* * *
The air in the outside stairwell is blessedly cool. Goodhew leans against the wall. Probably he is smiling.
"I expect you'll be looking forward to your weekend, sir. won't you?" the janitor says respectfully.
Touched by the man's good face, Goodhew hunts for a kindly answer.
* * *
Burr was working. His body clock was stuck in mid-Atlantic, his soul was with Jonathan in whatever hell he was enduring. But his intellect, his will and his inventiveness were concentrated upon the work before him.
"Your man blew it," Merridew commented, when Burr called him to hear how the Steering Committee meeting had gone. "Geoffrey walked all over him in hobnail boots."
"That's because Geoffrey Darker tells bloody lies," Burr explained carefully, in case Merridew needed educating. Then he went back to work.
He was in River House mode.
He was a spy again, unprincipled and uncontrite. The truth was what he could get away with.
He sent his secretary on a Whitehall forage, and at two o'clock she returned, calm but slightly breathless, bearing the stationery samples he had instructed her to scrounge.
"Let's go," he said, and she fetched her shorthand pad.
Mostly, the letters he dictated were addressed to himself. A few were addressed to Goodhew, a couple to Goodhew's master. His styles were various: Dear Burr, My dear Leonard, To the Director of Enforcement, Dear Minister. In the more elevated correspondence, he wrote "Dear So-and-so" by hand at the top, and scribbled whatever kiss-off occurred to him at the bottom. Yours, Ever, Yours aye, My best to you.
His handwriting also varied, in both its slope and its characteristics. So did the inks and writing instruments he awarded to the various correspondents.
So did the quality of the official stationery, which became stiffer the higher he moved up the Whitehall ladder of beings. For ministerial letters he favoured pale blue, with the official crest die-stamped at the head.
"How many typewriters have we got?" he asked his secretary.
"Five."
"Use one for each correspondent, one for us," he ordered. "Keep it consistent."
She had already made a note to do so.
Alone again, he telephoned Harry Palfrey at the River House. His tone was cryptic.
"But I must have a reason," Palfrey protested.
"You can have it when you show up," Burr retorted. Then he rang Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw in Newbury.
"Fuck should I take orders from you, Christ's sake?" Bradshaw demanded haughtily, in a quaint echo of Roper-speak. "No executive powers, lot of wankers on the touch line."
"Just be there," Burr advised.
Hester Goodhew telephoned him from Kentish Town to say that her husband would be staying home for a few days: winter was never his best time, she said. After her, Goodhew himself came on the line, sounding like a hostage who has been rehearsed in his lines. "You've still got your budget till the end Of the year, Leonard. Nobody can take that away from you." Then, rather horribly, his voice cracked. "That poor boy. What will they do to him? I think of him all the time."
So did Burr, but he had work to do.
* * *
The interviewing room at the Ministry of Defence is white and sparse and prison lit and prison scrubbed. It is a brick-lined box with a blacked-out window and an electric radiator that stinks of burned dust whenever it is switched on. The absence of graffiti is alarming. Waiting, you wonder whether the last messages are painted out after the occupant is executed. Burr arrived late by design. When he entered, Palfrey attempted to look at him disdainfully over the top of his trembling newspaper, and smirked.
"Well, I did come" he said truculently. And stood. And made a show of folding up his paper.
Burr closed and carefully locked the door behind him, set down his briefcase, hung his coat on the hook and slapped Palfrey very hard across the side of the face. But dispassionately, reluctantly almost. As he might have hit an epileptic to ward off a fit, or his own child to calm him in a crisis.
Palfrey sat down again with a plop, on the same bench where he had been sitting earlier. He held his hand to the offended cheek.
"Animal," he whispered.
To a point, Palfrey was right, except that Burr's wildness was under iron control. Burr had the real black mood on him, and not his closest friends, not his wife, had seen him with the real black mood. Burr himself had seen it seldom. He didn't sit, but crouched fat-arsed and chapel-style at Palfrey's side, so that their heads could stay nice and close together. And to help Palfrey listen, he grabbed the poor fellow's drink-stained tie at the knot in both hands while he spoke, and it made a rather fearful noose.
"I've been very, very kind to you, Harry Palfrey, up till now," he began, in a mainstream speech that benefited from not having been prepared. "I've not queered your pitch. I've not peached. I've looked on indulgently while you gumshoed back and forth across the river, into bed with Goodhew, selling him out to Darker, playing all the ends against the middle, just the way you always did. Still promising divorce to every girl you meet, are you? Of course you are! Then hurrying home to renew your marriage vows to your wife? Of course you are! Harry Palfrey and his Saturday night conscience!" Burr tightened the hangman's knot of Palfrey's tie against the poor man's Adam's apple. " 'Oh, the things I have to do for England, Mildred!' " he protested, playing Palfrey's part. " 'The cost to my integrity, Mildred! If you but knew the tenth of it, you'd not sleep for the rest of your life ― except with me, of course. I need you, Mildred. I need your warmth, your consolation. Mildred, I love you!... Just don't tell my wife; she wouldn't understand.' " A painful lunge of the knot. "You still peddling that crap, Harry? Back and forth across the border, six times a bloody day? Ratting, re-ratting, re-re-ratting, till your furry little head's sticking out of your puzzled little arse? Of course you are!"
But it was not easy for Palfrey to give a rational response to these questions, because of Burr's unyielding, double handed, closing grip on his silk tie. It was a grey tie, silvery, which made the stains more prominent. Perhaps it had served Palfrey for one of his many marriages. It seemed incapable of breaking.
Burr's voice became a mite regretful. "Ratting days are over, Harry. The ship's sunk. Just one more rat, and that's your lot." Without at all relaxing his grip on Palfrey's necktie, he put his mouth close to Palfrey's ear. "You know what this is, Harry?" He lifted the thick end of the tie. "It's Dr. Paul Apostoll's tongue, pulled through his throat, Colombian style, thanks to Harry Palfrey's ratting. You sold Apostoll to Darker. Remember? Ergo, you sold my agent Jonathan Pine to Darker also." He was tightening his grip on Palfrey's throat with every sold. "You sold Geoffrey Darker to Goodhew ― except you didn't really, did you? You pretended to, then you doubled on yourself and sold Goodhew to Darker instead. What are you getting out of it, Harry? Survival? I wouldn't bet on it. In my book you're due about one hundred and twenty pieces of silver out of the reptile fund, and after that it's the Judas tree. Because, knowing what I know and you don't, but what you are about to know, you are finally, terminally ratted out." He relinquished his grip and rose abruptly to his feet. "Can you still read? Your eyes are looking poppy. Is that terror or penitence?" He swung to the door and grasped the black briefcase. It was Goodhew's. It had scuff lines where it had ridden on the carrier of Goodhew's bicycle for a quarter of a century, and the remnants of the official crest, worn off. "Or is it alcoholic myopia affecting our vision these days? Sit there! No, here! The light's better."