Talking to Strange Men Page 6

  It was funny how the idea of doing this obsessed him. If he wanted to make things up with Guy there was no reason why he shouldn’t have sent him the book in a parcel or, if that was rather costly, given him the book at half-term. This term their breaks coincided, being the middle week of February.

  Angus didn’t really want to wait that long. He wanted to get the book to Guy and somehow to get it to him in a mysterious way. Bruce had a cousin in the preparatory department at Utting, the junior school. When Bruce’s relations came up one Sunday to take him out to tea Angus had the book ready wrapped up with a note to the eleven-year-old inside plus a fifty pence piece. Would they please pass this on to their son when he came home next weekend? The juniors went home most weekends though seniors never did unless, for instance, one’s grandfather had a ninetieth birthday or one’s sister got married or something.

  The note said to get the book secretly into the drawer under Guy Parker’s bunk in the study Guy shared with nine others – for this was the reality even at Utting. Bruce’s cousin had told him all about it. Weeks went by and Angus heard nothing. For all he knew the cousin might have kept the fifty pee and dropped Cat Walk into his study wastepaper basket, if little ones like that had studies. On the other hand, things were much freer and easier at Utting than at Rossingham and the senior houses were very likely not out of bounds to juniors. It might be that the cousin had to do no more than walk openly from Andrade House where he lived into Fleming House which was Guy’s house, and up the stairs. He could do it during prep, for Angus had found out that the Lower Fourth at Utting did their prep in the library, not in their studies.

  The Camerons took the local daily paper as well as The Times. It had a circulation not only in the city but across the whole county. That year 14 February fell on a Monday, the first day of Angus’s and Ian’s half-term holiday. They had come home the evening before, having been fetched by their mother. Ian got up early on the Monday and rushed downstairs to get the Free Press. Angus found him sitting at the kitchen table reading page seven which, on 14 February, was devoted entirely to St Valentine’s Day messages.

  Looking over his shoulder, Angus read: ‘Cameron, I.M., Violets are blue, My Valentine is you. Lorna.’ He didn’t think much of that. Ian looked up at him.

  ‘There’s one for you.’

  ‘There can’t be.’

  ‘No kidding. You’re Cameron, Angus H., aren’t you?’

  ‘There must be lots,’ said Angus.

  ‘I doubt it.’ Ian pointed out the piece he had himself inserted: ‘Markham, Lorna: I am, you are, love is. I.M.C.’ He seemed proud of it. Angus looked back at the left-hand column where his own name was. ‘Someone must fancy you,’ said Ian. ‘D’you know who it is?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

  ‘“Cameron, Angus H.,”’ Angus read, ‘“APTHQ KQUCC BEX UDNQ BT DTTW QEAK UW ODKSDB STNQPT.”’

  It wasn’t signed, or if it was the signature was incorporated in the code. Angus knew who it was, of course. He felt happy. Last year he remembered telling Guy that Ian’s girlfriend Lorna had put a Valentine’s message in the paper and the two of them had teased Ian who at first had tried to pretend the message wasn’t for him. Guy must have thought of that when he was wondering how to thank him, Angus, for the loan of the book in suitably mystifying fashion. Mystifying it was, though. No doubt Guy had used a line from a book to base his code on. That was what they had always done. Angus spent most of the day trying the code on the first lines of all the works he possessed by their favourite authors. It would be a novel of espionage, he was sure of that, and very possibly a novel by Yves Yugall. Angus tried the code on the first lines of Scorpion Road, Tiger Toll, Monkey Wrench, Tarantula Town and Wasp Sting. Surely Guy wouldn’t have used a line from the middle of the book, would he? After all, he would want his code to be deciphered. He would want to give Angus a hard time of it but he would want his code deciphered in the end.

