LEN DEIGHTON
Spy Story

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1974

Copyright © Len Deighton 1974

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2012

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2012

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007458400

Version: 2017-05-23

‘But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.’

William Cowper, 1731–1800

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgements

Cover designer’s note

About the Author

By Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

I don’t know how or when I became interested in the history of military uniforms but I remember why. It was because John Edgcombe, manager of the Times Bookshop, told me that collectors of model soldiers were the most expert and dedicated group of military enthusiasts he had ever come across. We met on the third Friday of each month in the Tudor Room of Caxton Hall, London SW1. And my first visit there was a revelation. I didn’t know what model soldiers were until I saw these amazing figures, painted with the skill and detail that I had hitherto associated only with the sort of fine miniature paintings on display in museums.

Copies of The Bulletin, the monthly newsletter of The British Model Soldiers Society, alongside those of the associated Military Historical Society (Saturday afternoons at the Imperial War Museum), still fill a shelf in my library and they go back to January 1959. I have never discarded them because they provide a wealth of information not available elsewhere. I never collected or painted model soldiers but I enjoyed those evenings and it was a member of that group who invited me to a naval war game session.

I expected to see a complicated desk game, perhaps something like three-dimensional chess, which was going through a fashionable phase about that time. In the event I went to one of those grim Victorian-period school buildings that are still to be found in south London. It was Saturday morning and the war gamers had taken over the whole premises for the weekend: ‘war doesn’t stop when it gets dark,’ it was explained to me.

One classroom was occupied by the staff of battle group Red. Another held the staff of battle group Blue. A ‘sentry’ was at the door to ensure that a trip to the toilets did not include a chance to glimpse the gymnasium. For on the floor of the gymnasium model ships, drawn up into two battle fleets, were arranged and constantly moved by monitors. Isolated in the upstairs classrooms, the staffs would only be given information that could come from the crow’s nest of their tallest warship.

The staffs were all at sea but for us spectators, standing around the gymnasium, the whole picture was provided. On the stage a row of chairs gave half a dozen ‘referees’ a place to supervise, observe and declare damage or sinking as the engagement progressed.

I was captivated. This was serious stuff and there were not many smiles or jokes. This was war and I had no doubt that many of those involved in this game knew what the real thing was like. I must have been an incongruous figure at these gatherings. I never painted a toy soldier or participated in any of the war games; younger than most of the others, all I did was ask questions. Fortunately most people enjoy answering reasonably sensible questions that test their expertise so I was accepted. Many years later it was that elaborate war game that provided the starting place and background to a book, and it was naval combat that was in my mind.

I am not in a minority as far as my interest in submarines is concerned. Starting with Jules Verne, there have been dozens of books and movies about the men who brave the claustrophobic tin tubes. Submarines have interested me ever since childhood when I discovered that submarines that carried aircraft really did exist. In the Second World War the Japanese navy had many of them. In September 1942 the submarine I-25 launched a seaplane that dropped incendiary bombs on a forest in Oregon and returned safely back to its submarine.

A more bizarre type of submarine was the steam-driven K Class that the Royal Navy used in the First World War. The difficulties and dangers of reconciling diving under water with the capricious machinery of steam engines surprised no one but the men in the Admiralty; and these submarines were a tragic disaster for those assigned to them.

When in January 1955 the submarine USS Nautilus was underway on nuclear power for the first time, it was a triumph for Admiral Hyman Rickover, one of the most important and prescient men of his century. The conversion of ships and civilian power supply to nuclear energy was largely due to him. In 1959 the USS George Washington, a nuclear-powered (and nuclear missile-equipped) submarine, was launched it was followed by the first nuclear-powered warship and the first nuclear-powered merchant ship in that same year. The following year, 1960, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was launched. The coming of the nuclear-powered submarine completely changed naval warfare, and this joined the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as the major strategic weapon. In this book I have attempted to give a glimpse of what life was like in the nuclear submarines during the Cold War that sometimes became hot, and when some submarines did not return from patrol

But above all, this is a book depicting the ‘great outdoors’. I have always admired those writers who have a deep and lifelong obsession with nature. I had very little experience of the countryside when I was a child. I grew up in central London so the trips to Wales and to Cornwall, on which my father took us, were exciting expeditions. As a footloose teenager I would frequently splurge on a cheap overnight railway ticket to the Scottish highlands and the region of the great lochs. From that time onwards the rough country that Scotland and Ireland provides was my first choice when on walking holiday. In the 1950s, with an equally foolish fellow-student, I hitchhiked to Edinburgh to be there for New Year’s Eve. Short of money, we pitched a two-man tent each night and more than once awoke to find ourselves buried under a snowdrift. My travelling companion – Bob Hyde – had done his military service in the RAF mountain rescue service so he was rather hardier than I proved to be, but I persevered. In December, northern England becomes dark early. We learned how to pitch our tent in darkness and brewed tea using a tiny Primus stove. One morning we were awoken by the cheers and jeers of young girls. We climbed out of our tent to find we had pitched on the well-kept front lawn of a girl’s boarding school

We had allowed for a week on the road and as the holiday approached traffic became infrequent. One of our early morning lifts was on a lorry, and when we were dropped off at a smart hotel for a hot breakfast the waiter was polite and welcoming. It was only later that day that we realised that the lorry had been carrying boxes of herring and that we both stank of stale fish. I so admired the sang froid of that waiter.

With good luck and good lifts we arrived at Edinburgh’s YMCA in the early evening just in time for New Year’s Eve. But after three flights of stairs carrying my heavy rucksack I dropped down on my bunk, my eyes closed and by the time I awoke it was morning and a New Year. I was an urban creature who had to learn what life was like when devoid of city comforts. It was only as an adult that I came with my family to live in rural areas and saw it season by season at its best and at its worst. Some of my experiences in harsh winter informed the scenes in this book, Spy Story.

Len Deighton, 2012

1

As each bound ends, units cease to be operative until commencement of next bound.

RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

Forty-three days without a night: six pale-blue fluorescent weeks without a sniff of air, sky, or a view of the stars. I drank in a cautious half-lungful of salty mist and smelled the iodine and seaborne putrefaction that seaside landladies call ozone.

HMS Viking, a deep water anchorage in western Scotland, is no place to celebrate a return to the real world. The uninhabited islands, a mile or more out in the Sound, were almost swallowed by sea mist. Overhead, dark clouds raced across the water to dash themselves upon the sharp granite peaks of Great Hamish. Then, in threads, they tumbled down the hillside, trailing through the stones and walls that had once been a Highland croft.

There were four submarines alongside the one from which I emerged. Out at the anchorage were more of them. The lash of the westerly wind made them huddle close to the mother ships and their crooning generators. The yellow deck lights were visible through the grey mist, and so were the flocks of gulls that screamed and wheeled and shrieked as they fell upon the kitchen garbage.

The wind brought gusts of rain, whipping up crested waves that awoke the subs. Underfoot I felt the great black hull strain against its moorings. The brow tilted. Stepping from the edge of each horizontal fin to the next was easier if I didn’t look down.

Now the next hull groaned, as the same wave sucked and gurgled at its bow. The forecast had been reasonably right for once: overcast, low cloud, drizzle and wind westering. The rain scratched at the slop-coloured sea and crept into my sleeves, boots and collar. My rubber shoe slipped but I recovered my balance. I shook the water off my face and cursed pointlessly.

‘Steady on,’ said Ferdy Foxwell behind me, but I cursed again and built his name into one of the inversions.

‘At least the navy is on time,’ said Ferdy. There was an orange-coloured Ford on the jetty. The door opened and a slim man got out. He was wearing a Burberry and a tweed hat but I knew he’d be the British naval officer from the police office. He bent his head against the rain. The armed USN sentry at the end of the gangway poked his head out of his shelter to check the pass. I recognized the officer as Frazer, a lieutenant. He made his way along the slippery walk towards us, stepping across the gaps with commendable agility.

‘Let me take that.’ He extended a hand, and then smiled in embarrassment as he noticed that the shiny metal case was padlocked to a shoulder-chain under my coat.

‘Help Mr Foxwell,’ I said. ‘He never fastens his.’

‘Neither would you if you had any sense,’ puffed Foxwell. The man squeezed past me and I had a chance to look down at the oily scum, and smell the diesel, and decide that Ferdy Foxwell was right. When I reached the brow – the horizontal fin – of the next submarine I rested the box and looked back. The young officer was bowed under the weight of Ferdy’s case, and Ferdy was stretching his arms to balance his two hundred pounds of compact flab, teetering along the gangway like a circus elephant balancing on a tub. Six weeks was a long time to spend in a metal tube, no matter about sun lamps and cycling gear. I picked up the case loaded with spools and tape recordings, and remembered how I sprinted across these brows on the outward journey.

A red Pontiac station wagon came along the jetty, slowed at the torpedo store and rolled carefully over the double ramps. It continued along the front until turning off at the paint shop. It disappeared down between the long lines of huts. The curved huts were shiny in the rain. Now there was no human movement, and the buildings looked as old as the black granite hills that shone rain-wet above them.

‘Are you all right?’ Frazer asked.

I shouldered the wet case as I started down the companionway to the jetty. The hatch in the sentry hut slid open an inch or two. I could hear the radio inside playing Bach. ‘OK, buddy,’ said the sailor. He slammed the hatch shut as a gust of wind hammered the hut with rain.

There was a panel van behind the Ford. A bad-tempered Admiralty policeman grumbled that we were two hours late and about how the Americans couldn’t make tea. He scowled as he signed for the cases and locked them in the safe in the van. Ferdy shot him in the back of the head with a nicotine-stained finger. Frazer saw the gesture and permitted himself a thin smile.

‘Perhaps a tot?’ said Frazer.

‘I wish I had your job,’ said Ferdy Foxwell.

Frazer nodded. I suppose we all said that to him.

There was the clang of a steel door. I looked at the nuclear submarine that had taken us to the Arctic and back. We civilians were always permitted to leave first. Now there was a deck party assembling forward of the conning tower, or what I’d learned to call a sail. They faced several more hours of work before the sub’s second crew arrived and took her to sea again.

‘Where is everyone?’

‘Asleep, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Frazer.

‘Asleep?’

