James Long - Sixth Column

The customer nodded. ‘How long’s it going to take to get them?’

The supplier breathed easier. He liked it when they asked that first, before the ‘What’ll it cost?’ question.

‘Tell you in a minute,’ he said. ‘Give me the size and the time specs and I’ll find out right away.’

Armed with the details, he went to a different room to phone. It was lucky there was an Aberdeen agent. The manufacturers were in Norway and that could take a bit of sorting.

The agent was on the ball, had almost all the sizes he wanted right there on the shelf and could get the remaining ones in two days. Four hundred quid would cover it all, Red Star on British Rail.

He went back to the customer. ‘I can do it,’ he said. ‘It’s a special order and the transport’s tricky. Two grand should just about do it. I’ll need half the cash up front. You can collect them here with the other half.’

‘Do it,’ said the man, reaching for his briefcase, as the supplier had known he would.

Johnny got back to the flat at 8 p.m. The porter was looking at him in that knowing way again.

Johnny squared his shoulders and unlocked his front door. ‘Maggie?’ he called.

‘I’m in here,’ came her voice from the bedroom.

‘I’ll be along in a minute,’ he said. He went to his desk in the corner of the sitting room, found the writing paper and wrote a short note which he tucked into an envelope. He took a deep breath and pushed the bedroom door open.

There was a low buzzing noise. Maggie lay sprawled diagonally across the bed, one hand artfully arranged under her head, the other holding a vibrator with which she was tracing lines up and down the centre of her pubic hair. Her eyes were half closed and she was rolling her head back and around, slowly. She brought one foot up as he came in and dipped the vibrator deeper.

‘Just in time,’ she said in a voice intended to convey deep arousal. ‘Come on, Johnny, I’d rather have the real thing.’ It sounded unutterably fake to him.

He stood over her, looking down for a moment, reached down and took the buzzing vibrator from her hand, switched it off and dropped it on the floor. She misunderstood him, smiled and tried to pull him down towards her but he stepped back.

‘No thanks, Maggie. I want you to go,’ he said, ‘it was never a very good idea. I’ve decided you’re not my type.’

That startled her. ‘What are you on about, Johnny? Come on. I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Maggie. I mean it. Really. I’ve thought about it and I’d like you to go.’

‘Have you got someone else?’ Her question sounded impersonal to Johnny, more like an interrogator’s than a lover’s.

‘That’s neither here nor there. I don’t like you wandering in and out of my flat, OK? I didn’t ask you to come.’

‘Have you had a bad day?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘on the contrary. I’ve had a great day. Let’s say I’ve come to my senses.’

‘Wham, bam, thank you ma’am and bye bye, is that it?’

‘It seems to me, Maggie, that most of the wham, bam was your idea.’

‘Who’s been pulling your strings, Johnny? Darling Mummy?’ She knew it couldn’t be but she was curious.

That really got to him. ‘Out,’ he said, ‘right now. I promise you I do mean it. Up and get dressed or I’ll put you out of the door as you are.’

He picked her clothes up from the chair and threw them at her. She jumped out of bed on the other side reached for a pair of lace knickers and stood flaunting herself at him.

‘Why don’t you come and try it?’

‘Forget it, Maggie. Just go, please.’

‘You could try and make me. I passed out top of my intake on the mats.’

He felt weary, disgusted by her and it dawned on him that she really wasn’t going to go.

‘There’s something I’d like you to take to Sibley,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ There was that interrogator tone again in her voice.

‘Come with me, I’ll give it to you.’

She followed him out to the hall, dangling the knickers from her finger. He gave her the envelope.

‘It’s my resignation,’ he said and she stared at him. ‘It’s open, you can read it if you like.’

She took it out of the envelope, unfolded it and began to read. While she was distracted, he quietly opened the front door, took her wrist, yanked her, suddenly off-balance, through it and slammed it after her.

There was a shout from outside of ‘You bastard!’

He looked through the spy hole. She pulled on the knickers, crossed her arms over her breasts and looked nervously at the door of the other flat across the hall. Johnny went back into the bedroom, feeling a little ungentlemanly, picked her clothes up off the bed, returned to the front door and opened it for just long enough to throw them out into the hall.

As soon as she had dressed, she began hammering on the door and shouting at him. He picked up the phone and called the porter’s desk.

‘Mr Webley,’ he said, ‘there’s a woman banging on my door. I don’t want her here. You let her in. Could you please get her out?’

Sir Greville Kay put the finishing touches to his work, read it through a final time to make absolutely sure, walked out into the ante-room of his office and fed it into the fax machine himself. His secretary pretended to ignore the action but felt secretly slighted as she always did when he treated her as if he couldn’t trust her. He waited for it to feed through, took it from the machine and pushed it into the shredder.

He caught sight of her expression as he turned back to the inner office, checked himself and crossed the room to her desk. She was pretty, this one. He knew it wouldn’t be much longer before Viola found a pretence for getting rid of her.

‘Do you know where my wife is, Mandy?’

‘She’ll be back at three, Sir Greville. She’s gone to the City for lunch.’

His hand dropped to her shoulder. ‘Well, would you like to come in and do some special dictation, if we’re sure we’re not going to be disturbed.’

She choked off an involuntary sigh. He was feeling pleased with himself. Always seemed to want a bit when he thought he’d done something smart. Still, the bonuses were good. She let her hand waft lightly across his groin as she got up. Nothing yet. This was going to be hard work.

Sir Greville’s fax message bounced across the surface of the Earth like a yo-yo. It went straight on to hard disk at GCHQ Cheltenham with all the rest of the international fax traffic, but there was nothing in it that matched entries in GCHQ’s computer, so it sat there with all the millions of others against the remote possibility of a far-off day when someone might seek it out.

It also took its intended route, direct to a large private house in Germany’s Eifel mountains where a man with whom Sir Greville had done business in the past took it from the machine, read it carefully in the light of the earlier message he’d received by quite a different route and chuckled to himself.

It went a third way too, plucked out of the air at Ramsgill Stray, ringing all the bells on Pacman Gerow’s watch set-up. He read it off the screen, printed it for Ray Mackeson, copied it to Grosvenor Square then packed it off with a few keystrokes up to a satellite stationed over the Atlantic. It downlegged straight from there into the big dishes at Fort Meade, blinked into their computer system and was passed up the chain of command all the way to the Deputy Director before Sir Greville’s secretary had finished beating him behind his locked office door. The Deputy Director called his boss.

‘We’d better meet,’ he said, ‘GKC and this Rage thing. It’s moving.’