“It’s for the best if you come with us straightaway, Mr. White. Yesterday we encountered what you might term hostile parties in the area.”

“Tried to run us off the road.”

“I’ll need to get a few things. Have a word with my parents,” Peter said.

Hollis and Lamb went with him. I waited, sitting on the wall. The birds were singing, but my spirits were at a low ebb. Peter would be safe. Peter would be gone.

When they came back, Patricia and the vicar were with them. The vicar had Patricia’s hand. She was in her dressing gown and her face was pink and swollen with tears.

Peter put his bag in the boot of a silver Audi and then came over to where I was sitting. “I’ll see you soon,” he said. “Don’t look like that.” He bent and pressed his lips against my cheek. “You should see Marcus, ask him … ask him about Mrs. Duncan.”

“Mrs. Duncan the dinner lady?”

“Mrs. Duncan the dinner lady who also worked in the charity shop.”

Then he went and got in the car with the men from MI5, and his parents and I watched as they drove Peter away.

CHAPTER 21

REVISITED

We grow up but the games go on. Work, relationships, belonging to a religion, being left or right, having a class or gender, or interests, a personality even, they all seemed like games begun long ago, far back among the mists of time, played ceaselessly, routinely, and with neither end nor prizes in sight. Each day, less convincing. In the days after Peter went away with the men from MI5, I could not have told you anything about myself and been certain it was true. I stayed at the vicarage; finally the spare bedroom with the daisy curtains and matching bedspread was mine.

“Do you like fish, dear?” But the question seemed too hard, so Patricia made me chicken, every night, for two weeks. After they went to bed, never later than ten p.m., I would sneak into Peter’s room and lie on the bed and take up something of his in my hands; a falling-apart paperback edition of Crime and Punishment; a scrapbook into which we had once stuck clippings from the local paper. One reported a missing donkey, rustled from its field. Another was a piece about a spate of car thefts, where the cars had been mysteriously returned, washed and waxed, the insides given the full valet treatment.