by Len Deighton
‘Yes, I spoke with George. I went there,’ I said. ‘But what is the mystery?’
David looked at Fiona. Sitting well back in her armchair she was almost lost in the gloom, but her head swung round and I saw her become attentive, as if the mention of Tessa’s name had sparked some alarm in her.
‘Where’s the body?’ David asked me, and then looked at Fiona: ‘Now, now, Fiona, I know this distresses you; it distresses me. But it has to be dealt with.’
He waited for me to answer. I said: ‘I suppose it’s with the DDR authorities. Wasn’t there a burial or post-mortem or anything? What have you been told?’
‘We’ve been told nothing,’ said David resentfully.
‘Just that she died in a car accident on the Autobahn,’ said Fiona.
Fiona knew all about it. She had been there at the Brandenburg Exit that night when Tessa was killed. But wisely Fiona had not shared her memories of that experience with her father, and it wasn’t something I was inclined to embark upon. In any case Bret had got me to sign an official letter acknowledging that the events of the night when Fiona escaped from the DDR were all covered by my terms of employment. Taken literally, I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, not even to Fiona.
‘So where’s the body?’ said David. He finished off his gin and tonic and got up with a movement that emphasized his frustration.
‘What time does the film end?’ Fiona asked him as he rattled through the drink bottles.
There was a hiss as David snapped the top from a can of tonic. I could only just see him standing at the cupboard that held his paints and linseed oil and turpentine. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said and then, turning to look at her, he added: ‘Your mother usually takes them for tea and cakes, but I don’t suppose she’ll do that today.’
‘It’s just the snail’s pace of their bureaucracy,’ said Fiona.
‘So what’s happening meanwhile? Is she buried? Or is she rotting away forgotten in some refrigerator in some filthy little German mortuary?’
‘Please don’t, Daddy,’ said Fiona.
‘You’ve got to face it, Fiona. You can’t hide your head in the sand.’
‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ I volunteered. ‘I’m going over there next week. I’ll see what I can discover unofficially.’
‘I wish you would, Bernard. George has hired a Berlin lawyer, and some investigator at zillions of dollars a day, but I don’t hold out much hope that anyone can get those swine moving. I’ve heard nothing from him lately. Have you heard anything, Fiona?’
‘From George?’ said Fiona vaguely.
‘From anyone,’ snapped her father with that special wrath that parents save for inattentive children.
‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘Not from anyone.’
All of a sudden the door opened and the children came bounding in, shouting and laughing. Billy was fourteen now, the time when children undergo great physical change. Sally was two years younger. No matter how many times I’d tried to explain to her that both of us still loved her, Sally had never accepted and adjusted to the idea of her mother going away so suddenly and without a goodbye or explanation. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ Sally asked without receiving an answer. But pragmatic Billy went round switching on the lights.
Billy was wearing a dark blazer and grey pants, but Sally was in a pretty dress. ‘Long trousers,’ announced Billy when there was enough light for us to see what he was wearing. This was why he was wearing school uniform on a weekend. He pointed to the badge on his pocket. ‘And this is the school motto in Latin. I do Latin now. And French. I’m third from top.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘You need Latin for languages.’
‘Sally won’t be doing Latin for a long time,’ he said.
‘But I’m in the swimming team,’ said Sally. They were both standing close to me and waiting to be embraced in the way I always greeted them. But I didn’t grab them. I could see that Fiona was tense and frightened of this confrontation. ‘Go and kiss Mummy,’ I said. ‘You haven’t seen her for a long time, have you?’
They turned to look at Fiona, but didn’t move towards her. ‘Hello, Mummy,’ said Billy diffidently. ‘Was it nice?’
‘No,’ said Fiona and smiled. She’d dreaded this first meeting and done everything to put it off.
‘Are we coming home to live with you?’ Sally asked her mother in a whisper.
Fiona glanced for a fleeting moment at her father and then at me.
I answered: ‘Yes, of course. I’m going to cook spaghetti in our new home in London. I’ve made the sauce already. And you’ll try out your new bedrooms. Then I’ll bring you back here to Grandpa’s tomorrow night.’
