“She’s left the flat, apparently. Didn’t like the neighbourhood.”
Kathleen glanced at me again.
“Posh girls, eh!” She gave a caustic little laugh (my wife had not been a posh girl).
And then, quite out of the blue, she slammed on the brakes and twisted right round in her seat to face me.
“What’s going on, Tristram? Something’s wrong here and I don’t like it. Give me a straight answer for once in your rotten life.”
I was pole-axed. She hadn’t spoken to me like that for a long, long time. Years of civilised conversation had fooled me into complacency and I was slow to reply.
“Please don’t bother to think up another lie, it must be so wearing,” she pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and didn’t offer me one. “Let me tell you something, Tristram Upshott. I’m fed up with the bloody elephant in the room. Your damn job. I actually used to think it was other women that made you such a secretive, devious sod, but it wasn’t, was it? It was your job. Whatever your job is (and I’ve got a damn good idea of what it might be), it’s turned you into somebody I barely know any more.”
I started to protest, except she took such a vicious drag of her cigarette that I felt compelled to stop and wait to see whether the smoke would ever emerge.
“But when you involve Rosa . .” there was unmistakeable menace in her voice, “ . . which you have, haven’t you? Well, then it’s a different story altogether. Because, if you’ve involved our little Rosa in whatever it is that you do, Tristram, then I will kill you. Believe me when I say that. I will kill you.”
I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her until her lips were swollen; kiss her as we used to kiss.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Kathleen added. “There’s been a black Austin K8 van on our tail for the last ten minutes.”
I squinted into the mirror. It had hidden itself somewhere, but I’d no reason to suppose she wasn’t right. Had Magnus Arkonnen betrayed us? One thing was certain, my wife would now have to be involved. Well, she was already - it looked like the game was up with Kathleen.
“Can you lose the van, darling?” I asked.
She chucked her fag out of the window.
“Watch me,” she said.
I had to hand it to my wife; nobody could have moved that car as she did, and I include myself in that. She really was a superb driver. What’s more, she was totally without fear. We must have gone from nought to fifty in two seconds flat, and she wasn’t stopping there. It was familiar territory for Kathleen, our house being in Tite Street, directly off Chelsea Embankment, but I’d never seen her drive quite like that before. We bombed down Cheyne Walk and she weaved in and out of the evening traffic, seemingly oblivious to any cars coming in the opposite direction. For quite a stretch, she simply drove on the wrong side of the road and forced the other cars to do the weaving. A cacophony of horns sounded in our wake, almost blocking out the unmistakeable whine of police sirens. She glanced in her mirror.
“Ambulances, probably,” she remarked, rather casually, “off to the Brompton or the Marsden.”
I hardly thought so, but now was not the time to contradict her. I unrolled my window and stuck my head out just as we flew past the Albert Bridge. I couldn’t see any black vans behind us, but there were several motorbikes that I wasn’t too happy about. Even given the atrocious way many motorbike riders careered through London, they were taking it to extremes.
“Bikes on our tail, darling.”
“Fine,” she murmured.
I waited with interest to see how she would out-manoeuvre those bikes in her Austin; hardly the most stream-lined of cars. As we reached Millbank, she opted for a slight detour around the back of the Tate Gallery; not the best course of action, in my view, because narrow Pimlico streets opening out onto all the congestion one finds around Victoria would favour a motorbike. Soon enough, we were forced to slow down at the corner of Herrick Street and Marsham Street and the three bikes made their move. All of the riders were leathered and goggled, but only one was toting a gun. He took aim and, for the second time that day, I shouted:
“Duck!”
But Kathleen, hunched like a pro over the steering-wheel, didn’t appear to hear or, if she did, had made up her mind to ignore me and proceeded to slam the gears into reverse and actually drive closer to the gunman. I had my head in my lap and my hands over it by this time, but felt the car lurch backwards and, instinctively, made a grab for the wheel; at which she performed a karate-like chop at my hand, slicing me on the knuckles with one of her diamond rings.
“Christ, Kathleen!”
