The Yellow Glass

Claire Ingrams

Contents

1.  The Yellow Glass. 2

2.  The First
Uncle. 10

3.  The
Journalist 17

4. The Girl’s Done a Bunk. 23

5.  HQ.. 29

6.  Down the
Slide. 34

7.  Radiation. 40

8.  The Fair
Lady of Golabki 45

9.  The
Establishment & The Black Box. 51

10.  The Second
Uncle. 59

11.  Grounded in
Kent 64

12.  A Platter
of Vegetables. 72

13.  Cullet,
Crizzling & Murder 77

14.  The Rare
Bird. 85

15.  Hospitals
& Pubs. 91

16.  On Board
the Humber 101

17.  The Third
Uncle. 108

18.  The Arms of
Morpheus. 114

19.  The Tramp. 121

20.  Being Joe
Bloggs. 130

21.  Rosa Thinks
it Through. 137

22.  The Covert
Operation. 145

23.  Up and At
It 151

24.  The
Power-House & the Caravan. 157

25.  The New
Elizabethan Age. 165

26.  Watching
& Listening. 173

27.  May I Ask a
Question?. 179

28.  The Kelp
Chamber 184

29.  Burn in
Hell 189

30.  The Same
Stars. 195

1.  The Yellow Glass

These are the facts.  My name is Rosa.  Rosa Stone.
I was nineteen in August and that’s the honest to God truth.  What else?
Let me give you some family background.
My mother, Millicent Stone, makes fashionable hats.  My father, Jerzy Stone, baked the bread for
the new Queen’s coronation breakfast.  My
brother, Samuel Stone, is eight (so he hasn’t done much at all).  I grew up in London
and then Kent and now I’m
back in London and living in digs over the
bridge from Chelsea, which is actually Battersea
and I don’t know why I was such a snob as to mention Chelsea at all because the two are obviously
worlds’ apart.  So far so good, but now
it gets more tricky.  I work as a
personal secretary for a firm in the import/export line.  Truth or lie?
Well, take a look at me in my crisp, white blouse and plain, woollen
skirt with my cardigan draped over my shoulders in case of chilly
draughts.  I’ve got a little string of
imitation pearls round my throat and I’ve pinned my dark brown hair up in a bun
(even though it took thirteen bobby-pins to do it).  I’m wearing glasses, although I have the eyes
of a hawk.  Or do I?  I’m afraid I’m rather a pill.  Or am I?
That’s for you to decide.  Only
one thing is certain (write it in CAPS):
I AM A SPY IN HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE.

In ten seconds this paper will self-destruct: one, two,
three . . .

It didn’t, of
course.  Which means that the above bit
of doodling on the office foolscap is actually a rather severe transgression
against the Official Secrets Act of 1939, which I signed many months back . . although
the Official Secrets Act of 1939 is, in fact, a law, so I’d be transgressing
against it whether I’d signed it or not.
Such a lot of transgression in such a small space.

“Four teas, Miss Dodd,” Mr Orchard has stuck his head
around the office door and into my tiny anteroom, which is so crammed full of
boxes that I am practically condemned to my desk.

“Quick as you can.”

“Coming right up, Mr Orchard,” I reply, because Miss
Dodd is me.

With some effort, I manage to push my chair back and
squeeze my way to the door and then I walk down the corridor (in my sensible
heels) to the kitchenette with the enamelled tile ceiling, leaving the
incriminating paper lying face up on my desk for any old person to see.  Don’t worry; it honestly doesn’t matter,
because it’s encrypted.  What my
shorthand teacher at the Marian
Claybell Secretarial
College for Young Ladies
called ‘an absolute atrocity, Miss Stone.
Utterly incomprehensible in every way’ and I like to think of in more
historical terms.  I call it ‘the Rosetta
Stone’ because it’s a cipher that can be used to crack an unknown language (for
Ancient Egyptian read Rosa Stone’s story).
And because it sounds like me.

The kitchenette smells of tinned meat and fish paste
mixed together and fried in rancid dripping.
The two girls from Mr Unsworth’s office are there.

“I do think it’s the limit . .” says the bottle
blonde, breaking off abruptly when she sees me.

“Good afternoon, Miss Saunders,” I say, reaching for
the whistling kettle.  “Any milk left?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” she replies.  “Come on, Flo.  Some people have work to do.”

They sway back to their office, ever so tight with one
another; their pointy-brassiere-ed bosoms colliding as they hook arms to
whisper about me.  I know what they
say.  They dislike me because I’m a temp.
and a pill, to boot.  Also, they can’t
quite place me in terms of class.  And -
the worst crime of all - I once used one of their personal teacups by
mistake.  I couldn’t care less.

Yet (here’s a thought), might they be working undercover, too?
It seems most unlikely in a business that appears to be mainly engaged
in the import/export of glass and other ceramics from Finland, but you never know; when one
is a spy one sees the world quite differently.
It grows layers like a Savoy
cabbage.  Is this business a cover for
something else, entirely, or is it a legitimate concern blighted by one rogue
element?  These are the type of questions
that I ask myself when I’m not transgressing against the Official Secrets Act
of 1939.

Certainly, there are plenty of crates and boxes
containing pottery and glassware of an unmistakably Scandinavian design about
the place.  I know this because most of
them are stacked up in my office and I’ve had ample opportunity to investigate
them thoroughly in quiet periods (i.e.: most of my working day).  I take care to kick over the traces of my
snooping activities, of course and go to immense trouble to un-knot bits of
string and not reach for the scissors.
I’ve even hidden a screwdriver in my handbag so that I can pry nails
from packing cases and crates.  So far,
I’ve found quantities of mustard-coloured plates, bowls and coffee pots, a
number of glass owls, a lot of chunky, yellow glass and heaps of white platters
decorated with stick ladies wearing big hats and picking flowers.  It’s all tremendously interesting, (you will
discover that I find most things tremendously interesting, except when I find
them tremendously dull), but if there’s a state secret hidden among the
crockery, I’ve yet to uncover it.

All I know is that the boss got me in here to be his
eyes and ears after my first - and only - term at Cambridge proved to be a bit of a
disaster.  (Oh, I found the subject I was
reading phenomenally dull and began to go to other students’ lectures and stay
out all night and, before I knew it, the porter had tattled to the dean and
several departments had ganged up on me and I was sent down.  Although I’d gone before then.)  However, that’s ancient history now and
couldn’t matter less, because the boss knows what I can do: my special
talents.  The boss has known me for
years.  I must say, I didn’t expect the
assignment to be this quiet and uneventful and downright dull when I agreed to undertake it, though.

Having got that off my chest, today feels appreciably
different.  Spooning tea into the teapot,
I can feel butterflies beginning to emerge from their cocoons (?!) in the pit
of my stomach.  This is what I’ve been
waiting for during these interminable weeks of being pill-like Miss Dodd.  He’s
here, you see; the boss is actually here, in Mr Orchard’s office.  And I’m making tea for him.  No more being bored to tears.  No more fooling about with the Rosetta Stone
and playing Russian roulette with the Official Secrets Act before I’ve accomplished
anything palpable.  I have the distinct
feeling that this is the day that my mission will become clear.  Teaspoons, sugar bowl, milk jug, four cups
and saucers, cosy on the teapot and it’s time to go.

“Would you mind awfully holding the door for me, Jim?”

The lazy office boy is loitering in the corridor
looking like a tremendous ted with his hair greased up in a quiff.

“Righto, Miss,” he holds it only just open and I have
to squeeze through, under his arm, with my tray, because I’m no sylph.  I make sure to smile gratefully at him.

Then I rest the tea things on top of a filing cabinet
and knock on Mr Orchard’s door.

“Enter.”

There are four men in Mr Orchard’s office and, at
first, it’s difficult to tell one from the other because the curtains are
two-thirds closed and the lights are switched off.  Scraps of a dejected afternoon - or is it a
precocious twilight? – sidle in, revealing dim stacks of dockets and files and
a Paul Nash[1]
print of a bomb crater and some defoliated trees hanging, slightly crooked, on
one wall.  It takes a minute for my eyes
to adjust to such gloom, while I hover with the tea tray, uncertain where to
place it.

“Capital, Miss Dodd.”

Mr Orchard is in his usual place behind his desk.  I know him to be a jowl-ed middle-aged man
with big teeth and mustardy tweeds and a knitted tie and I don’t need to give
him a second glance.  Of the newcomers,
two have their backs to me.  One stands
by the window, presumably watching the sights of Fulham - in this case, the
chimneys of Lots Road Power Station - get swallowed up by dirty grey fog.  He’s wearing a grey suit and hat, and has one
hand in his trouser pocket, while the other swings a pair of dark glasses
against his leg to a rhythm of his own.
Back and forth they go as I bend to set the tea-tray down on the little
side table that Mr Orchard has indicated.
Forth and back, as I straighten and pick up the teapot to pour.

I pass a cup to the nearest man, who is sitting at the
desk facing Mr Orchard and he reaches for the sugar bowl, turning to smile up
at me with nice white teeth.  He is young
and not bad-looking, but I wish he hadn’t because the third newcomer has
noticed the smile and frowns, fleetingly.
The third man is sitting in a shadowy corner and wearing a pin-striped
suit and black shoes shiny enough to see one’s face in.

“Will that be all, Mr Orchard?”  I ask, hoping for more.

“That’ll do for now, yes,” he replies, in such a
distracted manner that I flick a glance at him.

I note that Mr Orchard now merits this second glance,
his tie having skewed to one side and a single bead of sweat being all set to
launch itself from the tip of his nose.
I feel like a sniffer dog released into the scene of a crime for one
second flat; all a-quiver.  If this
second is all I have then I will make the most of it.  I am immediately struck by the unlikely
presence of a black velvet cloth, which has been spread over Mr O.’s desk and
upon which sits a selection of the chunky Finnish glass, gleaming softly in the
crepuscular gloom.  I would note more,
given more time, but that seems to be that; I can’t help but feel a touch dispirited.  Nevertheless, I begin to trip cheerfully out
of the office, as if fully satisfied with the successful completion of my
onerous secretarial duties.

“We’ll need a record, Orchard,” the third man pipes
up, suddenly.  “To dot the i’s and cross
the t’s.”

“Yup,” the good-looking young man agrees, turning out
to be American (which explains the excellent teeth), “gotta be signed and
sealed.”

Mr Orchard swipes at his nose and then reaches,
belatedly, for the checked hankie in his top right-hand pocket.

“Of course.
Take it down, please, Miss Dodd.”

“Two ticks, Mr Orchard.”

I slip out for my notepad, trying not to look pleased.

When I get back the young American rises and offers me
his chair, but leaves his hand lying casually along the back of it while I sit
down.  This is puzzling, but I shift to
the front of the seat to avoid contact and sit ramrod straight.

“Ready when you are, Mr Orchard.”

“Right, let’s see.
14th April 1955, stop.
Contract drawn up between Heaviside
Import/Exports Ltd and Sambaware Enterprises,
Territory of Alaska, stop. Ref: Dilko
Arkonnen (two ‘n’s) Vas-Glass &
Ceramics, stop.  Quantities as
follows:”

“That is some freaky shorthand you have there, Miss
Dodd,” the American is still standing behind me and has begun leaning over with
his hand now on my shoulder.  “I’ve never
seen shorthand quite like that before.”

I smile up at him, “I know, it’s dreadful really, but
it gets the job done, I can assure you.
Sorry, Mr Orchard.  I’ve got as
far as ‘Quantities as follows:’?”

“One million pieces, stop.”

I break the lead in my pencil.

“Sorry, Mr Orchard, but I may have misheard.  The quantity was . . ?”

“One million pieces.
Stop.”

Somebody passes me a new pencil, not the American, who
is actually beginning to tickle the back of my neck, but the third man.

“Six noughts, I think you’ll find,” he remarks, drily.

“Thank you so much,” I reply and swat lightly at my
neck, as if at a fly.

The American chuckles quietly and extends a couple of
fingers down the back of my crisp, white blouse.  I really don’t like this.

“Signatories, Orchard, don’t you think?  Mmm?
Then we can get this show on the road,” says the third man.

“Signatories, Miss Dodd.  Mr G. Orchard, Financial Director, Heaviside etc., stop. Space for
signature.  New line,” the American’s
fingers are tickling me atrociously and I cross my legs and slide forward to
get away from him, so that I’m barely sitting on the chair at all.  “Mr A. Arkonnen, Managing Director, Dilko Arkonnen Vas-Glass & Ceramics
Finland, stop.  As before,” it’s becoming
just about unbearable and I slap my notepad down on Mr Orchard’s desk and lean
my head and shoulders over it, as if over a decidedly tricky piece of
work.  “Mr B Dexter, Sambaware Enterprises, Cape Prince of Wales, Seward Peninsula,
Territory of Alaska, USA, stop.
Witness to the above signatories, Mr T. Clarendon, Legal representative
for Trelawney & Mole Solicitors,
Bayswater, Lon . .”

My notepad slips out from under me and skids clear
across the desk as if propelled by some wicked power of its own, knocking over
a hefty yellow vase, which promptly knocks over two yellow goblets,
precipitating all three off the edge of the desk and onto the hard linoleum
floor.

“I’m so . .” I make an automatic move to catch them
before they smash to smithereens, but my arms scrabble in thin air.

“No!”  The
American leaps away from me, like a man possessed.

“Really, I didn’t mean to . .”

“Christ!”  Mr
Orchard positively screams.

I suspect that I look at him rather blankly because
I’m actually so taken aback at the violence of the general reaction to my
unfortunate accident.  I cannot help
noticing that Mr O. has grabbed his checked hankie and clamped it over his
mouth and nose.

Then it is that the Finn at the window turns around
for the first time and I have the opportunity to see his face, quite
distinctly, in the strip of light between the curtains.  He’s a bluff, pleasant-looking man in his mid
forties under his grey, felt hat.
Strawberry-blond sideburns and rounded cheeks, full, bloody-coloured
lips.  Yes, the effect is pleasant enough
. . until the light catches his eyes.
There is something very odd about his eyes.  They are tremendously pale, like a pint of
milk, so that his pupils stand out like tiny beetles that have fallen in and
are trying not to drown.  His mouth opens
in shock.  Is he about to say something
Finnish?  No, he isn’t.

The Finn flings out one arm and punches it in a great
arc through the window behind him.  He
repeats this once and then twice and then he launches himself through the hole
that he has made.  Crumbs, it’s lucky
that we’re on the ground floor.  I may
have turned to the other three men and begun to gabble something to that
effect, but nobody hears me because they are so intent on escaping, themselves:
first Mr Orchard and then the American rush to the window and positively vault
after the Finn.  I stare through the
broken glass as if they might suddenly re-appear, jumping in bottoms’ first,
like a film that’s spooling backwards.

The third man looks at me and sighs.

“Oh Rosa,” he sighs, “what have you done?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Tristram,” I say.  “Perhaps you could tell me?”

“I can tell you what you haven’t done, Rosa,” he says, unfolding his handkerchief and
kneeling down to pick up a shard of yellow glass.  “You haven’t condemned the whole of London to
uranium poisoning and slow death by radiation.”
He turns the fragment of glass until it winks, prettily.  Then he smiles his crooked smile.  “So that’s something.”

My uncle - and my boss - Tristram Upshott, and I left
Heaviside Import/Exports via the front door and went to wait for a bus at the
stop outside the Lots Road Power Station.
Fulham was looking at it’s most abject.
Fog had turned to rain and it was still so very cold after the freezing,
interminable winter we’d just endured.
The boss unfurled his black umbrella so that we could both take shelter
while we waited.

“Where’s your car, Uncle?”

I’d never imagined that he would take buses, not in my
wildest dreams.

“I parked it up by World’s End.  I daresay they’ll be watching it.  It may be a goner.  Now, tell me, Gypsy (his pet name for me),
that room you took in Battersea; anything you’re particularly attached to in
it?”

“What, like peeling wallpaper, or the stained
mattress, d’you mean?”

“Please don’t be more than usually precocious.  Any personal things you care about?  Or, more to the point, things that could be
used to trace you?”

“No.”  I thought
about it.  “No, nothing at all.  Miss Dodd’s clothes are in the wardrobe.  And some books . .”

“Notebooks?”  He
broke in.  “Were you scribbling
there?  You had strict instructions not to scribble, remember.  Not to scribble and not to touch any
deliveries,” he peered down at me under the umbrella and a thick lock of
blue-black hair broke free from the bondage of hair-oil and fell over his
unreadable eyes.

I was saved by the bus.  We climbed up to the top deck and found we
had it all to ourselves.

“Do let’s sit at the front,” I exclaimed.

“Very well,” he slid in first, but remained standing
and seemed to be winding open the top bit of window, which was odd considering
that it such an exceedingly nippy afternoon for April.  “One moment.”
He took off his black bowler hat and promptly dropped it out of the
window.  “That’s better.  Trelawney
& Mole Solicitors have rather bitten the dust, I should think.”

“Can you explain it all to me now?  Please?
Please?”

He lifted a finger to hush me.  The conductor had crept up behind us and I
hadn’t noticed.

“Where do you go?”
Uncle Tristram asked.

“Putney Common, Sir.”

“That’ll do nicely.
Two, please.  Thank you.”

The conductor rolled the dial on his ticket machine,
handed us the tickets and went back down the stairs.

After that the boss seemed to relax and stretched his
long legs out as far as they could go, which wasn’t far.

“Oh, I do like buses, don’t you?”  He said.
“Buses and trains and planes.
It’s rather nice to get out of the car.
Putney, too; I’m not terribly familiar with it.  What will we find, d’you think, Gypsy?  Trees and that kind of thing?”

This was an awful lot of small talk for my uncle who -
unlike myself - was inclined to be terse, verging on the abrupt at times.

“You’re trying to wriggle out of telling me, aren’t
you?  But I shan’t let you!”  I put a pleading note into my voice that I’d
found worked well in the past.  “Weeks
I’ve been in that desperately tedious place with nothing at all going on.  I’ve had to wear the most ghastly clothes and
go back to that terrible hole after work, with nobody but bed-bugs for
company.  You’ve got to tell me the full
story!  You’ve simply got to!”

“Ha!
Battersea?  I’m sure it did you
good to see how the other half lives.”
He gave me his stern look.

“Yes, well, it’s done me good and now you’ve got to
tell me.  So there.”

He leant forward to inspect the small gap under the
front window of the bus, which was situated immediately above the driver’s
head.

“I think we should take a short walk on Putney
Common.  After which, we could stop off
at a pub.  Or a milk bar, if that’s more
your style, Gypsy.  Then we might think
about taking another bus somewhere else.”

——

They’d said to keep an eye on her, so that’s what I
done.  I was saving the loot for a pair
of pointed alligator casuals.  Besides,
it weren’t no bad thing to be in their good books.  They were hard-faced for oldsters, those
two.  The old man had come in sozzled and
stinking of fags and she’d been narked and he’d given her what for.  Then he’d moved on to me, rabbiting on about
how there weren’t no teenagers in his day and Ernie Bevin[2]
had made it too easy and we hadn’t had to fight in the war.  Blah, blah, blah, war, blah, blah, blah, war,
blah, blah, blah, war.

——

It was dreadfully cold on Putney Common and
deeply dispiriting.  I felt like a
plucked pheasant with my unusually bare neck and was conscious of my nose
growing embarrassingly red.  I shivered
and pulled the collar of my coat close.

“Haven’t you got a scarf?”  My uncle asked.

“No.”

I hadn’t known that I would be out and about in any
fresh air, of course.  I unpinned my
hair, pulling bobby-pin after bobby-pin out of it (all thirteen of them), until
the curly mass plummeted, nearly to my waist.

“Vas-Glass is short for Vaseline glass .
.” he began, striding along with his eyes on some personal horizon.

I had to gallop to keep up with him, since he appeared
to be on a mission to circumvent Putney Common in record time.  (I should explain, my uncle is relatively
young and energetic for somebody’s uncle; he’s probably about thirty.  He is actually married to my mother’s sister,
my beautiful Aunt Kathleen and . . . Why am I
explaining?  This was his time to explain.)

“ . . and Vaseline glass is another name for uranium glass.  It’s glass that has been manufactured with a
small quantity of uranium in it; nothing new about that, been going on for a
couple of centuries, at least.  In fact,
it’s possible that the Romans mixed a bit into their mosaics, although that
might have been the naturally occurring amount that turns up in sand
anyhow.  However . . .”  I was so tremendously interested that I
started to say something, but he shot me an especially severe look from under
his black brows.  “However, production in
this country ceased in the war, when the government confiscated all supplies of
uranium and that’s still the state of play.”

We had emerged from trees and scrub onto a road,
crossed over and circumnavigated Putney Hospital before arriving at a
semi-derelict graveyard that had mislaid its church.  My uncle halted by a Victorian stone angel
and they stared at one another for a bit.
Something rustled nearby: a stray cat, or fox, or somebody’s unquiet
ghost.  Abruptly, he swung round to face
me.

“Tell me, Rosa, what did you notice?  What was your assessment of the situation?”

I smiled, took a deep breath and then something
clicked in my brain.  Images tumbled over
each other, vying to be first out.

“Fifty-seven boxes and nineteen crates in my office
alone, all stamped and labelled DA FINLANDIA HANDLE WITH CARE.  White labels, black ink, letterpress
printed.  Most recent delivery 10th April
1955, ten boxes stamped and labelled as per, however, not letterpress but phototypeset employing individual glyphs on film
strip.  Also, anomaly with string . .”

“Bravo,” he broke in, “those were ours . .”

“Blue and white cotton twist on thirty-five boxes not
matched by the mid-grey and white of the . .”

“Move on . .”

“Saunders, Loretta, secretary at Heaviside
Import/Export engaged in wild affair with fiancée of best friend Higgs,
Florence.  Johnson, James, office boy,
hours of work not commensurate with those stated in the work sheet provided and
. .”

——

Jim Johnson seemed like a good enough name to
me.

“Dig this,” I’d told Gloria and Little Frank and the
rest, “we’ve got the keys to one of my dad’s motors and a few bob for the tube
if it’s not free.  Coffees on me and
all.”

“Cappuccinos?” Gloria asked.  “Iced coffees?  That cassata ice cream with the coloured
stripes?”

“Half an avocado pear up Mayfair, if that’s what you
really dig,” I’d said, carried away.

She ruffled my hair and pouted; the prettiest little
chick in London by a mile.

“D’I ever mention, Tel, you look just like Johnny
Ray?”

——

“Enough!”  My
uncle had put his hands upon my shoulders and shook me, gently.  “Enough, Rosa.  Too much information.”

I swayed on my sensible shoes.

“Sorry.  Was it
too much again?  I can’t edit it, you
know . .”

“Never mind.
There will be a complete debriefing later, HQ will see to that.  You’ve done your best, Gypsy,” he actually
smiled at me for a brief, magical second.
“I knew you’d come up trumps.”

I shivered, suddenly so tired that I could barely
string two words together.

“Now.  P . . p .
. please,” I stuttered.  “Tell me the
story.”

2.  The First Uncle

The Dissenters coffee bar, on the corner of
Putney High Street and the Lower Richmond Road, had brick wallpaper plastered
over one wall and egg yolk-yellow paint on another, with a black ceiling and a
red and white checked lino floor.  The
horseshoe shaped bar was fringed with high stools, and lushly-leaved
rubber-plants in pots punctuated the Formica counter at regular intervals.  I loved it and I dragged the boss off the
pavement and through the door before he had a chance to protest much.

“Must we?”

“Yes we must.
And the coffee will be good; it’s got one of those Gaggia machines.  I don’t want to go to an old man’s pub,
Uncle.  Besides, the rain’s actually
turning to sleet, look and it’ll be as dark as death in a minute.  I’ve had enough walking for one day.”

He looked askance at the rubber-plants, but shook out
his umbrella and sat down on a stool, nonetheless, rather out of place in his
debonair pin-striped suit and shiny shoes.
The Dissenters was empty and I calculated we’d have a good half an hour
of privacy before the end of the working day brought any further influx of
customers.

“I’ll get them,” I offered, going up to order from the
man behind the Gaggia.

I waited at the counter watching the man pull the great
levers and the machine belch steam into the bar, but he studiously ignored me,
while a waitress in a dirndl skirt nipped over to my uncle behind my back and
took the order, smiling unnecessarily.  I
went over to admire a glorious monster of a jukebox - a Seeburg with bright
yellow chrome tubes - before I plonked myself down on the stool next to my
handsome uncle.

The glass cups of frothy coffee had arrived on a
melamine tray and Dizzy Gillespie[3]
was blowing some brain-expanding, intricate riffs on his trumpet before Uncle
Tristram got down to business.  He bent
his dark head towards mine and spoke just loudly enough for me to hear and
nobody else.

“You must understand, Rosa, that the more you know
about this operation, the more dangerous it might be for you.  That’s why I hesitate, do you see?  As it is, I wonder whether I should have
involved you at all,” he took a sip
of his coffee and his eyes collided with mine, briefly, over the rim of his cup,
“despite your abilities.”

“But why?” I barged in.  “Why should I be in danger?  Why couldn’t I have stayed at the
office?  Why are we running away like
this?”

He raised a warning finger, “That’s enough.  Or I won’t tell you anything.”

I subsided into silence.  I knew from past experience that pestering my
uncle would get me nowhere.

“You were to be our eyes and ears; that was our
agreement, yes?  You have frankly
remarkable powers of observation, Rosa.
As you well know.  And they were the reason we signed you
up.  I have absolutely no doubt that your
debriefing will uncover a wealth of useful information; stuff that you have no
idea that you possess.  However, at no time did I ask you to do anything
that might put you in any danger, now did I?”

“No, but . .”

“Mr Orchard’s secretary was offered a free holiday,
paid - unbeknownst to her - by the British taxpayer.  At which we slotted you in with the
secretarial agency and gave you some glowing testimonials, correct?  The rest was up to you.  You were to go in as a temporary secretary,
fulfil your duties quietly and efficiently and then leave.  And that is precisely what would have
happened, if not for today’s piece of rotten luck.  Or, to put it another way . .” he shook his
head and sighed, “right royal cock-up.”

And then he added, as if to himself,

“It’s not the fact that we didn’t flee the scene with
them that makes me uneasy - I mean the solicitor and the secretary simply wouldn’t have because the solicitor and
the secretary were, supposedly, oblivious.
It’s that we witnessed their reactions.  Especially Arko’s reaction.  Yes, whether the glassware were lethal, or
not, that’s the bit they won’t like, where we
are concerned.”

I had no idea what he meant.  Would he tell me the full story, or not?  It seemed a jolly long time coming.  I’m a girl who just cannot bear not to know everything
immediately.  It’s like a kind of curse,
actually.

“Uncle Tristram, if you don’t tell me the whole story
this very minute, I shall . .”

I looked about me, desperate for something that I
could threaten him with, when inspiration struck.

“I shall change the record on the jukebox,” I said,
and I found a couple of pennies in my handbag and got up to do just that.

‘One, two,
three o’clock, four o’clock rock . .’

The opening strains of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the
Clock’[4]
came crashing into the coffee bar and the boss’s face twisted in disgust.

“You don’t like this rot, do you?  I must say I find it pretty unbearable.”

“Like it?” I said.
“I love it.  I love it so much that, if you don’t tell me
what on earth has been going on, I shall grab the first boy to come in here and
dance with him.  And if no boys do come
in, then I shall grab you and force you to dance with me.  How about that!”

The best thing about this spontaneous plan was that my
uncle knew me too well to dismiss it out of hand.

“Oh, Rosa,” he sighed, again, “will you please try not
to make a spectacle of yourself?”

“I will do
it.  You know I will.”

“For heavens sake, we’re supposed to be working
undercover . . .  Honest to God . .”  He shifted on his stool and looked as
uncomfortable as I’ve ever seen him.  I
felt quite pleased with myself; that I’d worked out how he might feel.

“Look.
Rosa.  Positively no dancing – and
I mean that, not even a suggestion of a hand-jive, or whatever they call
it.  Let me finish my coffee, please.”

——

We were out for kicks, that was all.  Then the ground floor window got smashed and
everything changed.  The girl had only
just left with the toff when the phone rang.

“It’s for you, Jim,” the office manager went, narked
at me getting a call in office hours, when I should’ve been sweeping up broken
glass.

“Is she still there?”

“No.  Upped and
gone this minute.”

“After her and let me know where she goes.  Forget the job.  Get the others.  Keep me informed all along the line,
right?   I’ll send some back-up.”

“What if I can’t get to a phone box?”

“You will if you know what’s best for you.”

——

The boss drained his cup and then clicked his
fingers at the waitress for another one in a grand manner that I hadn’t seen
anybody use in a coffee bar before, but which seemed to do the trick because it
came super fast.  Then he leant towards
me once more.

“They’re smuggling uranium, and huge quantities of it
at that, most probably to the Soviets, but we can’t be sure.  You’re aware of how desperate the world is
for uranium?  It’s application to nuclear
power?  There was the Manhattan Project[5],
of course - a Pandora’s box that will never be shut again - and the amazing
things it does to steels, in terms of durability and elasticity.  The Russians opened the world’s first
commercial scale nuclear power station in Obninsk only last year and the
Americans have used nuclear power to propel a submarine.  It’s the future, whether we like it or not.”

“And they’re smuggling it in glass?”  I was breathless
with excitement.

“They’re smuggling it in a number of ways, but, yes,
glass in this instance,” his voice had dropped to a whisper, even though nobody
could possibly overhear our conversation above the racket that Bill Haley and
His Comets were making.  “Somebody is
extracting substantial amounts from an unknown source and we believe - and our
experience this afternoon rather backs up our theory - that they’ve found a way
for the fabric of the glass to carry increasing amounts of uranium; dangerous
amounts that may not be perfectly stable.
In fact, as we saw, it seems that they, themselves, don’t know how
stable or otherwise the uranium is.  When
you broke those glasses they panicked in the sincere belief that radiation
poisoning was on the cards.”

“But it wasn’t?” I asked.

“No.  We’ve been
introducing dummy crates of Vaseline glass for quite some little while.  Had they been as smart as you when it came to
letterpress labels and string and so forth, they’d have smelt a rat.  Luckily they weren’t.”

We were almost bumping noses now, because a group of
teen-agers had come in and made a beeline for the jukebox.  ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had been swiftly
followed by ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’ and the joint was beginning to jump.

“We’d had word that the big man was coming today,” he
continued, “and I put in an appearance as the tame solicitor.  We were checking samples prior to despatching
some extremely large orders (‘though I’d made damned sure that they weren’t the
real McCoy, not being terribly keen to get on close terms with their
baby).  The curtains were drawn and we
had a black cloth on the desk owing to a rather interesting phenomenon; uranium
glass glows bright green in the dark when ultraviolet light is shone on
it.  Fluorescence is the technical
term.  The more uranium, the more green
it glows.  Well, that’s what we were up
to when you came into the room . . and we know what that led to.”

“But . .” it struck me, “if the glass samples you were
looking at weren’t the real thing,
then how did you get them to glow?”

“Good point, Rosa.
Our technical man put plenty of manganese in them and that will produce
a similar kind of effect, I’m told.”

He pulled his pocket handkerchief out and unwrapped
the fragment of yellow glass so that it lay between us on the counter and we
both stared at it, as if to confirm for ourselves:

“Nope, no uranium in this one”.

“Which was the big man, Uncle?  The American or the Finn?”

“Oh, that’s a bad Yank, but he’s not the biggest
fish.  Arko is the big man.”

He folded up the piece of glass and stowed it away in
his trouser pocket.  Then he retrieved a
few coins and left them on the Formica counter by our empty cups.  He stood up to go.

“Arko Arkonnen
is the devil incarnate.”

I admit it, I squealed with pure excitement.

“Now forget I
ever told you anything, Gypsy.  If your
Aunt Kathleen ever hears of this, there’ll be merry hell to pay.”

I jumped off my stool and began to button up my coat,
my fingers trembling with the thrill of it all.

Glancing outside, I noted that darkness had fallen
upon Putney High Street.  Car headlights
came and went on the road, but I could still discern the sleet, streaking in
diagonal lines, through the ochre glow from the Dissenters’ neon sign.  I felt such a sense of unreality; half there
and half a long way away, as one feels when emerging from a theatre onto cold
London pavements, or turning the final page in a book one’s read deep into the
early hours of the morning.  Might the
devil incarnate really be on our
tail?  Would my Uncle Tristram and I take
another bus and then perhaps another and another, ad infinitum?  I did hope so; if I had to be on the run,
there was nobody else in the whole, wide world I’d rather run with.

I stooped to pick up the boss’s umbrella, where it lay
beneath my stool on the red and white checked floor.  Which was when I saw him.

It was the Heaviside office boy, Jim Johnson, hogging
the jukebox with his teen-age crowd.  I went
hot and cold and possibly hot again, un-buttoning my coat in what I hoped was a
nonchalant fashion, and then buttoning it up again, slowly, while I put my mind
to this strange coincidence.  I supposed
that if one were to run into Jim anywhere at all, the Dissenters would be the
place for it.  No doubt, he met up with
his friends after work every evening.
Actually,  I believed I’d even noticed
him waiting at that bus stop before.
That bus stop that my uncle and I had waited at.  Of course, that would be it; he must live out
in the suburbs.

Jim turned round, as I’d known he would (according to
the laws of serendipity), before we’d reached the door.  His freckled face was as empty as ever
underneath his towering quiff, his mouth working at a piece of chewing-gum like
a ruminating cow.  He clocked me.

“Why, hello Jim,” Miss Dodd said.  “Small world.”

“Evenin’ Miss,” he looked at her and then at the man
with her and then back at her again.

“See you tomorrow, Jim.  Bright and early.”

The boy nodded, imperceptibly and returned to the
jukebox, completely uninterested in dull Miss Dodd (which was how it should be
when there was a pretty, little, blonde pony-tailed creature at his elbow).

As soon as we were out of the door and striding down
the street, the boss took my elbow in a pincer-like grip.

“Do you believe that?”

“I do, actually.
I think he lives around here.”

“Well I sure as hell don’t!  Come!”

He hooked his arm through mine and propelled me across
the road, despite the fact that the traffic had a green light.  Then he practically threw me down some stone
steps at the bottom of Putney Bridge.

“Stay!”  He demanded,
like a cross man to his dog, before disappearing in the direction in which we’d
just come.

Of course I’d no intention of staying and had just
climbed back up the steps when the boss came charging towards me again.

“He went straight to a public phone box.”

He pointed down the steps again and scowled at me,

“Back!”

So we clattered down the steps together, to where the
Thames lapped at her dirty shore in the dark.
Oily, black wavelets flickered here and there in the light from a
lamppost high on the bridge, breaking against unidentifiable junk and probable
detritus from the war (unexploded bombs were suddenly uppermost in my
mind).  I’d thought of Putney as
virtually rural, but the river said otherwise.
How close the warehouses and wharves must be: all of the frantic
commerce that bled into the waters (the smell of which were overpoweringly
sulphurous).  The boss indicated right
along the water and took my hand.

“This way.  Run,
Rosa and don’t stop for anything.”

I can’t tell you how exciting it was!  We ran along the shoreline  - because it was far more of a shoreline than a riverbank and we seemed to gallop
along a littered beach at the edge of an eerie, black sea - and my uncle’s hand
was warm and firm in mine and I felt so completely happy, if rather
breathless.  To be honest, it was as if
I’d forgotten why we were running.

Then the shots rang out.

“Christ Almighty!”
My uncle swore, and then, “Duck!”

So I did, but couldn’t prevent myself glancing behind
us.  There seemed to be quite a crowd
behind us.  Quite a gang of them.  Not just Jim,
but all of the other teen-agers, pony-tailed girls included, and several men
for whom Bill Haley and His Comets would not have been their scene.  It was an older man wearing a pork pie hat
and a short car-coat who was waving the gun about.  He shouted something but, thankfully, we
weren’t quite close enough to hear; had we been, we’d probably have been
riddled with bullets.  I imagine he
wished us to stop, but that wasn’t going to happen, not in a month of Sundays;
we weren’t stopping for anything.

We had run underneath a railway bridge when it became
clear that we needed a change of plan.
They were gaining on us, you see - I wasn’t as fit as my uncle and was
bursting with lack of breath - and the man had taken another pot-shot and the
open green space of a park to our right offered scant protection and I couldn’t
see how we’d ever throw them off.  My
earlier enthusiasm was certainly ebbing away, although I still felt cushioned
by a sense of dream-like unreality; unable to equate the preposterous idea that
somebody was shooting at me with anything I’d ever known in my previous
nineteen years of existence.  When my
uncle came up with a shocker:

“Can you swim, Rosa?”

He had to be stark, staring mad.  I was so knocked sideways by the very idea
that I promptly stumbled and dropped my handbag.  Yes, I could swim and was, in fact, a pretty
strong swimmer due to my father’s determination that I should master the
perfect crawl (owing to a near-drowning incident that had happened when I was a
child), but nothing would persuade me to go swimming in the filthy waters of
the Thames.

“You must be joking!
Haven’t you heard of cholera?”

He shot me one of his swift, stern glances.

“Haven’t you heard of a bullet through the head?”

Then he picked up my beautiful, leather handbag with
the gold clasp and lobbed it into the river.

“Let’s lose this thing, first off.  Now, skirt, shoes and coat,” he actually
smiled, the madman.  “Last one in’s a
cissy.”

A bullet squealed over our heads and, this time, it
seemed awfully real, somehow.  I tore my
clothes off in two seconds flat and made straight for the water.

It was hideously cold before I’d even made the plunge,
but I’d less than a heartbeat of sheer revulsion, of shivering on the shore
with the tails of my blouse barely covering my stocking-tops, before he grabbed
my hand and ran with me into the water.
Over the slimy, green stones, through the scum of disintegrating,
splintered wood and detergent froth and unknown horrors hardly worthy of the
noble, Latin terms ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’; it was so unpleasant in every single
way that I very nearly turned around and took a bullet.  And the water was beyond cold, stinging those
bits of me that it could get at, which were more and more, as my uncle dragged
me in and seemed to fling me at the river, loosing me from all bearings until I
was all alone, trying to remember my perfect crawl.  It was horrible . . and then . . it wasn’t.

Because the magic happened, the magic that only water
can conjure.  Everything that was
unpleasant and shiver-making transformed into its opposite as I swam.  Even my lungs expanded, so that I was able to
breathe properly; it felt like the longest time since I’d taken a proper
breath.  The Thames spread out a silver
pattern upon her black surface, a path for me to follow through her immense
treasury of water.  There, ahead of me,
was my uncle’s head - his well-oiled black hair making him look like a bobbing
seal - turning to see how I was doing.  I
think I actually laughed.  All at once
there was so incredibly much space; for the sky seemed to unwrap above the
river as if only here did it have the freedom to show itself.  Were there stars over London?  I’d never noticed them before.  Or were they streaks of sleet snow,
glittering against so much black?

I swam as if it were the easiest thing in the world,
not bothering to look over my shoulder.
Bullets may have spattered on the
water but, if they did, the Thames gulped them down, silently.  Everything was so quiet that night.
Sometimes a floating spar of wood bumped, gently, against a leg or an
arm, before it went on its way.  There
were no river police and surprisingly little river traffic of any kind.  Even the tides seemed to have slowed to the
gentle pull of blood through an artery and there was no need to fight the river;
one arm and then the next did their job without me, while I was free to gaze
and gaze.

“Rosa!” Uncle Tristram called, nearer now.  “Rosa!
Grab the cable.  Do you see
it?  The cable from the barges.  Grab it as soon as you can manage!”

A flotilla of flat, black barges were moored up
together and I stretched out to catch the wire cable.  It held me and I waved in the water, like
seaweed.  As if from a deep sleep, I came
to, blinking away droplets of river.  My
God . . we’d reached the other side!  My
legs snared on a mooring post and I kicked myself free, only to find that I
could touch the stones on the ground with my toes.

I waded out of the water feeling like a cold-blooded
being arriving in a new, warm world.

He was there to greet me, as if I’d swum alone.

“Well done, Gypsy.
I knew you’d make it.”

A line from a play I’d seen bubbled up into my
brain.  Peggy Ashcroft in ‘Twelfth Night’[6].

“What country, friends, is this?”

3.  The Journalist

My uncle thought it might be Hurlingham.

“Quick!” He continued.
“They’ll be over Wandsworth Bridge before we know it.  Let’s find a taxi.”

I looked down at my sodden white blouse and torn
stockings and acres of streaming hair.

“I don’t know that I can ride in a taxi like this,
Uncle Tristram.”

“Details, Rosa; you have an unfortunate tendency to
get hung up on details.  I’ll bribe the
driver.  Just get a move on, will
you?  We haven’t got all day.”

We found some steps up from the river and began to run
again.  We covered the length of
Hurlingham Park, negotiating rafts of daffodils and I waddled after my uncle
like a duck who is infinitely much better at swimming than running.  I wish I could say that the park was deserted
and there wasn’t a soul to witness my half-dressed state but, sadly, that
wasn’t the case.  Heaven knows what they
thought, (but then I’m never entirely sure what anybody thinks).  Anyhow,
nobody called a policeman.  Perhaps they
thought it was just high spirits.
Actually, I didn’t care as much as I probably should have, because I was
turning turquoise blue with cold.
Honestly, I felt quite ill with it.

When we’d got to the park gates, the boss stopped for
a breather and took his bearings.

“This isn’t looking promising.”

He was right, it wasn’t the type of area that taxis
regularly frequent.  Grim Victorian
terraces, with Watney’s pubs on the corner and housewives gossiping on their
front steps while the tea cooked, that was the kind of territory we were
in.  A miasma of thoroughly boiled
laundry and even more thoroughly boiled cabbage floated over the rooftops.   Then it dawned on me that I’d been there
before.

“Crumbs,” I exclaimed, “I think I know where we
are.  We’re down the wrong end of the
Kings Road.  I’ve got a friend who lives
here somewhere.  Parsons Green for his
sins.”

I took the lead and set off at a determined walk; it
was pure agony to stand still in my frozen state - especially when a housewife
in curlers and a scarf began to stare at me and make me feel strange -  but a brisk walk was my limit.

“Get a move on!”
I turned and waved my arms at the boss, looking as stern as
possible.  “We haven’t got all day, you
know!”

Lettice Road, Parsons Green, that was where
Magnus lived.  It wasn’t difficult to
remember because the whole address reminded me of salad.  It was a shabby house in a shabby London
street and the inside of it was even shabbier, but I liked Magnus and we needed
shelter.  There was a strong possibility
that Magnus might be in the pub, of course, but he wouldn’t have gone further
than the establishment at the end of the road.
That was partly why I liked him; he wasn’t as hard to read as other
people were.  Magnus was a creature of
habit, of smoke-filled rooms and smudged teapots, black turtle-necks and
ink-stained fingers.  Of darkness.  The only bright thing around Magnus was
Magnus, himself.

The boss tapped me on the shoulder at the beginning of
Lettice Road.

“Can we trust this friend of yours, Rosa?  What does he do?”

“Of course we can trust him, Uncle.  If we couldn’t then he wouldn’t be any friend
of mine, would he?  He was up at
Cambridge with me, in his final year when I was just beginning.  I got to know him when I wrote a piece for
Varsity.”

“Varsity?  He’s
not a bloody journalist, is he?”

“Um, well, yes, you could say that.  He edits a small magazine called A Paler Shade of Red.  He puts the whole thing out, in fact:
writing, subbing, funny little cartoon, everything.  I think the whole magazine actually is Magnus.”

“Whoa . . stop right there.  A Paler
Shade of what?  Is this a home
decoration magazine, flogging paint?  Or
am I right in thinking that your friend Magnus is a bit of a Commie?”

“Possibly,” I pretended to think about it (knowing
full well that Magnus was an out and out Lefty, if not your actual,
full-throated Commie).  “I’d say he leans
to the left.  But he wouldn’t agree with
smuggling uranium anywhere, you can bet your bottom dollar on that, because
he’s a ban the bomb man.  He’s completely
against all nuclear power, and all fighting, for that matter.  If he’d been old enough to fight in the war,
he wouldn’t have.”

Uncle Tristram looked exasperated and hesitated, as if
to hike all the way back up the Kings Road to the land where taxis plied their
trade and people fought wars when they were told to.

So, I marched up to the front door of Magnus’ two-room
flat and knocked, hard, on it.  Magnus
opened up immediately, as if he’d been skulking behind the door.  He looked like a man who’d been to a funeral
and forgotten to tell his hair: layers of black wool and dusty black corduroy,
trousers tucked into black socks, hands even swathed in horrible, possibly
home-made, black fingerless mittens, and his pink complexion and luminous,
strawberry- blond hair perched on top of all that bulk.  I looked a bit closer.

“You’ve grown a goatee, Magnus,” I said.

He peered at me and his face got pinker.

“You’ve got no shoes on, Rosa.”

Before I could reply to this polite observation, my
uncle made himself known behind me.

“Good evening,” he said, sticking out his hand, “I’m
Rosa’s uncle.  We’ve taken a tumble in the
river and we wondered if we might warm up a bit in front of your fire.”

Magnus hesitated to shake his hand and I could tell
that he had my stocking-tops in his head and was striving, manfully, to make
sense of them.

“He is,
Magnus.  My uncle.  He’s married to my aunt and all that.”

He clasped Uncle Tristram’s hand, briefly and stepped
away from the door.

“You’d best come in then,” he said.

There’s something I’ve neglected to tell you.  It shouldn’t make any difference but, life
being life and Britain being the class-ridden snake-pit that it patently is, it
struck me - as I put on a pair of Magnus’ enormous black slacks and a scratchy,
black turtle-neck - that it probably would.
You see, Uncle Tristram Upshott is, actually, the Honourable Tristram
Upshott because his father is an honest to goodness Lord.  And Magnus is from Hull.  Of course, Cambridge was over-run with
Honourable types but, if I remember correctly (and I always do), Magnus hated
all of them.  Without exception.  I know this might seem a ridiculous
consideration, when one  has just been
faced with international smugglers and gun-toting teen-age gangs, but it was on
my mind when I went back into Magnus’ other room.

The place really was a hovel.  There were galleys and proofs lying upon every
conceivable surface, floor included.  On
top of the paperwork stood an assortment of chipped mugs, some encrusted with
ancient tea-leaves, others swimming with stubbed out cigarette butts.  It wasn’t much warmer than outside, either,
because Magnus had his gas fire turned down to the merest flicker.  A shallow bowl of water stood in front of it,
from which a huge marmalade tomcat was drinking thirstily, spraying water from
foot-long whiskers.  Things were
certainly pretty bad if Magnus couldn’t even run to a bowl of milk for his cat
(a truly enormous specimen; I’d often
wondered whether he had some Scottish wildcat in him).  Magnus followed my gaze.

“He’s not supposed to be drinking that,” he said,
“it’s to stop the gas drying up the air.”

“I don’t think you’ll find that makes any difference,
actually,” commented Uncle Tristram, but Magnus ignored him, ominously.

My uncle had rubbed himself down with a small, greying
towel and was standing beside the cat in hopes of a bit of secondary heat.

“I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a
cigarette?”

Again, Magnus said nothing at all.  Eventually - in his own sweet time - he loped
over to a funereal coat, which was slung over the back of a chair, retrieved
some papers and tobacco and threw them at Uncle Tristram, who, looking rather
surprised, caught them, miraculously, with one hand.  It was as if war had been declared.

“How’s the mag. going, Magnus?”  I asked, delving into a slew of papers that
concealed a battered, Olivetti typewriter.

He scratched his glowing head, “Not so well, man.  I’m snowed under just now.  It’s going to press tomorrow and I’ve that
much to do . .”

“A paler shade of red would, surely, be pink?”  My uncle broke in, sticking a twist of a
cigarette between his lips and looking quizzical.

“It would.  But that’s not the title of the magazine,
man,” Magnus replied, extremely slowly, as if to a kindergarten class.

“ ‘Pinkos’!”  Uncle Tristram exclaimed, as if it had just
come to him that minute and he thought he was being frightfully helpful.  “Now that
would be a considerably better title, in my view.  That
would say what it did on the tin.”

I laughed, nervously.

“We mustn’t keep you, Magnus, not when you’re so
busy.  It’s terribly kind of you to lend
me these clothes; I’ll see they get back to you.”

“Send a servant to deliver them, will you?”

“Hey! That’s not fair!”

He bent his broad, black shoulders over his work.  From where I was standing, he looked like a
buffalo.

“You and your boyfriend’d best be off, Rosa.”

“I told you!
He’s my uncle!”  I felt peculiarly
hot.

“Pull the other one.
He’s hardly older than we are.”

“That’s just . .” I tried to explain, but he
interrupted me.

“I’m not interested in what you’ve been getting up to
this evening, but, if you don’t mind, can you go and get up to it somewhere
else and not in my office?”

“That is just so unfair, Magnus!”  Now we were face to face and I may have been
shouting.  “It’s not true, but even if it
was, it’s so square, it’s
laughable.  I thought you were cool, but
you’re not, you’re a complete wet rag . .”

I had so
much more to say, but my uncle had begun to laugh and cut me off, just when I
was getting into my stride.

“Ha, ha, ha!
Wet rag.  I like that. The only
wet rag around here is me,
actually.  Sopping wet.  Would you turn your damned fire up a bit,
man, for pity’s sake?  And Rosa, stop
shouting please.  We’ve heard more than
enough out of you.  He’s absolutely right
to regard this scenario with suspicion; your friend obviously has your best
interests at heart.  For all he knows,
I’ve torn your clothes off you and been chasing you through deepest, darkest
Fulham for hours on end.”

I blushed to the roots of my damp hair, overwhelmed
with embarrassment to hear my uncle say those words out loud.  However, nobody paid me the slightest
attention because Magnus had shuffled over to where Uncle Tristram was
standing, by the cat, and had curled his big hands into tight fists, like
dumbbells at the end of his stiff, black arms.

“And have you?”
Asked Magnus.

My uncle’s eyes gleamed, “What if I have?”

Magnus drew back his elbow and aimed a punch at my
uncle’s right cheekbone.  It was a smart,
staccato kind of a movement, straight from the boxing ring, that would have
taken most of us by surprise.  However, Uncle
Tristram had fought in the war and, no doubt, been trained in all kinds of
deviant ways by the Secret Service and he deflected the blow just as it was
about to connect with skin and bone; he swung Magnus’ arm right round his back,
rather as if he were jiving with him, and then tripped him up in one, fluid
movement, so that Magnus was face down on the floor before he knew what was
what, with the boss sitting comfortably on top of his pinioned arm.

The silence that followed was only broken by the cat,
who started to make the most appalling, rasping noise - like rusty cogs cranking
into gear - which must have been his way of purring.  Unnerved, my uncle and I both stared at the
animal, who launched into a lip-smacking washing routine that seemed rather
traitorous to his owner.  As if the
identical thought had occurred, Uncle Tristram jumped up and extended a hand to
Magnus.  Not surprisingly, Magnus
declined to take it, but got himself up, in a clumsy fashion, rubbing his
wrist.  His face had gone bright red.  I felt I should say something calming, but
couldn’t think what it might be.

However, “I like
your friend,” Uncle Tristram remarked, oddly, and then, “I’d be interested to
see more of your magazine, Magnus.”

Magnus snorted in disbelief, “Oh, yeah?”

“No, I really would.
It sounds like an intriguing publication.  Actually, my mother is involved in your sort
of field.  You may have heard of
her.  Leonora Thetford?  She’s always been to the left side of the
spectrum.”

Magnus’ mouth fell open.

“Wha . .?
Leonora Thetford the politician?”

Uncle Tristram nodded.

“Bloody hell,” Magnus whistled, as if he just couldn’t
believe that such a thing might be possible.
“Leonora Thetford’s my idol, man.
She’s my heroine.  She’s the
coolest politician on the entire planet.”

“Mmm,” Uncle Tristram agreed.  “She’s quite a lot of people’s cup of tea.  Speaking of which . .”

The room had warmed up and we were ranged around
Magnus’ paper-strewn table with chipped mugs of steaming tea in hand.  The earlier part of the day was beginning to
seem far-fetched in the extreme; fading back to that bizarre dream-world that
just couldn’t be squared with real life.
Yes, we were finally warm and cosy and all getting on like a house on
fire (a trip to the pub had even been mooted), when my uncle asked to use
Magnus’ telephone.  Magnus indicated the
ancient Bakelite number screwed to his wall.

“Have you got an extension?  I’ll use that one if you don’t mind.”

There was one in the other room and Uncle Tristram
went to make his call.  I was rather
surprised that he wanted to speak in secret because something in A Paler Shade of Red - or in Magnus
himself, or, perhaps, in the efficient use he’d made of his right fist - had
persuaded the boss that he could be trusted with the bare bones of our story.

Magnus, for his part, had lit up with excitement.  He was as incandescent as his hair.  In fact, the only times that I’d seen Magnus
that enthused, he’d either had a half bottle of Hennessey in his jacket pocket,
or Chet Baker[7]
had been on the gramophone, or both.

“You, a spy!”
He kept repeating, as if it were the oddest concept ever.  “You, a spy!”

“And why shouldn’t I be?”  I was getting slightly cross.

“You!  Quirky
Rosa Stone with her long hair and her bright dresses and her earrings!  I can’t believe it!”

This was a fairly accurate description of my usual
clothes, I suppose (which you haven’t seen, of course, since I’d been working
undercover as Miss Dodd), but still puzzling.
What did he mean, ‘quirky’?

“What do you mean, ‘quirky’?” I asked.  “What kind of word is that when it’s at
home?”

He burst out laughing, “I’m sorry, Rosa, but you
are.  Right quirky.  For a start, nobody says stuff like that any
more;  ‘when it’s at home’.  You make
me laugh, man.”

I could’ve begun a rant about the idiotic way he
called everybody ‘man’, regardless of gender, as if he’d grown up in San
Francisco and not Hull.  But I decided
against it.  The truth is that lots of
people have thought I was peculiar, for as long as I could remember, because
I’ve never fitted in.  It’s just a
fact.  I’m a Jewish girl who grew up in
the Kent countryside, for starters.  My
uncle’s an Honourable and my mother began life below stairs, in service.  Then, one could factor in the many schools I
had to go to because of the war.  And my
crazy, extrovert father, the noisiest baker ever.  And my abilities, of course.  So you see, I’ve just had to be me and I’d
thought that Magnus was one of the few who could understand that.  But I’d got it wrong, as always.

So I didn’t say anything at all.  Not that he noticed.

“You, a spy!”
He said, again.  Then he nodded
his head at the door, “I can believe he’s
a spy, he’s got it written all over
him, once you know.  I wouldn’t trust him an inch, man.”

“Indeed?”  Uncle
Tristram re-appeared.  “How very
interesting.”

I let Magnus stew; I felt he deserved it.

“My wife’s meeting us at the pub.  She’s bringing the car.  The Quiet Dog, did you say it was?”  He had borrowed Magnus’ undertaker’s coat and
was shrugging it on.  Somehow, he made
even that disreputable garment look rather elegant.  “She may be a while, but that shouldn’t
matter, should it?  I could do with a
beer.”

I caught up with the boss while Magnus was locking his
front door.  He was striding up Lettice
Street towards the subdued glow of lights leaking through the frosted-glass
windows of a mean-looking pub.  It looked
like the front parlour of somebody’s house (somebody I didn’t particularly want
to visit).

“I thought you were telephoning HQ, Uncle?”

“Mmm . . what?”
He was miles away.  “Oh yes, I did
that.”

“What did they say?
Do we have new orders?”

“We?”  He stopped dead in his tracks.  “I
may have orders, Rosa, but you do
not.”

I couldn’t believe it; he was going to leave me out of
it.  I’d swum the Thames.  I’d handled radioactive glass (although, I
was not about to confess to that; in
fact, I was trying not to think about it at all).  I’d put my life in the service of my country.

“But . .”

Magnus overtook us and stormed through the door of the
public bar (Magnus would no more sit in the saloon than vote for Churchill or
Eden[8]),
and Uncle Tristram strode in after him, as if I simply didn’t exist.

I went to follow them in and . . hesitated on the
threshold.  I just hesitated for a
heartbeat.  I took a step backwards and I
closed the door with care, leaving the two men on the inside and me . . on the
outside.  Then I began to run.

4.
The Girl’s Done a Bunk

Damn the girl.  Damn and blast the girl to kingdom come.  You want to know what I thought?  Well, that was it.  I’d been a complete lunatic to have involved
her in the first place.  It wasn’t as if
she didn’t have form.  She’d reverted to
type and done a bunk.

“Rosa Stone, a spy!”
Her journalist friend commented.
“You must have been off your head, man.”

And now I’d also involved some new species of bohemian
from the North of England.

Initially, we thought she was visiting the
Ladies.  Well, I did; we didn’t discuss
it, obviously.  We ordered our pints and
carried them back to a table.  I’d bought
Rosa a small shandy.  Time passed while
we debated the Marshall Plan[9]
and, if I thought about my niece at all, it was to assume that she was doing
something with her queer mop of brown hair, or powdering her nose.

“They got us right where they wanted us,” Magnus was
becoming increasingly het up.  “They gave
us money, right enough, but it was all used to buy goods from the U.S. of
A.  And we’re supposed to be grateful to
them, man!  We paid for the war in Korea[10],
that’s what people don’t get!  And it’ll
go on and on, so that the world becomes more polarised; it’ll all be Us and
Them for evermore and us’ll stand for U.S. more than owt else.”

He was not without brains, that much was obvious, but
what was the alternative?  I’d bought a
pack of Player’s and offered him one.

“What about the death of Stalin[11],
Magnus?  Bring a tear to the eye, did
it?”

“Hey!”  He
raised his palms in an interesting gesture of fake supplication, “You’re at it,
too; if I’m not bowing at the feet of Uncle Sam, then I must be in the pay of
Uncle Joe, that’s how you lot think, isn’t it?”

Yes, I was rather enjoying the conversation, and the
ale, after what had been an unnecessarily wearing day.  Until I realised that my niece had gone and
done a bunk.

Of course it crossed my mind that they might have
abducted her.  But that was
unlikely.  It was possible - all things are possible in my trade - but, as I say, not
likely.  The man Magnus (who, like most
of his tribe, was a crass romantic at heart), came up with a crackpot theory,
whereby a Dickensian network of street urchins had been bribed to keep a lookout
and report our whereabouts to a criminal mastermind; Rosa having fallen into
their net upon the threshold of the Quiet Dog public house.  It was an amusing idea (for the Artful Dodger
substitute a spotty teen-ager who bought his clothes from Woolworths), but that
was all it was.  Besides . . I knew my
niece.

We made a desultory effort to look for her in the
local streets, but she’d have been miles away by then.  Magnus seemed prepared to spend the entire
night searching for her, if need be, and was distinctly unhappy when we turned
back to the Quiet Dog.  He wanted to
carry on charging about in the most ineffectual manner (as amateurs usually do),
but it made far more sense to wait
for my wife to arrive with the car and then conduct a comprehensive sweep of
the area.  Of course, the journalist was
pretty far gone on her - that much was plain to see (and, in retrospect, I
suppose that must have been the reason I’d let him in on the game).

Anyway, eventually I managed to drag him back to the
pub and we waited a bit.

“Why don’t you go home and put your paper to bed,
Magnus?”  I tried to get rid of him.  “If you give me your telephone number, I’ll
let you know how she is in the next few days.”

“How could you do
this?”  The ants were still in his
pants.  “Put her in danger like this,
man?  You’re supposed to be her bloody
uncle!”

He had a point, although he didn’t need to know it.  I was a lot more rattled than I was letting
on.  We were in a hole, one way or
another.  In fact, we were in an entire
rabbit warren’s worth of holes, several of which had been dug by my missing
niece: dropping Arko’s glass, taking us straight to the haunt of Arko’s young
mole.  But being rattled doesn’t do in my
business.  I tried another tack.

“What do you know of her other friends, Magnus?  Are there any others living round here that
you know of?”

He stopped maundering on for a minute and gave it some
thought.

“I don’t know.
I mean, she’s got friends, man, but I’m not sure where they live.  Rosa kind of dips in and out of her friend’s
lives.”

I could imagine; she sounded just like a spy.  How close were they, I wondered - my unusual
niece and this clumsy northerner?  How
well did he really know her?

“She’s always been something of an escape-artist,” I
let drop.  “Were you aware of that,
Magnus?”

He looked surprised and then, thoughtful.  I daresay his heart had known, even if his
brain hadn’t.

“You’ll remember the Cambridge fiasco, of course, but
that was only the latest in a long line of bunks.  She was particularly active during the war
years, apparently; never stopped running away from kindly people she was
evacuated to, or boarding-schools, or what have you.  She once stowed away on a ship and nearly
drowned when it got wrecked!  She’s an
interesting girl, in many ways.  I’ve
only known her for the last ten years - since I married her aunt, Kathleen -
but she’s been a source of considerable interest to me.”  I grinned, “A source of considerable anguish to her poor parents, of course,
but there you go . . aren’t we all?”

I couldn’t think why I was talking so much; unless it
was to conceal how rattled I actually was.
Thank God Kathleen arrived promptly, or who knew what sad and sorry
tales the beer - and the kickback one gets from a botched operation - might
have encouraged me to dredge up from my own childhood.

“Ah,” she’d tooted the horn, “that sounds like my
lift.”

I stood up and removed his coat.

“Please, take this back.  Many thanks.
Just give me your telephone number will you?  There’s no need to write it down, I’ve a head
for them.”

I could tell he was reluctant to abandon the chase and
- if he was any kind of journalist - he’d be even more reluctant when he cast eyes upon my rather well-known wife, so
I tried to make a clean exit.  Even so, I
thought I’d better give him my number, too, in the remote chance that Rosa made
contact with him first.

“You can reach me at FLAxman 4390.  Now get back to work.  A Paler
Shade of Red needs you, Magnus.”  I
stopped at the pub door.  “Do you have a
surname, by the way?”

“Arkonnen,” he said.
“With a k.  It’s Finnish, man.”

I’m not often surprised these days, but that did the trick.  HQ hadn’t mentioned any relations living in
London and I was prepared to swear that they would have done, had they known of
any.  I’d been handed a file a yard wide
on Arko Arkonnen’s background and nothing of the kind had cropped up.

More to the point, had Rosa known that her friend was
an Arkonnen?  The issue was
problematic.  I’d observed that Rosa
didn’t always know what she
knew.  I mean, I’m no psychologist, but
I’d often noticed that she seemed to have two sections to her brain and the
conscious section seemed to lag behind the other, hidden, part, so that, in a
queer way, the girl was capable of knowing everything and nothing at all.   This being the case, Rosa might well have connected Arkonnen with
Arkonnen and yet have known damn all about it.
That remarkable brain of hers simply contrived to deliver us straight
from the frying-pan into the fire.

As you will have guessed by now, my niece is a
savant.  They’d identified her at
Cambridge, despite her flying visit.  The
grapevine had twitched.  I hope I don’t
sound too self-justifying when I say that I sincerely believed that they might
run her, with, or without, me.  So,
wouldn’t it be better to use her in one of my operations - in a strictly
clerical position - where I could keep an eye out for her?  Well, that was my thinking at the time.  Incredibly, dropping her into Heaviside
hadn’t seemed like the act of pure lunacy it turned out to be.

My wife (a woman of instinct rather than
fact), instantly intuited that something was up.  She leant across to open the passenger door
of her white Austin Princess.

“Isn’t it a trifle cold for shirtsleeves?”  She commented.  Then, “Where’s Rosa, Tristram?  I thought Rosa was with you?”

“She’s done a bunk, darling.  I think we’d better have a good look for
her.”

Her wide-set, navy blue eyes registered alarm.  Had I overplayed it?

“She introduced me to a man friend of hers and, to cut
a long story short, they had words and she ran off into the night in a bit of
state.”

