by Len Deighton
'If they trace that handgun back to you, I'll make you wish you were,' said Dawlish.
'Just tell me your problem,' I said wearily. 'You want this in my file? Give me a sheet of paper, I'll be pleased to oblige you. Anything else you want-crimes you need a confession for? Typewriters missing from the inventory? Petty-cash slips without counterfoils? I'll make it all right in one bumper-size confession.'
I sank back in the chair and shook my shoes off. 'I'm very tired,' I said. 'Perhaps it would be easier on all of us if you told me what you had in mind, instead of straining to pretend that you're being hit by a succession of brilliant ideas.'
The brevity of the glance they exchanged in no way lessened its conspiratorial quality. 'There's a chance to stick a transistor radio up Champion's arse,' explained Schlegel. '
I knew enough about Schlegel's allegorical syntax to guess that I was cast as the radio. 'If it's all the same to you,' I said, 'I'll stay with the murder charge.'
'We haven't got time for comic backchat,' said Dawlish.
'Don't look at me,' I told him. 'I'm the straight man.'
Dawlish said, 'Of course, Major Champion will guess that charging you with the girl's murder was just a device...'
'... but he might believe that gunning down Fabre was too rich for the department's blood,' said Schlegel. 'Got me?'
'No,' I said.
There was a long silence. Finally, it was Schlegel who spoke. They were going to save Dawlish for the replay.
'Right now, you're charged with the murder of Melodic Page. O.K., it's very phoney, but we think we could exploit it. We could leak that to Champion, and make it sound convincing. Right?'
'Carry on,' I said. I opened the V.I.P. cigar box and lit one of Dawlish's Monte Cristos. Employees were not permitted access to the hospitality, but this wasn't the right time to remind me.
'Suppose we let the charge ride,' said Schlegel.
I pretended to search my pockets for matches. Dawlish sighed and lit it for me. I smiled up at.him.
'Suppose?' said Schlegel, to be sure I was paying attention.
'Yes, suppose,' I said. He need not have worried; I hadn't paid such dose attention to the spoken word since the day I got married.
Dawlish said, 'You're here, accused of the murder of the Page girl...'
Schlegel said, 'You break bail. You go to France, and ask Champion for a job with his organization. What do you think?'
'You know there's no bail on a murder charge,' I said. 'What are you two setting me up for?'
'No, well, break out of custody, then,' amended Schlegel.
'He's been seeing too many Began movies,' I told Dawlish.
'Well?' said Schlegel.
'It would have to make better sense to Champion,' I said. If a murder charge was brought against me, and then dismissed on some technicality-he'd see the hand of the department in that. Then if the department puts me out to grass... That might sound right to him.'
'Well, that fits in with what we know/ said Dawlish, and I realized too late that the two of them had deliberately led me into the planning of their crackpot idea. Dawlish hurried on, 'Champion has a contact with a contact with a contact-you know what I mean. He'd know what was happening to you if you were in Wormwood Scrubs sometime in the next two months.'
Obviously that meant a remand prisoner. 'Just don't ask me to plead guilty,' I said.
'No, no, no,' said Dawlish. The history of the department was littered with the corpses of men who had been persuaded to plead guilty, with the promise of a quiet trial and a release on 'unsound mind' clauses. 'No, no. You'll plead not guilty.'
'And none of those dumb little creeps from the legal department,' I said. 'You manufacture the flaw in the charge but I'll find some crooked lawyer who will discover it and think it was him.'
'Agreed,' said Schlegel.
'I'll go through the motions,' I said. 'But don't rely on it. Champion is a shrewdie: he'll compromise. He'll find me some bloody job with his potato farm in Morocco, and sit back and laugh his head off.'
'We don't think so,' said Dawlish. 'We've been through the reports he sent to London, in the war. He had a high opinion of your judgment then, and he probably still has it. He could use someone like you right now. He's under pressure to increase the Intelligence flow back to Cairo, or so we think.'
Schlegel said, 'But you see why we're worried about the Baroni woman. If this was all a set-up... if she was working with Champion. If you read the entrails wrong-then...'He ran a forefinger across his throat. There will be some corner of a foreign field...'
'I didn't know you were interested in poetry, Colonel,' I said.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS not the first time that I'd been in Wormwood Scrubs prison. In 1939, at the outbreak of war, the prisoners had been evacuated and the prison building housed Military Intelligence personnel. A few coats of paint and improvements to the plumbing had not changed the place very much. There was still the faint odour of urine that reached every cell and office. And there was still the resonance that made every sound vibrate and echo, so that at night I was kept awake by the coughing of some prisoner on the upstairs floor. And there was still the same strangled silence: a thousand throats waiting to scream in unison.
'And no reason why you shouldn't have toiletries-decent soap, after-shave and bath lotion-and your own pyjamas and a dressing-gown...' He looked round my cell as if he'd never seen inside one before.
'You're not defending some East-End ponce,' I said quietly. 'You work on my defence. Let me worry about the deodorants.'
