Our Game

FIVE

I HAD Two hours to kill before the last train left for Castle Cary, and probably I walked. Somewhere I must have bought an evening newspaper, though I loathe them. It was in my raincoat pocket the next morning, folded into a grimy wad of illiterate newsprint, with the crossword completed in spiky capitals quite unlike my own. And I must have had a couple of Scotches along the way, for I remember little of the journey beyond the reflection riding along beside me in the black window, and sometimes the face was Larry's, sometimes mine, and sometimes Emma's with her hair up, wearing the eighteenth-century pearl collar I had given her the day she brought her piano stool to Honeybrook. So much was in my head that nothing was. Larry has stolen thirty-seven million; Checheyev is his accomplice; I am supposed to be another. He has fled with the loot; Emma has gone after him. Larry, whom I taught to steal, rifle desks, pick locks, photograph papers, memorise, bide his time, and, if he ever had to, run and hide. Colonel Volodya Zorin, once the pride of Moscow's England section, is under house arrest. Crossing the footbridge at Castle Cary station, I was confused by the clatter of young shoes in the Victorian ironwork and fancied I smelled steam and burning coals. I was a boy again, lugging my school suitcase down the stone steps for another solitary holiday with Uncle Bob.

My splendid old Sunbeam stood in the station car park, where I had left it. Had they tampered with it, fitted it with bugs and tracking devices, sprayed it with the latest magic paint? The modern technology was beyond me. It always had been. Driving, I was irritated by a pair of car lights close on my tail, but on that winding lane only fools and drunks attempt to overtake. I cleared the ridge and passed through the village. On some nights the church was floodlit. Not tonight. In cottage windows the last television screens flickered like dying embers. The headlights came racing up behind me, flashing from dip to full beam and back again. I heard the honking of a horn. Pulling over to let whoever it was pass, I saw Celia Hodgson waving hilariously at me from her Land-Rover. I waved hilariously back. Celia was one of my local conquests from the days before Emma, when I was the absentee landlord of Honeybrook and the most eligible weekend divorce in the parish. She lived in penury on a large estate near Sparkford, rode to hounds, and masterminded our country holiday scheme for urban children. Inviting her to lunch with me one Sunday, I was surprised to find myself in bed with her before the avocado. I still chaired her committee, we still chatted in the grocer's shop. I never slept with her again, and she didn't seem to grudge me Emma. Sometimes I wondered whether she remembered the episode at all.

The stone gateposts of Honeybrook rose before me. Slowing to a crawl, I switched on my brass foglight and willed myself to study the tyre marks in the drive. First John Guppy's postal van. Any other driver swings left when he wants to avoid the three big potholes in the dip, but John, despite my best entreaties, prefers to swing right because that's what he's been doing these forty years, churning the grass verge and trampling the daffodil bulbs.

Beside John Guppy ran the brave thin line of Ted Lanxon's bicycle tyres. Ted was my grower, bequeathed to me by Uncle Bob with orders to keep him till he dropped, which he resolutely refused to do, preferring to perpetuate my uncle's many errors. And bouncing through the middle of everything came the Toiler sisters in their jungle-painted Subaru, as much off the ground as on it. The Toilers were our part-time helpers and Ted's bane, but also his delight. And straddling the Toilers ran the alien imprint of a heavy lorry. Something must have been delivered. But what? The fertiliser we ordered? Came on Friday. The new bottles? Came last month.

In the gravel sweep before the house I saw nothing untoward, until the nothing began to bother me. Why were there no tyre tracks in the gravel? Had the Toiler girls not roared through here on their way to the walled garden? Had not John Guppy parked here when he delivered my mail? And what about my mystery lorry, which had come all this way only to make a vertical takeoff?

Leaving my lights burning, I got out of the car and patrolled the sweep, scouring it for the marks of feet or car tyres. Somebody had raked the gravel. I switched off the lights and mounted the steps to the house. On the train journey, my back had acted up. But as I let myself into the porch, the pain left me. A dozen envelopes lay on the doormat, most of them brown. Nothing from Emma, nothing from Larry. I studied the postmarks. They were all a day late. I studied the gummed joins. They were too well sealed. When would the Office ever learn? Setting the envelopes on the marble-topped side table, I climbed the six steps to the Great Hall without putting on the light and stood still.

And listened. And sniffed. And caught a waft of warm body on the still air. Sweat? Deodorant? Men's hair oil? If I couldn't define it, I could recognise it. I eased my way down the passage towards my study. Halfway along, I caught it again: the same deodorant, the faintest whiff of stale cigarette smoke. Not smoked on the premises—that would be insanity Smoked in a pub or car perhaps—not necessarily by the person whose clothes had borne the stale fumes—but alien cigarette smoke all the same.

I had laid no clever traps before I set out for London this morning, no hairs in locks, no bits of cotton thread stretched across the hinges, had taken no Polaroid pictures. I hadn't needed to. I had my dust. Monday is Mrs. Benbow's day off. Her friend Mrs. Cooke will come only when Mrs. Benbow comes, which is her way of disapproving of Emma. Between Friday night and Tuesday morning, therefore, nobody dusts the house unless I do. And usually I do. I enjoy a little housework, and on Mondays I like to polish my collection of eighteenth-century barometers and one or two oddments that receive less than their fair share of Mrs. Benbow's rather strict ministrations: my Chinese Chippendale footstools and the campaign table in my dressing room.

This morning, though, I had risen early, and with the tradecraft that seemed to have been laid on me since childhood, I had let the dust lie where it was. With a log fire in the Great Hall and another in the drawing room, I get a fine crop by Monday morning but an even better one by Monday night. And I saw as soon as I entered my study that there was no dust on my walnut desk. On its entire surface not one speck of honest dust. The brass handles pristine. I could smell the polish.

So they came, I thought without emotion. It's a given: they came. Merriman summons me to London, and while I am safely under his eye he sends his ferrets in a furniture van, or an electricity van, or whatever vans they use these days, to break into my house and search it, knowing that Monday is a good day. Knowing that Lanxon and the Toiler girls work five hundred yards away from the main house, inside a brick-walled garden cut off from everything except the sky. And while he is about it, Merriman slaps a mail check on me for good measure and by now, no doubt, a telephone check as well.

