Not this room, he thought, running his hands through his hair to clear his mind. Try somewhere else. He was on his way to the billiards room when he noticed a leather wastebasket nestling between a reading chair and an occasional table, and knew he had seen it before without acknowledging its significance. A padded yellow paper bag, empty but fattened by whatever it had contained, was the only thing in the basket. His gaze lifted to a pair of cupboard doors got up as bookcases. They stood ajar, revealing in vertical section a stack of audio and video and television equipment. And as he hobbled toward them with his one good shoe and one stockinged foot, he caught the flash of a green pinlight winking at him from the video machine. On the lid of the video player lay a white, unmarked cassette box, also empty. Oliver’s head cleared, his desires, subsided. If somebody had written COLLATERAL on the box’s spine and drawn an arrow pointing downward at the winking light, the connection could not have been more obvious. Collateral is forwarded to you under separate cover. Y. I. Orlov. The phone was ringing.
It’s for Tiger.
It’s Mirsky who calls himself Münster.
It’s Katrina to say she’s coming up and the lift is stuck.
It’s bald Bernard offering to perform a service.
It’s the porters to say they’re on their way.
It’s Brock to say you’re blown, abort.
It went on ringing and he let it. No message machine intercepted it. He pressed the eject button on the console, extracted the cassette, put it in the white box and the box into the padded yellow bag. To Mister Tiger Single, ran the label. Electronically typed. By Hand, but no courier’s label and no sender’s name. He hobbled to the hall and was alarmed to see a photograph of his younger self, dressed in barrister’s wig and legal drag. He grabbed a leather jacket from the row of coats and slung it over his shoulder, wedging the padded bag under his arm and using the jacket to hide it. He recovered his shoe from the lift doors, put it on, stepped into the lift and after a moment’s shameful hesitation pressed the button for the ground floor. The lift descended at its own stately pace. He passed the twelfth and the eleventh and by the tenth had squeezed himself into a corner so that she couldn’t see him through the window as he passed the eighth landing. But in his mind’s eye he had her sprawled naked and resplendent on the bed she shared with Tiger and called spare. In the lobby Mattie had appropriated Joshua’s Mail on Sunday.
“Would you please give these to Miss Altremont?” Oliver said, handing him Kat’s keys.
“In due course,” said Mattie, without looking up from his newspaper.
Emerging on the pavement, he turned right and walked briskly till he came to Mohammed’s News & Smokes, Open All Hours. Not far past it, tucked against the railing, stood three phone boxes. He heard the teasing hoot of a car horn close behind and turned quickly, half fearing to see Katrina in her House of Single Porsche. But it was Aggie, waving to him from the wheel of a green Mini.
“Glasgow,” he breathed as he flopped gratefully onto the seat beside her. “And step on it.”
The Camden house living room was a natural viewing theater with a smell of stale sandwiches and departed bodies. Brock and Oliver sat on a prickly sofa. Brock had offered to watch on his own. Oliver had overridden him. A trail of numbers rolled down the screen. It’s a blue movie, Oliver thought, remembering Kat’s hands on him: just what I need. Then he saw Alfred Winser chained and kneeling on a rock-strewn hillside, and a masked angel in a white raincoat holding a glinting automatic to his head. And he heard Hoban’s awful twanging voice explaining to Alfie why he had to have his head shot off. And all he could think of after that was Tiger in his brown Raglan overcoat, alone in his penthouse, seeing and hearing the same things before going to the eighth floor to wake up Kat. In the kitchen the crew listened to the drone of Hoban’s voice while they drank their tea and stared at the partition wall. You lot are coming to the second house, Brock had told them. The men sat hushed and close together. Aggie sat apart from them, eyes closed and thumb knuckles driven against her teeth, remembering how she had made bird noises on blades of grass for Zach.