  Another thing to be taken into consideration was that Guy would only have a limited number of books – that is, works of fiction – with him at Utting. And he must have composed the message at Utting, even though he would be at home now. Angus didn’t know about Utting, but at Rossingham, what with sports and clubs and flexi-prep and the Combined Cadet Force, there wasn’t much time for reading apart from required prep reading and one’s housemaster didn’t like one to stuff one’s drawer with books. What books would Guy have with him? Maybe a school set book? Angus, rather dubiously, tried the code on the first lines of Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, and though it seemed a bit way out, Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin. Nothing worked. He pored over the code, going through books all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday, and on Wednesday evening they all went over to some friends of his parents for supper. The friend had two Siamese cats one of which had injured its leg falling out of a tree.

  ‘Look at the way that cat walks,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to take her to the vet. I thought she’d be OK but she’s going to have to have that leg seen to.’

  Cat Walk, thought Angus. Why didn’t I think of that before? That was one book I knew for certain he had at Utting. That’s the book he used. The ridiculous thing was that Angus himself no longer had a copy of it, for he had sent his copy to Guy. He couldn’t buy another, it wouldn’t appear in paperback for nearly a year, and there would be a long waiting list at the library for the hardcover, he knew that from past experience. Next morning he went down to Hatchard’s, a branch of which had just opened in Edge Street. Cat Walk was still on the best-seller list and copies of it were prominently displayed. Angus picked one up and opened it. As soon as he had tried the first few letters of the coded message against the first line, he knew he had found the right book.

  Shop assistants looked suspiciously at Angus. He was afraid that one of them, a thin cross-looking girl, was going to come up to him and tell him he wasn’t supposed to read the books without buying them first. But nothing happened. He deciphered the message without having to write it down. He kept it all in his head.

  Guy had written: ‘Great stuff. Why don’t we keep this up? Moscow Centre.’

  That was the signature, Moscow Centre. And somehow, standing there in the Broad Street Hatchard’s, Angus had known exactly what Guy had meant. He wanted to start a spy network. They had talked about doing that in the past. They had wondered if they could set up a sort of MI5 or SIS (or CIA) and somehow use it. But they had never quite been able to decide what they would use it for. And then of course they had nothing to use it against. They were together, they were at the same school. But now they found themselves on opposing sides. Literally so, for like the West and the Soviets they were divided by a barrier which in fact separated east from west, in their case the river that split the city. Utting was on its eastern outskirts in what had once been the village of Utting. Rossingham, on the other hand, lay some twenty miles to the west in (according to the school prospectus) some of the most beautiful arable land in England. They were apart in a not dissimilar way from that in which the Western and Eastern blocs on an international level were apart.

  Angus wanted very much to reply to Guy but he knew he mustn’t. Contact had been made and now there must be no more. In falling in with Guy’s suggestion, Angus realized something else: that in gaining Spookside (the name was invented two days afterwards) he would lose Guy. Oh, they would have the game, the network, the intrigue, the codes, the trappings of the game, but they would never again meet as they had once done. They would meet only as the heads of the SIS and the KGB, say, might meet, at some diplomatic party in Vienna. Their friendship as such would be over.

  The attractions of Spookside were such, though, as to make Angus discount this. And if he now regretted it, it was too late, for the game was over for him and he had gone his way and Guy his and they never saw each other except by chance. If they met in the street they would acknowledge each other with a raised arm and a shout of hi. But at the time this prospect, if prospect it was, seemed unimport
ant. Spookside was all.

  His answer to Guy was to recruit two field agents from his own house at Rossingham, one of whom had a cousin at Utting. The cousin admitted that Guy had already tried to enrol him but he fancied working for Western intelligence. The first thing Angus got him to do was get the book Cat Walk back from Guy. That was the signal really that things had started. Guy changed the code from the day he lost the book. And he started using a drop actually inside the grounds at Utting.

  For a while they only did joke things, to test themselves, to see if they could do them. Things like abstracting each other’s possessions. Guy’s second-in-command had an electric toothbrush which he kept with him in Oppenheimer House. He was known as the Controller of the Chamney Desk, Chamney being the next village to Utting, so that it was something of a triumph when one of his best officers managed to get hold of it and bring it over without detection. Soon after that the officer turned out to be a double agent. But by then they had moved on to higher, more involved and serious things.

