Our Game (11 page)

Merriman again: "So don't you go spoiling our game, Tim Cranmer, do you hear? If they catch Larry and he claims he worked for us, we'll deny it and go on denying it right up to the trial and out the other end. If he says he worked for you, then Mr. Timothy Cranmer, ex-Treasury, gets dropped down a very deep hole. And in the new spirit of openness, dear boy: If you so much as open your mouth, God help you."

"Is their ambassador presenting Checheyev as a bona fide Diplomat?"

"Ex-diplomat. Yes, he is. And since we never raised a finger of complaint against Checheyev in the four years he was

London, for the obvious reason that we wanted to keep the intelligence flowing, we're taking the same position. If anyone breathes the word spook, the Foreign Office will have vapours."

"What about Checheyev's relationship with Larry?"

"What about it? It was legit. Checheyev was a cultural attaché, active, popular, and effective. Larry was a pinko intellectual has-been who accepted regular freebies to Mother Russia, Cuba, and other unsavoury corners of the globe. Now he's a quietly flowing don in Bath. Their relationship was mural and proper, and if it wasn't, no one's saying so." Merriman had not taken his eyes off me. "If the Russians ever get the idea that Larry Pettifer worked for this service—had been, for the last twenty and more years, as you have repeatedly reminded us, our most obedient servant—there will be an earthquake, do you follow me? They've already given your nice friend Zorin the summary heave-ho—alcoholism, passive conspiracy, having his head up his arse—he's under house arrest and by all accounts stands a good chance of being shot at dawn. It's extremely nice of us not to have done the same to you. If they ever take it into their tiny minds—the police, the Russians, either or both: it's the same thing in this situation, since the police are flying blind and we propose to keep them that way—that this service, in cahoots with one or other of the Russian mafias, elected at a time when the Russian economy is dying of the common cold to con it out of thirty-seven million quids' worth of the best ..." He gave up. "You can finish the sentence for yourself. Yes, what is it?"

It was the eternal refrain in me. Even in my turmoil, I could not hold it back: "When was Larry last seen?" I said. "Ask the police, except don't."

"When did Checheyev last visit Britain?"

"No Checheyev entered Britain in the last six months. But since it was received wisdom that Checheyev was never his name in the first place, it would be fairly surprising if he came back as somebody he'd never been."

"Have you tried his aliases?"

"May I remind you that you're retired?" He had had enough of small talk. "You're to do nothing, young Tim Cranmer, d'you hear? You're to sit in your castle, perform your good works, churn out your vintage pipi, act natural and look innocent. You're not to leave the country without Mummy's permission, and we've got your passport, though these days that's not the guarantee it used to be, alas. Your not to make the smallest move towards Larry by word, deer gesture, or telephone. Not you, not your agents or instruments, not your delicious Emma. You're not to discuss Larry or his disappearance or any part of this conversation with anyone at all, and that includes colleagues and connections. Does Larry still flirt with Diana?"

"He never did. He just kept up with her to annoy me. And because they decided they hated the Office."

"Absolutely nothing has happened. Nobody is missing. You're an ex-Treasury boffin who lives with a neurotic child composer, or whatever she is, and grows bloody awful wine. Over and out. If you call us, make it a full-blown clandestine call from a safe phone. The number we're giving you has a rotating final digit for each day. Sunday's one, Monday's two. Do you think you can handle that?"

"Seeing that I invented the system, yes."

Marjorie Pew handed me a slip of paper with an 071 number typed on it. Merriman kept talking.

"If the rozzers want to talk to you again, you're to continue lying in your teeth. They're trying to find out what research you were doing at the Treasury, but Treasury is being anally retentive as Treasury usually is, and the rozzers will it nowhere. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. You were never here. Cranmer? Cramer? Never heard of him."

We were alone, Merriman and Cranmer, blood brothers as always. Merriman had taken my arm. He always took your arm to say goodbye.

"After all we've done for him," he said. "A pension, a fresh start, a good job after practically every university in England had turned him down, status. Now this."

"It's too bad," I agreed. There seemed nothing else worth saying.

Merriman smiled roguishly. "You haven't executive-actioned him, have you, Tim?"

"Why should I have done?"

For the first time that day, I came within an ace of losing the last of what Marjorie Pew had called my overcontrol.

