Reckoning in Ice, page 12
Paula and I maintained our regular Tuesday and Friday telephone calls – they were the highlights of my week. But I felt more and more guilty at having absolutely nothing to report. She had nothing, either. We chatted about this and that, and I found myself saying ‘darling’ rather often. She didn’t seem to mind.
One irritating little thing happened towards the end of January – my typewriter was stolen from the office. It was my own fault. I had a cabinet in my room which I could lock, but I never bothered to put away my typewriter in it – I just left it on my desk. One morning it was gone. I went to see Morgan-Jones about it and he was most concerned.
‘That’s about the fourth typewriter to be stolen in three weeks,’ he said. ‘It’s quite intolerable. But what can we do? The office cleaning’s done under contract, and we have no control whatever over the people the contractors employ. They say that they find it harder and harder to get labour, and if they put on anyone to check the cleaners as they leave, there’s a strike. I’ll read the Riot Act again, but I haven’t any hope that it will do much good. We can sack the contractor, of course, but then we’ll have to get somebody else, and they all seem to be as bad. We have thought of employing our own cleaners, but that means that our personnel department will have all the bother of recruiting and trying to keep them, to say nothing of the cost of employing staff directly nowadays. It’s a hell of a problem. What was your machine?’
‘A very ordinary little portable – what they call a briefcase model. And please don’t worry about it – it’s entirely my own carelessness. I ought to have kept it locked up.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty awful if you can’t leave a typewriter on your own desk in your own room. I feel that we’ve got a definite responsibility here. We’ll certainly replace the machine and have a go at getting something out of the insurance company. But I don’t suppose they’ll pay – they don’t like theft without any visible signs of breaking and entering, and with present society what it is I can’t say that I blame them. Underwriters want to stay in business, too.’
I told him again not to bother, but he acted at once. About an hour after I left him Caroline came to my room with a brand new portable. ‘With Mr Morgan-Jones’s compliments,’ she said. ‘It was rotten luck.’
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to have this. It was my carelessness, and I must stand my own losses. It’s awfully nice of you and Mr Morgan-Jones but I just can’t have it. Anyway, when it comes to the audit I’ll surcharge one Richard Garston for the full cost, and that will be that.’
‘You can’t’, she laughed. ‘Mr Morgan-Jones gave me cash to pay for it, so there won’t be any little bit of paper for you to get your fingers on. Oh dear, I ought not to have said that – Mr Morgan-Jones wouldn’t like it. Just say “Thank you” like a polite man and leave it at that. Don’t let me down with Mr Morgan-Jones.’
I assured her that I wouldn’t, though I was a bit annoyed by the whole incident. It seemed a good opportunity to invite her to another lunch. She couldn’t manage that day, but she agreed to come on the day after, and seemed pleased. We didn’t go to the club this time – I took her to a rather smart restaurant near Leicester Square. She obviously enjoyed it, and treated me to another brief engagement in the sex war, lightly taunting me on my bachelor life and asking whether I had a lot of girlfriends. I said that on the whole I preferred boats. She asked what boat I had, and I told her about Gudrid. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proper cruising yacht,’ she said. ‘Is your boat far away?’
There didn’t seem any reason why I should not have a day out with Caroline, and there was everything to be said for keeping on friendly terms with her. I said that if she were doing nothing in particular on Saturday I’d be delighted to take her to see my boat. She accepted at once.
It was an odd expedition. I picked her up in town and my heart sank when I saw her in stiletto heels – I remembered Paula’s comment on her high-heeled shoes in Sutherland. I gave her lunch in Burnham in a place popular with those who do most of their yachting in bars, and in that company she was decidedly decorative. When we got to the boatyard her shoes and rather tight skirt were a problem. Nothing could be done about the skirt. Joe produced an enormous pair of ancient carpet slippers in which she waddled into the dinghy. I had to lift her more or less bodily on board Gudrid, and in the performance both slippers fell off into the river. Later, I gave Joe £1 for them – they weren’t worth sixpence, but I was feeling so ashamed that I just wanted to pay and go.
