I felt very weak and I had forgotten why I was here or who I was. Marlow, Graham, Jackson? The names ran vaguely and unimportantly round my head, like children in a playground being watched by a mysterious anonymous presence. It simply wasn’t important. As long as the three children were happy. Someone else was responsible for them. The person I had been or might become had been wiped clean away, purged out of me with the sickness. And what was left of me at that moment, was nothing, nobody, void.
So that when the man beyond the lamp eventually began to speak I grasped his words willingly, as a landline back to life — any conscious life, which I suddenly craved, just as I had in Durham jail months before when McCoy had first voiced his mean proposals. I could live Jackson’s life as a recompense — for his failure and mine — in such a way that would vindicate both of us and destroy them. So instead of arguing when I’d recovered, I said calmly: ‘What is it? Tell me what you want of Jackson?’
‘I have a plan,’ the man said in the shadows, speaking the words slowly, almost in a lilt, like a singer taking the first words of a song without music, ‘a plan for all of us —’
‘An offer I can’t refuse,’ I broke in, taking the advantage. And I could feel them looking at me in some surprise.
And when I heard what the plan was I was happy in a way, a hard and brutal way perhaps, but one needed something of that — for the first thing I thought now, after he had given me the outlines of it all, was that now I was Helen Jackson’s husband. My association with her had been licensed here at last, a wedding by proxy. I was her husband and her lover all in one. And thus surely, I felt, when we met again, I could not help but find out all about her. For now I should be privy, quite naturally, both to the history of her marriage and to all the long processes of her affair. Surely, I thought, she could not deny me that knowledge any longer?
That night I slept in the Jacksons’ big double bed, his fine black leather suitcases half packed all around me, all the bits and pieces of his departure scattered about the room waiting to come together in me.
We had spent the hours before going through all Guy’s effects, his papers from Cheltenham, his new identity card with my photograph on it now, his passport which had been changed in the same way. Another man had arrived with these half-way through the evening, some kind of electronics expert, and he spent a long time with familiarising me, as far as he could, with the job Guy was to have done back in England.
I had told the blue-suited man that I thought his plan would fail very early on, that the communications experts in Cheltenham would surely sec through my lack of expertise at once. But he disagreed, while the man who had briefed me said, ‘If you memorise these basic details we’ve gone over — here in these papers — and say nothing else, don’t attempt to offer any thoughts of your own, you’ll be all right. In any case, we know that Jackson would have been given a two-week induction course with this new system. So they’ll be teaching you the business. They won’t expect you to know anything about it. As to the general procedure in this building — codes, cyphers, cryptanalysis — you should have nothing to do with this at alclass="underline" you’re being specially posted as a trainee to this electronic one-time pad unit.’
‘And you really think no one in this place is going to know me?’ I’d said at the time, talking across to the little man, still in the shadows. ‘Nobody from personnel in Cheltenham? Surely Guy Jackson must have been interviewed by someone down there?’
‘No. He was interviewed and cleared for the posting by the Foreign Office Communications section in London when he was last on leave there. And he’s since been checked up again, and debriefed on his New York posting by your friend Harper when he was over here. Jackson has no unfinished business in London or New York. He’s completely cleared to start the course.’
‘All right. But what about my “wife” — have you thought about her? How she’s going to react to my sudden presence and her husband’s death? Take it all quite calmly, you suppose? She may do something quite wild.’
‘Mrs Jackson has been estranged from her husband for several years. You can look at the evidence of that here later. You will tell her when you meet all that we’ve told you. She’ll collaborate. She too will have no safe alternative.’
‘And what about my “suicide” here in New York this evening? The section in London is going to want to check Jackson out on that when he gets back. He was my control, remember. Or someone here in New York, now. The UN people will have been onto the British Consulate already.’
‘I’m sure they have. But as far as they’re concerned you’re just an ordinary British citizen. Jackson was the only person in America who really knew what you were doing here. The Consulate will make the usual investigations — with your hotel, a report to your bogus address in London. It will be some time before anyone in your London section knows you’ve killed yourself. And when they do, and want to talk to you about your “death”, we have means of ensuring that the inquiry will amount to nothing.’
‘How? The first person they’ll send down to Cheltenham to see Jackson will be my section chief, McCoy — or more likely his deputy, Harper. And Harper is certainly going to know that I’m not Jackson.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Leave it to us.’
And I said then, I remember, looking along every avenue while I had the chance: ‘What happens if I don’t go along with you? How can you kill me if I tell them everything when I get back — and they put me in a top-security prison again where I came from. What then?’
‘We’ll kill Mrs Jackson instead,’ the man said carefully. ‘And surely you can’t let her die, can you? With no husband and two young children to look after. I’m sure you’ll see that. And remember there will be people of ours with you both all the time in Cheltenham — waiting and watching, all that kind of business. We’ve not gone into this lightly. Any ideas you have about getting out of this on your own will result in certain disaster for Mrs Jackson and her children. And the same applies if you try and run together. Try running with two small children — you won’t get far. Leave them behind anywhere, and we will find out where they are — and their lives will be held against your return and carrying on the job, Mr Marlow. It is as simple as that. Over-dramatic, you may think, but as far as we are concerned an absolutely precise intention. You were meant to see clearly what happened to Mr Jackson this evening. Just remember what you saw.’
‘And if I succeed,’ I asked. ‘If I get you what you want?’
‘You’ll be free then, won’t you? Perhaps you’ll find you like the work in Cheltenham. Or like being Mrs Jackson’s husband. Who knows?’
Of course I knew he was lying. For the information to be of any use to the Russians it would have to be extracted from Cheltenham without the people there ever knowing it was gone. And the only way of making sure they never did know would be to get rid of me and Helen afterwards in any case — kill us in some way made to seem an accident, a car crash, a fire or some such. Our deaths would have to be part of any successful deal.
‘Perhaps you fancy Mrs Jackson already,’ the little man continued. ‘She seems to have been quite free with her favours.’