The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

knew I wasn’t working for anyone else. There must be a way of proving it. On the other hand there wasn’t a government in the world who’d have any compunction about killing an operator who knew as much as I did, if there were any doubts about loyalty. In a way this cheered me up. Whatever else, I wasn’t dead yet, and killing someone isn’t difficult.

      I suddenly remembered Barney on the generator truck. I wondered if it was true. It had a terrible ring of truth somehow, but if Barney was killed for warning me, what did I deserve? Perhaps the Americans who held me weren’t genuine. After all, the Hungarians hadn’t been. No, that was out of the question.

      Those interrogations had been as American as shoo-fly pie and hominy grits. The ‘Hungarians’; where did they fit into all this? Who was K.K.? Naturally he would be keeping out of the way. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t in British Government pay.

      Did the Al Gumhuria file that I’d declined to buy from Ross have anything to do with it? Things seemed to go wrong for me soon after that.

      I must have dozed off with my problem still unresolved. Charlie woke me with tea and biscuits and said I had been shouting in my sleep. ‘Nothing that I could understand,’ said Charlie hastily. All day Saturday and all day Sunday I did nothing. Charlie fed me bouillon and steak while I hung around and felt sorry for myself. Sunday evening found me listening to Alistair Cooke on the radio and staring at a piece of blank paper upon which I’d resolved to write my plan of action.

      I was better after the food and rest. I was still no Steve Reeves but I was moving into the Sir Cedric Hardwicke class. The paper I was doodling on stared back at me. Dalby’s name I’d underlined. Connected to it in one direction: Alice; in the other: Ross, because if Dalby was going to crucify me there’s no one to give him a more willing hand than Ross and the military boys. Murray and Carswell I’d linked together as the two unknowns. Chances were that by now Dalby had detached them back into some long-lost dust-covered office in the War House. Then there was Chico. He had the mind of a child of four, and the last time I’d heard from him was on the phone from Grantham. Jean? That was another big query. She’d risked a lot to help me in Tokwe, but just how long do you stick your neck out in this business? I was probably in a very good position to find out. Any way I worked it out the answer seemed to be: see Dalby. I resolved to do so. But there was something that must be done first.

      By 9.30 P.M. I decided that I’d have to ask Charlie yet another favour. By 10 P.M. he was out of the house. Everything depended on Charlie then, or so it seemed at the time. I looked at the sepia photo of Reg Cavendish,* Charlie’s son. He looked down from the top of the writing cabinet in one of those large boat-shaped forage caps that we’d all looked so silly in. I remembered coming to tell his father of his death when, after four years of unscathed combat action, Reg was killed by a truck in Brussels four days before VE day.

      I had told Charlie that his son had been killed in a traffic accident just as simply as I’d heard it on the phone. He went into the kitchen and began to make coffee. I sat with the smell of my best uniform wet with the spring rain, and looked around at the shelves of books and gramophone records. At Balzac and Byron, Ben Jonson and Proust, Beethoven, Bach, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

      I remember that when Charlie Cavendish had come back with coffee we talked about the weather and the wartime Cup Final and the subjects people talk about when they want to think about something else.

      I remember thinking the coffee rather strange, it was as black as coal and almost as solid. It was only after two or three subsequent visits that I realized that Charlie had stood in the kitchen that night, ladling spoonful after spoonful of coffee into his white porcelain coffee-pot while his mind refused to function.

      And now here I was again, sitting alone among Charlie’s books; again I was waiting for Charlie to come back.

      By 11.25 P.M. I heard his footsteps on the creaking winding staircase. I brought him coffee in that same white German porcelain coffee-pot that I had remembered from 1945. I went to the FM and switched ‘Music at Night’ down in volume.

      Charlie spoke. ‘A cipher,’ he said, ‘nothing nowhere, no trace, not ever.’

      ‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘You must have got the Indian Army stuff.’

      ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘I even did a repeat request under “Calcutta Stats Office”. There’s no Carswell with the initials J.F. and the only one with anything possible is P. J. Carswell, aged 26.’

      ‘No, that’s nowhere near him,’ I said.

      ‘Are you sure of the spelling? Want me to try Carwell?’

      ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’m sure of the spelling as much as I’m sure of anything. Anyway, you’ve taken enough chances already.’

      ‘A pleasure,’ said Charlie simply and sincerely. He continued with his coffee. ‘French drip. I used to make it vacuum. Another time I had one of those upside-down Neapolitan things. French drip is best.’

      ‘I’ll tell you the whole story if you like, Charlie,’ I offered. I always find it difficult to use his first name, having been a friend of his son before I met him.

      ‘Rather not. I know too many secrets already,’ he said. It was a magnificent understatement. ‘I’m turning in now. If you get inspired, let me know. It wouldn’t be unusual me popping into “tracing” in the middle of the night.’

      ‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said. ‘I’ll work something out.’ But I was no longer sure that I would.

       28

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Don’t allow petty irritations to mar your good nature. Sometimes success brings a train of jealousy. It is up to you to rise above it.]

      Near Leicester Square there are some grubby little newsagents who specialize in the fleshier style of art magazine. Carnal covers posture, peer and swarm like pink spiders across their shop windows. For a small fee they act as accommodation addresses for people who receive mail that they would rather didn’t arrive at home.

      From the inner confines came the smell of boiled socks and an old bewhiskered crone with a fat manilla envelope addressed to the person I was purporting to be.

      I opened it right away for they have little curiosity left, the people who work in these shops. Inside I knew there was a new Chubb key, a United Kingdom passport, an American passport (clipped to which was a social security card in the same name), and a UN Secretariat passport. Tucked inside each was an International driving licence, and a few bills and used envelopes in the same name as that particular passport. There were also cheque books issued by the Royal Bank of Canada, Chase Manhattan, Westminster and the Dai-ichi Bank of Tokyo, a small brown pawn ticket, twenty used ten-shilling notes, a folded new manilla envelope, and a poor-quality forged Metropolitan Police warrant card.

      I put the key, pawn ticket, warrant card and money into my pocket and the other things into the new manilla envelope. I walked down the road and posted the envelope back to the same address. A taxi took me to a bank in the city and the chief clerk conducted me to the vaults. I fitted the key into the safe deposit box. I removed some five-pound notes from inside it. By this time the clerk had discreetly left me alone. From under the bank-notes I slid a heavy cardboard box, and broke the wax seals on it with my thumb-nail. It was the work of a moment to slip the Colt .32 automatic into one pocket and two spare clips into the other.

      ‘Good day, sir,’ the clerk said as I left.

      ‘Yes, it’s a bit brighter,’ I told him.

      The pawn shop was near Gardner’s corner. I paid £11 13s 9d and exchanged the pawn ticket for a canvas travelling bag. Inside was a dark green flannel suit, cotton trousers, two dark shirts and six white ones, a bright Madras jacket, ties, socks, underwear, black shoes and canvas ones. The side panels contained razor, shaving cream, blades, comb,