The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  “If . . ? Do you mean it may have been somebody else in the radiation suit? That he had an accomplice?”

  This had never occurred to me.

  “It’s best to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions. Please describe the contents of the shed to me, Miss Stone.”

  I focussed and felt the click.

  “Steel walls, table piled high with uranium glass, paintbrushes, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, blowpipes, pontils, bags of salts, rack of test tubes, blowtorches with the name ‘Sievert’ engraved on their handles, sea charts tied up with raffia and standing in a basket, row of coat hooks, corpse of Mr B Dexter of Seward Peninsula, Territory of Alaska, US . .”

  “Crikey! How do you do that, Miss Stone?”

  I came to and found Sergeant Riley staring at me intently.

  “Do you have a photographic memory?”

  “No, not exactly. I only remember things that I’m interested in, although, having said that, I’m interested in pretty much everything, so . .”

  “You’d be a great help in the force, you know.”

  “Mmm, that’s what they thought at HQ.” I felt a little sad. “Though, I don’t know what they think now. They’ve dropped me like a hot brick, even though I put my life on the line for my country.”

  “Oh, HQ! Who knows what that outfit think? They’re a law unto themselves. I tell you frankly, we’re on tenterhooks with this case; always are when we stray into HQ’s territory.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And when the CIA get in on the act, too . . .”

  “The CIA are here?” This was fascinating. “Would that be because Mr Dexter was an American citizen?”

  His face shut down, rather; I could tell he thought he’d blabbed.

  “I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act of 1939, you know, so there’s no need to worry.”

  He had risen and was returning the chair to its former position by the window, in a meticulous, policeman-like, fashion.

  “Thank you, Miss Stone. That will be all for the moment.”

  I was torn between relief that he hadn’t made me go through the rest of the horrors of that terrible day, and a slight sense of disappointment that he was leaving, (because he was really rather dishy).

  “Here’s my card. If you remember anything else that might be useful, please feel free to give me a call, Miss Stone.”

  I watched him go, wondering whether there was any way the card might be construed as a sign of interest in me and my pink bedjacket. I picked my compact up from the bedside cabinet, flicked it open and promptly yelped out loud at the sight that met me in the mirror. No, sadly not.

  I’d steeled myself for a fight the following morning, but none came. On the contrary, I got the strong sense that Charing Cross were glad to see the back of me. When the usual doctor, accompanied by his troupe of medical students - like a feudal lord with his vassals - appeared first thing, I was already out of bed and dressed to go. He seemed a touch surprised, but no more than that. I brought up the hay fever theory and asked whether he would write me a prescription for some anti-hiss-something to save my having to visit Dr Knowles, and he was quite amenable, writing me out a note for the hospital chemist’s, there and then.

  “We don’t expect to see you here again,” he added, in a distinctly un-gentlemanly way. “The National Health Service is not a bottomless pit, you know.”

  I opened my mouth to answer back, but then I shut it again. I’d rather be thought a dreadful time-waster than die of radiation poisoning, after all. What mattered was that I was fit and well. So I took the note from him and thanked him politely for all they’d done for me, before making my getaway. It took a tremendous amount of scouring identical corridors before I found the chemist’s and, all the time, I was horribly conscious that the dismal dress that I was wearing would have to go straight into the scrap-bag the minute I got home.

  After getting the prescription business out of the way, I found the main exit and hung about outside. I’d telephoned my father as soon as I’d heard that I was coming out, so I was waiting for his old Crossley to arrive. However, a blue Hillman Husky honked at me from across the hospital car park and Major Dyminge stuck his head out of the window. I was non-plussed for a moment; I’d been avoiding the Major and I rather suspected he’d been avoiding me.

  “Over here, Rosa!” He waved a peremptory arm.

  “Hello Major. What are you doing here?” I went over and leaned down to speak to him through the car window. “I hope you’re not ill.”

  “No. Jerzy sends his apologies, but he has a large order of Battenberg cake to attend to. Another garden party at the Palace, apparently. So I said I’d come and pick you up.”