“Really?  That
doesn’t sound like Rosa.”

“Running away?
You can’t mean that, Kathleen!”

“No, not the running away; that sounds just like her.  I mean the state.”

“Young love, I suppose.  May have jogged something.  Touched a nerve.”

Dear God, I sounded such a fraud.  I never could talk about feelings.

Kathleen adjusted the silk scarf which had slipped a
fraction from her smooth, blond hair and the diamonds on her hand flashed (but
not as much as her eyes).  In the old days,
she would have come out with some fabulous expression involving tripe, or ham,
or hogwash.  She didn’t do that any more
and I rather missed it.  Instead, she
revved the engine and began to drive.

The sleet had ceased to fall and the pavements
glistened where it had become rain.  It
was as dark as it ever gets in town, which is to say, not that dark.  Kathleen drove as expertly as ever, gliding
that great bucket of a car at a serene speed, just slow enough to take a good
look around, but not too slow to hold up the traffic or excite attention.  Up and down the grids of terraces we went,
spreading outwards from Magnus Arkonnen’s flat like concentric circles from a
stone dropped in a pond.  Men came home
from work, children ventured out to play in the streets and we slid past them
all, looking for Rosa.  We drove down the
New Kings Road until it became the Kings Road, passed the theatre crowd in
Sloane Square and patrolled all the way around Harrods.  Then we doubled back by Eaton Square and made
for the Fulham Road, from the borders of South Ken to North End Road market and
looped back towards the Embankment: to the river and the power station and the
rubbish dump and the mundane streets where Heaviside Import/Export Limited
traded deadly glass.  It was all
singularly meaningless.

“Oh well,” Kathleen said, “she’s a grown girl, after
all.  I expect she’s got some money on
her.”

She glanced at me and then into her front mirror.

“And, anyway, she’s not too far from her flat in
Battersea, is she?  What’s the betting
she’s walked back there?  We’ll pop
round, shall we?”

I had a vision of her handbag bobbing up and down on
the Thames.  And, as for her flat . . I
bloody well hoped she hadn’t been so stupid as to return there against my
advice.

“She’s left the flat, apparently.  Didn’t like the neighbourhood.”

Kathleen glanced at me again.

“Posh girls, eh!”
She gave a caustic little laugh (my wife had not been a posh girl).

And then, quite out of the blue, she slammed on the
brakes and twisted right round in her seat to face me.

“What’s going on, Tristram?  Something’s wrong here and I don’t like
it.  Give me a straight answer for once
in your rotten life.”

I was pole-axed.
She hadn’t spoken to me like that for a long, long time.  Years of civilised conversation had fooled me
into complacency and I was slow to reply.

“Please don’t bother to think up another lie, it must
be so wearing,” she pulled a crumpled
pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and didn’t offer me one.  “Let me tell you something, Tristram Upshott.  I’m fed up with the bloody elephant in the
room.  Your damn job.  I actually used to
think it was other women that made you such a secretive, devious sod, but it
wasn’t, was it?  It was your job.
Whatever your job is (and I’ve
got a damn good idea of what it might be), it’s turned you into somebody I
barely know any more.”

I started to protest, except she took such a vicious
drag of her cigarette that I felt compelled to stop and wait to see whether the
smoke would ever emerge.

“But when you involve Rosa . .” there was unmistakeable menace in her voice, “ . . which
you have, haven’t you?  Well, then it’s a
different story altogether.  Because, if
you’ve involved our little Rosa in whatever it is that you do, Tristram, then I
will kill you.  Believe me when I say
that.  I will kill you.”

I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her until her
lips were swollen; kiss her as we used to kiss.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Kathleen added.  “There’s been a black Austin K8 van on our
tail for the last ten minutes.”

I squinted into the mirror.  It had hidden itself somewhere, but I’d no
reason to suppose she wasn’t right.  Had
Magnus Arkonnen betrayed us?  One thing
was certain, my wife would now have to be involved.  Well, she was already - it looked like the
game was up with Kathleen.

“Can you lose the van, darling?”  I asked.

She chucked her fag out of the window.

“Watch me,” she said.

I had to hand it to my wife; nobody could have moved
that car as she did, and I include myself in that.  She really was a superb driver.  What’s more, she was totally without
fear.  We must have gone from nought to
fifty in two seconds flat, and she wasn’t stopping there.  It was familiar territory for Kathleen, our
house being in Tite Street, directly off Chelsea Embankment, but I’d never seen
her drive quite like that before.  We
bombed down Cheyne Walk and she weaved in and out of the evening traffic,
seemingly oblivious to any cars coming in the opposite direction.  For quite a stretch, she simply drove on the
wrong side of the road and forced the other cars to do the weaving.  A cacophony of horns sounded in our wake,
almost blocking out the unmistakeable whine of police sirens.  She glanced in her mirror.

“Ambulances, probably,” she remarked, rather casually,
“off to the Brompton or the Marsden.”

I hardly thought so, but now was not the time to
contradict her.  I unrolled my window and
stuck my head out just as we flew past the Albert Bridge.  I couldn’t see any black vans behind us, but
there were several motorbikes that I wasn’t too happy about.  Even given the atrocious way many motorbike
riders careered through London, they were taking it to extremes.

“Bikes on our tail, darling.”

“Fine,” she murmured.

I waited with interest to see how she would
out-manoeuvre those bikes in her Austin; hardly the most stream-lined of
cars.  As we reached Millbank, she opted
for a slight detour around the back of the Tate Gallery; not the best course of
action, in my view, because narrow Pimlico streets opening out onto all the
congestion one finds around Victoria would favour a motorbike.  Soon enough, we were forced to slow down at
the corner of Herrick Street and Marsham Street and the three bikes made their
move.  All of the riders were leathered
and goggled, but only one was toting a gun.
He took aim and, for the second time that day, I shouted:

“Duck!”

But Kathleen, hunched like a pro over the
steering-wheel, didn’t appear to hear or, if she did, had made up her mind to
ignore me and proceeded to slam the gears into reverse and actually drive
closer to the gunman.  I had my head in
my lap and my hands over it by this time, but felt the car lurch backwards and,
instinctively, made a grab for the wheel; at which she performed a karate-like
chop at my hand, slicing me on the knuckles with one of her diamond rings.

“Christ, Kathleen!”

“Don’t you dare.”

She’d turned right round in her seat to eye the road
behind her, when a bullet sizzled an inch above her head and out through the
front windscreen, shattering the glass.
She hardly seemed to clock it.
Still she reversed, inexorably, until she was upon the gunman.  His goggled face leapt into the back window,
like a picture in a frame, and then it was gone.  If she hadn’t put paid to him altogether,
she’d certainly given him a few nasty bruises.
As for the other two, they’d driven onto the pavement, turned 360
degrees and were on their way back to the Tate.
Which was just as well, because I don’t know what odds I’d have given
them if they’d chosen to stick around.

We reversed round the corner and sailed back towards
the river and I didn’t breathe out until we were crossing Vauxhall Bridge and
had started to slow down.  I was rather
lost for words, actually.  My wife was
moaning quietly, I noticed, and her headscarf had fallen off.  Wisps of yellow hair stuck to her cheeks and
she looked a mite crazed.  She didn’t
appear to have noticed that she couldn’t see a thing out of her windscreen,
criss-crossed, as it was, with a thousand tiny fractures.

“Allow me,” I said and punched the glass out (my hand
was already bleeding from it’s encounter with her engagement ring and the
windscreen glass made minimal difference).

And then Kathleen gave a small whimper and took her
foot off the gas and her eye off the ball.
Because we rolled off the end of Vauxhall Bridge, gathering momentum,
and then straight up a ramp and through the open back doors of a large, black
van, shuddering to a standstill a second before we hit the cab.  Kathleen pitched forward onto the steering
wheel, the doors slammed shut and we were plunged into darkness.

5.  HQ

Kathleen was dead to the world.  She felt warm in my arms, yet I couldn’t
discern any breathing.  I put my lips to
hers, but there was no rush of air from her mouth, or nostrils.  I pushed her back on the seat - but not too
far to obstruct her windpipe - and felt for the pulse on her neck.  It beat, hard and strong.  I rolled her lovely hair around my fist and
kissed her there, on her neck, where that drum beat.  She stirred a fraction, but I let her lie in
her own darkness; soon enough she’d wake to this other obscurity.  (She might be frightened and I didn’t want to
see Kathleen frightened.)  So I held her
lightly and I waited for whatever would happen next.  Whatever that was, there was no use in
fretting about it.  As it turned out, I
hadn’t long to wait.

I estimated the van had driven for no more than ten
minutes before it stopped.  By that time
Kathleen was beginning to come to, shuddering in my arms and finally drawing a
decent breath.

“It’s alright, darling,” I whispered into her
ear.  “Nothing to worry about.”

After which, nothing much happened.  We waited and we waited and it felt like an
absolute age had limped past before the clang and clash of doors opening made
us jump in our seats.  The beam of a
powerful torch temporarily blinded us.

“Mr Upshott,” came a mild, not particularly
authoritative voice, “would you please reverse the car out of the van.”

The murmur of another voice came and went.

“I beg your pardon,” the first man continued, “Mrs
Upshott, I see you are at the wheel.
Would you please reverse the car out of the van, Mrs Upshott.”

I grinned, squeezing Kathleen’s hand.

“You’d better do as the old man says, darling.  It seems we’re back at HQ.  I’m sure you’re dying to meet the man who
signs my paycheques.”

“You mean . .?”
She was still rather dazed.

“Safe as houses,” I replied.

Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft was head of both
Services in 1955, an unsurpassed achievement for anybody, never mind a retiring
chap with a singular lack of charisma.
In fact, the lack of charisma was the only singular thing about
Hutchcraft, if an absence of something may be described that way.  There was little to be said about him at
all.  Even his staff would have had
trouble describing his clothes, for example, or the make of car that he drove,
or tobacco he smoked.  He seemed to carry
a nebulous cloud of grey with him that shrouded everything he touched.  Gossip had it (and, however uncharismatic a
person, there is always gossip in every organisation – most especially one with
as many secretaries and switchboard operators and tea ladies as HQ), that he
was in his late sixties, although even that was questionable.  And that he possessed a wife out in the
suburban badlands of North West London.
Possibly.  He definitely possessed
a border terrier, because he’d once brought it into the office and the
secretaries had fed it on digestive biscuits . . which was about as far as the
powder-room gossip could stretch, in terms of Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft.   Or ‘Hutch’, as his staff called him, to a
man.

“Good evening, Hutch,” I said, climbing out of the
Austin and stretching my legs upon the red, herring-bone patterned bricks of
HQ’s courtyard. “Have you met my wife?”

“Evening, Upshott.
I don’t believe I have.”

A situation he was obviously determined to remedy,
having got himself round to her side of the car and tugged the door open for
her in double-quick time.  I stared at
him in frank surprise.  For the first
time in our seven-year acquaintance, the grey cloud above his head had shifted
a bit.  Kathleen often had a powerful
effect on men, but it would never have occurred to me that old Hutch might be
susceptible.

My wife was still a beauty at 38 - possibly even more
beautiful than when I’d first met her - but she also had what the popular press
called ‘a famous face’.  She’d been a
singer during the war of the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ variety, and then been cast
in a number of British films.  She spent
a lot of time in places like Pinewood and Bray[12].  To my mind, Kathleen wasn’t looking her best
at that precise moment, having turned rather grey herself, but that didn’t
appear to be putting Hutch off.

“Mrs Upshott!”
He exclaimed, pawing at her hand.
“How delightful!”

He was acting as if she’d decided to visit her husband’s
place of work of her own accord, rather than been abducted from Vauxhall
Bridge.

“Are you a fan, Hutch?”  I enquired, but he chose to ignore me.

Kathleen clutched her free hand against the car for
support.  She looked like she might be
about to heave.

“I’m sorry,” she thrust Hutch from her and covered her
mouth with her hands, “may I use your loo?”

“Ah,” Hutch replied, at a loss.  “My secretary’s gone home and . . any ideas
where the girls’ powder-room might be?”

He glanced, helplessly, at myself and the other man
present, the shadow who’d been at the wheel of the black van.

“Now’s not the time for protocol, Hutch; she can use
the downstairs Gents, surely.”

I directed Kathleen to the relevant quarters and she
stumbled over the herring-bone bricks to get there in time.  Hutch drifted into the building after her,
vaguely indicating that I should follow.

All was quiet inside, save for a distinct hum - like a
trapped swarm of bees, I’d often thought - that emanated from the basement.

“I don’t like involving civilians, Upshott.  You should know that,” Hutch murmured,
peeling back the brass gate of his personal lift.

I refrained from commenting upon how delighted he’d
seemed to have met that particular civilian.
It was time to get down to business.
Hutch, himself, might be a tad underwhelming, but the accoutrements of
his power were not: the tiny box of a
lift with the gold fleur-de-lys on ceiling, walls and floor, as if one were
wrapped up in a box of Christmas marrons glacés, or smart cigars.  The spacious office at the very top of the
unremarkable building.  Its panoramic
views of the river, its Persian rug upon the parquet, its gleaming, mahogany
furniture.  The oil painting of our young
Queen.  Hutch’s kingdom was a world away
from the scuffed linoleum and the nicotine-yellow net curtains, the regulation
issue typewriters, overflowing in-trays and general squalor of the floors
beneath.  It was little wonder that he
didn’t know where the girls’ powder-room was.

Hutch shut the door of his office securely behind us
and went and sat down behind his desk.

“What have you done with the Stone girl,
Upshott?”  He asked.

I glanced at the river, snaking past like a fat, black
mambo.

“She’s out there somewhere, sir.  It’s my belief that she’s with a friend.  As yet, I can’t say which one, but I’m pretty
sure that her disappearance is unconnected to
Operation Crystal Clear.”

“Are you?”  He
furrowed his brow, a tad peeved.  “It’s
messy, Upshott; all of this.  I’d say
you’ve been flailing about like a pig in mud today.  Am I right?”
All expressed in the mildest of tones, so that one almost forgot to
listen to him.  That was the ‘Hutch
effect’ and one couldn’t say whether it was a drawback in a mandarin of his
status, or bloody clever.

I encountered her Majesty’s serene, royal-blue gaze
and pulled myself together.

“I’d have to agree, sir.  Our cover’s been blown wide open.”

“Mmm, and in record time.  A Geiger counter would have confirmed the
glass was innocent of uranium, of course.
But . . two sessions of target
practice?  In the space of, what, three
hours?  That pre-supposes resources and
an impressive communications network.  I
wouldn’t rule it out, you know.”

“Sorry, sir?
Rule what out?”

“That they’ve bagged the Stone girl.”

I breathed, slow and hard, into the uneasy silence
that followed.

“But . .”  I did
my best to catch his eye,  “. . we’ll be
throwing everything we’ve got at trying to find her, won’t we, sir”

“Mmm,” he murmured, seemingly transfixed by the space
above my head; sounding as weak as water.

“Right,” he
pushed his chair back and stood up, patently relieved that our meeting was at
an end.  “Try not to balls anything else
up, will you?”

He strolled over to the door and held it open for me
to be on my way.

“I say . .” his
bland features had a shot at animation, “ . . nice to meet your wife after all
these years, Upshott.  I thought she was
far and away the best thing in ‘The Furies from Venus’.”

There was another uneasy silence while he contemplated
that little masterpiece and I waited to be dismissed.

“Load of old codswallop, of course,” he decided (one
of the very few times we were in accord).
“Off you go then, man.  See if you
can do some semblance of a decent job.”

“Oh . . incidentally . .” I’d almost got away, when he
added, “ . . she killed that gunman.  We
scraped him up, of course.  Disposed of
the bits.  But . . well . . just so’s you
know, Upshott old boy.”  His eyes held
mine for an infinitesimal fraction of time and then he shut the door in my face.

I took the stairs back to the ground floor - it wasn’t
done to travel in Hutch’s lift Hutch-less - and tried to shuffle my thoughts
into a decent hand.  I’d put two women in
jeopardy and I’d miscalculated the extent of Arko’s intelligence network.  It hadn’t been my best day’s work.  I must find Rosa and I must get Kathleen home
safely.  If at all possible, before the
night was done.  Plus, in the days to
come, I might need to find a safe house for both of them (assuming that Rosa
could be persuaded to stay in it).  Hutch
had made it as plain as Hutch ever did, that HQ weren’t going to do any of this
for me.  I also badly needed to write up
my report and alert my handler to Magnus Arkonnen, before proceeding any
further with Operation Crystal Clear.
Yet I passed the Operatives’ Floor without a second’s hesitation.  Kathleen came first.

My shoes tapped down the stone stairs, unusually
audible in the after-hours’ quiet that swaddled the building.   However, not everyone had gone home to
bed.  I’d reached the ground floor and
was just heading towards the garages in search of my wife, when Jay Tamang
emerged from the basement and caught me.
Tamang was the hardest working person at HQ, an affable, dark-skinned
Chinese in his early twenties with an inexplicably vast store of technical
know-how the rest of us would have required several lifetimes to squirrel
away.  He reminded me faintly of my
niece, except that Tamang applied himself to the job in hand, rather than
running away from it.  When it came to
tenacity, Jay Tamang was a limpet.

“Mr Upshott,” he beckoned me over to the top of the
basement stairs.  “Do you have  a moment?”

“Not really, Tamang.”

“I think you will find this of interest, Mr Upshott.”

“I’m sure I will, but it’ll have to wait.”

“You will be sorry to miss it.”

“Look,” I turned to him, “my wife’s here somewhere
waiting for me and I’ve put her through enough for one night.  I’ll be in touch in the next couple of days,
that do you?”

“Come, Mr Upshott.
I won’t keep you any longer than necessary.  The longer that we talk in the corridor, the
longer Mrs Upshott will have to wait.”

I sighed and traipsed after him, down the basement
stairs and into the innards of the beast that was HQ.  Here were the technical bods’ desks and the
labs, where the overhead fluorescent strips might have been switched off for
the night, but lights flashed on and off wherever one looked, and monitors
beeped and chirruped at one another.  An
arcane, world-wide, conversation was in mid-sentence; a gathering and
dissemination of vital information that must never be allowed to cease.  It meant
precisely nothing to a layman like myself, of course, but it was the
necessary conversation of nations that flowed back and forth beneath the
specious babble of newspapers and radio and television.  And, when a nation like the Soviet Union
refused to talk . . well . . we listened, anyway.

“I hear the Stone girl broke my glass,” Tamang
commented, leading the way around other staff desks to his den.

“It was an accident but, yes, it’s rather blown our
cover for the time being.”

“She didn’t touch any of theirs’, I hope.”

“She had orders not to, Tamang.”

He nodded.

“It is always best to know what one is dealing with,
so I’ve been working on a little device for you, Mr Upshott.  It’s here somewhere . .”

Professor Monkington (‘The Monk’ to all and sundry)
was the head scientific honcho at HQ, but it hadn’t taken the great man long to
recognise Tamang’s extraordinary ability and he’d given the boy a corner of
floor space all to himself in which to play.
There, Tamang had accumulated enough technical hardware to fill a large
warehouse and one took one’s life in one’s hands venturing anywhere near it, it
was piled so high with God only knew what.
A heavy spanner had once toppled off a six foot high stack of rolled
wire and very nearly brained another boffin; if forced to approach Tamang’s
lair, most people tiptoed with extreme care and some even removed their
shoes.  I stood well back while he rooted
around.

“It’s not a watch, is it?  There are only so many watches one can
wear.  Or a cigarette lighter; so easy to
lose and then one feels so bloody guilty.”

He laughed in the affable way he had:

“I wasn’t able to miniaturise to quite that extent.  Ah, here it is.  Please take it, Mr Upshott.”

Tamang handed me a brown fedora hat with a narrow
brim.  I turned it over in my hands and
looked inside.  It was an up-market
model, with white silk lining and leather stitched around the underside of the
band.  I’d have said it was a fraction
heavier than the norm but, apart from that, appeared to be a perfectly ordinary
gentleman’s hat for a perfectly ordinary gentleman.

“I’d have preferred charcoal grey, personally.”

“Apologies.  Any
ideas?”

“At a wild guess, I’d suggest there was something in
the band.  Something flexible, like a
plastic ruler.  Will I be undercover
measuring, Tamang?”

“You are not as wide of the mark as you might think,
Mr Upshott!”  The boy looked
delighted.  “It is, indeed, in the
hatband, but it’s no ordinary ruler.  See
. . .”  He slipped the long, rectangular
object out of one end of the leather band.

I put my ear to it; now that it was released, I could
detect an audible ticking coming from the thing.

“Tell me it’s not a bomb, Tamang.  I’d really rather not have one of those wound
around my brain.”

“It is an instrument for detecting the emission of
nuclear radiation!”  He exclaimed.

“A Geiger counter, you mean?”

“Not exactly.
It counts nuclear particles, but, technically, it’s more of an ion
chamber because it can measure the highest ranges of beta and gamma radiation,
which a Geiger is unable to do.  If such
levels are present when you are wearing the hat, you will be able to sense a
sharp increase in those clicks against your forehead; there will be no need to
remove the hat or to extrude the device.
What’s more, the clicking will be completely silent to those around
you.”

“Why, thank you, Tamang.”

I could see that the hat might prove extremely handy and
I was just so relieved he hadn’t given me another cigarette lighter.

“It was nothing,” he bowed his head, all modesty.  “Just, please
don’t get it wet.  I’ve taken a lot of
trouble to set it correctly, you see.
Too low and no pulsing, too high and the discharges cascade.  Moisture will completely de-stabilize it and
undo all of my hard work.”

“I promise.
Scout’s honour.”  (Not that my
time with the scout’s had been one of my finest hours.)  “No more jumping in the Thames for me.”

“You have been jumping in the Thames?”

Jay Tamang adored to hear about the gung-ho aspects of
the job, buried, as he was, in the fathomless depths of HQ.

“Mmm, but that’s another story.  Christ, is that the time?”

I’d glanced at my watch and discovered that it was
eleven-thirty at night.  If I was going
to redeem myself, I must get a move on.

6.  Down the Slide

I found Kathleen in the garages, as I’d
thought I might.  They had some
interesting vehicles there (that I wasn’t sure she should be looking at), but
she’d managed to get the night-shift mechanic wound around her little finger,
and was being given a full-blown tour.
He’d even rustled her up a cup of tea.

“Tristram!  Take
a look at this Aston Martin, darling.
How come you’ve never been given one of these?”

It was a lovely, pale blue number and I had an idea
who it belonged to[13].

“I’d hate to think what one would have to do to earn
that, Kathleen.”

She looked like whatever it was would be well worth
it, peering in to look at the dials and the upholstery, sighing over the car as
if it were a child.

“It’s never out of the workshop, this one,” remarked
the mechanic.  “Who knows what ‘e finds
to do with it.”

“Come on Kathleen, I think I’d better get you
home.”  I turned to address the man, “Has
my wife’s car been given the thumbs up, or have you something else we could
drive?”

“Back window’s a write-off and some damage to the
front fender.  What’s more, none of the
papers’ been signed.  This should do
you.  Over here.  Not so much to look at, but she’s a great
little mover.”

The great little mover in question was a two-tone
Hillman Minx in shades of shrew.

Kathleen sighed.
“That’s a bit of a come-down.  I
don’t think you can have been working hard enough, Tristram.  Still . . I hear they corner well.”

“Oh no you don’t!
I’m driving us home and I don’t want any arguments, so let’s get
cracking.”

I took possession of the keys and signed the car off,
which - like a whole raft of new procedures at HQ - seemed to take an
interminable amount of time.

It was while I was tossing Tamang’s hat onto the back
seat that the idea first occurred to me.

“How’s the slide, these days?”  I asked the mechanic.

Let me elaborate.
The slide is a tunnel that lies fifty feet beneath HQ which has, on the
odd occasion, been used as a secret exit.
I believe it’s part of the network of underground tunnels and shelters
that were used during the war: parts of it having been built at that time of
maximum civilian danger, on top of other parts which were already in existence,
either from when they built the Tube, or from when Bazelgette[14]
built the sewers back in the mid-nineteenth century.  The slide will get an operative to Borough
High Street, with an exit just before London Bridge - should he wish to leave
there - or it will carry on, burrowing lower, until it reaches the deep-shelter
beneath Chancery Lane tube station, which is 130 feet down.  That’s one of the second-wave of
deep-shelters originally built for Londoners after the Blitz, you remember . .
those shelters nobody wanted to use because they were just too far down and
people didn’t fancy being buried alive.
It’s my understanding that Chancery Lane became a bolt-hole for a
top-secret branch of HQ[15],
instead, which is why the slide lands up there.
However, on this occasion I fancied that Borough High Street would do
the job.

“That’s a bit irregular, Mr Upshott,” the mechanic scratched
his head.  “I don’t know that I can help
you there . .”

“I know, I know
. .” I sighed, “I’d have to get permission and sign some more bits of paper and
so on and so on.  The Services are
dwindling to desk jobs for the shifting of ever more bits of paper.”

It was damn frustrating, especially as I knew that the
only executive left in the building was Hutch and Hutch would never agree to a
night ride down the slide.  Not unless
World War Three had been declared.

“What is the
slide?” Asked Kathleen.  “It sounds like
fun.”

The idea was growing on me.  We had to get out of HQ without a tail and
what better way?  Getting Kathleen back
to our house in Chelsea in one piece was the number one priority.  I was sure that Rosa had never mentioned my
full name to Magnus Arkonnen and that he hadn’t seen Kathleen’s famous face; it
was unlikely that Arko’s gang knew who I was, or where I lived.  Not yet, anyhow.  Tomorrow I would find a safe house for her,
but she could sleep in her own bed that night.
I was more and more determined to use the slide.  If I could only find somebody with the
know-how to get us through the door and into the tunnel, Hutch need never find
out.  What was required was a bod with a
technical head on their shoulders.

The small figure of Tamang sat all alone in his gloomy
citadel, guarded by his towers of bric-a-brac.
He was at his desk with a salt-beef sandwich in front of him - gherkins,
mustard, the whole shebang.

“All alone, Tamang?
The Monk left you in charge, has he?”

“Mr Upshott!
What brings you back so soon?”

“I need your help.”
I played my trump card.  “We need your help.”  I stepped aside to reveal my wife.

He stood up, slowly, brushing crumbs from his mouth
and lap.

“Good evening,” said Kathleen.  “I love your office.  What on earth do you get up to down here?”

Tamang appeared mesmerized.  His black eyes widened and he opened his
mouth to reply.  I cut him short; it was
unwise to ask Tamang anything at all about what he’d been up to down there
because he was liable to tell you.

“Tamang is one of the masterminds behind all the
technical gubbins, Kathleen.  Sorry, let
me introduce you two.  Jay Tamang, this
is my wife Kathleen.  Kathy Smith to her
fans, of course.  Now, as I said, we need
your help.”

“Apparently we have to go down a slide,” Kathleen
added.

He was taken aback.

“The slide?”

“Yes,” I replied.
“There are eyes out and about and we need to avoid them.  The slide seems the obvious solution.  We just want to get it operational and then
we can slip out and nobody will be any the wiser.”

Tamang smiled, “You mean, you haven’t got permission
from upstairs, Mr Upshott?”

“Not as such, no.”

“The Stone girl smashes my glass and now this .
.”

“Rosa smashed some glass?”  Kathleen asked.  “Can’t you just glue it back together again?”

“Never mind that,” I interjected, keen to change the
subject, “there’s been one hell of a blowback and we’ve already had tails
behind us with shooters several times tonight . .”

“Several
times?  Not when Rosa was with you?  Tristram?”
Kathleen broke in.

“ . . and it’s vital we go to ground safely.  If you could just get it operational, Tamang,
I’ll take any flak that comes our way, tomorrow.  What do you say?”

Tamang looked dubious, then shook his head,
vigorously.  It wasn’t encouraging.  Frankly, he was my last hope; if the boy
couldn’t help then I didn’t see how I was going to get the idea off the
ground.  That is . . until my wife piped
up.

“Oh, come on Mr Tamang,” she said, “we can’t hang
about here all night.  Whatever this
slide is, why don’t you come down it, too?  You’d be doing me a favour.  I tell you, the way I’m feeling at the
moment, if I’m left alone with my husband, I’m liable to commit murder.”

God knows how, but Kathleen had instinctively found a
way to get through to him.  I supposed it
was working in a job where all the excitement happened to other people that did
it.  (I mean, if you were left in a dark corner to re-wire sprockets, or whatever it
was he did, and - even when you’d re-wired your sprockets and invented some
ingenious bit of kit - you knew that you’d never actually get to see any of it
in action, well, wouldn’t you jump at
the chance to speed along the slide at midnight with a glamorous blonde in
tow?)

Young Jay Tamang’s dark face lit up:

“I shouldn’t be doing this, Mr Upshott.  I’m sure Professor Monkington would not be pleased, but . . give me a minute
and I’ll be right with you.”

He dived into a shrouded area of his den and began to
toss things about.

“Well done, Kathleen,” I thought I’d give her her due.

However, now that we were alone, she appeared to be
hyperventilating.

“Rosa got shot at?
And now Rosa’s disappeared?”  She
hissed at me, like a goose.  “I cannot believe how you could’ve been such an
arrogant sod as to’ve involved her in this, Tristram!”

I did my best to ignore her.  There was plenty of time for all that
later.  We had to get cracking.

“Hurry up,” I urged Tamang.  “What’s taking so long in there?  Can’t you just find the switches and levers
for us?”

Tamang reappeared bearing a small, rectangular
object.  He was beaming from ear to ear,
so I was surprised by his reply.

“I’m sorry, I cannot do that for you.  I have no idea where the switches and levers
are.”

Well, that seemed to be that.  (However, the fact that he was pulling on his
duffle coat and stuffing the remains of his supper into a pocket suggested it
might not be that.)

“But I do
have this little device, Mr Upshott and I would be most interested to have the
chance to test it out.  That is, if you
and Mrs Upshott have no objections?”

He didn’t wait for a reply, but dashed towards the
basement stairs.

“Come!”  He
grinned at us.  “I’m presuming we have a
car?”

Even the sight of the shrew-coloured Hillman
Minx didn’t dampen Tamang’s enthusiasm.

“I hope you don’t mind sitting in the back, Mrs
Upshott?”

He held the door open for Kathleen, before he jumped in
next to me and began to fiddle about with his little box of tricks.  After which, he gave us a short description
of what the box did (well, as short as Tamang could ever make it, which wasn’t terribly short at all), before rolling
down his window and leaning forward in his seat, little box to the fore.  He looked like a small boy on Christmas
morning.  I switched the engine on and
began to glide towards the rear garage wall, to where I was reasonably sure the
entrance to the slide was hidden; a ventilation duct the only clue as to its
whereabouts.  We drove past the Aston
Martin and then past a jacked-up Land Rover and then straight past the exit to
the anonymous Waterloo backstreet where HQ was located.

“Oy!”  The
mechanic had seen us and spurted out of his cubby hole.  “Where d’you think you’re going?”

“Christ, I hope that thing works, Tamang,” I said,
between gritted teeth, “because we’re heading right into the bloody wall.”

And we were; we drove straight at the wall, like a
drill into mortar.  Kathleen stifled a scream,
ineffectively.  Then, just when it seemed
like we were about to get our heads smashed in, Tamang pointed his box and
pressed his thumb down, hard and . . .
‘Open Sesame’!    The wall swung
open, proving to be a steel door behind a single layer of bricks, and we shot
through into a dim, narrow tunnel.
Tamang turned around to aim his box through the rear window and the door
promptly swung shut again.  I screeched
the car to a standstill.  For a moment we
sat in complete and utter darkness, before I switched on the interior
light.  Somewhere, water dripped on
stone.

“How about that!” Tamang crowed.  “It works!”
He turned to Kathleen in the back.
“My distance controlling device works, Mrs Upshott!”

Kathleen’s grey look had returned, but she mustered a
smile for him.

“Fabulous.”

“It works on a similar principle to the controls they
use to open garage doors in America, you see.
They are also developing such devices for use on television sets, for
those people who are so unbelievably lazy as to wish to change channels without
getting up from their chairs.  Can you
believe that?”  He raised his eyebrows.  “But I’ve been applying the technology to
lights and, indeed, all electrical circuits.
The difficult part is making it universally applicable and that was
where I was less than one hundred per cent certain of the response . .”

I let him burble on for a bit and then I switched on
the headlights.

We gazed down the slide and I pointed the Hillman’s
nose down.  There was nowhere to go but down.  It was more of a bricked pipe than anything
else, a perfect circle of bricks with a mere foot of air between the car and
the wall at all points.  If we’d been in
Kathleen’s Austin Princess we’d never have squeezed through - we’d have jammed
like a cork in a bottle.  It was clear
that we were inside one of Joseph Bazelgette’s Victorian sewer pipes.  It was slick with running moisture - not
sewage, I hasten to add - and the walls were striped green with moss and algae.  I wondered whether melting ice from the
February freeze had drained down through the slide and been trapped with
nowhere else to go, for a small stream ran along the pipe, glinting in the headlights.  It was a cold, disorientating place to
be.

Kathleen tapped my shoulder.

“Let’s make a move, shall we Tristram?  I’d rather not sit here any longer than I
have to.”

“Absolutely, darling.”
I took a deep breath.  “Are we all
set?”

Tamang nodded, vigorously, beside me and I caught my
wife narrowing her eyes in the mirror.

“Then let’s go!”
I slammed my foot to the floor.

The Hillman bombed down the slide, surfing through
water and gaining momentum as we descended.

“Tristram!”
Kathleen screamed.  “Slow down,
Tristram!”

But it had been one hell of a day and and I needed to
let off steam.  And what a way to do
it!  How often can a man drive across
London unimpeded by other cars and traffic lights and the endless petty
restrictions of life in town?  It felt
absolutely fantastic.  Top hole.  The tunnel magnified the noise of the car
engine into a magnificent roar and I felt as if I were  racing Formula III at Brands Hatch.  I glanced sideways at Tamang, to see how he
was taking it.  He still had his window
wound down and his black hair was plastered to his skull, but the thrill of the
ride was plain to see in his wide grin.
I felt rather glad to be giving him his money’s worth.

However, all good things must come to an end and the
sight of a couple of concrete bulkheads in the distance, rearing up to either
side of the tunnel wall, forced me to brake.
The tunnel seemed to be widening and changing until it wasn’t a tunnel
at all, but a colossal cave with concrete slabs laid on the floor and a ridged
and vaulted ceiling.

“What’s this, I wonder?”  The acoustics had altered noticeably at that
depth and my voice boomed out.

“It’s the Southwark shelter, you madman,” Kathleen
squawked.

“Is it really?
Have we come too far, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Mr Upshott,” Tamang said.  “ I didn’t see any exits before this, but you
were going so fast . .”

“I will kill
you, Tristram.   Just you see if I
don’t,” Kathleen was gibbering in the back.
“Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?
I mean, take a look at that,
will you?”

She swiped at the back of my neck, drawing my
attention to a poster on the wall.

Important
Notice:  Speed not to exceed 5 miles per
hour.

“Good grief, Kathleen, that was during the war, when
the hordes were liable to come surging down the stairs to take shelter at any
given moment.  They don’t mean now.”

“No, they don’t,” she agreed, “because we’re not
supposed to be down here at all now,
are we?”

“Technically, no.
But would you look at all this?
It’s really rather fascinating.”

And it was.  I’d
never been down a shelter of any kind, having spent much of my childhood in the
countryside and then fought abroad in the last couple of years of the war.  I switched off the ignition and got out.

Everything had been left as it was, as if they’d
simply walked away on the last day of hostilities and never come back.  Ten years of damp and silence, layer upon
layer of it drifting over the concrete toilet cubicles, the wooden seating and
the shelves for bunks.  There were
numerous signs and posters, too, plastered all over the walls that had once
been white-washed, but were now grey and streaked with green: exhortations not
to smoke, directions to latrines, refreshment menus.  Everything was still down here, except
people.  Kathleen came up behind me,
shivering, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her coat.

“Why do you want to look at this, Tristram?  It’s horrible.  I hated these places.”  Kathleen was a Londoner.

“D’you think they used this one much?”

“They’d have used it during the Blitz.  Probably not so much after that; too far
down.  Do you know  . . the Government actually thought that
people might turn into cave-dwellers and never want to leave these deep places,
that they might turn tribal and aggressive to outsiders who dared to venture
into their little patch.  Utterly barmy!”  She stepped, fastidious in her high heels,
around a green pool that had collected on the concrete floor.  “God, I hated the war.  So many people seem to hang on to it; our
finest hour and all that.  But I hated
it.”

“Mmm.  I didn’t
exactly have a ball, myself . . .”  Just
then, I caught sight of Tamang eyeing up some old crates which had been stacked
up against one wall.  “Young Jay would
have been a child, of course.  I say,
what’s he up to over there?”

Tamang looked up and beckoned me over, “Mr
Upshott.  There is something strange
here.  Please look at these crates.”

I did as requested.
Five rather bashed-about wooden boxes that had once held tea didn’t
strike me as particularly strange.  I
bent down to get a closer look.  Somebody
had scrawled the word ‘CULLET’ with an HB pencil on the top of one of them.  All the crates were stamped on their sides
with the name of a well-known make of tea, one that was readily available in
every grocer’s in the land.

“I don’t think that this brand was available before,
or during, the war - not under this particular name.  And this design was definitely created
several years later.”

He certainly did remind me of Rosa at times.

“You mean that somebody is using this place for
storage?  It wouldn’t surprise me,
there’s no shortage of space, after all and, actually . .” I noticed a spiral
staircase that began a couple of yards from where we were standing, “ . .
actually, it’s probably pretty easy to access from street level.  If you know where to look and you don’t mind
a few stairs.”

Tamang wasn’t paying attention, having got down on his
knees to wrench off the loose bit of ply that sealed the box marked ‘CULLET’
shut, and plunged his hands inside.  He
stiffened.

“What have you got there?”  I asked.

Rather abruptly, he stood up and took several, long,
paces back from the crate that had so fascinated him the second before.

“Mr Upshott, may I ask, do you have your hat with
you?”  He sounded a touch jittery.  “And, if s . . so, would you be so good as to
put it on your head?”

7.  Radiation

I shooed Kathleen back to the car and grabbed
the hat.   The thing practically jumped
out of my hands.  I crammed it onto my
head and it immediately began to play the bongo drums on my brain.  The place was alive with radiation.

“Christ almighty, Tamang.  Get yourself away from that crate and over
here, instantly!”

“No.  I cannot,
Mr Upshott.  I touched it, you s . .
see,” he backed off.

“Touched what, man?
What the hell’s in there?”

“The glass.  The
crate is full of broken uranium glass.  I
must not make it worse for you.  Please
go.”

He’d raced to the bottom of the spiral stairs and was
all set to bolt.

“What?  Don’t be
crazy, Tamang.  We’re all in this
together.”

But he’d already disappeared.  I took the stairs two at a time, nearly slipped
on the slimy surface, then caught up with him around the second curve, but he
was small and nimble and took off like a shot.
Round and round we went.

“Come back, you fool!”
I shouted up.

“No!”  He
shouted down.  “Please.  Extreme danger.  Please leave.”

“Come back!  I
can’t let you go running around the streets of London.  Don’t you see that?”

A pause, while my words hit home.

“But . . Mrs Upshott?”
He was quieter now.  Quiet and
rather plaintive.

“Don’t be a bloody hero, Tamang,” I reached him and
grabbed the hood of his duffle coat.
“Don’t ever be a bloody
hero.  We’ve all caught a dose; put a
match to us and we could probably light up subterranean London all by
ourselves.  Come back to the car and
we’ll have a think about how to get out of this mess.”

He was still reluctant, but I didn’t let go of his
coat until I’d bundled him into the passenger seat.  I ran round to the driver’s door, yanked it
open and jumped in.  Then I started the
engine and swung the car back round to face the tunnel, driving slowly and carefully
now.  I didn’t know where I was going,
only that I must get us as far as possible from the source of radiation.

“What’s going on now?”  Kathleen asked.

I tried to give her the bare facts about what we’d
found, but - being somewhat distracted by events - one thing led to another
and, before I knew it, I’d blurted out the entire uranium in glass scenario and
she’d put two and two together and come up with her beloved niece.

“Uranium in glass?!”
She was puce in the face.  “You
sent Rosa to work in an office full of radiation?!  Y . . you . .”

She was so incensed, she couldn’t come up with a
rotten enough word.  (Not that she needed
to; I knew very well what I was.  But,
hadn’t I’d protected the girl as best I could?
Hadn’t I’d given her strict orders not to touch anything?)  I tried to convey all of that to Kathleen,
but she wasn’t having any.

“Do you honestly
think that Rosa would be capable of curbing her curiosity in a situation like
that?  If you do, then you’re not just a madman,
but a complete fool.  Rosa absolutely
adores you, Tristram; you must know that, surely?  She’s got a crush on you a mile wide.  She’d have been thrilled to bits to be
working with you, but she’s the very last
person to put in a situation like that.
‘Strict orders not to touch anything’, my foot!  Rosa must have been pulling out armfuls of
glass day after day after day.  I swear .
. I’m speechless!”

I stopped the car.
Silence descended; we were all speechless.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not
good with feelings, but, for a moment there, it really did feel . . not so
good.

When Jay Tamang piped up.  “I may have panicked,” he said.  “Uranium is only mildly radioactive.”

“What?
Really?  Is that true?”  I was a man clutching at straws.

“Yes.  I’ve been
working on the subject with the backing of Professor Monkington,  but you did not hear me say that.  You
see, it is when it decays that it becomes truly dangerous.  It mutates into other substances, such as
radium, for example.  We are beginning to
find links between radium and the growth of various cancers.”

“You mean, Rosa could be unaffected?”  Kathleen leapt in.

“No, Mrs Upshott.
I didn’t say that.  The
conjunction of glass with toxic radiation is a mystery to us at the lab, I must
admit.  You see, we have little
experience of the flux - the levels of radiation - when used in these
quantities in an inert product such as glass.
When intact, I’d suggest that glass is highly resistant to leaching.  In that respect, your niece has only been
marginally exposed.  It’s when it is
broken that it would, most probably, become dangerous; in terms of toxicity,
rather than radioactivity, if I make myself clear.  You see, we may all have ingested uranium dust and that, I’m sorry to have to tell
you, is poisonous.  A high dose of that would produce kidney
failure and certain death.”  But then he
brightened.  “However lower intakes might
only cause rashes and breathlessness, and any kidney damage would soon repair
itself.”

“Breathlessness?”
I remembered Rosa running after me, puffing and panting as if she’d run
the four-minute mile with Roger Bannister[16].

“Yes.  It all depends on the chemistry of the
mix.  Radioactivity, in itself, is merely
a pulse - or quantum, if you like - of energy being powered through space like
a ball off a cricket bat and . .

“And they were willing to stack it up in their
office,” I brought him back down to earth.
“That’s a good sign, surely?  For
Rosa?”

“I think so, Mr Upshott.”

“But that’s wonderful!”  Exclaimed Kathleen, tears welling up in the
corners of her eyes.  “Pray God she’ll be
alright!”

Tamang smiled at her and said nothing.

I went to start up the car and then paused with the
key in my hand.  Alright, uranium might
be only mildly radioactive, but radiation was definitely leaking from somewhere
nearby;  if not from the crates of broken
Vas-glass, then from somewhere else.  The
hat said so.  There was a rocketing level
of radiation in the shelter and we’d been exposed to it.  The question was; where should we go?  Was it even remotely responsible of me to take us above ground at all?  Tamang was thinking the same thing; I could
tell.  Our eyes collided and I could see
it in them.  We had to get out of that
subterranean hell-hole if we were to save ourselves, yet every possible
precaution must be taken to minimise danger to others.

Now . . as it
happened, all of us at HQ had been marched off to a course on that very subject
some months back: What to do if exposed
to unacceptable levels of radiation.
I’d forgotten what an unacceptable level of radiation actually was
(although any level at all seemed pretty unacceptable to me), but I could
remember the first step that one should take.
Yes, I could remember that very clearly, indeed and so - from his eyes,
which had shied away from mine in obvious embarrassment - could Jay
Tamang.  I was going to have to bite the
bullet and inform my wife.

“Right, everybody,” I announced.  “Time to strip off.”

“Excuse me?”
Said Kathleen.

“We’ve got to get our kit off and chuck it out of the
window before we go any further, because the radiation will be saturating our
clothes.”  I tried to keep it as factual
as possible.  “We then drive straight
home and hose ourselves down thoroughly, before alerting the relevant
authorities of our contamination.
Assuming I can find some way out of the slide.”

“If you think I’m stripping naked, Tristram Upshott,
you’ve got another think coming!”

“Come on, darling.”
I adopted another tack.  “You were
as good as starkers in ‘The Furies from Venus’.”

“I most certainly was not.  A bit of cleavage and
leg is not remotely the same thing.”

“Well, that wasn’t what the Censor[17]
thought, was it?”  I was getting
desperate.  “Come on, just bend over,
Kathleen.  You’re an old trooper, you can
do it!”  I regretted both of those
sentences the very minute I’d said them.

Thankfully, my wife was not one of the ‘How dare you’
brigade of women but, even so, I was willing to concede that I’d given her more
than enough grounds for divorce that night.
If it had been down to me alone, I don’t think that anything I could
have said would have persuaded her, but Tamang came to the rescue again.  The fact was that Jay Tamang was far more of
a true gentleman than I’d ever be.

“Mrs Upshott,” he said, “I would like to assure you
that I will not be looking behind me at any time.  But Mr Upshott is speaking the truth; it’s essential
that we discard our clothes.  I am now
taking off my coat and then I will be removing my tie.  That is all that I have to say.”

He was as good as his word, struggling out of his
duffle coat and ditching it through the car window.  Kathleen subsided into silence, while I
whipped off my shirt, trousers and so forth and dumped them, too.  It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a
brass monkey, never mind any-one else.
Realising when she was beaten, Kathleen began to remove her clothes.  She rolled down the back window and stuffed
her coat and shoes through it, sniffing ostentatiously while she undid her
stockings (not being a true gentleman - and, being her husband, if only for a
limited duration - I may have looked in the mirror once or twice).

When we were all done, and shivering like three shorn
sheep on a Welsh hillside, I got the Hillman going and re-traced our steps,
until I found the way out.  On our previous,
full-throttled, journey, I’d missed a dark alcove recessed into the brick wall
and positioned just behind one of the bulkheads that marked the beginning of
the Southwark shelter.  I pulled up and
got out to inspect it.  The alcove was
about the right size for a small car like the Hillman and contained a
rectangular section of false floor, hinged at either side.  I looked up and felt the sensation of rushing
air against my cheeks.   There was no
glimmer of light to indicate the outside world, but then, it had to be long
past midnight.  A steady ribbon of
ice-cold water flowed down the wall, over my bare, white feet and out into the
tunnel.

“I reckon it’s a lift,” I said, retreating into the
comparative warmth of the car.  “God
knows how it works, though, or whether it’ll respond to your little box,
Tamang.”

He put his hand on the door as if to leap out and
inspect it for himself, then hesitated - no doubt recalling his lack of
trousers.  He gave it a bit of thought
from the safety of the Hillman.

“The hydraulics must be electrically powered,” he
decided.  “If this is still used as an
exit, then HQ must have installed some means of power; they wouldn’t have
somebody winching up cars manually.  I
think there must be a switch somewhere, Mr Upshott.  We should drive in and see if there isn’t a
switch on the wall nearest to the driver.”

“Excellent idea,” I said.  “I love a switch.”

I did as he said and, by the simple process of
sticking my hand out of the window, found the thing and yanked at it.  There was a violent jolt, at which the floor
began to rise; the contraption squeaking to high heaven like it needed a can of
oil applied to it’s joints.  It wasn’t
the fastest of lifts, but it did its job and we ascended from what had, at
times, felt like the bowels of hell itself, to a pill-box shaped,
concrete-walled building just behind Borough High Street.  Setting aside the knowledge that we were
thoroughly irradiated for one moment  (and
that severe levels of radiation were wafting about beneath the streets of
London), it was bloody good to be above ground.

Nobody much was about at that hour, so we drove over
London Bridge and followed the river past bridge after bridge - Southwark and
Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster, Lambeth, Vauxhall and Chelsea - until we reached
Tite Street, and Tamang and I vowed to keep our eyes closed while Kathleen went
to open the front door with the key from her handbag (my front door key having
been lost countless pages back in the saga of that evening).

They came at break of day.  We’d all soaped and scrubbed ourselves red
raw and put on fresh clothes and I’d just rung round the hospitals and was
wondering whether to wash the car, when the doorbell rang.  I left Kathleen and Tamang at the kitchen
table eating toast and marmalade and went up the basement steps to answer the
door.  There must have been six or seven
of them - a fearsome sight in their masks - barging into the hall and pushing
past me to run down the stairs and catch my wife and colleague.  They corralled us into the drawing-room,
surrounding us in a circle, leaving us nowhere to escape.  The main man pointed his instrument at me and
I knew that I was for it.  But . . .

“There’s no radiation here, sir,” he said, tapping at
his Geiger counter, or whatever it was that he held.

“What?”  Tamang
and I exchanged glances.  “There must
be.”

The man traced the line of each of our bodies with his
meter, measuring us from top to toe, and then studied it again.  He shook his head and the elephantine tube
that extended from his mouth and nose jiggled about.  Then he went over to the window and peered at
the thing in the early morning light.  He
removed his mask apparatus and peeled down his radiation suit until it flapped,
like a deflated balloon, around his waist, revealing a well-pressed, white
shirt and a conservative tie.

“What made you think there might be, sir?”

“The hat,” I replied.

“The hat, sir?”
The man obviously thought I was a complete lunatic.

I looked at Tamang again, for guidance, but he was
giving nothing away.  All of his
inventions came under the aegis of the Official Secrets Act, of course.

I waited until the men had left before I bearded
him.  At least he had the decency to look
upset.

“I cannot think what happened.  Why my hat should not have worked.  I mean, my ideas always work . . . unless . .”

“Unless, what?”

“Unless it got wet.”

I recalled that underground citadel running with
water.  Yes, I thought we could safely
say that it had got wet.

“The calibrations must have been destroyed by the
moisture,” he appeared genuinely mortified.
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr Upshott.  Mrs Upshott.”

“Please don’t give it another thought,” I said.  One had to laugh, in all honesty.  “Would you say seven in the morning is too
early for a whisky and soda?”  I didn’t
wait for a reply, but made a beeline for the bar in the corner of our
drawing-room.  “No.  Me neither.”

I handed them their drinks and we all took a good
gulp.

“Aargh!”  Kathleen wailed, unnervingly.  “We’ve forgotten Rosa!  How could we?
We must find poor Rosa!”

I set my glass down on the sideboard.  The arrival of the masked men from the
Ministry of Defence had put it out of my mind.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Kathleen.  I rang round the hospitals and they’ve got a
case of mild uranium poisoning at Charing Cross.  She’s in solitary confinement and they didn’t
want to tell me at first, but I put them in touch with HQ.  It turns out that Rosa was with some friends
in Hammersmith when she collapsed with lack of breath and they took her
straight to the hospital.  There’s no
cause for concern and you can visit her tomorrow if you . . ”

I was interrupted by my wife tipping her entire glass
of scotch over my head.  If that was all
I was in for, then I’d got off lightly.

8.  The Fair Lady of Golabki

This happened weeks before I killed a man,
when all I had on my mind was another lousy job and the possible ending of my
marriage.  Happy days.  My agent had sent me off to see a man about a
part in a film starring Diana Dors[18],
only it turned out it was to play her mother.
I’d taken it on the chin and laughed it off - after all, it made a
change from zombies and lesbian geography teachers - but brassy barmaids were
heading my way, there was no doubt about that.
Even if DD’s mum was still a bit
of a stretch.

The temperature was outrageously cold for spring, I
remember and I had my camel-hair coat belted tight and was wearing a nut-brown,
velvet tam that my sister, Millicent, had made for me.  I’m not a fan of hats, but if one really must wear one, then she’s the girl to go
to.  I admit, I was feeling rather low;
not best part of a bottle of Gordon’s low, but blue enough to do something that
would have shocked even my closest friends: I slipped into Brompton Oratory to
offer up a Stations of the Cross and a candle (and it wasn’t a one-off, either -
there’d been a few times those past months when the inside of a church had seen
Kathleen Upshott, née Smith).

Our mother had made sure we’d been brought up good Catholics,
but it hadn’t exactly stuck as far as
I was concerned.  Well, the nuns had
hated me (probably with good reason because I’d been a complete tearaway as a
kid), and I’d duly hated them back and, I suppose, nuns and God had got all mixed
up until I’d come to believe that you couldn’t have one without the other.  In fact, I still kept a weather eye out for nuns,
as if they might haul me out of church like a drunk from a nightclub.

Anyway, as I said, I slipped into Brompton Oratory, into
that chilly sanctuary all done up with domes and pillars.  It was a Monday lunchtime, just before Mass
and I had the place to myself; that little tearaway could’ve taken all sorts of
daft revenges - run off with a cassock, danced the jitterbug down the aisle -
but she didn’t because she was now a sober, middle-aged woman in a camel-hair
coat and a modest hat.  She walked to the
front, sat down and put her head in her hands, trying to empty it of worldly
concerns.  But it was impossible;  it was the same old story.  I’d lost the ability to pray.  Why couldn’t God let me pray?  What did I have to do: go to confession, give
alms to the poor, sign on the dotted line?
Probably.  I got up to leave,
prickling with a sense of shame.  I was a
tourist in that place and I knew enough about the Catholic church to know you
couldn’t be a tourist.

And that’s when I caught him.  A man in a black hat and hounds-tooth coat
had crept up the aisle while I had my eyes closed and stuffed something behind
the nearest pillar.  In the cavity
between the pillar and the church wall, to be precise.  I nearly said something along the lines of,
“Excuse me, I think you may have dropped . .” but, then . . I didn’t.  I kept my mouth shut and my head well down
while I fumbled in my pockets for my kid gloves and he hurried away as if all
the nuns in Christendom were after him.
I was intrigued, no two ways about it.

I went up to the altar and I lit my candle and then I
sidled left and stuck my hand into the hidey-hole and retrieved whatever it was
- a flat envelope with some nonsensical writing on the front was my immediate
impression -  and I dropped it into my
handbag.  Then, as I knew Mass was about
to begin and that was a step too far in my religious re-awakening,  however
much I’d enjoyed Deborah Kerr in Black
Narcissus, I exited into South Kensington, crossed Exhibition Road and made
a beeline for my favourite Polish cafe[19].

My favourite Polish café was a fixed point in my life
that never seemed to change.  It was
pickled in aspic.  The same wallpaper just
got a little browner and the same plant languishing in the window got a little
dustier as the years went by.  No, the
décor may have been nothing to write home about, but . . ooh, that place had
seen some sights!  During the war, that
is, when it seemed as if every Polish soldier in London had homed in on it,
with the unerring accuracy of radar.  A
girl had taken her life in her hands just going past (and, if I hadn’t been
here, there and everywhere entertaining the troops, I’d have gone past a lot
more often, I can tell you!)

Well, I had a coffee and a fag while I waited for
something wrapped in a cabbage leaf to arrive.
It struck me I was feeling a bit less blue.  I’d have liked to’ve been able to say that
was the effect of a quiet period of religious reflection, but, in all honesty,
I think it was more to do with the suspicious envelope burning a hole in my
handbag.  I began to think about
spies.  Actually, it wasn’t unusual for
me to be thinking about spies since I was ninety-nine per cent certain, at that
point in time, that I’d been daft enough to go and marry one.  Not that the handsome, young soldier I’d wed
ten years before had ever been easy -
Tristram had always been a ‘mixed up kid’, as they say nowadays - but . . we’d
spoken the same language.  He’d let me be
the foul-mouthed tearaway I still am underneath the Dior dresses and . . he’d
let me laugh at him, too.  Which had been
good for Tristram, somehow, because what was underneath the stuffed shirt that
he’d become, was a shy boy all tied up in knots.

What laughs we’d had together!  I hated to think that was over and done with
. . but I couldn’t live much longer with his abominable job.  That job had taken the worst of him and
allowed him to hide behind it.  It was
turning him into the type of establishment Englishman who couldn’t say a
natural sentence and, personally, I’d preferred him when he was a thief.  (Yes, that was what I said and, yes, I’m afraid that was what he’d been.)

I sighed over my coffee.  What a thought!  I should go running back to church for a few
Hail Mary’s after that thought.  But not
quite yet.  I put my handbag on my lap
and opened it under the table.  The
envelope was roughly six inches by four and I could feel a piece of card
inside, to prevent it bending.  I was no
expert, but the odd letters on the front seemed to me like they might have been
the Russian alphabet.  I put it on the
table to get a better look in the low, rather dingy, light of the café, because
this was exciting.

“May I?”

A man gestured at the seat opposite and waited for my
reply.  A quick glance around the café
revealed it was filling up for lunch, so I gave him a brief smile.

“It’s free.”

He was elderly, but rather dashing, with a beak of a
nose, a mane of swept back, silver, wavy hair and a plum-coloured cravat.  An old Pole taking lunch at his usual spot.

“Ty russkiy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed to the envelope.

“I was asking if you were, perhaps, a Russian, Madam,”
he said in perfect English, tinged with only the faintest wash of Eastern
European.

“Oh, no.  No I’m
not.”

I hastily put the envelope back in my handbag and
wondered whether I might give the cabbage leaves a miss, having managed to call
attention to myself in the space of a quick coffee.  It was obvious that I’d have made the world’s
worst spy.

“You are so fair, you look Russian.  Or Polish; we have very many beautiful fair
women.”

I smiled politely - wishing I’d brought a book - but,
just then, my lunch arrived.

“Golabki,” he noted.
“An excellent choice, if I may say so.
They do them very well here.”

He unfolded a Polish newspaper and perched a pair of
wire-rimmed specs on top of his impressive, rather aristocratic, nose and I
began to relax because he was only a polite old gentleman, after all; far from
intrusive and, obviously, not a spy of any kind.  I had spies on the brain.

“Yes, these are delicious,” I remarked, because they
were.

He nodded, seriously, above his newspaper and read for
a few minutes, while I ate my meal.  I
was about halfway through when he finished reading, took his specs off and laid
newspaper and glasses on the tablecloth.

“Tell me, Madam” he asked, “are you a spy?”

I choked on my lunch and had to make signs at the
waiter for a glass of water and pound on my chest and mop at my eyes, choking
all the while.  He waited until this
display looked like it was coming to an end before he said anything more.

“Forgive me.
I’m an old man with too much time on his hands.  I was going to go to Mass until I saw you in
the church.  Old habits die hard, I’m
afraid.”

“Praying?” I spluttered.

“Oh no,” he replied.
“Spying.”

I pushed back my chair and sprang to my feet, flailing
about for my coat.

“Your lunch, Madam!
Please!  You must not leave your
good lunch because of my rudeness,” he looked utterly crestfallen and I hovered
over the table, unsure what to do, while other diners swivelled their necks to
get an eyeful.

“Please sit down,” he began to roll up his newspaper
and then reached for his hat.  “I will
go, Madam.  I must learn not to stick my
big nose into other people’s business.
My very big nose.”

There was a glint of a smile, before he stood up and
tipped his hat at me.  I felt so
ridiculous that I sat back down again.

“Don’t go,” I said and I’ll never know why I said that
. . only . . I suppose I rather liked him.

He looked surprised, but promptly sat back down and
removed his hat.  A plate of little
dumplings arrived for him and he got down to work in silence, eating like a
trencherman, so that he caught up with me and we both finished our lunches
together.

I reached for my cigarettes and he lit a thin, black
cigar, before he spoke.

“An old agent - long retired and out of the game, but
not so soft in the head that he’s forgotten how it works, altogether - knows a
dead drop when he sees one.  It’s a
favourite place, there, for the Russians, being so near the Embassy.  But you,
Madam . . well, you interest me.  You are
a little conspicuous, if I may say so.
Your beauty.  The envelope placed
on the table, for all the world to see.
I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but I do not believe that you are
a spy at all.”

“You’re right there,” I half-laughed.

“So why take the delivery?”  He asked, not unreasonably.

“I don’t know.
Revenge, maybe.”

“Revenge?  On
whom, may I ask?”

“My husband.”

There, I’d said it.
I didn’t know this man from Adam, so he was the only person that I could say it to.  Yes, that was exactly why I’d taken it.  How paltry.
How sad.  What a pathetic little
woman I’d become, snatching at other people’s secrets.  Tristram’s life was one long secret that had
me left out in the cold and all I’d wanted was a secret to call my own.

“Is your husband the spy?”  The old Pole cottoned on fast.

He was relaxed in his seat, with the arm that held his
cigar draped over the back of the chair, nonchalance itself.  He was giving nothing away, like they all
learn to do.  And yet, some instinct in
me still rather liked him.  Was I right
to do so?

“Who did you spy for?”
I asked.

“I spied for us!”
He exclaimed, greatly amused.
“For the Allies and the liberators of the modern world.  For my Poland and for America and for the
British Empire, God Bless the King!”

“Don’t you mean Queen?”

“Certainly, I would have spied for her, too, but I’d
been put out to grass long before she came to the throne.”

“Hmm.  But you
speak Russian.”

“Indeed, and very useful it was, too.  Not as useful as it would be now, of course, but they have discarded
me like an old sock,” he said, with a theatrical shrug.

I smiled, “An old sock?  I’d say there was plenty of life in you,
yet.”

He laughed and shot me an unmistakeable look that I
might have taken seriously if he’d been twenty years younger and things had
been different.

“You flatter me, Madam.”  He leant over the table to stub out his cigar
in the ashtray and whispered into my ear as he did so, “I am not happy about
you being in this place with that document about your person.  It isn’t safe.”

“What are you going to do,” I whispered back, “take it
from me, by any chance?”

“Ha!  You don’t
trust me; that is good.  Trust no-one, do you hear me?  Ever.”

“Isn’t that a bit bleak?”  I said, thinking of Tristram as I said it.

“Very.  But
nobody asked you to take the delivery and you should not have done it.  I tell you
so and I am sure your husband would say the same.”

“Well, what do you want me to do with it?  Put it back where I found it so that you can
steal it when I’m gone?”

“Bravo!  Your distrust
is admirable; we will make a spy out of you, yet!”

“Oh, for goodness sake” I said, beginning to get
exasperated.  “I can’t sit here
whispering all day long.  I’ve got things
to do.”

I summoned the waiter and paid my bill and I noticed
that he did the same.  I put my coat on
and he put his hat on.  I picked up my
handbag and he picked up his newspaper.
Then we both went outside and I rounded on him once we were out of
earshot.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I am following you, Madam.”

“I can see that.
Stop it and go away, or I shall call a policeman.”

“Please do so, that is a very good idea indeed.  Ask the policeman to take you home
immediately.”

“Why?”  I didn’t
really want to call a policeman, of course.
Not at all.

“To keep you out of danger.  If you do not do this, then I shall accompany
you home myself, Madam.”

“If you think you’re coming home with me, then you
have another think coming.”

He sighed, obviously unhappy about the situation.

“Very well, I shall say no more,” he lifted his hat.  “Good afternoon Madam.”

“Good afternoon to you,” I said and promptly turned on
my heels and went into the nearest shop, so that I could hang about and make
sure that he really had taken himself off.

I looked at a lot of superior stationary - it being a
stationers - and eventually bought a postcard of Peter Pan in Kensington
Gardens[20]
because I’d been there so long I could sense the shop assistant getting
frosty.  I’d been peeking out of the shop
window every now and again, while I browsed envelopes, and couldn’t see anything
of the retired spy, yet I still had an uneasy feeling that he was lurking about
somewhere nearby.  He was an old pro,
after all; look how he’d witnessed the whole business in the church, when I
could have sworn blind that I’d been on my own.
I decided to take a circuitous route home, involving my hairdresser’s in
Sydney Street and the little woman who ran up the odd frock for me in Dovehouse
Street and that should do it.

