Dead Letter Drop

by James, Peter

  ‘No, sir, I have a free weekend.’

  ‘Good.’ The Home Secretary handed me a photocopy of a map showing how to get to the cricket pitch near the village of Fulking in the Downs behind Brighton. ‘Lucky for me you’re here, Flynn – no chance of getting anyone else at this hour on a Friday.’

  Scatliffe contained himself admirably, I thought.

  So I turned up on a grey Sunday morning at the cricket pitch, to join 21 men who between them had the job of hunting out the subversives among Her Britannic Majesty’s 1060-odd million Commonwealth subjects, and monitoring the rest of the world’s attitudes and plans towards what remained of the British Empire.

  As the umpire signalled the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Hobart’s third wide in succession, and Scatliffe wearily rubbed his hands in the slips as the rain drizzled forlornly down, I looked around this strange bunch of middle-aged men in their white flannels and college jumpers, among whom my destiny lay, little realising that one day not long after, one of them, with the bizarre code name of the Pink Envelope, would be playing a game with me considerably less amusing even than this.

  Success or failure for me would depend on how deeply the Envelope had buried his tracks; I had one advantage, which was that with luck none of them except for Fifeshire and Jephcott knew I was here, but I didn’t think that advantage would last very long.

  I wondered about Wetherby; whether he was alive on the ocean waves and cursing blindly, or drowned by now, or on dry land, pacing the streets in search of me with a meat cleaver in his hand.

  I was going to have to prove my case pretty damn quickly, because if time caught up on me and I didn’t have the answers, I was going to have one great deal of explaining to do and I wasn’t going to know where to begin. My having gone absent without leave from Intercontinental was, according to the rule book, a very serious no-no. I should have gone straight to Hagget, who was my chief there, and told him the facts, then waited for his instructions. There was a simple reason why I hadn’t; it was a sincere belief that if I had, I would be dead by now. I knew that I had stumbled into a deadly game of hide and seek, and it was too late to try and stumble out.

  I just managed to avoid solving everyone’s problems, by halting two inches from the tail-overhang of an articulated lorry that didn’t go in for brake lights. For the next couple of miles I actually concentrated on driving, before once again lapsing into my normal pattern of deep thought punctuated by occasional glances through the windscreen.

  I found Wetherby’s flat in a tatty building off Pembroke Square in Earl’s Court. There wasn’t even an entry-phone in the porch. I pushed the door and entered the building; it smelt, like many of London’s conversion buildings, of boiled cabbage.

  Wetherby’s door was at the top of four steep flights, and there was no answer to my knocking; I hadn’t figured what I was going to say if he himself answered it but the problem didn’t arise. For an apparently insignificant flat it was remarkably well protected by locks; the custodians of the Bank of England would have eaten their hearts out if they could have seen the equipment he had securing that door to its frame. The door had enough ironmongery in it to keep a relay of safe-crackers busy for several weeks. It could have been used as the practical examination for the finals of a locksmith’s apprenticeship course. Without the right crate of keys nothing short of gelignite was going to open that door. Wetherby had made damn sure that entry through this door was going to be on a strictly invitation-only basis. As I didn’t happen to have an invitation I was going to have to find another entrance.

  Wetherby’s next-door neighbour’s door was easier; it opened in about five seconds with my trusty AmEx card through the frame, tripping the latch. I let myself in and I found myself in a dim room which stank of joss sticks and burning hash, and was occupied by a hairy object, vaguely human, squatting on a threadbare carpet and jerking his head to the sound of a sitar coming from a portable cassette with nearly flat batteries. ‘Hey, man,’ it said, ‘you might have knocked.’

  I stood dumbfounded for a second. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that this flat might be occupied. ‘The door was open,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ it said. It had almost lost interest in me.

  ‘I’ve locked myself out – I live next door – mind if I use your window?’

  ‘Use it, man, use it all.’ It lapsed into a trance. Or maybe it was deep thought.

