Nobody tells you you’re dead – you have to figure it out yourself. It took me rather a long time. In fact, it was the presence of time that held me back. At the start, the idea didn’t even occur to me. I seemed to be surrounded by an endless grey landscape, but that didn’t mean death, surely: I was simply unconscious.
Only I wasn’t. I could vividly remember everything, right up until when Smale had shaken me and I had stopped breathing. But still, the fact that I was thinking meant I was alive: probably in a hospital somewhere, recovering.
I clung on to that idea for a very long time. I thought it must have been at least a few months since I’d ‘gone’ and ended up… wherever I was. That was when it occurred to me that perhaps death wasn’t what I had always thought it would be, but that it was a limbo state in which you had all eternity to reflect on the life you’d had, without being able to return to it.
My considerations of death were briefly interrupted by a series of extremely vivid hallucinations. One of these involved a tie I’d owned when I was a boy, a dark green silk tie with tiny red spots my father had bought me from Gieves when I’d turned sixteen, my last birthday in London before the war. The silk had been so thick and smooth it was like a river, and now it became just that and I dove deep into its comfort, luxuriating in its coolness and wishing I could stay there for ever, breathing bubbles up to the green, red-spotted surface. And then others started diving in after me, like the bodies in the ceremony I’d been at in Biafra, spirit bodies that cut through me and around me and seemed to keep diving further and further but never got any smaller or changed shape. And I wanted to climb up to the surface but I couldn’t, because it was blocked by loose threads of silk, white and sticky, and I couldn’t struggle past them and again I felt the weight on my chest and the trouble breathing, until I opened my eyes and saw a pair of disembodied eyes staring down at me from deep within a ball of white silk…
*
The lamps, though dimmed, had an unpleasant glare to them, and the walls a greenish tinge. I was in a hospital somewhere, but it was almost as bad as whatever I’d woken from. My food and drink were passed to me through a network of tubes, and I sat there, alone, imagining the fluid pumping into me and thinking back to what had happened, and what might happen next. I was in England, I knew, because the place smelled unmistakably of Dettol and every so often there was a hollow clanging, which I eventually realized was a radiator that was out of my line of sight.
I still couldn’t move. There was a window, but like everything else it only changed from white to grey to black and back again. But I was in a hospital in England, recovering. Of that I was sure.
*
The disembodied eyes returned one day: now I saw they were attached to a man in a white coat, white gauze mask, white hood, white gloves. I couldn’t speak to him, and he didn’t say anything to me – just checked my tubes and wrote things down on a white pad. I thought that my hearing must have gone again at some point, because every sound was amplified. When he moved his foot on the linoleum, it was like a coin dropping in a well.
I no longer felt pain – physical pain, that is. I thought about Anna every day, every hour. And grieved for myself, and the life I’d wasted.
*
Another man came to see me after that, wearing the same garb. It was Smale.
‘You survived,’ he said. ‘They didn’t think you would.’
I watched his eyes. Narrow and slanted, they seemed to me to be the kind of eyes that would belong to a small, ugly, grey fish. I tried to imagine the face of such a fish, and fitted it behind his mask.
‘You were extremely lucky,’ said the fish. ‘You were in a medical facility when it happened. You were out for a minute and a half – your heart even stopped beating. The wog doctor you came with declared you dead. But then you came to – almost as if you had heard us and weren’t willing to go.’
The fish paused. ‘Of course, a lot of people have been hoping you wouldn’t make it.’ He looked away contemplatively. ‘Not me, though. We’d lose so much valuable information.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Let’s get your clothes sent up, shall we? We’ve an important meeting to get to.’
*
London looked exactly the same: office workers jumped around puddles and struggled with umbrellas. We sploshed through the streets in the black Bentley. I sat in the back in my old suit, my hands cuffed to two soldiers sitting on either side of me. Smale was up in front. Near Piccadilly Circus Underground, we stopped at some lights and I glimpsed the headlines at a newspaper kiosk. ‘THE PRIME MINISTER AND MOSCOW: LATEST REVELATIONS!’ blared the poster for The Times, while The Telegraph had the more subdued: ‘MOUNTBATTEN SUSPENDS ARMS TO NIGERIA’.
