Heavy, p.15
Heavy, page 15
Can’t be that bleeding urgent if he has to chase it around the office, thought Pig, whose head felt like it had a ten tonne weight in it and whose sinuses were itching. He got up slowly, and followed the fat secretary out of the room.
He heard footsteps in the corridor behind him.
When he reached Mr. Wallace, who was standing in a stairwell with his fists on his hips, Pig said nothing.
“I am not a messaging service,” said Mr. Wallace.
“Sorry, Sir,” said Pig, with no idea or interest in whatever the hell the man was talking about. He wondered if he could go and buy an aspirin somewhere. Maybe one of the girls would let him buy one from them. Girls usually carried that sort of thing around with them.
“I shan’t be made to do your running around for you,” Mr. Wallace snapped.
“No, Sir,” said Pig, looking out of the stairwell window as rain ran down the large panes.
“Under the circumstances,” Mr. Wallace said, “you had better take the remainder of the day off. But do not allow this to become a habit, Mr. Ridell, or I shall have to discuss your employment with Mr. White.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Pig, thoroughly non-plussed.
Mr. Wallace glared at him expectantly. Pig stared back, his scars itching, his hangover bubbling, his brain asleep. They remained in deadlock for nearly a minute.
His manager broke first.
“At least thank me,” he snarled, pulling up his trousers in a defensive gesture, trying to stare down a man who had four inches on him.
Pig, bewildered, said, “Thank you, Sir,” with bad grace.
“Your wife – I note you are not wearing a ring, Mr. Ridell, I should hope there is no hanky panky taking place on your part, I do not appreciate lax morals in my office – your wife,” Mr. Wallace went on, coughing into his hand, “your wife will meet you at Kings Cross Station.”
“My wife,” Pig repeated, through fog.
“Your wife,” Mr. Wallace barked. “Unfortunately should you require a script for forthcoming interactions you will bloody well have to supply your own.”
“Yes, Sir,” Pig muttered, falling back on what he knew.
* * *
He climbed into Miss Gaitskill’s car with a little less of a headache. His stomach rumbled belligerently as she provided him with what amounted to an explanation as the Morris, black and scuffed around the fenders, belched its way north up York Way.
“Our compromised operative has taken flight,” Miss Gaitskill said, as Pig sat bolt upright in his seat, bent over at the shoulders to fit his head under the roof. She looked as if someone had slapped her, long enough ago that the flush had gone from her cheeks, but recently enough that it still smarted.
“I see,” said Pig, when the silence got too oppressive.
“We are to bring him back,” Miss Gaitskill said, changing gear. She had the testy competence of the women NCOs from training. He supposed this must count as her Service. She was too young to be finished with even a short-term posting, and too Proper to have wormed out of it.
“Yes, Miss,” said Pig, after another lengthy silence. The wind-screen wiper swept back and forth like the tail of a furious cat.
“Alive,” said Miss Gaitskill.
“Right, Miss.”
The silence descended over the car, thick and heavy. Pig wanted badly to go to sleep: Mr. Goldstein had been forced to wake him in the night, some time after two, with a bucket of water. He’d stood the rest of the night. To stay up, he’d walked in circles, aired out his bedding, and eventually climbed out of the window in defiance of area curfew because Mr. Singh was starting to complain about the noise of his fidgeting:
“The screaming first and then the bloody pacing,” Mr. Singh’s voice came through the boards, “Could he not fall asleep wearing a gag?”
He’d fallen asleep for about an hour on a bench in Victoria Park, but then there had been a misunderstanding with a policeman who wanted to know why, if he had a home to go to, he wasn’t in that home, and was accused of being a drunk.
The rumbling, growling engine of the Morris cut through his attempts to doze: every so often something in the internal combustion popped with a sound enough like gunfire to jerk him wide-eyed again.
On the road into Essex Miss Gaitskill found their quarry. It took Pig a little longer, as he’d been watching an apparently insane motorcyclist in the wing mirror, but he found them without pointing.
