Red Anger (6 page)

‘How do you know he’s in Moscow?’

‘Because I was at school with the First Secretary of the Romanian Embassy and we have kept up our friendship. On politics we agree to differ.’

‘It seems to me you’d be the perfect double agent,’ I said.

He ignored the silly brashness of the remark.

‘Yes, I am—if you mean just explaining one side to the other. So my friend entrusted to me a message for Rory’s nearest relation—an aunt whom he is very fond of. He is
anxious that she should know he is alive and that she should have his address. No harm in that, is there? The man can do no more damage to us.’

I admitted rather reluctantly that it might be a kindly thing to do even if Rory did not deserve it.

‘But naturally they don’t want to risk sending it through the post or telephoning. They have to deny Rory’s presence in Russia for the moment. Later on, of course,
they’ll let it leak through the correspondents of the London papers. Now, I wondered if you would go down and give her the address in person. You have enough English for that and you need say
nothing at all about yourself. If a question of your bona fides comes up and she gets some Russian-speaking friend to test you, you’ll pass.’

‘If the message is just an address and no more …’ I began.

‘I’ll show it to you.’

He pulled out an unsealed envelope and gave it to me. Inside was nothing but the name Alwyn Rory and a Moscow address.

‘I shouldn’t expect you to do it for nothing,’ he said.

I was a little unhappy about that; but his whole explanation sounded open and simple and I could see no way in which handing over the address might harm my country. In the very unlikely event of
running into trouble I could always say I had been asked to deliver an envelope by a Romanian friend, a Mr. Marghiloman. That would only reinforce my identity as Ionel Petrescu. Besides, it seemed
very possible that our own security people knew all about Marghiloman and were humane enough to allow a message to go through to the aunt. No doubt my reasoning was also affected by the fact that I
was broke.

‘I want you to establish good relations with Mrs. Hilliard,’ he went on. ‘To do that you might have to stay down there a day or two. So you had better take fifty pounds in case
of unforeseen expenses. And when you come back you might tell me how you got on—whether she was ashamed or just maintaining Rory’s innocence against the odds or perhaps pro-Russian.
Suppose we meet here a week from today, same time?’

He gave me Mrs. Hilliard’s address but said little more about her beyond the fact that she was a widow in her fifties and had strong left-wing sympathies in her youth. She lived in South
Devon at a house called Cleder’s Priory in the village of Molesworthy.

I took his fifty and the envelope and went home. I must emphasize that I had nothing against Romania—except that it was not my country—and this very typical Romanian reminded me in
some way of my stepfather, also a very pleasant, persuasive character ready to appreciate both sides of any intrigue. However, I have to admit a humiliating resemblance to the ingenuous American
sitting alone in a foreign café and welcoming some highly respectable stranger of polished manners who entertains him in his own language and offers to give him an option on the site of the
Eiffel Tower.

Molesworthy was below the southern edge of Dartmoor. I took a train down to Totnes and then had a three-hour bus journey over a distance which a stout-hearted walker could have covered in the
same time. I had never realised that so many railways in Devon had been closed, thus returning country life, for those too old or too poor to drive, to the conditions of the eighteenth century.

I got off at Buckland and trailed along from signpost to signpost until I arrived at Molesworthy. I inspected three or four likely abodes for a widow, but none of them was called Cleder’s
Priory; so I went into the pub for a pint of bitter. It was just past opening time and the bar of the Crown and Thistle was empty. In reply to my enquiry the landlord said Cleder’s Priory was
lower down the valley, and added:

‘You’ll be the new Portuguese butler Mrs. Hilliard is expecting, I dare say?’

That seemed a handy excuse for my presence, so in my most grotesque English I allowed him to think that I had come down to be interviewed. Marghiloman had not given me the impression that Mrs.
Hilliard was the sort of person to have butlers and I had expected that she lived quite modestly in some pretty village house.

‘Is rich? True?’ I asked.

‘Well, not what you’d call stinking rich. Too well liked for that she is. She’s got money all right, but she’ll help anyone any time. Sporting old girl, too. Master of
Hounds. It ain’t what they call a fashionable pack, but we has our fun. And it’s a damn shame that the married couple who worked for her left her like that.’

