by Pat Barker
I then asked her whether this was all talk or whether some plan was afoot. She replied, ‘Can I trust you?’ I think I said something to the effect that she was in a pretty pickle if she could not. She then said that she knew where to get curare and that Walton Heath Golf-course would be a good place to get Mr Lloyd George with an air-gun. She said she knew three good lads in London who would do the job. She then asked me if I wanted to be in on it and I considered it my duty to reply in the affirmative in order to procure further information. 1 passed that night at Mrs Roper’s house, and the following morning I reported back to Major Lode’s department in code.
Spragge was a big, fleshy, floridly handsome man, with thick brows and startling blue-green eyes that slanted down at the outer corners. His neck and jowls had thickened, and rose from his broad shoulders in a single column. Hair sprouted from his ears, his nostrils, the cuffs of his shirt. He was as unmistakably and crudely potent as a goat. Beattie would have gone for him, Prior thought, as he stood up to shake hands. He wondered how he knew that, and why he should mind as much as he did.
‘I asked you to come in,’ Prior said, after Spragge had settled into his chair, ‘because we’re thinking of employing you again.’ He watched the flare of hope. Spragge was less well turned out than he appeared to be at first sight. His suit was shiny with wear, his shirt cuffs frayed. ‘You’ll have gathered from the papers there’s a lot of unrest in the munitions industry at the moment. Particularly in the north, where you spent a good deal of time, didn’t you? In’16.’
‘Yes, I —’
‘With MacDowell. Who’d just come out of a detention centre, I believe?’
‘Yes, he’s a deserter. Conchie. You should see the size of him, for God’s sake. Built like a brick shithouse. See some of the scraggy little buggers that get sent to France.’ Spragge was looking distinctly nervous. ‘I don’t think I could approach him again. I mean, he knows me.’
‘He knows you from the Roper case, doesn’t he?’
‘Before that.’
‘You might be able to give advice, though. Obviously we’d need to keep you away from the areas you were working in before.’
Spragge looked relieved.
‘You met MacDowell in the summer of ‘16? In Sheffield?’
‘Yes, I was making inquiries into the shop stewards’ movement.’
Prior made a show of consulting his notes. ‘You stayed with Edward Carpenter?’
‘I did.’ Spragge leant forward, his florid face shining with sweat, and said in a sinister whisper, ‘Carpenter is of the homogenic persuasion.’
‘So I believe.’ That phrase again. It had stuck in Beattie’s memory, and no wonder. It was transparently obvious that Spragge’s natural turn of phrase would have been something like ‘fucking brown ‘atter’. ‘Of the homogenic persuasion’ was Major Lode. Who had once told Prior in, of all places, the Cafe Royal, ‘This country is being brought to its knees. Not by Germany’ — here he’d thumped the table so hard that plates and cutlery had leapt into the air – ‘NOT BY GERMANY, but by an unholy alliance of socialists, sodomites and shop stewards.’ Prior had felt scarcely able to comment, never having been a shop steward. ‘Do you think that’s relevant?’
‘It was relevant to me. There was no lock on the door.’
‘He is eighty, isn’t he?’ said Prior.
Spragge shifted inside his jacket. ‘A vigorous eighty.’
‘You went to a meeting, next day? Addressed by Carpenter.’
‘I went with Carpenter.’
‘And in the course of his speech he quoted a number of… well, what would you call them? Songs? Poems? In praise of homogenic love.’
‘He did. In public.’
‘Well, it was a public meeting, wasn’t it? And then after the meeting you went into a smaller room, and there you were introduced to a number of people, including the author of these songs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Walt Whitman.’
‘Yes.’
‘Walt Whitman is an American poet.’ Prior waited for Spragge’s mouth to open. ‘A dead American poet.’
‘He didn’t look well.’
‘1819 to 1892.’
Spragge jerked his head. ‘Yeh, well, it’s the money, innit?’
‘Is it?’
‘I’ll say it is. Two pound ten a week I was promised. Mind you, he says the information’s got to be good and you’ve got to keep it coming.’ Spragge sat back and snorted. ‘Didn’t matter how good it was, I never had two pound ten in my hand, not regular, just like that. Bonuses, yes. But what use are dribs and drabs like that to me? I’m a family man.’
‘You got bonuses, did you?’
‘Now and then.’
‘That would be if you turned up something special?’
Spragge hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘How big a bonus did you get for Beattie Roper?’
Spragge hesitated again, then clearly decided he had nothing to lose. ‘Not big enough.’
‘But you got one?’
‘Yes.’
‘All in one go?’
‘Half on arrest, half on conviction.’
‘You got a bonus if she was convicted?’
‘Look, I know what you’re after. You’re saying I lied under oath. Well, I didn’t. Do you think I’m gunna risk – what is it, five years – for a measly fifty quid? ‘Course I’m bloody not. I’d have to be mad, wouldn’t I?’
