A Perfect Spy

CHAPTER 7

Five years ago Jack Brotherhood had shot his Labrador bitch. She was in her basket, rheumatic and shaking; he’d given her the pills but she’d sicked them up, then shamed herself by messing the carpet. And when he threw on his windcheater and took his 12-bore from behind the door, willing her, she looked at him like a criminal because she knew she was finally too sick to find for him. He ordered her to get up but she couldn’t. When he yelled “Seek!” she rolled herself on to her forepaws and lay down again with her head stuck stupidly over the basket. So he put down the gun and got a shovel from the shed and dug her a hole in the field behind the cottage, a bit up the slope with a decent view across the estuary. Then he wrapped her in his favourite tweed jacket and carried her up there and shot her in the back of the head, smashing the spinal cord at the nape, and buried her. After that he sat beside her with a half-bottle of scotch while the Suffolk dew settled itself over him and he decided she had probably had the best death anyone was likely to have in a world not distinguished by good deaths. He didn’t leave a headstone or a coy wood cross for her but he had taken bearings on the spot, using the church tower, the dead willow tree and the windmill, and whenever he passed it by he’d send her a gruff mental greeting, which was as near as he had ever come to pondering on the afterlife, until this empty Sunday morning as he drove through deserted Berkshire lanes and watched the sun lifting on the Downs. “Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle,” Pym had said. “The Firm should have retired him ten years ago.”

And how long ago should we have retired you, my boy? he wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? How many miles have you had in the saddle? How many miles of exposed film have you rolled into how many newspapers? How many miles of newspaper have you dropped into dead letter boxes and tossed over cemetery walls? How many hours have you listened to Prague radio, seated over your code pads?

He lowered his window. The racing air smelt of silage and wood smoke and it thrilled him. Brotherhood was country stock. His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates. With the morning wind pouring into his face, he became a raggedy-arsed boy again, galloping Miss Sumner’s hunter bareback across her park and getting the hiding of his life for it. He was freezing to death in the flat mud of the Suffolk fens, too proud to go home without a catch. He was making his first drop from a barrage balloon at Abingdon Aerodrome and discovering how the wind kept his mouth open after he yelled. I’ll leave when they throw me out. I’ll leave when you and I have had our word, my boy.

He had slept six hours in forty-eight, most of them on a lumpy camp bed in a room set aside for typists with the vapours, but he was not tired. “Can we have you for a minute, Jack?” said Kate, the Fifth Floor vestal, with a look that stayed on him a beat too long. “Bo and Nigel would like another small word.” And when he wasn’t sleeping or answering the telephone or thinking his usual puzzled thoughts about Kate, he had watched his life go by in a kind of bewildered free fall into enemy territory: so this is what it’s like, this is badland and these are my feet spinning towards it like a sycamore twig. He had contemplated Pym in all the stages he had grown up with him, drunk with him and worked with him, including a night in Berlin he had totally forgotten until now when they had ended up screwing a couple of army nurses in adjoining rooms. He had remembered contemplating his own mangled arm on the winter’s day in 1943 when it had hung beside him embellished with three German machine-gun bullets, and he had experienced the same feeling of incredulous detachment.

“If you could only have let us know a little earlier, Jack. If only you could have seen it coming.”

Yes, I’m sorry, Bo. Careless of me.

“But Jack, he was practically your own son, we used to say.”

Yes, we did, didn’t we, Bo. Silly really, I agree.

And Kate’s reproving eyes, as ever, saying, Jack, Jack, where are you?

There had been other cases in his lifetime, naturally. Ever since the war had ended, Brotherhood’s professional life had been regularly turned upside down by the Firm’s latest terminal scandal. While he was Head of Station in Berlin, it had happened to him not twice but three times: night telegrams, flash, for Brotherhood’s eyes only. Phone call — where is he? Jack, get off your elbows and get in here now. Race through wet streets, dead sober. Telegram one, the subject of my immediately following telegram is a member of this service and has now been revealed as a Soviet Intelligence agent. You will inform your official contacts of this in confidence before they read it in the morning papers. Followed by the long wait beside the codebooks while you think: is it him, is it her, is it me? Telegram two, spell a name of six letters, who the hell do I know who’s got six letters? First group M — Christ, it’s Miller! Second group A — oh my God, it’s Mackay! Until up comes a name you never heard of, from a section you didn’t know existed, and when the expurgated case history finally arrives on your desk all you have is a vision of an under-welfared little nancy-boy in the cypher room in Warsaw who thought he was playing the world’s game when what he really wanted was to shaft his employers.

But these distant scandals had been till now the gunfire of a war he was certain would never come his way. He had regarded them not as warnings but as confirmation of everything he disliked about the way the Firm was going: its retreat into bureaucracy and semi-diplomacy, its pandering to American methods and example. By comparison his own hand-picked staff had only looked better to him, and when the witch-hunters had gathered at his door, led by Grant Lederer and his nasty little Mormon bag-carriers, baying for Pym’s blood and brandishing fanciful suspicions based on nothing more than a few computerised coincidences, it was Jack Brotherhood who had banged his open hand upon the conference table and made the water-glasses hop: “Stop this now. There’s not a man or woman in this room who won’t look like a traitor once you start to pull our life stories inside out. A man can’t remember where he was on the night of the tenth? Then he’s lying. He can remember? Then he’s too damn flip with his alibi. You go one more yard with this and everyone who tells the truth will become a barefaced liar, everyone who does a decent job will be working for the other side. You carry on like this and you’ll sink our service better than the Russians ever could. Or is that what you want?”

And God help him, with his reputation and his anger and his connections and with his section’s record, in the modern jargon that he loathed, of low cost and high productivity, he had carried the day, never thinking for a moment that another day might come where he wished he hadn’t.

Closing his window Brotherhood stopped the car in a village where no one knew him. He was too early. He had needed to get out of London, out of touch, away from Kate’s brown stare. Give him one more hopeless damage-limitation conference, one more session on how to keep it from the Americans, one more glance of pity or reproach from Kate, or of plain hatred from Bo’s grey army of suburban mandarins, and possibly, just possibly, Jack Brotherhood might have said things that everyone, but most of all himself, would afterwards have regretted. So he had volunteered for this errand instead, and Bo with rare promptness had said what a good idea, who better? And he knew as soon as he cleared Bo’s doorway that they were as glad to see him go as he was to leave. Except for Kate.

“Just do keep phoning in if you don’t mind,” Bo called after him. “Three-hourly at most. Kate will know the score. Won’t you, Kate?”

Nigel followed him down the corridor. “When you phone in, I want you coming through Secretariat. You’re not to use his direct line and I shall need to speak to you first.”

“And that’s an order,” Brotherhood suggested.

“It’s a temporary licence and it can be withdrawn at any time.”

The church had a wooden porch, a footpath led beside a playing field. He passed a farmyard with brick barns and smelt warm milk on the autumn air.

“We evacuate them in echelons, Jack,” Frankel is saying in his hand-pressed Euro-English. “That’s if we evacuate them at all.”

“And on my say-so,” Nigel adds from the wings.

The room is low and windowless and overlit. A uniformed guard mans the peephole. Spaced along the wall sit Frankel’s greying female assistants at their trestle desks. They have brought thermos flasks and share each other’s cigarettes. They have done it all before, like a day at the races. Frankel is fat and ugly, a Latvian headwaiter. Brotherhood recruited him, Brotherhood promoted him. Now he was taking over Brotherhood’s mess. So it goes. It is three in the morning. It is today, six hours ago.

“Day one, Jack, we move only head agents,” says Frankel with a doctor’s false assurance. “Conger and Watchman in Prague, Voltaire in Budapest, Merryman in Gdansk.”

