The Crocus List

10

The conference room-one of many in the Cabinet Office on the corner of Downing Street-was an elegant reminder that the building had originally been designed by William Kent for the true lords of Whitehall, neither spiritual nor temporal, but Treasury. It was a quiet, unhurried room smelling of scorched dust from the recently tumed-on heating; high-ceilinged, with white-painted panelling above the carved chair rail, and Maxim was seated with his back to a tall grey marble fireplace.

Of the six others seated around the green baize table-top littered with files, diagrams and tea cups, he had met three before: Sir Anthony Sladen, rigid and refined as the surroundings, which were his home ground; the new Director-General of MI5, an academic lawyer with brief wartime experience of code-breaking who had been appointed to appease Parliament and, it seemed, enrage George Harbinger; and Sprague himself, radiating friendliness as fresh as the rosebud in his buttonhole.

"So you aren't any longer suggesting that Person X threw himself on the grenade, then, Major?" The Chairman, Admiral Kirkland, was lean and thin of neck, with a sharp aristocratic face that seemed fleshless under its loose skin.

"No, sir, I just mentioned it as a possibility. I thought he came forward further than I'd expected in the circumstances. "

"The circumstances?" The Admiral blinked, puzzled.

"I'd shot him."

"Ah, of course."

Because of the strict hierarchical placing, Maxim sat next across a corner of the table from the Assistant Commissioner from the Metropolitan Police, a manwho looked like a perfectly barbered gorilla, contrasting strongly with the well-bred faces around the table. He asked abruptly: "Have you shot many men before this?"

Admiral Kirkland said: "Good God," but let the question stand.

"Some." Maxim wondered whether to try and count back, then added a tentative inspiration: "And I've seen quite a number of people hit by small-arms fire in operational situations. If they're not moving already, they tend to crumple or stagger to keep their balance."

Had he tried to be too helpful? But the glances and feeling around the table had swung against the AC. Policemen, Maxim was coming to realise, were seen in Cabinet Office circles as co-existent but certainly not equal.

Admiral Kirkland said: "Quite. What I'd say from my own experience. Don't expect we'll ever clear that point up."

The AC opened his mouth for another question, then turned a page of Maxim's statement instead. "Now, halfway down page 2, you met the inspector in the East Cloister. Where had he come from?"

"I don't know. There's several…" Maxim checked himself in time. "He was a bit further up the Cloister, towards the Abbey." Several members glanced at the big ground plan of the Abbey buildings which lay in the middle of the table, speckled with tiny coloured markers and pencil tracks. Maxim had already charted his own movements on it.

"How far from you?"

"Six-no, more, eight or ten feet."

"What did he say?"

"I said to him-I can't remember the exact words, but-"

"Just go ahead," Admiral Kirkland assured him. "Give us the sense of it."

"I asked if anybody had come past him and he said No, and then he said the shooting had been inside. The Abbey."

"What did he do then?"

"I don't know. I went the other way, into the Dark Cloister, after Person X."

"You didn't see him again after the explosion?"

Maxim thought. "Not to remember. There were quite a lot of people around immediately after that."

"Would you describe the inspector, please?"

Puzzled, Maxim tried to dredge back the hasty glimpse. "A bit shorter than me, say five-ten… older, fiftyish… just a bit of short grey hair over his ears… I think a thin face, a moustache… The rest was his uniform."

"You're sure he was an inspector?"

"The two pips on his shoulders."

"Did you notice his number?"

"He didn't have a number." Inspectors didn't.

"Yes, I'm sorry… How long would you say you spent with him?"

"Hardly any time at all. Just long enough to say what we said."

"How long would that be?"

"I don't know… three, four seconds?"

"You were looking at him the whole time?"

"No. I was trying to watch down the Dark Cloister."

"So you perhaps saw him for… one second?"

"It might have been that."

"One second." The AC broke off and thumbed through a neat stack of papers, reaching without looking for a cigarette from an open packet on the table, lighting it with a throwaway lighter. All the time thatone second hung in the air dissolving slower than his first breath of smoke. The Committee glanced at Maxim and away again, all except Sprague who smiled throughout with rich sympathy. The AC grunted, drew out a paper and skimmed it.

"Sir Roderick"-he looked up at the chairman-"we had three inspectors covering that area, by which I mean the Deanery, the Revestry and the door at the west end of the North Cloister. Two are in their thirties, one just forty: we prefer to have the younger men on these security jobs. None of them reports having seen or spoken to Major Maxim between the shooting in the Abbey and the explosion. I spoke to them all myself. Oh, none of them has a moustache, either."

Emotions swept through Maxim as quick as heartbeats: disbelief, annoyance, apprehension and then, to his ownsurprise, relief. He said: "You've got a fake copper, then. And a conspiracy. Just put on a uniform and walk in carrying a clip-board."

"Was he carrying a clip-board?" That was the dry, disinterested voice of the D-G from five, at the far end of the table.

"Yes, sir, he was. I remember now."

"You remember now. Good." The D-G took up the questioning. "And what did this man, thisfake copper, actually do?"

"Well, he… didn't really do anything."

"Did he call a warning to the Person X?"

"No, sir."

"Or try to misdirect you away from him?"

"Well, there wasn't much point… No."

"Or try to impede you in any way?"

"No."

"You wouldn't say that this/afeecopper, whom you saw for one second-approximately-was of much constructive help to any conspiracy, then?" The D-G was speaking to a distant corner of the ceiling and sounded very bored.

"No, sir."

I blew it, Maxim thought.