A sinuous cloud of freezing mist curled at me out of the brook as I crossed the footbridge. Reaching the wicket gate, I disengaged the latch and lowered it to its housing. Then I rammed the gate back as fast as I could, causing an indignant shriek to add itself briefly to the night sounds. I stole up the path and through the old cemetery that was Uncle Bob’s last resting place, to the porch, where I groped for the keyhole. In total blackness I guided the key into the lock, gave it a sharp twist, shoved the door, and stepped inside.
Church air is like no other. It is the air the dead breathe, humid, old, and frightening. It echoes even when there is no sound. Feeling my way to the vestry as quickly as I dared, I located the cope cupboard, opened it, and, with my palms flat on the ancient stones, wriggled up the spiral staircase to my sanctuary and put on the light.
I was safe. I could think the unthinkable at last. A whole internal life that I dared not acknowledge, let alone explore, until I was secure inside the confines of my priesthole, was once more open to my scrutiny.
Mr. Timothy D’Abell Cranmer. How do you say? Did you or did you not, on or about the night of September 18, at Priddy Pool in the County of Somerset, murder by battery and drowning one Lawrence Pettifer, formerly your friend and secret agent?
We are fighting, as only brothers can. All my gentling and cossetting of him, all the careless insults I have swallowed whole—beginning with his sneering asides about Diana, my first wife; continuing for twenty more years with gibes about my emotional inadequacy, about what he calls my rent-a-drool smile, and my good manners that do duty for a heart; and culminating in his wanton theft of Emma—all my cancer-giving forbearance, has turned outward in a pent-up, furious revolt.
I am showering blows on him and probably he is hitting me back, but I feel nothing. Whatever is hitting me is merely an obstruction on the path to him, because I am going to kill him. The intention I have come with is about to be fulfilled. I am hitting him as we hit when we are boys, wild, heaving, artless blows, everything we are taught not to do at combat camp. I would tear him apart with my teeth if my fingers weren’t strong enough for the job. All right! I am shouting. You called me an espiopath, now you’ve got a bloody espiopath! And between whiles, without the least hope of getting an answer, I am shouting the questions at him that have been burning my soul ever since Emma left me: What have you done with her? What lies have you told her about us? I meant what truths. What have you promised her that she can’t get from me?
A full moon is shining. The long sour grass beneath our feet has grown into great tufts under the lashing Mendip winds. Advancing on him, swinging blows at him, I feel the mounds thumping at my knees. I must be falling, because the moon swings away from me and then comes back, and I see a vertical skyline with the jagged rims made by the opencast mining. But I am still hitting him with my gloved hands, still shouting questions like the worst interrogator in the world. His face is wet and hot, and I think he must be bleeding all over it, but in the shadowy light of the moon nothing is to be trusted: a film of sweat and mud can look like an obliterated face. So I trust nothing and keep hitting him and screaming at him: Where is she? Give her back to me! Leave her alone! His taunting has given way to self-pitying sobs as I strike home. I have defeated him at last, Larry, the true version of me, as he calls himself, the Timbo Unbound whose life I never dared to lead until I led it vicariously through him. Then die, I yell at him as I hit him—with my elbow now; I am tired and am remembering a few tricks. In a minute I’ll be giving him a chop to the windpipe, or thrusting his lusting eyes back into their sockets with the leading fingers of my gloved hand. Die, and then there’ll be only one of us to live my life. Because two of us living it, Larry, old boy, is actually a crowd.
It has been a long conversation, you understand, all this talk of breaking omertà and whose life is whose, whose girl is whose, where she is hiding and why. It has reached into our far, dark past. All the same, talk is only talk, and I have come to kill him. I have the .38 in my waistband, and in the fullness of time I intend to shoot him with it. It’s an unattributable gun, unnumbered, unsourced. Neither the British police nor the Office has ever heard of it. I have arrived here in a car that is nothing to do with me, wearing clothes I shall never wear again. It is clear to me by now that I have been planning Larry’s murder for years without being aware that I was doing so, perhaps from the day we embraced each other in St. Mark’s Square. Perhaps already at Oxford, where he took such pleasure in publicly humiliating me: Timbo, who can’t wait to be middle-aged; Timbo, our college virgin, our bourgeois striver, our boy bishop. Perhaps even at Winchester, where for all the caring I invested in him, he was never sufficiently in awe of my exalted status.