I went upstairs. Smoke again. Mrs. Benbow does not smoke. Her husband doesn't. I don't, and I detest the habit and the smell. If I have returned from somewhere and have woke in my clothing, I require a complete change, a bath, and a hairwash. When Larry has been visiting, I have to fling open all the doors and windows that the weather permits. But the landing I again smelled stale cigarette smoke. In my dressing room and bedroom, more stale smoke. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house: her side, my side, and the gallery a sword between us. Larry's sword.

Key in hand, I stood before her door, as I had done last mew again uncertain whether I should enter. It was oak and studded, a front door that had somehow made it up the stairs. I turned the key and stepped inside. Then quickly closed and locked the door behind me, against whom I didn't know. I hadn't trespassed here since the day I tidied up after her departure. I breathed in slowly, mouth and nose together. A whiff of scented talc mingled with the musk of disuse. So they sent in a woman, I thought. A powdered woman. Or two. Or six. But women certainly: some asinine piece of Office decorum insists on it. Married men cannot be allowed to rootle among young women's clothing. I stood in her bedroom. To my left, the bathroom. Ahead, her studio. On her bedside table, no dust. I lifted her pillow. Beneath it lay the exquisite silk nightdress from the White House in Bond Street that I had put into her Christmas stocking but never seen her wear. On the day she left me, I had found it still wrapped in its tissue paper, pushed to the back of a drawer. In my role of Operational Man I had unfolded it, shaken it out, and placed it under her pillow for cover. Miss Emma has gone up north to listen to her music being played, Mrs. Benbow. . . . Miss Emma will be back in a few days, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma's mother is desperately ill, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma is still in bloody limbo, Mrs. Benbow... .

I pulled open her wardrobe. All the clothes I had ever bought for her hung neatly from their gibbets, exactly as I had found them on the day of her disappearance: long silk jersey dresses, tailored suits, a sable cape she resolutely refused even to try on, shoes by someone grand, belts and handbags by someone grander. Staring at them, I wondered who I had been when I bought them, and what woman I had thought I was dressing.

It was a dream, I thought. Yet why should any man need to dream who has Emma for his reality? I heard her voice in the darkness: I'm not bad, Tim. I don't need changing and disguising all the time. I'm fine as I am. Honest. I heard Larry's voice jeering at me from the darkness of the Mendip night. You don't love people, Timbo. You invent them. That's God's job, not yours. I heard Emma again: It's not me who needs to change, Tim, it's you. Ever since Larry walked into our walled garden, you've been behaving like someone on the run. I heard Larry again: You stole my life. I stole your woman.

I closed the cupboard, stepped into her studio, switched on the lights, and managed a skimming glance of the kind that is ready to take evasive action the moment something unseeable presents itself. But my eyes detected nothing they needed to avoid. Everything was as I had left it when I had re-created the seeming after her departure. The Queen Anne kneehole desk I had given her for her birthday was, thanks to my labours, a model of organisation. Its drawers, all tidied, were stocked with fresh stationery. The grate, now sparkling bright, was laid with newspaper and kindling. Emma loved a fire. Like a cat, she would stretch herself before it, one hip raised, one crooked arm cradling her head.

My investigations allowed me a momentary easing of my burden. If the entire break-in team had crowded in here with cameras, rubber gloves, and headsets, what would they have seen apart from what they were supposed to see? Cranmer's woman is of no operational significance. She plays the piano, wears long silk dresses, and writes of country matters at a lady's kneehole desk.

Of her files of correspondence, of her rekindled determination to cure the entire world of its maladies, of the tap-tapping and wheezing of her electric typewriter at all hours of the day and night, they knew nothing.

* * *

I was suddenly ravenous. Raiding the fridge, Larry style, I polished off the rest of a pheasant left over from an excruciating dinner party I had given for a bunch of village worthies. There was half a bottle of Pauillac waiting to be finished too, but I had work to do. I forced myself to switch on the television news, but of missing professors and female composers on the run not one dangling participle or split infinitive. At midnight I went back upstairs, turned on the light in my dressing room, and, behind drawn curtains, slipped on a dark zip-up pullover, grey flannels, and black plimsolls. I switched on the bathroom light so that it would be visible from outside and after ten minutes turned it off again. I did the same in my bedroom, then stole downstairs and, still in darkness, put on a country cap and wound a black scarf round my face before tiptoeing down the servants' staircase to the kitchens, where by the glow of the pilot light from the gas burner I removed an ancient ten-inch key from its hook in the butler's pantry and dropped it into my trousers pocket.

I opened the back door, closed it behind me, and stood motionless in the freezing night, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. At first it seemed they never would, for the night was pitch black, without a star. The cold hung like a cloak of ice around my shivering body. I heard bird cries and the whimpering of a small animal.

Gradually I made out the stone path. It went by way of four flights of sandstone steps down the terraces to the brook that gives the house its name. Across the brook ran a footbridge, and beyond it stood a wicket gate leading to a treeless hillock on which by degrees I discerned the familiar silhouette of a small and sturdy church, so solid against the sky that it was like an imprint embossed on the darkness.

I crept forward. I was going to church. But not to pray.

* * *

I am not a God man, though I believe society is the better for Him than without Him. I do not reject Him, as Larry does, and then go scurrying after Him to apologise. But I do not accept Him either.

If deep down I believe in some central meaning, some Urgeist, as Larry would call it, my route to it is more likely to be the aesthetic one—the autumnal beauty of the Mendips, say, or Emma playing Liszt for me—than the path of prayer.

Yet destiny had decreed that I become a keeper of the faith, for when I inherited Honeybrook from blessed Uncle Bob and decided to appoint it my Cold Warrior's rest, I acquired also the title of squire, and with it the advowson to the benefice of the Church of St. James the Less, an early-Gothic cathedral in miniature, perched at the eastern boundary of my land, complete with antechapel, wagon roof, miniature hexagonal bell tower, and a superb pair of giant ravens—but because of its remoteness and the decline in religious interest, fallen into disuse.

Fresh from London, and flushed with dutiful enthusiasm for my new bucolic life, I had determined, with the full consent of the diocesan authority, to revive my church as a working place of worship, not realising, any more than did the bishop, that by doing this I would be imperilling the already diminished congregation of the parish church a mile away. At my own expense I repaired the roof and saved the timbers in the splendid little porch. With the personal encouragement of the bishop's wife, I had the altar cloth repaired, organised a cleaning rota of willing spirits and, when all was ready, obtained the services of a pallid curate from Wells, who, for informal reward, gave bread and wine to a mixed bag of farmers, weekenders, and us retired types, all doing our best to look pious for him.

