Troy sat at his desk in Scotland Yard and opened Voytek’s letter. It was direct and to the point—it did not mention Skolnik—it ought to do the trick, and whilst MI5 might be permanently baffled as to who sent it, they’d be bound to act upon it.
He fed two sheets and a carbon into the roller of his typewriter, thinking that while he was at it he’d scrub up her grammar and make the author of this anonymous denunciation sound less like a foreigner. Before his fingers had touched qwerty he realized that he did not want this done on his typewriter, he wanted it done on a typewriter no one would ever think to check. He was not above suspicion but he knew a man who was.
He phoned Rod’s office. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. Rod ought to be on the floor of the House.
“He is,” said Megan the secretary. “It’s the armed forces funding debate. Rod’s the principal speaker for the government. He told me not to wait. Said it would take until at least six o’clock and then there’d be the vote. I was just packing up when you called.”
Perfect.
Troy strolled out onto the embankment, ducked down the tunnel to the Palace of Westminster, accepted an unquestioning salute from the duty copper, and dashed up the stairs to Rod’s office.
Megan was the epitome of neatness—the sort of woman who remembered to empty the ashtray and put the plastic cover on the typewriter before she went home in the evening. Troy tore it off and typed out the two copies he needed.
When he’d finished he read it through, concluded it did not sound like the work of someone ratting themselves out, and folded the original to put it back in the envelope.
He realized the envelope was not empty. He shook it and a small piece of yellow cardboard fell out onto the desk. A pawn ticket, the number bold and black, the edges of the card worn and woolly—an address in the unfashionable World’s End stretch of the King’s Road, down by the Fulham gas works.
Had she meant to give this to him, or was it merely in the envelope when she reused it? No matter, she wasn’t coming back for it, whatever it was.
Rod breezed in, brimful of bonhomie. Whatever it was he’d been saying on the floor of the House, it had gone down well. Troy tore the “confession” from the roller and folded it before Rod could sneak a look.
“Don’t they have typewriters at Scotland Yard?” Rod asked without a hint of resentment and scarcely any of real curiosity.
“Bust,” Troy said simply.
“Well, be my guest.”
Rod dropped into an armchair. Put his feet up on the edge of the desk.
“I am knackered. I have fought the good fight and I am royally and righteously knackered. There’s nothing like giving the Tories a metaphorical arse kicking to cure insomnia. I could sleep the sleep of the brave, I could sleep for a week.”
“Do you have a couple of envelopes you could spare?” Troy said.
“With or without House of Commons crest?”
Troy was tempted. It was all but irresistible, but resist he did.
“I think plain will do,” he said, and watched a good gag vanish in the face of common sense and caution.
“Do you fancy getting pissed tonight?” Rod said. “I think it’s time we showed the Age of Austerity some decidely unaustere excess, don’t you? Time to open the good stuff.”
“Your place or mine?”
“Mine, I think.”
“Okay. I’ve letters to post and a call to make at World’s End, but I could be there not long after eight.”
“You could drop the letters in the out tray. I’m sure the government can spare the price of a stamp or two.”
Troy posted them on the other side of the road. The first envelope read simply “MI5.” He’d thought hard about to whom the second should be sent. It would be a scoop for the Post, edited by his brother-in-law, Lawrence, but there was just a chance Lawrence would recognize the type . . . and above all he wanted it to go to a newspaper so hostile to the government that there’d be no easy deals done to delay or suppress printing. He wanted it in black and white and all over the hoardings before anyone at MI5 could even think about a D-Notice. Voytek’s bunking off in Vienna depended on the story breaking before MI5 could find her. It had to be a Beaverbrook paper—he could almost imagine the relish, the schoolboy glee with which the Beaver would receive this, so he scribbled Daily Express, Fleet Street, on the envelope in his most schoolboy scrawl and dropped it in the box. Rod would never know the service he had rendered. If they lived to be eighty, then he might tell him . . . sometime around . . . 1995 . . . just in time to coincide with the invention of the no-stick frying pan and the telephone answering machine. Rod could hit him with one and record his confession with the other.