The Harry Palmer Quartet

I’m not good at guessing numbers, so it would be the roughest possible estimate if I said that Charlie’s little apartment contained three thousand books. Enough to say perhaps that in no room was there much wall to be glimpsed. And I wouldn’t like you to think that they were paperbacks of the Bushwacker of Deadman’s Gulch genre either. No, these wonderful books were the reason Charlie Cavendish hadn’t got past 1947 with his motor-cars.

‘You’re up,’ said Charlie, coming into the living-room with a big white coffee-pot. ‘Continental roast. OK?’ I hoped I wasn’t becoming that sort of fanatic that people had to check blends with before they could offer me a cup of coffee. ‘Great,’ I said.

‘Would music bother you?’

‘No, it would do me good,’ I answered. Charlie went across to the hi-fi. It was a mass of valves and assorted components strung together with loops of wire, sticking-plaster and slivers of matchstick. He laid a huge shiny LP on the heavy turntable and delicately applied the diamond head. Strange that he should have chosen Mozart’s 41st; for the second movement took me directly back to that evening I sat with Adem listening to the song of the blackcap. How long ago was that?

After breakfast Charlie settled down with Encounters and I tuned in to the Saturday morning concert and began to wish I hadn’t eaten, I was feeling pretty sick. I walked into the bedroom and took the weight off my feet. I had to think. I’d told Charlie as much as he need know, and ideally I should get away from here. Implicating a personal friend was bad enough, implicating someone employed within the framework of the service was unforgivable.

I had got as far as this merely because K.K. and Co had divided their anxieties between recapturing me and packing up their confidential stuff and clearing out quickly. But that did not mean that they were a set of amateurs, nor that they were going to take the heat off me in any way. What to do now?

Dalby seemed out of the question, so did anyone who worked for him. Ross wasn’t even on my list. I could go to the CIGS but I really wasn’t under Army jurisdiction any longer. Anyway that was out because Dalby would hear about my application for an interview before the ink on it was dry. If I gave a false name they would look me up in the List and arrest me when they found it wasn’t there. If I gave someone else’s name? No, of the Military Police and secretaries at the War House there was too many that know me by sight. Anyway, the CIGS probably wouldn’t believe me. Ripley is probably the only one that will believe it, I thought.

The PM? I toyed with this idea for thirty seconds. What would the Prime Minister do? He’d have to ask advice from the next responsible security authority. Who was that? In this particular case it was Dalby. Even if it wasn’t Dalby it would be someone closely associated with Dalby. It was a maze and Dalby stood at the only exit.

Then perhaps the only way was to go directly to Dalby and sort out this muddle with him. After all, I knew I wasn’t working for anyone else. There must be a way of proving it. On the other hand there wasn’t a government in the world who’d have any compunction about killing an operator who knew as much as I did, if there were any doubts about loyalty. In a way this cheered me up. Whatever else, I wasn’t dead yet, and killing someone isn’t difficult.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pawn shop was near Gardner’s corner. I paid £11 13s 9d and exchanged the pawn ticket for a canvas travelling bag. Inside was a dark green flannel suit, cotton trousers, two dark shirts and six white ones, a bright Madras jacket, ties, socks, underwear, black shoes and canvas ones. The side panels contained razor, shaving cream, blades, comb, compressed dates, plastic raincoat, folding knife, prismatic compass and a packet of Kleenex. Into the lining of the suit was sewn a 100NF note, a £5 note, and a 100DM note, and into the small amount of padding was sewn another key to another safe deposit box. This, too, is a spy’s insurance policy.

I booked into a hotel near Bedford Square, then met Charlie in Tottenham Court Road Fortes. Charlie was dead on time as usual: 12.7 (to make appointments on the hour or half-hour is to ask for trouble). I took off the raincoat and gave it to him, producing my own plastic one from my pocket. ‘I’ve left your door key in my hotel room,’ I told him.

‘Yerse?’ said the girl behind the counter. We ordered some coffee and sandwiches, and Charlie put on the raincoat. ‘It’s just beginning to spot with rain,’ he said.

‘What a shame,’ I said, ‘it seemed as though it was going to be a nice day.’ We munched the sandwiches.

‘You can let yourself in and leave the key on the shelf, because I must be back by two o’clock,’ said Charlie. I paid for the food and he thanked me. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve got used to having you drop in from time to time.’ Before he left me, Charlie told me three times that I must contact him if I needed any help. Naturally I was tempted to use Charlie to help me. He was too old to be foolhardy, too knowledgeable to be garrulous, and too content to be curious, but he was too willing to be exploited.

I left Charlie, and from Fortes I went to a black sooty building in Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘Waterman’s World-Wide Detective Agency’ it said, in black raised letters on the door. Inside, a thin shiny-black-suited detective looked up like a subject of a photo in a divorce case. He was removing a piece of wax from his ear with a match stick. He thought I should have knocked; if it hadn’t prejudiced his income he might have told me about it. Instead he took off his bowler hat and said, ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ He didn’t like me sitting down without permission either. I told him that I was in a difficult domestic situation. ‘Really, sir? I’m sorry,’ he said, like he had never met anyone in a difficult domestic situation before.

