"I understand the implications," Massinger murmured. Blue Cortina, Aubrey framed, blue Cortina, collusion … The word pained him like a blow. A rumbling headache had begun in his left temple. He rubbed it. "I understand," he repeated,
"You're my only hope," Hyde said flatly.
"I know. Give me a little time. Ring — ring your landlady tomorrow, at the same time…" He looked up questioningly. Ros nodded. "At the same time," he repeated. "She'll have information for you. Try — try to stay out of trouble until then."
"Just believe it, mate." Hyde paused. The connection seemed distant, unreal, tense once more. "All right," he said finally, "I'll trust you. Everyone always said you were a bit too nice for our kind of work, but you're Aubrey's closest pal. All right — I trust you." Then he cackled in an ugly, fearful way. "After all, I can kill you when you get here, can't I?"
"You can — if I'm not what you need or expect."
The connection was broken at that point. The telephone purred. Hyde was gone, almost as surely as if the call had never been made; as surely as if he had been taken.
He gingerly put down the receiver. Ros was glaring at him, but her lips moved with a silent, involuntary fear.
"I'll try — as hard as I can, I'll try," he soothed. "Meanwhile, you know nothing. You have not heard from Hyde, you don't expect to. As his landlady, you're angry enough to let his flat to someone else. Understand?"
Slowly, uncertainly, Ros nodded. "OK."
"Good. Now, I must go." He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. He would have to hurry to meet Shelley. The sunlight lay chill and pale across the carpet, cold on the cat's fur. Massinger shuddered, as at an omen.
"What will you do?" Massinger asked.
"Hide the car and keep a look-out," Peter Shelley's breath curled around him like grey signals of distress.
"You say you lost the tail?"
"I lost one car by hiding in a coal merchant's yard," Shelley replied without amusement. "But I only spotted one car, I'm not Hyde — not a field man. I don't trust my judgment that much. Neither should you."
"Very well. To photocopy this—" He indicated the buff envelope, thickly filled with paper, that the younger man had given him. " — I'll need at least half an hour."
Shelley looked at his watch with a feverish little gesture, fumbling back the cuff of his dark overcoat. When he looked up again, his face seemed to Massinger even paler and more drawn than before.
"I have to have that file back at Century House by one," he pleaded. "The meeting is immediately after lunch — the copies will be collected…"He seemed to be damming a small flood of reluctance, excuses.
"Very well — I'll hurry," Massinger replied stiffly, and opened the car door, climbing out as quickly as he could from the bucket seat. He slammed the door of the BMW without looking back at Shelley.
Shelley watched him ascend the steps to the portico of the Imperial War Museum, its huge dome threatening to topple and crush him in the now grey, low-clouded morning. His slightly limping figure was dwarfed by the two fifteen-inch naval guns in front of the portico. Bedlam, Shelley thought. The Bethlem Royal Hospital for the Insane was what the building had once housed. It seemed an apt meeting place, after he had crossed the river and passed the weatherstained concrete of the South Bank buildings only to find a tailing red Vauxhall in the driving mirror. It had been a long time before he shook the tail. It was Bedlam. He had volunteered his own incarceration in this insane, dangerous situation.
Massinger entered the museum's doors in search of the photocopier in the Reference Library. In the moment of his disappearing, he was the image of the historian he really was. He fitted the place, would be anonymous and unregarded inside its doors. Yet he was old, he limped… he wasn't an agent, a professional.
Angrily, Shelley started and revved the car's engine. He paused for a few moments, foot hard down as if receiving the engine's determination into his body. He consciously had to use the gears, force himself to drive back towards the gates and Brook Drive. He had to make himself expose the car, leave it parked in the street so that his tail might pick it up again. He had to make himself want to see his tail.
He parked the car and left it, re-entering the Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park towards the museum. He unfolded his copy of The Times on a cold, damp bench and sat on the newspaper. The chill struck through his overcoat and the trousers of his grey suit. He slid into a lounging position, his BMW visible through the railings of the park, and considered Paul Massinger.
Was he frightened, like himself? Frightened and old and weak like Aubrey? The huge weight of class, of social context, of his marriage and friendships. Massinger could lose patronage, friendship of a powerful, beneficial kind — even his identity. He could lose his wife because Aubrey was presumed to have betrayed her father. Shelley, too, could lose everything, take the same losses — his own marriage apart — if he continued this investment in Aubrey's cause.
He wanted to walk away from it. He saw a red Vauxhall almost immediately, hadn't really lost them, then. He feared that Massinger's present mood of resolution could not last and he would be left holding the grenade. Massinger vacillated, saw round things, into and through them. The red Vauxhall passed the gates, wrong car, then. His breath sighed smokily into the cold air. It was possible that Massinger was doing no more than marking time, making the appearance of an effort simply to assuage guilt and for friendship's sake — as he was himself…? Just doing a little bit, looking good, then dropping Aubrey like a live coal when things got rough.
He kicked at a stone in self-disgust. It narrowly missed a pigeon, which fluttered a few feet then settled to inspect the gravel once more.
The red Vauxhall was coming back, slowly. It stopped outside the gates. Shelley drew in his long legs, hunching into the cover of a bush growing beside the bench. He'd first spotted the red car as he crossed Waterloo Bridge, the Vivaldi on the cassette suddenly becoming more chilly, echoing coldly in a vacuous acoustic. He'd tried to shake the Vauxhall through the narrow, terraced, ugly Lambeth and Southwark streets, and then thought he had lost it after he had turned into the coalyard amid the blackened lorries. Now he suspected that there had been two cars, and a radio link.
He watched the red Vauxhall. A man in an overcoat — who? — got out and crossed to inspect the BMW. Almost at once, he turned and nodded to his driver. Then the passenger returned to the Vauxhall, climbed in, and the car pulled away, leaving the smoke of its exhaust to disperse in the chill, windless air. Shelley listened to its engine note retreat, slow, louden, and then stop. Parked. They would wait — who would wait? He shivered.
He had to get the file back to Century House — it was his most urgent priority — because the JIC meeting under Sir William's chairmanship scheduled for tomorrow had been brought forward to that afternoon. Shelley had been caught on the hop.
Who, in the red car who …?
MI5, SIS, KGB…?