Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “Are they though?” said Brock softly, and for a moment everything stopped, for this was a subject dear to Brock’s heart.

  “There’s this ex-girlfriend of Fidelio’s cook,” Derek said. “Freakedout English sculptress, Cheltenham Ladies College, three needles a day and living with a bunch of lowlife in a commune out on the headland. Drops into the Driftwood to collect her junk.”

  “She’s got this little boy, Nat,” Aggie cut in again, while Derek scowled and colored. “Zach, his name is. He’s hell in bare feet, believe me. The commune kids, they all run wild, hustling flowers to the tourists and draining the petrol out of their cars while they’re away taking a look at the Ottoman fort. So Zach, he’s up in the mountains among the goats doing God knows what with a bunch of Kurdish kids, when a whole convoy of limousines and jeeps pulls up below them and the fellows all get out and act a scene from a gangster movie.” She broke off as if expecting to be challenged, but neither Derek nor Brock spoke. “One man gets shot while the rest of the gang film him. When they’ve killed him, they throw him in a jeep and drive down the hill and away into town. Zach says it was just great. Blood like real blood and everything.”

  Brock’s pale gaze was straining across the bay. Billows of white cloud rose behind the cockscomb ridges. Buzzards circled in the shimmering heat.

  “And deposited him in a dinghy with an empty whisky bottle,” he said, completing her story for her. “Lucky they didn’t do the same to Zach. Anyone live up there apart from goats?”

  “Rocks and more rocks,” said Derek. “Beehives. Lot of tire marks.”

  Brock’s head turned until his eyes were feasting thoughtfully on Derek’s and his good smile seemed cast in iron. “I thought I told you not to go up there, young Derek.”

  “Fidelio’s trying to flog me his old Harley-Davidson. He let me try it for an hour.”

  “So you tried it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And disobeyed orders.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you see, young Derek?”

  “Car tracks, jeep tracks, footprints. Lot of dried blood. No attempt to clear up. Why bother to sweep everything under the carpet when you own the mayor and the police chief? And this.”

  He dropped it into Brock’s waiting hands: one scrumpled bunch of cellophane with the words VIDEO—8/60 PRINTED IN REPEAT.

  “You get out of here tonight,” Brock ordered when he had spread the cellophane on his knee. “The both of you. There’s a six P.M. charter from Izmir. They’re holding a couple of seats for you— and Derek.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “On this occasion, in the eternal struggle between initiative and obedience, initiative paid off. Which makes you a very lucky young man, doesn’t it, Derek?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Estranged from each other in all but their work, Derek and Aggie returned to their attic at the Driftwood and packed their kit bags. While Derek went downstairs to pay the bill, Aggie shook out their sleeping bags and gave the room a tidy. She washed the remaining cups and saucers and put them away, wiped down the hand basin and opened the windows. Her father was a Scottish schoolmaster, her mother a general practitioner and visiting angel of the poorer Glasgow suburbs. Both had notions of decency that went beyond the ordinary. Her ministrations completed, Aggie trotted after Derek to the jeep and they set off at speed along the winding coast road to Izmir, Derek driving with an air of injured manhood and Aggie watching the hairpin bends, the valley beneath them and the clock. Derek, still smoldering from Brock’s rebuke, was silently vowing he would resign the Service as soon as he got home, and qualify as a solicitor if it killed him. It was an oath he took once a month at least, usually after a couple of pints in the canteen. But Aggie, on a different tack entirely, was torturing herself with memories of the child Zach. She was remembering how she’d picked him up the day he came trotting into the taverna with his money to bargain for an ice—I pulled him, for God’s sake!—how she had danced with him, skimmed stones with him on the beach and sat with him on the seawall while he fished, one arm round his shoulder in case he slipped. And she wondered what she thought of herself, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of her parents, worming secrets out of a kid of seven who believed she was the woman of his life.

  4

  Perched like a royal coachman at the wheel of his overpolished Rover, Arthur Toogood drove at a stately pace down the winding hill into town while Oliver followed him in his van.

  “What’s all the fuss about?” Oliver had asked in the Salvation Army forecourt as Toogood helpfully handed up the wrong box.

