The barber lifted his scissors from the short back and sides he was performing. ‘Afternoon, sir.’
I was out into the street, doubled round into Park Lane, and managed to get straight into a taxi that was unloading a fare at an apartment building.
‘Carlton House Terrace,’ I said, ‘56.’
I got out at 56, flashed my security pass and, avoiding the excruciatingly slow lift, sprinted the four flights of stairs up to the Control floor.
There was the hawk-nosed, skinny, wrinkly tartar perched at the typewriter in the ante-room to Scatliffe’s office; she lifted her bill to enquire the purpose of my visit and then promptly had to duck it under her desk in order to retrieve the pile of papers my slipstream had swept off it. I stormed straight into Scatliffe’s office and caught him well and truly on the hop, one hand holding a telephone receiver to his ear, the other supporting a finger up his nose. The finger came out smartly and he snapped into the telephone, ‘He’s here now,’ and replaced the receiver.
‘I want to know what the hell’s going on, Scatliffe. I’m just about through with you and everything else, I’ve had it up to here.’ I swung my hand up under my chin. ‘I’ve been kidnapped, shot at, my car’s been blown up, my home’s been destroyed. I’m mad and I’m fed up, Scatliffe, I’m fed up with the whole damn thing and I want some explanations.’
He stood in rock silence for a long time, his cold eyes colder than ever, his small frame cosseted inside his expensive and natty tweed suit, his pasty-white face shaking like a blancmange in a breeze. He clenched and opened his hands, pushing his white knuckles down on the leather top of his desk, and lifting them up again. Slowly he leaned forward; his lips curved into a circle and he began to spit out his words like a machine gun. ‘I have been trying to get hold of you for eight days. You have gone absent without leave and I’m going to have you very severely disciplined. You have caused this department untold damage with your crazy recklessness, God alone knows what you have been up to but you must have taken complete and utter leave of your senses, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, breaking into my house, breaking into Mr Wetherby’s flat, breaking your cover and returning to England, going here, going there, going bloody everywhere. Who the hell do you think you are? Have you gone completely and utterly mad? How much of the Secret Service do you intend to destroy before you’ve finished? Half of it? Three quarters of it? Or all of it? You’re not above the law — who the hell gave you permission to start rummaging in my house? Who the hell gave you permission to beat up a member of staff less than ten minutes ago? I’ve got a million questions for you, Flynn, and I want every single one of them answered and answered thoroughly, and if you don’t have some damn good answers, the consequences for you are going to be grave, very grave indeed. Do I make myself clear?’
I looked at him and with great restraint said, ‘Yes. Perfectly clear.’
‘You’re removed from your assignment as from now. You’ll work inside this building on your report and when you have finished it you will be suspended from this Service until we have decided what to do about you. You are not to leave London and you are to keep this office informed of your exact whereabouts, day and night. Is that also clear?’
‘It is. And I want my house put back into order within half an hour.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know because I won’t believe it. My house has been taken apart at the seams.’
‘I don’t know anything about your house; I didn’t even know you had a house. Perhaps you’ve had burglars. You do get them in England, you know.’
‘Burglars don’t saw your radiators in half.’
‘If you’re accusing me I’d like it in writing.’
‘You’ll get it.’ I stormed back out and sent the siren’s pile scattering back onto the floor again.
I went down to the third floor to my office. It was just about an office, at any rate: it made the average changing room of a King’s Road boutique look like the Mansion House banqueting hall. It had one chair, one desk and one light, and had to be entered sideways, and then by someone slim and agile. It was tucked away at the back of the accounts department; all agents’ offices were tucked away in different parts of different buildings so that no one would know who were agents and who were lesser or greater minions. For all the accounts department knew, I could be a humble costings clerk; for all I knew, the entire accounts department could actually be field operatives in disguise — except that most of them didn’t look as though they were capable of going to the bathroom unaided.
I filled in a requisition form and took it along to the filing clerk; he looked like he lived in a cosy little bed inside one of his filing cabinets. He was about 50, very short indeed, with an immaculate three-piece pin-stripe suit, watch chain, tie chain, chain-link sleeve bands and no doubt chain-link garters. His shirt was clean, his suit immaculately pressed, and every hair on his head perfectly and permanently ironed into place. Unfortunately the wretched man had filthy body odour and the rest of the staff permanently kept well clear of him.
Whilst accepting my requisition form with his usual dispassionate seriousness his face expressed the merest trace of excitement at the prospect of actually having a task to do. Without a word he scurried to a cabinet immediately behind him, pulled out a drawer about halfway up it, and had to stand on tiptoe in order to see into it; he shovelled his two arms in over the top and gave the impression from behind of an errant schoolboy trying to peer into someone else’s Christmas stocking. He rummaged about for some while then produced a sheath of papers. He came back over, slipped them inside an envelope and handed them to me.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He nodded silently and I realised I had never in all the time I had been here heard him speak. I wondered if perhaps he was a mute. I turned to go back to my office when behind me I heard him suddenly and loudly say, ‘High!’
I turned around thinking he must have discovered his personal problem, but he was pointing at the filing cabinet.
‘Difficult for me to reach up there,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t bother me,’ he went on. ‘Any time I can oblige,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
I decided the Department must have got him cheap. I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope. Inside was a wadge of phone bills attached to massive breakdowns of times, zones and units; these breakdowns had been instigated by Scatliffe so that they could be analysed for cost-effective use of the telephones. Even MI5 had budget problems.
The wadge I held was all the telephone bills of the Department for the past six months; it was a hefty wadge — the Department didn’t scrimp on phone calls. I began with the April, May, June quarter and turned to May 1st, three and a half months before Fifeshire’s shooting.
21
The British telephone bill, as interpreted by Commander Clive Scatliffe, deserved to be in the Guinness Book of Records. The heading should be: ‘Most unintelligible communication ever produced.’ It was after eleven o’clock that night and I was just beginning to master those portions of it that it was in any way possible to master. I had sorted out inland call charges, peak rate, standard rate, cheap rate, direct dialled and operator dialled, exclusive of Value Added Tax, inclusive of Value Added Tax, analysed the lower operator charge calls and the normal operator charge calls, the international call charges, standard rate, cheap rate, reverse-charge call rate; even without Scatliffe’s interference, I wondered how any normal human being could take such an unwise step as to have a telephone installed in his home without owning the latest data-processing equipment with which to decipher the bills.