She brought a fax from the BBC to the hospital saying that as Dr Chand had requested a further week of tests for my tubercular illness, I would not be expected back at work until I’d fully recovered.
‘Don’t worry, please,’ said Ravi Chand, looking in and reassuring his protesting patient. ‘You can still probably leave on Sunday, but you obviously need rest. You have a strong constitution but also you don’t know when you are in danger of overtaxing yourself. Illnesses like this deplete muscle power, believe me.’
He swept out again at his usual speed, white coat floating, waving a hand to Jett.
‘You know him well,’ I commented, and added in his own chirping accent, ‘my dear Jett.’
‘I’ve nursed several of his patients after they’ve left here,’ Jett said, smiling from past familiar moments. ‘Ravi’s terrifically well thought of. I brought you here because he’s a top man for radiation sickness, which I thought you had, but he’s mega thrilled to find you’ve got something he’s never met before. He’s going to write you up for publication, did you know?’
She stayed, good company, until John Rupert and Ghost returned, and then left, saying she would be back in the evening.
The two men brought cold November air in with them, but little in the way of fruitful aid.
Ghost studied his toe-caps, smoothed a hand over his hair and did his best. ‘We have consulted our — er — superior officer, and the answers he told us to give you are...’ He still hesitated, as it seemed telling nothing at all was a near-unbreakable habit. ‘The answers are...’ He pulled a small neat sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and read in a strangled voice, ‘Yes, you are useful, yes, your information is passed on, and as for our ultimate aim...’ he hesitated yet again, and I waited in persuasive silence until he managed to resume. Then, looking down at the page, he read, ‘We do want to put the Unified Trading Company out of business, but we also want more, we want the people behind them, the unknown mostly foreign groups who are constantly planning and putting together the threat of a bomb. It’s like infiltrating a drugs ring, to get beyond the pushers to the main suppliers.’
‘Except,’ I said dryly, ‘that your suppliers are trading in enriched uranium and plutonium, not in fairly harmless stuff, like cocaine.’
Ghost wriggled in his chair and read again directly from his paper.
‘As Dr Stuart is primarily a meteorologist he is not expected to proceed any further in this matter.’ He folded the paper and tucked it away. ‘That’s all I have,’ he said, sighing. ‘John Rupert has a shorter message.’
I turned to John Rupert who, also with hesitation, issued a much briefer instruction. He read, ‘Win quietly. Look sideways at what you learn. I have faith in you. If you can swim through a hurricane, you can find a way through a maze.’
I said, ‘Are those the exact words?’
John Rupert nodded. ‘When I asked him what he meant, he said you would understand.’
He looked uncomfortable, and I saw that even for ‘authorities’ there were baffling acres of ‘need to know’. One thing that these two apparently didn’t know was the identity of their superior officer. I asked who he was. They numbly shook their heads and confessed ignorance, but owing to the overall secret nature of their business, I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe them.
They both expected (and said) that in the absence of fully satisfactory replies to my questions, I would retire from the field at once; but in a minor fashion I was addicted to crossword puzzles, and as I’d been invited to find a way through a maze that might not exist, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to discover more about how the undercover mind worked. Rather to the surprise of publisher and ghost writer, I asked them about books.
Ghost knew hardly enough about storms to blow the head off a dandelion, but said if I talked onto a tape the way I could talk in their office, with all my best stormy dramatics topping high C, we might even hit best-sellerdom, and John Rupert good humouredly worked out how many tons of paper it would need. The book that had started out as camouflage unexpectedly struck flint and caught fire.
I learned from my visitors’ increasingly relaxed light-heartedness during the next hour that the lady ‘authority’ at the Health and Safety Executive who had sent me to Kensington originally, hadn’t steered me very high up the anti-terrorist ladder. John Rupert, all the same, had proved a reliable middle rung, leading upward to a loftier level, and had given me a path now if I wanted to take it.
‘What have you decided?’ he asked.
‘Have to think,’ I said.
When he and Ghost had left I sat in an armchair in the dusk and let the meaning of the answers I’d been given filter through into a clearer understanding.
First of all, I thought, I’d been told incidentally that I might already know by sight the person who stood on the next rung up. Next-rung-up most likely had, like myself, a recognisable face. Maybe next-rung-up was a politician.
Next-rung-up, far from choking me off, had more or less urged me to go on. It seemed to me that the main message that had been delivered could be interpreted as ‘destroy the Trading operation, but don’t let the Traders know how you did it’.
I drifted from the possible future back to the unexpected past and tried without stress to see if a pattern would emerge that I could trust, like laying down random-seeming threads on a loom that all of a sudden revealed themselves as a piece of whole cloth in three dimensions. There had been a whole lot of ‘magic illusion’ pictures like that once, which gave three-D effects if one looked beyond the close and obvious and focused on the distant. A lot of weather forecasting fell into atmospheric pressure pictures of close and distant fronts, three dimensional and always on the move.
The close and obvious in Unified Trading terms — as I saw now, when it was too late — had been George Loricroft with his multiple contacts on European racecourses.
If I’d been a Trader I would be searching now for either a dishonest physicist or a linguist or preferably both in the same man. Yet George Loricroft had been neither...perhaps a racehorse trainer then... perhaps the Traders were indeed solely middlemen, and George had broken the company’s own rules of never taking the merchandise home, especially if you have a jealous wife.
Jett arrived when I reached that unfruitful point, slapping on hospital-bright lights and asking why I was sitting in the dark.
I blunder about in the shadows, I thought, but made do with ‘Hi’ and ‘You know those crossword puzzles with no black squares and not even black lines?’
‘They’re impossible,’ Jett said. ‘I can’t do them.’
‘They sometimes take me a week and a reference library,’ I said.
‘What exactly is the point?’
‘The point is, where in the world is one across.’
‘Do you mean you don’t know where to start?’
I said, ‘Dearest Jett, you’re right. Where in the world would you look for a folder full of orders and invoices? Where would you keep it if it was yours?’
Jett said she didn’t know, but asked if I meant Vera’s Equine Research Establishment folder full of records of Harvey’s filly. That folder and the box of fragrant droppings were still in her car.
‘No,’ I said, though struck by the similarity. ‘The last time I saw the one I mean, it was being stowed aboard an aeroplane on Trox Island. Where is it now?’
‘On the aeroplane?’ She was puzzled.
I shook my head. ‘That plane was rented, and everything on it would have been cleared out between flights. I’d expect that one of the Traders still has that folder. Nothing else makes sense, unless—’ I broke off in half sentence and only after a short-breath recovery said, ‘Let’s phone Kris.’