Our Game (20 page)

Bryant sat one end of the table, I sat the other, Luck between us in his shirtsleeves. I wondered where his jacket was. On the floor to Luck's right lay an open briefcase in fake brown leather. In its partitions I spotted four rectangular packages of different sizes, each wrapped in black plastic and labelled. On the labels were references written with a red felt-tipped pen, such as LP Exb 27, which I took to mean Exhibit 27 in the case of Lawrence Pettifer. It was somehow natural to my attenuated state of mind that I found myself worrying less about Exhibit 27 than about the other twenty-six. And if twenty-seven, why only four of them in the briefcase?

There was no preamble. Nobody apologised for hauling me over to Bristol on a Saturday afternoon. Bryant had one elbow on the table and was resting his chin in his clenched fist like a man holding his beard. Luck fished a chipped black cassette recorder from the briefcase and dumped it on the table.

"Mind if we do this?"

Not waiting to hear whether I minded or not, he pressed the start switch, snapped his fingers three times, stopped the tape, and wound it back. So we listened to Luck's fingers snapping three times. He had acquired a shaving rash since I had last seen him, and bags under his little eyes.

"Does your friend Dr. Pettifer possess a car, Mr. Cranmer?" he demanded morosely. And beckoned at the recorder with his long head: speak to that thing, not to me.

"In London, Pettifer had a stable of cars," I replied. "They tended to be other people's."

"Whose?"

"I never asked. I was not familiar with his acquaintances.”

“How about in Bath?"

"In Bath I have no idea what arrangements he made for his transport."

I was being dull and literal. I was much older than I had been a week ago.

"When did you last see him in a car?" said Luck.

"I would be pressed to remember."

Bryant had acquired a new smile. It had something of victory in it. "Oh, we'll press you if that's what you want, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Won't we, Oliver?"

"I understood that you had called me here to identify some property," I said.

"We did," Bryant agreed.

"Well, if it's his car you're talking about, I'm afraid it's most unlikely I can help you."

"Ever see him in a green or black Toyota, model circa 1990?" Luck asked.

"I am no expert in Japanese cars."

"Mr. Cranmer-sir is no expert in anything," Bryant explained to Luck. "He don't know nuffink, Officer. You can tell by all those big foreign books he's got in his mansion."

From the briefcase Luck handed me a thumbed police manual of line drawings of cars. As I turned its pages I saw the outlines of a 1989 blue Toyota Carina with the black flashing just like the one Larry had used for his positively last Sunday appearance at Honeybrook. Luck had seen it too.

"How about this one?" he was demanding, holding down the page with his bony finger.

"I'm afraid it doesn't ring a bell."

"Meaning no?"

"Meaning I do not recall him driving such a car."

"Then why does Mr. Guppy, your local postman, recall seeing a black or green Toyota driven by someone answering to Pettifer's description entering your drive just as he was coming out of the village church on a very hot Sunday, he thinks in July?"

I was sickened that they should have questioned John Guppy. "I have no idea why he should recall or not recall any such thing. And since the entrance to my drive is not visible from the church, I am inclined to doubt whether he did."

"The Toyota passed the church heading in your direction," Luck retorted. "It disappeared out of sight below the churchyard wall and did not come out the other end. The only turning it could have taken was into your drive."

"The car could have emerged without Mr. Guppy's noticing," I replied. "It could have stopped on the verge."

While Bryant looked on, Luck again foraged in his briefcase, extracted one of the packages and from it a plastic-covered bankbook from Larry's bank in London. It was such an old friend to me I almost smiled. I must have been through hundreds of them in my time, always trying to puzzle out what had happened to Larry's money, who he had given it to, which cheques he had forgotten to pay in.

"Did Pettifer ever make you a present of any cash, by any chance?" Luck asked.

"No, Mr. Luck, Dr. Pettifer never gave me any money.”

“How about you giving him some?"

"I lent him small sums from time to time."

"How small?"

"Twenty here. Fifty there."

"You call that small, do you?"

"I'm sure it would feed a lot of starving children. It didn't keep Larry going long."

