The Extremes

John Gray – Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

Scanned by NOVA

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Date: 07 September 2002

NOVA Scans so far:

01. A.J Quinnell - Man on Fire

02. Clive Cussler - Vixen 03

03. Nick Hornby - How to be Good

04. Locks Picks & Clicks

05. Jeffrey Deaver – The Empty Chair

06. Kim Stanley Robinson – The Years of Rice and Salt

07. John Gray – Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus 08. Jeffrey Deaver – The Stone Monkey

09 Christopher Priest – The Extremes

10 David Morrell - Double Image

11 Stephen Leather - Tango One

CHAPTER 1

Her name is Teresa Ann Gravatt and she is seven years old. She has a mirror through which she can see into another world.

The real world is for Teresa a small and unexciting one, but she dreams of better things, of a world beyond the one she knows. She lives with her parents on a US Air Force base near Liverpool, in the northwest of England. Her father is a serving officer in the USAF; her mother is British, a local girl from Birkenhead. One day the family will move back to the USA when her father's tour of European duty is through. They will probably go to Richmond, Virginia, where Bob Gravatt originated, and where his own father has a franchise for distributing industrial paints. Bob often talks about what he will do when he leaves the Air Force, but it's plain to everyone that the Cold War is going to continue for many years to come, and that US military preparedness is not going to be relaxed.

Teresa has long curls of palebrown hair, gradually darkening from the baby fairness that made her daddy call her his princess. Her mommy likes to brush it for her, although she doesn't seem to realize when the tangles get caught. Teresa can now read books by herself, write and draw by herself, play by herself She is used to being alone, but likes playing with the other kids on the base. She rides her bicycle every day in the safety of the park near the living quarters, and it's then she plays with some of her friends. She's currently the only one with an English mother, but no

one seems to notice. Every weekday her daddy drives her to and from the other side of the base, where the children of the serving men attend school.

Teresa looks and acts like a happy little girl; she is loved by her parents and liked by her friends at school. Nothing seems wrong in Teresa's life, because those who know her best live in the same secure world of the US Air Force. Her friends also lack a permanent home, and are moved at the will of the Defense Department from one Air Force camp to another. They too know the long weeks when their fathers are away on exercises, or training. They also understand the sudden disruption to their lives that follows when a posting comes through: to West Germany, to the Philippines, to Central America, to japan.

Although she has never yet crossed the Atlantic, Teresa has spent almost all of her life on American territory, those pockets carved out of other people's countries that the US

Government takes for its own bases. Teresa was born an American citizen, she is being educated in the American way, and in a few years' time, when her father finishes his military service, she will live out the rest of her life in the United States. Teresa knows none of this at the moment, and if she did she would probably not care. To her, the world she knows is one place, and the world she imagines is another. Daddy's world ends at the perimeter fence; hers goes on for ever.

Sometimes, when it rains, which in this part of England it seems to do almost every day, or when she most wants the company of other kids, or when she just feels like it, Teresa plays a game in her parents' bedroom that she has made up by herself Like all the best games it has been growing and changing for some time, and goes on getting more complicated week by week, but right from the start it has been built around the wooden door frame that stands at the midpoint of the bedroom wall. No actual door has apparently ever hung in the frame; perhaps no door was intended for it, for there is no sign in the smooth wood of where hinges might once have been.

Long ago, Teresa noticed that the window of the, living room beyond is the same size, shape and appearance as the window of the bedroom, and that identical orange curtains hang in both. If she arranges these curtains Just so, and then stands in a certain position a foot or two away from the door frame, and does not look to either side, it is possible for her to imagine that she is looking not through an open doorway but into a mirror. Then, what she sees ahead of her, through the frame, is no longer a part of the next room but actually a reflected view back into the room behind her.

The mirror world is where her private reality begins. Through there it is possible for her to run for ever, a place that is free of military bases, free of perimeter fences, a land where her dreams might come true.

That place begins with the identical room that stands on the other side of the frame. And in that room she sees another little girl, one who looks exactly like her.

A few weeks ago, while she stood before her makebelieve mirror, Teresa had raised a hand, reaching out towards the little girl she could so easily imagine standing beyond her, in the next room, in the mirror world. Magically, the imagined friend raised her hand too, copying her every movement.

The little girl's name was Megan, and she became Teresa's opposite in every way. She was her identical twin, but also her reverse, her opposite.

Now whenever Teresa is left alone, or when her parents are busy elsewhere in the house, she comes to the mirror and plays her harmless fantasy games with Megan.

First she smiles and tweaks at her dress, then inclines her head. In the mirror the Meganfriend smiles and lifts the hem of her dress and lowers her head shyly. Hands stretch out, fingertips brush clumsily where the mirror glass would be. Teresa dances away, laughing back over her shoulder as Megan mirrors her movements. Everything the girls do has a reflection, an exact replica.

Sometimes the two little girls settle on the floor at the base of the mirror and whisper about the world they each inhabit. Should an outsider ever be able to overhear what they are saying, it would not make sense in adult terms. lt is a strange, erratic fantasy, endlessly absorbing and plausible to the children, but it would seem shapeless and random to an adult mind, because they make it up as they go along. For the two little girls, the nature of this contact is the rationale. Their lives and fantasies fit seamlessly together, because each is the complement to the other. They are so uncannily alike, so instinctively in touch, but their worlds are filled with diffierent names.

So the pleasant dreams of childhood spin happily away. Days, weeks, months go by, and Teresa and Megan live out their innocent daydreams of other lands and deeds. lt is a period of certainty and stability in their lives. They both have a constant friend, and they completely trust and understand each other.

Because Megan is always there, looking back at her from the other side of their mirror, Teresa draws strength from the friendship and begins to develop more ideas about herself and the world she lives in. She feels better able to seewhat's going on around her and live with what she finds, to understand what her dad is doing, and why he and her mommy had married, and what their lives would mean for her. Even her mother detects a difference in her, and often remarks that her little girl is growing up at last. Everyone can sense the growth.

In the mirror, Megan is changing too.

One day her mommy says to Teresa, 'Do you remember that I said we would be going to live in America?'

'Yes, 1 do.'

'It's going to happen soon. Really soon. Maybe in a couple of weeks or so. Would that make you happy?'

'Win Daddy be there with us?'

'He's the reason we're going.'

'And Megan?'

Her mother holds her against her chest more tightly.

'Of course Megan win be with us. Did you think we would leave her behind?'

'I guess not,' says Teresa, looking back over her mother's shoulder at the doorway, where the mirror usually stands. She can't see Megan from this angle, but knows she must be there, somewhere out of sight.

One day, while her parents are in another part of the apartment talking about the trip back to America, how close it's getting, all the things they have to do before they fly back, Teresa is alone in the bedroom. She has her toys spread out on the carpet, but she's bored with them.

She looks across to the doorway, and sees that Megan is there, waiting for her. Her friend looks as cross and bored as she feels, and both little girls seem to realize that for once their shared fantasy world is not going to' distract them from reality.

While Megan turns away, Teresa crosses the room to her parents' double bed, where the lightly padded quilt her mommy made last Christmas holiday lies in a show of muted colours across the sheets and blankets. Out of sight of Megan she bounces up and down a few times, but even this familiar physical activity is not enough to cheer her up. She's beginning to wonder if Megan really will be there, in the new house in America.

Teresa looks across at what she can see of the mirror, but because the bed is not visible she knows that Megan cannot be seen either. Already, her little world feels as if it is narrowing, that the perimeter fences are drawing in around her.

Later, after a meal, she returns to the bed, still worried and alarmed. Her daddy has been saying he will be flying out to Florida the day after tomorrow, and that she and Mommy will follow within a few days. At the mirror Megan is as unhappy as she is, fearing a final separation, and they soon move back from each other.

There's a low table beside the bed on her daddy's side, and facing into the room there's a shallow drawer which, once, long ago, her daddy had warned her never to open. Teresa has always known what lies inside, but until now she has never felt sufficiently curious to look.

Now she does, and lays her hand on the gun that lies within. She touches it once or twice, feeling the shape of it with her fingertips, then uses both hands to lift the weapon out. She knows how it should be held, because her daddy once showed her, but now she actually has a hold of it in her tiny hands her main preoccupation is how heavy the thing is. She can barely carry it before her.

It's the most exciting thing she has ever held, and the most frightening.

In the centre of the room, facing the mirror, she lays the gun on the seat of a chair, and looks across at Megan. She is standing there beside her own chair, still with the melancholy expression they have both been wearing for the last day or two.

There is no gun on Megan's chair.

'Look what I've got,' says Teresa, and as Megan strains to see she lifts it up and holds it out.

She points it at her twin, across the narrow space that divides them. She is aware of movement in the room, a sudden intrusion, an adult size,

and she moves swiftly in alarm. In that moment there is a shattering explosion, the gun flies out of Teresa's hands, twisting her wrists, and in the other part of the room, beyond the make-believe mirror, a small life of dreams has suddenly ended.

Thirtyfive years pass.

Eight years after the family's return to the USA, Bob Gravatt, Teresa's father, dies in an automobile accident on Interstate 24 close to a USAF base in Kentucky. After the accident Teresa's mother Abigail moves to Richmond, Virginia, to stay with Bob's parents. lt is an arrangement forced on them all, and it is difficult to make it work. Abigail starts drinking heavily, runs up debts, has a series of rows with Bob's parents, and eventually remarries.

Teresa now has two new stepbrothers and a stepsister, but no one likes anyone. It's not a happy situation for Teresa, or even, finally, for her mother. The remainder of Teresa's teenage years are hard on everyone around her, and things do not look good for her.

As she grows into an adult, Teresa's emotional upheavals continue. She goes through heartbreaks, failed romances, relocations, alienation from her mother, also from her father's family; there's a long livein relationship with a man who develops steadily into an alcoholic brimming with denial and violent repression; there is a short period living alone, then a longer one of sharing an apartment with another young woman, then finally arrives the good fortune of discovering a city scheme that funds mature students to take a degree course.

Here her adult life begins at last. After four years of intensive academic work, supporting herself with secretarial jobs, Teresa earns her BA in information studies, and with this lands a prize job with the federal government, in the Department of Justice.

Within a couple of years she is married to a fellow worker named Andy Simons, and it is on the whole a successful marriage. Andy and Teresa live contentedly together for several years, with few upsets. The marriage is childless, because they are both dedicated to their careers and sublimating all their energies into them, but it's the life they want to lead. With two government incomes they gradually become well off, take expensive foreign vacations, start collecting antiques and pictures, buy several cars, throw numerous parties, and wind up buying a large house in Woodbridge, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac river. Then one hot June day, while on an assignment in a small town in the Texas panhandle, Andy is shot dead by a gunman, and Teresa's happiness abruptly ends.

Eight months later, life is still in limbo. She knows only the misery of sudden widowhood, made infinitely worse by a deep resentment about the circumstances in which Andy was killed, and a lasting frustration at the failure of the Department of justice to give her any substantive information about how his death occurred.

She is now fortythree. A third of a century has slipped by since the day Megan died, and in the cold light of hindsight the years telescope into what feels like a summary of a life, a prologue to something else she does not want. Everything that happened led only to the moment of bereavement. Teresa is left with the generous payouts from Andy's insurance policies, their three jointly owned cars, a large house echoing with unwanted acquisitions and treasured memories, and a career from which she has been granted the opportunity to take temporary leave on compassionate grounds.

In the dark of a February evening, Teresa finally takes up her section chief s offer of leave.

She drives to john Foster Dulles Airport in Washington DC, deposits her car in the longstay parking garage, and flies American Airways on the overnight plane to Britain As she looks eagerly from the window, while the aircraft circles down towards London Gatwick in the morning light, Teresa thinks the English countryside looks dark and rainsodden. She doesn't know what she had been expecting, but the reality depresses her. As the plane touches down her view of the airport is briefly obscured by the flying spray thrown up from the runway by the wheels and the engine exhausts. February in England is not as cold as February in Washington, but as she crosses the airport's concrete concourse in search of her rental car, the weather feels to Teresa more damp and discouraging than she wanted or expected.

She drives away into England, fighting back these initial feelings of disappointment. She is nervous of the twitchy handling of the small car, a Ford Escort, uncomfortable too with the impatient speed with which the rest of the traffic moves, and the erratic and apparently illogical way the intersections have to be negotiated.

As she becomes more familiar with the car, she casts quick glances away from the traffic and round at the countryside, looking with intense interest at the low hills, the winter~ bare trees, the small houses and the muddy fields. This is her first trip back to England since she left as a child, and in spite of everything it begins at last to charm her.

She imagines a smaller, older, more tightly constructed place, different from the one she knows, spreading out, not in endless stretches of featureless country, as in the US, but in concentrated time: history reaching behind her, the future extending before her, meeting at this moment of the present. She's tired from the long flight, the lack of sleep, the wait at the UK Immigration desk, and so she's open to fanciful thoughts.

She stops in a small town somewhere, to walk around and look at the shops, but afterwards returns to the car and naps for a while in the cramped position behind the steering wheel. She wakes up suddenly, momentarily unsure of where she is, thinking desperately of Andy, how much she wishes he could see this with her. She came here to try to forget him, but in many ways she had been doing better so long as she stayed at home. She wants him here. She cries in the car, wondering whether to go back to Gatwick and take the first flight home, but in the end she knows she has to see this through.

The short afternoon is ending as she drives on south towards the Sussex coast, looking for a small seaside town called Bulverton. She keeps thinking, This is England, this is where 1 come from, this is what 1 really know. But she has no remaining family in Britain, no friends. She is in every way a stranger here. A year ago, eight months ago, what was for her a lifetime ago, she had never even heard of Bulverton on Sea.

Teresa arrives in Bulverton after night has fallen. The streets are narrow, the buildings are dark, the traffic pours through on the coastal road. She finds her hotel but sits outside in the car for a few minutes, bracing herself At last, she collects together some of her stuff and climbs out.

A brilliant white light suddenly surrounds her.

CHAPTER 2

a

Her name was Amy Colwyn and she had a story to tell about what had happened to her one day last June. Like so many other people in Bulverton, she had no one to tell it to. No one around her could bear to hear it any more, and even Amy herself no longer wanted to say the words. How many times can you express grief, guilt, missed companionship, regrets, remembered love, lost chances? But failing to say the words did nothing to make them not thought.

Tonight, as so often, she sat alone behind the bar at the White Dragon with nothing much to distract her, and the story played maddeningly in her mind. lt was always there, like music you can't get out of your mind.

'I'll be in the bar if you want me,' Nick Surtees had said to her earlier. He was the owner of the hotel, someone else perhaps with a story to tell.

'All right,' she said, because every evening he told her he was going into the bar, and every evening she replied that it would be all right.

'Are we expecting any visitors tonight?'

'I don't think so. Someone might turn up, 1 suppose.'

'I'll leave that to you, then. If no one checks in, would you mind coming in and helping out behind the bar?'

'No, Nick.'

Amy Colwyn was one of the many leftover victims of the massacre that had taken place in Bulverton the previous summer. She had not been in physical danger herself, but her life had been blighted none the less by the event. The horror of that day lived on. Business at the hotel was usually slow, allowing her too much time to dwell on what had happened to others, and what might have been her life now if the disaster had not happened.

Nick Surtees, another indirect victim of the shootings, was one of the matters of regret on which she frequently dwelt. There had been a time, not so long ago, when it would never have occurred to her that she would see Nick again, let alone be working, living and sleeping with him. Yet that had happened and they were all still happening, and she wasn't entirely sure how. Nick and she had found comfort in each other, and were still there holding on when that need had begun to retreat.

Bulverton was situated on the hilly edge of the Pevensey Levels between Bexhill and Eastbourne. Fifty years ago it had been a holiday resort, the type of seaside town traditionally preferred by families with young children. With the conning of cheap foreign holidays Bulverton had gone into rapid decline as a resort; most of the seafront hotels had been converted into blocks of flats or retirement homes. For the last two decades Bulverton had in a manner of speaking turned its back on the sea, and had concentrated on promoting the charms of its Old Town. This was a small network of attractive terraces and gardens, covering part of the river valley and one of the hills rising up beside it. If Bulverton could be said to have an industry now, it was in the shops that sold antiques or secondhand books, in a number of nursing homes in the high part of the town known as the Ridge, and in providing homes for the people who commuted to their jobs in Brighton, Eastbourne or Tunbridge Wells.

lt was because of Nick that the White Dragon could not seem to make up its mind whether to be a pub or a seaside hotel. Keeping it as a pub suited him, because he spent most evenings in the saloon bar downstairs, drinking with a few of his pals.

The marginally more profitable hotel side, the bed and breakfast and the occasional halfboard for a weekend, was Amy's domain, mainly through Nick's own lack of interest. in the days and weeks immediately after the shootings, when Bulverton was crammed with journalists and film crews, the hotel had been full. The work had offered itself as a welcome distraction from her own preoccupations, and she had thrown herself into it. Business had inevitably declined as the first shock of the catastrophe began to fade, and media interest receded; by the middle of July it was back to what Amy now knew was its normal level. So long as there were never too many people arriving at the same time, Amy, working alone, could comfortably keep the rooms clean and have the beds made up, provision the tiny restaurant with a reasonable choice of meals, and even keep the financial records up to date.

None of these jobs interested Nick.

Amy often thought back to the times when she and some of her old schoolfriends would move across to Eastbourne every summer, from July to September, when there were always two or three major conferences taking place: trade unions, political parties, business or professional organizations. lt had never been hard finding shortterm but comparatively well paid Jobs: chambermaids and bar staff were always needed in the big hotels. It had been a laugh as well, lots of young men on the loose, all with money to bum and no one taking too much notice of what was going on. She had met Jase then, also working the conference business, but as a wine waiter. That had been another laugh, because Jase, who was a roofer in real life, knew less about wine than did even Amy.