‘Mountbatten?’
Smale turned back to look at me, his eyes dead. ‘He formed a government a couple of weeks ago.’
I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Wilson wasn’t KGB’ was what eventually came out.
‘Really?’ Smale replied, with a smile soaked in aspic. ‘Did you believe everything your handler told you?’ Then he turned away again and told the driver to take a right at the next junction.
*
They blindfolded me soon after that, and about twenty minutes later I was bundled out of the car and marched down a steep stairway. The room was cold and there was a slightly dank smell. Pipes gurgled in the background. Someone took the blindfold off. The two soldiers turned on their heels and took up station outside the door; Smale pushed me inside.
It was a familiar scene, right down to the naked bulb hanging from a coat-hanger. Beneath it, three men were seated behind a large desk that looked as though it were made from a solid block of steel. Two of the men were no surprise: Farraday and Osborne. The man sitting between them gave me more food for thought: Sandy Montcrieff, the Mirror reporter I’d met at the Lagos Yacht Club, and whom I’d later seen with Smale at the clinic in Udi.
We were in the ‘rubber room’, a space reserved for the interrogation of suspected double agents and other such undesirables; I’d sat in on a couple of sessions here before, during the renewed round of vettings after Philby had made a run for it. This gave me an advantage, of course. The bulb was burning through my eyes, but I knew it was a trick: it had been especially made by a company in Vauxhall to burn that bright, and the things were a devil to get replaced. Apart from the lamp, desk, chairs and a plastic bucket filled with dirty-looking water on the floor, the room was unfurnished, so as to enhance the subject’s isolation and disorientation – but I knew that we were in the soundproofed basement of one of the smarter hotels in West Kensington.
Despite all of this, I was much more afraid than the poor souls I’d seen interviewed here before. Because I was guilty.
Osborne asked me to take a seat, which I did. The chair was cold and too low. I mentally stripped the three of them, visualizing Montcrieff’s pale and bony legs, Osborne with his gut hanging over his belt and Farraday with unsightly moles across his back. It didn’t help much.
‘What’s this about?’ I said, selecting a tone somewhere between irritation and puzzlement. Might as well kick off proceedings. ‘Are you holding me responsible for Wilson’s death? I did everything I—’
‘I’m sure you did,’ said Montcrieff. ‘Thankfully, it wasn’t enough. But that’s just between ourselves. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’ll announce that you were the assassin.’
The other two didn’t flinch.
Montcrieff adjusted his cuffs and smiled innocently. ‘What we want to know,’ he went on, ‘is how long you thought you could get away with playing us all for fools.’
‘“Us”?’ I said. ‘Sorry, who the fuck are you again?’ I turned to Osborne: ‘William, I thought this was Service business.’
Osborne was stony-faced. ‘Sandy’s been with Five for years,’ he said. ‘And he was appointed Foreign Secretary two weeks ago.’
So. Not just a Mirror hack, then, but one of Cecil King’s men in Five, and these two – along with Pritchard – had been plotting with him from the beginning. It was a repeat of King’s coup attempt from last year, only this time the idea had been to have Wilson assassinated and then exposed as a Russian agent – and this time they had succeeded. Mountbatten was merely the figurehead: these three and a handful of other right-wing crackpots were in power now. No swastikas waving over The Mall – just a few desks moved. I imagined Chief would have been given the option of carrying on under the new regime or being shunted into retirement.
‘You know I didn’t kill Wilson,’ I said. ‘The Grigorieva woman pulled the trigger before I got to her.’
‘We only have your word for that. According to Smale, you were holding the gun when he came in.’
‘And he’s willing to testify to that, is he?’
