And that’s how it was, Tom. Betrayal is a repetitious trade and I will not bother you with more of it. We have reached the end, though it seems from here to look quite like the beginning. The Firm pulled Pym out of Washington and sent him to Vienna so that he could take back his networks and so that his growing army of accusers could draw its wretched computer pattern tighter round his neck. There was no saving him. Not in the end. Poppy knew that. So did Pym, though he would never admit it, even to himself. Just one more con, Pym kept saying to himself; one more con will see me right. Poppy pressed him, begged him, threatened him. Pym was adamant: Leave me in place, I’ll win through, they love me, I’ve given my life to them.
But the truth is, Tom, that Pym preferred to test the limits of the tolerance of those he loved. He preferred to sit here in Miss Dubber’s upper room and wait for God to come, while he looked down the gardens to the beach where the best pals ever had kicked a football from one end of the world to the other, and ridden their Harrods bicycles across the sea.
CHAPTER 18
It’s fireworks night at Plush, thought Mary, staring into the darkness of the square. It’s an unlit bonfire waiting for Tom. Through the windscreen of their parked car she gazed at the empty bandstand and pretended she saw the last of her family and retainers crammed into the old cricket pavilion. The muffled footsteps were the footsteps of the gamekeepers as they gathered to her brother Sam, back for his last leave. She pretended she could hear her brother’s voice, a little too parade-ground for her liking, still scratchy from the strain of Ireland. “Tom?” he calls. “Where’s old Tom?”… Not a move. Tom is stuck inside Mary’s sheepskin coat, his head jammed against her thigh and nothing short of Christmas is going to lure him out. “Come on, Tom Pym, you’re the youngest!” cries Sam. “Where is he?… You’ll be too old next year, you know, Tom.” Then his brutal dismissal. “Fuck it. Let’s have someone else.” Tom is shamed, the Pyms are disgraced, Sam as usual is angry that Tom has no taste for blowing up the universe. A braver child puts the match and the world ignites. Her brother’s military rockets race over it in perfect salvoes. Everyone is small, looking at the night sky.
She sat at Brotherhood’s side and he was holding her wrist the way the doctor held it when she was about to bear her little coward. To reassure her. To steady her. To say “I am in charge here.” The car was parked in a side street and behind them stood the police van and behind the police van stood a caravan of about six hundred parked police cars and radio vans and ambulances and bomb lorries, all occupied by Sam’s familiars who spoke soundlessly to one another without moving their eyes. Beside her was a shop called Sugar Novelties with a neon-lit window and a plastic gnome pushing a wheelbarrow laden with dusty sweets, and next to it a granite workhouse with “Public Library” engraved over a funereal door. Across the street stood a hideous Baptist church that told you God was no fun either. Beyond the church lay God’s square and His bandstand and His monkey-puzzle trees, and between the fourth and fifth tree from the left, as she had counted twenty times, and three-quarters of the way up, hung an arched lighted window with the orange curtains drawn, which my officers advise me is where your husband’s room is situated, madam, though our enquiries indicate that he is known locally by the name of Canterbury and is well liked in the community.
“He’s always liked,” Mary snapped.
But the superintendent was saying this to Brotherhood. He was speaking through Brotherhood’s window and deferring to Brotherhood as her keeper. And Mary knew that the superintendent had been ordered to speak to her as little as possible, which came hard to him. And that Brotherhood had given himself the job of answering for her, which the superintendent seemed to accept was as near to godliness as he was likely to get without having his ears blasted off. The superintendent was a Devon man, and ponderously traditional. I’m so frightfully glad he’s being arrested by a Devon man, she thought cruelly, in Caroline Lumsden’s Sloane-Ranger twitter. I always think it’s so much nicer to be taken prisoner by a man of the soil.
“Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to come into the Church Hall, madam?” the superintendent was saying for the hundredth time. “It’s much warmer in the Church Hall and there’s some quite fine company. Cosmopolitan, counting the Americans.”
“She’s best here,” Brotherhood murmured in reply.
“Only we can’t allow the gentleman to switch on the engine, you see, to be truthful, madam. And if he can’t switch on the engine, well you can’t have the heating, if you see what I mean.”
“I’d like you to go away,” Mary said.
“She’s all right as she is,” said Brotherhood.
“Only it could be all night, you see, madam. Could be all tomorrow too. If our friend decides to stick it out, kind of thing, to be truthful.”
“We’ll play it as it comes,” Brotherhood said. “When you need her, this is where she’ll be.”
“Well I’m afraid she won’t, sir, to be truthful, not when we go in, if we have to. I’m afraid she’ll have to withdraw to a somewhat safer position, to be truthful, same as you. Only the rest of them are back in the Church Hall, if you follow me, sir, and the chief constable says that’s where all non-combatants have got to be at that stage in the proceedings, including the Americans.”
“She doesn’t want to be with the rest of them,” said Mary before Brotherhood could speak. “And she’s not American. She’s his wife.”
The superintendent went away and came back almost immediately. He’s the go-between. They’ve chosen him for his bedside manner.
“Message from the roof, sir,” he began apologetically, crouching yet again to Brotherhood’s window. “Do you happen to know, please, the precise type and calibre of the weapon our friend is alleged to have in his possession?”
“Standard Browning three-eight automatic. An old one. Shouldn’t think it’s been cleaned for years.”
“Any theories regarding the type of ammunition at all, sir? Only it would be nice for them to know the carry, you see.”
“Short nose, I should think.”
“But not a stopper, for instance, or a dumdum?”
“Why the hell should he want a dumdum?”
“I don’t know, sir, do I? Information is gold dust on this one, the way it’s being passed around, if I may say so. I haven’t seen so many tight lips in one room for, oh, a long time. How many rounds has our friend got, do you think?”
“One magazine. Maybe a spare.”
Mary was suddenly furious. “For God’s sake. He’s not a maniac! He’s not going to start a—”
“Start a what?” said the superintendent, whose country manners had a way of slipping when he wasn’t spoken to respectfully.
“Just assume it’s one magazine and one spare,” Brotherhood said.
“Well, then, perhaps you can tell us how our friend’s marksmanship is,” the superintendent suggested as if stepping on to safer ground. “You can’t blame them for asking that, can you?”
“He’s been trained and topped up all his life,” said Brotherhood.
“He’s good,” Mary said.
“Now how do you know that, madam, if I may be allowed to ask a simple question?”