The Liar

Adrian brought down his arm.

'Play!'

Rudder bowled a ball of full length and the batsman swept his bat elegantly forward in defence. But the ball had already gone through him and Rice the wicket-keeper was leaping in glee. The batsman looked round in disbelief to see his off-stump lying on the ground. He returned to the pavilion shaking his head, as if Rudder had been guilty of some appalling social blunder. There was a liquid spatter of applause from the boundary. The school were in lessons and wouldn't be watching until after lunch.

Adrian tossed a pebble into his right hand and smiled across at Hugo.

'I got him, sir!' said Rudder, polishing the ball against his leg. 'I bloody got him. Golden bloody duck.'

'You beat him for pace, old love,' said Adrian, drawing him aside. 'The next batsman will be scared, bowl him two very quick ones just outside the line of off-stump and then a slower ball on middle, but disguise it.'

'AH right, sir.'

Adrian wondered if it was a breach of etiquette for an umpire to coach during play. But then he saw Hugo, who had been replacing the bails at the other end, whispering urgently to the incoming number three. Very well then, they would fight it out between them, like First World War generals.

Rudder did as he was told for the first two balls, letting them fly at the new batsman, who played and missed at the first and left the second alone. He came thundering up for the third ball, grunting and stamping like a buffalo. The batsman quaked.

'Subtle disguise I don't think,' Adrian said to himself.

The ball was let go of early and seemed to float in at half the speed. The batsman had nearly completed his defensive stroke by the time it got to him, with the result that the ball was knocked from his bat gently back to Rudder who threw it up in the air with a yell of triumph.

'Caught and bowled! And hast thou slain the number three? Come to my arms, my beamish boy. Two for none, oh frabjous day, calloo callay!'

Hugo was furious at lunch. His side had been bowled out for fourteen runs. He couldn't believe it.

'I'll kill them!' he said. 'I'll castrate them and hang their scrotums from the score-board.'

'Don't worry,' said Adrian. 'We'll probably be all out for ten.'

'I'm going to replace the whole team with boys from the scholarship Sixth. At least they'll have some brains. What good is ball sense without common sense? I mean, trying to square cut a straight half-volley! It makes me want to throw up.'

Adrian was sure that he himself wouldn't sulk quite as gracelessly if it had been his side that had been dismissed for fourteen. But then Cartwright had always been ambitious. He remembered the time they had walked back from Biffen's tea-party and Cartwright had talked about going to Cambridge. That had been the same day that Trotter had hanged himself.

Adrian smothered a sudden desire to rap his spoon on the table, call for quiet and announce, 'This man opposite me here, my fellow umpire, I thought you might like to know that he sucked me off one night in a hotel when he thought I was asleep.'

'Funny old game,' he remarked instead.

'Look,' said Hugo. 'If you do cream us straight after lunch, how would you feel about making it a two-innings match?'

'Well...'

'It'll go down as your victory of course, but we do need the practice.'

'All right,' said Adrian. 'I'll check with my team first.'

Hooper was doubtful.

We've never played two innings before, sir. What happens when we pass their first score?'

'We make as many runs as possible before we're all out.'

'Sir, suppose they can't get us all out?'

'That's when you have to declare, dear. Make sure you judge it so that there's time to put them in again, bowl them out and then pass their total before stumps. We don't want a draw.'

'When are stumps?'

'Narborough's Mr Cartwright and I agreed on seven o'clock. I'll have to ring the school and check with the headmaster. You'll be late for bed of course, but it'll all be the most super-duper fun.'

The whole school turned out to watch after lunch. As Adrian had feared, Narborough's leg-spinner, Ellis, completely baffled his boys. Once they had got used to the ball bouncing and spinning one way, he would send down top-spin and undetectable googlies that made the ball fly off to the waiting close field. Chartham was all out for thirty-nine after an hour and a half of tortured embarrassment. Hugo looked very smug as Narbor-ough prepared for their second innings.

'We're only twenty-five ahead,' said Adrian.

'That's all right, isn't it, sir?' said Rudder. 'If we get them out for fourteen again we'll have won by an innings and eleven runs.'

'If.'

The Narborough openers stalked to the wicket looking determined and confident. They were playing in front of their home crowd now and had experienced the satisfaction of seeing the Chartham team writhe.

Rudder's first ball was a wide. Adrian signalled it, with raised eyebrows.

'Sorry, sir,' said Rudder with a grin.

His next ball was driven to the mid-off boundary, the next was hooked for six. The fourth, a no-ball, was late-cut for two which became six after four overthrows had been added. The next two were both glanced for four. Rudder turned to Adrian to collect his sweater.

'Two more balls yet, Simon.'

'Sir?'

'There was a wide and a no-ball in there. Two more balls.'

'Oh. Yes, sir. I forgot.'

The next two were each smacked for four over Rudder's head.

'What's going wrong, sir?'

'What's going wrong is you're not bowling properly. Line and length, darling, line and length.'

For the next two hours the opening pair batted freely and fiercely, putting on a hundred and seventy-four, until one of the batsmen, the same man Rudder had clean bowled first ball of the morning, retired to let some of his friends enjoy the slaughter.

Hugo's merriment was unbearable over tea, for all the whiteness of his teeth and the sparkle in his eyes.

'Well that's a bit more like it,' he said. 'I was beginning to get worried this morning.'

'Dear old friend of my youth,' said Adrian, 'I'm afraid you've discovered our principal weakness.'

'What, you can't bowl you mean?'

'No, no. Sympathy. My boys were simply devastated by your glumness at lunch, so we decided to cheer you up by letting you have some batting practice. I take it you're declaring over tea?'

'You bet. Have you out of here, tail between your legs, by half past five.'

'Is that a promise?' said a voice behind them. It was Professor Trefusis.

'Certainly, sir,' said Hugo.

'What do you think, Mr Healey?'

'Well let me see . . . two hundred and thirty-nine to make before seven. I think we can do it all right, if we don't panic'

'Ellis isn't tired, you know,' said Hugo. 'He can bowl for hours at a stretch.'

'My boys were beginning to read him by the end,' said Adrian. 'We can do it.'

'I have just placed a bet with my nephew Philip,' said Trefusis. 'Two hundred pounds on Chartham to win at odds of five to one against.'

'What?' said Adrian. 'I mean . . . what?'

'I liked your entrance papers, most amusing. I don't see how you can fail.'

'Well,' said Hugo, as Trefusis ambled away, 'what a bloody idiot.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Adrian, popping a sandwich into his mouth, 'smart investment if you ask me. Now, if you'll forgive me, I have to go and brief my platoon.'

'Want a side bet?' Hugo called out after him.

'Right,' said Adrian to his team. 'There's a man out there who is so sure, based on the evidence of what he's seen, that you can do it, that he has bet two hundred pounds that you will blow these bastards out of the water.'

They were padding up in the pavilion, forlorn but brave, like Christians preparing for an away match against Lions.

'But what do we do about Ellis, sir!' said Hooper. 'He's impossible.'

'That's a trough of piss. You step up to him and you cart him all over the park, is what you do. Just don't get pushed against your stumps. Aim for the close-in fielders, if you miss the ball you might manage to belt them with your bat on the follow-through.'

'Isn't that a bit unsporting, sir?'

'Arseholes. Whistle, hum, look unconcerned, look bored. When he's ready to bowl, you step forward and say you're not ready. Disturb his rhythm, demonstrate contempt. Don't forget, I'm out there, and he'll want to bowl from my end because of the slope.'

'You won't cheat will you, sir?'

'Cheat? Good heavens. This is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.'

Out in the middle, little Ellis took the ball and flipped it from hand to hand, with the disturbing competence of a born spinner of the ball.

Adrian patted his head.

'Good luck, little chap,' he said. 'Don't get upset if they punish you a bit. It's only a game, eh?'

Ellis looked puzzled. 'Yes, sir.'

A sporting round of applause from the Narborough boys welcomed Chartham's opening pair to the wicket.

'Here they come now. They're both rather savage hitters of the ball, I'm afraid. But if you don't lose your head you should be able to cut it down to ten or so an over. A word of advice, though. Try and do something about disguising that googlie of yours a bit better . . . sticks out like a sore thumb.'

Ellis tweaked the ball out of the side of his hand uncertainly.

'Thank you, sir.'

'All right, here we go. Don't be nervous.'

Frowde and Colville, the openers, had certainly taken the game-plan literally. They surveyed the field with lofty disdain and smiled faint patronising smiles at the short leg and silly point crowded around them, nicely blending admiration for their physical courage and doubt for their mental capacity. They were welcome to stand there and be cut in two, but they had been warned.

'Play!' said Adrian.

Ellis stepped forward. Frowde at the other end threw up a hand and bent to do up his shoe-laces.

'Sorry!' he called. 'Won't be a sec'

Ellis turned back to his mark and waited.

'All right, Frowde?' said Adrian.

'Fine thank you, sir. Just don't want to get tangled up when I start running.'

'Quite so,' Adrian dropped his arm. 'Play!!' he boomed.

Ellis bowled a full toss which Frowde hooked straight over the boundary. The short leg fielder glared at Ellis: the ball had nearly decapitated him.

Adrian signalled a four to the scorer.

'It was a six,' said Hugo at square leg.

'Sorry?'

'It was a six!'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure! It went clean over.'

'Well if you're sure,' said Adrian, signalling a six. 'I didn't want to give ourselves two extra runs. That was a six, scorer!' he yelled, just as Ellis next to him was catching the return from deep mid-wicket. The blast in his ear made him drop the ball. Adrian picked it up for him.

'Try and get them to bounce on the ground first,' he said helpfully. 'That way it's harder for the batsman to hit quite so far.'

Ellis's second was a long hop square-cut for four.

'You see?' said Adrian. 'That's two fewer already.'

The next was on a good length and driven straight to close extra cover.

'There might be a couple here,' shouted Frowde to his partner.

'Genius,' thought Adrian, as they ran one run after the extra cover fielder fumbled the ball in his amazement at the possibility that anyone was going to run at all.

Ellis was made of stout stuff. His next ball was an excellent leg-break that nearly had Colville stumped.

Adrian stepped forward and patted the pitch.

'You must watch your feet after you've bowled,' he said to him. 'You're not allowed to run on in the area between the two wickets. It kicks up rough stuff and helps the bowler at the other end.'

Little Ellis was aghast at the possibility that Adrian might think he had been trying to cheat.

'I'm very sorry, sir,' he said. 'I didn't mean . . .'

'I'm sure you didn't, my dear fellow. That was just a warning, that's all. I'm sure it won't happen again.'

Ellis knocked the next ball from so wide of the stumps that it glanced straight across Colville for four byes.

He was taken off after three more catastrophic overs and retired to long on, blinking back tears and fending off the jeers of his home supporters on the boundary.

Cricket, thought Adrian. It's so character-building.

After the collapse of Ellis the outcome was never really in doubt. The fast man at the other end was competent but soon exhausted. Weirder and wilder alternatives were tried, boys who dropped slow balls from a great height, boys with violent actions like windmills that produced gentle long hops, boys who bowled balls that bounced twice before reaching the middle of the pitch, but to no avail. The openers put on a stand of a hundred and twelve and the fourth-wicket partnership of Rice and Hooper scored the final runs as Narborough church clock struck six.

Adrian watched it all with raised eyebrows and an impartial smile. Hugo boiled and seethed and glared, glancing miserably from time to time at the stony figure of his headmaster who sat perched on a shooting-stick next to Professor Trefusis.

'An instructive match,' said Adrian as he and Hugo pulled up the stumps. 'I thought we were in real trouble at one stage.'

'I can't understand what the hell went wrong with Ellis,' said Hugo. 'I really thought he was the most gifted cricketer in the school. An England prospect even.'

'He's young yet. Temperament is the problem there, I fancy. I tried to calm him down and encourage him to get on with his natural game, but he was a bit overawed. Don't give up on him, he's learnt a lot today.'

'He'll learn a bloody sight more after I'm through with him.'

The Narborough team, hot and limp with exertion and defeat, saw them off in the driveway. Hugo stood with them, sipping at a can of beer.

'Three cheers for Chartham Park,' called Malthouse, their captain, raising his arm with an attempt at casual gallantry. 'Hip-ip.'

'Ray!' murmured Narborough.

'Hip-ip!'

'Ray!'

'Hip-ip.'

'Ray.'

'Three cheers for Narborough Hall,' shouted a flushed and triumphant Hooper, punching the air. 'Hip-Hip!'

'Hooray!' bellowed Chartham.

'Hip-Hip-Hip!'

'Hooray!'

'Hip-Hip-Hip-Hip!'

'HOORAY!'

'Goodbye then, Hugo. See you for the return match.'

'We'll pulverise you.'

'Of course you will.'

A madness suddenly possessed Adrian. With a pounding heart he leant forward and whispered in Hugo's ear.

'I was awake, you know.'

'What?'

'That night in Harrogate. I was awake all the time.'

Hugo looked annoyed.

'I know you bloody were. Do you think I'm an idiot?'

Adrian stared open-mouthed and then burst out laughing.

'You total. . . you complete . . . you . . .'

Trefusis stepped forward.

'Well, young man, you've earned me a thousand pounds.

Here's two hundred, my original stake.'

'Oh really,' said Adrian. 'I couldn't.'

