The car swung on to the gravelled drive through large, ornate wrought-iron gates.
‘What is this place?’ asked Sculby.
‘Crowden House. One of Surrey’s finest country estates. Grade One listing, very good gardens, or so they tell me.’
‘They?’
‘National Trust. We have the use of one wing and share the running expenses.’
‘Christ, there’s people all over the place.’
The car was nearing the house and coaches were visible, drawn up in a neat line alongside the tennis courts.
‘That’s the point,’ replied Royston. ‘Basically we use this place as a convalescent home for “difficult” cases – getting back to normality, and so on. But it’s also useful for meetings with people like Kyril, who don’t like closed doors. See that lot?’
Sculby followed the direction of Royston’s pointing finger. Several people were straggling after a uniformed guide in the direction of some greenhouses.
‘Loshkevoi needs reassuring as much as Kyril. What could be more cosy than for the two of them to strike up a conversation on the lawn, in the open air, two tourists free to come and go as they please? With me? Thank God Easter was early this year. The place looks crowded enough for a bank holiday.’
Royston parked the car outside the main entrance next to a family of four picnicking out of the boot of an Allegro. Sculby looked at his watch. ‘Nearly time.’
‘Look… there he is.’
Sculby saw Loshkevoi come into view at the end of a grassed avenue winding in front of the house. Two men were with him but they kept their distance. It all looked very natural. Loshkevoi was wearing his own clothes and one of his companions had a camera slung round his neck.
From the front seat of Royston’s car he and Sculby had an uninterrupted view of the main drive. Kyril was due to keep his appointment at three o’clock.
‘No sign of him yet.’
Loshkevoi stopped as he reached the drive and turned back uneasily. One of his companions spoke to him and Sculby saw a look of panic-stricken protest appear on the face of his former client. The other man raised his hands in a calming, placatory gesture.
Royston picked up the radiophone and Sculby saw the third man raise the camera as if to adjust a setting.
‘Tell him we’ve got marksmen all round the perimeter wall,’ said Royston softly. ‘Tell him anything, but for Christ’s sake ditch him. It’s three o’clock.’
‘Loshkevoi doesn’t know…’
‘That Kyril wants to meet him?’ Royston snorted. ‘Too damn right he doesn’t.’
The man with the camera moved across to join the other two. A few seconds later the bodyguards sauntered off towards the main gate, leaving a bewildered and apprehensive Loshkevoi to stand on the drive alone.
Minutes passed. Kyril was late. Several people passed within a few feet of Loshkevoi but none of them made any attempt to speak to him. Royston looked at his watch for the umpteenth time and swore.
‘Look!’
Royston watched curiously as a well-dressed woman picked her way across the grass towards Loshkevoi. When she was almost touching him she spoke and Loshkevoi’s lips moved in reply. Then the woman’s hand moved in a tiny wave and she started to walk away, the encounter plainly at an end. Royston reached for the handset, his face tense. ‘Right,’ Sculby heard him say. ‘Pull them both in and bring them back to the house. Only for God’s sake, do it quietly.’
He replaced the receiver and got out. Sculby followed. Royston led the way through the main hall and over a red rope carrying a ‘private’ sign. At once the decor became less elaborate. After a few minutes’ walk they arrived in what Sculby guessed must have been part of the old kitchen, now partitioned off. Most of one wall was taken up with a large, sooty fireplace. The room was bare except for a table and half a dozen chairs, in one of which the woman they had seen on the drive was already seated. Royston lounged over to the fireplace, keeping his back to it, and put his right hand in his pocket.
‘Introduce me,’ he said quietly.
Sculby now saw that the woman was young, pretty and extremely composed. She was smoking a cigarette, but apart from that slight indication of nervousness showed no sign of surprise at her situation. Sculby wondered why. On hearing Royston speak she crossed her legs and sat back.
‘He said it would be just like this,’ she observed conversationally. ‘How frightfully interesting.’
‘He?’
The woman smiled and deposited some ash in the cocoa-tin lid on the table in front of her.
‘That rather dishy man with the Slavonic-sounding name. Kyril.’
Her husky, well-bred voice conveyed that when she described Kyril as dishy she was speaking from intimate personal experience. Sculby was becoming more and more mystified.
‘What’s your name?’ said Royston. Hearing the roughness in his voice the woman turned to him and smiled.
‘Lucinda Bayliss, my sweet. What’s yours?’
