10
In London that Saturday morning Harper had come in specially for a meeting with McCoy in their Holborn office — an empty glass honeycomb, shot through from wall to wall with bright July sunshine, Mid-East espionage and Navy Recruitment both closed down for the weekend. The duty security officer let them into McCoy’s office on the eighth floor in the northern wing and a smell of sun-warmed disinfectant greeted them, a disgusting mixture of synthetic lavender and carbolic.
McCoy studied the text of the message which had come up overnight from Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham, rustling the flimsy but heavily typed orange paper, the letters pierced through to the other side like Braille.
‘Well, Marlow’s had nearly two months — and no joy.’ He looked up at Harper, passing him the message. ‘Nothing. No approach to him. And no approach to the mailbox at Grand Central. And nothing sent to the box either. We’ve no idea who the person is who’s getting all this stuff — the names of all these people. They must be onto us. Someone’s seen through Marlow.’
‘Of course we don’t know how often these communications take place,’ Harper said seriously, trying to give his hope weight. ‘Or how often the letters are picked up. They may let it pile up — or the recipient may be away.’
‘It’s no good, Harper. Something should have come through that mailbox by now. It’s the only dead-letter drop for this KGB internal security division in America. There must have been messages to send. That’s what Graham was going to do in the States after all — be given a batch of names from that box and check their security out.’
‘Well, we know it’s a woman.’ Harper pressed his optimism. ‘The Post Office authorities in New York told us that. It was a woman who rented out the box in the first place.’
‘Yes, three years ago. And the clerk fellow had no exact memory of what she looked like.’
‘Said she was American, quite young and pretty.’
‘Even in America there are quite a few women who fit that description.’ McCoy was sour and depressed. His scheme was falling apart, the trail had died, the CIA would soon cease to collaborate with them on it, and he didn’t want that. He wanted something to take out of it all, even if only the smell of success which he could waft in the faces of his superiors. And Harper knew this. McCoy’s vanity was really the only card he held.
So he said, ‘We’ve not had Marlow on it long enough surely? You were more than eight weeks before you pulled in Graham.’
‘Exactly — and no one contacted him either.’
‘Can’t always hurry these things.’
‘I know that. But we’ve lost this hand. I feel it. We’ve got all the information we’re going to get on this KGB secret security service — from Graham himself. Special Branch are still working on him. Perhaps they’ll get some more from him. We might as well leave it at that.’
‘Why? After all there’s no urgency, no deadline. Marlow appears quite happy — why not leave him there for the moment? And we’re not paying for him after all — the UN is. And the twenty-four-hour surveillance on that mailbox is costing very little. And there’s one other thing: I don’t think this fellow Jackson has run Marlow as well as he might, not got enough out of him. I’d like to talk to Marlow. You see I’m sure that this KGB Security Officer — this “stayer” in New York — must have sounded Marlow out already. Someone in the UN maybe — she must have made some sort of tentative approach to him, either socially or professionally, and Marlow’s thought nothing of it, not seen the approach as at all important. And Jackson is not trained as an interrogation officer. He doesn’t know the right lines with him, how to run back through each and every person Marlow’s met since he arrived in New York, Probably has his mind on his next posting. Moving to Cheltenham isn’t he in August? Some new course in communications there.’
‘Yes. He said something about that. Couldn’t go on liaising with Marlow.’
‘I think I’d find something out if I spoke to him. I’m sure I would. I feel it —’
‘I feel you won’t. The trail’s dead. They’ve packed up.’ Harper’s spiel had been frustrated at its climax and he was annoyed. But he showed nothing. The humps and hollows, the switchbacks of skin about his pockmarked face remained quite stationary. Had he been pressing too hard? He tried the opposite approach as a last chance.
‘Maybe you’re right. Just thought we might rescue something from it all. But it’s too long a shot, I agree. Not worth it,’ he said, crossing his fingers in his mind. He got up and looked out the side window onto Red Lion Street. Then Harper’s stomach turned and he smiled as he heard McCoy say: ‘Well — perhaps. Yes. Yes — if you like, why not try it, Harper? Last chance for a feather in our caps.’
And they agreed then and there that Harper should leave for New York on the following day.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper said as they left the office, blowing their noses against the fearful smell. ‘I think I may find this woman — “American, quite young and pretty.” I think I will.’ And he really hoped he would, for Moscow wanted nothing less.
‘I hope you do, Harper — for all our sakes,’ McCoy added, looking at him very carefully. And he really hoped he would, smelling once more the chance of his own sweet success.
Without noticing it — they never had — the two men walked past the Hepworth abstract in the forecourt and out into the warm sunlight, both deep in thought as to how each might deceive and trap the other.
11
‘Yes, take him riding, Helen.’ Guy Jackson got up and went to the dining-room window, sipping his coffee. Hair too neatly brushed, in a polka-dot Skula dressing-gown, framed in the grand casements, he had the air of someone testing for the part Cary Grant got in the original High Society, There was something insincere in his suggestion. He looked out over the terraces of sloping lawn, past the meadow to the trees and mountains rising beyond, with too eager an expression, as if contemplating a bed and not a landscape. ‘We can swim later. Or take a picnic lunch to Flatrock.’
The twins were in the kitchen, being fed by the housekeeper. Harold Perkins had not appeared for breakfast — no reasons offered, and none needed.
‘But I don’t ride. I’ve never ridden,’ I said, lying. I’d been round the pyramids several times years before — the sand made it easy falling — and as a child I’d been thrown twice by an old pony, suddenly come young again, passing other horses on the road. ‘Well, I’ve fallen off more times than I’ve ridden,’ I added.
But it was no use. Guy wanted me off riding with her, getting his generous obsessions to work again first thing, gathering fodder for his morning fantasies. By lunch time, no doubt, he’d have organised some other little scheme for our exciting togetherness and his absent delectation.
The stables and other yard buildings were quite a distance down from the side of the house, behind a big patch of chestnut trees with a grand arched gateway leading into them. There were two big bay hunters which we looked at, eighteen hands or whatever, fierce in the eye and quite frisky too, one of them bowing and pawing the ground ominously. And I said at once, there and then, that I wouldn’t think of riding either of them. Suicidal.