Spragge made an impatient gesture. ‘What dogs? There weren’t any fucking dogs. They’re not used in detention centres. You might not know that, but she does. She’s talked to men who’ve been in every detention centre in England. She knows there aren’t any dogs.’ He stared at Prior. ‘Have you been talking to her?’
‘I’ve interviewed her, yes.’
Spragge snorted. ‘Well, all I can say is the old bitch’s got you properly conned.’
‘I haven’t said I believed her.’
‘She was convicted. It doesn’t matter what you believe.’
‘It matters a great deal, from the point of view of your job prospects.’ Prior gave this time to sink in. ‘The letter that came with the poison. From Mrs Roper’s son-in-law.’ He drew the file towards him. ‘“If you get close enough to the poor brutes, I pity them. Dead in twenty seconds’.”
‘All that proves is that the son-in-law thought it was for the dogs. Well, she’d have to tell him something, wouldn’t she?’
‘You still say she plotted to kill Lloyd George?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that the suggestion came from her, and not from you?’
‘Yes. She didn’t need any bloody encouragement!’
‘Even to the details? Even to suggesting Walton Heath Golf-course as a good place to do it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How would she know that? She’s spent her entire life in the back streets of Salford, how would she know where Lloyd George plays golf?’
Spragge shrugged. ‘Read it in the paper? I don’t suppose it’s a state secret.’ He leant forward. ‘You know, you want to be careful. If you’re saying I acted as an agent provocateur — and that is what you’re saying, isn’t it? — then you’re also saying that Major Lode employed an agent provocateur. Either knowingly, in which case he’s a rogue, or unknowingly, in which case he’s a fool. Either way, it’s not gunna do his career much good, is it? You watch yourself. You might find out it’s your head on the chopping-block.’
Prior spread his hands. ‘Who’s talking about chopping-blocks? I’m interviewing a new agent — new to me. And I’ve made it clear — at least I hope I’ve made it clear — that any little flight of fancy — Walt Whitman rising from the dead — and I’ll be on to it. If there aren’t any flights of fancy, well then… no need to worry.’ With the air of a man getting to the real purpose of the meeting at last, Prior drew another file towards him. ‘Now tell me what you know about MacDowell.’
After he’d finished milking Spragge of information, all of which he knew already, and had sent him home to await the summons, Prior sat motionless for a while, his chin propped on his hands.
‘The poison was for the dogs.’
‘There weren’t any fucking dogs. You might not know that, but she does.’
Was it possible Beattie had tried to reach out from her corner shop in Tite Street and kill the Prime Minister? The Beattie he’d known before the war would not have done that, but then that Beattie had been rooted in a communal life. Oh, she’d been considered odd — any woman in Tite Street who worked for the suffragettes was odd. But she hadn’t been isolated. That came with the war.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, Miss Burton’s little dog had gone missing. Miss Burton was a spinster who haunted the parish church, arranged flowers, sorted jumble, cherished a hopeless love for the vicar — how hopeless probably only Prior knew. He’d been at home at the time, waiting for orders to join his regiment, and he’d helped her search for the dog. They found it tied by a wire to the railway fence, in a buzzing cloud of black flies, disembowelled. It was a dachshund. One of the enemy.
In that climate Beattie had found the courage to be a pacifist. People stopped going to the shop. If it hadn’t been for the allotment, the family would have starved. So many bricks came through the window they gave up having it mended and lived behind boards. Shit — canine and human — regularly plopped through the letter-box on to the carpet. In that isolation, in that semi-darkness, Beattie had sheltered deserters and later, after the passing of the Conscription Act, conscientious objectors who’d been refused exemption. Until one day, carrying a letter from Mac, Spragge had knocked on her door and uncovered a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. Or so he said.
Could she have plotted to kill Lloyd George? Prior thought he understood how the powerless might begin to fancy themselves omnipotent. The badges of hopeless drudgery, the brush and the cooking-pot, become the flying broomstick and the cauldron, and not only in the minds of the persecutors. At first there would be only wild and flailing words, prophecies that Lloyd George would come to a dreadful end and then, nudged along by Spragge — because whatever Beattie’s part in this, Spragge had not been innocent — the sudden determination to act out the fantasy: to destroy the man she blamed for prolonging the war and causing millions of deaths.
Lode would have had no difficulty in believing Spragge. The poison plot fitted in very neatly with his preconceptions about the anti-war movement. Not much grasp of reality in all this, Prior thought, on either side. He was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.
He began putting away the files. It was a situation where you had to hang on to the few certainties, and he was certain that Spragge had lied under oath, and since Spragge had been the only witness, this of itself meant the conviction was unsafe.
He locked the filing cabinet and the door of his room, and walked along to the end of the corridor. The lift was stuck on the fifth floor. He decided not to wait and ran downstairs, coming out on to the mezzanine landing where he paused and looked down into the foyer, as he often did, liking to imagine the hotel as it must have been before the war, before this drabness of black and khaki set in.
The shape of a head caught his attention. Charles Manning, waiting for the lift, and with him — good God — Winston Churchill and Edward Marsh. Prior watched. Manning, though obviously junior, seemed perfectly at ease in their company. Certainly he was not merely dancing attendance; there was a good deal of shared laughter, and, as they moved into the lift, Marsh’s hand rested briefly on his shoulder. Well, well, well, Prior thought, continuing on his way downstairs. ‘Connections’ indeed!
Prior lived in a seedy basement flat in Bayswater. He could have afforded better, but he preferred to spend his money on properly tailored uniforms, and these did not come cheap. His bedroom had french windows that opened on to a small high-walled yard, so dark that he had never been tempted to sit out, though his landlady had made an effort. The walls were painted cream to a height of about ten feet, and there were a number of thin, straggly plants dying in a great variety of containers.
The room was small and L-shaped. His bed lay along the upright of the L, facing the window, with a desk and hard chair at the foot. The baseline of the L contained a wardrobe, with an oval mirror set into the door. There was space for nothing else.
The bathroom was next door. He had a tepid bath, and then, wrapped in his dressing-gown, lay on the bed and lit a cigarette. He was too tired to think constructively, and yet his mind whirred on. This was the frame of mind that led to a bad night, and it irritated him, almost to the point of tears, that he could do nothing about it.