Our Game (22 page)

"No," said Luck.

With a final squeeze, Bryant released me.

"Thank you for coming to Bristol, Mr. Cranmer. Expenses downstairs if you wish to claim, sir. Cash."

Luck was holding the door open for me. I think he would have preferred to smash it into my face, but his English sense of fair play restrained him.

With the humiliating imprint of Bryant's fist burning my shoulder, I stepped into the grey evening drizzle and struck a vigorous course up the hill for Clifton. I had booked rooms in two hotels. The first was the Eden, four stars and a nice view down the Gorge. There I was Mr. Timothy Cranmer and heir to Uncle Bob's old Sunbeam, pride of the car park. The second was a seedy motel called the Starcrest on the other side of town. There I was a Mr. Colin Bairstow travelling representative and pedestrian.

Seated now in my elegant room at the Eden overlooking the Gorge, I ordered a minute steak and a half bottle of Burgundy and asked the switchboard to put through no calls till morning. I dropped the steak into the shrubbery below my window, poured the wine down the sink—all but a small glass, which I drank—placed the tray and a spare pair of shoes outside my door, hung up the Do Not Disturb notice, and slipped down the fire stairs and out of the side entrance and walked.

From a call box I dialled the Office emergency number, using 7 as the final digit because it was a Saturday. I heard the sugared voice of Marjorie Pew.

"Yes, Arthur. How can we help you?"

"The police questioned me again this afternoon.”

“Oh yes."

And oh yes to you, I thought.

"They've rumbled the payments to ABSOLOM through our friends in the Channel Islands," I said, using one of Larry's battery of code names. I imagined her typing up ABSOLOM on her screen. "They've unearthed a Treasury connection, and they think I've been siphoning off government funds and paying them to ABSOLOM as my accomplice. They've convinced themselves that this is the same trail that will lead them to the Russian gold."

"Is that all?"

"No. Some fool in Pay and Allowances has been crossing the wires. They've been using the ABSOLOM pipeline to pay other friends apart from ABSOLOM."

Either she was giving me one of her trenchant silences or she couldn't think of anything to say.

"I'm staying in Bristol tonight," I said. "The police may want to have another go at me tomorrow morning."

I rang off, mission accomplished. I had warned her that other sources might be at risk. I had fed her my excuse for not returning to Honeybrook. The one thing she would not be doing was rushing to the police to check my story.

Colin Bairstow's bed at the motel was a lumpy divan with a glittering orange counterpane. Stretched on it full length, with the telephone at my side, I stared at the grimy cream ceiling and considered my next step. From the moment I had received Bryant's telephone message at my club, I had placed myself on operational alert. From Castle Cary station I had driven to Honeybrook, where I collected my Bairstow escape pack: credit cards, driving licence, cash, and passport, all crammed into a scuffed attaché case with old labels testifying to the salesman's wandering life. Arriving in Bristol, I had deposited Cranmer's Sunbeam at the Eden and Bairstow's briefcase in the manager's safe here at the motel.

From the same briefcase I now extracted a ring-backed address book with a speckled fawn gazing from the cover. How much had Office routine changed with the move to the Embankment? I wondered. Merriman hadn't changed. Barney Waldon hadn't. And if I knew the police, any procedure that had worked for twenty-five years was likely to be working for the next hundred.

Heart in mouth, I dialled the Office's automated switchboard and, guided by the numbers in the address book, keyed myself into the Whitehall internal network. Five more digits gave me Scotland Yard's intelligence liaison room. A plummy male voice answered. I said I was North House, which used to be the code name for my section. The plummy voice manifested no surprise. I said the reference was Bunbury, which used to be the code name of the section chief. The plummy voice said, "Who do you wish to speak to, Bunbury?" I asked for Mr. Hatt's department. Nobody had ever met Mr. Hatt, but if he existed, he had charge of vehicle information. I heard rock music in the background, then a breezy girl's voice.

"It's Bunbury from North House with a boring one for Mr. Hatt," I said.

"That's all right, Bunbury. Mr. Hatt likes being bored. This is Alice. What can we be doing you for?"

For two decades I had kept track of Larry's cars. I could have recited the number of every wreck he had ever shown up in, plus colour, age, decrepitude, and luckless owner. I gave Alice the number of the blue Toyota. I had barely spoken the final letter before she was reading the computer printout.

