Our Game

ELEVEN

"OH, MARVELLOUS, TIM," Clare Dugdale had cried in her voice of late-Thatcherite thrill when I telephoned her from a call box, saying I just happened to be in the area. "Simon will be over the moon. He hasn't had any buddy-buddy talk for weeks. Come nice and early and we can have a drink and you can help me put the children to bed, just like the old days. You won't believe Petronella. She's enormous. Do you mind fish? Simon's got a new thing about his heart. Shall you be alone, Tim, or are you with?"

I crossed a bridge and saw below me our white hotel, now turned grey by the recession. The riverside lawns were overgrown. The bar where I had waited for her had DISCO scrawled in chalk across the door. Pinball machines winked in the once stately dining room, where we had eaten flambe steak while she probed my crotch with her stockinged foot and we waited till it was all right to go to bed—which we did as soon as decent, because by four in the morning she was perched in front of the mirror, repairing her makeup to go home.

"Mustn't let the children miss me, must I, darling?" she says. "And poor Simon might easily decide to give me a wake-up call from Washington. He never can sleep on short trips."

"Does he suspect?" I ask, more it now seemed to me out of human curiosity than any particular sense of guilt.

Pause while she completes a line of lipstick. "Shouldn't think so. Si's a Berkeleyan. He denies the existence of everything he can't perceive." Clare took a Cambridge degree in philosophy before shouldering the intellectual burdens of a Foreign Office wife. "And since we don't exist, we can do whatever we jolly well want, can't we? And we still won't have done it, will we?"

In Maidenhead I parked at the railway station and, armed with Bairstow's briefcase, took a taxi to the hideous fifties barracks where they lived. A disintegrating climbing frame adorned the overgrown front garden. Clare's bashed Renault stood abandoned at a dramatic angle in the weed-infested drive. A faded notice by the bell said CHIEN MECHANT. I presumed it was a relic of Simon's visits to Brussels as a NATO Moscow-watcher. The door opened, and the au pair eyed me with slothful curiosity.

"Anna Greta. Still here, my goodness. How splendid."

I stepped round her into the hall, picking my way between perambulators, children's bicycles, and a wigwam. As I did so Clare came charging down the stairs and flung her arms around me. She was wearing the amber brooch I had given her. Simon believed she had inherited it from a distant cousin. Or so she said.

"Anna Greta, darling, will you please go and dish up the vegetables and put them on the hotplate?" she ordered, taking my hand and leading me upstairs. "You're still terribly yummy, Tim. And Si says you've found an absolutely super, frightfully young girl. I think that's awfully clever of you. Petronella, look who's here!" She carried my hand round to my backside and pinched me. "It isn't fish; it's duck. I decided Si's heart could lump it for once. Let me look at you again."

Petronella emerged scowling from the bathroom, dressed in a towel and a mackintosh hat. She was now an ungrateful child of ten, with wire round her teeth and her father's hovering smile.

"Why are you kissing my mother?"

"Because we're very old friends, Pet, darling," Clare replied with hoots of laughter. "Don't be so silly. You'd like a hug from somebody as dishy as Tim, I'll bet."

"No, I wouldn't."

The twin boys wanted Rupert Bear. A visiting girl called Hubbie wanted Black Beauty. The conciliator in me chose Peter Rabbit, and I was coming to the bit about Peter's father having an accident in Mr. McGregor's garden when I heard Simon's footsteps ascending the stairs.

"Hullo, Tim, nice to see you," he said, all on one note, as he offered me a lifeless hand. "Hullo, Pet. Hullo, Clive. Hullo, Mark. Hullo, Hubbie."

"Hullo," they said.

"Hullo, Clare."

"Hullo," said Clare.

I went on reading, while Simon listened from the doorway. In my weightless state of mind I had hoped he might like me better now that I was a fellow cuckold. But he didn't seem to, so perhaps it didn't show.

* * *

The duck must have been frozen, because parts of it still were. As we hacked our way through the bleeding limbs, I remembered that this was how we had always eaten, when we ate our frightful meals together: potatoes boiled to a sludge and school cabbage floating in a green lake. Did their Catholic souls derive solace from such abstinence? Did they feel closer to God and further from the herd?

"Why are you here?" Simon asked in his dry, nasal voice. "Visiting a spinster aunt, actually," I replied.

"Not another filthy rich one, Tim?" said Clare.

"Where is she?" said Simon.

"No, this one's indigent," I told Clare. "Marlow," I told Simon.

"Which nursing home?" said Simon.

"Sunnymeades," I said, giving him a name I had plucked from the yellow pages and hoping it was still in business.

"Is she an aunt on your father's side?" Simon asked.

"Actually she's a cousin of my mother's," I said, forestalling the likelihood that Simon would telephone Sunnymeades nursing home and establish that she didn't exist.

"Are you growing many grapes, please?" sang Anna Greta, who had been elevated to guest for the evening.

"Well, not a bumper harvest, Anna Greta," I replied. "But fair. And first tastings extremely promising."

"Oh," Anna Greta exclaimed, as if astonished.

"I inherited a bit of a problem, quite honestly. My uncle Bob, who founded the business for love, put a lot of trust in his Maker and rather less in science."