  I lifted the window and leaned out. The next window, the start of Wetherby’s flat, was less than an arm’s length away. I wrapped my handkerchief around my wrist, leaned out and punched hard at the glass. It was double-glazed and exploded with a fiendishly loud bang, followed by a seemingly interminable series of smashings as chunks of glass fell down to the concrete basement. I ducked back smartly into the hairy’s room and waited some moments before daring to look out, but the noise didn’t seem to have attracted any attention.

  I leaned right out and over, unscrewed the catch, and swung the window wide open. A few more chunks of glass fell out. I crawled out onto the ledge and heaved myself into Wetherby’s abode.

  It was a dreary place, sparsely furnished with objects that were old without being of interest. Curtains and upholstery were in nasty cheap fabrics, in faded dull colours; lampshades were yellowing. There was an old record-player, an electric kettle sat on the drawing room floor beside the sofa, and on the far side of the room sat an old black-and-white television set that looked like it had been stolen from a 2-star hotel. And yet there were some objects of outstanding beauty among it all: there were a couple of fine oil paintings of ancestors on the walls, another oil depicted a Crimean war scene; a superb George III chiffonier stood against one wall, with a couple of fine Chinese vases on it. But mostly the flat looked the sort of place where secondhand furniture shops acquire their most miserable specimens.

  It was clearly a bachelor flat, with bed unmade and the appearance of having been unmade for several weeks judging from the dust on the pillow, filthy crockery including a half-full cup of tea with mould growing out of it, socks and shoes and vests and dirty shirts piled around a bedroom chair. I worked my way carefully and thoroughly around. There was a small room that was his study; it had the only other decent piece of furniture in the flat – an Edwardian roll-top desk, but the appearance was spoilt by a complete absence of polish, and a nasty yellow anglepoise lamp plonked on the top.

  I went through all his papers even opening his latest mail for him; judging from the postmarks it had been six weeks since he was last there. I pocketed the mail rather than leave it for him to discover opened, but it wasn’t of much interest. There was an offer from a mail-order bakery in Texas, wondering if he could survive Christmas without having cakes from their world-famous bakeries delivered to all his friends. A note from the Brompton library to say that These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer would be held for him for 14 days, and an application for tickets to the Founder’s Day dinner at Charterhouse were among the more exciting contents of the envelopes.

  My visit looked as though it were going to turn out to be no more inspiring than my one to Scatliffe’s house, when the thought struck me that the kitchen looked a great deal smaller than it should have been for a flat of this size. I looked around it carefully but for some minutes I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then I realised; from its position in the flat it should have run the entire length of the dining room. But it didn’t. It stopped, and yet the dining room didn’t extend into the area where it stopped. There was an area of about 20 square feet completely missing.

  I opened the kitchen cupboards that backed onto it and removed a stack of Heinz beans; then I put my hands through and felt the back wall. What my hands touched gave me a shock: instead of plaster, it was wood. I slid my hands round further and found a bolt, which slid easily; suddenly the entire cabinet came free. I pulled it out, revealing a door. I went in through the door into a pitch-dark room. I lit my lighter and found a light switch, which I pushed; the room came to l
ife in a dim orange glow. Looking around it gave me for the first time in the last few days more than just a little reassurance that I might after all not be completely and utterly mad: it was a very comprehensive photographic darkroom. In striking contrast to the rest of the flat this room was spotlessly clean and the equipment was up to date.

  I searched every inch of the darkroom and went back out and searched every inch of the flat but nothing further of any interest yielded itself to me. I wished I could have found just one shred of evidence to put one more tiny piece of the puzzle into place. Whilst having a secret darkroom is distinctly odd there is nothing necessarily underhand about it; I knew damn well that it wasn’t for processing snaps of Welsh valleys but I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was for. If it was Wetherby’s quirk to pass his leisure hours munching peanuts in a hidden darkroom, then he was fully entitled to, all the days of his life. He certainly swept up the shells all right.

  20

  Trout and Trumbull would have looked more at home in a dusty gentleman’s outfitters – probably the school clothing department of an old-fashioned provincial department store. They were pasty-faced men, both well into their fifties, Trout short and stocky, Trumbull short and thin, and both wore dark flannel suits, white shirts and grey-and-black patterned ties knotted very precisely.

