The Boat House (24 page)

"And become somebody else's?"

He smiled faintly, as if in concession. "Who knows?"

She thanked him again for the loan of the car.

And then, feeling pretty buoyant, she drove away.

She went down the track, around the turn, and past the trees before the iron bridge. The air blower didn't seem to work but she wound the window the rest of the way down to get the breeze, and after she'd left the village behind she turned on the radio. It was strange, but on the way out she didn't seem to have noticed how downright pleasant the day really was. She tried all of the radio's preset buttons, but the only signal coming through with any clarity was that of the local station down on the coast. It was the wrap-up for the eleven o'clock news.

It wasn't this, but the message that came in on the tail end of the bulletin that almost caused her to swerve and bang up the Zodiac's other headlight as she was turning into the narrow dirt road leading to the Hall.

She parked messily, and ran inside to her office. Wednesday was the day that the rugs were taken out and the hall tiles washed down in the morning, and she almost skidded on the wet marble and arrived in the former library in a heap. Luckily, Jed wasn't here to see her breaking almost all of the rules that she'd laid down for him. She pulled open the desk drawer where she vaguely remembered that she'd put the Auto-Marine's business card, and then when she'd found it she picked up the phone to call Pete.

But she couldn't, because there was already someone on the line.

She recognised the voice immediately. No one else that she'd ever known had spoken with an accent quite like it.

"
All right
," the Peterson woman was saying. "
But you come along and you tell nobody where you're going. I wouldn't want this to get out…
"

And then her voice tailed away, as if she'd become aware that someone was listening.

As silently as she could, Diane replaced the receiver. She winced as it clicked down the last quarter-inch. And then she sat back from her desk and waited.

It had to have been Dizzy on the other end; this line was shared with an extension up in his private suite, and nobody else could use it. When Bob Ivie or Tony Marinello wanted to make a call, they had to come down and borrow Diane's. The household staff had a pay phone in what had once been the pantry. Dizzy's Women sometimes called out, but there were none of them around and hadn't been for several weeks now; so Dizzy himself it was.

Dizzy and the Peterson woman, arranging a private meeting? Diane had known about the two of them going up to his private apartments on the night of the party, but then she'd seen Dizzy coming down alone only a few minutes later. Whatever he'd been planning, it clearly hadn't happened. But it was equally clear now that this hadn't been the end of it.

Her door was open, and she could hear Dizzy as he came down the stairs. She was expecting him to come in, either to explain or to make a complaint about her cutting in on the call, but he did neither; instead he went down the hallway and on out of the main door, and when Diane went over to look out of one of the windows she saw his limousine, the big black monster with the tinted glass, swinging around to head out of the estate.

Slowly, she walked back to her desk. She stood there, thinking for a few moments. And then she sat down, picked up the phone, and began to dial.

Her first impulse had been to call Pete at the yard. The item that she'd heard on the Zodiac's scratchy radio had a direct relevance to him, after all, and if she hadn't been so close to home she'd probably have swung right around and gone back to tell him about it.

But something about the situation troubled her.

There's something about her that worries me,
he'd said,
and I don't know what it is.

Me, too, Diane was thinking.

She finished dialling, not the Auto-Marine's code but a number that was still running through her mind in the mnemonic of the radio station's jingle.

And when she finally got through, she said, "I'm calling about the emergency message that you broadcast at the end of the news…"

THIRTY-ONE

Dizzy Liston tended not to do much of his own driving; this had seemed like a good idea ever since a Marylebone magistrate had taken his license away, some eleven months before. Caution wasn't uppermost in his mind now, however, as he turned the big shadow silent car out onto the valley road. His mind was on the directions that he was now repeating, over and over, fixing them in his memory with continuous rehearsal. Even though he was technically the major landowner at this end of the valley, he knew his way around no better than the average visitor; most of his life so far had been spent at Winchester school, a minor Oxford college, and a series of Mayfair addresses all taken on short leasehold. It was said that the Liston males had stopped taking much of an interest in their home territory around the time that the custom of
droit de seigneur
had fallen out of use. Most of the land was now in hock, anyway, and the house was halfway to a ruin; Dizzy's plan had been to kick around here for a few months obeying doctor's orders and getting his topspin back, and then head once more for the bright lights leaving Diane in command for good. She'd be charged with the duty of keeping the estate staff in mortal terror and liaising with the forestry people so that Dizzy's cash float would be regularly renewed.

That had been the idea; but the waitress had changed everything.

He saw a gated track just before the village, marked by a boulder painted white at the edge of the road; he took the limo up as far as he could go, and then he left it to walk the rest of the way. What if he was in the wrong place? What if he was in the right place, and she didn't come?

The first question was settled when he came to a slate-built stile, which was exactly as she'd described it to him. The second remained unanswered, because when he scrambled over and walked out into the wooded clearing on the other side of the wall, she wasn't there.

It was part of an estate forest - one of his own, he supposed. The gate and the KEEP OUT notices that he'd left behind ought to be enough to ensure privacy, even so close to the village and at this time of the year. But he didn't want solitude, he wanted to see Alina. She'd promised, so where was she? What was he supposed to do, go down to her tatty little cafe like one of the herd and try to bid for a minute of her distracted attention?

Never, he thought.

But underneath the thought, he knew that if it proved to be the only way, he'd probably do it.

"Well?" she said.

He spun around, spooked like a rabbit. She was standing by the stile, one hand still on the topstone, and she was looking at him; he hadn't heard anything of her approach, anything at all.

He said, "I thought you wouldn't come."

"Why would I lie to you?"

"That's not what I meant. But you've strung me out for so long, I was starting to believe that it would never happen." He was also starting to sound the way he knew that he'd sounded on the phone, but he couldn't help it.

