There were three of them, all men, dressed in blacks, grays, dark blues, and browns; the usual urban camouflage of a fifties man, but to Herbert’s eye, in this particular place and at this particular time, colors that were determinedly—perhaps too determinedly—neutral. Two of them were sitting on the opposite side of the carriage from him, at an angle of ten and two o’clock respectively; the third was on his side of the aisle, about four seats along.
It was this configuration that had given them away, for they had used the exact same one on the journey from Green Park to Leicester Square. Plenty of people had changed trains with him, but for the same three people to take up the same three positions in the same carriage as him on both occasions was beyond coincidence.
He wondered where they were from. An espionage service was the most obvious possibility; Five, of course, given Stensness’ role, though the dead man’s political leanings meant that the MGB, Soviet foreign intelligence, could not be ruled out either. Or perhaps the followers were strictly criminal elements, come to protect a part of Stensness’ business about which Herbert as yet knew nothing. He wondered whether Elkington had found something at the destination, or whether old man Stensness was somehow involved. Though, if he was, it would not have been directly, assuming he had been telling the truth about looking after Lady Clarissa twenty-four hours a day.
Questions, Herbert thought; questions.
Of one thing, however, Herbert was certain: these were amateurs. Professionals would never have let themselves get burnt like that, especially so early in the surveillance; they could only have picked him up this morning because it would have been impossible to tail anyone in the fog last night.
At least they did not seem to be togged out in pantomime get-ups such as false beards, which were not only more trouble than they were worth but also tended to be easily detectable under the intense lights of a train or restaurant.
At Highgate station, Herbert tore off the Times crossword, put it in his pocket, and disembarked as planned. He was relying for orientation on what he had memorized from the A to Z, and wanted to stick with what he could remember.
The three men followed him off the train, all but signaling to each other as they moved. Whichever outfit they represented needed to buck up either their training or the quality of their recruits, and fast.
God Almighty, Herbert thought; he was beginning to sound like de Vere Green.
The cleanness of the air took Herbert by surprise. All of a sudden, it was a perfect winter’s day, cold and crisp. He gulped down lungfuls which felt impossibly pure after the filth of the smog.
It was the height that was making the difference, rather than the distance from central London; visibility was no better at Kew than at Kingsway, after all. Highgate was several hundred feet above the river, and the fog was low-lying. The residents here, and round Parliament and Shooters Hills too, must have wondered what all the fuss was about.
Herbert’s route took him down Archway Road, past a smattering of shops and cafés, and then right down Cholmeley Park, into a labyrinth of comfortable suburbia. He stayed on the left side of Archway Road until it was time to cross; not at the pedestrian beacons, which might have forewarned the trackers, and not until there was traffic approaching, which gave him a reason to take a long look both ways, and in doing so to size up what was happening behind him.
A Hillman Minx and a Vauxhall Wyvern closed on him, and on each other, at slow speed. He looked up the hill, down the hill, and up again, giving himself enough time to see that his three escorts had arranged themselves in the classic pattern for foot surveillance—“going foxtrot” as the trade term had it.
The first man was about twenty yards behind him, and would be designated “A” for Adjacent. Herbert mentally christened him Alf.
A farther twenty yards behind Alf was “B,” Backup, whom Herbert called Bob.
On the other side of the street, more or less level with Alf, was the third, “C” for Control—Charlie.
It was the work of a few seconds for Herbert to fix their respective statures and gaits in his mind; their faces he had memorized on the train. Bob was the tallest and Charlie the shortest; Alf looked like he might be the most athletic.
Herbert wondered whether their brief was simply to keep an eye on him, or to do him active harm. He supposed he would find out one way or the other before too long.
When the Minx and Wyvern had passed each other, Herbert crossed the road.
He took a quick look back up the hill just before he reached the other side, and tried very hard not to laugh. In a devotion to the rules that was positively slavish, Bob had come across with him. Charlie was now the one directly behind him—the “eyeball”—with Bob still backup and Alf acting as control.
Once he had put in a few more turns, Herbert thought, it would be like the old parlor game where a magician put a pea under one of three upturned cups and moved them round and round until the audience could no longer tell which was which.
Herbert turned into Cholmeley Park, and the order changed again. Charlie kept going across the entrance to Cholmeley Park, turning only when he was on the other side of the road from Herbert—in essence, regaining the control position. Bob quickened his pace and fell in behind Herbert as the new eyeball; while Alf, crossing from the far side of Archway Road, took up position behind Bob as backup.
There was little either to commend or condemn any of the houses in the neighborhood. They were all of a good size, relatively new—twenties or thirties, most of them, at a guess—and architecturally inoffensive. The kind of place a bank manager would live, Herbert thought, sounding like his mother.
His mother; he had to go and see her this afternoon. That in turn reminded him: it was his birthday. Thirty-five today—halfway to his biblical allotment of three score and ten—and he had chosen to mark the occasion by wandering round Highgate with a trio of goons in tow.
