Getting into his leathers to go home for his half-day off - early closing was on Thursdays - John felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out the piece of paper he had taken from the wall at 53 Ruxeter Road. 'Chimera, Leviathan, Dragon, Basilisk, Medusa, Scylla, Unicorn, Charybdis, Empusa, Hydra, Minotaur' were printed on it in two columns. John felt disappointed. It seemed meaningless, though he had come across three of those names in the coded messages. He didn't want to take any books out but he called in at the Lucerne Road library to look those words up in the dictionary. At home he only had a pocket one. The words on the list all turned out to be the names of fabulous animals or mythological monsters. But the reason for their being there remained a mystery. John had no doubt however that they related in some way to the gang or society or group that was sending the coded messages. He made a detour and went home via cats' green where, inside the central pillar, he found a fresh message. This he copied down into his notebook, taking care this time that when restoring the plastic package to its place the tape adhered precisely to the site from which he had unpeeled it. There were no cats about. A licked-clean saucer and baking tin showed that they had eaten the food provided and withdrawn to sheltered spots, perhaps to sleep. A few cars passed. In a yard at the back of one of the factory buildings a man was sawing wood. John had never been there in daylight before. He cruised the bike slowly round the green and took one of the narrow lanes that led river-wards. The flight of steps looked quite different today. An almond tree was in blossom outside the converted maltings. It was sunny and warm, very mild for the end of March, and patrons of the pub were sitting outside at tables and some of them actually on the steps or on the parapet with their legs dangling through the railings. The water gleamed blue and sparkling below. John felt pained by the sight. It was irrational this feeling, he knew that, for what was he saying? That every place where someone had died a violent death should be kept sacred? That no one should ever again tread where she had died, still less chatter and drink and laugh? The sound of a man's uncaring laughter made him wince. He drove home, trying to expel it from his mind, wishing he hadn't gone that way, turning his thoughts instead to the coded message he carried with him. He had made no plans for the afternoon. A few weeks ago he might have gone to Jennifer's house to wait outside and try to catch a glimpse of her, but he had put this sort of behaviour behind him. To his way of thinking it hinted at neurosis, at mental aberration. Normal people don't behave that way. John had a dread of something happening to his mind, of 'nervous breakdown'. Even the wearing of her blue leather jacket now seemed not quite normal and he resolved not to do it again. It was almost warm enough to sit in the garden and read. Perhaps he would weed the rosebed and the left-hand border and then sit down for a read. But the coded message first. He applied the letters to the key he had made. 'Leviathan to Dragon and Basilisk,' he read. 'Ignore all Tosos commands. Bruce-Partington commences Friday.' That told him at any rate what the list of fabulous beasts implied. Leviathan was some kind of boss and Dragon some kind of servant or agent. But what was Tosos? Another imaginary animal? He tried the pocket dictionary but it wasn't there. Later on he might go back to the library and see if he could find it in Chambers' Twentieth Century. Bruce-Partington, presumably, was some new man they had taken on, some recruit to whatever racket they were involved in. He had been out in the garden for half an hour, a trug full of weeds beside him, when he heard the phone ringing. He had half a mind to let it ring - but suppose it was Jennifer? Suppose it was Jennifer changing the time on Saturday or even the day, or even saying she wanted to come here to the house instead? His hands were earthy and there was dirt in his nails. You couldn't garden properly with gloves on. He ran indoors, not pausing to rinse his hands. The prospect of hearing her voice hung a weight on his chest, restricting his breathing. She had a soft, quiet, unhurried voice that never became impatient, but when excited was infinitely sweetened and enriched... He lifted the receiver in his earthy hand. It wasn't Jennifer. It was Mark Simms. John had difficulty in suppressing an actual cry of disappointment.

13

Mungo patrolled the safe house while he waited for Graham O'Neill. It wasn't very light in there but it was light enough to see by. The house was a warren of small, high-ceilinged, badly proportioned rooms in which the last owners had left behind a certain amount of furniture. Mungo walked about in those rooms sometimes when waiting for one of his agents, liking the solitude and the decay, the ruined evidence of a lost life, an ancient pink silk chaise longue propped up on bricks where it had lost a leg, a chest of drawers from which all but one of the drawers had gone, the curtains that were rags held together by dust, scored by the depredations of moths, windows across which a blind of cobwebs stretched. You scraped away the cobwebs and held nothing in your hand but a shred of dry greyness. Through the clouded glass you could see the river like a metal strip undulating slightly, treetops that were still bare but reddish with buds, the cathedral spires and the tower with the digital clock on it, green, winking, eternal: six forty-two and eleven degrees. A narrow, very steep, flight of stairs led up to the top, the third floor, where there were two or three attic bedrooms under the sloping roof. It was a bit like his own room at home up there, but empty and forlorn. You could get out on to that roof by means of a trapdoor and a pair of steps strung up to the ceiling on ropes. Several times he had unwound the rope from the cleat and lowered the steps and climbed out on to the roof, parts of which were flat with broken metal railings, but one day someone had seen him and pointed up and for a while after that he had been afraid the owners of the house would find out people were using it and seal it off impenetrably. It wouldn't start getting dark for two hours. Mungo, sitting on a table in the kitchen, on the greasy oilcloth that covered it, wondered why Medusa or Dragon had taken away the list of agents' aliases. He had wanted to add to it Cockatrice and Gryps, names for two new Lower Fourth recruits. Perhaps it was wiser to hold these things in one's head. He wouldn't hear Graham come. To make audible movements, footfalls that could be heard, would have been a cause of shame to any of the names on the list. The door would simply edge open. Like all the other basement doors in this block of houses, that of number 53 had been locked and further secured by two wooden crosspieces, only here one of the battens had started to come away. It was this which had made them fix on 53. They had removed both pieces of wood and Charles Mabledene had picked the lock, got it open with one of his credit card implements. Waiting, watching the door, Mungo asked himself why it was he didn't much like Charles. Generally speaking, he wouldn't have admitted to a dislike of people younger than himself but excused the propensities in them he objected to on the grounds that they were just kids still. Not that he could have said what it was, if anything, in Charles that he objected to. On the other hand, you wouldn't ever think of describing Charles as 'just a kid still'. He somehow gave the impression of never having been a kid, indeed of being about thirty now and having been born that way. There was something cold and remote about him, something not exactly condescending - Mungo sought for a word - calculating, perhaps. Graham O'Neill felt the same about him. He and Graham usually did have similar feelings about people and things, which was why they got on so well, had become friends. His father was still friends with men he had been at school with, and Mungo liked the idea of that, in which there was something secure and enduring. The O'Neills didn't live in the city but somewhere in Norfolk. Graham and Keith were only here until tomorrow when they were off to join their parents, newly home from Saud. They had been staying with an aunt up at Hartlands. Graham might have difficulty in getting away, Mungo thought, he had no idea what the set-up was at this aunt's. Silence prevailed. Distantly, sitting there in the dimness, he could hear the wail of a police car's siren. The door opened and Graham came in, closing the door behind him. Graham was tall - not so tall as he but who was? - with dead black hair and a pale shiny face, long rather hooky nose and chin, gooseberry-coloured eyes like a cat's. Both O'Neills looked like that, though there was no problem telling them apart. Another pleasure of the holidays was being able to wear jeans, denims, which weren't allowed at Rossingham. You could wear anything you liked at Utting - well, more or less. Graham had jeans on that looked new and stiff because he seldom got the chance to wear them. In the middle of the front of his tee-shirt was printed an octopus with red and black writhing tentacles. 'The nearest I could get to a jellyfish,' Graham said. His alias was Medusa. Mungo grinned. 'Are you going to be back here before term starts?' 'No way. We've got to go to Guernsey for a week.' Graham cast up his eyes. 'No way will I be back.' 'I'll see you in Pitt on the tenth then.' 'I've got something for you.' Graham handed him a small piece of paper, a page torn off a lined notebook. 'Minotaur to Medusa. Dragon advises planning permission granted. Definite repeat definite,' it said. Minotaur's family lived out in the country near Dragon's family, which accounted for the roundabout route the message had followed. Mungo looked up from the paper, shaking his head the way one does when wondering in an admiring sort of way. 'How did he do it?' 'Search me.' Graham produced from the pocket of his jeans a crushed dirty pack of cigarettes, offered them to Mungo. Mungo shook his head. 'Do you have to smoke in the safe house?' 'That's all bullshit about passive smoking, you know. You wouldn't get cancer from my cigarettes if we sat here with me smoking for the rest of our lives. You ought to smoke anyway. It might stop you growing. You're always saying you wish you could stop growing.' 'How d'you reckon Charles Mabledene did it?' 'I told you I don't know. No way can I guess. Why do we always call that guy Charles Mabledene instead of just Charles? Have you ever thought of that? Why do we?' 'I don't know but I know what you mean.' Graham snorted smoke out of his nostrils. 'Have you got any money?' 'Not what you'd call real money,' said Mungo. 'I don't mean real money. I mean enough for fish and chips. I fancy fish and chips.' 'OK. Anything to get away from your fags. You know what day it is, don't you? It's the thirty-first. New code starts tomorrow. The Bruce-Partington Plans.' Graham's face registered incomprehension. 'Why are all my officers illiterate? I bet Stern doesn't have this sort of thing to contend with.' They were young enough still to lash out at each other in play but too old to keep it up. A year ago they would have grappled and rolled on the ground. Graham took a final sideswipe at Mungo who ducked and pulled the door open. 'Did you take the list off the wall?' 'Not me. No way.' 'It must have been Charles Mabledene then,' said Mungo, and realising he had done it again, they both laughed. The fish and chip shop they went to was on the eastern side and was in a side street in a block of shops between Randolph Bridge and the Shot Tower. Claims were made that it was the best in town. Another distinction of this shop was that you could eat there too if there was room. There were four small marble tables only, each with only two chairs. All the tables were full. At the one nearest to the door sat Guy Parker with a girl. They were eating scampi. 'Good evening,' said Mungo in a breezy tone. Guy Parker said hallo and gave one of his small grins, showing no teeth. The girl with him was rather plump and dark, olive-skinned and with black hair, the front of which was streaked with orange. At the counter Mungo gave their order, two portions of chips and two of skate, two pickled gherkins. 'Who's that with him?' he said to Graham. 'Don't you know?' 'I wouldn't ask if I did.' 'It's Rosie Whittaker. I heard he was giving her a whirl.' 'Hm,' said Mungo. He thought he only liked beautiful women. Or he would only like them when he came to start thinking about going out with women. A tall thin blonde with a long neck and hair down to her waist and big green eyes, thought Mungo. Rosie Whittaker wasn't his cup of tea. He and Graham took their parcels of fish and chips. A table at the further end from Guy Parker and Rosie Whittaker became free as the couple sitting at it got up to leave. As they were sitting down Graham said quietly, 'Dragon never speaks to them, you know.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well, if he saw them like we did he wouldn't have said anything, he'd have just walked by.' 'Uncivilized,' said Mungo. 'There is something uncivilised about Charles Mabledene, don't you think?' 'I don't know. I wouldn't have said so exactly. More that he's just a weird guy.' Mungo wanted to add something that he had felt about Charles Mabledene for some time, that he seemed to be without ordinary human feeling, but he did not care to say this to Graham. Nor how - illogically and quite unfairly, he knew - it got up his nose rather the way Charles Mabledene had betrayed Stern. No more deeply dyed traitor could be found. Kim Philby had nothing on Charles Mabledene, for Philby presumably had done what he did for an ideal of Communism while Charles Mabledene had betrayed Stern for nothing more than power and glory. Of course he, Mungo, had taken absolute advantage of Charles Mabledene's betrayal and the West had profited by it. He was in no position to condemn the conduct of the agent who had taken the name of Dragon. 'Best bit of skate they've had here for a long time,' he said to Graham and Graham nodded his agreement.

14

From the picture window which seemed to occupy the whole of one wall Hartlands Gardens could be seen spread out below, its walks, lawns, copses, avenues, terraces and the great house itself, now a gallery and restaurant, that had once been the seat of the Douglas family. Mark Simms in returning to the city, John admitted to himself, had chosen well when he picked this fiat. Fonthill Court stood on an eminence and all its balconies had wonderful views. Coming here at all had been unexpected. Mark, on the phone, had talked of meeting for a drink, had named a pub for the rendezvous. It was an invitation John would have refused if he could have thought of an excuse. He didn't much care for going out in the evenings when he had to be at work next morning. The garden centre opened at nine and he liked to be there by eight-thirty. But he had said a reluctant yes to Mark, with the proviso that he mustn't be late back. I sound like an old woman, he said to himself as he put the receiver down, and immediately he remembered how Jennifer had hated that expression, how she had said it was sexist. 'Why not an old man? Why are old women supposed to be stupider than old men?' The phone rang again ten minutes afterwards. Mark again, this time to say why not come to his flat instead? They could go out later if tney felt like it. This was even less to John's liking, for the address Mark gave him was a good four miles away and if he was going to be drinking he couldn't go on the Honda. Why did Mark want to see him again so soon anyway? It was only on Monday that they had spent that evening together with Cohn. Of course it might only be a return of hospitality. In the event he did go on the motorbike, making a resolution to drink no more than one beer or glass of wine or whatever was on offer, no great sacrifice for him, anyway. And at the last moment he put Jennifer's jacket on. The evening was mild for the time of year but he still needed his leathers. The blue jacket was smart and comfortable and he reminded himself that he had felt shabby on Monday by contrast to Mark's neat dressing and good taste. The road wound up round the perimeter of Hartlands Gardens to the crown of Fonthill Heights. Through the trees he could see great drifts of daffodils and white narcissi. The hedges in the park contained a lot of blackthorn or wild plum and this was in full bloom, not massy snowfalls of blossom as hawthorn might be or elder, but fine white nets of flowers hung on the black branches. In less than forty-eight hours now he would be meeting Jennifer there. He thought, I won't get there first, I won't get there at half-past two and have to pace about waiting. I'll be strong and walk into the Gardens by the main gates at two minutes to three... Now in Mark's flat in Fonthill Court no more had been said about their going out. They were seated by the window, looking out on to the gardens and the lights coming on in the city and a huge expanse of darkening sky, still reddish at the horizon from the setting sun. Under observation, John felt exposed there, though there was no one to see him except possible aircraft crews. Mark had produced beer in cans, so cold that John had feared it must actually be frozen solid. It was becoming clear to him why Mark had wanted to meet him again and what he wanted to talk about. 'Have you ever done any encounter groups?' he had begun. 'Me? No, I haven't. I only just about know what they are. Why would I have done them?' 'Business people do. It's supposed to enhance social interaction.' 'Not my kind of business,' said John. 'I asked because they work on the principle that it's good for you to talk about your feelings and hear other people's frank views on you and that sort of thing.' At this stage John was mystified. The beer was headache cold. It brought on a niggling pain in one temple. 'It's just that I thought it might be good for us to talk about our feelings, it might help us. You and me, I mean. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Well, for years actually. Having - well, quite a lot in common really. I mean I thought it would do us both good to express our feelings about the other and our feelings in general really. It might bring a lot to the surface.' The lights on the by-pass were a double string of yellow, the motorway white, the through road that became Ruxeter Road an old-fashioned soft amber. The CitWest clock could just be seen winking away, a lime-green star too far off for John to read the time or the temperature. He turned to look at Mark. What things did they want to bring to the surface, what buried pain? 'Have we got a lot in common?' he asked and then feared he had been rude. 'We've got Cherry,' said Mark. John was aware that he was blushing. His face had grown hot. It wasn't true that only shame or embarrassment made you blush. Any strong emotion could do it. He felt suddenly deeply moved. And he didn't want this, he didn't want this further complication in his life now, at this juncture. 'Wouldn't you like to talk to me about Cherry?' Mark was saying. 'Haven't you got things you'd like to get off your chest? I'm sure you must have. You mustn't be inhibited about this, John. You can say anything to me.' How was it he realised then that Mark didn't really mean him at all? Mark meant himself, he meant that he wanted to talk to John. 'We've never talked about her, John. We buried it and then we pretended it hadn't happened.' John wanted to say, speak for yourself, but he only nodded. He knew intuitively that little as he wanted to, he now only had to listen. In an hour or so he could make his escape. Mercifully, Mark seemed to have forgotten to replenish their glasses with more frozen beer. Not looking at John, leaning forward, his hands resting on the windowsill and staring out as if trying to identify some particular light down there, he began talking about Cherry. There was nothing new in it to John. He was well aware how Mark had felt, how he had loved Cherry, even - incredibly - thought her beautiful. Mark lay back in his chair, his face still turned aside, and talked about the first time he had taken Cherry out, the funny things she had said, about how six months later they had gone to buy the engagement ring and how she had wanted an opal. Opals were unlucky, even the shop assistant in the jeweller's had been discouraging, but Cherry had wanted the opal and said superstition was rubbish. How could a stone bring misfortune? That ring was on her finger when they found her body... He fell silent. Then he said, 'Say something.' 'It's a long time ago, Mark. You've been married since then.' 'A dismal failure. A relationship that never got off the ground.' 'You're quite young still. You'll find someone else.' 'What do you know about it? How can you know? I hate that sort of specious advice. Bloody counselling.' I've been married too, John wanted to say. I am married now. But Mark seemed to have forgotten this, to have forgotten indeed that John had a life of his own, was any more than a receiver or recording device. He talked on. He seemed to remember every word that Cherry had ever said to him. Of course this was impossible but he did have amazing recall. He even remembered her clothes and what she had worn on particular days. It all made John uneasy, for it seemed obsessive; it was all seventeen or eighteen years ago. He looked surreptitiously at his watch, but not surreptitiously enough. 'You want to go. I'm boring you. You're a very conventional person, aren't you, John? Not to say routine-driven. You'd sacrifice real living to a principle of going to bed at the right time and getting up at the right time. Life will always pass you by because your petty rituals are more important to you than your own or other people's pain or happiness. I'm being very frank. We agreed, didn't we, that we were going to be quite open about our feelings for each other?' John didn't think they had quite agreed to that. He tried not to be offended. It was nearly midnight and many of the lights that had come on down there were going out again. 'Goodnight, Mark,' he said. 'Thanks for the beer.' And he added, because Mark was obviously in a bad way, 'We'll meet again soon.' It was the last thing he wanted, he thought, driving home. St Stephen's clock struck midnight. It's April the first, John thought. It's April Fools' Day, and he recalled his and Cherry's childhood when they had played mostly successful April Fool's tricks on each other and how their mother had told them it was only April Fools' Day up till noon and after that it became Tailpike Day. The idea was to pin a tail on some unsuspecting person. Cherry had pinned a tail on to their mother's coat and she had gone to the shops like that and wondered why everyone in the grocer's was staring. It had been a wonderful tail like a lion's, made of yellow knitting wool and with a tuft on the end. The things you remember, John thought. He didn't sleep well. He never did if he got home late. All part of being a conventional, routine-driven person presumably. Next day, waking early, he arrived at work even earlier than usual. There was a delivery to make of trees and shrubs to a house near the estate where Jennifer lived. John had promised to go with the driver and give the purchaser of the trees some on-site advice. It was a big order and he had felt obliged to do this. Much as he wanted to see Jennifer, he hoped the driver wouldn't go past the cottage where she and Peter Moran lived. He didn't want to see her while with someone else, especially with someone who didn't know, though he couldn't have explained why this was. But the driver took another route there and back, mainly on the by-pass, leaving the big road on the return journey by the cats' green flyover, open at this hour to traffic heading for the city. As they bumped over the pillars, John thought there might be a new message down there, under the wheels of the van, and he said to the driver to drop him off. It was lunchtime and he might as well find his lunch down here as at the cafe near the garden centre. The bus he caught to work on the days he wasn't on the Honda started from the garage half a mile from here and there would be one going at one-forty. It might be the old message still there, he thought, as he crossed the street towards the green. It was only yesterday, after all, that he had discovered and read the one that mentioned Bruce-Partington. He reached up and unpeeled the tape. A new message. He could tell that at once. He copied it down into his notebook, replaced the package inside the pillar and went off to look for somewhere to have lunch. The nearest place would be the pub on the steps. Imagine eating there! Imagine standing on the very spot where... John walked up Albatross Street past Ahman-Suleiman, to where the street widened, found a small but clean-looking workmen's cafe on a corner where four streets met. The tables inside actually had cloths on them, red check cotton, and there were posters of holiday places on the walls. At the small self-service counter cheeseburgers or ham sandwiches or samosas were on offer, these last perhaps for the Ahman-Suleiman workforce. He took the sandwiches. The least adventurous, he thought. Mark Simm's estimate of his character still rankled rather. But it was true. If one of the questions in a quiz was: which of these lunch choices would a conventional person make, a sandwich, a cheeseburger, a samosa, the first would be the correct answer. He took a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie too. Without a copy of _The Other Side of Silence_ he could still decipher the message, for he had written the first lines down in his notebook. The book, after all, would soon have to go back to the library. The first word of the message was nine characters long, the second two characters, the third six. John started placing them against the code alphabet. The result was VCHIFUAH FZ LWASZH. Could he have copied the first lines incorrectly into his notebook? This was the first time he had not used the novel itself. But he was sure he hadn't copied them wrongly. He was beginning to be very familiar with the code. If, as seemed likely, the message began: 'Leviathan to Dragon', the TH of Leviathan should be AB in the code not TW and the T of 'to' would be A not F. John couldn't understand it. What had gone wrong? He spread the paper out on the table between his place and coffee cup, as if by smoothing it with his hands he could suddenly make all clear. More slowly this time, concentrating, he tried again. VCHIFU... And then he understood. He saw plainly what had happened. A new month had begun and they had changed the code. They had made an April Fool of him.

