Gerald Seymour - Condition black

Her underclothes had been neatly folded in the bottom of her handbag. No sketcher nor painter nor artist wanted to see the elastic weals on a model's shoulders and chest and hips and thighs, every model left her underwear off for as many hours as possible before posing.

The eyes of the man in the doorway had been a reawakening for Sara. It was more years than she cared to remember since she had last seen a man stare at her in frank admiration. When had she last seen Frederick stare at her, worship her? Back beyond memory.

When she had been at art college, but that was just kids hunting for trophies, and they hadn't meant a toss to her. She had turned her back on the lot of them, and married Frederick Bissett, from a terraced house in Leeds, bright boy of the street. That was her statement to her parents, to her school, to her upbringing. She could not remember when poor old Frederick had last gazed in lust at her naked body, not like Debbie's husband had.

It had been better, a long time ago it had been better, when their loving had made Frank, and better up to the time of Adam's birth. Such excruciating pain and three weeks premature, and fast, but with the pain, and Frederick on his one and only trip to New Mexico.

Alone in her agony, she had vowed that the responsible bastard would go short… He'd gone short and the trouble was – she pegged his flannel pyjamas to the frame – that he didn't seem to care.

When she had finished hanging out the washing, before she went for the weekly shop at SavaCentre, Sara applied her lipstick, and around her throat she squirted the toilet water which she had had for three years and never before used.

Debbie's husband would have cared if he had gone short, oh yes.

Rutherford was in a poor humour, because the best that the pool could provide was a two-year-old Astra with 70,000 on the clock, and a ticket on the windscreen. He couldn't have been more than two, three minutes collecting Erlich in South Audley Street, but there it was. Accounts would be pleased.

He couldn't use his own car because they were going to be way out of radio range, and he needed the car telephone with the scrambler attachment. He had argued with the pool supervisor, but it was the Astra or nothing. He detested starting the day with an argument. At least he hadn't argued with Penny. She never fussed when he said that he was going down to the country and didn't know when he'd be back. Best thing that had ever happened to him, Penny.

Erlich had the passenger seat as far back as it would go and he still shifted his weight about as if he needed another six inches of leg-room.

They had come off the M3 and were cruising on the dual carriageway A303. That was the Astra's optimum pace, a reasonably quiet 70 m.p.h. It had no guts left in it. Pool cars were watchers' cars, and were hammered.

There was the fork ahead of him, and he slowed for a gap in the oncoming traffic.

The stones were wonderful. There was light shafting off the Plain ahead, cutting down behind the stones. He loved that place.

He had loved the magic and mystery of Stonehenge since early childhood. On the way down to their holidays in Cornwall his parents had always stopped at Stonehenge for a slow coffee break while he had crossed the road to walk around the stones. Penny only wanted a West Country holiday, not the least ingratiating thing about her, and they took the same cottage that his Mum had rented, and they stopped, he and Penny, for the same coffee and the same stroll round the monument. Well, nowadays you could get no closer than the wire cage around the perimeter, thanks to the hippies or the busloads of Americans or druids maybe, who knew? He pulled into the car park.

" Y o u want to stretch your legs?"

"Not particularly."

" Y o u want a coffee from the stall?" Rutherford gestured towards the open-sided van at the edge of the car park.

" N o, thanks."

" Y o u want to see the stones?"

"I should?"

Rutherford said evenly, "Those stones were cut and erected four thousand years ago. Each one weighs more than 100 tons and was brought 200 miles overland on rollers, by sea on rafts.

We still don't understand how prehistoric man achieved that feat.

Nobody in this much bull-shitted century has achieved anything that can outlast what the men who laid out these stones did here.

So, yes, you should, just for five minutes forget about being a policeman and be a human being. I do it regularly myself. It gives me a balanced perspective."

The wind tore at their trouser legs as they circled the cage, and Erlich smiled his admiration of the great stone circle.

"Well, we mustn't lose time, must we?"

Rutherford said, "Tell me, then, who in this age of miracles can be set against the master designer of Stonehenge?"

"I am afraid you will have to take account of the men of the Manhattan Project," said Erlich through chattering teeth. "They will be remembered as long as there is history. And now, mind-boggling as this shrine of yours is, I think I need one of those coffees."

Turk, Station Officer for Tel Aviv, always responded immediately to a summons from that office, cancelled whatever appointments he had. Tork's time there was never wasted. And after the affair in the Beqa'a Valley, he was trusted. A famous mission organised by Tork's London masters – an Israeli sniper with an English guide – had killed a P. L . O. training-camp commander.

Tork was shown the transcript of a brief conversation. The text totally underlined in red ink, he was told, was that of the Director of Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission.

Tork had been Station Officer in Tel Aviv for eleven years. He had learned that there were no favours handed out. He had learned also that if there were a continuing nightmare in Israel then it was that an Arab enemy might one day possess the capability to strike at the Jewish heartland with nuclear weapons.

"I'll get it off to Century at once."

" B u t will they act on it?"

"It's not a lot to go on."

" B u t you will give it a 'most urgent' rating."

" A t my end, of course."

She had lived all her life in the street running alongside the railway, and since she had retired from her late father's business, a haberdashery store in Wimbledon, since she had sold it to a family from Northampton for a good price, Hannah Worthington walked each day to the shop at the end of the street. She never bought more, nor less, than she would need for her housekeeping for the next 24 hours. It was one of the rituals of this lonely spinster's life that every day she would take her chihuahua to the shop on the corner and back again.

Miss Worthington was a small woman. In her winter coat she appeared to be little more than a central pole with a tent draped from her shoulders. She wore a dark grey hat taken from the store on her last day as owner, and that was 17 years ago, and a plain grey scarf round her throat, and leather gloves that had stood a long test of lime. In her flat and comfortable lace-up shoes, she made good progress on her daily outing.

She walked towards the shop.

In her wicker basket there was a shopping list for a packet of porridge, one pork chop, some oven-ready chips, a carton of frozen broccoli, one apple and one orange, a small loaf of wholemeal sliced bread, and an 8oz tin of Pedigree Chum. What she liked about the shop was that it was open for business on every day of the year, liven on Christmas Day, after church, she could walk to the shop and buy her necessaries.

Of course, the street had changed mightily in the years since her birth in 1909, the year King Emperor Edward the Seventh died. Before the Great War, and afterwards also, this had been a street where bank managers and principal shopkeepers lived.

After the Second World War, the street had changed, and she knew that had brought sadness to her late father. He had talked about moving, but after his passing her late mother had simply refused to countenance what she had called "evacuation". Miss Worthington often felt it would have been an unendurable sorrow to her parents if they had lived to witness the extent of the deterioration. To start with, every single front door in the street, excepting her own, was now festooned with illuminated bell buttons, marking the division of fine family homes into little warrens of flats. To go on with, in the former days, between the Great War and the Second World War, there would never have been men working on cars in the street, as if the place were a communal garage. She saw the taxi inching down the street.