I put everything back into the attaché case, fetched my own luggage from the red Ford, restored the .38 to my briefcase, and loaded them into the boot of the Mercedes. I was making a choice between two hot cars: the Ford, which together with the person of Colin Bairstow might or might not be on every policeman’s wanted list; and the blue Mercedes, which, from the moment the bodies were discovered, would be the hottest car in the country, but until then nothing. And after all: if seven days had passed already, why not an eighth? Aitken May, as far as anyone knew, was abroad. He collected his mail from a postbox in Macclesfield. No postman had occasion to come here. And how long would it take anyone to notice that the Odd Couple were absent from their remote cottage on the moors?
Parking the Ford out of sight between the Dormobile and the pony cart, I hauled down a bale of hay and spread it over the roof and bonnet. Then I drove across the white bridge, knowing that every hour that I delayed was likely to be my last.
Emma was talking to me again. Insistently. I had never heard this tense, commanding voice from her before.
“Hardwear,” said the first message. “This is Sally. Where are you? We’re worried about you. Call me.”
“Aitken. It’s me again. Sally,” said the second. “I’ve got a very important message for you. There’s a bit of trouble on the way. Call me, please.”
“Hardwear, this is Prometheus again,” said the third. “Listen. Terry can’t make it. Things have changed. Please, when you hear this, wherever you hear it from, drop everything and phone. If you’re away from work, stay away. If you have family, take them on holiday. Hardwear, talk to me. Here’s the number in case you’ve lost it. Cheers. Sally.”
I switched off the tape.
I was in a state of horror deferred. The moment I allowed myself to sink through the thin ice of my composure, I was lost. Whatever doubts I might have had about my errand were swept away. Larry and Emma were at terrible risk. If Larry was dead, Emma was in double jeopardy. The fire I had kindled in him half a life ago, and stoked for as long as it had served us, was out of control, and for all I knew, its flames were lapping at Emma’s feet. To bare my soul to Pew-Merriman would be to compound my guilt and achieve nothing: “They’re worse than thieves, Marjorie. They’re dreamers. They’ve enlisted in a war that nobody’s heard of.”
I had two passports, one for Bairstow, one for May. I had luggage for May and Bairstow, and I was driving May’s car. In my head I set to work testing combinations of these blessings. Bairstow’s passport was a liability, but only within the United Kingdom, since I could not imagine the Office, with its congenital terror of exposure, would risk passing Bairstow’s name to Interpol. May’s passport was in better health than its owner, but it was still May’s, and our features were comically dissimilar.
Ideally I would have liked to replace the third page of May’s passport—which carried the photograph but no personal particulars— with the third page from Bairstow’s, thus giving the bearer my face. But a British passport lends itself badly to adaptation, and vintage models such as May’s and Bairstow’s are the worst. No page exists in isolation of any other. Sheets are concertina’d, then stitched into the binding with a single piece of thread. The printer’s ink is water based and runs the moment you start to fiddle with it. Watermarks and colour gradations are impressively complex, as the resentful white-coated instructors of the Office forgery section never tired of telling us: “With your British passport, gentlemen, you do better to suit your man to the document rather than the document to your man,” they would intone, with a venom more commonly associated with army sergeants addressing officer cadets.
Yet how could I suit myself to May’s passport when it gave him a height of one metre seventy—even allowing for his raised heels— and my own height was a metre eighty-three? A black beard, a slight darkening of the complexion, blackened hair—these, I supposed, were all more or less within the reach of my inexpert skills. But how on earth was I supposed to reduce my height by thirteen centimetres?
The answer, to my joy, was the Mercedes driver’s seat, which, by the depression of a button on the inside of the door, turned me into a dwarf. And it was this discovery that, an hour out of Nottingham, persuaded me to pull in at a roadside café, take the travel agent’s luggage labels from May’s folder of tickets, write May’s name and address on them, and substitute them for the Bairstow labels on my own luggage; then book myself and the Mercedes in the name of May a passage on the ferry from Harwich to the Hoek of Holland, sailing at nine-thirty that night; and, having done all this, to consult the yellow pages for the nearest theatrical costumier and supplier, who turned out unsurprisingly to be in Cambridge, not fifty miles away.
In Cambridge also I bought myself a lightweight blue suit and gaudy tie of the sort May appeared to favour, as well as a dark felt hat, a pair of sunglasses, and—since this was Cambridge—a secondhand copy of the Koran, which I placed, together with the hat and glasses, on top of the attaché case on the passenger seat, in a position best suited to influence the casual eye of an alerted immigration officer leaning through the window of my car in order to compare me with my passport.
I now encountered a dilemma that was new to me and which in happier circumstances I would have found diverting: where can an honest male spy spend four hours altering his appearance, when by definition he will enter the place as one person and leave it as another? The golden rule of disguise is to use as little of it as possible. Yet there was no getting round the fact that I would have to rub a darkening agent into my hair, lower the English country tone of my complexion, not forgetting my hands, paint mastic on my chin, and provide myself, strand by strand, with a greying black beard which I must then lovingly trim to Aitken May’s flamboyant taste.