‘Why?’ said Billy, his voice a wail of disappointment. ‘Why can’t we stay with you always?’
‘Just until the end of term,’ I said. ‘We think it might be bad to pull you out of school so close to the exams.’
‘I’ll do the exams,’ promised Sally. ‘I’ll do anything.’ They were wonderful children; uncomplaining and trusting; and resolutely cheerful despite the constant upheavals they’d been subjected to. One day soon, when they were judging us for what we had done to them, could we plead extenuating circumstances? They were big now; very big. Suddenly I realized that they were so big that I would never again pick either of them up in my arms, throw Sally into the air or carry Billy pick-a-back and gallop upstairs with him. This realization gave me a pang, a deep and desperate feeling of loss.
Fiona’s mother came through the door. Her coat and dress were almost ankle-length, and she was wearing a broad-brimmed hat with silk flowers on it. Her pastel-coloured clothes made her look like someone from a Victorian photo, and that perhaps was her intention. Behind her there was a maid in starched frilled apron carrying a tray. The Kimber-Hutchinsons had lots of local people working for them; they arrived from the village each with their assigned individual tasks. One made the beds, another cleaned the baths, another did the washing-up and so on. They provided a house that constantly teemed with women of all ages coming and going, and gave fitting reason to seek refuge in the den to which such labourers were denied access.
‘Ah, there we are,’ boomed David, looking at the tea-tray. ‘This is what you children like, isn’t it.’
The tray was arrayed with a Staffordshire bone china tea service, and two huge glass goblets inside which ice-cream of primary colours had been doused in brightly coloured sauces, whipped cream, chopped nuts and other confectionery. Stabbed into these sundaes were two wooden sticks: one bearing a coloured cut-out of Mickey Mouse and the other of Pluto. Solemnly David handed the ice-creams to the children. ‘This is their favourite,’ he told us over his shoulder in a conspiratorial voice.
‘Don’t eat it all; it will spoil your dinner,’ said Fiona, who had spent many years restraining her children from eating sweets and biscuits and chocolate bars.
‘Don’t ruin the fun, Mummy,’ David admonished her as he used a teaspoon to savour the concoctions. ‘Eat up, children. You’re only young once.’
Mrs Kimber-Hutchinson smiled wanly and took off her hat and coat. Catching Fiona’s eye she mouthed the question: ‘Did you bring the tapes?’ Fiona nodded.
David smoothed his hair with the flat of his hand and said. ‘What did I hear you saying, Bernard? Spaghetti? That’s not a proper meal. We can’t have you racing off again as soon as you get here. That Kingston bypass is a dangerous stretch on a Saturday night. “Murder mile” they call it. There was a TV documentary showing all the fatal pile-ups last year. You’re staying to eat a real dinner. It’s a celebration in Fiona’s honour.’ He was facing me now.
‘We must get back,’ I said firmly.
‘But Fiona promised you’d be staying,’ he insisted. ‘We’ve made all the arrangements. We have friends coming all the way from Richmond. The food is being cooked and your bedroom is all prepared.’
I looked at Fiona in alarm. Defensively she said: ‘That was when Uncle Silas was expected too. I
thought you might want to say hello to him, Bernard.’ Was it supposed to be a chance for me to ingratiate myself with Silas Gaunt, and thereby get a decent promotion? Jolted back to life, I found I’d been glaring at Fiona without even seeing her.
David corrected her: ‘Silas hasn’t said he wouldn’t come. He said he would try. He is at some important antique show in Guildford. And there’s a dealers’ get-together afterwards. It’s only a stone’s throw from here. He’ll come; we’re expecting him. He won’t want to drive all the way home from Guildford. Did you bring your things, Fiona?’
My glaring must have had some effect, for she was looking at me, her expression more contrite than I can ever remember, and her voice so hushed as to be almost inaudible: ‘I did tell Daddy we would stay, Bernard. I packed a bag for us. Perhaps I forgot to tell you.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said David, jovial now that he had won the day. ‘And tomorrow we’ll go to church.’ To me he said: ‘We go to church every Sunday. I hope you’ll join us, Bernard.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a whole list of things I want to take up with God.’
