Ruth Rendell Talking to Strange Men

(First published in Great Britain, 1987)

PART ONE

1

He was crossing the bridge over the river from the western bank to the east. The bridge, for some forgotten reason to do with the Second World War, was called Rostock. It was a suspension bridge, painted a dull dark red, with walkways on either side. Up river three more bridges, Alexandra and St Stephen's and Randolph, gleamed with lights, both stationary and in motion, and the water beneath them looked black and glittering from the mass of lights reflected in its moving swelling surface. But when Mungo looked southwards all this illumination soon came to an end and there were no more bridges, only warehouses and cranes looming out of the dusk and the beginnings of a dark grey countryside. It was six-thirty in the evening, March, but already growing dark. A horizon of high hills could still be made out against a faintly paler sky. He was on the southern walkway of the bridge, alone, the lamp-lit wall between him and the deep water shoulder-high to deter suicides. This evening the river gave off a strong smell. It was a smell of oil and fish and something sour and rotting. The dark grey mottled stones, granite perhaps, of which the embankment on the eastern side was composed had a greasy look. The water lapped against the stones, against the fringe of weed that was green by day. Mungo came off the bridge by the pedestrian stairs and began to walk along the embankment towards the Beckgate Steps. There was no one about. Hardly anyone lived down here in the south-east. Sometimes a fisherman was to be seen sitting on the granite quayside but not at this hour. The squares of light that fell on to the broad shallow flight of steps were from the Beckgate pub, from the saloon where two people could be seen standing at the bar. That single lighted room, bright and snug, those companionable drinkers, served only to point out by contrast the sombre dreariness of the place, the absence of humanity, of any living creature, any green thing. Years ago, before he was born, a girl had been murdered here. They had found her body on the steps, lying on the broad space or landing between the two flights. Mungo, at the age of eight, had been told of it by some older child, the spot pointed out, a search instituted for bloodstains. He had joined in, awed, aghast, not finding out till later that there would have been no blood, that she had been strangled. And much later a vague shame had afflicted him that he had played games here, made a mockery of that awful thing, playing murderers, none of them wanting to be her, but all vying for the role of manic slavering pursuer. The real killer of the real girl had never been found. It was sometimes said that in a spot where some dreadful thing had taken place, a kind of unceasing vibration from these events caused a later haunting. As a small child Mungo had been afraid of that, brave when near this place in the company of Ian, say, or Angus, avoiding it fearfully when on his own. But he could have counted on his fingers the number of times he had mounted or descended these steps. They led nowhere he normally wished to go to and they ran down only to the river. His usual route to the flyover drop was by way of Albatross Street, and now, instead of taking Bread Lane, he made a prudent little detour, though there was no one to see him, he was nearly sure of that. It was an ugly unfrequented district. There were a lot of buildings which he thought of vaguely as docks or wharves, and streets on which stood featureless, obviously non-residential blocks, a whole floor of windows lit and showing cardboard crates inside; strange old brick edifices between them, narrow whitewashed factories sandwiched, rows of ancient cottages, used by day as workshops. Here, on concrete stems like huge attenuated plants with hanging heads, greenish-white lamps shed a radiance that was curiously bright and dull at the same time. It lay on roadway and walls like a coat of phosphorescent liquid, still wet. Above the main street, about five hundred metres from the end of Rostock Bridge, a flyover passed across, carrying a further line of traffic, this time that which was coming south from Alexandra, and bearing it towards the access road to the main north-south artery. This flyover had been built about twenty years before to relieve the pressure on the old city by-pass. They thought they had traffic in those days. They didn't know what traffic was. So they had built the flyover with one carriageway only and in the mornings the cars passed over it from south to north and in the evenings from north to south. There was no room for a two-way flow. Of course there were always plans to build a new three- or four-lane flyover but nothing had yet come of this. The cars on the flyover made a sound like thunder above his head. Or perhaps like gunfire, he thought. He turned left into Albatross Street between a dark almost windowless block and a factory with Ahman-Suleiman in chrome capitals over its dirty front entrance. A man in a turban was replacing a pane of frosted glass in a window and a large yellowish ginger cat, having overturned and emptied a dustbin, was tearing apart a plastic bag full of rubbish. These two, the first living creatures apart from the two people in the pub he had seen since leaving the bridge, took absolutely no notice of each other. He liked cats, he liked the colony of feral cats that lived down here, and he said hallo to this one, holding out his hand. It turned briefly to give him a look of cold dislike and the man in the turban, surprisingly, said: 'It will bite.' 'Thanks for telling me,' he said. The man in the turban wiped his thumb along the strip of putty. 'It has bitten me twice and my wife once.' Gathering up his tools, he unlocked the right-hand door of the double doors. 'Devil!' he said to the cat and banged the door behind him. The cat continued to behave as if no one had spoken, as if indeed no one was there. At the resounding slam the door made it did not even flinch. It was wrenching apart a chicken gizzard. Mungo was glad the man in the turban had gone in. There was no one to see him now, no one even to see which way he was going, except the cat which did not count. Ahead of him the flyover appeared once more, making its downward curve towards the approach road. All along its length it was supported on uprights, steel pillars that were not cylindrical but rather, in section, cruciform, each with four grooves indenting it from top to base. These pillars grew (so to speak) out of the pavements and ends of roads turned into cul-de-sacs and the backyards of warehouses but here, at this point, rose out of a triangle of grass that turned to wispy hay in summer but was now a cropped damp green, dotted about with small stunted bushes. The uprights did not exactly shake under the pressure of traffic but an illusion suggested they did. The roar overhead was like warfare in the sky. Few cars came along down here, especially after the factory workforces had left for home. But he looked to the right and left before he crossed the street just the same. As much as anything he was looking for a possible watcher. The dull bluish light made indigo shadows, broad and deep and with invisible depths. He looked up and felt rain on his face, a thin spray of drizzle only. The night was so dark so early because of cloud hanging in a bulging canopy. But down here the lights glittered, few and far between though they were, their slab-shaped bulb cases vague in the mist the rain made. There was no soul to be seen. And because it was constant, unvarying, the roar of the traffic was itself a kind of silence. He went across and stepped on to the grass which at once spotted the toes of his shoes with water drops. Under the shelter of the steel pillars he took the piece of paper out of his pocket. It was contained in an envelope he had made out of a small plastic bag, the kind you buy on a roll at a supermarket. Also in his pocket was a spool of transparent sticky tape. He managed to tear off a fifteen-centimetre strip, impatient because the first time it tore diagonally and stuck itself back on to the spool. Carefully, at a level some way beneath his own head height, for he was exceptionally tall, he secured the paper in its plastic envelope to the inside of one of the grooves of an upright, the right-hand one of the two central pillars, choosing the groove that was of all forty-eight the least visible from any external point. He stuck it in there with two strips of tape, pressing the tape against the smooth cold metal with the heel of his hand. Turning round once more to check if it was possible the drop had been observed, he thought he saw a movement on the far side of the road he had crossed to reach the green, at the opening to a narrow passage between the red-brick side of a deserted, no longer used, boarded-up church, and the stucco wall of a squat unidentifiable building with flat roof and metal-framed windows. These buildings lay in semidarkness between two widely-spaced lamp stilts. He crossed the empty street, leaving behind and above him the steady roar, feeling the hair on the back of his neck prickle. They had been using this drop since Angus's day. In fact, Angus had begun it, instituted it, out of that curious bravado or panache that made him long to infiltrate what were Moscow Centre's preserves. And with all the rest he had handed it on: 'Down below Rostock, Mungo, where the flyover dips down, there are twelve steel posts on a green. The post in the centre on the right, that's the one that's sacred.' Angus had used it a lot and Guy Parker had never known. Jealously appreciating the drop, Mungo had kept it as his private preserve, confined to himself and his best agents. Even his second-in-command was ignorant of it. As for Ivan Stern, he didn't even begin to suspect. Unless... Mungo, keeping in shadow, crept along the front wall of the church, past the great sandstone arch in which the double doors were battened up, past a Victorian flying buttress, its bricks chipped where a truck had hit it, flattening himself against the shadowed stone, emerging suddenly into the alley. And seeing what the movement had been, had probably been: a sheet of black plastic, originally a rubbish sack, that someone had nailed up to cover a broken pane in a window on the stucco wall, a corner of which had worked free and flapped in the wind. He was aware then of the wind that had got up, blowing the rain into his face in spurts, sending to trundle and clatter along the street with appalling noise, with a ringing hollow cacophony, an empty cuboid oilcan. Or had someone kicked it to make it clang and bounce like that? The oilcan was stilled now, the flap of plastic hanging immobile, everything motionless but for the pounding traffic, the roar. And even that was diminishing as the exodus of cars lessened, as the evening came on. It would seem therefore that there had been no one, that he had imagined it, imagined that he had seen not the corner of a shiny black sheet arbitrarily blown, but a man in a black oilskin jacket who for one second, one split second, had emerged from the dark of the passage to eye him and the copse of metal trees. He must have been mistaken but for a moment he considered returning to the sacred tree and removing the message from the long fissure in its trunk. If he did that it would mean he was saying it could never be used again, its life as a drop was over. And what of Basilisk coming for it, at some danger to himself, Basilisk whom he could think of no way of warning? Mungo knew himself to be over-imaginative, he did see things that weren't there, or that other people said weren't there. 'A visionary, that's what you are,' Ian had said, 'or else it's schizophrenia.' On the other hand, he couldn't ever remember seeing visions in this sort of situation before. But he would leave it. He would trust to common sense and experience, not to visions. One last look down the passage and then back past Ahman-Suleiman. The cat had gone, leaving grains from a bird's crop and bones spread about the pavement. It was growing cold and the wind gusted round corners. Mungo knew he was not followed, he was positive there was no one to follow him, but he pursued a tortuous route homewards just the same, plunging into a network of little streets that gradually became residential, rows and rows of pre-First World War houses, corner shops, pollarded trees with swollen bulging amputations, cars parked nose to tail along the gutters. If there had been anyone he had shaken him off. Mungo was adept at losing a tail. Time was, soon after he became Director General, that Moscow Centre had put a tail on him steadily for weeks, months maybe. But he had always known, had known from the beginning. Others had had the luck to be trained by Angus but none, naturally, had been as close to this particular teacher as he. Mungo had gained much pleasure from eluding tails, had even, on one triumphant day, managed to lead Michael Stern - for Guy Parker's successor had set his own brother on to him - into a disused warehouse where he succeeded in locking him in. He turned down a street that would bring him out at the Shot Tower. Before he reached the end of it he could see the thick-set concrete shape of Alexandra, the bridge lying low on the water (for no vessels of any size came up higher than Rostock), the incised lines and parabolas on its sides painted in a red and green which the lights bleached of colour. If someone were following him - and it would have to be a very clever, almost invisible, someone - this person would hardly dare cross the bridge. He would know where Mungo was bound for. In the middle of the bridge he was very vulnerable, very alone. There were cars but only one other pedestrian, someone he didn't recognise but young and of the male sex. This person was walking towards him on the pavement, on the parapet side. He wasn't wearing black oilskin and he was coming from the wrong direction anyway. Even one of Stern's Stars - a Moscow Centre pun from the Utting German Department - couldn't be in two places at once. They passed one another with studied indifference. At least, Mungo's was studied. He lifted his eyes from an apparent scrutiny of the river's rippling surface and looked across to the western bank and the tower on the CitWest insurance building. Green digits on its crest told him the time was six-fifty-nine, the temperature six degrees Celsius. And then the cathedral clock, the clock that from here was invisible, hidden on the north face of the apse, began striking the hour. It was always fractionally fast. The mist which the rain had become gave to the grave and majestic cathedral an other-worldly look as if it floated the way a palace might do in a dream, its twin spires and saint-laden east front no longer anchored to the earth but soaring to heaven. The road came off the bridge under the cathedral wall. Mungo felt the vibration from the clock's notes thrill through his whole body. Up above him gargoyle faces in decaying stone grinned or grimaced or made rictus mouths of agony. They seemed to emerge from the mist, these faces, as if attached to bodies, as if belonging to mediaeval people who moved to peer at passers-by over a high stone wall. Mungo shook himself. Stop seeing visions, he said, there's nothing there, there never was anything, and coming out into the square with its trees, thought, I'll run the last bit, I could do with a good run.