'Just so, just so,' he said. Michael Moncrieff, he called himself, a name just as artificial as 'Michael the Mouth', by which he was known to his gangland clients. Men like him fight their way out of the gutters of every slum in Europe. He was a tall man with broad muscular shoulders, and a face pock-marked and scarred. And yet time had softened those marks, and now his thick white hair and wrinkled face could easily persuade you that he was the genial country lawyer that perhaps he'd liked to have been.
He reached into the waistcoat pocket of his expensive bird's-eye suit and found a gold pocket-watch. He looked at it for long enough to let me know that he was annoyed with me, but not so long that he might be deprived of the rest of the fee I'd promised him.
With some effort, he managed a smile. 'I've been going over the notes I've made. On both my last visits you said something that interested me very much.'
I yawned and nodded.
He said, 'It could just be that our friends have botched up their case even before it comes to trial.'
'Yes?'
'No promises, mind. Lots of legal work yet. I'll have to see a couple of people in Lincoln's Inn-and that will cost you a monkey...'
He waited until I nodded my assent to another five hundred pounds.
'I hope you don't think...' he said.
'Never mind the amour propre,' I said. 'You get your friends working on the legal double-talk. Right?'
'Not friends-colleagues. No fee-splitting, if that's what you're hinting at.'
'You get them working on it, and come back in the morning to tell me what they say.' I got up from the table and walked across to the bedside cabinet for my cigarettes.
'Probably take me two or three days to get a meeting-these chaps are the top people...'
'What am I?' I said. 'Bottom people?' I leaned over him to take his gold lighter. I used it, and tossed it back on to the table in front of him.
He didn't look round at me. He got out a red foulard handkerchief and made a lot of noise blowing his nose. He was still dabbing at it when he spoke again. 'You sit in here and get broody,' he accused me. 'You think I'm sitting on my arse all day. You think I take your money and then don't give a damn.'
'Is it your legal training that makes you so perceptive?' I said. 'Or have you got second sight?
'I work bloody hard,' he said. 'Worrying about people who if they had anything between the ears wouldn't be in here in the first pla
ce.' He sat down and fingered some papers on the table. 'Not you, I don't mean you, but some of them... Look, it will take me a few days to set up this meeting. Now, be patient, just trust me.'
I lit my cigarette. From behind him I leaned down and whispered softly, very close to his ear. 'Do you know what it's like in this lousy nick, waiting while some overfed mouthpiece spares time to earn the bread he's taken in advance?'
'I know, I know,' he said.
'I'm in here for topping this bird, Michael, old pal. I mean, I've got nothing to lose. You know what I mean: nothing to lose, except wonderful friendships.'
'Now, cut that out,' he said, but I'd shaken him. I saw his hands tremble as he put his typed notes back into the pigskin document case. 'I'll see them this afternoon, if I can. But it might not be possible.'
'I've got every confidence in you, Michael. You won't disappoint me.'
'I hope not,' he said, and again managed a smile.
Stupid bastard, I thought. Three Q.C.s from the Public Prosecutor's department worked a holiday weekend to build mistakes into that paperwork. By now, any prison-visitor with Everyman's Guide to the Law could have sprung me in ten minutes, but this schnorrer needed ten days, and two consultants, and he was still only nibbling the edges.
'I don't like the way they are treating you in here,' he said.
'Oh?'
'No association, no sport, no TV, no educationals, and your visits all closed. It's not right. I've complained about it.'
'I'm violent,' I told him.
'That's what they always say, but you're getting your forty-five minutes' exercise, aren't you? You're entitled to that.'
'I threatened a warder,' I told him. 'So they stopped it.'
He looked at me, and shook his head. 'You behave like you prefer it inside,' he said.
I smiled at
After he'd gone, I settled down with Inside the Third Reich, but it was not easy to concentrate. As a remand prisoner I'd been given a quiet landing, but there was always the clickety-clack of the peep-hole. As the screw passed, I'd hear his footsteps slow and then there was a moment or so as he watched me, to be sure I wasn't doing any of the forbidden things. It was the same when there was a visit. The peep-hole slammed shut and there was a jangle of keys and the clatter of the door-lock.
'Visitor! Stand up!'
It was Schlegel, complete with document case and a supply of cigarettes. I sat down again. Schlegel remained standing until we both heard the warder move away from the door.
'Stir-crazy yet?' Schlegel asked. 'They say the first ten years is the worst.'
I didn't answer. He went across to the wall cupboard, opened it, pushed my shaving brush and soap aside, and threw the cigarette packets well to the back of the second shelf 'We'd better keep them out of sight,' he explained. He closed the cupboard door, and reached into his pocket to find his ivory cigarette holder. He blew through it noisily.
'And don't smoke,' I said. He nodded.
'Anything happened in here? Champion is in London, that we know! Anything happened here inside?' He smiled.
'Not a thing,' I told him.
'You got the butter, and the tea and stuff? Dawlish said it wouldn't be exactly what you had in mind, but we figured that a parcel from Harrods might be a bit too conspicuous.'
