Talking to Strange Men (29 page)

‘And suppose he goes to prison in the future? What then?'

She made no answer. She turned and walked out of the room, looking over her shoulder and saying as she reached the front door:

‘I'll never willingly see you again, John. I'll never speak to you again.'

Regrets first for playing it the way he had and saying the things he had said, then anger, then a desire for revenge. Wriggling in among it a worm of hope, the only vital thing in that carcase of negative emotions. If her passion for Peter Moran, her starry-eyed love, was over, killed by what she now knew, there was hope for him, wasn't there? Yet she had said she would never see him again.

At cats' green on the Sunday he took the message from the inside of the pillar and added Peter Moran's name to the two names already printed there in the ‘Brontosaur' code. The message now read: ‘Leviathan to Dragon: Martin Hillman, Trevor Allan, Peter Moran: observe and tail.' What was the good of it John hardly knew. He had some vague idea of thus harassing Peter Moran, of causing him anxiety or even fear, and he derived great satisfaction from what he had done for quite a long while. He felt better, he felt that at last he had made an attack on Peter Moran instead of waiting passively and effecting no retaliation. Besides, what was the use of being in possession of the key to the codes if he never took advantage of it?

But during the early hours of the morning, this morning, while the storm rumbled in the surrounding hills and the rain pounded on his bedroom window, he awoke out of an uneasy doze to a kind of shocked realization. What had he done? What absurd game was he playing? Was he really setting a bunch of gangsters on to his wife's lover? Dismay soon gave place to reason. They wouldn't know who Peter Moran was. He didn't have a phone, they wouldn't be able to find him. It was then that, inexplicably, depression descended and enclosed him, remaining with him now, dulling all his perceptions, as he walked through the
greenhouses and out into the covered way that led to the gardens and the tree and shrub grounds. The rain was falling in straight rods with a perfect steady evenness. He turned back into the shop and was immediately appealed to by a woman wanting to know how to get her last Christmas's poinsettia to bloom again this year.

The rain went on all Monday evening and through most of the night. They probably didn't pick up those messages at cats' green every day, John thought, and heavy rain like this was as likely to stop their activities as other people's. If he went there before going to work in the morning he might be in time to change the message back again, to remove Peter Moran's name. When he inserted it into the message he must have been a bit mad. Well, not mad exactly but off balance, unhinged as his mother used to put it, as if the mind were a room with a door to it that somehow got slewed off its hinges. And it was true that he had felt like that in the heat and humidity and in his misery.

The temperature had fallen dramatically. A fresh breeze ruffled the water that reflected a sky of clouds and rare patches of blue. The rain had laid the dust of summer and everywhere had a washed look as of a huge clean-up operation that extended even to the leaves on the trees and the annuals in the flowerbeds. Pools of water still lay in the hollows on Beckgate Steps, a lake of it on the landing of stone slabs. John shied away from thoughts of Cherry as he had done ever since Mark Simms's confession and his revelations as to her true nature. He gave his attention instead to the Beckgate pub, closed of course at this hour, a slow drip-drip of water falling from the hanging basket over the saloon-bar door. The gang he was involving himself with had damaged furniture and a phone in there and threatened worse violence. John climbed the Beckgate Steps rapidly and broke into a run up the lane, impelled now by an urgent need to get to cats' green as soon as he could.

A steady rumble came from the flyover, carrying its morning load of traffic southwards. A thin young tomcat with wet orange fur was licking itself dry, sitting on an
upturned wooden box which hadn't been there on Sunday. Was this the new king? John didn't want a repetition of Friday's asthma attack and he kept well clear of the cat. Because of this he didn't see the interior of the upright until he was close up to it. For the first time, there were two messages inside, two plastic envelopes taped to the metal. But even before he took them down John could see that the one to which he had added Peter Moran's name was gone.