What Amy hadn't told Nick about was the feeling of letdown that had been growing in her all that day. lt concerned a reservation made two weeks before from America. Amy had not mentioned the booking to Nick at the time lt was made, and she had quietly slipped the deposit for the room into the bank. A woman called Teresa Simons had written to ask if she might reserve a room with en suite bathroom on an openended basis; she said she was making a long visit to Bulverton, and needed a base.

A pleasant daydream then swept over Amy, a vision of having one of the rooms permanently occupied throughout the slow months of late winter: it was a potentially lucrative booking, with meals and bar takings all boosted by the woman's stay. lt was absurd to think that one semipermanent guest could transform their fortunes, but for some reason Amy had felt convinced that she could. She faxed back promptly, confirming the room, and had even suggested a modest discount for a long stay. The booking and the deposit turned up not long afterwards. Nick still didn't know about it.

Today was the day Mrs Simons was due to arrive. According to her letter she would be flying into Gatwick in the morning, and Amy had been half expecting her to turn up from midmorning onwards. By lunchtime there was no sign of her, and no message either. As the day crept by she still didn't arrive and Amy had been feeling a steadily growing sense of mishap. lt was out of proportion to its importance there were all sorts of reasons why the plane might have been delayed, and anyway why should the woman come straight to the hotel after getting offa plane? and Amy realized this.

It made her aware yet again how much of herself she was pouring into this unprormsing business. She had wanted to surprise Nick with Mrs Simons' arrival, tell him about what she assumed would be a welcome source of income for some

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time. lt might even, she had brifly hoped, break him out of his seemingly permanent round of worry and silent brooding.

She knew that they were both in a cycle of misery, a long period of grief They weren't alone in Bulverton: most of the people in the town were still grieving.

lt was what Reverend Oliphant had said at the town's memorial service the week after the disaster that one occasion in her life when Amy had wanted to go to church, and did.

Kenneth Oliphant had said: grief is an experience like happiness or success or discovery or love. Grief has a shape and a duration, and it gives and takes away. Grief has to be endured, surrendered to, so that an escape from it lies beyond grief itself, on the other side, only attainable by passing through.

There was comfort in such words, but no solutions. Like so many others in the town, Amy and Nick were still passing through, with the other side nowhere in sight.

Sitting on a high stool behind the bar, staring vacantly across at the table where Nick and his pals were playing brag on a table lightly puddled with beer and under a paleblue cloud of tobacco smoke, Amy heard a car.

lt came to a halt in the street outside. Amy did not move her face or her eyes, but all her senses stretched out towards the sound of the idling engine. No car doors opened, and the engine continued to run. lt was a sort of silence.

There was a metallic grinding of gears being engaged lazily, incompetently, or tiredly? and the car moved away again. Through the frosted lower panes of the bar windows Amy saw its rear brake lights bdightening as the driver slowed at the archway entrance, then swung the car into the car park behind. Amy's heightened senses followed it like a radar tracker. She heard the engine cut out at last.

She left the stool, raised the serving flap in the counter, and walked across the room to peer through the window at the street outside. If Nick noticed her movement he showed no sign that he had. The card game continued, and one of Nick's friends lit another cigarette.

Amy pressed her forehead to the cool, condensationlined window, rubbed a wet aperture with her fingers, and looked across Eastbourne Road in the direction of the unseen sea. The main road outside was tracked with the shine of old rain and the drier strips where vehicle tyres had worn their paths. The orange light from the streetlamps reflected in distorted patches from the uneven road surface and from the windows of the shops and flats on the other side.

Some of the shop windows were lit, but most of them were either covered by security panels or simply vacant.

Amy watched the passing traffic for a moment, wondering how it was possible that the sound of one car coming to a halt had stood out so noticeably against the continuous noise of all the others. lt must mean that she had never relaxed, that the arrival of the American woman had assumed a personal significance of some kind.

She walked back to the area behind the bar, closed the hatch, then went into the corridor that ran behind the barroom. At the other end of this was the part of the building in which she and Nick lived and slept. Immediately beyond the bar door was the small kitchen where they cooked and ate their own meals. She did not turn this way, though, but walked along to the fire exit. She pushed her way through the double doors. They opened into the hotel's car park at the rear of the building.

Amy switched on the main security light, drenching the area in light that seemed, suddenly, too white and intrusive. A rainspotted car had been parked at an angle across two of the whitelined bays, and a woman was leaning through the

open rear passenger door to reach something. Presently she moved backwards and straightened, and placed two small valises on the ground.

Amy went across to her as the woman opened the tailgate. Inside the car were several more cases, and large bags stuffed with belongings.

'Mrs Simons?' Amy said.

'I'll show you to your room,' Amy said, and started up the stairs. Mrs Simons had gone ahead, so Amy overtook her on the first half-landing. As she passed, she saw the woman flash her a grateful simile.

She looked younger than Amy had expected, but her expectation had been based on hardly any information at all: an American address, handwriting in blue ballpoint on a kind of notepaper Amy had never seen before, something about the phrasing she used. The careful formality of the letter had summoned a vague but now clearly baseless impression of a matronly woman, at or close to the age of retirement. This was not the case. Mrs Simons had that preserved attractiveness, apparently ageless, of some TV actresses. Amy felt as if she knew her already, and for a moment even wondered if she might have seen her on TV.

Behind the well-made surface she looked and sounded tired, as you would expect from someone who had come in on a plane from the US, but even so she had a relaxed manner that made Amy feel at ease with her. She looked as if she would be different, a more interesting kind of guest than the weekending retired couples and the overnight business visitors they normally had in their rooms.

Amy took her to room 12 on the first floor, which she had prepared earlier by checking that the bed linen was fresh and that the heating was on. She went inside in front of Mrs Simons, switching on the central light, then opening the

connecting door to the bathroom for inspection. Americans were supposed to be fastidious about hotel bathrooms.

' I'll go and see about the rest of your luggage,' she said, but there was no response. Mrs Simons had already passed through into the bathroom. Amy left, and closed the door.

Downstairs in the bar Amy informed Nick of Mrs Simons' arrival straight away, but by this time he had drunk more than he should which was the same thing as his usual amount, which was always more than enough and he simply shrugged.

' Would you help her bring her luggage in from the car?' Amy said.

'Yeah, in a minute,' Nick said, indicating his hand of cards. 'Who is this, anyway? 1 don't remember you saying anything about someone arriving tonight.'

'I thought it'd be a surprise.'

Nick played a card.

Suppressing her irritation with him, Amy went out to the car and picked up the remaining pieces of luggage herself She struggled up to room 12 with them.

'You can leave them there,' Teresa Simons said, indicating the corner of the floor. 'Did you carry them up on your own?'

'It's no problem,' Amy said. 'I was coming to see you anyway. Would you like something to eat, a supper? We don't really keep hotel hours for meals so it wouldn't be any trouble to me.'

'I guess not, but, thanks. I stopped somewhere along the way. One of those roadside restaurants back there. You have a bar here?'

' Yes.'

'I'm going to rest up for a while, then maybe I'll have a drink downstairs.'

When Amy returned to the bar, Nick had left the table and was behind the counter drawing another pint of best for himself

'Why didn't you tell me about her?' he said, raising the glass to his lips, and sucking at the foam.

'I thought you'd look in the file.'

'I leave all that to you, love. How long is she likely to stay? One night? A week?'

'She's booked in for an indefinite stay.'

She had expected a surprised reaction, but he simply said, 'We'd better give her a bin every weekend, then. You can't be too careful.'

Amy frowned, and followed him out from behind the counter.

She went round the tables and collected the few used glasses she could find. She changed the ashtray on Nick's table. Back behind the bar she leant forward, her hair falling at the sides of her face. She washed the glasses under the pressuretap then stacked them on the rubber tray that went into the drier.

She was thinking about Nick and his drinking, the aimless life he had drifted into, and the way in which for him one day seemed to lead into the next with neither change nor improvement. Yet what was the alternative for him? Come to that, what was the alternative for her? Both her parents were dead, jase was dead, many of her friends were away in Brighton or Dover or London, starting up again, anywhere that was not in Bulverton. A lot of people had forsaken the town since the summer. The same urge was strong in her.

Two weeks ago Amy had received an unexpected letter from a cousin called Gwyneth, who had flown to Australia on a working holiday ten years ago, had fallen in love with a young builder and stayed on after her visa expired. Now she was an Australian citizen, married, and had two small

children. Amy and Gwyneth hadn't written to each other

1

since last winter. Her letter was full of concern about the life she supposed Amy must be having to lead in Bulverton these days. She didn't mention the disaster in the town, like so many people who were outsiders, or who had become one. Gwyneth was urging her, not for the first time, to come to Australia for a holiday and give Sydney a try. She had a spare room and a spare bed, she said, and they were only half an hour from downtown Sydney, with the harbour and the surfing beaches just a tramride away ...

'Hi.'

The American woman had returned. Amy looked up in surprise.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I was miles away. May 1 get you a drink?'

'Yeah. Do you have any bourbon?'

'Yes, we do. You want ice with it?'

'Please. Make it a double.'

Amy reached for a glass on the shelf behind her, and drew off a double.

When she turned back Mrs Simons had taken a seat on one of the bar stools and was leaning forward across the counter, resting her elbows on the curved edge of the bar. She cradled her drink in both hands, looking tired, but as if she was settling in.

'I thought I was ready to fall asleep,' she said, after a first sip. 'But you know, you find you're sitting there in a room a couple thousand miles from home and you realize sleep is the last thing that's going to happen. I'm still on that plane, 1 guess.'

'Is this your first visit to England?'

'I don't know whether that's a compliment or not!'

She made a wry grimace, then picked up the glass as if to drink more of the whiskey, but apparently thought better of

it and put the glass down on the counter.

'My mother was English and 1 was born here. In that sense I'm English. My dad was a serviceman. I don't know what people here call it, but in the US they call people like me an Air Force brat. My ma married Dad while he was stationed here ... there were a lot of our troops over here then. He was from Virginia. You ever hear of Richmond?'

'Yes, 1 have. Are your parents still alive?'

'No.' She added, with a shrewd look at Amy, 'It's been that way a long time. 1 still miss them, but you know .

'Do you remember much about England?'

'I was only small when we left, and before that 1 always seemed to be on the base. You know how some Americans can be. They don't like being too cut off from familiar things. That was my dad. We lived on the base, we went shopping on the base, we ate burgers and ice cream on the base, we saw movies on the base, all my dad's friends were on the base. My ma sometimes took me to see my grandparents in Birkenhead, but I don't remember much about all that. 1 was too young. I grew up in the US. That's what I tell people, because that's where 1 feel like I'm really from.'

She had a mannerism when she spoke, perhaps exaggerated by fatigue: she often reached up and stroked her head behind her left ear, running the fingers down to her neck, gently touching something. She was wearing a silken scarf, so it was impossible to see what was there. Amy assumed the woman's neck was stiff after the journey, or that she had some kind of sore place.

She said, 'So are you on holiday?'

'No.' The whiskey glass was empty already, and she was turning it in her fingers. 'I'm here to work. May 1 buy you a drink?'

'No, thanks.'

'You sure? OK, then let me have another double, and after that I'm quitting. 1 was drinking on the plane, but you know it sort of flows through you and you don't feel anything. Not until you get up to go to the john, and then it seems as if the plane is moving all over the place. But that was hours ago.'

She took the newly filled glass of iced bourbon that Amy placed in front of her.

'Thanks a lot. 1 guess I'm talking too much. just for tonight ... 1 want to go to bed and sleep, and 1 can't do that after a journey unless I've had a couple of drinks.' She glanced around the almost deserted bar. Amy instantly looked at the back of the woman's neck, which was briefly exposed when she turned. 'So what's the main action in Bulverton?'

Amy said, 'Not much action, really. Some people come here to retire. If you go towards Bexhill you'll see a lot of big old houses, most of them converted into nursing homes. There aren't many jobs in the town.'

'Are there any places to see? You know, sights for tourists?'

'There's the Old Town. That used to be the big attraction. It's just round the corner from here.

Where you parked the car, at the back, there's a road that leads away from the seafront, going up the hill. If you walk up there you'll see the market place. That's the heart of the Old Town.'

'You got a museum here in town?'

'A small one. There's another in Bexhill, and there are a couple in Hastings.'

'Local history, that sort of thing?'

'It's been a long time since 1 went to any of the museums, but 1 think that's what you'll find.'

'Is there a newspaper office here, where 1 can go talk to them?'

'The Courier, yes. There's a shop in the Old Town where they take bookings for classified ads.

But the editorial office is in Hastings, 1 think. Or maybe Eastbourne. I'll try and find out for you in the morning.'

'So the newspaper doesn't just carry local news? I mean, about Bulverton only?'

'We're not big enough to have our own paper. Actually, the real name of the paper is the Bexhill and Bulverton Courier, but everyone calls it the Courier. It's the only one. lt covers this stretch of coast, as far along as Pevensey Bay.'

'Right. Thank you ... 1 don't know your name.'

'Amy. Amy Colwyn.'

'Nice to meet you, Amy. I'm Teresa.'

Teresa stood up, saying she was going to hit the sack; Amy asked her again if everything in her room was satisfactory, and was told it was.

As she left, Teresa said, 'I hope you don't mind my asking. What kind of an accent is it you have?'

'Accent?' lt was the first time anyone had commented on the way Amy spoke. 'I suppose ... 1

mean, it must be the way we all speak around here. It's nothing special.'

'No, it's very attractive. OK, 1 guess I'll see you in the morning.'

CHAPTER 3

he first few times Teresa used the extreme experience T scenarios she had played a witness.

That was how the Bureau worked. You wired in and they did the stuff on you, and soon enough you found yourself in a situation that was about to go wrong.

The problem of being a witness, as they described it, was having to decide where to be before the action began. You had to witness, be close enough and see enough so you could write a report afterwards, but you also had to survive.

lt was the Bureau's way not to explain too much in advance about what was going to happen, so before their first experience the only training Teresa and the others received was in how to abort a scenario.

Her instructor was Special Agent Dan Kazinsky, who said to her, 'You don't need to know how to get out. You only have to know that if you survive. But I'll show you anyway.'

He taught her one of those acronym mnemonics the instructors were so fond of. LIVER.

Locate, Identify, Verify, Envision, Remove.

'But you aren't going to make it,' said Kazinsky. 'You might later on, but the first few times are tough.'

The first extreme experience lasted exactly seven seconds, and for all of that short time Teresa was overwhelmed and disoriented by a flood of sensations. Some were physical, some mental.

She shifted abruptly from the cool, underlit ExEx

laboratory in the training facility in Quantico to brilliant sunshine in a city street at noon. She staggered as she entered the unaccustomed weight of another woman's body. The noise of traffic burst against her like an explosion. Heat stifled her. The tall buildings of the downtown area of a city crowded around and above her. The sidewalks were full of people. There was a siren wailing somewhere, construction workers clattering at something metal, car horns blowing. She stared around in amazement, astounded by the shock of this false reality.

Information rushed in at her. This was Cleveland, Ohio, on East 55th Street between Superior and Euclid. Date: July 3, 1962. Time: 12.17 p.m. Her name was Maryjo Clegg, age twentynine, address

But the first five seconds were already up. Teresa remembered what she was here to do, braced herself against the risk of some violent event, and stepped into the cover of the first doorway she came to.

A man with a gun emerged through the door at the same moment, and he shot her in the face.

Entry into an extreme scenario was an almost instant process; withdrawal and recovery after virtual death were slow and traumatic. The day after her first session, Teresa had to report back to Agent Kazinsky to continue her training. She did so after only three hours' sleep, having spent much of the previous day and most of the night undergoing recovery therapy at the Quantico clinic. She was exhausted, terrified and demoralized, and convinced that she would never again venture into extreme experience.

She was obviously not the only one: two of the other trainees had not turned up at all, and were immediately dropped from the course. The remaining trainees looked as fatigued as Teresa felt, but no one had time to compare

notes. Kazinsky announced they were all to return to the scenario and attempt to resolve it.

Their only relief was that they would be more fully briefed about the details of the incident they were dealing with.

Instead of having to learn about the witness in the few seconds before the incident began, Teresa was now given a full character profile. She learned not only factual details about Ma

'jo Clegg, but something about her personality.

ry

She was also informed, significantly, that Maryjo had survived the incident. lt was her description of the bank robber, and later her ability to pick him out in a lineup, that secured his conviction and, ultimately, his execution. Details of the gunman were also given. He was a man called Willie Santiago, age thirtyfour, a repeat offender with a string of armed robberies behind him. At the moment of his encounter with Maryjo he was attempting to escape from the bank he had just held up. He had shot and killed one of the tellers, and was being pursued by the bank's security officers. The police had already been called, and were on their way to the scene of the crime.

Full of misgivings, and terrified of what she knew was almost certainly going to happen to her, Teresa reentered the Clegg scenario later that day.

She arrived in Cleveland in circumstances identical to the first time. The same rush of impressions swooped in on her: heat, noise, crowded downtown. Additionally, though, she was in a state of blinding panic. She saw the door to the bank, and instantly knew not only what was about to happen but that she could do nothing to protect herself, She turned away from the door and ran as fast as she could. Santiago rushed out and ran up East 55th in the other direction, firing his gun at passersby, wounding two of them. He was apprehended by the police a few minutes

later. After another three hours Teresa was still in downtown Cleveland, wandering through the streets, unsure of what she was expected to do. She had forgotten all the training, the mnemonics and acronyms. She was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the simulation in which she found herself, its incredible attention to detail and its apparently limitless size, the thousands of reallooking people who populated it, the endless procession of traffic and events: she looked at newspapers, even found a bar where a TV was playing, and saw a news report of the Santiago holdup. Her venture into this scenario had started in panic, and, after a short period of relief that Santiago had not actually harmed her this time, it ended in the same way: Teresa began to believe that she was permanently trapped, for ever stuck in the Cleveland of 1962, knowing no one, having nowhere to live, no money, no way back to the place and time she had left. lt was terrifying to think this, and in her state of mental exhaustion she began to believe' it. No thought of the LIVER mnemonic, nor how it could be used, entered her mind.

