We came to the High Street, were forced right on a one-way system, then left up the long Promenade of the town, the lamps bright all along its sloping length under the huge canopy of chestnuts. But where to — which way now?
There was a uniformed policeman on the kerb half-way up by a set of traffic lights. I took the chance. Our car was unmarked. He gave us very precise directions to the hotel.
We went left off the Promenade and to our right we saw the floodlit Town Hall, a great Edwardian rump of blackened stone standing back from the road, with a poster outside — ‘The Kirov Dance Troupe and Balalaika Ensemble’. Harper had said the place was surrounded but no one stopped us or followed us as we passed it.
The hotel was a mile or two further on, a strange two-storeyed Chinese-styled building with a pagoda-like roof and delicately carved wooden eaves — just off a by-road, behind a row of new pseudo-Georgian villas.
The receptionist was very helpful. Yes, a woman and the two children were in number 14, at the end of a ground-floor corridor. At least they weren’t in the lounge in front of us. Of course they might be eating: the dining-room was on the left just before the bedrooms.
We looked in the dining-room — full of quiet, elderly people murmuring over Dover sole and roast chicken — then we moved on towards some french windows at the end of the corridor. Number 14 was the last bedroom on the right. Helen gestured me to go in first.
I knocked. Nothing. I tried the handle and went in.
The bedside light was on and a man was standing next it, behind the bed, facing me with a revolver, a silencer at the end of it: a small, intelligent-faced man with deep-set eyes, in his fifties with ruffs of white hair about his ears. He saw Helen immediately behind me, and he began to move his gun about, looking at her, waving her out of the way. Then he fired. I heard a slight ‘Pop’ the same moment as the bullet hit me somewhere in the thigh. There was no pain at first, just a quick stab like a syringe needle going in. And I was down on the floor, writhing, yet still there wasn’t pain; one was waiting for it somehow. And then it came, as if another bullet had hit me — a sharp and colossal pain, a succession of jabs, as though my whole thigh were being pressed down onto a row of knives.
Harper was leaning over me when I came to. I was lying on the bed of the same room. Croxley was standing behind him, and there was a doctor there, packing up his bag.
‘What happened?’ I asked after a minute. My mouth tasted of some kind of disinfectant. My trousers had been cut and my thigh was bandaged and numb.
‘Happened?’ Harper said pityingly. ‘You madman. You walked straight into it. I’d have told you if you’d given me half a chance without the woman, if you hadn’t jumped us in the pub; your friend Helen Jackson is with the KGB. She was using you all down the line, stringing you along. And you fell for it. If you’d stayed with us in the pub we’d have had them both — her and the other fellow she was meeting here.’
‘What other fellow?’
‘The man who shot you — Alexei Flitlianov, head of the KGB’s Second Directorate, on the run. That’s who she was making for all the time. She works with him. She has some names for him. We’ve known for some time. That’s why I told you to stick with her.’
‘And her children — the woman they were with?’
‘Well, they’re not here, are they?’ Harper said, looking round the room. ‘They’ve all gone. You one-man army! Never mind. All the roads out of the town are blocked. We’ll have them. They can’t get far with two children in tow.’
Croxley left the room with the doctor.
I said, ‘You’re lying, Harper. You’re making it up.’
He managed a look of very genuine astonishment. ‘Am I? Then that’s an imaginary bullet the doctor took out of your leg.’ He picked up a smudge of lead from the bedside table. ‘All right then, if I’m wrong, you tell me what happened.’
‘I came into the room. And he shot me —’
‘Yes? You had your own gun out, of course?’
‘No. I wasn’t expecting —’
‘Of course you weren’t. But he was. Got you first time round. It was all fixed. You walked into the room first, didn’t you — because she asked you to, didn’t she?’
And she had, I remembered. I nodded.
‘Look,’ he said, like a teacher spelling it out for a dunderhead, ‘you’ve been living in the Jacksons’ house above the town, haven’t you? And the place has been surrounded by the KGB. They got rid of Jackson in New York and put you in his place to get hold of this new code process here. That’s the gist of what you told me on the phone. But the real thing they wanted was a collection of names from Mrs Jackson — unreliable KGB operatives all over the world — which she’d been keeping for Flitlianov. And all she wanted was to get these to him — and get herself and her children safely out of the place at the same time if possible. You were the means. How did she do it? What happened?’
Harper was lying. He must have been. Hadn’t she said … No, not that. We’d said very little up in the hills. Much more, hadn’t we completely trusted and understood each other? Of course, it could all have been counterfeit.
‘She must have used you, Marlow,’ Harper went on, the clever Iago I thought at first, until I began to wonder. If I didn’t believe him I’d begun to doubt Helen. ‘Can’t you see?’ He was studious now, an earnest commentator on the arts of betrayal. And then I remembered Mrs Grace — that sweet smile full of some shared confidence which she had given Helen on my first day in the hills and her subsequent — and to me, almost unbelievable — recantation of her faith. Harper’s theory fitted there all right: she had been in league with Helen all along. She was a member of Flitlianov’s dissident group. That would fit her very well. She had been in contact with him on the outside; they had arranged the whole escape together — all three of them: she would take the children out and I would take Helen, for we would never have made it altogether. And afterwards I would have to be dispensed with. With a bullet. It seemed unfair. Yet it had been a bullet. There was no doubt about that. I didn’t trust Harper. But, yes, I had begun to distrust Helen — and, yes, she had gestured me into the room first, then got out of the way as he fired. That was certain too.
‘Well, so she used me. So what?’ I said brashly. And then I thought of the few days on the hill together, the easy things we’d done, the brilliant light and the leaves turning — all that sanity, affection and fun up there in the woods, and the fire in the evening. And I thought, no, it couldn’t be. How could she fake all that?
And then I thought, why not? She could. Hadn’t she spent a lifetime faking things with people? A fake marriage with her husband. And in her belief a whole faked face to all the world. Hadn’t she always inhabited permanent cover, absolutely according to the book, lied convincingly about everything? — about her politics as about her lovers.
Her belief, which was no doubt genuine, and the secrecy with which she’d had to hold it, had led her to infect and destroy every close relationship with the same illicit urges — to sacrifice any present truth, a happy body or thought, for a clandestine political ideal. Things had to be secret for her before they could be real and so she could not sustain love in any open reality. She was a woman who only really thrived on the intermittent and clandestine in any affair, who required eventual failure and betrayal in love as others seek orgasm as a culmination.
Or perhaps, simply, she had just wanted to be with Flitlianov again. Perhaps it had only really ever worked with him: a father, a body and a belief all wrapped up in one — and everything in her life since had simply been done in memory of him. Graham, Guy and I — we had simply been bystanders, stepping-stones to that end, to that eventual reconciliation with the one man who had really mattered to her. These were theories. And Harper could have been bluffing and lying. But whatever her motives there was no doubt that I’d been shot, that she’d left me and gone off with Flitlianov. That was no theory.