Len Deighton - The Spy Quartet - An Expensive Place to Die, Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy, Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to prove?’

‘Nothing. I’m just putting you in the picture. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’m just juxtaposing a hydrogen expert from Peking with a hydrogen expert from the Pentagon. I’m wondering why they are both in the same city at the same time and especially why they both cross your path. It’s the sort of thing that makes me nervous.’ He gulped down the rest of his coffee.

‘You shouldn’t drink too much of that strong black coffee,’ I said. ‘It’ll be keeping you awake at night.’

The courier picked up his photos and copy of L’Express . ‘I’ve got a system for getting to sleep,’ he said. ‘I count reports I’ve filed.’

‘Watch resident agents jumping to conclusions,’ I said.

‘It’s not soporific.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ve left the most important thing until last,’ he said.

‘Have you?’ I said, and wondered what was more important than the Chinese People’s Republic preparing for nuclear warfare.

‘The girl was ours.’

‘What girl was whose?’

‘The murdered girl was working for us, for the department.’

‘A floater?’

‘No. Permanent; warranty contract, the lot.’

‘Poor kid,’ I said. ‘Was she pumping Kuang-t’ien?’

‘It’s nothing that’s gone through the Embassy. They know nothing about her there.’

‘But you knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are playing both ends.’

‘Just like you.’

‘Not at all. I’m just London. The jobs I do for the Embassy are just favours. I can decline if I want to. What do London want me to do about this girl?’

He said, ‘She has an apartment on the left bank. Just check through her personal papers, her possessions. You know the sort of thing. It’s a long shot but you might find something. These are her keys – the department held duplicates for emergencies – small one for mail box, large ones front door and apartment door.’

‘You’re crazy. The police were probably turning it over within thirty minutes of her death.’

‘Of course they were. I’ve had the place under observation. That’s why I waited a bit before telling you. London is pretty certain that no one – not Loiseau nor Datt nor anyone – knew that the girl worked for us. It’s probable that they just made a routine search.’

‘If the girl was a permanent she wouldn’t leave anything lying around,’ I said.

‘Of course she wouldn’t. But there may be one or two little things that could embarrass us all …’ He looked around the grimy wallpaper of my room and pushed my ancient bedstead. It creaked.

‘Even the most careful employee is tempted to have something close at hand.’

‘That would be against orders.’

‘Safety comes above orders,’ he said. I shrugged my grudging agreement. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Now you see why they want you to go. Go and probe around there as though it’s your room and you’ve just been killed. You might find something where anyone else would fail. There’s an insurance of about thirty thousand new francs if you find someone who you think should get it.’ He wrote the address on a slip of paper and put it on the table. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the coffee, it was very good.’

‘If I start serving instant coffee,’ I said, ‘perhaps I’ll get a little less work.’

The dead girl’s name was Annie Couzins. She was twenty-four and had lived in a new piece of speculative real estate not far from the Boul. Mich. The walls were close and the ceilings were low. What the accommodation agents described as a studio apartment was a cramped bed-sitting room. There were large cupboards containing a bath, a toilet and a clothes rack respectively. Most of the construction money had been devoted to an entrance hall lavished with plate glass, marble and bronze-coloured mirrors that made you look tanned and rested and slightly out of focus.

Had it been an old house or even a pretty one, then perhaps some memory of the dead girl would have remained there, but the room was empty, contemporary and pitiless. I examined the locks and hinges, probed the mattress and shoulder pads, rolled back the cheap carpet and put a knife blade between the floorboards. Nothing. Perfume, lingerie, bills, a postcard greeting from Nice, ‘… some of the swimsuits are divine …’, a book of dreams, six copies of Elle , laddered stockings, six medium-price dresses, eight and a half pairs of shoes, a good English wool overcoat, an expensive transistor radio tuned to France Musique, tin of Nescafé, tin of powdered milk, saccharine, a damaged handbag containing spilled powder and a broken mirror, a new saucepan. Nothing to show what she was, had been, feared, dreamed of or wanted.

The bell rang. There was a girl standing there. She may have been twenty-five but it was difficult to say. Big cities leave a mark. The eyes of city-dwellers scrutinize rather than see; they assess the value and the going-rate and try to separate the winners from the losers. That’s what this girl tried to do.

‘Are you from the police?’ she asked.

‘No. Are you?’

‘I’m Monique. I live next door in apartment number eleven.’

‘I’m Annie’s cousin, Pierre.’

‘You’ve got a funny accent. Are you a Belgian?’ She gave a little giggle as though being a Belgian was the funniest thing that could happen to anyone.

‘Half Belgian,’ I lied amiably.

‘I can usually tell. I’m very good with accents.’

‘You certainly are,’ I said admiringly. ‘Not many people detect that I’m half Belgian.’

‘Which half is Belgian?’

‘The front half.’

She giggled again. ‘Was your mother or your father Belgian, I mean.’

‘Mother. Father was a Parisian with a bicycle.’

She tried to peer into the flat over my shoulder. ‘I would invite you in for a cup of coffee,’ I said, ‘but I musn’t disturb anything.’

‘You’re hinting. You want me to invite you for coffee.’

‘Damned right I do.’ I eased the door closed. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’

I turned back to cover up my searching. I gave a last look to the ugly cramped little room. It was the way I’d go one day. There would be someone from the department making sure that I hadn’t left ‘one or two little things that could embarrass us all’. Goodbye, Annie, I thought. I didn’t know you but I know you now as well as anyone knows me. You won’t retire to a little tabac in Nice and get a monthly cheque from some phoney insurance company. No, you can be resident agent in hell, Annie, and your bosses will be sending directives from Heaven telling you to clarify your reports and reduce your expenses.

I went to apartment number eleven. Her room was like Annie’s: cheap gilt and film-star photos. A bath towel on the floor, ashtrays overflowing with red-marked butts, a plateful of garlic sausage that had curled up and died.

Monique had made the coffee by the time I got there. She’d poured boiling water on to milk powder and instant coffee and stirred it with a plastic spoon. She was a tough girl under the giggling exterior and she surveyed me carefully from behind fluttering eyelashes.

‘I thought you were a burglar,’ she said, ‘then I thought you were the police.’

‘And now?’

‘You’re Annie’s cousin Pierre. You’re anyone you want to be, from Charlemagne to Tin-Tin, it’s no business of mine, and you can’t hurt Annie.’

I took out my notecase and extracted a one-hundred-new-franc note. I put it on the low coffee table. She stared at me thinking it was some kind of sexual proposition.