The Yellow Glass (34 page)

I couldn’t feel that he’d given
my performance a vote of confidence and subsided into my seat.

“There,” he returned with the glass.
 
“You do drink ale?”

“I’ll drink anything, me.
 
Ta very much.
 
Down the hatch!”

“I think that will do, Kathleen;
we are alone in the pub, after all.
 
Is
there any particular reason behind this subterfuge?”

I leant over the table and
whispered:

“
You Know Who
has his men watching the house and listening to my
telephone calls.”

“Indeed?
 
This does not surprise me.”

“No?
 
Well, it blooming well surprised
me
, I can tell you!
 
But I’ve given them the slip and I think
they’re probably watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly by now.
 
It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure.”

“The thing is, I don’t know
whether it’s me or my husband they’re interested in.”
 
I took a quick slurp of my beer, thirsty
after all the excitement.
 
“Probably my
husband.”

“No, you’re quite wrong,” he
remarked.
 
“It’s you, Kathleen.”

“What?
 
You mean he really
is
deranged with lust?”

“No.
 
I mean that the clerk at the front desk of HQ
had a good look at the front of the microfiche envelope and will have reported
his observations to Hutchcraft immediately after our hasty departure.
 
They must have been highly delighted when you
spent those hours at my flat, giving them ample time in which to tap your
phone.
 
I feel I have let you down.”

“Why?”

“Because I had no idea of the
scope of this business; none, whatsoever.
 
Only as I reached the final document in the encrypted correspondence,
did I realise the terrible danger in which I had left you.
 
I congratulate you on your disguise; it shows
a speed of thought and a flare for detail that are the hallmarks of a successful
spy . .”

 
“ ‘Cor, stone the crows!”
 
I nearly choked on my beer.

“. . despite your tendency to
overdo it.
 
I think you will find, my
dear, that the cake does not always require
quite
so much icing!”

He could have been directing me
in . . just about any part I’d ever played, to be honest.

“Now drink up.
 
We need to be on our way as soon as
possible.
 
Tell me, Kathleen, do you have
a safe house?
 
Preferably somewhere out
of London.
 
I’m afraid they’ll trace my
flat like a shot, if they haven’t already done so.
 
In fact, I also took precautions not to be
followed today.”

All I could think of was Shore
House.

“I know a place,” I said.
 
“We could catch the train.
 
It’s a hop and a skip and then you’re in the
sea.”

 
The train was too
crowded with passengers returning home from work to discuss the microfiche any
further.
 
Then it was into a taxi at
Dover Priory and straight to St Margarets Bay, and it was well past nine at
night before we reached my sister’s house.
 
What with all the dashing about that our flight from London had
entailed, I’d quite forgotten to ring and give advance notice of our arrival.

“Kathleen!”
 
It was Mills at the white front door and she
seemed ever so glad to see me.
 
“Why are
you dressed as a man, dear?”

“Who’s dressed as a man?”
 
Went Rosa, in the background.

“A window-cleaner, actually,” I
said.
 
“Evening, both.
 
This is Mr Piotrowski.
 
We’re seeking sanctuary, if that’s alright
with you.”

“How nice to meet you,” said my
polite sister, shaking Mr Piotrowski’s hand.
 
“Please
do
come in.”

We stepped in out of the night
and I took off my cloth cap, slung it on a peg by the door and then whisked the
old spy’s filthy coat off him before he had a chance to protest.

“Hallo there,” my brother-in-law
bounded out of the sitting-room to greet us.
 
“Piotrowski, did you say?
 
I’m
Jerzy Stone.
 
Delighted you could make
it.”

A slight man followed him into
the hall.

“Mr Tamang!”
 
I cried.
 
“What in heavens’ name are
you
doing here?”

“Mrs Upshott!”
 
He exclaimed.
 
“I am
so
sorry.
 
So
terribly
sorry.
 
We have heard no news.
 
It is driving us mad with anxiety.”

I must have looked more than
usually blank.
 
Millicent took my hand in
hers and drew me aside, confiding in her low, sensible voice:

“I’ve been trying to call you
all day, but there was an odd noise on your line and I couldn’t get
through.
 
I’m
so
glad you’re here, Kathleen; it’s like a miracle that you’ve
come.
 