Finally, Special Agent Kazinsky took pity on her, and got the Quantico staff to pull her out before she became completely disoriented.

She reported back to the Academy the following day, in a worse physical and mental state than before, and with her resignation written down on a sheet of the Bureau's own memorandum paper.

Dan Kazinsky took it from her, read it slowly, then folded it and put it in his pocket.

'Agent Gravatt,' he said. 'I'm not concerned that you ran away, as taking evasive action is warranted. However, in the real event you are attempting to take control of, Miss Clegg obtained a witness description of the perpetrator that ensured his conviction and execution.

You did not. You

may take twentyfour hours' leave and report back here tomorrow at this time.'

'Thank you, sir,' Teresa said, and went home and called Andy. They were due to be married within two months. She told him what she had done, and what Kazinsky had said. Andy, who had already trained with extreme experience, was able to help her through this difficult time.

On her next visit to Cleveland, she did not run away but stood beside the door as Santiago rushed out, and tried to see his face clearly. He shot her.

Next time she tried to get a glimpse of Santiago, then threw herself facedown on the sidewalk.

Not only did she fail to get the description, she was shot in the back of the head as she lay there.

Next time she tackled Santiago, hurling herself at him and trying to force him to the ground.

She tried to use the disabling techniques in which she had been trained. There was a brief, violent scuffle, at the end of which she was shot again.

Each time the experience was worse, because although Teresa retained her own identity she never believed she had actually become Maryjo Clegg the fright, pain and trauma of being repeatedly shot and killed were almost impossible to handle. The hours of physical and mental recovery that followed the extreme experience were gradually extending to two days; this was not unusual for a trainee, but it used up expensive time. She knew she had to get this right or flunk the course.

On her next extreme, she did as Kazinsky had repeatedly advised, and tried to let Maryjo's own reactions control her behaviour. In the actual incident, which had really occurred as depicted, Maryjo of course had had no warning that an armed man was going to burst out of the bank, and she would not have reacted until something happened.

Teresa barely had time to adjust to the shift into Mary~ jo's identity. She took four steps along the street, then Santiago appeared in the doorway. Maryjo turned towards him in horror and surprise, saw the gun he was holding, and Teresa's instincts took over. She ducked away, and Santiago shot her. This time it took two bullets to kill her.

Teresa finally got it right on her seventh extreme. She allowed Maryjo to react as she would, turned in surprise as Santiago appeared, faced him, then raised an arm and stepped forward.

Santiago fired at her, but because the instin ctive attack by an unarmed passerby took him by surprise, he missed. Teresa felt the heat of the discharge on her face, was stunned by the loud report of the gun, but the bullet went past her. At last she ducked, and as she fell to the ground she saw Santiago sprinting away in the brilliant sunshine. A few moments later two bank security guards appeared: one of them stooped to help her. Shortly after this the extreme experience scenario ended, and Teresa had survived with her description.

Over the next few weeks the extreme experience course continued, and Teresa was steadily progressed by Kazinsky and the other instructors from one type of event participant to the next: from witness to nonwitnessing bystander, to victim, to security guard, to perpetrator, to police officer or federal agent. In one case she was a hostage; in another she had to negotiate.

The hardest cases to deal with were the ones in which the developing incident was not at all obvious, and the instructors set the scenario to run for a long time before the main event occurred. In one notable sequence Teresa was in the role of undercover police Officer, staking out a bar in suburban San Antonio in 1981. She had to sit in wait for nearly two hours, knowing that the first chance would be

the only one. When the gunman burst into the bar he was a man from Houston called Charles Dayton Hunter, who was at the time one of the Bureau's Ten Most Wanted Teresa got him with her first shot.

Later, she moved on to direct access with some of the surviving participants. For instance, she was taken to Cleveland to meet Maryjo Clegg a month after completing the Santiago extreme. Maryjo was by then in her late sixties, a retired city employee who clearly welcomed the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars working for the Bureau in this way. She appeared refreshingly untraumatized by her horrific experience back in 1962, and minimized her contribution to the arrest and execution of Willie Santiago, but Teresa found it disconcerting to have shared so intimately this woman 1 s terror and, several times, death.

CHAPTER 4

Nick Surtees was living in London at the time of the Bulverton massacre. In the trauma of subsequent events he later found it difficult to remember what he had been doing during the actual day, except that he knew he would have been working as usual at his office near Marble Arch.

At the end of the afternoon he was driving home along the elevated section of Westway, part of the A40, heading out of London towards his house in Acton. It was a sweltering day in early June, and he drove with the car windows open and the cooling fan blasting at him. The radio was on, the volume adjusted as he preferred it, just below the level of perfect audibility.

He liked to think when he was driving: not great or important thoughts, but a general state of reflectiveness, helping him wind down after the stresses of the day, half his mind turned inwards, the other half coping with the car and the traffic conditions. If the radio was loud it interfered with this, whether it was with music, the blathering of disc Jockeys or the more urgent tones of newsreaders. So he had just enough sound on for a relevant word or a phrase to catch his attention: 'drivers in West London' and 'the elevated section of Westway' were common ones anything that he was already mentally tuned into.

That evening one word came unexpectedly out of the background noise: 'Bulverton'.

He reached immediately across the dashboard to turn up

the volume, but another telling phrase struck before he could do so: 'the quiet seaside town in Sussex has been devastated . . .'

Then he heard it at full volume: the newsreader said news was coming in that a gunman had gone berserk in the centre of town, shooting at anyone he saw, or at any vehicle that moved.

The situation was still unclear: police had so far been unable to disarm the man, or prevent him from carrying on, and his present location was unknown. The death toll was thought to be high. The news was still breaking; more would be brought as soon as possible. Meanwhile, members of the public were warned to stay away from Bulverton.

Another presenter then launched into an obviously unscripted talk on the state of gun control in the country, the blanket prohibition on most types of gun, how sports shooters' lobby groups had failed to get the law changed, and the unsuccessful appeals that had been made to European courts. He was interrupted by a phonedin report from a BBC reporter described as 'on the spot'. In reality she was phoning from Hastings, several miles away, and in spite of her compelling tone of voice had little to add. She said she thought the number of dead had reached double figures. Several policemen were believed to be amongst the casualties. The presenter asked her if any children were thought to be involved, and the reporter said she had no information on that.

A scheduled traffic report followed, but this too was dominated by the news from Bulverton.

Drivers were warned to keep away from the A259 coast road between Hastings and Eastbourne, and generally to avoid the area until further notice. Bulverton was closed to traffic from all directions. More information, they said, would be made available soon.

All through this Nick continued to drive along in the

slowmoving rushhour traffic, his gaze fixed blankly on the back of the car in front of him. He was on a kind of emotional autopilot, suspending his feelings until he was convinced that what he was hearing was true. The programme switched to another topic, so he took the mobile phone from the glove compartment and punched in his parents' number. After a brief delay for cellular connection, the number rang and rang without answer.

He switched the phone off and on, then tried again in case he had keyed in the wrong number. There was still no answer.

He knew it could mean anything, and that their absence from the hotel could have a mundane explanation: they sometimes drove into Bexhill or Eastbourne during the afternoon to do a little shopping, and such expeditions were so much a part of their lives that he rarely phoned them before he arrived home from work. However, he also knew that it was unusual for them to stay out this late. Another explanation could be that they were simply outside the building. Or that he had in his anxiety dialled the wrong number; he had to wait for the traffic to halt for a few seconds, but then immediately punched the keys again, being extracareful to get them right. No answer.

His mind started racing, imagining the worst. He thought of them hearing gunfire in the street outside, going to a window to investigate, or, worse, stepping outside the door, to be caught instantly in a fusillade of bullets. His father was an instinctive intervener: he never ran away from trouble.

Nick's dominant feeling continued to be disbelief Terrible events reported in the news traditionally happen to other people, or are carried out in places you know of but are nowhere near, or they don't directly concern you at all. When all these selfima 'ned rules are broken, you find 91

yourself emotionally exposed.

lt was hard for Nick to believe that it had happened in the dull little place he knew, where he had grown up and 1

1

which

was full of people he knew. He couldn't take in the fact that it was happening now, that he was one of the people who

were going to have to deal with it in some way, that he was already an indirect victim.

The radio programme was interrupted again, with another hastily arranged call from somewhere close to the incident. This was from a senior police officer, but again he was not on the spot, not there in Bulverton.

After this, it was clear that the shootings had become the main, the only, news story of that evening. Gradually, the BBC's news organization responded to the sudden incident, and information began to come through more coherently, and therefore more immediately and terrifyingly.

Nick switched stations, though, irrationally trying to find more news, or better news, some message that would cushion the shock. He discovered, of course, that all the London and national stations were concentrating on Bulverton. They seemed to be reporting at diffierent stages of the incident. He retuned to the BBC, and continued to drive in a state of numbness and inattention. He was aware that drivers of the other cars around him would be listening to the news on their own radios, but to almost all of them it must have been as if it was happening to someone else, in a place they had only heard of The other drivers' faces were neutral. Were they listening? Was he the only one? Unreality surged around him, coming and going.

At this time Nick was living alone in London, but he had a girlfriend called Jodie Quennell.

He usually saw jodie at weekends and on odd evenings in the week. That evening, that fateful day, he and jodie had arranged as they often did to meet for a meal and a drink, but while he was in his car he had no way of contacting her. She too drove home from work at this time, but she had no mobile in her car. He would have to call her later. He distracted himself for a few seconds with an imagined conversation with her, but predominating were thoughts of the quiet and familiar streets of his home town and of people he probably knew being fired on in them.

At last he reached the Hangar Lane interchange, where the North Circular Road crossed the A40. He turned left, heading south, but was still heavily delayed by the slowmoving traffic.

He was trying to think ahead, work out which would be the best route to the Bexhill region of the coast from this part of London, but all the time the radio was distracting him. He had driven this way dozens of times before, but usually timed h's departure to miss the worst of the rushhour traffic. He could easily imagine what the M25 would be like at this time of the early evening. He was in no mental condition to deal with that sort of stressful driving.

Nick had been born in Bulverton, the only child of James and Michaela Surtees. His parents lived and worked in the White Dragon for most of their adult lives, first as tenants of the large brewery chain that ran the place, then latterly, when the brewery started shedding its less prosperous sites, as the owners.

Bulverton had been in decline through all their years, but they had never given tip trying to make the place profitable. What started out as a large white elephant of a pub on an unfashionable part of the coast had gradually been modernized and improved. When it was clear that Bulverton had no future as a holiday resort, his father took the difficult decision to move the White Dragon upmarket and concentrate on the business and weekend markets.

All the guest rooms were expensively refurbished, satellite and cable TV went into every room, the hotel installed fax, cellular phone

and internet nodes, teleconferencing facilities, a small but well-equipped business conference suite. The rooms were centrally heated and airconditioned, they had minibar facilities, the bathrooms had needle showers As well as pressurejet tubs, and so on. For a time, James Surtees employed a gourmet chef, and he built up what he claimed was t e finest small wine cellar on the South Coast.

All to only temporary avail. The economy of the area was not dynamic enough to support a hotel of that kind, and although there were good years the decline was measurable. At the same time, the public bar continued to be popular with the locals, and it would have been foolish to take away this core business. The White Dragon for years had a split personality, in the kinds of custom it sought.

None of this had been of much concern to Nick, although he knew better than anyone the amount of work, and the huge investment, that his parents put into making the place what it had become. He grew up taking it all for granted, as any child would. When he was old enough his father made it clear to him that the business would be his one day, but Nick was going through his own adolescent insecurities. Although he learnt the basics of the hotel trade, and helped out around the hotel in the evenings and at weekends, his heart was never in it.

Habitually lazy at school, at the age of sixteen Nick at last started to take his schooling a little more seriously. lt was computers and programming that did it for him. After years of messing around with the school computers he suddenly became interested, and soon transformed himself into a typically obsessive computer freak. Programming came as naturally to him as French or German came to some of his friends, and within a few weeks it was clear where his career would lie. The only problem was that jobs were almost impossible to find locally.

He found the tasks around the hotel increasingly irksome, and tensions grew between him and his parents. A solution presented itself when Nick saw some computing jobs in London being advertised in the Courier; he applied, and within a few days was offered a fulltime job as a software engineer.

The break from Bulverton, sought by so many other young people of his generation, had come quickly and unexpectedly. Once he was established in London, Nick felt almost as if he had been reborn. His memories of his days in Sussex receded. At first he returned to Bulverton to see his parents on most weekends, but these visits gradually became less frequent, and shorter in duration. After three years he was promoted and became a department head. He later bought a small flat, then traded up to a small house, then a larger house. He married, and three years later he divorced. He changed jobs, started to make more money, and took on increasing responsibilities at work. He put on weight, lost some of his hair. He drank too much, spent too much money on food, wine, entertaining, went out too often, had too many women friends. He rarely thought of Bulverton.

But down in Bulverton his parents were getting older and less able to look after themselves.

His mother's health gave special concern. They were beginning to talk about retirement, something that seemed inevitable to them but which worried Nick a great deal. The reality of the future of the White Dragon was getting closer to him every week. He knew that they had few savings, that all their wealth was tied up in the business, that neither of them could afford to stop working.

Unspoken pressure began to mount on him. He knew they wanted him to say he would move back to Bulverton and take over the running of the hotel, but by this time he was settled in his life in London and nothing could have

been further from his wishes. As with many big decisions in families, nothing concrete was agreed on and the months and years slipped slowly by.

Then everything changed, that hot afternoon in June.

The news from Bulverton grew steadily more horrifying. The gunman was thought to be cornered, but then he somehow escaped. Now he had taken a hostage, but a few minutes later he shot her in the head and left her for the police to find. Witness reports were coming in from people who had managed to get away from him, but few details were confirmed: he was a young man, he was middleaged, he wore combat gear, he was dressed in Jeans and Tshirt, he carried one gun, he carried two guns, he carried several. One witness claimed the gunman was actually a woman. Another denied this, said it was a man from a village outside the town, someone he thought he recognized. All this was described disjointedly in a series of phonedin reports. There was another BBC reporter on the scene by this time, and his descriptions, though incomplete, were graphic in detail.

After a period in which nothing seemed to happen, at least as reported on the radio, hard news came in again. Now the police had surrounded the gunman, but he managed to get into a church and again there was at least one hostage with him.

Nick knew from the rough description which church he was probably in. lt would be St Stephen's, the parish church, a short way from the hotel along Eastbourne Road. lt was not an especially ancient or beautiful church, but it was well-proportioned, solidly built and positioned attractively at the junction of the coast road and a residential street lined with good houses and many trees. It had been bombed during World War II, with some loss of life.

Imagining the

gunman there, brandishing his weapons, Nick started to drive faster. He was full of anxiety about his parents, but also for the town itself, for the people who lived there, for everyone. lt was the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, and he hadn't even been there to experience it.

He headed for Eastbourne. On the outskirts of the town he turned off into the first of several narrow country roads that would take him past Pevensey and across the Levels. As he had guessed there was hardly any other traffic heading this way. By now he had by force of win put himself into a controlled state of mind, driving with super care, making acute anticipation of hazards ahead.

The radio told him that the known death toll in Bulverton had reached seventeen, most of them people who had been walking in the town or passing through in cars. Three policemen had been shot, and two had died. Three of the civilian victims were children, whose school bus had happened to stop just as the gunman rounded the corner. Many other children had been injured by stray bullets or flying fragments of glass.

As Nick passed Normans Bay, with Bulverton only a couple of miles ahead, the BBC reporter in the town revealed that several shots had been heard from inside the church, and police believed that one of them had been the gunman turning his weapon on himself.

Then, suddenly, the news bulletins ended. The BBC continuity announcer said that they were returning to the scheduled programmes and would bring regular updates on the incident whenever possible.

Nick switched channels again, finding SouthEast Sound, the local talkbased commercial station. lt was covering the incident live, but in a style remarkably different from the BBC's. It had managed to get two of its reporters actually into the town, broadcasting their impressions live, and only

interviewing people when they encountered them, in snatches of shouted questions. lt was a crude, racy broadcasting technique that had become identified with the station, but until the massacre they had never really found a subject strong enough to do it justice. With the two young reporters alternating, both of them hoarse and sounding frightened, it was immediate, shocking and highly effective. Once you worked out what was going on it was impossible to tune away to another station. Nick was still listening to this channel when he reached the place where the narrow country road rejoined the A259, and he saw a police roadblock ahead. He drove slowly towards it.

He was immediately spotted by two armed policemen, who waved him to the side of the road. They were just outside the Old Town, a hundred yards from St Stephen's Church, twice that distance from the White Hotel. There was a curve in the road beyond the church, so he could see no further. He was so nearly home. The sergeant in charge took his name and address, told him to wait by his car but not to get back inside. Meekly, Nick complied.

Later, they allowed him to continue on foot, with a policewoman assigned to conduct him. He had to wait until she returned from some other mission. When she arrived she was pale and flustered, and would not look directly at him.

'Where did you say you lived?' she said.

'I told the sergeant. The White Dragon Hotel. It's not far from here.'

'I know where it is. Have they told you what's been happening.

'Yes,' said Nick, but in fact they hadn't.

Until that moment, with the radio programme, the police roadblock, the quietly spoken sergeant, there had been a veneer of unreality. Now it all became real. lt was this young policewoman's expression, drained and too controlled, that finally convinced him. She muttered an informal warning that he would see distressing sights in the town, but her voice trailed off before she finished. She walked off down the streets he knew so well, keeping a couple of paces ahead of him.

The first sign was the broken glass. lt was all over the place, scattered across both the road and the pavements. Much of it was the coarse granules of shattered car windows. They stepped over long smears of darkbrown stains on the pavements. Most of the windows they passed were broken. There were belongings scattered everywhere: shopping bags, children's toys, packages of food, satchels of school books, a pair of shoes. He saw several vehicles that had been abandoned in the middle of the road, their windows shot away and the panels of their doors pockmarked with bullet holes. He was astounded by the number of bullets that appeared to have been fired. How much ammunition could one man carry? How many weapons had he used?

