The Crocus List

by Gavin Lyall

  17

  As far as Maxim could see, nobody followed George through the fading damp light back to Albany, although there was no way to be sure and less way of knowing if he was followed himself, not over such a short and crowded distance. He caught George up at the porter's lodge and they walked together up the Ropewalk.

  "Security here could be good," Maxim said tentatively.

  "Apart from once having a porter who was a burglar, I think it is. The back gate's kept closed these days, so there's only the one way in and I have to tell the porter the name of anybody who's coming-you know that."

  "Even when you're throwing a big party?"

  "Well, not then, no, just to warn him I'm expecting guests… I see what you mean." It takes only one leak to sink a ship, one gate to let in a Trojan horse. George was frowning in thought as they clattered up the prison-like stone steps to his set.

  Annette greeted George with cheery concern and Maxim with, he thought, some coolness behind the immediate offer of dinner. Suddenly he could imagine George on the Sunday after that Saturday evening at the cottage, exhausted by nightmares, pacing the rooms and jumping whenever the phone rang. As a good wife, Annette would have blamed it, whateverilwas, on Maxim. Rightly so, he thought sadly, and I'm going to make it worse.

  He said: "Thank you, no, I'm just picking up a book George promised me."

  "And a quick jar," George called from the cloakroom. "Go on in, Harry, help yourself, you know where."

  "I'll get some ice." Annette vanished.

  Alone in the big drawing-room, where Annette's choice of bright fabrics had fought hardest, albeit still without winning, against her dead in-laws' passion for dark-panelled gloom, Maxim went straight to the telephone. It was the same old-fashioned type as Miss Tuckey's, and he unscrewed the mouthpiece carefully but found nothing extra inside. Looking around, he remembered it was difficult to plant bugs actually inside panelling, but even his half-trained eye could see that the elaborate cornices and mouldings gave a myriad opportunities to a good wire man.

  Annette came back, shining with suspicious goodwill. "You haven't got yourself anything yet, Harry. It's usually Scotch, isn't it? Water and ice?"

  He took the glass, although he disliked iced drinks after the brief British summer, and asked: "Had a busy day?"

  She ignored that. Glancing over her shoulder, she whispered: "Whathappened on Saturday night? George came in looking likedeath. Can you tell me what it was?"

  "Misunderstanding, all cleared up now," he said, and her look told him how much use that reply had been.

  "Isee," she said, smiling lopsidedly. "Youare getting into our little Whitehall ways, Harry. Oh well," gaily now, "these things blow over. Have I had a busy day? I made it seem like one. I got out to the shops this afternoon, and have you noticed they're into Christmasalready? Two and a half months ahead. The Americans do it much better, having Thanksgiving to space it out so they only have a month of Christmas, though they do seem to let their elections creep back, just as we do with football…"

  George bustled in, rubbing his hands. "A drink, a drink, my kingdom for…" He gave Annette a piece of paper and put his finger to his lips. Annette stared, but took it silently while George clanked and prattled over the tray of bottles. "Had a good day, sweetie? Harry, the book, I was forgetting, it's over there…"He pointed to a rack of video tapes. "Dig it out for yourself, will you? It's quite good on D'Urbino and Speckle particularly, if you were ever thinking of going back to that monograph."

  "One of these days, when I've got the time." Maxim found the tape of the Abbey shooting. Annette passed the paper back to George, her eyes wide.

  "Of course, what I'm really interested in," Maxim went on, "is where D'Urbino gothis ideas from." He looked at the paper George held out. "Was he really the innovator they make out? I'm not trying to run him down, but…"

  He read: The place could be bugged. Did anybody get in here today?

  Annette had written: Somebody lost his u/ay going to a lunch party at the Metcalfes', but I didn't let him in. I was out for 2 hours from about 2.30.

  Still talking about the designer of Antwerp's city walls, Maxim reached and scribbled: Exploration, then penetration.

  "I've got an idea," George said. "Why don't we take Harry out to dinner at the club? As long as he stops talking fortresses. Or we can get that over with while you change -right?"

  With silent frightened eyes, Annette went to the bedroom.

  Theclichéimage of London clubs being full of government officials muttering Top Secrets over the cold steak-and-kidney pie had, Maxim was coming to see, not only a lot of truth but also a lot of sense. The essence of a club is that it is select and private; you cannot be followed in there. A club servant might be taking Moscow gold, so perhaps one should not share secrets with them, and so might another club member-but since he is likely to be a government official as well, you already have a far bigger problem than just his being a member of your club. As to planting electronic bugs, you would need an ant colony of them and an army of listeners before you could be reasonably sure of covering every room in London where George Harbinger might whisper an indiscretion.

  "I'll put in a request for them to check out Albany," George grumbled, "but it takes months to get them to do your office, never mind your home. I've been trying to get routine security stepped up, but you come right up against the lords of the wallet: who's going to pay for it? I've got another meeting tomorrow, but…"

  "George, are they really doing this to us?" Annette demanded. "In our own home? It's absolutely hateful."

