Our Game

NINE

I TOOK A cab to Bristol Temple Meads railway station and walked from there. I was in an industrial desert made sumptuous by the night. Heavy lorries tore past me, spewing oily mud and plucking at my raincoat. Yet a tender haze hung over the city valley, moist stars filled the sky, and a languid full moon drew me up the hill. As I walked, lane upon lane of orange-lit railway line opened before me, and I remembered Larry and his season ticket, Bath to Bristol, £71 a month. I tried to imagine him as a commuter. Where was business? Where was home? Anderson, Sally, at 9A Cambridge Street. The lorries had deafened me. I couldn't hear my footsteps.

The road, which had begun as a viaduct, joined itself to the hillside. The summit moved to my right. Directly above me stood a terrace of flat-fronted cottages. A red-brick wall made a battlement round them. Up there, I thought, remembering my map. Up there, I thought, remembering Larry's affection for abandoned places. I came to a roundabout, pressed the pedestrians' button, and waited for the motorised cavalry of England to come squealing and clanking to a halt. Gaining the other pavement, I entered a side street festooned with overhead cables. A serious black boy of about six was sitting on the doorstep of the Ocean Fish Bar Chinese Takeaway.

"Is this Cambridge Street? Bellevue Road?"

I smiled, but he didn't smile back. A bearded Druid in a baggy Irish cap stepped a little too carefully out of Robbins Off Licence. He carried a brown paper bag.

"Watch your feet, man," he advised me.

"Why?"

"You want Cambridge Street?"

"Yes."

"You're bloody near standin' on it, man."

Following his instructions, I walked fifty yards and turned right. The cottages were on one side only. On the other lay a platform of grass. Round the grass, in crinkle-crankle pattern, ran the brick parapet with red coping that I had seen from below. Playing the accidental tourist, I placed myself before it. From the station, the discontinued high roads of empire streamed into the darkness.

I turned and surveyed the cottages. Each had two windows upstairs, a flat roof, a chimney stack and television aerial. Each was painted a different pastel shade. Front doors to the left, bay windows to the right. In most, as my eye ran along the line of them, the bay window was lit, or a bedroom was lit, or a television flickered, or a phosphorescent doorbell glistened, and you felt a life behind the curtains. Only the last house stood in darkness, and it was 9A. Had the occupants fled? Had two lovers taken off their wristwatches and fallen asleep in one another's arms?

Deliberately, a person with no secrets, I linked my hands behind my back and, colonial style, prepared to inspect the ranks. I am an architect, a surveyor, a potential purchaser. I am a wine-growing Englishman of a certain class. Parked cars blocked the pavement. I took the centre of the road. No blue Toyota. No Toyota of any kind. I walked slowly, making a show of reading the house numbers. Shall I buy this one, or this one? Or all of them?

Sweat was running down my ribs. I'm not prepared, I thought. Not able, not trained, not armed, not brave. I've been too deskbound too long. After fear came a storm of guilt. He's here. Dead. He staggered back and died here. The murderer is about to discover the body. A guilty man has come to take his medicine. Then I remembered that Larry was alive again, and had been alive since Jamie Pringle had remembered the last grouse of the season, and my guilt crept back into its lair.

I had reached the end of the row. Number 9A was a corner house, as every safe house should be. The drawn curtains in the upper windows were orange and unlined Pale light from the street lamp shone on their poor fabric. There was no light from inside.

Continuing my reconnaissance, I turned into the side street. Another upstairs window, unlit. A plastered wall. A side door. Crossing to the opposite pavement, I took a proprietary look up and down the street. A yellow cat stared back at me from behind a net curtain. Among the dozen cars parked each side of the street, one had a plastic cover to protect it from the weather.

Another controlled glance at the doorways, pavements, and parked cars. The shadows were not easy to read, but I could make out no human shape. With the toe of my right shoe I raised the plastic cover and saw the buckled rear bumper and familiar registration number of Larry's blue Toyota. It was one of the little tricks we taught on training courses, for the joes to forget the moment they returned to the real world: if you're worried about your car, put a cover over it.