‘Zey ’ave a bust-up?’

‘Dunno. But it was all along of her nephew. Well, you might as well know it now as later. He’s that Rory which let the spy escape. I’d never have believed it of him and I
don’t. A real gentleman he was. I remember as once Mrs. Hilliard had just taken on my brother as whipper-in and I wanted to go out to see if he were any good, but I couldn’t because the
missus was away in Plymouth looking after her mother who was took ill as always when ’twas inconvenient. “Don’t you bother, Jack,” Mr. Rory says. “I’ll look
after the bar and you can have my Sherry-and-Bitters—” lovely hunter he was! “—so you don’t break your bleeding neck trying to keep up with your brother on that damn
screw of yours.”’

I had to look blank at all this rush of west country talk, though God knows it was gloriously familiar, and got the conversation back to the vanished married couple.

‘Worst snobs I ever knew! Always telling me how they’d worked for Lady Slingemup or some such name. And what do you suppose they did when the police and worse began snooping round
here? They upped and cleared off! And if you get the job I hope you’ll see that Mrs. Hilliard has the service she deserves. And you’ll find we don’t care whether a man’s a
Portugoose or a Chinaman so long as he’s a sweet, easy bloke. You married?’

I said I wasn’t but could do as much as any woman and better than most. That seemed to amuse him. He slapped me on the shoulder and assured me I’d get a good job easily in
Kingsbridge or Salcombe if the old girl didn’t like me.

Cleder’s Priory was a gem of a seventeenth-century house, compact and ornate with parkland running up to the front door and a walled garden which looked as if it was all that remained of a
much vaster one. I recognised that because our own farm-house had stood in pasture. My father could not afford to keep up more than the kitchen garden and the fruit on its walls.

I rang the bell which Mrs. Hilliard answered herself. She was a very imposing personage in her middle fifties getting on for six feet tall, though some of that may have been made up by a mass of
white hair almost as towering as in pictures of fashion two hundred years ago. She was dressed in a blue seaman’s jersey, smart and expensive jodhpurs and a pair of carpet slippers.

She, too, asked if I was the Portuguese. I answered that I was Romanian and had been entrusted with a message for her. She took me into the entrance hall where I handed over the envelope while
we both remained standing. She read the slip of paper. Eyes gave away nothing. Mouth was perhaps a little tighter than before.

‘Your name?’ she asked.

‘My name it is Prefacutu.’

‘And who gave you this?’

‘Anozzer Romanian. In London.’

‘And where did he get it?’

‘From zer Russian Embassy.’

‘I see. Well, thank you very much. You’ll find it difficult to get back to London now, so you had better stay the night. That suits you?’

‘Yes, Madame.’

‘Come along, and I’ll show you your room. It’s in the annexe.’

I picked up my bag and followed her through a fine, oak-panelled living room, furnished in half a dozen different and dignified styles so far as they could be seen under dogs and bits of
saddlery. We went out through French windows into the walled garden closed on the far side by a two-storey building like a range of stables—a blank face of ancient, rose-coloured brick with
magnificent pear trees espaliered over it.

She led me through a door into a sort of kitchen full of sacks and tubs with an immense, lidded boiler—a copper we used to call it—and a butcher’s blood-stained slab; then up
some stairs into a passage which looked as if it had once served living quarters. She ushered me into a room which had indeed an old bed in it and a broken arm-chair. Before I could protest or even
show surprise she had slammed the door and locked it.

‘You can hear me all right?’ she asked from outside.

‘I just come bring letter,’ I said. ‘Know nozzing!’

‘Well, what you do know you’re going to spill. If you climb out of the window you’ll land in the kennel yard. The hounds are all right if people come in through the gate, but
one can’t say what they might do to anyone who drops into the middle of them from the air. That boiler you passed is for cooking their meat, by the way. There’s a pot under the bed.
Empty it down the chute! Goodbye for the present, Mr. Prefacutu!’

