A Perfect Spy (32 page)

“He'll be calling in a medium next,” said Brotherhood.

“They've checked flights to the Bahamas, Scotland and Ireland. That's as well as everywhere else. They've checked ships, car-hire firms and goodness knows what. They've got warrants running on every telephone he ever used and a blanket warrant for the rest. They've cancelled leave and weekends for all transcribers and put the surveillance teams on twenty-four-hour alert, and they still haven't told anybody what it's about. The canteen's a funeral parlour, nobody talking to anybody. They're questioning anyone who shared an office with him or bought a secondhand car from him, they've turned the tenants out of the Pyms' house in Dulwich and stripped the place from top to bottom pretending to be woodworm experts. Now Nigel's talking of moving the whole search team to a safe house in Norfolk Street, it's getting so big. Including the help, that's about a hundred and fifty staff. What's in the burnbox?”

“Why?”

“There's a shadow over it. Not in front of the children. Bo and Nigel clam up as soon as anybody mentions it.”

“Press?” said Brotherhood, as if he had answered her question instead of deflecting it.

“Sewn up as usual. From
TitBits
downwards. Bo had lunch with the editors yesterday. He's already written their leaders for them in case anything gets out. How rumours weaken our security. Uninformed speculation as the true Enemy Within. Nigel's been leaning his full weight on the radio and television people.”

“All two stone of it. What about the phoney copper?”

“Whoever called on Tom's Headmaster wasn't family. He wasn't from the Firm and he wasn't police.”

“Maybe he was from the competition. They don't have to ask us first, do they?”

“Bo's terror is that the Americans are launching their own manhunt.”

“If he'd been American there'd have been three of him. He was a cheeky Czech. That's the way they work. Same as they used to fly in the war.”

“The Headmaster describes him as up-market English, not a whiff of foreign. He didn't come or leave by train. He gave his name as Inspector Baring of Special Branch. There isn't one. The taxi bill return between the station and the school was twelve pounds and he didn't ask the driver for a receipt. Imagine a policeman not wanting a receipt for twelve pounds. He left a fake visiting card. They're looking for the printer, the paper-maker and for all I know the ink manufacturers, but they won't bring in police, the competition or liaison. They'll make any enquiry they can think of as long as it doesn't frighten the horses.”

“And the London phone number he gave?”

“Bogus.”

“I could nearly laugh about that if humour was my mood. What does Bo think about the moustachioed gentleman with a handbag who holds Pym's arm at cricket matches?”

“He refuses to take a view. He says if we all had our friends checked at cricket matches, we'd have no friends and no cricket. He's drafted extra girls to comb the Czech personalities index and he's signalled Athens Station to send someone to Corfu to talk to the car-hire man. It's delay and pray, and Magnus please come home.”

“Where do I stand? In the corner?”

“They're terrified you'll pull down the Temple.”

“I thought Pym had done that already.”

“Then perhaps it's guilty contact,” Kate said in her crisp Queen Bee voice.

Brotherhood took another long swallow of vodka. “If they'd get the bloody networks out. If they'd do the obvious thing, just for once.”

“They won't do anything that might alert the Americans. They'd rather lie all the way to the grave. ‘We've had three major traitors in three minor years. One more and we might as well admit the party's over.' That's Bo speaking.”

“So the Joes will die for the Special Relationship. I like that. So will the Joes. They'll understand.”

“Will they find him?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe's not enough. I'm asking you, Jack. Will they find him? Will you?”

She sounded suddenly imperious and urgent. She took the glass from his hand and drank the rest of his vodka while he watched her. She leaned over the side of the bed and fished a cigarette from her handbag. She handed him the matches and he lit it for her.

“Bo's put a lot of monkeys in front of a lot of typewriters,” Brotherhood said, still watching her intently. “Maybe one of them will come up with the goods. I didn't know you smoked, Kate.”

“I don't.”

“You're drinking well too, I'm pleased to see. I don't remember you hitting the vodka as hard as this, I'm sure I don't. Who taught you to drink vodka that way?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“More to the point is why should you? You're trying to tell me something, aren't you? Something I don't think I like at all. I thought you were spying for Bo for a minute there. I thought you were doing a bit of a Jezebel on me. Then I thought, no, she's trying to tell me something. She's attempting a small and intimate confession.”

“He's a blasphemer.”

“Who is, dear?”

“Magnus.”

“Oh he is, is he? Magnus a blasphemer. Now why is that?”

“Hold me, Jack.”

“Like hell I will.” He pulled away from her and saw that what he had mistaken for arrogance was a stoical acceptance of despair. Her sad eyes stared straight at him, and her face was set in resignation.

“‘ I love you, Kate,'” she said. “‘ Get me clear of this and I'll marry you and we'll live happily ever after.'”

Brotherhood took her cigarette and drew on it.

“‘ I'll dump Mary. We'll go and live abroad. France. Morocco. Who cares?' Phone calls from the other end of the earth. ‘I rang to say I love you.' Flowers, saying ‘I love you.' Cards. Little notes folded into things, shoved under the door, personal for my eyes only in top-secret envelopes. ‘I've lived too long with the what-ifs. I want action, Kate. You're my escape-line. Help me. I love you. M.'”

Once again, Brotherhood waited.

“‘ I love you,'” she repeated. “He kept saying it. Like a ritual he was trying to believe in. ‘I love you.' I suppose he thought if he said it to enough people enough times, one day it might be true. It wasn't. He never loved a woman in his life. We were enemy, all of us. Touch me, Jack!”

To his surprise he felt a wave of kinship overcome him. He drew her to him and held her tightly to his chest.

“Is Bo wise to any of this?” he said.

