'And she lives in Reigate.'
'Yes. McCane was going there last night, to put up at a hotel and see her this morning.'
'That's where I start?
'That is where you start.' He crushed out his cigarette. 'I don't think I need to point out that you may well attract the attention of these people simply by showing up in Reigate. You don't normally like support, do you?
'Only when I ask for it.'
'That's a pity. It could finish you off, one fine day. I just hope it doesn't happen while I'm running you.'
I went back to my flat in Sloane Square and showered and slept for three hours. When I got up I put the clothes I'd worn last night into a plastic bag and phoned Harry and asked him to take them to the cleaners as soon as he could; the smell of burning was pervasive, lingering. Then I phoned the stage door at the St James's, but Thea was in the middle of rehearsal and I left a message saying I couldn't make it this evening, and phoned The Conservatory and asked them to send flowers for the opening night tomorrow.
It was eleven o'clock when I checked in again at the Bureau. They told me they'd arranged for me to have tea with Helen Maitland in Reigate at four, and that gave me time to look over the documented briefing that Shatner had given McCane and go over the present situation in Berlin regarding the Red Army Faction's activities. Shatner said there was no need for me to go through Clearance at this stage; a lot was going to depend on how much Helen Maitland was prepared to help us and whether she could give us any positive information to work on.
When I left Whitehall and drove south along Millbank by the Thames I didn't have any sense of professional engagement. Shatner had officially started running me but there was no actual mission on the board and the truth was, after all, that the reason that was driving me south from London on this cold November afternoon was purely personal. I owed a man a death.
Chapter 3: HELEN
She was standing in the middle of the lawn behind the house, perfectly still, her back to me. There was frost on the grass, and dead leaves, their edges silvered in the last of the winter daylight. A birdbath stood on a stone pedestal with ice in it, and something else, a small rounded object, perhaps a dead bird: I couldn't quite see from here. I'd rung the doorbell at the front of the house but couldn't hear any sound. I'd knocked, but not too hard; this was a house of grief. Then I'd come along the narrow redbrick path and through the gate by the hedge and seen her there on the lawn, a thin figure hunched in a sheepskin coat, facing away from the house. I couldn't see that she was watching anything in particular; there was a tennis court and a summer house and, farther away, a shed with some gardening tools leaning against it and the door half open. It was intensely quiet here, but in the distance there was traffic, its sounds muted, it seemed, by the cold and the lowering dark.
She turned round and saw me.
I hadn't gone close, not wanting to startle her. We stood facing each other for a time in silence. Then she spoke.
'Who are you?' 'Victor Locke. I'm sorry to disturb you.' I meant her reverie. She'd known I was coming; it was just four.
She seemed not to connect, then said, 'Oh yes. You're coming to tea.' She still didn't move. At this distance she looked insubstantial, a small cold face above the coat, her hands tucked into the sleeves, her feet together in their fleece-lined boots. There was a toy railway engine not far from where she stood, lying on its side among the frosted leaves. I hadn't been briefed that the Maitlands had any children.
I went towards her. That's right. I'm sorry about your husband.'
There was no expression in her cool grey eyes, though she looked at me without blinking. Not at me, perhaps, but at all the things I meant, because I was here, all the things she was going to have to do now that she was a widow. That was my impression. I was breaking into the small Confusing world that was taking its place between the old one, where her husband had been, and the new one, where he would not be.
'Oh,' she said at last, not having heard what I'd said, perhaps, or not knowing how to answer. 'Are you in the Foreign Office?'
'I'm in one of their lesser-known departments.' Not true, but the lesser-known' bit should give her the idea that she shouldn't ask for specifics. She thought about that. She was pretty, in an ethereal way, pale and cool and still. I couldn't see her playing tennis, but of course she might have looked quite different a week ago, before it had happened.
'We'd better go in,' she said, but it had the sound of a question.
'Not unless you want to.' She might not feel like being in the house now that it was empty. Perhaps that was why she'd come out here.
'But you'd like some tea.'
'Not really.'
'Oh.' She watched me quietly for a moment, then looked around and said, 'We could sit down, I suppose.' There were some rustic-looking chairs at the edge of the lawn, where the tennis court began, their white paint beginning to peel. 'Am I being terribly unwelcoming?' She said it without a smile, dipping her head, so that her long fair hair swung a little.
'Look,' I said, 'this isn't a social visit, and I want to make it as painless for you as I can.'
In a moment: 'Painless?'
That was the first clue. 'I need to ask you about Berlin. They told you, didn't they?
'Yes. But that's all right.' She moved at last, walking across to one of the garden chairs, her suede boots leaving streaks on the frost; she walked with a slight sway, as if through water. 'I don't mind talking about Berlin. I expect I seem a little distrait. Everything was rather sudden. And of course beastly.'
She perched on the arm of the chair, throwing her hair back and looking at me a little defensively, I thought. No one likes questions about something they'd rather forget. I said, 'We want to know what happened over there. Your husband was -'
'His name is George. Was George. You can call him that.'
'All right. He was well into the scene in Berlin, knew a lot of people. He did a good job at the embassy, so I imagine he was pretty popular there.'
'Not very.'
'People tend to envy success, don't they?' I dragged a chair over and hitched myself onto the arm.
'I don't think it was that, quite. He was rather cocky, you see.'
'He wasn't too well-liked outside the embassy, either? Would you say?'
'Not enormously.'
There was a face over there in the hedge, in a gap in the hedge. 'But not so unpopular,' I said, 'that people would want to… harm him?'
'Oh, no. He was just – I mean he was just George. Rather supercilious. No, I think it was the Red Army Faction that killed him. The police think so.'