A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 3

Mary had prepared herself for everything except for this. Except for the pace and urgency of the intrusion and the number of the intruders. Except for the sheer scale and complexity of Jack Brotherhood’s anger, and for his bewilderment, which seemed greater than her own. And for the awful comfort of his being there.

Admitted to the hall he had barely looked at her. “Did you have any inkling of this?”

“If I had I’d have told you,” she said, which was a quarrel before they had even begun.

“Has he phoned?”

“No.”

“Has anybody else?”

“No.”

“No word from anyone? No change?”

“No.”

“Brought you a brace of house guests.” He jabbed a thumb at two shadows behind him. “Relatives from London, come to console you for the duration. More to follow.” Then he swept through her like a great ragged hawk on its journey to another prey, leaving her one frozen impression of his lined and punctured face and shaggy white forelock as he stormed towards the drawing-room.

“I’m Georgie from Head Office,” said the girl on the doorstep. “This is Fergus. We’re so sorry, Mary.”

They had luggage and she showed them to the foot of the stairs. They seemed to know the way. Georgie was tall and sharp-edged, with straight, sensible hair. Fergus was not quite Georgie’s class, which was the way the Office worked these days.

“Sorry about this, Mary,” Fergus echoed as he followed Georgie up the stairs. “Don’t mind if we take a look round, do you?”

In the drawing-room Brotherhood had switched out the lights and wrenched open the curtains to the French windows. “I need the key for this thing. The Chubb. The whatever they have here.”

Mary hastened to the mantelpiece and groped for the silver rose bowl where she kept the security key. “Where is he?”

“He’s anywhere in the world or out of it. He’s using trade-craft. Ours. Who does he know in Edinburgh?”

“No one.” The rose bowl was full of pot-pourri she had made with Tom. But no key.

“They think they’ve traced him there,” said Brotherhood. “They think he took the five-o’clock shuttle from Heathrow. Tall man with a heavy briefcase. On the other hand, knowing our Magnus as we do, he might just be in Timbuctoo.”

Looking for the key was like looking for Magnus. She didn’t know where to begin. She seized the tea-caddy and shook it. She was getting sick with panic. She grabbed the silver Achievement Cup that Tom had won at school and heard something metal skid inside it. Taking the key to him, she barked her shin so hard her eyes blurred. That bloody piano stool.

“The Lederers ring?”

“No. I told you. No one did. I didn’t get back from the airport till eleven.”

“Where’s the holes?”

She located the top keyhole for him and guided his hand to it. I should have done it myself then I wouldn’t have had to touch him. She knelt and began fumbling for the lower one. I’m practically kissing his feet.

“Has he ever vanished before and you not told me?” Brotherhood demanded while she continued to grope.

“No.”

“I want it level, Mary. I’ve got the whole of London at my throat. Bo’s having the vapours and Nigel’s cloistered with the Ambassador now. The RAF doesn’t fly us out in the middle of the night for nothing.”

Nigel is Bo Brammel’s hangman, Magnus had said. Bo says three-bags-full to everyone and Nigel pads behind him chopping off their heads.

“Never. No. I swear,” she said.

“Did he have a favourite place anywhere? Some hideaway he talked of going to?”

“He said once Ireland. He’d buy a croft overlooking the sea and write.”

“North or south?”

“I don’t know. South, I suppose. As long as it was sea. Then suddenly the Bahamas. That was more recent.”

“Who does he have there?”

“Nobody. Not as far as I know.”

“Did he ever talk of going over to the other side? Little dacha on the Black Sea?”

“Don’t be a fool.”

“So Ireland, then the Bahamas. When did he say the Bahamas?”

“He didn’t. He just marked the property advertisements in The Times and left them for me to see.”

“As a sign?”

“As a reproach, as a come-on, as a signal that he wanted to be somewhere else. Magnus has a lot of ways of talking.”

“Has he ever talked about doing away with himself? They’ll ask you, Mary. I might as well do it first.”

“No. No, he hasn’t.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m not. I’ll have to think.”

“Has he ever been physically frightened for himself?”

“I can’t answer it all at once, Jack! He’s a complicated man — I’ve got to think!” She steadied herself. “In principle, no. No to all of it. It’s all a total shock.”

“But you still rang very fast from the airport. As soon as he wasn’t on that plane, you were on the phone: ‘Jack, Jack, where’s Magnus?’ You were right, he’d vanished.”

“I saw his suitcase going round the bloody apron, didn’t I? He’d checked himself in! Why wasn’t he on the plane?”

“How about his drinking?”

“Less than before.”

“Less than Lesbos?”

“Miles less.”

“What about his headaches?”

“Gone.”

“Other women?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. How could I? If he says he’s out for the night, he’s out for the night. It could be a woman, it could be a Joe. It could be Bee Lederer. She’s always after him. Ask her.”

“I thought wives could always tell the difference,” said Brotherhood.

Not with Magnus they can’t, she thought, beginning to settle to his pace.

“Does he still bring papers back at night to work on?” Brotherhood asked, peering into the snow-clad garden.

“Now and then.”

“Any here now?”

“Not that I know of.”

“American papers? Liaison stuff?”

“I don’t read them, Jack, do I? So I don’t know.”

“Where does he keep them?”

“He brings them at night, takes them back in the morning. Just like everyone else.”

“And keeps them where, Mary?”

“By the bed. In the desk. Wherever he’s been working on them.”

