The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  Be that as it may, at the time of which I am writing she had what she called an “agency”. I had come across her because in the latter part of the war my own organisation had been transmogrified and I had spent an unpleasant six months in London with a section, set up with unwonted prescience by some maverick in the security world, which was attempting to subvert members of legations in what was to become the Eastern Bloc. We had a few successes, all of whom were executed as soon as the communists took power. Mrs Mudge had supplied us with some of what my colleagues insisted on calling “live bait”. She was devotedly patriotic, and regarded these activities as her war-work, even claiming to be giving us a reduced rate for her services, though no doubt charging as much for them as she thought the market would bear. When I had got in touch with her for help with my Dutchman she had seemed delighted to be reminded of “the old days”, but now her reception of my call was icy. She recognised my voice.

  “Mr Charles!”

  We had all used pseudonyms, and mine, I’m sorry to say, had been Charlie. Mrs Mudge was not one for that level of informality.

  “Got it in one,” I said. “I hope you’re well, Mrs Mudge.”

  “We have nothing to say to you.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “You have let me down very badly. Very badly indeed.” “You’ll have to explain.”

  “You know quite well what I’m talking about, Mr Charles. You gave a certain person my name. He proved utterly untrustworthy.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. He’s a very old acquaintance of mine, and he’s never let me down. Is there anything I can do to make amends? Are you in a position to tell me what happened?”

  “Well … for old times” sake then. There is a very talented child I befriended when she was alone in London, and not yet twenty. How some parents allow that I cannot imagine, and I don’t know what mightn’t have happened to her if she hadn’t come under my wing. When your friend called and explained his problem she came immediately to mind.”

  “Can you tell me roughly what it was he wanted, Mrs Mudge? I’m not asking you to break confidences, of course.”

  “Oh, I certainly wouldn’t normally, but after what he’s done! I don’t know if you are aware of it, Mr Charles, but there are some gentlemen who seem to feel that they have not been sufficiently corrected in their youth …

  “I’ve heard about that. Did he want her to be able to dress as a man?”

  She sounded surprised, and immediately suspicious again.

  “What made you think that?” she said.

  “If it’s the same girl, that’s how she was dressed when I met her.”

  “You didn’t tell me that you had met her.”

  “If it’s the same girl … please, Mrs Mudge, this really is above board. It involves a very dear friend of mine and I don’t want her hurt. That’s all.”

  “I see. In that case … yes, the girl likes to pass herself off as a young man, but I don’t believe your friend made it a requirement.”

  “What happened next?”

  “We arranged an interview, which proved satisfactory, but believe it or not within days the misguided girl had been persuaded to leave our protection, which was bad enough. But on top of that your friend allowed her to become involved with some very undesirable people.”

  The shock of what she appeared to be telling me took me off balance and I overdid my response, but she appeared not to notice.

  “That’s awful. I’m really appalled, Mrs Mudge. Do you mean to say this happened without any acknowledgment to you?”

  “Not even a severance fee, Mr Charles.”

  “That’s too bad. Would you like me to see what I can do about that? What do you suggest? Fifty pounds?”

  “Guineas, please, Mr Charles.”

  “I’ll see what can be arranged.”

  “You are most kind.”

  “Tell me, Mrs Mudge, have you tried to do anything about this yourself? Persuade the girl to come back, for instance?”

  “I asked some friends of mine to reason with her, but they were forcibly prevented from doing so.”

  (Would she have told me if the men who’d tried to abduct the girl had recognised Gerry? I think so.)

  “How unpleasant,” I said. “Tell me, these people she is now connected with—are they by any chance involved in the licensed trade? In Wapping, perhaps?”

  She hesitated again, but I reckoned she would know that she had not yet given me anything like enough for my fifty guineas.

  “Are you sure you are not working for anyone else these days, Mr Charles? Not you-know-who?”

  “Not any more. I work for myself, and it’s not the sort of work we used to do ten years ago. I sell business machines for a living, but as I told you, I’m trying to help a friend. I happened to hear something at a dinner party about these people in Wapping, and put two and two together.”

  “Well, I have to believe you. Let me tell you that there are certain folk, not a hundred miles from Wapping, and if they were to learn that I’d been passing on tittle-tattle about them to someone who might be working for you-know-who—then, well, I don’t know what.”

  “I quite understand. But you’re not going to tell me I’m wrong in my guess?”

  “No, I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “Well, thank you. I won’t press you any further. What about the girl, though? What’s she like, can you tell me? Apart from being ungrateful and disloyal, of course?”

  “Oh, we are most disappointed in her. Such a waste. Such real possibilities. If only she’d played her cards right and followed my advice, she might have done really well for herself, made a good marriage, even. It has happened … you say you’ve met her.”

  “Not to talk to. I sat opposite her at a dinner party, when she was dressed as a man—for a bet, apparently …”

  “The things they get up to!”