11
I’ve often suspected that my father-in-law had sold his soul to the devil. How else could he have arranged that everything he wanted came so easily to him? I was unpacking the bag that Fiona had hidden in the back of the car, and selecting a tie and shirt suitable for the sort of dinner party David liked to give, when I heard a car arrive. I looked out of the window in time to see the driver of a very muddy Range Rover holding a door open and helping the Falstaffian figure of Silas Gaunt as he climbed laboriously out of the front passenger seat. Silas was wearing a short military-style khaki waterproof. On his head he had a floppy-brim fisherman’s hat of checked cloth.
Trying to describe Silas Gaunt’s role in the Secret Intelligence Service would be like trying to describe Irving Berlin’s role in the history of popular music. Gaunt had lived a long time and had seen the British Secret Service through thick and thin. Mostly thin; there hadn’t been much thick; some said it had been nothing but one disaster after another. Now Silas was retired to ‘Whitelands’, his farm in the Cotswolds, but the influence he still wielded ensured that few major decisions were made in London Central without Silas’s blessing.
Silas was seated at the end of the dinner-table. There was little alternative, for his girth and his gestures precluded him from fitting in between other guests. Once in position, he assumed the demeanour of host as he ordered the other guests to pour the wine or pass the vegetables and commanded their silence when he related one of his anecdotes. Instead of the country tweeds that were his uniform, he seemed to have gone to a great deal of trouble for this rare excursion into the outside world. He was wearing a dark pin-stripe suit, whose seams had succumbed at places to the weight he’d added since buying it. He had a dark blue pullover that I knew had been knitted for him by his adoring housekeeper, Mrs Porter. Now it was beginning to become unravelled at the hem. His shirt was freshly washed and pressed but the overall effect was marred by his worn and well-fingered necktie, its repeat pattern the neat coat of arms of some school or college he’d attended.
David was at the other end of the table. He was wearing a dark blue worsted Savile Row three-piece with a pink poplin shirt and a very brightly coloured necktie. Perhaps he’d forgotten about the clamorous behaviour for which Uncle Silas was famous, for David never entirely relaxed, and he quickly instructed the girl waiting at table to move some of the more valuable items of china and cut glass, so they were not within radius of Silas’s exuberant gesturing.
There were other guests at the dinner party: a retired insurance tycoon, the owner of ten racehorses, and his magistrate wife. A son of a duke, looking down-at-heel as sons of dukes are expected to look, with long hair in a pony-tail and a shrill wife who shamelessly plugged her pony club and the titled people who sent their daughters there. There was also a very quiet Australian couple who had made an unexpected fortune from a marina built on the site of their alligator farm. They seemed to be constantly circling the world in an earnest attempt to spend the proceeds. Now they were considering the purchase of a luxury Monaco apartment in which David seemed to have a financial interest.
Soon after we sat down, a common theme emerged: horses. There was enough talk of point-to-points, ‘accumulators’, ‘yankees’ and Lipizzaners to leave me silent and confused. Even Uncle Silas joined in, contributing an old story about the horses of the Berlin fire department that were sold to the breweries when the motorized fire engines arrived. Every time they heard fire-bells these massive creatures galloped in the direction of the sound, taking the loaded drays with them on frenzied errands that shed barrels and teamsters too.
The menu was an elaborate one of pheasant and all the trimmings, with caviar to start, an oyster and bacon savoury to end, and crispy apple charlotte somewhere in between. On some other evening I might have found the food and conversation amusing, but I couldn’t help remembering that while I was enduring this pretentious ritual, my children were upstairs having sausages and mash with one of David’s many servants before being packed off to bed.
It was midnight when the racehorse people got up and went for their coats, and began the rites of thank-yous and goodnights. The Australians went racing after their coats too, skilfully resisting all David’s urging to stay and look at his colour photos of Monaco. It was then that I noticed that Uncle Silas had also slipped away. I went upstairs and caught him as he emerged from the bathroom.