"I'm not so hard to get hold of," she said.

"You want to bet?"

"I'm a working girl, Mister Liston, I can't come running every time you call. Why is it so important to you, anyway?"

This was it; and he knew, without need of omens or evidence, that he was somehow going to mess up the next couple of minutes.

He said, "I don't know what you did to me."

"Me?" Alina Peterson moved away from the stile and into the clearing, not toward him but in a wide circle around him. It was as if she were deliberately staying out of his reach - half taunt, half provocation. She made no sound on the bark and fallen leaves. She said, "I've done nothing."

"That night," he insisted, "at the party. I thought that you'd stay, but you didn't. I tried to call you, and you kept putting me off. What do I have to
do
?"

"Try explaining what you mean."

He wasn't sure that he could. He said, "I can't stop thinking about you. It's way out of control. I can't relax, I can't sleep. I sit around all the time just wondering how you are, and what you're doing."

She stopped, and fixed him with a hard look. "Are you trying to say that you're in love with me?"

"No," he said bleakly. "I might understand it if I was, but how can I be? We went upstairs, we talked for ten minutes, you disappeared. Nothing works that fast. I'm thirty-five years old, and I've made a fool of myself often enough to know the real thing when I get it. This is something else."

"So now you're asking me for an explanation, and I can't give it to you."

"Do you affect anyone else like this?"

"I don't know. I'm not the one to ask."

She looked away from him now, and moved toward a fallen trunk to sit. The trunk was hollowed out and scorched, lightning-burned. As she took a perch, Liston said, "It's tearing me up, and every day I don't see you it gets worse. If I don't get help, I'm going to crack up."

But she wasn't exactly taking all of his soul-baring with the sympathy that he'd hoped for.

"So see a doctor," she said.

"I don't need a doctor, I need you."

"How?"

"Come and stay with me. I've heard about the place where you're living now, and I can give you better than that. All I'm asking for in return is the chance to get you out of my system."

She looked at him for a long moment, her hands clasped around her knees and something in her expression that might have been amusement. Over on the far side of the wall behind her a stream could be heard, a constant sluicing like rain on the darkest of nights. A breeze sighed, and lightly shook the branches overhead.

"My, my," she said. "How you sweep a girl off her feet with your romantic talk. You may have made it through thirty-five years, Mister Liston, but you don't seem to have learned much about other people. If you can stop looking on the rest of humanity as minor characters in your biography, then perhaps we can start to discuss this. Until then, I don't think there's anything more to be said."

And with that, she got up from the burned log and walked back toward the stile over which she'd arrived. "Alina,
please
," Liston began as she passed him, not reaching out to stop her even though she was close enough for him to be able to; and she half-glanced back, as if in approval.

"That's a start," she said. "Keep trying."

"Can I call you?"

"No." She reached for the topstone again. "I have to make a few changes in my life around here. When I've made a final decision on what I want to do, then you'll hear from me. Until then you wait, and you say nothing to anyone about this."

He was about to speak, but he quickly changed his mind. Unless he was mistaken, she'd just offered him some hope. He had a profound sense of being like a fish on a line; she was playing him and it was painful, and with every move the hook was biting deeper. It was maddening, frustrating; he was used to women that he could pick up and use, blow off his infatuation like so much steam before letting them go. Alina seemed to know it, and she wasn't going to play it his way; instead, he was going to have to follow the rules that she'd laid down for the occasion.

He didn't understand it.

But he didn't have any choice, either.

She paused at the top of the stile, as if she'd just thought of something; and she said, "Who cut in on the call?"

Liston shrugged. He'd heard the click of the extension, but that happened all the time and everyone in the Hall knew better than to stick around and eavesdrop.

"I don't know," he said.

Alina seemed to think for a moment; and then she lightly swung herself from the stile, and landed without a sound on the other side.

By the time that Dizzy Liston had reached it, she was gone.

THIRTY-TWO

From the moment that he walked into the rendezvous, Pavel sensed trouble.

It wasn't a place that he'd have chosen, but perhaps the woman had thought that she'd be safer if she were to meet him somewhere public like this. She knew nothing of him, after all, and the sight of him now would probably do little to reassure her. He looked across the bar to the reservations counter, and saw two of the staff in a hurried conference.

He crossed to an alcove, and sat down.

It was a three-masted restaurant ship moored in the harbour by the town's market square, and the message had specified for him to be there at seven. He was early, and the bar was empty. It was also an upmarket looking kind of a place, all wood panelling and buttoned velvet padding, and Pavel was aware that he was no longer an upmarket looking kind of a person. He didn't even like to look in a mirror any more; his eyes were so dark-ringed and sunken that it was a shock to stare into them. He knew that he had the appearance of someone who was either close to exhaustion, or long-gone on drugs.

He leaned out, and checked the clock over the bar. One of the staff glanced his way and, on meeting his eyes, hurriedly looked away again.

He wondered how close to the road's end he really was.

A teenaged girl came over and offered him a menu. He said, "Thank you, but I'm only here to meet someone. It was her idea to come here, not mine. As soon as I've had the chance to speak to her, I'll leave. Perhaps just some coffee?" He could afford coffee. Just about.

She backed off uncertainly. He didn't get to see exactly how they took his reassurances behind the scenes, but after a few minutes he noted that they seemed to be leaving him alone for now.

He stretched out a little, and leaned back.

If she didn't get here soon, he'd probably fall asleep where he was sitting. He didn't seem to be sleeping much at all, these days, almost as if he'd trained himself out of the need; but what sleep he did get was mostly in odd moments like this, and then he'd either be roused by somebody or have to remember to rouse himself and move on. It was affecting him, he knew. Sometimes the effect could be a little weird; sometimes it could feel as if as if the world around him was utterly unreal.