The Secret Pilgrim (39 page)

“You can't put a date to that change of habit, can you?” I enquired as boringly as I could manage, turning dutifully to a fresh page of my notebook.

Curiously enough, Gorst could. He pursed his lips. He frowned. He raised his girlish eyebrows and pressed his chins into his grimy shirt collar. He made a vast show of ruminating. And he finally remembered. “The last time Cyril Frewin did young Burton's evening watch was Midsummer's Day. I keep a log, you see. Security. I also have quite an impressive memory, which I don't always care to reveal.”

I was secretly impressed, but not by Gorst. Three days after Modrian left London for Moscow, Cyril Frewin had ceased to work late, I was thinking. I had other questions that were clamouring to be asked. Did the Tank boast electronic typewriters? Did the cypher clerks have access to them? Did Gorst? But I was afraid of arousing his suspicions.

“You mentioned his love of the opera,” I said. “Could you tell me a little more about that?”

“No, I could not, since we do not get blow-by-blow accounts, and we do not ask for them. However, he does come in wearing a pressed dark suit on his
operah
days, if he doesn't bring his dinner jacket in a suitcase, and he does impart what I would refer to as a state of high if controlled excitement somewhat similar to other forms of anticipation, which I will not mention.”

“But he has a regular seat, for instance? A subscription seat? It's only for the record. As you say, he's a bit short of relaxing pastimes otherwise.”

“As I think I told you, squire, alas, me and
operah
were not made for each other. Put down ‘opera buff ” on his form and you're covered for your relaxing pastime is my advice.”

“Thank you. I will.” I turned another page. “And really no enemies that you can think of?” I said, my pencil hovering over my notebook.

Gorst became serious. The beer was wearing off. “Cyril is laughed at, Captain, I'll admit. But he takes it in good part. Cyril is not disliked.”

“No one who would speak ill of him, for instance?”

“I can think of no single reason whatever why anyone should speak ill of Cyril Arthur Frewin. The British civil servant, he may be sullen but he's not malicious. Cyril does his duty, as we all do. We're a happy ship. I wouldn't mind if you put that down, too.”

“I gather he went to Salzburg for Christmas this year. And previous years too, is that right?”

“That is correct. Cyril always takes his leave at Christmas. He goes to Salzburg, he hears the music. It's the one point on which he will make no concession to the rest of the Tank. There's some of the young ones try to complain about it, but I won't let them. ‘Cyril makes it up to you in other ways,' I tell them. ‘Cyril's got his seniority, he loves his trip to Salzburg for the music, he has his little ways, and that's how it's going to stay.'”

“Does he leave a holiday address behind when he goes?”

Gorst didn't know, but at my request he telephoned his personnel department and obtained it. The same hotel, the last four years running. He's been keeping company with Modrian for four years too, I thought, remembering the letter. Four years of Salzburg, four years of Modrian, ending in a
highly solitary life.

“Does he take a friend, would you know?”

“Cyril never had a friend in his life, skipper.” Gorst yawned. “Not one he'd take on holiday, that's for sure. Shall we do lunch next time? They tell me you boys have very nifty expense accounts when you care to give them a tickle.”

“Does he talk about his Salzburg trips at all when he comes back? The fun he's had—the music he's heard—anything like that?” Thanks to Sally, I suppose, I had learned that people were expected to have fun.

Having made a brief show of thinking, Gorst shook his head. “If Cyril has fun, squire, it's very, very private,” he said with a last smirk.

That wasn't Sally's idea of fun at all.

From my office at the Pool I booked a secure line to Vienna and spoke to Toby Esterhase, who with his infinite talent for survival had recently been made Head of Station.

“I want you to shake out the Weisse Rose in Salzburg for me, Toby. Cyril Frewin, British subject. Stayed there every Christmas for the last four years. I want to know when he arrived, how long he stayed, whether he's stayed there before, who with, how much the bills come to and what he gets up to. Concert tickets, excursions, meals, women, boys, celebrations—anything you can get. But don't raise local eyebrows, whatever you do. Be a divorce agent or something.”