  “There’s no fuss, Ollie, that’s not the tone at all,” Toogood had retorted. “It’s the searchlight. It can happen to anyone,” he insisted, handing up the right one.

  “What searchlight?”

  “The beam that comes round, takes a look at us, finds no fault and passes on,” Toogood had said heatedly, already dismissive of his own metaphor. “It’s totally random. Nothing personal at all. Forget about it.”

  “What’s it examining us for?”

  “Trusts, as it happens. They’re doing trusts this month. Trusts corporate, charitable, family, offshore. Next month it will be securities, or short-term loans, or some other branch of business.”

  “Carmen’s trust?”

  “Among others, many others, yes. What we call a nonaggressive dawn raid. They choose a branch, look at the numbers, ask some questions, move on. Routine.”

  “Why are they interested in Carmen’s trust suddenly?”

  Toogood had by now become thoroughly cross with being questioned. “It’s not just Carmen’s. It’s all trusts. They’re doing a general inspection of trusts.”

  “Why are they doing it in the middle of the night?” Oliver had persisted.

  They parked in the bank’s cramped backyard. Intruder lights beat down on them. Three steps led to a steel rear door. Toogood crooked a finger to type the entry code, changed his mind and made an impulsive grab for Oliver’s left biceps.

  “Ollie.”

  Oliver shook his arm free. “What?”

  “Are you—were you—expecting any movement on Carmen’s account? Recently, say, over the last few months—in the near future, for instance?”

  “Movement?”

  “Monies in or out. Never mind what movement. Action.”

  “Why should I be? We’re both trustees. You know what I know. What’s happened? Have you been playing games?”

  “No, of course not! We’re on the same side in this. And you haven’t—you’ve had no advance notice of anything? Independently? Privately? From anyone? You’re aware of no other factor affecting the trust’s position—as of recent date?”

  “Not a dickie bird.”

  “Good. Perfect. Stay that way. Be exactly who you are. A child’s magician. Not a dickie bird.” Toogood’s eyes gleamed greedily under the brim of his hat. “When they ask you their routine questions, say exactly what you just said to me. You’re her father, you’re a trustee, as I am, bound to do your duty.” He typed a number. The door buzzed and opened. “They’re Pode and Lanxon from Bishopsgate,” he confided, willing Oliver ahead of him into a steel gray corridor with strip lights. “Pode’s small but he’s big. Big in the bank. Lanxon’s more your type. Heavy fellow. No, no, no, on you go, youth before beauty, or whatever they say.”

  It was a starry sky, Oliver noticed before the door closed on them. A pink moon hung above him, cut to pieces by the razor wire coiled along the courtyard wall. Two men sat at a conference table in the window bay of Toogood’s office, both worried about their hair. Pode, small but big in the bank, was tweedy with rimless bifocals, and his exiguous hair was drawn over his scalp in tramlines all starting from the same side of his head. Lanxon, the heavy fellow, was an old boy of somewhere, with budlike ears and a tie adorned with golf clubs, and a news announcer’s wig of brown wire wool.

  “You took some finding then, Mr. Hawthorne,” said Pode, not altogether playfully. “A
rthur’s been chasing round town after you like a man demented, haven’t you, Arthur?”

  “My pipe bother you?” Lanxon asked. “Sure not? Take your coat off, Mr. Hawthorne. Chuck it over there.”

  Oliver removed his beret but not his coat. He sat down. A strained silence followed while Pode fiddled with papers and Lanxon gardened at his pipe, gouging sodden tobacco onto an ashtray. White blinds, Oliver recorded glumly. White walls. White lights. This is where banks go at night.

  “Mind if we call you Ollie?” Pode asked.

  “Whatever.”

  “It’s Reg and Walter—never Wally, if you don’t mind,” said Lanxon. “He’s Reg.” The silence came back. “And I’m Walter,” he added for a laugh he didn’t get.

  “And he’s Walter,” Pode confirmed, and all three men smiled awkwardly—on Oliver, then on one another.

