“A pleasure, Mr…?”
“Ransome,” he replied brightly, clasping my hand in his and shaking it warmly. His fingers were cold from where he’d held his drink, passing it from hand to hand, and damp with still-clinging condensation from the outside of the glass. “I’ve read so much of your work, followed your career, you might say.”
“That’s very considerate of you, Mr… Ransome?” I nearly stumbled on the enquiry, important to make it clear I didn’t know him, but push any lie too far and it begins to totter. “Are you in the trade?”
The trade, to any large profession on the planet, is always whatever craft the speaker happens to practise.
“Good God, no!” He chuckled. “I’m something of a layabout really, terrible thing, but I do admire you journalist chaps, striding about places, putting wrongs to right and that.”
Vincent Rankis and his bare, sweaty throat.
“I hardly do that, Mr Ransome. Just earn those dimes, as they say.”
“Not at all. Your commentary is engaging–some might even say incisive.”
Vincent Rankis sat by my bedside as the rat poison flooded through my veins.
Walking away as the torturer began to pull the nails out of my toes.
Riding a boat down the river Cam.
Hopping with excitement at another experiment. We can push the boundaries, Harry. We can find the answers, all things, everywhere. We can see with the eyes of God.
Not turning back at the sound of my screams.
Take him, he said, and they took me, a bullet to the brain, and here I am, and I will never forget.
He was looking.
God but he was looking, above that brilliant smile and behind those empty, charming lies, he was studying every feature of my face, looking for the lie in my eye, looking for recognition, revulsion, rebellion, some hint that I was still who I had been, that I knew what he had done. I smiled and turned back to our host, heart beating too fast, no longer confident I could stop my body from revealing what my mind would not.
“You clearly have excellent taste in both friends and reading material, ma’am,” I explained, “but I trust my invitation here wasn’t merely to discuss the incisiveness of my text?”
Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, God bless her, God praise her, had an agenda to push, and in that moment of crisis, that moment when I might have turned and lost my control altogether, she exclaimed, “Mr August, you’ve got such a journalist’s mind! As a matter of fact, there are a few people I’d like you to meet…”
And she put an arm around my shoulder and I could have kissed that arm, could have wept into its clean white sleeve, as she led me away from Vincent Rankis and back into the crowd. And as Vincent had not looked back, neither did I.
Chapter 71
I had him.
I had him.
I had him.
And best of all, I had him without having to expose myself.
He had sought out me.
He had come to me.
And I had him.
I had him.
At last.
Utterly cool, as the Americans would say.
Time to play it utterly cool.
I listened to Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s friends discuss in earnest, occasionally frantic tones the threats of nuclear war, the dangers of ideological stand-off, the invasion of technology into conflict, and knew that Vincent was only a few paces from my back, and I didn’t look once. Not too cold, not arctic and distant: on my way out of the house I smiled at him and complimented him once more on his excellent literary taste, expressing the hope that he was a regular subscriber to the magazine. He was. What a good man, what a fine bastion of learning in this ever-changing time.
Not too hot either.
I did not shake his hand on the way out, and as I walked back down the drive beneath the now star-studded sky, I did not turn my head to see if he stood in the door.
I had him.
I made it back to my hotel, a second-floor room that stank of the damp mould creeping into every corner of this soggy town, and locked the door, sat down on my bed and shook for nearly fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stop, and for a while, as I watched my hands tremble across my lap, wondered what kind of twisted conscious reaction of my mind this was, what manifestation of the many emotions I knew I should feel to see this man who I had hunted for over a century, this man who had come so close to destroying me. But if it was so, still I could not control it, and as I went mechanically through the motions of going to bed, my hands shook, and I smeared toothpaste down my chin.