Brock took pleasure in having Massingham kicked out of bed at midnight. Hovering on the tiny landing, he was consoled to hear him shriek as Carter and Mace woke him with nearly minimum force. And when they hauled him out of his bedroom looking like a condemned man arrayed for the public amusement in his shapeless Mother Hubbard dressing gown and slippers and hideous striped pajamas, and his dazed eyes blinking and beseeching, and a jailer either side of him, Brock thought a vicious Serve you right before forcing his features into an expressionless bureaucratic stare. “My apologies for the intrusion, sir. An article of information has come to light which I feel I have to share with you. A tape recorder if you please, Mr. Mace. The minister will be wanting to hear this one personally.”
Massingham didn’t budge. Carter stepped back from him. Mace went off in search of a recorder. Massingham stayed put. “I want my solicitor,” he said. “I’m not saying another bloody word until I get written assurance.”
“Then on present showing, sir, you had better prepare yourself for the life of a Trappist monk.”
Without drama Brock pulled open the door to the attic living room. Massingham marched ahead, ignoring him. Each sat in his usual chair. Mace brought a tape recorder and switched it on.
“If you’ve been persecuting William . . .” Massingham began.
“I haven’t. Nobody has. I want to talk to you about jeopardy. You remember jeopardy?”
“Of course I bloody do.”
“Good, because the minister’s private office is giving me serious grief. They think you’re hiding something.”
“Then bugger them.”
“That’s not my preference, thank you, sir. Lunchtime, Tiger Single goes missing from Curzon Street. But you’ve already left the building. By eleven o’clock that morning you’d walked out of your office and returned to your domicile in Chelsea. Why?”
“Is that a crime?”
“Depends on the reason, sir. You remained there for a full ten hours, until nine-oh-five P.M., when you asked for protection. Do you confirm this?”
“Of course I confirm this. It’s what I told you.” Massingham’s bold words belied his manner, which was increasingly nervous.
“What made you go home early that morning?”
“Have you absolutely no imagination? Winser had been murdered, the news was out, the office was bedlam, phones ringing off the hook. I’d got a string of people to get onto. I needed peace and quiet. Where else would I find it but at home?”
“Where you duly received your threatening telephone calls,” said Brock, reflecting that liars also sometimes told the truth. “At two P.M. the same afternoon, you received a courier with a package. What was in that package?”
“Nothing.”
“Come again, sir?”
“I received no package. Therefore there was nothing in it. It’s a lie.”
“Someone in your household received it. And signed for it.”
“Prove it. You can’t. You can’t find the courier service. Never signed for it, never touched it. Whole thing’s a fiction. And if you think William did, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“I never suggested it was William, sir. You did.”
“I warn you: keep William out of this. He was in Chichester since ten o’clock that morning. Rehearsing the whole bloody day.”
“What for, sir, may I ask?”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edwardian. He’s Puck.”
“What time did he get home, then?”
“Not till seven o’clock. ‘Go, go, go,’ I told him. ‘Get out of the house, it’s not safe.’ He didn’t understand but he went.”
“Where?”
“Mind your own business.”
“Did he take anything with him?”
“Of course he did. He packed. I helped him. Then I called a cab for him. He can’t drive. He won’t. He’s had lessons galore but it
’s not his thing.”
“Did he take the parcel with him?”
“There was no parcel”—icy hard now—“your parcel is a piece of crap, Mr. Brock. It doesn’t exist and it never will.”
“At two P.M. exactly, a neighbor of yours saw a motorcycle courier coming up the steps to your door with a parcel in his hand and coming back down again without one. She didn’t see who signed for it because the door was on the chain.”
“The neighbor’s a liar.”
“She’s got multiple arthritis and there’s not a thing that happens in that street she doesn’t notice,” Brock replied, with unearthly patience. “And she’ll make a very good witness. A prosecution witness.”
Massingham examined his fingertips disapprovingly, as if to say, look what’s become of them. “I suppose it could have been telephone directories or something,” he speculated, offering an explanation that would serve them both. “Those Telecom people turn up at any odd hour. I suppose I might have signed for them and not realized. Given the state I was in. It’s possible.”