"Anderson, Sally, 9A Cambridge Street, off Bellevue Road, Bristol," she announced. "Want the dirt?"

"Yes, please."

She gave it to me: insurance, owner's phone number, car's visible characteristics, first registered, expiry date, no other cars registered in this name.

At the motel desk, a spotty boy in a red dinner jacket gave me a thumbed street map of Bristol City.

NINE

I TOOK A cab to Bristol Temple Meads railway station and walked from there. I was in an industrial desert made sumptuous by the night. Heavy lorries tore past me, spewing oily mud and plucking at my raincoat. Yet a tender haze hung over the city valley, moist stars filled the sky, and a languid full moon drew me up the hill. As I walked, lane upon lane of orange-lit railway line opened before me, and I remembered Larry and his season ticket, Bath to Bristol, £71 a month. I tried to imagine him as a commuter. Where was business? Where was home? Anderson, Sally, at 9A Cambridge Street. The lorries had deafened me. I couldn't hear my footsteps.

The road, which had begun as a viaduct, joined itself to the hillside. The summit moved to my right. Directly above me stood a terrace of flat-fronted cottages. A red-brick wall made a battlement round them. Up there, I thought, remembering my map. Up there, I thought, remembering Larry's affection for abandoned places. I came to a roundabout, pressed the pedestrians' button, and waited for the motorised cavalry of England to come squealing and clanking to a halt. Gaining the other pavement, I entered a side street festooned with overhead cables. A serious black boy of about six was sitting on the doorstep of the Ocean Fish Bar Chinese Takeaway.

"Is this Cambridge Street? Bellevue Road?"

I smiled, but he didn't smile back. A bearded Druid in a baggy Irish cap stepped a little too carefully out of Robbins Off Licence. He carried a brown paper bag.

"Watch your feet, man," he advised me.

"why?"

"You want Cambridge Street?"

"Yes."

"You're bloody near standin' on it, man."

Following his instructions, I walked fifty yards and turned right. The cottages were on one side only. On the other lay a platform of grass. Round the grass, in crinkle-crankle pattern, ran the brick parapet with red coping that I had seen from below. Playing the accidental tourist, I placed myself before it. From the station, the discontinued high roads of empire streamed into the darkness.

I turned and surveyed the cottages. Each had two windows upstairs, a flat roof, a chimney stack and television aerial. Each was painted a different pastel shade. Front doors to the left, bay windows to the right. In most, as my eye ran along the line of them, the bay window was lit, or a bedroom was lit, or a television flickered, or a phosphorescent doorbell glistened, and you felt a life behind the curtains. Only the last house stood in darkness, and it was 9A. Had the occupants fled? Had two lovers taken off their wristwatches and fallen asleep in one another's arms?

Deliberately, a person with no secrets, I linked my hands behind my back and, colonial style, prepared to inspect the ranks. I am an architect, a surveyor, a potential purchaser. I am a wine-growing Englishman of a certain class. Parked cars blocked the pavement. I took the centre of the road. No blue Toyota. No Toyota of any kind. I walked slowly, making a show of reading the house numbers. Shall I buy this one, or this one? Or all of them?

Sweat was running down my ribs. I'm not prepared, I thought. Not able, not trained, not armed, not brave. I've been too deskbound too long. After fear came a storm of guilt. He's here. Dead. He staggered back and died here. The murderer is about to discover the body. A guilty man has come to take his medicine. Then I remembered that Larry was alive again, and had been alive since Jamie Pringle had remembered the last grouse of the season, and my guilt crept back into its lair.

I had reached the end of the row. Number 9A was a corner house, as every safe house should be. The drawn curtains in the upper windows were orange and unlined Pale light from the street lamp shone on their poor fabric. There was no light from inside.

Continuing my reconnaissance, I turned into the side street. Another upstairs window, unlit. A plastered wall. A side door. Crossing to the opposite pavement, I took a proprietary look up and down the street. A yellow cat stared back at me from behind a net curtain. Among the dozen cars parked each side of the street, one had a plastic cover to protect it from the weather.

