Hasson tried to put aside the distraction. “It’s hard to show up before an accident.”

“Accident my ass,” Morlacher growled. “That was no accident. Those hopped-up young punks get away with murder. We let them get away with murder.”

“One of them got killed as well.”

“You think that makes things right?”

“No.” Hasson had to concede the point. “But it shows…” “The other man who got hit wasn’t just anybody, you know. He was an important visitor to our country. An important visitor — and look what happens to him!”

“Did you know him?” Hasson’s attention was distracted from the subject of the dead flier by the fact that Pridgeon had spread one of his hands out and was holding it a bare centimetre away from Theo’s nose. The boy sensed its presence almost at once and jerked his head back. Pridgeon’s mouth twitched with amusement behind the wispy tendrils of his moustache and he repeated the experiment, this time holding his hand a little further away. Hasson stared down at his own hands gripping the steering wheel and tried to comprehend what Morlacher was saying.

“… in all the media tonight,” the big man thundered, “and what will the message be? I’ll tell you what the message will be. They’ll be saying it isn’t safe to fly north of Calgary. They’ll be saying this is cowboy country up here. I tell you, it’s enough to make a man…” Morlacher’s peg-like front teeth came together with an audible click, shutting off a flow of words as his anger went beyond the limits of articulation.

Hasson gazed up at him, mute, helpless, baffled, wondering what was coming next, wondering if the predatory strangers would resort to violence against a sick man and a blind boy. Beside him, Theo was rocking his head from side to side in an effort to escape the unseen proximity of Pridgeon’s hand. “When you see Werry tell him I’ve had enough,” Morlacher said at last. “You tell him I’m full up to my back teeth with this sort of thing, and that I’m coming over to his place to see him. Got that?”

“I’ll tell him,” Hasson said, relieved to see that Morlacher’s hand was now resting on the flight control panel on his belt.

“Come on, Starr — we’ve got work to do.” Morlacher moved a switch and was hurled upwards into the sky, disappearing from Hasson’s restricted field of view in a fraction of a second. On the other side of the car, Pridgeon snapped his fingers loudly in Theo’s face, causing the boy to flinch, then performed his intimidatory trick of suddenly fixing Hasson with a bleak, hostile stare. He backed away from the car, still staring, leaped upwards and was gone. There was a silence disturbed only by the flustering of the breeze in the car’s open doors.

Hasson gave an uncertain laugh. “What was all that about?”

Theo compressed his lips, refusing to speak.

“It was nice of them to drop by and see us,” Hasson said, trying to make light of his sense of inadequacy and shame. “Friendly people you have around here.”

Theo put out his right hand, pulled the passenger door shut and shifted slightly in the seat, signalling that he wanted to go home. Hasson took a deep breath as he closed his own door and set the car rolling again. They emerged from the cutting. Scattered houses, some of them already showing lights, became visible far off to one side. In all other directions a vast unfamiliar land stretched away to the dimness where the snow was turning as grey as the sky. Hasson felt totally alone.

“I wasn’t quite sure what to say back there,” he ventured. “Only having been in town a few hours … not really knowing anybody… I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the situation.”

“It’s all right,” Theo replied. “You handled it exactly the way my father would have done.”

Hasson weighed the comment and understood that he had been insulted, but he decided against trying to put up a defence. “I can’t understand why Morlacher is so upset — is he the city mayor or something?”

“No, he’s just our friendly local gangster.”

“Then what’s on his mind?

“You’d better ask my father about that. He works for Morlacher, so he should know.”

Hasson glanced at Theo and saw that his face was pale and stern. “That’s going a bit far, isn’t it?”

“You think so? All right, let’s put it this way.” Theo spoke with a bitterness which made him sound like a much older person. “Mr Morlacher put my father into the reeve’s job, and he did it because he knew he would be completely ineffectual. The idea was that Mr Morlacher would be able to do anything he wanted around Tripletree without being inconvenienced by the law. Now the situation has changed and Mr Morlacher needs some hard-nosing done on his behalf — and there’s nobody to do it for him. I’m sure you can appreciate the humour in that. Everybody else in town does.”

The boy’s words came across like a carefully planned and rehearsed speech, one which had been repeated many times to many people, and Hasson realized he had dipped his toes into a deep dark pool of family relationships. Shocked though he was by Theo’s cynicism, he made up his mind to backtrack before getting involved in other people’s problems. He was in Canada for no other reason than to rest and recuperate, and at the end of his allotted time he was going to flit away, as free and unencumbered as a bird. Life, he had learned, was difficult enough…

“I think we’ll be home in a few minutes,” he said. “There’s a road ahead which looks like the northbound motorway, freeway.”

“Make a right there, then take the third on the right,” Theo replied, an odd inflection in his voice making him sound almost disappointed over Hasson’s failure to respond to his set piece. He changed his position in the seat several times, looking moody and intelligent, giving the impression that his mind was far from being at ease.

“The accident this afternoon,” he said. “Was it a bad one?”

“Bad enough — two people dead.”

“Why was Mr Morlacher talking about murder?”

Hasson slowed down at the intersection. “As far as I know some mental subnormal started bombing the east approach — with the inevitable result.” “Who says it’s inevitable?”

“A character called Isaac Newton. If somebody is crazy enough to switch off in mid-air it only takes him seven seconds to reach terminal velocity of two-hundred kilometres an hour, and no matter what sort of vector he tries to add …” Hasson paused as he became aware of Theo’s unseeing eyes being turned towards him. “We get to know about that sort of thing in the insurance business.” “I suppose you would,” Theo said thoughtfully.

Hasson fell silent, wondering if the stories he had heard about the uncanny perceptiveness of some blind people could be true. He followed the directions given him by Theo and brought the car to a halt outside Al Werry’s house. Theo made an adjustment to the control on his cane bringing life to the inset ruby beads, got out of the car and began walking towards the house. Hasson lifted his television set out of the rear seat and followed him, glad to turn his back on the darkening world.

The hall seemed smaller than before due to the fact that Theo was struggling out of his coat in the centre of it, and this time the aroma of coffee had been added to the background smells of wax polish and camphor. Hasson’s anxiety level increased at the prospect of having to go into the back room, there and then, and sit making conversation with a group of near-strangers. He made immediately for the stairs, fighting off the urge to go up them two at a time before the door to the back room was opened.

“Tell your folks I’ve gone up to unpack,” he said to Theo in a low voice. “Then I’m going to freshen up a bit.”

He reached the landing just as the sound of a door handle turning came from below. He made a panicky rush into his own room, set the television on the bed and locked the door behind him. The room looked dim and strange in the twilight. Faces in framed photographs stared at each other in silent communication, agreeing among themselves that the intruder in their midst should be ignored. Hasson drew the curtains together, switched on a light and busied himself with setting up the television on a table beside the bed. He switched it on, bringing into existence a miniature proscenium under which tiny human figures strutted and strove in a perfect simulation of life.