  “… otherwise I’ve seen her once in the distance, in a long dress with a wig. I thought she looked decidedly attractive like that.”

  “Oh, yes, quite a picture she can be, Mr Charles. Apart from the lower limbs, poor dear. Too much muscle is not becoming, I always think.”

  “Perhaps that’s why she prefers to wear trousers. Is she intelligent?”

  “Far from stupid, and a nice educated voice she can do, too. Her big problem is the way she’s got it in for men. Quite a few of them have, deep down, in my experience, and of course there’s gentlemen that find that interesting in various ways … only this girl’s got it stronger than most.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “You’d need Professor Freud to tell you that, but it’s something that happened a long time ago, when she was a little girl, I should think. It usually is.”

  “All right. I’ll call again in a few days” time, and if you happen to have heard any more I’d be very glad to know. And I’ll see what I can manage about your fee. How would you like it paid?”

  “In cash, if you please. Leave it in an envelope for me with the cashier at Culley’s in Jermyn Street when you’re next passing, please.”

  “That’s the saddler’s, isn’t it? It will be there by tomorrow evening.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “Not at all.”

  We rang off. I was of course considerably perturbed and distressed by what I seemed to have learnt, but I had no time to think about it for a while, as a Spanish client of mine with whom I was hoping to do a lot of business was already waiting for me. By the time I was able to call Lucy she had gone out, so I sent a note round asking her to get in touch at once. She sounded cross when she rang, and reluctant, but I insisted on a meeting. We had found a strange little tea-room a few minutes” walk from my office, and the same from Heal’s and the British Museum and other places where Lucy might reasonably get the c
hauffeur to drop her. It was one of about a dozen small shops around a quiet crossroads—a tobacconist, an ironmonger, a fishmonger selling only three basic sorts of fish, and so on—all having an air of being left over from before the war. The sweet-shop looked as if it might still be selling sherbet in halfpenny twists. The tea-room had this aura too. The middle-aged waitress wore a lace cap and apron, called one “dearie” and brought excellent fresh tea and home-made sponge cake. It was a quietly cheerful place, with a regular clientele, though we never needed to wait for a table. Some of these were in screened booths, so we had a sense of secrecy, congenial to such an affair. That afternoon Lucy stood out in the open, looking round while she removed her gloves.

  “Father would have liked this place,” she said as she sat down.

  “I expect so. How have things been?”

  “Just living from day to day. Sometimes I feel I want to go back to when I was seventeen and start all over again.”

  “You’re sure about the seventeen?”

  “It’ll do. Why?”

  “It doesn’t cut me out of your life. We’d already met.”

  Her smile was not convincing. I sensed her unhappiness, but when the waitress came for our order, treating us already as old customers, she made the necessary small-talk with apparent pleasure and interest.

  “You’ve got something to tell me,” she said as soon as we were alone.

  “You’re not going to like it. I don’t.”

  “Let’s get it over.”

  I started with what Edward Voss-Thompson had told me at the dinner party. She listened impassively, asking no questions but breaking again into factitious liveliness while our tea was brought. Her only comment on that episode was “Michael is a bastard. Go on.” So I told her about Gerry’s original request and my conversation with Mrs Mudge.

  When I’d finished she drank her tea in silence for several minutes. Then she said, “Sorry. I was getting over being furious with you. I wanted to scream at you that it was all none of your business, and you should never have rung that woman and you should never have told me, but I suppose you had to. Now you’d better tell me what you think I ought to do.”

  “It is still none of my business.”

  “Go on.”

  “If you tell Nancy, she’ll tell Gerry?”

  “Of course, but I don’t have to tell her about the programme. I can just say it’s something I found out, but I can’t tell her how.”

  “Will she accept that?”

  “She’ll bloody have to. Let’s have another pot of tea. And a lot more cake. The only thing to do when you’re really miserable is to eat or drink, and drinking’s worse. Then you can tell me what to do about Tommy.”

  She sat brooding while I caught the waitress’s eye and re-ordered.

  “You are not yet prepared to ask him for a divorce?” I said.

  “No. Definitely not. He won’t divorce me because he’s a Catholic. Besides, he’s got an idea that what’s happening is like some sort of disease he’s going to get better from, and then we can go back to rubbing along like we were.”

  “But you could divorce him.”

  “He won’t give me the evidence, and don’t tell me I could use this girl. Just think of it in the papers. It would finish him—and it would be almost as horrible for me. And even if it were someone normal, you know, the sort of woman he might have met at a dinner party and fallen in love with … no, I don’t mean that … if he’d really fallen in love, of course I would … got besotted with, I suppose … have you got any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “Not much.”

  “He committed himself to me, because he was a Catholic. He knew what he was doing, that I’d had affairs and so on. I couldn’t do less, could I? I promised. I’m not going to break my promise unless he wants me to. I’ve always known that.”

