With a day to go before returning to Washington, I was at a bit of a loose end. It was nice after all the running around I'd been doing lately but I felt honour bound to do something productive, even though White had told me to have a day off.
I mulled over the idea of hypnotising Arthur and decided that I would at least suggest it to him. I'd done a course in counselling and hypnotherapy about ten years previously and was confident I could do it properly. All I would be doing was relaxing Arthur and putting him in a state of semi-sleep where he'd be more likely to remember things. Brainwashing or any of that past-life regression shit wasn't on the agenda.
We discussed it for a good hour but in the end he decided against it. I think it was the possibility of reliving his shooting or the surgery, though I assured him that was massively unlikely, that put him off. It was just an idea, and in his position I'd almost certainly have declined as well.
So that afternoon I decided instead to go and see his wife to see if I could establish a more precise time for the start of his erratic behaviour. White had already interviewed her, but he probably just terrified her. I hoped I could take a more chatty approach and encourage her to reveal her thoughts in her own time.
"When will he be allowed home," Barbara asked me as we sat down in their conservatory with a pot of tea.
"He's fine so far as we can tell," I said, "but we're going to have to go back to America tomorrow. It seems to be the only way of maybe unlocking his memory."
"I can't complain, can I? When he signed that consent document for experimental surgery I wasn't happy, but I never thought he'd actually be shot in the head. If he hadn't signed that paper he would have died, wouldn't he?"
I nodded.
"If he hadn't died, he would have been..." I searched for a polite way of saying it, "almost totally brain dead."
"Have you signed up for that?" she asked.
"I try to avoid getting shot as a rule but yes I have."
She hesitated. "He didn't so anything bad, did he? While he... didn't know what he was doing?"
"There's no evidence for that, but we still have no idea who did this to him or how. That's why I'm here. I'd like you to tell me absolutely everything that happened after he got home from work last Friday. Any tiny detail may be a clue, and at the moment we have none. You weren't planning to go away anywhere?"
"No," said Barbara, "he was due back on Wednesday so it wasn't worth going away. We were just going to have a quiet weekend, do some shopping, a car boot sale, go for a drive in the country on Monday.
"Was he his normal self on Friday?"
"Yes, he was fine until Sunday afternoon, then he seemed, well, odd."
"Okay, I'd still like you to tell me every tiny detail of your weekend. It's possible he was infected, tampered with, however you want to put it, during the weekend."
Barbara shuddered.
"You mean whoever did this to him was here?"
I paused. "Why do you say that?"
"I've been over everything many times. The only time we were apart all weekend was Sunday morning. I went to visit my sister, I was gone for three hours. Arthur said he'd cook lunch. When I got back he wasn't his usual self."
"We'll come to that in a minute. When you left the house, did you drive?"
"Yes, I took my car, the polo."
"Did you notice any cars or people when you left?"
"I'm sorry, your boss asked me that, but I'm just not spy material."
I smiled disarmingly. "That's fine. So, tell me precisely what happened when you got back from your sisters."
"He was very quiet the first few minutes, as if we'd had a row. We've never had a serious row, ever. Then I noticed he hadn't put the joint in, it was on the side in a tray. And he'd peeled enough potatoes for a whole village, it must have taken him over an hour. Then he started shouting that nothing was where it should be and where was the oven."
"He was generally disorientated?"
"Yes, that's it, disorientated. Very. It lasted about ten minutes and I was wondering what to do when he suddenly said he'd been given an urgent assignment and had to go. He just picked up his car keys and his jacket and left."
She looked upset for a moment so I tactfully sipped my tea and waited, hoping something else would occur to her.
"I put his mood down to the stress of having his time off taken away, and he has become slightly confused now and then in the past. You know, nothing serious, just annoyed when he can't remember something from a few years ago."
"I'm sure I'd be annoyed sometimes if I had a bunch of wires in my brain," I almost said aloud, but just managed to stop myself.
"And he didn't say anything else as he left?"
"No."
"Okay. Thanks for the tea, Barbara, you've helped make things a lot clearer. I'm sure when we get back from America Arthur will be given a proper holiday."
As I began to walk back to the office I phoned White.
"I've just been talking to Barbara."
"I couldn't get any sense out of her."
"No, I played the female sympathy card."
"You always were a good actress, 45."
I blew a raspberry down the phone. "Anyway, I'm convinced it happened within a three hour period on Sunday morning; that's when either the code was introduced or began to take effect. Can you find out what signal we got from him between 9am and midday? If he didn't leave home then somebody may well have been watching the house and nobbled him when Barbara went out."
"I'll get onto that right away. See you later."
Back at the office, we discovered that Arthur hadn't left his house until after his wife got back. It seems that he simply went to the airport and got the next plane to Washington, just taking a small, hastily packed suitcase.
The tech boys hadn't been able to decipher the virus any further, except to tell us that it was so incompetent that it was almost certainly a mishmash of coherent pieces of coding cut and pasted together at random. That meant at least that we definitely weren't dealing with a similar agency of a foreign power, but the alternatives were no less worrying. There was nothing for it but to go home and get some sleep in readiness for our second American trip in two days.
It took me an hour to fall asleep, during which time I kept hoping that Arthur hadn't got into any trouble on his little holiday. But more than anything I was burning with curiosity as to why he stopped in a field in the middle of nowhere to remove his memory stick. Was he accompanied for some of his journey after all?