Pauling swung the car key on her finger. Back and forth, thinking.

“It’s possible,” she said. “I guess. So what’s our play?”

“Taylor was with Lane three years,” Reacher said. “So he never met you and he sure as hell never met me. So it doesn’t really make much difference. He’s not going to shoot every stranger who comes to the house. He can’t really afford to. It’s something we should bear in mind, is all.”

“We’re going right to the house?”

Reacher nodded. “At least close enough to scope it out. If Taylor’s there, we back off and wait for Lane. If he isn’t, we go all the way in and talk to Susan.”

“When?”

“Now.”

The rental guy brought the Mini Cooper out from a garage space in back and Reacher shoved the passenger seat hard up against the rear bench and slid inside. Pauling got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. It was a cute car. It looked great in red. But it was a handful to drive. Stick shift, wrong side of the road, wheel on the right, early-evening traffic in one of the world’s most congested cities. But they made it back to the hotel OK. They double parked and Pauling ran in to get her bag. Reacher stayed in the car. His toothbrush was already in his pocket. Pauling got back after five minutes and said, “We’re on the west side here. Convenient for the airport. But now we need to exit the city from the east.”

“Northeast,” Reacher said. “On a highway called the M- 11.”

“So I have to drive all the way through the center of London in rush hour.”

“No worse than Paris or Rome.”

“I’ve never been to Paris or Rome.”

“Well, now you’ll know what to expect if you ever get there.”

Heading east and north was a simple enough proposition but like any major city London was full of one-way systems and complex junctions. And it was full of lines of stalled traffic at every light. They made halting progress as far as a district called Shoreditch and then they found a wide road labeled A-10 that speared due north. Too early, but they took it anyway. They figured they would make the lateral adjustment later, away from the congestion. Then they found the M-25, which was a kind of beltway. They hit it clockwise and two exits later they were on the M-11, heading north and east for Cambridge, Newmarket, and ultimately Norfolk. Nine o’clock in the evening, and getting dark.

Pauling asked, “You know this area we’re going to?”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “It was Air Force country, not army. Bomber bases all over the place. Flat, spacious, close to Europe. Ideal.”

England was a lit-up country. That was for damn sure. Every inch of the highway was bathed in bright vapor glow. And people drove fast. The limit was posted at seventy miles an hour, but it was widely ignored. High eighties, low nineties seemed to be the norm. Lane discipline was good. Nobody passed on the inside. The highway exits all followed the same coherent grammar. Clear signs, plenty of warning, long deceleration lanes. Reacher had read that highway fatalities were low in Britain. Safety, through infrastructure.

Pauling asked, “What’s Grange Farm going to be like?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Technically in Old English a grange was a large barn for grain storage. Then later it became a word for the main building in a gentleman’s arable farm. So I guess we’re going to see a big house and a bunch of smaller outbuildings. Fields all around. Maybe a hundred acres. Kind of feudal.”

“You know a lot.”

“A lot of useless information,” Reacher said. “Supposed to fire my imagination.”

“But you can’t get no satisfaction?”

“None at all. I don’t like anything about this whole situation. It feels wrong.”

“Because there are no good guys. Just bad guys and worse guys.”

“They’re all equally terrible.”

“The hard way,” Pauling said. “Sometimes things aren’t black and white.”

Reacher said, “I can’t get past the feeling that I’m making a bad mistake.”

England is a small country but East Anglia was a large empty part of it. In some ways it was like driving across the prairie states. Endless forward motion without much visible result. The little red Mini Cooper hummed along. The clock in Reacher’s head crawled around to ten in the evening. The last of the twilight disappeared. Beyond the bright ribbon of road was nothing but full darkness.

They bypassed a town called Thetford. Much later they blew through a town called Fenchurch Saint Mary. The road narrowed and the streetlights disappeared. They saw a sign that said Norwich 40 Miles . So Reacher switched maps and they started hunting the turn down to Bishops Pargeter. The road signs were clear and helpful. But they were all written with the same size lettering and there seemed to be a maximum permitted length for a fingerpost. Which meant that the longer names were abbreviated. Reacher saw a sign to B’sh’ps P’ter flash by and they were two hundred yards past it before he figured out what it meant. So Pauling jammed to a stop in the lonely darkness and U-turned and went back. Paused a second and then turned off the main drag onto a much smaller road. It was narrow and winding and the surface was bad. Pitch dark beyond the headlight beams.

“How far?” Pauling asked.

Reacher spanned his finger and thumb on the map.

“Maybe nine miles,” he said. The motoring atlas had showed nothing but a blank white triangle between two roads that fanned out south of the city of Norwich. The Ordnance Survey sheet showed the triangle to be filled with a tracery of minor tracks and speckled here and there with small settlements. He put his finger on the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then he looked out the car window.

“This is pointless,” he said. “It’s too dark. We’re not even going to see the house, let alone who’s living in it.” He looked back at the map. It showed buildings about four miles ahead. One was labeled PH. He checked the legend in the corner of the sheet.

“Public house,” he said. “A pub. Maybe an inn. We should get a room. Go out again at first light.”

Pauling said, “Suits me, boss.”

He realized she was tired. Travel, jet lag, unfamiliar roads, driving stress. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We overdid it. I should have planned better.”

“No, this works,” she said. “We’re right on the spot for the morning. But how much farther?”

“Four miles to the pub now, and then five more to Bishops Pargeter tomorrow.”

“What time is it?”

He smiled. “Ten forty-seven.”

“So you can do it in multiple time zones.”

“There’s a clock on the dashboard. I can see it from here. I’m practically sitting in your lap.”

Eight minutes later they saw a glow in the distance that turned out to be the pub’s spotlit sign. It was swinging in a gentle night breeze on a high gallows. The Bishop’s Arms. There was a blacktopped parking lot with five cars in it and then a row of lit windows. The windows looked warm and inviting. Beyond the dark outline of the building there was absolutely nothing at all. Just endless flatness under a vast night sky.

“Maybe it was a coaching inn,” Pauling said.

“Can’t have been,” Reacher said. “It’s not on the way to anywhere. It was for farm laborers.”

She turned in at the entrance of the parking lot and slotted the tiny car between a dirty Land Rover and a battered sedan of indeterminate make and age. Turned the motor off and dropped her hands off the wheel with a sigh. Silence rolled in, and with it came the smell of moist earth. The night air was cold. A little damp. Reacher carried Pauling’s bag to the pub’s door. There was a foyer inside, with a swaybacked staircase on the right and a low beamed ceiling and a patterned carpet and about ten thousand brass ornaments. Dead ahead was a hotel reception counter made from dark old wood varnished to an amazing shine. It was unattended. To the left was a doorway marked Saloon Bar. It led to a room that seemed to be empty. To the right beyond the stairs was a doorway marked Public Bar. Through it Reacher could see a bartender at work and the backs of four drinkers hunched on stools. In the far corner he could see the back of a man sitting alone at a table. All five customers were drinking from pint pots of ale.