'And your friend! Christ forgive me: who do you represent out here? Yourselves or the poor bloody taxpayer? I'll tell you who: the Club. Your Club. The bloody Foreign Office; and if you saw Rawley Bradfield standing on Westminster Bridge hawking his files for an extra pension, you'd bloody well look the other way.'
Turner was not shouting. It was rather the massive slowness of his speech which gave it urgency.
'You make me puke. All of you. The whole sodding circus. You didn't give a twopenny damn for Leo, any of you, while he was here. Common as dirt, wasn't he? No background, no childhood, no nothing. Shove him the other side of the river where he won't be noticed! Tuck him a way in the catacombs with the German staff! Worth a drink but not worth dinner! What happens now? He bolts, and he takes half your secrets with him for good measure, and suddenly you've got the guilts and you're blushing like a lot of virgins holding your hands over your fannies and not talking to strange men. Everybody: you, Meadowes, Bradfield. You know how he wormed his way in there, how he conned them all; how he stole and cheated. You know something else too: a friendship, a love affair, something that made him special for you, made him interesting. There's a whole world he lived in and none of you will put a name to it. What was it? Who was it? Where the hell did he go on Thursday afternoons if he didn't go to the Ministry? Who ran him? Who protected him? Who gave him his orders and his money and took his information off him? Who held his hand? He's a spy, for Christ's sake! He's put his hand in the till! And the moment you find out, you're all on his side!'
'No,' said de Lisle. They were pulling up at the gate; the police were converging on them, tapping on the window. He let them wait. 'You've got it wrong. You and Leo form a team of your own. You're the other side of the wire. Both of you. That's your problem. Whatever definitions, whatever labels. That's why you're beating the air.'
They entered the car park and de Lisle drove round to the canteen side where Turner had stood that morning, staring across the field.
'I've got to see his house,' Turner said. 'I've got to.' They were both looking a head of them, through the windscreen.
'I thought you'd ask me that.'
'All right, forget it.'
'Why should I? I've no doubt you'll go anyway. Sooner or later.'
They got out and walked slowly over the tarmac. The despatch riders were lying on the lawn, their motor-bikes stacked round the flagpole. The geraniums, martially arranged, glinted like tiny guardsmen a long the verges.
'He loved the Army,' de Lisle said, as they climbed the steps.
'He really loved it.'
As they paused to show their passes yet again to the weasel sergeant, Turner chanced to look back at the carriageway. 'Look!'he said suddenly. 'That's the pair that picked us up at the airport.'
A black Opel had lumbered in to the filter bay; two men sat in the front; from his vantage point on the steps, Turner could make out easily the multiple reflectors of the long driving mirror glittering in the sunlight.
'Ludwig Siebkron took us to lunch,' de Lisle said with a dry smile, 'and now he's brought us home. I told you: don't go thinking you're a specialist.'
'Then where were you on Friday night?'
'In the woodshed,' de Lisle snapped, 'waiting to murder Lady Ann for her priceless diamonds.'
The cypher room was open again. Cork lay on a truckle bed, a handbook on Caribbean bungalows lay beside him on the floor. On the desk in the dayroom was a blue Embassy envelope addressed to Alan Turner Esquire. His name was typewritten; the style was stiff and rather gauche. There were a number of things, the writer said, which Mr Turner might care to know about in connection with the matter which had brought him to Bonn. If it were convenient, the writer continued, he might care to call for a glass of sherry wine at the above address at half past six o'clock. The address was in Bad Godesberg and the writer was Miss Jenny Pargiter of Press and Information Section, presently on attachment to Chancery. She had signed her name and typed it beneath the signature for reasons of clarity; the P was written rather large, Turner decided; and as he opened the blue rexine diary he permitted himself a rare if puzzled smile of anticipation. P for Praschko; P for Pargiter. And P was the initial on the diary. Come on, Leo, let's have a look at your guilty secret.
CHAPTER EIGHT Jenny Pargiter
'I assume,' Jenny Pargiter began, in a prepared statement, 'that you are used to dealing in delicate matters.'