Montcrieff laughed. ‘I don’t think you fully understand the situation,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to try you. The public is distraught, and crying out for revenge. We could have you hanged in Wembley stadium and sell tickets if we wanted.’ He leaned down and took a rolled-up Standard from a briefcase by his legs. He slapped it onto the table and pointed to the headline: ‘BRITAIN BACKS UNITY GOVERNMENT’. It was the twenty-eighth of April, I noticed – exactly a month since Udi.
‘What do you want?’ I asked, though I had a fair idea.
‘We found Templeton’s body,’ said Osborne, referring to Chief by his surname; presumably he had the title now. ‘Washed up near Limehouse.’ He threw some photographs onto the desk. I picked them up and forced myself to look at them. They were as grim as could be expected.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Henry killed him.’
‘And why would he do something like that?’
‘Because he was Radnya, of course.’
‘We also found this in the clinic in Udi,’ said Osborne, making the recommended sudden leap of subject to disorient me. He placed the Tokarev on the table; it spun for a moment on the surface before coming to a stop. ‘Do you usually favour Soviet weaponry?’
‘That’s not mine,’ I said. ‘It belonged to a man called Akuji.’
‘Yes, we know about him – Henry’s contact with Ojukwu. We received his report a few days ago. He has shown no signs of developing the disease you had, thankfully.’ He nodded at the gun. ‘So what do you normally use, then? Henry told us you shot someone on a golf course.’
‘I didn’t shoot him,’ I said. ‘He took a pill.’
Osborne turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘What weapon do you use?’
They had me. They must have searched my flat, found the safe, cracked it open.
‘A Luger P08,’ I said. ‘As I presume you already know.’
‘Indeed,’ said Farraday, and he took it out and placed it next to the Tokarev. ‘Did you get a chit from Armoury for this? Because I wasn’t aware we kept a stock of antique German pistols.’
I smiled tolerantly. ‘You haven’t brought me here for carrying a non-regulation weapon. Presumably you’re about to tell me that Chief’s bullet-wound is consistent with it being fired from this gun.’
‘Bingo,’ said Montcrieff.
‘Most officers have their own weapons,’ I said. ‘No doubt you all have your own, somewhere, in case of emergencies.’ None of them reacted, so I went on. ‘These little things’ – I gestured airily at the Luger – ‘were highly prized in their day, and are still very efficient. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Pritchard also had one.’
‘So where is it?’ said Farraday.
‘How the hell should I know?’ I asked. ‘Have you tried searching his home? It’s interesting that he told you about Akuji, though. “Henry’s contact with the Biafrans”, my arse – don’t you remember Henry told us we didn’t have any contacts on the Biafran side? That’s because we don’t: the KGB does. Akuji is a Moscow man. He’s closely related to and physically resembles Ojukwu. His role was to pose as Ojukwu to any British representatives sent to try to arrange peace talks with the Biafrans – I suspect Geoffrey Manning had just such a meeting arranged on the day I met him. My guess is that Akuji was to agree to whatever Manning proposed regarding talks, naturally without informing Ojukwu or anyone else in the Biafran hierarchy about it. Then whoever from the PM’s party had gone along to meet him would either have found themselves stood up or wasting a lot of time trying to negotiate peace with an impostor – all of which would have drawn away vital resources and attention from the security arrangements for the visit to Udi.’
They just stared at me, and I kept looking from one to the other.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I said. ‘I’m not the double. Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Chief must have called Henry out to Swanwick to discuss Slavin, and during their conversation twigged that he was Radnya. So Henry shot him, took a few of his clothes, dumped his body and pretended he’d gone missing.’
Osborne sighed. ‘No. That is precisely what you did.’
It was my turn to stare. He sounded certain of it.
‘As well as the gun, we have three witnesses. The firmest is a local solicitor, who lives in the village and was passing on the way into town. But all three described a black sports car very much like your little toy.’
‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘It was in my garage. Did they get a licence plate?’
Osborne spread his hands on the desk.
‘Well, then!’
‘But they did identify the car in other ways. Our solicitor friend told us that it had no boot. There are very few models with that feature. Yours is one.’
‘Who questioned him?’
‘That is immaterial.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s not. I’ll wager that whoever questioned him had already come up with the theory that the car was mine, and the solicitor was just doing his best to give the answers he thought would satisfy the man from London. It’s a classic investigative error.’
‘Don’t be so bloody patronizing,’ said Osborne, and I knew he’d done the interview. Farraday’s scornful glance in his direction confirmed it.
‘Henry admitted to going out there – and admitted to the timing of the witnesses, if I remember rightly,’ I said. ‘It was also in the middle of the night, so anyone who saw a black car would have had to have been looking very closely. And as none of your “witnesses” took a number down, that seems unlikely.’
‘Then,’ said Osborne softly, ‘there are the fingerprints. We took yours when you were in your coma. And then we compared them to all the sets we found in Templeton’s house. Care to hazard a guess at what we discovered?’
‘That some of them matched. Bravo – I’ve probably visited that house fifty times in the last three years. I was there the weekend before Chief disappeared.’
‘I don’t have to. You have to prove I wasn’t.’
He raised his arm and for a moment I thought he was going to try to punch me, but he brought the palm of his hand down on a small bell on the table, the kind you see in hotel receptions, and a few seconds later the soldiers marched in. They aimed truncheons at my solar plexus, sending a jolt of pain through me and making me vomit. I tried to reach Montcrieff’s shoes but he was too far away.
‘Get him a towel or something,’ said Farraday. I wondered what his reward had been – one of the more important ministries, no doubt. I remembered his little spat with Osborne over whether Pritchard or I should be allowed to go out to Lagos. They’d played it well, the three of them. If the coup hadn’t come off perhaps they could have set up a small theatrical company.
I raised my head. Osborne was consulting a small leather-backed notebook. ‘You hadn’t visited Templeton in months,’ he said. ‘According to his daughter.’
I wiped my mouth with the cloth that had been handed me. ‘How would she know?’ I said.
‘Well, you were sleeping with her, weren’t you?’
‘Where do you get these absurd—’
‘She told us all about it,’ said Farraday, chipping in.
‘I hardly know her. She isn’t my type.’
‘Very suave,’ said Montcrieff. He pushed forward another set of photographs. ‘How do you explain these, then?’
In the car, rehearsing all the possible questions they could ask me, traps they could set, paths I could and could not take, this was one eventuality I hadn’t envisaged.
She’d hanged herself, the poor cow. Her final few hours must have been hell. I remembered the look on her face as she had stood on the steps of her flat. Sorrow and despair. I had known it – and done nothing, too wrapped up in my own problems.
‘Did she leave a note?’ I asked, my lips tight.
Osborne nodded solemnly. ‘Something about not being able to live with the fact that her boyfriend had killed her father.’
I leapt towards him, something like a scream coming from deep down in my throat, but I hadn’t even reached the desk before I felt the thump. The soldier helped me back into my seat.
‘So you were sleeping with her,’ said Osborne, taking the cap off his fountain pen and noting it down neatly in his book.
‘You really are a shit, Osborne,’ I said, once I’d got my breath back again. ‘Did you know that?’
He didn’t look up from his writing. ‘Murder and treason are more serious crimes.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Conspiring to kill the prime minister is about as serious as it gets.’
That hit something. He pushed back his chair and stood up: his body may have been encased in finest Savile Row wool, but it did little to hide his bulk. He walked over to the plastic bucket and pushed it across the floor with a pointed little shoe, until it was just by my chair.
He yanked my head back by the forelock and brought his face up to mine. ‘Did I ever tell you what we used to do with the Yids in Palestine back in ’47?’ he said, his eyes glazed over. ‘The ones who wouldn’t talk?’