“And Lederer hasn’t rung?”

“I told you. No.”

Brotherhood stood back. Two men, muffled against the night, tumbled into the room. She recognised Lumsden, the Ambassador’s private secretary. She had recently had a row with his wife, Caroline, about starting a bottle-bank in the Embassy forecourt as an example to the Viennese. Mary thought it essential. Caroline Lumsden thought it irrelevant and explained why in an angry outburst to an inner caucus of the Diplomatic Wives Association: Mary was not a real Wife, said Caroline. She was an Unmentionable, and the only reason she was accepted as a Wife at all was to protect her husband’s half-baked cover.

They must have soldiered up the bridlepath from the school, she thought. Waded through half a metre of snow in order to be discreet about Magnus.

“Hail, Mary,” Lumsden said brightly in his best scoutmaster’s voice. He was a Catholic but that was how he always greeted her, so he did it tonight. To be normal.

“Did he bring any papers back on the night of the party?” Brotherhood asked, closing the curtains once more.

“No.” She put on the light.

“Know what’s in this black briefcase of his that he’s carrying?”

“He didn’t take it from here so he must have collected it at the Embassy. All he took from here was the suitcase that’s at Schwechat.”

“Was,” said Brotherhood.

The second man was tall and sickly-looking. He carried a bulging bag in each gloved hand. Enter the abortionist. It was practically a full plane, she thought stupidly; Head Office must have a permanent defection team on twenty-four-hour standby.

“Meet Harry,” Brotherhood said. “He’s going to put some clever boxes on your telephones. Use them normally. Don’t think of us. Any objection?”

“How can I?”

“You can’t, you’re right. I’m being polite, so why don’t you do the same? You’ve got two cars. Where are they?”

“The Rover’s outside, the Metro’s in the airport carpark waiting for him to pick it up.”

“Why did you go to the airport if he had a car there?”

“I just thought he might like me to be there so I took a taxi and went.”

“Why not take the Rover?”

“I wanted to ride back with him, not drive in convoy.”

“Where’s the Metro key?”

“In his pocket presumably.”

“Got a spare?”

She searched her handbag till she found it. He dropped it in his pocket.

“I’ll get it lost,” he said. “If anybody asks, it’s gone for repair. I don’t want it kicking round the airport.”

She heard a heavy thud from upstairs.

She watched Harry pull off his gumboots and place them neatly on the mat beside the French windows.

“His father died Wednesday. What’s he been up to in London apart from burying him?” Brotherhood continued.

“I assumed he’d be dropping in at Head Office.”

“He never did. He didn’t ring, he didn’t visit.”

“Then probably he was busy.”

“Did he have any plans for London — anything he told you of?”

“He said he’d go and see Tom at school.”

“Well, he did that. He went. Anything else? Friends — dates — women?”

She was suddenly very tired of him. “He was burying his father and tidying up, Jack. The whole visit was one long date. If you’d had a father and he died, you’d know how it was.”

“Did he phone you from London?”

“No.”

“Steady, Mary. Think now. That’s five days already.”

“No. He didn’t. Of course he didn’t.”

“Would he usually?”

“If he can use the Office phone, yes.”

“And if he can’t?”

She thought for him. She really tried. She had been thinking for so long. “Yes,” she conceded. “He’d phone. He likes to know we’re all right, all the time. He’s a worrier. I suppose that’s why I went off with such a bang when he didn’t show up. I think I was worried already.”

Lumsden was stalking round the room in his stockinged feet, pretending to admire Mary’s water-colours of Greece.

“You’re so, so talented,” he marvelled, his face pressed against a view of Plomari. “Did you go to art school or simply do it?”

She ignored him. So did Brotherhood. It was a tacit bond between them. The only decent diplomat is a deaf Trappist, Jack liked to say. Mary was beginning to agree.

“Where’s the servant?” said Brotherhood.

“You told me to get rid of her. On the phone. When I rang.”

“She smell a rat?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It mustn’t get out, Mary. We’ve got to sit on it as long as we possibly can. You know that, don’t you?”

“I guessed.”

“There’s his Joes to think of, there’s everything to think of. Far more than you can know. London’s stiff with theories and begging for time. You quite sure Lederer hasn’t phoned?”

“Jesus,” she said.

His eye fell on Harry, who was unpacking his clever boxes. They were grey-green and possessed no apparent controls. “You can tell the servant they’re transformers,” he said.

“Umformer,” Lumsden piped helpfully from the wings. “Transformer is Umformer. ‘Die kleinen Büchsen sind Umformer.’”

Once again they ignored him. Jack’s German was almost as good as Magnus’s, and about three hundred times better than Lumsden’s.

“When’s she due back?” Brotherhood asked.

“Who?”

“Your servant, for God’s sake.”

“Tomorrow lunchtime.”

“Be a good girl and see if you can get her to stay away a couple more days.”

She went to the kitchen and phoned Frau Bauer’s mother in Salzburg. Sorry about the outrageous hour but with a death that’s how it goes, she said. Herr Pym is remaining in London for a few days, she said. Why don’t you take advantage of Herr Pym’s absence and have a nice rest? she said. When she came back it was Lumsden’s turn to say his piece. She got his drift immediately and after that she deliberately stopped hearing him. “Just to fill in any awkward blanks, Mary. . So that we’re all speaking the same language, Mary. . While Nigel is still closeted with Ambass. . In case, which God forbid, the odious press gets on to it before it’s all cleared up, Mary. .” Lumsden had a cliché for every occasion and a reputation for being nimble-minded. “Anyway, that’s the route Ambass would like us all to go,” he ended, using the very latest in daring jargon. “Not unless we’re asked, naturally. But if we are. And Mary he sends terrific love. He’s with you all the way. And with Magnus too naturally. Terrific condolences, all that.”