"SA why shouldn't you have done?" Merriman countered archly. "Isn't that rather what crooks do to each other, in preference to dividing up the loot?" A mirthless giggle. "And it is simply marvellous with Emma? Are you deliriously in love?"

"Yes, but she's away at the moment."

"I can't bear it. Where?"

"Attending a couple of performances of her stuff in the Midlands."

"Shouldn't you be there to chaperone her?"

"She prefers to do those things alone."

"Of course. Her independent streak. And she's not too young for you?"

"When she is, I've no doubt she'll tell me."

"Bully for you, Tim. Stout boy. Never withdraw your cavalry from the battle, I always say. The Emmas of this world require our constant attention. Look at her record."

"No, thank you."

But with Merriman you never score. "No, thank you? You haven't peeked?"

"No, and I don't intend to."

"But, my dear boy, you must! So full, so varied, quel courage! Change the names, you could write a blockbuster in your old age. Far more lucrative than Uncle Bobby's weasel's piss. Tim?"

"What is it?"

His fingers tightened round my biceps. "This long, long connection you had with dear Larry. Winchester, Oxford, the Office ... So fruitful at the time. So appropriate. But today. dear boy, a no-no."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"The image, dearie. The noble past, the old era. In the hands of Grub Street, dynamite. They'll be crying university spy rings and the love that dare not speak its name before you can say Kim Philby. And you weren't, were you?"

"Weren't what?" I replied, fighting off the memory of Emma standing naked at my bedroom window, asking me the same question.

"Well, you know. You and Larry. Any of that. Were you?'“

“If you're enquiring whether we were homosexuals and traitors, we were neither. Larry was that public school rarity the Compleat Heterosexual."

He gave my arm another lingering squeeze. "Poor you. What a disappointment for a healthy lad. Ah well, that's the way of it, isn't it? Punished for the crimes we never committed, while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else. So important that we're all terribly, terribly careful. The worst is scandal. Lie as much as you like, but spare me scandal. Very hard for the Office to find its niche these days. Lots of flies round the honey pot. Always here, dear boy. Anytime."

Munslow was hovering in the anteroom. Seeing me emerge, he fell in beside me. His hands dangled uncomfortably at his sides. Neither of them carried my passport.

FIVE

I HAD Two hours to kill before the last train left for Castle Cary, and probably I walked. Somewhere I must have bought an evening newspaper, though I loathe them. It was in my raincoat pocket the next morning, folded into a grimy wad of illiterate newsprint, with the crossword completed in spiky capitals quite unlike my own. And I must have had a couple of Scotches along the way, for I remember little of the journey beyond the reflection riding along beside me in the black window, and sometimes the face was Larry's, sometimes mine, and sometimes Emma's with her hair up, wearing the eighteenth-century pearl collar I had given her the day she brought her piano stool to Honeybrook. So much was in my head that nothing was. Larry has stolen thirty-seven million; Checheyev is his accomplice; I am supposed to be another. He has fled with the loot; Emma has gone after him. Larry, whom I taught to steal, rifle desks, pick locks, photograph papers, memorise, bide his time, and, if he ever had to, run and hide. Colonel Volodya Zorin, once the pride of Moscow's England section, is under house arrest. Crossing the footbridge at Castle Cary station, I was confused by the clatter of young shoes in the Victorian ironwork and fancied I smelled steam and burning coals. I was a boy again, lugging my school suitcase down the stone steps for another solitary holiday with Uncle Bob.

My splendid old Sunbeam stood in the station car park, where I had left it. Had they tampered with it, fitted it with bugs and tracking devices, sprayed it with the latest magic paint? The modern technology was beyond me. It always had been. Driving, I was irritated by a pair of car lights close on my tail, but on that winding lane only fools and drunks attempt to overtake. I cleared the ridge and passed through the village. On some nights the church was floodlit. Not tonight. In cottage windows the last television screens flickered like dying embers. The headlights came racing up behind me, flashing from dip to full beam and back again. I heard the honking of a horn. Pulling over to let whoever it was pass, I saw Celia Hodgson waving hilariously at me from her Land-Rover. I waved hilariously back. Celia was one of my local conquests from the days before Emma, when I was the absentee landlord of Honeybrook and the most eligible weekend divorce in the parish. She lived in penury on a large estate near Sparkford, rode to hounds, and masterminded our country holiday scheme for urban children. Inviting her to lunch with me one Sunday, I was surprised to find myself in bed with her before the avocado. I still chaired her committee, we still chatted in the grocer's shop. I never slept with her again, and she didn't seem to grudge me Emma. Sometimes I wondered whether she remembered the episode at all.