He had a curious unaccountable feeling of excitement. And as he unfolded the papers he remembered how he had used to think of his investigations into these messages as a kind of therapy. His interest in them and his curiosity about them had saved him from falling into total despondency. He ought now to be aghast at his action in giving the gang Peter Moran's name, that he was too late to remedy the mischief, but he felt no remorse. He had an inexplicable desire to laugh but of course he couldn't start laughing there, out in the open street. He read the two messages with the aid of the key in his notebook. The first said: ‘Unicorn to Leviathan: Stern resignation confirmed effective 1 August.' The second meant more to him personally. Reading it, he had a momentary sensation of dizziness. ‘Dragon to Leviathan: Peter Moran not known. Address required soonest.'

John replaced the message about Stern in its envelope and attached it once more to the upright, using a fresh length of tape from the roll he had brought with him. The other he put into his pocket. As he walked away and up to the bus stop the excitement seemed to ebb away and depression to return. Without knowing why such an idea should have come to him as he walked along a street where there was nothing to evoke her, not a name or a picture or an object to remind him, he realized suddenly and clearly that Jennifer would never leave Peter Moran. Somehow he had never quite accepted this before, he had always had hope, always believed that marriage itself, the solid fact of it, would draw her back. Now he didn't. While Peter Moran remained she would stay with him, and the lodestone, instead of exerting a magic pull over her, seemed to have further toughened the bond between them.

They – or he whose code name was Dragon – had actually
asked for Peter Moran's address. John kept on thinking about this and in a kind of wonderment, perhaps at the fact that his own message had been taken seriously. But why not? How could it have been otherwise? Dragon believed the message to have come from Leviathan and he was obviously accustomed to obeying Leviathan's commands. The code would change at the end of the week, John thought, and he might easily miss the announcement of what the new code was to be. Therefore, if he wanted to pass any information to them he ought to act in the next few days.

A sense of reality returned to expel these ideas. He was a law-abiding citizen, middle-aged and respectable, too dully respectable perhaps. If he had been a lawbreaker with criminal tendencies his wife might have loved him, have stayed with him. The ideas came back again when he returned home to his lonely empty house in the evening. Most people in his position wouldn't hesitate, he thought, people who found themselves by sheer chance with access to the services of hit men. What did they call it? Putting a contract out on someone? Gavin would know but of course he couldn't ask Gavin.

On the Wednesday evening he did what he had been promising himself to do for some time, he phoned his aunt, and as a result found himself spending the following afternoon and evening with her and his uncle. They didn't know about Jennifer and he didn't tell them, just said she was at work. Returning home on the Honda, taking a route via cats' green was one of the possible options, so of course he went that way. The message inside the upright read: ‘Leviathan to Dragon: October Men to take over from Sunday.' John got out his notebook and added to the foot of it in
Brontosaur
: ‘Twenty-two Fen Street Nunhouse.' He replaced the message, telling himself that by not inserting Peter Moran's name he had not really taken any significant step, he hadn't done anything wrong.

But on the next evening when he saw the police car draw up outside the house and the man and woman – plainly CID people – get out of it, he thought they had come to arrest him.

THEY AGREED THAT
Graham should set the test for Charles Mabledene. It was neither more nor less than that Dragon should get Stern's code – or Rosie Whittaker's code, as they must now call it. If he had the ‘in' at Utting which he claimed to have this should be possible, only loyalty to Moscow Centre would prevent it. If he got the key to the code he would prove his loyalty to London Central beyond a doubt. Graham wasn't going to use the flyover drop – indeed, Mungo didn't think he even knew of the location of the drop, using for his particular agents (Scylla, Wyvern and Minotaur) another near the Shot Tower – but intended to meet Dragon at the safe house.

Mungo usually looked forward to Corfu but this year his expectations were tempered with doubt. Could he afford to be so long as a fortnight away from the centre of operations? The situation was especially touchy now that Rosie Whittaker had taken over. Mungo suspected Rosie of a special brand of dynamism. And he wondered who would be coming into Utting among the autumn term's intake, more effective recruits for Moscow than Martin Hillman and Trevor Allan, he thought, whom Basilisk had reported as being scared by the prospect before them both academically and (as Basilisk put it) spy-wise.