‘Or in debt.’
Spragge blinked. ‘Just because I lied about Walt Whitman doesn’t mean I was lying all the time. That was the first report I wrote, I was desperate to get enough in.’
‘You never talked about dogs to Mrs Roper?’
Spragge made an impatient gesture. ‘What dogs? There weren’t any fucking dogs. They’re not used in detention centres. You might not know that, but she does. She’s talked to men who’ve been in every detention centre in England. She knows there aren’t any dogs.’ He stared at Prior. ‘Have you been talking to her?’
‘I’ve interviewed her, yes.’
Spragge snorted. ‘Well, all I can say is the old bitch’s got you properly conned.’
‘I haven’t said I believed her.’
‘She was convicted. It doesn’t matter what you believe.’
‘It matters a great deal, from the point of view of your job prospects.’ Prior gave this time to sink in. ‘The letter that came with the poison. From Mrs Roper’s son-in-law.’ He drew the file towards him. ‘“If you get close enough to the poor brutes, I pity them. Dead in twenty seconds’.”
‘All that proves is that the son-in-law thought it was for the dogs. Well, she’d have to tell him something, wouldn’t she?’
‘You still say she plotted to kill Lloyd George?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that the suggestion came from her, and not from you?’
‘Yes. She didn’t need any bloody encouragement!’
‘Even to the details? Even to suggesting Walton Heath Golf-course as a good place to do it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How would she know that? She’s spent her entire life in the back streets of Salford, how would she know where Lloyd George plays golf?’
Spragge shrugged. ‘Read it in the paper? I don’t suppose it’s a state secret.’ He leant forward. ‘You know, you want to be careful. If you’re saying I acted as an agent provocateur – and that is what you’re saying, isn’t it? – then you’re also saying that Major Lode employed an agent provocateur. Either knowingly, in which case he’s a rogue, or unknowingly, in which case he’s a fool. Either way, it’s not gunna do his career much good, is it? You watch yourself. You might find out it’s your head on the chopping-block.’
Prior spread his hands. ‘Who’s talking about chopping-blocks? I’m interviewing a new agent – new to me. And I’ve made it clear – at least I hope I’ve made it clear – that any little flight of fancy – Walt Whitman rising from the dead – and I’ll be on to it. If there
aren’t any flights of fancy, well then… no need to worry.’ With the air of a man getting to the real purpose of the meeting at last, Prior drew another file towards him. ‘Now tell me what you know about MacDowell.’
After he’d finished milking Spragge of information, all of which he knew already, and had sent him home to await the summons, Prior sat motionless for a while, his chin propped on his hands.
‘The poison was for the dogs.’
‘There weren’t any fucking dogs. You might not know that, but she does.’
Was it possible Beattie had tried to reach out from her corner shop in Tite Street and kill the Prime Minister? The Beattie he’d known before the war would not have done that, but then that Beattie had been rooted in a communal life. Oh, she’d been considered odd – any woman in Tite Street who worked for the suffragettes was odd. But she hadn’t been isolated. That came with the war.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, Miss Burton’s little dog had gone missing. Miss Burton was a spinster who haunted the parish church, arranged flowers, sorted jumble, cherished a hopeless love for the vicar – how hopeless probably only Prior knew. He’d been at home at the time, waiting for orders to join his regiment, and he’d helped her search for the dog. They found it tied by a wire to the railway fence, in a buzzing cloud of black flies, disembowelled. It was a dachshund. One of the enemy.
In that climate Beattie had found the courage to be a pacifist. People stopped going to the shop. If it hadn’t been for the allotment, the family would have starved. So many bricks came through the window they gave up having it mended and lived behind boards. Shit – canine and human – regularly plopped through the letter-box on to the carpet. In that isolation, in that semi-darkness, Beattie had sheltered deserters and later, after the passing of the Conscription Act, conscientious objectors who’d been refused exemption. Until one day, carrying a letter from Mac, Spragge had knocked on her door and uncovered a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. Or so he said.
Could she have plotted to kill Lloyd George? Prior thought he understood how the powerless might begin to fancy themselves omnipotent. The badges of hopeless drudgery, the brush and the cooking-pot, become the flying broomstick and the cauldron, and not only in the minds of the persecutors. At first there would be only wild and flailing words, prophecies that Lloyd George would come to a dreadful end and then, nudged along by Spragge – because whatever Beattie’s part in this, Spragge had not been innocent – the sudden determination to act out the fantasy: to destroy the man she blamed for prolonging the war and causing millions of deaths.
Lode would have had no difficulty in believing Spragge. The poison plot fitted in very neatly with his preconceptions about the anti-war movement. Not much grasp of reality in all this, Prior thought, on either side. He was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.
