He affected to weigh this, which was what he always did before he struck back.
“My definition of a madman, Timbo, is someone who is in possession of all the facts.”
It was midnight. I was approaching Chiswick. Pulling off the main road, I wove through a chicane and entered a private estate. The house was an overdecorated Edwardian gem. Beyond it lay the black Thames, its surface feathered by the city’s glow. I parked, fished the .38 from my briefcase, and jammed it in my waistband. The briefcase in my left hand, I stepped round a broken stile and stood on the towpath. The river air smelled brown and greasy. Two lovers were embracing on a bench, the girl astride. I walked slowly, picking my way round puddles, setting up water rats and birds. On the other side of the hedge, guests were taking leave of their hosts:
“Simply marvellous party, darlings, literally.”
I was reminded of Larry, doing one of his voices. I had reached the house again, this time from the back. Lights burned over the back door and on the garage. Selecting a point where the hedge was lowest, I pushed down the wire, dropped the briefcase the other side of it, and nearly castrated myself. I toppled into a garden of mown lawn and rose beds. Two naked children stared at me, their arms outstretched, but as I advanced on them they became a pair of porcelain cupids. The garage stood to my left. I hastened to its shadow, tiptoed to a window, and peered inside. No car. He’s out to dinner. He’s been summoned to a war party. Help, help, Cranmer’s flown the coop.
I propped myself against the wall, my eyes trained on the front gate. I could wait for hours like this. A cat rubbed itself against my leg. I smelled the liquid stench of fox. I heard a car, I saw its headlights bounce towards me down the unmade road. I pressed myself more tightly yet against the garage wall. The car drove on, to stop fifty yards up the road. A second car appeared, a better one: white lights, two sets, a quieter engine. Be alone, Jake, I warned him. Don’t make it hard for me. Don’t bring me some Significant Other. Just bring me your Insignificant Self.
Merriman’s overpolished Rover car bucked through the front gate and up the little ramp to his garage. It had Jake Merriman at the wheel, and no one else aboard, no Other at all, not of either sex. He drove into the garage, he dowsed the headlights of his car. There followed one of those pauses that I associate with single people of a certain age, while he stayed sitting in the driver’s seat and by the interior light fidgeted with things I couldn’t see.
“Just don’t be alarmed, Jake,” I said.
I had opened his door for him and was holding the gun a few inches from his head.
“I won’t be,” he said.
“Switch the interior light to full time. Give me the car key. Put your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t take your hands off the steering wheel. How do the garage doors close?”
He held up a magic box.
“Close them,” I said.
The doors closed.
I sat behind him. Holding the gun to the nape of his neck, I put my left forearm across his throat and gently drew his head to me until we were cheek-to-cheek.
“Munslow tells me you’ve been looking for Emma,” I said.
“Then he’s a bloody little fool.”
“Where is she?”
“Nowhere. We’re looking for Pettifer too, in case you haven’t noticed. We haven’t found him either. We’ll be looking for you as well after tonight.”
“Jake, I will do this. You know that, don’t you? I will actually shoot you if I have to.”
“I don’t need convincing. I’ll collaborate. I’m a coward.”
“Do you know what I did yesterday, Jake? I wrote a frank letter to the chief constable of Somerset, copy to the Guardian newspaper. I described how a few of us in the Office had decided to rip off the Russian Embassy with a little help from Checheyev. I took the liberty of mentioning your name.”
“Then you’re a stupid little sod.”
“Not as a ringleader but as someone who could be counted on to turn a blind eye at the right moments. A passive conspirator like Zorin. The letters will be posted at nine tomorrow morning unless I say the magic word. I shan’t say the word unless you tell me what you know about Emma.”
“I’ve told you everything we know about Emma. I’ve given you a bloody file on Emma. She’s a tart. What more do you want to know?”
The sweat was rolling off him in great drops. There was sweat on the barrel of the .38.
“I want an update. And please don’t call her a tart, Jake. Call her the nice lady or something. Just not tart.”
“She was in Paris. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well.”
Larry did, I thought. “When?”
