A Perfect Spy (56 page)

“Where are you going, Mary?” Fergus said, looming before Mary in the corridor. She had the book in her hand. She shoved it at him. “I can't sleep. I'm going down to the cellar to fool around with this. Now go back to your nice lady and leave me alone.”

Closing the cellar door she went quickly to the workbench. In minutes Georgie is going to saunter in with a nice cup of tea for me in order to make sure I haven't defected or cut my wrists. Filling a bowl with warm water she damped a rag and set to work soaking off the end-paper. The writer of the note knew what he was talking about. On a book of that age the original glue was animal and would have crystallised. Mary, when she had doctored it for Magnus, had used animal glue too. But the new paper had been stuck on with flour paste which responded quickly to water. She was using a cloth and scrubbing. Normally she would have used blotting paper and a pressing tin. The end-paper came away. The board remained. Taking a scalpel she began scuffing it with the blade. If they've used rope board, I've had it. Rope board was made of real old rope taken from a man-of-war. It was tarred and twisted and packed solid. To scrape into it would take hours. She need not have worried. It was modern millboard and disintegrated like dry earth. She kept scuffing and suddenly the code cloth lay before her, flat against the inside of the hide, exactly where she had put it for Magnus. Except that this one had capital letters instead of figure groups. This one began “Dear Mary.” She stuffed it quickly down her front, retrieved the scalpel, and set about removing the rest of the end-paper as if she were going to rebind from the beginning, full hide as Bee had requested.

“I just thought I
had
to come and see how you do it,” Georgie explained, sitting down beside her. “I really
need
a hobby like that myself, Mary. I just don't ever seem able to relax.”

“Poor you,” said Mary.

 

It was night and Brotherhood was angry. Though he was out in the streets and away from the Firm and the Firm's ken, though he had work to do and action to relieve him, he was angry. His anger had been mounting for two days. This morning's outburst about the Joes was not the start of it. It had been kindled yesterday, like a slow-burning fuse, as he was leaving the conference room in St. John's Wood after perjuring himself to save Brammel's neck. It had stuck with him like a faithful friend through his meeting with Tom and his excursion to Reading station: Pym has broken the moral laws. He has outlawed himself by choice. It had touched flashpoint in the signals room this morning and gathered more heat with every pointless conference and frittered hour since. From his position of half-pitied and wholly blamed has-been, Brotherhood had listened to his own arguments being used against him and had looked on as, under his very eyes, his old defence of Pym had been adopted and updated into a policy of institutionalised inertia.

“But, Jack, it's all so circumstantial—you said so yourself,” Brammel brayed, never stronger than when demonstrating that two positives made a negative. “‘ If you run any succession of coincidences through a computer, you will find that everything looks possible and most things look highly likely.' Who said that, pray? I'm quoting you deliberately, Jack. We're sitting at your feet, remember? Good heavens, I never thought I'd have to defend Pym against
you!”

“I was wrong,” said Brotherhood.

“But who says you were? Only you, I think. So Pym has a Czech code pad in his chimney place,” Brammel conceded. “He has a camera we didn't know about with a document-copying attachment or whatever. Good heavens, Jack, think of all the bits of equipment you've picked up in your time, just in the ordinary way of playing agents back and forth! Gold bars, cameras, microdot lenses, concealment devices, I don't know what. You could have started your own pawnbroker's shop with them. All right I grant you he should have turned the stuff in. I see him as being rather in the position of a police detective who has taken a lot of swag off one of his informants. He shoves it in a drawer—or in the fireplace—hides it from his family and one day it's all discovered. But it doesn't make him a burglar. It makes him an efficient policeman who's been cavalier or at worst careless.”

“He's not careless,” said Brotherhood. “He's not a risk taker.”