Graham had packed his case before he went off to Ruxeter Road but not put his digital travelling clock in, Mungo noticed. They could do with that, he would remind him when he got back. Strains of Monteverdi filled the house, mixing oddly with the smell of dim sum and black bean sauce hanging on from their supper. Angus was sulking – or going about looking grim and stoical which was his way of sulking – because they couldn't take his girlfriend Diana with them. He understood of course that this was only because
the request to take her hadn't been made till after their flight and hotel were booked but it was still hard to take when Gail was coming. Gail, in fact, would be staying the night because they were making such an early start in the morning.

The Chinese takeaway meal having been eaten an hour and a half ago, Mungo went downstairs to find something in the fridge. His mother was making coffee and reading the
Lancet
while she waited for the kettle to boil. His father paced up and down.

‘If anyone had ever told me when I was a young man,' Fergus was saying more in sorrow it sounded like than in anger, ‘that a request would be made to me for my son's girlfriend to share a bed with him under my own roof, I would have laughed in derision.'

‘Not laughed, darling. Sneered in derision.'

‘Well, sneered then. What does it matter? Is this going to go on while we're in Corfu? Are they to go in the same room? I find it bewildering, I find the assumption bewildering.'

‘Times have changed since you were young. I'm always telling you. Anyway, you're not going to refuse, are you? If you do they'll only creep about in the middle of the night and you'll think it's burglars, you know what you are.'

‘I find it so terribly worrying, Lucy. I mean, the assumptions and the possible consequences, the whole concept.'

‘Oh, darling, there won't be a concept, I promise you.'

Fergus made an impatient gesture. He realized for the first time that his youngest son was in the room. ‘Mungo, I didn't know you were there. Have you heard what we've been saying?'

‘Yes,' said Mungo, eating the last slice of a mushroom quiche.

‘Well, you must try to put it out of your mind.' Another awful revelation struck Fergus. ‘You booked, Lucy. You must have booked them a double room.'

Lucy poured boiling water on to the coffee. ‘If Mungo's to put it out of his mind you'd better not say any more till he's gone.'

Previously uninterested, Mungo began to find the issue intriguing. But the anxious misery on his father's face swayed
the balance. He reached for his mug of coffee. ‘I'm on my way.'

Angus sat hunched over the computer, a bag of chocolate truffles beside him for comfort.

‘There's coffee for you if you want it,' Mungo said, adding, ‘Make a bit of noise before you go in though, fall down the stairs or something.'

Up in his room he studied the latest of Stern's codes. As always it began and ended with numbers, 9 followed by a row of letters, 1132 to end. The previous two he had read began with a 5 and a 17 respectively and ended with 931 and 1003; the first he had ever seen, the one which appeared after Moscow Centre realized the West was in possession of Guy Parker's codebook, had begun with a 4 and ended with 817. What did they have in common, those numbers? Nothing much, as far as he could see. The initial numbers were all quite low, the ultimate numbers all quite high. He had never seen an ultimate number below 700, for instance, or come to that anything higher than 1258.

Could those final digits be house numbers? Only in North America did house numbers come that high. Or phone numbers? That was more likely. But the difficulty with that was that here in the city after the four-digit code you always got a six-digit number, or a completely arbitrary three-digit number following a more or less fixed three-digit number. Well, 931 and 817 might be the last digits of in total ten-digit numbers . . . Mungo went to shut the round window under the eaves. Nights had been cold this past week but they wouldn't be cold in Corfu. There wouldn't be clouds there either, there wouldn't be mountain ranges of vapour, scored with darkness and topped with gold, white foaming glaciers splitting them, green sky like marble appearing between . . . On the other side of the river scaffolding had gone up round the Shot Tower. Was there time for a quick message to Unicorn to find out why and how long for? Probably not. He hadn't packed yet.

Round the corner from Hill Street came Graham in the octopus tee shirt, wearing his crazy sunglasses even at this hour, black hair falling down over his forehead. Mungo
raised his hand in a salute and Graham waved back. He dropped his cigarette and trod it out.