Antoine was surprised at my appearance in his
salon, but happy to fit a regular like me in without an appointment.  We had our usual conversation about what I’d
been up to and I told him about Diana Dors’ mother, which gave him a laugh –
although not quite such a big laugh
as I’d expected (another couple of years, maybe less, and I predicted I’d be
grateful for the work).  I had him sit me
under the drier next to the window but wasn’t able to see much beyond a
towering display of artificial flowers and a swagged curtain arrangement.  By the time I’d let him pin my hair up in a
chignon and gas me with hairspray, I was pretty confident that the coast was
clear.

But, when I went up to the girl to pay, she handed me
a white envelope, with a confidential air.
Had Antoine not been in the vicinity, I shouldn’t have been surprised to
get a wink.  I glanced at the envelope
and frowned.  It was addressed in a
flowing hand with copperplate flourishes, To
the Fair Lady of Golabki.

“Are you sure this is for me?”

“He pointed you out, Madame.”

“Who pointed
me out?”

“The gentleman, Madame.  Distinguished-looking. Said he knew you, Madame.”

I wasn’t too happy about the way she said ‘knew’ (it was dawning on me that when a
woman reached her late thirties there was no rôle - and no man - too old for
her).  I thought on my feet.

“These film producers,” I said, “will they never leave
me alone?  Now, how much do I owe you?”

I hurried out with the envelope unopened, but there
was nobody on the pavement and, scanning Sydney Street in both directions, I
failed to see the old spy once more.
Short of summoning up that police escort, I had to assume that he was
somewhere nearby keeping an eye on me and lump it.  I forgot about my little woman in Dovehouse
Street and walked straight home.

I opened the letter before I’d taken my coat
off, standing in the hall with my kid gloves on the floor where I’d dropped
them in my haste to get at the envelope.

Dear Madam, (it said)

The unintelligible Russian words written on
the front of your document are not intended to be read by any Russian, but by
an Englishman with a simple knowledge of the layout of the keys of a Russian
typewriter.

Please remove the document from your handbag
and read what it says.  You will find
that there are three words, and the first of the words is Ишв.  If the
corresponding letters are sought on an English typewriter, (for example И
is five keys along from the right on the third, and bottom, row of keys, which
corresponds with the letter B on an English typewriter), the message will
become clear:

BID FOR GLASS

I humbly offer the suggestion that the
contents of the document reveal what the Soviets are prepared to offer in this
transaction.  If I were in your position,
I would leave the envelope sealed, for you what you do not know cannot harm
you.

Please, dear Madam, waste no time in handing
over this document to the British Secret Services (or to your husband, if you
have had your fill of revenge), and forgive the intrusion of an old spy who,
like an elderly dog with no teeth, cannot forget the taste of a bone.

Kind regards,

Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski

9.  The Black Box

Nobody bothered to tell me she was safe - no
surprises there.  The first I knew there
were a couple of suits at the door strong-arming me into the back of a
van.  (We live in a police state, right
enough.)

I thought it was to do with the mag, that I’d got
under the skin of a few establishment cats with my newest feature, my A to Z of
conspiracy theories.  How governments
manipulate conspiracy theories to their own advantage, especially with regards
to war.  There was plenty of mileage in
it and I’d only got as far as G for Gunpowder plot; as in discrediting the
Catholics.  (Wait until I get to K for
Korean war - that should really shake ‘em up!
I’m interested in the conspiracy theory as a paradigm for how we live
today:  how paranoia and ignorance
combine to create these fables where we all think we’re the only ones who know
what the hell’s going on and how these stories can be manipulated by
governments for their own ends . . although the idea that governments might be
engaged in this type of manipulation is, obviously, a conspiracy theory in itself.)

To be honest, I hoped
that was what was going on.  That the mag
had got right up a few establishment noses.
I should’ve realised the men were connected with Rosa’s uncle, the spy.

Then again, I reckoned it was good to know your
enemies whoever they turned out to be
(if you want to understand the times you live in you’ve got to be open to as
many experiences as you can, man).  So I
was dead curious about the whole story on that journey in the van.  Yeah, all the time I was in there I was
thinking about how necessary it was to get close to the enemy in order to
understand what made them tick and how, while doing that, you’d got to try and
seal yourself off, so they didn’t influence you unduly.  In that way, I guess we’re all spies.

I leant over to talk to the grey suit accompanying me
in the back of the van.

“Where’re we going, then?”

“Not far now, Mr Arkonnen,” he replied.  “We’ve just got one or two questions for
you.  Shouldn’t take too long.”  He was quite an approachable lad, for a goon.

“Fair enough,” I said.
“The magazine’s gone to the printers and I’ve a bit of time on my
hands.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in antagonizing
them.  Not yet.

It took around half an hour to reach our destination,
which was a lot further than the local police station.  We’d driven right inside an enclosed
courtyard before they let me out and I just got a glimpse of grey stone walls
and blind-eyed windows before they hustled me in, so I was unable to identify
the joint.  But, wherever it was, it had
establishment all over it, that was for sure; it was carved into the fabric
like the letters on a stick of Blackpool rock.

After that, they left me in an under-furnished room
for a couple of hours - most likely to unnerve me - and let me mull over my
many crimes.  It was laughable how they
followed the manual, but it was no big
sweat.  I mean, they didn’t take my
tobacco.  So I smoked a few rollies and
thought about George Orwell[21].

But then Rosa’s uncle turned up.

“Hello Magnus,” he said.  “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Hey!”  I was
genuinely surprised to see him - that character just hadn’t crossed my
mind.  “What are you doing here, man?”

“We’ve got some questions to ask you, Magnus.  That alright?”

He sat down on the only other chair in the room, took
a fountain pen out of the top pocket of his Saville Row suit and spread a few
papers out on the bare table.

“I won’t beat about the bush.  It’s pretty serious stuff and we need some
straight answers.”

“Is it Rosa?”  I asked.
“Have you found her?  How’s she
doing?”

He stared right through me with that piercing,
entitled, look of his.

“Rosa is fine,
Magnus.  That is . . I haven’t had a chance
to see her, but I hear she’s absolutely fine after her adventures.  I’m interested that you didn’t telephone me
to find out how she was.  If you care so
very much.”

He was wrong-footing me, trying to making me feel bad
and, therefore, vulnerable.

“I lost the number you gave me.”

“Did you?”

“But I’m only a friend.  You’re her bloody uncle and it looks like
you’ve not bothered to check up on her at all.”

He finally blinked and squeezed out a cold, lop-sided
smile.  “Touché.”

“Did she run away again?”

“Oh yes.”

“Rosa Stone, a spy!
Tell me you won’t use that lass again, man.”

“I can certainly assure you of that.  Now . . Magnus . .” he handed me a document
and his Cartier fountain pen, “this is the Official Secrets Act of 1939 and I’d
be grateful if you’d put your signature to it before we proceed any further.”

“The Official Secrets Act, eh?”  I took a quick look at it.  “I’m impressed.  However . .”
I handed it straight back to him, “no way can I sign this thing,
man.  Freedom of the press, yeah?  You can’t muzzle us.”

“Oh, really; pull the other one!  A Paler
Shade of Red is not exactly the New
Statesman, is it?  It’s not even Punch magazine and that’s gone
completely downhill[22].”

“Come again?”

“If your circulation extends to a hundred, I’d be
surprised, quite frankly.  As a citizen
of this country, it’s your duty to sign the Act when required to do so.”

I stood up.  I
felt like rolling up my sleeves again.

“As a journalist, it’s my primary duty to report what’s going on in this country.  And that duty applies however small my
circulation.  Although, I think you’d be
surprised to hear how way off target your estimation is.”

“Christ.  Sit
down, Magnus.  Please.”  He suddenly looked dead tired.  “Let’s have no more aggro.  Listen to me, now,” his voice had jettisoned
a fraction of it’s public school baggage.
“I let slip a few details that were not for common consumption the other
day and I take full responsibility for that.
But.  The Service can only protect this country if
it’s allowed to do its job properly and that means with as little fuss as
possible; I really don’t see that it would be any skin off your nose to sign
this document.  Just to reassure us that
one or two details about this particular operation will not be splashed all
over your publication and that we can talk in further confidence.  What do you say?”

I sat back down and thought about it.

“Ask me whatever it is you’ve brought me in here to
ask, and then I’ll consider signing it.”

He made an exasperated little noise and I could see
I’d scored a point off him.

“Very well.
I’ll get straight to the crux of the matter.  Tell me about your family, Magnus.  The Arkonnens.”

“You what?”  I
was flummoxed.  “The Arkonnens?  What the hell is all this about?”

He was studying me again, staring like a hawk at a swaying
blade of grass.

“You say your family came from Finland, is that
correct?”

I nodded, slowly.

“Recently?”

“I don’t think you’d call sailing over on a Viking
longboat that recent, no.  There’ve been Arkonnens in Hull forever.  Why?”

“Are you in touch with any branches of the family
remaining in Finland?”

“It’s a way back, wouldn’t you say?”  I laughed.
“Keeping up family connections with your Viking forebears!”

“I can see that you
might have trouble keeping up connections with anybody, Magnus.  But what
about your parents?”

He was great at a put-down, was Rosa’s uncle, but I’d
had enough.

“My parents were both killed in the Hull Blitz[23].”  I stood up.
“If you’re not going to tell me what all this is about, then I’d like to
go now, please.”

He stood up, too.
“Ah.  I’m . . .”  There was a long pause while he tried to get
his head round saying something kind and failed.  “You are, what . . twenty-four?  Twenty-five?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“Are you
now?  You’ve done well to be supporting
yourself with your little publication.”
He looked dead surprised, the patronizing bastard.

“Are you
supporting yourself, Magnus?”

“Yes, I bloody am!”
I exploded.  He’d seen where and
how I lived, did he honestly think I was taking some rich man’s shilling?

“No affiliations that bring . . how should I put
it?  Grants?  Endowments?”

Ah!  This was more like it.  This was the kind of crap I’d been expecting
when they’d pulled me in.

“You think I’m working for Mother Russia, don’t
you?  In the pay of the Soviets and
spreading propaganda through this lily-white country that’d never consider
spreading propaganda anywhere, itself!”

“Sit down again, if you would.  And think before you speak, will you?  You’re doing yourself no favours with that
tone.  I’ll ask you once more.  Magnus Arkonnen, is your publication - A Paler Shade of Red - receiving
financial backing from any interested parties that we should know about?”

“No, it damn well isn’t!”

I ignored his request and went over to the door; I was
pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t locked.
I couldn’t prevent myself firing off a parting shot:

“And you can stick your Official Secrets Act wherever
you like . . I know where I’d stick
it!”

I yanked open the door and walked, fast, down the
corridor.  I had my head down and was
pounding towards what I intensely hoped was the exit, expecting to be
challenged and clapped in irons any moment, when another door opened abruptly
to my right and out stepped Rosa Stone, of all people.  She had a poppy-red dress on with a purple
cape over her shoulders, emerald green high heels, earrings like the
chandeliers in the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool and her curly black hair loose
down her back.  It was like they’d just
invented Technicolor with no advance warning.

“Magnus!”  She
cried.  “Have they been pumping you, as
well?  Too awful, isn’t it?”

I think I mumbled something non-committal about her
uncle.

“Oh no!  Uncle
Tristram’s not here, is he?  We must
leave at once.”

She was toting a big carpet bag in one hand, but she
grasped my arm with the other one and pushed me in the opposite direction to
the one I’d been going; she’s a substantial girl, is Rosa, and she’d dragged me
halfway down the corridor before I knew where I was.  We reached the lobby unscathed, but there was
a big man in uniform leaning on the reception desk I didn’t much like the look
of.  Surprisingly, Rosa hailed him like
he was her best mate.

“Evening, Arnold.
How are you?  Lovely to see
you.  Must dash.”

She swept me past him and out onto the pavement of a
quiet street.  There was a smear of good,
old London smog in the air and dusk had crept in while I’d been having fun and
games with ‘Uncle Tristram’, the spy.

“D’you come here often, Rosa?”  I asked.

“Me?  No, only
the second time ever.  I just remembered
his name.  You know how it is.”

I didn’t really, but then my memory is downright
ordinary, however much I’ve tried to train it for my job; not like Rosa’s.  She remembers everything - and I mean everything - from the names of folk
she’s barely met to the variety of cake I was eating when we first ran into
each other back at the Varsity office in college.

Rosa sighed.
“I’m dog tired, Magnus.  I can’t
tell you!  You don’t have a car, by any
chance?”

“Wish I could afford one, man.  Where’ve you got to get to?”

“Good question.
I’ve just got out of hospital, actually,” she said, airily.  “I can’t go back to my flat in
Battersea.  I’m avoiding my uncle, so I
can’t go to my aunt’s house.  I was
staying with some friends on a house-boat next to Hammersmith Bridge, but it’s
an awfully tight squeeze and I can’t offer to pay any rent because I haven’t
got a job . .”

“You can come back to mine, if you like,” I tried to
say it nonchalantly, but it came out right gruff and unwilling.  I don’t think Rosa noticed, either way.

“Oh, Magnus, that’s so sweet of you.  I might
take you up on that another time, but I think I’ll go home to my parents in
Kent for a bit.  Most of my things are
there, you know?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve got to re-coup.”

“Yeah?  What
about a drink?  We could do some
re-couping together.”  I wrenched my eyes
off her and looked around for familiar landmarks, taking stock.  “Where are we, anyhow?”

“Waterloo, but we’re supposed to keep schtum about the
location of HQ.  I expect you signed the
Official Secrets Act?”

“Funny you should ask that,” I said, and changed the
subject.  “Well, if we’re in Waterloo, I
know a tidy little place off The Cut, stays open all hours and plays some great
jazz.”

“You would!  I
thought the area was a wasteland, apart from the Old Vic.”

I tapped my nose, “Gotta be in the know, man!  Let’s scoot!”

I hustled Rosa past the Old Vic with
difficulty because the lass was mad for theatre and remembered whole
performances from curtain-up to the last bow, and I mean whole performances: every single word of them, including who said
what when and what they were holding at the time.  She was going on that much about Richard
Burton in Hamlet[24],
I thought I’d have to strangle her.

“I can’t think why, but he made me shiver just watching him because one
never knew what he might do next, somehow, even though I know Hamlet from cover to cover and Claire Bloom, well, she was so unbelievably beautiful and I think she
might be Jewish, like me, although
Ophelia is a bit of a drip however
she’s performed and . .”

“Give it a rest, Rosa,” I said.  “I thought you were tired, man.  This is the place, look.  The Black Box.”

——

Down the stairs, snoop.  I’ve got you.

——

Rosa tripped down the stairs in her green heels, still
all starry-eyed and in a world of her own about Richard bloomin’ Burton.  She’d start acting the whole of Hamlet out,
there and then, if I didn’t distract her and get a drink down her neck,
fast.  I suggested she find us a table
and pushed my way to the front of the bar for a couple of pints and some
Smiths’ crisps.

The Black Box wasn’t one of those swank, West End
joints, all red plush banquettes and men on the door who made you wear a tie; I
steered well clear of them.  (I wasn’t sure I still owned a tie, to be
honest.)  Those places attracted visiting
Jazz royalty from the States, but you could always buy those cats’
records.  The Black Box was just a dim,
little cellar, a bit spit and sawdust, but authentic.  You got a right mix of clientele, from
be-boppers to some local gangland types (as I said; authentic), but  somebody
there did know their jazz and, if you
struck lucky, you could see some storming live sets.

No-one was playing when we came down the stairs, they
just had some Bird on the turntable (not that there’s any ‘just’ about it - nobody did bebop like Charlie Parker,
God rest his soul)[25].

“Here are, Rosa,” I handed her a pint, “get that down
you.”

——

I set the boy to wait across the street, all fired up
because I’d bought him a new pair of shoes.
Idiot boy.  Morons, the pack of
them.  Cretins everywhere you look.  Not got the faintest how bloody serious this
is.

——

She looked a bit dubious about the pint, but I hadn’t
wanted to patronize her with a half and, besides, that amount of fluid should
drown Richard Burton, good and proper.

“Now, what’s all this about hospital?  Have you been ill?”

“Oh, it was only a little uranium poisoning; nothing
to worry about.  I shouldn’t think I’m radioactive,
or anything,” she breezed.  “When it gets
darker you can tell me whether I start to glow.”

My beer sloshed all over the table.  Uranium poisoning?  They’d mentioned a bit of spying in an office
and a swim across the river, but nobody had said anything about uranium.  What the hell had ‘Uncle Tristram’ got her
mixed up in?

“Are you telling me you’ve been exposed to uranium,
Rosa?”

“Yes, but I don’t think I can divulge any more if you
haven’t signed the Official Secrets Act of 1939.”  She took a big swig of her beer and rummaged
through her crisps for the blue bag of salt.
“Why were you at HQ, then?”

“I don’t know . . I thought I knew; I thought I’d got
to them politically.  Through the
mag.  But now I’m not sure that was
it.  I think, maybe, your uncle wanted to
check my credentials.”

“Why?”  She
laughed, gaily.  “To see whether you were
suitable marriage material for his lovely niece?”

I felt my cheeks flush, but she was oblivious;
crunching crisps and learning the beer mats by heart.

“I don’t think so, Rosa.  Though he did seem dead interested in my
family.”

“Really?  I’m interested in your family, too.  Tell me about them, Magnus.”

“You’re
interested in everything!”

I downed the remains of my pint that weren’t dripping
off the edge of the table and fumbled in my pockets, hopefully.  By some miracle, I’d enough for a couple more
and the bus fare home for two.  I’d have
to make the next drink last.

“Hey!”  Rosa
noticed me counting coins.  “Let me.  I’m not completely broke, you know.”

This was good news and I began to relax, fetching my
tin of Old Holborn out of my coat pocket and my papers.  The joint was filling up nicely; a group of
laid-back West Indian men had come in and some office girls were pretending not
to notice them and the vibe was mellow.
And then somebody behind the bar replaced Bird with Chet Baker and the
Gerry Mulligan Quartet’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ and I was done for.  I paused with my rollie paper stuck to my
lip.  Man, oh man!  Chet’s trumpet solo came sliding off the street
and into the Black Box - so apparently simple - starting off plain, so you’d no
idea that he was about to gather up the strings of your heart, one by one, and
pick you up like a balloon and send you flying into the sky.  Why didn’t everybody shut up?  Couldn’t they get what the cat was at?  It was romance without the cheese; stripped
of show-tune baloney until it was nothing but a pure stream of air -
trumpet-air, Chet-breath - circling your head and heart and binding them with
sadness.  So much sadness.  Then Rosa Stone came back to the table in her
red dress and green shoes, two pints of best bitter in her hands and I looked
up at her and it dawned on me how bloody lost I was.

——

Fred clocked me at the bar and he came over.

“Not just yet, Fred.
I’ll get ‘em in a bit later.”

They were drinking pints.  What was the betting she was a
lightweight?  Bide my time ‘til she’d had
a skinful.  Look at the state of her.  Yid snoop.
Bide my time at the bar, then peel them apart; skim her off like fat
from a pan of gravy.

——

“I’ve been thinking . .” she said, “thinking how unfair this has all been.  I mean, I was a fine undercover agent; I bet
they’ve learnt all sorts of important
things from my de-briefing.  Uncle
Tristram said that would be the case, actually.
But now I’m not going to know what any of those things are.  They’re leaving me out in the cold and none
of it’s my fault.”  She glared at me,
accusingly, as if I’d had summat to
do with it.

“So the dose of uranium hasn’t put you off, then?”

She made a scoffing sound and downed some more beer.

“Can I have your crisps, Magnus?”

“Feel free, man.”

A trio of musicians had arrived and were getting
themselves sorted out in the corner, just a couple of yards from our table and
a crowd had built up all of a sudden, leaning over our pints and using my
ashtray.  Soon we’d not be able to hear
ourselves talk.  I thought about her
uncle and what he’d said about her running away.  It was true; for somebody so persistent, she
wasn’t half elusive.  She edged closer.

“I’m just going to have to go it alone,” she
confided.  “I think my country needs
me.  I really do.”

“Oh Rosa.  I’m
not sure that’s such a good idea, man.
This stuff is dangerous;  you
could get yourself in all kinds of trouble.
Real, grown-up trouble.”

She smiled, so close to my face, I could have kissed
her, just like that.

“I am
grown-up, Magnus.”  Her big, brown eyes
crossed, ever so slightly.  “I’m also
rather drunk.  Uranium with a beer chaser
may have been a bit silly.  Got any more
crisps?”

A man leant over us and tapped me on the shoulder.

“’Evening Magnus.
Not seen you here for a
while.”

It was my Uncle Reg - my father’s younger brother, my
London uncle.  He’d got his hat and
shades combo on and a wide, black scarf wound round his neck, like a genuine
hepcat.  I wasn’t that surprised to see
him there; his office was in the vicinity and I’d run into him at the Black Box
before.

“Uncle Reg, man!”
I stood up to shake his hand.

“Who’s your lady friend, lad, and may I have the
honour of buying her some more crisps?”

Rosa got up, swaying a fraction.

“That’d be lovely, thanks so much.  I’m Rosa, by the way,” she reached for his
hand and held onto it for support.  “I
say, have we met before?”

He bent his head over her hand and kissed the back of
it.

“I don’t think so, Rosa.  I reckon I’d have remembered you, love.”

He picked up our glasses and headed off to the bar.

“Isn’t that funny!”  She exclaimed.  “Uncles coming out of the woodwork all over
the place!  He’s quite ‘hail fellow well
met’, isn’t he?”

She made me laugh.
Rosa was a treasure trove of archaic expressions.

“He’s harmless,” I replied.  “I didn’t see much of him when I was growing
up in Hull, but we’ve caught up over a pint once or twice, since.  He’s a businessman; can’t remember exactly
what he does, but he’s done alright for himself and his family, has Uncle
Reg.  Lives in a big house in
Cricklewood.  He’s got a little brat of a
son I’m not that keen on, though.  Bit of
a Johnny Ray[26]
fan, if you get me.”

“Do you know . .” Rosa laid her palm on top of mine, like
she had summat of great import to communicate,
“I quite like Johnny Ray.  Even when he cries.  In fact, Magnus . . I think I prefer him when he cries.”

Blimey she was drunk.

“Well I’m not sure we can be friends any more, Rosa,”
I said.

10.  The Second Uncle

Uncle Reg was making his way back to us
through the crowd, bearing two pints held well above his head and with a packet
of crisps stuck under his armpit.

“I don’t know how jazz fans can see in those dark glasses,” Rosa remarked.  “Not in a basement in gloomy, old London, at
any rate.”

“Their eyes adjust, I reckon,” I said.  “But Uncle Reg always wears them.  He’s got trouble with his eyes.  Some industrial injury the Trades Unions
should’ve come down hard on, only the Unions in this country’ve got no
teeth.  Ta for that!”  My pint had arrived.  “Not supping, yourself?”

“Not tonight, son.
There you are, Rosa,” he flung the crisps on the table.  “Mind if I join you?  Be honest; I wouldn’t want to break up a
tête-à-tête.”

“Please do.
You’re not breaking up anything,” Rosa looked puzzled.  “We can budge up, can’t we, Magnus?”

We certainly could.
My leg was jammed up against Rosa’s and I caught a whiff of her
scent.  She smelt of lilacs in the park
after the rain.  I took a swift gulp of
my pint and tried to concentrate on the music.

“What d’you reckon to this, Uncle Reg?”  I cocked my head at the trio, who were
attempting a driving, hard bop sound done streets better by Art Blakey[27].  It was acceptable, but it lacked the blues
edge it should’ve had.

“I’m a trad man, me,” he said.  “Give me a bit of Acker Bilk[28]
and I’m happy.”

“Fair enough.
He’s not half bad, is Acker.”

“I suppose you like
the low lighting down here, Uncle Reg?”
Rosa broke in, with that avid look on her face.  “I suppose it’s soothing for you?”

The lass couldn’t help herself, of course, but the
lack of tact could throw people who didn’t know her that well.

“Soothing?”  He
looked surprised for a moment.  “Ah, he’s
told you about my eyes, has he?”

“Yes.  How did
it happen?”  She had no shame.

“My, my,” he stared, “what a nosy little parker you
are, Rosa.”

“Yes, I suppose I am,” she said, plain and simple.

Did she mind?
That he’d said that to her?  I
couldn’t tell.  It didn’t look like she
was taking it amiss.  But I did.

“Hey man,” I said, “she didn’t mean anything by
it.  Rosa’s just . . interested.  She’s dead
interested in everything.”

He ignored me and carried on sizing her up.

“Well, you know what happened to the cat, don’t
you?”

“What?”  Rosa
was as fascinated as ever.  “Oh, do tell me.  What happened to the cat?”

“Curiosity killed it, love.”

And that’s when I realised I’d gone off my Uncle Reg.

The trouble with pubs - and clubs - is that
it’s hard not to take root.  You slip in
for a quick drink and, next thing you know, you’re standing on the table, singing
the Red Flag.  Well, maybe that’s just
me.  The third pint had taken Rosa quite
differently.  She’d emptied the contents
of her carpet bag all over the table and was scrabbling about for a lipstick,
which she proceeded to stab at arbitrary parts of her face; taking pot luck as
to where her mouth had landed up.
However, if anything, her speech had become more precise and she was busy rattling off a comprehensive list of
lipstick shades.

“Now, this
is Fire and Ice by Revlon of course, but I also
like Radiant Peony.  And Blush Rose,
Heart Red and Pink Violet.  Also Promises Pink, Jeopardy Red, Kiss
and Make up, Divine Mastery, Coral Seas, Puckery, Sonnet In Mauve, Fleur du
Jour . .”

“Give it a rest, sweetheart,” I said.  “You are the cleverest girl I’ve ever met,
Rosa Stone - and the most beautiful,
by the way - but you don’t need to clog up your brain with all that fluff, you
know?  Save it for the fluff . . I mean stuff that matters, eh?”

“Has she got total recall?”  A familiar voice cut through the beer
fumes.  Was it my Uncle Reg?  Was that saddo Acker Bilk fan still with us?  He’d been sarky to my girlfriend.  Well, I wasn’t having that!

“What if she has?  Wanna make summat of it?”  I stumbled to my feet and rolled up my
sleeves.

“Now, now, that’s the drink talking.  There’s no need for any of that, son.  Let’s get you two young people home.  Can I offer you a lift?”

“No!”  It came
out louder than intended.  “We’re getting
the night bus, thanks.”

“The car’s only parked down the road.”

Rosa looked up from her lipsticks and focussed on my
uncle.

“You could take me to Charing Cross station if you really don’t mind, Uncle Reg.”

“No he couldn’t!”

What was she thinking of?  Sitting in the station all night to wait for
the early morning train to Kent?  It was vital that she came home with me.  (Yeah, yeah – I know what you’re thinking;
but it wasn’t all that.  I honestly felt like I’d got to grab onto her
coat tails, or she’d be up and off, and then who knew what might happen to her?)

“Of course I could,” said Uncle Reg.  “Have you got a train to catch, Rosa, love?”

“I’m going home to my parents in Kent.  I’ll just get the Dover Priory train and ring
from there.”

She’d rammed all her belongings back in her bag and
was tying her peculiar purple cape around her shoulders, like her mind was made
up.

“Dover?  What a
coincidence.  I’ve a factory down there,
would you believe?  I’m heading that way
tomorrow - first thing - for business.  Now
I come to think about it, it wouldn’t hurt to go down tonight; set the ball
rolling.  Why don’t I give you a lift all
the way, Rosa?”

She was all smiles.
“Well, I wouldn’t say no!  How
wonderful!  That’s frightfully kind,
Uncle Reg.  I say . . I can’t keep
calling you Uncle Reg, can I?  What’s
your name, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, just call me Reg,” he stuck out a gallant hand to
help her up and made a decisive skip for the door, like he wanted her all to
himself and I’d just hand the goods over and scoot.

What was going on?
I was drunk, of course - that was one thing that was going on - but,
even so, I was knocked sideways by a genuine sense of loss.  I felt like she was slipping out to sea before
I’d even found the beach.

I pushed through the crowd after the two of them,
shouting to make myself heard above the music:

“You can blooming well call him Mr Arkonnen!”  I shouted.

I didn’t mean much by it; I’ve gone over and over it since
that evening and, yes, there may have
been a touch of jealousy involved, but - more than anything - I was just trying
to catch her attention, to say:

“Hey, Rosa!  I’m
still here!”

Never, in a million years, could I have predicted the
effect it had.

“Arkonnen?”

She froze on the bottom step of the stairs to the
exit.  When she turned round, I could see
her face had bleached to the colour of quality stock typing paper, those brown
eyes gaping out of this paper mask.

“Arkonnen,” she said - straight at me - like she’d
just come up with the answer to a sum.

“What’s up, Rosa man?”

She didn’t reply, just gurgled out a weird, gasping
sound and flung her arms out wide,  substantial bag and all.  Uncle Reg - who’d been welded to her side, about
to escort her up the Black Box steps - got the full force of that bag in the
stomach, before Rosa shoved him out of her way and made a run for it up the
stairs.

“Rosa?” I cried, belting after her.

It was the dead of night and that miserable backstreet
was poorly lit.  Opposite the club, a
striped barber’s pole revolved under a wan light-bulb and, further down the
road, a single lamp-post smouldered with an orange, sodium glow, but it was
properly black.   I couldn’t see her, at
first.  But then, when a figure ran out
between two parked cars, it dawned on me that it could only be Rosa.  She veered into the middle of the road and,
as she passed beneath the lamp-post, I recognised her long hair and her cape
and the heavy bag that dragged over the ground, so that she ran all lopsided
and awkward; there was something about the way she ran that snagged at the
heart.

I was so preoccupied, I nearly missed him; no more
than a shadow splitting from the deeper shade of a doorway.  Then he came nearer and I realised who it
was; with his pipe-cleaner legs and bouffant hair - not unlike the splurge of
ice-cream on top of the type of cornet you get from an ice-cream van - it could
only be my least favourite cousin,
Terry Arkonnen, Uncle Reg’s son.  We
stared each other down.

“After her, Terry!”
Uncle Reg came storming out of the club, behind me.  “After that girl!”

Now I really was flummoxed.  I gawped from one of them to the other, out
of my depth.  It was the way that he’d
said it:

“After that girl!”

It just wasn’t how you’d expect any uncle of yours to
speak; the tone was downright vicious.  I expect the booze wasn’t helping, but I
honestly felt like my brains were scattered all over the pavement.  What was happening here?  What’d made Rosa scarper again and why was my
uncle setting his little tyke of a son on her?

“Eh?  Leave her
alone, man.  She can run if she wants
to,” I shouted.

But nobody paid me a bloody bit of attention.  Terry bolted after her, running hell for
leather and I stared after him in disbelief, none too steady on my feet.  It felt like an age passed while I got myself
under control and sobered up, but it was probably no more than a heartbeat.

“Pull yourself together, Arkonnen,” was the general
theme.  “You don’t need to know the
details, all you need to know is Rosa’s in some kind of danger.  The girl needs your help.”

Not before time, I got going.  Given that Rosa was in heels, she was a
surprisingly quick mover, but my cousin was gaining on her, fast.  He was a skinny, agile, little bastard, that
boy, and there was no way she’d manage to escape him on her own.  However, Terry had me to reckon with and, even
with four pints inside me, I could also
run.

She was heading north toward the railway line, past
the sort of neglected patch you find all over this country from slum clearance,
or old bomb damage, or both.  A sharp
wind had got up and weeds that had grown into trees waved, head-height.  Few people were about, just a couple of
working girls taking a shortcut home and a cloth-capped man pushing a barrow
top-heavy with coal, up ahead.  He
reached her long before Terry or I did; the barrow took an unexpected turn
across Rosa’s path and there was nearly a collision, but she jumped out of the
way, while he pulled up to collect the lumps of good coal that were rolling all
over the street.  This was a lucky break
because he made an excellent job of blocking the pavement while he picked them
up, and he managed to slow Terry down for a precious few seconds; just enough
for me to catch up with him, leap onto his back and pummel him, good and proper,
with my fists.

“Leave her alone, Terry Arkonnen!”

There was nothing to the boy, just sinewy skin and
bone, but his reflexes were quick – I’ll say that for him, if nothing
else.  He twisted round, threw me half
off his back, somehow brought his knee up and stabbed me with it as hard as he
could.  It was eye-wateringly
painful.  I staggered a couple of steps,
breathing hard.  When the mist cleared
and I could see again, I caught him pulling a hooligan face at me, giggling
inanely and flicking a V sign for good measure (Terry was living proof that all
the old fogeys had it spot on when they complained about the younger
generation, he really was).

A car horn blared at us, and we both dived out of its
path.  I couldn’t help noticing Terry’s
face as it sped past and I knew, there and then, that his dad had been at the
wheel.  I’d sensed this scene was serious
the minute I’d heard Uncle Reg yell in that vicious way and yet I couldn’t have
known how serious it was.  Not then.
But now . . if the man was on wheels, it was hotting up.  I mean, if I didn’t move it, the stranger I
called my uncle might abduct her from the streets.  So I did something I’d been itching to do for
a while and punched my obnoxious cousin on the nose.  Terry fell backwards, his hands nursing his
nosebleed, while I straightened up to see where Rosa had got to.

She was off the road by now, and halfway across the derelict
patch by the railway line.

“Rosa!”  I
bellowed, loud enough to catch her attention.  “Wait for me, Rosa!”

She stopped to catch her breath, dropping her bag and
hugging her body as if there was little breath in it to catch.  It took a minute before she could speak.

“Go away, Magnus,” she shouted, when she could.  “I hate you!
Go away, you traitor!”

She hated me?  The scene was becoming more bizarre by the second.  Then, as if to confirm that, Uncle Reg’s
black sedan drove clear off the road, flattening a broken, wire fence and began
to lurch over the bombsite, crashing through saplings and over lumps of rubble,
the car jolting up and down on its springs.
It was aiming straight for Rosa.
I promptly jumped over the crumpled wire and set off after them, half-crazy
with a new fear; never mind abduction, it looked like my uncle was going to run
her over.  The maniac was actually about
to commit murder and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

I’ve never run so fast in my life.  The sedan reached Rosa instantly, of course,
yet it didn’t run her over, it circled round her.  She had plenty of room to escape, but she
didn’t; she just stood there - stock still like piggy-in-the-middle - clutching
her bag to her chest, white-faced and gibbering with terror.  I saw why when I’d caught up a bit.  Uncle Reg was turning the steering wheel in a
leisurely circle with his left hand, while his right held a small pistol, the
snout protruding out of the driver’s window.

“Into the car, love,” I heard him say, pleasantly.  “Into the car, or I shoot you.”

I judged that Rosa was incapable of movement, at that point.  So I moved for her.  I ran at the sedan, wrenched the passenger
door open and leapt in.  Uncle Reg didn’t
even bother turning his neck to acknowledge my presence, he just carried on
circling round Rosa like a bird of prey who had all the time in the world; all
of the sky and all of the earth below at his disposal.

“Stop!”  I
cried.  “Whatever the hell you’re doing,
just stop it will you?”

“Keep your nose out, son.  This is none of your business.”

“It bloody is!”
I shouted and, without thinking, I fell on top of him, fists
flying.

His head jerked forward and the gun went off, the
retort unbelievably loud inside the car.
Had he got her?  I tried to hold
him down and get a look out of his window at the same time, but he kept
struggling and he’d got his weight on the accelerator, so the car was out of
control.  I’d just time for one serious
punch, which must have connected somewhere because a great, winded, ‘oomph’
broke out of him, and to scream out:

“Run, Rosa!
Run!”

Before the car smashed into the side of a wall and all
the colours in the world turned to black.

11.  Grounded in Kent

I was convinced they would follow me.  I sneaked into an empty First Class carriage
after the ticket inspector had done his rounds, stowed my tapestry bag in the
rack and prayed to God that they’d missed me on the platform.  (I don’t believe in God but, somehow, that’s
never stopped me praying to him.)  The
first train of the day would have been too obvious, I’d calculated, so I’d
taken the second and gone to such elaborate precautions at Charing Cross that
my Uncle Tristram would have been proud of me.
Even so, I’d learnt to expect the unexpected and I spent the beginning part
of the journey - when I wasn’t praying - with my teeth positively chattering
with fear.  I’d had hours to think about
it and I had slotted the pieces together from the hallucinatory fragments of
the night before.  I was pretty sure that
I knew who my enemies were, now:  Uncle
Reg, who was also Arko the devil incarnate.
An extremely fast runner called Terry, who was also Jim Johnson the
office boy at Heaviside Import/Exports.  And Magnus . . who was just Magnus.

I felt peculiarly sick when I thought of Magnus; especially
when I recalled him jumping into that car to join his wicked uncle.  (The feeling reminded me of the sickness I’d
felt on the Big Dipper at Battersea Funfair the only time I’d tried it: out of
my element, dizzy, stripped of the ability to grasp anything real and make
something comprehensible out of it.)
Magnus wasn’t actually ‘just Magnus’, you see.  He wasn’t who I’d thought he was at all, and
that made me feel so sad.  Sad and lost.  I looked out of the train window and watched
London become Kent and the miserly, early morning light expand into gay, spring
sunshine and I wondered whether I would ever
understand other people.  What’s more, I
wondered whether I even knew who I was, myself.
My name is Rosa, I repeated over the driving bass beat of the train
chugging southwards.  My name is
Rosa.  Rosa Stone.

Yet, astonishingly, as the journey went on and nobody
burst into the carriage with a gun, I began to dare to believe that I’d got
away with it.  As each oasthouse sailed
past my window, each strict assembly of hop poles, each orchard of stunted
apple trees, just come into leaf, I breathed a little easier.  It helped that those signs of spring were all
around me; London was still in thrall to the terrible, long winter we’d
suffered, but Kent appeared to have thrown it off like that thick jumper you
come upon in the summer and cannot believe you ever wore.  Speaking of which, I’d had Magnus’ black
slacks and jumper rolled up in my tapestry bag and - for purposes of disguise -
had taken them out and put them on over my dress, earlier that morning.  With the sun streaming through the window, I
was starting to feel tremendously hot.
By Folkestone I’d thrown caution to the winds and stripped them
off.  There they sat, on the seat beside
me, so hard-wearing, so voluminous, so black . . so Magnus.  I hated how I felt when I looked at
them.  Somewhere before Dover Priory I
chucked them off the train.

Alighting on the platform, I kept a firm grip on my
bag; I’d used it as a weapon before and I would again.  But there was no need; it was quite miraculous, but I really seemed to have got
off scot free.  Oh, the relief!  I can’t tell you!  I swished the satisfyingly full skirts of my
scarlet dress and clicked down the platform in the green shoes I’d bought with
my last pay-packet, to where I could see my father waiting with the ticket
collector.  He waved his arms about (as
if there was any possibility that I might miss the mountainous mass of him in
his blue fisherman’s jumper, red trousers and unfortunate beret), and shouted unnecessarily:

“Bubeleh!  I’m
here!”

I resisted the urge to inform him that I wasn’t blind
and allowed him to envelop me in his arms, the tang of coal and steam from the
train adding a piquancy to the wafts of cinnamon and cologne that he habitually
gave off.

“You shouldn’t have come, Daddy, not halfway through
the working day.  I told you on the
phone, I was going to get a taxi.”

“Well, I thought I’d find a poor, little, ailing soul,
all shrivelled and yellow in the face.”
He set me at arms length.  “But
what is this?  As hale and hearty as ever,
Rosa!”

“It was only a touch of uranium poisoning, Daddy.  I didn’t have jaundice, you know.”

“According to your mother and your aunt, you were at
death’s door in that hospital.”

He took my bag from me and we set off to find the car.

“Hardly!”

They’d come dashing up to Charing Cross hospital and
tried to lure me back to Kent with my baker father’s chocolate buns, only,
since I’d been poisoned, I’d gone off my food for the first time in my life, so
it hadn’t worked.  Except . . here I
was.  When you are nineteen, however much
you love your childhood home - and I did, I really
did - any trip back without a job or a place of your own to return to, well, it
feels a bit abject.  I couldn’t help it;
at nineteen one only wants to fly and I felt grounded.

I got into the old Crossley while my father put my bag
in the boot.  When he got in next to me
the car sagged and gave a resigned, little sigh, but it started first time,
which wasn’t usually the case.  We drove
out of Dover, taking the route past the harbour and up the hill towards home.

“Now,” he announced, “prove to me that you are
well.  Tell me what you see, Rosa.  Tell me everything.”

This was an old game (possibly as old as my parents
themselves, which was, of course, as old as Methuselah).  I gave a low growl of irritation to let him
know how very antediluvian he was, while leaning forward in my seat because I
simply adore being tested.  I opened my
mouth to begin as we sped past the castle, those ancient walls which slanted,
so proprietorial, over the town and the sea.

“Not the castle!”  He said (we’d done the castle too many times
to count).

Beyond the castle, then, to where the road opened up
to the sea and the chalk downlands.  I
focussed on the wildflowers that had sprung up in the verges since I’d last
been there, and felt the reassuring click in my brain.

“Speedwell, buttercup, stinging nettle,” I cried,
“chalk milkwort, vetch, heartsease, oxeye daisy . .”

“Oy,” he interrupted, “you don’t get points for oxeye!  They’re not out yet.  Only what you can see, remember.

“I saw the leaves!
Knapweed, hoary plantain, cowslip, birds foot trefoil . .”

“Bravo!  Now the
Latin!”

I won’t bore you with all of that.  Just to say that I’d got to ‘ranunculus
vulgaris’ when I saw the rabbit.  It’s
eyes were gummed shut with myxomatosis[29]
and it crouched on the verge as a rabbit should never do, as if it had run out
of hops.  I shivered.  Somehow, Arko had followed me home.  Arko
with his milk-white eyes.  Arko who was
Magnus’ Uncle Reg.  Arko who circled round
and round, pointing his gun.  It struck home
- for the very first time, really - that one day Arko might kill me.  I burst into tears.

They put me to bed in my old room and I slept a deep,
dreamless sleep.  I tend to forget about
sleep, but - though it pained me to admit it - they were right and I’d been
exhausted.  When I woke up, I was
momentarily disorientated by a shaft of the brightest yellow sunlight entering through
a gap in the curtains, where the everlasting wind set them flapping.  I thought I heard voices raised in alarm, but
it was only my mother shushing my brother Sam.
I may have smiled into my pillow before sleep dragged me back under.

Next time I awoke, the shaft of light had travelled
and the familiar angles of my room had softened.  I could have sworn that I heard voices once
more; many voices whispering to one another:

“She’s brought us a story,” they whispered.  “She’s brought us another story.”

But it may have been the conversation of the sea,
gossiping around our wall in the fervour of high tide.

I shook myself awake, got up and flung the curtains
wide.

The house was on the beach.  Actually, there were two houses - Shore House
and Coast Cottage - two white-washed, 1930’s houses, like beached ocean liners
staring out at the sweep of St Margaret’s Bay[30];
such an apparent panorama of blue ocean and, yet, the closest point on our
islands to France.  In the winter the
wind screamed and the salt spray whipped red stripes on one’s cheeks for daring
to venture out.  It could be wild, but it
was never dispiriting because even the depths of winter brought surprising new
palettes of light to wash over the sky, boosting morale.  Yet in the first, swooning, days of spring
there was almost too much light and
it hurt my eyes after months of London.
April by the sea on a sunny afternoon - I looked at my old clock and
could barely credit that it was going on for six - it must, surely, be time for
a chocolate bun.

My little brother, Sam, was lying on his stomach on the
sitting-room carpet, transfixed by something on the television.

“Hey,” he said, “did you know we’re getting ITV?”

“Everybody’s getting ITV, stupid.”

“Are they?”  He
looked doubtful.  “Bill Hawking isn’t.”

My mother came into the room with two cups of tea.

“That’s because the Hawkings don’t have a set,
Samuel,” she said, handing me a cup.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

“Fine, thanks.”

I gave her an awkward kind of a hug over the teacups
because I’d been a bit surly when I’d arrived at the house and she’d ordered me
to bed as if I were eight years old, like Sam.
As always, I’d forgotten how tiny she was, how petite in every way; the
complete antithesis of me.  I felt like a
great, galumphing elephant next to my mother.
Her brown hair was cut quite short and curled softly around her face,
with a wide streak of silver flaring from the centre of her head, as if going
grey was a rather glamorous decision that her hair had decided to make.  She was wearing a perfect, simple white shirt
and a wide, boldly patterned skirt of green and yellow and red, cinched tight
at her waist.  The skirt rustled and
dipped as she moved, there was so much fabric in it.  Possibly net petticoats under it, too. Talk
about New Look!  (We’d both been
intoxicated when clothing restrictions and the meagre amounts of fabric allowed
during the war were dropped.)

“You look beautiful, Mummy,” I said.

She looked surprised.  Actually, we were both rather surprised I’d said it.

“Thank you, Rosa.
You look lovely, too.  Isn’t that
dress a glorious shade of red!”  She put
down her cup and picked up the hem, fingering the warp and woof, casting her milliner’s
eye over it.  “Too much blue for
strawberry and too much orange for raspberry.”

“Tomato?”  I
suggested.

“Squashed tomatoes and stew!”  Sam sang out.

“That’s enough out of you,” my mother straightened up.

“You look like a monkey and you smell like one, too!”

“There’s only one person round here smells like that
and he’s having a bath the instant his programme’s over,” she peered at the
set, blind as a bat without her glasses.
“What’s that you’re watching, Samuel?”

“Auntie Kathleen.
She’s gone to the doctor’s and he’s got his steth-thingy out.”

“Oh, heavens!”
She made a flying leap at the television set and her petticoats took a
minute to subside.  “You’re not watching
that rubbish, I can tell you.  It’s going
off immediately.  So there.”

Sam started to wail, “But it’s Auntie Kathleen!  It’s Auntie Kathleen!”

“It’ll be that Doctor film, Mummy[31].  With Dirk Bogarde.  There’s no harm in it,” I suggested.

“Well, you can never be too sure, Dirk Bogarde or no
Dirk Bogarde.  Not with Kathleen’s
films.  That St Trinians[32]
film she was in was ideal family viewing until she popped up as the geography
teacher.  They ought to warn you about
her in the Radio Times.”

“Ought to warn you about who in the Radio Times?”

My father had come into the room wearing his striped
apron and brandishing a pair of tongs.

“Kathleen,” said my mother.

“Why, what’s she done now?  I thought it was her husband that you were so
cross with, Millicent.  Do you know,
Rosa, your mother has vowed never to speak to him again because he caused her beautiful
daughter to be poisoned?  Ha!”  He laughed.
“And not just food poisoning, but uranium!  Uranium!”

“And the rest,” my mother muttered, darkly.

“And what rest?”

She made a face at my brother, one of those not in front of the children faces that
immediately alerted Sam to something he’d been paying little attention to
before.  His black eyebrows shot up into
points and his ears seemed to prick, visibly, like those of an elf.

“Bath-time,” she grabbed his skinny shoulder and
propelled him out of the room.

“There is more?” My father turned to me.  “What else is Tristram responsible for,
Rosa?”

“Oh, you know . . chases, shootings, swims across the
Thames, more chases, more shootings,” I ticked off the list, as if it were just
another of our games.  What was the point
of dwelling in darkness when you could live in the light?

“By the way, Daddy, have you made any chocolate buns
recently?”

He had and we both agreed that, even though it was
Friday evening and preparations for the Shabbat meal were in full swing, a plate
of chocolate buns would do me no harm at all.
I promised to finish the lot before my mother returned and keep deeply
schtum.  A chocolate bun is a halfway
house between a French profiterole, or éclair (with a plain chocolate and crème
patissière filling instead of whipped cream) and the Jewish rugulach, which has
a more elastic dough than choux pastry; often involving cream cheese.  It has more heft and chew to it than a
profiterole, in other words.  I’ve never
had one anywhere else, so I think my father may have invented it.  He watched me out of the corner of one eye,
while he stirred things on the hob.

“What have they been feeding you on in London,
Rosa?  Apart from uranium?”

“Um, well, I was doing for myself in my room in
Battersea,” I licked the chocolate out of my second bun, “and I found that
adding things to soup worked quite well.
I mean, if you’ve got a few cold potatoes hanging about from supper the
night before, then stirring them into a tin of tomato soup and dribbling in
some Worcestershire Sauce, or chopping up some tinned meat and strewing it over
the top can be . .”

“Vegetables?”
He’d gone rather quiet.

“Oh, yes.
Heaps.  Frozen peas with a
spoonful of Bovril, for example . .”  I
tried to think of a few other examples, but there weren’t really any other
examples.

“I expect you eat out every now and again?”

“Oh, yes.  All
the time.  Lots of milky coffee, you know
and . . beer and . . crisps.  Lots and lots of crisps.”

He looked considerably more shocked than he had when
I’d brought up the shootings.

“Feh!”  He
exclaimed.  “I was going to ask you to
choose between carrots and parsnips, but I shall do both.  And the swede.  And the turnips.”

“Scrumptious.”

And it would
be; everything that my father cooked tasted good, even swede and turnips.

“I’ll lay,
shall I?”  I pulled open the knife and
fork drawer.  “Is it just us?”

“Us and Next Door.”

The long table in the dining-room was draped down to
the floor in a white table-cloth, with a row of silver candlesticks along the
centre.  It looked as elegant as could be
in that room that my parents had painted deep, gentian blue.  A few years earlier, I’d helped my mother
paint gold stars on the blue ceiling, holding the feet of the ladder steady on
top of the table while my mother strained upwards with her paintbrush, like a
pocket Michelangelo.  On clear nights,
when the black velvet curtains were open, their hems tumbled over themselves in
fat folds, the stars outside appeared to swim across the sky to meet ours in a
seamless progression.

I’d laid the table and changed out of the red dress
that I’d been wearing for ever and a day, when the old couple who lived next
door in Coast Cottage arrived.  She was
bearing an enormous platter of vegetables.

“Not more
vegetables!”  I exclaimed.

“Oh dear, have you too many?  I should have asked beforehand.  I’ve made a hash of things, haven’t I?”  She looked so crestfallen.  “I’ll take them away immediately, it will be
no trouble.”

“Don’t you dare!”
My father boomed, advancing upon her with a ladle.  “Mrs Dyminge, don’t you dare!  Your vegetables are like nobody else’s.  We all
love your vegetables.”

Her fluffy white head disappeared altogether in an
enormous bear hug.  My father was just so embarrassing.

When she came up for air, her cheeks were flushed with
pink.

“Golly, I haven’t grown
them, Jerzy dear.  Just bought them from
the greengrocers in St Margaret at Cliffe, you know.”

“No matter; they will be splendid, I am sure.”  He took the platter from her.  “What have you done with the old man,
Frances?”

She glanced around the kitchen.

“Oh.  He was
here a minute ago.  I seem to have lost
him on the way.”

I went to look for him, going out of our kitchen door
and stepping over the low wall that separated Shore House and Coast Cottage,
trying not to put my big feet on the cushions of plants that Mrs Dyminge had
cultivated in her garden that was, essentially, a gentle slope of shingle.  She had sea asters and sea kale, thymes and
irises, minute tulips sprouting among pads of thrift, golden gorse and - in the
summer - thickets of blue vipers bugloss.
I could give you the Latin if you’d like.  No?  It
was Mrs Dyminge who’d taught me the names of flowers, of course.  (I take full credit for remembering them, but
even somebody with my abilities needs to be alerted to interesting things to
begin with.)

“Major Dyminge?”
I lifted the latch on their back door to call inside.

Nobody answered, so I walked around the front of the
house and held my hand over my eyes to shield them from the surprisingly strong
sun, which was descending in the west.

Two figures were sitting on the Dyminges’ front wall,
smoking cigarettes and scanning the sea.
They both wore odd, battered-looking hats and one had a newspaper spread
open on his lap.

“Which horse takes your fancy, Uncle Albert?”  I cried and they turned their sea-toasted,
old faces to watch me pick my way towards them in my green heels, trying not to
massacre anything underfoot.

“Your uncle favours Crimson Star, but I’ve told him Impending
Danger is the only sure-fire bet,” Major Dyminge spoke for Uncle Albert -
as everybody did - because my mother’s younger brother (and uncle number 3 in
this uncle-ridden story) never said anything much at all, having been hurt in
the brain when he was a baby.

“How are you, Rosa?”
Major Dyminge got up from the wall and tipped his peculiar hat.

“Extremely well, dear Major,” I said and gave him a
kiss on the cheek.

Then I went over to my uncle and patted his hand - aware
that a kiss would only frighten him away - and comprehension crept into his
blank, round face, slowly.  He smiled and
hung his head.  Then he picked up his
paper, as if to shield himself with it.

I turned to Major Dyminge, who took my chin in one calloused
hand and squinted at me with his functioning eye, as if I might have changed
since we’d last met.  He sighed, rather,
as if he’d been holding his own breath along with my face, and then he let both
go.  He tugged his hat further down over
his forehead and turned back to the sea.

“You were worried, weren’t you?”  It struck me even as I spoke.  “Was that why you didn’t come inside the
house?”

“Poison,” he remarked, his back to me.  “Terrible stuff.”

The Major had been poisoned, you see.  Centuries ago, he’d been poisoned by Fascists
and it had deformed his face from that day forwards.

“Come and have some vegetables,” I said.  “You too, Uncle Albert.  We have enough vegetables to open our very
own greengrocers.”

“Is it a Jewish thing?”  Major Dyminge enquired politely, as we walked
back to our house.

“Not particularly . .
I think it’s more of a ‘feed Rosa up until she bursts’ thing, actually,”
I laughed.  And then it slipped out: “If
Arko doesn’t kill me, the vegetables will!”

Major Dyminge stopped, abruptly, on the threshold of
Shore House.  I stopped, too, and
steadied myself, fighting that dizzy feeling; up high on the Big Dipper again,
swaying in the empty air.  Then voices
reached us.  The Friday night feast was
waiting, so I hurried in.

The candles had been lit, the wine un-corked and two
glossy challah loaves were sitting on the table.  My brother was already there, washed and
scrubbed, his little yarmulke on top of his tight, black curls.  My father never wore one and was still
sporting his ridiculous beret, but Sam had asked to be bought his, for some
unknown reason.  This meal was as Jewish
as our family got, actually.  I’d once
joked that Daddy only celebrated his God with food and he’d looked
scandalised.

“God is not in food?”
He’d exclaimed.  “If he’s anywhere
at all, Rosa, he’s surely in food!”

Jerzy Stone was in his element, therefore.  With great ceremony, he carried an enormous
fish on a plate to the table and set it down amid the legions of vegetables.

“May I sit beside you, Mr Smith?”  Mrs Dyminge addressed Uncle Albert.  “Doesn’t the table look superb!”  She clapped her hands.  “Loaves and fishes.  How wondrously biblical!”

“Indeed.  For
not only is it our Shabbat, but we are celebrating the return of the Prodigal
daughter,” boomed my father.

“Prodigal?” I queried, sitting down beside my brother
and within easy reach of the roast potatoes.
“I’m not sure I like that word.
Don’t you mean prodigious?”

“No he doesn’t,” said my mother, decidedly.  “If anybody’s prodigal, it’s you, Rosa.  Turnips anyone?”

I wondered how she knew that I’d spent the entirety of
my six months wages - the money from the secretarial agency and the pittance I’d got from HQ - and then some.  Perhaps the green shoes had given me away.  My mother had grown up dirt poor and worked
like a Trojan all her life (as she constantly reminded me), and knew the cost
of everything.

“Now, what are your plans for the future, Rosa
dear?”  Asked Mrs Dyminge.  “Is Cambridge quite passé?”

“Cambridge just wasn’t me, Mrs Dyminge.  It’s not that I’m not intellectual, of
course, but it was just so passive;
listening to other people tell me things . .”
I helped myself to some delectable-looking caramelised parsnips.

“No, that’s never been your strong point,” my mother
agreed.

“ . . I think I’m a more active type of person, actually.
I’m hoping to prove to my uncle Tristram that I’m a safe pair of hands,
because I’ve got so much more to
offer in his area of expertise.”

“And what area would that be, exactly?”  Asked Mrs Dyminge.

There was a sudden hush around the table and a number
of forks paused a fraction away from a number of mouths.

“Import/Exports,” I said, rather fast.  “It’s frightfully interesting.  Honestly.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Mrs Dyminge, “but . . uranium,
dear?  I do hope Tristram’s not an arms
dealer of any description.”

It was impossible to miss how, well, stunned, everybody around the table
looked (except my little brother, who was busy trying to toast a chunk of
challah in the flame of a candle).

“Oh.”  She was
flustered.  “Have I spoken out of
turn?  You mustn’t mind me; I’m the
world’s nosiest parker.”

“Yes you are, Frances,” Major Dyminge spoke up for the
first time.  “It’s quite obvious what Tristram
is; what he’s been for years.  Tristram
Upshott is a spy.”

Sam dropped his bread on the table and a brief flame
flared.

“A spy!”  His
mouth fell open.  “Gawrsh!”  He gave it his best Goofy voice.

“Samuel!”  My
mother grabbed her glass of water and chucked it at the tablecloth.

And I suppose that was when I should have been quoting
the Official Secrets Act of 1939 to them and swearing them all to silence.  But I didn’t.
Because my eye had chanced to fall on Mrs Dyminge’s platter of
vegetables, where it sat beside the hole that my brother had burned in the
tablecloth.  Mrs Dyminge’s white platter
decorated with a stick lady wearing a big hat and picking flowers, in an
unmistakeably Finnish design, was not Mrs Dyminge’s at all.  It was Arko’s.

12.  A Platter of Vegetables

My first thought was that it might be
contaminated.  I closed my eyes and
played over the conversation I’d had with Uncle Tristram in that coffee bar in
Putney, from:

“They’re
smuggling uranium, and huge quantities of it at that . .” to “Arko Arkonnen is the devil incarnate”.

I had every word off pat, of course, but nowhere in
our conversation had my uncle specified whether it was only the yellow glass
that was contaminated with uranium, or whether all of the deliveries from
Finland were carrying the stuff.
Whatever the case, it simply wasn’t worth hanging about.  I grabbed the platter and streaked out of the
room.

“Goodness, she does
like her vegetables, doesn’t she?”  Mrs
Dyminge’s voice followed me all the way into the drawing-room.

I stood there for a bit, holding the platter at arm’s
length, humming and hawing over what on earth to do with it.  Initially, I scooped a rug up from the
polished floorboards and bundled the thing up and then I tried to stuff it
behind a cushion on the sofa, but that didn’t feel like an adequate enough
precaution.  In the end, I opened a
window and leant through to drop the bundle onto the stones outside, shutting
the window firmly after it.  Then I did
what I should have done the minute I’d got off the train and come home.  I rummaged through the address book for Uncle
Tristram’s phone number and dialled it.

“FLAxman 4390,” he answered, promptly.

“Uncle Tristram, it’s me, Rosa.”

“Hullo, Gypsy.
I was wondering when I might hear from you.  How are
you?  Alright?”

“Oh, yes, yes, fine and all that.  At home in Kent, actually . .”

“Nice weather?”

“Good grief, yes . .”

“You sound a little het up, Gypsy.  Are
you het up?”

“Well I am.
Yes.  If you’ll just let me
finish, Uncle, I’ve got some tremendously vital stuff to say.”

“Vital?  I’m all
ears.”

“Rosa?”  My
mother stuck her head around the sitting-room door.  “Your dad says we’ve got plenty more
vegetables in the kitchen and he’s putting some more out on the table for you
as we speak, only it’s a bit rude to our guests, wouldn’t you say, dashing off
like that and . . .  Who are you talking
to in the middle of dinner, Rosa?”

“Uncle Tristram.”

“Tristram?”  She
scowled.  “Well you can just tell
Tristram Upshott from me that . .”

“What’s that?”
My uncle went, down the line.

“It’s Mummy.
She sends her love and . .”

“I most certainly do not send my love!”

“I heard that,” he said.

“And he
sends his love, Mummy.”

“Well, he can keep it and I don’t care if he hears
that, too!”

Her head disappeared from the side of the door.

“Three way conversations are not ideal for vital
information,” Uncle Tristram observed.
And then, in a louder voice, “Two lumps, please and plenty of gin in
it.  Now,
where were we?”

I cut to the chase and whispered down the receiver, in
case anybody else was lurking nearby.

“The contaminated glass, Uncle, was it just the yellow
glass, or all of it?  I mean all of the
deliveries: the mustard-coloured pottery and the white platters with stick
ladies wearing hats and picking flowers, were they carrying tremendous amounts of uranium, too?”

“I can’t say I know anything about stick ladies
wearing hats, Rosa, but, as far as I’m aware, the uranium gives the glass - and
probably the pottery, too - it’s concentrated, yellow colour.  So I think we can rule out the white
platters.  Why?”

“Oh, phew!”  The
relief was overwhelming.  “Only we’ve got
a stick lady here, if you know what I mean, and we’ve all eaten heaps of
vegetables out of her.”

“Plenty of
gin,” he said, loudly, “because I think I’m going to need it.”

“Mrs Dyminge brought her and I’ve wrapped her up in a
carpet and put her outside.”

There was a distinct pause, while he thought through
my new information.

“Let me get this straight.  Your neighbour owns a similar white platter to
those found among the deliveries from Arko.
Which you’ve spotted because you deliberately chose to ignore my orders
not to unpack those boxes.”

Crumbs, he wasn’t going to go harking on about all
that, was he?  This was precisely why I’d
been giving him a wide berth.

“Marvellous!”
He exclaimed, rather unexpectedly.
“This is the first damn break-through we’ve had in weeks.  Bring the stick lady in, would you,
Rosa?  And take a good look at her
bottom.”

“Righto!  I’m
just putting the receiver down.  Don’t go
anywhere.”

I ran to the window, my heart beating like crazy in my
breast.  I mean to say; this was more like it!  The break-through had come from me, Rosa Stone (spy in Her Majesty’s
Secret Service).

I unwrapped the platter by the window and couldn’t
help noticing that a number of greasy patches had appeared on my mother’s
Chinese rug.  However, there was work to
do.  I took a swift look at the bottom of
the dish on my way back to the telephone.

“It says ‘R’co
& Son Glassware, Dover and there’s a little blue cross underneath that,
which is lying on its side.”

“Ah, the Siniristilippu,” he said.  “It’s the flag of Finland, so we’re on the
right lines.  And the company is simply
called ‘Arko’, you say?”

“Yes, but it’s a capital ‘R’ for Uncle Reg and then co
for company.”

“What do you mean, ‘R’
for Uncle Reg’?  Who’s Uncle Reg when
he’s at home?”

“Well, I’m glad you asked that, Uncle, because that
was the next part of my vital information.”

I sat down on the sofa and told him exactly what had
happened after I ran into Magnus at HQ, missing nothing out because who could
tell what was important and what wasn’t?

“Richard Burton?”
Came his voice down the line and then, louder in my ear, “Just a splash
more gin this time, darling.”

“ ‘. . Into the
car, or I shoot you!’  And then
Magnus jumped right into the black sedan with him and I was so galvanized with
horror that I just took my life in my hands and I broke free, not looking back,
but running and running and running some more, all the way to Charing Cross
station.”

It had gone very quiet at his end.

“Are you still there, Uncle?”

“Damn,” he said, sounding rather subdued.  “Are you alright, Rosa?”

“Yes, yes, of course I am.  You asked me that before and I said I
was.”  We were going round in circles.

“I should have detained that Commie traitor while I
had the chance. Christ only knows why I let him stroll out of HQ like that.”

