Our Game

EIGHT

THE WINDOW WAS too small to jump from, and too high to see from unless you had a yen for orange cranetips and banks of rain-soaked Bristol cloud. There were three chairs, and like the table they were bolted to the floor. A mirror was screwed to the wall. I assumed a one-way glass. The air was old, foul, and beery. A curled notice warning me of my rights trembled to the traffic five floors down.

Bryant sat one end of the table, I sat the other, Luck between us in his shirtsleeves. I wondered where his jacket was. On the floor to Luck's right lay an open briefcase in fake brown leather. In its partitions I spotted four rectangular packages of different sizes, each wrapped in black plastic and labelled. On the labels were references written with a red felt-tipped pen, such as LP Exb 27, which I took to mean Exhibit 27 in the case of Lawrence Pettifer. It was somehow natural to my attenuated state of mind that I found myself worrying less about Exhibit 27 than about the other twenty-six. And if twenty-seven, why only four of them in the briefcase?

There was no preamble. Nobody apologised for hauling me over to Bristol on a Saturday afternoon. Bryant had one elbow on the table and was resting his chin in his clenched fist like a man holding his beard. Luck fished a chipped black cassette recorder from the briefcase and dumped it on the table.

"Mind if we do this?"

Not waiting to hear whether I minded or not, he pressed the start switch, snapped his fingers three times, stopped the tape, and wound it back. So we listened to Luck's fingers snapping three times. He had acquired a shaving rash since I had last seen him, and bags under his little eyes.

"Does your friend Dr. Pettifer possess a car, Mr. Cranmer?" he demanded morosely. And beckoned at the recorder with his long head: speak to that thing, not to me.

"In London, Pettifer had a stable of cars," I replied. "They tended to be other people's."

"Whose?"

"I never asked. I was not familiar with his acquaintances.”

“How about in Bath?"

"In Bath I have no idea what arrangements he made for his transport."

I was being dull and literal. I was much older than I had been a week ago.

"When did you last see him in a car?" said Luck.

"I would be pressed to remember."

Bryant had acquired a new smile. It had something of victory in it. "Oh, we'll press you if that's what you want, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Won't we, Oliver?"

"I understood that you had called me here to identify some property," I said.

"We did," Bryant agreed.

"Well, if it's his car you're talking about, I'm afraid it's most unlikely I can help you."

"Ever see him in a green or black Toyota, model circa 1990?" Luck asked.

"I am no expert in Japanese cars."

"Mr. Cranmer-sir is no expert in anything," Bryant explained to Luck. "He don't know nuffink, Officer. You can tell by all those big foreign books he's got in his mansion."

From the briefcase Luck handed me a thumbed police manual of line drawings of cars. As I turned its pages I saw the outlines of a 1989 blue Toyota Carina with the black flashing just like the one Larry had used for his positively last Sunday appearance at Honeybrook. Luck had seen it too.

"How about this one?" he was demanding, holding down the page with his bony finger.

"I'm afraid it doesn't ring a bell."

"Meaning no?"

"Meaning I do not recall him driving such a car."

"Then why does Mr. Guppy, your local postman, recall seeing a black or green Toyota driven by someone answering to Pettifer's description entering your drive just as he was coming out of the village church on a very hot Sunday, he thinks in July?"

I was sickened that they should have questioned John Guppy. "I have no idea why he should recall or not recall any such thing. And since the entrance to my drive is not visible from the church, I am inclined to doubt whether he did."

"The Toyota passed the church heading in your direction," Luck retorted. "It disappeared out of sight below the churchyard wall and did not come out the other end. The only turning it could have taken was into your drive."

"The car could have emerged without Mr. Guppy's noticing," I replied. "It could have stopped on the verge."

While Bryant looked on, Luck again foraged in his briefcase, extracted one of the packages and from it a plastic-covered bankbook from Larry's bank in London. It was such an old friend to me I almost smiled. I must have been through hundreds of them in my time, always trying to puzzle out what had happened to Larry's money, who he had given it to, which cheques he had forgotten to pay in.

"Did Pettifer ever make you a present of any cash, by any chance?" Luck asked.

"No, Mr. Luck, Dr. Pettifer never gave me any money.”

“How about you giving him some?"

"I lent him small sums from time to time."

"How small?"