The solution, after a reconnaissance of the environs of Harwich, turned out to be a single-storey motel whose cabins gave directly onto numbered parking bays, and whose unpleasing male receptionist required payment in advance.
“Been on long?” I asked him conversationally as I counted out my thirty pounds.
“Too bloody long.”
I was holding an extra five pounds in my hand. “Shall I see you tonight? I’m catching the ferry.”
“I’m off at six, aren’t I?”
“Well, here, have this,” I said generously: and for five pounds established that he would not be there to see me in my new persona as I left.
My final act before leaving England was to have the Mercedes washed and polished. Because when you are dealing with official minds—I used to teach—if you can’t be humble, then at least be clean.
Frontier posts have always made me nervous, those of my own country the most. Though I count myself a patriot, a weight rolls off my shoulders each time I leave my homeland, and when I return I have a sense of resuming a life sentence. So perhaps it came naturally to me to play the outgoing passenger, for I entered the queue of cars with a good heart and advanced cheerfully towards the immigration post, which was manned, if that was the word, not by a posse of officers provided with a description of me, but by a youth with a white peaked cap and blond hair to his shoulders. I flapped May’s passport at him. He ignored it.
“Tickets, mate. Bill-etti. Far-carton.”
“Oh, sorry. Here.”
But it was a wonder I could speak to him at all, for by then I had remembered the .38. It was nestling, together with sixty rounds of ammunition, not four feet from me, on the floor of the passenger seat in Bairstow’s bulky briefcase, now the property of Aitken Mustafa May, arms dealer.
On deck a fierce night wind was blowing. A few hardy passengers huddled among the benches. I staggered towards the stern, found a dark patch, leaned over the rail, and, in the classic pose of a seasick passenger, allowed first the gun and then the ammunition to slip into the blackness. I heard no splash, but I could have sworn I smelled the grassy smells of Priddy racing past me on the sea wind.
I returned to my cabin and slept so deeply that I had to dress in
a hurry to reach the Mercedes in time and consign it to a multistorey parking garage in the docks. I bought a phone card and from a public call box dialled the number.
“Julie? It’s Pete Bradbury here from yesterday,” I said, but I had barely got even this far before she cut in on me.
“I thought you said were going to ring me,” she burst out hysterically. “He still hasn’t come back, I’m still getting the answering machine, and if he’s not home tonight I’m putting Ali in the car and I’m going out there first thing in the morning and—”
“You mustn’t do that,” I said.
A bad pause.
“Why not?”
“Is there anyone with you? Apart from Ali? Is there anyone with you in the house?”
“What the hell’s that to do with you?”
“Is there a neighbour you can go to? Have you got a friend who will come round?”
“Tell me what you’re trying to tell me, for Christ’s sake!”
So I told her. I had no tradecraft left, no tactical aids. “Aitken’s been murdered. All three of them have. Aitken, his secretary, and her husband. They’re in the stone hut on the hill above the store. He dealt in arms as well as carpets. They got caught in the crossfire. I’m very sorry.”
I had no idea anymore whether she was hearing me. I heard a shout, but it was so shrill it could have been the child. I thought I heard a door open and shut and the sound of something crashing. I kept saying, “Are you there?” and getting no answer. I had a picture of the receiver swinging on its cord while I talked to an empty room. So after a while I rang off, and the same evening, having removed my beard and restored my hair and skin to something of their former colour, took the train to Paris.
Dee’s a saint, she is saying from the window of my bedroom.
Dee took me in when I was down-and-out, she is saying as we stroll together on the Quantocks, her two arms locked round one of mine.
Dee put me back together again, she is reminiscing drowsily into my shoulder as we lie before the fire in her bedroom. Without Dee I would never have made it out of the gate. She’s been mother, father, chum, the whole disaster for me.
Dee gave me back to life, she is saying, between earnest discussions of how we can be most useful for Larry. How to make music, love, how to say no . . . Without Dee I would have died. . . .
Until bit by bit my agent-runner’s pride takes exception to this other controller of her life. I wish Dee forgotten and discourage further talk of her—this Dee of the fabulous empty castle in Paris, nothing in it except a bed and a piano—this Dee whose aristocratic name and address are lovingly illuminated in Emma’s pop-up book: alias the Contessa Ann-Marie von Diderich, with an address on the Île St.-Louis.
13
Wet chestnut leaves stuck to the cobbled pavement. This is the house, I thought, staring up at the same high grey walls and shuttered windows that I had pictured in my dreams. Up there in the tower is where Penelope sits, weaving her shroud, and remains faithful to her Larry in his wanderings, accepting no substitutes.
I had watched my back for hours. I had sat in cafés, observed cars, fishermen, and cyclists. I had ridden on the metro and in buses. I had walked through classical gardens and perched on benches. I had done everything that Operational Man could think of to protect his unfaithful mistress from Merriman and Pew, Bryant and Luck, and The Forest. And my back was clean. I knew it was. Though the experts say you never know for sure, I knew.
