And the Land Lay Still (39 page)

So did he say anything odd, or did anything unusual happen on your walk? Ritchie said.

Jimmy did what he thought was a good impression of weighing up the question.

No, he said.

Think, Jimmy. Ye were away wi him for an oor and a hauf at least, his father said. Whit
did
ye talk aboot? Ye must’ve talked aboot something?

We just walked, he said. He doesn’t say much, Uncle Jack.

That’s true enough, Hugh said. A man of few words is my brother-in-law, Sergeant. But did he no say
onything
, son?

Nothing, Peter remembers, that he cared to repeat. Uncle Jack had started to tell him about when he was a prisoner of the Japanese. He’d talked about a man who’d tried to escape into the jungle and what had happened when he was recaptured. Jimmy saw it all, heard the slice of blade through neck, the horror of it. But he said nothing, just strode along beside his uncle, up through the trees, up and up till they came to the edge of the wood and a stone dyke and beyond it the moor and hills in the distance, and they stood there, warm in the cold afternoon, and Uncle Jack put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and said, I love this country, Jimmy, but there’s too much wrong with it. There’s too much wrong with the world. Do you know what I’m saying? And the hand squeezed his shoulder and Jimmy felt awkward. The word
love
made him uncomfortable. Uncle Jack turned and crouched down till their faces were level, and his eyes were very blue as they stared into Jimmy’s, and he said in a harsh whisper, Of course you don’t. But you will. You’re the same as me, lad, you don’t fit. I can tell. I’ve had enough. I’m going away. Don’t tell anyone I told you that. When you’re old enough, you get away too. You’ll understand when it’s time. And Jimmy didn’t know what he was on about, it was a bit scary but exciting too, and then Uncle Jack’s hand swept the ground and he put something into Jimmy’s hand, a wee stone, and he said, Don’t forget this. And he stood up and said, in a different kind of voice, We’d better be heading back or your father will be anxious. And the stone was in Jimmy’s pocket and they made their way back to the path and came up over a rise and there was a man and a much wee-er boy coming towards them out of the trees.

We just walked, Jimmy said again. He said about how he liked Scotland. That was all.

Did ye see anybody when ye were oot wi him?

He might have made a mistake, lying about that as well, but he was too smart for them.

Aye. A man called Don.

How d’ye ken his name?

He tellt me it. He had a wee boy with him. His son, I think. Called Billy.

Ritchie consulted his notebook and nodded at Jimmy’s father. That’s right enough. Very good, son. You should be daein my job.

How long’s he been missing? Jimmy asked.

Here, steady on, I was joking, Ritchie said, and he and Hugh laughed, and then Ritchie said, A couple o days, and Hugh said, We’re worried aboot him.

So if there’s anything ye’ve no tellt us, Ritchie said, it’s important that ye speak up noo. Ye’re practically the last person he spoke tae.

Jimmy shook his head and there was silence in the room. Eventually Ritchie spoke again.

I’m going tae ask ye something difficult, he said.

A pause. Peter remembers that Jimmy knew exactly what was coming next. Something in the way he accumulated and filed information, even then, meant that when it came to being questioned he was, almost always, ahead of the game.

Did anything happen that your uncle might have felt ashamed of? Ritchie said. Or that
you
feel ashamed of? Anything that might have made him panic? Anything that might have driven him tae run away?

Jimmy looked at his father. His father looked away. Jimmy thought, you can’t deal with this but I can. He shook his head.

Anything bad happen? Ritchie said.

He shook his head again.

Did he touch ye at all? Ritchie said. Did he interfere wi ye?

No, Jimmy said, indignant. He never laid a finger on me. He’s no like that.

All right, son, Ritchie said. I guess ye ken what I’m talking aboot. I just had tae ask. We’re trying tae establish what makes your Uncle Jack tick.

Hugh’s forehead was glistening with sweat.

So are ye gonnae find him? Jimmy asked.

Oh aye, we’ll find him, Ritchie said. Dinna you worry aboot that.

Jimmy nodded. He wasn’t worried. They wouldn’t find Uncle Jack. And they didn’t have a clue what made him tick. He felt the stone in his pocket.