I have been crafty too. Everything covert, like the old days. This is no Sunday lunch cooked by Timbo, dialogue courtesy of Larry, and a romantic stroll with Emma thrown in afterwards. I have invited him for a clandestine meeting up here on the Mendip Hills, on this moonscape plateau nearer to the sky than to the earth, where the trees throw dead men’s shadows on the whited lane and no cars pass. I have suggested an urgent but unspecified operational context to allay his suspicions. And Larry has presented himself early, because for all his bohemian posturing, after twenty years of my patient manipulation he is Operational Man to his fingertips.
And I? Do I shout? No, no, I don’t think so. “It’s actually about Emma, Larry,” I explain by way of introduction as we face each other under the moon. I probably give him my rent-a-drool smile. Timbo Unbound is still waiting to spring free. “About our relationship.”
Our relationship? Whose relationship? Emma’s and mine? Larry’s and mine? Theirs and mine? You pushed me at him, Emma is saying through her tears. You set me up for him without even knowing it.
But he sees my face—distorted, I am sure, by the moonlight and already wild enough to raise a warning in him. And instead of taking fright he produces a reply so insolent, so perfectly in keeping with all I have learned to hate about him over thirty years, that unknowingly he signs his death warrant. It is a reply that has rung in my head ever since. It hovers before me in the dark like a lamp I must track down and put out. Even in broad daylight it echoes brazenly in my ear.
“Hell’s your problem, actually, Timbo? You stole my life. I stole your woman. Simple as that.”
I realise he has been drinking. I smell Scotch as well as autumn on the Mendip wind. I hear that arrogant extra note that gets into him when he’s about to deliver one of his word-perfect monologues, complete with subordinate and relative clauses and, practically, the semicolons. The notion that he is not clear-minded fills me with indignation. I want him sober and accountable.
“She’s a fully paid-up woman, you idiot!” he chokes at me. “Not some late developer’s bed toy!”
Maddened, I draw the .38—across the body, from the waistband, the way both of us were taught—and I point it, from about a foot away, at the bridge of his nose.
“Ever seen one of these, Larry?” I ask him.
But pointing it at him only seems to make him stupid. He squints at it, then raises his eyebrows at me in an admiring smile.
“Well, you have got a big one,” he says.
At this I lose my temper and, using both hands, smash the butt into the side of his face.
Or I think I do.
And perhaps that was when I killed him.
Or perhaps I am remembering the seeming, not the being.
Perhaps the rest of my blows, if I ever struck them at all, were wasted on a dead or dying body. Neither in my dreams nor waking did I any longer know. The days and nights between have brought me no enlightenment, only terrible variations of the same scene. I drag him to the Pool, I bump and roll him into it, he scarcely makes a splash, just a kind of sucking noise, as if he has been drawn right down. I can’t tell whether it is panic or remorse that has the upper hand as I perform this final act. Perhaps self-preservation has it, for even as I cart him feet first over the tufts of grass, as I watch
his nodding, moon-white head grin up at me and then go under—I seriously debate whether to put a bullet through him or drive him at breakneck speed to Bristol Infirmary.
But I don’t do either of these things. Not in the seeming and not in the being. He slides into the water headfirst, and his best friend drives home alone, stopping only to change cars and clothes along the way. Am I exhilarated? Am I in despair? I am both, one minute lighter of heart than I have been for years, the next in murderer’s remorse.
But have I murdered him?
I have fired no bullet. None is missing from the revolver.
There is no blood on the butt of my revolver.
He was breathing. I saw bubbles. And dead men, unless they are Larry and drunk, don’t breathe even if they grin.