'Of course you could,' he pushed a bundle of notes at him. 'Tremendous display.'

'Yes, they're not a bad bunch, are they?' Adrian looked on affectionately as his team climbed into the minibus.

'No, no, no. You!'

'Professor?'

'I knew that the man who wrote those artfully disguised second-hand essays, who disgorged such specious and ill-thought-out nonsense with such persuasive and brilliant flair wouldn't let me down. You've clearly a genius for deceit and chicanery. I look forward to seeing you next term.'

Ten 'Well!' said Trefusis when Adrian had finished. 'Did I really say that? "A genius for deceit and chicanery"? Did I really? And we had only just been introduced. How rude.'

'I didn't take it so.'

'Well of course not.'

Trefusis groped about with this right hand in the driver's side glove compartment until he found a figgy oatcake, which he inspected carefully, blowing off a piece of fluff before popping it into his mouth. 'My goodness, Adrian,' he mumbled through the crumbs, 'that was all so much more than I had bargained for. Tell me . . .'

'Yes?'

'The girl who was the Matron at Chartham . . .'

'Clare? What about her?'

'Did you really . . .? I mean the lard and the football pump and the jam and the urine and so . . . and so on . . . you really did. . .?'

'Oh yes,' said Adrian. 'Isn't that usual?'

'Well now, usual. Usual isn't the word I'd've . . .' Trefusis wound down the window distractedly.

'Well anyway,' said Adrian, 'there it all is.'

'Young people sometimes give me the impression that I have never lived at all.'

'Surely you must have had experiences of a similar nature?'

'Oddly, no. Of a similar nature? No. It is profoundly strange I know, but I have not.'

'Well apart from . . .'

'Apart from what, dear boy?'

'Apart from, you know . . . that night in the lavs in Cambridge.'

'I beg your pardon? Oh . . . oh yes, of course. Apart from that, obviously.' Trefusis nodded contentedly. 'Now, unless I am more hugely mistaken than God, our service-station should be just around the corner. Ah! here we are. Petrol and lemon tea, I think. The car could do with a fill up and we could do with a fillip, hee-ho.'

Adrian, as the car swung off the road, marvelled, like many an English traveller before him, at the trimness and appealing order of continental service-stations. Euro-colours might be a little too bright and primary, but better this luminous cleanliness than the drab squalor of British motorway stops. How could they afford to have all the litter swept up and the paintwork so freshly maintained? Everything neat, from the little hanging-baskets of geraniums to the merry pantiled roofs that offered shaded parking to hot and weary travellers... a metallic gleam suddenly caught Adrian's eye. He gaped in astonishment.

Down the, end of the same row into which Trefusis was inexpertly manoeuvring the Wolseley was parked a green BMW with British licence plates and a Hoverspeed 'GB' sticker.

'Donald, look! It's them.'

'I should hope so too. I was most specific as to time.'

'You were what?'

'And don't forget, dearest lad, that the verb "to be" takes a nominative complement.'

'What?'

'You said "it's them". What you meant of course was, "it's they".' Trefusis pulled up the handbrake and opened the door. 'But that's unbearable pedantry. Who, in their right mind, says "it's they"? No one. Well? Are you going to sit in the car or are you going to come along with me and hear me practise my Luxembourgeois ?'

They took their trays of tea and buns to a table near the window. The couple from the BMW was sitting in a nonsmoking section at the other end of the dining area.

'It won't do to talk to them,' said Trefiisis. 'But it's good to know they are there.'

'Who are they?'

'Their names are Nancy and Simon Hesketh-Harvey and they have been kindly provided by an old friend of mine.'

'They're on our side then?'

Trefusis didn't answer. He bobbed his teabag up and down in its glass and thought for a moment.

'After the war,' he said at length, 'Humphrey Biffen, Helen Sorrel-Cameron, a mathematician called Bela Szabo and I had an idea.'

'At last,' said Adrian. 'The truth.'

'You shall judge. We had all of us worked together on Enigma and become increasingly interested, in our own ways, in the possibilities of language and machines. Bela knew very well that the path to what is now called computing had been opened up in Britain and America and that digital machines would one day be capable of linguistic programming. Turing's work at Bletch-ley had shown that the old Hollerin-based punched-card systems would soon be a thing of the past. Algorithmic, low-level mathematical languages would be followed by higher level modular intelligent languages giving rise, ultimately, to heuristic machines.'

'Heuristic?'

'Capable of learning by mistakes, of operating, like human beings, through trial and error. My interest in all this was not mathematical, nor especially social. I was not frightened of machines becoming cleverer than human beings, nor of their in some way "taking over". I was however very interested in the development of new languages.'

'On account of your having learnt all the existing ones and being in danger of growing bored?'

'You exaggerate charmingly. Bela returned to Hungary after the war, Humphrey married Lady Helen, as you know, and became a schoolmaster. I stayed on at Cambridge. But we continued to work, where possible, on our idea for a perfect high level language that could be spoken by both machines and human beings. The dream, you see, was to invent an inter- national language, like Esperanto, that would also serve as a lingua franca between man and machine.'

'But surely the ideal solution would be to teach a machine to speak English?'

'Well I'm very much afraid that this is what will happen. We had no way of predicting the arrival of the microprocessor, or perhaps I should say; we lacked the imagination to predict its arrival. The cost of computing has been reduced by a factor of a million in ten years. It is simply astonishing. This means that you can now buy for one pound processing ability that would have cost you a million pounds in nineteen-seventy-one.'

'But isn't that good?'

'Marvellous, simply marvellous. But of no use to me. There are now dozens of languages at work in computing. Cobol, Forth, C, Lisp, Superlisp, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, Logo, simply scores of the wretched things. We have a new Babel. This will sort itself out as soon as computing power comes still further down in price. Before the end of the century we shall have computers that recognise existing human languages.'

'So what's the problem?'

'Oh, there's no problem. None at all. We spent thirty years mining what turned out to be a barren seam, that's all. Nothing wrong with that. That's academe-biz, as they say. I tell you this to give you the background of my relationship with Szabo. We stayed in touch, do you see? He inBudapest, I in Cambridge.'

Adrian said that he saw.

'Two years ago Szabo made a curious discovery. He had shifted the focus of his attentions over the years from pure mathematics to electronics, acoustic engineering and any number of invigorating related fields. Hungary is very good about that sort of thing. That coloured cube that everyone is playing with at the moment is Hungarian, of course. I suspect that it is the advantage of speaking a language understood by so few that has turned the Magyars into such experts in numbers and shapes and dimensions. There is even a Hungarian mathematician at the moment who is close to achieving what was once thought to be the impossible. He is on the brink of squaring the circle. Or is it circling the square? Whichever.'

'A Hungarian is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first,' quoted Adrian.

'Exactly. Szabo is just one such hornery cuss. He had been working, during the seventies, on cures for the common stutter, experimenting with ways of playing back the speech of a stutterer into their ears as they spoke. Apparently if a subject hears his own voice back a split second after he has spoken and while he is moving on to the next thing he wants to say, his stutter will be eliminated.'

'How baroque.'

'Baroque? If you say so.'

'But not very practical to go about the place in headphones, I should have thought.'

'Quite so. Far from a feasible cure for the affliction. Experience in this area, however, did lead Bela towards what turned out to be immensely fruitful researches into the speech centres of the brain. The subject that most interested him was that of lying or, as it were, saying the thing which is not. He wanted to find out what happened in the brain when people said things which were not true; to see, for example, whether there is any difference between telling a lie, making a mistake in memory and inventing a fiction, all of which involve, in one way or another, saying the thing which is not. Thus a man might say: "I have to work late tonight, darling," or "The German for a chive is ein Zwiebel," or "Once upon a time there was a fabulous trouser-eating dragon called Geoffrey." These might all be taken to be examples of a lie. The speaker is in fact not going to be working late that night, he is instead going to the flat of his mistress there to conjoin with her in carnal riot. That is an Alpha-type lie. In the second case the man's brain knows full well that Zwiebel is in fact the German for "onion" and that the word he is groping for is Schnittlauch, but his mind is unable for the moment to gain access to that information. His statement that ein Zwiebel is the German for "a chive" is therefore a Beta-type lie. And lastly, there never was a fabulous trouser-eating dragon called Geoffrey, once upon any time and what is more the speaker knows it: a Gamma-type pseudology. The Alpha-type, the first kind of lie, the moral lie, if you like, the lie that disturbs the conscience of the speaker, might well be detectable using a polygram machine, the other two most certainly will not be.'

'Your friends are leaving,' said Adrian.

The BMW couple had stood up and were making for the exit.

'Excellent!' said Trefusis. 'That means we really are being followed.'

'How do you mean?'

'If Nancy and Simon leave the rendezvous first it is a sign that we are not alone. If they let us leave first, it means that we go unobserved.'

'Moscow Rules, George. Moscow Rules all the way.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Nothing. So who is following us?'

'I dare say we shall find out. Drink your tea precipitately. We must not lag too far behind.'

Out in the car park the BMW had gone. Trefusis opened the driver's side door of the Wolseley, while Adrian looked around for signs of other cars preparing to start up in pursuit.

'Can't see any likely looking candidates,' he said.

Trefusis stooped and picked something from the ground. He came up holding a thick oblong of folded paper which he handed to Adrian across the top of the Wolseley.

'This was wedged in the hinges of the door. What does it say?'

Adrian unfolded the oblong and spread it over the roof.

'I think it must be in code, or cypher, rather. Or whichever one was which. Either way it's gibberish to me. You take a look.'

Adrian revolved the sheet of paper to face Trefusis.

'Young Nancy takes after her mother,' he said. 'It's in Volapiik.'

'In what?'

'Volapük. A very silly international language devised at least a hundred years ago by a charming man called Johann Schleyer. "Vol" means world in his language and "piik" means speak. If he had known that in English it meant vomit, he might have chosen more carefully.'

'And what does the note say?'

'It seems that we are being followed by two cars, one a French-registered blue Lemon BX, whatever that might be, the other a white Swiss Audi Four.'

'They must mean a Citroen BX and an Audi Quattro, I should think.'

'That would seem to make sense. Well, this is refreshing to know, is it not?'

'What, that we're being followed?'

'Yes.'

'But we stick out like a sore thumb in this bloody jalopy.'

'I hope so. The element of surprise is absolutely crucial.'

'What element of surprise?'

'Exactly!' beamed Trefusis as he edged onto the autoroute and pointed the Wolseley towards Germany. 'That is what is so surprising.'

The staccato rush of cars travelling in the opposite direction reminded Adrian of interminable childhood journeys to the coast. He would gaze at his father's cocked wrists on the steering wheel or count all the four-legged animals in the fields as they passed, one for a sheep or cow, two for a horse, yawning repeatedly in a giddy cloud of car-sickness. He had had a trick of covering his ears with his hands and removing them rhythmically in time to the whoosh of each car as it passed the window.

He tried it again now.

'Are we there yet, Daddy?'

'Why do people always say that on car journeys?' asked Trefusis.

'It reminds them of when they were young.'

'Humph.'

'Anyway,' said Adrian. 'We were talking about lies.'

'So we were. Light me a cigarette, there's a good fellow.'

Adrian lit two from Trefusis's cigarette case and passed one over.

Trefusis took in a deep lungful of Gold Leaf.

'We can be fairly certain,' he said, 'that animals do not lie. It has been both their salvation and their downfall. Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it.'

'Surely when a bird uses a twig for nesting material it is doing the same thing?'

'Birds collect for nests much as we expand our lungs a dozen or so times a minute in order to suck in air or, in our case, tobacco smoke. It is, or so I am reliably informed by those who know, an entirely instinctive mechanism. Animals do not have the lying capability of man.'

'Keats's negative capability?'

'To some extent, yes. Within our brains connections are made and stored all the time. This word signifies this thing, this fact actually occurred, this experience was in truth undergone; the whatness and whichness of everything is established. Thus I ask you, "What did you drink just now?" and you reply "lemon tea" because lemon tea and your recent drinking are connected. If you deliberately wish to lie you think "lemon tea" - you can't help that because the link is there - but you search for some other drinking material and say, for example, "apple juice". A link is now made between your recent drinking activities, lemon tea and apple juice. The strongest link, however, is between the drinking activity and lemon tea because it is the true one. The link between what you drank and apple juice exists, because you created it. But it only exists through the link with the lemon tea. Are you following me?'

'Like a panther,' lied Adrian.

'The details of a lie are harder to recall than the truth, because they are less strongly linked in the mind. The act of remembering is literally just that: the act of reassembling the members of something. If the members are illusory it is naturally more difficult to enact this mental reconstruction.'

'So your friend Szabo discovered what happens in the brains of people when they lie and has invented some kind of lie-detector, is that it?'

'No, no. He did much more than that. He discovered a lie-deftector!'

Adrian watched the smoke from his cigarette being sucked through the quarter-light of the car. He had an awful feeling, deep down inside him, that he was somehow more than a passenger on this journey, more than an observer.

'A lie-deflector?' he said.

'Let us suppose that all true things are connected in the brain by pathways called A-type pathways and all untrue things are connected by B-type pathways.'

'Okay.'

'Imagine a machine which inhibits the brain from making any B-type connections. When under the influence of such a machine, the subject is simply unable to lie.'