“Just nothing to Lederer’s crowd,” said Brotherhood. “Nothing to anyone but for God’s sake nothing to Lederer. There’s no disappearance, nothing abnormal. He’s gone back to London to bury his father, he’s staying on for talks at Head Office. End of message.”

“It’s the same route I’ve been going already,” Mary said, appealing to Brotherhood as if Lumsden didn’t exist. “It’s just that Magnus didn’t apply for compassionate leave before taking it.”

“Yes, well now I think that’s the part Ambass wants us not to say, if you don’t mind,” said Lumsden, showing the steel. “So I think we won’t, please.”

Brotherhood squared to him. Mary was family. Nobody messed her around in front of Brotherhood, least of all some overeducated flunkey from the Foreign Office.

“You’ve done your job,” said Brotherhood. “Fade away, will you? Now.”

Lumsden left the way he had come, but faster.

Brotherhood turned back to Mary. They were alone. He was as broad as an old blockhouse and, when he wanted to be, as rough. His white forelock had fallen across his brow. He put his hands on her hips the way he used to, and drew her into him. “God damn it, Mary,” he said as he held her. “Magnus is my best boy. What the devil have you done with him?”

From upstairs she heard the squeak of castors and another loud thud. It’s the bow-fronted chest of drawers. No, it’s our bed. Georgie and Fergus are taking a look round.

* * *

The desk was in the old servants’ room next to the kitchen, a sprawling, spidery half-cellar to which no servant had been consigned for forty years. Near the window among Mary’s plant pots stood her easel and water-colours. Against the wall, the old black-and-white television and the agonising sofa for watching it. “There’s nothing like a little discomfort,” Magnus liked to say primly, “for deciding whether a programme is worth its salt.” In an alcove under lanes of piping stood the ping-pong table where Mary did her bookbinding and on it lay her hides and buckram and glues and clamps and threads and marbled end-papers and powering knives, and the bricks in Magnus’s old socks that she used instead of lead weights, and the wrecked volumes she had bought for a few schillings at the flea market. Beside it, next to the defunct boiler, stood the desk, the great, crazy Hapsburg desk bought for a song at a sale in Graz, sawn up to get it through the door and glued together again all by clever Magnus. Brotherhood pulled at the drawers.

“Key?”

“Magnus must have taken it.”

Brotherhood lifted his head. “Harry!”

Harry kept his lock picks on a chain the way other men keep keys, and held his breath to help him listen while he probed.

“Does he do all his homework here or is there somewhere else?”

“Daddy left him his old campaign table. Sometimes he uses that.”

“Where is it?”

“Upstairs.”

“Where upstairs?”

“Tom’s room.”

“Keep his documents there too, does he?. . Firm’s papers?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know where.”

Harry walked out smiling with his head down. Brotherhood pulled open a drawer.

“That’s for the book he was writing,” she said as he extracted a meagre file. Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.

“Is it though?” He was pulling on his glasses, one red ear at a time. He knows about the novel too, she thought, watching him. He’s not even pretending to be surprised.

“Yes.” And you can put his bloody papers back where you got them from, she thought. She did not like how cold he had become, how hard.

“Gave up his sketching, did he? I thought you two were in that together.”

“It didn’t satisfy him. He decided he preferred the written word.”

“Doesn’t seem to have written much here. When did he switch?”

“On Lesbos. On holiday. He’s not writing it yet. He’s preparing.”

“Oh.” He began another page.

“He calls it a matrix.”

“Does he though?”—still reading—“I must show some of this to Bo. He’s a literary man.”

“And when we retire — when he does — if he takes early retirement, he’ll write, I’ll paint and bookbind. That’s the plan.”

Brotherhood turned a page. “In Dorset?”

“At Plush. Yes.”

“Well, he’s taken early retirement all right,” he remarked not very nicely as he resumed his reading. “Wasn’t there sculpture, too, at some point?”

“It wasn’t practical.”

“I shouldn’t think it was.”

“You encourage those things, Jack. The Firm does. You’re always saying we should have hobbies and recreations.”

“What’s the book about, then? Anything special?”

“He’s still finding the line. He likes to keep it to himself.”

“Listen to this: ‘When the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.’ Not even a main verb, far as I can make out.”

“He didn’t write that.”

“It’s in his handwriting, Mary.”

“It’s from something he read. When he reads a book he underlines things in pencil. Then when he’s finished it he writes out his favourite bits.”

From upstairs she heard a sharp snap like the cracking of timber or the firing of a pistol back in the days when she had been taught.

“That’s Tom’s room,” she said. “They don’t need to go in there.”

“Get me a bag, dear,” Brotherhood said. “A bin bag will do. Will you find me one?”

She went to the kitchen. Why do I let him do this to me? Why do I let him march into my house, my marriage and my mind and help himself to everything he doesn’t like? Mary was not usually compliant. Tradesmen did not rob her twice. In the English school, the English church, in the Diplomatic Wives Association, she was regarded as quite the little shrew. Yet one hard stare of Jack Brotherhood’s pale eyes, one growl of his rich, careless voice, was enough to send her running to him.

