Spy Story

2

In games where the random chance programme is not used, and in the event of two opposing units, of exactly equal strength and identical qualities, occupying same hex (or unit of space), the first unit to occupy the space will predominate.

RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

The London flight was delayed.

Ferdy bought a newspaper and I read the departures board four times. Then we drifted through that perfumed limbo of stale air that is ruled by yawning girls with Cartier watches, and naval officers with plastic briefcases. We tried to recognize melodies amongst the rhythms that are specially designed to be without melody, and we tried to recognize words among the announcements, until finally the miracle of heavier-than-air flight was once again mastered.

As we climbed into the grey cotton wool, we had this big brother voice saying he was our captain and on account of how late we were there was no catering aboard but we could buy cigarette lighters with the name of the airline on them, and if we looked down to our left side we could have seen Birmingham, if it hadn’t been covered in cloud.

It was early evening by the time I got to London. The sky looked bruised and the cloud no higher than the high-rise offices where all the lights burned. The drivers were ill-tempered and the rain unceasing.

We arrived at the Studies Centre in Hampstead just as the day staff were due to leave. The tapes had come on a military flight and were waiting for me. There is a security seal when tapes are due, so we unloaded to the disapproving stares of the clock-watchers in the Evaluation Block. It was tempting to use the overnight facilities at the Centre: the bathwater always ran and the kitchen could always find a hot meal, but Marjorie was waiting. I signed out directly.

I should have had more sense than to expect my car to sit in the open through six weeks of London winter and be ready to start when I needed it. It groaned miserably as it heaved at the thick cold oil and coughed at the puny spark. I pummelled the starter until the air was choked with fumes, and then counted to one hundred in an attempt to keep my hands off her long enough to dry the points. At the third bout she fired. I hit the pedal and there was a staccato of backfire and judder of one-sided torque from the oldest plugs. Finally they too joined the song and I nudged her slowly out into the evening traffic of Frognal.

If the traffic had been moving faster I would probably have reached home without difficulty, but the sort of jams you get on a wet winter’s evening in London gives the coup de grâce to old bangers like mine. I was just a block away from my old place in Earl’s Court when she died. I opened her up and tried to decide where to put the Band-aid, but all I saw were raindrops sizzling on the hot block. Soon the raindrops no longer sizzled and I became aware of the passing traffic. Big expensive all-weather tyres were filling my shoes with dirty water. I got back into the car and stared at an old packet of cigarettes, but I’d given them up for six weeks and this time I was determined to make it stick. I buttoned up and walked down the street as far as the phone box. Someone had cut the hand-piece off and taken it home. Not one empty cab had passed in half an hour. I tried to decide between walking the rest of the way home and lying down in the middle of the road. It was then that I remembered that I still had the door-key of the old flat.

The Studies Centre was turning my lease over the following month. Possibly the phone was still connected. It was two minutes’ walk.

I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I gave it an extra couple of minutes, remembering how often I’d failed to hear it from the kitchen at the back. Then I used the old key and let myself in. The lights still worked. I’d always liked number eighteen. In some ways it’s more to my taste than the oil-fired slab of speculator’s bad taste that I’d exchanged it for, but I’m not the sort of fellow who gives aesthetics precedence over wall-to-wall synthetic wool and Georgian-style double-glazing.

The flat wasn’t the way I’d left it. I mean, the floor wasn’t covered with Private Eye and Rolling Stone, with strategically placed carrier bags brimming with garbage. It was exactly the way it was when the lady next door came in to clean it three times a week. The furniture wasn’t bad, not bad for a furnished place, I mean. I sat down in the best armchair and used the phone. It worked. I dialled the number of the local mini-cab company and was put up for auction. ‘Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham?’ Then, ‘Will anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with twenty-five pence on the clock?’ Finally some knight of the road deigned to do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with seventy-five pence on the clock if I’d wait half an hour. I knew that meant forty-five minutes. I said yes and wondered if I’d still be a non-smoker had I slipped that pack into my overcoat.

If I hadn’t been so tired I would have noticed what was funny about the place the moment I walked in. But I was tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d been sitting in the armchair for five minutes or more when I noticed the photo. At first there was nothing strange about it, except how I came to leave it behind. It was only when I got my mind functioning that I realized that it wasn’t my photo. The frame was the same as the one I’d bought in Selfridges Christmas Sale in 1967. Inside was almost the same photo: me in tweed jacket, machine washable at number five trousers, cor-blimey hat and two-tone shoes, one of them resting on the chromium of an Alfa Spider convertible. But it wasn’t me. Everything else was the same – right down to the number plates – but the man was older than me and heavier. Mind you, I had to peer closely. We both had no moustache, no beard, no sideboards and an out-of-focus face, but it wasn’t me, I swear it.