“When do we begin?” says Brotherhood.

“When Bo waves the flag, and not before,” says Nigel. “We’re still evaluating and we still regard Pym’s loyalties as quite possibly impeccable,” says Nigel, like somebody mastering a tongue-twister.

“We move them very quietly, Jack,” says Frankel. “No goodbyes, no flowers for the neighbours, no finding somewhere for the cat. Day two radio operators, day three the cut-outs, subagents. Day four whoever’s left.”

“How do we reach them?” Brotherhood asks.

“You don’t, we do,” says Nigel. “If and when the Fifth Floor says it’s necessary, which at the moment, I repeat, is pure hypothesis.”

Kate has followed them in. Kate is our widowed English spinster, pale and sculptural and beautiful, who at forty mourns the loves she never had. And Kate is still Kate, he can see it as clear as ever in her eyes.

“Maybe we pick them off the street when they go to work,” Frankel continues. “Maybe we bang on the door, tell a friend, leave a note somewhere. Just anything we think of, so long as it wasn’t done before.”

“That’s where you’ll be able to help if we get that far,” Nigel explains. “Telling us what’s been done before.”

Frankel has paused before a map of Eastern Europe. Brotherhood waits a step behind him. Head agents red, subagents blue. So much easier to kill a pushpin than a man. Still gazing at the map Brotherhood remembers an evening in Vienna. Pym is playing host, Brotherhood is Colonel Peter bringing London’s thanks for ten years’ service. He remembers Pym’s gracious speech in Czech, the champagne and medals, the handshakes, the assurances, the quiet waltzes to the gramophone. And this dumpy couple in brown, he a physicist, she a senior lady in the Czech Ministry of the Interior, lovers in betrayal, their faces glistening with excitement as they whirl round the drawing-room to the strains of Johann Strauss.

“So when do you start?” Brotherhood asks again.

“Jack, that is Bo’s judgment,” Nigel insists, dangerously patient.

“Jack, the Fifth Floor has ruled that the most important thing is to look busy, act natural, keep everything normal,” says Frankel, picking a sheaf of telegrams from his desk. “They use letter boxes? So clear the letter boxes like normal. They got radio? So send radio like normal, stick to all the normal schedules, hope the opposition are listening.”

“That’s the most important thing at the moment,” Nigel says, as if anything Frankel says is invalid until he says it too. “Total normality in all areas. One premature step would be fatal.”

“So would a late one,” Brotherhood says as his blue eyes start to catch fire.

“They’re waiting for you, Jack,” Kate says, meaning, come away, there’s nothing you can do.

Brotherhood does not move. “Do it now,” he tells Frankel. “Take them into the embassies. Broadcast a warning. Abort.”

Nigel doesn’t say a word. Frankel looks to him for help but Nigel has folded his arms and is looking over the shoulder of one of Frankel’s women while she types a signal.

“Jack, no way do we take those Joes into embassies or consulates,” Frankel says, making faces in Nigel’s direction. “Verboten. The most we can do when we get the order from the Fifth Floor is fresh escape papers, is money, transport, a couple of prayers. That right, Nigel?”

“If you get the order,” Nigel corrects him.

“Conger will head east,” Brotherhood says. “His daughter’s at university in Bucharest. He’ll go to her.”

“Okay, so where does he go from Bucharest?” says Frankel.

Brotherhood is nearly shouting. There is nothing Kate can do to stop him. “South into bloody Bulgaria, what do you think! If we give him a date and place, we can put a plane in, hedgehop him into Yugoslavia!”

Now Frankel also lifts his voice. “Jack. Hear me, okay? Nigel, confirm this for me so I don’t sound too negative all the time. No little planes, no embassies, no frontier crashes of any kind. This is not the sixties any more. Not the fifties, not the forties. We don’t drop planes and pilots around Eastern Europe like birdseed. We are not enthusiastic about reception committees for ourselves or our Joes that are laid on by the opposition.”

“He’s got it straight,” Nigel confirms with just enough surprise.

“I got to tell you this, Jack. Your networks are so contaminated at this moment that the Foreign Office wouldn’t even drop them in the trash can, would they, Nigel? You are isolated, Jack. Whitehall’s got to cover itself in polythene before it shakes your hand. Is this correct, Nigel?” Frankel hears himself and stops. He looks to Nigel yet again but receives no comforting word. He catches Brotherhood’s eye and stares at him with a long and unexpected fearfulness, the way we look at monuments and find ourselves contemplating our own mortality. “I take orders, Jack. Don’t look at me that way. Cheers.”

Brotherhood slowly climbs the stairs. Climbing them ahead of him, Kate slows down and trails a couple of fingers for him to take hold of. He pretends he hasn’t seen.

“When will I see you?” she says.

Brotherhood has gone deaf as well.

* * *

The responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of Tom Pym that morning were as heavy as any he had been obliged to face during his first month as a school prefect and captain of Pandas. Today was the first of Pandas’ duty week. Today, and for the six awesome days to follow, Tom must ring the morning bell, assist Matron to supervise showers and call the roll before breakfast. Today being Sunday he must keep charge of letter-writing in the day room, read the Lesson in chapel and inspect the changing rooms for untidiness and impropriety. When evening came at last he must preside over the boys’ committee that receives suggestions about the management of school life and, after editing, submit them to the agonised consideration of Mr. Caird the Headmaster, for Mr. Caird could do nothing lightly and saw all sides of every argument. And when he had somehow got through all this and rung the bell for lights out, there was Monday to wake up to. Last week it had been Lions’ turn for duty and Lions had done well. Lions, Mr. Caird had pronounced in a rare show of conviction, had displayed a democratic approach to power, holding votes and forming committees on every contentious issue. In chapel, waiting for the last lines of the hymn to die, Tom prayed earnestly for his dead grandfather’s soul, for Mr. Caird and for victory in Wednesday’s squash match against St. Saviour’s, Newbury, away, though he feared it would be another humiliating defeat, for Mr. Caird was divided on the merits of athletic competition. But most fervently he prayed that come next Saturday — if Saturday ever did come — Pandas too would earn Mr. Caird’s favour, because Mr. Caird’s disappointment was actually more than Tom could bear.

Tom was a very tall boy and affected already the British administrator’s bobbing walk that characterised his father. His receding hair-line gave him an air of maturity that may have accounted for his advancement to high position in the school. To watch him, hands linked behind his back, detach himself from the prefect’s pew, step into the aisle, duck his head at the altar and mount the two steps to the lectern, you could have been forgiven for wondering whether this was a pupil at all and not a member of Mr. Caird’s impressively youthful staff. Only his froggy voice as he barked the day’s text betrayed the changeling inside the senatorial exterior. Tom heard little of what he was reading. The Lesson was the first he had read and he had practised it till he knew it by heart. Yet now that he came to perform it, the red and black print before him had neither sound nor meaning. Only the sight of his chewed thumbs stuck either side of him on the lectern, and the white head floating above them in the back row of the congregation, held him to the world at all. Without them, he decided, he could have taken off, smack through the chapel ceiling and into the sky, and thereafter levitated, like his gas balloon on Commemoration Day, which flew all the way to Maidenhead and landed with his name on it in an old lady’s back garden, earning him five pounds in book tokens and a letter from her saying she too had a son called Tom, who worked at Lloyd’s.

