He got as far as the olive groves that surrounded a large house nearby, from where the road could be seen. Police cars swarmed along it now, and the men from them had begun to fan out through the vineyards with dogs. Naturally, they had heard the two shots, and were now making their way toward the wood with the pack leading.
He came to a path with high cypresses and with more forest beyond it. To his right the police moved up through a steep vineyard and the dogs barked furiously. There were cries and shouts: they had discovered the dead Rockhold. Faoud slipped across the track and into the new woods and began to run stealthily through the olive trees beyond. Eventually he dropped the bag and retained only one shotgun and one pistol. He came to another house, and here there was a swimming pool brilliantly lit by the sun. A woman was lying next to it, and in a moment she had seen him. She had raised her head, her mouth had opened, and a short scream had been uttered. He darted up the slope above it, vaguely conscious of the dogs also darting through the trees below. They brought his fear back. One of them appeared right behind him; he turned and shot at it with the shotgun, missed, and then resumed his run. But the pack caught up with him as he came to the edge of yet another copse, and there he turned on them with the pistol and fired off three rounds, scattering them and giving him time to settle behind a tree and reload the shotgun. It was midday before the police had controlled the area and set up their cordon and begun to talk to him through a loudspeaker. But he had already decided not to play games with his honor.
They waited until nightfall before moving in. During the afternoon the fields were peaceful, birds swooped in blustering gangs upon the vines and the silver-backed olive leaves, and Faoud lay on his side remembering the grave of Ibn Taymiyyah, which he had once visited in a parking lot in Damascus when he was a boy. That was courage, if you thought about it. The theologian who rode out of Damascus in the year 1301 to confront the Mongol invader Ghaza Khan and accuse him of being a bad Muslim because he had taken it upon himself to wage war on other Muslims. To face down a conqueror with words and remonstrations. If you meant what you said, you could confront whole empires. Death was far from being the worst thing that could afflict you. Being a slave was more bitter, and being a heretic was darker still. Remembering which, he aimed his shotgun with a calm calculation as the dark blue figures came edging through the vines. He wondered how long it would take for them to kill him, those soft officers of European law who had probably never fired a weapon in their lives. It might last well into the night with all the advantage on his side. They, after all, cared about their lives: it was a tremendous, perhaps fatal, disadvantage.
THE
MILLIONAIRES
TWENTY-TWO
Rockhold’s funeral was held in the Sussex village of Poynings, hidden in a fold of the South Downs a few miles from Devil’s Dyke. It wasn’t far from where the Rockholds had long lived, and his wife had reserved a place for them in the small cemetery behind the church years before.
Of course she had realized that, to begin with, it would be occupied by only one of them. But she had never imagined that it would be so soon, and under such circumstances. The Codringtons came down from London as a group, staying for a few days at the Metropole in Brighton: Jimmie’s brother Rupert, his nieces and nephews, and Naomi, who had returned from Greece for the formalities. It rained all week and the service in the chilly church was one that Jimmie would not have liked—so said his brother. The priest who knew him well extolled his virtues; the little crowd was silent. Rockhold’s body was consigned to the earth in the shade of the Victorian yews with the chalk hill behind it, its crust filled with the Iron Age relics he used to collect on Sundays with his metal detector. The gathering afterward at the Plough Inn was awkward. Rockhold had worked for the Codringtons for thirty years, but few of them knew who he was. He was Jimmie’s secret, and Jimmie had still not surfaced nor ever would. The secret, therefore, endured and grew. The survivors did not know what to say or think about Rockhold. They didn’t know the stiff, petite widow in her black pearls, with her air of accusation and fury. They didn’t know what his virtues really were. Only Rupert knew about him.
He took Naomi aside and they went out into the drizzle of the lonely, steep-pitched lane that ran outside the pub. He suggested that they drive up to the Dyke together and have a talk.
“I think it would help to get away,” he said. “You look a little shaken.”
“Better than stirred.”
He almost smiled.
“Quite.”
It was the end of the day when they got there, and the cafe at the summit was barely open. But the summer rain had stopped and they walked together down the open hillside with its grassy fosses. In their funereal dress they looked, she thought, like suitable ambassadors from the afterlife in a place where she had always thought that ghosts were legion.
“Jimmie used to take me here when I was very small,” she said. “You can see the sea on a clear day.”
“So you can. Not today, though.”
There was just a layer of horizontal light where the sea lay. They came to a halt among the stiff flowers of gorse, the grass rippled by wind. The skylarks trilled so far up they couldn’t see them. Rupert was a rugged man, more rugged than his brother, but in the end peas and pods yielded their results and she could see that the two men were made of the same stuff. They were both half self-made and the same bitterness lay at the bottom of both. Rupert, the younger man, had looked up to his elder sibling only until a certain point in his life. Was that not always an irreparable loss?
“I’m glad you came to the funeral,” he said, not looking at her. (The view was an excuse for both of them to avoid each other’s eyes.) “I believe you met Rockhold once, did you not?”
“He came to Greece to interview me.”
“Would you call it an interview and not an interrogation?”
“It was both, in a way. I didn’t mind him. He had his reasons.”