“October.”
“We’re in October now. When in October?”
“Mid. The twelfth. What on earth do you think you’re up to?
Relent. Make a confession. Come home.”
“How do you know it was the twelfth?”
“The Americans picked her up on a random sweep.”
“The Americans? How the hell did the Americans get in on the act?”
“Computerland, darling. We gave them a sample of her voice-print. They backtracked through their intercepts. Out popped your precious Emma, speaking with a phony Scottish accent.”
“Who was she calling?”
“Philip somebody.”
I didn’t remember a Philip. “What did she say?”
“She was well, she was in Stockholm. That was a lie. She was in Paris. She wished all the boys and girls to know that she was happy and was proposing to make a new beginning. With thirty-seven million quid to play with, one imagines she very well might.”
“Did you listen to her yourself?”
“You don’t think I’d leave her to some spotty CIA college boy, do you?”
“Give me her words.”
“ ‘I’m going back to where I came from. I’m making a new start.’
To which our Philip says, ‘Right, right,’ which is what the lower classes say these days. Right, right, and cheers instead of thank you. She’s waiting for you, you’ll be pleased to hear. She’s totally devoted to you. I was proud of you.”
“Her words,” I said.
“ ‘I’ll wait for him for as long as it takes,’ spoken with the most marvellous conviction. ‘I’ll do a Penelope for him, even if it’s years. I’ll weave by day and I’ll unpick by night until he comes for me.’ ”
With the gun in my hand and the briefcase flying out behind me, I pelted to my car. I drove south till I came to the outskirts of Bournemouth, where I checked into a bungalow motel with crematorium music in the corridors and mauve night-lights marking the fire exits. I’m coming for you, I told her. Hang on. For pity’s sake, hang on.
She is dead of cold, except that she is shivering. It’s as if I have res-cued her from a freezing sea. Her clammy skin sticks as she clutches me. Her face is pressed so hard against mine that I am unable to resist.
“Tim, Tim, wake up.”
She has rushed into my room, naked. She has yanked back my duvet and wound her freezing body round me, whispering, “Tim, Tim,” when all she means is “Larry, Larry.” She is shaking and writhing uselessly against me, but I’m not her lover, just the body she hangs on to while she nearly drowns, the nearest she can get to Larry.
“You love him too,” she says. “You must.” She slinks back to her room.
Paris, Merriman had said. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well.
Paris, I thought. For her new beginning.
Dee’s place, she is saying. Where I was made alive again.
Who’s Dee? I ask.
Dee’s a saint. Dee saved me when I was flat on the deck.
I’m making a new start, Merriman is saying in his perfumed voice, quoting Emma. I’m going back to where I came from.
A grey morning with no sun. A long drive lifting to the house, gulls and peacocks squawking at my arrival. I spoke my name, the iron ga
tes parted as if I had said “Open Sesame,” the mock-Tudor mansion rose before me amid misted lawns, and the tennis court where no one ever played and the pool where no one swam. A flaccid Union Jack dangled from a tall white mast. Behind the house, golf links and dunes. In the distance, a ghostly old battleship stuck halfway up the sky. It had been there ever since I first ventured up the same hill fifteen years ago and timidly suggested to Ockie Hedges that he might consider putting a little back by assisting us in certain matters not unrelated to the arms trade.
“Assist in what way, son?” Ockie demands from behind his napoleonic desk. For while officially he trades from the Isle of Wight, his preference in later life is to do business from his Bournemouth hilltop.
“Well, sir,” I say awkwardly, “we know you talk to the Ministry of Defence, but we thought you might talk to us as well.”
“What about, son?” More irritably yet. “Tell it to us straight. What’s the bottom line?”
“The Russians are using Western dealers to supply their covert arms for them,” I say.
“Course they are.”
“Some of the dealers are business acquaintances of yours,” I say, refraining from adding that they are also his partners. “We’d like you to be our listening post, accept questions, talk to us on a regular basis.”
A long silence follows.
“Well?” he says.
“Well what?”
“What are you offering, son? What’s the sweetener?”
