The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  “Well enough,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I know you like Michael,” I said.

  He made a little gesture with his hand, telling me to stop talking, and then just sat there staring straight in front of him.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “You were no doubt right to tell me. Now it is my turn. I have three things to contribute. All of them are security matters, so I must ask you not to pass them on to Ackerley. Do I have your word?”

  “Yes, but you don’t have to tell me. I just thought …”

  He stopped me again.

  “The first thing is about the UFTFA official who dropped out of the dinner party,” he said.

  “Mikowicz?” I said. “The playboy?”

  “That’s the man,” he said. “You remember I was going to have him looked into? David Pottinger tells me that he is thought to be a senior agent in the Yugoslav intelligence service. The other two things are more intimate. You’ll remember that when we married you were subjected to a security interview? Other checks were run on your immediate family and close friends, and very much to my surprise I was informed that two of them turned out to be what they called ‘semi-positive’, that is to say not above suspicion. They were Ackerley and Grantworth.”

  My mouth fell open.

  “I have long regarded the suspicions of most security services as largely paranoid,” he said. “So I decided not to pay much attention, particularly as one of the reasons I was given for the suspicion of Grantworth was an obviously bureaucratic bungle involving a double identity.”

  “His doppelganger!” I said. “Was it a blue-eyed madman who told you all this? If so, it was me who told him about Gerry’s doppelganger. Good Lord!”

  “I share your opinion of the man,” said Tommy, “though he carries a lot of weight these days. However, even madmen can occasionally be correct, and David Pottinger now tells me that Mikowicz was a senior member of the partisan group with whom Grantworth worked in the war.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Anyway, I still think he’s potty. His bonnet’s all bees. Did he tell you I couldn’t be trusted either?”

  “Not in so many words,” said Tommy. “But that was the third thing.”

  “And you still went ahead and married me?” I said.

  “I chose to,” he said. “I felt I needed to. I wish it had worked out better.”

  “Oh, so do I!” I said. “Do you think …?”

  “No,” he said.

  His body gave a little jerk, as though it wanted to jump up and rush out of the room, but he’d managed to stop it.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said in his Foreign Office voice. “I think we have burnt our boats. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I said. I managed not to start crying—he’d have hated that. I thought of telling him there must be ways of building another boat, but then I thought not.

  So I let him go back to his newspaper and finished my breakfast and just squeezed his hand when I left the room.

  I did that yesterday. The upsetting bits are extra tiring. But in the middle of the night I remembered the other bit I’ve got to get in, about David Fish, so I’ll do that before I go on about talking to Nan, which might be upsetting too.

  Well, David rang, out of the blue, and asked me to lunch. He sounded really embarrassed about it, but he managed to make it clear that he wasn’t just hoping to get things going again between him and me. He said he was in a silly mess and he needed my help. I’d always felt a bit guilty about David, as if I’d used him, twice, without him really having a say, so I agreed. He gave me directions. I had to go to a pub in the City, go through the Saloon Bar as if I was going to the loos, and then up some dark stairs, two floors, where there’d be a door with a “Private” notice on it.

  I did that, getting more and more inquisitive. The bar was rowdy with large men lunching off double gins, and the stairs reeked of grease and gravy, but the room was fascinating, with really old panelling and diamond-pattern windows, the real thing with old wavy glass. You could easily imagine Restoration rake-hells getting roaring drunk in there and then going out to beat up any honest citizens who had the bad luck to meet them. David was there before me. He had taken a picture off the wall and was peering at the panelling behind it.

  “Shan’t be a mo,” he said, but then he made a mess of getting the picture back on its hook and I had to help him.

  “The trouble is I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he said. “I think we’ll just have to assume it’s OK. Have some lunch. It’s all cold, so we don’t get interrupted.”

  He was gabbling, so I sat down and helped myself to cold beef and salad, slowly, to give him a chance to pull himself together. When he was ready too I smiled at him, doing my best to look wise and calm and comforting, and said, “Well, how can I help?”

  “That dinner party,” he said. “Janet, your sister, she said something about what you were doing after Halford Hall closed down.”

  “Janet gets pretty well everything wrong,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “I don’t want you to,” he said. “I’m just hoping you can tell me somebody I can go to, because I’m in a mess.”

  “What sort of mess?” I said. “I won’t tell anyone else. I promise.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’d certainly rather you didn’t. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else I could talk to, because you’ll understand. Well, let’s get it over. Earlier this year I went to Yugoslavia for a fortnight. I don’t know if you remember, but I’m a Roman Empire fanatic and I didn’t just want to go to the obvious places like Split, which they’ve started to open up. I wanted to get there before they started to spoil things with all the tourists. The trouble was, the Yugoslavs weren’t at all keen. They don’t like us going where we can’t be watched. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I moaned about it to everyone I met, and then, out of the blue, the Yugoslav Embassy—not the Tourist Board—rang me up and said they actually wanted someone like me to go and have a look round at places which they might open up for archaeological tours, because they needed the foreign currency. They didn’t just give me a visa and permits, they laid on a courier for me. Obviously that was so they could have me watched, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t planning to do any spying, and I just thought it would be nice to have someone along who spoke the language, provided we got on alright. Which we did. In fact—this is what I mean about you being the only person I don’t mind telling this to—Anna turned out to be a good deal more than your ordinary courier.”