The side door of the house had neither a handle nor a keyhole. Passing it on my way back, I gave it a furtive push, but it was locked or bolted from inside. A smear of chalk in the shape of an L ran across the centre panels. The lower stroke of the L tailed downward. I touched the chalk mark. It was wax based and resistant to rain. I turned the corner back into Cambridge Street, marched confidently up to the front door, and pressed the bell. Nothing happened. Electricity's cut off. Larry's way with bills. I gave the knocker a diffident tap-tap. It's Honeybrook on New Year's Eve, I thought as the din echoed inside the house: my turn to knock the happy lovers out of bed. I was acting boldly, nothing up my sleeve. But I was thinking seriously of the chalk mark.

I lifted the flap of the letter box and let it slap shut. I rapped on the bay window. I called, "Hey, it's me!"—more for the seeming than the being, for there were people going past me on the pavement. I wrenched at the sash window, trying to move it up and down, but it was locked. I was wearing leather gloves, and they reminded me of Priddy. Still at the bay, I put my face against the glass and by the light from the street lamp squinted inside. There was no entrance hall. The front door opened straight into the living room. I made out the ghostly shape of a portable typewriter on a desk and, below me to my left, a heap of mail, mostly bills and printed matter: Larry could step over them for weeks without a thought. I looked again and saw what I had half seen the first time: Emma's piano stool set in front of the typewriter. Finally, assuming I had by now attracted the interest of the neighbours, I did what legitimate people do in such cases: I took out my diary, wrote in it, tore the page out, and dropped it through the letter box. Then I walked off down the road to give their memories a rest.

I took a brisk walk round the block, keeping at the centre of the road because I didn't like the shadows, till I had reentered the street from the opposite end. I passed the side door a second time, looking not at the chalk mark but in the direction indicated by the tail of the L. L for Larry. L for Larry's tradecraft in the days when he and Checheyev exchanged their secret materials by way of dead-letter boxes and safety signals. In parks. In pub lavatories. In parking lots. In Kew Gardens. L for "I have filled the dead-letter box," signed Larry. The L converted to a C for "I have emptied it," signed CC. Back and forth, not once but more like fifty times in the four years of their collaboration: microfilm for you; money and orders for me; money and orders for you; microfilm for me.

The tail pointed downward, and it was strongly drawn. A defined tail. It ran diagonally towards my right foot, and at the toe of my right foot ran the skirting of the door, and underneath the skirting a flattened cigarette end protruded, and I suppose a very curious person might just have wondered quite how a cigarette end came to be flattened and wedged beneath the skirting of a door unless someone had deliberately stood on it and kicked it there; and the same person might also have remarked that the beam of the corner street light shone brightly onto the lower part of the door, so that once you were aware of the conjunction of the chalk mark and the cigarette end, you marvelled that there wasn't a great crowd of people round you, staring at the same thing.

I did not, however, possess Checheyev's physical dexterity; I could not achieve the lightning swing of the upper body that had put Jack Andover, our chief watcher, in mind of Welsh miners. So I did what middle-aged spies do the world over: I stooped and made a show of fastening my shoelace, while with one hand I pinched hold of the cigarette end, and of the string that was inside it, and I tugged: to be rewarded, after a further length of string, with the flat brass Yale door key that was attached to it. Then, with the key concealed in my hand, I stood up and walked confidently round the corner to the front door.

"They're on holiday, darling," a bass voice called from beside me.

I turned quickly, my rent-a-drool smile hoisted in readiness. A large blond-headed woman, backlit by the light of her own hall, was standing in the neighbouring doorway, dressed in what seemed to be a white nightgown and clutching a glass of something strong.

"I know," I said.

"Feebs is what he calls me. I'm Phoebe really. You were here before, weren't you?"

"That's right. I forgot to collect the key and had to go back and get it. I'll forget my own name next. Still, a holiday was what they needed, wasn't it?"

"He did," she said darkly.

My brain must have been working overtime, for I divined her meaning immediately. "Of course! Poor man," I cried. "I mean how was he looking? Better? On the mend? Or was he still all colours of the rainbow?"

But some sense of need-to-know held her back from further confidence. "What do you want, then?" she asked sullenly.

