After some minutes she wondered why she had come to bed instead of staying up and waiting for Slade and Pickett to return. But she knew they would not come back. Just as she knew her name would not be mentioned in connection with the shooting foray in the street.

  Already she was understanding how the Command Squad worked, just from meeting two of its members. She wondered how many more there were, and if some were females.

  She even wondered if Slade would ever refer to the fact that she had shot the man with the sub-machine-gun. She was wondering that when she fell asleep.

  4

  The black Jag driven by Sam Pickett had cleared London by a few minutes after eleven o'clock. Sally sat beside him, wearing a blue-grey suit and black suède shoes with insets of grey on the sides which matched her grey gloves and black handbag with diamond-shaped grey panels in suede. It looked chic but was essentially a practical accessory. Ward had bought it for her in Cannes when they had been staying with their friend Pierre X, who had once saved Sally's life during a nightmare powerboat adventure on Lake Geneva. Pierre X was a description more than a name. He belonged to one of the departments of the French Deuxième Bureau. To Ward and Sally Digburn he had been a good friend and a proven comrade. The first thing she had done that morning after bathing and dressing was to send Pierre a brief message announcing what had happened. The message had been in a code the three friends had used from time to time.

  She stroked the top grey suède panel of the handbag in her lap, recalling Ward's comment at the time he gave it to her, 'To go with those fussy little shoes, sweetheart.'

  Pierre had been in the garden at the time. His comment had been illuminating. 'A handbag,' he had observed drily, 'that looks so feminine no Customs officer will afford it a second glance, and yet it could hold enough explosive to destroy a jumbo-jet as well as a double allowance of perfumes and liqueurs. I don't think such handbags should be legal.'

  It had all been said as a joke. But then they had all shared a bad time while men had died in agony, and even a holiday in Cannes had been little enough as a bonus, even with Pierre around with his Gallic charm and reassuring friendship.

  Pierre had been brought into her life by Ward. The chances were, she reflected, he would never re-enter it, which made her feel sad in a curiously secret way, for it would mean losing something more that had been Ward and the life with him she had married into. Yet in a handful of lonely hours it had all become remote.

  It was a quarter past eleven when Slade said, 'Thank you, sergeant, for your promptness when we left last night. One was dead when removed in the ambulance, the other died a couple of hours after leaving the scene of the shooting and hadn't recovered consciousness.'

  'So neither made a statement,' she said without turning round to look at Slade.

  'Not only that. The only thing found in their pockets was money. No papers, no personal possessions. A pair of killers hired for a job. Unknown men with unknown faces. Probably they'll check out to have no records in this country. But we'll contact Interpol in Paris, have their fingerprints circulated. Even knowing where they might have come from could be a lead of sorts.'

  'They could be responsible for killing my husband?'

  Slade watched the back of her ash-blonde head as he said, 'They could be. But we won't be sure even after a ballistics test on their guns. Others could have used the same guns. But only one man shot Ward Digburn. All the bullets came from the one gun. A second man must have driven the getaway car.'

  She watched the Surrey countryside unfolding as they cleared the south-western suburbs, absorbing the meaning of Slade's words without trying to find alternatives.

  When she made no response, Slade added, 'Your husband had no gun when he was found. We must assume either it was taken from him or he had discarded it.'

  Again she did not speak in immediate reply and Slade allowed the silence to drag. When she found something to say it seemed at a wide tangent from Slade's last words.

  'I rang the Wessex Heights Hotel at half-past nine, Commander, and I've booked in as Miss Sally Dean. I thought it simpler to use my own name and avoid confusion.'

  'I agree, sergeant. Here's something for you.'

  She turned in her seat and took the ring with a couple of car keys Slade held out.

  'There's a car hired in your name from a garage in Bournemouth. You can pick it up when we go through tomorrow morning.'

  'Thank you,' she said and opened her handbag, dropped the keys in one of the compartments, and snapped the bag shut.

  Sam Pickett gave her a quick glance, as though surprised by some omission. He moved his eyes and met Slade's gaze in the driving mirror. The driver shrugged. The woman in the passenger seat noticed the byplay without appearing to, and waited for one of the men to speak.

