Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Mister heard what she said, but hardly listened. He read the note again and felt a small sensation of excitement, better than when the launcher had fired.

The Eagle repeated what the receptionist had told him.

'Yes, yes – I heard it the first time…' He laughed quietly. 'Would have been choice if I'd gone through without thinking… '

'But you always think, Mister, don't you?'

Mister was smiling. 'Tomorrow's not busy, not till the evening, and it's the day after tomorrow that matters. Anyway, I'll be out of town on a little trip.

You and Atkins can lose yourselves, can't you, till the evening?'

'Buckets to do here,' the Eagle said. 'Buckets of fun to be had.'

He thought there was a brittle snap in the Eagle's voice. If it hadn't been for the message he might have kicked the Eagle's shin, but he'd read it. They walked to the lift. The Eagle, as always, pushed the outside button for him and stood aside to let him enter first, then pushed the inside button for their floor. Mister was slow to recognize sarcasm: it was too far back in his life for him to remember the last man who had been sarcastic to his face.

Henry hadn't left a contact address. He'd been vague, infuriatingly obtuse, about where he could be reached when he was abroad. 'May be in and out of several hotels – I'll be on the move. It wouldn't really be a good idea for you to call me or me to call you – it's only for a few days.' It had never been Mo Arbuthnot's habit to quiz her husband on his work, and she'd let it go. He'd kissed her cheek and said he'd ring from Heathrow when he was back in the country.

Three hours before, while she and the girls had slept, the cars had crunched onto the pepper-coloured gravel of the drive. The dogs in the kitchen had woken first, had disturbed Mo, and she'd seen in a half-awake haze the headlights against her bedroom curtains. She'd heard the dogs' barking and the chorus of birdsong in the garden's trees, the slamming of doors, the scrape of feet across the gravel, and the peal of the bell. She'd gone down the stairs, shrugging into her dressing-gown, and peered through the front door's spyhole. They'd activated the security lights.

They were well lit: a cluster of men, and one woman, on the step; one face was masked by a plume of pipesmoke. She'd called out that they should identify themselves and small cards were held up to the spyhole. She'd opened the door. Four of the men and the woman had pushed past her, no word said, but the one with the pipe, the eldest, biting on its stem, puffing like a damned chimney, had intoned the text of the authorized warrant to search her home then handed her the sheet of paper as if she might want to check that an error had not been made. She hadn't bothered to read it, but she had claimed, had insisted, that there had to be an error. ' I doubt it,' the older man had growled. 'We make very few errors, ma'am.' A police car was parked behind their cars, but the two uniformed men stayed in it, as if this was not their business. She had demanded the names of the intruders, and had been ignored. When the older man had stepped sideways in the hall to go by her she had proclaimed, with all the haughtiness she could muster, that she did not permit smoking in her home.

He'd smiled, a chilling crack at the side of his mouth, then strolled back on to the outer doorstep where he had whacked his pipe against the raised heel of his polished shoe and the embers had fallen onto the grouted bricks. He'd left them glowing there and gone by her

… Without proper points of contact, Mo Arbuthnot had no one to call, no one to cry to for help

… She thought her home was violated. Two of them were in her husband's study, his inner sanctum off the far end of the lounge. One was in the dining room and had the drawers and books out of the antique rosewood desk where she recorded the household accounts. Another had chosen the oak chest, Jacobean, in the sitting room. It had been like a wound to her.

But the worst of the wounds had not been the rape of her privacy, or the silent shock on the faces of her daughters who clung to each other at the top of the stairs, it was the woman and the family dogs. The woman had gone into the kitchen and left the door open. The dogs should have been leaping at her, or getting behind her legs and snarling at her ankles. She was down on the kitchen's heavy-weave carpet, scratching bellies, crooning to them: she had bought their affection. Then she had started to search every cupboard, every shelf, to open every cookery book kept on top of the dresser.

The older man, his warm pipe pocketed, tramped up the stairs. She saw the politeness with which he requested the girls to move aside and make way for him. He went into her bedroom. Out of her sight he would have been sifting in the drawers of her dressing-table, and that hurt too; but nothing hurt as cruelly as the betrayal of her dogs.

Mo Arbuthnot knew little of her husband's work.

He was a criminal lawyer, he worked through the week in London, and brought little of the work home.

At weekends, he did not discuss his caseload with her.

'Not what I come down here for,' he'd say. 'Down here is for getting away from it.' Sometimes, on a Sunday evening, he'd shut himself away in his study for an hour, and she and the girls would be in the sitting room with the television, then he'd bring out his briefcase and leave it by the front door for the early Monday-morning departure. It was always locked. At dinner parties or drinks sessions, at home or at their friends', if Henry was asked about work, he would answer in generalities and effortlessly steer away the talk. 'Legal stuff, anything that comes along, enough to make a c r u s t… How's the cricket team doing this summer?' The crust – she was not stupid, she could do the arithmetic – was in excess of two hundred thousand pounds in income a year, and there was a stocks portfolio and a pension scheme. She was looked after, as were the girls' schools, and the horses.

Few of the women she knew in the village, of her status, had a finger on the pulse of their husband's finances… She understood so little of his life and never pressed to be told. Not often, occasionally, not more than once a calendar month, the phone would ring, and Henry would he in the garden or at the stables, and she'd answer it, and a very soft-spoken voice would say, 'Mrs Arbuthnot? So sorry to trouble you, hope it's not inconvenient – can I speak to him, please? It's Mister…' She'd go to the front door, or the kitchen door, or the french windows off the dining room, and shout that he was wanted and who wanted him, and Henry would always come running. Mister was, Henry said, 'just another client'.

They left They look nothing with them, went empty- handed to their cars.

She hated them., but most of all their chief. 'You see?'she said, with venom. 'You made a mistake. As a piece of rudeness this is beyond belief. You bullock into my home, you disturb me, you terrify my girls, and al the end of otl the exercise was without the slightest justification.'

The older man said, as he lit his pipe, 'What you should remember, ma'am, and tell your husband upon his return is that as a more unpleasant creature than myself once remarked "We only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time." Good day, ma'am.'

She went to the phone, rather than to her daughters. It was the sixth time she'd called their office number – she was too stressed to consider or ponder on it, that the previous five times she'd dialled out none of the men, nor the woman, had objected They had not tried to prevent her spreading the word of their search – and she was rewarded.

'Josh? Thank God I've got you… It's Mo Arbuthnot… I am in the middle of a nightmare…