Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

Maxim sat up straight. "Did he buggery!"

"They'd have done it anyway. This way, he could send an officer along from the SIB to make sure they didn't nick your spoons. And George had to agree to go through your files at Number 10."

Maxim wondered why he wasn't more shocked at the instinctive distrust implied by that decision, and sighed as he realised it was because he'd been nearly six months in the atmosphere of Whitehall. "Does George – or Sir Bruce -want me back in London now?"

"At the moment, I think it would suit Georgejust fine if you caught a slow boat to Yokohama. He told Husband he'd have to consult with the rest of the Private Office and maybe even the PM before he could agree to them interrogating you; he may actually be doing that, for all I know, though I think it's more likely he's been waiting for his temper to cool before he briefs you. He's had a rough week.

"Well, what's happened to Blagg, then?"

"They lost him, in Rotherhithe, the day they picked up you."

"Theylost him?"

"They blame you for that, too. They'd already split their team to cover both the gym and some other place, and then split it again to follow you, so Blagg only got the leftovers, spotted them, and took to the hills. "

Maxim chewed that over. "They said all that at the meeting?

"All that except his name and the fact that he was a deserter. I suppose they were scared of what Sir Bruce might say. Whatdoes the Army do about deserters these days?"

"Gets very uptight and doesn't want to talk about them. We're an all-volunteer force now so you shouldn't have any reason to run away. Mostly it's woman trouble, though there's a few went to Sweden rather than Northern Ireland. Poor bastards." Perhaps they had adjusted to the sanitised neutralism of a Stockholm commune, but it seemed an odd life for men who had chosen to become soldiers.

The cricket stopped. The boys headed for the tea-table, not quite hurrying, with the two umpires strolling behind and a frigid few paces apart. Each a master from one of the schools, they had obviously totally disagreed on some decision.

"Good for Blagg," Maxim added thoughtfully. "Giving them the slip."

"He also did it without use of grievous bodily harm. "

"I meant in spotting them at all.1 hadn't thought he'd be all that bright at the bogeyman stuff."

"I don't suppose the team was exactly a thousand-candle-power. You spotted them as well." Agnes clearly wasn't going to take Maxim any more seriously as a spotter of fan clubs than she took Six as an organiser of them.

"So the position is, " Maxim summed up, "that they assume the dead man, Hochhauser, had some document or other, they assume Blagg picked it up, and now they're assuming he gave it to me."

Intelligence is mostly assumptions. Tea, however, is fact. " Agnes stood up purposefully.

The tea was handed round by a posse of mothers who greeted Agnes in a friendly but appraising way which infuriated her. She knew she was overdressed for the occasion but hadn't realised it would make her look both predatory and incompetently so, since one of the main adult sports at Chris's school was trying to get that nice Major Maxim remarried. That, and trying to recruit him to the Parents' Association committee (which was almost the same thing, as the most active women members were divorcees).

"We only meet about three times a term," one drastically lean lady was telling him; "and the dates are always fixedwell in advance so all you have to do isarrange to be free on that evening."

"The trouble with my job at the moment is that J, can't guarantee to be free at any given time. "

"Surely it's just a matterof arrangement. My brother works for the Department of Health and he can alwaysarrange to get away if he knows the date far enough in advance. "

"My job just isn't that predictable. "

"My brother is veryhigh in the Department of Health, " she said warningly.

"That's just the trouble," Agnes chipped in. "When you're more junior your life simply isn't your own. If somebody sends you off to – say – Acton or Rotherhithe, you don't have a choice. You just have to go."

"Acton? Rotherhithe?" The lady looked mystified. "Who'd want to go to those places?"

"Nobody in his right mind," Agnes agreed. "They were just random examples. But I do know the difficulty the Major has in getting away to do his own things. It can be very frustrating."

She could feel Maxim's steady glare.

"Well," the lean lady said, "I still feel that something could bearranged. My brother has always found the civil servicemost accommodating…" She drifted away, trailing aromatic dissatisfaction.

"Thank you, " Maxim said in a sort of growl.

"Any time."

Chris appeared with a handful of rather sweaty egg-and-cress sandwiches and a smaller boy who wore spectacles and had a problem. Chris explained: "James here is our scorer and Mr Marshall signalled four wides when there was a wide and the ball went to the boundary, but the other side's scorer says you can'thave four wides at once, only one, and the other three must count as byes. What do you say, Daddy?"

Maxim was still wondering what to say when Agnes said: '"Certainly you can have four wides off one ball. Look it up. 'All runs that are from a "Wide Ball" shall be scored "Wide Balls", or if no runs be made one run shall be scored.' It doesn't mention the boundary, but it must be implicit. It's Rule 29, isn't it?"

James dropped his pen, adjusted his spectacles and fumbled through the back of the score-book. "Gosh, yes, 29: 'The ball does not become "Dead" on the call of "Wide Ball" '… Do you know all the rules by heart?"

"Most of them, yes." The two boys gazed at her with such blazing admiration that she came close to blushing. "When I was your age I spent almost every summer weekend scoring for my father's village team. And pouring jugs of beer and passing bowls of pickles at the 'tea' intervals."

"It must be very useful, "James said with utter sincerity, "to know all the rules of cricket by heart."

"Not quite as much as it used to be. I don't do much scoring nowadays."

"Don't you?" Maxim asked.

"We don't get pickles," Chris said, staring at his crumpled handful of sandwich. "Have you finished talking work?"

Maxim and Agnes looked at each other. "Not quite," she said in a small serious voice.

"Are you in a rush to get back?" Maxim asked.

"No-o. I'mjust the messenger. I'll have to ring George and my office any way…"

"Why don't you stay on and have dinner with us? – at my parents' place?"

There were a lot of reasons why she didn't want to get involved in Maxim's domestic life, particularly when he seemed to be intent on jumping from the tenth storey of his career structure – but in the end, why not? Curiosity was oneof her best-developed talents.

"You're sure it'll be all right?" She glanced quickly at Chris, but he was grinning broadly.

"My mother keeps an open-house policy. Chris is always bringing somebody home. "

"Then I'd love to. I'll go and ring George now. The message is, you don't know nuffin' – right?"

"I could ring a couple of people, or go and see them, about trying to find you-know-who, but…" He shrugged.

"I don't think George wants you doing any more on your own initiative."

"Then he can bloody well tell me so himself. "

"I was under the impression that he had." She grinned suddenly. Her smiles were light, acted expressions, but her grin was wide and uninhibited. "But I'll pass the thought on. " She picked up her jacket and handbag and headed for the distant clubhouse. Behind, she heard another parent swoop on Maxim. "Oh, Major, did you get the message about our little wine and cheese party for…"

Corporal Blagg had spent his childhood – those parts of it the local authority hadn't been able to control – in the courts, alleyways and concrete 'gardens' of Rotherhithe's blocks of flats. He had learned to fight there, to ride there, to play football there, and at last how to get his hand inside Betty Tanner's jeans there. He knew those courts and gardens, not just as places and secret short cuts, but as a whole pattern of life and behaviour. And he knew immediately that the two men walking towards him didn't belong, were wrong. They couldn't have been more wrong if they'd worn Father Christmas suits.