  They had clean hands, white, with a few veins showing, their shoes were brilliantly polished, and what hair remained to them was neatly lacquered to their heads. They smelt, ever so slightly, of a mixture of talcum powder and hair cream.

  Trout and Trumbull ran the Playroom. This is the name given to the area of the underground offices at Hyde Park that houses the agents’ weapons, or toys as they are better known. These two gentlemen were the agents’ armourers; they doled out the weapons, cleaned the weapons, serviced the weapons, and spent much of their time trying to devise new weapons, some brilliant, some not so brilliant, but always weapons that could be trusted to work. Their reputation for reliability was legendary. Once, some years ago, a bullet had failed to go off; Trout and Trumbull were in tears for a week. The agent wasn’t; he was dead. Now they packed every single bullet themselves.

  Messrs Trout and Trumbull were not the world’s liveliest people, nor did they have much of a sense of humour, or if they did they never made it apparent to me or to anybody else; but I had to take my hat off to them. ‘I would take my hat off to any pair of grey-haired gentlemen who could hand me in all solemnity a packet of exploding parrot seeds without the faintest hint of a smile. They were showing me the latest they had to offer.

  ‘Exploding parrot seeds?’

  ‘Correct, Mr 4404,’ said Trumbull. Due to regulations, they had to address everyone by their number only; but it was beyond their dignity not to place the correct title before the number. Accordingly my number was always prefixed by Mister.

  ‘What do I do? Fill some poor parrot’s food tray with these things and wait for him to explode?’ I had visions of perplexed customs officials all over the world wondering why a small percentage of English businessmen and businesswomen had taken to carrying packets of parrot seed in their baggage.

  ‘Mr Trout.’ Trumbull indicated with a short movement of his hand.

  Trout solemnly took a packet and held it up. It read: ‘Oldham’s sunflower seeds for parrots and other tropical cage birds.’

  ‘Vacuum-packed,’ said Trout, tapping the packet. ‘No air inside. Open the top’ – he proceeded to rip off the top – ‘and the air reacts with the seeds, fuses them.’ He took out a seed and held it up. ‘Come, Mr 4404.’ He walked over to the firing range and I followed. He pushed a button and a dummy man was automatically lowered down on a web of wires. The dummy was a complete life-size replica of a 200-pound human, authentic in every possible detail, including internally. Trout and Trumbull had invented this type of dummy, which were now produced in vast quantities for a great variety of testing purposes.

  Trout tossed a parrot seed at the dummy and it landed at his feet; there followed an explosion which shattered the dummy completely, blowing him in forty different directions. I was impressed. Trout turned to me quite unemotionally. ‘Don’t leave an opened packet lying around. Best used for dealing with a crowd; throw the whole lot at once – don’t want to go tripping over with an open packet.’

  Trout could have spared his breath.

  Trumbull handed me a cigarette lighter. ‘Click one way and it lights cigarettes. Click another way and it takes pictures. Click another way and it records sound. Click another way and it’s a radio receiver. Click another way’ – he pointed it away from me, and a flame about 10 foot long seared out. ‘Click another way,’ this time he just pointed, ‘and in ten seconds it blows to smithereens.’ Trout and Trumbull were big licks on bangs this year.

  ‘If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I think I’ll take a rain check on those two and stick to what I’m used to right now.’ I handed them my Beretta and they gave me a shiny, stripped, repaired, oiled and tested replacement. Along with it they handed me a new pair of hand-made leather boots. I tugged my old ones off and pulled the new ones on. They were a good snug fit. One heel was packed with spare ammunition, the other contained a silencer.

  Away down a corridor I heard the dull ‘plunk’ of a silenced gun, followed by the whang of the bullet hitting some metal target. The ‘plunk’ got louder at each shot until it became a loud ‘crack’. It has always been a problem for the ballistics boys to produce an effective silencer. They were trying out a new lightweight silencer. From the sound of it, Trout and Trumbull had a long way to go.

  In another direction a steady ‘crack-whang-crack-whang-crack-whang’ of target practice started up. Open-plan offices were all right in some places. Here it was downright mournful. Maybe if it wasn’t for Trout and Trumbull it would be all the fun of the fair. Somehow I doubted it.

