The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  "Break both," one of the fighters suggested. They came steadily on.

  Tanner gasped: "You bastards," and Maxim chopped him under the ear and dropped him. He got his back to the wall as they swept over him.

  Maxim tried a roundhouse kick that missed, turning with it to launch a back kick that dropped one of them. But the others were too close. He grabbed one forearm and broke it, then a blow on the forehead knocked his eyesight out of kilter, another thumped his ribs and he gave up, sliding hunched down the wall trying to keep his groin and kidneys safe. There was no point in getting hurt any more.

  They tied Maxim to a wooden chair-just like the scene they'd watched a dozen times at the cinema-in the loading bay of a deserted warehouse. There was no light except hard bars of sunlight shafting almost horizontally through the broken windows, and the concrete floor gave the place a gloomy chill even on that evening.

  The boy with the broken arm had fainted once; now he was sitting against a wall, crying. The black, who had stopped the back-kick, sat beside him with grey lips, holding his stomach and only semi-conscious. The other three seemed uncertain what to do next; Dave Tanner hadn't come with him, though he had been on his feet again when Maxim last saw him.

  "Christ," said one of the others. "You really buggered themup-"

  "Did you break his arm?" another asked.

  "What do you fuckingthink?" moaned the boy most likely to know.

  "It's broken," Maxim said. "Hospital job. And him, too." He nodded at the black boy, who wasn't listening.

  "Now," one of them said, "we're going to talk to you. I mean you're going to talk to us. We want to know where Ron Blagg is, see?"

  Another slapped Maxim across the face, but not very hard. "We can keep doing that 'til you tell us. "

  Maxim goggled at them. "Bloody hell! I came down here to try and find him. If I knew where he was I wouldn't have come. I thought you were hiding him. "

  "Don't give us that shit."

  "If I knew where he waswhy would I come here?"

  He was slapped again, still without much conviction. "You just tell us where he is. "

  "I don't know. You had him at the Lord Howe, that's the last I know. I'm an Army officer and all I want to do is persuade him to go back to the Army. "

  "Well, if you don't know where he is, where is he?"

  Maxim stared back wearily.

  "We're going to torture you, " one of them decided. "I mean like stick cigarettes in your face until you talk. "

  Maxim did his best to shrug inside the ropes wrapping him to the chair. "Go ahead. It's a police job already so why not give them some solid evidence like burn marks?"

  "Stuff the police."

  "They're involved, from the moment you get those two to hospital. Unless you just leave us all here to die. "

  The black boy suddenly keeled over and his head hit the concrete with a startling crack.

  "Oh Christ," the torturer wavered. "Is he going to be all right?"

  A door banged, echoing across the empty bay, and footsteps clattered towards them. The boys stepped back, looked hastily around, then just resigned themselves. Maxim tried to turn hishead to see, but Billy Dannhad already begun to talk before he came into view, with Dave Tanner limping behind.

  "Jesus," he said softly. "I have seen some fuck-ups in my time, butyou lot, andthis…"

  Billy Dann's office was long and narrow, almost as narrow as the desk placed across it just in front of the window, but very high because it had been partitioned out of a much bigger room. The walls were lined with old fights posters and photographs of boxers in stiff, ferocious poses, and it had a musty, faded feel to it, contrasting with the bright cleanliness of the gym just up the hall.

  By now it was dark, with just two small desk lamps throwing clear-cut areas of light: one at a typist's table halfway down the room where Maxim had finally met up with a pint of cold lager, one at the desk where Dann waslistening on the telephone and sipping a small glass of neat gin. The rest of the room was lit only by the dim bluish light from a street lamp below the uncurtained window.

  Dannput down the phone. "One busted forearm, one ruptured spleen. They have to remove that. They say they'll be all right. Might even fight again. It's the arm that worries me. If you remember what it felt like, broken, every time you throw a punch… I don't much like you, Major. " Maxim just nodded. "What about the police?"

  "They've been there. I don't know what they asked, I didn't get to talk to the boys… maybe they'll think they filled each other in, I don't know. If nobody makes a complaint… What are you going to say?"