15

Strange, remote music, a soprano voice singing: ....

Ah, Belinda, I am prest With torment not to be confest...

Angus was lying on his bed, flat on his back, lying beside him the record sleeve which had a picture on it of a woman dressed like one of the goddesses on the City Hall Parthenon frieze. He was reading. The curtains were drawn but sunshine made bright lines and spots round their edges. Angus wasn't keen on morning sunshine. He had his bed lamp on. Mungo knocked politely, though the door was as usual wide open. Everyone in the house had to put up with Purcell or Gluck or whoever it might be until Lucy lost patience and told him to turn it off or shut the door. When Angus saw who it was he said: 'I don't suppose you happen to know who said, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," do you?' 'Me? No, I don't know. Why would I? I came to ask if I could use the computer. As a great favour.' 'You can't use it, can you? You don't know how.' 'I thought you could show me,' said Mungo. 'It would be easier if I just did it for you.' Angus looked penetratingly at him. 'You don't want me to know what it is, do you?' 'I don't mind. Not really. Only we ought to do it before lunch and catch the afternoon post. I want him to get it tomorrow.' 'Get what?' Angus got up and sat on the bed but he didn't turn Dido off. Mungo closed the door. His father was out but he wasn't sure about his mother. She was usually at the hospital on Fridays. He explained about the planning permission and Blake and Charles Mabledene. Angus started to laugh. 'You're never going to write to Dad and tell him permission's been granted!' 'Why not?' Mungo said cautiously. 'I thought it would look official done on a computer. I've got a bit of the right paper. Well, it's not quite right but Dad won't know. It's City Council paper, not City Planning. I've had it ever since Hydra got ten sheets for me when we did the rates thing. I want to say there's been a supplementary meeting held in camera at which it was resolved to grant permission...' 'Why in camera?' 'I like the sound of it. It means in private.' 'It really means in a room. Camera obscura, a dark room. Like the inside of your head,' Angus added, and he offered Mungo a chocolate truffle. 'Will you do it for me, then?' said Mungo, munching. 'I suppose. You mustn't sign it with Blake's name though. You'd better make up someone. And I won't put that "in camera" bit, it's crazy. I suppose you're absolutely sure about this?' 'About it being true? Charles Mabledene is completely reliable. I'd trust him with my life.' As soon as he had said this Mungo knew he didn't really mean it. He wouldn't trust Dragon an inch but he knew he would get his facts right. 'You're bananas, Bean, do you know that?' But Angus switched on the computer and sat in front of it, commanding it to edit a new file. 'Suppose Dad rings up the planning people?' 'Why would he?' 'I don't know. "Dear Dr Cameron..."' Angus pattered away at the keyboard. 'What's your next project, Bean?' 'I'm getting all my officers working on finding out who it was dented in the wing of Unicorn's brother's car. And then I want two invitations for Graham and me to the Conservative Association's cocktail party. I've never been to a cocktail party. I reckon we ought to get that all wrapped up before term starts.'

16

With the aim of being honest and open, no secrets, no deceptions, Jennifer had got John to meet Peter Moran on the day she left him. Peter Moran came to Geneva Road in that Citro�Diane of his to pick her up. John had had a few days to get used to the idea, or at least to get over the worst of the shock, but he was still in a stunned or bemused state. 'It's better for you to meet,' she said. 'It's better for you to see each other. I want you to understand, John.' He took that to mean that when he saw Peter Moran her desertion of him for such a man would be comprehensible. Peter Moran would dazzle perhaps by his appearance, his personality, his wit and charm, his sheer cleverness. Jennifer always said how clever he was, how she admired his needle-sharp intellect. John was still in a condition then of believing that in order to attract the opposite sex a person had to be specially good-looking and hyper-intelligent too, and this in spite of all the married couples he saw around him. This in spite of long-past evidence of Mark's love for Cherry. And then Peter Moran arrived, laconic, casual, and with that sort of bludgeoned half-awake look, as if he had just come round from deep, perhaps drugged sleep. Not handsome at all, gaunt-faced and pallid. That made it worse somehow, or at least didn't make it better. It insulted John that Jennifer preferred him. He spoke in an effete public school drawl, spare of words, supercilious, seemingly indifferent to what anyone's opinion of him might be. And there was more to it than that. Later John thought he must have imagined this, it must be that just anything bad he could think of he had applied to this man, but in fact he had thought at once: there is something nasty about him, something awful. Of sexual deviation he knew little but he could sense its monsters lurking. Such a monster sat behind Peter Moran's eyes, he had thought, crouching behind those eyes that were dull as stones, screened by the windows of his glasses. When he came in he had said hallo but John had not been able to copy him. He had said, very stiffly: 'Good afternoon.' There had been a casting up of those eyes at that and a murmur that might have been 'bloody hell'. To Jennifer Peter Moran said: 'Is this all the stuff you're taking, Jen? I thought you were coming for good, not the weekend.' Since he made no move to pick up her suitcases, John carried them down the path. He had a stupid hope the neighbours would think Jennifer was going off on holiday somewhere and Peter Moran was just her driver to the station. Peter Moran, watching him do this, said: 'Shades of Sacher-Masoch.' They went off and John closed the front door and went upstairs. He threw himself down on the queen-sized bed where he had slept alone for several nights by then but he couldn't lie still, the pain was too bad for that, the sheer pain of her absence. He imagined them in the car together and for some reason he imagined them laughing. Whenever he imagined them together they were laughing which was strange, for Peter Moran seemed like a man who would hardly ever laugh. Next time he was at the library John looked up Sacher-Masoch in an encyclopaedia and found out that he was a man who derived sexual enjoyment from suffering. He had accompanied his wife and her lover on a tour as their servant in order to witness their most intimate moments together. This, then, was how Peter Moran saw him. The dream he had very early on Saturday morning was of the day he and Jennifer had parted, now five months past. In the dream things weren't as they truly had been but distorted so that some of the events, on waking, seemed absurd. He might have carried her cases a few yards but he had never knelt at her feet and polished her shoes. Why did one dream such things? Peter Moran too had appeared deformed, with a hideous growth on one side of his face, instead of the quite normal-looking man he was. John sometimes lay in till nine or nine-thirty on those alternate Saturday mornings when he didn't have to go to work and he had meant to do that today. But he woke up at seven sickened by this dream and instead of being able to get off to sleep again, his thoughts went immediately to the afternoon, to three o'clock and the meeting with Jennifer. He was excited and he was afraid. The bedroom didn't look exactly dirty but frowsty and it smelled stale. He got up and dressed, opened the windows and began putting clean linen on the bed. The sheets were fresh from the laundry, white and crisp. John confessed guiltily to himself that he hadn't changed the sheets for a month but he fancied that men living alone seldom did change linen very often. Mark Simms would be the same. Suppose when he woke tomorrow Jennifer's head were to be lying on this pillow, on this white linen pillowcase, next to his? He had been afraid of love-making. His virginity, which had been nothing before he met Jennifer, which had seemed to him the normal condition of a single person, became a burden no longer willingly carried, a dragging weight and an absurd embarrassment. He would have felt it less if she had been a virgin too, only he knew she wasn't. There had been Peter Moran - and others, for all he knew. More than once she had hinted to him that they ought to live together - his expression, a euphemism - before marriage but he had said not exactly that he respected her too much but that he wanted to save love-making for when they were married, for their wedding night. Smiling, she had accepted. Perhaps he should have minded that she showed no disappointment. It was all right on the night. Strange what an application that common phrase could have. It was just all right. An exercise he had never performed before, as using some unfamiliar machine might be, but possible if one followed the directions. The earth didn't move, nor did he soar to heaven, and he was sure she didn't. It was enough for him in those early days that he had acquitted himself respectably. He knew how to do it, apparently, and he had certainly done it. The burden had been dropped and left behind in the middle of the road. Two days before they were married she said she thought she ought to tell him that if Peter Moran ever came back and wanted her she would go to him. She wouldn't be able to help herself. Jennifer was tired and a bit weepy and he put this down to pre-wedding nerves. He didn't really believe her. Peter Moran was in America, she said, teaching at a college in the Middle West, though how she knew that when she never had letters from him John didn't know. John had laughed and said he would have something to say about his wife running off with an old flame, he would lock her up. Various feeble jokes of that kind had been made. And then, at their Registrar's Office wedding, she had said suddenly: 'You don't have to make any vows. Isn't that interesting? You don't have to promise anything.' He thought he loved her. He really fell in love with her after they were married. What he would have liked was to have laid everything at her feet, the sun and moon and the heaven's embroidered cloths. All he had was his house and some small savings and an equally small inheritance from his parents. He would have liked to spend that on making the house nice for her but she wouldn't have it, she wanted nothing changed. 'Leave it as it is,' she said. 'I'm not houseproud and it's the garden you really like.' So all he bought was this bed and the beautiful, expensive, old-fashioned bed linen that had to be starched and ironed. Between those sheets she was kind and polite to him, but after a while, after the time of indulgence was over, he didn't dare ask her for love more than once a week and then not more than once a fortnight... But he knew himself, he knew he would never speak to her about it. Frank talking, openness, wasn't in his line, the kind of thing Mark Simms seemed to advocate wasn't for him. If their marriage became white, sexless, it would have to be so, he would accept. To his astonishment it was she who broached the subject, who said with a sort of admirable simplicity that it was awful, their love-making, boring at best, painful at worst. She couldn't stand it, it would make her ill. She spoke so softly and gently but she was firm. Couldn't she, wouldn't he let her - she baulked a little here, but she came to him and put her arms round him - suppose she were to try to teach him? Suppose they were to try together? And there began his happiness, the learning of love with a woman who loved him, or who he thought loved him. That which had been a novelty, a source of satisfaction of various kinds, became a glory and a sensuous triumph. 'Going to bed' took on a quite different meaning for him. She would draw back the curtains and fill the room with light, slip back into his arms and nuzzle him and whisper. Sometimes in the day she would embrace him downstairs and quickly lead him up to bed. She promised him she would never pretend to a pleasure she didn't feel, so he knew that first orgasm she had and all the subsequent ones were real and he had given them to her. Feverishly she talked while he moved and strove, 'yes, yes, yes' and his name repeated, and 'my darling!' and a cry of such evident bliss - from Jennifer who otherwise never made so loud a sound. Into the midst of this, at the peak of it, it seemed to him, when they had found each other and the heights of mutual sensuousness, Peter Moran came back and she left and went to him. It would have been less, much less, if she had gone during that first year. His potency might have been spoiled for ever, but what use was potency to him without her? She had gone when all was perfect between them, when they touched each other all the time they were together and held hands and acknowledged the other with secret smiles and glances of tenderness and remembrance. There was a night when they made love, in the evening and again at dawn, and then there was the day after on which, walking across Nevin Square, she saw Peter Moran sitting on the stone plinth where stood the statue of Lysander Douglas... Remembering that time was something John struggled against. The mind is said to block off recollections that are wounding or even disturbing to it, but John had not found this to be so. All sorts of things he fancied would be useful to him he forgot, but these bitter memories were always present and clear. He finished the bed and went downstairs but he wasn't interested in breakfast. Would she notice how thin he had got? It was going to be a beautiful day. English weather has a way of behaving like this, of warming up slowly, half a dozen pleasant days burgeoning at last into the splendour of a heatwave that will endure for a week and then break up with thunder. This being early April, it was hardly a heatwave, but the sky was clear and blue, the sun misty but strong, and John could go outside without a coat on, felt he might sit out there quite comfortably in a deckchair. Did anyone but he still have deckchairs? She had asked him this, laughing, when he had set outside on the little lawn the two seats of striped canvas, the one for her with its detachable leg rest. Old-fashioned and conventional he was, he who had been young in the Swinging Sixties, though they had never swung for him. Perhaps that had been part of the trouble. He had wanted so much to take care of her, because he loved her and because he saw this as a husband's duty. She had never gone out to work while she was with him. To distract his mind, or to attempt to, from the afternoon ahead, he got out his code notebook and studied it. Already, because he knew the first word must be 'Leviathan' and the third 'Dragon', he had made a little headway. Then he had got stuck. But now, immediately, as if his subconscious had silently, during the night, been working on the problem, he saw what 'Tosos' meant. 'Ignore all Tosos commands' was now clear. It meant to disregard any messages that might be received in the The Other Side of Silence code. But did the bit that preceded it therefore mean that now April was here, a new month, the Bruce-Partington code must be adopted? Who, anyway, was Bruce-Partington? Not some participant in this mini-Mafia, John thought. They all had those fabulous beast aliases. Bruce-Partington might well be an author of espionage fiction. John had never heard of him but this didn't mean he didn't exist. He wasn't very well up in the writers of this genre, knowing only the great ones really, Le Carr�Deighton, Yugall, and now Albeury and one or two others. He had hours and hours before the appointed time of his meeting with Jennifer. Why not go down to the library in Lucerne Road now and ask if they had any novels by Bruce-Partington? With luck the man might have written no more than half a dozen, in which case, provided the library had them in, it would be a simple task to check their opening lines for the April code. First, though, he tidied up a bit. He cleaned the sink and wiped down the surfaces. It was pointless to think of cleaning the whole house at this stage, and hadn't she told him often she wasn't houseproud, that she was indifferent to these things? The sunshine showed up cobwebs, fingermarks on woodwork, curtains that needed cleaning. It would be nice to throw the lot away and buy new. And why not, for her, if she wanted it? She may be changed, he thought. If Peter Moran was about to desert her again, if she had suffered a double disillusionment, would she be bitter and despairing? For the first time John confronted the possibility that she was only returning to him because Peter Moran was leaving her once more, that in other words, it was a matter of any port in a storm. He found he didn't much care. At any rate, this time, she would be cured of Moran, that would be the end of it. John recalled the feeling he had had about Peter Moran, the rather creepy intuition that Moran might have nasty sexual proclivities. Such as what, though? John didn't know much about this kind of thing. He couldn't be someone who preferred men. Perhaps he liked being beaten or even - John shrank at the thought - doing the beating himself. He had been very quick and glib with his reference to Sacher-Masoch. Could it be this which was driving her away? As for him, she had loved him once and would again. Self-confidence came to him with the sunshine and he found that he was whistling as he pottered about the kitchen. The librarian at the Lucerne Road branch was sure they had no books by Bruce-Partington. She looked through the author files they kept on a computer and showed John that there was no writer on record between Robert B. Parker and Harry Patterson. 'The name does ring a bell, though.' 'You mean,' John said hopefully, 'there may be such a writer but you don't have his books?' 'I don't think it's actually a writer. More a name of something. Like a firm or a make of something.' It didn't much matter. Next week, anyway, he might not have the time or inclination for breaking codes.

