The Crocus List

by Gavin Lyall

  "Quite. Indeed, quite. Let me see, now… I could dig up those documents… I seem to recall we dealt through local estate agents, and knowing the properties personally, I might well have recommended them to you, as a prospective buyer… Dear me," he smiled wanly; "I seem to be becoming quite conspiratorial."

  30

  When it was late enough for the embassy to be fully staffed, Agnes called to say she probably wouldn't be in, but could perhaps be contacted at the motel number. Now, if the Liaison Office had got the same number from Maxim, then the embassy gossip vine had to be more security-minded than she believed possible for it not to come to one conclusion.

  And how close and how far wrong they will be, she thought numbly.

  The morning crawled past. St Louis would be a nearly two-hour flight, and then getting to the university and making polite conversation… She drove out for an early lunch at a small diner down the road and was back at the cabin by half past twelve. That was when time really started to drag.

  She wished she had brought a bottle of gin with her, even a bottle of wine, but now the only place she could find one was a state liquor store, and while the clerk would know of one, sitting with a bottle waiting for the phone to ring wasn't her own image of herself. Anyway, she'd been drinking too much, of late. She was also running out of cigarettes. But she'd been smoking too much, as well. Pull yourself together, girl.

  She lit another one.

  I'm not the type to get lonely, she thought. It's a relief to get away by myself for once. She switched on the electric kettle and made a cup of instant coffee flavoured with powdered milk and artificial sweetener. At least the water must be real, she hoped. She spilt it when the phone rang.

  "Alan J. Winterbotham."

  "Hi, there. How was the flight?" She didn't care if the relief showed.

  "Routine. Sorry I've been a time. I've just sent a cable to the club: list of delegates expected for the next week's visit-does that sound okay? The convention was quite a thing, it seems."

  "Any mention of Tatham?"

  "No." He sounded surprised. "D'you think he was there?"

  "I would have been, doing his job. It would need the personal touch." Tatham the believer, recruiter of believers. Yes, he would have been there-but not as Arnold Tatham. "Give me the British names."

  He read them over, but Agnes thought she had heard of only two, and one of those now dead.

  "If we just get your one," she reassured him, "we're that much further forward. It's up to George now. Are you off to the wilds of Illinois?"

  "Wilds is right. It's only two and a half thousand population and one bus a day in each direction. I can't get there tonight: I'll probably spend the night in Springfield and be in something like ten tomorrow. It'll give me time to buy a clean shirt here, anyway."

  "Okay, and take care-Alan."

  She was going to have to spend a second night at the motel, if only to continue their cover of an 'affair'. My God, if only they knew… but nobody will ever know. How could I have got it so wrong when it mattered so much? Magill wasn't the first time I've given my Little All for my job, but that can't mean I can only get it right when… With Graham, and David, it had mattered-for a while-and that was fine… She let herself drift off to memories of fiercely joyful nights that now… that now… They'd beensnakes. Whatever you said about Harry Maxim, he was no snake.

  So why couldn'the have got it right last night? He was like a schoolboy, never mind that I was behaving like a schoolgirl, I cannot stand a man who can'tcope with me…

  Even if I was using him, a time of my choosing, to wash away the guilt…

  Why couldn't it have goneright?

  In the middle of the afternoon, she rang her office: there was nothing more than a routine acknowledgment of the debriefing report she had sent after Maxim's meeting with the Secret Service. Plus a warning not to let him start doing anything of his own.

  Ha! You try and stop him, she thought.

  But soon-perhaps very soon-I am going to have to lay it on the line, tell them what really has been happening… The trouble was, she could prove nothing yet and certainly didn't want her Service approaching Magill direct, for confirmation. Still, she could get started on a draft. She took out her pocket recorder and began dictating.