'And this is what your friend Szabo has come up with?'

'Such is his claim.'

Adrian thought for a moment.

'There are some lies,' he said, 'which you tell . . . which people tell ... so often that they believe them themselves. What about those?'

'However much you may consciously believe what you are saying, your brain knows the truth, and has made connections accordingly. You may imagine, for instance, that on holiday in Sardinia you witnessed a gang of twelve bandits robbing a bank with machine guns and hand grenades, you may repeat this story to the dismay of all your acquaintances at every dinner party to which those friends have made the rash mistake of inviting you, such that you believe it surely and wholly. Nonetheless, buried under the dead neural weight of all these convictions, your brain knows perfectly well that in fact there were only two bandits with nothing more than a water-pistol and a spud-gun between them. Your brain was there too, you see, and it has registered the truth.'

'I do see. I do.'

'Szabo claims the machine is in fact as much a memory-retrieval device as a lie-inhibitor. It can just as easily make the subject disinter the German for "chive" as disgorge the details of his true whereabouts on the night in question.'

'Wow.'

'W, as you rightly remark, ow. Or, as they say in Poland, "Vov".'

'And where do you fit into all this?'

'Nowhere in the development of the machine. Bela and I have corresponded over the decades, and a little over a year ago he began to include in his letters to me references to his development of Mendax, as he has fancifully dubbed this fruit of his intellectual loins. Last July Istvan Moltaj, a violinist friend of his, left Hungary to take part in the Salzburg Festival. Bela entrusted him with a sheaf of papers relating to Mendax. The idea was that Moltaj should give the papers to me. We had an appointment to meet at Mozart's Geburtshaus in the Getreide-gasse. It is apparent that someone had either been following Moltaj or had intercepted Bela's letter to me arranging the rendezvous. He was there most unpleasantly killed, not ten yards away from us, as we both have cause to remember.'

'And he never got to give you the papers?'

'Moltaj had taken the sensible precaution of leaving a package for my collection at the reception desk of the Goldener Hirsch Hotel. The package contained a sheaf of musical manuscript paper. A duet for piano and violin. The music was cacophonous in the extreme but the notes corresponded to letters which spelt out a text in classical Volapuk.'

'So you got it?'

'You may remember that on our return to England last year we were robbed?'

'They took your briefcase!'

'They did indeed.'

'But, Donald, if I may say so . . .'

'Yes?'

'Why didn't you post the papers or something? If they were willing to cut a man's throat in broad daylight ... I mean just to go round with them in a briefcase in your car! Not exactly tradecraft, old man.'

Tradecraft?'

'You know. Not how Sarratt would train Circus men to operate in the field.'

'Adrian, I'm rather afraid that you are gibbering.'

'Le Carre. Operational procedures. A good field man would have taken the papers and shoved them in a DLB or DLD.'

'A what?'

'A Dead Letter Box or Dead Letter Drop.'

'Oh.'

'Moscow Rules, George, old boy. Moscow Rules all the way.'

'Yes, no doubt a Dead Letter Drop would have answered perfectly. I should have thought of that. Instead I made a false copy of the manuscript and left the real one in Salzburg.'

'You did?'

'It seemed sensible,' said Trefusis.

'So the papers in the briefcase that was stolen . . .?'

'Were drivel. It must have taken them a long time to discover, read it which way they might, that the manuscript they took from us contained nothing more illuminating than pages three-two-three to three-six-seven of the Salzburg telephone directory.'

'And what exactly did you do with the real manuscript?'

'There was a very nice chambermaid at the hotel. She said she would look after it for me. Was that bad tradecraft too?'

'Well,' said Adrian. 'If she's still got it, it was good tradecraft, if she hasn't, it wasn't.'

Trefusis inclined his head gratefully. 'Don't look behind you,' he said, 'but there has been a white Citroen two cars behind us for the last twelve kilometres. As to whether it's a BX or not, I really couldn't say.'

Adrian looked behind him.

'You still haven't told me,' he said, 'who was responsible for cutting this violinist's throat. . . what was his name again?'

'Moltaj.'

'Right. Do you know who killed him?'

'So many people would love to get their hands on a machine that can inhibit pseudology, mendacity and falsehood. The police, Intelligence services, all sorts and conditions of interested agencies and institutions. Bela, like any good scientist, is worried that he may have opened the door to something rather frantic, something rather ghastly.'

'What have I done? What have I done? Have we any business "taking away people's right to lie? That sort of thing.'

'Questions of free will certainly do seem to arise. It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest. One might never reveal one's true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one's innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed, Man's first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone's right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name "stone". There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the Universe. Man's next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. To take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human. So at least Bela fears.'

'Yes,' said Adrian. 'You still haven't told me who killed Moltaj.'

'The Hungarians have a wonderful word,' said Trefusis. 'It is puszipajtás and means roughly "someone you know well enough to kiss in the street". They are a demonstrative and affectionate people, the Hungarians, and enthusiastic social kissers. "Do you know young Adrian?" you might ask and they might reply, "I know him, but we're not exactly puszipajtás."'

'I have no doubt whatever in my mind,' said Adrian, 'that all this is leading somewhere.'

'A few weeks ago Bela's grandson arrived in England. He is a chess-player of some renown, having achieved grandmaster status at last year's Olympiad in Buenos Aires. No doubt you followed his excellent match against Bent Larsen?'

'No,' said Adrian. 'I missed his match against Bent Larsen and somehow his matches against Queer Karpov and Faggoty Smyslov and Poofy Petrosian also managed to pass me by.'

'Tish and hiccups. Bent is a perfectly common Danish Christian name and it would do you no harm, Master Healey, to acquire a little more patience.'

'I'm sorry, Donald, but you do talk around a subject so.'

'Would you have said that?' Trefusis sounded surprised.

'I would.'

'I will then straight to the heart of the matter hie me. Stefan, the grandson of Bela, came to England a fortnight ago to play in the tournament at Hastings. I received a message to meet him in a park at Cambridge. Parker's Piece to be exact. It was ten o'clock of a fine June night. That is not extraneous colour, I mention the evening to give you the idea that it was light, you understand?'

Adrian nodded.

'I walked to the rendezvous point. I saw Stefan by an elm tree clutching a briefcase and looking anxious. My specifying that the tree was an elm,' said Trefusis, 'is of no consequence and was added, like this explanation of it, simply to vex you. The mention of the lad's anxiety, however, has a bearing. The existence of the briefcase is likewise germane.'

'Right.'

'As I approached, he pointed to a small shed or hut-like building behind him and disappeared into it. I followed him.'

'Ah! Don't tell me . . . the small shed or hut-like building was in fact a gentlemen's lavatory?'

'Meeting for the first time one of his grandfather's oldest friends, a man of whom he had heard much, Stefan naturally embraced me, bestowing a friendly kiss on each cheek. We were puszipajtás, do you see? Stefan then knelt to open his briefcase. It was at this point that two policemen emerged from a cubicle, making unpleasant insinuations and an arrest.'

'Is that a zeugma or a syllepsis?'

'It was an impertinence and an inconvenience.'

'It was in a convenience certainly . . . But you can hardly blame them. I mean, two men kissing in a lavatory and then one of them getting down on his knees . . . what was he thinking of?'

'The job in hand,' said Trefusis coldly.

'Oo-er!'

'Adrian, it is a long walk back to England. I suggest you keep your putrid sense of humour in check.'

'I'm sorry.' Adrian clamped his mouth shut.

'It is possible, I grant you,' Trefusis continued, 'that a person stumbling upon such a tableau might be tempted to place constructions of a deleterious nature upon it, but only if their minds were already composed of stuff so gross and rank in nature as to be themselves guilty of as much impropriety as the most shameless erotic miscreant in the land. Stefan, at any rate, found himself wholly perplexed by events. I managed to communicate to him in Hungarian, however, as we awaited the police van. I . . . er . . . created a scene and he was able to grab his briefcase and "make good his escape" as the newspapers have it.'

'What sort of a scene?'

'A scene-y sort of a scene. Just a general, you know, scene.'

'What sort of a scene?'

'Does it matter what sort of a scene?'

'Come on, Donald. What sort of a scene?'

'Oh very well. If you must know, I let out a screech of animal lust and attempted to remove the trousers of the officer detaining me.'

'You did what?

'Well I have no doubt you could have dreamt up a dozen more appropriate schemes, Adrian, but it was all that occurred to me under the duress of the moment. I scrabbled at the unfortunate man's trouserings and while his companion leapt forward to rescue him from this parlous circumstance, Stefan found himself temporarily deoppilated. He returned to the Shoulder of Lamb where he left the item he had come up expressly to deliver and which I have with me now. Bob then arranged for his safe return to Hastings'

'Yes, I was meaning to ask you. How come Bob is involved in all this?'

'Bob is a friend.'

'Bletchley?'

'Bob has been involved in all kinds of things in his time. He had his tongue ripped out by the Japanese.'

What?'

'Yes, but he doesn't talk about it.'

'Oh ha frigging ha. You still haven't told me who the enemy is.'

Trefusis reached for a figgy oatcake.

'Enemy?'

'Yes, enemy. The people who robbed us in Germany and stole your briefcase. The people who killed Moltaj and who are,' Adrian craned his neck round, 'still hot on our arses.'

'Well now, it would seem we have two "enemies", Adrian. Moltaj was killed by a servant of the Magyar Republic of Hungary, I think there is no doubt of that. Bela's employers have no intention of letting his invention leave their country'

'And now they are following us?'

'No, we are being followed by enemy number two. It was they who robbed us in Germany last year.'

'And who are they?'

'Well,' said Trefusis, 'I was rather hoping you might know that, Adrian.'

Eleven

I

In the corridor, Rudi nearly collided with an enomously fat man with a small head and lank hair. Rudi managed, with a supreme effort of balance and co-ordination, learnt on the ski-slopes of Innsbruck, to avoid the calamity of dropping the drinks tray he was carrying and preceded, trembling, on his way, cursing under his breath the rudeness and clumsiness of the guests as he went. Probably a music journalist in Salzburg for the Festival; such gracelessness was to be expected from the press.

Rudi tapped gently on the door to the sitting room of the Franz-Josef Suite and listened for a reply. This was his first week at the Österreichischer Hof and he was not certain if it was done simply to knock and enter as he would have done at the Hotel der Post in Fuschl-am-See where he had learnt his trade. The Österreichischer Hof was altogether smarter than the Hotel der Post and things were done here on the international scale, with taste, style, courtliness, discretion and just a Schluck of Austrian Gemütlichkeit.

There was no reply from within. Yet someone had ordered a bottle of Absolut lemon vodka and three glasses, someone had commanded room-service. Surely it was reasonable to suppose that someone was in the room? He knocked again and waited.

Still nothing. Most puzzling.

Rudi balanced the tray on his shoulder, leant forward towards the door, and coughed purposefully.

From inside he heard a voice. An English voice.

'Entschuldigen Sie . . .' Rudi called through the keyhole.

He could sense that his husky tones were not penetrating the thick wood of the door. Rudi was a little nervous. In the kitchens yesterday he had caused a beautiful puff-ball of Salz-burger Nockerl, the hotel's speciality, to deflate by dropping a fork into it by mistake, and two days ago - Rudi blushed at the memory - two days ago in the dining room he had spilt some kirsch down the shirt-front of Signor Muti, the famous conductor. Fortunately the maestro had been wearing one of his famous black polo-neck shirts and the stain had not shown up so much, but the memory was painful to Rudi.

English people. Were they deaf?

'Excusing me!'

Rudi knocked again, his head leaning against the door. He heard the voice still.

'. . . incontinently and savagely beautiful, not unlike a small chaffinch, but much larger and with less of a salty after-tang . . .'

This Rudi could not understand. The word 'beautiful' was familiar certainly. English girls who came to stay with their families at the Hotel der Post liked to say that it was 'a very beautiful morning this morning, Rudi', that the mountain and the lake and the Schloss were 'simply beautiful' and sometimes, when he had been lucky, that his hair and eyes and his legs and his Schwartz were so 'beautiful'. Beautiful he knew, but what was this 'chaffinch'? Of course! a green vegetable, like Kohl or Kraut, that was chaffinch. A strange conversation this man was having.

'. . . a certain degree of Schadenfreude under the circumstances is inevitable perhaps . . .'

'Schadenfreude7' He could speak German.

Rudi knocked until his knuckles were raw.

'Entschuldigen Sie bitte, mein Herr. Hier ist der Kellner mit Ihren Trinken!'

'. . . a message delivered by motor-bicycle. A curious new phenomenon these despatch riders . . .'

Rudi could wait no longer. He swallowed twice, turned the handle and entered.

A beautiful suite, the Franz-Josef. Herr Brendel the pianist had stayed there last week and the Bosendorfer Grand that had been installed for him had not yet been collected. They should keep the piano here always, Rudi thought. With the flowers and the cigarette boxes and long flowing curtains, it conspired to give the room the look of a film set from the nineteen-thirties. With great care he set down his drinks tray on top of the piano and listened again to the English voice.

'. . . this rider, standing in the threshold holding out a clipboard to be signed, reminded me at first of a copy of Izaac Walton's Compleat Angler that I have in my possession. Bound in leather, lavishly tooled and a lasting joy . . .'

