There were his colleagues at the School. He could always ring one of them up and arrange to call and collect a loan.
He suddenly realized that he did not intend to go near the School again if he could help it until the Bosun had retired from the struggle. The blatancy of this new campaign was too alarming. The Bosun must obviously have some pretty foolproof plans to plant his men so openly.
And there was only one way to combat such moves. To hide. And from whatever hiding place he chose – it need not be very obscure – to launch out at unexpected moments and pursue his inquiry into the Infiltraitor. After all, the Bosun’s resources were not endless: he could not watch everybody all the time.
Roger leant back and took a long, reflective drink. Surely this was the way out. The Bosun had other fish to fry when all was said and done. He could not stay in Dublin indefinitely. At present he had his Infiltraitor to keep watch for him. But once they had been detected …
Professor O Nuallain was by no means without influence in high places. A man of his immense stature, a world figure, could get things done quickly and quietly. A word in the right place and the Infiltraitor would be out of the country in a couple of hours.
Roger’s easily spurting elation flickered slowly down. He had contrived to thrust out of his mind in these last hours the figure of his dying chief. But now the thought had obtruded in spite of himself.
He sat sombrely amid the noise of the crowded bar until the barmen looked as if they were on the point of calling ‘Time’. Then he joined the rush to get hold of a last drink at the low wall of bottle-ends that constituted the bar.
Another large whiskey.
He downed it in one.
The tangy shot.
And he knew what he would do. He went to the corner where the telephone was kept. He leafed through the book. They were an unexpectedly numerous clan, but at last he found the number he was looking for.
Bloom, Miss Etain, Dublin 42632.
Chapter Thirteen
The big black clouds were scurrying raggedly across the moon. A gusty wind was blowing in from the sea, salty but not cold. Roger crossed the road from the bus stop in accordance with Etain’s instructions. He made his way back along the route he had travelled looking for the entrance to the lane she had said he was to go down.
He found it without difficulty and stepped hesitantly into the thick darkness between the high walls on either side. He took a few slithering steps along the muddy surface of the lane and then halted. He felt round about until his outstretched hand touched the left-hand wall.
Cautiously he stepped towards it and flattened himself against the slimy wet stones. He settled down to wait.
Some way of stopping himself asking why he had come. To avoid at all costs dwelling on the possible consequences of his sudden need for this visit, to a girl he hardly knew. Something to stop himself feeling he was taking an absurd risk while he stood in the darkness waiting.
The advantages of a word-loving mind. The stored memory.
‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’. ‘The Deserted Village’.
Roger strained his ears. The wind buffeted the branches of the big tree over his head and it was difficult to account for all the various sounds of the night.
He decided not to take risks. A couple of minutes more. Something comparatively short. And appropriate. Yeats.
‘Among School Children’.
By now Roger’s eyes were well accustomed to the darkness. He took one final long, careful look round.
No one.
He set off confidently along the lane looking for the white gate off its hinges at the top. It was not difficult to find. He went through the gap and approached the looming house.
Etain’s instructions were clear, except that the bell knob was on the left and not the right. But Etain was unlikely to be very sure about which was which.
Roger pulled the bell. Once. Twice. Three times. Very far away in the deep interior of the house he heard a dim jangling.
Who else was waiting to hear it?
Roger waited.
There was no sign of life. He peered up at the broken cliff of brick above him. The occasional moonlight was reflected from irregularly placed windows, but there seemed to be no sign of any other light.
Good or bad?
He reached forward to pull at the knob again. And as he did so he caught the sound of clicking heels.
He listened. He could hear no accompanying steps of any sort. But the trap would not be sprung outside the house. It would be set in Etain’s flat. If trap there was.
The arch-shaped front door with its seamed and lined paintwork swung open. In the darkness he recognized Etain.
‘I didn’t put on the light,’ she said. ‘You told me you wanted nobody to know you were here.’
Roger detected no sign of nervousness in her voice.
‘It sounds very melodramatic, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘It does. And I’m longing to know what it’s all about. Will I go out into the garden now and pretend I only came down to pick a handful of herbs? I often do that in the late hours, truly.’
‘No, I don’t think that will be necessary. I made sure no one followed me out here.’
But there was no way of making sure that no one waited in the flat.
‘Then I’ll put on the light,’ Etain said. ‘I nearly killed myself two or three times coming down in the pitch black.’
A tiny bulb hanging from the high ceiling of the hall gave out a dull orange glow. It revealed an interior constructed with distinct reference to its previous ecclesiastical function as a rectory. The walls were covered for half their height with panels of shiny pinewood and the banisters of the big flight of imposing stairs were of the same material. Each newel post bore a large knob carved in the form of a mitre.
The windows, which showed blackly in the dim orangeish light, were in the shape of sharply pointed arches with leaded lights and rims of pale coloured stained glass. On the blank wall opposite the front door there was a small stone platform suitable for the statue of a saint.