It was twenty-five past two when John walked through the main gates into Hartlands Gardens. He had had lunch, a very sparse lunch, and bathed and put clean clothes on, washed the dishes, dried them, put everything away and it was still only one-thirty. And then it was simply that he couldn't stay in the house any longer. He had to be out in the air and walking about. The bus had come at once and for some reason there was very little traffic to hold it up. A summer's day it had become, a freak hot day, the leafless trees having a strange look against that blue unclouded sky. The broad central walk which led from the gates up to the Douglas mansion were bordered with masses of golden-eyed white narcissi, thousands upon thousands of flowers, and their rich heady scent had been brought out by the heat. John left the main path and took a right-hand turning, heading for that part of the grounds that was always known as Lady Arabella's Garden. Lady Arabella had been the wife of Lysander Douglas, a society hostess and a great gardener. John's mother, as a child, could remember seeing her being driven about the city in a big Lagonda car. John and Cherry had often come here with their mother and naturally had preferred the play area with the swings and slide. At that time the park hadn't long been made over to the city, the result of death duties which had nearly impoverished the Douglases. John's mother's favourite place was this garden which he was now making for and which had been designed by Lady Arabella herself. As he approached it, John wished he had thought of suggesting to Jennifer that they meet there instead of at the tea place. He and she had been there and sat and walked on several occasions. It was a white garden that somehow managed to have flowers blooming in it at three seasons of the year. Yew hedges enclosed it and it was not until you had walked down one of the passages between them and under an arch that you could see the flowers at all. John was astonished to see so much in bloom, such a variety of narcissi, white tulips coming into flower, snowy arabis, ivory crocus just touched with mauve, honesty, and some type of early iris he didn't know the name of. The branches of a cherry tree were clustered with fat buds, not yet open, but a clematis that overhung the wall of the small pavilion was covered with star-shaped delicate papery blossoms. He found himself quite alone in the garden. The beauty of it, with the scents and the warm sun, affected him strangely so that he felt tremulous and weak. He could have gasped aloud. He sat down on one of the stone seats and thought, suppose she were to come in here now, come in from the other end behind the pavilion, and walk up to me? It was possible, it was even likely, for she couldn't be far away. He looked at his watch. Two forty-five. Perhaps he would bring her back here after they had had tea. There were white violas growing everywhere between the stones, on the edges of the symmetrical flowerbeds, among the other flowers, as if the gardener had opened and scattered packet after packet of seeds. John thought, I shall will her to come in here now, and he closed his eyes, concentrating, praying really. But when he opened them he was still alone. Only a butterfly had arrived, a winter survivor, fluttering above the ara and as appropriately white as its petals. He left the garden and walked back towards the mansion along one of the high terraces. From these it was possible to look down on to the circular stone-paved courtyard where in summertime tables and chairs were set out and the doors to the restaurant thrown open. Normally, at this time of the year, it would have been too cold for this but as John came along the narrow path and leaned over the railing, he saw that the tables were out and even one or two sunshades up. At a table in the full sun, sitting upright in her chair and apparently reading a newspaper or magazine spread out in front of her, was Jennifer. She was early. And she looked as if she had already been there for some minutes. John, after his heart had lurched and his throat dried, enjoyed the considerable pleasure of watching the beloved person without being oneself observed. She was dressed as he best liked to see her, simply enough in skirt, shirt and pullover, but the skirt must have been a very long very full one, for it spread out in thick folds nearly to the ground, showing only her fine slender ankles, her feet in pointed flat pumps. The sun shining on her hair had turned it to the tawny gold Rembrandt used for Juno's crown, John thought, admiring her, wondering if he could bear the pleasure that would come to him if she turned and saw him and waved, or if it would be too much for him, for his heart, and he would die of it. His heart wasn't put to the test. She continued to read. She turned a page. He walked to the next set of steps, experiencing now that sensation we have when tremendous anticipation is over, when the end is achieved and the consummation come - an absence of thought and blankness of mind. Like an automaton he approached her table and she, hearing his footfalls, turned and got up, standing there and gradually managing to smile. He understood very quickly that of course he couldn't kiss her or shake hands with her or even touch her hand. She said, 'Hallo.' He said,'Hallo, Jennifer.' The long tweed skirt hung like a bell. She held her hands clasped up against her chest. Her fingers were bare, the wedding ring gone. 'It's good to see you.' She nodded. It might mean anything. 'Would you like a cup of tea? Shall we have tea and cakes?' 'I don't want anything,' she said. 'You have cakes if you like. You've lost a lot of weight, haven't you?' 'I expect it's better for me.' He watched her pick up her magazine, fold it, start to put it into the big carrier of woven straw she had with her. 'If we're not going to eat,' he said, 'we could go for a walk. We could walk to the white garden. I've just come from there, it's beautiful, you'd like it.' 'I'd rather sit here. We may as well stay here.' He knew then. He knew from her tone and the look on her face, a bored, rather miserable expression, anticipating an unpleasant task ahead, that she wouldn't be coming back with him. She sat down and he sat opposite her. The sun hadn't gone in but he had a feeling that it had. She put her left hand on the table and made nervous finger movements like someone testing the tone of a piano. And suddenly it seemed to him that sheepishness, passivity, would no longer do. What had he to lose from speaking? What to gain from this devoted humble patience? He had already lost everything. 'Why did you ask me to come here, Jennifer?' He surprised himself with the sharpness of his voice. 'What is it you want?' 'A divorce,' she said, looking him straight in the eye. 'I want a divorce.' The clean sheets on the bed, he thought. He had made a fool of himself, if only to himself. 'Are you going to marry him?' She nodded. 'And what guarantee will you have this time that he won't turn tail and leave you two days before the wedding?' 'That's my problem,' she said. The blood came up into her face and he exulted because he could still upset her. 'He won't though. It's different this time.' She said quickly, in a ru3h, 'I don't want to wait two years. I want you to divorce me for adultery with Peter.' 'Why should I?' 'Because I ask you, John.' He winced at her use of his name. 'It was a mistake our marrying in the first place. We made a mistake.' 'I didn't make a mistake.' He found out of his misery a wonderful articulateness. He was able to express himself as he never had before, with perfect heartfelt lucidity. 'I fell in love and I married the woman I loved and as far as I was concerned I hoped and meant to stay married until I died or she did. I'm still in love and I still want that.' 'It's impossible!' 'You're my wife. Doesn't that mean anything? You said you were sorry you said that about not having to make vows or promises.' He lost the thread of what he had been about to say. Cold realisation seemed to cut him to the bone. He would go home alone. He would always be alone. And she would go back to Peter Moran, relieved no doubt, glad to have got it over, this necessary interview, would throw herself into Peter Moran's arms and kiss him, sob her disappointment - and be comforted. 'What is there about him? He's not good-looking or good company as far as I can see.' 'He's clever and he's cool, he's an intellectual. He's funny. He makes me laugh. We speak the same language.' That was bitter to hear. 'He hasn't a job, he can't even provide for you properly.' 'You don't love people because they're good breadwinners.' 'He deserted you once, he left you more or less at the altar. Did you ever find out why?' 'It doesn't matter,' she said. Her face looked as soft and vulnerable as one of those paper-petalled flowers that bloom for a day, that bruise at a touch. 'I'll never divorce you,' he said. 'You'll have to wait five years. But he'll have left you by then.' He jumped up and walked rapidly away. He was determined not to look back and he didn't, keeping his eyes fixed on the green lawns ahead, the blue sky, the white shimmering mass of narcissi. Very nearly colliding with a woman walking towards him, he was surprised that there were other people in the world. He looked about him, saw children, a man with a dog on a lead, and felt dazed, stunned. For half an hour he and she had been the only man and woman on earth - and now there was only himself. Two days afterwards there was a piece on the local television news about Lady Arabella's Garden. Even the white butterfly - perhaps the same white butterfly - appeared in the film, fluttering about. But the main item was concerned with the missing schoolboy. A boy of twelve, a pupil at Hintall's the prep school, had disappeared on Saturday afternoon while out on a supervised nature walk. The last anyone had seen of him was by the river on the other side of Nunhouse where a group of boys, keeping very quiet and still, had been observing the behaviour of herons. During this silence and stillness James Harvill had vanished. Any mention of Nunhouse caught John's attention. But it was to be quite a long time before he connected the disappearance of the boy with something in Jennifer's letter.

PART TWO

1

He was one of those small neat people, the kind that never look ungainly or, come to that, anything but spruce and spotless. Beside Mungo he seemed very small indeed. He had elfin ears, the tops of them not pointed but not rounded either, ever so slightly peaked. His pale hair was always newly-washed and well cut. The squeaky voice that, nearly a year before, had told Mungo on the phone that its owner wanted to defect, was still unbroken. Trimly dressed in the clothes ordained for Rossingham casual wear, grey flannel trousers, dark green pullover, without a tie because it was after six, he accepted Mungo's offer and sat down at the study counter in the chair that was normally used by Graham O'Neill. There he cast the eye of one who is insatiably inquisitive over the books Mungo had been using for his French prep. Mungo reached across and slid his attempt at a translation out of that eye's range and as he did so an arm came out and produced first an egg from his pullover sleeve and then a couple of dozen yards of paper streamers from his trouser pocket. 'Don't do that,' said Mungo. 'You make me nervous.' Charles Mabledene smiled with his lips closed. That was a habit with the Moscow Centre lot, they picked it up from Guy Parker, and it served to remind Mungo of Dragon's antecedents, as if he could ever forget them. His trousers fitted him snugly and his pullover was even rather small on him, far too tight to conceal an egg and all those streamers, yet egg and paper had unaccountably appeared and as unaccountably vanished. 'Why are you called Mungo?' 'After Mungo Park, the explorer. He was Scottish too and a doctor and we're all doctors in our family.' 'I've heard your brother call you Bean. Is that because of mung beans?' Mungo felt irritated. 'I think so. I've forgotten.' He added, 'No one but my brothers call me Bean, absolutely no one.' The smile reappeared. 'I got you down here to ask you how you got that piece of information out of Mr Blake.' 'My mother asked him.' 'Your mother? All right, go on.' 'My mother wants to open a new salon...' 'A what?' 'A salon. A hairdresser's. I got her to ask the Blakes to dinner. She didn't know them but she does Mrs Blake's hair or one of her stylists does. And Mrs Blake kept on saying she wanted to see my mother's sauna. I'd told my mother I'd heard the doctors' place was coming up for sale, that a friend of mine had told me and that was all I needed to say. Mr and Mrs Blake came to dinner and I knew she'd tell them, I knew that was why she'd invited them. Blake said he was surprised to hear that as he understood the doctors would be extending their premises.' Simple. Mungo looked at diminutive Charles Mabledene, a child in looks if not in mind and guile. Still, no doubt he was reckoned sufficiently adult to be present at his parents' dinner parties... 'I wasn't there,' Dragon said. 'I taped it.' 'You what?' The door opened and Graham came in, wearing tennis whites and carrying his racquet. Charles Mabledene got up courteously to give up his chair but Graham waved him away. 'It's OK. I'm going to have a shower.' Coming out of the adjoining room where their two bunks were he slung the towel he had gone to fetch over his shoulder and six tennis balls all dyed different colours bounced out of it. Charles Mabledene's eyebrows went up and he smiled, without modesty. 'I was just saying,' he said, 'that I taped the conversation. Of course it's a bit muzzy and parts of it you can't hear at all on account of my having to conceal the recording device behind some dead grass. I mean, my mother goes in for these dried-flower arrangements and I stuck it behind that.' 'Do you often do that?' asked Graham. 'If I think something useful might be said, yes.' 'Useful?' 'Something I could put to use,' said Charles Mabledene, and he began juggling with his coloured tennis balls. After he had gone Mungo pondered for a while before returning to the passage from de Maupassant he was rendering into English. His father had believed in the letter and acted accordingly, or rather, not acted. By now, presumably, it being the last week of April, he would have had a real letter about the decision of a real meeting but Mungo wasn't going to worry about that. Fergus might find it odd but everyone was always saying how unaccountable councils and bodies like that were in their behaviour, apparently you came to expect anomalies. Dragon had done very well. Mungo asked himself why he found his methods distasteful. Or was it Dragon himself he found - well, not so much distasteful as somehow cold and repellent? After all, there wasn't anything strictly wrong about recording a conversation when the end you were going to use it for was good, was there? Mungo thought he had heard some saying or principle or whatever about the means being justified by the end or was it the end by the means? He would have to find out. Half-term would be coming up in three weeks' time. Sports Day on the Saturday and then home on the Sunday until the following Monday week. So far no one had been able to discover the perpetrator of the damage to Unicorn's brother's car, though Mungo had had Basilisk, Empusa, Charybdis, and Minotaur all working on it. Charybdis, whose real name was Nigel Hobhouse and who went to a day school in the city, might be getting somewhere by now. The great advantage he had over other agents, at any rate in Rossingham term time, was that his parents had a weekend cottage at Rossingham St Mary which meant that Charybdis could use the school grounds drop. Mungo wrote the two last sentences, closed his dictionary and put it back on the bookshelf. He still had maths to do I but that could wait. Out in the corridor he met Graham coming back from the showers and then Mr Lindsay. The Pitt housemaster was a zealous man, frequently on the prowl, his aim to keep every man in his house usefully occupied from morning till night. 'You look as if you might be at a loose end, Cameron (or O'Neill or Mabledene or Ralston)' was a favourite phrase of his. This time, it being out of school hours, he addressed Mungo by his christian name. 'I left my biology essay in the New Library, sir,' said Mungo. This was true, as a matter of expediency as much as ethics. Mungo had taken care to leave his half-completed explanation of the working of a rabbit's alimentary canal on the desk where he had begun flexi-prep at six. 'That was careless of you.' Mr Lindsay's speech was as spare and ascetic as his physical self. He seldom used adverbs; adjectives, sparsely indulged in, were never qualified. He had been a classical scholar, was reputed to have taken a Double First at Oxford but had few calls on his knowledge at Rossingham where Greek was no longer taught and Latin only as a special subject. This was a source of permanent frustration to him. By way perhaps of compensation, he laced his speech with Latin words and phrases. 'Our biblioteca will be locked up by eight-thirty, so you had better hurry. Oh, and Mungo...' 'Yes, sir?' 'If you are going to prowl about the grounds at dusk, may I suggest you slip into track suit and trainers? Running is one of the best forms of exercise, I'm told. Currite, noctis equi, or in this case noctis pueri.' That meant Mr Lindsay must have spotted him going out to the drop. He didn't miss much but Mungo realised he must have been careless. Mr Lindsay now turned his attention to a member of the Lower Fourth heading for the common room and known for his addiction to commercial television. 'Finished your flexi-prep, Stephen?' The New Library stood on its own, a rotunda, or at any rate an octagon, built only the year before Mungo came to Rossingham. In the same style of architecture as the physics and technology wing, nineteen-eighties Victorian, it was constructed of fashionably dark materials, dark red brick, black woodwork, dark grey polished slates. The trees for which Rossingham was famous, mostly limes and chestnuts, made a high screen behind these buildings, a screen on which the new young leaves looked livid at this hour. The fine weather of early spring had given place to a chilly greyness with sharp spurts of rain. Mungo went into the library. Those who preferred to do their flexi-prep in here were sitting about at desks or the long pine tables that occupied the central aisle of the reference section. The supervising prefect, by a piece of luck, was Angus. 'I confiscated your essay, Bean,' Angus whispered, 'plus the obscene illustrations.' 'They're only a rabbit's innards,' Mungo protested. Angus gave him the two sheets of paper. 'What are you up to?' 'Counter-intelligence, of course.' Angus announced that it was eight twenty-five. Five minutes to clear up in and he'd be closing and locking the doors. Mungo slipped out before he could get asked any more awkward questions. The drop was at the back of the cricket pavilion, on the other side of the pitch that was said to be the finest piece of grass in the west of England. Mungo had to skirt round it, keeping close to the hedge. The essay he had folded up and stuck inside his pullover, for the rain had begun again. A loose brick to the left of the foundation stone when removed revealed a deep cavity. Mungo eased it out and withdrew from inside a paper in a plastic bag. It was still just light enough to see the paper. Charybdis to Leviathan, he read, but for the rest of it he would need the Bruce-Partington key...