'Your drinks are arrived, my sir.'

'. . . of the package that he delivered I can say only this . . .'

The voice was coming through from the bedroom. Rudi approached nervously.

'. . . it shocked me right down to my foundation garments. From stem to stern I quivered . . .'

Rudi straightened his bow-tie and tapped loosely on the half-open bedroom door with the back of his hand.

'Sir, your drinks that you have ordered . . .'

Rudi broke off.

The door he had knocked on so lightly had swung open to reveal a man sitting on the end of the bed, soaked from head to foot in blood. He faced a writing table on which stood a small radio.

'. . . I suppose there are degrees of startlement, much as there are degrees of anything. If there is an official scale comparable to, for example, the Beaufort, Moh or Richter Scales and if that scale be measured from one to ten, I would say that on this Trefusian Scale of Abject Bestartlement I scored at least a creditable 9.7, certainly from the European judges. The East Germans would probably have been less generous, but even they could not have failed to give me 9.5 for artistic impression . . .'

Rudi hugged the door-handle and half swung from the door, staring at the dead man with innocent surprise and wonder, like a child watching donkeys copulate.

A knock on the sitting-room door brought him to his senses.

A high English voice called through the sitting room.

'Martin! Are you there? Martin!'

Rudi jumped. This was witchcraft.

Two men had entered the sitting room, one silver-haired, the other closer to Rudi's age. They were smiling.

'Ah, lemon vodka on the piano. Very much Martin's poison.'

Rudi gasped.

'Sie sind. . . sie sindF said Rudi, pointing at the older man.

'Was bin ich?' the man asked in surprise.

So he was German, this man. But the voice. The voice was...

Rudi pointed to the bedroom.

'Der sitzt ein Mensch dareinF 'Is there something wrong with him, Donald?'

'Er ist tot! 'Oh dear,' said Trefusis, hurrying forwards. 'Please not.

Please not!'

Adrian followed him into the bedroom.

'. . .I will let you know, those of you who are interested, of course, the others will simply have to guess. Meanwhile if you have been, then continue to and don't even think of stopping.'

'Well, as the Professor has just told us, that was the last of the current series of Wireless Essays from the Desk of Donald Trefusis. Half an hour of World News in a moment, followed by Meridian. BBC World Service. This is Lond '

Adrian switched off the radio and brought his gaze to bear upon the young man on the bed.

His throat had been cut in a wide crescent from one ear to the other. It was as if a second mouth had been cut beneath the chin. Even the lining of the poor man's jacket had been ripped open. As with Moltaj the previous year, the flap of skin had a gruesomely false, plastic, made-up appearance. Adrian supposed that just as genuine gunfire was said not to sound realistic, so genuine death had a falser air than the gore of the movies.

Rudi gestured towards the radio: 'Das war Sie, nicht wahr?'

Trefusis nodded vaguely, fawohl, das war ich.'

'Aber Sie sind schon Österreicher oder Deutscber?'

'Nein, Engländer.'

'Echtr

'Echt, said Trefusis. 'Hast du die Polizei schon telefoniert?' 'Nein . . . icb bin nur zwo Minuten da . . .'

'Also:

Trefusis crossed over to the writing table and picked up the radio.

'Und hast dujemanden gesehen?'

'Nein . . . nie - Moment! Ja, ein dicker Mann . . . sehrdick . . .'

'Mit kleinem Kopfand schlichten Haare?'

'Ganz genau!'

'This young gentleman and I will await the police, Adrian.'

Adrian nodded. He felt sick, deeply sick. Sicker than when he had witnessed the death of Moltaj in Mozart's house, sicker than he had ever felt in his life. It was his fault. It was all his fault. From liar to murderer, like in the ^Esop fable.

Trefusis had sat at the table and was scribbling on a sheet of hotel writing-paper. Adrian steeled himself to turn and look at the dead man again. The torn throat and the blood soaking into the sheets were disgusting enough, but somehow the savage shredding of the viscose lining of the jacket seemed a world more obscene. It revealed a wanton animal fury that struck fear into Adrian's soul.

'Adrian, I want you to deliver this note to the British Consulate,' said Trefusis. 'It is to be placed into the hands of the addressee himself. None other.'

Adrian looked at the name written on the envelope.

'Are you sure, Donald?'

'Quite sure, thank you. The Consulate is situated in number four Alter Markt. This has all gone quite far enough.'

II

Adrian made his way across the Makart Steg bridge that connected the Österreichischer Hof with the old town. The Salzach flowed beneath him, traffic flowed past him on the Staatsbräcke, crowds of holiday-makers flowed around him and dark, dreadful thoughts flowed within him.

Some of the shops on the Franz-Josef Kai had begun to place posters in their windows of the conductors and soloists due to appear in the Festival. An umbrella and luggage shop by the taxi-rank where Adrian waited was tricolated in the yellow and black livery of the Deutsche Gramophon Gesellschaft. A huge photograph of von Karajan glowered out at him, distrust apparent in the deep frown and clenched brows, contempt all too clear in the upward thrust of the chin and the sour wrinkle about the mouth. Two-horse nacres flicked past him, bearing tourists and Festival-goers along the Mullner HauptstraBe. A bruised sky bore down. Adrian saw an image of the whole scene through a camera that was zooming outwards and outwards with himself in the centre diminishing and diminishing until he was a frozen part of a postcard pinned to a cork noticeboard in a warm suburban kitchen in England, eternally trapped, blessedly unable to move forwards or backwards in time or space.

At last, after twenty minutes, just as he was preparing to go in the shop and ask about buses, a Mercedes taxi drew up into the empty rank beside him.

'Britischen Konsulat, bitte. Alter Markt vier.'

Aber man kann es in zwo Minuten spazieren.'

'Scheiße. Never mind. Das macht nichts. Take me there anyway. Es sieht nach Regen aus.'

Indeed, as Adrian spoke, the first drops began to fall, and by the time the cab drew up outside the Alter Markt, which would indeed have taken only a few minutes to reach on foot, the rain was pouring heavily. The taxi had not been able to go right to the door of the Consulate, so Adrian had to thread his way through the market itself, where people were gathering for shelter under a stall that sold artificial flowers. Number four itself was a small doorway next to the Oberbank a few doors down from Holzermayer's, which sold the Mozartkügeln, small chocolate marzipans wrapped in silver-foil portraits of Salzburg's most famous son. Adrian had bought a box for his mother there the previous summer.

'Sir David who?'

The woman at the desk was not helpful.

'Pearce. I know he's here, could you just tell him that . . .hang on.' Adrian took a Festival brochure from a pile on the desk and wrote in a white space on the back. 'Just show him that. I'm sure he'll see me.'

Well I'm sorry, Mr . . . Telemackles, does it say?'

'Telemachus.'

'No one called Sir David anything at the Consulate. Never has been;'

'He's here. He must be here.'

'You're in trouble, I suppose? Want to borrow money?'

'No, no, no. Look, could you call the Consul and tell him that Telemachus insists on seing Sir David Pearce. Just tell him that.'

'I'll try his secretary,' she said, with a sniff.

Adrian tapped the desk with his fingers.

'Hello, Mitzi? It's Dinah at the front desk. Have a young gentleman here who says he wants to see a Sir David Pearce. I told him we . . . oh . . . I'll ask him.'

The receptionist favoured Adrian with a combative scowl.

'What was that name again, please?'

'Oh, Healey. Adrian Healey.'

'That's not what you said.'

'Never mind, just say Adrian Healey.'

'Mitzi? He says Adrian Healey . . . yes, I'll hold.'

She turned to Adrian again. 'Could you not do that?'

Adrian smiled. His fingers stopped tapping against the desk.

'Yes, dear? All right. You'll send someone down will you?'

'Everything all right?' Adrian asked.

'You're to wait. Chair over there.'

The words had hardly left her lips before Adrian heard a door closing upstairs and footsteps descending the stairs. A greasy-haired man in a powder-blue safari suit bounded towards him with hand outstretched.

'Adrian Healey?'

'We've met before, I think,' Adrian said. 'On the Stuttgart to Karlsruhe Autobahn.'

'Dickon Lister. Simply delighted. Come on up, why don't you?'

Adrian followed Lister up the central staircase and into a vast reception room. Sitting on a sofa, hunched over a small radio set, an earpiece plugged into his left ear, was a man in a Savile Row suit and St Matthew's College tie. Dickon Lister winked at Adrian and left the room.

'Hello, Uncle David.'

'It's unbelievable, Adrian, simply unbelievable!'

'I really don't see how . . .'

Uncle David waved him to silence.

'That's it! That must be it. Lillee has gone, that must be it.'

'What 'Haven't you heard? Headingley, man! Botham and Dilley put on one hundred and seventeen for the eighth wicket yesterday.

Simply unbelievable. And now . . .' He clapped his thighs ecstatically. 'You won't believe this, Adrian, but Australia needed only one hundred and thirty to win today and they went from fifty-six for one to seventy-five for eight. Willis has run through them like a tornado. What? No . . . Chilly, you cunt!'

'What is it?'

'Chris Old has just dropped Bright. Wake up man!' he boomed at the radio. 'It was five hundred to one against an England victory in the betting tent today, can you credit it?

And if it wasn't for you and your bloody Trefusis I'd be up there now watching the most exciting Test Match in history.

But oh no . . .'

He relapsed into silence again, wincing and grimacing at the radio.

Adrian settled himself on the edge of the sofa and stared into the empty fireplace. He could hear a faint hiss from Uncle David's earpiece. A clock ticked slowly on the mantelpiece.

Adrian felt the same molten surge of guilt in his stomach he had felt so often in the past. He could not for anything imagine the outcome of the next twenty-four hours, but he knew that it would be dreadful. Simply dreadful.

Finally Uncle David let out a great roar.

'That's it, that's it! Willis has taken eight for forty-three!

England have won! Ha, ha! Come on, my boy, cheer up! Let's get Dickon to bring us in some champagne, what do you say?'

'I think you should read this first.'

'What is it?' Uncle David took the envelope. 'A demand for more money, Ade?'

Adrian watched Uncle David's face, as he read the letter through, change from benign indifference to irritation, anxiety and anger.

'Damn him! Damn him to Spitzburg in a cork-bottomed raft.

Where is he now?'

'Osterreichischer Hof.'

'With Pollux?'

'No,' said Adrian. 'The thing is Pollux was dead when we got there. His throat had been . . . you know . . . like Moltaj.'

'Shitty damn. Police?'

'Not yet. There was a waiter though, so I suppose . . .'

'Doublefuck, hell and arse-tits. Lister! Where the hell is that man when you need him? Lister! T 'Sir?'

'Get on to Dun woody at Vienna. Tell him to fix the Salzburg Polizei soon, sooner, soonest. Pollux has been bollocksed in the Osterreichischer Hof. Suite?' He clicked his fingers at Adrian.

'Come on boy! Suite? Room number!'

'Franz-Josef it was called, I think,' said Adrian. And don't call me sweet, he added to himself.

'You think? Was it or wasn't it?' Uncle David shook him by the shoulders.

'Yes!' shouted Adrian. 'The Franz-Josef.'

'Got that Lister? Full diplo tarpaulin over the whole farting mess. And a car for me and laughing boy here to be at the Goldener Hirsch by six o'clock this pip emma. You'd better come along as well.'

'Armed?'

'No,' said Adrian.

Uncle David's right hand slammed lazily into the side of Adrian's face.

'Don't give orders to my men, Ade, there's a dear.'

'Right,' said Adrian, sitting down on the edge of the sofa.

'I'm sorry.' Uncle David's signet-ring had caught the flesh above his left eyebrow and he blinked as a drop of blood oozed into his eye. The blinking only caused the blood to sting his eyes more, so tears sprang up to wash it away.

Uncle David nodded to Lister.

'Armed,' he said, 'and ever so slightly dangerous.'

Twelve

At one end of the Schubert Banqueting Room at the Goldener Hirsch Hotel a small platform had been arranged on which stood a chair and a table. On the table were set a gavel, a medicine bottle of purple liquid, a metal waste-paper bin, a box of matches, two small radio sets and a pair of headphones. The chair was set to one side, facing out into the rest of the room. Behind the stage a grey curtain obscured the back wall, trimly pleated like a schoolgirl's skirt. The impression given might have been that of a village hall in Kent preparing to host a Women's Institute lecture. Only the tondo portrait of Franz Schubert who gazed down at the room over round spectacles with an affable, academic and Pickwickian air and the collection of antlers distributed on the walls betrayed the Austrian bloodlines of the setting.

A cluster of people stood against the tall window at one side and twittered quietly to each other like shy early arrivals at a suburban orgy. Humphrey Biffen, white-haired and awkwardly tall, stooped like an attentive stork to hear his son-in-law Simon Hesketh-Harvey relate the details of the extraordinary cricket match that had taken place earlier that day in Yorkshire. Lady Helen Biffen was clucking sympathetically at a pale young man with red-rimmed eyes. Amidst them bustled Trefusis with a bottle of Eiswein.

At precisely the moment a gilt and porcelain clock on a plaster corbel by the window chimed six o'clock with dainty Austrian insistence, Sir David Pearce strode in, followed by a smiling Dickon Lister and an ovine Adrian.

Pearce looked about him, failing quite to conceal his satisfaction at the silence his arrival had caused to descend on the room.

