A Perfect Spy

Brotherhood did not stoop but held his arms out. Georgie passed the box up to him and Brotherhood took it to the table where Tom did his Spirograph and his Lego and his endless drawings of German aeroplanes being shot down against a Plush sunset, with family in the background, everybody waving, everybody absolutely fine. Brotherhood picked out the biggest bundle first and they looked on while he started to unwrap it and changed his mind.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Georgie. “Woman’s fingers.”

She’s one of his mistresses, Mary suddenly realised. She wondered why on earth it hadn’t dawned on her before.

Georgie rose elegantly to her full height, one leg, other leg, and having fixed her straight hair behind her ears, applied her woman’s fingers to unwinding the strips of bedsheet that Magnus had said he wanted for the car, revealing at last a small, clever-looking camera with a clever steel harness round it. And after the camera a thing like a telescope with a bracket on it which, when you pulled it to its full length, made a stand that you could screw the camera to, face downwards and at a fixed distance, for photographing documents on your father-in-law’s campaign table. After the telescope came a succession of films and lenses and filters and rings and other bits of equipment she could not identify offhand. And underneath these a pad of flimsy cloth-paper with columns of numbers on the top sheet and thickly rubberised edges so that you could only see the top page. Mary knew the type of paper. She had worked on it in Berlin. It shrivelled into fern the moment you put a match near it. The pad was half used. Underneath the pad again, an aged cardboard-backed military jotting pad marked “W.D. Property,” standing for War Department and consisting of unwritten-on lined paper of blotchy wartime quality. And inside it, when Brotherhood continued searching, two pressed red flowers of great age, poppies, but just possibly roses, she was not entirely certain, and anyway by then she was shouting.

“It’s for the Firm! It’s for his work for you!”

“Of course it is. I’ll tell Nigel. No problem.”

“Just because he didn’t tell me about it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong! It’s for in case he gets landed with documents in the house! At weekends!” And then, realising what she had said: “It’s for his Joes — if they bring him documents, you fool! If Grant does, and he’s got to turn them round at short notice! What’s so fucking sinister about that?”

Fergus was fingering the half-used pad, turning it over and over, tilting it in the beam of Tom’s Anglepoise lamp.

“Looks more like your Czech, sir, frankly,” said Fergus, tilting the pad to the light. “It could be Russian but I think Czech’s more likely, frankly. Yes,” he said pleasantly as his eye caught some unexplained feature of the rubber edge. “That’s it. Czech. Mind you, that’s only where they’re made. Who’s dishing them out is another matter. Specially these days.”

Brotherhood was more interested in the pressed flowers. He had laid them on his palm and was staring at them as if they told his future.

“I think you’re a bad girl, Mary,” he said deliberately. “I think you know a lot more than you told me. I don’t think he’s in Ireland or the bloody Bahamas. I think that was a lot of smoke. I think he’s a bad man and I’m wondering whether you’re bad together.”

All constraint left her. She screamed “You shit!” and hit at him with her open hand but he blocked her. He put an arm round her and swung her off the ground as if she had no legs left. He carted her across the corridor to Frau Bauer’s bedroom which was the only room that hadn’t so far been ripped apart. He dumped her on the bed and whisked her shoes off exactly as he used to in the squalid safe flat where he did his screwing. He rolled her into the eiderdown, making a straitjacket of it. Then he lay on her, grappling her into submission while Georgie and Fergus looked on. But somehow, amazingly, throughout all these antics and dramatics, Jack Brotherhood had still contrived to keep hold of the two pressed poppies in his left fist, and kept hold of them even when the doorbell went again, one long peal for authority.

CHAPTER 4

“To be above the fray,” Pym wrote to himself on a separate sheet of paper. “A writer is King. He should look down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.”