“Don’t you dare.”
She’d turned right round in her seat to eye the road behind her, when a bullet sizzled an inch above her head and out through the front windscreen, shattering the glass. She hardly seemed to clock it. Still she reversed, inexorably, until she was upon the gunman. His goggled face leapt into the back window, like a picture in a frame, and then it was gone. If she hadn’t put paid to him altogether, she’d certainly given him a few nasty bruises. As for the other two, they’d driven onto the pavement, turned 360 degrees and were on their way back to the Tate. Which was just as well, because I don’t know what odds I’d have given them if they’d chosen to stick around.
We reversed round the corner and sailed back towards the river and I didn’t breathe out until we were crossing Vauxhall Bridge and had started to slow down. I was rather lost for words, actually. My wife was moaning quietly, I noticed, and her headscarf had fallen off. Wisps of yellow hair stuck to her cheeks and she looked a mite crazed. She didn’t appear to have noticed that she couldn’t see a thing out of her windscreen, criss-crossed, as it was, with a thousand tiny fractures.
“Allow me,” I said and punched the glass out (my hand was already bleeding from it’s encounter with her engagement ring and the windscreen glass made minimal difference).
And then Kathleen gave a small whimper and took her foot off the gas and her eye off the ball. Because we rolled off the end of Vauxhall Bridge, gathering momentum, and then straight up a ramp and through the open back doors of a large, black van, shuddering to a standstill a second before we hit the cab. Kathleen pitched forward onto the steering wheel, the doors slammed shut and we were plunged into darkness.
5. HQ
Kathleen was dead to the world. She felt warm in my arms, yet I couldn’t discern any breathing. I put my lips to hers, but there was no rush of air from her mouth, or nostrils. I pushed her back on the seat - but not too far to obstruct her windpipe - and felt for the pulse on her neck. It beat, hard and strong. I rolled her lovely hair around my fist and kissed her there, on her neck, where that drum beat. She stirred a fraction, but I let her lie in her own darkness; soon enough she’d wake to this other obscurity. (She might be frightened and I didn’t want to see Kathleen frightened.) So I held her lightly and I waited for whatever would happen next. Whatever that was, there was no use in fretting about it. As it turned out, I hadn’t long to wait.
I estimated the van had driven for no more than ten minutes before it stopped. By that time Kathleen was beginning to come to, shuddering in my arms and finally drawing a decent breath.
“It’s alright, darling,” I whispered into her ear. “Nothing to worry about.”
After which, nothing much happened. We waited and we waited and it felt like an absolute age had limped past before the clang and clash of doors opening made us jump in our seats. The beam of a powerful torch temporarily blinded us.
“Mr Upshott,” came a mild, not particularly authoritative voice, “would you please reverse the car out of the van.”
The murmur of another voice came and went.
“I beg your pardon,” the first man continued, “Mrs Upshott, I see you are at the wheel. Would you please reverse the car out of the van, Mrs Upshott.”
I grinned, squeezing Kathleen’s hand.
“You’d better do as the old man says, darling. It seems we’re back at H
Q. I’m sure you’re dying to meet the man who signs my paycheques.”
“You mean . .?” She was still rather dazed.
“Safe as houses,” I replied.
Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft was head of both Services in 1955, an unsurpassed achievement for anybody, never mind a retiring chap with a singular lack of charisma. In fact, the lack of charisma was the only singular thing about Hutchcraft, if an absence of something may be described that way. There was little to be said about him at all. Even his staff would have had trouble describing his clothes, for example, or the make of car that he drove, or tobacco he smoked. He seemed to carry a nebulous cloud of grey with him that shrouded everything he touched. Gossip had it (and, however uncharismatic a person, there is always gossip in every organisation – most especially one with as many secretaries and switchboard operators and tea ladies as HQ), that he was in his late sixties, although even that was questionable. And that he possessed a wife out in the suburban badlands of North West London. Possibly. He definitely possessed a border terrier, because he’d once brought it into the office and the secretaries had fed it on digestive biscuits . . which was about as far as the powder-room gossip could stretch, in terms of Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft. Or ‘Hutch’, as his staff called him, to a man.