"It's what they want, I'm afraid. Sally's typewriter. More clothes. Practically anything I can carry."

"You're not a debt collector, are you?"

"Good Lord, no." I laughed and took a couple of paces towards her so that she could see what a trustworthy fellow I was. "I'm his brother. Richard. Dick. The respectable one. They phoned me. Would I put together some stuff for them? Take it up to London. He'd had this accident. Fallen downstairs, he said. Poor love, if it's not one thing, it's another. Did they manage to leave together? I gather it was all rather rushed."

"There's no accidents round here, darling. Everything's deliberate." She giggled at her own wit. So did I, elaborately. "He went first, she followed him, I don't know why." She took a sip from her glass, but kept her eyes on me. "I don't think I like you going in, you see. Not while they're in France. I think I'm worried."

Stepping back into her house, she slammed the front door. A moment later a wet crack like a training grenade split the air as an upper window of the house was flung open and a broad-headed hairy man in an undershirt leaned out.

"You! Come 'ere! You're Terry's brother, are you?"

"Yes."

"Dick, right?"

"Dick is correct."

"Know all about him, do you?"

"Pretty much."

"What's his favourite football team, then, Dick?"

"Moscow Dynamo," I replied, before I had given myself time to think, for soccer was one of Larry's many incongruous obsessions. "And Lev Yashin was the greatest goalkeeper of all time. And the greatest goal ever scored was by Ponedelnik for Russia against Yugoslavia in 1960."

"Bloody hell."

He disappeared, and a delay followed, presumably while he conferred with Phoebe. Then he was back and smiling.

"I'm Arsenal myself. Not that he minded. Here. How'd he get his black eye, then? I've seen some shiners, but he was classic. 'What happened?' I says to him. 'She close her legs too soon?' Walked into a door, he says. Then Sally turns round and says it was a car smash. You don't know who to believe these days, do you? Want a hand at all?"

"Maybe later. I'll give you a shout, if I may."

"I'm Wilf. He's a mad bugger, but I like him."

The window slammed shut.

* * *

I closed the front door behind me and stepped round the heap of mail on the floor. In a spurt of futile optimism I flipped the light switch, but no light came. Fool that I was, I had brought no hand torch with me. I stood in the half dark, not daring to breathe. The silence scared me. Bristol has been evacuated. Hurry or you'll be killed. The sweat again, this time oily cold. I breathed out, then slowly in again, and smelled an old house going into her dotage. I peered round me, trying to let more light into my eyes. The only source was the street lamp. But its glow fell across the bay window, not into it. To see into the interior, my eyes had to scavenge light from the bay and hurry with it across the room, like carrying water in cupped hands.

Her piano stool, unscathed. I ran my hand over it: the light alloy tubes, like an angled reading lamp that reached out and then returned, pressing the padded support against the small of her back. Her portable electric typewriter. It stood on a table, but I could hardly see the table for the papers on it, and I could hardly see the papers for the dust. Then I saw a second table, except that it wasn't a table but a tea trolley, and on the tea trolley a digital telephone with an answering machine attached to it, with a typical Pettifer lash-up of wires and aerials and the judicious use of Scotch tape. But no light burned on the answering machine, because there was no electricity in the socket.

The room grew smaller, and the walls came towards me. My eyes were seeing more. I could follow the typewriter wire all the way to the wall. I began to distinguish signs of hasty departure: desk drawers pulled out and half emptied, documents spilled across the floor, the grate stuffed with charred paper, the wastebasket lying on its side. I recognised more bits of Larryana: piles of fringe magazines stacked against the wall, with tags of paper marking the places; an ancient poster of Josef Stalin at his most benign, cutting roses in a garden. Larry had drawn an imperial crown on his head and scribbled the words WE NEVER CLOSED across his chest. Scrawled messages on rectangles of sticky paper, posted on an etching of Notre Dame hanging over the grate. With my gloved hand I pulled off a couple of them and took them to the bay, but I couldn't read them, except to see that the first was written by Emma and the second by Larry. Peeling off the rest in order, I stuck one on top of the other before dropping them into my pocket in a wad.

