Our Game

"Yes, how much have you? There's the Bechstein for a start. That cost a bomb. Then there's your little pilgrimages to Mr. Appleby's nice jeweller's shop in Wells, never cheap—you've dropped thirty grand there—not to mention all the fillies and smart frocks you've bought her. Must be quite a gal. Lucky she disapproves of motorcars, or I can see a Bentley with mink-lined seats. I know you inherited early from your parents, I know your uncle Bob left you Schloss and contents, but what about the rest? Or is it all from naughty Aunt Cecily, who died so conveniently in Portugal a few years back? For a fellow who never cared about money, you certainly know how to pick a relative."

"If you don't believe me, check with my solicitors."

"My dear boy, they bear you out entirely. Half a million quids' worth of the best, added to what you've already got, paid in two instalments from a nice Channel Islands trust fund. The solicitors never met the aunt, mind. They were instructed by a firm in Lisbon. The firm in Lisbon never met her either. They were instructed by her business manager, a lawyer in Paris. I mean really, Tim, I've seen money laundered before, but never lawyers." He turned to Marjorie Pew and spoke as if I weren't in the room. "We're still checking, so he needn't think he's in the clear. If Aunt Cecily turns up in a pauper's grave, Cranmer's for the high jump."

"Tim?"

It was Marjorie again. She would like to go back to the logic of my behaviour last night, she said. She wondered whether she might run it by me one more time to make sure she had it straight, Tim.

"Be my guest," I said, using a phrase I had never used in my life.

"Tim, why did you telephone us from your house? You said it was in your mind that the police might have been running illegal taps and that they'd made up the story about Larry's vigilant Scottish landlady as cover. Mightn't they have been tapping your phone too? I'd have thought that with your training and experience, you'd have driven to the village and used the public box."

"I used the established procedure."

"I'm not certain you did. Rule One is to make sure it's safe."

I glanced at Merriman, but he had adopted the posture of a hostile audience, eyeing me as he might a prisoner in the dock.

"The police could have put a tap on the village box as well," I said. "Not that they'd have got much joy of it. It's usually bust."

"I see," she said, implying once again that she didn't.

"It would have looked pretty damned odd, at eleven at night, if I had driven a mile into the village to make a call. Particularly if the police were watching my house."

She looked at the tips of her groomed fingers, then at me again, as she began counting off the points that were troubling her. Merriman had decided he preferred the ceiling. Waldon the floor.

"You cut yourself off from Pettifer. You think his disappearance may be perfectly normal. But it worries you so much you can't wait to tell us about it. You know Checheyev has retired. You know Pettifer has. But you suspect they're up to something, though you don't know what or why. You think the police may be tapping your phone. But you use it to ring us. You spend twenty minutes staring at this building before you pluck up the courage to enter it. One could therefore be forgiven for assuming that ever since the police called on you last night, you have been in a state of stress quite disproportionate to Pettifer's disappearance. One might even suppose that you had something very weighty on your mind. So weighty that even a person as overcontrolled as yourself makes a string of tradecraft errors at odds with his training."

My apprehensions had given way to outright rejoicing. I forgave her everything: her courtroom pomposity, her shrouded savagery, her description of me as overcontrolled. Angel choirs were singing in my ears, and as far as I was concerned, Marjorie Pew as in church was one of the angels. I had told her nothing. Never mind that she couldn't or wouldn't tell me the date of Checheyev's last visit. She had told me something even more important: They didn't know about Emma and Larry.

They knew about Emma and me, because under Office rules I had been obliged to tell them. But they hadn't drawn the third line of the triangle. And that, as we used to say, was three-star intelligence: worth the whole journey.