Jago sought some daylight to see the letter clearly. A burnt rocking horse watched him, its dapples now paint blisters. The fire had cleansed him of the clutter of childhood. All those inherited things – his mother’s Bible, the notebooks of Aunt Esme’s poetry, the photograph albums – all gone and no longer a burden to him.
He found the light he required in what had been his bedroom. By the charred frame that had been a window, he read the letter. He went through it twice. The writer didn’t name the person they’d recruited on behalf of 6, referring to the asset as the Three Graces, but when he read it, Jago, who had attended a public school for girls, knew the secret.
In the letter, Lady Duggan complained about the noise her three girls were making in the corridor outside her study while she was trying to write. They were apparently playing the Grace Game and Lady Duggan wrote that she hoped her Three Graces over the water were a little more discreet.
The Grace Game. The very words brought a world back to Jago. Play up,the house! rattled round his head again. It was a sport that existed nowhere outside of an English girls’ boarding school. Huntingdon School, like many of the others, ran a tournament named the Grace Game. Jago had quite forgotten this obscure winter term cup, when teams of three competed with other teams of three, using rods and hoops. It was a keenly fought competition, and the teams were selected from pupils who had a special relationship with each other. That relationship informed Jago of the identity of the MI6 agent. And now he knew, it was vital to get this information to Foxley.
Intelligence that couldn’t be passed on and acted upon wasn’t intelligence. It was dead knowledge. Jago knew he could hardly now use SOE radio to contact Foxley in Zürich, but he had a plan. He just needed a piano–player and a rocket attack on London. The V2s were falling nightly, so Jago felt he could rely on the dependable Germans.
As he made his way to the telephone kiosk, Jago held back the concern that threatened to swamp all others: Nicky. They had Nicky. Beautiful, lovely Nicky was in the hands of men who pathologically despised what he was. Policemen, who had the double reward of an aristocrat and a queer to torment. Jago ached to give them what they wanted, not destroying the evidence. He could bargain for Nicky. But Jago walked through these temptations, trying to block them out. He needed to put together a team. The priority was Foxley and getting a message to them.
There was almost a full moon, what had been called in the Blitz a bomber’s moon. But rockets didn’t need natural light to find their targets – they were blind and implacable – and Jago knew he was right. The war had to be brought to a final conclusion with the total and unconditional surrender of Germany. Otherwise, on a night like this in just a few years, a rocket would fall on London with God knew what explosive in its cone.
Jago used a telephone kiosk on the edge of Warwick Square. He rang both Lavender and Mrs Cambridge and set things in motion. When he left the box he found Billy Grogan and his team waiting for him.
‘We turned over your office to no avail, so I think it’s time we stopped pussyfooting around, don’t you?’
They took him to a police station on Rochester Row, and to a small, windowless office below ground.
‘Fetch a bowl, Nolan,’ Grogan said, and one of his men nodded and disappeared. Then he opened a drawer in the only desk in the room and threw a face flannel onto the surface of it. The other detective moved the desk chair to the centre of the room and guided Jago firmly into it. Jago felt vulnerable with Grogan’s henchman lurking behind him. The third policeman returned with an enamel bowl, water sloshing around in it. He carried it to the desk.
‘Careful,’ Grogan said, as it was put down.
Grogan dropped the flannel into the water. Jago wondered if he was going to freshen up before a long interrogation.
‘Where’s the Foxley file, and where’s that blasted letter?’
Grogan spoke with his back to Jago, working the flannel in the bowl.
‘I’ve no idea what…’
Grogan spun around and the wet flannel smacked across Jago’s cheek. The pain was almost as intense as the shock. ‘What the hell…’ He saw the flannel coming back from the other side, heading for his un-smacked cheek. He lifted his hand to protect it, but the detective behind grabbed it and held it clear as the flannel smacked home.
Grogan hit him three or four more times in quick succession, while Jago’s arms were held. When he was released, he instinctively jumped up. Jago realised too late he was expected to do this, as Nolan, the detective who had fetched the bowl, hit Jago full in the belly with a balled fist. He fell, trying to gasp and throw up simultaneously. He lay there as they talked football. Apparently Brentford, an unlikely team, lurked near the top of the league.
‘Only because there’s so many pro footballers stationed in London. When peace breaks out they’ll all go home up north and Brentford’ll go down the table as is right and proper,’ said Nolan.
‘Back to the Third, where they belong,’ pronounced Grogan.
They all nodded in agreement.
‘Right,’ said Grogan, the break over, ‘get him up.’
Jago, sick and faint, was lifted off the floor and put back into the chair. The flannel cracked again, and the dance was renewed. Before too long, Jago found himself back on the floor, gasping like a stranded fish and hardly able to remember a time when he wasn’t in agony and consumed by fear.
Grogan bent down by him. ‘You will run out of spunk. You are going to tell us where you’ve hidden the letter and the file.’
Jago was slammed back in the chair and it began again; the slaps, the punches, the collapse.
‘What about putting the boot in?’ suggested Nolan.
‘I don’t think we need to. Remember, this is a ducky-boy, not a real man. Okay sunshine, where’s the stuff you nicked?’
And so it went on.
‘What letter?’ he would say occasionally, through lips caked with blood, and, ‘Please, I don’t have the file.’
Sometimes they would halt the assault to taunt him.
‘Are you a bum-boy, Craze? Has Commander Godwin had his willy up your arse?’
Lying on the ground, Jago became aware of something; that he could take it. Their violence, so shocking to start with, hurt less with each round. A terrible tiredness gripped him and he wanted to be left alone to crawl into a ball and sleep, but their efforts were the torments of unimaginative men. Jago found a place to go in his mind to plot and plan.
Grogan was speaking in his ear again. ‘Not so pretty now, are you?’
Jago stayed silent. His lips felt they belonged to someone else, fat and badly attached. Blood, trickling from his nose, climbed them and spilled down into his mouth. His stomach throbbed, his sweaty hair irritated his eyes.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve probably looked better.’
Grogan punched his stomach hard and he slipped from the chair back onto the floor.
‘Get him up. Let’s take him to see lover boy.’
Jago, dragged and stumbling, was taken out of the office, down into the arse of the station, down into its Victorian bowels. They came to a door as solid and respectable as the age it was made in; it wore its studs with pride. A huge key was turned and the door swung back. There inside was Nicky.