Our Game (2 page)

"Yes, sir?"

"Well, for heaven's sake"—

I laughed—"Larry always had someone on the go, surely."

Luck cut in. Rudely. He was a stop-or-sprint man, no middle gear. "You mean a woman?" he blurted.

"Whenever I knew him he had a stable of them," I said. "Don't tell me he's turned celibate in his old age."

Bryant weighed my words.

"Such was the reputation that preceded him to Bath, Mr. Cranmer, sir. But the truth, we find, is somewhat different, isn't it, Oliver?" Luck went on glowering at the fire. "We have quizzed his landlady thoroughly, and we have quizzed his academic colleagues. Confidentially. Not wishing to stir up a mare's nest at this early stage of our enquiries, naturally." He drew a breath, and I was moved to wonder how much his lugubrious behaviour was modelled on his absurdly successful television counterparts. "To begin with, immediately subsequent to his taking up his appointment in Bath, he was all that you imply. He had his drinking haunts, he had an eye for the pretty girl student, and it appears that more than one succumbed. Gradually, however, we see a change. He goes serious. He doesn't do the parties anymore. Many evenings are spent away from his diggings. Sometimes whole nights. Less drink is taken. Subdued is a word that crops up quite a lot. Purposeful is another. There's a secretiveness in the Doctor's recent habits, not to put it too finely, that we seem unable to crack."

It's called tradecraft, I thought. "Perhaps he was growing up at last," I suggested airily, but evidently with more feeling than I intended, for Luck's long head turned to stare at me while the firelight played red and orange on the strings of his neck.

"His only occasional visitor we're aware of in the last twelve months is an overseas gentleman known as the Professor," Bryant went on. "Professor of what or where is anybody's guess. The Professor never stayed long; he seemed to turn up unannounced, but the Doctor was always glad to see him. They'd have a take-in curry and a pack of beer, some Scotch was popular and laughter was heard. The Professor was clearly a wit in his own right, according to our source. He would sleep on the sofa and leave next day. Just a light bag, he had, very self-sufficient. A cat that walked by himself, she called him. He never had a name, not as far as the landlady was concerned, just Professor: This is the Professor. Him and the Doctor spoke in a very foreign language too, quite often into the small hours."

I nodded, trying to display a polite interest rather than the fascination he was kindling in me.

"It wasn't Russian, or the landlady would have recognised it. Her late husband was a naval officer who'd done a Russian course, so she knows what Russian sounds like. We've checked with the university. None of their official guests fit the bill. The Professor came privately and left privately."

I am walking on Hampstead Heath, five years ago, Larry at my side. We walk too fast. Together, we always do. In London parks, on our weekend retreats to the Office's safe house in Norfolk, we walk like two athletes competing even in their leisure.

"Checheyev's become a curry convert," Larry announces. "For six bloody months he's been telling me a lamb's a lamb and sauces are decadent. Last night we go to the Viceroy of India, he wolfs a chicken vindaloo and discovers God."

"A small, sturdy type of person he was in build, apparently," Bryant was saying. "Late forties, she puts him at, black hair swept back. Sideburns, a full moustache, drooping at the corners. Usually wore a bomber jacket and the track shoes. Complexion brownish but still white, she says. Pitted. Like he'd had spots when he was a kid. Dry type of humour, a lot of twinkle. Not like some professors she knows. I don't know if that rings a bell at all?"

"I'm afraid it doesn't," I said, refusing to allow the bell to ring—or, more accurately, to acknowledge its deafening chimes.

"Went so far as to say sparkling, didn't she, Oliver? We thought she might have the hots for him."

Instead of answering, Luck brusquely addressed himself to me. "Which languages does Pettifer speak, precisely, apart from Russian?"

"Precisely, I don't know." He didn't like that. "He's a Slavonic scholar. Languages are his forte, minority languages particularly. I had the impression he picked them up as he went along. He's something of a philologist too, I believe."

"In his blood, is it?"

"Not to my knowledge. He has the flair."

"Like you, then."

"I have application."

"And Pettifer hasn't?"

"He doesn't need it. I told you. He has flair."

"When did he last travel abroad, to your knowledge?"

