Here Comes Charlie M

NINE

Edith looked away from the view from the Baur au Lac balcony, coming back to her husband. It had been a long time, she thought, since she had see him as relaxed and as happy as this. Almost two years, in fact. She’d never know him completely, she accepted. He was a strange man.

‘You’re fun again, Charlie,’ she said gratefully.

He responded seriously to the remark.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s been ages,’ she said.

‘It’ll be better now,’ he promised.

‘It’s a lot of money,’ she protested cautiously, reverting to the conversation in which they’d been engaged throughout the dinner.

‘Two hundred thousand, added to what Sir Archibald left me,’ recounted Charlie. ‘Still less than half of what I’ve got. And that’s not an unusual amount for underwriters to deposit To be admitted simply as a member of Lloyd’s needs assets of?75,000.’

He saw it as even greater independence from her money, she realised. Not moving the remainder from the Brighton bank worried her.

‘You’re not a normal underwriter. I’m amazed the man agreed.’

‘So am I,’ admitted Charlie. ‘He shouldn’t have done.’

‘You’re quite sure it’s safe?’ she asked, a frequent question since he had returned from London three weeks earlier.

Charlie sighed patiently.

‘I’ve checked the firm thoroughly,’ he reminded her. ‘There’s no trace with any of the standby companies the department use for links with outside businesses. And for three days after I made the arrangement with Rupert Willoughby I watched him, from morning to night. There was no contact whatsoever.’

‘You still can’t be one hundred per cent sure.’

‘Ninety-nine is good enough.’

‘It used not to be.’

Charlie frowned at her concern.

‘Edith,’ he lectured her, ‘it’s now over six weeks since the cemetery … almost a month since I went to London, by an appointment they would have known about had he been in any way connected with them. And here we are having a pleasant dinner in one of the best restaurants in Zurich. If Rupert Willoughby weren’t genuine, then I wouldn’t be alive. We both know that.’

She nodded, in reluctant agreement. His involvement with Willoughby would provide the interest he had lacked, she decided. And it was wonderful to see him laugh again.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said.

‘I always have been.’

That was another thing that had been absent for too long, Charlie’s confidence. It had been one of the first things to attract her, she remembered. It had been at a party at the Paris embassy, where Charlie had been on secondment and she had been the guest of the ambassador. The diplomat had apologised for Charlie afterwards, she recalled. Described him as an upstart. When she’d told Charlie, he’d nodded quite seriously and said ‘bloody right’: and two weeks later established that the ambassador’s mistress had links with Soviet intelligence.

‘What are you smiling about?’ asked Charlie.

‘Just thinking,’ said Edith.

‘What about?’

‘You.’

He smiled back at her.

‘It’s going to be all right, Edith,’ he promised.

‘Tell me something, Charlie,’ she said, leaning over the table to enforce the question. ‘Honestly, I mean.’

‘What?’

‘You regret it, don’t you?’

He took his time over the answer.

‘Some things,’ he admitted. ‘People died, which is always wrong. But I’m not sorry I exposed Cuthbertson and his band of idiots.’

He stopped, smiling sadly.

‘I tried to do it and Sir Archibald tried to do it,’ he recalled. ‘And I wouldn’t mind betting that people like Wilberforce have still clung on. Bureaucracy is a comfort blanket to people like that.’

‘The killing wasn’t your fault,’ she said.

‘Some was,’ he insisted. Gunther Bayer had had a fiancee in West Berlin, he remembered. Gretel. She’d been preparing a celebration dinner on the night of the crossing and Gunther had wanted him to go.

‘Not all.’

‘But for me, it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘No one would be feeling regrets if you’d died,’ she said. ‘And God knows, they tried hard enough.’

‘Only you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I’d still be regretting it.’

Did Charlie have the love for her that she felt for him? wondered Edith. She wished he’d tell her so, more often.

‘And the money was a mistake,’ he conceded. ‘It was necessary, to make the Kalenin crossing seem absolutely genuine. But to take it was wrong …’

Because it put a price on his betrayal, decided Edith. Money — his lack of it and her inheritance — had always been a problem for Charlie. He’d accepted the house beyond that which he could have afforded on his Grade IV salary. And the furnishing. But he had always adamantly refused any for his personal needs, keeping shoes until they were worn through and suits until they were shiny at the seat and elbows. He’d actually tried to change, in the early months after the Kalenin affair. He’d bought Yves St Laurent and Gucci and looked as comfortable as Cinderella at five minutes to midnight. The seat and elbows weren’t shiny, but the suit still came from a department store. And the shoes were still Hush Puppies, even though they weren’t down at heel any more. Charlie would always be the sort of person to wear a string vest with a see-through shirt, she thought fondly.

‘Let’s stop living in the past,’ she said.

He nodded, brightening.

‘Right,’ he accepted. ‘At last we’ve got something to consider in the future … I’m going into high finance, Edith.’

She laughed with him, trying to match his enthusiasm. Please God, she thought, make it last. She hadn’t liked Charlie Muffin very much in the last two years.

‘John Packer?’

The safebreaker looked up from his drink, gazing steadily at the man standing at the other side of the table.

‘Yes,’ continued the man, as if satisfying some private question. ‘You’re John Packer.’

Packer sat back, waiting. The man pulled out a chair and sat down, smiling. Smart, decided Packer. But not flash. Good voice; air of breeding, too, so he could make everyone else feel a turd. Confidence trickster, maybe. Nasty scar on his face. Perhaps a job had gone wrong.

‘What do you want?’ asked Packer.

‘Want?’ echoed the man, as if it were an amusing demand. ‘I want to put you into the major league, John Packer.’