"Twenty here. Fifty there."

"You call that small, do you?"

"I'm sure it would feed a lot of starving children. It didn't keep Larry going long."

"Do you wish to change, in any shape or form, your story to the effect that you and Pettifer were never once involved in any type of business transaction?"

"It's the truth. Therefore I do not wish to change it."

"Page eight," he said, and tossed the bankbook at me.

I turned to page eight. It was the statement covering September 1993, which was the month when the Office paid Larry his hard-earned gratuity: £150,000, drawn on the account of Mills & Highborn, Trustees, of St. Helier, Jersey, wiping out an overdraft of £3,728.

"Do you have any idea at all," Luck demanded, "where, how, or why Dr. Pettifer got hold of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling in September 1993?"

"None. Why not ask the people who made the payment?"

My suggestion annoyed him. "Mills and Highborn, thank you, is one of your old-fashioned, blue-chip, father-to-son Channel Islands law firms. Partners do not like talking to policemen and are not disposed to hand out customer information without a court order effective in the Islands. However—"

Upstaging him, Bryant placed his forearms on the table, squaring himself for combat.

"However," Luck repeated, "my researches do reveal that the same firm of trustees has also been paying Pettifer an annual salary, apparently on the instructions of certain foreign publishing and film companies registered in funny places like Switzerland. Does that surprise you at all?"

"I don't know why it should."

"Because the so-called salary payments were bogus, that's why. Pettifer never did the work. Foreign book royalties for books he didn't even write. Retainer money that didn't retain him. The entire structure was a figment from start to finish, and not a very competent one either, if you want my opinion. You haven't any theories to offer, I don't suppose, at all, have you, Mr. Cranmer, as to who might be going to all this trouble on the Doctor's behalf?"

I had none and was quick to say so. And I was appalled to confirm that the Top Floor's vaunted arrangements for paying Larry his Judas money could, as I had always suspected, be cracked open in a couple of days by one fanatical policeman with a desktop computer.

"There's a very funny thing about this firm Mills and Highborn which I might be permitted to share with you," Luck resumed with dinning sarcasm. "One of its fringe activities, so far as we can establish from certain sources, is channelling unofficial payments on behalf of Her Majesty's government." My world rocked. "By which I mean receiving large cash sums from Her Majesty's Treasury and turning them into other forms of disbursement"—sticking out his jaw at me on the word Treasury—"such as bribes for foreign potentates, such as slush funds for defence contracts and other so-called grey areas of government spending. You wouldn't know anything about that side of things. would you? Mr. Bryant and myself were somewhat enchanted by the coincidence, you see, of you being in Treasury and British government funds being siphoned off to Pettifer's Channel Islands benefactors."

In my wildest nightmares it had not occurred to me that Pay & Allowances Section could be so crass as to use the Larry laundromat for other, unrelated clandestine operations, thus multiplying to infinity the risk of compromising Larry and anybody else on the payroll.

"I'm afraid all this is far beyond me," I said.

"Maybe you'll tell us what isn't beyond you, then," Bryant suggested coarsely. "You being a high-ranking Treasury gentleman, which is about all we're allowed to know about you."

"I've no idea what you are trying to imply."

"Imply? Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, Mr. Cranmer-sir. That would be above my station. Very heady stuff, Treasury slush money, they tell me. Well, I can understand that. After all, if you're slipping a few million to some Arab shyster for helping you flog off your clapped-out fighter planes, why not slip yourself a few bob for being an English gentleman? Or slip it to your accomplice, better still?"

"That's a scandalous and totally untrue allegation.”

“Page thirteen," Luck said.

* * *

"Notice anything?" Luck asked.

It was hard not to. Page thirteen of Larry's bankbook covered the month of July 1994. Until the twenty-first of that month Larry's current account stood at upwards of £140,000. On the twenty-second Larry had withdrawn £138,000, leaving £2,176 to his credit.

"What do you make of it?"

"Nothing. He probably bought a house."

"Wrong."

"He invested it. What do I care?"

