Horse Under Water (21 page)

I stepped through the aeroplane door at London Airport and watched the rain swirling across the shiny apron. The mainplanes shed little niagaras, and the ground hostess clamped her collar in her fist and screwed up her face in the teeth of the rainstorm. Jean was waiting for me in the lounge with a heavy briefcase.

It was the beginning of a week of hard work; we had the first meeting of the Strutton Committee. It went as all first meetings go; people requiring definitions, and asking for copies of memos that had long since been lost. Dawlish and I made a good team; I turned the major objections into minor objections and Dawlish’s speciality was ironing out minor objections. As these combined committees go, it was successful enough but I could see that O’Brien was going to make trouble for us. He insisted upon all kinds of procedural rigmarole hoping that Dawlish would get flustered or annoyed or both. But Dawlish had been
weaned on this sort of thing. He let O’Brien talk himself to a standstill and then paused a long time before saying, ‘Oh yes?’ as though he wasn’t sure that O’Brien had made his point. Then Dawlish made
his
point all over again in careful measured syntax as though speaking to a child. Dawlish would rather split his trousers than an infinitive. I tell you it was a pleasure to watch him handle it.

Bernhard was a new, intelligent youth that Charlotte Street had recruited in my absence. He was a tall, good-looking boy who wore woollen shirts, went to see films with writing on them and was apt to use one long word where eight short ones would do. I told him to start investigating all Smith’s holdings. Smith employed a legal staff to wrap up his companies in holding companies, and other holding companies’ companies. It would be a long task.

On Thursday morning Ivor Butcher phoned. He used one of the outside phones which was listed as a Detective Agency in the G.P.O. list. Jean said that I would see him at an S.W. 7 address at 8.30 p.m.

I was busy all that afternoon. At 7.30 I closed and locked the I.B.M. machine which we used to correlate most of the secret information we held in the building. Without it our file cards were meaningless collections of street numbers, road names, photos, and data.

I’d submitted a superficial report of the Albufeira situation; I marked the Alforreca file ‘closed’ and submitted it to Dawlish for initialling. He chiselled
his signature into the little manilla rectangle without comment, then gave the file to Alice, but his eyes never left mine.

Number 37 Little Charton Mews is one of a labyrinth of cobbled cul-de-sacs in that section of Kensington where having a garage as a living-room is celebrated by planting a rose bush in a painted barrel. Outside, two men in short lambswool coats poured whisky from a hip-flask into glasses. I tapped lightly on the brass-plated doorknocker and a man in a rubber gorilla mask opened the door. ‘Come one come all,’ he said. His voice vibrated and boomed inside the thin rubber.

‘Popsies to the right, booze straight on.’ He smelled of Algerian wine.

There was a dense scrum of party-goers – men with regimental ties and girls with velvet gloves up to the armpit.

Someone behind me was using words like ‘quasi-humanist’ and ‘empirical’ and a man who was using two hands to drink his beer said, ‘… so what; does Picasso understand
me
?’

I reached the big table at the far end. Behind it was a man with a paisley scarf inside an open-neck shirt.

He said, ‘There’s only gin, beer, tonic, and …’ he shook a bottle of sherry viciously, ‘… sherry.’ He held it up to what light there was and said ‘sherry’ again. A girl with a long ivory cigarette-holder said, ‘But I like my body better than I like yours.’

I took my drink and wandered off through a doorway into a tiny kitchen. A girl with smudged mascara was eating pilchards out of a tin and sobbing. I turned round. The girl who liked her body was talking about automatic chokes.

Nowhere did I see Ivor Butcher. It was just as crowded upstairs except for a small room at the end of the passage. Inside were three young men in jeans and thick sweaters. The blue TV set had its controls set to give a narrow distorted image and its sound turned down. The soft music of Mingus came from the gramophone. They turned their heads slowly towards me. One face removed its dark glasses, ‘You’re standing there like it’s another channel, dad.’

