by Joseph Hone
“You mean he’s left—for good,” I said flatly, playing as limp a hand as possible since I’d no intention of making things worse for Henry by being helpful. None the less McCoy perked up a little as if I’d presented him with a vital clue to the mystery.
“Yes, that’s one way of putting it. Nothing good about it though.”
“Anyway, why should I know about his leaving? I’m just a friend of his. I’m not his operator.”
“You were the last person to see him apparently. He came to your office the day before—well, sometime before he left. Perhaps he told you something and perhaps—” he paused like a ham actor settling into a role—“perhaps you might tell me. There’ll be an enquiry. It might help if you spoke to me about it first. It looks as if this may be something on the Blake scale all over again. You may want to sort your ideas out beforehand. I shall want a full report from you anyhow.”
McCoy paused after each sentence, like counsel bullying a witness with inessentials before slipping in a loaded question—looking at me each time for a response I didn’t give.
What with the disappearances, deaths and defections over the years—and the odd person who had genuinely retired—the ranks in our Middle East section had thinned dramatically by the spring of 1967. We were a few survivors, still snooping around by hand as it were—planning cunning sorties along dark alleyways in Cairo and through hotel bedrooms in Beirut only to find when we got there that the lights had gone on again all over the Middle East; that whatever bird it was we’d had in mind was flown or dead, the blood already congealed by the time we turned the body over. Other powers ruled the area where once we had been the sword of punishment and mercy—and did so with a thorough modern brutality which we couldn’t hope to emulate, much as our superiors would have wished it. We could only work off our energy by keeping up appearances at home, for the sake of the press or a new Minister—or the Americans. And of course everyone sprang to attention and looked like Kitchener whenever someone defected from our section—when one “disappeared” as McCoy put it, as if one had been the victim of some fiendish conjuring trick and we only had to put the squeeze on the magician to get him back. For even after so many tricks McCoy still couldn’t face the fact that one of his men had gone for good. When this had happened before, like the headmaster of some wretched prep school trying to placate a parent, McCoy had always implied in his approach to the enquiry that the laggard would be back in time for chapel.
Still, even if Henry had done something careless it didn’t seem important. He’d always struck me as being too sensible a person ever to want to defect; he was too sure of himself, his pleasures and his friends and the way they all fitted into his London to want to throw it all over, I thought. In our section there wasn’t much left to betray anyway. Blake had pretty well cleared the shop. But perhaps Henry had been involved in some drunken accident, some schoolboy nonsense—as when he’d broken his ankle lunging out at a taxi at a zebra crossing.
“Has he been in some brawl? Have you checked the hospitals? He lived alone you know. And are you sure I was the last to see him? Have you been in touch with any of his other friends?”
McCoy sat there quietly. It was my turn to ask the staccato questions; the chance that Henry had been hurt seemed to me something to worry about. Like a parlour game McCoy let me run through a variety of suggestions. None of them got a response. In the end he smiled.
I knew then that Henry really had disappeared, that there hadn’t been any stupid accident and that in so far as McCoy could manage it there would be a fuss. It was McCoy’s fashion to smile when something really serious occurred—that’s to say when something big enough happened to ensure him a substantial role in the matter.
*
“Where do you think he is then?” Williams said, in his usual violet shirt and polka-dot bow tie. He asked the question with a monumental lack of interest as if Henry himself had simply been late for the meeting. I knew Williams liked these preparatory enquiries with his subordinates even less than McCoy did. He would be at home in the matter only while making his confidential report to the Minister. McCoy sat next to him, feeding him papers every now and then—mechanically, invisibly, like a dumb waiter—and there were several other people from Whitehall in the basement room which had just been repainted so that my eyes were smarting.
“I don’t know. You’ve read my report. I don’t think he’s defected. He could be anywhere—just gone off on a holiday or something. He was like that.”
Williams’s face winced painfully as if he’d been stuck with a pin. His eyes closed and he drew his face back into a hideous grimace—nostrils dilated, his mouth twisted up above his teeth in a colossal sneer. Then he sneezed twice, his whole body surging to and fro across the table uncontrollably.
“Gone on holiday did you say? McCoy—has Edwards simply taken leave?”
“Well—gone somewhere …” I interrupted. I wasn’t really interested. Edwards would turn up and being in the room was torture.
“Exactly. ‘Gone somewhere’, as you say. And that’s why we’re here. To find out. Where.”
McCoy handed him another piece of paper and he was off again, this time in his scolding tone, like a girl let down on a date, and I had the easy feeling of just being a cog in the wheel again.