  I suppressed a snigger and went round to the passenger seat. The palace garden parties were a bit of a joke with the Stone family, I’m afraid, because my father was actually quite anti all that. Deep down, I think he still blamed the Royal Family for his long stay in an internment camp during the war. Since that time he had developed a strong distrust of all ideologies, (together with a penchant for the works of Albert Camus[44] – hence the beret). “L’essentiel est de bien faire son métier,” he would quote from ‘La Peste’, and I think doing his job well pretty much summed up my father’s attitude to life, (whilst also allowing him not to bite the hand that fed him by supplying perfect Battenberg’s to the ‘oh-so-English’ Windsors).

  “That was kind of you,” I got into the front seat. “I could very well have caught the train.”

  “Goodness me, we couldn’t have you doing that; not in your state of health.”

  Major Dyminge hunkered down and negotiated his way out of the car park with immense care, which was how he always drove. (We assumed this was to compensate for the fact that he’d never informed the licensing authorities of his damaged eye. We didn’t know this for a fact, but how many one-eyed drivers did one see behind the wheel?)

  “I’m fine, Major. A touch of hay fever is all I have.”

  We sat for a good minute, maybe more, waiting for a car to emerge from the distant horizon and trundle past us, before chancing our arm and joining the main road.

  “What about the . . ? You know, the . . ?” He was evidently reluctant to bring the subject up.

  “The glass, Major?” I grasped the nettle. “The plain, old glass with nothing more harmful in it than a touch of yellow dye? I have to say that I think the glass was a bright yellow shaggy dog. Or even a herring. Of the red variety.”

  “A red . . ? Oh, I see. How strange.”

  He was hunched over the wheel - as if driving the car required the use of every muscle in his body - and I couldn’t see his face, but he certainly sounded astonished. “What the devil was it all about, then? I mean, why was the murderer wearing that radiation suit, Rosa? Tell me that.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought and thought about that suit and what it might mean, Major.”

  I was genuinely surprised that Major Dyminge wanted to talk about that day. Surprised, too, that my sinking feeling had suddenly taken itself off and I’d been seized with a strong desire to make sense of it all. (My old friend, curiosity.)

  “Did Reg Arkonnen want me to think that the glass was dangerous, so he went and put it on – but why would he bother when he was about to kill me? Or was it, in fact, not Reg Arkonnen in the suit, but somebody else? A policeman brought that one up, I have to admit . .”

  “So . . the somebody else - a person possibly known to yourself - wore the suit in a deliberate attempt to hide their face from you, rather than as protection against poisonous substances?”

  “Yes! That’s a brilliant idea, Major!” He was jolly good at all this.

  “Hmm . . do you know, when in doubt, I’ve always thought it best to plump for the most obvious proposition. And, I can’t say that one strikes me that way.”

  “Oh.” I felt a little crest-fallen. “What is the most obvious proposition, would you say?”

  “Well . . ”

  The Lon
don traffic was taking the vast majority of his attention and it was several minutes before he felt able to finish his sentence. When he did, though, it was highly impressive.

  “Well . . I would suggest that the murderer, Reg Arkonnen, did not know that the glass wasn’t poisonous. That, on the contrary, he was under the belief that it was highly poisonous. Which was why he jumped out of the window in that office that Tristram had you working in. Moreover . . that if he were labouring under this erroneous belief, then somebody else has been deliberately keeping him in the dark. Which rather suggests that Arkonnen - while being a base murderer who killed one of the best men I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet in a long and eventful life - is not the main architect of the plot. That there is another hand at work, Rosa.”

  I gasped at his insight and proceeded to turn over the implications of this for the rest of the - extremely long - journey back home. Yes, it seemed many hours later that we were creeping along the coast road, high above the sea and the South Foreland Lighthouse, Major Dyminge still hugging the wheel and breaking every time he dared to shift into a different gear.