“Did you already have your eye on Magnus, then?”

I was highly surprised to learn this.

“Mmm.  He let
slip he was an Arkonnen . . . I have to say, I’m completely bemused about Arko
operating in Dover and being an Uncle Reg.
We’ve got a file a yard wide on Arko Arkonnen and none of this begins to tally.”

“Perhaps your file is wrong.  After all, not many people can achieve one
hundred per cent accuracy when relating information.”  He didn’t reply, so I hammered it home, “Like
I can.”

“Point taken, Gypsy.
You’ve done well.”

I was thrilled, I really was.  If the boss said you’d done well, then, by
anybody else’s estimation, you had in fact done a fabulous, if not brilliant, job.

“So I’m back on the payroll?”

“You most certainly are not!”

“What?!”

“You are not to involve yourself further in any aspect of this operation,
understand?”

“What?!”

My mother appeared at the door again.  “Why are you shouting, Rosa?  We can hear you all the way from the
dining-room.  Oh my goodness, you’re not
still talking to Tristram, are you?”  She
marched up to me and held her hand out.
“Give me the phone this instant, Rosa.
Go on; I won’t ask twice.”

I gave her the phone.

“Tristram Upshott, this is Millicent Stone here, and I
have one thing to say and one thing only. You are not to involve my daughter in your unsavoury business dealings, do
you hear me?  I don’t care if the whole
future of Great Britain is at stake.  I
won’t have it.  No I won’t.  You just keep your unsavoury dealings to
yourself . . talking of which, may I have a word with my sister, please.  Thank you.”

I kicked the Chinese rug under an occasional table while
she had her back turned and sidled out of the room with Mrs Dyminge’s
dish.  I carried it into the kitchen and
left it in the sink because they would surely be on lemon syllabub by that
time.

“There you are, Rosa,” said my father when I
re-appeared in the dining-room.  “I think
you owe our guests an apology, don’t you?

“I’m so sorry, Mrs Dyminge.  Major Dyminge.”  I sat back down behind my plate, which was
jam-packed with vegetables.  “I love your
dish so much Mrs Dyminge; I just wanted to get a better look at it.  The light’s better in the drawing-room.  Wherever
did you get it?”

“My Scandinavian platter?  It was a present, dear.  From one of my pupils.  Let me think which class,” she put down her
dessert spoon and crinkled her brow.  “I
think it might have been ‘Mystery, Murder
and Mayhem: the alternative face of humdrum’.

Mrs Dyminge wrote rather odd detective stories.  I’d never been able to finish one, but she
had her fans, who were also rather odd.
Every now and again one of them would make a pilgrimage to see her and
knock on the door of Shore House by mistake, so I had some experience of their
oddness: they tended to be dressed in brown, with hats straight out of the
1930s - sinister bits of bird wing and netting - and, often, galoshes on their
feet.  One - a woman, because they were always women - had even been wearing a
monocle.  Sam and I had spent a wonderful
afternoon spying on her and Mrs Dyminge through the Dyminge’s side window,
while they drank pots of tea and ate biscuits and chatted about murder.

Anyhow, Mrs Dyminge also taught evening classes at the
‘Stute in Dover, which is where she must have been given Arko’s dish.  I ate a parsnip while I considered what to
say next.

“Well, I must say, I do love it.  I don’t suppose
you could ask your pupil where they got it from, Mrs Dyminge?  I mean, I’d love to have one of my own.”

Mrs Dyminge looked delighted.

“For your flat in town, dear Rosa?  Gosh, please take mine.  No, I insist.
Call it a flat warming present.
I’d be so pleased if you
would.”

This wasn’t going to plan.

“Oh, no!  I
couldn’t possibly deprive you of yours,” I said, vehemently.  “Not in a million years!”

“Oh you must!”
She exclaimed.  “You simply must!”

“Let the girl have her own dish, Frances,” Major
Dyminge intervened.  “If she wants it so
much.”

Mrs Dyminge subsided and picked up her pudding spoon
again.

“Well, I shall just have to put my thinking cap on and
remember who the dickens gave it to me . . .
Oh, what a sublime pudding this is, Jerzy!  Nectar for the gods!”

I tried a more general approach and threw a question
at the table:

“Is there a glass factory in Dover, does anybody
know?  Glass and other ceramics?  Only the dish is made in Dover, by the stamp
on its bottom.  It says ‘R’co & Son Glassware, Dover.”

“Bottom!”  My
little brother shouted.  “Rosa said
‘bottom’!”

“Stop it Sam, I’m asking a serious question.”

My father stood up and blew the candles out.

“Enough, Samuel.
Now Major and Mrs Dyminge, would you like coffee in the drawing-room?”

I tried again.

“No, but is there?
A glass factory?”

My father took Mrs Dyminge’s arm and led her out of
the room as if they were at the head of a stately procession and I noticed her
smile shyly up at him as they passed my chair.

“Bottom!”  Sam
gave it a last whirl and ran out after the grown-ups.

Only Major Dyminge and I were left at table and he
shook out the napkin that had been lying on his lap and placed it by his empty
bowl.

“R’co and Son,
eh?”  He said.  “Would this be the R’co who might kill you, Rosa?”

13.  Cullet, Crizzling & Murder

So I told Major Dyminge the whole story.  He’d led an adventurous life and had plenty
of experience of the ‘genre’.  (Besides,
Major Dyminge had once saved me from drowning in the sea, which none of my
family would ever forget.)  I hoped, in a vague kind of way, that he
might have a few tips for me, but all he’d said was:

“Promise me one thing, Rosa.  That you won’t begin searching for that glass
factory all by yourself.”

I’d promised and then he had gone for his coffee and
I’d followed Sam up to bed.

Saturday stayed fine and I did something I
hadn’t done for the longest time; something I’d loved to do when I was
younger.  I jumped out of the drawing-room
window, still wearing my nightie and slippers, and ran along the beach, certain
that nobody else was up and about and that the expanses of shingle and sand and
mussel-encrusted rock pools that had come up for a breather while the tide was
at it lowest, all belonged to me.
However, in the distance, picking his way over the tumble of rocks that
lay beneath Ness Point, I made out the unmistakeable figure of my Uncle Albert,
beachcombing.

Uncle Albert was in love with the sea and scarcely
worked in my mother’s millinery business any more.  So astonished had he been when first brought
down from London to the coast, that we’d all had to run after him into the
waves to prevent him from drowning himself with glee.

“He’s gone native,” my mother had remarked, not long
after our arrival at St Margarets (I remember how she’d smiled to see him so
happy).  It was as if she had released
him - as you might release a tired pit pony after a lifetime of arduous work in
the dark - setting him down in a lush, green field and watching him gallop off.
I didn’t wave; it would only have un-settled
him.

Seagulls swooped about, taking their fill of the
mussels and a tiny crab scuttled sideways when it saw me running and jumping on
the wet sand.  Perfect puffs of cloud sat
motionless in the lively blue sky.  I got
as far as Major Dyminge’s boat, moored up by the jetty, and sat down beside it.

Over at the other end of the beach, where the road
curved down the hill in a lush, green sweep - for holm oaks and pines and thick
tangles of ivy gave St Margarets Bay quite a Mediterranean look - the girl who
worked at the Coastguard pub brought some empty bottles out and put them in the
pub bins.  We knew each other, so I waved
at her and she waved back.  We weren’t
completely alone on the beach, you see.
Before the war, there’d been more houses and a tea-rooms and St
Margarets had been rather a smart little resort until the army had taken it for
a ‘battle school’, which had pretty much done for it, except for the bit of the
pub that was left standing and the houses we were soon to move into.  Since then, the ruins had been swept away and
the New Promenade and a small slipway had been built, instead.

I ran over to the slipway, to where Major Dyminge
moored his boat.  The Major’s boat was
his pride and joy and no wonder when she was the prettiest tub in the world.  He had spent years sawing away at lengths of
wood and constructed a magical vessel; like the best boat that was ever
launched on Regent’s Park pond, only full-size.
Her sides swelled gently and she gleamed conker-brown.  It looked like he’d been applying another
coat of varnish because a couple of tins of the stuff were stacked inside,
along with some paintbrushes, upright in an old petrol can.  When she was in use, he rigged her up with
spotless white sails that my mother had made on her sewing machine.  I ran a hand along The Rose of Kent’s glossy flank and wondered whether I might ask
the Major to take me out in her.  Perhaps
we could sail through Dover harbour looking for tell-tale signs of a glass
factory, whatever they might be.  (Sometimes it feels as though knowing a lot
about some subjects only serves to highlight my ignorance about others.)  It was obvious I needed to do some research,
if I was to proceed any further with my undercover work.

I ran back down the beach, brushed some of the sand
off the soles of my feet and wriggled through the drawing-room window.  I was heading back to my bedroom, where I kept
all twenty-three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, leather-bound and in
glorious alphabetical order, plus one index volume containing an atlas.

I didn’t waste time dressing, but pulled out the
relevant volume, sat cross-legged on my bed and looked up Glass.  There was a satisfyingly lengthy entry (which
I will now proceed to summarize).

In short, I discovered that the basic ingredient of
glass was sand, or ‘silica’ to give it its proper name, and that other minerals
were added to it, creating a glass recipe known as ‘batch’.  Those other minerals being, generally, soda
ash and limestone.  After the batch had
been mixed, it was then melted in a furnace, which had been fired to an extremely
high temperature.  If uranium were to be
introduced, it would have been as an oxide, and - as Uncle Tristram had said -
its purpose would be to add colour to the batch.  All sorts of colours could be produced with
different metallic oxides:  violet-blue
with the addition of cobalt, peacock-blue with copper, pale pink with tellurium
(to give three examples).

I also learnt quite a bit about crystallisation, and
the unusual ability of glass not to
form crystals – although, should crystals be desired, a controlled amount could
be introduced, creating a type of glassware that was a combination of the best
bits of glass and pottery and, therefore, jolly strong.  Then there was the vast subject of
sandcasting, pressing and moulds (which I won’t go into here) and a host of
interesting new words: such as cullet,
being broken or waste glass suitable for re-melting, crizzling, being deterioration in the fabric of the glass and annealing, being gradual cooling to
prevent cracks.

I rolled the lovely words around in my mouth with
pleasure and lapped up every fact that Britannica had to give me.  Even so, I wanted more - encyclopaedias always skimmed the surface.  Dover Library did its best, but was unlikely
to have anything more in-depth on the subject.
There would be books I could send off for, of course, although I was
sadly short of funds . . but then I was forced to remind myself that I wasn’t
actually going to be manufacturing any glass, personally.  Facts were all very well - facts were wonderful - but I had a tendency to
overdo the lapping until I was stuffed to bursting and immobilised by them.

I had to try to think in a more general way, if I was
going to progress with a plan.  I replaced
the encyclopaedia in strict, alphabetical order and made a start at getting
dressed.  As I was putting on my
dark-green linen shirt and a pair of Capri pants, I went over some of the information
that I already knew (for me, going over information is much like re-running a
spool of film).  The image of Magnus’
Uncle Reg immediately popped up.  Uncle
Reg leaning across the pub table to offer me a lift home:

“Dover?”  He’d
said.  “What a coincidence.  I’ve a factory down there, would you believe?”

I shook my head to dislodge the picture.  How interesting that he’d used the word
‘factory’ when I’d just learnt the correct term was either ‘glasshouse’ or
‘glassworks’; he hadn’t wanted to give too much away.  But that was just semantics.  The main thing was, wouldn’t we have heard of
a big glassworks in Dover?  Or anywhere near
Dover?  Because it had to be a big
affair.  From what I could gather, modern
glass was always produced on an industrial scale simply because the furnaces
had to be so incredibly powerful.

Halfway through tucking in my shirt, it struck me that
I’d missed something crucial.  I thought
back to Mr Orchard’s office at Heaviside
Import/Exports and the dictation I’d struggled to take down while that
American tickled my neck.  They’d been
drawing up a contract to export one million pieces to America.  One million pieces of substantially sized yellow
glass!  Only a truly enormous concern
could produce such an amount for a single order and a glassworks that size
couldn’t possibly be based in our part of Kent without any of us having heard
of it.  I sat down on the edge of my bed
and thought it through.  Uncle Reg had
two companies.  The company on the
contract was Dilko Arkonnen Vas-Glas
& Ceramics, Finland and they were evidently huge and perfectly capable
of producing one million pieces of glass to export to Sambaware Enterprises, Cape Prince of Wales, Seward Peninsula,
Territory of Alaska, USA.  So what
did R’co & Son Glassware, Dover
do?

I began to brush my long, tangled hair, an activity
that always helped me to think.  There
was something else that was troubling me.
Just why had my uncle said that the huge quantities of uranium were most
probably being exported to the Soviets when Sambaware
Enterprises was an American company?
(Not that Alaska was a fully paid up part of the United States, being
only a territory.)  I paused with the
hairbrush in my hand and looked at the fool in the mirror.  Alaska?!

I opened the Britannica with the atlas inside, going
straight to the index at the back and ‘S’ for Seward Peninsula.  (They say pulses can quicken and I felt it
happen.)  The Seward Peninsula was just
below the Arctic Circle, in north-western Alaska, and only the tiniest sliver
of blue sea separated it from eastern Russia.
And there was Cape Prince of Wales at the far west of the Peninsula,
like a finger pointing across the Bering Strait and nearly, so nearly, scraping its nail on dry
land.  It was like looking at a map of
the English Channel, for just as St Margaret’s Bay was the closest point to
France, so Cape Prince of Wales was the closest point to Russia.

I felt as if I were just beginning to catch up with
HQ.  The ‘bad Yank’ who’d tickled my neck
- Mr B Dexter, as I recalled from the contract - was a link in the chain of
manufacture and supply that led, eventually, to the Soviets.  How tortuous it all was, though!  Why make yellow glass in Finland, bring it to
England, export it from here to sub-Arctic Alaska and then ship it over the
Baring Strait to Russia, when Finland shared a border with Russia in the first
place?  Was Finland on the wrong side of
the country, I pondered?  Could it be
that the uranium was specifically needed on the furthest reaches of Eastern
Russia, where it ran up to the Bering Sea?
I studied the map, mouthing the place names: Chukotskiy Poluostrov,
Korvakskoye Nagor’ye, Kamchatka.  To me,
they were as outlandish as the mountains of the moon, unimaginable regions of
ice liberally sprinkled with the letter ‘k’.

I slapped the great volume shut and slotted it back
into the bookcase that had come free with the encyclopaedias.  I could research Chukotskiy Poluostrov until
the cows came home but it was the ‘English connection’ that I’d discovered; that was where I’d stolen a march on HQ.  As far as they’d been concerned, the glass
had travelled from Finland to Heaviside
Import/Exports without a hitch, and all under the eagle eye of that native
Finn Arko Arkonnen.  But they had been
wrong.  Something else was going on, here
in Kent, something the smugglers desperately wanted to keep hidden - enough to
falsify information about Vas-Glas and it’s managing director and insinuate it
into the files of HQ, and enough to
make trad jazz-loving, myopic Reg Arkonnen from Hull impersonate a
Scandinavian.  Underneath the secret
negotiations to smuggle uranium-laden glass to the Soviets there was another
secret altogether.  An even more
dangerous secret.

I was thoughtful at my late breakfast and let Sam show
me the new additions to his immense cigarette card collection with barely a
murmur.  He chattered on until his best
friend, Bill Hawking, arrived, carrying a football, to claim him.

I wandered outside and hoisted myself up onto the sea
wall, watching Sam and Bill dribble the ball down the promenade.  Sam had his mouth open, talking non-stop, and
was hurling his short body about with unnecessary effort, while Bill scarcely
appeared to run, but dipped his smooth, fair head and scooped the ball with a
long leg in one, economical movement.  It
was rather like watching a sparrow hop around a great wading bird.  Bill was only a year older than Sam, but many
inches taller and quiet and serious where Sam was garrulous.  He lived in a council house in the village
with his mother, who’d never been married and never been tempted to put a
curtain ring on her wedding finger, either; she was a dark dynamo of a woman,
brim-full of organising energy, who ran every village event going.

The Hawkings (and the Dyminges) had ties with our
family that reached back into the past, to long before I was born. When we’d
moved to the house on the beach, Major and Mrs Dyminge and the Hawkings had all
come, too, like a job lot.  Mrs Dyminge
was especially close to Bill Hawking - as close as any grandmother - and he
would run down the zig-zag cliff path to the beach to see her, before he
collected my brother for a game of football.

The wind had
got up and, behind the two boys, the sea slapped up against Ness Point, turning
grey when a dark cloud hid the sun and then blue once more as the wind sent it
about its business.

“No Channel swimmers today?”  Mrs Dyminge straightened up with a trowel in
her hand, her white hair blowing in all directions.

“I didn’t see you there, Mrs Dyminge,” I clutched at
my heart, as one does when taken by surprise.

“You were many miles away.  Don’t let me disturb you.”

She bent to her work, pulling tufts of interloping
grass from a clump of green thrift.  I
swivelled round on the wall and watched her for a minute.

“How can you tell what’s grass and what’s
thrift?”  I asked.  “To my eyes they look just the same!”

“Thrift hugs the ground, as if it’s forever in the
teeth of a howling gale.  Grass will do
that, too, but one day it will aspire to grow taller.  Its aspirations give it away.”

“That sounds very wise.”

“Wise, dear Rosa?”
She chuckled.  “No.  Just old, I’m afraid.  Old enough to have watched plenty of grass
grow under one’s feet . . there, that’s done.
And jolly boring it was, too!  I
must go and make a cup of coffee immediately.”
She fluttered a finger at me in a sketchy wave and set off with her
trowel.  “Oh, by the way.”  She halted on her garden path.  “I remembered who gave me my Scandinavian
platter.  It came to me in the
night.  Yes . .”  She narrowed her eyes and the sharp planes of
her lean, tanned face seemed to spring into focus.  “I must say, I didn’t warm to her awfully, clever
though she was.  Mmm . . undeniably clever.”

“One of your students, you said?  Was
it Mystery, Murder and Mayhem?”

“Oh, Mystery, Murder and Mayhem, without a shadow of a
doubt.  She had a talent for it; one of
those women who look like butter wouldn’t melt, as they say - neat as two pins
with a closed face - but put a pen in their hand and they dredge up stuff you
certainly wouldn’t show to your granny.
I was rather shocked, although I tried not to let it show because it was
so terrifically well done.  I suppose I
must have succeeded because she turned up on the last day and presented me with
the platter, which came as a pleasant surprise.”

“But who was
it?”

“Well, she was a secretary in London, a married woman
with a holiday home towards Ringwould; one of that group of brand new
bungalows, you know.  ‘Sea-Surf’, or
‘Sea-Turtle’, something in that line.  I
expect they’re very nice.  Very
convenient.  One wouldn’t have to worry
about stairs and nasty falls, of course . .”
She looked dubious.

“But who was
it, Mrs Dyminge?”

“They were here for the summer - last summer, it was -
and her husband was working locally and she was at a bit of a loose end, she
said . .”

“But . .”

“Mrs Dilys Arkonnen.”

I stifled a gasp.

“Yes, that
was it.  I remember the name quite
distinctly because I brought up Tove Jansson and Finn Family Moomintroll[33],
which Bill and I’d absolutely adored, but it didn’t seem to ring any
bells.  Silly really . . I daresay it was
only her husband who was the Finn.
Anyway . . ” she wiped her hands on her tweed skirt absent-mindedly,
leaving a long streak of mud behind, “I doubt she’d be at home; holiday people do come and go so.”

“That’s marvellous, Mrs Dyminge.  You’ve been the most tremendous help!”

“Have I?”  She
beamed.  “I wish you would take my platter, Rosa, I really do.  Go on.
Why not?  I’d simply love it if you would . .”

“Frances!”  The
low growl of Major Dyminge’s voice issued from behind the front door of Coast
Cottage.

I packed a rucksack with provisions, put on
some plimsolls and wheeled out my old bike.
The spokes and handlebars were brown with rust (all metal rusted super
fast by the sea, even if it hadn’t been abandoned for the last three years, as
was the case with my bike).  I stopped
outside the house to see what I could do with a hanky and some spit and Major
Dyminge caught me at it.

“I’m coming with you and no arguments,” he waggled a
finger at me.

“What?
Why?”  This was a bit much.  “I’m only going for a gentle bike ride,
Major.”

“No you’re not.
You’re going to see Mrs Dilys Arkonnen, who is connected to Arko, who
might, or might not have a glass factory in Dover and might, or might not be
going to kill you.  Tell me I’m wrong.”

A tremendous sense of annoyance swelled in my
breast.  This was my adventure . . no - more
than that - this was my work.  They’d had their time and now it was my turn.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more,
Major!”  I said, hotly.  “It’s not admissible under the Official
Secrets Act of 1939, you see.”  And I
swung my leg over my rusty bicycle.

He pushed his misshapen hat back on his head and
glared at me with his working eye, which was such a piercing shade of blue it
was as if it had sucked the power out of the other eye when that one had given
up the ghost.

“Official Secrets Act, what tosh!  I’ve been racking my brains to try to
understand why that young thief, Tristram Upshott, has involved you in this
business and I’ve drawn a complete blank.”
He waggled his finger at me again and his bristly eyebrows shot up and
down in an alarming fashion.  “This is nasty stuff, do you hear me, Rosa?  Nasty.
And I won’t have you shooting off all by yourself thinking you can right
all the wrongs of the world, however much you may want to . .”

“Thief?”  I
yelled (having not heard anything he’d said since he’d said that).
“My Uncle’s not a thief.  How dare you call my uncle a thief?!”

“Och!”  He
shrugged his shoulders in irritation.
“That’s by the by; water under the bridge.  I expect his old skills come in very useful
in his new profession.  What I meant to
say, Rosa, was . .”

“I don’t care what you meant to say!”  I got the pedals moving and pushed off,
slowly, wobbling along the promenade and towards the road.  “Leave me alone, you horrible old man!”

The fire of righteous indignation propelled
me up the steep, cork-screwing road from the bay, but, by the time I’d reached
St Margaret at Cliffe, I was starting to wish I hadn’t said that and the
feeling grew with each turn of the pedals, until it had become a rock that
weighed me down all the way through the village and up to the Dover Road and
beyond.  How could I have said such a
thing?  I’d have been nothing but a few
scraps of white bone buried in the bed of the North Sea, if not for the Major.  How I hated myself.  I gave up pedalling by Oxneybottom Wood and
sat down under a tree to have my picnic.  I stuffed myself with chocolate buns and a
thermos flask full of cocoa, which I suppose I should say turned to ashes in my
mouth (they didn’t, they tasted divine), but I still didn’t feel much
better.  I felt so down I wanted to run
through the trees and then keep going, on and on over the ploughed fields and
through the villages.  On and on and
on.  (When people say, ‘I didn’t know
where to put myself’, they speak metaphorically, of course.  Not me.)
I tipped the thermos upside down to drain the last drops of cocoa into
my mouth and sighed.

My picnic had made me feel drowsy and I lay down with
my face up-turned to the afternoon sun, my thoughts skittering off in a million
directions.  Assuming she was there, what
could I possibly say to Mrs Dilys
Arkonnen, who was (presumably) Reg’s wife and Magnus’ aunt?  And what if Uncle Reg were at home, too?  There was a thought!  Perhaps I’d knock on the door and find the
whole family enjoying a leisurely weekend lunch together, Acker Bilk playing on
the gramophone in the background and Magnus annoying Aunt Dilys by smoking his
roll-ups at table.  Crumbs.  I rolled onto my side and fell asleep.

Heaven knows how long I slept, but I woke up
stiff as a board all along my right side, with a twig stuck to my cheek.  I was cold, too and more than a bit
disorientated until I caught sight of my rusty bike and empty thermos and
remembered my mission.  The whole thing
suddenly seemed pretty daft and I nearly turned back towards home, but for the
little niggle of pride; I needed to achieve something - anything, just to say I’d been to the bungalow would do - before I
apologised to Major Dyminge.  So I limped
over to my bike, stuffed the thermos back in my rucksack and continued my
journey to ‘Sea-Surf’ or ‘Sea-Turtle’, or whatever the Arkonnen’s holiday
bungalow on the Ringwould road turned out to be called.

At some point in my sleep I’d arrived at the sensible
decision not to knock on the front
door (in case Uncle Reg was around) but to scout about and see what I could see.  What I was hoping to find was anybody’s guess
- including my own - but, as I’ve already explained, I possess good noticing
skills.  So that was what I was going to
do; be as low-key as possible and notice.

Bungalows had been cropping up all over the area, but
few of them were as grand and white and hot off the assembly line as ‘Seaspray’
proved to be.  I sailed right past it to
begin with because I thought it was just too big to qualify as a bungalow and
was more of a mansion.  However, when
none of the other bungalows proved to be called ‘Sea-Anything at all’ and I’d ridden
through Ringwould as far as the lane to Kingsdown, I turned right round and
followed a tractor back along the road.
This time I noticed the sign by the gate, so I cycled a bit further along,
propped the bike up against a pillar box and ran over to the front wall,
ducking down low in case anybody happened to be looking out of the net
curtains.  Nobody was about in the road,
thankfully, so I bobbed up and down behind the wall, trying to take in as much
as I could.

The place had a dead feel to it, but then houses with
windows swathed in net often do.  There
were white pillars that made me think of the Deep South mansions in Gone With the Wind[34]
and rose bushes and a lot of lawn that had grown taller than I expected lawns
belonging to people with portico-ed mansions to have.  I thought of Mrs Dyminge’s grass with its
‘aspirations’; the growing season had evidently begun and yet nobody had cut
this grass since the end of the previous year.
It seemed like a clue to me.  So,
screwing up courage, I lifted the latch on the front gate and ran up the
concrete path - scored with a stick as it set, so as to look like flagstones –
and hid behind one of the pillars by the front door.  Crisp, brown leaves were lodged in the
corners of the doorstep where the wind had sent them.  I picked one up and it crumbled between my
fingers.  Then I crouched down and looked
through the letter-box.  A whole pile of
letters had fallen onto the mat and been left to accumulate.  That decided it; I was confident that nobody
was at home.

The view through the letter-box yielded no more clues,
because an inner door of thick, patterned glass was firmly shut, so I stood up
and ran around the front of the house to take a look at the side.  No lavatory window had been left, carelessly,
open and there was no side entrance to the house but, on the plus side, there
was no fence barring the way to the back, so I scuttled all the way around,
expecting to find an expanse of garden; a rockery like a mini-Switzerland and a
bit of a shed, at the very least.  But I
didn’t find a bit of a shed, I found a lot of a shed.

All of the space behind the
house, bar a couple of yards’ width of more scored concrete abutting the back
door, was taken up by a low shed that was considerably bigger than most
people’s houses.  A rectangular, white
building with four windows evenly spaced along the front and all barred.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood
up.  This seemed over the top for a
holiday home in Ringwould.

A thumping great padlock hung from the shed door and
my excitement mounted still further.
There was definitely something
worth hiding inside.  Could it be the
second secret?  How maddening that I
couldn’t get to it!  I yanked the padlock
this way and that, as if it might have been left not fully clicked by mistake,
which, of course, it hadn’t been.  Then I
cupped my hands around the sides of my eyes and tried peering between the
window bars, but all was black and indistinguishable.  Straightening up, I noticed that it was
beginning to grow dark around me and, while the passage between the two white
buildings must have been starved of light at the best of times, it was
positively gloomy now that the clouds above were thickening into a solid wodge
of charcoal grey, rimmed with the last vestiges of daylight.  If twilight were on its way, I must have been
asleep for much, much longer than I’d
imagined.

It was frustrating, but I’d noticed as much as I was
going to notice at ‘Seaspray’.  I sighed
out loud and turned from the window but, even as I turned, a faint glow from
inside the shed imprinted itself on my retina.
I jumped and, instinctively, glanced behind me to find the light that
had cast its reflection onto the shed window.
But there was no light.  I peered
inside the shed once more, my heart now thumping like crazy.  There was no doubt about it, something in
there had begun to glow, modestly at first and then, as if gathering the last
daylight to itself, ever bolder.  Deep in
the recesses of my odd brain, there came a click.  Twilight, black light, ultraviolet light;
three names for similar phenomena.
Arko’s yellow glass was inside the shed and it was starting to fluoresce
under the ultraviolet rays inherent in twilight.  I was transfixed as the glow burned pale
yellow, then gold, then a sharp acid-green, tossing light at the corners of the
shed, at bulky sacks and iron rods stacked against the wall.  At a row of coat hooks hammered high up,
where the figure of a man swung by his neck from a rope.  A gust of wind howled down the gloomy
corridor and swept under the shed door, pawing at the suspended figure.  He swung round to look at me.  It was Mr B Dexter and he’d never see Alaska
again.

14.  The Rare Bird

Immediately after I’d had words with Rosa, I
jumped in the new car, drove over to HQ and convinced the night watchman to let
me in.  It was around ten at night and
the general hubbub had died down and only a few tenacious souls were hunched
over their desks in shirtsleeves, determined to burn the midnight oil.  Slipping past the stairs to the basement, I
detected the rumble of far-flung voices from down below.  Jay Tamang was probably at home, but it wasn’t
Tamang that I’d come to find.  I wanted
to get a look at the files - Arko Arkonnen’s files - because somebody had done
such a thorough job of pulling the wool over our eyes that it looked like we
were all sporting bloody balaclavas.

The whole thing took a bit of effort, because my
section’s remarkably efficient secretary had set up labyrinthine filing systems
of her own devising.  I’d never have
cracked them but for the fact that I’d hung about behind her door one day,
trying to get my lighter to work, and chanced to see what she was up to.  She’d had a type of grid worked out on a
piece of paper and was checking a pile of dockets against it before she filed
them away.  The grid interested me, so I
hung about a bit more and saw her hide it in the back of her desk calendar (one
of those office jobs with a page for every day that one rips off when today
becomes yesterday).   However, even with her
grid to hand, it was hard work finding Arko’s file.  I couldn’t think why she hadn’t been satisfied
with locking her filing cabinets like all the other girls; picking locks was
childsplay by comparison.  I reflected
upon the interesting nature of unnecessarily
devious minds, before I switched on a desk lamp, hung my jacket on the back of
the chair and got down to work.

——

Nobody catches on!  He’s too good, that’s the trouble; it makes
my job a bit dull when nobody at all catches on and I’ve nothing to report.  So Arko was more than welcome.

——

Somebody had taken considerable pains to compose the
file on Ragnvald ‘Arko’ Arkonnen.

He was born in 1904 in Helsinki into a poor,
Finnish-speaking family in the period, before the Revolution, when Finland had
been subject to what was termed the ‘Russification’.  His father, Ove Arkonnen, was on record as a
supporter of the Socialist-Communist Reds during the brief Finnish Civil War of
1917.  When Imperial Germany sided with
the Whites, however, Arkonnen senior had been thrown into a prison camp, where
he subsequently perished of pneumonia, leaving his young family destitute.  Arko, himself, first came to the notice of
the authorities at an early age, when he stole some money from a Lutheran
church, for which he was given a spell in prison.  What followed was a fairly seamless descent
into the criminal underworld that could have served as a textbook for every
third-rate hood with ambition, it was so detailed.  It rather reminded me of Simenon[35]
and the type of character that Inspector Maigret routinely pitted his wits
against on the streets of Paris.

——

Arko Arkonnen.  You bad, bad boy.

——

To sum up, there’d been another prison sentence - for
smuggling alcohol during Finland’s prohibition - and reports of a wide variety
of misdemeanours during that time, with the emphasis on extortion and
assault.  There were hints, too, of
several murders in his immediate sphere, where the culprit was never brought to
justice for lack of crucial evidence.
However, the second world war years drew a blank; from which one could
only infer that Arko had not been
fighting alongside the brave Finns, but had preferred to align himself with
parties unknown.  His subsequent
involvement in a string of different industries - before he bought into
Vas-Glas - and the clear indications that he’d benefited from ‘trade
privileges’ with the Soviets, gave some idea of just who he might have been fighting with during the war.  In short, Arko Arkonnen was a nasty species
of jumped-up thug, and an out and out Red, to boot.

I had to admit that nothing in Arko’s file smelt,
specifically, of rodent; it was all extraordinarily well done.  Perhaps too
well done.  Was that it?  I thought of my niece and her propensity for
giving too much detail.

I leaned back in the chair and happened to clock the
filing cabinet against the wall, where I’d left it open in my hunt for Arko’s
file, and it was then that I had what’s known as a flashback.

“What an unnecessarily
devious mind my secretary must have,” I’d thought.

I sat bolt upright.
Well . . could it be her?  She was
perfectly placed, after all.
In-situ.  What were the odds?  After all, HQ was - by definition - choc-full
of characters with unnecessarily devious minds (like my own, if I were being
honest).  Yet I had an instinct about it;
it was a foolish spy who got so bogged down in fact he forgot to use his
instinct.  I just had the strongest of
hunches that my secretary - Miss Whatshername - had written Arko’s file.  It was a gamble, but . . odds on, I’d found
our mole.

I resolved to drop into Personnel in the morning -
Saturday be damned - and do a bit of background research on our Miss
Whatshername, before I set a shadow on her when she left work on Monday.  We had some excellent shadows and it was
unlikely that their paths would ever have crossed . . although, if she were as
devious as I thought, I’d better shake up a good shadow who’d been out of the
building for a spell.

I put my jacket back on, thinking about Miss
Whatshername.  She was a spinster of a
certain age; just a touch desiccated, was the first impression.  A slim woman, neatly turned out and of
average height.  Pale pink skirt-suit
affairs.  Good legs.  Mousy hair set with a wave, quiet demeanour, nothing
remotely reprehensible about her.  I
seemed to think her voice was on the high side, although not shrill, and that
she wore reading glasses; the variety that had a touch of sparkle and a
definite point to the upper, outer edge of the frames.  The glasses hinted at a frivolity that was
otherwise entirely absent.  However, I couldn’t,
for the life of me, remember what her name was.

I did a swift search of her desk, which yielded
little, if not nothing.  Of course, she
was so delightfully devious that
there wasn’t a clue to be found.  The
kind of woman who can refrain from cosying up her office with anything
whatsoever - no calendar with pictures of cats, no snapshots of somebody’s baby,
no spare lipstick nor bottle of scent in the bottom drawer of the desk - is
rare, in my experience.  Miss
Whatshername was either watching her back, preparing to scarper, or a very rare
bird, indeed.

I drove back to Tite Street wondering whether the
parsimonious Hutch would run to shadows for Miss W, the Black Box nightclub and the journalist’s house in
Fulham.  He might take some convincing,
but there should be no skimping – you couldn’t defend Britain and what was left
of her Empire on tuppence halfpenny and that was all there was to it.  Then there was Rosa.  Oughtn’t Rosa to have protection of some
kind?  She’d sworn blind that she hadn’t
been followed down to Kent, but what did she know?  The girl was an amateur.

I parked the car and sat, running over it all, at the
wheel.  What I really ought to do, was to get one of the family to keep an eye on
Rosa and make sure she didn’t go trolling into Dover as if she were Bulldog
Drummond[36].  But who?
My wife’s older sister, Millicent, would have been the ideal candidate
because, on top of being Rosa’s mother, she was an admirably tough cookie and
the real force to be reckoned with in that family.  However, she’d made it pretty clear that I
was persona non grata in those quarters and I wasn’t sure that I felt like
braving her quite so soon after our phone conversation.  I locked the car, thoughtfully.

Kathleen had gone to bed when I got in, leaving a note
propped up against the empty bottle of Gordon’s to the effect that she’d an
early call for Elstree and would be in the spare bedroom, neither of which was
unusual.   After an initial, rather nice,
period of frankness (brushes with death can have that effect, I’ve found), we’d
drifted back into politeness in the weeks since our journey down the slide and,
if she wasn’t busy filming, she was on the telephone to her agent, or her
sister.  She also spent long hours
chewing the cud with my father and his friend, Air Chief Marshal Sir Gabriel
Adair, at their home in Norfolk.  God only
knew what they found to say;  I certainly didn’t because my father and
I’d never seen eye to eye (and the less I knew about the Norfolk set-up, the
better).  In the early days, Kathleen had
tried to interest me in their affairs in an all too transparent plot to effect
a touching family reunion - Kathleen’s plots were generally signalled with
flags and multiple costume changes -  but
I’d resisted and she’d given me up for a bad job.

I collapsed into an armchair and pulled the
boomerang-shaped coffee table closer with one foot, reaching for the green, glass
ashtray; a great chunk of trapped air bubbles.
Too much was churning about in my mind to make sleep a practical
proposition, so I smoked a couple of cigarettes and stared at the wall of
curtain - a blue and fawn material spattered with a pattern that might have been
snowflakes, or diagrams of atomic matter - before I got up to switch the
television set on.  It was just going off
air and I turned it off again before the National Anthem got into its
stride.  There was nothing for it but to
make tracks, and that’s what I was doing when the telephone rang.

“FLAxman 4390.”

“Ah.  Ah.  So
sorry to disturb you at this late hour, Tristram . .”

Talk of the devil, it was my father.

“Is Kathleen still . . I mean to say, is Kathleen
there?  Any chance of a quick word with
Kathleen?  In other words.”

Either he’d been on the juice, or senility was making
inroads.

“She’s asleep, Father.
Can’t it wait?”

“Um.  The thing
is, Tristram.  She rang for a brief
confab, oh . . twenty minutes ago, max, and I was supposed to ring her back,
but I got caught up in one thing and another and . .”

“Well she’ll be fast asleep by now and she’s filming
in the morning.”

“Is she?  She
didn’t mention that.  I don’t suppose
you’d just pop your head around the door and . .”

“No I won’t.
You can speak to her tomorrow.
Goodbye, Father.”

I was heading to the bathroom when I pulled up
short.  What did he mean “Is Kathleen
still . .”   Had he begun to ask “Is
Kathleen still awake, or is Kathleen still there?”  And, if it was the latter, had he aborted the
sentence when he realised he was giving the game away?  What was going on?

I knocked on the spare bedroom door, but there was no
answer, so I opened it as gingerly as I could.
She hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains and the orange glow from a
street lamp washed across the flower-strewn walls.  The bed was untouched, not a wrinkle in the
white counterpane.  I went cold.  Then I ran to our bedroom and wrenched open
the wardrobe doors.  She’d taken every
stitch she owned, down to her furs.
There was no need to sprint outside to check that her white Austin Princess
had gone, but I did.  This was one plot I
hadn’t seen coming.

Kathleen had left me and, contrary to many people’s
expectations when we’d got married, it was the first time she’d ever done
so.  (I was guessing there hadn’t been a
guest present on the steps of Chelsea Town Hall who hadn’t expected the worst .
. and yet . . I never had.)  I felt like the carpet had been pulled out
from underneath my feet and I’d landed in a completely unknown place.  I sat down on the bedroom floor and remained
there for the next two hours, waiting for Kathleen to fetch up at my father’s
house in Norfolk.

I woke up in the spare bed and couldn’t think
where the hell I was.  It didn’t take too
long to remember.  I closed my eyes
again, as if the recollection were the tail end of a nightmare that might take
itself off if I put my mind to it.  I’d rung
Norfolk and she’d refused to speak to me and I’d pushed the matter and got into
an argument with my father that was just like every argument we’d ever
had.  My recent disgraceful behaviour was
merely an addendum to the long list of disgraceful behaviour that my father had
been compiling from my earliest childhood; I rather wondered how he’d had the
time to do anything else, the list was so lengthy.  The only up side to Kathleen’s choice of
refuge was that it looked like she hadn’t got another man.  If she’d taken a lover, she would, surely,
have run to his arms and not to those of my elderly father.  I reached for the empty pack of cigarettes on
the bedside table and discovered that I was still wearing my suit and tie.

The sun was shining when I got into the car, coughing
my lungs up from too much tobacco.
London had grabbed at the chance of a sunny weekend in that unanimous
way that it does, as if everybody had read the memo together: all the men were
in light-weight suits and all the women were wearing summer frocks.  The elms were a chlorotic green, the river
sparkled, the air was softer and every damn person except me had a spring in
their step . . but no more of that.  I
was off to HQ to do some work.  First
stop, Personnel.

Essentially, Personnel was one step up from the typing
pool and entirely manned by women.  Of
course, it was another world from hiring operatives, for which there were
grapevines that curled questing tendrils through Oxbridge and one or two of the
top public schools and an elaborate hierarchy within the system, beginning with
the young shadows and ending with Hutch.
The war had been different - more of an open playing-field in some ways
- and I doubted whether they’d have taken me
but for my war record (especially since I’d been sent down from more public
schools than I’d had hot dinners).
However, I had the sense that there’d been a certain amount of
backsliding since 1945, despite Atlee and Bevan et al.  It was remarkable, then, that Hutch, himself,
didn’t hail from the top drawer (although, where he did hail from was anybody’s guess), but surveyed the scene with an
outsider’s eye; one of the few things I rather admired him for, in actual fact.  But I digress.

The auburn-tressed girl perched at the front desk in
Personnel was more than happy to hand over the file on my section head
secretary (who turned out to be a Miss Jane Watson, which was not so very far
from Miss Whatshername, after all).  I
sat down with the document while she made me a strong cup of unspeakable office
coffee.

——

What do they want?
I asked myself.

——

Miss Watson had been with HQ for over a year and had
come with a glowing reference from her previous position, as personal secretary
to a member of the House of Lords.  I was
familiar with the name of the peer who’d been so bowled over by the
‘trustworthy and supremely efficient’ Miss Watson.  The gentleman was - I had it on good
authority - an ancient relic who’d lost his marbles long before the outset of
the Great War.

The red-head set my coffee down beside the open file
and leant over me with an encouraging smile; at a loose end on a sunny Saturday
when everyone else had gone out to play.

“Do all of the references get checked, do you
know?”  I asked.

“We do our very best to check every detail, Mr
Upshott.  We have to, when you think what
important material we handle.”

“Right.  Are you
familiar with this one?”  I pointed to
the peer’s name and she leant so close I could read the tag on the inside of
her summer frock.

“Before my time, I’m afraid, Mr Upshott.  Would you like me to look into it now?  I’d be happy to.”

She certainly looked like she’d be happy to look into
all sorts of things.

“That won’t be necessary.”

She wandered off, a mite disconsolate.

——

What do they want?
The familiar, the faithful, the feminine.  I gave them plenty of all that.   I couldn’t resist a little chuckle when I
pulled the carbon out.

——

I cast an eye over Miss Watson’s personal statement,
from her birth in Hillingdon, to her triumphant grades at secretarial
school.  Her years of selfless dedication
to an ailing mother.  Her voluntary work
for the Girl Guides Association, as a Brown Owl, no less.  Her attachment to Lord Relic, whose employ
she had been reluctant to leave but for his insistence that her country would
be better served at HQ.  The recent death
of her mother, allowing her to move to a flat on Baker Street.  I nearly choked on my coffee.  Baker Street, Miss Watson?  Rooming with your friend, Miss Holmes,
perhaps?

I snapped the file shut, convinced that the so-called
Miss Jane Watson had written her own Curriculum Vitae, references and all,
before being installed as a mole in my section and applying her fertile
imagination to Arko’s files.  And the
worst of it was that she’d been with us for an entire year!  It was unthinkable, the kind of damage she could
have done in that time.  Had she been
falsifying all manner of documents, or was Operation Crystal Clear her
priority?  It occurred to me that if she
were reporting directly to Reg Arkonnen, it was rather intriguing that he’d
turned up to the Heaviside meeting in person.
If he were fully clued up about HQ having spies at the scene, then he’d
have known about me and he might very well have known about Rosa, too.  For heaven’s sake, had there been anybody at
all at that meeting who wasn’t in disguise?
It was like a night at the theatre.

Well, Orchard was certainly kosher.  Gerald Orchard, the Managing Director of
Heaviside Import/Exports, was well known to us as a conduit - a fence, if you
prefer - of long standing.  He did a bit
of this and that, old Orchard, although Operation Crystal Clear was pretty high
octane stuff for him.  We’d let him lie
for the time being because we hadn’t wanted to disturb Arko any more than was
strictly necessary after the farrago of the broken glass.  However, that was now irrelevant if Arkonnen
was in the know, and I’d get Orchard brought in as soon as possible and give
him a squeeze.  Which left Bob Dexter,
the American.  It was beginning to look
like Dexter was the key.  Reg Arkonnen
had risked a hell of a lot to be at that meeting, just so that he could present
a front to the American.  If Bob Dexter
was the key, I asked myself . . was he also the patsy?

15.  Hospitals & Pubs

Is it finished?
That was as much as I could get my head around.  So unbearably short and I’d never get to hear
Chet Baker blow his trumpet again.  Is it
finished?

“Hello Mr Arkonnen.
Time to wake up.  It’s a
beautifully sunny Saturday morning.
Wakey wakey, Mr Arkonnen.”

It was a nurse and a young, pretty one at that; she’d
a scrap of lace on her head and lipstick on her teeth.  It had to be a nurse.  Choirs of angels didn’t say wakey wakey, did
they?  It was a nurse and I wasn’t
finished at all, but in hospital.  I had
a terrible thought: if I was in hospital, who was looking after Pablo?

“Here’s your auntie come to see you, Mr Arkonnen.  Can you say hello to your auntie?”

“Hello Auntie,” I said, startled by the sound of my
own voice; somebody had attacked it with sandpaper, it was that raw.  “Please could you look after Pablo.”

Another face, inches from mine, but it seemed
distorted, like the view through a fish-eye lens.  It wore winged glasses and it gave off the
smell of warm face powder.

“Pablo?”  It
asked.  “Who’s Pablo?”

“Pablo Neruda[37].  My cat.”

The face smiled and nodded and turned into my Aunt
Dilys.

“Hello Aunt Dilys.
What’re you doing here?”

“You’ve been in the wars, Magnus,” she said, smiling
down at me, “but we’ve got a lot to be grateful to you for.”

“Have we?”  I
was confused

She carried on smiling and nodding, and I got more
confused.

“You saved your uncle’s life, Magnus.”

“Did I?”  I genuinely
hadn’t a clue what she was on about.
“How did I do that, then?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No.”  My
forehead felt clammy and I tried to bring a hand up to wipe it, only my arm was
bandaged, shoulder to tips of my fingers, and consequently unable to move.  “No.
Tell me.  Please tell me.  I can’t . .”

I heard the nurse murmur in the background, but I
couldn’t shift myself to look at her.
None of me was working properly and I was beginning to panic.

“Don’t you remember anything, Magnus?”

“No.  Please
tell me, Aunt Dilys.”

“Well . .”

I heard the nurse murmur again, but my aunt bent her
head to my ear and half-whispered into it, very fast, in her clipped, high
voice.

“ . . . Reginald was giving you a lift home the night
before last and the brakes failed and your uncle would have been killed if you
hadn’t thrown your body over his to protect him, so that all he got was a
couple of scratches.  So bless you,
Magnus.”  She patted my head as if I were
still a schoolboy and disappeared.

“A car crash, was it?”
I asked.

“She’s nipped off, Mr Arkonnen,” it was the young
nurse again.  “It was just a quick visit,
I’m afraid, and that’s your lot for today.
You’re not up to visitors, only she begged me, being your nearest and dearest
and everything.”

Nearest and dearest?
I’d no idea what anyone was on about.
You could count the number of times I’d met my London aunt on one
hand.  I closed my eyes and breathed
slowly.  How many deep breaths did it
take to make a bad dream go away?

——

Inevitably, I ran into Jay Tamang on my way
out of HQ.

“Morning, Tamang.
Working weekends, eh?  The Monk
certainly keeps your nose to the grindstone.”

“Good Morning, Mr Upshott.  How is Mrs Upshott?”

“Mrs Upshott?”
He’d caught me off-guard.  “Mrs
Upshott is fine.  Blooming.  Terrific form.”

“You are a very lucky man, if I may say so, Mr
Upshott.”

“Yes.
Indeed.  She’s a lovely woman.”

“She is.  But I
meant that you are lucky to have been forgiven so swiftly.”

This seemed somewhat impertinent; as if our
experiences down the slide - the fear of radiation and death and the shedding
of clothes - had brought us together.  I
opened my mouth to express my thoughts, only to hear myself say:

“D’you fancy a drink, Tamang?”

He looked surprised.
Was it too early?  Perhaps he
didn’t drink?  I, instantly, regretted
asking.

“Look . . scrap that.
I expect your religion forbids it, or something.”  I turned to go.

“I’ve drunk alcohol with you before.  We drank whiskey at seven o’clock in the
morning.”

A belligerent look had crept over his face and his
shoulders had tensed.  Had I offended the
man?

“So we did.”  I checked
my watch.  “Well it’s ten-forty five now,
so we’re practically teetotallers, wouldn’t you say?”

“Let me get my new duffle coat, Mr Upshott.”

London was looking far too full of the joys
of Spring for me, so I deliberately ignored the riverside pubs and I took him
to the Black Box, instead.  A grubby hole
like that suited me down to the ground that morning.  It still stank of the tobacco and ale
consumed by some of South London’s finest crooks the night before, although a
cleaner was finishing up and the floor was damp from the mop.  We were the first customers of the day and I
picked up a hand bell on the bar counter to ring for the landlord, who rose
from the cellar with his sleeves rolled up to show inky blue tattoos on both
forearms.

“What can I get you, gentlemen?”

“Scotch I think.
For old times sake.”

I got a grin out of Tamang, who nodded his head for
the same.

“Two, please.”

Some music started up, a snatch of Charlie Parker.

“Sad, isn’t it?”
Said Tamang.

“What’s sad?”
Could the man see inside my head?

“His death last month.”

I looked at him with new eyes; there was evidently
more to Tamang than nuts and bolts and abstruse technical manuals.

“It was,” I agreed, selecting a hard chair in a gloomy
corner and sitting down.  “A damn waste
of a brilliant talent.”

“Ah, but might not the talent have been different -
even diminished - had he not been the type to waste it?”

What did we have here?  A philosopher?
I was pleasantly surprised by his comment.  The dreariest part about being a spy was the
need to categorize people; one learnt to put them into little compartments with
monotonous accuracy.  How I loved it when
people rebelled against my preconceptions.

“How old are you, Tamang?”

“I am twenty-seven, Mr Upshott.  How old are you?”

“I’m thirty.  D’you
know, I thought you were younger?”

He laughed his delighted laugh.

“Do you know, I thought you were older?”

That would be the war.
The three years that separated us might have been three hundred.

“Well . .”  I
raised my glass.  “Cheers.”

“Cheers, Mr Upshott!”

He put his scotch down and silence fell, while he
jiggled his glass about on the table.  He
looked unusually bashful.

“I have seen Mrs Upshott before,” he announced,
abruptly.

“Mmm?  Is that
so?  In one of her films?”

“No.  I have
watched her films . . some of them . . but . .”

“Spit it out, Tamang.”

“Mrs Upshott sang for us in Burma.  She sang like . . a nightingale.  I have never forgotten it.”

What was he talking about?  Burma?
What had Tamang been doing in Burma?

“Gorkha battalion, Indian Army.  Burma Campaign.  Allied offensive 1944 to 1945.”  He rattled it off like every soldier there
ever was or would be, his face impassive as a stone.

“You were a Gurkha?”
I was astonished.  “But . . you’d
have been, what, sixteen or seventeen, at most?”

“They needed every man they could get in the final
push.  Even a Tamang,” he gave a wry
laugh.  “Then, after the partition of
India in 1948, my regiment moved across to the British Army, where I qualified
as an engineer and became interested in the sciences.”

“So, you’re from Nepal, Tamang?”

“The Kathmandu Valley, Mr Upshott,” he nodded.

I couldn’t get over it; I’d thought him a child and
all the time he’d been one of the bravest of the brave - because my admiration
for the Gurkhas was immense - and liberated Burma from the Japs.  He’d have seen some sights over there, that
was for sure.  I shook my head in
wonder.

“And Kathleen sang for you all those years ago?”

“A nightingale
in the jungle,” Tamang said.  “You are a
very lucky man, Mr Upshott.”

“Me?”

Luck wasn’t everything.  Somewhere along the line, I’d made a complete
cock-up of my marriage, as I’d cocked-up so much in my life.  I shrugged and chucked the last of my scotch
down my throat.

“Let’s get back to work, Tamang.”  A thought occurred.  “You must be sick to death of being stuck in
that basement, especially on a day like this.
If the Monk can spare you, how’d you like to join me in the field?”

He looked more than happy to join me in the field.

“It would be an honour.”

“Don’t talk bloody rubbish,” I replied.  “The honour’s all mine.  Come on,”
I got up from the table.  “I’ve a
few questions for the tattooed landlord.”

——

I woke up again later in the day.  It was like coming up for air, like swimming
up from a cave deep under the sea and wondering whether you’ll ever make it to
the surface.  I gasped and opened my
eyes.  The curtains were drawn round my
bed, but the shape of the hospital window shone through in a yellow rectangle
of sunshine.  They’d pumped me full of
dope and I was dead drowsy.  There was a
newspaper by my bed, but I hadn’t a hope of reaching it because my arms and
legs still refused to co-operate.  I
craned my neck.  It was the Express and
there was a picture of Elizabeth Taylor on the front at some film gala.  I wasn’t proud; I’d have given anything to read about Elizabeth
Taylor’s gala.

It was silent as the grave in that ward.  I wondered whether anybody knew I was there: any
mates, any people I cared about who cared about me and might smuggle me in a
fresh pouch of tobacco, or the latest copy of the Tribune.  Not just some woman who’d happened to marry
my uncle and I barely knew.  Not that I
liked my uncle, anyhow.  I frowned,
wondering why that’d come to me.  Why
didn’t I like my uncle?  He was easy
enough to talk to, wasn’t a rabid Tory as far as I knew, liked a drink and a
smoke and a bit of music.  I hadn’t a
clue why, but I suddenly thought of Acker Bilk; just like that.  There was Acker, toting his clarinet, all got
up in his striped waistcoat and bowler hat, filling my brain with a vague, but
growing, sense of disquiet.  Blimey, trad
Jazz wasn’t that bad!  In the list of
crimes against music it wasn’t up there with Dean Martin crooning ‘That’s
Amore’[38]
or Johnny Ray crying.  Cold panic
clutched at me.  My God, I wasn’t having
a heart attack, was I?

“Nurse,” I tried calling, but it came out as a
squeak.  “Nurse!”

“What’s the matter, Mr Arkonnen?”  The matron poked her head through the
curtain.

“Johnny Ray,” I panted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Danger.
Terrible danger . .”

“Now, now, what’s all this?”  She bustled in and picked up the chart at the
end of my bed.  “Doctor must have
overdone the morphine.  Try to control
yourself, Mr Arkonnen.”

“No!!”  I cried,
shocking myself with the vehement way it shot out of my mouth.  “You don’t understand!  Rosa’s in mortal danger . .”

I was rocking about in the bed, trying to get the hurt
parts of me to work, so I could get up and out and warn Rosa Stone about
something.  I hadn’t the faintest what it
was that I’d got to warn her about, but that didn’t matter.  I just knew that I’d got to get out of that
hospital.

“Dear, dear, what a fuss!”  Matron grasped my shoulders and held me down
with washer-woman arms. “You’re not leaving St Thomas’ hospital and that’s all
there is to it.  You’ve got two broken
arms and two broken legs and you need to hold still, or you’ll do more
damage.  Do you hear me?”

I stopped writhing about on learning this.  Two broken arms and two broken legs?  I’d got a full deck.  It took some adjusting to, but, then again .
. . at least I hadn’t broken my neck.

“There, now that’s better.  The painkillers have got you hallucinating,
Mr Arkonnen, but there’s no need to worry.
You just lie still and get some rest and we’ll lower the dose to make
you more comfortable.”

I stopped panting and closed my eyes, while she re-positioned
my sheet and blanket over the metal contraption that arched over my bandaged
arms and legs.  There’s no need to worry,
I repeated to myself.  I just needed to
lie still and get some rest and banish all thoughts of Acker Bilk, or Johnny
Ray, or - more disturbingly - Rosa Stone.

——

After I’d waved a couple of pound notes under
his nose, the tattooed landlord proved most helpful.  Reg was a regular jazz nut and had been
haunting the Black Box during the whole of the two years that it had been open for
business.  He came in after work and
drank pints of best - the local Anchor bitter, usually - and was often on his
own, which was how the landlord knew a bit about him.  Reg liked a natter and he’d hang about at the
bar.  Like most northerners, he was a
friendly enough feller, was Reg, and he’d told the landlord that he was in the
warehousing business and owned a big warehouse down by the river, right by that
new Bankside Power Station[39].  He’d mentioned a wharf, too and the landlord
reckoned he shipped some of his goods up and down river, himself.  Had he said what it was he traded in?  If he had, he’d forgotten.  All he knew was that Reg’s route home of an
evening took him down The Cut, and that’s when he’d stop in for a pint and to
catch whatever was on.  The landlord
scratched at his tattoos, thoughtfully: an amorphous mess of dark blue, a chain
of blurred anchors suggesting the Merchant Navy.

Reg had introduced his nephew to the landlord the
first time they’d come in together, but the lad had been in before with a crowd
of mates.  The nephew was a big,
fair-haired lad who looked like he hadn’t two pennies to rub together.  A be-bopper.
Probably chuffed to be stood a beer or two by his uncle.  Night before last, the lad had come in with a
bit of stuff with long black hair, hard to miss because she looked like she’d
raided the fancy dress box.  Quite a
stunner, in her own way; he’d wondered whether she might be an actress because
they got a few of those every now and again, being so close to the Vic.

“Ahem,” I interrupted.
“That’s my niece you’re
talking about.”

“Is it?”  His
canny eyes narrowed.  “Well, you asked, squire.”

“I don’t suppose you ever overheard any conversations
between Reg Arkonnen and his nephew?
Anything you’ve got might help.”

The landlord stopped scratching his tattoos and folded
his arms.

“Here . .” he said.
“Who did you say you was working for?”

“For the Government.
Civil Service.”

He glanced at Jay Tamang.

“Chink Civil Service, is it?”

“Her Majesty’s Civil Service,” Tamang replied, evenly.

“Take anybody nowadays.  This country’s going to the dogs.”

“Right . .” I said, replacing the pound notes in my
wallet and slipping it back into my jacket pocket.  “Time we were off.”

“Here . . where’s my money?”

I ignored him and ushered Tamang out of the door.

“Now, where did I put the car?”  I scanned the street; a desolate, broken-down
slum of a street.

“Do you think he will come after us, Mr Upshott?”

“I rather hope the villain does, Tamang.  I don’t know about you, but I’m all for a fight
every now and again.  It clears the air
and I could certainly do with that today.
Besides . .” I located the car and beckoned him over, “ . . I’m with a
Gurkha.”

Tamang laughed:

“I think I shall enjoy working in the field with you,
Mr Upshott.”

“Really?”  We
got into the car.  “I shouldn’t speak too
soon, if I were you.”

Bankside Power Station was only
half-finished, although the half that was up and running was busy manufacturing
electricity for the nation.  Almost
everything around it, however, was much more than half dead.  There were rotting bits of wharf and derelict
warehouses lining the river and the narrow streets that had somehow escaped
Jerry’s attention had dilapidated iron walkways and covered bridges running
above them, obliterating any sense of sky.
Some post-war housing had been plonked among the desolation,
arbitrarily, so that children ran between the neat playgrounds behind the
Estates - with their large notices forbidding ball-playing - and straight onto
bombed-out wastelands, littered with broken glass.  Down by the Thames, the old Anchor brewery
sat foursquare between Southwark and London Bridges, belching out smoke and the
air was rank with the stink of filthy river-water, stewed hops and malt.

“No post-war miracles here,” I observed.

“How will we find Mr Arkonnen’s warehouse?”

Tamang had his head stuck out of the window and was
taking note of everywhere we passed.  I
could see that he was taking his duties extremely seriously.

“I’m not exactly sure.
Let me find somewhere to park and we can do a recce.”

“Why don’t we ask there?”  He pointed to the Anchor pub.

“You haven’t had enough of talking to publicans?”

“If Reg Arkonnen drinks Anchor beer, then, surely, he
must drink there sometimes, too.  So near
to his place of work.  So
convenient.  He cannot always be
listening to jazz.”

“Do you know, that’s not a half-bad idea,
Tamang!”  I secured the hand brake.  “You sit there and wait for me.  I won’t be a tick.”

——

I’d just finished a tasty square of pink
sponge pudding with pink custard and was going to ask the pretty nurse if she’d
fetch my tobacco tin out for me.  I
didn’t see how I’d get into the corridor to smoke, but just sniffing the stuff
would be better than nothing.  Better
than a slap in the face with a wet fish, as my Gran used to say!  As Rosa Stone probably still said . . . Damn, I’d got to stop thinking about that
girl.  Even with the pain that I’d begun
to feel now they’d taken my drip away, I couldn’t stop thinking about her;
worrying about her, for no good reason I could come up with.

I tried to block her out by going over the A-Z of
Conspiracy Theories that I was compiling for the mag, and considering
candidates for H.  British Honduras
seemed a definite possibility; all those old colonial outposts that we hung
onto for dear life were fertile ground for conspiracy theories . . oh, good, here was a nurse.  An even younger nurse than the other
one.  It looked like they were recruiting
them straight from the first forms of the secondary moderns these days.

“Afternoon, Mr Arkonnen.  Stretcher here for you.”

“Stretcher?  Am
I going somewhere, then?”

“Yeah,” she smiled and I caught a glimpse of chewing gum,
“you’re off to another ward ‘cos they need the bed.”

This was news to me . . still, I might be able to get
a sneaky smoke out of it.

“Hey, don’t suppose we could stop off in the corridor
for a quick smoke, could we?”

“’Spect so,” she said, laughing.

“Only you’d have to roll it and stick it in my
mouth.  What with my broken arms and
all.”

“No skin off my nose.
Here,” she motioned to one of the hospital porters who’d followed her in
through my curtains, “you take one side and ‘e can take the other.  One, two, three and up!”

It hurt like hell, but they man-handled me onto the
stretcher, and hoisted me onto a hospital trolley. The pain didn’t subside once
I was lying down, but carried on, gathering momentum like it had a lot more to
give.  I felt like a crab turned on its
back, arms and legs rigid in the air and vulnerable underbelly exposed.  I can tell you, I went right off the idea of
a cigarette; it was much more important that I got straight back into bed.

“Let’s split,” said the nurse and they swung me
through the curtains and into the sunny ward and ran with me through the door.

“Can we slow down a bit, please?”  I gasped, feeling like I might be about to
pass out.

Nobody answered me; they were too busy flinging me
down the corridors like I was a sack of potatoes at Covent Garden.

“Please!”  I
shouted, as hard as I could make it, and faces turned to see what was up.

But we carried on, barging through a group of
somebody’s relations, so that they had to leap out of our way and clamp
themselves against the hospital walls.

“Stop!” I shouted.
“Help!  Somebody hel . .”

I just had time to see the young nurse smile down at
me, her fair pony-tail swinging forward as she leant over and clamped a wodge
of cotton wool over my mouth, before I lost consciousness.

——

I knocked on the driver’s window and Tamang
rolled it down.

“Caribbea Wharf,” I announced.  “Off beginning of Southwark Bridge, concealed
steps down to Bear Gardens.  We’re
practically there.  Chop, chop!”

We found the steps and climbed down, arriving on the
shore of the Thames.  Patches of oil
stained the ground and broken groynes poked up, haphazardly, here and
there.  It was low tide and the brackish
river had duly delivered assorted oddments to dry land: a rusting doorknob, a
mouldy hat, a variety of shoes and many fragments of green glass.  A pigeon picked over them like a connoisseur
in an art gallery.

“Is this a wharf, Mr Upshott?  I am not familiar with them.”