2

The sudden cold caused John Creevey to pull up the zip on his jacket. It was not of black plastic, this jacket, but very dark blue leather, and a light skin of rain made it glisten. It had belonged to his wife and would once have been too small for John, but lately he had lost a lot of weight and his shoulders were in any case narrow. He wore the jacket because she had worn it, because it was one of the few really personal things of hers he still had. Without thinking, he had come out of the passage into that exposed place, into the light. It had not occurred to him there might be someone on the green under the pillars. His mind had been occupied with the green and the messages, wondering why for instance there had been nothing there for a month, but actually to catch sight of someone in the act of depositing one, that had hardly crossed his mind as a possibility. Immediately, of course, he retreated. He did not think he had been seen by the very tall, very thin, man on the green, whom he had himself seen only briefly. Back down the passage he went, not running, but walking fast, and concealed himself in a doorway just round the end of it. Here he would make himself stand for a full ten minutes, he thought, until he could be sure the bearer of the message would be gone. After all, he had all the time in the world, he had the whole empty evening before him, and his sole purpose in using this route had been to keep that pillar under observation, to feed his curiosity, to try and find some clue as to what it was all about. Three months it had been going on now, he calculated. Well, it had probably been going on longer than that but it was in December that he had first seen one of their messages. Before that he had had no occasion to come down here, to this desolate place that had its utility by day but died at night. The hands of his watch crawled. At exactly seven he left the shelter of the doorway and made his way back along the passage. For one moment he had a nasty feeling that he would be punished for his nosiness if the tall thin man were to be waiting round the corner for him. With a cosh perhaps - or a gun. But he made himself go on, cautious, prepared. And there was no one. The stream of metal flowed on over the flyover. The pillars that supported it seemed faintly to vibrate. Where the roadway dipped right down and the pair of pillars were shorter than a man, a cat crouched in the scrubby grass. John could see its bright, piercingly green, eyes. He was allergic to cats, their fur gave him a sort of asthma, but it was usually all right out of doors, they didn't bother him so much there. He went across the street and on to the grass and up to the pillar where the message must be. It was funny what a thrill of excitement he felt each time he saw one of those little packages up there. He reached up and took down the plastic envelope, not tearing it but unpeeling the scotch tape with care. An interesting thing was that this time it was up above his head, which meant perhaps that this was the first time for a long while that the tall man had deposited the message. As he had known it would be, the message was in code. But had they changed the code? Suppose it was a different code from last time? That didn't really help him, nor did knowing if they had changed it, for he had so far deciphered none of the messages he had seen. As had become his habit, he wrote the words down in a small notebook he had bought for the purpose, going back across the street and standing under a light to do this. Then he folded up the paper again, replaced it in its envelope and returning to the green, taped it back inside the groove of the pillar once more, reaching up to find the spot where the tall man had put it. Should he have followed the tall man? John confessed to himself that he hadn't the nerve for that. Not yet. Not unless he prepared himself, anyway. And there was another consideration, an absurd one perhaps, though it wasn't a matter of vanity. He didn't want to get the jacket wetter than was absolutely necessary. As it was, he would have to dry it with care. Did this sort of leather soil in the rain? When she bought it they were on their honeymoon at a place on Lake Garda. He had thought it rather masculine for Jennifer but she had loved it, the unusual colour, the softness of the calfskin. Only Italian leather was like that, she had said, and she had planned to buy herself something to wear in leather as soon as they decided on Italy. It smelt of her, offered the occasional fleeting illusion that she was pressed close against him. This was the first time John had worn it to go out in. He put it on because he had made up his mind it wouldn't rain today. The weather forecaster on television had said rain was unlikely in the west. The first time he had come here - or rather had passed here on his way back from Nunhouse - he had been more sensibly dressed in his raincoat and had had an umbrella with him. He had needed the umbrella because he had stood for quite a long time opposite the cottage in Fen Street which Jennifer lived in, just watching the place, watching the windows and the front door. That time - it was just before Christmas - there had been no one at home. But he had returned, in spite of himself, a few days afterwards and was rewarded by the sight of her, or the shape of her rather, a dim figure moving behind the clouded glass of the living-room window. Going home by bus, looking out of the bus window in a kind of stunned misery, he had caught sight of something stuck inside one of the flyover uprights. But he had been too wretched then to think much of it, still less follow it up. Going to Nunhouse was unwise. It was worse than that, humiliating and somehow perverted, voyeur's behaviour, Peeping Tom's. But he couldn't help himself. He went back, and waiting on the opposite side of the road at last caught a glimpse of her at an upstairs window. There he had stood, watching her hungrily until she revealed more of herself, lifting up the curtain and smiling, then waving. Unable to believe his eyes, trembling with relief, he had been on the point of stepping out from under the hawthorn tree, crossing the road. But then he saw who was coming from the other direction, who it was she was smiling and waving at, who she had been waiting for, and he turned and walked quickly away. It was a village of sorts Peter Moran and she lived in, and in a cottage of sorts. Nunhouse had been half-swallowed by the expanding city, devoured by an outskirts estate of council houses, as a small pretty fish might be devoured by a predatory shark. And the cottage was a tiny thatched hovel with a shack-like extension tacked on the side. That was the best he could do for her, John thought, the best Peter Moran could offer a woman for all his university degree and his posh voice. The bus ran only every two hours and John had walked all the way back, though it was a long way and he didn't enjoy walking. But she had made him ashamed of the motorbike, the Honda. If she saw him there he didn't want her to see the Honda too. Perhaps it was true, as she had once gently said, that motorbikes were best for people under thirty. What then if you were over thirty but couldn't afford to run a car? Walking back this way, along what had not so long before been a country lane, then on to a main road which was almost disused since the coming of the motorway, he had somehow missed the turning that would bring him to the eastern suburb where he lived and had come up under the flyover. Immediately he realised where he was he had started to retrace his steps. Another two or three minutes' walking in that direction, nearer and nearer to the East Bank, and he would have come to the place he had avoided for sixteen years. No doubt it had changed now, no doubt they had rebuilt things, pulled things down and put new ones up, but he would know it, he would recognise it, even under fresh concrete, new gleaming metal, tiles, paintwork. He crossed the street in the direction he had come from and began taking a short cut across the green, making his way between the uprights that supported the overhead road. Why had he looked back? Had he remembered what he saw from the bus? Had he heard something? A rare car perhaps or a footstep? Or had it been a sound made by one of the cats? Since then, on his frequent visits, he had often seen them, the yellow king cat and his many-coloured wives and offspring and rivals who lived here under the pillars, amid the grass and stunted blackthorn bushes. Whatever it was that caused him to turn his head, he had turned it and seen, taped inside the groove of the central pillar, the first - or first to him - of the plastic-covered messages. Misery has to be very deep, has to be at suicide point, before it can quench curiosity. That thought actually came to him when he saw the little package up there. Until then he had believed his unhappiness total, swamping everything else, allowing room only for other old miseries to come in and share its ebb and flow. There was a place in its deep wide sea for his sister and her death but none, he had believed, for an island of interest and speculation. Yet here. It had been about six feet up. He unpeeled the tape, took the folded sheet out of the envelope and read what was written on it - or tried to read it. He happened to have a ballpoint pen with him and he copied the six coded words, or six groups of letters, on to a piece of paper that he found in his raincoat pocket, a supermarket account print-out. Then he folded up the message once more, replaced it in its envelope and re-taped it to the inside of the pillar. At home he had looked once more at the coded message. John knew very little about codes and what little he did know he remembered from schoolboy books he had read when he was very young, twenty-five or thirty years ago. But he was so intrigued by this unlikely message found in this unlikely place that he had shown it to Cohn Goodman, though without telling Cohn the circumstances in which he had discovered it. Not that he had known then that Cohn was interested in codes, though he was aware that he did crossword puzzles, and no mean ones at that, The Times, no less, and sometimes the Guardian. Codes, however, it turned out were something Cohn also dabbled in. He looked at the letters on the supermarket bill and quickly came up with what seemed a sound idea of the kind of code that had been used, though that was a long way from being able to decipher the message. No more appeared for a while after early January, then there were two in mid-February, this one now. It was a strange thing what those messages had done for him, John thought as he walked home. They had distracted his mind. In a curious sort of way, incredible as that seemed, they had consoled him. He was still deeply unhappy, his life emptied by Jennifer's desertion of everything that made it worth while, his future destroyed, but he had ceased to be obsessed, he was no longer single-mindedly wretched. It was weeks now since he had made one of those shameful vigils outside her house. And in that time he hadn't thought exclusively of her. Whole minutes, hours even, had gone by in which his mind hadn't been occupied by her. And as he visited and revisited the green with its steel pillars where the cats lived, watching for new messages, he felt that he had an interest in his life. It was absurd, of course, it was ridiculous that a man of his age should be so absorbed by this mystery but he was and he was thankful for it. Without this to sustain him, wouldn't he have broken down? Wouldn't he have abandoned himself to despair?

Twenty-five Geneva Road was a small semi-detached house in a street of small semi-detached houses, but what distinguished his was its garden. Even from the end of the street, two hundred yards away, you could make out his garden and see what set it apart from the rest. An early-flowering prunus was in full bloom in the tiny front garden, a pale shimmer in the gathering dark. The lamplight took away its rosy colour but not the gauzy delicacy of its flowers. And as he approached he could see the clusters of blue star-shaped scillas at the foot of the tree, a drift of aconites, iris Stylosa, its unfolding lilac petals half hidden by its long fragile leaves, while his neighbours' gardens, though neat and trim, were barren. Still, if he couldn't contrive a nice garden, who could? He was proud of it, though, this flowery strip under the bay window, and the longer plot at the back with the rockery and the little pond, the two brave herbaceous borders the area of land wasn't really big enough to support, the collection of rare shrubs and the gingko tree. It was still impossible for him to understand why Jennifer hadn't appreciated the garden. He had said that to Cohn in the days when he had had to open his heart to someone and Cohn had been there and willing to listen. 'I don't suppose,' Cohn had said gently, 'that having a nice garden would keep a woman from leaving her husband.' Put like that, it did sound rather preposterous. John let himself into the house. It was shabby inside and not very clean. When he came in like this after being out for some time he was aware of the smell. It was the smell of somewhere that hasn't been properly cleaned for a long time, where all the curtains need washing and the carpets shampooing and the windows opening. But after he had been indoors a little while the smell faded. There was nothing to remind him particularly of Jennifer. He switched lights on, took the blue leather jacket off and laid it over the arm of a chair. Jennifer had added scarcely anything of her own to the furnishings of the house, nothing at all down here. It remained as it had been in his mother's time and she had been content with that. But it seemed peculiar to him, and had seemed strange then, that a young woman with good taste and very decided ideas had been prepared to live with fifties furniture when over and over he had suggested they have the place done up and buy new things. He sat down, opened the notebook and looked at the latest message. SIDKCKDM AF HCRKTABIE SHIMC KD LFDAILA. This was the fourth. He had told Cohn they came from a friend of his up North with whom he had been corresponding for years. As schoolboys they had been keen on codes and lately the friend had taken to sending these cipher messages. He didn't know whether Cohn believed him. It wasn't a very convincing story. 'The code is probably based on a line from a book,' Cohn said. 'What do you mean, a line from a book? What book?' 'That's what we don't know.' 'I wish you'd explain.' 'Well, let's take a sentence, any sentence. For instance: "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party". The first letter N would represent A, the second letter O would represent B, W would be C, I would be D, S E and so on. Cohn was writing all this down. John looked at the paper. 'What happens when you reach T. T is already F so it can't be I. Do you miss it out and go on to the I? But that would make I I.' 'That doesn't matter. That's what you do. And if you get to the end of the sentence before you reach the end of the alphabet, you start a new sentence. In this case presumably: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Do you see?' John had objected, 'It seems very simple.' 'It is very simple. But if you don't know what the sentence is it's virtually indecipherable.' 'Could it be deciphered without knowing the sentence?' 'I expect there are some people who could do it but I couldn't.' 'So if I don't know what the book is I haven't a hope of finding out what these messages mean?' Cohn laughed. 'It's not as bad as that. This friend of yours, this Philip, if you and he know each other that well, presumably you know the kind of books he likes. I mean did you have a favourite book when you were kids?' John didn't enjoy perpetuating these lies. He shrugged rather unhappily. 'Most likely it's a first sentence or last sentence, you see. And a first is more probable that a last.' 'Why is that?' 'Because you could reach the end of the book before you came to the end of the alphabet,' said Cohn patiently. 'And you've got a clue in these recurring words, names probably. HCRKIABIE and SIDKCKDM and OQIUFE.' After he had gone John had tried testing out the coded messages against the first sentences of a selection of books. His father had been a great reader of detective stories and there were a lot of these in the house as well as nineteenth-century novels which he enjoyed because they offered him a more absolute escape from day-to-day life in this city in the eighties than any modern fiction could do. But it seemed to him quite probable that if one wanted to base a code on the first sentence of a book one might choose the Bible or Shakespeare. He was not surprised to find that the first line of Genesis was: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." But he had not expected his Shakespeare to start with:

"Boatswain!" "Here, Master, what cheer?"

Anyway the code was based on neither of them. Nor, when he tested it against the opening lines of all Dickens's novels, Jane Austen's, the Bront� and George Eliot's, was he able to find any enlightenment. In spite of what Cohn said, he tried final sentences. He moved on and tried the first and last lines of Kipling, Trollope, Hardy and Conrad. He tried John Creasey and Agatha Christie. Sometimes he found himself devoting whole evenings, and once practically a whole Sunday, to trying to discover the book that the code maker had used. It was rather cold in the living room. There was no central heating. He would have had it put in for Jennifer but she had been indifferent when he suggested it. He reached out with his toe and switched on both bars of the electric fire. The three books he had borrowed from the library that afternoon lay on the low stool on the right-hand side of the fireplace: _She_ and _Wisdom's Daughter_ by H. Rider Haggard and John Le Carr�_A Small Town in Germany_. He seldom read anything but novels. One of these was as likely to have been used by the code maker as anything else, he thought. On the other hand, there was no reason to suppose the code maker had used a book at all. He might have used a sentence or paragraph from a newspaper, from a magazine. He might have used - chilling thought! - part of a page from the telephone directory. But John refused to let himself dwell on that one. Pen and notebook in hand, he began setting the letters of the alphabet against the letters in the first line of _She_:

"In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men..."

3

It was the heart of the city that Mungo was bound for, specifically a tall narrow early Victorian house on the corner where Hill Street met Church Bar. From its upper windows, especially from the windows of his headquarters on the top floor, you could see everything, Fonthill Heights and the hills beyond, a segment of the gardens, a gleam of the river, a buttress of the cathedral, all but the tower whose green digits blinked. You could see the green dome of the city hall, or part of it, and a corner of the polytechnic's shabby black brickwork, and the opening in the old wall they called the Fallowgate. The front door was approached by a flight of steep steps and it had long sash windows in which the glass seemed particularly clear and glowing. But Mungo let himself into its garden by a gate in the wall. It was a green door rather than a gate and with a curved top which fitted the arched opening in the wall of white bricks that in the summer would be thickly overgrown with a round-leaved climbing weed. On the left-hand side of the door was a brass plate on which was engraved: Dr Fergus J. Cameron MB, FRCP and under it, Dr Lucy Cameron MB, MRCP. Mungo closed the gate behind him and entered the house by a stained-glass door in the side wall, a door which was kept locked only at night. Inside it was quite silent. Then, from high up in the house, he heard music playing very softly, the peculiarly civilised, lilting baroque music Angus liked even when he was working. Mungo began to climb the stairs. There were fifty-two to the top of the house but it was seldom that anyone but he ever went beyond the second floor. The door to Angus's room was open and Angus could be seen sitting at the table at work on his computer. He had had the computer only a few days and was teaching himself to use it. Boccherini tinkled out of the record player. Mungo went up behind him and read on the VDU screen:

WELL DONE, ANGUS, THAT WASN'T SO BAD, WAS IT?

'Isn't it a bit uncanny the way it talks back at you?' Mungo said. 'Christ, you made me jump.' 'Sorry. But isn't it?' 'It's only while I'm doing the lessons. Shall I get it to say something to you?' 'No, thanks,' Mungo said, as Angus called up on to it a column of figures. 'Could it do codes?' Angus took his hands from the keyboard and started to laugh. 'What are you laughing at?' Mungo said, though he knew. 'Was I ever as keen as you?' 'I don't know. I think you were.' 'You've been up to something now, haven't you? Some cloak and dagger stuff. You've got that furtive look.' Mungo didn't say anything. 'Mum's taking Dr Marsh's surgery on account of he's got flu and Dad's been called out to a private patient.' 'I'm starving.' 'Yes, well, Mum's bringing takeaway in with her. She won't be long. Sometimes I think what I like most about the holidays is being able to eat junk food.' 'It's because they're doctors,' said Mungo. 'Doctors always approve of junk food. It's the amateurs want you to be eating brown rice. Can I have one of your truffles?' Angus always kept a bag of chocolate truffles in his desk drawer. They were rum-flavoured, rolled in chocolate vermicelli. 'You can have one. They're expensive. 'Oh God, I could eat fifty of these.' 'Why don't you buy yourself Mars bars?' 'I've got gourmet tastes in chocolate.' Angus made everything on the screen vanish but for a small dancing green arrow. He switched the computer off at the plug. Red-haired, ruddy-faced, the shortest of them though not short, he looked up at Mungo's great height. 'How old are you now, Bean?' 'Fourteen. I'll be fifteen in July. You're my brother, you ought to know how old I am.' 'I scarcely know how old I am myself.' 'You're seventeen,' said Mungo. 'You had that thing for your seventeenth birthday. Right? Why did you ask how old I am, anyway?' Angus didn't answer him directly. 'You must be about six feet four.' 'Six feet three but I don't think I've grown since Christmas. I worry about it sometimes, Ang. I think, suppose I've got acromegaly.' 'What the hell is acromegaly?' 'It's when your pituitary goes wrong and you grow and grow and they have to take it away and it makes you sterile.' 'I thought that was gigantism. For Christ's sake, you've got both parents doctors and you think they wouldn't know about a thing like that? The whole family are giants. Ian's taller than you. Dad's taller than you.' 'Yes, but Ian's twenty and God knows how old Dad is, about fifty.' 'I didn't ask you how old you were because I thought you were too tall. I asked because I was wondering how you felt about Spookside.' 'We don't call it that any more,' Mungo said rather loftily. 'What do you mean, how do I feel?' Angus had an air of choosing his words carefully. 'I mean are you still keen?' 'Sure I am. Of course. Why?' 'Well... Nothing. You're only fourteen. OK, forget it. There's Mum I heard the car.' Mungo went up to his own room. It was gradually returning to the state which prevailed in the holidays, the order of term time (which had appalled him when he looked on it two days before) quickly giving place to a comfortable chaos. Mungo liked to drop his clothes on to the floor when he took them off and when the pile got too big he took it down to the washing machine in the basement and put the lot in, dark and light together. All his clothes gradually took on the same muddy blue colour as a result of this, which was why his mother snatched his school shirts off him on the day Rossingham broke up. His room was a crow's nest up here, the ceiling sloping, following the lines of the roof. It was so big because a hundred years before it was shared by the four maids who kept the house clean. The two windows were round, set under eyelid dormers, and from them you could see over the tops of leafless trees across old slate roofs and new tiled roofs to that wonderful view. Unease troubled Mungo, slightly marring what had been a happy and busy day. It's because of what Ang said, he thought. What did he mean? Why had he said that? After all, it was he who began it, he and Guy Parker, he who handed it on, a finished and beautiful thing, to his heirs. Mungo liked that phrase and he repeated it to himself. A finished and beautiful thing to his heirs. He might become a writer. There was too much of this medicine thing in their family. Could it only be that Angus regretted giving up the directorship himself? Mungo dropped his jacket absent-mindedly on to the floor. He picked up a book, turned the pages, considering. Then he pulled the blinds down over the round windows that were a bit like ship's portholes. His stomach reminded him that his mother was home. There reached him, as he started down the third flight, a scent of Indonesian takeaway, his first favourite.