“As some of you know,” Williams looked at the dry men from Whitehall, “Edwards was our provisional replacement in the Middle East for Everley, who was head of our operation there, and it was his job to re-activate the network: the ‘Cairo-Albert circle’ as we know it. Edwards had the go on all our new contacts, codes and so on—right through the area … Losing Blake was bad enough.” He paused and I thought for a moment that he might be going to echo Wilde’s remark about the carelessness of losing two parents. But the same thought may have occurred to him (Williams had been brought up in all the right places, indeed he had been born somewhere near Goring-in-Thames) and he veered away from what looked like being a catalogue of all the embarrassments which Henry’s sudden departure had caused. We knew of them already in our section—the Whitehall drivers chatting with the receptionists downstairs, Williams arriving an hour earlier in the mornings instead of an hour late; and many of us knew too of Henry’s fresh responsibilities, since we weren’t supposed to know. It’s difficult to keep a secret among men who are already a secret in a building which isn’t supposed to exist; the strain is too much and people start giving away odd things the moment they get inside the doors.
“Well, I don’t have to go into every detail—except to impress upon you all the seriousness of the matter.”
Williams was marking time, I thought, before moving into his final peroration. Nothing would be decided but we’d be out of this frightful room in a minute. McCoy passed him another piece of paper.
I knew then that I’d been wrong in my calculations about the outcome of the meeting, indeed that I’d probably misunderstood its whole purpose—for pinned to the top of the sheet was the ten-piastre note I’d given the barman. Someone, McCoy no doubt, had been hard at work at quite a different angle.
I suppose by my saying nothing of importance about Henry’s disappearance—by inventing nothing—they had detected a certain evasiveness in my attitude towards the whole thing and had decided to check more carefully. I didn’t mind being a temporary scapegoat, that was to be expected, I’d been the last person in the section to see Henry apparently. But it was obvious that Williams was looking for more than that. If Henry really had defected and there was a public scandal when the fact came to light, then Williams wanted a permanent scapegoat, a victim. As had happened so often before when someone had left us—he was followed by his friends. Williams had at last decided to bolt the stable door. I’d been unlucky enough to be caught inside when the music stopped.
“What was Edwards talking to you about when you last saw him?” Williams continued in a livelier tone.
“About Egypt. We were talking about Egypt,” I answered at once in as tired a way as
possible, hoping that my words might slip by unnoticed in the stream of previous banalities. “We taught there together. I was recruited in Cairo, as you know. Just chatter, that’s all. Old gossip.”
But already the others round the table had perked up, noticing the personal level the meeting had dropped to and sensing it might go deeper.
“And this note. Why did you pay your bill in the pub with this Egyptian ten-piastre note?” Williams was fidgeting with the grubby piece of paper, twisting it about with his fingers as if it were counterfeit. “Where did it come from?”
“Henry hadn’t any money with him. So I paid with that instead—a sort of deposit until we came back and settled up. A joke, I suppose. We knew the barman. Henry had given me the note earlier that day, I don’t know why.”
The others round the table were fully roused now, as if my last words clearly hinted at a confession of some terrible truth. And certainly, if they thought, as they seemed to, that a man could be bribed or paid off with the equivalent of a shilling, the business over the note looked incriminating. No one said anything. I felt they were trying to decide which of us had been buying whom: had Edwards been anxious for my silence—or I for the barman’s? Or was the note part of some elaborate code—a signal passed from hand to hand heralding some devious Arab plot?
The tired piece of paper could only arouse their wildest suspicions for they were incapable of seeing in its movements through that day the casual attributes of friendship.
I said, “The whole thing, the money and so on—it was a bit childish really. But I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with his disappearance.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Williams was happier now, as if, in the matter of the note, he’d elicited another vital piece of information and was considering all its implications. Yet suspiciously, I thought, he didn’t go on about it. He said nothing more to pin me down, though with these shocking intimacies I’d surely given him every opportunity. Perhaps he was working on a next incisive, embarrassing question, so I said the first thing that came into my head to stall him, thinking of the note again—the ten piastres which had done as a tip for so many good things in Egypt in the past.
“Perhaps he’s gone back to Egypt. He had a lot of friends there. He liked the country.”
But McCoy had already eased another piece of paper in front of Williams and I didn’t think he heard me. I could see it, the yellow office memo paper we used. It was the frugal report I’d written.
“Why do you think Edwards told you he wanted to leave the section that last evening you saw him?” Williams said, looking at the piece of paper very carefully.
“He didn’t say that. That’s not in my report—”
But I’d been too eager. For the first time I’d flatly contradicted Williams while the sudden urgency in my voice was enough to discredit everything else I’d said as unimportant and suggest that my last response had been a lie. I’d made the oldest mistake—of suggesting murder in an enquiry about a natural death. But no one had noticed. Williams simply looked puzzled.
“I’m sorry. Didn’t McCoy show you his letter? His letter of resignation—it was posted some days after he’d seen you. I thought you knew about it. He says you can explain about why he left, that he told you all about it that evening.”
Williams shoved the paper across the table. The letter had been typed and it looked like Edwards’s scrawled signature at the end; a short note on office paper pinned in front of my report. Of course, it could have been forged.
