"And? In Salzburg?"
"We went to a hotel."
"The name of the hotel, please?"
"I don't remember. I didn't notice."
"Then describe it."
"It was old and big and near a river. And beautiful," she added.
"And you had sex. He was very virile, he had many orgasms, as usual."
"We went for a walk."
"And after the walk you had sex. Don't be silly, please."
Once more, Charlie let her wait. "We meant to, but I fell asleep as soon as we'd had dinner. I was exhausted from the drive. He tried to wake me a couple of times, then gave up. In the morning he was dressed by the time I woke."
"And then you went with him to Munich--yes?"
"No."
"So what did you do?"
"Caught an afternoon plane to London."
"What car did he have?"
"A hire car."
"What make?"
She pretended not to remember.
"Why did you not go with him to Munich?"
"He didn't want us crossing the border together. He said he had work to do."
"He told you this? Work to do? Nonsense! What work? No wonder you were able to betray him!"
"He said he had orders to pick up the Mercedes and deliver it somewhere for his brother."
This time Helga showed no astonishment, not even indignation, at the scale of Michel's abysmal indiscretion. Her mind was upon action, and action was what she believed in. Striding to the door, she flung it open and waved imperiously for Mesterbein to return. She swung round, hands on hips, and stared at Charlie, and her big pale eyes were a dangerous and alarming void.
"You are suddenly like Rome, Charlie," she remarked. "All roads lead to you. It is too perverse. You are his secret love, you drive his car, you spend his last night on earth with him. You knew what was in that car when you drove it?"
"Explosives."
"Nonsense. Of what sort?"
"Russian plastic, two hundred pounds of it."
"The police told you this. It is their lie. The police lie always."
"Michel told me."
Helga let out a false, angry laugh. "Oh, Charlie! Now I don't believe you one word. You are lying to me completely." With a soundless tread, Mesterbein loomed up behind her. "Anton, everything is known. Our little widow is a complete liar, I am sure of it. We shall do nothing to help her at all. We leave at once."
Mesterbein stared at her, Helga stared at her. Neither seemed half as certain as Helga 's words suggested. Not that Charlie cared either way. She sat like a slumped doll, indifferent once more to anything except her own bereavement.
Sitting beside her again, Helga put her arm round Charlie's unresponsive shoulders. "What was the brother's name?" she said. "Come." She kissed her lightly on the cheekbone. "We shall be your friends perhaps. We must be careful, we must bluff a little. This is natural. All right, tell me first Michel's name."
"Salim, but I swore never to use it."
"And the brother's name?"
"Khalil," she muttered. She began weeping again. "Michel worshipped him," she said.
"And his work name?"
She didn't understand, she didn't care. "It was a military secret," she said. *
She had decided to keep driving till she dropped--a Yugoslavia all over again. I'll walk out of the show, I'll go to Nottingham and kill myself in our motel bed.
She was on the moor again, alone and touching eighty before she nearly went off the road. She stopped the car and took her hands sharply from the wheel. The muscles in the back of her neck were twisting like hot wires and she felt sick.
She was sitting on the verge, putting her head forward between her knees. A couple of wild ponies had come over to stare at her. The grass was long and full of the dawn's dew. Trailing her hands, she moistened them and pressed them to her face to cool it. A motorcycle went slowly by and she saw a boy looking at her as if uncertain whether to stop and help. Between her fingers she watched him disappear below the skyline. One of ours, one of theirs? She returned to the car and wrote down the number; just for once, she didn't trust her memory. Michel's orchids lay on the seat beside her, she had claimed them when she took her leave.
"But, Charlie, don't be too utterly ridiculous!" Helga had protested. "You are too sentimental altogether."
And screw you too, Helg. They're mine.
She was on a high, treeless plateau of pink and brown and grey. Sunrise was in her driving mirror. Her car radio gave nothing but French. It sounded like question and answer about girlish problems, but she couldn't understand the words.
She was passing a sleeping blue caravan parked in a field. An empty Landrover stood beside it, and beside the Landrover baby linen hung from a telescopic clothesline. Where had she seen a clothesline like that before? Nowhere. Nowhere ever.
She lay on her bed at the guest house, watching the day lighten on the ceiling, listening to the clatter of the doves on her window-sill. Most dangerous is when you come down from the mountain, Joseph had warned. She heard a surreptitious footfall in the corridor. It's them. But which them? Always the same question. Red? No, Officer, I have never driven a red Mercedes in my life so get out of my bedroom. A drop of cold sweat ran over her naked stomach. In her mind, she traced its course across her navel to her ribs, then onto the sheet. A creak of floorboards, a suppressed puff of exertion: he's looking through the keyhole. A corner of white paper appeared beneath her door. And wriggled. And grew. Humphrey the fat-boy was delivering her Daily Telegraph.
She had bathed and dressed. She drove slowly, taking lesser roads, stopping at a couple of shops along the way, as he had taught her. She had dressed herself dowdily, her hair was anyhow. Nobody observing her numb manner and neglected appearance could have doubted her distress. The road darkened; diseased elm trees closed over her, an old Cornish church crouched among them. Stopping the car again, she pushed open the iron gate. The graves were very old. Few were marked. She found one that lay apart from the others. A suicide? A murderer? Wrong: a revolutionary. Kneeling, she reverently laid the orchids at the end where she had decided his head was. Impulse mourning, she thought, stepping into the bottled, ice-cold air of the church. Something Charlie would have done in the circumstances, in the theatre of the real.
For another hour she continued aimlessly in this way, pulling up for no reason at all, except perhaps to lean on a gate and stare at a field. Or to lean on a gate and stare at nothing. It wasn't till after twelve that she was certain the motorcyclist had finally stopped tailing her. Even then, she made several vague detours and sat in two more churches before joining the main road to Falmouth.