Talking to Strange Men (23 page)

He watched their departure from the front door and then he ran upstairs and watched the car till it disappeared. After that came a feeling of let-down and of emptiness, a sensation of being alone in the world and with nothing to do. It was still light, it was still only nine o'clock. Making an effort to expel Jennifer and Peter Moran from his mind – an effort that could only be partly successful – he returned to the living room and cleared away the glasses, put the empty wine bottle into the waste bin. It was nearly a month since the estimate from the builder about the guttering had come. He sat down and answered it. He got out his notebook and tried the latest cats' green message against the first lines of all the fiction in the bookcase that was even remotely associated with spies, including Conan Doyle's
The Naval Treaty
and a couple of Father Brown stories. Yves Yugall had published a collection of short stories since
Cat Walk
and he had managed to get a copy from the central library. The collection was called
The Armadillo Army
and comprised eight stories. Laboriously, he tried the message against the first lines of each story, but the June code wasn't based on any of them.

It was after eleven when he stopped, lay back in the armchair and closed his eyes. On the dark red retina, print appeared in paler letters and as it faded he seemed to see there the face of Jennifer, her soft full cheeks and her unhappy eyes.

IT HAD BEEN
a busy Saturday morning at Trowbridge's. Sunshine always brought the crowds out at weekends, though no true gardener would plant anything out in full sunshine, the worst killathon of all, as he had heard Gavin tell a customer. Gavin wanted to know if he might take the mynah bird home with him for the weekend and John hadn't been able to see any reason why not.

‘When I'm not here he suffers from benign neglect.'

John wasn't sure what that was. He hadn't much hope of anyone ever buying the mynah. The black shiny head with its bright yellow beak poked out between the bars as Gavin carried off its cage.

‘I'm a turnaround, I'm a super slurper,' sang Gavin, but the mynah said nothing, only looking apprehensively at the great outdoors.

It wasn't until after they had gone that John thought he might have asked Gavin what a lodestone was. He seemed to be a mine of curious information. The dictionary John consulted at the central library told him load-stone or lodestone meant a magnet. Why then had Peter Moran suggested he was in possession of a magnet? Was it some sort of insult? In that context it seemed to have no more meaning than ‘turnaround' or ‘super slurper'. As he entered the house the phone was ringing. Mark Simms, he thought, and he braced himself to deliver another sharp rejection.

Jumping to conclusions, he had made the same mistake as he had on Thursday evening.

‘It's Colin. I've been trying to get you all the morning.'

‘It's my Saturday morning at work.'

‘I tried yesterday too.'

People who resented the fact that one wasn't permanently
sitting by the phone waiting for their calls exasperated John. ‘Well, I'm here now.'

‘That chap I met at your house on Thursday, is he a mate of yours? I mean, is he a close friend?'

John said slowly, ‘Do you mean Peter Moran?'

‘That's him, yes. The guy who came out and asked where the loo was.'

Colin spoke as if John had had a whole houseful of people with him that night, a party. But of course he might have thought he had, he might even resent not having been asked. John said, choosing his words,

‘He isn't a friend of mine. He's the man Jennifer is living with. She was here too. It was all very awkward, that's why I couldn't ask you in. I don't really want to talk about this on the phone, Colin.'

Colin's voice sounded very strange. He said, ‘Are you sure Jennifer is living with him? I mean, like that?'

‘I don't want to talk about it, Colin. I said I didn't.'

‘Look, you couldn't come over, could you? Or I could come to you? Mother would like to see you. Come and have a cup of tea.'

John said decisively, ‘Not to talk about Jennifer, I don't want to do that. Really, Colin, that's not on. I have to sort all that out on my own.' He relented a little. Colin, after all, was his oldest friend. Colin had listened to his confidences far more readily than he had when hearing the confessions of Mark Simms. ‘I hope Jennifer will come back to me, I'm hoping it's only a matter of time. You do see, don't you, that it's really not on to discuss it with any outsider. Even you,' he added.

‘I don't want to talk about Jennifer,' Colin said. ‘I wouldn't dream of it. All I want to do is give you some information about Peter Moran I think you might find useful. I want to tell you where I last saw him.' Colin paused to give his statement the fullest dramatic impact. ‘It was in court.'

