Madrigal for Charlie Muffin (2 page)

Then there had been a reason for it. Edith had been alive, sharing the existence and the fear, ageing visibly and trying to hide it. ‘
I didn’t know it was going to be like this, Edith. But trust me. We’ll beat the bastards
.’ And so she’d trusted him, like she always had. But he hadn’t beaten them. At the moment when it had mattered, when he thought the vengeance hunt had been abandoned, he’d relaxed. And the bullet meant for him had taken away half her spine.

Charlie shook his head, an angry, physical gesture. The recollections of Edith were in the closed, no-entry part of his mind, the place of the deepest guilt. Always came out when he drank too much.

Charlie struggled up, moving through the pot-cluttered kitchen, opening cupboards and then the refrigerator, staring disappointedly at the age-wrinkled tomato and some forgotten celery, limp like he would probably have been if the whore hadn’t crossed the road. He’d meant to bring something back from the pub, but he’d forgotten: he seemed to forget a lot of things lately. Charlie groped back into the main room, staring around as if seeing it for the first time.

The home of the nobody man. There were no mementoes or souvenirs or photographs, not even of Edith. It was like a doll’s house setting, which real people never occupied, a small settee and two matching chairs and a cabinet with some books he could never maintain the concentration to read and a television which bored him with its inanities. A place to come to, out of the rain, when the forecasters got it right.

Directly inside the bedroom, Charlie halted in near fright at the sudden, sag-shouldered reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He still wore the unnecessary raincoat and looked like a bundle that someone had been embarrassed about and tied in polythene before leaving on a rubbish dump. About right, he thought. He undressed, letting the clothes puddle about him on the floor, but ignored the bed. Charlie knew it would rise and fall on the sea of booze if he lay down, until he had to dash for the bathroom anyway. He filled the basin with water and sank his face deeply into it. He kept coming up for breath, then down again, finally panting to a halt and gazing at his dripping, pouch-eyed image. Broken veins showed bright in his nose and cheeks.

‘Bloody fool,’ he said. The whisky-buoyed bravado was ebbing away. They wouldn’t have forgotten. Just one mistake and the hunt would start all over again. And he didn’t want to get caught. Any life, even one as empty as that he now lived, was better than what would happen if they ever found him.

Charlie dried his face and was reentering the bedroom when the telephone which never rang jarred through the tiny apartment. His immediate reaction was one of fear. He watched it for several moments and then reached out hesitantly.

‘Hello?’ There was still a vague fog of alcohol in his voice.

‘Charlie,’ said the voice. ‘I’ve been calling you for hours. It’s Rupert Willoughby.’

Charlie had rehearsed the approach but when the time came he couldn’t think of the prepared words. Instead, he said, ‘I’d like to see you.’

‘Good idea,’ said the underwriter. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem.’

It was a measure of how careless Charlie had become that he talked unaware of the listening device that had been implanted in his receiver. In the early days he had dismantled it regularly, but, as with everything else, he hadn’t bothered for months.

Sure of the man and his movements, they recrossed the river after the surveillance ended, because the pubs were better in Chelsea and Pimlico. They should not have gathered in a group at all, just as they shouldn’t have left Charlie’s apartment block until the arrival of the relief team, but they had been doing it for so long, on monthly rotating shifts, that most of the usual rules were being ignored. Tonight it was the pub on the corner of Bessborough Place. The supposed whore was first; the ridiculous shoes had made her feet hurt and she had managed to get a taxi. The two who had pretended to be lovers arrived as she was ordering the drinks. They went straight to a vacant table, waiting for her to carry the glasses across.

‘Good health,’ said the man, lifting the beer mug. His fingernails were bitten and he had chipped teeth; his breath smelled and the girl in the exaggerated high heels was glad she hadn’t been selected to be his partner.

‘Cheers,’ she said. Beneath the table she slipped off the shoes and began kneading her feet. ‘I actually thought he was going to approach me tonight.’

‘What would you have done?’ asked the man.

Knowing the answer would upset him, she said, ‘Gone with him, of course.’

‘It’s been a year,’ protested the other woman. ‘It’s stupid.’ Crossing the bridge, her partner had touched her breast, twice, pretending it was an accident but she knew it hadn’t been. She knew there was no objection she could make either. Dirty bastard.