“Don’t allow yourself to be spotted,” Miss Gaitskill said. She took a carton of cigarettes from her satchel, crammed between their two seats, and took a cigarette from the carton without offering him one: she lit it.
Pig cautiously slid back the window. Rain immediately spattered the side of his face.
“What are you doing?” Miss Gaitskill asked. She sounded neither angry nor curious, only preoccupied.
“Fresh air, Miss.”
“It’s raining, Ridell.”
“Only on me, Miss.”
She squinted at him briefly. “Oh, yes,” she said, without explanation. She extinguished her cigarette half-way through it, and put the remainder back into the carton.
Without a word, Pig slid the window back into the closed position.
* * *
Miss Gaitskill started to hang back in the road as the car they were following began to separate from the traffic. She seemed to know what she was doing. Pig supposed that Foley must have taught her. Maybe They just taught everyone who worked for Them. He’d thought she was a secretary, to begin with.
“They won’t go fast,” said Miss Gaitskill, as they dropped back behind a horse-drawn tiller, one of the older models that Mr. Dean at home had used until the estate had been bitten by the modernising bug in ’48 and applied to the Government for a production loan. It looked out of place on a main road, but from the looks of the land hereabouts there was a good chance it wasn’t going far. “His condition won’t allow it.”
Pig, jolted out of reminiscence about Mr. Dean, about the woods at the bottom of the largest of the turnip rotation fields, and about the time William nearly shot one of Mr. Dean’s escaped, multiple-swearword-christened calves by accident in the gloom among the oaks, stared at her. For a moment he couldn’t remember why he was in this car. For a tiny splinter of a second he thought he was going back to check the snares and had caught a lift with a WAAF.
‘His condition’, Pig thought, relocating himself.
“Captain Foley has asked that further injuries are kept to a minimum,” Miss Gaitskill added.
“Yes, Miss,” said Pig, who was sure that any further injuries to the unnamed man in the blanket would probably kill him. It was a miracle he wasn’t dead already: then again, he thought, watching the lifted tiller blades bounce gently in time with the hoofsteps of the square-shouldered horse, they’d said that about him when he got back to base.
He noticed, as additional phrases drifted out of the woman at intervals, that she never once even alluded to the fact that she’d set him free.
* * *
Ernie lay back under a mostly-yellow quilt and listened to Haxonbury panic.
Mrs. Turner had provided a meal that included what was almost certainly very illegal rabbit with a wink. The pastry seemed to be made from what Haxonbury sniffily dismissed as potato flour, and the spuds themselves seemed in reply to have been made from flour, or possibly damp dust, but it was hot, and it was filling, and when he’d mashed it up enough – fork bound to his bandages with a piece of twine by Haxonbury – it was edible. He could feel it doing him good.
Pepper would have been nice, he thought.
“At least consider,” Haxonbury whimpered, his head in his hands, “why you were brought back by a different agency than the one you said sent you out. Don’t you think you were an MI6 man? What reason—”
“Rodney,” said Ernie, as kindly as he could, “you’ve brought me this far. I can’t blame you if you go home now. Mrs. Turner won’t turn me in.”
“You don’t know that,” grunted Haxonbury, at last, patting miserably at his moustache. “You’re in no fit state…”
Ernie admitted that he didn’t know that, and that in fact, if he tried to stay here without Haxonbury’s money he’d be back in the arms of whichever agency paid her first, within the hour. But he did not do so out loud: Haxonbury’s constitution didn’t want confirmation at this moment. The man’s sense of adventure was having a crisis and he had to be allowed to work his way back up to feeling like he was being naughty and rebellious by himself, because what he was actually doing, and what Ernie knew he was doing, and what Haxonbury knew he was doing if he stopped and thought about it too clearly—
Ernie examined the side of his bandages. There was gravy on the bottom of his hand.
What Haxonbury was actually doing was risking his neck so that he could feel the equal to his brother. Kind of him to lay his neuroses out where anyone could see them but not a stupidity that deserved to be rewarded with terror, or death. Ernie watched a moth headbutting the dim electric bulb above.