He gestured at the soldiers again, and they stepped forward, took me crisply by the arms and shoved my face into the water, holding me down. I’d counted to twenty and was starting to panic when they jerked me out and dumped me back in the chair.
‘Could we get some sandwiches or something?’ said Montcrieff. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Yes, good idea,’ said Osborne, whose face was flushed. He turned to one of the soldiers. ‘Anderson, see if they have any decent food they can send down. Sandwiches or something.’
‘Sir!’ The soldier saluted and he and the others turned on their heels and left the room.
There was silence for a moment, then Farraday cleared his throat. ‘Listen, Paul,’ he said reasonably. ‘We don’t want to spend all day on this. We know you’re working for the Russians. We just want the details. The name of your handler, where you meet him, how often. What information you’ve passed over. You know the drill. I can’t guarantee immunity, but if you cooperate now it will be a lot better for you.’
I’d got my breathing back now, and I summoned up my energy to look up at him. He was busy adjusting one of his shirt-cuffs, which had unpardonably jutted against the bevel of his wristwatch. It was twenty past one. So I could at least place myself: it was twenty past one on the twenty-eighth of April.
‘The smoked salmon and cucumber ones are good here,’ I said. ‘Could we have some tea as well?’
‘This isn’t funny, Dark,’ said Osborne. He held out his hand in a fist and then opened it, like a child playing a game. ‘Do you recognize this?’ he said. It was a small green booklet about the size of a box of matches. He flipped it open, revealing a string of numbers and other figures. ‘A one-time pad. To be used in conjunction with a radio transmitter. Care to explain?’
I was still catching up with a thought I’d had a few seconds earlier. I wasn’t certain of it, but I played it anyway.
‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But before I do, perhaps you can all answer one question that has been troubling me. Who was the poor chap who had his head shot off in Udi – one of the PM’s bodyguards? I presume there’s a D-notice on it.’
Osborne made to stand up, but Montcrieff gestured at him to stay seated.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘It was bloody good,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you that. The posters at the traffic lights were a nice touch. How long did that take you to put into place? Was it just the one kiosk, or did you set up several along the route between here and the hospital?’
None of them answered.
‘It was this that gave it away,’ I said, tapping the copy of the Standard on the desk. ‘You’re a newspaperman, Sandy, so I’m a little disappointed. I’m sure all the details in it are perfect, but you over-egged the pudding making it today’s West End Final. That edition doesn’t come off the presses until two o’clock, and according to John’s watch we’re a good half-hour away from then. Careless, really – yesterday’s edition would have done the trick just as well.’
They stared at me for a moment, and I savoured it.
‘Fuck you, Dark!’ spat Montcrieff, the first time I had seen him angry. ‘This doesn’t change that you’re a traitor. Confess now and…’
‘And what? You won’t arrange my hanging at Wembley? Something tells me the PM might not be too keen to sign the chit for that whatever I say, and even if it were signed by the real Foreign Secretary.’ I turned the screw. ‘Perhaps he’d be more interested in hearing how you planned to kill him. I bet you all loved it when Henry proposed the idea – it was Henry’s idea, wasn’t it? Kill Wilson, then pin the blame on Moscow and claim he had double-crossed his masters at the KGB. Masterful. Did he tell you an actual KGB agent would do the job, though?’ They didn’t respond. ‘How do you think he got her to do that? Did it not occur to you that his more-fascist-than-thou act might have been just that – an act – and that he was, in fact, leading you straight into a position in which the KGB could send a sniper to assassinate our prime minister?’
I let it sink in for a moment. Osborne rallied from the shock of me discovering their little subterfuge and waved the one-time pad at me. ‘This was found in your pockets when we searched you…’
‘And I took it from Henry’s pockets moments after I discovered he was Radnya and shot him,’ I said. ‘Radnya means “related” in Russian, and just as you were all delighted Henry had access to the Queen – who you would need to form a government – so were the KGB. What could be more precious than a double agent with blood ties to the throne?’ Their faces were turning white, so I closed in for the kill. ‘I suggest you send a team to Henry’s house and search the basement. Once you’ve found his transmitter, perhaps we can stop this charade and get down to the serious business of trying to assess just how much the bastard has compromised over the last twenty-five years.’