The stone gateposts of Honeybrook rose before me. Slowing to a crawl, I switched on my brass foglight and willed myself to study the tyre marks in the drive. First John Guppy's postal van. Any other driver swings left when he wants to avoid the three big potholes in the dip, but John, despite my best entreaties, prefers to swing right because that's what he's been doing these forty years, churning the grass verge and trampling the daffodil bulbs.

Beside John Guppy ran the brave thin line of Ted Lanxon's bicycle tyres. Ted was my grower, bequeathed to me by Uncle Bob with orders to keep him till he dropped, which he resolutely refused to do, preferring to perpetuate my uncle's many errors. And bouncing through the middle of everything came the Toiler sisters in their jungle-painted Subaru, as much off the ground as on it. The Toilers were our part-time helpers and Ted's bane, but also his delight. And straddling the Toilers ran the alien imprint of a heavy lorry. Something must have been delivered. But what? The fertiliser we ordered? Came on Friday. The new bottles? Came last month.

In the gravel sweep before the house I saw nothing untoward, until the nothing began to bother me. Why were there no tyre tracks in the gravel? Had the Toiler girls not roared through here on their way to the walled garden? Had not John Guppy parked here when he delivered my mail? And what about my mystery lorry, which had come all this way only to make a vertical takeoff?

Leaving my lights burning, I got out of the car and patrolled the sweep, scouring it for the marks of feet or car tyres. Somebody had raked the gravel. I switched off the lights and mounted the steps to the house. On the train journey, my back had acted up. But as I let myself into the porch, the pain left me. A dozen envelopes lay on the doormat, most of them brown. Nothing from Emma, nothing from Larry. I studied the postmarks. They were all a day late. I studied the gummed joins. They were too well sealed. When would the Office ever learn? Setting the envelopes on the marble-topped side table, I climbed the six steps to the Great Hall without putting on the light and stood still.

And listened. And sniffed. And caught a waft of warm body on the still air. Sweat? Deodorant? Men's hair oil? If I couldn't define it, I could recognise it. I eased my way down the passage towards my study. Halfway along, I caught it again: the same deodorant, the faintest whiff of stale cigarette smoke. Not smoked on the premises—that would be insanity Smoked in a pub or car perhaps—not necessarily by the person whose clothes had borne the stale fumes—but alien cigarette smoke all the same.

I had laid no clever traps before I set out for London this morning, no hairs in locks, no bits of cotton thread stretched across the hinges, had taken no Polaroid pictures. I hadn't needed to. I had my dust. Monday is Mrs. Benbow's day off. Her friend Mrs. Cooke will come only when Mrs. Benbow comes, which is her way of disapproving of Emma. Between Friday night and Tuesday morning, therefore, nobody dusts the house unless I do. And usually I do. I enjoy a little housework, and on Mondays I like to polish my collection of eighteenth-century barometers and one or two oddments that receive less than their fair share of Mrs. Benbow's rather strict ministrations: my Chinese Chippendale footstools and the campaign table in my dressing room.

This morning, though, I had risen early, and with the tradecraft that seemed to have been laid on me since childhood, I had let the dust lie where it was. With a log fire in the Great Hall and another in the drawing room, I get a fine crop by Monday morning but an even better one by Monday night. And I saw as soon as I entered my study that there was no dust on my walnut desk. On its entire surface not one speck of honest dust. The brass handles pristine. I could smell the polish.

So they came, I thought without emotion. It's a given: they came. Merriman summons me to London, and while I am safely under his eye he sends his ferrets in a furniture van, or an electricity van, or whatever vans they use these days, to break into my house and search it, knowing that Monday is a good day. Knowing that Lanxon and the Toiler girls work five hundred yards away from the main house, inside a brick-walled garden cut off from everything except the sky. And while he is about it, Merriman slaps a mail check on me for good measure and by now, no doubt, a telephone check as well.