Dinna get mixed up wi thae folk that want tae ruin your life.

That was Hugh, his father, on the platform at Waverley Station, shaking his hand, the first time he went south. He said it shyly, almost surreptitiously, as if the mysterious folk he referred to were already hovering in the background, amid the steam and din of the station, ready to pounce on his son and lead him off into temptation. A parade of bad people hurried through Jimmy’s mind: card-sharps and gangsters in coloured shirts and flash cars, winking purveyors of mysterious cigarettes, salacious women in dangerous bars. Lead me to them, he thought, releasing his dry hand from his father’s sweaty grip and stepping up into the carriage. Peggy had stayed at home: she’d only have made a scene if she’d come through to Edinburgh to see him off. Don’t worry, Dad, he said. I can look efter masel. Hugh looked wee and lost on the platform. He’d have to get the train back to Drumkirk alone, then a bus home, and Jimmy experienced a moment’s anxiety on his behalf. His father was a child, always would be, whereas he was about to grow up. Up and away.

The train pulled clear of the city and he settled himself to look out of the window at the smeary countryside. He was off! He knew he wasn’t heading for anything glamorous, he wasn’t going to be the next Sidney Reilly. But London itself was something. London was new, the future. London was different and vast and anonymous. It was going to release him from the tired old certainties of small-town Scotland.

He started in a basement in Curzon Street, buried there with a handful of other young men and subjected to lectures on Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. Object: to get a ‘thorough grasp’ of the aims and activities of the Communist Party of
Great Britain. Practical training included participating in the ongoing monitoring of the entire membership of the CPGB, and learning intricate, tedious procedures for creating and updating files on them and anybody else suspected of subversion. Every day a class-set of the
Daily Worker
was delivered to the recruits, and they scoured the pages for information on individuals and groups. It was said that if it weren’t for the bulk orders from the Service and the Soviet Embassy the paper would have folded.

After six months he was moved to another part of the building, then out of it altogether. These moves happened without discussion or explanation: in his lowly position he did not need to know the reasons for his redeployment. He was just a cog. Better to be that, though, a cog in the secret arm of government, than to be shifting pallets around in a Scottish paper mill.

The Service was full of cogs and wheels. There were wheels within wheels, circles and inner circles. You never quite knew where among them you were, in or out. Sometimes you thought you were in and then you’d request a particular file and access would be denied and you realised you’d inadvertently tried to enter a space that wasn’t yours to enter. Maybe in time it would become yours, maybe it wouldn’t. You were in an intricate game, a complex dance, but nobody explained the moves to you or how many other dancers there were, and just when you thought you’d mastered one sequence the formation changed.

He thought he was getting on fine. He thought they were preparing him for greater things. One of the Service’s roles was to provide Intelligence advice to colonies and former colonies. There were security liaison officers scattered from Delhi to Trinidad. Peter thought he detected hints that he might be suitable material for a foreign posting. He fancied the Caribbean. Anywhere really. So he can still remember the crushing disappointment, three years in, when the Scottish stuff was dumped on his desk.

Why did they do that? At the time he hadn’t a clue. Maybe he does now? Aye, maybe. Could it have been, for example, because he was Scottish, therefore he understood the people, the culture, the politics? Don’t be ridiculous. That would be far too fucking logical. The Service didn’t think like that, certainly not about
Scotland. The Scots were the same as the English, just less civilised, more indecipherable. Their culture was non-existent if you discounted Burns Night, their politics a joke, parish-pump stuff. Once maybe, when Glasgow was second city of the Empire and Clydeside was Red, Scottish politics might have mattered. John Maclean:
We are in the rapids of revolution
. Not in 1963. By then the tanks in George Square were a fading legend.

But there would have been another logic at work, and with hindsight he recognises it. God, he hates hindsight. Anyway. The twisted, doublethink, illogical logic: they probably dumped it on somebody else’s desk at the same time, to see if the other bloke came up with a different version of events. They’d be checking up both on them
and
on what was going on in Scotland. Which, as far as Peter could see, was pretty much fuck all.