I returned to the front door and gathered a handful of letters from the heap on the floor. Miss Sally Anderson, I read crookedly, Free Prometheus Ltd., 9A Cambridge Street. Postmark not Macclesfield but Zurich. Terry Altman, Esq., I read, Free Prometheus Ltd.—Terry Altman, who had been one of Larry's work names, and Prometheus, who for his trickery had been chained to a mountain in the high Caucasus until Larry and Emma had set him free. Pamphlets, lurid brochures, Russian quality. Printed matter from the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham, headed "Southern Russia (West)." To the Manager, Free Prometheus Ltd. To Sally, Free Prometheus Ltd. Bank statements. A folder full of letters, incoming to Emma and handwritten by Larry, for whom a letter could be anything from a beer mat to a paper napkin to the title page of a radical paperback published by some fly-by-night anarchist in Islington. Addressed to Darling, Darling Emm and continuing Oh Christ I forgot to tell you. A newsletter headed "Media Manipulated" and subtitled "How the Western Press Plays Moscow's Game." Stay calm, I told myself as I dropped everything back on the pile. Method, Cramer. You're a field man, veteran of innumerable Office break-ins, some of them with Larry as your inside man. Pace yourself. One job at a time. A red-and-white pamphlet in Russian called "Genocide in the Caucasus" in blazing capitals, school of Soviet agitprop, vintage 1950, except that it was dated February 1993 and referred to "The Holocaust of Last October." I opened it at random and saw the stabbed and bloated bodies of small children. Caucasian Review II (Munich '56), see pages 134-156. Caucasian Review V (Munich '56), see pages 41-46. Side-lined passages. Angry marginal scrawls, illegible in the ailing light.

There was an interior door, and geography dictated that it led to the part of the house that gave onto the side street. I turned the handle. Nothing happened. I pushed hard and the door gave, shrieking on the linoleum. I smelled rancid butter, dust, and Lifebuoy soap. I was in a scullery. Through a window above the sink more street light streamed onto the flagstones. A line of plates stood drying in a rack. They had been drying so long they were filthy again. In the shelves, a selection of Larry's undemocratic self-indulgences: pepper sardines from a grand grocer in Jermyn Street, Oxford marmalade, and Fortnum's English Breakfast Tea. In the fridge, rancid yoghurt, sour milk. Beside it a wooden door with bolts top and bottom, and a latch with a chain and pin. It was the side door I had inspected from the pavement. As I returned to the living room I looked at my watch. Three minutes was how long eternity had so far lasted.

The stairs were in pitch darkness, rickety and uncarpeted. I counted fourteen from ground level. I reached a landing, groped, felt a door, then a door handle. I pushed and stepped inside. I was in a lavatory. I stepped out again, closed the door, and, with my back against it, groped either side of me until I found another door, opened it, and entered Emma's bedroom in broad daylight, because the halogen light from the street lamp poured straight in the window, passing through the threadbare curtains as if they didn't exist. I gave her everything, I thought, surveying the bare floorboards and cracked washbasin, the dead flowers in a paste pot, the wonky reading lamp, the brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in strips; and she wanted none of it. This is what I saved her from. And she preferred it.

On the floor lay a futon, and it was prepared the way she liked to prepare our bed when we were going to make love: sideways to the fire, lots of pillows, a white duvet. Across the duvet, the severe little Marks & Spencer nightdress she had brought with her when she came to live with me, its long sleeves stretched out for the embrace. I saw her naked on her stomach with her chin in her hands, turning to look at me over her shoulder as she hears me enter. And the light of the log fire drawing finger shadows on her flanks. And her unpinned hair falling like black flames over her shoulders.

Two books, one his side, one hers. For Larry, a red-cloth nineteen-twentyish volume by one W. E. D. Allen, with the unlikely title Beled-es-Siba. I opened it at random and came on a memorial tribute to the poet Aubrey Herbert and, underlined, the words: he lacked the caddishness of genius. I had a vague memory that Herbert had fought to save Albania from the self-styled Liberators of the Balkans, and that he was one of Larry's heroes. For Emma, Fitzroy Maclean's To Caucasus, subtitled The End of All the Earth.