It certainly ranked as an unusual way to celebrate.
Cholmeley Crescent was on the right-hand side of the road. As its name suggested, it looped back on itself, so if the next turning was the entrance, the one after that was the exit, and vice versa if one was coming from the other direction.
Would they know that Elkington was already here?
If they did, Herbert thought, there was nothing he could do about it. If not, there was no point in making it easy for them. Either way, he could not go directly to Stensness’ house, that was evident; he had to lose his tail first.
So he kept on walking, though not without a quick, innocent look at the crescent as he went past. Most people glanced down side streets while they walked; keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead would have been as much of a giveaway as marching right up to the door of number 43.
Suddenly Herbert knew where he could lose the goons; he knew, too, a place which would offer a perfectly reasonable explanation for his having come up here at all.
Cholmeley Park turned into a small slope, the sizes of the houses increasing with the gradient. At the top, Herbert emerged onto the main drag of Highgate Hill, and stopped dead, all thought of evasion temporarily gone. There before him was the city shrouded in mist, as though it were Avalon, an impossibly beautiful vista of soft clouds through which the odd rooftop poked like a periscope.
There was no telling, at this distance, that those tender billows reeked with clammy poison. From where he stood, the slanting rays of the sun gave the fog a coppery, rather handsome, appearance. It was only nearer at hand that it would appear yellow and ugly, a vast and unappetizing sea of chicken soup.
Herbert stared in wonderment at the view for a few moments, then remembered that he had men on his tail. He turned left down Highgate Hill, almost immediately right onto Dartmouth Park Hill, and then right again into Waterlow Park.
London had more parks than virtually any other city in the world, and Herbert had always loved them—they were the city’s lungs, and it had never needed to breathe more than it did now. By the standards of the gr
eat spaces in the middle of town, Waterlow was nothing special, but after almost twenty-four hours wading through fog, even the bare branches of winter trees seemed impossibly and refreshingly rustic.
Herbert stepped off the path and walked on the grass, for no other reason than that, unlike in Hyde Park, he could do so without getting hopelessly lost. He had never thought himself capable of rediscovering such childlike joy in nature.
He walked past a trash can, counted five strides, and turned on his heel without warning, fishing the crossword out of his pocket as he headed back to the can.
When one was performing surveillance, there were two things to avoid above all costs, and the first of these was sudden movement. Even when one’s target did the unexpected, as Herbert had just done, one should keep behaving normally; better to lose sight of him for a moment than risk blowing the entire operation. Eyeball and, if necessary, backup, should keep going past the subject, leaving control to keep watch while the other two rejoined the surveillance when they could.
The three comedians assigned to Herbert could hardly have behaved less normally if they had tried. They stopped dead and looked anywhere but at him: at each other, up to the sky, around the park, as if they were out for a nature walk.
It was said that ninja assassins were trained not to look at their targets, even if they found themselves directly behind them, for fear that some deep-rooted sixth sense would warn the subject that he was being watched. This, however, was ridiculous. Herbert was tempted to stop where he was; perhaps, had he done so, all four of them could have remained in petrified tableau forever.
Instead, he put the crossword in the trash, turned back around, and continued on his original course across Waterlow Park.
Behind him, he fancied he heard a communal sigh of relief.
In a strange way, their ineptitude was beginning to unnerve him. Professionals knew what they were doing, so there was less chance of things going wrong. Amateurs were unpredictable. If this lot could bungle the relatively simple task of keeping tabs on him without his noticing, he wondered what else they could mess up.
If, for instance, they had been ordered to bring him in unharmed, he would have put precious little money on the second part of that command necessarily following the first.
Herbert led them all the way through Waterlow Park, left out of the gate on to Swains Lane, and then immediately left again, into the eastern part of Highgate Cemetery. He took the main footway, tombstones dotting the pathside like signposts: Baird, Pocklington, Dalziel, Bruce, Hardman.
At the giant bust of Marx, near the northeastern corner, the usual delegations of communist worshippers were paying homage. There would be a Watcher or two nearby, no doubt, taking pictures for the files back at Leconfield House; Herbert had done so himself on several occasions. That this was a largely pointless exercise had, naturally, seldom been an impediment to its implementation.
There was a brief moment, when he had walked past the flock of Marxist homage-payers but his trackers had still yet to get through, that Herbert was out of their sight. It was then that he moved.
Stepping quickly off the main path and onto one of the small, muddy passages which led to and between the serried ranks of gravestones, he dropped to a crouch, then to all fours, and scurried through the undergrowth, turning right and then left.
The vegetation around the less notable tombstones had been left to grow almost to waist height. Silently praising whoever was responsible for such neglect, Herbert crawled across graves, offering whispered apologies for any disrespect he was showing the dead, and eventually stopped in a particularly dense clump of bushes, invisible to anyone more than a couple of yards away.
Adjusting his position slowly, he found that he could see back to the main path.
Charlie was standing there, looking around frantically, his hands spread in bewildered supplication. Of Alf or Bob, no sign. Searching elsewhere, presumably.