His manufactured angry glance flashed across at Biffen and his son-in-law, then back to Trefusis who was hurrying forward with three glasses and a bottle.

'Donald, you old barrel of piss!' barked Sir David. 'What are you doing with my man Hesketh-Harvey?'

'Ah, David. Prompt almost to the second! So grateful, so grateful.'

Trefusis proffered Lister a glass, blinking up at him.

'Have we . . .?'

'Lister, Professor. How do you do?'

'If you take hold of these two glasses, Adrian, then I can pour.'

Trefusis looked enquiringly at the swelling over Adrian's eye.

Adrian inclined his head minimally towards Pearce and twisted his own ring-finger to indicate the cause of the cut. Trefusis bobbed with comprehension and began gingerly to pour the wine.

'I think you'll like this, Mr Lister... oh dear, "Mr Lister"!

How inelegant of me. That's worse than "Lord Claude" isn't it?

Or "Professor Lesser", come to that. This is called Eiswein, by the way. Are you familiar with it?'

'Ice vine?'

'Eiswein, yes.' Adrian watched with amusement the light of lecture come into Trefusis's eyes as he backed Lister into a corner and began to preach. 'They allow, you know, the full effects of the pourriture noble, or Edelfaule as they call it here, to take effect on the grape, such that the fruit simply glistens with rot and sugar. They then take the most audacious risk. They leave the grape on the vine and await the first frost. Sometimes, of course, the frost comes too late arid the fruit has withered; sometimes too early - before it is yet fully purulent with botrytis. But when, as in this vintage, the conditions concatenate ideally, the result is - I'm sure you'll agree - vivid and appealing. One's sweet tooth returns with age, you know.'

Lister sipped his wine with every evidence of appreciation.

Trefusis poured a glass for Sir David and one for Adrian. The overpowering bouquet of thick, honeyed grape almost made Adrian, his head still buzzing from the blow he had received from Uncle David, his mind still dizzy with apprehension, swoon. As he blinked and steadied himself, his focusing eyes met the sad, solemn gaze of Humphrey Biffen who smiled sweetly from the corner and looked away.

'Hum ho,' said Trefusis. 'I am supposing that we had better proceed. Adrian, I wonder if you wouldn't mind accompanying me to the dais?'

Adrian drained his wine-glass, handed it with what he hoped was a flourish to Dickon Lister and followed Trefusis to the platform. He could not rid himself of the suspicion that this whole charade had been rigged to expose him. But exposure as what, to whom or to what end, he could not for the life of him figure out.

'If you would sit here,' said Trefusis indicating the single chair. 'I think we might be ready to bully off.'

Facing his audience like a conjuror's stooge, with Trefusis behind him at his prop-table, Adrian looked down at his shoes to avoid the stare of expectant faces that were turned towards him. Enticing sounds floated up through the window from the central courtyard bar below; the prattle of drinkers; tinkles of ice and glasses and laughter; a horn concerto by that same Mozart who was born three and half centuries after this hotel had been built and almost exactly two centuries before Adrian had gulped his first lungful of air. The funeral march of Siegfried would have suited his mood better than this foolishly exuberant gallop.

Behind him Trefusis cleared his throat. 'If I might have everyone's attention . . .?'

An unnecessary request, thought Adrian. Every eye in the room was already fixed firmly on the stage.

'Do sit down, everyone, I beg. There are chairs for all. So!

That is much better.' Lister had ignored Trefusis's invitation to be seated and stood in the doorway with his legs apart. Whether he imagined he was deterring entrance or egress, Adrian could not decide.

'Perhaps I can prevail upon you to lock the door, Mr Lister . . . ah, I see that you have already done so. Excellent! Now then, I think we all know Adrian Healey. He is Sir David Pearce's nephew, on the distaff. Sir David, of course, is a well-known servant of the government, by which I mean he is not well-known at all, for his department is a clandestine one. His assistant Dickon Lister you see guarding the doorway like Cerberus. They, on behalf of their government, are most interested in a system devised by my friend Bela Szabo. Sir David as an old tutee of mine from university has long known of my association with Szabo, whose distinguished grandson, Grandmaster Stefan Szabo, is with us today.'

Adrian looked at the young man with eyes fresh from weeping who sat between Biffen and Lady Helen. Nothing in the shape of his head or the set of his expression indicated anything of the abstract or logical genius that marked out the chess champion.

A rather ordinary, innocent looking fellow. But sad: very, very sad.

'I had hoped that Bela's other grandson, Martin, would be with us too. As I think you all know he was killed today.'

Five sets of eyes bored into Adrian, who coloured and looked down again.

'Also with us are Humphrey Biffen and his wife Lady Helen, old friends and colleagues of Bela and myself. Their son-in-law, Simon Hesketh-Harvey, is here too. As it falls out Simon works in the same department as Sir David.'

'Or at least did until six o'clock this evening,' growled Sir David. 'I'll have your arse for a plate-rack, Hesketh-Harvey.'

'But then of course Simon and Mr Lister are not the only people to have been in your employ, are they, Sir David? I believe I am right in saying that young Master Healey here has been drawing a stipend from you for the last two years at least.'

Adrian closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on Mozart.

'But let us get things in order. Two years ago, Szabo, when still an obedient Hungarian scientist, had been to Salzburg for a conference. There he had hidden papers relating to his Mendax machine. And not a moment too soon. Six months following his return to Budapest, the Hungarian authorities had found out about his work and were demanding to be shown the fruits of it. Your department, David, had heard of Mendax too and became determined that Britain must certainly do its best to gain possession of so intriguing a device - if only as a means of impressing your American confreres. The world had just learnt about poor dear Anthony Blunt, we must remember, and I am sure there must have been an overwhelming desire within your Service to win gorgeous trophies to lay before the feet of your betters. You supposed that were Szabo to try to dispose of Mendax then I, as his oldest friend outside Hungary, would in some manner be involved.'

'And so you were, old love.'

'It is true that Szabo sent me a letter last year. He wrote of his wish for me to collect the documents he had hidden in Salzburg. I was requested to be at Mozart's Geburtshaus at two p.m. on the seventh of July where a contact would be awaiting me by a diorama of the supper scene from Don Giovanni. I have no doubt you intercepted this letter to me, Sir David. Quite right too, I don't complain of that.'

'Too bloody bad if you did, Professor.'

'Neatly put. So, what happened next? Well, Adrian, the eyes and ears of Sir David Pearce, accompanied me to the rendezvous. My contact at the Geburtshaus was to be a friend of Szabo's named Istvan Moltaj, a violinist officially present in Salzburg for the Festival. So far so splendid.'

'So far so obvious.'

'Well, now to something rather less obvious perhaps.'

Adrian wondered why this meeting seemed to be developing into a public dialogue between Donald and Uncle David.

'I wonder if you have ever heard, Sir David, of Walton's Third Law?'

'No matter how much you shake it, the last drop always runs down your leg?'

'Not quite. It was a wartime SIS convention. If a meeting is set up and a time for it given in the twelve-hour clock - using an a.m. or p.m. suffix - then the meeting is understood to be called for a time thirty-three minutes earlier than that designated. What Adrian would call tradecraft, I believe. Accordingly Moltaj met me not at two p.m. on the appointed day, but at one twenty-seven p.m. At this meeting he told me where to find the Mendax papers. They were to be collected by me from the reception desk here at the Goldener Hirsch. Moments after imparting this information, Moltaj's throat was cut by someone, I must assume, who was blessedly unfamiliar with Walton's Third Law. A few days later, your man Lister, acting, I have no doubt, on information received from Adrian, made a rather vulgar attempt to relieve me of the papers in an Autobahn lay-by in West Germany.'

Sir David leant back in his chair and looked round at Lister, still standing in the doorway. 'Were you vulgar, Lister? I'm sorry to hear that. See me afterwards.'

'Vulgar and unsuccessful. I had left the papers here. I knew perfectly well that Adrian was not to be trusted. That is why I ensured that he was always by my side. Was it not Don Corleone who kept his friends close, but his enemies closer?

How could Don Trefusis do less?'

Adrian opened his mouth to speak, but decided against it.

'The technical data on Mendax were securely locked in the safe here at the hotel. But Szabo had also built a working Mendax machine, which he had split into two and entrusted to his grandsons, Stefan and poor Martin. Stefan smuggled out his half in a radio set belonging to another member of his chess delegation and presented it to me in a Cambridge public lavatory a fortnight ago. Martin was to have given me the other half this afternoon in the Hotel Osterreichischer Hof, but his throat was cut before he was able to do so. It seems that by this time the killer had worked out how Walton's Third Law operated. That, my dears, is the brief history of Szabo's attempt to get Mendax to me. Does anyone have any questions?'

'If you had left the entire business to us, Tre-blasted-fusis, this whole sordid shambles would have been avoided,' said Sir David.

'I wonder. A problem that has been exercising me mightily is the killing of Moltaj. He was an innocent musician delivering a message for a friend. We have no reason to imagine that he knew about Mendax, no grounds for supposing that he presented a threat to anyone. The Hungarians are not nowadays noted for their savagery in these matters - unlike the East Germans or the British. What conceivable ends could the death of Moltaj serve? It seems to me that this is far from being a trivial issue.'

Trefusis lit a cigarette and allowed the import of his question to sink in. Adrian had done with his inspection of the floor and had now started on the ceiling. He tried to believe that he was a thousand miles and years away.

'Well, we will return to the "Why" later,' said Trefusis. 'The "Who" is interesting also. I saw the killer, as it happens. A very fat man with lank hair and a small head.'

'Who cares?' said Pearce. 'Some bloody Hungo knife artist.

Probably halfway across Czecho by now.'

'I think not-o, David-o.'

Sir David put his hands behind his head. 'Donald, give me listen. If you press that wonderful mind of yours into service you will find, after due stock-taking, adding up, taking away, knitting, purling and tacking, that the score is one and a half to half in your favour. You are in possession of the technical bumf and the one half of the machine that your chess-playing friend Castor here gave you in your bog in Cambridge. That's the major haul, old darling. The other half, which the Hungoes got ahold of this afternoon, is n.f.g. without the book of words that you have so cunningly kept clasped to your sagging bosom.

You're ahead of the game. Give your winnings to us like a good boy and expect a knighthood by return of post. Failing that, shove it on the open market and make yourself a millionaire.

But don't fucking horse around with us. We're busy men. You follow me?'

'Now why should you think that I have only the one half of Mendax?'

'Donny dear, you just said, did you not, that the knife artist got to Pollux before you? I take it he didn't kill him just for the fun of it - saving your grief, young Stefan.'

'No, as it happens you are right.' Trefusis picked up the medicine bottle from the table and unscrewed the lid. 'The lining of Martin's coat had been ripped open. I am forced to assume that something was taken.'

'There you are then, so why don't you . . . what the Nigel Christ?'

Trefusis was pouring the purple contents of the bottle into the waste-paper bin on the table in front of him.

'A little prestidigitation to entertain you,' said Trefusis. He struck a match and dropped it into the bin. A great ball of blue and green flame blossomed upwards up for an instant and then shrank away into thick smoke.

'And so we say farewell to Bela's Mendax papers,' said Trefusis.

'You great flapping clitoris,' said Sir David. 'You pointless, fatuous, drivelling old man. What the hell do you think you're playing at?'

'I know what's worrying you, David, but you may rest easy.

The smoke alarm has been disconnected. I saw to it earlier this evening.'

'Of course you realise now that you can kiss goodbye to any chance you ever had of getting onto the BBC Board of Governors, don't you?'

'I had no idea I was in the running.'

'All you're in the running for now, matey, is ten years of tax inspectors waking you up at dawn twice a week and policemen stopping your car four times for every two miles you drive.'

'Don't be dismal, David,' said Trefusis. 'I have merely eliminated the vigorish. The game is now even. I have one half of Mendax, while the killer would appear to have the other.'

'Damn you to Hull and all points north.'

'Well, possibly. For the meantime, however, perhaps young Simon can help us out with the identity of this knife artist, if that really is the current jargon. Who is the Hungarians' best assassin, Simon? Not your desk I know, but you've worked there.'

'The artist they like to use is actually a German, sir. Sets up his stall under the name of Alberich Golka.'

'I see. And is this man, I wonder, fat at all?'

'Very fat, sir. That's about the only thing we know about him. He's fat, he's German and he's very expensive.'

'So this costly, full-figured Teuton was employed by the Hungarians to intercept Mendax and, it seems, to kill anyone remotely connected with it. I return to my original question.

Why? Why kill Moltaj?'

'Well, sir, it's what killers do. They kill.'

'Only to order. Why order this Golka to kill an innocent violinist?'

Simon shrugged politely; Humphrey and Lady Helen shifted themselves into a more upright position, like churchgoers demonstrating their attentiveness to a sermon; Sir David Pearce yawned; Stefan gazed forlornly out of the window and Dickon Lister continued to bar the door. Adrian wondered when attention was going to be paid to him.

'I ask myself,' said Trefusis, 'why people are ever murdered.

They are murdered for reasons of revenge, retribution and rage.

They are murdered as a means of winning secrecy and silence, they are murdered to satiate a psychotic lust and/or to achieve a material gain. None of these grounds satisfactorily explains the immense expenditure of monies and risk that was involved in putting a period to the existence of a harmless Hungarian fiddler. Consider too the manner of the murder. So grisly, so public, so violent, so uncomely.'

