Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"It took me a bit of time to find out where Sergeant Caswell was, sir. I mean, I couldn'tjust ring up and ask, could I'"

"Did you try and get hold of Captain Fairbrother or anybody else in the Army?"

"No, just Jim here, sir."

"Does anybody else in this country know you're back7"

Blagg frowned at his fingernails.

"Come along, lad." Caswell's voice was sharp but quiet. "Major Maxim may be able to do something, but God Himself won't be able to help you if you don't tell the whole story The theologyofthatwasn't too sound, Maxim thought, but it seemed to work. Blagg muttered: "Couple've people I know, Rotherhithe way. You want to know what they'd tell the pig-feet if they come asking around'"

"You needn't bother "

"All I want, sir, really – is if you can get Captain Fair-brother to say I really was working for The Firm Or them themselves. If they'd just tell Battalion that, it would be all right." Blagg sounded fnghteningly earnest, as if life – and death-was just that simple.

"I'll do what I can " Maxim glanced at Caswell: any furtherquestions? Caswell gave the smallest shake of his head, ground out the cigarette in a tin-lid and began picking up the rifles.

Blagg reached. "Here, Sarge, let me -"

"I'm not a bleeding cripple!"

Blagg snapped into a fighting crouch and immediately Caswell was ready for him, a rifle held across his chest like a quarter-staff. The oil-dusty air shimmered with pent-up violence.

"It's a great day for the Army," Maxim said pleasantly, "when the sergeants insist on doing all the work."

The tension died like a match flame. Caswell straightened up, nodding angrily at his own obtuseness. Blagg wasn't offering to help because of any stiff arm; the lad wasn't that sensitive. It was just that although he'd run away from the Army, he wanted to prove he was still a soldier, even by something as simple as putting rifles in racks.

Caswell stroked his moustache with an oily forefinger. "Behind the door there. Don't drop more than half of them."

Blagg picked up four of the gutted weapons. "You're sure they aren't loaded, Sarge?"

The rack looked as if it had been built for the long Lee-Metfords of the South African War. Blagg fitted the rifles in, ran a chain through the trigger guards and padlocked it. The bolt actions went in a small safe bricked into the outside wall. They were ridiculous precautions for guns that couldn't any longer fire live ammunition, but airliners have been hijacked with toy pistols. Terrorism didn't take sunny Saturday afternoons off.

"You left the car in Dortmund," Maxim said. "Do you remember the number?"

Even better, Blagg seemed to have written it down. Maxim sighed. "Anything else that might interest the police if they pick you up?"

Silently, Blagg showed him the paper. The car number was worked somehow – Maxim couldn't see how – into an innocent-looking sum of minor expenses. Almost the first thing taught in the SASis to memorise map references, so that no piece of paper will betray your base or objective.

"Sorry," Maxim said. "How about the phone number she gave you in Soltau?"

That wasn't part of the sum; Blagg looked annoyed with himself.

"Never mind, you weren't to know. How do I get hold of you?

Blagg glanced at Caswell, who said: "I'll know how." Maxim was about to say No, and then didn't. He didn't want Jim Caswell to get involved any deeper, but he couldn't really help it. Blagg on his own around London was a babe in the woods, even if he thought of himself as a two-gun tiger, as he probably did. Under Jim's eye in the country he was as well hidden as they could hope for.

He still didn't like the risk to Caswell, and took it out on Blagg. "Corporal, don't let anybody, including yourself, tell you you've been anything but a bloody twallop. You might still come out luckier than you deserve-provided you do what Jim and I tell you. But if you do anything clever and landjim in it, then I'll go straight to the MPs and tell them everything you've told me. Have you got that?"

"Sir," Blag said stiffly. "But you will talk to…?"

"I'll do what I can. But you've been dealing with some funny people. Jim – ring me if you need to. Just as a precaution, call yourself… say, Galloway – and leave a message. I'll ring you back. "

"I'll do that. Don't worry about this end." The atmosphere had become formal, more like a company office at a time of serious decisions. It was a good mood to leave with them.

Caswell ceremonially escorted Maxim to his car and, still in uniform, saluted as he drove away. When he got back to the armoury, Blagg had found a broom and was poking at the pitted, oil-stained concrete. Caswell nodded approval and lit another cigarette.

After a while, Blagg said: "He was the one that lost his wife, didn't he? Out in the Gulf, was it?"

"That's right. Some wily oriental gentleman put a bomb on board her plane. I was with him. He saw it. "

"Jesus," Blaggsaid thoughtfully. "Something like that happened to me, I'd sort of want to kill somebody."

Caswell put his clenched fist to his mouth, as if politely masking a yawn, and drew hard on his cigarette. "He did, lad," he said in a slow smoke cloud. "He did."

Monday morning was another perfect day and George Harbinger arrived at Number 10 Downing Street alreadym afoul temper. He perched on the edge of the desk of the Principal Private Secretary and growled: "The Broad-Rumped Nikon-Tufted Tourist seems to have bred particularly freely this year. There is a positiveinfestation of them outside. I even saw one without a camera."

"Really? I wonder that he got past Immigration at Heathrow. Coming in without a camera seems proof positive that he intends to settle here illegally. "Jeremy was tall, with a natural elegance that would never decay into dandyism and always scrupulously polite, having been to that school which believes that it is manners, rather than God, that maketh man, though a spot of money also helps.

George grunted On Monday mornings no remarks were funny but his own, and he usually regretted even those by the end of the day. He was one of the six private secretaries who -Jeremy included – formed the Prime Minister's Private Office. His own special responsibility was defence and security, although they all sugared each other's tea in busy times. Today looked like being one: on Saturday afternoon the Prime Minister had cancelled a speech he was to have made at an agricultural show in his Scottish constituency and taken to his bed there. He hadn't got up yet.

"How is the Headmaster?" George asked "Coughing hard but fairly cheerful in the circumstances." Jeremy had flown up and back on the Sunday.

"What are we telling the press7" After the revelations by Churchill's doctor that he had suppressed news of several strokes, and seeing other prime ministers leave the job byambulance, Fleet Street had become over-sensitive to any hint of illness in Number 10 "One of these persistent summer colds that they're trying to stop going to his chest. I assume it's bronchitis but Sir Frank won't commit himself. I've suggested they get in a reference to his old war wound."

In May 1940 the Prime Minister, then a young lance-corporal defending a section of the Magmot Line, had taken a mortar burst that peppered his chest with fragments of metal and concrete. The wound might even have saved his life, since he was back in an English hospital when the remains of his battalion surrenderedmthe wreckage of St Valery-en-Caux a month afterwards. But over forty years later, most of them spent smoking heavily while the cameras weren't looking, his scarred lung could still turn a simple cold into something that needed to be talked down, and bits of metal were still wandering around his body and occasionally needing to be picked out. I wonder, George thought irrelevantly, ifhe pings as he goes through an airport metal-detector gateway? But as PM he never has to go through such gateways – George had flown with him many times – so probably I'll never know. Bother "Have they done an X-ray?"