‘A Russian sub came down through the North Channel and into the Irish Sea on Wednesday morning … big panic – hunter killers, sonar buoys, County Class destroyers, you name it. Yards of teleprinter. Seventy-two hours of red alert. We were only stood-down last night. You missed the pantomime.’

‘They were frightened it was going to put guns ashore in Ulster?’ Ferdy asked.

‘Who knows what?’ said Frazer. ‘There were two Russian intelligence trawlers and a destroyer off Malin Head, too. You can see they’d be worried.’

‘So?’

‘We stopped Class A Radio traffic for five and a half hours.’

‘And the sub?’

‘They tracked it out past Wexford yesterday afternoon. Looks like they were just taking our pulse.’ He smiled as he unlocked the door of his car. It was well cared for, and all dressed up in black vinyl, Lamborghini-style rear-window slats, and even a spoiler.

‘They’re tricky bastards!’ said Ferdy resignedly. He blew on his hands to warm them. ‘Who said something about splicing that damned mainbrace?’

Frazer got into the driver’s seat and twisted round to unlock the rear doors. ‘It might have been me,’ he said.

I reached under my oilskin coat and found a dry handkerchief to polish the rain off my spectacles. Frazer started the car.

Ferdy Foxwell said, ‘Never mind the dollars and the cinnamon toast and grain-fed steaks … six weeks without a drink: it’s positively unnatural.’

Frazer said, ‘Not all the skippers are as bad as Fireball.’

Ferdy Foxwell settled back into the rear seat of the car. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall and broad enough to carry it. He was in his early fifties but still had enough brown wavy hair to visit a smart barber once a month. But his hair was no more an advert for the barber than were his rumpled suits for his Savile Row tailor, or his curious inability to spell for the famous public school to which he’d also sent his two sons. ‘A drink,’ said Ferdy. He smiled. His crooked, gapped teeth needed only gold wire to complete the image of a mischievous child.

The Admiralty van containing our tapes went at the regulation fifteen miles an hour. We followed at the same pace, all the way to the exit. It was a double compound, with a large check-point at each gate, and the wire twenty feet tall. Newcomers were always told that HMS Viking had been a prison camp during the war but they were wrong, it had been an experimental torpedo testing unit. But it would have done, it would have done.

The dog handlers were drinking hot coffee in the guard tower and the dogs were howling like werewolves. The sentry waved us through. We turned on to the coast road and went down past the housing, the Officers Club and cinema. The streets were empty but the coffee-shop car park was full. The lights of the housing were lost in a flurry of sea mist that rolled in upon us. The Admiralty van continued along the coast road to the airport. We took the high road, climbing steeply up the narrow road that leads to the moors and the pass over the Hamish.

Defoliated by Iron Age farmers, the land is now good for nothing but a few black-faced sheep. This ancient tilted edge of Scotland has only a scattering of poor soil upon the hard granite that does not weather. I felt the wheels hesitate on an ice patch, and ahead of us the higher ground was grey with last week’s snow. Only the red grouse can survive outdoors on this sort of moorland, sheltering under the heather and feeding upon its shoots, moving gently all the time so that the snow does not bury them.

From here the valley formed an enormous stadium, roofed by the hurrying black clouds. Halfway up its steep far side there was a huddle of grey stone cottages smudged with smoke from open fires. One of them was a cramped little pub.

‘We’ll stop for a drink at The Bonnet?’

‘You’ll not get me past it,’ I said.

‘My God, it’s cold,’ said Ferdy, and rubbed the condensation from the window to see how far it was to the pub.

‘There’s the one I’m going to get next year,’ said Frazer. A large light-blue BMW was on the road behind us. It had a left-hand drive. ‘Second-hand,’ Frazer added apologetically. ‘It shouldn’t cost me more than a new one of these. My next door neighbour has one. Says he’ll never buy another English car.’

Cars, politics or climate, for a Scotsman they were English if bad, British if good. Perhaps he sensed my thoughts. He smiled. ‘It’s the electrics,’ he said.

I could hear it now, just a faint burr of the Highlands. It would make sense for the navy to use a local man for this kind of job. Strangers could still find a barrier of silence once the cities were left behind.

Frazer took the hairpin bends with exaggerated care. On one of the turns he stopped, and reversed, to pull tight enough to avoid the snow-banked ditch. But the blue BMW stuck with us, following patiently. Following more patiently than was natural for a man who drives such a car.

Frazer glanced in his mirror again. ‘I think we should,’ he said, voicing our unspoken thoughts, and Ferdy wrote down the registration number in his crocodile-covered note pad. It was a Düsseldorf registration, and even while Ferdy was writing it, the BMW gave a toot and started to overtake.

Whatever was the extent of his intention, he’d chosen his moment well. The BMW squeezed past us in a spray of powdery snow from the drift on our left, and Frazer’s nervous reaction was to swerve away from the flash of light blue and the hard stare of the bearded man in the passenger seat.

The road was downhill and the ice was still hard and shiny up here on the top of the Hamish. Frazer fought the wheel as we swung round – as slowly as a boat at anchor – and slid almost broadside down the narrow mountain road.

We gathered speed. Frazer pumped the brake pedal, trying vainly to snatch at the road. I could see only the sheer drop, down where a clump of firs were waiting to catch us a thousand feet below.

‘Bastards, bastards,’ mumbled Frazer. Ferdy, flung off-balance, grabbed at the seat back, the roof and the sun visor, so as not to grab at Frazer and kill us all.

There was a thump as the rear wheel struck some stones at the road edge, and the tyres for a moment gripped enough to make the differential whine. Frazer was into bottom gear by now, and at the next patch of stones the car whimpered and ceded to his brake pedal enough for him to narrow the angle at which we were sliding. The road was more steeply downhill and the low gear had not slowed us enough to take the steep bend ahead. Frazer hit the horn in two loud blasts before we hit the banked snow that had collected around the edge of the hairpin, like piped icing round a birthday cake. We stopped with a bang of hollow steel, and the car rocked on its suspension.

‘My God,’ said Ferdy. For a moment we sat still. Praying, sighing or swearing according to inclination.

‘I hope you’re not going to do that every time someone tries to overtake,’ I said.

‘Just foreign registrations,’ said Frazer.

Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.

He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.

‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy it,’ said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. ‘I’m a destroyer man myself … like to keep my head above water.’

I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.

‘Peace time,’ pronounced Ferdy, ‘a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.’

‘In winter the Med’s a damned site rougher,’ I said.

‘You’re right,’ said Ferdy. ‘As sick as a dog, I was, and I could see that Russian cruiser as steady as a rock all the time.’

‘Your second trip, wasn’t it?’ asked Frazer.

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, you chaps never do more than one a year. It’s over and done with, eh?’

‘Are you buying?’ Ferdy Foxwell asked him.

‘Then it’ll be small ones,’ said Frazer. The wind bit into us as we stepped from the car but there was a fine view. The hills at the other end of the valley obscured the anchorage, but to each side of the summit I could see the Sound and the mist-shrouded islands that continued all the way to the grey Atlantic breakers. The wind sang in the car aerial and tugged at the chimney smoke. We were high enough to be entangled in the fast moving underside of the storm clouds. Ferdy coughed as the cold wet air entered his lungs.

‘All that air-conditioned living,’ said Frazer. ‘You’d better take your briefcase – security and all that, you know.’

‘It’s only dirty underwear,’ said Ferdy. He coughed again. Frazer went around the car testing each door-lock and the boot too. For a moment he looked down at his hand to see if it shook. It did, and he pushed it into the pocket of his trench-coat.

I walked across to the BMW and looked inside it. There was a short oilskin coat, a battered rucksack and a stout walking-stick: a walker’s equipment.

It was a tiny cottage. One bar; a front parlour except for the warped little counter and flap scorched by cigarettes and whittled with the doodles of shepherds’ knives. On the whitewashed walls there was a rusty Highlander’s dirk, an engraving of a ship in full sail, a brightly shone ship’s bell and a piece of German submarine surrendered in May 1945. The landlord was a shaggy-haired giant, complete with kilt and beer-stained shirt.

There were two customers already drinking, but they had taken the bench near the window so we could stand around the open peat fire and slap our hands together and make self-congratulatory noises about its warmth.

The beer was good: dark and not too sweet, and not crystal clear like the swill that the brewers extol on TV. The Bonnet’s had flavour, like a slice of wheat loaf. Frazer knew the landlord well but, with the formality that Highland men demand, he called him Mr MacGregor. ‘We’ll have another fall of snow before the day’s through, Mr MacGregor.’

‘Is it south you’re heading, Mr Frazer?’

‘Aye.’

‘The high road is awful bad already. The oil delivery could not get through that way: he made the journey by the road along the Firth. It never freezes there. It’s a wicked long journey for the boy.’ He prodded the peat fire with a poker and encouraged the smoke to turn to flame.

‘You are busy?’ asked Frazer.

‘Travellers. People walk, even in winter. I don’t understand it.’ He made no attempt to lower his voice. He nodded impassively at the two customers by the window. They were looking at large-scale walker’s maps, measuring distances with a tiny wheeled instrument that they rolled along the footpaths.

‘Travellers, walkers and spies,’ said Frazer. The wind banged on the tiny window panes.

‘Ahh, spies,’ said the landlord. He came as near as I’d ever seen him to laughing: the two men in the window seat looked like some inept casting director’s idea of Russian spies. They had black overcoats and dark tweed hats. Both wore coloured silk scarves knotted at their throats and one man had a closely trimmed grizzled beard.

‘We’ll have the other half, Landlord,’ said Ferdy.

With infinite care the landlord drew three more pints of his special. In the silence I heard one of the other men say, ‘In our own good time.’ His voice was soft but his accent had the hard spiky consonants of the English Midlands. In the context of our remarks the sentence hung in the air like the peaty smoke from the fireplace. What in their own good time, I wondered.

‘Well, what’s been happening out here in the real world?’ said Ferdy.

‘Nothing much,’ said Frazer. ‘Looks like the German reunification talks are going ahead, the papers are full of it. Another car workers’ strike. The Arabs put a bomb in the Tokyo Stock Exchange but it was defused, and Aeroflot has started running its own jumbos into New York.’

