Horse Under Water

39 Inside a cabinet

When I got to Charlotte Street on Tuesday morning, Alice was sitting alongside the switchboard operator comparing knitting patterns and drinking coffee. When she saw me she crooked a bony finger and I followed her into the office that Dawlish had recently given her. It was stacked to the ceiling with directories, gazetteers, Who’s Whos and cardboard folders of newspaper clippings. She sat down behind the tiny table she used as a desk. I helped her move the two-pound bag of sugar, an electric kettle, two laced and lead-sealed secret files and a Nescafé tin with a hole cut in the top in which contributions to the office tea swindle were kept. She turned the pages of a file.

‘You’ve had coffee?’ said Alice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Alforreca is on,’ said Alice, ‘officially I mean, word came from the top.’

‘Oh good,’ I said.

‘Don’t try that “oh good” stuff with me,’ she said. ‘I know what you’ve been up to.’

‘Smoke?’ I said. I offered her a Gauloise.

‘No,’ said Alice, ‘and I don’t want you spreading a lot of fumes through this room either.’

‘O.K., Alice,’ I said and I put the cigarette back in the packet.

‘Clings for days,’ said Alice, ‘that French tobacco.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose it does.’

‘That’s all,’ said Alice. It seemed odd that Alice should invite me into her office for the first time just to say that. As I got up Alice said, ‘Try to look a little bit surprised when Dawlish tells you. The poor man doesn’t know you as I do.’

‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said.

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Alice, ‘I just want him to keep his pathetic illusions, that’s all.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but thanks anyway.’ I turned to go. Alice called, ‘There is one more thing. Jennifer,’ she said.

‘Jennifer,’ I repeated dumbly, mentally riffling through all the code names I knew.

‘Jennifer in the cashier’s department; she’s getting married.’

I felt no guilt or jealousy. ‘I don’t even know who you are talking about,’ I said.

‘We’ve put you down for two pounds,’ said Alice irritably, ‘towards a present.’

In the office I found Jean (who had put her hair up after all), thirty letters to sign and a great mass of abstracts to read: American State Department, Counter-Intelligence Corps and Defence reports as well as the pink foolscap translations from Red Flag, People’s Daily and M.V.D. Information. I put the whole bundle into my briefcase. The snow was still threatening and the heavy grey clouds hung across the sky like a false ceiling. Wardens were licking their pencil stubs and policemen with a huge tray of keys were unlocking double-parkers and driving them to the pound. I looked into Dawlish’s office. He was hammering panel pins into the wall.

‘Hello, what do you think of this?’ he said. It was a framed coloured print of the Iron Duke seated upon a rotund horse, doffing his hat with one hand and waving a sword with the other. Under the print in a fine copperplate it said:

‘Very handsome,’ I said.

‘Present from my son. He’s very fond of quotations by Wellington. Each year on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo we have a little party, and all the guests have to have an anecdote or quotation ready.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do the same thing every time I pull on my Wellington boots.’ Dawlish slid me a narrowed glance.

I offered him a cigarette to break the tension.

‘You intend to pursue the Alforreca operation?’

‘I want to know why Smith sent Harry Kondit a seven-thousand-pound laboratory to a backwater of Portugal.’

‘You think that will explain everything?’ said Dawlish. He smacked the metal hammer-head into the palm of his hand.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘perhaps I’ll be able to tell you better after I’ve talked to the man who’s been examining the canister. I think the explosives in my car were placed so as to destroy that rather than the driver.’

Dawlish nodded. ‘Have a nice trip to Cardiff,’ he said, and began hammering. I said, ‘Don’t hit your finger and drop the hammer on your toe.’ He nodded again and continued hammering.

I leaned upon the gravy-stained tablecloth as Paddington slid past. Soot-caked dwellings pressed together like pleats in a concertina. Grey laundry flapped in the breeze. Past Ladbroke Grove the small gardens suffocated under choking debris, only corrugated iron and rusty wire remained of things collapsed.