The policewoman strode ahead of him, glancing back from time to time to make sure he had not fallen behind. By the time the White Dragon was in sight, he was no longer looking around at what they passed. He stared only at the back of her legs, clad in dark stockings, trying not to see, trying not to think.

At last they arrived at the White Dragon. lt was at the epicentre of the violence that had spilled across the streets. Here at last Nick was forced not only to witness the results of the rampage, but to begin, ineptly, unwillingly, uncomprehendingly, the long process of facing up to what had happened to his parents that afternoon, the day they apparently decided against driving into Eastbourne to do a little late shopping.

CHAPTER 5

Dave Hartland, flattened uncomfortably on the bare and dusty floorboards below the window frame, inched forward on his stomach until his head was by the sill. His view of the street below was restricted and his heart was beating so fiercely that he could barely hold still.

He glimpsed a number of policemen taking shelter behind a row of parked cars.

A bullet shattered the window pane and embedded itself in the ceiling. Glass and plaster showered down on the boards around him. In a reflex he rolled over, covering his head and neck as best he could.

Using his elbows for propulsion he wriggled backwards, scraping his limbs on the rough boards. Somewhere out there a helicopter was searching for him, and it was surely only a matter of time before it ventured within range. Once he had been picked up by the helicopter's heatlmager he would be effectively done for. He could hear the pulsating of the motor as an insistent rhythm beneath every movement, almost subaudible, a throbbing pressure.

In the corridor outside he was able to stand. He looked to right and left, then raised his boot and kicked down the door opposite. He burst into the room, covering every corner of it with a sweep of the rifle muzzle. When he was satisfied it was clear, he crouched and moved across to the window. He looked down into a wide, straight road. A row of tall terraced houses stood on the opposite side.

Until this moment he could have been anywhere; now he

knew that he could be anywhere except Bulverton. He had lived in Bulverton all his life.

Nowhere in the town looked like this. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, and behind these he could make out, as before, several armed policemen crouching for shelter.

One was only barely concealed; Dave Hartland raised his riffle and shot him.

In instant response, all the other police emerged from their positions, raised their rifles and fired back at him. Dozens of bullets smashed through the glass, thudded into the brickwork, or whined into the room behind him. Dave easily dodged them all.

He backed out of the room and ran to the window at the Ear end of the corridor. He could see the helicopter hovering, outlined against the snowcapped mountains in the distance.

Mountains?

An amplified voice suddenly burst around him.

'We know you're in there, Grove!' shouted the voice. 'Throw down your weapon or weapons, and come out with your hands up! Let the hostage go first! Lie on the ground facedown!

Disarm your weapon or weapons! You can't escape! We know you're in there, Grove! Throw down your

The name Grove momentarily disoriented him. Until then Hartland had been suspecting he was in the wrong scenario. Now, briefly, he wondered again what was going on.

No time for thought! He hurried to the staircase, went down the steps two at a time and ran into the large room at the back of the house. This led through shattered french windows into a small yard protected by high walls. He dashed Out, crossed the yard safely, and made it through a high wooden gate into an alley that ran along the back of the garden. He ran crouching along the alley until he reached a

second gate. He vaulted over this and immediately took up 1 1

1

rifle

1

1

a defensive position with the i c, scanning from side to side.

He was in another wide road, this time a broad divided highway leading up to the suspension bridge that crossed the river by the downtown business section. Cars were streaming past in both directions, their drivers and passengers unidentified shapes behind the skyreflecting windows. There were dozens of pedestrians, some walking or standing alone, others together in groups or couples. No one had a face with discernible features. Tall skyscrapers, glinting with gold, silver and blue mirrorglass, stretched up endlessly into the sky in dizzying perspectives.

Dave Hartland clicked on a new magazine, and opened fire.

Soon he was surrounded by bodies and wrecked cars, so he set off at a run towards the suspension bridge. He came more quickly than he expected to the row of toll booths. As he approached, numerous armed police emerged from their shelter behind the booths and began firing at him.

Dave threw himself to the ground while the police bullets cracked into the concrete road surface around him. He took aim and began picking off the cops one by one.

The helicopter moved in overhead, and again there came an amplified voice, screeching down at him from above:

'We know you're in there, Grove! Throw down your weapon or weapons, and come out with your hands up! Let the hostage'

Dave rolled on his back, took aim, and pumped a dozen bullets into the belly of the helicopter. There was a mighty explosion. Shattered glass, engine housing and rotor blades flew in all directions.

He returned his attention to the police by the toll booths. Five of them were still alive, and continuing to fire at him.

He stood up, held his rifle by his hip, and walked towards them. Bullets scorched the air past his face.

The policemen did not move from their positions, but continued to fire an unending stream of bullets at him. Their faces were concealed by their silver helmets and mirrored sunglasses.

One was different: this was a woman wearing police uniform. She had removed her helmet and shades to reveal her face. She was gorgeous, with long flowing tresses of black hair. She regarded Hartland with a surprised expression.

He stood still, knowing that at this range the cops would not truss him. Moments later, the bullets struck him in the chest, throwing him backwards across the surface of the road. His last sight was of one of the tall suspension towers, coloured a glistening red, outlined against the frozen sky. An illuminated sign, strung between the girders, suddenly came to life.

An animated pig with an idiotic grin tottered into view, and settled at the top of the screen with a scattering of muddy droplets. A scroll it was carrying in its mouth unfurled. It carried these words:

World Copyright Stuck Pig Encounters

Check Out Our Website

For Our Catalog Call Toll Free 1800STUCPIG

Bullets continued to tear painfully into him.

The silence that followed neither lasted an eternity nor felt like one, because Hartland was braindead and unable to measure elapsed time. A few moments after the technician registered that his ExEx session had ended she activated the doorrelease and light flooded into the cubicle where Dave Hartland's body was lying.

The technician's name was Patricia Tarrant, and she was tall and intenselooking, with her brown hair stretched back tautly from her face. She coolly regarded the dead man lying there. He had thrown back both his arms a not uncommon gesture amongst ExEx users.

Patricia brought his arms down, then with some difficulty turned the man on his side. She brought forward the nanosyringe.

She laid it horizontally along the base of his neck, seeking the tiny valve that connected to the nerve cluster next to the spinal column. She slipped the point of the syringe into the opening of the valve, then twisted the plastic integument to seal it. With the syringe in place, she felt under the tiny flap and located the microswitch. She was supposed to use a special tool for this, but she had carried out the operation so many times that she now usually used the simple pressure of her fingertip. She flicked the microswitch, reactivating Hartland's life. He stirred immediately, grunting. One of his shoulder muscles twitched slightly and he drew a breath.

'OK, take it easy, Mr Hartland,' she muttered auto

matically, quietly. 'You'll be all right. Let me know if any of this hurts.'

He lay still, but she knew by the movements of his eyes behind the lids that he was either conscious or fractionally below the threshold of consciousness. To be on the safe side she reached over to the console above the trolley and sent a signal through to the medical team, giving them a green alert. This advised them that a resuscitation was in progress, with no complications expected at this stage.

With the life neurochip reactivated she extracted it into the syringe, then deftly transferred it to the phial placed beneath. Using the sensors she located the remaining nanochips and removed them from the valve with one steady suction of the syringe. When all the tiny modules had been removed, she took the phial to the ExEx cabinet.

What then followed was fully automated. The chips were checked electronically to make sure they were the same ones that had been administered at the beginning of the session, then they were moved to the ultrasonic autoclave and cleansed of any fluids or cells brought from Hartland's body. Each nanochip was then in turn deprogrammed, scanned, formatted and reprogrammed, and stored ready for the next use.

The ExEx cabinet, totally sealed not only against atmospheric and other pollution but also against interference from the user, performed all these operations within four and threetenths seconds, of which by far the longest was the ultrasonic cleansing.

A total of six hundred and thirteen different neurochips had been injected into Hartland's nervous system for his session inside the ExEx equipment, and six hundred and thirteen of them were recovered from him, cleansed and reprogrammed.

After Patricia had completed her resuscitation work, she left the cubicle, leaving Dave Hartland to recover in his own time.

Soon Hartland was sitting up on the edge of the bed, glancing around the bare interior of the cubicle, feeling tired and listless, but as he reorientated, and remembered what had happened inside the scenario, he began to feel aggrieved. After a quarter of an hour, Patricia returned and asked him if he was ready. When he confirmed he was she gave him the releases to sign.

'I'm not prepared to sign anything, Pat,' he said, and thrust the sheaf of forms back at her.

'Not this time.'

'Any particular reason?' said Patricia, apparently unsurprised.

'Yeah. lt was no good. lt wasn't what 1 wanted.'

'Can you at least sign this ones?' Patricia turned over the first three pages to expose the last one. 'You know what it is. lt confirms 1 resuscitated you promptly and correctly.'

'I don't want to commit myself. I'm really pissed off with what happened.'

She continued to hold the page towards him, and after a moment he took it from her. He read it through, and of course it was exactly what she had said it was.

When he had signed it, she said, 'Thanks. If you've got a complaint, you should see Mr Lacey.

He's the administrator in charge of software policy here.'

' It's a pile of crap, Pat.'

'Which one was it?'

'The Gerry Grove one.'

'I was beginning to wonder if it might be. Quite a few people have complained about that.'

'I've been on the waiting list for more than three months. All the hype there was about it. Of all the scenarios I've tried, it's by far the most expensive

'Please ... it's nothing to do with me. 1 know why you're unhappy, but 1 only make sure the equipment works properly.'

'All right, I'm sorry.'

She left the cubicle briefly, and went to her own desk. She returned with another sheet of paper.

'Look, fill out this form, and you can either leave it in reception, or if Mr Lacey's available you can possibly see him straight away.'

'What 1 want is a refund. I'm not going to pay all that money for'

'You can probably get a refund, but it has to be authorized by Mr Lacey. I've put on the reference number of the scenario. AR you have to do is explain why you weren't satisfied.'

He stared at the sheet of paper, which was headed GunHo Corporation Customer Services: Our contract of your guaranteed satisfaction.

'All right. Thanks, Pat. I'm sorry to have a go at you.'

'I don't mind. But if you want your money back I'm the wrong person.

'OK. Sorry.'

'How are you feeling? Ready to return to the real world?'

'I think so.'

Mr Lacey was not in the building that afternoon, so at the invitation of the young woman on the front desk Dave Hartland sat down in the reception area and filled out the complaint form. He crossed out the first few preprinted responses: equipment failure, staff error or neglect, impolite staff, incorrect selection of scenario software, interruption by power failure, and so on, and concentrated on the part of the form headed OTHER?. This had a large space where the customer could describe the complaint in his/her own words. Dave wanted to do this. After some thought he wrote the following:

1.

This scenario was not set in Bulverton, because there are no mountains anywhere near Bulverton, there are no tall office buildings in Bulverton, traffic does not drive on the right, there is no suspension bridge, and no river either. The only reference to Gerry Grove is that his name is used.

2.

This was an Americanstyle police siege, not a gunman prowling the streets in search of his victims, whom my brother was one of, and 1 wanted to know how he might have died.

This did not tell me.

3.

1 have been waiting several weeks to try the scenario, as advertised in the paper, and it costs a lot of money. 1 want a refund.

He handed the form to the receptionist, who read it quickly.

' 'I'll see Mr Lacey receives this tomorrow morning,' she said. 'They get many complaints about this one, and they've been talking about using a replacement. But there's still demand for it.'

'It's no bloody good. It's just a stupid game. My kids have that sort of thing on their console.'

'That's what people seem to want.'

'It could be anywhere! It's nothing to do with what happened here. Have you tried it?'

'No, 1 haven't.' She slipped the paper into a drawer. 'I don't think there's going to be a problem with a refund. Could you come back tomorrow afternoon, or call us?'

'Yeah. OK.'

He left, feeling disgruntled. Outside, in the cold evening, the wind was blowing sharply up from the sea. Dave Hartland turned up the collar on his coat and began the long walk down the hill towards his house on London Road.

CHAPTER 6

n the morning Teresa went in search of breakfast and found the hotel owner and the woman she'd spoken to in the bar apparently waiting for her in the tiny office by the downstairs corridor. The man stepped out to greet her as soon as she reached the bottom step.

'Mrs Simons?' he said. 'Good morning. I'm sorry we didn't meet properly last night. I'm Nicholas Surtees. Amy didn't tell me we were expecting a guest until after you had checked in.'

'She looked after me OK.'

'Is the room satisfactory?'

'It's fine,' Teresa said, instantly suppressing the irritated and perverse thoughts she had had as she dressed. She was full of contradictions: she realized she had been expecting something British and eccentric, not the familiar modernity you found in business hotels anywhere in the world. At the same time, she liked having satellite TV with CNN, she liked the minibar, she was impressed with having fax facilities in the room, the bathroom was modem and beautifully equipped. She guessed that what she had really deepdown wanted was an antiquated broom closet with a bowl and a jug of cold water, a lumpy bed, and a bathroom two hundred yards down the corridor.

'Would you like breakfast this morning?'

'I guess.'

He was indicating the room at the end of the corridor. She noticed that Amy was still standing behind him,

watching and listening as this banal exchange took place. Teresa smiled politely, and walked past them both. She already felt uncomfortable. The great quietness that had descended on the building soon after she went to bed had convinced her she was the only guest in the place.

lt made her feel conspicuous, and she was already wishing she had paid a little more and found a larger, more impersonal hotel. Everything she did was going to be observed, remarked upon and perhaps questioned.

What she wanted . . . Well, she didn't know what she wanted here in Bulverton, except generally, and that general wish included a distinct need to be left alone. She wanted to keep A low profile, not look or act like whatever a typical American tourist looked like. Her dad would have been one of those, she guessed Dad was the sort of American who went all around the world without leaving home. But she knew if she was going to be prominent there was nothing she could do about it. There was no point in coming to Bulverton at all unless she slept and lived in the centre of the town.

The White Dragon was supposedly the best hotel in town. She had located it almost by accident: an evening of web browsing found her a list of hotels in the UK, and thence to those in East Sussex. The White Dragon was the only one listed for Bulverton, but was recommended. With some misgivings she had airmailed her booking the next day, but she was surprised and pleased when she received a faxed acknowledgement and receipt a couple of days later.

The dining room was cold, although a large open log fire was burning. A side buffet table had been laid with a spread of cold breakfast foods: cereals, fruit, milk, Juice. They seemed to be making an effort for her: if as she suspected she was the only guest, there was more food here than she could eat, and more choice than she wanted or needed. just like the restaurants at home, dedicated to the cause of maintaining obesity in the American public.

When she had taken a bowl of mixed citrus fruits, and some muesli, she chose a place by the window. There were six tables, and all of them had been laid for four people. Her table looked out on a main road where traffic ground by at a funereal pace. There were few pedestrians.

Amy came through to take her main order.

Then came a long wait, and solitude. She wished now she had gone out of the hotel first and bought a newspaper. She had assumed there would be a row of newspaper vending machines outside the building, but her discovery that there was not had discouraged her. Her inability to throw off American assumptions was adding to her selfconsciousness about being an intruder here. She hated being on her own. It was something she doubted she would ever get used to. Now there was just the Andyless void, the silence, the permanent absence. Much of the night had passed in that void: the aching for him never went away, and in her jetlagged wakefulness she could think only of what she had lost. She had listened to the town around her in the darkness: the immense silence, the uncanny quiet, and from this her imaginings had spread out, making her envision the whole place as a focus of grief She was not the only widow in Bulverton, but that didn't help. Not at all.

With no sign yet of the food arriving, Teresa left her table and walked back along the corridor to the office, where Nick Surtees was sitting at a PC.

'Is there a newspaper I can buy?' she said.

'Yes, of course. I'll get it brought in to you. Which one would you like?'

Momentary blankness, because it was the Washington Post she was used to at home and she hadn't thought beyond that.

'How about The Times?' she said, that being the first one that came to mind.

'All right. Would you like me to order it for you every day?'

'Thank you.'

When she returned to her table a silver pot of coffee had been put out for her, presumably by Amy, together with several triangular pieces of toast, steepled in a silver holder. She took one of them, still warm, and spread it with lowfat yellow stuff from a tiny sachet. She looked around for the jelly, then remembered again which country she was in. She spread the marmalade, and liked it so much she wanted to ask what brand it was and where she could buy some for herself.

An hour later, bathed and dressed in warmer clothes, Teresa went downstairs and again sought Nick Surtees in his office. Although she had only recently woken she was tired again, and as she dressed she had felt the distracting mental fluttening of an incipient migraine. She had left her medication at home. She had thought the migraine attacks were a thing of the past, but she should have known better. Maybe the flight had brought this one on. She dreaded having to find a doctor here, and being given drugs she didn't know.

Nick Surtees was not in his office, but the computer was on, the screen shimmering with the glittering random shapes of a screen-saver program. lt looked familiar, and it briefly amused her that the same software she saw being used all over the US was also popular here.

Amy was in the bar, vacuuming the carpet. Teresa found her there, having been drawn by the loud irregular hummung of the machine. Amy switched off as soon as she saw her.

'May 1 help?'

'Yeah ... Mr Surtees. Is he around?'

'He should be. Maybe down in the cellar?' To Teresa's surprise the young woman stamped three times with the heel of her shoe. 'He'll come up if he's there,' she said.

A few moments later Nick appeared at the door. He was carrying a large plastic crate filled with dark bottles of lager, their caps wreathed in shiny golden foil. He dumped the crate on the counter, and because Amy had turned the vacuum cleaner on again he led Teresa back to his office.

She said, 'I can't help noticing you're into computers.'

'Not really,' he said. 'Not as much as 1 used to be, anyway. 1 use that one for writing letters, and keeping the bar records. Amy does the hotel bookings on it as well.'

'I've been hoping you could help me with mine,' Teresa said. 'I've brought my laptop, but I'm not sure if 1 can use it while I'm in England. It's got rechargeable batteries, but 1 have to run them up from the mains and things are probably different here.'