“All right, so now he is. The fellow's had a nervous breakdown, he's acting clean out of character, he's hidden himself away somewhere, he's putting out the usual cries for help,” Brammel reasoned, in a note of saintly tolerance. “Probably a girlfriend, knowing him. We shall find out soon enough. But look at the scenario, Jack. His father dies. He's the artistic type of officer, always wanting to write the great novel, paint, sculpt, take sabbaticals, I don't know what. He's hit a menopausal age in life. He's been living under a cloud of suspicion for far too long. Do you wonder he's had a bit of a crack-up? Be a wonder if he hadn't, if you ask me. All right, I don't condone it. And I shall want to know why he took that burnbox, though you tell me he knew everything that was in it anyway and wrote most of it himself, so what's the difference? And when we find him, I may pull him out of the field for a while. There is still no justification for me to raise a public hue and cry. To go to my Minister and say ‘We've found another one.' Least of all to the Americans. Bang go the barter treaties. Bang goes the intelligence pooling and the private line to Langley that often means so much more than normal diplomatic links. Do you want me to risk all that until we
know?”

“Bo feels you should stop flying solo,” Nigel said when they were back on the servants' side of Brammel's door. “I'm afraid I agree. From now on you'll make no field enquiries without my personal authority. You're to remain on call and you're to start nothing. Is that clear?”

It is clear, thought Brotherhood, examining the house from across the road. It is clear that the rewards of my old age are dangerously threatened. He tried to remember who it was in mythology who was cursed to live long enough to witness the consequences of his bad advice. The house was in the best of Chelsea's many beautiful backwaters, set at the end of a long garden only partly visible above the gate. An air of decadence pervaded its genteel shabbiness, an unworldly languor inhabited its flaking stucco. Brotherhood walked past it several times, checking the upper windows, studying the skyline for sight of a church, for Pym's mental substitutions were becoming rooted in his mind like spy talk. On the fourth floor a dormer window was lit and curtained. As he watched he saw a figure pass across it, too quickly and too far away for him to tell whether it was man or woman.

He took a last look up and down the road. A brass bellpush was set into the gatepost. He pressed it and waited but not long. He shoved the gate, it creaked and opened, he stepped inside and closed it after him. The garden was a secret patch of English countryside walled on three sides. Nothing overlooked it. The sounds of traffic ceased miraculously. The flagstone path was slippery with unswept leaves. Home, he rehearsed again. Home in Scotland, home in Wales. Home by the sea. Home as an upper window and a church. Home as an aristocratic mother who took him visiting great houses. He passed the statue of a draped woman, one stone breast offered to the autumn night. Home as a series of concentric fantasies, all with the same truth at the centre. Who had said that?—Pym or himself? Home as promises to women he didn't love. The front door was opening as he reached it. A young manservant was watching him approach. His monkey jacket had a regimental cut. Behind him, unrestored gilt mirrors and a chandelier glinted against dark wallpaper. “He's got a boy name of Stegwold living there,” Superintendent Bellows of police liaison had reported. “If you were old enough, I'd read you his record of convictions.”

“Sir Kenneth in, son?” said Brotherhood pleasantly as he wiped his shoes on the mat and shook off his raincoat.

“I don't know, do I? Who shall I say?”

“Mr. Marlow, son, and I'd like ten minutes with him alone on a mutual matter.”

“From?” said the boy.

“His constituency, son,” said Brotherhood just as pleasantly.

The boy tripped quickly upstairs. Brotherhood's gaze skimmed the hall. Hats, idiosyncratic. Coaching overcoat, green with age. One Guards bowler, ditto. Army service cap with Colds-tream badge. Blue china urn stuffed with ancient golf clubs, walkingsticks and warped tennis racquets. The boy came mincing down the stairs again, trailing one hand on the banisters, unable to resist an entrance.

“He'll see you now, Mr. Marlow,” he said.

