by Jessica Mann
NO MAN’S ISLAND
Jessica Mann
© Jessica Mann 1983
Jessica Mann has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1983.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 1
When the explosion came, the girl’s neck cracked straight across. Tamara Hoyland, who had been expecting it for minutes, was under the table with her unspilled drink still in her hand by the time the fragments of glass from the pub mirror finished falling beside her. Sherds of blue from the girl’s dress, of yellow from her flowing hair, and green from the water-lilies tinkled to the floor. The mirror had been ninety years old. Nothing else in the Rose and Crown’s saloon bar actually broke, except for some glasses stacked beside the sink, but the whole building seemed to rock. The publican said, “It’s like the bloody blitz.”
The only other customer went to the door and admitted a cloud of dust and rain.
“The whole terrace is going,” he said.
“That’ll save the bulldozers a job.”
The street had been cleared for redevelopment, and in the last few weeks even the squatters had left for better accommodation. Mike, Rory, and Tamara had shared their rooms with spiders and rodents.
Tamara had left Mike and Rory in what they called their pad. The men were disentangling sticky tape, their backs to Tamara, while she made her adjustments to the timing device. When they turned round, she was crouched on the mattress again, looking martyred.
“Worse?” Mike asked with some sympathy. But Rory was irritated.
“You ought to get that stomach of yours seen to,” he growled.
Mike said, “Go and get yourself a drink. There’s time.” He knew that she could not touch their whisky. Tamara put her coat on slowly, wincing.
“I shan’t be long,” she said and gave Mike a Judas kiss.
Her instructions were to get well away, out of the district, but she wanted to be on the spot. She ordered brandy, and needed it, but was too tense to feel its benefit. If she had twisted that dial too far, the police would already be in the house when the bomb went off. And they would be as unprepared as Mike and Rory.
The yearning maiden’s eyes were soulfully, perpetually turned towards the row of bottles upside-down above their polished measures. Above them, the hands of the clock jerked. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven—and the end of the maiden’s long contemplation.
When the dust settled, Tamara joined the publican and his other customer at the door. They all knew better than to go nearer the ruins.
“There may be more to come,” the publican said.
The street lights were all smashed. Nothing was left of the houses but rubble and dust. Tamara had not been sure how strong the bomb’s explosive charge would be nor how fragile its surroundings. Mike and Rory’s planned target had been smaller, but probably tougher.
The sirens of official vehicles approached, and a crowd was assembling, but nobody was keen to come very close.
“All condemned anyway,” a woman said, and another remarked that nobody had been living there for weeks.
“I’d better be getting home,” Tamara said. The publican patted her on the back and advised hot-water bottles and sweet tea.
“Clinical shock,” he told her knowingly. “I saw a lot of it during the war.”
Tamara slipped through the crowd and along to the main road, where nobody was taking much notice of the noise or of the fire-engines and police cars speeding by. Londoners were getting used to big bangs again.
Mike and Rory must have been killed instantly. Tamara wondered, as so often before, whether it had been as quick for Ian. She felt no sympathy, neither for Mike with whom she had lived and slept, nor for Rory, who had disliked but trusted her. She felt no guilt. She was unsullied by the necessities of revenge; on the contrary, she felt cleansed by violence. If she had possessed a sword, she would have marked two notches on its blade.
Tamara took a taxi home to the other side of town. She lived on the attic floor of a house in South Kensington. After her long absence, piles of letters were waiting on the mat, but her family and friends had been told that she was away on an excavation.
She switched on the water-heater, looking forward to her first bath in weeks, and took a fish pie from the freezer. Mike and Rory had insisted on meat for every meal. She had left a wood fire laid in the grate before leaving home weeks before, and she put a match to it before going across to draw the curtains. She stood for a moment looking out at the clean and peaceful street, all bright stucco, wrought-iron balconies, and trailing plants. One of her neighbours was walking his dog around the block before bed, and some cats were quarrelling in the communal gardens. Outside the front door of the Cabinet Minister in the next house, the police constable reassuringly stood.
Ian had died to preserve all this. But now his killers’ colleagues had joined him.
The next morning Tamara went to work. Her office was in Savile Row, in a building that housed several Civil Service departments, including the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments, for which Tamara worked. The drivers who overtook her bicycle whistled at the snub-nosed, yellow-haired girl with the brief-case in her carrier, and when she passed them again in traffic jams she waved back. The streets sparkled after the previous night’s rain. Solid houses exuded security, thick-leaved parks invited relaxation. This did not look like a place where bombers planned terror. Nor did Tamara Hoyland look like what she was: an archaeologist, a civil servant—and a spy.