“I have trodden the winepress alone,” he bellowed to his surprise. “And of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury.” The threat alarmed him and he wondered why he had uttered it and to whom. “And their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”

Still reading, feeling the backs of his knees batting against his trousers, Tom considered a number of other matters that turned out to be weighing on his mind, some of which were new to him until this moment. He had no expectation any more that his mind would be ruled by what was going on around it, even in work. In Friday’s gym class he had found himself thinking out a problem of Latin grammar. In yesterday’s Latin he had worried about his mother’s drinking. And in the middle of French construe he had discovered that he was no longer in love with Becky Lederer, despite their ardent correspondence, but preferred instead one of the Bursar’s daughters. Under the pressures of high office his mind had become a slice of undersea cable like the one in the science lab. First there was this bunch of wires, all carrying their proper messages and doing their appointed jobs; and then, swimming around them like a shoal of invisible fish, ran a whole lot more messages which for some reason did not need wires at all. And that was how his mind felt now, while he honked out the sacred words in his deepest possible voice only to hear them tinkling like cracked bells in a distant room.

“For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come,” he said.

He thought of gas balloons and of the Tom who worked in Lloyd’s, and of the forthcoming apocalypse when he failed his common entrance examination, and of the Bursar’s daughter when she rode her bicycle with her blouse flattened against her chest by the wind. And he fretted about whether Carter Major, who was Pandas’ vice-captain, had the qualities of democratic leadership to handle afternoon kickabout. But there was one thought he refused to have at all because really all these other thoughts were surrogates for it. There was one thought he could not put in words or even pictures, because it was so bad that even thinking it could turn it into truth.

“How’s your beef, son?” Jack Brotherhood asked, what seemed about twenty seconds later, over lunch in the Digby Hotel where they always went.

“Super, Uncle Jack, thank you,” said Tom.

Otherwise they ate in the silence that they mostly observed till lunch was past. Brotherhood had his Sunday Telegraph, Tom a fantasy novel he was reading over and over again, because it was a book in which everything came right and other books could be dangerous. Nobody understands better than Uncle Jack how you take people out from school, Tom decided, while he read and ate and thought of his mother. Not even his father had such a clear idea of how everything should be the same each time yet exquisitely different in tiny ways. How you had to be completely calm and unfussed yet draw out the day by doing masses of different things until the last moment. How school was a place that for most of the day must not exist, so that there was never any question of going back there. Only during the last countdown must it be sufficiently reconstructed to make return a possibility.

“Want a second?”

“No, thank you.”

“More Yorkshire?”

“Yes, please. A bit.”

Brotherhood lifted his eyebrows to the waiter and the waiter came at once, which was what waiters did for Uncle Jack.

“Heard from your father?”

Tom did not answer at once because his eyes suddenly hurt and he couldn’t breathe.

“Here, now,” said Brotherhood softly, putting down his newspaper. “What’s this, then?”

“It’s just the Lesson,” said Tom, fighting away his tears. “It’s all right now.”

“You made a damn good job of reading that Lesson. Anyone tells you different, knock him down.”

“It was the wrong day’s,” Tom explained, still fighting to get back above water. “I should have turned to the next bookmark and I forgot.”

“Bugger the wrong day’s,” Brotherhood growled, so emphatically that the old couple at the next table swung their heads round at him. “If yesterday’s Lesson was any good, it won’t do anyone an ounce of harm to hear it twice. Have another ginger beer.”

Tom nodded and Brotherhood ordered it before once more taking up his Sunday Telegraph. “Probably didn’t even understand it the first time anyway,” he said with contempt.

But the real trouble was Tom had not read the wrong Lesson; he had read the right one. He knew very well he had, and he had a suspicion Uncle Jack knew it too. He just needed something easier to cry about than the fish that were swimming round the cable in his head and the thought he refused to have.

They agreed to do without pudding so as not to waste the fine weather.

Sugarloaf Hill was a chalky hump in the Berkshire Downs with Ministry of Defence barbed wire round it and a warning to the public to keep out, and probably in all Tom’s life there was nowhere better in the world to be, except at home in Plush at lambing time. Not Lech and skiing with his father, not Vienna and riding with his mother: nowhere he had ever been or dreamed of was as private, as amazingly privileged, as this secret hilltop compound with barbed wire to keep out enemies, where Jack Brotherhood and Tom Pym, godfather and godson and the best friends ever, could take turns to loose off clay pigeons from the launcher, and shoot them down or miss them with Tom’s 20-bore. The first time they had come here, Tom hadn’t believed it. “It’s all locked, Uncle Jack,” he had objected as Uncle Jack stopped the car. It had been a good day till then. Now suddenly it had gone all wrong. They had driven ten miles by the map and to his chagrin ended at a pair of high white gates that were locked and forbidden by order. The day was over. He had wished he could be back at school again, doing his voluntary-punishment prep.

“Then go over and yell ‘Open sesame!’ at it,” Uncle Jack had advised, handing Tom a key from his pocket. And the next thing was, the white gates of authority had closed again behind them and they were special people with a special pass to be up here on the hilltop with the boot open, pulling out the rusted launcher that Uncle Jack had kept secret all through lunch. And the next thing after that was that Tom scored nine clays out of twenty, and Uncle Jack nineteen, because Uncle Jack was the best shot ever, the best at everything, although he was so old, and he wouldn’t give away a match to please anybody, not even Tom. If Tom ever beat Uncle Jack, he would beat him fair, which was what they both wanted without needing to say it. And it was what Tom wanted more than anything today: a normal exchange, a normal competition, with normal conversation, the kind that Uncle Jack was brilliant at. He wanted to hide his worst thoughts in a deep hole and not have to show them to anybody ever until he died for England.

It was the outdoors that set Tom free. Uncle Jack had nothing to do with it. He didn’t like too much talk and certainly not about things that were private. It was the sense of daytime that was like a resurrection. It was the din of gunfire, the clatter of the October wind that buffeted his cheeks and slid inside his school pullover. Suddenly these things got him talking like a man instead of whimpering under the bedclothes with the stuffed animals which progressive Mr. Caird encouraged. Down in the river valley there had been no wind at all, just a tired autumn sun and brown leaves along the towpath. But up here on the bare chalk hilltop the wind was going like a train through a tunnel, taking Tom with it. It was clanking and laughing in the new Ministry of Defence pylon that had gone up since they had last come here.

“If we shoot the pylon down we’ll let the bloody Russians in!” Uncle Jack yelled at him through cupped hands. “Don’t want to do that, do we?”

“No!”

“All right, then. What do we do?”

“Pitch the launcher right next to the pylon and shoot away from it!” Tom had shouted back joyfully, and as he shouted he felt the last bits of worry go out of his chest, and his shoulders settle on his back, and he knew that with a wind like this whipping over the hilltop he could tell anything he wanted to anybody. Uncle Jack launched ten clays for him and he brought down eight with eleven cartridges, which was his absolute best yet considering the wind. And when it was Tom’s turn to launch, Uncle Jack had a fight on his hands just to match him. But match him he did and Tom loved him for it. He didn’t want to beat Uncle Jack. His father maybe, but not Uncle Jack; there would be nothing left. In his second ten Tom did less well but he didn’t mind because his arms were aching, which wasn’t his fault. But Uncle Jack stayed steady as a castle. Even when he was reloading, the white head stayed forward to meet the rising butt.

“Fourteen eighteen to you,” Tom shouted as he galloped about collecting empty cartridges. “Well shot!” And then, just as loud and cheerful: “And Dad’s all right, is he?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Brotherhood shouted back.

“He seemed a bit down when he came to see me after Granddad’s funeral, that’s all.”

“I should think he bloody well was down. How would you feel if you had just buried your old man?”

Still shouting in the wind, both of them. Small talk while they loaded the 20-bore and cranked back the launcher for another go.

“He talked about freedom all the time!” Tom yelled. “He said nobody could ever give it to us, we’ve got to grab it for ourselves. I got rather bored with it, actually.”

Uncle Jack was so busy reloading that Tom even wondered whether he had heard. Or if he had, whether he was interested.

