David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

The ablutions Pinker explained — rubbing his barked shin while Paul apologised — were a shared facility along the corridor.

Once the door was shut the two performed a cramped waltz as they attempted simultaneously to stow their luggage. After a series of collisions and several more apologies, Paul as last man in, conceded the field to Pinker. He took the greatcoat and leaving his bag on the lower bunk climbed back on deck for a cigarette.

There was an east wind blowing and after the stuffy cabin Paul pulled the greatcoat on once more.

It had been almost seven-thirty before the train from London reached Yarmouth. Once he’d arrived he had locked himself in the station lavatory and sponged off his jacket with a cloth. In the dim reflection from the clouded mirror his suit looked even cheaper than before and no doubt would have dropped him even further down the social ladder in his mother’s eyes. Having made himself as orderly as possible, exchanging the blood on his jacket for damp patches, he had made his way to the quay.

There were still crowds thronging the waterside stalls, being harangued by costers shouting their wares. Men in uniform strolled arm in arm with girls; women and children walked along the piers. The evening air was heavy with the aroma of bloaters and the smell of the sea.

He found the steamer easily enough, tied up alongside the few pleasure craft that despite the war still plied the coastal towns and up the River Yar. But the boat was an unprepossessing sight. Streaked with rust and grimed with soot, it leaked a thin trail of grey smoke into the air like the contaminated breath of a tubercular patient.

The name on the stern, Hesperus , gave him a sudden sense of foreboding as the Longfellow poem he had studied at school came back. He couldn’t have recited a single line of The Wreck Of The Hesperus now, only vaguely recalling a story of a captain’s hubris, a huge storm, and a girl lashed to a mast. It had not turned out well. He remembered that much. The ship had sunk and the captain’s daughter had washed ashore, drowned. Not an ending to dwell upon, he decided. He hung around the quayside for a while awaiting the elusive Hart, but no one seemed to be hanging around waiting for him so eventually he passed under the stern of the ship toward the gangway.

The officer to whom he passed his ticket welcomed Paul aboard, addressing him as Mr Filbert which made Paul stare at him blankly until remembering who he was supposed to be. Then he passed his bag to the sullen cabin steward and followed him below to encounter Pinker.

Now, back on deck, Paul found a spot aft to sit where through the deepening gloom he could see the quay. A dim light on a bulkhead shed almost sufficient light for him to read the evening paper he had bought at the station and he looked through it for any report of murder in London. There was nothing, though, only the usual amalgam of hopeful news from the front and fatuous articles about the sterling work being done at home.

He saw two men carrying bags approach the gangway and put the paper down and stood at the rail. They were dark and dapper and wore brown suits and bowler hats. As they climbed the gangway he saw they both wore beards, one full but short and trimmed, the other man’s worn as a goatee, pointed beneath pince-nez balanced on a thin nose.

They looked familiar — but then he had thought that about the man in the cap. He put it down to their superficial resemblance to Lenin and Trotsky. The omen momentarily gave him an odd turn, but the pair looked more like music hall impersonators than the real thing and he decided it was nothing but a coincidence. Still, he was reminded again of Kell’s admonition. Despite the likelihood, he shouldn’t suppose the agent he had been warned against was the man he’d left dead in the alley and resolved to take the appearance of two ersatz Bolshevik leaders as a reminder against taking anything for granted. Doing that had almost got him killed once already.

That thought brought home once again the enormity of what it was Cumming expected of him.

Paul’s only experience of Intelligence work had, till then, been the odd occasion at the front when some staff officer or other would arrive to throw his braided weight around. But that had always been the colonel’s business. By the time information had trickled down to his level, anything that remotely related to intelligence had been stripped out. All that ever reached him was couched in the sort of plain language even a junior officer could understand: in the morning you’ll be doing this or they need you to do that . And he’d do as he was told, not worrying about where the information had come from.

But he suspected that hadn’t been the sort intelligence with which Cumming dealt. Back at the front, it was more likely to be the result of simple observation or, as Paul often supposed, wishful thinking. No doubt they had other, more nefarious means of procuring information although he had never bothered himself over that. Not the kind that Cumming and Browning dealt in. A gentleman on a walking holiday might keep his eyes open for useful tid-bits; and it was one thing for Baden-Powell to draw butterflies out of Boer defences, or for Winston Churchill to pick up this or that piece of information while employed as a journalist. But the other kind of spying had always seemed to Paul to be somehow underhand. At least, not the sort of thing in which a gentleman would engage.

Such people existed, of course. Everyone had heard of Mata Hari , and poor Nurse Cavell, who probably hadn’t done anything at all but had still been shot for her pains. Yet even then he found it difficult to equate people like that — noble or ignoble — with someone like the man he had left in the alley. He could hardly be called a ‘spy’. To Paul’s way of thinking he was more akin to the kind of anarchists and socialists who had plagued Europe before the war, tossing their bombs at innocent passers-by in pursuit some unattainable pie-in-the-sky. But hadn’t it been exactly this sort of person who had turned the Russian order on its head? Perhaps the pie wasn’t as unattainable as he had thought.

The two bowler-hatted men disappeared below and the crew were readying to cast off. There was still no sign of the mysterious Hart and it dawned upon Paul that he was on his own. There was still time to bolt for the quay, but how would he explain that away? The ship’s officer had taken Paul’s ticket so Cumming would know he hadn’t missed the boat — and, more pertinently, taken Cumming’s money and not missed the boat.

The steamer’s engines began to turn and after a moment she slid away from the quay. Yarmouth receded and within a few minutes had sunk, like his stomach, into the water behind them. There were no lights to watch fade. Yarmouth had been blacked out. There might not have been any recent Zepplin raids but Yarmouth, he remembered, had suffered under the first attack back in 1915. People had been killed and they weren’t tempting providence by lighting an airship’s way for a second pass.

He turned away from the rail. It was always possible Hart had boarded the steamer before Paul had arrived or, failing that, planned to catch up with it in Hull. But if not — always assuming they didn’t get sunk by a German U-boat (for all he knew drowning through enemy action might be a hereditary trait) — Paul was going to have to make his own way from Helsingfors to the Russian border. And then to Petersburg. Or Petrograd, as he better get used to calling it. If he ever managed that, he would somehow have to find his cousin, Mikhail, a man he hadn’t seen for thirteen years and hadn’t cared much for when last he had.

Assuming Mikhail was still in Petrograd.