Tristram is in the most
dreadful
danger and the police can’t
find him and seem to think there’s nothing wrong and we don’t know what on
earth we should do and . .”

“Tristram?
 
In danger?”
 
My heart tumbled out of my ribcage and, if I hadn’t known how much I
loved the man before, I certainly did then.
 
“Tell me.
 
Oh, God, Mills!
 
Tell me quickly.”

She led me into the drawing-room
and sat beside me as they told me what had happened.

“The Government?”
 
It seemed that all my fears had come
true.
 

“Yes,” they chorused.
 
“
The
British Government
.”

It was then that Mr Piotrowski
spoke up from a stool by the fire to which he had, unobtrusively, hidden
himself, so that it was as if we’d all forgotten he’d ever been there:

“No,” he said, firmly.
 
“This is not the work of the Government.
 
They’re
not behind this.”
 

He raised his elegant fingers -
as he had done three days earlier - to mimic a conjurer shooting cards from
beneath his cuffs; spreading that invisible deck of cards and then magicking
them into thin air.

“It is the magician,
Hutchcraft.”

 
My Aunt Kathleen’s
mysterious companion seemed to know more about the operation than the rest of
us put together and I couldn’t help wondering where he’d sprung from.
 

“Psst,” I whispered into Jay
Tamang’s ear.
 
“Who
is
he?”

We were side by side on the
sofa, with a ringside view of my parents as they fussed over my aunt.
 
The man had chosen to sit behind us on an
uncomfortable, carved stool that an Eastern European carpenter had made for a
child a hundred years earlier and that my mother kept as a decoration by the hearth.
 
Nobody had ever sat on that stool by choice,
not since it had escaped from a pogrom on the back of a horse and cart.

“I don’t know, Rosa.
 
I’ve never seen him at HQ.”

I kept snatching glances at the
mystery man, trying not to let him catch me at it.
 
He was positively antediluvian, with
transparent skin stretched tight over high cheek-bones and a preposterous nose
and silver hair worn long, as if he were a fin-de-siècle bohemian who guzzled
absinthe, and tremendously etiolated fingers and
dirty
clothes.
 
Honestly; not
just dirty, but
filthy
.
 
I wondered whether he’d chosen to sit so far
away from the rest of us because he ponged.

“The microfiche will be
Hutchcraft’s undoing,” Mr Piotrowski proclaimed.

“Goodness, I’ve no idea who or
what you’re talking about, but please
do
come and join us,” my mother put her oar in.
 
“Come and sit next to Rosa on the sofa.
 
Make room for Mr Piotrowski, dear.”

The old man sat down beside me
and I held my breath.

“Rosa Stone, I believe?”
 
He offered a skeletal hand.
 
“You are a remarkable young lady, by all
accounts.
 
I am
greatly
interested to meet you.”

I released my breath in a great
whoosh, which I tried to convert into a cough, and smiled.
 
Now that I came to look at him properly, I
was struck by his uncanny resemblance to John Gielgud’s ‘King Lear’
[49]
at his most noble.

“Hay fever still bad, is it,
Rosa?”
 
Enquired my aunt.

“Oh . . you know . . I’m
coping.
 
Please tell us more about this
microfiche, Mr Piotrowski,”
 
I
pleaded.
 
“We’re simply
dying
to hear.”

“And how about a small brandy to
oil the wheels?”
 
My father asked.

“That would be most
acceptable.
 
Thank you, Mr Stone.”

“Jerzy, please.”

“Apoloniusz.”
 

They’d recognised one another;
something indefinably Eastern European had passed between them, it was clear.
 
Any minute now and my father would be pickling
beets.

“The microfiche is an encrypted
correspondence between Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft, the current head of British
Security and the KGB, which was discovered, hidden in a church, by
Kathleen.
 
Who then brought it to me - in
a roundabout fashion - because I have some expertise in these matters.
 
Now, before I reveal its contents, I need to
know exactly what you all know,” Mr Piotrowski declared, looking more
Gielgud-esque by the minute, while we all maintained a respectful hush in the
face of such charismatic delivery.
 
“For
her part, Kathleen has told me about a plot to trade illegal uranium, hidden in
glass, around the world; a clandestine operation upon which she believes her
husband was engaged undercover, before his disappearance.”
 