  It was Slade, who said, 'I thought you'd be curious, sergeant, about this car.'

  She lifted her chin but did not turn her head.

  'It's a black Jag with a souped-up engine that can probably push past a hundred and fifty,' she said. 'It has a telephone and two-way radio and more compartments for housing equipment than any normal factory model. Also, it's not the black Jag you used before.'

  Sam Pickett started to grin and only with an effort managed to wipe it from his face. He tried to find Slade's eyes in the driving mirror, but this time the Command Squad chief was watching the woman side-face.

  'You checked the numbers, sergeant?'

  'No, I didn't get the chance. Last night's car was square under my window and I couldn't see the numbers. After the shooting I drew my curtains again. There was no point in drawing attention to my flat.'

  'Then how do you know?'

  'The earlier Jag had its radio aerial on the right. The aerial for this car's on the left.'

  Slade nodded. 'I'm glad you are practised at using your eyes, sergeant. They didn't tail us to your flat, by the way.'

  She felt an urge to ask him how he could be so sure, but smothered it, arguing that neither Slade nor Pickett was a novice. It was a chilling argument that offered only one possibility. She voiced it.

  'They must have been watching my flat.'

  'I'm afraid so.'

  'Is that why you mentioned the gun?' she asked.

  'No, I thought we could take care of anything outside. I just wanted you to be ready when you came out and joined us. As it turned out, I was wrong, sergeant. If you hadn't broken up that ambush at least the Inspector or myself would have been dead, possibly both of us.'

  'It was chance I went to the window — no more than curiosity, Commander.' She sounded insistent, as though she wanted no misunderstanding about the role she had played at the window. 'I missed the second man. Luckily the Inspector's shot was on target.'

  'One apiece makes me feel I'm well supported,' Slade said drily. 'Besides, that's the kind of curiosity I can endorse.'

  She felt there was more to his words than their literal meaning. 'What kind's that, Commander?'

  'The kind that acts with the lights out so that it isn't revealed in sharp relief.'

  She smiled at her handbag. She was beginning to feel a member of a team. Slade and Pickett had probably made sure from which window the first shot had come before leaving their crouching postures on the pavement. She wasn't the only person in the Jag trained to use a sharp pair of eyes.

  For the first time since she had taken her seat beside Sam Pickett she felt herself relaxing. Slade filled his pipe and lit it. The Inspector produced cigarettes and a lighter and offered them to her first.

  There was little more talk until they were entering the outskirts of Gronchester. A few hours before Sally had told her husband she knew Gronchester, but she found herself unsure of the route they followed through the streets of a town that had changed its face a score of times and its shape almost as many since the days of the ancient guilds, when ladies rode palfreys and wore wimples, which she had always considered the most impractical headdress ever designed. The Jag joined a traffic crawl in the centre of the town, and just before turning towards the bridge passed a very modern pub that had been given a very ancient look and a name that sounded ancient, which probably meant that it was modern, the Knight and Palfrey.

  She stared at the multi-coloured inn sign set at the entrance to a large car park that ran back from a forecourt. The thought came to her that it might have been somewhere around here she could have waited to pick up Ward if she had driven to Gronchester after his phone call and he hadn't run out of luck.

  Slade hadn't explained where they were headed, but she knew. The mortuary attached to the hospital. She tried to fathom how he had reasoned — get her to provide the formal evidence of identity before she has lunch. It could be too risky after she'd had a meal. Even as the thought left her mind she was aware of a warm sour taste at the back of her mouth.

  Swallowing this self-induced nausea, for which she felt half ashamed, was not easy and she was left with a sense of having been booby trapped by a malignant Fate which had allowed someone else to trip the wire intended for her feet. Even this was frustrating, and she was aware that frustration could produce a chain reaction of regret that could destroy her determination to see that the killers of Ward Digburn were trapped in turn.

  She felt in her handbag for a cigarette, but withdrew her groping hand without selecting one from her case. She had recollected that she was Sergeant Sally Dean.