It’s because he’s so like Daddy, she decided. He loves our kind of England and the rest can go hang.

It’s because I worked for Jack in Berlin when I was an empty-headed schoolgirl with one small talent. Jack was my older lover at a time when I thought I needed one.

It’s because he steered Magnus through his divorce for me when he was dithering and gave him to me “for afters” as he called it.

It’s because he loves Magnus too.

Brotherhood was flipping the pages of her desk diary.

“Who’s P?” he demanded, tapping a page. “ ‘ Twenty-fifth September, six-thirty p.m. P.’ There’s a P on the sixteenth too, Mary. That’s not ‘P’ for Pym, is it, or am I being stupid again? Who’s this P he’s meeting?”

She began to hear the scream inside herself and had no whisky left to quell it. Of all the entries, the dozens and dozens, and he has to pick that one. “I don’t know. A Joe. I don’t know.”

“You wrote it, didn’t you?”

“Magnus asked me to. ‘Put down I’m meeting P.’ He didn’t keep a diary of his own. He said it was insecure.”

“And he made you write the entries for him.”

“He said if anybody looked, they wouldn’t know which were his dates and which were mine. It was part of sharing.” She felt Brotherhood’s stare. He’s making me speak, she thought. He wants to hear the quaver in my voice.

“Sharing what?”

“His work.”

“Explain.”

“He couldn’t tell me what he was doing, but he could show me that he was doing it and when.”

“Did he say that?”

“I could feel it.”

“What could you feel?”

“That he was proud! He wanted me to know!”

“Know what?”

Brotherhood could drive her mad even when she knew he meant to. “Know that he had another life! An important one. That he was being used.”

“By us?”

“By you, Jack. By the Firm! Who do you think — the Americans?”

“Why do you say that — the Americans? Did he have a thing about them?”

“Why should he? He served in Washington.”

“Needn’t stop him. Might even encourage him. Did you know the Lederers in Washington?”

“Of course we did.”

“But better here, eh? I hear she’s quite an armful.”

He was turning forward to the days yet to be endured. Tomorrow and the day after. To the weekend, which was already gaping at her like a hole in her shattered universe.

“Mind if I keep this?” he asked.

Mary damn well did mind. She possessed no spare diary and no spare life either. She snatched it back and let him wait while she copied out her future on a sheet of paper: Drinks Lederer. . dinner Dinkels. . Tom’s school term ends…. She came to “meet P” and left it out.

“Why’s this drawer empty?” he asked.

“I didn’t know it was.”

“So what was it full of?”

“Old photographs. Mementoes. Nothing.”

“How long’s it been empty?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I don’t know! Get off my back, will you?”

“Did he put papers in his suitcase?”

“I didn’t watch him pack.”

“Did you hear him down here while he was packing?”

“Yes.”

The telephone rang. Mary’s hand shot out to take it, but Brotherhood was already grasping her wrist. Still holding her, he leaned towards the door and yelled for Harry while the phone went on ringing. It was rising four a.m. already. Who the hell calls at four in the morning except Magnus? Inside herself Mary was praying so loud she hardly heard Brotherhood’s shout. The phone kept calling her, and she knew now that nothing mattered except Magnus and her family.

“It might be Tom!” she shouted while she struggled. “Let go, damn you!”

“It might be Lederer, too.”

Harry must have flown downstairs. She counted two more rings before he was standing in the doorway.

“Trig this call,” Brotherhood ordered, loud and slow. Harry vanished. Brotherhood released Mary’s hand. “Make it very, very long, Mary. Spread it right out. You know how to play those games. Do it.”

She lifted the phone and said, “Pym residence.”

Nobody answered. Brotherhood was conducting her with his powerful hands, willing her, pressing her to talk. She heard a metallic ping and crammed her hand over the mouthpiece. “It could be a call code,” she breathed. She held up one finger for one ping. Then a second. Then a third. It was a call code. They had used them in Berlin: two for this, three for that. Private and prearranged between the Joe and base. She opened her eyes to Brotherhood to say what shall I do? He shook his head to say I don’t know either.

Speak, he mouthed.

Mary drew a deep breath. “Hullo? Speak up, please.” She took refuge in German. “This is the residence of Counsellor Magnus Pym of the British Embassy. Who is that? Will you speak, please? Mr. Pym is not here at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, you may do so. Otherwise, please call later. Hullo?”

More, Brotherhood was urging. Give me more. She recited her telephone number in German and again in English. The line was open and she could hear a noise like traffic and a noise like scratchy music played at half speed, but no more pings. She repeated the number in English. “Speak up, please. The line is dreadful. Hullo. Can you hear me? Who’s that calling, please? Do — please — speak — up.” Then she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes closed and she screamed, “Magnus, for God’s sake say where you are!” But Brotherhood was miles ahead of her. With a lover’s knowledge he had felt her outburst coming and clapped his hand over the cradle.

“Too short, sir,” Harry lamented from the doorway. “I’d need another minute at the least.”

“Was it foreign?” Brotherhood said.

“Could be foreign, could be next door, sir.”

“That was naughty, Mary. Don’t do those things again. We’re on the same side in this and I’m boss.”

“Someone’s kidnapped him,” she said. “I know they have.”

