And a quaint little cutting, culled from God knows where, recording the arrest at sea, on the cruise ship S.S. Grande Bretagne, of the notorious confidence tricksters Weber and Woolfe alias Cunningham, masquerading as the Duke and Duchess of Seville.
One by one, with a red pen, Pym numbered each document in the top right corner, then entered the same numbers at the appropriate points in his text by way of reference. With a bureaucrat’s neat manners he stapled the exhibits together and inserted them in a file marked “Annexe.” Closing the file he stood up, gave an unrestrained sigh and thrust down his arms behind him like a man slipping off a harness. The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies. Crossing to the window he made a last inspection of the square, the tired lights of England fading as he watched. Gravely he undressed, drank a last vodka, gravely took a look at himself in the mirror and prepared to put himself to bed. But lightly, very lightly. Almost on tiptoe. Almost as if he were afraid to wake himself up. On his way he paused at the desk and read again the decoded message that for once he had not bothered to destroy.
Poppy, he thought, stay exactly where you are.
CHAPTER 7
Five years ago Jack Brotherhood had shot his Labrador bitch. She was in her basket, rheumatic and shaking; he’d given her the pills but she’d sicked them up, then shamed herself by messing the carpet. And when he threw on his windcheater and took his 12-bore from behind the door, willing her, she looked at him like a criminal because she knew she was finally too sick to find for him. He ordered her to get up but she couldn’t. When he yelled “Seek!” she rolled herself on to her forepaws and lay down again with her head stuck stupidly over the basket. So he put down the gun and got a shovel from the shed and dug her a hole in the field behind the cottage, a bit up the slope with a decent view across the estuary. Then he wrapped her in his favourite tweed jacket and carried her up there and shot her in the back of the head, smashing the spinal cord at the nape, and buried her. After that he sat beside her with a half-bottle of scotch while the Suffolk dew settled itself over him and he decided she had probably had the best death anyone was likely to have in a world not distinguished by good deaths. He didn’t leave a headstone or a coy wood cross for her but he had taken bearings on the spot, using the church tower, the dead willow tree and the windmill, and whenever he passed it by he’d send her a gruff mental greeting, which was as near as he had ever come to pondering on the afterlife, until this empty Sunday morning as he drove through deserted Berkshire lanes and watched the sun lifting on the Downs. “Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle,” Pym had said. “The Firm should have retired him ten years ago.”
And how long ago should we have retired you, my boy? he wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? How many miles have you had in the saddle? How many miles of exposed film have you rolled into how many newspapers? How many miles of newspaper have you dropped into dead letter boxes and tossed over cemetery walls? How many hours have you listened to Prague radio, seated over your code pads?
He lowered his window. The racing air smelt of silage and wood smoke and it thrilled him. Brotherhood was country stock. His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates. With the morning wind pouring into his face, he became a raggedy-arsed boy again, galloping Miss Sumner’s hunter bareback across her park and getting the hiding of his life for it. He was freezing to death in the flat mud of the Suffolk fens, too proud to go home without a catch. He was making his first drop from a barrage balloon at Abingdon Aerodrome and discovering how the wind kept his mouth open after he yelled. I’ll leave when they throw me out. I’ll leave when you and I have had our word, my boy.
He had slept six hours in forty-eight, most of them on a lumpy camp bed in a room set aside for typists with the vapours, but he was not tired. “Can we have you for a minute, Jack?” said Kate, the Fifth Floor vestal, with a look that stayed on him a beat too long. “Bo and Nigel would like another small word.” And when he wasn’t sleeping or answering the telephone or thinking his usual puzzled thoughts about Kate, he had watched his life go by in a kind of bewildered free fall into enemy territory: so this is what it’s like, this is badland and these are my feet spinning towards it like a sycamore twig. He had contemplated Pym in all the stages he had grown up with him, drunk with him and worked with him, including a night in Berlin he had totally forgotten until now when they had ended up screwing a couple of army nurses in adjoining rooms. He had remembered contemplating his own mangled arm on the winter’s day in 1943 when it had hung beside him embellished with three German machine-gun bullets, and he had experienced the same feeling of incredulous detachment.
“If you could only have let us know a little earlier, Jack. If only you could have seen it coming.”
Yes, I’m sorry, Bo. Careless of me.
“But Jack, he was practically your own son, we used to say.”
Yes, we did, didn’t we, Bo. Silly really, I agree.
And Kate’s reproving eyes, as ever, saying, Jack, Jack, where are you?
There had been other cases in his lifetime, naturally. Ever since the war had ended, Brotherhood’s professional life had been regularly turned upside down by the Firm’s latest terminal scandal. While he was Head of Station in Berlin, it had happened to him not twice but three times: night telegrams, flash, for Brotherhood’s eyes only. Phone call — where is he? Jack, get off your elbows and get in here now. Race through wet streets, dead sober. Telegram one, the subject of my immediately following telegram is a member of this service and has now been revealed as a Soviet Intelligence agent. You will inform your official contacts of this in confidence before they read it in the morning papers. Followed by the long wait beside the codebooks while you think: is it him, is it her, is it me? Telegram two, spell a name of six letters, who the hell do I know who’s got six letters? First group M — Christ, it’s Miller! Second group A — oh my God, it’s Mackay! Until up comes a name you never heard of, from a section you didn’t know existed, and when the expurgated case history finally arrives on your desk all you have is a vision of an under-welfared little nancy-boy in the cypher room in Warsaw who thought he was playing the world’s game when what he really wanted was to shaft his employers.
But these distant scandals had been till now the gunfire of a war he was certain would never come his way. He had regarded them not as warnings but as confirmation of everything he disliked about the way the Firm was going: its retreat into bureaucracy and semi-diplomacy, its pandering to American methods and example. By comparison his own hand-picked staff had only looked better to him, and when the witch-hunters had gathered at his door, led by Grant Lederer and his nasty little Mormon bag-carriers, baying for Pym’s blood and brandishing fanciful suspicions based on nothing more than a few computerised coincidences, it was Jack Brotherhood who had banged his open hand upon the conference table and made the water-glasses hop: “Stop this now. There’s not a man or woman in this room who won’t look like a traitor once you start to pull our life stories inside out. A man can’t remember where he was on the night of the tenth? Then he’s lying. He can remember? Then he’s too damn flip with his alibi. You go one more yard with this and everyone who tells the truth will become a barefaced liar, everyone who does a decent job will be working for the other side. You carry on like this and you’ll sink our service better than the Russians ever could. Or is that what you want?”