‘Difficult to imagine that he was once so good, isn’t it?’ said the man reflectively.

‘I don’t think he ever was,’ said the girl in the prostitute’s disguise. ‘I think it’s some typical bureaucratic mistake in Moscow; the sort of thing they do all the time.’

The man shook his head positively. ‘Not this one. Charlie Muffin is important, for some reason.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’d better get back to the embassy.’

The two women looked at each other, irritated. It was the third night in succession he’d avoided buying any drinks and they were sure he was charging more on his expenses than they were.

‘This is a shitty job,’ complained the girl who had been fondled. ‘Really shitty.’

By the time they got back, the telephone conversation between Charlie and Rupert Willoughby had already been reported to Moscow. And Kalenin knew the protection he had evolved was possible. The priority cables were already arriving from Dzerzhinsky Square.

‘I’m bored.’

Rupert Willoughby didn’t bother to look up from his book at Clarissa’s protest. ‘As usual,’ he said.

‘Amuse me then.’

‘I’m your husband, not your jester.’

‘And fuck all good at either.’

‘You really shouldn’t swear,’ said Willoughby. ‘You always sound as if you’re reading the words from a prompt card.’

‘Fuck!’ she said defiantly.

‘Still not right,’ said Willoughby, knowing the condescension would irritate her even more. He lowered the book to look at her. She was moving listlessly around the apartment, lifting and replacing ornaments and running her hand along the top of the furniture.

‘Jocelyn and Arabella have taken the yacht to Menton,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘They’ve invited me down.’

‘They usually do.’

‘I thought I’d go.’

‘Why not?’ Intent on her reaction, he said, ‘I’m seeing Charlie Muffin tomorrow.’

‘Charlie!’ She stopped. The brightness was immediate. ‘I’d love to see him again.’

She’d tried hard enough after New York. Which is what had planted the idea in Willoughby’s mind after the man’s telephone call and the yacht invitation.

‘I’ll ask him to dinner,’ he promised.

2

The office of the intelligence director was on the Waterloo side of the Thames. Sir Alistair Wilson asked the driver for the cross-over route through Parliament Square; purposely early for the meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary responsible for liaison between the department and the government, he’d heard the displays were particularly good this year and he wanted to see for himself.

The rose beds in St James’s Park were by the lake, bursts of Ophelia and Pascali and Rose Gaujard. He leaned forward, studying with an expert’s eye the colour lustre and feeling the texture of the leaves. Growing roses was Wilson’s hobby and he liked to see a naturalness about their arrangement, not this patterned rigidity, as if they were sections of some jigsaw puzzle. But over-arranged or not, the blooms were better than his. It had to be the soil in Hampshire, full of chalk. When he got the chance, he’d talk to the gardener about increasing the compost to balance. Wilson smiled at the thought; he was going to do so much, when he got the chance.

Distantly, somewhere in the direction of the Mall, a clock bell chimed and he set off towards Whitehall. For a man who until five years before had commanded a Gurkha regiment and been seconded to intelligence with a reputation for efficient discipline, Wilson’s appearance was a personal contradiction. Careless of the obvious amusement it caused within his working circle, he wore a deerstalker, because it had flaps he could bring down over his ears in the winter and after so much time in India he suffered from the cold. The suit was good but neglected, thick tweed – again for the cold – but the trousers were absolutely without crease: although there were lots of the wrong sort, crimped tiredly behind the knees and elbows. The overcoat, of forgotten fashion, was too long and over-padded at the shoulders and cuffs, and again at the elbows the wear was obvious; in another six months, it would be threadbare.

He was bonily thin and the face was hawkish, big-nosed, with sharp, attentive eyes. Greying hair escaped from beneath the hat, like a plume, heightening the bird-like appearance. He moved awkwardly, limping where the left knee refused to bend. Wilson had come unscathed through Europe, Korea and Aden but almost lost his leg when a polo pony fell and rolled on him in Calcutta. For years it had irritated him, because of the physical hindrance, but now he was only aware of it in the coldest weather, when the ache settled deep in his calf.

