Guy Adams - The Clown Service

O’Dale looked at me again and I shrugged, reassuring: ‘You can trust Cyril.’

‘He officially vetted?’

‘Don’t be a prig,’ I told him. I hated it when agents tried to vie over each other in a nonexistent pecking order. ‘Cyril’s fine.’

‘O’Dale,’ the detective said, returning Cyril’s offered handshake.

‘Pleased to meet you. Do much of this sort of thing?’

‘A fair bit.’

‘Gets you out of the house, doesn’t it?’ Cyril turned back to me. ‘When do you want me to go in?’

‘As soon as we can get you kitted up,’ I told him. ‘There’s no point in hanging around longer than we have to.’

‘You’re sending him in there?’ said O’Dale, clearly not impressed with the idea.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Cyril assured him, ‘I have a rather special skill when it comes to infiltration.’

‘You’re familiar with the concept of “going grey”?’ I asked O’Dale. ‘Making yourself blend into the background, to avoid being spotted by the people you’re observing? Of course you must be in your job…’

‘I tend to find people walk around with their eyes closed,’ O’Dale admitted. ‘It’s surprisingly easy to avoid being noticed.’

‘Well, in our trade it’s a little more difficult, as you tend to be expecting surveillance. In Cyril’s case, he has an advantage.’

‘Who’s Cyril?’

‘The man you’ve just been talking to.’

O’Dale shifted uncomfortably in his seat and I couldn’t help but smile at this proof of Cyril’s abilities. ‘I wasn’t talking…’ He looked around. ‘Hang on… there was… something about Mount Pleasant.’

‘Mount Pleasant Sorting Office,’ said Cyril, stepping back into O’Dale’s eyeline and therefore his attention. ‘It’s where I work. During the day at least…’

O’Dale’s confusion was a delight to watch.

‘Cyril has a natural aptitude for going grey.’

‘Nobody wants to be beneath people’s attention,’ said Cyril, ‘but at least I put it to good use.’

‘What I couldn’t do with an ability like that…’ said O’Dale.

Cyril shrugged. ‘Depends how you feel about reminding your wife who you are every morning. Not that she’s slow in deciding how she feels about me once she’s remembered…’

‘So you’re just going to walk in there?’ asked O’Dale.

‘And plant these,’ I said, holding up a selection of microphones and transmitters. If all went well we’d have the whole place wired up by the time Cyril had finished.

Cyril packed the equipment into a large satchel (‘discreet recording equipment’ was anything but in those days) and pulled a balaclava over his head. ‘The less they have to focus on, the better,’ he explained.

He walked downstairs and I wished him luck at the front door.

I climbed back upstairs and moved to the bedroom window where I could watch Cyril cross the road and walk up to the front door of Krishnin’s house.

‘He’s actually going to knock on the front door?’ asked O’Dale.

Cyril did just that before stepping to one side. After a moment, Krishnin opened the door and I got my first good look at him in the flesh. The blandness he had conveyed on the film footage was less in evidence here. Some people wear their distinctiveness deep beneath the skin. It’s only when you really pay attention that you catch something in their eyes, the set of their mouth, the way they carry themselves. Krishnin was a spy to his core: an interesting man buried deep inside a boring one.

He stepped out of the doorway, moving along the short path to the street, looking up and down to see if he could catch sight of whoever had knocked. The moment he had cleared the door, Cyril stepped inside and vanished from sight.

‘That’s our boy is it?’ asked O’Dale, pointing out of the window at Krishnin.

‘It is indeed.’

‘Doesn’t look much.’ He rubbed his hands on the shiny legs of his slacks, no doubt missing being able to punch things now he was a civilian.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ I replied. ‘He strikes me as a man who would surprise you.’

O’Dale scoffed. ‘That’s what you lot always think. We’d have an end to the bloody Russians if everybody stopped staring through binoculars and scribbling on foolscap, and pulled a trigger once in a while.’

‘I’ve never shot anyone in my life,’ I told him. ‘I hope I never have to.’

I had made the ultimate admission of worthlessness to O’Dale, who sighed and returned to the newspaper he’d been reading. I felt no need to defend myself. I didn’t think killing was something to take pride in.

I occupied myself with setting up the receiver and recording equipment. At a flick of the switch, the awkward silence had been replaced with the sound of Russian conversation.

‘I thought you said you didn’t have any listening devices set up?’ remarked O’Dale, folding his paper and leaning forward in his chair to listen. He sighed, rubbing at his temples. ‘Hang on… oh yes, that little man took them in with him.’ He looked up at me. ‘How do you work with him? He’s so easy to forget.’

‘I think I’ve built up some kind of receptiveness,’ I admitted. ‘I know him so well now that I can always hold his presence in mind. Isn’t that always the way? Once you’ve really noticed something you see it all the time?’

‘Like red cars.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You notice there are a lot of red cars on the roads, then you can’t stop seeing them. Everywhere you look, red cars.’

‘Yes, selective attention. The brain is assaulted with information all the time. Once it decides to fixate on one particular thing it seems to find it everywhere. It’s the same root cause as coincidence: you don’t notice how many times coincidences don’t happen, just when they do.’

I was listening to the Russian conversation. Krishnin was sharing the house with at least one other man.

‘We need to find out who that is,’ I said to O’Dale. ‘If you get the chance to photograph him going in or out, we can try to pin him down.’

‘I know my job, lad,’ O’Dale replied. ‘My Russian may be a bit rusty, but it’s serviceable. Though I may miss the finer detail.’

‘Don’t worry, I can review the recordings. At the moment they’re just talking about who was at the door. The man we don’t know is of the opinion it’s local kids playing, Krishnin is too paranoid to believe it.’

‘Sensible. No spy worth his salt would be that easy to fool.’

‘As long as he doesn’t notice Cyril we’ll be fine.’

‘But if they end up looking right at him…’

‘He has to avoid their eyeline. I tell you it’s fine – he knows his job.’

‘You wouldn’t catch me risking it.’

The conversation was quiet and it was hard to pick up everything. Wherever Cyril had left the microphone it was too far away from the men to provide perfect coverage. That was par for the course and acceptable: Cyril was a compromise who was never going to be able to match the placement and precision of an advance team working an empty house.

The main thrust of the conversation concerned another base of operations at a warehouse. I made a few notes about it, trying to narrow down its location. I didn’t have a great deal to go on: it was on the river, not overlooked, central enough to be practical but hidden enough to be private. Finally, the stranger made reference to Gainsford Street. That suggested Shad Thames. Cyril had changed the game in our favour.

He should have been back with us by now. It was possible he would have to wait before leaving, picking the optimum moment when he could walk out without drawing attention to himself. But the longer he was there, the greater the chance of being exposed.