He moved across to the window, dropped to one knee and raised the carpet to disclose a Browning automatic he had used at his first meeting with Kristou in London. Underneath it was a large buff envelope containing the best part of two thousand pounds in ten-pound notes, the bulk of the money he had received from Meehan. He slipped the envelope into his breast pocket and checked the Browning quickly.
He found a roll of surgical tape in the cabinet over the washbasin and cut off a couple of lengths, using the razor Jenny had loaned him, then taped the Browning to the inside of his left leg just above the anklebone, covering it with his sock.
He buttoned his trench coat as he went downstairs. Jenny was waiting in the hall dressed in a red plastic mac. She gave him a tight smile as she pulled on her gloves. “Ready to go, then?”
He opened the front door, but stopped her with a hand on her shoulder as she was about to step outside. “There isn’t anything else, is there? Anything you’ve forgotten to tell me?”
She flushed and the anger was there in her voice again. “Would I be likely to do a thing like that?”
“That’s all right, then,” He smiled calmly. We’d better get going.”
He dosed the door and followed her down the steps to the Mini-Cooper parked at the bottom.
The marsh at Grimsdyke on the river estuary was a wild, lonely place of sea-creeks and mud flats and great, pale barriers of reeds higher than a man’s head. Since the beginning of history men had come here for one purpose or another, Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman, but now it was a place of ghosts. An alien world inhabited mainly by the birds, curlew and redshank and brent geese coming south from Siberia for the winter on the mud flats.
They passed through the village, a pleasant enough little place. Thirty or forty houses, a garage and pub, and then they were out on the other side. It was raining quite hard, the wind driving it in off the sea and across the marshes in great clouds.
“Half a mile beyond the village on the right” Jenny glanced at Fallon briefly. “That’s what the man said.”
“This looks like it,” Fallon told her.
She turned the Cooper off the main road and followed a track no wider than a farm cart that was little more than a raised causeway of grass. On either side miles of rough marsh grass and reeds marched into the heavy rain and a thin sea mist was drifting before the wind.
Fallon lowered the window on his side and took a deep breath of the pungent salt air. “Quite a place.”
“I used to love coming here when I was a kid,” she said. It was like nowhere else on earth. A different world after the city.”
The closer they got to the estuary, the more the mist seemed to close in on them and then they topped a rise and saw what was very obviously the mill sticking up above a clump of trees about a hundred yards to the south of them.
Fallon put a hand on her arm and she braked to a halt. “Now what?”
We’ll walk from here.”
Is that necessary?”
If I’ve learned anything in life it’s never to take anything for granted.”
She shrugged, but got out of the car without further argument and Fallon left the track and forced his way through a fir plantation towards the mill, dimly seen through the trees.
He crouched under a bush, pulling Jenny down beside him and examined the place carefully. There was a three-storeyed stone tower, roof open to the sky. At one end there was an extension made of wood which looked like a barn and seemed to be in a better state of repair than the rest of the building. A thin trickle of smoke drifted up from an iron chimney.
At the other side there was an immense water-wheel and it was moving round now with an unearthly creaking and groaning, forced by the rushing waters of the flooded stream.