4

The garden centre was on the old by-pass. Once it had been nearer the city centre and then it had been called a nursery. That was when John Creevey first went to work there as a school leaver aged seventeen. In those days he had been the boy who swept up, graduating to become the boy who put the compost in the seed trays, the 'nurseryman', the assistant manager. He was nurseryman when Cherry died and by the time Jennifer came in to buy something suitable for window boxes, Trowbridge's had doubled its size, called itself a garden centre and moved out to the by-pass. And John was more or less the boss, the then manager being on an extended sick leave that was to become permanent. He had recommended fuchsias to Jennifer, plus a couple of pelargoniums, trailing lobelia, white alyssum, the usual stuff, and a canary creeper which was a bit more out of the ordinary. 'Why is it called that?' 'Canary creeper?' he had said. 'You wait and see. Its flowers look like yellow birds.' Those had been the first words they had ever said to each other, apart from the requisite good morning and hallo and can I help you? It all came back to him now because he was in the main greenhouse, checking on the fuchsia cuttings, all in their individual fibre pots. Alice Hoffman, Jennifer had had, and Thalia. And later, when she had invited him to the flat, he had seen how well they were doing. They looked wonderful, those window boxes, he couldn't have done better himself. He couldn't understand, though, why she hadn't held on to her mother's house that had a garden to go with it. It had never crossed his mind to sell the house when his own parents died. That was one of the things they had in common, he and Jennifer, it had struck him at once, both of them losing their mothers within weeks of each other. 'My mother died a year ago and I came in for her house, so I sold it and bought this flat. I moved in two weeks ago and there were these empty window boxes.' 'My mother died a year ago too - well, a year and two months.' She smiled at him, rather sadly. She was a quiet-looking girl. Modest was the word that came into his mind. He could remember exactly what she had been wearing on that first occasion: a pleated skirt in a check pattern, two shades of brown, a camel-coloured sweater over a white shirt, brown shoes, very well-polished, with low heels but not flat shoes. Not a scrap of make-up, she never wore make-up. Her hair was a bright sparkling yellow-brown that hung to her shoulders. No, not 'hung', flew out and curled in its abundance like a chrysanthemum. He had never seen a face so soft as hers and so expressive. The skin was soft and the lips, the rather full cheeks, the thick furry eyebrows and the liquid eyes. Of course it was Cherry she looked like, though he hadn't realised that then, not understanding at that time that one woman can resemble another though one is ugly and the other beautiful. He had packed up all the plants in two cardboard boxes for her and carried them out to the car a friend had brought her along in. Of course it wouldn't have crossed his mind then to ask if he could see her again. He didn't go out with girls. But she came back to replace Thalia and the alyssum because they had died or something had eaten them up and it was then, because they hadn't another Thalia in stock, that he said he would bring one round to her as soon as they came in. There was in fact no question of their 'coming in', Trowbridge's grew all their own fuchsias, but John had selected one of his own plants for her from his own greenhouse. When was all that? May? June? The May of nearly three years ago, he thought. It can't have been on that occasion but maybe the next time they met that she told him about Peter Moran and he told her about Cherry... Most of the fuchsia cuttings had taken and were looking good. John had a look at the thermometer. Fifteen degrees - which he was getting used to saying instead of sixty - not bad for the end of March with the heat only on low. Easter was coming. Tomorrow would be Good Friday. John didn't enjoy holidays these days. Marriage had taught him loneliness. Maybe Cohn would come over. And there was always his aunt to whose house on the other side of the city he had a standing invitation. Don't go over to Jennifer's, don't hang about outside Jennifer's, he found himself muttering as he returned to the shop. Sharon at the check-out eyed him. 'Just reminding myself to take a look at the fish before we close up, Sharon.' He didn't really approve of garden centres selling goldfish and birds and whatever, but you had to keep up with the times. Shubunkins swam around in a leisurely fashion among the elodia and the water hawthorn. They looked healthy enough. It was a mystery why they all seemed to die as soon as customers got them home. Still, he wasn't a fish expert. Trowbridge' had better get an ichthyologist in if it bothered them, some out-of-work ex-college boy. Everyone seemed to have degrees nowadays, he wouldn't be surprised if even Sharon had a BSc in computer sciences. It was a natural progression from this to think of Peter Moran. Peter Moran had been educated at a famous university and had taught at a less famous one. Or so Jennifer said. Any time he unwillingly summoned it up John could hear that mocking voice with its perfect diction, its scathing or incomprehensible utterances. But I won't think of him, I mustn't, John thought. It's bad for you, it makes you sick in your mind, thinking of people you hate. I don't hate Jennifer, I never have. I love her still. Sometimes I think I love her more. He took off his brown canvas coat and hung it up in the office. If the weather holds, he thought, I'll have the weekend in the garden. It's a funny thing with gardening, you never get tired of it, you never get bored. Those snowdrops that multiplied so, I'll have them out. And I'll get a bed ready for the pink lilies, the nerines. What I will also do is take a look at cats' green - it must have had a name but he always called it cats' green - and see if anyone's been there and taken that last bit of paper. John had his library books with him in a string bag: _She_, _Wisdom's Daughter_, and _A Small Town in Germany_. He said goodnight to Sharon and Les and told Gavin to lock up after him. Gavin was the new assistant manager, only twenty-three, a graduate of the local horticultural college. Latin names tripped off his tongue. He was the only person John had ever known who didn't pronounce aubrieta as orbreeshia. The mynah bird, which he seemed fond of, he had given the name of Grackle - from its designation of Gracula religiosa, he explained. Only that afternoon John had heard him promising to obtain for a customer a fremontodendron, whatever that might be. 'Ciao, chief,' said Gavin in a multi-national lingo he used when he wasn't talking Latin.

The central library was so much better than his local branch that he used it just as frequently. _She_ was a wonderful book but he hadn't thought much of _Wisdom's Daughter_. That was often the way with sequels. They hadn't got _King Solomon's Mines_ in at the library. John felt disproportionately disappointed. He had always been like that about books, wanting some particular book specially, building on it somehow, thinking of the evening ahead when he would be reading it, and feeling absurdly fed up and resentful if he couldn't get hold of it. When he was younger he would have been prepared to chase from branch to branch in pursuit of it. But not now. Too many things had happened to him for him to get that worked up over a book. John Le Carr�idn't let him down. Both _Smiley's People_ and _The Honourable Schoolboy_ were in. Of course they would be a good deal less easy to read than Rider Haggard. John liked espionage books but he hadn't read many of them. He asked the girl what she could recommend. 'Do you like it all made up or sort of founded on fact?' John had never thought about it like that. 'I mean something like _The Riddle of the Sands_ would be founded on fact while Ian Fleming wouldn't be.' 'I like a bit of realism,' said John and immediately wondered why he had said that because surely it was escape he was seeking? 'This one's non-fiction. _My Silent War_ by Kim Philby. I expect you remember about him going over to Russia.' It was ancient history to her, something the grown-ups talked about when she was a child. John took the book from her. She was smiling at him in a friendly way. He thought, I could ask her to come out with me. I know how it's done. I didn't once, I hadn't a clue, but I do now. You chat for a while and find out what she likes doing, walking, for instance, or seeing films, or going to fairs or botanical gardens (that would be a piece of luck) and you say, We might go for a walk some time or we might take in that film together at the Astoria and if she looks keen you just say, How about tomorrow evening then? I'll call for you, shall I? Her expression was a little puzzled because he was staring at her. Quickly he looked away, turned back to the shelves. He didn't want to go out with her, it would be boring and embarrassing. And he would end up telling her about Jennifer. My wife's former fianc�urned up out of the blue and she went off with him. Poor you, how awful for you. But she would be embarrassed too, not knowing what to say. He sometimes thought he would never be alone with another woman for as long as he lived. The books were heavy but he made a detour to cats' green just the same. A thin kitten, white with tabby patches, was sitting in the grass at the foot of the central pillar. It retreated a little, mewing, when John came up. He didn't dare touch it in case it started him off coughing and sneezing. The message had gone from inside the upright but a strip of tape remained, one end still stuck to the metal. It had been a better day than when he was last here. The clocks would go forward on Saturday night and then you would really feel spring had come. There was already a hint of warmth in the air, what his father would have called a balminess, though that sounded strange to John, as if the weather had gone mad. A blue sky showed between the flocks of cloud and from the end of the alley next to the disused church he saw the glint of water. He had walked down here almost without knowing it. A young woman was pushing a child in a pram in the direction of Albatross Street but otherwise there was no one. She was going John's way and it would have been natural for him to follow her but then he thought, it might scare her to have a man walking behind her. It's a bit rough down here and not another soul about. He turned in the opposite direction, heading straight for the embankment and river walk, and found himself suddenly, almost before he knew it, at the head of the Beckgate Steps where Cherry's body had been found. Immediately it came to him that he had told himself he would know the place by a kind of instinct or intuition, no matter how it had changed. Well, it had changed, it had changed unrecognizably, only the broad flight of ancient steps remaining as they had always been. The red-brick chapel had gone and the ruined maltings been rebuilt, the huddle of Victorian cottages transformed into a wholesale clothes place and the once-derelict pub refurbished and renamed - and he had not known it. But the steps were the same and the remoteness and the quiet, for the wholesaler's was closed for the evening and the pub not yet open. At the foot of the steps, beyond the stone-flagged embankment, the river glittered with innumerable wavelets. A segment of it only could be seen with the further bank beyond, trees on that side and blocks of expensive flats with protuberant balconies on every floor. The sun was shining but no sunlight penetrated to the double flight of shallow dark steps. They were made of some kind of black and grey mottled stone those steps, and with an iron railing on each side, polished to silver by the hands of those who descended. He felt a nervous clutching sensation in the region of his heart. He knew his face had contorted, that he had screwed up his eyes, and he was glad there was no one to see him. It was sixteen years since he had been here. All that time he had lived no more than a mile away but he had never returned to this spot. It was right to do so now, he felt that. He couldn't shy away from it for ever. Slowly, holding on to the gleaming handrail, he made his way down the steps to the bottom of the first flight. For it was on this ten-foot-long break in the staircase or landing, so to speak, not on the steps proper that Cherry had been found. Two weeks afterwards, when the steps were open to the public once more, when the police barriers had been taken away, he had gone there alone to look at the place and imagined how it had been, the body face-downwards, the arms flung out, the legs drawn up towards the red-brick wall. His kind, loving, ugly sister, nineteen years old... John found that he was squatting down, staring at the blackish stones as if he expected still to find there some signs of Cherry's murder. There had been no signs even then. And in two of the intervening winters, before they built the weir, the river rose and water came up the Beckgate Steps as far as the half-way mark. He jumped up and ran down the steps to the river walk, swinging his bag full of books. After a few moments he was aware of relief. It had been right to do that, not to go on shunning the place. Going there and looking at it provided a kind of cleansing. Were there other areas in his life, his past, that would benefit from the same treatment? Jennifer, of course, he was going to have to look at all that and decide what he must do. Not give up, not take that defeatist line, but make up his mind how he was going to get her back. The boldness of this made him shiver as he walked along, though the sun was quite warm and there was scarcely a breath of wind. Her departure had been such a blow - like the physical stroke his father had had, only this was a stroke of the mind - coming as it did when he believed everything was working out for the two of them, just when he was really learning about love-making, when they were learning together how to please each other. John's own thoughts embarrassed him and he would have shirked them but he forced himself to keep on the same tack. It was partly humiliation, he supposed, that had made him sink under the blow, feel that his life was ruined and there was no hope. All he ever did about it was go and stand outside her house and look and wait and wonder if he would catch a glimpse of her. He had never till now considered it might be possible to re-make his marriage. Instead he had looked for external consolation - not what most men would mean by that, some other woman, but in the mystery of cats' green and the messages of a mini-Mafia. In the light of this, it was extraordinary to find the letter waiting for him on the doormat when he entered his house. The name and address were typewritten and it had come through the post. At first he thought it was an estimate from the builder he had asked to renew the guttering on the rear of the house and he did not open it until he had made himself a cup of tea and opened a can of ravioli for his supper. The letter was typewritten too. It started Dear John. He knew what a 'Dear John' letter was but there hadn't been one waiting for him when she left. Face to face she had told him, she had been honest and brave. She had talked to him and told him everything. He began to read: 'Dear John...' and thought that this was the first letter she had ever written to him. They had been married for two years but she had never had occasion to write to him. That came only - ironically - when they were apart and their marriage apparently over. It hurt him that she had typed it, though he remembered her handwriting was more or less indecipherable. If he hadn't seen letters of hers before at least he had seen notes to tradesmen.

Dear John,

I don't know if you will be surprised to get a letter from me. I saw you outside this house back in January and, incidentally, Peter saw you too. It would have been civilised to invite you in, I know that, and we did discuss it but by the time I came to the front door you had gone. John, I think we ought to meet and have a talk. I expect you hate me and think I treated you badly. You would feel more kindly towards me perhaps if you knew how terribly guilty I have felt all these months. It's no use saying that I did warn you, I did say that if Peter ever came back and wanted me I would go to him. Obviously this isn't the sort of thing one should say when one is married. And I'll admit now that it was a stupid and unkind thing to say. I also seem to remember saying that when you get married in a Registrar's Office as we did you don't actually have to make any vows. I'd like to apologise here and now if I made you unhappy saying those things. So can we meet? Emotions surely won't run so high as they did when we talked last time. I am no longer on the crest of a wave and I expect - I'm afraid, oddly enough - you no longer feel about me the way you once did. There are many kinds of love and I would like to think we can still be fond of one another, that we can pick up the pieces and each of us start again. I'd rather you didn't phone me. I'll tell you what I'd like us to do. Not for you to come here or me to go to you but for us to meet in Hartlands Gardens, have tea there perhaps and maybe go for a walk. You took me there in April once and I remember you said it was a good time when the narcissi are out. So if you agree, what about next Saturday, i.e. April 2nd? Peter will be out that afternoon. I will be at Hartlands Gardens in the tea place, the cafeteria, at three. Will that be all right? I don't know how to sign this really.