'Perhaps the killer didn't like his face,' suggested Pearce.

'Oh, but it was a lovely face. No, there is only one motive that strikes me as necessary and sufficient. Moltaj's murder was directed at/we.'

'Golka mistook him for you, sir? That's hardly . . .'

'No, no, Simon. I meant precisely what I said. Moltaj was murdered at me, to frighten me.'

Sir David rose, stretched and made his way to the sideboard.

'More of this wine anyone?' he called out to no one in particular.

'Yes please,' said Adrian.

Sir David ignored him, poured himself a glass and resumed his seat. Adrian flushed and scrutinised his shoe-laces.

'I believe,' continued Trefusis, 'that the killing of Moltaj was designed to impress upon me the savage and remorseless lengths to which the Hungarians were prepared to go in order to acquire Mendax. If they mean to kill for it, I was supposed to say to myself, then I had better let them have it at once. But what a footling statagem! I am not, I hope, so old and feeble an old quiz as all that. If I was truly scared - and I must pause here to assure you that indeed I was as pitifully afraid as ever I have been - then surely the natural course of action for me to have taken would have been to deliver the Mendax papers to Sir David and to rely on his department for protection. The Hungarians are not the kind to set murderers on one's tail simply to exact revenge. They are not MI5, for heaven's sake.

Then again, nor are they such idiots as to imagine that they could ever panic me into giving Mendax to them, they could only panic me into giving it to my own people. That is when I realised, of course, that this is precisely what was intended. I was meant to be cowed into presenting Mendax not to the Hungarians, but to Sir David Pearce. Sir David Pearce had been running Golka. Sir David Pearce had ordered the death of Moltaj as a means of frightening me out of the game and Sir David Pearce had ordered the identical death of Martin Szabo that he might maintain his fiction of bloodthirsty Hungarians running riot throughout Salzburg.'

Til call for a nurse,' said Sir David. 'You lot keep him talking.

And for God's sake humour the poor bastard before he turns violent.'

Trefusis dipped his head sorrowfully. 'No, David, I don't think anyone will be calling for nurses. Not just now.'

Sir David met the stares of the others in silence and then burst into laughter.

'Oh for God's sake, look at you all! You can't possibly be serious! The man's babbling and you know it.'

'Perhaps we should ask Golka,' said Trefusis.

'Ooh, yes, what a good idea. Let's ask Golka. Or Florence Nightingale perhaps, or the Nabob of Bhandipur.'

'Well, Golka?' said Trefusis. 'You are the one who did the killing. Perhaps you could tell us on whose orders?'

Lister did not alter his expression at all. He shifted his weight from his right to his left leg and remained silent.

Adrian felt his gut churning. Ten minutes ago he had not imagined getting out of this session with his integrity unscathed, now he was beginning to doubt that he would get out of it alive.

Simon Hesketh-Harvey coughed and raised a tentative hand.

'Um, excuse me, sir. I hate to seem dim, but are you suggesting that Lister is Golka?'

'Oh, there can be no doubt of that. I recognise him, you see.'

'Mm. He's... not very fat though, is he, sir?'

'Well of course not. Such a noticeable thing to be, isn't it, fat?

Far from ideal, one might therefore think, for the successful pursuit of the dreadful trade Golka has chosen. But you see, while a fat man can never make himself thin, a thin man may easily make himself fat.'

'Padding, do you mean, sir?'

'Quite. His face might not properly match the corpulence of his body, but it is not uncommon, after all, to see men who are fatter in frame than in feature. Is that not right, Mr Lister?'

Lister said nothing.

Adrian stared at him, trying to picture where on his person a gun might be concealed. Or his knives.

'Are you absolutely certain, sir? I mean . . .'

'Oh for God's sake!' exploded Sir David, his voice setting the bells of the gilt and porcelain clock on the wall to chime. 'You work to me Hesketh-Pisshead-Harvey! You sir me, do you understand? You do not sir this sack of rotting tweed. You sir me!'

Simon did not turn to look at Pearce during this outburst. 'As you say, sir,' he said stolidly. 'You are suggesting then, Professor, that in order to acquire Mendax, Sir David hired Golka?'

'Yes, because he has been operating privately, I think. He wants Mendax for himself. A supplement to the nugatory pension he might expect from his masters. If he had succeeded in frightening me into offering Mendax to Her Majesty's Government, he would have made sure, I have no doubt, that Golka crashed the handover and took Mendax away, apparently from the both of us. It had to look like the Hungarians had won, you understand.'

'This is so stupid of you, Donald,' said Sir David. 'So very stupid. You see, if your analysis is correct, I already have one half of Mendax, the half that Lister took from Martin this afternoon. It seems natural that I should trouble you for the other half.'

'Oh but you don't have one half of Mendax, David. That is the whole point. I have both halves.' Trefusis looked down at the two radio sets on the table in front of him.

Adrian watched as Uncle David's eyes froze into a momentary stare of panic before slowly relaxing into a smile.

'Bad bluff, Donald. V. bad bluff.'

'I am afraid not. You see, there is something else of which you and Lister or Golka - whichever he prefers - are in ignorance. Walton's First Law.'

'Oh hell!' said Humphrey Biffen suddenly.

Everyone turned to stare at him.

'Ever since you mentioned the Third Law I've been sitting here racking my brains trying to remember the others,' said Biffen with an apologetic shake of the head. 'I remember Two and Four of course, but what on earth was One?'

'Oh come on, Humpty!' his wife nudged him playfully, ' "Whatever is on the person is not true. k' How could you forget?'

'Oh yes!' cried Biffen with satisfaction. 'I am an old fool. So sorry, Donald.'

'My dear fellow, not at all. Lady Helen is of course quite right. "Whatever is on the person is not true." I wonder, Sir David, if you ever listen to the little wireless essays with which from time to time I infest the air waves? They may be heard domestically every Saturday morning on Radio 4. They are also broadcast around the globe by the BBC World Service.'

'I know that. Anyone who's ever tried to listen to the cricket knows that. To their bored cost.'

'Ah, then it is possible that you heard this week's essay? It was transmitted in Europe this morning at oh three hundred hours and again at fifteen hundred this afternoon.'

'Yes, I heard it,' said Sir David. 'By God, this had better be leading somewhere.'

'Indeed it is. You might recall a reference to a chaffinch in my piece. Chaffinch is my name for Martin Szabo. Stefan here is Coaltit, I am Bald Eagle, Adrian is Lyre Bird.'

Adrian blushed again. Why 'Liar Bird'? It didn't seem fair.

'And you, Sir David,' continued Trefusis, 'are Duvet, I don't know why, but you are. I hope that doesn't upset you.'

'I've been called worse things.'

'Oh, surely not?'

'Just get on with it, will you?'

'Very well. In this same broadcast I also uttered these words... let me see . . . the sentence went like this . . . "reminded me at first of a copy of Izaac Walton's Compleat Angler that I have in my possession". Yes, I think that was it. This was an instruction to Martin to obey Walton's First Law: Whatever is on the person is not true. "Reminded me at first of a copy of Izaac Walton's . . ."I knew, you see, that if you or Golka did intercept Martin you would expect to find your treasure in the lining of his coat. In his last interview with his grandson in Hungary, Szabo had deliberately told Martin that this was where Mendax should be secreted. Ychir department's man in Budapest has a contact inside the Hungarian secret police.

Simon tells me he is called "Locksmith". "What you want will be in the lining of Martin Szabo's jacket," Locksmith no doubt signalled to London, as Bela intended him to. You briefed Golka accordingly: "Expect to find Mendax in the lining of Pollux's coat," you will have said. Martin did indeed create an inner pocket to his jacket in which he hid a piece of microcircuitry.

This Lister gratefully took after he had cut the poor boy's throat. I believe you will discover that what you killed that boy to obtain controls the spin cycle of a tumble drier. The wireless set on Martin's dressing table would have yielded a much richer secret. I have it here.'

Trefusis held up the second of the two radios.

'There we have it, you see. Mendax. I know how badly you want it, David, and I am so terribly sorry that I am not in a position to oblige you. Humphrey and Lady Helen, like myself, are old friends of Bela Szabo and we feel that we have the prior claim. Simon's loyalty, naturally, is to his parents-in-law and to me, the devoted godfather of his wife Nancy. Stefan here, as Bela's heir and the brother of Martin, whom you so pitilessly slew, must decide on what punishment should be meted out to you. Lister, I'm afraid, cannot be allowed to live.'

Sir David rose to his feet. 'This has all been most instructive,' he said. 'A tidy operation on your part, Donald. I congratulate you. I must now ask you to present Mendax to me. Mr Lister, if you please.'

Adrian watched as Lister's right hand went slowly to his left side and brought out, from under the lapel of his powder-blue safari jacket, an automatic revolver. At least Adrian supposed it was an automatic revolver. It was certainly some form of hand gun, and it was pointed very directly at the head of Professor Trefusis. Adrian had imagined that he had a lifetime before him in which to acquire all kinds of facts, including a basic knowledge of firearms, enough for instance to be able to tell the difference between a pistol, a revolver, an automatic or a semiautomatic. But now he was to be killed by one such instrument before he had the chance to find out what it might be.

'Mendax,' said Trefusis with no indication of concern, 'is of course yours to keep or dispose of as you will, Sir David. I have no argument against bullets. But I must ask you to allow me to finish my address. Then you may kill us all, as kill us all you surely must, for I am sure I speak for everyone in this room when I say that I have every intention of informing your political masters of the entirely reprehensible part you have played in this affair.'

'Oh certainly I shall kill you all,' said Sir David. 'With the greatest pleasure in the world I shall kill you all.'

'Naturally. But I cannot allow you to purchase Mendax, even at the bargain price of six bullets, without offering you a demonstration of its prodigious abilities. You cannot be expected to buy a pig in a poke, Sir David . . . sight unseen.

That, after all, is why Adrian is with us here.'

Sir David folded his arms and reflected.

'Very well,' he said. 'If it amuses you.'

'Thank you,' Trefusis bent down over the table. 'Now correct me if I am wrong, Stefan, but I believe that all we need do is connect these two radio sets like so . . .'

Adrian forced his eyes away from the gun in Lister's hand and round towards Trefusis behind him. He had prised open the battery compartments of each radio. From one a ribbon of parallel connecting cable now protruded, ending in a plug. As Trefusis pushed this plug into the battery compartment of the other it snapped home with a soft plastic click. He plugged the headphone jack into one of the radios and looked enquiringly towards Stefan, who was shaking his head.

'Not this, it must be the other. Certainly the other.'

'Thank you, my boy.' Trefusis unplugged the headphones from the first radio and attached them to the minijack socket of the second. 'Two hundred and fifty metres, I think?'

'Sure,' said Stefan. 'You will hear noise.'

Trefusis held the headphones up to one ear and turned the tuning wheel on the first radio set. 'Aha!' he said at length.

'Adrian, if you would be so kind . . .'

Adrian took the headset with trembling hands. He looked up at Trefusis, who returned the gaze affectionately.

'Must be done, my dear,' he said. 'I don't believe you will be harmed in any way.'

As soon as the headphones were over his ears, Adrian felt reassured. A gentle hiss filled his head, foregrounded by brighter, sharper little sounds that were like an aural equivalent of spots in front of the eyes. It was very pleasant, very relaxing; a bath for the brain. He heard too, quite clearly, the real external sound of Trefusis pressing a button on the device behind him. The effect of this was to cause the hiss, and the dancing little sounds in front of it, to be replaced by a wider, deeper hum. Slowly Adrian lost all sensation of physical contact with the world. He knew quite clearly that he was sitting in a chair, but he could not feel which parts of his body were touching it. Somewhere in the centre of this warm, weightless pool of sound hung the voice of Donald Trefusis.

'Tell me how you feel, Adrian.'

Adrian knew how he felt. He knew everything. Suddenly nothing in his mind was mystery; all was open and clear. It was as if he was swimming through the lobes, folds, neurones, synapses, chambers and connectors of his own brain.

