The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

good, chief, this is a 3H Security. If you can’t do better than that I’ll get authority to use my soldiers.’

      ‘Well, I’ll try for forty minutes.’

      ‘Thanks, chief. See you.’ It was 7.58.

      I went upstairs. Murray was leaning over a big scrubbed table with the elderly constable, a sergeant and an inspector with a neatly trimmed moustache. I asked the sergeant who the inspector was. It didn’t make any of them madly happy, but ‘twice bitten could get to be a habit’. Murray had worked out a sensible way of hitting 42 Acacia Drive. He had dug out a photo of the street and had drawn a diagram showing heights of garden walls and deploying twenty-five men. Murray had also implied by unknown subtle means that his rank was considerably higher than sergeant. The inspector was deferring to his suggestions and the police sergeant was saying, ‘Yes sir, good sir, very good, sir.’ I told the policemen that they could come along if they wished, but explained that since I had put ‘complete blackout’ on the operation, any leakage would be actionable under the Official Secrets Act.

      Murray used a propelling pencil with changeable coloured leads to mark in the extra five men; then we stood around drinking another cup of sweet tea. By now the canteen was organized for the top brass. I had a swallow-pattern cup with a saucer to match and a spoon. Murray decided that this was a good time to ask about his living-out allowance. It was nearly three months behind. I said I’d do what I could.

      At 8.21, after a knock at the door, a constable said a military police vehicle had just driven into the courtyard, the driver asking for ‘Mr’ Murray. Murray said he thought a Champ vehicle with radio equipment ‘might be useful’. He’d asked for it to drive in instead of parking conspicuously. Murray and I went downstairs to see if the radio could get the Scotland Yard wavelength. He told me that by having a Provost vehicle we automatically got a revolver and ammunition and what he described as ‘other useful things’. Murray was proving so unlike what I imagined that I decided to recheck his security clearance the next day.

¹ Criminal Records Office.

       12

      Acacia Drive was a wide wet street in one of those districts where the suburbs creep stealthily in towards Central London. The soot-caked hedges loomed almost as high as the puny trees encased in their iron cages. Here and there a dirty net curtain let a glimmer from a 40-watt bulb escape to join the feeble street lighting.

      We waited while the last two men got into position. A door opened somewhere down the street, firing a yellow shaft of light into the gloom. A man in a cloth cap pulled a silver fabric cover from a shrouded car. It proved to be not the one he was looking for. He lifted the silver skirt of the next car. The third one had the right number plate. He drove it off down the street which now became a dark and silent car mortuary once more.

      No. 42 had two gates joined by a semicircular driveway of crunchy gravel. On the top floor one very small window showed a light. The Champ vehicle was nearer to the house than any of the private cars the police had used. In the back seat the military policeman was listening to the radio sets of the plainclothes men positioning themselves in the back garden. He gave us the high sign with thumb touching forefinger. Murray and I decided to force a window at the side of the house. The MP was to talk out a description of signals we gave him by torch. Murray had the jemmy and I had a sheet of brown paper covered with police canteen golden syrup.

      The gravel crunched underfoot and an aeroplane winking coloured lights vibrated against the cloud. It had almost stopped raining, but the house shone wetly. The grounds were extensive and once across the path we plunged into the kitchen garden that lay alongside the house. The soles of my feet began to squelch as the soaked long grass sprinkled my legs, trousers and socks. We paused alongside the greenhouse through which the moon played shadow games, making mythical monsters of pots and beans and flowers. Every few seconds the house changed character, at one time menacing and sinister, and again the innocent abode of law-abiding citizens about to be attacked by my private army. The luminous watch said 9.11. Over the far side of the grounds I saw a movement by one of the policemen. The wind had dropped and now the aircraft had passed over it seemed very quiet and still. In the distance I heard a train. I stood there unhappily, my feet were wet and made little sucking sounds. I felt Murray touch my elbow with the cold metal jemmy. Looking round I found him pretending it was an accident. I took the hint. The side window was higher than it had looked from the road. Reaching up with the sticky brown paper I smoothed it across the glass and a little syrup ran down my wrist. Murray stuck the jemmy into the woodwork, but it was locked right enough. The window to the left was barred, so he hit the brown-paper-covered pane with the iron. A muffled syrupy crunch and then the broken glass fell inwards hinged on the brown paper. Murray was groping for the fastenings as we did a Charleston in slow motion on the flower-bed. The window swung open and Murray dived head first through. I saw the soles of his hand-made shoes (eighteen guineas) with a small sticky rectangular price tab still affixed under the instep. I passed the army pistol into his hand and followed.

      The moonlight poked a finger into a small lounge; the furniture old and comfortable; the fireplace held an electric fire with plastic logs; and scattered across the sofa was some clothing. Suddenly a clock chimed loudly. Murray was out in the hallway. Down the staircase someone had dropped sheets of blue lined writing paper. I knew that the house was empty, but we continued to creep around until 9.28.

      Except for a couple to look after the house, the policemen had all been packed off in the cars. The gambling party, we told them, had been cancelled at the last minute. Murray and I went down the road for a cup of ‘coffee’ in one of the Espresso palaces – rubber plants and buns to match. A sour-faced young waitress flung a smelly dishcloth around the table, said ‘Two cappercheeny,’ then went back to the three young men in black imitation-leather jackets and jeans, with genuine rivets, for a conversation about motor cycles.

       13

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Pay special attention to insurance arrangements. Romance may be expected to delay social commitments.]

      I talked to Murray about everything except the job. Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger, would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an RSM or the leader of a wildcat strike.

      He was efficient and responsive to orders in a way that more than faintly criticized his superiors by its very efficacy. It reminded me of those NCOs who drilled officer cadets. His hair was tightly arranged across his lumpy skull. His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation. Unlike Chico, Murray’s smile wasn’t motivated by a desire to join other men – it separated him quite deliberately from them. We talked about Bertold Brecht and the 1937 Firearms Act, and it amused Murray that I was probing around amongst his acquisition of knowledge. He’d not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket. The sergeants tried to talk like officers and the officers like gentlemen, he said. The mess was full of men who’d sit in a cinema all the weekend and come back with stories about house-parties on the river.

      ‘Georgian houses,’ Murray said, and he had a great love for beautiful buildings. ‘The only Georgian houses they’d ever been to were George the Fifth ones along the by-pass.’

      By the time we had got back to 42 the fingerprint men and photographers had done their stuff and Chico and Ross had arrived. Ross resented my sudden rise to power and had got his department into the act probably via Keightley. Chico was wearing his short tweed overcoat with the gigantic pattern and looking like a bookies’ clerk. I noticed his chin had got those pimples again that I called ‘caviare rash’. He and Ross were poking about