The Crocus List

30

When it was late enough for the embassy to be fully staffed, Agnes called to say she probably wouldn't be in, but could perhaps be contacted at the motel number. Now, if the Liaison Office had got the same number from Maxim, then the embassy gossip vine had to be more security-minded than she believed possible for it not to come to one conclusion.

And how close and how far wrong they will be, she thought numbly.

The morning crawled past. St Louis would be a nearly two-hour flight, and then getting to the university and making polite conversation… She drove out for an early lunch at a small diner down the road and was back at the cabin by half past twelve. That was when time really started to drag.

She wished she had brought a bottle of gin with her, even a bottle of wine, but now the only place she could find one was a state liquor store, and while the clerk would know of one, sitting with a bottle waiting for the phone to ring wasn't her own image of herself. Anyway, she'd been drinking too much, of late. She was also running out of cigarettes. But she'd been smoking too much, as well. Pull yourself together, girl.

She lit another one.

I'm not the type to get lonely, she thought. It's a relief to get away by myself for once. She switched on the electric kettle and made a cup of instant coffee flavoured with powdered milk and artificial sweetener. At least the water must be real, she hoped. She spilt it when the phone rang.

"Alan J. Winterbotham."

"Hi, there. How was the flight?" She didn't care if the relief showed.

"Routine. Sorry I've been a time. I've just sent a cable to the club: list of delegates expected for the next week's visit-does that sound okay? The convention was quite a thing, it seems."

"Any mention of Tatham?"

"No." He sounded surprised. "D'you think he was there?"

"I would have been, doing his job. It would need the personal touch." Tatham the believer, recruiter of believers. Yes, he would have been there-but not as Arnold Tatham. "Give me the British names."

He read them over, but Agnes thought she had heard of only two, and one of those now dead.

"If we just get your one," she reassured him, "we're that much further forward. It's up to George now. Are you off to the wilds of Illinois?"

"Wilds is right. It's only two and a half thousand population and one bus a day in each direction. I can't get there tonight: I'll probably spend the night in Springfield and be in something like ten tomorrow. It'll give me time to buy a clean shirt here, anyway."

"Okay, and take care-Alan."

She was going to have to spend a second night at the motel, if only to continue their cover of an 'affair'. My God, if only they knew… but nobody will ever know. How could I have got it so wrong when it mattered so much? Magill wasn't the first time I've given my Little All for my job, but that can't mean I can only get it right when… With Graham, and David, it had mattered-for a while-and that was fine… She let herself drift off to memories of fiercely joyful nights that now… that now… They'd beensnakes. Whatever you said about Harry Maxim, he was no snake.

So why couldn'the have got it right last night? He was like a schoolboy, never mind that I was behaving like a schoolgirl, I cannot stand a man who can'tcope with me…

Even if I was using him, a time of my choosing, to wash away the guilt…

Why couldn't it have goneright?

In the middle of the afternoon, she rang her office: there was nothing more than a routine acknowledgment of the debriefing report she had sent after Maxim's meeting with the Secret Service. Plus a warning not to let him start doing anything of his own.

Ha! You try and stop him, she thought.

But soon-perhaps very soon-I am going to have to lay it on the line, tell them what really has been happening… The trouble was, she could prove nothing yet and certainly didn't want her Service approaching Magill direct, for confirmation. Still, she could get started on a draft. She took out her pocket recorder and began dictating.

If somebody had suggested to Agnes that she was not security-minded, she would just have stared at them. Security was her trade, always had been. But, as Maxim had realised the evening before, her training was in hunting, not being hunted. Even in the long-ago undercover work on the weekly magazine, she had always worked with the comforting feeling of being in her own country, with the big battalions immediately behind her. She had never-quite-known what Dorothy Tuckey, and Magill and Tatham had known of the real loneliness of the hunted. Otherwise, she would never have put anything on record in that isolated motel cabin, all ready for Them to snatch when they kicked the door in.

By Hand

Private amp; Confidential

Dear Mr Harbinger,

Anglam Gateway amp; its Properties

With the kind assistance of the local estate agencies I have gone some way to tracing the subsequent history of the two properties owned by the above company.

The Tunbridge Wells house was sold, as I believe I told you, when the company acquired the lease on Oxendown House, near Eastbourne. It was purchased by the late Colonel J. R. M. Clarke, and passed to his children on his death seven years ago. Three years ago it was sold toa Dr William Baxter, who lives and operates his surgery there.

Anglam Gateway had only a nineteen-year lease on Oxendown House, which is part of the Gardener Estates. We sold the residual sixteen years, approx, to a client represented by Harvey Gough amp; Partners, who soon afterwards resold it by private treaty to a small company whose name I have not yet discovered, with the rumoured intention that it would be turned into a private nursing home.

However, I understand it has since been resold to yet another private company, who appear to have resold the lease to the Estates who in turn sold the farmland to local landowners but rented the house to the company, presumably for a much reduced sum.

I am afraid this is all very complicated and difficult to untangle at short notice, but I hope, nonetheless, that it is of some help.

Please give my best regards to your Uncle Charles;

Yours sincerely,

Donald Nightingale.

George locked the letter away, smiling with grim satisfaction. Practise in peace, Dr Baxter of Tunbridge Wells, he thought; you sound an honest pill-peddler to me. But if that wasn't a second smokescreen settling on Oxendown House as fast as possible after Charlie's Indians had withdrawn their own, then I don't know smoke signals when I smell them.

He would have liked to know who that 'client of Harvey Gough amp; Partners' had been-Arnold Tatham himself, perhaps, using the pension contributions he had withdrawn on his resignation. Certainly that was as close to a gap in the smokescreen as there had been, when Charlie's Indians were screaming (silently) for a quick sale to sever their connection but before a barricade of shell companies could be erected to take it over…

But why had Tatham wanted to keep that house? To keep a base, yes, and what could be an isolated one, surrounded by farmland, yes-but he could have bought some other, without any history. Unless Oxendown had certain special facilities, something not easily transferred… He would like to take a look at Oxendown House. He also wished Maxim was back.