‘No, no. I gave them to you.’
She stared at him. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. I’m sure I did.’
She closed the files carefully, picked up her handbag and, as he had hoped, opened it on the desk. She took out her purse, then bent her head to look through the compartments. The bag lay open. David looked round quickly but no-one was watching them; their friendship was stale gossip now and Dabb, the Registrar, was busy checking a file. David bent over a little, enough to see into the bag. There was a powder-puff, a packet of cigarettes and the key on its metal tab. Squinting, he made out the numbers stamped onto it: 2342. He stepped away just as Carol looked up from her purse.
‘They’re jolly well not here.’ There was anxiety in her voice.
David took out his wallet, checking. With an expression of surprise, he pulled out the tickets. ‘I’m terribly sorry. They were here all along. I am sorry, Carol.’
She sighed with relief. ‘For a moment I was frightened I was going potty, with all this worry over Mother.’
Walking back to his own office David had to stop at the gents. He went into a cubicle and was violently sick. He crouched, breathing heavily; the vomiting relieved the almost unbearable tension he had felt since getting the number, but did nothing to assuage his shame.
And so he began to come in at weekends and photograph papers from the secret files. At least once a month he met in Soho with Jackson, Geoff – who was indeed the Resistance agent in the Colonial Office – and Boardman, a tall, thin man from the India Office, an old Etonian like Jackson. The quiet discussions in the squalid Soho flat went on for hours, while next door a prostitute – another Resistance supporter – plied her trade, cries and bumps occasionally audible through the wall. David learned more and more about the fragility of Fascist Europe. The Depression and the demands on her economies to feed the gigantic, endless German war effort in Russia were sucking the continental countries dry, while labour conscription to Germany was sending young men in France and Italy and Spain literally running to the hills. On the other side of the world Japan was as deadlocked in its war with China as Germany was in Russia. Its strategy towards the Chinese was the same as the Germans towards the Russians, summed up in their policy of the ‘three alls’: kill all, burn all, destroy all. Recently Jackson – who David knew now was in the Foreign Office – had told them the rumours that Germany was in political trouble were true. The reason Hitler never appeared in public was that he was seriously incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease, barely lucid enough to take decisions, hallucinating about Jews with skullcaps and sidelocks grinning at him from the corner of the room; hallucinations were sometimes a symptom of the latest and severest stage of the disease. Following Goring’s death from a stroke the year before Goebbels was his nominated successor but he had many enemies. Factions representing the army, the Nazi Party and the SS were all circling and plotting.
He learned more about the Resistance, too, an alliance of Socialists and Liberals with old-fashioned Conservatives like Jackson and Geoff, who loathed Fascist authoritarianism and who had come, sadly, to realize the Imperial mission had failed. Their numbers were growing all the time, and violence had become necessary to destabilize the police state.
Natalia was always there; listening avidly, always smoking. David didn’t know what her politics were, knew only that she was a refugee from Slovakia, a far corner of Eastern Europe of which he had barely heard. At meetings she said little, though what she said was always to the point. As time passed he began to see her look at him in the way Carol did, and Sarah once had. He didn’t respond, but something in the way she was both focused and committed, yet somehow rootless, stirred him unexpectedly.
He stubbed out his cigarette. This Sunday he had to copy some papers for the next High Commissioners’ meeting detailing possible South African military assistance to Kenya. Then he had to photograph a secret paper which he had heard of but not seen – about the Canadians supplying uranium to the United States for their nuclear weapons programme. It was known the Germans were working on nuclear weapons, too, but with little success. Apart from anything else they lacked uranium; they were mining it in the former Belgian Congo but had lost a huge consignment which the Belgians had shipped to the United States just before the colony was annexed by Germany in the peace treaty with Belgium in 1940. He also had to find anything he could on New Zealand’s threats to leave the Empire. That made him think of his father; he was happy there, kept asking David and Sarah to join him. With a sigh, David put the camera in his pocket, picked up the bulky High Commissioners’ file, and went out.
He walked along the corridor, stepping quietly. He could have photographed the High Commissioners’ file in his office, but papers were best copied in bright artificial light, and the room where the secret files were kept had an Anglepoise lamp. In the Registry, he opened the flap of the counter and walked over to Carol’s desk. There was a pile of stubs in her overflowing ashtray. He went up to the frosted-glass door, took out his duplicate key, and opened it.
The room was quite small, with a table in the centre and files on shelves. He knew his way around the filing system intimately now. The Anglepoise lamp with its powerful bulb stood on the desk.
He laid the High Commissioners’ file on the table and began taking the buff envelopes, each with a red diagonal cross, out of their places. It took an hour to find the documents he wanted, rapidly scanning them to check their relevance, then extracting them and laying each one neatly on the desk with the papers he needed from the High Commissioners’ file. He worked efficiently, calmly, very quietly, always with one ear cocked for sounds from outside. Then he switched on the Anglepoise lamp and carefully photographed the documents, one by one. When he was finished David switched off the light, replaced the camera in his jacket pocket and started returning the secret papers to the files piled on the table, stringing them quickly through the tail-tags.
He was halfway through when he heard a loud voice beyond the door speak his name. He froze, one of the secret papers still in his hand.
‘Fitzgerald’s not in his office.’ It was the deep voice of his superior, Archie Hubbold. ‘I’ve come down to the Registry, you know my office phone isn’t working. I
There was a chair by the desk and David sat down. He forced himself to be calm. Hubbold occasionally came in to work at weekends, and the porter must have told him David was in. He must have gone to David’s office, then come down to the Registry to telephone.
He had to get back to his room fast; finding him absent, Hubbold would probably have left a note. He would have to tell him he had been in the toilet; Hubbold was too fastidious to look for someone in there. Moving as rapidly as he could, David replaced the remaining papers in the files. He always liked to double-check everything was in order but there wasn’t time now. He re-tagged the papers from the High Commissioners’ file and then, with a deep breath, unlocked the door, stepped out, and locked it again.
Back in the office, Hubbold had indeed left a note for him.
Archie Hubbold was a short, stocky man with thinning white hair. Thick glasses magnified his eyes, making his expression unreadable. He and David had moved to the Political Division at the same time, three years ago. It had been a sideways move for David, though he was overdue for promotion. But David knew that although he was regarded as reliable and conscientious he was thought to lack the spike of ambition. Hubbold, though, had relished his promotion to Assistant Under-Secretary. He was vain, pompous and pernickety, but sharp and watchful, too. When policy issues were discussed, like many in the Service he enjoyed paradoxes, playing one view off against another.
David knocked on Hubbold’s door. A deep voice called, ‘Enter,’ and he forced himself to smile casually as he went in.
Hubbold waved his junior to a chair. ‘So you’re working overtime as well.’
‘Yes, Mr Hubbold. Just wanted to check all was well on the agenda. I got your note. Sorry, I was in the gents.’ David patted the file under his arm. ‘You wished to see this?’
Hubbold smiled generously. ‘If you’ve been checking it over, I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver box, tapping two little spots of brown powder onto the back of his hand. Many senior civil servants liked to cultivate some personal eccentricity, and Hubbold’s was that he took snuff, like an