  "Nothing if nobody else does. " Maxim had a sore forearm and. stomach, a slight headache and a torn seam in his lightweight jacket. "I'll send you the tailor's bill."

  "You do that, Major,"Dannsaid heavily. "You do that."

  "And I still want to know where Ronnie Blagg is."

  "So do I. I'm not arsing you around, I just don't know. When we got him out of here, a couple of the boys had a cuppa with him at a caff down the road. An hour later, he rings in, he says he thinks somebody's following him. That's all. Nobody's seen him. I said something to the lads, I don't knowwhat, like your people had caught up with him… They must've got the idea from that, called Dave Tanner and got him to set you up… I mean it was stupid, just plain wet-nappy stupid. "

  "D'you have any idea where he might have gone?"

  "He had a mate in the country. Kent, I think. "

  "I know that one. He's not there."

  "Was it your people? I mean the Military Police – what's the Army call them: the Redcaps?"

  "Actually the Army calls them 'those fucking MPs'. No, they wouldn't have followed him, they'd have grabbed him. He belongs to them, now. I don't know who it was. " He took a drink. "You can't think of anybody else he might go to?"

  "Tanner, he'd be the only one. "

  There was a silence. Dannlooked at Maxim's glass, then took a bottle of gin from a desk drawer and refilled his own. He wasn't a drinking man. At fifty-five his stomach was as flat as an ironing board. He took a big swallow and sighed.

  Maxim asked carefully: "Did he see you before he went to the country, when he first came back from Germany?"

  Dannconsidered. "Just a minute or two."

  "Did he say anything why he deserted?"

  "He said… This is unofficial? – I really mean that."

  "Yes."

  "Well, he said he might've killed somebody. "

  "He told me he had, quite sure. "

  Dannlooked relieved, then curious. "And you didn't tell nobody?"

  "Not officially."

  "I'm buggered if I understand that Army of yours."

  "Me too. But you were never in the services yourself?"Dann wascertainly the age for National Service, if not the war itself.

  He tapped his left ear. "I've got about twenty per cent hearing in this one, that's what they said last time. That happened in the ring, we didn't have head-guards in those days. When I was just seventeen. That's why I took up PE, training. Another punch and I could've lost the lot. " Could you have been a contender?"

  Dannthought for a moment. "You have to say yes. You have to believe it. But how much does anybody else know about… about Ron and this business?"

  "I've read the German papers and there's nothing been said, so we don't think they've made the connection. So if you see Ron, tell him if he goes back and keeps shut-up, he'll only have the AWOL to answer for. But I'd still rather talk to him myself."

  Dannnodded slowly, then asked:"Who d'you mean by 'we'?"

  Maxim grinned suddenly at the idea of dragging George openly into this. "Nobody's who going public on it. So if he does get in touch…" He stood up and wriggled carefully. "I'm stiffening up. I'd do better to jog home than drive."

  Dannstood up, too. "You did better against those… thosetwats than I'd've expected. Some of them must be near half your age. I still don't like you much, Major, but I don't say I've liked most of the best fighters I've
trained. In a way, I won't say I like Ron too much, and he could have been a contender. "

  "In its small way, the Army also contends. You've still got my number in case anything comes up? It could be important. And still unofficial. "

  He walked slowly towards the hall, stretching at each step like a newly awakened cat. He had an early appointment the next day.

  Chapter 9

  Agnes Algar had dressed with particular care on Friday morning. She chose a slightly flared skirt of fawn flannel, plain white silk shirt with a demurely high neckline, a jacket in soft pastel-brown tweed with a standing collar, absolutely plain but very expensive Italian court shoes and a matching handbag that was small enough to be ladylike but not so small as to seem frivolous. Around her neck she put a thin early Victorian gold chain, on her right hand a fire opal she had recently had reset in a simple gold ring, on her left wrist the gold Baume amp;Mercierwatch.

