Spy hook: a novel (4 page)

It was only when the Deputy had finished his tea that protocol permitted even the busiest of us to take our leave. Just when the Deputy was moving towards the door, Morgan – the D-G’s most obsequious acolyte - came in flush-faced and complete with Melton overcoat carrying, like an altar candle, one of those short unfolding umbrellas. He said, in his singsong Welsh accent, “Sorry I’m late, sir. I had the most awful and unexpected trouble with the motorcar.” He bit his lip. Exertion and anxiety had made his face even paler than usual. The Deputy was annoyed but allowed no more than a trace of it to show. “We managed without you, Morgan,” he said. As the Deputy marched out Morgan looked at me with a deep hatred that he made no attempt to hide. Perhaps he thought his humiliation was all my fault or perhaps he blamed me for being there when it happened. Either way, if the Department ever needed someone to bury me Morgan would be an enthusiastic volunteer. Perhaps he was already working on it.

I went downstairs, relieved to get out of that meeting even if it meant sitting in my cramped little office and trying to see over the top of the uncompleted paper-work. I stared at the cluttered table near the window, and more specifically at two boxes in beautiful Christmas wrappings, one marked “Billy” and the other “Sally”. They’d been delivered by the Harrods van together with the cards that said “With dearest love from Mummy” but not in Fiona’s handwriting. I should have given them to the children before Christmas but I’d left them there and -tried not to look at them. She’d sent presents on previous Christmases and I’d put them under the tree. The children had read the cards without comment. But this year we’d spent Christmas in our new little home and somehow I didn’t want Fiona to intrude into it. The move had given me a chance to get rid of Fiona’s clothes and personal things. I wanted to start again, but that didn’t make it any easier to confront those two bright boxes waiting for me every time I went into my office. My desk was a mess. My secretary, Brenda, had been covering for two filing clerks who were sick or pregnant or some damned thing, so I tried to sort out a week of muddle that had accumulated on my desk in my absence.

The first things I came across were the red-labelled “urgent” messages about Prettyman. My God, last Thursday there must have been new messages, requests, assignments and words of advice landing on my desk every half hour. Thank heavens Brenda had enough sense not to forward it all to Washington. Well, now I was back in London, and they could get someone else to go and bully Jim Prettyman into coming back here to be roasted by a committee of time-serving old flower-pots from Central Funding who were desperately looking for some unfortunate upon whom to dump the blame for &heir own inadequacies.

I was putting it all into the classified waste when I noticed the signature. Billingsly. Billingsly! It was damned odd that Billingsly hadn’t mentioned it to me this morning in Number Two Conference Room. He hadn’t even asked me what happened. His passion, if not to say obsession, for getting Prettyman here had undergone some abrupt traumatic change. That was the way it went with people like Billingsly - and many others in the Department - who alternated displays of panic and amnesia with disconcerting suddenness.

I threw the notes into the basket and forgot about it. There was no point in stirring trouble for Jim Prettyman. In my opinion he was a fool to suddenly get on his high horse about something so mundane. He could have testified and been the golden boy: he could have declined without upsetting them. But I think he liked confrontation. I decided to smooth things over as much as I could. When it came to writing the report I wouldn’t say he’d refused point-blank: I’d say he was thinking about it. Until they asked for the report, I’d say nothing at all. I didn’t see Gloria until we had lunch together in the restaurant. Her fluent Hungarian had recently brought her a job downstairs: promotion, more pay and much more responsibility . I suppose they thought that it would be enough to make “her forget the promises they’d made about paying her wages while she was at Cambridge. Her new job meant that I saw much less of her and so lunch had become the time when our domestic questions were settled: would it look too pushy to invite the Cruyers over. who had the receipt for dry cleaning ? Why had I opened a new tin of cat-food for Muffin when the last one was still half-full?

I asked her if anything more had been said about her resignation, secretly hoping, I suppose, that she might have changed her mind. She hadn’t. When I broached the subject over the “mushroom quiche with winter salad” she told me that she’d had an answer from a friend of hers about some comfortable rooms in Cambridge that she could probably rent.

“What am I going to do with the house?”