  I thought this extremely pig-headed of her, but I could see she meant it, so I held my tongue. Our second tea arrived, but she’d hardly begun on it when she looked at her watch and rose.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ll try to talk to Tommy. And Nan. I don’t know about Ben—I sort of feel it’s her look-out. I’ll see what Nan says. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. Most of this is, as you say, not my business, but Gerry seems deliberately to have involved me, and I’ve a perfect right to ask him why.”

  “Oh, please don’t. Not yet, anyway—not till I’ve talked to Nan.”

  “If you say so.”

  LUCY VIII

  June/July 1956

  I’m going to have to do this in more than one go, because several things happened and I can’t remember quite in what order. There was talking to Tommy, of course, and Nan, and something else—it’ll come to me.

  Anyway, talking to Tommy. We hadn’t said anything much since we’d talked after the opera, just carried on as usual. Tommy was working appallingly hard. He was away quite a bit, mainly in France and America, trying to get a common front together against Colonel Nasser. It was all very tricky for him because Anthony Nutting, who was officially senior to him at the FO, disapproved of what was going on, and the civil servants at the FO were desperately pro-Arab, which meant anti-Israel, and Selwyn Lloyd, who was Foreign Secretary—I really liked him, not just because he reminded me of the man who kept the sweet-shop in Bury where we were allowed to go if we’d been good on shopping expeditions—Selwyn Lloyd couldn’t afford to do too much of the plotting in case things went wrong, and Eden kept changing his mind though he really detested Nasser, and the French were impossible as usual, and the Israelis didn’t care what happened to anyone else provided they got what they wanted, and there was Tommy—cold, honourable, reasonable, frightened Tommy—having to act like a shifty kind of middle-man doing dirty deals and knowing that if it all went wrong he’d be the one who got the blame. And on top of all this his marriage was a sham and he was infatuated with a call-girl.

  Not that he talked to me about any of this, either. We’d have breakfast together if we were both in town or at Seddon Hall and we’d be perfectly friendly—in fact most of the time we felt like good old friends –and if we talked it would be about the children, or arrangements about cars and dinner parties. Luckily he was too busy for week-end house parties. Of course after what happened I’ve always been interested in Suez so I’ve read everything I can about it and even when the books disagree with each other I usually know enough from being on the fringe of it to have a good guess who’s right and who’s wrong. But at the time all I knew was that Tommy was away a lot and working much too hard and not enjoying it.

  In fact I had a better idea what was going on between him and Sammy Whitstable. If he was abrupt and nervous and finished his breakfast early, then I knew he was seeing her that night, and then next day he’d be extra-friendly and relaxed and wanting to know if I was alright. I was glad it was that way round. I’ve sometimes wondered, suppose earlier on I’d thought of wearing men’s clothes and bossing him around—Paul seems to think they went in for whips and things—oh, how can I know? In fact to be absolutely honest I’ve never really understood why men seem to want me as I am. Me, rather than anyone else, I mean. I just feel I wouldn’t, in their shoes. Of course sometimes you can see things which seem to make sense, for instance my own Timmy instead of messing around and trying things out with different girls the way it’s so easy for them nowadays struck up with an art student when they were both only nineteen and stayed with her through thick and thin. Her father was a bricklayer at an ironworks, and she still speaks like that—Staffordshire—though she’s Lady Seddon now. Tommy thought he’d get tired of her and marry someone suitable, but I’d heard her talking to Timmy the way his nanny used to, as if he wasn’t safe to cross the road without having his hand held … where was I? Putting off talking about telling Tommy.

  There wasn’t that much to it, as a matter of fact. We were at Seddo
n Hall, in the Breakfast Room, which was modelled on that place where Charlemagne’s tomb is but surprisingly cosy despite that, and the sun was streaming in and there were kidneys and bacon and scrambled eggs and mushrooms on the sideboard, so it must have been Saturday morning. I can smell them now.

  I said, “I’m afraid there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.”

  He just nodded but he put his paper down, so he must have known it mattered.

  “That evening at the opera,” I said. “Do you know why we were there? Gerry rang Paul up almost at the last moment and said he’d got tickets to spare, only when we got there we found they weren’t all four together. And Nan was furious all evening, and I think that was because he’d made her come when she didn’t want to. Wait. And then a few days ago we had dinner with Janet and Edward, and Edward told Paul he was doing a programme about some nasty property deals, you know, turning old people out of houses, which Michael Allwegg seems to have something to do with, and Gerry works for Michael, and Paul somehow put two and two together and next day he rang up someone he used to know who supplies call-girls because he’d given Gerry her number a bit before, and she pretty well told him that Gerry had asked her for someone special and she’d suggested your friend, and then your friend had suddenly stopped working for her and it was her friends who were trying to get her back that night in Greek Street—I’m afraid that sounds desperately muddled. Do you understand?”

  He sighed.