Yours affectionately, Jennifer

He read it several times, his heart behaving oddly at first, beating hard and irregularly, it seemed, then as he took deep breaths, he gradually accustomed himself to what was in front of him, a letter from Jennifer, a letter from his wife. She had been going to invite him in, she wanted to see him. If he hadn't been such a fool and rushed away he would have talked to her, sat with her... Of course Peter Moran would have been there too. His eye once more followed the lines of typing down the page. She wanted to see him alone. She made a point of saying she wanted to see him when Peter Moran was out. Did that mean she wanted to meet him without Peter knowing? It must do. John didn't keep much liquor in the house. He wasn't much of a drinker and Jennifer hadn't been much of a drinker, though both of them would have a beer in a pub or a sherry before dinner in a restaurant. But he always kept a bottle of brandy and for that old clich�eason, medicinal purposes. He kept the brandy in the cabinet just as he kept aspirins in the medicine chest. The bottle was three-quarters full. John poured a single measure into an ordinary water glass and drank it down. It made him choke a bit as well as steadying him. His tea had got cold. He poured it down the sink. It was quite plain that, wasn't it, about picking up the pieces and starting again? Surely she was saying that after what had happened they could never feel quite the same about each other, the starry-eyedness would be gone, but there were many kinds of love, the quiet mature sort which might be as good as passion - which might be better in the long run. I dare not think of it like that, he thought, I dare not build on it. She says she's sure I've ceased to care for her, she's reminding me how she always threatened to return to Peter Moran if he turned up. And that nonsense about not making vows. I didn't need to make vows. I won't think about it. I'll go to Hartlands Gardens, of course I will, but I won't think about it between now and then. The unaccustomed brandy affected him, making his hands unsteady. He spilt the tomato sauce from the ravioli can on to the counter and he burned the toast. He wasn't hungry anyway. The trouble was he couldn't distract his mind from her letter. Why had she said not to phone her? Because she didn't want Peter to answer the phone or even to overhear what was said? It could only mean one thing: that she wanted to come back to him but was hedging her bets. She wanted to make sure she could come back to him before separating herself from Peter. John tried to think of the weekend ahead. He tried to think of Cherry, to remember her, and of Mark who had been engaged to her. It was time he saw old Mark, someone had told him he had moved back here. Why not find out where Mark lived and suggest they meet for a drink? He could go round to Cohn's tomorrow and maybe take in a visit to his aunt's, have Sunday lunch there. He stood by the window, looking out into the street he had looked onto since he was a small child. It was hard for him to imagine any other outlook from a window where one lived, anything but the pairs of houses opposite, the monkey puzzle pine in front of the fourth house on the left that he had seen planted when he was eight and which was now a large, ugly, ridiculous but somehow endearing tree. The pink prunus was shedding its petals and they lay like rosy snow, half-covering the scillas. She remembered about the narcissi in Hartlands Gardens and remembered he had first taken her there in April. She must mean this projected meeting as a reunion... Stop thinking about it, he said fiercely and aloud. On the seat of the armchair in the bay he had dropped the string bag full of books as, letter in hand, he had walked first of all into this room. The two Le Carr� the Philby book, a novel by Disraeli he didn't think he would get round to reading, Rider Haggard's _Allan's Wife_ as a substitute for the King Solomon's Mines that wasn't in. John realised that these days before he started on a book he always subjected the first and last lines to the code test. This got to mean he read the last line but he had never been one of those readers who cares about a surprise ending. He tested the six code words in the first message against the first lines of The Honourable Schoolboy. Nothing, the merest nonsense. There are literally millions of books they could have used, he told himself. You'll never find the right one.

5

Mungo sat up in his room under the eaves looking at a document headed FTELO - For the Eyes of Leviathan Only. Between the end of last year's spring term and the beginning of this one they had secured: advance information on three planning applications, discovered four instances of quite amazing police leaks, recovered fifteen 'borrowed' books, abstracted any number of architects' plans, rearranged restaurant bookings, secured invitations to a number of official functions, and more or less reorganised to suit their own purposes the plans for the city's annual festival of arts. Not to mention all kinds of rather more frivolous exercises. Since then though, during the past term, things had proceeded less satisfactorily. Undisputed success was a thing of the past. He was eating dry-roasted peanuts, having an idea they were better for him than chocolate. Nothing gave him spots or did anything to change his extreme gauntness but he sometimes wondered if it was all this eating between meals that helped him to grow so tall. He had some yoghurt-coated hazelnuts as well but these he was saving until after he came back. From his window he could make out the roof of his father's surgery building. His mother was an anaesthetist at Hartland Mount Hospital, not a GP, though she sometimes helped out when one of the partners was sick or on holiday. There were three doctors in the practice besides Fergus Cameron. They worked from a listed building, one of the oldest in the city, that Mungo's father had bought nearly twenty years before and now wanted to extend. He wanted to build a new waiting room and consulting rooms on to the back. A group from the city planning committee had already been to view the premises. If they agreed to building, listed building consent would almost certainly be given. Their decision depended almost exclusively on the advice given them by the city planning officer, a man called Blake, who was in some way related to Ivan Stern. 'They don't know the meaning of speed,' Fergus Cameron had said. The family were all at lunch, Fergus and Lucy, Angus, Mungo, and Ian just home from medical school for the Easter break. 'Those representatives of the planning committee came to see the place two days after the monthly meeting. Which means we have twenty-four days to wait for a decision. And in the meantime I could lose that other property.' The other property was a much more modern building at the western end of Ruxeter Road. Fergus could get it comparatively cheaply if he bought it now but would very likely lose it if he waited three weeks. And suppose the planning committee's decision went against him? 'There's absolutely nothing to be done, darling,' said Lucy, eating salad with a fork and reading the Lancet. She was a large placid woman of perfectly even temper who had sat - and passed - her examination for membership of the Royal College of Physicians when nine months pregnant, answered the final question, laid down her pen and gone into labour. Ian was born five hours later. She turned the page. 'It's all in the lap of the gods.' Mungo wasn't too sure of this. It might be in his lap. That was why he had gone straight upstairs really, apart from taking comfort from the 'most secret' document. Today was 25th March. Only six more days' use to be got out of the current code, after which he'd have to start a new one. Might use Stern's Childers which would be rather amusing. But now for his father's planning application. The difficulty wouldn't so much be in acquiring the advance information as in convincing his father that the advance information he had was accurate. Deal with that when the time comes, thought Mungo. He'd use the drop under the flyover. Instructions alone wouldn't be sufficient, there would have to be a meeting. In the safe house possibly and it shouldn't be postponed. Monday at the latest. He looked about him but couldn't see the book anywhere. That Ian, he thought. The minute he's home he's on the nick. Nothing's sacred. The first thing he heard when he opened the door was a girl laughing. Ian's girlfriend Gail that would be. Mungo went downstairs and saw them all in Angus's room, Angus showing off the computer, Gail pressing one of the keys and making a picture of an explosion come up with 'ka-boom' printed in the middle of it. 'You've got my Albeury,' Mungo said. Ian grinned at him. 'Have a heart. I've nothing to read.' 'You can't have that. Not till next Thursday anyway. You can have the latest Yugall if you like.' 'That's very handsome of you, Bean.' Mungo wondered why Angus was looking at him like that, half-smiling and yet as if he were somehow sorry for him. He didn't like it much and it made him feel a certain regret that he was too old to go and trip his brother up and stick his tongue out at him.

6

Fergus Cameron was as nervous as his wife was placid. He worried about everything. He worried about his wife and his sons and his home and about money, though as he very well knew none of these people or these matters afforded genuine cause for anxiety. Not of the stuff of which general practitioners are ideally made, he was nevertheless enormously popular with his patients. There was nothing godlike about him. When they told him they were worried or depressed he said he understood and he commiserated with them. They could tell he was sincere. When they came to him worried that they might have cancer or muscular dystrophy or heart disease he said that he worried about those things too, even though he had no more cause than they. Because he did not know he had anything to feel superior about, he chatted to them as might their next-door neighbours and as often as not told them of his own worries. As a physician he was no better and no worse than the other doctors in the practice and less well-qualified than his own wife, but he was much better liked than any of them. It was on account of his pleasing personality and reputation for being easy to get on with that the City Board of General Practitioners had appointed him their representative on a particularly awkward mission. This was to call on an eighty-two-year-old woman who still had a medical practice and still saw patients and explain to her in the gentlest and most tactful way that it was time she retired. Old Dr Palmer had been making mistakes in prescriptions which, though no harm had yet been done, might one day result in disaster. She lived in one of the north-eastern suburbs, three or four miles away. Fergus had been worrying about this visit and what he would say to her, not just for the whole of Saturday but Thursday and Friday as well. In the event - as was so often the case in the event - things turned out perfectly satisfactorily and with the minimum of pain. Almost the first thing Dr Palmer said was that she was glad to have an opportunity to talk to him alone because she was thinking of retiring and would like to hear his views. Driving home again, one anxiety removed, instead of relaxing, Fergus perforce allowed the worry which the Dr Palmer business had temporarily displaced to return. What was he going to do about the surgery extension? If the city council's planning committee allowed the extension there was no problem but he could not know for the next three weeks whether permission would be granted. In the meantime a building that had been specifically constructed as a private clinic had come on to the market. In a moment or two he would pass it, it was up here on Ruxeter Road. The asking price was seventy thousand pounds - rather less than the extensions were going to cost. He would have to take out a mortgage anyway, there was no question of anything else. His boys were at present costing him and Lucy the maximum, with Ian at university and Angus and Mungo both at their public school. And he would prefer to keep the beautiful old building in which the practice was currently housed. The top floor, for instance, would one day make an excellent flat if any of the boys should want it. While he waited for planning permission it was most likely that the clinic building would be sold to someone else. The estate agent had told him as much. He was passing it now, and stopping at a red light, turned to look at it. That stark sixties architecture, that box construction and plate-glass windows, weren't to his taste but how much did his taste matter? It might so easily happen that planning permission was refused and this building simultaneously lost to him. The lights changed. It was as Fergus was moving off that he caught sight of his son Mungo walking along the opposite pavement in the direction of a row of derelict houses, condemned to demolition and boarded up, and a public house called the Gander. Since Mungo could scarcely have any business at the condemned houses he must be going to the pub. Because of his great height he could easily pass for four years older than he was. Fergus very much disliked the thought of his youngest going into pubs at the age of fourteen but he didn't know what he could do about it. He drove on with a fresh worry in reserve. On one side of the wide road were row upon row of little poky shops, opposite them a bingo hall and the old Fontaine Cinema. All those houses awaiting demolition didn't improve matters. But when they were demolished and new blocks erected, what then? He could offer for that clinic building and proceed with negotiations while he was waiting to hear if Planning permission had been granted. And then, if he got his Permission, withdraw from the purchase. It would be dishonourable and underhand and Fergus knew he couldn't do it. But suppose he lost both? What would happen then was that he would have to look around for other premises and whatever they were, they would cost him a hundred thousand pounds, not seventy. He put the car away in the garage at the bottom of the garden, a converted coachhouse. The Cameron garden was a pleasing wilderness of old pear trees and lilac bushes growing out of shaggy grass. Or Lucy said it was pleasing and the boys used to play in it when they were younger. Fergus would have liked a pretty garden with flowerbeds and rose bushes like his grandmother had had in Oban, but he wouldn't have liked to do the gardening, as Lucy pointed out. She was lying in an armchair with her feet up. Ian and Gail sat on the sofa, holding hands and yelling with laughter at _Some Like It Hot_ on television. 'How did it go, darling?' said Lucy in her sleepy, smiling way. 'OK. Fine. Much better than I thought.' 'Things are always much better than you think.' Fergus smiled rather sadly. 'If life has taught me anything it's that while most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.' If Gail hadn't been there he would have said something about Mungo. He went downstairs to get himself a drink. Fergus usually made himself a cup of cocoa in the evenings and in the mornings too sometimes. He made it with whole, full-cream milk and real cocoa - not drinking chocolate - and white granulated sugar, first mixing cocoa, sugar and a little of the milk to a paste in the mug, then pouring on the milk at the zenith of its boiling. His wife and children laughed at this and always refused offers of his cocoa, which Fergus had never understood: why it should be funny, why there was apparently something intrinsically funny in the very idea of cocoa, when in fact it was the most delicious drink he had ever tasted. He found his son Angus in the kitchen, with a slice of cold pizza in one hand and a blue cardboard box, something to do with the computer, in the other. Since he and Lucy had given Angus that computer for his birthday he had been obsessed by it. 'I was looking for somewhere to keep the floppy discs.' 'Why can't you keep them in your room?' said Fergus, opening a new tin of cocoa. 'When I've saved a file to archives I don't want the floppy discs in the same area as the hard disc, do I? I mean suppose there was a fire in my room?' Fergus didn't know what he was talking about. For form's sake, he offered cocoa. Angus shook his head abstractedly, climbed up on to a stool and put the box on the top shelf of a cupboard, up among the wine-making equipment no one had used for ten years. 'Angus, do you think Mungo goes to pubs?' 'Mungo? What would he do that for? He wouldn't even have a glass of wine at my party.' 'I thought I saw him going into a pub.' 'Unless maybe he's a secret drinker.' Fergus's children were never much comfort to him. They seldom allayed his fears. 'Where was this pub then?' 'Ruxeter Road, near where all those houses are going to be pulled down. I shouldn't talk to you about him. It's not fair on you or him. I daresay he was just walking home, only it was a funny way for him to be going.' 'I wouldn't worry if I were you, Dad,' said Angus. This was the sort of thing people always said to Fergus. He knew they wouldn't worry, that wasn't the problem. He took his mug of cocoa back upstairs.

