|
Slowly, carefully so as not to disturb the rising construction of cards, he got up from the table and walked to the cabin door, taking in the view as he gulped down the fresh evening air. The roof tops of London were bathed in the red glow of the setting sun, and he imagined himself on some Pacific island, stranded alone with the incandescent WPC and a magical supply of ice cold lager. He felt better now, and with fresh determination returned to the cards.
The cards seemed to rise effortlessly in front of him. He had now reached the sixth level, as high as his card houses had ever gone before, and he started quickly on the seventh level so as not to destroy his rhythm. Two more cards to go - he was nearly there! But as the penultimate card got to within half an inch of the top of the tower, his hand began to shake again. Damn the caffeine!
He cracked his knuckles to relax his fingers, and picked up the card once more. With his left hand clamped firmly around his right wrist for extra support, he guided the card slowly upwards and sighed in relief as he watched it come to rest gently on top of the others. One more to go, but try as hard as he could he was unable to stop the tremble. The tower had become a great phallic symbol, his mind could see nothing but her body, and the harder he tried to control it the more his hand shook. He could no longer feel the card, his fingers had gone numb. He cursed Fate and implored it for just one last favour. He sucked in another lungful of breath, positioned the shaking card a half inch above the tower and, scarcely daring to look, let the card fall. It dropped precisely into its appointed place.
Fate, however, had other ideas. Just as the inspector watched the final card complete his masterpiece, the first cool breeze of evening passed across the top of Smith Square, lightly kissed the tall towers of St John's, and wafted through the door of the cabin which the inspector had left open. It nudged gently into the house of cards, which first trembled, then twisted, and finally crashed to the table top with a roar which cut dead the inspector's inner cry of triumph and echoed inside his head as loudly as if the house had been built of brick and steel.
For several long moments he stared at the ruins of his weekend, trying in desperation to convince himself that he had after all succeeded, if only for an instant, before his house of dreams had crumbled. Perhaps he had, but he knew now he would have to make up his own mind. He felt more miserable than ever.
His private misery and the poker game were cut short by the crackling of the radio in the corner. The Party Chairman was on his way back from visiting the troops at the front line, and soon other senior politicians would be joining him in party headquarters. The work of the long night was about to begin for the Special Branch protection officers. Just time for the inspector's colleagues to lay a few final bets as to which Ministers they would still be protecting next week, and which would by then have been dumped in the great waste bin of history.
The Right Honourable Francis Ewan Urquhart was not enjoying himself. Ministerial office brought many pleasures, but this was not one of them. He was squashed into the corner of a small and stuffy living room pressed hard up against a hideous 1950s standard lamp, which showed every sign of wanting to topple over. Try as he could, he had been unable to escape the devoted attentions of the posse of matrons who doubled as his constituency workers and who now surrounded him, chattering proudly about their canvass returns and pinched shoes. He wondered why they bothered. This was suburban Surrey, where Range Rovers stood in the driveways and only got mud on their tyres when being driven carelessly over the lawns late on a Friday night. They didn't count votes here, they weighed them.
He had never felt at home in his constituency, but then he never felt at home anywhere any more, not even in his native Scotland. As a child he had loved to wander through the bracing, crystal air of the Perthshire moors, accompanying the old gillie on a shoot, lying for hours in the damp peat and sweetly scented bracken waiting for the right buck to appear, just as he had imagined his older brother was waiting even at that same moment for German tanks in the hedgerows outside Dunkirk. But the Scottish moors and ancestral estates had never completely satisfied him and, as his appetite for politics and power grew, so he had come steadily to resent the enforced family responsibilities which had been thrust at him when his brother failed to return.
3/134 首页 上一页 1 2 3 4 5 6 下一页 尾页
|