He could feel the sweat collecting on his back. He could smell Pym's nearness in the crevices of her body. She rolled her head against him but he gently shook her, making her say it aloud: Bo knows nothing. No, Jack. Bo's got no idea.

“Magnus wasn't interested till he was calling the whole game,” she said. “He could have had me any time. That wasn't enough for him. ‘Wait for me, Kate. I'm going to cut the cable and be free. Kate, it's me, where are you?' I'm here, you idiot, or I wouldn't be answering the phone, would I? . . . He doesn't have affairs. He has lives. We're on separate planets for him. Places he can call while he floats through space. You know his favourite photograph of me?”

“I don't think I do, Kate,” Brotherhood said.

“I'm naked on a beach in Normandy. We'd stolen the weekend. I've got my back to him, I'm walking into the sea. I didn't even know he had a camera.”

“You're a beautiful girl, Kate. I could get quite hot about a picture like that myself,” said Brotherhood, pulling back her hair so that he could see her face.

“He loved it better than he loved me. With my back to him I was anyone—his girl on the beach—his dream. I left his fantasies intact. You've got to get me out of it, Jack.”

“How deep in are you?”

“Deep enough.”

“Write him any letters yourself?”

She shook her head.

“Do him any little favours? Bend the rules for him? You better tell me, Kate.” He waited, feeling the increasing pressure of her head against him. “Can you hear me?” She nodded. “I'm dead, Kate. But you've got a while to go. If it ever comes out that you and Pym so much as had a strawberry milkshake together at McDonald's while you were waiting for your bus home, they will shave your head and post you to Economic Development before you can say Jack anybody. You know that, don't you?”

Another nod.

“What did you do for him? Steal a few secrets, did you? Something juicy out of Bo's own plate?” She shook her head. “Come on, Kate. He fooled me too. I'm not going to throw you to the wolves. What did you do for him?”

“There was an entry in his P.F.,” she said.

“So?”

“He wanted it taken out. It was from long ago. An army report from his National Service time in Austria.”

“When did you do this?”

“Early. We'd been going for about a year. He was back from Prague.”

“And you did it for him. You raided his file?”

“It was trivial, he said. He was very young at the time. A boy still. He'd been running some low-grade Joe into Czechoslovakia. A frontier crosser, I think. Really small stuff. But there was this girl called Sabina who'd got in on the act and wanted to marry him and defected. I didn't listen to it very clearly. He said if anybody picked through his file and came on the episode he'd never make it to the Fifth Floor.”

“Well that's not the end of the world now, is it?”

She shook her head.

“Joe have a name, did he?” Brotherhood asked.

“A codename. Greensleeves.”

“That's fanciful. I like that. Greensleeves. An all-English Joe. You fished the paper from the file and what did you do with it? Just tell it to me, Kate. It's out now. Let's go.”

“I stole it.”

“All right. What did you do with it?”

“That's what he asked me.”

“When?”

“He rang me.”

“When?”

“Last Monday evening. After he was supposed to have left for Vienna.”

“What time? Come on, Kate, this is good. What time did he ring you?”

“Ten. Later. Ten-thirty. Earlier. I was watching
News at Ten.”

“What bit?”

“Lebanon. The shelling. Tripoli or somewhere. I turned the sound down as soon as I heard him and the shelling went on and on like a silent movie. ‘I needed to hear your voice, Kate. I'm sorry for everything. I rang to say I'm sorry. I wasn't a bad man, Kate. It wasn't all pretend.'”

“Wasn't?”

“Yes. Wasn't. He was conducting a retrospective. Wasn't. I said it's just your father's death, you'll be all right, don't cry. Don't talk as if you're dead yourself. Come round. Where are you? I'll come to you. He said he couldn't. Not any more. Then about his file. I should feel free to tell everyone what I'd done, not try to shield him any more. But to give him a week. ‘One week, Kate. It's not a lot after all those years.' Then, had I still got the paper I took out for him? Had I destroyed it, kept a copy?”

“What did you say?”

She went to the bathroom and returned with the embroidered spongebag she kept her kit in. She drew a folded square of brown paper from it and handed it to him.

“Did you give him a copy?”

“No.”

“Did he ask for one?”

“No. I wouldn't have done that. I expect he knew. I took it and I said I'd taken it and he should believe me. I thought I'd put it back one day. It was a link.”

“Where was he when he rang you on Monday?”

“A phone box.”

“Reverse charges?”

“Middle distance. I reckoned four fifty-pence pieces. Mind you, that could still be London, knowing him. We were on for about twenty minutes but a lot of the time he couldn't speak.”

“Describe. Come on, old love. You'll only have to do it once, I promise you, so you might as well do it thoroughly.”

“I said, ‘Why aren't you in Vienna?'”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he'd run out of small change. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I've run out of small change.'”

“Did he have a place he ever took you? A hideaway?”

“We used my flat or went to hotels.”

“Which ones?”

“The Grosvenor at Victoria was one. The Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. He has favourite rooms that overlook the railway lines.”

“Give me the numbers.”

Holding her against him, he walked her to the desk and scribbled down the two numbers to her dictation, then pulled on his old dressing-gown and knotted it round his waist and smiled at her. “I loved him too, Kate. I'm a bigger fool than you are.” But he won no smile in return. “Did he ever talk about a place away from it all? Some dream he had?” He poured her some more vodka and she took it.

“Norway,” she said. “He wanted to see the migration of the reindeer. He was going to take me one day.”

“Where else?”

“Spain. The north. He said he'd buy a villa for us.”

“Did he talk about his writing?”

“Not much.”

“Did he say where he'd like to write his great book?”

“In Canada. We'd hibernate in some snowy place and live out of tins.”

“The sea—nothing by the sea?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention Poppy to you? Someone called Poppy, like in his book?”

“He never mentioned any of his women. I told you. We were separate planets.”