Angus stood eating his pizza. It was quite clear to him where Mungo had been going, to the safe house which was one of the middle ones in the condemned row between the Gander and Collingbourne Road. He would have been meeting someone there or even hiding someone there from Stern, would most probably be there now. And Angus realised that he too worried about Mungo, not like his father did, not jumping to crazy conclusions about Mungo's slinking off for illicit pints or gin and tonics, but about Mungo's being so - well, fixated on Spookside. Did he ever think of anything else? Didn't his school work suffer? He was probably a bit young to be thinking about girls, Angus could understand that, but did he have ordinary friends? Did he have any other interests at all? This mantle that had fallen upon Mungo's shoulders was his own. And 'fallen' was the wrong word anyway, for he had taken it off himself and placed it over Mungo. He had taught Mungo everything he knew, had inculcated in Mungo a passion for espionage which he himself no longer shared. At fifteen he had grown out of Spookside. Surely the same would happen to Mungo, surely there would soon be signs of weariness... Angus could remember it all very well. Sometimes, now he had the computer, he thought of putting it on that and keeping a record, though he didn't know for what purpose. For his own children, if he ever had any? For some sort of future social study? The beginning of it all. Its inception. "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" - Angus had read that under the picture on the Lyle's Golden Syrup tin but apparently it came from the Bible. He thought it expressed what had happened with him and Guy Parker and Spookside, as someone had christened it. As Guy had christened it. And now it was a world away, down there in his childhood when he had had other priorities and other needs. He had been thirteen and Guy Parker had been thirteen too, a month or two older. They had known each other all their lives, been friends since, according to their mothers, those mothers met at the baby clinic. And Mrs Parker used to mind him and Ian while his own mother was working at the hospital. Guy and he went to prep school together, Hintall's, where Ian had been and Mungo was then in the second form. Candidates usually sit the Public Schools Entrance in June. The examination is the same for all schools within the Head-masters' Conference but papers are marked and results judged at the particular school of the candidate's, or more probably his parents', choice. There was no question but that Angus would go on to Rossingham. His father had gone there and Ian was there. And Guy Parker was also going to Rossingham, it was an understood thing that they would be attending the same public school, and no one, as far as Angus knew, had ever disputed this. Later, in all fairness though, he couldn't have categorically stated that Guy had actually told him so. The results came and Angus was in, which was no great surprise to anyone. It was holiday time and the Camerons were all off to their annual fortnight in Corfu, so he had no opportunity of seeing Guy Parker until after they got back. Besides, he hadn't felt any pressing need to see Guy. He knew they would both be going to Rossingham in a month's time and they'd be bound to meet a couple of times before that. He went round to the Parkers' because Mrs Parker phoned up and asked him and Mungo to lunch on one of the days both his parents were working at the same time. Mungo was only a little kid of ten then and it was always a bit of a problem getting him looked after in the holidays. When he got there Angus realised he had never actually asked Guy if he had passed that exam, though he was bound to have done. It was a well-known fact that you had to be quite dim not to pass and Guy was very bright. They were alone together in the place the Parkers called the playroom, having exiled poor old Bean to the kitchen with Mrs Parker and Guy's little sister. 'Have you got all your gear yet?' Angus asked. 'I reckon those hats are the end, the pits. We had to go to London to get mine. Tuckers don't stock them any more.' Had Guy looked embarrassed or ashamed? If he had Angus hadn't noticed, but perhaps he hadn't. For a moment or two he didn't say anything, then: 'I don't have to have a hat.' 'Yes, you do. It's on the list.' 'They don't wear hats at Utting.' Angus didn't have to ask him to elucidate. He knew at once. Guy had the grace to look abashed. They were silent. It was a long awkward unpleasant silence. And in those minutes, while Guy took from his bookshelves the paperback novel of espionage he was going to lend Angus, while they descended the stairs together in response to Mrs Parker's shout of 'Lunch!', Angus felt the first real pain of his life. Or he thought of it that way; perhaps it wasn't. But no one had ever done anything like that to him before, no one had ever deceived him. Going to schools like Hintall's was supposed to start you off on the stiff upper lip thing. He could remember his Scottish grandfather calling it that. He hadn't had much faith in it himself but perhaps it was true. At any rate he was able to conceal his feelings and eat Mrs Parker's lunch - he even remembered what it was, a very good lunch too, steak and kidney pie, scalloped potatoes, fresh garden peas, black-currant shortcake and cream - and to keep his cool. After lunch Guy explained. He didn't want to go to Rossingham. It was conventional, reactionary and old-fashioned. 'I mean, look at that hat thing.' 'What hat thing?' 'Well, having to wear a bloody straw boater. Who needs it?' Utting was progressive. They took girls in at all levels. They did a Russian course. They had an amazing new technology department. You could play polo if you wanted or learn to fly a helicopter. 'Are you kidding?' said Angus. 'Well, they've definitely got a helicopter. And an ice rink. And it's all first names and everyone gets to have a bedroom of their own.' Angus took his pain home with him. He thought it was only being deceived that he minded but he found he also minded the loss of Guy. He would not see Guy again until half-term and probably not then, for the half-term holidays of Rossingham and Utting would not necessarily coincide. Three months, which was the length of a term, is a very long time when you are thirteen years old. Guy ought to have told him, at least when they sat the exam if not before, that he planned on going to a different school. But this dislike of being deceived was as nothing compared to their separation. People said of their family that Ian and Mungo were like their father, tall and skinny and fidgety, while he was like their mother, not only in physical appearance but in temperament too. He was supposed to be placid. Angus did not think anyone was ever very much like anyone else. He wasn't placid but he was good at not showing his feelings. No one suspected at home that he was unhappy, that he carried Guy's betrayal around with him as the boy in the fable carried the fox that gnawed at his insides. His dismay turned to anger. He had borrowed the Yugall paperback from Guy - it was Mole Run - but when he had finished it, instead of taking it round to the Parkers' house he got Mungo to put it through the letter box when he was passing on his way to his fencing class. A couple of days after that the Rossingham autumn term started. Angus missed Guy very much. New school was strange anyway, and although the old fagging system had been abolished and things were quite civilised compared to in his father's day, although bullying had virtually gone, there was still bewilderment to contend with and mystifying rules. He told himself he hated Guy and was glad to see the back of him. Soon he made a couple of friends, one of them being Bruce Reynolds, who he supposed he could say was now his closest friend. Half-term passed without occasion to go near the Parkers but when the Christmas holidays came, a few days after Rossingham broke up, Guy phoned. His mother took the call. He heard her speak Guy's name and then he went and hid in the top-floor lavatory, not answering when she called him. He knew she would tell Guy he would call him back, which in fact she had done. Angus thought he and his brothers were lucky to have a mother who never fussed, who wouldn't dream of asking such searching questions as where had he got to and what was he up to and why hadn't he answered when she called him. On the other hand he knew better than to ask her to tell lies for him over the phone or anywhere else. She would never have stood for that. He didn't call Guy back. The Parkers always went away for Christmas, to Mrs Parker's sister in Devon or Mr Parker's Sister in France, and by the time they got back the new term would have started. By Christmas Eve he was rather regretting he hadn't called Guy back. He was missing him again. Among his Christmas presents was the new Yugall novel. Guy and he were crazy about espionage fiction and they loved all the great masters of the genre but their current favourite was Yves Yugall, whom for a while they preferred even over Len Deighton, though it was a close-run thing. Yves Yugall had written about twenty books by that time and he and Guy had read them all, Mole Run being the latest. The latest in paperback, that is, for they couldn't afford to buy hardcovers. Of course the books always came out in hardcover about a year before the paperback appeared but they just had to wait unless they could get them out of the library. The new one, Cat Walk - Yugall always had the name of an animal in his titles - was from his mother and father along with the track suit he had asked for and the really good ballpoint pen they thought he ought to have. It was a brand new hardcover, seven pounds ninety-five and with an artist's impression of the Brandenburger Tor on the jacket. Angus read it at a sitting, or a lying really. He read it in bed on Christmas night, staying awake till three to do so. When he had finished it he thought, I've read it and he hasn't. Too bad. If we were still friends I'd have passed it on to him the moment I finished it. Probably what he would have done was to send Guy a coded message - a note by hand of Mungo or some little pal of his - letting him know he had the book and to come and get it. Guy would have had to break the code and decipher the message. But they were good at that. It had really started because their parents all made a fuss about the amount they used the phone and what it cost. Cat Walk went back to school with Angus. Bruce wasn't interested, he didn't want to read it. Angus started thinking a lot about Guy and one night he dreamed about him. He was at Utting, visiting Guy, and it was an amazing place with bedrooms like in an hotel with en suite bathrooms, and an ice rink and saunas and one helicopter to every ten boys, flying lessons being a weekly event. Guy had his own built-in cupboards in his room and a chest of drawers and two bedside cabinets instead of the drawer under his bunk and narrow hanging cupboard which was the lot of boarders at Rossingham. When Angus woke up he thought that if the dream had gone on he would have secretly put Cat Walk into the top drawer of the chest in Guy's room for Guy to find when next he opened it to take out a pair of socks. It was funny how the idea of doing this obsessed him. If he wanted to make things up with Guy there was no reason why he shouldn't have sent him the book in a parcel or, if that was rather costly, given him the book at half-term. This term their breaks coincided, being the middle week of February. Angus didn't really want to wait that long. He wanted to get the book to Guy and somehow to get it to him in a mysterious way. Bruce had a cousin in the preparatory department at Utting, the junior school. When Bruce's relations came up one Sunday to take him out to tea Angus had the book ready wrapped up with a note to the eleven-year-old inside plus a fifty pence piece. Would they please pass this on to their son when he came home next weekend? The juniors went home most weekends though seniors never did unless, for instance, one's grandfather had a ninetieth birthday or one's sister got married or something. The note said to get the book secretly into the drawer under Guy Parker's bunk in the study Guy shared with nine others - for this was the reality even at Utting. Bruce's cousin had told him all about it. Weeks went by and Angus heard nothing. For all he knew the cousin might have kept the fifty pee and dropped Cat Walk into his study wastepaper basket, if little ones like that had studies. On the other hand, things were much freer and easier at Utting than at Rossingham and the senior houses were very likely not out of bounds to juniors. It might be that the cousin had to do no more than walk openly from Andrade House where he lived into Fleming House which was Guy's house, and up the stairs. He could do it during prep, for Angus had found out that the Lower Fourth at Utting did their prep in the library, not in their studies. The Camerons took the local daily paper as well as The Times. It had a circulation not only in the city but across the whole county. That year 14 February fell on a Monday, the first day of Angus's and Ian's half-term holiday. They had come home the evening before, having been fetched by their mother. Ian got up early on the Monday and rushed downstairs to get the Free Press. Angus found him sitting at the kitchen table reading page seven which, on 14 February, was devoted entirely to St Valentine's Day messages. Looking over his shoulder, Angus read: 'Cameron, I. M., Violets are blue, My Valentine is you. Lorna.' He didn't think much of that. Ian looked up at him. 'There's one for you.' 'There can't be.' 'No kidding. You're Cameron, Angus H., aren't you?' 'There must be lots,' said Angus. 'I doubt it. ' Ian pointed out the piece he had himself inserted: 'Markham, Lorna: I am, you are, love is. I. M. C.' He seemed proud of it. Angus looked back at the left-hand column where his own name was. 'Someone must fancy you,' said Ian. 'D'you know who it is?' 'Haven't the foggiest.' '"Cameron, Angus H.,"' Angus read, '"APTHQ KQUCC BEX UDNQ BT DTFITW QEAK UW ODKSDB STNQPT."' It wasn't signed, or if it was the signature was incorporated in the code. Angus knew who it was, of course. He felt happy. Last year he remembered telling Guy that Ian's girlfriend Lorna had put a Valentine's message in the paper and the two of them had teased Ian who at first had tried to pretend the message wasn't for him. Guy must have thought of that when he was wondering how to thank him, Angus, for the loan of the book in suitably mystifying fashion. Mystifying it was, though. No doubt Guy had used a line from a book to base his code on. That was what they had always done. Angus spent most of the day trying the code on the first lines of all the works he possessed by their favourite authors. It would be a novel of espionage, he was sure of that, and very possibly a novel by Yves Yugall. Angus tried the code on the first lines of Scorpion Road, Tiger Toll, Monkey Wrench, Tarantula Town and Wasp Sting. Surely Guy wouldn't have used a line from the middle of the book, would he? After all, he would want his code to be deciphered. He would want to give Angus a hard time of it but he would want his code deciphered in the end. Another thing to be taken into consideration was that Guy would only have a limited number of books - that is, works of fiction - with him at Utting. And he must have composed the message at Utting, even though he would be at home now. Angus didn't know about Utting, but at Rossingham, what with sports and clubs and flexi-prep and the Combined Cadet Force, there wasn't much time for reading apart from required prep reading and one's housemaster didn't like one to stuff one's drawer with books. What books would Guy have with him? Maybe a school set book? Angus, rather dubiously, tried the code on the first lines of Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, and though it seemed a bit way out, Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin. Nothing worked. He pored over the code, going through books all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday, and on Wednesday evening they all went over to some friends of his parents for supper. The friend had two Siamese cats, one of which had injured its leg falling out of a tree. 'Look at the way that cat walks,' she said. 'I'll have to take her to the vet. I thought she'd be OK but she's going to have to have that leg seen to.' Cat Walk, thought Angus. Why didn't I think of that one before? That was one book I knew for certain he had at Utting. That's the book he used. The ridiculous thing was that Angus himself no longer had a copy of it, for he had sent his copy to Guy. He couldn't buy another, it wouldn't appear in paperback for nearly a year, and there would be a long waiting list at the library for the hardcover, he knew that from past experience. Next morning he went down to Hatchard's, a branch of which had just opened in Edge Street. Cat Walk was still on the best-seller list and copies of it were prominently displayed. Angus picked one up and opened it. As soon as he had tried the first few letters of the coded message against the first line, he knew he had found the right book. Shop assistants looked suspiciously at Angus. He was afraid that one of them, a thin cross-looking girl, was going to come up to him and tell him he wasn't supposed to read the books without buying them first. But nothing happened. He deciphered the message without having to write it down. He kept it all in his head. Guy had written: 'Great stuff. Why don't we keep this up? Moscow Centre.' That was the signature, Moscow Centre. And somehow, standing there in the Broad Street Hatchard's, Angus had known exactly what Guy had meant. He wanted to start a spy network. They had talked about doing that in the past. They had wondered if they could set up a sort of MI5 or SIS (or CIA) and somehow use it. But they had never quite been able to decide what they would use it for. And then of course they had nothing to use it against. They were together, they were at the same school. But now they found themselves on opposing sides. Literally so, for like the West and the Soviets they were divided by a barrier which in fact separated east from west, in their case the river that split the city. Utting was on its eastern outskirts in what had once been the village of Utting. Rossingham, on the other hand, lay some twenty miles to the west in (according to the school prospectus) some of the most beautiful arable land in England. They were apart in a not dissimilar way from that in which the Western and Eastern blocs on an international level were apart. Angus wanted very much to reply to Guy but he knew he mustn't. Contact had been made and now there must be no more. In falling in with Guy's suggestion, Angus realised something else: that in gaining Spookside (the name was invented two days afterwards) he would lose Guy. Oh, they would have the game, the network, the intrigue, the codes, the trappings of the game, but they would never again meet as they had once done. They would meet only as the heads of the SIS and the KGB, say, might meet, at some diplomatic party in Vienna. Their friendship as such would be over. The attractions of Spookside were such, though, as to make Angus discount this. And if he now regretted it, it was too late, for the game was over for him and he had gone his way and Guy his and they never saw each other except by chance. If they met in the street they would acknowledge each other with a raised arm and a shout of hi. But at the time this prospect, if prospect it was, seemed unimportant. Spookside was all. His answer to Guy was to recruit two field agents from his own house at Rossingham, one of whom had a cousin at Utting. The cousin admitted that Guy had already tried to enrol him but he fancied working for Western intelligence. The first thing Angus got him to do was get the book Cat Walk back from Guy. That was the signal really that things had started. Guy changed the code from the day he lost the book. And he started using a drop actually inside the grounds at Utting. For a while they only did joke things, to test themselves, to see if they could do them. Things like abstracting each other's possessions. Guy's second-in-command had an electric toothbrush which he kept with him in Oppenheimer House. He was known as the Controller of the Chamney Desk, Chamney being the next village to Utting, so that it was something of a triumph when one of his best officers managed to get hold of it and bring it over without detection. Soon after that the officer turned out to be a double agent. But by then they had moved on to higher, more involved and serious things. There were the defectors, for instance, and the excitement of the debriefing sessions. But the first really important thing they did was to get hold of the plans for the block of flats it was proposed to build next door to Bruce Reynolds's parents' house. The architect happened to be Ivan Stern's mother's best friend's husband. They used the best officer for that and somehow he infiltrated the architect's studio on a visit to the house with Stern and Stern's parents. While the others were in the garden eating food barbecued by the architect he took the top sheet of the plans, the one with the general outlay on and the building heights and so on, round the corner to the late-night instant print place and photocopied it. This was a daring coup. But the agent was a sort of genius, Angus (or Chimera) sometimes thought, and it was a bitter blow to him when he found out he was working for Guy at the same time. Guy learnt all about the plans coup before the photocopy was on Bruce Reynolds's father's breakfast table, placed there by Bruce in a blank envelope with no covering letter. Mr Reynolds had actually believed in the validity of those plans and had acted accordingly. He thought the envelope had come from a town councillor known to be crooked. Instead of selling his house as he had planned to do should the block of flats have turned out to be as large and tall as he had feared, he withdrew it from the market and set about building the extension which would provide an indoor swimming pool and double-size bedroom for Bruce. That was the kind of thing they did. Better things and worse. Pointless things and absurd things too and sometimes dangerous things. Until one day, in the summer holidays just before he was sixteen, when he was in the Fifth and O-Levels were coming up the following year, Angus woke up in the morning, remembered what he had to do first thing, go down to the safe house and begin the de-briefing of the latest defector, and thought Oh God, what a drag, do I have to...?

