The Human Factor (2 page)

‘I think I knew a cousin of yours at Corpus,' Daintry said. He spoke agreeably, but he looked a little impatient; he probably had to catch a train north at King's Cross.

‘Colonel Daintry,' Brigadier Tomlinson explained, ‘is our new broom,' and Castle noticed the way Daintry winced at the description. ‘He has taken over security from Meredith. But I'm not sure you ever met Meredith.'

‘I suppose you mean my cousin Roger,' Castle said to Daintry. ‘I haven't seen him for years. He got a first in Greats. I believe he's in the Treasury now.'

‘I've been describing the set-up here to Colonel Daintry,' Brigadier Tomlinson prattled on, keeping strictly to his own wavelength.

‘I took Law myself. A poor second,' Daintry said. ‘You read History, I think?'

‘Yes. A very poor third.'

‘At the House?'

‘Yes.'

‘I've explained to Colonel Daintry,' Tomlinson said, ‘that only you and Davis deal with the Top Secret cables as far as Section 6A is concerned.'

‘If you can call anything Top Secret in our section. Of course, Watson sees them too.'

‘Davis – he's a Reading University man, isn't he?' Daintry asked with what might have been a slight touch of disdain.

‘I see you've been doing your homework.'

‘As a matter of fact I've just been having a talk with Davis himself.'

‘So that's why he was ten minutes too long over his lunch.'

Daintry's smile resembled the painful reopening of a wound. He had very red lips, and they parted at the corners with difficulty. He said, ‘I talked to Davis about you, so now I'm talking to you about Davis. An open check. You must forgive the new broom. I have to learn the ropes,' he added, getting confused among the metaphors. ‘One has to keep to the drill – in spite of the confidence we have in both of you, of course. By the way,
did
he warn you?'

‘No. But why believe me? We may be in collusion.'

The wound opened again a very little way and closed tight.

‘I gather that politically he's a bit on the left. Is that so?'

‘He's a member of the Labour Party. I expect he told you himself.'

‘Nothing wrong in that, of course,' Daintry said. ‘And you . . .?'

‘I have no politics. I expect Davis told you that too.'

‘But you sometimes vote, I suppose?'

‘I don't think I've voted once since the war. The issues nowadays so often seem – well, a bit parish pump.'

‘An interesting point of view,' Daintry said with disapproval. Castle could see that telling the truth this time had been an error of judgement, yet, except on really important occasions, he always preferred the truth. The truth can be double-checked. Daintry looked at his watch. ‘I won't keep you long. I have a train to catch at King's Cross.'

‘A shooting week-end?'

‘Yes. How did you know?'

‘Intuition,' Castle said, and again he regretted his reply. It was always safer to be inconspicuous. There were times, which grew more frequent with every year, when he daydreamed of complete conformity, as a different character might have dreamt of making a dramatic century at Lord's.

‘I suppose you noticed my gun-case by the door?'

‘Yes,' Castle said, who hadn't seen it until then, ‘that was the clue.' He was glad to see that Daintry looked reassured.

Daintry explained, ‘There's nothing personal in all this, you know. Purely a routine check. There are so many rules that sometimes some of them get neglected. It's human nature. The regulation, for example, about not taking work out of the office. . .'

He looked significantly at Castle's briefcase. An officer and a gentleman would open it at once for inspection with an easy joke, but Castle was not an officer, nor had he ever classified himself as a gentleman. He wanted to see how far below the table the new broom was liable to sweep. He said, ‘I'm not going home. I'm only going out to lunch.'

‘You won't mind, will you . . .?' Daintry held out his hand for the briefcase. ‘I asked the same of Davis,' he said.

‘Davis wasn't carrying a briefcase,' Castle said, ‘when I saw him.'

Daintry flushed at his mistake. He would have felt a similar shame, Castle felt sure, if he had shot a beater. ‘Oh, it must have been that other chap,' Daintry said. ‘I've forgotten his name.'