“Good evening, Hutch,” I said, climbing out of the Austin and stretching my legs upon the red, herring-bone patterned bricks of HQ’s courtyard. “Have you met my wife?”
“Evening, Upshott. I don’t believe I have.”
A situation he was obviously determined to remedy, having got himself round to her side of the car and tugged the door open for her in double-quick time. I stared at him in frank surprise. For the first time in our seven-year acquaintance, the grey cloud above his head had shifted a bit. Kathleen often had a powerful effect on men, but it would never have occurred to me that old Hutch might be susceptible.
My wife was still a beauty at 38 - possibly even more beautiful than when I’d first met her - but she also had what the popular press called ‘a famous face’. She’d been a singer during the war of the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ variety, and then been cast in a number of British films. She spent a lot of time in places like Pinewood and Bray[12]. To my mind, Kathleen wasn’t looking her best at that precise moment, having turned rather grey herself, but that didn’t appear to be putting Hutch off.
“Mrs Upshott!” He exclaimed, pawing at her hand. “How delightful!”
He was acting as if she’d decided to visit her husband’s place of work of her own accord, rather than been abducted from Vauxhall Bridge.
“Are you a fan, Hutch?” I enquired, but he chose to ignore me.
Kathleen clutched her free hand against the car for support. She looked like she might be about to heave.
“I’m sorry,” she thrust Hutch from her and covered her mouth with her hands, “may I use your loo?”
“Ah,” Hutch replied, at a loss. “My secretary’s gone home and . . any ideas where the girls’ powder-room might be?”
He glanced, helplessly, at myself and the other man present, the shadow who’d been at the wheel of the black van.
“Now’s not the time for protocol, Hutch; she can use the downstairs Gents, surely.”
I directed Kathleen to the relevant quarters and she stumbled over the herring-bone bricks to get there in time. Hutch drifted into the building after her, vaguely indicating that I should follow.
All was quiet inside, save for a distinct hum - like a trapped swarm of bees, I’d often thought - that emanated from the basement.
“I don’t like involving civilians, Upshott. You should know that,” Hutch murmured, peeling back the brass gate of his personal lift.
I refrained from commenting upon how delighted he’d seemed to have met that particular civilian. It was time to get down to business. Hutch, himself, might be a tad underwhelming, but the accoutrements of his power were not: the tiny box of a lift with the gold fleur-de-lys on ceiling, walls and floor, as if one were wrapped up in a box of Christmas marrons glacés, or smart cigars. The spacious office at the very top of the unremarkable building. Its panoramic views of the river, its Persian rug upon the parquet, its gleaming, mahogany furniture. The oil painting of our young Queen. Hutch’s kingdom was a world away from the scuffed linoleum and the nicotine-yellow net curtains, the regulation issue typewriters, overflowing in-trays and general squalor of the floors beneath. It was little wonder that he didn’t know where the girls’ powder-room was.
Hutch shut the door of his office securely behind us and went and sat down behind his desk.
“What have you done with the Stone girl, Upshott?” He asked.
I glanced at the river, snaking past like a fat, black mambo.
“She’s out there somewhere, sir. It’s my belief that she’s with a friend. As yet, I can’t say which one, but I’m pretty sure that her disappearance is unconnected to Operation Crystal Clear.”
“Are you?” He furrowed his brow, a tad peeved. “It’s messy, Upshott; all of this. I’d say you’ve been flailing about like a pig in mud today. Am I right?” All expressed in the mildest of tones, so that one almost forgot to listen to him. That was the ‘Hutch effect’ and one couldn’t say whether it was a drawback in a mandarin of his status, or bloody clever.
I encountered her Majesty’s serene, royal-blue gaze and pulled myself together.
“I’d have to agree, sir. Our cover’s been blown wide open.”
“Mmm, and in record time. A Geiger counter would have confirmed the glass was innocent of uranium, of course. But . . two sessions of target practice? In the space of, what, three hours? That pre-supposes resources and an impressive communications network. I wouldn’t rule it out, you know.”