  Agnes thought of her clothes and jewellery in such terms, just as she thought of her car as a two-year-old 3-door Chevette ES in Regatta Blue with wing mirrors and two radio aerials. She lived in a world of detail and precision, of getting the names right and the appearances correct, and had done ever since she joined the Security Service straight from Oxford fourteen years before. She would have described herself quite objectively as aged 35 and looking neither older nor younger, height 5 feet 4 and usually just under nine stone with a figure that was well kept rather than dramatic. Her hair was light ginger and she had long ago given up trying to curl it; she had a snub nose and blue eyes in an oval face that was cheerful but perhaps forgettable. But being forgettable was part of her job; a jigsaw piece that fitted invisibly into any puzzle.

  However, that morning Agnes intended to be neither forgettable nor invisible. Only a few hours earlier an unexpected Meeting Notice had been issued, the agenda being simply 'To consider the conduct of Major H. R. Maxim'. Since her job was to maintain liaison with Number 10, which made Maxim technically a colleague, she was to represent the Security Service at the meeting. She had no idea what that 'conduct' had been – a few early morning phone calls had produced more bad language than information – but she knew what 'to consider' meant in Whitehall, and frankly Harry had had it coming. Not that she had anything against him. She had no prejudice against any of the Army's trigger-happy desperadoes – not in the right place. Number10just wasn't that place, and she didn't mind who heard her say so.

  But what concerned her even more was that the Notice had shown the meeting would includetwo members of the Secret Intelligence Service. That sounded bad. Long ago, the legend said, the security (or spy-catching) service and the espionage (or spy-hiring) service had been born next door to each other in rooms 5 and 6 of the corridor where Military Intelligence first nested in Whitehall. Nostalgically, the old door numbers still stuck among the mass of code and jargon names slapped on the services since then. Thus the Intelligence Service could be MI6, just Six, or The Firm, The Friends (said with a knowing, slightly twisted, smile) or, if you were one of Agnes's mob, the Other Mob.

  That is, unless you happened to be about to meet them across a conference table. Then you reminded yourself that they were a bunch of gilded pederasts who spent what little time they could spare from betraying the country's secrets in stealing the Security Service's territory, influence and share of the Secret Funds. If it had ever existed, the cosy Whitehall corridor was long gone, though Agnes sometimes wondered what it would be like to concern herself with frustrating only other countries' spies. But she always dropped the thought as frivolous speculation.

  "The room was swept just three days ago," the uniformed messenger said, and Sir Anthony Sladen thanked him automatically, although everybody knew the remark was meaningless. Listening devices didn't grow like bacteria: they had to be planted. The room might have been 'swept' three minutes or three months ago, but what mattered was what had happened since then. Three minutes is a lifetime to a good wire man.

  The complete absence of windows gave the room a sense ofbeing right out of time and place, abetted by the bland neon lighting and acoustics which made everyone's voices sound flat and small. The walls were covered in oatmeal-covered sackcloth, and in the centre two heavy tables had been pushed together to form a single one that looked absurdly big for the eight tweed-covered office chairs around it.

  "Lock the door when you go out," Sladen added. "And tell the coffee ladies that we'd like ours in, say, three-quarters of an hour?"

  He looked around for support and everybody nodded, but the messenger became doubtful. "I expect they'll be here when they get here, sir."

  Sladen sighed. "Far easier to change our entire defence policy than alter the timing of one coffee-trolley. Very well, then."

  The messenger ambled out and for no good reason everybody stopped talking until they heard the lock click.

  "How is the PM, do you hear?" Sladen asked George. "It's been almost a week, now. " He lowered himself very carefully into the chair at the head of the table. He was a stiff man by nature and now his back had seized up on him. The Assistant Secretary from the Cabinet Office, a motherly woman with very neat grey hair and fashionable spectacles, clucked around him, adjusting the embroidered cushion she had brought along.

  "Quite chirpy on the phone," George said. "Probably the worst thing wrong with him is Frank Hardacre." Sir Frank, who had earned his knighthood by making house calls only at houses where there might be photographers waiting outside, had once told George he drank too much. "If he survives that he should be back in town next week."

  "In the House? Taking Questions?" the Foreign Office asked. He got Mummy's Chair at the opposite end, the natural place for Sladen to look first when asking for comment.