  "There's a war on. Orthey are determined there should be."

  "But why now? You're not even in Downing Street any more." She glanced quickly at Maxim, then back to George. "Or is this something to do with last Saturday?"

  George shivered. "Let's say it could be."

  "Oh." She stared into the dregs of her gin and tonic. "If that was all to do withthem, I don't mind so much. That's a bit silly, isn't it? I just thought it might be something, well, personal and rather awful. But I expect you'll tell me, one of these days."

  "One of these days," George promised, and they smiled quickly at each other,. isolating Maxim in a twinge of envy. People who have been married, apparently happily, for a long time can make you feel an outsider with just one private glance.

  George went to make sure there was a table for dinner; Annette said: "I'm so sorry I acted the way I did with you… somehow I'd got to blaming you, you know how it is…"

  "It could have been my fault. Some of it."

  "No, I'm sure you were doing your best." With a sharp memory of the darkened cottage, Maxim wondered: my best? My most direct, but perhaps not my best. "I do trust George completely," Annette went on, "I just have to, with his work and so much he can't tell me, but when he came back in that state, I just couldn't help… I don't know if I was thinking about Another Woman, but if George was being blackmailed about something like… and he'd taken you along because you were tough and… you see the silly fantasies I get into when I'm alone?"

  "It was nothing like that," Maxim said with huge relief.

  "I suppose I read too many thrillers, but in the end I'd convinced myself you'd got too tough and killed somebody and George was mixed up in that!" She laughed cheerily.

  "Ha, ha," Maxim agreed feebly.

  Back at the Barracks, Maxim had to wait until after midnight before he had the officers' mess video machine to himself. He ran through the sequence of the shots, listening carefully and timing the spacing with the seconds hand of his watch. Then he picked up a long poker from the fireplace and held it like a rifle when he played the tape again. At each shot he jerked the 'rifle' up, as the recoil would kick it, then re-aimed as fast as he could.

  "So you've finally lost your last marble," a voice said from the far end of the room. It was the duty officer, prowling with a cup of tea in his hand. Shamefaced, Maxim twirled the poker casually.

  "It's that SAStraining," the dut
y officer went on. "Learning to live on seaweed and beetles. Bound to have an effect. Can I help by uttering a strangled cry and falling at your feet? Anything for one of the Army'sélite."

  "Piss off," Maxim suggested.

  "Or have I stumbled on the trials of the Regiment's new secret weapon? Fear not, my lips are sealed. Gad, I never realised what Total War really meant until this moment…"

  Maxim left him cackling and slopping his tea with mirth. In his room he unpacked the little portable typewriter that had once been Jenny's, and stared at a blank paper until his embarrassment had faded. Then he began to tap: 'I. The range from the firing point to where the rounds impacted was between 35 metres (the shot that hit Barling) and 30 metres (the ones that hit the pillar)…'

  Twenty minutes later he had reached paragraph 9 when a voice from the next room told him that if he were typing anything other than his bloody resignation he should bloody well do it at a more civilised bloody hour. It sounded a senior voice; Maxim went to bed.

  18

  "All very competent," George said, "though I don't find any significance in the intervals between the shots-but what does it all prove?"

  "That they wanted to kill Barling. Himself. Not just smear the KGB by making them seem callously careless in their shooting. The pause after the first shot, making sure they'd killed him, which isn't easy to do with a heart shot, but they couldn't go for the head because the sight line wouldn't fit with shooting at the President's head-"

  "Harry, please." George put his head in his hands. "Anything you say, except just don't say it this early in the day."

  "Why Barling?" Maxim asked bluntly.

  George waved a hand vaguely. "He was an expert on Russian affairs-as much of an expert as MPs get to be on anything-and they made him a junior minister to add credibility to their soft-line policy. He couldn't speak against that policy once he'd accepted a government post. "

  "Where did he stand on Berlin?"

  "Why Berlin?" George asked suspiciously.

  "Miss Tuckey told us to look for a narrow objective within a broader attack. Berlin seems the most immediate. Are we going to demilitarise our Zone there?"

  "This is not your concern, Harry."

  "The government can give one of two answers to the Russians: we'll talk about Berlin, or we won't talk. After two months we haven't said we won't talk. What the hell sort of secret d'you think you're keeping? The time and place of the talks, I'd say."

  "I don't know about that," George grumped.

  "Then I hope these people don't know, either, although they seem to know a lot. They smeared Ettington, they drugged Westerman, they killed Barling: I call that escalation. I think they're getting desperate, and Berlin seemsthe likeliest cause. We can't defend on a broad front, George, not just two of us. We have to find the next point of attack and be there first."

  "I do hate this remorseless military logic, particularly when-as usual-it is based on an incomplete knowledge of the facts."

  "Any general would like to postpone his battles for forty years until the historians can tell him what to do. But he's usually short of time as well as information, same as us. What difference could Barling's death make to Berlin?"

  George sighed. "1 may just be able to tell you after his funeral."