The stairs were lined with portraits of rude men. In a dining-room, two places were laid with enough silver for a banquet. A decanter, cold meats, and cheeses lay on the sideboard. It was not till Brotherhood noticed a couple of dirty plates that he realised the meal was already over. The library smelled of mildew and the fumes of paraffin from a stove. A gallery ran along three walls. Half the balustrade was missing. The stove had been shoved into the fireplace and in front of it stood a clothes-horse hung with socks and underpants. In front of the clothes-horse stood Sir Kenneth Sefton Boyd. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and an open-necked shirt and old satin slippers with gold-stitched monograms worn away. He was burly and thick-necked, with uneven pads of flesh round his jaw and eyes. His mouth was bent to one side as if by a clenched fist. He spoke with the bent side while the other stayed still.

“Marlow?”

“How do you do, sir,” said Brotherhood.

“What do you want?”

“I'd like to speak to you alone if I may, sir.”

“Policeman?”

“Not quite, sir. Something like.”

He handed Sir Kenneth a card. This is to certify that the bearer is engaged in enquiries affecting the national security. For confirmation please ring Scotland Yard extension so-and-so. The extension led to Superintendent Bellows's department, which knew all Brotherhood's names. Unimpressed, Sir Kenneth handed the card back.

“So you're a spy.”

“Of a sort, I suppose. Yes.”

“Want a drink? Beer? Scotch? What do you want to drink?”

“A scotch would be very welcome, sir, now you mention it.”

“Scotch, Steggie,” said Sir Kenneth. “Get him a scotch, will you? Ice? Soda? What do you want in your scotch?”

“A little water would be welcome.”

“All right. Give him water. Bring him a jug. Put it on the table. Over there by the tray. Then he can help himself. You can go away. And top mine up, while you're about it. Want to sit down, Marlow? Over there do you?”

“I thought we were going to the Albion,” said Steggie from the door.

“Can't now. Got to talk to this chap.”

Brotherhood sat. Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish. On the table between them lay a backgammon board with the pieces in mid-battle. Who was he playing with? thought Brotherhood. Who dined with him? Who was sharing his music with him? Who warmed my chair before I sat in it?

“You surprised to see me, sir?” said Brotherhood.

“Take a bit more than that to surprise me, old boy.”

“Anyone else been here recently, making funny enquiries? Foreign gentlemen? Americans?”

“Not that I know of. Why should they?”

“There's a bunch going round from our own vetting side as well, I'm told. I wondered whether any of them had been here. I tried to find out before I left the office but there's a lack of coordination, it's all moving so fast.”

“What is?”

“Well, sir, it seems that your old school friend Mr. Magnus Pym has disappeared. They're looking into everyone who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. That will include you naturally.”

Sir Kenneth's eye lifted to the door.

“Something out there bothering you, sir?” said Brotherhood.

Sir Kenneth rose, went to the door and pulled it open. Brotherhood heard a scuffle of footsteps on the stairs but he was too late to see who it was, though he jostled Sir Kenneth aside in his haste to look.

“Steggie, I want you to go to the Albion ahead of me,” Sir Kenneth called into the well. “Go now. I'll join you later. I don't want him hearing this stuff,” he told Brotherhood as he closed the door. “What he doesn't know can't hurt him.”

“With his record I don't blame you,” said Brotherhood. “Mind if I look upstairs now we're standing?”

“Yes, I damn well do. And don't lay hands on me again. I don't fancy you. Got a warrant?”

“No.”

Resuming his chair, Sir Kenneth took a spent matchstick from the pocket of his smoking jacket and set to work on his fingernails with its charred end. “Get a warrant,” he advised. “Get a warrant and I might let you look. Other hand I mightn't.”

“Is he here?” said Brotherhood.

“Who?”

“Pym.”

“Don't know. Didn't hear. Who's Pym?”

Brotherhood was still standing. He was unnaturally pale, and it took him a moment to steady his voice before he spoke again.

“I've got a deal for you,” he said.

Sir Kenneth still did not hear.

“Hand him over to me. You go upstairs. Or you ring him. You do whatever you've agreed to do between you. And you hand him over to me. In return I'll keep your name out of it, and Steggie's name out of it. The alternative is ‘Baronet M.P. shelters very old friend on the run.' It's also a serious possibility that you will be charged as an accomplice. How old is Steggie?”