Everything froze: herself, his pale eyes, even Harry in the doorway. “Well, well,” said Brotherhood at last. “That would make you feel better, would it? A kidnapping? Now why do you say that, dear? What’s worse than kidnapping, I wonder?”

* * *

Trying to meet his gaze Mary experienced a violent time warp. I don’t know anything. I want Plush. Give me back the land that Sam and Daddy died for. She saw herself as a school-leaver seated in front of the careers mistress in the middle of her last term. A second woman is with her, London and tough. “This lady is a recruiting officer for the Foreign Service, dear,” says the careers mistress. “A special bit of it,” says the tough woman. “She’s terribly impressed by the way you draw, dear,” says the careers mistress. “She so admires your draughtsmanship, as we all do. She wonders whether you’d be interested in taking your folder to London for a day or two, so that some other people can look at it.” “It’s for your country, dear,” the tough woman says with meaning, to the child of English patriots.

She remembered the training house in East Anglia, girls like herself, our class. She remembered the jolly lessons in copying and engraving and colouring, in papers and cardboards and linens and threads, how to make watermarks and how to alter them, how to cut rubber stamps, how to make paper look older and how to make it look younger, and she tried to remember just when it was exactly that they had realised they were being taught to forge documents for British spies. And she saw herself standing before Jack Brotherhood in his rickety upstairs office in Berlin, not a stone’s throw from the Wall, Jack the Stripper, Jack the Stoat, Jack the Black and all the other Jacks he was known as. Jack who had charge of Berlin Station and liked to meet all newcomers personally, particularly if they were pretty girls of twenty. She remembered his bleached gaze running slowly over her body while he guessed her shape and sexual weight and she remembered again hating him on sight, as she was trying to hate him now as she watched him flip through a folder of family correspondence he had pulled from the desk.

“You realise half of those are Tom’s letters from boarding-school, I suppose,” she said.

“Why doesn’t he write to both of you?”

“He does write to both of us, Jack. Tom and I have one correspondence. Magnus and Tom have a separate correspondence.”

“No interconsciousness,” said Brotherhood, using a bit of trade talk he had taught her in Berlin. He lit one of his fat yellow cigarettes and watched her theatrically through the flame. There’s a poseur in all of them, she thought. Magnus and Grant included.

“You’re absurd,” she said in nervous anger.

“It’s an absurd situation and Nigel will be here any minute to make it more absurd still. What caused it?” He opened another drawer.

“His father. If it’s a situation at all.”

“Whose camera’s this?”

“Tom’s. But we all use it.”

“Any other cameras around?”

“No. If Magnus needs one for his work he brings it from the Embassy.”

“Any here from the Embassy now?”

“No.”

“Maybe his father caused it or maybe a lot of things did. Maybe a marital tiff I don’t know about caused it.”

He was examining the camera’s settings, turning it over in his big hands as if he were thinking of buying it.

“We don’t have them,” she said.

His knowing eyes lifted to her. “How do you manage that?”

“He doesn’t offer a fight, that’s why.”

“You do though. You’re a right little demon when you get going, Mary.”

“Not any more,” she said, mistrusting his charm.

“You never met his dad, did you?” said Brotherhood as he wound the film through the camera. “There was something about him, I seem to remember.”

“They were estranged.”

“Ah.”

“Nothing dramatic. They’d drifted apart. They’re that sort of family.”

“What sort, dear?”

“Scattered. Business people. He’d said he’d let them in on his first marriage and once was enough. We hardly talked about it.”

“Tom go along with that?”

“Tom’s a child.”

“Tom was the last person Magnus saw before he vanished, Mary. Apart from the porter at his club.”

“So arrest him,” Mary suggested rudely.

Dropping the film into the bin bag Brotherhood picked up Magnus’s little transistor radio.

“This the new one they do with all the shortwave on it?”

“I believe so.”

“Take it with him on holiday, did he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Listen to it regularly?”

“Since, as you once told me, he runs Czechoslovakia single-handed out here, it would be fairly startling if he didn’t.”

He switched it on. A male voice was reading the news in Czech. Brotherhood stared blankly at the wall while he let it continue for what seemed like hours. He switched off the radio and put it in the bag. His gaze lifted to the uncurtained window, but it was still a long while before he spoke. “Not displaying too many lights for the time of morning, are we, Mary?” he asked distractedly. “Don’t want to set neighbours chattering, do we?”

“They know Rick’s dead. They know it’s not a normal time.”

“You can say that again.”

I hate him. I always did. Even when I fell for him — when he was taking me up and down the scale and I was weeping and thanking him — I still hated him. Tell me about the night in question, he was saying. He meant the night they heard of Rick’s death. She told it to him exactly as she had rehearsed it.

* * *

He had found the cloakroom and was standing before the worn dufflecoat that hung between Tom’s loden and Mary’s sheepskin. He was feeling in the pockets. The din from upstairs was monotonous. He extracted a grimy handkerchief and a half-consumed roll of Polo mints.

“You’re teasing me,” he said.

“All right, I’m teasing you.”

“Two hours in the freezing snow in his dancing pumps, Mary? In the middle of the night? Brother Nigel will think I’m making it up. What did he do in them?”

“Walked.”

“Where to, dear?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Ask him?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then how do you know he didn’t take a cab?”

“He’d no money. His wallet and change were upstairs in the dressing-room with his keys.” Brotherhood replaced the handkerchief and mints in the duffle.

“And none in here?”

“No.”

“How d’you know?”

“He’s methodical in those things.”