2

Mark Simms and John sat in John's living room, sharing a bottle of wine. The television was on and they were watching a programme of no interest to John and of little, he suspected, to Mark. But he was sick and tired of Mark and of his conversation, his criticism of John and defence of himself, his curious obsession with Cherry and his memories of Cherry. Having this quiz programme on was a way of preventing or perhaps only postponing talk. John knew that he had brought all this on himself. On that Saturday four weeks ago when Jennifer had told him she wanted a divorce and in his rage and misery he had walked away from her and out of Hartlands Gardens, he had been visited by a desire to get drunk. This was something he hardly ever did. He drank very little. The idea of getting drunk as even a temporary solution to his problems astonished him at the time. But it was what he needed, or thought he needed, as much because he dreaded being alone that evening as for the solace of alcohol. Hardly thinking, not permitting himself to reflect or reason, he had gone home and first phoned Cohn Goodman, then when Cohn said his mother wasn't well, Mark Simms. Mark, whose life seemed as lonely as his own, had jumped at the chance. They had gone to several pubs, then bought wine and taken it back to Mark's flat. John had not meant to say a word about Jennifer to Mark but the drink in its well-known way had overcome his inhibitions and later that night he had come out with it, all of it. Mark hadn't been very sympathetic. He was a tremendous egotist, too self-centred to care much about the suffering of others and his comments had been of the 'Forget her' and 'Make a clean break' kind. In a way this had been more acceptable to John, certainly later if less so at the time, for he was pretty sure Mark had forgotten all that had been said to him, even supposing he had ever taken it in. John had only to pause for Mark to deflect the conversation to himself, to Cherry or rather to his own feelings for Cherry, to her death, his loneliness, his own disastrous marriage. Without actually disgracing himself, John had succumbed to the unaccustomed amounts of wine and fallen asleep. He was obliged to stay the night on Mark's settee. Since then - and he realised he had only himself to blame - there had been no possibility of putting Mark off. Indeed, Mark rather took it for granted that they should spend the greater part of their free time together. Yet John didn't think Mark particularly liked him or preferred his company over that of others. He was just an ear that listened, a voice that interjected, a presence instead of a void. He hadn't mentioned Jennifer again, though he had come to believe that it was only while he was with Mark and perhaps to a lesser extent while he was dealing with customers at work, that he was not thinking of her. It seemed to him imperative that he shouldn't divorce her. She had written to him twice during the intervening time, letters of a very different kind from that which he had received asking for the meeting in Hartlands Gardens. The first was cold, the second pleading. John had replied to the second one, refusing to meet her and Peter Moran as had been suggested and reaffirming his intention to remain married to her. Curiously, since writing that letter, his heart had ached less. Action, decisiveness, made him feel strong, convincing him he might prevail. This morning, though she had not asked for it, he had wrapped the blue leather jacket up in a parcel and sent it off to her with a covering letter saying he knew she would return to him, it was only a matter of time. And then he had cleaned up the living room, taking curtains and chair covers to the dry cleaner's and on the way back made a detour to cats' green to look inside the flyover upright. There was nothing there. There had been nothing there since he had found the second message in the current month's code. That had been on 9 April, the day he had made up his mind not to consider a divorce. Feeling if not more cheerful at least more positive, he had gone to the flyover and found the message. Of course he had been unable to decipher it. A search of the city's Hatchards and its six other bookshops, new books and secondhand, had failed to discover a Bruce-Partington among the authors. But the searching had been good for his morale. Now, though, the messages had ceased to appear. Did that mean they were no longer using the cats' green location or did it mean something more sinister? Another thing that had changed was his level of drinking. Under Mark's influence he was drinking a lot for him. Not spirits but beer and wine, a lot of wine, at least a bottle every time they met. It had the effect of making him sleep heavily and not think about Jennifer during those vulnerable night hours, and for some reason not even dream about her. He reached across and re-filled Mark's glass, laughing because it seemed expected of him at some outrageous reply made by a contestant in the quiz game. Because the windows were uncurtained all the headlights from all the cars that passed made bands of light that rushed across the ceiling and down the walls. Both bars of the electric fire were on. The programme came to an end and football started. Mark reached for his glass. No longer feeling it necessary to keep replenishing bowls with crisps and nuts, John picked up the Free Press. He had lately got into the habit of going through it story by story to see if there was ever anything that might give him a clue to the group he called the mini-Mafia. Some drugs gang, he thought vaguely, or maybe something to do with horse-racing. The missing boy called James Harvill had never been found and no one now expected him to be alive. Mark watched the football for no more than ten minutes. He switched the television off without asking John. 'The way those lights keep flickering across the ceiling is very irritating,' he said. 'It makes it impossible to relax. Why don't you have curtains or blinds or something?' 'I told you, they're at the cleaner's.' 'You should have had them done express,' said Mark. He began on one of his favourite criticisms of John, his condemnation of what he called John's 'cheeseparingness'. John caused himself absurd inconvenience by penny-pinching. The absent curtains were a case in point. And why did they have to bring wine and beer in by the bottle and can when anyone else would have beer in the fridge and a rack full Of wine? His face, though handsome, had a peevish look, John noticed not for the first time, a sour down-turning of the mouth, a pinching of the nostrils. A permanent frown sat on Mark's much-lined forehead. He started to talk about his marriage, the elision from John's meanness to his former wife's profligacy being quite naturally made. John did have one further bottle of wine in the house and he went out to the kitchen to fetch it. The back garden, even in this dismal weather, was a little orchard of shimmering fruit blossom, the pink and white shining in the radiance of distant unseen lamps, the pond a dark glowing mirror in a circle of stones. Under the trees all John's tulips were out, no colour by night, but scarlet and purple and yellow and gold by day. He took the wine bottle out of the fridge and went back with it, no longer caring whether Mark went or stayed, quite unhurt by his fault-finding. In fact the wine had so thoroughly quelled his social inhibitions that he even picked up the paper again and searched idly for some reference to a gang or disreputable syndicate. Drink never mellowed Mark. 'The least you could do is give me your attention while I'm telling you these things. You must be the only living soul I've opened my heart to in this way. It's rather galling, to say the least, that you prefer the columns of the local rag.' John said he was sorry. Another part of his mind was wondering if the two men charged the day before at the Crown Court with possessing heroin could have anything to do with these messages. One of them was called Bruce, though his surname was Chambers. Mark, suddenly, asked him what he was thinking about. He could tell he had something on his mind. John didn't make it up or say it because he thought it would please Mark. It came, unsummoned, into his head. 'I was just remembering something about Cherry.' What? What were you remembering?' 'How she used to spend a lot of time with an old neighbour of ours, a more or less bedridden woman, a Mrs Chambers. She used to go shopping for her and sit with her, just drop in and sit with her. She was a very kind thoughtful girl, wasn't she? But of course you know that.' 'You know nothing at all about women, John,' Mark said. 'You've had three women in your life, your mother and Cherry and that wife of yours and you don't know a thing about any of them. You don't know a thing about women.' 'You talk about women as if they were a different species,' John protested. 'That's just what they are.' 'I don't agree. Women have the same sort of emotions and thoughts as we do.' 'Utter bullshit. Let's have some more wine. My God, you haven't got the cork out yet. Give it to me.' Mark began driving the corkscrew into the cork of the long-necked hock bottle. 'The way you talk about Cherry proves you didn't know her. You saw what you wanted to see, not what was really there.' 'Are you saying she went to old Mrs Chambers for some ulterior motive or something? Is that what you mean? I don't see how she could have. She wasn't like that, Mark, really she wasn't.' 'Oh, forget old Mrs Chambers. I'm not talking about that.' He pulled the cork out with a long whoosh and John saw how red his face had become. The wine was poured - slopped, rather. John took his wet slippery glass. 'I knew Cherry, I knew her too bloody well.' John had begun to feel very uncomfortable. He hadn't realised how drunk Mark was. Mark must have been drinking before they met that evening to be in a state like this. Twin streams of light, more than usually dazzling, poured across the ceiling and, because of the position he had taken up at the end of the settee by the table, down Mark's face and over his hands. John saw that those hands were shaking. And Mark's face, in that rush of light, looked ghastly as if he were wincing from some inner pain. In trembling fingers he lifted his wineglass to his lips and drank the wine down as if he were parched and it were water. For the first time John had begun to wonder what Cherry's life would have been like had she lived to marry Mark Simms. But surely he had been a very different person in the days when he was engaged to her, when she wore that opal ring on her broad stubby left hand? John confessed to himself that he couldn't remember very well. His father hadn't much liked him and it was this which had given rise to John's mother's defence of Mark and to her calling him 'Cherry's choice'. 'He's a nice enough boy,' she had said, 'and we have to remember he's Cherry's choice.' They had laughed at that and his father had said it sounded like a kind of jam. But he had privately thought that Cherry hadn't had a choice, with her appearance she was lucky to get anyone, incredibly lucky to have got hold of someone like Mark. And then he had castigated himself for having such thoughts about his dear sister whom he loved. 'Poor Cherry,' he found himself exclaiming. Mark started to laugh. He lay back against the settee cushions, bare and crumpled without their covers, and laughed in drunken whoops. He reached for the bottle and drank from it, the wine slurping down his throat. John picked up the glasses and the bowls that had had nuts in and took them to the kitchen. Cherry must have been unkind to Mark, he thought while he rinsed the glasses under the tap. Had her unkindness perhaps only been a refusal to grant sexual favours? He could easily imagine that. Cherry was the sort of girl, chaste as ice, who would never have anticipated marital pleasures. The man who killed her had not assaulted her sexually. John remembered being glad about that. And his mother, sitting here in this kitchen on a hard upright chair, her hands in her lap ever on the move, wringing and twisting, his mother had said: 'At least he didn't interfere with her. I hold on to that, I say to myself, be thankful for that, she wasn't interfered with.' This kitchen had become a kind of hiding place for his mother after Cherry's death. When she sat in the living room she was afraid of people passing along the street looking in and seeing her. She sat on one of the two windsor chairs with her elbows on the table, and after ten minutes or so she would get up and potter about, wash something up, wash some garment, return to her chair and sit there, looking at the window. But looking at it, not through it. That was when he took to gardening. People said they would have thought he had had enough of gardens all day without starting on his own in the evenings. But working with the soil, planting and tending, was a kind of therapy, it began the healing process. When he was in the garden he could accustom himself to Cherry's death, he could bow before it and accept. It was incongruous that his father, whose daughter had been murdered, should have taken to detective stories. But they were the classic kind that he became addicted to, and perhaps bore little relation to reality. They were his kind of escape. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Innocence of Father Brown, The Hollow Man, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor... His father had devoured all this without savouring it, without pause, skipping, John had suspected, as soon as he had begun one, longing for it to end so that he could begin on the next. And when he had got through half a dozen, re-reading them all. They had all taken their wounds to different springs of healing but none had been completely healed. Did I look for my lost dead sister in my wife? John asked himself. But a pretty, daintier, more charming version? The court dwarf transformed to the queen of the gods? He was suddenly quite sober. His head ached a little but all euphoria was gone, all irresponsibility, all carefreeness. He went back into the living room to find Mark fast asleep. The wine bottle had fallen over and wine poured out over the bookcase with his father's books in it. John heaved Mark's legs up on to the settee, went upstairs and fetched a blanket to cover him. He got a cloth from the kitchen and set about wiping the books. They would reek of wine. The room seemed very hot and stuffy and he kicked off the bars of the electric fire. He had to wring out the cloth in the sink and this time he fetched a bucket back with him. The Conan Doyle books were in the worst state and one of them would have its pages permanently corrugated. John started on the Sherlock Holmes collection, The Memoirs, His Last Bow. Opening this volume, he began to wipe the pages and his eye was caught by the title at the beginning of one of the stories, 'The Bruce-PartingtOn Plans'. I've found it, he thought. Not a man, not an author, but the name of a story. And a story about spies, I shouldn't wonder. And then he understood that it was too late anyway. Half an hour past midnight, his watch told him. It was May the first. A new month had begun.

3

Lights-out for the Lower Fourth was nine-fifteen. When Fiona Ralston heard that flexi-prep didn't end till nine but her Nicholas was still expected to be in bed and composing himself for sleep by a quarter past, she said it sounded like Tom Brown's Schooldays. Mr Lindsay had done his best to explain that a boy was not obliged to be still doing prep at nine, he could get it all done by seven if he chose, this was why it was flexi, but Mrs Ralston was unconvinced. She didn't care for the names of the houses either. If there was a Churchill why wasn't there a Lloyd George? If a Gladstone, why not a Disraeli? She had to be content with her Nicholas being put into Pitt, a statesman who had lived so long ago as hardly to have been, in today's terms at any rate, of any particular political persuasion. Her elder son, nearly ten years his brother's senior, had been at a comprehensive school. That was in the days before the Ralstons made money. Ralston the elder had come to fetch Nicholas on the last day of the spring term, taken him into the city for tea, and while they had been eating cream pastries in the Fevergate Cafe, someone had backed his or her car into Ralston's parked car, smashing the headlamp, breaking off the wing mirror and denting in the wing. The cost of repairing the damage was estimated at six hundred pounds. Witnesses there had certainly been but no witness came forward. The police weren't interested, for no injury to anyone had occurred. Ralston would either pay up himself or, if his insurance company paid, lose his no-claim bonus. Autoprox was what Mungo called the investigation. A significant fact was that a flat in the building overlooking the car park was said to be occupied by the sister of Mrs Whittaker, Rosie Whittaker's mother. Of all this Angus Cameron knew very little. Spookside interested him now only insofar as it affected his brother Mungo. He very much wanted Mungo kept out of trouble until he grew out of this obsession of his. Passing along the second-floor corridor on his way upstairs - as you ascended the ladder of seniority at Rossingham so you descended the stairs for your study accommodation - Angus glanced through the glass panel in Mungo's door. Graham O'Neill was there, drawing some sort of diagram on a sheet of file paper, but Mungo was not. There was no reason why Mungo should be there at nine in the evening, Angus reassured himself. His prep was very likely done. He could be at the drama society of which he was a member or the chess club or even in the common room watching television. Lights-out for the Upper Fourth wasn't till nine forty-five. I get all these guilt feelings, Angus told himself, because I started it all. I and Guy Parker were responsible for it. He went up the last flight. All but ten members of the Lower Fourth had by now received their first summer term pep talk from a prefect and only those in the study at the far end remained. Angus made a noise on purpose as he approached, walking more than usually heavily and clearing his throat. There were scuffling sounds from behind the door. They were all in bed, sitting up breathless and rumpled, when he entered the room. Or all but Charles Mabledene whose bunk, for some reason, always looked cleaner than anyone else's, the top sheet as if it had just been ironed, the pillow plump and uncreased. Charles's bunk had no pictures over it, no mobile hanging from the bunk above, no snowstorm paperweight or china pigs or polythene monster on the bedside shelf. It was odd, reflected Angus, how when you thought about Charles Mabledene you somehow pictured him as looking Chinese. In fact he didn't look the least Chinese, for he was fair of hair and light of eye and his cheekbones were not high nor his face broad. Was this illusion perhaps founded on the smooth blankness of his features and the inscrutability of his expression? Nicholas Ralston was in the bunk above, a photograph of himself and his golden retriever puppy on the shelf beside him. He was big for his age and unfortunately spotty. The Harper twins, younger brothers of that Harper who was Hydra, the double agent, were in the next pair of bunks, then Robert Cook, then Patrick Crashaw... Angus was a conscientious prefect and knew the names of everyone in Pitt. He frowned mildly at the disorder, an overturned wastepaper bin, a drift of pencil sharpenings, dirty tee-shirts, shorts and socks dropped where they had been taken off. 'The linen lady's going to have something to say to you lot,' he said. 'Crashaw,' said Charles Mabledene who always called everyone by his surname, 'will clear it up in the morning.' 'You'll all clear it up in the morning,' Angus said, severely for him. 'You know very well nobody's to be turned into the study servant. Right?' He sat down straddling a chair, his arms along the back of it. They sat waiting for him to begin, knowing what to expect, wanting only to defer the moment of lights-out. 'Well, you're coming up to the end of your first year at Rossingham,' Angus began, 'and I think you've all settled in pretty well, don't you, and found your feet? I'd like to think you were enjoying the place too and that's what I...' Downstairs, in his study on the second floor, Mungo stood looking down at Graham who still sat with felt-tipped pen in his hand. 'Are you saying we've got a leak in the department?' Graham said. 'What other explanation is there? I smelt a rat first when Rosie Whittaker never took up that dead letter at the Mabledene garage drop. I sent her there but she never went. And no one knew I'd sent her outside the firm. Even Angus didn't know.' 'We've got a mole in London Central, is that what you're Saying?' 'This is what every departmental head dreads, Graham,' said Mungo. 'You know what I'm afraid of, don't you?' 'That when you get home at half-term you'll find planning permission for that extension was refused, not granted.' 'Absolutely,' Mungo said.