"On the twenty-second of July, having advised the manager of his intention by telephone two days before, Dr. Pettifer drew the entire sum of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds in cash across the counter of his bank, in brown envelopes of twenty-pound notes. He refused to accept fifties. He had failed to bring a container, so the cashier had a whip round among the girls till one of them produced a Safeways carrier bag, into which the envelopes were stashed. The next day he paid one thousand pounds cash to his landlady and settled four outstanding bills, including his wine bill. The destination of the remainder of the cash—totalling one hundred and thirty thousand pounds precisely—is as of now unknown."

Why? I was thinking stupidly. What logic is at work here, when a man who is swindling the Russian Embassy of thirty-seven millions has to empty his own bank account for a hundred and thirty thousand? For whom? For what?

"Unless he gave it to you, of course, Mr. Cranmer," Bryant proposed from the head of the table.

"Or unless it was yours in the first place," Luck suggested.

"Not legally, of course," said Bryant. "But we're not talking legal, are we? More the thieves' code. You fiddled it. The Doc banked it. He was your winger. Your accomplice. Right?"

I disdained to reply, so he continued in his tone of laboured knowingness.

"You're a money bug, aren't you, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Magpie is what I like to call them. You've got a lot, but you want more. Way of the world, isn't it? You sit there in the Treasury all day, or you did. You see these big piles of money going here, there, and everywhere, and a lot of them doing no good, I dare say. And you say to yourself: 'Now, Timothy, wouldn't a little of that be better in my pocket than in theirs?' So you fiddle a bit. And no one notices. So you fiddle another bit. A bigger bit. And still no one notices. So as a good businessman you expand. Well, we can't stand still, can we, not in this day and age. No one can. Not human nature, is it? Not after Mrs. Thatcher. And one day an opportunity arises, let us say, for you to break into a certain foreign market. A market where you speak the lingo and have the expertise. Like Russia, for instance. So you pull the big one. You and the Doctor and a certain foreign gentleman of his acquaintance who calls himself Professor. Experts in your ways, all of you. But Mr. Cranmer-sir is the mastermind. The Mister Big. He has the class. The cool. The rank. Am I getting warm at all, sir? You can tell us. We're little people, aren't we, Oliver?"

When you are accused of monstrous things, nothing sounds so feeble as the truth. I had devoted my working life to protecting my country from its predators. Now I was being cast as a predator myself. I had never misappropriated a single penny entrusted to me. Now I was being accused of squirrelling large sums in the Channel Islands and paying them to myself by way of my former agent. Yet as I heard myself protest my innocence, I sounded like any other guilty man. My voice slipped and became strident, my fluency deserted me, I became as unconvincing to myself as to my accusers. Well, that's the way of it, I heard Merriman say: punished for the crimes we never committed while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else.

"We're only thinking aloud, Mr. Cranmer, sir," Bryant explained with elephantine sweetness, when they had heard me out. "No charges are being preferred, not at this stage. It's collaboration we're after, not warm bodies. You tell us where to find what we're looking for, we put it back where it came from, everybody goes home and has a nice glass of Honeybrook wine. Know what I mean?"

"No."

A disjointed interlude followed while Luck produced earlier bankbooks, which differed only in degree from the first. The pattern was clear. Whenever Larry had any substantial money in his account, he drew it in cash. What he did with it remained a mystery. There was a monthly season ticket, still current, for the journey between Bath and Bristol, cost £71. They claimed to have found it in a drawer of the desk in his lecture room. No, I said, I had no idea why Larry should wish to be so much in Bristol. Perhaps for the theatres or the libraries or the women. For a happy moment Luck appeared becalmed. He sat as if winded, mouth open, shoulders rising and falling inside his sweaty shirtsleeves.

"Did Dr. Pettifer ever steal from you at all?" he asked, with that adamant sourness that made him such an unpleasant conversation partner.

"Of course not."

"Odd, that is. You don't have a very high opinion of him in other respects. Why are you so sure he wouldn't steal from you?"

The question was a trick, a prelude to some new onslaught. But not knowing what sort of trick, I had no option but to provide him with a straight answer.

"Dr. Pettifer may be many things, but I do not regard him as a thief," I said, and had scarcely spoken before Bryant was yelling at me. I thought at first it was a tactic to wake me from my absorption. Then I saw him waving a padded envelope in the air above his head.