“He’s dead right,” said Brotherhood snapping the gun shut. “Patriotism’s a dirty word these days.”

Tom released the clay and watched it curl and burst to powder under Uncle Jack’s perfect aim.

“He wasn’t talking about patriotism exactly,” Tom explained, delving for another couple of cartridges.

“Oh?”

“I think he was telling me that if I was unhappy I should run away. He said it in his letter too. It’s sort—”

“Well?”

“It’s as if he wanted me to do something he hadn’t done himself when he was at the school. It’s a bit weird actually.”

“I shouldn’t think it’s weird at all. He’s testing you, that’s all. Saying the door’s open if you want to bolt. More like a gesture of trust by the sound of it. No boy had a better father, Tom.”

Tom fired and missed.

“What do you mean letter, anyway?” said Brotherhood. “I thought he came and saw you.”

“He did. But he wrote to me as well. A great long letter. I just thought it was weird,” he said again, unable to get away from a favourite new adjective.

“All right, he was cut up. What’s wrong with that? His old man dies, he sits down and writes to his son. You should feel honoured — good shot, boy. Good shot.”

“Thanks,” said Tom and looked on proudly while Uncle Jack marked a hit on his scorecard. Uncle Jack always kept the score.

“That’s not what he said, though,” Tom added awkwardly. “He wasn’t cut up. He was pleased.”

“He wrote that, did he?”

“He said Granddad had gobbled up the natural humanity in him and he didn’t want to gobble it up in me.”

“That’s just another way of being cut up,” said Brotherhood, unbothered. “Your dad ever talk about a secret place, by the by? Somewhere he could find his well-earned peace and quiet, ever?”

“Not really.”

“He had one though, didn’t he.”

“Not really.”

“Where is it?”

“He said I was never to tell anyone.”

“Then don’t,” said Uncle Jack firmly.

Suddenly, after that, talking about one’s father became the necessary function of a democratic prefect. Mr. Caird had said it was the duty of people of privilege to sacrifice what they held most dear in life, and Tom loved his father beyond bearing. He felt Brotherhood’s gaze on him and was pleased to have aroused his interest even though it did not seem to be particularly approving.

“You’ve known him a very long time, haven’t you, Uncle Jack?” said Tom, getting into the car.

“If thirty-five years is a long time.”

“It is,” said Tom, for whom a week was still an age. Inside the car there was suddenly no wind at all. “So if Dad’s all right,” he said with false boldness as he buckled on his seat belt, “why are the police looking for him? That’s what I want to know.”

* * *

“Going to tell our fortunes today, Mary Lou?” Uncle Jack asked.

“Not today, darling, I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re always in the mood,” said Uncle Jack, and the two of them had a huge laugh while Tom blushed.

Mary Lou was a gypsy, Uncle Jack said, though Tom thought her more like a pirate. She was fat-bottomed and black-haired and had false lips drawn over her mouth like Frau Bauer in Vienna. She cooked cakes and served cream teas in a wooden café at the edge of the Common. Tom asked for poached eggs on toast and the eggs were creamy and fresh like the eggs at Plush. Uncle Jack had a pot of tea and a piece of her best fruitcake. He seemed to have forgotten everything Tom had been talking about, which Tom was grateful for, because he was feeling headachey from the fresh air and embarrassed by his own thoughts. It was two hours and eight minutes till he had to ring the bell for evensong. He was thinking he might take his father’s advice and run away.

“So what was all this about the police again?” said Brotherhood a little vaguely, long after Tom had decided he had forgotten or not heard.

“They came and saw Caird. Then Caird sent for me.”

“Mr. Caird, son,” Brotherhood corrected him perfectly kindly and took a grateful pull of tea. “When?”

“On Friday. After house rugger. Mr. Caird sent for me and there was this man in a raincoat sitting in Mr. Caird’s armchair, and he said he was from Scotland Yard about Dad, and did I by any chance have his leave address because in his absentmindedness after Granddad’s funeral Dad had taken leave and not told anyone where he was.”

“Bollocks,” Brotherhood said after a long time.

“It’s true, sir. It really is.”

“You said they.”

“I meant he.”

“Height?”

“Five foot ten.”

“Age?”

“Forty.”

“Colour of hair?”

“Like mine.”

“Clean-shaven?”

“Yes.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

It was a game they had played often in the past.

“Car?”

“He took a taxi from the station.”

“How do you know?”

“Mr. Mellor brought him. He takes me to cello and works from the station cab-rank.”

“Be accurate, boy. He came in Mr. Mellor’s car. Did he tell you he’d come by train?”

“No.”

“Did Mellor?”

“No.”

“So who says he was a policeman?”

“Mr. Caird, sir. When he introduced me.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A suit, sir. Grey.”

“Did he give his rank?”

“Inspector.”

Brotherhood smiled. A wonderful, comforting affectionate smile. “You silly chump, he was a Foreign Office inspector. That’s just a flunkey from your dad’s shop. That’s not a policeman, son; that’s a half-arsed clerk from Personnel Department with too little to do. Caird got it wrong as usual.”

Tom could have kissed him. He nearly did. He straightened up and felt about nine feet taller, and he wanted to bury his face in the thick tweed of Uncle Jack’s sports coat. Of course he wasn’t a policeman! He didn’t talk like a policeman, he didn’t feel like a policeman, he didn’t have big feet or short hair like a policeman, or a policeman’s way of being separate from you even when he was being nice. It’s all right, Tom told himself in glory. Uncle Jack’s made it right, the way he always can.

Brotherhood was holding out his handkerchief and Tom scrubbed his eyes with it.

“So what did you tell him anyway?” Brotherhood said. And Tom explained that he didn’t know where his father was either, he’d talked about losing himself in Scotland for a few days before returning to Vienna. Which had made Dad somehow seem at fault, a sort of criminal or worse. And when Tom had told his Uncle Jack everything else he remembered about the interview, the questions, and the telephone number in case Dad surfaced — Tom didn’t have it, but Mr. Caird did — Uncle Jack went to the phone in Mary Lou’s parlour and rang Mr. Caird, and got an extension for Tom till nine o’clock, on the grounds that there were family matters that needed talking about.

“But what about my bells?” said Tom in alarm.

“Carter Major’s doing them,” said Uncle Jack, who understood absolutely everything.

He must have rung London too, because he took a long time and gave Mary Lou an extra five pounds to fill what he called her Christmas stocking, which had them both in fits again, and this time Tom joined in.

* * *

How they came to be talking about Corfu, Tom was afterwards never sure and perhaps there was no real path to their conversation any more; it was just chat about what they had both been up to since they had last met, which after all was before the summer holidays so there was masses to talk about if you were in a talking mood. And Tom was; he hadn’t talked like this for ages, maybe ever, but Uncle Jack had the ease, he had that mixture of tolerance and discipline that for Tom was the perfect blend, for he loved to feel the strength of Uncle Jack’s frontiers as well as the safe ground inside.

“How’s your confirmation going?” Brotherhood had asked.

“All right, thanks.”

“You’re of an age now, Tom. Got to face it. In some countries you’d be in uniform already.”

“I know.”

“Work still a problem?”

“A bit, sir.”

“Still got your eye on Sandhurst?”

“Yes, sir. And my uncle’s regiment says they’d take me if I do all right.”

“Well you’ll have to swot, won’t you?”

“I’m really trying actually.”

Then Uncle Jack drew nearer and his voice dropped. “I’m not sure I should tell you this, son. But I’m going to anyway because I think you’re ready to keep a secret. Can you do that?”

“I’ve got lots of secrets I’ve never told to anyone, sir.”