I gave him a lot of stuff about my wife and another fellow, and he ‘ho’ed’ and ‘oh deared’ his way through it. I didn’t think there would be a breach of the peace, I told him, but if he could be on hand. We agreed on a fee of eight guineas, which was pretty handsome. This character would lay on an SS Armoured Division for a fiver. I felt better now I had finally decided not to involve Charlie, and it was five o’clock that afternoon before I got back to Charlie’s place in Bloomsbury. I wanted to speak to him before he went to his part-time job as barman at the ‘Tin-Tack Club’, and give him his key.

I arrived at Charlie’s place at 5.10. I let myself in by the front door. The slight amount of daylight that filtered through the green glass window on the back stairs lit the moth-eaten stair-carpet with a dense emerald light. The place smelt of unlit corners, bicycles in the hall and yesterday’s cat food. One ascended like a diver, slowly nearing the white daylight surface of Charlie’s top flat. I reached the loose stair-rod two steps from the top of the first flight before I heard the sound. I paused and listened without breathing for a second or so. I know now that I should have turned around and left the house, and I knew it then. But I didn’t go. I continued up the stairs towards the woman’s sobbing.

The whole place was upside down; clothes, books, broken plates, the whole place a battlefield. On the landing was an old-fashioned fridge as big as a portable radio, a gas oven, a sink, and Charlie’s body. He looked limp and relaxed in a way that only dead things do. As I bent close to him I saw the white porcelain coffee-pot smashed into a thousand pieces, and fresh dry coffee crunched under the soles of my shoes. In the living-room whole shelf-fuls of books had been heaved on the floor, and there they lay, open and upside down, strangely like Charlie.

Shiny records, letters, flowers, brass ornaments, and a small leather-cased carriage clock had been swept from the top of the writing cabinet, leaving only Reg’s photo as the sole survivor. I removed Charlie’s wallet as gently as I could to provide the police with a motive, and as I straightened up I looked straight into the eyes of a young, ill-looking woman of about thirty. Her face was green like the downstairs window, and her eyes were black, very wide open, and sunk deep into her face. The knuckles of her small hand were white with tension as she pushed it into her mouth. We looked at each other for perhaps a whole minute. I wanted to tell her that although I hadn’t killed Charlie she mustn’t … oh, how could I ever begin. I started down the stairs as fast as possible.

Whoever had slaughtered Charlie was there after me, and when the police had finished taking my description from the whimpering woman on the stairs, they’d be after me, too. Dalby’s organization was the only contact with enough power to help me.

At Cambridge Circus I jumped on a bus as it came past. I got off at Piccadilly, hailed a cab to the Ritz, and then walked east up Piccadilly. No car could follow without causing a traffic sensation by an illegal right turn. Just to be on the safe side, I hailed another cab on the far side of the road, outside Whites, in case anyone had done that turn, and now sped in the opposite direction to anyone who could have followed me. I gave the cabbie the address of a car hire company in Knightsbridge. It was still only 5.25.

Not without difficulty, I hired a blue Austin 7, the only car they had with a radio. I used Charlie’s driving licence, and some envelopes I’d found in his wallet ‘proved’ my identity. I cursed my foolishness in not having taken a driving licence from the safe deposit. I was taking a long chance on Charlie’s name not being released to the Press before the various Intelligence departments had a look in, but I tuned in to the 6 o’clock news just the same. Algeria, and another dock strike. The dockers didn’t like something again. Perhaps it was each other. No murders. An antique Austin 7 in front of me signalled a right turn. The driver had shaved under the arms. I drove on through Putney and along the side of the common. It was green and fresh and a sudden burst of sunshine made the wet trees sparkle, and turned the spray from speeding tyres into showers of pearls. Rich stockbrokers in white Jaguars and dark-green Bentleys played tag and wondered why I’d intruded into their private fun.

‘Waaa Waaa Waaa Waaa – you’re driving me crazy,’ sang the radio as I changed down to negotiate Wimbledon Hill, and outside, the nightmare world of killers, policemen and soldiers happily brushed shoulders. I gazed out on it from the entirely imaginary security of the little car. How long was it to be before every one of the crowds on Wimbledon High Street were going to become suddenly interested in Charlie Cavendish and interested even more in finding me. The pianist at the ‘Tin-Tack Club’; I suddenly remembered that I still owed him thirty shillings. Would he give my description to the police? How to get out of this mess? I looked at the grim rows of houses on either side of me and imagined them all to be full of Mr Keatings. How I wished I lived in one – a quiet, uneventful, predictable existence.

Now I was back on the Kingston by-pass at Bushey Road. At the ‘Ace of Spades’ the road curves directly into the setting sunlight, and the little car leapt forward in response to a slight touch of the foot.