‘We get all the big news,’ said Ferdy. ‘And American home-town stuff. I could tell you more about the climate, local politics and football scores of the American heartland than any other Englishman you could find. Do you know that a woman in Portland, Maine, has given birth to sextuplets?’

It had begun to snow. Frazer looked at his watch. ‘We mustn’t miss the plane,’ he said.

‘There’s time for one from this man’s stone bottle,’ said Ferdy.

‘The stone bottle?’ said MacGregor.

‘Come along, you hairy bastard,’ said Ferdy. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

MacGregor’s face was unchanging. It would have been easy to believe him deeply offended, but Ferdy knew him better than that. Without taking his eyes from Ferdy, MacGregor took a packet of Rothmans from his pocket. He lit one and tossed the packet on to the counter.

MacGregor went into his back parlour and reappeared with a jar from which he poured a generous measure. ‘You’ve a good palate – for a Sassenach.’

‘No one would want the factory stuff after this, Mac,’ said Ferdy. MacGregor and Frazer exchanged glances.

‘Aye, I get my hands on a little of the real thing now and again.’

‘Come along, MacGregor,’ said Ferdy. ‘You’re among friends. You think we haven’t smelled the barley and the peat fire?’

MacGregor gave a ghost of a smile but would admit to nothing. Ferdy took his malt whisky and tasted it with care and concentration.

‘The same?’ asked MacGregor.

‘It’s improved,’ said Ferdy.

Frazer came away from the fireplace and took his seat at the counter. MacGregor moved the malt whisky towards him. ‘It will help you endure the cruel blows of the west wind,’ he said.

So he must have rationalized many such drinks up here on the bare slopes of the Grampians’ very end. A desolate place: in summer the heather grew bright with flowers, and so tall that a hill walker needed a long blade to clear a lane through it. I turned an inch or two. The strangers in the corner no longer spoke together. Their faces were turned to watch the snow falling but I had a feeling that they were watching us.

MacGregor took three more thimble-sized glasses, and, with more care than was necessary, filled each to the brim. While we watched him I saw Frazer reach out for the packet of cigarettes that the landlord had left on the counter. He helped himself. There was an intimacy to such a liberty.

‘Can I buy a bottle?’ asked Ferdy.

‘You can not,’ said MacGregor.

I sipped it. It was a soft smoky flavour of the sort that one smelled as much as tasted.

Frazer poured his whisky into the beer and drank it down. ‘You damned heathen,’ said the landlord. ‘And I’m giving you the twelve-year-old malt too.’

‘It all ends up in the same place, Mr MacGregor.’

‘You damned barbarian,’ he growled, relishing the r’s rasp. ‘You’ve ruined my ale and my whisky too.’

I realized it was a joke between them, one that they had shared before. I knew that Lieutenant Frazer was from RN security. I wondered if the landlord was a part of it too. It would be a fine place from which to keep an eye on strangers who came to look at the atomic submarines at the anchorage.

And then I was sure that this was so, for Frazer picked up the packet of cigarettes from which he’d been helping himself. The change of ownership had been a gradual one but I was sure that something more than cigarettes was changing hands.

2

In games where the random chance programme is not used, and in the event of two opposing units, of exactly equal strength and identical qualities, occupying same hex (or unit of space), the first unit to occupy the space will predominate.

RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

The London flight was delayed.

Ferdy bought a newspaper and I read the departures board four times. Then we drifted through that perfumed limbo of stale air that is ruled by yawning girls with Cartier watches, and naval officers with plastic briefcases. We tried to recognize melodies amongst the rhythms that are specially designed to be without melody, and we tried to recognize words among the announcements, until finally the miracle of heavier-than-air flight was once again mastered.

As we climbed into the grey cotton wool, we had this big brother voice saying he was our captain and on account of how late we were there was no catering aboard but we could buy cigarette lighters with the name of the airline on them, and if we looked down to our left side we could have seen Birmingham, if it hadn’t been covered in cloud.

It was early evening by the time I got to London. The sky looked bruised and the cloud no higher than the high-rise offices where all the lights burned. The drivers were ill-tempered and the rain unceasing.

We arrived at the Studies Centre in Hampstead just as the day staff were due to leave. The tapes had come on a military flight and were waiting for me. There is a security seal when tapes are due, so we unloaded to the disapproving stares of the clock-watchers in the Evaluation Block. It was tempting to use the overnight facilities at the Centre: the bathwater always ran and the kitchen could always find a hot meal, but Marjorie was waiting. I signed out directly.

I should have had more sense than to expect my car to sit in the open through six weeks of London winter and be ready to start when I needed it. It groaned miserably as it heaved at the thick cold oil and coughed at the puny spark. I pummelled the starter until the air was choked with fumes, and then counted to one hundred in an attempt to keep my hands off her long enough to dry the points. At the third bout she fired. I hit the pedal and there was a staccato of backfire and judder of one-sided torque from the oldest plugs. Finally they too joined the song and I nudged her slowly out into the evening traffic of Frognal.

If the traffic had been moving faster I would probably have reached home without difficulty, but the sort of jams you get on a wet winter’s evening in London gives the coup de grâce to old bangers like mine. I was just a block away from my old place in Earl’s Court when she died. I opened her up and tried to decide where to put the Band-aid, but all I saw were raindrops sizzling on the hot block. Soon the raindrops no longer sizzled and I became aware of the passing traffic. Big expensive all-weather tyres were filling my shoes with dirty water. I got back into the car and stared at an old packet of cigarettes, but I’d given them up for six weeks and this time I was determined to make it stick. I buttoned up and walked down the street as far as the phone box. Someone had cut the hand-piece off and taken it home. Not one empty cab had passed in half an hour. I tried to decide between walking the rest of the way home and lying down in the middle of the road. It was then that I remembered that I still had the door-key of the old flat.

The Studies Centre was turning my lease over the following month. Possibly the phone was still connected. It was two minutes’ walk.

I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I gave it an extra couple of minutes, remembering how often I’d failed to hear it from the kitchen at the back. Then I used the old key and let myself in. The lights still worked. I’d always liked number eighteen. In some ways it’s more to my taste than the oil-fired slab of speculator’s bad taste that I’d exchanged it for, but I’m not the sort of fellow who gives aesthetics precedence over wall-to-wall synthetic wool and Georgian-style double-glazing.

The flat wasn’t the way I’d left it. I mean, the floor wasn’t covered with Private Eye and Rolling Stone, with strategically placed carrier bags brimming with garbage. It was exactly the way it was when the lady next door came in to clean it three times a week. The furniture wasn’t bad, not bad for a furnished place, I mean. I sat down in the best armchair and used the phone. It worked. I dialled the number of the local mini-cab company and was put up for auction. ‘Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham?’ Then, ‘Will anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with twenty-five pence on the clock?’ Finally some knight of the road deigned to do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with seventy-five pence on the clock if I’d wait half an hour. I knew that meant forty-five minutes. I said yes and wondered if I’d still be a non-smoker had I slipped that pack into my overcoat.

If I hadn’t been so tired I would have noticed what was funny about the place the moment I walked in. But I was tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d been sitting in the armchair for five minutes or more when I noticed the photo. At first there was nothing strange about it, except how I came to leave it behind. It was only when I got my mind functioning that I realized that it wasn’t my photo. The frame was the same as the one I’d bought in Selfridges Christmas Sale in 1967. Inside was almost the same photo: me in tweed jacket, machine washable at number five trousers, cor-blimey hat and two-tone shoes, one of them resting on the chromium of an Alfa Spider convertible. But it wasn’t me. Everything else was the same – right down to the number plates – but the man was older than me and heavier. Mind you, I had to peer closely. We both had no moustache, no beard, no sideboards and an out-of-focus face, but it wasn’t me, I swear it.

I didn’t get alarmed about it. You know how crazy things can sound, and then along comes a logical, rational explanation – usually supplied by a woman very close to you. So I didn’t suddenly panic, I just started to turn the whole place over systematically. And then I could scream and panic in my own good, leisurely, non-neurotic way.

What was this bastard doing with all the same clothes that I had? Different sizes and some slight changes, but I’m telling you my entire wardrobe. And a photo of Mr Nothing and Mason: that creepy kid who does the weather print-outs for the war-games. Now I was alarmed. It was the same with everything in the flat. My neck-ties. My chinaware. My bottled Guinness. My Leak hi-fi, and my Mozart piano concertos played by my Ingrid Haebler. And by his bed – covered with the same dark green Witney that I have on my bed – in a silver frame: my Mum and Dad. My Mum and Dad in the garden. The photo I took at their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

I sat myself down on my sofa and gave myself a talking-to. Look, I said to myself, you know what this is, it’s one of those complicated jokes that rich people play on each other in TV plays for which writers can think of no ending. But I haven’t got any friends rich and stupid enough to want to print me in duplicate just to puzzle me. I mean, I puzzle pretty easily, I don’t need this kind of hoop-la.

I went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe to go through the clothes again. I told myself that these were not my clothes, for I couldn’t be positive they were. I mean, I don’t have the sort of clothes that I can be quite sure that no one else has, but the combination of Brooks Brothers, Marks and Sparks and Turnbull and Asser can’t be in everyone’s wardrobe. Especially when they are five years out of fashion.

But had I not been rummaging through the wardrobe I would never have noticed the tie rack had been moved. And so I wouldn’t have seen the crude carpentry done to the inside, or the piece that had been inserted to make a new wooden panel in the back of it.

I rapped it. It was hollow. The thin plywood panel slid easily to one side. Behind it there was a door.

The door was stiff, but by pushing the rackful of clothes aside I put a little extra pressure on it. After the first couple of inches it moved easily. I stepped through the wardrobe into a dark room. Alice through the looking-glass. I sniffed. The air smelled clean with a faint odour of disinfectant. I struck a match. It was a box room. By the light of the match I found the light switch. The room had been furnished as a small office: a desk, easy chair, typewriter and polished lino. The walls were newly painted white. Upon them there was a coloured illustration of Von Guericke’s air thermoscope given as a calendar by a manufacturer of surgical instruments in Munich, a cheap mirror, and a blank day-by-day chart, stuck to the wall with surgical tape. In the drawers of the desk there was a ream of blank white paper, a packet of paper clips, and two white nylon jackets packed in transparent laundry packets.

