Gavin Lyall - Blame The Dead

'Now – I know why you were carrying an unlicensed gun around France,' he said, aiming a ham sandwich at me. 'Because your own licences don't mean a thing over there, you couldn't get a French licence, and so you might as well take one that can't be traced back if you used it. I'm not even asking you where you got it and having you tell some bedtime story about it. But-'

'It wasn't in this country.'

He gave me a quick sharp look, then nodded. 'That's something, then. But the French papers have tied that gun to you and the ones here would have done if we didn't have a law of libel. So far as I know none of the newspaper boys has been clever enough to ask if you've got a pistol licence. We wouldn't tell them, and I've made sure the rozzers won't either, but there're plenty of other people who must know. Down at your pistol club and so on. Once that gets printed, there're going to be people asking why we give licences to people who then go running around France playing James Bond with unlicensed Walthers. Are you getting the picture, buster?'

I nodded. 'Why d'you keep calling me "buster"?'

He thought about it. 'Habit, I suppose. I usually only do it to people I like.' He sat down again and rifled through some papers. 'When's the last time we asked you to do a bodyguard job for us?'

'When those Libyans were over here for the oil treaty.'

'And that was last autumn. You've got a lot of guns on that licence in return for not much work. How much d'you really need 'em? Or the licence?'

The windows were closed and the room was full of dry, warm, dusty air faintly spiced with pipe-smoke. Civil Service air. They mix it up in a secret plant just south of the river and pipe it out to all the offices all over London. You can see the pipes running along the underground tunnels next time you're in a train. It's good for you. Breathe enough of it and you lose all anger, all pity, all concern. And you never die; you only fade away like the red ink on an old forgotten file.

I took a deep breath and it tasted familiar, almost reassuring, then let it go again slowly. There wasn't anything to be said. So I just shrugged.

He sipped coffee from a thick crock cup and leaned back in his chair. 'Why d'you go in for these outside jobs, buster?

You're doing all right on the security consultancy, aren't you? Why not stick to it?'

'That's three questions and you don't expect me to answer any of them.' I got up and reached over and helped myself to one of his sandwiches. Cheese, just as he'd promised me, and the bread tasted of bread, so maybe his wife made it herself. 'You sound just like my solicitor.'

'I'm surprised you've got a solicitor. Why pay for advice if you don't take it?'

I sat down again. 'What's the over-all situation? – about Fenwick?'

He sat forward and clasped his hands. 'The Yard's been asked to look up his background – and yours. Apart from that, Arras thinks it was probably a British murder that just happened to happen in France. They're rather niggled: seem to think it breaks some rule of exporting.'

'They could be right. So, what now?'

'Just keep your name out of the papers, buster. Think of yourself as on probation.'

'Thanks, Jack. Think of yourself as getting stuffed.'

'What are you up to now?' he asked calmly.

'Asking a few questions here and there.'

'I should leave that to professionals.'

'It's a free country.'

'Thank God that at least isn't true,' he snorted. 'But if you wanted to find out what it was all about, why didn't you stick it out in Arras?'

'Because there wasn't anything I could tell them. And for Christ's sake, I'd've…'

'I know: you'd be in the freezer. Well, you deserve it, you knew you were breaking their laws, and you were being paid for it. Butif you'd stayed, then we'd have some case for prodding them into action. You were in the business long enough to know how the Foreign Office works": it just needs to express concern that a British national got himself murdered over there and would they kindly get their fingers out? And we'd have done it, too.'

'For a Lloyd's underwriter, driving a Rover and with an address like Kingscutt Manor. I mean not a bus driver on a package tour.'

He looked at me in a growly sort of way. 'Are you getting class conscious in your declining years? Never mind. But what happens if the FO expresses concern now? – the Arras rozzers express concern right back that the only witness has scarpered to Britain and what are we doing aboutthat? HM Government really doesn't like its citizens getting bumped off abroad, underwritersor bus drivers, so don't bother to read the next Honours List too carefully, buster. You aren't on it.'

'You can't have been breathing the air in here too much recently.'

'Iwhat?'

'Skip it.' I stood up. 'Was that the Order of the Day, then?'

'It was. Now get out and let a man have a working lunch in peace.'

'I can't until you've signed my pass. And I'm not supposed to walk these corridors unguarded.'

He scribbled a signature and threw the little green slip back at me. 'Find your own way out. Call it an initiative test.'

I looked back with my hand on the doorknob. He was hunched over his desk, munching savagely at another sandwich and sorting a bunch of loose papers with sharp flicks of a finger. Above him on the wall was a neat framed notice saying Don't leave until tomorrowwhat you can get some other poor sod to do today.

I said, 'Arras is right, you know. They're only where it happened. And I'll tell them when I know why.'

Without looking up, he took off his glasses, clenched his eyes, and squeezed the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb. 'When we want to see you again, buster, you'll hear the sirens first.'

I closed the door behind me as gently as I could, but the click echoed like a gunshot in the tall corridor.

At near half past three I was winding up Harrow Hill in a convoy jammed behind a heavy truck. As far as I could remember, I'd never been up there before; I was sure I'd never visited the school, but just assumed I'd know it when I saw it. I didn't.

The road turned into a winding village street of cafés and shops that all seemed to sell only hunting horns, and then huge houses that looked as if they'd been built by Victorian and Edwardian tycoons. After that the slope started down the other side. Oh, dammit! – the one thing everybody knows about Harrow School is it's on top of a hill. I squeezed over to the side and waved on a big white Vauxhall that immediately started hooting behind me.

There was a pure-looking young man in a shabby raincoat trudging along carrying a squash racket. I leaned across and called, 'Excuse me – can you tell me where the school is?'

He looked blank, then said, 'Well-here.'

I nodded at the tycoons' village. 'What, this?'

He glanced up and down the road. 'Yes, every building you can see is part of the School.' Then he grinned. 'It is a bit odd. What house did you want?'

'Cundall's.'

He pointed; it was only twenty yards away, a solid flat-faced red-brick affair, four storeys high. 'Thanks. Do you teach here?'

'For the last three years – I still get lost myself. And I teach geography.'

I parked in a tiny gravel forecourt that was already mostly full of a small estate car. Before I reached the door – a stone-framed item borrowed from a Robin Hood movie – it opened, and Hawthorn himself came out.

Well, it had to be; you'd've known him for a schoolmaster at half a mile in flat darkness. Tallish, thinnish, a bit stooped, with a close-cut fringe of white-grey hair, a moustache that was just a bristle patch of the same colour, and a camouflage-coloured tweed suit that looked as if he'd collided with it rather than put it on. Horn-rimmed bifocals and a pipe, of course.