Hopscotch (20 page)

In any case they'd achieve facts which were mainly negative but no less important on that account. They'd find out he hadn't flown on from Heathrow. Cutter, with the advantage of knowing through Saint-Breheret that Kendig had a blank French passport, might treat with Chartermain to have all ports of embarkation watched for both Jules Parker and a French emigrant who fitted Kendig's description. The fact was that Kendig didn't have the French passport—he'd left it in the safe in Paris.

They'd find out he hadn't taken a taxi from the airport or from the West End terminal. They might find out he'd taken the limo bus from Heathrow to the terminal but in any event they'd lose the trail there; he'd covered his tracks between terminal and hotel. They'd canvass hotels for Jules Parker, not for Reginald Davies.

They'd know quite positively that he was in England. But that was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Knowing he was on the island but not knowing where, they'd get snappish. Irritably they'd blame one another. They'd get into a hell of a flap. It was fun to contemplate.

But it wasn't enough. He couldn't sit cooped up and satisfy himself with visualizations of their confusion. Passivity wasn't the object of the game.

He'd have to come out in the open. Sting them.

Six years ago he'd spent months in the Middle East pulling the camouflage off the Soviet-sponsored arms traffic in heavy arms to Al Fatah. They were getting armored vehicles, field guns, long-range mortars, even ground-to-air missiles. These came from various sources—Arab governments, Czechs, arms merchants in the West—but the job was to determine how the stuff found its way to the secluded desert camps of the Palestinian liberation armies. It had become evident the smugglers' route was as neatly laid out and maintained as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It had befallen Kendig to find and close it.

The job had required liaison with MI6 because Aden, which was British-occupied, was a key distribution point on the arms route. Local
apparatchiks
kept kicking the buck upstairs until Kendig had been obliged to fly out to London, meet with the top man and smooth out the arrangements.

The top man had been Chartermain and the meeting had taken place on a Sunday—not in White-hall but in Chartermain's home in Knightsbridge, a detached Victorian manse in a mews: too large for practical living but then Chartermain and his
memsahib were given to lavish entertaining. Chartermain used his study there as a second office; it was a good deal more than the usual gentleman's library.

An excellent way to enrage a lion was to disturb its den.

Luck could run bad; there was always the danger of the unhappy coincidence; there'd be scores or hundreds of them searching for him and if he spent a lot of time in public places there was the risk of someone's fortuitously spotting him. Pure accident like that accounted for a large number of man-hunting coups; pure accident like that was not accident at all but a mere mathematical long shot—if they kept enough people searching long enough then the chances of their finding him increased geometrically with the passage of time and the accretion of clues.

When he went out of the hotel he avoided using the lift which could be a trap; he used the stairs. When he set out for the first time he did it during the morning rush and melted into crowds. Impulse made him cache the manuscript: he removed the pages from the false-bottomed suitcase, crept to the basement with them and found the domestic supply cupboard, a fair-sized room filled with mops and dustcloths and bedding fresh from the laundry, hampers on wheels for the daily room changings, cartons of loo paper and hotel-size bars of soap, brooms, vacuum cleaners, spray polishes and the like. He opened a bar-soap carton and counted the contents and multiplied that figure by the three dozen cartons stacked against the wall and concluded it would be at least seven weeks before they
got down to the last carton in the stack, if they didn't cover it again with fresh supplies; he emptied the carton he'd opened, put the manuscript in it, filled the rest with soap bars and rearranged the stack with the manuscript carton at the back and bottom of everything. He marked it with a little pencil cross that nobody would notice unless he was looking for it and knew what it meant. He carried the excess bars of soap out of the hotel in an ordinary paper bag and disposed of them miles away in a sidewalk dustbin.

When he made his first evening reconnaissance he went out at dusk when the light was poorest. He used the underground a bit but mostly buses; never taxis.

