The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 76: With One Leap ...

Tilly Curtain told William to stay exactly where he was, in the coffee bar on Brook Street.

“Has Ducky gone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Sometimes he pretends to go, but still hangs around.”

William looked around the coffee bar, then rose to peer out of the window. There were a few people on the street outside, but none of them, as far as he could see, was Sebastian Duck.

“The coast seems quite clear,” he said.

Tilly Curtain arrived fifteen minutes later. Without taking off her coat, she sat down opposite him at the table. “All right,” she said. “Listen carefully. We know Freddie de la Hay is alive. Our ops people are monitoring the signal from the transmitter under his skin. He’s fine.”

William reached out impulsively and took her hand. “I’m so relieved,” he said.

“Yes. So am I. I’m … well, I’m fed up with all the lies, all the compromises. I’ve had it.”

William watched her. He was not sure whether to raise the issue of her working for the Belgians. Perhaps he could hint that he knew and see if she took it up. “Everybody tells lies,” he says. “States operate on the basis of lies. They claim to be above it all, but there are tawdry lies underpinning everything, aren’t there? Even the Belgians …”

She stared at him. “Did he say that? Did he say that I was a Belgian double agent?”

William lowered his eyes. “He did.”

Tilly sighed. “He’s made the accusation before. He’s told people I’m a Belgian mole. There’s just no truth in it, William. And you know why he says it? It’s because he himself is a Belgian agent! I’m sure of it.”

William made a gesture of helplessness. “A world of mirrors reflecting mirrors,” he said.

“Exactly,” said Tilly. “But enough of that. Let’s go and get Freddie de la Hay.”

They left the coffee bar and travelled by taxi to a street on the edge of St John’s Wood. “He’s in a mews house down there,” said Tilly. “I’ve already done a quick recce. It has a garden gate at the back. We can enter unobserved that way.”

William followed her. There had been light rain, but it had stopped and London seemed bathed in a curious misty white light. He had got into the taxi without thinking; now he asked himself whether it was all about to end for him too. Had Duck been right? Was this woman he hardly knew working for the Belgians? In a shifting, confusing world, anything could be true; anything could be false.

They made their way into a garden. There was a pergola; a bench; a child’s ball that had dropped in from a neighbouring garden and remained unretrieved. Fear makes us leave things where they are, thought William; makes us leave them the way they are.

Tilly was ahead of him, crouching behind a bushy wisteria. She made a sign for him to join her. “Look,” she whispered. “Look up there.”

William studied the back of the mews house, his gaze travelling up. There was a small dormer window in the roof, an afterthought child’s bedroom, perhaps. He squinted. There was a movement behind the glass, but it could just have been the sun, which had come from out of the clouds, breaking through that misty light and glinting off the glass. The sun upon glass can be like sun on the water – a movement, a liquid dash of gold, of silver.

“Freddie de la Hay,” whispered Tilly.

William looked again. His heart was thumping hard within him, as hard as a hammer. He felt as he had felt when he was about to be beaten as a boy. They had beaten him. Beaten him. That awful, horrid history master.

Freddie de la Hay. It was Freddie de la Hay, his nose pressed up against the glass. And even though no sound could reach him, William knew that Freddie had seen him.

“We must get him out,” William said. “Is that door locked?”

“Locked and alarmed,” said Tilly. “But are you prepared to climb up on the roof? Its pretty low, if I give you a hike up you could break the window and get him out. Could you do that?”

William did not hesitate. “Of course.”

They crept forward. When they came to the back wall of the house, Tilly Curtain bent down and invited William to step on her back. “I can take it,” she muttered. “Go ahead.”

He climbed carefully on top of her. It was a long time since I’ve climbed on somebody’s back, he thought. Here I am, very late forties, a MW (failed), and I’m climbing on a woman’s back. But he put such thoughts out of his mind as he clambered up on to the roof. There above him was the window, and there was guttering to give him purchase. He climbed further up, and in less than a minute he was just below the window at which he had seen Freddie de la Hay.

He peered in, and Freddie de la Hay looked back at him. Neither moved for a few moments. Then William called out, “Sit, Freddie! Sit!” He did not want Freddie to be right in front of the glass when he broke it.

Freddie de la Hay sat, and that gave William his chance. Taking from his pocket the stone he had picked up in the garden, he brought it down sharply on the glass pane. From within, Freddie gave a yelp of surprise. William wondered whether he had been hit by shattering glass, but it was too late to stop. He quickly cleared the window frame of the last few vicious shards. Then he called to Freddie. “Come here, Freddie! Quick, Freddie! Good boy, Freddie de la Hay!”

The dog responded immediately. Leaping up, he hurled himself out of the window, straight into the arms of his owner.

“Oh, Freddie,” William shouted with joy. He did not care who heard him. He did not care what happened now. Freddie de la Hay was free. Freddie de la Hay was coming home.

In the taxi, which they hailed at the end of the street, William examined Freddie for injury. The dog seemed in good shape, he thought, apart from a small cut that he had received from a piece of glass still in the window frame. There were a few drops of blood – bright, canine blood – and William thought as he dabbed his handkerchief on the tiny wound, Freddie de la Hay has shed this blood for his country. It is blood no different from that which other animal heroes have shed. He remembered the monument to animals in war, that strange, unexpected monument on the edge of Hyde Park, where people left small, movingly inscribed wreaths; where the words said that they had no choice …

“We’d normally take him to a safe kennel in these circumstances,” said Tilly. “But I think that, given everything that’s happened, he should go right home with you.”

“I think so too,” said William. He looked at her. “And thank you, Tilly. Thank you.”

She seemed embarrassed by his words of appreciation, and glanced away. He wondered for a moment whether he should invite her for dinner that night, but then he decided, No. She came from a different world; she still inhabited a world of deceit and deception. There was no place for him, he thought, in that shadowy landscape.

They would go home together, he and Freddie de la Hay – back to Corduroy Mansions.