“I’m not,” Ernie agreed, when Haxonbury took a breath. “And I appreciate your courage, Rodney. Not many men would go out of their way to help a bloke from Bow.”
It felt cheap, hitting the man in his belly like this, but there wasn’t much alternative.
“Of course I can’t just leave you here,” Haxonbury muttered, at last. “But you must take this seriously, Ernest.”
Ernie snorted internally. If this was what Haxonbury wanted…
“Are you saying we should abandon the roads and try to hide out in the woods?”
Haxonbury gave him a look demonstrating the city boy’s instinctive horror of all places green and unpaved. Ernie knew it from the mirror. “You’re not well.”
Still unable to walk, barely able to move his arms, choking on every tenth breath, jumping at shadows and having to have his arse wiped by a fastidious spiv, Ernie felt he was already well-informed of this.
“They always get who They’re after,” Haxonbury said, at last, slumping. His suit had flecks of mud on it. He was probably out of pocket to the tune of more money than he could stand. Ernie felt a very tiny stab of sympathy: it was not as if he’d been given a choice. “You understand that? It won’t be a fluke.”
“According to your brother Reggie,” said Ernie, feeling himself unnecessarily spiteful.
“Everybody knows,” said Haxonbury to his shoes. “It’s not a joke.”
“Rodders – sorry – half an hour ago you were telling me the world didn’t even think they existed, and now everyone knows how they work?”
“You’ve been away,” Haxonbury hissed, standing up. “You don’t know.”
“Then help me understand,” grumbled Ernie, trying to discern panic from caution and rumour from reality in the utterances of one man. “Because when I left, Mr. H, they were considered a joke by the MI boys, do you see? They had no money and they had offices in the basement of someone’s club and they just sniffed around whatever the military censors couldn’t be arsed with doing.”
He recalled Colonel R’s disdain, replayed by Simon to the rest of the recruits as they desperately tried to establish themselves as equals in a room full of public schoolboys.
“That name was just because they couldn’t even afford detergent,” he added. “Grey and dirty shirts!”
Haxonbury stared at him in frank disbelief. “Well, Ernest, I can’t say where They got their money from and I don’t know the half of it, you see, They don’t conduct this sort of thing in the evening papers—” he had on his telephone voice, but it dropped as he went on, “They just started poking their noses into everything. Things run smooth because of Them; They know what’s going and when, and They don’t interfere, my bro—everyone knows that. But They know everything and if you’re Under Suspicion Of Unpatriotic Activities…”
“This,” said Ernie, looking at the ceiling as the moth’s shadow grew and shrank, “sounds familiar.”
* * *
Irene had hoped she would be allowed to rectify her mistake alone.
Instead, she had company.
Captain Foley was right: if both of them had been involved in Shoe’s departure from under lock and key in Chelsea then both of them ought to take care of the problem, but she wished – now she had the rest of the information on him – that she’d run into someone else in the corridor.
She didn’t wish, and this puzzled her as she sat stiff and horrified beside this man, that she hadn’t done the thing that her guilty conscience had forced her to own up to. It was Wrong, in the eyes of her employer, and it was detrimental to the security of the country, but it didn’t appear to be Wrong in the eyes of her immediate superior, and she couldn’t believe it was wrong in the eyes of the Lord.
“Make sure you’re fully-briefed on everyone involved,” said Captain Foley, before she left, and waved at the filing cabinet.
She’d already read about Shoe. No one had access to the Captain’s files, of course. They were from Colonel Braithwaite, and highly classified. This left, as a certainty, Haxonbury – she’d read about him before, of course. And Ridell.
Ridell’s file was also, technically, not her remit. It wasn’t her job to be fully-briefed on people unless there was a surveillance request. But Captain Foley had strongly implied it would be in her interest, and that he was concerned for her safety. She’d read as much as she could in the time available. To be prepared, the letter headers said, was to be armed against all foes. There was not much to be gleaned, but from the look on Captain Foley’s face, what was hidden was even worse.