“We’re not talking telephone directories. We’re talking one padded envelope, yellow, with a white adhesive label. Something approximately the size”—he looked slowly round the room, taking his time when he came to the television set and video recorder— “the size of one of those paperback books.” Massingham turned his head to look at them. “Or it could have been a cassette,” Brock went on, as if the idea were just now dawning on him. “One of those johnnies on the shelf there. Portraying in glorious color the murder by shooting of your late colleague Alfred Winser.” No answer, beyond the same stubborn glower that had come over him the moment Brock had mentioned William. “With a message in it,” Brock continued. “The film was shocking enough but the message that came with it was worse. Am I right?”
“You know you are.”
“It was so shocking that, before you sought the protection of HM Customs, you made up a cock-and-bull story that denied the existence of the tape, which you handed to William with instructions to burn it and scatter the ashes to the four winds—or words to that effect.”
Massingham rose to his feet. “The message, as you’re pleased to call it,” he announced, digging his hands into the pockets of his shapeless dressing gown and throwing back his head, “was not a message at all. It was a pack of lies that painted me in the foulest light. It practically made me responsible for Winser’s death. It accused me of every crime under the sun, without a shred of evidence to back it up.” Theatrically, he advanced on the seated Brock and, with his knees close to Brock’s face, spoke down on him. “Do you really suppose I was going to arrive on your doorstep—my hosts, Her Majesty’s Customs, no less—brandishing as my ticket of entry a grossly defamatory document—tape—that portrays me as the supershit of all time? You must be mad.”
Brock was not mad but he was beginning to appreciate his adversary. “On the other hand, Mr. Massingham, if what your detractors say is right, you’d have two good reasons for destroying the evidence instead of one, wouldn’t you? He did do that, did he, your William—destroy the evidence?”
“It wasn’t evidence, so he destroyed none. It was a lie, it deserved to be destroyed, and was.”
Brock and Aiden Bell sat teacup to teacup in the wardroom of the house beside the river after a late-night showing of Winser’s execution. It was two A.M.
“Pluto knows something big that I don’t,” Brock said, echoing the confession he had made to Tanby. “It’s staring me in the eye. It’s like a bomb lit somewhere. I can smell burning, but I’m not going to see it till it blows me up.” Then, as seemed to happen these days, they fell to talking Porlock. His behavior at meetings: blatant. His lavish lifestyle: blatant. His supposed prime sources in the underworld, who in reality were his trading partners: blatant. “He’s testing God’s patience,” Brock said, quoting Lily. “He’s seeing how high he can fly before the gods clip his wings.”
“She means melt,” Bell objected. “She’s thinking of Icarus.”
“All right, melt. What’s the difference?” Brock conceded grumpily.
13
The shotgun wedding was arranged only after prolonged debate between Brock and the planners, if not between the contracting parties. The honeymoon, it was quickly decided, must take place in Switzerland, because it was to Switzerland that Tiger Single, alias Tommy Smart, had been traced after his departure from England. Arriving at Heathrow late in the evening, Smart-Single had spent the night in the Heathrow Hilton, taken a frugal dinner in his room and caught the first plane to Zurich next morning. He had paid cash at every turn. It was to Zurich also that he had telephoned from a public phone box in Park Lane, his interlocutor being identified as an international law firm long associated with the House of Single’s offshore transactions. A six-strong support crew would shadow the couple at all times, provide countersurveillance and communications.
The decision to join Oliver and Aggie in wedlock was not lightly taken. Brock had at first assumed that Oliver would carry on abroad as he had done at home: nominally alone, with a team to watch over him, and Brock himself on instant call to debrief him and dab away his tears. It was only when the fine print of the plan started to come under discussion—how much cash should Oliver carry? what passport? what credit cards? in what name? and should the team travel on the same planes as Oliver and share his hotels, or should they keep their distance?—that Brock went into reverse. Something had choked in him, he told Bell awkwardly. I just can’t see it, Aiden. See what? I just can’t see Oliver on his own, Brock said, abroad, with a funny passport and credit cards and a wad of money in his pocket, and a live telephone at his bedside. Not even with a whole regiment of minders out on the street, or in the cab behind him, or at the tables next to him, or in the bedrooms either side of him. But when Aiden Bell pressed him for his reasons, Brock was uncharacteristically lost.