“I suppose so.
Long past its heyday, but . . you see that barge moored over there?”

I pointed out a long, steel-hulled London barge,
flat-bottomed enough to allow it to navigate in shallow water, moored up to an
ancient wooden construction.
Dilapidated, weed-encrusted poles protruded from the brown river, none
standing true, all on their last legs.

“I daresay that’s Caribbea Wharf.”

There was a ramshackle effort of a bridge protruding
thirty feet from a flat-faced building and leading down to the barge.  A length of corrugated iron had been bent and
nailed over the top of the bridge to protect it from the rain . . or to provide
some privacy.  We walked over to
investigate.

The warehouse had impenetrable, fortress-like walls of
soot-blackened brick with not a window to be seen.  I gazed up at it, studying the surface.  There had
been windows at one time, high up on the walls, but they’d been bricked over -
and not so very long ago, at that - for the shape of them was clearly visible
in paler, cleaner brick.  Reg Arkonnen
wasn’t risking the chance that anybody might get a glimpse of his wares.  I put an ear to the wall, but heard
nothing.

I gave the warehouse up for a bad job and turned back
to the river, just in time to see Jay Tamang spring from the shore like an
acrobat, grasping the underneath of the bridge with both hands.  Passing hand over hand, he swung himself along
the underside of the bridge, out over the water and all the way down to the barge.  He jumped on-board and waved at me, grinning.  He made it look like a piece of cake.  I didn’t believe it had been, not for a
minute, but I thought I’d better give it a go and just about managed to save
face (with a rather more ungainly landing, it had to be said).

The barge was approximately ninety feet long, with a
big rudder on the stern, a low wheelhouse, or brig, before that, and a couple
of masts - not too tall, so that she could pass beneath the Thames bridges.  Despite the masts, I was prepared to bet that
she’d been fitted with a motor in recent times.
Her sails were furled and bound tight to the unusual rigging those
London barges have and were the colour of dried-blood, as the sails of the
older style of sailing barge had always been.
She was in pretty good condition for her age and unusually clean, but,
then, I was guessing that she didn’t carry bricks or coal as her sisters so
often did.  There wasn’t much to be
learnt from the wide deck, save that I noticed that she’d been named ‘The
Humber’, presumably in homage to the Arkonnen family’s background.  The large hatch in the stern was bolted shut,
with an expensive lock attached.  However,
a low whistle from Jay Tamang called my attention to a smaller hatch in the
bow.  He’d already slipped the bolt, slid
the hatch open and was halfway down the ladder before I got there.

Below deck was utterly different.  To begin with, the tiny berth was lined with
steel, like a submarine, and the entrance to the rest of the hold was sealed
off; what had once been a door was now welded shut.  But, of more interest than this, was that
somebody had been at home until very, very recently.  A pair of metal bunks took up most of the
available space, and the lower had been neatly made up with clean sheets and
blankets, with a copy of that day’s Daily Mail lying on the pillow.  A quick snoop revealed that the kettle on the
hob was still warm, that there was fresh bread in the bin and - lifting a fancy
glass lid - a fruitcake on the table.  There
was a bowl of apples, too and a small fridge which proved to contain milk, a
strawberry blancmange and a Tupperware box filled up with a great deal of what
looked like chopped chicken livers.  I
sniffed at it, reluctantly.   One
certainly hoped it was chopped chicken livers.

Tamang and I glanced at one another and turned to leave,
but not before I’d inadvertently banged my shins on a square, metal chest that
had been shoved underneath the ladder, wedged against a narrow door to a
rudimentary lavatory.  I swore, under my
breath and bent to take a look inside.
It was a well-stocked first aid box.
I closed the lid and put a foot on the bottom rung . . and that’s when I
clocked that others had come on board.

A great thump heralded their arrival, followed by
several lesser thumps.

“Feet first!”
Came a young, female voice.  “I
said feet first, you deaf or somethin’?”

There was no time for anything smarter than rolling
under the bottom bunk and cowering against the wall.  It was a tight squeeze, but I thanked our
lucky stars that Tamang was so small.
The thumping and bumping carried on, gaining momentum.

“There!  Get ‘im
on the bed and cover ‘im with that blanket and that’s us done,” said the
girl.  “What a blast, eh?”

The mattress above our heads sagged, dramatically,
with the weight of the new occupant, bashing us on both our skulls.  At which, my elbows gave way and I fell flat
on the floor, breathing hard against the dust.
Tamang was so silent, I’d never have known he was there.  Had I given us away?

“Get your hands off!”
The girl exclaimed, abruptly.

Did she mean me?
I stayed where I was, peeking at her scuffed sneakers from beneath the
bunk.

“She won’t mind us havin’ a bit of cake, Gloria,” a
boy protested.  “Not after all we’ve
done.”

“She didn’t say nothin’ about cake, so best not.”

The boy sighed, aggrieved.

“’E was that ‘eavy,” he sighed.  “What about a cuppa, then?”

“No,” said Gloria, clearly top dog.  “We’ve gotta split.  Terry’ll be waiting at the Dissenters,
remember, to divvy up the takings.  She
said we’ve gotta leave the car here and get the tube.”

“The chube?!”
The boy whined.

“D’you ever get your licence, Gloria?”  Asked another young male voice.

“Do I look old enough to get my licence, blockhead?”

“Ha, ha . . bloody good driving, then!”

The sneakers took themselves off and the laughter
dissipated.  We waited.  Not a murmur came from the heavy being
weighing down the mattress above our heads.
Whoever it was made no sound and never stirred.

“Come on,” I whispered, eventually, bored to tears
with waiting.

We slid out from beneath the bunk and shook ourselves
down, Tamang tut-tutting as he picked dust balls from his new duffle coat.   Then we took a good, long look at the new
arrival.

The Commie traitor, Magnus Arkonnen, was out for the
count and wrapped up in bandages.  What
on earth had happened to him?  Another
alarming thump at the top of the hatch made us jump, but we hadn’t a second to
hide ourselves before a blur of marmalade fur threw itself down the ladder and
belly-flopped onto the bottom bunk.  It
was the journalist’s cat.

16.  On Board the Humber

Nobody could sleep through an animal the size
of Pablo purring and flexing his claws on their chest.  Pablo’s purrs sounded like his vocal chords
had got rusted and he was about to vomit them up.  And his breath stank of hot rubbish
bins.  It was that great to see him.

“Hey, boy!
What’re you doing here?”

He rubbed his broad, orange face against mine, turned
round and flopped down, right at the point where my ribs ended and my
intestines began.

“Oomph!”

“Looks painful,” said a voice.  “In fact, it all looks exceedingly painful.”

I angled my head around the mass of ginger fur and
found I was staring into the chilly eyes of Rosa’s uncle, the spy.  Another face popped up behind his shoulder; a
dead-pan Chinese, or possibly Malay, lad wearing a duffle coat.

“What the hell . . ?”

“ . . are we
doing here?  I might ask the same thing
of you, Magnus Arkonnen.”

“I . . .”  Then
I noticed the metal walls and metal floor: metal everywhere, even the metal
springs of a metal bed inches above my head.
This wasn’t hospital.

“I don’t know.
What am I doing here?  What’s going on?”

Rosa’s uncle crouched down by the side of my pillow
wearing his menacing face.

“Well, it looks like you’ve been gathered into the
fold, Magnus.  Tea and cake and a first
aid box; all mod-cons provided.  I’d
suggest that somebody wants you to recuperate from whatever you’ve been
through, somebody very close to home,
indeed.  Your uncle, say.”

“My uncle?  What
are you talking about, man?”  The mists
were beginning to clear a fraction and I remembered something.  “I was abducted from hospital . . that was
it!  A nurse doped me with chloroform and
ran off with me!  I’ve been
kidnapped!”

My breath began coming in fits and starts and a cold
sweat tingled on my upper lip.

“Now stop that.
No need to get yourself into a lather.”

“I’ve been in a car crash and got two broken arms and
two broken legs and now I’ve been kidnapped, man!”

I’d started to make whooping noises between words and
even the cat panicked and leapt off my chest.

“I said, calm down.
It’s all in the family, don’t you see?”

I didn’t see anything - hadn’t seen anything for days
- except that I’d a cracking headache and had turned into this man who wore his
nerves on the outside, like his coat.

“Mr Upshott,” the lad tapped on the spy’s
shoulder.  “Excuse me, Mr Upshott.”

“Not now, Tamang.
This is rather interesting.”

“Mr Upshott, I really
think you should . .”

“Why the abduction, I ask myself?  They wanted him out of hospital because we’d
have found him and be questioning him any minute, that’s a given, but . . why
the abduction without his consent?”

“We are moving!”
The lad shouted.

“Christ, we’re not are we?  Up on deck.
No time to lose.  Jump in and swim
if you have to.”

I heard them go, their footsteps clattering against
the metal floor.  Odd words pierced the
red mist of panic.  Deck?  Swim?
Were we on a boat?  What the hell
had happened to my life?  There was no
time to come up with an answer to my own question because the footsteps came
clattering right back.

“Under the bed.”
The spy’s face re-appeared, inches from mine.  “Mention we’re here and we’ll show no mercy,
Arkonnen.  The judge will come down so
hard on you, thirty years of hard labour in a Siberian mine would be a picnic
by comparison.”

I gaped at him.
I’d reached the far side of astonishment, mystification, whatever you
wanted to call it.  I didn’t understand
anything and no longer expected to.
Either I turned my face to the wall, or I didn’t (not that I could move
it much, either way).  So, bring it on, I
thought.  Bring the madness on.

And that’s when
my Aunt Dilys showed up.

“How are you, Magnus?
Feeling any better?”

She had a pink dress and a bobbly, white cardigan on
and was clutching the cardi around her, like she was feeling the cold.

“I haven’t got my sea-legs yet,” she said, pulling the
only chair in the room up to the side of my bed.  It screeched against the metal floor.

“I fetched your cat for you.  I expect you’ve seen him.”

She sat down, crossing beige stocking-ed legs and
folding her hands in her lap.  I noticed the
hands twitch; like fish when they’re nearly, but not quite, dead.  It came to me that I liked this woman even
less than I liked her husband.  There was
silence while she waited for me to ask her what was going on.  I didn’t.

“You should be quite comfortable.”

I cleared my sand-papered throat:

“You couldn’t have waited until I’d got out of
hospital?  For this trip to wherever it
is we’re going?”

“No,” she answered, flatly.  She was wearing a bracelet of multi-coloured
beads and began to twist it round and round.
“This is for the best.  No point
in hanging about in hospital when you could be with your family, is there?  Reginald thought I should look after you
until you’re quite better and it’s all blown over, Magnus, and I’m happy to do
it.  This is all your uncle’s idea.”

A dab of a smile, so quick it’d been and gone before
you knew it.

“All what’s blown over?”  I asked.
“I thought you said I’d saved Uncle Reg’s life.  What needs to be blown over, Aunt Dilys?”

“We have a nice place in Kent, near the sea,” she
ignored me, “and we’ll have a pleasant trip down and make a bit of a holiday
out of it.  Let’s hope the weather stays
fine.”  She carried on twisting that
bracelet round and round her wrist; her wrist so thin, I could see blue veins
beneath the white of it.  “Reginald is
already there, so he can answer any questions you might have later.”  She glanced around the cabin.  “Would you like a cup of tea and a slice of
cake, Magnus?  It’s nearly teatime . .
oh!”

Her bracelet came apart in her hand and red and green
beads bounced onto the floor, rolling all over, under the chair, the table, the
bunk I was lying on.

“Oh, that’s too bad!”
She exclaimed and went to bend down to retrieve them from beneath the
bed.

I blinked and saw Rosa Stone running down the road in
her red dress and green shoes.  My cousin
Terry.  Uncle Reg’s black sedan, his hand
sticking out of the window with a gun in it.

“It’s all come back,” I said, abruptly.  “I’ve remembered the whole thing.”

She paused with her knees bent and, slowly,
straightened up.  Nothing in her face
altered in any way.

“Uncle Reg tried to abduct my friend Rosa,” I
said.  “We were in his car and he was
threatening her with a gun and I jumped on top of him to try to stop him
shooting at her.  And that was when we
crashed.”

“Oh, no,” she said, calmly, “I don’t think that can be
right.  Reginald would never do a thing
like that, Magnus.  You’re not well,
dear; don’t you worry about it at the present moment.  Reginald will clear it all up for you later,
as I said.  Now,” she was distracted, “where do they keep the broom?”

Aunt Dilys opened and closed a few cupboards.

“Bother!”  She
said.  “Bother, bother, bother!  And I liked
that bracelet, too.”  She headed to the
ladder that led up on deck.  “Let me just
find the broom; I can’t abide all this mess about the place.  Then we’ll have a cup of tea and a slice of
my nice Dundee.”

Her footsteps receded, her heels tap-tapping on the
metal ladder that led out of the metal cabin where she’d imprisoned me.  I moaned, but it wasn’t from any pain; it was
sheer, blind panic.  There wasn’t a pain
in the world that could make me panic like this.  Had he killed Rosa, or had I managed to
divert the car in time?  Waves of panic,
each one bigger than the last, crashed over my head and I started whooping
again.

There was a rustle from under the bed and the spy and
his sidekick slid out on their backs.

“His wife!”  The
spy exclaimed.  “Who’d have thought
it!  My secretary is Reg Arkonnen’s wife.
And you appear to be an innocent party in all this, Magnus.  What a turn up for the books!”  He bent over me.  “That’s an odd sound you’re making.  Not got whooping cough, have you?”

“Mr Upshott, there is no time for that.  The lady will return and we cannot hide
beneath the bed, not when she is so determined to sweep,” the sidekick cried.  “Do you have a plan?  Should we hit her on the head with a
frying-pan and commandeer the boat?”

The spy ran a languid hand through his thick, black
head of hair and considered his options.

“Well now, I’m not sure that is such a good idea,
tempting though it may be.  Far better to
let her take us to her husband, Trojan horse-style, if you see what I mean.”

“Excellent,” said the lad, speaking very quickly,
“then you hide on the top bunk, pressing yourself against the wall as much as
possible, and I will lie on the far side of Mr Arkonnen, underneath his
blankets.  And . .” he cocked his head to
listen, “ . . we will do it now.”

He made a neat job of diving across me without
disturbing any of my injuries.

“Jayagaon Tamang,” he said.  “Hello,” and then he buried himself under my
blanket.

The whooping stopped, but I let out another deep,
despairing moan.

“Bad pain?”  A
muffled voice whispered beside me.

“It’s not the pain, man.  It’s my friend.  I think my uncle may have murdered her.”

“Oh dear,” he whispered.  “I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Ssh!”  A sharp
hiss came from the top bunk.

“Rosa!”  I
moaned.  “Oh, Rosa!”

“One minute . .”
Mr Tamang’s face popped up right next to mine.  “I don’t think . .”

“Ssh!”

There was a light clanging of careful footsteps on the
metal ladder and Mr Tamang shot back under the blanket.

“There we are!”
Said Aunt Dilys.  “We’re just past
the Tower of London and about to go under the bridge.  The river’s a bit whiffy, but it’s a
magnificent view, I must say.  Just think
of all the terrible deeds that went on in that place, Magnus; all the
disembowelling and torture and that,” she went on, gaily, as she swept.  “I’d plump for the rack as my favourite.  So simple and yet so clever.  What’s yours?”

I didn’t reply, but tried turning my face to the wall.

“Ow!”

“Hurts, does it?
Would you like a couple of aspirin?”

“No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.”
She finished sweeping and sat down to pick the beads of her bracelet out
of the dustpan, placing them on the table one by one.  “But I’m sure you won’t say no to a nice cup
of tea.  Let me just finish this and I’ll
put the kettle on.”

I watched her in amazement, sorting out those beads
like she was panning for gold in the Klondike.

“How can you live with yourself, Aunt Dilys?”  I burst out.
“Knowing your husband is a cold-blooded criminal who may have killed a
young girl?”  I gave it to her hot and
strong.  “And your son’s no bloody
better; a juvenile delinquent who’d do God knows what for the price of a fizzy
drink.  They may have kept you in the
dark, but you should know that aiding and abetting is a bloody serious
crime.  You could do a good, long stretch for this, woman.”

She jumped up from her chair with her hands on her
narrow hips.

“Don’t you ‘woman’ me, young man,” she hissed.  “What kind of a way is that to speak to your elders and betters?  And all that bad language, too!  Your mother would turn in her grave if she
could hear the way you speak.”

“Ha!”  I laughed
in her face.  “You’re talking semantics
when you’re up to your neck in murder and kidnap.  Get your bloody priorities straight.”

“There you
go again; it beggars belief!  And with
all the education you’ve had.  It’s
wasted on you, do you know that?”  She
was spitting at me now, she’d got so cross.
“Some of us . . well . . who knows what
we could have become with your education . . but your generation . . you’re all
the same . . handed it on a plate . . you just don’t know you’ve been
born!”

Her white face had become blotched with pink and she
was actually trembling.

“Louts!”  It
shot out of her mouth like she’d gone into spasm.  “Hooligans, the lot of you!  We work our fingers to the bone and we get
nothing . . nothing . . in
return.  Look what I’ve done for you
here,” she gestured around the cabin, “ . . why, I’ve a good mind to rip the
blanket off your lazy back and tip you off the bed; let you sleep on the cold,
hard floor and douse you with bilgewater!”

That’s when I should’ve come up with something to
placate her, should’ve  apologised for my
dirty mouth and asked for some of her damn cake.  (I curse myself for the hothead that I am -
that I couldn’t say those simple, simple things.)

“You’re off your rocker, woman!”  I rose to the bait like a dead fish.  “Clap me in irons and put me to the bloody
rack, why don’t you?  That’d be right up
your street!”

So she took hold of the corner of my blanket and
ripped it clear off the bunk and there was Mr Tamang, crouching by the wall.

“Aargh!”  She
leapt a foot in the air. “Who . . ?  What
. . ?”

“Jayagaon Tamang,” he said.  “So sorry to disturb you.”

He rolled over me as delicately as before and stood
up.

“Good afternoon, Mrs Arkonnen . . for I gather you are
Mrs Arkonnen.”

Aunt Dilys grabbed the broom and brandished the handle
at him.

“Don’t you come another step further!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Who’s this Chinaman, Magnus?”  She panted.
“What’s he doing in your bed?”

It was difficult to know what to say, to be
honest.

“Wait a minute . .” she nearly dropped her broom, “I know you, don’t I?  I’ve seen you at the office.  You’re a spy!”

“It’s kind of you to say so, Mrs Arkonnen, but I am
not a spy.  I work in the technical
department.  And I believe you are on the
secretarial side, is that correct?”

She didn’t reply, but whipped around and grabbed the
cake knife from the table behind her, so that she grasped the broom in one hand
and the knife in the other.

“Now we’ll get some answers.  What are you doing here?”

“I am sorry,” he bowed his head, “I cannot disclose
that information.  But you may rest
assured, Mrs Arkonnen, that I know very little of your case.”

“You’ve been ear-wigging since the barge set off,
haven’t you?”

She approached him warily, as if he were an unfamiliar
animal from the outer reaches of the world, and jabbed at the air around his
face with her knife.

“Who sent you?”
Jab, jab.  “What are you
after?”  Jab, jab.

“My name is Jay Tamang and I am a mere observer.  May I ask that you please stop doing that,
Mrs Arkonnen?”

His politeness seemed to get right up her nose,
because she revved up with the cake knife, swiping it round his body like she’d
taken up fencing.

“Please, Mrs Arkonnen,” he asked, quietly.

“Stop it, Aunt Dilys!”
I cried.

But she wasn’t having any, she was that busy working
herself up into an uncontrolled frenzy.

Mr Tamang’s hand shot up, so fast it was near-on
invisible to the naked eye, and relieved her of the knife, at which she
promptly swung her broom handle and dealt him an almighty conk with it.  The man crashed, head-first, onto the metal floor.  And stayed there.  He lay spread-eagled on the ground,
unconscious if not worse.  It felt like
whole minutes passed and, still, he didn’t move.  A trickle of red seeped out from behind his
black hair and collected in a small pool on the silver floor.

“Look what you’ve done now, you bloody madwoman.  Have you killed him?  Have you?”
I shouted at the top of my voice.

She glanced at me, still breathing heavily, her
complexion still patched with pink like some terrible skin disease.

“Shut up, you,” she said, and her eyes looked like
they’d died in her face.

Then she straightened up and, carefully, propped her
broom up against a cupboard, before bending to pick up the cake-knife that was
still lying in Mr Tamang’s hand.  She
wiped the handle on her skirt and replaced it next to the cake.  Then she went over to the ladder and shouted
up to the deck.

“Severs!”  She
shouted.  “Mr Severs!  Down here, please.  Straight away.”

Somebody shouted back down at her.

“I’m sure it can steer itself for a second.  Just leave the steering, please.  Come down here and bring the strongest rope
you’ve got, Mr Severs.”

A stocky, middle-aged man in a flat cap and
collar-less shirt appeared in the cabin, dragging a coil of rope that must have
been six inches in diameter.  When he saw
Mr Tamang lying on the floor, his eyebrows shot up.

“How did ‘e get aboard?”

“I don’t know, Mr Severs, but I’m very cross about
it.  Goodness knows what Reginald will
have to say when he finds out.”

“Is ‘e dead?”

She leant over Mr Tamang and prodded his coat with one
finger.

“I don’t know.
Possibly.  Possibly not.  Serve him right if he is; trying to attack an
English lady with a knife.”

She went over to the kitchen tap and washed her hands
thoroughly, dousing the sink with bleach while she was at it.

“Just truss him up and carry him up on deck, please,
Mr Severs.  If he’s still alive, I have a
few ideas that should encourage him to speak.
If not, we’ll drop him in the Thames.”
She looked thoughtful.  “Out past
Rotherhithe, perhaps, where the tides are stronger.”

I was speechless.
I think I opened and shut my mouth and some kind of horrified squawk
emerged of its own accord.

“And as for you, young man,” she shook her head, sadly
as she followed her lackey - the small, rope-bound figure of Mr Tamang in his
arms - up the ladder.

“No cake for you.
Not until you learn how to behave.”

The spy waited until they’d gone before he
clambered down from the top bunk.  He sat
on the only chair, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered me
one.

“She won’t be back for a bit,” he observed.  “She’s got other fish to fry.”

He lit our fags with his lighter and held mine for me
while I inhaled deeply.

“Are all your family complete lunatics, Magnus?”

Anger flared up inside.  That and the aftermath of shock.

“Where were you,
then?”  I spat out.  “What kind of spy leaves his partner to fend
for himself like that?”

“The kind of spy who can see the bigger picture, I
suppose.”  He let out a sigh.  “Well, Magnus Arkonnen, what the blazes am I
to do with you?”

We stared at one another.

“I suppose I’d better let you in on the game,” he finally
looked away, off into thin air.  “Its
codename is Operation Crystal Clear . . and it’s all about glass.”

He took a sound drag of his cigarette, held it deep
down in his lungs, then blew a perfect smoke-ring in the air.

17.  The Third Uncle

I screamed and a hand came from behind and
clamped itself so hard on my open mouth that
I nearly swallowed my tongue.  A
knee stabbed into my lower back, pushing me flat against the wall of the shed
and holding me there while he unlocked the padlock.  His hand travelled from my mouth to my hair,
gathering up a great clump of it and yanking.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

“Get in there, snoop.”

He flung me inside so violently that I went flying
into the far corner and dislodged a shelf-full of paintbrushes and
screwdrivers.  Nuts and bolts rained down
on top of me, then made a pinging sound as they scattered far and wide over the
steel floor.

“Ow!”

He slammed the door shut and I heard him lock it again
from the outside.

I uncurled slowly, bruised in all known parts of
me.   Shaking my hair from my eyes, it
dawned on me that I, too, had begun to glow fluorescent green.  My spread fingers waved like starfish in an
aquarium, my hair cleaved to my shoulders like fronds of seaweed.  On top of a rough table cobbled together from
planks of wood, the pile of glass pulsed, as if it were alive.  Sentient.
Fear swooshed in like the tide - not the Big Dipper fear, that unstable,
gulping panic - but something so much worse; as if my lungs were collapsing
under the pressure created by fathoms of water.

When I managed to stand up, I saw his face in the
window, squinting through the bars at what he’d caught.  The milk-white of his pupils looked like
empty craters gouged over that fleshy mouth.
How could I have forgotten Arko’s mouth?
Then he was gone, leaving me to the poisonous glass, which appeared to
shimmer between green and yellow, changing as I watched, waning under the brief
magic of twilight.  I glanced around the
interior of the shed.   He’d wrapped it
up in sheets of steel, as if it were his strong-box.  All was so terribly silent, sliding back into
the dark . . until a breath of sea wind sighed through the gap beneath the
steel door and Mr Dexter’s corpse shifted on its hook once more.  Tears sprang to my eyes and I threw myself
down at the foot of that door, mouthing at the gap.  I didn’t want to die; oh, how I didn’t want
to die!

Lying there in the dark, I sobbed and howled myself
into near stupor.  (I’d imagined how
brave I’d be if ever an occasion such as this arose, but it was all pie in the
sky because I hadn’t an atom of bravery in me; was nothing but a useless,
selfish, blob of incoherent matter.)
Would he come for me and finish me off, or leave the glass to do it,
radioactivity seeping into my pores, drip by deadly drip?  Maybe it had already entered every cell I
possessed.  Maybe I was already
dead.  The wind shrieked under the door
and something struck me on the back of my neck.
I raised my head and rubbed my swollen eyes.  It was Mr Dexter’s foot, still clad in a
nice, brown loafer.  I hiccupped and got
up.

Poor Mr Dexter was so very, very, dead.  There was a neat hole through his heart and
his clothes were rusty with dried blood.
This was death and it looked
nothing like me.  I reached up and
unhooked him from that foul hook; it was the least I could do, to stop him
looking like a slaughtered pig in an abattoir.
I wrenched at the stiff rope around his neck and took his weight in my
arms, before I laid him on the floor, to rest.
I sat down next to him, in a strange way glad of his company.  I wished, with all my heart, that he were
here to tickle my neck; whatever other misdeeds he’d performed in his
relatively short, but handsome, life, that
had been such a little one.  I could have
allowed him that.  I let out a rueful
sigh and rubbed the remains of my tears away with the tail of my shirt.

I don’t know how long I sat by him, but long enough to
grow accustomed to the dark.  In time, I
got myself up and began to look around the shed, sniffing.  Amongst the paintbrushes and everyday tools
were glass-maker’s instruments that I took to be blowpipes and pontils, bags of
salts, some test tubes sitting upright in a rack and a basket full of
Swedish-made brass blow-torches with the name ‘Sievert’ engraved on their
handles.  I found a number of rolled-up
scrolls of paper, secured with lengths of raffia, standing upright in a basket
and I felt the beginnings of my old interest stir.  I lifted them out of the basket and knelt on
the floor, to get a better look.

The first chart I unscrolled was of the English
Channel, moderately large-scale - I peered at the corner, but the scale print
was too small to read in that light - and included Dover and St Margaret’s
Bay.  There were a lot of dark patches in
the sea and minuscule numbers that I hadn’t a hope of making out.  I let the chart roll itself up and tried
another one.  The second was of the
Pacific Ocean, centring on the Channel Islands; not our Channel Islands, but those islands off the coast of Los
Angeles, in the Gulf of Santa Catalina.
The third was further north up the Pacific coast of America, near San Francisco;
another thickly hatched and patched area of sea.  Peering intently, I could just make out the
tiny word ‘Farallon’.  I ran my finger over the dark areas,
wondering what they could be; what was hidden beneath the sea there.  Might they be wrecks, or particularly deep
trenches in the ocean floor, sea-beds that were geologically rich in oil,
perhaps, or gas, or various minerals?
And what connection did they have with the Bering Strait . . ?  I was reaching for a fourth chart when I
heard the wind call my name.

“Rosy?”  It
called under the door.  “You there,
Rosy?”

I jumped up and ran to the window, thumping on the
thick glass.

“I’m here, Uncle Albert!  It’s me!
I’m here!”

His dear, round face appeared on the other side of the
window, as pale as the moon.  I pointed
to the door and flung myself down at the gap.

“At the bottom of the door, Uncle Albert,” I cried,
“it’s the only way we can hear each other.”

“’elp?” he asked, as if from a great distance away.

“Yes, you
can!  You’ve got to get me out of here as
soon as possible, do you understand?”

“’elp?”

“Yes, yes, yes!  Fetch the police!”

“Coppers?”  He
sounded doubtful and I remembered that he didn’t like the police.

“Major Dyminge, then.
Fetch him straight away, Uncle Albert.
As fast as ever you can.”

“Oh, the old Major!”
He was relieved.  “Impendin’ Danger she come in at twenty
to one!”  And he chuckled.

“That’s good,” I said, “but . . what’s that noise?”

An odd, rhythmical clanking was distinctly audible at
ground level, faint at first, but growing louder by the second.  The earth shook with it.  I froze with fright.  Something beyond my comprehension was heading
for Uncle Albert.  Something
terrible.  I could scarcely think for the
waves of terror and pity that swept over me; was knocked sideways by the most
unusual sense of how somebody else might feel besides myself.

“Run, Uncle Albert!”
I screamed.  “Save yourself!”

I cannot say exactly what happened after that, just
that I heard my uncle wail, softly, like a small child waking in the night and
I thought it the most terrible sound I’d ever heard . . until I registered the
unmistakeable whip crack of a pistol.  I
flew to the window and pounded on it with my fists, goggling into the dark,
unable to see or understand.  Minutes
passed and nothing happened, while I ran between the foot of the door and the
barred window and then back again, trying to see and then trying to hear and
managing neither.  I felt as if I might
explode with frustration and dread, with trying to block out what I knew in my
heart must have happened; knew with as much certainty as I’d known anything
about another human being in my entirely self-centred life.  The most appalling thing had happened to
somebody I loved.

I was weeping, uncontrollably, when the key turned in
the padlock and the thick chain plummeted, clanging against the steel frame of
the door as it fell.

Arko’s padded radiation suit filled the doorway, an apparition
from a tale of horror.  I was rooted to
the spot.  His face was concealed behind
a mask, the bottom half distended into a ridged, snorkel-like apparatus that
snaked into a cylinder attached to his back.
His feet looked to be encased in metal and he walked towards me,
treading heavily - clank, clank, clank - as if he were a deep sea diver negotiating
the ocean floor.  In one gloved hand he
held a small pistol.

I came to my senses, grabbed an iron blow-pipe and
swung it at him before he had a chance to take aim, but it made little
impression against the protective layers of his suit.  His arm jiggled, momentarily, then he pointed
the gun straight at me, but, even as he did so, he set his right foot down on Mr
Dexter and was thrown off balance; unnerved by the sudden appearance of a
corpse at his feet, when it should have been hanging from a coat hook by the
door.  The bullet hummed across the shed,
pinged smartly against the steel-clad back wall and rebounded straight into his
mask.  He toppled over backwards under
the sheer force of it.

I leapt over him, and through the shed door.  There, lying outstretched on that mean,
concrete passageway, was my Uncle Albert.
I ran at him, scooping him up into my arms, trying to contain the
awkward, bird-boned entirety of him, but a gangly, flannelled leg flopped from
my embrace.  I rocked him and kissed his
cheek - as if to galvanise him into resistance by doing things he so hated in
life - but he did not respond.

“Rosa, thank God!”

Major Dyminge burst around the corner of the bungalow,
hatless and breathing hard.  He had a gun
in his hand.

“We’ve been hunting high and low for you.  Where’s . . ?”  Then he saw the contents of my arms and came
to a grinding halt.

“Mr Smith.  What
. . ?”

I pointed to the shed, scarcely able to speak through
my tears:

“Help me,”  I
sobbed.  “Arko shot him.  I th . . think he might be dead.  Please help me, Major Dyminge.”

His face was entirely expressionless; an old soldier’s
face.  He whipped a linen handkerchief
from his pocket and flung it at me.

“Staunch the flow of blood,” he ordered.  Then he nodded at the shed door:

“Still in there, is he?”

“Ye . . yes.”

He cocked his pistol and ran straight into the shed
without a moment’s hesitation, while I dabbed, uselessly, at Uncle Albert.

“Flown the coop,” he came back out.  “There’s a suit affair on the floor, but
nobody in it.  There must be a back door
hidden somewhere, I can’t see in this light.
Did you know there’s a dead body on the floor?  What in damnation has been going on here,
Rosa?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but bent to look at
Uncle Albert, his face grim.  He felt the
pulse point on Uncle Albert’s neck and then he sighed.

“Let’s get out of this hell-hole and call the
police.  I’ll take Mr Smith, shall
I?”

He laid his hand, lightly, on my shoulder and looked
at me with his kind eye.

“B . . but should he be m . . moved?”

“I’m afraid it will make little difference at this
stage, my dear.”

He patted my shoulder and began to pry my hand from my
uncle’s body.

That night was all weeping.  The Major hadn’t wept on the journey home,
but the sound of him repeating, over and over again, “I should not have let him
come.  I should not have let him come”,
was almost worse than any storm of tears.
When my mother came to the door of Shore House, she didn’t hear the news
from me, for I was quite incapable of speech by that time, but from him,
standing back as she held me while I shook, his head bowed low.

“I found him hiding in the back of the car.  He knew Rosa was missing and was determined
to come.  I don’t know how he knew.  I should have turned back there and then, but
I didn’t.  I made him promise to stay on
the road and come for me if he saw anything.
But I should not have let him
come.”  His gruff voiced cracked.  “Oh, Millicent, I should not have let him come.”

My tiny mother had never looked taller than that
night, supporting her daughter with one arm and taking Major Dyminge’s hand in
the other.

“I won’t
have you blaming yourself, Major, do you hear me?  You’re not
to do it.”  She was as fierce as I’d ever
heard her be.  “You were our Albert’s
friend; the first real friend the poor boy had.
Don’t you ever let me hear you
blame yourself again.”

But, deep into the night, I heard her voice through my
bedroom wall, keening softly to my father.

“I kept him safe after Mum died.  All those years I kept him safe by me, Jerzy,
and she had to bring this to our
door.”

And I knew that it was me she blamed.

Policemen came to the house in the morning
and I suppose I must have squeezed out some words for them, but I can’t
remember what they were.  I wasn’t
interested any more, you see, not in the yellow glass, or HQ, or any of
it.  There was nothing left to be
interested in, not in the whole, wide world.
I lay on my bed and pulled the covers over my head and wept.

Every now and again, people would come and tell me
things, as if they thought I was the same person I’d been before; that person
who had been interested in everything.
Somebody told me that they couldn’t get hold of Uncle Tristram and asked
me if I knew where he was, but I knew nothing and I wasn’t interested.  Then Sam rushed in, bubbling over with
excitement that our Aunt Kathleen had arrived, expecting me to be interested,
but I . . just wasn’t.  I refused to talk
to her when she knocked on the door.
After all, what could I possibly say?
I got your brother killed?  If it
wasn’t for me, he’d be here?  Sorry?  Days passed and I wasn’t interested.  I was much too busy weeping.

But then . . there was the funeral at the local
church, and I couldn’t get out of that.  It
was drizzling with rain and we hung about outside - just us, the Dyminges and
the Hawkings - all dreading going inside that empty church.  Eventually, my father put his arm around my
mother and steered her in and we had to follow.
I dragged in last, head down.
Only the sound made me lift my head.

The light hum of chatter.  It was as if the church were full of
birds.  As if a great flock of tropical
birds had alighted on the pews, feathered shocking pink and violet, netted and
beaked with copper and silver.  They
strained their delicate necks to look at us and hummed amongst themselves.  For the first time in days, I felt my
interest stir.  I followed my parents
down the aisle and sat down beside my mother.

“Who are
they?”   I whispered.

“His hats,” she whispered back.  “Your uncle was a master at his trade.  It’s a grand
tribute to our Albert that they’ve worn his hats.”

When the service was over, we walked back down the
aisle together and the hats nodded as we passed; as if all of Uncle Albert’s
birds had flown home to roost together.

That night - the night after my uncle’s
funeral - my mother came into my room without knocking and sat down on my bed.

“What’s all this, Rosa?”

I’d stopped weeping, but I had nothing to say.

“We want to see you,” she said.  “We need to be together at this time.”

“Be together without me,” I rolled my face down onto
my pillow, choking out the words.  “I
don’t belong with you, anyway.  I don’t
belong anywhere.”

“Nonsense,” she said.
“What utter nonsense you can talk, my girl.”

I started to cry again.

“How can you bear to look at me?  Knowing it was all my fault?  I hate myself!  Why didn’t he kill me, instead?  I wish I was
dead . . .”

She let me bawl and then she picked up my hand, and
held onto it with a vice-like grip when I tried to pull it away.

“Bear to look at you?
My beautiful, clever girl that I’m so proud of; that we’re all so proud of.  Even your Uncle Albert . .”

I flung the pillow off my bed and sat up.

“But I got
him killed, Mum.  It was all my fault.”

“You didn’t
do it; you must never, ever, take
that on yourself, Rosa.  An evil man
killed my brother, not you.  Albert got
in the way of a chain of events . . somebody else’s plan . . story . . call it
whatever you like.  It was terrible, but
terrible things do happen, you’ll
discover.  They happen, and we can’t hide
away from them because they come and find us whatever we do . . .  You only did what any of us would have done
in your place (and did do in our
time, believe you me; even your tiresome, old mother).  Come on, now, love . . .”

She pulled me off the bed, towards the door:

“It’s hard enough missing our Albert; we can’t miss you as well.”

18.  The Arms of Morpheus

A spy came to talk to me early one morning; a
stranger with owlish, black-framed glasses and a shiny, grey suit, a mackintosh
over one arm and a briefcase in the other.
I didn’t like him, but that was neither here nor there.  I offered him a cup of tea after his travels,
but he would only take a glass of water, so that was all he had.  We sat down at the dining-room table,
underneath the ceiling of painted stars, and he began to de-brief me once
again, asking me questions about Magnus and the Arkonnen family, about the
platter and the contents of the shed.  I
forced myself to think of my country - to answer as best I could - and I think
I was making a relatively decent fist of it until he asked about Uncle Albert.

“What made Albert Smith come after you, Miss
Stone?  Had you informed him of your plan
to visit the bungalow?”

I gulped nervously, trying to see my way clear,
because a change had come over me since my uncle’s death and, instead of the
flowing stream of fact after fact that had always come so easily, I’d become
quite clogged up with anxiety.  What
should I say?  Should I mention Major
Dyminge, or would it be kinder to leave him out of it?  I couldn’t bear to do any more damage, you
see.

“I . . I . .”

The dining-room door flew open and Aunt Kathleen
appeared, her face all high cheek-boned and white against her black, silk
dress.  (My mother and father were at
work and Sam was at school, so I was alone in the house with my aunt that
morning.)

“I think that’s enough, don’t you?”  She said.

The spy glanced up at her and his mouth, literally,
fell open.

“She’s told you all she knows and you’ve had your
money’s worth out of the poor girl.”  She
had her hands on her angular hips and looked just like a photograph by Richard
Avedon in Harper’s Bazaar.  “Just take
yourself  back up to London, why don’t
you?  You can give Hutch the latest and
let my niece get on with her life in peace.
She never should have been
involved in the first place, it was absolutely criminal, and if you see my
impossible husband you can tell him that I blame this entire, ghastly tragedy
on him . .”

The spy pulled himself together and closed his mouth.

“It’s Kathy Smith, isn’t it?  ‘Zombie Girls On Bikes’ was a corker, if I
may say so . . I don’t suppose you’d give me your . .”

“No I bloody well wouldn’t!”  She exploded.
“Excuse my French, Rosa, but this is the last straw.”  She advanced upon the man as if she were
about to pull his chair out from under him.
“Go on you . . hop it!”  Her
accent, which was generally BBC newscaster to a fault, had lapsed into
undiluted North London.  “I mean it . .
sling your hook!”

The spy gathered up his brief-case and mackintosh,
looking understandably put out.

“I hear you’re married to Upshott,” he muttered.  “Poor devil.
No wonder he’s done a runner.”

“What do you mean?”
Aunt Kathleen asked.

“I mean to say, being hitched to you . .”

“Not that;
what do you mean ‘done a runner’?”

“They say he’s upped and gone without a murmur to
anybody.  His secretary disappeared
around the same time, but that is a
stretch of the imagination, whatever the girls say . .”

He gulped down the rest of his water and bared his
teeth at us, in a nasty sort of sneer and then he hurried out of our house,
before my aunt had the chance to boot him out (which I’m sure she would have
had no qualms about doing, had he remained any longer).

She sat down at the table and put her blond head in
her hands, her shoulders heaving with the force of her emotions, and it felt
like aeons before I could think what to say.

“Don’t blame him.”

“Him?”  Her
voice was husky, as if she’d caught her throat when she’d shouted.  “He’s just another spy; another empty spy.”

“I meant Uncle Tristram.”

“So did I.”

“Uncle Tristram’s not empty,” I said.  “He’s wonderful.”

She raised her head and smiled at me, sadly.  There were tears in her dark blue eyes.

“Oh, Rosa,” she said.

“He is, you know.
Really wonderful.  Brave and
clever and handsome and . . everything he does is in the service of his
country.  You’re so, so lucky to be married to him and I don’t believe a word about the
stupid secretary.  If I were you, I
couldn’t rest until I’d discovered where he’d gone and brought him back to
us.  In fact . . if you don’t do it, then
I jolly well will!”

And I got up and ran out of the dining room and then
out of the front door and all the way along the beach, until my breath went and
I had to bend over double, coughing and spluttering like billy-o, my eyes
streaming.  My aunt caught up with me and
put her hand on my back while I coughed, rubbing between my shoulder blades as
if she thought I’d choked on a fishbone.

“Are you alright, darling?”

I straightened up, wiping my eyes and smiled at her,
ruefully.

“Not really, no,” I managed.  “I think I may’ve been poisoned again.”

——

I wasn’t quite the bastard Magnus Arkonnen
seemed to think I was.  Nearly, but not
quite; give me another twelve months in the service and he’d be spot on with
his diagnosis.  You’ll be glad to hear
that I wasn’t about to leave technical whizz and ex-Gurkha, Jay Tamang
completely vulnerable to the tender mercies of Dilys Arkonnen.  I’d taken her for an accomplished fantasist,
but the lady was more than that; she was in thrall to her husband to the point
of lunacy.  More to the point, she was
dangerous.  I’d no way of knowing whether
she’d taken a life before, or simply thought about it, but the scene on board
the Humber had convinced me that she was certainly unstable enough to
kill.  I had to find a way to put her out
of action temporarily, and it had to be in as natural a way as possible to
avoid alerting the barge skipper, Severs and, then, her husband, Reg
Arkonnen.  I instantly thought of the
well-stocked first aid box.

I stubbed my cigarette out
with the toe of my shoe and bent down to flip the butt into the familiar, dusty
corner beneath the bunk beds.  Then I did
the same with the one I’d been sticking in young Magnus’ mouth.

“Hey,” he protested, “I’d
not finished with that.”

“Sorry, interval over.  We’ve got to crack on, Magnus and the smell
of tobacco isn’t going to help our cause.”

I began flapping at the
fumes with my arms and then I went to the sink and sloshed the bottle of bleach
about; Dilys Arkonnen was the kind of woman who breathed bleach and she’d
hardly notice a drop more.  Then I took a
good look in the first aid box.

“What’re you doing now . . ?
Don’t worry about me, man - I don’t need any more dope - it’s Mr Tamang  you should be helping!  Christ, if I only had the use of my arms and
legs!”  Magnus positively seethed with
frustration.

“Tamang’s tougher than he
looks,” I replied, delving through the usual sticking plasters and bottles of
aspirin.  “Aha!  What do we have here?  Morphine and a bloody great syringe.  Capital.”

“Hey!”  Magnus cottoned on.  “That’s more like it; happen you’re not as
useless as you look.  I’ll call her down
here under some pretext or other and you can hide under the bed again and jab
her in the leg before she knows what’s hit her.”

Amateur night; the boy
simply didn’t know how to think things through properly.

“Hardly!”

I carried the equipment over
to the table and began to fill up the syringe, hesitating over the quantity
required for such a slight woman (I was no anaesthetist and it’d be easy to get
it disastrously wrong; I didn’t want to put her out for good, after all.)  Then I took the lid off the cake.

“Think straight, Magnus:
torn stocking and puncture mark equals obvious assault.  We need something a fraction more subtle;
just enough to put her out of mischief for the journey but not arouse the bargeman’s
suspicion.  We want him to take us to Reg
Arkonnen and we’ll work it out from there.”

I gave up the guess-work
with weights and measures and saturated the fruitcake with liquid morphine,
having come to the conclusion that they’d only be having a slice each and not
the entire cake.

“But . . what about Mr
Tamang?  You’re not going to leave him
trussed up on deck, are you?  I mean, he
could be fatally wounded!”  Magnus was
getting het up again.

“Don’t shout at me, you
fool!  The game’s well and truly up if
you shout.”  I cocked my head to listen
to a slight sound that had nearly been masked by his histrionics.  “I told you; Tamang is as tough as they come.  If he’s fatally wounded, then that’s that - damn
shame and all, but so it goes - otherwise, I’m sure he can sweat it out.”

“Man, you’re a cold-blooded
bastard.”

I glanced at him:

“I’m afraid so.  Now, listen carefully to what I say because
we’re not at school and there’s no time to spell it out on the blackboard for
you.”

His face had reddened to the
tips of his ears in his fury at me.  His
juvenile emotions disabled him far more than any broken limbs.  I spoke as quickly as I could:

“I’ve injected the cake with
liquid morphine and you’ll both be having a slice.  You can do some theatrical stuff with your
piece if you really must; some stalling and nibbling from the edge and so
forth, but you’re not my wife and I’m prepared to bet that when it comes to
acting, you’re an excellent journalist.
Your face gives you away, in other words.  So just chomp it down and have some more kip,
eh?  You’re twice the size of your aunt,
so you won’t be out for nearly as long, and you’re pretty damn useless at the
moment anyway.  Understand?”

He stared, mutinously, at
me.  I just hoped I’d played it correctly
with the boy.

“Good.  Now, prove me wrong and give it the full
Donald Wolfit[40].  You want tea and cake and you’re going to
grovel to get it.  Go on, Magnus,
grovel,” I stuffed the medicine and the syringe back into the box, deep beneath
rolls of gauze and bandage and slipped back under the bed, “because I just
heard Jay Tamang scream and I don’t ever
want to hear that sound again.”

——

I took a couple of deep
breaths and then I yelled.  The bed
trembled with the force of it.

“Aunt Dilys!  Aunt Dilys!”

Nothing happened, so I did
it again.

“Aunt Dilys!”

Footsteps; her light tread
on the steps.

“What is it now,
Magnus?  I’m busy.”

“I want to apologise,
Auntie.”

There was a pause before she
answered.

“I’m glad you’ve come to
your senses, but I’m busy at the moment and I’m afraid you’re interrupting me.”

Don’t let her get away.  Grovel, Arkonnen, like you’ve never grovelled
before.

“Please, Auntie!  Let me apologise.  Talking to you like that; I don’t know what
came over me.  I’ve not been in my right
mind with all the medicine and that.  They
stuff you full of pills and you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.  And the kidnap was a bit of a shock, to be
honest, ‘though I know you’ve only got my best interests at heart and a holiday
by the sea will be just what the doc
ordered and . .”

I was sweating from every
pore, spouting gibberish in torrents.  I
barely knew what I was saying, but I
kept it coming because the minute I stopped an innocent man might be harmed by
that monstrous woman.

“ . . can we not bury the
hatchet and have that cake together; your beautiful cake you so kindly baked
for me.  All you’ve done for me, Auntie,
and I go and sound off like that.  I’ll
never forgive myself.  Please come down
and cut us some cake.  Please, please,
please . .”  I was practically
sobbing.  Practically?  I was sobbing my heart out.

Another light tread and then
another and another and there she was, watching me cry like a baby.  She reached into her cardigan pocket, got out
a handkerchief and handed it to me.

“Have a mop up,” she said,
as if I was six years old and I’d had a rough time  in the playground.  “There, there, you’re a good boy, really, I
know you are.  Was I a bit too
strict?  I know I can be; I can go it a
bit strong with our Terry, I know, although it’s only for his own good.  It’s just . .” she sat down on the chair and began
to wring her pale hands again, “ . . your generation, you’re so very . .
different.  Even the words you
speak.  We don’t know what we should be
doing with you because it’s all moving so terribly fast and it’s leaving us
behind.  I don’t want to be left behind,
Magnus.”

I stared at her, amazed by
the transformation.  Because this was
another woman from the maniac of half an hour back.  This woman was thoughtful and intelligent
enough to understand what was happening to her.

“What’s this all about, Aunt
Dilys?”  I asked, before I could stop
myself.

“Reginald is such an able
man,” she said.  “So skilled at what he does.  You
should’ve seen the glass he used to make; it was like something out of a
museum.  Better than that, even!  But
he had to give that up, so what did he do?
He built up a whole new business importing it and he’s made another
success out of all that, too.  It’s his
whole life, glass.   The only thing he’s
ever really cared about.  Oh . . I know I’ve got brains, but where’s that got
me?  Reg can get things done because he’s
a man, you see, and he’s allowed to
achieve things I can only dream about.  He
tells me very little, but I know he has big dreams for us and I’m so very grateful.  If there’s any way I can help him, I will.  He’s a wonderful man to be married to,
Magnus.  He really is.”

“I’m pleased for you both,”
I said.  “That’s great news, Auntie.  Now, how about a cuppa and a slice of your delicious
cake?”

——

It didn’t take
particularly long.  The clink of cutlery
on china and then I heard her comment on the taste:

“It’s nice and damp, but it
could do with a tad more sugar; that’s not like me.”

I was concerned that she might leave the rest
of her slice uneaten on her plate, but . .

“Eat up your cake,
Magnus.  Think of the children in
Africa.”

They, obviously, both
polished it off.

“My, I’m bushed,” she
said.  “I can’t think what’s come over
me.”

“Me, too,” he replied,
yawning.  “It’s been a long day,
Auntie.  We could take a nap.  You can have the top bunk if you like.”

She giggled, flirtatiously
and caught his yawn.

“Pardon me.”

Then there was a prolonged
silence.

“You can come out now,”
Magnus’ voice was weighed down with sleep.

I scrambled out in time to watch
his eyelids descend.

“Just . . do . . what’s . .
right,” he managed, before he tumbled into the arms of Morpheus.

Dilys Arkonnen was sitting
on the chair, her head flung back and her mouth wide open, catching flies, as
if she’d been about to protest when sleep had captured her.  I tipped her forward, so that she sprawled
over the table and wedged the chair securely to prevent her rolling off.  Then I tucked her arms under her head, aiming
to make her position look as natural as possible in case the bargeman came
looking for her.  I thought of Tamang’s
remark about knocking her out with the frying-pan and couldn’t help wondering
whether that mightn’t have been the best idea, in the long run.  Still, what was done was done.  Who knew what state I’d find the man in,
though.  I removed my shoes and began to
creep up the ladder, before a noise made me freeze.

Magnus Arkonnen’s marmalade cat
had jumped on top of the table and was sniffing at the cake.

“Shoo, “I whispered,
climbing back down as I did so.

I’m rather fond of animals
and I wasn’t willing to have the cat on my conscience; there being enough
morphine in that Dundee cake to kill the animal outright, despite his
size.  “Shoo!”

He shot me a look and jumped
off the table, padding over to wind his great bulk around my legs and nudge my
socks with his astonishingly ugly mug.
He was a friendly enough beast and I bent to stroke him, before replacing
the glass lid over the fruitcake.

“Stick to chicken livers,
old boy.”

I consulted my watch and
found it was approaching half past six in the evening.  I could’ve wished it had been later and
darker, but there was nothing for it; I had to risk going above board if I was
to find out what she’d done with Jay Tamang.
I prodded the cat with one toe to break his ardent attachment to my
socks, pulled up the dark grey lapels of my suit jacket in order to conceal the
white shirt that I wore underneath, and set off up the ladder once more.

The minute I slid the hatch
and poked my head above the hold, I felt a welcome sense of release from
captivity.  Fresh air - less brackish-smelling,
with a definite tang of the marine, now - hit me.  Then, the realisation that we weren’t alone,
that the river was a crowded highway lined with docks and thronging with
lighters and tugs, motorships, coasters and colliers: all the momentum of a
busy river widening into her estuary, pulling towards the sea.  I was struck by the thrum of the engine, not
having noticed it in the metal-lined berth below.  I crawled out and onto the deck, staying low
to the ground, aware that Severs would be up in the small wheelhouse to the
stern.  I just had to trust that his eyes
were on the great river ahead and not the expanse of deck, which lay bare,
darkening under long, evening shadows.  But,
where was Tamang?  I crawled towards the
bows and then I saw him.

She’d lashed him to the mainmast
(of course she had), wrapped him up with the rope and secured it around a
cleat.  I could see the silhouette of his
head against the evening sky, his chin resting upon his chest.  There was a rusty smudge of blood at the collar
of his coat, but I couldn’t make out any more damage than that.  Perhaps that had been enough.

I kept low and ran
over.  Just before I reached him,
however, I stumbled upon something lying on the deck.  Three slim, short lengths of rope had been
tied together and knotted at their ends; a makeshift cat-o’nine tails -
cat-o’three tails, if you must - with which to whip the brave Tamang.  My gorge rose at the sight of the foul thing
and I was sorely tempted to toss it into the river in disgust . . but sentiment
only leads to stupidity.  I picked up the
little horror and stuck it under my jacket, looping the loose ends around the
belt of my trousers.  No point in looking
any gift horses in their muzzles.

“Tamang!” I whispered.  “Tamang!
Are you still with us, Jay?”

He stirred and lifted his
head, blinking in the dusk.

“Mr Upshott?  Is it you?”

I breathed a deep sigh of
relief and got on with the job.

——

“Straight to hospital!”  Aunt Kathleen exclaimed, frogmarching me
across the beach and back to the house.  “I’ll
drive you, but you’ll have to tell me where to go.”

We drove to Buckland
Hospital in Dover, but, when we got there, they turned me away the instant I
mentioned the word ‘uranium’.

“Straight to the isolation
hospital,” the woman at reception ordered.
“Noah’s Ark Road.”

“The isolation
hospital?”  Aunt Kathleen queried, once
we were back in the car.  “Isn’t that for
the unlucky kids who’ve caught polio[41]?  I can’t possibly take you there, Rosa.  Millicent would never forgive me.  No, there’s only one thing for it,” she
checked her petrol gauge.  “I’ll have to
drive you back to London.”

“To London?  Whatever for?”  I was beginning to feel tired and rather
disorientated.

“They know you in Charing Cross;
they’ll be up to speed on how to deal with another poisoning.”

“Fine.”

“Just lie back and take a
nap, darling,” she said, whipping the car onto the London road.  “I’ll have you there in two shakes.”

I closed my eyes and sank
into the welcoming arms of Morpheus.

19.  The Octopus

Rosa was all done in
and little wonder.  She rattled about in
the passenger seat, sliding to the right and left as we bumped over the many
potholes the appalling winter had gouged into the old London Road, but nothing
could wake her.  I hoped that her dreams
were sweet ones but, glancing at her as she slept  - her face thinner, now, than I’d ever seen
it and sallow, too, against the brown sack of a dress that she’d chosen to wear
- I doubted whether they were.  My niece
looked like adulthood had caught up with her and ripped her from her childhood
overnight.  It had to happen, I
supposed.  After all, it happens to every
one of us.  (Although, in my own case, I wasn’t
so sure there’d ever been anything
soft and childish in me; whether that hadn’t been one more luxury that we hadn’t
been able to afford in my family.)  Yet
the magic dust of childhood had certainly lingered over Rosa and I hated to
think that it had gone.

She woke up not long before we
got to Charing Cross hospital.

“Don’t leave me,” she cried,
startling me out of a thicket of black thoughts.

“I won’t.  Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Sorry.  You may have some acting to do, Aunt
Kathleen.  I mean, I wouldn’t want to
disturb . .”

“Acting?”  I snorted.
“I’m in rather a lull at the moment, darling.”

“It must be wonderful to be an
actress; I know I’d love it,” she
seemed to be picking up.  “Especially
Shakespeare.  At the Old Vic, or
Stratford.  Or on film, you know, like
Olivier’s new Richard III[42].”

“Shakespeare?  They’ve never let me loose on Shakespeare, I
have to say.”

“Perhaps you could give me some
advice, Aunt Kathleen, on how one becomes an actress?”

I’d just taken the wrong road
off Hammersmith Broadway and was searching for somewhere to turn round, so I
blurted out what I really thought, rather than cooking up a pat response to her
question (which was one I’d frequently been asked before).

“Don’t do it,” I said, “that’s
my advice.  It’s a life of diminishing
returns for a woman.  What’s more, you’ve
got brains; unlike some of us.  God alone
knows why I landed up in the
business!  One minute I was singing and
the next somebody cast me in a film and that was that . . and it’s not as if I
ever wanted to sing in the first place!”

“Didn’t you?”  She sounded fascinated by my boring, old
story; the sweetheart.  “What did you really want to do, then, Aunt Kathleen?”

“I wanted to be a mechanic, or
an engineer, something like that, Rosa.
To race cars and pilot planes around the world.  Build a motorbike and whirl off into the
sunset.”

There was a pause, while we both
thought about what I’d just said.

“Well, why don’t you do it now?  If you’re in a lull, I mean.”

Such a simple question.  Why had I never asked myself that
question?  I stopped the car outside the
hospital and sat back in my seat.  Maybe
some questions were so simple that even simpletons like myself failed to ask
them.

They put my niece in
solitary confinement again and wouldn’t let me go with her.  We hugged before they took her away and there
were tears glinting in the corners of her eyes.

“Don’t listen to me, Rosa.  You be
an actress if you want to be.”

She rubbed the tears away with
the sleeve of her sackcloth and ashes dress.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,
Aunt Kathleen.  I never used to cry.”

“Then you should have done.  Goodbye, darling.  I’ll let everyone know where you are and
we’ll be here, like a shot, the minute they give us the say so.  And you can call me  any time you like,  just reverse the charges.  Promise?”

I kissed her again and hung
about in the hospital lobby, watching her through the glass pane in the first
door of a long corridor of other doors with glass panes; watching her walk the
length of the corridor with a nurse to either side - like prison escorts -
leading her on and on until she was out of sight.  I stood there long after she’d gone, lost in
thought.

I was fervently hoping our
shiny, new health service could get that muck out of her system before it did
any serious damage.  ‘Tristram’s uranium’;
that’s how I’d come to think of it.  Damn
the man.  I only wished I could remember more of what young Mr Tamang had said
about radiation when we’d been in that tunnel (the whole experience having been
so odd that it’d been difficult to take it all in).  There’d been something about glass being
inert and not leaching and some discussion about whether this changed when it
was broken . . because Rosa had smashed some glass, that much I did know.  And, of course, there’d been the broken glass
in that underground shelter, which had sent Mr Tamang into a complete
tailspin.  Smashed glass, intact glass,
uranium-bearing glass.  This horror that
Tristram had brought to my family, that had taken my brother and poisoned my
niece, was all about glass.

I turned to go . . and then, not
before bloody time, I remembered the envelope.

The minute I got
home to Chelsea, I dashed upstairs and dug out the envelope that I’d stolen from
Brompton Oratory, and the note from the old, Polish spy.  I’d hidden them in my underwear drawer and
they smelt of Patou’s Joy.  The spy had
wanted me to hand them over to the authorities, or to Tristram, but I’d done
neither and kept them to myself.  I
hadn’t opened the envelope, however, and in that sense I had followed Mr Piotrowski’s advice.   (Although that part of it hadn’t been
difficult, because it had dawned on me that I couldn’t give a fig for what was inside; it was the fact
of the thing that I liked, the little part of Tristram’s other life that I
owned and he didn’t know about.)

I turned the envelope over in my hands and studied the
random Russian letters that, apparently, made up the dull as ditchwater
sentence ‘BID FOR GLASS’.  It might mean
something, then again it might be entirely unconnected to Tristram’s case, but
one thing I did know and that was that the time for pathetic, marital games was
over.  In every respect, it was over.

I caught sight of my face in the hall mirror; there
were faint lines in it that hadn’t been there weeks before.  Bert’s death had been so terrible, of course,
so unexpected and appalling in every way . . but those lines stretched back even
further than that.  I traced one with a fingertip,
from temple to temple.  It was then that
the plan came to me.  I had to stop
treating my life as if I were acting in it and I couldn’t begin to do that
until I’d done what was right.  So, I made a start.  After I’d rung Millicent and told her Rosa
was back in Charing Cross, I put the envelope into my handbag, grabbed a light
coat and picked up my car keys.  Then I
drove over to South Kensington before I lost my nerve.

I found a parking space in Thurloe Place and walked
back to the café, checking my watch.  It
was still only lunchtime (although it felt a whole lot later), and it was even
another Monday and I reckoned Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski was a creature of habit;
if he wasn’t to be found reading his newspaper over Polish dumplings, then I
planned to sneak into Brompton Oratory and ambush him while he was on his
knees.  But he was there, alright.

“Good afternoon, Mr Piotrowski,” I said.

The debonair, retired spy looked up at me and his eyes
widened very slightly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles,
that was all.

“Good afternoon, Madam.  How pleasant to see you again.”

“Is this seat taken?”

“Please be my guest.”

“Thank you,” I said.
“Oh, and I’m Kathleen by the way.
Kathleen Upshott, but you can call me Kathleen.”

“To what do I owe this honour, Kathleen?”

He’d put down his newspaper and removed his specs and
was smiling, benignly, at me over his plate of half-eaten dumplings.  The waiter appeared and I ordered a strong
black coffee before I answered his question.

“Well, Mr Piotrowski, to put it bluntly, I need some
information and I was rather hoping you could help me.”

“Information?
What information could an old fellow like me possibly have to give
you?  I’m always happy to help a
beautiful woman, but I fear you may have come to the wrong quarter, Kathleen.”

“Trust nobody, eh?”
I smiled back at him.  “That’s
right and proper, of course, but I’m completely harmless, you know.  Nobody
is more harmless than myself, if you want the honest truth . .”

“I think you do yourself an injustice . .”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t flirt with me, Mr Piotrowski.  Just eat your dumplings and listen to what I
have to say, will you?”

“How delightful
it is to see you again,” he laughed.
“But you’ve put me off my lunch . . in the nicest possible way.”  He reached for a thin, black cigarette.  “Please continue.”

I leant towards him and lowered my voice.

“You remember the envelope?”

He frowned and nodded.

“Well, I still have it . . I know, I know . .”  (He’d made to interrupt and, no doubt, give
me a good telling off.)  “ . . I should’ve
handed it over to the proper people straight away - and thank you for the note,
by the way; you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.  But I didn’t
and that’s all there is to it.  I didn’t
show it to anybody, but I also didn’t open it, as you can see for yourself, if
you want to, because I have it right here in my handbag.”

I went to open the clasp, but he stuck a hand out to
stop me.

“Not here, if you please.  Did I teach you nothing, Kathleen?”

“Sorry.  I’m
very difficult to teach; practically impossible they used to say at
school.  Anyway, it’s here and it hasn’t
been opened and you’ll just have to take that on . .” ( I’d been about to say
‘trust’, but, of course, that word wasn’t in his vocabulary.)

“So what are you going to do with the item?”  He asked, after a considerable pause.

“I want to take it to HQ, as I believe they call
it.  I was hoping you had the
address.  I want to take it in person,
you see.”

He took a long drag of his cigarette and sighed.

“I must say, you continue to mystify me, Kathleen.  Why not give the item to your husband to
deliver?  Or, if you are still so
determined to thrust yourself into matters that do not concern you, pump your
husband for the relevant information;
I’m sure that would not be beyond your capabilities.”