4

The king cat had a carcase of something half-hidden under the bushes. It was meat or fish and it emitted a pungent reek. As John approached the king cat began a threatening singsong noise. There were half-grown kittens everywhere in the long grass, thin and leggy, with pointed faces and hungry eyes. It was all too much for John who began to sneeze. The king cat picked up his carcase and fled across the road with it. John came to the central pillar and looked up inside it but there was nothing there. There had been no message, either in the Bruce-Partington code or whatever might have succeeded Bruce-Partington, for five weeks. He would have to resign himself to the likelihood that it was all over. It might very well be that the moving spirit behind it had been the man Chambers who had been charged with possessing heroin. And certainly the last message, which with the help of the short story in His Last Bow, John had been able to decipher, seemed to point to some drugs connection. 'Dragon to Leviathan: No news on bang. Awaiting developments.' John had a vague idea 'bang' might be a slang term for heroin. When he went to the library in Lucerne Road and looked it up in the appropriate dictionary he found the word defined as meaning narcotics in general or an injection of a narcotic or a marijuana cigarette. He was on his way to work. They were coming up to one of the busiest times of the year. In the garden centre Gavin was trying to teach the mynah bird to talk. 'I'm a basket case,' he said. 'I'm a basket case.' John hadn't the least idea what he meant. The mynah said, 'Ha ha ha, damn!' which was all it ever did say. It was a handsome bird, about ten inches long, with glossy black feathers and white wing patches. Its beak and legs were yellow and its wattles the orange of marigolds. 'I'm a basket case,' said Gavin, his face up to the bars of the cage. 'I'm an empty nester.' John told the boy called Les to open the front doors and hook them back. A woman came in and went straight to Sharon's counter asking for plant-food spikes. In the house-plant house there was a subtle fresh scent that arose from the damp foliage of begonias and ivy-leaved geraniums. John walked along the central isle, plucking out from the fibre pots an occasional tiny weed. It was Thursday and his half-day. He and Mark Simms were supposed to be going out into the country in Mark's car to a village where there was quite a famous pottery. There Mark meant to buy two large ceramic pots to stand in his large window and which he would fill with an oleander and a Ficus benjamina from the garden centre. 'I hope you don't mind my saying so,' Cohn Goodman had said when they encountered each other by chance at lunchtime the day before, 'but it's a bit peculiar, isn't it, spending all your time together, the way you and Mark do? I mean I don't want to imply anything, but it seems a bit strange, you both being men if you see what I mean.' John saw what he meant. He also thought it absurd coming from Cohn whose remarks suggested he himself took women about when in fact he led a celibate existence, living in his mother's bungalow. 'You know me better than that,' was all John said. It wasn't as if he wanted to spend all this time with Mark. But he had begun to be afraid to say no, afraid, that is, about Mark's mental state if he said no. He thought Mark might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Besides, though he had felt angry on the previous Saturday night, his feelings had been much softened by Mark's subsequent behaviour. He reminded himself too that it was Mark who, though unwittingly, had twice provided him with clues to the mini-Mafia codes. In the morning the apologies had been unexpectedly profuse. Mark said he didn't know what had come over him, what was the matter with him these days. Or, rather, he did know but John was the last man he could confide in. 'Though, frankly, you've been my lifeline these past few weeks, John. I don't actually know how I'd have got by without your support.' He added rather pathetically, 'I'm all right when I'm not drinking, aren't I?' He was even more carping and critical when he wasn't drinking, John thought, but he didn't say so. And on the Monday evening Mark had made restitution by coming round to Geneva Road with a magnificent leather-bound copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories and all the volumes of Father Brown in paperback. After that John couldn't very well refuse the invitation to go out to Rossingham St Clare and the pottery place even though this would entail a meal out afterwards and the inevitable bottles of wine taken home. Mark's hands had started shaking again after he had handed over the books and sometimes John saw an awful expression on his face. He would be staring at the wall or the window with his eyes very wide and that frown very deep as if he could see something abominable, but of course there was nothing there to see. A stout white-haired man with his elderly wife and an infant who was probably a grandchild was asking Gavin about the mynah. How old was it? Would it bite? How much was it? Gavin looked alarmed. 'You wouldn't want him around kids. There's a disease you can get from mynahs. Newcastle's Disease, it's called. How about a budgie?' Later he told John with an air of guile that this was an illness to which only birds were subject. He led them off to look at budgerigars. John put his hand into the pocket of his jacket under the canvas work coat and felt the letter he had put there after he had read it that morning. Jennifer was trying again for a meeting between him and her and Peter Moran. They should all talk about this divorce like reasonable people. John thought that a funny way of putting it, as if they weren't reasonable people but should try to behave as if they were. Perhaps there was no such thing as a reasonable person. Could he bear to see her in the company of Peter Moran? Suppose they touched each other in his presence? If he saw Peter Moran even touch her hand or look at her in a certain way he could not answer for what he might do. Why then was he even considering the possibility of seeing them? There was no question of his divorcing Jennifer, for he knew that if he waited Peter Moran would eventually behave as he had done before and leave her. Or go back to whatever it was he really preferred doing to making love to Jennifer. John asked himself if he was contemplating agreeing to meet them because in this way, and only in this way, he would have a chance of seeing Jennifer again. If this were true it was pathetic and humiliating. A customer was standing meekly beside him holding up a handful of seed packets. John apologised and hastened to answer the stream of questions put to him about seeds which the packet said would grow into a banana passion flower. 'Ha ha ha, damn!' shouted the mynah bird.

In the pottery shop, which was dim and cavernous inside and smelt of clay, Mark bought two large earthenware jars ornamented with flowers and swags and silenus faces and John, though he had not meant to, found himself buying a lamp with a heavy bulbous base glazed in grey and coffee brown. In the back of his mind was a half-formed idea of arranging that meeting in his house and of making the place look more attractive before this happened. The chair covers had come back from the cleaner's and the curtains were up. Why not splash out a bit and buy those two jugs to match the lamp and a couple of flower pots too that he could put geraniums in... 'You were the one who didn't care about coming,' said Mark, 'and you've bought more than I have.' He seemed particularly nervous today. John hadn't been able to relax in the car. Mark had overtaken a truck as they were coming out of Ruxeter and for a terrible few seconds John hadn't thought they were going to make it. Sweating, his mouth stretched into a gargoyle grimace, Mark had pulled in just in time to avoid an oncoming removal van. But he drove back to the city in an apparently calmer frame of mind, talking to John in a very ordinary rational sort of way about what plants to put in the new pots and even asking his advice. Only when John explained to him that Trowbridge's would be closed now, that this was the one afternoon of the week that they closed, did he begin grumbling again, asking what the country was coming to, how could Britain expect economic stability when shops still kept to that ridiculous old-fashioned early closing system? A newly-opened Indian restaurant called the Hill Station in Alexandra Road was suggested as a desirable place to eat. Mark wanted to go into a pub first and parked the car on a meter in Collingbourne Road. Fontaine Park was a mass of greenery, its lawns scarcely visible between the beeches and sycamores. Since John had penetrated the condemned house all the trees had come into leaf and it was scarcely possible any longer to see its rear windows from here. He looked curiously at the front of the house as they passed it but its boarded-up ground-floor windows and metal-sealed front door gave nothing away. Suppose, when he looked up, he had seen a face at a first- or second-floor window? The face perhaps of the very tall young man who had come that evening to the cats' green drop? John was not at all sure he would know that face again. Perhaps it had been the man called Chambers. Mark pushed open the saloon-bar door of the Gander. It was the kind of pub John most disliked, an inner city pub of Edwardian origin with a lot of stained glass, ornate but dirty ceilings, marble tables, apathetic barmaids and strident clientele. A strong smell of beer met him on a hot wave. Mark said, 'Oh God, we forgot to buy any wine for later.' John would have been happy to go on forgetting, though he knew that when the wine was there he would drink it. It wasn't yet five-thirty with half an hour to go before the wineshop in Ruxeter Road would close. John was given a half-pint of lager and settled at a corner table while Mark went off in quest of cheap Riesling. All the time they had been out Mark hadn't once mentioned Cherry and John was glad of it. He felt that Mark had a very different picture of Cherry in his memory from the one that he personally cherished and he was made to feel uneasy when they came into conflict. Mark seemed to remember her as some sort of beautiful goddess, a fatal woman, while to him she was the little sister he had first realised was ugly when she was eleven years old. But without Cherry, or Mark's marriage, which was another favourite subject he hadn't touched on, what on earth would they have to talk about? The empty evening seemed to yawn before him. It would end perhaps in silent moody drunkenness. An idea came suddenly to him. Why not ring up Cohn and get him to join them? If only, between the three of them, they knew some women! But John didn't really want to know any women except Jennifer. He had a notion that a married man shouldn't really know other women, except as casual acquaintances. Mark took the suggestion about Cohn with his old belligerence. 'I'm boring, I suppose?' He drank nothing but beer during the meal. Wine, John had often reflected, doesn't seem to go with spices and curries. It had been somehow taken for granted that they would end the evening at Mark's flat, though this would mean John's taking a taxi home unless Mark were still sober enough to drive him. Silence prevailed while they were eating and John was able to relax a little. It was still broad daylight and the evening had become much warmer with one of those unheralded rises in temperature that sometimes occurred at about this time of day in late spring. Mark said as he started the car: 'Do you know what day tomorrow is?' 'It's May the twenty-second.' 'It's Cherry's birthday,' Mark said. 'She would have been thirty-five.' John felt a sinking of the heart. Not because he had forgotten Cherry's birthday, he would have remembered it next day, and it wasn't important anyway, remembering her birthday. But he sensed that Mark had used this ploy to bring the conversation back to her or, rather, to resume where they had left off last Monday. 'She might have had teenage children by now,' Mark said. He was driving up the steep road that skirted Hartlands Gardens, the terraces of which, hung with blossoming trees and others in full fresh leaf, fell away to the house in its parkland and to the city below, its spires and towers and grey slate roofs, the curling river, the green everywhere among the brick and stone. The sky, now the sun had gone, was melon-coloured, a very pale red-gold. Suddenly Mark began speaking rapidly, a high-voiced gabble. 'The first time I ever came to your home, to your parents' house, I thought it was wonderful, I'd never known anywhere like it. Everybody was so nice to everyone else, polite and kind and sort of praising everyone. I'd had a rotten childhood. My parents never spoke to each other unless they had to. I never heard them say anything pleasant to each other, not ever. My father was always telling me horrible things about my mother behind her back, how hopeless she was and stupid and how he had married her when he was too young to know any better. And my mother used to tell me he'd ruined her life and hint at appalling sorts of sexual mistreatment. I went away to college and never went back, I just lived in furnished rooms after that. I'd never known what a real home was till I met Cherry and she took me to Geneva Road. Do you know one of the first things that happened when I got there? Your father came home from work. He put his arm round your mother and said, "How's my sweetheart?" I've never forgotten that. I never will. I thought, one day I'll marry Cherry and we'll be like that. We'll still be like that when we're old.' 'We were an exceptionally happy family. All that changed, of course.' Mark took no notice. 'Your father asked Cherry's opinion of something. He asked her what she thought. It was some international thing, something out of the paper, not women's stuff. I couldn't believe it. And she answered him very intelligently but it was the way she answered I'll never forget. He was sitting down and she laid her hand on his shoulder and her cheek against his hair. She called him Daddy. She was eighteeen but she still said Daddy. I thought she was lovely. I was breathless and sort of frightened because I thought she was too good for the likes of me and I might so easily lose her.' Mark threw back his head and broke into a horrible kind of staccato laughter, cold and humourless and self-mocking. He banged his foot on the accelerator and the car shot into the Fonthill Court car park, juddering and squeaking to a halt. Mark opened the first bottle before he had even sat down. He went straight into the kitchen with it. John sat in the window looking at the clear sky whose colour was now a greenish gold, already punctured by a few bright winking stars. It gave him a strange feeling sitting there, so exposed, so out on a perch, as if he might suddenly be precipitated off the edge. In the gardens below the thickening foliage was a deep, dense and mysterious green. The flickering tower pointed up to the stars, to the transparent slice of moon. John didn't know why, he was sure there was no cause for it, but he had a sense of panic, as of something awful being about to happen. In that moment - for there was a precise moment at which he became aware of this feeling -he knew that he ought to get up and go. He ought to go out and find Mark, tell him he felt ill or had remembered some appointment, run out into the street and find a taxi or walk down and get the bus. Mark would be offended and might never speak to him again but what would that really matter? John knew his being there wouldn't really save Mark from having a breakdown if such a thing was imminent. And he desperately wanted to go. If that window had opened on to a lawn, would he have stepped out quietly and vanished without a word to Mark? Convention held him back. Mark had said he was ruled by convention and it was true. Abruptly to leave someone who was opening a bottle of wine for the two of you to share was something he couldn't do. It must be surely that he would prefer to face whatever was coming to him than provoke a scene with Mark or have to stand up to him. But nothing was coming to him, it was all nonsense, all imagination... Mark walked in with the bottle on a tray and two glasses already filled. The dishes of nuts and crisps John served were never provided here. John put out his hand for the glass with a sense that it was too late now. Whatever was going to happen would happen. Mark said, 'D'you want a light on?' The sky was so glowing still, the city such a bright galaxy of lights, that John had scarcely noticed how dim it had grown indoors. He looked into the shadows of the room, then up at Mark. It was a distorted face that he saw, its expression that same staring look of horror. 'I suppose so,' John said. 'It will be dark soon.' Mark drank his glass of wine at what seemed to be one swallow. He immediately refilled the glass, his hand trembling, slopping the wine. 'I don't want lights,' he said in a fierce belligerent way. 'I want the dark. You'll have to sit in the dark whether you like it or not.' John shrugged. 'OK.' The wine was sharp. He was aware of its cold passage down through his chest and of a tremor of nausea. 'Look at that sky,' he said. He had to say something. 'Look at that wonderful clear colour. It's going to be a fine day tomorrow.' 'It's going to be a fine day tomorrow,' Mark mocked him. He was still standing. He was standing over John. 'It's enough to make anyone puke the way you go on. Cliches and small talk. You're programmed, did you know that? You're a floppy disc the Great Computer Programmer has put a file of words and phrases on. Two hundred for average daily use. That's a good name for you, floppy disc. I think I'll call you that. It implies feebleness and learned responses in the right proportions. Christ, no wonder that wife of yours left you. What did you say to her every night before you went to bed, floppy? "It's going to be a fine day tomorrow. Me for Bedford. Up the wooden hill"?' John knew that he hadn't blushed but had turned very pale. Mark was still standing there, shaking all over now. And suddenly, to John's horror, he fell on his knees. He fell on his knees at John's feet and lifting up his face, holding up his hands, muttered at first incoherently, then all too articulately, that he was sorry, that he didn't know what had come over him, that he was a bastard. 'I don't know why I say these things. I take it all out on you. I can't go on like this, behaving like this. I'll crack if I don't tell you. It's been weeks since I've known I've got to tell you, that's why I got in touch in the first place, but I'm a coward, I couldn't do it. So I insult you instead. Say you forgive me. An inkling of his own value, that he too had his rights, that he shouldn't be Mark's punching bag, held John back. He wouldn't say it. Why should he, after the things Mark had said? Mark had attacked him without provocation in his most vulnerable part. Instead he said: 'What is this you've got to tell me?' 'Please forgive me, John. Later on you won't be able to forgive me.' 'Get up,' John said. 'Don't kneel there.' Mark slid back across the floor. He sat on the floor with his back to a chair and his face in shadow. The second glass of wine was swigged down like the first and looking with open eyes at John, he said: 'I killed her.' 'What? You did what?' 'I killed her,' Mark said. 'I killed Cherry.'

5

Fergus Cameron was glad it was all over. He could never attend a Sports Day at Rossingham without remembering that terrible Sports Day in 1953, a week after the Coronation, when he had been beaten in the putting the shot event by a rank outsider from Churchill. Everyone knew he would win, he had no rivals, yet here quite suddenly was this newcomer from a new house - Churchill was then only four years old - and as soon as the shot flew from his hand Fergus knew it was all up with him. Strange how it still rankled after more than thirty years. Hobhouse, the Churchill name had been, but his boys didn't come here, he wouldn't be here. Fergus remembered how he had congratulated Hobhouse and with his heart full of bitterness and rage, held out a hand and grinned while an inner voice whispered to him it was winning and losing which mattered and to hell playing the game. A lot of water had flowed under Rostock Alexandra, St Stephen's and Randolph since then. 'I pity that one's son,' he whispered to Lucy, indicating an amazing woman who looked like a magazine cover with purposely tangled stripy hair and a dress that was a knitted tube of emerald green with an armour-plated belt around the middle. 'I've a notion boys don't mind as much as they used to,' said Lucy. 'Human nature doesn't change.' 'You know who it is anyway, darling. It's Mrs Mabledean who's married to the garage man. She's a hairdresser. Well she's got a hairdressing shop.' She began a conversation with the O'Neills' aunt. Their parents were back in Saudi. The tent had been decorated with hanging baskets, white flowers, and green foliage, the colours by Mrs Lindsay. Angus appeared with a tray of teacups and tuckshop cake. He had rather distinguished himself by coming third in the long jump while Mungo, hardly famous for his sports prowess, had at least been among the first five in the mile. Mungo, whom Fergus hadn't yet spoken to, now joined them rather breathlessly. He was still wearing his green and white striped tee-shirt and shorts, though Angus had changed into grey flannels and blazer as befitted a prefect. 'That lady in the green dress is Mrs Mabledene,' said Angus, starting on madeira cake. 'Don't you think she's very beautiful? She is my idea of an English beauty.' 'What an extraordinary thing to say!' exclaimed Fergus. 'Why? You mean you don't think she's beautiful?' 'I certainly do not but that isn't what I meant. Please take this amiss, Angus, but I do think it a most peculiar and unnatural comment for a male person of your age to make.' 'Hardly unnatural, darling. Anyway, I'm always telling you times change. Your sons aren't carbon copies of you.' Mungo had been sitting in a kind of bursting silence as if unless a lid were quickly removed he would explode. Now he said on rather a high monotone: 'Did you get planning permission, Dad?' 'What?' Fergus seemed confused. He looked from the younger to the elder of his sons with an almost distressed bewilderment, and then back again at Mungo's intense staring face. 'Did you get planning permission? For the surgery extension? Did they say you could do it?' 'Yes. Oh, yes. Of course they did. Weeks ago now. I told you I'd had a letter before you went back to school.' Mungo said warily, 'And that was all right, was it?' 'What do you mean all right? Of course it was. Why shouldn't it be?' 'I just wondered.' Mungo wondered whether he dared, then decided he must. 'You didn't ever hear any more?' Angus flicked him a look. With a face as blank as Charles Mabledene's Mungo gazed innocently at his father. 'It's funny you should say that,' Fergus said, 'I had a second letter, not exactly confirming the first but saying what amounted to the same thing. These departments, you know, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. But I thought it was rather strange. Still, the main thing is we can go ahead. Why are you interested? I can't imagine why it should interest you.' Angus said quickly, 'Mrs Mabledene won't be able to have her salon there after all.' Fergus forgot the suspicious circumstances of Mungo's enquiry in his anxiety to know how Angus could be aware of events in the life of a woman twenty years his senior, a woman whom he appeared to admire and had called beautiful. Was it possible that his seventeen-year-old son...? Could he possibly have...? Worry dug lines all over Fergus's face. 'I have my spies,' said Angus. Traditionally, after the Sports, on the Saturday evening, the long Summer Half began. Rossingham would be down until the following Monday week. Before joining his parents and Angus in the car, Mungo picked up the message Charles Mabledene had left him in the cricket pavilion drop. It was in the June code, based on the first lines of William Crisp's _Spytrap_. "Dragon to Leviathan. Agree safe house Sunday p.m." The flood of relief, which had come when his father told him of the arrival of a second letter of permission, settled now into a steady feeling of satisfaction. Very likely Dragon was all right. Most probably Autoprox had come to an end simply because there were no witnesses of the car park incident and not for the more sinister reason that Moscow Centre had been secretly forewarned. Walking back from the cricket field, Mungo found himself remembering the time of Charles Mabledene's defection, those glorious weeks with Guy Parker's code book in his possession, Stern's rage: he had been beside himself with anger... Mungo stopped in his tracks and stood still for a moment on the steps of Pitt. How did he know Stern had been so angry? Because Charles Mabledene had told him so. There had been no source. Dragon had told him that when Stern had heard that one of his best men, whom he had thought a mere sleeper in enemy territory, had defected, he had 'gone mad'. But he had had nothing more than that to go on. For all he knew Dragon might have made it all up. He might have made it all up because in fact he had not come over at all, he was not even a double agent, but still working entirely for Eastern Intelligence. And who was to say that Guy Parker's code book was not simply a plant? True, the codes from it had continued to be used for a week or two but possibly only for the passing of information Stern wanted him to have. It could all be a colossal con.. 'You look as if you're at a loose end, Mungo,' said voice of Mr Lindsay. Mungo looked up at the window behind which was the Lindsays' living room. 'Just going home, sir.' 'A negotiis publicis feriatus, eh? Have a good holiday.' 'You too, sir.' There was a rumour that the Lindsays went to a health farm every holiday. No doubt they needed it. Mungo went upstairs, collected one small suitcase, and made his way towards the car park.