“Sorry, sir? Rule what out?”
“That they’ve bagged the Stone girl.”
I breathed, slow and hard, into the uneasy silence that followed.
“But . .” I did my best to catch his eye, “. . we’ll be throwing everything we’ve got at trying to find her, won’t we, sir”
“Mmm,” he murmured, seemingly transfixed by the space above my head; sounding as weak as water.
“Right,” he pushed his chair back and stood up, patently relieved that our meeting was at an end. “Try not to balls anything else up, will you?”
He strolled over to the door and held it open for me to be on my way.
“I say . .” his bland features had a shot at animation, “ . . nice to meet your wife after all these years, Upshott. I thought she was far and away the best thing in ‘The Furies from Venus’.”
There was another uneasy silence while he contemplated that little masterpiece and I waited to be dismissed.
“Load of old codswallop, of course,” he decided (one of the very few times we were in accord). “Off you go then, man. See if you can do some semblance of a decent job.”
“Oh . . incidentally . .” I’d almost got away, when he added, “ . . she killed that gunman. We scraped him up, of course. Disposed of the bits. But . . well . . just so’s you know, Upshott old boy.” His eyes held mine for an infinitesimal fraction of time and then he shut the door in my face.
I took the stairs back to the ground floor - it wasn’t done to travel in Hutch’s lift Hutch-less - and tried to shuffle my thoughts into a decent hand. I’d put two women in jeopardy and I’d miscalculated the extent of Arko’s intelligence network. It hadn’t been my best day’s work. I must find Rosa and I must get Kathleen home safely. If at all possible, before the night was done. Plus, in the days to come, I might need to find a safe house for both of them (assuming that Rosa could be persuaded to stay in it). Hutch had made it as plain as Hutch ever did, that HQ weren’t going to do any of this for me. I also badly needed to write up my report and alert my handler to Magnus Arkonnen, before proceeding any further with Operation Crystal Clear. Yet I passed the Operatives’ Floor without a second’s hesitation. Kathleen came first.
My shoes tapped down the stone stairs, unusua
lly audible in the after-hours’ quiet that swaddled the building. However, not everyone had gone home to bed. I’d reached the ground floor and was just heading towards the garages in search of my wife, when Jay Tamang emerged from the basement and caught me. Tamang was the hardest working person at HQ, an affable, dark-skinned Chinese in his early twenties with an inexplicably vast store of technical know-how the rest of us would have required several lifetimes to squirrel away. He reminded me faintly of my niece, except that Tamang applied himself to the job in hand, rather than running away from it. When it came to tenacity, Jay Tamang was a limpet.
“Mr Upshott,” he beckoned me over to the top of the basement stairs. “Do you have a moment?”
“Not really, Tamang.”
“I think you will find this of interest, Mr Upshott.”
“I’m sure I will, but it’ll have to wait.”
“You will be sorry to miss it.”
“Look,” I turned to him, “my wife’s here somewhere waiting for me and I’ve put her through enough for one night. I’ll be in touch in the next couple of days, that do you?”
“Come, Mr Upshott. I won’t keep you any longer than necessary. The longer that we talk in the corridor, the longer Mrs Upshott will have to wait.”
I sighed and traipsed after him, down the basement stairs and into the innards of the beast that was HQ. Here were the technical bods’ desks and the labs, where the overhead fluorescent strips might have been switched off for the night, but lights flashed on and off wherever one looked, and monitors beeped and chirruped at one another. An arcane, world-wide, conversation was in mid-sentence; a gathering and dissemination of vital information that must never be allowed to cease. It meant precisely nothing to a layman like myself, of course, but it was the necessary conversation of nations that flowed back and forth beneath the specious babble of newspapers and radio and television. And, when a nation like the Soviet Union refused to talk . . well . . we listened, anyway.
“I hear the Stone girl broke my glass,” Tamang commented, leading the way around other staff desks to his den.
The Yellow Glass Page 5