The Dark Chronicles (6 page)

Because Pritchard
was
trained to hunt men.

I breathed through my nostrils, as slowly and evenly as possible, and prayed that the rain and the mud and the foliage would mask any scents emanating from me, the bag or Chief. I closed my eyes.
He might pick out my whites from even the tiniest of movements, or see the reflection of the moon in my pupils. I shut down my brain and retreated inside myself, urging every fibre of my being to blend into the tree, the wind, the night, so that Pritchard would not register my presence.

I don’t know how long I stood like that. Perhaps several minutes, perhaps only seconds. Then I heard a footfall and I broke back into full consciousness. He had moved into the hedge, a step closer to me. Could he sense me? If he came any nearer, he would
see
me. I wondered how quickly I would be able to draw the Luger. It shouldn’t be a problem: I was younger, fitter and stronger than Pritchard, and he wouldn’t be expecting it. Fizz wouldn’t like it, but I could handle a few bites, if necessary.

Two steps more and I would have to kill him. I had killed Chief so that Pritchard would not suspect me of being the traitor. But if he discovered me now, with Chief and the debris from his murder beneath my feet, it wouldn’t have helped me much.

The debris beneath my feet. I opened my eyes a fraction and looked down. I could see the Becherovka label, and a small greyish lump. Chief’s sandwich.

Pritchard had his back to me now, turning to see where Fizz had gone. Taking care not to brush against any branches, I crouched down very slowly and picked up the sandwich. The rain had transformed it into a knot of mush. With my hand still an inch or so above the ground, I flicked the thing with my wrist, as though I were skipping a stone, in the direction of the riverbank.

Fizz barked at the rustle in the leaves, and ran over to see what it was.

Pritchard waited a few seconds, and then followed.

I stepped back another pace, deeper into shadow, and looked up to count the stars to calm myself. I couldn’t make out much through the spitting rain, though, so I soon gave up and tried to peek over towards where I’d thrown the sandwich.

Where were they?

And then I saw Fizz emerging from the undergrowth a few feet down. The dog had a bird in its mouth, and Pritchard was laughing and calling it a stupid beast and then he took it by the scruff of the neck and they set off back up the drive.

Pritchard walked round the house and rapped on the windows again, then went back to try the front door again. He was puzzled and frustrated now, but finally he marched back to the car, the buttons of his coat clinking as he walked, stroking Fizz’s ears with one hand.

The sound of the engine faded. I waited a few minutes, still breathing at the same slow pace, until I was sure he was not returning. Then I set about putting everything back into the bag. I picked it and Chief’s body up again, and made my way through the bracken to the car.

*

There was some space for him behind the seats. Not much, but it might be enough. I put the bag on the passenger seat and set to work. First, I tried to squeeze him in with his knees folded to his chin. When that didn’t work, I used a series of swift downward strikes until his legs broke at the knees. That helped me push him to the floor, at which point I heard a thin, sharp crack, which must have been his spine. An image suddenly flashed into my mind of the look on his face when he’d seen the gun. I forced it away. It wasn’t Chief I was doing this to – it was just a lump of flesh that would soon become part of the soil, as we all did at some point… And as I would too sooner rather than later if I didn’t focus.

I took off my coat and draped it over him, partly so he wouldn’t be seen on the road, more to hide his unmoving stare. Then I walked around the car, stretching my legs, feeling the rain on my forehead, trying to rid my mind of bullets and broken bones and formulate a workable strategy to get me out of this hole. I had a rendezvous with Vanessa at midnight. Miss it, and I’d have some awkward questions to answer later on. Make it, and it would avert
suspicion, although the idea made me queasy inside. The last person I wanted to see now was Vanessa – let alone use her as an alibi. I snapped out of it. I wasn’t about to be hanged because of an attack of qualms.

I climbed into the front seat and put the key in the ignition. The house was in my rear-view mirror, dark and deserted under the sliver of moon. I had a sudden memory of school: holidays when I’d stayed behind, the gloom of empty dormitories in the dark.

I started her up, and began to move off slowly.

