Triumphantly she found a bee orchis and picked it.
“You wouldn’t do that if you knew that flowers scream when they are picked,” said Bond.
Gala looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked, suspecting a joke.
“Didn’t you know?” He smiled at her reaction. “There’s an Indian called Professor Bhose, who’s written a treatise on the nervous system of flowers. He measured their reaction to pain. He even recorded the scream of a rose being picked. It must be one of the most heartrending sounds in the world. I heard something like it as you picked that flower.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, looking suspiciously at the torn root. “Anyway,” she said maliciously, “I wouldn’t have thought you were a person to get sentimental. Don’t people in your section of the Service make a business of killing? And not just flowers either. People.”
“Flowers can’t shoot back,” said Bond.
She looked at the orchis. “Now you’ve made me feel like a murderer. It’s very unkind of you. But,” she admitted reluctantly, “I shall have to find out about this Indian and if you’re right I shall never pick a flower again as long as I live. What am I to going to do with this one? You make me feel it’s bleeding all over my hands.”
“Give it to me,” said Bond. “According to you, my hands are dripping with blood already. A little more won’t hurt.”
She handed it to him and their hands touched. “You can stick it in the muzzle of your revolver,” she said to cover the flash of contact.
Bond laughed. “So the eyes aren’t only for decoration,” he said. “Anyway it’s an automatic and I left it in my room.” He drew the stalk of the flower through one of the button holes in his blue cotton shirt. “I thought a shoulder-holster would look a bit conspicuous without a coat to cover it. And I don’t think anyone will be going over my room this afternoon.”
By tacit agreement they edged away from the moment of warmth. Bond told her of his discovery of Krebs and of the scene in his bedroom.
“Serves him right,” she said. “I’ve never trusted him. But what did Sir Hugo say?”
“I had a word with him before lunch,” said Bond. “Gave him Krebs’s knife and keys as proof. He was furious and went straight off to see the man, muttering with rage. When he came back he said that Krebs seemed to be in a pretty bad way and was I satisfied that he’d been punished enough? All that business about not wanting to upset the team at the last moment and so forth. So I agreed that he’d be sent back to Germany next week and that meanwhile he would consider himself under open arrest-only allowed out of his room under surveillance.”
They scrambled down a steep cliff-path to the beach and turned to the right beside the deserted small-arms range of the Royal Marine Garrison at Deal. They walked along in silence until they came to the two-mile stretch of shingle that runs at low tide beneath the towering white cliffs to St Margaret’s Bay.
As they trudged slowly through the deep smooth pebbles Bond told her of all that had gone through his mind since the previous day. He held nothing back and he showed each false hare as it had been started and finally run to earth, leaving nothing but a thin scent of ill-founded suspicions and a muddle of clues that all ended in the same question mark… where was a pattern? Where was a plan into which the clues would fit? And always the same answer, that nothing Bond knew or suspected seemed to have any conceivable bearing on the security from sabotage of the Moonraker. And that, when all was said and done, was the only matter with which he and the girl were concerned. Not with the death of Tallon and Bartsch, not with the egregious Krebs, but only with the protection of the whole Moonraker project from its possible enemies.
“Isn’t that so?” Bond concluded.
Gala stopped and stood for a moment looking out across the tumbled rocks and seaweed towards the quiet glimmering swell of the sea. She was hot and out of breath from the hard going through the shingle and she thought how wonderful it would be to bathe-to step back for a moment into those childish days beside the sea before her life had been caught up in this strange cold profession with its tensions and hollow thrills. She glanced at the ruthless brown face of the man beside her. Did he have moments of longing for the peaceful simple things of life? Of course not. He liked Paris and Berlin and New York and trains and aeroplanes and expensive food, and, yes certainly, expensive women.