“Your father is rather a secret man himself actually. I expect you knew that, didn’t you?”

“You are too, aren’t you?”

“Quite a great man as well, he is. But he’s got to keep it quiet. For his country.”

“And for you,” said Tom.

“A lot of his life is blocked off completely. You could almost say from human gaze.”

“Does Mummy know?”

“In principle, yes, she does. In detail, next to nothing. That’s the way we work. And if your father has ever given the impression of lying, or being evasive, less than truthful sometimes, you can bet your boots it was his work and his loyalty that were the reason. It’s a strain for him. It is for all of us. Secrets are a strain.”

“Is it dangerous?” Tom asked.

“Can be. That’s why we give him bodyguards. Like boys on motorbikes who follow him round Greece and hang about outside his house.”

“I saw them!” Tom declared excitedly.

“Like tall thin men with moustaches who come up to him at cricket matches—”

“He did, he did! He had a straw hat!”

“And sometimes what your dad does is so secret he has to disappear completely. And not even the bodyguards can have his address. I know. But the rest of the world doesn’t and it mustn’t. And if that inspector comes to you again, or to Mr. Caird, or if anybody else does, you must tell them whatever you know and report to me immediately afterwards. I’m going to give you a special phone number and have a special word with Mr. Caird too. He deserves a lot of help, your father does. And gets it.”

“I’m really glad,” said Tom.

“Now then. That letter of his he wrote to you. The long one that came after he’d gone. Did it talk about things like that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read it all. There was a whole lot of stuff about Sefton Boyd’s penknife and some writing in the staff loo.”

“Who’s Sefton Boyd?”

“He’s a boy in the school. He’s my friend.”

“Is he your dad’s friend too?”

“No, but his father was. His father was in the school too.”

“Now what have you done with this letter?”

Punished himself with it. Squidged it up till it was tight and prickly and kept it in his trousers pocket where it jabbed his thigh. But Tom didn’t say that. He just handed the remnants gratefully to Uncle Jack, who promised to take proper care of them and talk everything over with him next time — if there was anything that needed talking over, which Uncle Jack very much doubted that there would be.

“Got the envelope, have you?”

Tom hadn’t.

“Where did he post it from then? There’s a clue there, I expect, if we look for it.”

“The postmark was Reading,” said Tom.

“What day?”

“The Tuesday,” said Tom unhappily, “but it could have been after post on Monday. I thought he was going back to Vienna on Monday afternoon. If he didn’t go to Scotland, that is.”

But Uncle Jack didn’t seem to hear because he was talking about Greece again, playing what the two of them called report writing about this weedy fellow with a moustache who had shown up at the cricket ground in Corfu.

“I expect you were worried about him, weren’t you, son? You thought he was up to no good with your dad, I expect, although he was so friendly. I mean, if they knew each other that well, why didn’t your dad ask him home to meet your mum? I can see that would have bothered you on reflection. You didn’t think it very nice your dad should have a secret life on Mum’s doorstep.”

“I suppose I didn’t,” Tom admitted, marvelling as ever at Uncle Jack’s omniscience. “He held Dad’s arm.”

They had returned to the Digby. In the great joy of his release from worry, Tom had rediscovered his appetite and was having a steak and chips to fill the gap. Brotherhood had ordered himself a whisky.

“Height?” said Brotherhood, back at their special game.

“Six foot.”

“All right, well done. Six foot exactly is correct. Colour of hair?”

Tom hesitated. “Sort of mousy fawny with stripes,” he said.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“He wore a straw hat. It was hard to see.”

“I know he wore a straw hat. That’s why I’m asking you. Colour of hair?”

“Brown,” said Tom finally. “Brown with the sun on it. And a big forehead like a genius.”

“Now how the hell does the sun get under the brim of a hat?”

“Grey brown,” said Tom.

“Then say so. Two points only. Hatband?”

“Red.”

“Oh dear.”

“It was red.”

“Keep trying.”

“It was red, red, red!”

“Three points. Colour of beard?”

“He hasn’t got a beard. He’s got a shaggy moustache and thick eyebrows like yours but not so bushy, and crinkly eyes.”

“Three points. Build?”

“Stoopy and hobbly.”

“What the hell’s hobbly?”

“Like chumpy. Chumpy’s when the sea is choppy and bumpy. Hobbly is when he walks fast and hobbles.”

“You mean limps.”

“Yes.”

“Say so. Which leg?”

“Left.”

“One more try?”

“Left.”

“Certain?”

“Left!”

“Three points. Age?”

“Seventy.”

“Don’t be damn stupid.”

“He’s old!”

“He’s not seventy. I’m not seventy. I’m not sixty. Well only just. Is he older than me?”

“The same.”

“Carry anything?”

“A briefcase. A grey thing like elephant skin. And he was stringy like Mr. Toombs.”

“Who’s Toombs?”

“Our gym master. He teaches aikido and geography. He’s killed people with his feet, though he’s not supposed to.”

“All right, stringy like Mr. Toombs, carried an elephant skin briefcase. Two points. Another time, omit the subjective reference.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Toombs. You know him, I don’t. Don’t compare one person I don’t know with another I don’t know.”

“You said you knew him,” said Tom, very excited to catch Uncle Jack out.

“I do. I’m fooling. Did he have a car, your man?”

“Volvo. Hired from Mr. Kaloumenos.”

“How do you know that?”

“He hires it to everyone. He goes down to the harbour and hangs about and if anyone wants to hire a car Mr. Kaloumenos gives them his Volvo.”

“Colour?”

“Green. And it’s got a bashed wing and a Corfu registration and a fox’s tail from the aerial and a—”

“It’s red.”

“It’s green!”

“No points,” said Brotherhood firmly, to Tom’s outrage.

“Why not?”

Brotherhood pulled a wolfish smile. “It wasn’t his car, was it? How do you know it was the bloke with the moustache who hired it when two other blokes were riding in it? You lost your objectivity, son.”

“He was in charge!”

“You don’t know that. You’re guessing it. You could start a war, making up things like that. Ever met an Auntie Poppy at all, son?”

“No, sir.”

“Uncle?”

Tom giggled. “No, sir.”

“A Mr. Wentworth a name to you?”

“No, sir.”

“No bells at all?”

“No, sir. I thought it was a place in Surrey.”

“Well done, son. Never make it up if you think you don’t know and ought to. That’s the rule.”

“You were teasing again, weren’t you?”

“Maybe I was at that. When did your dad say he’d see you again?”

“He didn’t.”

“Does he ever?”

“Not really.”

“Then there’s no fuss, is there?”

“It’s just the letter.”

“What about the letter?”

“It’s as if he’s dead.”

“Bollocks. You’re imagining. Want me to tell you something else you know? That secret hideaway of your dad’s that he’s gone to. It’s all right. We know about it. Did he give you the address?”

“No.”

“Name of the nearest Scottish town?”

“No. He just said Scotland. On the sea in Scotland. A place to write where he’s safe from everyone.”

“He’s told you all he can, Tom. He’s not allowed to tell you any more. How many rooms has he got?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Who does his shopping then?”

“He didn’t say. He’s got a super landlady. She’s old.”

“He’s a good man. And a wise man. And she’s a good woman. One of us. Now don’t you worry any more.” Uncle Jack glanced sideways at his watch. “Here. Finish that up and order yourself a ginger beer. I need to see a man about a dog.” Still smiling, he strode to the door marked toilets and telephone. Tom was nothing if not an observer. Points of happy colour on Uncle Jack’s cheeks. A sense of merriness like his own and everybody absolutely fine.

