A Perfect Spy

He was seated close to Syd and he had put his whisky beside Syd’s on the beaten-brass Indian table that Syd kept polished till it shone like the Eastern sun. Syd was speaking very reluctantly, and his voice had almost died.

“How many?”

“Two blokes.”

“Did you give them a cup of tea?”

“Course I did.”

“See their lorry?”

“Course I did. I was looking out for them, wasn’t I? That’s a major entertainment, that is, round here, a lorry.”

“What was the firm?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t written, was it? It was a plain lorry. More like a hired one.”

“Colour?”

“Green.”

“Hired from who?”

“How should I know?”

“Did you sign anything?”

“Me? You’re daft. They had a tea, loaded up, and buggered off.”

“Where were they taking it?”

“The depot, weren’t they?”

“Where’s the depot?”

“Canterbury.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure. Canterbury. Package for Canterbury. Then they complained about the weight. They always do that, they think it gets them more dropsy.”

“Did they say package for Pym?”

“Canterbury. I told you.”

“Did they have a name at all?”

“Lemon. Call at Lemon’s, get the package for Canterbury. I’m Lemon. The answer is a Lemon.”

“Did you see the number of the lorry?”

“Oh yes. Wrote it down. I mean that’s my hobby, lorry numbers.”

Brotherhood managed a smile. “Well, can you at least remember what make of lorry it might have been?” he asked. “Distinguishing marks and whatnot?”

It was a harmless enough question, harmlessly put. Brotherhood himself had little expectation of it. It was the kind of question that unasked leaves a gap, but asked produces no dividend: part of the necessary luggage of the interrogator’s trade. Yet it was the last that Brotherhood put to Syd on that dying autumn evening, and as a matter of fact it was the last in his short but desperate search for Magnus Pym, because after it he had only answers to concern him. Yet Syd refused point-blank to address himself to it. He started to speak, but then he changed his mind and clapped his mouth shut with a little pop. His chin came off his hands, his head lifted, then by degrees his whole little body lifted too, painfully but strictly from the chair, as if a distant bugle had summoned him to a last parade. His back arched, he held his stick to his side.

“I don’t want that boy doing prison,” he said with a husk to his voice. “Do you hear me? And I’m not going to help you put him there. His dad did prison. I did prison. And I don’t want the boy there. It bothers me. Nothing personal, copper, but on your way.”

* * *

It’s over, thought Brotherhood calmly, staring round the crowded conference table in Brammel’s suite on the Fifth Floor. This is my last feast with you. I shall walk out of this door a gamekeeper’s son of sixty. A dozen pairs of hands lay under the downlight like corpses waiting to be identified. To his left languished the tailor-made worsted sleeves of the Foreign Office representative named Dorney. Heraldic lions postured on his gold cufflinks. Beyond Dorney reposed the unspoiled fingertips of his master Brammel, whose mid-Surrey heredity needed no advertisement. Beyond Bo sat Mountjoy from Cabinet. Then the rest. In his mood of increasing alienation Brotherhood found it difficult to put the voices to the hands. Not that it mattered any more because tonight they were one voice and one dead hand. They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts, he thought. In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution. We have nothing to clear away but ourselves. The musty midnight air smelt of decay. Nigel was reading the death certificate.

“They waited outside the Lumsden house till six-twelve, then telephoned the house from a callbox down the road. Mrs. Lumsden replied that she and her maid were looking for Mrs. Pym at this moment. Mary had taken herself for a walk in the back garden and not returned. She’d been out more than an hour. The garden was empty. Lumsden himself was at the Residence. The Ambassador apparently required him.”

“I hope nobody’s going to try and blame the Lumsdens for this,” said Dorney.

“I’m sure not,” said Bo.

“She left no note, no word to anyone,” Nigel continued. “She’d been preoccupied during the day but that was natural. We checked the airlines and found she was booked to London on tomorrow morning’s British Airways flight club class. She gave her address as the Imperial Hotel, Vienna.”

“This morning’s,” somebody corrected, and Brotherhood saw Nigel’s gold watch tilt sharply towards him.

“This morning’s flight then,” Nigel agreed testily. “When we checked the Imperial she wasn’t in her room and when we tried the airport a second time we established she’d taken a standby seat on the last flight of the day, Lufthansa to Frankfurt. Unfortunately we did not come by this information until after the Frankfurt flight had landed at its destination.”

She diddled you, thought Brotherhood with a satisfaction bordering on pride. She’s a good girl and knows the game.