James Long - Sixth Column

‘That was… us?’ he asked. ‘You knew about it?’

‘Why did you think we were sanitizing the house?’ she said. ‘I would have thought it was obvious.’ She was excited, eyes glistening, breathing hard.

‘Why was that necessary?’ he said angrily.

‘Hey, what happened to big bad Johnny Kay?’ she asked, surprised. ‘Wineglass Johnny, who blows away top Provos when he loses his temper? What gives?’

He bit his lip. ‘Quill’s not PIRA,’ he said. ‘Maybe someone could have told me.’

I haven’t got to the bottom of him yet, Sibley had said when he’d suggested she didn’t tell Johnny first. Watch his reaction, he’d said. Tell me how he takes it. She had and it hadn’t been what she expected.

‘What he’s doing was bloody dangerous,’ she said. ‘You want to argue with Sibley?’

She phoned one-handed while she drove. Sibley’s private number. Someone answered.

‘Been there. Done that,’ she said and switched off.

They said nothing on the way back. Johnny sat there, the picture of the cartwheeling body assaulting him so that he had to keep pushing it aside. It came back at him again and again, spraying its appalling, irreparable blood and he fought it, struggling to lock it away in a box with the fox hunting memories and all the rest, down there in the darkness. He blanked it all out, blanked out everything around him so that he seemed for a time to be in a trance. When all was serene again and he could afford to let his mind surface, he did what he had always done, took on the protective camouflage of those immediately around him. It had been sanctioned, he told himself, it must have been necessary. Magie seemed quite relaxed about it.

She was driving with total concentration, shifting gears and carving through the traffic as if every split second counted, then her mood seemed gradually to change. She slowed, took one hand off the wheel and began to play with Johnny’s knee, stroking up the inside of his thigh. He accepted it, switched on to autopilot, looking at her feline face, and even, after a while, began to enjoy it.

She drove straight to his house, slotted quickly into a parking space, got out and locked the car. No doubt, no questions. She stood separately, demurely, as the porter came to open the door, but as soon as they climbed the stairs to Johnny’s flat her hands were all over him, pushing down between his shirt and his jeans as he fiddled the key into the lock.

‘Come on,’ she said and he got the door open. He turned to close it and she was past him. Inside, he turned back and she was standing there at the end of the hall, eyes glazed, breathing hard, kicking her skirt clear of her feet, pulling her blouse over her head so that for a second he couldn’t see her face, just her hard, slim body in pointed leather shoes and lacy red silk knickers, breasts bobbing clear of the blouse. Then it was over her head and she was looking at him again.

‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake,’ she said in a thick voice. ‘Are you always this slow over everything?’

Go with it, he thought, and was pulling off his clothes as he followed her into the bedroom. Her legs and her lips opened as one as she rolled backwards on the bed, each in matching, moist warmth. As he slid into her, she gasped, pulled her head away from his, arching back with her eyes closed. She seemed somewhere else entirely and, had he known, it wasn’t somewhere he would have liked to be. She came before he did, crying out, then came again, shuddering with him, only – as soon as their bodies stopped moving – to pull abruptly away. He wondered at that but she lay next to him, still, exhausted and in the end they both slept.

He was deeply asleep at 2 a.m. when her eyes flicked open and she moved carefully from the bed. She did the phone first. Sibley had said this device was brand new. Johnny wouldn’t recognize it even if he did happen to find it. It looked just like a BT component and it went not in the handset but in the base of the phone. For all that, she took care – slipping it into place with its adhesive pad lined up with the other capacitors so it would pass any casual inspection. The next two devices had been carefully prepared after the recce, a hollowed-out wooden block that matched the colour of the bedside table and fitted in underneath as if reinforcing the angle of one of its legs and a similar white painted piece, longer, that she stuck up inside the corner of the pelmet in the sitting room. The batteries would last two weeks. The bugs, with their own short range radio transmitters, would each feed a different tape recorder in a car parked in the street near by. If Johnny had the room swept while they were transmitting they’d show up, but not otherwise. Not otherwise, that is, except to Pacman Gerow, who would spend some time wondering about the strange interference creeping across his own tap on Johnny’s phone.

She slipped back into bed and went straight back to sleep.

It was eight thirty when Johnny woke, turned over to find his face in unfamiliar hair and felt her long, smooth back warm against him. His arm went round her to cup her breast and she stirred slightly in her sleep. This morning, without her passion to lead him, it felt a little odd, distant, and as if to make up his mind for him the phone began to ring in the next room. He got carefully out of bed and went to answer.

Heather’s voice disconcerted him. ‘Johnny? Good morning. Have I woken you up?’

‘No,’ he said, and pushed the door closed with his foot feeling suddenly embarrassed, as though she could see.

‘I just thought I’d catch you. I was wondering if you really thought you might get anywhere with the doctor. My lawyer says we’d have to know pretty soon to be able to use her.’

‘Yes. Yes, I have,’ he said, thinking how to play this, ‘she’s somewhere in France. It’s complicated.’

‘That’s fantastic.’

‘Up to a point,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got an address as such. It needs a bit of discussion.’

‘You can’t come up, can you? Sir Michael’s invited me to have supper with him on Saturday. He said he really liked you and was there any chance you could come too?’

Good God, thought Johnny. ‘Saturday, I don’t know if I can,’ he said.

‘It would be nice,’ she said and he could see her face as if she stood there. Acutely conscious of the traces of Maggie on his body and suddenly certain that the one in his bed was not the woman he would have chosen to wake beside, he heard himself agreeing.

He put the phone down and turned to find Maggie, slim and naked, leaning in the now open doorway, reaching one arm up the wall to accentuate the long flow of her body.

‘Good morning,’ she said, ‘and how are you this morning?’

The text of Johnny’s brief phone conversation was delivered by Ivor Sibley’s driver to Lady Viola’s secretary two hours after he put the phone down. Sophia was the sort of secretary a wife might choose for her husband. Indeed that was exactly what Lady Viola had tried to do, but Sir Greville had managed to finesse his way out of trouble. It was a terrible waste of such a light, lyrical name. Sophia’s parents, keen movie-goers, had been torn between honouring Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale when it came to baptising their daughter but Sophia grew up to be a grim, solid girl whose need to be shackled to an institution led her first to try to join the police force, which turned her down for lacking sufficient sense of humour, and then, eventually, to Lady Viola.

She devoted herself to anticipating Lady Viola’s every need and she knew that her employer would want to see anything from Sibley’s office at once. She sent it straight on by GKC’s own messenger to an expensive gallery off Bond Street where Lady Viola was inspecting what purported to be an Alphonse Legros study of a blacksmith.