Spragge swallowed hard. ‘It’s the job.’
‘You shouldn’t’ve done that.’
‘Aw, for God’s sake,’ Spragge said. ‘Do you think she’d mind? I saw her in the Palm House, she virtually had your dick out.’
Prior grasped Spragge lightly by the forearms and butted him in the face, his head coming into satisfying, cartilage-crunching contact with Spragge’s nose. Spragge tried to pull away, then slumped forward, spouting blood, snorting, putting up an ineffectual shaking hand to stop the flow.
Prior tried to make him stand up, like a child trying to make a toy work. Spragge staggered backwards and fell against the standard lamp, which crashed over and landed on top of him. He lay there, holding his spread fingers over his shattered nose, trying to speak, and gurgling instead.
Disgusted, with himself as much as Spragge, Prior went into the kitchen, wrung out a tea-towel in cold water, came back, and handed it to Spragge. ‘Here, put this over it.’
Wincing, tears streaming down his face, Spragge dabbed at his face with the wet cloth. ‘Broken,’ he managed to say. He gestured vaguely at the towel, which was drenched in blood. Prior took it away and brought another.’ He looked at the roll of fat above Spragge’s trousers and contemplated landing a boot in his kidneys. But you couldn’t, the man was pathetic. He threw the tea-towel at Spragge and sat down in the nearest chair, shaking with rage, unappeased. He wanted to fight. Instead of that he was farting about with tea-towels like Florence fucking Nightingale.
After a while Spragge started to cry. Prior stared at him with awed disgust and thought, my God, I’m not taking this. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Spragge by the sleeve. ‘Out.’
‘Can’t walk.’
‘I’ll get you a taxi.’
Prior struggled into his boots and puttees, then returned to the living-room and dragged Spragge to his feet. Spragge lurched and stumbled to the door, half of his own volition, half dragged there by Prior. Bastard, Prior thought, pushing him up the steps, but the anger was ebbing now, leaving him lonely.
They staggered down the street, Spragge leaning heavily on Prior. Like two drunks. ‘Do you realize how much trouble I’d get into if I was seen like this?’ Prior asked.
The first two taxis went past. Spragge’s face, in the brown air, looked dingy, but less obviously bloody than it had in the flat. He stood, swaying slightly, apart from the noise and heat, the passing crowds, the sweaty faces. He was visibly nursing his bitterness, carrying it around with him like a too full cup. ‘Lode offered me a passage to South Africa. Did you know that? All expenses paid.’
‘Will you go?’
‘Might.’ He looked round him, and the bitterness spilled. ‘Fuck all here.’
Prior remembered there were things he needed to know. ‘Did Lode tell you to follow me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you following me when I went to see Hettie Roper?’
‘No, not there.’
Either Spragge was a better actor than he’d so far appeared, or he was telling the truth. Spragge started waving and shouting ‘Taxi!’
It pulled up a few paces further on. ‘I’ll need money,’. he said.
Prior dug in his breeches pockets. ‘Here, take this.’
Spragge bent down and said, ‘Marble Arch.’ He wasn’t going to give an address while Prior was within hearing.
‘You must have been following me,’ Prior said. ‘It was you who told the police where to find MacDowell.’
Spragge looked up from the dim interior. ‘Not me, guv.’ His tone was ironical, indifferent. ‘Lode says it was you.’
SIXTEEN
In the Empire Hospital Charles Manning surveyed the chess-board and gently, with the tip of his forefinger, knocked over the black king.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘Again.’
Lucas grinned, and then pointed over Manning’s shoulder to the figure of a man in army uniform, standing just inside the entrance to the ward.
Manning stood up. For a second there might have been a flicker of fear. Fear was too strong a word, perhaps, but Manning certainly wasn’t at ease though he gave the usual, expensively acquired imitation of it, coming towards Prior, offering his hand. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘How are you?’
‘Getting better. Let’s go along to my room.’
Manning chatted easily as they walked along the corridor. ‘Remarkable chap, that. Do you know, he can’t remember the names of any of the pieces? But, my God, he knows how to play.’
Manning’s room was pleasant, with a bowl of roses on the bedside table, and a bright, yellow and red covered book lying face down on the bed.
‘A name you’ll know,’ Manning said, picking it up.
Prior read the title, Counter-Attack, and the name, Siegfried Sassoon.
‘You must’ve been at Craiglockhart at the same time,’ Manning said.
‘Ye-es. Though I don’t know how much of a bond that is. Frankly.’ Prior closed the book and put it on the bedside table beside a photograph of Manning’s wife and children, the same photograph that had been on the grand piano at his house. ‘He hated the place.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh, yes, he made that perfectly clear. And the people. Nervous wrecks, lead-swingers and degenerates.’
‘Well,’ Manning said, waving Prior to a chair, ‘as one nervous, lead-swinging degenerate to another… how are you?’
‘All right, I think. The Intelligence Unit’s being closed down, so I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.’
Manning smiled. ‘I suppose you want to stay in the Ministry?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh? Well, that might be a bit more difficult. I’ve got a friend at the War Office — Charles Moncrieff — I don’t know whether you know him? Anyway, one of his jobs is to select instructors for cadet battalions. I suppose that might be a possibility?’
Prior leant forward. ‘Hang on a minute. I didn’t come here to brown-nose you or your fucking friend at the War Office. What I was going to say — if you wouldn’t mind listening — is that I want to talk to you about something.’
‘What?’
‘Who. A woman called Mrs Roper. Beattie Roper.’
Manning was looking puzzled. ‘The Mrs Roper? Poison-plot Roper?’
‘Yes.’ Prior got a file out of his briefcase. ‘Except she didn’t do it.’
Manning took the file from him. ‘You want me to read it?’
‘I’ve summarized it. It’ll only take you a few minutes.’
Manning read with total concentration. When he finished he looked up. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘Yes, I’ve got a copy. I’ve got copies of the documents as well.’
‘You mean you’ve made personal copies of Ministry files?’ Manning pursed his lips. ‘You certainly don’t play by the rules, do you?’
‘Neither do you.’
‘We’re in the same boat there, aren’t we?’ A hardening of tone. ‘I would have thought we were in exactly the same boat.’
The merest hint of a glance at the photograph. ‘Not quite.’
Manning got up and walked across to the window. For a while he said nothing. Then he turned and said, ‘Why? Why on earth couldn’t you just come in and say, “Look, I’m worried about this. Will you read the report?” All right, you’ve got the opening to do so because of… There was no need for anything like that.’