The Ghost

water, his cheap winter clothes stiff with brine and cold. I imagined him emerging out of the bleak dawn, carried in on the tide from Vineyard Sound, scraping the sand with his big feet, being washed out again, and then returning, slowly creeping higher up the beach until at last he grounded. And then I imagined him dumped over the side of a dinghy and dragged ashore by men with flashlights, who’d come back a few days later and thrown a garrulous old witness down her architect-designed stairs.
    A few hundred yards along the beach a pair of figures emerged from the dunes and started walking toward me, dark and tiny and frail amid all that raging nature. I glanced in the other direction. The wind was whipping spouts of water from the surface of the waves and flinging them ashore, like the outlines of some amphibious invasion force: they made it halfway up the beach and then dissolved.
    What I ought to do, I thought, staggering slightly in the wind, is give all this to a journalist, some tenacious reporter from the Washington Post , some noble heir to the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein. I could see the headline. I could write the story in my mind.
    WASHINGTON—The death of Michael McAra, aide to former British prime minister Adam Lang, was a covert operation that went tragically wrong, according to sources within the intelligence community.
    Was that so implausible? I took another look at the figures on the beach. It seemed to me they had quickened their pace and were heading toward me. The wind slashed rain in my face and I had to wipe it away. I ought to get going, I thought. By the time I looked again they were closer still, stumbling determinedly up the expanse of sand. One was short, the other tall. The tall one was a man, the short one a woman.
    The short one was Ruth Lang.

    I WAS AMAZED THAT she should have turned up. I waited until I was sure it was her, then I went halfway down the beach to meet her. The noise of the wind and the sea wiped out our first exchanges. She had to take my arm and pull me down slightly, so that she could shout in my ear. “I said,” she repeated, and her breath was almost shockingly hot against my freezing skin, “Dep told me you were here!” The wind whipped her blue nylon hood away from her face and she tried to fumble for it at the nape of her neck, then gave up. She shouted something, but just at that moment a wave exploded against the shore behind her. She smiled helplessly, waited until the noise had subsided, then cupped her hands and shouted, “What are you doing?”
    “Oh, just taking the air.”
    “No—really.”
    “I wanted to see where Mike McAra was found.”
    “Why?”
    I shrugged. “Curiosity.”
    “But you didn’t even know him.”
    “I’m starting to feel as if I did.”
    “Where’s your bike?”
    “Just behind the dunes.”
    “We came to fetch you back before the storm started.” She beckoned to the policeman. He was standing about five yards away, watching us—soaked, bored, disgruntled. “Barry,” she shouted to him, “bring the car round, will you, and meet us on the road? We’ll wheel the bike up and find you.” She spoke to him as if he were a servant.
    “Can’t do that, Mrs. Lang, I’m afraid,” he yelled back. “Regulations say I have to stay with you at all times.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake!” she said scornfully. “Do you seriously think there’s a terrorist cell at Uncle Seth’s Pond? Go and get the car before you catch pneumonia.”
    I watched in his square, unhappy face, as his sense of duty warred with his desire for dryness. “All right,” he said eventually. “I’ll meet you in ten minutes. But please don’t leave the path or speak to anyone.”
    “We won’t, officer,” she said with mock humility. “I promise.”
    He hesitated, then began jogging back the way he’d come.
    “They treat us like children,” complained Ruth, as we climbed up the beach. “I sometimes think their orders aren’t to protect us so much as to spy on us.”
    We reached the top of the dune and automatically we both turned round to stare at the sea. After a second or two, I risked a quick glance at her. Her pale skin was shiny with rain, her short dark hair flattened and glistening like a swimmer’s cap. Her flesh looked hard, like alabaster in the cold. People used to say they couldn’t understand what her husband saw in her, but at that moment I could. There was a tautness about her, a quick, nervous energy: she was a