  There were the defectors, for instance, and the excitement of the debriefing sessions. But the first really important thing they did was to get hold of the plans for the block of flats it was proposed to build next door to Bruce Reynolds’s parents’ house. The architect happened to be Ivan Stern’s mother’s best friend’s husband. They used the best officer for that and somehow he infiltrated the architect’s studio on a visit to the house with Stern and Stern’s parents. While the others were in the garden eating food barbecued by the architect he took the top sheet of the plans, the one with the general outlay on and the building heights and so on, round the corner to the late-night instant print place and photocopied it. This was a daring coup. But the agent was a sort of genius, Angus (or Chimera) sometimes thought, and it was a bitter blow to him when he found out he was working for Guy at the same time. Guy learnt all about the plans coup before the photocopy was on Bruce Reynolds’s father’s breakfast table, placed there by Bruce in a blank envelope with no covering letter. Mr Reynolds had actually believed in the validity of those plans and had acted accordingly. He thought the envelope had come from a town councillor known to be crooked. Instead of selling his house as he had planned to do should the block of flats have turned out to be as large and tall as he had feared, he withdrew it from the market and set about building the extension which would provide an indoor swimming pool and double-size bedroom for Bruce.

  That was the kind of thing they did. Better things and worse. Pointless things and absurd things too and sometimes dangerous things. Until one day, in the summer holidays just before he was sixteen, when he was in the Fifth and O Levels were coming up the following year, Angus woke up in the morning, remembered what he had to do first thing, go down to the safe house and begin the de-briefing of the latest defector, and thought O God, what a drag, do I have to . . . ?

  7

  ‘THEY ARE JUST like schoolboys,’ Fergus said, turning off the television. ‘Like so many schoolchildren playing games.’

  The main item on the early evening news had been an account of the latest spy trial currently taking place in the United States.

  Mungo grinned to himself. It was not the first time he had heard this comment from his father and it never failed to afford him private amusement. Not quite private, in fact, for once or twice he had caught Angus’s eye.

  Now his father said, ‘It must be the game element that keeps it all going. No rational person can see any sense in it. It’s of no positive benefit to the world. Rather the reverse. I sometimes think it’s actively dangerous. I mean, without this insanity would we even have the high level of tension that exists between East and West?’

  ‘Probably not, darling,’ said Lucy.

  Mungo excused himself. They had been eating one of Lucy’s junk-food – what she called her scratch-as-scratch-can – teas: baps and mustard pickles and German sausage out of packets, all sitting in armchairs up in the den. Only Lucy had the sofa. A woman of her size needed exclusive possession of the sofa, she said. There had been pineapple juice to drink and a bottle of white wine. Mungo couldn’t understand why his father offered him a glass of wine and gave him such a searching look when he refused it. He always did refuse it, after all.

  In the next hour or so he had to get down to the flyover drop and see if there was anything for him. He was expecting to hear from his agent Nicholas Ralston (or Unicorn) that he had solved the problem, that he had found a way of eliciting from Blake his decision over the surgery planning permission. And if Unicorn’s efforts failed, he was keeping Charles Mabledene (or Dragon) in reserve. Dragon, Mungo thought, was by far his best agent, the best agent he had ever had, better than any of Stern’s Stars.

  Charles Mabledene had been his first defector, come over to him before he had assumed the headship of London Central, when he was still Angus’s right-hand man. It was in the summer term, when Angus was thinking of giving up, was schooling Mungo to take his place, only no one knew that, it was still a dead secret between them. Mungo had been up in his study, doing flexi-prep, and Angus was still in town, according to his entry in the house book. It was policy at Rossingham to put brothers in the same house unless they or their parents specifically asked for this not to be done. The O’Neills, for instance, had requested that Keith and Graham be kept apart on account of Graham being so much brighter. But when Mungo started at Rossingham he was put into Pitt with Angus. Ian had left by then but he too had been in Pitt, though Fergus all those years before had for some reason been in Gladstone.

