'Well, I know one thing, she did like to empathise with her interviewees, and that could sometimes mean dressing like them. As to favourite colours ...' He shook his head. 'The best I can come up with is bright colours, reds, blues, yellows. Primary colours.'

I nodded. I'd been told to look for yellow and blue. I stared at Draper, trying to see something behind his eyes, some inkling of guilt. But where was his motive? No, there was nothing there.

'What about Mrs Prendergast?' Bel inquired suddenly.

'What about her?' Draper asked back.

'She's a public figure, and she's tough, plus she's got an interest in the cult.' Draper still didn't get it. 'She might be persuaded to take over where Ms Ricks left off.'

Draper leapt to his feet. I thought he was going to vault the desk, but he just leaned over it towards Bel.

'Brilliant!' he shrieked. 'That's f.u.c.king brilliant!' He slapped the desk with both hands and shook his head wildly.

He was somewhere in the hinterland between laughter and tears. 'That is just so brilliant. Why didn't I think of it?'

Bel's look towards me confirmed she thought this a tautology. Draper couldn't get us out of there quick enough, but all the time trying to be polite. He had his hand on Bel's shoulder and one on my back. He was telling her to think about fronting his doc.u.mentary series.

'All right,' she said, 'I'll think about it.'

'You'd be a great loss to the force,' I told her as we left.

Outside, I headed for the first newspaper kiosk I saw, and bought up several of the dailies. I wanted more on the Tottenham shoot-out. I didn't think Harry would have said anything, but how could I be sure? Without a trip to Tottenham, the answer was, I couldn't.

I told Bel she deserved some time to herself, and managed to press 50 on her, which in Knightsbridge would just about pay for a pa.s.sable lunch. Then I headed north. I knew this 142.

was one of the most stupid things I'd ever done, but I couldn't talk myself out of it. One thing I did know was that if I was going to meet Hoffer, I didn't want Bel around. No matter that she was my best form of camouflage, I'd promised she wouldn't be in danger.

Before we separated, she made me make a phone call.

Afterwards, I said I'd see her back at our hotel. She kissed my cheek, and I pressed a finger to her chin. She didn't tell me to be careful, but I knew what she was thinking.

All the way to Tottenham, I found myself doing something I never ever do. I thought of the past. Not the distant past, I don't mind that, but the more recent past, and my life as an a.s.sa.s.sin. Well, what else was I going to do with my life? I'd never fancied being deskbound, but the Army weren't going to have me. As a teenager I was clever but easily bored, and I was frustrated that I couldn't play football or rugby. I did try to take part in games sometimes, but the other kids knew about me, and they wouldn't come near. They were being kind in their way, I suppose, but I couldn't see it at the time. All I saw was that I was different.

I started to spend more time on the gun range, and I acquired a marketable skill.

My father had started me off, despite my mother's warnings. He was a top-cla.s.s target shooter himself. He started me with air pistols and air rifles, then we moved up to real ammo, small calibre at first. Funny to think those afternoons of bonding had led me here.

Here, thinking about my victims.

I had never had much of a conscience. Like I say, everyone bleeds. But then I'd missed a target and killed an innocent girl. That was when word started to go round that I was losing it. I'd cried about that girl. I'd sat by a hotel swimming pool in the Bahamas and played it through in my head, over and over again, the New York cold, that icy step, that single slip ...

They called me the Demolition Man, but all I'd ever really i43 demolished were lives. You could buy a new dustbin, new windows, you could repair walls with fresh bricks and mortar. But I'd noticed something in Draper's office, I'd noticed his pain. He'd lost someone, and the loss, for all my glibness at the time, was not merely financial. He'd lost someone he loved. He might be a hard-nosed businessman, a schemer, a ruthless capitaliser on rumour and grief. I'd seen the clips from some of his programmes; they concentrated on the tearful close-up and the hounding of interviewees.

But he was human too. He could feel what his victims felt.

He was feeling it now.

See, that's why I like to get away from the scene. I never go back. I don't buy the papers or anything, I don't read about myself and cut out my exploits to stick in some sc.r.a.p alb.u.m. I do the job and I get the h.e.l.l away. I never think about it afterwards. I drown the memories in alcohol and travel.