‘Sorry fellers,’ I said, and closed the door on the gentle fug of reefer smoke. I finally found Ivor Butcher downstairs. In the centre of the crush half a dozen couples danced very slowly so as not to get their clothes slashed by diamond rings. Ivor Butcher was dancing rather unsteadily with a short girl who had green eyes, a large body and a small evening gown.

‘Great to see you pal,’ Ivor Butcher said in a slurred voice. ‘Swell party?’

‘Fascinating,’ I said. He grew with pride and I decided that hyperbole had outlived its usefulness as a means of communication. After his dance Ivor Butcher wanted a word with me. He went out to my car with uncertain steps. The man in the gorilla mask was holding the shoulders of a girl who was being spectacularly ill.

‘Do you know what?’ said Ivor Butcher once we were seated in the car. He was looking around the dashboard anxiously. I pointed to the second knob from the left. He pulled it and the windscreen wipers started. He nodded. Windscreen-wiper motors mar tape recordings.

‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked.

‘I’m being followed,’ he said.

‘Really,’ I said.

‘Straight up,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure until today. Then I phoned you.’

‘I don’t know why you phoned
me,’
I said. ‘There’s nothing
I
can do.’ I paused. ‘It’s gone too far for me to interfere.’

‘Too far?’ said Ivor Butcher. ‘What’s gone too far?’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said, like I’d said too much already.

‘You mean the Portuguese business? The Spanish bloke and all that?’

‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘You’ve been dabbling in pretty big stuff. Can’t Smith help you?’

‘He
says
he can’t. What’s going to happen now?’

I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘You know I could get into a lot of trouble just talking to you.’

Ivor Butcher said, ‘Yeah,’ in varying permutations about twelve times. At what I considered the appropriate interval I said, ‘It was because you gave us false information that things really came to a head. You know,’ I said casually, ‘became treason.’

Ivor Butcher repeated the word treason a few times, changing it from a statement to an interrogative, transcribing it to a minor key and pitching it an octave higher each time. ‘You mean that I could be shot?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘this is England after all. We don’t do things like that. No. You’ll be hanged.’

‘No.’ Ivor Butcher’s voice came back like an echo and he leaned heavily against the passenger door. He had fainted. The man with the gorilla mask left his friend and asked if he could help. ‘My friend isn’t very well,’ I told him. ‘It’s all that heat and noise and strong drink. Perhaps a glass of water would help.’ It took gorilla-head a long time to push his way through to the kitchen. In the meantime Ivor Butcher shook his head and breathed heavily.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘you must think I’m a terrible neddie.’

‘It’s all right,’ I told him, ‘I know exactly how you feel.’ I knew.

‘You’re a good sort, you are,’ he said. ‘Do you think I should make a proper statement? Smith paid me practically nothing for what I did. I’m just small fry.’ He closed his eyes at the thought.

I said to make a proper statement would be a sensible idea. Then gorilla-head came back with a jam-jar of water.

‘There aren’t any glasses left in the kitchen,’ he said in his echoing voice.

He offered the water to Ivor Butcher, who said, ‘He’s the one,’ in a shrill, frightened voice and lost consciousness again.

‘Is that girl with the smudged mascara still in the kitchen?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said gorilla-face. ‘She says Elvis Presley is a square.’ His voice echoed.

‘Why don’t you go and see if you can’t talk her round?’ I said, ‘because you needn’t continue with this surveillance any longer.’

‘Very good, sir,’ he said.

‘And Tinkle Bell,’ I said, ‘take that mask off, it makes your voice echo.’

If you ever get clear away from a difficult situation by abandoning a large part of your personal belongings, you may feel an urgent need of certain articles you have left behind, like a Locarte fluorimeter that has an eight-month delivery time. Don’t
send
for them; because that’s how we traced da Cunha.

I asked Alice for a manilla cover and wrote ‘Ostra’ on the front. Into that I put certified copies of all Ivor Butcher’s mail. I added six foolscap sheets of his statement, laced the file and locked it back into the top drawer of my desk. So far it had no file number. It was my special secret contribution to the nation’s security. I looked at the map. The Ford station-wagon with da Cunha’s laboratory equipment was moving north and looked as though it would cross the Spanish border near Badajoz.

