The Hard Way

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.
    Reacher stepped up to the empty reception counter and dinged the bell. A long moment later the bartender came in through a door behind the counter. He was about sixty, large and florid. Tired. He was wiping his hands on a towel.
    “We need a room,” Reacher said to him.
    “Tonight?” he said back.
    “Yes, tonight.”
    “It’ll cost you forty pounds. But that’s with breakfast included.”
    “Sounds like a bargain.”
    “Which room would you like?”
    “Which would you recommend?”
    “You want one with a bath?”
    Pauling said, “Yes, a bath. That would be nice.”
    “OK, then. That’s what you can have.”
    She gave him four ten-pound notes and he gave her a brass key on a tasseled fob. Then he handed Reacher a ballpoint pen and squared a register in front of him. Reacher wrote
J & L Bayswater
on the
Name
line. Then he checked a box for
Place of Business
rather than
Place of Residence
and wrote Yankee Stadium’s street address on the next line.
East 161st Street, Bronx, New York, USA.
He wished that was his place of business. He always had. In a space labeled
Make of Vehicle
he scrawled
Rolls-Royce.
He guessed
Registration Number
meant license plate and he wrote R34-CHR. Then he asked the bartender, “Can we get a meal?”
    “You’re a little too late for a meal, I’m afraid,” the bartender said. “But you could have sandwiches, if you like.”
    “That would be fine,” Reacher said.
    “You’re Americans, aren’t you? We get a lot of them here. They come to see the old airfields. Where they were stationed.”
    “Before my time,” Reacher said.
    The bartender nodded sagely and said, “Go on in and have a drink. Your sandwiches will be ready soon.”
    Reacher left Pauling’s bag at the foot of the stairs and stepped in through the door to the public bar. Five heads turned. The four guys at the bar looked like farmers. Red weathered faces, thick hands, blank uninterested expressions.
    The guy alone at the table in the corner was Taylor.

CHAPTER 60
    LIKE THE GOOD soldier he was Taylor kept his eyes on Reacher long enough to assess the threat level. Pauling’s arrival behind Reacher’s shoulder seemed to reassure him.
A well-dressed man, a refined woman, a couple, tourists.
He looked away. Turned back to his beer. Beginning to end he had stared only a fraction of a second longer than any man would in a barroom situation. And actually shorter than the farmers. They were slow and ponderous and full of the kind of entitlement a regular patron shows to a stranger.
    Reacher led Pauling to a table on the other side of the room from Taylor and sat with his back to the wall and watched the farmers turn back to the bar. They did it one by one, slowly. Then the last one picked up his glass again and the atmosphere in the room settled back to what it had been before. A moment later the bartender reappeared. He picked up a towel and started wiping glasses.
    Reacher said, “We should act normally. We should buy a drink.”
    Pauling said, “I guess I’ll try the local beer. You know, when in Rome.”
    So Reacher got up again and stepped over to the bar and tried to think back ten years to when he had last been in a similar situation. It was important to get the dialect right. He leaned between two of the farmers and put his knuckles on the bar and