Irene pulled into a traffic jam of unholy proportions.
Shoe and Haxonbury were eight cars ahead and going nowhere.
Ridell and his grim, horrifying file of misdeeds sat in the car beside her and leaned out into the rain.
After a moment Irene realised she must be aggravating his nasal injuries with her cigarette; for a while she considered just letting the thing burn, but the desire had no teeth in it. It was not Irene’s place to administer punishment to the unrighteous – only the Lord did that. It was – and this was harder, far harder – it was also not her place to judge so, as Mother often said.
She extinguished the cigarette and tried not to look at Ridell and his dishonourable discharge, scarred into his face. She tried not to judge a man who had most of his file details excised under unknown orders, an act rare and unheard-of in someone in such lowly employ—
The traffic crawled forward. Somewhere behind them a motorcycle coughed and spluttered. She wondered why it was not zipping forward among the cars, and was about to turn in her seat when Ridell closed the window with some force.
It took all her self-control not to jump out of her skin.
* * *
Mr. Haxonbury had not expected to hear from their host after tea. She had come for the plates, and after remarking how lucky they were that the Reverend had “hit a rabbit with his bicycle” and had been “too overcome with Christian charity” to eat it himself, had vanished back into her so-called drawing room with the satisfied air of a woman who could charge them for a round meal.
After Ernest impressed upon him the seriousness of their situation, after he gave Mr. Haxonbury a potted history of the Greyshirts, MI6, and China that he’d never asked for and wanted to forget – stopping only for a moment to wonder if Reggie and Reggie’s boys knew all of this – he cast about for something to do.
The room lacked any sort of book, and besides, Mr. Haxonbury was not a great reader. He liked figures providing they could be doctored, and he liked the pictures on the rare occasion that the ruddy Government would consent to a picture house being opened of a Saturday evening, and he lived and died by the serials on the wireless even if they were mostly Improving rather than Entertaining. Nothing of that sort was available here, and his nerves would simply not allow him to take a constitutional in the middle of the bloody countryside.
Ernest appeared to be asleep. Mr. Haxonbury could hardly fault him for it: he still looked like the grim spectre of death and the meal they had eaten had been unexpectedly rich. These country people could get their hands on all sorts of extras, Mr. Haxonbury thought. There really ought be some sort of scheme set up so that the luxuries passing through London – certainly those passing through his warehouse and Reggie’s unmarked cars – could be exchanged for the kind of extras housewives in the city were crying out for: eggs, meat, milk that wasn’t two thirds white paint…
He took out his notebook and added this to the location of the chemist where he had bought more aspirins for Ernest.
The morphine, he realised, would run out soon. He’d thought there was more of it. Not that it seemed to be doing much good: the doses ought to have been knocking Ernest for six, giving him a little peace, and instead they barely seemed to take the edge off. He’d contemplated popping the odd dose into Mrs. Haxonbury occasionally, to calm her down, but the last thing he needed was a dope fiend for a wife. She was bad enough already.
The thought of Mrs. Haxonbury sent a small current through him. Extended holiday or not, she would be back home soon. Words would be had. Julietta – Julietta, he thought with sudden relish, hated Mrs. Haxonbury even more than she hated him. She wouldn’t implicate herself in the acceptance of a condemned man into their home. She did not know where Mr. Haxonbury had gone. Mrs. Haxonbury could – he suppressed a sudden, elated chuckle – whistle for it.
He patted his moustache and put away his notebook. Maybe he exaggerated the risk to himself. After all, Ernest was a capable man. He had survived a dozen years in the SinoSoviet Alliance. He knew The Ropes.
Reggie would probably be impressed by him.
Mr. Haxonbury glanced at Ernest, with shadows lengthening in the pools beneath his eyes, and sleeping breaths as ragged as a milkman’s nag on the verge of becoming cats’ meat: Reggie might stretch to being impressed, Mr. Haxonbury corrected, if he was feeling generous. He wondered what Mrs. Turner would have said had it been his half-brother who’d showed up in dark of night with an injured man.