A sepia poster. Not of Josef Stalin this time, not of anyone I recognised. But a bearded, strong-jawed, dark-eyed modem prophet in what I took to be the traditional garb of a Caucasian hillsman: fur hat, skin waistcoat with loops for ammunition. Looking closer, I made out the name Bashir Haji in sharp Cyrillic script across the lower corner and, with difficulty, the words "to my friend Misha the great warrior." It seemed a strange sort of trophy to hang in a love nest. Tugging it from its fastenings, I laid it on the bed next to Emma's nightdress. Clothes, I thought: I need more clothes. Nobody who leaves in a hurry takes all his clothes. A curtain hung across a recess beside the chimney breast, reminding me of Uncle Bob's blackout curtain across the alcove in my priesthole. I pulled it aside and took a sharp step backward.

I am on Priddy, grappling with him. I have seized him by the lapels of his green Austrian raincoat that he calls his moleskin. It is a flowing, long-skirted, olive-coloured affair, silky to the touch. Its softness is offensive to me. As I haul him towards me, I hear a rent and I laugh. As we fight, I have an image of it turning to shreds. As I drag him feetfirst and mud-caked towards the pool, I see its tatters in the moonlight, trailing after him like a beggar's shroud.

And I saw it now, dry-cleaned and none the worse for wear, hanging from a wire coat hanger with the cleaner's tag still stapled to the inside lining. I checked the buttons. All there. Did I pull the buttons off? I had no memory of doing so. The rip, where was the rip? I had distinctly heard cloth ripping. I could find not one tear, not a mend, whether in the lining, the hem, or round the buttonholes. Nor round the lapels where I had seized him.

I examined the belt. He had worn it knotted. It had a perfectly good buckle, if you have to wear a belt with your raincoat, but the buckle wasn't good enough for Larry. He had to knot his belt like a gigolo, which is why I had taken such pleasure in seeing my gloved fists clutching it as I dragged him along the ground, with his head going bumpety-bump and his grin switching on and off in the moonlight.

It's a different coat, I thought. Then I thought: When did Larry ever have two of anything except women?

* * *

Beneath the kitchen sink I had found a roll of black plastic bin bags. Tearing one free, I stuffed the mail into it, making no distinction between printed and personal letters, As I did so I saw the bayonetted children again, and remembered Diana and his perfect note. What was perfect, I wondered, about the screams of dying children? On my knees before the fireplace, I scraped together the charred paper in the grate and with huge care laid it in a second bag. I filled a third and fourth with files and papers strewn around the desk. I tossed in an Esso diary, and a singed account book that somebody had attempted to burn but failed, and a forties pop-up Bakelite address book I associated with neither Larry nor Emma which seemed to be some foundling in their lives, until I realised it was Russian. I extracted the tape from the typewriter, pulled the plug out of the socket, and set the typewriter on the kitchen table on its way to the side door. And that was for the seeming, because I had told Phoebe I needed to collect Sally's typewriter. I put the tape in the third bin bag.

I returned to the drawing room and made to unplug the answering machine, but on second thoughts picked it up, base and receiver both, and by the glow of the street lamp identified the redial button on the telephone, lifted the receiver, and pressed redial. A number rang out. I heard a man's voice, soft, foreign, and well-spoken like Mr. Dass: "Thank you for calling the offices of Hardwear Carpets International. If you wish to leave a message or place an order, kindly speak after the tone...." I listened to the message twice, unplugged the machine, and set it on the kitchen table beside the typewriter. My eye caught sight of a set of car keys hanging from a nail. The Toyota. I put them in my pocket, grateful that I wasn't going to have to jump the wires in a dark side street late on a Saturday night. I rushed upstairs. There was no hard reason for this excessive haste, but perhaps if I hadn't run I wouldn't have found the courage to walk.

