‘He can’t hang around in someone’s back garden for ever.’
‘And you can’t stop every car leaving town for ever either.’
‘No.’
‘It may not be that easy, Harper. You may never get those names. I hope you don’t.’
‘Ah, Marlow, I should never have suggested you for this job in the first place.’ Harper shook his head in mock despair. ‘You believe in it all. In the rights and wrongs. But there aren’t any in this business. It’s fatal to believe anything about it. You get your head chopped off.’
Flitlianov moved carefully through the municipal gardens that lay at the back of the Town Hall, round a fountain, along neat paths, beside a wilting succession of herbaceous borders. Clouds had come in with the evening and for the first time in a week the night was dark.
Ahead of him, between clumps of evergreens, he could see the stage door, to the right of the building, with a man posted outside. But to the left, on the other side of the hall, was another doorway with a pile of beer crates stacked beside it. A man came out, pushing a trolley of empty bottles. Flitlianov cut across the grass towards the catering entrance.
Once inside the building, he walked through a pantry, across a corridor, and up some steps to a door which led backstage. He opened it and the music hit him, flowing over him, a Georgian peasant dance he remembered well, a bright and stormy affair, where two circles merged and then flowed away from each other, the men moving outwards, stamping their feet, the girls clustering in the centre clapping their hands. He knew the shapes of it all exactly without seeing anything behind the back curtain. A Russian approached him. Flitlianov showed him his card. ‘Embassy Security. I’ve just come down from London. Just a check-up. I’ll be leaving with you after the show.’ The man nodded blankly. Flitlianov listened happily to the music. He was home again.
The next time Harper left the ambulance I reached up for the small brass fire-extinguisher above my head and hid it beneath the blanket, holding the plunger tap firmly, and pointing the thing to where Harper had been sitting opposite me.
And when he came back and was sitting comfortably and had lit a cigarette, had talked some more, and was saying: ‘No, you’ve had a lot of bad breaks, Marlow —’ I emptied the canister of foam straight into his face. And then I was up, hovering on my good leg, falling towards him, the canister raised until I cracked him over the head with it. I was getting quite good at chopping people’s heads off.
Immediately I was finished with Harper the back doors of the ambulance flew open and Croxley was there with two plain-clothes men. They looked disappointed, I remember. One man stayed behind with Harper, while the other two carried me across to the police caravan. All three of them had been waiting just outside I realised. They must have been there all the time.
‘Harper is with them, Croxley. With the KGB,’ I said when they’d got me on a chair in the caravan. Croxley looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, Marlow,’ he sighed, politely. ‘We knew that. We —’
The skin at the back of my neck and in the small of my back pimpled in an instant and my stomach turned violently.
‘Well, what the fucking hell have you been doing then?’
‘It wasn’t my —’ Croxley stopped and shrugged his shoulders. ‘The idea was that he’d hang himself, if we gave him enough rope. We —’
‘What rope? How?’ Croxley looked over my shoulder.
‘You were the rope, Marlow,’ a voice said.
I turned. McCoy was standing in the doorway, his puffy face gleaming from some exertion, folds of skin seeping out over his starched collar and tightly knotted old boys’ tie. He came in and looked at my leg with distaste. ‘We knew about Harper. But couldn’t really prove anything.’ McCoy was suddenly an awful version of Hercule Poirot, assembling the candidates for murder in the library, about to superintend the final denouement. We had moved from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Agatha Christie. It was all still so unreal, still a fiction to me. But not for much longer, I thought. The fiction was running out fast.
‘So?’ I asked, working now for the truth.
‘We’d been watching him quite a while, tapping his phone. And when you called him this afternoon telling him about Guy Jackson in New York and how you’d got away from the KGB — out of that house in the hills, we thought he’d probably try and get rid of you then. You were screwing all their plans up. But once you ran from the pub, we were sure he’d go for you. Because somehow you knew about him then, didn’t you? That he was a double with the KGB. And he knew that you knew. So we gave him his head with you after that — left you alone together — in the hotel room, in the ambulance. And hoped he’d get on with it. Instead you bungled it — tried to kill him. If only you’d let him do it, then we’d have had cast-iron evidence.’
‘Thanks.’
Croxley looked sad, one of his crestfallen looks, as though he knew for certain now the ale was off.
‘You stupid fucker, McCoy.’
McCoy took no notice. He moved over to the sergeant on the radio desk. Some information was coming in, a voice crackling on the receiver. McCoy listened carefully.
‘We’d have stopped him actually killing you,’ Croxley put in, by way of mitigation. ‘We were just outside.’
‘Thanks again.’
McCoy came back.
‘Well, you have Harper now,’ I said. ‘A week with Croxley here, and he’ll spill everything. But what about the others? You know about these names? Flitlianov must have them now — a liberal group within the KGB, dissidents. They’re important.’
‘Yes,’ McCoy said wearily, ‘we know about the names. But they’re not liberal dissidents, Marlow. Our politicals here checked. They’re just unreliable KGB agents, the names we sent you over to New York for in the first place. Nothing to do with liberalism. Mrs Jackson sold you that idea. I suppose she thought we might take them over and believe we were running them back against Moscow. But it would have been the other way round: we’d have bought ourselves a brigade of double agents, instead of the one or two like Harper we have anyway. “Liberal dissidents” my foot. I can tell you — when we get those names we’ll pack them out of the country smartish.’
‘You knew about Mrs Jackson then — all along?’
‘Yes.’
‘About her and George Graham?’
‘Yes. Graham told us about her as well as the names — in the end. And of course we’d read her letter to Graham that morning in Marylebone before you did.’
‘So I was planted on her — from the start? You knew she was with the KGB?’
‘Well, obviously we couldn’t have told you, Marlow. We had to get you to trust each other, so that we could keep tabs on her, through you. Guy Jackson was no use. We knew that. He was working for the Americans. So you were the crucial link there. And it would have gone fine — we’d have had all the information about her out of you — and got those names a lot earlier — if the KGB hadn’t decided to switch you and Jackson in New York and start this Cheltenham deal.’
‘You knew about that too?’
‘Yes. And we decided to ride with it. Jackson was no loss. And it looked like an interesting situation, full of possibilities from our point of view: whatever happened when you got back to England we were going to lay our hands on a lot of KGB men in this country — legals and illegals. To handle you they were going to have to come out of their holes and be counted. And they have, Marlow, they have: half a dozen so far — and more to come, many more, before the night is out. So you’ve done all right, Marlow. Even though you did your best to screw it all up. Don’t despair.’