by Gavin Lyall
"It all comes back to Mrs Jackaman," Agnes said remorselessly. "If anybody's got that letter, it's most likely her."
"Why did Jackaman commit suicide in the first place?" Maxim asked.
"Or, of course," Agnes added, "the last place."
"Because," George began with the reined-in patience of a kindergarten teacher, "Box 500 confronted him with rumours of his illegal French bank account."
Maxim shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that. Most suicides are despair, hopelessness, things are only going to get worse… I'm assuming Jackaman wasn't a complete moron, so he must have known that account could wreck his whole career. So – did he simply say to himself. Okay, if I'm found out, I'll shoot myself? And if he hadn't decided that, why did he do it? I just can't get hold of it."
George started a slow circuit of the Cabinet table. Since it seated about thirty, that took time. He stopped at the far end and called back: "You aren't, God help us all, trying to turn this into a country house murder mystery?"
"I'm just asking."
"And," Agnes persisted, "why wasn't there a suicide note?"
"Oh blast it, there aren't any rules for committing suicide."
"Yes there are. Look at Japan. And Jackaman was a senior civil servant; paperwork was his daily bread. Minutes, memos, reports, letters, just let me have a draught paper about that, will you, old boy?"
Maxim said: "Perhaps it wasn't anything to do with the bank account, but he just despaired of paperwork."
"Or perhaps," George snapped, "he had a horrible prevision of his life being batted around by you two clowns." He cruised slowly back down the fireplace side of the table, past the PM's chair.
Maxim asked calmly: "Who found his body?"
George stopped and looked at him suspiciously. "His wife. There were only the two of them in the house and it was fairly isolated. She heard a shot but thought it was him having a crack at a pigeon or something, then after a time she went to see and… I read her statement."
"I don't call that very sensitive of him," Agnes said. "He can't have expected to look very palatable."
"He wasn't a very sensitive man, not in an imaginative way. He just had a strong sense of honour and duty."
"Except where money was concerned." Maxim suggested.
George slumped into a chair, took a thin cigar from a case in his top waistcoat pocket and stared moodily at it. He sighed, clipped the end, and lit it with a plain match. He looked defeated.
"He left a note," Agnes said quietly, "and he left the Tyler letter. She suppressed both. I don't know why. Then she let the KGB know that she had it. Again, I don't know why. And we don't know where she is to ask her."
"I rather think," Maxim said, "that I do. But if I do, then so does Greyfriars."
It was past midnight. Whitehall was still brightly lit, still empty. The ministerial palaces on either side wore, for once, a stark blue-rinsed beauty, with fringes of snow on their cornices where they reached up almost out of the light.
"Sometimes this town remembers its past," Agnes said, huddling in her sheepskin and breathing like a dragon. She began to quote: "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!"
"When I first joined the Army," Maxim said, "most suicides happened in the lavatories. I suppose it was the only place the poor kids could get any real privacy."
She stopped dead and stared at him. "Bloody flaming hell's fire. Did you hear one word of what I said?"
"It's Wordsworth, isn't it? The one about Westminster Bridge."
They walked for a while in silence, then Maxim asked: "D'you want a lift anywhere?"
"No thanks. I'll drop in at one of our offices around the corner. I want to know if they've turned up anything more."
But she wasn't in any hurry, and it was a rare privilege to have the centre of London to yourself. They drifted past Maxim's car and instinctively headed for Westminster Bridge.
"Where do you get a handle like Maxim?" Agnes asked. "Are you descended from the restaurant or the machine-gun?"
"Neither, I'm afraid. But it's supposed to be a French Huguenot name, so perhaps we're all umpteenth cousins."
"I should try and inherit the restaurant; the patents on the gun must have run out years ago. You don't come of an Army family?"
"I'm the first, as far as I know. My father tried to join up in '39, but he was a skilled tool-maker by then, a reserved occupation… I think he's always felt bad about not having Done His Bit. His father had been in the Navy in the First War. No-" he shook his head as she was about to ask something. "He didn't push me into it. He doesn't have a very high opinion of Army officers in peace-time. He'd rather I was doing something useful for exports."