I took a sip of my coffee, found it a bitter brew and
unwrapped a sugar cube, thoughtfully.

“It’s complicated, Mr Piotrowski.  Too complicated to go into at this point.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and
fluttered the tips of his fingers in an elegant, if disdainful, little gesture
of dismissal at the very idea of my marital complications.

“Is that so?
Well, then,” he said, “in that case, we had better go.”

“What?”  I was
taken aback.  “But . . you’re not coming with me, you know.”

“I may have mentioned that I have plenty of time on my
hands.  A visit to the old firm might be
. . diverting.”  He got up and threw some
coins on the table.  “Your coffee is
taken care of.  Do you have a car,
Kathleen, or shall I hail a taxi?”

As I drove to HQ, I found myself explaining
to my passenger that I had, in fact, visited it before, although I had no idea
where it actually was.

“I mean, I never intended to go there.  They scooped me up with my husband just past
Vauxhall Bridge and I don’t think they actually knew they had me until my husband’s boss opened the van door.  Hutch.
Was he there in your day?”

“Oh, yes.  I
know Hutchcraft.”  His noble profile gave
nothing away.

“Well, my meeting with him was over in the blink of an eye; I spent most of my visit in
the garage, actually, and then we left from there.  We went down the slide.”

“Indeed?”

“Did you ever . .?”

“All of it,” he interrupted, “I have seen and done all
of it.”

It was obvious that subject was closed, so I shut up
and we drove to the address in Waterloo that he’d given me, each lost in our
own thoughts.

“Are you sure we’ve come to the right place?”

I remembered a square courtyard, like a university college,
and four imposing walls.  Also, a pattern
of herring-bone bricks underfoot that had caused me to stumble in my
heels.  I’d been disorientated - in
shock, perhaps - but, even so, the building in front of us looked quite wrong.
This was a narrow place, with a soot-stained façade like an old pawnbrokers
without the balls.  Unwashed windows and
yellow nets suggested a building that had been left untenanted for years, where
the landlord was sitting tight and waiting for better things to come.

“I am perfectly sure.
The front is a front, if I make myself clear.  The genuine entrance is at the back, where
the horses used to go to be stabled in happier times,” Mr Piotrowski said.

I followed the old spy around the corner and noticed
that, although his back was ram-rod straight, he walked with a pronounced limp
in his left leg.  Out in broad daylight
and away from the dingy glow of the Polish café, I saw that the back of his
long, black coat was shabby and unpleasantly stained and worn to greasiness at
the elbows.  His shoes were so beyond
down at heel that no heel remained.  Like
the façade that hid HQ from the world’s gaze, Mr Piotrowski had seen better
days.  He might give the appearance of Polish
aristocracy, but, from the back, you’d have taken him for a tramp, in all
honesty.  I liked the old gentleman and
suddenly felt rather sorry for him.  Did
he really want his former colleagues
to see him like that?

I grabbed his arm just before we turned in to HQ.

“Are you sure you want to come in, Mr Piotrowski?”

He swung round and I realised what a fool I’d been,
because one look at that magnificent face and he could have been wearing the
emperor’s new clothes, for all it mattered.
Never mind a Count, he looked like a King
returning to his kingdom; all the time we’d been driving across London he’d
been steeling himself for this moment, I could see that.  It struck me that Mr Piotrowski was no spent
force.

“Are you sure you
want to come in, Mrs Upshott?”  He
retorted.

I was quaking in my boots; my plan seemed utterly
ridiculous in that moment, and going into that building was the last thing I wanted to do.

“No,”  I said,  “but don’t try and stop me.”

And we went inside.

A uniformed man sprang out of a cubby-hole
and tried to prise my envelope from me before I’d said any of what I’d come to
say.

“No you don’t!  I’m afraid I’m not parting from this until I
see . .”

“Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft,
please,” Mr Piotrowski interjected.

“Do you have an
appointment?”

“No, but we have met,” I tried, “and . . ”

“Then I’m sorry, but Sir
Godfrey can’t see you.  He’s far too
busy.”

“Tell him his old friend,
Apoloniusz, has come,” Mr Piotrowski said.

“Apple on what?”

“Apoloniusz.  But you can say ‘A’, if you prefer.”

The uniformed man picked up
his receiver and dialled, not taking his eyes from us.

“I have ‘A’ here to see you,
sir,” he announced.  “And . . Mrs
Upshott.”

It wasn’t possible to hear
the reaction to this, but it must have gone done fairly well because the man
informed us that Sir Godfrey was on his way down, adding, “In person,” as if he
usually sent a stand-in.

I clutched my handbag,
tight, and we waited for the arrival of the chief.  We waited and we waited in that small,
airless lobby, and, several times, we had to make way for official types
rushing about on, presumably, top-secret business. It all seemed remarkably
cramped for an intelligence service bent on safe-guarding the secrets of the
nation . . or finding out the secrets of other nations . . or whatever it was
that they got up to in a dull building in the worst part of Waterloo.  However, we hadn’t too much longer to wait
before a lift descended, a shiny, brass gate was pulled to one side and there
was Hutch; a rather droopy category of man in a creased, grey suit.  He was small-ish and old-ish and when they’d
handed out shoulders he’d been at the back of the queue.  I couldn’t think why I’d been so nervous.

“Mrs Upshott.  How lovely to see you again,” he murmured,
taking my hand in his and hanging on.  “I
expect you have concerns about your husband?”

Of course I had many
concerns about my husband, but they certainly weren’t for public consumption
and had nothing, whatsoever, to do with why I was there.

“Let me reassure you that we
are doing everything in our power to find him, Mrs Upshott.”

He didn’t sound terribly
reassuring, but then, luckily, I wasn’t particularly in need of reassurance.

“I’m so glad,” I replied,
“but I expect Tristram can fend for himself.”

“Mmm.  That’s the spirit.”  He glanced, vaguely, about the lobby, but
didn’t seem to register Mr Piotrowski at all.
“I say . . can I tempt you to a small glass of sherry in my office?  Now that you’ve come all this way.  The view of the Thames is quite something
from up top.”

I had no desire to drink
sherry with Hutch, but very much wanted to get out of the lobby and proceed
with my plan.

“Thank you . . Hutch.  May I call you Hutch?”

“I’d be honoured.  Step this way.”

He laid a feather-light, yet
strangely intimate, arm around my waist and directed me into the ornate, little
lift.

“Oh, Hutch,” I said,
stepping as far away from his arm as the tiny dimensions of the lift allowed,
“you remember Mr Piotrowski, don’t you?”

He looked straight through
the old spy, as if he were looking through glass.  Mr Piotrowski narrowed his eyes but said
nothing.

“Sorry, old boy,” said
Hutch, pulling the brass gate to as he spoke, “only room for two.”

I was slightly startled by
the offhand way he’d dismissed the old spy and fell silent as we ascended in
the lift, playing the scene over in my head; it being difficult to work out
just how rude Hutch was being when he habitually spoke in such a low-key,
inexpressive fashion (as if he were reading lines and hadn’t made up his mind
how to play them).

There was nothing low-key
about his office, however, for he’d feathered his nest in some style.  It was the epitome of luxury after what had
gone before; all gleaming parquet and the lingering tang of lavender furniture
polish.  The view of the river certainly
did take the eye and the dirty old Thames scrubbed up nicely from that
height.  Hungerford railway bridge was
transformed - I had to step closer to the window to prove it was Hungerford - because it spanned the
river like a bracelet on a delicate lady’s arm, quite unlike the heap of blackened
ironmongery with which Londoners were familiar.

“This will buck you up.”

He handed me a glass of
sherry - chestnut brown and syrup-sweet, by the look of it - and I slid my
handbag up my arm to take it from him.

“Honestly, Hutch, I’m not
too concerned about my husband.  I’m sure
he can find his own way home.  No, I’ve
come to see you about an entirely different matter.”

He was standing very close
to me with his sherry and I made a move to sit down, to put the meeting onto a
more professional footing.  However,
rather than placing himself behind his impressive, mahogany desk, he pulled a
gilt chair over and sat down beside me.

“I’m not too concerned about
your husband, either,” he said.

“Oh.  Well that’s encouraging, I expect.  I mean, you’d know whether he was in any
danger, or not.”

“Mmm.  Tell me . .”

“What I’ve come to see you
about?  Well . .”

“ . . about ‘The Furies from
Venus’.  That corset-affair you were
wearing . .” he put his hand on my knee and squeezed, “ . .  was damned fetching, if I may say so.”

This was not unfamiliar
territory, but I’d failed to see it coming and was disconcerted.

“Hutch!”  I exclaimed, sounding like the ingénue in a
French farce.  “I’m a married woman!”

“When the cat’s away and all
that.  I’ve always had a soft spot for
you, Kathy.  May I call you Kathy?”

“No, you may not and would
you please take your hand off my knee!”

He removed his hand, but
only to take a swig of his sherry.  He
seemed, if anything, rather thrilled by the bracing tone of my voice.

“Why such formality,
Kathy?  This is our chance to get to know
one another properly.”

I’d stood up and backed
towards the door because I had a sudden sense that this was the type of fool
who might not take no for an answer.  And
my instincts proved right because he promptly lunged at me, hands like an
octopus diving underneath the hem of my coat and the skirts of my black
mourning dress.  I screamed, but his
mouth came straight at me, scraping at my teeth, while he pressed me into the
back of the door, my scream stifled into a series of gasps.  I may have been taller than him, but he was
wiry and surprisingly strong and all over me.
I kicked one leg free and stamped on his foot with the heel of my shoe.

“You damned bitch,” he
snarled, hopping up and down, “don’t you come that with me.”  (While I wrestled with the doorknob in the
brief moment that I had before he flung himself on me again.)  “What I know about you could see you put away
for life,” he spat into my ear.  “You
killed a man, don’t you know?  Play ball
and we’ll forget it ever happened.
Otherwise . .”

I went limp.  Yes I knew I’d killed a man; I’d been living
with the guilt of it for weeks and it had been nothing less than a living
death.  That was why I’d come to HQ, you see.  That
was my plan.  To offer up the envelope in
return for information on the man I’d run over.
To see if I could find his family and make some sort of amends for the
terrible thing I’d done.

Hutch seized his
moment.  He swooshed my skirts up above
my face and yanked, hard, at my legs, so that I lost my footing and slipped,
flat on my spine, onto the floor, while he began to fumble with his
trousers.  I felt no terror; felt
nothing, whatsoever.  The guilt was so
all-consuming, you see, that it left room for nothing else at all.

When, the door burst open
and Mr Piotrowski jumped over me and barrelled into him, laying hands on his
puny shoulders and slamming him backwards onto his own desk.

“Up to your old tricks, eh,
Hutchcraft?”

He must have had him pinned
against the desk, but all I could see was the back of the old spy’s filthy
coat, shrouding the two of them.  (I was
glad of that moment of privacy, because I’d finally caught on; had realised
that the helpless woman, flat on her back on the floor, was me.  Shame piled on top of guilt and it was so
overwhelming that, in that second, it crossed my mind I might actually die of it.)   I wrapped my coat around me, hiding the
torn, silk skirts of my black dress as best I could and got myself up stiffly,
like an old lady, my shredded stockings pooling around my ankles.

“How the hell did you get up here?”  Hutch asked Mr Piotrowski.

“With the greatest of ease.  Your security is not up to scratch, old boy.”

“You always were light on
your feet, A, I’ll give you that.  Look,
get your damned hands off me, will you?
You’ve had your bit of fun.”

“What, and let you press
that buzzer that I see over there, Hutchcraft?
Let you summon your boys and get me accused of another of your little
slip-ups, eh?  Add attempted rape to my
crowded biography?  Why, it really is just like old times.”

“I don’t know what you’re
talking about, man.  What is this senile
drivel?  Just get the heck off me if you
know what’s best for you.”

“Oh, I have never known
what’s best for me,” said Mr Piotrowski, “not like you, Hutchcraft.  If it were up to me, I’d advise Mrs Upshott to press charges and make a big splash
of it over the front pages.  I’d
certainly be willing to testify to the state I found her in.  We might not get anywhere, but it could put a
blot on your copybook.”

“Ha, ha,” Hutch’s laugh was
a listless effort.  “I think you’ll find
that Mrs Upshott has no desire to press charges.  Not with her history.”

There was a pause.

“Damn you, Hutchcraft!”  It was the first time that I’d heard the old
spy raise his voice.  “You’ve got
something on her, haven’t you?”

“Ha, ha.”

A tremendous, smacking noise
reverberated through the office.  It was
the sound of Mr Piotrowski punching Hutch smartly in the mouth, coupled with
the thwack of Hutch’s head hitting the gleaming surface of his mahogany desk.

“Out cold.”  Mr Piotrowski turned to look at the state of
me, rubbing his bruised knuckles as he did so.
“No, I have never known what is best for myself.  But what does it matter any more?  How are you,
Kathleen?  Recovered enough to run?”

“Just about.”

In truth, my legs had begun
to shake of their own accord.

“Excellent.  Come, my dear.  We shall take the little lift first, I
think,” he held the door open for me.  “Then we run.”

20.  Being Joe Bloggs

“I’ve put the witch out of action for the
journey, so you don’t need to worry about her.
But d’you think you can sit tight for much longer, Tamang?”  I whispered.

He managed a small smile,
which was pretty impressive in his position; trussed to the mainmast and
recovering from a brush with the cat.

“I can sit tight for as long
as it takes, Mr Upshott.”

“Good man, because I can’t
unbind you yet, I’m afraid.  There’s too
much damn daylight.”

But, how long would it take?  I was counting on at least twelve hours from
the Thames Estuary to the Port of Dover, but my estimation was on the hazy
side; the barge, after all, was fairly steaming towards the mouth of the Thames.  I reckoned the reason she could move so fast
was because she wasn’t carrying much cargo.
A barge like the Humber was able to carry tremendous loads, but not
without slowing down.

“Well, keep your chin
up.  I’ll see if I can bring you some
water and something to eat when the lights go down.”

I set off across the deck at
a scuttle, making my way towards the larger of the two sliding hatches, the one
situated in the stern (because I’m naturally inquisitive and I like to know as
much about any given situation I find myself in as I possibly can).  If this floating steel box was carrying anything, then uranium
glass was my guess and I certainly wouldn’t be diving into the hold to join
it.  But I wouldn’t mind crossing that
one off my list.  I slid past the
wheelhouse on my stomach, practically under the nose of Severs, who had donned
a muffler and jacket against the night air and was resolutely upright at the
wheel, scanning the river like a good skipper.
I was so close I could hear him humming a tune, wholly off key.

When I reached the hold, I
patted at my jacket pocket for my little collection of picks.  However, when it came to it, I found they
were unnecessary because the bolt wasn’t fully shot and the padlock was
separated from the chain, which hadn’t been the case when Tamang and I’d first
come aboard.  It seemed that something or
other was in the cargo hold, although
they couldn’t have had much time in which to load it.  I slid the hatch and poked my head in, but
the hold was empty.  It occurred to me
that whatever it was we were carrying might be stowed away through an inner
door, much like the sealed door we’d found at the bow end of the barge.  So I turned round and climbed down the steel
ladder, closing the steel hatch over my head.
I’d nearly reached the bottom when a hand grabbed my ankle.

He yanked me from the ladder
and I stumbled on the floor, righting myself almost instantly; although not
quickly enough to dash the gun from his gloved hand.  Actually, it took a second to regain my
savoir faire, but that may have been the daunting effect of the padded
radiation suit, hood and mask.  Anyhow, I
had my hands in the air straight away because he’d pushed the barrel of his gun
against my forehead before I had time to think.
He indicated that I should head back up the ladder, which gave me a
moment to get my bearings.  I turned
tail, as if to go, but ducked instead, kicking backwards with one foot.  His suit slowed him down, and I twisted my
torso round, hooked a leg behind his and sent him crashing to the ground.  The gun skidded out of his hand and across
the floor and I dived after it.  At
which, he began to make strenuous efforts to get up, so I promptly whipped his
hood off and bashed him over the skull with the hilt of the gun, rather hard.

This was a development that
I should have foreseen; the presence of another member of crew, I mean.  After all, a barge the size of the Humber
would normally have had a couple of men working her and, if one was steering
the thing, then the other was more than likely to be down in the hold.  What’s more, if the hold contained valuable
cargo, then the likelihood was that crew member number two would be guarding it
(and this hold evidently contained extremely valuable - if toxic – cargo).

However, every cloud has a
silver lining and the radiation suit was very good news, indeed, (and the
discovery of a spare suit and second pair of boots, even better).  I tugged my attacker out of his padding and
put his suit on over my clothes.  Then I
stepped into his heavy boots and laced them up.
It was a little hot, but night was drawing in fast and the glorious spring
day would soon be turning chilly.  Joe
Bloggs, or whoever he was, had been sweating in the padded suit in the full
glare of day and had taken the precaution of divesting himself of most of his
clothes, save for a pair of cotton shorts and a string vest.  I examined him, thoughtfully.  He wasn’t much more than a lad, with dark
brown hair shaved close at the neck, as if he’d been in the army.  Actually, he looked vaguely familiar,
although I couldn’t think why that should be.
Sadly, I was forced to humiliate him further - because he wouldn’t
remain unconscious for long - and I tied his arms behind his back with his
string vest, overhand-knotting it to the foot of the ladder and stuffed his
shorts into his mouth.  I hoped he didn’t
have a cold.

Then I went to take a look
at the goods.  I sprung open the bolt on
the inner door and gave it a sharp push. What I saw inside surprised me.  The Humber was carrying one, solitary, piece
of cargo.  It sat in the dark, a few feet
away from the door, shining silver in the light from the open door.  It was a good-sized, metal box, nailed shut,
with some foreign words stamped in red at the upper edge; This Way Up in Finnish, was my guess.  No wonder her cargo hadn’t weighed her down
and we’d been able to travel so swiftly.
One box, however . . just what
was in that box that necessitated its own, personal, armed guard?  I had to take a look; I didn’t want to, but
there was no way around it.  I stepped
outside for a moment, retrieved my picks from my jacket and returned, shutting
the reinforced metal door behind me.

My picks all dangled from
the one ring, to which I’d also attached a tiny torch and a  miniscule screwdriver.  I selected the screwdriver and got to
work.  It was a clumsy job and I very
nearly made a hash of it; the lid of the box was a deadweight and I was
drenched with sweat by the time I’d undone the final screw and lifted it
off.  It was so heavy that I actually
staggered with it in my arms and had some trouble getting it onto the floor
without dropping it on my toes.  I shone
the torch inside, encountering a good deal of white, protective wadding, which
I burrowed through, gingerly, until my gloved hand hit upon the edge of
something sharp.

I’d been quite wrong, for
there was no glass inside that
box.  What I found were bundles of steel
rods.  I withdrew my hand, instantly.  I’d a shrewd idea what those rods were for
and it put a different complexion on everything.  Who the hell was supplying Reg Arkonnen with
the materials to make a nuclear reactor?
The sound of my own panicked breathing nearly deafened me inside the
padded hood.  This game was not the game I thought I’d been
playing.  I replaced the wadding and the
screws with great care, and left the hold as fast as my boots would take me.

A sudden, sharp rap came from
above.

“Keep an eye on the wheel,
will you, mate?”  It was Mr Severs,
knocking on the sliding hatch to get his crew’s attention.   “I’m
just nippin’ to the carsy.”

“Right,” I shouted back,
only it came out as muffled as one would expect.

I climbed back up the ladder
and lumbered over to the wheelhouse, glad of the hood and mask.  It was a good ten minutes before Severs
re-appeared from the bows and, when he did, he was carrying a tray with two
mugs of tea and the damned fruitcake.

“They’re all asleep down
there, would you believe?  Mrs A’s passed
out on the tea table after her exertions.”
He lowered his voice and took his mug from the tray.  “Lucky you didn’t see that, mate.  Ugly,
it was.”  He shook his head, clearly on
the horns of a moral dilemma.  “Still . .
pays the wages.  Here, you hold this, if
you’d be so kind and I’ll cut us a bit of cake.
Keep us goin’ for a bit, eh?”  He
handed me the tray.  “Then you can take
your hat off, mate; no need to stand on ceremony on my barge, ha ha!  It may not be what you’re used to, roughing
it on the river, but the only thing’ll gas you up here is good old London fog!”

Unfortunately, I had to put
an end to Severs’ hilarious repartee by pretending to stumble over my big boots
and up-ending the tray and its contents into the river.  It was rather a shame, because I could have
done with a cup of tea, but the cake and Severs had to be kept well apart if we
were going to reach Arkonnen’s Dover hideaway.

“What?!”  Severs protested and I waited for a ticking
off but, strangely, none came.

He simply turned to watch
the cake sink into the waters of the Thames and sighed.

“I’ll get us a sandwich
later, how about that?  You’ll have to
make your own tea, mate, if you want another one.  I’ve got to get back to work.”

I bowed my hooded head to
ask forgiveness, mumbled a bit and headed back into the hold.  As I climbed down the ladder, I stopped to
look at Joe Bloggs, who was still out for the count.

“Who are you?”  I wondered.

Because my attacker was no
ordinary crew member, or hired muscle, that much was obvious.  By the way Severs spoke, it was clear that
Joe Bloggs was no ordinary Joe.

Time passed, during
which I sat on an uncomfortable chair and kept Joe company, not wishing to
intrude any further into the inner cargo hold.
If I was uncomfortable, I was acutely conscious that Jay Tamang was a
hundred times more so.  But I couldn’t
hurry it.  I was waiting for nightfall,
for Joe to stir and, most of all, for a plan.
And, in time, all three came to pass.

Joe mumbled and lifted his
head.  Before he had a chance to open his
eyes I walloped him again.

“Sorry Joe.”

Then I took off the
radiation suit I was wearing - it was far too cumbersome for my purposes and stood
out considerably more than the dark grey Saville Row job that I had on
underneath - and I climbed up the ladder, slid the hatch and crept up on
deck.  I could hear Severs singing
tunelessly above the chug of the motor, in a world of his own.  The deck was now completely dark, with pinprick-small
electric lights by the holds and nothing more.
I kept my head well down and scuttled back to Tamang.  Then I grabbed the end of the rope that bound
him and loosened it from the cleat.  He lifted
his head.

“Ssh!” I whispered.  “Follow me and keep well to the ground.”

I unwound the tremendous coil
of rope; round and round it went, and it struck me that the aunt from hell had
wound so much hemp around his small frame that she’d actually done a good job
of protecting him from the whiplash.  He collapsed
onto the deck, stifling a moan and I let him lie there for a minute, while I
wound the rope back around the mast, roughly creating the impression that he
was still there.

“Come, Jay”

He took a deep breath and
scrambled after me, across the deck and down the hatch, where our two sleeping
beauties were still doing their stuff in the dark.

“Sorry about the delay,” I
said.

I found a lamp by the bunks
and switched it on, turning it so that it faced away from my secretary.

“Will you pull through?  Anything I can get you from the medicine
chest?”

He was leaning against the
steel wall, flexing his arms and legs, when he suddenly clocked the presence of
Dilys Arkonnen.  His dark eyes widened
and little wonder.

“She’s been put out of
action, Tamang.  Drugged up to her
eyeballs.  Pretend she’s not here.”

He began to breathe again
and slid down the wall to sit on the floor.

“I think my head’s
bleeding,” he said.  “And my legs are
rather sore.”

“Other than that you’re in
tip top shape?”

He managed to squeeze out a
smile.

“Mr Upshott, I have
remembered now what it’s like in the field . .”

“And you can’t wait to get
back to the lab?”  I finished his
sentence off for him.

“Exactly so,” he said.

“Good.  I’m glad one of us has come to his
senses.  Now, I’ve got to scoot off
again, but make yourself a cup of tea, or whatever, while I’m gone; only mind
you grab the kettle before it starts whistling, won’t you?  I won’t be two ticks.”  I headed back up the ladder; I was beginning
to feel like I’d climbed the rigging to the crow’s nest on a fleet of tall
ships, I’d climbed up and down so many ladders in the previous hours.  “Oh, and one thing more.”

“Yes, Mr Upshott?”

“You’ve got to take your
clothes off again.  Yes, off with the
trousers, I’m afraid.  Now, if you’d be so kind.  Trousers, duffle and shoes will do.  If you’ll just get a move on, I’ll take them
with me.”

To cut a long spy
story short, I nipped back to the stern, dressed Joe in Tamang’s clothes,
grabbed the radiation suits and, somehow, slogged back up the ladder with Joe
and the suits slung over my back.  I
dragged the lot over to the bows, where I slid the hatch and flung the suits
into the hold.  Then I retrieved Joe and
got him over to the mainmast, lashed him securely, made sure to keep him gagged
and rested his chin on his chest.  I
pulled the hood of the duffle coat up around his closely shaved neck, to hide
the pallor of his skin but, all in all, his dark brown hair and youth gave a
similar impression to Jay Tamang.  Then I
crawled back down the hatch and drank two cups of tea, extremely fast, with a
big bowl of pink blancmange to follow.

Tamang had treated the cut
on his head and the bruising on his legs with antiseptic and then hopped into
the spare suit, but he still seemed uneasy, largely because he seemed to have developed
an antipathy to the cat.  He sat,
cross-legged, on the floor, clutching a mug of tea and staring at the creature,
which lay curled up on top of Magnus’ chest, staring back.

“Don’t keep looking at him,”
I advised.  “He’s lapping up the
attention; any minute now, he’ll come and jump on your head.”

“Aargh!”  The cat seemed to have got to him more than
anything else.

I went over and picked the
cat up by his front legs and he hung, placidly, in my arms - his back paws
almost grazing the ground - like a sack of particularly heavy potatoes.

“He’s a peaceful old fellow,
look.”  I set the cat on my head and he
stayed there, quite happily, purring.
“Does he suit me?”

Tamang stared, gravely, at
the cat on my head.

“Why is it so big?  I don’t think it natural for a feline to be
so big.”

I put the cat back down on
the floor and watched him wander over to the fridge.

“Well, he’s the full tom, if
you get my meaning.  And a hungry tom, at
that.”

I dug out his chicken livers
from the fridge, watched him gobble them up in two seconds flat and then washed
up the bowl with the other dishes we’d used.

“Time to get some kip, I
think.  I’d better get that ruddy suit
back on.”

“What about the man?”  Tamang motioned upwards.  “Won’t he come down here?”

“Oh yes.  By my estimation, he should be joining us any
minute now to make sandwiches, but I don’t think he’ll be too fussed if he
finds Joe Bloggs having some kip on the top bunk.  I rather think Joe pulls rank, actually.”

“Joe Bloggs?”

“Mmm.  Young chap in a radiation suit escorting a
select cargo to Reg Arkonnen in Dover.
But only one of us can be Joe, you understand.  The other has to be small enough to top and
tail with the sleeping journalist, keeping his head well under the blankets.”

Tamang gave a resigned sigh,
grabbed himself an apple from the fruit bowl and got into bed with the
Left.  The cat promptly tried to dash in
with him.

“Oh, no, you don’t!”

I grabbed the animal and
took him up to the top bunk with me.  It
had been a long enough night for Jay Tamang, already and that seemed the very
least I could do.

I was woken by the
sound of murmuring voices down below.

“Rosa,” murmured Magnus
Arkonnen.  “Rosa Stone.”

“Yes,” went Tamang, “that was the girl.  But we have had no notification that she is
dead and I’m sure Mr Upshott would have mentioned it, if that were the case.”

“Yeah?  I wouldn’t put it past him not to; he’s a
cold-blooded bastard, that one.”

I hung my head down over the
edge of the top bunk.

“Good morning, Magnus.  Slept well?”

He stared, glumly, up at me.

“I’ve a cracking
headache.  Any more dope and I’ll OD.”

I climbed down and
considered Dilys Arkonnen.

“Auntie’s still out, I see.”

I glanced at my watch and
discovered that it was six thirty in the morning.

“I wonder how long she’ll
be?  You might want to put your hood on
just in case, Tamang.  Oh, and get out of
bed.  Finding any more men in her
nephew’s bed might tip her over the edge.”

“I reckon she’s well over
the edge by now,” Magnus pointed out.  “So,
what’s the plan, man?”

I put the kettle on the
stove and began to assemble some thick wodges of bread, margarine and jam for
the assembled parties.

“I’m afraid there’s not an
awful lot that can be done with you, Magnus.
You’re pretty much surplus to requirements until your injuries
mend.  I hope you can understand that.”

For once, he didn’t argue.  Although, he looked severely down in the
mouth.

“One thing I will say, however.  You can stop worrying about my niece; I spoke
on the phone with her, a couple of evenings back and she was alive and well and
staying with her family in Kent.  Going
on about Richard Burton, actually.”

“Hey, man!  That sounds like Rosa!”

His entire face transformed
before my eyes.  Lit up and all the rest
of it.  The boy was one hell of a sorry case.

“Yes, it does.  She’s keeping an eye on proceedings that end
- she tipped us off about the Kent angle - but she’s got strict instructions
not to interfere any further.”

“You’ll be lucky!”

I finished making breakfast,
passed the plates round and went to find my hood.

“I think she’s learnt her
lesson,” I said and, I have to say, it sounded thoroughly unconvincing, even to
my own ears.

“Right,” there were a couple
of points that needed clearing up.  “I’m
heading up on deck, so just a few words, you two.”

They looked alert and ready
for action.

“Magnus, you will be
departing with your aunt for the holiday home.
Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.  But,
I’d be grateful if you’d use your journalist’s skills and commit anything unusual
you might come across to memory; even the smallest thing could help the
Operation.  This is the telephone number
of the Stone family and I’ll check back with them from time to time.  Got it?”

I told him the number and
got him to repeat it back to me several times.
I was pleased to see that he accepted his fate with unusual grace,
considering that he was Magnus Arkonnen.

“Tamang, I want you to remain down here, with your hood
over your face, for the time being.  But,
the minute that Dilys Arkonnen begins to stir, get yourself up the ladder and
over to the hold in the back of the barge and let me know.  You will be passing the wheelhouse, so try to
walk tall and mumble politely if Mr Severs says anything because, obviously,
you will be being Joe Bloggs.”

He nodded, as bright-eyed
and bushy-tailed as if the day before had never happened.

“Good luck everyone,” I gave
them my old army salute.

Then I shuffled up the
ladder for the last time, feeling optimistic that we had all the bases covered.

“See you in Dover.”

21.  A
Shaggy Dog

They took samples of
every bodily fluid I owned, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me.

“Are you sure you don’t have
kidney pain?”  One doctor asked.

“How are your eyes?”  Asked another, holding up four fingers.  “How many?”

I was tempted to say five,
but I stopped myself.

“We’ll take a good look at
them, anyhow,” he promised, and they did, holding up charts of rapidly
diminishing letters for me to read.

“J. K. Q,” I got down to the
itsy-bitsy ones at the very bottom.

“Q?”  He queried.
“I don’t think that’s a Q.”  He
peered at it.  “No, you’re right, Miss
Stone.  It is a Q.  Well done; not many
get that far.”

I felt absurdly pleased
because I could have memorised all of the charts from my last visit to Charing
Cross, but I hadn’t.  Honestly.

I’d been in hospital for two
days when a nurse asked me, casually, whilst filling up my jug of water:

“Any hay fever in your
family?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied,
sitting up in bed.  “My father’s riddled
with it.  He grew up in the London fogs
and he didn’t know he had it until we went to live in Kent and all of the
wildflowers attacked him en-masse.  But
I’ve never suffered from it.”

“No?  It can start at any time.  But I expect the doctors have ruled it
out.  Like me to find you a magazine?  Home Chat’s got some lovely knitting patterns
in it this month.”

“Thank you, that would be
wonderful,” I said.

But I wasn’t really thinking
about knitting patterns.  No, I was
thinking about speedwell, buttercup and stinging nettle.  About chalk milkwort, vetch, heartsease and
oxeye daisy.  And then, further back, to
the verdant spaces of the riverside at Putney and the daffodils in Hurlingham
Park.  Was it possible that I was
suffering from nothing more than the onset of a particularly chesty form of hay
fever?

I spent a lot of time
thinking - having little else to do in my solitary confinement - and the idea
grew on me.  And, then, other ideas began
to germinate and I thought them
through, one by one, while I stared, unseeing, at the hospital ceiling.  I thought about my involvement in Uncle
Tristram’s operation, about him wanting me to be his eyes and ears, and it
occurred to me that I’d gone much further and that what I’d actually become was
a canary.  Only, instead of carrying me
down mineshafts to test the presence of poisonous gases, I’d been exposed to yellow
glass.  Again and again, I’d been exposed
to glass that was ostensibly pumped full of dangerous amounts of uranium, but I
hadn’t keeled over in my cage.  My
kidneys were still functioning and my eyes were still clear.  There was only one, logical, conclusion; I
had proved beyond any reasonable doubt - by my continuing, healthy existence -
that the deadly glass was a fabrication of a different kind.  It was, in fact, a story.

I thought back to my
research with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I wondered why anybody had ever
thought it possible that glass could
hold vast amounts of uranium?  The whole
idea was completely ridiculous!  Yes,
uranium glass certainly existed and had enough uranium oxide in it to fluoresce
under ultraviolet light; I’d seen that for myself in Reg Arkonnen’s shed.  But massive
amounts of uranium that could be exported to Russia?  I hardly thought so.  And, if I
hardly thought so, then why on earth had HQ fallen for it?  If this was
a story, then it was the persistent variety they called a shaggy dog story.  I was only too conscious that I’d sworn to
have no more to do with Uncle Tristram’s work, but who could resist a shaggy
dog?  Certainly not me.  At which point, my father poked his head
around the hospital door and broke my chain of thought.

“Surprise!”  He boomed.
“The powers that be have allowed visitors.  How are you, bubeleh?”

“Hello Daddy.  How lovely to see you.  I’m perfectly fine, actually.”

He came in, parked himself
on the edge of my bed and dumped a brown paper bag on my bedside table.

“You didn’t bring grapes,
did you?”

“What do you take me
for!”  He gave me a look of mock horror
and a dramatic arm gesture that was straight off the boards of the Yiddish
theatre.  “Chocolate buns, Rosa.  But I shall take them away if you are too ill
to eat them.”

“Just you try!”  I grabbed the bag and hugged it to my breast.

“This I like to see.  You do
seem well.  Have they drained the poison
out of you?”

“Poison!”  I scoffed.
“It’s pure poppycock.  I don’t
believe there ever was any poison in the first place.”

He looked confused and took
his horrible, black beret off to scratch his head.

“No poison?  How can that be?  Everybody says
there was poison.”

“Yes, they do and that’s the
problem, actually . . . Tell me, Daddy, how is your hay fever?”

“Not so good, now you ask,”
he began to mop his eyes with his beret, as if my question had brought on an
attack.  “It’s started unusually early
this year, but Doctor Knowles says they’ve developed a new medicine that might
help.  Anti-hiss-something or other[43].  I forget.
The old brain is slowing down.”

“So, what’s new?”

He laughed and put his beret
back on:

“Are you sure you’re not
well enough to come home?”  And then,
“Sam misses you.”

This was such an outrageous
lie that I wondered what could be behind it.
(Until I remembered how awful the atmosphere had been at home since
Uncle Albert had died, what with his sisters missing him so much and me feeling
so racked with guilt that I could barely speak.)  Perhaps they needed me at home.

“I shall discharge myself first
thing tomorrow morning and get the Dover train,” I said, “whether they want me to or not.”

“Oh.  I didn’t mean . .”

“I know you didn’t,
Daddy.  But I’m fine, honestly; as well
as I’ve ever been.  It looks like I’ve
inherited your hay fever, actually, so I’ll get Dr Knowles to give me some
anti-hiss-something, too.”

“Really?  Is that the doctors’ diagnosis?”

“Mmm,” I said, feeling
virtuous because I could have lied and given him an outright ‘yes’, but I
hadn’t.  “Tell Mummy not to worry and I
love her and I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“Well.  If you are sure.  I must get back to work now; I have a meeting
in London with a very important customer.”
He got up, kissed me and went to go.
“Oh, by the way, there is a little something for you in the bag with the
buns.  I thought it might help to pass
the time . . .”

I watched the door shut
behind him and lay back on my pillows, feeling rather surprised at myself.  I’d had the chance to run - to do a bunk, as
they called it in my family - and I hadn’t taken it.  Instead I was going back home to do my
duty.  Wonders would never cease!  I felt I deserved a chocolate bun, so I
stuffed one into my mouth, quickly followed by another one and then another,
and then I took a look at the book he’d brought me.

It was a miniature Collins
GEM, ‘Plants of the British Isles: Sea & Shore’, and I was very pleased to
have it.  I set about memorising the
entire contents ready for the next time I saw my father, because he was bound
to test me on them.

Of course, I already knew
quite a bit about sea-campions and thrifts and other wildflowers that grew by
the shore, but I was actually fairly ignorant about seaweeds, so I set about
filling this gap in my knowledge.  Hours
passed while I immersed myself in wracks and kelps, dulses and ulvas and I
thrilled to the wonderful common names of many species:  from Dead Man’s Bootlaces, to Landlady’s Wig,
Brown Tuning Fork Weed to Sea Whistle and Sugar Kelp.  There was even one called False Eyelash
Weed!  I imagined generations of people
finding these bizarre weeds, slimy of texture and alien of shape, washed up on
their beaches and attempting to make sense of them by giving them names that
related to commonplaces in their own lives; attempting to tame them with
language.

The tea lady interrupted me,
eventually.

“Anybody at home?”

“Come in,” I called and she
wheeled her urn through the door.

“They’ve taken the notice
off of your door, I see, dear.  Looks
like you’ve got nothing worth catching.
Fancy a cuppa?”

“I’d love one, thank you.”

She was just pouring me a
cup of tea when the policeman walked in.

“Miss Stone?  Miss Rosa Stone?”

The terrible, sinking
feeling reappeared; the feeling that had only just begun to go.  I had to make a conscious effort not to let
it drag me down.

“That’s me.  Can I help you?”

“Sergeant Riley,” he
said.  “I’m from Scotland Yard.”

He showed me his badge, but
once you’ve had dealings with the police you recognise them forever more,
whether in or out of uniform.  There was
something about the voice and the set of the shoulders.  And the feet, of course.  I couldn’t see this one’s feet, but the voice
and the shoulders were all present and correct.
He was quite young and brown-haired and wearing a brown cord jacket over
a brown v-necked jumper over a white shirt and a brown knitted tie.  Despite being a symphony in brown, he looked
quite presentable, actually, and my hands went to my hair, which was in even
more of a sorry tangle than usual.  I
could have done with a little warning.

“Hello Sergeant Riley.  Would you like a cup of tea while the urn’s
here?”

He shook his head and pulled
up a chair, rather close to the bed.  I
felt a touch flustered and adjusted my pale pink bedjacket, wishing it hadn’t
been pink because I looked an absolute lemon in pink, whatever the shade.

“We just need a few more
details, Miss Stone.”

“Righto,” I said, as
brightly as I could muster.

“I’d like to take you back
to the moment you looked in the shed, is that alright?”

It very much was not alright, but I took a big swig of my
tea, nearly burning the roof off my mouth in the process, and began.

“Well, I looked in the shed
and, at first, I saw nothing . . but once the uranium glass began to glow . .”

“To glow?”

He looked up from his
notepad and wrinkled his nose, in a sceptical fashion; I’d had a bit of trouble
with the police and this part of the story before.  Being policemen, they tended to distrust
anything that was new to them and fluorescing glass had certainly been off
their radar.

“Yes.  The uranium oxide used to tint the glass
reacted to the ultraviolet light inherent in twilight; it’s a perfectly normal
phenomenon and I can lend you my Encyclopaedia Britannica if you’d like to
confirm it.”

“Thanks, but I can go to the
library,” he muttered, head well down while he wrote out the above sentence in
longhand.

“You need to learn
shorthand,” I suggested.

He looked up from his pad
and into my eyes, briefly.  His eyes were
a rather lovely limpid hazel.  I think I
may have tugged at my bedjacket a bit more.

“Anyway.  Where was I?”

“Glowing glass.”

“Right.  And then a hand came from behind and shoved
me into the shed and locked the door.”

“A hand?  No glove?”

“Gosh, no you’re
right!”  Sergeant Riley was obviously
brainier than the others who’d been to see me.
“So . . he didn’t have his radiation suit on at that point.  He put it on before he came back to finish me
off.”

“If that was him,” he muttered into his pad.

“If . . ?  Do you mean it may have been somebody else in
the radiation suit?  That he had an
accomplice?”

This had never occurred to
me.

“It’s best to keep an open
mind and not jump to conclusions.  Please
describe the contents of the shed to me, Miss Stone.”

I focussed and felt the
click.

“Steel walls, table piled
high with uranium glass, paintbrushes, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, blowpipes,
pontils, bags of salts, rack of test tubes, blowtorches with the name ‘Sievert’
engraved on their handles, sea charts tied up with raffia and standing in a
basket, row of coat hooks, corpse of Mr B Dexter of Seward Peninsula, Territory
of Alaska, US . .”

“Crikey!  How do you do that, Miss Stone?”

I came to and found Sergeant
Riley staring at me intently.

“Do you have a photographic
memory?”

“No, not exactly.  I only remember things that I’m interested
in, although, having said that, I’m interested in pretty much everything, so . .”

“You’d be a great help in
the force, you know.”

“Mmm, that’s what they
thought at HQ.”  I felt a little
sad.  “Though, I don’t know what they
think now.  They’ve dropped me like a hot brick, even
though I put my life on the line for my country.”

“Oh, HQ!  Who knows what that outfit think?  They’re a law unto themselves.  I tell you frankly, we’re on tenterhooks with
this case; always are when we stray into HQ’s territory.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  And when the CIA get in on the act, too . .
.”

“The CIA are here?”  This was fascinating.  “Would that be because Mr Dexter was an
American citizen?”

His face shut down, rather;
I could tell he thought he’d blabbed.

“I’ve signed the Official
Secrets Act of 1939, you know, so there’s no need to worry.”

He had risen and was
returning the chair to its former position by the window, in a meticulous,
policeman-like, fashion.

“Thank you, Miss Stone.  That will be all for the moment.”

I was torn between relief
that he hadn’t made me go through the rest of the horrors of that terrible day,
and a slight sense of disappointment that he was leaving, (because he was really rather dishy).

“Here’s my card.  If you remember anything else that might be
useful, please feel free to give me a call, Miss Stone.”

I watched him go, wondering
whether there was any way the card might be construed as a sign of interest in
me and my pink bedjacket.  I picked my
compact up from the bedside cabinet, flicked it open and promptly yelped out
loud at the sight that met me in the mirror.
No, sadly not.

I’d steeled myself
for a fight the following morning, but none came.  On the contrary, I got the strong sense that
Charing Cross were glad to see the back of me.
When the usual doctor, accompanied by his troupe of medical students -
like a feudal lord with his vassals - appeared first thing, I was already out
of bed and dressed to go.  He seemed a
touch surprised, but no more than that.
I brought up the hay fever theory and asked whether he would write me a prescription
for some anti-hiss-something to save my having to visit Dr Knowles, and he was
quite amenable, writing me out a note for the hospital chemist’s, there and
then.

“We don’t expect to see you
here again,” he added, in a distinctly un-gentlemanly way.  “The National Health Service is not a
bottomless pit, you know.”

I opened my mouth to answer
back, but then I shut it again.  I’d
rather be thought a dreadful time-waster than die of radiation poisoning, after
all.  What mattered was that I was fit and
well.  So I took the note from him and
thanked him politely for all they’d done for me, before making my getaway.  It took a tremendous amount of scouring
identical corridors before I found the chemist’s and, all the time, I was
horribly conscious that the dismal dress that I was wearing would have to go
straight into the scrap-bag the minute I got home.

After getting the
prescription business out of the way, I found the main exit and hung about
outside.  I’d telephoned my father as
soon as I’d heard that I was coming out, so I was waiting for his old Crossley
to arrive.  However, a blue Hillman Husky
honked at me from across the hospital car park and Major Dyminge stuck his head
out of the window.  I was non-plussed for
a moment; I’d been avoiding the Major and I rather suspected he’d been avoiding
me.

“Over here, Rosa!”  He waved a peremptory arm.

“Hello Major.  What are you
doing here?”  I went over and leaned down
to speak to him through the car window.
“I hope you’re not ill.”

“No.  Jerzy sends his apologies, but he has a large
order of Battenberg cake to attend to.
Another garden party at the Palace, apparently.  So I said I’d come and pick you up.”

I suppressed a snigger and
went round to the passenger seat.  The
palace garden parties were a bit of a joke with the Stone family, I’m afraid, because
my father was actually quite anti all that.
Deep down, I think he still blamed the Royal Family for his long stay in
an internment camp during the war.  Since
that time he had developed a strong distrust of all ideologies, (together with
a penchant for the works of Albert Camus[44]
– hence the beret).  “L’essentiel est de
bien faire son métier,” he would quote from ‘La Peste’, and I think doing his
job well pretty much summed up my father’s attitude to life, (whilst also
allowing him not to bite the hand that fed him by supplying perfect
Battenberg’s to the ‘oh-so-English’ Windsors).

“That was kind of you,” I
got into the front seat.  “I could very
well have caught the train.”

“Goodness me, we couldn’t
have you doing that; not in your state of health.”

Major Dyminge hunkered down
and negotiated his way out of the car park with immense care, which was how he
always drove.   (We assumed this was to
compensate for the fact that he’d never informed the licensing authorities of
his damaged eye.  We didn’t know this for
a fact, but how many one-eyed drivers did one see behind the wheel?)

“I’m fine, Major.  A touch of hay fever is all I have.”

We sat for a good minute,
maybe more, waiting for a car to emerge from the distant horizon and trundle
past us, before chancing our arm and joining the main road.

“What about the  . . ?
You know, the . . ?”  He was
evidently reluctant to bring the subject up.

“The glass, Major?”  I grasped the nettle.  “The plain, old glass with nothing more
harmful in it than a touch of yellow dye?
I have to say that I think the glass was a bright yellow shaggy
dog.  Or even a herring.  Of the red variety.”

“A red . . ?  Oh, I see.
How strange.”

He was hunched over the
wheel - as if driving the car required the use of every muscle in his body -
and I couldn’t see his face, but he certainly sounded astonished.  “What the devil was it all about, then?  I mean, why was the murderer wearing that
radiation suit, Rosa?  Tell me that.”

“I don’t know.  I’ve thought and thought about that suit and
what it might mean, Major.”

I was genuinely surprised
that Major Dyminge wanted to talk about that day.  Surprised, too, that my sinking feeling had
suddenly taken itself off and I’d been seized with a strong desire to make
sense of it all.   (My old friend,
curiosity.)

“Did Reg Arkonnen want me to
think that the glass was dangerous, so he went and put it on – but why would he
bother when he was about to kill
me?  Or was it, in fact, not Reg Arkonnen in the suit, but
somebody else?  A policeman brought that
one up, I have to admit . .”

“So . . the somebody
else  - a person possibly known to
yourself - wore the suit in a deliberate attempt to hide their face from you,
rather than as protection against poisonous substances?”

“Yes!  That’s a brilliant idea, Major!”  He was jolly good at all this.

“Hmm . . do you know, when
in doubt, I’ve always thought it best to plump for the most obvious
proposition.  And, I can’t say that one
strikes me that way.”

“Oh.”  I felt a little crest-fallen.  “What is
the most obvious proposition, would you say?”

“Well . . ”

The London traffic was
taking the vast majority of his attention and it was several minutes before he
felt able to finish his sentence.  When
he did, though, it was highly impressive.

“Well . . I would suggest that the murderer,
Reg Arkonnen, did not know that the glass wasn’t poisonous.  That, on the contrary, he was under the
belief that it was highly
poisonous.  Which was why he jumped out
of the window in that office that Tristram had you working in.  Moreover . . that if he were labouring under this erroneous belief, then somebody else has
been deliberately keeping him in the dark.
Which rather suggests that Arkonnen - while being a base murderer who killed
one of the best men I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet in a long and eventful
life - is not the main architect of
the plot.  That there is another hand at
work, Rosa.”

I gasped at his insight and
proceeded to turn over the implications of this for the rest of the - extremely
long - journey back home.  Yes, it seemed
many hours later that we were creeping along the coast road, high above the sea
and the South Foreland Lighthouse, Major Dyminge still hugging the wheel and
breaking every time he dared to shift into a different gear.

Eventually, however, we ground
to a halt outside Shore House and Coast Cottage, the wheels of the Hillman
Husky crunching on beach pebbles, and we sat walled up in such silence, it was
as if we’d forgotten how to speak.  It
went on and on, until I could bear it no longer.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted
out.  “So sorry.  I should never
have said you were a horrible old man, Major Dyminge.  You’re not at all horrible and it was unforgivable.”

He turned his lop-sided face
to look at me.

“It was just that I thought
I knew best and I wanted to do it all by myself and . .”

“Do you know who you remind
me of, Rosa Stone?  You remind me of
myself.”  He patted my hand,
lightly.  “Now go out there and find
whoever did this and bring them to justice.”

I gawped at him.

“You’re not going to tell me
to keep out of it, like everybody else does?”

“No, I’m not.  Not now.
Finish it off, Rosa.  Finish the
damn thing off.”

22.  The Covert Operation

“It was a covert operation,” the
old spy said, “in the early years of the war.
I could tell you the year.  I
could tell you every detail of the case, but I still harbour lingering
loyalties that do not permit it.  Even
after all these years.  Would you care
for another glass, Kathleen?”

The drink he’d fed me was a tiny
shot of palest green rocket fuel - bison-grass vodka, he’d said it was -  and it had cured the shaking in my legs, like
magic.

“Yes, please, Mr Piotrowski.”

“May I offer you a piece of
toast with that?”

He was standing in his dimly-lit
living-room cum kitchen cum bedroom, and he’d taken his shabby coat off to
reveal a grey, woollen cardigan that was more patches and darning wool than
cardigan and a yellow shirt that it was difficult to believe might, once, have
been white.  Yet, still he gave off the
impression that his clothes and his surroundings had little to do with
him.  I respected that.  Because, if his clothes were bad, his
surroundings were worse.  Having grown up
in a slum, I recognised one when I saw it.
Mr Piotrowski lived in Onslow Dwellings, just round the corner from
South Ken tube, so he qualified for a nice SW3 postage code but, really, his
flat was a slum.  Apparently, they’d been
knocking down most of the building to make into decent flats for working-class
people, but they certainly hadn’t got as far as Mr Piotrowski’s piece of
heaven.

The kitchen was in a tiny alcove
and so was the bathroom.  In fact, he had
a bit of old board over the bath and was using it as a table.  He leant over it to light his single gas ring
with a match and then toasted me a piece of bread on a toasting fork, held well
above the blue flame.

“I’m afraid I don’t have
anything to go on it,” he said.

“That’s fine.  Vodka and toast; couldn’t be better.”

I gazed about me in the
semi-darkness - from the vantage point of a bony settee - at the walls that
erupted with brown damp at the corners, at a fine print of Our Lady hanging
over the fireplace, where he’d rushed to bank the small amount of slack and
kindle a fire the minute we’d arrived, still shaken from our trip to HQ.

“The covert operation; was that
where you met him?  Hutch?”

The name still caught in my
craw; not enough time had elapsed, I supposed.
Give me a couple of weeks and it would be ancient history.  “You’ll never believe . .”  I would laugh, gaily, down the phone to one
or other of my girlfriends, “what a dreadful old lech Tristram’s boss turned
out to be!   Nearly had me on the polished
parquet!”  I shivered and took another
sip of lovely, green vodka.

“Oh no, we go back much further
than that.  We came into the services in
1906, thrown together during our training by our dissimilarity to every other
man there.  Not that Hutchcraft and I had
much else in common.  He was a boy from
the outskirts of London and I was descended from an old Krakόw family . .
but neither of us, needless to say, had put a foot inside either Eton or
Oxford.  A rather remarkable fellow, long
gone now, had charge of HQ in those years and I believe that we were an
experiment.  (For myself, I had studied
languages at Krakόw University and my senior tutor had connections, but I
cannot say how he acquired Godfrey Hutchcraft.
Perhaps Hutchcraft accosted him on a dark backstreet; I have no way of
knowing.)  I have cut your toast into
soldiers - I believe you English enjoy it that way?”

“How comforting!”  I took the plate from him and he settled at
the far end of the settee, placing an ashtray between us.

“In those days Hutchcraft looked
like a half-starved, clerical assistant, but he soon shed his accent, along
with his cloth cap, and began to excel in the dark art of shadowing.   While I showed a modicum of artistic
ability, on top of my languages, and found a niche in funny papers.”

“Funny papers?”  I imagined him drawing cartoons and penning
comic skits.

“Forgery, my dear.”

“Ah.

He leant forward to nudge the
fire with a poker.

“In later years Hutchcraft
re-invented himself as a somewhat vague, even amiable, character.  People thought him rather a duffer.  But that was not the man that I knew.   So sharp and clever, such a marvellous
ability to turn events the way that he desired.
There were rumours in those
early days, but it seemed that nobody cared . . . We both became agents and
were operating from the lobby of the Savoy Hotel one evening, when I had occasion
to witness a particularly ugly episode involving a young lady and felt it my
duty to report it to our case officer.
Yet, nothing came of it.  Until,
that is, I heard that the young lady’s father, an eminent surgeon, had also complained, and Hutchcraft was
forced to act.  He had begun to establish
his own network of young shadows - the youngest, most impressionable boys, over
whom he exerted the power of a Svengali - and two of them swore on the graves
of their mothers that it was not Hutchcraft, but myself, who had committed this
crime.  My superiors might have dismissed
the boys’ story, if it had not been for an odd development.  For the young lady, herself, declared the
culprit to be me.”

“No!”  I gasped.
“The bastard!  Did he have
something on her?  Something he could
blackmail her with?”

“Undoubtedly.  He had been watching her in the lobby for
some days, while I pursued more official business, and I believe that he may
have identified a man with whom she took tea.
I can say no more.”

“So what happened, Mr
Piotrowski?  Did they try to drum you out
of the service?”

“Oh, no.  No, it was all hushed up.  Money may have changed hands and so
forth.  But the stain on my character
remained for the rest of my career and, while Hutchcraft leapt up to the topmost
pinnacle, I remained a lowly birdwatcher on the ground.”

Mr Piotrowski poured us both
another shot of vodka and tossed his back in one go.

“However, I kept my sights
trained upon Godfrey Hutchcraft . . and, in many ways, I have to say that he
impressed me greatly.  The smooth way in
which he operated.  The sheer gall of the
man.  He possessed the skills of a superb
magician.”

“Magician?  Hutch?”

“Mmm.  Sleight of hand, you know.”  Mr Piotrowski mimicked a conjurer shooting
delicate fingers beneath his cuffs.
Spreading an invisible hand of cards and then magicking them into thin
air.  “He’d make you look the wrong
way.  Or lull you into not looking at
all!”  He laughed.  “Excellent for a spy,  but . . not for a gentleman.  But I do not need to tell you that.  I think you met the genuine article today,
Kathleen.”

I peered into the fire; I wasn’t
ready to talk about it.

“The covert operation,” I
said.  “Tell me more about that.”

He went very still.  Then he shrugged his shoulders and began.

“I lost touch with Hutchcraft
for some years.  The town of my birth,
Krakόw, underwent a renaissance in the years after 1918 and the
establishment of the Second Polish Republic.
It blossomed into a vibrant, intellectual and ideological centre and
Poland’s position - bound on all sides by neighbours of every political
persuasion - made it an ideal place for HQ to establish a humble birdwatcher,
like myself.  I had contacts at the
University and . . it was fruitful.”

He set light to one of his thin,
black cigars and lay back on the uncomfortable settee, as if it were cushioned
in eider and satin.

“Then, I was sent to the Kingdom
of Romania for a while and . . so on and so on.
But I had returned to London and was working in codes and ciphers, when
Hitler invaded.   (Poland’s geographical
position making it as vulnerable to invasion as it had been to
birdwatching.)  I was not a young man by
that time, but my nationality and my skills with cryptography persuaded them to
use me in the field.  My case officer was
one Godfrey Hutchcraft.”

Mr Piotrowski crossed his
elegant legs to reveal ankles bare of socks.
The end of an ugly scar - blue-white and wrinkled at the edges - peeped
from beneath his left trouser-leg.  I
looked away, hurriedly.

“As I said earlier, I cannot
divulge too much detail.  Besides . .” he
gave a wry laugh, “it would be excessively boring for you, Kathleen, and I am
sure I have bored you enough for one evening.
However . . an old man can never resist telling his story.  Let me assure you that I will keep it
brief.”

“They parachuted me into the
occupied area of Poland, at the heart of which sat my Krakόw, the new
capital of Germany’s General Government.
I went with my own, Polish, passport and a mission to re-establish my old
contacts at the University.  This I
attempted to do.”

“My parents were long dead by
this time, and my sister and her husband had been living in the family house in
the Las Wolski Forest; a beautiful place, Kathleen – you cannot imagine!  Such a beautiful house, too.   The French would call that house a
‘chateau’, a word I find infinitely preferable to ‘castle’.  However, those days had gone, by then . . .
The Nazis had taken the house by force and my sister and her husband were now
living in a completely different situation.
For Zuza’s husband, an academic at the University, was one of the many,
many Jews of Krakow.  And I am sure that
you know what happened to them.”

“The Nazis had already built the
ghetto on the opposite side of the Vistula River from the Kazimierz - the
Jewish Quarter - but the deportations had not yet begun.  Zuza and Gregor were held captive inside the
walls of the ghetto and it had become impossible to reach them.  Everything had changed.  The University, too, was quite different from
what it had once been, for so many academics had been removed from their posts,
or fled, or been sent to the ghetto, that the halls were silent.  However, I did manage to find one old contact
- I shall call him Jarek - an ambitious man who had been high up in the
administration of the University and was now hand in glove with the Nazis.”

“Jarek had become a very busy
fellow.  I had never trusted this man, so
I shadowed him and soon discovered what was keeping him so very busy.  The University of Krakόw had owned many
old treasures and, just before the invasion, there had been clumsy, panicked
attempts to conceal them.  Jarek had
known of this.  Of course, the Nazis were
no different from any on the long list of history’s barbarians - they looted
whatever they could find - and Jarek had his nose to the ground, like a pig
sniffing out truffles for his new masters.
This I conveyed to my handlers in London through a system of code that I
had invented and which - although I hesitate to boast - is, I believe, still
widely employed.”

“Now Hutchcraft had no interest
in saving Poland’s precious heritage, but he saw that the stolen treasures
might be used to our advantage and enable us to infiltrate the General
Government.  To that end, he decided to
use my background, as the scion of an old and venerable Krakόw
family.  (Incidentally, I believe that
the difference in our backgrounds had always rankled with him, but no
matter.)  I was to approach Jarek with
the promise of a magnificent hoard of Medieval glassware from Lesser Poland,
that had been buried in various locations in Las Wolski forest, and which had
belonged to the Piotrowski family.  In
return for this, I was to receive a share of Jarek’s increasingly profitable
business and an introduction to his Nazi contacts.  The Medieval glass was a fiction, you
understand.  Not that there was no glass; deliveries arrived, by
parachute, of glass which had been manufactured by an English glassmaker of
such talent that it might be mistaken for the real thing.”

“By this time I had made contact
with the local Resistance and there were four of us at work, taking delivery at
night under the most dangerous of circumstances and burying the glass in the
forest, all set to be found.  Not in one,
or even two sites, but three, four, five!
The sheer detail of the
operation astounded me . . but that was Hutchcraft’s forté.  He worked in layers, you see, Kathleen.  He would pile layer upon layer, as if
painting a watercolour.  Moles and
shadows, allies and enemies, truth and lies. So many details seemed superfluous until one realised the point of the
obfuscation; that only one man could
see the whole picture.  Only one man ever held that power.  Hutchcraft.”

He fell silent, gazing into the
fireplace at the crumbling ashes that were rapidly greying and losing their
heat.  I glanced over at the coal
scuttle, but there was no more coal.

“And did it work, Mr
Piotrowski?”  I asked.  “The glass?”

“What?  Oh . . yes, my dear.  For a while, it worked.  They fell for the glass and I made new
friends, you might say.  I was able to
pass on this and that to London; information that I had picked up from my
contacts in the General Government.  For
a time it became a black bag operation . . .”

The old spy was slowing
down.  Was it the memories, or was it the
vodka that had begun to affect him?

“Black bag, Mr Piotrowski?”

“Oh, I managed to get a small
listening device in.  To a room they used
for meetings and so forth.  I hope it was
useful; difficult to say.  One never really knew.”

He glanced over at me, his eyes
as unreadable as ever.

“Then I had to go and chance my
arm,” he sighed.  “They began the
deportations . .  to the camps.  Deportations?
Does it count as a deportation when there is no distance to go?  They built a camp in Krakόw, itself, you know?
Inside my beloved city.”  A flicker of rage, immediately suppressed.  “Well, I tried to trade some stained glass:
some precious, stained glass windows from a tiny church that Jarek knew of,
deep in the countryside.  I tried to
trade it for the release of Zuza and Gregor.
I thought Our Lady might forgive me that.  But I chanced my arm once too often and I was
arrested.”

“They didn’t know I was a spy,
of course; if they’d known that I
would not be here today.  They never
found the recording equipment, to the best of my knowledge.  But they sent me to Liban Workcamp, even so;
a hell-hole where Polish and Ukrainian prisoners quarried limestone.  I spent the rest of the war there and survived
where so very many did not.  I got this
there . .” he tapped his left leg, “this scar that you observed earlier,
Kathleen.”

“What happened to Zuza and
Gregor,” I asked, quietly.

“Zuza and Gregor?  Well, my dear . . Zuza and Gregor also
survived.  Tell me you expected that one,
eh?  While living in the Krakόw
ghetto, my sister and her husband had found work in a factory, you see, and it
saved their lives.  A factory run by a
gentleman named Mr Schindler.[45]”

He shook the vodka bottle, but
it was empty.

“Ah, but I’m tired!  And drunk!
You hold your drink well, Kathleen.
For an Englishwoman.”

“Thank you.  ‘Though I’m not sure that’s something a girl
should be proud of!”

If I’d felt a bit tipsy earlier,
I certainly felt as sober as a judge now, sitting bolt upright on the
settee.  Bells had been ringing in my
head for the last fifteen minutes of Mr Piotrowski’s story; I’d got to get all the details
straight.  For his part, he looked as if
he’d tied up all the ends and was ready for bed, but I couldn’t let him go yet.

“Haven’t you forgotten
something, Mr Piotrowski?”  I said.  “I mean to say, you haven’t told me the end
of the story.  The story of you and
Hutch.  And, when you have . . ” I
drained the last drop of vodka and set the glass on the floor, “ . . I’ve got a
story of my own that I really think
you should hear.”

“You’re a hard woman, Kathleen –
forcing a tired, bitter, old fellow to stay up so late and tell stories!  But I will do my best for you and it has
nothing whatsoever to do with your
yellow hair and deep, blue eyes,” he laughed.
“It is bitter, however, the
end of my story.  Bitter enough to curdle
the milk, if I had any.”

“So . . the war ended and I
returned to London.  I was growing old
and the limestone quarries of Liban had aged me still further, so I hardly
expected to get my old job back.  But I
did expect to collect my pension; that I did
expect after so many years of faithful service.
And a welcome, of sorts, perhaps.
I felt that might not be too much to ask.”