7

'They are just like schoolboys,' Fergus said, turning off the television. 'Like so many schoolchildren playing games.' The main item on the early evening news had been an account of the latest spy trial currently taking place in the United States. Mungo grinned to himself. It was not the first time he had heard this comment from his father and it never failed to afford him private amusement. Not quite private, in fact, for once or twice he had caught Angus's eye. Now his father said, 'It must be the game element that keeps it all going. No rational person can see any sense in it. It's of no positive benefit to the world. Rather the reverse. I sometimes think it's actively dangerous. I mean, without this insanity would we even have the high level of tension that exists between East and West?' 'Probably not, darling,' said Lucy. Mungo excused himself. They had been eating one of Lucy's junk-food - what she called her scratch-as-scratch-can - teas: baps and mustard pickles and German sausage out of packets, all sitting in armchairs up in the den. Only Lucy had the sofa. A woman of her size needed exclusive possession of the sofa, she said. There had been pineapple juice to drink and a bottle of white wine. Mungo couldn't understand why his father offered him a glass of wine and gave him such a searching look when he refused it. He always did refuse it, after all. In the next hour or so he had to get down to the flyover drop and see if there was anything for him. He was expecting to hear from his agent Nicholas Ralston (or Unicorn) that he had solved the problem, that he had found a way of eliciting from Blake his decision over the surgery planning permission. And if Unicorn's efforts failed, he was keeping Charles Mabledene (or Dragon) in reserve. Dragon, Mungo thought, was by far his best agent, the best agent he had ever had, better than any of Stern's Stars. Charles Mabledene had been his first defector, come over to him before he had assumed the headship of London Central, when he was still Angus's right-hand man. It was in the summer term, when Angus was thinking of giving up, was schooling Mungo to take his place, only no one knew that, it was still a dead secret between them. Mungo had been up in his study, doing flexi-prep, and Angus was still in town, according to his entry in the house book. It was policy at Rossingham to put brothers in the same house unless they or their parents specifically asked for this not to be done. The O'Neills, for instance, had requested that Keith and Graham be kept apart on account of Graham being so much brighter. But when Mungo started at Rossingham he was put into Pitt with Angus. Ian had left by then but he too had been in Pitt, though Fergus all those years before had for some reason been in Gladstone. There was a phone in the house common room. There was a television set too which you were at liberty to watch once your prep was done. But use of the phone was very much restricted. Once you were in the Sixth Form you could do practically anything you wanted anyway, or things were a whole lot less constrained, but even then you weren't supposed to receive calls on that phone. It was strictly for making essential outgoing calls, such as if one of your parents was ill or you had to cancel their weekend visit to you, something like that. And it was a pay phone too which made it unlikely it would be used unnecessarily. To the outside world the number of that phone was unknown. It appeared in no directory. Even parents didn't know it. If they needed to phone up and enquire about something they were supposed to call the headmaster or one's housemaster on the private phone in his flat. Angus told Mungo afterwards that in all his three years at Rossingham in Pitt House he had never heard that phone ring or been told that it had rung. And there was Mungo, on that evening in June last year, sitting up in his study doing his biology with his best friend and second-in-command Graham O'Neill (or Medusa) sitting beside him doing his history, when he heard a bell ring downstairs. They didn't know what it was, they thought it must have been Mr Lindsay's phone ringing in the flat, that maybe he or Mrs Lindsay had left the door open. It was someone he didn't know all that well, not one of his agents, who came up to tell him the call was for him. Mungo thought someone must be ill, even dying, for his people actually to phone him at school. He got up quickly, starting in the direction of the housemaster's flat. A shrill whisper: 'The phone in the common room!' 'I don't believe it.' The whisperer shrugged. 'Who is it, for God's sake?' Mungo said. 'They wouldn't say. They sounded scared shitless.' Half a dozen men were sitting round the TV but they weren't looking at it. They were all looking at the receiver of the phone, lying there resting on the pay box. When it rang it must have shaken them more than the fire bell would have, Mungo thought. He'd never forget picking up that receiver, quite mystified, and a squeaky kid's voice that hadn't even started breaking said: 'I'm called Charles Mabledene. I want to come over.' 'You what?' Mungo wasn't as on the ball then as he had become later. 'I want to defect. I could bring you something good. I could bring you Guy Parker's code book.' Remembering it nine months later, Mungo smiled to himself. He was passing Mabledene's now, the big garage that had the Volvo concession on the western side of Rostock, though the family lived ten miles out in one of the villages. Charles had found a new drop for them, in a tree on the vacant lot next to his father's car wash. It might be wise not to keep on too long with the flyover one, especially remembering the watcher he had seen or thought he had seen last time he was down here. This was only the second light evening. At midnight on Saturday the clocks had gone forward. It wasn't cold but mild and damp, visibility poor, giving to this deserted place an air of mystery. Moisture lay on the flight of stone steps that ran down to the embankment and yellow light from the pub windows made it gleam. Mungo went up the steps from the river, crossing the place where that girl had been strangled, up Bread Lane this time, the steepish hill that wound between high brick walls with broken glass on top. Easter Monday and the flyover seemed to shake under the weight of traffic, cars going northwards tonight, returning from holiday resorts. But underneath all was still, shadowed, undisturbed. Mungo saw the king cat's eyes, points of green fire, before his fur was visible. He crossed the road and put out his hand but the animal twisted away and slid under one of the stunted bushes. A folded piece of paper in a plastic envelope was taped inside the central upright, fixed there at the level of Mungo's chin, which would just about be head height for Basilisk. It came away very easily, Mungo thought, almost too easily. The tape peeled off as if it had already been unstuck once since Basilisk put it there. I wonder if I am imagining things, Mungo said to himself as he put the message into his pocket.

8

John Creevey was sixteen when he first noticed his sister was ugly. She must have been eleven. He was doing his homework - writing an essay about the War of the Spanish Succession, funny how you remember these things - when she came into the living room to tell him something about a cake. A birthday cake, that was it, so it must have been her eleventh birthday. She came to tell him tea was ready in the dining room and her cake was on the table with its eleven candles. He looked up and seemed for some reason to see her face for the first time. Perhaps it was because she surprised him, he hadn't heard her come in. He saw her bulging forehead that seemed to overhang her eyebrows, her cheeks as round as apples, her snub nose and sickle mouth. She was ugly and he had never noticed it before. He loved Cherry and she loved him. In their family they all loved each other, they were happy, they were content with each other's company. Perhaps appearances didn't matter much to them. For himself John didn't mind Cherry being ugly but he began to wonder what would become of her. Would any man ever want her? Would anyone ever want to marry her? When she was older he noticed that she had developed a good figure, large breasts and shapely legs, and she had beautiful hair, thick and of a rich light chestnut colour, but that did nothing in his eyes to redeem those coarse ill-fashioned features. One day he saw a reproduction of a picture by Velasquez and the court dwarf in it had a face just like his sister Cherry's. He wondered how she came to look like that. He knew he wasn't bad-looking, ordinary but passable, and his father was much the same while their mother was positively pretty. Then when he was looking through an album of old photographs he saw a family group with his father's father and his father's aunt in it and then he knew. Genes behaved like that. He started watching her as if she were an invalid, someone with a dormant disease whose terrible symptoms would one day show themselves. She wasn't even clever. She couldn't be a teacher or a secretary. The job she got when she left school was sending out the invoices for a builder who had an office in a wooden hut down on the west side of Rostock. Sixteen she was then and with a host of friends, all pretty girls, it seemed to John. It made him sad to see her with those girls and her not even aware of the contrast. Maitland the builder had the reputation of being a womaniser, in spite of being married and with children and grandchildren, but that never worried John. A man like that wouldn't give Cherry a second glance. And then one day she met Mark Simms. Mark was handsome and tall, with fine straight features and good teeth and dark eyes, broad shouldered, slim. And he had a nice personality and a good job. John couldn't believe it when she told him they were engaged. He thought she must have made a mistake, she was so innocent she'd mistaken some remark of his for a proposal. But he met Mark and knew at once it was all genuine, it was all as Cherry said, and the amazing thing was it wasn't one-sided, it wasn't a case of Mark being sorry for her or indifferent, he was crazy about her. You only had to see the way he looked at her to know that. It was in this very room in the house in Geneva Road that Cherry had introduced him to Mark. Seventeen years ago it must have been, nearer eighteen. And here was Mark back again, still slim and handsome, still with those nice white teeth, his hair going a bit grey but that was all. A failed marriage behind him and seemingly half if not entirely forgotten. John didn't think he had forgotten Cherry though. He might have found someone else eventually and got married but the place in his heart was for Cherry. He and Cohn Goodman were watching snooker on John's television. They had all been to a pub and thence to an Italian restaurant, and now here they were, all three of them, sitting here drinking Carlsberg, Mark smoking his pipe, both bars of the electric fire switched on. He hadn't seen Mark Simms for years, ten years probably, but when they met in the pub tonight there had been no constraint between them. All had been as in the days when Mark was courting Cherry and expecting to become John's brother-in-law. I resented him marrying that woman, John thought, that's what it was, I expected him to keep faith with my dead sister for ever and ever. What a fool I am! The marriage didn't even work out. I might have saved myself all that misery and resentment, reproaching him, poor Mark. John wasn't interested in snooker. Sport in general bored him. He waited on the other two, bringing in more beer, fetching Mark a clean ashtray, producing a bowl of cheese crackers and another of peanuts. They had talked throughout the Italian meal but it had been small talk, not real. And now John wondered if the truth was that he had only asked Cohn to join them to make any heart-to-heart unburdenings impossible, to rule out the possibility of confidences. Yet it seemed to him there hung in the very air a yearning for confession, for openness. He knew he would never do it yet on another level he longed to tell Mark about Jennifer and listen while Mark spoke to him of Cherry. They had much to say to one another but they would not say it while Cohn was there. The snooker came to an end and no one wanted to see the play which followed it. John switched off the set. Kim Philby's _My Silent War_ lay on the low table which stood between the settee where Cohn and Mark sat and the television. The table, like almost everything else in the house, had belonged to John's mother. It was of oak with an inlay of olive-green leather and his mother had kept it highly polished. John noticed how dusty and fingermarked it had become. On the crosspiece that joined the four legs together a few inches from the floor dust lay like grey fungus. Generally men don't notice these things, John thought, only women notice them. It wasn't the dust that Mark had been looking at but the Philby book which he now reached forward to pick up. John remembered that Mark had always been a great reader, though it was almost unknown for Cherry to read a book. For his part he had not much enjoyed My Secret War. Indeed he had begun but not finished it. A romantic man - well, sentimental, why not say it? - it was fiction that he liked. What really happened didn't much interest him, he had enough of that in his own life. Mark was slowly turning the pages, absently helping himself to peanuts with the other hand. 'Still racking your brains, are you, over that code?' Cohn said. John nodded. 'John's got this pal sends him letters in code, only he can't read them.' Mark didn't seem much interested. John wouldn't have said this to anyone else but it was all right thinking it. Mark wasn't interested in others and their affairs. His favourite word was 'I', John's father had once said, with 'me' a close second. John had thought this a bit unfair at the time but now he wasn't so sure. 'Nineteen sixty-eight, this was published, the year I met Cherry. I always think of it as the year I met Cherry.' 'Was it really that long ago?' Cohn looked embarrassed, sounded gruff. 'We were engaged for nearly two years,' Mark said. His eyes met John's and it seemed to John that they were full of sorrow - no, more than that, full of grief. He was sure then that Mark was going to say something more, that in spite of Cohn's presence, he was going to speak of his love for Cherry that still endured. And John felt mean for thinking him such an egotist. But instead Mark put the book back on the table and said in quite a different tone from that he had used when talking of her: 'There's rather a good novel I read about him, about Philby I mean. Well, a thriller. By Ted Albeury. I can't remember what it's called. They'd know at your library, I should think.' John said he would ask them. If he remembered, he added to himself. Cohn was looking at his watch. They had come in Mark's car so there was no question of last buses, but it was late, it was after eleven. The rain that was forecast had started and John offered them an umbrella to the car but they didn't want that. Mark shook hands with him rather formally. He hadn't mentioned Jennifer all evening which made John think Cohn must have said something before he got to the restaurant. John imagined them in the car, Mark asking what exactly did happen about his wife, and Cohn saying, she left him, went off with some chap she used to be engaged to. Cohn would add that the marriage was over. But John refused to think of it in those terms. He preferred to say to himself that they were temporarily apart. It made him cringe a bit to think of those two - though he liked them, though they were his friends - talking about his failed marriage, comparing it maybe with Mark's own experience. He had replied to Jennifer and posted his letter on the way to the restaurant. Well, not on the way really, for he had made a detour to take in cats' green. There he had unpeeled the plastic envelope from the inside of the pillar and copied down the coded message into his notebook. Perhaps because of the damp he had some difficulty in making the tape adhere to the metal once more. As he was walking away he saw an elderly woman cross the street with a bottle of milk in one hand and a carrier bag in the other. She was going to feed the cats. He didn't think she had seen what he was doing and now, in any case, he was very purposefully making for the pillar box on the pavement outside the church building. He posted his letter. It wouldn't go out till the morning but she should get it by Wednesday. She had asked him not to phone but had said nothing about not writing. Perhaps Peter Moran went out in the mornings before the post came, though would an unemployed man do that? He had begun his letter: 'Dearest Jennifer'. Of course he would meet her, he was longing to meet her, he had written. Hartlands Gardens at three p.m. next Saturday. I hope the sun will shine on us, he went on, and then crossed that bit out which meant he had to begin the letter all over again... Emptying Mark's ashtray, putting their glasses into the sink, he came back to the living room, sat down in front of the electric fire once more and picked up the Philby book. Philby had been a spy, these were spy memoirs. Why shouldn't the sender of the messages have used the first lines of this book for his code? It seemed as likely as any other. John got out his notebook and tried the coded messages against the first lines of My Silent War. Wrong again. No again. Why do I bother? John asked himself. And he was aware that since the arrival of Jennifer's letter cats' green and the messages had meant less to him, they had been hess of a diversion. They had not served to distract his mind as efficiently as he expected. He would look at the coded words and speculate and then gradually feel speculation being displaced by images of Jennifer and by memories of when they were together. Above all he would have this very vivid recollectiOn of the second time they went out together and he had told her about Cherry and she told him about Peter Moran. 'I suppose we were really very dull ordinary sort of people in our family,' he had said to her. 'Not interesting, nothing special, any of us. My dad worked for the Post Office. I don't think Mother had ever had any sort of job, it wouldn't have crossed her mind. We were such a happy family, we honestly never had a cross word, I suppose we just didn't disagree about anything. We - my sister and I - didn't want to rebel and our parents didn't try to stop us enjoying ourselves. We were always doing things for each other. I mean when someone wanted something one of us would jump up and say I'll get that or I'll do that. We all liked each other, you see. And we liked to see the others happy. We were always laughing. Does that sound crazy? I mean we had little family jokes and catchwords and we'd tell each other funny things that happened at work. It was a regular thing every evening and Mum would say, "Don't you do any work, you lot? It's all play by the sound of it."' She was looking at him dubiously. Her expression was kindly but puzzled too. 'It doesn't sound like you - well, what I know of you.' 'I was different. I changed. We all changed. A death like that, it blows a world apart.' 'Your sister was going to be married?' 'In two months' time. Her fianc�sed to be with us most days. I mean he and Cherry would go out together, of course they would, but we weren't the sort of people to keep a friend to ourselves. Cherry and I brought our friends home. It was natural to her to bring Mark home to eat his meals with us and stay the night sometimes.' She was looking at him inquiringly. He felt the colour come up into his face. 'We only had the three bedrooms but Mother would make up the couch downstairs for him.' 'What happened?' she asked. 'One evening she just didn't come home from work. It was winter and the evenings were dark. Mark called round at the place she worked, down at Beckgate. He had been going to pick her up and they were going out somewhere, but she had already left and the place was locked up. They found her body lying on those steps that go down to the embankment below Rostock. She'd been strangled. They never found the person who did it. There were no witnesses, nothing.' 'And that changed you all?' she said. 'That broke your family up?' 'It was like,' he said, 'you imagine being struck by lightning. We were - blasted. The next year my father had a stroke. Oh, they said it had nothing to do with Cherry's death, it would have happened anyway. Perhaps it would. He was more or less bedridden for years. My mother looked after him. It sounds melodramatic, it sounds exaggerated, but I don't think she ever laughed any more. I never heard her laugh. We clung to each other for support, the three of us, but we couldn't support each other. Can you understand? There was no comfort to give.' 'You stayed with them? You lived at home?' He had never considered an alternative. Jennifer seemed astonished, as if he had made a sacrifice. He told her about his father's death and his mother's but said nothing about his own loneliness. She looked at him. She had a way of looking intently into one's eyes. Her face was wide at the temples, full-cheeked, the pale skin freckled, deep charming dimples at the corners of her pretty mouth. And everything about her was soft, it was in this that her uniqueness lay, her voice, her gaze, her touch. Oh, beyond all, her touch! Of course he had known nothing of that then. Those were early days. But even then he had recognised her apartness from all other women, her quality of hushed velvety sweetness. He enjoyed looking at art books, the kind that have reproductions in them of famous paintings. And he would identify the looks of people he knew with the subjects of portraits. If Cherry was the Velasquez dwarf, Mark Simms looked like El Greco's picture of the poet-scholar Paravicino and Jennifer - well, Jennifer was Rembrandt's Juno. 'I like the sound of your family,' she said. 'I'd have liked to know them. If you'd known me then would you have taken me home to meals?' It was so unexpected he blushed again. He stammered, 'You're too young. You'd have been a child.' 'If I was as I am now, would you have?' 'Of course I would, of course.' She looked away. 'My family weren't like that. My father was ill for years too, in and out of hospital, and he made us all suffer for that. It sounds unkind but it's true. My mother had learnt to repress her emotions. Not committing herself, not talking of anything but the weather and the shops and what the neighbours said - that made her feel safe. Do you know what I mean?' He nodded. 'I think so.' Looking down, her eyebrows drawn close together, she said in that voice he had never heard raised, then or later, 'I'll tell you what happened to me and the man I was going to marry. It was awful. It was the most terrible thing. Can I tell you?' Don't hurt me, he wanted to say. You can hurt me, already you can. But he only nodded again and her eyes on his, into his, she began... Soon after that he had brought her back here. Then the house still seemed full of ghosts - Cherry holding hands with Mark, his mother's lost laughter - when it didn't seem the emptiest place on earth. The ghosts had gone now but the emptiness was back. John kicked off the switches on the electric fire and then, reaching under the table, he wiped the fur of dust away with the palm of his hand.