Royston said nothing. Sculby sensed that he was every bit as puzzled as the rest of them. The woman smoothed down her dress, drawing every eye in the room to long, attractive thighs.
‘Is that all you’re going to ask me?’ she said lightly. ‘How dreadfully disappointing. Kyril assured me there’d be lots of men in jackboots wielding rubber truncheons. It all sounded quite thrilling…’
‘What are you?’ interrupted Royston aggressively. The woman smiled at him.
‘Expensive, my sweet. Very, very expensive indeed.’
Sculby watched comprehension dawn in all the other faces round him, and knew their expressions matched his own.
‘So you’re on the rent,’ said Royston. Lucinda shrugged, apparently quite unruffled by the sneer in his voice.
‘You could say that. At my end of the profession we call it an honorarium, darling.’ Seeing the look on his face she added, very softly, as if not to embarrass a thick child, ‘From the Latin.’
Royston moved away from the fireplace. Like everyone else in the room he seemed partly mesmerised by this outstandingly cool performance.
‘And how did you meet this… Kyril?’
‘He rang me up, then came round later. At first I couldn’t place him at all. He was refreshingly honest, you see.’ She rolled her eyes upwards. ‘My God, you don’t know how refreshing honesty can be until you’ve done my job. He said some very nice things about my body but he didn’t want to sleep with me, only to marry me. Look, isn’t it nice?’
She held up her left hand, enjoying the effect which the sight of the gold band produced on the roomful of men.
‘You married him?’ said Royston incredulously.
‘Oh no. Not really. Although he did say he’d rather like to…’ She giggled. ‘…and he wanted me to keep the ring as a memento of the occasion. But no, I didn’t actually marry him. He said he was playing a very elaborate joke on an old friend and if I helped him he’d pay me three times my usual hourly rate. He was a very generous man, was Mr Kyril. The kind who settles in advance without being asked…’
Sculby wanted to smile but the look on Royston’s face deterred him.
‘What exactly did Kyril want from you?’
‘Well, he wanted me to go on a coach trip with him. As his wife, you understand. I’d never ridden in a coach before. I know you shouldn’t knock anything ’til you’ve tried it, especially in my line, but it was pretty disgusting, actually. Then, when we arrived…’
Royston sat down heavily in the nearest chair. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he interrupted very quietly, ‘that Kyril is here, now? In this house?’
The woman’s eyes widened. ‘Of course, my sweet. Didn’t I just explain it all to you?’
For a moment nobody spoke, and Sculby fancied he could hear the sound of his own heart beating, it was so quiet in the room. Then Royston spread his hands in a gesture of hopeless inquiry and looked at the bodyguards, both of whom shook their heads. Sculby read consternation on every face, Loshkevoi’s most of all.
‘My God,’ said Royston. There was another awed silence. ‘My God, and we never saw him. Go on.’
At a sign from Royston one of the bodyguards slipped from the room while Lucinda resumed her story.
‘Well, after we got here he pointed him…’ (a wave at Loshkevoi) ‘…out to me and asked me to go over and say a few words to him. First of all he said goodbye and gave me something extra, he really was terribly, terribly sweet about the whole thing…’
Royston drummed his fingers on the table.
‘What… exactly mind you… did he tell you to say?’
‘He told me to say: I’ll be late, wait for me.’
‘Those were his exact words?’
Lucinda nodded.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘And nothing else?’
Lucinda shook her head. Royston turned to Loshkevoi. ‘Is that right?’
Loshkevoi roused himself with an effort. He seemed dazed.
‘Yes. It’s what she said. Then I said something… I can’t remember…’
Royston turned back to Lucinda Bayliss. ‘What did he say?’
Lucinda’s brow puckered in thought. ‘He said: okay, thanks. At least, I think that’s…’
‘What were you supposed to do then?’
‘Nothing. I’d earned my money and that was the end of it.’
The jerky, unpredictable silences were starting to get on Sculby’s nerves. Loshkevoi’s fingers played over his face, the remaining bodyguard frowned, Royston was lost in thought. Sculby wondered just how badly things were off course.
‘What was he wearing?’
Royston’s question seemed unnaturally loud after the long silence. Lucinda laughed, a soft ripple of sound which sent a tingle up Sculby’s spine.
‘I never look at what men wear, darling.’
Royston nodded, as if accepting a valid point made against him, and for a while nobody spoke. At last he seemed to make up his mind.
‘That gentleman will give you tea and take you through this story of yours again.’ Royston gestured at the remaining bodyguard. ‘Then you’re free to go.’