"Travel? Good heavens, he travelled all the time. Used to. It was his passion. The more unsavoury a place, the better he liked it."

"When was his last time?"

September 18, I thought. When else? His last time, his last clandestine meeting, his absolute last laugh. "The last time he travelled, you mean?" I said. "I'm afraid I've really no idea at all. If I ventured a guess I should simply mislead you. Can't you check flight lists and things? I thought that sort of information was computerised these days."

Luck glanced at Bryant. Bryant glanced at me, his smile stretched to the limits of its patience.

"Well now, Mr. Cranmer, sir, if I could just go back to my original question," he said with terminal courtesy. "When's the problem, that's for sure. And it would be very nice of you if you would finally let us into the secret and tell us when you last had contact with the missing man."

For the second time, truth almost intruded. Contact? I wanted to say. Contact, Mr. Bryant? Five weeks ago on September 18 at Priddy Pool, Mr. Bryant! Contact on a scale you'd never imagine!

"I guess it must have been sometime after the university offered him permanent employment," I replied. "He was ecstatic. He was sick of short-term lectureships and scrabbling for a living as a journalist. Bath offered him the security he was looking for. He grabbed it with both hands."

"And?" said Luck, for whom gracelessness was clearly a sign of virtue.

"And he wrote to me. He was a compulsive note scribbler. That was our last contact"

"Saying what, exactly?" Luck demanded.

Saying that Bath University was exactly what it was when I brought him there: grey, bloody cold, and smelled of cat piss, I retorted in my mind as the truth again welled up in me. Saying that he was rotting from the head down, in a world without faith or antifaith. Saying that Bath University was the Lubyanka without the laughs and that, as ever, he held me personally to blame. Signed, Larry.

"Saying he had received his official letter of appointment, that he was overjoyed, and that we should all share his happiness," I replied blandly.

"When is this, exactly?"

"I'm not good at dates, I'm afraid. As I keep telling you. Not unless they're vintages."

"Have you got his letter?"

"I never keep old correspondence."

"But you wrote back to him."

"Straight away. If I get a personal letter, that's what I do. I can't stand having anything in my in tray."

"That's the former civil servant in you, I expect.”

“I expect it is."

"Still, you're retired now."

"I am anything but retired, thank you, Mr. Luck. I have never been busier in my life."

Bryant was back with his smile and his scarred moustache. "I expect that's your varied and useful community work you're referring to there. They tell me Mr. Cranmer-sir is the regular saint of the neighbourhood."

"Not neighbourhood. Village," I replied equably.

"Save our church. Help the aged. Country holidays for our disadvantaged children from the inner cities. Open up the house and grounds to the peasantry for the benefit of the local hospice. I was impressed, wasn't I, Oliver?"

"Very," said Luck.

"So when was the last time we met with the Doctor, sir, face-to-face—forgetting our compulsive letter writing?" Bryant resumed.

I hesitated. Intentionally. "Three months? Four? Five?" I was inviting him to choose.

"Was that here, sir? At Honeybrook?"

"He's been here, yes."

"How often, would you say?"

"Oh my goodness. With Larry, you sort of don't log it: he drops in, you give him an egg in the kitchen, kick him out.... In the last couple of years, oh, half a dozen times. Say eight."

And the very last time, sir?"

"I've been trying to think. July, probably. We'd decided to give the wine vats an early scrub. The best way to get rid of Larry is put him to work. He scrubbed for an hour, ate some bread and cheese, drank four gin and tonics, and pushed off.”

“July, then," said Bryant.

"I said. July."

"Got a date at all? A day of the week, say? A weekend, was it?"

"Yes, it must have been.”

“Why?"

"No staff."

"I thought you said we, sir."

"Some children from the housing estate were helping me for a pound an hour," I replied, again delicately avoiding any mention of Emma.

"And are we talking here of the middle of July or the beginning or more the end of it?"

"The middle. It must have been." I stood up, perhaps to indicate how relaxed I was, and made a show of studying a bottlemakers' calendar that Emma had hung beside the telephone. "Here we are. Aunt Madeline, twelfth to nineteenth. I had my ancient aunt staying with me. Larry must have dropped in that weekend. He chatted her up."

