‘Back again, Mr Bond, nice to see you,’ the salesman said with a wide sincere smile as Bond circled the chocolate-brown Jensen Interceptor I. It was parked on the forecourt of a showroom just off Park Lane, in Mayfair. Bond had visited it three times already, checking out the Interceptor, hence the salesman’s welcoming smile. What was his name? Brian, that was it, Brian Richards. Bond’s Bentley was out of action, having its gearbox replaced. The old car, much loved, and lovingly customised over the years, was showing signs of its age and its rambunctious history and was beginning to cost him serious money just to keep it roadworthy. It was like an old thoroughbred racehorse – its time had come to be put out to grass. But what to replace the Bentley with? He wasn’t particularly enamoured of modern cars – he’d test-driven an E-type Jaguar and an MGB GT but they didn’t trigger any pulse of pleasure in him, didn’t make his heart beat. But the Interceptor was different – big and beautiful – and this was what kept bringing him back to Park Lane.
Brian, the salesman, sidled up and lowered his voice.
‘I’ll have the Interceptor II in a few weeks, Mr Bond, after the Motor Show. And I can do you a very fair price – so buying the One wouldn’t be that clever, what with the Two coming out, know what I mean? But . . .’ He looked around as if he was about to divulge a dark secret. ‘In the meantime, come through the back and have a look at this.’ Bond followed Brian across the showroom and through a door to a small mews courtyard at the rear. Here were the workshops and extra space for cars to be waxed and polished before they went to the forecourt on display. Brian gestured to what looked like another Interceptor, painted a dull gunmetal silver. Bond walked around it. An Interceptor but somehow longer, he thought, and with two air vents set behind the front wheels.
‘The Jensen FF,’ Brian said softly in veneration, almost with a catch in his voice. ‘Four-wheel drive.’ He opened the door. ‘Step in, Mr Bond. Try her for size.’
Bond slipped into the driving seat and rested his hands on the wooden rim of the steering wheel, his eyes taking in the grouped dials on the fascia, his nostrils filled with the smell of new leather. It worked on him like an aphrodisiac.
‘Take her out for a spin,’ Brian suggested.
‘I just might,’ he said.
‘Be my guest, Mr Bond. Take her out on the motorway, give her some gas. You’ll be amazed. Take all the time you need, sir.’
Bond was thinking. ‘Right. When do you close? I may be a couple of hours.’
‘I’m working late tonight. I’ll be here till ten. Just bring her round the back and ring the bell on the gate.’
‘Perfect,’ Bond said and switched on the engine.
Bond felt he was in a low-flying plane rather than an automobile as he accelerated the Jensen down the A316 towards Twickenham. The wide curved sweep of the windscreen filled the car with light and the powerful rumble of the engine sounded like the roar of jet propulsion. The four-wheel drive meant the tightest corner could be negotiated with hardly any diminution of speed. When he stopped at traffic lights pedestrians openly gaped at the car as it idled throatily, heads turning, fingers pointing. If you needed a car to boost your ego, Bond thought, then the Jensen FF would do the job admirably. Not that he needed an ego boost, Bond reminded himself as he accelerated away, the speed forcing him back in the seat, cutting up and leaving a Series V Sunbeam Alpine for dead, its driver gesticulating in frustration.
Bond turned left before Richmond Bridge. He went into a post office to ask directions to Chapel Close, where Bryce Fitzjohn lived. He motored down Petersham Road, along the river’s edge, found the narrow lane, turned the corner and parked. It was just before six o’clock and he rather liked the idea of being the first to arrive at her little party. A few minutes alone would negate or confirm any lingering doubts he had about her.
Bryce Fitzjohn’s home turned out to be a pretty Georgian ‘cottage’ with a walled garden, the grand houses of Richmond Hill rising behind and beyond. Bond surveyed the driveway and the house’s facade from across the lane. Worn, patinated red stock-brick, a slate roof, a moulded half-shell pediment over the front door, three big sash windows on the ground floor and three above – a restrained and elegant design. They weren’t cheap, these refined houses on the river – so she wasn’t short of money. However bitter her divorce had been, perhaps it had proved lucrative, Bond wondered as he crossed the road, noting that there were no cars parked outside. He was the first to arrive – excellent. He rang the doorbell.