*

Winding through the empty lanes at about twenty miles an hour with the lights dimmed, the urge to push the pedal and leave it all behind was almost overpowering. But I couldn’t yet risk it. I didn’t want to wake people up.

I’d gone about ten miles when I came to a call box. I parked on the verge, went in and put in a collection of sixpences. Nothing happened. I cursed and was just about to hang up when I got through.

‘Yes?’ said a gruff voice.

‘Something is going to fall like rain,’ I said. ‘And it won’t be flowers.’

‘Pardon?’

Oh, Christ.

‘Something is going to fall like rain – and it won’t be flowers.’

There was a long pause, and then a resigned ‘Righty-ho’ and he hung up. It’s only when you’re forced to rely on emergency measures that you see all the holes in them: a straight-faced ‘Please pass the message on to Sasha that I need to meet at location four in two hours’ would have sounded a deal less suspicious to anyone listening in. And what the hell had Auden been going on about? I wondered. Why would flowers fall like rain? Wouldn’t rain be the more likely turn of events?

The spy games concluded, I climbed back in the car and set off again.
I carried on weaving through the lanes until I reached the turn-off to the A32, and then put my foot down. It had already gone half ten, and it was going to be very tight getting everything done and still making Ronnie Scott’s before midnight. I tuned the radio to some rock music on one of the pirate stations. I could barely hear it at this speed, but all I wanted was some noise. As the car tunnelled through the night, I wanted something chaotic to churn beneath it all, to keep me conscious that the soft years were over.

There was no way back.

*

I wound the window down to let some air in.

He was already there, which was a good sign. A no-show would have left me with all sorts of difficulties. I had given myself two hours from placing the call, but that was the absolute minimum: standard procedure was four hours, with an intricate set of checks and double-backs I’d developed over the years, but that clearly hadn’t been possible tonight. This was an emergency, and I was working to a very tight deadline – Vanessa would be arriving soon, checking her coat, ordering a Cointreau – and it had been tempting to take a few more shortcuts on the security. I comforted myself with the fact that it was a Sunday night, which was probably the safest time of the week. I finished my cigarette, then got out of the car and walked across the street.

*

There were fewer people than I’d hoped for: some old men playing mah-jong; a couple of dockers. I breathed in the smell of fried rice, pork and incense. This was location four, the New Friends restaurant, one of the last surviving vestiges of the old Chinatown. A waitress with impossibly thick eyelashes drifted towards me, but I nodded in the direction of the man hunched over a table in the corner, and she moved off again.

He was pushing the remains of a chow mein around his plate and nursing a cup of tea. His postage stamps, our usual cover for conversation, were already neatly laid out on the table.

I seated myself beside him. I’d last seen him six months ago. His beard was a little greyer, his paunch a little wider.

‘Hello, Sasha,’ I said.

‘Hello, Paul. I hope this is good.’

He was irritated at being called out to an emergency meeting: he’d grown accustomed to routine, as had I, and had started to believe he had a right to lead a normal life.

I pushed the barrel of the Luger into his thigh.

‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Not enough cover.’

He quickly shuffled his stamps together, left some money on the table and followed me out to the car.

*

The streets were mainly one-way, and there were long gaps between the lamps. But I knew where I was going. I circled round the back of the restaurant and found the Horseferry Road turning.

I looked across at him. He wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his fear: he couldn’t keep his eyes still and rivulets of sweat licked his forehead. I put the gun away. I didn’t want him to give the answers he thought I was looking for – I’d had enough of that.

‘What happened?’ he said.

‘
Radnya
.’

It was the name Moscow had known me by for over twenty years, the name he had sat and encoded after every one of our meetings. The name I hadn’t known before tonight.

He swore in Russian.

‘Who?’ he said. ‘How?’

Who had betrayed me? How had I learned of their betrayal?

‘Anna.’ It answered both questions.

This time I got a different reaction: shock, and a seemingly overwhelming
sadness. Apparently I’d underestimated his emotional range.

‘I think you should explain,’ he said, which was lovely. I composed myself as I dipped the headlights for an oncoming car.

‘How long have you known she was alive?’

He looked down. Always, then.

‘I never lied to you, Paul. You must—’

‘Don’t
Paul
me,’ I said, and I felt the anger rise. ‘No, you never lied, old friend. Just omitted a few things.’