I had not set eyes on Aunt Madeline for twenty years. But if they intended to go looking for witnesses, I had rather they went after Aunt Madeline than Emma.

"Now, they do say, Mr. Cranmer," Bryant proposed archly, "that Dr. Pettifer also made quite copious use of the telephone."

I gave a sprightly laugh. We were entering another dark area, and I needed all the self-assurance I could muster. "I'm sure they do. And with reason."

"Something come back to you, does it, sir?"

"Well, dear me, yes, I suppose it does. There were times when Larry with a telephone could make one's life utter hell. Ring you up all hours of the day or night. He wasn't singling you out; he rang everyone in his phone book."

I laughed again, and Bryant laughed with me, while Luck the puritan went on brooding at the flames.

"We all know one of those, don't we, sir?" Bryant said.

"Drama merchants, I call them, no disrespect. They get themselves a problem—a fight with the boyfriend or girlfriend; should they buy this incredible house they've just seen from the top of a bus?—and they're not happy till they've sucked you in. I think it's my wife who attracts them in our household, to be frank. I haven't the patience myself. When was the last time Dr. Pettifer came up with one, then, sir?"

"With one what?"

"A drama, sir. A what I call a wobbly."

"Oh, way back."

"Months again, was it?"

I again affected to rummage in my memory. There are two golden rules to being interrogated, and I had already flouted both of them. The first is never volunteer extraneous detail. The second is never tell a direct lie unless you are able to stick it out to the bitter end.

"Perhaps if you could describe to us the nature of the drama, sir, that might enable us to put a date on it, mightn't it?" he suggested in the tone of somebody proposing a family game.

My dilemma was acute. In my previous incarnation it was the accepted wisdom that the police, unlike ourselves, made little use of microphones and phone taps. Their misnomered discreet enquiries were confined to pestering neighbours, tradesmen, and bank managers, but stopped short of our private preserve of electronic surveillance. Or so we thought. I decided to take refuge in the distant past.

"So far as I remember, it was the occasion when Larry was taking some kind of public farewell from left-wing socialism and wished his friends to be part of the process," I said.

Still seated before the fire, Luck laid a long hand to his cheek, seeming to nurse a neuralgic pain. "Is this Russian socialism we're talking?" he demanded in his surly voice.

"Whatever kind you like. He was deradicalising himself—that was his expression—and he needed his friends to watch him do it."

"Now, when would that have been, exactly, Mr. Cranmer, sir?" asked Bryant from my other side.

"A couple of years ago. More. It was while he was still cleaning up his act before applying for the job at the university."

"November 'ninety-two," said Luck.

"I beg your pardon?"

"If we're talking the Doctor's public renunciation of radical socialism, we're talking his article entitled 'Death of an Experiment,' published Socialist Review November 'ninety-two. The Doctor linked his decision to an analysis of what he termed the underground continuum of Russian expansionism whether it was conducted under the tsarist, Communist, or, as of now, federalist flag. He also referred to the West's newfound moral orthodoxy, which he likened to the early phases of Communist social dogma without the fundamental idealism to go with it. One or two of his left-wing academic colleagues considered that article a rather hefty act of betrayal. Did you?"

"I had no opinion of it."

"Did you discuss it with him?"

"No. I congratulated him.”

“why?"

"Because that was what he wanted."

"Do you always tell people what they want?"

"If I'm humouring somebody who is being a bore, Mr. Luck, and I want to get on with something else, yes, I very likely do," I said, and ventured a glance at my French striking clock in its glass dome. But Luck was not so easily confounded.

"And November nineteen ninety-two—when Pettifer wrote this famous article—that would have been about the time you were retiring from whatever it was you were doing in London, I take it?"

I didn't like Luck drawing parallels between our two lives, and I detested his assertive tone.

"Probably."

"Did you approve of him renouncing socialism?"

"Are you asking me to tell you what my politics are, Mr. Luck?"

"I was merely thinking it must have been slightly risky for you, knowing him during the Cold War period. You being a civil servant and him, in those days, as you have said this very moment, a revolutionary socialist."