There was no response. Bond listened, then rang again. And again. Now new intimations of alarm began to cluster. What kind of invitation was this? Bond was unarmed and felt suddenly vulnerable, wondering if he was being watched from some vantage point. He looked around him and stepped back out on to the road. A mother pushing her pram. A boy walking his dog. Nothing out of the ordinary. He returned to the house and slipped through the ornate iron gate at the side that led to the walled garden. Bond saw well-tended herbaceous borders edging a neatly mown lawn with a large stone birdbath set on a carved plinth in the centre. At the bottom of the garden, under a gnarled and ancient fig tree, was a wrought-iron bench and table. All very ordered and civilised. Bond followed paving stones set in the turf round to a conservatory at the rear. Beside it was a door that led into the kitchen.
Bond peered through the window. Here, laid out on a scrubbed pine kitchen table were trays of canapés, ranked glasses of various sorts and bowls of nuts, cheese balls and olives. So, there was going to be a party . . . But where was the hostess? Bond thought about returning home to Chelsea, but his curiosity was piqued and he felt it was his professional duty to find out if there was anything more clandestine going on here. He just had to gain access to this house. Needs must, he thought to himself, and reached down and removed one of his loafers. He twisted off the heel, revealing the two-inch, dirk-like stabbing blade that projected from it, sheathed by the specially constructed sole. He slipped the blade into the gap by the Yale lock, probed, eased and then turned it, feeling the tongue of the lock spring back and the door yield. He pushed it open. It was all too easy, this breaking and entering.
Bond replaced the heel and slipped his shoe back on. He allowed himself a couple of seconds’ reflection – he could close the door and return home, no one would be the wiser – but he felt that having achieved ingress, as it were, it would be wrong not to explore further. Who knew what he might discover? So he stepped in and wandered around the kitchen, listening intently, and, hearing no sound of anyone stirring, he helped himself to a chicken vol-au-vent and then a triangle of smoked salmon. Delicious. There was a drinks trolley with an impressive display of alcohol set upon it. Bond contemplated the array of bottles (some serious drinkers were expected, clearly) and was tempted to have a dram of the Scotch on offer as it was Dimple Haig, one of his favourites – but decided this wasn’t the moment. Then he decided it was, so he poured three fingers into a tumbler and left the kitchen to investigate the house.
The rooms were high-ceilinged and generously sized on the ground floor: there was a dining room and a drawing room with fine cornicing and French windows that gave on to the lawn. To the other side of the entrance hall was a cloakroom-bathroom and a small study. He spent some time in the study, one wall of which was lined with bookshelves – mainly biographies and non-fiction, he saw, with a distinct showbiz slant. He opened the bottom drawer of the small partners’ desk that sat in a corner (always start with the bottom drawer) and was surprised to find a cache of large glossy professional photographs of Bryce Fitzjohn nearly and provocatively naked. In some she was wearing a tiny leather bikini; in others she was topless, her arm held demurely across her breasts; and there were others of her in full make-up, hair blown awry by a wind machine, her cleavage plungingly on display. There was one set of her sitting up in a rumpled bed, naked, her back to the camera, the cleft of her buttocks visible, her hair tousled, her eyes half closed and invitingly come-hither. The name at the foot of each photograph was ‘Astrid Ostergard’. So, Bryce Fitzjohn was Astrid Ostergard in another life. The name seemed familiar to Bond – where had he seen it before? He leafed through the photos – an actress, a dancer, a model? A high-class prostitute? Bond was tempted to take a photo as a souvenir.
He quickly went through the other drawers of the desk and found nothing out of the ordinary. Her passport confirmed her name was indeed Bryce Connor Fitzjohn (aged thirty-seven) born in Kilkenny, Ireland. It was time to go upstairs. Bond drained his glass of Haig and left it on the desk.
On the first floor there were two bedrooms, one with a bathroom en suite and clearly Bryce’s. Bond opened cupboards and drawers and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom – he noticed there seemed no trace of a male presence anywhere. In the guest bedroom the bottom drawer of the bedside table revealed an ancient, desiccated half-pack of Gauloises cigarettes and a well-thumbed copy of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves. Scant evidence of a man in her life. No, there was really nothing to go on apart from the pseudonymous photographs—
The sound of a motor – diesel – and a tyre-scatter of gravel made Bond freeze for a second before he strode to the window, peering out cautiously. A breakdown van towing a Triumph Herald 13/60 convertible pulled up outside. Bryce Fitzjohn stepped out of the cab of the van and, from the other door, an overalled mechanic emerged, who unhitched the Herald. Bond watched Bryce write a cheque for the driver and see him and his van off with a cursory wave, and then Bond drew back as she unlocked the front door to her house.