GOING HOME FOR
the weekend was almost unheard of at Rossingham but most people got taken out on Sundays. Parents came or godparents or uncles and aunts. On the whole, going off for lunch and tea with those vaguely designated ‘friends' wasn't encouraged.

‘It's remarkable,' Mr Lindsay had been heard to say, ‘how many of the senior men in Pitt have beautiful aunts no more than eighteen years old.'

He might have been including Angus Cameron who one Sunday in late June was called for by a pretty blonde girl who arrived in a Mini. Mungo, on the other hand, was taken out to lunch at the Mill Hotel in Rossingham St Clare by his parents with Ian and Gail. It was Charles Mabledene's sister's fifteenth birthday and after the whole family had been out to lunch and tea they would take her back to Utting.

‘Isn't it rather peculiar,' Mungo said to Graham O'Neill, ‘that we never knew till now he had a sister at Utting?'

‘We never knew he had a sister, full stop. He's very secretive.'

‘I suppose we shall all be on top of each other for lunch,' said Mungo gloomily and he was right, the Mabledenes, Camerons and Graham's uncle and aunt being given contiguous tables. Angus and his girlfriend had disappeared in a blast of black exhaust from the Mini which needed a new silencer.

Charles Mabledene was well aware of the implications of his sister's school. He and she had been in the junior school at Utting together and she had continued there after the Common Entrance, while he on that historic and never to be forgotten occasion, had ‘come over'. But he wouldn't stoop to explain all this to the Director of London Central. Early in his life Charles had adopted the enigmatic dictum,
‘never apologize, never explain'. Indeed, he had had no personal contact with Leviathan, Medusa, or any other agent of Western Intelligence since the interview in the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road. On that occasion Leviathan had told him he must ‘prove you're ours' but so far no test had been set him. Apart, that is, from the normal run of his duties. And even these had not been pressing – a small photocopying job, the setting up of a new drop – leaving him plenty of time for experimenting with Banham locks and, of course, for his flexi-prep.

The new drop was under a loose stone beneath the horse trough in Rossingham St Mary market place, the one in the cricket pavilion having ceased its function when the brickwork in the wall was unexpectedly repaired. On the pretext of buying a birthday card for his sister, he had been given Mr Lindsay's permission to go to the village on Friday afternoon, and there he had taken from under the horse trough the latest command in
Spytrap:
‘Repossess Reynolds' books.'

Charles knew what this referred to, a work on chess and two on yachting which Angus's friend Bruce Reynolds had two years before lent to an Utting man called Simon Perch, who was one of Stern's Stars. Though repeatedly asked, Perch had never returned them and this was the only way to get them back. It would be quite easy, Charles thought, seeing that he was actually going to Utting later that day, though Leviathan had not known that when the command was issued, assuming only that Dragon had another kind of special ‘in' at Parker's and Stern's school. Was this then the test? Would it almost be better for Dragon not to secure the borrowed books?

Nicholas Ralston, or Unicorn, whom he could see with a huge family party at the opposite end of the dining room, might just as well have been asked. It was more his mark really. In a way it was rather a feeble task to set someone of Dragon's undoubted acumen and brilliance. If he was being tested, would it be to his credit to fail? On the other hand, he would be very surprised if by now Leviathan and Medusa didn't know very well that he had a sister at Utting. On balance, the test should be passed.

It was Charles Mabledene's overriding ambition that when
Mungo Cameron retired, as next year he surely would, the mantle should fall upon his own shoulders and the directorship of London Central become his.

While they were having coffee he did his new trick and produced a bunch of carnations from the sleeve of his mother's rather strange new white satin jacket. She shrieked with delight. Charles had picked the carnations in Mrs Lindsay's private garden very early that morning before anyone was up. The locked front and back doors of Pitt presented no problem to him. His parents and his sister seemed to assume that some occult agency was at work and even to suspect that the flowers weren't real. Charles smiled indulgently at them.