I heard her footsteps go down the stairs and die away. She was quite right about the window. It was boarded up, but through the cracks I could see the hounds lazing in the yard below. Her
suggestion that they might attack anyone who startled them by dropping from the sky was hardly believable, but might well alarm some city-bred foreigner. However, it was not an experiment I was
eager to try, though brought up among dogs including foxhound puppies. Every countryman has heard stories—usually myths—of babies and helpless old people who have fallen into pig sties
or kennels.

The chute sounded hopeful, but it wasn’t. Either it had been there since these outbuildings were first constructed or some groom had made it. It was a rusty iron pipe splayed out into a
funnel at the top, and it led, my nose told me, directly down to the dung heap. Walls and door were solid. So there I was.

Having satisfied myself that escape was going to be a hard night’s work—assuming I could detach a leg of the iron bed to use as a lever—I sat down in the ruins of the chair and
tried to make sense of my reception. It looked as if Mrs. Hilliard were about to hand me over to the police or—as the innkeeper put it—worse. If that was so, the sooner, the better. On
the other hand she wanted a lengthy, personal chat with me first. She must also be reckoning that I had too guilty a conscience to yell for help. The old bitch, I said to myself, was wrong there.
In the last of the light I saw through the boarded window someone attending to the hounds and shouted to him to let me out. He paid no attention whatever.

Nobody brought me anything to eat or drink. When night fell I wrenched off a bit of my bed fairly easily and started to poke around in the pitch darkness for a bit of rotten flooring I had
noticed earlier. I was making progress, or thought I was, when my improvised lever slipped on the smooth top of a beam and crushed my thumb against a sound plank. I called on God to damn and blast
the thing to bloody hell and hopped round the room mouthing further comments on its birth and sexual practices.

‘I’m afraid you must have injured yourself, Mr. Prefacutu,’ said a quiet voice outside the door. ‘And how very good your English is!’

My thumb hurt like the devil and I hadn’t the heart to play the fool with broken English. Nothing gives away a man’s true native language so absolutely as a fine string of idiomatic
curses, especially if he reverts in agony to the barndoor dialect of his youth.

‘Wiltshire, Mr. Prefacutu? Or is it Somerset?’

‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t know you were there.’

‘Oh, don’t apologise! I’ve used much worse in the hunting field.’

‘Would you mind telling me why the hell you are keeping me here and spying on me?’

‘Because I have had just about enough of slick young gentlemen from MI5 and their dumb agents.’

‘I am not a slick young gentleman from MI5. I could be one of their agents, but I don’t think so.’

‘What’ll you do if I let you out?’

‘Dot you one and run.’

‘Why not have something to eat first?’

‘I don’t want anything to eat.’

‘Temper, temper! Come out of there, young man, and behave yourself!’

She unlocked the door and threw it back, standing on the far side of it.

‘If there’s any dotting to be done I’ll do it. Go down the stairs in front of me and continue across the garden! You will see a rather larger man than you standing at the
French window. Say good evening to him politely and sit down until I join you.’

I did what she ordered, for there was no escape from the garden. I observed a burly man standing in the lit window and that he carried a hunting crop, so I greeted him as if all this was in the
day’s hospitable work. Mrs. Hilliard entered not far behind me.

‘Thank you, John,’ she said to her retainer. ‘That will be all right now.’

‘I’ll be over the way in the gun-room, Master, if you should want me.’

When he had gone out and closed the door, she offered me a cigarette and made herself comfortable between one very aged foxhound and an immovable tom-cat. I myself was more upright in a chair
opposite to her. It was the proper position for interrogation though she had not obviously arranged it.

‘Now, Mr. Prefacutu! Why did you come here speaking English like some sort of greaser just off the boat?’

I replied that I was told it might carry more conviction.

‘Who told you? A Whitehall office boy?’

‘I have nothing to do with Whitehall.’

‘Do you want to be fed to the hounds?’

‘They might touch it boiled, Mrs. Hilliard, but not raw.’

‘I don’t see why not. You won’t taste of soot if you were brought up in Wiltshire.’

‘I can speak it.’

‘I’ll say you can! Do you think the address you gave me is correct?’

‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. The chap I got it from was really a Romanian and in touch with the Russian Embassy.’