"What do you regard this lot as, then, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

I heard it before I saw it: Emma's antique jewellery, rattling and skidding down the table at me, every piece I had bought for her since my first timid offering of a pair of Victorian jet earrings, graduating by way of the three-string pearl collar to the intaglio necklace, the emerald ring, the garnet pendant, and the gold-backed cameo that could have been of Emma herself—all slewed down the table at me like so much dross by the inexpert hand of Detective Inspector Bryant.

* * *

I was standing. The jewels lay along the table like a trail, and the trail ended with me. I must have got up quickly, because Luck was standing also, blocking my path to the door. I picked up the intaglio necklace and ran it fearfully through my fingers as if to confirm it was unharmed, though in my mind it was Emma I was touching. I turned her cameo over, then her brooch, her pendant, finally the ring. A babble of Office buzzwords went through my head: linkage ... spillage ... interconsciousness. Keep her separate from Larry, I was telling myself. Whatever they do or threaten: Emma stays separate from Larry.

I sat down.

"Recognise any of these items at all by any chance, do we, Mr.-Cranmer-sir?" Bryant was asking benignly, like a conjuror who had performed a clever trick.

"Of course I do. I bought them."

"Who from, sir?"

"Appleby of Wells. How did you come by them?"

"On what precise date did you purchase them, if you don't mind, from Messrs. Appleby of Wells? We do know you're a trifle weak on dates overall, but—"

He got no further. I had driven my fist onto the table so hard that the jewellery danced and the tape recorder rose in the air and turned belly-up as it landed.

"Those jewels are Emma's. Tell me where you got them from. Stop taunting me!"

It is a rare thing when emotion and operational necessity coincide, but they had done so now. Bryant had shed his smile and was studying me with calculation. Perhaps he thought I was about to offer him my confession in exchange for her. Luck sat upright, craning his long head at me.

"Emma?" Bryant repeated thoughtfully. "I don't think we know an Emma, do we, Oliver? Who would Emma be, sir? Perhaps you could enlighten us."

"You know very well who she is. The whole village knows. Emma Manzini is my companion. She's a musician. The jewels are hers. I bought them for her and gave them to her."

"When?"

"What does it matter when? Over the last year. On special occasions."

"Foreign, is she?"

"She had an Italian father, who is dead. She is British by birth and was brought up in England. Where did you find them?" I resorted to a wistful fiction. "I'm her common-law husband, Inspector! Tell me what's going on."

Bryant had put on horn-rimmed spectacles. I don't know why they should have shocked me, but they did. They seemed to drain his eyes of the last dregs of human kindliness. His moth-eaten moustache had turned downward in an angry sneer.

"And is Miss Manzini in any way friendly with our Dr. Pettifer at all, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

"They've met. What does it matter? Just tell me where you got her jewellery from!"

"Prepare yourself for a shock, Mr. Cranmer, sir. We obtained your Emma's jewels from Mr. Edward Appleby of the Market Place in Wells, the selfsame gentleman as sold you the said treasures in the first place. He tried to contact you, but your phone had gone funny. So, fearing the matter might be urgent, he reported it to the Bath police, who, being somewhat short-handed at the time, took no further action." He had awarded himself the role of storyteller. "Mr. Appleby is doing his rounds of Hatton Garden, you see, calling on his jeweller friends, which is his way. All of a sudden one of them turns round and, knowing that Mr. Appleby deals in the antique variety of jewellery, offers him your Miss Manzini's necklace—the Roman number, what do they call it? By your left hand there."

"Intaglio."

"Thank you. And after offering Mr. Appleby the entirely-o, he offers him the whole works. Everything you see before you. Is that everything you bought for Miss Manzini, sir—the full collection?"

"Yes."

"And since all dealers know each other, Mr. Appleby asks him where he got the stuff from. The answer is a Dr. Pettifer of Bath. Twenty-two thousand pounds the Doctor obtained for his jewels. Family heirlooms they were, according to him. Inherited from his old mother, now alas passed on. That's a fair price for this lot, is it—twenty-two thousand pounds?"

"It was a trade price," I heard myself say. "They were insured for thirty-five."

"By you?"

"The jewels are recorded as being in Miss Manzini's possession. I pay the premiums."

"Has any claim been made at all to an insurance company for the loss of these jewels?"

"Nobody knew they were missing."

"You mean you didn't. Could the Doctor or Miss Manzini have made a claim on your behalf'?"

"I don't see how. Ask the insurance company."

