reassured, closing the door slowly behind him. I drew the heavy striped curtains across the two windows and briefly surveyed the spacious but old-fashioned accommodation: reproduction antique furniture, twin beds, pair of armchairs, door to bathroom.
No murderer in the bathroom.
‘Ian …’ Malcolm said.
‘Did you bring any scotch?’ I asked. In the old days, he’d never travelled without it.
He waved a hand towards a chest of drawers where I found a half-full bottle nestling among a large number of socks. I fetched a glass from the bathroom and poured him enough to tranquillise an elephant.
‘For God’s sake …’ he said.
‘Sit down and drink it.’
‘You’re bloody arrogant.’
He did sit down, though, and tried not to let the glass clatter against his teeth from the shaking of his hand.
With much less force, I said, ‘If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have let that car hit you tonight. I’d have jumped the other way… out of trouble.’
He seemed to notice clearly for the first time that there had been any physical consequences to our escape.
‘Your leg,’ he said, ‘must be all right?’
‘Leg is. Trousers… can I borrow a pair of yours?’
He pointed to a cupboard where I found a second suit almost identical to the one he was wearing. I was three inches taller than he and a good deal thinner but, belted and slung round the hips, whole cloth was better than holey.
He silently watched me change and made no objection when I telephoned down to the reception desk and asked them to get his bill ready for his departure. He drank more of the scotch, but nowhere was he relaxed.
‘Shall I pack for you?’ I asked.
He nodded, and watched some more while I fetched his suitcase, opened it on one of the beds and began collecting his belongings. The things he’d brought spoke eloquently of his state of mind when he’d packed them: about ten pairs of socks but no other underwear, a dozen shirts, no pyjamas, two towelling bath-robes, no extra shoes. The clearly new electric razor in the bathroom still bore a stick-on price tag, but he had brought his antique gold-and-silver-backed brushes, all eight of them, including two clothes brushes. I put everything into the case, and closed it.
‘Ian,’ he said.
‘Mm?’
‘People can pay assassins… You could have decided not to go through with it tonight… at the last moment…’
‘It wasn’t tike that,’ I protested. Saving him had been utterly instinctive, without calculation or counting of risks: I’d been lucky to get off with a graze.
He said almost beseechingly, with difficulty, ‘It wasn’t you, was it, who had Moira… Or me, in the garage…? Say it wasn’t you.’
I didn’t know really how to convince him. He’d known me better, lived with me longer than with any of his other children, and if his trust was this fragile then there wasn’t much future between us.
‘I didn’t have Moira killed,’ I said, ‘If you believe it of me, you could believe it of yourself.’ I paused, ‘I don’t want you dead, I want you alive. I could never do you harm.’
It struck me that he really needed to hear me say I loved him, so although he might scoff at the actual words, and despite the conditioned inhibitions of my upbringing, I said, feeling that desperate situations needed desperate remedies, ‘You’re a great father… and… er… I love you.’
He blinked. Such a declaration pierced him, one could see. I’d probably overdone it, I thought, but his distrust had been a wound for me too.
I said much more lightly, ‘I swear on the Coochie Pembroke Memorial Challenge Trophy that I would never touch a hair on your head… nor Moira’s either, though I did indeed loathe her.’
I lifted the suitcase off the bed.
‘Do I go on with you or not?’ I said, ‘If you don’t trust me, I’m going home.’
He was looking at me searchingly, as if I were a stranger, which I suppose in some ways I was. He had never before, I guessed, had to think of me not as a son but as a man, as a person who had led a life separate from his, with a different outlook, different desires, different values. Sons grew from little boys into their own adult selves: fathers tended not to see the change clearly. Malcolm, I was certain, thought of me basically as still having the half-formed personality I’d had at fifteen.
‘You’re different,’ he said.
‘I am the same. Trust your instinct.’
Some of the tension at last slackened in his muscles. His instinct