Well, here I was stone-cold sober, and travelling towards something, not away from it. I wasn't even armed, and I knew Hoffer would be.

I got the cab to drop me on the High Road, and walked the few hundred yards to Harry's street. The front door was still waiting to be repaired. I could see where the lock had been wrenched open, but there were no signs of leverage, no marks left by a crowbar. No footprints on the door either, which meant it had been a shoulder charge.

There was noise on the stairs. A black man came down, on his way out. He glared at me.

'What happened here?' I asked. He ignored me. 'I'm a friend of Harry's.'

He gave me a look br.i.m.m.i.n.g with distrust. 'He ain't in, man.'

'What happened to the door?'

'Some big white f.u.c.ker rammed it.' If he'd been a dog he'd have been sniffing me. 'Cop?' I shook my head. He looked around him, up and down the street. A train which had 144.

been sitting at the station started to move past us, way up the embankment. 'Some big guy, right? Kicked the door in, kicked in Harry's door. We came back and thought someone was ripping us off, right? So in we go, and this guy's got a gun out and he's standing over Harry. Harry's looking like he's going to croak, right? So we chased the f.u.c.ker off.'

I whistled. He shifted his weight, looking pleased at the part he'd played in the drama.

'Is Harry all right though?'

'Dunno, man, he took off. Cops wanted to talk to him, but Harry was gone.'

'I don't blame him.'

Yeah.'

'No point trying his door?'

'The place is picked clean. Cops didn't put a lock on it, so kids went in and ripped off everything. We had to chase them off, too.'

I nodded, though suspecting that the bulk of Harry's goods were now sitting in a pile in the flat above his.

'Thanks for helping him out,' I said.

'Hey,' he shrugged, 'what are neighbours for, right?'

Back in my room, I lay on the bed and read the Disciples of Love? project. Eleanor Ricks had been planning little less than an a.s.sa.s.sination of her own. The cult had its roots in the Pacific north-west of the USA, an area I knew, but its branches stretched all around the world. There were more than a dozen communes in Europe, but only one in Great Britain. Prendergast's daughter had actually belonged to a commune in south-west France, but the focus of Ricks's investigation was the British enclave on the Scottish west coast.

According to some notes added at the back of the file, she'd twice visited Scotland, but was planning a much longer visit once she'd completed what she called her i45 "primary research'. Only she'd never been allowed to finish that research.

The funding of the sect seemed to be the key. So long as no one would explain it, you could guess any way you liked: drugs, prost.i.tution, blackmail, coercion. There were press cuttings in the file referring to stories about other cults, not just the Branch Davidian in Texas but the Children of G.o.d in Argentina and some Southern Baptist splinter groups in Louisiana and Alabama. As far as I could see, cults in general provided a useful service: they kept the arms dealers in business. Koresh's group in Waco had stockpiled enough weapons for Armageddon and beyond. I'd visited Texas. To buy a gun, any gun, all you needed was a state driver's licence and a form you completed yourself stating you'd never been in an asylum and you weren't a drug addict.

They have about four guns in Texas for every man, woman and child. And those are the legal ones. I knew there were plenty of gun dealers who didn't require any ID from their buyers, just a wad of cash. I'd once bought a night-vision scope from a man with a military haircut after I got talking to him in a bar in Lubbock. I paid half the market price. It was the only good thing that happened to me in Lubbock, until I met Spike. Spike was, Max and Bel apart, the closest thing I had to a friend in the whole overpopulated world.

And Spike was crazy, gun crazy.

Bel gave her knock and came into my room. She was red- cheeked as she flopped on to the bed beside me.

'I must've walked for miles,' she said. 'How did it go?'

'I don't think we can hang around much longer.'

'Well then, that makes it easy.'

'What do you mean?'

She rolled on to her side and propped her head on one hand. 'I've just spent an hour in a cafe reading through the file.' She nodded at my copy. 'And the way I see it, the Disciples of Love are as likely suspects as anyone.'

'How would they know what clothes she'd be wearing?'

146.

'They must have had someone watching her, otherwise they couldn't have compiled all that information they gave you. Maybe the watcher spotted that she wore similar clothes every day, or every interview she did.'

