The Crocus List

15

He started the car by letting it run downhill-Maxim had insisted they park so that there would be no give-away noise of the starter-and drove steadily for several miles. Almost as steadily, he told Maxim of what had happened to Miss Tuckey.

"Sounds as if she killed herself, then," Maxim deduced.

"She was handcuffed…"

"Who was the man?"

They were out on the anonymous A40; George pulled into a lay-by and gingerly fingered through the wallet with renewed twinges of horror. There was only money and a driving licence.

"Oldrich Praeger," he read. "Address in SW16, he must be… thirty-four," working out the age from the licence expiry date at age seventy. "Have been," he added gloomily.

"We can get it chased up, but it's probably one they hand out to anybody about the right age when they're on the job." Having no photograph, a driving licence is thin proof of identity. "All it tells us is he must'vehad a foreign accent, for them to give him a name like that. I should have got you to photograph him," he added. George came close to retching.

When he'd swallowed he said: "The police will find him. And then…"

"D'you really think so?" Maxim turned his red-rimmed eyes at George, winced with pain even at the feeble car light, and shut them again. "Those boys are going to go back. They've got a lot of clearing up to do-more than they expect, now. But the police won't find a thing unless we call them."

"Harry-youkilled that man!"

"I've said I was sorry-"

"Sorry? We were there illegally, we broke in, when they find that out they'll…" But the future horror was too big for words.

"George, they aren't going to find out a thing if we don't tip them off. Don't you see who we're up against? Your Kilo Golf Bravoes."

The truth was that George hadn't been thinking about anything except himself. Maxim's assumption came as a relief- and a very obvious fact. He had wondered how the KGB would react to the Reznichenko Memorandum; now he saw they must have been analysing the pattern long before it had occurred to him. The Abbey would simply have stampedproven on their file.

Maxim was well ahead in his thinking. "They must have bugged her for the same reason we went to see her: she was somebody unofficial but experienced in underground work-They'd know they were up against some British group, not the CIA. Perhaps they bugged a dozen other people as well, but they'd only hear you and me talking about naming names on her bug. It's probably one that picks up conversations in the room as well as just on the phone, but I can show it to the boys at-"

"Harry" -impossibly, yet further darkness had dawned on the total blackness of George's conscience-"then we led them to her. We got her killed!"

Exasperated, Maxim opened his eyes and glared through the pain. "They're killers. They had her phone. bugged before we even thought of going there-and they were never going to leave her alive once they'd started asking her questions; how could they? Just as they couldn't leave that bug in her phone. She did the one thing she could to screw them up by killing herself first. So don't waste that: make an anonymous phone call."

George turned the ignition key, very slowly, and jumped when the engine started. "But-what will the police think happened to… him?"

"Who cares?" Maxim sat back, closing his eyes against his ineffective tears.

George came out of the call box sounding shaken and pensive. "I told them it was a murder and all they wantedto know was my name… Does holding a handkerchief over the mouthpiece really disguise your voice?"

"I shouldn't think so, but-"

"They always do it in films."

"You're not a public figure, nobody knows your voice. What did theysay?'

"They wanted more details and I said it was a murder, dammit, and why didn't they do something about it, and he said 'Another of those,' and… well, theymust do something. Mustn't they?"

"It's Saturday night, they probably get a lot of hoax calls from drunks." Maxim wished he had made the call himself, even if George had had to look up and dial the number for him. But the police wouldhave to react -wouldn't they?

George was in no mood to hang around: he wanted to be back in the safety-illusory though it might be-of the big city, with a drink in his hand. He had some memory of having promised God to give up drinking, but God hadn't turned the clock back, so that didn't count any more. He skimmed Oxford on the bypass and settled to a steady seventy mph on the M40.

As London got nearer, his confidence trickled back. "Do you think they got anything out of her?" he asked.

"Names? No; she wouldn't commit suicideafter talking. But we didn't get them either."

The thought damped George down for a few miles; then he asked: "How are the eyes?"

"Getting better."

"Chilli-a new weapon, for them."

Maxim just grunted. He was assuming that the spice had come from Miss Tuckey's kitchen, a makeshift to arm 'Praeger' while the others went to get a van or just new instructions, since they wouldn't have planned on removing a body. On leaving her dead, yes, but a whiff from a cyanide gun would have brought an automatic verdict of heart failure on a stout, elderly smoker.

The chilli also meant that Praeger had been just a wire man, with ordersnot to kill anybody who came at him, just blind them and run. That seemed obvious, now hehad had time to think. He hoped George wasn't thinking the same thought.

But George was looking further forward. "With her background, it'll be referred to Special Branch and Five… and that fiddled telephone… and Praeger without any background-we should have left his wallet, but they'll trace something about him anyway-and then we can admit we went to see her -once-and what we talked about, and there we are."

"It'll all blow wide open-in a very narrow, quiet way." Maxim was fairly familiar with Whitehall by now.

"Just so. Even the present Cabinet won't want to admit it's had right-wing desperadoes running around interrupting the even tenor of its betrayals. No, there are Ways and Means, and whether by way or by mean, those persons will be traced and told to cease and desist. Or be charged with Barling's murder. It must go that way-mustn't it?"

Only it didn't. The local police had had a busy evening, with an exceptional number of hoax calls that led them to non-existent road accidents, drunken brawls and even-a touch that showed a nice appreciation of British susceptibilities-a rabid dog on the loose. George's murder call had sounded the phoniest of the lot; it had certainly been the most amateurish. A single policeman finally arrived to try the doors-all locked-and ask if the neighbours had heard anything suspicious. They hadn't. Not until Miss Tuckey had missed next morning's service did a neighbour with a key go in to see if she was all right.

By then the house was tidy-and empty. Miss Tuckey's car was gone, and so were some of her clothes and suitcases. She did go away a lot, but normally told somebody first, so it was odd. Eventually the police were called back, but they found nothing. The telephone was in one piece, there were no bloodstains, no signs of what they still call 'foul play' as if somebody had been kicked behind the referee's back. There might have been a rug and a sheet missing from the bedroom, a picture gone from the wall, an incomplete rack of spice jars. But imperfection and incompleteness are normalcy; sheets get torn, rugs stained and sent for cleaning, pictures need reframing, spice jars break on stone floors. The police agreed that her disappearance was odd, even suspicious, but oddness and suspicion are on every breath a policeman takes-and meanwhile, their offices are stacked with files of unquestionably real and still unsolved crimes. So the vicar signed a missing person report to be added to the dozens of others filed that day all over the country and that, until something else happened, would be that.