I stood at the bedroom window. Cambridge Street was deserted. Waiting for my head to clear, I stared out over the grass platform at the rivers of railway line. The night was darker. Bristol was putting itself to sleep. This is where Emma stood when she was waiting for him to arrive, I thought. Naked, as she used to wait for me when she had decided we would make love. I stood at the futon. The pillows were stacked to one side, for a single head. What was she thinking as she lay here alone? He went first, she followed him, Phoebe had said. And this was where she lay, all on her own, before she went. I bent down, intending to pick up the signed poster of the hillsman. Imagined or real, the scent of her body rose at me from the bedclothes. I folded the poster until it would fit my pocket. I removed Larry's green raincoat from its hanger and slung it over my arm. I returned slowly downstairs and walked to the kitchen. Slowly. I slid back the bolts of the side door, cocked the latch, and poked the pin in place to hold it open. Slowly. It was very important to me that I should do nothing hasty.

Leaving the door ajar, I walked down the pavement to the car, pulled off the cover, and saw Larry's buckskin boots lying on the back seat. I determined to make nothing dramatic of the boots. They were Larry's boots. and Larry was alive. What was so remarkable about his damned boots, made to measure by Lobb of St. James's and paid for to screams of pain from the Top Floor, all because Larry had decided that it was time he put our love for him to the test?

I noted the caked mud on them, as one notes mud on anything: take a wire brush to them, do it later. The hatred in me was aflame again. I wished I could call a rematch, go back to Priddy and finish him off.

I walked to the kitchen, collected the typewriter and answering machine, and walked back to the car with them, agonising about whether it was intending to start. I made some fanciful calculations about how long it would take to push the car to the top of the hill so that I could roll it down to the station and, if it still didn't start, transfer my new possessions to a cab.

My courage almost exhausted, I returned to the house for the remainder of my load: Larry's moleskin raincoat, which I seemed to need as proof positive of his survival, and my four bin bags, which I carried by their necks and packed around the typewriter, all but the bag containing the burned paper, which out of respect for its delicacy I laid on the passenger seat. And now all I wanted in the world was to get into the car and drive myself and my treasures to a safe place. But I was worried about Phoebe and Wilf. During the break-in they had become major characters in my imagination. I had been grateful for their acceptance of me, but I needed to know that I had done everything possible to preserve their good opinion, particularly Phoebe's, because she doubted me. I didn't want them phoning the police. I wanted them easy in their minds.

So I went back to the house, bolted the side door top and bottom from the inside, slipped the locking pin into its housing, then walked through the living room again, passing Emma's piano stool on my way. I let myself out of the front door, double-locking it because that was how I had found it. Then I stood on the crown of the road and called to the upper window.

"Thanks, Wilf. Mission accomplished. All done."

No answer. I don't think I remember a longer twenty yards in my life than the distance from the front door of 9A to the blue Toyota, and I was halfway when I realised I was being followed. I thought at first it might be Larry behind me, or Munslow, because my follower was so quiet that my awareness of him was communicated less by hearing than by my other professional senses: the prickle on your back; the reflection in the air before you, made by someone just behind you; the sense of presence each time you check a shop window and see nothing.

I stooped to open the car door. I cast about but still saw nothing. I rose and swung round with my forearm in the strike position, and found myself standing face-to-face with the small black boy from the Ocean Fish Bar, who had been too serious to speak to me.

"Why aren't you in bed?" I asked him.

He shook his head.

"Not tired?"

He shook his head again. Not tired or no bed.

I climbed into the driver's seat and turned the ignition key while he watched me. The engine fired first time. He put his thumbs up, and before I could stop myself I had dragged Colin Bairstow's wallet from the sweat-sodden recesses of my jacket and given him a ten-pound note. Then I drove off down the road calling myself every kind of fool, because in my imagination I was hearing Inspector Bryant enquiring in his most blandishing voice what the nice white middle-aged gentleman in the blue Toyota thought he was buying for himself when he handed you that tenner through the window, son.

* * *

There is a hilltop on the Bristol side of the Mendips that gives one of the longest and most beautiful views in England, steeply downward over small fields and unspoiled villages and outward between two great hills towards the city.

It was one of the places where I had driven Emma on sunny evenings, when we liked to hop in the car and go somewhere for the joy of it. In spring and summer there is quite a traffic of young lovers up there. Fathers kick footballs with their children in the nearby fields. But by late October, between one and seven in the morning, you may be pretty confident of privacy.

