A Perfect Spy

Mary never heard the shot. The superintendent was crouching at Brotherhood’s window again, this time to tell him that Magnus’s presence inside the house had now been positively confirmed by a ruse and that he had orders to assemble non-combatants in the Church Hall without delay. Brotherhood was contesting this, and Mary still had her eye on the four men playing Grannie’s Footsteps among the chimneypots across the square. For half an hour now they had been reeling out rope to one another and adopting classic postures of stealth, and Mary loathed the lot of them more than she could have imagined possible. A society that admires its shock troops had better be bloody careful about where it’s going, Magnus liked to say. The superintendent was confirming that there were no other male lodgers on the premises apart from the said Canterbury, and he was asking Mary whether she would hold herself in readiness to speak to her husband on the telephone in a conciliatory manner if this became necessary during the course of operations. And Mary was retorting: “Of course I will,” in an overbold whisper intended to deflate all this theatrical nonsense. All those things in her later memory were taking place or had just done so as Brotherhood shoved open the driver’s door, sending the superintendent flying to one side, one boot for ever frozen in the window frame. After that she had a forward image of Jack pelting towards the house at a young man’s pace because sometimes she had a dream of him doing exactly that, and the house was always Plush and he was coming to make love to her. But with the clamour all around him he was standing still. Lights had come on, ambulances were racing to the spot without apparently knowing where the spot was, police and plainclothesmen were falling over each other and the fools on the roof were shouting at the fools in the square and England was being saved from things it didn’t know were threatening it. But Jack Brotherhood was standing to attention like a dead centurion at his post, and everyone was watching a dignified little lady in a dressing-gown coming down the steps of her house.