The woman pouted and consulted what was obviously a very expensive gold watch.
‘Can’t I go now? I’ve been here simply ages.’
Royston stood up.
‘Try thinking of it as helping the police with their inquiries.’
Lucinda unfolded herself slowly from the chair in which she had been sitting, and the men saw that as well as being beautiful she was also very tall. Beside her Royston looked tense and shrunken, and for an instant Sculby was reminded of those countless fairy stories where the lovely princess falls into the hands of an ugly dwarf.
‘You look as though you could use a little help,’ she said, casting a look of cold appraisal over Royston’s unattractive body, and again Sculby wanted to smile but dare not. Royston’s face remained impassive, as though he had heard nothing.
Sculby was nearest the door. He opened it for Lucinda Bayliss to pass through, and was rewarded by a delightful, lingering smile. Loshkevoi waited until the door had closed again, then said: ‘What the hell is going on around here?’
‘Shut up.’
‘No. I won’t shut up. First of all you give me this headache…’
Royston stirred impatiently in his chair.
‘When you refused to get into the laundry basket you left us no choice. The doctor says it’ll soon wear off.’
‘Would you have agreed to get into a basket? Too much like a coffin. Then who the hell is this Kyril?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, leave it out. You know bloody well who he is.’
‘Look, I…’
‘We know about the arms in the garage, Loshkevoi. And the radio. And the money. And don’t pretend you don’t know what we’re talking about, because we’ve got a lovely set of prints of you digging Kalashnikovs out of the rubble.’ Sculby had read about people going grey but had never seen it, until now. Loshkevoi looked as though he had gone into a state of suspended animation. Royston, on the other hand, seemed to be warming up.
‘You want to know what’s going on? All right, I’ll fucking tell you. We have made a deal, see? If you say who you’re working for, why, for how long and all the other details you know, it is just conceivable that we will not leave you in jail for the rest of your stinking, useless life. But that’s for later. Right now, you’re bait. Colonel Ivan Yevseevich Bucharensky wants to talk to you, very badly. So this is a trap and you’re the lure. We’re going to pot both of you.’
Loshkevoi shot Sculby a furious look. ‘I should have known you were bent, all along. My Christ, but I should!’
Sculby turned his back on him and walked over to the fireplace.
‘You’re not very smart, are you?’ Royston agreed. ‘Next time, be a bit more choosy.’
Loshkevoi took no notice. ‘You heard what that whore said,’ he gibbered. ‘He’s here! Inside this house…’
‘So you do know what we’re talking about.’
Loshkevoi’s face fell and he mumbled something Sculby couldn’t catch.
‘Better start talking, Loshkevoi, if you want to buy some protection.’ Royston’s eyes were gleaming. ‘It doesn’t matter to me whether Kyril gets to you or not. You’re not important. All we’ve got to do is watch your garage and sooner or later we’ll have all the answers anyway. So if Kyril means to harm you, that’s okay with me. He’s another matter. It’s true he’s slipped through undetected so far, but even if we had spotted him we’d still have let him in. Don’t be under any illusions about that.’
Royston stood opposite Loshkevoi, his hands resting on the table. The faces of the two men were very close.
‘We’ll gamble your life away, Loshkevoi, if we have to. You come cheap. It’s Kyril we want, not you, and we want him so badly it’s like a disease!’
It really is like a disease with you, thought Sculby wonderingly. Something pervasive and rotten. Syphilis, perhaps.
‘Now you’d better start talking if you want us to help you.’
Royston lowered himself into a chair.
‘For a start, try explaining why Kyril needs to get to you so desperately. What’s the big attraction?’
Loshkevoi opened his mouth and uttered some incoherent noises. He looked sick. For a few seconds of painful suspense Sculby thought that he was on the point of refusal. Then the dam broke and he started to babble.
‘You keep Bucharensky away from me! All right, I’ll grass, I’ll say anything you want, but keep him off my back, you hear!’
He paused, gasping for breath, and loosened his collar. Royston nodded curtly. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m not part of the regular KGB. They pay my salary but Stanov’s my boss.’
‘You mean you report direct to Centre?’ Royston interrupted him.
‘No. I mean I report direct to the Chairman. He has this job for me. Terrorism. It’s his pet game. He’s been working on it for years. That’s where I come in. I liaise for Centre with the Provisional IRA, National Liberation Army, a few others as well. I’m their banker. It’s through me Stanov puts together his operations in this country. I’m telling you this as a guarantee of good faith, okay? To show that the source is impeccable. I can finger the men who killed Mountbatten…’
‘Go on.’ Royston’s voice was still tired but now he was having to work to keep the emotion out of it.
