by John Lawton
“You have ten minutes, Colonel Horsfield. You fail to meet me in the Penguin Café in Kingly Street, this goes to your wife.”
He was impressed by his own timing. The Polariod shot out of the bottom of the camera just as he said “wife.”
HG was staring at him glassy-eyed. Judy grabbed her clothes and ran past him hell-for-leather. Still, HG stared. Perhaps he was too drunk to understand what was happening.
“You have ten minutes, Colonel. Penguin Café, Kingly Street. Das vidanye.”
He’d no idea why he’d thrown in the “das vidanye”—perhaps a desperate urge to sound more Russian.
HG said, “I’ll be there . . . you commie fucking bastard. I’ll be there.”
Much to George’s alarm, he got up from the bed, seemingly less drunk, bollock-naked, stiff cock swaying in its frenchie, and came toward him.
George fled. It was what Donna had told him to do.
Down in the street, George arrived just in time to see Judy pulling on her stilettos and heading off toward Beak Street. Donna took the Polaroid from him, waved it in the air, and looked for the image.
“Gottim,” she said.
George looked at his watch. Didn’t dare to raise his voice much above a whisper.
“I must hurry. I have to meet Boris.”
“No. No, you don’t. You leave Boris to me.”
This wasn’t part of the plan. This had never been mentioned.
“What?”
“Go back to the party.”
“I don’t . . . ”
“Find your mates. They must be in a club somewhere near. You know the pattern: booze, booze, strippers. Find ’em. Ditch the wig. Ditch the camera. Go back and make yourself seen.”
She kissed him.
“And don’t go down Berwick Street.”
DONNA STOOD AWHILE on the next corner, watched as HG emerged and saw him rumble off in the direction of Kingly Street. Then she went the other way, toward Berwick Street, and stood behind one of the market stalls that were scattered along the right-hand side.
She could see Boris. He was reading a newspaper, letting his coffee go cold and occasionally glancing at his watch. He was almost taking George’s arrival for granted, but not quite.
She was reassured when he finally gave up and stood a moment on the pavement outside the caff, looking up at the stars and muttering something Russian. Really, he wasn’t any taller than George, just a bit bigger in the chest and shoulders. What with the wig and flashbulb going off, all HG was likely to say was “some big bugger, sort of darkish, in a dark suit, didn’t really get a good look I’m afraid.”
That was old Boris, a big, dark bugger in a dark suit.
Her only worry was that if Boris flagged a cab and there wasn’t one close behind, she’d lose him. But it was a warm summer evening: Boris had decided to walk. He set off westward, in the direction of the Soviet embassy. Perhaps he needed to think. Was he going to shop George for one no-show or was he going to roll with it, string it and George out in the hope of keeping the stream of information flowing?
Boris crossed Regent Street into Mayfair and headed south toward Piccadilly. He seemed to be in no hurry and paid no attention to cabs or buses. Indeed, he seemed to pay no attention to anything, as though he was deep in thought.
She matched her pace to his, trying to stay in shadow, but Boris never looked back. In Shepherd Market he turned into one of those tiny alleys that dot the northern side of Piccadilly, and she quickened her step to get to the corner.
The light vanished. A hand grabbed her by the jacket and pulled her into the alley. The other hand pulled off her wig, and Boris’s voice said, “Don’t take me for a fockin’ fool. Horsfield doesn’t show and then you appear in a silly wig, trailing after me like a third-rate gumshoe. What the fock are you playing at?”
It was better than she’d dared hope for. She’d been foxed all along to work out how to get him alone, this close, in a dark alley. And now he’d done it for her.
She pressed her gun to his heart and shot him dead.
Then she leaned down, tucked the Polaroid into his inside pocket, put her wig back on, walked down to Piccadilly and caught a number 38 bus home.
THE FIRST GEORGE heard was from Daft Elsie, pushing her trolley round just after eleven the next morning.
“Can’t get on the fourth floor. Buggers won’t let me. Some sort of argy-bargy going on. I ask yer. Spooks and spies. Gotta be a load of old bollocks, ain’t it?”
“Two sugars, please,” said George.
“And I got these ’ere jam don’uts special for that Colonel ’Orsepiddle. ’Ere, love, you have one.”
“So,” he tried to sound casual, “it all revolves around the good colonel, does it?”
“Let’s put it this way, love. ’E’s doin’ a lot of shoutin’. An’ it’s not as if he whispers at the best of times.”
So—HG wasn’t so much blowing the whistle as shouting the odds.
After lunch Ted dropped in, dropped the latest, not-yet-late-final-but-almost edition of the London Evening Standard onto his desk.
George pulled it toward him.
Soviet Embassy Attaché Shot Dead in Mayfair.
George said nothing.
Ted said, “Could be an interesting few weeks. Russkies play hell. Possibly bump off one of ours. A few expulsions, followed by retaliatory expulsions. . . . God I’d hate to be in Moscow right now.”
“What makes you think we did it? I mean, do we shoot foreign agents in the street?”
“Not as a rule. But boldness was our friend. I gather from a mate at Scotland Yard that they’re clueless. No one saw or heard a damn thing. Anyway . . . change the subject . . . what was up with you last night? Throwing up in the bogs for an hour. Not like you, old son.”
“Change it back—does this have anything to do with the hoo-ha going on on the fourth floor?”
“Well, let me put it this way. Be a striking bloody coincidence if it didn’t.”
IT BECAME RECEIVED wisdom in the office that the Russians had tried to set up HG and that he would have none of it. Less received, but much bandied, was the theory that rather than keep the meeting with the man attempting blackmail, HG had simply rung MI5, who had bumped off the unfortunate Russki on his way across Mayfair. That one Boris Alexandrovich Bulganov was found dead within a few yards of MI5 HQ in Curzon Street added to veracity, as did a rumor that he’d had a photograph of HG in bed with a prozzie in his pocket. Some wag pinned a notice to the canteen message board offering ten pounds for a copy but found no takers.