The door from the office also opened easily. By now I was well into the next apartment. Adjoining the hall there was a large room – corresponding to my sitting-room – lit by half a dozen overhead lights fitted behind frosted glass. The windows were fitted with light-tight wooden screens, like those used for photographic dark rooms. This room was also painted white. It was spotlessly clean, walls, floor and ceiling, shining and dustless. There was a new stainless-steel sink in one corner. In the centre of the room there was a table fitted with a crisply laundered cotton cover. Over it there was a transparent plastic one. The sort from which it’s easy to wipe spilled blood. It was a curious table, with many levers to elevate, tilt and adjust it. Rather like one of the simpler types of operating table. The large apparatus alongside it was beyond any medical guess I could make. Pipes, dials and straps, it was an expensive device. Although I could not recognize it, I knew that I’d seen such a device before, but I could not dredge it up from the sludge of my memory.

To this room there was also a door. Very gently, I tried the handle, but it was locked. As I stood, bent forward at the door, I heard a voice. By leaning closer I could hear what was being said ‘… and then the next week you’ll do the middle shift, and so on. They don’t seem to know when it will start.’

The reply – a woman’s voice – was almost inaudible. Then the man close to me said, ‘Certainly, if the senior staff prefer one shift we can change the rota and make it permanent.’

Again there was the murmur of the woman’s voice, and the sound of running water, splashing as if someone was washing their hands.

The man said, ‘How right you are; like the bloody secret service if you ask me. Was my grandmother born in the United Kingdom. Bloody sauce! I put “yes” to everything.’

When I switched off the light the conversation suddenly stopped. I waited in the darkness, not moving. The light from the tiny office was still on. If this door was opened they would be certain to see me. There was the sound of a towel machine and then of a match striking. Then the conversation continued, but more distantly. I tiptoed across the room very very slowly. I closed the second door and looked at the alterations to the wardrobe while retreating through it. This false door behind the wardrobe puzzled me even more than the curious little operating theatre. If a man was to construct a secret chamber with all the complications of securing the lease to his next door apartment, if he secretly removed large sections of brickwork, if he constructed a sliding door and fitted it into the back of a built-in wardrobe, would such a man not go all the way, and make it extremely difficult to detect? This doorway was something that even the rawest recruit to the Customs service would find in a perfunctory look round. It made no sense.

The phone rang. I picked it up. ‘Your cab is outside now, sir.’

There are not many taxi services that say ‘sir’ nowadays. That should have aroused my suspicions, but I was tired.

I went downstairs. On the first-floor landing outside the caretaker’s flat there were two men.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ said one of the men. I thought at first they were waiting for the caretaker, but as I tried to pass one of them stood in the way. The other spoke again. ‘There have been a lot of break-ins here lately, sir.’

‘So?’

‘We’re from the security company who look after this block.’ It was the taller of the two men who’d spoken. He was wearing a short suede overcoat with a sheepskin lining. The sort of coat a man needed if he spent a lot of time in doorways. ‘Are you a tenant here, sir?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The taller man buttoned the collar of his coat. It seemed like an excuse to keep his hands near my throat. ‘Would you mind producing some identification, sir?’

I counted ten, but before I was past five the shorter of the men had pressed the caretaker’s buzzer. ‘What is it now?’

‘This one of your tenants?’ said the tall man.

‘I’m from number eighteen,’ I prompted.

‘Never seen him before,’ said the man.

‘You’re not the caretaker,’ I said. ‘Charlie Short is the caretaker.’

‘Charlie Short used to come over here now and again to give me a break for a couple of hours …’

‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘Charlie is the caretaker. I’ve never seen you before.’

‘A bloody con man,’ said the man from the caretaker’s flat.

‘I’ve lived here for five years,’ I protested.

‘Get on,’ said the man. ‘Never seen him before.’ He smiled as if amused at my gall. ‘The gentleman in number eighteen has lived here for five years but he’s much older than this bloke – bigger, taller – this one would pass for him in a crowd, but not in this light.’

‘I don’t know what you’re up to …’ I said. ‘I can prove …’ Unreasonably my anger centred on the man who said he was the caretaker. One of the security men took my arm. ‘Now then, sir, we don’t want any rough stuff, do we?’

‘I’m going back to “War and Peace”,’ said the man. He closed the door forcefully enough to discourage further interruption.

‘I never had that Albert figured for a reader,’ said the taller man.

‘On the telly, he means,’ said the other one. ‘So –’ he turned to me, ‘you’d better come and identify yourself properly.’

‘That’s not the caretaker,’ I said.

‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, sir.’

‘I’m not wrong.’

‘It won’t take more than ten minutes, sir.’

I walked down the flight of stairs that led to the street. Outside there was my taxi. Screw them all. I opened the cab door and had one foot on the ledge when I saw the third man. He was sitting well back in the far corner of the rear seat. I froze. ‘Do get in, sir,’ he said. It should have been a mini-cab, this was a taxi. I didn’t like it at all.

One of my hands was in my pocket. I stood upright and pointed a finger through my coat. ‘Come out,’ I said with a suitable hint of menace. ‘Come out very slowly.’ He didn’t move.

‘Don’t be silly, sir. We know you are not armed.’

I extended my free hand and flipped the fingers up to beckon him. The seated man sighed. ‘There are three of us, sir. Either we all get in as we are, or we all get in bruised, but either way we all get in.’

I glanced to one side. There was another man standing beside the doorway. The driver hadn’t moved.

‘We won’t delay you long, sir,’ said the seated man.

I got into the cab. ‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘You know that flat is no longer yours, sir.’ He shook his head. The driver checked that the door was closed and drove off with us, along Cromwell Road. The man said, ‘Whatever made you trespass there, at this time of night? It’s brought all three of us out of a bridge game.’ The taller man was sitting on the jump seat. He unbuttoned his sheepskin coat.

‘That really reassures me,’ I told them. ‘Cops playing poker might frame you. Cops playing pontoon might beat you to death. But who could get worried about cops who play bridge?’

‘You should know better,’ said the tall man mildly. ‘You know how security has tightened since last year.’

‘You people talk to me like we are all related. I’ve never seen you before. You don’t work with me. Who the hell are you, dial-a-cop?’

‘You can’t be that naïve, sir.’

‘You mean the phone has always been tapped?’

‘Monitored.’

‘Every call?’

‘That’s an empty flat, sir.’

‘You mean – “Anyone do a Gloucester Road to Fulham with fifty pence on the clock” was your people?’

‘Barry was so near to winning the rubber,’ said the second man.

‘I just went in to use the phone.’

‘And I believe you,’ said the cop.

The cab stopped. It was dark. We had driven across Hammersmith Bridge and were in some godforsaken hole in Barnes. On the left there was a large piece of open common, and the wind howled through the trees and buffeted the cab so that it rocked gently. There was very little traffic, but in the distance lights, and sometimes a double-decker bus, moved through the trees. I guessed that that might be Upper Richmond Road.

‘What are we waiting for?’

‘We won’t delay you long, sir. Cigarette?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

A black Ford Executive came past, drew in and parked ahead of us. Two men got out and walked back. The man with the sheepskin coat wound down the window. A man from the other car put a flashlight beam on my face. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘Is that you, Mason?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Mason was the one who did the weather print-outs and got himself photographed with strangers wearing my clothes.

‘Are you in on this, then?’ I said.

‘In on what?’ said Mason.

‘Don’t bullshit me, you little creep,’ I said.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ said Mason. He switched off the light.

‘Well, we knew it was,’ said the first cop.

‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Or else I would have got you with only twenty-five pence on the clock.’ How could I have been so stupid. On that phone if you dialled TIM you’d hear the tick of the Chief Commissioner’s watch.

‘We’d better get you home,’ said the cop. ‘And thank you, Mr Mason.’

Mason let the driver open the door of the Executive for him as if to the manner born. That little bastard would wind up running the Centre, that much was clear.

They took me all the way home. ‘Next time,’ said the cop, ‘get car-pool transport. You’re entitled to it after a trip, you know that.’

‘You couldn’t get one of your people to collect my Mini Clubman – between games of bridge, I mean.’

‘I’ll report it stolen. The local bobbies will pick it up.’

‘I bet sometimes you wish you weren’t so honest,’ I said.

‘Goodnight, sir.’ It was still pouring with rain. I got out of the cab. They’d left me on the wrong side of the street. U-turns were forbidden.

3

All time is game time …

RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

I let myself into the flat as quietly as possible. Marjorie turned up the heating whenever I was away, and now the stale air, heavy with fresh paint and unseasoned timber smells, hit me like a secondhand hangover. It would be a long time before I’d get used to living here.

‘Is that you, darling?’

‘Yes, love.’ I prodded at the pile of mail, pushing the unsealed buff envelopes aside until there remained only a postcard from a ski resort, Cross and Cockade magazine and a secondhand book about the Battle of Moscow. On the silver-plated toast rack – a place kept for urgent messages – there was a torn piece of hospital notepaper with ‘Please go to Colonel Schlegel’s home on Sunday. He’ll meet the ten o’clock train’ written on it in Marjorie’s neat handwriting. I’d have gone Monday except that Sunday was underlined three times, in the red pencil she used for diagrams.

‘Darling!’

‘I’m coming.’ I went into the sitting-room. When I was away she seldom went in there: a quick bout with the frying pan and a briefcase full of post-graduate medical studies on the bedside table was her routine. But now she’d got it all tidied and ready for my return: matches near the ashtray and slippers by the fireplace. There was even a big bunch of mixed flowers, arranged with fern and placed in a jug amid her copies of House and Garden on the side table.

‘I missed you, Marj.’

‘Hello, sailor.’

We embraced. The lingering smell of bacon I’d encountered in the hall was now a taste on her lips. She ran a hand through my hair to ruffle it. ‘It won’t come loose,’ I said. ‘They knit them into the scalp.’

‘Silly.’

‘Sorry I’m late.’

She turned her head and smiled shyly. She was like a little girl: her large green eyes and small white face, lost somewhere under that dishevelled black hair.

‘I made a stew but it’s a bit dried up.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You haven’t noticed the flowers.’

‘Are you working in the mortuary again?’

‘Bastard,’ she said, but she kissed me softly.

In the corner, the box was keeping up its bombardment of superficial hysteria: British Equity outwits fat German extras shouting Schweinhund.