*
He was wearing a green tweed coat and a polka-dot bow tie. It had taken me four and a half hours to get to the meeting, and he’d turned up in an outfit a child could describe.
I wasn’t in the best of moods. I’d spent most of the day with a team from Five, searching every inch of Pritchard’s enormous flat in Belgravia. He’d made me sweat – for several hours I had seriously wondered if I might still be looking at the rope. In the end, it hadn’t been in the basement, or the attic, or under the floorboards, but in a compartment concealed in one of the bookshelves.
‘I want out,’ I said to Sasha. ‘I mean it.’ But it sounded weak, even to my ears.
He leaned over and placed a hand on my arm. ‘Please, Paul,’ he said. ‘Is that any way to greet an old friend?’ We were in the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, which he had once confided in me was his favourite meeting-place. I assumed it wasn’t for the beer or because you could visit the stairs where the Pilgrim Fathers boarded the ship, but because it was dark and cosy. The place was about half-full, with a good deal of background noise, and we were seated at a remote corner table, next to a mantelshelf filled with the usual assortment of books gathering dust: Lloyd’s Shipping Register for 1930, Bernard Spilsbury – His Life and Cases, Foote’s Handbook for Spies…
On the way over, between checking for tails and hopping on and off buses, I’d bought a paper – a real one – and seen that de Gaulle had resigned over a referendum on the Senate: it looked like the events in Paris the previous year had finally caught up with him. The editorial on page nine opined that his ‘ideas and presence would nevertheless continue to play a part in French affairs’, while the item beneath it discussed the fall of Biafra’s stronghold, Umuahia. Would his idea of supporting the Biafrans continue, too? I’d thought of the deserters and their families huddled in the hut in Aba; and of Gunner, ranting in the field at the futility of it all.
‘I’m no use to you any more,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe any of it.’ And too many people were dead, I could have added – most of them because of me.
He pursed his lips, then placed his forefinger and thumb on either side of his mouth and stroked his beard. It meant he was thinking.
‘They have questioned you?’ he said, drawing his head a little closer to me. I gave him a look. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘I thought of something.’
He stopped stroking his beard. ‘What?’
I took a sip of my pint. ‘I blew Henry’s cover,’ I said. ‘And I don’t care what you say, it won’t scare me. Trust me, nothing you can say will scare me.’
He didn’t move for some time, and then he suddenly leaned back in his seat and started laughing. I asked him if he would mind explaining the joke.
He slowly wound down the merriment. ‘You were worried about how I might react?’
I shrugged.
‘This was foreseen, Paul,’ he said pompously. ‘This was always the endgame.’
‘What was?’ I asked. ‘For me to blow Henry’s cover?’
‘Of course. If he was not going to survive, you had to remain protected at all costs. It does not matter that you have exposed him now. They can’t question him, and you are clean.’ He frowned. ‘You told them about Anna also, I presume? I mean, that she was… working with Henry?’
I noted the hesitation and tried not to hate him too much for it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Was that also part of the endgame?’
Sasha raised his hands in a very Russian gesture. ‘Perhaps. It is possible. I was never in contact with her. It was always Henry.’
It was always Henry. ‘So Pritchard was running you?’ I asked. He nodded. That explained a lot – why he’d had the transmitter, for a start. He had run Anna, he had run Sasha and, although I hadn’t known it, he had run me. That night he’d left Vanessa’s table at Ronnie Scott’s – he hadn’t gone home. He’d gone to meet Sasha and then home, where he had sent a message to Anna in Lagos. She had immediately upped sticks for Udi, telling her back-up man to find Slavin and kill him – and me if I tried to get anywhere near? Yes, that was how it must have been, or something like it.