On board things were not too bad. Stockinged feet at least did no harm to decks or bright-work. Gudrid is a welcoming little boat, and Caroline was enchanted with the doll’s-house size of her galley and saloon fittings. She had a child’s interest in my housekeeping and asked what the red rings meant on the tins in the food locker. When I explained she was impressed. ‘You sailors don’t need wives,’ she said. ‘I wonder why you have them in every port?’
I got the stove going and made coffee. I was wondering whether I ought to take her for a trip in the dinghy when mercifully it started to rain. I was thankful to get ashore and to be in the car again. I gave her dinner in town and took her home to her flat in South Kensington. She invited me in for a drink but I pleaded a need to make an early start next morning to visit an aunt at Cheltenham. ‘She’s not really an aunt,’ I said, ‘but I always called her auntie – I think she’s about a third or fourth cousin of my mother’s. You know how it is. She’s expecting me at nine thirty to take her to church at ten. If I’m a minute late she’ll start worrying.’ Caroline did not press the invitation and thanked me – as far as I could tell quite genuinely – for her outing.
I had sufficient respect for the enemy’s intelligence service to get up at six and drive to Cheltenham. I had friends there, anyway.
*
Paula had considered the ‘How’ of the suspicion that I had apparently attracted of no immediate importance. I did not altogether agree with her. The fact that I was under both suspicion and investigation was obviously of more direct concern, but I felt that if I could come nearer to discovering the ‘How’ we should be at least that much nearer to discovering the ‘Who’ – the various parts played by X and Y and possibly Z in this ugly chain of events. I cast my mind back to Christmas and tried to remember precisely what I had done almost from hour to hour over the Christmas period and my journey to Hee House.
Christmas had been on a Wednesday. Not much work was done at the office on Christmas Eve: I had put in an appearance and left soon after midday. I had, in fact been invited to spend Christmas with some friends at Minster Lovell, near Witney, but two days before Christmas they had rung up to put me off because their children were in bed with flu – the Oxfordshire and the flu parts of my story were real up to a point, only I had transposed things a bit. My Wykehamist friend at Minster Lovell was Reader in Classical Archaeology at Oxford. He had no connection with anybody in the office – I could say this with certainty because we were quite close friends. Earlier in December he had been doing some work at the British Museum, and he had stayed with me for the best part of a week. We had talked about our various jobs and he obviously knew no one at International Metals.
The cancellation of my visit just before Christmas left me rather at a loose end, so I decided to go down to the Wild Duck. I wanted to paint the inside of my boat, and at the pub I could be sure of cheerful company. I slept there on Christmas Eve and Christmas night and worked on Gudrid on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. I left in the middle of the afternoon on Boxing Day because I’d been invited to a party that night at Highgate. I went to the party and then home to my own flat.
There was a post on Friday morning – the morning after Boxing Day – and it had brought me Mr Villeneuve’s letter asking me to telephone Hee House. I had done so during the morning and spoken to Paula. They had had people staying over Christmas and due to leave on New Year’s Day – that was why I had arranged to get there on January 2.
I had no immediate problem with the office because nobody was going in that Friday – the staff had been given the extra day. I reckoned that I could make Hee House in two days’ driving, which meant leaving early on the Wednesday morning, New Year’s Day. I had thus four days to dispose of: the weekend, which didn’t matter, and Monday and Tuesday of the following week. I had been asked not to let the office know that I had been summoned by the chairman, and flu was the obvious excuse. I had debated whether to go to the office on Monday and go home feeling groggy on Monday night, but had decided it was better to stay away altogether. I had no idea then what Mr Villeneuve wanted of me, nor what it might involve, and to be sick somewhere out of London would leave me a fairly free hand. I could have stayed quite happily in my flat, but I was half-afraid that someone from the office might come round, or ring up. I need not of course, have answered the telephone, but it is damnably difficult to leave a ringing telephone unanswered on the mere possibility that it may be a call you do not want to take. There was also a slight chance that if I went out for a meal or to shop somebody from the office might see me – a pretty remote risk, but I had entered on a piece of deception and did not want to take any risks that could be avoided.