“Not so loud, darling,” she said. We kept up this absurd pretence that our co-workers - or such of them as might be interested - didn’t know we were living together. “I’ll keep paying half the rent. I told you that.”

“It’s nothing to do with the rent,” I said. “It’s simply that I wouldn’t have taken on a place out in the sticks so I could sit there every night on my own, watching TV and saving up my laundry until I’ve got enough to make a full load for the washing machine.”

That produced the flicker of a grin. She leaned closer to me and said, “After you find out how much dirty laundry the children have every day, you won’t be worrying about filling up the machine: you’ll be looking for a place where you can get washing powder wholesale.” She sipped some apple juice with added vitamin C. “You’ve got a nanny for the children. You’ll have that nice Mrs. Palmer coming in every day to tidy round. I’ll be back every weekend: I don’t know what you are worrying about.”

“I wish you’d be a little more realistic. Cambridge is a damned long way away from Balaklava Road. The weekend traffic win be horrendous, the railway service is even worse and in any case you’ll have your studying to do.”

“I wish I could make you stop worrying,” she said. “Are you ill? You haven’t been yourself since coming back from Washington. Did something go wrong there” “If I’d known what you were going to do I would have made different plans.”

“I told you. I told you over and over.” She looked down and continued to eat her winter salad as if there was no more to be said. In a way she was right. She had told me time and time again. She’d been telling me for years that she was going to go to Cambridge and get this honours degree in PPE that she’d set her heart on. She’d told me so many times that I’d long since ceased to give it any credence. When she told me that she’d actually resigned I was astounded.

“I thought it would be next year,” I said lamely. “You thought it would be never,” she said curtly. Then she looked up and gave me a wonderful smile. One thing about this damned business of going to Cambridge. It had put her into an incomparably sunny mood. Or was that simply the result of seeing me discomfited?

It was Gloria’s evening for visiting parents. Tuesday she had an evening class in mathematics, Wednesday economics and Thursday evening she visited her parents. She apportioned time for such things, so that I sometimes wondered if I was one of her duties, or time off.

I stayed working for an extra hour or so until there was a phone call from Mr. Gaskell, a recently retired artillery sergeant-major who’d taken over security duties at reception. “There is a lady here. Asking for you by name. Mr. Samson.” The security man’s hoarse whisper was confidential to the point of being conspiratorial. I wondered if this was in deference to my professional or social obligations.

“Does she have a name, Mr. Gaskell?”

“Lucinda Matthews.” I had the feeling that he was reading from the slip that visitors have to fill out.

The name meant nothing to me but I thought it better not to say so. “I’ll be down,” I said.

“That would be best,” said the security man. “I can’t let her upstairs into the building. You understand, Mr. Samson?” “I understand.” I looked out of the window. The low grey cloud that had darkened the sky all day seemed to have come even lower, -and in the air there were tiny ffickcrs of light; harbingers of the snow that had been forecast. Just the sight of it was enough to make me shiver.

By the time I’d locked away my work, checked the filing cabinets and got down to the lobby the mysterious Lucinda had gone.

“A nice little person, sir,” Gaskell confided when I asked what the woman was like. He was standing by the reception desk in his dark blue commissionaire’s uniform, tapping his fingers nervously upon the pile of dog-eared magazines that were loaned to visitors who spent a long time waiting here in the draughty lobby. “Well turned-out; a lady, if you know my meaning.”

I had no notion of his meaning. Gaskell spoke a language that seemed to be entirely his own. He was especially cryptic about dress, rank and class, perhaps because of the social no-man’sland that all senior NCOs inhabit. I’d had these elliptical utterances from Gaskell before, about all kinds of things. I never knew what he was talking about. “Where did she say she’d meet me?”