Chapter 2
Tamara’s success in her first mission in the field was for private recognition only. In Mr. Black’s eyes she had not exactly failed, herself unsuspected and her quarry dead, but things had not worked out according to his plan of arrest and trial. But he admitted forgivingly that the state would be spared considerable expense.
“I sometimes ask myself whether we only bring malefactors to justice to provide a Roman holiday for the newspaper reading public.” He sighed and seemed about to embark on his next theme when his telephone buzzed. Tamara waited with some impatience. On her own desk, two floors down, several corridors along, piles of work awaited her delayed attention.
Tamara could still remember her initial surprise at Mr. Black’s room; it had temporarily distracted her from absorbed grief. For she had read enough thrillers to know what the office of a Secret Service’s middle manager should be like. He should be a distinguished-looking man, perhaps a retired rear-admiral. His work place should be disguised as the branch office of a faintly seedy business, and grey-faced men should come in through the kitchens of a restaurant next door to discuss their dirty tricks.
Tamara had expected only condolences when she had received a note inviting her to call on Mr. M. Black, Works Departme
nt. She was a conventional civil servant at the time, qualified as an archaeologist, and employed to study and record field monuments. She had known something of Ian’s secret work, for he had not been as discreet with her as he should have been, but until he died she had been more amused than convinced by the idea of Mr. Black and the Works Department. In other circumstances the sight of Mr. Black’s room would also have amused her, so redolent as it was of Civil Service anonymity; it could have been duplicated many times in Whitehall, on the South Bank, in any of those office blocks on prime sites in which government departments proliferate. Chipped grey filing cabinets, a square of dingy carpet, and a coat-rack announced the ostensible grade of the room’s occupant, and it was not a high one. Yet Mr. Black’s air of authority was undiminished by the camouflage of his surroundings.
Even with half her mind still at a graveside, Tamara’s attention was easily caught by what Mr. Black had to say. She had not guessed it. Perhaps that was foolish. She was unprepared for the surge of primitive fury that swamped her on hearing that Ian’s death had not been plain bad luck. She knew that he had been an agent. But he had led her to believe that his activities had been intellectual, not physical.
“He died for his country,” Mr. Black affirmed. “When you have grown used to the idea, you will be comforted to know that he did not die from fate’s caprice. That bullet had Ian Barnes’s name on it.”
“But how? How could it have had?”
“He was betrayed,” Mr. Black said.
“By whom?”
“We don’t know. The man with him, another of my people, was injured in the same explosion.”
“Seriously?”
“Enough to incapacitate him for this work, though not for ordinary life. He’s left the service.”
“Doesn’t he know who gave them away?”
“Does it matter? A criminal, a traitor, or a patriot? Whatever they call themselves, they are our enemies.”
It was not patriotism that made Tamara willing to be recruited to the service in Ian’s place.
“Revenge is a quite satisfactory motive,” Mr. Black said primly. “To begin with at least.”
Tamara was surprised that agents should be recruited from within the Civil Service. No more than Mr. Black and his office did it fit the preconceptions she had derived from fiction.
“Where better to recruit, after all?” Mr. Black asked. “In the old days the most ingenious spies came from the universities. But one would not stake much on the loyalty of some of the younger dons now. On the other hand, we still need the brains.”
“But civil servants …” Tamara was in the habit of describing herself as an archaeologist. The title of civil servant seemed to carry with it connotations of interference, incompetence, idleness, and caution.
“You must be half my age, Miss Hoyland; yet you still believe the myths of my youth.”
“Income tax inspectors? Men from the ministry?”
“May have as adventurous imaginations as anyone.”
He was offering her a job; and a chance, perhaps, to avenge Ian Barnes. Or if not that, then a chance to risk a life that since his death seemed worthless.
“I should need to know a good deal more about it,” she said cautiously. Mr. Black told her a good deal more about it, and most of what he offered was no more interesting than any other job. But it would be thought-consuming and would fill in the time no longer earmarked for domestic felicity. It seemed that her employers were obliged to release her for some of her working hours too, if she needed to spend more time on this “good work” than her official leisure periods allowed, just as they would if she were a local councillor or a magistrate. She would benefit, as Mr. Black did, from the anonymity of government employment, her work place open to visitors, her secretary paid on the clerical grades, her extra emoluments tactfully concealed from the finance officer. Mr. Black commuted to work as though he were indeed a principal in the Works Department, and he lived in the confident expectation of receiving the civil servant’s OBE—“Bearing in mind,” he said, “that the expression ‘other buggers’ efforts’ will be particularly appropriate.”
“Are there people doing this work all over the building?” Tamara asked.
“They are scattered throughout the Civil Service.”
“Do they recognize each other? Is there a kind of secret handshake?”
