“With a black baby, Simpkin? I should like to think that was true. No, somebody was playing a joke on us.”
“I know who it was,” Peter Rabbit said. He pointed across the table at Simpkin. “You.”
“And how does Peter Rabbit make that out?” There was an undercurrent of mockery in Hilary’s voice, but he did not fail to notice that Simpkin was left sitting at one end of the table, the others drawing away as though he had an infectious disease. Simpkin himself seemed unaffected. He drained the glass in front of him and refilled it from one of the bottles on the table.
“I’ll tell you how I know,” Peter Rabbit began in a low furious voice. Hilary stopped him. His eyes were bright with pleasure.
“We must do this according to law. There was no trial in any Beatrix Potter story—”
“Sod the Beatrix Potter stories,” said the man who had been leaning against the lamppost, a youth whose spottiness was partly hidden by his thick beard.
“Now then, Samuel Whiskers, no bad language if you please,” Hilary said indulgently. The young man who had been pushing a broom spoke. He was another recent recruit, a broad-shouldered man with a round ruddy face and a snoutish vertical-nostriled nose that had led Hilary to christen him Pigling Bland. Like all of them except Peter Rabbit and Hilary himself, he spoke in the mid-Atlantic accent that denies the existence of English class distinctions.
“He’s right. We don’t want any playing about. If there’s a grass we’ve got to know who it is.”
“Precisely, Pigling. But let us do it by considering evidence rather than by simple accusation. Simpkin, you are the accused — you may remain where you are. Peter Rabbit, you will be prosecutor — you should go to the other side of the table. The rest of you will serve as the jury and should group yourselves at the end. Thank you. I will serve as judge, summing up the evidence, although the verdict will be yours. I think I should sit away from you. Over here, perhaps.” He placed his chair beside the door. “If you wish, Simpkin, you may ask one of the jury to defend you.”
“I’ll defend myself,” Simpkin said. Of all the people in the room he seemed the least moved.
“Very well. Prosecuting counsel, begin.”
The blond young man did not look at Hilary. “I should like to say that this is a stupid way—”
Hilary tapped on the arm of his chair with the lighter he was using for another cigarette. “Out of order. Produce your evidence.”
“All right. Simpkin joined the group four months ago. Since then he’s been concerned in three jobs. The first was leaving a bomb in an Underground train. He did that himself. At least he says so, but the bomb never went off. Did he ever leave it?”
Simpkin intervened. “Can I answer that?”
“Not now. You’ll have your turn.” Hilary’s eyes had been closed, and now he shut them again. With eyes closed Peter Rabbit’s voice sounded exactly like Charlie Ramsden’s.
“Two. Simpkin was one of the people who planned to get a comrade out of Brixton Prison. Almost at the last minute the comrade was moved to Parkhurst. Coincidence? Perhaps. Three. A couple of weeks ago we should have had an open-and-shut job, getting documents out of a Ministry file. They’d have been very useful to us. You, Jeremy Fisher—” He nodded at the man who had been driving one of the getaway cars. “—I don’t know your name, so I have to call you that — you set it up, you had a friend on the inside. Simpkin is suppose to know the Ministry layout, which is why he was involved so closely. The job went through all right, but the papers weren’t in the file.
“And four, the job today. You were the grass.”
He stopped. Hilary opened his eyes. “Is that all?”
“No. But I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
Simpkin’s features were watchful; he really did look a little like the cat he was supposed to represent. “No need to say much. One, I left the bomb. The mechanism was faulty, it was reported in the press.”
“Of course. You fixed a cover story.”
Simpkin shrugged. “Number two was a coincidence, must have been. Number three, maybe the papers had been taken out months earlier. Anyway why pick on me, why not on Jeremy Fisher?”
“He wasn’t in on the other jobs. You were.”
“So were you.” Simpkin permitted himself a brief catlike smile. “And if you remember, I was against this snatch. I thought it was too risky.”
“I’m an old member, not a new one. We’ve made mistakes before, but it’s since you joined us that things have been going wrong persistently. And of course you’d be against the snatch, that was another bit of cover.”
Hilary moved in his chair. “You said there was something more.”
“Yes. Some of you know that I have — that I see people—”
“We know about your social position,” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle said in her harsh voice. “We know you meet the best people. I’ve seen your name in the papers.”
“All right,” Peter Rabbit said. “Through my position I’ve been able to get a good deal of information. You know that,” he said to Hilary, who nodded and smiled his acid smile. “Last Wednesday I had dinner at Morton’s, which is a small luncheon-and-dining club with a very restricted membership. Top people in the services and the Ministries, a few members of the Government and so on.”
“Top people, period,” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle said. “Nice company you keep.”
The young man ignored her. “Morton’s has a couple of rooms where you can take people for dinner if you’ve got something extremely private to discuss. On this night — it was fairly late, very few people in the Club — three people came out of one of these rooms. One was Giles Ravelin, who’s an assistant head in MI 6. He’s a member of Morton’s, and the two others must have been his guests. One was Sir Llewellyn Scott who acts as a sort of link between the police and the counterespionage agencies. And the third was Simpkin.” He paused. “I want him to explain how he came to be there. If he can.”
It was for such moments as these that Hilary lived, moments of excitement outside the routine of life. Revolutionary intrigue he had found for the most part boring, a matter of dull little men discussing how to obtain power over other dull little men. But the possible visit of the Wolf, the fun of calling him Mr. McGregor, the tension in this long low windowless room with its hidden light that made every face look ghostly pale — oh, these were the moments that made life worth living, whatever their outcome. How would Simpkin react to Charlie Ramsden — no, to Peter Rabbit? What would he say?
The silence was total. All of them were staring at Simpkin, waiting for Simpkin. At last he gave a faint catlike cough. “What was the light like?”
“The light?” Then he realized the question’s purpose. “A good deal better than it is here. Good enough to recognize you.”
“How near were you to this man?”
“I was four feet away or less, sitting in an alcove. You didn’t see me, or I don’t think so, because I was partly hidden. But I had a good view of you.”
“You saw the man for — how long? Two seconds?”
“Long enough. It was you. I’ll ask you again. What were you doing there, whom do you work for?”
From the rest of them, those appointed as a jury, there came a murmur, an angry dangerous sound. “Answer him,” Samuel Whiskers said. “If you don’t, we’ll know what to think.”
“I can’t answer,” Simpkin said flatly. “I wasn’t there.” There was a moment’s pause while they digested this. “I was never inside that place in my life, never heard of it. I gave him a chance to say he was mistaken, but he didn’t take it. He’s lying.”