  There was one specific item I wanted from Trout and Trumbull; I filled in a requisition form and Trumbull marched off into the racks of stores, moments later he returned, holding it with all the emotion of a man holding a replacement set of wiper blades; but it wasn’t wiper blades in his hand. It was something that looked a good deal more innocent even than that: it was a slim object that to all outward appearances was one of a standard brand of slimline pocket calculators, complete with chimes. I slipped it inside my jacket pocket, left Trout and Trumbull to their devices, and look the elevator two floors up to Wotan’s domain.

  Arthur was white and shaking and looking very agitated when I went in. ‘You’re for the high jump!’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘which particular high jump are you referring to?’

  ‘Your boss, Commander Scatliffe.’

  ‘My boss is Fifeshire.’

  ‘I know that and you know that,’ he gave me a long warm smile, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would appear that Commander Scatliffe isn’t aware of that. Not that it’s any of my business – and you can be sure I haven’t told him a thing – but he’s out for your blood.’

  I refrained from telling him that that was more than a small hunch of my own. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s left a message in no uncertain terms that the moment you turn up here I’m to tell you to go straight to Whitehall. He’s really hopping mad, old boy.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing very much at all; he just shouted down the phone at me, the same instructions about three times, then hung up. I damn near shouted back at him. Been rubbing him up the wrong way?’ He smiled wryly.

  ‘I don’t have to try very hard with him.’

  ‘Take a tip from me – it’s not my business to be telling you this, but I think you should listen to me for a moment. I get to hear a lot; not everything, but a lot of what goes on in this outfit sooner or later ends up down here. I don’t listen through keyholes but it’s unavoidable, doing this job, that I should hear things. Scatliffe’s going to the top. Whatever your view on him might be it’s going to be better for you in the long term
to stay on the right side of him. He’s very good at rubbing people up the wrong way himself but he is going to the top, and he’s a relatively young man so when he does get to the top he’s going to remain there a long time. If you’re going to stay in this game, really make this your career, your chances of promotion and getting into the plum jobs aren’t going to be too clever if you remain on the wrong side of him.’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you; but it’s not easy.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not.’

  ‘Will Fifeshire get the reins back?’

  ‘Until the call I had from him yesterday I’m afraid I’d written him off. So had everyone else. Now I’m not so sure.’ He shrugged. ‘Commander Scatliffe’s got himself pretty well entrenched and he’s got his hands on most things; if Fifeshire does come back, and please God he does, he’s not going to have an easy task getting back to the real controls. That S.O.B., if you’ll excuse my language, is making sure of that.’

  I’d never before heard Arthur express a personal point of view. It indicated to me that he had very strong feelings indeed on the subject. ‘Does Scatliffe know Fifeshire’s coming back?’

  ‘If he does he’s kept damn quiet about it. Personally I shouldn’t think so – I think he’s written him off. And I shouldn’t be saying all this to you.’

  ‘So why are you?’ I wanted to get as much out of him as I could and he seemed in the mood to talk.

  He pulled out a bag of Turkish delight and proffered it to me. ‘Without the likes of you,’ he said, ‘Wotan, all that clanking stuff out there, me, the rest of us, we’d all be bloody useless. There’s nothing in Wotan’s brain that hasn’t been put there by the sweat of the likes of you. All my job consists of is filing it so I know where to find it. But in my time here I’ve seen a lot of good men on your side of the fence, youngsters like you, and there’s damned few of them make it to their pensions. Too damned few.

  ‘When you go out on a mission you have no idea what the truth of the situation is; only your chief knows and often he doesn’t know that much, only has the vaguest of ideas – information given to him by other operatives, sometimes false information from double agents, sometimes he’s just acting on a hunch. You and your fellow agents are unfortunately dispensible. Very dispensible. It costs the Government a lot less to train an agent than it does to build a Chieftain tank; to the British Government you people are very cheap indeed. I’m not saying this to demean you, I think you’re one of the best that’s ever come my way, and I want to make sure you keep on digging; but you have to look to your laurels. The next person that starts digging could easily be the chap in your village graveyard and the hole he’d be making could be for you.’