Agnes gave a sympathetic grunt.
They came out of Bridge Street below Big Ben into the blast of Siberian air funnelled up the Thames, and scurried across the road to the bridge.
"And how did a nice girl – and all that?" Maxim asked.
She thought about it. "I don't know if I was pushed or just fell. I was reading Modern Languages at Oxford and I hadn't got much idea of what I wanted to do afterwards, and one of the dons suggested I might pop down to London and have lunch with an old friend of hers.. so you do that, and gradually you begin to realise what they're talking about. It sounded more interesting than translating French comic books for a publisher, so…"
"Why you?"
"My father was a civil servant all his life, mostly at Agriculture or the Home Office. The head-hunters at universities look for sons and daughters of people like him – my sister was at Defence until she married, and my young brother's in the Treasury. We're supposed to have a bred-in sense of duty and patriotism. I suppose we do – for a time."
Maxim scooped crusted snow off the bridge parapet, waited until his bare hands had melted it into a ball, then threw it into the swirling water below. There was no 'glideth' about the Thames tonight.
"What happens after that?" he asked, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets.
"What happened to you?"
"I asked first."
"So you did." She folded her arms on the parapet and stared down river, against the wind. "I suppose it was because I'd taken the Queen's shilling. And she always seems to want thirteen pence in change. Maybe I should have held out for fourteen pence, like our dearly beloved Rex Masson."
Maxim didn't say anything to that, so she asked: "And what about you, now?"
"I don't know…"
"That's a good start."
He grinned and made a useless attempt to stop his hair blowing in all directions. At least in uniform you wore a hat… "I just wonder now if anybody joins the Army they thought they were joining. A few generals and sergeant-majors, probably, and the odd one like David Stirling or Popski and Tyler. For the rest of us.. there's always enough small issues to keep you busy.
Maybe it's only when you get to Whitehall that you begin to wonder about the big picture – even about whether there is a big picture. Perhaps I let Je-, my wife, do too much of the thinking for me."
"I heard about her." Agnes didn't say any more.
"You weren't married?"
"No." She paused. "I'm not in a nine-to-five job. The big picture is that there's a war on. Or at least you have to believe there is." She swung around and pecked him on the cheek. "G'night, ahr 'Arry."
He watched her walk briskly back across the bridge, then followed more slowly.
19
›From the air, Ireland was an opaque stained-glass window of delicate greens and browns, the hedges and walls making strong lines of shadow in the low afternoon sun. Then a glance of the soft feminine shapes of the western mountains, with only a dusting of snow on their northern slopes, and the Boeing 737 slammed down on Shannon's wet runway.
"Are you commercial?" the girl at the hotel desk asked. Maxim just stared, wondering what the answer should be, before asking what sh
e meant.
"Well, we find…" she was suddenly rather embarrassed, "… that the commercial gentlemen don't usually want a bath. A bathroom, by that I mean. We don't have any rooms left with bathrooms."
"Let's say I'm commercial."
Maxim grinned to himself as he unpacked, then deliberately went and wallowed – free – in a deep tub in the communal bathroom down the corridor. The flight had been two hours late since Heathrow still hadn't got itself defrosted properly, and his job in Ireland could only be done in working hours. It had also been a cold fifteen miles from Shannon to Limerick, the only car left for hire at the airport being an Escort with a busted heater.
He had booked nothing in advance, getting the air ticket at the last moment. The name Maxim hadn't gone ahead of him – they hoped.
"Once you're on that plane, you're out of the United Kingdom," George warned him, quite unnecessarily.
"Most of the serious soldiering I've done has been outside the UK."
"If you do any serious soldiering in the Irish Republic, you needn't bother coming home again. You haven't got that pistol with you, I hope and trust but don't really believe?"