‘You’re forgetting,’ he said, and his voice wavered as I took a corner at high speed. ‘We are both only pawns in this game.’

That made me laugh. My life falling apart, and he was feeding me B-film lines. Judging by the expression on his face, I was sounding a touch hysterical, so I carried on, out of spite. I felt sorry for him, too, of course: his longest-serving agent losing his nerve so spectacularly. But there it was – the taste of betrayal fresh in my mouth, and I felt sick with it and desperate to lash out. Perhaps I would use the gun again tonight. He deserved to die more than Chief. He had known of the plot – he had not only failed to tell me about it, but had continued to feed it to me.

‘We’re not pawns,’ I told him. ‘I told you at our very first meeting that I didn’t want any more games – I had enough of that with Yuri. If you had told me the truth then, I would have accepted it.’

‘No,’ he said, regaining his composure. ‘You wouldn’t have. That, too, is horseshit.’

I ignored him. He wasn’t answering my questions, and I needed answers to them, now.

‘Why?’ I asked him, my knuckles straining against the steering wheel. ‘Why this way?’

‘It shouldn’t matter how you were recruited.’

A few hours previously I would have agreed with him, if we’d been discussing some other poor fool who had been lured in like this: yes, a clever little honey trap, very nice, the means justify the ends,
and all that crap. Very nice – in theory. ‘It matters to
me
,’ I said, barely able to control my fury. ‘The murder of my father
matters to me
, Sasha.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said after a moment. ‘But you must understand that he would have been seen as a dangerous enemy.’

Yes, I understood, all right: eliminate a prime anti-Communist, and recruit his own son off the back of it. My code-name even gloated over the fact.

‘How did it work?’ I asked. ‘How many people were involved? I want to know the details.’

‘I don’t have them,’ he said. ‘I was shown your file before I left Moscow, but the matter of your recruitment had only a very brief description.’

‘Indulge me,’ I said. ‘I suspect it was fuller than the one I got.’

He turned to me, the shadows on his face shifting shape as we passed in and out of the fields of each streetlamp. ‘You were admitted to a Red Cross hospital, where the agent you knew as Anna cared for you. Investigations established that you were the son of a leading British intelligence officer with links to fascist groups before the war.’

I kept glancing over at him, because I needed to match the meaning of his words with the way he said them. If he sounded a false note – if he was lying – I needed to know. I couldn’t yet tell.

‘So a plan was drawn up.’

‘Yes. Anna was to persuade you of the rightness of our cause using her particular talents—’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said. ‘Who killed my father?’ I asked. ‘Who pulled the trigger?’

‘That I do not know, Paul.’

Narrow Street. I veered into it and Sasha lurched into the dashboard as we flattened a few cobblestones. Was this the truth – or more omission?

‘And Anna disappeared.’

He shrugged. ‘There was nothing else about her in the file. Perhaps you can tell me what you have learned?’

I debriefed quickly, leaving nothing out but embellishing nothing either. He didn’t say anything, didn’t react at all, even when I’d finished. He seemed to be more interested in the activity on the river: there were a couple of tankers moving silently about their business.

‘Did you hear me?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘The
only
thing,’ I corrected. ‘There wasn’t anything right about it.’

He turned away from the river to look at me, and smiled thinly. He placed his palm on my shoulder, a pastiche of avuncular affection. ‘I understand your distress,’ he said, and it was all I could do to stop myself reaching for the gun again. ‘That is something I can’t help you with. You must look in your soul and examine the reasons things were done in this way. In time—’

‘What do you know about Slavin?’ I asked him. I didn’t
have
any time – that was the bloody point.

‘Slavin?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You remember – the KGB officer whose defection is threatening my life.’

‘Only what you have just told me: that he is attached to the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. Considering the strategic importance of Africa, and Nigeria in particular, I imagine he is regarded highly by Moscow. But that is all I know, I’m afraid – that and I count my blessings that my services are required here, surrounded by beauty and art, whereas Comrade Slavin has the ill fortune of being posted to one of the world’s most inhospitable cities during wartime.’