A wrinkled old woman opened the door to me. She wore grey hair knotted behind her and the coarse blue-black tunic of a menial. And wooden therapeutic sandals over lisle stockings.
“I would like to see the Contessa, please,” I said severely in French. “My name is Timothy. I am a friend of Mademoiselle Emma.”
I could think of nothing to add, and for a while neither apparently could she, for she remained on the threshold, tilting her head and screwing up her eyes as if to get me into focus, until I realised she was measuring me minutely, first my face, then my hands and shoes, and then my face again. And if what she saw in me was an uncomfortable mystery to both of us, what I saw in her was an intelligence and a humanity that were almost too powerful for the rumpled little frame that was obliged to accommodate them. And what I heard, faintly from upstairs, was the sound of a piano playing, whether live or recorded was anybody’s guess but mine.
“Kindly follow me,” she said in English, so I walked behind her up two flights of stone steps, and with each step the sounds of the piano grew a little louder, and I began to feel a sickness of recognition that was like a giddiness from altitude, so that the views of the Seine through the windows at each half-landing were like views of several different rivers at once, this one fast-flowing, another calm, and a third strict as a canal. Brown-skinned children watched me from a doorway. A young girl in the bright cottons of Arabia flitted past me on her way downstairs. We reached a high room, and here through the long window the rivers joined together and became the Seine again, with appropriate anglers in berets, and lovers arm in arm. In this room the music was much fainter, though my recognition of it was no less, for it was some obscure Scandinavian piece that Emma used for her finger exercises at Honeybrook before the Hopeless Causes took her over. And this morning she was still sticking on the same little phrases, replaying them over and over till she had them to her satisfaction. And I remembered how, where others might have tired of this constant repetition, I had always been deeply taken by it, empathising with her, trying almost physically to help her over every hurdle, however many shots it took, because that was basically how I had seen my role in her life: as her conductor and devoted audience, as the fellow who was ready to pick her up each time she fell.
“I am called Dee,” the woman said, as if accepting that I was unlikely to offer much in the way of conversation. “I am Emma’s friend. Well, you know that.”
“Yes.”
“And Emma is upstairs. You hear that.”
“Yes.”
Her accent was more German than French. But the lines in her face were of universal suffering. She had sat herself stiffly in a tall chair and was holding its arms like a dowager. I sat opposite her on a wooden stool. The floorboards were bare and ran directly from her feet to mine. There were no carpets, no pictures on the walls. In a room not far off, a telephone was ringing, but she paid it no attention and it stopped. But soon it began ringing again, as I suspected it rang most of the time, like a doctor’s.
“And you are in love with her. And that is the reason why you are here.”
A diminutive Asian girl in jeans had appeared in the doorway to listen to us. Dee said something sharp to her, and she pattered off.
“Yes,” I said.
“To tell her that you love her? She knows it already.”
“To warn her.”
“She is warned. She knows she is in danger. She is content. She is in love, though not with you. She is in danger, but his danger is greater than hers, therefore she is not in danger. It is all quite logical. Do you understand?”
“Of course.”
“She has ceased to find excuses for loving him. You must not ask for them, please. It would be degrading for her to apologise any more. Please do not require it of her.”
“I don’t. I won’t. That isn’t why I came.”
“Then we must ask again: why did you come? Please—it is honourable not to know! But if you should discover your motives when you see her, kindly consider her feelings first. Before she met you, she was a shipwreck. She had no centre, no stability. She could have been anyone. Like you, perhaps. All she wished was to climb into a shell and live the life inside it. But now it is over. You were the last of her shells. Now she is real. She is defined. She is one person. Or feels she is. If she is not, then at least the different people in her are going in the same direction. Thanks to Larry. Perhaps it is also thanks to you. You look sad. Is that because I mention Larry?”
“I didn’t come for her thanks.”
&nb
sp; “Then for what? For an obligatory scene? I hope not. Perhaps one day you also will be real. Perhaps you and Emma were very similar people. Too similar. Each wished the other to be real. She is expecting you. She has been expecting you for some days now. Are you safe to go alone to her?”
“Why should I not be?”
“I was thinking of Emma’s safety, Mr. Timothy, not yours.”
She returned me to the staircase. The piano playing had stopped. The little girl was watching us from the shadows.
“You gave her a lot of jewellery, I believe,” Dee said.
“I don’t remember that it did her any harm.”
“Is that why you gave it to her—to save her from harm?”
“I gave it to her because she was beautiful and I loved her.”
“You are rich?”
“Rich enough.”
“Perhaps you gave it to her because you didn’t love her. Perhaps love is a threat to you, something to be paid off. Perhaps it is in competition with your other ambitions.”
I had faced Pew-Merriman. I had faced Inspector Bryant and Sergeant Luck. Facing Dee was worse than any of them.
“You have one more flight to climb,” she said. “Have you decided what you came for?”