'Did you notice the terminal connector in your room? That's compatible with most laptops.'

'No, 1 didn't see it.' Teresa realized that the strangeness of the hotel and the English accents were making her feel as if she was unable to look after herself, She had started acting what must seem to these people like the role of the helpless woman.

lt was actually she who had bought the laptop in the first place, not Andy. He said he saw so many computers at work he didn't want to have to deal with them at home too. Teresa saw a lot of them at work too, but what that did for her was underline how useful a portable could be. These days she couldn't imagine how she could ever function without hers.

'There's something else,' Teresa said. 'There must be a pharmacy here somewhere?'

'There's a branch of Boots. And a couple of smaller places. Do you want me to tell you how to find them?'

'No, thanks. 1 thought I'd take a walk through the town.'

lt was a cold, brisk day, but without rain. She left the hotel, wearing her quilted coat with the hood, and walked up the road at the side of the hotel. She left behind her the nondescript area of twentiethcentury town houses and shops, and came almost at once into the Old Town area.

At one time Bulverton had sat astride an inlet of the sea, where there was a natural harbour. lt had silted up and fallen into disuse many centuries ago, but all the houses in this part of town were built as if the harbour was still there, facing in from the declivities of the shallow hills around. Where Phoenician and Levantine trading ships had reputedly once docked was now a park, well covered for the most part with trees, and containing a small pond for boating and ducks, a bowling green and tennis courts. The houses had been built, replaced and rebuilt many times over the centuries, but apart from a few places of modem infilling, presumably after German bombing during World War II, the houses were all pleasantly matured. Even the modem ones did not look too out of place.

Close to the park the buildings were mostly small cottages or houses, many of which had been turned into shops, restaurants or businesses, but above and behind them rose several terraces of larger white and pastelcoloured houses. Standing there, looking at the rows of attractive houses, Teresa felt a wave of recognition sweep over her. She knew she had been here before, in this park, in this gracious, resigned town. A sudden sickness rose in her: denying the unwelcome sensation, she snatched her head to one side, as if in an angry rejection of someone or something.

lt worked, and she felt her head clearing. Her migraines

were something she had always kept to herself, protecting her job. Anything that seemed to indicate chronic frailty was not a wise career move with the Bureau. Taking medication created another risk: all federal agents had to submit to random urine and blood tests, and you never knew what conclusions the testing teams would draw from the presence of certain chemicals in the body. A friend of Andy's had put her on to a psychotherapist in Washington, and he had taught her techniques to help ward off the onset of attacks. They worked once or twice. Later she had tried other methods.

Feeling a little better, Teresa walked through the centre of the park itself, enjoying the peaceful ambience in the cold air, with the surrounding houses constantly glimpsed through the shrouding branches of wellgrown trees and shrubs. She could easily imagine how peaceful this park would be in summer. The noise of traffic was muted, even now, when most of the branches were bare.

She sauntered through slowly, half expecting to come across a hamburger franchise or sports store ruining the place, but there was none of that and the whole park gave off a sense of pleasant neglect. In fact, the only sign of sponsorship she could see anywhere was a number of wooden benches placed at various points, each with a small plaque, commemorating the lives of some of the residents of the town. Teresa was particularly touched by one: To the Cherished Memory of Caroline Prodhoun (d. 1993) She Loved this Park.

Teresa walked as far as she could in the park, coming eventually through a gate into a residential street that ran across the top. She turned right along this, then followed the perimeter of the park and walked back down in the direction of the sea, pausing to glance in the windows of the small shops along the way. Here she discovered that appearances can be deceptive: many of the quietly prosperouslooking shops turned out, when you were actually standing in front of them, to be closed or in some cases closed and empty. Many of them were antiques shops or secondhand book stores, but almost without exception they were unstaffed and unlit. The antiques shops, in particular, looked as if they were used more for storage than for selling to the public. One or two had printed cards thumbtacked to the door, directing the delivery of packages to nearby alternative addresses.

Teresa peered through several of their windows, dreaming about being able to buy some of the chests, lightstands, tables, cases of books, dressers. They looked so solid, so well made, so old. Staring at the ancient pieces of furniture, Teresa felt the subliminal resonance of a different kind of culture from the one she was used to: the civilization of Europe, its history, long traditions, old families, deeprooted customs. She was still enough of a Briton to recognize with a kind of longing the culture she had left behind when her father removed her to the US

all those years ago, but also enough of an American to feel the urge to acquire some of it by purchase. None of the shops gave any indication of prices, though, and then there would always be the problem of shipping such heavy and bulky stuff back home.

Which made her remember again, in sudden acute anguish, the house standing empty in Woodbdidge by the Potomac, and then think of Andy, and then of why she was here in England.

Halfway along the parade of closed shops Teresa turned to the left and walked up the hill to pass the larger houses. This was a residential zone, and from the look of it the people who lived here were fairly affluent. Although cars were parked at the sides of the road, the lanes that ran in front of each row of houses were obviously intended for pedestrians only. From this relative eminence she gained a wider view of the town, which continued to enchant her with its simple prettiness. She knew nowhere at home that had this kind of effect on her. Directly in front of her, on the other side of the park, was a large church with a square tower. A cluster of houses surrounded it, but behind those she could see taller buildings, longer roofs. Further towards the sea, on the same side of the park as the church, Teresa could see the coloured canopies of an outdoor market; again, there were large recently built buildings behind them. In the distance, inland, there was a ridge of higher land, crusted with modern houses.

She tried to imagine what this sleepy little town must have been like, that day Gerry Grove went walkabout with his semi-automatic rifle. The news reports from England had described how the quiet town had been shattered by the violence of the event, a rude awakening from its peaceful slumbers, and the rest of the cliches journalists loved so much. lt wasn't a painting on the lid of a box of candy, or a still from a romantic movie. People lived and worked here, brought up their kids, grew their flowers. Some fell in love, some beat each other up, some tried to make a living, some tried to do something useful in the community ... and one of them, a selfabsorbed and lonely youth with a string of minor offences behind him, had a thing about guns.

Teresa, of course, came from a country where a lot of people had a thing about guns. She too had a thing about guns. There was nothing in the idea that was itself shocking, but for it to happen here, probably the last place you would expect it, was one step beyond the expectable.

just as the tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the schoolchildren in Dunblane, the students in Austin, Texas, wouldn't have expected it. All were nice places, quiet and livable places, the sort of small towns that people moved to

rather than from. There were dangerous cities, and all cities had areas where no one in their right mind would walk alone or after dark, but still there remained in most people a profound, instinctive belief that bad things only happened in bad places. Bulverton was the sort of place you searched for, so to speak, a kind of comforting ideal.

What was it? Staring down at the large area of the town she could see from this place, Teresa tried to isolate and identify what it was she was responding to. lt was not just Englishness, nor prettiness, because England didn't have a monopoly on pretty places, and anyway Bulverton was too much of a muddle to be simply pretty. The area around her hotel was grim enough, and although grim in a particularly British way it was a quality of grimness that was commonplace to her. It could have been in almost any town anywhere. Maybe it was a sense of proportion: one building set against the rest, each one in its turn built to blend with the others. Scale came into it too: this was a town that had grown up in and around a small valley. American architects would have vied with each other to build the biggest, brashest place and grab the best view, but here the buildings seemed to work organically within a kind of consensus of what Bulverton meant to everyone who lived there.

It all made for a simple naturalness, and although she had been in the place for only a few hours and had been trying to sleep for most of those she already felt more deeply about the town than she ever had about Washington or Baltimore or even her agreeable dormitory town of Woodbrlidge.

She crossed the park again and headed for the church she had seen. lt was called St Gabriel's, and was built on a low rise and fronted with a small churchyard. She tried to read some of the headstones but without exception they had been made illegible by erosion. The door of the church was

locked and no one was around to open it for her.

Next to the church was a small garden, fenced and gated, but unlocked. A sign on the fence described its circumstance:

CROSS KEYS GARDEN. This is the Site of the Cross Keys Inn, Destroyed by a German Bomb at around 1. 00 pm on 17th May, 1942. It being a Sunday Lunchtime the Inn was full and there were many Casualties. Eleven Residents of Bulverton died, and TwentySix more were injured, the worst Loss of Life in the Town in a Single Incident during the World War. The Names of the Dead are Inscribed on a Plaque at the rear of the Memorial Garden.

Teresa pushed open the gate and walked in. The garden had not been allowed to become overgrown, but it was obviously not given regular attention. The grass of the tiny lawn was in need of cutting, and long shoots drooped from the trees and shrubs. She found the commemorative plaque on the wall, and pushed aside a long thorny shoot from a rose bush that was growing across it. She regarded the names, trying to remember them for later, in case she came across anyone still living in the town who was related. Her memory was fallible, so she found her notebook and jotted down all the surnames.

Eleven dead; that was fewer than Gerry Grove's victims last year, but it had been a major disaster. lt would have felt just as devastating in its day, even during a war, something so terrible it would never be surpassed.

Bulverton today was still in the aftershock of Gerry Grove's shooting spree, but in half a century would there be any more lasting memorial than this?

A sidestreet led away from the church and the memorial

garden, and Teresa walked along it, emerging after a short distance into a broad shopping street. This was the High Street, a fact she elicited from a sign attached to a wall on one of the intersections. Many people were moving around, going about their shopping. She walked from one end of the street to the other, looking at everyone, feeling that although it was still only her first morning she had nevertheless been able to see many different facets of life in the town. She kept her notebook open, and while she walked along she wrote down the locations of the police station, the library, the Post Office, the banks, and so on, all places she would probably be needing in the days ahead.

At a newsagent's she bought a town map, and a copy of the local paper. She glanced quickly through the pages as she walked along, but if the massacre was still on people's minds that fact wasn't reflected in the local news.

Outside the council offices a modem block, but built to blend unobtrusively with the rest of the town she saw at last an explicit reminder of the massacre.

A large sign had been erected in the shape of a clockface. The legend above it said: Bulverton Disaster Lord Mayor's Appeal. Where twelve o'clock would normally be was the figure

£5,000,000, and instead of two hands only one large one swept around, signifying what had been collected so far. lt presently stood at about twentyto, or at just over £3,000,000, and a red band had been painted in behind it.

Wreaths were laid on the ground beside the door to the building. Teresa stood a short distance from them, unsure of whether to go over and peer at the messages, feeling this would be intrusive, but at the same time she didn't want just to pass by, as if she had not noticed. lt was beginning to seep into her at last: a constant, background sense of the disaster. Not just the wreaths, the memorials, but the fact she was always thinking about it, looking for some sign of it.

She realized she had been seeking it in the expressions on the faces of passersby, and bearing a hitherto unremarked surprise that there were no more physical scars on the town, or more specifically the fact that the people at the hotel hadn't said anything about it. But people hid pain behind calm expressions.

Teresa knew she too was acting like that. What she ought to do was get straight down to what she had planned. Find people, talk to them. Were you here in town on the day it happened? Did you see Grove? Were you hurt? Was anyone you know killed? She wanted to hear herself say it, wanted to hear the answers, wanted to release all the pain that was pent up in these people and in herself

But it was of course none of her business. The disarmingly pleasant aspect of the town, the restrained conduct of the people in the streets, as well as the fact that she knew nobody well enough even to talk with them casually, underlined the fact that she didn't belong. She had wondered about this before she left home, knowing it would probably happen. How would she, an outsider, be treated? Would they welcome her, or would they shun her? Now she knew it would be neither. They left her alone presumably because they would anyway, but also perhaps because that is what they wanted her to do to them.

This was a town that had been bereaved, and she knew something about that. She was an expert, in fact. She thought about Andy again. Why could she never stop? However much time passed it never got better, never got easier. She forced her thoughts away from him, and almost at once a coincidence followed.

As she walked back in the general direction of the hotel, Teresa was thinking about Amy. She had been easy enough to strike up a conversation with, and Teresa wondered if she should start her enquiries with her. She must have been

living in Bulverton last summer when the shooting happened, and would probably know a lot of local people. Working behind the bar in a small hotel had that effect.

As she was musing about this, Teresa reached a paved square where a dozen or so market stalls had been erected. People were shopping, wandering along between the stalls, and a pleasant hubbub of voices mingled with music coming from one or two radios placed at the back of the stalls. Many of the stalls were selling fruit, vegetables or meat, but there were other kinds too: secondhand books, videos and CDs, gardening tools, children's clothes, pine furniture, and so on. lt was at one of these, which sold inexpensive household goods plastic buckets, mops, laundry baskets, brooms that Teresa saw Amy. She appeared to be arguing with the stallholder. He was a man no longer in the first flush of youth, his body apparently once developed but now going to fat; he had straggly hair and a full beard. He looked angry and was talking quickly to Amy, Jabbing his forefinger at her. She was standing her ground, looking almost as irate as he was, her face jutting towards him. She looked pale and determined. At one point she pushed his prodding finger aside, but he brought it back threateningly.

Teresa was immobilized by the sight of the man, and stared at him in amazement. She knew him! But how, and where from?

Other shoppers, who had been walking behind her, were bumping into her and trying to get by, and she realized she was blocking the narrow passage between the stalls. She walked on as slowly as she dared.

As she approached she could see the man's face more clearly, and the certainty of recognition began to recede. His looks were undoubtedly familiar, but now she saw him close up she wondered if it was because he was a type she recognized, rather than an individual. His hair, moustache,

high forehead, incipient pot belly, the dirty white Tshirt under the leather jacket, his thick shoulders and arms, were in themselves unremarkable enough, but there was something about his bearing, the aggressive way he confronted Amy, that reminded her unnervingly of many men she had had to deal with in the US. He looked like he belonged to one of the many armed militias that had formed in the last two decades in the rural USA, buried away on remote farmland, and hidden in woods. Teresa involuntarily cased his body with her eyes, looking for the bulge of a firearm, the linear indentation of a holster strap, or some other hint of a concealed weapon.

Then she checked herself.. this was England, where firearms were banned entirely, where there were no armed militia groups that she had ever heard of, where you could not make the same assumptions based on someone's appearance. For all she knew, men who looked like that in England drove taxis, wrote poetry or sold household goods in street markets.

Even so that first flash of recognition had unnerved her, and as she drew closer she continued to feel wary of him.

Neither he nor Amy noticed her. Whatever they were talking about was nothing to do with her, but now she was so close she experienced another sense of intruding on the lives of others.

She wanted to step right up to them to find out more about what was going on, but couldn't bring herself to do so.

She felt that to halt beside the stall would be to make her interest obvious, so she kept going.

Soon she had passed. She was briefly within earshot, and she was able to make out what they were saying. The man said, ". . . want you out of there. You don't belong, and you bloody know it. If jase were here . . ."

But his words were lost in the general tumult of the place, even though she was only a few feet away from them. Amy made a reply, but it was inaudible.

Teresa walked on, trying not to be curious. Visitors always encroach on other people's lives.

They can't., help it. And they can't help being curious about the people they meet: strangers, but strangers with backgrounds and families and positions of some kind in the place where they are encountered.

Teresa was starting to feel hungry. lt was still only the middle of the morning, but most of her was jetlagged back to Washington time. She looked around for a restaurant but there was nothing in the market square. Remembering she had seen a couple of places on the High Street she walked back that way, but when she found them she didn't like the look of them any more.

She decided to do what she would if she was at home, and headed for the big Safeway supermarket she had passed earlier. Inside, she went straight to the fresh food counters, thinking how much she would enjoy getting her own food ready, before remembering she was staying in a hotel room where there were no cooking facilities. She was still jetlagged, not thinking right. Or the sight of that man had rattled her more than she wanted to believe.

Disappointed, and kicking herself for her momentary forgetfulness, she wandered round the store instead, experiencing the inquisitiveness she always had in someone else's supermarket.

Everything was a fascinating mix of the familiar and the strange.

There was an instore pharmacy, and she paused by the counter.

'Do you have anything 1 can take for migraine?' she said to the young man who was serving there.

'Do you have a prescription?'

'No . . . wen, I'm visiting from the US. 1 do have

prescription drugs there, but 1 didn't bring them with me and 1 was hoping ... 1

She let the words run out, disliking having to explain her life to a complete stranger. Actually, the real situation was more complicated than she wanted to say: she used the prescription drugs as little as possible. After the psychotherapist's methods had worked a few times, failed a few more times, she had consulted one of her neighbours, a homeopath. She had given Teresa ignatia, a remedy for migraine sufferers, and it had seemed to have some effect. The migraine attacks cleared up for a while, and one of her last decisions before leaving home had been not to bring the tiny tablets with her. She was already regretting this, but right now she didn't want to take the time to find a homeopath in this town and submit to the long diagnosis all over again. What she wanted was something to kill the headache.

The pharmacist had turned away as she spoke, and now he laid two packets on the counter before her. She picked them up, and read the instructions and ingredients on the backs. One product was based on paracetamol and codeine, the other on codeine alone. Both had an antihistamine ingredient. In one it was buclizine hydrochloride, which she recognized from medication she had taken in the US, so with nothing else to go on she selected that one, a product called Migraleve. She paid at the pharmacy counter, fumbling briefly with the unfamiliar British currency.

Before she was through in the supermarket she bought a triangular cellophane package of sandwiches and a can of Diet Coke from the lunch counter, and lined up at the main checkout to pay a second time. She nibbled one of the

sandwiches as she headed down the High Street, again looking for Eastbourne Road and the hotel.

'Hello, Mrs Simons.'

Teresa turned in surprise, and found that Amy was walking along beside and slightly behind her. The tense expression she had worn during her confrontation in the market had vanished.

Teresa slowed. 'Hi, Amy!'

'I saw you back there, in the market square. Are you having a look round our town?'

'It's beautiful,' Teresa said. 'I love the way the houses sit on the hill, looking down across the park.'

Now she was speaking to someone, she realized that the peaceful quality of the town was a bit of an illusion. They were both having to raise their voices against the noise of the traffic.