Clare gave a hoot of laughter, but Anna Greta's jaw sagged in mystification. For some inexplicable reason, I forged on.

"He planted the wrong grapes in the wrong place, then he prayed for sun and got frost. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a vine is twenty-five years. Which means we must either commit genocide or keep on fighting nature for another ten years."

I couldn't stop. Having derided my own efforts, I exulted in the success of my English and Welsh competitors and deplored the tax burdens imposed on them by an uncaring government. I painted a fulsome picture of England as one of the ancient wine-growing countries of the world, while Anna Greta gawped at me with her mouth open.

"Poor you," said Simon.

"So let's hear about this underaged girl you've shacked up with," Clare cut in recklessly; after two glasses of Romanian claret, she was capable of saying absolutely anything. "You're such an old dog, Tim. Simon's absolutely green with envy. Aren't you, Si?"

"Not in the least," said Simon.

"She's beautiful, she's musical, she can't cook, and I adore her," I proclaimed gaily, grateful to have an opportunity to extol Emma's virtues. "She's also warmhearted and brilliantly clever. What else do you want to know?"

The door opened, and Petronella stormed in, her blond hair brushed over her dressing gown, her blue gaze fixed on her mother in an expression of ethereal agony.

"You're making so much noise I can't sleep!" she protested, stamping her foot. "You're doing it on purpose."

Clare led Petronella back to bed. Anna Greta moodily cleared away the plates.

"Simon, I've got a bit of office shop I need to try out on you," I said. "Could we possibly have quarter of an hour alone?"

* * *

Simon washed while I dried. He wore a blue butcher's apron. There was no machine. We seemed to be washing up several meals at once.

"What do you want?" said Simon.

We had had these conversations before, in his joyless eyrie at the Foreign Office, with jaded Whitehall pigeons eyeing us through the filthy window.

"I've been approached by someone who wants to be paid a lot of money for some information," I said.

"I thought you'd retired."

"I have. It's an old case come alive."

"You don't have to bother with those; they'll dry by themselves," Simon said. "What's he trying to sell you?"

"A forthcoming armed uprising in the North Caucasus."

"Who's rising against who? Thanks," he said as I handed him a dirty saucepan. "They're rising all the time. It's what they do."

"The Ingush against the Russians and Ossetians. With a little help from the Chechen."

"Tried it in '92 and were trounced. No arms. Only what they'd pinched or bought at the back door. Whereas, thanks to Moscow, the Ossetians were armed to the teeth. Still are."

"What if the Ingush equipped themselves with a decent armoury?"

"They can't. They're scattered and dispirited, and whatever they get hold of, the Ossies will get more of. Weapons are the Ossies' thing. We had a story in last week that they've been buying up Red Army surplus in Estonia and running it down to the Serbs in Bosnia with the help of Russian intelligence."

"My source insists that this time the Ingush are going for broke."

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

"He says there's no stopping them. They've got a new leader. A man called Bashir Haji."

"Bashir's yesterday's hero," said Simon, vehemently scouring a very pitted saucepan. "Brave as a lion, great on a horse. Black-belt Sufist. But when it comes to fighting Russian rocketry and helicopter cavalry, he can't lead a brass hand."

We had had conversations like this before. In Simon Dugdale, the art of debunking secret intelligence had found its master. "If we believe my man, Bashir is promising to provide high-tech state-of-the-art Western weaponry and send the Russians and Ossetians back where they came from."

"Listen!"

Slamming down his saucepan, Simon splayed a wet hand in my face but managed to stop it a couple of inches short.

"In '92 the Ingush popped their garters and made an armed march on the Prigorodnyi raion. They had some tanks, a few APCs, a bit of artillery—Russian stuff, bought or plundered, not a lot. Drawn against them"—he grabbed his thumb with his spare hand—"they had North Ossetian Interior Forces"—he grabbed his index finger—"OMON Russian special forces; Republican guards; local Terek Cossacks"—he had reached his little finger—"and so-called volunteers from South Ossetia flown up by the Russians to cut throats for them and squat the Prigorodnyi raion. The only support the Ingush got was from the Chechen, who lent them so-called volunteers and a bit of weaponry. The Chechen are pals with the Ingush, but the Chechen have got their own agenda, which the Russians are aware of. So the Russians are using the Ingush to drive a wedge into the Chechen. If your man is seriously telling you that Bashir or anyone else is planning a full-scale organised attack on the enemies of Ingushetia, either he's making it up or Bashir's gone potty.",

His outburst over, he plunged his arms back into the suds.

I tried another tack. Perhaps I wanted to draw something out of him that I knew was there. Something I needed to hear again as an affirmation of Larry's emotional logic.

"So what about the justice of it?" I suggested.

"The what?"

I was making him angry. "Of the Ingush cause. Have they got right on their side?"

He slapped a colander facedown on the draining board. "Right?" he repeated indignantly. "You mean in absolute terms, as in right and wrong—how has history treated the Ingush?"

"Yes."

He seized a roasting tray and attacked it with a scourer. Simon Dugdale had never been able to resist the lecturer's temptation.