‘The flowers were from my mother. To wish me many happy returns.’

‘You’re not rerunning that twenty-ninth birthday again this year?’

She hit me in the ribs with the side of the hand and knew enough anatomy to make it hurt.

‘Take it easy,’ I gasped. ‘I’m only joking.’

‘Well, you save your lousy jokes for the boys on the submarine.’

But she put her arms round me and grabbed me tight. And she kissed me and stroked my face, trying to read her fortune in my eyes.

I kissed her again. It was more like the real thing this time.

‘I was beginning to wonder,’ she said, but the words were lost in my mouth.

There was a pot of coffee clipped into an electric contraption that kept it warm for hours. I poured some into Marjorie’s cup and sipped it. It tasted like iron filings with a dash of quinine. I pulled a face.

‘I’ll make more.’

‘No.’ I grabbed her arm. She made me neurotic with all this tender loving care. ‘Sit down, for God’s sake sit down.’ I reached over and took a piece of the chocolate bar she’d been eating. ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink.’

The heroes on the box got the keys to a secret new aeroplane from this piggy-eyed Gestapo man, and this fat short-sighted sentry kept stamping and giving the Heil Hitler salute. The two English cats Heil Hitlered back, but they exchanged knowing smiles as they got in the plane.

‘I don’t know why I’m watching it,’ said Marjorie.

‘Seeing these films makes you wonder why we took six years to win that damned war,’ I said.

‘Take off your overcoat.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Have you been drinking, darling?’ She smiled. She’d never seen me drunk but she was always suspecting I might be.

‘No.’

‘You’re shivering.’

I wanted to tell her about the flat and the photographs of the man who wasn’t me, but I knew she’d be sceptical. She was a doctor: they’re all like that. ‘Did the car give you trouble?’ she asked finally. She wanted only to be quite certain I wasn’t going to confess to another woman.

‘The plugs. Same as last time.’

‘Perhaps you should get the new one now, instead of waiting.’

‘Sure. And a sixty-foot ocean racer. Did you see Jack while I was away?’

‘He took me to lunch.’

‘Good old Jack.’

‘At the Savoy Grill.’

I nodded. Her estranged husband was a fashionable young paediatrician. The Savoy Grill was his works canteen. ‘Did you talk about the divorce?’

‘I told him I wanted no money.’

‘That pleased him, I’ll bet.’

‘Jack’s not like that.’

‘What is he like, Marjorie?’

She didn’t answer. We’d got as close as this to fighting about him before, but she was sensible enough to recognize male insecurity for what it was. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. ‘You’re tired,’ she said.

‘I missed you, Marj.’

‘Did you really, darling?’

I nodded. On the table alongside her there was a pile of books: Pregnancy and Anaemia, Puerperal Anaemia, Bennett, Achresthic Anaemia, Wilkinson, A Clinical Study, by Schmidt and History of a Case of Anaemia, by Combe. Tucked under the books there was a bundle of loose-leaf pages, crammed with Marjorie’s tiny writing. I broke the chocolate bar lying next to the books and put a piece of it into Marjorie’s mouth.

‘The Los Angeles people came back to me. Now there’s a car and a house and a sabbatical fifth year.’

‘I wasn’t …’

‘Now don’t be tempted into lying. I know how your mind works.’

‘I’m pretty tired, Marj.’

‘Well, we’ll have to talk about things some time.’ It was the doctor speaking.

‘Yes.’

‘Lunch Thursday?’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Sensational, wonderful, I can’t wait.’

‘Sometimes I wonder how we got this far.’

I didn’t answer. I wondered too. She wanted me to admit that I couldn’t live without her. And I had the nasty feeling that as soon as I did that, she’d up and leave me. So we continued as we were: in love but determined not to admit it. Or worse: declaring our love in such a way that the other could not be sure.

‘Strangers on a train,’ said Marjorie.

‘What?’

‘We are – strangers on a train.’

I pulled a face, as if I didn’t understand what she was getting at. She pushed her hair back but it fell forward again. She pulled a clip from it and fastened it. It was a nervous movement, designed more to occupy her than to change her hair.

‘I’m sorry, love.’ I leaned forward and kissed her gently. ‘I’m really sorry. We’ll talk about it.’

‘On Thursday …’ she smiled, knowing that I’d promise anything to avoid the sort of discussion that she had in mind. ‘Your coat is wet. You’d better hang it up, it will wrinkle and need cleaning.’

‘Now, if you like. We’ll talk now, if that’s what you want.’

She shook her head. ‘We’re on our way to different destinations. That’s what I mean. When you get to where you’re going, you’ll get out. I know you. I know you too well.’

‘It’s you who gets offers … fantastic salaries from Los Angeles research institutes, reads up anaemia, and sends polite refusals that ensure an even better offer eventually comes.’

‘I know,’ she admitted, and kissed me in a distant and preoccupied way. ‘But I love you, darling. I mean really …’ She gave an attractive little laugh. ‘You make me feel someone. The way you just take it for granted that I could go to America and do that damned job …’ She shrugged. ‘Sometimes I wish you weren’t so damned encouraging. I wish you were bossy, even. There are times when I wish you’d insist I stayed at home and did the washing-up.’

Well, you can’t make women happy, that’s a kind of fundamental law of the universe. You try and make them happy and they’ll never forgive you for revealing to them that they can’t be.

‘So do the washing-up,’ I said. I put my arm round her. The wool dress was thin. I could feel that her skin was hot beneath it. Perhaps she was running a fever, or perhaps it was passion. Or perhaps I was just the icy cold bastard that she so often accused me of being.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bacon sandwich?’

I shook my head. ‘Marjorie,’ I said, ‘do you remember the caretaker at number eighteen?’ I walked across to the TV and switched it off.

‘No. Should I?’

‘Be serious for a moment … Charlie the caretaker. Charlie Short … moustache, cockney accent – always making jokes about the landlords.’

‘No.’

‘Think for a moment.’

‘No need to shout.’

‘Can’t you remember the dinner party … he climbed in the window to let you in when you’d lost your key?’

‘That must have been one of your other girls,’ said Marjorie archly.

I smiled but said nothing.

‘You don’t look very well,’ said Marjorie. ‘Did anything happen on the trip?’

‘No.’

‘I worry about you. You look pretty done in.’

‘Is that a professional opinion, Doctor?’

She screwed her face up, like a little girl playing doctors and nurses. ‘Yes, it is, honestly, darling.’

‘The diagnosis?’

‘Well it’s not anaemia.’ She laughed. She was very beautiful. Even more beautiful when she laughed.

‘And what do you usually prescribe for men in my condition, Doc?’

‘Bed,’ she said. ‘Definitely bed.’ She laughed and undid my tie.

‘You’re shaking.’ She said it with some alarm. I was shaking. The trip, the journey home, the weather, that damned number eighteen where I was now in mass production, had all got to me suddenly, but how do you explain that? I mean, how do you explain it to a doctor?

4

The senior officer in Control Suite at commencement of game is CONTROL. Change of CONTROL must be communicated to Red Suite and Blue Suite (and any additional commanders), in advance and in writing. CONTROL’S ruling is final.

RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

You might think you know your boss, but you don’t. Not unless you’ve seen him at home on Sunday.

There are only three trains to Little Omber on Sunday. The one I caught was almost empty except for a couple of Saturday-night revellers, three couples taking babies to show Mums, two priests going to the seminary and half a dozen soldiers connecting with the express.

Little Omber is only thirty-five miles from central London but it is remote, and rural in a genteel way: frozen fish fingers, and picture-window housing-estates for the young executive.

I waited at the deserted railway station. I hardly knew Charles Schlegel the third, Colonel US Marine Corps Wing (retired), so I was expecting anything from a psychedelic Mini to a chauffeured Rover. He’d taken over the Studies Centre only ten days before I’d gone off on my last sea trip, and our acquaintance had been limited to a Charles Atlas handshake and a blurred glimpse of a pin-striped Savile Row three piece, and a Royal Aero Club tie. But that didn’t mean that he hadn’t already scared the shit out of half the staff, from the switchboard matron to the night door-keeper. There was a rumour that he’d been put in to find an excuse for closing the Centre down, in support of which he was authoritatively quoted as saying we were ‘an antediluvian charity, providing retired limey admirals with a chance to win on the War Games Table the battles they’d screwed up in real life’.

We all resented that remark because it was gratuitous, discourteous and a reflection on all of us. And we wondered how he’d found out.

Bright red export model XKE – well, why didn’t I guess. He came out of it like an Olympics hurdler and grasped my hand firmly and held my elbow, too, so that I couldn’t shake myself free. ‘It must have got in early,’ he said resentfully. He consulted a large multi-faced wristwatch of the sort that can time high-speed races under water. He was wearing charcoal trousers, hand-made brogues, a bright-red woollen shirt that exactly matched his car, and a shiny green flying jacket, with lots of Mickey Mouse on sleeves and chest.

‘I screwed up your Sunday,’ he said. I nodded. He was short and thickset, with that puffed-chest stance that small athletes have. The red shirt, and the way he cocked his head to one side, made him look like a gigantic and predatory robin redbreast. He strutted around the car and opened the door for me, smiling as he did so. He wasn’t about to apologize.

‘Come on up to the house for a sandwich.’

‘I have to get back,’ I argued without conviction.

‘Just a sandwich.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He let in the clutch, and heel-and-toed like a rally driver. He gave the car the same sort of attention that I suppose he’d given his F-4 or his B-52 or his desk, or whatever it was he flew before they unleashed him onto us. ‘I’m glad it was you,’ he said. ‘You know why I say that?’

‘Man management?’

He gave me a little you’ll-find-out-buddy smile.

‘I’m glad it was you,’ he explained slowly and patiently, ‘because I haven’t had a chance of a pow-wow with you or Foxwell, on account of the mission.’

I nodded. I liked the glad-it-was-you stuff. You’d have thought the message said anyone who’d like a free train ride to Little Omber this Sunday could go.

‘Goddamned imbecile,’ he muttered as he overtook a Sunday driver tooling down the white line, chatting with his kids in the back seat.