"Thank you, sir, I will," said Bryant, and wrote down the name and address from my diary. "The Doctor wanted cash for his old mother's legacy, but the shop in Hatton Garden couldn't do that for him," he resumed in his false-friendly voice. "Regulations, you see, sir. The best they could manage was a cheque made out to cash because he said he hadn't got a bank account. The Doctor then pops up the road and presents it at the jeweller's bank, collects his loot, and is seen by the jeweller no more. Left his full name behind, though; he had to. Verified by his driving licence, which is rather amusing, considering how many points it's got against it. Address Bath University. The jeweller rang the registrar's office for verification: yes, we have a Mr. Pettifer."

"When did all this happen?" I said.

How he loved to torture me with his knowing smiles. "That really bothers you, doesn't it," he said. "When. You can't remember dates, but you're always asking when." He made a show of relenting. "The Doctor flogged your lady's jewellery on July twenty-ninth, a Friday."

Which was roughly when she stopped wearing it, I thought. After Larry's public lecture, and the curry for two that did or didn't follow it.

"Where is Miss Manzini, by the way?" Bryant asked.

I had my answer prepared and delivered it with authority. "When last heard of, somewhere between London and Newcastle on a concert tour. She likes to travel with the group that plays her music. She's their guiding spirit. Where she is at this precise moment, I don't know. It's not our way to be in constant touch. I'm sure she will telephone me very soon."

* * *

Now it was Luck's turn to have his fun with me. He had opened another package, but it seemed to contain nothing but inky notes he had written to himself. I wondered whether he was married and where he lived—if he lived anywhere outside the shiny, disinfected corridors of his trade.

"Did Emma happen to inform you that her jewellery was missing at all?"

"No, Mr. Luck, Miss Manzini did not."

"Why not? Are you trying to tell us your Emma's been shy of thirty-five thousand quid's worth of jewellery for a couple of months and hasn't even bothered to mention it?"

"I'm saying Miss Manzini may not have noticed that the jewels were missing."

"And she's been around, has she, these last months? I mean around you. It's not that she's been touring all that time."

"Miss Manzini has been at Honeybrook throughout the entire summer."

"Nevertheless you did not have the smallest inkling that one day Emma had her jewellery, and the next day Emma was without it."

"None whatever."

"You didn't notice that she wasn't wearing the stuff, for instance? That might have been a clue, mightn't it?"

"Not in her case."

"Why not?"

"Miss Manzini is capricious, like most artists. One day she will appear in her finery, then whole weeks can go by when the notion of wearing something valuable is anathema to her. The reasons can be many. Her work—something has depressed her—she is in pain from her back."

My reference to Emma's back had produced a pregnant silence.

"Injured, was it, her back?" Bryant enquired solicitously.

"I'm afraid it was."

"Oh dear. How did that happen, then?"

"I understand she was manhandled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration."

"There could be two views about that, though, couldn't there?"

"I'm sure there could."

"Bitten any more policemen recently, has she?"

I refused to answer.

Luck resumed. "And you don't ask her: Emma, why aren't you wearing your ring? Or your necklace? Or your brooch? Or your earrings ... for instance?"

"No, I don't, Mr. Luck. Miss Manzini and I don't speak to each other that way."

I was being pompous and knew it. Luck had that effect on me.

"All right. So you don't talk to each other," he blurted. "Same as you don't know where she is." He appeared to be losing his temper. "All right. In your highly personal, highly privileged Treasury opinion, how does your friend Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, in July this year, come to be flogging off your Emma's jewellery at two-thirds what you gave for it, to a dealer in Hatton Garden, claiming the jewels came from his mother, when in fact they came from you, via Emma?"

"The jewellery was Miss Manzini's to dispose of as she wished. If she had given it to the milkman I could not have raised a finger." I saw a means to strike at him and seized it gratefully. "But surely your Mr. Guppy has already provided you with your solution, Mr. Luck?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Wasn't it July when Guppy claims he saw Pettifer approach my house? A Sunday? There's your burglar for you. Pettifer approaches the house and finds it empty. On Sundays there are no staff around. Miss Manzini and I have gone out for lunch. He forces the window, enters the house, goes to her apartment, and helps himself to the jewellery."

He must have guessed that I was teasing him, for he had coloured. "I thought you said Pettifer didn't steal," he objected suspiciously.