"Three hundred years of having the living shit beaten out of them by the tsars. Frequently returned the compliment. Enter the Corns. False interlude of serendipity, then business as usual. Deported by Stalin in '44 and declared a nation of criminals. Thirteen years in the wilderness. Rehabilitated by decree of Supreme Soviet and allowed to empty the dustbins. Tried peaceful protest. Didn't work. Rioted. Moscow sits on its arse." Pressing down on the roasting tray, he gave it a vengeful scrub. "Corns go down the tube; enter Yeltsin. Sweet-talks them. Russian Parliament passes fuzzy resolution restoring dispossessed peoples." He kept scrubbing. "Ingush buy it. Supreme Soviet adopts law favouring an Ingush republic within Russian Federation. Hooray. Five minutes later Yeltsin puts the knockers on it with a presidential decree forbidding border changes in the Caucasus. Not so hooray. Moscow's latest plan is to force the Ossetians to accept the Ingush back in agreed numbers and on terms. Some bloody hope. Morally, whatever that's supposed to mean, the Ingush case is unassailable, but in the world of conflicting compromises which it's my misfortune to inhabit, that means approximately bugger all. Legally, for whoever gives a toss about post-Sov legality, it's no contest. The Ossies are in breach of the law, the Ingush are blameless. When did that alter the price of fish?"

"So where are the Americans on this?"

"The what?" he said—implying that while he might be an expert on the North Caucasus, the United States of America were an unfamiliar concept to him.

"Uncle Sam," I said.

"My dear man—" He had never in his life till now used an endearment towards me. "Listen up, do you mind?" He assumed an American accent. It fell somewhere between a Deep South plantation owner and an East End costermonger. "What the fuck's the Ingush, man? Some kind o' Injun, man? Ameringush?"

I pulled a dutiful smile, and to my relief Simon returned to his normal drab voice.

"If America has a post-Sov policy down there, it's not to have a policy. Which is consistent with her post-Sov policy everywhere else, I may add. Planned apathy is the kindest description I can think of: act natural and look the other way while the ethnic cleansers do their hoovering and restore what politicians call normality. Which means that whatever Moscow does is okay by Washington, provided nobody frightens the horses. End of policy."

"So what can the Ingush hope for?" I asked.

"Absolutely sweet Fanny Adams," Simon Dugdale replied with relish. "There are bloody great oil fields in Chechenia, even if they've been screwed up by lousy exploitation. Minerals, timber, all the goodies. There's the Georgian Military Highway, and Moscow intends to keep it open whatever the Chechen and the Ingush think. And the Russian army isn't about to march into Chechenia and leave Ingushetia next door as a joker in the pack. Piss."

He had spilled something on his apron, and it had permeated his trousers. He seized another apron and, though it was even dirtier than the first, wrapped it round his midriff. "Anyway," he said accusingly, "who would you favour if you were the Kremlin? A bunch of bloodthirsty Muslim highlanders, or the Sovietised, Christianised, arse-licking Ossetians, who pray every day for Stalin to come back?"

"So what would you do if you were Bashir?"

"I'm not. Hypothetical codswallop."

Suddenly, to my surprise, he sounded like Larry dilating on the subject of fashionable and unfashionable wars. "First, I'd buy myself one of those smirking Washington lobbyists with plastic hair. That's a million bucks down the tube. Second, I'd get hold of a dead Ingush baby, preferably female, and put her on prime time television in the arms of a snivelling newscaster, preferably male, also with plastic hair. I'd have questions asked in Congress and the United Nations. And when absolutely sod all has happened as usual, I'd say to hell with it, and if I had any money left, I'd take my family to the south of France and blow the lot. No, I wouldn't. I'd go alone."

"Or go to war," I suggested.

He was crouching, packing saucepans into a pitch-dark cupboard at floor level.

"There's a warning out about you," he said. "Thought I'd better tell you. Anyone who sights you is supposed to tell Personnel Department."

"And will you?" I asked.

"Shouldn't think so. You're Clare's friend, not mine."

I thought he had finished, but there was evidently too much left in him.

"I rather dislike you, to be frank. And your bloody Office. I never believed one word you and your people told me unless I'd happened to have read it in the newspapers first. I don't know what you're looking for, but I'd be grateful if you didn't look for it here."

"Just tell me whether it's true."

"What?"

"Are the Ingush planning something serious? Could they do that? If they had the guns?"

Too late in the day, I wondered whether he was drunk. He seemed to have lost his orientation. I was wrong. He was warming to his subject.

"It's quite an interesting one, that, actually," he conceded, with the boyish enthusiasm he brought to all forms of catastrophe. "From stuff we're getting in, Bashir seems to be raising a pretty good head of steam despite himself. You may be onto something."

I took Emma's part and played the innocent. "Can't anyone stop it happening?" I asked.

"Oh sure. The Russians can. Do what they did last time. Turn the Ossies loose on them. Rocket their villages. Gouge their eyes out. Drag 'em down to the valleys, bang 'em up in ghettos. Deport them."

"I meant us. NATO without the Americans. After all, it is Europe. It is our patch."

