This time the question wasn’t rhetorical and Pinker was waiting for an answer.
‘I don’t know,’ Paul said at length. ‘What do they do?’
‘Send some politico or other.’
‘A politico?’
‘And allow civilians to travel as well, to cover his mission.’
Paul’s dropped his fork, scattering herring across the table. He stared at Pinker. Either the commercial traveller was possessed of an unsuspected degree of perspicacity, or he really was Hart. Was it possible? Was he testing Paul out in some way?
‘What kind of mission do you mean exactly?’ he asked cautiously.
Pinker seemed irritated by Paul’s inability to keep up. ‘The two Russians,’ he hissed forcibly. ‘They’re go-betweens.’ When Paul made no obvious sign of comprehension, Pinker spelled it out. ‘Talks with the Bolsheviks, old chap. About them doing a deal with the Hun!’
‘You mean they’re going to talk to the Bolsheviks on our behalf?’
‘No, no. That’s why we’ve been delayed. Our chap, whoever he is, will be travelling with them. Only he hasn’t turned up yet. He’s incognito, you see. Otherwise they’d had sent them on a warship.’ Pinker inclined his head towards the quay. ‘Bit of an old tub, the Hesperus. But so much the better if it’s all undercover. Don’t want to alert the Beastly Hun — look what had happened to Kitchener. So mum’s the word,’ he winked.
‘Mum,’ Paul echoed.
‘Of course, the politico might turn out to be the parson, but my guess is that it’s the fellow we’re waiting for.’
‘Not you or me, then?’ Paul said, watching closely for a reaction.
‘Us?’ Pinker laughed. He looked up from his herrings. ‘You’re a card, Filbert, and no mistake. Us! That’s a good ‘un.’ He drained his glass and looked at Paul’s. ‘Well, my round, I think. Now I’ve got the nod from my office I can put it on expenses. We’ve got all day while we wait at His Majesty’s Pleasure, so we might as well enjoy ourselves. Same again?’
The day dragged interminably. Paul had another glass of beer with Pinker then made an excuse about having to telephone his company. He wandered around the market for a while, riding up and down on the electric tramway, then crossed the river and walked through the docks. It was a Sunday and everything beyond the riverfront was shut. He hadn’t even been able to buy a newspaper. At the quayside there were still ships moving in and out and, thinking he might be less conspicuous in a crowd, he’d hung around there where he could keep an eye on the Hesperus in case she slipped her moorings unexpectedly. Late in the evening, having eaten again at a stall on one of the piers, he’d finally gone back aboard, dropping by the deserted saloon for a night-cap before turning in. Turner was still on duty but, despite being asked, couldn’t give any better explanation for the delay in sailing than had Pinker.
It made Paul suspect Pinker had been right and they were waiting for someone in particular. The man had been right in much else of his supposition, even if he had got the details wrong. The steamer had been laid on for political reasons — for Paul and Hart to be precise, because the War Office had refused to stump up for a warship. And since Paul was there the delay could only be because they were waiting for Hart. The damn man must have missed the boat in Yarmouth! That meant, of course, that Pinker wasn’t Hart. Not that he’d really considered the possibility seriously. But it was still all very confusing. Nothing quite as it seemed and yet, on the other hand, transparent enough for a man like Pinker to see right through it. He speculated as to what Cumming would make of that. If nothing else it would put Browning’s back up. And, amusing as that might have been to see, looking at it dispassionately Paul was beginning to think that this line of work was not going to suit him. At bottom, he was the kind of man who preferred to know exactly where he stood. Even if that meant in the mud of Flanders.
Pinker was snoring on the top bunk giving off a beery aroma when Paul went down to his cabin. He undressed and folded his clothes away and climbed into bed. Some faint light from the dock filtered through the porthole and he could hear a faint grinding of machinery, almost drowned by the guttural purr issuing from the bunk above. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep but it didn’t come. He shifted one side and then the other and finally lay on his back and listened to Pinker. The hours crept by. It wasn’t the snoring keeping him awake; he heard that as an underlying leitmotif, the theme accompanying the helter-skelter of thoughts running through his head: Cumming, Mikhail, Hart, the man with a stiletto protruding from his chest… They turned, twisted and fused in different combinations and he didn’t realise he had fallen asleep and was dreaming the same thoughts as he had had awake. Until he woke. With a start.
No trace of light showed at the porthole. He felt a vibration and realised the ship’s engines had started. They were underweigh and the last chance he had of not going on the mission had disappeared. It felt like a loss. The ties that joined him to all he had known had been severed. He lay in the dark, eyes open. Above him Pinker had fallen silent. The leitmotif had faded. All that was left in its place was a void.
12
The rhythm of the engines and the sway of the boat had finally lulled him to sleep and it was light again when next he opened his eyes. Yet, despite having slept, he felt exhausted.
‘Rise and shine, old chap.’
Pinker was standing in the middle of the cabin. He held a toilet bag in one hand and a towel in the other, his face the colour of his name.
‘Time for breakfast, Filbert. I’ve been up top and taken a turn round the deck. Sun’s shining. Calm as the proverbial mill pond.’
Paul grunted and turned over.
‘No? Suit yourself.’
Paul heard him fussing for another minute or two then the cabin door closed and everything was silent, except for the throbbing of the ship’s engines. He wondered whether he should get up. He wasn’t hungry and was sure he could wait until lunch, although a cup of tea would have been nice. On any decent ship the cabin steward would have brought one. Not that he had ever been on a decent ship. The last time he’d been at sea had been on the hospital ship coming back from France and he hadn’t known much about that. The time before, going out to France, he’d been as sick as the proverbial dog. Nothing to do with rough weather; his nausea had been due to his apprehension at the thought of having to go over the top once at the front. He wasn’t a professional soldier. He had been far from sure he was even going to make a decent amateur. He had volunteered, but only because the rest of the male population had and he had felt conspicuous out of uniform. Initially he had thought himself fortunate to have been commissioned. Volunteering, it turned out, had found favour with some bachelor member of his mother’s family with ‘pull’ for whom the lack of male progeny and having ‘young so-and-so’ at the front, left him without bragging rights among his peers. By then though, the horror of what Paul had let himself in for had begun to dawn on him; stories about the attrition of inexperienced subalterns had filtered back home, and confirmation of it as plain as day in the newspapers’ casualty lists every morning.
If the thought of it happening hadn’t been so shaming he might have hoped to fail the training. Although in that case he supposed they would have taken him into the ranks, and the infantry soldier’s chances of survival weren’t much better than a subalterns. As it was, he had the impression that he had only just squeaked though officer training. The trick of the thing, he had found out belatedly, was not in being able to tell others what to do, but in getting them actually to do it. In the end he had got his commission, not in one of the better regiments, of course, but in a decent-enough line regiment. One, at least, that would provide bragging-rights for his mother’s relative. And it hadn’t taken him long after moving up the line to discover that bragging-rights in London drawing rooms were far preferable to the mud-filled trenches and the pervasive stench of death in France.