Close to Schlegel, I could see that the sun-lamp tan was there to disguise the complicated surgery he’d had on his jaw. What from a distance might look like the legacy of acne was a pattern of tiny scars that gave one side of his face the permanent hint of a scowl. Sometimes his face puckered enough to bare his teeth in a curious lopsided humourless smile. He did one now. ‘I can imagine,’ he said. ‘Yank trouble-shooter, hundred missions in Nam. They probably are saying I’m a hatchet man.’ He paused. ‘Are they saying that?’

‘I’ve heard it whispered.’

‘What else?’

‘They are saying that you are taking the staff aside one by one and giving them a working over.’ They weren’t saying that – as far as I knew – but I wanted to get his reaction.

‘Like this?’

‘Let’s wait and see.’

‘Huh.’ He did that crooked smile again. He slowed to go through the village. This was really home-counties stuff: six shops and five of them selling real estate. It was the kind of authentic English village that only Germans, Americans and real-estate men can afford. At the far end of the village there were four locals in their Sunday clothes. They turned to watch us pass. Schlegel gave them a stiff-armed salutation like the ones in that old English war film. They nodded and smiled. He turned off the road at a plastic sign that said ‘Golden Acre Cottage. Schlegel’ in ye olde English lettering. He gunned the motor up the steep track and fired gravel and soft earth from the deep-tread tyres.

‘Nice place,’ I said, but Schlegel seemed to read my thoughts. He said, ‘When they cut my orders they said I must be within easy access of NATO/ASW down the road at Longford Magna. Your government won’t let us Yanks buy a place to live – by law, by law! And half the county is owned by the same English lord who’s got his finger in my eye.’ He slammed on the brakes and we slid to a halt inches short of his front door. ‘A goddamn lord!’

‘You haven’t started Chas off about the landlord, I hope,’ said a woman from the doorway.

‘This is my bride, Helen. There are two daughters and a son around the house someplace.’

He’d parked outside a large thatched cottage, with black cruck-frame timbers and freshly whitened plaster. Placed on the front lawn there was a very old single-furrow plough and over the front door there was a farming implement that I didn’t recognize. The daughters arrived before I was even half out of the car. Slim, fresh-faced, clad in jeans and brightly coloured lambswool sweaters, it was difficult to tell wife from teenage daughters.

‘What a wonderful thatching job,’ I said.

‘Plastic,’ said Schlegel. ‘Real thatch harbours vermin. Plastic is cleaner, quicker and longer lasting.’

Mrs Schlegel said, ‘Gee, Chas, you should have told me. I was only doing BLTs for lunch.’

‘BLTs, Helen! You want to send him into a state of shock? These Brits strike into roast beef with all the trimmings for Sunday lunch.’

‘A bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich will be fine, Mrs Schlegel.’

‘Helen, call me Helen. I sure hope Chas hasn’t been too rude about our English landlord.’

The Southern United States – its climate and terrain so suitable for training infantry and aviators – has played a part in moulding the character of American military men. And it is there that so disproportionately many of them met their wives. But Mrs Schlegel was no Southern belle. She was a New Englander, with all the crisp assurance of that canny breed.

‘He’d have to be a lot ruder before he could hope to offend me … er … Helen.’ The sitting-room had a big log fire perfuming the centrally heated air.

‘A drink?’

‘Anything.’

‘Chuck made a jug of Bloody Marys before going to meet you.’ She was no longer young, but you could have prised that snub nose and freckled face out of a Coke commercial. The teenager’s grin, the torn jeans and relaxed hands-in-pocket stance made me happy to be there.

‘That sounds just right,’ I said.

‘You Englishmen … that cute accent. That really gets to me. Do you know that?’ she asked her husband.

‘We’ll go into the den, Helen. He’s brought me some junk from the office.’

‘Take the drinks with you,’ said Mrs Schlegel. She poured them from a huge frosted glass jug. I sipped at mine and coughed.

‘Chas likes them strong,’ said Mrs Schlegel. At that moment a small child came through the sitting-room. He wore a Che Guevara sweatshirt, and, with arms outstretched, dumped small clods of garden earth upon the carpet while emitting a steady high-pitched scream.

‘Chuckie!’ said Mrs Schlegel mildly. She turned to me. ‘I suppose here in Britain any mother would beat the daylights out of a child for doing that.’

‘No, I believe there are still a few who don’t,’ I told her. We could hear the scream continue out into the garden and around the back of the house.

‘We’ll be up in the den,’ said Schlegel. He’d downed half of his drink and now he poured himself more and added some to my glass too. I followed him through the room. There were black timber beams across the ceiling, each one decorated with horse brasses and bridle fittings. I hit my head on the lowest one.

We went up a narrow wooden staircase that creaked at each step. Off the passage at the top of it there was a small box room with a ‘Do not disturb’ label from the Istanbul Hilton. He pushed the door open with his elbow. The screaming child came nearer. Once inside Schlegel bolted the door.

He sat down heavily, and sighed. He had a rubbery face, well suited to his habit of pummelling it with his hands, pushing at his cheeks, bending his nose and then baring his teeth, as if to be sure that all the muscles were in working order. ‘I hate lords,’ he said. He fixed me with an unwinking stare.

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said.

‘Aw, I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Hell, no one would take you for a lord.’

‘Oh well,’ I said, trying to sound indifferent.

From Schlegel’s den there was a view of the surrounding country. A clump of poplar trees were bare, except for bunches of mistletoe, and the birds that rested there before coming down to join in the feast of holly berries. The gate to the next field was open, and the cart tracks shone with ice all the way round the side of the hill over which the steeple of Little Omber church could be seen. Its bell began striking twelve. Schlegel looked at his watch. ‘Now that damned village clock is fast too,’ he said.

I smiled. That was the essence of Schlegel, as I was to find out.

‘Bring good stuff this time?’

‘I’ll let you know when we see the analysis.’

‘Can’t you tell when you’re out there monitoring it?’

‘One trip last year they found the Russians working a new Northern Fleet frequency. The monitor leader got permission to change the cruise route to get cross-bearings. They brought in forty-three fixed-position Russian radio stations. There was talk of some kind of citation.’

‘And … ?’ said Schlegel.

‘Buoys. Meteorological stations, some of them unmanned.’

‘But it wasn’t you.’

‘I’ve always been on the cautious side.’

‘It’s not a word you’d want on your fitness report in the Marine Corps.’

‘But I’m not in the Marine Corps,’ I said.

‘And neither am I any longer – is that what you were about to say?’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything, Colonel.’

‘Drink up. If your new stuff is anything like the analysis I’ve been reading, I want to War Game the results and submit them for next summer’s NATO exercises.’

‘It’s been suggested before.’

‘It’s a hardy annual, I know that. But I think I might do it.’

If he was expecting a round of applause he was disappointed.

He said, ‘You’ll see some dough pumped into the Centre if they agree to that one.’

‘Well, that’s just fine for the controller of finance.’

‘And for the Studies Director, you mean?’

‘If we ever use the stuff we’re picking up on these trips as a basis for NATO fleet exercises, you’ll see the Russians really light up and say tilt.’

‘How?’ He bit into a cigar and offered them. I shook my head.

‘How? For starters the C-in-C will recognize the NATO movements as their alert scheme, and he’ll guess that these sub trips must be collecting! He’ll hammer the First Deputy who will get the War Soviet into a froth … bad news, Colonel.’

‘You mean this is all something we should be at pains to avoid.’

‘Then you are reading me correctly,’ I said. ‘They’ll know for certain that we have subs on the ocean floor outside Archangel, they’ll surmise about the Amderma and Dikson patrols. And then maybe they’ll guess what we are doing in the River Ob. Bad news, Colonel.’

‘Listen, sweetheart, you think they don’t already know?’ He lit the cigar. ‘You think those babies aren’t sitting on Norfolk, Virginia, taping our signals traffic from under our water?’

‘Colonel, I think they are sitting outside Norfolk. For all I know they are up the Thames as far as Stratford, and sending liberty crews ashore to see Ann Hathaway’s cottage. But so far, both sides have kept stumm about these operations. You base NATO exercises on a real Russian Fleet alert, and Russian Northern Fleet are going to get roasted. And the price they’ll have to pay for returning life to normal will be nailing one of our pig-boats.’

‘And you like it cosy?’

‘We’re getting the material, Colonel. We don’t have to rub their noses in it.’

‘No point in getting into a hassle about something like this, son. The decision will be made far above this level of command.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You think I’ve come into the Centre to build an empire? …’ He waved a hand. ‘Oh, sure. Don’t deny it, I can read you like a book. That’s what riles Foxwell too. But you couldn’t be more wrong. This wasn’t an assignment I wanted, feller.’ The athletic Marine Colonel sagged enough to show me the tired old puppeteer who was working the strings and the smiles. ‘But now I’m here I’m going to hack it, and you’d just better believe.’

‘Well, at least we both hate lords.’

He leaned forward and slapped my arm. ‘There you go, kid!’ He smiled. It was the hard, strained sort of grimace that a man might assume when squinting into the glare of an icy landscape. Liking him might prove difficult, but at least he was no charmer.

He swivelled in his chair and clattered the ice cubes in the jug, using a plastic swizzle stick with a bunny design on the end. ‘How did you get into the Studies, anyway?’ he asked me, while giving all his attention to pouring drinks.

‘I knew Foxwell,’ I said. ‘I saw him in a pub at a time when I was looking for a job.’

‘Now straighten up, son,’ said Schlegel. ‘No one looks for a job any more. You were taking a year off to do a thesis and considering a lot of rather good offers.’

‘Those offers would have to have been damn near the bread line to make Studies Centre the best of them.’

‘But you’ve got your Master’s and all those other qualifications: maths and economics; potent mixture!’

‘Not potent enough at the time.’

‘But Foxwell fixed it?’

‘He knows a lot of people.’

‘That’s what I hear.’ He gave me another fixed stare. Foxwell and Schlegel! That was going to be an inevitable clash of wills. No prizes for who was going to buckle at the knees. And what with all this lord-hating stuff … Ferdy wasn’t a lord, but he’d no doubt do for Schlegel’s all-time hate parade until a real lord came by in a golden coach. ‘And Ferdy fixed it?’

‘He told Planning that I’d had enough computer experience to keep my hand from getting jammed in the input. And then he told me enough to make it sound good.’