Yes, I'd thought of that myself. 'Maybe,' I said.

'Look,' said Bel, 'there's the jealous husband, the misunderstood teenage son, the producer who wanted to jump into bed with her, the lawyer who might have been just behind him in the queue.'

It was true that the solicitor, Geoffrey Johns, had professed a more than merely professional interest in Eleanor Ricks when we'd talked to him.

'So we've got a lot of possible paymasters,' I said.

'Agreed, but none as strong as the Disciples of Love. Look at what she was saying about them. I mean, from those American press clippings these aren't people to toy with.'

Bel had another point. The Disciples of Love had been in trouble in the USA after a journalist had been beaten up and another pummelled with his own camera. .

'We don't know they'd go as far as a.s.sa.s.sination.'

'We don't know they wouldn't. Besides, there's my final point.'

I smiled. So far, we'd been thinking along such similar lines that I knew what was coming.

'The need to get out of London,' I said. Bel nodded agreement.

'We've got two choices,' she said. 'We either wait it out here until Shattuck comes back, since he's the only one who can tell us for sure who hired you. Or we scarper. We can always come back later, and meantime we could be doing something useful like checking on the Disciples of Love.'

'You took the words right out of my mouth,' I said. 'And I can always drop you off at Max's on the way.'

'What?' She sat up. 'What do you mean?'

'Bel, I needed you here to give me some cover. I don't need any cover in Scotland.'

i47 'How do you know?'

'I just do. They're not combing the streets for an a.s.sa.s.sin up there.'

'But there's this man Hoffer. If he's figured things out this far, what's to stop him going to Scotland?'

'What if he does? Are you going to shield me from him?'

I was smiling, but she wasn't. With teeth gritted she started to thump my arms. 'You're not leaving me behind, Weston!'

'Bel, see sense, will you?'

'No, I won't.' She was still thumping me. 'I'm going with you!'

I got off the bed and rubbed my arms. Bel put a hand to her mouth.

'Oh my G.o.d,' she said, 'I forgot! Michael, are you all right?'

'I'm fine. There'll be bruises maybe, but that's all.'

'Christ, I'm sorry, I forgot all about...' She got off the bed and hugged me.

'Hey, not too hard,' I said. I was laughing, but when I looked at Bel she had tears in her eyes. 'It's okay,' I said. 'I'm a haemophiliac, not a paper bag. I won't burst.'

She smiled at last, then embraced me again.

'I'm coming with you,' she said. I kissed both her eyes, tasting salt from her lashes.

'We'll talk to Max,' I said.

148.

13.'Come in, Mr ... ah ...'

'Hoffer.'

'Absolutely. Take a seat, won't you?'

Geoffrey Johns's office was everything Hoffer loathed and loved about England. It was old-fashioned, a bit dusty, and fairly reeked of centuries of history and family and tradition.

There was something upright and solemn and confidential about it. You couldn't imagine Johns in red braces and Gekko-slick hair, doing billion-dollar deals on the telephone.

He was more father-confessor than lawyer, and though he wasn't so old, he put on a good act of being wise, benign and endearingly fuddled. Like making Hoffer introduce himself, even though he knew d.a.m.n fine who he was. Hoffer wanted to flick the man's half-moon gla.s.ses into the wastebin and slap him on the head, try to wake him up. The twentieth century was drawing to a close, and Geoffrey Johns was still working in the d.i.c.kens industry.

'Now then, Mr ... ah ... Hoffer.' He'd been shuffling some papers on his desk. They were little more than a stage- prop, so Hoffer bided his time, sitting down and smiling, arms folded. The solicitor looked up at him. 'Some tea perhaps? Or coffee, I believe you Americans prefer coffee.'

'We prefer, Mr Johns, to cut through all the s.h.i.t and get down to business.'

Johns didn't peer through his spectacles at Hoffer, he dropped his head and peered over them. 'There are courtesies to be observed, Mr Hoffer. Mrs Ricks's family is still in mourning. I myself am still in a state of some shock.'

'She was a good client, huh?'

149.

Johns wasn't slow to get the meaning. 'I regarded her as a friend, one I'd known for many years.'

Hoffer's attention had been attracted to the bakelite telephone. It made him smile. The solicitor misunderstood.