“It’s his bloody tricks,” he said.
Bell misunderstood him. What tricks had Oliver been up to, he inquired severely, that Brock had failed to report? Bell was an ex-Ireland man. A joe was a joe for him. You paid him what he was worth and dropped him down a hole when he wasn’t worth it anymore. If he was leading you up the garden, you had a quiet word with him in a backstreet.
“It’s his conjuring tricks,” Brock explained, sounding stupid to himself. “It’s his private puzzling all the time, never reaching a conclusion, or none he lets you know about.” He tried again. “It’s his hours and hours of sitting up there in his bedroom. Shuffling his playing cards. Juggling. Modeling his bloody balloons. I never trusted him, but now I don’t know him either.” But his complaint went further. “Why doesn’t he ask me about Massingham anymore?” Deriding his own inventions: “‘Mending fences? Roaming the globe? Soothing customers’ feathers?’ What sort of a cover story is that to blind a man of Oliver’s intelligence?”
Even then, Brock failed to get to the heart of his unease. Some kind of sea change was occurring in Oliver, he wanted to say. An assurance was getting into him that hadn’t been there a couple of days ago. Brock had felt it after the film show, when he’d expected Oliver to be rolling round on the floor, threatening to take himself off to a monastery or some such nonsense. Instead, he’d remained sitting sweetly on the sofa after the lights had gone up, looking as calm as if he’d been watching Neighbours. “Yevgeny didn’t kill him. It was Hoban flying solo,” he had declared with a sort of heated cockiness. And this conviction was so strong in Oliver, so emboldening somehow, that when Brock proposed to run the tape a second time for the benefit of the crew—who later watched it in taut silence and departed looking pale and determined—Oliver had been half disposed to see it round with them just to prove his point, until under Brock’s admonishing eye he got up, did his stretching number and sauntered to the kitchen and made himself a hot chocolate to take up to his room.
Brock selected the conservatory for the ceremony and was conscious all the time of flowers. “You’ll be traveling as ma
n and wife,” he told the couple. “Which means you’ll be sharing the same toothbrush and the same bedroom and the same name. That’s all it means, Oliver. We’re clear on that, are we? Because I don’t want you coming home with both arms broken. Are you hearing me?”
Oliver was hearing him or he wasn’t. First he scowled, then he turned sanctimonious and seemed to reflect on whether such an arrangement was compatible with his high moral principles. Then he pulled a silly grin which Brock put down to embarrassment and mumbled, “Whatever you say, boss.”
And Aggie reddened, which rocked Brock to his foundations. Platonic cover marriages were standard kit for crew members on overseas assignments. Putting girls with girls and boys with boys was just too damned conspicuous. So why this maidenly confusion? Brock decided it was because Oliver wasn’t strictly crew, and chided himself for not taking her aside for a premarital homily. Love and its variations did not occur to him. Perhaps he was too much the victim of the belief, shared by Oliver, that any girl who fell for him had to be a basket case by definition. And Aggie—though Brock would not have told her this in a month of Sundays—far from being a basket case, was simply the best and sanest girl he had come upon in his thirty years of service.
An hour later, conducting a pair of middle-aged Hydra analysts to Oliver’s room to give him a few parting words of wisdom, Brock found him, instead of packing, standing by his bed in his shirttails juggling his thuds—stitched leather bags stuffed with sand or whatever. He’d got three going, and when the two women cheered him on he added a fourth. Then for a few glorious moments he managed the entire five-alive.
“You have just witnessed a personal best, ladies,” he intoned in his barker’s voice. “Nathaniel Brock, sir, if you can hold a five-alive for ten consecutive throws, you’ll be a man, my son.” What the hell’s wrong with the boy? Brock wondered once more—he’s practically happy. “And I want to ring Elsie Watmore,” Oliver told Brock as soon as the women had left, because Brock had ruled no calls from Switzerland. So Brock led him to the telephone and stayed with him until he was done.
Single & Single Page 24