"Let's say you have given me reason to revise that opinion," I replied suavely as the tape recorder gave a choke and stopped rotating.

"Leave it like that a minute, will you, please, Oliver," Bryant ordered sweetly.

Luck had already reached out to change the tape. Now, somewhat ominously, I thought, he removed his hand and laid it beside its companion on his lap.

"Mr. Cranmer, sir."

Bryant was standing close beside me. He had cupped his hand on my shoulder in the traditional gesture of arrest. He was stooping, and his lips were not an inch from my ear. I had forgotten physical fear till now, but Bryant was reminding me of it.

"Do you know what this means, sir?" he asked me, very quietly, as he gave my shoulder a painful squeeze.

"Of course I know. Take your hand off me."

But his hand didn't budge. The pressure of it increased as he continued speaking.

"Because this is what I'm going to be doing to you, Mr. Cranmer, sir, unless I have a lot more of the collaboration I spoke about than I am getting from you at the present time. If you don't play ball with me very soon, I'm going to fake any pretext, bend any evidence, as the old song goes, and I'm going to make it my personal business to see you spend the remaining best years of your life looking at a very boring wall instead of at Miss Manzini. Did you hear that, sir? I didn't."

"I can hear you perfectly well," I said, trying in vain to shake off his hand. "Let go of me." But he held me all the more firmly.

"Where's the money?"

"What money?"

"Don't 'what money' me, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Where's the money you and Pettifer have been salting away in foreign bank accounts? Millions of it, the property of a certain foreign embassy in London."

"I've no idea what you're talking about. I have stolen nothing, and I am not in league with Pettifer or anybody else."

"Who's AM?"

"'Who?"

"AM who's all over Pettifer's diary in his lodgings. Phone AM Brief AM Visit AM"

"I have absolutely no idea. Perhaps it means morning. And PM means afternoon."

I think in a different place he would have hit me, for he lifted his eyes to the mirror as if appealing for permission.

"Where's your pal Checheyev, then?"

"Who?"

"Don't give me bloody who again. Konstantin Checheyev is a Russian cultural gentleman, formerly of the Soviet, then Russian, embassy in London."

"I've never heard the name in my life."

"Of course you haven't. Because what you are doing to me, Mr. Cranmer, sir, is lying in your nasty upper-class teeth, whereas you should be assisting me in my enquiries." He squeezed my shoulder and pressed down on it at the same time, sending lines of pain shooting through my back. "Do you know what I think you are, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Do you?"

"I don't give a damn what you think."

"I think you're a very greedy gentleman with a lot of arrogant appetites to feed. I think you have a little friend called Larry. And a little friend called Konstantin. And a little gold digger called Emma, who you spoil rotten, who thinks the law's an ass and policemen are there to be bitten. And I think you play Mr. Respectable, and Larry plays your little lamb, and Konstantin sings along with some very naughty angels in the Moscow choir, and Emma plays your piano. What was that I heard you say?"

"I didn't speak. Get off me."

"I distinctly heard you insulting me. Mr. Luck, did you hear this gentleman using insulting language to a police officer?"

"Yes," said Luck.

He shook me hard and shouted in my ear. "Where is he?”

“I don't know!"

The pressure of his fist did not relent. His voice dropped and became confiding. I could feel his hot breath in my ear.

"You are at a crossroads in your life, Mr. Cranmer, sir. You can play ball with Detective Inspector Bryant, in which case we shall turn a blind eye to many of your misdeeds, I'm not saying all. Or you can go on leading us up the garden path, in which case we shall not exclude from our enquiries any person who is precious to you, be she never so young and musical. Were you shouting filth at me again, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"

"I said nothing at all."

"Good. Because your lady shouts it, according to our records. And her and me are going to be chatting quite a lot in the near future, and I won't have bad manners, will I, Oliver?"

"No," said Luck.

With a final squeeze, Bryant released me.

"Thank you for coming to Bristol, Mr. Cranmer. Expenses downstairs if you wish to claim, sir. Cash."

Luck was holding the door open for me. I think he would have preferred to smash it into my face, but his English sense of fair play restrained him.

