"Tim. How nice."
"Hullo, Jake. You're just in time. I'm being asked to say how much money I've spent this year."
"Yes, how much have you? There's the Bechstein for a start. That cost a bomb. Then there's your little pilgrimages to Mr. Appleby's nice jeweller's shop in Wells, never cheap—you've dropped thirty grand there—not to mention all the fillies and smart frocks you've bought her. Must be quite a gal. Lucky she disapproves of motorcars, or I can see a Bentley with mink-lined seats. I know you inherited early from your parents, I know your uncle Bob left you Schloss and contents, but what about the rest? Or is it all from naughty Aunt Cecily, who died so conveniently in Portugal a few years back? For a fellow who never cared about money, you certainly know how to pick a relative."
"If you don't believe me, check with my solicitors."
"My dear boy, they bear you out entirely. Half a million quids' worth of the best, added to what you've already got, paid in two instalments from a nice Channel Islands trust fund. The solicitors never met the aunt, mind. They were instructed by a firm in Lisbon. The firm in Lisbon never met her either. They were instructed by her business manager, a lawyer in Paris. I mean really, Tim, I've seen money laundered before, but never lawyers." He turned to Marjorie Pew and spoke as if I weren't in the room. "We're still checking, so he needn't think he's in the clear. If Aunt Cecily turns up in a pauper's grave, Cranmer's for the high jump."
"Tim?"
It was Marjorie again. She would like to go back to the logic of my behaviour last night, she said. She wondered whether she might run it by me one more time to make sure she had it straight, Tim.
"Be my guest," I said, using a phrase I had never used in my life.
"Tim, why did you telephone us from your house? You said it was in your mind that the police might have been running illegal taps and that they'd made up the story about Larry's vigilant Scottish landlady as cover. Mightn't they have been tapping your phone too? I'd have thought that with your training and experience, you'd have driven to the village and used the public box."
"I used the established procedure."
"I'm not certain you did. Rule One is to make sure it's safe."
I glanced at Merriman, but he had adopted the posture of a hostile audience, eyeing me as he might a prisoner in the dock.
"The police could have put a tap on the village box as well," I said. "Not that they'd have got much joy of it. It's usually bust."
"I see," she said, implying once again that she didn't.
"It would have looked pretty damned odd, at eleven at night, if I had driven a mile into the village to make a call. Particularly if the police were watching my house."
She looked at the tips of her groomed fingers, then at me again, as she began counting off the points that were troubling her. Merriman had decided he preferred the ceiling. Waldon the floor.
"You cut yourself off from Pettifer. You think his disappearance may be perfectly normal. But it worries you so much you can't wait to tell us about it. You know Checheyev has retired. You know Pettifer has. But you suspect they're up to something, though you don't know what or why. You think the police may be tapping your phone. But you use it to ring us. You spend twenty minutes staring at this building before you pluck up the courage to enter it. One could therefore be forgiven for assuming that ever since the police called on you last night, you have been in a state of stress quite disproportionate to Pettifer's disappearance. One might even suppose that you had something very weighty on your mind. So weighty that even a person as overcontrolled as yourself makes a string of tradecraft errors at odds with his training."
My apprehensions had given way to outright rejoicing. I forgave her everything: her courtroom pomposity, her shrouded savagery, her description of me as overcontrolled. Angel choirs were singing in my ears, and as far as I was concerned, Marjorie Pew as in church was one of the angels. I had told her nothing. Never mind that she couldn't or wouldn't tell me the date of Checheyev's last visit. She had told me something even more important: They didn't know about Emma and Larry.
They knew about Emma and me, because under Office rules I had been obliged to tell them. But they hadn't drawn the third line of the triangle. And that, as we used to say, was three-star intelligence: worth the whole journey.
I selected a sentimental, wounded tone. "Larry was more than my agent, Marjorie," I said. "He was my friend for quarter of a century. On top of that, he was the best live source we had. He was one of those joes who make their own luck. In the beginning, the KGB recruited him on spec. He wasn't big enough to be an agent of influence; he didn't have access worth a hoot. They gave him a small salary and let him loose on the international conference circuit, armed with a bunch of briefs written by Moscow Centre, and they hoped that in time he would amount to somebody. He did. He became their man, talent-spotting left-wing students, earmarking tomorrow's friendlies for the Kremlin, and flying kites at world conferences. After a few years, thanks to Larry, this office had put together its own cast of tame Communist agents, some Brit, some foreign, but all wholly owned by this service, who between them fed Moscow some of the most sophisticated disinformation of the Cold War, and the KGB never rumbled it. He attracted subverts like flypaper. He worked the Third World fence-sitters till he had blisters on his backside. He had a memory that most of us would kill for. He knew every bought MP in Westminster, every suborned British journalist, lobbyist, and agent of influence on Moscow Centre's London payroll. There were people in the KGB and people in the Office who owed him their living and their promotion. I was one of them. So yes, I was concerned. I still am."
* * *
In the respectful silence that followed this peroration, I realized that I knew what H/IS stood for. If Jake Merriman was Head of Personnel and Barney Waldon was Office liaison at Scotland Yard, Marjorie Pew was that hated jackal of the Service, formerly known to the lower orders as the Polit-Commissar and now dignified by the title Head of Internal Security. Her job involved everything from unemptied wastepaper baskets to thinking dirty about the love lives of past and present employees and reporting her suspicions to Jake Merriman. Why else would Merriman and Waldon defer to her like this? Why else would she now be asking me to describe—in my own words, as if I were about to use someone else's—how I had succeeded in acquiring Larry for the Office in the first place? Marjorie Pew wanted to test some cockeyed conspiracy theory that Larry and I had been in calhoots from the beginning; that I had not recruited Larry but Larry had recruited himself; or, better, that Larry and Checheyev between them had recruited me in some crooked and self-serving enterprise.
I trod cautiously all the same. In our trade, theories like hers had wrecked good men's lives on both sides of the Atlantic before being laid sheepishly to rest. I answered her with care and accuracy, even if, to demonstrate my ease of mind, I allowed myself occasional flights of flippancy.
"When I first met him he was a total gypsy," I said.
"That was at Oxford?"
"No, at Winchester. Larry was a new boy the same term I became a prefect. He was an exhibitioner of some sort. The school paid half his fees, the Church of England provided him with a bursary for being impoverished and picked up the rest. The school was still in the dark ages. Fagging, flogging, bullying galore, the whole Arnoldian package. Larry didn't fit, and he didn't want to. He was sloppy and clever, he refused to learn his Notions but couldn't keep his mouth shut which made him unpopular in some quarters and a bit of a hero in others. He got beaten blue. I tried to protect him."