“I, and my secretary Mrs. Uglow, and your own boss, who has signed the Official Secrets Act, will be the only repositories of your secret. Even my masters seldom know the identity of those whose information they use or whose gallantries they honour.”
“With medals?”
“In cash. Ian Barnes’s family will have been told that he took out insurance on special Civil Service terms.”
“You’ll do the same for me if I’m shot, will you?”
“You should not overdramatize. Very few of my young people encounter any danger. Their work is less exciting than it seems in fiction. In your case, it is the archaeologist’s expertise in sifting and evaluating evidence that will be especially useful.”
Tamara was to receive training of a physical kind all the same. Mr. Black had an open file before him, and Tamara was disconcerted to realize that he knew all about her. Who would have asked sly questions of whom? Casual enquirers must have gone to her school in Devon, to the sports centre where she had learned gym and judo, to the tennis club on Damden Hill, to the Commonwealth Swimming Pool in Edinburgh where Tamara had swum as an undergraduate, to the Cambridge University Boat Club where she had rowed when she was a post-graduate student there. Tamara experienced the superstitious fear that a tribesman might feel on hearing his secret name, the name in which his soul resided, the knowledge of which gave power to his enemy.
In the following weeks and months Tamara’s friends thought that she was attending a civil servants’ health club, sweating out her sad preoccupations. But in a basement below the gym, swimming pool, and solarium, she was prepared for what the instructor called “a spot of turbulence.”
Tamara was good at shooting, having begun on rabbits in her childhood, but was useless at aiming a throw. “No grenades for you, miss,” the instructor said, marking her card with the lowest grade. She learned to defend herself with weapons and without, to construct a variety of sinister devices, and to disarm those made by others; she learned how to use innocent substances in ways their manufacturers did not intend and to be suspicious of signs that others might have done so; she learned how to attack as well as defend; and she developed a memory already trained in the precise recollection of archaeological detail. At the end of a winter she was qualified to set herself up as an assassin or a private eye, and when she went home to her parents in Devonshire for a wet March week-end, they congratulated themselves—too tactful to congratulate her—on what seemed a remarkable recovery. Tamara’s father was a solicitor who had little time for psychological mishmash and took her improvement in looks and health with matter-of-fact approval. Her mother wondered how she was sublimating her grief. Mr. Hoyland stroked her shining hair, and Mrs. Hoyland admired its style. But Alexandra Hoyland kept to herself the thought that Tamara wore the familiar expression of a younger sister planning mischief.
Mischief? Or a public service?
Her first mission completed, Tamara could argue a case for its being neither or both. She wondered whether Mr. Black had realized how whole-heartedly she would throw herself into the Mike-and-Rory assignment. Had he perhaps saved them up for her, knowing that her wits would be sharpened by personal motivation? Or was it merely a chance that was lucky for her?
And now it seemed her qualifications were lucky. She was to start out again at once. Her protests about in-trays were waved aside. Her director accepted that she must go to Forway. She was, ostensibly, to start the survey of its antiquities—a useful archaeological task that was at the same time the best possible cover story.
“Cover story? For Forway?”
“Didn’t you mention that you had be
en there with Ian Barnes?”
Tamara knew that she had not mentioned it; and knew equally well that Mr. Black knew all about it. Was there anything about her or Ian that he did not have in his file?
Ian had taken her home to Forway just once. It was the only time that their leaves coincided in the three years they had spent together. She had found the island frightening and claustrophobic. But Ian loved it. He went back whenever he could.
“I don’t want to go there again,” Tamara said. “I won’t.”
Mr. Black said, “You have the excuse of your survey work; and Ian’s family and friends will talk to you. You are just right for the job.”
“On Forway, for heaven’s sake? What job?”
Mr. Black passed Tamara a sheet of photocopied paper. The quality of print was poor, but the words were legible. It was the announcement of Forway’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
“This is a joke, isn’t it?” Tamara said. “I mean, you can’t be taking this seriously. I don’t believe it. Forway’s the remotest inhabited island in Europe. It’s only got a handful of people living there. This is a practical joke.”
Mr. Black admitted that he was inclined to agree, but it was the kind of joke that could turn sick or sour. “You go and see what’s going on. It’ll be like a holiday for you. After your hard time in the slums with those bombers.”
“I can’t go and spy on Ian’s mother.”
“You can. You will. Honour is dead. British officers shoot their enemies in the back. This is the twentieth century. You go and gather some information. Let’s call it a watching brief.”
Chapter 3
Tamara managed to catch the afternoon train. It was very full, and she had little space to arrange the papers she needed to study before arriving on Forway in the guise of a specialist in its antiquities. The conversations around her seemed more interesting. It was always amusing that people travelled together as though they were in some kind of limbo where nobody would recognize the names or be interested in the details they described.