Chartermain's garden was a horseshoe around the house, well tended but drab this late in the year. On the fourth side—the left—a paved lane ran past the kitchen door, made a little dogleg at the rear corner of the house and ran on through the back garden to a coach house that had been converted into a garage with servants' quarters upstairs—a remodeling job that had been done in the 1920s when occupants of such a house could afford a large staff. Goosenecked streetlamps bathed the front garden and the porte-cochere but the lane went back through a patch of shadow beyond the kitchen; the illumination at the rear was poor, thrown by a single lamp high on the side of the coach house at the head of an outside stair that clung to the ivied wall.

Past the garage the lane continued in a gentle bend, going on between two five-story Georgian monoliths into a street beyond. But there was a gate across the front of the lane and at its other
end a chain hung across it to prevent traffic; it was no thoroughfare out of the mews.

It took him several days to work out the population and routines of the household. There were two servants; they looked like husband and wife; they lived in the quarters above the coach house. Presumably the maids' and butler's quarters in the main house were unoccupied—perhaps closed off to conserve heat. The wife evidently performed as housekeeper and cook, the husband as butler, chauffeur, gardener and handyman. On the second night of his surveillance there was a gathering of eight couples among whom Kendig recognized a member of Parliament and a man who had been, and perhaps still was, the Deputy F. O. Secretary to whom Chartermain's department reported through the Chief of MI6. On that occasion two additional servants worked in the house but they went home afterward and presumably had been supplied by some agency on a temporary basis.

Each morning a Humber saloon piloted by a liveried driver—a government employee—collected Chartermain and drove him away to his duties. The garage housed two automobiles—an Austin Mini which the servant husband used for errands and the wife for shopping, and a Jaguar 3.8 saloon which the memsahib used twice in the four days, both times for afternoon excursions lasting several hours (shopping? hairdresser? liaison with lover?); she drove herself. When she returned she let herself into the house with a single key, indicating there was no burglar alarm system. That conformed with what he knew of Chartermain; the man was as old-fashioned as Yaskov, he probably had contempt
for gadgets and gimmicks and the electronics of modern espionage.

He performed his surveillance from stolen cars, He would boost a car, park it somewhere in the mews and watch the house; he would drive the car to another part of London and abandon it within a few hours before the description could have got onto the hot-sheets.

His break came on the Thursday evening. The servant husband emerged from the kitchen door carrying two valises; the memsahib, who was quite trim and attractive in her lean fifties, came along a moment later tugging on her gloves with brisk little jerks. She wore a topcoat and a little pincushion hat—a traveling outfit. The servant fed the luggage into the boot of the Jaguar and the memsahib smiled and spoke, got into the car and backed it out into the mews and drove away. Chartermain had private means and a country estate; quite likely she was going down to Kent for the weekend.

He'd had the Cortina since morning and it would be heating up by now. He drove out of the mews ten minutes behind the memsahib.

After dinner and a movie he purloined a Rover from the car park of a block of high-priced flats near Victoria Station. He chose it for three reasons: it was expensive enough to be in keeping with Chartermain's quarter; it had a Spanish plate and diplomatic tags which meant it wouldn't be disturbed by traffic patrols for illegal parking; and the keys had been left in it.

By the time its operator discovered the theft in
the morning Kendig would have abandoned it like the others; in time it would be returned to its owner with the apologies of the Foreign Office and a shrug of the shoulders and a word of advice about leaving keys in the ignition.

He drove into the mews at half-past ten and made a three-point U-turn at the end of it and drove out again. It happened five times a day, drivers losing their bearings and not knowing they were going down a dead end. He drove slowly out of the mews again, scrutinizing the house. Two windows were alight upstairs; and a light burned in the bedroom of the apartment above the garage.