But after a month of this, both the diocese and I were forced to recognise that my efforts were misplaced. First, my willing spirits ceased to be so willing, ostensibly on account of Emma. They did not take kindly, they said, to arriving in their Land-Rovers with their mops and pails, only to find her perched in the organ loft, playing Peter Maxwell-Davies to a congregation of one. They implied ungraciously that if the cradle-snatching Londoner and his fancy girl wanted to use the church as their private concert hall, they could do their cleaning for themselves. Next, an unprepossessing man in a blazer and a pair of Larry's buckskin boots presented himself, claiming to speak for some unheard-of ecclesiastical body and requiring information of me: the numbers of our congregation, for instance, the sums and destination of our offertories, and the names of our visiting preachers. In another life I would have suspected his credentials, for he also asked me whether I was a Freemason, but by the time he left I had decided that my days as the saviour of St. James the Less were over. The bishop gladly agreed.

But I did not desert my charge. There is a natural butler in me somewhere, and in no time I discovered the soothing satisfactions of mopping down flagstones, dusting pews, and buffing brass candlesticks in the stillness of my seven-hundred-year-old private church. But by then I had other reasons to persist: in addition to spiritual solace, St. James was providing me with the best safe house I could ever hope to find.

I am not speaking of the lady chapel, with its worm-eaten panelling so adrift you could stuff a complete archive behind it and it wouldn't show; or of the capacious vaults where the crumbling tombstones of the abbot-farmers offer any number of natural dead-letter boxes. I am speaking of the tower itself: of a secret, windowless hexagonal priesthole reached by way of a cope cupboard in the vestry, and thence by a tiny curling staircase to a second door, and, as I truly believe, not entered for centuries by a living soul until I happened on it by accident after puzzling over the discrepancy between the tower's external and internal measurements.

I say windowless, but whatever genius designed my secret chamber—whether for refuge or for venery had had the further ingenuity to provide one slender horizontal arrow slit high in the wall at each point where the main joists support the wooden canopy that skirts the outside of the tower. So that by standing my full height and moving from one arrow slit to another, I commanded a perfect all-round view of the enemy's approach.

As to light, I had made the test a dozen times. Having rigged up a crude electric lighting system, I had undertaken elaborate tours of the church, now at a distance, now close to. It was only when I pressed myself against the wall of the tower and craned my head upward that I detected the palest glow, reflected on the inside of the wood canopy.

I have described my priesthole in detail because of its importance to my inner life. Nobody who has not lived in secrecy can appreciate its addictive powers. Nobody who has renounced the secret world, or been renounced by it, recovers from his deprivation. His longing for the inner life is at times unendurable, whether of the religious or clandestine kind. At any hour he will dream of the secret hush reclaiming him in its embrace.

And so it was for me each time I entered the priesthole and revisited my little treasure hoard of keepsakes: the diaries I should not have kept but, having done so, kept still; old encounter sheets, unsanitised operational logs, jottings dashed off in the cool of conspiracy, uncensored debriefing tapes, and here and there whole files ordered for destruction by the Top Floor and so certified—only to be spirited into my private archive, partly for the enlightenment of posterity, but partly as a piece of personal insurance against the rainy day I had always feared might come and now had: when some misperception on the part of my employers, or some foolish act of my own, would cast a crooked backward light on things that I had said and done in honour.

And finally, as well as my papers, I had my personal escape kit for the event that nothing, not even the record, could protect me: my reserve identity in the name of Bairstow, comprising passport, credit card, and driving licence, all legitimately acquired for some aborted operation, then kept back and artificially extended by myself, to be tested and retested until I was confident that the Office quartermaster had ceased to be aware they still existed. And serviceable, you understand. We are talking of the Office functioning on home soil, not some cheapjack forger taking a one-time risk. Each of them fed into the right computers, credit rated and proofed against outside enquiry, so that, provided a man had his tradecraft about him, and I had—and his money, and I had that too he could live a whole other life more safely than he could live his own.

* * *

A sinuous cloud of freezing mist curled at me out of the brook as I crossed the footbridge. Reaching the wicket gate, I disengaged the latch and lowered it to its housing. Then I rammed the gate back as fast as I could, causing an indignant shriek to add itself briefly to the night sounds. I stole up the path and through the old cemetery that was Uncle Bob's last resting place, to the porch, where I groped for the keyhole. In total blackness I guided the key into the lock, gave it a sharp twist, shoved the door, and stepped inside.

Church air is like no other. It is the air the dead breathe, humid, old, and frightening. It echoes even when there is no sound. Feeling my way to the vestry as quickly as I dared, I located the cope cupboard, opened it, and, with my palms flat on the ancient stones, wriggled up the spiral staircase to my sanctuary and put on the light.

I was safe. I could think the unthinkable at last. A whole internal life that I dared not acknowledge, let alone explore, until I was secure inside the confines of my priesthole, was once more open to my scrutiny.

Mr. Timothy D'Abell Cranmer: How do you say? Did you or did you not, on or about the night of September 18, at Priddy Pool in the County of Somerset, murder by battery and drowning one Lawrence Pettifer, formerly your friend and secret agent?

* * *

We are fighting, as only brothers can. All my gentling and cossetting of him, all the careless insults I have swallowed whole—beginning with his sneering asides about Diana, my first wife; continuing for twenty more years with gibes about my emotional inadequacy, about what he calls my rent-a-drool smile, and my good manners that do duty for a heart; and culminating in his wanton theft of Emma—all my cancer-giving forbearance, has turned outward in a pent-up, furious revolt.

I am showering blows on him and probably he is hitting me back, but I feel nothing. Whatever is hitting me is merely an obstruction on the path to him, because I am going to kill him. The intention I have come with is about to be fulfilled. I am hitting him as we hit when we are boys, wild, heaving, artless blows, everything we are taught not to do at combat camp. I would tear him apart with my teeth if my fingers weren't strong enough for the job. All right! I am shouting. You called me an espiopath, now you've got a bloody espiopath! And between whiles, without the least hope of getting an answer, I am shouting the questions at him that have been burning my soul ever since Emma left me: What have you done with her? What lies have you told her about us? I meant what truths. What have you promised her that she can't get from me?