* * *

Brotherhood had a wife and a house in Lambeth, and in theory he could have gone to them. He had another wife in his cottage in Suffolk, divorced it was true but given notice willing to oblige. He had a daughter married to a solicitor in Pinner and he wished them both to the devil and it was mutual. Nevertheless they would have had him as a duty. And there was a useless son who scratched a living on the stage and if Brotherhood was feeling charitable towards him, which oddly enough these days he sometimes was, and if he could stomach the squalor and the smell of pot, which he sometimes could, he would have been welcome enough to the heap of greasy coverlets that Adrian called his spare bed. But tonight and for every other night until he had had his word with Pym he wanted none of them. He preferred the exile of his stinking little safe flat in Shepherd Market with sooty pigeons humping each other on the parapet and the tarts doing sentry go along the pavement below him, the way they used to in the war. Periodically the Firm tried to take the place away from him or deduct the rent from his salary at source. The desk jockeys hated him for it and said it was his fuck-hutch, which occasionally it was. They resented his claims for hospitality booze and cleaners he didn’t have. But Brotherhood was hardier than all of them and more or less they knew it.

“Research have turned up more stuff about the use of newspapers by Czech Intelligence,” Kate said into the pillow. “But none of it’s conclusive.”

Brotherhood took a long pull of his vodka. It was two in the morning. They had been here an hour. “Don’t tell me. The great spy pricks the letters of his message with a pin and posts the newspaper to his spymaster. Said spymaster holds the newspaper to the light, and reads the plans for Armageddon. They’ll be using semaphore next.”

She lay white and luminous beside him on the little bed, a forty-year-old Cambridge débutante who had lost her way. The grey-pink glow through the grimy curtains cut her into classic fragments. Here a thigh, here a calf, here the cone of a breast or the knifeline of a flank. She had turned her back to him, one leg slightly bent. God damn it, what does she want of me, this sad, beautiful bridge-player of the Fifth Floor, with her air of lost love and her prim carnality? After seven years of her, Brotherhood still had no idea. He’d be out touring the stations, he’d be in Bongabonga land. He’d not speak or write to her for months. Yet he’d hardly unpacked his toothbrush before she was in his arms, demanding him with her sad and hungry eyes. Does she have a hundred of us — are we her fighter pilots, claiming her favours each time we limp home from another mission? Or am I the only one who storms the statue?

“And Bo’s called in some top shrink to join the feast,” she said, in her impeccable vowels. “Somebody who specialises in harmless nervous breakdowns. They’ve thrown Pym’s dossier at him and told him to assemble the profile of a loyal Englishman under severe stress who is arousing anxiety in other people, particularly Americans.”

“He’ll be calling in a medium next,” said Brotherhood.

“They’ve checked flights to the Bahamas, Scotland and Ireland. That’s as well as everywhere else. They’ve checked ships, car-hire firms and goodness knows what. They’ve got warrants running on every telephone he ever used and a blanket warrant for the rest. They’ve cancelled leave and weekends for all transcribers and put the surveillance teams on twenty-four-hour alert, and they still haven’t told anybody what it’s about. The canteen’s a funeral parlour, nobody talking to anybody. They’re questioning anyone who shared an office with him or bought a secondhand car from him, they’ve turned the tenants out of the Pyms’ house in Dulwich and stripped the place from top to bottom pretending to be woodworm experts. Now Nigel’s talking of moving the whole search team to a safe house in Norfolk Street, it’s getting so big. Including the help, that’s about a hundred and fifty staff. What’s in the burnbox?”

“Why?”

“There’s a shadow over it. Not in front of the children. Bo and Nigel clam up as soon as anybody mentions it.”

“Press?” said Brotherhood, as if he had answered her question instead of deflecting it.

“Sewn up as usual. From TitBits downwards. Bo had lunch with the editors yesterday. He’s already written their leaders for them in case anything gets out. How rumours weaken our security. Uninformed speculation as the true Enemy Within. Nigel’s been leaning his full weight on the radio and television people.”

“All two stone of it. What about the phoney copper?”

“Whoever called on Tom’s Headmaster wasn’t family. He wasn’t from the Firm and he wasn’t police.”

“Maybe he was from the competition. They don’t have to ask us first, do they?”

“Bo’s terror is that the Americans are launching their own manhunt.”

“If he’d been American there’d have been three of him. He was a cheeky Czech. That’s the way they work. Same as they used to fly in the war.”

“The Headmaster describes him as up-market English, not a whiff of foreign. He didn’t come or leave by train. He gave his name as Inspector Baring of Special Branch. There isn’t one. The taxi bill return between the station and the school was twelve pounds and he didn’t ask the driver for a receipt. Imagine a policeman not wanting a receipt for twelve pounds. He left a fake visiting card. They’re looking for the printer, the paper-maker and for all I know the ink manufacturers, but they won’t bring in police, the competition or liaison. They’ll make any enquiry they can think of as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses.”

“And the London phone number he gave?”

“Bogus.”

“I could nearly laugh about that if humour was my mood. What does Bo think about the moustachioed gentleman with a handbag who holds Pym’s arm at cricket matches?”

“He refuses to take a view. He says if we all had our friends checked at cricket matches, we’d have no friends and no cricket. He’s drafted extra girls to comb the Czech personalities index and he’s signalled Athens Station to send someone to Corfu to talk to the car-hire man. It’s delay and pray, and Magnus please come home.”

“Where do I stand? In the corner?”

“They’re terrified you’ll pull down the Temple.”

“I thought Pym had done that already.”

“Then perhaps it’s guilty contact,” Kate said in her crisp Queen Bee voice.

Brotherhood took another long swallow of vodka. “If they’d get the bloody networks out. If they’d do the obvious thing, just for once.”

“They won’t do anything that might alert the Americans. They’d rather lie all the way to the grave. ‘We’ve had three major traitors in three minor years. One more and we might as well admit the party’s over.’ That’s Bo speaking.”

“So the Joes will die for the Special Relationship. I like that. So will the Joes. They’ll understand.”

“Will they find him?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe’s not enough. I’m asking you, Jack. Will they find him? Will you?”

She sounded suddenly imperious and urgent. She took the glass from his hand and drank the rest of his vodka while he watched her. She leaned over the side of the bed and fished a cigarette from her handbag. She handed him the matches and he lit it for her.

“Bo’s put a lot of monkeys in front of a lot of typewriters,” Brotherhood said, still watching her intently. “Maybe one of them will come up with the goods. I didn’t know you smoked, Kate.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re drinking well too, I’m pleased to see. I don’t remember you hitting the vodka as hard as this, I’m sure I don’t. Who taught you to drink vodka that way?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“More to the point is why should you? You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you? Something I don’t think I like at all. I thought you were spying for Bo for a minute there. I thought you were doing a bit of a Jezebel on me. Then I thought, no, she’s trying to tell me something. She’s attempting a small and intimate confession.”

“He’s a blasphemer.”

“Who is, dear?”

“Magnus.”

“Oh he is, is he? Magnus a blasphemer. Now why is that?”

“Hold me, Jack.”

“Like hell I will.” He pulled away from her and saw that what he had mistaken for arrogance was a stoical acceptance of despair. Her sad eyes stared straight at him, and her face was set in resignation.

“‘ I love you, Kate,’” she said. “‘ Get me clear of this and I’ll marry you and we’ll live happily ever after.’”

Brotherhood took her cigarette and drew on it.

“‘ I’ll dump Mary. We’ll go and live abroad. France. Morocco. Who cares?’ Phone calls from the other end of the earth. ‘I rang to say I love you.’ Flowers, saying ‘I love you.’ Cards. Little notes folded into things, shoved under the door, personal for my eyes only in top-secret envelopes. ‘I’ve lived too long with the what-ifs. I want action, Kate. You’re my escape-line. Help me. I love you. M.’”

