But Harper broke in suddenly, appraising her like a bar-fly muscling in on interesting company. ‘Hello. How are you, Mrs Jackson?’ He might have gone on: And the children — keeping well?
‘And your children,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’
‘A hotel outside town,’ I interrupted. ‘I told you.’
I stared at him. He sipped his gin.
‘Yes, of course. But which hotel? Where?’
‘What are you up to, Harper?’ I asked. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Do?’ He turned and looked over into the saloon bar, listening to the music wistfully for a moment, as though the tune had stirred some old colonial memory in him, tales of derring-do: the Boer War, Anzac Day, of times when the far-flung Empire had saved the sceptred Isle.
‘… Goodbye DOLLY GRAY! …’
They ended it with cheers, roused old voices — suddenly, vehemently unwearied.
‘Do?’ He turned back. ‘Round up these KGB operatives you’ve put us onto. That’s the first thing — now you’re safe. We’ve taken three of them. But there must be a crowd of them in town. There’s a show on tonight in the Town Hall, some Russian guitar stuff. So God knows how many men they may have here. We were just considering it — making plans.’
The young Special Branch man broke in to Croxley. ‘Yes, sir. The extra men are on their way — got it on the radio. Coming through Northleach now. Should be here in twenty minutes. And the caravan has been set up behind the Town Hall.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Storm the building? Very good for Anglo-Soviet relations.’
Croxley smiled again, his little sweet weary smile. ‘Not exactly.’ A man of few words. I remembered that. Except when they were needed.
Harper said, ‘We were going over there now — thought they might have taken you there somehow. We have the place surrounded: the plan was to make a few “inquiries” among the cast after the show. Cleared at the highest level, this. The PM. You won’t have heard, but there’s a bit of a purge in the works with these KGB fellows.’ He turned to Helen. ‘Anyway, your children are just as important. We should make sure they’re safe first. So let’s pick them up at that hotel now.’
I could see what Harper wanted: to play a double game right to the end: arresting a few KGB men for the sake of a far grander design — getting the names of all their dissident members from Helen. Obviously he must have known about them, known she was the woman behind the mailbox in Grand Central station. He’d been part — the English part — of this whole KGB plan for me all along. Now he was closing in, making sure of the kill, part of a pincer movement: if the KGB men already in Cheltenham didn’t get the papers off Helen, he would, which would amount to just the same thing. And if I’d said to Croxley that Harper was a KGB man himself he wouldn’t believe me. No one would. They never did. There could be no help from that quarter. So Harper was heading us both now towards some other plan, a situation somewhere in the city where Helen would be confronted with the deaclass="underline" the names she held in exchange for her children.
They were onto another song in the saloon — the mood besotted and elegaic: ‘Roses are blooo-ming in Picardy …’
‘Come on,’ Harper said. ‘Let’s go. We’ve no time. Where are the children?’ He was threatening now. And there wasn’t much time.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But just a quick one. I need it.’
‘Brandy?’ Harper turned away to order, and when he turned back I had the revolver out, pointing at him. Croxley looked at the weapon with great boredom, as if it was a dirty postcard I was trying to sell him. But he put his hand out, restraining the young policeman who had made a slight move forward. I liked Croxley. He’d always made the effort to try and see my point of view.
‘Thank you, Croxley. Get him to give me the keys of the car he came here in please.’
Croxley complied. So did the young policeman.
‘Stay here till you’ve finished your drinks,’ I said. ‘Don’t hurry.’
The car had only gone half-way down the narrow street when the engine suddenly stalled, then stopped. I tried the starter once, twice, but nothing. Yet there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. There must have been some anti-theft device, an automatic cut-out on the ignition, some technical pre-condition which I had omitted to fulfil. And there was no time now to try again.
The door of the pub opened a hundred yards behind us. And in front, at the end of the street, a Panda police car appeared.
We were out of the car and running. There was a narrow alleyway twenty yards ahead of us to the right and we made for it. It led between two back garden walls to a piece of open, waste land, the site of some fine old urban estate now razed to the ground, with piles of brick and broken masonry everywhere.
We could hear them clearly now behind us. And then suddenly, looming up in the soft darkness in front of us was the shell of a whole house, still standing, a white stuccoed Italianate villa that had not yet come under the hammer.
At the side were steps leading down to the basement area and a door hanging drunkenly forward out of the deep shadows. Inside it was totally dark with a strong smell of fungus and old damp, and a more recent odour, dry and peppery, of lime dust and plaster rubble. We crouched just inside, backs against the wall, not daring to move further in or strike a light.
And now we could hear them running forward all round us, on either side of the house. But for some reason they had no torches and must have been as blind as we were. Someone stopped at the top of the basement steps. But then his footsteps moved away with the sound of half a dozen running feet and we breathed again.
‘Where do you think the Moorend Park Hotel is?’ I asked. ‘To the east of the town, off the Swindon road Mrs Grace said. We’re heading westwards. We’ll have to double back. The hotel is the first thing. And the second is to get rid of that packet of names, drop it somewhere. And pick it up again afterwards. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Are you sure this is right at all?’
‘What else? Harper is with the KGB, not against them. He would have pushed us into their hands somehow; then “rescued” us and the children when they’d got those names off you.’
‘Listen, why don’t we give it up — I can’t risk the twins like this. Let’s give the KGB the names and get the children back. There’s no alternative really.’
I paused, thinking: the children versus hundreds of lives in Russia. But of course she was right. There was no alternative.
‘There isn’t anything else, is there?’ she said, a strangely conversational, easy voice coming from a black void, a hole in the air. And suddenly I felt the need to confirm her physical existence and I put my hand out and it touched her breast for an instant and then I found her arm and squeezed it.
‘No, of course not. There’s nothing else, Helen. Come on.’
And I felt we’d come to the end then, given up the battle, that the story was over: I trusted her completely at that moment, was completely convinced that she was right. How right and true she was, I thought. We could find the children and give the names up and then we could stop running for ever. And perhaps we would live together. Or perhaps we wouldn’t. That didn’t matter. But at least we would never do this again. Let them have their world of politics and spies, their long battles of belief. We would belong to ourselves from now on, lose the horrors that are due to great ideas: we would take the little roads that led somewhere.
So we went back the way we’d come, creeping through the alleyway, and there, in front of us, where we’d left it, was the police car. Empty. And I suddenly thought: what if I turn the ignition key anti-clockwise first, then in the normal direction? I got in and tried this and the engine fired and kept on running.