Bond moved quickly to the top of the stairs, the better to overhear the series of calls she proceeded to make from the telephone on the small table in the hallway. ‘Yes,’ he heard her say, ‘me again. Nightmare . . . After the breakdown in Kingston . . . It got worse – completely dead . . .’, ‘Hello, darling, so sorry . . . No we’ll do it another time . . .’, ‘I might have been in Siberia, nobody offered to help . . . Took me three hours after I called you to find a garage . . .’, ‘And then the man said the car was fixed but it still wouldn’t fucking start . . . Exactly, so I had to find another garage . . . Day from hell . . . Yes, I’m going to have a hot bath and an enormous gin and tonic . . .’, ‘Bye, my dear . . . Yes, it is a shame . . . everything was ready . . . No, we’ll do it again. Promise . . .’ and so on for another few minutes as she rang around apologising to the friends who were meant to have come to her party, Bond assumed.
As he stood there listening he began to wonder what his best course of action would be. Reveal himself? Or try to slip out unnoticed? He heard her go into the kitchen and then a minute later head back across the hall for the stairs. He ducked into the spare bedroom. He heard her kick off her shoes on the landing and the chime of ice in a glass, then, moments after, the sound of water tumbling into a bath. Bond peered out, carefully. She had left the door to her bedroom open and he was able to watch her undress, partially, in a kind of jump-cut striptease, as she crossed and recrossed her room, shedding clothes. He moved cautiously out into the corridor and saw her reflected in the mirror of her dressing table. She was wearing a red brassiere and red panties, and her skin was very white. He noted the furrow of her spine deepen as she arched her arms back to unclip the fastener of her brassiere. And then she slipped out of vision.
Bond stepped back into the spare bedroom – he was both excited and, at the same time, made vaguely uneasy by this unsought-for act of voyeurism. Everything seemed unexceptionable and explicable: there had indeed been a party planned – that was then cancelled when her car broke down in Kingston on the way back from London. No honey trap after all; sheer coincidence being the explanation behind everything – yet again. Still, he thought, better to be secure in this knowledge than worry that some sort of elaborate scheme of entrapment had been set in motion.
He eased past the door of the spare room, pulling it closed behind him, and paused for a moment on the landing. It was quiet. She seemed to have gone into the bathroom, no doubt luxuriating in a deep bath. For a crazy second he contemplated walking in on her – no, madness, slip out unnoticed while you have the chance. He stepped over her discarded high-heeled shoes and swiftly went down the stairs and into her study. On a piece of her writing paper he wrote ‘Thanks for the cocktail. James’ and weighted it with his empty whisky glass in the centre of her desk. What would she make of that? he wondered, pleased with his mischief, not bothering to question the professional wisdom of the gesture. To hell with it – it was his day off. He let himself out of the front door, closed it silently behind him and strolled, hands in pockets, nonchalantly back to where he’d parked the Jensen.
Bond drove steadily back to Chelsea, not testing the powerful car at all, so caught up was he with the images crowding his brain. Images of Bryce undressing – the red of her brassiere offset by the alabaster whiteness of her skin; the way she’d used a finger to hook and tug the caught hem of her panties back over the swell of her buttock. What was it about this woman, this virtual stranger, that so nagged at him? Maybe it was the fact that he had broken into her home and had spied on her, that his illicit presence in her house made his glimpses of her more . . . what? More charged, more erotic, more perversely exciting? At the back of his mind was the thought that, come what may, he had to contrive a way of seeing her again. It wasn’t over.
He wound down the window to allow some cool air into the car. His face was hot, he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and as he crossed over Chiswick Bridge he drove through the drifting smoke of some early evening bonfire. Instantly, the trigger-effect of the association worked on him and he was back once again in the world of his wartime dream, back in the orchard of the Chateau Malflacon, flitting from tree to tree, Corporal Tozer’s Sten gun heavy in his hand, listening to the sound of German voices – chatting, unconcerned – growing louder as he approached.
