In the road Mamoulian was speaking to one or two of the mourners. Handshakes were exchanged; commiserations offered to Carys. Marty watched impatiently. Perhaps she and the European would separate in the throng, and he’d get a chance to show himself, if only momentarily, and reassure her of his presence. But no such opportunity presented itself. Mamoulian was the perfect guardian, keeping Carys close to him every moment. Pleasantries and farewells exchanged, they got into the back of a dark green Rover and drove away. Marty raced to the Citroën. He mustn’t lose her now, whatever happened: this was perhaps his last chance to locate her. The pursuit proved difficult. Once off the small country roads and onto the highway the Rover accelerated with insolent ease. Marty gave chase as discreetly as the twin imperatives of tactics and excitement would allow.
In the back seat of the car Carys had a strange, flickering thought. Whenever she closed her lids to blink or shut out the day’s glare, a figure appeared: a runner. She recognized him in seconds: the gray track suit, a cloud of steam emerging from the hood, named him before she glimpsed his face. She wanted to glance over her shoulder, to see if he was, as she guessed, behind them somewhere. But she knew better. Mamoulian would guess something was going on, if he hadn’t already.
The European looked across at her. She was a secret one, he thought. He never really knew what she was thinking. She was, in that regard, her mother’s child. Whereas he had learned, with time, to read Joseph’s face, Evangeline had seldom let a glimmer of her true feelings show. For the space of several months he’d assumed her to be indifferent to his presence in the house; only time had told the true story of her machinations against him. He sometimes suspected Carys of similar pretenses. Wasn’t she simply too compliant? Even now she wore the faintest trace of a smile.
“It amused you?” he inquired.
“What?”
“The funeral.”
“No,” she said lightly. “No, of course not.”
“You were smiling.”
The trace evaporated; her face slackened. “It had some grotesquerie value, I suppose,” she said, her voice dull, “watching them all play up to the cameras.”
“You didn’t trust their grief?”
“They never loved him.”
“And you did?”
She seemed to weigh the question up. “Love . . .” she said, floating the word on the hot air to see, it seemed, what it would become. “Yes. I suppose I did.”
She made Mamoulian uneasy. He wanted a better grip on the girl’s mind, but it refused his best endeavors. Fear of the illusions he might evoke for her had certainly given her a veneer of obsequiousness, but he doubted they’d truly made a slave of her. Terrors were a useful goad, but the law of diminishing returns pertained; each time she fought him he was obliged to find some new, more awesome fright: it exhausted him.
And now, to add insult to injury, Joseph was dead. He had perished-according to the talk at the funeral-“peacefully in his sleep.” Not even died; that vulgarity had been exorcised from the vocabulary of all concerned. He had passed on, or over, or away; he had gone to sleep. But never died. The cant and sentimentality that followed the thief to the grave disgusted the European. But he disgusted himself more. He had let Whitehead go. Not once, but twice, undone by his own desire to have the game concluded with due attention to detail. That, and his concern to persuade the thief to come willingly into the void. Prevarication had proved his undoing. While he had threatened, and juggled visions, the old goat had slipped away.
That might not have been the end of the story. After all, he possessed the facility to follow Whitehead into death, and bring him out of it, had he been able to get to the corpse. But the old man had been wise to such an eventuality. His body had been kept from viewing, even by his closest companions. It had been locked in a bank safe (how appropriate!) and guarded night and day, much to the delight of the tabloids, who reveled in such eccentricities. By this evening it would be ash; and Mamoulian’s last opportunity for permanent reunion would have been lost.