Harry Keogh wasn’t nearly so far away as Edinburgh. In fact he was in the foyer of the hotel where he’d been staying the past few nights in Bonnyrigg itself. After speaking to Shukshin on the phone he shrugged into his overcoat and went out to his car, a battered old Morris he’d bought on the cheap especially for this trip. He had passed his driving test the first time around – or at least an ex-driving instructor in the cemetery in Seaton Carew had passed it for him.
Now he drove on icy roads to the top of a hill some quarter of a mile from the old house and overlooking it, where he parked and got out of the car. There was no one about; the scene was bleak and bitter; shivering, Harry carried binoculars to a stand of trees rising starkly naked against the sky. From behind the bole of one of them, he trained the glasses on the house and waited -for no more than a minute or two.
Shukshin came out through the study’s patio doors and hurried through his courtyard garden, finally emerging from a door in the wall facing the river. In his hand he carried a pickaxe . . .
Harry drew breath sharply, let it out slowly to plume in the frosty air. Shukshin scrambled through brittle shrubbery and brambles down to the river’s rim. He let himself down carefully on to the ice, tested it, sprang up and down at its very edge. Then he turned and looked all about. The place was quite deserted.
He walked to the centre of the grey-shining expanse of ice and bounded again, and once more seemed satisfied. And now Harry’s eyes were riveted to the scene, that monochrome tableau which he almost felt he’d watched before, and the act which he was absolutely certain Shukshin had performed before.
For the figure trapped and enlarged in the lenses of his binoculars now crouched down, took his pickaxe and swung it in a wide circle, scoring a boundary, a demarcation, in the crusty surface of the ice. And all around that etched circle he strode, hacking periodically with all the strength and passion of a madman, until spouts of water jetted up each time the point of the pick struck home; so that in a matter of minutes a great disc of ice nine or ten feet across floated free in a pool of its own. Then the final touch:
Once more pausing to peer all about, finally Shukshin walked the perimeter of the circle, using his feet to brush icy debris from his assault back into the gap. The water would freeze over again, of course, but it would not be safe for hours yet, certainly not before tomorrow morning. Shukshin had set his trap – but he didn’t know that the intended victim had watched him do it!
Harry could scarce control his shivering now, the trembling in all his limbs which had little or nothing to do with the actual temperature. No, it had more to do with the mental condition of that hunched figure down there on the ice. The binoculars were not powerful enough to bring the figure really close, but still Harry was sure that he’d seen its face working hideously through all the hacking. The face of a lunatic, who for some reason lusted after Harry’s life as once he had lusted after – and taken – his mother’s.
Harry wanted to know why, would not rest until he had the answer. And there was only one way to get it.
Feeling physically and mentally weary, and yet knowing that his work wasn’t over yet, Viktor Shukshin returned to the house. Inside the walled courtyard, he dragged his pickaxe behind him across frosted flags, letting its haft fall clattering from his fingers before he stepped through the open patio doors and into his study. Head down and arms dangling at his sides, he took two more paces into the room – and froze!
What? Was Keogh here already? The entire house felt filled with strange forces. It reeked of ESP-aura, its very atmosphere seeming to vibrate with alien energies.