  If somebody had suggested to Agnes that she was not security-minded, she would just have stared at them. Security was her trade, always had been. But, as Maxim had realised the evening before, her training was in hunting, not being hunted. Even in the long-ago undercover work on the weekly magazine, she had always worked with the comforting feeling of being in her own country, with the big battalions immediately behind her. She had never-quite-known what Dorothy Tuckey, and Magill and Tatham had known of the real loneliness of the hunted. Otherwise, she would never have put anything on record in that isolated motel cabin, all ready for Them to snatch when they kicked the door in.

  By Hand

  Private amp; Confidential

  Dear Mr Harbinger,

  Anglam Gateway amp; its Properties

  With the kind assistance of the local estate agencies I have gone some way to tracing the subsequent history of the two properties owned by the above company.

  The Tunbridge Wells house was sold, as I believe I told you, when the company acquired the lease on Oxendown House, near Eastbourne. It was purchased by the late Colonel J. R. M. Clarke, and passed to his children on his death seven years ago. Three years ago it was sold toa Dr William Baxter, who lives and operates his surgery there.

  Anglam Gateway had only a nineteen-year lease on Oxendown House, which is part of the Gardener Estates. We sold the residual sixteen years, approx, to a client represented by Harvey Gough amp; Partners, who soon afterwards resold it by private treaty to a small company whose name I have not yet discovered, with the rumoured intention that it would be turned into a private nursing home.

  However, I understand it has since been resold to yet another private company, who appear to have resold the lease to the Estates who in turn sold the farmland to local landowners but rented the house to the company, presumably for a much reduced sum.

  I am afraid this is all very complicated and difficult to untangle at short notice, but I hope, nonetheless, that it is of some help.

  Please give my best regards to your Uncle Charles;

  Yours sincerely,

  Donald Nightingale.

  George locked the letter away, smiling with grim satisfaction. Practise in peace, Dr Baxter of Tunbridge Wells, he thought; you sound an honest pill-peddler to me. But if that wasn't a second smokescreen settling on Oxendown House as fast as possible after Charlie's Indians had withdrawn their own, then I don't know smoke signals when I smell them.

  He would have liked to know who that 'client of Harvey Gough amp; Partners' had been-Arnold Tatham himself, perhaps, using the pension contributions he had withdrawn on his resignation. Certainly that was as close to a gap in the smokescreen as there had been, when Charlie's Indians were screaming (silently) for a quick sale to sever their connection but before a barricade of shell companies could be erected to take it over…

  But why had Tatham wanted to keep that house? To keep a base, yes, and what could be an isolated one, surrounded by farmland, yes-but he could have bought some other, without any history. Unless Oxendown had certain special facilities, something not easily transferred… He would like to take a look at Oxendown House. He also wished Maxim was back.

  31

  The East Coast of America is dominated by the big cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington all exert such a gravitational pull that the smaller towns are sucked into an orbit of dependency on the nearest city sun. In the Midwest, not even Chicago exerts such influence, and St Louis very little at all. Across the plains on either side of the Mississippi and Missouri, it is as if a giant city planet had exploded, leaving a random scatter of asteroid towns frozen in their wanderings but uncommitted to an urban star.

  Never quite ran
dom, of course. Some grew up on river crossings, at water-holes on the westward trails, and a remarkable number-Matson included-on the railroads or, thanks to founding fathers with a keen eye for land values, where they deduced the railroads must come. Robert Julius Matson had guessed right: the first train had come through just nine years after the town was founded in 1858, pulling behind it the fertiliser works, the corn mill, the seed-corn warehouse, and with them the quiet prosperity that spawned the first Masonic lodge in 1871, a voluntary fire brigade in '75, the telephone in '84 and the first sewer in 1920. All this-and a lot more-Maxim learnt from a centennial booklet in the town library, just one floor up from the town offices.