I didn’t get alarmed about it. You know how crazy things can sound, and then along comes a logical, rational explanation – usually supplied by a woman very close to you. So I didn’t suddenly panic, I just started to turn the whole place over systematically. And then I could scream and panic in my own good, leisurely, non-neurotic way.

What was this bastard doing with all the same clothes that I had? Different sizes and some slight changes, but I’m telling you my entire wardrobe. And a photo of Mr Nothing and Mason: that creepy kid who does the weather print-outs for the war-games. Now I was alarmed. It was the same with everything in the flat. My neck-ties. My chinaware. My bottled Guinness. My Leak hi-fi, and my Mozart piano concertos played by my Ingrid Haebler. And by his bed – covered with the same dark green Witney that I have on my bed – in a silver frame: my Mum and Dad. My Mum and Dad in the garden. The photo I took at their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

I sat myself down on my sofa and gave myself a talking-to. Look, I said to myself, you know what this is, it’s one of those complicated jokes that rich people play on each other in TV plays for which writers can think of no ending. But I haven’t got any friends rich and stupid enough to want to print me in duplicate just to puzzle me. I mean, I puzzle pretty easily, I don’t need this kind of hoop-la.

I went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe to go through the clothes again. I told myself that these were not my clothes, for I couldn’t be positive they were. I mean, I don’t have the sort of clothes that I can be quite sure that no one else has, but the combination of Brooks Brothers, Marks and Sparks and Turnbull and Asser can’t be in everyone’s wardrobe. Especially when they are five years out of fashion.

But had I not been rummaging through the wardrobe I would never have noticed the tie rack had been moved. And so I wouldn’t have seen the crude carpentry done to the inside, or the piece that had been inserted to make a new wooden panel in the back of it.

I rapped it. It was hollow. The thin plywood panel slid easily to one side. Behind it there was a door.

The door was stiff, but by pushing the rackful of clothes aside I put a little extra pressure on it. After the first couple of inches it moved easily. I stepped through the wardrobe into a dark room. Alice through the looking-glass. I sniffed. The air smelled clean with a faint odour of disinfectant. I struck a match. It was a box room. By the light of the match I found the light switch. The room had been furnished as a small office: a desk, easy chair, typewriter and polished lino. The walls were newly painted white. Upon them there was a coloured illustration of Von Guericke’s air thermoscope given as a calendar by a manufacturer of surgical instruments in Munich, a cheap mirror, and a blank day-by-day chart, stuck to the wall with surgical tape. In the drawers of the desk there was a ream of blank white paper, a packet of paper clips, and two white nylon jackets packed in transparent laundry packets.

The door from the office also opened easily. By now I was well into the next apartment. Adjoining the hall there was a large room – corresponding to my sitting-room – lit by half a dozen overhead lights fitted behind frosted glass. The windows were fitted with light-tight wooden screens, like those used for photographic dark rooms. This room was also painted white. It was spotlessly clean, walls, floor and ceiling, shining and dustless. There was a new stainless-steel sink in one corner. In the centre of the room there was a table fitted with a crisply laundered cotton cover. Over it there was a transparent plastic one. The sort from which it’s easy to wipe spilled blood. It was a curious table, with many levers to elevate, tilt and adjust it. Rather like one of the simpler types of operating table. The large apparatus alongside it was beyond any medical guess I could make. Pipes, dials and straps, it was an expensive device. Although I could not recognize it, I knew that I’d seen such a device before, but I could not dredge it up from the sludge of my memory.

To this room there was also a door. Very gently, I tried the handle, but it was locked. As I stood, bent forward at the door, I heard a voice. By leaning closer I could hear what was being said ‘… and then the next week you’ll do the middle shift, and so on. They don’t seem to know when it will start.’

The reply – a woman’s voice – was almost inaudible. Then the man close to me said, ‘Certainly, if the senior staff prefer one shift we can change the rota and make it permanent.’

Again there was the murmur of the woman’s voice, and the sound of running water, splashing as if someone was washing their hands.

The man said, ‘How right you are; like the bloody secret service if you ask me. Was my grandmother born in the United Kingdom. Bloody sauce! I put “yes” to everything.’

When I switched off the light the conversation suddenly stopped. I waited in the darkness, not moving. The light from the tiny office was still on. If this door was opened they would be certain to see me. There was the sound of a towel machine and then of a match striking. Then the conversation continued, but more distantly. I tiptoed across the room very very slowly. I closed the second door and looked at the alterations to the wardrobe while retreating through it. This false door behind the wardrobe puzzled me even more than the curious little operating theatre. If a man was to construct a secret chamber with all the complications of securing the lease to his next door apartment, if he secretly removed large sections of brickwork, if he constructed a sliding door and fitted it into the back of a built-in wardrobe, would such a man not go all the way, and make it extremely difficult to detect? This doorway was something that even the rawest recruit to the Customs service would find in a perfunctory look round. It made no sense.

The phone rang. I picked it up. ‘Your cab is outside now, sir.’