6

Revelations that overturn a world can also change a man. John felt himself radically changed by Mark Simms's confession and by Mark's reasons for doing what he had done. He realised that all his life up till now - and this in spite of Cherry's death - he had acted as if the world were a quiet ordinary place in which people followed a routine of work and duty, lived by rules, loved and made marriages which endured, in which at best a cheerful acceptance and at worst a stoical resignation prevailed. Now he felt that he saw things differently. He saw the world as a dangerous place, the seemingly ordinary men who lived in it as dangerous, and himself as potentially so. The events of that evening in Mark's flat he had many times relived. He had gone over and over in his mind the things Mark had said. At first, though, he had tried to forget, had tried to close his mind and give himself up to innocent things, to his own flowers at this most beautiful season of the gardener's year. But the real events, the real words, bored through, like worms, like termites. Also there was the impulse to take his knowledge to the police, though this was gradually receding. He was almost sure now that he wouldn't go to the police, for he couldn't see what good that would do to anyone. There was only himself left of the people who had been close to Cherry - unless you counted Mark. For his own part, he couldn't imagine deriving any satisfaction from knowing Mark had been arrested and brought to trial. At the time of the confession his feelings, though, had been very different. There had been a moment when he had wanted to kill him. Facing John, crouched on the floor with his back agains the legs of a chair, Mark had made that incredible confession. His face was in shadow but his eyes gleamed. A trickle of wine ran from the corner of his mouth. 'I killed her. I killed Cherry.' 'You mean,' John said, staring, breathing shallowly, 'you physically murdered her? You killed her with your own hands?' 'What other way is there of killing someone?' Then Mark seemed to understand what John implied, that he might only figuratively have killed her. With unkindness, for instance, or by neglect. 'No, I mean I murdered her, I strangled her.' 'But why?' John cried out. He didn't wait for an answer. 'Oh, I don't believe you. You're making it up.' 'I tell you, I killed Cherry. I strangled her on the Beckgate Steps.' 'Were you mad or something? Had you gone mad?' Mark was quiet and still. It was almost dark in the room by then. He wiped the trickle of wine off his chin. John said, 'Are you really telling me you killed my sister?' 'How many times do I have to say it?' 'It was you all the time and no one knew it.' John felt if his eyes were starting from his head. He stared at Mark with strained bared eyeballs. It was as if he were seeing for the first time. He said in a hoarse whisper, 'Do yot understand what you did? It wasn't just Cherry you killed, it was my parents too. And you made us all desperately unhappy. You said how wonderful our family life was and what it meant to you, yet you destroyed all that...' 'I wasn't exactly happy about it myself, you know.' All Mark's shaking had stopped and his face, or what John could see of it, seemed to have relaxed. He got to his feet, stood at the window, stretched. John felt the shock of what he had been told fully reaching him, effecting a throbbing in his head, a palpitating of the heart. He said it again, his voice breaking: 'Was it a temporary madness, a fit of madness?' Mark sat in the chair, on the edge of it, leaning forward. 'It must have been, when I actually physically did it. There wasn't anything mad about my reasons for doing it.' 'Why did you do it?' 'Jealousy. Rage. Hurt.' 'But you hadn't any reason to be jealous of Cherry. She loved you. She never looked at any man but you and I'm sure no man ever looked at her.' Mark gave that brittle laugh of his. 'Are you kidding?' he said in a very artificial way, like an actor in a bad film, 'She was the biggest whore in town.' For the first time that he could remember John knew what it was to be totally out of control. His body acted without his apparent volition. A redness of the kind you usually only see when looking at the light through closed lids appeared before his eyes. He jumped up and lashed out with both fists at Mark. But Mark dodged and was struck only a light blow on the neck. He sidestepped and when John lunged again he found himself pummelling the upholstery of the chair. Mark reached for the table lamp and a switch by the door and the whole room was flooded with brilliant blinding light. John fell head foremost into the chair and crouched there in silent misery. 'You and your parents,' Mark said. 'You must have been living with your heads buried in sand. From the time she was fifteen, long before she left school, she was going with anyone. And it wasn't some sort of insecurity, mark you, it wasn't because she needed her ego bolstering or anything like that. It was because she loved it. She was mad for sex, it was the mainspring of her life. I suppose that was what made her so attractive.' 'Attractive?' John said. 'Cherry attractive?' He felt dreadful saying it, wicked and abominably disloyal, but at the same time that it didn't matter what he said, nothing like that mattered or ever would again. 'She was one of the plainest girls I ever saw.' That hateful laugh of Mark's made him wince. 'Those eyes,' he said. 'That hair. She had the most beautiful body. She had a breathtaking body.' John faltered, 'You mean you'd seen...' 'Of course I'd seen. Do you think she'd go to bed with all those others and not with me? She was going to marry me. At least she did want me - only she wanted all the others as well. Anybody - old, young. I suppose she couldn't help it. I really do suppose that. It was a pity I couldn't take it, wasn't it? It was a pity I couldn't say to myself, this is the most wonderful woman I will ever know and the best sex I will ever get, surely I can put up with her promiscuity if she's discreet about it, if she doesn't broadcast it. I was right thinking it was the best. My marriage was a travesty compared to that. But I couldn't put up with it, John. couldn't take it. Not when she'd promised me to change an then I found she was sleeping with old Maitland.' 'I don't believe it!' 'I know. That's what I said. A sixty-year-old bricklayer with a bricklayer's hands. He stank of Guinness. He had white stubble on his face.' 'But when was all this? When could she have...' 'Half those visits to Mrs Chambers were never made, for instance. Nearly all the times she was supposed to be staying with your aunt she wasn't there. It was very convenient for Cherry your parents not having the phone. And as for Maitland, at work of course. I walked in there unexpectedly one evening - I was half an hour early fetching her - and found her sitting on his knee.' 'Perhaps she was sick,' John said. 'She was ill.' 'Nymphomania? Don't give me that. We don't say a man's ill if he's crazy about sex, if he can't get enough. Why should a woman be different? You're the one who says that women are the same as us. There was nothing wrong with Cherry. It was me that was wrong, that was inadequate if you like. I killed her because she admitted going with other men and said she couldn't stop, it was no good her pretending she could stop.' 'You could have left her. You could have broken the engagement and left her.' 'I know, but I didn't. I'm going to tell you what happened. I called for her that night. Well, about five. It was already dark. We walked along the embankment quarrelling. She told me quite frankly that old Maitland had been screwing her every day, or as often as he could make it. She said she didn't see any point in lying to me, nor would she have lied to her parents if they'd asked her, or you, only none of you ever asked. We came up Beckgate Steps. I got hold of her. I put my hands round her throat and once they were round her, John, I couldn't let go. It was as if my hands were fused there. I squeezed and squeezed and I heard something snap and as soon as that happened the life went. She went limp and slipped down, she fell through my hands and lay on the stones... He stopped and was silent. He closed his mouth and bowed his head. John felt hollow and worn out as if he had not eaten or slept for a long time. It was then too that he was aware of the world having changed. 'Why have you told me?' he said in a strange voice that sounded unlike his own. 'I had to tell someone. Do you know what it's like going about with something like that on your conscience? It's like a weight that pulls you down...' John got up. The city lay below him, embroidered with light and lit by the moon. He thought, irrelevantly, how many times, a couple of hundred times by now, that moon had waxed and waned since Cherry died, and all that time Mark had held on to his stupid cruel secret. He gasped out, still in shock: 'I'm going. I don't want to see you again.' 'I'd better drive you home.' 'No, thanks. You're drunk.' 'I drive better when I'm drunk,' said Mark, and John thought he looked better than he had done for weeks, he looked happier. He left the flat quickly without saying any more. It must have been very late. For some reason his watch had stopped. Sometimes it was possible to pick up a taxi here that was returning to the city after dropping a fare at Fonthill. But there were no taxis that night. He began the long walk down, confused, shocked, his head still swimming from it, but resolving as he walked to go to the police. A kind of angry horror took hold of him when he remembered that relieved happy look on Mark's face as he was leaving. The road brought him down among the big houses of Hartlands. A few last lights gleamed between the trees in gardens that were like woodland clearings. He saw no one, passed no one. The lights of an occasional car swept the road ahead, the grass plots in the pavement. There was a police station at Feverton, down near Randolph Bridge. They would think he was mad, going in there with a thing like this at that time of night. For suddenly, now, the CitWest tower clock reared up ahead of him, still a mile away but plainly visible. The time was twelve-forty-two and the temperature eleven degrees. It would be better to go to the police in the morning... That Friday was the first day John had ever stayed away from work for a less than sound reason, for real illness or, for instance, a funeral. He had taken a morning off for his mother's funeral and an afternoon for his father's. But before he went to bed he knew he would take the day off. And the Saturday morning when he was supposed to be working he would take off too. After lying awake for an hour in the dark, he understood that he had only gone to bed because that was what one did in the night time. It was a rule, a convention, and he lived by those. But the world had changed. So he got up and dressed again and sat downstairs and after a while he went out into his garden. He buried his face in the cold blossoms of a pink rose. He sat on the little stone seat and closed his eyes and he was surprised at the blankness of his mind, his inability to think. But he didn't sleep there either and at four the birds started. I will never rest again, what will happen to me? an inner voice asked, and as the dawn came he wandered indoors and out again, waiting for the time when he could reasonably phone Gavin... That had been three weeks ago. He hadn't gone to the police and on the Monday he had returned to work. Being born again, he thought, generally seemed to imply being reborn for the better, but why shouldn't it also mean being born anew into a grimmer world and with the knowledge that life was hard and terrible? He also had some curious feelings about what pain can do to you. Perhaps it could cut into and damage that part of the brain we call the mind. perhaps in this way it could alter you and make you a different, less scrupulous, less timid, person. The old John, he felt, would not have said harshly to Gavin: 'Leave off talking to that damned bird, will you? There's a queue of customers at the goldfish pond.' The old John wouldn't have let Jennifer's letter lie about for a week before answering it, nor when he did answer agree in clipped cold terms to the proposed meeting, stipulating only that it should be in his house. Certainly, the old John, when Mark phoned to suggest talking it over more fully, would not have replied: 'I've nothing to talk about with you,' and replaced the receiver.

7

A recurring dream for Angus Cameron led him through a series of large shabby high rooms where the wallpaper, of faded roses, hung in strips from beneath a crumbling cornice, broken chandeliers were suspended precariously from the ceilings by a single chain of prisms, and split or missing floorboards revealed through fissures sooty depths where beetles crept. Sometimes, along his fearful route through this dream house, Angus would see ahead of him, through a floorboard hole, a bony hand rise up. And then he yelled out. When he was a little boy Lucy would come, calm and comforting. Now it was different and he groaned softly in an empty room. It was just as well perhaps that he had only once entered the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road and never been higher than the ground floor. To walk up that staircase as Mungo did and wander from decaying room to decaying room would have brought up goose pimples on his flesh and one of those dreams that night... They never opened the windows. They hardly knew whether it was possible to open them. Eventually it would have been noticed and their presence detected. On a warn June night, still daylight at nine and after, the drawing roon on the first floor was airless and smelling of dust and a dry powdery smell that made you sneeze. Moths had left the dirty pink silk curtains with furry runnels. A cobweb, a multi-layered structure of rigging and galleries, hammocks, and swinging ropes, stretched from cornice to dust-clotted pelmet and held a hecatomb of dead flies. Graham O'Neill, wearing his octopus tee-shirt, sat on the ragged chaise longue, Mungo on the garden seat of loops and curlicues. The slanting rays of the setting sun filtered in here through dirty panes and made squares on the floor the colour of fire. 'He's late,' Graham said. 'Your watch is fast. I'll be surprised if he's late. Whatever he may have been up to, he won't be late. He's not a late person.' Mungo went to the window, not to look down into street, but up at the sky and the tower. 'Eight-fifty-six,' he said, 'and nineteen degrees.' He stood with his back to the window, his eyes on the door which was shut. It was a panelled door with fingerplate and knob of heavy blackened brass. 'I've got something to tell you before he comes. Stern has got our June code.' 'What do you mean, got it?' 'There are two possibilities, aren't there? One is that he or one of his field agents happened on it by chance. It could be done with a lot of guesswork and a lot of work. He would have to have found out it's espionage fiction we use. That was always possible. But Spytrap? It's quite an obscure book. It's a spy-novel buff's book. I mean it's not in the Smiley's People class, is it? The other possibility is someone gave it to him.' Graham said nothing but he made his mouth into a whistling shape. Reflected in his cat's eyes, the window panes could be seen, and the red sun. Mungo waited for him to ask how he knew and when he didn't ask, said: 'Basilisk got a command in Spytrap to abandon Autoprox.' Mungo stopped talking abruptly. He listened. One of the stairs creaked, the fifth from the top. No matter how you trod on it and at which point, it would creak. Not when it was he mounting the staircase, of course, for he would jump it. He thought he had heard something, not a creak, more a tremor in the depths of the house. Silently he moved back to the metal seat and sat in the middle of it. The door opened - and Charles Mabledene came in, but the stair hadn't creaked. He, too, had learned to miss it. He looked very small, a little boy with a child's face. With his soft fair wavy hair and his swimmy blue eyes, his expressionless, rather flat face, he looked stupid. He was the only brilliant person Mungo had ever known who looked stupid. 'I suppose you know why we've asked you to come here.' I sound like Mr Lindsay, Mungo thought, I sound like the headmaster. But what other way was there? 'You can sit down if you want.' A shifting of the blue eyes reminded him. 'Don't do any conjuring tricks, please.' Mungo asked the question sharply: 'How does Stern know about Autoprox?' 'You're asking me?' Mungo nodded. It was Graham who said: 'Basilisk was given a fake command. In the June code. The real command was removed and a fake one substituted in Spytrap.' Charles Mabledene's small feet in immaculate white trainers only just reached the floor. One of the squares of red light bathed them, they were set in the centre of it as if in deliberate quest of symmetry. But the sun was setting, had almost set, and quite quickly the colour receded, faded, was gone. Dragon, who could scarcely have been less aptly named, looked down at his feet, at the vanishing light, the dying fire, then lifted his eyes and looked at Mungo. 'Are you saying I'm a traitor?' Instead of replying directly, Mungo said, 'You defected. I know it's hard. It's a hard doctrine that the defector is always set apart from one's own, but there it is. In a way it's a paradox, because the defector in order to want to come over has to have powerful feelings of allegiance to the firm he's going to, and yet...' 'What he means is,' said Graham harshly, his gooseberry cat's eyes gleaming, 'once a traitor always a traitor. If you could betray Stern you can betray us.' 'But surely the argument is that I never betrayed Stern, that I'm still Stern's man?' Charles Mabledene was cleverer than Graham, Mungo thought, and he didn't want to think that way. The voice that hadn't yet broken, the choirboy's treble, said: 'What do you want me to do?' Mungo hadn't thought that far. He was aware of dusk coming, of more than dusk. Dark clouds had come up to cover the sunset's afterglow. The room was filling with shadows and the smell of dust and rotten wood was a sour cold smell. He didn't want to lose Charles Mabledene but his skin grew cold and crept when he thought of every secret, every new exercise, passing stealthily to Stern. 'You must prove you're ours,' he said.