  Already he had spent an hour wandering around the town-it needed no more time than that-trying to get the feel of the place. This wasn't easy, because it was clearly a private town: self-contained within its white wooden houses that seemed as well-rooted on their green lawns as the tall trees of Elm Street, Pine, Walnut, Chestnut… the usual street names of such towns, not unimaginative, just because you built houses like that and named streets likethat. If you wanted to be different, you could find a big city at the end of the railroad and be different there. He guessed a lot of young people had: the few faces on the street seemed of retirement age. He realised why when he walked down to where Main Street crossed the railroad tracks and saw the grass-grown rails, the deserted depot and the dusty windows of the empty fertiliser works.

  Robert Julius had been right, but only for just over a hundred years. The railroad giveth and the railroad taketh away, and when it stops giving and taking, a lot more stops as well. Maxim stood on the rails and tried to imagine the bustle as a train panted in, of the steam glowing the lamplight at night, of the sense of distance and connection… but it was trying to imagine the broken chimes of a clock you never heard.

  Nobody had even thought to throw stones through the windows of the fertiliser works.

  The Maison Sentinelhad died, too, just a few years before, and the bound copies of its back numbers were also in the library. Maxim leafed through them because-as he was forced to admit to himself- he had no idea of how to approach Clare Hall. Surrounding himself with local knowledge was a form of entrenchment; if you dig in and stare at a hill you can often persuade yourself you know what's going on behind it. Confidence wins battles; even false confidence has won a few.

  (This is not a battle, he reprimanded himself. Alan James Winterbotham does not fight battles.)

  The woman librarian finished a murmured telephone call and drifted across. "Are you finding what you wanted?"

  "Just pottering," Maxim (Winterbotham) said. "Seeing America by bus on my way home. As far as Minneapolis, anyway. My car busted there."

  Her indifference told him he had explained too much (but maybe Canadians, or Winterbothams, did explain too much). "Looking up the town history? It's kind of quiet these days, since the railroad pulled out. Mostly folk retired off the farms around here."

  She had the Midwestern accent that is usually called 'flat' because the Midwest doesn't believe that emotionalemphasis makes the corn grow taller. Her tall thin elegance was camouflaged by a loose, dark woollen dress and heavy glasses, but restored by her prematurely grey hair-she was about Maxim's age-that was cut in simple elegant sweeps over her ears. Perhaps she was playing the part of a small-town librarian but hoping not to be taken too seriously.

  "Anything more you'd like to know, just ask." She drifted away to the shelves, shuffling a book here and there.

  County Board Approves Salary Hikes, Maxim learnt, along with Maison Mothers' Club Makes Donation. This is not telling me much about the far side of the hill, he thought. Hold on, now. If Mothers' Club Donation makes the front page, how about Local Rector's Son Kidnapped, Murdered, In Italy?

  Since he wasn't sure of the date, it took a little time, but there was no missing it when he found the right volume. It ran across three weekly issues, and was blatantly lifted from the big city papers and radio, but the editorial comment was strictly home town. If any Matson citizen had taken an Italian holiday that year, he would have kept very quiet about it.

  He read carefully, starting with the last issue where the facts would be most accurate, and working back. He took no notes-why would Winterbotham bother?-but he had been trained to memorise map references and other details of a mission. The SASdidn't like its people getting captured with pockets full of data. There was, of course, a picture of Arnold Tatham himself, much younger than when he had died, and of his daughter Clare. She, too, was younger and dark-haired-but unmistakably the librarian.

  The room seemed very quiet as he closed the volume and selected another and made himself turn its unseen pages for ten more minutes. She was back at the desk when he stood up, stretched elaborately, and said: "Guess I'll get myself a cup of coffee."

  "If you're coming back, we close for lunch around half twelve."

  The centre of Matson was brick-built, a few buildings rising to three storeys, a few of them whitewashed but therest left the whisky colour of the local clay. Somehow the roads managed to be the same colour, but several tones lighter. The drug-store, where he had breakfasted late, was around the corner on Walnut Street, a deep dim-lit room with a counter and stools midway down one side, after the racks of maga7ines and trinkets. He bought a magazine and flipped its pages while he drank the coffee.