Roger looked up at the little orange bulb. Had it been switched on as a signal? Did it mean: he is alone, be ready?
‘I live right at the top,’ Etain said. ‘It’s rather a long trend, I’m afraid, but at least the rooms are reasonably small when you get there. Down here they’re enormous.’
Roger followed her up the shiny pinewood stairs. She was wearing a light sage green woollen dress and her hair, no longer in its ineffective chignon, fell in a blonde mass on to her shoulders.
The stairs from the second floor to the third were narrower and strictly secular.
Roger looked at them. Would he get a chance even to come tumbling down them in front of the Bosun’s men?
‘Servants’ quarters,’ Etain said. ‘They make a nice little flat.’
At the top a Yale lock had been put into the door across the head of the stairs. Etain pushed and the door swung open.
‘I leave it on the snub,’ she said. ‘I’m always forgetting my key.’
Was there some significance in that?
Etain went in. Roger took a deep breath and followed. He closed the door behind him.
Nothing happened.
Little Collins and the tall black-coated man he had seen outside his flat did not pounce.
Roger stood for a moment at the door of the little sitting-room. It was obvious that Etain was the only person in it. The room looked cosy and inviting. A bright fire burnt in the narrow grate of the painted iron mantelpiece. Although basically the room was rather forbidding with its narrow walls papered in a bilious yellow colour and its single window of puritanical straightness, the cheerful little fire made it entirely welcoming. By its light the gay scattering of Etain’s additions to the decoration looked more than transient. A collection of glass animals above the fireplace, lilac gingham curtains frilled round the window, little cushions peppering the two big old armchairs, a doll with a wide skirt lying beside the t
elephone she was meant modestly to envelop.
‘Well, now,’ said Etain, ‘put your coat to hang on the pegs there and then come in and tell me all about it.’
Roger hung his coat among the litter of scarves and exhausted mackintoshes on the pegs in the hallway.
All right, the Bosun was not there. But perhaps Etain had not been able to get hold of him. It could still be that she was the Infiltraitor.
He came to a decision.
‘All right,’ he said as he went into the sitting-room, ‘I will tell you everything. I can’t go on really without telling someone.’
Etain, sitting on the floor leaning back against the corner of one of the big ugly armchairs, smiled up at him.
‘The thing is,’ Roger said, ‘that I have a secret, which I used to think only Professor O Nuallain knew. And now I’ve found out that somebody else at the School has got hold of it. Well, I’m determined to find out who.’
He felt that the very name of O Nuallain would act somehow as a talisman. It would bring the truth to light.
He looked down at Etain. She showed no change of expression. The blonde hair falling unevenly on her shoulders.
‘I need somebody to confide in,’ Roger said.
Etain smiled again.
‘You can talk to me,’ she said.
A simple statement.
Roger grinned wryly.
‘Nothing could be easier. Only you may be the person I’m looking for.’
She looked suddenly startled.
‘But – but –’ she said. ‘But there must be something I can say that would convince you. Honestly, I’ve not the least hesitance in assuring you I don’t even know what it is you’re talking about.’
The candid eyes. Can eyes lie?
They clouded.
‘I suppose whatever I say you’ll only think I’m pulling on an act,’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ said Roger. ‘So there’s only one thing to do.’
Etain, almost crouching on the floor, looked up at him. Roger turned and strode up and down the confined space of the little room.
‘Eric Smith was murdered,’ he said. ‘His death came about because the work he was doing in England was so secret that he could not be allowed to live once he had refused to go on with it.’
‘So that’s why he came over. I sometimes wondered if he was a refugee.’
Roger did not bother to look at her. The prepared reaction would tell him nothing.
‘Apparently,’ he said, ‘the same fate does not await me – yet. I’m to be captured alive.’
Now he turned and looked at her. She was still sitting on the floor, but she was no longer leaning on the corner of the armchair. Instead she was bolt upright, looking at him with wide open eyes.
‘That’s why I asked you to take me in,’ he said. ‘I hope it’s not going to get you into trouble with the landlord here.’
Etain gave a little half-forced smile.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘This place is a refuse of free thought. I think a couple even lived in sin in the flat below once – though not for long, of course.’
Roger flopped down in the other sprawling knobbly armchair. He looked at Etain sombrely.
‘I got all this from Bosenwite himself,’ he said.
‘Bosenwite?’
She shook her head slowly. An argument not followed. A familiar event.
Roger sat forward.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘as far as I could tell you were genuinely bewildered by the name Bosenwite. It’s a pretty feeble test, but I shall have to abide by it. Bosenwite is Professor William Bosenwite, head of the Institute for Human Relations, Leeds, which is a place where they are working on a new form of brainwashing.’
‘Brainwashing? Now I begin to understand. You didn’t like it, and so you came over here. In the last war it used to be the physicists.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you’re a brainwashing expert as well as Eric?’
‘I’m not a psychologist. I was what the Bosun – that’s Bosenwite – used to call a member of the Department of Applied Linguistics.’