“Maybe he paid the other end.”

“No.”

“Maybe someone picked him up.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a walker and he was in shock. That’s why. His father was dead, even if he didn’t particularly like him. It builds up in him. The tension or whatever it is. So he walks.” And I hugged him when he came back, she thought. I felt the cold on his cheek and the trembling of his chest and the hot sweat clean through his coat from his hours of walking. And I’ll hug him again, as soon as he comes through that door. “I said to him: ‘Don’t go. Not tonight. Get drunk. We’ll get drunk together.’ But he went. He had his look.” She wished she hadn’t said that, but for a moment she was as cross with Magnus as she was with Brotherhood.

“What look is that, Mary? ‘Had his look.’ I don’t think I follow you.”

“Empty. Like an actor without a part.”

“A part? His father takes up and dies and Magnus doesn’t have a part any more? What the hell does that mean?”

He’s closing in on me, she thought, resolutely not answering. In a minute I’m going to feel his sure hands on me, and I’m going to lie back and let it happen because I can’t think of any more excuses.

“Ask Grant,” she said, trying to hurt him. “He’s our tame psychologist. He’ll know.”

* * *

They had moved to the drawing-room. He was waiting for something. So was she. For Nigel, for Pym, for the telephone. For Georgie and Fergus upstairs.

“You’re not doing too much of this, are you?” Brotherhood asked, pouring her another whisky.

“Of course not. When I’m alone, almost never.”

“Well, don’t. It’s too damn easy. And when Brother Nigel’s here, nothing. Keep it under wraps completely. Yes, Jack?”

“Yes, Jack.” You’re a lecherous priest scavenging the last of God’s grace, she told him, watching his slow purposeful movements as he filled his own glass. First the wine, now the water. Now lower your eyelids and lift the chalice for a sanctimonious word with Him who sent you.

“And he’s free,” he remarked. “‘I’m free.’ Rick’s dead, so Magnus is free. He’s one of your Freudian types who can’t say ‘Father.’”

“It’s perfectly normal at his age. To call a father by his Christian name. More normal still, if you haven’t seen each other for fifteen years.”

“I do like you to defend him,” Brotherhood said. “I admire your loyalty. So will they. And you never let me down. I know you didn’t.”

Loyalty, she thought. Keeping my silly mouth shut round the Station in case your wife finds out.

“And you wept. Quite the old weeper, you are, Mary, I didn’t know. Mary weeps, Magnus consoles her. Odd, that, to the casual observer, seeing as how Rick was his daddy, not yours. A rôle reversal with a vengeance, that is: you doing his mourning for him. Who were the tears for exactly? Any idea?”

“His father had died, Jack. I didn’t sit down and say, ‘I’ll cry for Rick, I’ll cry for Magnus.’ I just cried.”

“I thought it might be for yourself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the one person you didn’t mention. That’s all. Defensive: that’s how you sound.”

“I am not being defensive!”

She was too loud. She knew it and once more so did Brotherhood and he was interested.

“And when Magnus is done with consoling Mary,” he continued, picking a book from the table and flipping through it, “he slips on his duffle and he goes for a walk in his dancing pumps. You try to restrain him — you beg him, which is hard for me to visualise, but I’ll try — but no, he will go. Any phone calls before he leaves?”

“No.”

“No incoming, no outgoing?”

“I said no!”

“Direct dial, after all, you’d think a bereaved man would want to share the bad news with other members of his family.”

“They’re not that kind of family. I told you.”

“There’s Tom for a start. What about him?”

“It was much too late to ring Tom and anyway Magnus thought it better to tell him himself.”

He was looking at the book. “Another gem he’s underlined. ‘If I am not for myself who is for me; and being for my own self what am I? If not now when?’ Well, well. I’m enlightened. Are you?”

“No.”

“Nor am I. He’s free.” He closed the book and put it back on the table. “He didn’t take anything with him on his walk, did he? Like a briefcase?”

“A newspaper.”

You’re going deaf. Admit it. You’re worried that a hearing-aid will spoil your self-image. Speak, damn you!

She had said it. She knew she had. She had been waiting all evening to say it, prepared it from every possible angle, practised it, rehearsed it, denied it, forgotten it, revived it. And now it was echoing in her head like an explosion while she took a frightfully careless pull at her whisky. Yet his eyes, straight at her, were still waiting.

“A newspaper,” she repeated. “Just a newspaper. What of it?”

“Which newspaper?”

“The Presse.”

“That’s a daily.”

“Correct. Die Presse is a daily.”

“A local daily newspaper. And Magnus took it with him. To read in the dark. Dressed in his dancing pumps. Tell me about it.”

“I just did, Jack.”

“No, you didn’t. And you’re going to have to, Mary, because when we get the heavy guns here you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

She had perfect recall. Magnus was standing by the door, a step from where Brotherhood stood now. He was pale and untouchable, the dufflecoat flung crookedly over his shoulders while he glared round in stiff phases: fireplace, wife, clock, books. She heard herself telling him the things she had already recounted to Brotherhood, but more of them. For God’s sake, Magnus, stay. Don’t get the blacks, stay. Don’t sink into one of your moods. Stay. Make love. Get drunk. If you want company, I’ll get Grant and Bee back, or we’ll go there. She saw him smile his rigid, bright-lit smile. She heard him put on his awfully easy voice. His Lesbos voice. And she heard herself repeat his words exactly, to Brotherhood, now.