I shivered inwardly and turned back to Sasha. ‘If Henry was Radnya,’ I said, ‘what was my code-name?’
He pretended not to hear the tense I’d used. ‘You really want to know?’ he said. ‘It’s an ugly one. “Nezavisimyj”.’
‘“Independent” – why that?’
‘Because we had to keep you separate from the rest of the cell, for…’ – he looked around for a suitable phrase – ‘personal reasons.’
‘You mean because if I had discovered that Anna was alive, Henry had pimped her to me and Father had shot himself over the whole affair, I might not have been so cooperative.’
He smiled tolerantly. ‘If you prefer. But from the start you were seen as an independent operator. A free agent. Someone who had to be nurtured, but who was his own man.’
‘And now?’
He leaned over and grabbed a handful of peanuts out of a tinted glass bowl I hadn’t noticed on the table between us, and dropped a few into his mouth.
‘Now we need you more than ever,’ he said, and crunched a few of them down noisily.
‘Not interested,’ I said.
‘Paul, listen. I understand you are no longer a Communist. In truth, I sometimes wonder if I am either.’ He caught my look. ‘It is the truth. But times and circumstances change. Look at what you distrust about us. About me, if you wish. Do you really believe I am a worse master than the men now running your country?’
‘The coup failed,’ I said. ‘They’re not running it any more than they were last month.’
He tilted his head a little. ‘No? With your old Chief gone, I think you will see some changes. These men have a lot of ambition, Paul. That is why Henry thought of the coup: he felt it would be less dangerous in the long term to let them into the open, with the illusion of victory, than to continue their games behind the scenes. The plan was for him to control them from the inside – and in doing so slowly immobilize them.’
‘Hell of a risky plan.’
He shrugged: he could wear as much tweed as he wanted, but his shrugs were more Russian than vodka. ‘I think it was well calculated. Britain would have been in a state of shock – look at what happened with the Americans – and a traumatized enemy would have suited us well. But, as you say, the coup failed. And Henry is dead. The faction is in a more powerful position than ever, however: far from being under suspicion for the attempt on the Prime Minister’s life, they have used it to call for more financial support, which I think they will receive. They have a hold of the reins, and we need a way to control them.’
‘Did I mention that they offered me Deputy Chief?’ I said. ‘Same as Pritchard would have got – isn’t that funny?’
Sasha swallowed his peanuts. Very slowly, he let out a wide, car salesman’s beam. Then there was the faintest quiver in his lower lip.
‘You accepted, naturally.’
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’m retiring.’
His face froze for a moment, but almost at once he decided I was joking. ‘You can’t retire! You are finally coming to fruition!’
I didn’t like it – being talked about as though I were a wine.
‘I’m going to teach English at a prep school in Berkshire,’ I said. ‘Read Bulldog Drummond to the boys before lights out and learn to smoke a pipe.’
He gazed at me with puzzlement. ‘I’ve lived here nearly twenty years and I still don’t understand your sense of humour,’ he said. And then he reached inside his coat and took out a slim leather wallet, from which he removed a group of postage stamps. He placed them on the table, taking care to hold the corners down with the tips of his fingers. ‘But just in case you have misunderstood the situation…’ he said, inviting me to lean across for a closer look. As I did, I realized that they weren’t stamps, but negatives. He held one up to the bulb for me, but I could already see what it was.
I had been wrong. He could still scare me.
*
Outside, I lit a cigarette and thought about the arrangement we had made. Arrangement is perhaps the wrong word: I hadn’t had any say in the matter. The photographs of Anna and me covered every conceivable angle. I wondered who had taken them – Father? Pritchard? Well, it hardly mattered now.
I wandered down the street, looking for a cab but not seeing any. It was getting late, and I was on the wrong side of the river. A free agent, I thought bitterly, as I buttoned my coat.
Far from it.