“That’s my Uncle Tristram,” I
couldn’t help piping up, “who employed me to be his eyes and ears.”

“The brave Mr Upshott,” Jay
added, “my senior officer in the field - although I work in the technical
department and, sadly, cannot claim to be a spy.”

“Ah,” Mr Piotrowski turned to
Jay and I, “I shall consider you two young people my primary assets.
 
Tell me more, if you please.”

I practically rocketed off the
edge of the sofa, I had so much to tell him.

“One minute,” Jay put a restraining
hand on my arm.
 
“Exactly who
are
you, sir?
 
If you don’t mind me asking?”

“He’s a spy,” Aunt Kathleen
said.
 
“Surely anyone can see that.
 
Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski is probably one of
the best spies this country has ever had and we’ve treated him shamefully.”

A look passed between the old
man and my beautiful aunt that I couldn’t begin to decipher; it held secrets.

“Shamefully?”
 
Repeated my father, shaking his head.
 
“Now, that I
can
believe.”

“Oh, Jerzy,” my mother sighed,
“let’s hear what everybody’s got to say before we start the revolution.”

Anyway, Jay and I then proceeded
to tell him our stories, (and I hung my head and spoke to the carpet while I
told him of the death of Uncle Albert).
 
We culminated in our mutual revelation regarding seaweed.
 

“And that’s all we know about
Operation Crystal Clear; the sum total of our knowledge, to date,”
 
I finished.

“Operation Crystal Clear, is
that what he calls it?”
 
Mr Piotrowski
uttered a rather mirthless laugh.
 
“Why
did you not tell me this at the very beginning, Kathleen?
 
That name has Hutchcraft stamped all over
it.
 
It’s his little joke, do you
see?
 
Crystal clear; in other words, completely
and utterly empty.
 
You are right;
although there evidently
is
glass, it
does not contain uranium.”
 
He looked
thoughtful.
 
“I’d be interested to
discover his relationship to this glass-maker, this man who is, apparently,
supplying a million pieces of glass in the belief that Hutchcraft’s scientists
are pumping it full of dangerous substances.”

“I told you,” I pointed out,
“his name is Reg Arkonnen and he’s a murderer.”

“And Hutchcraft and he worked
together during the war,” he added.

“Did they?”
 
I was surprised to hear this.

“Oh, yes.
 
They parachuted glass into the Las Wolski
forest, of that I have no doubt.”

The room went quiet while we all
attempted to picture this and then my mother spoke up:

“May
I
ask a question?”

“Please do, Mrs Stone.”

“What is there in the microfiche
that my sister found that leads you to suppose that the head of British
Security is feathering his own nest, rather than working under the auspices of
the British government?”

I looked at her with unusual
admiration; when had she ever used the word ‘auspices’?

“Well done,” I mouthed across
the room.
 
“ ‘Auspices’, eh?”

“I’ll ‘auspice’ you, if you’re
not careful, Rosa Stone,” she said, with piercing clarity.

“Well, that is an excellent
question, if I may say so, Mrs Stone,” Mr Piotrowski continued, smoothly.
 
“To which the answer is, in fact, pitifully
simple because it is the
eternal
answer; the answer that always was and always will be.”
 

We looked at one another,
mystified.
 
Was it a code of some
sort?
 
But Jay knew.

“Money,” he said.

“Indeed, Mr Tamang.
 
The microfiche is one, interminable, wrangle
over money.
  
Unimaginably large sums of
the stuff.”

“But, surely,” I interjected,
“anybody could be asking for payment?
 
I
mean, why wouldn’t the British Government want to be paid for their uranium?”

“That’s right,” agreed my
father.
 
“Take arms-dealing, for
example.
 
The world is a huge
market-place and who is to say whether those who claim to be enemies really
refrain from trading with one another when there is good money to be made?”

“Bad money, you mean,” went my
mother.

“These are valid points, but you
forget one thing.
 
I have known
Hutchcraft since he was a boy of seventeen and I was in my early twenties, but,
more than that, I have made it my business to study him.
 
I know how Hutchcraft operates.
 
I know how he bullies young operatives into
his private army of shadows.
 