Dawlish called me up for a drink that evening. He had been so busy building the administrative side of the Strutton Committee that I had seen
little of him. I knew that O’Brien was still making things difficult for us. O’Brien, unmarried, propped up the corner of the downstairs bar at the Travellers’ Club, twenty-four hours a day. What he was giving up in food he was gaining in influence. O’Brien was trying to get Foreign Office people on all the subcommittees with executive power. Dawlish said that, at the meeting I had missed, he had taken the liberty of putting me up as convening chairman of the training structure sub-committee. I told him that I might be away for a few days. Dawlish said he thought that might be the case. He blew his nose loudly and smiled drily from behind his big handkerchief. ‘I’ll convene the meeting and you delegate your vote to me. It will be all right.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ I said, and I drank to his success. Dawlish came from behind his desk and stood near the gas fire, which was popping and spluttering as they always do about 5 p.m.

‘Did you check with the Sc.Ad.C.
^*
about the molecular ice-melting theory?’ I asked him.

Dawlish gave a histrionic sigh. ‘Don’t you
ever
give up?’ he said. ‘It is
impossible
to rearrange molecules as a way of changing ice to water.’ We stared at each other for a minute or so. ‘Very well, my boy, I’ll ask him.’ He closed his eyes, gulped down his claret and leaned against the wall like a worn-out roll of lino.

He said, ‘Keightley was on the phone today.’ (Keightley was the liaison officer at Scotland Yard.) ‘You can’t keep this man Butcher available for questioning unless you are preferring charges.’

‘I’ll clear that in a few days,’ I said, ‘he’ll make no complaint; he
wants
to be in custody.’

Dawlish said, ‘I’m feeling a certain amount of pressure in respect of the Alforreca business.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I didn’t ask you to hold the door open. But don’t start closing it now that I’m half-way through.’

Dawlish produced another handkerchief with the aplomb of a tea-party conjurer. ‘Careful not to slam it on my fingers,’ he told me, ‘there’s a good boy. Oh, I know that you have a thousand reasons for not slipping up, but remember that the man who fell off the Empire State Building said to a resident on the first floor as he fell past him, “So far so good”.’ Dawlish smiled blankly.

‘Thank you for those words of encouragement,’ I said. Dawlish walked across to the drink cupboard. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘There are certain things which if I know about I must act upon. As it is I’m happy enough to leave them. But if you go wrong I’ll tear you to shreds and anyone you try to protect will be torn up with you.’

‘What about another drink?’ I said.

‘It’s a good thing you like Tio Pepe,’ replied Dawlish self-consciously.

Dawlish thought I was heading for where the sherry comes from.

The brown tilled earth of the Castilian steppe surrounds Madrid like a brim around a stone hat. The northern section of the stone crown has crumbled to produce the Cuatro Caminos where thousands of
productores
live in the rubble. Along the streets which lie deep between pink-brown buildings only the blue-shirted Falangists go jacket-less. Traffic cops wear flashing white cross-straps on their uniforms and cite, pass and dedicate the brave blue two-decker buses, while between the densely packed riflemen there is scarcely room to pry a peasant. They stand, eyes focused on long ago, lining the route of a procession that never comes.

Café la Vega is a bright, stainless, espresso temple. Cups clatter, machines hiss and high heels click across the white marble floor. An elderly American couple argued about pasteurized milk and Felix the Cat tripped happily through the TV screen in a city where TV is something to go
out
to. From the Super Mercado across the street there is a continual flash of red neon, and an advertisement for sherry balances on a skyline of tiles.

I sat near the door where I could see the street. I ordered some hot chocolate and watched a bald-headed man shining a pair of two-tone shoes. I sipped the sweet cinnamon-chocolate for which Madrid used to be famous. The shoe-shine man’s box was studded with brass studs; inside the lid were pin-ups of movie stars. He delved amongst the bottles, tins, brushes, and cloths and offered a last flick to the toes. From the upper extremities of the two-tones a large hand descended with paper money.