8

John knew she didn't much care about houses and furniture, that sort of thing, but she must surely notice the improved look of the place, the clean covers, the new lamp. And the garden, even she who had been indifferent couldn't fail to admire the garden. The wisteria that covered the front bay was out, long mauve tassels draping the window panes, the patch of lawn was cut to the precise length of one inch and the edges trimmed, and among the last of the Siberian wallflowers the first pansies were coming out. On an impulse he brought a big plaster tub back from Trowbridge's and, though this was the kind of cheating he had formerly despised, filled it with geraniums and begonias that were already in bloom. It seemed to him that he kept on doing things he would not have done in the past, that his - nature was changing. The old John would have waited at the window for them, staring at the street, at his opposite neighbour's monkey puzzle tree, or paced the front bedroom, on every count of a hundred peering to right and left round the edges of curtains. Instead he went into the greenhouse to nip the side shoots off his tomato plants and pot up capsicum seedlings. He didn't even worry about getting dirty, for he hadn't dressed up, he hadn't done what he once would have and changed out of the clothes he had worked in all day. She is my wife, he had said to himself, and you don't dress up for your wife, that is the point of marriage, that you can be your natural self, you can behave as if you were alone. And he regretted a little the lawn and the tub but it was too late to do anything about them now. Every year for years and years he had grown green peppers, yet he had never liked the taste of them, growing them rather for their appearance and the fun of it. When they were ripe he picked them and gave them away, to Cohn or Sharon or his aunt, though she didn't much like them either. The only one in their family who had was Cherry. He shied away from naming her, he didn't want to think about her ever again, yet she kept returning to his mind. A thousand small associations called her up. He wanted to forget her because she was not what he had thought her, he couldn't forgive her for having been what she was. And the strange thing was that he recoiled almost more from her, the memory of her, Mark's victim, than he did from Mark who had killed her. Yet two days before, he had gone back to the place where she died, had made a kind of pilgrimage to those scenes of her dying and her death and the time preceding her death, to the building where Maitland's office had been. The builder's premises had been no more than a room at the back of a great white decaying Victorian house with a trailer clamped on the side of it to give more space. It had stood in a wilderness of nettles and brambles, bisected by a railway line that was disused even then. He had gone there a few times to meet Cherry after work. Flinching from the thought of it, he imagined her on her best behaviour for this prudish brother, putting a reluctant stop to Maitland's gropings and kisses, or those of any other man presumably, who might drop in about a roof repair or bricklaying job. It made him shiver. That broad face, bunched cheeks, snub nose, dwarf woman's distorted face, that fibrous glittering hair, came before his eyes now as a portrait of malevolence as well as lechery. The house was still there but utterly changed. He only recognised it by the tree which grew in front of it, a rather rare tree for England, a lyriodendron, much bigger and taller after sixteen years and hung with a web of yellowish-green lyre-shaped leaves. Some company that sported an etched steel doorplate had bought the house and refurbished it. The facade glistened shining ivory, the roof with dark silver-coloured slates. Its grounds had disappeared under a windowless hangar-like shopping mall. And this whole area of the embankment the city council had converted into one of its river walks, with paved paths, decorative railings, raised flowerbeds, suitable shrubs. The Beckgate was open, on this summer evening spilling patrons out on to the steps. The hanging basket of ivy-leaved geraniums that hung above the saloon-bar door he had sold the licensee himself, wincing when the man gave his address. John went up the double flight and straight on ahead, trying to imagine Mark's feelings after the deed was done, after he knew Cherry lay dead behind him. But it was impossible. He could only think of his mother at home growing more and more anxious, of having to go next door and use the phone because they hadn't got one, of Mark at last coming to Geneva Road and seeming so normal... He had walked a long way without much noticing the route he took and now he found himself on the pavement opposite cats' green. It was feeding time and though there was no cat to be seen, the pans of milk and plates of tinned food were being set out among grass that had by now grown as high as the woman's waist. A faded, middle-aged woman with a gentle face - but what was she really? Another such as Cherry, as lascivious and insatiable, as uncaring of loyalty and faithfulness, of common decency? She saw him watching her. It made her hurry to pick her milk cartons, the empty cans, yesterday's empty plates. She takes me for some sort of would-be molester, John thought, and the idea, though fantastic, didn't altogether displease him. Why not he as much as any other man? In a world full of terrible things, why should he be set apart, islanded? Men were dangerous and women, in their way, dangerous too. He started to cross the road and felt a very real pleasure, a pleasure that was almost sexual, in seeing her hasten away, walk far more quickly than was natural across the road, look back once, plunge into one of the narrow alleys. Shame quickly succeeded that pleasure. Wickedness is contagious, he thought, I am catching it from others. Somewhere, once, he had heard or read the phrase: Evil communications corrupt good manners. The Bible or something Victorian? It didn't sound like the Bible. He looked up at the rumbling bouncing flyover and saw, there inside the central upright, five or six feet up, a plastic package secured with tape. They were back. They had survived whatever had kept them away, arrest or even imprisonment, and started up again.

9

The last of the capsicum planted and watered in, John turned his attention to the tomatoes. None of the fruit had yet begun to redden. He would stop the stems after four trusses, but next week would do for that. He began mixing plant feed into a can of water and could not prevent himself catching sight of his watch which told him it was five past eight. They were due at eight. He watered the tomato plants, flooding the pots, forcing his thoughts back to the message he had found at cats' green. He had copied it into his notebook - strange how he had gone on carrying that notebook even when he thought his mini-Mafia disbanded - and as soon as he got home had applied it to the first lines of 'The Bruce-Partington Plans'. But as he feared, they had changed the code. They were logical. Court appearances, imprisonment, whatever it had been, they stuck to their monthly routine. It was June now, so the code had changed. Twelve minutes past eight. He had better, at any rate, wash his hands. How could she be late for something so important? But perhaps it was Peter Moran who made her late. John washed at the kitchen sink. He had begun to feel sick. There was just time to run upstairs and change his clothes. Up he went two at a time, flung off baggy trousers, check shirt, put on white shirt, new tie, grey flannels, his heart racing. A car was stopping outside. Wait, he told himself, don't have the door standing open before they get up the path. Holding his fists clenched, he looked at them through the bedroom window. Both doors of the car opened simultaneously and they both got out. John's heart squeezed and seemed to move a little at the sight of Jennifer in her cotton dress, her sandals, the long bright hair tied back with white ribbon. He transferred his gaze to Peter Moran and then he turned quickly away and ran downstairs. Inside the door he made himself pause before opening it. Waiting those few seconds was like waiting through a lifetime. If they don't ring that bell, I will throw myself at that door, he thought, I will beat it down with my fists. Yet when the bell did ring he jumped. And still he waited, counting. When he had counted thirty, it was impossible to do more, it was beyond his strength, he had to open the door. Jennifer said, 'Hallo, John.' She looked neither sad nor happy. Her face was composed as it always was. Not for her the careless untidiness of a frown, a puckering of the lips or a half-smile. Peter Moran didn't say anything, but John didn't think this was through embarrassment. Again he was aware of that indifference to the opinions of others. 'The garden looks nice,' said Jennifer. He was happy because she didn't say 'your garden'. They walked into the living room and he saw her look at the lamp, the jugs, the two new books that lay on the coffee table. He found it hard to keep his eyes off her and he had to compel himself to stop looking. He had forgotten all about making plans to give them food or drink. There was no coffee in the house, not even instant. Wine he had. Two bottles of wine were in the kitchen somewhere, last remnants of those sessions with Mark Simms. 'Would you like a drink?' She looked surprised when he offered wine. It made him hope, it made him think she might like the new John better. 'Thanks. Wine would be nice.' Peter Moran still hadn't spoken. Without appearing to look at him, John had taken in every detail of his appearance, the thick glasses, the floppy fair hair, the rather pasty face. His skin had a greyish look, his hair was greasy, his ill-fitting loose jeans stained. For this important visit, this meeting which was to decide his fate, he hadn't even been bothered to have a bath and put on clean clothes. He looked bored; he looked - 'laid-back' was the expression, John thought, casual, relaxed, not so much in control as uncaring as to who might be. Cool, Jennifer had called him. John fetched the wine, uncomfortably aware that it should have been chilled, not brought straight out of the cupboard that was next to the immersion heater. Jennifer said: 'Muscadet - that's my favourite.' Why hadn't he known that? It suddenly seemed terrible not to know what was your wife's favourite wine. He found it actually physically difficult to pour wine for Peter Moran and hand it to him. Peter Moran still hadn't sat down or spoken, he was still moving idly about the room. But now he took the glass out of John's hand, not looking at it or him or saying thanks. John might have been a waiter. It went against the grain to start drinking without raising one's glass in some sort of a toast but John couldn't think what to say, he couldn't bring himself to say Cheers! It was Jennifer who settled it by lifting her glass, looking hard at Peter Moran, and saying in a deliberate, almost ritualistic way: 'To our futures - all our futures.' That sent a chill down John's spine. It sounded so final and so somehow loaded against himself. 'Right,' Peter Moran said, and he took a long sucking draught from his glass, emptying it at one go. He pushed the glass across the table towards John and John was so surprised he found himself re-filling it. Jennifer began speaking in a nervous monotone, very quickly for her. 'John, you know why we've come and we have to start talking about it. It's very nice of you to - well, sort of entertain us and all that but we mustn't lose sight of why we're here. I do want a divorce and I want it as soon as possible. You know that, I've explained about that. We made a mistake, you and I, and it's no good, I'll never come back, even if you won't divorce me I won't come back. Don't you understand that?' 'I think that in time, if I don't divorce you, you may come to see you're better off with me.' John spoke coolly, surprising himself. She shook her head vehemently. 'I love Peter and he loves me. We want to get married. We want to make a public statement of our commitment to each other and marriage is the way to do that.' 'You've made one of those already - to me.' 'I've told you, that was a mistake. And what use is all this? You can't keep us apart. We'll still live together. All that will happen is that instead of getting married in six months' time we won't for five years - well, four and a half years now. Only' - Jennifer essayed a smile at him, a rueful inquiring smile it was, and his heart moved - 'only we'd sooner it was in six months.' 'We?' he said, and he was aware of a breathlessness. 'We? I don't hear his views in all this.' She looked at her lover. The midsummer evening light fell on the lenses of his glasses in such a way as to seem to change them into planes of opaque metal. He had pushed his empty glass across the table a second time but John ignored it. At last he spoke. His voice was beautiful, John had to admit that, it was the sort of voice you associated with Oxford and the diplomatic service and aristocrats. It was Received English Pronunciation and more than that. The words he used seemed to have an intellectual cast and to John at any rate they were incomprehensible. It was Sacher-Masoch all over again. 'He thinks he has the lodestone,' he said. 'What does that mean?' 'Never mind,' Jennifer said, sweet-voiced, like a teacher to a class of little boys. 'Never mind, what does it matter? What does any of it matter? We just have to make John understand we're serious, we're committed to each other and we aren't going to have a change of heart just because...' It was at this moment, before she had finished her sentence, that the front door bell rang. For no particular reason John was certain it must be Mark Simms. It would be just like him, after getting the receiver put down on him and no answer at all to his further calls, to come round. Probably he hadn't done with his confession and there was more he wanted to say, more details to fill in. The bell rang a second time. 'Aren't you going to see who it is?' Jennifer said. He left them and went to the door. The caller was Cohn Goodman. His car was at the gate and his mother was sitting in the passenger seat. Something in John's face made him say: 'It's all right, we're not coming in, not if you're busy. It's just that I was giving Mother a run out and as we were passing this way...' John never learned what his intention was in calling - to invite him to join them perhaps? - for at that point the sitting-room door opened, Peter Moran came out and said in his polished newscaster's voice: 'Where's the loo?' John was affronted. 'Upstairs,' he said coldly. 'Upstairs and to your left.' In order to reach the foot of the stairs Peter Moran had to come nearly up to the front door, so John had no choice but to introduce him to Cohn. Would Cohn remember who this man was, that he was Jennifer's lover? John couldn't remember if he had previously told him the name. 'Cohn Goodman, Peter Moran,' he said. There was nothing in Cohn's face to show that it meant anything to him. He had that rather weary resigned look he usually wore when he was taking his mother anywhere. In these circumstances it wasn't unusual for him to call on friends or acquaintances for half an hour or so of their society. He retreated down the two steps, though slowly. 'I won't stop, seeing you've got company.' And as John glanced again at the car - an aged Triumph Dolomite but far smarter than Moran's dirty Citro�- old Mrs Goodman looked up and rapped on the window. Having summoned her son, she waved cordially to John. Peter Moran had disappeared upstairs. 'Look, sorry, I'll ring you,' John said. He forced himself to wait until Cohn reached the gate before closing the door. Jennifer was alone in the living room. Husband and wife looked at each other in silence and then John said very simply. 'Please come back to me, darling. I do love you very much.' 'I can't,' she said, her voice very low and gruff. 'No one could love you as I love you, don't you know that?' 'But I love him like that,' she said. It was a blow that made him close his eyes as if he feared a fist in his face. Peter Moran came back. In pain, with a pain that was physical, John forced himself to look at him, pondering the mystery of love. What was there about the man? True, he was four or five years John's junior and an inch taller - but all this was nonsense. Somewhere in the man's make-up must be some secret ingredient. His mouth was full and slack, his eyes lazy, bored. Looking at Jennifer now, he gave the ghost of a wink - or John thought he did, he couldn't be sure. And Jennifer's face remained grave and unhappy. The awful silence endured. She broke it, her tone anxious, tentative. John thought in a kind of bitter triumph, I've moved her, I've upset her by what I said. 'John, will you think about it, please? Would you, say, take a week and give it some thought? I mean, about how we're going to settle all this? If you won't divorce me for adultery, will you divorce me on grounds of incompatibility after two years? That is, next November twelve months?' 'I'll think about it,' he said. 'I think about it most of the time anyway. But I won't change.' Peter Moran poured the last of the wine into his glass, drank it down. 'We're wasting our time here,' he said. 'I don't know why we came.' The old John would have accepted that meekly. The new John said: 'For free-loading, by the look of things.' Jennifer looked from one to the other, pleading, 'Please don't quarrel!' 'I won't divorce you. And one reason is you'll be better off with me than him,' John said. 'I'm better for you. He'll only make you unhappy.' 'For God's sake,' said Peter Moran, 'let's go.' He watched their departure from the front door and then he ran upstairs and watched the car till it disappeared. After that came a feeling of let-down and of emptiness, a sensation of being alone in the world and with nothing to do. It was still light, it was still only nine o'clock. Making an effort to expel Jennifer and Peter Moran from his mind - an effort that could only be partly successful - he returned to the living room and cleared away the glasses, put the empty wine bottle into the waste bin. It was nearly a month since the estimate from the builder about the guttering had come. He sat down and answered it. He got out his notebook and tried the latest cats' green message against the first lines of all the fiction in the bookcase that was even remotely associated with spies, including Conan Doyle's The Naval Treaty and a couple of the Father Brown stories. Yves Yugall had published a collection of short stories since Cat Walk and he had managed to get a copy from the central library. The collection was called The Armadillo Army and comprised eight stories. Laboriously, he tried the message against the first lines of each story, but the June code wasn't based on any of them. It was after eleven when he stopped, lay back in the armchair and closed his eyes. On the dark red retina, print appeared in paler letters and as it faded he seemed to see there the face of Jennifer, her soft full cheeks and her unhappy eyes.

10

It had been a busy Saturday morning at Trowbridge's. Sunshine always brought the crowds out at weekends, though no true gardener would plant anything out in full sunshine, the worst killathon of all, as he had heard Gavin tell a customer. Gavin wanted to know if he might take the mynah bird home with him for the weekend and John hadn't been able to see any reason why not. 'When I'm not here he suffers from benign neglect.' John wasn't sure what that was. He hadn't much hope of anyone ever buying the mynah. The black shiny head with its bright yellow beak poked out between the bars as Gavin carried off its cage. 'I'm a turnaround, I'm a super slurper,' sang Gavin, but the mynah said nothing, only looking apprehensively at the great outdoors. It wasn't until after they had gone that John thought he might have asked Gavin what a lodestone was. He seemed to be a mine of curious information. The dictionary John consulted at the central library told him loadstone or lodestone meant a magnet. Why then had Peter Moran suggested he was in possession of a magnet? Was it some sort of insult? In that context it seemed to have no more meaning than 'turnaround' or 'super slurper'. As he entered the house the phone was ringing. Mark Simms, he thought, and he braced himself to deliver another sharp rejection. Jumping to conclusions, he had made the same mistake as he had on Thursday evening. 'It's Cohn. I've been trying to get you all the morning.' 'It's my Saturday morning at work.' 'I tried yesterday too.' People who resented the fact that one wasn't permanently sitting by the phone waiting for their calls exasperated John. 'Well, I'm here now.' 'That chap I met at your house on Thursday, is he a mate of yours? I mean, is he a close friend?' John said slowly, 'Do you mean Peter Moran?' 'That's him, yes. The guy who came out and asked where the loo was.' Cohn spoke as if John had had a whole houseful of people with him that night, a party. But of course he might have thought he had, he might even resent not having been asked. John said, choosing his words, 'He isn't a friend of mine. He's the man Jennifer is living with. She was here too. It was all very awkward, that's why I couldn't ask you in. I don't really want to talk about this on the phone, Cohn.' Cohn's voice sounded very strange. He said, 'Are you sure Jennifer is living with him? I mean, like that?' 'I don't want to talk about it, Cohn. I said I didn't.' 'Look, you couldn't come over, could you? Or I could come to you? Mother would like to see you. Come and have a cup of tea.' John said decisively, 'Not to talk about Jennifer, I don't want to do that. Really, Cohn, that's not on. I have to sort all that out on my own.' He relented a little. Cohn, after all, was his oldest friend. Cohn had listened to his confidences far more readily than he had when hearing the confessions of Mark Simms. 'I hope Jennifer will come back to me, I'm hoping it's only a matter of time. You do see, don't you, that it's really not on to discuss it with any outsider. Even you,' he added. 'I don't want to talk about Jennifer,' Cohn said. 'I wouldn't dream of it. All I want to do is give you some information about Peter Moran I think you might find useful. I want to tell you where I last saw him.' Cohn paused to give his statement the fullest dramatic impact. 'It was in court.'