And then there is the other reason, the one he can barely bring himself to consider. That they
did
give it deliberately, personally, to him. That they started loading him like a mule even way back then. Could they have? When it comes to conspiracies there is no more dedicated theorist than Peter Bond, but could they have set him up that early? A Trojan Mule? Just the thought of it’s enough to make his knees give way. Thank God for whisky. How he loves the feel of that Alice in Whiskyland bottle.

Still, what could he do? He buckled down, familiarised himself with the history, the known names, the groups and splinter groups, the almost total absence of any current activity. Periodically his section head, Henry Canterbury, would ask for an update. But there was nothing to update, so they just went over old ground, and then Canterbury went away again. Until the next time.

Bond the gatherer, the explorer. He did his job, in an office at the back of a faceless government building beside the Thames, then in the early evening he slid up to Soho and carried on with his other, unofficial occupation: familiarising himself with the unfamiliar. He believed he had a knack for the double life. Maybe the recruitment officer Edgar and his silent companion had clocked that in him even before he knew it himself – not even taking into account the recommendation of the editor of the
Drumkirk
fucking
Gazette
. Or
maybe they’d seen the other potential, the one that ends thirty years on in a pile of debris and a bin full of empty whisky bottles. The self-destruct mechanism built into one in ten Scots. Approximately. According to unsubstantiated reports. According to Croick. Anyway. He walked the grimy streets, through drizzle and wind and the sulky glare of street lamps, till he could have walked them blind. He hung out in bars and cafés, followed strangers for the sake of following them, listened in on arguments and assignations, threats, promises, worked out who was paying for protection, who was taking, who were the men behind the rackets and who were the men behind the men. He watched, watched, watched, identifying the amateurs and the pros, the day trippers and the lifers, the ones who lived in fear and the ones who didn’t give a fuck. He read the tarts’ cards in doorways and cracked the codes for every straight and weird sexual service they were selling; he lingered at the edges of deals and exchanges; he bypassed the ranks of girlie mags –
Poetic Beauty
,
Femme
,
Beautiful Britons
,
Funfare
,
Titter
– and insinuated himself into back rooms and behind counters where the real porn was kept. He paced out the long and short distances between the overworld of Westminster and Whitehall and the underworld of Soho and Notting Hill. He spotted MPs, junior ministers and senior civil servants on their furtive journeys to particular addresses, and he worked out what their tastes and proclivities were. Some like Bishopsgate, some like Maida Vale. In the summer of 1962, around the time Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet and another nine ministers outside it, Peter noted an increase in the number of politicians taking taxis to addresses that weren’t their marital homes. Ach well, they had to work off their frustrations somehow. Dean Acheson, the ex-US Secretary of State, put it neatly in a speech at West Point at the end of the year:
Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role
. Indeed. Why not have some fun while you’re waiting? Peter filed all the fun details away in the mental vaults. Call it professional interest, call it saving for the future. He liked the idea that he knew things about people who didn’t even know he existed.

Once or twice he went with a tart himself, a different one each time. It was all right; nothing more or less than that. He kind of stepped outside himself, watched himself doing it. If he got kicks
from anything, it was from that: observation, not action. He was a model customer: clean, no fuss, no emotion, no surprises, money up front, thank you, darling, thank you, love. The girls thought he was lonely, a Scotch boy far from home wanting some comfort. Maybe he was, or maybe he was happiest being alone. Maybe he didn’t actually want intimacy but liked the pretence of it. They put it down to loneliness, he put it down to experience. He knew there was every chance he himself was being watched, and didn’t care. Whoever was watching him it wouldn’t be Canterbury. Somebody else, the same cut as himself, a bad fit. Somebody out on the fringe. Somebody who’d expect him to be like that.

Jesus. Was that really his name, his real name? Henry Canterbury? Jesus.

He enjoyed a drink.

No, correction. He enjoyed drink.

No, correction. He liked to drink.

He didn’t know he liked to drink until he liked it too much not to. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle it. He could handle it all right. It wasn’t that there was a bit of him saying, Don’t do this, Peter, don’t do this, it’s bad for you. Like smoking was bad for you. He cut out the fags around 1970. Clearly they
were
bad for you. But the drink? No. The drink was good for him. The drink kept him going. That self-destruct button: he’d have pushed it a lot fucking sooner if it hadn’t been for the drink.