  Perhaps he had been stupid, but had he actually done any damage? She would recognise him when he made his approach, would know he had been behaving deviously -but he would be straight into devious matters anyway. And the accounts of Tatham's kidnapping and death had been very worthwhile reading. A woman walked in and sat at the middle of the counter-Maxim had chosen the furthest end. She wore a bulky mock-leather jacket of much the same colour as the local brick, a tweed skirt and even in that light, wrap-around sunglasses. Apart from that, she was Agnes Algar.

  Maxim felt a moment of total disorientation before he realised that something must have gone badly wrong, that because she had not greeted him he must stay being Winterbotham, that because they were strangers he must make the first move. She had lit a cigarette and was alternating puffs with nibbling on a Danish pastry and sipping coffee. He went and bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine behind him, searched his pockets, then asked: "Could I trouble you for a light, Miss?"

  She snapped her lighter. "Can't give it up, either, hey?"

  "I've tried." He drew on the first cigarette for eight years, nearly choked, and wheezed: "First today, anyway. Thank you. You don't sound local."

  "I'm British, just passing through. You don't sound as if you were a native, either."

  "I was born in London, I moved to Canada, oh, twelve years ago. Are you from London?"

  "Not by birth, but I worked there. Don't we all?"

  The druggist, a bird-like little man in his fifties who longed to repeat his father's reputation as town matchmaker, but had so little chance since the youngsters who hadn't moved out permanently were commuting to biggertowns, was delighted to see two mature strangers getting together over coffee. In his view, friendships made over alcohol-as in the Star Bar around the corner-seldom lasted. He threw his own span into the bridge he saw a-building.

  "Now, isn't that a funny thing?-I get two people meeting in a town like this, and wouldn't you know it?-their paths have crossed before. Isn't that a funny thing?"

  "London's a big town," Agnes said coolly.

  "It sure is, I visited there five years back, with my wife-now, would you know the Bedford Hotel? Wouldn't it be something if you both knew that?"

  "I think I used to drink there with a man called George Harbinger," Maxim invented, knowing how George loathed tourist territory. "A fat man. He was something in the Civil Service."

  "I don't think I ever heard of him," Agnes said.

  The druggist surreptitiously slid Maxim's coffee along the counter, fixing him next to Agnes. "Lady, do you mind my asking if you have an eye problem? With the dark glasses in here, like…
I could recommend some medication, or-"

  "I got mugged," Agnes said bleakly. She pushed the glasses up, giving Maxim a glimpse of the purple bruise under her left eye.

  "That is terrible," the druggist pronounced. "I mean truly terrible. It surely wasn't-"

  "Not here."

  "Terrible. You should get a doctor… Mister, you should tell her she should get a doctor."

  There was a huge anger welling in Maxim that choked off anything he might have said, a yearning to reach that mugger and snap his arms, which he could do so easily, then kick the helpless manhood out of him…

  I love her.

  He had no idea whether that was a decision or a revelation. It was just a fact, whose origins no longer mattered. He shook his head slowly, to show some reaction, staring past the druggist at the dark handcrafted old shelving, wondering if he should remember every detail of thisplace, and sadly realising he would only remember the huge can of chilli that appeared on the menu board as Home Made.

  "Dreadful," he managed to say.

  A customer came past to the pharmacy, counter at the back and the druggist said: "Excuse me, folks…"

  Agnes touched his hand on the counter, quickly and secretly.

  "Calm down, Harry. I'm all right. Really."

  "Was it Them?"

  "Them. They got the Clare Hall address and that you're here; I was drafting a report… I should never have put anything on record in that place…"

  "I led them to you."

  "Not you. I think they must have had a bleeper on my car; I never checked, and they'd have taken it away when they caught up-damn it, it's what I'd have done: a simple radio bleeper with a magnet, you can stick it on in two seconds. We probably lost them on the Beltway, and they'd been chasing round the Virginia countryside trying to pick me up… those things only have a range of about three miles."