‘But you are.’
‘Exactly.’ He took a sip of his pint and sighed. ‘Enough of my problems. What are you up to?’
‘Surveillance job.’
‘Obviously. Can I ask about him?’
‘You can ask… but if I knew anything I wouldn’t have needed to call you.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll be going in blind as usual.’
‘As usual.’
He shrugged and took another mouthful of his beer. ‘One day you’ll be the death of me.’
‘I do hope not.’
‘I know you do. Which is the reason I stick my neck out anyway. You ask for a lot, but you do it nicely.’
We finished our drinks and I walked him to Krishnin’s house, being careful to take the long way around, coming in from the top end of the street.
Inside our cuckoo’s nest, I led Cyril upstairs to O’Dale, who was sipping without enthusiasm at some soup he had brought in a flask.
‘I could tell you how to keep that hot for days,’ said Cyril, but O’Dale showed the idea as much interest as the soup.
‘One more pair of hands is it?’ he asked, looking at me. ‘One of your lot?’
‘I’m a freelancer,’ said Cyril with a smile, ‘like you, I presume?’
‘Not another private lad?’ O’Dale was clearly put out that I might have gone to another agency.
‘No, no,’ Cyril replied, ‘I work for the government. Just up the road in fact. Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.’
‘You work for the bloody post office?’
‘For ten proud years.’
O’Dale didn’t really know what to say to that so he returned to his soup and left the subject alone.
‘Cyril Luckwood,’ said Cyril, holding out his hand in greeting.
O’Dale looked at me again and I shrugged, reassuring: ‘You can trust Cyril.’
‘He officially vetted?’
‘Don’t be a prig,’ I told him. I hated it when agents tried to vie over each other in a nonexistent pecking order. ‘Cyril’s fine.’
‘O’Dale,’ the detective said, returning Cyril’s offered handshake.
‘Pleased to meet you. Do much of this sort of thing?’
‘A fair bit.’
‘Gets you out of the house, doesn’t it?’ Cyril turned back to me. ‘When do you want me to go in?’
‘As soon as we can get you kitted up,’ I told him. ‘There’s no point in hanging around longer than we have to.’
‘You’re sending him in there?’ said O’Dale, clearly not impressed with the idea.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Cyril assured him, ‘I have a rather special skill when it comes to infiltration.’
‘You’re familiar with the concept of “going grey”?’ I asked O’Dale. ‘Making yourself blend into the background, to avoid being spotted by the people you’re observing? Of course you must be in your job…’
‘I tend to find people walk around with their eyes closed,’ O’Dale admitted. ‘It’s surprisingly easy to avoid being noticed.’
‘Well, in our trade it’s a little more difficult, as you tend to be expecting surveillance. In Cyril’s case, he has an advantage.’
‘Who’s Cyril?’
‘The man you’ve just been talking to.’
O’Dale shifted uncomfortably in his seat and I couldn’t help but smile at this proof of Cyril’s abilities. ‘I wasn’t talking…’ He looked around. ‘Hang on… there was… something about Mount Pleasant.’
‘Mount Pleasant Sorting Office,’ said Cyril, stepping back into O’Dale’s eyeline and therefore his attention. ‘It’s where I work. During the day at least…’
O’Dale’s confusion was a delight to watch.
‘Cyril has a natural aptitude for going grey.’
‘Nobody wants to be beneath people’s attention,’ said Cyril, ‘but at least I put it to good use.’
‘What I couldn’t do with an ability like that…’ said O’Dale.
Cyril shrugged. ‘Depends how you feel about reminding your wife who you are every morning. Not that she’s slow in deciding how she feels about me once she’s remembered…’
‘So you’re just going to walk in there?’ asked O’Dale.
‘And plant these,’ I said, holding up a selection of microphones and transmitters. If all went well we’d have the whole place wired up by the time Cyril had finished.
Cyril packed the equipment into a large satchel (‘discreet recording equipment’ was anything but in those days) and pulled a balaclava over his head. ‘The less they have to focus on, the better,’ he explained.
He walked downstairs and I wished him luck at the front door.
I climbed back upstairs and moved to the bedroom window where I could watch Cyril cross the road and walk up to the front door of Krishnin’s house.
‘He’s actually going to knock on the front door?’ asked O’Dale.
Cyril did just that before stepping to one side. After a moment, Krishnin opened the door and I got my first good look at him in the flesh. The blandness he had conveyed on the film footage was less in evidence here. Some people wear their distinctiveness deep beneath the skin. It’s only when you really pay attention that you catch something in their eyes, the set of their mouth, the way they carry themselves. Krishnin was a spy to his core: an interesting man buried deep inside a boring one.
He stepped out of the doorway, moving along the short path to the street, looking up and down to see if he could catch sight of whoever had knocked. The moment he had cleared the door, Cyril stepped inside and vanished from sight.
‘That’s our boy is it?’ asked O’Dale, pointing out of the window at Krishnin.
‘It is indeed.’
‘Doesn’t look much.’ He rubbed his hands on the shiny legs of his slacks, no doubt missing being able to punch things now he was a civilian.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ I replied. ‘He strikes me as a man who would surprise you.’
O’Dale scoffed. ‘That’s what you lot always think. We’d have an end to the bloody Russians if everybody stopped staring through binoculars and scribbling on foolscap, and pulled a trigger once in a while.’
‘I’ve never shot anyone in my life,’ I told him. ‘I hope I never have to.’
I had made the ultimate admission of worthlessness to O’Dale, who sighed and returned to the newspaper he’d been reading. I felt no need to defend myself. I didn’t think killing was something to take pride in.
I occupied myself with setting up the receiver and recording equipment. At a flick of the switch, the awkward silence had been replaced with the sound of Russian conversation.
‘I thought you said you didn’t have any listening devices set up?’ remarked O’Dale, folding his paper and leaning forward in his chair to listen. He sighed, rubbing at his temples. ‘Hang on… oh yes, that little man took them in with him.’ He looked up at me. ‘How do you work with him? He’s so easy to forget.’
‘I think I’ve built up some kind of receptiveness,’ I admitted. ‘I know him so well now that I can always hold his presence in mind. Isn’t that always the way? Once you’ve really noticed something you see it all the time?’
‘Like red cars.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You notice there are a lot of red cars on the roads, then you can’t stop seeing them. Everywhere you look, red cars.’
‘Yes, selective attention. The brain is assaulted with information all the time. Once it decides to fixate on one particular thing it seems to find it everywhere. It’s the same root cause as coincidence: you don’t notice how many times coincidences don’t happen, just when they do.’
I was listening to the Russian conversation. Krishnin was sharing the house with at least one other man.
‘We need to find out who that is,’ I said to O’Dale. ‘If you get the chance to photograph him going in or out, we can try to pin him down.’