The Yellow Glass (32 page)

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

“But you’re Joe Bloggs, whatever
name you go under.
 
You’re one of Hutch’s
little shadows, aren’t you?
 
One of his
special boys.”

Then Tristram said no more
because I heard the man punch him.

“Oomph!”

“Get him out on the field,” the
man ordered.
 
“I need more space to deal
with this bastard.”

I counted to three and then I
leapt up, tossing off the hood and charging after them while they had their
backs to me and the caravan door was still hanging open.
 
The two men who had been holding Tristram
turned when they heard me.
 
One, I kicked
in the face and the other, an enormous, sluggish-moving type of person, dropped
his captive and advanced upon me with his bare knuckles up.
 
I slipped beneath his armpit and began to
run.

“Stop”, cried the young man, who
had been ahead of the group and had been slow to notice what was
happening.
 
“Stop or I shoot!”

I hesitated, but my senior
officer’s orders were loud in my head; I was to run and I was not to look
back.
 
So this I did.
 
He let fly a shot, but the moon was on the
wane and he had so little light to aim by.
  
More shots, but, by then I was running from one caravan to another, each
looming out of the dark to shelter me from his bullets.
 
Cries went up and, all the way down the
field, lights flickered on inside the caravans, as if to guide me to the
exit.
 
I ran past a herd of horses, who
rolled the whites of their eyes and swished their long tails and then I reached
the field gate, and I vaulted up and over and into a narrow, country lane, just
wide enough for a tractor.
 
I ran on,
despite not knowing the direction I should go, my legs pumping hard and a sharp
wind against my face.
 
I had never run so
fast in my entire life.

Eventually, I stopped, cocking
my head to listen for my pursuers.
 
Only
the movements of the sea, somewhere very close, could be heard, nothing
more.
 
It shifted and sighed and it
seemed as if it whispered encouraging words that only I could hear.
 
I smiled in the dark, unexpectedly heartened.
 
In that moment, it was as if the sea and I were
brothers.

 
I dreamt that I
heard my mother in the hall downstairs.

“Let her sleep,” she said.

But when I awoke, I discovered
it hadn’t been a dream at all.
 
She
knocked on my door at first light and came in.

“Rosa!
 
Time to wake up Rosa.
 
A visitor arrived for you in the middle of
the night.”

I moaned in protest and squinted
through my hair at her.

“Mr Tamang needs to talk to you,
urgently.
 
He says he’s from HQ.”

I closed my eyes again.
 
Not another grey spy,
please
.
 
I had nothing more for
them.
 
But she shook my shoulder.

“Listen Rosa.
 
Your Uncle Tristram is in mortal danger and I
called the police in the night and
 
. .”

Uncle Tristram in mortal
danger!
 
Why hadn’t she said so in the
first place?
 
I leapt out of bed, grabbed
my scarlet dressing-gown and took the stairs, two at a time.
 
When I flung open the door to the
dining-room, it was to find the spy eating steak and fried tomatoes and
chatting to my father, who was wearing his stupid beret with his striped
pyjamas.

“Isn’t it unusual in that part
of the world?”
 
My father was saying.

“Certainly the Tamangs have
suffered through their propensity to eat beef,” replied the spy.
 
“But we have suffered many . .”
 
He caught sight of me and dropped his fork.

“Ah, Rosa, there you are.
 
This is Mr Tamang.
 
He’s come to see you.”

“Jayagaon Tamang.”
 
The young man jumped up and held out his
hand.
 
I couldn’t help noticing that he
was drowning in my father’s blue fisherman’s sweater and a rolled up pair of his
trousers.
 
“So pleased to meet you at last.”

“Tell me . . ” I asked, shaking
his hand, but my breath coming in fits and starts, so alarmed was I, “ . .
exactly what’s happened to my uncle?”

He glanced at my father and at
my mother (she’d followed me into the room in her silk kimono and fluffy slippers,
two big curlers, like horns, on top of her head).

“Sorry,” she said, “but we’ve
had enough of being kept in the dark.
 
Anything you say to our daughter, you say to us, too.
 
Those are my rules, I’m afraid.”

Mr Tamang muttered something
about the Official Secrets Act, but I could have told him that wouldn’t cut the
mustard with my mother.

“Stuff and nonsense,” she
responded.
 
“Tristram and I’ve had our
ups and downs in the past, but he’s family and that’s that.
 
