Solo - Jack Higgins [27]
'She hasn't broken down yet, if that's what you mean. If you'd like to see her, you'll find her on the dyke, painting. I'd tread very softly, if I were you.'
'Why?'
'Surely they explained the peculiar circumstances of Megan's death?'
'She was killed by a hit and run driver.'
'There was rather more to it than that, Asa.'
Morgan gazed at him blankly. 'Then you'd better tell me about it, hadn't you?'
Morgan followed the path through the lych gate, round the grey stone rectory with its pantile roof, and took the track along the dyke towards the estuary. He could see her from a long way off, seated at her easel, wearing the old military trenchcoat he'd bought the year they got married.
She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of his approach, then carried on painting. He stood behind her for a while without saying anything. It was a water-colour, of course, her favourite medium. A view of the marsh and the sea and a grey sky full of rain beyond, that was very fine indeed.
'You get better.'
'Hello, Asa.'
He sat on a grass bank to one side of her, smoking, and she kept on painting, not looking at him once.
'How was Belfast?'
'Not too good.'
'I'm glad,' she said. 'You deserve each other.'
He said calmly, 'I used to think that phrase had a particular application where we were concerned.'
'No, Asa, whatever eke I may have deserved in this life I never earned you.'
'I never pretended to be anything other than I was.'
'We went to bed together on our wedding night and I woke up in the morning with a stranger. Every rotten little war they came up with, you were the first to volunteer. Cyprus, Borneo, Aden, the Oman and now that butcher's shop across the Irish Sea.'
'That's what they pay me for. You knew what you were taking on.'
She was angry now. 'Like hell I did. Certainly not Cyprus and the things you did there for Ferguson.'
'Another kind of soldiering, hunting urban guerrillas,' he said. 'The rules are different.'
'What rules? Torture, brainwashing? Lean a man against a wall on his fingertips with a bucket on his head for twenty-four hours? Isn't that what the newspapers accused you of in Nicosia? Are you still using that one in Belfast, or have you come up with some more acceptable refinement?'
He got up, his face bleak. 'This isn't getting us anywhere.'
'Do you know why I left?' she said. 'Do you know what finally decided me? When you were in Aden. When I read in the papers how after they'd ambushed one of your patrols, you went into the Crater on foot, totally unarmed except for that damned swagger stick, and walked in front of the armoured car to draw the fire, daring the rebels to come to the window and take a shot at you. When I read that, saw the photo on every front page, I packed my bags because I knew then, Asa, that I'd been married to a walking dead man for ten years.'
Morgan said, 'I didn't kill her, Helen.'
'No, but someone very much like you did.'
It was perhaps the cruellest thing she could have said. All colour drained from his face. For a moment, she wanted to reach out, hold him in her arms again. To bind him to her as if she could contain the incredible vitality of the man, that elemental core to his being that had always eluded her. But that was foolishness of the worst order, doomed to failure as it had always failed before.
She stifled any pity she might have felt and carried on coldly, 'Has Francis told you about the funeral arrangements?'
'Yes.'
'We're hoping for a very quiet affair. There's to be no public connection with the Cohen business for security reasons, which is one good thing. If you'd like to see her, she's at an undertaker's in Grantham. Pool and Son -George Street. And now, I'd like you to go, Asa.'
He stood there for a long moment, looking at her, then walked away.
Mr Henry Pool opened an inner door and led the way through into a chapel of rest. The atmosphere was heavy with the scent of flowers and taped music provided a suitable devotional background. There were half a dozen cubicles on either side and Mr