Bond pulled up at a traffic light. Somebody, seeing the Jensen, shouted, ‘Nice motor, mate!’ Bond didn’t even look round – he was in another place, twenty-five years ago. The woodsmoke, he thought, recalling it as if he was actually there in that Normandy orchard, moving cautiously from tree to tree. As he had reached the edge of the orchard he had seen the actual bonfire, heaped high with concertina files and flung boxes of documents, smouldering weakly, wisps of smoke seeping from the mass of paper but no sign of flames catching. Three young German soldiers – his age, teenagers – were emptying the last boxes of documents on to the bonfire, laughing and bantering. One of them, his jacket off, exposing his woollen vest and his olive-green braces, was using a long-handled French gardening fork to spear and heave the tied bundles of paper on to the mound. Filing clerks, stenographers, radio operators, Bond supposed, the last to leave the chateau, instructed to burn everything, unaware that Major Brodie and the rest of BRODFORCE were about to thunder in the front door.
The boy threw down his fork and began to empty a jerrycan of petrol over the pile of papers, sloshing the fuel on the bonfire. He dumped his jerrycan on the grass and searched his pockets for some matches. One of the others tossed him a box.
Bond stepped out from the trees, the Sten gun levelled.
‘Weg vom Feuer,’ he said, ordering them to move away from the fire.
They froze – completely shocked to see a British soldier, and then to realise he was speaking fluent German. Two of the clerks turned immediately and raced away, panicked, for the woods beyond. Bond let them go. The boy in the braces fumbled with his matches, trying to be a hero. There was something wrong with them, they wouldn’t light.
‘Lass das,’ Bond warned him, cocking the Sten. ‘Sonst schiess ich.’
The boy in the braces managed to light a match and immediately dropped it on the grass. He scrabbled for another. Was he insane, Bond thought?
‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said, in German. He raised the Sten and fired it into the air.
Nothing. The redundant click of the trigger. The gun had jammed. Jamming – the curse of the Sten gun. Carbon build-up in the breech, or a feed malfunction in the magazine. The operating instructions when this occurred were to remove the magazine, tap against knee and reinsert. Bond didn’t think he was going to do this.
The boy in the braces looked at Bond and seemed to smile. With deliberate care he took out another match and struck it. It caught and flared.
‘Now you are fool,’ the boy said, in English. He dropped the match on the bonfire and small flames flickered.
Bond slapped the Sten’s magazine and worked the cocking bolt.
Bond pulled the trigger again and again. Nothing. Click-click-click. The boy stooped and picked up the long-handled fork. It had three tines, Bond saw, curved, ten inches long.
Bond worked the bolt again. He aimed the Sten at the boy.
‘Forke weg,’ Bond said. ‘Sonst bring ich dich um.’
The boy quickly stepped towards him and thrust the fork upward. The sharp, curved gleaming tines were suddenly two inches from Bond’s chest and throat. Bond imagined them entering his body, effortlessly, puncturing the material of his uniform and then his skin, plunging deep inside him. He couldn’t turn and run – he’d be speared in the back. He still had the useless Sten in his hands; he thought in the mad scrambling seconds left to him he could fling himself sideways and smash the gun against the boy’s head. Somewhere in the back of his mind rose up the absolute determination that he was not going to die here, in this Normandy orchard.
The boy smiled thinly and pressed the tines of the fork closer, so that they actually touched the serge of Bond’s jacket, ready for the fatal thrust.
‘Dummkopf Englander,’ he said.
Tozer’s first shot hit the boy full in the throat, the second in the chest and flung him backwards.
Bond glanced round. Tozer was leaning against an apple tree. He lowered Bond’s Webley, smoke drifting from its barrel.
‘Sorry about that, Mr Bond,’ he said. ‘Bloody useless Sten, always has been.’ He limped forward, raising the revolver to cover the German lying on the ground. ‘I think I got him fair and square,’ Tozer said, with a satisfied smile.
Bond realised he was shuddering, as if suddenly very cold. He took a few steps towards the boy and looked down at him. His woollen vest was drenched in his blood. The round that had caught him in the throat had torn it wide open. Big thick pink bubbles formed and burst, popping quietly as his lungs emptied.
Bond sank to his knees. He laid the Sten carefully on the ground and vomited.
The traffic light changed to green. Bond put the Jensen in gear and accelerated cleanly away. Now he knew why the dream had so haunted him, summoned up from his unconscious mind like a minatory symbol. Why had he remembered it? What had provoked this recollection in every detail and texture? His birthday? The fact that he was aware he was growing older? Whatever it was, the memorable part of that particular day, he realised, 7 June 1944, was that he had been confronted with the possibility that his life was about to end, there and then – it marked the first time he had stared death full in the face. He could have had no idea that this was to be the pattern of the life ahead of him.