Of course, he'd been followed before, almost certainly. But that had been in Beirut, which hardly counted, because everyone who was anyone was followed there, by someone or other, and it would have been an insult not to be followed; in fact, he'd probably been followed by the Syrians, who had been protecting them both, who had been shadowing other and nastier followers, like the lesser fleas on the bigger fleas on the proverbial dog, and so ad infinitum.
Only, he hadn't much liked the possibility then, and he liked it no better now, with Reg Buller's final patronizing and belittling words of wisdom echoing in his ear —
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'No good looking for 'em, because you won't see 'em — not if they know their job. So no good tryin' to be clever, peerin'
into shop windows. An' whatever you do, don't try an' lose
'em — that's Rule Number One. 'Cause, when you do need to slip 'em, it's gotta seem like by accident, an' all nice an' slow.
An' I'll stage-manage that, there's a taxi-driver I know who'll fix it. . . An' anyway, your job today is to draw 'em off to let me get off. So you just walk round to the Lady's flat for your Sunday lunch like always. An' phone me tonight at seven — from a public pay-box. Okay?'
Not okay. Because now, with the Sunday streets emptied by rain, and the Sunday pubs filled, the temptation to look over his shoulder at every corner was like an itch in his brain. And all the little antique shops, the contents of whose windows had never much interested him before, seemed full of intriguing objects . . . which he mustn't stop and look at, just in case someone might think he was trying to be clever. And as there probably wasn't anyone, that made him feel like a right prick.
But then ... if Reg Buller was right . . .
He decided to concentrate on it, partly to help him to forget that itch and its accompanying incipient paranoia, and partly because Reg Buller usually was right, when it came to such mundane matters. Which cleared the way in turn for the consideration of the more important matters with which Jenny would hit him during her version of Sunday lunch —
yuk!
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Because Jenny, too, had been right this time — and not in any mundane matter, either: her little shell-like ears (sensitive appendages, always attuned to items of scandal and indiscretion, as sharp as the diamonds which customarily adorned each of them) had picked up a winner this time, like a blip on a high-tech radar screen which registered not so much 'Friend or Foe?' as 'Profit or Loss?'
unfailingly —
'What about Masson, then?'
'A turn-up for the book, you mean?'
'Not a turn-up. I never did believe that story. It was too neat.'
'Which story? The official one — ? Or . . . ?'
'Neither of them. But I tell you one thing: David Audley won't like it.'
'David Audley? You don't mean — ?'
'I don't mean anything. Except . . . people who don't suit his book have a way of being safely written out of it. And Masson was a front runner then . . . remember?'
'Yes . . . But, surely, you don't think — ?'
'Not aloud I don't — no! But I think . . . if I was Audley . . . I might be remembering the banquet scene in that play the actors don't like naming — eh?'
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'You're sure you've got it right, Jen — ?'
'Don't be a bore, Ian. Of course I've got it right. I was listening to them.'
'To whom?'
'To these two men. And don't ask me who they were, because I don't know — yet.'
'They didn't introduce themselves to you?'
'Now you're being thick. They weren't talking to me. I overheard them. And the play's "Macbeth", of course — '
'Oh? Not "Hamlet", then?'
'Not— what?'
'You overheard them. But I can't think they wouldn't have noticed you. Because you're quite noticeable, Miss Fielding-ffulke. So presumably you were hiding behind some arras, like Polonius in "Hamlet". That's all.'
I see. So now you're being clever. So at least you're awake . . . Well, for your information, I was partly behind an arras, actually. Or a curtain, to be exact. . . And Victor Pollard and Nigel Gaitch were regaling me with inane Palace gossip about Charles and Di, which I really didn't want to know, but which they thought was just up my street. So I stopped listening to them . . . and there must be some sort of acoustic trick just there, because of the alcove there, and the curtain — I don't damn well know. All I know is what I heard. And it's "Macbeth" — the one the actors won't ever mention. And the banquet scene, too. And you dummy2
know what that's about, do you, Ian?'
'Yes — '
' It's about a murder that's gone wrong, is what it's about — '
So maybe Jenny was right. For certainly Jenny was clever, and she was very often as lucky as she was clever, which was an unbeatable alliance.
But that still left them with the Unnamed Play expert, who had been unlucky, as well as indiscreet, beside the curtain at the embassy party; he sounded clever too, and maliciously so perhaps. But just how clever had he been with that throwaway Macbeth reference?
Just generally clever, with Macbeth's hired murderer reporting back on the bodged killing —
— Is he dispacht?
— My lord, his throat is cut; that I did for him.
Or exactly clever, with Philip Masson as well as Audley in mind, after Banquo's grisly ghost had broken up a pleasant dinner —
— the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would dummy2
die,
And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools
Was that it?
Had Banquo/Masson risen again, in order that Jenny Fielding and Ian Robinson should push David Audley from his stool — ?
Well . . . Jenny Fielding's castle was now just across the wet road, and he could hear no footsteps behind him, only his old tutor's warning against preconceived ideas which fitted so well that one bought them too easily, without feeling the quality of the shoddy material.
The road was safe, anyway — as safe as suburban East Berlin on a wet Sunday, never mind Hampstead; and he was probably as unfollowed here and now as he had been there and then — and Jenny could have simply heard two malicious Civil Service tongues chatting imaginative gossip
—
He skipped the last few yards, from the road and across the glistening pavement, to the refuge of the flat's entrance, and stabbed the bell with a sense of anti-climax, feeling foolish because he was simultaneously relieved and disappointed.