  "Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God…"

  "Romans 8," Sprague whispered. "I believe Barling was quite a devout man. By Parliamentary standards."

  "Quite," George said, as the coffin wobbled past his ear. "And we haven't had anything tactless about the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, since your Committee hasn't apportioned the blame yet. Book of Job, I believe."

  "One, possibly verse twenty-one," Sprague topped him easily.

  The coffin reached the catafalque as the minister finished his intonation: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions."

  "And doctrinally at least," Sprague murmured as they sat down, "the Church of England has a seat by the fire in every one."

  The crematorium chapel was a large, modern redbrick structure with pews varnished to a garish yellow. It was crowded, despite its size, for Mrs Barling had made no effort to keep it private, and there were TV crews on the driveway outside. A lady, George thought sombrely, with a fine appreciation of the politicalrimescale: comethe inevitable memorial service in three weeks' time, people would already be asking 'Barling? Who was he? Oh yes, him.'

  "I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me," the minister droned, his voice thin in the unfamiliar acoustics. "My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue…"

  "I do believe that the widow Barling," Sprague whispered, "is trying to tell us something. She must have chosen this psalm. Why not the dear old 23rd?-at least a decent bit of poetry. But of course he never did speak with his tongue, nor ever would have done if he wanted to hang on to his job. They almost never do… is this the moment, George, to tell you something of uttermost Top Secrecy?"

  "… and verily every man living is altogether vanity," the minister went on.

  "Something the Committee has not yetquite decided," Sprague murmured, thumbing through his hymn book, "but I believe will come to accept shortly. If our dear departed werenot going to speak out against the Berlin talks, as seemed altogether likely, suppose-I must say suppose-that some deranged mind decided to eliminatehim, under the guise of a Muscovite attempt on the dear President? Consider that for a moment, George." He raised a satisfied, bright-eyed smile towards the pulpit.

  "Good Lord," George said, bowing his head.

  Sprague's smile got even brighter. "If one thinks about it, the President makes an ideal stalking horse. Nobody else could possibly be the target. But, viewed in tranquillity, that is pure theory, so another theory is equally tenable. Think on it, George."

  "Why Barling, though?"

  "It frees his followers in the House. He would have voted with the government, they would have voted with him. Now we have twenty-five Members, it could be more, floating free and liable to vote their consciences. A frightening thought, for a coalition government. However, there are no signs of a foreign policy debate being forced at the moment, and one rather doubts there will be unless something dramatic happens, so one might say the assassin failed…"

  "You still believe it was just one man?"

  "What other evidence? That mythical policeman whom your Major saw for just one second, as he admitted? Amen," he added, in perfect time with the congregation. "No, the lone psychopath, all quite within the compass of one warped brain."

  "And now a right-wing brain, which must sit nicely with our Masters."

  "You know me better than that, George," Sprague reproved from the corner of his mouth. "And what conspirators were you favouring? Charlie's Indians? I won't denythat might find favour with our Masters." Sprague rose, bright-eyed and smiling pleasantly, to sing the hymn.

  "Of course," he said, sitting down again, "it would have been so much easier if we had the assassin alive and on trial. But your Major, alas…"

  "… while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal…"

  "So like our dear friends from the secret services," Sprague observed. "Concerning which, one hears a whisper that the Secret Service, the White House Protective Detail, is holding a little affair called an After Action Study. Presumably to find out what went wrong in the Abbey."

  "Standard procedure," George suggested.

  "Doubtless. And far better than any Congressional inquiry or suchlike; I gather it's a totally private proceeding. But since it didn't happen on their home ground, they will be requesti
ng witnesses from where it did happen. You do follow me?" Said reprovingly, because George looked as if he might have been following the lesson.

  "Yes… they'll want some of our people. You aren't thinking of refusing?"

  "Of course not. Once the request becomes official, we shall send somebody from the veryhighest level of my Office, nothing less."

  "But not anybody who actually knows what happened."

  "But who does really know? Surely this is where the Committee comes into its own. When we have resolved the matter, we shall be in a position to give them all the reassurance they can ask. And reassurance is what it comesdown to: security remains a national responsibility. They can't ask for more than that we have reviewed and reformed our procedures."

  "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ," the minister warned them; "that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."

  "Reassurance," George agreed glumly.

  "The President was not, after all, harmed. Nor were a dozen other heads of state who are not, I think, going to request witnesses for an After Action Study." Sprague turned the last word into a throat-clearing noise, because the minister had finished just ahead of him.

  With a jerk, the coffin began trundling on its conveyor belt towards the curtains and the waiting flame. It was, as always, a moment of terrible sorrow and, because of the creaking conveyor, cringing banality.

  "… the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to be consumed by fire," the minister gabbled, trying to keep pace with the vanishing coffin; "ashes to ashes, dust to dust…"

  In the moment of silence before the organ started and the congregation began to move, somebody sobbed loudly. It was a lonely world-wide, world-deep sound.

  "So where," Sprague asked, "might it not all end?"