9

The first day back after a holiday was always busy. People had all the long weekend in which to look at their gardens and decide that only a new shrub here or a row of perennials there would be enough to transform them into Sissinghurst or Kew. There was a run on dahlia tubers and gladioli bulbs, showy things that John didn't much like. He overheard Gavin persuading a woman to buy Eucalyptus salicifolia for planting in an exposed north-facing garden where of course only gunnii was likely to survive. Gavin didn't like to be told, though John did it discreetly enough and out of anyone else's earshot. There had been a willow-leaved eucalyptus in Hartlands Gardens but the severe frosts of two winters before had killed it. John and Jennifer had gone for a walk there that March and seen the poor gum tree, its trunk hike stripped bone, its leaves dried and curled and rattling in the wind. He walked through the greenhouses, checking on the African daisies, the gazanias and gerberas that he was bringing on from seed. It would be an experience to see them in their natural habitat, in Namaqualand where the dried-up plains, he had read, might remain arid for months or years even, and when at last the rain came burst next day into bloom, into limitless acres of brilliant and glorious colour, as far as the eye could see. That must be the origin of the Bible promise, that the desert should blossom as the rose... Imagining Africa made him think again of King Solomon's Mines. He would call at the central library on his way home. It might be in by now. And perhaps he would also see if he could find that novel about Philby, though he had forgotten the name of it and the name of the author. Gavin was feeding the mynah with pieces of brazil nut which it seemed to like. For the first time John noticed that Sharon had painted her fingernails the colour of imperial jade. There was nothing he could do about that and why bother anyway? Leaving, he essayed a joke. 'How many customers have asked you if you've got green fingers, Sharon?' 'Fifteen,' she said without a smile. 'I counted.'

The librarian said she knew of several novels based on the life of Kim Philby. He hadn't brought My Silent War back with him and he told her he still had it. 'Oh, yes. Right. There's a book called The Other Side of Silence.- I mean I suppose it's referring to Philby's own book. Would that be it? It's by Ted Albeury.' The name rang an immediate bell. The librarian made title and author come up on the computer screen. 'I'll see if it's in.' Both books were in, King Solomon's Mines and The Other Side of Silence. John felt disproportionately pleased. He would have two good books, two absorbing books, to get him through to Saturday. His front garden was buried under a quilt of pink petals. The high winds had blown the last of them down. It would be light for another two hours and he would have plenty of time to sweep them up, snip the dead heads off the daffodils, and perhaps plant out Siberian wallflowers among the bulbs. This year he was going to have a hanging basket under the porch, a begonia and pelargoniums in it. Jennifer would like that, she liked flowers if not gardens... Don't count your chickens, he said to himself, there's a long way to go yet, she's not just going to move back in with you on Saturday night. The thought made his heart move painfully. For suppose it were in fact to be so? Suppose she wanted to do just that? Peter Moran had treated her vilely once and had very likely done so again. A man of that kind doesn't change. 'We were living together,' she had said. 'I was the only girl he'd ever been serious about. He wanted to get married and at first I was the one that hung back. We just had this bedsit we shared and then my mother got ill and I had to move back in with her. But Peter and I were engaged by then, we were planning on getting married in August. Mother had cancer but they have remissions, you know, cancer patients, even people as far gone as she was. I don't want to speak ill of her, that's the last thing, but she liked show did my mother. A big white wedding was what she wanted for me and I gave in and Peter didn't seem to mind. I thought, well, it'll be the last celebration of her life, the last really big event. We sent out invitations to nearly two hundred people. 'A white dress was ridiculous, wasn't it? Especially the crinoline Mother wanted me to have and the great billowing veil. You'd have liked the flowers I was going to have though, John. I wouldn't have white, I wanted colour. Peach-pink cactus dahlias and deep pink pompoms and pink zinnias... He hadn't had the heart - or the nerve - to tell her dahlias and zinnias were the flowers he most disliked, their stiffness, their vulgar show. The flowers he grew were graceful, delicate, rare even. He let himself into the house, dropped the books on to the oak and leather table, kicked on the bar of the electric fire. In the morning she would get the letter. Would she phone him? It was a possibility. When she read that 'dearest' she might well decide to phone... made himself a pot of tea with loose tea, not teabags, a mug. Maybe he should try to change his ways, have a drink, for instance, when he got home, a small tulip-shaped glass of dry sherry. Later he would think about eating. Scrambled eggs pizza or pasta out of a tin. It was always something like that. Before that, though, to try the first of the coded messages against the first lines of King Solomon's Mines. Wrong again. No again. He looked at the jackets of both books, undecided which one to start on first. Of course he wouldn't start either until it got dark. He had the petals to sweep up and the wallflowers to plant out. They were in a seed tray in the lean-to greenhouse attached to the back of the kitchen, where for want of a garage he also had to keep the Honda. John imagined the orange flowers they would bear in May and June and their rich delicate scent. He brought the watering can through house with him. The water in it had been allowed to stand for two days, for he never used it fresh from the tap. All the time he was working out there, the street remained empty - empty of people on foot, that is. Plenty of cars went past. When he was young, when Cherry was still alive, there would have been people walking up and down Geneva Road right up till dark and beyond. The sky was overcast and it was warm for late March, in spite of the wind, a west wind that swayed the branches of the monkey puzzle tree. His mother had always liked Geneva Road because through the gaps between the rows of houses you could see the countryside beyond the city, glimpses of green hills. John planted his wallflowers, watered them in, and went back into the house. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Scrambled eggs would be the easiest dish to make, scrambled eggs on toast with half a tin of fruit to follow and longlife cream. His supper on a tray, he went back into the living room. It felt hot and stuffy and he saw that he had left the fire on all the time he was out in the garden. Wasteful but there was no point in turning it off now. Out of politeness he had never read at table while Jennifer was with him, though at home they had all read books or magazines at mealtimes if they had wanted to and it hadn't seemed anti-social or rude. At home - John realised the phrase he had used. Wasn't this home then? Wasn't this the very same house? Home is where the people you love are, he thought, the people who love you. He opened The Other Side of Silence and read the opening lines. "The snow lay thick on the steps and the snowflakes driven by the wind looked black in the headlights of the cars." Almost mechanically, because he did it with every book he started, he began placing the alphabet against the letters. Not in the book itself, of course, but in his notebook, using a pencil. He took a mouthful of egg on toast. A would be T, B would be H, C would be E, DS, EN, FO, GW,...... It was going to work out - or was it? The first word in the coded message he had copied from the pillar at cats' green when he saw the very tall young man was HCRKTABIE. If you used the first lines of The Other Side of Silence, that came out as LEVIATHAN. Well, 'Leviathan' was a word or at any rate a name. 'To Basilisk', it continued. There followed 'Take Sterns Childers.' John had a vague idea 'childers' might be old-fashioned or dialect English for children. 'Take Sterns Childers' didn't seem to mean anything. Never mind. He had more coded messages in the notebook, including the one he had found last night. Feeling disproportionately excited, he began matching letters in this message against letters in those first lines. The results were more comprehensible. The second message when deciphered read: 'Leviathan to Basilisk and Unicorn. Fifty-three Ruxeter Road stays as safe house.' He tried other messages, those picked up in January and February but here he could not break the code. Nevertheless, John had that feeling common to all humanity in his sort of situation. He had triumphed and now he wanted to tell someone about it. The person he would best liked to tell was Jennifer. He got as far as the phone and dialling the first three digits of Cohn's number instead, and then he put the receiver back, asking himself if he wanted to share this with anyone. A more satisfactory thing might be to go to fifty-three Ruxeter Road and see what those people meant by a 'safe house'. By now it was dark outside but how much did that matter? It might be better in the dark. He could go up there on the Honda. Across Alexandra Bridge, he thought, and up Nevin Street which after a time became Ruxeter Road. He got into his motorcycle leathers, black and heavier than Jennifer's soft blue jacket. As he turned into Berne Road he felt the sting of a raindrop on his face. He would regret this adventure if the rain came on like it had last night, he thought. Adventure it was, though. He wondered what he was getting himself into. Nothing presumably that he couldn't pull out of again. There had been a lot in the papers and on television lately about drugs and it sometimes seemed to John as if everybody except himself had taken drugs at some time or other. To hear them and read about them you'd think the whole nation was permanently stupefied by dope and crack. What if these people he had got on to were involved with drugs? What if that was what they were up to and why they needed this' code and these messages? They might be drug dealers and drug pushers, what was called a narcotics ring. The wind had dropped and the river lay calm and flat with a dark oily surface. At the other end of the bridge the street narrowed, passing under the cathedral walls, then between tall office blocks, widening into Nevin Square where behind green lawns and a fountain that never played after six p.m. stood the city hall. The chock on St Stephen's Cathedral struck an uncounted number of strokes. There were few people about, few cars. On the pedestal of the statue of Lysander Douglas, philanthropist, explorer and former mayor of this city, sat two punk people with bright-coloured hair, dressed in leather far more bizarre than his own and eating fish and chips from paper bags. John went round the square, leaving by the third exit of the roundabout which was Nevin Street. Neon digits on top of the CitWest insurance tower told him it was nine-O-two and the temperature nine degrees. The whole left-hand side of this street was dominated by the buildings of the polytechnic. The swing doors on the main entrance opened and John saw Peter Moran come out and start to walk down the steps. He had only seen him twice before but he would have known him anywhere. We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love. This was the man his wife was living with. John told himself this in so many words as he slowed and turned his head and looked at Peter Moran. Fair-haired, nothing special to look at, a lantern jaw and glasses so thick that he must be very short-sighted. Of course John couldn't see the thickness of his glasses at this moment but he had noticed them before on the single occasion they had met, an occasion he remembered with pain but could no more forget than he could forget Peter's face. Peter, of course, didn't see him. A man on a motorbike is the most anonymous, the most invisible, of people. He is scarcely a man, more an adjunct of the bike, furnished in black and chrome and upholstered in leather like itself. John revved the bike and swung off up into Ruxeter Road. Two days before her intended wedding day, she had told him on that evening of confidences, that man had said to her he couldn't marry her after all, he couldn't go through with it. 'He didn't really give a reason, just said he couldn't go through with it. I didn't believe what I was hearing. I thought it was some sort of joke. We were at my place - well, my mother's. My aunt was staying with us, she'd come from Ireland for the wedding.' 'You knew it wasn't a joke though,' John had said. 'After a while I did. I said was it all the fuss, I mean a white wedding and all those people coming, I said was it that which was upsetting him. I said it didn't matter, we could get married in a registry office, we didn't have to do what Mother wanted. He said no, it wasn't that. It was just the idea of being married, of marriage itself, he couldn't face, he wasn't the kind of person who could ever be married. And suddenly there wasn't any more to say. Can you understand that, John? There was nothing to say. We just stared at each other and then he said, well, goodbye then, and he walked out of the house and closed the front door behind him. My mother came in and said Peter hadn't gone, had he, without being introduced to Auntie Katie. I said he'd gone and there wouldn't be any wedding and she started laughing and crying and screaming. Those repressed people, they're the worst when they break out. I didn't cry, not then. I was stunned, I wasn't even angry.' 'I can't imagine you angry,' he had said to her. John parked the bike down a side street called Colhingbourne Road. A pub called the Gander was advertising something called a 'Neez-up Nite' for the coming Saturday but for all that it had a gloomy look, its lights dim. Between it and the road where he had parked stood a terrace of Victorian houses, tall, bleak, the rough grey plaster with which they were faced cracked or broken away, their lower windows, rectangular and of uniform size, sealed with boards. Sheets of corrugated metal covered where the front doors should have been. Number 53 was the middle house of this row of five. It was the only one with a gable and in the centre of this gable, on a circular plaque of smoother stone, were engraved the name Pentecost Villas and the date, 1885. For a moment or two John doubted if he had come to the right place. But this was Ruxeter Road and Pentecost Villas were not separately numbered from the rest of the houses in this long street. Carrying his crash helmet and visor, he walked back along Collingbourne Road to see if there might be a way in at the side but the long gardens of those grey houses were separated from the pavement by a high wall of yellow bricks unbroken by any gateway. When the wall came to an end he turned left along Fontaine Avenue. The gardens ended in a fence here and in the fence were five solid-hooking gates. He could see this by the light from a series of street lamps on the opposite pavement, behind which instead of more houses was the green space called Fontaine Park. John couldn't recall having been down here since he was about ten. He was alone in the street. As usual there was no one about, the only sign that people were in the vicinity, those inevitable parked cars. He tried the first gate in the fence but it was bolted as he had feared, and probably locked too. So was the next one. They all would be and that would be that. But because he had come all this way and must when he started out surely have intended to find out what this 'safe house' business was all about, he tried the third door. The latch yielded and it opened. John looked round. He looked to the right and the left and behind him but there was no one. He went into the garden and closed the gate. A wilderness met his eyes, a waste land of rough grass and sprawling shrubs, tree stumps and trees overgrown with rampant ivy. The back of the house seemed boarded up too where it wasn't festooned with a cobweb-like creeper. As he approached it the shadow of the fence loomed up behind him, rising up the house, quelling the light, until by the time he reached it he and it were in darkness. He shouldn't have come at night, or he should have brought a torch. But he had hardly expected something like this. What had he expected? He didn't know. Down a shallow flight of steps he could just make out a door, the only door in the whole block surely that wasn't boarded up. John had a feeling this door was painted green though he couldn't in fact see what colour it was. As he went down the steps he thought, suppose the door is unlocked and I open it and go in and the whole place is a blaze of light and there are twelve men sitting at a round table and one of them gets up with a gun in his hand... By the time he had thought that, he had tried the door and it yielded and he was inside. There was no light though and when he fumbled on the wall for a switch and found it and pressed it, nothing happened. It was deathly dark in there, as dark as a mine or a tomb. He didn't even know if he was in some sort of a living room or in a kitchen. The strong smell was of mould. The dampness touched the skin of his face like cold rubber. He moved warily across a floor which had a slippery feel, realising before he reached the far side of the room that it was hopeless. In the absence of light or access to any source of light, he could go no further. Anyway, there was no one here. More accustomed now to the darkness, he peered about him searching for what he thought those sort of people would leave behind them, empty bottles, cigarette stubs, half-smoked joints perhaps, though he doubted if he would recognise these. Pinned to one wall, to peeling wallpaper and squashy rotted plaster, was a sheet of paper that seemed to have writing on it. Impossible to read the writing here. He pulled it down, folded it and put it into his pocket, opened the door and went out the way he had come. Something about the garden, its desolation, its rough grass, its air of absolute neglect, reminded him of cats' green. Only there were no cats, there was nothing alive. He felt curiously relieved to be out in Fontaine Avenue once more, the neat little park opposite, its hedges and trim trees lit by splashes of yellow light. What a fool I am, he thought, coming all the way out here. Like a schoolboy. Like a kid. And for what? What did I hope to find? He retrieved the Honda, put on his visor and crash helmet, and started back.