Once again, Brotherhood waited.

“‘ I love you,’” she repeated. “He kept saying it. Like a ritual he was trying to believe in. ‘I love you.’ I suppose he thought if he said it to enough people enough times, one day it might be true. It wasn’t. He never loved a woman in his life. We were enemy, all of us. Touch me, Jack!”

To his surprise he felt a wave of kinship overcome him. He drew her to him and held her tightly to his chest.

“Is Bo wise to any of this?” he said.

He could feel the sweat collecting on his back. He could smell Pym’s nearness in the crevices of her body. She rolled her head against him but he gently shook her, making her say it aloud: Bo knows nothing. No, Jack. Bo’s got no idea.

“Magnus wasn’t interested till he was calling the whole game,” she said. “He could have had me any time. That wasn’t enough for him. ‘Wait for me, Kate. I’m going to cut the cable and be free. Kate, it’s me, where are you?’ I’m here, you idiot, or I wouldn’t be answering the phone, would I?. . He doesn’t have affairs. He has lives. We’re on separate planets for him. Places he can call while he floats through space. You know his favourite photograph of me?”

“I don’t think I do, Kate,” Brotherhood said.

“I’m naked on a beach in Normandy. We’d stolen the weekend. I’ve got my back to him, I’m walking into the sea. I didn’t even know he had a camera.”

“You’re a beautiful girl, Kate. I could get quite hot about a picture like that myself,” said Brotherhood, pulling back her hair so that he could see her face.

“He loved it better than he loved me. With my back to him I was anyone — his girl on the beach — his dream. I left his fantasies intact. You’ve got to get me out of it, Jack.”

“How deep in are you?”

“Deep enough.”

“Write him any letters yourself?”

She shook her head.

“Do him any little favours? Bend the rules for him? You better tell me, Kate.” He waited, feeling the increasing pressure of her head against him. “Can you hear me?” She nodded. “I’m dead, Kate. But you’ve got a while to go. If it ever comes out that you and Pym so much as had a strawberry milkshake together at McDonald’s while you were waiting for your bus home, they will shave your head and post you to Economic Development before you can say Jack anybody. You know that, don’t you?”

Another nod.

“What did you do for him? Steal a few secrets, did you? Something juicy out of Bo’s own plate?” She shook her head. “Come on, Kate. He fooled me too. I’m not going to throw you to the wolves. What did you do for him?”

“There was an entry in his P.F.,” she said.

“So?”

“He wanted it taken out. It was from long ago. An army report from his National Service time in Austria.”

“When did you do this?”

“Early. We’d been going for about a year. He was back from Prague.”

“And you did it for him. You raided his file?”

“It was trivial, he said. He was very young at the time. A boy still. He’d been running some low-grade Joe into Czechoslovakia. A frontier crosser, I think. Really small stuff. But there was this girl called Sabina who’d got in on the act and wanted to marry him and defected. I didn’t listen to it very clearly. He said if anybody picked through his file and came on the episode he’d never make it to the Fifth Floor.”

“Well that’s not the end of the world now, is it?”

She shook her head.

“Joe have a name, did he?” Brotherhood asked.

“A codename. Greensleeves.”

“That’s fanciful. I like that. Greensleeves. An all-English Joe. You fished the paper from the file and what did you do with it? Just tell it to me, Kate. It’s out now. Let’s go.”

“I stole it.”

“All right. What did you do with it?”

“That’s what he asked me.”

“When?”

“He rang me.”

“When?”

“Last Monday evening. After he was supposed to have left for Vienna.”

“What time? Come on, Kate, this is good. What time did he ring you?”

“Ten. Later. Ten-thirty. Earlier. I was watching News at Ten.”

“What bit?”

“Lebanon. The shelling. Tripoli or somewhere. I turned the sound down as soon as I heard him and the shelling went on and on like a silent movie. ‘I needed to hear your voice, Kate. I’m sorry for everything. I rang to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t a bad man, Kate. It wasn’t all pretend.’”

“Wasn’t?”

“Yes. Wasn’t. He was conducting a retrospective. Wasn’t. I said it’s just your father’s death, you’ll be all right, don’t cry. Don’t talk as if you’re dead yourself. Come round. Where are you? I’ll come to you. He said he couldn’t. Not any more. Then about his file. I should feel free to tell everyone what I’d done, not try to shield him any more. But to give him a week. ‘One week, Kate. It’s not a lot after all those years.’ Then, had I still got the paper I took out for him? Had I destroyed it, kept a copy?”

“What did you say?”

She went to the bathroom and returned with the embroidered spongebag she kept her kit in. She drew a folded square of brown paper from it and handed it to him.

“Did you give him a copy?”

“No.”

“Did he ask for one?”

“No. I wouldn’t have done that. I expect he knew. I took it and I said I’d taken it and he should believe me. I thought I’d put it back one day. It was a link.”

“Where was he when he rang you on Monday?”

“A phone box.”

“Reverse charges?”

“Middle distance. I reckoned four fifty-pence pieces. Mind you, that could still be London, knowing him. We were on for about twenty minutes but a lot of the time he couldn’t speak.”

“Describe. Come on, old love. You’ll only have to do it once, I promise you, so you might as well do it thoroughly.”

“I said, ‘Why aren’t you in Vienna?’”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he’d run out of small change. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ve run out of small change.’”

“Did he have a place he ever took you? A hideaway?”

“We used my flat or went to hotels.”

“Which ones?”

“The Grosvenor at Victoria was one. The Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. He has favourite rooms that overlook the railway lines.”

“Give me the numbers.”

Holding her against him, he walked her to the desk and scribbled down the two numbers to her dictation, then pulled on his old dressing-gown and knotted it round his waist and smiled at her. “I loved him too, Kate. I’m a bigger fool than you are.” But he won no smile in return. “Did he ever talk about a place away from it all? Some dream he had?” He poured her some more vodka and she took it.

“Norway,” she said. “He wanted to see the migration of the reindeer. He was going to take me one day.”

“Where else?”

“Spain. The north. He said he’d buy a villa for us.”

“Did he talk about his writing?”

“Not much.”

“Did he say where he’d like to write his great book?”

“In Canada. We’d hibernate in some snowy place and live out of tins.”

“The sea — nothing by the sea?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention Poppy to you? Someone called Poppy, like in his book?”

“He never mentioned any of his women. I told you. We were separate planets.”

“How about someone called Wentworth?”

She shook her head.

“‘ Wentworth was Rick’s Nemesis,’” Brotherhood recited. “‘ Poppy was mine. We each spent our lives trying to put right the wrong we’d done to them.’ You heard the tapes. You’ve seen the transcripts. Wentworth.”

“He’s mad,” she said.

“Stay here,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.”

Returning to the desk, he wiped the books and papers off it with a single sweep of his arm, switched on the reading lamp, sat down and laid the sheet of brown paper beside Pym’s crumpled letter to Tom, postmark Reading. The London telephone directories were on the floor at his side. He chose the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria, first and asked the night porter to put him through to the room number Kate had given him. A drowsy man answered.

“House detective here,” Brotherhood said. “We’ve reason to believe you’ve got a lady in your room.”

“Of course I’ve got a fucking lady in my room. This is a double room I’m paying for, and she’s my wife.”

It wasn’t any of Pym’s voices.

He laughed for her, rang the Great Eastern Hotel, and got a similar result. He rang Independent Television News and asked for the night editor. He said he was Inspector Markley of Scotland Yard with an urgent enquiry: He wanted the time of transmission of the item on the Lebanese bombing story on Monday night News at Ten. He held on for as long as it took, while he continued to leaf through the pages of Pym’s letter. Postmark Reading. Posted Monday night or Tuesday morning.