‘But what did you do?’
Roger smiled.
‘That’s what I’m bound by the Official Secrets Acts not to tell you,’ he said.
‘But you were going to tell me everything.’
‘Yes. And I am. Everything that matters. But I’ve entered into a sort of bargain with myself not to give away any secrets I’m officially obliged to keep.’
Etain plucked at a thread in the carpet.
‘All the same,’ she said, ‘can’t you give me a hint what it is you do? I mean just to say you work in the Department of Applied Linguistics –’
‘That’s only its joke name.’
‘Well, that makes it worse.’
She pouted.
Roger stirred uneasily in the big armchair. Not with physical discomfort.
‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.
She looked up at him in frank amazement.
‘Why wouldn’t I want to know?’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever want to know anything that’s a mystery.’
Roger smiled.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I can’t go on and on doubting. I’ll give you a rough outline.’
Suddenly a look of intense concern swept over her.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Your bargain. You mustn’t go back on it. Don’t say a word.’
Roger laughed.
‘I’ll be a model of discretion, I promise,’ he said. ‘I’ll do no more than hint at what I was actually doing.’
He looked round the little cosy room. The glass animals twinkling on the mantelpiece, the little fire popping away, the frilly curtains moving gently in the faint draught coming through the elderly window.
‘During the 1914–18 war,’ he said, ‘a German newspaper once published a report that on the fall of Antwerp the church bells were rung, that is the German church bells. A French paper took up the story and put it that the Belgian clergy had been compelled to ring their own bells. Then the Paris correspondent of The Times filed a story saying that priests who refused to ring the bells were driven from their churches. An Italian paper picked this up and got the priests sentenced to hard labour. Finally, the French paper that first took the story from the German Press published a second report, crediting the Italians, which confirmed that the priests were punished for their heroic refusal by being used as living clappers in the bells.’
‘Are you making it all up?’
‘No, I’m not, really. If I had my notes here I could tell you the very names of the papers. But you see the point, don’t you? That all happened by accident, but it had a splendid effect on French morale. Now, if you could arrange similar things a bit more scientifically –’
‘But that would be cheating.’
Roger smiled.
‘You’ve gone to the heart of the matter,’ he said.
‘And that’s what you were doing?’
‘That’s the germ of it.’
She frowned.
‘But I still don’t see quite how you go about it.’
‘Oh, it’s basically perfectly simple. Take a classic example of jumping a word’s meaning. We say that the gardener mows the lawn, but actually he doesn’t: the lawnmower does the mowing. Well, you can jump meanings along bit by bit in that way until you’re saying what you want people to believe without needing any awkward facts to back you up.’
‘No wonder you wanted to come over here.’
‘It took me a long time to see it, though. Partly I was the victim of my own techniques. You can make people forget as well as making them create, you know.’
‘You mustn’t tell me anything that goes beyond your agreement.’
The schoolgirl honesty.
‘I won’t. This is all well-known stuff. For instance, it was pointed out years and years ago that by calling a body by a name based on its initials you gradually make people forget what the body’s true aim is.
It’s perfectly simple.’
‘And how did you come to do this in the first place?’
He grinned.
‘It was a matter of administration,’ he said. ‘I began working for a highly respectable Government department on perfectly innocuous subjects. Then for financial reasons that particular department was closed and what was kept of its functions were transferred to other departments. My section happened to come under the War Office. And to comply with regulations I was given a commission. So I found myself under orders, and after a bit my orders were to work for the Bosun.’
‘But eventually you and Eric Smith decided to give it up and come over here?’
‘Yes. And Professor O Nuallain looked after us both. You can imagine how much I feel I owe him.’
‘But how did all the present trouble come about then?’
‘Oh, one day last summer the Bosun happened to be over here and Eric couldn’t resist shouting some insults at him. And a few months later Eric was killed. The Bosun told me himself that he had seen to it.’
‘The Bosun – you said his name was Bosenwite, didn’t you – what does he look like?’
‘Oh, you can’t mistake him once you’ve seen him. He’s a huge fat man with a terrible deep pink face and pale goldy hair.’
‘Then I think I have heard of him after all,’ she said. ‘He must be the person Fergus was talking about last summer.’
‘Fergus?’
‘Oh, you know, Fergus Peck.’
Roger abruptly sat forward in his chair.
‘Fergus Peck,’ he said, ‘you mean the chap who was Professor O Nuallain’s personal assistant until you came to the School?’
‘Well, there aren’t two Fergus Pecks in Dublin so far as I know.’
‘No, of course not. It was just that I hardly know him. I know so few people over here really. And you say he was talking about the Bosun last summer?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Don’t you see? He was Professor O Nuallain’s personal assistant. The professor trusted him. He would have access to all the papers. If it is him …’
The hard line of Roger’s mouth. His set eyes.
‘Where does he live?’ he said. ‘Where can I get hold of him?’
The Dog It Was That Died Page 13