I know how
he uses the secrets of others to his own advantage.
 
I know the ways in which he gains power.
 
This new plot of his may show a deal more
flair than his old methods - the peculiarly superfluous use of glass strikes an
interesting note - but it cannot fool an old spy.
 
I believe this to be his master-stroke, his
most ambitious grab at power and wealth.
 
It may be that there will be no more heights to scale after this is
done; that we will hear no more of him.
 
That he will simply leap off the topmost pinnacle and soar into the sky
like a bird.
 
I know this.
 
Every bone in my old body knows this.
 
And what’s more . . .”
 

He paused to draw breath, like
King Lear on the moor – that moment of calm before he rent his last shreds of
civilisation and tossed them to the roaring winds and there was nothing left of
him but raw, wounded, humanity.
 

“ . . I know the number of his private
bank account.”

What?
 
I have to say that we broke into laughter.

“Yes, there it was on the last
fiche.
 
I cannot believe the old devil
still banks in Cricklewood.
 
What they
make of regular cheques from the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopanosti in
Cricklewood High Street, the Lord alone knows!”

The case seemed clear.
 
I mean to say, the British Government might
well have been communicating in code with the Soviets in some devious game of
double bluff, but they’d
never
have
been asking for huge sums of money to be sent to Cricklewood.
 
Of course not.
 
Sitting beside me on the sofa, I noted that Jay
was beaming from ear to ear.

“Do you feel vindicated?”
 
I asked him - just between ourselves - and he
turned his beautiful smile my way.

“I think I
do
, Rosa.
 
Mr Upshott and I
had it all the wrong way around.
 
I am so
happy to know this!”
 
He became
serious.
 
“I believe that Professor
Monkington may have stolen my work, that he may be working for Hutch . . and I
ask myself whether Mr Upshott wasn’t deliberately led up the garden path when
they put him to work on this operation?”

“Of course he was, Jay,” I
said.
 
“You both were.
 
You and Uncle Tristram are what they fear
most, don’t you see?”

“I’m not sure that I do.
 
Please explain, Rosa.”

“They fear you because you are
both honourable men.”

Our eyes met, but his suddenly
had such a faraway look in them, it was rather as if my parents’ drawing-room
in Kent had melted away and he had another world in his sights.

“Honourable, yes.”
 
He nodded his head, decisively.
 
“And not afraid to die.”

I shivered, abruptly reminded of
Uncle Tristram.
 
Were we doing enough for
him?
 
I got up, claiming hunger, and left
the room.

Upstairs in my bedroom, I
ransacked piles of books and clothes, flinging the lot onto the floor when I
couldn’t find what I was looking for.
 
I’d tried every last place that I could think of, when I remembered my
pink bedjacket.
 
I ran into the bathroom
to delve deep into the dirty linen basket.
 
There it was and there, in the pocket, was the card that Sergeant Riley
had given me when I was in hospital.
 
I went
into my parent’s bedroom to use the extension, keeping my voice down because
Sam was asleep in the room next door.

I managed to get through
straight away, but it was to a female telephone operator on the Scotland Yard
switchboard.

“Good evening,” I said.
 
“May I please speak to Sergeant Riley?”

“What is it concerning, Miss?”

“Well, it’s an emergency and I
need to speak to him urgently, you see.
 
He gave me his card and told me to ring this number if ever I had any
more information on this extremely important case and . .”

“Sergeant Riley has gone home,
Miss, it being past eleven at night.
 
May
I give him a message, or would you like to try again tomorrow?”

“Oh.
 
Of course.
 
How stupid of me; I’ve lost all track of time.”
 
I tried to think clearly and concisely.
 
“Please could you give him this urgent
message.
 
Really; it’s Top Priority, with
capital letters.
  
My name is Rosa Stone
and I have irrefutable evidence that Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft is producing
illegal uranium at Crab Bay, near Dover.
 
That he is keeping my uncle, Tristram Upshott, imprisoned there and has
already had two other men killed.
 
The
local police are investigating, but I don’t think they have the first idea how
serious this is.
 
I mean, I really think
this is a case for Scotland Yard.
 
Sergeant Riley will know what I’m talking about.
 
Have you got that all that down?
 
Do you take shorthand?”