"Do a Bosnia, you mean?" he proposed in the same triumphant note that in Simon Dugdale celebrated every impasse. "On Russian soil? Brilliant idea. And let's have a few Russian shock troops to sort out our British football hooligans while we're about it." The anger I had been provoking in him had caught light. "The presumption," he reasoned on a higher note, "that this country—any civilised country—has a duty to interpose itself between any two groups of knuckle-draggers who happen to be determined to butcher each other ..." He's talking like me, I thought. "... to patrol the globe, mediating between hell-bent heathen savages nobody's ever heard of ... Do you mind going now?"

"What's the forest?"

"Are you mad?"

"Why would an Ingush warn somebody about the forest?"

Once more his face cleared. "Ossetian Ku Klux Klan. Shadowy mob, fed and watered by the KGB or its derivatives. If you wake up tomorrow morning with your balls in your mouth, which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, in my view, it will like as not be the work of The Forest. After you."

Clare was in the drawing room with a magazine on her lap, watching a black-and-white television set over the top of her reading glasses.

"Oh, Tim, darling, do let me run you to the station. We've hardly talked at all."

"I'm ordering a cab for him," said Simon, at the telephone.

The cab came and she took my arm and led me to it, while Simon the Berkeleyan stayed indoors, denying the existence of everything he couldn't perceive. I remembered the occasions when I had performed a similar courtesy for Emma, fuming inside the house and grimacing at my reflection while she said goodbye to Larry in the drive.

"I always think of you as a man who does things," Clare whispered in my ear, while she chewed it half to pieces. "Poor Si's so academic."

I felt nothing for her. Some other Cramer had slept with her.

* * *

I drove, with Larry beside me in the passenger seat. "You're mad," I told him, taking a leaf from Simon Dugdale's book. "Dangerously, cogently mad."

He affected to weigh this, which was what he always did before he struck back.

"My definition of a madman, Timbo, is someone who is in possession of all the facts."

It was midnight. I was approaching Chiswick. Pulling off the main road, I wove through a chicane and entered a private estate. The house was an overdecorated Edwardian gem. Beyond it lay the black Thames, its surface feathered by the city's glow. I parked, fished the .38 from my briefcase, and jammed it in my waistband. The briefcase in my left hand, I stepped round a broken stile and stood on the tow-path. The river air smelled brown and greasy. Two lovers were embracing on a bench, the girl astride. I walked slowly, picking my way round puddles, setting up water rats and birds. On the other side of the hedge, guests were taking leave of their hosts:

"Simply marvellous party, darlings, literally."

I was reminded of Larry, doing one of his voices. I had reached the house again, this time from the back. Lights burned over the back door and on the garage. Selecting a point where the hedge was lowest, I pushed down the wire, dropped the briefcase the other side of it, and nearly castrated myself. I toppled into a garden of mown lawn and rose beds. Two naked children stared at me, their arms outstretched, but as I advanced on them they became a pair of porcelain cupids. The garage stood to my left. I hastened to its shadow, tiptoed to a window, and peered inside. No car. He's out to dinner. He's been summoned to a war party. Help, help, Cranmer's flown the coop.

I propped myself against the wall, my eyes trained on the front gate. I could wait for hours like this. A cat rubbed itself against my leg. I smelled the liquid stench of fox. I heard a car, I saw its headlights bounce towards me down the unmade road. I pressed myself more tightly yet against the garage wall. The car drove on, to stop fifty yards up the road. A second car appeared, a better one: white lights, two sets, a quieter engine. Be alone, Jake, I warned him. Don't make it hard for me. Don't bring me some Significant Other. Just bring me your Insignificant Self.

Merriman's overpolished Rover car bucked through the front gate and up the little ramp to his garage. It had Jake Merriman at the wheel, and no one else aboard, no Other at all, not of either sex. He drove into the garage, he dowsed the headlights of his car. There followed one of those pauses that I associate with single people of a certain age, while he stayed sitting in the driver's seat and by the interior light fidgeted with things I couldn't see.

"Just don't be alarmed, Jake," I said.

I had opened his door for him and was holding the gun a few inches from his head.

"I won't be," he said.

"Switch the interior light to full time. Give me the car key. Put your hands on the steering wheel. Don't take your hands off the steering wheel. How do the garage doors close?"

He held up a magic box.

"Close them," I said.

The doors closed.

I sat behind him. Holding the gun to the nape of his neck, I put my left forearm across his throat and gently drew his head to me until we were cheek-to-cheek.

"Munslow tells me you've been looking for Emma," I said.

"Then he's a bloody little fool."

"Where is she?"

"Nowhere. We're looking for Pettifer too, in case you haven't noticed. We haven't found him either. We'll be looking for you as well after tonight."

"Jake, I will do this. You know that, don't you? I will actually shoot you if I have to."

"I don't need convincing. I'll collaborate. I'm a coward."

"Do you know what I did yesterday, Jake? I wrote a frank letter to the chief constable of Somerset, copy to the Guardian newspaper. I described how a few of us in the Office had decided to rip off the Russian Embassy with a little help from Checheyev. I took the liberty of mentioning your name."

"Then you're a stupid little sod."