"No." All he had was a totally illegal flick-knife in among his shaving gear. He wasn't sure how illegal it was in Ireland, but assumed it must be.
He walked the damp drabness of O'Connell street until he found a telephone box, and rang a London number Agnes had given him. All he said was: "H at hotel number one."
A man's voice said: "Right," and rang off. George would be told that he'd got in at the first hotel on their list.
Then he rang a number up in the Silvermine Mountains, twenty miles north, and made an appointment for nine-thirty the next morning. The man at the other end was very willing but played his part like the first read-through at a church hall dramatic society. Maxim hurried back through the drizzle grinning wryly to himself. The poor put-upon bastard. Being an old chum of George's and owning a retreat in the right part of Ireland could suddenly become a nervous hazard, particularly since they couldn't tell him what it was all about.
Maxim had vaguely expected a run-down castle. What he got was a run-down cottage. It sat in a field ringed with walls that were just lines of dark stones piled together, and at some time it must have burned down. But long ago, because now the remaining roof timbers were almost smothered by some climbing evergreen, making a green thatch above the empty window-frames. In good weather it would be the perfect meeting-place for lovers from a bad historical novel. Now it seemed like a mistake in map-reading.
But there was a nearly new silver-grey BMW saloon parked in the yard behind, and an unseen wing of the cottage had been restored, slate roof, double glazed windows and all. Jonathan St. John Rafford hurried out and snatched open the door of the Escort.
"My God, isn't the weather awful? Get yourself inside." He scampered away again. Maxim picked up his briefcase and followed. The restored rooms were warm, bright, cosy, with books jammed into every space.
Rafford was pouring coffee. "Black? Do you take sugar?" He was a few years older than Maxim but still trying to be twenty-six. He wore very tight faded jeans with his tummy bulging over them, and a rough-knit fisherman's sweater. His face was slightly puffy, with a sharp aristocratic nose and long dark hair that he had to keep sweeping out of his eyes with an elaborate gesture.
He wrote, so George had said, very sensitive biographies of minor but well-born European politicans.
"Aren't you having any?" Maxim asked. There was only one cup poured.
"No, no, I'll be away. There's the phone, and I've put out the directory. You did want the Yellow Pages as well?"
"Thank you. If you ever have to explain why I was here, and we don't think you will, it was to look over this property in case you'd let George and me buy into it, as a shared holiday home."
"Actually," Rafford said thoughtfully, "that might not be a bad idea."
"Oh Lord."
"I'm terribly sorry." He really looked it. "No, what I meant was: I spurn your offer, after due consideration, as being far below the market value. Is that better?"
"Much."
Rafford picked up a worn duffle coat, turned to the door, then turned back. "This is absolutely nothing to do with North and South, is it?"
"It's nothing to do with Ireland at all," Maxim said firmly.
"Oh, that's fine. Help yourself to anything you can find in the kitchen or the drinks and…" he smiled boyishly; "… just look the property over."
Maxim sipped coffee until the BMW had growled away, then sat down at a telephone which wasn't in a call box and didn't go through a hotel switchboard, and started on the first of a long list of numbers.
He began with what were, or might be, Mrs Jackaman's relatives; Brennans were very thick on the ground in south-western Ireland. Maxim was a London estate agent who only wanted to know who was handling the sale of the English house because he might have a client; did they know where he could contact Mrs Jackaman, nйe Mary Brennan? No fish bit on that one, though once he thought he sensed a nibble. He underlined the name.
Then he became a furrier and tried the bigger shops of Limerick, Ennis, Nenagh and Killaloe: did Mrs Jackaman have an account with them? – she'd left Britain after ordering this fur jacket and said she'd send her Irish address when she had one, but… Nothing.
After nearly two hours, he got up and walked around the room, shaking the creases out of himself and rubbing his dialling hand. For the first time in his life he felt some sympathy for journalists who must spend whole days doing this sort of thing, carefully sifting through pan after pan of gold to discover one speck of dirt.