'I love it too,' Amy said. 'I do now, anyway. 1 didn't think much of it when 1 was at school.'

'Have you lived in Bulverton all your life?'

'I worked away for a while when I was younger, but I think I'm back for good now. There's nowhere else 1 really want to be.'

'You must know a lot of people here.'

'More of them seem to know me, though. Look, Mrs Simons, I've been worrying about the room we put you in. Is it OK?'

' It's charming. Why?'

'Well, 1 went to America once on a holiday, and everything seemed so modem over there.'

In the bland, silvertinged daylight, Teresa saw that Amy was not as young as until now she had thought. Although she still had an attractive face, and she carried herself as if she was in her twenties, her hair had faint grey streaks and her body showed signs of thickness round the waist. Teresa wondered if she had ever tried working out, as she herself had done two or three years ago. The main benefit she had

found was that while there was no obvious improvement to her figure, she felt she had been doing the best she could for herself. Unless you worked out for hours every week, exercise was essentially about morale, not looking good.

'Look, don't worry about the room,' Teresa said. 'When you were in the US, did you ever stay in one of our motels?'

'No. '

'I've been in motels all over the country. Let me tell you, after a few nights in one of those a place like the White Dragon feels as comfortable as home.'

They had now reached Eastbourne Road with its continual flow of slowmoving traffic in both directions. The noise had increased, and already the slightly eccentric feeling the Old Town had induced in her was slipping away.

Amy came to a halt, and said, 1'd forgotten. I'll have to go back to the shops. I was on my way out to buy something.'

'That's my fault. Keeping you talking.'

'No, not your fault,' Amy said.

'The man I saw you with,' Teresa said. 'Who was he?'

'At the hotel, you mean?'

'No. just now. In the market.'

Amy looked away, across the line of cars and vans, towards the sea. 'I'm not sure who you mean.'

'I thought 1 might know him,' Teresa said.

'How could you? You coming in last night, getting in late.'

'That's what 1 thought. Well, it doesn't matter.'

'No, 1 suppose not,' Amy said, her hair flailing across her eyes.

CHAPTER 7

Nick was already in bed and lounging around with that morning's newspaper when Amy came upstairs and went into the bathroom. He heard her brushing her teeth. A little later she walked into the bedroom and began undressing. He watched her as he always did. She was used to him lying there at night watching her, and didn't seem to mind. To him she still looked the same naked as she had always done. Everything that he had found attractive in the old days was unchanged by the years.

His parents and her husband had been cremated on the same day, less than a week after the massacre, and he and Amy had met at the crematorium. She had been waiting outside the chapel when he emerged, blackcoated, darkeyed, swathed in misery, alone, not supported by any of her friends. They had simply stared at each other. lt was one more upheaval in a week of upheavals, a time of shock when nothing was a surprise. Afterwards they walked back down to the town, side by side, noticing other hearses moving up towards the cemetery on the Ridge, and the attendant camera lights and film crews, and the reporters.

He had no one left, and she was also alone. Subject to powerful feelings neither of them had tried to control, he took her back with him to the hotel in the afternoon, they were together that night, and had stayed together ever since.

That was still a time when people were able to speak about it. There were reporters everywhere, nowhere more than in

the White Dragon, where many of them stayed, and telling the story of what Grove had done became a way of trying to deal with what happened.

Later, it was no longer like that. The survivors found that it was not after all a way, that it added somehow to the horror of what had occurred. Those enquiring faces and voices, sometimes polite, sometimes intrusive, the notepads and tape recorders and video cameras, led quickly to the headlines and pictures in the tabloids, the suffering translated into a series of cliches. At first it was a novelty for people in Bulverton to see the town and its people on television, but then it quickly sank in that what was being shown to the world was not what had actually happened. lt was only an impression gained by outsiders.

Gradually a silence fell.

But five days after the shootings, when Amy and Nick came together again, was still in the time before anyone had learned media sophistication. People spoke from the need to explain, to try to make sense of the upheaval in which they were caught up.

That first night, still in distress after the funeral, Nick woke up into darkness and heard Amy sobbing. He turned on the light and tried to comfort her, but something unstoppable was flowing out of her. lt was not long after midnight.

He sat up beside her in the bed, staring down at her naked back as she sobbed and groaned in her misery. Looking at her, unable to offer comfort, he remembered what she had been to him in the good times, when she was unpredictable, funny and sexy, and causing endless trouble between him and his parents. For a few weeks back then he had never been happier in his life, and that euphoria of being a young man with an attractive and sexually compliant girlfriend had borne him on for months after it had all started going wrong.

She said, her voice muffled by the pillow, 'Nick, if you want to make love again, we can do it.

Then I'll leave.'

'No,' he replied. 'That's not it.'

'I'm cold. Please cover me.'

He loved to hear her voice, the familiar accent and intonation. He fussed around with the pillows and bedclothes, trying to make her comfortable and warm, then lay down once again beside her with his arm cradling her. A long time passed in silence.

Then Amy said, 'Your mum never liked me, did she?'

'Well, 1 wouldn't say'

'You know she didn't. 1 wasn't good enough for her son. She actually said that to me once. lt doesn't matter now, but it used to hurt me. She got her way in the end, and you went off to London.'

'We'd split up months before that.'

'Three months. lt pleased her, anyway.'

'I don't think'

'Listen, Nick, I'm trying to explain something.' When she breathed in he could still sometimes hear a sob in the sound, but her voice was steady. 'I started hanging around with jase after that. You probably didn't know him, but your parents did. He often came in here with his mates, he liked a few drinks. jase had his bad ways, and 1 never went along with those, but 1

saw the best of him. 1 didn't fall for him straight away, it took a couple of years, but he was always around, often had been even when 1 was going out with you. 1'd been at school with him, but he wasn't in my crowd then. He was just one of the lads 1 knew from the village. Up the road, where you never went. You wouldn't understand someone like Jase, because all you'd notice about him would be the way he got drunk or drove his car with the stereo on loud or went berserk at football matches.

'We were both working over in Eastbourne, but after that he was offered some building work out at Battle. When he'd been doing it for a few weeks a new contract came up and he was offered a steady job as a charge hand. I quit the Metropole Hotel straight away, and we rented a flat in Sealand Place. You know, about half a mile from here. We decorated it, made it nice, and after we'd been living together for a while, we got married.

'I was pregnant within a few months, but 1 lost that one. The following year it happened again. Then we went three years without getting anywhere at all, until 1 fell for another baby and we lost that one as well. After that, the hospital told me 1 probably wasn't going to be able to have any more.

'That was when things started to go wrong. He went out drinking a lot more than he had, but he always came back and there was never anyone else. He always swore that was something 1 didn't need to worry about.

'One day, after we'd had one of our rows, he says to me, had 1 ever thought about going into the hotel business? You see it was this place, the White Dragon, that he used to come to with his mates when he wanted a few drinks. He'd got hold of the idea that your parents were going to sell the hotel and that he and 1 ought to buy it from them. We didn't have money like that, but jase said money was the least of the problems, because his brother Dave would come in with us. He talked big, and 1 believed him. We looked into it properly and went to the bank about it. They said no, and I think other people said no, because jase dropped that idea. Instead, he said he was going to ask your dad for a job. There was an idea behind this, that if he worked hard and your dad grew to trust him, then one day, when he did retire, he might make jase into a partner.

'Anyway, it came to nothing. jase went along to see your

dad one day, and he was out again almost quicker than he

1

1

it

went in. I don't know what was actually said, but what came down to was no again.

'This is where you come into it, Nick. He knew your parents hadn't liked you going out with me, and now he'd married me it was as if he had saved them from having to put up with me, a favour, like. Afterwards, when your dad turfed him out, jase kept going on about how you must have spoken up against him. He blamed himself too, but in small ways. Kept saying he was a fool for even thinking of trying, he should have known people like you would keep him out. Bitter he was, and he never forgave you.'

When he first began talking to her earlier that day Nick had assumed, without thinking, that Amy's misery was the same as many people's: the unfocused sense of loss when a friend dies.

No one had told him anything about the relationships between the people Grove had killed that day, because in a close community like Bulverton it was assumed that everyone would already know. Nick had never asked. AH he had was the list of names, the one everyone in Bulverton now had and probably knew by heart. The twentythree dead, of whom one was Jason Michael Hartland, aged thirtysix, of Sealand Place, Bulverton. Until Amy told him, as they walked down to the town after the funerals, he had not realized that jason Hartland was her husband, that her bereavement was sharper, closer than most people's, including his. He was devastated by the deaths of his parents, and also by the way in which they had died, but how much more horrible was what had happened to Amy?

Grief comes unpredictably, out of control. Nick found himself weeping beside Amy that night, thinking of what had happened to jase and all the others. Death brings innocence to the dead. Whatever jason Michael Hartland's failings in life had been loutish behaviour, drunkenness,

naivety, running away death wiped clean the slate and made the dead as children once again.

While Nick still lay close beside her, Amy continued with her story.

She said, 'Jase was the one the newspapers called "the man on the roof ". He was helping a friend with some tiling, at the house next door to the Indian restaurant, out there by the church. When Grove came down the road jase had nowhere to hide. He tried to get behind the chimney stack but Grove shot him. His body was thrown backwards by the impact of the bullets, and he slid down the roof on the far side, out of sight. Only a child saw this happen.

He was in his parents' car, which had already been fired at and damaged by Grove. The little boy saw jase being killed, and afterwards tried to tell one of the policemen. He was so upset that all he could say was "There was a man on the roof' a man on the roof." Because jase had fallen back his body wasn't found until the next day.

'I had no idea where jase was at the time. We'd had another row, and it felt like it was the last one. He left me. I hadn't seen him for two or three weeks. He could have been anywhere there was work: Hastings, Eastbourne, one of the villages outside, somewhere along the coast. He often went to see one of his mates when he was angry with me.

'After the massacre, the police listed him officially as a missing person, and put his name on the list with the other people who couldn't be found. All of them were actually dead, but for a few hours 1 had the devil of hope in me. More than anything 1 wanted to see jase so 1 could tell him about the massacre. lt was such an immense event, so shattering, it affected the whole town, it was on TV and the radio, and 1 just needed jase with me so 1 could say sorry to him for the argument we'd had, and talk to him about what

had gone on in the town. 1 suppose it was a way of coping, or burying my head in the sand.

1 was awake all that night, round at Dad's place, and in the morning the police told me they'd found him.'

Nick's own story seemed painless and unaffecting compared with hers, but she wanted to know it. Eventually he told her, ashamed of his weaknesses. She dried her eyes, sat up, listened.

They talked on through that long night, holding and touching each other, finding out what had happened, what, in fact, had brought them together again. Sometimes they lay still and in silence, but they never slept. He began to feel, perhaps wrongly, that only by being with Amy would he recover something of what he had lost.

Amy moved in to live with him the following day, arriving back at the hotel after midday, carrying a suitcase of clothes. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, she brought over more of her belongings and furniture from her flat in Sealand Place, as gradually she became a permanent part of his life.

They soon got over the surprise of their reunion, and settled into daily routines. When they talked about the past at all, the furthest back they went was to the Gerry Grove shooting, the only unfinished business that mattered.

That was then, this was now. While he watched over the top of his newspaper as Amy undressed, he noticed she was smiling. He loved the way maturity had filled out her body: strong and well-shaped legs, a long and handsome back, breasts that were much fuller than before but without any sign of sag, a strong face and a crown of dark hair. She was no longer pretty, but he could imagine no woman more attractive.

'What is it?' he said. 'What are you smiling at?'

'You, lying there looking at me.'

She was naked, and stood directly before him.

'I look at you every night. That's what you like, isn't it?'

'Shall 1 put on my nightie?'

'No ... get straight in.'

He tossed the newspaper aside and took her in his arms as she climbed into the bed beside him. Her skin was cold, and when she turned her buttocks against him and pressed them into his groin she felt like a chill vastness. With the hand stretching under her body he cupped one of her breasts, with the other he reached around and pressed his hand against her sex, pushing that lovely chill vastness of buttocks harder against him. He loved to feel the soft weight, the hairy moistness, together.

They never hurried their lovemaking, and rarely fell asleep straight away afterwards. They liked to he together, arms holding around, playing affectionately with each other's body.

Sometimes it led to more lovemaking, but at other times they simply dozed together or talked inconsequentially about the day. That night Amy was not sleepy, and after a few minutes of cuddling she sat up, pulled on her nightie and switched on the bedside lamp.

'Are you going to read?' Nick said, blinking in the sudden glare.

'No. 1 want to ask you something. Do you think Mrs Simons is a reporter?'

' The American woman?'

'Yes.'

'I hadn't given it a thought.'

1 Well, think about it now.'

'What's given you that idea?' he said. 'And what does it matter if she is?'

'I ran into Dave today. He said she was.'

'You know what Dave's like better than 1 do.'

'It doesn't matter, of course, not really. But I've been thinking. She hasn't said anything about it to us, and when the other reporters came around asking questions, they never made a secret of it. They weren't too popular and they knew it, but they didn't try to hide what they wanted.'

'Then she probably isn't,' Nick said. 'Not every stranger who comes to town is trying to get a story.'

'I wondered if, because she's an American, maybe she works differently.'

'Why don't you ask her?'

'All right.' Amy yawned, but showed no sign of being about to turn off the light and lie down. 'She told me she's British. Born over here, anyway. One of her parents was British.'

'Why are you interested in her?'

'I thought you might be.'

'I'd hardly noticed her,' he said, with complete truth.

'That wasn't the impression 1 got.'

Amy had an expression he had only recently learned to recognize, in which she smiled with her mouth but not with her eyes. lt usually meant trouble for him, because of something he was thought to have done, or to have omitted doing. Now she was staring down into her lap, scooped into shape by her crossed legs. He reached out to touch her hand, but found it unyielding.

'What's up, Amy?'

'I saw you with her in your office, laughing and that.'

'What ... ?' He could hardly remember it. 'When was that?'

'This morning. 1 saw her in there with you.'

'That's right,' Nick said, and glanced at an imaginary wristwatch on his arm. 'I was setting myself up for a visit to her bedroom later this evening. Do you mind if 1 go to her now?'

'Shut up, Nick!'

'Look, just because a single woman checks into my hotel doesn't mean' He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence, so ludicrous was the idea.

'She's not single, she's married,' Amy said.

'Let's turn out the light,' he said. 'This is getting silly and pedantic.'

'Not to me it's not.'

'Suit yourself'

He tried to make himself comfortable, bashing the pillow and pulling up his side of the bedclothes, but Amy sat in rigid anger beside him. Her lovemaking had given no clue of the mood she had been working herself into. He turned to and fro, trying to settle, and all the while Amy sat beside him, her eyes glinting, her mouth in a thin rictus of irritation. He fell asleep in the end.

CHAPTER 8

The next morning Teresa took her rental car for a drive around the Sussex countryside, but the sky was shrouded in low clouds, which were dark and fastmoving, bringing in squalls of heavy rain from the sea and obscuring the views she had come out to look at. She gained only the barest impression of the trees and hills and pretty villages she passed through. She was still ill at ease with driving on the left and before lunchtime she had done enough exploring to satisfy her curiosity.

She ate lunch in the bar of the White Dragon: Amy Colwyn served her in what seemed to be unfriendly silence, but on request microwaved a quiche for her and produced some boiled rice. Teresa sat at one of the tables closest to the fire, forking the stodgy food into her mouth with one hand and writing a letter to Joanna, Andy's mother, with the other. Amy meanwhile sat on a stool behind the counter, flicking through the pages of a magazine and not taking any notice of her. Teresa inevitably wondered what she might have said or done, but was not too concerned. A little later, when more customers came in from outside, the oppressively silent atmosphere in the room lifted noticeably.

After lunch she drove along the coast to Eastbourne, and found the editorial offices of the Courier. She saw this as a preliminary trip, expecting that a trawl through the back issues of the paper would take two or three days, but to her surprise the newspaper stored its archives digitally. In a small but comfortably appointed room set aside for the purpose she accessed the archive from the terminal she found there, and in under half an hour had identified and downloaded everything she wanted about Grove, including brief court reports of his earlier minor offences as well as 'detailed accounts of the day of the massacre, and the aftermath. On her way out she paid for the floppy disk she had used, thanked the woman on the reception desk, and by midafternoon she was back in Bulverton. If she had known, or had thought to enquire, she could have used the internet and downloaded the same information from home. Or perhaps even from the hotel, if there was a modem she could use.

. She returned briefly to the hotel and put away the disk for future study. Consulting her town map she located Brampton Road. lt was one small street amongst many others like it, on the north-eastern edge of the town. She worked out the simplest route that would take her there, then found her tape recorder. She slipped in the new batteries she had bought that morning and briefly tested the recording level. All seemed well.

Brampton Road was part of an ugly postwar housing estate, whose best feature was that its position on one of the hills surrounding the town gave it an impressive distant view of the English Channel. The thick clouds of the morning were starting to disperse, and the sea was brilliantly illuminated by shafts of silver sunlight. Otherwise, the estate itself was a bleak and dispiriting place.

The terraced houses and three and fourstorey apartment blocks were built in a uniform palebrown brick, and had been positioned unimaginatively in parallel rows, reminding Teresa of the Air Force camps of her childhood. There were not many mature trees to soften the harsh outlines of the buildings, and gardens were few. Much of the ground appeared to be covered in concrete: paths, hardstandings,

driveways, alleys. AH the roads were lined by rows of vehicles parked with two wheels up on the kerbs. A short row of shops included a convenience store, a satelliteTV supplier, a betting shop, a video rental store and a pub. A main road ran along the crest of the hill, and through the line of trees up there she could glimpse the high sides of trucks moving quickly along.

There was a smell of traffic everywhere.

When she had found a place to park her car, and had climbed out to walk the rest of the way, Teresa felt the sharp edge of the cold wind. lt had not been too noticeable in the lower parts of the town; here the uneven dips in the rising land created natural funnels when the wind came in from the direction of the sea. From the angle at which some of the more exposed trees were growing, she presumed it must do so most of the time.