Ted was profound upon the matter, “Always knew he’d end up in trouble if he let his dick do the thinking for him.”
It became, almost at once, a diplomatic incident. Nothing on the scale of Profumo or the U2 spy plane, but the Russians accused the British of assassinating Boris, whom they described as a “cultural attaché.” The British accused the Russians of attempting to blackmail HG Horsfield, whose name never graced the newspapers—merely “unnamed high-ranking British officer”—and George could only conclude that neither one had put the dates together and worked out that they had been blackmailing an HG Horsfield for some time, but not the HG Horsfield. If they’d swapped information, George would have been sunk. But, of course, they’d never do that.
HG’s “reward” was to be made a full colonel and posted to the Bahamas. Anywhere out of the way. Why the Bahamas might need a tactical nuclear weapons expert was neither here nor there nor anywhere.
George never heard from the Russians again. He expected to. Every day for six months he expected to. But he didn’t.
SIX MONTHS ON, Boris’s death was eclipsed.
George arrived home in West Byfleet to find an ambulance and a crowd of neighbors outside his house.
Mrs. Wallace, wife of Jack Wallace, lieutenant in REME—George thought her name might be Betty—came up oozing an alarming mixture of tears and sympathy.
“Oh, Captain Horsfield . . . I don’t know what to
. . . ”
George pushed past her to the ambulance men. A covered stretcher was already in the back of the ambulance and he knew the worst at once.
“How?” he asked simply.
“She took a tumble, sir. Top o’the stairs to the bottom. Broken neck. Never knew what hit her.”
George spent an evening alone with a bottle of scotch, ignoring the ringing phone. He hadn’t loved Sylvia. He had never loved Sylvia. He had been fond of her. She was too young, a rotten age to go . . . and then he realized he didn’t actually know how old Sylvia was. He might find out only when they chipped it on her tombstone.
Grief was nothing—guilt was everything.
Decorum ruled.
He did not go to Henrietta Street for the best part of a month. He wrote to Donna, much as he wrote to many of his friends, knowing that the done thing was the notice in The Times, but that few of his friends read The Times and that the Daily Mail didn’t bother with a deaths column.
When he did go to Henrietta Street, he cut through Covent Garden, fifty yards to the north, and bought a bouquet of flowers.
“You never brought me flowers before.”
“I’ve never asked you to marry me before.”
“Wot? Marriage? Me an’ you?”
“I can’t think that ‘marry me’ would imply anything else.”
And having read the odd bit of Shakespeare in the interim, George quoted an approximation of Hamlet on the matter of baked meats, funerals, and wedding feasts.
“Sometimes, Georgie, I can’t understand a word you say.”
She was hesitant. The last thing he had wanted, though he had troubled himself to imagine it. She said she’d “just put the kettle on,” and then she seemed to perch on the edge of the sofa without a muscle in her body relaxing.
“What’s the matter?”
“If . . . if we was to get married . . . what would we do? I mean we carried on . . . once we got shot of the Russians, we just carried on . . . as normal. Only there weren’t no normal.”
George knew exactly what she meant, but said nothing.
“I mean . . . oh . . . bloody nora . . . I don’t know what I mean.”
“You mean that serving army officers don’t marry prostitutes.”
“Yeah . . . something like that.”
“I have thought of leaving the army. There are opportunities in supply management, and the army is one of the best references a chap could have.”
The kettle whistled. She turned it off but made no move toward making tea.
“Where would we live?”
“Anywhere. Where are you from?”
“Colchester.”
Colchester was the biggest military prison in the country—the glasshouse, England’s Leavenworth. Considered the worst posting a man could get. He’d never shake off the feel of the army in Colchester.
“Okay. Well . . . perhaps not Colchester . . . ”
“I always wanted to live up north.”
“What? Manchester? Leeds?”
“Nah . . . ’ Ampstead. I’d never want to leave London . . . ’specially now it’s started to . . . wotchercallit? . . . swing.”
“Hampstead won’t be cheap.”
“I saved over three thousand quid from the game.”
“I have about a thousand in savings, and I inherited more from Sylvia. In fact about seven and a half thousand pounds. Not inconsiderable.”
Not inconsiderable—a lifetime of saving roughly equivalent to a couple of years on “the game.”
“And of course, I’ll get a pension. I’ve done sixteen years and a bit. I’ll get part of a pension now, more if I leave it, and at thirty-five I’m young enough to put twenty or more years into another career.”
“And there’s the money in the bottom of the wardrobe.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“I counted it. Just the other day I counted it. We got seventeen hundred and thirty-two pounds. O’course there been expenses.”
Donna was skirting the edge of a taboo subject. George was in two minds as to whether to let her plunge in. Who knows? It might clear the air.
“I give Judy two hundred. And there was money for the room . . . an ’at.”
George bit, appropriately, on the bullet.
“And how much did the gun cost you?”
There was a very long pause.
“Did you always know?”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t come cheap. Fifty quid.”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Marry without secrets.
George cleared his throat.
“And of course, there’s the cost of your return ticket to West Byfleet last month, isn’t there?”
He could see her go rigid, a ramrod to her spine, a crab-claw grip to her fingers on the arm of the sofa.
He hoped she’d speak first, but after an age it seemed to him she might never speak again.
“I don’t care,” he said softly. “Really I don’t.”
She would not look at him.
“Donna. Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll marry me.”
Donna said nothing.
George got up and made tea, hoping he would be making tea for two for the rest of their lives.