If Luck was intending to annoy me, he was making a rare job of it. "The suggestion is totally improper," I retorted. "I might as well ask you whether you take bribes."
Once more, with a laboriousness calculated to exasperate me, Bryant lumbered to the rescue. "Forgive him, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Oliver is but young." He put his hands together in mock prayer. "Mr. Cranmer, sir—please—if I may, sir."
"Yes, Mr. Bryant?"
"I think we have distracted ourselves once more, sir. We're rather good at that, I notice. We're talking the telephone, and the next thing I know we're talking a piece of history two years ago. What about today, sir? When was your most recent conversation with Dr. Pettifer on the electric telephone: put it that way. Never mind the subject or topic; just tell me when. That's what I'm after, and I'm beginning to think that for some reason you don't want to give me a straight answer, which is why young Oliver there was getting a bit testy just now. Yes, sir?"
"I'm still thinking."
"Take all the time you require, sir."
"It's like his visits. You just forget them. He always telephones when you're slap in the middle of things." Making love with Emma, for instance, in the days when love was what we made. "Have I seen such and such an article in the newspaper; did I see that jackass So-and-so on television, lying in his teeth about the whatever? That's what happens with undergraduate friendships. What was charming twenty-five years ago becomes a pest. You grow up. Your friends don't. You adjust. They stay the same. They become old kids, then they become bores. That's when you switch off."
I did not like Luck's glower any more than I liked Bryant's moustachio'd leer.
"Now, by switch off, sir," said Bryant, "do we mean here literally switch off? Switch off our telephone? Have it disconnected? Because that is what I believe we did on the first of August last, Mr. Cranmer, sir, and did not resume contact with the outside world for three full weeks thereafter. At which point we acquire a new number."
I must have been ready for him, for I struck back quickly, and at both of them.
"Inspector Bryant. Sergeant Luck. I think I've had rather more than enough of this. One minute you're engaged in a missing person enquiry. The next you're asking a lot of extraneous nonsense about unethical contacts while I was a civil servant, my politics, whether I'm a security risk, and why I went ex-directory."
"So why did you?" Luck said.
"I was being intruded upon."
"Who by?"
"Nobody of the smallest consequence to you."
Bryant's turn. "Now, if that was the case, sir, why didn't you get in touch with the police? Not as if you're a wilting violet, is it? We're more than happy to assist with nuisance phone calls, be they threatening or obscene. In collaboration with British Telecom, naturally. No need to cut yourself off from the outside world for three weeks."
"The calls I found objectionable were neither threatening nor obscene."
"Oh? So what were they, sir, if you don't mind?"
"They were not your business. They aren't now." I added a second excuse where one would have served well enough: "Besides, three weeks without the telephone are a rest cure."
Bryant was delving in an inside pocket. He extracted a black notebook, removed the elastic band, and opened it longways on his lap.
"Only you see, sir, me and Oliver here have been making quite a study of the Doctor's phone calls, going back over his entire period of residence in Bath," he explained. "We are highly fortunate in the Doctor having a very Scottish landlady and a shared telephone line. Every outgoing call was timed and noted down. Her late husband the Commander started the practice. Mrs. Macarthur carries it on."
Bryant licked a thumb and turned a page.
"Incoming calls, the Doctor had any number of them, many from far-flung places by the sound of them, and a lot cut off in midstream. Quite often the Doctor was speaking this language she can't place too. But outgoing, that's different. When we're talking outgoing, you were the Doctor's star telephone partner until August first this year, according to Mrs. Macarthur. Six hours and twenty minutes the Doctor notched up with you in May and June alone."
He paused, but I still didn't interrupt him. I had played an impossible hand and lost. I had wriggled and ducked, I had hoped to satisfy them with half-truths. But against such a well-planned assault I had no defence. Casting round for a scapegoat, I lighted upon the Office. If the fools in the Office were aware of Larry's disappearance, why the devil hadn't they sent me an early warning? They must know the police were looking for him. Then why didn't they stop them? And if they couldn't stop them, why leave me dangling in the wind, not knowing who knew what or why?
* * *
I am attending my last meeting with Jake Merriman, Head of Personnel. He is sitting in his carpeted rooms overlooking Berkeley Square, snapping his Rich Tea biscuit in half while he moans about the Wheel of History. Merriman has played the English bloody fool so long that neither he nor anybody else knows anymore whether he is the genuine article.
"Done your job, Tim, old boy," he complains in his drawled, echoless voice. "Lived the passion of your time. Who can do more?"
I say, Who indeed. But Merriman has no ear for irony except his own.
"It was there, it was evil, you spied the hell out of it, and now it's gone away. I mean we can't say, simply because we won, there was no point in fighting, can we? Much better to say, Hooray, we trounced them, the Commie dog is dead and buried, time to move on to the next party." He manages a little whinny of amusement. "Not Party with a capital P The small kind." And he subdivides one section of his Rich Tea before lowering the point of it into his coffee.
"But I'm not invited to the new party, am I?" I say. Merriman never gives you the bad news himself. He prefers to drag it out of you.
"Well, I don't think you are, Tim, are you?" he agrees, with a commiserating tilt of his fleshy head. "I mean twenty-five years do rather shape the mind, don't they? I'd have thought you'd be far better off agreeing you'd served your stint, and time to find pastures new. After all, you're not a pauper. You've got your nice place in the country, and a little bit of your own. Your dear uncle Robert has had the grace to die, which is more than we can say for some rich uncles. What could be jollier?"
There is a saying in the Office that you have to be careful with Merriman lest you resign by mistake, rather than waiting for him to sack you.
"I don't think I'm too old to take on new targets," I say. "Cold Warriors of forty-seven don't recycle, Tim. You're all far too nice. You have too many rules of engagement. You'll tell Pettifer, won't you? It's best coming from you.”
“Tell him what, exactly?"
"Well, the same as I've just told you, I suppose. You don't think we can direct him against the terrorist target, do you? Do you know what he's costing me? Just for his retainer? Not to mention his expenses, which are a joke."
"Since it's my section that is responsible for paying him, yes."
"Well, I mean for what anymore? Hang it all, when you're trying to persuade chaps to join the Baghdad Brotherhood for you or whatever, you need every penny you can get. The Pettifers of this world are extinct. Admit it, says I."
Too late, as usual, I start to lose my temper. "That wasn't the Top Floor's ruling when his case last came up for review. It was agreed by all parties that we would wait and see whether Moscow dreamed up a new role for him."
"We waited and we got bored." He slides a cutting from the Guardian across the desk at me. "Pettifer needs a context, or he'll be trouble. Talk to the resettlement people. Bath University is looking for a linguist who can double up on something called global security, which sounds to me like the oxymoron of all time. Temporary but could be permanent. Their Big I Am is ex-Office and well disposed, provided Pettifer keeps his nose clean. I didn't know Bath had a university," he adds grouchily, as if nobody ever tells him anything. "Must be one of those Techs in drag."