"Not as a ringleader but as someone who could be counted on to turn a blind eye at the right moments. A passive conspirator like Zorin. The letters will be posted at nine tomorrow morning unless I say the magic word. I shan't say the word unless you tell me what you know about Emma."

"I've told you everything we know about Emma. I've given you a bloody file on Emma. She's a tart. What more do you want to know?"

The sweat was rolling off him in great drops. There was sweat on the barrel of the .38.

"I want an update. And please don't call her a tart, Jake.

Call her the nice lady or something. Just not tart."

"She was in Paris. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well."

Larry did, I thought. "When?"

"October."

"We're in October now. When in October?"

"Mid. The twelfth. What on earth do you think you're up to? Relent. Make a confession. Come home."

"How do you know it was the twelfth?"

"The Americans picked her up on a random sweep.”

“The Americans? How the hell did the Americans get in on the act?"

"Computerland, darling. We gave them a sample of her voiceprint. They backtracked through their intercepts. Out popped your precious Emma, speaking with a phony Scottish accent."

"Who was she calling?"

"Philip somebody."

I didn't remember a Philip. "What did she say?"

"She was well, she was in Stockholm. That was a lie. She was in Paris. She wished all the boys and girls to know that she was happy and was proposing to make a new beginning. With thirty-seven million quid to play with, one imagines she very well might."

"Did you listen to her yourself?"

"You don't think I'd leave her to some spotty CIA college boy, do you?"

"Give me her words."

" 'I'm going back to where I came from. I'm making a new start.' To which our Philip says, 'Right, right,' which is what the lower classes say these days. Right, right, and cheers instead of thank you. She's waiting for you, you'll be pleased to hear. She's totally devoted to you. I was proud of you."

"Her words," I said.

" 'I'll wait for him for as long as it takes,' spoken with the most marvellous conviction. 'I'll do a Penelope for him, even if it's years. I'll weave by day and I'll unpick by night until he comes for me.' "

With the gun in my hand and the briefcase flying out behind me, I pelted to my car. I drove south till I came to the outskirts of Bournemouth, where I checked into a bungalow motel with crematorium music in the corridors and mauve night-lights marking the fire exists. I'm coming for you, I told her. Hang on. For pity's sake, hang on.

* * *

She is dead of cold, except that she is shivering. It's as if I have rescued her from a freezing sea. Her clammy skin sticks as she clutches me. Her face is pressed so hard against mine that I am unable to resist.

"Tim, Tim, wake up."

She has rushed into my room, naked. She has yanked back my duvet and wound her freezing body round me, whispering,—rim, Tim," when all she means is "Larry, Larry." She is shaking and writhing uselessly against me, but I'm not her lover, just the body she hangs on to while she nearly drowns, the nearest she can get to Larry.

"You love him too," she says. "You must."

She slinks back to her room.

* * *

Paris, Merriman had said. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well.

Paris, I thought. For her new beginning.

Dee's place, she is saying. Where I was made alive again.

Who's Dee? I ask.

Dee's a saint. Dee saved me when I was flat on the deck.

I'm making a new start, Merriman is saying in his perfumed voice, quoting Emma. I'm going back to where I came from.

* * *

A grey morning with no sun. A long drive lifting to the house, gulls and peacocks squawking at my arrival. I spoke my name, the iron gates parted as if I had said "Open Sesame," the mock-Tudor mansion rose before me amid misted lawns, and the tennis court where no one ever played and the pool where no one swam. A flaccid Union Jack dangled from a tall white mast. Behind the house, golf links and dunes. In the distance, a ghostly old battleship stuck halfway up the sky. It had been there ever since I first ventured up the same hill fifteen years ago and timidly suggested to Ockie Hedges that he might consider putting a little back by assisting us in certain matters not unrelated to the arms trade.

"Assist in what way, son?" Ockie demands from behind his napoleonic desk. For while officially he trades from the Isle of Wight, his preference in later life is to do business from his Bournemouth hilltop.

"Well, sir," I say awkwardly, "we know you talk to the Ministry of Defence, but we thought you might talk to us as well."

"What about, son?" More irritably yet. "Tell it to us straight. What's the bottom line?"

"The Russians are using Western dealers to supply their covert arms for them," I say.

"Course they are."

"Some of the dealers are business acquaintances of yours," I say, refraining from adding that they are also his partners. "We'd like you to be our listening post, accept questions, talk to us on a regular basis."

A long silence follows.

"Well?" he says.

"Well what?"

"What are you offering, son? What's the sweetener?”

“There isn't one. It's for your country."

"I'll be damned," says Ockie Hedges devoutly.

Nevertheless, after we have taken several walks round the prinked garden, Ockie Hedges, widower, bereaved father, and one of the biggest crooks in the illegal-arms business, decides it is after all time he joined the armies of the righteous.

* * *

A tall young man in a blazer marched me across the hall. He had broad shoulders and short hair, which was what Ockie liked his tall young men to have. Two bronze warriors with bows and arrows guarded the double doors to Ockie's panelled study.

"Jason, bring us a nice tray of tea, please," Ockie said, grasping my hand and upper arm at the same time. "And if there's a fatted calf, kill it. Mr. Crammer gets nothing but the best. How are you, son? You'll stay for lunch, I've told them."

