Gavin Lyall - The Crocus List

I'm supposed to be just liaison, and the climate isn't good for that. But a list like that can't be anything secret… Did George suggest you got me mixed up in all this?"

Maxim smiled and shrugged. "He suggested I contact you. But I would have done anyway."

"However, not just for my big blue eyes and tiny morals? And what's he going to be doing meanwhile?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary, I hope."

Asit turned out, George had not had to stir up the matter of Miss Tuckey himself. It arrived at his desk, as he had privately hoped, simply because he was the long-stop for security/intelligence matters that nobody else wanted to field. It had not been the Army which first noticed her disappearance, but an old Resistance colleague. Forty years after the event, the survivors were a sociable group with their own small London club and a way of closing ranks that, in wartime, had needed to be desperately widespread. The file brought with it a twinge of now-familiar guilt and a covering note from Army Intelligence: Will you please try and persuade the creepy-crawlies that we have neither the facilities nor any reason to investigate this lady's apparent disappearance. Even if she fails to turn up for her next set of lectures there is nothing we can do but not pay her. Sir Bruce had a low opinion of civilian intelligence officers.

The usual 'open end' at MI6 was a small bird of a man whose telephone voice sounded permanently pained. "My dear George, we haven't any interest in the woman, missing or not. If the Army doesn't care what happens to its lecturers then that's no skin offour nose. As you know perfectly well, and I'm sure they do, too, we can't mount any active investigation in this country"-just as if six had never done such a thing."We only got involved because we're being badgered by one of our ex's, an old friend of hers, I believe. They were in the Resistance together, that sort of thing. We took him on after the war, when we were a bit short-handed. He retired some time ago; had a stroke, I understand." The sentence ended on a high, uninterested note.

"What's he worried about?" George asked.

There was a pause; there almost always was when you asked a question of the Secret Intelligence Service. After twenty years, George still couldn't decide whether they spent the time thinking or it was just to show they needn't really answer anything.

"You've got our note? That's really all we know. She vanished, it was reported to the police, they couldn't find anything criminally suspicious. We at least went to the trouble of asking them."

"Is he going to make a fuss?"

Pause. Then the voice said distantly: "He certainly should know better. But he was rather… wartime."

"If he had any idea of what she was doing for us, Mo D doesn't want it spread around. Would it help if I go and lend him a sympathetic ear?"

This time, the voice after the pause might, by MI6 standards, have been described as faintly eager. "If you really feel like doing that, George, by all means. I've got his address around here somewhere. It could be the best thing, might even do some good. "

Clenching his teeth, George had to remind himself that he had now got just the endorsement he wanted.

Edward Marriage, Secret Intelligence Service (retired) managed a small boat-hire yard on the Thames below Oxford. There were five boats moored to the shored-up bank, all with names beginning Duke, hung with bright blue fenders that hadn't saved them from long scratches and stains. Behind, in a tilting wooden boathouse, a youth with cropped hair was tinkering with a partly stripped engine. The place smelt of oil, paint, damp and slow failure, and Marriage himself sat with his back to it in the cold sunshine, looking across to the willows and alders of the far bank and the fields beyond. It was very still, with the landscape painted in shades of smoke.

They drank tea out of mugs labelled Captain and Bosun brought by his wife, who was small, bright-eyed and determinedly busy. The stroke had left Marriage hunched and rigid; he turned his head slowly and his smile had become a lopsided leer. His legs were wrapped in a tartan rug and he was fortressed by small tables, stools, a frameto help lever himself upright. George had an old kitchen chair brought from the boatshed.

"We never met," Marriage said carefully. "1 got my Little Problem before you became involved in our side. You were at Number 10? But you aren't there now?" However carefully he spoke, he still released a litjtle dribble from the stiff side of his mouth and wiped it away with a routine gesture of his left hand. His right hand was permanently supported by a strap around his neck.

"No, I'm back at Mo D, security and intelligence, on thepolside. That was why Miss Tuckey's file came across my desk."

"Yes… are you allowed to tell me anything about her?"

"I was rather hoping you could tell me. I'm afraid she's just a name to me."

Marriage took a moment to assemble his thoughts. "I don't get out much, just sit here pecking out letters to old friends"-there was a portable typewriter on one of the tables-"and she was coming to tea last Monday. Liz had it all ready-but she didn't show up. That's not like Dot, I felt if she'd been called away she'd have got word to me somehow so… so that's why I rang the Firm. Of course, I hardly know anybody there, not now…"

The file had shown that Miss Tuckey had had no official connection with the Intelligence Service since turning down a backroom job there in 1946, the year Marriage himself had joined them. After losing most of its wartime recruits back to the universities and the law, the Service was determined to maintain its new influence, in Whitehall if not the world. The gap was filled with people who had learnt something about intelligence and too much (in the Service's view) about weaponry in the Resistance schools of the Special Operations Executive. But they remained second-class citizens as the Service restocked itself with young men of the right background from Oxford and Cambridge. After all, with the sunset of Empire and most departmental requests becoming for economic intelligence, you need trained minds who understood international banking, surely George could seethat? So the Resistance-trained amateurs were gradually shuntedto filing jobs or forgotten overseas stations where they needed do nothing but show an invisible flag and curl a lip at the way the CIA did the real work.

George asked: "Did she say anything about her job?"

"Oh no. Dot never would. But I knew she was giving a series of lectures somewhere, and they weren't being reported, and there's only one thing you'd ask Dot to lecture on, so…" The mouth did its best to become a wry smile. "I just guessed you were getting interested in the old Winter Garden stuff…"

"Winter Garden?"

Marriage's smile became slightly superior. "Before your time, of course. And that was the Americans." He called them Amurricanes, in a heavy stage accent that came over as an envious sneer.

"An American Resistance movement?"

Mrs Marriage came up tentatively along the line of boats, making sure she caught her husband's good eye before she moved into their circle of secrecy. She wore a faded anorak over her long cardigan. "I'm just popping into town to pick up a parcel from the station. It could be the parts John was wanting. Can I make you some more tea before I go?"

"No. We're both swimming in tea, we're both sinking in tea." Marriage's tone became abrupt and petulant.

She just smiled. "All right, dear. And shall I see when the garage can take in the car? The clutch really does need-"

"There's nothing wrong with the clutch. It's the way you drive it."

"It's snatching. I really think it's getting dangerous."

"It's the way you drive it."