Another controlled glance at the doorways, pavements, and parked cars. The shadows were not easy to read, but I could make out no human shape. With the toe of my right shoe I raised the plastic cover and saw the buckled rear bumper and familiar registration number of Larry's blue Toyota. It was one of the little tricks we taught on training courses, for the joes to forget the moment they returned to the real world: if you're worried about your car, put a cover over it.

The side door of the house had neither a handle nor a keyhole. Passing it on my way back, I gave it a furtive push, but it was locked or bolted from inside. A smear of chalk in the shape of an L ran across the centre panels. The lower stroke of the L tailed downward. I touched the chalk mark. It was wax based and resistant to rain. I turned the corner back into Cambridge Street, marched confidently up to the front door, and pressed the bell. Nothing happened. Electricity's cut off. Larry's way with bills. I gave the knocker a diffident tap-tap. It's Honeybrook on New Year's Eve, I thought as the din echoed inside the house: my turn to knock the happy lovers out of bed. I was acting boldly, nothing up my sleeve. But I was thinking seriously of the chalk mark.

I lifted the flap of the letter box and let it slap shut. I rapped on the bay window. I called, "Hey, it's me!"—more for the seeming than the being, for there were people going past me on the pavement. I wrenched at the sash window, trying to move it up and down, but it was locked. I was wearing leather gloves, and they reminded me of Priddy. Still at the bay, I put my face against the glass and by the light from the street lamp squinted inside. There was no entrance hall. The front door opened straight into the living room. I made out the ghostly shape of a portable typewriter on a desk and, below me to my left, a heap of mail, mostly bills and printed matter: Larry could step over them for weeks without a thought. I looked again and saw what I had half seen the first time: Emma's piano stool set in front of the typewriter. Finally, assuming I had by now attracted the interest of the neighbours, I did what legitimate people do in such cases: I took out my diary, wrote in it, tore the page out, and dropped it through the letter box. Then I walked off down the road to give their memories a rest.

I took a brisk walk round the block, keeping at the centre of the road because I didn't like the shadows, till I had reentered the street from the opposite end. I passed the side door a second time, looking not at the chalk mark but in the direction indicated by the tail of the L. L for Larry. L for Larry's tradecraft in the days when he and Checheyev exchanged their secret materials by way of dead-letter boxes and safety signals. In parks. In pub lavatories. In parking lots. In Kew Gardens. L for "I have filled the dead-letter box," signed Larry. The L converted to a C for "I have emptied it," signed CC. Back and forth, not once but more like fifty times in the four years of their collaboration: microfilm for you; money and orders for me; money and orders for you; microfilm for me.

The tail pointed downward, and it was strongly drawn. A defined tail. It ran diagonally towards my right foot, and at the toe of my right foot ran the skirting of the door, and underneath the skirting a flattened cigarette end protruded, and I suppose a very curious person might just have wondered quite how a cigarette end came to be flattened and wedged beneath the skirting of a door unless someone had deliberately stood on it and kicked it there; and the same person might also have remarked that the beam of the corner street light shone brightly onto the lower part of the door, so that once you were aware of the conjunction of the chalk mark and the cigarette end, you marvelled that there wasn't a great crowd of people round you, staring at the same thing.

I did not, however, possess Checheyev's physical dexterity; I could not achieve the lightning swing of the upper body that had put Jack Andover, our chief watcher, in mind of Welsh miners. So I did what middle-aged spies do the world over: I stooped and made a show of fastening my shoelace, while with one hand I pinched hold of the cigarette end, and of the string that was inside it, and I tugged: to be rewarded, after a further length of string, with the flat brass Yale door key that was attached to it. Then, with the key concealed in my hand, I stood up and walked confidently round the corner to the front door.

"They're on holiday, darling," a bass voice called from beside me.

I turned quickly, my rent-a-drool smile hoisted in readiness. A large blond-headed woman, backlit by the light of her own hall, was standing in the neighbouring doorway, dressed in what seemed to be a white nightgown and clutching a glass of something strong.

"I know," I said.

"Feebs is what he calls me. I'm Phoebe really. You were here before, weren't you?"

"That's right. I forgot to collect the key and had to go back and get it. I'll forget my own name next. Still, a holiday was what they needed, wasn't it?"