The sherry stood between them on the glass-topped sofa table. The flat was dark and ugly: the chairs were Victorian wicker, the drapes German and very heavy. Constable reproductions hung in the dining alcove.
'Like a doctor, you have standards of professional confidence.'
'Oh sure,' said Turner.
'It was mentioned at Chancery meeting this morning that you were investigating Leo Harting's disappearance. We were warned not to discuss it, even among ourselves.'
'You're allowed to discuss it with me,' said Turner.
'No doubt. But I naturally would wish to be told how much further any confidence might go. What, for instance, is the relationship between yourselves and Personnel Department?'
'It depends on the information.'
She had raised the sherry glass to the level of her eye and appeared to be measuring the fluid content. It was an attitude evidently designed to demonstrate her sophistication and her ease of mind.
'Supposing someone - supposing I myself had been injudicious. In a personal matter.'
'It depends who you've been injudicious with,' Turner replied, and Jenny Pargiter coloured suddenly.
'That is not what I meant at all.'
'Look,' said Turner, watching her, 'if you come and tell me in confidence that you've left a bundle of files in the bus, I'll have to give details to Personnel Department. If you tell me you've been going out with a boy friend now and then, I'm not going to fall over in a faint. Mainly,' he said, pushing his sherry glass across the table for her to replenish, 'Personnel Department don't want to know we exist.' His manner was very casual, as if he barely cared. He sat impassively, filling the whole chair.
'There is the question of protecting other people, third parties who cannot necessarily speak for themselves.'
Turner said, 'There's also the question of security. If you didn't think it was important, you wouldn't ask to see me in the first place. It's up to you. I can't give you any guarantees.' She lit a cigarette with sharp, angular movements. She was not an ugly girl, but she seemed to dress either too young or too old, so that whatever Turner's age, she was not his contemporary.
'I accept that,' she said and regarded him darkly for a moment, as if assessing how much Turner could take. 'However, you have misunderstood the reason why I asked you to call here. It is this. Since you are quite certain to be told all manner of rumours about Harting and myself, I thought it best if you heard the truth from me.'
Turner put down his glass and opened his notebook.
'I arrived here just before Christmas,' Jenny Pargiter said," 'from London. Before that I was in Djakarta. I returned to London intending to be married. You may have read of my engagement?'
'I think I must have missed it,' said Turner.
'The person to whom I was engaged decided at the last minute that we were not suited. It was a very courageous decision. I was then posted to Bonn. We had known one another for many years; we had read the same subject at university and I had always assumed we had much in common. The person decided otherwise. That is what engagements are for. I am perfectly content. There is no reason for anyone to be sorry for me.'
'You got here at Christmas?'
'I asked particularly to be here in time for the holiday. In previous years, we had always spent Christmas together. Unless I was in Djakarta of course. The... separation on this occasion was certain to be painful to me. I was most anxious to mitigate the distress with a new atmosphere.'
'Quite.'
'As a single woman in an Embassy, one is very often overcome with invitations at Christmas. Almost everyone in Chancery invited me to spend the festive days with them. The Bradfields, the Crabbes, the Jacksons, the Gavestons: they all asked me. I was also invited by the Meadowes.
You have met Arthur Meadowes no doubt.'
'Yes.'
'Meadowes is a widower and lives with his daughter, Myra. He is in fact a B3, though we no longer use those grades. I found it very touching to be invited by a member of the Junior Staff.'
Her accent was very slight, provincial rather than regional, and for all her attempts at disowning it, it mocked her all the time.
'In Djakarta we always had that tradition. We mixed more. In a larger Embassy like Bonn, people tend to remain in their groups. I am not suggesting there should be
total assimilation: I would even regard that as bad. The A's, for instance, tend to have different tastes as well as different intellectual interests to the B's. I am suggesting that in Bonn the distinctions are too rigid,and too many. The A's remain with the A's and the B's with the B's even inside the different sections: the economists, theattachés, Chancery; they all form cliques. I do not consider that right. Would you care for more sherry?'