"Do you wish to change, in any shape or form, your story to the effect that you and Pettifer were never once involved in any type of business transaction?"

"It's the truth. Therefore I do not wish to change it."

"Page eight," he said, and tossed the bankbook at me.

I turned to page eight. It was the statement covering September 1993, which was the month when the Office paid Larry his hard-earned gratuity: £150,000, drawn on the account of Mills & Highborn, Trustees, of St. Helier, Jersey, wiping out an overdraft of £3,728.

"Do you have any idea at all," Luck demanded, "where, how, or why Dr. Pettifer got hold of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling in September 1993?"

"None. Why not ask the people who made the payment?"

My suggestion annoyed him. "Mills and Highborn, thank you, is one of your old-fashioned, blue-chip, father-to-son Channel Islands law firms. Partners do not like talking to policemen and are not disposed to hand out customer information without a court order effective in the Islands. However—"

Upstaging him, Bryant placed his forearms on the table, squaring himself for combat.

"However," Luck repeated, "my researches do reveal that the same firm of trustees has also been paying Pettifer an annual salary, apparently on the instructions of certain foreign publishing and film companies registered in funny places like Switzerland. Does that surprise you at all?"

"I don't know why it should."

"Because the so-called salary payments were bogus, that's why. Pettifer never did the work. Foreign book royalties for books he didn't even write. Retainer money that didn't retain him. The entire structure was a figment from start to finish, and not a very competent one either, if you want my opinion. You haven't any theories to offer, I don't suppose, at all, have you, Mr. Cranmer, as to who might be going to all this trouble on the Doctor's behalf?"

I had none and was quick to say so. And I was appalled to confirm that the Top Floor's vaunted arrangements for paying Larry his Judas money could, as I had always suspected, be cracked open in a couple of days by one fanatical policeman with a desktop computer.

"There's a very funny thing about this firm Mills and Highborn which I might be permitted to share with you," Luck resumed with dinning sarcasm. "One of its fringe activities, so far as we can establish from certain sources, is channelling unofficial payments on behalf of Her Majesty's government." My world rocked. "By which I mean receiving large cash sums from Her Majesty's Treasury and turning them into other forms of disbursement"—sticking out his jaw at me on the word Treasury—"such as bribes for foreign potentates, such as slush funds for defence contracts and other so-called grey areas of government spending. You wouldn't know anything about that side of things. would you? Mr. Bryant and myself were somewhat enchanted by the coincidence, you see, of you being in Treasury and British government funds being siphoned off to Pettifer's Channel Islands benefactors."

In my wildest nightmares it had not occurred to me that Pay & Allowances Section could be so crass as to use the Larry laundromat for other, unrelated clandestine operations, thus multiplying to infinity the risk of compromising Larry and anybody else on the payroll.

"I'm afraid all this is far beyond me," I said.

"Maybe you'll tell us what isn't beyond you, then," Bryant suggested coarsely. "You being a high-ranking Treasury gentleman, which is about all we're allowed to know about you."

"I've no idea what you are trying to imply."

"Imply? Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, Mr. Cranmer-sir. That would be above my station. Very heady stuff, Treasury slush money, they tell me. Well, I can understand that. After all, if you're slipping a few million to some Arab shyster for helping you flog off your clapped-out fighter planes, why not slip yourself a few bob for being an English gentleman? Or slip it to your accomplice, better still?"

"That's a scandalous and totally untrue allegation.”

“Page thirteen," Luck said.

* * *

"Notice anything?" Luck asked.

It was hard not to. Page thirteen of Larry's bankbook covered the month of July 1994. Until the twenty-first of that month Larry's current account stood at upwards of £140,000. On the twenty-second Larry had withdrawn £138,000, leaving £2,176 to his credit.

"What do you make of it?"

"Nothing. He probably bought a house."

"Wrong."

"He invested it. What do I care?"

"On the twenty-second of July, having advised the manager of his intention by telephone two days before, Dr. Pettifer drew the entire sum of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds in cash across the counter of his bank, in brown envelopes of twenty-pound notes. He refused to accept fifties. He had failed to bring a container, so the cashier had a whip round among the girls till one of them produced a Safeways carrier bag, into which the envelopes were stashed. The next day he paid one thousand pounds cash to his landlady and settled four outstanding bills, including his wine bill. The destination of the remainder of the cash—totalling one hundred and thirty thousand pounds precisely—is as of now unknown."