11

Going home for the weekend was almost unheard of at Rossingham but most people got taken out on Sundays. Parents came or godparents or uncles and aunts. On the whole, going off for lunch and tea with those vaguely designated 'friends' wasn't encouraged. 'It's remarkable,' Mr Lindsay had been heard to say, 'how many of the senior men in Pitt have beautiful aunts no more than eighteen years old.' He might have been including Angus Cameron who one Sunday in late June was called for by a pretty blonde girl who arrived in a Mini. Mungo, on the other hand, was taken out to lunch at the Mill Hotel in Rossingham St Clare by his parents with Ian and Gail. It was Charles Mabledene's sister's fifteenth birthday and after the whole family had been out to lunch and tea they would take her back to Utting. 'Isn't it rather peculiar,' Mungo said to Graham O'Neill, 'that we never knew till now he had a sister at Utting?' 'We never knew he had a sister, full stop. He's very secretive.' 'I suppose we shall all be on top of each other for lunch,' said Mungo gloomily and he was right, the Mabledenes, Camerons, and Graham's uncle and aunt being given contiguous tables. Angus and his girlfriend had disappeared in a blast of black exhaust from the Mini which needed a new silencer. Charles Mabledene was well aware of the implications of his sister's school. He and she had been in the junior school at Utting together and she had continued there after the Common Entrance, while he on that historic and never to be forgotten occasion, had 'come over'. But he wouldn't stoop to explain all this to the Director of London Central. Early in his life Charles had adopted the enigmatic dictum, 'never apologise, never explain'. Indeed, he had had no personal contact with Leviathan, Medusa, or any other agent of Western Intelligence since the interview in the safe house at 53 Ruxeter Road. On that occasion Leviathan had told him he must 'prove you're ours' but so far no test had been set him. Apart, that is, from the normal run of his duties. And even these had not been pressing - a small photocopying job, the setting up of a new drop - leaving him plenty of time for experimenting with Banham locks and, of course, for his flexi-prep. The new drop was under a loose stone beneath the horse trough in Rossingham St Mary market place, the one in the cricket pavilion having ceased its function when the brickwork in the wall was unexpectedly repaired. On the pretext of buying a birthday card for his sister, he had been given Mr Lindsay's permission to go to the village on Friday afternoon, and there he had taken from under the horse trough the latest command in Spytrap: 'Repossess Reynolds' books.' Charles knew what this referred to, a work on chess and two on yachting which Angus's friend Bruce Reynolds had two years before lent to an Utting man called Simon Perch, who was one of Stern's Stars. Though repeatedly asked, Perch had never returned them and this was the only way to get them back. It would be quite easy, Charles thought, seeing that he was actually going to Utting later that day, though Leviathan had not known that when the command was issued, assuming only that Dragon had another kind of special 'in' at Parker's and Stern's school. Was this then the test? Would it almost be better for Dragon not to secure the borrowed books? Nicholas Ralston, or Unicorn, whom he could see with a huge family party at the opposite end of the dining room, might just as well have been asked. It was more his mark really. In a way it was rather a feeble task to set someone of Dragon's undoubted acumen and brilliance. If he was being tested, would it be to his credit to fail? On the other hand, he would be very surprised if by now Leviathan and Medusa didn't know very well that he had a sister at Utting. On balance, the test should be passed. It was Charles Mabledene's overriding ambition that when Mungo Cameron retired, as next year he surely would, the mantle should fall upon his own shoulders and the directorship of London Central become his. While they were having coffee he did his new trick and produced a bunch of carnations from the sleeve of his mother's rather strange new white satin jacket. She shrieked with delight. Charles had picked the carnations in Mrs Lindsay's private garden very early that morning before anyone was up. The locked front and back doors of Pitt presented no problem to him. His parents and his sister seemed to assume that some occult agency was at work and even to suspect that the flowers weren't real. Charles smiled indulgently at them. There were areas of his mind which sometimes troubled him, but not the area that did the magic. That was a mere matter of the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye and of a rather gruelling discipline. His gift for discerning what others thought and, more than that, of divining what might happen in some future anticipated situation - this was what gave him pause and made him wonder. The thought processes of others interested him, he was one of those rare people who, though selfish and unscrupulous, are more interested in others than in themselves. Now, for instance, he was wondering where they would go that afternoon. It was his sister's choice, for it was her birthday, and there were many options open. Several great houses in the neighbourhood as well as Rossingham Castle; the wildlife park at Songflete; the otter sanctuary on the Orr at Orrington; the Life in Tudor England exhibition at Togham Hoo; a boat on the river from Orrington up to Rostock Bridge. Her face told him nothing. She was fond of clothes and the Tudor exhibition had plenty of dresses in it. And she liked boating, she was cox of the Utting junior boat. Otters, he said to himself and he didn't know why. It was this not knowing why that sometimes made him uneasy. When his prediction was as unlikely as this one he would have hiked to be wrong. They had profiteroles for pudding. Profiteroles were her favourite. Charles watched the Camerons leave the dining room, marvelling at those men's height. They were like another race. Mungo was probably a whole foot taller than he. His father looked across the table. 'Have you decided where you want to go, Sarah?' 'Otter sanctuary,' she said. 'I'm torn between that and Togham but I really do think the otters.' Charles sighed to himself. There were European otters and Asian otters, pairs of them each in their own section of the river. At feeding time which was at three-thirty they dived and swam for the fish the keepers threw in out of reeking buckets. Charles was a better photographer than his sister, so to oblige her he took pictures of otter cubs. On the way back, after tea in Orrington, they got in a traffic jam on the motorway caused by weekend roadworks and the car threatened to overheat. 'I'll ruin this car if I drive her any further,' said his father. 'I'm going to drop her at the works and pick up another one. 'The works' was what all the Mabledenes called the garage at Rostock. Charles's father drove the BMW on to the forecourt and let himself into the office to find the keys for one of the secondhand Volvos which were lined up for sale outside. Charles hadn't been down at the works for ages. He didn't know what it was that made him get out and wander about among the cars, through the big shed with the turntables and out to the back where vehicles awaited repairs or service. That flair he had, he supposed later, that ESP or second sight or whatever you called it. The red car, a Datsun, had its offside rear wing quite badly dented and the light unit smashed. There was a very obvious smear of green on the bodywork where the red paint had flaked away. Charles was glad now that he had taken those otter pictures for his sister, for the camera was still slung round his neck. With a quick glance round to see that no one was looking he took two shots of the red car, carefully ensuring the inclusion of the number plate. He returned by way of the office, having composed his face into that expression of innocence and naivety which seemed so much to please his mother. It was becoming second nature to him now and he no longer needed to practise it in front of a mirror. Through the big plate-glass window he could see his father still rummaging around in the office. Charles pushed open the door and felt it stick as it seemed to be obstructed by something in its passage across the doormat. He bent down and picked up the envelope which he could feel contained a bunch of car keys on a ring with a fob. On the envelope was printed the number of the car he had photographed and the name Whittaker... By now his father had found the Volvo keys. Feeling pleased with himself but revealing nothing of this, Charles handed the envelope to his father, they all got into the Volvo and set off for Utting in the outer eastern suburbs. 'Shall I get this film developed for you?' Charles said to his sister and added untruthfully, 'Someone I know in the camera club at school will do it for free.' Naturally, she agreed. Charles decided to finish up the film in taking some useful pictures of Utting. You never knew when that sort of thing might come in handy. His sister was in Curie House but in the general mel�of boys and girls returning from Sunday outings and the in any case far freer atmosphere than ever prevailed at Rossingham, he had no difficulty in penetrating Huxley and inquiring of someone who looked like a prefect where Simon Perch's room was. The prefect seemed to know Perch quite well, might even have been a friend of his, and helpfully told Charles he wasn't back yet and wasn't expected before eight. The worst part for Charles was picking the lock of Perch's door. Not because it was difficult - those simple locks on interior doors never were - but because of the risk of being seen, the process necessarily taking two or three minutes. He found two of the books on the shelf above the counter top Utting people used as desks. The chess book wasn't there though and a search of the room failed to find it. Perch had probably taken it home and left it there or never brought it to school. The only thing of real interest in the room was a telescope mounted on the windowsill with its sights turned to the city. Charles had a squint through it. It was amazing how much was to be seen and how clearly. He could even see the clock on the CitWest tower and read that the time was six-twenty-two and the temperature seventeen degrees. In the absence of a flash bulb he wasn't able to take much of a photograph of the room but he did his best. As far as he knew, this would be the first picture anyone at London Central had of the interior of Utting. He left the building without mishap, carrying the two books in a green and white Marks and Spencer's plastic carrier he had found in Perch's wastepaper basket. Re-entering Curie where his parents were still closeted with Sarah's housemistress, Charles passed Rosie Whittaker in the hall. She knew Sarah and looked as if about to speak, but he froze her with a cold uncomprehending stare.

12

Constance Goodman belonged in that category of women who are nice to their children's friends but not very nice to their children. This had been evinced in the friendly wave she gave John from the car after rapping crossly on the window to summon Cohn. In her seventies now, she was known to three generations whom she had taught at primary school. John - and Cherry - had been among her pupils, though her own son never had. Those former pupils, when she met them, she tended to call 'pet'; her son, though the term was often less than affectionately bestowed, was 'chickie'. And Cohn did have something of a chicken-like look with his pink beaky face, small dark eyes and curly hair. He had seemed quite excited when he let John into the house, rather resembling Harpo Marx when suppressing glee. 'Nice to see you, pet,' Mrs Goodman said, creaking about on arthritic joints, laying the table for a tea John hadn't felt he could possibly eat. 'I'll make myself scarce for ten minutes and you and Cohn can have your chat.' She had made it very plain that she knew what it was Cohn had to impart but was being discreet. John waited until she closed the door and said, 'What on earth is it?' That was three weeks ago now and he had done nothing with his information. He had been torn, in perhaps the worst dilemma of his life. It was as if he needed something to happen, something that would either trigger off a disclosure or show him that he must bury what Cohn had told him. Present always in his mind was a desire not to behave yet perhaps disclosing this would not be bad, would be a duty as well as his own salvation. Scarcely a vestige of triumph remained that without guessing precisely, he had been right about the thing that lurked behind Peter Moran's dull eyes. Making his way out to Cohn's on the Honda that Saturday afternoon, his feelings had been very different. He had been curiously buoyant and hopeful, though with nothing then on which to base this optimism. Cohn and his mother lived a long way out of the city, on the outskirts of Orrington really, and it took him nearly half an hour to get there. The bungalow, which he hadn't visited since Jennifer left him, had such a stark and barren look about it that you might have thought it brand-new but for the unmistakable building features - you couldn't call it architecture - of the sixties. The garden consisted merely of closely mown grass flowerless and treeless, while the house was a low-roofed L shape of light pink brickwork with square metal-frame windows. Once John had tried giving Cohn rooted shrub cuttings and boxes of seedlings but what became of these he never knew, certainly they never appeared in that garden. When he and Cohn were alone together and two doors had been heard to close on Mrs Goodman, Cohn again asked him if it were really true Peter Moran was living with Jennifer. 'I've told you so,' John said. He was beginning to learn that people don't necessarily listen attentively when one confides in them, but still he said, 'Surely I told you so when Jennifer first left me?' 'You may have done. The name didn't ring a bell - then.' 'I wish you wouldn't be so mysterious.' 'How much do you know about this chap, this Moran?' 'He's about thirty-five. He comes from around here - I think he does. He's got a degree, economics or philosoph or something. I believe he was once a teacher, I'm not sure. He hasn't got a job now, that's for sure. He's renting a tumbledown sort of cottage out at Nunhouse that I suppose the dole pays for.' John knew he sounded contemptuous but he didn't care. 'Oh, and he's got one of those little French cars that aren't really cars, if you know what I mean.' Cohn started to laugh. 'You really love him, don't you?' 'What do you expect?' 'How did Jennifer meet him?' John didn't much care for the question. 'I don't know how she first met him. It was a long time ago.' He hesitated. He said with difficulty, 'They were engaged but he broke it off just before - the wedding. That would have been about four years ago.' 'Four years ago,' said Cohn, 'I served on that jury at the Crown Court at Orrington. Do you remember that?' John remembered. Cohn had made a fuss about taking time off work and the inadequacy of a juryman's pay. 'When I saw Moran at your house on Thursday I recognised him at once and when I got home I looked him up.' 'What d'you mean, looked him up?' 'You know me, making notes of everything. I noted down everyone who came up in court and made a few comments of my own. It was helpful at arriving at verdicts. Your Peter Moran was one of the people before that court. Do you want to know what he was charged with?' 'Of course I do.' 'Assault on a child under the age of thirteen,' said Cohn. He moistened his lips, evidently embarrassed. 'I mean indecent assault.' Mrs Goodman put her head round the door. 'Finished, chickie?' 'You know what I've been telling him, so I doubt if it matters much.' 'Don't be sarcastic with me, chickie. I can't spend all night in the kitchen.' She dumped on the table a tray of tea things, including a huge brown teapot and an equally dark and heavy-looking fruit cake. 'Please, Mrs Goodman,' John said. 'I honestly don't mind.' He looked at Cohn. 'I can't believe it.' But he could. It explained so much, Peter Moran's abrupt leaving of Jennifer, Jennifer's belief that she was the only woman there had ever been in his life, his failure to get work in his own field, above all that suspicion of horror John had always felt about him. 'What happened to him?' he asked. 'I mean what was the'- he couldn't find the right word - 'punishment?' 'It was a first offence. Or the first time they'd caught him, more like. He got three years' probation on condition he spent six months in a psychiatric clinic.' Mrs Goodman was pouring out half-pint-size cups of dark brown tea. Cohn reached for his and it slopped from the over-full cup into the saucer. 'You did that, chickie, mind, not me.' 'All right, Mother, I'm not complaining.' 'Did he spend six months in a psychiatric clinic?' 'I suppose so. He must have.' John didn't like having to ask this question in front of Mrs Goodman. He could never be in her presence without recalling her as she had been in class, biggish, gaunt, beakyfaced, writing sums in long division on the blackboard or walking down the aisle between the desks and pausing to look over one's shoulder. Not looking in her direction, eyeing his plate on which reposed a thick slice of Dundee cake, he said: 'Was it a girl or a boy?' Mercifully, Cohn needed no further elucidation. 'Oh, a boy.' 'I wonder why it wasn't in the papers.' 'It was in the Orrington paper, pet. Perhaps it wasn't big enough for the Free Press.' 'He pleaded guilty, you see,' said Cohn. 'It wasn't much of a case. It was all over in half an hour.' John knew what they were thinking. And he too repeated her name with a silent inner voice. Jennifer, Jennifer... He said abruptly to Mrs Goodman: 'Do you know what a lodestone is?' 'A magnet, isn't it?' 'That's what the dictionary said.' 'Wait a minute, pet. Wasn't it supposed to be a kind of magic magnet which - well, if a husband possessed it, he could use it to get back a runaway wife?' 'charming,' said Cohn. 'So much for your well-known tact.' Mother and son had begun quarrelling after that in a kind of gruff controlled way. They never quite lost their tempers, though Mrs Goodman would sometimes laugh unpleasantly and Cohn's eyes flash. It ended with Mrs Goodman remarking that John would hardly now want to spend the rest of the evening in such a disagreeable house whose occupants sparred all the time and made their guests uncomfortable. How do you respond to that one? Of course John hadn't wanted to stay and didn't, taking his departure with all sorts of fabricated excuses while Mrs Goodman shook her head sadly and said it was just what she had foreseen, Cohn had driven his friend away by his rudeness. John could see a parallel between his present behaviour and the way he had reacted to Mark Simms's confession. Returning home on the Honda, he had been full of plans for how to use his new knowledge just as, on that previous occasion, he had intended to go to the police. That evening he had spent in restless speculation and by the next day he had decided he must know more facts. Consulting the newspaper files in the library of the Orrington Onlooker was a far simpler process than he expected, but the account of the court proceedings was brief, for the child's name could not be given or any personal details about him included. The boy hadn't been injured in any way. Peter Moran had not attempted to deny what he had done. In fact there was little more to be gathered from the paper than Cohn had already told him. If he was like that though, why did he want Jennifer? To persuade himself, presumably, that he wasn't like that. To be saved from himself and protected? Because there was something very motherly and caring about Jennifer? Or simply because Jennifer wanted him and with her love provided a cloak for his activities? Speculating, John realised how little he understood of abnormal psychology. And he shied away from the thought that Jennifer might want her lover more than he wanted her. Perhaps Peter Moran had been cured in the clinic he had attended - if he had attended it. But there was a memory which kept returning to John and a question he continually asked himself. That Saturday when he and Jennifer had met in Hartlands Gardens, 2 April, that was the afternoon on which Peter Moran had 'gone out' and the afternoon also on which twelve-year-old James Harvill had disappeared. Was it fantastic to connect the two, knowing what he now knew? The question John kept asking himself and receiving, of course, no answer to, was: Does Jennifer know? The information seemed to lie heavily in his keeping like a ponderous inert mass or like the lodestone that was a magnet with supernatural powers. He had only to lift it up and show it to the light of day to draw his wife back to him...

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