The going was easy as we were driving against the flow of the rush hour; we went down Notting Hill Gate, round White City roundabout, down towards Hammersmith, then down over Putney Bridge, through Putney, and out onto the A3. We hooked left at the Robin Hood roundabout, then I opened her up to the maximum 3,500 rev limit the mechanic had advised, and in half a minute was thundering along at a rock steady 90 on the clock. I pushed the side screen open a short distance and the bitter December air thrashed in; I let it continue for several seconds until I was shaking with the cold, and then closed it again. It made me feel a lot better still.
I drove to Guildford, where I bought a battery razor, a sports jacket, trousers, shirt, tie and underclothing, then washed and shaved in a public lavatory under the hawk-eye of an uncommonly wretched attendant who was convinced I was going to try to steal the soap.
I had a couple more cups of coffee in a cafe and actually began to feel like any normal human being once more. It wasn’t such a bad feeling.
19
I drove a few miles out of Guildford, down the bypass, and turned off at a signpost marked Milford. It was a country road, just about two lanes, and every few hundred yards were sets of gateposts, ranging from the ordinary to the baronial, beyond which stretched rhododendron-lined gravel driveways up to hidden houses. There was thinning shrubbery on either side of the road, mostly brown or bare in its winter state, with the occasional splash of evergreens. I drove over a small hump-backed bridge and came to a parade of shops and a village green which was evidently the cricket pitch in summer.
I obtained directions from a newsagent and carried on. After a mile or so I found what I was looking for: Scatliffe’s house. It was the type of house any self-respecting stockbroker might have owned. Mock Tudor, built probably in the late twenties, set about 50 yards back from the road, and no shortage of gravel and evergreen shrubbery in front of it; it was by no means a magnificent dwelling but it was smart. There was a mud-spattered Mini Metro in the driveway, and I noticed the front door was ajar.
I drove on past, then turned around, pulled over well into the side of the road and switched off the engine. It looked to me as though Mrs Scatliffe was about to go off shopping, which suited me fine; whilst Scatliffe was now high up the scale he didn’t yet rate a police guard on his house, although the local constabulary would no doubt keep a closer watch on it than on most. From the information from Wotan I knew that there were no live-in staff and a char came only three days a week and this wasn’t one of her days. There was a part-time gardener but he only came afternoons.
I lit a cigarette and turned on the radio to see what was going on in the world. Radio Four was occupied by a passionate do-it-yourself Christmas-decorations maker; she was explaining how to make paper chains out of cornflake packets. Radio Three was into Brahms. Radio Two had Jimmy Saville holding his own with a heart-transplant surgeon. Radio One was analysing the chart potential of a record called ‘I did Dung’ by a new group called Filthy. The world was going on as normal.
I thought about Sumpy; she’d be back in New York by now. I thought about Christmas and wondered where I would be. I looked at the dust that had gathered in a hundred places inside the car — above the dashboard, on the steering column, over the dials — and wondered when I’d have the time to give her the spring-clean she needed.
The nose of the Metro appeared out of the drive and amid a cloud of steam and smoke from the choked engine on this cold morning the car turned out onto the road and drove off away from me.
I started up and followed, to make sure she wasn’t just going to the shops nearby. She drove down onto the bypass, then turned left towards Guildford. I turned back, drove on past her house out of sight of the drive, pulled over onto the verge, wrote a note stating ‘Broken down’, stuck it on the windscreen, raised the bonnet, and set off briskly for the house. I reckoned on a good hour before the local bobby would start showing any interest in the car. Parking a car in the countryside is always a problem; in a town, nobody takes any notice but to a dutiful bobby a parked car in the middle of nowhere is as suspicious as a man walking down a street in a black mask, carrying a bag labelled Swag.
Mrs Scatliffe couldn’t have been planning to be away long — she hadn’t even locked the front door. Just to be sure no one was in I rang the bell, with a spiel ready about a mix-up between the local water board and gas board, resulting in a gas leak in the water pipes, and fingered my identification card from the gas board in my pocket. But the spiel wasn’t required and I let myself in.
The house was decorated much as the exterior had hinted; it was comfortable, well carpeted and parqueted, and the furniture was mostly comfortable-looking conservative and reproduction antique. There was a strong bias towards the nautical in the paintings and prints, not surprisingly since Scatliffe had spent a good deal of his life in the navy, although mainly in Admiralty House rather than on ships.
I quickly checked all the rooms in the house to ensure there were no visitors anywhere that I ought to know about. The house was empty.
I settled into Scatliffe’s study and started a routine systematic search. The system I used was one Scatliffe himself had devised.
His desk revealed nothing, except that he appeared to support a considerable number of charities, including being a member, for some reason, of the Water Rats. He was a month overdue with his American Express bill, about which a computer had written him a caustic letter; he had just applied for a credit account at Harrods; and he was collecting estimates for a switch from oil-fired central heating to gas. I was amused to discover correspondence in which he had been attempting unsuccessfully to persuade Scotland Yard to intervene on his behalf in cancelling half a dozen parking tickets: an extremely rude letter to him from the Chief Commissioner accused him and his whole department of a cavalier attitude towards yellow lines, and a general wholesale contempt for the motoring laws of the country.
Relationships between the Yard and the Department were frequently less than amicable, with the Yard regarding us as a bunch of privileged thugs who went around doing whatever we wanted, leaving them to clear up the messes we left behind. In a way they had a point. They dealt with the enforcement of the written laws of the land, adhering as closely to the book as possible. Our work had little to do with these laws and we abided much of the time by nothing but the law of the jungle. The police could measure their results by numbers of convictions and annual increases or decreases in the crime rate. We never had yardsticks; there is little that is black or white in the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage: one is perpetually scrabbling and scratching around in an endless blanket of grey.
Never was this blanket more apparent than today, sitting in Scatliffe’s study, searching for God-knew-what — some little scrap of paper that would make my hunch a certainty — listening for the engine of Mrs Scatliffe’s Metro — a noise, which, if I missed, would result in my being drummed out of the Department by the seat of my pants, my short and curlies, and anything else remotely grabbable.
I found the safe. Scatliffe had made little effort to hide it; it was behind a leather-bound collection of John Buchan novels, and it opened within 30 seconds. There was nothing in it. Nothing. I stared inside, then felt the base plate. There was a little give and after a few moments of jiggling with my knife blade it came away, revealing a combination dial underneath; it was more than a little crafty. The dial was harder to crack and it was a full couple of minutes before the door swung up and I pulled out the contents: a sheath of documents and two small heavy boxes.