He was stocky and powerful and seventy, a pint-sized dictator in a tailor-made brown suit, with a gold watch chain across the flat stomach of his double-breasted waistcoat. When he greeted you he filled his little chest with pride, appointing you his soldier. When he seized your hand, his prizefighter's fist cupped it like a claw. A picture window looked down the gardens to the sea. Around the room lay the polished trophies Ockie valued most: from the cricket club of which he was chairman, and the police club of which he was president for life.

"I've never been more glad to see anyone than what I am you, Tim," Ockie said. He spoke like a British airline steward, oscillating between social classes as if they were wavelengths. "I can't tell you the number of times I nearly picked up that phone there and said, 'Tim. Get yourself up here and let's have some sense.' That young fellow you introduced me to is as much use as a wet weekend. He needs a good barber for a start."

"Oh, come on, Ockie," I said with a laugh. "He's not that bad."

"What do you mean, come on? He's worse than bad. He's a fairy."

We sat down, and I listened dutifully to a recitation of my luckless successor's failings.

"You opened doors for me, Tim, and I did some favours for you. You may not be a Mason, but you behaved like one. And down the corridor of the years a mutuality developed which was beautiful. My only regret was you never met Doris. But this new boy you've landed on me, it's all by the book. It's where did you get this from, and who told who that, and why they said whatever they said, and let's have it down in duplicate. The world's not like that, Tim. The world's fluid. You know it, I know it. So why doesn't he? No time, that's his trouble. Everything's got to be by yesterday. I don't suppose you're going to tell me you're back in harness, are you?"

"Not in the long term," I said cautiously.

"Pity. All right, what's your angle? You never came here without a need that I remember, and I never sent you empty away."

I glanced at the door and lowered my voice. "It's Office but it's not Office, if you follow me."

"No, I don't."

"It's right off the record. Ultradelicate. They want it you and me and no one else. If that's going to bother you, you'd better say so now."

"Bother me? You're joking." He had taken on my tone. "They should check that boy out, if you want my advice. He's a pacifist. Look at those flared trousers he wears."

"I need an update on somebody we used to have an interest in, back in the bad old days."

"Who?"

"He's half a Brit and half a Turk," I said, playing to Ockie's appalling views on race.

"All men are equal, Tim. All religions are paths to the same gate. What's his name?"

"He was cosy with certain people in Dublin and cosier still with certain Russian diplomats in London. He had an interest in a shipment of arms and explosives by trawler out of Cyprus bound for the Irish Sea. You took a piece of it, remember?"

Ockie was already smiling a rather cruel smile. "Via Bergen," he said. "A greasy little carpet seller, name of Aitken Mustafa May."

Payment to AM, Macclesfield, I was thinking as I dutifully congratulated Ockie on his prodigious memory.

"We need your ear to the tracks," I was saying. "His private addresses, trade addresses, the name of his Siamese cat if he's got one."

* * *

There was a well-trodden ritual about Ockie putting his ear to the tracks. Each time he did it, I had a vision of a terrible inner England that we poor spies can only guess at, with insiders' signals being flashed over secret computer lines, and secret covenants being called in. First he summoned Miss Pullen, a stone-faced woman in a grey twin set, who took dictation standing up. Her other concern was the autobiography with which Ockie was planning to instruct a waiting world.

"Oh, and take a discreet sampling on a firm called Hardwear up north somewhere, will you, a Mr. May, Aitken M. May?" he said, in a lugubriously throwaway voice, after he had given her a list of other commissions to conceal his purpose. "We had a side deal with them way back, but they're not the same people anymore. I'll want credit rating, company accounts, stockholders, current trading interests, principals listed, private addresses, home phone numbers, the usual."

Ten minutes later Miss Pullen returned with a typed sheet, and Ockie retired to a side room and closed the door and made telephone calls that I could only faintly hear.

"Your Mr. May is on a shopping spree," he announced when he returned.

"Who for?"

"The mafia."

I played my part for him: "The Italian mafia?" I cried. "But, Ockie, they've got all the guns in the world!"

"You're being stupid deliberately. The Russian mafia. Don't you read the newspapers?"

"But Russia's awash with guns and everything else. The military's been selling them off to all corners for years."

"There's mafias and mafias over there. Maybe there's mafias that want something special and don't want the neighbours looking over their shoulders while they buy it. Maybe there's mafias with hard currency who'd like to pay for a little superiority." He studied Miss Pullen's fact sheet, then his notes. "He's a middleman, your Mr. May. A shyster. If he owns more than one demonstration model of anything, I'd be surprised."

"But which mafia, Ockie? There are dozens."

"That's all I know. Mafias. Officially his client is a major nation that wishes to remain below the skyline, so his nominal end-user is Jordan. Unofficially it's mafia, and he's in over his head."

"Why?"

"Because what he's buying is too big for his boots, that's why. He's a scrap dealer is what he is, a greasy scrap dealer. Now all of a sudden he's out there with Stingers, heavy machine guns, antitank, heavy mortars, ammunition like there's no tomorrow, night vision. Where he ships it all to is another story. One says northern Turkey, another Georgia. He's cocky. Dined a friend of mine at Claridges the other night, if you can believe it. I'm surprised they let him in. Here you are. Never trust a man with a lot of addresses."

