Реджинальд Хилл - Matlock's System

“Come in please,” he said.

The door opened to reveal Colonel Mackay.

“You wished to speak to me.”

Again the neutrality which frightened more than hate.

“To you, Colonel, or to anyone who can convey a message for me.”

“I am no errand boy, Mr. Matlock.”

“As you will, Colonel. But here’s the message all the same. I would like Mr. Boswell to be reminded that it is my seventieth birthday the day after tomorrow. Tell him I hope he will be coming to the party.”

The Colonel left without a word. Matlock wondered whether he would make any effort to deliver the message, then shrugged and returned to his book, surprised and half pleased by his own feeling of complete indifference. But his sleep that night was troubled and uneasy.

He awoke with a start and sat up. For a moment he thought that his idle imaginings had come true and a party of tourists was being shown around the room. Standing round the bed were half a dozen men all peering down at him.

The only one he recognized was Boswell.

“Thank you for your message, but you need not have bothered. You were not forgotten. Indeed quite the contrary. You have been in the very forefront of our minds day and night. Please come now.”

He started to dress but Boswell prevented him.

“It is not necessary. Just put on your dressing gown.”

Slightly uneasy, Matlock slipped his robe over his shoulders and allowed himself to be escorted from the room. They moved swiftly along bare stone corridors. No one spoke, but Boswell noticed Matlock shiver as they turned a comer and walked into a keen-edged draught, and he increased the pace still further. Matlock was reminded of his wanderings through the echoing passages of Fountains and shivered again at the strangeness of it all.

“In here, please.”

The door was held open for him and he politely muttered his thanks as he passed through. No one came after him. He heard the door close. He was in an operating theatre.

Four white-clothed, gauze-masked figures stood round the operation table, forming a tableau of terrifying hygiene.

“Take off your clothes please, Mr. Matlock, and step over here, won’t you?”

It was a pleasant, reassuring voice and Matlock began to undress without hesitation, unaffected by the dispassionate professional eyes that watched him. But as he moved over to the table he sensed that at least one pair of eyes was anything but dispassionate and professional. The amount of emotion which can be registered by the two inch strip of face below the hairline and above the nose is obviously limited. It was equally unidentifiable, but Matlock felt there was something familiar about those eyes. Their owner stood behind the other three as though she were an onlooker rather than a participant in whatever was going to happen.

“Just a wee operation,” said the reassuring voice, “and then you can

enjoy your birthday.”

“You mean, you’re going to take it out?” asked Matlock.

“Of course we are. Lie down here please.”

Matlock climbed on to the table.

“Turn your head slightly.”

He turned his head and looked up into the brown eyes which he was so near now to recognizing. A name came scrambling up to the top of his mind as one of the others leaned down and pressed an anaesthetizing disc to the side of his neck. He blinked once and spoke.

“Lizzie.”

She leaned down over him, unmasked now, her long black hair freed from the unbecoming restrictions of a surgical cap.

“Hello, Matt. How are you feeling?”

“Why, fine. Fine.”

He looked around. He was back in his bed and there was a dressing taped to his chest.

“Is it done?” he asked incredulously, then he laughed. “That’s a stupid bloody question, isn’t it?”

“Yes it’s done,” she said, her face strangely solemn.

“But you, Lizzie, here! This is marvellous!” Matlock said, pushing himself upright on the bed.

“Today I should be dying, but I’ll live. And with my life I get you!”

For a moment the sheer joy of the moment so pressed in on him that his head began to swim and the room seemed to stir slightly on its foundations. Lizzie reached out to him anxiously but his head cleared almost instantly and he pulled her down beside him and pressed his lips deep into her hair.

“Oh Matt, Matt!” she whispered.

“Lizzie!” he whispered in reply. “My darling.”

His right arm tightened over her shoulders and his left hand moved down from her face, along the slimness of her neck and came to rest on her breast. For a second she thrust herself against him, then gently pushed him away.

“Later, Matt, later. But now, before they come, we have to talk.”

“Before who comes? Anyway I don’t give a damn who comes. You come here!” He reached out for her laughing and caught her hand. “Some of the early doctors seriously suggested that the warmth of a naked girl was the best palliative for the illnesses of age. I think they may have been right.”

But Lizzie leaned back so that the whole of her weight pulled on his arm and he could not move her.

“No, Matt. Please listen. They’ll be here soon. They want your help, Matt. They need you. You must help, Matt.”

He let go of her hand and dropped his arm, but the tension between them did not fade with the relaxing of tendon and muscle.

“Why must I help?”

“Because you are here, helpless. You can look at it that way if you like. But also because it’s right that you should help, Matt. It’s the only way to achieve what you’ve been aiming at.”

There was a note of passionate sincerity in her voice which filled him with foreboding. She was standing over him now her face flushed with emotion, her body within easy reach, but he made no move to touch her.

“Why are you saying this to me, Lizzie? What are you doing here anyway? How did you escape?”

“What does it matter, Matt? I am here, that’s all that matters, and you are too, and there’s an opportunity to do what’s seemed so important to us both for so long. Overthrow Browning.”

Matlock fixed his eyes steadily on her face.

“The Abbot tried to tell me you were one of Browning’s spies, but I wouldn’t believe him. I told you, remember? Did you laugh as I told you?”

“No, Matt. No!”

“Did the Abbot just get the employer wrong? Was that all?”

“No, no. Please try to understand.”

But he only understood what was now obvious. Lizzie was in the pay of the Scots and had been since the beginning nearly twenty years before.

He turned his head away and stared blindly at the wall.

“Yes, try to understand, Mr. Matlock.”

When he looked round again, Boswell had appeared from somewhere and stood at the foot of the bed.

“Do not be hard on Miss Armstrong. She has served you at least as well as us over the years. She could have been moved from the assignment any time she wished after it became apparent that your real political value had disappeared completely. It’s only in the last four or five years that you began to become important again. For the rest of the time there was nothing in it for her as an agent. And at no time was there ever any real clash of interests.”

“How convenient for her,” said Matt dully.

“Oh, Matt,” cried Lizzie in a voice husky with strain, “Matt, I love you. I’ve loved you for years. All I wanted was to marry you, it didn’t matter for how short a time. And I believed in you and all you were trying to do. I couldn’t foresee all this, Matt, not this. I thought all this was over for you years ago.”

“But it wasn’t,” interjected Boswell swiftly. “Now, Matlock, the position is this. At the expense of much time and energy, we have got you safely away from the wrath of your countrymen. But back in England, Browning is still firmly in control, men who have worked with you, for you, even if you did not know it, are now in danger, are now being arrested. Imprisoned. Murdered. We in Scotland are preparing to intervene in support of the forces of democracy before it is too late.”