“He said, ‘Mabs, where’s the bloody paper, darling?’ I thought he meant The Times for looking at the Scottish property market, so I said, ‘Wherever you put it when you brought it back from the Embassy.’”

“But he didn’t mean The Times,” said Brotherhood.

“He went over to the rack — there—” She looked at it but didn’t point, because she was terrified of giving too much importance to the gesture. “And helped himself. To Die Presse. From the rack, where the Presse is kept. Till the end of each week. He likes me to keep the back numbers. Then he walked out,” she ended, making it all sound perfectly normal, which of course it was.

“Did he look at it at all when he took it out?”

“Just the date. To check.”

“What did you suppose he wanted it for?”

“Maybe there was a late-night film.” Magnus had never gone to a late-night film in his life. “Maybe he wanted something to read in the café.” With no money on him, she thought, as she filled the void of Brotherhood’s silence. “Maybe he was looking for distraction. As we all might be. Have been. Anyone might when they’re bereaved.”

“Or free,” Brotherhood suggested. But he did not otherwise help her.

“Anyway, he was so upset he took the wrong day’s,” she said brightly, clinching the matter.

“You looked, did you, dear?”

“Only when I was throwing away.”

“When were you doing that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Which one did he take?”

“Monday’s. It was all of three days old. So I mean obviously he was in considerable shock.”

“Obviously.”

“All right, his father wasn’t the great love of his life. But he was still dead. Nobody’s rational when a thing like that happens. Not even Magnus.”

“So what did he do next? After he’d looked at the date and taken the wrong day’s?”

“He went out. As I told you. For a walk. You don’t listen. You never did.”

“Did he fold it?”

“Really, Jack! What does it matter how somebody carries a newspaper?”

“Just tuck in your ego a minute and answer. What did he do with it?”

“Rolled it.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. He carried it. In his hand.”

“Did he carry it back again?”

“Here to the house? No.”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

“I was waiting for him in the hall.”

“And you noticed: no newspaper. No rolled newspaper, you said to yourself.”

“Purely incidentally, yes.”

“Incidentally nothing, Mary. You had it in your mind to look. You knew he’d gone out with it and you spotted at once he’d come back without it. That’s not incidental. That’s spying on him.”

“Please yourself.”

He was angry. “It’s you who’s going to have to do the pleasing, Mary,” he said, loud and slow. “You’re going to have to please Brother Nigel in about five minutes from now. They’re in spasm, Mary. They can see the ground opening up at their feet again and they do not know what to do. They literally do not know what to do.” His anger passed. Jack could do that. “And later — as soon as you had a chance — you incidentally searched his pockets. And it wasn’t there.”

“I didn’t look for it, I simply noticed it was missing. And yes, it wasn’t there.”

“Does he often go out with old newspapers?”

“When he needs to keep abreast — for his work — he’s a conscientious officer — he takes a newspaper with him.”

“Rolled up?”

“Sometimes.”

“Bring them back ever?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Ever remark on it to him?”

“No.”

“He to you?”

“Jack. It’s a habit he has. Look, I’m not going to have a marital row with you!”

“We’re not married.”

“He rolls up a newspaper and walks with it. The way a child carries a stick or something. As a comforter or something. Like his Polos. There. He had Polos in his pocket. It’s the same thing.”

“Always the wrong date?”

“Not always — don’t make so much of everything!”

“And always loses it?”

“Jack, stop. Just stop. Okay?”

“Does he do it on any special occasion? Full moon? Last Wednesday of the month? Or only when his father dies? Have you noticed a pattern to it? Go on, Mary, you have!”

Beat me, she thought. Grab me. Anything is better than that ice-cold stare.

“It’s sometimes when he meets P,” she said, trying to sound as if she were pacifying a spoilt child. “Jack, for God’s sake, he runs Joes, he lives that life, you trained him! I don’t ask him what his tricks are, what he’s doing with who. I’m trained too!”

“And when he came back — how was he?”

“He was absolutely fine. Calm, completely calm. He’d walked it out of himself, I could feel. He was absolutely fine in every way.”

“No phone calls while he was out?”

“No.”

“None after?”

“One. Very late. But we didn’t answer it.”

It was not often she had seen Jack surprised. Now he almost was. “You didn’t answer it?”

“Why should we?”

“Why shouldn’t you? It’s his job, as you said. His father had just died. Why shouldn’t you answer the phone?”

“Magnus said don’t.”

“Why did he say don’t?”

“We were making love!” she said, and felt like the worst whore ever.

Harry was looming in the doorway again. He was wearing blue overalls and had a red face from his exertions. He was holding a long screwdriver in his hand and he looked shamefully joyful.

“Care to pop upstairs a jiffy, Mr. Brotherhood?” he said.

* * *

It’s like our bedroom before the Diplomatic Wives’ jumble sale, with our cast-off clothes all over the bed, she thought. “Magnus, darling, do you really need three worn-out cardigans?” Clothes over the chairs. Over the dressing-table and the towel-horse. My summer blazer that I haven’t worn since Berlin. Magnus’s dinner-jacket hung from the cheval mirror like a drying hide. There was nothing on the floor because there was no floor. Fergus and Georgie had removed the carpet and most of the floorboards underneath it, and stacked them like sandwiches beneath the window, leaving the joists and the odd plank for a walkway. They had taken the bedside lamps to pieces and the bedside furniture and the telephone and the wake-up wireless. In the bathroom, it was the floor again, and the panel to the bath, and the medicine chest, and the sloped attic door that led to the sloped attic where Tom had hidden for a whole half hour last Christmas playing Murder, and nearly died of fright from being so brave. At the basin, Georgie was working her way through Mary’s things. Her face-cream. Her diaphragm.