He shoved a sheaf of papers at me, and I stored them in my briefcase. Ushered by Jason to the dining room, we lunched at a twenty-foot oak table and drank barley water while Ockie Hedges successively dismissed intellectuals, Jews, blacks, the Yellow Peril, and homosexuals with a benign and universal hatred. And Tim Cranmer, he just smiled his rent-a-drool smile and munched his fish, because that was what he had been doing for Ockie Hedges these fifteen years: stroking his little man's vanity, riding out his insults, turning a deaf ear to his bigotries, and paying court to his disgusting calling, in the service of a safer, wiser England.

"Flawed from birth is my view. Subhuman. I'm surprised you boys don't have them shot."

"There'd be no one left, that's the trouble, Ockie."

"Yes, there would. There'd be us. And that's all that's needed."

And after lunch there was the garden to admire, not a petal out of place. There were the latest additions to his collection of antique weaponry, which was kept, like fine wine, in a temperature-controlled cellar reached by a lift designed as a portcullis. So it was after four o'clock by the time he stood on his porch with his arms folded, just another childless old tyrant on a hilltop, glowering after me as I climbed into my humble Ford, with the Union Jack behind him sulking on its flagpole.

"That the best your country can do for you, is it?" he demanded, poking his chin at me.

"It's the New Era, Ockie. No big expense accounts, no nice shiny cars."

"Come more often, I might buy you one myself," he said.

* * *

I drove again, and for a while the movement dulled my fears. Sometimes a roadhouse offered, but the thought of more stale cigarette smoke and another candlewick coverlet discouraged me, and I kept driving until I was all in. Rain came on, a dark sky lay ahead of me. Suddenly, like Emma, I needed comfort, if only in the form of a decent dinner. The first village provided me with what I was looking for: an old coaching inn with a framed menu and a cobbled yard. The receptionist was a fresh-faced country girl. I smelled roasting beef and wood smoke. I was blessed.

"On the quiet side of the house, if possible, please," I told her while she examined her list of bookings.

And that was when my eye fell on the sheet of printed numbers that lay upside down at her bare elbow. I have little memory for figures as a rule, but I have a nose for danger. There were no names, just groups like groups on a code pad, each group four digits and each line four groups. The heading on the page read WATCHLIST, the source was the credit card company of which Colin Bairstow was a long-standing member.

Not any longer, however. The number of my Bairstow credit card was printed in the bottom right-hand column of the sheet, beneath the word CURRENT in capitals.

"How would you be wishing to pay your bill, sir?" the receptionist asked.

"Cash," I said, and with a fairly steady hand invented a new name for her book of registered guests: Henry Porter, 3 The Maltings, Shoreham, Kent.

* * *

I sat in my room. The car, I thought. Ditch the car. Take off the number plates. I willed myself to calm down. If the Ford was hot, then the Ford was a liability. But how hot was it? How hot was I? How hot could Pew-Merriman allow me to be without blowing their interest to the police? Sometimes, I used to tell my joes, you have to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and jump.

I bathed and shaved and put on a clean shirt. I went down to the dining room and ordered a bottle of the best claret. I lay in bed listening to the sibyl voices: Don't go north, Misha. Misha, take heed, please.... If he has started his journey, he should please discontinue it.

But the journey was not of my choosing. I was being con- veyed, never mind whether The Forest, or the whole valley of the shadow, was watching me pass through.

* * *

The hill was steep, and the house a stern old lady with her feet firmly planted amid elderly friends. She had a Sunday school face and a stained-glass porch that glowed like heaven in the morning sun. She had pious lace curtains and a hint of grief, and boxed hedges and a bird table and a chestnut tree that was shedding gold leaves. The hill's gorse summit rose behind her like the green hill in the hymn, and behind the hill lay several different heavens: blue for sunshine, black for judgment, and the clear white sky of the north.

I pressed the doorbell and heard the drumming of strong young feet on the stairs. The time was 9:25. The door flew open, and I stood face-to-face with a pretty young woman in jeans, bare feet, and a checked shirt. She was smiling, but her smile faded when she realised I wasn't whoever she'd hoped I was.

"Oh, sorry," she said awkwardly. "We thought you were my friend, giving us a nice surprise. Didn't we, Ali? We thought it was Daddy." Her voice was antipodean but soft. I guessed New Zealand. A barefoot half-Asian boy peered from behind her waist.

"Mrs. May?" I said.

Her smiled returned. "Well, near enough."

"Sorry to be a bit early. I've got a date with Aitken.”

“With Aitken? Here at the house?"

"My name's Pete Bradbury. I'm a buyer. Aitken and I deal a lot together. We have an appointment here at nine-thirty." My tone still brisk but kindly: just two people chatting on a doorstep on a sunny autumn morning.

"But he never has buyers to the house," she objected, as her smile became supplicatory, and slightly disbelieving. "Everyone goes to the store. Don't they, Ali? That's the rule. Daddy never brings his business home, does he, pet?" The boy took her hand and swung from it, trying to draw her back into the house.

