‘No, I burnt them. And yes, they were fairly complete. And there was no gossip. The two of them were extremely discreet. She went round the place with him as his secretary-assistant on the COI programme he was filming and researching.’
‘Didn’t you find it surprising that someone could follow the pair of them so closely, across the breadth of Africa in all those open spaces, without being noticed?’
‘Yes, I did. But that was what I was paying for. That was their job.’
‘They did it well.’
‘Yes,’ he said, the sadder and wiser man, ‘they did. It’s a long, dull story. Forget about it.’
‘I will — but I’m a little uneasy about the weekend. That’s really why I brought it up. I want to know as much as possible. You see my position, don’t you? It’s rather an awkward threesome, isn’t it? She knows, you know and I know. But we don’t all three know the same things together. With her I’m Mr X, impersonating her lover, about whom you know nothing. But in fact you do know about him — you know everything. I’m in the middle and I know very little.’ Jackson nodded his agreement.
‘Of course, she’s been asking you where he is?’ he asked.
‘To say the least.’
‘It was her suggestion — that you came up for the weekend.’
‘I’ve told her nothing.’
‘Of course.’
‘Except asking her to say nothing about it all, my impersonating Graham — to you or anyone — until I finish my work here. But how long can this go on for — this charade?’
‘I should tell her I’ve had her followed you mean, that I know all about George Graham?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, it’s simply a personal business, all this with Graham. We’ve agreed on that. There’s no political connection. So why upset our present situation?’
‘She wanted a divorce.’
‘Yes, I knew that. She can have it now.’
‘Now that he’s gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now that you won’t be bruised — by knowing and thinking of the man she’s leaving you for? Now that there’s no one for her?’
‘Yes. Is that unreasonable?’
‘Fairly.’
‘Then I’m unreasonable. Where does that leave you for your weekend? You can get out of it easily enough.’
But why in the circumstances, I thought, had Jackson not got me out of the invitation before? I was a potential risk to him — both professionally and personally — in any association I might have with his wife. I might give any number of games away. Yet it seemed he wanted me to see as much as possible of her (as he had encouraged me to go flat-hunting with her in the first place) in circumstances which he could control and oversee. He would lose his private eyes and replace them with mine. I would spy on his wife for him and make my reports — perhaps that was what he hoped. Sensing my interest in her he had the opportunity now of hearing of her flaws and infidelities direct from a surrogate lover — or perhaps as her real lover, for such seemed the role he was tacitly encouraging me in. Realising the wild obsession that lay at the heart of his relationship with her, this was one explanation at least. At the same time, though I was not interested in satisfying his voyeurism, I was interested in his wife. I felt sure that somewhere in her past with Graham lay the key to my own immediate future. There was something I didn’t know, which she would never tell me — something which had happened between them, a plan, a future arrangement, which could only now have an outcome in me. I needed to know about her now for reasons quite beyond affection or sex.
So I said: ‘No, I’d like to come up for the weekend. It sounds a marvellous place. Wheel was telling me about it.’
‘Yes, he knows it. Good then, just a family weekend. And the rest — let it drop. I’ve had them call the man off. We’ll forget that.’
‘The man? But there were two men. I told you. There was a second man, with sandwiches and a homburg, deep-set eyes and white hair round his ears.’
‘Must just have been a bystander. I checked — the agency had only one man on the job: Moloney — the man you impersonated.’
‘There were two of them, I know. The other fellow tried to go on following me afterwards, when I’d slipped back into the restaurant.’
‘Not from the agency there wasn’t. There was someone else following you — if you’re sure. That’s all.’
‘That’s all? Well who? If there wasn’t anyone sent after me from London.’
‘Your KGB contact perhaps. The “stayer”. That was the plan, wasn’t it? He was going to check you out, make sure you were really George Graham, before passing on the information about KGB unreliables over here. No doubt he’ll be in touch with you now, give you those names — and we can wrap all this up and send you home.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, while doubting just as much Jackson’s glib idea of ‘home’. Where was that? A small flat I’d had in Doughty Street near the office in Holborn, before the years in Durham jail. And I doubted Jackson himself now as well. Or rather Wheel and Jackson together, for hadn’t he just said that Wheel knew the house upstate in the Catskills? Yet Wheel at lunchtime had said equally clearly that he didn’t know it. That he had never been there. Someone else was following me. And someone was lying.
As I left Guy’s office I bumped into Wheel just about to enter it, carrying a sheaf of papers.
‘Hi!’ he said, flourishing that badge of permanent good humour which was his face. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by it now. The two of them didn’t just meet in the Delegates’ Lounge for two religious martinis before lunch. They shared some business together as well. Wheels within wheels …
‘Yes,’ she said in the Coffee Shoppe where everything had an ‘e’ at the end of it, the décor and furniture all folksy and ye olde from an England that never was, panelled in synthetic fumed oak with black plastic beams overhead. ‘Yes,’ she said, sitting on a milkmaid’s stool, dressed now in a rust-coloured Pringle sweater, the same shade in slightly flared corduroys and a leather belt, ‘I wrote the book. How did you guess?’
I just said I’d guessed and she licked her lips gently.
‘How did you come to be playing the detective?’ I went on.
‘I wasn’t. We were all there together, staying at the same hotel in Addis. George Graham was a friend, my English professor at Makerere University in the early sixties.’
What was she saying? Already I was on the defensive.
‘Is that what you do to old friends? Write novels about their private lives, their mistresses?’
‘What do you do with my old friends, Mr Graham? Kill them? Your story is surely better than mine. Though I don’t suppose you’ll ever publish it. I used a pseudonym. You’ve stolen his real name, his body, his life.’ She played with a sachet of sugar, tore it open, dipped a finger in and then sucked it.
‘How did you manage to follow them round East Africa without being noticed?’
‘How do you mean? That was part of the job.’ She was properly surprised. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you when you took him over? We were filming together, a documentary about an African girl visiting other African countries: I was the girl. Didn’t you see the film?’
‘No. One of his I didn’t see. There wasn’t a lot of time before — before I came over here.’
‘I used to think that George was involved in something more than just public relations for the British government.’
‘Think? You surely must have actually known — from what you’ve written in your book.’
‘No, I didn’t know exactly. That was an invention of mine in the novel. Now I see that I was right. You’ve taken his place. And I shouldn’t know about it,’ she went on. ‘Should I? Such bad luck — our running into each other the other night. Your “cover” is broken. Isn’t that the word?’ Now she laughed outright. ‘Just like the spy novels. I have you in my grasp, at my mercy — Grrrrr!’ She leant across the table towards me over the sour coffee, mimicking a tiger. I drew back involuntarily, alarmed. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to tell anyone.’ She rested her hand on my arm for an instant. ‘I’ve nothing to do with that world, I promise,’ she said, the animal tamed in her now, meek and mild, still lightly amused. ‘This is my world. New York this month. This here, this now. My apartment upstairs. That book was a long time ago. Written and finished with. I’m not going to use it against you.’