A full moon is shining. The long sour grass beneath our feet has grown into great tufts under the lashing Mendip winds. Advancing on him, swinging blows at him, I feel the mounds thumping at my knees. I must be falling, because the moon swings away from me and then comes back, and I see a vertical skyline with the jagged rims made by the opencast mining. But I am still hitting him with my gloved hands, still shouting questions like the worst interrogator in the world. His face is wet and hot, and I think he must be bleeding all over it, but in the shadowy light of the moon nothing is to be trusted: a film of sweat and mud can look like an obliterated face. So I trust nothing and keep hitting him and screaming at him: Where is she? Give her back to me! Leave her alone! His taunting has given way to self-pitying sobs as I strike home. I have defeated him at last, Larry, the true version of me, as he calls himself, the Timbo Unbound whose life I never dared to lead until I led it vicariously through him. Then die, I yell at him as I hit him—with my elbow now; I am tired and am remembering a few tricks. In a minute I'll be giving him a chop to the windpipe, or thrusting his lusting eyes back into their sockets with the leading fingers of my gloved hand. Die, and then there'll be only one of us to live my life. Because two of us living it, Larry, old boy, is actually a crowd.

It has been a long conversation, you understand, all this talk of breaking omerta and whose life is whose, whose girl is whose, where she is hiding and why. It has reached into our far, dark past. All the same, talk is only talk, and I have come to kill him. I have the .38 in my waistband, and in the fullness of time I intend to shoot him with it. It's an unattributable gun, unnumbered, unsourced. Neither the British police nor the Office has ever heard of it. I have arrived here in a car that is nothing to do with me, wearing clothes I shall never wear again. It is clear to me by now that I have been planning Larry's murder for years without being aware that I was doing so, perhaps from the day we embraced each other in St. Mark's Square. Perhaps already at Oxford, where he took such pleasure in publicly humiliating me: Timbo, who can't wait to be middle-aged; Timbo, our college virgin, our bourgeois striver, our boy bishop. Perhaps even at Winchester, where for all the caring I invested in him, he was never sufficiently in awe of my exalted status.

I have been crafty too. Everything covert, like the old days. This is no Sunday lunch cooked by Timbo, dialogue courtesy of Lamy, and a romantic stroll with Emma thrown in afterwards. I have invited him for a clandestine meeting up here on the Mendip Hills, on this moonscape plateau nearer to the sky than to the earth, where the trees throw dead men's shadows on the whited lane and no cars pass. I have suggested an urgent but unspecified operational context to allay his suspicions. And Larry has presented himself early, because for all his bohemian posturing, after twenty years of my patient manipulation he is Operational Man to his fingertips.

And I? Do I shout? No, no, I don't think so. "It's actually about Emma, Larry," I explain by way of introduction as we face each other under the moon. I probably give him my rent-a-drool smile. Timbo Unbound is still waiting to spring free. "About our relationship."

Our relationship? Whose relationship? Emma's and mine? Larry's and mine? Theirs and mine? You pushed me at him, Emma is saying through her tears. You set me up for him without even knowing it.

But he sees my face—distorted, I am sure, by the moonlight and already wild enough to raise a warning in him. And instead of taking fright he produces a reply so insolent, so perfectly in keeping with all I have learned to hate about him over thirty years, that unknowingly he signs his death warrant. It is a reply that has rung in my head ever since. It hovers before me in the dark like a lamp I must track down and put out. Even in broad daylight it echoes brazenly in my ear.

"Hell's your problem, actually, Timbo? You stole my life. I stole your woman. Simple as that."

I realise he has been drinking. I smell Scotch as well as autumn on the Mendip wind. I hear that arrogant extra note that gets into him when he's about to deliver one of his word-perfect monologues, complete with subordinate and relative clauses and, practically, the semicolons. The notion that he is not clear-minded fills me with indignation. I want him sober and accountable.

"She's a fully paid-up woman, you idiot!" he chokes at me. "Not some late developer's bed toy!"

Maddened, I draw the .38—across the body, from the waistband, the way both of us were taught—and I point it, from about a foot away, at the bridge of his nose.

"Ever seen one of these, Larry?" I ask him.

But pointing it at him only seems to make him stupid. He squints at it, then raises his eyebrows at me in an admiring smile.

"Well, you have got a big one," he says.

At this I lose my temper and, using both hands, smash the butt into the side of his face.

Or I think I do.

And perhaps that was when I killed him.

Or perhaps I am remembering the seeming, not the being.

Perhaps the rest of my blows, if I ever struck them at all, were wasted on a dead or dying body. Neither in my dreams nor waking did I any longer know. The days and nights between have brought me no enlightenment, only terrible variations of the same scene. I drag him to the Pool, I bump and roll him into it, he scarcely makes a splash, just a kind of sucking noise, as if he has been drawn right down. I can't tell whether it is panic or remorse that has the upper hand as I perform this final act. Perhaps self-preservation has it, for even as I cart him feet first over the tufts of grass, as I watch his nodding, moon-white head grin up at me and then go under—I seriously debate whether to put a bullet through him or drive him at breakneck speed to Bristol Infirmary.

But I don't do either of these things. Not in the seeming and not in the being. He slides into the water headfirst, and -best friend drives home alone, stopping only to change cars and clothes along the way. Am I exhilarated? Am I in despair? I am both, one minute lighter of heart than I have been for years, the next in murderer's remorse.

But have I murdered him?

I have fired no bullet. None is missing from the revolver.

There is no blood on the butt of my revolver.

He was breathing. I saw bubbles. And dead men, unless they are Larry and drunk, don't breathe even if they grin. So perhaps I only killed myself.

Larry is my shadow, I think in some far outstation of my mind, as I drive in dream-like detachment between the sandstone gateposts of Honeybrook. The only way to catch him is to fall on him. Then I remember something he once said to me, a quotation from one of his literary icons: "To kill without being killed is an illusion."