There are not many taxi services that say ‘sir’ nowadays. That should have aroused my suspicions, but I was tired.

I went downstairs. On the first-floor landing outside the caretaker’s flat there were two men.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ said one of the men. I thought at first they were waiting for the caretaker, but as I tried to pass one of them stood in the way. The other spoke again. ‘There have been a lot of break-ins here lately, sir.’

‘So?’

‘We’re from the security company who look after this block.’ It was the taller of the two men who’d spoken. He was wearing a short suede overcoat with a sheepskin lining. The sort of coat a man needed if he spent a lot of time in doorways. ‘Are you a tenant here, sir?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The taller man buttoned the collar of his coat. It seemed like an excuse to keep his hands near my throat. ‘Would you mind producing some identification, sir?’

I counted ten, but before I was past five the shorter of the men had pressed the caretaker’s buzzer. ‘What is it now?’

‘This one of your tenants?’ said the tall man.

‘I’m from number eighteen,’ I prompted.

‘Never seen him before,’ said the man.

‘You’re not the caretaker,’ I said. ‘Charlie Short is the caretaker.’

‘Charlie Short used to come over here now and again to give me a break for a couple of hours …’

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘Charlie is the caretaker. I’ve never seen you before.’

‘A bloody con man,’ said the man from the caretaker’s flat.

‘I’ve lived here for five years,’ I protested.

‘Get on,’ said the man. ‘Never seen him before.’ He smiled as if amused at my gall. ‘The gentleman in number eighteen has lived here for five years but he’s much older than this bloke – bigger, taller – this one would pass for him in a crowd, but not in this light.’

‘I don’t know what you’re up to …’ I said. ‘I can prove …’ Unreasonably my anger centred on the man who said he was the caretaker. One of the security men took my arm. ‘Now then, sir, we don’t want any rough stuff, do we?’

‘I’m going back to “War and Peace”,’ said the man. He closed the door forcefully enough to discourage further interruption.

‘I never had that Albert figured for a reader,’ said the taller man.

‘On the telly, he means,’ said the other one. ‘So –’ he turned to me, ‘you’d better come and identify yourself properly.’

‘That’s not the caretaker,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, sir.’

‘I’m not wrong.’

‘It won’t take more than ten minutes, sir.’

I walked down the flight of stairs that led to the street. Outside there was my taxi. Screw them all. I opened the cab door and had one foot on the ledge when I saw the third man. He was sitting well back in the far corner of the rear seat. I froze. ‘Do get in, sir,’ he said. It should have been a mini-cab, this was a taxi. I didn’t like it at all.

One of my hands was in my pocket. I stood upright and pointed a finger through my coat. ‘Come out,’ I said with a suitable hint of menace. ‘Come out very slowly.’ He didn’t move.

‘Don’t be silly, sir. We know you are not armed.’

I extended my free hand and flipped the fingers up to beckon him. The seated man sighed. ‘There are three of us, sir. Either we all get in as we are, or we all get in bruised, but either way we all get in.’

I glanced to one side. There was another man standing beside the doorway. The driver hadn’t moved.

‘We won’t delay you long, sir,’ said the seated man.

I got into the cab. ‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘You know that flat is no longer yours, sir.’ He shook his head. The driver checked that the door was closed and drove off with us, along Cromwell Road. The man said, ‘Whatever made you trespass there, at this time of night? It’s brought all three of us out of a bridge game.’ The taller man was sitting on the jump seat. He unbuttoned his sheepskin coat.

‘That really reassures me,’ I told them. ‘Cops playing poker might frame you. Cops playing pontoon might beat you to death. But who could get worried about cops who play bridge?’

‘You should know better,’ said the tall man mildly. ‘You know how security has tightened since last year.’

‘You people talk to me like we are all related. I’ve never seen you before. You don’t work with me. Who the hell are you, dial-a-cop?’

‘You can’t be that naïve, sir.’

‘You mean the phone has always been tapped?’

‘Monitored.’

‘Every call?’

‘That’s an empty flat, sir.’

‘You mean – “Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with fifty pence on the clock” was your people?’

‘Barry was so near to winning the rubber,’ said the second man.

‘I just went in to use the phone.’

‘And I believe you,’ said the cop.

The cab stopped. It was dark. We had driven across Hammersmith Bridge and were in some godforsaken hole in Barnes. On the left there was a large piece of open common, and the wind howled through the trees and buffeted the cab so that it rocked gently. There was very little traffic, but in the distance lights, and sometimes a double-decker bus, moved through the trees. I guessed that that might be Upper Richmond Road.

‘What are we waiting for?’

‘We won’t delay you long, sir. Cigarette?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

A black Ford Executive came past, drew in and parked ahead of us. Two men got out and walked back. The man with the sheepskin coat wound down the window. A man from the other car put a flashlight beam on my face. ‘Yes, that’s him.’