A Perfect Spy

Extract from Daily Telegraph dated October 9, 1948, recording the death in Truro Hospital, Cornwall, of one John Reginald Wentworth, after a long illness resulting from his injuries, beloved husband to Peggy.

And a quaint little cutting, culled from God knows where, recording the arrest at sea, on the cruise ship S.S. Grande Bretagne, of the notorious confidence tricksters Weber and Woolfe alias Cunningham, masquerading as the Duke and Duchess of Seville.

One by one, with a red pen, Pym numbered each document in the top right corner, then entered the same numbers at the appropriate points in his text by way of reference. With a bureaucrat’s neat manners he stapled the exhibits together and inserted them in a file marked “Annexe.” Closing the file he stood up, gave an unrestrained sigh and thrust down his arms behind him like a man slipping off a harness. The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies. Crossing to the window he made a last inspection of the square, the tired lights of England fading as he watched. Gravely he undressed, drank a last vodka, gravely took a look at himself in the mirror and prepared to put himself to bed. But lightly, very lightly. Almost on tiptoe. Almost as if he were afraid to wake himself up. On his way he paused at the desk and read again the decoded message that for once he had not bothered to destroy.

Poppy, he thought, stay exactly where you are.

CHAPTER 7

Five years ago Jack Brotherhood had shot his Labrador bitch. She was in her basket, rheumatic and shaking; he’d given her the pills but she’d sicked them up, then shamed herself by messing the carpet. And when he threw on his windcheater and took his 12-bore from behind the door, willing her, she looked at him like a criminal because she knew she was finally too sick to find for him. He ordered her to get up but she couldn’t. When he yelled “Seek!” she rolled herself on to her forepaws and lay down again with her head stuck stupidly over the basket. So he put down the gun and got a shovel from the shed and dug her a hole in the field behind the cottage, a bit up the slope with a decent view across the estuary. Then he wrapped her in his favourite tweed jacket and carried her up there and shot her in the back of the head, smashing the spinal cord at the nape, and buried her. After that he sat beside her with a half-bottle of scotch while the Suffolk dew settled itself over him and he decided she had probably had the best death anyone was likely to have in a world not distinguished by good deaths. He didn’t leave a headstone or a coy wood cross for her but he had taken bearings on the spot, using the church tower, the dead willow tree and the windmill, and whenever he passed it by he’d send her a gruff mental greeting, which was as near as he had ever come to pondering on the afterlife, until this empty Sunday morning as he drove through deserted Berkshire lanes and watched the sun lifting on the Downs. “Jack’s had too many miles in the saddle,” Pym had said. “The Firm should have retired him ten years ago.”

And how long ago should we have retired you, my boy? he wondered. Twenty years? Thirty? How many miles have you had in the saddle? How many miles of exposed film have you rolled into how many newspapers? How many miles of newspaper have you dropped into dead letter boxes and tossed over cemetery walls? How many hours have you listened to Prague radio, seated over your code pads?

He lowered his window. The racing air smelt of silage and wood smoke and it thrilled him. Brotherhood was country stock. His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates. With the morning wind pouring into his face, he became a raggedy-arsed boy again, galloping Miss Sumner’s hunter bareback across her park and getting the hiding of his life for it. He was freezing to death in the flat mud of the Suffolk fens, too proud to go home without a catch. He was making his first drop from a barrage balloon at Abingdon Aerodrome and discovering how the wind kept his mouth open after he yelled. I’ll leave when they throw me out. I’ll leave when you and I have had our word, my boy.