“Ten-seventeen and ten seconds. That’s when he rang you,” he said, and glanced round to make sure she was all right. She was sitting up against the pillow, head back like a boxer between rounds.

He rang the post office investigation unit and got the night officer. He gave her the Firm’s codeword and she responded with a doom-laden “I hear you,” as if the third world war was about to happen.

“I’m asking the impossible and I want it by yesterday,” he said.

“We’ll try our best,” she said.

“I want a backtrack on any cash call to London made from a Reading area telephone box between ten-eighteen and ten-twenty-one on Monday night. Duration around twenty minutes.”

“Can’t be done,” she said promptly.

“I love her,” he told Kate over his shoulder. She had rolled over and was lying on her stomach with her face buried in her arm.

He rang off and addressed himself in earnest to Kate’s purloined pages from Pym’s personal file. Three of them, extracted from the army record of First Lieutenant Magnus Pym, number supplied, of the Intelligence Corps, attached No. 6 Field Interrogation Unit, Graz, described in a footnote as an offensive military intelligence-gathering unit with limited permission to run local informants. Dated 18 July 1951, writer unknown, relevant passage sidelined by Registry. Date of entry to Pym’s P.F., 12 May 1952. Reason for entry, Pym’s formal candidature for admission to this service. The extract was from his commanding officer’s conduct report at the close of Pym’s tour of duty in Graz, Austria: “. . exceptional young officer. . popular and courteous in the mess. . earned a high reputation for his skilful running of source GREENSLEEVES who over the last eleven months has supplied this unit with secret and top-secret intelligence on the Soviet Order of Battle in Czechoslovakia.”

“You all right there?” he called to Kate. “Listen. You did nothing wrong. Nobody even missed this stuff. Nobody would have been the wiser for it. Nobody ever tried to follow it up.”

He turned a page: “. . close personal relationship established between source and case officer. . Pym’s calm authority during crisis. . source’s insistence on operating through Pym only. .” He read fast to the end then began again at the beginning more slowly.

“His C.O. was in love with him too,” he called to Kate. “‘. . his excellent memory for detail,’” he read, “‘. . lucid report writing, often done in the early hours of the morning after a long debriefing. . high entertainment value…’

“Doesn’t even mention Sabina,” he complained to Kate. “Can’t see what the devil he was so worried about. Why risk his hotline to you to suppress a bit of paper from the dark ages that did him nothing but credit? Must be something in his own nasty little mind, not ours at all. That doesn’t surprise me either.”

The phone was ringing. He glanced round. The bed was empty, the bathroom door closed. Scared, he sprang up and pulled it quickly open. She was standing safely at the basin, chucking water in her face. He closed the door again and hastened back to the telephone. It was a mossy green scrambler with chrome buttons. He picked up the receiver and growled “Yes?”

“Jack? Let’s go over. Ready? Now.”

Brotherhood pressed a button and heard the same tenor voice trilling in the electronic storm.

“You’ll enjoy this, Jack — Jack, can you hear me? Hullo?”

“I can hear you, Bo.”

“I’ve just had Carver on the line.” Carver was the American Head of Station in London. “He insists his people have come up with fresh leads concerning our mutual friend. They want to reopen the story on him immediately. Harry Wexler’s flying over from Washington to see fair play.”

“That all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Where do they think he is?” said Brotherhood.

“That’s exactly the point. They didn’t ask, they weren’t worried. They assume he’s still coping with his father’s affairs,” said Brammel, very pleased. “They actually made the point that this would be an excellent time to meet. While our friend is occupied with his personal affairs. Everything is still in its place as far as they’re concerned. Except for the new leads of course. Whatever they are.”

“Except for the networks,” Brotherhood said.

“I’ll want you with me at the meeting, Jack. I want you in there punching for me, just like your usual self. Will you do that?”

“If it’s an order, I’ll do anything.”

Bo sounded like someone organising a jolly party: “I’m having everyone we’d normally have. Nobody’s to be left out or added. I want nothing to stick out, not a ripple while we go on looking for him. This whole thing could still be a storm in a teacup. Whitehall is convinced of it. They argue that we’re dealing with follow-on from the last thing, not a new situation at all. They’ve got some awfully clever people these days. Some of them aren’t even civil servants. Are you sleeping?”

“Not a lot.”

“None of us is. We must stick together. Nigel’s over at the Foreign Office at this moment.”

“Is he though?” said Brotherhood aloud as he rang off. “Kate?”

“What is it?”

“Just keep your fingers away from my razor blades, hear me? We’re too old for dramatic gestures, both of us.”

He waited a second, dialled Head Office and asked for the night duty officer.

“You got a rider there?”

“Yes.”

“Brotherhood. There’s a War Office file I want. British Army of Occupation in Austria, old field case. Operation Greensleeves, believe it or not. Where will it be?”

“Ministry of Defence, I suppose, seeing that the War Office was disbanded about two hundred years ago.”

“Who are you?”

“Nicholson.”

“Well, don’t bloody suppose. Find out where it is, fetch it and phone me when it’s on your desk. Got a pencil, have you?”

“I don’t think I have actually. Nigel has left instructions that any request from you has to be processed by Secretariat first. Sorry, Jack.”

“Nigel’s at the Foreign Office. Check with Bo. While you’re about it, ask Defence to give you the name of the Commandant of Number Six Interrogation, Graz, Austria, on July 18, 1951. I’m in a hurry. Greensleeves, have you got it? Maybe you’re not musical.”

He rang off and pulled Pym’s battered letter to Tom savagely towards him.

“He’s a shell,” Kate said. “All you have to do is find the hermit crab that climbed into him. Don’t look for the truth about him. The truth is what we gave him of ourselves.”

“Sure,” said Brotherhood. He set a sheet of paper ready to jot on while he silently read: “If I don’t write to you for a while, remember I’m thinking of you all the time.” Maudlin slush. “If you need help and don’t want to turn to Uncle Jack, this is what you do.” He continued reading, writing out Pym’s instructions to his son, one by one. “Don’t worry your head so much about religious things, just try to trust in God’s goodness.” “Damn the man!” he expostulated aloud for Kate’s sake and, slamming down his pencil, pressed both fists against his temple as the phone rang again. He let it ring a moment, recovered and picked it up, glancing at his watch, which was his habit always.

“Anyway the file you want went missing years ago,” said Nicholson with pleasure.

“Who to?”

“Us. They say it’s marked out to us and we never returned it.”

“Who of us in particular?”

“Czech section. It was requisitioned by one of our own London desk officers in 1953.”

“Which one?”

“M.R.P. That would be Pym. Do you want me to ring Vienna and ask him what he did with it?”

“I’ll ask him myself in the morning,” he said. “What about the C.O.?”

“A Major Harrison Membury of the Education Corps.”

“The what?”

“He was on secondment to Army Intelligence for the period 1950 to ’54.”

“Christ Almighty. Any address?”

He wrote it down, remembering a quip of Pym’s, paraphrased from Clemenceau: “Military intelligence has about as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.”

He rang off.

“They haven’t even indoctrinated the poor bloody duty officer!” Brotherhood expostulated, again for Kate.

He went back to his homework better pleased. Somewhere beyond Green Park a London clock was striking three.

“I’m going,” Kate said. She was standing at the door, dressed.

Brotherhood was on his feet in a moment.

“Oh no you’re not. You’re staying here until I hear you laugh.”

He went to her and undressed her again. He put her back to bed.

“Why do you think I’m going to kill myself?” she said. “Has somebody done that to you once?”

“Let’s just say once would be too often,” he replied.

“What’s in the burnbox?” she asked, for the second time that night. But for the second time, too, Brotherhood appeared too busy to reply.