Horse Under Water (15 page)

When I got to Charlotte Street on Tuesday morning, Alice was sitting alongside the switchboard operator comparing knitting patterns and drinking coffee. When she saw me she crooked a bony finger and I followed her into the office that Dawlish had recently given her. It was stacked to the ceiling with directories, gazetteers,
Who’s Whos
and cardboard folders of newspaper clippings. She sat down behind the tiny table she used as a desk. I helped her move the two-pound bag of sugar, an electric kettle, two laced and lead-sealed secret files and a Nescafé tin with a hole cut in the top in which contributions to the office tea swindle were kept. She turned the pages of a file.

‘You’ve had coffee?’ said Alice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Alforreca is on,’ said Alice, ‘officially I mean, word came from the top.’

‘Oh good,’ I said.

‘Don’t try that “oh good” stuff with me,’ she said. ‘I know what you’ve been up to.’

‘Smoke?’ I said. I offered her a Gauloise.

‘No,’ said Alice, ‘and I don’t want you spreading a lot of fumes through this room either.’

‘O.K., Alice,’ I said and I put the cigarette back in the packet.

‘Clings for days,’ said Alice, ‘that French tobacco.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose it does.’

‘That’s all,’ said Alice. It seemed odd that Alice should invite me into her office for the first time just to say that. As I got up Alice said, ‘Try to look a little bit surprised when Dawlish tells you. The poor man doesn’t know you as I do.’

‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said.

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Alice, ‘I just want him to keep his pathetic illusions, that’s all.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but thanks anyway.’ I turned to go. Alice called, ‘There
is
one more thing. Jennifer,’ she said.

‘Jennifer,’ I repeated dumbly, mentally riffling through all the code names I knew.

‘Jennifer in the cashier’s department; she’s getting married.’

I felt no guilt or jealousy. ‘I don’t even know who you are talking about,’ I said.

‘We’ve put you down for two pounds,’ said Alice irritably, ‘towards a present.’

In the office I found Jean (who had put her hair up after all), thirty letters to sign and a great mass of abstracts to read: American State Department,
Counter-Intelligence Corps and Defence reports as well as the pink foolscap translations from
Red Flag, People’s Daily
and
M.V.D. Information.
I put the whole bundle into my briefcase. The snow was still threatening and the heavy grey clouds hung across the sky like a false ceiling. Wardens were licking their pencil stubs and policemen with a huge tray of keys were unlocking double-parkers and driving them to the pound. I looked into Dawlish’s office. He was hammering panel pins into the wall.

‘Hello, what do you think of this?’ he said. It was a framed coloured print of the Iron Duke seated upon a rotund horse, doffing his hat with one hand and waving a sword with the other. Under the print in a fine copperplate it said:

All the business of war,
And indeed all the business of life,
Is to endeavour to find out
What you don’t know by what you do.

‘Very handsome,’ I said.

‘Present from my son. He’s very fond of quotations by Wellington. Each year on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo we have a little party, and all the guests have to have an anecdote or quotation ready.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do the same thing every time I pull on my Wellington boots.’ Dawlish slid me a narrowed glance.

I offered him a cigarette to break the tension.

‘You intend to pursue the Alforreca operation?’

‘I want to know why Smith sent Harry Kondit a seven-thousand-pound laboratory to a backwater of Portugal.’

‘You think that will explain everything?’ said Dawlish. He smacked the metal hammer-head into the palm of his hand.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘perhaps I’ll be able to tell you better after I’ve talked to the man who’s been examining the canister. I think the explosives in my car were placed so as to destroy that rather than the driver.’

Dawlish nodded. ‘Have a nice trip to Cardiff,’ he said, and began hammering. I said, ‘Don’t hit your finger and drop the hammer on your toe.’ He nodded again and continued hammering.

I leaned upon the gravy-stained tablecloth as Paddington slid past. Soot-caked dwellings pressed together like pleats in a concertina. Grey laundry flapped in the breeze. Past Ladbroke Grove the small gardens suffocated under choking debris, only corrugated iron and rusty wire remained of things collapsed.

‘Soup,’ said the attendant. He set a chipped cup before me. A girl across the aisle applied cosmetics in three primary colours to her blotchy face. I wrote the word
STURGEON
into the crossword. That would make 23 down
MULGA
. The clue for 2 across was ‘old solution’:
SISTRUM
, because I knew the last four letters were
TRUM
.

I was a long way out on a thin plank over a deep sea. I had blocked Smith at least for the time being, but I had done it at the expense of making a V.I.P. enemy. It wasn’t something one could do too frequently without uncomfortable consequences. Perhaps it was something one couldn’t do
once
without uncomfortable consequences. I wrote
NOSTRUM
to replace
SISTRUM
.