“There isn’t one. It’s for your country.”
“I’ll be damned,” says Ockie Hedges devoutly.
Nevertheless, after we have taken several walks round the prinked garden, Ockie Hedges, widower, bereaved father, and one of the biggest crooks in the illegal-arms business, decides it is after all time he joined the armies of the righteous.
A tall young man in a blazer marched me across the hall. He had broad shoulders and short hair, which was what Ockie liked his tall young men to have. Two bronze warriors with bows and arrows guarded the double doors to Ockie’s panelled study.
“Jason, bring us a nice tray of tea, please,” Ockie said, grasping my hand and upper arm at the same time. “And if there’s a fatted calf, kill it. Mr. Cranmer gets nothing but the best. How are you, son? You’ll stay for lunch, I’ve told them.”
He was stocky and powerful and seventy, a pint-sized dictator in a tailor-made brown suit, with a gold watch chain across the flat stomach of his double-breasted waistcoat. When he greeted you he filled his little chest with pride, appointing you his soldier. When he seized your hand, his prizefighter’s fist cupped it like a claw. A picture window looked down the gardens to the sea. Around the room lay the polished trophies Ockie valued most: from the cricket club of which he was chairman, and the police club of which he was president for life.
“I’ve never been more glad to see anyone than what I am you, Tim,” Ockie said. He spoke like a British airline steward, oscillating between social classes as if they were wavelengths. “I can’t tell you the number of times I nearly picked up that phone there and said, ‘Tim. Get yourself up here and let’s have some sense.’ That young fellow you introduced me to is as much use as a wet weekend. He needs a good barber for a start.”
“Oh, come on, Ockie,” I said with a laugh. “He’s not that bad.”
“What do you mean, come on? He’s worse than bad. He’s a fairy.”
We sat down, and I listened dutifully to a recitation of my luckless successor’s failings.
“You opened doors for me, Tim, and I did some favours for you. You may not be a Mason, but you behaved like one. And down the corridor of the years a mutuality developed which was beautiful. My only regret was you never met Doris. But this new boy you’ve landed on me, it’s all by the book. It’s where did you get this from, and who told who that, and why they said whatever they said, and let’s have it down in duplicate. The world’s not like that, Tim. The world’s fluid. You know it, I know it. So why doesn’t he? No time, that’s his trouble. Everything’s got to be by yesterday. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me you’re back in harness, are you?”
“Not in the long term,” I said cautiously.
“Pity. All right, what’s your angle? You never came here without a need that I remember, and I never sent you empty away.”
I glanced at the door and lowered my voice. “It’s Office but it’s not Office, if you follow me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s right off the record. Ultradelicate. They want it you and me and no one else. If that’s going to bother you, you’d better say so now.”
“Bother me? You’re joking.” He had taken on my tone. “They should check that boy out, if you want my advice. He’s a pacifist. Look at those flared trousers he wears.”
“I need an update on somebody we used to have an interest in, back in the bad old days.”
“Who?”
“He’s half a Brit and half a Turk,” I said, playing to Ockie’s appalling views on race.
“All men are equal, Tim. All religions are paths to the same gate. What’s his name?”
“He was cosy with certain people in Dublin and cosier still with certain Russian diplomats in London. He had an interest in a ship-ment of arms and explosives by trawler out of Cyprus bound for the Irish Sea. You took a piece of it, remember?”
Ockie was already smiling a rather cruel smile. “Via Bergen,” he said. “A greasy little carpet seller, name of Aitken Mustafa May.”
Payment to AM, Macclesfield, I was thinking as I dutifully congratulated Ockie on his prodigious memory.
“We need your ear to the tracks,” I was saying. “His private addresses, trade addresses, the name of his Siamese cat if he’s got one.”
There was a well-trodden ritual about Ockie putting his ear to the tracks. Each time he did it, I had a vision of a terrible inner England that we poor spies can only guess at, with insiders’ signals being flashed over secret computer lines, and secret covenants being called in. First he summoned Miss Pullen, a stone-faced woman in a grey twin set, who took dictation standing up. Her other concern was the autobiography with which Ockie was planning to instruct a waiting world.