  George shrugged. "Tired Tim's quite happy playing Sorcerer's Apprentice. Why close a show that's taking money?" He had to settle for the seat at Sladen'sright hand, opposite the Assistant Secretary. Agnes came next to him and Major-General Sir Bruce Drewery next to her. Across thetable, the younger of the two men from Six had already torn up his place card and put it in his pocket as a gesture of security.

  The Assistant Secretary gave Agnes an all-girls-together smile and flipped open her notebook.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologise for dragging you in here at such short notice, but as you will have guessed from the Meeting Notice the urgency…" Urgent or not, Sladen was experienced enough to give them thirty seconds of platitudes while they kicked their briefcases under the table, tugged at their waistcoats – both MI6 men wore them even on a hot June day – and shuffled their papers, although few of them were prepared to put much paperwork on view. One of two Second Permanent Secretaries to the Cabinet, Sladen's whole life was committees, conferences, meetings. He was a thin, thin-faced man and a bad back suited his dignity. His one concession to the heat was a grey suit in place of the usual Cabinet Office blue, with a Trinityist amp; 3rd tie.

  "Chairman -" the first off the mark was Guy Husband from Six "-I'm sorry to be singing the school song so early, but the Meeting Notice was classified merely as 'Secret'. Could my service assume that any rrswould only be distributed as 'Top Secret'?"

  Sladen glanced down the table. '". air," the Foreign Office said cheerfully. That was Scott-Scobie, a swinger from their harmlessly-named 'Research Department'; forty-fiveish, healthily plump, curly dark hair and wearing a rumpled linen suit.

  George nodded. "Agreed. But does this mean that our friends from Dixieland -" the Intelligence Service lived south of the river "- are going to give us a hint of what they're up to these days?"

  "We hope everybody will be giving hints of what they're up to," Husband said smoothly. His voice was pleasant but characterless, as if he were mostly concerned with avoiding mistakes; a provincial schooling or all the years in the spy business?

  "Sir Bruce?"

  "By all means. Classify it any way you prefer. " He was a big Scottish pussycat with a contented purr of a voice.

  "Splendid." Then Sladen remembered Agnes;
she gave him a happy smile. "Splendid, then. You'll make a note?" The Assistant Secretary already had. "Good. Now, I think we all know that the matter before us concerns Major Maxim, currently attached to the Private Office at Number 10. Guy, perhaps you'd like to…?"

  "Yes, Chairman. But first…" Husband had the good looks of a schoolboy football star who had reached forty with one mighty bound: a strong nose, high forehead, brown hair set in tousled wiry waves. Even in a service which had a reputation for snappy dressing, he was an exquisite. His Italian suit was a little too shaped, too light in colour and probably too expensive. He adjusted his blue-tinted pilot-style glasses with a hand that wore a broad gold ring backed up by a gold cufflink in the shape of a reef-knot. Agnes disliked rings on men, although to be fair to Husband – which she had no intention of being – she had little trouble in finding something to dislike about everybody from Six.

  "But first, " Husband said again, glancing quickly at Agnes; "may I ask why onr sister service is represented here?-no matter how pretw'i‹r'4 ask only because of the need-to-know principle."

  You bastard, X¿'".ísthought. You peacock's prick. She waited for George to answer, but he sat hunched beside her, turning a gold pencil in his fingers. She realised she was on her own; George must be expecting a true Conflict Situation if he was already saving his last bullet for himself.

  Our Harry has trodden on some Very Important Toes, she thought.

  She became the bright helpful little girl, friendly but perhaps just a little out of her depth among all these clever men. "I only know that the Meeting Notice was sent out according to a list drawn up by the Prime Minister. "

  "Deputy Prime Minister," Husband corrected.

  "I really don't know. My Director-General asked me to come along because I usually handle the lower-level liaison with Number 10. But -"

  "Lower-level,"Husband said quickly. "That, Chairman, is precisely my point, " although it hadn't been to start with.

  Her voice stayed steady, despite feeling sick with anger and humiliation; " – but I imagine the Cabinet Office must have had some idea as to whether this is going to touch on security within this country."