I won’t have spies turning up at all hours of
the night
 
and telling me what I can and
can’t know about my own family.
 
Not in
my own house, I won’t.”

“I am not a spy,” he shook his
head.
 
“I work in the technical
department.”
 

“Well, that settles it,” she sat
down at the dining-room table and reached for the teapot.
 
“More tea, anyone?”

So Mr Tamang told us the utterly
dreadful news that the Arkonnens’ had captured Uncle Tristram nearly a week earlier
and were keeping him tied up in a gypsy caravan, several miles away.
 
My father had also sat down by this time and
he nodded his head, sagely:

“The field above Crab Bay,” he
said.
 
“ . . almost bound to be.
 
It’s the only Gypsy stopping-place I know of
between here and Dover.”

“That’s what I told the police,”
my mother added.

Our visitor shook his head
again, in a worried sort of way.

“I’m not convinced that
involving the police was . . ”

“I know you’re not,” she leant
over the table and patted his hand, kindly.
 
“But
I
am.”

At which point, he took a deep
breath and let fly the most astonishing news yet; the news about the British
Government being at the heart of things and actually manufacturing it’s own
uranium from seawater.
 
My mouth fell
open and I gulped, several times.

“Are you quite
sure
about that, Mr Tamang?”

“I’m afraid it is undeniable,
Miss Stone.”

Silence fell upon the table,
broken only by my father muttering, darkly:

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Because . . to employ a thug
like Reg Arkonnen . .” I stuttered in disbelief.

“Not just a thug, but a
murderer
,” my mother added, sadly.

I was deeply, deeply shocked; to
the depths of my soul and beyond.

“It is the Death of Innocence,”
my father proclaimed and, for once, I couldn’t feel that he’d overdone it.
 

“Well,” my mother got to her
feet and began to clear the table, shaking her curlers.
 
“The uranium is beyond me, I admit it.
 
But at least the police know where that
murderer is now.
 
All I ask is that they
catch him and bring him to justice.
 
For
the sake of our dear Albert.”

My father put his arm around her
shoulder and stroked her cheek in a tender way that made me avert my eyes,
before he gathered up the pile of plates and they both disappeared into the
kitchen.

Mr Tamang and I remained at
table, lost in our various thoughts.
 
I
was thinking about his position in the technical department of HQ when
something occurred to me.

“Mr Tamang,” I said.
 
“May I show you my Encyclopaedia Britannica?”

He jumped up and followed me to
the stairs.
 

“It’s in my bedroom, I’m
afraid.”
 
He stopped in his tracks and
blinked.
 
“Please don’t mind the mess.”

He looked like he had no
objection to mess, whatsoever.

 
I tipped a pile of
clothes off my bedroom chair to make space for him and went to find the two
volumes of Britannica that I’d consulted previously: the one about glass and
the one that contained the atlas of the world.
 
Then I sat down on the bed with them.

“I don’t know whether my uncle
told you how involved I’ve been with Operation Crystal Clear, Mr Tamang?”

“Ah.
 
Yes, he did, Miss Stone.
 
He has given me strict orders to convey to you
that you
must not
involve yourself
further in any way.”

The usual piffle, of
course.
 
I ignored him.

“In fact, HQ employed me to work
undercover at one point and I, too, have signed the Official Secrets Act of
1939.”

He nodded his head, slowly:

“I am aware of this.
 
Actually, Miss Stone, I have a bone to pick
with you.
 
Because you broke my glass,
you see.”

“Oh.
 
Crumbs.
 
You
made that, did you?
 
Well, I have to say, you made a jolly good
job of it.
 
It looked just like the real
thing.”

“Thank you.”
 
He had a rather delightful smile.

“Not that there
is
a real thing . . which brings me to
my Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
 
I handed
it over to him, open on the relevant page.
 
“Now you read this and then you tell me how on earth an inert product
like glass could possibly be made to carry gargantuan amounts of uranium.”

He laughed, clapping his hands
with glee and it struck me how handsome he was.

“It cannot, Miss Stone!
 
It
cannot
!”

“Rosa,” I said.
 
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your first
name.”

“Jay,” he replied.

“Well, Jay, are we agreed that
the glass is a red herring designed to distract from the real business of
manufacturing uranium?”

“Yes, indeed.
 
This must be the case.”

