'Are you going?' I asked, fascinated.
'No, I'm not. You are.'
'Um…' I said a shade breathlessly, 'I hardly fit the bill.'
'I told Bill Baudelaire,' the Brigadier said succinctly, 'that I would send him a passenger Filmer didn't know. One of my men. Then if Filmer does try anything, and after all it's a big if, we might have a real chance of finding out how and what, and catching him at it.'
My God, I thought. So simple, put like that. So absolutely impossible of performance.
I swallowed. 'What did Mr Baudelaire say?'
'I talked him into agreeing. He's expecting you.'
I blinked.
'Well,' the Brigadier said, 'not you by name. Someone. Someone fairly young, I said, but experienced. Someone who wouldn't seem out of place…' his teeth gleamed briefly '… on the millionaires' express.'
'But' I said, and stopped dead, my mind full of urgent reservations and doubts that I was good enough for a job like that. Yet on the other hand, what a lark.
'Will you go?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said.
He smiled. 'I hoped you might.'
Brigadier Catto, who lived ninety miles from London in Newmarket, was staying overnight, as he often did, in a comfortable bedroom upstairs in the club. I left him in the bar after a while and drove the last half-mile home to where I lived in a quiet residential street in Kennington.
I had looked in that district for somewhere to put down a few roots on the grounds that I wouldn't be bothered to use the club much if I lived on the other side of London. Kennington, south of the Thames, rubbing shoulders with the grittiness of Lambeth and Brixton, was not where the racing crowd panted to be seen, and in fact I'd never spotted anyone locally that I knew by sight on the racecourse.
I'd come across an advertisement: 'House share available, for single presentable yuppy. 2 rooms, bath, share kit, mortgage and upkeep. Call evenings', and although I'd been thinking in terms of a flat on my own, house sharing had suddenly seemed attractive, especially after the loneliness of work. I'd presented myself by appointment, been inspected by the four others in residence, and let in on trial, and it had all worked very well.
The four others were currently two sisters working in publishing (whose father had originally bought the house and set up the running-mortgage scheme), one junior barrister who tended to stutter, and an actor with a supporting role in a television series. The house rules were simple: pay on the dot, show good manners at all times, don't pry into the others' business, and don't let overnight girl/boy friends clog up any of the three bathrooms for hours in the morning.
There was a fair amount of laughter and camaraderie, but we tended to share coffee, beer, wine and saucepans more than confidences. I told them I was a dedicated racegoer and no one asked whether I won or lost.
The actor, Robbie, on the top floor, had been of enormous use to me, though I doubted he really knew it. He'd invited me up for a beer early one evening a few days after I went to live there, and I'd found him sitting before a brightly lit theatrical dressing table creating, as he said, a new make-up for a part he'd accepted in a play. I'd been startled to see how a different way of brushing his hair, how a large false moustache and heavier eyebrows had changed him.
'Tools of the trade,' he said, gesturing to the grease paints and false hair lying in neat rows and boxes before him. 'Instant stubble, Fauntleroy curls-what would you like?'
'Curls,' I said slowly.
'Sit down, then,' he said cheerfully, getting up to give me his place, and he brought out a butane hair curler and wound my almost straight hair on to it bit by bit there and then, and within minutes I looked like a brown poodle, tousled, unbrushed, totally different.
'How's that?' he said, bending to look with me into the looking glass.
'Amazing.' And easy, I thought. I could do it in the car, any time.
'It suits you,' Robbie said. He knelt down beside me, put his arm round my shoulders, gave me a little squeeze and smiled with unmistakable invitation into my eyes.
'No,' I said matter of factly 'I like girls.'
He wasn't offended. 'Haven't you ever tried the other?'
'It's just not me, dear,' I said, 'as one might say.'
He laughed and took his arm away. 'Never mind, then. No harm in trying.'
We drank the beer and he showed me how to shape and stick on a bold macho moustache, holding out a pair of thick-framed glasses for good measure. I regarded the stranger looking back at me from the glass and said I'd never realized how easy it was to mislead
'Sure thing. All it takes is a bit of nerve.'
And he was right about that. I bought a butane curler for myself, but I took it with me for a week in the car before I screwed myself up to stop in a lay-by on the way to Newbury races and actually use it. In the three years since then, I'd done it dozens of times without a thought, brushing and damping out the effects on the way home.
Sundays I usually spent lazily in my two big bright rooms on the first floor (the barrister directly above, the sisters below) sleeping, reading, pottering about. For about a year some time earlier I'd spent my Sundays with the daughter of one of the Hobbs Sandwich members, but it had been a mutual passing pleasure rather than a grand passion for both of us, and in the end she'd drifted away and married someone else. I supposed I too would marry one day: knew I would like to: felt there was no hurry this side of thirty.
On the Sunday morning after meeting the Brigadier in the club I began to think about what I should pack for Canada. He'd told me to be what I spent so much time not being, a rich young loafer with nothing to do but enjoy myself. 'All you need to do is talk about horses to the other passengers and keep your eyes open.'
'Yes, 'I said.
'Look the part.'
'Yes, right.'
'I've caught sight of you sometimes at the races, you know, looking like a stockbroker one day and a hillbilly the next. Millington says he often can't see you, even though he knows you're there.'
'I've got better with practice, I suppose, but I never really do much. Change my hair, change my clothes, slouch a bit.'
'It works,' he said. 'Be what Filmer would expect.'
It wasn't so much what Filmer would expect, I thought, looking at the row of widely assorted jackets in my wardrobe, but what I could sustain over the ten days the party was due to take before it broke up.
Curls, for instance, were out, as they disappeared in ram. Stuck-on moustaches were out in case they came off. Spectacles were out, as one could forget to put them on. I would have to look basically as nature had ordained and be as nondescript and unnoticeable as possible.
I sorted out the most expensive and least worn of my clothes, and decided I'd better buy new shirts, new shoes and a cashmere sweater before I went.
I telephone Millington on Monday morning as instructed and found him in his usual state of disgruntlement. He had heard about the train. He was not in favour of my going on it. The Security Service (meaning the Brigadier) should have sent a properly trained operative, an ex-policeman preferably. Like himself, for instance. Someone who knew the techniques of investigation and could be trusted not to destroy vital evidence through ignorance and clumsiness. I listened without interruption for so long that, in the end, he said sharply, 'Are you still there?'
'Yes,' I said
'I want to see you, preferably later this morning. I'll have your air ticket I suppose you do have an up-to-date passport?'
We agreed to meet, as often before, in a reasonably good small snack-bar next to Victoria Station, convenient for both Millington who lived a couple of miles south-west across Battersea Bridge, and for me a few stops down the line to the south.
I arrived ten minutes before the appointed time and found Millington already sitting at a table with a mug of