A young army officer in a grey, immaculate uniform, hung around with aiguillettes, tapped his saucer to summon the shoe-shine. The high black boots were a long and careful operation. It was 7.30 p.m. I looked at the menu. I was worried in case something might have gone wrong. This was a country where it is easy to go wrong.

The shoe-shine man was kneeling at my feet. He placed small pieces of paper inside the shoe to prevent polish soiling my sock. After he had finished polishing, one piece of paper remained there. I could have shouted or tapped my saucer in the Spanish manner, or I could have merely pulled the paper out and thrown it away; but I went to the toilet and read it. On the paper it said, ‘Calle de Atocha and Paseo del Prado. Corner. 8.10.’
Both the Army officer and the two-tones were gone by the time I returned to my table.

The wind whistled down the Paseo del Prado and the night was suddenly cold, the way it goes in Madrid’s fickle climate. A new Chev. rolled down on me like the day of judgement, all headlights and flashing signals with chrome and enamel poured over it like cranberry sauce. I sank into the pink upholstery, the hood dipped, and we purred south towards the river.

Cats sat around with their hands in their pockets and stared insolently back into the headlight beams. The driver parked the car with meticulous care and killed the lights. He opened a wrought-iron gate for me and conducted me to a first-floor front. A man silhouetted in the narrow rectangle of window was studying the café opposite with an enormous pair of binoculars. He moved to one side.

Across the street in the tiny
tasoa
the marble table-tops were covered in glasses of Valdepenas, the stone floor with prawn shells and dirty boots. The men in the boots were shouting, smoking, drinking wine and then shouting again. I applied my eyes to the soft rubber eye-pieces of the binoculars. They were trained on the window next door to the café. Iron bars divided the window into rectangles. The scene beyond was bright and clear. The Chevrolet was parked carefully with good reason. The car had more lenses, spotlights, fog lights, overtaking lights – more lenswork than a
fly’s eye. Now I realized that one of the headlights had infra-red beams and was still switched on. Through the infra-red binoculars I saw two men taking scientific instruments out of their packing. Shavings and screwed-up paper littered the floor. Into my ear a voice said, ‘They must be nearly finished. They’ve been at it for nearly an hour.’ It was Stewart, one of the Navy’s Intelligence, who had probably been put on that frogman course just to watch me.

‘They aren’t setting it up,’ I said. It wasn’t the sort of room that would make a good laboratory. I moved aside for the other man to resume observation.

‘What do you want us to do, sir?’ Stewart asked.

‘Who does this house belong to?’ I asked.

‘We’ve put one of the embassy chauffeurs into it since …’ he nodded his head towards the house which held da Cunha’s equipment.

‘Perhaps he has a wife who will make some coffee,’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ said Stewart.

‘You’d better organize it,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling we’re in for a long wait.’

After a lifetime of travelling one is prepared for transient discomfort. A good-quality dressing-gown will double as a blanket, a bed will fold to the size of an umbrella and a pair of soft slippers go into an overcoat pocket. I had all of these things – in my baggage at the hotel.

Stewart and I took an hour each at the binoculars and the chauffeur took an embassy car around the block to cover the back. I don’t know what he was expected to do if they went out that way, but there he was.

At 3.30 in the morning, or what
I
call the night, Stewart woke me.

‘Now there’s a little van parked outside,’ he said. By the time I had got across to the binoculars they were moving the fluorimeter out.

‘Do you have a gun?’ I asked Stewart.

‘No sir,’ he said. I hadn’t considered the possibility that da Cunha would move the laboratory equipment elsewhere. I was waiting for him to turn up. When the van was sagging under the weight the three men locked the back doors and drove away. We followed. It wasn’t a long drive to the airport.

As dawn drew a pink frown across the tired forehead of night a small Cessna aeroplane turned its nose to south-south-west and buzzed happily towards the horizon.

‘Cessna’; I thought of Smith’s file-card; it had to be a Cessna. We watched from the tarmac because none of the three charter planes had a pilot available. Stewart beat on the doors of the padlocked offices and damned them, but it got us no nearer to the equipment that was now at three thousand feet and still climbing. It was 7.22 a.m., 15 December.