'I feel fucking great,' he declared. 'Sort of swimming feeling like the time I had that grass round at Mark's place in Winner Street - that must have been years ago - I can see the outline of Lister's cock the way he's standing there - very badly cut safari suit I suppose - small circumcised as well - and after we had the grass I was really sick all over Mark's duvet - when Uncle David came to stay and I was twelve I found magazines under his bed I remember - that fluff smell under the spare-room bed - I smelt it again when we stayed in the hotel on Wednesday on our way to Salzburg - I had to pretend I knew the difference between grass and resin which I didn't which is pathetic because it's so fucking obvious isn't it - I wish I hadn't taken Uncle David's fucking money - why on earth Donald calls him Duvet - the word for the unit of thermal insulation in duvets is tog -Donald will know where it comes from - come to think of it I haven't had a wank in two days - Lister can't kill us all can he -I mean this is mad completely mad - they might sell KY jelly in a chemist's somewhere in the Getreidegasse - all that blood - if I do die it won't matter anyway because I'm such a cunt I won't notice - Uncle David is listening to me and looking at me as if I was a fish in a tank and I can hear Donald talking to me so I suppose if none of you minds I had better shut up and listen to what he's saying - big helmet but tiny cock - you've hardly said anything Biffo and your wife hasn't said much either - showing through his togs - what are you doing here anyway - I suppose Donald asked you to follow him as well when we were driving here - I'm asking you a question Mr Biffen and you aren't answering - or rather I suppose you are answering because your mouth is opening and closing but I can't hear you — awful white spittle you have in the corners of your mouth - I've just had this gross image of you and Lady Helen snogging can you imagine - someone is telling me to be quiet I can hear them - I think I had better stand up now - no I can't because the headphones would slip off - I mean grass looks like grass and resin doesn't but I thought it was a trap I suppose - Lister wearing padding and looking fat - I wonder if Simon is armed and is going to try and shoot Lister before he can fire at Donald - Lister has heard me say that now and he will probably shoot Simon first just in case - me and my big mouth - can't be an automatic revolver come to think of it doesn't sound right - somebody is still telling me to be quiet - thirty-eight that must be it a thirty-eight

automatic though whether that's thirty-eight millimetres or inches I have no idea - wasn't there someone called Lister at school - Hugo is turning into an alcoholic because of me - it really is a very small cock that Lister has got perhaps that is why he is a killer - if Donald knew all along that I was being paid by Uncle David then he has never liked me and if he has never liked me then perhaps it's just as well Lister is going to shoot us all - do you remember that time when you made me write to Mother Uncle David and I saw Tony Greig - I hope Lister shoots the others first so I can watch - that's disgusting but then I am disgusting I suppose everyone is - I'm so happy - I really like all of you you know that -1 simply must have a fuck before I die there was a girl on the footbridge with simply astonishing tits - Stefan's got quite a cute bum it has to be said oh for God's sake Adrian he's just lost a brother - I don't know why but I like you all but I am glad that we are all going to die and be together - I like you too Uncle David I always - the magazine under your bed was called Lolita wasn't it completely hairless vaginas - I can't imagine how you spell Golka but it is rather an impressive name - I suppose it gets bigger when he's excited -when he's cutting someone's throat probably - as big as a thirty-eight slug I suppose - looks like a slug at the moment - this is an amazing experience -1 probably love Donald - not like Hugo or Jenny - not like wanting to go to bed with him - ha can you imagine that Donald - me going to bed with you - no I don't mean that but I think I love you in every other way and of course you hate me don't you as you should because I am such a cunt - everyone watching me and listening to me and me making a total arse of myself because I can't help it though it's good to get it off my chest - of course it's never going to end because '

'Thank you, Adrian, I think that will do.'

Trefusis pulled off the headphones and the air seemed to scream into Adrian's head with a huge kicking electric shock.

He gasped like a skin diver breaking the surface. He felt Donald's hand on his shoulder and the stares of everyone else in the room piercing him through to the brain. Rocking backwards and forwards in his chair, he buried his head in his hands and began to cry.

Through the close snivel of his weeping he heard re-establish themselves the sounds of the room: the music in the courtyard below, the ticking of the clock and Uncle David's crude heckling.

'What bloody use is this? The boy's done no more than drool and blub like a maniac. I don't need a machine to make him do that. One swift kick in the balls would be enough.'

'I imagine,' said Trefusis, 'that had we left the machine attached for longer, every truth in Adrian's brain would have been disgorged.'

'What a revolting thought.'

Adrian leant back in his chair and opened his eyes.

'May I stand up please?' he asked in a small voice. 'I think my leg may have gone to sleep.'

'Yes, yes, of course. Walk around the room a little, my boy.'

Avoiding the eyes of Stefan, Simon and the Biffens, Adrian stepped down from the dais.

Sir David gave the wide shrug of a man who believes himself to be surrounded by fools. 'Well I dare say it might work,' he said. 'Just leave it where it is and walk away from the table, will you?'

'In a moment, David,' said Trefusis. 'First I have to do this ...'

Trefusis raised the gavel like a benevolent judge and brought it down onto the coupled radios. Splinters of broken plastic flew across the room. Sir David stiffened.

'You're dead, Donald,' he hissed. 'Do it, Dickon!'

'No! No, no, no, no, no!'

With a screech that tore his throat Adrian threw himself at Lister, knocking him to the floor. He fell on him with a roar, banging his head down onto his chest, barking and bellowing into his face.

'I'll kill you! Kill you! I'll kill you!'

He felt the sharp profile of the gun against his stomach, and pressure upwards as Lister's gun hand tried to free itself from the weight of Adrian's body.

Through the background clamour of upraised voices, Adrian thought he heard Simon Hesketh-Harvey shout, 'Pull him off!'

Hands pulled roughly at his shoulders, trying to tug him away. Why the hell didn't they run? Why couldn't they leave him be? What was the point of sacrificing yourself like this if your allies stayed around to watch? This was their chance to flee. Did they want to be killed?

Adrian kicked his knee into Lister's stomach and the gun exploded with a dull boom.

For a second Lister and Adrian stared at each other. Someone, it could have been Uncle David, said, rather impatiently, 'Oh for heaven's sake!'

Adrian felt hot blood surge against his stomach like a.discharge of semen and wondered whether it was his or Lister's.

'Oh shit,' he said as Lister rolled away. 'It's mine.'

'It's not my fault!' someone close to him cried. 'He just . . .'

Adrian's eyeballs slid upwards and he fell forward. 'I'm so sorry,' he said.

As he fell into unconsciousness he thought he heard the voice of Bob, the landlord of the Shoulder of Lamb.

'You silly arse, sir. I had him covered all the time.'

But as Adrian slipped away, Bob's voice, if it had ever been there, tapered and dissolved into the only sound that accompanied Adrian into the darkness, the sound of Trefusis wailing.

Thirteen

Professor Donald Lister's face hung above Adrian like a great white balloon. Adrian forced his eyes wider open and tried to remember who Professor Donald Lister, could be. He had not realised that such a person was.

The balloon moved away and split itself into two, like the dividing of a gigantic cell.

'You should sleep, my boy,' said Trefusis.

'Sleep,' echoed Dickon Lister.

The two new balloons separated and disappeared from Adrian's line of vision.

A little while later he opened his eyes again to find Istvan Moltaj and Martin Szabo gazing down upon him. Their throats were pure and unscarred, their brown eyes round with compassion.

'Very pale, Helen. Is it right he should be so pale?'

'Only to be expected,' said the voice of Lady Helen Biffen.

Adrian smiled. 'Thank you for welcoming me here,' he said.

'I had always known that death would never be the finish. I hope we can stay friends throughout eternity.'

He realised with a flick of annoyance that although he had uttered the words quite plainly they had sounded only inside his head. His lips had not moved nor had his larynx stirred.

Perhaps there was a special technique up here that he would have to master in order to be able to communicate. He dwelt on the possibility for a while and contemplated with drowsy satisfaction the prospect of the infinite time now available to him.

Adrian awoke from his dreams in some discomfort. The bedrom was very familiar. The dressing table at the end of the bed he had seen before only recently. He hauled himself up onto his elbows to get a better view, then yelped in agony as a sharp pain shot through his stomach. Footsteps hurried towards him from a connecting room. As he sank back, spent, the thought came to him that he was in the same suite of the Hotel Osterreichischer Hof that Martin Szabo had stayed in, that he was lying on the very bed that Martin Szabo had sat on when his throat had been cut.

'Adrian, you shouldn't try to move,' said Trefusis.

'No,' said Adrian. 'Sorry.' He closed his eyes in order to concentrate on framing a question but the question eluded him and he fell asleep.

He came round a little later to find Trefusis sitting by his bed.

'Morning, Donald. If it is morning.'

'Yes,' said Trefusis. 'It is morning.'

'I'm alive then?'

'I think we can go that far.'

'What day is it?'

'Wednesday.'

'Wednesday. How long have I been here?'

'No more than a few hours.'

'That's all?' Adrian was surprised. 'They got the bullet out, did they?'

'Bullet? There was no bullet.'

'But I was shot.'

'Yes, you were shot, but there was no bullet.'

Adrian pondered this.

'What's hurting me then?'

'You lost some blood. I should imagine your stomach will be a little sore for a while. The plaster from your dressing will be pulling at your skin.'

'I'm quite hungry.'

'Rudi will bring you something.'

'Good-o,' said Adrian and fell asleep again.

Two days later Adrian sat at the piano in the Franz-Josef Suite and picked his way through Beethoven's Minuet in G. There was a plate of sandwiches and a glass of beer in front of him. His suitcases were assembled in the middle of the room ready to be taken down to reception. He had felt fully fit enough to bear Donald company for the long drive home in the Wolseley but Trefusis had insisted he go by air.

Adrian's stomach was healing very well, the raw little eruptions where the embedded wadding had been picked out with tweezers were capped with fresh scar tissue and he could now touch the long soft tongue of burn-tissue on his left side without wincing.

He closed the piano lid and straightened himself. It was a companionable kind of pain, clean and sharp as Pilsner; a better pain than the crushing leaden ache of guilt he had carried around with him for as long as he could remember.

There was a hearty knock at the door and Simon Hesketh-Harvey came in, followed by a beaming Dickon.

'Grüß Gott,' said Adrian.

'And how's the lad?'

'The lad's fine thank you, Dickon,' said Adrian. 'And looking forward to going home.'

'That's the ticket,' said Simon.

'No,' said Adrian, pulling a travel wallet from his jacket pocket, 'this is.'

A long table had been prepared in the upstairs room of the Shoulder of Lamb. Nigel the barman was serving soup under the vigilant eye of Bob, the landlord. Trefusis sat at one end, with Adrian at his left hand side and Lady Helen Biffen on his right. Martin and Stefan Szabo, Humphrey Biffen, Dickon Lister, Istvan Moltaj and Simon and Nancy Hesketh-Harvey were all present, chattering and laughing with the hysterical bonhomie of businessmen at a Christmas party. There was one empty chair halfway down the table on Lady Helen's side.

'But why did you have to go to such lengths?' Adrian was asking Trefusis. 'I mean why couldn't you just tell me what was going on?'

'It was very necessary, I am afraid, that you acted in complete ignorance of the whole affair. David Pearce was paying you to spy on me after all. You believed you were acting in the interests of his department. That was how it had to remain. We knew he wanted Mendax for himself, not for his country but for his own enrichment. It was expedient that you should be unaware of this.'

'What about Lister? Is he really Golka?'

'Lister used to work as a junior official at the British Council in Bonn. Simon found out that Pearce had inexplicably seconded him to the Consulate in Salzburg. This puzzled Simon.

He picked Lister up and questioned him with some force. Lister is indeed Golka - between ourselves,' said Trefusis, lowering his voice, 'not a very pleasant man, I'm afraid. It became apparent that Sir David was quite prepared to kill for Mendax.

This was wholly unacceptable to us. We made Lister an offer.

He was to keep us informed of Pearce's plans, much as you were keeping Pearce informed of ours, and we would arrange that he need only pretend to kill Moltaj and Martin.'

'As long as I witnessed these killings?'

'Oh yes, that was very necessary. Your description of them to your Uncle David would be of the utmost importance. It had to seem to him that, although he had just failed to get hold of the Mendax papers, he had at least succeeded in getting hold of one half of the device itself. When he knew that I had the rest he would come out into the open and reveal his true motives.'

'There's one thing,' said Adrian. 'When you attached Mendax to me I heard nothing through those headphones but white sound. I felt no compulsion to do anything but fall asleep. All that guff I came out with, it was just a put on. I made it up.'

'Of course!' said Trefusis. 'Haven't you understood it yet?

Mendax doesn't exist.'

'What do you mean?'

'It's a nonsensical notion, absolutely nonsensical. But we had to make Pearce believe it could really work.'

'But you hooked me up to it!'

'That's right.'

'I might have blown the whistle. Simply announced that it wasn't doing anything for me, just hissing in my ear. How could you know that I wouldn't?'

'I relied on the fact that you are a chronic liar. Once you were attached to a device that was supposed to make you tell the truth but didn't work, you would naturally do the dishonest thing and pretend that it did. It was mixture of suggestion on my part and appalling dishonesty on yours. Not that it mattered whether you went through that charming and absurd act or not.

Pearee had shown his hand by this time. I am only sorry that you decided to behave in such a peculiar fashion as to throw yourself at Lister's gun.'

'It was very brave of the poor darling,' said Lady Helen. 'And it was criminally foolish of Lister to have loaded blank charges.

They can be very dangerous.'

'It might have been necessary for him to appear to shoot one of us,' said Trefusis.

'A toast!' cried Simon Hesketh-Harvey. 'To Adrian Healey, saint and hero.'

'Adrian Healey, saint and hero.'

'Thank you,' said Adrian, touched. 'It was nothing, really.'

He beamed around the room. 'So the invention of Mendax was merely a ruse.'

'Some of us,' said Simon Hesketh-Harvey, 'had been entertaining doubts as to Sir David's trustworthiness over a number of years. Donald came up with the idea of Mendax. Over a two-year period he corresponded with Bela on the subject, knowing that Sir David would eventually get to hear of it. An old hand like Donald must expect his mail to be interfered with. He never expected that one of his own students would be set to spy on him, however. That was a tremendous bonus.'

'Steady on,' said Adrian. 'David is my uncle you know. Blood is thicker than water after all.'