The problem was solved for me by a telephone call that Friday evening. The man who had put me up for the Mariners some years previously and whom I still saw fairly frequently, wanted to take his own boat from the Beaulieu River, where he had left her in the autumn, to a yard at Poole. It is not a long passage. Weekend after weekend he had been meaning to go down and do it but in the way of life he had not got around to it. Now the yard wanted to get on with various jobs he hoped to have done by the spring. Could I crew for him to work her over? On Saturday morning we went down to Southampton by train together and hired a car to take us to Buckler’s Hard. His boat was what is called a motorsailer, which generally means – and certainly did in his case – more engine than sail. We made the passage almost wholly under power. It was a cold trip, but otherwise the weather was kindly and we got in early on Sunday morning. He wanted to get back to his family in London and rushed off for a train as soon as we’d tied up. I said that I was in no particular hurry and offered to stay on board to make things shipshape – I could go back in the afternoon or evening. But I did not return to London. I found a hotel in Poole, stayed there over Sunday and Monday, and took a train that got to town Tuesday evening, safely after City workers had gone home. I had telephoned Caroline from Poole on Monday morning. Why I had flu in Oxfordshire instead of Dorset I don’t know – deception, I suppose, is a habit that grows on one.
I had a meal in a sad little café near Waterloo station and did not get to my flat at Richmond until after eleven. I left again at six in the morning to drive north. Had I been suspected from the moment of my call to Caroline, and had X or Y possessed an organisation sufficiently elaborate to keep a permanent watch on my flat? I suppose I could have been seen at Richmond when I should have been in Oxfordshire that Tuesday night. But I couldn’t credit such an organisation. Besides, what – at that stage – could I be suspected of? At the most of swinging the lead, and that – in my position – would be more a subject for a pointed office joke or two than for elaborate espionage.
But somehow I was suspected – and from the moment I got back to London from Scotland, if not before. Caroline’s letter to my flat might have been ordinary politeness – it might equally have been a probe to see whether I would ring up.
This analysis of events at least helped to define the time limit within which I had begun to attract suspicion. I was satisfied – as satisfied as theoretical reasoning can make one – that I could not have been suspected of anything dubious before I left for Scotland. If I was not suspected then, but was suspected when I got back, something must have happened to provoke suspicion either on my journey, or at Hee House. The journey, then – what had happened on the journey? As far as I could recall nothing had happened. I had driven hard, intending to reach Perth on the first night, and I had got to Perth a little after six that evening. I had stayed at the Royal William and left after breakfast, around nine.
When you say of some occasion in life that ‘nothing happened’ it is, of course, not true. It is a wholly subjective statement – what you mean is that nothing occurred that you deem worth recording. On a journey, things are happening all the time – the acts of driving, the passing of or being passed by other cars, stopping for petrol or for a meal. Within my ‘nothing’ something must have happened – something that I judged of no significance but which, if I could know the truth, had been very significant indeed.
I went over the journey in every detail I could remember. It had been a grey, cold New Year’s Day, with rain here and there, but no ice: I had not met snow until beyond Perth on the second day. I had wanted to get on and lunched quickly off bread and cheese – bread of the blotting-paper, wrapped variety – in a nondescript pub on the outskirts of Doncaster. I had also filled up with petrol at a garage near the pub. I had filled up with petrol again at Berwick – not that my tank was empty either time, but I like to keep it reasonably full.