“She’d put the car on the pavement, sir. I had to ask her to move it. You know the regulations.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Car bombs and that sort of thing.” No matter how much he rambled, his voice always had the confident tone of an orderly room: an orderly room under his command. “Where did she say she’d meet me?” I asked yet again. I looked out through the glass doors. The snow had started and was falling fast and in big flakes. The ground was cold, so that it was not melting: it, was going to lie. It didn’t need -more than a couple of cupfuls of that sprinkled over the Metropolis before the public transportation systems all came to a complete halt. Gloria would be at her parents” house by now. She’d gone by train. I wondered if she’d now decide to stay overnight at her parents”, or if she’d expect me to go and collect her in the car. Her parents lived at Epsom; too damned near our little nest at Raynes Park for my liking. Gloria said I was frightened of her father. I wasn’t frightened of him, but I didn’t relish facing intensive questioning from a Hungarian dentist about my relationship with his young daughter.

Gaskell was talking again. “Lovely vehicle. A dark green Mercedes. Gleaming! Waxed! Someone is looking after it, you could see that. You’d never get a lady polishing a car. It’s not in their nature.”

“Where did she go, Mr. Gaskell?”

“I told her the best car park for her would be Elephant and Castle.” He went to the map on the wall to show me where the Elephant and Castle was. Gaskell was a big man and he’d retired at fifty. I wondered why he hadn’t found a pub to manage. He would have been wonderful behind a bar counter. The previous week, when I’d been asking him about the train service to Portsmouth, he’d confided to me - amid a barrage of other information - that that’s what he would have liked to be doing. “Never mind the car park, Mr. Gaskell. I need to know where she’s meeting me.”

“Sandy’s,” he said again. “You knew it well, she said.” He watched me carefully. Ever since our office address had been so widely published, thanks to the public-spirited endeavours of “investigative journalists’,- there had been strict instructions that staff must not frequent any local bars, pubs or clubs because of the regular presence of eavesdroppers of various kinds, amateur and professional.

“I wish you’d write these things down,” I said. “I’ve never heard of it. Do you know where she means? Is it a cafe, or what?”

“Not a cafe I’ve heard of,’ said Gaskell, frowning and sucking his teeth. “Nowhere near here with a name like that.’ And then, as he remembered, his face lit up. “Big Henry’s! That’s what she said: Big Henry’s.”

. “Big Henty’s,” I said, correcting him. “Tower Bridge Road.

Yes, I know it.”

Yes, I knew it and my heart sank. I knew exactly the kind of “informant who was likely to be waiting for me in Big Henty’s: an ear-bender with open palm outstretched. And I had planned an evening at home alone with a coal fire, the carcass of Sunday’s duck, a bottle of wine and a book. I looked at the door and I looked at Gaskell. And I wondered if the sensible thing wouldn’t be to forget about Lucinda, and whoever she was fronting for, and drive straight home and ignore the whole thing. The chances were that I’d never hear from the mysterious Lucinda again. This town was filled with people who knew me a long time ago and suddenly remembered me when they needed a few pounds from the public purse in exchange for some ancient and unreliable intelligence material.

“If you’d like me to come along, Mr. Samson. . .” said Gaskell suddenly, and allowed his offer to hang in the air. So Gaskell thought there was some strong-arm business in the offing. Well he was a game fellow. Surely he was too old for that sort of thing: and certainly I was.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Gaskell,” I said, “but the prospect is boredom rather than any rough stuff.” “Whatever you say,” said Gaskell, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

It was the margin of disbelief that made me feel I had to follow it up. I didn’t want it to look as if I was nervous. Dammit! why wasn’t I brave enough not to care what the Gaskells of this world thought about me?

Tower Bridge Road is a major south London thoroughfare that leads to the river, or rather to the curious neo-Gothic bridge which, for many foreigners, symbolizes the capital. This is Southwark. From here Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury ; and a couple of centuries later Shakespeare’s Globe theatre was built upon the marshes. For Victorian London this shopping street, with a dozen brightly lit pubs, barrel organs and late-night street markets, was the centre of one of the capital’s most vigorous neighbourhoods. Here filthy slums, smoke-darkened factories and crowded sweat-shops stood side by side with neat leafy squares where scrawny clerks and potbellied shopkeepers asserted their social superiority. Now it is dark and squalid and silent. Well-intentioned bureaucrats nowadays sent shop assistants home early, street traders were banished, almost empty pubs sold highly taxed watery lager and the factories were derelict: a textbook example of urban blight, with yuppies nibbling the leafy bits.