I sat with my arms on the wheel of the Toyota, and my chin in my arms, and stared into the shifting night. Stars and moon hung above me. Smells of dew and bonfire filled the car.

By the courtesy light I read the lovers' exchange of messages, one square of yellow paper after another stuck along the dashboard of the car in the order in which I had removed them from the picture frame.

* * *

EMMA: AM expects your call 5.30 today.

Who's AM? I heard Bryant say. AM who's all over Pettifer's diary?

LARRY: Do you love me?

EMMA: CC rang. Didn't say where from. Still no carpets.

LARRY: Where's the bloody Bovril, woman?

Larry hated coffee but was an addict. Bovril was what he called his methadone.

LARRY: I am NOT obsessed by you. It's just that I can't get you out of my stupid head. Why won't you make love to me?

EMMA: AM rang. Carpets arrived. All present as promised. Because I'm off games. Wait till Thursday.

LARRY: Can't.

* * *

The hours crawled by like all the useless hours I had wasted waiting for spies to come and go—in cars, on street corners, in railway stations and lousy cafés. I had two beds in two hotels and couldn't sleep in either of them. I owned a comfortable, leather-upholstered Sunbeam with a brand-new heater but was obliged to freeze in a clapped-out Toyota. Gathering Larry's moleskin over my shoulders like a cape, I tried repeatedly to go to sleep, in vain. By seven I was pacing the gravel, fretting about the fog. I'm stranded! I'll never get down the hill! By eight-thirty, in perfect visibility, I arrived at the entrance to the covered car park of a new shopping centre, only to learn that on Sundays it didn't open till nine. I drove to a cemetery and mindlessly studied headstones for half an hour, returned to the shopping centre, and embarked on the next leg of my spy's odyssey. I parked in the car park, bought shaving cream and razor blades for the seeming, caught a cab to Clifton, collected my Sunbeam from the Eden, and drove it back to the shopping centre. I parked the Sunbeam as close to the Toyota as I could, freed a reluctant trolley from its string of partners, placed it alongside the Toyota, dumped the four bin bags into it, boots, typewriter, answering machine, and green raincoat, and transferred the whole lot to the Sunbeam.

All this without shame or circumspection, because when God invented the supermarket, we used to say in the Office, he provided us spies with something we had till then only dreamed of: a place where any fool could transfer anything in the world from one car to another without any other fool noticing.

Then, because I had no wish to draw attention to Miss Sally Anderson of Cambridge Street—or for that matter Free Prometheus Ltd., or Terry Altman, Esq.—I drove the Toyota to a filthy industrial estate beyond the city's parking zone, pulled the plastic cover over it, and wished it an unfond farewell.

Then back to the supermarket car park and so by Sunbeam to the Hotel Eden, where I parked, paid my bill with a Cranmer credit card, and took a cab to the Starcrest motel, where I paid a second bill with Bairstow's credit card.

Thence to the Eden to collect my car, and so to Honey-brook to sleep, perchance to dream.

* * *

Or not, as Larry would say.

On the verge opposite the main gates, two cyclists were busy doing nothing. In the hall, a painfully written note from Mrs. Benbow regretted that "what with my husband's heart and the questions going on by police," she would not be obliging me in the future. The rest of my mail was scarcely more cheerful: two demands from the Bristol Constabulary for payment of parking fines I had not incurred; a letter from the office of the Value Added Tax inspector advising me that, acting on information received, he proposed to launch a full investigation of my assets, income, outgoings, and receipts over the last two years. And a premature bill from Mr. Rose, my carrier, who had never been known to send a bill to anyone unless someone went round to his home and threatened him with the collectors. Only my friend the excise officer seemed to have escaped enlistment:

Dear Tim,

I propose to make one of my surprise visits to you next Wednesday around midday. Any chance of a bite of lunch?

Best, David

David Beringer, ex-Office. Never happier than when he was resettled.

A last envelope remained. Brown. Poor quality. Typed on an old portable. Postmark Helsinki. The flap tightly sealed. Or, as I suspected, resealed. One sheet of paper inside, ruled. Inky handwriting. Male. Blotched. Headed Moscow and dated six days ago.