“I walked back into that
building in Waterloo and enquired whether I might see Hutchcraft, who, I was
informed, had become the new head of operations at HQ.  But, no, no they were afraid that was not
possible.  Not under any
circumstances.  Not now, not ever.  They turned me away.  Again and again I was turned away, until,
eventually, they dispensed with any pretence at manners and threw me out of the
building.  I waited beyond the door until
an old colleague appeared, waylaid him and asked if he would be kind enough to
look into the matter further.  He wasn’t
happy about it but I persisted and he did so, for old times sake I presume.”

“My colleague blushed when we
met again - I remember that as if it were yesterday.  He had dug up the notes that my case officer
had written on the operation in Krakόw and had managed to make a carbon
copy of the document for me.  He pushed
it into my hands and fled, as if all the shadows in HQ were on his tail.  I read those notes in utter disbelief.  For Hutchcraft had accused me of profiteering
for my own advantage in Poland; he had virtually accused me of collaborating
with the enemy, although not in so many words.
It was enough to lose me my job and pension and the last vestiges of my
good name, but not enough to send me to prison.”

He hauled himself up, staggering
slightly.

“So there you have it, Kathleen;
the sorry tale of an old Polish spy.

“Forgive me, my dear, I must go
to bed . .”

“Just a minute, Mr Piotrowski,” I said.  “I haven’t told you my story, yet.  My story about
glass.”  He cocked his noble head to one
side.  “Yes, glass.  Ring any bells?  Well . . I say it’s my story, but really it’s not.  It’s Tristram’s story.  Or Rosa’s story, perhaps.”

He looked confused, but flopped
back down on the settee to hear me say my piece.  And say it, I did.  I told him everything I’d learned about the
glass and, by the time I’d finished, he didn’t look tired, or drunk, or bitter
at all.

Then I retrieved the envelope
from my handbag and we opened it together.

23.  Up and At It

The barge didn’t get
as far as Dover.  My niece had informed
me that Reg Arkonnen owned a factory there and I’d presumed that to be where we
were heading, but we weren’t.  A basic
contravention of rule number one, on my part, therefore (rule number one being,
never, ever, presume).  We were somewhere between Deal and the Port
of Dover, right in the area where the Stone family lived.  It made a fatalistic kind of sense.  Try keeping Rosa out of this one, was my
first thought.

A speedboat joined us from North
Foreland, just past Broadstairs and Ramsgate, zooming around the nose of The
Humber to take up the lead.  The
following surge sloshed over the deck, soaking Joe Bloggs’ feet as it swilled
past the mainmast, over the port rail and back down into the Channel.  The wave also caught me unawares because I’d been crouched low in the bows, scanning the
horizon, and was comprehensively soaked.
Behind me, Joe gurgled and thrashed a bit; he’d been fully conscious for
hours and was as furious as a shark on the end of a fishing-line.  He had a right to be, all things considered.

I soon realised why the
speedboat had gone in front when I saw what was rising out of the waves to sun
itself.  The boat was piloting us around
the Goodwin Sands.   It was a calm,
bright morning, with no breath of a wind, but I shivered.  There wasn’t an Englishman alive who could
forget the appalling storm of the year before and the wreck of the South
Goodwin Lightship.[46]  It looked so tame in the sun; just one,
northerly, sandbar partially exposed above the water.  Such a bright, singing, yellow - more like
bucket and spade territory than a maritime graveyard - but hop onto it, take
one step in the wrong direction and, storm or no storm, it could suck you down,
feet first, without a hope in hell of escape.

The pilot boat turned towards
shore, pointing directly through a deep gully that cut between the ridges of
sand and the Humber promptly listed to starboard in its wake.  It was then I realised that our destination
was not, in fact, Dover, but somewhere more private; some secret port of call
hidden among the white frontiers of the famous chalk cliffs.

I scrambled along the deck and
climbed down the rear cargo hold.  I was
beginning to tire of our game of snakes and ladders.  With our destination almost in sight, I felt
that the time had come to declare ourselves.

As luck would have it, I’d no
sooner got to the bottom of the ladder than Jay Tamang appeared at the top.  I dearly hoped that Severs had his hands full
navigating the barge through the Goodwins because, if not, he must have thought
he was seeing double.

“Mr Upshott,” he raised the neck
of his hood to speak.  “She’s awake, Mr
Upshott.”

I put my finger to my own mask,
to hush him up.  My mind raced.  Damn the woman; just ten more minutes and we
might have made dry land.  As it was,
there were two of us, when there should have been one, and the game was up the
minute that she went to take a look at her captive.  Should I create a distraction?  Tipping the box of steel rods into the ocean
would have been satisfying, but that container was much too heavy for us to
shift (and Jay Tamang, quick and resourceful as he’d turned out to be, was no
muscle man.)  Besides, just suppose that
the rods were already enriched with
uranium.  It would be a disaster to
contaminate the English Channel with that type of gunk.  I wished I knew more about the subject.  If enrichment had taken place, then wouldn’t there be cooling water present, and
a great deal more effective protection than one steel box?  I cursed myself for not picking Tamang’s
brains about the matter while I’d had the chance, because he’d certainly have known; the bloody cat had
distracted me from the job in hand.  I’d
come over all sentimental and allowed Tamang to get a decent night’s kip, when
I should have been interrogating him about nuclear fission.

But the time for chat had been
and gone.  The game was nearly at an
end.  I unzipped my suit and un-looped
the little whip from my belt.

“Here,” I shoved the thing at
Tamang, who took a step backwards when he saw what it was.  “You’ll have to deal with Mrs Arkonnen,
Jay.  Just ensure she can’t shout out to
alert the welcoming party, will you?  You
may not need this, but it’s better than nothing.”

I retrieved the gun from behind
the chair, and took off Joe’s heavy boots, in case I needed to run.  I motioned to Tamang to do the same.

“Quick, now.  Let’s commandeer the ship.”

And he certainly was quick, shucking off his boots and
flying back up the ladder.  He had a
score to settle with Dilys Arkonnen, of course . . I couldn’t help wondering
how he’d go about it.

——

I don’t think I’ve
seen anybody scale a ladder like Mr Tamang did when he clocked Aunt Dilys was
waking up.  He was up and out of it like
greased lightning, while she was still yawning and blinking and patting her
hair.

“Heavens, did I fall asleep at the
table?”  She peered round the cabin,
dumbfounded.  “I can’t think what came
over me.  What on earth is the time,
Magnus?”

“ I suppose it could be morning,
Aunt, but it’s difficult to say, stuck down here.”

“Morning?!”  She jumped up and then swiftly regretted it,
her backside crashing back down on the chair.
“Ayee . . my head’s killing me.”

“I’d make you a brew, if I
could.”

“Thank you, Magnus.  I appreciate the thought.  It’s one of my headaches, I suppose; I’m
prone to them . . although I usually get them after a lot of close work at the
typewriter.”  She had her head in her
hands.  “I must say, I feel like death
warmed up.”

“Me too, man.”

“Man?”  Her headache didn’t blunt that sharp tone of
hers, I noticed.

“Sorry.”  I was keeping on her good side if it killed
me.  Which it might well do.

“But, then, yesterday was rather tiring.”  She straightened her neck, as if she’d
suddenly remembered something.  “Yes,
indeed.”  Taking extreme care - like a
drunk shouldering his hangover - she got herself up and headed for the
lav.  “Well, no time for slacking.  I’ll just tidy myself up and then I’ve got a
bit of business to see to on deck.  You
can look after yourself, can’t you Magnus.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a
statement and I wasn’t about to contradict her.
Of course, I’d had some breakfast with the spies so I was alright there (though
nobody’d brought up the subject of bedpans, which I was going to have to broach
any minute).

Pablo plummeted from the top
bunk and came to say hello, wheezing blocked drains at me.

“Hey, boy.  How’re you doing, eh?”  We rubbed noses.

There was a slight noise from
above - the cabin hatch sliding open, softly - and an almost imperceptible
tread on the ladder.  I couldn’t see who
it was from the bunk, but my heart began to thump.

Aunt Dilys shut the lav door
behind her.

“I swear that cat gets bigger
every time I look at him, Magnus.  Are
you sure he’s not a tig . . .”

A terrifying, hooded, figure
leapt from the top of the ladder.  She
had no time to scream before his gloved hand was over her mouth and a knotted
length of rope looped round her neck.
She went limp, as he dragged her over to the kitchen, throttling the
life out of her with the garrotte.

“No!”  I shouted.
“Stop!  That’s not right!”

He bent her backwards over the
sink and all I could see was her thin legs lifting off the ground, one white
sandal tipping from a flailing foot.

“No!”

There was a smart rap - like a
drop of rain pinging into a bucket - and she slumped onto the floor.

“No!”  I shouted.
“What the hell have you done to her?”

Mr Tamang took off his hood and
bent to look at me, hands on his knees and breathing hard.

“I have knocked her on the head
with the frying-pan,” he replied.  “Don’t
worry, Mr Arkonnen.  All will be well.”

——

I crept up behind Severs and stroked the
back of his head with the muzzle of the handgun.

“Disobey me and you’re dead,”  I whispered.

He burbled something and tried
to turn round, so I flipped off his cloth cap and screwed the muzzle into his skull,
so that there’d be no mistaking just what I held in my hand.

“Got that?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

“Good.  Now, keep following the speedboat and take us
in, nice and easy.  Just do your job and
I’ll let you live to do it again another day.”

We were well inside the Goodwins
by now, a mere mile or so away from the shore and our escort zoomed off into
the distance, leaving us to make our own way in.  The white cliffs loomed, closer and closer
and I was able to make out a stretch of shingle and figures gathering at the
water’s edge.  I’d hoped for just one or
two men that Tamang and I could overpower, but it looked like it wasn’t going
to be that simple.

“D’you weigh anchor, or can you
beach her?”  I asked Severs.

“She’ll go right in, but they’ve
got to ‘ave the ropes.”

Damn it; this had no more sense
than a pirate galleon sailing into a Royal Navy Dockyard, but it was far too
late to jump ship and swim for it now.
It was fight it out, or nothing.

I jettisoned the stifling hood
and shouted for Tamang, conscious he was unlikely to hear me through those
steel walls.  There was no reply.

“No ropes,” I turned back to
Severs.  “Just forget about the ropes,
d’you hear me?  Get her in as close as
you can without them.”

“But . . .”

“You’ve got your orders!”  I rammed the gun still harder; he had to know
I meant business.

Now we were fast approaching
land.  I scanned the coast for some
distinguishing features, but the small bay was an unremarkable spit of shingle
and scrub fronting the high chalk cliff, whose sparkling, white face dirtied to
a splodged, pale grey as we grew closer.
As far as I could see, there were no houses above the cliff, no church
spires, lighthouses nor relics of the war.
But . . wait a minute; the grey splodges that I’d taken to be marks upon
the pristine white, deepened in colour until I realised that they formed a
single entity; a shadowy hole which had been gouged from the face of the
cliff.  It was the entrance to a tunnel,
or a cave.  The entrance to a
hiding-place.

The barge changed course,
slipping sideways.

“No!”  I grabbed the wheel from Severs and righted
her with one hand, so that her nose pointed straight at land .  “And don’t cut the bloody engine, either!”

“But . . .”

I walloped him over the head, as
hard as I could, and then I made a dash for the front cargo hold.

“Tamang!”  I shouted down the hatch.  “Up on deck!
We’re motoring straight at land and we’re outnumbered.  We’ve got nothing but surprise on our side.”

His hooded head appeared and I
swiped the hood off him.

“No need for that now.  Here we go!”

He turned to shout back down the
hatch:

“Mr Arkonnen, you must hold on tight!”

I remember we glanced at one
another, the sad irony of Magnus’ situation (for what would he hold on tight with?) lost on neither one of us, before
the Humber crashed onto the shingle and surfed up the beach, like a bloody,
great, jet airliner hitting land and we were both swept off our feet and thrown
head-first into the open hold.

I got off lightly; just a
glancing blow to the cheekbone where I struck the metal ladder, while the
padded suit cushioned most of it.  Jay
Tamang, too, rolled with the punch and was back on his feet before I was, but
Magnus didn’t have it so easy and screamed blue murder when he was ditched out
of bed.  Nasty.  Even the great, placid cat yowled with
surprise.  Meanwhile, I clenched my teeth
and waited for the bigger crash, the crash that would mean the barge had hit
the cliff.  But it didn’t happen.  The Humber just shuddered to a standstill, her
motor juddering.  (She’d scraped up a
small mountain of shingle and sand when she propelled herself up and out of the
sea and that wedged itself beneath her bows so that her nose stuck straight into
the sky, I later discovered.)  The chair
sped across the cabin, followed by the bowl of apples, after which the prone
body of Dilys Arkonnen slid straight past me and wedged itself in the open
lavatory door.

“Oh God.  You didn’t kill her, did you, Jay?”

“Frying-pan,” moaned Magnus from
the floor.

That was something.  I got myself upright and dived under the bunk
beds for the gun, which had careered out of my hand when we’d crashed.

“Up and at it!” I shouted to
Tamang, and we stormed back up the ladder to the crazily-angled deck.

There were swarms of them by now
and we hadn’t a hope in hell, but that didn’t stop us giving it a good go.  I fired a few warning shots and may have got
at least one man, while Jay performed heroically with the cat o’three, but they
kept on coming; more and more of them streaming out of the cliff, having
clocked the almighty row that had heralded our arrival.  I’d jumped onto the wheelhouse roof when my
ammo ran out.  Whatever game we’d been
playing, was most certainly up.

Two of them wrestled my arms
behind my back, while Severs - who’d come to in the crash - beat me black and
blue, until I couldn’t stand straight.
They had to pull him off me, or I’d have been a goner.  As they carted me off the barge, I’d just
time to see them reach up to unwind Joe Bloggs from the mainmast, where he clung,
winched up high in the blue sky, like a flag.

Then they dragged me up the
beach and through the gaping mouth of the cliff and all kinds of darkness
swallowed me up.

——

I couldn’t believe
the pain; it was hellish.  It’d be more
than a miracle if I ever walked again, ever held a pint in my hand, or used a
typewriter.  What had they done to the
barge?  Were we all about to drown?

“Frying-pan,” I moaned.  And then, “Save me, man,” because there was
nothing I could do to save myself.

Nobody answered.  They’d left me all alone on the cabin
floor.  The noise stopped and there was
total silence in that metal sarcophagus.
I lay there, just waiting for the waves to come gushing down the hatch to
drown me.

“We’re going to drown.  We’re all going to drown,” I sobbed out loud;
so loud I didn’t hear the steps coming down the ladder.

“Who’s going to drown, soft
lad?”

It was my Uncle Reg, leering
over me with his white eyes.  Now I knew
I really was in hell.

24.  The Power-House & the Caravan

‘It is better to die
than be a coward.’

The sacred words of my regiment
returned to me when they took us down.  I
had been a scientist for a number of years and could no longer remember how it
would feel to be ‘in the field’ (as Mr Upshott so liked to call it).  To tell you the truth, it felt most odd - as
if my years of diligent study had never been: the physics, the chemistry, the
mathematics and my scholarship to Cambridge - and, yet, so very familiar.  The Gorkha in me had not gone and I was glad
to discover that I had no fear of death.
Only the thought that there would be no Lama for my passing - to rescue
my soul and allow it to be born again - disturbed my Tamang heart (for I could
not think that any Lama would choose
to live beside the barbaric British sea).

Barbaric, yes.  I cannot describe the foreign nature of that
grey ocean to a man born in the Kathmandu Valley!  We Tamangs are men of stone, not water; from
the earliest age we are accustomed to traversing the foothills of great
mountains and thinking nothing of it.  We
Tamangs may not be Sherpas, but we have worked alongside them (whenever they
allowed us to do so) and proved to be as expert climbers and guides as
they.  So, to be strapped to the mast of
a ship with the waves spitting in my face!
To be borne into a chamber within the cliff, where the sea cried out at
such a volume that it threatened to burst the eardrums!  The sea was a stranger to me, where death was
not.

Which was not to say that I felt
no fear of any kind.  All soldiers live with some fear and the
Gorkha is no exception.  But the fear
that I felt in that moment brought to mind my long-passed father; my father who
had pulled a rickshaw all his life (for low porters and rickshaw pullers,
drinkers and easy women: these are what Tamangs are supposed to be in the Kathmandu
Valley).  My father who had been so proud
when I became a soldier in the British Army (despite his insistence that I
would never be accepted unless I changed my name to ‘Gurung’, or any other name
that wasn’t ‘Tamang’, which I refused
to do).

‘It is better to die than be a
coward’.

Mr Upshott may have been many
things, but he wasn’t a coward.  They
beat him severely and he was in a bad way when they dragged him off the barge
and into the chamber in the cliff.  I
followed soon after, allowing myself to be taken so that I might pay full
attention to the strange new place where we now found ourselves.  It was a place that belonged to the sea, as if
the waters had only parted for our entrance and would rush in behind our backs.  So close and shadowed and filled with the
most powerful aroma.  A large-leafed,
brown seaweed had colonised the ground and clouds of tiny flies swarmed around
our feet.  Kelp, I thought.   Oarweed, or Laminaria digitalis, to be precise.
The smell was deep and savoury as one of our fermented Nepali chutneys,
or a fish sauce.

However, that is the limit of
what I can describe in the first chamber, because we soon left it behind to
enter a tunnel that opened up in the back wall, loosely stepped with the
strange, white chalk, and graduating down into the belly of the earth.  It was narrow and airless and what air there
was seemed to heat up with each step we took.
Every now and again the ground trembled, distinctly, beneath our
feet.  We would have been in darkness
except that a cable of electric lights had been strung, most carelessly, over
protruding nails, to light our way down.
I couldn’t help being reminded of our journey down the slide and - by
association - of my disappointment at the performance of my hat with the
concealed ion chamber in the band.  I
wasn’t used to such failure and it still rankled with me.  Even the remarkable success of my distance
controlling device couldn’t compensate for it. Yes: I believe those were the very thoughts that were running through
my brain as we arrived at a polished, steel door.

So, imagine my astonishment when
the door slid open and we were confronted with a man wearing the familiar,
protective suit and mask, and holding a distance controlling device identical in every
way to the model that I, Jayagaon Tamang, had invented!

Now, I must say here that,
during the course of my scientific career, I’ve found that ideas belong to no one person, alone; that they run like
electric currents and we merely scramble to pick them up.  If a scientist does not discover such and
such a thing and make it known to the world at large as quickly as he is able,
then another scientist surely will.  The
times in which we live dispose us to think along the same lines, and no idea is
ours and ours alone.  (In my humble
opinion it is certain that the West puts far too much importance upon the
individual in every aspect of
life.)   Therefore, I was prepared to
admit that others would be at work on Jay Tamang’s distance controlling device,
despite the ‘spec.’ - the exact specification of the dimensions and materials
used - being so similar.

I decided to waste no further
time on this problem and to turn my attention to the room in which we found
ourselves; an area of much activity, suggestive of an engine-room, or
power-house (and not wholly unlike
our own technical department in the basement of HQ).  These are my observations:

It was intensely hot and busy,
for ten, or more, men in protective suits were congregated around a singular
apparatus.  The noise of the sea had been
replaced by the rumble of a mighty generator.
What could all of these men be up to?
I thought of turbines; the heat energy of combustion being converted
into mechanical energy and sent to power a generator.  A closed loop cycle?  The second law of thermodynamics concerned me[47].  Were they using the sea to cool the waste heat?
But, burning fossil fuels so far down in the depths of the earth would
present problems.  They would be forced
to pump out the sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane and mercury compounds,
for a start.  The protective suits
suggested nuclear power, of course, yet I hesitated to assume that a nuclear
power station was being operated below ground . . when my questions were
abruptly curtailed.  For I’d caught sight
of some equipment that reminded me, peculiarly, of my own work on the
production of uranium from diverse sources.

“Blindfold them, you
morons!”  Somebody shouted.

Straight away, a hood came down
over my face, shutting out the possibility of further speculation.  Then a knee pushed me in the back, urging me
to move and I set off once more, stumbling forward into black heat.  After a time, I collided with a wall and
heard the mechanism of a lift grind into play, before the floor jolted beneath
my feet.  I was shoeless and could feel
the warmth of the metal floor underfoot.
It was as if the whole of that underground power-house was warmed by its
own, hidden, sun.

The lift bore us up to the top
of the cliff and a whistling rush of chill sea air.  Voices came and went nearby and I strained to
pick them out.

“Permission to . . now, sir,” said one man.

“No.  I said no
and I . . .” answered another.

“If you’d seen, sir . . what he
did . .  barge . . pay for that with his
. . .”

“Listen, you jumped-up . . not
now . . later . . coming later . . .”

Later?  I didn’t like the sound of this ‘later’.  I flexed my torso and managed to dig into
whoever was behind me with both elbows.

“Aargh!”

A boot kicked out and caught me
on the back, so that I fell onto the grass, but I was still wearing the
protective suit and it did no damage.

“Watch the Chink, you
moron!  That’s what comes of using
Gyppos.  Christ, do I have to do
everybody’s job for them?  Right, this
one’ll do . . .”

A padlock was unlocked.

“Into the caravan with the both
of them.  I want arms and legs tied.  Got that?”

They threw me in and I collided
with the long limbs of Mr Upshott, who moaned, so very quietly.  Then they tied my arms behind my back with a
flexible strap that I surmised was leather and secured my ankles with
another.

“You, you and you on guard
duty.  As for you, you’re coming with me.
I don’t trust you.  You can have
your bit of fun, later.”

The door slammed shut, leaving
us bound and hooded and lying side by side on the cold floor of a caravan,
which was, presumably, parked above a hollow cliff.

“Mr Upshott?”  I whispered into the dark.  My voice was muffled by my hood, so I spoke a
fraction louder to make myself heard.
“Are you able to hear me, Mr Upshott?”

“ . . not deaf,” his voice came
back - a little slurred - but sounding reassuringly much as he always did.

“Are you in much pain?”

“I’ve felt better, Tamang.”

“I am sure.  Listen, Mr Upshott, I believe that strange
coincidences are at work here.”

He gave a snort of laughter,
which I found more reassuring, still.

“Truly.  I hesitate to boast, but I believe that these
men may be familiar with my work on the production of uranium from diverse
sources.  They also possess a distance
controlling device identical to my own invention, which you may recall from our
travels along the slide.”

You see, I had been prepared to
apply my theorem of the multiple ownership of ideas to the distance controlling
device, but the distillation apparatus that I had glimpsed - boiler, condenser,
fractioning tower and centrifuge designed to an unusual spec. of my own
devising - was a step too far.  I heard
Mr Upshott shuffle about beside me, bravely suppressing a gasp of pain.

“Are you suggesting you’ve a
mole in the technical department, Tamang?”
The curiosity in his voice sprung out of the darkness, as if it were a
flame flaring from a match.

“I think that might be the
case.”

“Interesting.  Tell me, what’ve you been up to in the
lab?  With uranium?”

“Well, I’ve been running a
series of tests on the uranium-bearing capacities of glass, obviously; although
I must admit that I still don’t fully understand how such quantities could be
contained within the fabric of an inert material, despite all the information
we have received on Operation Crystal Clear.
However . .” I continued, warming to my subject, “ . . I have also been experimenting with the
production of uranium from seawater.  We
know the rich mix of chemical compounds in marine water, of course, and I’ve
been separating the mineral ions - such as sodium, iron and calcium, at a very
basic level - and employing a fractional still to divide many substances from
each other by means of evaporation and condensation to  . .”

“I had to go and ask,” he moaned.
“D’you know, I’m not sure I’m up to this, Tamang.”

“However, the results are not
encouraging, I must admit.  Trace
elements are all I have been able to produce so far.  And hydrogen, of course.  I believe I can say, with complete
confidence, that while uranium is
present, viable levels cannot be
harvested from the sea at this moment in time.”

“Right; I think I’m with
you.  What you’re making such a song and
dance about is, in effect, that parts of your work have been stolen and that
Arkonnen has succeeded where you failed . .”

“Well, I’m not sure that . .”

Again, that wry laugh of his, so
unfathomably British.

“Ha, ha.  Bite the bullet.  Looks like they’ve got one over on you!”

“You are certainly feeling
better, Mr Upshott.”

“Oh, God, no I’m not,” he sighed.

There was a protracted silence
and then he said, most unexpectedly:

“I hate all this, you know, Jay.”

I considered the reason for his
hatred.  Was it the beating that he had
undergone?  No man would enjoy that.  Yet, I didn’t think brave Mr Upshott would
remark upon a mere beating.  Not in those
terms.  I thought beyond the beating.

“The field?”  I enquired.

“The field, the cows and the
entire, bloody, farm.”

That was the first
of many interesting conversations that Mr Upshott and I had during this
time.  They kept us hooded and bound for
five days, feeding us bread and watery soup and taking us out to relieve
ourselves on the field early in the morning and late at night, as if we were
dogs.  Apart from that, they left us
completely to ourselves.  It was a most
peculiar time in our lives and, I’m sure that I speak for Mr Upshott, too, when
I say that the effect it had  upon us was
deeply unnerving.  We waited for the
forthcoming interrogation, expecting it to happen at any minute and yet, day
after day, we did no more than wait.
Even our nights were fragmented; pierced through with the expectation of
sudden violation from forces beyond the intimate darkness that we, two, had
come to share.  Yet nothing happened.  We agreed that they seemed to be waiting for
something, or somebody.  (How much later
would ‘later’ be?  We asked one another.)

“So, we think it’s a gypsy camp,
yes?”

“The caravans would suggest so,
Tristram.”

“These foul, leather bindings,
too; I’ve worked out what they are,
Jay.  I knew they reminded me of
something.  They’re horse leather; cut
lengths of bridle and rein.  There are a
hell of a lot of Gypsies and travelling people in Kent, of course.  They pick the hops and fruit in season . .
with a nice side-line in the manufacture of home-grown uranium, apparently.”

“Really, I don’t see how . .
.”

I was still unable to comprehend
our captors’ apparent success with distilling uranium from seawater.

“I know you don’t, Jay.  Somebody’s pipped you to the post and that
can be hard to take.  But this outfit is big; from day one I’ve underestimated
how big it is.  They’ve got the funds to
riddle HQ with moles and the technical wizardry to actually manufacture
uranium, melt it into glass and export it around the world to the highest
bidders.  Just think of that!  Which world power wouldn’t give their
eye-teeth for that kind of technology?”

“The glass disturbs me,
Tristram.”  Perpetual dark had encouraged
deeper insight.  “In all seriousness, I
don’t see how such amounts of uranium could possibly be carried in glass.  They tell me it’s so, but I find I cannot
believe it any more.”

He was silent.  It was night and I tried to make myself
comfortable enough to sleep, but it was hard when my arms now ached so very
badly.  I closed my eyes beneath the
hood, grateful, at least, for the warmth of the padded suit.

“Who told you so?”

“I beg your pardon, Tristram?”

“Who handed you the file on
Operation Crystal Clear and instructed you to make dummy glass?”

I thought about it.

“Professor Monkington,” I
replied.

“And who do you think handed me the file on Operation Crystal Clear?”

“Your case officer?”

“No, not this time.  This one came from the very top.  It was Hutch.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Think back, Jay.  Where was it that we found a crate of
innocent, broken, yellow glass stored against a damp wall?  More to the point, who still uses that forgotten thoroughfare?”

Did he mean the slide?

“But . .” I was struggling to
follow his line of argument, “ . . if the case files were a deliberate
fabrication and the production of uranium is at the heart of the matter, then
that must mean . .”

“Yes, indeed.  Are we, or are we not, dunderheads?  It’s Her Majesty’s Government.  That’s who’s cooking up uranium.  It’s us,
Jay.”

I slept extremely
badly and, when I awoke, I sensed a new anger in myself.  That Professor Monkington had used my work
without my knowledge!  That he hadn’t
trusted me enough to let me into the government’s secret!  I’d worked night and day for the British to
the very best of my ability, and this
was how they saw fit to reward me!  I was
forced to conclude that it was my nationality that had made them behave in such
a dishonourable way.  To them I would
forever be the ‘little Chinaman’; a source of curiosity and contempt.  As a Tamang, I had experienced such treatment
countless times before, but I believed I’d travelled far enough to have escaped
it.  How foolish of me.  There was no escaping.  And, though I’d fought to prove myself a
worthy man in the West - for every hour that my fellows had worked, I had
completed ten more - it all came to nothing.
In the eyes of the world, I would never be their equal.

Anger burned within me when they
man-handled me out of the caravan at dawn and, if I’d had the use of my arms, I
would have made myself known as a Gorkha.
Visions of the kukri danced in my head.
Yet, I must crouch like a dog in the grass and, dully, await whatever
fate my masters had in store for me.
This time, when I crouched, I rolled sideways on the ground, my suit
around my shackled ankles.

“Oy!  What’s ‘e doing?”

They came down hard on me,
slapping me round the head before they threw me back into the caravan.  I breathed hard in the darkness, my cheeks
stinging and my body aching into bruises.
But I had not returned empty-handed.
I had a sharp stone, pressed tight into the palm of my hand and I would
rub it against the ties on my wrist until I was free and no man there could
prevent me.

“Trouble?”  Asked Tristram.

“A few bruises,” I replied.  “”They’re worth it.”

“Worth what?”

“The sharp stone.  I will free myself, then I will free
you.  The time has come.”

“Ha!”
He said.  “Great minds think
alike, Jay.  I picked up one of my own
during toilet duty; this field must be strewn with flints.  Race you for it.”  I could hear the smile in his voice and it
gave me heart.

We worked away at our leather
bindings for hours, until my hand hurt too much to continue, when he suddenly
asked:

“D’you think they’ll sacrifice
us to this project?”

“As you said, it’s a big project.”   I had no hope to offer him.

“They never liked me, of course; I was always too much of
a wild card for the boys at HQ.  They
recruited me immediately after the war when the status quo had been shaken
about a bit and the smallest of windows opened.
Windows of opportunity, I mean . . . Did you know I used to be a thief,
Jay?”

“A thief?!”

“Mmm.  I wondered whether it might have reached the
flapping ears of the office gossips; might be a staple of powder-room chat, you
know?”

“No . . I don’t think so.
.”  I was most surprised by this new
information.

“ . . although I cannot say what they talk about in the powder-room,
Tristram.  Or anywhere else in the
building, for that matter.”

“Really?  Bastards been giving you the silent treatment?”

“Oh . . not that bad.  They talk a bit.  They refer to me as the ‘little Chinaman’.”

“They’ve not taken you to their
bosoms, then.  Christ almighty, Jay .
.”  he exclaimed, “ . . why the bloody
hell do we do it?  I love my country as
much as the next man, but I don’t want to live like this any more.”

“How would you like to live?”

“How would I like to live?  Now, there’s
a question!  Sounds damn silly, I know
but . . Kathleen and I, well, we’ve both always loved engines and mechanics and
so forth.  I always dreamt that Kathleen
and I’d build an airplane from scratch and fly off around the world
together.  Properly together, as we
haven’t been for so long.”  His voice had
changed and he sounded less like an operative in the field and more like a man
who had found a brother with whom he might speak his true mind.”  “She and I . . well, she’s the only person
who’s ever really understood me and I love her like I could never love another
woman, that’s for sure.  And now I’ve gone
and lost her and nothing else really matters, you know, Jay.  Not now I come to think about it.  Nothing else really matters at all . . .” he stopped, abruptly and gave an
embarrassed little cough; that noise the British make when they try to swallow
up their words.  To pretend that they’d
never allowed such thoughts into the free and open air.  “Christ, what’s got into me?  I’m sorry, Jay.  I must sound bloody ridiculous.”

“I don’t find this ridiculous,
not in any way,” I said, firmly.  “To
build an airplane, to take to the air like birds; I could think of nothing
better!  You must do it.  Straight away, I mean.  As soon as this business is over.  You and beautiful Mrs Upshott must take to
the air.  I will help you build it.”

“Will you Jay?  That makes me
happy, you know?  Because, if you’re any
part of it, it might actually have a hope in hell of happening.”

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t
happen, Tristram.”

“No, I don’t suppose you
do.  The rest of us see endless reasons
why things shouldn’t happen . . .”

Then we fell silent, because it
was really rather difficult to view our present situation with optimism.

“If you get out, will you
promise me one thing, Jay?”

“Certainly.”

“There’s a house in a bay
nearby, sitting right on the beach itself.
St Margaret’s Bay, I’m pretty sure it is.  Well, the house is white-washed and they call
it something simple, something like Sea House, or Sand House.  It belongs to Miss Stone’s family; Rosa Stone
being my niece who broke your glass, Kathleen’s sister’s daughter.  Go there.
They’ll look after you.  And . .
this is the important bit . . tell Rosa it’s the British Government; that she
mustn’t, under any circumstances,
meddle with this can of worms.  She knows
a bit about the op. and she’s tempted to stick her nose in and, well, she just must not do it.  Have you got that?”

“I have.  But what makes you think that I would ever
escape and leave you behind, Tristram?”

“I’ve told you before, don’t be
a bloody hero, Jay.  If you get out, you
run and you don’t look back and those are orders,
d’you hear me.  I’m the senior officer
and I’m telling you to save your own skin.
Don’t give me a second thought.”

“Is this what you would do if you were the first to
escape?”

“Me?  None of your damn business what I’d do.”

It took me two days
and almost two nights to saw through the leather that bound my wrists and then
I began work on my hood and the bindings around my ankles.  This was considerably easier, being merely a
matter of working at the knots.  It was
the middle of the night and I was nearly done, when a man came for Tristram.

The chain clanked against the
caravan door and a voice said:

“The tall one.  He’s
the bastard I want.”

I heard them grasp Tristram and
pull him from my side.

“Hello Joe,” he said, quietly.

“Joe?”  The man enquired, in an unpleasant, sneering
tone.  “Do we know one another?”

“Have we been properly
introduced, d’you mean?  Or run into one
another on the bloody polo field?  Not as
such, no.”

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

“But you’re Joe Bloggs, whatever
name you go under.  You’re one of Hutch’s
little shadows, aren’t you?  One of his
special boys.”

Then Tristram said no more
because I heard the man punch him.

“Oomph!”

“Get him out on the field,” the
man ordered.  “I need more space to deal
with this bastard.”

I counted to three and then I
leapt up, tossing off the hood and charging after them while they had their
backs to me and the caravan door was still hanging open.  The two men who had been holding Tristram
turned when they heard me.  One, I kicked
in the face and the other, an enormous, sluggish-moving type of person, dropped
his captive and advanced upon me with his bare knuckles up.  I slipped beneath his armpit and began to
run.

“Stop”, cried the young man, who
had been ahead of the group and had been slow to notice what was
happening.  “Stop or I shoot!”

I hesitated, but my senior
officer’s orders were loud in my head; I was to run and I was not to look
back.  So this I did.  He let fly a shot, but the moon was on the
wane and he had so little light to aim by.
More shots, but, by then I was running from one caravan to another, each
looming out of the dark to shelter me from his bullets.  Cries went up and, all the way down the
field, lights flickered on inside the caravans, as if to guide me to the
exit.  I ran past a herd of horses, who
rolled the whites of their eyes and swished their long tails and then I reached
the field gate, and I vaulted up and over and into a narrow, country lane, just
wide enough for a tractor.  I ran on,
despite not knowing the direction I should go, my legs pumping hard and a sharp
wind against my face.  I had never run so
fast in my entire life.

Eventually, I stopped, cocking
my head to listen for my pursuers.  Only
the movements of the sea, somewhere very close, could be heard, nothing
more.  It shifted and sighed and it
seemed as if it whispered encouraging words that only I could hear.  I smiled in the dark, unexpectedly heartened.  In that moment, it was as if the sea and I were
brothers.

25.  The New Elizabethan Age

I dreamt that I
heard my mother in the hall downstairs.

“Let her sleep,” she said.

But when I awoke, I discovered
it hadn’t been a dream at all.  She
knocked on my door at first light and came in.

“Rosa!  Time to wake up Rosa.  A visitor arrived for you in the middle of
the night.”

I moaned in protest and squinted
through my hair at her.

“Mr Tamang needs to talk to you,
urgently.  He says he’s from HQ.”

I closed my eyes again.  Not another grey spy, please.  I had nothing more for
them.  But she shook my shoulder.

“Listen Rosa.  Your Uncle Tristram is in mortal danger and I
called the police in the night and  . .”

Uncle Tristram in mortal
danger!  Why hadn’t she said so in the
first place?  I leapt out of bed, grabbed
my scarlet dressing-gown and took the stairs, two at a time.  When I flung open the door to the
dining-room, it was to find the spy eating steak and fried tomatoes and
chatting to my father, who was wearing his stupid beret with his striped
pyjamas.

“Isn’t it unusual in that part
of the world?”  My father was saying.

“Certainly the Tamangs have
suffered through their propensity to eat beef,” replied the spy.  “But we have suffered many . .”  He caught sight of me and dropped his fork.

“Ah, Rosa, there you are.  This is Mr Tamang.  He’s come to see you.”

“Jayagaon Tamang.”  The young man jumped up and held out his
hand.  I couldn’t help noticing that he
was drowning in my father’s blue fisherman’s sweater and a rolled up pair of his
trousers.  “So pleased to meet you at last.”

“Tell me . . ” I asked, shaking
his hand, but my breath coming in fits and starts, so alarmed was I, “ . .
exactly what’s happened to my uncle?”

He glanced at my father and at
my mother (she’d followed me into the room in her silk kimono and fluffy slippers,
two big curlers, like horns, on top of her head).

“Sorry,” she said, “but we’ve
had enough of being kept in the dark.
Anything you say to our daughter, you say to us, too.  Those are my rules, I’m afraid.”

Mr Tamang muttered something
about the Official Secrets Act, but I could have told him that wouldn’t cut the
mustard with my mother.

“Stuff and nonsense,” she
responded.  “Tristram and I’ve had our
ups and downs in the past, but he’s family and that’s that.  I won’t have spies turning up at all hours of
the night  and telling me what I can and
can’t know about my own family.  Not in
my own house, I won’t.”

“I am not a spy,” he shook his
head.  “I work in the technical
department.”

“Well, that settles it,” she sat
down at the dining-room table and reached for the teapot.  “More tea, anyone?”

So Mr Tamang told us the utterly
dreadful news that the Arkonnens’ had captured Uncle Tristram nearly a week earlier
and were keeping him tied up in a gypsy caravan, several miles away.  My father had also sat down by this time and
he nodded his head, sagely:

“The field above Crab Bay,” he
said.  “ . . almost bound to be.  It’s the only Gypsy stopping-place I know of
between here and Dover.”

“That’s what I told the police,”
my mother added.

Our visitor shook his head
again, in a worried sort of way.

“I’m not convinced that
involving the police was . . ”

“I know you’re not,” she leant
over the table and patted his hand, kindly.
“But I am.”

At which point, he took a deep
breath and let fly the most astonishing news yet; the news about the British
Government being at the heart of things and actually manufacturing it’s own
uranium from seawater.  My mouth fell
open and I gulped, several times.

“Are you quite sure about that, Mr Tamang?”

“I’m afraid it is undeniable,
Miss Stone.”

Silence fell upon the table,
broken only by my father muttering, darkly:

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Because . . to employ a thug
like Reg Arkonnen . .” I stuttered in disbelief.

“Not just a thug, but a murderer,” my mother added, sadly.

I was deeply, deeply shocked; to
the depths of my soul and beyond.

“It is the Death of Innocence,”
my father proclaimed and, for once, I couldn’t feel that he’d overdone it.

“Well,” my mother got to her
feet and began to clear the table, shaking her curlers.  “The uranium is beyond me, I admit it.  But at least the police know where that
murderer is now.  All I ask is that they
catch him and bring him to justice.  For
the sake of our dear Albert.”

My father put his arm around her
shoulder and stroked her cheek in a tender way that made me avert my eyes,
before he gathered up the pile of plates and they both disappeared into the
kitchen.

Mr Tamang and I remained at
table, lost in our various thoughts.  I
was thinking about his position in the technical department of HQ when
something occurred to me.

“Mr Tamang,” I said.  “May I show you my Encyclopaedia Britannica?”

He jumped up and followed me to
the stairs.

“It’s in my bedroom, I’m
afraid.”  He stopped in his tracks and
blinked.  “Please don’t mind the mess.”

He looked like he had no
objection to mess, whatsoever.

I tipped a pile of
clothes off my bedroom chair to make space for him and went to find the two
volumes of Britannica that I’d consulted previously: the one about glass and
the one that contained the atlas of the world.
Then I sat down on the bed with them.

“I don’t know whether my uncle
told you how involved I’ve been with Operation Crystal Clear, Mr Tamang?”

“Ah.  Yes, he did, Miss Stone.  He has given me strict orders to convey to you
that you must not involve yourself
further in any way.”

The usual piffle, of
course.  I ignored him.

“In fact, HQ employed me to work
undercover at one point and I, too, have signed the Official Secrets Act of
1939.”

He nodded his head, slowly:

“I am aware of this.  Actually, Miss Stone, I have a bone to pick
with you.  Because you broke my glass,
you see.”

“Oh.  Crumbs.
You made that, did you?  Well, I have to say, you made a jolly good
job of it.  It looked just like the real
thing.”

“Thank you.”  He had a rather delightful smile.

“Not that there is a real thing . . which brings me to
my Encyclopaedia Britannica.”  I handed
it over to him, open on the relevant page.
“Now you read this and then you tell me how on earth an inert product
like glass could possibly be made to carry gargantuan amounts of uranium.”

He laughed, clapping his hands
with glee and it struck me how handsome he was.

“It cannot, Miss Stone!  It cannot!”

“Rosa,” I said.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your first
name.”

“Jay,” he replied.

“Well, Jay, are we agreed that
the glass is a red herring designed to distract from the real business of
manufacturing uranium?”

“Yes, indeed.  This must be the case.”

At long last, here was somebody
I could talk to!  I edged closer.

“So Mr Dexter died because he
discovered what the British Government were really up to; he discovered the
second secret.  And, while they wanted to
sell him uranium, they had no
intention of revealing how they’d come by it.”

“Mr Dexter?  I’m afraid I am not familiar with that name.”

“An American businessman with
links to the Soviet Union.  Namely
exporting uranium from Alaska to Eastern Russia via the Bering Strait.”

“How do you know this, Rosa?”

I showed him the atlas and
explained about Mr Dexter’s business in Cape Prince of Wales.

“But what I don’t quite understand
. .” I continued, “ . . is why the
English Channel and why the Bering
Strait?  Doesn’t that strike you as
beyond the realms of coincidence?  I mean
to say, two such incredibly similar
waterways when seawater, after all, can be found all over the world.”

He sat back in my bedroom chair
and gazed at the wall above my head, pondering deep, technical thoughts.  I was beginning to wonder whether he was ever
going to speak again when he suddenly uttered:

“Because it’s not seawater.”

“Not seawater?”  I leapt off
the bed.  “I thought we’d established it
was seawater!  You just told us it
was!  ‘I’m afraid it is undeniable, Miss
Stone.’  Those were your very words!”

“Forgive me.  I jumped to conclusions when I didn’t have
the full facts at my disposal; an unpardonable mistake for any scientist to
make.”

I laughed at his solemn face:

“That’s alright, Jay.  We all make mistakes, you know.”

“No,” he shook his head,
vehemently.  “Not Jayagaon Tamang.”

“Well, I don’t know what makes you so special.  I
make mistakes all the time; my whole life is one long mistake, if you ask me!”

But he was still shaking his
head.

“No, no, no.  I glimpsed a thing and assumed it to be
something else.  It was so familiar, you
see, that I assumed the process to be the same.
But it was not.  I see that now.”

“I’m glad you do.  I’m totally in the dark.
What on earth are you talking about?”

“It wasn’t a fractional distillation
tower at all.  The process was, in fact,
destructive!”

I instantly grasped what he was
getting at.

“You mean they’re using dry distillation?”

I was pleased to see him look at
me with new eyes.

“Yes, that’s exactly it, Rosa.  They weren’t separating one substance from
another using evaporation and condensation;
I had experimented with this fractional process, myself, and produced
minimal results from marine water.  No,
they were heating a solid substance in order to break it down.  Destructive, or dry distillation, in other
words.”

This was so tremendously exciting
that I began to dance around the room. (Just finding somebody who wanted to
talk to me properly, who used the same language and thought the same way, well,
that alone went completely to my head!)

“Solids!”  I exclaimed.
“Solids from narrow bodies of water!”
It all started to come back to me.
“Dark patches in the sea!  The
Pacific Ocean!  Gulf of Santa
Carolina!  Farallon!  Oh my goodness, Jay – it’s seaweed!!!”

He was on his feet, jumping up
and down with me.

“Kelp!”  He shouted.
“Kelp! Kelp! Kelp!”

And then:

“Laminaria!”  We cried, as
one, and we jumped into one another’s arms and toppled backwards onto the bed.

——

Rosa Stone was alive
and somewhere in Kent.  Maybe lying in
bed at that very moment, memorising Shakespeare’s lesser sonnets and crunching
her way through a bag of crisps.  I took
heart from the idea.  Magnus Arkonnen,
meanwhile, was lying in bed in a drafty caravan listening to his crazed aunt
and uncle argue outside.  They were going
at it like hammer and tongs.

“I just fail to see why we can’t
go back to ‘Seaspray’, Reg.  I’ve had it
done up so nicely and the roses will be out before we know it.  I don’t want to spend my holidays in a
cramped, little caravan, Reg,” Aunt Dilys whined.

“For Pete’s sake, woman, would
you give it a rest?  I’ve said we can’t
and that’s my last word,” Uncle Reg stormed.

“You can’t expect me to live in
a field full of gypsies, Reg.  It’s not
what I’m used to.”

“Christ Almighty . . if you knew
what I’ve to deal with!  Will you just
shut up for a moment!”

“It’s not just you, Reg,” she said, huffily, “I’ve done
my bit, haven’t I?  All that time in the
office and that?”

“Yes, and now look what you’ve gone and done; only brought two rogue spies
right to our bloody door.  It’s the last
straw!  Can’t you see I’ve enough to do
with my glass?  It’s near on bankrupting
me.  The factory in Finland is working at
full stretch to meet this insane order and I’m shipping it down here to the
scientists as fast as humanly possible.
Just one more order and I swear it could ruin me.  Tip me over the edge.   I can’t be doing with these distractions,
Dil.”

There was a blessed bit of quiet
and then I heard her ask:

“What do they want with all this
glass, Reg?”

I strained to hear more.

“I told you before, Dil, it’s
big and it’s going to set us up for life.
That’s all you need to know; I don’t want you bothering your pretty head
about it any further, alright?  Now let’s
get inside and have our tea, woman.”

“But Re . . eg,” she began to
whine again, “why can’t we go back to ‘Seaspray’?  You know I love it there and . . . Ow!”

It sounded horribly like he’d
clouted her one and she began to cry nagging, hopelessly dreary, tears.  He must have taken himself off, because I
heard her open the door and climb into the caravan and go and sit up front, by
the driver’s seat, and she was all on her own, still weeping.  I waited until her crying jag showed signs of
subsiding and then I called out:

“Are you alright, Aunt Dilys?”

She climbed round the seat and
came over to see me, where I lay on a mattress in the back.  She looked that blotchy and down-trodden it
was pitiful to see.  She had a rolled
paper tissue in her hand and damp scraps of it had got stuck round her eyes and
nose.  A pencil and pad stuck out of the
pocket of her cardigan, as if she’d been writing.

“I couldn’t help overhearing . .
you shouldn’t let him get away with hitting you.  It’s not right for a man to do that to a
woman.”

She sat down on the end of my
mattress with her head bowed over her restless hands, which turned her tissue
this way and that, that way and this, in that odd, compulsive way of hers.

“Has he done it before?” I
asked.

She gave a little mewing noise,
and then a shudder; both of which I took to mean the bastard had.

“Well, it’s got to stop.  You let him get away with that and who knows
what he’ll do to you next time.  Have you
got any friends or family you could go and stay with?”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,
Magnus.  I appreciate your concern, but .
. it’s just that he’s got a lot on his plate at present.”

“That makes no difference;
there’s never an acceptable time to hit a woman.”

“And the poor man has such
trouble with his eyes, you know.  I
couldn’t possibly leave him to go blind all by himself.”

“Blind?  As bad as that, is it?”

“Oh, yes, dear.  I’m very much afraid it is.”

“Well, I’m dead sorry to hear
that.  I had no idea . . .  What set it off in the first place, if you
don’t mind me asking?”

“The glass did him in, it’s as
simple as that, Magnus.  He learned his
trade young, when the Yorkshire glass industry was at its peak . . it’s dying now,
of course, like so much else in this country of ours.  The New Elizabethan Age, my foot!”

She’d begun to pluck at her
skirt, while her voice rose an octave and I wondered what we were in for.  Thankfully, she recollected herself.

“Your uncle is a
master-craftsman - one of the best there is, they say - he loves his glass and
he can turn his hand to anything.  But
his great love gave him cataracts; not that it’s unusual for a glass maker to
suffer from cataracts, but his are so bad nothing can be done.  They de-mobbed him early from the war because
of them, but not before he’d worked for some of the best people at the very
highest levels, if you get my meaning.”

A light flared in her eyes as
she mouthed the word, “Intelligence” and tapped the side of her nose.  A bit of tissue paper was dislodged and
fluttered into the air.

“It was round about that period
that Reginald and I met, actually.”  She
sighed.  “He’s built himself this
wonderful new career as a businessman, but who knows how much longer he can
carry on . . when his sight’s completely gone.
When he’s got nothing left but his jazz music.”

“And you and Terry,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled brightly,
“and Terry and I, of course.”

Then she got up and put on her
pinny to make the tea, humming snatches of a top-twenty tune; the picture of a
contented housewife.

——

“The Channel Islands of the
Pacific are noted for their kelp forests,” said Jay, as we walked along the
beach towards Ness Point, holding hands.
“Giant Kelp and Bull Kelp, predominantly.”

I nodded:

“Macrocystis pyrifera and Nereocystis
luetkeana,” I declared.

He laughed, delightedly, and
squeezed my hand.  I was a bit taller
than him and felt rather a pang when I remembered my new, high-heeled, green
shoes.

“I’ve had occasion to study
these species,” he said, “although not in association with the production of
uranium, I admit.  They are quite
remarkable.  They grow as profusely as
the rainforests in Brazil.  Two feet per
day – can you imagine that, Rosa?  Great
ropes of kelp winding through the ocean.
What an incredible resource this would be!”

“Mmm.  But, that’s not what we’ve got here in Kent,
is it?”  I thought of my miniature Collins GEM, ‘Plants of the
British Isles: Sea & Shore’.
“Laminaria digitalis, or hyperborea, I rather think.”

“Exactly!  And Laminaria
digitalis is what I saw on the floor of the chamber in the cliff; a far
greater volume of it than I would expect to see in Southern England.”

We sat down by the low fence
that skirted the Coastguard pub and a herring gull the size of a cat hopped
around us, pretending not to be eyeing us up for sandwich crusts or crisp
crumbs.

“Do you think that it might have
something to do with the nutrients in the water?”  I suggested.
“I’ve heard that seaweed is on the increase around Dover because all the
activity around the harbour is heating the water up.  Just a millionth of a degree will do it,
apparently.  The same goes for the
power-stations on the Thames and all the river-weed they have to dredge out by
the gallon because it hinders the boats.
Here, too, the fishermen get jolly cross about it.”

“Yes!”  He jumped up.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Rosa!
What a wonderfully intelligent girl you are!”

I tried to smile demurely, but
it may have come out as more of a smirk.

“Let’s say that Dover is the
first stage of a gigantic experiment,” Jay pronounced.  “The technique is being perfected, so now the
British Government begins to do deals around the world, wherever there are
healthy supplies of kelp:  the Pacific
coast of America, sub-Arctic Alaska, from the Bering Strait down the coast of
Eastern Russia to the Bering Sea.  They
are mining the oceans of the world to produce uranium for a nuclear future!”

I looked out to sea and thought
about it.  The gunmetal-grey shape of a
tanker sat on the horizon and I wondered how many more of those there would be
in the coming years, scouring the seas.
Should we be rejoicing that Britain was on the up; that Britannia was
going to be ruling the waves once again?
Think how many jobs would be created for her people.  How much wealth would pour into her
cities.  Truly, it would be the New
Elizabethan Age . . . How could they be expected to care about poor, handsome,
Mr Dexter or my brave Uncle Tristram when their secret was still vulnerable?  What were two lives, when such wonders were so
very nearly ready to be performed?  Why,
they’d let entire armies burn before they gave the game away.  Two lives were nothing.

“Do you think the police will
manage to set him free?”  I asked Jay the
question that had loomed in the back of my mind all morning long.

He sat down beside me once more,
hung his head and said nothing.

——

She started on our
tea, switching the wireless on to keep me company on my bed of pain.  I’d managed to persuade her to tune into the
BBC Home Service so I could catch up with the news, but it only got me
down.  Every now and then they’d stick in
some classical music, but they never strayed off the beaten track far enough to
broadcast any jazz.  I’d have turned the
damn set off if I could, only I couldn’t, of course, being so completely and
utterly useless.  Pablo, who was sitting
on the end of the mattress, making a serious job of washing himself, stopped,
with one leg cocked in the air, to assess me.
Yes, I could tell he thought I was useless, too.

For the thousandth time, I
wondered what they’d done with the spies.
Or had they managed to escape?
Aunt Dilys refused to discuss it and Uncle Reg steered as well clear of
me as he possibly could in a caravan.  To
tell the truth, it was a mystery to me what was going through his nasty
mind.  He knew that I could blow the
whistle on him, no problem.  He knew that
I knew what he’d attempted to do to Rosa.
So what was the old devil up to?
Was Aunt Dilys keeping me safe from him, or was he waiting until I’d
recovered to make his move?  Surely he
wasn’t banking on my silence because we were ‘so-called’ family?  That would have been preposterous!  If I’d had the use of my arms and legs, I’d
have called the police the minute I hit dry land, you bet I would.

It was mystifying; everything
that’d happened since Rosa Stone knocked on my door with no skirt on had been
mystifying.  Take that story Rosa’s uncle
had told me about glass and uranium: that could’ve done with a journalist’s
analytical eye, and no mistake!  It
sounded like the biggest load of crap I’d heard in a long while.  Or . . a conspiracy theory.  If I didn’t already have a G (for Gunpowder
Plot) in my series on how governments manipulate conspiracy theories to their own advantage, I
could have slotted Glass in there like a dream.

26.  Watching & Listening

Mr Piotrowski
fetched a magnifying glass and peered through the clear jacket at the little
squares of flat film.”

“What is it?”  I asked.

“It’s a microfiche, Kathleen,”
he replied.  “Ninety-eight documents on
one fiche.  I don’t have the optimum
magnification system, but this may do for the moment.”

“Yes, but what is it?”

“All in good time, my dear.  All in good time.”

It was after midnight and his
flat had grown cold.  Twenty minutes had
passed since we’d opened the envelope and, if I was going to stay much longer,
I’d have to wrap up a sight warmer.   A
car drove down the road and the lights streaked across a wall and then up and
over the ceiling.  My throat hurt from
all the cigarettes I’d smoked and I suddenly wanted to lie in my own bed so much more than I wanted to know about
the microfiche.  I got up to fetch my
coat. Only then did I realise how much of me ached.  I ached all down one side and it wasn’t just
the effect of hours spent on the old spy’s uncomfortable sofa; there would be
bruises where I’d fallen against that parquet floor.  Bath and bed and, perhaps, a cry, if I could
remember how.

“Must you go?  This is really rather interesting, you know.”

Mr Piotrowski had got his second
wind.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the
stamina for ninety-eight documents.  Not
tonight.”

“No?”  He seemed rather surprised.

“I’m dying on my feet.  I must go home to bed.”

He nodded, scarcely hearing
because he was so engrossed in what he had under his magnifying glass.

“I’ll ring you tomorrow,” I
promised, “if you’ll give me your number.”

“Ah,” I’d got his attention, “my
telephone is - temporarily - out of order, Kathleen.”

In other words, they’d cut him
off.

“Let’s rendezvous at the Queen’s
Elm,” he suggested.  “Opening time do
you?  Shall we say Thursday because there
is so much de-coding to do?”

Thursday was three days away,
but I took his point.  After all, it had
taken me long enough to open the envelope, what were a few more days?

“Opening time in the morning, or
evening?”  I asked.

“Oh, I never drink in the day,
my dear.  Not all of us have your head for strong drink!”

I laughed and he stood up and
performed an elegant, little bow over my hand.

“Are you sure you will be
alright, Kathleen?”  He asked.

“Thank you, yes,” I picked up my
handbag.  “Thank you so much for . . everything.”

“Nonsense.  It is you I should thank.  This business shows promise . .” he was
returning to the microfiche before I’d got as far as the door.  “Yes . .” I heard him mutter, “considerable promise.”

Nothing much
happened on the Tuesday . . well, nothing much that anybody would want to know
about.  I think I slept in a bit and then
I had a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge with a puddle of golden syrup in the
middle, while I stood at the sink looking up through the bars on the window to
the feet going past on the pavement above – the kitchen being in the basement
of our house in Tite Street.  I think I
wondered, vaguely, what had become of my husband.  I had left him - had cleared out and gone to
stay with Peter and Gabe in Norfolk - so why did I feel as though he had left
me?  It was, frankly, annoying to be
trounced at the leaving game like that; to be wondering about Tristram’s
whereabouts, when he should have been wondering about mine.

I’d played it all wrong, I
thought, going upstairs to use the sitting-room telephone and harass my
agent.  Tristram’s things were everywhere
I looked - not surprisingly, it being his house - but I’d tipped most of my stuff into those bags you get from
the laundry when they return the sheets, stuffed the lot into the car and
carted it off to Norfolk, so now I appeared to be living in somebody else’s
house.  Any other woman would have sat
tight and shown him the door,
possession being nine-tenths of the law, etc.
I was prepared to bet the Duchess of Argyll sat tight.  Zsa Zsa, too.

I sat down at the telephone
table and put a hand on the phone.  The
trouble was, I reflected - taking in the tasteful blue and cream curtains from
Harrods, the quiet, yet quality, watercolours that Tristram had brought to the
marriage and the naff old cocktail cabinet full of bits of shiny rubbish that’d
come along for the ride with me - that I didn’t really care as much as one was supposed to care.  For the stuff, I mean: all the stuff one
doesn’t care about that one works at jobs one doesn’t care about to buy and put
in one’s house that one doesn’t care about.
My hand remained on the phone while I gazed into thin air, summoning up
pictures of things that I possibly might
care about.  The motorbike, or the car,
or the airplane that I was going to pilot into the deep, blue yonder.  And then, rather unexpectedly, Tristram
Upshott . . .  Don’t say I didn’t warn
you about Tuesday.

Wednesday morning
saw me standing at the sink again with my bowl of porridge.  But this time my mind was on shoes.  An impeccably polished, handmade pair of
gentlemen’s shoes, to be precise.  By the
clock on the kitchen wall, I’d established that these shoes strolled across the
front of the kitchen window every ten minutes.
Not nine, not eleven, but every ten minutes, on the dot.  Hutch was having the house watched - I was
convinced of it - and I could not, for the life of me, think why.
It certainly put the willies up, though, and I had to go and have a
steadying cigarette in the patch of garden out the back; as far away as I could
possibly get from those shoes, short of leaping over the wall.

I sat on the back step next to
the fishing gnome I’d bought to annoy my husband - it hadn’t worked, he’d only
laughed - flicking ash into a pot full of dead chrysanths, while all sorts of
wild scenarios played out in my head.
From the abduction scenario, where Hutch was so deranged with lust that
he’d commanded his men to bring me to him, to the idea that this had nothing to
do with me at all, but was all about my errant husband.  Had Tristram been up to something dreadful
that had put his bosses’ backs up and set them watching the house for his
return?  That seemed a distinct
possibility, although I said so myself.
Abduction was just too straight out of ‘Ivanhoe’ for the modern day and
age and Hutch struck me as more of an opportunist than a man consumed with
desire.  However, the notion that
Tristram had returned to his old, light-fingered ways was not so absurd.  (Not that my husband had been the type of
thief who stole anything of particular value, but perhaps he’d picked something
important up inadvertently, which was
why he’d been forced to disappear.)  I
had visions of him spending the rest of his life fleeing from the authorities;
of him yearning after me from dark doorways and us having snatched meetings on
the tops of Ferris wheels.  For the first
time that week, I began to worry about him.

My anxiety was only compounded
when I telephoned my sister, Millicent, that evening.  She told me that Rosa had been discharged
from hospital and was back home, apparently suffering from a nasty bout of hay
fever, which I was pleased - if a touch puzzled - to hear.  We discussed this and that, and then (this is
the anxiety-making bit) we said goodbye and she replaced the phone at her end
and there was a distinct ‘click’ on the line after she did so.  I stared at my receiver, like bad actors do
when they’ve received surprising news in a play involving French windows.  It was clear to me that we had not been alone
on the line and that the powers that be now knew all about my niece’s hay
fever.

Thursday evening
couldn’t come too soon for me.  Yes, I
wanted to find out about the microfiche, but - more than that - I was desperate
to learn Mr Piotrowski’s professional opinion on the watchers and listeners; to
be reassured that I wasn’t simply going stark, staring, off my rocker.  However, before that, there was plenty to be
done.  For I’d drawn up a schedule.

First on my list had been the quick
call to my cleaner in the morning, to enquire whether she could possibly do the
house later that afternoon, because I was giving an impromptu cocktail party
that very evening.

“I’m awfully sorry to muck you
about like this, Joan,” I said.  “I know
Friday is your day, but the house is in such
a state I daren’t let company over the threshold.  Please, please
say you will, darling.  Double wages for
your trouble?”

It turned out to be no trouble
at all, and Joan would be delighted to pop round at half past four to do me.

“Marvellous!  You’re an absolute saint to do it.  I’ve got the window-cleaner coming too, thank
heaven, so that’s perfect timing!  See you
later, Joan.”

I waited for the click before I
replaced the receiver, then I went upstairs to sort out some clothes and lay
them on the bed.

When the allotted time arrived,
Joan was wonderfully punctual (which was just as well, because I was hovering
about on the doorstep pretending to water a dead plant and giving the street an
eyeful of my dress).  She tripped in,
fluffing up her blond hair and taking her apron out of her bag.

“Oh, don’t worry about all
that,” I said, having shut the door behind her, firmly and pushed her down the
hall.  “The house can look after
itself.  Let’s have a cup of tea together
while I tell you my plan.  Come on,”  I beckoned her towards the basement stairs.

“Plan, Mrs Upshott?”

“Mmm,” I replied.  “You know how you once admired this dress,
darling?  Well . .”

Joan looked charming
in my frock, as she did in the blue hat with the broad brim that I’d once worn
to Ladies Day at Ascot.  With twice her
usual wage stashed away in an old handbag of mine (and the money to see Cary
Grant and Grace Kelly in ‘To Catch a Thief’[48] at The Chelsea Classic), and the promise that she could keep the
dress, it was little wonder that she positively glowed when she left the house
at five.  Would they take the bait?  In all honesty, it didn’t matter too much if
they didn’t because I had the rest of my schedule to complete.

If I said I didn’t enjoy the
next bit, I’d be lying.  I was in my
element and had to stop myself reaching for the bashed, tin box of greasepaint
that I’d used during the war.  I’d taken
the collar off one of Tristram’s shirts and shortened a pair of braces.  The trousers were on the baggy side, but not
too long, since I’m tall, and I made sure to stuff plenty of cash into the
pockets, so as to be ready for all contingencies.  The jacket didn’t work, though - being far
too broad in the shoulders, so that I looked like one of those old music hall
girls who dressed up as a chap and kept twirling the ends of their moustaches -
so I ripped the arms off a grey jumper that’d suffered from the moths and put
that on, instead.  It really wasn’t bad
at all and, when I’d washed my face and stuck my hair under a cloth cap that
Tristram wore in the country, I was quite delighted with the effect, swaggering
back and forth in front of the wardrobe mirror.
Next off, it was down to the kitchen to collect a bucket of water and a
dishcloth.

