‘Want some tea?’ said Arthur.
I nodded, and he gave an order into an intercom on the back of his desk. Then we started. For the next ten minutes a succession of names followed by personal details poured onto the screen. They appeared in a clinical lettering that was oblivious to the fact that human lives was the subject matter: ‘Dallyn. June, Sally. Nee Wick. B. 16-3-38. Widow. Late husband: Kevin, Eric. Cause of death: coronary arrest. Place of death: Black Lion Lane, London W1, prostitute’s apartment. Prostitute: Nola Kebbit. Children: Daniel Henry Nigel, Susan Margaret Anne, Mary Angela Jennifer…’
It was all there; the dates, the schools, the hobbies, the family friends, where they spent their holidays, who they slept with, the charities they supported; all the good and bad and the skeletons in the closets; all the facts not originally entered on the job application forms, that had been gleaned by the team of agents whose sole job, unsavoury but necessary, was much the same as that of ordinary private eyes operating throughout the country: to pry out all the facts. The only difference between these agents and the private eyes was that private eyes mainly worked on jobs concerning marriage fidelity; the agents worked on jobs concerning a different type of fidelity: fidelity to the country.
Tea arrived. It wasn’t served by a robot but by a tea lady who looked like she’d been kloned from an original mould, produced by a factory that supplied railway and factory canteens throughout the land. As she opened the door the screen went blank, and would remain blank until after she had departed and Arthur pushed the reset button.
Arthur sat awkwardly, confused by the presence of this lady as she shuffled about, placing first saucers, then cups, then spoons in front of us, then pouring first milk into the cups, then tea, then putting down a plate and then putting biscuits onto the plate. He swivelled his head as if it was on a mechanical pivot, to look at her, at the tray, at me, at the table, then back to her again. For the last hour he had brimmed with information, glowed like a light bulb while Wotan spewed forth, and now, suddenly, he had shrivelled up, as if another coin needed to be put into his meter.
I looked at his bushy face and thought about the extraordinary life he had spent so much of, and would continue to spend a great deal more of, down here in this bright hole, going home at night in his Ford Cortina to another bright hole, to a bright little wife to whom he no doubt waxed lyrical about the latest advances in microprocessor technology, about Josephson junctions and packet switching and finite state theory.
Arthur, with his walking holidays in Snowdonia, and his £12,000 a year pay packet, would no doubt go on for many years to come, waking with a bushy smile in the mornings while I would wake a shaking wreck, diving for my gun, trying to remember where I was each morning; in 30 years’ time Arthur would still be waking, smiling, in his own bed, slitting open his mail, reading his papers, and I would probably be long since buried — silently, quietly killed and buried in some far-off lonely land.
A bag was thrust under my nose. It contained Turkish delight: green ones with white icing. It was a crinkly paper bag of the sort sold at any confectioners. Crème-de-menthe-flavoured Turkish delight was his one vice in life, so he had previously told me; he never smoked, never drank, but ate incessant quantities of crème-de-menthe Turkish delight. I took one from the bag, and it laid a little trail of icing sugar across the glistening table-top.
I had a couple more lumps. That little paper bag and the growing trails of icing sugar, the plate of biscuits and the steaming cups on the table were all a welcome intrusion into this strange twilight world that, but for this array of items from the ordinary world outside, could well have been on another planet altogether. Thinking about Wetherby’s crinkly bag of peanuts, I idly wondered whether a crinkly bag of goodies was an essential item of equipment for employees of British Intelligence.
We settled back down to work again. We were about a quarter of the way through the A’s. Arthur put a Turkish delight and half a gingernut into his mouth, and chewed them happily. ‘Curious taste, the two together; mix very well. Did you bring your overnight bag?’
‘No, I’ve taken a 6-year lease on this corner of your office.’
‘Well, I hope the lease is renewable, because it’s going to take all of that.’ He was longing to ask me what it was I was looking for, and then to be able to point me straight to the answer — if it lay in here at all, which I doubted; but he knew it wasn’t his job to ask, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
An hour and a half later we got to my name. The file was up to date to the start of my assignment in the States. No one had been able to find out very much of interest about me and there was certainly nothing there that upset me. There was nothing under Jephcott that upset him either. He’d probably made sure of that himself, not that there was likely to have been anything much anyway.
We finished that particular job at eleven o’clock. Arthur looked blearily at me; the hair in the immediate vicinity of his mouth was almost white with icing sugar. I hadn’t slept for two nights and right now, as far as I was concerned, another one wasn’t going to make much difference. I wanted to get my job done and to be gone from England before anyone else found out I was here, and news didn’t travel slowly in my particular company.
Arthur telephoned his wife for the third time. He had missed the cocktail party they had been going to, he’d missed the dinner party she’d decided to go on to and meet him at, and he was becoming resigned to the fact that there was every likelihood he was going to miss breakfast as well. He talked to his wife with all the tenderness of someone dictating a letter to the rates officer. He put the receiver down and looked up at me. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘Orchnev,’ I said.
He looked thoughtful. ‘Rings a bell. Can’t place it, though. Does ring a bell.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Russian. Wanted to flog some secrets. Something like that.’ He tapped the keyboards and a short dossier appeared, much as Karavenoff had described, but more detailed. The dossier ended with a written letter to Fifeshire dated 15 July — exactly one month before Fifeshire was shot. The letter was short and to the point. Orchnev introduced himself as being a senior member of the Science Council of the Politburo. He wished to defect and live in England, and would be willing to trade information for cooperation on the part of the British authorities. He stated he would be prepared to provide evidence of the calibre of information he had, and asked Fifeshire to reply to an address in West Germany.
The letter had been delivered by a complicated route; it was brought to the United States by a bribed Aeroflot stewardess, it then went to the British Embassy in Washington, who passed it on in the diplomatic bag. It was marked ‘Received’ by Whitehall on 12 August — three days before the shooting. It was not the sort of letter Fifeshire would have forgotten, yet he hadn’t mentioned it when I saw him, in spite of my showing him the second letter.
‘You must have a reply to this letter,’ I said.
Arthur shook his head. ‘It would be here if there was one. Maybe Sir Charles didn’t have time to deal with it before the shooting.’
‘Then surely someone else would have…’ I trailed off. I was saying it to myself as much as to Arthur. Who dealt with whose correspondence wasn’t his division. ‘Could the reply be in another file?’
‘If it was there’d be a copy here too. Everything in Wotan is cross-referenced to everything else. Everything with the name Orchnev in it would be duplicated here.’