Two trucks were driving neck and neck ahead of me. Each one was doing twenty-eight mph, each grimly intent on proving he could do twenty-nine! I passed them eventually and fell in behind a man in a rust-coloured pullover and Robin-Hood hat who had been to BRIGHTON, BOGNOR REGIS, EXETER, HARLECH, SOUTHEND, RYDE, SOUTHAMPTON, YEOVIL and ROCHESTER, and who, because of this, could not now see through his rear window.

At Esher I put on the lights, and well before Guildford the gentle smack of raindrops began to hit the windscreen. The heater purred happily, and I kept the radio tuned to the Light for the 6.30 bulletin. Godalming was pretty well closed except for a couple of tobacconists, and at Milford I slowed up to make sure I took the right route. Not the Hindhead or Haslemere road, but the 283 to Chiddingfold. A hundred yards before I reached the big low Tudor-fronted inn I flashed the headlights and got an answering signal from the brake-actuated red rear lights of a parked vehicle there. I glimpsed the car, a black Ford Anglia with a spotlight fixed to the roof. I watched the rear-view mirror as Mr Waterman pulled his car on to the road just behind me.

I’d been to Dalby’s home once before, but that was in daylight, and now it was quite dark. He lived in a small stone house lying well back from the road. I backed, just off the road, up a small driveway. Waterman parked on the far side of the road. The rain continued, but wasn’t getting any worse. I left the car unlocked with the keys on the floor under the seat. Waterman stayed in his car and I didn’t blame him. It was 6.59, so I listened to the 7 o’clock news bulletin. There was still no mention of Charlie, so I set off up the path to the house.

It was a small converted farm-house with a décor that writers in women’s magazines think is contemporary. Outside the mauve front door there was a wheelbarrow with flowers growing in it. Fixed to the wall was a coach lamp converted to electricity, not as yet lit. I knocked at the door with, need I say it, a brass lion’s-head knocker. I looked back. Waterman had doused his lights, and gave me no sign of recognition. Perhaps he was smarter than I thought. Dalby opened the door and tried to register surprise on his bland egg-like public school face.

‘Is it still raining?’ he said. ‘Come in.’

I sank into the big soft sofa that had Go, Queen and Tatler scattered across it. In the fireplace two fruit-tree logs sent an aroma of smoky perfume through the room. I watched Dalby with a certain amount of suspicion. He walked towards a huge bookcase – the aged spines of good editions of Balzac, Irving and Hugo glinted in the fire-light.

‘A drink?’ he said. I nodded, and Dalby opened the ‘bookcase’ which proved to be an artful disguise for doors of a cocktail cabinet. The huge glass and mirror box reflected a myriad of labels, everything from Charrington to Chartreuse – this was the gracious living I had read about in the newspapers.

‘Tio Pepe or Teachers?’ asked Dalby, and after handing me the clear glass of sherry added, ‘I’ll have someone fix you a sandwich. I know that having a sherry means you are hungry.’ I protested, but he disappeared anyway. This wasn’t going at all the way I planned. I didn’t want Dalby to have time to think, nor did I intend that he should leave the room. He could phone – get a gun … As I was thinking this, he reappeared with a plate of cold ham. I remembered how hungry I was. I began to eat the ham and drink my sherry, and I became angry as I realized how easily Dalby had put me at a disadvantage.

‘I’ve been bloody well incarcerated,’ I finally told him.

‘You’re telling me,’ he agreed cheerfully.

‘You know?’ I asked.

‘It was Jay. He’s been trying to sell you back to us.’

‘Why didn’t you grab him?’

‘Well, you know Jay, he’s difficult to get hold of, and anyway, we didn’t want to risk them “bumping you off” did we?’ Dalby used expressions like ‘bumping off’ when he spoke to me. He thought it helped me to understand him.

I said nothing.

‘He wanted £40,000 for you. We think he may have Chico, too. Someone in the USMD1 works for him. That’s how he got you from Tokwe. It could be serious.’

‘Could be?’ I said. ‘They damn’ nearly killed me.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t worried about you. They were unlikely to kill the goose and all that.’

‘Oh, weren’t you? Well you weren’t there to get worried and all that.’

‘You didn’t see Chico there?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was the only alleviating feature of the whole affair.’

‘Another drink?’ Dalby was the perfect host.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I must be getting along. I want the keys to the office.’ His face didn’t flicker. Those English public schools are worth every penny.

‘I insist that you join us for dinner,’ said Dalby.

I declined and we batted polite talk back and forth. I wasn’t out of the wood yet. Charlie was dead, and Dalby either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. As I was about to tell him Dalby produced from an abstract painting that concealed a wall safe, a couple of files about payments to agents working in the South American countries.2 Dalby gave me both files, and the keys, and I promised to figure out something for him by ten o’clock the next morning at Charlotte Street. I looked at my watch. It was 7.50 P.M. I was pretty anxious to leave because Waterman’s instructions were to come at the run after one hour exactly. From his performance so far it seemed unwise to count on him being tardy. I took my leave, still without the name of Charlie Cavendish being mentioned. I decided to leave it until we were in the office.