‘Watson?' the brigadier suggested.

‘Yes, Watson.'

‘So you've even been checking our chief?'

‘It's all part of the drill,' Daintry said.

Castle opened his briefcase. He took out a copy of the
Berkhamsted Gazette
.

‘What's this?' Daintry asked.

‘My local paper. I was going to read it over lunch.'

‘Oh yes, of course. I'd forgotten. You live quite a long way out. Don't you find it a bit inconvenient?'

‘Less than an hour by train. I need a house and a garden. I have a child, you see – and a dog. You can't keep either of them in a flat. Not with comfort.'

‘I notice you are reading
Clarissa Harlowe
. Like it?'

‘Yes, so far. But there are four more volumes.'

‘What's this?'

‘A list of things to remember.'

‘To remember?'

‘My shopping list,' Castle explained. He had written under the printed address of his house, 129 King's Road, ‘Two Maltesers. Half pound Earl Grey. Cheese – Wensleydale? or Double Gloucester? Yardley Pre-Shave Lotion.'

‘What on earth are Maltesers?'

‘A sort of chocolate. You should try them. They're delicious. In my opinion better than Kit Kats.'

Daintry said, ‘Do you think they would do for my hostess? I'd like to bring her something a little out of the ordinary.' He looked at his watch. ‘Perhaps I could send the porter – there's just time. Where do you buy them?'

‘He can get them at an ABC in the Strand.'

‘ABC?' Daintry asked.

‘Aerated Bread Company.'

‘Aerated bread . . . what on earth . . .? Oh well, there isn't time to go into that. Are you sure those – teasers would do?'

‘Of course, tastes differ.'

‘Fortnum's is only a step away.'

‘You can't get them there. They are very inexpensive.'

‘I don't want to seem niggardly.'

‘Then go for quantity. Tell him to get three pounds of them.'

‘What is the name again? Perhaps you would tell the porter as you go out.'

‘Is my check over then? Am I clear?'

‘Oh yes. Yes. I told you it was purely formal, Castle.'

‘Good shooting.'

‘Thanks a lot.'

Castle gave the porter the message. ‘Three pounds did 'e say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Three pounds of Maltesers!'

‘Yes.'

‘Can I take a pantechnicon?'

The porter summoned the assistant porter who was reading a girlie magazine. He said, ‘Three pounds of Maltesers for Colonel Daintry.'

‘That would be a hundred and twenty packets or thereabouts,' the man said after a little calculation.

‘No, no,' Castle said, ‘it's not as bad as that. The weight, I think, is what he means.'

He left them making their calculations. He was fifteen minutes late at the pub and his usual corner was occupied. He ate and drank quickly and calculated that he had made up three minutes. Then he bought the Yardley's at the chemist in St James's Arcade, the Earl Grey at Jackson's, a Double Gloucester there too to save time, although he usually went to the cheese shop in Jermyn Street, but the Maltesers, which he had intended to buy at the ABC, had run out by the time he got there – the assistant told him there had been an unexpected demand, and he had to buy Kit Kats instead. He was only three minutes late when he rejoined Davis.

‘You never told me they were having a check,' he said.

‘I was sworn to secrecy. Did they catch you with anything?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘He did with me. Asked what I had in my macintosh pocket. I'd got that report from 59800. I wanted to read it again over my lunch.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Oh, he let me go with a warning. He said rules were made to be kept. To think that fellow Blake (whatever did he want to escape for?) got forty years freedom from income tax, intellectual strain and responsibility, and it's we who suffer for it now.'

‘Colonel Daintry wasn't very difficult,' Castle said. ‘He knew a cousin of mine at Corpus. That sort of thing makes a difference.'