  He peered at me slyly through his great thick glasses, waiting for me to laugh, which I did. The funny thing about David was that though he was absolutely not an Adonis and pretty wet in most ways, he was rather good in bed—fairly simple, but enjoying himself a lot and seeing that you did too.

  “Sounds like a perfect holiday,” I said.

  “It was,” he said. “At least I thought so at the time. We talked quite a bit about how to get her over to England, and I was going to go back and see her again as soon as I could. I’ve never felt so happy. I’ve been purring all summer. Then a few evenings ago a chap turned up at my door and showed me a photograph, just of me and Anna having a picnic. I remembered exactly when it happened. There was this man pushing his bicycle up the path through the olives and he stopped to chat and we asked him to take our photograph with Anna’s camera, so of course I assumed this other fellow came from her.”

  “Was he a Yugoslav too?” I asked.

  “Well, if he was, he was a terrific actor. He looked a bit like an undertaker’s assistant, professionally gloomy you know, but he talked a cut above that, like an estate agent in a dingy suburb, or a solicitor’s clerk, or something. Of course I invited him in. Then he took out some more photographs. Me and Anna.”

  “In bed?” I said.

  “And other places,” he said. “You’ve
no idea how empty that part of the world can be. She found some wonderful beaches. I thought we had them completely to ourselves. She showed me a lot of things you can do which I didn’t know. They’ve got pictures of all that happening, and you can always see it’s me. And there’s some of us just doing touristy things in front of places you can recognise and see it’s Yugoslavia.”

  “What do they want you to do?” I said. “Spy for them? I wouldn’t have thought …”

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “I don’t know anything. But there was this ghastly little man—he had a great big signet ring on one hand and he kept rapping it with his knuckle and saying “Hot stuff, eh, Mr Fish. Hot stuff. You wouldn’t want that coming out, would you?” I asked him what he wanted. I thought it was going to be money and I’d already decided to tell him to go to hell, but he said “Just a little co-operation, Mr Fish. Just a little co-operation on the international money markets. We’re not asking anything illegal.”

  “No dice,” I told him. “You aren’t going to find a paper prepared to publish muck like this, and it wouldn’t do me much harm if you did.”

  “I mean, who’d mind? It’s not as if I’m married or anything. But the fellow just tut-tutted and tapped his bloody ring and said, “That’s as may be, Mr Fish. But you wouldn’t want Mr Jules Okers in New York, as a for instance, finding one of these in his breakfast mail with a note about it all happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Would you, now?”

  “That shook me. It’s no use my trying to explain how I earn my living, but the point is that it all depends on trust. I work on very fine margins, two or three hundredths of a point, maybe, and all over the telephone. So you’ve got to be sure that the chap at the other end will stick to exactly what he’s said he’ll do, and he’s got to know the same about you. Jules Okers is one of the people I deal with in New York. He’s an out-and-out anti-communist. Rabid is not too strong a word. I had no intention of letting him know I’d even been the other side of the Iron Curtain, let alone that I’d had an affair with a woman who turned out to be an agent of the secret police. Maybe I could talk Jules round, maybe not, but suppose I can’t, suppose he’s got even the beginnings of a doubt about me, then I’m in trouble. He’ll pass the word round, and it might take me years to get back to where lam now. If ever.”

  “Where did this man come from?” I said. “How did he know?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “I’m just telling you what happened. Well, it shook me when he mentioned Jules, and I let him see it—I’m not much of an actor, I’m afraid. All I could do was ask him again what he wanted. “Just you sit tight for the mo, Mr Fish,” he said. “I’ll be leaving you the snaps as a reminder. Nice to see young people enjoying themselves, I always say. If you want copies, we’ve got the negs, right? And we’ll be in touch when we need you. Don’t come to the door. I’ll let myself out.” And off he went. I haven’t heard from him since.”

  “What do you think he wants?” I said. “Did he really mean it wasn’t illegal? I mean, why bother. …”

  “Good Lord,” he said. “I’m sometimes not sure if some of the things I do are legal. They haven’t been tested in the courts yet. The exchange controls are a total maze, but I do know my way round most of it. That’s the whole point. Suppose you got wind there was going to be a great run on sterling on such and such a date, you couldn’t just go to your bank and borrow a few million quid and buy dollars with it, with an option to buy your sterling back the day after the run. You’d have to come to someone like me. You’d need to put some money down—if we’re talking millions, a couple of hundred thousand would do it—and then I could put the deal through for you on the back of other transactions in such a way that provided you took your profit in sterling the whole thing was still inside the rules. Mind you, I’d have to set it up. The people I deal with are extremely sharp. I can’t just ask Jules Okers, say, to take a great block of sterling off me out of the blue. He’d smell a rat at once. I’d need to have been doing things before that which made it look like part of my normal pattern of dealing, and I’d have to have what looked like reasons for that pattern, and so on. I could do it, but I doubt if there are more than half a dozen other people in the City who could. They must have known that when they set this up.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” I said.