  Eventually, however, we ground to a halt outside Shore House and Coast Cottage, the wheels of the Hillman Husky crunching on beach pebbles, and we sat walled up in such silence, it was as if we’d forgotten how to speak. It went on and on, until I could bear it no longer.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted out. “So sorry. I should never have said you were a horrible old man, Major Dyminge. You’re not at all horrible and it was unforgivable.”

  He turned his lop-sided face to look at me.

  “It was just that I thought I knew best and I wanted to do it all by myself and . .”

  “Do you know who you remind me of, Rosa Stone? You remind me of myself.” He patted my hand, lightly. “Now go out there and find whoever did this and bring them to justice.”

  I gawped at him.

  “You’re not going to tell me to keep out of it, like everybody else does?”

  “No, I’m not. Not now. Finish it off, Rosa. Finish the damn thing off.”

  22. The Covert Operation

  “It was a covert operation,” the old spy said, “in the early years of the war. I could tell you the year. I could tell you every detail of the case, but I still harbour lingering loyalties that do not permit it. Even after all these years. Would you care for another glass, Kathleen?”

  The drink he’d fed me was a tiny shot of palest green rocket fuel - bison-grass vodka, he’d said it was - and it had cured the shaking in my legs, like magic.

  “Yes, please, Mr Piotrowski.”

  “May I offer you a piece of toast with that?”

  He was standing in his dimly-lit living-room cum kitchen cum bedroom, and he’d taken his shabby coat off to reveal a grey, woollen cardigan that was more patches and darning wool than cardigan and a yellow shirt that it was difficult to believe might, once, have been white. Yet, still he gave off the impression that his clothes and his surroundings had little to do with him. I respected that. Because, if his clothes were bad, his surroundings were worse. Having grown up in a slum, I recognised one when I saw it. Mr Piotrowski lived in Onslow Dwellings, just round the corner from South Ken tube, so he qualified for a nice SW3 postage code but, really, his flat was a slum. Apparently, they’d been knocking down most of the building to make into decent flats for working-class people, but they certainly hadn’t got as far as Mr Piotrowski’s piece of heaven.

  The kitchen was in a tiny alcove and so was the bathroom. In fact, he had a bit of old board over the bath and was using it as a table. He leant over it to light his single gas ring with a match and then toasted me a piece of bread on a toasting fork, held well above the blue flame.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have anything to go on it,” he said.

  “That’s fine. Vodka and toast; couldn’t be better.”

  I gazed about me in the semi-darkness - from the vantage point of a bony settee - at the walls that erupted with brown damp at the corners, at a fine print of Our Lady hanging over the fireplace, where he’d rushed to bank the small amount of slack and kindle a fire the minute we’d arrived, still shaken from our trip to HQ.

  “The covert operation; was that where you met him? Hutch?”

  The name still caught in my craw; not enough time had elapsed, I supposed. Give me a couple of weeks and it would be ancient history. “You’ll never believe . .” I would laugh, gaily, down the phone to one or other of my girlfriends, “what a dreadful old lech Tristram’s boss turned out to be! Nearly had me on the polished parquet!” I shivered and took another sip of lovely, green vodka.

  “Oh no, we go back much further than that. We came into the services in 1906, thrown together during our training by our dissimilarity to every other man there. Not that Hutchcraft and I had much else in common. He was a boy from the outskirts of London and I was descended from an old Krakόw family . . but neither of us, needless to say, had put a foot inside either Eton or Oxford. A rather remarkable fellow, long gone now, had charge of HQ in those years and I believe that we were an experiment. (For myself, I had studied languages at Krakόw University and my senior tutor had connections, but I cannot say how he acquired Godfrey Hutchcraft. Perhaps Hutchcraft accosted him on a dark backstreet; I have no way of knowing.) I have cut your toast into soldiers - I believe you English enjoy it that way?”

  “How comforting!” I took the plate from him and he settled at the far end of the settee, placing an ashtray between us.

  “In those days Hutchcraft looked like a half-starved, clerical assistant, but he soon shed his accent, along with his cloth cap, and began to excel in the dark art of shadowing. While I showed a modicum of artistic ability, on top of my languages, and found a niche in funny papers.”

