Ian Rankin: Westwind

‘I have a good reason.’ Parfit snapped his mouth shut, but too late. He had already said it. Gilchrist smiled again, nodding.

‘I thought there must be a reason. So come on, what is it?’

Parfit sighed. ‘Not here.’

‘Very well then, let’s stretch our legs as far as the secure room. I’m all ears, I’m sure.’

At last, Hepton had two clear days free from the base, and could take a drive into the country. Ripening fields, the sun beating down as it had no right to do in the course of an English summer. An occasional splash of garish yellow where rape — vegetable cash to the farmers — had been sown. But mostly the fields were green, or were delivering up golden buds of wheat and barley. A beautiful country. He so seldom noticed it, but it was the truth. He had become blind through living his life underground, but like a mole, he had burrowed his way to the surface and was now scenting the air anew. He checked in the Renault’s rear-view mirror. The Ford Sierra was still with him, a hundred yards back but quite noticeable, there being so little traffic on these winding roads.

Twenty minutes ago, he had slowed behind a tractor, though overtaking would have been easy, and had watched the car behind him edge forward until the face of the driver — female — was clear in his mirror. The face of a businesswoman, but she didn’t appear to be in any rush. So that when he had waved her past, she had flashed her lights once in acknowledgement, but shaken her head too. And stayed behind him.

She was still behind him, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing. He thought of pulling in to a café, to see whether she would follow him. After all, this might be innocence itself, a chance encounter that might lead... well, anywhere. Except that he had to press on. Paul Vincent was in the Alfred de Lyon Hospital, and the Alfred de Lyon Hospital was an inconvenient forty or so miles away yet. So he drove on.

He thought of Zephyr , of the miracles satellites could perform. He stuck an arm out of his window and waved towards the sky, wondering if he could be seen. There was no doubt that Zephyr could see him if it wanted to. It could give close-ups of his car, of his number plate. But Zephyr wasn’t trained on him. It was trained on a series of air force bases, where the US personnel were preparing for their flights back home. Or at least that was what it had been watching yesterday evening, on Hepton’s last shift.

Something niggled, though, something he had noticed and mentioned in passing to Nick Christopher. It was to do with Buchan Air Force Base in the north of Scotland, just outside the town of Peterhead. Buchan had been an RAF radar station, but then the American forces had moved in for a time. Hepton had watched it before. He liked the quality of light in northern Scotland. That was what niggled: the sun was setting early in Buchan.

‘Cloud cover,’ Christopher had explained. ‘I’ve seen the weather reports. Overcast skies.’

‘Yes,’ Hepton had said, ‘but they’re not overcast.’

And Christopher had shrugged his shoulders, then placed a hand on Hepton’s own.

‘Maybe when you go to visit Paul, you and he should swap places. What do you say?’

Then they had both laughed and gone to watch the night’s television.

Was something wrong with the weather, then? Or had the Zephyr malfunction caused some tinting of the lens, some aberration to appear on the glass? What the hell. He’d think about it some other time. For today, he had forty-eight hours’ worth of off-base permission, and he intended to use the time well. He switched on the radio and found a station broadcasting a phone-in about the Geneva arms talks. The Soviets were offering yet more deals. Jesus, what were they going to do with all those redundant guns and tanks and missiles? Better yet, what would they do with all that redundant manpower?

On another station, two critics discussed the latest high-grossing American film, Gun Law . They’d had a bootleg tape of that on the base last week. Usual vigilante stuff, all about how the USA should pull up the drawbridge and let everyone outside the moat rot. Laughable really, yet some of the men on the base had started acting tough the very next morning, and come in wearing black T-shirts and white jeans, the way the hero did.

‘Strange times,’ Hepton said out loud, flicking to another channel. Mahler. Radio 3, he supposed; some lunchtime concert. He didn’t know which Mahler it was, but he knew it was Mahler. Jilly had listened to Mahler before, during and after each session of lovemaking. Which had seemed weird to him at first. In fact, it had seemed weird all the time. She would push his prone body away from her so that she could go and change the cassette tape and then would come to him again and give him a hug, just to show that she liked him a little bit too.

But not enough to stop her taking the newspaper job in London, not enough to stop her zipping a bag and throwing it into the back of her MG, giving him a brief embrace while her eyes glazed over with thoughts of leader columns and front-page scoops. A peck on the cheek, and then into the driving seat where she belonged, no seat belt necessary, though he had warned her before.

‘Phone me!’ he had called, but she never had. And now it was over. He had toyed with the idea of using Zephyr to track her down, to peek through some bedroom window as she pushed away another prone body and went to change the tape.

It was a nice dream.

After the Mahler, there was the one o’clock news, including a small item on Major Mike Dreyfuss and the American reaction to the shuttle disaster. Predictable stuff. He had watched the TV pictures. Orange flame, the nose of the craft crumpling, turning in on itself, more explosions. It was a funny thing about Dreyfuss, though. He was in his late thirties, a few years older than Hepton, not exactly his physical prime. Hepton had read about the other candidates who’d been in the running for the UK’s only place on the mission. They’d been young, strong. So why Dreyfuss? Not that it was any big deal. Not the big deal it was when the first Briton in space had gone up on that Soviet mission, or when the second one had gone up soon afterwards, courtesy of the Americans. No, to be Britain’s third man in space: well, there was something pathetic about that, wasn’t there? He allowed himself a guilty smile.

The Alfred de Lyon Hospital was, for the most part, a rest home, and had been chosen not because it was so far away from the base but, in Fagin’s words, ‘because Paul is suffering from some kind of nervous exhaustion, and they specialise in that’. Now that Hepton re-ran that statement in his head, he saw an ominous ambiguity to it. He checked in his mirror but couldn’t see the Sierra. He signalled and came to a halt by the side of the road, where he waited for three minutes. But there was still no sign of the car. Somehow, he felt disappointed. Maybe he should double back. The woman might be in trouble, her car might have gone off the road...

Or, more likely, she had taken a turning and was heading towards her destination.

Maybe Nick was right, Hepton said to himself. Maybe I do need to book myself into this place. He started the car again, and within quarter of an hour was turning the Renault through an imposing main gateway and up a country house driveway of gravel so clean it might have been polished that very morning. Therapy for the patients, perhaps?

As he rounded a bend, a rabbit leapt into his path and he nearly hit it. He braked hard and watched it flee across an expanse of manicured lawn and into some shrubbery. Skin tingling, he opened the car door and stepped out. He could hear a car approaching the gateway. When he turned, he saw the same Ford Sierra driving past. He listened as its engine faded into the distance. Smiling, he got back into the Renault and drove up to the imposing entrance of the Alfred de Lyon Hospital itself.