  “The Yugoslavs, I assume,” he said. “Probably not their central bank, more likely some security outfit operating on its own. They’re always hungry for hard currency. Much more use to them, if they could bring it off, than stealing plans of the latest fighter. Anyway, it’s all academic, because I’m not going to do what they want. I don’t get angry very easily, you know, but I’m really angry about this. After that bastard had gone I burnt all the photographs except the one of the picnic and I sat looking at it and thinking about Anna. There was one particular beach I couldn’t get out of my mind. We swam, and fooled around in the water and took our towels up onto the sand and she made a fuss about choosing a really lucky place—laughing about it, fey, excited—at least that’s what I thought, only now I know she was making sure we were in a good light and at a good angle so that the beggar on top of the rocks could get a nice clear picture of us, showing exactly who I was and what we were up to, when all I was thinking was what fun we were having, and it was just us, and just for each other. I’m never going to have another holiday like that, and now I haven’t even got that. They’ve ruined it. I don’t want just to tell them to go to hell. I want to get back at them somehow.”

  “I bet they blackmailed her into it,” I said.

  “I’ve thought of that,” he said. “I hope so, but it isn’t enough. How can I get them to eat their own dirt, that’s what I want to know.”

  “What about Mr Okers?” I said.

  “That’s why I came to you,” he said. “I’d still like to keep it quiet, and I’d like those negatives destroyed. But most of all I want to make things hot for whoever cooked up this idiot idea, and I thought the first place to start might be by finding someone sympathetic in our own security set-up. Do you know anyone?”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “It’s been a long time. Actually—I don’t usually talk about this—I’m the wrong person, because I was sacked. I blotted my copybook and broke the rules and they decided they couldn’t trust me any more. I do know one man who’s still there. He’s pretty-high up now. But I don’t like him, in fact I think he’s mad, and I wouldn’t trust him an inch. How difficult. The only thing I can think of, and I’d have to ask Tommy first because I mustn’t go behind his back, is that you could try David Pottinger. I don’t know him very well, and he hasn’t got any small-talk, but I think he’s probably alright. He’s Foreign Office, but he’s the one Tommy talks to about security things. I wish I knew him better. I’ve a sort of hunch he might be upset about all the sex. You never know.”

  He thought about it and shook his head.

  “Not if it means going through your husband,” he said. “I’m sorry … nothing personal, but …”

  I’ve forgotten to say that during our brief fling after the Ascot party David kept asking me to marry him. Now I just smiled as understandingly as I could and told him that was all I could think of for the moment, but if anything came to me I’d let him know. We talked about it a bit more, and then other things—he wanted to know all about Janet, for some reason—and only when he was helping me into my coat did he go back to the Anna business.

  “You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?” he said. “I mean, not anyone.”

  It was the way he said it. I realised he was talking about Paul, as well as Tommy. So he must have guessed. I didn’t think we’d been that obvious, or else he’d got much brighter about that sort of thing than when I’d known him before.

  This is actually three days later. Paul had to go away and it was a new nurse came in, one with a button-holey eager look—I bet her lace curtains never stop twitching when
she’s at home—and I didn’t want her listening outside the door while I was rambling on about family things. At least it’s a relief having him away doing something else, not brooding and remembering and writing it down all day. The last lot he did he didn’t come to bed till four in the morning. I’ve tried to get him to stop. I’ve told him I think it’s bad for him. He just said, “I’ve got to get it over.” I feel like that too, really, I suppose, though I’m not obsessed by it the way he is. Nothing’s going to be ordinary again until we’ve finished.

  Well, this bit is going to be mainly about Nan. I’m going to have to go back, though. After I got married I still used to try and get home most weeks—back to Blatchards, I mean. When the children happened I had the excuse of taking them over from Seddon Hall to see Mother—they adored her just as much as she adored them—though I’d tell myself and anyone else who was listening what a chore it was. But even if they were ill, or Mother was away, I still used to do it, out of habit, really. I don’t think I really enjoyed going that much, certainly not every time, and quite often I’d drive away feeling cross with myself, unsatisfied, like one of those dreams where you know something interesting or exciting is just about to happen and then you wake up realising you’ve missed it, and you can’t even remember what.

  Mother got a Shetland pony for Rowena, not a bad little brute as Shetlands go, only it didn’t. I mean it liked standing much better than walking—not that it mattered because Rowena was far too small to do anything except perch. So I’d leave them and Nanny to the riding lessons (in the coach-house if it was raining, which Mother had cleared out much to Nan and Gerry’s irritation as it meant they had to find somewhere else to store a lot of accumulated junk which no one could bring themselves to throw out) and I’d go down and see what Nan was up to now.

  I think I’ve said something about the way people change, mostly you don’t notice, only years too late you realise that Harry who you’ve written down as larky and odd, but worthwhile, because that’s how he used to be, has actually been a bitchy, selfish old nuisance since you don’t know when. But some people let you see them changing, almost on purpose, as if they were tired of who they’d been so far and now they were going to be someone else, and they wanted everyone to know, like sending out change-of-address cards.