I was beginning to get it now.

Up here the snow had gathered into light grey clumps in the corners of brown fields. Cows snorted white puffs and huddled together in the dells under bare trees splattered with blots of birds.

I crossed
STURGEON
through and made it
STALLION
; this gave me
MAQUI
as 23 down, instead of
MULGA
.

The train wheels chattered across a junction and my warm chicken-leg made concentric waves in the thin gravy. I wondered how many people in Albufeira had connexions with Smith. Who had stolen the photographs and to whom were they delivered? Why had either Fernie or the sound of a two-stroke motor cycle been everywhere at once? The blonde girl with the painted face was putting pink acetate on her finger-nails; the acrid smell assailed my taste-buds as I chewed the chicken – it was better than no taste at all.

Past the City Hall the Cardiff traffic was as thick as Welsh rarebit. The clock struck five thirty as we turned on to the
A
469. The moorland was bleak
and wind-scoured. Through the twilight ‘our man in Cardiff’ lifted a finger at the crooked castle of Caerphilly. Under the dark sky the stone houses squinted yellow light through the lacework. The shops had been tightly shut since lunch-time. I had no matches.

The Cardiff man spoke in a mocking Celtic treble.

‘I thought you London men could afford lighters.’

‘And I thought you Cardiff men could afford car-heaters.’ I blew on my hands and received a wizened glance of amusement from under a stained bowler hat. The Welsh are gourmets at the feast of insults.

Beyond the ruins of Caerphilly Castle stunted trees grew hunchbacked against the wind.

We pulled off the road, the loose surface shuffled and the eggshell crack of ice splintered under the wheels. The wind was screaming through the car’s radio antenna as a bald man in a roll-neck sweater opened the door of a small stone house. Inside, the cool green light of an oil lamp described circles on the table and ceiling. Draught made the fire flare, a soot-caked kettle buzzed with boiling water, and almost before we were seated a large bowl of sweet dark tea was warming the palms of our hands. I lit a cigarette with a stick from the wood fire. Our man from Cardiff rapidly sank his scalding tea and pulled on his dirty knitted gloves and bowler hat.

‘I’ll be pushing along then,’ he said. I didn’t mean to look pleased. He said, ‘Ah, you develop a
strong sense of knowing when you are not wanted here in Glamorgan.’ I grinned.

He said, ‘You can phone when you want to be collected. Would you want me to arrange a room at the Angel for you? American Bar and television they have there. It will be just like you were still in London.’

Their singing voices argued the pros and cons of my travel arrangements, and finally my host in the roll-neck sweater offered to let me stay the night.

‘On a “Put-U-up”, you know; nothing fancy.’ I agreed, and watched the small, heatless car rumble down the rough road and turn back towards Cardiff.

We sat quietly making toast in front of the fire and Glynn would every now and then get up to fix the back door, draw an extra can of water from the outdoor pump or attend to something for the pigs. Finally, he lit a filthy old pipe and said, ‘You had my report all right? Your canister contained traces of crude morphine. The young lady was most anxious that it didn’t go astray.’ The man in the sweater was also on a small retainer from W.O.O.C.(P) and a smaller one from the Home Office Forensic Science Lab. in Cardiff.

‘It was fine,’ I said, ‘but I decided to come down to see you because I know so little about dangerous drugs.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘well, what do you want to know?’

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Just talk about drugs so I’ll know my way around.’

‘I’ll tell you all about drugs,’ said Glynn, ‘like I tell the youngsters that come to work in the lab. There are three kinds of dangerous drugs. First there is the coca bush, this is what cocaine is made from.’

I said, ‘That isn’t such a problem, cocaine, is it?’

‘Don’t ever think that, man. It just depends where you are. There are about a million and a half addicts in Peru alone. In South America it has been a part of the diet since the Incas used it as a pep pill. You can sniff it into the mucous membrane. The poor swines take it because it mutes their hunger and because it’s the only way they can face hellish hard work in conditions a lot worse than my pigs have. They chew it mixed with ash. You’re right, though, from a European viewpoint it’s one of the lesser problems. The second is what we call cannabis.’

‘Hashish,’ I said.

‘Hashish in the Middle East, kif in Morocco, bhang in Kenya. Called Indian hemp, marijuana …’

I interrupted, ‘These are all the same?’

‘Roughly. It’s easy to grow, the flowers and leaves are made into cigarettes, while the resin is dried into a slab which is smoked in a pipe – that is hashish.’