Toby was predictably appalled. “Ned, listen to me. Ned, this is actually completely impossible. I'm in Vienna, okay? Salzburg, that's like the other side of the globe. This city is buzzing like a beehouse. I need more staff, Ned. You got to tell Burr. He doesn't understand the pressures here. Get me two more guys, we do anything you want, no problem. Sorry.”

He asked for a week. I said three days. He said he'd try his best and I believed him. He said he had heard a rumour that Mabel and I had broken up. I denied it.

Ever since I can remember, watchers have been most at home in condemned houses handy for bus routes and the airport. Monty's choice for his own headquarters was an unlikely Edwardian palazzo in Baron's Court. From the tiled hall, a stone staircase curled grandly through five pokey floors to a stained-glass skylight. As I climbed, doors flew open and shut like a French farce as his strange crew, in varying stages of undress, scurried between changing room, cafeteria and briefing room, their eyes averted from the stranger. I arrived in a garret once a painter's studio. Somewhere a women's foursome was playing noisy ping-pong. Closer at hand, two male voices were singing Blake's “Jerusalem” under the shower.

I had not set eyes on Monty for a long time, but neither the years between nor his promotion to Head Watcher had aged him.

A few grey hairs, a sharper edge to his hollow cheeks. He was not a natural conversationalist, and for a while we just sat and sipped our tea.

“Frewin, then,” he said finally.

“Frewin,” I said.

Like a marksman, Monty had a way of making his own particular area of quiet. “Frewin's a funny one, Ned. He's not being normal. Now of course we don't know what normal is, do we, not really, not for Cyril, not apart from what you pick up from hearsay and that. Postman, milkman, neighbours, the usual. Everyone talks to a window cleaner, you'd be amazed. Or a Telecom engineer who's lost his way with a junction box. We've only been on him two days, all the same.”

With Monty, when he talked like this, you just pinned your ears back and bided your time

“And nights, of course,” he added. “If you count nights. Cyril's not sleeping, that's for sure. More prowling, judging by his windows and his teacups in the morning. And the music. One of his neighbours is thinking of complaining to him. She never has before, but she might this time ‘Whatever's come over him?” she says. ‘Handel for breakfast is one thing, but Handel at three in the morning's a bit of another.' She thinks he's having his change. She says men get like that at his age, same as women. We wouldn't know about that, would we?”

I grinned. And again bided my time. “
She
does, though,” Monty said reflectively. “Her old man's gone off with a supply teacher from the comprehensive. She's not at all sure she'll have him back. Nearly raped our pretty boy who'd come to read the meter. Here— how's Mabel?” he demanded.

I wondered whether he too had heard the rumour; but I decided that if he had, he would not have asked me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Cyril used to take a newspaper on the train. The
Telegraph,
need you ask. Cyril doesn't hold with Labour—he says they're common.
But he doesn't buy a paper any more. He sits. Sits and stares. That's all he does. Our bloke had to give him a nudge yesterday when they pulled up at Victoria. He'd gone off in a daydream. Going home last night, he tapped out the whole score of an opera on his briefcase. Nancy says it was Vivaldi. I suppose she knows. Remember Pauli Skordeno?”

I said I did. Diversions were part of Monty's way. Like, “How's Mabel?” for instance.

“Pauli's doing seven years in Barbados for bothering a bank. What gets into them, Ned? He never put a foot wrong while he was watching. Never late, never naughty with his expenses lovely memory, lovely eye, good nose. Burglaries galore we did. London, the Home Counties, the Midlands, the civil-rights boys, the disarmers, the Party, the naughty diplomats—we did the lot. Did Pauli ever get rumbled? Not once. The moment he goes private, he's all fingers and thumbs and boasting to the bloke next door to him in the bar. I think they
want
to be caught, that's my opinion. I think it's wanting recognition after all the years of being nobody.”

