I shook my head and began to hand it back.
‘Read lower down.’
I did as he said, and came across the familiar words, etorphine... acepromazine... chlorocresol... dimethyl sulphoxide.
‘It’s a copy of a report from a chemical company,’ he said, ‘sending an analysis asked for by your friend with the moustache. It seems to have been delivered to him yesterday.’
‘So they wanted to find out what they’d bought.’
‘It would seem so.’ He took back the letter and restored it to his pocket. ‘That is all,’ he said. ‘Your positive identification of these men was required, but nothing more. You are at liberty to go back to England when you wish.’ He hesitated slightly, then continued, ‘It is believed that you will be discreet.’
‘I will,’ I said, and hesitated in my turn. ‘But... these two will have colleagues... and that liquid does exist.’
‘It may be necessary,’ he said heavily, ‘to search every spectator at the entrances.’
‘There’s a quicker way.’
‘What is that? ’
‘It will be summer... Watch for anyone wearing gloves. If they have rubber gloves underneath, arrest them.’
He gazed at me from behind his glasses and rubbed his chin, and slowly said, ‘I see why they sent you.’
‘And gallons of naloxone at every turn...’
‘We will work out many precautions.’
I looked across for the last time at the naked hate-filled faces of international terrorism, and thought about alienation and the destructive steps which led there.
The intensifying to anger of the natural scorn of youth for the mess their elders had made of the world. The desire to punish violently the objects of scorn. The death of love for parents. The permanent sneer for all forms of authority. The frustration of not being able to scourge the despised majority. And after that, the deeper, malignant distortions... The self-delusion that one’s feelings of inadequacy were the fault of society, and that it was necessary to destroy society in order to fee! adequate. The infliction of pain and fear, to feed the hungry ego. The total surrender of reason to raw emotion, in the illusion of being moved by a sort of divine rage. The choice of an unattainable end, so that the violent means could go on and on. The addictive orgasm of the act of laying waste.
‘What are you thinking?’ the Major-General said.
‘That they are self-indulgent.’ I turned away from them with a sense of release. ‘It is easier to smash than to build.’
‘They are pigs,’ he said, with disdain.
‘What will you do with them?’
But that was one question he had no intention of answering directly. He simply said, with polished blandness, ‘Their newspapers must find other writers.’
The Watch, I thought, would be facing the same problem: and an old irrelevant piece of information floated to the surface.
‘Ulrika Meinhof was a journalist,’ I said.
19
The flight home was met at Heathrow at four in the afternoon by one of Hughes-Beckett’s minions, who whisked me off to what he called a debriefing and I called a bloody nuisance.
I coughed my way into the mandarin’s office and protested. I got an insincere apology and a small glass of sherry, when the only thing likely to bring me back to animation was a quadruple scotch.
‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’ I said, feeling feverish.
‘The Prince wants you to meet him at Fontwell Park races in the morning.’
‘I thought of staying in bed.’
‘What’s wrong with your arm?’ he said, disregarding this frivolous statement and eyeing Stephen and Gudrun’s farewell attempt at a restful sling for the journey.
‘Fingers got hammered. But not sickled.’ I must be lightheaded, I thought. Lightheaded from the upsurge of relief at being back where liberty still poked up a few persistent tendrils. Lightheaded at the sight of people smiling in the street. At Christmas trees, and bright lights and cornucopias of shops. One could spurn the affluent society and seek the simple life if one wanted to: the luxury lay in being able to choose.
Hughes-Beckett eased himself in his comfortable office chair and studied the back of his hand.
‘And how... ah... did it go?’ he said.
I told him more or less exactly what I had told the Major-General. He stopped looking at his hands and came to mental life in a very positive and alert way, quite different from his habitual air of boredom.
I talked and coughed, and coughed and talked, and he gave me another and slightly larger sherry.
‘So there you are,’ I said finally. ‘As far as I could tell there will be a great deal of hush over the whole scene. And as for johnny Farringford... well, I got no definite assurances, but I doubt if after this the comrades would consider him a suitable prospect. So from that point of view I think it would be safe for him to go... but it’s of course up to you and the Prince.’
I stood up. I really felt most unwell. Nothing new, however. The story of my life.
He came with me all the way to the front door and saw me off in an official car, which represented a radical rethink on his part of the usefulness of horses.
I found that meeting the Prince at Fontwell Park races involved lunch with him, the Princess, Johnny Farringford, the Chairman of the racecourse, sundry Stewards and assorted ladies, all in the glass-walled corner box at the top of the stands, looking down over the green turf.
There was a lot of champagne and civilised chat, which on other days would have pleased me well enough: but the shadows of Moscow still sat close at my shoulder, and I thought of the fear of Boris and Evgeny and the doubts and caution of Yuri and Misha and Kropotkin. I should be glad to hear in time from Ian and Stephen that none of them had come to harm.
I had spent a toss-and-turn night in a hotel and hired a car and driver to take me to the races. Practically every remedy in the plastic box had been pressed into service, to only moderate avail. It was a bore to drag around with lungs filling up like sumps and every breath an effort, but I’d ridden in races in that state once or twice in my foolish life, so why fret at some gentle spectating. Bits of lines of the Scottish ballad of the dying Lord Randal, with whom I’d identified heavily as a child, ran from long habit in my mind, more as a sort of background music than organised thought, but now with an added new meaning...
‘Randall,’ the Prince said, ‘we must talk.’
We talked in short snatches through the afternoon, standing alone on the Stewards’ balcony between the races, using the times when everyone else went down to look at the horses in the parade ring.
‘There were two plots involving Johnny,’ I said.
‘Two?’
‘Mm... Being who he is, he’s a natural target. He always will be. It’s something that needs to be faced.’
I told him bit by bit about the terrorists, and about the identity of Alyosha. It all shocked him a great deal more deeply than it had those two wily gamesplayers, Hughes-Beckett and the Major-General.
‘Dreadful. Dreadful.’ he said.
‘There was also,’ I said eventually, ‘some question of the K.G.B. setting him up.’
‘How do you mean?’
I explained about the pornography.
‘Johnny?’ The Prince looked surprised and most displeased. ‘The bloody fool... doesn’t he realise that is just what the Press are always looking for?’