Safely back in my study, hands shaking at last, I pour myself a huge whisky and gulp it down; then another and another and another. I have not drunk like this since one Guy Fawkes night at Oxford, when Larry and I poisoned each other nearly to death by drinking glass for glass in competition. It's the black light, I am thinking as I shove aside the empty bottle and, stubbornly sober, embark upon a second: the black light that the boxer sees as he goes down for the count; the black light that lures decent folk across the moor with revolvers in their belts to murder their best friends; the black light that will shine from this night on, inside my head, over everything that did or didn't happen at Priddy Pool.

* * *

I woke myself. I was sitting head in hands at the trestle table in my priesthole, my files and keepsakes heaped around me.

But Larry a thief as well as my dead nemesis? I asked myself. An embezzler, a conspirator, a lover of secret wealth as well as women?

Everything I knew about myself and Larry revolted against the idea. He had no use for money: How many times did I have to scream this at the empty air before someone believed me? Greed makes you stupid.

Never once, on all the occasions we had prodded him towards this or that step in his agent's career, had he asked me: How much will you pay me?

Never once had he demanded an increase in his Judas money, complained about our niggardly approach to his expenses, threatened to fling down his cloak and dagger unless he was promised more.

Never once, when he received from his Soviet case officer the monthly briefcase stuffed with cash to pay the salaries of his notional subagents—we are talking here of tens of thousands of pounds—had he raised any objection when Office rules obliged him to hand the whole lot over to me.

And now a thief, suddenly? Checheyev's bagman and accomplice? Thirty-seven million pounds and rising, squirrelled away in foreign bank accounts, by Larry? And Checheyev? With the connivance of Zorin? All three common swindlers together?

* * *

"Hey, Timbo!"

It is evening in Twickenham, where neither of us lives, which is why we have come here. We are sitting in the saloon bar of a pub called The Cabbage Patch, or perhaps it is The Moon Under Water. Larry selects his pubs solely for their names.

"Hey, Timbo. You know what Checheyev told me? They steal. The gortsy do. Stealing's honourable as long as they're stealing from Cossacks. You go off with your rifle, shoot a Cossack, pinch his horse, and come home to a hero's welcome. In the old days they used to bring back their victims' heads as well, for the kids to play with. Cheers."

"Cheers," I say, steeling myself for Larry at his most impressionable.

"No law against killing, either. If you're caught up in a blood feud, noblesse obliges you to top everyone in sight. Oh, and the Ingush like to start Ramadan earlier than scheduled so that they can shove it up their neighbours and demonstrate how pious they are."

"So which are you going to do?" I ask tolerantly. "Steal for him, kill for him, or pray for him?"

He laughs but does not directly answer me. Instead I must be treated to a discourse on Sufism as practised among the gortsy, and the powerful influence of the tariqats in preserving ethnic unity; I must be reminded that the Caucasus is the true crucible of the earth, the great barrier to Asia, the last redoubt of small nations and ethnic individuality—forty languages in an area the size of Scotland, Timbo! I must be told to reread Lermontov and Tolstoy's Cossacks, and dismiss Alexandre Dumas as a romantic slob.

And at one level, if Larry is happy, I am. Before Checheyev's arrival in London, I wouldn't have given two-pence for the future of our operation. Instead all three of us are enjoying a renewal. Come to think of it, so, in clouded secrecy, is Checheyev's poker-backed boss, the venerable Volodya Zorin. But at another level I distrust Larry's relationship with Checheyev more than any he has conducted with his previous Russian controllers.

Why?

Because Checheyev is touching Larry where his predecessors have not. And neither have I.

* * *

Larry too bloody word perfect, I was reading in an irritable footnote in my own hand on the encounter sheet. Convinced he and CC are cooking something up. . . . Yes, but cooking up what? I demanded impatiently of this useless insight. Robbing lowlanders for sport? It was too absurd. Larry under a stronger man's influence could get up to a lot of things. But falsify receipts, open foreign bank accounts? Take part in sustained, sophisticated fraud to the tune of thirty-seven million pounds? This Larry was nobody I knew. But then which Larry did I know?

* * *

CC PERSONAL, I read, in Cranmer's stern capitals, across the cover of a fat blue folder that contained my private papers on Checheyev, starting on the day of his arrival in London and ending with Larry's last officially recorded visit to Russia.

"CC's a star, Timbo half noble, half savage, all Mensch, and bloody funny...." Larry is rhapsodising. "He used to hate like a creed...." all things Russian because of what Stalin did to his people, but when Khrushchev came along he became a Twentieth Party Conference man. That's what he keeps saying when he gets drunk: 'I believe in the Twentieth Party Conference,' like a creed...

" 'CC, how did you get into the spook business,' I ask him. It was while he was studying in Grozny, he says. He had fought his way into the university against heavy bureaucratic odds. Apparently Ingush returnees are not welcome at neighbouring Chechenia's only university. A bunch of hotheads tried to persuade him to come and blow up Party headquarters as a protest against the way the Ingush were being kicked around. CC told them they were crazy, but they wouldn't listen. He told them he was a Twentieth Party Conference man, but they still wouldn't listen. So he beat the daylights out of them, waited till they'd bolted to the hills, then peached to the KGB....

"The KGB were so impressed that when he'd finished his studies they scooped him up and sent him to school outside Moscow for three years of English, Arabic, and spying. Hey, and get this—he acted Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. He says he was an absolute wow. An Ingush acting Lord Goring! I love him!"

Confirmed by microphone intercepts, prosaic Cranmer had duly noted, in his bank clerk's hand.

* * *

Grozny in Russia? I hear myself ask.

Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It's gone independent.

How did you get there?

Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake.

* * *

Time, I thought, staring blindly at the stone wall before me.

Cling to time.

Time the great healer of the dead. I had been clinging to it for five weeks, but now I was clinging to it for dear life.

On August 1 I cut off my telephone.

Several Sundays later—Sunday being our day of destiny—Emma removes her piano stool and antique jewellery and departs without leaving a forwarding address.

On September 18, I do or do not kill Larry Pettifer at Priddy Pool. Until Emma left, I knew only that in the best civil service tradition, steps would have to be taken. Time becomes blank space lit by black light.

Time becomes time again when, on October 10, the first day of Larry's appointed lecture course at Bath University and twenty-two days after Priddy, Dr. Lawrence Pettifer goes officially missing.

Question: How long had Larry been missing before he went officially missing?