Why? I was thinking stupidly. What logic is at work here, when a man who is swindling the Russian Embassy of thirty-seven millions has to empty his own bank account for a hundred and thirty thousand? For whom? For what?

"Unless he gave it to you, of course, Mr. Cranmer," Bryant proposed from the head of the table.

"Or unless it was yours in the first place," Luck suggested.

"Not legally, of course," said Bryant. "But we're not talking legal, are we? More the thieves' code. You fiddled it. The Doc banked it. He was your winger. Your accomplice. Right?"

I disdained to reply, so he continued in his tone of laboured knowingness.

"You're a money bug, aren't you, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Magpie is what I like to call them. You've got a lot, but you want more. Way of the world, isn't it? You sit there in the Treasury all day, or you did. You see these big piles of money going here, there, and everywhere, and a lot of them doing no good, I dare say. And you say to yourself: 'Now, Timothy, wouldn't a little of that be better in my pocket than in theirs?' So you fiddle a bit. And no one notices. So you fiddle another bit. A bigger bit. And still no one notices. So as a good businessman you expand. Well, we can't stand still, can we, not in this day and age. No one can. Not human nature, is it? Not after Mrs. Thatcher. And one day an opportunity arises, let us say, for you to break into a certain foreign market. A market where you speak the lingo and have the expertise. Like Russia, for instance. So you pull the big one. You and the Doctor and a certain foreign gentleman of his acquaintance who calls himself Professor. Experts in your ways, all of you. But Mr. Cranmer-sir is the mastermind. The Mister Big. He has the class. The cool. The rank. Am I getting warm at all, sir? You can tell us. We're little people, aren't we, Oliver?"

When you are accused of monstrous things, nothing sounds so feeble as the truth. I had devoted my working life to protecting my country from its predators. Now I was being cast as a predator myself. I had never misappropriated a single penny entrusted to me. Now I was being accused of squirrelling large sums in the Channel Islands and paying them to myself by way of my former agent. Yet as I heard myself protest my innocence, I sounded like any other guilty man. My voice slipped and became strident, my fluency deserted me, I became as unconvincing to myself as to my accusers. Well, that's the way of it, I heard Merriman say: punished for the crimes we never committed while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else.

"We're only thinking aloud, Mr. Cranmer, sir," Bryant explained with elephantine sweetness, when they had heard me out. "No charges are being preferred, not at this stage. It's collaboration we're after, not warm bodies. You tell us where to find what we're looking for, we put it back where it came from, everybody goes home and has a nice glass of Honeybrook wine. Know what I mean?"

"No."

A disjointed interlude followed while Luck produced earlier bankbooks, which differed only in degree from the first. The pattern was clear. Whenever Larry had any substantial money in his account, he drew it in cash. What he did with it remained a mystery. There was a monthly season ticket, still current, for the journey between Bath and Bristol, cost £71. They claimed to have found it in a drawer of the desk in his lecture room. No, I said, I had no idea why Larry should wish to be so much in Bristol. Perhaps for the theatres or the libraries or the women. For a happy moment Luck appeared becalmed. He sat as if winded, mouth open, shoulders rising and falling inside his sweaty shirtsleeves.

"Did Dr. Pettifer ever steal from you at all?" he asked, with that adamant sourness that made him such an unpleasant conversation partner.

"Of course not."

"Odd, that is. You don't have a very high opinion of him in other respects. Why are you so sure he wouldn't steal from you?"

The question was a trick, a prelude to some new onslaught. But not knowing what sort of trick, I had no option but to provide him with a straight answer.

"Dr. Pettifer may be many things, but I do not regard him as a thief," I said, and had scarcely spoken before Bryant was yelling at me. I thought at first it was a tactic to wake me from my absorption. Then I saw him waving a padded envelope in the air above his head.

"What do you regard this lot as, then, Mr. Cranmer, sir?"