Our Game

I am sitting in the upper room of our safe house in Shepherd Market, sharing a farewell drink with Counsellor (Economic) Volodya Zorin, in reality head resident of the revamped Russian intelligence service in London. It is the last of these semiofficial exchanges between us. In three weeks I shall take my leave of the secret world and all its works. Zorin is a grizzled Cold War horse with the secret rank of colonel. Saying goodbye to him is like saying goodbye to my own past.

"So what shall you do with the rest of your life, friend Timothy?" he asks.

"I shall limit it," I reply. "I shall do a Rousseau. I shall turn my back on grand concepts, cultivate my grapes, and perform good works in miniature."

"You will build a Berlin Wall around yourself?"

"Unfortunately, Volodya, I already have one. My uncle Bob put his vineyard inside an eighteenth-century walled garden. It's a frost trap and a haven for disease."

"No, Dr. Pettifer never introduced me to anybody of that kind," I replied.

"Did he talk to you about them? Who they were? What he got up to with them? The deals they were hatching together? Mutual services performed, anything of that nature?"

"Deals? Of course not."

"Deals. Mutual services. Transactions," Luck added with threatening emphasis.

"I've no idea what you're talking about. No, he didn't discuss anything of the sort with me. No, I don't know what they did together. Talked hot air, most likely. Solved the problems of the world in three easy bottles."

"You don't like Pettifer, do you?"

"I neither like nor dislike him, Mr. Luck. I am not of a judgmental slant, as you appear to be. He's an old acquaintance. Taken in small enough doses, he's an amusement. I have always treated him as such."

"You ever had a serious quarrel with him?"

"Neither a serious quarrel nor a serious friendship."

"Did Pettifer ever offer to cut you in on a piece of the action in exchange for favours of some sort? You being a civil servant. Or an ex one. Some path you could smooth for him, a tip-off, a recommendation you could put his way?"

If Luck was intending to annoy me, he was making a rare job of it. "The suggestion is totally improper," I retorted. "I might as well ask you whether you take bribes."

Once more, with a laboriousness calculated to exasperate me, Bryant lumbered to the rescue. "Forgive him, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Oliver is but young." He put his hands together in mock prayer. "Mr. Cranmer, sir—please—if I may, sir."

"Yes, Mr. Bryant?"

"I think we have distracted ourselves once more, sir. We're rather good at that, I notice. We're talking the telephone, and the next thing I know we're talking a piece of history two years ago. What about today, sir? When was your most recent conversation with Dr. Pettifer on the electric telephone: put it that way. Never mind the subject or topic; just tell me when. That's what I'm after, and I'm beginning to think that for some reason you don't want to give me a straight answer, which is why young Oliver there was getting a bit testy just now. Yes, sir?"

"I'm still thinking."

"Take all the time you require, sir."

"It's like his visits. You just forget them. He always telephones when you're slap in the middle of things." Making love with Emma, for instance, in the days when love was what we made. "Have I seen such and such an article in the newspaper; did I see that jackass So-and-so on television, lying in his teeth about the whatever? That's what happens with undergraduate friendships. What was charming twenty-five years ago becomes a pest. You grow up. Your friends don't. You adjust. They stay the same. They become old kids, then they become bores. That's when you switch off."

I did not like Luck's glower any more than I liked Bryant's moustachio'd leer.

"Now, by switch off, sir," said Bryant, "do we mean here literally switch off? Switch off our telephone? Have it disconnected? Because that is what I believe we did on the first of August last, Mr. Cranmer, sir, and did not resume contact with the outside world for three full weeks thereafter. At which point we acquire a new number."

I must have been ready for him, for I struck back quickly, and at both of them.

"Inspector Bryant. Sergeant Luck. I think I've had rather more than enough of this. One minute you're engaged in a missing person enquiry. The next you're asking a lot of extraneous nonsense about unethical contacts while I was a civil servant, my politics, whether I'm a security risk, and why I went ex-directory."

"So why did you?" Luck said.

"I was being intruded upon."

"Who by?"

"Nobody of the smallest consequence to you."

Bryant's turn. "Now, if that was the case, sir, why didn't you get in touch with the police? Not as if you're a wilting violet, is it? We're more than happy to assist with nuisance phone calls, be they threatening or obscene. In collaboration with British Telecom, naturally. No need to cut yourself off from the outside world for three weeks."