Our Game

"We waited and we got bored." He slides a cutting from the Guardian across the desk at me. "Pettifer needs a context, or he'll be trouble. Talk to the resettlement people. Bath University is looking for a linguist who can double up on something called global security, which sounds to me like the oxymoron of all time. Temporary but could be permanent. Their Big I Am is ex-Office and well disposed, provided Pettifer keeps his nose clean. I didn't know Bath had a university," he adds grouchily, as if nobody ever tells him anything. "Must be one of those Techs in drag."

* * *

It is the worst moment of our twenty-something operational years together. Life has decreed that we sit in parked cars on hilltops. This time we are in a lay-by on a hilltop outside Bath. Larry sits beside me, his face buried in his hands. Above the trees I can make out the grey outlines of the university that we have just inspected and the two pairs of dirty metal tubular chimneys that are its ominous landmark.

"So what do we believe in now, Timbo? Sherry at the dean's and stripped pine furniture?"

"Call it the peace you fought for," I suggest lamely.

His silence, as always, is worse than his abuse. He reaches up his hands but finds, instead of free air, the roof of the car.

"It's a safe haven," I say. "For half the year you're bored, for the other half you're free to do whatever you want. That's a damned sight better than the world average."

"I'm not tameable, Timbo."

"No one's asking you to be."

"I don't want a safe haven. I never did. To hell with safe havens. To hell with stasis. To hell with dons and index-linked pensions and cleaning my car on Sundays. To hell with you too."

"To hell with history, to hell with the Office, to hell with life, and to hell with growing old," I suggest, enlarging on his thesis for him.

Nevertheless I have a lump in my throat, I can't deny it. I would put my hand on his shoulder, which is trembling and hot with sweat, except that it is not our way to touch each other.

"Listen," I say to him. "Are you listening? You're thirty miles from Honeybrook. You can come every Sunday for lunch and tea and tell me how bloody it all is."

It is the worst invitation I ever extended to anyone in my life.

* * *

Bryant was talking to his notebook, which he held before his face while he taunted me with the record of Larry's phone calls.

"Mr. Cranmer-sir also features on the incomings, I see. It's not all your funny foreigners. An educated gentleman, always very polite, more like the BBC than human, is how the landlady describes you. Well, that's exactly how I'd describe you myself, no disrespect." He licked a finger and gaily flipped a page. "Then all of a sudden you turn round and cut off the Doctor without a shilling. Well, well. No more incomings, no more outgoings, for three whole weeks. What you might term a radio silence. Slammed the door in his face, you did, Mr. Cranmer-sir, and me and Oliver here were wondering why you did that to him. We wondered what had gone on before you cut him off and what stopped going on once you did. Didn't we, Oliver?"

He was still smiling. If I had been taking my last walk to the gallows his smile would not have altered. My anger against Merriman swung gratefully towards Bryant.

"Inspector," I began, gathering heat as I went. "You call yourself a public servant. Yet at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, without a warrant and without an appointment, you have the impertinence to barge your way into my house—two of you—"

Bryant was already on his feet. His facetious manner had fallen from him like a cloak. "You've been very kind, sir, and we've overstayed our welcome. We got carried away by your conversation, I expect." He slapped a card on my coffee table. "Give us a call, sir, won't you? Anything at all. He rings, he writes, he turns up on your doorstep, you hear something from a third party which could be of assistance in locating him ..." I could have knocked his insinuating smile through his head. "Oh, and in case the Doctor surfaces, would you be so kind as to give us your new telephone number? Thank you."

He scribbled to my dictation while Luck looked on.

"Nice piano," Luck said. He was suddenly too close to me, and too tall.

I said nothing.

"You play, do you?"

"It's been known of me."

"Your wife away?"

"I have no wife."

"Same as Pettifer. What branch did you say you were? Of the civil service? I forget."

"I didn't mention a branch."

"So what were you?"

"I was attached to the Treasury."

"As a linguist?"

"Not especially."

"And you didn't find that too negative? The Treasury? Cropping public spending, pegging pay-rounds, no more money for the hospitals? I think that would get me down." Again I disdained a reply. "You should keep a dog, Mr. Cranmer. A place like this. Crying out for one."

The wind had dropped dead. The rain had ceased, leaving pall of ground mist that made autumn bonfires of the geot's headlights.

TWO