Herbert caught his breath and considered his options.
The cemetery was not especially large, and there were not that many hiding places. More importantly, there was only the one entrance, which meant one exit.
If he stayed where he was, therefore, it would simply be a matter of time before they found him. Having given them the slip, it was better to keep moving, and press home the advantage that way.
He was on the far side of the cemetery, away from the main gate. They might not have put someone back at the entrance yet, but they soon would. Even these three could not be that incompetent.
Herbert stood up cautiously, brushing leaves and patches of mud from his clothes, and stepped smoothly but quickly through the tombstones until he found another wide graveled path. This, he rapidly surmised, was the trail that led back to the entrance.
A group of six people were strolling a few yards ahead of him. He tagged himself unobtrusively onto one end. Ambling at such a slow pace was against all his instincts, but he reasoned that his pursuers were less likely to spot him in even a small crowd.
More tombstones, inscriptions to those who had died midway between fame and anonymity: Thomas, Barratt, Harrison, Wolf, Thornton, Shaw, Colnagi, Critchett.
Herbert was ten yards away from the main gate when he saw them, though of course he did not allow his disappointment to make him break stride. Someone in this whole farrago had to behave like a professional, after all.
Charlie and Alf were either side of the entrance—Charlie had moved fast for one with such short legs, Herbert thought—and Bob was approaching at speed from the path Herbert had originally taken, the one which led to Marx. Herbert had clearly underestimated them; or perhaps, by the simple law of averages, they were bound to have got something right sooner or later.
Ten yards, and closing. Herbert had to make up his mind fast.
He realized suddenly that they might not be aware he was on to them. He had not behaved abnormally in any way; he had not even given a sign that he had registered their presence, benign or otherwise.
Herbert pictured himself as a tourist, come to visit the graves, as hundreds did every week; a man going about his business, with nothing to hide and nothing to justify another’s suspicion. What would such a man do in this situation?
He walked right past them, across the road, and into the cemetery’s western part.
Herbert felt as though he had entered another world.
Where the eastern portion of the cemetery had been relatively bright and airy, the western half was a fairy-tale forest, as dark and impenetrable in its own way as the fog which shrouded the city down the hill.
He moved down lines of oaks and hazels, sweet chestnuts and field maples, their bare branches bending to each other like lovers overhead.
Losing the trackers in here would be child’s play.
Herbert took his time, pausing to admire the masonry on the graves. Men’s tombs were adorned with symbols of their professions: whips and horseshoes for mail-coach riders, painters with palettes, a general edged with miniature cannons. Columns were left broken when a life had been cut short; grieving women clutched wreaths or wrapped themselves round urns, all frozen forever in moments of stone.
He turned a corner and saw Egyptian Avenue, its entrance flanked by obelisks and columns of lotus flowers, and its roofed corridor leading through to the ring of vaults over which a vast Lebanese cedar towered. Even though the day was clear, the corridor was dank; as he walked through, water fell in steady, bulbous drops from a crack in the ceiling. He fancied the unsettling conditions as the result of an unquiet soul, brooding malevolently in one of the burial chambers that ran down either side.
He was nearly at the far end when he noticed that one of the iron doors to these chambers was open, though a ladder propped against the wall outside mitigated against supernatural explanation; even burial chambers required maintenance.
Before Herbert could consider what might be lurking inside—inside his imagination, if not inside the chamber—he had stepped through the door and flattened
himself against the wall, out of sight from the corridor.
There was little enough light in here, but even so he kept his eyes shut. Too long in a room with only coffins for company could have sent the sanest man unstable, and he had in some ways less far to go than most.
Voices penetrated from outside, and it was pretty clear that they belonged to his chasers. He had never heard any of them speak, of course, but what they were saying left little doubt as to their identity.
“He must have gone through there,” said one, in an estuarine accent.
“He could have gone right at the last junction.” A Geordie, this one. “What’s to have stopped him?”
“It’s a circle up ahead.” The first man again. “I’ll go left, you go right. If he’s there, we’ll pincer him. Terry, you go back the way we came and follow the path up and around. There’s a mausoleum at the top, I think. We’ll meet you there.”
Any pretensions they might have had towards remaining unnoticed or keeping a recognized formation had well and truly vanished. They sounded rattled; presumably they would be in substantial strife if they lost him. To have done so once was bad enough, though at least they had rectified that. Herbert did not envy them the dressing-down they would receive when they returned empty-handed.
Their footsteps squelched slightly on the damp surface. Herbert counted backwards from sixty, making sure to separate each number with the word “thousand” so he did not hurry the last twenty and break cover too soon.
When the minute was up, he stepped out of the chamber.
No one was around, which was just as well; anyone who had seen him might have run shrieking to the gatehouse to report that one of the dead had suddenly risen.
He walked back down Egyptian Avenue, checking that none of his pursuers were visible, and then continued with purpose but without haste back to the main entrance.
This time, there was no one waiting for him.
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