The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

and the constant rasping of insects. I’d taken off my dark glasses and slowly my range of vision increased.

      The greater part of the room was taken up by olive-coloured metal boxes, upon which the faint English words like ‘Factory’ and some numbers could be read. In the far corner bars of sunlight revealed broken wooden boxes, large metal cartridge clips and some rotting leather straps. On a level with the top of my head a platform extended the width of the blockhouse, and provided slots for the machine-gunners and riflemen. Jean’s torch made yellow ovals as it splashed over the emplacement walls, and held in one spot almost over the entrance door. She’d seen Dalby’s torch shine through that particular port. I moved the green metal boxes to make a step. The paint on the underside where they had been packed together was fresh with stencilled lettering: ‘.5 Machine-Gun. US Army. 80770/GH/CIN/1942’. I moved a second box to put on the first, and fifteen inches of brightly coloured lizard flashed away under my feet. I climbed up on the platform and edged slowly along the crumbling earth ledge. Close to, the sand was almost black, and stank of death and the things that lived on it.

      There was not room to stand upright, and I went slowly on my hands and knees. The bright daylight burned my eyes through the narrow slot, and I could see a small traverse of beach. The largest of the grey landing craft was directly in line with me, and from this angle I was able to see a burnt and battered tank jammed into the open doors like a squashed orange in the mouth of a barbecued sucking-pig. A red and yellow butterfly entered the white chalky bars of light from the aperture. Slowly I moved towards the corner position. It was darker and damper there. Jean threw the torch to me without switching it off. Its beam described a curious parabola. I used it to probe the thick roof timbering above me. Part of the ceiling had given way when the flame-thrower had poured its jet of flaming petrol into the firing position. The timber supports were charred, and under my hands, only the metal parts of a heavy bolted-down machine-gun remained. I could see nothing that looked recently disturbed. I moved the light a little to the left. There was a wooden crate with writing on it. It said, ‘Harry Jacobson, 1944, 24 DEC. OAKLAND. CALIF. USA.’ and was empty. Jean said why didn’t I try the box underneath. I’m glad I did. It was a new cardboard box and carried the words ‘General foods. One gross 1 lb packets Frozen Cranberries’. Under that was printed a small certificate of purity, and a long serial number. Inside was a brand new short pattern seven-inch cathode ray tube, about a dozen transistors, a white envelope and a yellow duster containing a long-barrelled machine-pistol shiny with fresh oil. There were no cranberries. I opened the envelope, and inside was a small slip of paper about 2 in by 6 in. On it were written about fifty words. There was a VLF (very low frequency) radio wave-length, and a compass bearing and some mathematical symbols that were a bit too post-graduate for me. I held it up for Jean to read. She looked up and said, ‘Can you read Russian?’

      I shook my head.

      ‘It’s something about …’

      I interrupted her. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Even I know the Russian script for “Neutron Bomb”.’

      ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.

      I took the paper, still carefully holding it by the edge and dropped it back into the cranberry box. The envelope I burned, and ground up the ash under my heel. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

      We scrambled down the steep approach to the beach. The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn golden lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. I wanted to be away from something – I don’t know from what. So we walked along the water-line, stepping around crates full of death, Coca-Cola and Band-Aids.

      ‘Why would anyone,’ Jean didn’t like to say Dalby, ‘take a cathode ray tube up there?’

      ‘He didn’t want anyone to know that he can’t bear to miss “Wagon Train”.’

      Jean didn’t even contract her lip muscles.

      ‘I don’t want to pry,’ I said, ‘but I’d find this whole thing more simple if you’d tell me what he said about me.’

‘That’s easy – he said that one of the departments of the “friends” is sure you are working for the KGB.¹ They told the CIA direct and everyone is pretty steamed up. Dalby said he wasn’t sure one way or the other but that the CIA are keen to believe it since you killed a couple of their Navy people a long while ago.’

      ‘Dalby said it’s not him that laid the complaint?’ I asked.

      ‘No – he said that one department gives you a higher clearance than he has at present – him working away from the office caused that of course – he didn’t seem very happy about that, by the way.’

      She paused, and said apologetically, ‘Did you kill those men?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said a little viciously, ‘I killed them. That brought my total up to three, unless you count the war. If you count the war …’

      ‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jean said.

      ‘Look, it was a mistake. There’s nothing anyone could do. Just a mistake. What do they want me to do? Write to Jackie Kennedy and say I didn’t mean it?’

      Jean said, ‘He seemed to think they’d wait to see if you made a contact before doing anything. He wondered if Carswell was working with you, and radioed a code message to have Carswell and Murray isolated.’

      ‘He’s too late,’ I said. ‘They bludgeoned me into giving them a leave of absence just before we left.’

      ‘That will probably convince Dalby,’ Jean said. She looked great with the sun behind her and I wished I had more of my frontal lobes to spare to think about it.

      ‘That Carswell’s my contact?’ I mused. ‘Maybe. But I’d say he’s more likely to suspect you.’

      ‘I’m not your contact.’ She almost seemed not sure.

      ‘I know that, dope. If I was really working for the KGB I’d be smarter than to be suspected, and I’d know who my contact was before I reached an island like this one, or there’d be no way for me to cross-check on you. But since I’m not working for that six-storey building in Dzerzhinsky Street, there isn’t a contact, so you’re not one.’ Jean splashed a foot deliberately into the water and smiled a childlike smile. The sun was behind her head like the open door of a Scunthorpe steel furnace. A light breeze coming off the ocean had her dress clinging like cheap perfume. I dragged my mind back to earth. She said, ‘It seems I didn’t listen as closely as you did at Guildford.’

      A tank track lay half out of the water like a giant caterpillar, and the waves spurted and splashed through the intricacies of the interwoven castings. Beyond us, B61, the tank with one track missing, lay head down in the glistening foam. The sea, to which it had returned in a great involuntary semicircle, drummed and slapped at the great metal hull in restless derision. Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. I must concentrate.

      ‘Suppose you don’t work for the KGB but whoever thinks you do, wants to do something to stop it, what will they do?’

      ‘It’s something no one in our position ever dares think about,’ I said.

      ‘But suppose it happens. Then they have to think about it.’

      ‘OK,’ I said, ‘then they think about it.’

      Jean’s voice was husky, a bit edgy and rasplike. I realized she’d spent a lot of night time wondering what to do about me, and at least I owed her enough not to kid her around.

      I said, ‘They don’t give them free legal aid at the Old Bailey, and let them sell their memoirs to the Sundays if that’s what you mean.’

      ‘No, that’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘It’s only multiple murderers who are allowed to do that.’ She paused. ‘So what does happen?’

      ‘I