‘Where is it grown?’ I asked.

‘Almost any damn where. There are some trade routes that come out of Jordan south to Sinai through Negev into Egypt. There’s the route out of Syria to Sharm-el-Sheik, at the tip of Sinai, through Saudi Arabia. And there is the sea route from Tyre to Gaza …’

‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘I get it. Now what about opium?’

‘Well, that’s the third drug. It’s a very different story from the others.’

‘Tell me about opium,’ I said.

The kettle had been singing for five minutes and he turned the wick of the oil lamp up a little to give him light to make tea. I wielded the bent wire toasting-fork and put a dish of Welsh butter nearer to the fire to soften it. Outside the wind moaned around the small windows. ‘Opium,’ said Glynn as he warmed the teapot.

‘Difficult to grow, therefore sought after. The basis of narcotic smuggling, grows anywhere up to a latitude of 56°. The oriental poppy or the common poppy is of no interest to the narcotic trader, only the P.S.L. (the
Papavar somniferum Linnaeus
) gives opium. They are sown in May for the August crop and in August for the April crop.’

‘It’s like painting the Forth Bridge,’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s year-round employment,’ said Glynn. ‘To get it … you want to know?’

‘Sure.’

‘Little incisions are cut into the green capsules of the poppy before the seeds ripen. White latex appears and you wait ten to fifteen hours for the latex to harden and turn brown. The evening they do this you can smell the aroma for miles.’

‘Are there various strains of poppy?’

‘Yes, from purple-black to white, but I don’t know which strain is the best.’ Glynn made the tea and I traded a thick piece of toast with him.

‘Why do Home Office do sample tests?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. What we can do is make a fair guess at whereabouts a batch came from, by analysis. But it’s seldom needed; they come packaged with trade marks and even signs saying “Beware of Imitations”. You must know that.’

‘Yes, I have seen some of those packs,’ I admitted. ‘But where is it grown? You haven’t said where.’

‘Chiengrai in Northern Siam is said to be the world trading centre, but whether that is true or not, we can say that it is the Yunnan-Kwang-si area. Or let’s generalize and say Burma, Laos, Siam, and Korea. The Americans say that the Chinese Government support the traffic to undermine U.S. moral fibre. It tends to move towards the U.S.A. anyway, because that’s where it commands the best prices. Mind you, I’ve been talking
about illegal cultivation, but Yugoslavia, Greece, Japan, and Bulgaria grow it legally, as well as India, Turkey, and Russia. The U.K. produces forty-five legal kilos a year.’

‘And there’s the processing too?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Glynn, ‘the latex from the P.S.L. poppy isn’t much good as it is. It has to be made into morphine base, and then that has to be made into diacetyl-morphine. Which is what you would call “heroin”, or “H”, or “horse” I believe, in some circles.’

‘Do you need a big place to do that?’

‘It’s the drainage, man,’ Glynn said, ‘that’s the problem. There is a tremendous amount of acetic acid to get rid of. If you start floating it down the public drains it’s likely to excite attention. You know what acetic acid is like?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s the stuff my local supermarket sells as vinegar.’

‘Supermarket,’ said Glynn, pronouncing each syllable separately, ‘yes, they would do that in London.’

We talked on into the lonely Welsh night, eating sandwiches and toast and drinking strong tea with goat’s milk in it.

Dawn crawled red-eyed over the horizon before we finished talking. Glynn dozed in his huge wing armchair. I could get no further with the crossword.

I lifted the latch gently and stepped outside into the damp Welsh mists.

On the horizon bare branches grew across the grey skyline like cracks in a sheet of ice. Foraging around the snow patches rooks fluttered and flopped until my arrival sent them climbing into the moist air, their black wings richly pink in the light.

I thought about my talk with Glynn as my shoes built up a rim of loam. So the green canister had contained traces of crude morphine. I was right about the explosives in my car. Someone wanted to destroy the evidence. Where had it come from, how much had there been, who had moved it, to where? My investigation at Albufeira was no nearer to completion than my crossword, in which I had made
STALLION
into
STARLING
. The clue to 19 down was ‘Bright red’. I wrote down
BALAS
– a red ruby.

‘Bright red,’ I thought; perhaps I should write
TOMAS
; he had bright red hair which he dyed. Why did he dye it? Was he bright red in the political sense? H.K. said he had fought in Spain. Would H.K. know, and if he did would he tell me the truth? It was alarming that so few people told me the truth. Fought in Spain, I thought. I wonder how many Englishmen fought in Spain? The Home Office keeps a file devoted to Englishmen who fought in Spain. I would ask Jean to study it.