‘A regular Mr Fixit.’ There was no admiration in his voice.

‘I’ve earned my keep,’ I said.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Schlegel. He gave me the big Grade A – approved by the Department of Health – smile. It wasn’t reassuring.

From the next room there came the shouts of children above the noise of the TV. There was a patter of tiny feet as someone screamed through the house, slammed the kitchen door twice and then started throwing the dustbin lids at the compost heap. Schlegel rubbed his face. ‘When you and Ferdy do those historical studies, who operates the computer?’

‘We don’t have the historical studies out on the War Table, with a dozen plotters, and talk-on, and all the visual display units lit up.’

‘No?’

‘A lot of it is simple sums that we can do more quickly on the machine than by hand.’

‘You use the computer as an adding machine?’

‘No, that’s overstating it. I write a low-level symbolic programme carefully. Then we run it with variations of data, and analyse the output in Ferdy’s office. There’s not much computer time.’

‘You write the programme?’

I nodded, and sank some of my drink.

Schlegel said, ‘How many people in the Studies Group can write a programme and all the rest?’

‘By all the rest, you mean, get what you want out of storage into the arithmetic, process it and bring it out of the output?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

‘Not many. The policy has always been …’

‘Oh, I know what the policy has been, and my being here is the result of it.’ He stood up. ‘Would it surprise you to hear that I can’t work the damn thing?’

‘It would surprise me to hear that you can. Directors are not usually chosen because they can work the computer.’

‘That’s what I mean. OK, well I need someone who knows what goes on in the Group and who can operate the hardware. What would you say if I asked you to be a PA for me?’

‘Less work, more money?’

‘Don’t give me that stuff. Not when you go in to do Ferdy’s historical stuff for free nearly every Saturday. More money maybe, but not much.’

Mrs Schlegel tapped on the door and was admitted. She’d changed into a shirt-waist dress and English shoes and a necklace. Her dark hair was tied back in a tail. Schlegel gave a soft low whistle. ‘Now there’s a tribute, feller. And don’t bet a million dollars that my daughters are not also in skirts and fancy clothes.’

‘They are,’ said Helen Schlegel. She smiled. She was carrying a tray loaded with bacon, lettuce and tomato toasted sandwiches, and coffee in a large silver vacuum jug. ‘I’m sorry it’s only sandwiches,’ she said again.

‘Don’t believe her,’ said Schlegel. ‘Without you here we would have got only peanut butter and stale crackers.’

‘Chas!’ She turned to me. ‘Those have a lot of English mustard. Chas likes them like that.’

I nodded. It came as no surprise.

‘He’s going to be my new PA,’ said Schlegel.

‘He must be out of his mind,’ said Mrs Schlegel. ‘Cream?’

‘There’s a lot more money in it,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Yes, please. Yes, two sugars.’

‘I’d want the keys to the mint,’ said Mrs Schlegel.

‘And she thinks I’ve got them,’ explained Schlegel. He bit into a sandwich. ‘Hey, that’s good, Helen. Is this bacon from the guy in the village?’

‘I’m too embarrassed to go there any more.’ She left. It was clearly not a subject she wanted to pursue.

‘He needed telling,’ said Schlegel. He turned to me. ‘Yes, clear up what you are doing in the Blue Suite Staff Room …’ He picked a piece of bacon out of his teeth and threw it into an ashtray. ‘I’ll bet she did get it from that bastard in the village,’ he said. ‘And meanwhile we’ll put a coat of paint on that office where the tapes used to be stored. Choose some furniture. Your secretary can stay where she is for the time being. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘This history stuff with Foxwell, you say it’s low-level symbolic. So why do we use autocode for our day to day stuff?’

I got the idea. My job as Schlegel’s assistant was to prime him for explosions in all departments. I said, ‘It makes much more work when we programme the machine language for the historical studies but it keeps the machine time down. It saves a lot of money that way.’

‘Great.’

‘Also with the historical stuff we nearly always run the same battle with varying data to see what might have happened if … you know the kind of thing.’

‘But tell me.’

‘The Battle of Britain that we’re doing now … First we run the whole battle through – Reavley Rules …’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ground scale determines the time between moves. No extension of move time. We played it through three times using the historical data of the battle. We usually do repeats to see if the outcome of a battle was more or less inevitable or whether it was due to some combination of accidents, or freak weather, or whatever.’

‘What kind of changed facts did you programme into the battle?’ said Schlegel.

‘So far we’ve only done fuel loads. During the battle the Germans had long-range drop tanks for the single-seat fighters, but didn’t use them. Once you programme double fuel loads for the fighters, there are many permutations for the bombing attacks. We can vary the route to come in over the North Sea. We can double the range, bringing more cities under attack and so thinning the defences. We can keep to the routes and attacks actually used, but extend fighter escort time over the target by nearly an hour. When you have that many variations to run, it’s worth bringing it right the way down, because machine time can be reduced to a quarter of autocode time.’

‘But if you were running it only once?’

‘We seldom do that. Once or twice we’ve played out a battle like a chess game but Ferdy always wins. So I’ve lost enthusiasm.’

‘Sure,’ said Schlegel, and nodded in affirmation of my good sense.

There was a silence in the house, and the countryside was still. The clouds had rolled back to reveal a large patch of clear blue sky. Sunlight showed up the dust of winter on the austere metal desk at which Schlegel sat. On the wall behind it there was a collection of framed photographs and documents recording Schlegel’s service career. Here was a cocky crew-cut trainee in a Stearman biplane on some sunny American airfield in World War Two; a smiling fighter pilot with two swastikas newly painted alongside the cockpit; a captain hosed-down after some final tropical-island mission; and a hollow-cheeked survivor being assisted out of a helicopter. There were half a dozen group photos, too: Marine flyers with Schlegel moving ever closer to the centre chair.

While I was looking at his photos there was the distant roar of a formation of F-4s. We saw them as dots upon the blue sky as they headed north.

Schlegel guessed that they were going to the bombing range near King’s Lynn. ‘They’ll turn north-west,’ he said, and no sooner had he spoken the words than the formation changed direction. I turned back to the sandwiches rather than encourage him. ‘Told you,’ he said.

‘Ferdy didn’t want to give anyone the excuse to say that the machine time was costing too much.’

‘So I hear, but this historical stuff … is it worth any machine time?’

I didn’t react to the provocation. A man doesn’t give up his spare time working at something he believes not worth continuing. I said, ‘You’re the boss, that’s what you’ll have to decide.’

‘I’m going to find out what it’s costing. We can’t go on eating our heads off at the public trough.’

‘Strategic Studies is a trust, Colonel Schlegel. Under its terms, historical studies were a part of its purpose. We don’t have to show a profit at the end of the year.’

He pinched his nose as a pilot might to relieve sinus pressure. ‘Have another sandwich, kid. And then I’ll run you down to the station for the two twenty-seven.’

‘Foxwell is a historian, Colonel, he’s given quite a few years to this historical research. If it was cancelled now it would have a bad effect on the whole Studies Group.’

‘In your opinion?’

‘In my opinion.’

‘Well, I’ll bear that in mind when I see what it’s costing. Now how about that sandwich.’

‘No mayonnaise this time,’ I said.

Schlegel got up and turned his back on me as he stared out of the window after the fading echoes of the Phantoms. ‘I’d better level with you, son,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Your screening’s not through, but I can block in the plan. The trustees have relinquished control of the Studies Centre, although they will still be on the masthead of the Studies Centre journal and mentioned in the annual accounts. From now on, control is through me from the same naval warfare committee that runs the USN TACWAR Analysis, your British Navy’s Undersea Warfare Staff School and NATO Group-North at Hamburg.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, you’ll be able to carry on with the historical games, if that’s what you want, but gone are the days of the horse and buggy – and you’d better be sure Foxwell knows it.’

‘I’m sure it will become evident, Colonel.’

‘You’re damn right it will,’ said Schlegel. He consulted his watch. ‘Maybe we’d better get your coat – remember that damn station is running fast.’

5

No game decisions or plays are valid or binding except those made in writing during game time.

RULES. ‘TACWARGAME’. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

Ferdy Foxwell had this solid fuel stove in his office. He was some kind of fire freak, because he’d bribed five successive porters to bring him coal from next door without a chit. I thought the porters changed over just to make him go through the bribe business all over again, but Ferdy said that was just my nasty mind.

Anyway, he had this stove and I liked to go into his office in the winter time because I was a fire freak, too, in a small way of business.

When I entered I found Ferdy reading Red Star, the Soviet Defence Review, designed by Smersh to kill by boredom.

‘There are one hundred and twenty military academies in Russia,’ said Ferdy. ‘And that’s not counting technical staff colleges.’ He turned the page and folded it into a small wad again, turning it in his hands as he read down the column. He looked up as he got to the end. ‘Is Schlegel Irish?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘One of the Boston O’Schlegels.’

‘I thought he must be,’ Ferdy said.

‘That last programme failed, Ferdy. They’d set the bloody label twice. When one of the boys corrected it, it read-in but then stopped. The intermediate print-out is on its way.’

‘Ummm.’

‘Someone will have to stay tonight.’

‘What for?’

‘If we don’t finish today, we won’t have machine time again until Thursday. Unless you know some way of fiddling the computer charges.’

Our programmes were written in FORTRAN (Formula Translation Language) and fed into the computer on tape together with a ‘processor tape’, that translates it into instructions of a sort the machine can comply with. By means of the FORTRAN, certain common errors (like the double printed label that was Ferdy’s fault) were programmed to respond on the print-out. On this tear-off sheet the machine had written: ‘I’m only a bloody machine but I know how to print a label once only.’

I thought Ferdy would laugh, and I pushed the sheet across the desk to him, half expecting that he would pin it up on his board. He looked at the machine’s message, screwed it into a ball and tossed it in the direction of his waste-basket.

‘Bomber bloody Schlegel will have to hear about it, I suppose.’

‘He looks at the sheets every day.’

‘Only because you take them up to him.’

I shrugged. Ferdy had no need to do these programmes personally, but since he’d done this one it was his error and a stupid one. There was no way to hide it from Schlegel.