'Not thicker than friendship I might have hoped,' said Tre-fusis. 'But there! No recriminations. You acted splendidly.'

Bob, the landlord, leant forward and winked. 'I had a great big gun pointed at Sir David from behind the curtain all the time, Master Adrian, sir.'

'Well, you might have told me,' said Adrian. A wave of tiredness came over him and he gave a huge yawn, the effort pulling at his stomach muscles and reawakening the wound.

Humphrey Biffen must have read the momentary twinge of pain in Adrian's face, for he was instantly on his feet. 'You are still weak, Adrian. One of us should take you back to St Matthew's.'

Adrian rose as steadily as he could. 'That's all right,' he said.

'The walk will clear my head.'

Cambridge in the long vacation had a forlorn, slightly embarrassed appearance, like an empty theatre. It was a warm night.

Adrian looked up at St John's College chapel and at the stars beyond. The soft summer air refreshed him. Perhaps he would not go straight home to bed after all. There was a great deal to think about. In his pocket he had a letter from Jenny. It had awaited him in his pigeon-hole at St Matthew's on his return from Gatwick that afternoon. It seemed that she had got herself a job as an assistant director at Stratford. Adrian crossed the road, sat on the low stone wall opposite the pub and lit a cigarette. He found that the letter could be read both as a farewell and as a plea for his return.

'I cannot decide whether or not you have grown up yet. What is this fantasy world that men inhabit? I don't think there is anything so wonderful about hard-nosed realism or remorseless cynicism, but why must you always revert to type? Have you already become an irretrievable "Enemy of Promise"? I was rereading it the other day. What is that final phrase about all Englishmen . . . that they become "Cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual"? It was written fifty years ago for God's sake! It can't still be true can it - after a world war, a social revolution, rock and roll and all the rest?

'I was so in love with you last year. I believed we were the most remarkable couple anywhere. All my friends thought I had it made, that's a terrible phrase I know, but you know what I mean. I don't think you quite believe that women exist. To you they're a kind of difficult boy with surplus flesh in some places and missing flesh in others. I'm not even sure if you ever enjoyed my company, but then I don't know if you ever enjoyed anyone else's either, including your own. I know you hate amateur psychology but there it is.

'"Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys." I can't believe that our generation is growing up to fulfil all the ridiculous stereotypes. So I'll become an earth mother and you will loll in front of the television watching cricket and Clint, is that it? Then why the years of education?

Why a youth at all? Why read books and try to puzzle things out if it all ends in the same way?

'To you and your kind your youth and upbringing take on this great mystique, the quality of myth. The first twenty years of my life are an open book, school and home, home and school, some friends here, some friends there. To you they are the backdrop to a gigantic world of fantasy to which you have endlessly to return. "Dearest creature, you do not understand . . ."I hear you say, as generations of men have always whined to their women. But that is the point! I do not understand. Nor, even if you had more persuasive powers of exposition than you already do, could you ever make me understand. Because there is nothing to understand. That is what you have to understand.

You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with; the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever ...'

A commotion coming from the Mitre, the pub next door to the Shoulder of Lamb, caused Adrian to look across the road. Both establishments had reached closing time. The landlord of the Mitre was escorting a boisterous group of drinkers into the street. Nigel, next door in the Shoulder, was locking up for the night. Something higher up caught Adrian's attention. One window of the room upstairs, the private dining room which he had just left, was directly above the street entrance of the pub. Adrian could see the clear silhouette of a man standing with his back to the window. Trefusis proposing a toast, perhaps. He looked harder: No, assuredly not Trefusis.

Adrian waited for the pack of drunken rejects from the Mitre to disperse. They stood jeering boozily outside the pub for what seemed an age before at last shouting and kicking their way towards Magdalene Bridge and out of sight. The street was empty. Adrian crossed over and edged his way round to the alleyway that connected the two pubs. The ground floor of the Shoulder of Lamb was empty. Adrian looked around for a box or beer crate that he could stand on. There was a plastic dustbin in the corner of the alley marked 'Mitre Only!' in white paint, the exclamation mark betraying a whole history of bitter inter-pub rivalry that Adrian had time to find both comic and pitiful.

He edged the bin under the Shoulder's ground floor window and, setting his left leg onto the lid, tried to haul himself up, but the dustbin buckled and he found himself thigh deep in refuse. Pain ripped across his stomach and he gagged at the stench of garbage that rose to his nostrils. It was an abiding mystery to Adrian that all man-made rubbish smelt the same once it had been in a dustbin for any length of time. Trying hard not to breathe, he turned the bin upside down and tested if the base would be more likely to take his weight. It held and Adrian got his foot to the window ledge and straightened himself. His head was now no more than two feet below the level of the first floor window. He heard the voice of Humphrey Biffen.

'I'm still not quite sure how we score this,' he was saying.

'Excuse me?' said a Szabo.

'Well, it's Donald's victory again. No doubt about that,' said Nancy. 'Even if we take Lyre Bird out of the picture altogether. He was, after all, a shared resource. The same result would have been achieved without him. He merely added zest. You have to admit it, you failed to take Walton's Rules into account and you genuinely believed that you held one half of Mendax: you loused up, didn't you, David?'

'Bollocks to the lot of you,' growled the voice of Uncle David. 'Donald changed the game halfway through! Turned it into some half-baked fiction just so that he could put that dandiprat of a nephew of mine over his knee and give him a spanking. A spanking that he richly deserved, I will grant you.'

'Well, that's what gave you half a chance,' said Nancy. 'You were beaten all ends up and you know it.'

'Ha! You wait. Just you watch my smoke. If you're not all excessively nice to me I'll set the next round in Lebanon and then you'll know what's what.'

'What are you going to tell the department?' asked Humphrey.

'Nothing to tell. Wasted a tiny amount of cash on the surveillance of Stefan. A few flights to Salzburg. Activated our man Locksmith in Budapest. An idle bugger who needed a sharp toe up his totsie anyway. No harm done. The world knows you're my Moriarty, Donald. They let me have a fly at you once in a while, to humour the mad dog in me. They're relieved to see that I have a human flaw, is my view of it.'

'And when do you play your next game?' asked the other Szabo.

'We try to make each game run for at least two or three years,' said Trefusis. 'Like any decent real life engagement. We will take the next year off before starting again. David and I are the antagonists and it is up to us to recruit as we please. I nearly always have Humphrey and Helen on my side, and David likes to use Dickon. I am the spy and David the spycatcher.'

'Donald devises the scenario and I have to stop him. Which I did in seventy-four.'

'David is at liberty to use all the facilities of his Service, but at his own risk.'

'And at yours, old love,' said David. 'The fact that you are now branded a dirty lavatory loiterer is some kind of victory for me, I venture to think.'

'That's a point,' said Simon. 'You did nearly get yourself sent to prison, Donald.'

'An unlooked-for occurrence, I admit, but these things lend lustre to the reputation of a fading don, don't you feel?'

'Can't you do something about that, David?' asked Helen. 'A word in the right ear, a review of evidence, a retraction from the arresting officer . . . something?'

'Of course, of course,' Uncle David's voice murmured affably.

'Really David, there's no need . . .'

'When did you start all this please?'

'When the game proper ended,' said David. 'About twenty years ago life in the Service became dull, pompous, sordid and absurd. Bloody good bouillabaisse, Bob.'

'Thank you, sir. Got the trick of it in Marseille.'

'Yum, yum.'

'Tell me a thing,' said Trefusis. 'In the car driving over to Salzburg, Adrian told me what we might call his life story.'

'Oh ah?'

'He told me about you and Helen at school, Humphrey.'

'Yes, he came to a couple of our Friday afternoon teas, didn't he, dear?'

'He told me too, about bumping into you, David, at Lord's in . . . seventy-five or six it must have been.'

'Oh yes, that'll be the Aussie test. I remember. Don't know what he means by "bumping into me" though.'

'No?'

'His parents were going on holiday. Naturally they didn't want the little rat getting under their feet then. Shoved him onto me.'

'He hadn't. . . then . . . run away from home in any way?'

'Good Lord no! That what he told you? No, no. Pretty normal schooling he had as far as I can remember. Got slung out for nobbing half his house and circulating filthy drivel in a school magazine. Couple of years at the local college in Gloucester where he got his "A" levels. Taught at some prepper in Norfolk. Then St Matthew's. Why, tell you something different did he?'

'No, no. That was broadly the story as he told it me. One or two, er . . . embellishments perhaps. A lot of highly entertaining nonsense about Piccadilly and prison and so forth. I'm sure he never intended to be so insulting as to expect me to believe them.'

Adrian's foot slipped on the ledge. Scrabbling wildly to regain his balance, he kicked a toe through the window, knocked the dustbin from under him and fell backwards onto the ground.

Without stopping to see what damage he had caused either to himself or to the window, he picked himself up and ran out into the street.

Fourteen

Adrian brought the tips of his fingers together and smiled gently. The girl's voice continued to read.

'Othello is a tragedy of privacy, a phrase that itself expresses incongruity, for, as with most Shakespearean tragedy, success is achieved by a treatment unsuited to the form. And it is the lack of suiting which makes the theme perennial; the tearing-down of a privacy is a subject which fits our age, as it might fit any age. It lets in chaos, and lets out love.'

'Oh bravo!' cried Adrian. 'Memorably phrased, Shelagh.'

The girl flushed slightly with pleasure. 'You like it Dr Healey?'

'Indeed! I liked it when I first read it . . . phew, let me see . . . must be getting on for ten years ago now... nineteen eighty-one, I'm pretty sure it was . . . and I like it just as much now. If anything age seems to have improved it. John Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy, published, unless I'm very much mistaken, by Routledge and Kegan Paul.'

'Oh dear,' the girl flushed again, but not this time with pleasure.

'Too memorably phrased I am afraid, my dear.'

'Thing is . . .'

'I know you are . . . frantically busy. But believe me, I had far rather listen to that good essay than the bad one you would have contrived without Bay ley's help. All's well. I think you will manage to get yourself an adequate degree without my pestering you every fortnight for an essay, don't you?'

'Well '

'Of course you will!' Adrian stood and refilled Shelagh's glass. 'A little more malvoisie for you?'

'Thank you.'

'A smoky volcanic bite that cannot disgust. You act, I believe?'

'Yes . . . that's why I get so behind with work.'

'I don't know why I say "believe" you act, I've seen you in a number of productions. My wife is down from London this weekend, you may have heard of her?'

'Jenny de Woolf, the director? Of course!'

'Then why don't you come round to our house in Trumping-ton this evening and say hello?'

'Really? I'd love to.'

'All right, my dear. Seven o'clock, shall we say?'

'That would be fine. Thanks!'

Adrian watched with approval as the girl gathered her bag and her scarf and made for the door. 'By the way, Shelagh . . .'

She paused enquiringly in the doorway.

'I note,' said Adrian, 'that you are a member of the University Humanist Society.'

She looked back at him with a hint of defiance and suspicion.

'Yes?'

'You take it seriously?'

'Very.'

'You dislike religion perhaps?'

'I loathe religion.'

'Ah, now that is interesting. I think that tonight I shall invite old Trefusis along as well, you'd like him I'm sure, and I know he'll like you. We are currently working on a . . . on a problem that may interest you.'

'Oh?'

'As you may know, the nineties have been nominated the "Decade of Evangelism" by various functionaries culled from the madder wings of the Christian church.'

The girl's mouth wrinkled in comic disgust. 'Don't remind me.'

'We have discovered that behind this weird and pitiable phrase there lies . . .' Adrian broke off. 'Never mind. I'll tell you the rest tonight. Dryden House, Trumpington. Can't miss it.'

The girl looked intrigued. 'Right. I'll see you then, Dr Healey. Er . . . bye then.'

'Goodbye, Shelagh. Oh and Shelagh?'

'Yes?'

'I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention this to anyone for the moment. You'll find out why.'

Adrian looked out of the window and watched the girl hop across the grass of Hawthorn Tree Court. He smiled to himself as he sat at his desk and wrote a short note on a sheet of writing-paper.

'To Bald Eagle. Gingerbread. Informal. I think the game may well be afoot. Love Liar Bird.'

Adrian leant back in his chair, fed the paper into his fax machine and pressed an autodial key. He watched the sheet chug through the machine before crossing to his window again.

On the other side of the court he could make out the figure of an old man through an open window on the first floor. The figure stooped down for a moment and fiddled with something on his desk and then came up bearing a ripped sheet of paper.

He turned in Adrian's direction, flourishing the paper like a Morris dancer waving a handkerchief, and executed a quick little jig.

Adrian laughed and turned back into the room.

Acknowledgements

Donald Trefusis and his Wireless Essays first appeared

on the BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. I should

like to thank the producer Ian Gardhouse, and

the presenter Ned Sherrin, for allowing the Professor

a platform for his ideas and observations.

There is no possibility that this book could ever

have been written without the violent threats and

pitiless blackmail of Sue Freestone of William Heinemann

and Anthony Goff of David Higham Associates.

I'm grateful to my parents for their researches

into Salzburg, to Tim Rice for allowing the quotation

from 'I Don't Know How to Love Him',

to Hugh and Jo Laurie for reading the manuscript

when they had hundreds of better things to do,

and to Jo Foster for everything.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Acknowledgements