  There was a phone in the house common room. There was a television set too which you were at liberty to watch once your prep was done. But use of the phone was very much restricted. Once you were in the Sixth Form you could do practically anything you wanted anyway, or things were a whole lot less constrained, but even then you weren’t supposed to receive calls on that phone. It was strictly for making essential outgoing calls, such as if one of your parents was ill or you had to cancel their weekend visit to you, something like that. And it was a pay phone too which made it unlikely it would be used unnecessarily.

  To the outside world the number of that phone was unknown. It appeared in no directory. Even parents didn’t know it. If they needed to phone up and inquire about something they were supposed to call the headmaster or one’s housemaster on the private phone in his flat. Angus told Mungo afterwards that in all his three years at Rossingham in Pitt House he had never heard that phone ring or been told that it had rung. And there was Mungo, on that evening in June last year, sitting up in his study doing his biology with his best friend and second-in-command Graham O’Neill (or Medusa) sitting beside him doing his history, when he heard a bell ring downstairs. They didn’t know what it was, they thought it must have been Mr Lindsay’s phone ringing in the flat, that maybe he or Mrs Lindsay had left the door open.

  It was someone he didn’t know all that well, not one of his agents, who came up to tell him the call was for him. Mungo thought someone must be ill, even dying, for his people actually to phone him at school. He got up quickly, starting in the direction of the housemaster’s flat.

  A shrill whisper: ‘The phone in the common room!’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  The whisperer shrugged.

  ‘Who is it, for God’s sake?’ Mungo said.

  ‘They wouldn’t say. They sounded scared shitless.’

  Half a dozen men were sitting round the TV but they weren’t looking at it. They were all looking at the receiver of the phone, lying there resting on the pay box. When it rang it must have shaken them more than the fire bell would have, Mungo thought. He’d never forget picking up that receiver, quite mystified, and a squeaky kid’s voice that hadn’t even started breaking said:

  ‘I’m called Charles Mabledene. I want to come over.’

  ‘You what?’ Mungo wasn’t as on the ball then as he had become later.

  ‘I want to defect. I could bring you something good. I could bring you Guy Parker’
s code book.’

  Remembering it nine months later, Mungo smiled to himself. He was passing Mabledene’s now, the big garage that had the Volvo concession on the western side of Rostock, though the family lived ten miles out in one of the villages. Charles had found a new drop for them, in a tree on the vacant lot next to his father’s car wash. It might be wise not to keep on too long with the flyover one, especially remembering the watcher he had seen or thought he had seen last time he was down here.

  This was only the second light evening. At midnight on Saturday the clocks had gone forward. It wasn’t cold but mild and damp, visibility poor, giving to this deserted place an air of mystery. Moisture lay on the flight of stone steps that ran down to the embankment and yellow light from the pub windows made it gleam. Mungo went up the steps from the river, crossing the place where that girl had been strangled, up Bread Lane this time, the steepish hill that wound between high brick walls with broken glass on top. Easter Monday and the flyover seemed to shake under the weight of traffic, cars going northwards tonight, returning from holiday resorts. But underneath all was still, shadowed, undisturbed. Mungo saw the king cat’s eyes, points of green fire, before his fur was visible. He crossed the road and put out his hand but the animal twisted away and slid under one of the stunted bushes.

  A folded piece of paper in a plastic envelope was taped inside the central upright, fixed there at the level of Mungo’s chin, which would just about be head height for Basilisk. It came away very easily, Mungo thought, almost too easily. The tape peeled off as if it had already been unstuck once since Basilisk put it there.

  I wonder if I am imagining things, Mungo said to himself as he put the message into his pocket.

  8

  JOHN CREEVEY WAS sixteen when he first noticed his sister was ugly. She must have been eleven. He was doing his homework – writing an essay about the War of the Spanish Succession, funny how you remember these things – when she came into the living room to tell him something about a cake. A birthday cake, that was it, so it must have been her eleventh birthday. She came to tell him tea was ready in the dining room and her cake was on the table with its eleven candles. He looked up and seemed for some reason to see her face for the first time. Perhaps it was because she surprised him, he hadn’t heard her come in. He saw her bulging forehead that seemed to overhang her eyebrows, her cheeks as round as apples, her snub nose and sickle mouth. She was ugly and he had never noticed it before.