He began putting away the files. It was a situation where you had to hang on to the few certainties, and he was certain that Spragge had lied under oath, and since Spragge had been the only witness, this of itself meant the conviction was unsafe.
He locked the filing cabinet and the door of his room, and walked along to the end of the corridor. The lift was stuck on the fifth floor. He decided not to wait and ran downstairs, coming out on to the mezzanine landing where he paused and looked down into the foyer, as he often did, liking to imagine the hotel as it must have been before the war, before this drabness of black and khaki set in.
The shape of a head caught his attention. Charles Manning, waiting for the lift, and with him – good God – Winston Churchill and Edward Marsh. Prior watched. Manning, though obviously junior, seemed perfectly at ease in their company. Certainly he was not merely dancing attendance; there was a good deal of shared laughter, and, as they moved into the lift, Marsh’s hand rested briefly on his shoulder. Well, well, well, Prior thought, continuing on his way downstairs. ‘Connections’ indeed!
Prior lived in a seedy basement flat in Bayswater. He could have afforded better, but he preferred to spend his money on properly tailored uniforms, and these did not come cheap. His bedroom had french windows that opened on to a small high-walled yard, so dark that he had never been tempted to sit out, though his landlady had made an effort. The walls were painted cream to a height of about ten feet, and there were a number of thin, straggly plants dying in a great variety of containers.
The room was small and L-shaped. His bed lay along the upright of the L, facing the window, with a desk and hard chair at the foot. The baseline of the L contained a wardrobe, with an oval mirror set into the door. There was space for nothing else.
The bathroom was next door. He had a tepid bath, and then, wrapped in his dressing-gown, lay on the bed and lit a cigarette. He was too tired to think constructively, and yet his mind whirred on. This was the frame of mind that led to a bad night, and it irritated him, almost to the point of tears, that he could do nothing about it.
He thought of Beattie in her cell. Eighteen months since Lionel Spragge knocked on her door. Eighteen months ago he’d been in France. Eighteen months ago William Roper had been in Wandsworth Detention Centre. An image of William began to form in Prior’s mind, tiny but powerful, like the initial letter of a gospel. William, naked in his cell, watched constantly through the eye in the door, and beside him, on the stone floor, the uniform he’d refused to put on. A small, high, barred window, lit with a bluish glow from the snow outside.
He found himself resenting the power of this image. The claim it made on his sympathy. Deliberately, he entered the cell and then let himself drift out of the window, between the bars, into the falling snow. He was in France now, lying out in the open with his platoon. The trenches had been blown flat, there was no shelter from the icy wind, no hope of getting the wounded back. And no water, because the water in the water-bottles had frozen. Once a hawk flew over, its shadow black against the snow. The only movement, the only life, in a landscape dead as the moon. Hour after hour of silence, and the snow falling. Then, abruptly, Sanderson’s convulsed and screaming face, as they cut the puttees away from his frost-bitten legs.
This was no use. Prior sat up and started reading The Times, but the print blurred and Beattie’s face took its place, the white hair straggling round her neck. He closed his eyes. The bell of the shop in Tite Street rang as he pushed the door open. How old? Four? Five? A smell of cat pee and tarred string from the bundles of firewood in the corner. Beattie’s cat had never been able to resist marking those bundles. Mrs Thorpe plonked their Alfie on the counter while she paid her bill. Alfie swung his short legs in their sturdy boots, puffing away at a fag end, though he was only three. Between drags, he sucked his mother’s breast, puffing and sucking alternately, peering round the white curve at Prior, who was a Big Boy and therefore an object of interest and suspicion. It was late in the afternoon. Mrs Thorpe would be far gone. Jugs of best bitter were her favourite, chased down by sips of something medicinal that she kept in a flask fastened to her thigh with a home-made elastic garter. Whisky for the heart, brandy for the lungs, gin for the bladder. Alfie, guzzling away at his mother’s milk, looked contented, and well he might, since it could hardly have been less than 70 proof.
The past is a palimpsest, Prior thought. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge. He made himself walk to the counter again, this time remembering nothing but the moment, push his sweaty coin across the cool marble, and ask, ‘What can I have for a ha’penny?’
There was a white apron round Beattie’s waist with two pockets, stained black from the coins inside them. These coins smelled very strong when she emptied them on to the table to count them, a dark, dank, heavy smell.
‘What can I have for a ha’penny?’
Beattie’s voice, patient as if she hadn’t said all this a million times before, reeled off the list: aniseed ball, sherbert delight, liquorice s
tick, a packet of thousand-and-ones, and finally – his favourite because it lasted so long – a gob-stopper.
Towers’s eye lay in the palm of his hand. ‘What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper?’ Logan’s hand reached out, grasped his shaking wrist, and tipped the eye into the bag.