Timothy, my friend,

They have let loose an unjust hell on me. I am a prisoner in my own house, disgraced for nothing. If you have cause to come to Moscow, or if you are in touch with your former employers, please assist me by making my oppressors see reason. You can contact Sergei, who is arranging to post this letter for me. Phone him in English only at the number you know, and mention only the name of your old friend and sparring partner:

Peter

I continued staring at the letter. Peter for Volodya Zorin. Peter for talking on the telephone and arranging to meet him in Shepherd Market. Peter for deniable initiatives of friendship. Peter the victim of an unjust hell, under house arrest and waiting to be shot at dawn, welcome to the club.

It was a Sunday, and on Sundays, even without Larry to cook for, there was a lot of seeming to attend to. Eleven o'clock found me in the village church, kneeling on Uncle Bob's embroidered hassock in my lovat suit and mouthing the middle notes of Sung Eucharist, which I heartily dislike. Mr. Guppy took the collection, and the poor old man couldn't bring himself to raise his eyes as he passed me the bag. After church it was the turn of the Misses Bethel in the Dower House to give us bad sherry and alarm us with the latest rumours of the bypass. But today they weren't interested in the bypass, so we talked about nothing while they shot sideways glances at me whenever they thought I wasn't looking. But by the time I crept down to my priesthole under cover of darkness, my booty loaded onto Ted Lanxon's handcart, I was beginning to feel less the master of my house than the burglar who was breaking into it.

* * *

I stood before the strip of old blackout curtain that I had tacked across the alcove. Even tonight, Emma's privacy was as dear to me as it had ever been to her. To spy on her was to sin against the convictions I had never held until I met her. If she had received a phone call and I happened to take it, I passed it to her without comment or enquiry. If a letter, it lay intacta on the hall table till she chose to notice it. I would make nothing of the postmark, the gender of the handwriting, the quality of the stationery. If the temptation became unbearable—I had recognised Larry's handwriting, or another male pen was becoming too familiar to me—then I would stomp cheerily upstairs, flapping the envelope at my side, yelling "Letter for Emma! Letter for Emma! Emma, letter for you!" and with pious relief ease it under the door of her studio, and goodbye to it.

Until now.

Until, with the very reverse of triumph, I tugged aside the curtain and peered down at the eight wine boxes I had blindly filled with the contents of her kneehole desk that Sunday when she left me; and at the anonymous buff folder that Merriman had gaily dubbed my doggy bag, lying askew across the top of them.

I opened it quickly, the way I had always imagined I might swallow poison. Five unheaded A4 pages, compiled by his Sheenas. Without even granting myself time to sit, I read them at one gulp, then again more slowly, waiting for the epiphany that would have me clutching at my throat and crying, "Cranmer, Cranmer, how could you have been so blind?"

None came.

For instead of some cheap textbook solution to Emma's mystery, I found only the affecting confirmation of things that I had assumed or known already: transient lovers, the repeated involvements and escapes, the quest for absolutes in a world of botch and falsehood. I recognised her readiness to be unprincipled in pursuit of principle; and the ease with which she shrugged off her responsibilities when they conflicted with what she perceived as her life's quest. Her parentage, though not as lurid as she would have me think, was quite as ill-starred. Brought up by her mother to believe she was the love child of a great musician, she had visited his home town in Sardinia, to discover that he had been a bricklayer. It was from her mother, if anyone, that her musical talent was derived. But Emma had hated her, and so, as I read the file, did I.

Setting the folder gently aside, I found time to wonder what Merriman had imagined he was achieving by pressing it upon me. All it had done was rekindle the anguish that I felt for her and my determination to save her from the consequences of whatever madness Larry had drawn her into.

I seized the nearest box, overturned it, and seized the next, till all eight of them were empty. The four bin bags from Cambridge Street, their throats bound with ligatures of paper wire, stared at me like masked inquisitors. I ripped off their nooses and shook their contents to the floor. Only the bag of charred paper remained. Gingerly I tipped it out and with my fingertips stroked the unburned fragments into separate piles. On my hands and knees before the detritus of Emma's unscripted disappearance, I launched myself upon the task of entering the secret world of my mistress and her lover.