Both servants would be in the coach house by this hour. The two lights in the house were at the head of the main stair and in the memsahib's room—some sort of reading or sewing chamber where she seemed to spend part of each evening when they weren't entertaining. It didn't seem a room to which Chartermain repaired. The conclusion to be drawn was that there was no one in the house; the lights had been left on purposefully by the servants. Chartermain might have gone from his office straight down to Kent but it was more likely he was working late trying to collate the clues to Kendig's whereabouts.

He made three successive left-hand turns and parked the Rover in a no-parking space within fifty feet of the gap between the two Georgian blocks where the rear of Chartermain's lane emerged, chained off at the pavement. The Watney's pub at the corner was getting ready to close but he squeezed in and used the pay phone. He let it ring seven times; there was no answer. He went back to the lane and stepped over the chain and walked
into deep shadow between the two five-story buildings, guiding on the weak lamp at the head of the servants' stair.

He stopped under the stair and studied the rear of the main house. There was a light burning in the cupola over the kitchen door, illuminating the steps down to the lane. Beyond at the head of the lane was a streetlamp. But the back of the house was dark; upstairs the middle window showed a vague glow from the stair-head chandelier at the far end of the corridor. He'd been up the main staircase, along that corridor and inside Chartermain's study which was at the rear of the house on that floor.

He wasn't a second-story human fly and that sort of ivy probably wouldn't hold his weight. An expert might do it but Kendig's expertise didn't run in that direction. He'd have to enter at the ground floor and go upstairs inside the house.

He crossed the lane, stepped over a cultivated bed that had held annuals in the summer, crossed the back lawn and stood in the shrubbery examining one window. It was a casement affair, latched on the inside with a heavy brass fitting. The only way to get at it would be to cut or smash a pane, reach inside and undo the latch. He had no glass cutter and he couldn't risk breaking a pane because the servants' bedrom window looked out on the house and they'd hear the glass shatter.

He tried four windows—all there were. They were latched firmly. He had no better luck with windows on both sides of the house toward the rear and he couldn't try the ones nearer the front because he'd be exposed to the mews there.

It left only the kitchen door. It could be seen from a small area in the end of the mews but he
didn't see anyone there; it also would be plainly visible to the servants if they happened to look out their bedroom window but their curtains were drawn.

He had with him the only tools he'd bothered to improvise—a coiled length of coat-hanger wire and one of the hotel's plastic pocket calendars. The latch was a modern spring-loaded affair and the plastic sheet unlocked it easily and without sound but when he pushed the door open it creaked a bit on an unoiled hinge. He made a face, slipped inside and slowly pushed the door shut behind him, twistting the knob to prevent the latch from clicking when it closed. Then he turned to the window and looked out toward the coach house.

Did the servants' curtain stir? He couldn't be sure; he watched it but it didn't move.

Well the uncertainty put a little spice into it. He moved very slowly through the unfamiliar room, feeling his way with the backs of his fingertips: if the fingernail touched an object it would flinch away rather than toward and there was less likelihood of knocking anything over.

The door to the hallway was open; once he'd passed through it there was some light—it filtered along the hall from the foyer which was lit from above by the chandelier at the head of the stairs. He could see his way now and he moved rapidly to the foot of the steps. The staircase was a sweeping carpeted affair with a handsomely carved hardwood bannister. There was a bust of Churchill on a marble side table, a filigreed mirror beside the cloakroom and a portrait that probably was a likeness of the memsahib's father or grandfather.

Going up the stairs with the chandelier in his
eyes made him uneasy; he passed beneath it quickly and retreated along the upstairs corridor before he stopped to double-check his bearings. The study would be the third of the three doors on the left. He went along opening doors and looking into the rooms on both sides; that was elementary caution—better to be surprised while he was in the open corridor than to be trapped in the study. But he didn't really expect the house to be crawling with agents waiting to nail him. They hadn't enough evidence to lay that sort of trap. He hadn't confided his wild-hair scheme to anyone and it wasn't the sort of thing any of them could have anticipated.

The door to the study was locked and that pleased him because it meant there was something beyond the door that Chartermain wanted to protect.