I had wondered whether I would have difficulty in getting into a hotel in Scotland on New Year’s Day, but my fears were ignorance. The parties and jollifications are on Old Year’s Night. On the night of New Year’s Day it is all anti-climax. The hotel was almost deserted and only a few forlorn tables were laid in the dining room – most of the staff were off duty. I had seen only one other person staying in the place, a man I met in the bar. We were the sole occupants and drifted into conversation, buying each other a couple of drinks. It was a desultory encounter. I was not particularly attracted to him nor, I imagine, he to me, and we talked because there was nobody else to talk to. He was a salesman for some pharmaceutical concern and he grumbled about what he called the penny-pinching habits of Scottish chemists’ shops. They would order, he said, about three bottles of cough mixture at a time. Now they were in the middle of a flu epidemic, and out of stock of most of the lines his firm supplied. So he had to tour round in that beastly first week of January supplying stuff that any sensible shopkeeper would have ordered in October. I said that I was a solicitor summoned by an eccentric but wealthy client who lived in the far north. ‘She probably wants to add a codicil to her will leaving her parrot to a nephew, or revoking the legacy of her parrot to some nephew. But what can you do? She owns masses of property in the Midlands and near London, and that means a lot of business for my firm.’ We commiserated with ourselves on the unreasoning whims of others. We did not dine together. He went off, saying that he had a number of telephone calls to make. I did not see him again.
He had been a faceless sort of acquaintance and by next morning I had forgotten him. Now I felt that I must dredge my memory for he was the only person other than an occasional barman and petrol pump attendant with whom I had spoken on the whole journey. What had he looked like? Biggish, I could recall, in an undistinguished brownish suit, with, I thought, a waistcoat. No glasses. Fiftyish – which meant that he could have been anything between forty and sixty. Broad rather than tall, in fact rather short. Rather short – my pulse of memory quickened. Joe had described ‘Bill’ as ‘a bit of a shorty’. Did anything else fit Joe’s description? It didn’t. ‘Bill’ had had noticeably grey hair, and wore glasses. My bar acquaintance might have had some grey in his hair, but it was not marked. I was sure that he had not been wearing glasses. Neither of these things, however, necessarily mattered much. It may be hard to discard glasses if you normally require them, but it is easy enough to add glasses if you don’t. Every parish hall dramatic society can make a tolerable show of giving people grey hair.
I began thinking of my bar acquaintance as Y. Then I asked myself: Could such a coincidence possibly have happened? Was it not that kind of many-millions-to-one chance which ought to be ruled out in considering human affairs? I decided that although such a meeting would have been a stroke of luck for Y, it was not necessarily such an outside chance. If my bar acquaintance were Y, he definitely had business in the north of Scotland – nefarious business, but for him important business. He might have been on his way to collect tapes – the fag-end of the New Year was not a bad time, with not many people about. And if he were Y he might even know me by sight. I believed that I had been brought into International Metals to provide a scapegoat for Morgan-Jones in some shape or form – if Y were mixed up in the plot to the extent that he appeared to be he might easily have arranged to have a look at me. But there need have been nothing so complicated. I had been cautious enough to be somewhat fanciful about my affairs in talking to a stranger, but I had not then acquired cloak-and-dagger habits to the extent of giving false names at hotels. I had signed the hotel register as Richard Garston – and my signature is clearly legible. Our chancing on the same hotel in Perth was a matter of luck, but given that we were both making for the same place, it was not a wildly outside chance – there are not so many hotels open in the north of Scotland at that time of year.
But Y – if he were Y – had not collected the tapes – they were not collected until after I had been and gone. Would meeting me have been sufficiently important to make him change his plans? I thought that it might. By leaving the tapes for a week he may have hoped to obtain a recording of whatever Mr Villeneuve might say to me. That would have been a hope destined to disappointment, because we found the tapes first – but he could not have known that. And there could have been other reasons. My appearance on the scene, in a part for which I had certainly not been cast by X or Y, might have required urgent consultation between them.