“Oh, and take a discreet sampling on a firm called Hardwear up north somewhere, will you, a Mr. May, Aitken M. May?” he said, in a lugubriously throwaway voice, after he had given her a list of other commissions to conceal his purpose. “We had a side deal with them way back, but they’re not the same people anymore. I’ll want credit rating, company accounts, stockholders, current trading interests, principals listed, private addresses, home phone numbers, the usual.”
Ten minutes later Miss Pullen returned with a typed sheet, and Ockie retired to a side room and closed the door and made telephone calls that I could only faintly hear.
“Your Mr. May is on a shopping spree,” he announced when he returned.
“Who for?”
“The mafia.”
I played my part for him: “The Italian mafia?” I cried. “But, Ockie, they’ve got all the guns in the world!”
“You’re being stupid deliberately. The Russian mafia. Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“But Russia’s awash with guns and everything else. The military’s been selling them off to all comers for years.”
“There’s mafias and mafias over there. Maybe there’s mafias that want something special and don’t want the neighbours looking over their shoulders while they buy it. Maybe there’s mafias with hard currency who’d like to pay for a little superiority.” He studied Miss Pullen’s fact sheet, then his notes. “He’s a middleman, your Mr. May. A shyster. If he owns more than one demonstration model of anything, I’d be surprised.”
“But which mafia, Ockie? There are dozens.”
“That’s all I know. Mafias. Officially his client is a major nation that wishes to remain below the skyline, so his nominal end-user is Jordan. Unofficially it’s mafia, and he’s in over his head.”
?
??Why?”
“Because what he’s buying is too big for his boots, that’s why.
He’s a scrap dealer is what he is, a greasy scrap dealer. Now all of a sudden he’s out there with Stingers, heavy machine guns, antitank, heavy mortars, ammunition like there’s no tomorrow, night vision. Where he ships it all to is another story. One says northern Turkey, another Georgia. He’s cocky. Dined a friend of mine at Claridges the other night, if you can believe it. I’m surprised they let him in. Here you are. Never trust a man with a lot of addresses.”
He shoved a sheaf of papers at me, and I stored them in my briefcase. Ushered by Jason to the dining room, we lunched at a twenty-foot oak table and drank barley water while Ockie Hedges successively dismissed intellectuals, Jews, blacks, the Yellow Peril, and homosexuals with a benign and universal hatred. And Tim Cranmer, he just smiled his rent-a-drool smile and munched his fish, because that was what he had been doing for Ockie Hedges these fifteen years: stroking his little man’s vanity, riding out his insults, turning a deaf ear to his bigotries, and paying court to his disgusting calling, in the service of a safer, wiser England.
“Flawed from birth is my view. Subhuman. I’m surprised you boys don’t have them shot.”
“There’d be no one left, that’s the trouble, Ockie.”
“Yes, there would. There’d be us. And that’s all that’s needed.” And after lunch there was the garden to admire, not a petal out of place. There were the latest additions to his collection of antique weaponry, which was kept, like fine wine, in a temperature-controlled cellar reached by a lift designed as a portcullis. So it was after four o’clock by the time he stood on his porch with his arms folded, just another childless old tyrant on a hilltop, glowering after me as I climbed into my humble Ford, with the Union Jack behind him sulking on its flagpole.
“That the best your country can do for you, is it?” he demanded, poking his chin at me.
“It’s the New Era, Ockie. No big expense accounts, no nice shiny cars.”
“Come more often, I might buy you one myself,” he said.
I drove again, and for a while the movement dulled my fears. Sometimes a roadhouse offered, but the thought of more stale cigarette smoke and another candlewick coverlet discouraged me, and I kept driving until I was all in. Rain came on, a dark sky lay ahead of me. Suddenly, like Emma, I needed comfort, if only in the form of a decent dinner. The first village provided me with what I was looking for: an old coaching inn with a framed menu and a cobbled yard. The receptionist was a fresh-faced country girl. I smelled roasting beef and wood smoke. I was blessed.