Question: Where was Emma when I was or wasn't killing Larry?

Question: Where is Emma now?

And the biggest question of all, which nobody will answer for me even if anybody knows: When did Checheyev visit Larry? For if CC's last visit to Bath occurred after September 18, Larry's resurrection was complete. If before, I must continue wandering in the black light, a murderer to myself if not to Larry.

After time, matter: Where is Larry's body?

There were two pools at Priddy, the Mineries and Waldegrave. It was the Mineries that we locals called Priddy Pool, and in summer children scrambled on its banks all day. At weekends, middle-class families picnicked on the tufted moorlands and parked their Volvos in the lay-by. So how could a corpse as large as Larry's—how could any corpse—stink and rot and float there undetected for thirty-six days and nights?

First theory of matter: The police have found Larry's body and are lying.

Second theory of matter: The police are playing me along, waiting for me to provide the proof they lack.

Third theory of matter: I am ascribing too much wit to the police.

And the Office, what are they doing? Oh, my dear, what we always did! Riding all the horses in the race at once, and coming nowhere.

Fourth theory of matter: Black light becomes white light, and Larry's body isn't dead.

* * *

How many times had I gone back to Priddy to take a look? Nearly. Got out the car, put on an old sports coat, turned out of the drive, only to invent some other purpose—pop down to Castle Cary, do some shopping, look in on Appleby of Wells instead?

Dead women float upward, I had read somewhere. Dead men keep their faces in the water. Or was it the other way round? Was it Larry's grin that was going to accuse me—still there, still staring up at me in the moonlight? Or the back of his broken head as he peered forever into the muddy waters of the hereafter?

* * *

I had turned up a pencilled record of Checheyev's postings, composed from his formal biography and Larry's embellishments.

1970: Iran, under the name of Grubaev. Made his reputation by contacting local (forbidden) Communist Party. Named and praised by Central Committee, of which KGB head of personnel is ex-officio member. Promoted.

1974: South Yemen, under the name of Klimov, as deputy head of residentura. Derring-do, desert skirmishes, throat-cutting. [Larry's indelicate description: he was a Russian Lawrence, living off camel's piss and roast sand.]

1980-82: Crash posting to Stockholm as Checheyev to replace local second man expelled for activities incompatible, etc. Bored stiff. Hated Scandinavia, except for the aquavit and the women. [Larry: he was ticking over at about three a week. Women and bottles.]

1982-86: Moscow Centre England Section, eating his heart out and getting reprimanded for cheek.

1986-90 In London as Checheyev, second man in the residentura under Zorin [because as I had told dear Marjorie, no blackarse will ever make top man in a major Western residency.]

From an envelope pinned to the inside cover of the tile I extracted a bunch of snapshots mostly taken by Larry: CC outside the Soviet Embassy dacha in Hastings, where Larry was sometimes invited to spend weekends; CC at the Edinburgh Festival, living his cultural cover in front of posters proclaiming "A Caucasian Entertainment of Dance & Music."

I looked again at Checheyev's face, as I had looked at it so often in the past: honed but pleasant-featured, an air of wry humour and resourcefulness. Thirty-seven million pounds' worth of calm eyes.

* * *

And went on looking at it. Took up Uncle Bob's old magnifying glass to look deeper into it than ever before. Great generals, I had read, carried photographs of their adversaries around with them, hung them in their tents, mooned over them before saying their prayers to the beastly God of Battles. But my feelings towards Checheyev contained nothing of hostility. I had wondered, as I always did of Larry's other parent, how on earth Larry managed to fool him. But that was the way with doubles the world over. If you were on the right side, the wrong side looked absurd. And if you were on the wrong side, you fought like hell to convince people you were on the right side until it was too late. And surely I had puzzled how anybody whose people had been hounded by Russian colonial rule for three hundred years could talk himself into serving his oppressors.

"He's a Caucasian werewolf, Timbo," Larry is saying excitedly. "Rational spy by day, gorets by night. By six in the evening you can see his fangs appear...."

I waited for his enthusiasm to fade. For once it didn't. So that gradually, with Larry as our go-between, I began quite to like Checheyev too. I came to rely on his professionalism. I marvelled aloud at his ability to hold Larry's respect. And if I didn't understand what Larry called the wolf in him, I was able, even at one remove, to sense the pull of his revolt against the dreary system that he served.

* * *

I am in the surveillance house in Lambeth, seated beside Jack Andover, our chief watcher, while he runs video film of Checheyev in Kew Gardens, emptying a dead-letter box that Larry has filled an hour earlier. First he strolls past the warning signal, which denotes that the letter box is filled, and the camera shows us the child's chalk mark that Larry has scrawled on the brick wall. Checheyev registers it with the corner of his eye and strolls on. His walk is buoyant, almost insolent, as if he knows he's being filmed. He advances casually on a rose bed. He stoops and affects to read the botanist's description of the stems. As he does so, his upper body makes one swift lunge while his hand whisks a package from its hiding place and secretes it in his clothing: but so deftly, so imperceptibly, that I am reminded of a military tattoo that Uncle Bob once took me to, with Cossack horsemen who slid beneath the bellies of their bareback mounts at full gallop, to reemerge at the salute.

"Your bloke got any Welsh blood in him at all?" Jack asks me, as Checheyev resumes his innocent inspection of the rose beds.

Jack is right. Checheyev has the miner's neatness and the miner's roll.

"My boys and girls have taken a real shine to him," Jack assures me as I leave. "Slippery isn't the word. They say it's a privilege to follow him, Mr. Cranmer." And shyly: "Any word of Diana at all, by any chance, Mr. Cranmer?"

"Fine, thank you. She's happily remarried and we're good friends."

My former wife, Diana, had worked in Jack's section before she saw the light.

* * *

Money again.

After time, matter, and Konstantin Checheyev, consider money. Not my annual expenditure, or how much I inherited from Uncle Bob or Aunt Cecily, or how I afforded Emma's Bechstein that she didn't want. But real money, thirty-seven millions of it, milked from the Russian government, planned white-collar banditry, Larry's hoofprints all over the file.

Rising from the table, I began a tour of my priesthole, peering from each arrow slit in turn. I was reaching for memories that danced away from me as soon as I went after them.

Money.