‘Soup,’ said the attendant. He set a chipped cup before me. A girl across the aisle applied cosmetics in three primary colours to her blotchy face. I wrote the word STURGEON into the crossword. That would make 23 down MULGA. The clue for 2 across was ‘old solution’: SISTRUM, because I knew the last four letters were TRUM.

I was a long way out on a thin plank over a deep sea. I had blocked Smith at least for the time being, but I had done it at the expense of making a V.I.P. enemy. It wasn’t something one could do too frequently without uncomfortable consequences. Perhaps it was something one couldn’t do once without uncomfortable consequences. I wrote NOSTRUM to replace SISTRUM.

I was beginning to get it now.

Up here the snow had gathered into light grey clumps in the corners of brown fields. Cows snorted white puffs and huddled together in the dells under bare trees splattered with blots of birds.

I crossed STURGEON through and made it STALLION; this gave me MAQUI as 23 down, instead of MULGA.

The train wheels chattered across a junction and my warm chicken-leg made concentric waves in the thin gravy. I wondered how many people in Albufeira had connexions with Smith. Who had stolen the photographs and to whom were they delivered? Why had either Fernie or the sound of a two-stroke motor cycle been everywhere at once? The blonde girl with the painted face was putting pink acetate on her finger-nails; the acrid smell assailed my taste-buds as I chewed the chicken — it was better than no taste at all.

Past the City Hall the Cardiff traffic was as thick as Welsh rarebit. The clock struck five thirty as we turned on to the A469. The moorland was bleak and wind-scoured. Through the twilight ‘our man in Cardiff’ lifted a finger at the crooked castle of Caerphilly. Under the dark sky the stone houses squinted yellow light through the lacework. The shops had been tightly shut since lunch-time. I had no matches.

The Cardiff man spoke in a mocking Celtic treble.

‘I thought you London men could afford lighters.’

‘And I thought you Cardiff men could afford car-heaters.’ I blew on my hands and received a wizened glance of amusement from under a stained bowler hat. The Welsh are gourmets at the feast of insults.

Beyond the ruins of Caerphilly Castle stunted trees grew hunchbacked against the wind.

We pulled off the road, the loose surface shuffled and the eggshell crack of ice splintered under the wheels. The wind was screaming through the car’s radio antenna as a bald man in a roll-neck sweater opened the door of a small stone house. Inside, the cool green light of an oil lamp described circles on the table and ceiling. Draught made the fire flare, a soot-caked kettle buzzed with boiling water, and almost before we were seated a large bowl of sweet dark tea was warming the palms of our hands. I lit a cigarette with a stick from the wood fire. Our man from Cardiff rapidly sank his scalding tea and pulled on his dirty knitted gloves and bowler hat.

‘I’ll be pushing along then,’ he said. I didn’t mean to look pleased. He said, ‘Ah, you develop a strong sense of knowing when you are not wanted here in Glamorgan.’ I grinned.

He said, ‘You can phone when you want to be collected. Would you want me to arrange a room at the Angel for you? American Bar and television they have there. It will be just like you were still in London.’

Their singing voices argued the pros and cons of my travel arrangements, and finally my host in the roll-neck sweater offered to let me stay the night.

‘On a “Put-U-up”, you know; nothing fancy.’ I agreed, and watched the small, heatless car rumble down the rough road and turn back towards Cardiff.

We sat quietly making toast in front of the fire and Glynn would every now and then get up to fix the back door, draw an extra can of water from the outdoor pump or attend to something for the pigs. Finally, he lit a filthy old pipe and said, ‘You had my report all right? Your canister contained traces of crude morphine. The young lady was most anxious that it didn’t go astray.’ The man in the sweater was also on a small retainer from W.O.O.C.(P) and a smaller one from the Home Office Forensic Science Lab. in Cardiff.

‘It was fine,’ I said, ‘but I decided to come down to see you because I know so little about dangerous drugs.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘well, what do you want to know?’

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Just talk about drugs so I’ll know my way around.’