‘Are you leaving, Silas?’
‘Alas I must.’ He opened the door of the room next to the bathroom, and switched on the lights. It was a bedroom, and from the clothes cupboard he took a hanger bearing his ancient waterproof coat. ‘Alas, I must, Bernard,’ he repeated. This bedroom had obviously been assigned to him for an overnight stay. The expensive soap on the wash-basin was new and unwrapped, the bedclothes had been turned down, and there were half a dozen of last year’s hardback best-sellers and half a dozen freshly cut pink roses arranged on each side of the bed.
‘I was hoping for a word with you,’ I said.
He was still nursing his coat, scarf and hat, but now he draped them over the back of a chair and pushed the door closed. ‘You open the batting, Bernard.’
‘They’ve kicked someone out of the Department. And I think it’s because of me.’
‘Who was that?’
‘A man named Kent. Outstanding record.’
‘The Hungarian dentist. Yes, I know. Why should you think that was anything to do with you?’ He turned to the window. The curtains had not been closed. I turned my head to see why he was looking at the walled kitchen garden. It was ablaze with light. I suppose they were anti-prowler lights; David had an obsession about prowlers.
‘I was living with his daughter,’ I said. ‘Some people think that he came under pressure in order to break up the relationship.’
‘The daughter?’ He frowned as he thought about it. ‘Is that who suspects that the Department applied pressure, and interfered with her love life?’ There was a mocking brutality behind his words; he wanted me to know that I was stepping out of line.
‘No, me,’ I said. ‘I suspect it.’
He stared at me for what seemed like ages. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Bernard. You’ve got a fine wife. You should be down on your hands and knees to her.’
‘I am, all the time,’ I said. ‘But I keep splitting the arse out of my trousers.’
‘Your dentist friend’s usefulness came to an end,’ said Silas. He pulled the curtains together with an angry jerk. ‘I don’t want to bore you with the minutiae of the Department’s projected dental needs, so I suggest you just take my word for it.’
‘Bore me,’ I said.
‘Very well.’ The curtain was not completely closed, and through the gap in it he looked down again at the garden. ‘There’s something forlorn about a floodlit cabbage patch,’ he pronounced. ‘Walled. Looks like a prison yard.’
/> ‘Then don’t look at it,’ I said, and pulled the curtain completely closed.
Forced now to look at me, he said: ‘We brought Kent and his family out of his homeland when things were very rough. He had a curious hobby: he collected old dental tools, and studied the history of European dentistry. He wrote a paper for one of the scientific journals. A smart young man in Coordination noticed it and told me. Here was a man whose handicraft could ensure that one of our agents sent into Hungary, East Germany, Poland or even the Soviet Union’s more remote regions could arrive there with dentistry appropriate to his cover story.’
‘That was useful,’ I said.
‘It was amazing. Of course it also meant that Mr Kent spent a long time with quite a number of our most important field agents. Unavoidably he knew when they were off, and where they were bound.’
‘You should have recruited men with better teeth.’
‘You’re right,’ said Silas. ‘And that’s what we have done. The false teeth and bad teeth that were so prevalent in my youth are now a thing of the past. Young men nowadays seldom have more than a filling or two.’ He took a quick look at his wrist-watch. ‘Cash is tight, Bernard, and we have to examine every penny of our expenditure. We decided to close the Kent operation down, and paid him off. Is he complaining about the money?’
‘No, I believe he’s content.’
‘The girl?’
‘Doesn’t want to rock the boat.’
‘She didn’t ask you to take this up on her behalf?’
‘She asked me not to. She’s one hundred per cent reliable and dedicated.’
‘Good. The work she is doing is very important. Hungary may be converting to capitalism, but we have to have people watching what’s happening there.’ He scratched himself and yawned, as if discovering the lateness of the hour had suddenly exhausted him. ‘And what about you, Bernard? Are you one hundred per cent reliable and dedicated?’