If Troy had one trait in common with Burgess, it was that boredom made him wicked.
By the middle of the following week, a dull, grey, wintery Wednesday, Westcott had not asked for another meeting, but the plods continued to traipse after him.
Troy walked down St. Martin’s Lane, down Villiers Street, to Charing Cross Underground, and caught a Circle Line train, on the inner track, towards Liverpool Street. At Liverpool Street, where trains regularly departed for “Harwich and the Continent,” a slogan vividly displayed and which he hoped might induce a touch of panic in his pursuers, he dawdled awhile by the ticket office, then exited at the far side, and climbed the steep outside staircase to Broad Street Station, and the North London Railway—suburban trains for Highbury, Hampstead, and Richmond. A grim little place which had once been the busiest station in the world. And if memory served, Mr. Pooter had gone to his office on this railway line in The Diary of a Nobody.
He got out at Hampstead Heath and set off uphill in the direction of Kenwood House.
A few hundred yards on, roughly level with the end of Well Walk, was a huge oak, battered by time and wind and rain. As a boy he’d climbed it dozens of times, and he knew that at chest height was a hollow about the size of a football. One summer, he’d found a red squirrel in residence. She had shrieked as loud as any goose. Today the hollow was empty.
He slipped in the envelope, looked quickly around, and walked back to the ponds in the lee of South Hill, where he found an empty bench, took out a paperback book—Burmese Days by George Orwell—and read until the light had dimmed. Then he packed up, walked to Bel-size Park Station, and caught the next Northern Line train home to Leicester Square.
Somewhere in Scotland Yard or at MI5 HQ in Leconfield House someone would be trying to make sense of the note he had left. An extract from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll:
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found Not a button, or feather, or mark, By which they could tell that they stood on the ground Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say, In the midst of his laughter and glee, He had softly and suddenly vanished away— For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
Troy had always been fond of Boojums. He’d never wanted to meet one—a sensible precaution considering the fate of those who did—but the affection remained.