Call up occasions when Larry mentioned money in any context except tax, debts, forgotten bills, pigs-in-clover materialism of the West, and the cheques he hadn't got round to paying in.

Returning to my table, I started to sift once more among the files, till I came on the entry I was looking for without quite knowing what it was: one sheet of yellow legal pad, scored with prim annotations in my blue rollerball. And along the top, couched in the self-conscious terms I use when I am talking to myself aloud, the question: Why did Larry lie to me about his rich friend in Hull?

* * *

I advance on the question slowly, just as Larry does. I am an intelligence officer. Nothing exists without a context.

Larry is just back from Moscow. We are entering his last year in harness. Our safe flat this time is not in the Tottenham Court Road but in Vienna's Hohe Warte, in a sprawling green-tiled mansion scheduled for demolition, the furniture Ministry of Works Biedermeier. Dawn has broken, but we haven't gone to bed. Larry flew in late last night and as usual we launched straight into the debriefing. In a few hours he will be delivering a keynote speech to a conference of International Journalists Concerned, whom Larry has predictably rechristened "Jerkers." He sprawls on the sofa, one slender hand dropped low like a Sickert drawing and the other balancing a mahogany whisky on his belly. A coven of middle-aged Russian analysts—the term "Moscow-watcher" is already out of date—has left him at odds with the approaching daylight. He is talking about the world: our part of it. Even approaching the subject of money, Larry must first talk about the world.

"West's compassioned out, Timbo," he announces to the ceiling, not bothering to stifle a huge yawn. "Running on empty. Fuck us."

You're still in Moscow, I'm thinking as I watch him. With age the switching back and forth between camps is getting harder for you and you take longer to come home. When you stare at the ceiling I know you are staring at the Moscow skyline. When you stare at me you're comparing my nourished contours with the deprived faces you've left behind. And when you curse like this I know you're washed out.

"Vote for the new Russian democracy," he resumes vaguely. "Anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, anti-Western, and corruption to die for. Hey, Timbers ..."

But even on the brink of talking about money, Larry must first eat. Eggs, bacon, and fried bread, his favourite. Nothing makes him fat. The eggs free range and turned, the way he likes them. Fortnum & Mason's English Breakfast Tea, flown in with the coven. Full-fat milk and caster sugar. The bread whole meal. Lots of salted butter. Mrs. Bathhurst, our resident safe-housekeeper, knows all Mr. Larry's little ways, and so do I. The food has mollified him. It always does. In the long brown moth-eaten dressing gown that he takes with him everywhere, he has become my friend again.

"What is it?" I reply.

"Who do we know who does money?" he asks with his mouth full. We have arrived at his goal. Not knowing this, of course, I am uncharacteristically short with him. Perhaps with the end of the Cold War he tires me more than I am prepared to admit.

"All right, Larry, what kind of hash are you in this time? It's only a couple of weeks since we bailed you out."

He breaks out laughing, too heartily for my blood. "Come off it, you ass. This isn't for me. It's for a chum of mine. I need a red-toothed fascist banker. Who do we know?"

So away we go. About money. This chum of mine at Hull University, he explains genially as he spreads his marmalade. Chum you wouldn't know, he adds, before I can ask his name. Poor sod's come into a pot of cash, he says. A mega pot. Totally out of the blue. Rather like you did, Timbo, when your aunt whosit kicked the bucket. Needs his hand held. Needs accountants, solicitors, trusts, all that junk. Someone big league, offshore, sophisticated—who do we know? Come on, Timbo, you know everyone.

So I ponder for him, though mostly I am studying to understand why he has chosen this particular moment to discuss something as irrelevant as the financial anxieties of his chum in Hull.

And it so happens that only two days earlier I have been sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with just such a banker, in my capacity as honorary trustee of a private charity called the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales.

"Well, there's always the great and good Jamie Pringle," I suggest cautiously. "Nobody could call him sophisticated, but he's certainly big league, as he's the first to tell you."

Pringle was our contemporary at Oxford, a rugger-playing scion of Larry's Unbearable Classes.

"Jamie's an oaf," Larry declares, swilling his English Breakfast Tea. "Where's he hang out anyway? In case this chum's interested?"

But Larry is lying.

How do I know? I know. It doesn't take the soured perceptions of post-Cold War depression to see through his wiles. If you have run a man for twenty years, if you have schooled him in deception, immersed him in it, coaxed out the guile in him and made it work; if you have sent him away to sleep with the enemy and chewed your nails waiting for him to come back; if you have nursed him through his loves and hates, his fits of despair and wanton malice and ever-present boredom, and struggled with all your heart to distinguish between his histrionics and the real thing, then either you know his face or you know nothing, and I knew Larry's like the map of my own soul. I could have drawn it for you, if I had only been an artist: every emphasis of his features, every lift and fall of every telltale line, and the places where nothing happens and a saintly stillness settles when he lies. About women, about himself. Or about money.

* * *

Cranmer's tight-lipped note to self, undated: Ask Jamie Pringle what on earth LP was up to.

But with Merriman's axe poised above us, and LP grating quite unusually on my nerves, Cramer must have had other things to do.

* * *

So it is not till a couple of months back, when we are two free men and Emma, enjoying our umpteenth Sunday lunch at Honeybrook, and I have directed the rather stilted conversation away from the anguish of Bosnia, and the ethnic cleansing of the Abkhazians, and the decimation of the Moluccans, and I forget what other raging issues of the day that consume them both, that Jamie Pringle's name accidentally crops up. Or perhaps some demon in me gives it a nudge, for I am starting to get a little reckless now.

"Yes my gosh—however did that go, by the way, with Jamie?" I ask Larry, with the extra carelessness we spy-men use when removing a topic from its secret wrapping in the presence of an ordinary mortal. "Did he deliver the goods for your chum in Hull? Was he helpful? What happened?"

Larry glances at Emma, then at me, but I have ceased to wonder why he looks at Emma first, because everything that passes among the three of us is by now a matter of tacit consultation between the two of them.

"Pringle's an arsehole," Larry replies curtly. "Was. Is now. And ever shall be. Amen."

Then, while Emma stares demurely at her plate, he launches himself into a diatribe against what he calls the useless mouths of our Oxford generation, thus converting the subject of Jamie Pringle into another diatribe against the compassion fatigue of the West.