I left the house through the
back garden, went round the side and out through the front gate,
whistling.  Then I strolled down the
Fulham Road, dumped the bucket and cloth outside the Queen’s Elm pub and went
in to find Mr Piotrowski.

He was sitting in the corner of
the empty saloon nursing a pint of bitter.

“Evenin’ Guv’nor,” I said.  “ ‘Ow’s tricks?”

He gazed up at me, as dead pan
as any straight man in a comedy turn.

“Take that chair,” he pointed to
the chair with its back to the bar, “and I’d better get you a pint.”

I couldn’t feel that he’d given
my performance a vote of confidence and subsided into my seat.

“There,” he returned with the glass.  “You do drink ale?”

“I’ll drink anything, me.  Ta very much.
Down the hatch!”

“I think that will do, Kathleen;
we are alone in the pub, after all.  Is
there any particular reason behind this subterfuge?”

I leant over the table and
whispered:

“You Know Who has his men watching the house and listening to my
telephone calls.”

“Indeed?  This does not surprise me.”

“No?  Well, it blooming well surprised me, I can tell you!  But I’ve given them the slip and I think
they’re probably watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly by now.  It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure.”

“The thing is, I don’t know
whether it’s me or my husband they’re interested in.”  I took a quick slurp of my beer, thirsty
after all the excitement.  “Probably my
husband.”

“No, you’re quite wrong,” he
remarked.  “It’s you, Kathleen.”

“What?  You mean he really is deranged with lust?”

“No.  I mean that the clerk at the front desk of HQ
had a good look at the front of the microfiche envelope and will have reported
his observations to Hutchcraft immediately after our hasty departure.  They must have been highly delighted when you
spent those hours at my flat, giving them ample time in which to tap your
phone.  I feel I have let you down.”

“Why?”

“Because I had no idea of the
scope of this business; none, whatsoever.
Only as I reached the final document in the encrypted correspondence,
did I realise the terrible danger in which I had left you.  I congratulate you on your disguise; it shows
a speed of thought and a flare for detail that are the hallmarks of a successful
spy . .”

“ ‘Cor, stone the crows!”  I nearly choked on my beer.

“. . despite your tendency to
overdo it.  I think you will find, my
dear, that the cake does not always require quite
so much icing!”

He could have been directing me
in . . just about any part I’d ever played, to be honest.

“Now drink up.  We need to be on our way as soon as
possible.  Tell me, Kathleen, do you have
a safe house?  Preferably somewhere out
of London.  I’m afraid they’ll trace my
flat like a shot, if they haven’t already done so.  In fact, I also took precautions not to be
followed today.”

All I could think of was Shore
House.

“I know a place,” I said.  “We could catch the train.  It’s a hop and a skip and then you’re in the
sea.”

The train was too
crowded with passengers returning home from work to discuss the microfiche any
further.  Then it was into a taxi at
Dover Priory and straight to St Margarets Bay, and it was well past nine at
night before we reached my sister’s house.
What with all the dashing about that our flight from London had
entailed, I’d quite forgotten to ring and give advance notice of our arrival.

“Kathleen!”  It was Mills at the white front door and she
seemed ever so glad to see me.  “Why are
you dressed as a man, dear?”

“Who’s dressed as a man?”  Went Rosa, in the background.

“A window-cleaner, actually,” I
said.  “Evening, both.  This is Mr Piotrowski.  We’re seeking sanctuary, if that’s alright
with you.”

“How nice to meet you,” said my
polite sister, shaking Mr Piotrowski’s hand.
“Please do come in.”

We stepped in out of the night
and I took off my cloth cap, slung it on a peg by the door and then whisked the
old spy’s filthy coat off him before he had a chance to protest.

“Hallo there,” my brother-in-law
bounded out of the sitting-room to greet us.
“Piotrowski, did you say?  I’m
Jerzy Stone.  Delighted you could make
it.”

A slight man followed him into
the hall.

“Mr Tamang!”  I cried.
“What in heavens’ name are you
doing here?”

“Mrs Upshott!”  He exclaimed.
“I am so sorry.  So terribly
sorry.  We have heard no news.  It is driving us mad with anxiety.”

I must have looked more than
usually blank.  Millicent took my hand in
hers and drew me aside, confiding in her low, sensible voice:

“I’ve been trying to call you
all day, but there was an odd noise on your line and I couldn’t get
through.  I’m so glad you’re here, Kathleen; it’s like a miracle that you’ve
come.  Tristram is in the most dreadful danger and the police can’t
find him and seem to think there’s nothing wrong and we don’t know what on
earth we should do and . .”

“Tristram?  In danger?”
My heart tumbled out of my ribcage and, if I hadn’t known how much I
loved the man before, I certainly did then.
“Tell me.  Oh, God, Mills!  Tell me quickly.”

She led me into the drawing-room
and sat beside me as they told me what had happened.

“The Government?”  It seemed that all my fears had come
true.

“Yes,” they chorused.  “The
British Government.”

It was then that Mr Piotrowski
spoke up from a stool by the fire to which he had, unobtrusively, hidden
himself, so that it was as if we’d all forgotten he’d ever been there:

“No,” he said, firmly.  “This is not the work of the Government.  They’re
not behind this.”

He raised his elegant fingers -
as he had done three days earlier - to mimic a conjurer shooting cards from
beneath his cuffs; spreading that invisible deck of cards and then magicking
them into thin air.

“It is the magician,
Hutchcraft.”

27.  May I Ask a Question?

My Aunt Kathleen’s
mysterious companion seemed to know more about the operation than the rest of
us put together and I couldn’t help wondering where he’d sprung from.

“Psst,” I whispered into Jay
Tamang’s ear.  “Who is he?”

We were side by side on the
sofa, with a ringside view of my parents as they fussed over my aunt.  The man had chosen to sit behind us on an
uncomfortable, carved stool that an Eastern European carpenter had made for a
child a hundred years earlier and that my mother kept as a decoration by the hearth.  Nobody had ever sat on that stool by choice,
not since it had escaped from a pogrom on the back of a horse and cart.

“I don’t know, Rosa.  I’ve never seen him at HQ.”

I kept snatching glances at the
mystery man, trying not to let him catch me at it.  He was positively antediluvian, with
transparent skin stretched tight over high cheek-bones and a preposterous nose
and silver hair worn long, as if he were a fin-de-siècle bohemian who guzzled
absinthe, and tremendously etiolated fingers and dirty clothes.  Honestly; not
just dirty, but filthy.  I wondered whether he’d chosen to sit so far
away from the rest of us because he ponged.

“The microfiche will be
Hutchcraft’s undoing,” Mr Piotrowski proclaimed.

“Goodness, I’ve no idea who or
what you’re talking about, but please do
come and join us,” my mother put her oar in.
“Come and sit next to Rosa on the sofa.
Make room for Mr Piotrowski, dear.”

The old man sat down beside me
and I held my breath.

“Rosa Stone, I believe?”  He offered a skeletal hand.  “You are a remarkable young lady, by all
accounts.  I am greatly interested to meet you.”

I released my breath in a great
whoosh, which I tried to convert into a cough, and smiled.  Now that I came to look at him properly, I
was struck by his uncanny resemblance to John Gielgud’s ‘King Lear’[49] at his most noble.

“Hay fever still bad, is it,
Rosa?”  Enquired my aunt.

“Oh . . you know . . I’m
coping.  Please tell us more about this
microfiche, Mr Piotrowski,”  I
pleaded.  “We’re simply dying to hear.”

“And how about a small brandy to
oil the wheels?”  My father asked.

“That would be most
acceptable.  Thank you, Mr Stone.”

“Jerzy, please.”

“Apoloniusz.”

They’d recognised one another;
something indefinably Eastern European had passed between them, it was clear.  Any minute now and my father would be pickling
beets.

“The microfiche is an encrypted
correspondence between Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft, the current head of British
Security and the KGB, which was discovered, hidden in a church, by
Kathleen.  Who then brought it to me - in
a roundabout fashion - because I have some expertise in these matters.  Now, before I reveal its contents, I need to
know exactly what you all know,” Mr Piotrowski declared, looking more
Gielgud-esque by the minute, while we all maintained a respectful hush in the
face of such charismatic delivery.  “For
her part, Kathleen has told me about a plot to trade illegal uranium, hidden in
glass, around the world; a clandestine operation upon which she believes her
husband was engaged undercover, before his disappearance.”

“That’s my Uncle Tristram,” I
couldn’t help piping up, “who employed me to be his eyes and ears.”

“The brave Mr Upshott,” Jay
added, “my senior officer in the field - although I work in the technical
department and, sadly, cannot claim to be a spy.”

“Ah,” Mr Piotrowski turned to
Jay and I, “I shall consider you two young people my primary assets.  Tell me more, if you please.”

I practically rocketed off the
edge of the sofa, I had so much to tell him.

“One minute,” Jay put a restraining
hand on my arm.  “Exactly who are you, sir?  If you don’t mind me asking?”

“He’s a spy,” Aunt Kathleen
said.  “Surely anyone can see that.  Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski is probably one of
the best spies this country has ever had and we’ve treated him shamefully.”

A look passed between the old
man and my beautiful aunt that I couldn’t begin to decipher; it held secrets.

“Shamefully?”  Repeated my father, shaking his head.  “Now, that I can believe.”

“Oh, Jerzy,” my mother sighed,
“let’s hear what everybody’s got to say before we start the revolution.”

Anyway, Jay and I then proceeded
to tell him our stories, (and I hung my head and spoke to the carpet while I
told him of the death of Uncle Albert).
We culminated in our mutual revelation regarding seaweed.

“And that’s all we know about
Operation Crystal Clear; the sum total of our knowledge, to date,”  I finished.

“Operation Crystal Clear, is
that what he calls it?”  Mr Piotrowski
uttered a rather mirthless laugh.  “Why
did you not tell me this at the very beginning, Kathleen?  That name has Hutchcraft stamped all over
it.  It’s his little joke, do you
see?  Crystal clear; in other words, completely
and utterly empty.  You are right;
although there evidently is glass, it
does not contain uranium.”  He looked
thoughtful.  “I’d be interested to
discover his relationship to this glass-maker, this man who is, apparently,
supplying a million pieces of glass in the belief that Hutchcraft’s scientists
are pumping it full of dangerous substances.”

“I told you,” I pointed out,
“his name is Reg Arkonnen and he’s a murderer.”

“And Hutchcraft and he worked
together during the war,” he added.

“Did they?”  I was surprised to hear this.

“Oh, yes.  They parachuted glass into the Las Wolski
forest, of that I have no doubt.”

The room went quiet while we all
attempted to picture this and then my mother spoke up:

“May I ask a question?”

“Please do, Mrs Stone.”

“What is there in the microfiche
that my sister found that leads you to suppose that the head of British
Security is feathering his own nest, rather than working under the auspices of
the British government?”

I looked at her with unusual
admiration; when had she ever used the word ‘auspices’?

“Well done,” I mouthed across
the room.  “ ‘Auspices’, eh?”

“I’ll ‘auspice’ you, if you’re
not careful, Rosa Stone,” she said, with piercing clarity.

“Well, that is an excellent
question, if I may say so, Mrs Stone,” Mr Piotrowski continued, smoothly.  “To which the answer is, in fact, pitifully
simple because it is the eternal
answer; the answer that always was and always will be.”

We looked at one another,
mystified.  Was it a code of some
sort?  But Jay knew.

“Money,” he said.

“Indeed, Mr Tamang.  The microfiche is one, interminable, wrangle
over money.   Unimaginably large sums of
the stuff.”

“But, surely,” I interjected,
“anybody could be asking for payment?  I
mean, why wouldn’t the British Government want to be paid for their uranium?”

“That’s right,” agreed my
father.  “Take arms-dealing, for
example.  The world is a huge
market-place and who is to say whether those who claim to be enemies really
refrain from trading with one another when there is good money to be made?”

“Bad money, you mean,” went my
mother.

“These are valid points, but you
forget one thing.  I have known
Hutchcraft since he was a boy of seventeen and I was in my early twenties, but,
more than that, I have made it my business to study him.  I know how Hutchcraft operates.  I know how he bullies young operatives into
his private army of shadows.  I know how
he uses the secrets of others to his own advantage.  I know the ways in which he gains power.  This new plot of his may show a deal more
flair than his old methods - the peculiarly superfluous use of glass strikes an
interesting note - but it cannot fool an old spy.  I believe this to be his master-stroke, his
most ambitious grab at power and wealth.
It may be that there will be no more heights to scale after this is
done; that we will hear no more of him.
That he will simply leap off the topmost pinnacle and soar into the sky
like a bird.  I know this.  Every bone in my old body knows this.  And what’s more . . .”

He paused to draw breath, like
King Lear on the moor – that moment of calm before he rent his last shreds of
civilisation and tossed them to the roaring winds and there was nothing left of
him but raw, wounded, humanity.

“ . . I know the number of his private
bank account.”

What?  I have to say that we broke into laughter.

“Yes, there it was on the last
fiche.  I cannot believe the old devil
still banks in Cricklewood.  What they
make of regular cheques from the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopanosti in
Cricklewood High Street, the Lord alone knows!”

The case seemed clear.  I mean to say, the British Government might
well have been communicating in code with the Soviets in some devious game of
double bluff, but they’d never have
been asking for huge sums of money to be sent to Cricklewood.  Of course not.  Sitting beside me on the sofa, I noted that Jay
was beaming from ear to ear.

“Do you feel vindicated?”  I asked him - just between ourselves - and he
turned his beautiful smile my way.

“I think I do, Rosa.  Mr Upshott and I
had it all the wrong way around.  I am so
happy to know this!”  He became
serious.  “I believe that Professor
Monkington may have stolen my work, that he may be working for Hutch . . and I
ask myself whether Mr Upshott wasn’t deliberately led up the garden path when
they put him to work on this operation?”

“Of course he was, Jay,” I
said.  “You both were.  You and Uncle Tristram are what they fear
most, don’t you see?”

“I’m not sure that I do.  Please explain, Rosa.”

“They fear you because you are
both honourable men.”

Our eyes met, but his suddenly
had such a faraway look in them, it was rather as if my parents’ drawing-room
in Kent had melted away and he had another world in his sights.

“Honourable, yes.”  He nodded his head, decisively.  “And not afraid to die.”

I shivered, abruptly reminded of
Uncle Tristram.  Were we doing enough for
him?  I got up, claiming hunger, and left
the room.

Upstairs in my bedroom, I
ransacked piles of books and clothes, flinging the lot onto the floor when I
couldn’t find what I was looking for.
I’d tried every last place that I could think of, when I remembered my
pink bedjacket.  I ran into the bathroom
to delve deep into the dirty linen basket.
There it was and there, in the pocket, was the card that Sergeant Riley
had given me when I was in hospital.  I went
into my parent’s bedroom to use the extension, keeping my voice down because
Sam was asleep in the room next door.

I managed to get through
straight away, but it was to a female telephone operator on the Scotland Yard
switchboard.

“Good evening,” I said.  “May I please speak to Sergeant Riley?”

“What is it concerning, Miss?”

“Well, it’s an emergency and I
need to speak to him urgently, you see.
He gave me his card and told me to ring this number if ever I had any
more information on this extremely important case and . .”

“Sergeant Riley has gone home,
Miss, it being past eleven at night.  May
I give him a message, or would you like to try again tomorrow?”

“Oh.  Of course.
How stupid of me; I’ve lost all track of time.”  I tried to think clearly and concisely.  “Please could you give him this urgent
message.  Really; it’s Top Priority, with
capital letters.   My name is Rosa Stone
and I have irrefutable evidence that Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft is producing
illegal uranium at Crab Bay, near Dover.
That he is keeping my uncle, Tristram Upshott, imprisoned there and has
already had two other men killed.  The
local police are investigating, but I don’t think they have the first idea how
serious this is.  I mean, I really think
this is a case for Scotland Yard.
Sergeant Riley will know what I’m talking about.  Have you got that all that down?  Do you take shorthand?”

She said she had and she did,
but whether it would make the slightest bit of difference, I couldn’t say.  What if Uncle Tristram were already
dead?  What if he died that very night,
while my message sat on Sergeant Riley’s desk waiting for him to turn up to
work in the morning?  Were we supposed to
do nothing but wait, for ever and a day?

I trailed back down the stairs,
suddenly sick to my stomach with apprehension.
I stopped off in the kitchen for something to eat, trying to still the
terrible churning in my insides, but there were no chocolate buns left in the
cake tin; probably because I’d eaten them all.
Despair truly began to set in.

Just then, I happened to glance
through the glass on our kitchen door.  A
light burned in Coast Cottage, a warm, amber glow defying the black of
night.  What was it Portia had said in
‘The Merchant of Venice’?[50]

That light we see is burning in my hall.

How far that little candle throws his beams!

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

I gazed at that light - taking
comfort from it - and, as I gazed, a dark shape stepped into the Dyminge’s side
window and looked straight at me.  Major
Dyminge was patrolling the cottage before they turned in for the night.  Without a moment’s hesitation, I rapped on
the glass.

We met in Mrs Dyminge’s shingle
garden among moonlit pools of thrift, the sea roaring great guns in our ears.

“You were right, Major,” I
cupped my palms over my mouth to cry into his ear, “there was another man involved apart from Arko.  Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft, the head of the
British Secret Services.  He’s gone
rogue.”

Major Dyminge nodded.

“Big fish,” he shouted
back.  “I suspected as much.”

I shivered in the cold, the wind
whisking up my skirts and knotting my hair.
A spring gale was beginning to brew.

“They’ve got Uncle Tristram, did
you know?  Down by Crab Bay.”

He didn’t move a muscle, yet it
was as if an electric pulse had shot through him and amplified the ferocity of
his singular, blue gaze.

“Oh, Major . . .”  Was it tears or the salt spray off the sea
that stung so?  “What if they kill
him?”  I collapsed onto his shoulder,
openly weeping.  “I don’t want him to
die!  Oh, Major Dyminge!  Don’t let Uncle Tristram die!”

“I should think not!”  He fished a white handkerchief out his pocket
and passed it to me, waiting patiently while I mopped up.  I handed his sodden hankie back to him and
looked out to sea, at the moon silvering the tops of the maddened waves.

“May I ask a question, Rosa?”

“Y . . yes,” I hiccupped.

“What in the name of all things
holy are we waiting for?”

28.  The Kelp Chamber

Jay Tamang
escaped.  I had to believe that; would
countenance nothing else.  For myself, I
got it in the neck from young Joe Bloggs, of course: the neck, the stomach, the
legs and the privates.  Christ, did I get
it in the privates!  It was a good thing
Kathleen and I’d never wanted children . . not that my wife was still on the
scene.  Call me sentimental, but  -
bruised, battered and back on the caravan floor - it was only the thought
of Kathleen that really hurt.

The shadow had spared my face,
so I assumed he’d not been officially let off the leash, that his anger had
built up until he could contain it no longer and he’d acted against orders when
he’d come for me in the night.  What on
earth were they keeping me for?  It took too much energy to speculate any
further, so I tried to keep calm and to rest as much as I possibly could before
I got back to work with the jagged edge of the flint.  Jay was more dextrous than I and he’d managed
it before me, but I would get there in my own time.  And, when I did . . .

Hours passed before I finally
got my hands free.  The hood and the ties
around my ankles were childsplay after that.
I had to go carefully because parts of me were still horribly tender in
places, but having made the initial, painful, effort to stand upright, I tried
a tentative stretch and, eventually, even managed to perform a few officer
training exercises that I’d forgotten all about in the intervening years since
the war.  It wasn’t pleasant, but it was
possible and I was rather pleased with myself.
Then I crouched down by the hinge of the caravan door to wait for the
evening visit.

——

“Yes!”  Said Jay.

“May I?”  Mr Piotrowski enquired.

“Both cars?”  Asked my father.

“I’ll drive,” said my aunt.

My mother opened her mouth to
speak, but:

“Sam,” we said.

She closed it again, frowning.

“Excellent,” Major Dyminge
pronounced.  “You can drive my car,
Kathleen.  Let me just go and get my
gun.”

——

They must have
imagined I’d be a bloody and broken reed because they sent just the one.  I smashed the door into his face, tied him
and locked up behind me with his key.
There was nobody at all about, because the world outside had changed
beyond recognition and a storm was raging.
When they’d taken us it had been sunny spring, but now the grass lay
flat in the wind and everything banged and rattled and icy rain - or was it
spray off the sea? - whipped at my face, blinding me for a moment.  The noise of the sea kicking up a storm was
simply staggering - would have been staggering to anyone, but to a man who’d
been kept blindfolded and bound for days on end, it was overwhelming.  I had to force myself to open my eyes wide
and then to get down on my hands and knees and crawl in the teeth of the wind
towards the lift shaft.  Because I wasn’t
about to go home.

They’d hidden it behind a
hummock of sandbags, as if some type of sea defences were being built.  I spent interminable minutes dragging the
damp bags to one side, before I could bend over and peer down the shaft.  There was distinct light at the bottom of the
rabbit hole.  I thought back to the day
Jay and I’d arrived; I’d been in a pretty bad way after Severs had walloped me,
but I didn’t remember the sound of a lift door shutting.  It had to be an open, step on, step off
contraption.  As I gazed down the shaft, surprising
wisps of intense heat reached me, sufficient to warm my cheeks, before the wind
took off with them.  Nobody was coming up,
but, then, why would anybody wish to come up on such a night?  I leant over to grasp the rope that held the
lift, curled a foot around it and jumped.

——

When Major Dyminge
returned, it was with a pistol and his wife.

“Babysitting?”  She asked.

My mother smiled.

“Thank you, Frances,” she
said.  “Jerzy, I’m coming with you in the
Crossley.”

We were piling in when I noticed
that Jay had disappeared.

“What’s that boy doing down by
the sea?”  My father asked.  “The storm waves will drag him in, if he’s
not careful.”

“Jay!”  I hollered and he came back, bent double
against the wind.

He was carrying a rusty, old
petrol can with a screw-top that he’d filched from Major Dyminge’s boat.

“What are you doing with
that?”  I asked.

“Oh, it’s just an idea.  Are we ready to go?”

——

I landed on the
roof of the lift - a light, metal grille tacked into the upper frame - and
bounced up and down, aiming to get the whole lift to drop enough for me to to
slip through the gap and out onto the floor.
The lift failed to budge, however, but a corner of the grille gave way
and I tore the rest of it free and slid through, down into the lift and then
out into the operations room.  The
sweltering heat immediately blasted into my face; a dry, desert heat that
sucked the lingering damp of the storm from me, like blotting-paper.  The operations room was empty.  Nevertheless, I kept flush to the wall while
I had a look around.  Our arrival the
previous week hadn’t given me much time to take stock, but I’d certainly
clocked the giant piece of apparatus in the middle of the room.  Yet, incredibly, given the size of that
great, glass chemistry set, it seemed to have disappeared altogether.  And that smell, too - an overpowering stink
of rotten meat, or pickled shark that nobody, however done in, could have
failed to notice - had dissipated, somewhat.
It hadn’t gone altogether, but it was definitely less raw.  Only a smattering of desiccated, brown flakes
marked the site where the distillery had stood.

As I watched, a breath of hot
wind scooped the flakes up from the floor and swirled them into the air, where
they spiralled, as if caught up in an invisible tornado.  I searched for the source of the wind and soon
found it; the heat was funnelling through a narrow opening within the cave wall.  I went over and peeked in.  A tunnel was plainly visible, stretching for
fifty feet, or more.  I squeezed inside
the opening and struck out.

The tunnel was wider inside than
the aperture had suggested, but that was soon to change.  The ground beneath my feet began to narrow,
inch by inch, and the light to dwindle so rapidly that I could see little of my
destination.  I wobbled precariously, one
foot balanced in front of the other, and stepped out into the strangest place.  I was skewered by a sudden sense of vertigo,
for the tunnel had delivered me to a ledge, high up on the cliff wall and the
floor of the cavernous chamber in which I found myself lay a full fifty feet
below.

The chamber was full of seaweed, as if it were
still possessed by the sea.  Racks had
been nailed into the chalk walls and ceiling - everywhere one looked - and
immense lengths of dry, brown seaweed had been draped over them, like drowned
men’s trousers hung out to dry.  I
reached out to touch a ribbon of the stuff and found the edge to be as crisp as
any biscuit; when I took it between finger and thumb, it promptly crumbled and
flakes sailed down into the chamber below, circling and dancing on currents of
hot air.

The giant, glass chemistry set
had been brought into that eerie place and I could have sworn that it had
grown.  From my perch high up on the
wall, it almost seemed alive, a creature of the depths crouched in its lair,
shrieking and gulping as it churned up its insides in that festering heat.  The stink was so horrendous that I was afraid
I might swoon at any minute and drop, like a dead fly, from the ceiling.  There was only so long that I could stand
that stink, and I was preparing to turn tail and re-trace my steps when, down
below, two men entered the chamber.  One
was bald and stooped and I knew him as the Monk, the other wore dark glasses
and, when I’d last seen him, had been a Finn by the name of Arko Arkonnen.

“ . . more glass?”  Arkonnen’s voice echoed around the hollow
void.  “I don’t see . .”

“It’s imperative, Mr Arkonnen,”
replied Professor Monkington.  “We cannot
proceed without it.  I hope you’re not
going to renege on our agreement?”

A crackle of dry laughter.  I knew that laugh.  Where the devil was he?  An umbra parted the curtain of seaweed and
stepped into the chamber.  Hutch.

“That wouldn’t do, Reginald old
boy.  Just wouldn’t do.  As it is, you’ve been flailing about like a
pig in mud.  Am I right?”

“Godfrey!  You made it!”

“Mmm.  I’ve been rather held up by our friends in
town; not answering my messages and so forth.”
Hutch’s habitually dreary conversational tone barely made it up to me on
my ledge.

“Ah, we wondered what was keeping you.”
Arkonnen went over and shook his hand.
“Good to see you, Godfrey.”

Professor Monkington wandered
off to a set of filing cabinets that were ranged the length of one wall and
bent to retrieve something within.  He
was still rootling around when the shadows burst into the chamber.  There were five of them, each with a gun in
his hand.  It was difficult to see from
my vantage point, but I was prepared to bet that one of them was Joe.

“Sir.”  One addressed himself to Hutch, breathing
hard, as if he’d been running.

“What is it?  What are you boys doing in here?”

“Sir.  We wouldn’t interrupt, sir.  Only, the prisoner’s gone missing, sir.  We put a man on the gate after the other one
escaped that way, but he swears he hasn’t got past him, sir.”

“What?  It’s not bloody Upshott, is it?”

I was pleased to note that Hutch
sounded as riled as I’d ever heard him.
It wasn’t much, but his smooth feathers had been ruffled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Find him, do you hear me?  I’ve underestimated that spy; he’s a cleverer
bastard than I took him for.  Oh, and
change of orders, lads.  I calculated I
had enough on that ponce to contain him, but it’s much too late for that now,”
he stirred himself just enough to squeeze out a final, lacklustre,
suggestion.  “Shoot to kill.”

——

Jay and I were in
the Crossley with my parents and we took the lead on the road to Crab Bay.  Major Dyminge and Mr Piotrowski followed in
the Hillman Husky with my Aunt Kathleen at the wheel.  I turned to wave at them from the back window,
but torrential, driving rain had obscured the rest of the world.

“This is exciting,” I whispered to Jay, beside me.

“No, Rosa,” he replied.  “You are not to leave the car.  This I have promised Mr Upshott and I always
keep my word.”

“Oh, Jay, don’t be such a wet
blanket.”  I was beginning to wish I’d
gone with the Major.

“Mr and Mrs Stone,” Jay said
loudly, “please assure me that Rosa won’t be allowed to leave the car.”

“Certainly,” agreed my
father.  “You should have stayed at home
when you were told to, bubuleh.”

“But that’s not fair!”  I protested.
“You’ve got no faith in me, none of you!
Not Uncle Tristram, nor Magnus . .”

“Magnus Arkonnen!”  Jay exclaimed.

“Yes, that traitor,” I replied.

“Traitor!”

“Yes.  Why do you keep repeating everything I say?”

It took him a while to answer,
but when he did his tone had completely changed.

“I can’t believe that I forgot
all about Mr Arkonnen,” Jay muttered under his breath.

He had shifted along the back
seat until he was as far from me as it was possible to get.

“I didn’t know you two knew each
other . . but what’s to remember?”  I
whispered back at him.  “Magnus is best
forgotten, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” he bowed his
head.  “I have done a very bad thing.”

What on earth was the matter
with him now?  Jay Tamang seemed to
possess a whole set of standards to which I’d never even attempted to aspire
(it wasn’t often that I’d glimpsed the moral high ground, never mind set foot
on it).

“I’m sure you haven’t done
anything bad in your entire life, Jay.”
I tried to pat his hand, but he yanked his palm away rather rudely.

“Mr Arkonnen is a good man,” his voice broke with
emotion.  “He saved your life when his
relative shot at you.  That is the
truth.  I must tell you that he broke both
arms and both legs while he was doing this.
He cares for nothing in this world as he cares for you, Rosa.  So you see, I am a very bad man indeed; one
who has taken advantage of a young girl in a time of terrible trouble.  One who has thought of nothing but himself
and brought dishonour to the name of . .”

“Stop it, Jay.”  My cheeks flamed.

I was beginning to feel
strangely sick; trapped at the top-most point on the Big Dipper, buffeted by
the wind.

——

The Monk stood up.  He’d donned safety glasses and a pair of
silver-coloured gloves that reached up beyond his elbows.

“Yes,” said Hutch, as if a
question had been put to him.  “I think
it’s time, don’t you.”

The Monk picked up a gigantic
pair of what looked like out-sized sugar tongs and disappeared around the back
of the apparatus.

“Time for what, Godfrey?”  Arkonnen asked.

“Oh, time to get the poker out,
old boy.  Stoke the flames and so forth.”

Reg Arkonnen gazed up at the
monstrous distillery and I thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that he’d
seen me.  But no.

“I can’t believe the job your
scientists have done, Godfrey,” he marvelled.
“Would you take a look at this bloomin’ great contraption!  It’s bloody mind-boggling.”

“Mmm.”

“I’ve just got one question,
though.  Well, two questions if I’m
honest.”

“Oh, please be honest,
Reginald.”

“Well . . where’s the
glass?  I mean to say . . I’ve not seen
them put it into the glass.  Where do
they do that, then?”

“Eh?  You’d like to see that, would you?  Well I’m sure that can be arranged.  It’s only fair after all the hard work you’ve
put in.  For which we will be eternally
grateful.”  He strolled round the back with
his hands in his pockets, following the Monk.
“Come on, Reg.  This way, old
boy.  Let me show you the business end.”

It took so little time.  Yet he must have realised what was about to
happen and that may have been the worst of it.
There was a falsetto scream - no, less than that, a squeak  - before they pushed him in.  The distillery gave an almighty whoop and a
stinking gust of putrid heat burped upwards.
My eyes watered and stung, but I was completely unable to look
away.  For there, within the glass,
emerging from the churning, brown weed like a swimmer from the sea, I saw Reg
Arkonnen.  For one split-second his
entire body glowed, converted into radiant, yellow flame, before he atomized to
dust.

“That’s for my little sister,” I
heard Hutch say, conversationally.

I swayed, tried to right myself,
swayed some more and pedalled in thin air, even as I plunged downwards.

29.  Burn in Hell

Jay told us to park
at the end of a country lane.  When the
headlights were switched off, blanket darkness descended.  The sea was so wild that Mr Piotrowski had to
rap several times on the car window to get our attention, and, when he did, he
looked so uncannily like a wraith emerging from the mists that I think we all
blanched with fright.

“Sorry, Mr Piotrowski,” my
mother wound down the passenger window.
“What was that?”

He pointed in the direction of
Crab Bay and then at himself, mouthing his intention to proceed first.  At least, I think that was what he mouthed;
the wind whipped his words off him before we could grasp anything of his
intentions.  I tapped my mother on the
back:

“Surely he’s not going first?”

But he’d already
disappeared.  She rolled the window back
up and we sat quietly in the dread dark, docile and somewhat subdued.  I wondered whether the gale might scoop us up
and deposit us into the sea; the old car rocked back and forth on its axles in
a fashion that was far from reassuring.
Mr Piotrowski seemed to be gone for an interminable length of time.  Trepidation mounted.  Well, it certainly did for me.

“I hope he hasn’t been blown off
the cliff,” my mother said, suddenly.
“Do you think we ought to . . ?”

The car door slammed beside me
and I jumped.

“Jay?”  I asked.
“Jay?”  And then,  “I don’t believe it!  He’s gone without us!  How could
he?”

“I have a torch in the glove
compartment,” went my father.  “Pass it
to me, will you, Millicent?”

She found it and passed it over
and my father pushed his beret down over his forehead and put a hand on the
door.

“I’m coming with you, Jerzy,”
she said.  “Don’t ask me to stay.”

He sighed.  I knew he didn’t want her to.

“I don’t think you would listen
if I asked that, my love.”

“No.  I’ve got
to come.  For Albert.”

They actually began to get out
of the car as if I wasn’t there.

“Hey!  What about me?”

My father mouthed something at
me through my window, something authoritarian and deeply unfair; something
patriarchal and rooted in the dim and distant past.  Whatever it was, the wind snatched it
away.  It was welcome to it.  I counted to twenty and then I opened my door
and got out.  Major Dyminge came up
behind me carrying a torch.

“They’ve let you come,
then?”  He shouted into my left ear.

“Oh yes,” I shouted back.

“Kathleen’s on standby in the
car, in case we need to make a quick getaway.”

I nodded, vigorously and took
his arm, following the powerful beam of the torch down the lane, cleaving
through hummocks of gorse and sea buckthorn.
Brambles lunged at my legs, maddened by the gale, and I fancied I heard
horses whinnying somewhere nearby, frightened.
The faint glow of my father’s torch, some distance up ahead, bobbed
about in black space.

“Stay by me, won’t you
Rosa?”  Major Dyminge said.  “I’ve got the gun and I’ll use it if I have
to.”

I shivered.  What would we find?

——

The rack snagged at
my fingertips, catching me seconds before I hit the ground.  I swung, madly out of control, smashing into
the wall.  A small avalanche of dried
seaweed flakes whirled into my mouth and eyes before they settled over me.

“Guards!”  Screamed Hutch.

But nobody was around.  I jumped down and squared up to him:

“You’re not acting under orders,
are you, you filthy bastard?  You’ve gone
solo.”

He tried to run, but I caught
him by his shabby suit and pinned him against the glass wall of the distillery.

“Aargh!”  He screamed.
“It’s burning me!  Help!  Help!”

“Hot is it?”  I held him firm.  “I saw what happened to Arkonnen.  May you burn in hell for it.”

His grey face had turned bright
red and sweat streamed off him.

“Help!  Help!”

Out of the corner of my eye I
saw the Monk creeping round the distillery with those bloody great sugar-tongs
still in his hands.

“Oh no you don’t!”

I punched Hutch hard in his
paunch, let him slide onto the floor and sprang at the scientist.  He may have known how to distil uranium, but
he didn’t know the first thing about a brawl.
I went for him with nothing held back, pummelling the living daylights
out of him until he was an unconscious heap on the floor.  I didn’t care what I did, I was so furious at
what that pair of murderers had done.
I’d seen war and I’d seen men die in appalling ways, but I’d never seen
anything as cold-blooded as what they’d done to Arkonnen.  I was still going at it, hot and strong, when
the shadows shot me.

——

When we got to the
gate we found a body slumped on the ground.
Major Dyminge aimed his torch at him and bent to feel his pulse.

“That’s odd,” he whispered,
“he’s breathing steadily, as if he’s asleep and I can’t see a mark on him.  I wonder how he did that?”

“Who?”

“Kathleen’s friend, I presume.  Come on.
I’m going to hold the torch down low, so the beam’s by our feet and we
don’t announce our arrival.”

The field was full of caravans -
a few quaint, painted ones standing amid the modern, white variety - and
electric lights shone through the small, square windows of the more up-to-date
models: yellow dabs of domesticity pointing all the way down the field to the
edge of the cliff.  The caravans
shuddered in the wind, altogether too close to the sea for a night like
that.  I saw a pole that held a
washing-line yank clear out of the earth and fly into the air, before smashing
back into the side of one caravan.  The
uncanny sound of terrified horses - whinnying and snorting and trampling at the
ground - was all around us now, rising and falling through the wind.

“What do we do?”  I asked the Major, still clinging to his arm.

“We find Tristram,” he replied,
matter-of-factly.  “He’ll be here
somewhere.”

But what if he wasn’t?  What if they’d killed him and thrown him off
the cliff and he was tossing about in the waves, broken to bits by the storm?

“Ah, there they are.”  He lifted his torch, briefly, to illuminate
my parents and Mr Piotrowski standing among a group of men.  “They seem to have found a welcome party.”

We ran over and my father turned
at my approach, looking daggers.

“What’s happening?”  I asked my mother.

“Mr Piotrowski speaks Romanian,
or Roma, or whatever language it is these people speak.  I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but
they seem to have taken to him.”

She was right.  Several men were clapping Mr Piotrowski on
the back, while they all gabbled and gesticulated wildly.

“Where’s Jay?”  I asked.

“I don’t know.  I haven’t seen him.”

A tremendous fork of lightening
ripped along the length of the sky, followed by the loudest rumble of thunder
I’d ever heard.  Moisture slapped me in
the mouth and I tasted salt; not rain, then, but sea.  Major Dyminge pushed through Mr Piotrowski’s
admirers to get to him and grabbed him by the arm.

“This is becoming dangerous,” he
shouted.  “Can you tell them to vacate
the field?  Put it to them in no
uncertain terms, will you?  If the waves
are reaching over the cliff, it’s time to go.”

Just then - as I turned to assess
the cliff - I saw a woman dash out of a caravan and run over to where a car was
parked.  The woman had one of those
transparent, plastic head-scarves on and was holding the edges of her white
cardigan up over her shoulders, as if it could protect her from the rain.  I hadn’t expected hooped ear-rings and
multi-coloured scarves, but she really
didn’t look remotely like a gypsy.  Not
only that, but the car she’d run over to inspect was a long, fat number.  It was some way off, but I’d have said it was
a Rolls Royce.  I slipped away from the
group, ran down the field and peered through the window of her caravan while
she was preoccupied.

Crumbs.  No, honestly.
I’d found Magnus.

——

The storm was
walloping at the caravan that hard I could feel the mattress shake under
me.   Pablo paused in his marathon
washing project for a moment and gazed off into thin air.  I’d imagined I could hear animals
screaming.  Did he hear them, too?  There was an almighty clap of thunder and he
spat in disgust and leapt off the bed.

“It’s alright, boy.”

The tempest chucked stones at
the window like it wanted to break the glass.
Like spatters of gunshot.  What a
night!  I looked up and saw Rosa Stone.

——

I climbed down the
lift shaft with the container grasped between my knees.  I had not thought to put that radiation suit
back on, but was wearing Mr Stone’s clothes; it was too late for such matters
now.  Perhaps it was too late for
everything.  What had made me wait so
long?  (She had.  She hadn’t meant to - I knew that - but she
had simply gone to my head.)

I’d searched for him in the caravan,
but found it empty, the door un-locked and banging in the mighty winds,
beginning to come loose at the hinges.  I
couldn’t search the entire field, not in that weather.  There was much that was beyond my control - a
scientist must be able to admit that, or he is a dangerous man - and yet, all
was not lost.  I’d strayed; had forgotten
the right way to go.  But, as long as
there remained one honourable path left to follow, all was never lost.

I had just jumped down through
the broken roof of the lift and into the power-house within the cliff, when,
behind me, the lift began to ascend to the top of the shaft.

——

It was a flesh wound
to the shoulder, but it was enough to bring me to my senses.  They pulled me off the scientist and one of
them stuck a gun to my head, while another stuck his in my back.  A face I knew all too well leered at me;
young, sleek, swollen with contempt.

“Permission to finish him off,
sir,” said Joe, breezily, as if he were doing a wounded dog a favour.

“One minute,” Hutch murmured
somewhere in the background.  “Interesting
to see  what he knows.”

I struggled against his thugs,
but it was just a gesture.  They had me
hog-tied and we all knew it.

“Everything,” I spat. “I know
every bloody thing and so does Tamang and he’s spreading the word and you
haven’t a hope in hell of containing this, whatever you do to me.”

“Now, now, Upshott,” said Hutch,
drifting into view.  “Surely you’ve
worked with me long enough to know better than that.”

He came up close, so close I
could see the grey hairs sprouting in his nostrils.  The freckles on his pale, nebulous face were
liver spots.  Patches of pink scalp shone
through his sandy-grey hair.  The man was
older than I’d thought; much older.

“Burn in hell, Hutch,” I
spat.  “It’s the only place they’ll have
you after this.”

A smirk travelled over his mild
face and was gone.

“Funny you should mention
burning, Upshott old boy.”

——

Even as I pulled
faces through the window at Magnus, a wave broke over the cliff-top and
frittered itself away over the caravan roof.
I waved goodbye and peered up the field to where Mr Piotrowski was
directing the Romanies, rather as if he were their long-lost leader come to
reclaim his men.  Major Dyminge, too, was
rushing about giving orders, helping calm the horses and hitch them up, or
directing cars one by one through the field gate, so that a queue of caravans
built up, waiting to depart.

My mother came running up to
me.  Under her belted mackintosh, her
skirts were still ebullient, dipping up and down despite the driving rain.

“I’ve found my friend Magnus,” I
shouted at her.  “But where’s Uncle
Tristram?”

“They say he’s still alive,” she
shouted back.  “According to Mr
Piotrowski, he escaped earlier this evening and they think he’s inside the
cliff.”

Another wave sloshed over us and
Magnus’ caravan nearly toppled over onto its side.

“Come on, Rosa!  We can’t stay.  If we do, we’ll be drowned.”

We ran, hand in hand, up the
field, the full force of the wind bearing down upon us.

——

“Tell me one thing before you
incinerate me, Hutch.”

“Mmm?  What’s that?”

“Why give me the fake files on
Operation Crystal Clear in the first place?
Why ask me to investigate your own conspiracy?”

He had the gall to laugh.

“Oh, I chose you very carefully,
Upshott.  Who else in the Services has a
past like yours?  Quite the little thief,
weren’t you?  Plenty to work with should
things turn nasty.”

He strolled up to the distillery
and gazed into its churning, brown guts.

“At first, you were simply
keeping an eye on Reginald for me.  But
then . . you began to do rather well.
Unexpectedly well.  The slide and
the barge . .” he turned around.  “Jolly good
show, Upshott.”

“Come off it, Hutch,” I wasn’t
having any, “you sent men on bikes to shoot me well before any of that!”

“Me?  No, that was Reginald, dear chap.  I’m afraid he did have to be let off the
leash every now and again.  Reginald kept
some truly dreadful company.  Gangland
types and so on.”  He gave a little
shudder.  “I wouldn’t have bothered with
all that . . not then.  You were just a
barometer, you see, nothing more; there to show me how I was doing.  As I say . .” he came up very close and peered
at me, “I’m really rather delighted you’ve done so well.  I mean, I always had you down as a bloody bad
spy, Upshott.  Never dreamed you’d get
this far in the story.”

“That really is how you see it,
isn’t it?”  I marvelled.  “It’s just another story to you, Hutch, isn’t
it?  Another day, another plot.”

“I beg your pardon,” came a
female voice.  “I think you’ll find the
plots are mine, actually.”

My secretary, Dilys Arkonnen, stepped
into the chamber wearing a plastic rain-hood.
She glanced down at her white cardigan, irritably and brushed a few
flakes of desiccated seaweed from it.

“Well,” she asked.  “Is it done?”

“Oh yes,” he replied.  “Done to a turn.  If you like cinders.”

“Oh, Godfrey,” she said, “you
are a caution!”  Then, “Let me do this one,
dear.  Please!”

When an inhuman, ear-shattering,
cry screamed out from above, like a war-cry from the depths of history.  It was so terrifying that we all jumped and the
shadows dropped my arms to aim their guns.
A small figure swung himself across the ceiling, grasping the racks of
seaweed, hand over hand.  He paused above
the distillery to pour something into the glass chimney, before he swung back,
and began to climb down the wall.

A staccato volley of bullets
spat into the air.

“Stop!”  Cried the Monk.  “Don’t hit the distillery!”

I seized my moment, backing away
while they were occupied, aiming for the entrance that I knew was concealed
beneath the seaweed.  However Hutch clocked
me trying to escape and started to shout:

“Don’t let him . .” he began, before
a sinister, sizzling noise caught his attention and he stopped, mouth hanging
open in surprise.

The sinister, sizzling noise
caught the attention of all of us.  It
was coming from inside the great apparatus.
Where there had only been brown, churning sludge, bubbles of molten gold
had begun to collect, perfect spheres of brilliance bouncing through the gloom.  It looked like every alchemist’s fantasy.  They jostled with one another, multiplying
fast, gleaming bubbles the size of footballs bobbing against one another in the
race to mount the glass tower.  The distillery
had become an alembic, and we were hypnotized, to a man, by those orbs of the
purest, most dazzling, gold that rose up the long funnel of the glass tower, so
close to the lip of the chimney that they were almost . . .

Jay Tamang swung over the
up-turned heads of the shadows and grabbed my arm.

“Out!”  He screamed.

‘Boom!’

The distillery exploded,
vomiting red-hot, fetid intestines into the chamber.  Jay and I were practically through the
entrance to the cave, but it must have hit the others, full blast, in the
face.  All screams are fearful, but, once
heard, screams of agony are the hardest to forget; they last longer than anyone
would think possible and then they follow you into your dreams.

But it was a mere heartbeat, two
at most, and then:

‘Boom!’

The second explosion came, strong
enough to rip the cliff from the earth’s core and sound from the ear.  If there was screaming, nobody heard it but
the sea.

Even as we raced through the
operations room, the cave began to implode around us; chunks of cliff tore off
the walls and scudded across the ground, spitting chalk.  We were still running towards the lift shaft
when the sea surged in to reclaim the cave.
The waters rushed in so fast that waves crashed ten feet high against
the walls before the initial trickle of moisture had dampened our shoes.  In they crashed, roaring like hooligans, and,
as they came, they caught up the rocks and flung them at us, rock against man
and, then, man against rock as we were lifted clear off the ground and swirled
around the cave, like ice cubes in a glass.

I know I was on the verge of
blacking out when the sea took a breath, sucking back the tide, and Jay and I
made one, final, simultaneous, surge of our own, kicking out towards the lift
shaft and swimming in, our heads completely submerged.  Jay Tamang’s black eyes were wide open under
the water and his hair waved around his face.
I pointed upwards to the broken grille on the roof and pushed off, breaking
through the surface of the water as I propelled myself through the top of the
lift.  Thank God, the water had yet to
rise further up the shaft.  I clung to
the rope and looked down, watching Jay emerge beneath me, gulping his fill of fresh
air.

“You alright to climb, Jay?”

He looked up at me and nodded.

So we set off, shinning up the
rope with the sea snapping at our heels.
But, when we emerged, it was as if the sea had got there before us, for
waves seemed to hurtle over our heads and the gale roared, wilder than
ever.   We bent into the wind, half-blind,
feeling our way forward, until:

“Boom!”

The final explosion and a
tremendous fireball burgeoned into the sky, washing the clifftop with such an
intensity of light that we seemed to see the world through amber: the empty
yellow field churned into yellow mud and the final, yellow, caravan - pulled by
an old, yellow, Crossley - bumping through the gate and out to safety.

30.  The Same Stars

The sun had
slipped down into the arms of the English Channel and the white moon had risen
and only the scattered leaves of holm oaks, ragged amongst the shingle, gave the
storm away.  I went to pull the fat folds
of the black velvet curtains.

“Don’t,” said my mother.  “Look at the stars.”

The stars over the sea were
swimming through our dining-room window to join the stars that she had painted
on the ceiling.

“They bring to mind the stars
above the Las Wolski Forest,” said Mr Piotrowski.

“Above the mountains of Nepal,”
said Jay.

“Over the chip shops of Hull,”
said Magnus.

We all laughed.

“The same stars, I daresay,”
said Uncle Tristram.  “Although it can be
hard to believe.”

“Ta da!”  Boomed my father, by way of introducing the
enormous side of beef that he was bringing to table.

Mrs Dyminge followed with the
vegetables.  I eyed the platter,
uneasily, before helping myself to roast potatoes.

“Hey!”  Went my little brother.  “Rosa’s taking all the potatoes again!”

“She could do with them, Sam,”
said Magnus, from the chaise longue that my mother had pulled up to the table
and positioned next to her chair so that she could serve him his meal.  “She put in a heck of a lot of work last
night.”

“Yes, she is extremely brave,”
agreed Jay.

I may have smirked.  I certainly stuck my tongue out at my brother
when the others weren’t looking.

“Hey!”  Went Sam, again.

“Hey, yourself!”  I replied.
“How’s your shoulder, Uncle Tristram?”

“Just a graze, Gypsy; nothing to
worry about.”

He barely gave me a second glance,
he was so busy giving first glances to Aunt Kathleen.  They looked like two film stars who’d
unexpectedly alighted at our table; pushing their food around unconvincingly
while they waited to light up another cigarette and gaze at each other through
the smoke.  I sighed and ate another
potato.

“My goodness but this is divine,
Jerzy,” exclaimed Mrs Dyminge.  “I feel
quite the fraud, I must say; being invited to your special Shabbat dinner when
all I contributed was a little babysitting.”
She speared a carrot and looked pensive.
“Tell me again, dear Mr Tamang,” she turned to Jay, “just why uranium
reacts so when water is added to it?”

“Ah, well, Mrs Dyminge . .”  he put down his knife and fork, “ . . uranium
as a dust is highly
combustible.”  She nodded, clearly taking
mental notes for her next book.  “It will
ignite almost instantaneously, generating hydrogen, of course.  Yes, the application of water to the molten
chemical - in the dust form - will intensify the burning to a point where a
severe explosion will be caused.  An
explosion which may only be extinguished by substantial amounts of dry sand, or
limestone which, happily, were both present . .”

“Because, if they hadn’t been,” Uncle Tristram
interjected, “the devil only knows how many sleepy Kent villages you’d have
blown to kingdom come!”

Jay smiled:

“I think it’s time I retired
from the field, Tristram,” he said.

“That makes two of us.”

“Three,” added my aunt.

“Goodness,” said my mother, “it
looks like Jerzy and I are the only ones who’ll be doing any work around
here!”  She cut up some more food and fed
it to Magnus.

There came a sudden, loud knock
at the front door.  Who on earth could it
be at that time of night?  There it was
again, even louder and more assertive than the time before.  My father got up from the table, adjusting
his beret and I couldn’t resist following him.

He opened up and stood there, not
saying a word.  Seized with insatiable
curiosity, I ducked under his arm to get a better look.

It was the police.  Lots and lots of police.  Blue lights were flashing like billy-o and
sirens were blaring and what looked like simply hundreds of men - in and out of
uniform and many wearing inexplicable sunglasses - were massing on the
beach.  Sergeant Riley stepped forward in
his brown suit.

“You left a message with
Scotland Yard switchboard, Miss Stone,” he said, bending his neck to address me
under my father’s arm.

“Oh.  Hello there.
Yes, I suppose I did.  But you’re much too late, Sergeant Riley.  It all blew up yesterday, didn’t they tell
you?  The local police dealt with it all through
the night and . .”

“The local police!”  He interrupted.  “But . . we’ve come all this way and . . I’ve
brought the CIA and everything!”

I gazed, blankly, at all those
policemen and several men sporting inexplicable sunglasses nodded, blankly,
back at me.

“I’m sorry,” said my father,
very politely, “but I’m afraid you have disturbed us in the middle of the
Shabbat meal.  You are welcome to come
back another day.”

He made an attempt to close the
door, but the handsome, brown-suited policeman stuck his foot in it.

“What?  You’ve got a nerve, when we’ve come all this
way!”  Sergeant Riley was losing his
cool.  “I mean, God Almighty!”

“God?”  Said my father.  “Why if God is not in food, then he is
nowhere at all.”

And he shut the door firmly,
bolting it from the inside.

We went back to the dining-room
and I hovered, for a moment, on the threshold, watching them all eat beef and
drink wine and look happy and thoughtful and sad and interested and happy
again.  The silver candle-sticks glowed
on the table.

“Come and sit by me, Rosa, man,”
Magnus called from the chaise-longue, his enormous, ginger cat asleep on his
plaster casts.

Jay glanced up from his beef and
offered me his lovely smile:

“Rosa?”

I sighed.

“I won’t be a sec.”

I went over to my little brother
and tickled his neck.

“Gerrof!”  He squirmed, and I let him punch me.

I caught Major Dyminge’s
singular, blue eye - so fierce, yet so kind - and I nodded.

Then I went to make my phone
call, fetched my carpet bag and stood outside - beneath the same stars -
waiting for the taxi to arrive.

THE END

[1]
Paul Nash (1889-1946).  British artist, a
Modernist and Surrealist greatly influenced by the British landscape.  Also a prominent war artist in both WW1 and
WW2, painting some of the most powerful images of war that we have.

[2]
Ernest Bevin (1881-1951).  British trade
union leader, Labour politician and statesman.
Minister of Labour in the war-time coalition government, where he
improved wages and working conditions for ordinary people.  Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour
government, where he acknowledged that Britain’s efforts to maintain its place
among the global powers, to hold onto its Empire and to subsidise its
considerable armed forces, was leading it towards bankruptcy.  Bevin was pragmatic enough to negotiate
financial support from America, to withdraw from India and the Middle East and
to support the beginning of NATO.  In
other words, he changed foreign policy in a way that still influences the UK
today.

[3]
John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie (1917-1993).
US virtuoso jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer, known for his skill
at improvisation.

[4] US
musician Bill Haley (1925-1981) was one of the first white musicians to
popularize rock and roll with his band, Bill Haley & His Comets.  Shake,
Rattle and Roll and Rock Around the
Clock struck a chord with the new teenagers all around the world, although Rock Around the Clock only took off in
the UK after the release of the first teen high school movie Blackboard Jungle in 1955, where it was
played over the opening credits.

[5]
The USA, UK and Canada formed the Manhattan Project to develop and manufacture
the first atomic bombs during WWII.

[6]
Dame Peggy Ashcroft (1907-1991), English actress renowned for her Shakespearean
heroines among many other wonderful performances.  She played Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night many times, but Rosa would
have seen the 1950 production at the Old Vic.

[7]
Chesney ‘Chet’ Baker (1929-1988) charismatic US jazz musician associated with
West Coast Jazz.  Baker played the
trumpet and flugelhorn, but was also known for his striking vocals.

[8]
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Sir Anthony Eden (1897-1977) British
politicians, Prime Ministers and members of the Conservative party.

[9]
The Marshall Plan (1948-1952), in which the US and Canada gave economic support
to help war-damaged western Europe get back on its feet.

[10]
The Korean War (1950-1953), came about as a result of the division of Korea
after WWII, when Japan surrendered and the Allies created a border between
North and South Korea at the 38th Parallel.  Tension mounted when the United Nations sided
with South Korea and Russia and China with North Korea, in a classic Cold War
stand-off.

[11]
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), leader of the Soviet Union from the 1920’s until his
death and one of the world’s most murderous dictators.

[12]
British Film Studios.

[13]
Bond.  James Bond.  Ian Fleming’s superspy owned a pale blue
Aston Martin, of course.

[14]
Sir Joseph Bazelgette (1819-1891) one of Britain’s most celebrated civil
engineers, remembered primarily for designing and building the London sewer
system, thereby saving many lives.
Bazelgette began the project after what became known as ‘The Great
Stink’ of 1858 when warm weather produced such a foul miasma from the River
Thames – where all London sewage had hitherto been dumped – that the entire
city was choked.

[15]
Chancery Lane deep shelter was never used by the public but became the
emergency command HQ for various government bodies, including the ‘Inter
Services Research Bureau’- a branch of MI6 that aided the Resistance in
German-occupied countries.

[16]
Sir Roger Bannister (born 1929) is an English athlete and doctor who ran the
first mile under four minutes in 1954 (3 minutes 59.4 seconds, to be precise),
while he was also practising as a junior doctor.

[17]
The British Board of Film Censors was set up in 1912 to monitor standards in
films nationally.  Fears of political
propaganda in the war years changed to concerns over sex and violence in the
1950’s, but, by the 1980’s the name had been changed to the British Board of
Film Classification in an attempt to distance themselves from the idea of
censorship and that name remains today.

[18]
Diana Dors (1931-1984) home-grown, British, blonde bombshell film star.  By the mid-Fifties she was known as
‘Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe’.
However, being born in 1931, she was only fourteen years younger than
Kathleen.

[19]
Kathleen’s favourite Polish café is actually Daquise, which still remains on
the same site near South Kensington tube station.

[20]
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is a statue of J.M. Barrie’s famous character
by the sculptor Sir George Frampton, which was erected near the Long Water in
1912 at the site in which Peter Pan landed after he flew out of the window in The Little White Bird.  It has long been a landmark for London
children.

[21]
George Orwell was the pen-name of British author, journalist and essayist Eric
Blair (1903-1950).  Best known for his
Socialism and concern with social justice as exemplified in his most famous
novels, Animal Farm(1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949), he was also
one of the most important left-wing commentators on all of the political and
cultural issues of his day.  In his 1945
essay ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’ for
the Tribune newspaper, he discussed the post-war future living in the shadow of
nuclear war, the “peace that is no peace”, which he termed a “permanent cold
war”.  This was the first use of the term
to describe relations between the United Nations and the Communist Bloc.

[22] Punch, or the London Charivari, was a
British satirical magazine that was first published in 1841 and became
immensely successful.  However, by the
Fifties it was in decline and, though it continued to languish in dentist’s
waiting-rooms for the rest of the century, it’s poor circulation figures
finally killed it off for good in 2002.

[23]
Kingston Upon Hull was bombed heavily by the Nazis throughout the Second World
War, being an easy target on the North East Coast of Britain, with docks and
heavy industry located in the heart of the city.  95% of all buildings were damaged, which made
it the worst affected city after London.

[24]
Richard Burton (1925-1984) and Claire Bloom (born 1931) starred in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Old Vic
theatre in 1953/1954.

[25]
Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955) US jazz saxophonist and composer, along with
Dizzy Gillespie, was one of the inventors of bebop.  Parker died in March 1955, just before this
book begins.

[26]
Johnny Ray (1927-1990), US singer, songwriter and pianist, one of the first
white teen idols before the advent of Elvis Presley.  Ray sold millions of records in the 1950’s,
particularly 1952’s Cry and The Little White Cloud That Cried.  When he performed he would often fall to the
floor or cry with emotion, producing hysteria in his young audience.

[27]
Art Blakey (1919-1990) US jazz drummer and bandleader.  His brand of ‘hard bop’ added influences from
blues and gospel to jazz with a rhythmic drumbeat that eventually led to
‘funk’.

[28]
Bernard “Acker” Bilk (born 1929), English jazz clarinettist and vocalist.  Acker Bilk was part of the traditional,
easy-listening, type of jazz that became popular in the Fifties.  He and his band - sporting their striped
waistcoats and bowler hats - would have been familiar on the London jazz
circuit  in 1955, although they were yet
to experience the international success that came in 1962 with Stranger on the Shore.

[29]
Myxomatosis is a disease that specifically kills rabbits.  It began in South America, spread through
Australia and was deliberately introduced in France to control the rabbit
population, from where it spread like wildfire to the UK.  By 1955, 95% of UK rabbits were dead and
there had been little or no attempt to find a cure.  While a vaccine is now available for tame
rabbits, wild rabbits can still suffer myxomatosis, despite increasing immunity
to the disease.

[30]  This is where I admit that I’ve stolen the
houses and given them false identities.  White Cliffs was one of four houses left
on the beach at St Margaret’s Bay after the war.  When playwright and actor Noel Coward
(1899-1973) bought it in 1945, it had suffered after being used by the army,
but he and his friends refurbished it and he spent six happy years there.  Coward loved being so close to the elements
and so did his many famous friends, including film star Katharine Hepburn
(1907-2003), who regularly swam in the cold sea.  In 1951 he sold it to another friend, the
author Ian Fleming (1908-1964), who already had ties with the Kent Coast,
living nearby and playing golf at Royal St George’s club in Sandwich.  Fleming lived at White Cliffs until 1957 and
set the entirety of his 1955 James Bond novel Moonraker in the area. (See
excellent website www.dovermuseum.co.uk
for further info.)

[31] Doctor in the House was a UK box-office
smash in 1954, a British comedy adapted from the Doctor series of books written by real-life surgeon, Richard Gordon
(born 1921).  It was the first in a
series of seven films set in a fictional hospital and it made a star out of
Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999), the British actor and writer who began his career as
a matinee idol, but gravitated to acting in art-house films, such as The Night Porter (1974).

[32] The Belles of St Trinians came out in
1954, the first of a series of films about the anarchic girl’s school, which
were developed from the work of British satirical cartoonist and artist Ronald
Searle (1920-2011).

[33]
Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Finnish author, artist and cartoonist.  Finn
Family Moomintroll (1948) was the third of her many books for children
about a family of round, white trolls - the Moomins – and centred around the
discovery of a magician’s hat.

[34] Gone with the Wind (1936), written by US
author Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was made into the enormously successful
film of 1939.

[35]
Georges Simenon (1903-1989), prolific Belgian writer best known for his
detective fiction featuring the calm and tenacious Parisian Inspector Maigret.

[36]
Bulldog Drummond was a fictional character in the book of the same name by
British author H.C. Macneile, writing under the pen-name ‘Sapper’
(1888-1937).  Drummond was a “Detective,
patriot, hero and gentleman!”  He
appeared in many thrilling adventures, which continued to be written by others
long after Sapper’s death.

[37]
Magnus has named his cat after left-wing Chilean poet and politician Pablo
Neruda (1904-1973).

[38]
Dean Martin (1917-1995) Italian-American singer and entertainer with a notably
relaxed and smooth delivery of easy-listening songs.  That’s
Amore was a big hit for Martin in 1952.

[39]
Bankside generated oil-fired electricity from 1952-1981.  It is now the Tate Modern art gallery.

[40]
Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-1968) British actor-manager, famed for stage
performances in the over-the-top style of days gone by.

[41]
Poliomyelitis (polio), an acute illness that can cause paralysis and death was
rife throughout the world in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  There was an epidemic in the UK in the early
1950’s, with many children infected and sent to isolation hospitals.  However, by 1956, the first vaccines were
beginning to be developed.

[42] Richard III, an adaptation of
Shakespeare’s play, was a British film that came out in 1955.  It was directed, produced and starred Sir
Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), one of the greatest stage actors of his time.

[43]
Effective antihistamine drugs were just beginning to be developed in the early
1950’s.

[44]
Albert Camus (1913-1960) French author, journalist and philosopher who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  La Peste (The Plague) was written in
1947.

[45]
Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), ethnic German industrialist and spy for the Nazi
party, who rescued 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his
factories.

[46]
Friday November 26th 1954 saw the worst Channel storm for two
hundred years.  The cable attaching the
South Goodwin Lightship snapped and the vessel was wrecked on the Goodwin
Sands.  One man escaped, but the bodies
of seven men were never found.

[47]
Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy.
The second law of thermodynamics (put very simply) states that heat will
naturally flow from hot to cold places when inside a closed system.

[48] To Catch a Thief, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly came out in 1955.

[49]
Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000), famed British actor and director.

[50] The Merchant of Venice by William
Shakespeare.  Written between 1596 and
1598.  Act v, scene i.