  That newly made widow, Mrs Ward Digburn, was someone she had known for a few hours and had pitied. They had parted without tears and without words. Mrs Ward Digburn to haunt the shadows of a past alive with poignant memories, Sergeant Sally Dean to do a job for Scotland Yard's Command Squad.

  'Smoke if you want to, sergeant,' Slade said, and added, 'I think, if you've no objection, it would be as well if, in less formal circumstances, the Inspector and I called you Sally.'

  'I've no objection, Commander,' she replied. 'In fact, I was thinking it could be awkward if you or the Inspector called at the Wessex Heights and were heard to address me as sergeant. I wouldn't be able to explain it away.'

  'Thank you, Sally,' Slade said and pleased her by sounding like someone who felt he had been accorded a real favour.

  The Inspector turned his head and gave her a friendly smile.

  'When I'm not pulling rank on you I'm Sam.'

  'Thanks, Sam,' she smiled back and turned quickly to face the street ahead. She didn't have to wink back tears because she had not allowed them to form. However, they had been perilously close to the surface when she realized this piece of byplay had been rehearsed before the drive, and Slade had chosen the right moment to make her feel she was with friends and belonged in a team.

  She didn't want the cigarette now, but she put one in her mouth and Sam Pickett was ready with his lighter. It was half smoked by the time he was pulling into the drive of the Gronchester General Hospital. None of them had stared at the shattered telephone box by the open gates. Sally wound down the window on her side and tossed the remains of her cigarette at a driveway drain.

  She kept telling herself she was ready.

  A quarter of an hour later she was far from sure. She stood with Slade and Pickett in a white-tiled room that felt cold and smelled faintly of disinfectant. There were two white-garbed attendants. A door in a wall was opened by a switch being turned, and a long shallow trestle was wheeled from a long cavity. The trestle gave a squeak every now and again, and each time she heard it Sally winced internally.

  When the cloth came away from the ravaged head her eyes blurred. Sam Pickett caught her arm unobtrusively on one side, Slade on the other. No one spoke. She was being allowed to take all the time she required. Before her sight cleared she saw bright coloured pictures inside her head, spinning as though on a mental roll of film that was unwinding. Herself and Ward on their honeymoon, in Paris, in a crazy little cellar at Grau-du-Roi, south of the Camargue, in a car overlooking Lake Geneva, in a boat pitching wildly in the Channel on a dark gusty night of no stars, in an embassy building in London with the certainty of death unless . . .

  The reeling series of pictures faded. Her sight cleared. She stared at the ruined face of the man who had shared her bed and life, who had brought her the good times like rare gifts, and who had sorrowed for her in the bad times brought them by strangers filled with hate.

  'You have no idea who did it?' she heard herself ask.

  His mouth almost against her ear, Slade said, 'Not here, Sally.' His tone held a warning and his pressure on her arm did not relax. Nor did Sam Pickett's. She thought, with one far side of her brain, that if she collapsed or fainted these two men would not let her fail. And there was fresh awareness in her that in some way they were doing this for the broken body that had been her husband, and that possibly in some remoteness from which he could not step Ward knew and was grateful.

  She wanted to think that, to feel it.

  One of the white-coated attendants must have received a cue from Slade. He said gently, 'You can identify the body?'

  She nodded, everything in front of her eyes now terribly clear, so that when they returned to the uncovered face she made out not only the fine stitchwork that had repaired the damage, but the tiny pinheads of dried blood caught under the pressure of the tiny nylon threads. She looked at the mouth that had been gentle on hers and passionate when it sought her body, and she felt only sadness and something she had not expected to feel — gratitude.

  'Thank you for those years, Ward. Thank you for coming into my life.'

  She didn't say the words aloud, but it was as though they were set to deep resounding chords of music and were chanted through the corridors of her mind so that they echoed.

  Then she was speaking aloud and was startled to hear her own voice projecting itself without her conscious volition.

  'Yes, it is the body of my husband, Ward Digburn.'