He's turned her, I'm thinking, in the jargon of our trade. She's gone. Defected. Crossed over. And doesn't even know it.

* * *

Through the arrow slits, grey streaks of morning were appearing behind the hills. An ungainly young barn owl flopped at grasstop height over the frosted hillside in search of breakfast. So many shared dawns, I thought: so much life lavished on one man. Larry is dead for me whether I killed him or not, and I am dead for him. The only question is: Who is dead for Emma?

I returned to my table, buried myself once more in my papers, and when I touched my face I felt to my surprise a thirty-six-hour stubble. I blinked round my secret sanctuary and counted the coffee cups. I consulted my watch and refused to believe it was three in the afternoon. But my watch was right, and the sun was entering the south-western arrow slit. I was not living some vicarious daylit night in Helsinki or pacing my hotel room, praying for Larry's safe return from Moscow or Havana or even Grozny. I was here in my priesthole, and I had pulled out strands but not yet made a thread of them.

Peering round, my eye fell upon a corner of my kingdom that was barred to me by my own decree. It was an alcove, screened by a makeshift blackout curtain that I had found in the attic and nailed across the entrance. I called it Emma's archive.

* * *

"Your lovely Emma's quite a gal," Merriman announces with relish, two weeks after I have been obliged to submit her name to him as my intended companion. "No risk to anyone, you'll be pleased to hear, except possibly to you. Would you like to take a tiny deniable peek at her biog before you plunge? I've made up a little doggy bag for you to take home."

"No."

"Her appalling parentage?"

"No."

The doggy bag, as he calls it, lies already between us on the desk, an anonymous buff A4 folder with half a dozen pages of anonymous white paper peeping out.

"Her missing years? Her exotic foreign ramblings? Her disgraceful love life, her absurd causes, her barefoot marches, picketings, her ever bleeding heart? Some of these young musicians these days, you wonder they have time to learn their scales."

"No."

How could he ever understand that Emma is my self-imposed security risk, my new openness, my one-girl glasnost? I wish for no stolen knowledge of her, nothing she does not tell me of her own accord. Nevertheless, to my shame, I take the file as he knows I will and jam it angrily beneath my arm. The pull of my old profession is simply too strong for me. Knowledge never kills, I have preached for twenty years to anybody who would listen to me: but ignorance can.

* * *

Setting everything in order for my next visit, I fed my weary body down the winding staircase to the cope cupboard. In the vestry I helped myself to overalls, a broom, a duster, and a floor polisher. Thus equipped, I proceeded to the main aisle, where I paused and faced the altar and, in the shifty manner of us agnostics, offered some clumsy acknowledgement or obeisance to the Maker I could not bring myself to believe in. This done, I went about my cleaning duties, for I was never a man to neglect my cover.

First I dusted the mediaeval pew ends, then I mopped the tiled floor and ran over it with the polisher, to the vexation of a family of bats. Half an hour later, still in my cleaner's overalls and bearing the broom as additional testimony to my labours, I ventured into the daylight. The sun had disappeared behind a blue-black cloud stack. Shadowy bands of rain pressed down on the bare hilltops. My heart stopped dead. I was staring at the hill we call the Beacon. It is the highest of the six. Its outline is pitted with shaped stones and hummocks said to be the remnants of an ancient burial ground. Among these stones, cut black against the seething skyline, stood the silhouette of a man in a long coat or raincoat that seemed to have no buttons down the front, for it flapped and billowed in the gusting wind, though his hands were plunged into its pockets.

His head was turned away from me, as if I had just hit him with a .38 revolver butt. His left foot was pointed outward in the quaintly Napoleonic pose that Larry liked to strike. He wore a flat cap, and though I did not remember ever seeing Larry in a cap, this meant nothing, for he was forever leaving his hats at people's houses and helping himself to others he preferred. I tried to call out, but no sound escaped me. I opened my mouth, wanting to shout "Larry!" but for once my tongue couldn't make the L. Come back, I mutely begged him, come down. Let's begin again; let's be friends, not rivals.

I took a step forward, then another. I think I was intending to charge at him as I had at Priddy, vaulting the stone walls, ignoring the gradient, yelling, "Larry, Larry! Larry, are you all right?" But as Larry was always telling me, I am not much good at spontaneity. So instead I set down my broom and cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted something shy, like "Hullo there, who is that, is it you?"

Or perhaps by then I had realised that for the second time in as many days I was addressing the unlovely person of Andreas Munslow, sometime member of my section and full-time keeper of my passport.

"What the devil do you think you're doing here?" I shouted at him. "How dare you come here snooping on me? Go away. Get out of here."

He was loping down the hill at me, glissading in spidery strides. I had not realised till now what an agile creature he must be.

"Afternoon to you, Tim," he said, with none of the previous day's deference. "Been cleaning up for God?" he asked, eyeing my broom, then me. "Don't you shave these days?"

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm keeping watch over you, Tim. For your safety and comfort. Orders of the Top Floor."

"I don't need keeping watch over. I can keep watch over myself. Get out."

"Jake Merriman thinks you do. He thinks you're messing him around. He's ordered me to tag you. Put a bell up your arse was how he put it. I'm at the Crown, day or night." He shoved a piece of paper at me. "That's my cell phone. Daniel Moore, room three." He stabbed his index finger into my chest. "And screw you, actually, Cranmer. Totally screw you. You gave me one and I owe you one. That's a warning."

* * *

Emma's ghost was waiting for me in the drawing room. She was seated at the Bechstein on her special stool, thinking her notes aloud with that strict posture she has that nips the waist and spreads the hips. She was wearing all her antique jewellery to please me.

"Have you been flirting with Larry again?" she asked above her music.

But I was in no mood to be laughed at, least of all by her.

* * *

Evening fell, but I had already entered the black light of my own soul. Broad daylight would not have saved me. I wandered the house, touching things, opening books and closing them. I cooked myself food and left it uneaten. I put on music and didn't listen to it. I slept and woke dreaming the same dream that had destroyed my sleep. I returned to the priesthole. What trail was I pursuing, what clues? I was picking through the rubble of my past, looking for the fragments of the bomb that had destroyed it. More than once I rose in despair from my trestle table and placed myself before the old rag of wartime curtain, and my hand braced itself to rip aside the self-imposed barrier to Emma's forbidden territory. But each time I restrained myself.