The house she was looking for was not difficult to find. In this most unappealing of neighbourhoods it presented an even harsher aspect than the others. lt was clearly unoccupied: all the windows in the front were broken, and the ones at street level had been boarded up, as had the door. Remains of an orange policeline tape still straggled on the concrete step and round the corner into the alley alongside. The grass in front of the house had not been trimmed for several weeks or months, and in spite of the winter season it was long and untidy.

lt was the end house of one of the long terraces. The number 24 on the visible part of the door confirmed that this was the house Gerry Grove had been living in during the weeks leading up to the massacre. Apart from its recent decrepitude it had obviously been neglected since its moment of notoriety there was little to distinguish the house from any of the others. Teresa found her compact camera in her shoulderbag, and took photographs from a couple of angles. Two women, trudging wearily up the hill and leaning low over the child strollers they were pushing, paid no attention to her.

She worked her way round to the rear, but here an old wooden fence, several feet high, blocked her access. A garden door had been sealed with a wooden hasp nailed across it. She peered through the loose slats of the fence, and could see an overgrown garden and more boardedup windows. If she had really wanted to she could have forced her way through the battered fence, but she wasn't sure of the rules. The police had once scaled this place; was it still protected by them from intruders? Why should anyone, other than the curious, like Teresa herself, want to look round this unexceptional house?

She stepped back and took some more photographs of the windows of the upper storey, wondering even as she did it why she was bothering. lt was just one more lousy house in a street full of identically lousy houses; she might as well take pictures of any of them.

Except, of course, for the fact that this was the actual one.

Feeling depressed about the whole thing, Teresa put her camera away and again consulted her map. Taunton Avenue was two streets away, parallel to Brampton Road and higher up the hill. She left the car where she had parked it and walked up.

The women pushing their children were still ahead of her. It was not a steep hill, but it was a long one. When she paused for breath and turned to look back, Teresa could see the road trailing down and away towards the main part of the town for at least a mile. She could imagine all too easily what it must be like to slog up and down this long hill with small children to push, or when laden with shopping bags.

When she reached Taunton Avenue the two women ahead of her continued slowly upwards, and Teresa felt a

guilty relief that she would not have to catch them up and perhaps speak to them. She was still acutely conscious of her status as an outsider in this shattered place, deserving nothing much from anyone. She was having enough difficulty explaining even to herself why she had made this expensive trip to England, and was not yet ready to explain herself to strangers.

Number 15 Taunton Avenue was a rnidterrace house, maintained to a reasonable standard of neatness with flowery curtains, a recently painted door and a tidy approach up the concrete path. She went to the door without glancing at the windows, as if to do so would give away the purpose of her visit, then rang the bell. After a wait the door was opened by a middle-aged, stoutly built woman wearing a clean but faded housecoat. She had a tired expression, and a fatalistic manner. She stared at Teresa without saying anything.

'Hi,' said Teresa, and immediately regretted the casual way she had brought with her from the US. 'Good afternoon. I'm looking for Mrs Ripon.'

'What do you want her for?' the woman said. A boy toddler came out from one of the rooms and lurched up to her. He clung to her legs, peering round them and up at Teresa. His face was filthy around the mouth, and his skin was pale. He sucked on a rubber comforter.

'Are you Mrs Ripon? Mrs Ellie Ripon?'

'What do you want?'

'I'm visiting England from the United States. 1 wondered if you would be willing to answer a few questions.'

'No, I wouldn't.'

Teresa said, 'Is this the house where Mr Steve Ripon lives?'

'Who wants to know?'

'I do,' Teresa said, knowing it was an inadequate and

irritating answer and that she wasn't doing this well. She was out of her depth in this country, without the usual backup. She was used to holding out the badge, and getting her way at once. Her name alone wouldn't mean anything to Steve Ripon himself, any more than to anyone else in the town. Come to that, neither would the badge. 'He won't know me, but'

'Are you from the benefit office? He's out now.'

'Could you say when you think he'll be back?' Teresa said, knowing she was getting nowhere with this woman, who she was now certain was Steve's mother.

'He never says where he's going nor how long he'll be. What do you want? You still haven't said.'

'Just to talk to him.'

Something was cooking inside the house, and its smell was reaching her. Teresa found it appetizing and repellent, all at once. Home cooking, the sort of food she hadn't eaten in years, with all its implicit pluses and minuses if you were someone like her who had to watch what she ate.

No you don't,' Mrs Ripon said. 'It's never just talking, what people want with Stevie. If you're not from the benefit office it's something to do with Gerry Grove, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'He doesn't talk about that any more. And no one else does, see?'

'Well, 1 had hoped he might speak with me.' She could not help but be aware of the woman's deliberately blank expression, which had barely changed since she opened the door. 'All right.

Would you tell Steve 1 called? My name is Mrs Simons, and I'm staying at the White Dragon, in Eastbourne Road'

'Stevie knows where it is. You from a newspaper?'

'No, I'm not.'

'TV, then? AH right, FE tell him you were here. But don't expect him to talk to you about anything. He's all clammed up these days and if you want my opinion, that's how it should be.'

'I know,' Teresa said. 'I feel that way too.'

'I don't know why you people can't leave him alone. He wasn't involved with the shooting.'

'I know,' Teresa said again.

She was suddenly taken by a tremendous compassion for this woman, imagining what she must have been through over the last few months. Steve Ripon was one of the last people to see Gerry Grove before the shooting began. At first he was assumed to be an accomplice, and had been arrested the day after the massacre, when he drove back into town in his battered old van. He claimed he had been visiting a friend in Brighton overnight. Although this alibi was checked out by the police, a search of his van and this house in Taunton Avenue had been ordered anyway. In the van they had found a small supply of the same ammunition Grove had used, but Ripon had vehemently denied knowledge of it. When it was forensically examined the only fingerprints found on the box or its contents were Grove's. By this time a sufficient number of eyewitness accounts had been assembled for it to be certain not only that Grove had acted alone but that any plans he might have made in advance had also been his alone. Steve Ripon had not been charged with an offence for having the bullets, but they got him anyway: for not having insurance or a test certificate for the van.

Throughout this period, the world's press had camped out in Taunton Avenue, trying to find out what anyone who lived there might have known about Steve's relationship with Grove, or indeed about Grove himself This woman, Steve's mother, would have borne the brunt Of all that.

Having been through something very like it herself back home, Teresa had only sympathy for her.

When she reached the end of the concrete path, she turned to glance back. Mrs Ripon was still standing at the door, watching to see that she left. Teresa felt an impulse to go back to her and try to explain, to say that what she was probably thinking wasn't true. But she had been trained never to explain unnecessarily, always to ask, wait for answers, evaluate carefully afterwards. Every situation with a member of the public had a procedure that had to be followed. Do it by the book.

The trouble was, the book was back home with everything else.

She returned to the hotel, and in her room she investigated the computer connection Nick Surtees had told her about. In fact it was simple and logical: her mains adaptor went straight in, and the batteryrecharge light came on.

She worked for a while, concentrating on the newspaper material she had downloaded that afternoon, transferring it to her hard disk before loading it into her word processor so she could edit it and sort it out.

What she was trying to do was build up a detailed picture of the day of Grove's outburst: not only what he had done, but also where his victims had been, where the witnesses had seen him. From there she intended to use Bureau methodology, analysing backwards from the known facts into Grove's mental and emotional framework, to draw up a profile of his personality, psychology, motives, and so on. The newspaper reports were the bare bones of this. Next would come what police and video material was available, then the more interesting but infinitely more difficult work of interviewing witnesses.

She felt she hadn't done too well with Steve Ripon's

mother. She opened a file for her, but it was as short and uninformative as the interview itself had been. She merely noted down the two main facts she had elicited: first, that Steve Ripon would probably not want to speak to her, and, second, that he was receiving money from the benefit office. Teresa was aware of how little she knew about the British welfare system, and therefore had no idea what this would mean, or how she could investigate it.

She had to decide what to do next. Probably the most urgent and important matter was to start her researches with the police. This was not a step to be lightly taken, because even with her FBI accreditation there would probably be limits on what she would be allowed access to, and she was too unfamiliar with the system to be able to bend the rules. Her network of insider contacts did not exist here, of course. And there were other difficulties. She knew for instance that there was no equivalent to the Freedom of Information legislation in Britain, which meant progress would probably be slow.

The remaining witnesses presented a different kind of obstacle, because after her unsuccessful interview with Mrs Ripon, Teresa was not eager to rush into another encounter for which she was unprepared.

She was tired; the jetlag was still affecting her. As she stared at the LCD screen of her laptop, she allowed her eyes to drift: out of focus, and two images of the screen floated away from each other. She snapped her attention back, and the two images resolved into one, but the focus was gone. She felt that sense of being dazed by something, in such a way that you cannot tear your gaze away, even though you know it is simply a matter of deciding to do so.

She stared at the screen, trying to will it back into focus; even moving her head to one side neither released her transfixed gaze nor brought back sharpness to what she was looking at.

Finally, she blinked and the spell was broken.

She glanced around the room. lt was already looking familiar and homey, reminding her in its neat efficiency of a hundred hotel rooms she had used in the past. She only wished it could have been in a Holiday Inn or a Sheraton, something that was faceless outside as well as in.

Everyone in town knew the White Dragon, and it wouldn't be long before everyone she met knew she was staying there.

Looking at the window, Teresa felt her gaze starting to lock again. This time she was too tired to resist it. The square of fading daylight, the four panes of glass, dominated her view.

Nothing of interest could be seen beyond it: part of a wall, a grey sky. She knew if she walked across to the window she could look down to see on one side part of the hotel car park and on the other a glimpse of the main road, but she was in a state of mental passivity and she simply stayed where she was and stared at the window. She felt as if her mind had stopped, and her energy had leached away.

Gradually, the window began to look as if it was breaking up: crystals of bright light, primary colours and white, coruscating together so vividly that it was impossible to look at them, crept in across her view of the sky. The wall containing the window darkened in her vision, becoming merely an undefined frame for the square of light that was all she could see.

But the unsteady, crystalline brilliance was eating up the image of the window, blinding her to it.

Nausea began to grow in her, and once again Teresa snapped out of the reverie. She realized at last what was happening, and in a state approaching panic she groped around to find her bag, and fumbled for her Migraleve tablets. They were in a foil shield, and she snapped two of them out and threw them straight into her mouth without pausing to wash them down with water. They stuck briefly in her throat, but she forced them down.

Leaving her computer, leaving the chair and table, turning away from the deadly window, she crawled across the floor, searching ahead of her for the bed. She crept up on top of it and fell across the covers, not caring how she was lying or where her head was. She lay still, waiting for the attack to pass. Hours went by, then at last she fell asleep.

CHAPTER 9

t was many years before.

mm

mie and her

Her name was Sam ie jessup. Sam i husband Rick were eating at a family restaurant called AI's Happy Burgabar, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesvine. It was 1958. Sammie and Kick had their three children with them.

The table was in a window booth, semicircular, with a central pedestal. The kids had piled in, noisily sliding into the centre of the padded couch seat, but Sammie knew from long experience that if Doug and Cameron sat next to each other they would end up fighting, and if Kelly sat between them she wouldn't eat anything, so she piled them all out again. She sat in the centre herself, wedged between Cameron and Kelly, with Doug next to Kelly on one end and Rick next to Cameron on the other.

They had eaten their burgers and fried chicken and salad and fries, and were waiting for the ice creams they had ordered, when a man carrying a semiautomatic rifle walked in quietly through the door.

He entered so quietly they hardly noticed him at first. Sammie realized something was wrong when she saw one of the waitresses running across the floor, tripping heavily as she collided with a table. The intruder, who was standing beside the cash register, stepped back nervously, jerking his weapon at anyone he saw. All the other people in the restaurant had noticed at the same time, but before anyone could move another man, dressed in the bright orange shirt worn by all AI's employees, appeared from behind the salad bar and fired a shot at the intruder. lt missed.

People began screaming, trying to get up from their seats or duck down under the tables.

Most of them were trapped by the narrow gap between the tables and the couches that ran round the booths. Sammie reached instinctively across to Kelly and Cameron, attempting to pull them down towards her lap. Cameron, twelve years old and big for his age, resisted. He wanted to see what was going on. Sammie saw Rick rising in his seat, lifting a protective arm towards Doug.

The intruder's reaction to being shot at was instant and deadly. He fired a burst of shots in return, then moved across the floor of the restaurant, firing in all directions.

A bullet slammed into Doug's head, hurling the boy backwards and spraying the tabletop with blood. As Sammie sucked in her breath in horror and twisted frantically in her seat, another bullet tore through her neck and throat. She died not long afterwards.

'I hate this training,' Teresa said quietly to her friend Harriet Lupi, who was taking the same course. 'I was up sick all night.'

'You going to quit?' said Harriet.

'No.'

'Neither am 1. But 1 sure thought about it yesterday.'

They were in the corridor with seventeen other trainees, waiting for Dan Kazinsky to arrive.

'Do you think it's a real incident?' Teresa said.

'Yeah. 1 looked it UP. 5

:Oh shit. They're the worst.'

Yeah.' lt was many years before.

Her name was Sammie jessup. Sammie and her husband Rick were eating at a family restaurant called AI's Happy Burgabar, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville. lt was 1958. Sammie and Rick had their three children with them.

Teresa had time to look around, think back, think forward. Time to get frightened. She looked over her shoulder, out of the window, and saw a man with a rifle walking steadily across the parking lot.

They were in a semicircular window booth. The kids had piled in, noisily sliding into the centre of the padded couch seat, but she and Rick had piled them all out again. Now she was in the centre, wedged between Cameron and Kelly, with Doug next to Kelly on one end and Rick next to Cameron on the other.

They were waiting for the ice creams they had ordered when the man with the rifle walked in quietly through the door.

Teresa saw one of the waitresses running across the floor, tripping heavily as she collided with a table. The intruder, beside the cash register, stepped back nervously, jerking his weapon at anyone he saw. Everyone in the restaurant had noticed at the same time, but before anyone could move a staff member in bright orange shirt appeared from behind the salad bar and fired a shot at the intruder. lt missed.

People began screaming, trying to get up from their seats or duck down under the tables.

Most of them were trapped by the narrow gap between the tables and the couches that ran round the booths. Teresa reached across to Kelly and Cameron, attempting to pull them down towards her lap. Cameron, twelve years old and big for his age, resisted. He wanted to see what was going on. Teresa saw Rick rising in his seat, lifting a protective arm towards Doug.

The intruder fired several shots at the man by the salad

bar, then moved across the floor of the restaurant, firing in all directions Teresa sucked in her breath in horror and twisted frantically in her seat, snatching at Doug's jerkin to pull him down. The window shattered behind them. Teresa grabbed frenziedly at her children, sliding them under the hard, unyielding surface of the table. A bullet went past her neck and buried itself in the thick cushion behind her. Rick was thrown backwards by another bullet, and as Teresa turned towards him she too was struck in the back of the head.

Teresa sucked in her breath in horror and twisted frantically in her seat, snatching at Doug's Jerkin to pull him down. The window shattered behind them. Rick was rising in his seat.

Teresa leaped across at him, crushing Cameron down into the seat. The bullet went through the side of her head.

Teresa sucked in her breath in horror, and rose desperately from her seat, pressing down her children's heads with both hands. Rick was starting to get up too. A bullet went past her and the window shattered behind them. Doug spun round as another bullet went through him, spraying the tabletop with blood. She hurled herself across Cameron, crushing the boy down into the seat, and shoving Rick to the side. The bullet went past them both, and embedded itself in the brightly coloured painting of the clown on the wall behind them. She could hear Kelly screaming, and the man's gun fired again and again, a curious clicking, horribly rhythmic, surprisingly quiet.

Teresa and Rick were sprawling on the floor, and she rolled to one side, clawing her way upright by gripping the hard edge of the table. Her fingers slipped in the blood that now poured across it. As she forced herself up a bullet went through her chest, and she died not long afterwards.

Teresa sucked in her breath in horror, yelled at her kids to throw themselves flat. She stood up. A bullet went singing past Doug's head and smashed into the window behind them.

Teresa forced herself up on to the hard surface of the table, then leapt across to the aisle. The man turned his rifle towards her, but she ducked down and ran crouching along the aisle.

People were screaming, and the place was full of smoke. She briefly lost sight of the man, but when she came to a crossaisle she realized he had moved swiftly to the side and was ready for her. Three bullets went straight into her.

Teresa sucked in her breath in horror, yelled at her kids to throw themselves flat. She stood up. A bullet went singing past Doug's head and smashed into the window behind them.

Teresa forced herself up on to the hard surface of the table, then leapt across to the aisle. The man turned his rifle towards her, but she ducked down and crawled as fast as she could towards the salad bar.

The man who had fired at the intruder was lying there, facedown in a chaos of spilled ice and fruit.

Teresa snatched his gun, checked quickly that it was still loaded, then rolled into the shelter of a huge CocaCola vending machine.

People were screaming, and the place was full of smoke. When she looked she could no longer see the intruder. She changed position, presenting the weapon before her at every move. Her heart was pounding with fear.

When she saw the man again he had walked calmly to the table where she had been sitting with her firmly, and aimed his rifle at her cowering children. He began firing.

Teresa shot him, but not in time to save her family.

Teresa never did get the Oak Springs ExEx right.

On her last entry to the scenario she assumed the role of the gunman: he was a man with the name Sam McLeod, who had earlier in the day carried out an armed robbery on a gas station, shooting the clerk as he snatched the money. A month earlier he had crossed into West Virginia from the neighbouring state of Kentucky, where he was wanted for several other violent robberies. He had moved on into Virginia over the previous weekend. As a federal Most Wanted he had nothing to lose, and earlier in the day, before going to AI's Happy Burgabar, he had stolen several weapons from a gun dealer's store in Palmyra. These were in his pickup truck parked outside the restaurant.