So perhaps I only killed myself.
Larry is my shadow, I think in some far outstation of my mind, as I drive in dream-like detachment between the sandstone gateposts of Honeybrook. The only way to catch him is to fall on him. Then I remember something he once said to me, a quotation from one of his literary icons: “To kill without being killed is an illusion.”
Safely back in my study, hands shaking at last, I pour myself a huge whisky and gulp it down; then another and another and another. I have not drunk like this since one Guy Fawkes night at Oxford, when Larry and I poisoned each other nearly to death by drinking glass for glass in competition. It’s the black light, I am thinking as I shove aside the empty bottle and, stubbornly sober, embark upon a second: the black light that the boxer sees as he goes down for the count; the black light that lures decent folk across the moor with revolvers in their belts to murder their best friends; the black light that will shine from this night on, inside my head, over everything that did or didn’t happen at Priddy Pool.
I woke myself. I was sitting head in hands at the trestle table in my priesthole, my files and keepsakes heaped around me.
But Larry a thief as well as my dead nemesis? I asked myself. An embezzler, a conspirator, a lover of secret wealth as well as women?
Everything I knew about myself and Larry revolted against the idea. He had no use for money: How many times did I have to scream this at the empty air before someone believed me? Greed makes you stupid.
Never once, on all the occasions we had prodded him towards this or that step in his agent’s career, had he asked me: How much will you pay me? Never once had he demanded an increase in his Judas money, complained about our niggardly approach to his expenses, threatened to fling down his cloak and dagger unless he was promised more.
Never once, when he received from his Soviet case officer the monthly briefcase stuffed with cash to pay the salaries of his notional subagents—we are talking here of tens of thousands of pounds—had he raised any objection when Office rules obliged him to hand the whole lot over to me.
And now a thief, suddenly? Checheyev’s bagman and accomplice? Thirty-seven million pounds and rising, squirrelled away in foreign bank accounts, by Larry? And Checheyev? With the connivance of Zorin? All three common swindlers together?
“Hey, Timbo!”
It is evening in Twickenham, where neither of us lives, which is why we have come here. We are sitting in the saloon bar of a pub called The Cabbage Patch, or perhaps it is The Moon Under Water. Larry selects his pubs solely for their names.
“Hey, Timbo. You know what Checheyev told me? They steal. The gortsy do. Stealing’s honourable as long as they’re stealing from Cossacks. You go off with your rifle, shoot a Cossack, pinch his horse, and come home to a hero’s welcome. In the old days they used to bring back their victims’ heads as well, for the kids to play with. Cheers.”
“Cheers,” I say, steeling myself for Larry at his most impressionable.
“No law against killing, either. If you’re caught up in a blood feud, noblesse obliges you to top everyone in sight. Oh, and the Ingush like to start Ramadan earlier than scheduled so that they can shove it up their neighbours and demonstrate how pious they are.”
“So which are you going to do?” I ask tolerantly. “Steal for him, kill for him, or pray for him?”
He laughs but does not directly answer me. Instead I must be treated to a discourse on Sufism as practised among the gortsy, and the powerful influence of the tariqats in preserving ethnic unity; I must be reminded that the Caucasus is the true crucible of the earth, the great barrier to Asia, the last redoubt of small nations and ethnic individuality—forty languages in an area the size of Scotland, Timbo! I must be told to reread Lermontov and Tolstoy’s Cossacks, and dismiss Alexandre Dumas as a romantic slob.
And at one level, if Larry is happy, I am. Before Checheyev’s arrival in London, I wouldn’t have given twopence for the future of our operation. Instead all three of us are enjoying a renewal. Come to think of it, so, in clouded secrecy, is Checheyev’s poker-backed boss, the venerable Volodya Zorin. But at another level I distrust Larry’s relationship with Checheyev more than any he has conducted with his previous Russian controllers.
Why?
Because Checheyev is touching Larry where his predecessors have not. And neither have I.