“I’m sorry to have gone off the subject—about why he left. That’s not so important. What interested me was your saying he’d gone to Egypt. You mean he told you this?—it’s not in his letter.
“On the other hand if he actually told you beforehand he was going back to Egypt that puts it all in a much more certain light. We may gather that he was going back—just to work for them.”
Williams broached this last phrase as if such an exercise in free will were a far more serious matter than being bundled up in a trunk.
“So you see our problem. Either way we shall have to find out what’s happened to him. We can’t wait till he crops up on their side—in Moscow or Cairo or wherever—and makes a fool of us. Like the others.”
There were always the others for Williams—the others who’d left us and lived to tell the tale. Like a tune reminding him of an unsatisfactory affair Williams couldn’t stand a change of heart.
“I’m afraid he’ll have to be stopped.”
McCoy shifted in his chair and the others raised their eyebrows, like a jury in a bad courtroom drama. For what Williams meant in his discreet, Thames Valley manner was that if Edwards had gone back just to work for the Egyptians—or even if he’d simply been kidnapped by them—we’d have to get him. To kill him. When Williams used the word “stop” he always meant “kill”. It was a euphemism which he’d introduced into our section long before, an ideogram for death quite in keeping with the polite, slightly academic reputation our section had.
“One way or another we shall have to be certain about him,” Williams continued, as if concerned about his welfare. “And I’d like you to be responsible for the arrangements.” He detached the ten-piastre note from my report and pushed it across to me. “You’ve not been in Egypt for years. They’ll never connect you with Edwards.”
*
It was no use telling Williams that Edwards’s being in Egypt had just been an idea of mine. Williams didn’t believe in ideas—except his own or his superiors’.
I said, “I’m not going to kill him.”
Williams had two offices, one in our building—sparsely furnished and looking out over the back courtyard and car park—and another, a much smarter one I’d heard, in Whitehall. We were in the grubby one where he managed his routine affairs.
“I didn’t speak of killing him, Marlow. You do dramatize things. You said he had friends in Egypt, that he liked the place. You were there with him—you should know. I’m going on that. It’s only a possibility. For the moment it’s all there is.”
“He has friends in London. He liked it pretty well here too.” I expected Williams to say “We’ve looked”.
“He’s not in London. We’ve looked. He’s taken his passport.”
“Well, even if he is in Egypt and I happen to find him—when you said ‘stop him’ you meant ‘kill him’, didn’t you? That’s what you’ve meant before. I can’t do that—even if it turned out there were very good grounds for doing so. And I can’t see that there are.”
“I should have said ‘find’—that’s what I meant.” Williams, like McCoy, was always having trouble with words—the trouble one has to take to make them suit every eventuality. “You just find him, if he is to be found. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Finding sounds the same as killing him.”
“Why do you harp on about killing him? I never mentioned the word. We simply want to know what’s happened to him. Don’t you? You were a friend of his. If people just disappear—if a member of this section simply vanishes—don’t you think we should make every effort to find out what’s happened to him? Really.” Williams looked at me with pained distaste, as if I’d kicked him in the crotch during a house match. “We’ve no one reliable left in Egypt. I should think it quite fair to say that if Edwards is there, or in any trouble, you’d be as good a person as any to find out. They won’t connect you with him—yet you know the place, you have the language and … connections.”
He must have meant my wife’s family and friends. Her parents were dead now, I’d heard, but Bridget had been half Egyptian. Her mother was English, from Aldershot. It was a connection certainly—one that I didn’t want to renew. “Incompatibility” her mother had afterwards written to me, describing our failure. I suppose the vague legal expression had been a comfort to her—a way of avoiding the real reasons for the disaster, which were quite precise. Could that be a part of Williams’s reason for sending me back there, I wondered?
As a sort of subtle punishment for my having failed in a sexual arrangement so opposed to his own proclivities in that field. Anything was possible with Williams.
“Start in Cairo, I should,” Williams said. “That’s where the gossip is. If he’s anywhere else in the Middle East, they’ll know in Groppi’s.”
Williams shared with so many others in our section the habit of an awkward facetiousness when speaking of something he considered important—as if he didn’t really believe in it but it was an entertaining thought anyway. Certainly I didn’t believe him; the whole idea seemed preposterous, a wild goose chase. Yet for a charade, it was dangerously elaborate. Williams usually stopped his nonsense long before—this, after all, was going to make quite an additional rent in his travel allocation for the year. I didn’t really know whether to believe him or not. One could never completely lend oneself to anything Williams said, or any of us for that matter, even if it were the truth. We had all of us, in the backwater of our section, moved so far away from reality in the hopes of establishing some purposeful, secretive, slightly eccentric personality which would justify the nonsense of our work. And in this attempt we didn’t lie but clung desperately to imagined truths. Which is what we’d done all day. On the face of it Henry had certainly disappeared and we were supposed to be looking for him; yet all we’d done was jockey for position, establish a role for ourselves in the matter, complicate the issue.