There were areas of his mind which sometimes troubled him, but not the area that did the magic. That was a mere matter of the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye and of a rather gruelling discipline. His gift for discerning what others thought and, more than that, of divining what might happen in some future anticipated situation – this was what gave him pause and made him wonder. The thought processes of others interested him, he was one of those rare people who, though selfish and unscrupulous, are more interested in others than in themselves.

Now, for instance, he was wondering where they would go that afternoon. It was his sister's choice, for it was her birthday, and there were many options open. Several great houses in the neighbourhood as well as Rossingham Castle; the wildlife park at Songflete; the otter sanctuary on the Orr at Orrington; the Life in Tudor England exhibition at Togham Hoo; a boat on the river from Orrington up to Rostock Bridge. Her face told him nothing. She was fond of clothes and the Tudor exhibition had plenty of dresses in it. And she liked boating, she was cox of the Utting junior boat.

Otters, he said to himself and he didn't know why. It was this not knowing why that sometimes made him uneasy. When his prediction was as unlikely as this one he would have liked to be wrong. They had profiteroles for pudding. Profiteroles were her favourite. Charles watched the Camerons leave the dining room, marvelling at those men's
height. They were like another race. Mungo was probably a whole foot taller than he. His father looked across the table.

‘Have you decided where you want to go, Sarah?'

‘Otter sanctuary,' she said. ‘I'm torn between that and Togham but I really do think the otters.'

Charles sighed to himself.

There were European otters and Asian otters, pairs of them each in their own section of the river. At feeding time which was at three-thirty they dived and swam for the fish the keepers threw in out of reeking buckets. Charles was a better photographer than his sister, so to oblige her he took pictures of otter cubs. On the way back, after tea in Orrington, they got in a traffic jam on the motorway caused by weekend roadworks and the car threatened to overheat.

‘I'll ruin this car if I drive her any further,' said his father. ‘I'm going to drop her at the works and pick up another one.'

‘The works' was what all the Mabledenes called the garage at Rostock. Charles's father drove the BMW on to the forecourt and let himself into the office to find the keys for one of the secondhand Volvos which were lined up for sale outside. Charles hadn't been down at the works for ages. He didn't know what it was that made him get out and wander about among the cars, through the big shed with the turntables and out to the back where vehicles awaited repairs or service. That flair he had, he supposed later, that ESP or second sight or whatever you called it. The red car, a Datsun, had its offside rear wing quite badly dented and the light unit smashed. There was a very obvious smear of green on the bodywork where the red paint had flaked away. Charles was glad now that he had taken those otter pictures for his sister, for the camera was still slung round his neck. With a quick glance round to see that no one was looking he took two shots of the red car, carefully ensuring the inclusion of the number plate.

He returned by way of the office, having composed his face into that expression of innocence and naïvety which seemed so much to please his mother. It was becoming second nature to him now and he no longer needed to practise it in front of a mirror. Through the big plate-glass
window he could see his father still rummaging around in the office. Charles pushed open the door and felt it stick as it seemed to be obstructed by something in its passage across the doormat. He bent down and picked up the envelope which he could feel contained a bunch of car keys on a ring with a fob. On the envelope was printed the number of the car he had photographed and the name Whittaker . . .

By now his father had found the Volvo keys. Feeling pleased with himself but revealing nothing of this, Charles handed the envelope to his father, they all got into the Volvo and set off for Utting in the outer eastern suburbs.

‘Shall I get this film developed for you?' Charles said to his sister and added untruthfully, ‘Someone I know in the camera club at school will do it for free.'

Naturally, she agreed. Charles decided to finish up the film in taking some useful pictures of Utting. You never knew when that sort of thing might come in handy. His sister was in Curie House but in the general mêlée of boys and girls returning from Sunday outings and the in any case far freer atmosphere than ever prevailed at Rossingham, he had no difficulty in penetrating Huxley and inquiring of someone who looked like a prefect where Simon Perch's room was. The prefect seemed to know Perch quite well, might even have been a friend of his, and helpfully told Charles he wasn't back yet and wasn't expected before eight. The worst part for Charles was picking the lock of Perch's door. Not because it was difficult – those simple locks on interior doors never were – but because of the risk of being seen, the process necessarily taking two or three minutes.