  “Funny papers?” I imagined him drawing cartoons and penning comic skits.

  “Forgery, my dear.”

  “Ah.

  He leant forward to nudge the fire with a poker.

  “In later years Hutchcraft re-invented himself as a somewhat vague, even amiable, character. People thought him rather a duffer. But that was not the man that I knew. So sharp and clever, such a marvellous ability to turn events the way that he desired. There were rumours in those early days, but it seemed that nobody cared . . . We both became agents and were operating from the lobby of the Savoy Hotel one evening, when I had occasion to witness a particularly ugly episode involving a young lady and felt it my duty to report it to our case officer. Yet, nothing came of it. Until, that is, I heard that the young lady’s father, an eminent surgeon, had also complained, and Hutchcraft was forced to act. He had begun to establish his own network of young shadows - the youngest, most impressionable boys, over whom he exerted the power of a Svengali - and two of them swore on the graves of their mothers that it was not Hutchcraft, but myself, who had committed this crime. My superiors might have dismissed the boys’ story, if it had not been for an odd development. For the young lady, herself, declared the culprit to be me.”

  “No!” I gasped. “The bastard! Did he have something on her? Something he could blackmail her with?”

  “Undoubtedly. He had been watching her in the lobby for some days, while I pursued more official business, and I believe that he may have identified a man with whom she took tea. I can say no more.”

  “So what happened, Mr Piotrowski? Did they try to drum you out of the service?”

  “Oh, no. No, it was all hushed up. Money may have changed hands and so forth. But the stain on my character remained for the rest of my career and, while Hutchcraft leapt up to the topmost pinnacle, I remained a lowly birdwatcher on the ground.”

  Mr Piotrowski poured us both another shot of vodka and tossed his back in one go.

  “However, I kept my sights trained upon Godfrey Hutchcraft . . and, in many ways, I have to say that he impressed me greatly. The smooth way in which he operated. The sheer gall of the man. He possessed the skills of a superb magician.”

  “Magician? Hutch?�
�

  “Mmm. Sleight of hand, you know.” Mr Piotrowski mimicked a conjurer shooting delicate fingers beneath his cuffs. Spreading an invisible hand of cards and then magicking them into thin air. “He’d make you look the wrong way. Or lull you into not looking at all!” He laughed. “Excellent for a spy, but . . not for a gentleman. But I do not need to tell you that. I think you met the genuine article today, Kathleen.”

  I peered into the fire; I wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “The covert operation,” I said. “Tell me more about that.”

  He went very still. Then he shrugged his shoulders and began.

  “I lost touch with Hutchcraft for some years. The town of my birth, Krakόw, underwent a renaissance in the years after 1918 and the establishment of the Second Polish Republic. It blossomed into a vibrant, intellectual and ideological centre and Poland’s position - bound on all sides by neighbours of every political persuasion - made it an ideal place for HQ to establish a humble birdwatcher, like myself. I had contacts at the University and . . it was fruitful.”

  He set light to one of his thin, black cigars and lay back on the uncomfortable settee, as if it were cushioned in eider and satin.

  “Then, I was sent to the Kingdom of Romania for a while and . . so on and so on. But I had returned to London and was working in codes and ciphers, when Hitler invaded. (Poland’s geographical position making it as vulnerable to invasion as it had been to birdwatching.) I was not a young man by that time, but my nationality and my skills with cryptography persuaded them to use me in the field. My case officer was one Godfrey Hutchcraft.”

  Mr Piotrowski crossed his elegant legs to reveal ankles bare of socks. The end of an ugly scar - blue-white and wrinkled at the edges - peeped from beneath his left trouser-leg. I looked away, hurriedly.

  “As I said earlier, I cannot divulge too much detail. Besides . .” he gave a wry laugh, “it would be excessively boring for you, Kathleen, and I am sure I have bored you enough for one evening. However . . an old man can never resist telling his story. Let me assure you that I will keep it brief.”