* * *

With the humiliating imprint of Bryant's fist burning my shoulder, I stepped into the grey evening drizzle and struck a vigorous course up the hill for Clifton. I had booked rooms in two hotels. The first was the Eden, four stars and a nice view down the Gorge. There I was Mr. Timothy Cranmer and heir to Uncle Bob's old Sunbeam, pride of the car park. The second was a seedy motel called the Starcrest on the other side of town. There I was a Mr. Colin Bairstow travelling representative and pedestrian.

Seated now in my elegant room at the Eden overlooking the Gorge, I ordered a minute steak and a half bottle of Burgundy and asked the switchboard to put through no calls till morning. I dropped the steak into the shrubbery below my window, poured the wine down the sink—all but a small glass, which I drank—placed the tray and a spare pair of shoes outside my door, hung up the Do Not Disturb notice, and slipped down the fire stairs and out of the side entrance and walked.

From a call box I dialled the Office emergency number, using 7 as the final digit because it was a Saturday. I heard the sugared voice of Marjorie Pew.

"Yes, Arthur. How can we help you?"

"The police questioned me again this afternoon.”

“Oh yes."

And oh yes to you, I thought.

"They've rumbled the payments to ABSOLOM through our friends in the Channel Islands," I said, using one of Larry's battery of code names. I imagined her typing up ABSOLOM on her screen. "They've unearthed a Treasury connection, and they think I've been siphoning off government funds and paying them to ABSOLOM as my accomplice. They've convinced themselves that this is the same trail that will lead them to the Russian gold."

"Is that all?"

"No. Some fool in Pay and Allowances has been crossing the wires. They've been using the ABSOLOM pipeline to pay other friends apart from ABSOLOM."

Either she was giving me one of her trenchant silences or she couldn't think of anything to say.

"I'm staying in Bristol tonight," I said. "The police may want to have another go at me tomorrow morning."

I rang off, mission accomplished. I had warned her that other sources might be at risk. I had fed her my excuse for not returning to Honeybrook. The one thing she would not be doing was rushing to the police to check my story.

* * *

Colin Bairstow's bed at the motel was a lumpy divan with a glittering orange counterpane. Stretched on it full length, with the telephone at my side, I stared at the grimy cream ceiling and considered my next step. From the moment I had received Bryant's telephone message at my club, I had placed myself on operational alert. From Castle Cary station I had driven to Honeybrook, where I collected my Bairstow escape pack: credit cards, driving licence, cash, and passport, all crammed into a scuffed attaché case with old labels testifying to the salesman's wandering life. Arriving in Bristol, I had deposited Cranmer's Sunbeam at the Eden and Bairstow's briefcase in the manager's safe here at the motel.

From the same briefcase I now extracted a ring-backed address book with a speckled fawn gazing from the cover. How much had Office routine changed with the move to the Embankment? I wondered. Merriman hadn't changed. Barney Waldon hadn't. And if I knew the police, any procedure that had worked for twenty-five years was likely to be working for the next hundred.

Heart in mouth, I dialled the Office's automated switchboard and, guided by the numbers in the address book, keyed myself into the Whitehall internal network. Five more digits gave me Scotland Yard's intelligence liaison room. A plummy male voice answered. I said I was North House, which used to be the code name for my section. The plummy voice manifested no surprise. I said the reference was Bunbury, which used to be the code name of the section chief. The plummy voice said, "Who do you wish to speak to, Bunbury?" I asked for Mr. Hatt's department. Nobody had ever met Mr. Hatt, but if he existed, he had charge of vehicle information. I heard rock music in the background, then a breezy girl's voice.

"It's Bunbury from North House with a boring one for Mr. Hatt," I said.

"That's all right, Bunbury. Mr. Hatt likes being bored. This is Alice. What can we be doing you for?"

For two decades I had kept track of Larry's cars. I could have recited the number of every wreck he had ever shown up in, plus colour, age, decrepitude, and luckless owner. I gave Alice the number of the blue Toyota. I had barely spoken the final letter before she was reading the computer printout.

"Anderson, Sally, 9A Cambridge Street, off Bellevue Road, Bristol," she announced. "Want the dirt?"

"Yes, please."

She gave it to me: insurance, owner's phone number, car's visible characteristics, first registered, expiry date, no other cars registered in this name.

At the motel desk, a spotty boy in a red dinner jacket gave me a thumbed street map of Bristol City.