At long last, here was somebody
I could talk to!
 
I edged closer.

“So Mr Dexter died because he
discovered what the British Government were really up to; he discovered the
second secret.
 
And, while they wanted to
sell him uranium, they had
no
intention of revealing how they’d come by it.”

“Mr Dexter?
 
I’m afraid I am not familiar with that name.”

“An American businessman with
links to the Soviet Union.
 
Namely
exporting uranium from Alaska to Eastern Russia via the Bering Strait.”

“How do you know this, Rosa?”

I showed him the atlas and
explained about Mr Dexter’s business in Cape Prince of Wales.

“But what I don’t quite understand
. .” I continued, “ . . is
why
the
English Channel and
why
the Bering
Strait?
 
Doesn’t that strike you as
beyond the realms of coincidence?
 
I mean
to say, two such incredibly
similar
waterways when seawater, after all, can be found all over the world.”

He sat back in my bedroom chair
and gazed at the wall above my head, pondering deep, technical thoughts.
 
I was beginning to wonder whether he was ever
going to speak again when he suddenly uttered:

“Because it’s
not
seawater.”

“
Not
seawater?”
 
I leapt off
the bed.
 
“I thought we’d established it
was seawater!
 
You just told us it
was!
 
‘I’m afraid it is undeniable, Miss
Stone.’
 
Those were your very words!”

“Forgive me.
 
I jumped to conclusions when I didn’t have
the full facts at my disposal; an unpardonable mistake for any scientist to
make.”

I laughed at his solemn face:

“That’s alright, Jay.
 
We all make mistakes, you know.”

“No,” he shook his head,
vehemently.
 
“Not Jayagaon Tamang.”
 

“Well, I don’t know what makes
you
so special.
 
I
make mistakes all the time; my whole life is one long mistake, if you ask me!”

But he was still shaking his
head.

“No, no, no.
 
I glimpsed a thing and assumed it to be
something else.
 
It was so familiar, you
see, that I assumed the process to be the same.
 
But it was not.
 
I see that now.”

“I’m glad
you
do.
 
I’m
totally in the dark.
 
What on earth are you talking about?”

“It wasn’t a fractional distillation
tower at all.
 
The process was, in fact,
destructive!”

I instantly grasped what he was
getting at.

“You mean they’re using
dry
distillation?”
 

I was pleased to see him look at
me with new eyes.

“Yes, that’s
exactly
it, Rosa.
 
They weren’t separating one substance from
another using evaporation and condensation;
 
I had experimented with this fractional process, myself, and produced
minimal results from marine water.
 
No,
they were heating a solid substance in order to break it down.
 
Destructive, or dry distillation, in other
words.”

This was so tremendously exciting
that I began to dance around the room. (Just finding somebody who wanted to
talk to me properly, who used the same language and thought the same way, well,
that alone went completely to my head!)

“Solids!”
 
I exclaimed.
 
“Solids from narrow bodies of water!”
 
It all started to come back to me.
 
“Dark patches in the sea!
 
The
Pacific Ocean!
 
Gulf of Santa
Carolina!
 
Farallon!
 
Oh my goodness, Jay – it’s seaweed!!!”

He was on his feet, jumping up
and down with me.

“Kelp!”
 
He shouted.
 
“Kelp! Kelp! Kelp!”

And then:

“
Laminaria
!”
 
We cried, as
one, and we jumped into one another’s arms and toppled backwards onto the bed.

——

 
Rosa Stone was alive
and somewhere in Kent.
 
Maybe lying in
bed at that very moment, memorising Shakespeare’s lesser sonnets and crunching
her way through a bag of crisps.
 
I took
heart from the idea.
 
Magnus Arkonnen,
meanwhile, was lying in bed in a drafty caravan listening to his crazed aunt
and uncle argue outside.
 
They were going
at it like hammer and tongs.

“I just fail to see why we can’t
go back to ‘Seaspray’, Reg.
 
I’ve had it
done up so nicely and the roses will be out before we know it.
 
I don’t want to spend my holidays in a
cramped, little caravan, Reg,” Aunt Dilys whined.

“For Pete’s sake, woman, would
you give it a rest?
 
I’ve said we can’t
and that’s my last word,” Uncle Reg stormed.

“You can’t expect me to live in
a field full of gypsies, Reg.
 
It’s not
what I’m used to.”