"So you'd take the cash off them, would you, and you'd put it in the safe?"
Jonathan lowered himself into the armchair and folded his hands behind his head. "I might."
"Suppose you stole it. How long before anybody noticed?"
"End of the month."
"You could always put it back for accounting day and take it out after, I dare say," said Burr thoughtfully.
"Meister's pretty watchful. Nothing if not Swiss."
"I'm building up a legend for you, you see."
"I know what you're doing."
"No, you don't. I want to get you inside Roper's head, Jonathan. I believe you can do it. I want you to lead him to me. I'll never nail him else. He may be desperate, but he doesn't drop his guard. I can have microphones up his arse, overfly him with satellites, read his mail and listen to his telephones. I can smell him, hear him and watch him. I can send Corkoran to jail for five hundred years, but I can't touch the Roper. You've four more days before you're due back at Meister's. I want you to come to London with me in the morning, meet my friend Rooke and hear the deal. I want to rewrite your life from day one and make you love yourself at the end of it."
Tossing an air ticket onto the bed, Burr placed himself at the dormer window, parted the curtains and stared out at the dawn. There was more snow in the air. The sky was dark and low.
"You don't need time to think about it. You've had nothing but time since you jacked in the army and your country. There's a case for saying no, same as there's a case for digging a deep shelter for yourself and living in it for the rest of your life."
"How long would it take?"
"I don't know. If you don't want to do it, a week's too long. Do you want another sermon?"
"No."
"Want to call me in a couple of hours?"
"No."
"How far have you got, then?"
Nowhere, Jonathan thought as he opened the ticket and read the time of departure. There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you, and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free, and the women who say you have no feelings but they can't live without you. There's a prison called England, there's Sophie whom I betrayed, there's an Irish boy without a gun who kept looking at me while I shot his face off, and there's a girl I've scarcely spoken to who puts equestrienne on her passport and annoyed me so much that weeks later I'm still raging at her. There's a hero I can never be worthy of who had to be put back into uniform to be buried. And a sweaty Yorkshire Pied Piper whispering in my ear to come and do it all again.
* * *
Rex Goodhew was in fighting fettle. He had spent the first half of the morning successfully arguing Burr's cause to his master, and the second half addressing a Whitehall seminar on the misuses of secrecy, ending with a pleasurable shoot-out with a young fogy from the River House, barely old enough to tell his first lie. Now it was lunchtime in Carlton Gardens, a low sun hit the white façades, and his beloved Athenaeum was a stroll away.
"Your chap Leonard Burr is putting himself about a bit, Rex," said Stanley Padstow of the Home Office with an anxious smile, falling in beside him. "I don't think I quite realised what you were letting us in for, to be honest."
"Oh dear," said Goodhew. "Poor you. What sort of putting about, exactly?"
Padstow had been up at Oxford at the same time as Goodhew, but the only thing Goodhew remembered about him was that he had seemed to have a mission to the plainer girl.
"Oh, nothing much," said Padstow, trying to sound light. "Using my staff to launder his file requests. Persuading the registrar to lie in her teeth for him. Taking senior police officers to three-hour lunches at Simpson's. Asking us to vouch for him when they get cold feet." He was glancing all the time at Goodhew but failing to catch his eye. "But it's all right, is it? It's just that, with these chaps, one never absolutely knows. Does one?"
There was a small delay while they negotiated themselves out of earshot of a flock of nuns.
"No, Stanley, one doesn't," said Goodhew. "But I did send you a detailed confirmation in writing, top secret for your very own file."
Padstow struggled yet more valiantly for the throwaway tone. "And devilish frolics in the West Country ― I mean, that's all going to be covered, is it? Only your letter didn't seem to make that totally clear."
They had reached the Athenaeum steps.
"Sounds fine to me, Stanley," Goodhew said. "Para three of my letter, as I recall, covers West Country frolics to the hilt."
"Murder not excluded?" Padstow asked urgently below his breath, as they stepped inside.
"Oh, I don't think so. Not as long as nobody gets hurt, Stanley." Goodhew's voice changed tone. "And it's compartmentation, isn't it?" he said. "Nothing to the River boys, nothing to anyone except Leonard Burr and, when you're worried, me. That's all right for you, is it, Stanley? Not a strain?"
They ate at separate tables. Goodhew treated himself to steak-and-kidney pie and a glass of the club's claret. But Padstow ate very fast, as if he were counting his bites against the clock.
SEVEN
Jonathan arrived at Mrs. Trethewey's post office store on a bleak Friday, calling himself Linden, a name he had picked out of the air when Burr invited him to suggest one. He had never met a Linden in his life, unless he was unconsciously recalling something on his German mother's side, a song or poem she had recited to him on her seemingly eternal deathbed.
The day had been sullen and damp, an evening that began at breakfast. The village lay a few miles from Land's End. The blackthorn on Mrs. Trethewey's granite hedge was hunchbacked from the southwesterly gales. The bumper stickers in the church car park told strangers to go home.
There is larceny to returning covertly to your own country after you have abandoned it. There is larceny to using a brand-new alias and being a new version of yourself. You wonder whose clothes you have stolen, what shadow you are casting, whether you have been here before as someone else. There is a sense of occasion about your first day in the part after six years as your undefined self in exile. Some of this freshness may have shown in Jonathan's face, for Mrs. Trethewey has always afterwards maintained that she observed a cockiness about him, what she called a twinkle. And Mrs. Trethewey is not given to romancing. She is a clever woman, tall and stately, not country to look at at all. Sometimes she says things that make you wonder what she might have been if she'd had the education they get these days, or a husband with more under his hat than poor old Tom, who dropped dead of a stroke in Penzance last Christmastime after a touch too much charity at the Masonic Hall.
"Jack Linden, he was sharp now," she will say in her didactic Cornish way. "His eyes was nice enough when you first looked at them; merry, I dare say. But they was all over you and not the way you're thinking, Marilyn. They saw you far and close at the same time. You'd think he'd stole something before he ever come in the shop. Well, he had. We know that now. Same as we know a lot else we'd sooner not."
It was twenty past five and ten minutes to closing, and she was running up her totals on the electronic till before watching Neighbours on TV with Marilyn, her daughter, who was upstairs minding her little girl. She heard his big motorbike ― "one of them real growlers." She saw him bump it onto its stand and take off his helmet and smooth down his nice hair though it didn't need it, more a way of relaxing himself, she guessed. And she believed she saw him smile. An emmet, she thought, and a cheerful one at that. In West Cornwall emmet means foreigner, and a foreigner is anyone who comes from east of the river Tamar.