He made another pot of coffee and sat down to try the long shots. They'd wondered about the doctors and lawyers, but decided not – not yet, anyway. Those would be professionally secretive and suspicious; you weren't speaking to some dumb blonde in Accounts.
"You're a Citroen agent, I think?"
"We are that. Can I help you?"
"I hope so. I was talking to a Mrs Mary Jackaman some time ago and she asked me to get her a couple of fog-lamps for her Citroen GS when I was next over in France, so I did that-"
"Why should she ask that? I could have got them for her meself, easy."
"No idea. But she does come to your garage?"
"We've had her car in here, sure."
Crunch. The fish had bitten. Now slowly, Harry, slowly.
"Oh good. I just don't know how to get them to her. She hadn't got a proper address there when I last saw her. Should I drop them off on you? I'll be down that way early next week."
"Surely you can." Maxim held his breath. "She's living in a houseboat on the Lough, up beyond Ballina. But you leave them with me any time, we're a deal easier to find. Did I have your name?"
"John Rhodes, from Bristol. Thanks for your trouble. I'll be seeing you."
Maxim put the phone down very carefully and unclenched his hand from around it. The fingers were white. Funny: he'd never have gripped a weapon that fiercely.
20
On the way, he stopped at a tiny village grocer's and bought himself a rough picnic: cheese triangles, potted meat, biscuits and a couple of tins of beer. He didn't want to show his face in any restaurant or bar around there. Then, once he had passed Ballina, he worked carefully up the east side of the Lough, snooping down every side road or track that could possibly lead to a boat. It took time and the drizzle turned to rain. He wished he'd thought of going up the far side of the Lough, where the road ran right along the shore, and using his field glasses. There couldn't be many houseboats around at this time of the year. Then he saw the Citroen, parked beside a gate in a field that stretched down to the water.
It might have been converted from one of the vast range of small landing craft sold off after the war. There had been dozens of different types, but all of them looking like half-sunken shoeboxes, and a lot had ended up as houseboats or small ferries. This one had a tall, split-level cabin built atop it, with wide windows and the
ir inevitable net curtains, and even a window-box under each one. It was old and needed painting, but it still had a certain spartan strength. High as the cabin was, the wind might blow it over but wouldn't blow it to pieces, He walked over a creaking gangplank that was as good a warning as any barking dog, and stepped down into a tiny cockpit. There was a small steering-wheel on the cabin wall and a slot for an outboard motor at the back. Or did you say 'stern' for houseboats?
After a moment, he tapped lightly on the cabin door, where the varnish was peeling off in long thin scabs. Nothing happened for a minute, then there was a scuffle and a clang, and more silence.
Then a woman asked: "Who is it, then?"
Maxim took the chance. "I'm Major Harry Maxim, British Army, and I work in Number 10 Downing Street."
A pause. "Why don't you bugger off back there, then?"
"We traced you, Mrs Jackaman, because a Czech defector told me where to look. They won't be long, if they aren't here already."
"Just suppose I went down and told the boys in the bar that the British Army's invading Lough Derg?"
"I don't know, Mrs Jackaman. I don't know what'll happen when the other side gets here, either."
Another pause. "I might be more interested in seeing them than you buggers." Her voice, if not her language, was very pure and precise, as if she'd once taken elocution lessons.
"Then why are you hiding out here?"
"Bugger off."
"I'll be in my car in the lane."
He walked back across the gangplank, feeling her stare piercing his back, and up the soaking field to the lane. In the car, he turned on his pocket radio and started to eat the cheese and potted meat. At some time, the Escort's steering-wheel had been taken off and put back ninety degrees wrong, so that the plaque in the centre read F O R D He daren't tell George that; he'd say it was Very Irish, when it wasn't, it was Very Garage. He cut and spread the food with the illegal flick-knife, then wiped it carefully clean and put it back in his trouser pocket.
After twenty minutes she trudged up the field. He got out politely and waited.