  You should have gray silky side-whiskers, Oliver thought, and purple noses tweaked with frost. You should have turnip watches inside your topcoats, instead of ballpoint pens. Pode held a pad of yellow legal paper in his hand. Scribbles in more than one hand-writing, Oliver noticed. Columns of dates and numbers. But Pode wasn’t doing the talking. Lanxon was. Ponderously, through his pipe smoke. He would jump straight in, he said. No point in beating about the bush.

  “My particular bailiwick for my sins is bank security, Ollie. What we call compliance. That’s everything from the night watchman who’s been walloped on the nut to money laundering to the teller who is subsidizing his salary from the cash drawer.” Still no one laughed. “And, as you will have gathered from Arthur here, trusts.” He took a suck of his pipe. It was of the short-barreled variety. In his childhood, Oliver remembered, he had had one not unlike it, made of china clay, for blowing bubbles in the bath. “Tell us something, Ollie. Who’s Mr. Crouch when he’s at home?”

  An abstraction, Brock had replied when Oliver had asked him the same question. We thought of calling him John Doe but it’s been done.

  “He’s a friend of my family’s,” Oliver said to the beret on his lap. Dull, Brock had dinned into him. Stay with dull. Don’t turn up the lights. Us coppers like dull.

  “Oh yes?” said Lanxon, all puzzled innocence. “What sort of friend, I wonder, Ollie?”

  “He lives in the West Indies,” Oliver said, as if that defined the friendship.

  “Oh yes? A black gentleman, then, I dare say?”

  “Not as far as I know. He just lives there.”

  “Where, for instance?”

  “Antigua. It’s in the file.”

  Mistake. Don’t make him look a fool. Better to look one yourself. Stay with dull.

  “Nice bloke? Like him?” said Lanxon, eyebrows raised high in encouragement.

  “I never met him. He communicates through solicitors in London.”

  Lanxon frowns and smiles at the same time, indicating reluctant doubt. Puffs at pipe for solace. No soap bubbles appear. Makes rictal grimace which among pipe smokers passes for a smile. “You never met him, but he made a personal gift to your daughter Carmen’s trust of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. By way of his London solicitors,” he suggested through a noxious cloud of smoke.

  It’s approved, says Brock. In a pub. In a car. Walking in a wood. Don’t be a fool. It’s signed for. Oliver refuses to be swayed. He has refused all day. I don’t care whether it’s approved or not. It’s not approved by me.

  “Don’t you find that a somewhat unusual way to carry on?” Lanxon was inquiring.

  “What way?”

  “To make such a large financial gift to the daughter of somebody you never met. Through solicitors.”

  “Crouch is a rich man,” Oliver said. “He’s a distant relative, some kind of cousin removed. He appointed himself Carmen’s guardian angel.”

  “What we call the vague uncle syndrome, then,” said Lanxon, and directed a smirk of heavy portent at Pode and then at Toogood.

  But Toogood took umbrage at this. “It’s not a syndrome of any shape or kind! It’s a perfectly normal banking practice. A rich man, a friend of the family, appointing himself a child’s guardian angel—that is a syndrome, I grant you. And a very normal one,” he ended triumphantly, contradicting himself at every turn, yet carrying his point. “Am I not right, Reg?”

  But little Pode who was big in the bank was too absorbed in his yellow pad to answer. He had found another angle for it, one less amenable to Oliver’s line of sight, and he was questioning it earnestly through his bifocals while the reading lamp made his striped pate glisten.

  “Ollie,” said Pode quietly. His voice was thin and circumspect, a rapier to Lanxon’s bludgeon.

  “What is it?” said Oliver.

  “Let’s go over this from the start, can we?”

  “Go over what?”

  “Just bear with me, please. I’d like to begin on the day of the trust’s birth and reason forward, if you don’t mind, Ollie. I’m a technician. Interested in antecedents and modus operandi. Will you bear with me?” Oliver the dullard gave a shrug of acquiescence. “According to our records you came to see Arthur here in this very room by prior appointment eighteen months ago almost to the day, and one week exactly after Carmen’s birth. Correct?”

  “Correct.” Dull as mud.

