A Perfect Spy

“We used an intermediary, sir. A fine lawyer of this district who in his modesty wishes to remain anonymous.”

Rick’s reply draws a rare smile from the improbably tiny lips of Sir Makepeace Watermaster. “I never knew a lawyer who wished to remain anonymous,” he says.

Perce Loft frowns distractedly at the wall.

“So where is it now?” Sir Makepeace continues.

“What, sir?”

“The coach, boy.”

“They’re painting it,” says Rick. “Green with gold lettering.”

“With whose permission, at any stage, have you embarked on this project?” asks Watermaster.

“We’re asking Miss Dorothy to cut the tape, Sir Makepeace. We’ve drafted the invite already.”

“Who gave you permission? Did Mr. Philpott here? Did the deacons? Did the committee? Did I? To spend nine hundred and eight pounds of Appeal funds, widows’ mites, on a motor coach?”

“We wanted the element of surprise, Sir Makepeace. We wanted to sweep the board with them. Once you spread the word beforehand, talk it round town, you take the air out of it. P.S.C. is going to be sprung upon an unsuspecting world.”

Makepeace now enters what Syd calls the dicey part.

“Where are the books?”

“Books, sir? There’s only one Book I know of—”

“Your files, boy. Your figures. You alone kept the accounts, we heard.”

“Give me a week, Sir Makepeace. I’ll account for every penny.”

“That’s not keeping accounts. That’s fudging them. Did you learn nothing at all from your father, boy?”

“Rectitude, sir. Humbleness before Jesus.”

“How much have you spent?”

“Not spent, sir. Invested.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred. Rounded up.”

“Where’s the coach at present?”

“I said, sir. Being painted.”

“Where?”

“Balham’s of Brinkley. Coach-builders. Some of the finest Liberals in the county. Christians to a man.”

“I know Balham’s. TP sold timber to Balham’s for ten years.”

“They’re charging cost.”

“You propose to ply for trade in public, you say?”

“Three days a week, sir.”

“Using the public coach stages?”

“Certainly.”

“Are you familiar with the likely attitude to be taken by the Dawlish & Tambercombe Transport Corporation of Devon to this venture?”

“A popular demand like this — those boys can’t block it, Sir Makepeace. We’ve got God driving for us. Once they see the ground-swell, feel the pulse, they’ll back away and give us our heads all the way to the top. They can’t stop progress, Sir Makepeace, and they can’t stop the march of Christian people.”

“Can’t they,” says Sir Makepeace, and scribbles figures on a piece of paper in front of him. “There’s eight hundred and fifty pound in rent money missing as well,” he remarks as he writes.

“We invested the rent money too, sir.”

“That’s more than the fifteen hundred then.”

“Call it two thousand. Rounded up. I thought you only meant the Appeal money.”

“What about the collection money?”

“Some of it.”

“Counting all monies from any source, what’s the total capital? Rounded up.”

“Including private investors, Sir Makepeace—”

Watermaster sat up straight: “So we’ve private investors too, have we? My gracious, boy, you’ve been going it a bit. Who are they?”

“Private clients.”

“Of whom?”

Perce Loft looks as though he is about to fall asleep out of sheer boredom. His eyelids are two inches long, his goatish head has slipped forward on his neck.

“Sir Makepeace, I am not at liberty to reveal this. When P.S.C. promises confidentiality, that’s what she delivers. Our watchword is integrity.”

“Has the company been incorporated?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Security, sir. Keep it under wraps. Like I said.”

Makepeace begins jotting again. Everybody waits for more questions. None come. An uncomfortable air of completeness settles over Makepeace, and Rick senses it faster than anybody. “It was like being up the old doctor’s, Titch,” Syd told me, “when he’s made up his mind what you’re dying of, only he’s got to write out this prescription before he gives you the good news.”

Rick speaks again. Unprompted. It was the voice he used when he was cornered. Syd heard it then, I heard it later only twice. It was not a pretty tone at all.

“I could bring those accounts up to you this evening, as a matter of fact, Sir Makepeace. They’re in safekeeping, you see. I’ll have to get them out.”

“Give them to the police,” says Makepeace, still writing. “We’re not detectives here, we’re churchmen.”

“Miss Dorothy might think a bit different, though, mightn’t she, Sir Makepeace?”

“Miss Dorothy has nothing to do with this.”

“Ask her.”

Then Makepeace stops writing and his head comes up a bit sharpish, says Syd, and they look at each other, Makepeace with his little baby eyes uncertain. And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won’t touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.