10

When he was going to get married John had bought only one new piece of furniture and that was a bed. All his life, up till then, he had slept in the three-foot-wide single bed in the smallest of the three bedrooms. His parents had slept in the large bedroom at the front and Cherry in the large bedroom at the back. When she died, or at any rate after she had been dead a few months, he might have taken over her room but he never had. No one ever again slept in that room, and it began to be kept as a sort of shrine. John suspected his mother sometimes went up and sat there. Cohn had once suggested he ought to find a tenant for it, people were always on the look-out for rooms, but to John the idea was sacrilegious. Jennifer and he would of course use his parents' room but to sleep in his parents' bed seemed grotesque. He and Cherry had been born in that bed and no doubt conceived there too. His bride and he couldn't sleep there. Without consulting Jennifer he went out and bought a big double bed, a bed the shop assistant called queen-sized. Now when he lay alone in this bed it seemed enormous. John told himself he respected Jennifer too much to attempt to make love to her before they were married. But wherever else he failed he tried to be honest and he knew in his heart it was not respect, whatever that might really mean, which stood in his way, but fear. He was thirty-seven years old and he had never made love to any woman, he was a virgin. It was not all that unusual, he suspected. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Cohn was too, and still was. Somehow, if you didn't get to go with a girl when you were sixteen or seventeen, you sort of missed the boat and unless you got engaged and married that was it. There were no opportunities, especially in a place like this and if you lived with your parents. Suppose, he asked himself, he had met a girl and they had wanted to sleep together and she was living at home too, what would they have done? He had no car, he couldn't have afforded an hotel room and would have baulked at the open air. Anyway he never seemed to meet any girls. After Cherry died happy things, normal things, ceased to happen in their family. They were crushed and frozen, cowed and driven indoors to be together, but not to share their exclusive sorrow, to deal separately with grief. He admitted quite freely to himself that he was afraid to try making love to a woman. How did you go about it? How did you begin? How would you know you were doing right? He could not imagine the first move. Well, the kiss he could imagine. By then he had kissed Jennifer many times. But how to take the next step? And what would the next step be? Her breasts, the books said. He shrank with diffidence and shyness at the thought. It seemed an assault. How could you get hold of a girl's breasts and feel them? By what right? She was not a virgin, he knew that. She had lived with Peter Moran. Therefore she would know what was due to her, she would know what men who were real lovers did... When the new bed came he put the old one, his parents bed, into Cherry's room beside her single divan. Cherry had been innocent, a modest, chaste girl. He had thought her plainness kept her that way until he had seen her with Mark Simms and seen the way Mark looked at her, with passion, with devotion. Then he knew she was naturally pure or pure by conscious choice. One day she said to their mother that she and Mark planned to save their money, they wouldn't have a honeymoon. Holidays abroad could wait till later on, till they had their home together. And their mother said maybe that would be too late, maybe she would have other commitments, and though he had known what she meant, that Cherry might have children, Cherry herself hadn't. There had been explanations and Cherry had seemed quite put out, offended even, which was almost unheard of for her, and their mother had said - very practically, John thought - that children would come unless Cherry took precautions to see they didn't. He had made some excuse and left the room after that. He was not so much embarrassed as somehow aware of the affront to Cherry's modesty. It was strange though that all the time he had sensed Cherry's underlying anger and something impatient or even derisive in her manner. Perhaps there was something about their family, something in the individual members of it, that shied away from sex. Jennifer had been so kind to him, so good. Once she understood what the problem was, the lack, she had been patient and caring and together they had... He pushed the memory of it along a shelf in his mind until it crashed off the end. No more of that! He turned over in the empty queen-sized bed, seeking elusive sleep, not unhappy though, full of hope. It was possible, indeed it was likely, she might be back with him here on Saturday night. Those terrors were gone now. Thanks to her, with her, he would be masterly and knowledgeable. As he thought of it his penis uncurled itself inside his pyjama leg, stiffened. Not for the first time he thought, why was it arranged this way, this awkward embarrassing way, by God or whatever? Why couldn't it all have been done by lips and hands or even by thoughts? Or as flowers managed, or fish. It wasn't long ago, a matter of months, that he had discovered the way fishes procreated, the males merely releasing spermatozoa into the water in which the fecund females swam. Trying as an experiment to grow galia melons at the garden centre, he had fertilised the female flowers with a pastry brush - clean, hygienic, fastidious! John knew very well how inhibited he was. He longed for a perfect himself in a perfect world in which he would not be ashamed or shy or pained and he knew also he had a possibility of finding this with Jennifer. He laid his hand upon his stiff penis and, contrary to what should have happened, it shrank under his touch. He turned his face into the pillow, his arms crossed now, a hand on each shoulder, and felt like a child waiting for his mother to come in and say goodnight.

11

Fergus always drove a Volvo, kept it five years and then turned it in for a new one. The latest came from Mabledene's, Which had opened its city branch about two years before. 'Extraordinary name,' said Fergus. 'Is it?' said Mungo. 'There's a Charles Mabledene in my house at school.' 'It must be the same family. Poor chap. I daresay he gets teased.' 'Teased? Why would he?' Fergus gave him a look indicative of sorrow that his youngest son was simple-minded. 'Well, Mabel. I suppose he gets called Mabel, doesn't he? He would have been in my day.' Mungo didn't know what his father meant. He had never heard of Mabel as a girl's name. 'Things have changed since your day,' said Lucy. Girls in the Sixth Form, she meant. People called by their christian names. They had girls in at all levels at Utting, and Stern's new second-in-command was a girl. Mungo thought what a funny thing it was that his father and he didn't seem to speak the same language. It was rather as if, while both speaking English, they had each learned it in parts of the world separated by thousands of miles, in countries where the customs and traditions were totally disparate. He sat at breakfast after his father had gone off to his morning surgery, trying to fathom what he had meant about someone deserving pity because they might be called by a girl's name no one had ever heard of. But after a while he gave up. You couldn't, anyway, imagine feeling sorry for Charles Mabledene, he wasn't that sort of person. Charles Mabledene had defected and Stern had been furious. No wonder. Agents of Charles's brilliance didn't grow on trees. He had been in the junior school at Utting, in Andrade House with Stern's brother Michael, and it was just after they had both taken the Common Entrance that he phoned Mungo. The situation, Angus said when told about it later, rather paralleled his own experience with Guy Parker. For the nub of Charles's conversation with Mungo that evening was that, without saying a word to Ivan or Michael Stern, or indeed anyone but his own parents and the powers-that-were at Rossingham, he had elected to come to Rossingham not Utting when term started in September. He meant, of course, more than this. He meant he wanted to defect to the West and be enrolled by Mungo. 'Recruited,' Mungo corrected him kindly. 'It's enemy security officers who are enrolled.' Then Charles said what he would bring with him as evidence of good faith. For a long time Mungo had dreamt of getting his hands on Guy Parker's code book. Guy was still nominally head of Moscow Centre at that time, though he was to hand everything over to Stern during the summer holidays. The codes he used were not based on the first lines of books, or any lines from books, but on secret sentences in this code book which Angus had long suspected was entirely in foreign languages, and probably obscure foreign languages such as Serbo-Croat and Friesian. On countless occasions he had sent people in to attempt the theft of this book, or better still make a copy of it. The double agent Hydra, who was in the Lower Fourth at Utting with Stern, had tried to get hold of it. But Guy Parker, alerted to what was going on by a clumsy attempt, took to carrying the book around on his person, opened and pressed flat against his chest between his shirt and his vest. Mungo didn't believe Charles Mabledene could get hold of it, and it was to be months before he learned how this had been effected. July and August went by and he heard not a word. Term began on 8 September, Mungo moved into the Upper Fourth and into a study in Pitt that he shared with only three others instead of the former nine. Angus, in the Lower Sixth now and a prefect, went along to the new ones' studies at lights-out to give them his pep talk. He reported back to Mungo the presence of Charles Mabledene. But by that time a photocopy of the code book was in the drawer under his bunk. He found it there when he went to get out his pyjamas. The safe house they were using then was one of the rooms in the old physics lab. New labs had been completed in the previous year but the original Edwardian buildings still stood, their fate being undecided. A proposal to convert them into two gardeners' flats was later rejected on grounds of expense, and demolition was begun. But back last September the rooms still stood, and stood empty and locked up. Charles Mabledene, of course, got the keys and had copies cut. He could get any keys, could Charles, make his way in and out of anything, come to that. Before he was ten he had been no mean conjurer - a tregetour was what he called himself - and he was studying escapology. Mungo de-briefed him in the old physics lab. Charles told him everything Parker and Stern had been doing and everything they planned to do. He found out from Charles how Parker had discovered their code system and the drops they were currently using, the one here outside the squash courts and the one in town in the old wall by the Fevergate. For weeks he had been wondering how it was that his efforts to secure four invitations to the mayor's garden party had been continually frustrated, had ultimately failed. It was Charles who told him that Hydra was a double agent and that the mayor had two sons at Utting. And Charles told him how he had got the code book. It was on Sports Day when Guy Parker was swimming in the hundred metres. He thought he was safe because all the changing rooms had lockers with keys. But opening a locker was nothing to Charles Mabledene. He used credit cards and not even old ones but Mabledene's personal cards they issued to their customers. Using a sharp knife he cut them into hooked shapes and serrated shapes and could open most things with them, but not Yale or Banham locks. He was working on Yale and Banham locks. Charles took the code book over to Technology about a hundred yards away, photocopied it and had it back in Parker's locker by the time he was emerging from the water. Then began a period of triumph. The other side continued to use the code book all that term and Mungo was privy to all their secrets. Months of work were undone by the loss of the code book, Stern's Deputy Controller Rosie Whittaker was reputed to have said. It was Christmas before they found out about the code book and then they thought an agent of their own was the traitor. Mungo would have welcomed this agent, he would have liked him to come over, but he wasn't all that bright and Rossingham didn't want him. Charles Mabledene, on the other hand, was one of those rare people who had been awarded a scholarship on his Common Entrance results. He didn't even have to apply for it. His parents must have got a pleasant surprise when the letter came saying he had not only passed but they would be getting five hundred pounds off their annual fees bill. Those were the days when Mungo had led Michael Stern a dance all over the city at Christmas time and locked him up in the warehouse; when he had been shown all Stern's drops and substituted all Stern's messages with his own; when he had actually entered Stern's safe house which, of all places, was the Douglas family mausoleum in the cathedral precincts. He had lain on the floor behind Lysander Douglas's enormous stone sarcophagus and listened to Ivan Stern and Rosie Whittaker and two other people he didn't know hold their meeting and then, at half-term, had witnessed Stern's de-briefing of Cyclops whom Mungo hadn't even suspected of wanting to go over to the East. There, on the cold dusty floor, out of the reach of Stern's candle flame, his face separated only by a thin stone wall from old Lysander's bones, he had heard Cyclops tell Stern everything, including the defection of Minotaur whom Stern had thought of up till then as a sleeper in the enemy territory, waiting only to be awakened. Cyclops was leaving Rossingham of course, going with his parents to live in Toronto and attend Upper Canada College. They were welcome to him, Mungo thought bitterly. He wondered what he would do if, when Stern left the mausoleum, he locked the door behind him. Charles Mabledene knew he was there, of course, but Charles Mabledene wouldn't come looking till the morning. Stern didn't lock the door. Mungo came out into a white world, into a snowstorm, hardly noticing the weather though, feeling this awful setback... Since then, during this past spring term in spite of what had been accomplished, they had known few real triumphs, it seemed to him. For one thing, Moscow Centre had formulated its new code, a marvellous code that began with a number and ended with a longer number and defied all attempts to decipher it. And then there was the dawning possibility that Stern had a mole in the very heart of the department. But if he could pull off this Blake business much would be paid for, much made equal. It seemed to entail getting inside a man's mind, though. How would you do that? How would even Charles Mabledene do that? Mungo climbed the stairs up to his room, passing on his way Angus's open door and Angus seated at the computer. He had the remains of his breakfast, which he had fetched on a tray, beside him on the desk: two empty eggshells, half a French breadstick, a tin of golden syrup. Gluck came wafting out of the record player. 'What is life to me without thee?' Eurydice was singing. Mungo went on up and into his own room and closed the door. It was 31 March and he had two things in mind: one, to play an April Fool's trick of some sort on the other side and two, to formulate a new code. For the code he had more or less decided to use Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands. This was the book he had, at half-term, got Basilisk to abstract from Stern because he was pretty sure Stern was using it as an arbitrary source for code-making. But it occurred to him that Stern would quickly guess that the Childers was being used, had probably guessed already and was anticipating this. Mungo looked round his own bookshelves and took down a thick volume, turned the pages and read: 'In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses.' That would do. What was the loom of a house anyway? Mungo didn't think it mattered. Before he worked that out he would set up an April Fool situation for Rosie Whittaker. Why not, for instance, send her to the Mabledene garage drop where she would find a dud message in Childers code? It would mean they could never seriously use the Mabledene garage drop but Mungo had gone off it anyway, it was too close to parental territory to be safe.

12