhaustion when the rescuers arrived, and was taken to the nearest hospital for a couple of hours to wait while Bond had his wrist dressed and attended to.

Bill Tanner arranged for the Saab to be driven to the hospital and they continued their journey back to London, where they lunched well, returning to the flat off the King's Road to rest and recover.

By the evening, they were restored enough to take a short walk to one of their favorite restaurants, after which they retired to bed and slept, holding each other close, for almost twelve hours. Eventually they were woken by the telephone call that summoned both of them to a full meeting and briefing on the situation.

Over a late breakfast, they went through the papers. Sir Max had certainly made the headlines – "Tycoon and Wife Killed in Horror Car Crash; Accident Claims Lives of Philanthropist and Wife." Prominence was also given to the fact that, within hours of his death, Tarn's headquarters near Ludgate Circus, and his Chelsea home, had been raided by police officers – including members of the antiterrorist and bomb squads, as well as officers from the fraud squad and security experts.

Bond was almost immediately on the telephone to his Bedford Square office, knowing that the "security experts" would be members of his own Two Zeros Section.

Before they left for their assignation with The Committee, he made certain that his four best people, two men and two women, had been assigned to the project.

The Minister opened the proceedings: "Now that the warrants have been acted upon and we seem to be in a paper maze, it would be best that the Double-On Section take over the entire investigation." So Bond was able to tell him that he had personally appointed members of his group to liaise with the other agencies.

The complete membership of The Committee was present, including Bill Tanner, who, as Secretary, was rarely required, for his job with MicroGlobe One was really a behind-the-scenes position, as organizer and head of liaison. It was to Tanner that Bond was speaking now, for his old friend had been in charge of coordination with the Security Service's surveillance teams in Cambridge.

"As I said, nobody actually saw the accident. So will you go over events again, Bill, just to humor me?"

Tanner smiled bleakly. Things, he said, had not gone well from the start. The surveillance teams had been unable to tap into both incoming and outgoing telephone calls. "Tarn seemed to be using some very sophisticated electronics," he told Bond, who recalled Maurice Goodwin's boast about "people who'd like to listen in to our telephone conversations – though they can't because we tend to bypass the switchboard."

"It was only after the sudden departure last night that we managed to steal a peep at them," Tanner admitted. "Even then it was some chatter between two of the cars. They were heading for Duxford airfield, we thought that was probable, but they were staying off the Motorway, taking side roads, going by the villages. As you know, some of those minor roads are dangerously narrow."

The surveillance teams had Sir Max's party well boxed in. The Rolls was being led by one of the Rovers, and Bill Tanner's people were able to drive well in front, with another party staying back about a mile.

"We were checking out Duxford. Wondering if Tarn's corporate jet had landed there, which was unlikely, and, in the event, it hadn't. Our people who were following got the first hint that something was wrong. When the accident occurred, there was a trail of flame and smoke which could be seen from the Motorway itself."

The police by this time on the Tuesday afternoon had put things together, and their findings lay next to the photographs. The Rover, ahead of the Tarns' Rolls, had disappeared, but the Rolls itself had been in a head-on collision with a heavy tanker that had no business being on that particular secondary road anyway. The driver of the tanker, together with the Tarns and their driver, had probably died instantly, their bodies consumed by the flames that followed the impact.