Brian Freemantle - Here Comes Charlie M

‘They would have asked you to have told them, if ever I made contact with you,’ predicted Charlie, the apprehension growing.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Willoughby. ‘They did.’

‘Well?’ Charlie demanded. He’d buggered it, he thought immediately. Edith had been right: he was wrong again.

‘Charlie,’ said Willoughby, coming forward again so that there was less than a yard between them. ‘They reduced my father into a shambling, disgusting old drunk who went to sleep every night puddled in his own urine. And then, effectively, they killed him. I don’t know what you did, but I know it hurt. Is it likely I’m going to turn in someone who did what I’d have given my eye-teeth to have done?’

Charlie was hunched in the chair, still uncertain.

‘It’s been five weeks since your telephone call,’ Willoughby reminded him, realising Charlie’s doubt. He waved his hand towards the window.

‘In five weeks,’ said the underwriter, ‘they would have made plans that guaranteed that once inside this office you’d never be able to get out again. Go on, look out of the window. By now the roads would have been sealed and all the traffic halted.’

Willoughby was right, Charlie realised. He got up, going behind the other man’s chair. Far below, the street was thronged with people and cars.

‘The outer office would have been cleared, too,’ invited the underwriter.

Without replying, Charlie opened the door. The secretary who had greeted him looked up, enquiringly, then smiled.

‘Satisfied?’ asked Willoughby.

Charlie nodded.

‘Tell me something,’ said Willoughby, in sudden curiosity. ‘What would you have done if it had been a trap?’

‘Probably tried to kill you,’ said Charlie. And more than likely failed, he added to himself, remembering his hesitation at personal violence in the cemetery.

Willoughby pulled his lips over his teeth, a nervous gesture.

‘What good would that have done, if you’d been bottled up here?’

‘Kept me alive,’ suggested Charlie. ‘They couldn’t have eliminated me, if I’d committed a public murder.’

Why, wondered Charlie, was he talking like this? It was ridiculous. He waited for the other man to laugh at him.

Willoughby remained blank-faced.

‘And do they want to eliminate you?’

‘I would imagine so.’

Willoughby shook his head in distaste.

‘God, it’s obscene,’ he said.

Charlie frowned. That wasn’t a sincere remark, he judged. The man still thought of it as he had as a boy that day in the office, a sort of game for grown-ups.

‘Consider it,’ Willoughby went on. ‘Two men, sitting here in the middle of London, calmly using words like eliminate instead of planned, premeditated murder.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Charlie. ‘Sometimes it has to happen. Though not as much as you might think …’

He looked at the other man, to see if he were appreciating the words.

‘… thank God,’ he concluded.

‘That was one thing about the service over which my father could never lose his disgust,’ recalled Willoughby. ‘He talked to me a great deal …’

He smiled over the hesitation. ‘Cuthbertson and Wilberforce would say too much — another breach of security. My father believed very strongly in what he did … the need for such a department. But he was always horrified that people occasionally had to die.’

‘I know,’ said Charlie. The remaining doubts were being swept away by the reminiscence. Willoughby would have had to be very close to his father — as close as he had been to him in the department — to know so well the old man’s feelings.

Willoughby sighed, shedding the past.

‘And now I know about you,’ he said, gravely. ‘Whether I wanted to or not.’

‘Only their possible verdict,’ qualified Charlie. ‘Not the cause.’

‘It must have been serious?’

‘It was.’

For a moment, neither spoke. Then Willoughby said: ‘My father often remarked about your honesty. Considered it unusual, in a business so involved in deceit.’

‘You seem to have the same tendency.’

‘My father preferred it.’

‘Yes,’ remembered Charlie. ‘He did.’

It was strange, thought Charlie, what effect the old man had had upon both of them.

The intercom burped and Willoughby nodded briefly into the receiver, smiling up at Charlie when he replaced the earpiece.

‘From your reaction in the cemetery, I thought you’d prefer lunch here, in the seclusion of the office,’ he said. ‘Now I’m sure you would.’

Charlie detected movement behind him and turned to see two waiters setting up a gatelegged table. There were oysters, duck in aspic, cheese, chablis and port. Underwriters lived well, he thought.

Willoughby waited until they had seated themselves at the table and begun to eat before he spoke again.

‘I must satisfy myself about one thing, Charlie,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Whatever you did … was it illegal?’

Charlie examined the question. There couldn’t be a completely honest answer, he decided.

‘Nothing for which I would appear in any English court of law,’ he said. ‘I was just trying to achieve, although in a different way, the sort of changes that your father believed necessary.’

And survive, he thought.

Willoughby smiled.

‘Then you’ve nothing to fear from me,’ he said. ‘The opposite in fact.’

‘Opposite?’

‘In the letter,’ explained Willougby, ‘the one in which he mentioned you so much, my father said he thought they were trying to do to you what they had done to him. He asked that if the opportunity or necessity arose that I should help you in any way I could.’

Charlie finished the oysters and sat fingering his glass, staring down into the wine he had scarcely touched. Trying to do to him what they’d done to Sir Archibald; certainly the drinking had become bad. He’d never considered suicide, though. And didn’t think he ever would.

‘You’ve already helped,’ he said, ‘by saying nothing.’

‘There was something else,’ continued the underwriter.

‘What?’

‘My father was a very rich man,’ said Willoughby. ‘Even after the setlement of the estate and the payment in full of death duties, there was still over three-quarters of a million pounds. He left you?50,000.’

‘Good God!’

Willoughby laughed openly at the astonishment.

Charlie sat shaking his head. Three years ago, he reflected, he was saving the taxi fares from the Wormwood Scrubs debriefings with Alexei Berenkov by walking in the rain with holes in his shoes. Now he had more money than he knew what to do with. Why then, he wondered, did he feel so bloody miserable?

‘I’ve had it for two years on long-term deposit at fourteen per cent,’ added Willoughby. ‘It’ll have increased by quite a few thousand.’

‘I don’t really need it,’ shrugged Charlie.

‘It’s legally yours,’ said Willoughby.

And fairly his, added Charlie. Better even than the American money. He had more than Edith now. The thought lodged in his mind, to become an idea.

The meal over, Willoughby poured the port and leaned back in his chair.

‘Why did you go to the cemetery, Charlie?’ he asked. ‘Surely, it was a dangerous thing to do?’

Charlie nodded.

‘Absolutely insane,’ he agreed.

Willoughby waited.

‘I’d drunk too much,’ Charlie admitted. ‘It was becoming a habit. And I had intended it to be my last visit to England. So I wanted to make just one visit.’

‘They did watch the grave,’ offered Willoughby.

Charlie’s eyes came up, questioningly.

‘Must have been for almost six months,’ expanded the underwriter. ‘I go there about twice a month … learned to recognise them, in the end. They were quite obvious, even to an amateur like me …’