He sipped his tea. “Cyril's other kick, apart from music, is his radio. He loves his radio. Only receiving, mind, as far as anybody knows. But he's got one of those fancy German sets with the fine tuning and big speakers for his concerts, and he didn't buy it locally because when it went on the blink the local shop had to send it off to Wiesbaden. Three months it took, and cost a fortune. He doesn't run a car, he doesn't hold with them. He shops by bus Saturday mornings, he's a stay-at-home except for his Christmases in Austria. No pets, he doesn't mix. Entertaining, forget it. No house-guests, lodgers, receives no mail except the bills, pays everything regular, doesn't vote, doesn't go to church, doesn't have a television. His cleaning lady says he reads a lot, mainly big books. She only comes once a week, usually when he's not there, and we didn't dare get close to her. A big book for her is anything bigger than a Bible-study pamphlet. His phone bills are modest, he's got six thousand in a building society, owns his house and maintains a
well-managed bank account fluctuating between six and fourteen hundred, except Christmas times when it drops to around two hundred because of his holiday.”

Monty's sense of the proprieties again required us to make a detour, this time to discuss our children. My son Adrian had just won a modern languages scholarship to Cambridge, I said. Monty was hugely impressed. Monty's only son had just passed his law exam with flying colours. We agreed that kids were what made life worth living.

“Modrian,” I said when the formalities were once more over. “Sergei.”

“I remember the gentleman well, Ned. We all do. We used to follow him round the clock some days. Except at Christmas, of course, when he took his home leave . . . Hullo! Are you thinking what I'm thinking? We all take leave at Christmas?”

“It had crossed my mind,” I said.

“We didn't even bother to pretend with Modrian, not after a while, you couldn't.
Oh,
he was a slippery eel, though. I could have walloped him sometimes, I really could. Pauli Skordeno got so angry with him once he let his tyres down outside the Victoria and Albert while he was inside sussing out a dead-letter box. I never reported it, I didn't have the heart.”

“Am I not right in thinking Modrian was also an opera buff, Monty?”

Monty's eyes became quite round, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing him surprised.

“Oh my Lord, Ned,” he exclaimed. “Oh dear, oh dear. You're right. Sergei was a Covent Garden subscriber—of course he was, same as Cyril. We must have taken him there and fetched him— oh, a dozen times. He could have used a cab if he'd had any mercy, but he never did. He liked wearing us out in the traffic.”

“If we could know the performances he went to, and where he sat—if you could get them—we could try and match them up with Frewin's.”

Monty had fallen into a theatrical silence. He frowned, the scratched his head. “You don't think this is all a touch too
easy
for us, do you, Ned?” he asked. “I get suspicious when everything fits in a pretty pattern, don't you?”

“I won't be part of your pattern,” Sally had said to me the night before. “Patterns are for breaking.”

“He
sings
, Ned,” Mary Lasselles murmured while she arranged my white tulips in a pickle jar. “He sings
all
the time. Night and day, it doesn't matter. I think he missed his vocation.”

Mary was as pale as a nightnurse and as dedicated. A luminous virtue lit her unpowdered face and shone from her clear eyes. A shock of white, like the mark of early widowhood capped her bobbed hair.

Of the many callings that comprise the over-world of intelligence, none requires as much devotion as that of the sisterhood of listeners. Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such passionate espousal of the destiny of others. Condemned to windowless cellars, engulfed by tracks of grey-clad cable and banks of Russian-style tape recorders, they occupy a nether region populated by absent lives which they know more intimately than those of their closest friends or relations. They never see their quarries, never meet then, never touch them or sleep with them. Yet the whole force of their personalities is beamed upon these secret loves. On microphones and telephones they hear them blandish, weep, smoke, eat, argue and couple. They hear them cook, belch, snore and worry. They endure their children, in-laws, and babysitters without complaint, as well as their tastes in television. These days, they even ride with them in cars, take them shopping, sit with them in cafés and bingo halls. They are the secret sharers of the trade.

Passing me a pair of earphones, Mary put on her own and, folding her hands beneath her chin, closed her eyes for better listening. So I heard Cyril Frewin's voice for the first time, singing
himself a passage from
Turandot
while Mary Lasselles with her eyes shut smiled in her enchantment. His voice was mellow and, to my untutored ear, as pleasing as it clearly was to Mary.

I sat up straight. The singing had stopped. I heard a woman's voice in the background, then a man's, and they were speaking Russian.