“What’s yours is his, for them, dear, and vice versa,” said Brotherhood as they paused to stare in from the doorless doorway. “There’s no his and hers, not for them — there can’t be.”

“Not for you either,” she said.

Tom’s bedroom was across the corridor from theirs. His luminous Superman lay sprawled over the bed, together with his thirty-one Smurfs and three Tiggers. Her father’s campaign table was folded against the wall. The toy chest had been pulled to the centre of the floor, revealing the marble fireplace behind. It was a fine fireplace. Works Department had wanted to board it over to reduce draughts but Magnus hadn’t let them. Instead he had bought this old chest to put across the opening, leaving the mantel visible over it, so that Tom could have a bit of old Vienna all his own. Now the fireplace stood free and the girl Georgie knelt respectfully before it in her fifty-guinea freedom fighter’s tunic. And before Georgie lay a white shoe box with its lid off, and inside the shoe box was a rag bundle, then several smaller bundles around it.

“We found it on the ledge up above the grate, sir,” said Fergus. “Where it joins the main flue.”

“Not a speck of dust on it,” said Georgie.

“Reach up and it’s there,” said Fergus. “Dead handy.”

“You don’t even have to shove the chest out really, once you get the knack,” said Georgie.

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood asked.

“It’s obviously something of Tom’s,” said Mary. “Children will hide anything.”

“Seen it before?” Brotherhood repeated.

“No.”

“Know what’s in it?”

“How could I if I haven’t seen it?”

“Easily.”

Brotherhood did not stoop but held his arms out. Georgie passed the box up to him and Brotherhood took it to the table where Tom did his Spirograph and his Lego and his endless drawings of German aeroplanes being shot down against a Plush sunset, with family in the background, everybody waving, everybody absolutely fine. Brotherhood picked out the biggest bundle first and they looked on while he started to unwrap it and changed his mind.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Georgie. “Woman’s fingers.”

She’s one of his mistresses, Mary suddenly realised. She wondered why on earth it hadn’t dawned on her before.

Georgie rose elegantly to her full height, one leg, other leg, and having fixed her straight hair behind her ears, applied her woman’s fingers to unwinding the strips of bedsheet that Magnus had said he wanted for the car, revealing at last a small, clever-looking camera with a clever steel harness round it. And after the camera a thing like a telescope with a bracket on it which, when you pulled it to its full length, made a stand that you could screw the camera to, face downwards and at a fixed distance, for photographing documents on your father-in-law’s campaign table. After the telescope came a succession of films and lenses and filters and rings and other bits of equipment she could not identify offhand. And underneath these a pad of flimsy cloth-paper with columns of numbers on the top sheet and thickly rubberised edges so that you could only see the top page. Mary knew the type of paper. She had worked on it in Berlin. It shrivelled into fern the moment you put a match near it. The pad was half used. Underneath the pad again, an aged cardboard-backed military jotting pad marked “W.D. Property,” standing for War Department and consisting of unwritten-on lined paper of blotchy wartime quality. And inside it, when Brotherhood continued searching, two pressed red flowers of great age, poppies, but just possibly roses, she was not entirely certain, and anyway by then she was shouting.

“It’s for the Firm! It’s for his work for you!”

“Of course it is. I’ll tell Nigel. No problem.”

“Just because he didn’t tell me about it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong! It’s for in case he gets landed with documents in the house! At weekends!” And then, realising what she had said: “It’s for his Joes — if they bring him documents, you fool! If Grant does, and he’s got to turn them round at short notice! What’s so fucking sinister about that?”

Fergus was fingering the half-used pad, turning it over and over, tilting it in the beam of Tom’s Anglepoise lamp.

“Looks more like your Czech, sir, frankly,” said Fergus, tilting the pad to the light. “It could be Russian but I think Czech’s more likely, frankly. Yes,” he said pleasantly as his eye caught some unexplained feature of the rubber edge. “That’s it. Czech. Mind you, that’s only where they’re made. Who’s dishing them out is another matter. Specially these days.”

Brotherhood was more interested in the pressed flowers. He had laid them on his palm and was staring at them as if they told his future.

“I think you’re a bad girl, Mary,” he said deliberately. “I think you know a lot more than you told me. I don’t think he’s in Ireland or the bloody Bahamas. I think that was a lot of smoke. I think he’s a bad man and I’m wondering whether you’re bad together.”

All constraint left her. She screamed “You shit!” and hit at him with her open hand but he blocked her. He put an arm round her and swung her off the ground as if she had no legs left. He carted her across the corridor to Frau Bauer’s bedroom which was the only room that hadn’t so far been ripped apart. He dumped her on the bed and whisked her shoes off exactly as he used to in the squalid safe flat where he did his screwing. He rolled her into the eiderdown, making a straitjacket of it. Then he lay on her, grappling her into submission while Georgie and Fergus looked on. But somehow, amazingly, throughout all these antics and dramatics, Jack Brotherhood had still contrived to keep hold of the two pressed poppies in his left fist, and kept hold of them even when the doorbell went again, one long peal for authority.