Gerald Seymour - The Contract

Perhaps he should say to Charles Mawby that he had pleaded a cold to avoid attendance of a routine liaison meeting at which he would have sat opposite that same senior official.

Just a bloody nuisance, wasn't it? A bloody nuisance but peripheral to their business. And Mawby was paranoid about Lentzer and the autobahn run, Mawby would be heaving into the ceiling if the indiscretion were known to him. Better left unsaid. And it would all be smoothed over, the ruffled German feathers, when Mawby's show was curtained down.

Percy walked with Mawby to the departure gates, shook his hand and summoned a bleak smile and confided that he was sure that all would be well.

When he was back in his car, before starting the engine, Percy wrote in his memory pad a gutting of the instructions that he had been given about the transhipment of firearms and explosives that would be sent from London to Bonn by diplomatic bag, and which he must then arrange for delivery to East Berlin. Not a complicated task for him, the moving of a package to the British Embassy in the DDR's capital, but a wretched chore. All of those years that he had been in West Germany, a working lifetime of commitment, and still there were wet eared young men out from London like Charles Mawby who regarded him as little more than a messenger.

He imagined Mawby back in London, and the quip in Century House,

'Awkward old cuss, that Percy in Bonn, right for retirement time', but he'd seen them off in the past, the youthful and ambitious Assistant Secretaries, he'd survive Charles Mawby.

When Adam Percy was angry his ulcer hurt, and he bit his lower lip as he started the car.

Together the Member for Guildford and the Chief Constable of the county walked around the policeman's garden. Both men had heavy diaries of appointments and a Sunday afternoon provided the opportunity for them to blend their free time.

His wife did all the work, really, the Chief Constable had remarked.

She was the one with the fingers to bring on the flowers and shrubs. He confined himself to keeping the grass cut, and he'd be doing that later, and that was a heavy enough hint that Sir Charles Spottiswoode should explain the reason for his visit.

'In confidence, right, that's understood…?'

'I'm always cautious of confidence. I'm a policeman, not a priest in confessional.' With his pen knife the Chief Constable sliced away the sucker stem from a rose bush.

' I've come to a friend for corroboration, and advice.'

'Try me. We've known each other enough years, we don't have to lay down ground rules.'

They paced the prim paths with the clear cut borders, they admired the blossom of the pear and apple trees, they bent to examine the rhododendron buds, they looked in the greenhouse at the coming tomatoes. And Sir Charles Spottiswoode talked of what Dennis Tweedle had told him at first hand, and what he had heard once removed of the experiences of Annabel Tweedle and Constable Potterton.

The Chief Constable led his guest to the centre of the handkerchief lawn.

'If it wasn't you I was talking to, if it was just your ordinary fellow from the public, then I'd say forget it. But a Member of Parliament doesn't have to forget anything. The incident at the Tweedle house took place, that I know. A young man being brought to the house in a state of distress, the local constable summoned and matching the boy with a missing person we'd been told to raise heaven and hell to find, that's all copper bottom. That end of the county was crawling with spooks and to put it most kindly they were cavalier with my people. I can neither confirm nor deny what was said to Potterton in the Tweedle house, I've made it my business not to find out. I heard separately from Special Branch that the matter was connected with a property at Holmbury. We all know about that place and we leave it to itself… if it caught fire I doubt they'd let the Brigade in. I imagine that everything you say is true, and I don't want to know.'

'I only asked for corroboration.'

'You've had that… and in confidence.'

'In confidence.' The Member smiled and his hand touched the Chief Constable's arm, gripped at his shirt sleeve. 'We don't have private armies in this country. We don't tolerate people being dragged out of private homes by faceless men who aren't accountable…'

'You're not going to shout this lot off the rooftops?'

'It will go to the Prime Minister. All the smell, all the nastiness I'll tip on his desk. He won't love me for it, but a backbencher who does his job isn't there to be loved by Cabinet. They had no right, no authority to treat this boy in that way… and it'll not happen again.'

'You didn't come and see me, did you?'

'As you said, we've known each other enough years. It's a wonderful garden, it does your wife great credit.'

There were no porters to carry their two suitcases at the Hauptbahnhof at Magdeburg.

Erica lifted them down onto the platform and started the long slogging trek down the steps to the tunnel that ran underneath the tracks and that emerged in the hallway of the station. There was a warm and clammy heat, as if rain might lurk in the sun haze. She shouldered her way through the crowds that milled between the ticket windows and the information kiosk and the sweet and cigarette shop. Her father trailed behind, carrying her handbag and magazine and his briefcase. In front of them stretched the wide square of ornamental lawns and laid out flower beds and beyond that the grey facade of the International Hotel. The bags were at her feet on the pavement outside the station, and she flexed her hands and braced her muscles. A Soviet army corporal, far from home, loading freight onto a military lorry looked with a longing at the tall, slender girl and was slashed with the contempt of her glance. She wished Renate had been there to meet them, but Renate had written to say that she would be in Sangerhausen in the south because her aunt was ill, and she was sorry and would be back in Magdeburg as soon as it was possible. And her father's friends were not at the station because Otto Guttmann had dithered in posting his letters and the service between Moscow and the DDR was awful and she had not been prepared to nag him into earlier action. What an idiotic, unhappy way to arrive in a far away city, and God alone knew why they had to take rooms in that hotel, why just once they could not accept the invitation of friends. No one there to help her, and too short a distance for a taxi. Erica hurried forward, bent by the weight of the suitcases, and Otto Guttmann was panting as he tried to stay at her heels.

A pretty girl, an old man, and the start of a summer holiday.

The days at Holmbury had slipped, tumbled, fallen away.

It was as Johnny would have wished and Carter was sensitive to the needs of his man. The final days for Johnny and the moments when he might brood in solitude were denied him. Pace and camaraderie were the order of the moment.

For Carter the atmosphere stretched back his memories to the days when he had been young and a new recruit of the Service and attached to Special Operations Executive in the last years of the war, when he had worked with men to be parachuted into occupied Europe. Thirty-five years later, 35 years of continental peace and nothing changed. The same tensions, the same belly flutters and loud laughter, the same fear of failure and the willing hopes of success. That was how Carter had learned to cosset and protect an agent, that was how he had acquired the knowledge of when to pamper and when to bully. They were all frightened, the young men who would suffer the abrupt snapping of the umbilical link, they all wanted their hand gripped by Henry Carter. This lad would not be pitched out of a swaying, slow running Mosquito bomber on a clouded night. He would take the train at 2 in the morning from Hannover… Didn't matter a damn, didn't alter the basics of the mission. Whether by parachute, whether by second class rail ticket, Johnny was going into enemy territory. There wouldn't be many who would recognise that destination. They wouldn't know, and fewer would care, that a young man was flirting with his life because he had been chosen to journey on their behalf. You're a maudlin old bugger, Henry Carter would say to himself.