Larry too bloody word perfect, I was reading in an irritable footnote in my own hand on the encounter sheet. Convinced he and CC are cooking something up. . . . Yes, but cooking up what? I demanded impatiently of this useless insight. Robbing lowlanders for sport? It was too absurd. Larry under a stronger man’s influence could get up to a lot of things. But falsify receipts, open foreign bank accounts? Take part in sustained, sophisticated fraud to the tune of thirty-seven million pounds? This Larry was nobody I knew. But then which Larry did I know?
CC PERSONAL, I read, in Cranmer’s stern capitals, across the cover of a fat blue folder that contained my private papers on Checheyev, starting on the day of his arrival in London and ending with Larry’s last officially recorded visit to Russia.
“CC’s a star, Timbo—half noble, half savage, all Mensch, and bloody funny. . . .” Larry is rhapsodising. “He used to hate all things Russian because of what Stalin did to his people, but when Khrushchev came along he became a Twentieth Party Conference man. That’s what he keeps saying when he gets drunk: ‘I believe in the Twentieth Party Conference,’ like a creed. . . .
“‘CC, how did you get into the spook business,’ I ask him. It was while he was studying in Grozny, he says. He had fought his way into the university against heavy bureaucratic odds. Apparently Ingush returnees are not welcome at neighbouring Chechenia’s only university. A bunch of hotheads tried to persuade him to come and blow up Party headquarters as a protest against the way the Ingush were being kicked around. CC told them they were crazy, but they wouldn’t listen. He told them he was a Twentieth Party Conference man, but they still wouldn’t listen. So he beat the daylights out of them, waited till they’d bolted to the hills, then peached to the KGB. . . .
“The KGB were so impressed that when he’d finished his studies they scooped him up and sent him to school outside Moscow for three years of English, Arabic, and spying. Hey, and get this—he acted Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. He says he was an absolute wow. An Ingush acting Lord Goring! I love him!”
Confirmed by microphone intercepts, prosaic Cranmer had duly noted, in his bank clerk’s hand.
Grozny in Russia? I hear myself ask.
Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It’s gone independent.
How did you get there?
Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake.
Time, I thought, staring blindly at the stone wall before me.
Cling to time.
Time the great healer of the dead. I had been clinging to it for five weeks, but now I was clinging to it for dear life.
On August 1, I cut off my telephone.
Several Sundays later—Sunday being our day of destiny— Emma removes her piano stool and antique jewellery and departs without leaving a forwarding address.
On September 18, I do or
do not kill Larry Pettifer at Priddy Pool. Until Emma left, I knew only that in the best civil service tradition, steps would have to be taken. Time becomes blank space lit by black light.
Time becomes time again when, on October 10, the first day of Larry’s appointed lecture course at Bath University and twenty-two days after Priddy, Dr. Lawrence Pettifer goes officially missing.
Question: How long had Larry been missing before he went officially missing?
Question: Where was Emma when I was or wasn’t killing Larry? Question: Where is Emma now?
And the biggest question of all, which nobody will answer for me even if anybody knows: When did Checheyev visit Larry? For if CC’s last visit to Bath occurred after September 18, Larry’s resurrection was complete. If before, I must continue wandering in the black light, a murderer to myself if not to Larry.
After time, matter: Where is Larry’s body?
There were two pools at Priddy, the Mineries and Waldegrave. It was the Mineries that we locals called Priddy Pool, and in summer children scrambled on its banks all day. At weekends, middle-class families picnicked on the tufted moorlands and parked their Volvos in the lay-by. So how could a corpse as large as Larry’s—how could any corpse—stink and rot and float there undetected for thirty-six days and nights?
First theory of matter: The police have found Larry’s body and are lying.
Second theory of matter: The police are playing me along, waiting for me to provide the proof they lack.
Third theory of matter: I am ascribing too much wit to the police.
And the Office, what are they doing? Oh, my dear, what we always did! Riding all the horses in the race at once, and coming nowhere.