CHAPTER II

C
ASTLE
was usually able to catch the six thirty-five train from Euston. This brought him to Berkhamsted punctually at seven twelve. His bicycle waited for him at the station – he had known the ticket collector for many years and he always left it in his care. Then he rode the longer way home, for the sake of exercise – across the canal bridge, past the Tudor school, into the High Street, past the grey flint parish church which contained the helmet of a crusader, then up the slope of the Chilterns towards his small semi-detached house in King's Road. He always arrived there, if he had not telephoned a warning from London, by half-past seven. There was just time to say good night to the boy and have a whisky or two before dinner at eight.

In a bizarre profession anything which belongs to an everyday routine gains great value – perhaps that was one reason why, when he came back from South Africa, he chose to return to his birthplace: to the canal under the weeping willows, to the school and the ruins of a once-famous castle which had withstood a siege by Prince Louis of France and of which, so the story went, Chaucer had been a Clerk of Works and – who knows? – perhaps an ancestral Castle one of the artisans. It consisted now of only a few grass mounds and some yards of flint wall, facing the canal and the railway line. Beyond was a long road leading away from the town bordered with hawthorn hedges and Spanish chestnut trees until one reached at last the freedom of the Common. Years ago the inhabitants of the town fought for their right to graze cattle upon the Common, but in the twentieth century it was doubtful whether any animal but a rabbit or a goat could have found provender among the ferns, the gorse and the bracken.

When Castle was a child there still remained on the Common the remnants of old trenches dug in the heavy red clay during the first German war by members of the Inns of Court OTC, young lawyers who practised there before they went to die in Belgium or France as members of more orthodox units. It was unsafe to wander there without proper knowledge, since the old trenches had been dug several feet deep, modelled on the original trenches of the Old Contemptibles around Ypres, and a stranger risked a sudden fall and a broken leg. Children who had grown up with the knowledge of their whereabouts wandered freely, until the memory began to fade. Castle for some reason had always remembered, and sometimes on his days off from the office he took Sam by the hand and introduced him to the forgotten hiding-places and the multiple dangers of the Common. How many guerrilla campaigns he had fought there as a child against overwhelming odds. Well, the days of the guerrilla had returned, daydreams had become realities. Living thus with the long familiar he felt the security that an old lag feels when he goes back to the prison he knows.

Castle pushed his bicycle up King's Road. He had bought his house with the help of a building society after his return to England. He could easily have saved money by paying cash, but he had no wish to appear different from the schoolmasters on either side – on the salary they earned there was no possibility of saving. For the same reason he kept the rather gaudy stained glass of the Laughing Cavalier over the front door. He disliked it; he associated it with dentistry – so often stained glass in provincial towns hides the agony of the chair from outsiders – but again because his neighbours bore with theirs, he preferred to leave it alone. The schoolmasters in King's Road were strong upholders of the aesthetic principles of North Oxford, where many of them had taken tea with their tutors, and there too, in the Banbury Road, his bicycle would have fitted well, in the hall, under the staircase.

He opened his door with a Yale key. He had once thought of buying a mortice lock or something very special chosen in St James's Street from Chubb's, but he restrained himself – his neighbours were content with Yale, and there had been no burglary nearer than Boxmoor in the last three years to justify him. The hall was empty; so seemed the sitting-room, which he could see through the open door: there was not a sound from the kitchen. He noticed at once that the whisky bottle was not standing ready by the syphon on the sideboard. The habit of years had been broken and Castle felt anxiety like the prick of an insect. He called, ‘Sarah', but there was no reply. He stood just inside the hall door, beside the umbrella stand, taking in with rapid glances the familiar scene, with the one essential missing – the whisky bottle – and he held his breath. He had always, since they came, felt certain that one day a doom would catch up with them, and he knew that when that happened he must not be betrayed by panic: he must leave quickly, without an attempt to pick up any broken piece of their life together. ‘Those that are in Judaea must take refuge in the mountains . . .' He thought for some reason of his cousin at the Treasury, as though he were an amulet, which could protect him, a lucky rabbit's foot, and then he was able to breathe again with relief, hearing voices on the floor above and the footsteps of Sarah as she came down the stairs.