  Slade came in to be helpful with, 'Mrs Digburn will sign the official form of identification and I will make the other arrangements.'

  Slade and Pickett didn't leave her to watch Ward's body return to its square hole in the wall. Still holding her arms, they escorted her from the mortuary storage room and down a short corridor ending in glass swing doors to a small office, where a short man with balding hair and half-spectacles made soft sounds of commiseration, drew out a chair for her, and put a pen into her right hand before smoothing a sheet of printed paper in front of her.

  'Two signatures, Mrs Digburn, please,' he said, pitching his voice so low that it crackled with the accent of Somerset. 'Here and again here.'

  He pointed to the pair of dotted lines marked with a cross in pencil. She signed her name on each, careful not to let her gaze wander to read the lines of print above or below. There was just a modicum of fantasy in the way all this was happening to her, and she didn't wish to destroy it with too much harsh realism.

  Reality awaited her somewhere outside this small office, maybe even everywhere outside this hospital. But she didn't want too much of it in these last moments after saying goodbye to Ward.

  'Thank you.'

  It was the man with the half-spectacles again, taking the pen from her. Slade let Sam Pickett take her back to the car. They sat in it smoking more of the Inspector's filter cigarettes, and then Slade came out and joined them. He was carrying a suitcase. He put it in the Jag's boot and got into the back seat. He did not refer to the suitcase and she didn't have to ask what it contained.

  Later would be soon enough to collect Ward's few things.

  'I think the Knight and Palfrey, Sam,' Slade said.

  They drove to the modern inn with the carefully designed ancient look and had lunch. She ate sparingly but satisfied a hunger she had not suspected, and after the meal they returned to the car. They drove to the main police station in Gronchester, and Slade left them for ten minutes. When he returned he collected the suitcase he had brought from the hospital and also Sally's case. He passed them to a uniformed sergeant, who carried them into the police station.

  Slade handed Sally the lunch edition of a London evening paper. The front page carried a story headed 'Early Morning Gun Duel'. It was a four-paragraph story about two men who had killed each other with gunfire in a deserted street. The men were of Italian or Spanish appearance, but their clothes contained no clue to their identities or where they had come from. One had died instantly, the other on the way to hospital. Scotland Yard were making inquiries.

  As a sample of how the Command Squad worked and liaised in the shadows, this fast piece of news coverage was impressive, Sally admitted.

  'It won't fool the people who sent them,' she pointed out.

  'It isn't meant to,' Slade told her. 'But it might teach them something they've overlooked.' When she remained silent he added, 'Mistakes have to be paid for.' He took the paper from her and placed it on the seat beside him. 'I want you to call on a Mrs Olive Fanchon. She lives in Rothmere Avenue and we'll drop you at the end of the next road. I've a feeling she was covering something up when the police were called.'

  The car slid away from the kerb and Slade went on to explain who the Fanchons were and how the woman had answered the questions put to her husband.

  'I think,' he went on, 'if Olive Fanchon is rattled she might drop something informative, and a woman might find it easier than a man to rattle her. If she's holding back facts we should know I want her scared into disclosing them. She's certainly lying.'

  'About what happened last night?' Sally asked.

  'About getting off the last bus to Gronchester that stopped at the Fox and Hounds on Sawley Common. We've checked with the conductor. No one got off at the Fox and Hounds and no one was waiting, so he rang the driver not to stop. Therefore Mrs Fanchon didn't get off. I suspect she wasn't on the bus. Why she lied could be important. I leave you to find a reason for calling, Sally, but suggest you wear glasses so that she won't recognize you too readily later. You did bring some glasses?'

  'Polaroids.'

  'They'll do. Now, just in case things get complicated, you'd better take down the phone number of Gronchester police station. If you have to call, ask for Inspector Wilson and tell him it's liaison. We have liaison officers ready to co-operate at most police headquarters. If you don't get through and want to leave a message, you tell whoever it is you're C.S. liaison and leave a number for the Inspector to contact you. He will as soon as he can. That is routine. Now, any questions before we arrive?'

 

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