In McLeod's guise, Teresa entered the ExEx at the point when he was parking the pickup truck. She loaded the semiautomatic with a fresh magazine, then climbed down from the pickup, slammed the door, and walked round the back to gain a clear view of anything that might be moving in the parking lot. Traffic went by on the highway beyond the lot, but the restaurant was in a cleared patch of forest and thick trees rose in every direction.

Satisfied that there was no one observing her from outside, McLeod shouldered her way through the door of the restaurant. Full of ease, with her rifle resting casually on her shoulder, she surveyed the customers and staff. A waitress was by the door, writing something on a pad of paper next to the cash register.

'Open it up, and let me have it,' she said, bringing the rifle to bear.

The waitress glanced up, and immediately ran away from her, yelling incoherently. After a few steps she collided with one of tables, which were heavy and made of metal and connected by a stout pillar to the floor. She sprawled across the floor. McLeod could have killed her then, but she had nothing against her.

She heard a shot, and turned in amazement towards the

sound. Someone shooting at her? She strolled across the restaurant to see who it was, stepping over the waitress who had fallen. A man by the salad bar, in a stupid shirt, with a glove-compartment handgun. Salad Bar Man lost his chance to fire again, after McLeod started striding towards him.

in one of the semicircular booths by the window, a young family was crowded in together, empty plates and glasses and screwed-up paper napkins scattered on the table in front of them. The young woman, the mother, was getting to her feet, trying to press down the heads of her children as she did so, getting them below the surface of the table. McLeod paused in her progress across the room, to stare her down. She seemed unafraid of her, concerned only with her children.

Teresa loosed a casual burst in her direction, then continued across to the salad bar, where the man with the toy pistol was still standing, apparently paralysed by fear.

Teresa decided to spare them all any more concern on her account. She reached over, removed the handgun from Salad Bar Man, checked to see that it was still loaded, then shoved the muzzle in her own mouth and pulled the trigger. She died within seconds.

Later, Teresa was taken through video recordings of the ExEx scenarios about the Oak Springs shootings, shown where she had gone wrong in her decisions, how she could have acted, what further options were open to her.

[In July 1958, Sam Wilkins McLeod, a former inmate of Kentucky State Penitentiary, who had recently become a fugitive from the same institution, went berserk with a semiautomatic rifle in a hamburger bar on Route 64, killing seven people, including one child. A young woman on the scene called Samantha Karen jessup tried to tackle him, but she was killed by one of McLeod's bullets. She was not related to the child who died.]

CHAPTER 10

W hen she had finished clearing up the restaurant and kitchen after breakfast, and Mrs Simons had gone upstairs to her room, Amy went through to the hotel office and discovered that a fax message had arrived overnight. She tore it off and read it.

Her first reaction was to run upstairs and show Nick, but he was still in bed asleep, and she knew he didn't like being woken early.

Instead, she decided to deal with it herself and let him see it later. Within half an hour she had drafted her reply. She faxed lt to the number in Taiwan, confirming that the White Dragon Hotel in Bulverton had reserved four bedrooms with double beds for single occupancy halfboard, from the Monday evening of the following week, for a minimum period of two weeks with an option to extend indefinitely. She quoted the prices. At the bottom of the letter she enquired as politely as she could as to their proposed manner of payment.

Thirty minutes later she was making a photocopy of the original fax for her files, and rimming the bookings software that Nick had installed seriously underused in recent months when a faxed response came through.

lt told her, in formal but roundabout English, that an account had been opened at the branch of Midland Bank in Bulverton, where she could make arrangements for weekly direct transfer in sterling to the White Dragon's account. Receipted invoices were to be sent direct to the company's

head office in Taipei. After a flurry of what read to her like exotic and oriental greetings, the fax message was signed by Mr A. Li, of Project Development Division, GunHo Corporation of Taipei.

At the bottom of the message were printed the names of the four GunHo executives on whose behalf the booking was being made. Amy stared at these for a moment, then went upstairs with the fax. Nick was still asleep.

The day went by, and although Nick did appear at midday he was obviously in another bad mood. Amy knew better than to try to get through to him.

In the afternoon she went for a brief walk, annoyed with herself for allowing him to control her with his moods, even, as things now stood, with her own anticipation of his moods. lt wasn't as if the news was bad: it promised a sudden increase in business, with nearly half the hotel's rooms occupied, probably for the first time since the media circus had left town last summer. The further news, that the people from Taiwan would be staying halfboard which meant they would be In the hotel for dinner every evening suggested that she and Nick could now afford to take on extra staff, at least on a temporary basis. As she walked through the Old Town park, Amy was already making calculations about how much help would be needed in the kitchen, in the restaurant, and also for servicing the rooms. She knew Nick would baulk at first at the idea of paying more staff, but the other side of the equation indicated that the hotel would be profitable for the next two weeks at least, and possibly afterwards.

When AMY returned to the hotel she noticed that Nick's car was missing from its parking place, so she was able to stay out of his way for the rest of the day. His moods still mystified her. She had seen many sides of him in the past,

when they were younger, but this destructive moodiness had not been one of them.

That evening, after she had cooked and served Teresa Simons' dinner, Amy went down to the bar, where she knew she would find Nick. He was there, propped up on the stool behind the counter, a paperback novel on his knee. Half a dozen customers were drinking at one of the tables by the window. The jukebox was playing.

'I thought you'd like to see this,' she said, trying to make it sound casual. She gave him the original fax message on its curl of thermal paper, and then used one of the cloth towels to wipe down the counter needlessly, while he read the fax.

'Two weeks,' he said. 'That's good.'

'The hotel will be busy.'

'It'll be a lot of work. And what sort of food will Chinese guests expect?'

'That's mentioned.' She leaned over, and pointed out the sentence. 'They say they expect international cuisine.'

'That could be anything. Pity we don't have a chef'

'We can manage, Nick! Come on ... say you're pleased!'

'I'm pleased. I really am.' He twisted his hand round the back of her neck, and gently pulled down her face for a kiss. 'But do we have four rooms free with double beds? There are only ten rooms in the whole place, and six of those are singles or twinbedded. Mrs Simons is in one of the doubles, isn't she?'

'That's something 1 wanted to ask you about,' Amy said. 'I was wondering what you would think if we asked her to change rooms?'

'Have you mentioned it to her?'

'Not yet. The booking only came through today. 1 thought until the people in Taiwan made it definite we shouldn't do anything.'

'But this is a firm booking.'

'Yes.'

'I don't think she likes this place,' Nick said. 'She never complains, but I'm certain she finds it uncomfortable. just little things she lets slip.'

'That's what 1 think too. Maybe she would like to move out. This would give her an excuse.'

'Do you think she needs one?'

'I've no idea. She's so polite it's impossible to work out what she really means.'

Nick put the fax message on the counter, where the curl of its paper made it stand up like a shallow arch. Amy picked it up again.

'These don't sound like Chinese names to me,' she said. 'Kravitz, Mitchell, Wendell, Jensen.'

'GunHo Corporation,' Nick said. 'That doesn't sound Chinese either. A bit oriental, but who can tell any more, and does it matter anyway? If they pay, we let them in.'

'Did you notice? Two of these people are women?'

'Yes, 1 did notice,' Nick replied. 'What do you think, Amy? Can we manage on our own, or should we think about getting a couple of extra staff in?'

CHAPTER 11

Nick was in the bar, waiting for something or other to happen, with not much hope that it would. Dick Cooden and his girlfriend June were playing pool; three men who he knew worked in a garage in Bexhill were standing at the far end of the bar, putting away a lot of pints of bitter; one of the tables near the door had a group of five youngsters perilously close to the minimum legal age, but he didn't feel like checking. Other people had been in and out earlier, and there were always one or two who would straggle in shortly before closing time.

Sitting in the bar was what he did, what he liked to do. Amy had gone to bed. He would close the bar in half an hour, once the Bexhill men had given up and gone home.

Then Teresa Simons came in and ordered a bourbon and ice. He put in a single measure, and reached down the counter for the ice. When he turned back she had drained the glass in one gulp without waiting for the ice. He hadn't known Americans would drink anything without ice.

'You people serve small shots, she said. 'Let me have another.' He went to take the glass from her but she tightened her hold on it. 'Would you make me one the way 1 like it? Let me show you, and then after that whenever 1 ask for a bourbon, you can fix it that way.'

When he agreed she asked for a tall glass with several large chunks of ice, two shots of bourbon, and then some soda.

He wrote down the cost of this and the first drink on the account he was keeping beneath the counter.

'Are you finding what you want in the town?' he said, making barman's conversation.

'What makes you think I'm looking for something?'

'You're obviously not here on holiday, so 1 assumed you were on a business trip.'

'Kind of Do people come to Bulverton on vacation?'

'Some do. Not as many now as in the past. They like the way the town looks.'

'The town's pretty enough, but it's kind of depressing.'

'Most local people think there's a good reason for that. You must know what happened last year.'

'Yeah ... It's why I'm here, I guess.'

'Amy said she thought you might be a reporter.'

'What gave her that idea? My interest is ... 1 guess you could say it's more personal.'

' I'm sorry,' he said, surprised, because Amy's suggestion had sounded right. 'I didn't realize.

Did you have a relative here who was involved?'

'No, nothing like that.'

She turned away from him sharply, almost literally giving him the shoulder, and looked towards the window. The bottom halves of the bar windows were frosted; all that could be seen through them were the diffused and haloed lights of the passing traffic. The three men from Bexhill wanted another round of drinks, so Nick went to attend to them. When he returned, Teresa Simons was facing the counter again, resting her elbows on the top and cradling her now empty glass. She indicated she wanted a refill, which he poured her, using fresh ice and a clean glass.

'What about you, Nick? You don't mind me calling you Nick? Your parents were caught up in the shooting, weren't they?'

'They were both killed, yes.'

'Do you ever talk about it?'

'Not a lot. There isn't much to say, when you leave out all the obvious stuff.'

'This used to be their hotel, right?'

'Yes.

'You really don't want to discuss it, do you?'

'There's nothing to talk about any more. They left me the hotel, and here 1 am. What 1 went through was less traumatic than some of the people here.'

'Tell me.'

He thought for a moment, trying to articulate feelings that had always remained undefined.

He remembered how, when he had realized that he couldn't cope with the idea of what Gerry Grove had done, he had begun to think in cliches. Soon, he heard other people spouting the same empty phrases: reporters on television, vicars in pulpits, leaderwriters in newspapers, wellmeaning visitors. He knew that those phrases, so quickly becoming familiar, simultaneously missed the true point and captured the essence of it. He learned the benefits of nonthought, nonarticulation. Life went on and he Joined in, because that way he was spared the need to think or to talk about it.

'There were all those people dead,' he said carefully. 'I didn't know them personally any more, because 1'd been living away from the town, but I knew of them. Their names went on lists, their stones were told. All that grief, all those people being missed. The relatives, the parents, the children, the dead lovers, and a couple of strangers. At first nothing surprised me: of course the survivors were going to be shocked. That's what happens when other people get killed. But the more 1 thought about it, the more complicated it seemed. 1 couldn't understand anything. So 1 stopped trying to think.'

Teresa was looking away, twirling ice cubes as he spoke.

'But in a funny kind of way, you know, they were the

ones who escaped, the people who were killed. They didn't have to live with it afterwards. In some ways surviving is worse than being dead. People feel guilty that they survived, when a friend or a husband or wife didn't. And then there are all those who were injured. Some recovered quickly, but there were others who didn't, who never will. One of those is a teenage girl.'

' Shelly Mercer,' said Teresa.

'You know about her?'

'Yes, 1 heard. How's she doing now?'

'She came out of the coma and she's out of hospital, but her parents can't look after her at home. They've had to put her in a special nursing home, in Eastbourne.'

He had been to visit Shelly one day, while she was still in intensive care in the Conquest Hospital in Hastings. He went with a small group of people from the town, all drawn to her by whatever it was that seemed to unite them. The feeling of guilt, he supposed.

The excuse was the radio and CD player that the people in the town had bought for her. She had been saving up to buy one like it before she was shot, and a collection was set up for her.

They took it along to the hospital and there was a presentation while a photographer from the Courier took some pictures. Nick had been stricken by the sight of Shelly; she was just a kid, swathed in dressings, kept alive by drips and tubes, monitored constantly by electronics. He could hardly even see her face, and none of them knew If she was conscious or understood who they were and what they were doing. They left the CD player in its box, put down their cards and flowers, and they went away.

'What's your interest in all this?' he said to Teresa.

'Intense. How about yours?'

The swiftness of her response, and its fierceness, took him by surprise again. She was staring at him steadily, her eyes

just a couple of feet away from his, an unsettling gaze. In the mix of different lights in the bar he could not tell the colour of her eyes, except that they were pale. He had never thought about them before. Now they momentarily eclipsed everything else in the room.

She picked up her glass and drank from it. He heard the cubes clinking as they shifted position in the long tube of the glass. The sound made him remember a bar in St Louis he'd been in while he was on holiday in the US a few years before. lt was hot weather, deep summer. All around him, in the airconditioned chill, Americans were clinking ice cubes in tall glasses. So much ice, every day and everywhere in that vast country, all that fossil energy being used up to freeze water to make drinks seem more cooling and refreshing. In the three days Teresa had been staying at the White Dragon they had got through twice as much ice as normal. Every day they put two extra icemoulds in the freezer in case the American guest wanted ice. And here she was, clinking it around in her highball.

'Well?' she said, putting down the glass. After just a couple of drinks she had acquired that directness, almost aggression, that some people take on when drinking. 'What's your own interest in it?'

'Intense too, 1 suppose. 1 haven't really thought about it like that.'

'Getting over it?'

'Starting to, I think.'

'Look, if people ask what I'm doing here, tell them I'm a kind of historian.'

'Is that what you really are?'

'Kind of,' she said, but she looked introspective for a moment, turning away from him to glance at the men from Bexhill as they laughed loudly at some joke. 'I keep forgetting what you people went through. Did you ever

hear of a place called Kingwood City, Texas?'

'No, 1 didn't, haven't.'

'I hadn't heard of Bulverton. 1 guess that's a kind of connection between us, if nothing else.'

'What happened in Kingwood, was that similar to this?'

'Kingwood City. The same.'

'A shooting? And you lost someone?'

'My husband. Andy. His name was Andy Simons, and he worked for the federal government, and he was shot in Kingwood City, Texas. That's why I'm here, in Bulverton, East Sussex, because some goddamned bastard killed the man 1 loved.'

She lowered her face, but her arm was stretched across the bar towards him, holding the glass. lt was empty, apart from the barely melted ice cubes. She said nothing, but the drinker's body-language said it all; he poured her another double whiskey.

'Thanks,' she said.

She looked up at him again, but now her gaze was not so steady. Her eyes had the glazed look familiar to everyone who has ever worked behind a bar and waited for the release of closing time. She was getting drunk more quickly than Nick had expected. While she used the soda syphon with concentrated accuracy, he quietly added the price of the new drink to her slate beneath the counter.

'Do you want to talk about what happened?' he said. He was the sympathetic barman, member of the caring profession for the drunk and the disconsolate.

'No more than you did.'

The ofage kids rose from their table with much scraping of chairs, and headed in an unruly bunch for the door. They left their table littered with empty glasses and snack bags. An insistent column of smoke was rising from the ashtray. Nick went round, cleared up the table, then doused the

smouldering paper and cigarette ends in the ashtray and started to wash everything in the sink underneath the bar. As he did so the door behind him opened and Amy appeared.

'Want me to take over for a while?' she said, with what he took to be a suspicious glance in the direction of Teresa Simons.

'No, lt's OK. I'll be closing soon.' He straightened, and turned to face her. She beckoned him down to the far end of the bar.

'Is Mrs Simons all night?' Amy said, over the music that was still coming from the jukebox, something else the kids had left behind.

'She's drinking a lot of bourbon, but she doesn't have a long way to go home.'

'Are you going to carry her upstairs after she's passed out?'

'Come off it, Amy!' He gestured in irritation. 'I thought you had gone to bed.'

'I wasn't tired. 1 could hear you talking down here.'

'Look, I'm just the barkeep people tell their troubles to.'

'She has troubles, has she?'

'Don't we all?'

'She never seems to use the bar when I'm working in it.'

'Maybe she feels she can open up to men.'

'So what's she been opening up to you about?'

'Let's do this later, Amy. OK?'

'She can't hear us.'

'Even so. You're being a bit bloody obvious.'

'I don't get any choice.'

Her voice was rising, so Nick pushed past her and went out from behind the bar. He flicked the hidden switch at the back of the jukebox, ensuring the music would fall silent after the current record.

'If you're closing, the barrel for the draught Guinness needs changing,' Amy said.

'I'll do the cellar work in the morning.'

'I thought you always said Guinness was best left to sit overnight.'

'I'll do it in the morning, Amy.'

She shrugged, pushed past him and went through the door into the main part of the hotel.

He dreaded what would be said, what might happen, when he eventually went upstairs to bed. He was still learning Amy, after all these years.

Teresa Simons had finished her drink again, but now she was sitting erect on her stool, her hands resting lightly on the counter.

'Did I hear you say you're about to close?' she said.

'Not to you. You're a resident. You can drink all night if you want.'

, No thanks, Mr Surtees. That's not my style.'

'Nick,' he said.

'Yeah, we agreed on that. Not my style, Nick. Hell, 1 don't even like bourbon much. That was Andy's drink, you know? 1 only started to drink it because of him, never had the guts to say I didn't much care for it. Before that 1 used to drink beer. You know all about American beer, right? Doesn't taste good, so you chill it right down so you can't taste anything at all. That's why people like Andy drink bourbon. Even he didn't drink too much of it. Said he had to keep a clear head, or he'd lose his badge.'

'His badge? Was he a cop?' Nick said.

'Sort of.'

'Sort of a cop like you're sort of a historian?'

She was standing now, and looked remarkably steady on her feet for someone who had drunk so much bourbon in so short a time