"Well, I'm a pretty substantial customer of his, actually.

We've been trading some while. I know he likes to be private as a rule, but he said he had something a bit special for me to look at."

She was impressed. "Are you the big, big buyer? The one that's going to make us all mountainously rich?"

"Well, I hope so. I hope he'll make me rich too."

Her confusion increased.

"He can't have forgotten," she said. "Not Aitken. He thinks about your deal day and night. He must be on his way." Her doubts returned. "And you really, really don't think you've made a mistake and you should be at the store? I mean he could easily have driven straight there from the airport. He keeps weird times."

"I've never been to the store. We've always met in London. I wouldn't even know where to find the store."

"Me neither. Ali, stop it. I mean he just never, never does this. He's abroad, you see. Well, he's on his way back, obviously. I mean he could be here."

I waited while she talked herself round.

"Look. All right. Why don't you come indoors and have a cup of tea till he shows up? He'll be terribly angry. If people stand him up, he goes totally spare. He's not a bit Oriental in that way. I'm Julie, actually."

I stepped after her into the house, took off my shoes, and put them with the family's in the rack beside the door.

* * *

The living room was a kitchen, playroom, and living room all at once. It had an old doll's house and cane furniture and pleasantly disordered bookshelves with books jammed upward and sideways in English, Turkish, and Arabic. It had a silver-gilt samovar and Koranic texts and silk embroideries. I recognised a Coptic cross and Ottoman carnations. A magic eye in gold and green hung above the door to ward off devils. In a carved wall cabinet, a mother-cult goddess rode sidesaddle on a very obvious stallion. And on the television set stood a studio photograph in colour of Julie and a bearded man seated among pink roses. The television was showing a children's animated film. She turned the sound down, but Ali grizzled so she turned it up again. She made a pot of tea and set shortbread biscuits on a plate. She had long legs and a long waist and a model's studiously casual walk.

"If you knew how unusual this was, it's so stupid, it's so untypical of him," she said. "You didn't come all the way from London just for—well—this, did you?"

"It's not a tragedy. How long's he been away?”

“A week. What's your speciality?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What do you deal in?"

"Oh, you name it. Hamadan. Balouchi. Kilims. The best of everything when I can afford it. Are you in the trade yourself?"

"Not really." She smiled, mostly at the window because she was keeping watch. "I teach at Ali's school. Don't I, Al?"

She went to the next room, and the boy went after her. I heard her telephoning. I snatched a closer look at the portrait of the happy couple. The photographer had been wise to pose them sitting, for straightened out, Mr. Aitken Mustafa May would have been a bearded head shorter than his lady, even allowing for the raised heels of his high-gloss, buckled shoes. But his smile was proud and happy.

"All I ever get's the answerphone too," she complained, coming back. "It's been the same all week. There's a store-man there and a secretary. Why don't they switch off the machine and answer the phone for themselves? They're supposed to have been there since nine."

"Can't you reach one of them at home?"

"Aitken just will hire these way-out people!" she protested, shaking her head. "He calls them his Odd Couple; she's a retired librarian or something, he's ex-army. They live in a cottage in the moors and don't talk to anyone except their goats. Which is why he hires them. Honestly."

"And no telephone?"

She had placed herself at the window again, bare feet apart. "Water from the well," she said indignantly. "No mains, no phone, no nothing. You're absolutely certain he didn't say the store. aren't you? I don't mean to be stupid or rude or anything, but he just never, never has business people here."

"Where's he been travelling?"

"Ankara. Baghdad. Baku. You know how he is. Once he gets on a scent there's no stopping him."

She drummed her fingertips on the window.

"It's his Muslim side," she said. "Keep the women out of it. How long have you known him?"

"Six years. Seven maybe."

"I just wish he'd talk about the people he meets. I'll bet some of them are really, really interesting."

A taxi came up the hill and drove past without slowing down. It was empty.

"I mean what's he pay them for?" she protested in exasperation. "Two grown-up zombies sitting on their backsides listening to a machine. I'm just so sorry for you. Aitken'll kill them, he really will."

"Oh dear."

"He has this really ridiculous superstition thing about not telling me which plane he's on too," she said. "He thinks they'll blow him up or something. I mean he's so spooky sometimes. I wonder—you know, am I going to be like him, or is he going to be like me?"

"What car does he drive?"

"A Merc. Metallic blue. Brand-new. Two-door. It's his pride and joy. It's your deal that paid for it," she added.

"Where does he leave it when he goes abroad?"

"At the airport sometimes. Sometimes at the store. Depends."

"He's not with Terry, is he?"

"Who?"

"Sort of half partner of mine and Aitken's. Terry Altman. Amusing chap. Talks a lot. Got a beautiful new girlfriend called Sally. Sally Anderson. But her friends call her Emma for some reason."

"If they're business, forget it."

I stood up. "Look. There's been a muddle. Why don't we abandon this, and I'll go down to the store and see if I can rouse the secretary. If I find anything out, I can give you a ring. Don't worry. I've got the address. I'll just wander down the hill and get a cab."

I took my shoes from the rack and laced them up. I stepped into the sunlight. A knot had formed in my gut, and there was a singing in my ears.