'Can't leave it alone, can you, Schlegel,' I said. 'Just couldn't resist coming in to take a look, eh?'
He said nothing. He put his cigarette holder back into his top pocket. A passing warder rattled his keys against the metal railings, making a sudden loud noise, like a football rattle. Schlegel was startled.
I whispered, 'Schlegel, come here.' He sat down opposite me and bent his head forward to hear better. I said, 'If you, or any of your minions, come here again, spy on me, pass me notes, send me parcels, ask for special privileges for me, ask me or even furrow your brow when my name is mentioned, I'll consider it a very, very unfriendly act I not only will screw up your goddamned Champion project but I will wreak physical vengeance upon all concerned...'
'Now, wait just one minute...'
'You button up your Aquascutum raincoat, Colonel, and rap on that door. You get out of here in a hurry, before I cut you into pieces small enough to squeeze through the peep-hole. And you stay away-a long, long way from me, until I make a contact-and you make sure there are no misunderstandings, because I'm a very nervous man. Remember that, very nervous.' ¯
Schlegel got to his feet and went to the door. He was about to rap on the door to call the warder, but he stopped, his fist in midair. 'Did you hear the ruckus this morning?'
'No.'
'Twelve prisoners coming back from their meal. Staged a sit-down in the offices. Threw a scare into the clerks, threw a typewriter into the yard and tore the locks off the filing cabinets: all good clean fun.'
'And?'
'It was all over in an hour or two. No sweat. They threatened to stop their TV, or cut back on the smokes, or something,' He thumped the door. 'High spirits, I guess. Don't worry, we had all the exits covered, pal.'
If he was expecting some significant reaction from me, he was disappointed. I shrugged. Schlegel rapped on the door. Within a minute the door was unlocked. He tipped his hat to me, and left It was only after he'd gone that the penny dropped. Why a sit-in, and why would they break the locks off the filing cabinets, except that they wanted to read the files. There was a dossier for each of the prisoners in that office. It might simply be high spirits; or it might be an indication of how far someone was prepared to go to get a look at my prison documents.
* * * I stayed in London after my release.
For the first few nights, I slept at Waterloo Station. The first night, I used the waiting-room, but the railway police come round asking to see rail tickets. Out on the concourse, it's cold. The regulars steal the unsold newspapers and line the slatted benches to stop the draughts, but you have to be tough, or very tired, to get much rest there.
By the third night I'd learned a thing or two. An old man they called 'the Bishop', who had arrived on foot from Winchester told me how to choose the trains. The heat comes from the front, so the residual warmth lasts longer at that end. The Bishop preferred dirty trains, because in those he'd be discovered by cleaners instead of by some railway cop who might turn him in. It was the Bishop who told me always to pretend to any inquisitive policeman that my wife had locked me out. His filthy raincoat tied with string, his broken boots and bundle of belongings, gave him no chance to try that story himself. But I used it three or four times and it worked like a charm. But now my shirt was dirty, and the sort of hasty shave I was able to have in the gent's toilet was stretching the errant-husband story thin.
It was the Bishop who found me a billet on Friday night. There were three of us. We got on to platform four, where the Guildford train was about to leave, and then slipped round behind the buffers to a darkened train that would not go until morning. It was the Bishop who had the square-sectioned key that opens the guard's-van doors. The Bishop settled into the narrow pew from which the periscope gives a view along the train top, while I kipped with Fuller, wedged behind some freight. Fuller was a hatchet-faced thirty-year-old. He wore a battered leather coat and a red-and-white woolly hat. He was a sociology graduate from Sussex University who 'weaseled' luggage for the boat-train passengers and was not above stealing the occasional camera or transistor radio. Such items went on sale in The Cut street-market, not thirty yards away, while the owner was still searching the taxi line to locate the Veil-spoken porter' and trying to remember when he last renewed the insurance.
'It's my back,' explained the Bishop. 'Sleeping on the floor plays merry hell with my back.'
'Spare us the details,' said Fuller. 'We know all about the state of your health.'
'You'll be old yourself someday,' said the Bishop..
'You need a bit of exercise,' said Fuller, 'that's what you need. You come and help me with that boat-train tomorrow. It'll be a good one, they say.'
'I wish I
could, but I'd do myself an injury,' said the Bishop. He wriggled into the upholstered seat and searched inside his hat He kept everything in there: paper money, cigarette stubs, string and matches. Finally he found the matches he wanted. Then he searched through his pockets until he found a tin. It was dented and all vestiges of advertising lettering had long since been polished away. Now it shone like silver, and from inside it he took a cigarette-rolling machine. 'Exercise is no good to anybody,' said the Bishop. 'Who lives to be a hundred? These fellers you see jogging down the road in a track suit at night, or those old cows with their poodles and their chauffeurs and their afternoon naps? You answer me that'
'Trust you to rationalize it out,' said Fuller, but he found no easy answer to the old man's contention.