  “You had been a customer of the bank for six months. And you had recently moved into the area after a period of residence abroad—where was that now, I forget?”

  Ever been to Australia at all? Brock is asking. Never, Oliver replies. Good. Because that’s where you’ve been for the last four years.

  “Australia,” said Oliver.

  “Where you had been—what?”

  “Drifting. Sheep stations. Serving fried chicken in cafés. Whatever came along.”

  “You weren’t into your magic, then? Not in those days?”

  “No.”

  “And you had been nonresident in the U.K. for tax purposes— for how long, by the time you returned?”

  We’re disappearing you from Inland Revenue records, Brock had said. You resurface as Hawthorne, resident on return from Australia.

  “Three years. Four,” Oliver replied, correcting himself for extra dullness. “More like four.”

  “So when you went to Arthur you were by then U.K. tax-resident but self-employed. As a magician. Married.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Arthur gave you a cup of tea, I expect, did you, Arthur?” A burst of hilarity to remind us how much bankers love the human touch, whatever tough decisions they are obliged to take.

  “He hadn’t got enough in his account,” Toogood rejoined, to show how human he was too.

  “It’s the antecedents I’m after, you see, Ollie,” Pode explained. “You told Arthur that you wanted to put some money in trust, right? For Carmen.”

  “Right.”

  “And Arthur here said—reasonably enough, assuming you were talking of a modest sum—why not just go for National Savings or a building society or an endowment policy? Why go through all the palaver of a formal legal trust? Correct, Ollie?”

  Carmen is six hours old. Oliver stands in one of the old red phone boxes that the councilors of Abbots Quay have insisted on preserving for the pleasure of our foreign visitors. Tears of joy and relief stream down his face. I’ve changed my mind, he tells Brock between chokes. I’ll take the money. Nothing’s too good for her. The house for Heather and whatever’s left for Carmen. Just as long as it’s nothing for me, I’ll take it. Is that corruption, Nat? It’s fatherhood, says Brock.

  “Correct,” Oliver agreed.

  “You were adamant that it had to be a trust, I see.” The yellow page again. “A full-blown trust.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was your position. You wanted to lock up this sum of money for Carmen and throw away the key, you told Arthur— you’re a great note taker, Arthur, I’ll give you that—you wanted to be sure that, whatever became of you, or of Heather or anybody else, Carmen would have her nest egg.”

  “Yes.”


  “There in trust. Out of reach. Waiting for her when she grew to woman’s estate, got married or whatever young ladies will be doing by the time she reaches the ripe age of twenty-five.”

  “Yes.”

  Fussy adjustment to bifocals. Churchy pursing of lips. Two fingertips to coax a tramline of black hair back into position. Resume. “And you had been advised—or so you told Arthur here—that it was possible to open a trust with a nominal amount and add to this amount whenever you or anybody else felt flush.”

  An itch had formed on the tip of Oliver’s nose. He rubbed it fervently with his big palm, fingers upward. “Yes.”

  “So who gave you that advice, Ollie? Who or what prompted you to come to Arthur that day, one week after Carmen had been born, and say, ‘I want to open a trust’? Specifically a trust. And talk quite knowledgeably on the subject too, according to Arthur’s memo here.”

  “Crouch.”

  “Our same Mr. Geoffrey Crouch? Residing in Antigua and contactable through his London solicitors? It was Crouch who gave you the original advice to set up a proper legal trust for Carmen.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “By letter.”

  “From Crouch personally?”

  “From his solicitors.”

  “His London solicitors, or solicitors in Antigua?”

  “I don’t remember. The letter’s on file, or it should be. I gave everything relevant to Arthur at the time.”

  “Who duly filed it,” Toogood confirmed with satisfaction.

  Pode was consulting his yellow page. “Messrs. Dorkin & Woolley, a reputable City firm. Mr. Peter Dorkin has Mr. Crouch’s power of attorney.”

  Oliver decided to show a little temperament. Dull temperament. “Then why did you ask?”

  “Just checking the antecedents, Ollie. Just making sure.”

  “Is it illegal or something?”

  “Is what illegal?”

  “Her trust. What’s been done. The antecedents. Is it illegal?”