There was no real need for a clash to come between Ferdy and the boss, yet it seemed to have an inevitability that they had both recognized already. Foxwell regarded my job as Schlegel’s personal assistant as blacklegging; Schlegel was convinced that I spent half my working hours covering up for the incompetence of my cronies.

Ferdy dropped the wadded journal into his out-tray and sighed. He’d not been reading it, he’d been waiting for me to come back from the computer. He got to his feet with a lot of creaking and groaning. ‘Fancy a drink?’

‘At the Lighthouse?’

‘Wherever you like.’

Ferdy was usually more imperious in his invitations. I interpreted it as a plea. I said, ‘As long as I’m not too late home.’

It was a cold evening. The Lighthouse was crowded: regulars mostly, some medical students and a Welsh Rugby club that had been infiltrated by hard-drinking Australians. ‘I knew he’d turn out a bastard,’ said Ferdy, pulling a cashmere scarf tight around his throat. The drinks came and he pushed a pound across the counter. ‘Have one with us, Landlord.’

‘Thank you, Mr Foxwell, a small bitter,’ said the barman. Characteristically, Ferdy chose a sheltered piece of bar counter under one of the huge sherry casks that formed one wall.

‘You’re the only one who can run the Russian desk, Ferdy,’ I told him. ‘Why don’t you talk to Schlegel tomorrow? Tell him that if he doesn’t give you the two girls and your programmer back you’ll do something drastic.’

‘Drastic?’ said Ferdy. ‘You mean the old karate chop: zap! Pow! Wallop!’

‘Well he couldn’t get anyone else for weeks, Ferdy. And they couldn’t leave the desk unmanned, could they? Hell, you don’t need the money anyway. I don’t know why you’ve stuck it as long as this.’

‘Zap, pow, wallop, Schlegel,’ said Ferdy experimentally. ‘No, I don’t think that’s my style.’

‘More my style, you mean?’

‘I didn’t say that, old chap.’

Ferdy twisted up his face and gave an impression of Schlegel. ‘And cut out this zap, pow, wallop crap, Foxwell. You show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.’ He let a trace of Schlegel’s suppressed Southern drawl creep in at the end. I dreaded to think what Ferdy did to imitate me when I wasn’t around.

I said, ‘You should get some of your titled relatives down to your place one weekend …’

‘And invite Schlegel and his “bride”. You know I had considered even that …’

‘Big heads think the same.’

‘But it’s a bit feeble, isn’t it?’

‘You know your relatives better than I do.’

‘Yes, well, not even my bloody titled relatives deserve a weekend of Schlegel. Drink up, old lad, he’s bringing some more.’

Ferdy had ordered more drinks by raising an eyebrow at a garrulous barman that he treated like an old family retainer. I paid for them, and Ferdy laid into his brandy and soda as though he didn’t want to risk it being knocked over. ‘What’s the difference,’ he said, after draining it. ‘It’s obvious the bloody Yanks are going to close us.’

‘You’re wrong there,’ I told him.

‘Time will tell,’ he said portentously.

‘No need to wait. I can tell you that they are pumping a couple of million into the Studies Group over the next six months. We’re going to have five hours a day computer time, including Saturdays and Sundays.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

But Ferdy knew that I was in a position to tell him. ‘Scenarios,’ I said. Instead of the studies, we were going to do projections forward: strategic guesses on what might happen in the future.

Ferdy is only a few inches taller than me but he is able to make me feel like a dwarf when he leans forward to murmur in my earhole. ‘We’d need all the American data – the real hard stuff,’ he said.

‘I think we’re going to get it, Ferdy.’

‘That’s pretty high-powered. Scenarios would be top level security. Joint Chiefs level! I mean we’d be running alive with Gestapo! … plastic credit cards with our photos, and Schlegel looking at our bank balances.’

‘Don’t quote me, but …’ I shrugged.

Ferdy tucked into his brandy and soda. ‘OK,’ Ferdy muttered, ‘industrial action it is then.’

As if on cue Schlegel came into the saloon bar. I saw him look round for us. Systematically he checked everyone along the counter and then came through into the public bar. ‘I’m glad I found you,’ he said. He smiled to indicate that he’d overlook the fact that it was still office hours.

‘Brandy and soda for me,’ said Ferdy. ‘And this is a Barley Wine.’

‘OK,’ said Schlegel; he waved his hand to indicate that he’d understood. ‘Can you do the Red Admiral tomorrow for some visiting firemen from CINCLANT?’

‘Zap, pow, wallop,’ said Ferdy.

‘How’s that again?’ said Schlegel, cupping his ear.

‘Bit short notice,’ said Ferdy. He shuffled his feet and bit his lip as if trying to work out the difficulties involved, although we all knew that he’d have to do it if Schlegel asked.

‘So was Pearl Harbor,’ said Schlegel. ‘All I’m asking for is a simple ASW run-through, to show these idiots how we work.’

‘Anti-Submarine Warfare run-through,’ said Ferdy patiently, as though encountering the expression for the very first time. It was easy to understand why Schlegel got angry.

‘Anti-Submarine Warfare run-through,’ said Schlegel, without concealing the self-restraint. He spoke as if to a small child. ‘With you acting as the C-in-C of the Russian Northern Fleet and these NATO people running the Blue Suite to fight you.’

‘Which game?’

‘The North Cape Tactical Game, but if it escalates we’ll let it go.’

‘Very well,’ said Ferdy, after stretching his silence to breaking point.

‘Great!’ said Schlegel, with enough enthusiasm to make some of the Welsh Rugby club stop singing.

He looked at the two of us and gave a big smile. ‘There’ll be Admiral Cassidy and Admiral Findlater: top brass from CINCLANT. Well, I’ve got a lot to do before they arrive.’ He looked around the pub as if to check on our associates. ‘Don’t be late in the morning.’

Ferdy watched him all the way to the door. ‘Well at least we know how to get rid of the bastard,’ said Ferdy. ‘Ask him to buy a round of drinks.’

‘Give it a rest, Ferdy.’

‘Oh, don’t think I don’t see what’s going on. You come out and buy me a drink and soften me up for him.’

‘OK, Ferdy,’ I said. ‘You have it your way.’ Just for a minute I was about to blow my top, the way I would have done in the old days. But I had to admit, I was Schlegel’s assistant, and it could have looked like that. I said, ‘Just four beats to the bar, Ferdy. Remember?’

‘Sorry,’ said Ferdy, ‘but it’s been a bloody awful week.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure they are watching the house again.’

‘Who?’

‘Our burglary last May; could be the same people.’

‘Oh, burglars.’

‘Oh yes, I know you all think I go on about it.’

‘No, Ferdy.’

‘You wait until you’ve been burgled. It’s not so damned funny.’

‘I never said it was.’

‘Last night there was a taxi outside the house. Driver just sat there – nearly three hours.’

‘A taxi?’

‘Say it was waiting for a fare. Ask me if the meter was on – it was on. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a burglar. What’s a cab doing out there in the mews at three o’clock in the morning?’

It was a good moment to tell Ferdy about my visit to number eighteen. I’d have to tell someone sooner or later and so far I’d not even told Marjorie. It was then that I remembered that I’d not seen Mason – the one who’d identified me – in the office lately. ‘Do you remember that little creep named Mason? Did the weather printouts. Had that tiny dog in his office some days, the one that crapped in the hall and that Italian admiral trod in it.’

‘Mason, his name was.’

‘That’s what I said: Mason.’

‘He’s gone,’ said Ferdy. ‘Doubled his salary, they say. Got a job with some German computer company … Hamburg or somewhere … good riddance if you ask me.’

‘How long ago?’

‘While we were on the trip. A month or so. You didn’t lend him any money did you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s good, because I know he went off only giving personnel twenty-four hours’ notice. Personnel were furious about it.’

‘They would be,’ I said.

‘He came to us from Customs and Excise,’ said Ferdy, as if that explained everything.

The best way was probably to mention the number eighteen business to Ferdy like this, over a drink. What was the alternative: suspect everyone – paranoia, madness, sudden death, and into the big King Lear scene.

‘Ferdy,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

I looked at him for a full minute but didn’t speak. Confiding is not one of my personality traits: it’s being an only child, perhaps. That’s Marjorie’s theory, anyway. ‘Brandy and soda, wasn’t it, Ferdy?’

‘That’s it, brandy and soda.’ He sighed. ‘You wouldn’t want to come back while I look at that programme again?’

I nodded. I’d already told Marjorie that I’d have to stay. ‘It will be quicker if both of us do it.’

When I finally left the Centre I didn’t drive directly home. I went over to Earl’s Court and cruised past my old flat. At the end of the road I parked and thought about it for a minute or two. For a moment I wished I had confided in Ferdy and perhaps brought him here with me, but it was too late now.

I walked back on the other side of the street. It was a fine night. Above the crooked rooftops there was a pattern of stars. The crisp polar air that had driven away the low clouds made the traffic noises, and my footsteps, abnormally loud. I trod warily, moving past each of the parked cars as if looking for my own. I need not have been so cautious. I saw them fifty yards ahead and long before they might have seen me. It was an orange Ford: black vinyl top, rear-window slats and that absurd spoiling device to stop the rear wheels lifting at speeds above Mach One. Frazer. There were undoubtedly others like it, but this was Frazer’s car. The long whip aerial and finally the silhouetted triangle of the Admiralty permit on the windscreen confirmed it. It would be just like Frazer to want a mileage allowance instead of using a car from their pool.

There was a girl with him. They were smoking and talking, but they were situated perfectly to watch the entrance to number eighteen.

They say that on his deathbed, Voltaire, asked to renounce the devil, said, ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’ That’s how I felt about Frazer, and whoever and whatever was behind him. I turned the ignition key and thought about home.

I wanted the end of the live concert on Radio 3 but got the news on Radio 4. On Monday the car workers would strike for a thirty-five per cent wage increase, and a six-week paid holiday. The Russians had announced the six-man team that would go to Copenhagen for the German reunification talks. Two of the Russian team were women, including its leader, who was in the running for chairman of the whole circus. (A proposal energetically supported by Women’s Liberation, who planned to march to Westminster on Sunday afternoon.) There’d been a fire in a Finsbury Park hairdresser’s, and a stick-up in a pay-office in Epsom. The weather forecast was frost, overcast skies and rain following. And I’d missed the best part of the concert.

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