‘You want to know why Kyril’s trying to see me? Because that’s his real mission. Everything else is straight cover. This fabulous plan he’s supposed to be carrying…’ Loshkevoi did not attempt to conceal his scorn. ‘…It doesn’t exist. Or if it does, Kyril hasn’t got it, that’s for sure.’
Royston had taken out a notebook and was busily writing in it, so that Loshkevoi couldn’t see his face.
‘That trek of his across Europe… a blind. It’s me he wants…’
‘How do you know that Kyril hasn’t got the project-plan?’ said Royston, looking up from his book.
‘Because it’s in Stanov’s blue safe.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘Because Nidus has seen it there, he told me.’
Royston held his pen up to the light and squinted at it, as if something was wrong with the nib. ‘Nidus?’ he said casually.
‘Oh come on,’ said Loshkevoi wearily. ‘You know who Nidus is. And I work for him on the side now. That’s the trouble. Stanov suspects. You really don’t know who Nidus is?’
Royston shook the pen a couple of times and tested it. ‘No,’ he said, after a long pause, and Sculby saw a look of cunning suddenly appear on Loshkevoi’s face.
‘I forgot… of course, only Bryant knows… well, you ask him then. I’m not telling.’
The nib seemed to have cured itself, for Royston was writing again.
‘Tell me this… why should Kyril want to see you?’ Royston did not look up from his book while he waited for a reply. Sculby couldn’t detect how important these answers were to him.
‘Because I can identify Nidus. Stanov wants to know who he is.’
‘And that matters?’ Royston seemed befogged by his total ignorance of who or what Nidus might be. Loshkevoi sniggered.
‘Ask Bryant. He’ll tell you if it’s important or not.’
‘But you know the name… I mean the real name, of this Nidus?’
‘No, I… When I said I knew who Nidus was, I meant I could identify him. I know what he looks like. And there’s nothing Bucharensky wouldn’t do to get that out of me. It’s the whole point of his mission, I tell you. Bucharensky’s loyal to Stanov, always was. Stanov suspects I know something. And he’s damn right!’ The rising note of panic was clearly audible now. ‘He knows I couldn’t stand the torture. Please! Give me a break, will you? Look, I can help you. I can…’
Royston started to interrupt but at that moment the door opened to admit one of the bodyguards. Royston looked up with annoyance and the man shrugged, spreading his hands to indicate that the search had drawn a blank. Royston appeared to deliberate for a moment.
‘We’ll go upstairs.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Five o’clock. There’s not much daylight left. My guess is that he’ll wait for nightfall before making a move, but I don’t want to get caught down here.’
Royston nodded at the bodyguard. ‘Take Loshkevoi upstairs to the first floor and wait there. I’m going to see if Franklin’s had any more luck with the Bayliss girl, and then we’ll all join you. Whatever happens, stay put.’
The man nodded, and beckoned Loshkevoi. Royston was about to follow them through the door when Sculby grasped his arm.
‘Do you need me any more?’
‘For your own protection, Laurie, don’t try to leave now.’
Sculby registered the note of anxiety in Royston’s voice and his eyes narrowed. ‘So there is a problem?’
Royston expelled some air in what might have been an expression of humour or annoyance.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘The theory went like this. There was no point in saturating the place because that would only scare Kyril away, right? But with four of us – Barnes, Franklin, you and me – five I suppose if you count Loshkevoi – he shouldn’t have been able to give us any trouble. We put a few men on the outer wall, in the hope that they’d spot Kyril as he came in and after that we’d monitor him. Well, it didn’t happen. It’s obvious that Kyril’s not going to keep to the deal he put up through you. But whether that spells danger, I don’t know.’
Sculby swallowed. ‘You think I’d be at risk if I tried to leave?’
‘It’s a long drive down to the main gate, Laurie, and I can’t afford to send anyone with you. Frankly, I need you here, if you’re prepared to stay. One extra body could make all the difference.’
Sculby nodded slowly, touched by Royston’s evident concern.
‘Okay, Michael. I suppose we’ve just got to sit it out and hope. Are you armed, by the way?’
Royston nodded reassuringly and patted his jacket pocket.
‘Good. That makes me feel a whole lot better.’
Sculby led the way through the door into the hall as he spoke these words, and so unfortunately did not see the expression on Royston’s face which they provoked.