Len Deighton - The Harry Palmer Quartet

‘It’s just like my friend’s zoo, sir.’

There was certainly a lot to support Chico’s observation. The gaunt cell-like room in which we were standing had a little coke-burning stove with the stove pipe leading out through the wall. Piled in a corner were some old army-style cooking pans. The floorboards were scrubbed white. I looked through the little unwashed window into the shiny little courtyard, at the rough plastered walls, pitted and broken and at the metal guarded wall-light.

‘It’s exactly like my friend ’s, sir.’ Anybody with Chico for a friend didn’t need an enemy. I nodded.

The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across a damp skyful of cloud. I tried to see it but the window-frame confined my view to a downward slant. I walked along the corridor, through the heavy wooden door and into the strangest room of all.

It was one of the largest rooms – about 20ft by 25ft. In the centre of the floor stood a heavy metal water tank 8ft by 8ft and 5ft high. There was four feet of water in it. Waterproof cloth had been roughly tacked to the floor. ‘There’s something in there,’ Chico shouted. He was poking around in the water tank with a stick he had found in the garden. It took the police nearly an hour to get all the pieces of the tape recorder, and a harness from the floor of the tank.

The movie camera men from Charlotte Street and two CID men from the forensic lab were in the hallway downstairs, and I decided to leave the place to them for a few hours.

The birds had awakened and a thin streak of wet dawn could be seen as I poured myself a cup of Blue Mountain coffee with cream, and went to bed with a backlog of memoranda from Alice, and still found time to send a fiver to Adem for his fauna preservation. The way I looked at it, I was fauna too.

I was still tired when I showered the next morning. I picked a suitable dark grey striped wool and nylon, with a white shirt, and handkerchief, plain brown tie, and brown shoes to add a touch of rebellion. I must get those brown trousers mended.

I read my copy of The Stage in the cab. We put in a regular classified advert to let Dalby know what was going on. It said:

‘Touring SOLO talent. Girl dancers (military number) very tall man for panto parts for certain Midland towns. Send photo details. Central London novelty act now complete. Scripts badly needed. Phone Miss Varley. Dalby casting.’

Alice was handling contact with Dalby in the field, but even without the master code-book it seemed pretty clear that she was having a go at me. My cab turned into Scotland Yard. The Commissioner has a very large corner room. His leather chairs were old and shiny but the finish was bright and tasteful. An expensively framed Stubbs print of a man and horse dominated one wall; below it the open fire crackled and flared with damp coal. Through the multi-paned window I could see the traffic creeping over Westminster Bridge. A stubby black tug dragged a train of dirt-filled barges against the oily water flow, and below me on the embankment a short man in a torn wet raincoat was trying to get a bent bicycle into the back of a taxicab. The Commissioner was going on about the house business. He had that Commanding Officer manner from which it was hard to tell exactly which element caused him distress, or indeed, if any aspect did. He started for the third time going through the injustice – the word sounded ironic coming from him – of Charlotte Street being given unlimited funds. I’d told him twice that my office could fit under his kneehole desk, and my view commanded a flyblown delicatessen. This time I let him run through the whole thing without interruption for the duration of two cigarettes. He was slowing down now he had got to the use we made of the Criminal Records Office and the Forensic Science Laboratory without cost, and the right of search, and how little I knew about it. If the old man knew half the things Dalby got up to he would flip his lid. I made a firm and immediate decision to curtail Chico’s participation as far as our illegal activities were concerned; he was easily the most loquacious and not the most tactful. The Commissioner broke through my reverie.

‘That fellow with you, dark chap, good talker.’

I went cold.

‘Murray?’ I said, hoping. ‘Sergeant Murray – statistics expert. He was at the house last night.’

‘No! No! No! Young feller-me-lad, er, now, er …’

I said, in a dull voice, ‘Chillcott-Oakes, Phillip Chillcott-Oakes.’

‘Yes, a charming chap, ab solute charmer – that’s him.’ He smiled for the first time and leaned across to me in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘At school with my youngest!’ he said.

The pub across the road had just opened. I downed a couple of Dubonnet and bitter lemons. What chance did I stand between the Communists on the one side and the Establishment on the other – they were both out-thinking me at every move.

[ Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Let your head rule your heart. Steer well clear of controversy both at home and at work .]

Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about.

At the office I started going through the documents in my locked ‘In tray’. Some stuff about chemical warfare documents on microfilm. The US Defense Dept seemed pretty sure that a BOAC engineer was handling them. I marked it for Special Branch LAP. The Public Information Officer at Scotland Yard was being very nice about the house business but said the press was getting a line on it. Alice said he’d been on the phone twice, what should she say. ‘Tell him to tell the newspapers that a high court judge, a Cabinet Minister and two press barons were watching a blue film, but that if they play their cards right we won’t give the story to ITN.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Alice.

The FSO sent a report on the house. I read quickly through: ‘Road dust, stains on floorboard; could be blood, very old; possibly from wartime bombing.’

Finger-prints – there were a lot, mostly mine, and unidentified; they were going through the single print collection and ‘scenes of crime’ (where other unidentified prints were filed under the place in which they were found).

I had to see Ross at three. Now that I had taken over from Dalby it was one of my weekly ordeals. I sent out for sandwiches – cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney. The delicatessen sent them with rye bread. I spent ten minutes throwing caraway seeds into the ashtray until Chico appeared, then I downed the last round, seeds and all. He put a reel of 16mm film on the desk and hung around to make conversation. I gave him the rich-man-with-ulcers-type grunt and nod, and he finally went away.

I sat for a long time staring into my Nescafé, but no particular line of action occurred. The opposition may have fumbled the pass but I hadn’t detected a gap in the defence, unless any of the documents in front of me now meant anything. It didn’t seem much to me. There was nothing to make me sure it was a matter for us to deal with even, let alone to connect it with Jay. It’s only writers who expect every lead the hero meddles in to turn out to be threads of the same case. Here in the office were about 600 file numbers; if all the villains were brought to justice simultaneously it would make Auschwitz look like the last scene of Hamlet .