After the confetti of memoranda and demands for speed, Sir Alistair knew that the location of the leak, coupled with the timing, would increase rather than diminish the pressure. It was like sailing out of the fog and seeing the rocks only yards away.

Sir Berkeley Naire-Hamilton hurried fussily across the office to meet him, hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you, my dear fellow. Good to see you.’

‘And you,’ said Wilson.

‘I’ve tea. Earl Grey, I’m afraid. All right? You’ll take it with lemon, of course?’

The man bustled around a side table where the tea things were set, asking the questions automatically without any wish or expectation of a reply.

Wilson accepted his tea and, instead of returning to his ornate, over-powering desk, Naire-Hamilton seated himself opposite the director on a matching, wing-backed chair.

‘Delighted to hear there’s a breakthrough,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure you will be,’ warned Wilson.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded the permanent civil servant. Naire-Hamilton was a florid-faced, balding man, a rim of tightly clipped white hair hedged around his face. There was the hint of a minor stroke or some facial paralysis, which had caused the left-hand side to collapse slightly, making one eye more pronounced than the other. Naire-Hamilton had a tendency to the flamboyant, with broadly striped suits and pastel shirts with matching ties. It went with the vague foppishness of the office. It was traditional Whitehall, like bowlers and striped trousers with black jackets and vintage Dow with Stilton. The furniture was predominantly Georgian, bulbous-calved with a lot of leather, and there were ceiling-to-floor bookcases with volumes that couldn’t easily be removed because they’d remained unread for so long that the covers were stuck edge to edge. The walls were panelled and hung with portraits of bewigged chancellors and diplomats and there was a large and heavily decorated grandfather clock. It ticked with a constantly sticky, hesitating tick, demanding to be listened to in case it didn’t reach the next second. Wilson found the clock irritating. He wasn’t sure about Naire-Hamilton either.

‘Rome,’ announced Wilson.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Naire-Hamilton brought his hand up over his sagging eye, a habit of embarrassment.

‘I wish I weren’t.’

‘That’s … it’s.…’ Naire-Hamilton’s hand moved from his eye, in a snatching gesture, as if he could pick the proper expression from the air.

‘…where the traitor is,’ said Wilson.

Naire-Hamilton carefully replaced his teacup on a wine table beside his chair and said, ‘Tell me why you’re so sure.’

‘Four months ago we started transmitting in monitored batches through normal Foreign Office channels an apparently genuine advisory document, recommending the manner of British response to Russian efforts to increase its influence throughout Africa.’

‘Why Africa?’

‘Because we had a lot of embassies to cover and the size of the continent gave us sufficient number of towns and cities.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The document was identical, but each message listed a different African city or town from which the intelligence prompting the cable was supposed to have come. And each receiving embassy was accorded an identifiable capital; the effect was to make each cable individual.’

‘Jolly good,’ said Naire-Hamilton. It sounded as if he were applauding the winning six during the annual Eton–Winchester cricket match.

‘Three days ago the document was relayed from Moscow to all the Warsaw Pact embassies. Our source checked back with Prague, for clarification, as we instructed. And got the reply that the message emanated from Cape Town.’

Naire-Hamilton frowned but, before the question came, Wilson said, ‘Cape Town was the code allocation we gave Rome. There can’t be any mistake.’

‘That couldn’t be worse.’

‘I thought it might be bad.’

The Permanent Under Secretary splayed his fingers, to tick off the points. ‘In three weeks’ time, Italy is hosting a Common Market Summit; every European president, prime minister, foreign minister and God knows how many other ministers will be there.…’ The first finger came down. ‘Chief item on the agenda is an attack mounted by us against Italy, for using Market regulations to avoid their full budgetary contribution.…’ He lowered the second finger. ‘We intend announcing our intention to lessen our financial commitment to NATO unless Italy gets into line.…’ Down went the third finger. ‘This year Britain has the presidency of the Council.…’ He threw up his hands in despair. ‘… and now we’re going to be shown up as the country to have right in the middle of everything a traitor leaking it all back to Moscow.…’

‘I understand the difficulty,’ said the intelligence director. Naire-Hamilton seemed to have overlooked that there had been three assassinations; perhaps he didn’t have enough fingers.